CU-MA English-SEM III-Specialization I-Postcolonial Theory

Macaulay's translator, , Decoud as the scene setter of the opera bouffe of the New World, these belong tothe appropriateobjects of a colonialist chain of command in the colonized world, authorized versionsof otherness.But they too, as I have shown thefigures of an enlarging and part-objects of an analogy of colonial desire thatseparates the processand routineof those dominant conversations wherethey come outas \"inappropriate\" colonial subjects. There isa desire involvedby means of thepartial presence getting repeated, which is fundamental tomimicry, expressesthose disruptionsinvolving cultural, historical and racialdifference that threatenthe colonial authority’s narcissistic demand. It is an inclinationthat reverses \"in part\" the colonial usurpation as currently producing a hazyvision under the authorityof the colonizers.Have a look atthe otherness, that allocatesthe astutenessof the genealogical gaze to which, Foucault explains it, lets out negligibleelements and disruptsthe unity and integration of man's being where he makes extension ofhis sovereignty. The perceptibilityof mimicry remains the same except white but is induced at the site of prohibition. It isone-of-a-kind colonial discourse gets uttered inter dicta: a discourse at the conjunction of known and permissible where theknown shouldn’t be disclosed;a discourse spoken draws the inference in contrary tothe rules and within them. Thus,the question of the delineationof difference is therefore becomesa problem of authority. The \"desire\" of mimicry, which is Freud's striking feature that hardly divulges anythingbut makes a huge difference. It is not about mere impossibility of the Other thatrepeatedly counteractssignification. The desire for colonial mimicry, i.e. - an interdictory desire might lackan object, yethas prudentobjectives known asthe metonymy of proximity. Those unsuitablesignifiers of colonial discourse-the difference between being English and Anglicized; the distinctivenessbetween stereotypes which, through repetition become different; the prejudicedidentities developed across traditional norms as seen in the cultureand classifications, the Simian Black, and the Lying Asiatic--all representmetonymies.They are desire strategiesin discourse that ensurethe inconsistentrepresentation of the colonized as something elsein lieu ofa process involving\"the return of the repressed,\" to whichFanon has characterized as cumulativecatharsis with disappointment. These are a few occasionsof metonymy belonging tothe non-repressive productions of differingand multiple belief. They cross the cultural limitsof expression through a strategic indecisionof the transmuteand metonymic axes conveyingthe cultural production.For every instance, f \"a difference exists whichis more or lessthe same, but not quite\" unintentionallydevelops a crisis in support ofthe cultural priority being given to the metaphoricsince the method of repression and substitution thatnegotiates the difference between paradigmatic systems and classifications. The representation of identity and meaning gets rearticulated in context tometonymy.Lacan here reminds us thatmimicry appears like 201 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

camouflage, but not a harmonization/ repression of difference. Nonetheless, resemblesto differpresence by exhibitingit partially, i.e.,metonymically. Its threatis from the enormousand strategic production of fantastic, conflictual,discriminatory \"identity effects\" in the play of a power remainselusive as it hides nothing,no \"itself.\" Thistype of resemblance is highlyterrifying thing to behold, as examined by Edward LonginHistory of Jamaica (1774). Towards the final part of thetortured and negrophobic passage, there is an anxious shift among the attributes likepiety, perversion, and prevarication,the text finally meetsits fear; nothing morethan the reiteration of its resemblance \"in part\". ‘Negroes’ get-well representationbymost of the authors beingthe dreadful of humankind, for which they have somemore assertion of resemblance than what comes outfrom their exterior forms. There comes a question regarding the ambivalence of the mimicry from thiscolonial encounter taking place between the white presence and its semblance in black,because it involvesa complicatedcolonial subjection. If there isscandalous theatricalization of language of Sade time and againreminds us,discourse couldclaim \"no priority,\" then theEdward’s work says thatnot to forgetthe \"ethnocentric and erratic will to power from which texts can spring\" is itself a theatre of war. Actually, mimicry as per the presence of metonymy is erratic and anomalousstrategy of authority as mentioned in the colonial discourse. Mimicry is not tantamount to pulldown narcissistic authority throughthe repetitive slippage of desire and difference. It is a way of fixing the colonial in termsof cross-classificatory and discriminatory knowledge in the impairsof aprohibited discourse.Therefore, it leads tothe questionover colonial representative authority.Additionally, there is a question markover the authority goingbeyond the deficiency ofpriority in the subject to a historical dilemmaas per the belief of colonial man asan object of regulatory power andthe subject of racial and cultural in addition to, national representation. \"This culture . . . fixed withinthe colonial status,\" Fanon states \"(is) both present and mummified, it affirmedagainst its members. It defines without appeal.\" The ambivalence of mimicry is mostly but not quite which suggests that the glamorized colonial culture is definitely and prudently a subversive counter-appeal. What I have said regardingits \"identity-effects,\" are in split always.Under the cover of disguise,mimicry is a part object meant forrevaluing the descriptiveknowledges with reference torace, history and writing. The imperial refusal of familiarization and intermarriage as likelymethods of colonizing India madequick impact onstereotyping peoplefrom European descent were seen as becomingirrevocably changedby environmental influences,racial mixture/or both.People frommixed descent, or 'Eurasians', were represented as the superiorof such types of degenerative transformation. It wasa notion held that the people from Eurasian originwere inferior to the non-mixedpopulation in white both physically and mentally.Still,this process of racial stereotyping is not given highimportance as per theongoing discussion.It is not about 202 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

the difference amongEurasians as such, but their ambivalent resemblance has more relevance.Though there is presence ofhis racialized otherness, the Eurasian subjectstill makes resemblance and claim to match a certain identitywith the white subject. As per the phrase byBhabha,he was ' the same person, but notthe `mimic man'. He was also a'changed' person,in a fragmentedand disturbing manner. It is not about the existence of the Eurasian people indulged indisturbing activities. Rather, it was the appealing effect of their mimicry. The Eurasian subject beingthe `mimic man', won’tbe a fixed and standalone identity.Instead,the mimic man performed an act ofrepeating, mocking and duplicating.He won’tbe an identity crisis asthat would enablehim visible therebynamed and categorized incolonial discourse. As per the work by Bhabha,'Mimicry repeats instead ofre-presents'. The Eurasian subject as mimicry has its presenceonly by relatingto the original, the white subject. There isan anonymous complain through a letter to a British newspaper in 1891,the Eurasian subject was 'bloated with wrongnotions related toequality with the Englishmen'. The supposed 'extra-racial' quality of the white subject could beperverted as somebody mocked him who wasfrom 'white, race but not quite'. Thus,there was an accusation on Eurasian subjectof being 'falsely white', and alsodoesn’t remember ofthe fact of being 'mixed'. As mentioned in thejournal article inThe Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review published in 1900, where the people Eurasianregions were 'desirous of passing themselves off for what they are not'. To understand from the Bhabha’s scopethings, it is likethe mimetic effect aboutthe Eurasian subject, instead ofhis racialized identity, which gives an indication of possiblepostcolonial intervention: a moment known as'hybridity'. As someone ambiguously resembling his supposedly un-changing self, the white subject is not appropriate for representing the Eurasian subject without distorting or 'ironizing' himself. Here, the impact accruing through mimicry could be considered as weakeningthe white subject as the other-worldly author of colonial discourse. It was his enigmatic similarityto the white man is in charge of mimicking man into a 'hybrid'. As Bhabha mentions in'Signs Taken for Wonders', mimicry asambivalence 'tracedon the undecidability that is turningthe rambling conditions of superioritydue tointervention'. The Eurasian subject reinforcedthe ambienceof hybridity because he was left withno coreother thanthe distractingresemblance to the white subject. He is not in a position to represent any traitsenoughto be distinguishedby colonial discourse.Therefore, he isneversubduedtothe totalizing system of representations of the latter. As per the expression byBhabha,he disseminated'without being seen'. Hence,the mimetic effect containingthe Eurasian subject reserved,withoutbeing perceived, the discursive conceptof colonial enlightenment, and split itwithin. We couldrecognize the specific ways followed under whichthe question of mimicry comes out as a result.Mimicry here was not meant to be an unrepresentable and indeterminate mode 203 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

of non-identity. In fact, it is quite opposite.Colonial discourse has been presented in graphsand described mimicryto categoricallyidentify it as the main reasonof what was perceivedas a pretentiousway of living. The discernedproblem wasn’t excessivelyambivalence, or otherness, of the mimicking Eurasian because his mimicry could impact practically likethe adventof a Eurasian underclass and its demeaningvisibility in context to the colonizing. There was muchconviction asthe Eurasian population wereimpoverished asits members were unaware of any notion of economy, even in the middle of their direstate of economic deprivation. Becausethey were spendthrift in nature therebyspending in excess than required to fulfiltheir desire for mimicking likeBritons, but they make effort for livinga humble lifelike the locals.It was inherentwith regards tothe mimicry representation mostlyfound itself in accordance with achronicle of solidancientprocesses of colonial social reform. TheEurasian poor had to go through the process of evaluationand disciplined before they moved far away fromthe British control. Generally,deliberation on mimicry wastied closely to a heterogeneous groupof reformist measuresaiming at the younger generationsof the Eurasian community. For example,employments in military and marine establishments were not being given to the Eurasian youth because of their mimetic tendencies. Rather they were employed in the capacity of labourers.Another example of radical attempt was to separateEurasian children from their biological parents likewise they were resorting to ouster from the colonial society.It wasbelieved that the poor Eurasian children were compelledto grow up in such conditions meant to be loafers.They had poor psychological understanding:'The destitute Eurasian, whatever may be his/her disgraceful positionor any such remoteconnection with Europe, holdsto the fact of beinga European. So, he won’t indulge in any kind of manual labour kind of activities. There was one special institution to take care of such children known asSt. Andrew's Colonial Homes at Kalimpong. They were raised at this home where they learnt togive respect—rather than mimic like —white Britons, while leavingtheir pride asideand preventingfrom interiorizing native Indians. In contradiction to mimicry, that is a proportionality determinedand limited idea, but postcolonial hybridity might beevasiveand comprehensive. At a primarylevel, hybridity indicates a blend ofeastern and western culture. However, within colonial literature as well as postcolonial literature, it indicates aboutcolonial subjects right from the Asia or Africa havinga balanced cultural attributebetween the eastern and western.When one goes throughthe Homi Bhabha’s initial usage of the term in theessay “Signs Taken For Wonders,” he had a clear notion thathybridity isan inflammatory tool to whichcolonized people couldchallenge different types of oppression (Bhabha’s example refers to the imposition by theBritish missionaryregarding the Bible in rural parts of India in the 19th century.). 204 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

