Colonial subjects discovered their collective identity only in the imperial center.

Evidence

We discovered, for the first time, that we were “West Indians.” We met African students for the first time. With the emerging postcolonial independence, we dreamt of a Caribbean federation, merging these countries into a larger entity. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 775

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the ‘imagined community’ mechanism — here the nation/federation is imagined among expatriates in the metropole, not at home. Directly reusable in the Islamophobia corpus where diaspora constructs home/nation identities from abroad.