Official documents layer received accounts and political semantics cumulatively

Evidence

If every document comes layered with the received account of earlier events and the cultural semantics of a political moment, the issue of offi- cial “bias” opens to a different challenge: to identify the conditions of possibility that shaped what warranted repetition, what competencies were rewarded in archival writing, what stories could not be told and what could not be said. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 211

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s stated purpose on ‘colonial commonsense’ and archival production - reframes the bias question into conditions of possibility.