Novelists have best captured colonial interiorities through petty anxieties and overheard whispers

Evidence

One might rightly argue that historical ethnography is unsuited to such a task. Such work is better left to those for whom interiorities are the grist of their work, to Marguerite Duras, who grew up in the French Empire and inhabited its seedy margins; to Nadine Gordimer and John M. Coetzee, who knew from the inside the beastly quality of empire and the fears of its white settlers. There are the Dutch colonial women novelists like Madelon Székeley-Lulofs, who spent her childhood in Aceh and who later, in the 1930s, as a rubber planter’s wife in East Sumatra, so viscerally captured the confinements and constraints of a colonial life in petty anxieties and agitated boredoms of the everyday. Or perhaps, it should just be left to their children, to the piercing fiction of someone like Hella Haasse, who was raised and played in the glare and shadows of empire, to those children who knew and did not know what they overheard, who unknowingly witnessed the shaky assurances that all was well, the whispered racial slurs, the empathies and disregards of their mothers and fathers. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1375

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘children who knew and did not know what they overheard’ connects to the reader’s existing interest in how insider-outsider epistemic positions work; also maps to Hella Haasse’s fiction as an archive of the everyday empire.
• FICTION: The positioned child-witness figure — knowing and not knowing what one overheard of empire — is a striking narrative device for a story about colonial childhood.