Family letters show how imperial politics permeated personal lives but resist confessional reading

Evidence

We are privy to lives in which the politics of empire bleeds into the texture of the personal and then, as if too present, is carefully washed out. … In this letterwriting trove of Frans Carl Valck, his daughter Susanna, and their acquaintances and family, no documents could offer thicker evidence of the veins of commitment, disregard, obligation, and investment that pulsed through their concerns and bound the life-force of personhoods and politics together. But clarity about what Valck “really felt” about living in empire and off its rewards is elusive at best. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1526

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s colonial archival focus — the ‘politics of disregard’ and the epistemic limits of intimate archives as evidence.