"In Cold Blood": Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial Narratives

Abstract

This essay is part of a broader project to explore the logos and pathos of empire. It invites the reader to attend closely to the political content in colonialism’s archival forms. Reading /along/, rather than /against/ the archival grain, it asks what we might learn about the nature of imperial rule and the dispositions it engendered from the writerly forms through which it was (mis)managed, how attentions were trained, and selectively cast. It argues that the grids of intelligibility in which colonial agents operated were neither clear nor shared. Their perceptions and practices were fashioned from piecemeal and uncertain knowledge; disquiet and anxieties disrupt rote reports when the prevailing conventions of colonial common sense failed them and when what they thought they knew, they found they did not. Wedged within these documents is epistemic, ethical, and political unease, the unsure movements of persons who could be ousted from their jobs for knowing too little – or too much. By attending closely to tone, temper, and ‘epistemological detail’, we can learn about the conceptual and political perturbations on the rough interior ridges of governance that opens to displaced histories folded within them.