Article ID: CBB625154341

The Case History in the Colonies (2020)

unapi

The case history in the colonial context was a hybrid form, caught between bureaucratic pressures toward racialization, aggregation, and generalization, on the one hand, and the individualistic bias of the genre, on the other. This tension posed a problem for colonial rulers. In their drive to harvest neat, ideologically reliable knowledge about the minds of colonial subjects, officials and researchers in the 20th-century British Empire read case histories in selective ways, pared them down to simplistic fables, and ultimately bypassed them whenever they could. In other words, although they worked mightily to bend the case history to their purposes, they never fully succeeded. The authority granted to personal testimony and the capaciousness of the detail in case histories always contained a subversive potential. As a result, the politics of the colonial case history were underdetermined, overflowing the categories and resisting the generalizations that colonial rulers sought to impose.

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Article Chris Millard; Felicity Callard (2020) Thinking in, with, across, and beyond cases with John Forrester. History of the Human Sciences (pp. 3-14). unapi

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB625154341/

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Authors & Contributors
Henrik Chetan Aspengren
Geetashree Singh
Priya Mirza
Hsu, Li Yang
Shanguhyia, Martin S.
Yip, Ka-che
Concepts
Great Britain, colonies
Colonialism
Science and government
Imperialism
India, civilization and culture
Science and politics
Time Periods
20th century
19th century
20th century, early
21st century
18th century
Places
India
Australia
Great Britain
Hong Kong
Melbourne (Victoria, Australia)
Nigeria
Institutions
British East India Company
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