Here an attempt has been made to explore and define the notions about cultural identity following the turn of events in the 19th century Europe.
The main points factored here are:
Bhabha’s goal in this essay is to “rethink our perspective on the identity of culture” in the Post-colonial world. He begins by drawing a distinction between (what some such as Kamau Brathwaite [in Contradictory Omens] have termed) “cultural diversity” and what he terms “cultural difference” in an allusion to the term ‘différence/différance’ so central to Post-Structuralist thinking. The following chart shows what Bhabha perceives to be the play of difference (rather than pure distinction) between these two terms:
The fundamental call that Bhabha makes is that the identity formation should be as wide as possible for Postcolonial nations. Enunciation of this identity should outstrip what former imperialistic nations still perceive "the other" to be. Cultural diversity is called here in to exist in its purest and freest form and it is here where the "commitment to theory" must be upheld in the modern setting.
.....
______________________________________________________________________
The main points factored here are:
- To rethink on the "perspective of identity of our culture" in the post colonial world.
- Begin by differentiating 'cultural diversity' and 'cultural identity'
- Culture- as a strategy for survival in transnational and transrational.
Bhabha’s goal in this essay is to “rethink our perspective on the identity of culture” in the Post-colonial world. He begins by drawing a distinction between (what some such as Kamau Brathwaite [in Contradictory Omens] have termed) “cultural diversity” and what he terms “cultural difference” in an allusion to the term ‘différence/différance’ so central to Post-Structuralist thinking. The following chart shows what Bhabha perceives to be the play of difference (rather than pure distinction) between these two terms:
Cultural
Diversity
|
Cultural
Difference
|
An object of empirical knowledge
|
The process of enunciation of culture as knowledgeable, authoritative,
adequate to the construction of the systems of cultural identification.
|
A category of comparative ethics, aesthetics, or ethnology
|
A process of signification through which statements “of” or “on”
culture differentiate.
|
The recognition of pre-given cultural ‘contents' and customs, held in
a time frame of relativism, it gives rise to anodyne liberal notions of
multiculturalism, cultural exchange, or the culture of humanity.
|
The problem of the culture emerges only at the significatory boundaries
of culture, where meanings and values are (mis)read or signs misappropriated.
|
Cultural diversity is also the representation of a radical rhetoric
of the separation of totalized cultures that live unsullied by the
intertextuality of their historical locations, safe in the Utopianism of a
mythic memory of a unique collective identity
|
Bhabha’s point in pointing out the difference between these
two terms is to stress the need to rethink the traditional notions of cultural
identity which have informed the process of decolonisation (what Bhabha alludes
to as an antagonistic view of “culture-as-political-struggle”) and the
concomitant growth of nationalism.
Bhabha's basic theory is to suggest a need to "rethink cultural identity." For Bhabha, the Postcolonial setting is one in which there is still an oppositional relationship between previously "dominant cultures" and "the other." The imperialism might be understated and surreptitious, but it is still there. Bhabha's theory is to demand a reconfiguration of this relationship. There needs to be a zone in which the cultural relationship between former colonizers and nations that were formerly colonized transcends the historical antagonism between them. "The Other" should not be perceived as a force to be submissive. It should not be one in which "First World capital" translates into "Third world labor."
Bhabha's basic theory is to suggest a need to "rethink cultural identity." For Bhabha, the Postcolonial setting is one in which there is still an oppositional relationship between previously "dominant cultures" and "the other." The imperialism might be understated and surreptitious, but it is still there. Bhabha's theory is to demand a reconfiguration of this relationship. There needs to be a zone in which the cultural relationship between former colonizers and nations that were formerly colonized transcends the historical antagonism between them. "The Other" should not be perceived as a force to be submissive. It should not be one in which "First World capital" translates into "Third world labor."
The fundamental call that Bhabha makes is that the identity formation should be as wide as possible for Postcolonial nations. Enunciation of this identity should outstrip what former imperialistic nations still perceive "the other" to be. Cultural diversity is called here in to exist in its purest and freest form and it is here where the "commitment to theory" must be upheld in the modern setting.
.....
______________________________________________________________________
Bhabha's basic theory
is to suggest a need to "rethink cultural identity." For Bhabha, the Postcolonial setting is one
in which there is still an oppositional relationship between previously
"dominant cultures" and "the other." The imperialism might be understated and
surreptitious, but it is still there.
