موقع الثقافة

by Homi K. Bhabha, هومي ك. بابا, ثائر ديب (مترجم)

هومي بابا، أستاذ الأدب الإنجليزي والفن في جامعة شيكاغو، والموصوف بأنه واحد من بين العشرين مفكراً الأبرز في حقبتنا هذه، يعمل في هذا الكتاب على تحديد ما تعنيه الدراسات الكولونيالية والثقافية مدققاً في مصطلح ما بعد الكولونيالية ليس باعتباره انقضاء الحداثة بل إعادة تحديد موقعها.

ينزع بابا تلك الألفة التي تغلف المصطلحات التي نتقاذفها اليوم، مثل: التعددية الثقافية -التنوع الثقافي- تعدد الهويات... فلا يعود بمقدورنا استخدامها بنوع من الرضا والبداهة ودونما تفكير..

ليس هذا الكتاب مجرد استكشاف لأوضاع البلدان الكولونيالية وما بعد الكولونيالية، بل جلاء لديناميات السلطة والإخضاع والمقاومة.

أثار هذا الكتاب زوبعة من التعليقات بين مديح وذم، ولكنه بإثارته لهذه النقاشات أكد أهميته.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Cultural Studies, Anthropology, Academic, Cultural

422 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Homi K. Bhabha is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and Language, and the Director of the Humanities Center, at Harvard University. He is one of the most important figures in contemporary post-colonial studies, and has coined a number of the field's neologisms and key concepts, such as hybridity, mimicry, difference, ambivalence. Such terms describe ways in which colonised peoples have resisted the power of the coloniser, according to Bhabha's theory.

Reviews

[Meg · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book recommended for...

1. People who like pain.
2. People who like elitist, dense, scholarship that arrogantly references a huge array of critical theory without attempting to show where any of this is coming from or what it really means, and then tries to pass itself off as politically efficacious.
3. Graduate students and academics in cultural studies or postcolonial theory.

This makes me wonder... are those in the third category just really those who fit both descriptions one and two? It's possible...

I know that this is now a classic piece of theory... and I know, and believe, that there is valuable content in this book. (For instance, the notion that culture is always hybrid; that 'authentic' culture accurately representing something in the past doesn't exist; and likewise that there is always some lack in culture, which is precisely where productive change can come in.) What I don't know is if it was worth the work it took for me to get at that.

[Andrew]

Homi Bhabha seems to collect thinkers together, and take fragments of them and try to glue them together, but he does a really bad job of it. His typical adhesive is Lacanian nincompoopery (holy shit, spellcheck accepted that)(but not "Lacanian"), so I'm probably not the best interpreter. He's borderline unreadable, but then he has these moments of utter clarity and charm when riffing on Salman Rushdie or Roland Barthes, and you realize he has a lot of talent. Which makes me think he's probably trying too hard in the rest of the book.

A lot of thinkers I admire really dig Bhabha. Toni Morrison and Edwards Soja and Said were big speakers-out for him. He talks about the positivity of a liminal, borderlands, postcolonial sort of life, but without the charm or wit of Gilles Deleuze or Frantz Fanon or bell hooks. Could be better. There's a valuable armature under all this verbal upholstery, I know it, but it's hard to get at.

[Scott Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is certainly an important book. Bhabha is one of the "Holy Trinity" of postcolonial theorists, along with Edward Said and Giyatri Spivak. He is known for being fairly difficult to read (he is a big fan of Lacan) but once you sort of get used to his style and his general thought process he becomes accessible. Spivak is still way harder to approach then Bhabha.
Anyway, his main thesis deals with the place of colonized subject somewhere in between the stereotypes of savagery and naivete that the colonizers place upon them. Mimicry is important to him, and a fair deal of psychoanalytic theory. He also bases a great deal of his argument on the writing of Franz Fanon, although Bhabha is much less pessimistic about the potential of the marginalized subject than Fanon ever was. I like that, and I think Bhabha is a pretty smart chap...

