Reading along the archival grain exposes imperial investments in unintelligibility.

Evidence

Epistemic anxieties are precisely about that reflection. Here the ethno-graphic is about the graphic, detailed production of social kinds, the archival power that allowed its political deployment and the grafting of affective states to those inventions. Reading along the archival grain draws our sensibilities to the archive’s granular rather than seamless texture, to the rough surface that mottles its hue and shapes its form. Working along the grain is not to follow a frictionless course but to enter a field of force and will to power, to attend to both the sound and sense therein and their rival and reciprocal energies. It calls on us to understand how unintelligibilities are sustained and why empires remain so uneasily invested in them. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 341

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that empires are ‘uneasily invested in’ unintelligibility — sustained confusion as a feature of rule — is dense and counterintuitive enough to reward sitting with.
• DEFINE: Defines the book’s signature method ‘reading along the archival grain’ against annular expectations.