Reports kept from state archives were consigned to controlled oblivion

Evidence

But it seems you do not realize, Meneer Pangemanann, that your report is not for the general public. Only a very few people in the Indies and in the world have read and studied it… . You will never know, and indeed do not need to know, who else has read it. Your work of scholarship, as you like to call it, will never receive the honor of being kept in the State archives. Once being read, it will become dust and smoke, in the safekeeping of the devils of darkness. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 110

Categorization

• XREF: Strong resonance with colonial ‘gray literature’ and the politics of what gets archived — connects to Michel-Rolph Trouillot on silencing the past and Saidiya Hartman on the limits of the archive.
• FICTION: The image of a document that ‘will become dust and smoke, in the safekeeping of the devils of darkness’ is rich material about archival erasure as a kind of damnation.
• QUESTION: Who is speaking here and to whom? This reads like a literary passage (Pangemanann is likely a novelistic figure) — the author may be invoking a fictional account of archival exclusion.