Introduction to Post-Coloniality

• Homi Bhabha: The Location of Culture, 1994

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.

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.

Post-Coloniality

Homi Bhabha

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.

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.

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 terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood -singular or communal- that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself.

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.

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.

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 intervining space.

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.

Post-Coloniality

Homi Bhabha

In that sense, then, the intervining space 'beyond', becomes a space of intervention in the here and now.

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’.

Post-Coloniality

Homi Bhabha

Where, once, the transmission of 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.

Post-Coloniality

Homi Bhabha

For the critic must attempt to fully realize, and take responsibility 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-fulfilling prophecy - 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

Introduction to Post-Coloniality

• Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak

Post-Coloniality

Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak

• We post-colonial intellectuals are told that we are ‘too’ Western, and what goes completely unnoticed is that our turn to the West is in response to a command, whereas the other is to an extent a desire marking the place of the management of a crisis.

• I could easily construct, then, a sort of 'pure East' as a 'pure universal' or as a 'pure institution' so that I could then define myself as the Easterner, as the marginal or as specific, or as the para-institutional.

Post-Coloniality

Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak

• That's one of my projects of unlearning my privilege, because in fact what is being done is that this kind of psychoanalytic discourse is being imposed upon the woman elsewhere.

• Also it seems to me what's being imposed on the woman elsewhere upon the other side of her more privileged ethnic sisters is a sort of glorification of sexual division of labour in other kinds of patriarchal/patrilinean/patrilocal societies, in opposition to the kind of space we inhabit.

Post-Coloniality

Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak

• 'India', for people like me, is not really a place with which they can form a national identity because it has always been an artificial construct.

If I can't keep my hands theoretically clean anyway, why not take the centre when I'm being asked to be marginal? I'm never defined as a marginal in India, I can assure you.

Post-Coloniality

Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak

• What is an indigenous theory?

• I cannot understand what indigenous theory there might be that can ignore the reality of nineteenth-century history.

• To construct indigenous theories one must ignore the last few centuries of historical involvement. I would rather use what history has written for me.

Post-Coloniality

Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak

• I am not interested in defending the post-colonial intellectual's dependence on Western models: my work lies in making clear my disciplinary predicament.

• My position is generally a reactive one. I am viewed by the Marxists as too codic, by feminists as too male-identified, by indigenous theorists as too committed to Western theory.

Post-Coloniality

Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak

• I am uneasily pleased about this. One's vigilance is sharpened by the way one is perceived, but it does not involve defending oneself.

• As far as I can understand, in order to intervene one must negotiate. If there is anything I have learnt in and through the last 23 years of teaching, it is that the more vulnerable your position, the more you have to negotiate.

Post-Coloniality

Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak

• What we are asking for is that the hegemonic discourses, the holders of hegemonic discourse should de-hegemonize their position and themselves learn how to occupy the subject position of the other rather than simply say, "O.K., sorry, we are just very good white people, therefore we do not speak for the blacks."

• That is what was reflected when I refused marginalization when there were questions form the floor about my practice and so on.

Post-Coloniality

Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak

•One of the things I said was that one of my projects is not to allow myself to occupy the place of the marginal that you would like to see me in, because then that allows you to feel that you have an other to speak to.