Colonial education creates insider knowledge of the metropole without belonging to it

Evidence

I had exactly the same relationship to England. Having been prepared by the colonial education, I knew England from the inside. But I’m not and never will be “English.” I know both places intimately, but I am not wholly of either place. And that’s exactly the diasporic experience, far away enough to experience the sense of exile and loss, close enough to understand the enigma of an always-postponed “arrival.” — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 767

Categorization

• DEFINE: Hall defines the diasporic experience as the paradox of being prepared from the inside yet never ‘English’ — insider knowledge without belonging.
• XREF: This is the classic ‘familiar stranger’ and hybridity concept that runs through Hall’s later work and connects to postcolonial readings of the colonial subject’s doubled consciousness.