Jamaica’s pigmentocracy schooled colonized elites for imaginary England

Evidence

Notwithstanding his family’s hybridity—as Stuart himself described it, “part Scottish, part African, part Portuguese-Jewish”—they, and most particularly his emotionally powerful mother, identified strongly with the ethos of an imaginary, distant England. Thus, he was schooled for a future as a member of the colonial elite but still lived those early years as a black native of the Caribbean (and indeed, as he sometimes noted, as the blackest member of his own family). On a day-to-day basis, he grew up living in the “pigmentocracy” of Jamaica, which he once described as being “the most exquisitely differentiated caste and class system in the world.” 10 By his teenage years, at night he was listening on the radio to the sounds of modernity—especially modern jazz—and dreaming about how he might get to wherever it was to be found. 11 Despite his political sympathies with the independence movement, he also identified with the imaginative world of the colonizers. Well versed in the nuances of English history and literature, he recalled that on arrival in the UK, when he took the train from Bristol to Paddington en route to Oxford, he saw a landscape that felt thoroughly familiar to him from the novels of Thomas Hardy. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 19

Categorization

• CANDY: The image of Hall feeling the Hardy landscape as familiar on first arriving in England is a striking, self-contained anecdote.
• XREF: Pigmentocracy recurs as a term worth tracking through Caribbean postcolonial theory. — connects to: Colonial education embedded English literary culture into young Black Caribbean children. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1174; England needed race-thinking as a unifying theory for distant colonies — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 478; Colonial rule manufactured political identities that it then naturalized as culture — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the…, 45 (+5 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Colonial education embedded English literary culture into young Black Caribbean children. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1174; England needed race-thinking as a unifying theory for distant colonies — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 478; Colonial rule manufactured political identities that it then naturalized as culture — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the…, 45 (+5 more)