Colonized subjects are already embedded at the heart of imperial national identity.
Evidence
People like me who came to England in the 1950s have been there for centuries; symbolically, we have been there for centuries. I was coming home. I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea. I am the sweet tooth, the sugar plantations that rotted generations of English children’s teeth. There are thousands of others beside me that are, you know, the cup of tea itself. Because they don’t grow it in Lancashire, you know. Not a single tea plantation exists within the United Kingdom. This is the symbolization of English identity—I mean, what does anybody in the world know about an English person except that they cannot get through the day without a cup of tea? — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 208
Categorization
Category: Connection Points
- XREF: The sugar-in-the-cup-of-tea figure is a compressed statement of how empire constitutes the metropolitan nation, anticipating the entanglement the Islamophobia field reads into contemporary Britain.
- SEED: The tea metaphor offers a vivid entry point for an essay on how imperial commodities are disavowed within self-image of the modern nation.
Related
- Empire’s labor is embedded inside the domestic quotidian (similarity 0.85)
Broader Connections
- Colonial histories are internal to the identity of the colonizer nation
#corroborates(0.95) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 209