Unrealized colonial plans function as diagnostics of official political knowledge

Evidence

It is the “non-eventful” quality of these archives that this chapter pursues and from which we may take our analytic cue. Rather than beginning from the notion that the colonial “facts of the matter” might be found in the concrete and discrete “events” that made up social reforms that were carried out, this archival form resides in the conditional tense. Such unrealized and improbable plans were accretions of official knowledge that we might read as a political diagnostic. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 624

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘conditional tense’ archive resonates with Ann Laura Stoler’s broader work and with subaltern-studies debates on reading colonial documents against the grain.
• SEED: Angle: how ‘blueprints of distress’ in any bureaucratic archive reveal more than executed policies about a regime’s fears.