Life & Background
Bhabha was born in Bombay in 1949 into the city's Parsi community, a minority whose position between larger communities he has described as shaping his interest in cultural in-betweenness. He took his first degree at the University of Bombay and went to Christ Church, Oxford, for his doctorate. He taught at the University of Sussex for over a decade, then at Chicago, and has been at Harvard since 2001, where he directs the Mahindra Humanities Center. His work brings Lacanian psychoanalysis and Derridean reading to the colonial archive, and his prose has been criticised for difficulty, including by writers otherwise sympathetic to his project. He has written and spoken widely on cosmopolitanism, on minority rights, and on contemporary art, and served on the jury for the Turner Prize.
The Location of Culture
A collection of essays that reads colonial discourse for its instabilities rather than its power. Bhabha argues that colonial authority is never as secure as it presents itself: it must be endlessly repeated, and the repetition introduces difference. In Of Mimicry and Man he examines the colonial demand that the colonised become imitation Englishmen — Macaulay's class of interpreters, English in taste and opinion — and shows that the resulting figure is neither English nor native but something the colonial project cannot control, so that mimicry becomes menace. Signs Taken for Wonders reads the arrival of the English book in India, immediately translated, misread, and repurposed. Other essays develop the concepts of hybridity, the third space, ambivalence, and his account of the nation as narration, drawing on Fanon, Lacan, and Derrida throughout.
Bhabha's contribution is to shift postcolonial analysis away from a binary of coloniser and colonised, which Said and Fanon largely preserved, towards the contaminated space between them, where identity is produced through negotiation rather than opposition. The theoretical payoff is a model of agency for the colonised that does not require heroic resistance: the subversion happens in the act of copying. The main objections, from Aijaz Ahmad and Benita Parry among others, are that the emphasis on discursive ambivalence dissolves material and economic power into textuality, and that celebrating hybridity suits a metropolitan academic class more than it describes colonial experience. His difficulty of style is itself part of that argument.
Key Concepts
Why Bhabha Matters
Bhabha completes the trio — Said, Spivak, Bhabha — through which postcolonial theory is normally taught, and supplies most of its working vocabulary for cultural mixture: hybridity, mimicry, the third space, ambivalence, and the interstitial. His terms travel far beyond colonial history into migration and diaspora studies, and are routinely applied to Rushdie and to Indian writing in English. The critique of hybridity from materialist critics is an equally standard examination topic.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Nation and Narration (ed.)1990
- The Location of Culture1994
- Of Mimicry and Man1984
- Signs Taken for Wonders1985
- Cosmopolitanisms (ed.)2000