Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense

THIS BOOK is about the force of writing and the feel of documents, about lettered governance and written traces of colonial lives. It is about commitments to paper, and the political and personal work that such inscriptions perform. Not least, it is about colonial archives as sites of the expectant and conjured—about dreams of comforting futures and forebodings of future failures. It is a book that asks what we might learn about the nature of imperial rule and the dispositions it engendered from the writerly forms through which it was managed, how attentions were trained and selectively cast. In short, it is a book precisely about that which Lévi-Strauss says anthropology is not.

Stoler, Ann Laura. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Kindle Location 142). Princeton University Press.