LOCATION OF

CULTURE
Homi K. Bhabha

JOHN JAY L. MORIDO, MA ELL, LPT

Homi K. Bhabha
Bhabha is the author of numerous works exploring colonial and
postcolonial theory, cultural change and power, and cosmopolitanism,
among other themes.
Some of his works include Nation and Narration and The Location of
Culture, which was reprinted as a Routledge Classic in 2004 and has been
translated into Korean, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Serbian, German, and
Portuguese.
Born in Bombay, Bhabha was educated and taught in British universities
before moving to the University of Chicago and, ultimately, Harvard, where
he teaches in the Department of English and is director of the Humanities
Center. Developing the work of psychoanalytic and post-structuralist
thinkers, Bhabha has been a profoundly original voice in the study of
colonial, postcolonial, and globalized cultures.
LOOKING BACK, MOVING FORWARD:
NOTES ON VERNACULAR
COSMOPOLITANISM
My childhood was filled with accounts of India’s struggle for Independence, its
complicated histories of subcontinental cultures caught in that deadly embrace of
Imperial power and domination that always produces an uncomfortable residue of
enmity and amity.
My everyday life, however, provided quite a different inheritance. It was lived in that
rich cultural mix of languages and lifestyles that most cosmopolitan Indian cities
celebrate and perpetuate in their vernacular existence – ‘Bombay’ Hindustani,
‘Parsi’ Gujarati, mongrel Marathi, all held in a suspension of Welsh missionary-
accented English peppered with an Anglo-Indian patois that was sometimes cast
aside for American slang picked up from the movies or popular music.
LOOKING BACK, MOVING FORWARD:
NOTES ON VERNACULAR
COSMOPOLITANISM

My search for a subject of my own did not emerge directly from the
English authors that I avidly read, nor from the Indian writers with whom
I deeply identified. It was the Indo-Caribbean world of V. S. Naipaul’s
fiction that was to become the diversionary, exilic route that led me to
the historical themes and theoretical questions that were to form the
core of my thinking.
LOOKING BACK, MOVING FORWARD:
NOTES ON VERNACULAR
COSMOPOLITANISM

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 multinationalism 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.
LOOKING BACK, MOVING FORWARD:
NOTES ON VERNACULAR
COSMOPOLITANISM

The concept of vernacular cosmopolitanism emphasizes the

local and culturally specific experiences that contribute to a
broader, global understanding of identity and community.
Bhabha critiques the idea of a singular, universal
cosmopolitanism and instead highlights how local practices,
languages, and histories shape our global interactions.
UNHOMELY LIVES: THE LITERATURE OF
RECOGNITION

To be unhomed is not to be homeless, nor can the ‘unhomely’ be easily

accommodated in that familiar division of social life into private and
public spheres. The unhomely moment creeps up on you stealthily as
your own shadow and suddenly, you find yourself taking the measure of
your dwelling in a state of ‘incredulous terror.’
UNHOMELY LIVES: THE LITERATURE OF
RECOGNITION

The ‘unhomeliness’ inherent in that rite of extra-territorial and cross-

cultural initiation. The recesses of the domestic space become sites for
his tory’s most intricate invasions. In that displacement, the borders
between home and world become confused; and, uncannily, the
private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon
us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting.
THE COMMITMENT TO THEORY

There is a damaging and self-defeating assumption that theory

is necessarily the elite language of the socially and
culturally privileged. It is said that the place of the
academic critic is inevitably within the Eurocentric
archives of an imperialist or neo-colonial West.
THE COMMITMENT TO THEORY

I am equally convinced that, in the language of international

diplomacy, there is a sharp growth in a new Anglo-American
nationalism which increasingly articulates its economic and
military power in political acts that express a neo-imperialist
disregard for the independence and autonomy of peoples and
places in the Third World.
THE COMMITMENT TO THEORY

I want to take my stand on the shifting margins of cultural

displacement – that confounds any profound or ‘authentic’
sense of a ‘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.
THE COMMITMENT TO THEORY

My concern here is with the process of ‘intervening ideologically’, as

Stuart Hall describes the role of ‘imagining’ or representation in the
practice of politics in his response to the British election of 1987.
For Hall, the notion of hegemony implies a politics of identification
of the imaginary. This occupies a discursive space that is not
exclusively delimited by the history of either the right or the left. It
exists somehow in between these political polarities and also
between the familiar divisions of theory and political practice.
THE COMMITMENT TO THEORY

It is significant that the productive capacities of this Third

Space have a colonial or postcolonial provenance. For a
willingness to descend into that alien territory – where I have
led you – may reveal that the theoretical recognition of the
split-space of enunciation may open the way to conceptualizing
an international culture, based not on the exoticism of
multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the
inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity.
THE COMMITMENT TO THEORY

To that end we should remember that it is the ‘inter’ – the

cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the inbetween
space that carries the burden of the meaning of culture. It
makes it possible to begin envisaging national, anti-nationalist
histories of the ‘people’. And by exploring this Third Space, we
may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of
our selves.
THE COMMITMENT TO THEORY

