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Knowledge, Power, and Racial Classifications: The “Japanese” in “Manchuria”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 March 2010
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Was knowledge always the basis of colonial power? If so, were colonial rulers invariably confident of the accuracy of their knowledge? Among the Victorian British, for example, there was widespread agreement that India could be known and represented as a series of facts (Cohn 1996, 4). Based on this agreement, the British colonial officials, missionaries, and entrepreneurs tried to demonstrate their power through what Bernard Cohn calls “officializing procedures”: counting, gathering, characterizing, ordering, and classifying the populations and their attributes in India. Such procedures offered numerous agents of colonization “seemingly immense culture-defining capacity” (Cooper and Stoler 1989, 609). Yet, their power was “never so omniscient nor secure to imagine itself as totalizing” (Dirks 1992, 7). Their insecurity may have been the result of their incomplete knowledge or even ignorance.
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