Bhabha's theory is to demand a reconfiguration of this
relationship. There needs to be a zone
in which the cultural relationship between former colonizers and nations that
were formerly colonized transcends the historical antagonism between them. "The Other" should not be perceived
as a force to be submissive. It should
not be one in which "First World capital" translates into "Third
world labor."
The fundamental call
that Bhabha makes is that the identity formation should be as wide as possible
for Postcolonial nations. Enunciation of
this identity should outstrip what former imperialistic nations still perceive
"the other" to be. Cultural
diversity is called here in to exist in its purest and freest form and it is
here where the "commitment to theory" must be upheld in the modern
setting.
One theme in Bhabha's
writing is how the relationship between nations needs to be reconfigured to
ensure that there is a "commitment to theory." In this case, the theory that is being
examined is whether that we have escaped the colonial or imperialist condition
in which nations relate to one another.
This theme takes on different forms, but drives the article. Bhabha's notion of exploring the relationship
in which the theory of internationalism is merely used to prop up "First
World capital to Third World labor" is a part of this exploration.
For Bhabha, the
commitment to theory has become a new way to pursue the ends of colonial
control. "The Other" has
become relegated to a condition in which control is being advocated through new
and surreptitious means. Bhabha's
example of the film festival in which the entry from India depicts the most
hopeless and destitute helps to enhance the condition in which "First
world" nations feel little in way of reticence to ensure that messages are
communicated that suggest that national identities should be formed in
accordance with "Western" ideals.
The relationship between both "the other" and those who
benefit from this configuration is a significant theme in his work.
In "The Commitment
to Theory," an essay collected in The Location of Culture (1994), Homi K.
Bhabha foregrounds the unfortunate and perhaps false opposition of theory and
politics that some critics have framed in order to question the elitism and
Eurocentrism of prevailing postcolonial debates:
There is a damaging and self-defeating
assumption that theory is necessarily the elite language of the socially and
culturally privileged. It is said that the place of the academic critic is
inevitably within the Eurocentric archives of an imperialist or neo-colonial
West.
What's ironic is that
Bhabha himself--perhaps more than any other leading postcolonial theorist--has
throughout his career been susceptible to charges of elitism, Eurocentrism,
bourgeois academic privilege, and an indebtedness to the principles of European
poststructuralism that many of his harshest critics portray as his unknowing
replication of "neo-imperial" or "neo-colonial" modes of
discursive dominance over the colonized Third World. By means of a complicated
repertoire of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Postmodern notions of mimicry and
performance, and Derridian deconstruction, Bhabha has encouraged a rigorous rethinking
of nationalism, representation, and resistance that above all stresses the
"ambivalence" or "hybridity" that characterizes the site of
colonial contestation--a "liminal" space in which cultural
differences articulate and, as Bhabha argues, actually produce imagined
"constructions" of cultural and national identity.
Whereas Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak uses deconstruction as a critical tool to rethink the
oversimplified binary opposition of "colonizer" and
"colonized" and to question the methodological assumptions of
postcolonial theorists (herself included), Homi K. Bhabha uses deconstruction
to dismantle the false opposition of "theory" and "political
practice"--a distinction reminiscent in many ways of Marx's distinction
between superstructure and base. Bhabha advocates a model of liminality that
perhaps dramatizes the interstitial space between theory and practice--a
liminal space that does not separate but rather mediates their mutual exchange
and relative meanings. Bhabha argues (perhaps in defense of himself) that
European theoretical frameworks are not necessarily intellectual constructs
that ignore the political situation of the dispossessed Third World. A critic
cannot choose between "politics" and "theory" because the
two are mutually reciprocal; "theory," an instrument of ideology,
narrates and in so doing creates the "political" circumstance of
Third World oppression. In other words, much as he treats the the
"liminal" space between national constituencies, Bhabha is interested
in juxtaposing "politics" and "theory" in order to find
where they overlap and how the tension between them in turn produces their
hybridity:
The pact of interpretation is never simply
an act of communication between the I and the You designated in the statement.
The production of meaning requires that these two places be mobilized in the
passage through a Third Space, which represents both the general conditions of
language and the specific implication of the utterance in a performative and
institutional strategy of which it cannot 'in itself' be conscious. (The
Location of Culture36)
According to Bhabha,
the "third space"--another way of framing the liminal--is an
ambivalent, hybrid space that is written into existence. In other words, what
mediates between theory and politics is writing--not merely theoretical
discourse but cultural exercises such as novels, cinema, music. As Jacques
Derrida suggests in Writing and Differance, writing does not passively record
social "realities" but in fact precedes them and gives them meaning
through a recognition of the differences between signs within textual systems.
