Failed colonial proposals reveal anxieties about what was wrong in both colony and metropole

Evidence

These visionary narratives were colonial negatives in more than one sense: they were cropped and re-cropped. Some were never developed. Some faded as they were overexposed to what was transpiring in the Indies. Others were blown up and distorted, out of all proportion to the social realities in which people lived. Most are absent from the historiography because they were colonial debris, unfulfilled visions discarded in process. But as a pulse on the tensions and uncertainties that pervaded these moments, such refracted images command attention. As blueprints of distress they underscore what was deemed to have gone awry in the Netherlands, what was imagined to be wrong with Dutch colonial society, what might be excised from that picture, and what could not be redeveloped or touched up. What such an archive “produced” was not specific reform, but a new compendium of expert, if uncertain, knowledge. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 803

Categorization

• XREF: Resonates with archival-turn scholarship like Stoler’s own earlier work on colonial knowledge production and Foucault’s notion of the archive as a site of knowledge-power.