Homi Bhabha

9 Key excerpts on "Homi Bhabha"

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  The Cultural Turn in Translation Studies

  • Wang Ning(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  When contemporary scholars involved in postcolonial translation discuss postcolonial translation theory, they often refer to the concept of cultural translation by Homi Bhabha. Although this concept was not first proposed by Bhabha, it is his interpretation and new reconstruction that give it a distinct postcolonial and deconstructive meaning. Bhabha had been relatively unknown due to his being young and having few publications to his name, but he became extremely active over the past decade or more. His works on postcolonial theory and criticism have seen a high citation rate in contemporary European and American literary theory and cultural critical circles, circles of cultural studies, and even circles of cultural translation, which earn him admiration from his peers. Although to date he has only published one monograph, which is a compilation of topical studies that were published elsewhere before, what is so admirable is that the citation rate is so high that not many can match it. Indeed, in the past 20 years, nearly every important paper or edited volume that Bhabha has published led to a rush of thousands of readers and critics to read, cite and discuss. This is no small feat for a postcolonial critic at the forefront of contemporary academia.

  As one of the most influential and critical postcolonial theorists in the academic world of English literature and culture, Homi Bhabha’s theoretical achievements are mainly reflected in the following aspects: (1) he creatively combined Marxism, psychoanalysis and (Foucault’s) poststructuralist theories into one, applied it quite effectively to his own critical practice of culture and art, and developed a challenging and deconstructive style of postcolonial cultural studies and cultural criticism based on this; (2) his theoretical concepts of hybridity and third space had an impact on the study of national and cultural identities in today’s global postcolonial context, and he proposed detailed strategies for Third World critics to enter the academic mainstream and make their voices heard; (3) his concept of mimicry and close reading of colonial-themed works have had a huge enlightening effect on the efforts of Third World critics who oppose Western cultural hegemony, and have somewhat contributed to the reconstruction of literary classics; (4) the theory of cultural translation that he developed also had a strong impact on translation studies which had for a long time been dominated by textual translation mainly based on linguistic conversion, dispelled the language-centered logocentrism at the cultural level, and played an important role in promoting the cultural turn in translation studies.

  Homi F. Bhabha (1949– ) was born in Mumbai, India, to a merchant family, and educated in schools in India. It is said that he has Persian ancestors and this “hybrid” ethnic identity gave him personal experience to study both national and cultural identities, as well as minority literature and culture, so he has a great say in these issues. Later on, Bhabha went to the UK to pursue his studies with the famous Marxist theorist Terry Eagleton and obtained his PhD from the renowned University of Oxford. Upon graduation, he taught at the University of Sussex for more than ten years, during which he frequently received invitations to lecture at well-known universities in the United States. In 1994, Bhabha was appointed Chester D. Tripp Professor in Humanities at the University of Chicago, while he also lectured as Visiting Professor at the University College, London. Since late 2000, Bhabha has served as the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University, while at the same time serving as the director of the History and Literature Center which was exclusively set up for him. He is now the director of the Humanities Center and deputy provost in charge of humanities. It can be said that Bhabha, like his peers in postcolonial criticism, has achieved his long-time aspiration of demarginalization and entrance into the academic mainstream.

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  Remapping the Indian Postcolonial Canon

  Remap, Reimagine and Retranslate

  • Nirmala Menon(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Satanic Verses , is testimony that the “truest eye may now belong to the migrant’s double vision” (5). Bhabha calls this moment of transition as “dwelling in the beyond,” an intervening space that becomes “a space of intervention in the here and now.” (7)

  Initiated as a counter-discourse in postcolonial theory, hybridity did indeed possess radical and interventionist qualities in its postcolonial avatar . Bhabha’s postulation of hybridity was disruptive in at least two ways: (1) it challenged the understanding of hybridity as something that is “impure” or “mongrelized” and oftentimes saddled with a negative connotation, and (2) hybridity became an ambiguous term that represents chaos refiguring it as an in-between space that “innovates and interrupts the performance of the present” (7). Bhabha called this disruptive and, thus, empowering position the “Third Space.” He defined such a space as follows:

  The “Third Space” though unrepresentable in itself, which constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure the meanings and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and translated anew. (37)

  Hybridity became a buzzword; everybody in postcolonial studies—critics and writers, historians and anthropologists, linguists and multiculturalists—was engaging with the hybrid aspects of postcolonialism in each of the distinct and varied fields.

