Homi K. Bhabha
Homi K. Bhabha
Homi K. Bhabha
HOMI K. BHABHA
3.0 INTRODUCTION:
Homi Bhabha was born into the Parsi community of Bombay in
1949 and grew up in the shade of Fire-Temple. He is an alumnus of St. Marys
High school, Mazagaon, Mumbai. He received his B. A. from Bombay University
and his M.A., D. Phil. from Christ Church, Oxford University. After lecturing in
the Department of English at the University of Sussex for over ten years, Bhabha
received a senior fellowship at Princeton University where he was also made Old
Dominion Visiting Professor. He was Steinberg Visiting Professor at the
University of Pennsylvania where he delivered the Richard Wright Lecture Series.
At Dartmouth College, Bhabha was a faculty fellow at the school of Criticism and
Theory. From 1997 to 2001 he served as Chester D. Professor in the Humanities at
the University of Chicago. In 2001-02, he served as Distinguished Visiting
Professor at University College, London. He has been the Anne F. Rothenberg
Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University
since 2001. He is currently a professor in the Humanities at the University of
Chicago where he teaches in the Department of English and Arts. He also serves
on the Editorial Collective of Public Culture, an academic journal published by
Duke University Press. Bhabhas work in postcolonial theory owes much to
poststructuralism. We observe the great influence of Jacques Derrida and
deconstruction; Jacques Lacan and Lacanian psychoanalysis; and the works of
Michel Foucault. In addition to these, he also stated in his interview with W. J. T.
Mitchell (in 1995) that Edward Said is the writer who has most influenced his
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boundary and location of the event of theoretical critique which does not contain
the truth (1994:22). He states that the critique or reading is a process rather than a
procedure. He asserts strongly that thinking something before reading anything
cannot be called a reading at all as it merely tries to find what we expected or in
other words, our expectations are likely to be confirmed. Bhabha argues that
critique, critical thinking, tends to dissolve certain commonplace oppositions,
which in the case of colonialism are inherited from the colonial discourse under
consideration. He writes against the dialectical form of argument. The concept
deferral is central to Bhabhas understanding of dialectical thinking. From Fanon
(Black Skin, White Masks) Bhabha has drawn the need to look at each situation in
the light of its particular specific history. Bhabha has developed a general and
productive rethinking of issues around colonial and post-colonial power and
psyche through the reading and re-reading of Fanons work. His reading of Fanon
is only the most obvious example of conceptual ignition, and its effects are
ongoing. His Works include:
1. Nation and Narration (ed)
2. The Location of Culture
3. Cosmopolitanisms in Public Culture. (ed)
4. Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation (ed)
Homi Bhabhas work in postcolonial theory is heavily influenced by
poststructuralism, most notably the writings of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan
and Michel Foucault. In addition to this bulk of writing and books, he has also
published contributed many more journal articles and book chapters. We find his
homepages and profiles on the external link section too. He has been interviewed
by many eminent figures.
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relationships with other cultures. In Bhabhas view, the source of the Western
compulsion to colonize is due in large part to traditional Western representations
of foreign cultures. His argument attacks the Western production and
implementation of certain binary oppositions. The opposition targeted by Bhabha
includes centre/margin, civilized/savage, and enlightened/ignorant. Bhabha
proceeds by destabilizing the binaries insofar as the first term of the binary is
allowed to unthinkingly dominate the second. Once the binaries are destabilized,
Bhabha argues that cultures can be understood to interact, transgress, and
transform each other in a much more complex manner than the traditional binary
oppositions can allow. According to Bhabha, hybridity and linguistic multivocality have the potential to intervene and dislocate the process of colonization
through the interpretation of political discourse. In this book he uses the 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 change. His work, The Location of Culture is a collection of
his writings. They are characterized by his promotion of ideas of colonial
ambivalence and hybridity and also by his use of aesthetic terms and categories
(mimesis, irony, parody etc.) to mobilize an analysis of terms of inter-cultural
engagement within the context of empire. For him, the rich text of the civilizing
mission is remarkably split, fissured and flawed. According to him, the question of
the ambivalence of mimicry as the problematic of colonial subjection arises from
the colonial encounter between the white presence and its black semblance. He
also states that the obligation on the part of the colonized to mirror back an image
of the colonizer produces neither identity nor difference. Thus the mimic man
who occupies the impossible space between cultures is the effect of a flawed
colonial mimesis in which to be Anglicized is emphatically not to be English.
