Colonial subjects internalized the imperial center’s landscape as already-known before ever seeing it.

Evidence

Arriving on a steamer in Bristol with my mother, getting on the train to come to Paddington, I’m driving through this West Country landscape; I’ve never seen it, but I know it. I read Shakespeare, Hardy, the Romantic poets. Though I didn’t occupy the space, it was like finding again, in one’s dreams, an already-familiar idealized landscape. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 774

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concrete first-person instance of how the colonized subject’s subjectivity is produced by the imperial metropole’s cultural imaginary — the anticipatory ‘knowing’ of England. This is the psychological mechanism underpinning Orientalism-style othering reversed onto the colonized self.
• XREF: Directly anticipates the Fanonian/colonial-psychology vocabulary the Islamophobia field inherits — the colonized subject’s ‘already-known’ England prefigures how the Muslim subject is discursively pre-constructed before any encounter.