Fetishism and Hybridity in Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture
Signs and Wonders
Fetishism and Hybridity in Homi Bhabha’s
The Location of Culture
S h a i G i n s b u r g
Bhabha sets hybridity as a site of interruption of the fetishistic logic and fixation that structure European colonial discourse. 229
I shall suggest that as he celebrates colonial desire and pleasure through hybridity, he quite explicitly dismisses reading, and as he shies away from reading the colonial book, he fetishizes that book.229
Bhabha similarly underscores the ways colonialist logic binds together the knowledge of non-European territories and the colonization of these territories.320
As it assumes a clear-cut distribution of power between the powerful—colonialists—and the powerless—the colonized—such a system does not merely fail to account for the terrifying images of the colonized that return to haunt the colonial project. It also fixes the colonized as a passive object of colonial discourse, unable to produce local resistance to colonialism, and completely dependent on those located at the centers of colonial power for the development of such a resistance.231
Me: the idea of the unknown is fetishised.
Through the logic of the fetish, Bhabha seeks to expose the ambivalences and discontinuities of colonial discourse, the locations in which control over the discourse slips away from the colonizer, opening up gaps and fissures in which resistance to colonial power can be produced.232
“Colonial discourse,” he continues, “produces the colonized as a social reality which is at once an ‘other’ and yet entirely knowable and visible” (70–71). In its anxious desire to fix the colonized under its surveillance, under its gaze, this discourse “moves between the recognition of cultural and racial diff erence and its disavowal, by affixing the unfamiliar to something established, in a form that is repetitious and vacillates between delight and fear” (73). As a fetishistic discourse of knowledge, colonial discourse vacillates between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the visible and the obscure, the knowable and the unknowable. It simultaneously acknowledges and denies the failure to fix the colonized as a stable object of knowledge of European colonial categories; it likewise acknowledges and denies that the encounter between the colonized and these categories undermines their claim for universality. Th e very obsession of the colonial power/knowledge structure with originary, fixed, unchanging identities of colonizers as well as the colonized, its manifest desire to fix the opposition between them, opens up colonial discourse to contradictions and ambivalence, to the presence of the diff erent that characterizes the colonial encounter. 232-233
Bhabha thus activates the double cognizance of the fetish against fetishistic fixation, to liberate the colonial subject from the mastery of the skin/culture signifier (1994, 75), or as he writes elsewhere in his book, to promote “cultural diff erence and incommensurability,” as well as “possibilities for other ‘times’ of cultural meaning . . . and other narrative spaces” (177–78). 233
It is telling, once again, that Bhabha turns to the words of a missionary to characterize reading, fully locating it within the discourse of the colonizer, as a marker of the attempt to undermine local social structures to facilitate their incorporation into the colonial order. Yet, as a close reading of the other two instances of the colonial primal scene shows, reading also unsettles the colonial order itself and points at its limits. 235
Bhabha is able to fixate writing and its eff ects, to probe its function within colonial strategies, to probe the modes in which it eff ects colonial power hierarchies by asserting colonial authority alongside colonial subjects.241
As European fetishism penetrates non-European territories, it produces hybridity. Whereas colonial fetishism figures authority through fantasies of originary, fixed identities, hybridity leads to the revaluation of these fetishist patterns of identification through unauthorized, repeated performances of colonial representations by the colonized. Hybridity, Bhabha maintains, does not mediate or resolve the friction between diff erent terms of identity or cultures.6 On the contrary, it reproduces colonial representations of diff erences and discriminations—between European and non-European culture, between the metropolis and its colonies, between colonizer and colonized, between self and other—diff erences that lie at the core of the attempt to establish fixed and stable colonial identities. 242
Th e repetition of this “discriminatory identity eff ect” (Bhabha 1994, 112) produces excess that unsettles colonial authority; it undermines the certainty, immediacy, and uniqueness upon which that authority relies and exposes its ambivalence, indeterminacy, and uncertainty. Displacing, distorting, dislocating, and repeating the colonial “distribution and arrangement of spaces, positions, knowledges,” the hybrid reveals the colonial space as one of unchecked procreation that reverses colonial disavowals and muddies colonial transparency. Indeed, it inverts the colonial gaze: whereas the gaze of colonial authority is directed from the knowing colonizer to the colonized subject, through hybridity the gaze of the colonized is directed back at the colonizer and on the discursive devices of colonial authority, forcing a “revaluation of the assumption of colonial identity” (112). 242-243
In hybridity, Bhabha seeks to address the question of intervention that has been haunting other critics. Resistance to the colonial power structures is now located within the ambivalence of colonial authority itself as a systemic eff ect of the colonial régime of truth. 243
For our purposes, it is important to note that Bhabha clearly distinguishes here between fetishism and hybridity. Th e mark of diff erence is the temporality of the two. Fetishist fixation takes place “prior to the perception of diff erence” (1994, 115, italics in the original). Hybridity, on the other hand, takes place after colonial intervention, that is, after an authoritative system of distinctions and diff erences has been installed in the non-European territory.243
hybridity is a historical product of European colonialism. 243
Bhabha’s repeated assertion that hybridity marks the “displacement from symbol to sign” (1994, 114) indicates that what underlies hybridity is, in eff ect, Saussure’s linguistics. 244
Bhabha puts into relief this compulsive repetition—the uncanny return of the repressed/oppressed—and celebrates it at the center of hybridity as the disruption of colonial transparency and, with it, of colonial authority. Simultaneously, the very same repetition also marks the return of custom, of habit, and the establishment of common language/law as an authoritative system of address, that is, as Language/Law. 247
Ginsburg, Shai. “Signs and Wonders: Fetishism and hybridity in Homi Bhabha’s ‘The Location of Culture’.” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol.9, no.3, 2010, pp 229-250.
