Repetitions within colonial archives mark attempted filiations and carry recuperative irony

Evidence

Some students of empire have sought new kinds of sources. Others have looked to different ways of approaching familiar archives with questions not yet asked and readings not yet done. In this book, it is unexplored fault lines, ragged edges and unremarked disruptions to the seamless and smooth surface of colonialism’s archival genres over which I linger and then attempt to track. My attention is on the field of entangled documents that have been “scratched over” and crossed-out many times. But it is as much on repetitions, what Edward Said reminds us is always about “filiations” pursued or abandoned. “Repetition cannot long escape the ironies it bears within it,” or the histories upon which it calls. In these colonial archives, these repetitions join the disparate, enlist the counterintuitive, and provide the vectors of recuperations and ruptures by making familiar what colonial agents sought to know. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 335

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the book’s core method — lingering on crossed-out and repeated passages in colonial archival genres.