The hybrid age

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH

Homi K Bhabha

THE LOCATION OF CULTURE 285pp Routledge £35 (paperback £11

0415 01635 5

t is common enough in leftish circles to complain

plain that the sort of literary and cultural

.theory that Homi Bhabha practises and

preaches is impenetrable except to those who

understand "the elite language of the socially and culturally privileged and to imply that

somehow this is at best a sign of insincerity and

at worst a guarantee of irrelevance This line of

argument has always struck me as somewhat muddled the ideas that are needed to change the

situation of the oppressed do not generally have

to be addressed to them in order to do their

work simplifying slogans are more likely to

reflect condescension than respect But in such

an atmosphere of muddle someone who produces

duces as Homi Bhabha has done a formidably difficult theoretical text the politics of which are

leftist can expect to find that some of his potential

tial allies will complain that he has not done what

is politically required to make his work accessible

ible It is then natural that Bhabha begins his

new collection with an essay which aims to challenge

lenge the "damaging and self-defeating assumption

tion that the "Olympian realms of what is mistakenly

takenly labelled ’pure theory’

are ... eternally

insulated from the historical exigencies and

tragedies of the wretched of the earth

Like most of the essays in 77ie Location o

fure "The Commitment to Theory is a revision

(with some quite significant reformulations of a

previously published essay - in this case from

Qu«s o 77iiVd Wor Cinema a widely discussed

cussed collection produced by the British Film

Institute in 1989 This first essay like several of

the others has had a good deal of influence in its

original form on the expanding world of scholars

in post-colonial and cultural studies And those

who have already decided with Edward Said that Bhabha is "a reader of enormous subtlety and wit a theorist of uncommon power or with

Toni Morrison that he is "one of the small group

occupying the front ranks of literary and cultural

theoretical thought will no doubt be grateful

to have these pieces gathered in from the scattering

ing of their separate publications

But for most of those who do not yet know

Bhabha’s work an initial browse in 7 Location

o is likely to produce only puzzlement at

the exuberant encomiums of Said and Morrison which adorn its cover Cavea /ector whatever

Said means by "wit there are few laughs and

only the occasional wry smile to be had This is a

sober not to say a melancholy book and pretty

hard going

Drawing like Stuart Hall and Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak on a whole range of French

theorists from Lacan and Fanon to Foucault and

Derrida Bhabha explores not only canonically literary texts

- from Joseph Conrad to Derek

Walcott - but also an extremely wide range of

less familiar narratives from rumours of the circulation

culation of chapatis "across the rural heartlands

of the Indian Mutiny to the Black Audio and

Film Collective’s film A Songs His

central theme - that of post-colonial theory and

criticism - is an exploration of the ways in which

the experience of Empire and the end of Empire

have shaped and been shaped by culture

It is risky trying to paraphrase summarize or

simplify an author as plainly preoccupied with

precision and complexity as Bhabha but it

should be an uncontroversial claim that he has

added to the vocabulary of the field a conception

of nyftrid’iO’ that has become part of the standard

critical repertory The term invokes a complex !

system of ideas Talk of hybridity suggests that

older oppositions - "binarisms in the jargon -

need to be replaced by a more nuanced view that

recognizes the mutual constitution of inside and

outside self and other As Bhabha puts it in a

characteristic formulation

It is the trope of our times to locate the question

of culture in the realm of the foevon .... The

"beyond is neither a new horizon nor a leaving

behind of the past . . . the boundary becomes the

place from which somfrt feegi /w presenc

in a movement not dissimilar to the ambulant

ambivalent articulation of the beyond that I have

drawn out ....

This sort of abstract formulation is easier to

appreciate once one sees the idea worked out

through examples For instance Bhabha tells us

that the nation is "mrermj marked by the discourses

courses of minorities the heterogeneous histories

ries of contending peoples antagonistic authorities

ties and tense locations of cultural difference or

that we should acknowledge "the historical connectedness

nectedness between the subject and object of critique

tique so that there can be no simplistic essentialist

ist opposition between ideological miscognition

and revolutionary truth In each case here he is

quite right the notion of the homogeneous nation-state really is a myth and political debate

does characteristically reshape the projects of

both parties

hat Bhabha would regard these paraphrases

phrases as reductive I have no doubt But

. it is through simplifying translations such

as these that his ideas - like all theoretical ideas -

have gained currency And it is a measure of the

helpfulness of "hybridity that it allows one to

appreciate these particular insights even though

the concept is so to speak more than the sum of

such instances Homi Bhabha’s substantial and

freely acknowledged debt to Derrida and de

Man is most obvious in the way that like deconstruction

struction in literary studies his talk of hybridity

involves not so much a thesis as a strategy (This

insight about deconstruction is of course Barbara

bara Johnson’s In approaching culture and politics

tics in a world whose peoples are so unequally joined together Bhahba asks us to recognize the

internal complexity the inhomogeneity of all

identities The literal hybridity of a Morrison or a

Rushdie - authors whom he discusses and

admires - provides a model for the figurative

hybridity of all culture in an age of globalization

Bhabha quotes approvingly more than once

(from 7 5afanic Verses a remark of Rushdie’s

stammering S S Sisodia "The trouble with the

Engenglish is that their hiss hiss history happened

overseas so they don’t know what it means The

post-colonial is already within the metropolis

(even if the metropolitan does not know it

When Bhabha insists on speaking of cultural difference rather than cultural diversity he is

employing the same strategy Where some see a

jumble of interacting cultural monads - the contest

test of a diversity of stable identities - Homi

Bhabha sees interacting "positionalities constantly

stantly reshaped always in flux In place of the

opposition of Self and Other the strategy of

hybridity proposes once more that the Other is

already "within the Self

At one point in the particularly helpful essay

on "The Postcolonial and the Postmodern

Bhabha writes that "a range of contemporary critical theories suggest that it is from those who

have suffered the sentence of history - subjugation

tion domination diaspora displacement - that

we learn our most enduring lessons for living and

thinking For those who have the patience for

writing that makes no compromise with the

reader and who care to understand these

"lessons for living and thinking 77ie /.oca r

Cw will repay the sustained attention it

requires