However, hybridity as a term has been in use in much larger scope thatrelies on a parable from biology, to refer some type of cultural confluencebetween East and West. Hybridity has itslimitations. It could bedefined as cultural mixing, but it doesn’t lead toexplicitly account for the various paths by virtue of which someone might try to embody a mix of both eastern and western attributes. Still, it does notdifferentiate between peopleconsciously strivingto achieve a mixed/balanced identity including those who reflect it occasionally.Hybridity as is defined this way appearsas awkward term for describingpeople in the e racially mixed category, similarly to“Eurasians” during the British Raj in India/ biracial/ multiracial people all overthe postcolonial world. Fourth, though its deployment seems as per the Indian contextor African societies totake on western influences,one needs to considerhow hybridity, such as mimicry, can run in reverse order,” i.e.itcould describe the inflection ofwestern culturesby Asian or African elements (\"chutneyfied,\" as it were). Finally, the point to be notedthat there couldbedifferent registers of hybridity, right from slight mixing to highlyaggressive instances of culture-clash. It might behelpful to concernabout varioushybridity’s using certainset of differentiated sub- categories:  Racial  Linguistic  Literary  Cultural  Religious Racial Hybridity The term \"hybridity\" has its originfrom biology, where it isdefined as the merger of two genetic streams. Henceitseems there is some logicto talk regardinghybridity in terms of race.In fact, while applying the term like this way doesn’tseem productive. First and foremost,colonial societies have their version of specific andlocalized words to representpeople of mixed-race ancestry. Further,the term “hybrid” is no more in usein the race context.( Using theterm this way could offend people belonging tomixed ancestry.) In context to India,there is a well-established community of “Eurasians,” andwere identifiedas an individual community by the British. It happened after the ban was imposed regarding interracial marriageafterwards,they clung to themselves as ademarcated community even after India got its independence (at the time ofmajority of the Eurasians left the country). In Latin America, the frequently used term is “mestizo”. The purpose isto depictpeoplefrom mixed European and African decent including the Native American.The notionof “racial hybridity” seems awkward at present mostlybecause itdistinctly relies on the 205 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

idea, taken fromthe nineteenth-century race science, whereracial discriminationis a reality that is subjected to verification empirically.Still, there is no clarity overthat racial markers like“African” or “Asian” lack the exactmeaning. Most of the scholars as of now agree to the fact ofdeemphasizingbiological or genetic race in favour of “culture.” However, the issue here isthat the biological basis favouringthe hybridity concept needs a meaningful discussion onrace, it looksinappropriate toapply it to biracial/ multiracial for the reasons mentioned above. Linguistic Hybridity Linguistic hybridityrefers to the elements from foreign languagesentering a given language, it could bethe adoption of English words into Asian/ African languages, or the emergenceof Asian/ African words into English. To discussmore about linguistic hybridity, one gets the advantagefrom reference to terms emanating from linguistics, which also includes the ideas of slang, pidgin, patois, and dialect. Just go throughthe long tradition of British colonialism in India, it gives idea aboutnumerous Indian words enteringBritish speech, first one is amongst the white “Anglo-Indians,”. However, in due course of time, these words entered the English language more widely.Today, words like “pajamas,” bungalow,” including “mulligatawny” are mostlyused and mostly we are unaware of it that their origin isfrom Indian languages. Likewise,words like “mumbo-jumbo” have its mark inthe English language from the African languages. Colonialism is the main reason, the English language got its remarkable presencein Ireland,African, Asian and Caribbeansocieties that were previously colonized by England.Historically,this fact remainedquite controversial. Nevertheless,it produces some sortof anxiety as observed in the entirepostcolonial world, even though majority of theAfrican and Asian countries embrace education in English-language like the language of international commerce. Besides the fact of the matter ofEnglish is consideredas an imposed language, there is a lingering problemthat in so many cases, writers fromAsia or Africa who use English are different from thespoken English. Thus,Achebe has tried to address this problem as mentioned in the following. An African trying to writein English has its drawbacks.He or shefinds himself/herself describing circumstancesor modes of thought that hasno direct linkage withthe English way of life. Caught in this type ofsituation, he couldresort toone out of two things. He can attemptand contain as per his requirement tosay but in a restrained manner ofexpressing conventional English. Otherwise,he can beyond the limitsto accommodate his ideas. Those capable of doingthe work of giving extension tothe frontiers of Englishfor accommodatingthe 206 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

African thought-patterns should conduct it by understanding the English literature thoroughly but not at the cost ofbeing innocent. There are so many works by people even with a little bit ofEnglish knowledge, like Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drunkard. At times, it is referred as an example oflinguistic hybridity. However,Achebe wants to make a point in this regardthat such works carry nomeaning or interestas compared to others havingremarkable mastery overEnglish; butare aware that a person couldwish to “extend the frontiers” of the language more than theStandard Written English as followedto capturethe voices and assumptionsof peopleoutside of Europe or North America. There are several instances oflinguistic hybridity.James Joyce’s ‘’Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’’ could be referred as one such fine instance ofanxiety related tothe status of English. Stephen Dedalus, an English-speaking personin Dublin meets a British priest at the turn of the century, and frets that “ our spoken language has already been started by him before we do” However,Joyce hadno option but to write in English. Henceit becomes clear that even in the novel by Joycethat Stephen has equal rightsto English like any otherEnglishman. In the early part of 1970s, there were scoresof prominent intellectuals who rebelled against English in Africa. The novelist from Kenya,Ngugi w’a Thiong’o, who initiated started his career in writing English novelsdecided to leavethe practice in favour of writing innative Kikuyu. Achebe defended his usageof English as a language while making an argument with Ngugi that is common to many Africans (Achebe argued, even within Nigeria, there are variouslanguages,English couldbe the only national language of the country). There are numerousinteresting approaches in favour oflinguistic hybridity involveusingof pidgin in Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English and the concept behind nation language by Edward Kamau Braithwaite,which entails the applicationof Caribbean patois elements as a liberatory gesture. Over the years,the practical and commercial benefitsof writing in English or French instead oflocal languages might have settled the debate where writers have the option of choosing a language (it reflectswriters havinga choiceto choose the language inthe largest market). However, people in Indiatheliterature has been writtenin Hindi andregional languages, even though thesewriting isoverlooked by \"postcolonial\" scholars, when it could remain untranslated or improper translation. Literary Hybridity What wecall literary hybridity (hybridity at the level of narrative form) is basicto what we aware ofthe postcolonial literature. To some extent,basic contemporaryliterary forms likethe novel and the short story are writing modeshas its origin in the West, even sothey 207 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

wereadopted by the colonial authors in the Africa and Asia (the first Indian novels were being published in the 1860s). I Immediately, after its emergence,the “foreign” genre of the western novel became theprimary ways by which collectively Africans and Asians began to imagine a sense of national and cultural identity. The fact is that the novel couldhave been a borrowed form but did not seem to be a limitation amongthe first generations of the Asians and Africans using it;rather the novel has proven to be an incredibly flexible and open format. Literary hybridity is mostlyinvoked with modernpostcolonial literatureusing experimental methodsof narration, like“magic realism.” The Indian born writer Salman Rushdie and African writer like Ben Okri have already experimented with modes of storytelling having the essence oflocal traditions and folk culture with experimental (postmodernist) ideas. Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is a fine exampleof literary hybridity where it containsIndian famous texts like The Ramayana with a self-reflexive narrative frame, whichis usually associated with the European postmodernist writers as that ofItalo Calvino. There is one moreway of thinking regardingliterary hybridity involvesto the response of postcolonial literatureto the Western Tradition (the Canon).At the time when postcolonial writers haveadapted western literary without any objection to meettheir purposes, there remains certainanxiety with regard toCanonical authorsrepresentingAfrica and Asia in their works. Resultantly,postcolonial writers have attempted to “write back” to the British Canon mostly with revisionist adaptations of classic works. Have a brief onthree recognizedexamples:  Aime Cesaire’s work like “black power” typeof Shakespeare’s work The Tempest, Caliban with Une Tempete playing a rebelliousblack intellectual.  Jean Rhys classic work like Caribbean-centred categoryof Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea, enquiresabout the back-story written onthe white Caribbean Creole Bertha Mason.  Tayeb Salih has a classic work known as Season of Migration to the North appears as areversal of Joseph Conrad’s work Heart of Darkness. These three examplesof postcolonial revisions might be consideredas one kindof literary hybridity. Rhys, Salih and Cesaire take theplot and form likeBritish narrativesinvokingAfrica/ the Caribbean yetwrite them from the perspective of an African or Caribbean. Cultural Hybridity Culture that has been defined in the forms of art, fashion, music,cuisine, and so on, could be the broadest and perhapsthe easiest place to think onhybridity. Cultural hybridity is omnipresent,as one sees a multiplicationof fusion cuisine, fusion cuisine, and fusion musical forms. For majority of thereaders, cultural hybridity is something we may come 208 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

acrosswithout a second thought, when we noticean Indian-based design in a blouse that is on sale at the Gap, or when we get awareof the Japanese (or Arab or German) hip hop. However,cultural hybridity has not been soeasy if we look at the history, nor has it been without any controversy.In colonial writing, hybridity wasless important in variousways as compared tomimicry. Some of theVictorian writers of the past like Kipling, saw Indians seemed to be a blend of east and west as absurd, and mocked them in his stories andpersonal letters. For Kipling and a few peers of him,the English-educated “Babus” were remain engaged in nastymimicry rather than some sort of intelligent kind of hybridity. Take for example,on the inauguration day of Punjab University in 1882, Kipling wrote a letter to George Willes as: Just thinka brown legged son fromthe east is in the red and black gown of an M.A. as I noticedhim. The effect lookskilling. I had a disdainful vision of the Common room in the get up like a Muhammedan.Towards the final part of the proceeding, an exhilaratedbard startedsome verses in Urdu composed as a tribute tothe occasion. It was like a tour de force of his, but I feel sadto say he was suppressed, i.e.,to say, they took him by the shoulders and allowed to seathim down again in his chair. Imagine this incidentat Oxford! For Kipling, the sceneof a “brown legged son of the east” at theBritish academic regalia looksmismatch means appearsfunny. (To be noted, biographers have identifiedthat the inclination on the part ofKipling to mock Indians who are highly educatedmay have got the motivationby his anxiety regardinghislack of college study).Interestingly, Kipling keeps on mentioningin his description, he feelsmore sympathy forthe speaker, who has been selectedto present verses in Urdu not inEnglish. Kipling has some kind ofadmiration for the verses.Still, the speaker'sBritish peers “suppress” what he has to informall the same, by compellinghim, rather impolitely,to sit down instead of completinghis recitation. Incontrast to Kipling, E.M. Forster, in his work A Passage to India,admires the wayambitious Indians towards the enddays of the British Raj were able to converse the English language like theirown. This fact can be presented in the form of an example involvingdress, Forster’s protagonist Dr. Aziz dresseslike an Englishman, without being perceived as abnormalby fair- minded people. Even soRonny Heaslop is ready to mock Aziz for missing a collar stud in thefamousscene in the novel in early part, actuality Aziz had given thecollar-stud to Fielding. Still, the novel by Forstershows the limits imposedon the cultural interaction between Indians and sympathetic Englishmen at the time ofwriting. As a rule of thumb then,cultural hybridity incolonialism rule resembles a close cousin of mimicry. It becomesdifficult for an Indian/ African, who is subjected to British rule, for adopting manners or cultural values from the British without in some sense suppressing his/ 209 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

