Family letters reveal how colonial subjects inhabited empire differently than official records do

Evidence

Family letters provide a personalized and ethnographic inflection in a minor key, not the crescendo of major chords, but the plaintive notes in which things may not be felt as they seem to be. … In tracking the molten relationship between bureaucratic missives and familial ones, sometimes these forms abruptly pull apart, elsewhere they merge registers of tone and mood, in which imperial dispositions were inhabited and remade. Rather than underscoring distinctions between the intimacies of empire and its public face, such letters address alternative senses of timing and distance, of expectation and exigency, of divided commitments that empire produced in its subjects and the elite hired help paid to manage them. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1527

Categorization

• XREF: Complements recent historiography using ego-documents to read colonial subjectivity against official archives.