The Location of Culture (1994)

[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. The social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation. The “right” to signify from the periphery of authorised power and privilege does not depend on the persistence of tradition; it is resourced by the power of tradition to be reinscribed through the conditions and contradictoriness that attend upon the lives of those who are ‘in the minority.’ The recognition that tradition bestows is a partial form of identification. In restaging the past it introduces other, incommensurable cultural temporalities into the invention of tradition.’ (The Location of Culture, New York: Routledge, 1994, p.2.)

‘Universalism does not merely end with a view of immanent “spiritual” meaning produced in the text. It also interpellates, for its reading, a subject positioned at the point where conflict and difference resolves and all ideology ends. It is not that the Transcendental subject cannot see historical conflict or colonial difference as mimetic structures or themes in the text. What it cannot conceive, is how it is itself structured ideologically and discursively in relation to those processes of signification which do not then allow for the possibility of whole or universal meanings.’ (‘[Of mimicry and man: the ambivalence of colonial discourse’, in October 28, Spring, 1984; rep. as The Location of Culture, Chap. 4.)

‘[T]he interstitial passage [liminality] between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy.’ (The Location of Culture, 1994, p.4.)

‘The problem is not simply the “selfhood of the nation as opposed to the otherness of other nations. We are confronted with the nation split within itself, articulating the heterogeneity of its population.’ (Ibid.; q.p.)

‘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 … may open the way to conceptualising 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 Location of Culture, 1994).

‘Even though [nationalism] as an ideology ... came out of the imperialist countries, these countries were not able to formulate their own national aspirations until the age of exploration. The markets made possible by European imperial penetration motivated the construction of the nation-state at home. European nationalism was motivated by what Europe was doing in its far-flung dominions. The “national idea”, in other words, flourished in the soil of foreign conquest.’ (Nation and Narration, 1990, p.59.)

‘The objective of colonial discourse is to construe the colonised as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin … colonial discourse produces the colonised as a fixed reality which is at once an “other” and yet entirely knowable and visible.’ (‘The Other Question’, in Padmini Mongia, Contemporary Postcolonial Theory, Arnold 1996, p.41.)

‘The visibility of the racial/colonial other is at once a point of identity and at the same time a problem for the attempted closure within discourse. For the recognition of difference as “imaginary” points to identity and origin [and] is disrupted by the representation of splitting in the discourse.’ (Ibid. p.50.)

‘Stereotyping is not the setting up of a false image which becomes the scapegoat of discriminatory practices. It is a much more ambivalent text of projection and introjections, metaphoric and metonymic strategies, displacement, overdetermination … It is the scenario of colonial fantasy which, in staging the ambivalence of desire, articulates the demand of the Negro which the Negro disrupts.’ (Ibid. p.41.)

‘My reading of colonial discourse suggests that the point of intervention should shift from the identification of images as positive or negative, to an understanding of the process of subjectification made possible (and plausible) through stereotypical discourse. To judge the stereotyped image on the basis of a prior political normativity is to dismiss it, not to displace it, which is only possibly by engaging with its effectivity; with the repertoire of positions of power and resistance, domination and dependence that constructs the colonial subject (both coloniser and colonised).’ (Ibid., pp.37-38.)

The Location of Culture (1994) argues that colonial discourse is compelled to be ambivalent because it never really wants colonial subjects to be exact replicas of the colonisers [as] this would be too threatening. Hence: Ambivalence and mimicry.

Bhabha shows that both colonising and colonised subjects are implicated in the ambivalence of colonial discourse. The concept is related to hybridity because, just as ambivalence ‘decentres’ authority from its position of power, so that authority may also become hybridised when placed in a colonial context in which it finds itself dealing with, and often inflected by, other cultures.

Bhabha emphasises that the ‘difference’ ’[...] is clearly connected with the radical ambivalence that he argues is implicit in all colonial discourse. He insists that this same ambivalence is implicit in the act of cultural interpretation itself since, as he puts it, the production of meaning in the relations of two systems requires a “Third Space”. This space is something like the idea of deferral in post-structuralism. While Saussure suggested that signs acquire meaning through their difference from other signs (and thus a culture may be identified by its difference from other cultures), Derrida suggested that “difference” is also ‘deferred’, a duality he defined in the new term “différance”. The “Third Space” can be compared to this space of deferral and possibility (thus a culture’s difference is never simply and static but ambivalent, changing, and always open to further possible interpretations). In short, this is the space of hybridity itself, the space in which cultural meanings and identities always contain the traces of other meanings and identities. Therefore, Bhabha argues, ‘claims to inherent originality or purity of cultures are untenable, even before we resort to empirical historical instances that demonstrate their hybridity.’ (Bhabha, 1994)