her own way of being. Something identical couldbe said abouta new immigrant in England/ the United States: there is highpressure to quickly congruency to the norms of the place, where one lives, which at timesentails controllinga heavyaccent or changing a person’sdress styles or habits. Books like Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, and Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, all these address the problem of acculturation, and overcomethe fine line between acclimatizing as an immigrant to a new environment and transformingradically that one makes the risk of giving up a significantpart of who one is. Once the colonialism comes to end,cultural hybridity in most of themetropolitan centres, in the west,Africa and Asia, becomes neutral to some extent, –- possibly an artisticway of expressing cosmopolitanism or eclecticism. People in large numbercelebrate cultural hybridity as a meansof creating innovativeartistic forms and developing newer ideas. Cultures remain toolong, as per the statement by so many artists and musicians would argue, stiffen,and die. Religious Hybridity This final sub-category of hybridity looks very important to some extentbecause religion (especially,religious conversion) isa widespread theme as mentioned in colonial and postcolonial literature. Again, itseems like a fitting place to end, asHomi Bhabha’s example related tohybridity in “Signs Taken for Wonders,” specifically solicits the enforcementof the Christian Bible in India. Bhabha mentionsthat in spite ofthe fact that local Indians “under a tree, outside Delhi,”accept the authority of the Missionary’s Book.Despite that clear Authority, they canacknowledgethe Christianity they are being exposed to through their cultural filters. Instead of becoming simple Christians, the local Hindus areadding the reference point of Jesus to acrowded Hindu pantheon. While ponderingabout religious hybridity, the question isnot aboutsomeone getting convertedto a foreign/ imposed religious belief system, ratherthe way variousbelief systems interact with conventionaland local cultural-religious frameworks. The goal in invoking \"religious hybridity,\" is not forposingpeoplepracticinga local religion as \"pure,\" wherethe converted people couldbe seen as hybrids. In reality,religious traditions like Hinduism wereinfluenced mostly by the British missionaries under colonialism. Hindu leaders then formed societies namelythe Brahmo Samaj,the Arya Samaj (including as perthe Sikh tradition, the Singh Sabha movement), which broughtreforms.In many ways, they were aimed atrecasting the Hindu conventionin a mannerthat made it even more legible, and could behighlyacceptable, to the British missionaries andreligion scholars of the western region. Simply,in the initial periodof the twentieth century, the method ofHinduism is being practiced and expoundedby variousHindus themselves gives a reflectionabout some type of\"religious hybridity\" 210 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Major works likeThings Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, or in recent times,Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichiefeature the issue of religious conversion. Forthe writing of Okonkwo by Achebe, his son Nwoyeconverting to Christianity is perceived as a loss. Again, it is seenas a type of subordinatetocultural values of the west. Similarly,the father of Kambili in Purple Hibiscus is observedas imposing a staunchChristianity on his family, but at the costof personal loyalty or inheritedlove. However,the novel is of argue that, it couldbe possible to become a “religious hybrid,” i.e.,to say, an African Christian, without relinquishingentirely on what is responsible for makingone a uniquely African, or a Nigerian. Mostly, theconcept of hybridity couldbe characterized aptly as a challenge tothe 'temporal dimension' of colonial discourse: its logic of being permanent presence/never-changing identity. We have made anobservation that the sheeridea of acclimatization includingmiscegenation has cropped upas a challenge to the royalconstruct of the relationship between people resorting totransform and gettingtransformed. Likewise,the trope of the Eurasian beingthe mimic personcould be consideredas 'hybridizing' the identicaltimeframe of colonial discourse. Beingtheeternal agent of regalcivilizing mission, the white peoplewill remain as'original'. He 'originates', he is the temporal flow himself, reigning, as it were, as the mystical author of history. Anyhow,colonial temporality was notstable in general. To obtainits 'originality', its author was supposed to remain legitimate, whichin turn dependedon the fact of him beingunrepresentable, being an unseenvanishing point from which, he mightrepresent all thingswithout he was gettingrepresented in return. The Eurasian subjectputs a stopto thissequenceof genesisand effects throughhis emulativeambivalence: hefreezes the original timeframe of colonialism by iteratingthe unrepeatable, therebyreproducing fakeversions of it. As it was subjected to piracyby an ambivalent mode of similitude,colonial discourse would have its t configuration split for that time being within. The outcomeof such a discursive form of splitting, Bhabha statesthat it has the abilityto serve the postcolonial theorist for making emphasis onthe temporal dimension of colonial discourse: `The splitting of the subject of enunciation endsthe conceptof synchronicity and the evolution thattraditionally authorize the topic ofcultural knowledge.’ There is no doubt thatthe temporal dimension of colonialism is one of themajor concerns of Bhabha's entire theoretical discourse in the book, The Location of Culture. The questionof colonial temporality by the hybridity conceptis beingenacted at all levels relentlessly, while it ischased through other related concepts like`time-lag' or 'disjunctive time' thatgives moreindications of his preoccupation with thespecific aspect of colonial discourse. The reason appears very simple.I would rather argue that, for Bhabha, thekeysource of colonial power considers of thehistorical temporality/ history itself as he puts it, `colonialism takes power in the realmof history. Indeed,the colonial discourse analysis by Bhabha couldberead as targeting the contemporaryidea of history born and developed in the Western Europe. This doesn’tmean,his critique is a hostileagainst thehistorical researchin the constrictedsense: it 211 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

isn’t with reference topicking up a specifichistorianfor exposingthe prejudices/errors of his work. Instead,Bhabha is very critical of historicist modes of reasoning that are apparent,not just in history, but in all theapproaches ofthe human and social sciences trying to account for the colonial encounter astemporality. The philosophical viewsof human progressgetrepresented in the worksof James and John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, and Gorge W. Hegel; and the 'scientific' ideas of evolution as mentionedin Social-Darwinist and anthropological view;the ideaof philanthropic improvement as identified in the rhetoric of the 'civilizing mission'. It was thehistoricist discourses of the Western modernity that paved way for a soundteleological orientation to colonialism. There isa passage in his essay stating that `The postcolonial and postmodern', Bhabha articulatesthis view distinctly: `The splendid narratives of nineteenth century historicism [...] were also, in one moretextual and territorial time / space, the technologies used incolonial and imperial governance'.According to Bhabha, the historicist purposeinferredin the Enlightenment is the utmost powerful logic of colonial domination. Still,if there is any need of subverting any such logic,then it shouldbe through the `hybrid' subject. This subject, he writes, would 'outstare linear, continuous history and turn its progressive dream into nightmarish chaos'. As of now there is no iota of doubt thatthe concept of hybridity doesn’tspecify about the identity to represent.The Eurasian subject beingthe mimic man would associatehimself to historyis not so comprehensive.Therefore, the colonial presence of the Eurasiansin any historically specific terms mightbe neglected in the theoretical discourse by Bhabha. Such neglect is a theoretical requirement.The Eurasian subject are seen as a `hybrid' subject only in casehe remainsunrepresentable. He loses out all the deconstructive potential if consigned to aform of historical representation or another.One can state thatto construe the Eurasian subject in philosophical way seemslimiting as it is illuminating. The colonial archive gives enough informationthat a hugerepresentations of the Eurasian people were in in the late British India. These representations are valuable to havecritical examination asthey are mostlysuggestive of the waycolonial ambivalence figured not onlyas a meta-historical problem but also as a historical one. So, let’s time to move from our first reading about the Eurasian question ashybridity, to another reading of it—a reading thattakes issue with the actual representationrather than what was not. As per the statement byBhabha, Hybridity is about the recapitulationof the presuppositionof colonial identity by means ofthe iterationof prejudicedidentity effects. It showsthe necessary deformation and displacement involving all sourcesof domination and discrimination.It makes unsettle the mimetic/ narcissistic clamouring forcolonial power but replicates its identifications in subversive strategiesthat turn the attentionof the discriminated again upon the eye of power. Tothe colonial hybrid, it is the articulation of the ambivalent space, where 212 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

the rite of power gets enacted on the site of desire and making its objects at once disciplinary and disseminatory or as permy mixed metaphor, it is a negative transparency. Supposing thatdiscriminatory effects giveauthorities the opportunity to observethem, their proliferating difference doesn’t come to notice andescapes that surveillance. Those discriminated peoplemay berecognized immediately, but at the same time they requirea re- cognition of by the authority, a disturbing effect whichis very popularin the reiteratedhesitancy that is contrary tothe colonialist discourse, when it scrutinizesits biasedsubjects: the unfathomableof the Chinese, the inexpressiblecustomsof the Indians, the ineffable habits of the Hottentots. It is not aboutthe opinionof authority beingdumbfounded.Rather,the colonial discourse has come to a pointthat,when encounteredwith the hybridity of its objects, the presence of powergets revealed as something elsethan what its rules of recognition assert. If the impactof colonial power could be taken into cognizanceas the production of hybridization in lieu ofthe boisterouscommand of colonialist authority or the silent suppressionof native traditions, then it leads to a significant change.The ambivalence at the disposalof conventionaldiscourses on authority entitlesa form of subversion, identifiedon the undecidability which t turns the dominant nature of discursive conditions to the grounds of intervention. It is a conventionalacademic wisdom asauthority is rightlyestablished by means ofnot exercising private judgement and the reasons for exclusionare contradictory with the authoritative reason. Nonetheless,the recognition of authority needsa validation related to its source at the earliest and withintuitively and apparently. 8.3 ‘POSTCOLONIAL READING OF TEXTS’ Postcolonial reading of texts is a means of reading texts again and againmetropolitan and colonial cultures for drawing the attention deliberately to the deep and inevitableimpact of colonization on literary production; anthropological accounts; historical records; administrative and scientific writing. It is some kind of deconstructive reading whichis applied most of the times to those works emergingfrom the colonizers (nonetheless may be applicableto works done by the colonized) which revealsthe extent ofthe text contradicting its basicassumptions (civilization, aesthetics, justice,sensibility, race) and divulgesits (mostlyunwitting) colonialist beliefsand processes. Examples of post-colonial readings of particular texts include Eric Williams’ interrogation of the formerly authoritative texts of Caribbean history in British Historians and the West Indies (1966); contemporary rereadingof the works of canonical European anthropologists such as Malinowski; numerous post- colonial rereading’s (and rewritings) of Shakespeare’s famous work The Tempest in French, English and Spanish; rereading’s of Jane Austen’s work Mansfield Park (see contrapuntal reading); Jean Rhys’ re readings (and thus rewriting, in Wide Sargasso Sea) of Charlotte 213 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Bronte’s Jane Eyre. The notion of a ‘post-colonial reading ‘need not be restricted to interrogating a body of works (for example, documents dealing with the European history of an area) nor to rereading and rewriting individual texts. A post-colonial rereading of, for instance, English literary history would (hypothetically) involve far greater stress on colonial relations between England and Scotland, Ireland and Wales, and the historical and contemporary effects of these relations on literary production and representation. It would also involve reconsidering English literature and literary production as less a series of domestically inspired changes and progressions than one emanating from and through the imperial process and/or colonial contacts. Thus, for instance, modernism couldbe argued to be the product of Europe’s contact with the so-called ‘savage’ cultures of Africa and the South Pacific; while post-structuralist theories (such as that of Derrida) might be reread as less the products of the Parisian intellectual climate than inspired or significantly inflected by colonial experience. Homi Bhabha’s theories can be used extensively to re-read texts. Chinua Achebe has mentionedthat during the period ofcolonization “we wereat the crossroads of cultures. We still do today.”[Undoubtedly, it is clearly evident,this crossroad is hybridity as per the thoughts of Bhabha. In Habib‟s words, “Hybridity expresses a state of „in betweenness,‟ as in a person who stands between two cultures.” Bhabha is not in favour ofthe conventionalnotion of binary oppositions and doesn’t take cognizance ofManichean conceptdeveloped by past postcolonial thinkers such as Fanon and Said. In the Location of Culture, Bhabha explains hybridity in terms of“new, neither the one nor the other.”[13]The notion of hybridity for Bhabha revolves aroundthe unhomeliness concept. As Tyson says, “to be unhomed is to feel not at home even in your own home because you are not at home in yourself: your cultural identity crisis has made you a psychological refugee.”[14] As a result,unhomeliness makes psychological refugees as a mix oftwo cultures. According toBhabha, cultures are like hybrid that follows postthe hybridization. As a result,it could be observedthat not a singleculture is refinedand genuine. Huddart has made statement toBhabha “authorizesour attention to happeningon the peripheryof cultures, to noticethe reality amongcultures.”[15] Bhabha implementsthe uncanny concepttaken from Kristeva who in turnextends Freud‟s perceptionof a foreignness/ the uncanny and truststhat we areforeign to ourselves.There is a vibeof foreignness among the people within the self therebydividing things in terms of self and other is not feasible.According to Tibile, “Once the binaries are destabilized, Bhabha argues that cultures can be understood to interact, transgress, and transform each other in a much more complex manner than the traditional binary oppositions can allow.”[16] According to Bhabha, “The objective of colonial discourse‟ is to construe the colonized as inhabitantsof degenerate versionsin accordance with theracial origin andto justify conquest. ”Bhabha takes a different perspective and in the words of McLeod, argues that “this important aim is never fully met. This is due to the fact of the discourse 214 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