[Phillip · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's hard to deny that Homi Bhabha changed the entire discourse surrounding postcolonial studies, but he's also one of those figures--like Foucault, Judith Butler, Marx, or Freud--whose central ideas have become so important and so widely discussed that they are now almost taken as a baseline for discussion in literary and cultural criticism. For my money, Bhabha's two best essays in this collection are "Of Mimicry and Man" and "Signs Taken for Wonders," which develop his theories of cultural hybridity and liminality. Basically, what Bhabha argues is that colonial contact fundamentally restructure/recomposes the cultures of both the empirial power and the colonized area through a process of cultural hybridity. This may take the form of a blending of cultures through repetitions, altered contexts, or borrowed behaviors (an idea especially developed in "Of Mimicry and Man"), or through the articulation of cultural values which never needed to be articulated as such before (like the role of the English book, in "Signs Taken for Wonders"). The encounter with an alternative culture is fundamentally transformative, not only in introducing new cultural practices, artifacts, and ideas, but also in altering one's relationship to his or her own culture by showing it in all its own strangeness.

[Catherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unforgivably, unnecessarily obtuse. Infuriatingly impenetrable. Rubbish.

[Joy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not readeable, even to those familiar with the terminology associated with post-structuralism and post-colonialism. Further, the content is repetitive. I didn't like this book at all.

[C. McGee · Rating 1 out of 5]

One of academia's best snake oil salesman. Bhabha says nothing, but he says nothing in an intimidatingly dense and jargon-laden fashion, so that the reader is too scared to call bullshit. No one in academia ever wants to be told that, "they don't get it," so barely anyone calls Bhabha out. What a joke.

[Melusine Parry · Rating 3 out of 5]

The ideas are fascinating, but the style is awful, terrifyingly jargonny and sometimes impenetrable. You have to read critical studies of the book to understand all of it.

[rory (jess' version)]

i survived my report even if i only understood the half of it :D

[Kevin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Given the work it takes to read this book, I would recommend reading the authors, such as Fanon, that Bhabha cites, instead. Those authors are compelling, and Bhabha's prose seems to suck the emotion and passion out of the issues he addresses and the writers he uses to make his arguments.

[Sarah AlObaid · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not for the faint of hearts. Academic torture.

[Tara Brabazon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is - put simply - one of the greatest books published in the humanities in the last fifty years. It changed knowledge. I have read it throughout my career, but I returned to it once because I required precision in my configuration of 'hybridity' and 'Third Space' for a research project.

It remains as powerful as when I read it in 1995. This version, republished as part of the Routledge Classics series, is superb, with a strong and new preface.

Yes, it is dense writing and reading. It requires work and focus from the reader. The sentences are deliberate and delicate. But - 17 pages of notes later - I can confirm that it is worth this attention. It is powerful.

So many of the arguments survive well through these (nearly) thirty years since it was published. The theorization that has lost some lustre is Bhabha's deployment of Foucault. The critiques of Foucault's work have been precise and well-aimed.

Noting this contextual transformation in the history of ideas, I log the power of this book.

Every now and again, a book changes multiple disciplines. This remains one of those books.

Read it before you die.

[Karl]

This book is the epitome of how critical theory creates its own dualism between elite theoretical discourse and other, more digestible, ways of writing. Bhabha's concepts, while worthwhile, remain buried in sentences that appear to be consciously overwritten and almost unintelligible. This is almost impossible to compare to other theorists. I would recommend Said, but never this.

[Nadia Mcgowan · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was painful.

[Suhaib · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have recently become more interested in postcolonialism and postcolonial subjectivity: the inner problems the postcolonial era entails for the people living in its wake. There is a plethora of postcolonial literature—from the works of Toni Morrison, Nadine Gordimer, Salman Rushdie, Bharati Mukherjee, and Maxine Kingston, to name a few. I have decided to read this book because according to ChatGPT it is a must-read for anyone interested in cultural studies, broadly speaking, and postcolonial literature, more specifically. Reading it definitely helps in putting postcolonial narratives in a unique and insightful perspective when it comes to interpretation and better understanding. The concepts readily apply. That is the first thing you will notice after reading this book and applying its concepts on any of the works by the authors aforementioned.

