Homi K. Bhabha The postcolonial and the postmodern: The question of agency
Homi K. Bhabha. Location of Culture. Routkedge, 1994
Chapter: The postcolonial and the postmodern: The question of agency
“Postcolonial perspectives emerge from the colonial testimony of Third World countries and the discourses of ‘minorities’” (171)
“They intervene in those ideological discourses of modernity that attempt to give a hegemonic ‘normality’” (171)
“To reconstitute the discourse of cultural difference demands not simply a change of cultural contents and symbols; a replacement within the same time-frame of representation is never adequate. It requires a radical revision of the social temporality in which emergent histories may be written, the rearticulation of the ‘sign’ in which cultural identities may be inscribed.” (171)
“It forces us to confront the concept of culture outside or beyond the canonization of the ‘idea’ of aesthetics, to engage with culture as an uneven, incomplete production of meaning and value, often composed of incommensurable demands and practices, produced in the act of social survival.” (172)
Talking about culture as both Transnational and Translational (172):
Transnational: physical movement, places, displacement
Translational: how culture signifies, histories
“cultural differences ‘calls us into question fully as much as it acknowledges the Other… neither reduc[ing] the Third World to some homogeneous Other of the West, nor… vacuously celebrat[ing] the astonishing pluralism of human cultures’” (173)
“Culture becomes as much an uncomfortable, disturbing practice of survival and supplementary” (175)
“It is from such narrative positions that the postcolonial prerogative seeks to affirm and extend a new collaborative dimension, both within the margins of the nation-space and across boundaries between nations and peoples.” (175)
“Increasingly, the issue of cultural difference emerges at points of social crises, and the questions of identity that it raises are agonistic; identity is claimed either from a position of marginality or in an attempt at gaining the centre” (177)
“If culture as epistemology focuses on function and intention, then culture as enunciation focuses on signification and institutionalization; if the epistemological tends towards a of its empirical referent or object, the enunciative attempts repeatedly to reinscribe and relocate the political claim to cultural priority and hierarchy (high/low, ours/theirs) in the social institution of the signifying activity.” (177)
“Hybrid states of cultural negotiation” (178)
“the language metaphor opens up a space where a theoretical disclosure is used to move beyond a theory. A form of cultural experience and identity is envisaged.” (179)
“My contention, elaborated in my writings on postcolonial discourse in terms of mimicry, hybridity, sly civility, is that this luminal movement of identification – eluding resemblance – produces a subversive strategy of subaltern agency that negotiates its own authority through a process of iterative ‘unpicking’ and incommensurable, insurgent relinking.” (184-185)
“The individuation of the agent occurs in a moment of displacement.” (185)
“The of agency bears no mimetic immediacy or adequacy of representation. It can only be signified outside the sentence in that sporadic, ambivalent temporality that inhabits the notorious unreliability of ancient oracles who ‘neither reveal nor hide in words but give manifest signs.’” (189)
“The process of reinscription and negotiation – the insertion or intervention of something that takes on new meaning – happens in the temporal break in-between the sign, deprived of subjectivity, in the realm of the intersubjective.” (191)
“When the sign ceases the synchronous flow of the symbol, it also seizes the power to elaborate – through the time lag – new and hybrid agencies and articulations. This is the moment for revisions.” (191-192)
“The synchronicity in the social ordering of symbols is challenged within its own terms, but the grounds of engagement have been displaced in a supplementary movement that exceeds those terms. This is the historical movement of hybridity as camouflage, as a contesting, antagonistic agency functioning in the time lag of sign/symbol, which is a space in-between the rules of engagement.” (193)