oncolonialism‟ doesn’tfunction as per the planning.Because it pulls upin two contrary directions simultaneously, most of the times.”[McLeod further adds that due to take into accountas the other from the viewpointof the colonizer, the colonized is set outside of the western culture. On the other hand,the colonizer makes attemptto domesticate the colonized and bring them withinthe culture as followed bythe colonizer through developingstereotypes; Bhabha has his opinion regarding two contrary positions (being inside and outside the colonizer culture) paves watto the ambivalence where theyalways movein these two directions. Again, Bhabha saysthat “the colonial presence remains ambivalentalways,split between its appearance in terms oforiginal and authoritative and its expressionas repetition and difference.” Hence, he is of firm opinion thatthis ambivalence is the reason forthe failure of colonial discourse, which itself is a place for opposingthe colonial domination. In accordance withKraidy, for Bhabha, the concepts related tohybridity, unhomeliness, mimicry, and ambivalence might be considered to be“the resilience of the subaltern.” From the perspective of Bhabha,colonizer’sidentity and culture is in contextto the colonized people’s culture.It is a matter of observationthatdependency on the colonized leadsthe culture of the colonizer to an ambivalent state and anxiety instead ofauthority and power. Before tracing these concepts in Foe, a summary of the novel is presented. Foe is a rewriting of Daniel Defoe‟s Robinson Crusoe, with the character Susan Barton representing a female focus seldom observed in such stories. Susan is on a quest to find her kidnapped daughter who has been conveyed to the New World. Her search being unsuccessful, she embarks for Lisbon. Sailing back across the Atlantic, a mutiny on the ship on which Susan is travelling leads to Susan being put aboard a small boat. After being stranded for a short time at sea, she washes ashore on a deserted island inhabited by Cruso and his mute servant Friday who were shipwrecked and came to the island accidently. After a year, a passive ship eventually arrives and rescues them, but Cruso, who has a fever, does not survive and dies en route to England. In England with Friday and in the letters, Susan beseeches Mr. Foe to write and publish her island story. Mr. Foe stresses that Susan‟s account of her life as a castaway on Cruso‟s island is not entertaining enough to make a good book. Susan refuses to change the substance of her story, insisting that the story she wants to tell concern her time on the island and nothing more. Then, Susan and Friday travel to Bristol, where she intends to find a ship that will take Friday back to Africa, but she finds that she cannot trust the captains running the ships. The two make their own way towards Mr. Foe‟s house which Foe has abandoned because of his own financial problems. Her letters to Foe indicate a troubled doubt as to how much any one is in command of his or her own story. Foe proposes that Susan should attempt to teach Friday to write, and she agrees though unwillingly. In the last part, a narrative voice other than Barton appears. In two versions, it depicts the characters in Mr. Foe‟s house, only Friday is still alive mimicking the sound of island. As Bhabha mentioned, one aspect of hybridity is unhomeliness. To put it another way, Bhabha refers to a hybrid identity as an 215 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

unhomely identity (feeling of being caught between two cultures). Needless to say, unhomeliness is not a physical state here. According to Tyson, “Unhomeliness is an emotional state: unhomed people don’t feel at home even in their own homes because they don’t feel at home in any culture and, therefore, don’t feel at home in themselves.” The hypothesis, here, is that a feeling of unhomeliness is found in Foe in the case of Susan, Friday and, to a lesser extent, Cruso. From the very first pages of Foe, it is apparent that Susan moves between two geographical places, the native land (England) and a foreign land (Cruso‟s island). Foe begins with the description of the moments of Susan‟s wandering on Cruso‟s island. Marooned on a deserted island, Susan wants to escape and return to England. In her view, the person who is “accustomed to the fullness of human speech,” cannot “be content with caws -and chirps and screeches, and the barking of seals, and the moan of the wind.”[19] She cannot adapt herself to life on the island because she finds island life so unbearable. She spends a little over a year with Cruso and silent Friday on the island. On the island she lives in a hut: “In the hut there was nothing but the bed . . . . and in a corner a pile of cured apeskins, that made the hut smell like a tanner's storehouse.” But Susan, refusing to use those apeskins, gradually becomes accustomed to island life to the extent that she misses it after leaving the island: “even today when I smell new leather, I grow drowsy.” She also asserts that “I am becoming an island-dweller. I am forgetting what it is to live on the mainland.” It can be said that Susan attempts to view herself as an island-dweller by imitating the island culture while at the same time keeping in touch with her English background. Borbor Comments on the ideaof place in Foe by statingthat “She [Susan] has become a settler on the island, and thus, her sense of place and her presentation of the island would be different from those of travellers and explorers embarking on an alien land.”[20] It can be viewed that Susan is living in in-between space which has played a great role in shaping her state of mind, carrying the meaning of culture. As Krishna asserts, for Bhabha hybridity “is a third space that is neither one nor the other because the translation or encounter between different cultural forms occur in a context where both these spaces are already preoccupied.”[21] Bhabha believes that this space signifies a resistance to binaries and unitary identities and cultures. While Susan is on board the ship that rescued them, she describes her feelings as follows: “In England we will have a roof over our heads that no wind can tear off. But did it not seem to you that the moon of our island was larger than the moon of England, as you remember it, and the stars more numerous?”[19] Later in the second part of Foe, Susan‟s mixed feeling becomes more obvious when he arrives in England. A good illustration of such feeling is depicted in the scene in which she speaks about her yearning to be on the island: When I was on the island I longed only to be elsewhere, or, in the word I then used, to be saved. But now a longing stir in me I never thought I would feel. I close my eyes and my soul takes leave of me, flying over the houses and streets, the woods and pastures, back to our old 216 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

home, Cruso's and mine. You will not understand this longing, after all I have said of the tedium of our life there. Perhaps I should have written more about the pleasure I took in walking barefoot in the cool sand of the compound. It seems that Susan has internalized the cultural values of the island life. The foregoing statements imply that Susan‟s imaginations and dreams of Cruso‟s island (flying over the houses, back to Cruso‟s hut and walking barefoot) arouse a sense of anxiety and no belonging to her homeland (England) even though she has been settled in England. As a result, Susan ends up being confused: “a being without substance”and getting stuck in between the two worlds (England and Cruso‟s island). In J.M. Coetzee in Context and Theory, Susan‟s experience is related to Kristeva‟s concept of abjection as follows: In her essay on abjection, Kristeva claims that the abject is also a deject “he separates, places, situates himself, he strays” Coetzee gives us an acute sense of Barton‟s unbelonging, her eternal homelessness, her obsessive desire to be elsewhere. The novelist translates the transcendental homelessness of the modern subject, a subject cast away, into Barton‟s paradoxical desire for a home and the knowledge of its eternal impossibility. In Bhabha‟s words, however, “to be unhomed is not to be homeless, nor can the „unhomely‟ be easily accommodated in that familiar division of social life into private and public spheres.” It can be said that Bhabha sees unhomeliness as the point from where one might go beyond the binary opposition of homeness and homelessness. It can be observed that Susan, here, gets stuck in between homeness and homelessness. She regards her life as one moving on the threshold of being and non-being. Here, unhomeliness does not signify homelessness but rather an uncanny feeling vacillating between self and other. Another thing to be considered is that as we proceed through the novel, it seems that the barriers between the two cultures become less. According to Susan, “the life we lead grows less and less distinct from the life we led on Cruso's island. Sometimes I wake up not knowing where I am.” Susan tries to forget that she is on the mainland. She remembers Cruso and his servant Friday, and her good and bad times living with them. Thecultural identity crisis might be seen in the depiction of Friday through his interactions with other characters. Even though Friday is silent, his identity crisis can be realized. From the starting,it could be seen that Friday as a subaltern turn toward the colonizer, here Cruso and Susan (after Cruso‟s death): “Friday has lived with me for many years. He has known no other master. He follows me in all things.” Just like Susan, Friday is also living in in-between space: having an ambivalent personality makes him to live in-between cultures. Friday’s cultural identity crisis comes up to him when leaving the island. Friday, seeing that the rescue ship comes ashore, suddenly goes into the hut, takes his spears and then goes into hiding to evade accompanying Susan and the ship crew. As Susan notes, Whenever I spoke to him, I was sure to smile and touch his arm, 217 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

treating him as we treat a frightened horse. For I saw that the ship and the sailors must be awakening the darkest of memories in him of the time when he was torn from his homeland and transported into captivity in the New World.This scene reveals that perhaps not only does Friday remember his time in Africa, but he also remembers the events leading him to serve as a slave. Moreover, his sense of unhomeliness is intensified when arriving in England. While walking through the streets, he falls into “confusion and distress.” As a result, he rarely leaves the house, “being too fearful” His sense of unhomeliness becomes further evident as he dances in Foe‟s robes and wigs, whirling around. It can be easily understood that he romanticizes his homeland and even Cruso‟s island: “it was to remove himself, or his spirit, from Newington and England.” This scene can be a good example of the unhomely moments Friday experiences. In his book about the Creole identities of postcolonial literatures, Bongie contends that Friday exists in a trance, “trance being the interval between self-identity and self-difference,” finding himself at a distance from the home. It seems that he neither lives in the present nor in the past. Clinging to his life on the island or to his past life in Africa and going along with Susan in England, Friday feels trapped between the two cultures and identities. In other words, he feels unhomely; he does not know to which culture he belongs. Neither one is his home. As Werbner asserts, “In the colonial encounter, then, it is not just the colonized who are subject to western ways; the colonizers too are transformed. Coetzee‟s Cruso feels no need for tools; he makes no table or chair, no lamp or candle and no boat. On the island, Susan attempts to gain information from Cruso, but her efforts are in vain. Cruso has no desire to be saved and just spends time making stone walls, laying the groundwork for a terraced farm though he has no seeds to plant. In Marais‟s words, “the island becomes an „autonomous place.” Spending some years on a deserted island with a Negro slave, Cruso adapts himself to ways of life in a newer perspective to a limitthat he doesn’tintend to develop or even change his lifestyle. Cruso, to quote Maher, “is no creator, nor has salvaged civilizations.” Cruso, in Susan‟s view, “though an Englishman was as strange to me as a Laplander.” In fact, Cruso has internalized the cultural values of the island life. This may be best evidenced when Cruso is on the ship. When Cruso understands he is en route to England, “he came to himself and fought so hard to be free that it took strong men to master him and convey him below.” Feeling homesick, Cruso passes away on the ship: “But now he was dying of woe, the extremist woe. With every passing day he was conveyed farther from the kingdom he pined for, to which he would never find his way again. He was a prisoner, and I, despite myself, his gaoler.” Cruso‟s minds might be preoccupied with the memories of the past, with the memories of the island. It might be inferred that it is not clear whether the place they have come to is his home or his prison. It is supposed to be his home, but simultaneously it is like a prison for 218 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

him. Similarly, Arkinstall states that Coetzee‟s Cruso prefers death to continuing imprisonment, for him the prison is not on the island, but off it. Unlike Said, Fanon and JanMohamed who principally define colonial relations in terms of Manicheanism, in McEwan‟s words, Bhabha “emphasizes its [colonial discourse] ambivalence heterogeneity, rather than its fixed homogeneity.” According to Britton, for Bhabha, unhomeliness is “a state in which the boundaries normally separating private, and public are erased.” The unhomely has more to do with the uncanny (the confusion between self and other). It is worth saying that for Bhabha the unhomely, often used synonymously with the uncanny, signifies the notion of ambivalence. When Susan washes ashore on the island, she relates her story, her quest for her missing daughter and the mutiny to Cruso, but Cruso asked nothing about her life and instead behaves as if “nodding to himself as though a voice spoke privately inside him that he was listening to.” This voice can be taken as the voice of the other existing inside Cruso. According to Macaskill and Colleran, Cruso is considered “sometimes as an almost- absent presence, sometimes as an almost present absence.” It can be said that there seems to be a feeling of the uncanny that exists within Cruso since it confuses borders between the self and the other or the presence and the absence in him. It might be so simpleto think that Cruso always represent the self or the colonizer. In the scene where Cruso is on the verge of death, he thinks he is in a prison. He is considered to be the colonized rather than the colonizer. The relationship between Susan and Friday can be realized as an example for the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized/subaltern. It can be noted that Lacan‟ concept of „the mirror stage‟ is a principal concept to Bhabha‟s notion of colonial discourse ‟s ambivalence and also the crisis of identity. The question here is to what extent Bhabha‟s perception of this concept can be applied in Susan and Friday relationships. The mirror stage explains the function of stereotyping productions in colonial discourse. As McRobbie states, for Bhabha “The stereotype produces on the part of the colonizer both power and pleasure and also anxiety and defensiveness.” Similarly, Huddart contends,for Bhabha there is “always both an aggressive expression of domination over the other and evidence of narcissistic anxiety about the self.” In Susan-Friday relations, there is an inconsistency between what they say and what they actually do. Susan confrontsher authority, repeatedly claimsthat Friday is no longerher slave buta free man: “Friday was not my slave but Cruso‟s and is a free man now. He cannot even be said to be a servant, so idle is his life. “However, she forcefully boasts of her civilization, claiming her supremacy over Friday: “If Friday is not mine to set free, whose is he? No man can be the slave of a dead hand.” In developing this argument, there is a scene in which Susan, while searching through Foe‟s belongings, comes across some recorders and takes the smallest one and gives it to Friday. Friday masters Foe‟s recorders and repeatedly plays the tune of six notes Susan “associate with the island and Cruso‟s first sickness.” Then, Friday plays it over and over on his little flute. Susan also plays “Friday’s tune, first in unison with him, then in the intervals when he 219 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

