Along the Archival Grain

[Dave Monroe]

Along the Archival Grain:
Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense
Ann Laura Stoler
Paper | 2008 | $22.95 / £13.50
Cloth | 2008 | $59.50 / £35.00
314 pp. | 6 x 9 | 8 halftones. 1 maps.

Along the Archival Grain examines the nature of colonial governance as
seen through its archival habits and conventions, and in doing so
offers a series of nuanced meditations on the nature of archives and
the spirit with which students of empire should approach them.
Focusing on the archives of the nineteenth-century Netherlands Indies,
Ann Laura Stoler reveals not the panoptic gaze of an omniscient
colonial state but rather the uncertain knowledge of those who
governed, the disquieting unease that resulted when credibility was in
question and evidence was suspect, and the anxious flux of colonial
common sense when rumors proved more reliable than facts. Here the
archives are not just a record of rule but an active force with
violent effect.

Navigating familiar and extraordinary paths through the lettered lives
of those who ruled, Stoler seizes on moments when ready narratives
failed and prevailing categories no longer seemed to work. At the
heart of this book are agents and architects of empire haunted by
epistemic anxiety about how to assess political disse't and
distinguish racial categories and social kinds. She asks not what
colonial agents knew, but what happened when what they thought they
knew they found they did not. Attending to hesitant, uncensored, and
confused assessments and asides, Stoler offers a unique methodological
and analytic opening to the affective registers of imperial governance
and the political content of archival forms.

Ann Laura Stoler is the Willy Brandt Distinguished University
Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at the New School for
Social Research. Her books include Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power
and Race and the Education of Desire

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8821.html

CHAPTER ONE
Prologue in Two Parts

http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8821.pdf
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8821.html