Homi K. Bhabha is a British-Indian scholar and critical theorist whose work represent a continuation of Edward Said’s Orientalism, on one hand, and an elaboration and critique of the works of other thinkers like Freud, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Jameson and many others. Bhabha now teaches at Harvard at the age of seventy-two. He is considered a key figure in postcolonial studies. In other words, there is no way of getting around not reading his work if you are interested in postcolonial literature.

The main contribution of Bhabha’s work, in my experience, is that reading him allows for a more elaborate and nuanced understanding and interpretation of postcolonial literature, which is the result of his integration of knowledge from critical theory, literature, psychology and ethnic studies. I have written notes and summarized some of the main and most useful concepts. The one problem I have with Bhabha is that his writing is often abstruse and difficult to follow due to lack of any introductory effort on his part regarding previous knowledge about the information and the people he discusses. Anyway, some of the important concepts Bhabha coined are mimicry, ambivalence, hybridity, cultural inscription and translation, the contingent agency of the postcolonial subject. Here is a summary:

- Ambivalence is the contradictory desire and fear of the colonized subject.

- Discourse is a body of knowledge in which normative power is overdetermined in a non-hierarchical manner. Power is just is.

- Discursive practice is one that is over-determined by the discourse in which we inhabit.

- An enunciating subject is one "qualified" with the power of articulation in a certain discourse.

- A fetish is produced as a replacement of the mother's missing phallus. It signifies both a disavowal/fear of difference and a desire for wholeness. In this manner, the fetish engenders ambivalence. It is a mimicry of something we desire and fear at the same time. This mimicry has an element of mockery in it.

- A stereotype is a fetish the colonizer ascribes to the colonized. It makes up something to be feared and desired. The stereotype is fortified with a certain fixity that prevents the signifier from circulation and thus from liberating the colonized subject and loosening the power of the colonial discourse.

- The presence of the postcolonial other is overlooked (in the double sense of the word meaning surveillance and being ignored) and overdetermined.

- Mimicry is at once resemblance and menace. The colonizer attempted to educate interpreters who would somewhat reflect their culture. Those mimic men became the carriers and facilitators of propagating the colonial discourse. But their acquired hybrid identities allowed for a certain slippage that would expose and mock their mimicry.

Verdict: I recommend this book for anyone interested in developing a nuanced understanding and interpretation of postcolonial literature—any novel that deals with postcolonial problems such as identity struggle, problems of belonging, hybridity, finding a voice, developing a sense of agency, and dealing with feelings of inferiority.

[Kastel · Rating 1 out of 5]

“The problem of progress is not simply an unveiling of human perfectibility, not simply the hermeneutic of progress. In the performance of human doing, through the veil, emerges a figure of cultural time where perfectibility is not ineluctably tied to the myth of progressivism ... What is crucial to such a vision of the future is the belief that we must not merely change the narratives of our histories, but transform our sense of what it means to live, to be, in other times and different spaces, both human and historical.” (1994, pp. 367)

What a bizarre conclusion to a text has a few interesting ideas but is extremely convoluted in explanations. Hybridity is an interesting idea, but I feel that it could be explored (and potentially has been explored under different names like ‘double consciousness’ in DuBois’s Souls of Black Follks) and it certainly isn’t worth the effort to read the whole damn thing. Hybridity is also crucially underexplored, despite being an important cornerstone for Bhabha’s argument against Marxist and other historicisr readings.

Plus there’s a lot of explaining Fanon’s work like a sixth grade book report. It’s atrocious at explaining something simple, but it knows how to buff it up in obscure terminology.

The chapters worth reading are: “The other question” (Chapter 3), ”Of mimicry and man” (Chapter 4), “Sly civility” (Chapter 5), Signs taken for wonders” (Chapter 6), and possibly “Articulating the archaic” (Chapter 7). The bolded ones are chapters I would use to cite from Bhabha for scholarly work because that’s at his clearest (debatably) in his exploration of the concepts on hybridity.

Though I find that the Wikipedia article on Bhabha the clearest discussion on the themes of those chapters.

Sigh... How is this a real book published? The argument is incoherent, but it has like two or three good ideas. That just can’t be a good reason to publish something, right?

RIGHT?