was not playing. “But she cannot keep playing the same tune on the flute, connecting it to her sense of superiority over Friday: But alas, just as we cannot exchange forever the same utterances- \"Good day, sir\"- \"Good day\" and believe we are conversing, or perform forever the same motion and call it lovemaking, so it is with music: we cannot forever play the same tune and be content. Or so at least it is with civilized people. In this sense, the creation of a stereotype (civilized/uncivilized) can be interpreted as suggestive of an attempt on Susan‟s part to reassert her superiority over Friday. Friday is viewed through the lens of a negative stereotype. To put it simply, Friday is stereotyped as uncivilized. In the same vein, Durrant argues that Friday‟s lack of the name is a sign of the uncivilized. According to him, Friday is “the negative image of the Enlightenment subject: a sign of the uncivilized, the inhuman, the native, the infant. From the standpoint of Bhabha, these stereotypes create a doubleness-an ambivalence-that simultaneously causes anxiety in the colonizer. What is underlined here is that as Huddart mentions, “The colonizer [Susan] aggressively states his superiority to the colonized [Friday], but is always anxiously contemplating his own identity, which is never quite as stable as his aggression implies.” In spite of her being considered a civilized person, Susan cannot help expressing her doubt about her own identity. Such feeling results in her sense of ambivalence and can be a menace to colonial discourse: “Nothing is left to me but doubt. I am doubt itself. Who is speaking to me? Am I a phantom too? To what order do I belong?” She also defines herself as “a being without substance, a ghost beside the true body of Cruso.” She beseeches Mr. Foe to return to her the substance she has lost: “For though my story gives the truth, it does not give the substance of the truth.” Therefore, in order to find her voice, she needs the story of Friday‟s past life since what is essential to her identity is Friday‟s untold story about how he has lost his tongue. In Comparison with Bhabha, Edward said, to quote Nayar, argues that “the West built its identity in contrast with the East, by constantly drawing on this difference . . . of „us and them”and through inventing a series of binary oppositions and repeating stereotypes, but he does not mention anxiety on the part of the colonizer. To put it in another way, said defines colonial relations in terms of binary oppositions and ignores the psychic level of analysis and ambivalence which has been at the heart of Bhabha‟s theories of colonial discourses. For Bhabha ambivalence of colonial relations is something that disturbs the self-identity of the colonizer. 8.4 SUMMARY  The work of the cultural theorist Homi K. Bhabha has gained wide currency not only within cultural studies but across a number of other disciplines. His concepts of 220 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

hybridization, interstitial space, ambivalence and mimicry, for example, have been widely adopted and adapted.  For Bhabha, mimicry appearsa kind of technique related tocolonialism andto providecolonial domination to others. Mimicry inspiressimilarity uponthe colonized to convert asthe colonizer. Their position will remaindifferent always. Mimicry deconstructs the certainty of colonial dominance and creates an uncertainty in the behaviour of the colonized.  As perBhabha the issue with colonial discourse is,it is in favour of creatingsubjects who have habits and values - that is, 'mimic' the colonizer. Bhabha argues ''colonial discourse is subjected to compelto remain ambivalent asit neverwants colonial subjects to be exact replicationof the colonizers - this appearstoo threatening''. This is the reasonthe colonizer master perceiveshimself, but not-himself, which indicates''double vision,'' so that the masterno longer remains the Subject but also the Object, in whichauthority has no moral purposeto exist. The convictionof hybridity indicates that, the ritualsof colonial authority is to intermingle other texts and discourses resultingin a hybridization that ensures colonial domination.  Texts and translators coming under the purview of translation studies are said to be operationalon the lines ofin-between, third space, a space between, the notion of hybridity, and the threat appears to contain, is mostly evoked, especiallyin the realm of the translation of postcolonial literature.  Under Bhabha's hybridity concept,cultural dimensionslike space and time could no longer be acknowledgedas homogenous or self-reliant.  Cultures are not subjected to remain unite themselves, nor dualistic as seen in the relation at the level of self or with others.In this respect, there is no scope fora Third Space, which can’t be confinedto the self or withthe other, likewise neither to the First or to the Third World, in the same vein neither the master nor the slave. Meaning gets produced more thancultural borders and its prime location isin the Third Space, a sort of 'in-between space' placedbetween incumbent referential systems and antagonisms.  Bhabha's theories on ambivalence, hybridity and mimicry can be widely used in the analysis of various texts.  Foe is an ambivalent text in that is a double reading which emphasizes the feminism and post colonialism of the novel. The novel on the postcolonial feminism can be understood by means of scrutinizing identicalpredicament of Susan Barton which also includesan African slave known asFriday who completes the story of Susan Barton just like she completes the metafiction narrative of Robinson Crusoand exhibither resistance andwon’t permit male dominance for completingher story.  Susan attempts to show herself as a native settler by emulating the island culture while at the same time communicating with her English heritage. 221 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

8.5 KEYWORDS  Culture: It is aboutthe knowledge and characteristics of a specific group of people circumscribing language, cuisine, religion, social habits, arts and music.  Hybridity: Refers to the creation of new transcultural forms within the contact zone produced by colonization.  Ambivalence: The ambiguous way in which colonizer and colonized regard one another.The colonizer mostly considersthe colonized asinferior butexotically other, wherethe colonized contemplatesthe colonizer as enviable andcorrupt.  Mimicry: This comes underan ambivalent strategy in whichsubaltern peoples express their subservience attribute to thepowerful and destabilizethat power by enactingmimicry seems like mockery.  Third World: There is a bleak line of demarcation exists between 'postcolonial' and 'Third World'. Further, there is anassumption regarding the applicationof the term 'postcolonial' is that it specifiesto the colonial societies,once upon a time were colonized. However,this assumption makesdifferences with regards toits implications on somecountries. Generally,'postcolonial' is accustomedto representing 'Third World'. Again,this 'Third World' isaconcept not brought overnight. Rather, it entailsa long history resulting of gradual interaction amongdifferent social, cultural, political, and literary factors.  In-between Space:The indeterminate spaces present in-between subject-positions are admiredas the centreof the disruption and displacement involvinghegemonic colonial narratives of cultural structures as well aspractices.  Postcolonial Reading:Analysing texts using postcolonial theories (the texts can be canonical as well as an act of writing back). 8.6 LEARNING ACTIVITY 1. This unit has already explored how J M Coetzee’s novel Foe has been given a postcolonial reading using Homi Bhabha’s theories. It also happens to be a subversion of Robinson Crusoe by Defoe. Another novel titled Disgrace by Coetzee can also be analysed in a similar manner. ……………………………………………………………………………………………. …………………………………………………………………………………………….. 2. Similarly, canonical texts like The Tempest by Shakespeare and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte can also be given a postcolonial reading. ……………………………………………………………………………………………. …………………………………………………………………………………………….. 222 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

8.7 UNIT END QUESTIONS A. Descriptive Questions Short Questions 1. Write a short note on Homi K Bhabha. 2. What do you understand by Ambivalence? 3. Write a short note on Hybridity. 4. What does Bhabha say about third world spaces? 5. What do you understand by postcolonial reading of texts? Long Questions 1. How do you place Bhabha’s theory of Ambivalence within the larger framework of postcolonial studies? 2. What are the different kinds of ‘Hybridity’? 3. How can J M Coetzee’s novel be given a postcolonial reading? 4. Give a postcolonial reading of the play The Tempest. 5. How can Bhabha’s theories be applied on canonical texts? Give examples. B.Multiple Choice Questions 1. “he separates, places, situates himself, he strays” was said by a. Homi Bhabha b. Edward Said c. J M Coetzee d. Julia Kristeva 2. Who is the author of the novel Wide Sargasso Sea? a. Kiran Desai b. Julia Kristeva c. Jean Rhyss d. George Lamming 3. “Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect\" was said by a. Macaulay b. Winston Churchill c. Lord Dalhousie d. V S Naipaul 223 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

4. Ralph Singh appears in the novel- a. The Inheritance of Loss b. Unaccustomed Earth c. The English Patient d. Mimic Men 5. Susan Barton appears in the novel- a. Disgrace b. Foe c. Robinson Crusoe d. Jane Eyre Answers 1-(d), 2-(c), 3-(a), 4-(d), 5-(b) 8.8 REFERENCES Textbooks  Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture.  Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, eds. (1995) The PostColonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge.  Barker, Francis, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen, eds. (1994) Colonial Discourse, Postcolonial Theory. Manchester [England]; New York: Manchester University Press.  Childs, Peter, ed. (1999) Post-Colonial Theory and English Literature: a Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999.  McClintock, Anne, Aamir Mufti and Ella Shohat, eds. (1997) Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives. Minneapolis, MN and London: Univ. of Minnesota. References  Moore-Gilbert, Bart, Gareth Stanton, and Willy Maley, eds. (1997) Postcolonial Criticism. London. New York.  Longman. Mongia, Padmini, ed. (1996) Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: a Reader. London; New York: Arnold.  Prakash, Gyan, ed. (1995) After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements. Princeton. NJ: Princeton Univ Press. 224 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

 Williams, Patrick and Laura Chrisman, eds. (1993) Colonial Discourse and Post- Colonial Theory: a Reader. Hemel Hempstead, England: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Websites  http://postcolonial-europe.eu/  https://core.ac.uk/  https://www.facinghistory.org/ 225 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