Bhabha, then, re-appropriates Derrida's notion of differance to suggest
cultural difference and its representation and negotiation in the form of
writing. Having already posed the question of "what is to be done"
about the precarious pedagogical legitimacy of postcolonial debates, in the
following passage Bhabha conceptualizes writing as a productive way of
conceptualizing the differences between cultures:
Within this essay Bhabha
accomplishes many things, yet he seems to focus upon two main subjects and
issues: the troubling of political and ideological discourse and then the
differentiation between culture difference and culture diversity. Bhabha illustrates the relationship between
politics and ideology, bringing out important points of encounter. There is a
sort of space, where discourse and ideology, language and the representation of
such lie--this space--is where Bhabha means to place focus, and put attention.
Bhabha means to speak
to the relationship between politics and theory, and the manner in which they
depend on each other. Calling back to Derrida's differance, Bhabha sums up this
relationship as "the difference of the same." This is where Bhabha
begins to elaborate on the relationship itself. He beings by looking at the
nature of theory: language, ideology, semiotics, representation, and so on.
Theory, "in a doubly inscribed move, simultaneously seeks to subvert and
replace." Theory's attempt to supplant, replace, re-present and so on
exists in relation to the very thing that it striving to remove. This
relationship, though obvious, puts forth a proposition that Bhabha requests: he
wants us to "rethink the logics of causality and dterminacy through which
we recognize the 'political' as a form of calculation and strategic action
dedicated to social transformation." Further, the 'political' that theory
calls attention to is delegated through an identification of the logics of
causality: it seems that Bhabha is asking us to rethink how we approach and
understand political discourse and the political subject as determined by
systems of identification that are bent on alterity, otherness, heterogeniety.
By rethinking these categories as determined and intimately connected with
history we may begin to see the relationship between political and ideological
discourse as developing side by side, as opposed to preceeding and following.
The rethinking of the
logics of causality, politics and then the strategic action of either the
political or ideological discourse leads to the obvious troubling of the
representation of either of these categories:
With this troubling of
these categories, through the assertion of rethinking the logics of causality
(understanding the importance of writing and textuality), which leads us to
understanding that the 'political' as a calculated form of societal
transformation and affection (meaning maintaining purpose to cause effect in
society) Bhabha leads us to a good explanation of the troubling of these
categories:
Stemming from this call
to rethinking and re-evaluating our categories concerning political and
ideological discourse, Bhabha leads us to the fact that these categories as now
understood depend on alterity, on a agonisitic environment of "cultural
difference" and "cultural diversity." Simply, it seems to me
that an initial difficulty with understanding these issues arises from the idea
of one emerging before another, and thus one being pre-established. Here Bhabha
means to focus on the fact that much of the acceptance of these categories has
depended upon a sort of understanding that one category may negate or supercede
the other. Instead, Bhabha calls for a sort of third space: a negotiation that
he called to earlier in referring to a sort of "to and fro." Bhabha
seems to critique a singleness of terms. Instead, he asks for a heterogeneity
of categories.
This third space, which
is neither one category or the other, results as a rethinking of the logics of
causality and recognition of political discourses relationship to social
transformation.
Throughout the rest of
his essay, Bhabha elaborates on the terms of cultural difference and cutlrual
diversity. He upholds an argument for thinking of things in multiplicity, in
heterogeneity, of thinking of cultures, peoples, histories, politics and
ideology as developing together, of simultaneously sustaining one another, and
all of this operating within a certain amount of ambivalence.
What seems to be at stake here, is
the issue of cultural identification in a post-colonial world. Much of what
Bhabha speaks to deals with representation, of historical emergence,
enunciation of identity that is in turn simultaneously created only out of a
sort of alterity. Yet this creation, this enunciation is qualified by the
process of writing, or textuality that prohibits it from any sort of ability to
stand alone. The relation here is the signifier to the signified and the fact
that Bhabha questions to the notion of given concepts, as opposed to
simultaneously created subject, objects only in the process of alterity. Here,
Bhabha offers a final clarification of cultural diversity and cultural
difference.
In a round about sort of way,
Bhabha's emphasis on the differentiation between cultural difference and
cultural diversity entails his concepts of hybridity, along with this assertion
of rethinking the logics of causality, and furthermore, this rethinking puts
forth the fact that maintaining any single notion of cultural identity and
so on is extremely troublesome when one looks at the truth of political and
ideological discourse.
