Marginal writing within archives helps constitute the administrative apparatus

Evidence

In these chapters Dutch colonial archival documents serve less as stories for a colonial history than as active, generative substances with histories, as documents with itineraries of their own. What was written in prescribed form and in the archive’s margins, what was written oblique to official prescriptions and on the ragged edges of protocol produced the administrative apparatus as it opened to a space that extended beyond it. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 35