UNIT 9:LOCATIONS OF CULTURE: THE COMMITMENT TO THEORY’ FROM LOCATION OF CULTURE STRUCTURE 9.0 Learning Objectives 9.1 Introduction 9.2 ‘Locations of culture: The Commitment to Theory’ 9.3 Summary 9.4 Keywords 9.5 Learning Activity 9.6 Unit End Questions 9.7 References 9.0 LEARNING OBJECTIVES After studying this unit, student will be able to:  Recognize Homi Bhabha's theory in the realm of postcolonial studies.  Apply the theory in the field of film studies.  Explain the complexity of new and overlapping theories. 9.1 INTRODUCTION In the current conditions of globalization and the hugegrowth of vehicles and means of communication, the dialogue between representatives of different backgrounds is becoming increasingly important. Works of art are created under the direct or indirect influence of verity of cultures and the language used to write those.Especially the cultural interactionis apparentin the works of authors, established in the so-called “third space”. H.K. Bhabha’s theory as introduced in 1994, is on the basis ofthe existence of such space where cultural borders open up to one another,and designof a new hybrid culture that combines their features and atones their differences. 226 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Colonial and post-colonial processes move and mix the various languages of the nations that, in one way or another, affects translatology. The concept of “cultural translation” most significantly gets represented by H.K. Bhabha in a chapter titled “How Newness Enters the World: Postcolonial Postmodern Space Time and the Trials of Cultural Translation” in his main work “The Location of Culture”. Homi Bhabha’s the location of culture is a provocative and illuminating text that will shock the reader into renewed knowledge of his/ her own position in history and cultural discourse. In an effort for revisingthe known and renamingthe postmodern from the postcolonial viewpoint, Bhabha investigates the concerns relatedto culture \"in the realm of the beyond\". As he asserts in the introductory chapter, to dwell on the beyond is \"to be part of a revisionary time,\" to address the present from the perspectiveof a new time frame, a new narrative. What he sees in that revisionary beyond is the \"boundary,\" which in Martin Heidegger's terms, is that from which something begins its presenting. This Heideggerian boundary is ingeniously translated by Bhabha into the liminal areasof cultural hybridity. His whole project is intended to theorize the different moments of hybridity in cultural discourse, and he accomplishes this task by relaunching the poststructuralist theory related tothe sign on postcolonial terrain. Indeed, New French Theory provides Bhabha with a vigorous and productive method for analysing the cultural in betweenness of the postcolonial world. His first chapter, 'The Commitment to Theory,\" can be interpretedas an answer to the following question: \"Are the interests of 'western' theory necessarily collusive with the hegemonic role of the West as a power bloc?\". In this chapter, he deploys the postmodern concept of ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, difference in laying the theoretical grounds for articulating the hybrid colonial subject, the split nation, and the translational/ transnational process of cultural signification. Bhabha begins by using historical and discursive difference to question the binarism of theory and politics between right and left, progressive and reactionary, and bourgeois and radical. For each position, there is a translation processand transference of meaning, and no political position can be determined beforethe act of critical engagement or beyondthe moment of its discursive performance. This can be best illustrated by the constitution meant for the subject. As a gathering of differential moments, the subject has beencharacterized by its multi-positionality. According to Bhabha, a working-class woman's multi-positionality is instantiated by an overlap of class and gender includingracial boundaries and it becomesimpossible to ascertain \"which of her identities is the right oneto determine her political choices\". This becomesan issue of vital importance to contemporary cultural politics. His argument on the hybrid subject echoes what Chantal Mouffe writes in anothercontext: \"within every society, each social agent is inscribed in an arrayof social relations. It is not just confined tosocial relations of production but includesthe social relations, among others, of sex, race, nationality, and vicinity . . . and every social agent is therefore the centre ofmany subject positions and cannot be reduced to only one \". But 227 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Bhabha does not subscribe to the viewof pluralistic counterhegemony implied in Mouffe's position for, as he argues, pluralism begins with difference, which is ultimately sublated and transcended. From his point of view, hybridity has beena historical necessity, a birthmark of postmodern thinking. That is to say, duringcontra modernity, the subject along withthe sign cannot be otherwise than split, ambivalent, and interstitial. Bhabha's major contribution to postcolonial counter discourse is not just meanto open up the colonial sign or subject as difference, but to salvage its emancipatory counterhegemonic potential from the indeterminacy of the sign that \"can be engaged in the postcolonial struggle against dominant relations of power and knowledge\". Here the indeterminacy of the sign is deployed by Bhabha against colonialism in a way that parallels WRITING ON BOUNDARIES Jacques Derrida's attack on logocentrism. Communication of the colonizer withthe colonized is always doubled and the resistance of colonized populations can be located in the doubling space of the indeterminate sign, which renders possible different, subversive interpretations and appropriations of the sign. One exemplary instance of counterhegemonic interpretation is about the translation work onthe Word of God and Man for the Anglo-Indian population, whose Foucauldian application onthe concept of God and New Life, consciously and unconsciously, bends it to their purpose, inverts its meaning, and redirects it against the Western colonizer. What happens at the point of contact between the colonizer and the colonized is the outcomeof the Third Space of enunciation, the hybrid, ambivalent, indeterminate space of signification. Just as Derrida adds a third term, the temporal dimension to the Saussurean sign, so Bhabha constructs a third space, an interstitial locus of meaning, between the indigenous in addition tothe European, the colonizer and the colonized. This newly emergent cultural space proves subversive to both the indigenous and the Western, allowing neither of them cultural nor discursive continuity. In the Western concept of manichean schemes of representation, the colonial Other has always been the colonizer's \"artifact\" or an imaginary projection of identity, which only discloses a lack, an absence, a space of splitting. In Chapter Two, \"Interrogating Identity,\" Bhabha rewrites Fanon's existential conceptof the contradictory identity of the colonial subject in terms of the poststructuralist split sign. The poststructuralist conception of the priority of the signifier foregrounds the uncanny, disturbing Otherness of language, revealing an untranscendable, unsublatable space of doubling. This subaltern, subversive Otherness of language provides Bhabha with a perfect examplefor the colonial subject, that has suffered as much violation and disfiguration as the heterogenous signifier, but in its split nature, \"the depersonalized, dislocated colonial subject [becomes] an incalculable object, quite literally difficult to place\" , as accomplishesthe signifier with its impenetrable materiality. The white-masked black person that comes outin Fanon's Black Skin; White Masks is disturbingly represented as the \"invisible\" man by an Indian poet Adii Jussawalla and the black writer Meiling Jin . The invisible man, as a Hegelian negative element in the hegemonic order, has learnt the \"secret 228 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

art of invisibleness,\" knitting the storiesof minority histories in invisible times and spaces, watching and haunting Western historicism, turning its \"dreams to chaos\". In Bhabha's assessment, subaltern discourse owes its liberatory, oppositional politics to its ambivalent, antagonistic non-western position, which, transgressing \"a signifying limit of space, permits on the very level of discourse, a counter division of objects, usages, meanings, spaces and properties\". The emergence of the split colonial subject not only threatens to defeat the Western Enlightenment historicist representation of the non-Western but deconstructs the unity of the Western nation itself. In Chapter Eight, \"Dissemination,\" Bhabha writes, \"the problem involvesnot aboutthe 'selfhood' of the nation in contrast to the herness of other nations. We are confronted with the nation split within itself, articulating the heterogeneity of its population\". Because of massive postcolonial migrations which have characterized the past four decades, the entire world has become restructured by a global cultural liminality or hybridity. There are no longer homogeneous cultural spaces and times. Once the Western nation-space is penetratingly transformed by ethnic Others, the threat perception from the cultural difference becomes an issueof internal Otherness. In this way too a nation's identity is challenged and crossed by anadditional movement of writing that ensures subvertingthe delusionof national collectivity and coherent.Culture beinga process of signification is criticizedto an unavoidable constant internal splitting. As is the case with Derridean difference, the sign of culture finds only a provisional anchorage to be ceaselessly displaced. In Bhabha's estimation, the liminal structure of national culture accounts for Raymond Williams's dynamic distinction between residual and emergent oppositional cultural practices. The tension between residual and emergent discourses, Bhabha argues, does not give rise to cultural plurality, for culture is no longer a clearly bordered mosaic, but an overlapping of boundaries instead, which constantly calls forth the struggle between the dominant and the emerging. Bhabha rethinks the problem of culture as having two symbiotic, complementary aspects or movements—the pedagogical and the performative. The pedagogical identifies with tradition, the hegemonic discourse, the conservative desire to totalize and stabilize; the performative can be articulated in terms of disruptive cultural praxis, the counter-discourse, the subversive impulse to destabilize. The people of a nation are doubly inscribed as pedagogical entitiesand performative subjects, and their duality as such leads to a counter-narrative against the historicist chronicleof the naturalistic continuity of the community. A national culture is a gathering of various temporalities—modern, colonial, postcolonial, and native which deconstructs \"the rationalist and progressive logics of the 'canonical' nation\". From this complex structure of national culture, the minority discourse emerges whose strategy is supplementary. But where and how does the performance of minority discourse acquire its agency? The most stimulating issue broached in Bhabha's book is the question of agency. In Chapter Nine, 'The Postcolonial and the Postmodern: The Question of Agency,\" Bhabha explores the condition of emergence of 229 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

agency or subjectivity in the liminal space of cultural discourse. His elaboration on agency evolves around the event of meaning outside the sentence. This is where, the postcolonial and the postmodern meet. In the realm of the Derridean sign crisscrossed by time and space, signification is an event that happens on the boundary of differences. This Derridean conception of the sign provides Bhabha with a narrative framework for analysing the subject of cultural difference. Bhabha begins by posing these questions: How does the deconstruction of the sign transform our formulationof the cultural subject and the historical agency of change? What alternative time schemes can we employ to articulate new histories of cultural minorities? Poststructuralist discourse dissolves the unity of the sign and the subject of history, but can we afford to drift ceaselessly with the anomic deferral of meaning? Does indeterminacy of signification have to head into a cul-de-sac of discourse? The object of Bhabha's investigation—cultural liminality or boundary—informs his method of investigation, for he is trying to establish his discursive position in between pure contingency and historical necessity, and between endless deferral of meaning and transparency of the sign. He locates theprobability of agency in the \"time-lag\" or the agonistic or disjunctive space \"between the sentence of predicative syntax and the discontinuous subject of discourse,\" and between \"the lexical and the grammatical dramatized in the liberty of the signifier\". When he poses the question of agency through such an in-between space, he would appear to reproduce Paul de Man's distinction between grammar and rhetoric or generality and particularity. Grammar does not allow any referential meaning to come into being, whereas any particular meaning subverts the logic of grammar. This is a Barthesian transgression momentbeyond the sentence that witnesses the collapsing of all linguistics, linguistics which holds on to grammar, syntax, and logic. It is also a timeof the subject slipping away from the Enlightened order of discourse into an indeterminate space of twilight, where he or she surrenders to a chaotic total flow of words, images, voices, memories outside of the boundaries of the sentence, a flow of sedimented forms of meaning and repressed unconscious set free. According to Roland Barthes, \"The sentence is hierarchical: it implies subjections, subordinations, internal reactions\" (50). The sentence as such provides Bhabha with a conceptual frame for investigating the subject of cultural disparity. The hegemonic discourse of modernity tends to subjugate all its subjects to its historicist syntax of narrative, moulding their consciousness, structuring their feelings and sensory data accordingly. However, the subject of cultural hybridity, postcolonial, diasporic, and migrant in nature, threatens to subvert the hierarchical syntax of modernity. For the diasporic, migrant subject to dwell in the colonizing space of modernity is to be subject to its grammar of communication, its modes of cultural signification, but never totally contained by the space; instead, it is always positioned on the boundary of modernity, at once inside and outside of the sentence of culture. Dwelling on the boundary, as a handicapped ghost ceaselessly displaced in the half-life, half-light of foreign cultures, the enunciation subjectis 230 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

seen to emerge as a discontinuous flow of fragmented memories, images, repressed voices, and forms of thought. Bhabha's ultimate purpose in locating the Barthesian outsidethe- sentence space isaddressing the question of agency. If the liminal locus of cultural difference collapses linguistics, then \"agency [is] the activity of contingency\". But the contingent is not the impossibility of closure or endless deferral of meaning; it is the \"temporality of the indeterminate and the undecidable\", a time-lag in-between the sign. The indeterminate becomes temporally determinate in the contiguous contact between the past and the present, the enunciation and the énoncé, the subject and the intersubjective. In Bhabha's view, the concept of agency as derived from such contingent, contiguous contact is already implicit in the Bakhtinian notion of the sign as a heteroglossia and dialogism. The sign is not used for the first time by the biblical Adam but is \"furrowed with distant and barely audible echoes of changes of speech subjects and dialogic overtones\" (Therefore the agency of the sign, realized outside of the author, is a result of the contiguous contact between the present and the past, the speaker and the discursive Other. Switching to Hannah Arendt's terminology, Bhabha contends that the unpredictabilityof political matters comesfrom the juxtaposedrelation between the individual \"who\" and the intersubjective \"what.\" According to Lacan's genealogy, subjectivity is an effect of intersubjectivity at the level of the sign. The contiguity between sign and symbol is indeterminately articulated in the constantly renewed contingent tension between the subject and the intersubjective. When the sign, deprived of intersubjectivity, returns as a subjectivity—a temporal break in-between the sign—directed towards a revision of questioning of truth, there happens \"a (re)ordering of symbols\" in the realm of social discourse. In conceiving agency as the activity of contingency, Bhabha turns the postmodern indeterminacy into a space of re-inscription and negotiation, for indeterminacy makes insurrectionand revision possible, opening up \"possibilities for other times of cultural meaning\". Bhabha elaborates the concept of the split or liminal subject of cultural difference by using poststructuralist conceptual language, and then constructs a theory of agency for postmodern cultural politics. In his view, the postmodern and the postcolonial become merged or overlapped, not only because the postcolonial has to be postmodern, but because both the postmodern and the postcolonial subject position are characterized by indeterminacy. In the realm of culture, Bhabha argues in Chapter Eleven, \"How Newness Enters the World,\" that the old national boundaries have collapsed, and the centre has disappeared. Culture has become a translational and transnational process of production of meaning. It is in these translational and transnational interstices that new times of meaning, new temporalities, have emerged. Living in the spaceof culture and history, he maintains, the subject of cultural differences assumes the statureof what Walter Benjamin reportsas the constituentof resistance in the process of translation. Further,in translation there are variousinterstitial points of meaning anddetermination of them is also a violation. Likewise,the ambivalent migrant culture, the interstitial minority position, \"dramatizes the 231 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