  In literature, following Salman Rushdie, postcolonial writers began to use migrant hybridity as a starting point to investigate both their native cultures and the culture they had migrated to (largely Western metropolitan spaces). In the South Asian context, Bharati Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chitra Divakaruni, Hari Kunzru and Shyam Selvadurai are some examples of writers who found hybridity an empowering metaphor to negotiate between different cultures. Interpreter of Maladies , Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of stories, includes stories not only of an expatriate Bengali family in the USA but also about poverty in Calcutta from the migrant perspective. Divakaruni’s Mistress of Spices and Bharti Mukherjee’s Jasmine

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  Reading Postcolonial Theory

  Key texts in context

  • Bibhash Choudhury(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge India

    (Publisher)

  The Location of Culture The question of agency: Bhabha’s postcolonial imperative

  By the time Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture appeared in print, ‘postcolonial’ as a term had its fair share of currency in critical discourse, articulated either through the historical envisioning of a past that required revision or in surveys that sought to address the subject of difference through a more insistent culture-centric lens. In many of these forays, the givens were quite a few, and as the writings of Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Octavo Mannoni, for instance, demonstrated, the focus was primarily on inviting attention to the pressures exerted on the colonized space by an imperialist apparatus that imposed itself from multiple quarters. As decolonization facilitated more nuanced, as well as, critical responses to the experience of colonialism, thinkers such as Edward Said and Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak offered reading positions that sought to attend to circumstances that were not quite given the attention they were now being subjected to. More than a settled, unwavering condition, colonialism was not confined to an either/or frame alone, but questions of method and other theoretical priorities came to occupy thinkers by the end of the twentieth century. Why is the method of examination as important as the subject itself? That we are now considering such an issue, in fact, owes much to the theoretical intervention of Homi K. Bhabha who, along with Said and Spivak, called for a radical redrawing of disciplinary boundaries for a subject that was only just finding its feet.

  Homi Bhabha’s placement of characteristics for association with and identification of ‘postcolonialism’ extends beyond the circumstances of its function as a political response to the changed world order. This does not imply that his critical undertaking swerves away from the political conditions that postcolonialism as an ‘agency’ refers to, but, rather, it invites us to attend to the necessity of assessing the terms and what these analytical exercises entail in the very process of questioning. Bhabha is often found to be difficult , or even unnecessarily dense, but such labels fall off the mark when it comes to dealing with the practice of critical theory that he fashioned to address issues which no straight binary arrangement can effectively negotiate. The Location of Culture is a packed book. Heavily wrought in conceptual detail, the book’s density is not its ornament but is a required structural condition whereby Bhabha draws in the complicated but connected threads impinging upon the processes of history making as well as those which are apparently situated outside the limits of the discipline. Bhabha’s departure from the settled channels of early postcolonial thought is, at one level, an indication of the pressures contemporary reading strategies exert upon situations and subjects whereby the seminal importance of the analytical process itself is taken up for examination and scrutiny. Bhabha locates postcolonialism as an intervention, as an argumentative strategy whose potential to unsettle set notions of modernity offers access to situations and circumstances that other critical practices fail to sufficiently address. Postcolonialism’s value derives from its ability to bring to notice conditions of narrative that existing analytical designs do not consider necessary for the purposes of scrutiny. Is it then this interventionist dimension of postcolonial theory that Bhabha situates as its most recognizable characteristic? Certainly, postcolonialism is much more than an instrument of intervention. And spread across the pages of The Location of Culture are insights, and excitingly innovative forays that stretch the theoretical possibilities of postcolonial studies outside the already-confirmed space of colonial experience and its immediate aftermath. Drawing on the recognized trajectories of critical thought, but departing to forge his own line of argument, Bhabha envisions a theoretical roadmap for a postcolonial response to literature and society that not only adjusts to the continually evolving dynamics in the contemporary world but also engages with other analytical methods to examine the potential of the critical exercise itself. A key to Bhabha’s approach emerges in his essay titled ‘The Postcolonial and the Postmodern’, placed midway in The Location of Culture

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  Understanding Postcolonialism

  • Jane Hiddleston(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Monolingualism of the Other teaches us that a universalized deconstruction of claims for linguistic mastery reveals colonialism's ethical transgression, but the discussion of the specific exclusion of Algerian Jews operates on another level, and the relation between these two levels remains uneasy. Derrida shows that postcolonialism cannot be a holistic critique; it must continually shift and negotiate between its divergent ethical and political requirements, but it is this dynamism that prevents the field from becoming programmatic and stops the critic from falling into complacency when contemplating an evolving and still traumatized field.

