Colonial identities form as refusals of contradictory parental models

Evidence

I’m trying to say that those classic colonial tensions were lived as part of my personal history. My own formation and identity was very much constructed out of a kind of refusal of the dominant and cultural models which were held up for me. I didn’t want to beg my way like my father into acceptance by the American or English expatriate business community, and I couldn’t identify with that old plantation world, with its roots in slavery, but which my mother spoke of as a “golden age.” I felt much more like an independent Jamaican boy. But there was no room for that as a subjective position in the culture of my family. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 747

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concretely illustrates how colonial subjectivity is constructed ‘out of a kind of refusal’ of the models a colonial family holds up — a working definition of identity-as-refusal that carries into analysis of colonial psychology.