Though I didn't know that Ann Stoler's book
would be the place where I found it, I've been waiting to read
something like Stoler's chapter, “Memory Work in Java: A Cautionary
Tale” all semester. As an Americanist who studies slavery, I'm
interested in the question of how slaves survived and made sense of
the experience of enslavement. In the context of a course on
Comparative Empire, this has translated into an interest in how
scholars of colonialism approach the colonized, and how the
perspective of colonized people is–or fails to be–captured in
scholarship of the colonial.
Anne Stoler's book Carnal Knowledge
and Imperial Empire: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule is
a series of revised articles and new chapters that examines the
intimate and the colonial in the Netherlands Indies. For Stoler, the
intimate includes not only sexual relations between Europeans and
Javanese, but also care giving and child rearing by Javanese servants
in European households. She argues that a focus on the intimate is
justified mostly because the colonialists seems so fixed upon it:
“domains of the intimate figured so prominently in the perceptions
and policies of those who ruled” (7).
Most
of Stoler's book focuses on the culture of the colonizer,
demonstrating what a scholar can do when she approaches the colonizer
/ colonized dichotomy as “a historically shifting pair of social
categories that needs to be explained” (13). Stoler's final
chapter, though, is a reversal of what's come before. In 1996 and
1997, Stoler and an anthropology doctoral student, along with two
Indonesian researchers conducted interviews with former servants in
Dutch homes. The interviews focused on questions about how the
Javanese viewed their employers, and was framed in part by Stoler and
Strassler's interest in whether these Javanese subjects would provide
a counter narrative to the cozy vision of Dutch colonial domesticity
that so many Europeans popularized. Here, finally, was a scholar
whose work asked questions, and sought out data about the experience
of the colonized.
What
Stoler discovers should come as no surprise to anyone with even a
passing familiarity with the scholarly literature on oral history.
The Javanese men and women who Stoler and her collaborators interview
did not remember out loud in stories with a plot or a moral. Nor did
a discernible counter narrative emerge out of the interviews when
taken collectively. Subjects “talked past” the archive more often
than they talked back to it. As Stoler points out, students of
colonial history often assume that oral histories will provide access
to a “secret script” that circulates through rituals or
folktales, but the interviews with former domestic workers revealed
no such counter narrative.
The
Dutch colonial as a era about which stories were told was much less
remarked upon than the Japanese occupation, and while nuanced
critiques of Dutch employers emerged in discussions of food, demands
for cleanliness, and prescriptions about childcare, Stoler readily
acknowledges
“Their
recollections of touch, taste, and smell were not shaped into tidy
plots, much less congealed as anti-Dutch resistance … these
accounts refused the colonial as a discrete domain of social
relations and politics, of experience and memory” (203).
So
where does Stoler's work leave me, as someone who wants to know more
about the experience of colonialism from the perspective of the
colonized?
At the
very least, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power should
make me question the degree to which indigenous people who lived
under colonial regimes would recount their own stories in terms of a
colonial encounter, or in terms that intersect with, never mind
corroborate, any of the scripts about resistance and accommodation
that historians construct. The gulf between the frames and agendas of
students of the colonial and the people who experienced the colonial
first hand should not, I think dissuade historians from trying to
engage with the memories of the colonized. But I think Stoler's final
chapter, as well as her extended meditation on a variety of colonial
categories, should push historians and ethnographers to try and
encounter the colonized on their own terms, which may have nothing to
do with their Dutch employers.
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