Homi K. Bhabha

David Huddart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134335121
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Homi K. Bhabha is one of the most highly renowned figures in contemporary post-colonial studies. This volume explores his writings and their influence on postcolonial theory, introducing in clear and accessible language the key concepts of his work, such as 'ambivalence', 'mimicry', 'hybridity' and 'translation'. David Huddart draws on a range of contexts, including art history, contemporary cinema and canonical texts in order to illustrate the practical application of Bhabha's theories. This introductory guidebook is ideal for all students working in the fields of literary, cultural and postcolonial theory.

1
WHY BHABHA?

Homi K.Bhabha was born in 1949 in Mumbai, India. He is one of the most important thinkers in the influential movement in cultural theory called post-colonial criticism. Bhabha’s work develops a set of challenging concepts that are central to post-colonial theory: hybridity, mimicry, difference, ambivalence. These concepts describe ways in which colonized peoples have resisted the power of the colonizer, a power that is never as secure as it seems to be. This emphasis illuminates our present situation, in a world marked by a paradoxical combination of violently proclaimed cultural difference and the complexly interconnected networks of globalization. Instead of seeing colonialism as something locked in the past, Bhabha shows how its histories and cultures constantly intrude on the present, demanding that we transform our understanding of cross-cultural relations. The authority of dominant nations and ideas is never as complete as it seems, because it is always marked by anxiety, something that enables the dominated to fight back.

To demonstrate this anxiety, Bhabha looks back to the histories of colonialism. In 1914, almost 85% of the world’s land surface was under the control of a small group of mainly European colonial powers. Yet the consequence of this control was not simple domination. We should not see the colonial situation as one of straightforward oppression of the colonized by the colonizer. Alongside violence and domination, we might also see the last five hundred years as a period of complex and varied cultural contact and interaction. In fact, the colonial period is ongoing, and post-colonial perspectives contribute an original understanding of our colonial present. Bhabha’s work is a main driver behind the creation of such post-colonial perspectives. His writings bring resources from literary and cultural theory to the study of, in the first instance, a colonial archive that seems to be a simple expression of the colonizer’s domination of the colonized. Bhabha’s close textual analysis finds the hidden gaps and anxieties present in the colonial situation. These points of textual anxiety mark moments in which the colonizer was less powerful than was apparent, moments when the colonized were able to resist the dominance exercised over them. In short, Bhabha’s work emphasizes the active agency of the colonized.

Of course the study of colonialism has always focused on certain kinds of colonial agency, particularly violent anti-colonial struggle. Decolonization did not just quietly happen, but had to be forced by colonized people rebelling against colonial authority. However, the agency studied by Bhabha is not the same as this revolutionary agency. His work is original because it does two connected things. First, it provides a conceptual vocabulary for the reading of colonial and postcolonial texts, beginning with those of British India in the nineteenth century. As I have outlined, this reading shows how rigid distinctions between the colonizer and colonized have always been impossible to maintain. Second, through its conceptual vocabulary Bhabha’s work demonstrates that the West is troubled by its ‘doubles’, in particular the East. These doubles force the West to explain its own identity and to justify its rational self-image. Western civilization is not unique, nor simply Western, and its ‘superiority’ is not something that can be confidently asserted when other civilizations are so similar. So, on the one hand, Bhabha examines colonial history; on the other, he rethinks the present moment, when colonialism seems a thing of the past.

These two aspects of his work are connected. Colonial doubling is something that troubles the self-image of the colonizer; similarly, the East troubles the bounded selfimage of the West. Such doubling is something Bhabha finds throughout colonial and post-colonial texts, particularly literary texts with their frequent forays into the fantastic, the monstrous, and the uncanny. Because literature is so often a matter of doubling, it is for Bhabha central to the processes of his postcolonial perspective, a perspective that reimagines the West and reminds it of its repressed colonial origins. But it is not only literature, more language in general that inspires Bhabha’s methods, particularly the idea that language is not a straightforward communication of meaning. This is important because the meaning of culture is not simply imposed by the colonizer. The colonizer’s cultural meanings are open to transformation by the colonized population: like any text, the meaning of colonial text cannot be controlled by its authors. When colonizer and colonized come together, there is an element of negotiation of cultural meaning. Bhabha’s work explores how language transforms the way identities are structured when colonizer and colonized interact, finding that colonialism is marked by a complex economy of identity in which colonized and colonizer depend on each other. As I have said, his work stresses and extends the agency of colonized peoples, whose participation in resistance to colonialism has often been underplayed when it does not fit our usual expectations of violent anti-colonial opposition: importantly, he develops a linguistic model of this agency.

