Male-centered archival practices erased women’s agentive histories from the colonial record

Evidence

Feminist historians have long sought out creative ways of demonstrating how what Bonnie Smith aptly dubbed “male prowess” shaped archival production, the initiation rites of historiography, and the absence of agentive histories of women excised from documents and excluded from subsequent texts. On colonial terrain the challenge to locate women as subjects continues to critically stretch the scope of the archive in ways that redefine what kinds of reading and writing are historically germane. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 310

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels my own work on epistemic exclusion and what counts as historically germane evidence.