Colonial superiors dismissed brutal assignments as routine and undemanding

Evidence

Valck stepped into what he later characterized as an untenable situation, what his superior described as a “not difficult” job, one that was “neither unusual nor particularly demanding.” Valck insisted on the opposite, that the conditions were extremely difficult, and that he was offered no help by the Resident who was formally in charge. He was sent to clean it up, he argued, precisely because there was nothing about Deli that was “normal” at all. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1427

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is the epistemic crux: the colonial commonsense that labels a grotesque posting ‘normal’ versus the official’s insistence that Deli was exceptional, framing the book’s core tension between imperial normalization and local truth.