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.

中文翻译：

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殖民地的案例历史

殖民背景下的案例史是一种混合形式，一方面是官僚主义对种族化、聚合和概括的压力，另一方面是流派的个人主义偏见。这种紧张局势给殖民统治者带来了问题。20 世纪大英帝国的官员和研究人员为了收集有关殖民臣民思想的简洁、意识形态上可靠的知识，他们有选择地阅读案例历史，将它们简化为简单的寓言故事，并最终尽可能绕过它们。换句话说，尽管他们努力使案例历史符合他们的目的，但他们从未完全成功。授予个人证词的权威和案例历史中细节的广泛性总是包含颠覆性的潜力。因此，