The Location of Culture

Bhabha, Homi. (2004). London and New York: Routledge Classics. (First published in 1994)

Preface to the Routledge Classics Edition (ix-xxv)
Bhabha's interest focus on the hybrid forms of life that the marginalized produce amid the situation where their cultural integrity is negated through the ignorance of their differences. He distinguishes two discourses of globalization. In this criticism of the predominant discourse, global cosmopolitanism, he asserts that it focuses on neo-liberal forms of governance and free-market forces of competition. He states:

A global cosmopolitanism of this sort readily celebrates a world of plural cultures and peoples located at the periphery, so long as they produce healthy profit margins within metropolitan societies. States that participate in such multicultural[sic] multiculturalism affirm their commitment to 'diversity', at home and abroad, so long as the demography of diversity consists largely of educated economic migrants--computer engineers, medical technicians, and entrepreneurs, rather than refugees, political exiles, or the poor. (p. xiv)

Instead, Bhabha calls attention to globalization that deals with difference within, such as problems of diversity and redistribution at the local level and the rights and representations of minorities in the regional domain. From this view, he suggests the term vernacular cosmopolitanism, which measures global progress from minorities perspective and their claims to freedom and equality are marked by a right to difference in equality. He states:

The vernacular cosmopolitan takes the view that the commitment to a 'right to difference in equality' as a process of constituting emergent groups and affiliations has less to do with the affirmation or authentication of origins and 'identities,' and more to do with political practices and ethical choices. (p. xvii)

Bhabha sharply criticizes Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations. The Article declares the rights of minority to preserve their cultural inheritance. (The current statement is as follows) "Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits." Bhabha contests that this statement neglects inter-cultural affiliation across minority communities. He states:

Article 27 emphasizes the need for minorities to 'preserve' their cultural identities, rather than to affiliate across emergent minority communities. For all its good intentions, such rights neglect the 'inter-cultural' political existence and ethical imperative...(p. xxii)

[The Universal Declaration of Human Rights begins with the sentence, "All human beings are born with equal and inalienable rights and fundamental freedoms." But it is quite intriguing that Arendt once wrote, "we are not born equal, but become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights" (The Origin of Totalitarianism, p. 297) Although the two approaches aim at the same goal of preserving human rights, Arendt emphasizes the need for struggle to achieve the goal, thus allows us to see the inveterate power differentials in our society.]


Introduction (p. 1-27)
Bhabha delineates an innovative theoretical approach as thinking beyond narratives of initial subjectivities and focus on processes produced in the articulation of cultural differences. He calls them"in-between" spaces. With respect to cultural engagement, Bhabha states:

The social articulation of difference, from minority perspective, is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation...The borderline engagements of cultural difference may as often be consensual as conflictual; they may confound our definition of tradition and modernity; realign the customary boundaries between the private and the public, high and low; and challenge normative expectations of development and progress. (p. 3)

Bhabha explains postcoloniality: (1) it focuses on the persistent 'neo-colonial' conditions within the 'new' world order and the multinational division of labor, and (2) it look at cultures 'otherwise than modern'. He describes this phrase, "Such cultures of a postcolonial contra-modernity may be contingent to modernity, discontinuous or in contention with it, resistant to its oppressive, assimilationist technologies; but they also deploy the cultural hybridity of their borderline conditions to 'translate', and therefore reinscribe, the social imaginary of both metropolis and modernity" (p. 9).

Under the postcolonial condition, Bhabha introduces the concept of unhomeliness, meaning the recess of the domestic space or simply displacement. He assert that it is inherent to inter-cultural rites and becomes historically the most intricate invasion, blurring the borders between home and world as well as private and public. [THIS REMINDS ME OF ARENDT'S ARGUMENT OF THE PRESERVATION OF PRIVATE DOMAIN]

Chapter 1. The Commitment to Theory (28-56)
Bhabha emphasizes the political commitment of a theory. Opposing to singularity, he states that hegemony requires iteration and alterity to be effectively produce politicized populations. Within this context, he argues that theoretical statements should be made through negotiation and recognition of heterogeneity, where hybrid forms of knowledge can be produced. He writes:

A knowledge can only become political through an agnostic process: dissensus, alterity and otherness are the discursive conditions for the circulation and recognition of a politicized subject and a public 'truth'. (p. 34)

He maintains that in the negotiation between politics and knowledge, theories cannot be a metanarrative claiming generality and should not lag the time and space of politics.

Bhabha notes that cultural diversity, the recognition of pre-given cultural contents and customs, gives rise to liberal notion of multiculturalism.

