Ethnic labels imposed by the metropole flatten internal differences among diasporic peoples

Evidence

Afro-Caribbean is the blanket term for any Caribbean in England. For real. It is as real as when many well educated people here say to me, ‘You are from the Caribbean, how come, you are not even black, you look Asian.’ … I do believe that the term ‘Afro-Caribbean’ is a British naming and perhaps it is supposed to represent the image of the majority of West Indian migrants who came here in the post-war period. And it is used to mark and remember in their past the politics and horrors of slavery, the European classification of Africans as ultrainferior. The fragmentation and loss of “culture” but with desires to negotiate a new ‘Afroness’ in this diasporic site.… In this specificity I can deal with ‘Afro-Caribbean’ … but not when it is used as the privileged index of horror to settle and centre all other subaltern Caribbean historiographies under an Afrophilia of the Caribbean here in Britain.… Trinidad has had a history of indentureship of Indians in labour camp apartheid for as long as it has had “organized” slavery. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 861

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains how ‘Afro-Caribbean’ functions as a British naming that erases the Indian/Coolie strain of Caribbean identity, privileging the African lineage.
• XREF: Connects to Hall’s broader work on ‘New Ethnicities’ and to Homi Bhabha’s colonial mimicry; also links forward to how Islamophobia readings employ similar flattening of ‘the Muslim’ into a single category.
• QUESTION: How does the British naming of one homogenized category parallel the way ‘Muslim’ or ‘Asian’ function as flattening official categories in Britain?
• SEED: Angle: catalogue of metropole-imposed ethnic categories (‘Afro-Caribbean,’ ‘Asian,’ ‘Muslim’) as administrative fictions erasing internal difference.