Poor fair-skinned colonists occupied a zone invisible to colonial documentary surveillance
Evidence
The failures and false starts of social reform took mounds of paper to explain away. Those explanations fostered evidentiary vignettes and the richly (ethno)graphic on their storied margins. Even in its impressionistic mode, the commission provided testimony to the changing geography of race. In this molten social landscape, people were transgressing both moral and spatial boundaries, living where they were said not to be “at home,” where fair-skinned adults and children “did not belong.” Below the purview of government surveillance and its documentary practices—birth certificates, housing permits, and legal declarations of male paternity— had emerged a muddled social space occupied by men and women with “light hair,” and by “blue-eyed” children who were vagrants or beggars, living homeless or in hovels on the outskirts of European neighborhoods or in native compounds. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 856
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Directly speaks to the reader’s epistemic-anxieties focus: the archive’s documentary practices (birth certificates, housing permits, paternity declarations) failed to capture the very people the commission claimed to describe — the gap between colonial knowledge regimes and actual social space.
- SEED: An essay angle: ‘blue-eyed children in the archive’ — the limits of documentary surveillance as a colonial episteme and what escapes it.