2.14.2006
The Location of Culture (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Title
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge Classics, 2004.
Field
Postcolonial Asian American Studies
Summary
Homi Bhabha's Location of Culture, is, as far as I can tell, a negotiation of the ethics of difference conceived within a relentlessly contested space and time of (post)modernity. I quote him at length from the Introduction of the book:
"Terms of cultural engagement, whether antagonistic or affiliative, are produced performatively. The representation of difference must not be hastily read as the reflection of pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in the fixed tablet of tradition. The social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation. The 'right' to signify from the periphery of authorized power and privilege does not depend on the persistence of tradition; it is resourced by the power of tradition to be reinscribed through the conditions of contingency and contradictoriness that attend upon the lives of those who are 'in the minority." (3)
Here Bhabha sets up what will be the central conceits of his book, further chapters enunciating and re-enunciating the themes and questions of hybridity and the dismantling of binaries (or at least, the binary that must disavow the production of hybridity) , non-linear temporality, the writing of the minority/subaltern, difference and representation, and performativity - of course all that I just listed informs one another and loops back on itself. In this vein, we have a discussion of "unhomeliness" and the migrant in the intro, a characteristic of Bhabha's interest in the interstitual, the inbetween and to take that further along in the absence of intentionality (or is it hyperintentionality, who knows...), his near obsession with ambivalence. Chapter one is a bit defensive, a justification of theory (but I guess if you are Homi, this is sort of the necessary starting point. It's kind of sad, really, but not in a way that I feel bad for him, more for me for having to wade into the pity party, really) He says, "I want to take my stand on the shifting margins of cultural displacement - that confounds any profound or 'authentic' sense of 'national' culture or an 'organic' intellectual - and ask what the function of a committed theoretical perspective might be, once the cultural and historical hybridity of the postcolonial world is taken as the paradigmatic place of departure." (31) Theoretical critique is the way to take that stand on the shifting margins, opening up "a place of hybridity, figuratively speaking, where the construction of a political object that is new, neither the one nor the other, properly alienates our political expectations and changes, as it must, the very forms of our recognition of the moment of politics." (37) This hybridity is acheived in the splitting of the enunciative subject, which affects the very knowability of cultural subjects, subject formation at that (and the conception of modernity as Bhabha discusses throughout the book). Chapter two deals with Fanon and the postcolonial as disruptive to this very conception of Western modernity as a struggle to see the invisible other (there is something here about realism and modernity, the inability to deal with the dark other that is neither what you see or what you get that results in profound colonial ambivalence). "Each time the encounter with identity occurs the point at which something exceeds the frame of the image, it eludes the eye, evacuates the self as site of identity and autonomy and - most important - leaves a resistance trace, a stain of the subject, a logical problem of being but with the discursive strategy of the moment of interrogation, a moment in which the demand for identifiction becomes, primarily, response to other questions of signification and desire, culture and politics." (71) Chapter three deals with ambivalence, colonial authority and the "processes of subjectification made possible through stereotypical discourse." (95) Bhabha productively and interestingly reads the stereotype along the lines of the fetish (this is pretty neat, I think) and the way colonial discourse enacts this through metaphoric/narcissistic and metonymic/aggressive positions. Then of course the famous (at least to me) Mimicry and Man chapter, where the idea of colonial narcissism and fear is exapanded upon in the face of the manufacture of white but not quite others. A short chapter on colonial writing is pretty neat, too - here Bhabha sorts out the inability of to sort out the colonized (and vice versa) and the resultant threat : "Both colonizer and colonized are in a process of miscognition where each point of identitification is always a partial and double repetition of the otherness of the self - democrat and despot, individual and servant, native and child. It is around the 'and' - that conjuction of infinite repetition - that the ambivalence of civil authority circulates as a 'colonial' signifier that is less than one and double." (139) The next chapter is a grand continuation of this thread of the ambivalence of colonial authority and the hybridity of the subaltern position. This chapter really ennunciates (can I even say that?) the issue of hybridity and the trouble it gives to linear time due to its iterstitulity and repetition: "Hybridity is the revaluation of the assumption of colonial identity through the repetition of discrimintory identity effects. It displays the necessary deformation and displacement of all sites of discrimination and domination. It unsettles the mimetic or narcisstic demands of colonial power but reimplicates its identifications in strategies of subversion that turn the gaze of the discriminated bck upon the eye of power. For the colonial hybrid is the articulation of the ambivalent spce where the rite of power is enacted on the site of desire, making its objects at once disciplinary and disseminatory - or, in my mixed metaphor, a negative transparency." (160) Bhabha next examines this colonial anxiety at hybridity and the kind of splitting that acts as a defence agaist it in a little more depth (see a quote in my other notes section).
