Colonial governance was a constant epistemic reckoning within the colonial world itself

Evidence

Rather than treating epistemology as a domain of the foundational, architectural, and fixed (I think here against Richard Rorty’s claim that “time will tell but epistemology won’t”), I start from a premise shared by students of historical and social epistemology: that epistemic considerations are neither transcendent nor abstract. They are of the colonial world and squarely in it. Colonial governance entailed a constant assessing and recapping of what colonial agents could know and how they could know it. Central to all the chapters in this book, then, is an engagement with this disquiet: with colonialism’s unevenly shared epistemic formations, the varying uneasiness and differential discomforts about what could be assumed to be communicable and circulated—or unrepeatable and not subject to the economy of official exchange. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 247

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the book’s operative premise: epistemic formations as historically embedded ‘constellations of concepts’ rather than transcendent foundations.