Colonial power is internalized into the most intimate domestic and emotional spaces

Evidence

It comes out of this horrendous family experience that I had, in which I came to understand that my family were living out in the interstices of the family, the most private domestic space, this huge colonial drama. That is what it was about. So the meaning of colonization was internalized into the intimate and the emotionally charged theater of the family; it was same thing on another terrain. And ever since then, I’ve really not been good at thinking about the distinction between private and public, the inside and outside, subjective interior and objective social relations; I don’t quite buy how that is usually written about or thought about. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 1064

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Fanon’s colonial psychology and the psychic interiorization of colonial relations that downstream Islamophobia readings assume; also echoes the ‘personal is political’ lineage. — connects to: Colonialism operates as an internalized state of mind, not just external domination — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 324
• QUESTION: This frame — refusing the private/public split — seems to drive Hall’s whole method. Worth tracing how this biographical origin translates into his theoretical commitments on representation and the subject.
• DEEPTHINKING: Colonialism as something lived ‘not understood and understood,’ internalized into the family theater, dissolving the private/public and subjective/objective distinctions — this is a dense, paradigm-level claim about how power operates at multiple scales at once.