Reading along the archival grain reveals empire’s sustained unintelligibilities

Evidence

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

• DEFINE: Defines ‘reading along the grain’ as engagement with archival granularity rather than a frictionless surface.
• XREF: Plausibly in dialogue with Ann Laura Stoler’s ‘Along the Archival Grain’ and works on colonial knowledge production.