Colonial exclusion categories sedimented into the national identity of the colonized

Evidence

The Dutch were quite clear on this point: whatever mother-tongue they spoke, they were irremediably inlanders, a word which, like the English ‘natives’ and the French ‘indigènes,’ always carried an unintentionally paradoxical semantic load. In this colony, as in each separate, other colony, it meant that the persons referred to were both ‘inferior’ and ‘belonged there’ (just as the Dutch, being ‘natives’ of Holland, belonged there). Conversely, the Dutch by such language assigned themselves, along with superiority, ‘notbelonging-there’. The word also implied that in their common inferiority, the inlanders were equally contemptible, no matter what ethnolinguistic group or class they came from. Yet even this miserable equality of condition had a definite perimeter. For inlander always raised the question ‘native of what?’. If the Dutch sometimes spoke as if inlanders were a world-category, experience showed that this notion was hardly sustainable in practice. Inlanders stopped at the coloured colony’s drawn edge. Beyond that were, variously, ‘natives’, indigènes and indios. Moreover, colonial legal terminology included the category vreemde oosterlingen (foreign Orientals), which had the dubious ring of false coin – as it were ‘foreign natives.’ Such ‘foreign Orientals,’ mainly Chinese, Arabs and Japanese, though they might live in the colony, had a politico-legal legal status superior to that of the ‘native natives’. Furthermore, tiny Holland was sufficiently awed by the Meiji oligarchs’ economic strength and military prowess for Japanese in the colony to be legally promoted, from 1899 on, to ‘honorary Europeans’. From all this, by a sort of sedimentation, inlander – excluding whites, Dutchmen, Chinese, Arabs, Japanese, ‘natives,’ indigènes, and indios – grew ever more specific in content; until, like a ripe larva, it was suddenly transmogrified into the spectacular butterfly called ‘Indonesian’. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 463

Categorization

• QUESTION: How far does this ‘sedimentation by exclusion’ mechanism generalize — did, say, ‘Filipino’ or ‘Nigerian’ emerge the same way from a nested hierarchy of who counted as the native?
• XREF: connects to: Divide-and-rule fragmented the colonized while whiteness unified the colonizers — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1481; Settler identity depends constitutively on the colonized it wishes to erase. — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 2105; Counter-mythology keeps colonised identity defined in relation to the coloniser — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 764 (+1 more)

Related

• Colonial category of the native stopped at each colony’s drawn boundary. (similarity 0.84)
• The negative category of the inlander crystallized into the positive identity ‘Indonesian’. (similarity 0.84)
• Colonial labels made the colonized simultaneously inferior and belonging to the land. (similarity 0.82)