Displacement applies even to one’s own imagined community and culture

Evidence

So being displaced, or out of place, is a characteristic experience of mine. It’s been all throughout my life. I even felt displaced in relation to black culture in Jamaica. I was a kind of nationalist from the very beginning, lots of my friends were. We were anti-imperialist; we wanted Jamaica to be free. But in relation to black culture and the life of ordinary black people, I really didn’t know what it was about in any depth, and I couldn’t get to it. I was a middle-class brown schoolboy with middle-class parents; I couldn’t reach it. I could sort of imagine it and relate to it by empathy, but I couldn’t be of it. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 1083

Categorization

• XREF: This instance of out-of-place-ness within one’s own nationalist community connects directly to the class/color stratification within colonized societies that postcolonial theory maps — think of Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks and later discussions of the Creole middle class in Caribbean writing. — connects to: Historical displacement lets fiction examine utopia’s aftermath cleanly — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 894; Ceremony is a vehicle for belonging to family, people, and land — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 133
• ADDENDUM: Relates to the field’s scaffolding concerns on colonial psychology and racialized selfhood: the middle-class colonial subject’s alienation from ‘the people’ is a recurring structural position in anti-colonial nationalism narratives.