Ordinary letters give historians entry into private lives through their affective expectations

Evidence

French historian Roger Chartier gives immense value to epistolarity sans qualité, not for the information conveyed but in the sense that Robert Musil uses the term in The Man Without Qualities, for entry into the affective and political expectations produced and the reciprocities they demanded and required. Ordinary epistolarity provides what Chartier calls an act of “housebreaking” into private lives. Mary Favret takes that violent trespass in another direction to suggest that such letters are less “windows into the intimate self” than a genre that introduces us into a Imperial Dispositions of Disregard • 277 79 CBG, FA, 6 March 1889, Susanna Lucassen to F. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1523

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies ‘epistolarity sans qualité’ — the methodological value of unremarkable letters as housebreaking into affective and political expectations.
• XREF: Relevant to the reader’s colonial archival focus: letters as a genre of access into intimate domestic registers of empire rather than transparent records.