  Homi Bhabha

  The work of Bhabha is perhaps best known for its explicit endeavour to combine poststructuralism and postcolonialism. Bhabha's essays are littered with references to the work of Derrida, and many of his key concepts are taken from the latter's philosophy. Colonial discourse, for example, is conceived as structured in spite of itself by the movement of the “supplement”, by chains of meaning that it cannot possess, and both colonial and colonized cultures are “deconstructed” by means of attention to their complex and deferred significatory processes. Similarly, Bhabha uses the concept of “dissemiNation” to explore how the construction of a national identity always covers over traces and patches of discrepant cultural meanings produced by that nations heterogeneous and plural people. His discussions of colonialism and resistance share with Derrida's work a resistance to binary oppositions and a meticulous attention to the ambivalence underpinning any apparently fixed and assertive subject position. Bhabha adds to Derrida's exploration of the overlap between ethnocentrism and logocentrism a further engagement with the mechanics of colonial power and with the ways in which minority voices trouble the hegemonic cultural and national discourses operating on them. Indeed, more than once he criticizes Derrida for remarking on colonialism only in passing, and for not paying sufficient attention to specific and determinate systems of oppression. Nevertheless, Bhabha's more consistent attention to colonialism scarcely makes his thought more militantly politicized, and his focus remains, like that of Derrida, ethical or at least “ethical political”. Indeed, if much of Bhabha's work is descriptive of the workings of colonial or migrant culture, he also frequently slips into prescription and stresses the ethical requirement that we “elude the politics of polarity and emerge as others of our selves” (Bhabha 1994

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  Edward Said

  A Critical Introduction

  • Valerie Kennedy(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  174). While in Culture and Imperialism Said focuses both on the textual and the historico-political contexts of the works by C. L. R. James, Antonius, Guha and Alatas that he is discussing, Bhabha, typically, develops the cultural dimension almost exclusively. 27 Hybridity, mimicry and subversion Ambivalence, most notably in the forms of hybridity and mimicry, is Bhabha’s most important means of theorizing the heterogeneity of colonial and postcolonial experience, especially in relation to resistance to the hegemonic discourses of the West. In ‘Sly civility’ (1985) Bhabha argues that colonial discourse in the case he is discussing is ‘not simply the violence of one powerful nation writing out the history of another’, but ‘a mode of contradictory utterance that ambivalently reinscribes, across differential power relations, both colonizer and colonized’ (LC, pp. 95–6). Bhabha’s view of colonial discourse as contradictory and conflict-ridden runs counter to Said’s presentation of it as an essentially unified and dominant system which effectively silences those it rules. This is seen in his concept of hybridity, which is much more developed and complex than Said’s. Whereas Said in Culture and Imperialism had used hybridity to mean the overlapping of colonizing and colonized cultures in all domains, and the characteristics of literary works produced in this situation, Bhabha develops the concept with much more emphasis on the resistance to and the subversion of colonial power. He explains in ‘Signs taken for wonders’ that ‘Hybridity is a problematic of colonial representation and individuation that reverses the effects of the colonialist disavowal, so that other “denied” knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority – its rules of recognition’ (LC, p. 114)

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  Impure Acts

  The Practical Politics of Cultural Studies

  • Henry A. Giroux(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  At a time when the social function of the university is frequently derided by cultural critics as either the handmaiden of an ever-evolving and encroaching corporatism or an “always already” bastion of support for the status quo, Bhabha s attentiveness to the relationships among writing, agency, and self- and social transformation provides educators with a much-needed reminder of the potential importance of their work in the university. Bhabha refuses to reduce literacy to the pedagogical imperatives of method or the ethnocentric appeal to reified notions of knowledge embodied in Western conceptions of the canon. At the same time, he is careful to assert that we must not fetishize literacy as a de facto socially ameliorative or democratic force; he claims, in one of the most insightful and sobering moments of a recent interview, that the leading ideology of most literate people is racism. 13 That caution having been made, Bhabha explores what a postcolonial criticism has to offer, pedagogically, to the student at all levels of education. What might it mean, he poses, to approach theory “by doing a certain kind of writing,” and to develop ideas that “also shape [and] enact the rhetoric”? 14 In contrast to Showalter s pedagogy-as-method, Bhabha links questions of teaching, writing, and literacy to issues of self-representation, and what it might mean for students to function as agents within a wider democratic culture. For students marginalized by their race, class, or gender, who cannot find themselves “within the sentence,” Bhabha proposes a strategy that Ranajit Guha calls “writing in reverse.” 15 Such an intervention does not simply articulate the absences of marginalized histories and narratives, but also reads dominant narratives against themselves in order to understand the moment of disruption that is, for Bhabha, the quintessential postcolonial moment

