Reading so many good (and, sometimes, less good) books and not talking about them has become rather depressing. If reading something makes my stride a little bouncier, my mood a little better, and my brain a little livelier, why keep these good feelings to myself? It is time to blow the dust off of this blog and get to the historiography that is mattering to me.
There are also some very self-serving reasons to do this: I have three books in progress right now, all of which are under contract, in addition to the work I am doing in preparation for the 2009 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Historical Association. I am so grateful to my students for inspiring me to not scale back on my teaching and supervisions: being in the classroom, reading drafts of graduate thesis chapters, exchanging emails with former students, remind me daily that all of my scholarly work is deeply and profoundly connected. I want to think out loud about these connections and this space seems ideal for just that. And so...
First up is the new Ann Laura Stoler book, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton UP, 2009). Stoler is writing a book about how the Netherlands Indes were archived, how they were written about, photographed, studied, reported upon, and talked about over a 100 year period, from the 1830s to the 1930s. It is not a book about life and death in the archives, about the odd dissonance involved with holding scraps of paper on which an unimaginable number of histories collide and bounce away. Nor is it a book about power-knowledge practices, technologies, and strategies which have become so important for governmentality and state formation scholars. It is both of those things, partly, but it is also a book that is committed to understanding how the making of colonial archives were endemic to the making of colonial histories. Stoler's breath-taking reading across theoretical and disciplinary traditions opens up some exciting meditations on the colonial archive of the Netherlands Indes that move in some significantly new directions from those opened up by other scholars interested in these issues, such as James C. Scott, Antoinette Burton, and Patrick Joyce. Selfishly, I wish Stoler would broaden what constitutes the "colonial archive" and probe how other locations of archiving might reveal about the patterns and processes she identifies in more official (i.e. statist) archival spaces, something, for example, Burton's Dwelling in the Archive does quite nicely. Like everything she writes, though, Stoler's Along the Archival Grain has much to offer scholars from all over the university and I hope historians in particular read, debate, and respond to the challenges this book makes.
Less scholarly, but no less important to me over the last couple of weeks has been John Hodgman. If you want to know why, head over to his website or his Wikipedia entry and prepare to laugh. That is all.
