The Location of Culture (Routledge Classics) | Homi K. Bhabha

The Location of Culture (Routledge Classics) | Homi K. Bhabha | the complexity of resistance

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The Location of Cu...

	The Location of Culture (Routledge Classics) Homi K. Bhabha Routledge, 2004 - 464 pages average customer review:based on 18 reviews view larger image
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Terry Eagleton once wrote in the Guardian, 'Few post-colonial writers can rival Homi Bhabha in his exhilarated sense of alternative possibilities'. In rethinking questions of identity, social agency and national affiliation, Bhabha provides a working, if controversial, theory of cultural hybridity, one that goes far beyond previous attempts by others. A scholar who writes and teaches about South Asian literature and contemporary art with incredible virtuosity, he discusses writers as diverse as Morrison, Gordimer, and Conrad. In The Location of Culture, Bhabha uses concepts such as mimicry, interstice, hybridity, and liminality to argue that cultural production is always most productive where it is most ambivalent. Speaking in a voice that combines intellectual ease with the belief that theory itself can contribute to practical political change, Bhabha has become one of the leading post-colonial theorists of this era.

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The enunciatory present

In The Location of Culture, Bhabha argues for a fundamental realignment of the methodology of cultural analysis away from ontology toward the "performative" and "enunciatory present" (p.178). Such a shift, he claims, provides a basis for the negotiation of cultural difference rather than its automatic repression or negation in the face of irreconcilable oppositions. Bhabha's emphasis on the enunciative production of meaning places the emphasis of critical inquiry on issues of representation or signification, thereby producing "a temporality that makes it possible to conceive of the articulation of antagonistic or contradictory elements" (p.25).

This argument represents a critical attack on the Western production of binary oppositions, traditionally defined in terms of centre and margin, civilised and savage, enlightened and ignorant. Bhabha questions the easy recourse to consolidated dualisms by repudiating fixed and authentic centres of truth, suggesting that cultures interact, transgress and transform each other in a much more complex manner than typical binary oppositions allow.

According to him, hybridity and linguistic multivocality have the potential to intervene and dislocate the process of domination through the re-interpretation and re-deployment of received discourse, thus re-focusing critical attention towards the "agonistic space" (181) which exists on the borders of difference, along the edges of alterity, where cultures meet. Bhabha celebrates cultural heterogeneity and the subversive effects of hybridisation.

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the complexity of resistance

I enjoy the central insights of The Location of Culture. As the one previous reviewer put it, this idea of in-betweenness is indeed one of Bhabha's central and defining claims. Moreover, the fact that this space of in-between--"located" in the "interstices" of colonial discourse itself, as well as the interstices "between" colonial and anti-colonial discourse--is both oppressive and liberating is one of the beauties of the argument. These various spaces of in-between serve as constant challenges to the attempts of the empowered to render their power and perspective natural, internally consistent and homogeneous. The self-contradictory aspects of this attempt to paper over actual and ever-present hybridity becomes a source of agency. In other words, life is actually always lived in-between but our conceptualization tends to resists this complexity. In-betweenness being both a source of oppression and of power does not leave us "nowhere." Rather, it places us in the conceptual flux that cultural discourses and practices and rituals often seek to hide. Actively inhabiting that conceptual flux rather than actively trying to project onto a disempowered other is indeed a tremendous act of resistance. I find Bhabha's claim to be fascinating and even beautiful.

Of course, I agree that there are ways in which Bhabha could have defined this resistance more efficiently, and I do think he relies on psychoanalytic modes of analysis a little too much. And my biggest problem with his argumenr is that it tends to emphasize the empowered discourse over the practices and subjectivities of the disempowered as they resist. In other words, there is more critique than affirmation, more identification of how this in-betweenness is a consequence of power and not enough explanation of how to inhabit it as a mode of resistance.

Nonetheless, the resistance to "theoryspeak" by which one reviewer objected to this book is often a bigger problem to understanding Bhabha than the 'theoryspeak' itself. I am no fan of such use of language that is sometimes seemingly at the expense of clarity but the problem is neither the language itself nor a non-white person adapting Western theory. After all, if Bhabha is invested in "in-betweenness," and in a strange way he is, then his use of Western theory merely confirms the possibility he sees in breaking down the false "othering" that maintains colonial power. His canonization has as much to do with non-white academics as white ones. More importantly, the idea that an Indian writer has no legitimate access to Western theory becomes part and parcel of the idea that people of color are absolute others from white Europeans. As much as the racists and the ethnic cultural nationalists both want this point to be true, it is not. Finally, what makes Bhabha's work of any value at all--and I think it is quite valuable--is that he grasps and elaborates upon the INSIGHTS of Western theory, not just its vocabulary and legitimacy. Uniting definitions of unconscious desire from Freud and Lacan with theories of how power inhabits language (discourse) from Derrida and Foucault allows for very sophisticated critiques. He takes the implications of Derrida, Foucault, Lacan and others and creatively imagines how imperial cultures operate in a way that provides terms for critique and resistance. While that approach can be alienating, its INSIGHTS, for the most part, compensate for the difficulties of its vocabulary. It is well worth the effort.

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Even The Little People Are Free

Bhabha writes dense, pretentious prose, which is commonplace now among the humanists who feel inferior to scientists, but he does have something to say. This little book does two things: it is in the end a celebration of literature (and not of theory for its own sake) and it defends the little brown people, such as Indians, against the claim of others, such as Edward Said, that whites oppressed them by denying them a voice. Bhabha argues in effect that the oppression created a new voice that subverted the oppressors. Bhabha has little patience for the sob-sister school of academic discourse which seeks out victims of racism. This is a sustained critique of liberal academic bad faith.

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I'd rather stick my hand in a blender than read this again

The fact that this book is influential is generally beyond argument. What astonishes me, however, is that so many people had the endurance to sit through the horrific writing; the author's style is obnoxious in the extreme. The first paragraph, for example, notes that the question of culture is the "trope of our times," characterized by "a tenebrous sense of survival." These concepts are not mind-bending. An everday, or as Homi would say, "colloquial" vocabularly would sufficiently articulate his thesis, yet he seems hellbent on packing his work with obscure language like he needs show off or prove something. Again, his ideas are influential, but he makes reading them as painful as possible.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

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