Along the Archival Grain:
Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Commonsense
Ann Stoler

Paper | January 2009 | $22.95 / £13.50
Cloth | January 2009 | $59.50 / £35.00
344 pp. | 6 x 9 | 17 halftones. 4 maps.

Shopping Cart | Endorsements

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 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 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.

Endorsements:

"A stunningly attractive book that reads like a great novel. Ann Stoler provides a model of the new historiography rich in the historical, anthropological, and psychoanalytical insights demanded by the newly theorized subjects of history. Reading with the grain of the archive provides a way of realizing Walter Benjamin's injunction to read against the grain of history."--Hayden White, Stanford University

"This is an ambitious and engaging work. Stoler lives and breathes these archives and it shows-her engagement is thorough and deep. She refuses to settle for even the most recent versions of conventional wisdom, and seeks to rethink accepted truths from the very colonial studies to which she herself has helped give shape."--Webb Keane, author of Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter

"This is an original, ambitious, excellently researched, sensitive, and smart book. Stoler's longstanding, intensive scholarly engagement with these archives makes for an especially rich and nuanced understanding of the particular ontologies of Dutch colonial rule that emerge by reading closely 'along the archival grain.' Equally important, this engagement allows her to reflect powerfully on the nature and import of archival production more generally."--Patricia Spyer, Leiden University

Subject Areas:

• Anthropology
• American History
• European History

Shopping Cart:

For customers in the U.S., Canada, Latin America, Asia, and Australia
Paper: $22.95 ISBN13: 978-0-691-01577-4
Cloth: $59.50 ISBN13: 978-0-691-01578-1

For customers in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and India
Paper: £13.50 ISBN13: 978-0-691-01577-4
Cloth: £35.00 ISBN13: 978-0-691-01578-1

Prices subject to change without notice

File created: 7/1/2008

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