The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha
Rutherford, Jonathan. “The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha.” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford, Lawrence and Wishart, 1990, pp. 207-221
“Homi Bhabha lectures in English and literary Theory at Sussex University. His writing on colonialism, race, identity and difference have been an important influence on debates in cultural politics.” (207)
“In fact the sign of the ‘cultured’ or the ‘civilised’ attitude is the ability to appreciate cultures in a kind of as though one should be able to collect and appropriate them.” (208)
“Western connoisseurship is the capacity to understand and locate cultures in a universal time-frame that acknowledges their various historical and social contexts only eventually to transcend them and render them transparent.” (208)
“A transparent norm is constituted, a norm given by the host society or dominant culture, which says that ‘these other cultures are fine, but we must be able to locate them within our own grid.’ This is what I mean by a of cultural diversity and a of cultural difference.” (208)
“in societies where multiculturalism is encouraged racism is still rampant in various forms.” (208)
“it is actually very difficult, even impossible and counterproductive, to try and fit together different forms of culture and to pretend that they can easily coexist.” (209)
“culture is a signifying or symbolic activity” (210)
“Meaning is constructed across the bar of difference and separation between the signifier and the signified. So it follows that no culture is full unto itself.” (210)
“because of its own symbol-forming activity, its own interpellation in the process of representation, language, signification and meaning-making, always underscores the claim to an originnary, holistic, organic identity.” (210)
“the notion of hybridity comes from the two prior discriptions I’ve made of the genealogy of difference and the idea of translation, because if, as I was saying, the act of cultural translation (both as representation and as reproduction) denies the essentialism of a prior given original or originary culture, then we see that al forms of culture are continually in a process of hybridity.” (211)
“hybridity to me is the ‘third space’ which enables other positions to emerge.” (211)
JR: “would you call this ‘third space’ an identity as such?”
HB: “No, not so much identity as identification.” (211)
“identification is a process of identifying with and through another object, an object of otherness, at which point the agency of identification – the subject – is itself always ambivalent, because of the intervention of that otherness.” (211)
“But the importance of hybridity is that it bears the traces of those feelings and practices which inform it” (211)
“The process of cultural hybridity gives rise to something different, something new and unrecognisable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation.” (211)
“the notion of hybridity… is about the fact that in any particular political struggle, new sites are always being opened up” (216)
“the founding moment of modernity was the moment of colonialism” (218)