Dissemination is a chapter which knits together several of the themes above - nation, hybridity, the crisis of modernity in the face of the (post)colonial, and is really a chapter on historical methodology, I think, and the other times and spaces that the types of amibalence, doubling, and hybridity Bhabha discusses calls for. As Bhabha asks, "Does the incommensurable act of living - so often dismissed as ethical or empirical - have its own ambivalent narrative, its own history of theory?" (219) The next chapter takes this methodological scrutiny to postmodernism and postcolonialism, also introduces Spivak's concept of the time-lag - "the temporal break in representation" (274) - which Bhabha seems to like a lot, and a reading of the last few pages of The Pleasure of the Text which I like a lot. The next chapter is Bhabha's completely crazy take on peasant insurgency which I can't even begin to talk about because it is about flying chapatis, but ok, I'll take a crack at it - it's about panic and rumor as more examples of this weird time space that interests him and also kinda a case study of peasant insurgency vis a vis his thinking on hybridity and in-between states and stuff. So I guess it works. The next chapter brings us back to issues of globality, modernity and migrants, hybridity and community (a direct reference to the closing chapters of Chatterjee's book who Bhabha always refers to with the descriptor phrase "the Indian 'subaltern' scholar") He says of community - "Community is the antagonist supplement of modernity: in the metropolitan space it is the territory of the minority; threatening the claims of civility; in the trasnational world it becomes the border-problem of the diasporic, the migrant, the refugee." (330) Finally (oh, finally, finally), the book ends with a discussion of race (with the attendent themes of ambivalence, delayed / nonlinear temporality, hybridity, of course) and a critique of Anderson and Foucault on the topic. To reiterate: "The postcolonial passage through modernity produces that form of repetition - the past as projective. The time-lag of postcolonial modernity moves forward, erasing that compliant past tethered to the myth of progress, ordered in the binarism of its cultural logic: past/present, inside/outside. This forward is neither teleological nor is it an endless slippage. It is the function of the lag to slow down the linear, progressive time of modernity to reveal it's 'gesture'..."(364) And where does this leave us? "What is crucial to such vision of the future is the belief that we must not merely change the narratives of our hisotries, but transform our sense of what it means to live, to be, in other times and different spaces, both human and historical." (367)
Keywords
Cultural Difference, Hybridity, Ambivalence, Other, Doubling, Time Lag, Disavowal.
Other Thoughts
"I do not mean, in any sense, to glorify margins and peripheries. However, I do want to mke graphic wht it means to survive, to produce, to labor and to create, within a world-system pointed in a direction away from you, your country or your people." (xi)
"Globalization, I want to suggest, must always begin at home. A just measure of global progress requires that we first evalute how globalizing nations deal with the 'difference within'-the problems of diversity and representations of minorities in the regional domain." (xv)
"Our nation-centered view of sovereign citizenship can only comprehend the predicament of minoritarian 'belonging' as a problem of ontology...the vernacular cosmopolitan takes the view that the commitment to 'right of difference in equality' as a process of constituting emergent groups and affiliations has less to do with the affirmtion or authentication of origins and 'identities,' and more to do with political practices and ethical choices." (xvii)
"It is in the emergence of the interstices - the overlap and displacement of difference - that the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community, interest or cultural value are negotiated." (2)
"Cultural diversity is an epistemological object - culture as an object of empirical knowledge - whereas cultural difference is the proces of the enunciation of culture as 'knowledgable', authoritative, adequate to the construction of systems of cultural identification." (50)
"Splitting constitutes an intricate strategy of defence and differentiation in the colonial discourse. Two contridictory and independent attitudes inhabit the same place, one takes account of reality, the other is under the influence of instincts which detach the ego from reality. This results in the production of multiple and contradictory belief. The enunciatory moment of multiple belief is both a defence against the anxiety of difference and itself productive of differentiations. Splitting is then a form of enunciatory, intellectual uncertainty and anxiety that stems from the fact that disavowal is not merely a principal of negation or elision; it is a strategy for articulating contradictory and coeval statements of belief." (188)
I am interested in this whole ambivalence thing, but I am also kinda sick of it...but I want to think about it in relationship to failure, something Homeboy doesn't really do. As far as I can tell, anyways.
I should also say that there are a lot of literary readings in this book - you probably wouldn't get that from what I wrote above. A lot of discussion of Naipal, Rushdie, Morrison, and Conrad.
Other QE Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. (Film and Media Theory)
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Said, Edward. Orientalism (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Jameson, Frederic. The Political Unconscious (Film and Media Theory)
Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Narrative)
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality (History and Theory of the Body)
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge Classics, 2004.
