Category Archives: History writing

Ann Laura Stoler Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Princeton & Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2009, 278 p & notes.

It was only when I googled the title of this book that I realized that I’d been thinking of it under the wrong name: it was not, as I thought “against” the archival grain, but “along” the archival grain.  It’s an important difference, as the author points out.  While previous historians concentrated on compiling records from the archives in an accessible form- and this is particularly true of 19th century Australian historians like Frederick Watson and the Historical Records of Australia- now we are exhorted to read against the archive and to resist its hard-won accessibility.  But Stoler writes:

Some would argue that the grand narratives of colonialism have been amply and excessively told.  On this argument, students of colonialism often turn quickly and confidently to read “against the grain” of colonial conventions.  One fundamental premise of this book is a commitment to a less assured and perhaps more humble stance- to explore the grain with care and read along it first. (p. 50) …Reading along the archival grain draws our sensibilities to the archive’s granular rather than seamless texture, to the rough surface that mottles its hue and shapes its form.  Working along the grain is not to follow  a frictionless course but to enter a field of force and will to power, to attend to both the sound and sense therein and their rival and reciprocal energies.  It calls on us to understand how unintelligibilities are sustained and why empires remain so uneasily invested in them. (p. 53)

When I first returned to postgrad study in history after an absence of some thirty years, I was perplexed by other students’ references to “the archive”.  Where was “THE archive”, I wondered?  Was it some huge Borgesian labyrinth that had somehow escaped my notice, like Platform 9 3/4 in Harry Potter?  I’ve since realized that “the archive” is not so much a place, as a mental construct of the primary material that we draw on as historians.  Approaching “the archive-as-subject” worthy of scrutiny in its own right, rather than “the archive-as-source” that needs to be mined and extracted, reflects the “archival turn” captured  by Derrida’s book Archive Fever.  The link with Derrida and cultural theory might suggest to you that, in many ways, the writing in this book is rather dense and self-conscious, and it certainly is.  But it is also very careful, poetic writing.  The author weighs her words carefully, reveling in alliteration and paradox, and I found that I had to slow down and subvocalize while I was reading  to let the pleasure of the language wash over me.

The title hints at the theoretical emphasis of the book, but it makes no mention at all of the Dutch East Indies context in which it is applied.  I think that’s probably intentional.  Stoler has been writing about the Dutch Indies for decades- the earliest of her works that she cites was written in 1985- but this is a book borne of long years of immersion in a historical context and it moves far beyond that region.  It is a tribute to the accessibility of the book that I could read and enjoy it with minimal knowledge of the Dutch Indies, and come away feeling that I had learned a great deal (although I really would have appreciated a good map!)

The book itself is divided into three parts.  She starts with a two-chapter reflection on the archive itself and methodological and epistemological responses to it.  Part I which follows is headed “Colonial Archives and Their Affective States” where she examines three small, or even non-existent events in Dutch colonial historiography.  The first was a protest meeting held in 1848 against an edict that the upper echelons of the civil service would be restricted to young men who had been educated in the Netherlands; the second was a series of blueprints of state fantasies for solving the ‘problem’ of the Inlandesche Kindern, a shifting category that included Indies-born Europeans, and mixed bloods; and the third examined two commissions that were held into poverty amongst poor Europeans in the Dutch Indies.  Part II entitled “Watermarks in Colonial History” focusses on Frans Carl Valck, a lowly ranked assistent-resident whose unwelcome report on the murder of a plantation-owner’s family led to his hasty removal to another colony and eventual dismissal and subsequent complete disappearance from the official record. In this section she juxtaposes and interrogates two different archives- the official and the family- against each other.

Interestingly, she suggests in the prologue that

some readers may want to turn directly to these last two chapters that trace the biographies of empire, and may find it more compelling to read them first. (p. 51)

Ah- there’s a problem: when the author herself is not secure in the structure that she has,like all authors, eventually have to settle for.  Which to go for? Compelling reading or the structure that won out? I stayed with the chapters as laid down, but I wonder if it would have been a different book if I had read the last chapters first.  As it was, each chapter was quite self-contained, but it’s an interesting question.

I very much enjoyed this book.  It is a dense read, and at times I found the references to Derrida, Foucault, Rorty etc. rather overwhelming.  Check out the Amazon look-inside feature first, and you’ll quickly sense whether it’s a book that will appeal to you or appall you.  But it came at the right time for me, and it has stretched my thinking about my own work and even spurred me to WRITE a paragraph or two!

