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. (shrink)

The furor which greeted David Friedrich Strauss's The Life of Jesus upon its publication in 1835 has always been something of a mystery. This essay argues that the ferocity of the reaction can be traced to the contravention of a widely shared expectation in nineteenth-century Germany that theological scholarship would and should be read exclusively by theologians. The reception of the book in the 1830s and subsequent decades shows that this expectation increasingly conflicted with the liberal vision of a public (...) sphere governed by universal reason. By the end of the century, the formerly controversial Strauss had become a venerated figure in Germany, which suggests the extent to which the liberal vision of the public sphere ultimately triumphed. (shrink)