Although many of his most influential writings were originally published during the 1980s, Bhabha is very much a thinker for the twenty-first century. The complex doublings he finds in the colonial archive have continued relevance. In the years following 9/11 (the destruction by terrorists of New York’s World Trade Center in September 2001), this relevance has become more obvious. Recently Bhabha’s work has begun to explore the complexities of a world marked by colonial and neo-colonial wars, counter-globalization movements and widespread cultural confrontation. We are faced with a world seemingly polarized and divided into discrete cultures. This situation is often described, in the words of historian Bernard Lewis, as a ‘clash of civilizations’ (2004). This description sees differences as being cultural rather than political: this usually means that historical events are explained as arising from innate cultural differences, implying that we cannot reconcile oppositions (e.g. oppositions between Islam and the West, or ‘Jihad vs McWorld’). Bhabha shows how such polarization is simplistic and dangerous, as it ignores the continuing processes of history. In particular, Bhabha explores how colonialism is still very much with us. Colonialism conditions the world in which we live in complex ways. But we cannot explain this by dividing the world into the good (the formerly oppressed) and the bad (the former oppressors). Bhabha’s writings complicate what we think we know about colonialism and its legacies. Accordingly, Bhabha’s rewritten perspectives on colonialism demand a more complex understanding of the present moment, which is never quite as radically new as it seems.

METHODS: COLONIAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

The methods behind Bhabha’s perspective are significant. His work transformed the study of colonialism by applying post-structuralist methodologies to colonial texts. Poststructuralism refers to the work of many distinct writers, whose work is not always connected in any explicit way: it usually refers to the work of philosophers like Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995), Michel Foucault (1926–1984) and Jacques Derrida (1930–2004). If this work could be reduced to a single explanatory term, that term would be difference. For example, even in writing, post-structuralists find differences and complexities that mean texts do not say what they initially seem to say, what they want to say, or what we think they say. Likewise, in our own sense of ourselves—our identity or subjectivity— these thinkers find division and difference. Such insights can be extended beyond philosophical issues to broad historical and cultural contexts. Cultural difference is often an implicit theme, and is sometimes explicitly discussed. And Bhabha explores and extends this relevance of post-structuralism for cultural difference.

Bhabha’s work takes post-structuralist approaches and applies them to colonialism, producing what has been called ‘colonial discourse analysis’. For most of the twentieth century, the study of colonialism was dominated by Marxist perspectives— understandable, given that Marxism had an important role in the traditions of anticolonialism. Perhaps the most significant challenge to this emphasis was that of Edward W. Said (1935–2003). Said’s most influential work has been Orientalism (1978), a study of the coherence of Western discourses about ‘the Orient’ or the East. Said argues that the way people in the West discussed the Orient developed a set of discourses of orientalism which set up an allegedly superior Western self in relation to an allegedly inferior non- Western other. Indeed, the academic study of the Orient in fact created its field of study, its object, by forcing together many varied cultures as simply ‘non-Western’. Philosophically speaking, orientalism begins by assuming that there is a radical distinction between East and West, and then proceeds to treat everything as evidence to back up this assumption. New evidence can never be entirely new, because all it can possibly do is confirm the basic distinction orientalism has already created. It is, then, more revealing to see how orientalism fits together as a consistent way of thinking, than to decide if orientalism is somehow actually accurate in its descriptions of the East. Indeed, orientalism tells us less about the Orient than it does about the West. If we look at what else the West was doing at the same time as studying the Orient, we see colonial expansion and domination, and this is not mere coincidence: Said argues that orientalism created an object that could be manipulated for political and economic purposes.

Bhabha finds Said’s argument very helpful, but he wants to ask certain supplementary questions about colonial power. He is interested in a psychoanalytic approach to that power, and his work suggests that colonial discourse only seems to be successful in its domination of the colonized. Underneath its apparent success, this discourse is secretly marked by radical anxiety about its aims, its claims, and its achievements. So, we might ask the question, ‘What does colonial discourse want?’ The answer seems to be, it wants only domination of the colonized. This domination depends on the assertion of difference: the colonized are inferior to the colonizers. However, colonial authority secretly—rather, unconsciously—knows that this supposed difference is undermined by the real sameness of the colonized population. This unconscious knowledge is disavowed: sameness is simultaneously recognized and repudiated. Importantly, the tension between the illusion of difference and the reality of sameness leads to anxiety. Indeed, for Bhabha colonial power is anxious, and never gets what it wants—a stable, final distinction between the colonizers and the colonized. This anxiety opens a gap in colonial discourse—a gap that can be exploited by the colonized, the oppressed. As I have suggested, this emphasis on agency is Bhabha’s originality, as his close readings seek out moments when the colonized resisted the colonizer, despite structures of violence and domination. According to Bhabha, Said minimizes spaces of resistance by producing a picture of the West endlessly and brutally subjugating the East. We should listen to the subaltern voice—the voice of the oppressed peoples falling outside histories of colonialism.