According to him, occupying the precarious area between mimicry and mockery,
the mimic man seems to iconic both of the enforcement of colonial authority and
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its strategic failure. Bhabha has become one of the leading post-colonial theorists
of this era.
Bhabhas interest in these figures or figurings of the in-between of
colonial discourse is evident also in his invocation and transformation of the
Bhaktian notion of hybridity. In Bhaktin, hybridization destabilizes univocal
forms of authority whereas; Bhabha sees it as a problematic of colonial
representation. According to him, the production of hybridization not only
expresses the condition of colonial enunciation but also marks the possibility of
counter colonial resistance. In other words, hybridity marks those moments of
civil disobedience within the discipline of civility as a sign of spectacular
resistance. He further extended the theory of resistance in his theorization of the
Third Space of Enunciation as a assertion of difference in discourse. He also
states that the transformational value of change lies in the rearticulating, or
translation, of elements that are neither the one nor the other, but something else
besides which contests the terms and territories of both.
The radicalism of Bhabhas work lies in its deployment of the idea
of difference within an analysis of colonialism as a cultural text or system of
meaning. He accounts the need of the performative dimension of cultural
articulation. This thinking provides the development of a postcolonial practice as a
guiding concern. This practice also recognizes the problem of cultural interaction
that emerges at the significatory boundaries of cultures, where the meanings and
values are read or signs are misappropriated. Bhabhas clearest statement of the
postcolonial perspective is outlined in the essay, The Postcolonial and the
Postmodern: The Question of Agency, which also forms a defense of his interest
in indeterminacy against charges of the formalist orientation of his work.
In 1999, Newsweek Magazine listed Bhabha as one of the 100
Americans for the Next Century. Bhabha has become something more than the
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own self perfectly. Bhabha points out that even the Bible is hybridized in the
process of being communicated to the natives. He states that the colonial presence
is always ambivalent, split between its appearance as original and authorative and
its articulation as repetition and difference. So he strongly asserts that this gap is
failure of colonial discourse and is a site for resistance.
Homi Bhabha generated the concept: hybridity of cultures refers to
mixedness or impurity of cultures knowing that no culture is really pure.
According to Bhabha, every culture is an original mixedness within every form of
identity. He states that the cultures are not discrete phenomena, but being always
in contact with one another, we find mixedness in cultures. Bhabha insists on
hybriditys ongoing process- hybridization. He further asserts that no cultures that
come together leading to hybrid forms but cultures are the consequence of
attempts to still the flux of cultural hybridities. He directs our attention to what
happens on the borderlines of cultures, and in-between cultures. He used the term,
liminal on the border or the threshold that stresses the idea that what is in between
settled cultural forms or identities is central to the creation of new cultural
meaning. He further states that The Location of Culture is both spatial and
temporal: so the terms- hybridity and liminality do not refer only to space, but also
to time. So he asserts that the people living in different spaces are living at
different stages of progress. (Huddart, 2006:6-7)
Bhabha rejects Fanons idea, colonial authority works by inviting
black subjects to mimic white culture, and states that this invitation itself
undercuts colonial hegemony. He also stresses that both the colonizer and the
colonized are independent. He further states that they are not only present together
but also act on one another and there are many reversible reactions between them.
The term hybridity being an integral part of postcolonial discourse, we should as
Ella Shohat rightly suggest, try to:
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effect of discriminatory practices. He also points out that cultures are effects of
stabilization produced by authority. Bhabha contends that hybridity is not a
consequence of other allegedly pure positions trust together. According to him,
hybridity is not the consequence of dialectical sublation- a synthesis of thesis and
anti-thesis.
