The stranger’s outsideness enables insight unavailable to cultural insiders.

Evidence

I used to comfort myself, I think, with that thought. You know the German sociologist Simmel said the stranger has insights into where he or she is, which the people who live it instinctively, live their culture instinctively, can’t possibly have. You need the shock of translation, etc. So I think that may be true. I thought you were going to say something else, which is that really a lot of people who are diasporic also have that. C. L. R. James called it the insights of the people who “are in but not of Europe.” — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 1085

Categorization

• XREF: Simmel’s stranger concept and C. L. R. James’s ‘in but not of Europe’ will recur in postcolonial theory readings; this grounds the insider-outsider epistemological position.
• DEFINE: Defines the epistemological privilege of the stranger/diasporic intellectual position that the field’s critique of Eurocentrism depends on.