Colonial historiography inherited administrative map distinctions its practice violated

Evidence

The official documents of colonial archives like those of the Netherlands Indies are so weighted with fixed formats, empty phrases, and racial clichés that one is easily blinded by their limpid prose and numbing dullness. Our readings are blunted by what often has been parsed as the seemingly panoptic glare of a vacuous, stylized official gaze. But in these archives the panoptic is a frail conceit. Administrative overviews index conventional forms of assumed mastery less than comprehensive knowledge. Such overviews—of regions, problems, or target populations— were rendered from cribbed and cluttered, spare and hurried reports of the disorder of things, written in the studied ineloquence of bureaucratese. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 143 (#expands, via linked claim)

Colonial domination, as we have seen, gives rise to and continues to dictate a whole complex of resentful behavior and of refusal on the part of the colonized. The colonized exerts a considerable effort to keep away from the colonial world, not to expose himself to any action of the conqueror. In everyday life, however, the colonized and the colonizers are constantly establishing bonds of economic, technical, and administrative dependence. Colonialism obviously throws all the elements of native society into confusion. The dominant group arrives with its values and imposes them with such violence that the very life of the colonized can manifest itself only defensively, in a more or less clandestine way. Under these conditions, colonial domination distorts the very relations that the colonized maintains with his own culture. — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 421 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Archival genres themselves shaped colonial epistemic practices; Colonial policy disputes centered on how race should be assessed, not what race is; Poor mixed-race Europeans were erased from both colonial and postcolonial Indonesian historiography (+14 more)

Related

• Colonial administrative overviews signaled assumed mastery rather than real knowledge (similarity 0.88)
• Colonial administrative overviews index assumed mastery more than actual comprehension. (similarity 0.85)
• Historians often over-assume the dispositions colonial officials’ positions encouraged (similarity 0.84)
• Conditional and future-tense archival writing shaped colonial administrative responses (similarity 0.83)
• Colonial administrative decision-making consolidated conflicting local knowledge into packages (similarity 0.83)
• Colonial administrative documents exceeded the demands for proof and causation (similarity 0.83)
• Colonial experts framed Javanese workers as requiring constant supervision to justify segregation (similarity 0.82)
• Pramoedya saw colonial archives as a mausoleum of paltry truths rather than knowledge (similarity 0.82)
• Colonial officials’ disjointed accounts shared vocabulary but not sources of knowledge. (similarity 0.82)
• Colonial curricula taught the effects of French power rather than French history proper (similarity 0.82)
• Metropolitan ideologies and science shaped colonial governors’ assumptions about uplifting Africans. (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial knowing relied on inattention and adverted gazes more than surveillance (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial settlers’ attention was selective, not panoptic, and oriented to Europe (similarity 0.80)
• Administrative maps shaped which colonial events historians recorded (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial historiography reproduced administrative maps that erased mixed-ethnic encampments (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Colonial administrative overviews signaled assumed mastery rather than real knowledge #expands (0.60) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 143
• Colonial domination distorts the colonized’s relationship with their own culture and traditions #expands (0.55) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 421