None the less, Bhabha is following Said’s thought very closely: Bhabha’s postcolonial criticism merely shifts our focus, so we see both colonizer and colonized. Like Said, Bhabha suggests that traditional ways of thinking about the world have often been complicit with longstanding inequalities between nations and peoples. His work operates on the assumption that a traditional philosophical sense of the relationship between one’s self and others, between subject and object, can be very damaging in its consequences— something we see too often in the encounter between different cultures. If you know only too well where your identity ends and the rest of the world begins, it can be easy to define that world as other, different, inferior, and threatening to your identity and interests. If cultures are taken to have stable, discrete identities, then the divisions between cultures can always become antagonistic.

SELF AND OTHER

In The Location of Culture (1994), a collection of his most important essays, Bhabha creates a series of concepts that work to undermine the simple polarization of the world into self and other. As the most famous example of these concepts, Bhabha’s writing emphasizes the hybridity of cultures, which on one level simply refers to the mixed-ness, or even ‘impurity’ of cultures—so long as we don’t imagine that any culture is really pure. This term refers to an original mixed-ness within every form of identity. In the case of cultural identities, hybridity refers to the fact that cultures are not discrete phenomena; instead, they are always in contact with one another, and this contact leads to cultural mixed-ness. Many literary writers have taken an interest in expressing hybrid cultural identities and using hybrid cultural forms—for example, novelist Salman Rushdie. Additionally, many non-literary writers like sociologists and anthropologists have explored this emphasis. Their writings undermine any claims to pure or authentic cultural identities or forms. But Bhabha insists less on hybridity than on hybridization; in other words, he insists on hybridity’s ongoing process. In fact, for Bhabha there are no cultures that come together leading to hybrid forms; instead, cultures are the consequence of attempts to still the flux of cultural hybridities.

Instead of beginning with an idea of pure cultures interacting, Bhabha directs our attention to what happens on the borderlines of cultures, to see what happens in-between cultures. He thinks about this through what he calls the liminal, meaning that which is on the border or the threshold. The term stresses the idea that what is in-between settled cultural forms or identities—identities like self and other—is central to the creation of new cultural meaning. To give privilege to liminality is to undermine solid, authentic culture in favour of unexpected, hybrid, and fortuitous cultures. It suggests that the proper location of culture is between the overly familiar forms of official culture. Because Bhabha focuses on signification (the creation of meaning) rather than physical locations (borders between nations), his position has been dismissed as idealistic and unrealistic. However, when he refers to the location of culture, this location is not metaphorical as opposed to literal. Instead, the location is both spatial and temporal: the liminal is often found in particular (post-colonial) social spaces, but also marks the constant process of creating new identities (their open-endedness or their ‘becoming’). Hybridity and liminality do not refer only to space, but also to time: one assumption that Bhabha’s work undermines is the idea that people living in differ-ent spaces (for example, nations or whole continents) are living at different stages of ‘progress’.

The emphasis on hybridity and the liminal is important because colonial discourses have often set up distinctions between pure cultures. Colonial power, for Bhabha, worked to divide the world into self and other, in order to justify the material inequalities central to colonial rule. When Bhabha comes to study colonial power, he argues that it is necessary to do something different. In other words, to continue thinking in terms of self and other, but simply to reverse the value of self and other so that the colonizer becomes morally inferior, is not a productive approach and in fact does not offer any real change. For example, to challenge the oppression of women by merely turning the tables and oppressing men instead is not going to offer any long-term solutions for anyone. This is just as true of the legacies of colonialism and racism. As I have suggested, Bhabha’s’ approach highlights the ways colonialism has been much more than the simple domination of one group by another. He stresses the unexpected forms of resistance that can be found in the history of the colonized, and the equally unexpected anxieties that plagued the colonizer despite his apparent mastery. Most often, he achieves these ends simultaneously, by picking on one phenomenon in which both colonizer and colonized participated, such as the circulation of colonial stereotypes.

