Bhabha for Architects

Felipe Hernandez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135146627
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

The work of Homi K. Bhabha has permeated into numerous publications which use postcolonial discourse as a means to analyze architectural practices in previously colonized contexts, particularly in Africa, Asia, the Middle-East, South-East Asia and, Latin America. Bhabha's useof the concept of 'space' has made his work highly appealing to architects and architectural theorists.

This introductory book, specifically for architects, focuses on Bhabha's seminal book The Location of Culture and reveals how his work contributes to architectural theory and the study of contemporary architectures in general, not only in colonial and postcolonial contexts.

CHAPTER 1
Introduction

Postcolonial theory has had a significant effect on the way we understand intercultural relations today and historically. Since the 1980s, the lexicon of postcolonial theory, the concepts it uses to represent cultures and cultural interaction, have penetrated the rhetoric of contemporary politics, international trade and all areas of academia. Needless to say, postcolonial discourse has also had an effect on architecture. In the past 30 years, the work of thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak has permeated into numerous publications which analyse architectural production around the world, both in previously colonised countries and in western metropolitan centres. It is, however, the work of Homi K. Bhabha which has dominated discussions about postcolonial architecture. The fact that Bhabha employs the concept of ‘space’, and numerous other architectural analogies, has made his work highly appealing to architects and architectural theorists. However, the political dimension of his work prohibits the facile application of his terminology in the study of specific buildings and cities, or in the broader historicisation and theorisation of architecture. The concepts that Bhabha uses in his writings demonstrate that cultures are complex assemblages made up of multiple elements, histories and subject positions (individuals, social groups, class affiliations, genders and sexual orientations). Hence, when used in architecture they establish a strong link with a wide range of issues outside the limits of such a disciplinary field. For that reason, this book argues that the postcolonial methods of critique used by Bhabha could help to develop further our understanding of architecture and its professional practice.

Before going any further, it is necessary to overcome an initial barrier: the word colonialism (in the title postcolonial). Often, the presence of the word colonialism deters people in the field of architecture because it seems to refer to ‘old’ buildings. Indeed, the period of colonialism may seem somewhat remote to a generation of people born in the last 30 years of the twentieth century. However, many modern nations were negotiating independence agreements and, even, fighting wars of independence until the late 1970s. Hence, there are many people amongst us who can still tell their own experiences of colonialism and narrate the occurrences of what has been termed by historians ‘the end of empire’: the years after the Second World War when many colonies gained independence from their European and North American rulers. Some of our grandparents, for example, and many parents of those born before 1980 lived through ‘the end of empire’. In the British context, most people are familiar with the case of India and Pakistan, which obtained independence in 1947. This historical event, however, was followed by a succession of others: the Republic of Congo became independent from Belgium in 1960, Algeria gained independence from France in 1962 after an eight-year bloody armed conflict, Equatorial Guinea was granted independence from Spain in 1968 and Mozambique became fully independent from Portugal in 1975. I have selected these examples because they represent the four larger colonial European empires – Britain, France, Portugal and Spain – from which I have taken most of the examples in this book. Interestingly, the British soap opera Coronation Street had already been launched in Britain, Ozzy Osborne was already singing with the band Black Sabbath and Le Corbusier had already passed away when some countries were in the process of decolonisation. It is not my intention to trivialise the historical importance of decolonisation but to establish a link between the period of colonialism and the present by highlighting events and people that are familiar to a contemporary architectural audience in order to prove that the period of colonialism is not quite as historically distant as it may seem at first sight.

The historical proximity of colonialism explains why many of the strategies used to construct and exercise colonial authority are still employed today and, indeed, influence many issues we accept unquestioningly, for example the notions of democracy, liberalism, equality and cultural diversity. Often we take those concepts for granted and, so, fail to question their adequacy and their implications in the way we live – and study and practise architecture. The unproblematic acceptance of such concepts makes us complicit with the perpetuation of western hegemonic discourses amongst which architecture is included. In other words, colonialism is not an event historically far removed from us, nor is it irrelevant to architecture. On the contrary, as we gradually get to understand the theories and critiques put forward by Bhabha, we will also get to see how architecture coincides with many aspects of colonial authoritarian discourse.

… colonialism is not an event historically far removed from us, nor is it irrelevant to architecture.

Let us now take a biographical detour in order to introduce the life and journey of Homi K. Bhabha. In the preface to the latest edition of his seminal book The Location of Culture (2004), Bhabha provides a brief autobiographical account which serves as background for some of the ideas he develops in the rest of the book. This, however, is not the only personal testimony one comes across when reading Bhabha. His work is filled with descriptions of his life, his experience as a migrant and the journey that has taken him from India to the United Kingdom and, then, to the United States where he currently lives and works.

