Along the Archival Grain

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".

"[E]legance, energy, and perspicuity has long been a hallmark of Stoler's scholarship, but in this book, Stoler's aim is particularly true... Along the Archival Grain is a call to arms from one of the most forceful practitioners of our discipline. The passions that haunt are of more than passing interest: they have done much to shape our contemporary world. In facing up to this reality, Ann Stoler has provided us with a new way of conceptualizing what students of the colonial can and should do."--Danilyn Rutherford, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History "Along the Archival Grain ... sheds new light on the nature of the colonial state... Stoler takes the lessons of colonial discourse analysis first opened by Edward Said to new heights... Along the Archival Grain is also an indispensable and innovative ethnography of the colonial state that dismantles the state's epistemic power and self-representation."--Julian Go, Pacific Affairs "This book has raised the benchmark for archival investigation and established a powerful model for new cultural geographies of colonialism that deserves to be read and debated by those beyond the fields of colonial studies and historical research methodology and theory."--Stephen Legg, Environment and Planning "The author presents a nuanced and meticulous reading of official nineteenth- and twentieth-century Dutch colonial archives and decenters how postcolonial scholars, feminist scholars, and historians have characteristically approached colonial texts."--Meredith Reifschneider, Current Anthropology "Stoler's historical examples are both fascinating and choice... Scholars of Dutch colonialism will naturally need to read [this book], but its significance and appeal will matter to nearly everyone working in postcolonial studies and provide an important retort to those 'students of colonialism' (in Stoler's stern phrase) who treat the colonial as an unproblematic term or a given."--John Mcleod, Interventions "As a significant contribution to the historiography of affect, this monograph will find places of honor in colleagues' bookcases, on research library shelves, and amid graduate seminar reading lists. Beyond the academy, thoughtful readers will find its insights valuable in considering personhood in the new digital age."--Elizabeth Bishop, Ab Imperio Quarterly

• List of Illustrations ix Appreciations xi Chapter One: Prologue in Two Parts 1 Chapter Two: The Pulse of the Archive 17 Part I: Colonial Archives and Their Affective States 55 Chapter Three: Habits of a Colonial Heart 57 Chapter Four: Developing Historical Negatives 105 Chapter Five: Commissions and Their Storied Edges 141 Part II: Watermarks in Colonial History 179 Chapter Six: Hierarchies of Credibility 181 Chapter Seven: Imperial Dispositions of Disregard 237 Appendix 1: Colonial Chronologies 279 Appendix 2: Governors-General in the Netherlands Indies, 1830-1930 285 Bibliography 287 Index 309