ALONG THE ARCHIVAL GRAIN by Ann Laura Stoler ( 9780691146362 )

Item Details

Title:

ALONG THE ARCHIVAL GRAIN
EPISTEMIC ANXIETIES AND COLONIAL COMMON SENSE

By:

Ann Laura Stoler

Format:

Paperback

List price:

£30.00

Our price:

£24.00

Discount:

20% off

You save:

£6.00

ISBN 10:

0691146365

ISBN 13:

9780691146362

Availability:

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Stock:

Currently 2 available

Publisher:

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Pub. date:

21 January, 2010

Pages:

336

Description:

Offers a methodological and analytic opening to the affective registers of imperial governance and the political content of archival forms. This title identifies the social epistemologies that guided perception and practice, revealing the problematic racial ontologies of that confused epistemic space.

Synopsis:

Along the Archival Grain offers a unique methodological and analytic opening to the affective registers of imperial governance and the political content of archival forms. In a series of nuanced mediations on the nature of colonial documents from the nineteenth-century Netherlands Indies, Ann Laura Stoler identifies the social epistemologies that guided perception and practice, revealing the problematic racial ontologies of that confused epistemic space. Navigating familiar and extraordinary paths through the lettered lives of those who ruled, she seizes on moments when common sense failed and prevailing categories no longer seemed to work. She asks not what colonial agents knew, but what happened when what they thought they knew they found they did not. Rejecting the notion that archival labor be approached as an extractive enterprise, Stoler sets her sights on archival production as a consequential act of governance, as a field of force with violent effect, and not least as a vivid space to do ethnography.

Illustrations:

8 halftones. 1 maps.

Publication:

Imprint:

Princeton University Press

Returns:

Returnable

Some other items by this author:

ALONG THE ARCHIVAL GRAIN

BEYOND MEMORY (HB)

CAPITALISM AND CONFRONTATION IN SUMATRA'S PLANTATION BELT, 1870-1979 (PB)

CARNAL KNOWLEDGE AND IMPERIAL POWER