Greek thinkers like Hegel, Marx, and many more state that the
logical structure of hybridity is not merely logical, but has pertinence to the
understanding of social structures. It is interesting that Will Kymlica (political
philosopher) should use the term hybrid to characterize the complex cases (inbetween cases) which may lead us astray. But Bhabhas sense of hybridity would
not only refer to the complexity of certain demands for rights but also to the
complexly hybrid histories from which those demands issue. Here he states that
hybridization is banal, it is everyday. He goes a step further and states that
hybridization is not just everyday banality, especially in terms of international law.
According to Bhabha, if cultures are the consequence of hybridization process,
then this view necessitates a rethinking of international agreement exemplified by
the universal declaration of Human Rights.
In short, Bhabhas idea of hybridity is important. It suggests that
cultures come after the hybridizing process, rather than existing before. He proves
that, in colonial relationships, this is just as true of the colonizer as of the
colonized. Bhabha reminds us that cultures are part of an ongoing process. He
further suggests that majority liberal cultures in the West must view themselves
through the post-colonial perspective. We observe that Bhabhas theoretization of
hybridity has important consequences for discourses of rights. Bhabha points out
that minority cultures have tended to be ignored or, alternatively, asked to
assimilate.
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substitution along a vertical axis in terms of parts for whole, a never ending
substitution that cannot reach any point of full presence.
Mimicry being a strategy is characteristically visual. Bhabha insists
on the visual as the key element in mimicry, making the connections with
stereotype absolutely clear. He states that the visibility of the mimicry is always
produced at the site of interdiction. Mimicry is itself a markedly ambivalent
phenomenon. Bhabhas idea of mimicry needs to be, thought of as a process that
mimics no fixed, final, foundational identity. The colonizer has no absolute preexistence identity which can be mimicked, and the colonized likewise has no real
identity which he or she is betraying through mimicry. V. S Naipauls The Mimic
Men (1967) is the central in Bhabhas lineage of mimicry.
Bhabha suggests that the structure of mimicry derives from a
fundamental but unstable urge on the part of colonial authority. There must be
intermediaries or collaborators with whom the colonial power can work in the
exercise of its authority and these intermediaries are come to seem a little too
similar to the colonizer, undermining ideologies of superiority. A further
consequence of mimicry is the undermining of the colonizers apparently stable
original identity. The identity of the colonizer is constantly slipping away, being
undermined by effects of writing, joking, sly civility and repetition. In conclusion,
mimicry implicitly offers an opening for agency, and even a model for agency.
or
inspiring
uneasiness
by
reason
of
is always coming from the future, or, in short, changing. Bhabha points out that
history confront its uncanny doubles. (1994:194) He adds further that like culture,
Western knowledge is homely and unhomely or canny or uncanny. Bhabha
concludes his discussion stating the important contribution of the uncanny sciencepsychoanalysis. He views that this science reminds us that a change of object
requires a change, or at least a transformation, in the procedures of observation.
The idea of the uncanny describes the dual quality of all identity, but
is particularly useful in the study of colonialism. Bhabha uses the idea to
complicate divisions between Western and non-Western identities, in other words,
large and abstract identities. As uncanny concept undermines the stability of
concepts in general, it seems to be a slippery concept. Homi bhabha is supposed to
be an expert in transforming concepts as his theoretical strategies. The slippery
quality means that it tends to elude definitive theorization. Bhabha further states
that literature is a source of many intriguing examples of uncanniness and
continues to produce uncanny effects for post-colonial criticism. Bhabha uses the
term uncanny, which has a wide contemporary critical currency, associated with
monstrosity, repetition and doubling. He uses it to interrogate the superficial selfsufficiency of Western modernitys narratives. Using the term canny and uncanny,
Bhabha focuses the colonial relationships- as the simple division of self and other.
