“The Archive is Dormant, Never Dead”: An Interview with Ann Laura Stoler

ABSTRACT In this wide-ranging, spirited, and generous interview, Ann Laura Stoler revisits her decades-long engagement with colonial archives, tracing a trajectory that moves from fieldwork in North Sumatra to her foundational contributions to archival theory and critique. Stoler discusses how her early encounters with the architecture of Dutch colonial capitalism and the personal archives of civil servant Frans Carl Valck led her to reconceive the archive not as a static repository but as a living site of affect, governance, and epistemic anxiety. She reflects on her sustained attention to language in archival reading, describing how the documents’ tonal and rhetorical textures shaped both her analytic orientation and her writing. Stoler speaks candidly about the politics of language, the risks of archival fabulation, and the ethical imperative to suspend certainties while engaging in research. The interview concludes with a discussion of her current pedagogical and intellectual commitments, emphasizing the enduring challenge—and necessity—of writing the colonial present with conceptual precision and stylistic care.