Homi K. Bhabha - interrogating identity

Author. Title of Book. Edition, Publisher, year of publication.

Homi K. Bhabha. Location of Culture. Routkedge, 1994

Chapter: interrogating identity

• “colonial governance: the visibility of cultural mummification in the colonizer’s avowed ambitionto civilise or modernisethe native that results in ‘archaic inert institutions [that function] under the oppressor’s supervision like a caricature of formerly fertile institutions.” (43)

• “the discourse of identity: the philosophical tradition of identity as the process of self-reflection in the mirror of (human) nature; and the anthropological view of the difference of human identity as located in the division of Nature/culture.” (46)

• “What is so graphically enacted in the moment of colonial identification is the splitting of the subject in its historical place of utterance” (46)

• “What is interrogated is not simply the image of a person, but the discursive and disciplinary place from which questions of identity are strategically and institutionally posed. Through the process of this poem ‘you’ are continually positioned in the space between a range of contradictory places that coexist.” (47-48)

• “Shifting the frame of identity from the field of vision to the space of writing interrogates the third dimension that gives profundity to the representations of Self and Other – that depth of perspective that cineastes call the forth wall” (48)

• Mentions semiotics (Barthes) and how it affects the visual. “the linguistic sign in its function” (48). Signifier and signified. This is what we see and what we assume from it. “Barthe’s description of the sign-as-symbol is conveniently analogous to the language we use to designate identity.” (49)

• “language of identity” (48)

• “This image of human identity and, indeed, human identity as – both familiar frames or mirrors of selfhood that speak from deep within Western culture – are inscribed in the sign of resemblance.” (49)

• “to fix cultural difference in a containable object. The desire for the other is doubled by the desire in language, which between Self and Other so that both positions are partial; neither is sufficient unto itself.” (50)

• “the doubling of identity: the difference between personal identity as an intimidation of reality, or an intuition of being, and the psychoanalytic problem of identification” (51)

• Above: what/who you think you are compared to what outsiders think of you when the see you without any context.

• “Remembering is never a quiet act of introspection or retrospection. It is painful re-membering, a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present.” (63)talking about the history of colonialism.