activity of culture's untranslatability\", therebydiscloses the indeterminate temporalities of the in-between. Bhabha's microstructural analysis of cultural doubling opens up a new horizon for postcolonial studies. In relaunching Derridean difference on postcolonial terrain, a narrative scheme is provided by him to analysethe thus farneglected grey, renaming the colonial subject, ambivalentspace of culture,and the colonial discourse asin-between, and more importantly, mobilizing indeterminacy of colonial discourse into agency of counterhegemonic resistance. In other words, indeterminacy in Bhabha becomes the enabling condition of subaltern subjectivity which is negative and disruptive in nature. The ambivalence of colonial discourse ensuresit possible for the subaltern to interpret the colonial sign outside of the hierarchal syntax of modernity. For all these insights, however, Bhabha's brilliant book is not without serious shortcomings. While focusing exclusively on the uncertainnessof the cultural sign and the ambivalence of colonial discourse, he has regrettably bracketed the political history of colonialism, ignoring the actual imperialist practices of violating cultural systems and socio- economic institutions, and of exploiting populations and their resources. While able to produce rigorous analyses of the mysticaland cultural structures of the diasporic migrant in the postcolonial \"beyond,\" Bhabha's conceptual system falls short of understanding the colonial past of the world. His writing certainly alerts us to the imaginary extent of success of Western colonialism and the neglected facts of the colonized people in possession of colonial power and of the prospectiveagency of resistance to domination made possible by the indeterminacy of the sign. But he fails to address the historical situations in which European colonialists promoted \"the destruction of native legal and cultural systems, and ultimately, the negation of non-European civilizations,\" which \"produce pathological societies, ones that exist in a state of perpetual crisis\". European colonialists destroyed the indigenous mode of production in those pre-capitalist areas, substituting capitalist social relations and values for local ones. Since such changes were intended only to optimize colonialism's exploitation of human and natural resources instead of answering the needs and desires of native peoples, the result was a perpetual conflict between pre-capitalist and capitalist modes of production and in an irresolvable crisis in social ideology and politico-cultural systems. Populations were caught forever in poverty and inferiority while seduced by a tantalizing future of the good life forever beyond their reach. All these historical facts Bhabha's postcolonial discourse makes no efforts to address. Moreover, in renaming the postmodern from the standof the postcolonial, Bhabha conflates the two distinct discourses. This position not only symptomatically betrays the inadequacy of postcolonialism as a counterhegemonic discourse but threatens to subvert its discursive foundations and its historical urgency. Over the last few years since the advent of \"postcolonial,\" there has been no consensus on the actual or professed status of 232 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

postcolonialism, but one feels tempted to agree, although not without reservations, with Gyan Prakash that it is a discourse \"to force a radical rethinking and re-formulation of forms of knowledge and social identities authored and authorized by colonialism and western domination\" . In this view, one can draw a definitive distinction between postcolonialism and postmodernism. Postcolonialism is supposed to designate, first of all, a counter-discourse of the formerly colonized Others against the cultural hegemony of the modern West with all its imperial structures of feeling and knowledge, whereas postmodernism is primarily a counter- discourse against modernism that emerges within modernism itself. Postmodernism, while stringentlychallenging the basicassumptions of Truth, Sign, Order,and subjectivity had been institutionalized since Plato and divertedby modernism have the tendencyto universalize its problematics. Postcolonialism, in order not to be recontained by Western master narratives, has to historicize postmodern thematics, deploying postmodern arguments in the service of decentring world history as well as vindicating and asserting the identities of the formerly colonized. It is also an act of rethinking the history of the world against the inadequacy of the terms and conceptual frames invented by the West. If postcolonialism signifies an attempt by the formerly colonized to re-evaluate, re-rediscover, and reconstruct their own cultures, critiquing and dismantling the manichean allegory of racial oppositions and the imperial structures of feeling and knowledge underpinning colonial cultural productions, then the postcolonial critic has to break out of the postmodern limits of indeterminacy which confines the critical subject to political ambivalence. As Linda Hutcheon has pointed out, the postcolonial needs a distinct political agenda and must put on hold the current postmodern challenges to the coherent, autonomous subject, for it has to strive to assert and affirm a denied or stigmatized subjectivity. But Bhabha's postcolonial project, sophisticated in theorizing yet ambivalent in political orientation, deliberately avoids such constructive, political commitments. Bhabha certainly has made a significant move, in turning to locate liminal or ambivalent areas of culture, to readdress the colonized subject as an exiled gathering of contradictory, indeterminate temporalities. In his analysis, the colonial subject identifies neither with the colonized nor with the colonizer; rather, he/she occupies a liminal position, a third term that negates the colonizer and the colonized at the same time. With its technological and economicsuperiority, neocolonialism is enteringthe third world or pre-capitalist erawith its \"entire system of attitudes, values,morality, institutions, and significantlythe mode of production\". In the pre-capitalist areas and related countries, Neocolonialist invasions used to create new and unforeseen socio-political chaos besidesunrest.Bhabha's postcolonial theory seems to prove impotent for handling neocolonialism, and, ironically, the professed counterhegemonic thrust of postcolonialism appears irretrievably compromised in Bhabha. This is partly why Arif Dirlik, in his recent intervention in the current debate on postcolonialism, says that critics like Bhabha \"have 233 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

engaged in valid criticism of past forms of ideological hegemony, but have had little to say about its contemporary figurations\". In deriving its language and conceptual framework from poststructuralism, Bhabha's postcolonial criticism becomes apolitically immersed in discourse on \"hybridity\" and \"in-betweenness\" outside of global power relations and corresponding political struggles. These blind spots of his theory, however, point not only to the inadequacy of his conceptual framework of analysis, but also to the difficulty of resisting the all-subsuming power of postmodernism itself. If Dirlik is correct in arguing that postcolonialism is a progeny of postmodernism, then we have to acknowledge a global predicament that no counterhegemonic discourse is innocent of complicity in reaffirming postmodernism's hegemony. This inescapable encounter with postmodernism confronts every progressive intellectual with an acute awareness of the necessity of constantly opening, as Bhabha himself emphasizes throughout the location of culture, new spaces of inscription and negotiation, of thinking on renewed boundary. If Bhabha's project purports to take postcolonial discourse beyond what is known, then, to move beyond his \"beyond\" is just what he expects us to do. In the Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha sets forththe interpretativeimperative and consistency at the political levelinvolving the colonialismintellectual project. In a scintillatingseries of essays, he spells outthe reason behind the culture of western modernismshould be replacedform the post-colonial viewpoint.Bhabha converse aboutwriters as divergentas Morrison, Conard, Gordimer,and Walcott. He reexploresthe chroniclesof the Indian Mutiny and the distressingterrain of the Satanic Verses. Again,Bhabha reviewsquestions of identity, national affiliation and social agency.Bydoing so, he givesa postulationof cultural hybridity and the 'translation' of social disparitywhich goes more thanthe counteractionof Self and Other including East and West. While reconsideringquestions of identity and social agency along withnational affiliation, Bhabha brings fortha working, if contentious,theory of cultural hybridity,that goes extra mile thanpastattempts by others. In the Location of Culture, he uses various concepts likemimicry, hybridity, interstice, and liminality to statethat cultural productionremains most productive on maximum occasions, where it is almostambivalent. Expressingin a voice containingintellectual ease with the optimismthat theory itself has the potential tocontribute to realisticpolitical change, where Bhabha has emerged asone of the foremostpost-colonial theorists of this age. This book congregatesmany significant essays ofHomi Bhabha,authorizingfor a scrutinyof his contribution to modernliterary theory. Being a self-described critic of postcolonial period,mostlyin contrast toEdward Said or Gayatri Spivak, Bhabha is probablythe most recognizedfor his theory oncultural hybridity, which he evolvesin “Signs Taken for Wonders” and manyother essays in this collection. Bhabha assertsthat hybridity emanatesfrom 234 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

numeroustypes of colonization, which usherto cultural frictionand interchanges. In an effortto advocatecolonial powerto develop anglicized subjects, “[t]he unearthof thedisavowed aspect is not repressed rather reiteratedas something dissimilar, —a alteration,a hybrid”. This hybrid trace countersboth the striveto fix and curbindigenous cultures and the delusionof cultural seclusionor purity. Thus,his projectadapts poststructuralist challenges to secureor predeterminedidentities, tryingto “rename” postmodernism from the viewpoint of a postcolonial aspect,and allowing uninterruptedattention to the methodswhererace, community, gender,and nationality converge. Further,one of his maincontributions to theories related tocultural production and identity is his review onthese various intersectionsand avoidance oflisting them or giving fillipto one aspect of his evaluationover others. Out of twelve chapters, eight have been already published though a few chapters requiresignificant revisions. All over, Bhabha givesreadings in a non-teleological seriesright from the Enlightenment to the present stage. Mostly,he draws upon psychoanalytic approaches havingspecific attention to Frantz Fanon, where he has given emphasis ondocuments from the British missionaries and Indian colonial administratorsand upon such writers likeSalman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, Nadine Gordimer, , Joseph Conrad, and E. M. Forster. By paraphrasing his arguments leads to risk of simplifying them andrequires translating a fewof hisneologisms used very often. Though the narrative of Bhabha looksopaque at times, yettheir best ofthe terms convey a newer framework todescribecultures and their makings.Bhabha emphasizes culture’s “in-between,” for example,the interstitial spaces within and among cultures and individuals,which don’tmaintain a single position, yetdevelop identities in an under-wayprocess. One ofthe significant stances by Bhava is his Defense of howthe theory couldbe transformative. Comparativelyviewing theory asan élite Occidental production orapolitical as briefedin Chapter One, “The Commitment to Theory,” he arguesthat politics work well with atheory thereby there can’t be any separation betweentheory and politics.He triesto establish a “committed theoretical perspective,” responsiblefor postcolonial positions, whereas eluding“the politics of polarities” that say no tohybrid cultures and histories. The wholecollection stretchesupon these claims, especiallythree essays, —“Sly Civility,” “Articulating the Archaic” and “Signs Taken for Wonders,” —develop the extended discussions of the agency bythe colonized, recommendingthat“in-between” theme of culturecould be implementedin ways that reveal many contradictions within the narratives whichwould uphold a linear and progressive model of the Western history and civilization. In a manner,his deliberationof contact amongcultures revampthe portrayalof progress or modernity, linkedspecificallywith the Enlightenment. Bhabha wades through the atrocitiescommitted intentionally and imposedin the colonies in the role ofthe “contra modernity” that contradictstraditional arguments with regard tosurgingcivility as well 235 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

asdevelopment of modernity. Specifically, “The Postcolonial and the Postmodern” and “By Bread Alone,”encounterteleological genreof history, with a recognition of the involvement by the colonial peopleand connivanceof modernity. His argument is subjected to extension for reviewingdiversemovements within the aspect of modernity and postmodernity and is forrevisingthe significantmodels of both by disclosingtheir stakes as per thecolonial practices. The work by Bhabha suggests aboutthe process related tomaking of modernity and the past is perpetual but to some extent, whereasthat political action ( involves writing theory in his argument), couldbe effective, if not fully.The contentmentof his work andits difficulty presentin his refusal for disentanglingcultures or to endorse assumptions with ease. 9.2 ‘LOCATIONS OF CULTURE: THE COMMITMENT TO THEORY In the \"The Commitment to Theory,\" an essay was collected namelyThe Location of Culture (1994), Homi K. Bhabha arguesthe regrettableand perhaps distortedopposition totheory and politics that certain critics have framedto question the aristocraticand Eurocentrism toprevail postcolonial debates: Througha complicated collection of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Postmodern notions related tomimicry and performance, includingDerridian deconstruction, Bhabha has given encouragement in favour of painstaking rethinking of nationalism, resistance and representationthat primarilystrainsthe \"ambivalence\" or \"hybridity\" that definesthe areaof colonial contestation--a \"liminal\" space, wherecultural dissimilarityarticulate andBhabha argues that it leads toenvisioned\"constructions\" of cultural and national uniqueness. He reviewsconventional notions of national identityand the colonial subject, manifestinghow the twoare shifting and hybrid cultural developments.Further,it provides a solidargument for the significanceof theory, for the lastinglink between theory and politics, and also for the implementationof poststructuralist theory in tacitly anti-imperialist purposeof postcolonial studies. According to Bhabha- “There is a blemishingand self-defeating speculationthat, theory is certainlythe elite language of the privileged people in the society.It is stated that the areaof the academic critic is unavoidablywithin the Euro- centric archives of a hegemonicor neo-colonial West. The Olympian domain of what is wronglyframed'pure theory' is presumedto be isolated eternally from the historical urgencyand misfortunesof the desolatedof the earth. Shouldwe polarizeto polemicize all the time? 236 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

