Inconsistencies in colonial records reveal rather than undermine racial epistemology

Evidence

Such discrepancies are neither misrecognitions nor cultural “mistakes” to be set aside. They provide a diacritics of the patent and latent distinctions that marked the colonial epistemology of race. … It is precisely those moments of difficulty, the “breach of the self-evident,” by which Foucault designates an “event.” It is such “uncertainty” in the order of things that enlists us to locate such sites for ethnography and problematization. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 234

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion — treating archival inconsistency as the most revealing data point rather than a defect to be corrected — is a genuinely paradigm-shifting methodological stance.
• SEED: An essay angle: how instability in a term (here Inlandsche kinderen) is precisely where its epistemic work becomes visible — instability as analytic signal.
• XREF: connects to: Reading judicial opinions as cultural productions exposes races’ contested origins — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 364