Empire’s agents operated in messy uncertainty, not settled clarity

Evidence

My starting point is elsewhere. Rather than assume that the worlds of empire’s agents had clarity in ways ours today do not, I am drawn to the messier, unsettling space that spans knowing and not knowing, good and bad faith, refusal and acceptance, allegiance to and belief in. Such an inquiry might attend to the wide berth of colonial actors, their names most historians of the period and region would barely recognize. They would be neither particularly malicious nor sympathetic figures, rather more like those that attracted Du Bois, “not the wicked, but calm, good [women and] men.” Nor would this be a matter of telling a tale of an unknown colonial everyman in any sense of the term. I think more of minor figures in major histories: not Van Hoëvell, who led the 1848 demonstration in Batavia described in chapter 3, but Ardesch, who turned against him; or Nauta, who joined the public assembly only to spy on its organizers; or Cantervisscher, who handed out petitions and was later exiled from Java,— or, as in the present chapter, of those expunged from the record like Valck. It might rather stay close to the sensibilities of the everyday—to what pressed on their bodies; what they chose to communicate differently to kin, colleague, and superior; what occupied their feelings; what slipped to the edges of their awareness, erupted, and then escaped their minds. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1347

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the book’s research program: colonial actors inhabit knowing-not knowing, good-bad faith spaces rather than clear-cut categories.
• SEED: A counter-method to colonial historiography focused on unremarkable minor figures and their epistemic muddles — could seed an essay on writing colonial history from ambiguity rather than villainy.