Bhabha tells us that he was born in India but he also stresses that he is a Parsi. The Parsis are a small and relatively unknown minority group, in India and in the rest of the world (although statistics are imprecise, today the Parsi community has approximately 100,000 members worldwide). The history of the Parsis is vast and complex, so I will not elaborate in great detail. However, I will underline a few points which may help to understand some themes in Bhabha’s writing and some of its theoretical and personal underpinnings. Amongst these points is the fact that the Parsis arrived in India from Persia. As such, the Parsis are neither Hindu nor Muslim but followers of the prophet Zoroaster, which makes them a religious minority in India. Bhabha argues that the Parsis have been ‘hybridised’ through the centuries so, today, their rituals pay respect to Hindu customs but simultaneously maintain their own religious and ethnic identity. In Bhabha’s view, the Parsi culture is not homogeneous or static but varied and dynamic; it has changed historically as a result of its geographical displacement and due to interaction with other cultures; yet it also remains distinct in many aspects.

Another important issue is the position that the Parsis occupied in the colonial sociopolitical structures during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in India. At that time, the Parsis had become a highly educated community familiar with British traditions. They were given administrative positions in the colonial government, received commercial licences and other benefits that helped them to obtain economic prosperity. As a result, the Parsis stood out from other Indian groups because they were wealthy, ranked highly in the local government and had acquired the cultural traits of the European. In that sense, the Parsis occupied a middle position between larger cultural groups: they were different from the Indian and also from the British, because in spite of the economic wealth they amassed, the Parsis never attained the same status of the British who remained in the position of authority. As will be explained throughout the book, this ‘ambivalence’ is an issue that haunts Bhabha’s writing. In fact, it is one of the most incisive points in his critique of colonialism: the way it constructs colonised subjects through an ambivalent process of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion that places subjects in an intermediate position between the colonised and the coloniser.

Another important facet in Bhabha’s life is the time when he was born: only a few years after India became a sovereign nation on 15 August 1947. Although he does not have personal experience of colonialism, he reminisces that his ‘childhood was filled with accounts of India’s struggle for Independence, its complicated histories of subcontinental cultures caught in that deadly embrace of Imperial power and domination that always produces an uncomfortable residue of enmity and amity’ (Bhabha 2004: ix). Referring to his experience in Bombay during his early university years, he says:

It was lived in that rich cultural mix of languages and lifestyles that most cosmopolitan Indian cities celebrate and perpetuate in their vernacular existence – Bombay Hindustani, ‘Parsi’ Gujarati, mongrel Marathi, all held in a suspension of Welsh-missionary-accented English peppered with an Anglo-Indian patois that was sometimes cast aside for American slang picked up from the movies or popular music (Bhabha 2004: x).

His description of Bombay highlights a multitude of languages, accents, cultures and nationalities that intermingle but remain apart. The hyphen that Bhabha uses repeatedly helps to represent those identities which coexist but do not mix fully. This rich assortment of peoples of different origins, cultures and languages is what Bhabha highlights and celebrates in his writings. However, it is not a facile celebration but a critical and heavily politicised analysis of the

This rich assortment of peoples of different origins, cultures and languages is what Bhabha highlights and celebrates in his writings.

circumstances in which different sociocultural groups have interacted historically and continue to interact in the space of modern nations; an interaction that is always determined by an uneven distribution of power which produces hierarchical systems of cultural dismissal and racial discrimination.

Arriving at Oxford to study English Literature in the 1970s was the culmination of what Bhabha calls an Indian middle-class trajectory of formal education, an education whose aim is to emulate the canon of elite English taste, traditions and practices. At Oxford Bhabha became an English scholar and a migrant, a highly educated foreigner in the nation of the former colonial master. He entered that intermediate space of irresolution where a person (or an entire social group) can be ‘neither one, nor the other’; ‘neither here, nor there’. This very condition generated an interest in the work of writers ‘who were off-centre; literary texts that had been passed by; themes and topics that had lain dormant or unread in great works of literature’ (Bhabha 2004: xi). Bhabha’s interest in such writers and literary works has continued to the present and has expanded to the work of female writers, minority artists and film makers whose work is located on the margins, away from the economic thrust that drives cultural production in the world today. Though Bhabha refers continuously to the margins of culture, to areas between cultures – what he calls the Third Space – and, indeed, locates cultural productivity there, by no means is he attempting to glorify the margins and the peripheries. He simply wants to draw attention to the fact that such marginal positions are the most tangible representation of the inequalities that characterise transnational relations in the world today, as well as in the past. That is why he has expressed concern about the impact that a market economy led by western countries has on cultural production on the margins. Speaking about the work of minority artists, and those working on the periphery, Bhabha says:

I do want to make graphic what it means to survive, to produce, to labour and to create, within a world-system whose major economic impulses and cultural investments are pointed in a direction away from you, your country or your people (Bhabha 2004: xi).