The category of the uncanny allows Bhabha to emphasize the connection between
what troubles our concepts and what troubles our sense of self. In relation of
using the concept, uncanny, the great impact of Sigmund Freud and Kristeva is
observed on Homi Bhabha.
peoples obviously resisted, and that the postcolonial critic must continue to resist
it too.
like the nation, are a strategy: a rhetorical strategy. The double movement is that
of pedagogy and performance, of certainties and anxieties which always go
together. Bhabha explains the double movement and its strange temporality as:
We then have a contested conceptual territory where the nations people
must be thought in double-time; the people are the historical objects of a
nationalist pedagogy, giving the discourse an authority that is based on the
pre-given or constituted historical origin in the past; the people are also the
subjects of a process of signification that must erase any prior or originary
presence of the nation-people to demonstrate the prodigious, living
principles of the people as contemporaneity; as that sign of the present
through which national life is redeemed and iterated as a reproductive
process. (1994:145)
Here Bhabha points out that on the one hand, pedagogy tells us that the nation and
the people are what they are; on the other, performativity keeps reminding us that
the nation and the people are always generating a non-identical excess over and
above what we thought they were. Bhabha further writes that in place of the
polarity of a pre-figurative self-generating nation in-itself and extrinsic to other
nations, the performative introduces a temporality of the in-between. (1994:148)
He adds further that the polarity of pedagogical and performative is constantly
blurring, so that the pedagogical is never as stable as it wants to be, and the
performative itself becomes pedagogically important.
Homi Bhabha explains the concept of nations as forms of narration
in following words:
The linear equivalence of event and idea that historicism proposes, most
commonly signifies a people, a nation, or a national culture as an empirical
sociological category or a holistic cultural entity. However, the narrative
and psychological force that nationness brings to bear on cultural
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I dont think we can eliminate the concept of the nation altogether, at a time
when in many parts of the world- in South Africa, in Eastern Europepeople are actually living and dying for that form of society. You cant
completely do away with the nation as an idea or as a political structure, but
you can acknowledge its historical limitations for our time. (1990:82)
designates the other who resembles the self, which the child discovers when it
looks in the mirror and becomes aware of itself as a separate being. The capital
O refers to the great other in whose gaze the subject gains identity. According to
Homi Bhabha, the other with capital O can be compared to the empire (the
empirical centre) which makes the colonized subject conscious of ones identity as
somehow other and dependent. This thinking reminds Gayatri Spivaks coinage of
the term, othering which means that the empirical centre creates its others. In
other words, the colonizing other gets established when the colonized others
are treated as subjects.
Homi Bhabha states that colonial discourse depends on the
ideological construction of otherness. He further states that it gives rise to the
stereotype. Here he says:
An important feature of colonial discourse is its dependence on the concept
of fixity in the ideological construction of othernessit is this
process of ambivalence, central to the stereotype that my essay explores as
it constructs a theory of colonial discourse. (Newton,1997:293)
Bhabha evaluates the complete question of colonization: that is, how
the colonizers came to build their colony and colonized, the native people, who are
now, termed the other. By studying this situation he states that the stereotype
image of the colonized is a negative one. In other words, they are considered
inferior to the colonizers in colour, race, knowledge and culture. Here he states
that colonial discourse is an apparatus of power. He further states in the following
words as:
The objective of colonial discourse is to construe the colonized as a
population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to
justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction.
Despite the play of power within colonial discourse and the shifting
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Aijaz Ahmad analyses the work of Homi Bhabha and gives his
comments in following words:
History does not consist of perpetual migration, so that the university of
displacement that Bhabha claims both as the general human condition and
the desirable philosophical position is tenable neither as description of the
world nor as generalized political possibility. He may wish to erase the
between commerce and revolution, between the mercantile and the
Marxist, and he is welcome to his preferences; but that hardly amounts to a
theory of something called post-coloniality. Most individuals are really
not free to fashion themselves anew with each passing day, nor do
communities arise out of and fade into the thin air of the infinitely
contingent. (1995:16)
Benita Parry comments on Homi Bhabhas work and says:
a critical consciousness or a literary imagination alert to the crossing of
borders and the boundaries is not by definition indifferent to the diverse
situations of those communities, without prestige or privilege, which not
only experience but effect sea-changes in existing cultural formations.