"Commitment to Theory" by Homi K. Bhabha discusses the role of

theoretical frameworks in understanding culture, identity, and
power dynamics, particularly in postcolonial contexts. Bhabha
argues that theory is not merely an abstract endeavor but a vital
tool for addressing the complexities of cultural hybridity and the
historical experiences of marginalized communities. He emphasizes
that a commitment to theory involves engaging critically with the
nuances of cultural displacement, identity formation, and the
impact of colonial histories.
HYBRIDITY 1/3
Hybridity is the sign of the productivity of colonial power, its shifting
forces and fixities; it is the name for the strategic reversal of the
process of domination through disavowal (that is, the production of
discriminatory identities that secure the ‘pure’ and original identity
of authority).
Hybridity is the revaluation of the assumption of colonial
identity through the repetition of discriminatory identity effects.
It displays the necessary deformation and displacement of all
sites of discrimination and domination.
HYBRIDITY 2/3

It unsettles the mimetic or narcissistic demands of colonial

power but reimplicates its identifications in strategies of
subversion that turn the gaze of the discriminated back upon
the eye of power. The colonial hybrid is the articulation of the
ambivalent space where the rite of power is enacted on the site
of desire, making its objects at once disciplinary and
dissemination – or, in my mixed metaphor, negative
transparency.
HYBRIDITY 3/3

Colonial hybridity is not a problem of genealogy or identity

between two different cultures which can then be resolved as
an issue of cultural relativism. Hybridity is a problematic of
colonial representation and individuation that reverses the
effects of the colonialist disavowal so that other ‘denied’ know
ledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the
basis of its authority – its rules of recognition.
AMBIVALENCE

In the world of double inscriptions that we have now entered, in

this space of writing, there can be no such immediacy of a
visualist perspective, no such face-to-face epiphanies in the
mirror of nature. On one level, what confronts you, the reader,
in the incomplete portrait of the postcolonial bourgeois – who
looks uncannily like the metropolitan intellectual – is the
ambivalence of your desire for the Other: ‘You! hypocrite
lecteur! – mon semblable, – mon frère!’
AMBIVALENCE

Look, a Negro . . . Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened . . . I could

no longer laugh, because I already know where there were legends,
stories, history, and above all historicity.... Then, assailed at various
points, the corporeal schema crumbled, its place taken by a racial
epidermal schema.... It was no longer a question of being aware of
my body in the third person but in a triple person.... I was
responsible for my body, for my race, for my ancestors.
(Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks)
AMBIVALENCE

Ambivalence refers to the complex, often contradictory relationships

between colonizers and the colonized, where both groups are caught in
a dynamic of power and resistance. He argues that ambivalence is a
critical aspect of colonial discourse, highlighting how the colonized both
adopt and resist the narratives imposed by colonial powers. This duality
creates a space for negotiation and reinterpretation, allowing for the
emergence of hybrid identities. Ambivalence thus serves as a site of
both domination and potential subversion, reflecting the intricate
interplay of authority and resistance in postcolonial contexts.
MIMICRY

Mimicry reveals something in so far as it is distinct from what

might be called an itself that is behind. The effect of mimicry is
camouflage.... It is not a question of harmonizing with the
background, but against a mottled background, of becoming
mottled – exactly like the technique of camouflage practised in
human warfare.
(Jacques Lacan, ‘The line and light’, Of the Gaze.)
MIMICRY

If I may adapt Samuel Weber’s formulation of the marginalizing

vision of castration, then colonial mimicry is the desire for a
reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that
is almost the same, but not quite. Which is to say, that the
discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in
order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its
slippage, its excess, its difference.
MIMICRY

Mimicry conceals no presence or identity behind its mask: it is

not what Césaire describes as ‘colonization thingification’
behind which there stands the essence of the présence
Africaine. The menace of mimicry is its double vision which in
disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts
its authority.
MIMICRY

Mimicry is a complex strategy used in colonial contexts where the

colonized imitate the culture and practices of the colonizers, but
with an inherent difference that disrupts the original authority. It
involves adopting elements of the colonizer's identity while
simultaneously revealing the ambivalence and contradictions of
colonial power. This mimicry is not merely imitation; it produces a
"slippage" that challenges and destabilizes the colonizer's
dominance, exposing the complexities of identity and power
relations in postcolonial contexts.
THIRD SPACE

The space of ‘thirdness’ in postmodern politics opens up an

area of ‘interfection’ (to use Jameson’s term) where the
newness of cultural practices and historical narratives are
registered in ‘generic discordance’, ‘unexpected juxtaposition’,
‘the semi automization of reality’, ‘postmodern schizo-
fragmentation as opposed to modern or modernist anxieties or
hysterias’
THIRD SPACE

The non synchronous temporality of global and national

cultures opens up a cultural space – a third space – where the
negotiation of incommensurable differences creates a tension
peculiar to borderline existences.
THIRD SPACE

The "third space" according to Homi K. Bhabha refers to a

conceptual space that emerges from the interactions and
negotiations between different cultural identities, particularly in
postcolonial contexts. It is a site of hybridity where new meanings
and identities can be formed, transcending binary oppositions like
colonizer/colonized. This space allows for the redefinition of
cultural encounters and offers opportunities for resistance and
transformation, emphasizing that identity is not fixed but fluid and
continuously shaped by these interactions.
Reference/s

Bhabha, H. (1994). The Location of Culture. Routledge.