His perspective on the relationship between cultural meaning and language is worth to look at. [Is it similar to poststructuralism?] In his view, the act of cultural enunciation [making known] is crossed by the difference of writing. Refusing a traditional emphasis on the content of symbols and functions within different cultures, he emphasizes the structure of symbolization shaped by language. In his view, the process of language itself is crucial to creating (cultural) meanings. Thus, meaning and symbols of culture is created beyond a simple act of communication between two people and is "mobilized in the passage through a Third Space, which represents both the general conditions of language and the specific implication of the utterance in a performative and institutional strategy of which it cannot 'in itself' be conscious " (p. 53). Therefore, this Third Space constitutes the act of cultural enunciation, which is a contradictory, ambivalent, and indeterminate space. The acknowledgment of this Third Space of cultural enunciation is critical to understanding the historical identity of culture. He states:

The intervention of the Third Space of enunciation, which makes the structure of meaning and reference an ambivalent process, destroys this mirror of representation in which cultural knowledge is customarily revealed as an integrated, open, and expanding code. Such an intervention quite properly challenges our sense of the historical identity of culture as a homegenizing, unifying force, authenticated by the originary Past, kept alive in the national tradition of the People. (p. 54)

For Bhabha, the nature of culture lies not in purity, fixity, or unity but in hybridity that a Third Space produces. Bhabha describes this Third Space as an alien territory, a split-space, or inbetween space. He argues that the theoretical recognition of this space may help conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or cultural diversity in a liberal sense but on the articulation of culture's hybridity.

By emphasizing the Third Space and the hybridity of culture, he calls attention to a discontinuity of cultural identities that people bring forward in their liberatory struggle. He observes that by destroying the continuity of the nationalist tradition, people can translate and negotiate their new culture within a new context. Bhabha states:

The people are now the very principle of 'dialectical reorganization' and they construct their culture from the national text translated into modern Western forms of information technology, language, dress. The changed political and historical site of enunciation transforms the meanings of the colonial inheritance into the liberatory signs of a free people of the future. (p. 56)

Bhabha distinguishes himself from nationalists who call for the true national culture as a safeguard against colonial cultural imposition. As he notes, his perspective resonates in Fanon's. Bhabha writes, "for Fanon, the liberatory people who initiate the productive instability of revolutionary cultural change are themselves the bearers of a hybridity identity" (p. 55).

[It seems that the reason why he is called a post-colonial scholar is that his emphasis on a departure from the legacy of colonialism on the basis of the changing culture from the people.]

Chapter 7. Articulating the Archaic: Cultural difference and colonial nonsense (175-198)
Bhabha opposes to the restoration of cultural essence or authenticity. According to him, this approach is taken from the perspective of relativism for the recognition of cultural difference. Defining cultural difference as a problem caused by cultural plurality, he argues that cultural difference is not acquisition or accumulation of additional cultural knowledge, but the momentous extinction of the recognizable object of culture. Thereby he continues to emphasize a discontinuity of culture at the edge of experience. For him, culture is not a fixity, but a fluidity, disrupted by time and space.

[His discussion is not much about cultural collision within an immigrant society, rather a nation-state in a post-colonial period.]

Chapter 8. DissemiNation: Time, narrative and the margins of the modern nation (199-244)

Focusing on the emergence of the modern nation from the mid-nineteenth century, he defines the Western nation as an obscure and ubiquitous form of living the "locality" of culture. He argues that in the act of writing the nation, which is an apparatus of symbolic power, a continual slippage of categories, like sexuality, class affiliation, territorial paranoia or cultural difference. But Bhabha argues that by focusing on the nation-space, the narrative of nation fails to address the ambivalent and chiasmatic intersections of time and place that constitute the 'modern' experience of the Western nation. Thus his focus is placed on the temporality of the modernity.

Within this context he warns that cultural difference must not be understood from the perspective of pluralities in the "homogeneous empty" time of the national community. He states:

The question of cultural difference faces us with a disposition of knowledges or a distribution of practices that exist beside each other, abseits designating a form of social contradiction or antagonism that has to be negotiated rather than sublated...The aim of cultural difference is to rearticulate the sum of knowledge from the perspective of the signifying position of the minority that resists totalization [my emphasis]...[that] serves to disturb the calculation of power and knowledge, producing other spaces of subaltern signification. (p. 232-233)

[I seems that Bhabha regards the other spaces produced in the hybrid conditions as a site of potential subversion, but it could be and in-between culture is not powerless, however his perspective is narrated without enough evidence. The in-between culture is negotiated and can be either subversive or obedient to the totalization.]

chapter. 9 The Postcolonial and the Postmodern: the question of agency

According to Bhabha, postcolonial criticism revolves around unequal cultural representation. In order to do so, they intervene in the discourse of modernity, in particular around its rationalization, that normalizes the unequal and differential representation. Thus, they attempt to reconstitute cultural difference, social authority and political discrimination in order to reveal the oppressive function of modernity. He states that, in the discourse of cultural difference, they oppose to the continuity of an authentic 'past' and a living 'present'. Instead they see culture as a strategy of survival and focus on the transnational dimension of cultural transformation, such as migration, diaspora, displacement and relocation. Thus, he argues that the postcolonialism challenges a consensual and collusive liberal sense of cultural community. Instead, they look at culture as a disturbing practice of survival and focus on a process of alterity, which construct cultural and political identities.