(1987:132)
Benita Parry diagnoses the concept of indifference in his work. She compares
Spivak and Bhabha on the question of the Subaltern Voice and points out:
For Bhabha, the subaltern has spoken, and his readings of the colonialist
text recovers a native voice. (1987:40)
Parry also objects to Bhabhas apparent readings of Fanon as a premature poststructuralist. Here she pleads the cause of it as:
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is generally concerned with dialectical structures and the analysis of power as selfidentical and monolithic, it is an appropriate form of analysis for imperialism.
Peter Hallward considers post-colonial theory in general and Bhabha
in particular to be examples of what he terms a singularizing critical tendency.
Pointing out Bhabhas view, behind every utterance there is a possibility of
creativity. He states that this behind-ness operates as an absolute singularization:
Escaping from a situated position relative to other positions, the postcolonial slips between every possible position because it refers back,
immediately, to that one logic that positions every possibility. (2001:26)
Here he views that Bhabha is a clear example of a singularizing tendency in postcolonial theory. Pointing out the post-colonial theory- with concepts like
hybridity- operates on terms of its own creation, as opposed to more politically
committed relational or specific forms criticism. Hallward adds ahead that, the
category of difference in Bhabha licenses a particular kind of de-contextualized
theory. In short, many cultural critics agree that bhabhas work is foundational in
post-colonial criticism. But they also state that there is a lot of uncertainty about
the value of his contribution.
Jaswant Guzder, McGill University comments Bhabhas book, The
Location of Culture as, a post-modern and post-colonial exploration of the 'subject'
voices relevant to the transcultural scholar, therapist or artist... this book deepens
our understanding of cultural hybridzation. In the Voice, Literary Supplement,
Bhabha is analyzed as: Homi Bhabha greatly expanded the discipline of critical
studies as he liberated it from the narrow scope and social indifference of much
structuralist and poststructuralist thought. Bhabha speaks in a voice that combines
intellectual, even poetic, density with the belief that theory itself can contribute to
practical political change. Terry Eagleton once wrote about Homi Bhabha in the
Guardian, 'Few post-colonial writers can rival Homi Bhabha in his exhilarated
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thought.
Any
serious
discussion
of
postcolonial/postmodern
contexts. Almost every text in the post-colonial studies references Bhabhas work
at some point.
The influence of many Western writers is observed on the work of
Homi Bhabha. He has developed his ideas from the work of M. M. Bakhtin,
Antonio Gramsci, Hannah Arendt, W. E. B. Du Bois, Albert Memmi, Frantz
Fanon, and many more. We also observe the key influences of Jacques Derrida
and Michel Foucault, on his development as a critical thinker. He takes two termsIteration and the statement from Derrida and Foucault respectively. (Iteration
means the necessary repeatability of any mark, idea, or statement if it is to be
meaningful and statement refers to a specific meaning). His work reflects the
significance of reading that helped him to derive some ideas, concepts, views from
his influences. He takes an analysis of thoughts complexity and a philosophical
approach, stressing difference from Derrida and Foucault. This helped him to
understand how the meaning of terms and ideas change in accordance with
context. From that he also has developed a critical thought emphasizing process.
We can observe that this thinking is specific to each situation, and cannot offer a
global answer to specific problems or issues without understanding specific
histories.
Many critics leveled the charge against Bhabha that he is dense and
obscure in his writings. He answers the saying, I use the language I need for my
work. He adds further that he was not interested in being a descriptive and
expository writer. He made all theoretical framework of his own and so attempting
new connections, articulating new meanings, always takes the risk of being not
immediately comprehensible to readers. He also expressed his satisfaction with the
empowerment that get from his work as well as empowering others.
Homi Bhabha has become one of the most recognized names in the
critical current known as postcolonialism, a current with a distinct interest in
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