Post-Coloniality: Homi Bhabha and the Third Space

1. Introduction to Post-Coloniality • Homi Bhabha: The Location of Culture, 1994

2. Post-Coloniality • Homi Bhabha • The postcolonial perspective - as it is being developed by cultural historians and literary theorists - departs from the traditions of the sociology of underdevelopment or 'dependency' theory. • As a mode of analysis, it attempts to revise those nationalists or 'nativist' pedagogies that set up the relation of Third World and First World in a binary structure of opposition. • The postcolonial perspective resists the attempt to holistic forms of social explanation.

3. Post-Coloniality • Homi Bhabha • It forces a recognition of the more complex cultural and political boundaries that exist on the cusp of these often opposed political spheres. • The postcolonial prerogative consists in reinterpreting and rewriting the forms and effects of an 'older' colonial consciousness from the later experience of the cultural displacement that marks the more recent, postwar histories of the Western metropolis.

4. Post-Coloniality • Homi Bhabha • Postcolonial perspectives emerge from the colonial testimony of Third World countries and the discourses of 'minorities' within the geopolitical divisions of east and West, North and South. • They intervene in those ideological discourses of modernity that attempt to give a hegemonic 'normality' to an uneven development and the differential, often disadvantaged, histories of nations, races, communities, peoples.

5. Post-Coloniality • Homi Bhabha • What is theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. • ‘In-between' spaces provide the terrainfor elaborating strategies of selfhood -singular or communal- that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in theact of defining the idea of society itself.

6. Post-Coloniality • Homi Bhabha • 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. • Political empowerment, and the enlargement of the multiculturalist cause, come from posing questions of solidarity and community from the intersitial perspective.

7. Post-Coloniality • Homi Bhabha • Social differences are the signs of the emergence of community envisaged as a project - at once a vision and a construction that takes you 'beyond' yourself in order to return, in a spirit of revision and reconstruction, to the political conditions of the present. • 'Beyond' signifies spatial distance, marks progress, promises the future. • The beyond challenges the homogeneity of cultural essentialism.

8. Post-Coloniality • Homi Bhabha • The very concepts of homogeneous national cultures, the consensual or contiguous transmission of historical traditions, or 'organic' ethnic communities - as the grounds of cultural comparativism - are in a profound process of redefinition. • Being in the 'beyond', then, is to inhabit an interviningspace. • But to dwell 'in the beyond' is also, as I have shown, to be part of a revisionary time, a return to the present to redescribe our cultural contemporaneity; to reinscribe our human, historic commonality.

9. Post-Coloniality • Homi Bhabha • In that sense, then, the intervining space 'beyond', becomes a space of intervention in the here and now. A Third Space. • To engage with such invention, and intervention [...] requires a sense of the new that resonates with the hybrid [...] aesthetic....   • The study of world literature might be the study of the way in which cultures recognize themselves through their projections of ‘otherness’.

10. Post-Coloniality • Homi Bhabha • Where, once, the transmissionof national traditions was the major theme of world literature, perhaps we can now suggest that transnational histories of migrants , the colonized, or political refugees these border and frontier conditions - may be the terrains of world literature. • The centre of such a study would neither be the 'sovereignty' of national cultures, nor the universalism of human culture, but the focus on those 'freak social and cultural displacements' that Morrison and Gordimer represent in their 'unhomley' fictions.

11. Post-Coloniality • Homi Bhabha • For the critic must attempt to fully realize, and takeresponsibility for, the unspoken, unrepresented pasts that haunt the historical present. • Finally, the question of identification is never the affirmation of a pregiven identity, never a self-fulfillingprophecy - it is always the production of an image of identity and the transformation of the subject in assuming that image. • How can the human world live End