Even a whistleblowing colonial official’s narrative casts the colonized as bit players
Evidence
As a window on what Valck felt, what deceptions he lived and how he was disposed, his narratives are wanting, full of holes. We know so many details and yet so little about him: not what books he read, how much he drank, what dreams he dreamt, whether he had a lover or frequented prostitutes during those seven years—from which injustices he chose to look away. His discrepant messages combine high morals and bold indifference, callousness and compassion, utter effectualness and power, depression and racialized distaste. They remind us that Valck’s humanist indignations and disregard were both nourished by colonial politics, were lived through those politics and on its edges. His first promotion occurred on Bali’s north coast, when he took a small part in blowing the whistle on the collusion of a Dutch official and a local regent. His demise followed his indictment of Deli’s European planters and high-ranking colonial offi- cials in Batavia who turned their backs on what they knew. But even within this do-good bent, the colonized appear with only walk-on roles. It is a sobering reminder of Salman Rushdie’s warning that if colonial history has been written with the colonized as bit players, that gives no license for contemporary historians to do the same. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1509
Categorization
- SEED: Angle: how the archival ethos itself — even radical, moralizing sources — reproduces the erasure of the colonized, and what methods recover them.
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s colonial archival focus on epistemic anxieties and what counts as a reliable witness.