Field
Postcolonial Asian American Studies
Summary
Homi Bhabha's Location of Culture, is, as far as I can tell, a negotiation of the ethics of difference conceived within a relentlessly contested space and time of (post)modernity. I quote him at length from the Introduction of the book:
"Terms of cultural engagement, whether antagonistic or affiliative, are produced performatively. The representation of difference must not be hastily read as the reflection of pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in the fixed tablet of tradition. The social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation. The 'right' to signify from the periphery of authorized power and privilege does not depend on the persistence of tradition; it is resourced by the power of tradition to be reinscribed through the conditions of contingency and contradictoriness that attend upon the lives of those who are 'in the minority." (3)
Here Bhabha sets up what will be the central conceits of his book, further chapters enunciating and re-enunciating the themes and questions of hybridity and the dismantling of binaries (or at least, the binary that must disavow the production of hybridity) , non-linear temporality, the writing of the minority/subaltern, difference and representation, and performativity - of course all that I just listed informs one another and loops back on itself. In this vein, we have a discussion of "unhomeliness" and the migrant in the intro, a characteristic of Bhabha's interest in the interstitual, the inbetween and to take that further along in the absence of intentionality (or is it hyperintentionality, who knows...), his near obsession with ambivalence. Chapter one is a bit defensive, a justification of theory (but I guess if you are Homi, this is sort of the necessary starting point. It's kind of sad, really, but not in a way that I feel bad for him, more for me for having to wade into the pity party, really) He says, "I want to take my stand on the shifting margins of cultural displacement - that confounds any profound or 'authentic' sense of 'national' culture or an 'organic' intellectual - and ask what the function of a committed theoretical perspective might be, once the cultural and historical hybridity of the postcolonial world is taken as the paradigmatic place of departure." (31) Theoretical critique is the way to take that stand on the shifting margins, opening up "a place of hybridity, figuratively speaking, where the construction of a political object that is new, neither the one nor the other, properly alienates our political expectations and changes, as it must, the very forms of our recognition of the moment of politics." (37) This hybridity is acheived in the splitting of the enunciative subject, which affects the very knowability of cultural subjects, subject formation at that (and the conception of modernity as Bhabha discusses throughout the book). Chapter two deals with Fanon and the postcolonial as disruptive to this very conception of Western modernity as a struggle to see the invisible other (there is something here about realism and modernity, the inability to deal with the dark other that is neither what you see or what you get that results in profound colonial ambivalence). "Each time the encounter with identity occurs the point at which something exceeds the frame of the image, it eludes the eye, evacuates the self as site of identity and autonomy and - most important - leaves a resistance trace, a stain of the subject, a logical problem of being but with the discursive strategy of the moment of interrogation, a moment in which the demand for identifiction becomes, primarily, response to other questions of signification and desire, culture and politics." (71) Chapter three deals with ambivalence, colonial authority and the "processes of subjectification made possible through stereotypical discourse." (95) Bhabha productively and interestingly reads the stereotype along the lines of the fetish (this is pretty neat, I think) and the way colonial discourse enacts this through metaphoric/narcissistic and metonymic/aggressive positions. Then of course the famous (at least to me) Mimicry and Man chapter, where the idea of colonial narcissism and fear is exapanded upon in the face of the manufacture of white but not quite others. A short chapter on colonial writing is pretty neat, too - here Bhabha sorts out the inability of to sort out the colonized (and vice versa) and the resultant threat : "Both colonizer and colonized are in a process of miscognition where each point of identitification is always a partial and double repetition of the otherness of the self - democrat and despot, individual and servant, native and child. It is around the 'and' - that conjuction of infinite repetition - that the ambivalence of civil authority circulates as a 'colonial' signifier that is less than one and double." (139) The next chapter is a grand continuation of this thread of the ambivalence of colonial authority and the hybridity of the subaltern position. This chapter really ennunciates (can I even say that?) the issue of hybridity and the trouble it gives to linear time due to its iterstitulity and repetition: "Hybridity is the revaluation of the assumption of colonial identity through the repetition of discrimintory identity effects. It displays the necessary deformation and displacement of all sites of discrimination and domination. It unsettles the mimetic or narcisstic demands of colonial power but reimplicates its identifications in strategies of subversion that turn the gaze of the discriminated bck upon the eye of power. For the colonial hybrid is the articulation of the ambivalent spce where the rite of power is enacted on the site of desire, making its objects at once disciplinary and disseminatory - or, in my mixed metaphor, a negative transparency." (160) Bhabha next examines this colonial anxiety at hybridity and the kind of splitting that acts as a defence agaist it in a little more depth (see a quote in my other notes section).
