Hybridity and History: A Critical Reflection on Homi K. Bhabha's 'Post-Historical' Thought (original) (raw)
Without doubt, Homi K. Bhabha's 'hybridity' is one of the most vital concepts in cultural criticism today. Along with his other ideas such as 'sly civility' and 'colonial non-sense', by the late 199Os it had passed into the currency of theoretical debate and has remained influential ever since.2 Its impact has been internationally felt not just in comparative literature and cultural studies, but also in other human sciences, including art criticism, anthropology, and history. Hybridity also plays a crucial role within Bhabha's own theoretical development, as it is intimately linked with his other concepts such as 'Third Space'. For all its international fame, however, the concept seems to be little understood, partly because of the notoriously difficult prose-style adopted by this renowned theorist now teaching at Harvard. As a result, except for some notable critical engagements', it 2 This essay is a substantially revised version of a paper first presented at the Postcolonial Theory Graduate Seminar at the English Faculty, Oxford University on 5 December, 2002. I would like to thank Dr. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan and Professor Robert J. C. Young for having given me the opportunity to present it. I also thank my colleagues at Doshisha University, Yoshiaki Mihara and Peter Neff, for reading the early drafts of the current paper.
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Signs and Wonders: Fetishism and Hybridity in Homi Bhabha's The Location of Culture
2009
Two key locations of pleasure and desire lie at the center of Homi Bhabha's discussion of colonial discourse: the fetish and hybridity. 1 Bhabha sets hybridity as a site of interruption of the fetishistic logic and fixation that structure European colonial discourse. Yet the two terms frame not only his manifest engagement with the colonial encounter, but also his endeavor to recontextualize the colonial book in general and reading in particular in contemporary (post)colonial studies. Still, relatively little attention has been paid to the way he positions the fetish and hybridity in relation to book and reading. Th e following is an attempt to chart the deployment of these four terms-fetish, hybridity, book, and reading-in Bhabha's essays. I shall suggest that as he celebrates colonial desire and pleasure through hybridity, he quite explicitly dismisses reading, and as he shies away from reading the colonial book, he fetishizes that book. His essays thus reproduce the same logic he decries. S i g n s a n d Wo n d e r s 230 •
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