2011, 177 p

There’s a new John Lukacs book out, I see.  I like books about history, written by historians. As a reader, they make me feel like an eavesdropper and novice rolled into one. This small book felt as if it were perhaps compiled from a series of lectures, similar to Margaret Macmillan’s The Uses and Abuses of History or Inga Clendinnen’s True Stories. But no- these are chapter-length reflections on historianship as a way of viewing the world and as a profession, and its relationship with literature.  They are written for their own sake.

I don’t really know all that much about John Lukacs.  I have only read one of his books- Five Days in London: May 1940- and I was very impressed by its close attention to just five days spent before and after Dunkirk, when Churchill decided that Britain would continue the war against Hitler after the fall of France.  It was a closely-focussed history that looked at just a few days (although VERY important days to be sure) while addressing big questions and issues.  After reading this latest book, I realize that it exemplified two of the big themes that Lukacs has explored over his long publishing history. First,  Five Days in London was an analysis of the personalities who were involved in the choice to stand up to Hitler, and the aspect of choice is important to Lukacs.

“Choice” is the operative word: because people, as well as their individual components, do not “have” ideas; they choose them. (p.30)

There is an emergent quality in events and decision-making as well: that perhaps the question is not “why” something happened, but “how” and “when” something became to be as it was:

Notice the emphasis on process in the syntax: not how “was” but how did it “become” (p. 39)

His second theme, again exemplified in Five Days in London is that of public sentiment. In the case of Churchill’s decision in 1940, it was set against the perceptions of the British people that were being monitored through the Mass Observation project.  He draws a distinction between Public Opinion which ostensibly can be measured and quantified and Popular Sentiment which is a more subtle and less graspable thing. I guess, in an Australian context, this would be the difference between  a Newspoll with its stark black and white choices, and a Hugh McKay survey .  He notes the dangers to democracy of government driven entirely by public opinion- and don’t we all know about that in Australia at the moment.

Lukacs is dismissive of statistical-based history, psycho-history and counterfactuals, and even more scathing of recent gender,  subaltern and other “faddish” histories.  However, it’s rather a cheap shot to mock journal papers from their titles alone, which are often framed to attract interest through their quirkiness.  There’s an element of grumpy-old-mannishness over the use of computers in research as well. He notes that there has always been more of a problem with spurious papers being inserted into an archive than papers being removed and that technology makes falsification even easier. He warns against the “insidious” practice of

“the presentation of a scholarly apparatus, listing or citing microfilm numbers or other archival “sources” that are not easily ascertainable- or, even if so require careful reading by a professional historian to eventually reveal that they do not prove the  “fact” or statement that they are supposed to confirm”. (p. 58)

To my mind, false claims can be made for both digital/technological and paper-based sources, and digital data-banks of journals and digitization have brought otherwise obscure journals and sources into a brighter light.  A microfilm is more accessible to many more sets of eyes than an individual archive will ever be, especially on the other side of the globe.

He notes that history is not science, and that it is much closer to literature.  Fact and fiction are related to each other, but not identical, and he champions not so much the fictional nature of history, as the historicity of fiction- that “every novel is a historical novel in one way or another” (p. 120)  He is open to the work of amateur historians and aspects of what-if histories that acknowledge the potentialities that lie in any situation.

“…the historian’s recognition that reality encompasses actuality and potentiality reflects his propensity to see with the eye of the novelist rather than with the eye of the lawyer” (p 124).

He closes the book with an Apologia and a greeting to his ‘good, serious’ historians.  He is, indeed, an “old” historian- eighty six years old, and by his own admission he spent much of his career working in small universities.  Although his list of publications is exhaustive, many were published by ‘trade’ presses with an eye to a wider audience and  he senses the ambiguity in the term “prolific” that his academic peers use to describe him. There is, as he admits, an element of  vanity in his chagrin at his marginalization.

Lukacs has elsewhere described himself as a reactionary and certainly elements of this come through here.  He is dismissive of the shortsightedness of American liberal historians, and there is an implicit assumption that the historians and the profession are male.  But I sense that he does not fit easily into any one political box.

He describes his book The Thread of Years as his “most extraordinary book”. It has 69 chapters, each consisting of two parts- the first a vignette about episodes in the lives of various imaginary people existing because of the historical realities of their places and their times.  The second part of each chapter is Lukacs’ own dialogue with an imaginary conversant who challenges either the historicity or the accuracy of the vignette.  He says that it is not a new kind of history, because almost all the men and women within it are imagined, but the times and places are not. He sees it as neither a history nor a novel.  And it’s sitting over there on the shelf, third row down, eight from the left.  I think he would want me to read it.