Colonial frameworks can unite close kin and alienate distant strangers into one nation

Evidence

Some of the peoples on the eastern coast of Sumatra are not only physically close, across the narrow Straits of Malacca, to the populations of the western littoral of the Malay Peninsula, but they are ethnically related, understand each other’s speech, have a common religion, and so forth. These same Sumatrans share neither mother-tongue, ethnicity, nor religion with the Ambonese, located on islands thousands of miles away to the east. Yet during this century they have come to understand the Ambonese as fellow-Indonesians, the Malays as foreigners. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 461

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: A story could explore characters whose ethnic kin across a strait become ‘foreign’ while strangers across an ocean become compatriots — the imagined nation overriding lived kinship.