The 1848 Batavia demonstration spawned conflicting multi-level reports and phantasmic speculation

Evidence

Such “official” circuits of communication between the Minister of Colonies and the Governor-General were crisscrossed with voices that were never contained by official pronouncements alone. In the case of the May 1848 demonstration, the subject of chapter 3, the number of detailed reports is staggering: they named names; recounted multiple and fractured versions of what transpired; and contested one another’s understanding of who was involved, how subversive they were, evincing phantasmic speculations on why they were so. Here, in 1848, the included documents reached low and deep onto the streets of Batavia and far to the outskirts of the city where soldiers were ready with arms. There are those between the Assistent Resident of Batavia and its Resident, the Resident and the Governor-General, the Governor-General and the Minister of Colonies, and the Minister of Colonies and the Netherlands’ King. But many other forms of communication swept across Batavia over that month: petitions, letters, and announcements that placed the threat of European treason, communist influence, Indo-European revolt, revolution in Europe, and state concerns over the political potential of outraged “parental feelings” at the heart of administrative fears and on virtually every page. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 96

Categorization

• QUESTION: The ‘phantasmic speculations’ about why demonstrators were subversive deserve chasing — which anxieties, exactly, drove the interpretive excess?