For colonial observers they were a plight and too present; for postcolonial historians they remained peripheral to the colonial stories they have chosen to tell. In the archives they are in both obvious and unexpected places: in the fixed frames of colonial history, they emerge and submerge, get “lost” in changing nomenclatures and sometimes cannot be “seen” at all.

Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ E…, loc. 858