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  Otherness and the Media

  The Ethnography of the Imagined and the Imaged

  • Hamid Naficy, Teshome H. Gabriel, Hamid Naficy, Teshome H. Gabriel(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Like Said, Bhabha views “the question of the ‘colonial’ in literary [and cinematic] representation” as political, “fundamentally a problem of the signification of historical and cultural difference.” 32 But unlike Said, Bhabha tries to demonstrate the interconnections, not just the oppositions, between the colonial subject and the colonized other. Instead of Said’s unchanging dichotomies of difference addressed to a unitary subject in control of a unitary other, Bhabha proposes viewing the fixity of racial/ethnic stereotypes as “a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always in place, already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated.” 33 For Bhabha, as a result, far more than for Said, stereotypes function as both phobias and fetishes, the co-presence of fear and desire betraying a fundamental ambivalence and split within both the colonial subject and the colonized other. Access to power and knowledge on the part of individual members within these groups is, of course, disproportionate, functionally over-determined by what Bhabha calls “the ‘play’ of power within colonial discourse and the shifting positionalities of its subjects.” By “positionalities” Bhabha understands the reinforcing and contradictory effects “class, gender, ideology, different social formations, varied systems of colonization, etc.” have on people

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  Politics of Possibility

  Encountering the Radical Imagination

  • Gary A. Olson, Lynn Worsham, Henry A. Giroux(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Staging the Politics of Difference: Homi Bhabha’s Critical Literacy Gary A. Olson and Lynn Worsham

  Postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha sees writing, composition, as a “highly political” activity. Writing, defined in its broadest sense, is closely linked to the acquisition of agency. This is why it is important that we not treat writing as a simple medium of communication in which there is some transparent mediation between “already pregiven subjects, pregiven objects, and a preconstituted mise en scène .” For Bhabha, writing constitutes, in a dialogic way, new relationships among these elements and is thus a “continually revisionary,” perhaps even “revolutionary,” activity. And, of course, the connection between writing and agency leads to issues of critical literacy. Bhabha believes that critical literacy is intimately connected to the question of democratic representation. For example, he says in the interview below that “literacy is absolutely crucial for a kind of ability to be responsible to yourself, to make your own reading within a situation of political and cultural choice.” Yet, at the same time we must be cautious not to treat literacy as a panacea or to fetishize it. As Bhabha points out, racism often is the “leading ideology” of the most literate people. Thus, critical literacy in and of itself guarantees nothing, but it is an essential step toward agency, selfrepresentation, and an effective democracy. Consequently, the kind of work we do in composition is extremely important socially, and more institutions need to understand that the work of composition is less about linguistic competence than it is about critical intervention in the world.

  The acquisition of agency and critical literacy is linked to another subject central to Bhabha’s project: the role of theory. Theory enables people, both in the academy and in the public domain, to “break the continuity and the consensus of common sense”—to break it and to break into

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  Networking the Globe

  New Technologies and the Postcolonial

  • Florian Stadtler, Ole Birk Laursen(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Central to the scholarly debates on the revision of the politics of national inclusion and identity fetishism in the fields of cultural and postcolonial studies is Homi Bhabha’s theorization of the “unhomely”, in which the concept of postcolonial migration is fundamentally predicated upon “a process of displacement and disjunction that does not totalize” (5). With its emphases on detotalization and reconfiguring the border between home and the world, Bhabha’s unhomeliness hypothesis, thus defined, accords very obviously with the post-migratory condition which is similarly “inherent in that rite of extra-territorial and cross-cultural initiation” (9). One question that needs to be asked, however, is whether the unhomely intellectual attempts to syncretize or disrupt both the local and the global. Abdul R. Jan Mohamed’s typology of the “specular border intellectual” and the “syncretic border intellectual” is relevant here. According to his definition, a post-migratory perspective can correspond to the double vision of syncretic border intellectuals who find themselves caught between two cultures and yet are “able to combine elements of the two cultures in order to articulate new syncretic forms and experiences” (97). In other words, those post-migratory writers or border intellectuals negotiate their relationship to the nation of the periphery (i.e. that of their birth), the history that precedes and threatens to determine them, and the centred, western canon into which they strive to write themselves.

  What is post-migratory literature?

  There is a growing tendency in the US academy to classify contemporary fiction according to the categories of exile and migrancy as either “home” (of a national affiliation) or “diasporic” (of a transnational affiliation) (Lau 237). In these geographically-oriented analyses, the “diasporic” and “immigrant” writers enjoy an advantage in terms of their global and multicultural profile. Such classifications depend on either the geographic stratification of several sites of production, circulation and translation, or the linguistic categorization of different strata of bilingualism and multilingualism. The institutionalization of new writings in English is thus still circumscribed by the traditional idiosyncrasies of the national, the geographic and the lingual. The deterritorialized writing of anglophone South Asian writers such as Aamer Hussein, Kamila Shamsie and Mohsin Hamid, anglophone Caribbean writers such as Wilson Harris, George Lamming and V.S. Naipaul, and anglophone African writers such as Ahdaf Soueif, Ben Okri and Ayi Kwei Armah would be hence reterritorialized and conceptualized as writing which represents new dimensions in the British and South Asian, Caribbean and African cultural scenes rather than the global or the postcolonial context in general.

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