Private letters and official records blur rather than oppose imperial and intimate registers

Evidence

In tracking the molten relationship between bureaucratic missives and familial ones, sometimes these forms abruptly pull apart, elsewhere they merge registers of tone and mood, in which imperial dispositions were inhabited and remade. Rather than underscoring distinctions between the intimacies of empire and its public face, such letters address alternative senses of timing and distance, of expectation and exigency, of divided commitments that empire produced in its subjects and the elite hired help paid to manage them. Not least, our use of such letters demands hermeneutic humility, forcing longer reflection on what made up their common sense and how much imperial dispositions are sustained by the generative power of a “vital lie.” — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1528