Colonialism’s innovation is the seeming absolute exclusion of the other

Evidence

What difference, then, does colonialism bring? What distinguishes its modern political order? Clearly the answer is not, in itself, the division into selves and others. Rather, it is the effect of seeming to exclude the other absolutely from the self, in a world divided absolutely into two. The establishing of this seemingly absolute difference is in fact an overcoming, or an overlooking, of difference. As with the example of the colonial city, by establishing a boundary that rigorously excludes the Oriental, the other, from the self, such a self acquires its apparent cleanliness, its purity, its uncorrupted and undivided identity. Identity now appears no longer self-divided, no longer contingent, no longer something arranged out of differences; it appears instead as something self-formed, and original. What is overlooked, in producing this modern effect of order, is the dependence of such identity upon what it excludes. It is forgotten that the boundary of the outside, as we have just seen, in this sense is something integral, something inside. How is such an overlooking, a forgetting, in the colonial order achieved? — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 522

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the colonial-city analysis from chapter 5 and sets up the state’s self-forgetting of its own dependence.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 522