Empire permeated colonial family life even when unmentioned

Evidence

The colonial is only a piece of their lives. The letters course through colonial concerns but as many do not. Still, empire is the watermark of these relations. Somehow they always return to an uncle just returned from Java, a niece marrying the son of a former colonial officer, an inadequate pension, a bolt of cloth lost in voyage, a tobacco or sugar stock that crashed, a squabble that endures continental divides. Not least, they offer a disquieting engagement and uncertain empathy. The closed-circuit lives of Suze and her cousins render it difficult for us to make the stretch. In fact, they instill an aversive distaste for their cosmopolitan leanings that so circumvented the worlds that hovered at their center and that they pushed to the margins. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1461

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘watermark’ metaphor and the evasion at the margins resonate with the reader’s work on archival silences and what colonial subjects omit.