[Malcolm · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brilliant, demanding, challenging, insightful, and in places just plain wrong this remains one of the most important texts in post-structural postcolonial studies. It is an absolute must read in that there is a basic defining of the field in this collection of papers published elsewhere and gathered here. It contains two of the fundamental texts of the approach – 'Of Mimicry and Man' and 'Sly Civility' – that merit repeated re-reading and re-evaluation. My problem with it is part of a more general problem with post-structural analyses – they tend away from questions of political economy (paradoxical given in this case a focus on colonial and post-colonial relations) and towards idealist analyses. Its strength is that for Bhabha, hybridity is a basic condition of life so he takes us in inspiring ways beyond culture as essential to ask challenging questions about nations, identities, ways of seeing and being in the world, and cultural politics in difficult times (where the politics of struggle as confrontation is likely to lead to defeat). I don't accept a lot of his answers – but they make me work hard to clarify my own.

[Sencer Turunç · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kitabı, maduniyet çalışmaları bağlamında, fena olmayan bir akademik metin olarak görmek mümkün, özellikle de kullandığı kaynaklar bakımından...

Ancak, bu kitabı okumak büyük bir zulüm! Şöyle ki, hindistan asıllı İngiliz akademik elitliğinden şıpır şıpır damlayan bir kibir kokusu tüm kelimelere, cümlelere, paragraflara sinmiş. Ek olarak, ele alınan konu ne kadar politik olsa da kitaptaki elitist tavrın gerçek hayatta hiçbir politik karşılığı olmadığı kanaatindeyim. Diğer bir ifade ile, hayatın içinde gördüğüm maduniyet yansımaları ile bu kitapta ele alınan teorik yaklaşımlar arasında bir mesafe olduğunu düşünüyorum.

Bu kitap bağlamında istemsizce, maduniyet çalışmalarının; sömürünün, acziyetin ve sessizliğin akademik bir nesne haline getirilip, seçkin hintlilerce işgal edilmesi dışında dünyaya getirdiği bir şey yok gibi hissettim.

[Nagisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very hard to read. It took me a couple of weeks to understand one chapter.

Read "2. Interrogating identity: Frantz Fanon and the postcolonial prerogative."

Bhabha studies identity from Frantz Fanon's works and proposes that identity is not fixed.
Unstable relationships between the self and the other, desires and demand create "a splitting space" between the self and the other. One recognizes its identity on created images within the space.
In other words, according to the relationships between the self and the other, identity changes.

[Drew Edwards · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a pillar of post-colonial and post-modern thought. The quality of ideas are no less than 5 stars. Despite openly acknowledging that ideas like this need to be made more accessible the author failed to write in a way that was accessible and clear, even for other academics. The thoughts often ramble and are sometimes incomplete. The verbiage used is unnecessarily complicated and flamboyant to the degree that detracts from the brilliant points he is making. I highly recommend reading accompanied by a Macat or other study guide

[Emily · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm too dumb to understand all the isms and iations and other complex-ass nouns Bhabha uses in the creation of the post-colonial studies vocabulary.

[BlueSeagullJam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bhabha is borderline inaccessible and I just don't understand most of his arguments after the first reading. But some of his concepts, such as ambivalence, postcolonial time-lag, and mimicry, have evolved to be the important signposts in the field of postcolonial theory, and can be understood in their broadest and loosest sense possible -

Ambivalence - the white man really wants black and brown people to be 'successful' in that they speak his language and think his thought and go about things his way, with impeccable verisimilitude; but at the same time the white man also really wants black and brown people to understand, and accept, that they can never be as perfect as he is - within the epistemological confines of his own.

What this translates in real life is, lol, you have to assimilate and fill their labour shortage in certain sectors if you want to get a work permit and successfully immigrate to a western country. The much coveted 'critical' skills visa (coveted by whom?) in these countries is the mega embodiment of this colonial ambivalence.

Postcolonial time-lag - the civilised and civilising settler looks into the mirror of history and sees only his own inflated self, and he is pleased. He declares our time a modern time, and deduces that all cultures live the same historical time - if not, then cultures of different temporalities live in the same globalised space. This way he invents the only way to possibly comprehend the Other from the center of modernity, and he becomes entitled to the representation of them. This way racism becomes an atavistic fetish for tribal lineage and gets delegated to a time outside history, a time the metropolitan liberal has grown out of, proudly.

