The conditional tense in colonial archives reshaped present responses and refigured the past.

Evidence

Because imagining what might be was as important as knowing what was, these archives of the visionary and expectant should rivet our attention upon their erratic movement back and forth in verbal tense: the conditional could powerfully reshape an immediate response as it recursively rewrote the present and refigured events that had long passed. The portent-laden future of revolt and betrayal is always on the imminent and dangerous horizon. When colonial social reformers conceived scrupulously planned utopias made of small-scale farmers drawn from the mixed blood orphanages, their minute descriptions of those children’s inclinations mirrored visions of what they conceived adults to be and what they feared improperly schooled children might become. Such projections, in turn, made more real the visceral fear of the resentments such subjects in the making were thought to harbor. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 133

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The conditional as a governing technology — imagining-what-might-be as an instrument co-equal with knowing-what-is — is a paradigm-shifting frame.
• XREF: Links to ‘developing historical negatives’ (chapter 4) and the reader’s thesis on epistemic anxiety. — connects to: Defeated cultural movements can be re-potentiated from their archives after decades — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1369; the MOC “The Word Is a Fence: Language as Battleground, Property, and Partition”