It would have been a straightforward task to take "speaking back to the
archives" to mean pushing the sentimentalism of Dutch nostalgia against the
distinctly unsentimental remembrances of those who served them. Sentimentalism
so underwrites colonial nostalgia that scholars' attempts to write against
it have tended either to avoid the subject of sentiment or to limit their focus to
affective extremes; i.e., to conditions of palpable duress, dislocation and diaspora.
In doing so, they have called attention to a variety of technologies of memory:
place names, ritual enactments of subjugation, commemorative events and
the violence of conflicts indelibly inscribed in bodies and minds.