In offering his account of colonialism, Bhabha is transforming our sense of both the method of study and the object of study. Bhabha’s project does not limit itself to the study of colonialism. In the same way as do post-structuralist thinkers, Bhabha challenges and transforms our ideas of what it means to be modern. Particularly in his later work, he extends his analysis to modernity in general—the ideas of scientific and material progress that mark the modern West, and are expressed in its globalized culture. In fact, it would be misleading to think of the study of colonialism as in any way narrow or of interest only to historians. Bhabha’s point is that we need to look again at modernity using perspectives drawn from the experiences of colonized people—he argues that we need a post-colonial perspective on modernity, and that modernity and post-colonialism are inescapably connected. He writes:

Our major task now is to probe further the cunning of Western modernity, its historical ironies, its disjunctive temporalities, its much-vaunted crisis of representation. It is important to say that it would change the values of all critical work if the emergence of modernity were given a colonial and post-colonial genealogy. We must never forget that the establishment of colonized space profoundly informs and historically contests the emergence of those so-called post-Enlightenment values associated with the notion of modern stability. (CSP: 64)

Colonialism has been a hidden presence shaping Euro-American power and the grand narratives of modern progress. The narratives of modernity seem to be coherent and serene in their self-confidence, telling of democratic and technological progress. However, that coherence and serenity are bought at the expense of denying historical reality. Modernity has repressed its colonial origins, and, in a sense, Bhabha’s project is the necessary analysis of modernity to uncover this repression. It is in fact like the psychoanalysis of modernity, an idea that will seem initially confusing, given that we usually think psychoanalysis is the analysis of individuals rather than groups, nations, etc. However, psychoanalysis is concerned with interpreting stories, and groups have their own stories, just like the stories of the analysed patient. In fact, psychoanalysis suggests all identities are incomplete, whether they are individual or collective identities. This incompleteness is not a problem to be solved, and we could never in principle have a full or complete identity. Instead, the incompleteness of identity needs to be acknowledged. So, modernity has seemed to be stable, with its own coherent narratives of progress. Instead, we should see modernity as something that needs to be hybridized: there are many ways to understand the modern world, and many contributions that have been ignored, which we now need to acknowledge and explore. Bhabha’s project foregrounds modernity’s complex hybridity.

THIS BOOK

The structure of this book is chronological, ending with Bhabha’s more recent application of his ideas to the context of human rights issues. In each case, chapters explore ideas found in The Location of Culture, illustrating them with Bhabha’s many varied writings on art,’ photography, cinema, and so on. In several chapters the ideas are applied in more detail to the reading of specific literary texts. The book works through various key terms, building a sense of Bhabha’s work that begins with his essential method, and moves on to look at different applications of this method in various colonial and postcolonial contexts.

The next chapter, ‘Reading’, gives an outline of Bhabha’s influences in the work of post-structuralist thinkers Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. It moves on to look at examples of Bhabha’s poststructuralist reading method, his interpretations of John Stuart Mill and Frantz Fanon. Following that, the chapter on ‘The Stereotype’ looks at how Bhabha reinterprets the discourses of colonialism, finding an anxiety central to the discourses of the colonizer. This idea of anxiety is developed further in the next chapter, on ‘Mimicry’, which examines the ways that the colonized retain their power to act despite the apparent domination of the colonizer. These two chapters explain Bhabha’s early work on colonialism. The chapters that follow explain the contemporary applications of his ideas. The chapter on ‘The Uncanny’ explains how Bhabha uses psychoanalytic categories to understand colonialism and post-colonialism: in particular, the idea of the uncanny structures both Bhabha’s theory of colonial identity and his postcolonial perspective on the present. This conceptual structure is extended in Chapters 6 and 7, which follow the implications of hybridity for discourses of nationalism and cultural rights. Bhabha’s work can be applied to nations and to what is beyond nations— transnationalism and globalization. These chapters together show how Bhabha’s thought transforms our ideas about nations and, increasingly, transnationalism or globalization. They point to future directions in Bhabha’s ideas. Finally, Chapter 8, ‘After Bhabha’, explains positive and negative responses to Bhabha’s work, suggesting ways people have either contested or transformed Bhabha’s analyses. The section on ‘Further reading’ gives detailed bibliographic information on Bhabha’s writings, and on related texts, allowing exploration of his ideas in greater depth.

Each chapter maintains a balance between on the one hand fully contextualizing Bhabha’s ideas, emphasizing the ways that we cannot simply extract his concepts and apply them elsewhere, and on the other hand cutting through that contextual information to give you a logical core and method for reading any text. It is an evident paradox of Bhabha’s status that, despite his influence on so many thinkers from art history to legal studies, much of his most influential work is apparently strictly and narrowly situated within colonial literature and other forms of colonial archive. To explain how this apparent paradox comes about, I will first introduce Bhabha’s reading method.

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READING

INTRODUCTION

This chapter explains how Bhabha approaches theoretical, historical...