Bhabha’s choice of words indicates that he is invested in the statement. The hesitant second person (you), ‘your country, your people’, generalises in such a way that he himself is part of the generalisation. Bhabha highlights the constraints and difficulties of being part of a minority, ethnic or artistic, working on the periphery against the grain of a market-driven economy. At the same time, Bhabha argues that the work of such marginalised, peripheral artists is politically contentious because it challenges the very structures that have placed them there, on the margins. What is more, the fact that marginal cultural productivity is never fully absorbed by the world-system is a demonstration of both the failures and the limits of democratic representation and of the inability of the world-system fully to eliminate difference (this seemingly complicated point will be explained in Chapter 5).

Bhabha’s interest in the cultural products of marginalised, minoritarian peoples working either in the peripheries or invisibly in the centres is amongst the most important reasons why his work is relevant in the field of architecture. The theories advanced by Bhabha provide a sound foundation to develop a critique of the way in which non-western architectures have been inscribed in the history of the field, and to the way they are theorised today in relation to the western canon. I refer here to the fact that buildings produced by non-western architects – or in countries outside Europe and North America – are always historicised and

Bhabha’s interest in the cultural products of marginalised, minoritarian peoples working either in the peripheries or invisibly in the centres is amongst the most important reasons why his work is relevant in the field of architecture.

theorised in relation to European architecture. For example, the buildings produced by indigenous people in Africa, Asia and the Americas were considered to be inferior by the European coloniser because they did not correspond with the classical canon. The same has occurred with modern architecture: western historicity serves to reinforce the hegemony of European buildings, architects and discourses on the basis that they precede modernism in other parts of the world (see Chapter 3). The theories that Bhabha employs in his critique of authoritarian structures (colonial or otherwise) are capable of assigning political value to architectures that have been neglected, or undermined, for not complying with dominant architectural narratives; such as those produced by indigenes prior to colonisation and non-western modernism. Bhabha’s theories could also assist in the development of more flexible methods of analysis capable of including architectures produced by poor people in slums and squatter settlements in cities around the world, and the alterations that they carry out on the cities where they live. By dominant (or pedagogical) narratives, I refer to academic discourses – like classicism, modernism, deconstruction and, even, architecture itself – which help to support the above-mentioned referential system used to judge architectural production around the world against the European and North American architectural traditions (see Chapter 5).

But let us return to the biographical account with which we started. Bhabha spent most of the 1980s and part of the 1990s in the United Kingdom where he taught at the University of Sussex. During that time he published various articles and essays which truly transformed the study of colonialism and the emergence of postcolonial theory. Some of those essays were compiled in the book The Location of Culture (1994) which had an immediate impact on literary, cultural and postcolonial studies. Bhabha’s book subscribes to a strong movement which started in the late 1960s and continued throughout the 1980s, that promoted a change in the way that social difference was understood and discrimination was legitimised. Postcolonial critics promulgated a focus on culture and cultural identity, rather than on ethnicity and gender. They turned their attention to the entire set of practices and histories of the people who were formerly derogatorily referred to or classified as the Black, the Latino, the Indian, Women, Gays and so on – banners which homogenise entire sociocultural groups. This is a ground-breaking proposition because it demonstrates that these groups are neither homogeneous, as the banner suggests (the Black), nor can they be represented in isolation, because identities are always constructed in relation to one another. In fact, the question of representation lies at the centre of postcolonial discourse because in the process of representing the ‘other’ (colonised subjects or minorities) as inferior, one is simultaneously representing oneself as superior. These two aspects (the fact that cultures are not homogeneous and that the cultures are inseparably connected, yet not united) are central to the postcolonial critique of authority; the way it is constructed and exercised in colonial and contemporary cultural relations.

Soon after the publication of The Location of Culture, Bhabha received a fellowship at Princeton University where he was also Old Dominion Professor. Subsequently, Bhabha took various academic positions at the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth College and, in 1997, became Chester D. Tripp Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. Currently, Bhabha is Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and Language, as well as Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard University. Nonetheless, Bhabha maintains close links with academic institutions in the United Kingdom and India through advisory positions, membership of various bo...