Dissemination is a chapter which knits together several of the themes above - nation, hybridity, the crisis of modernity in the face of the (post)colonial, and is really a chapter on historical methodology, I think, and the other times and spaces that the types of amibalence, doubling, and hybridity Bhabha discusses calls for. As Bhabha asks, "Does the incommensurable act of living - so often dismissed as ethical or empirical - have its own ambivalent narrative, its own history of theory?" (219) The next chapter takes this methodological scrutiny to postmodernism and postcolonialism, also introduces Spivak's concept of the time-lag - "the temporal break in representation" (274) - which Bhabha seems to like a lot, and a reading of the last few pages of The Pleasure of the Text which I like a lot. The next chapter is Bhabha's completely crazy take on peasant insurgency which I can't even begin to talk about because it is about flying chapatis, but ok, I'll take a crack at it - it's about panic and rumor as more examples of this weird time space that interests him and also kinda a case study of peasant insurgency vis a vis his thinking on hybridity and in-between states and stuff. So I guess it works. The next chapter brings us back to issues of globality, modernity and migrants, hybridity and community (a direct reference to the closing chapters of Chatterjee's book who Bhabha always refers to with the descriptor phrase "the Indian 'subaltern' scholar") He says of community - "Community is the antagonist supplement of modernity: in the metropolitan space it is the territory of the minority; threatening the claims of civility; in the trasnational world it becomes the border-problem of the diasporic, the migrant, the refugee." (330) Finally (oh, finally, finally), the book ends with a discussion of race (with the attendent themes of ambivalence, delayed / nonlinear temporality, hybridity, of course) and a critique of Anderson and Foucault on the topic. To reiterate: "The postcolonial passage through modernity produces that form of repetition - the past as projective. The time-lag of postcolonial modernity moves forward, erasing that compliant past tethered to the myth of progress, ordered in the binarism of its cultural logic: past/present, inside/outside. This forward is neither teleological nor is it an endless slippage. It is the function of the lag to slow down the linear, progressive time of modernity to reveal it's 'gesture'..."(364) And where does this leave us? "What is crucial to such vision of the future is the belief that we must not merely change the narratives of our hisotries, but transform our sense of what it means to live, to be, in other times and different spaces, both human and historical." (367)
Keywords
Cultural Difference, Hybridity, Ambivalence, Other, Doubling, Time Lag, Disavowal.
Other Thoughts
"I do not mean, in any sense, to glorify margins and peripheries. However, I do want to mke graphic wht it means to survive, to produce, to labor and to create, within a world-system pointed in a direction away from you, your country or your people." (xi)
"Globalization, I want to suggest, must always begin at home. A just measure of global progress requires that we first evalute how globalizing nations deal with the 'difference within'-the problems of diversity and representations of minorities in the regional domain." (xv)
"Our nation-centered view of sovereign citizenship can only comprehend the predicament of minoritarian 'belonging' as a problem of ontology...the vernacular cosmopolitan takes the view that the commitment to 'right of difference in equality' as a process of constituting emergent groups and affiliations has less to do with the affirmtion or authentication of origins and 'identities,' and more to do with political practices and ethical choices." (xvii)
"It is in the emergence of the interstices - the overlap and displacement of difference - that the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community, interest or cultural value are negotiated." (2)
"Cultural diversity is an epistemological object - culture as an object of empirical knowledge - whereas cultural difference is the proces of the enunciation of culture as 'knowledgable', authoritative, adequate to the construction of systems of cultural identification." (50)
"Splitting constitutes an intricate strategy of defence and differentiation in the colonial discourse. Two contridictory and independent attitudes inhabit the same place, one takes account of reality, the other is under the influence of instincts which detach the ego from reality. This results in the production of multiple and contradictory belief. The enunciatory moment of multiple belief is both a defence against the anxiety of difference and itself productive of differentiations. Splitting is then a form of enunciatory, intellectual uncertainty and anxiety that stems from the fact that disavowal is not merely a principal of negation or elision; it is a strategy for articulating contradictory and coeval statements of belief." (188)
I am interested in this whole ambivalence thing, but I am also kinda sick of it...but I want to think about it in relationship to failure, something Homeboy doesn't really do. As far as I can tell, anyways.
I should also say that there are a lot of literary readings in this book - you probably wouldn't get that from what I wrote above. A lot of discussion of Naipal, Rushdie, Morrison, and Conrad.
Other QE Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. (Film and Media Theory)
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Said, Edward. Orientalism (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Jameson, Frederic. The Political Unconscious (Film and Media Theory)
Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Narrative)
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality (History and Theory of the Body)
# posted by SMRT : 2:19 PM