Examples of this modernised racism, which calls itself by all kinds of names (multiculturalism, diversity, globalisation, 'international' community, etc) other than that, include popular notions that immigrants bring culture and inclusivity to work (instead of culture and inclusivity bringing immigrants to work), darker skin tones are sexy, Asians are good at maths, and a spice bag is spicy.

Mimicry - the colonised wants to become the coloniser. I personally very sadly have the misfortune of having to practise this, because I want a work permit and I don't have critical skills lol. Which makes it possible for me to take on that colonial ambivalence from both its initiating and recipient positions, which is a very schizophrenic experience.

This is, of course, a very reductionist and essentialist introduction to Bhabha's arguments. The space and depth for nuance in Bhabha's book far exceed what a few pages of summary would allow for. Hopefully I'll understand the arguments more the next time I come back to this book.

[Vinay Khosla · Rating 4 out of 5]

This must hit so hard if you’re a Lacanian deconstructionist

[Erdem Tasdelen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting progression in this book. Maybe it's because I don't have a firm grasp of the specifics of these histories of colonialism that I find it easier to relate to his analysis of the last century and the effect of modernity/postmodernity on postcolonial subjectivity. Bhabha's writing has much more clarity in the later chapters where he starts utilizing the terms he lays out in the previous ones, and adds a few that are more cohesive. I enjoyed how he methodically sculpts a postcolonial subjectivity that is hybrid, in-between, and ambivalently situated in a temporal zone; but I found his conception of the "time-lag" where meaning-making happens to be insufficient in explaining the ongoing deferral of sedimented meaning in the writing/interpretation of history. The time-lag is a process that never stops, and an effective strategy for political agency won't always come out of saying "Let's hold on here for a minute and try to look at this from different perspectives."

Interestingly enough, reading Bhabha's writing made me think whether all these arguments are self evident, only enriched by literary analysis, historical anecdotes and philosophical connections. I wonder whether that is because deconstruction is already so embedded in my thinking that I can't imagine thinking otherwise, and that I myself, along with many others around me, am a product of the hybridities and ambivalences Bhabha talks about. Either his writing is so equivocal that I can easily interpret it in a way I will agree with; or he isn't really saying very much, but his writing convinces me that he is; or we really are just on the same wavelength and I take that for granted.

[Kathleen Quaintance · Rating 4 out of 5]

very poststructural which means you have to wrestle with everything and read every sentence twice to absorb but what's being said, but the topics are so important so i think it's 10000% worth it, definitely way more than other poststructural writings which make you wrestle for no reason (thats not a nuanced statement but like, u get me. there's no way zizek's insanely dense account of some random midcentury eastern european film deserves the same amount of difficulty as this.) the density and fluidity of the language is actually part of bhabha's project itself, which is to comment on how postcolonial cultural productions thrive in ambiguity, and a call to bring further awareness and nuance to cultural productions which cannot be simply classified & instead live in the borderlands between dissolvable categories. lol @ all the other reviews being like 'this was so densely written!' when bhabha writes that way on purpose to try to get us to really spend some serious brain power thinking about how the culture we belong to and/or consume can respond to postcolonialism, which is obviously important

[Chon Mkliiry · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful book on the future challenges faced by the advent of post-colonialism and postmodernism. His observations on "the third space" certainly resonates with me as a multicultural, multiracial individual. He sees human development as always "media res" and refrains from binary classifications such as past and present or this culture/that culture. His argument, which compliments Deleuze and Guattari's "rhizome", is very compelling. A great book, but by no means a quick read.

[scott noble · Rating 5 out of 5]

awesome post-colonial theory

[Bridgett · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an awesome book for those interested in postcolonial theory.

[Ploy Suriyaporn · Rating 2 out of 5]

มึงควรพูดภาษาคนนะ

[Alhemičar želja · Rating 2 out of 5]

Koliko se samo priča o ovoj knjizi u akademskom svetu, uopše nije interesantna... Prepuna je teorijskih, haotičnih i suvoparnih misli.