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ALONG THE ARCHIVAL GRAIN: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. By Ann Laura Staler. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009. xiii, 314 pp. (Maps, B& 'W photos.) US$22.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-691-01577-4.
For years Ann Laura Stoler has invited readers to rethink the dynamics of European settler communities, colonial knowledge and discourse, colonial desire and affect. Her latest book continues to explore these themes while also pushing them further. While still shedding new light on the complexities of colonialism, this book asks us to question how we know about those complexities in the first place and if we can "know" them at all. The issue in the book is not how we get better archival sources; the issue is how to read the archival sources we have and think harder about the fact that we do not have all the sources we might want.
The book is positioned within "the archival turn" across the humanities. Archives are treated not just as sources to find truth but as subjects. Here the archives are colonial. They consist of the staggering papers and related documents produced by, of and for colonial governance in the Netherlands Indies. Accordingly, the chapters in the book take up specific events or themes...