Colonial formation made full belonging in the metropole permanently impossible.

Evidence

However, at Oxford he soon realized that although he could easily study English culture on the page, he could never completely “belong” there, being so fundamentally formed by the colonial experience of Jamaica. He was, he came to realize, simply one member of a particular generation of postwar migrants—starting with those who arrived in the UK on the ship the Empire Windrush in 1948—and who, he said, he knew constituted his prime subject, ever since he met them coming out of Paddington Station, off the boat trains. To that extent, he was part of a massive demographic and cultural change in the composition of the population of Britain, and in some ways he always remained, in part, an “outsider,” a familiar stranger in a liminal position with a fundamentally migrant/diasporic perspective on the culture of the country in which he lived most of his life. His subjectivity was formed not only on the edges of the British empire but on the edges of the West itself. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 13

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the ‘familiar stranger’ / liminal position and ‘migrant/diasporic perspective’ — core concepts for colonial psychology and the construction of selfhood in the field.
• DEEPTHINKING: The double-edged formation — ‘on the edges of the British empire but on the edges of the West itself’ — captures how the colonized subject’s standpoint is simultaneously inside and outside, a paradigm-shifting epistemic position worth sitting with.