The Location Of Culture By Homi Bhabha
Oda Znidarsic
Homi Bhabha is a leading voice in postcolonial studies. He is highly influenced by Western poststructuralists, theorists, notably Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan and Michael Foucault. In Nation and Narration (1990) he argues against the tendency to essentialize Third World Countries into a homogenous identity. Instead he claims that all sense of nationhood is narrativized. He has also made a major contribution to postcolonial studies by pointing out how there is always ambivalence at the site of colonial dominance. In The Location of Culture (1994) Bhabha uses concepts such as mimicry, interstice, hybridity and liminality all influenced by semiotics and Lacanian psychoanalysis to argue that cultural production is always most productive where it is most ambivalent.
Homi bhabha expresses his views on the relation between the culture and hybridity. According to him, just like colonial culture, contemporary culture is also hybrid. Hybridity idea characterizes the mechanism of the colonial psychic economy. He states that the important point to recognize is that cultures are always retrospective constructs means they are consequences of historical process. So he adds further that cultural hybridity is not something absolutely general and so hybridity appears in all cultures. It blurs all deference into difference, making all hybridity appear the same. His theory of hybridity is associated with mimicry and sly civility and also a denial that there were cultures already there that became hybrid.
The Criterion is refereed e-journal and is designed to publish theoretical articles and book reviews on English Language and Literature. The Criterion encourages interpretative criticism and fresh insights into new and established authors and texts and seeks to generate a serious debate on different academic issues. We also encourage literary contributions in the form of original as well as translated poetry and fiction.
We follow a strict double-blind reviewing of the submitted works, which we promise to conceal always the identity of both the reviewers and the author from each other.
In "The Commitment to Theory," an essay collected in The Location of Culture (1994), Homi K. Bhabha foregrounds the unfortunate and perhaps false opposition of theory and politics that some critics have framed in order to question the elitism and Eurocentrism of prevailing postcolonial debates:
What's ironic is that Bhabha himself--perhaps more than any other leading postcolonial theorist--has throughout his career been susceptible to charges of elitism, Eurocentrism, bourgeois academic privilege, and an indebtedness to the principles of European poststructuralism that many of his harshest critics portray as his unknowing replication of "neo-imperial" or "neo-colonial" modes of discursive dominance over the colonized Third World. By means of a complicated repertoire of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Postmodern notions of mimicry and performance, and Derridian deconstruction, Bhabha has encouraged a rigorous rethinking of nationalism, representation, and resistance that above all stresses the "ambivalence" or "hybridity" that characterizes the site of colonial contestation--a "liminal" space in which cultural differences articulate and, as Bhabha argues, actually produce imagined "constructions" of cultural and national identity.
Bhabha's Nation and Narration (1990) is primarily an intervention into "essentialist" readings of nationality that attempt to define and naturalize Third World "nations" by means of the supposedly homogenous, innate, and historically continuous traditions that falsely define and ensure their subordinate status. Nations, in other words, are "narrative" constructions that arise from the "hybrid" interaction of contending cultural constituencies. In The Location of Culture, Bhabha extends his explanation of the "liminal" or "interstitial" category that occupies a space "between" competing cultural traditions, historical periods, and critical methodologies. Again utilizing a complex criteria of semiotics and psychoanalysis, Bhabha examines the "ambivalence of colonial rule" and suggests that it enables a capacity for resistance in the performative "mimicry" of the "English book." Discussing artists such as Toni Morrison and Nadine Gordimer, Bhabha seeks to find the "location of culture" in the marginal, "haunting," "unhomely" spaces between dominant social formations.
c80f0f1006