We couldbe fairlyconvinced that in context to the language of international diplomacy, it has been observed that sharp growth has taken place in a new Anglo-American nationalism which highlyarticulates its economic status and military power in legislativeacts that reveala neo-imperialist ignorancefor the freedomand sovereigntyof people and places in the Third World countries. Think of the'backyard' policy of America towards the Caribbean and Latin America countries, the nationalistgore and aristocratic lore of the Britain's Falklands Campaign or the superiority of the American and British battalionsat the timeof the Gulf War. Again, I amconvinced that analogouseconomic and political supremacyhas an intensehegemonic influence on the information directives of the Western world and its famousmedia and its exclusiveinstitutions and academics. The demand further makes a discussion,if the 'new' languages of theoretical criticism(semiotic, deconstructionist, and poststructuralist, among others)lucidlycontemplatesthose geopolitikdivisions and their areasof influence. Whetherthe interests of the 'Western' theory surelyinsidiouswith the hegemonic role of the West beinga power coalition?Is the_ language used intheory purelyanother power tacticof the Western elite having the cultural privilege to inducea discourse of the Other than that of its power- knowledge equation. There are several cultural events in the West likea film festival and conference related to cinema. Take for instance,Third Cinema Conference that took place in Edinburgh no way fails to divulgethe unreasonableinfluence of the West as a cultural forum, in allthe senses of that word: as place for conductingpublic exhibition and discussion, as place for giving judgements, and as a market-place. An Indian film wins the Newcastle Film Festival award for showingthe plight ofpavement-dwellers in Bombaywhich then leads todistribution facilities acrossIndia.Exposing the Bhopal disaster in 1984 went toChannel Four. There isan importantdebate on topics like the politics and theory of Third Cinema finds itselfin Screen got published by the British Film Institute. Similarly,an archival article on the history of neo- traditionalism and the 'popular' in Indian cinema comes to limelightin Framework. There are so manysignificant contributors for the growthof the Third Cinema as principleand practice likeThird World film-makers and critics living inexiles or outsidersin the West often live problematic life andon the 'left' there are margins of a Eurocentric and bourgeois liberal culture. Remarkably,the site of culturally diversecould become the only phantom of an extremelydisciplinary struggle whereit has neither space nor power. Montesquieu's Turkish Despot, Kristeva's China, Barthes's Japan, , Derrida's Nambikwara Indians and Lyotard's Cashinahua pagans are part and parcel of this strategy of confinementwhere the Other text remains consistent isthe discursive horizon of difference but never remains the active agent of expression.The Other is cited, framed, quoted,illuminated and encased in the shot or reverse- 237 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

shot strategy related toa serial enlightenment. Both narrative and the difference in cultural politics become the closed circle tointerpret.The Other forfeitsits potentialfor signifying, for negating,forinitiating its historic desire, for establishing itsinstitutional and oppositional discourse. Bhabha suggeststhat nationalities, identities, and ethnicitiesare dialogic and indeterminate, and they are characterized by “hybridity”—which is one of the key terms. In “The Commitment of Theory,” he interpretshybridity as what “is new, neither the one nor the other,” that comesfrom a “Third Space.” To bolsterthis fluid perceptionof nationality and identity, Bhabha usesa vocabulary containing process-oriented terms, which also includesdialogic, negotiation, translation,in-between, ambivalence and cross-reference. The aimof Bhabha’s theory onhybridity is not so simple formodifying the terms of debate even in postcolonial studies rather for makinga political intervention. Generally,Bhabha claimsthat theory is not differentfrom or in oppositionto political activism, insteadworks hand in glovewith it. Bhabha's elementarytheory is suggesting a need to \"rethink cultural identity.\"For him,the Postcolonial setting is the one wherethere liesan adverserelationship between past\"dominant cultures\" and \"the other.\"The imperialism could be underemphasized andclandestine,but it remainsthere.The theory of Bhabhais to clamoura redesignof this relationship. Again,there is a need of azone wherethe cultural alliancebetween ex-colonizers and nations whichwerecolonized in past surpassesthe historical acrimony between them.\"The Other\" shouldn’tbe discernedas a strengthto remain submissive. However,it shouldn’tthe one within which \"First World capital\" gets translated into \"Third world labour.\" The basiccall that Bhabha constructsis,identity formation mustbe as much broadas possible for the Postcolonial nations. Proclamation of this identity mustoutpaceto what pastimperialistic nationsperceive \"the other\" to be even now.Cultural diversity is given importancehere to presentin its cleanestand freest form. Thisis where the \"commitment to theory\" shouldbe endorsedin the modern setting. One theme that is most important in the writings of Bhabhais the wayrelationship amongnations shouldbe reconfigured for ensuringthe presence ofa \"commitment to theory.\"In this scenario,the theory which is under reviewis whetherwe have managed to evadethe colonial or imperialist ambiencewherebynations remain relate to one another.This is the theme that takes on variousforms but guidesthe article.The notion to explorethe relationship by Bhabha whereinternationalism theory isused for sheerprop up \"First World capital to Third World labour\" formsa part of this analysis. 238 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Bhabha’sthe commitment to theory has become an innovative way to tracethe culminationof colonial control.\"The Other\" has beendowngraded to a condition wherecontrol is being favouredthrough new and in stealthyways. In this regard, Bhabha has cited anexample aboutthe film festival where the Indian film’sentrydepicts the most despondentand destitute assists inenhancingthe condition wherebythe \"First world\" nations realizelittle towardsreticence for ensuringthat messages are exchangedthat suggest aboutnational identities be formed in context to\"Western\" ideals. The interconnectionbetween\"the other\" and thosegetting benefits by this configuration is really a benchmarktheme as far ashis work is concerned. In \"The Commitment to Theory,\" there is an essay collected in The Location of Culture (1994), Homi K. Bhabha statesthe injudiciousand might bethe faulty opposition of theory and politics as framed by certain criticsto inquirythe elitism and Eurocentrism of ongoingpostcolonial debates. One more contribution byBhabha in film-theoretical debates iscontribution towards the Edinburgh “Third Cinema Conference” (1986). In The Commitment to Theory, Bhabha has cautionedagainst rejection of theory by certain participants inthe conference held on political militant cinema: [It is statedthat] theory is certainlythelanguage for the elite who aresocially as well asculturally privileged. It is informedthat the place involvingthe academic critic is inevitably within the Eurocentric archives of an imperialistic or neo-colonial West” (1989). Bhabha firmlyargues against thebinarism of (European) theory opposed to(developing world) politics and activism. According to Bhabha, it is exactlya politics of cultural works(namelycinema) that gives depth to and extends the domain of “politics” in other directions than only social and economic forces. Beyond the simplistic opposition of the West and the developing world, Bhabha draws attention to the complex and uneven interplays between developed and developing worlds. The West has great symbolic capital, as is clear from the example of an Indian film that wins a Western film festival, which then opens up distribution facilities in India. However,it doesn’tmean the West and India have a pure oppositional relationship. Rather, this relationship should be seen as a process of (often agonizing and traumatic) negotiations. In a similar vein, theory and political action are not opposed, but are mutually implicated. First and foremost,this is due tothe theory is not “so simple and a second-order ideological articulationor a verbal symptom of a pre-definedpolitical subject” {ibid.: 115). Rather, the political subject should be takenas a discursive event that emerges in writing and political enunciation. As with the “non-sense” in colonial discourse and the ambivalence of stereotypes, Bhabha emphasizes the fantasmatic ambivalence of the text that infuses the political fact. So, for Bhabha the oppositions between appearance and reality, fantasmatic and factual, theory and practice, are false oppositions. They are always already mutually 239 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

implicated in a process of negotiation. Bhabha hailsthis as the temporality of negotiation in addition to translation. Hence, this temporality, to which I will come backin the subsequentparagraphs with more elaborately, and it has two pertinentimplications as signalled by Bhabha: First, it acceptsthe historical linkagebetween the subject and object containingcritique, as a result,that there couldbe no simplistic and essentialist opposition exists between ideological miscognition and revolutionary truth. … [Secondly,] the function of theory within the political process becomes double-edged. It givesus awareness onour political referents together withpriorities are – the people, class struggle, the community,anti-racism, assertion of anti-imperialist, gender difference,black or third perspective – are actually not presentin certain primordial and naturalistic sense. They also don’t reflect a unitary/ homogeneous political object. Further, they “make sense” sincethey need tobe constructed in the discourses applicable tofeminism/ Marxism/ the Third cinema or whatever, wherethe priority is given to class/ sexuality/ “the new ethnicity” (Stuart Hall) – are always in historical and philosophical tension/ cross-reference with some other objectives. All thesepolitical groups have their presence or compatiblein the discourses they developin contextto some specifiedhistorical as well asphilosophical references. Each political position, Bhabha argues, is always a process of translation and transference of meaning. No position can claim a natural and timeless truth. And it is this emphasis on the construction of discourses that is the main contribution of theory’s vigilance that “never allows a simple identity between the political objective (not object) and its means of representation” (ibid.: 119). Bhabha is thus concerned with the knowledge that emerges in the encounter between theory and politics. Theory cannot claim a meta-position that presents a more general or total view, nor is it an elitist perspective outside the political. Instead,it is an actor in the procedure involved fornegotiation and translation that is not at allclosed, finished or total. The most significanttheoretical concept that Bhabha proposes in The Commitment to Theory is the theme of the Third Space of enunciation, “which speaks forboth the general conditions of language and the particularimplication of the utterance in a performative along withinstitutional strategy whereit can’t in itself be conscious”. This Third Space gives ameaning as an ambivalent process butnot to a fixed reference. Third Space in itself can’t berepresentable; it is not a rightspace, but it happensby the openness of signs, symbols and culture that can be “appropriated, translated, rehistoricised, and read anew” (ibid.: 130). It is a space of hybridity in and between cultural differences. Again, referringto A Passage to India once more, we can realize how accuratelythe confusing and traumatic moment of the echo in the cave that allows for appropriation, first by the hegemonic debateof the English, who want to become clearof this scene by fixing Aziz in the stereotypical place of the sexually uncontrollable Other. But as Adela re-opens the meaning of the mystery of the cave by 240 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

acknowledging that she does not know what happened, new meaning can be assigned to it and the Indian population turns it into a discourse of victory and possible change. With respect to the concernof Third Cinema, Bhabha has made it clear in histheory a new place, which is beyond the oppositions existing between theory and political practice, reflectingthat meaning has its site forstruggle, patheticnegotiation and open mode transference of meaning, precisely in the act of filming and the (theoretical) production of discourses. There is a damaging and self-defeating assumption that theory is necessarily the elite language of the socially and culturally privileged. It has been observedthat the positionof the academic critic is unavoidablyremainsin the Eurocentric documentscontainingan imperialist or neo-colonial West. The irony hereis that Bhabha is — said to be more than any other majorpostcolonial theorist, where he has althoughhis career been proneto charges of Eurocentrism, elitism, bourgeois academic privilege, and an obligationto the principles of European poststructuralism that most of his bittercritics depictas his inadvertentreplication of \"neo-imperial\" or \"neo- colonial\" typesof discursive dominance over the colonized Third World. Througha complicated repositoryof Lacanian psychoanalysis, Postmodern ideaof mimicry includingperformance, and Derridian deconstruction, Bhabha has inspireda hardcorerethinking of nationalism, resistance, and representation that above all stresses the \"ambivalence\" or \"hybridity\" that distinguishesthe site of colonial contestation--a \"liminal\" space wherecultural differences articulate and, as Bhabha makes statement thatproduce imagined \"constructions\" of cultural and national identity. On the other hand,Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak appliesdeconstruction in terms ofa critical tool for rethinking the simplisticbinary opposition between\"colonizer\" and \"colonized\" and to inquiry aboutthe methodological assumptions made bypostcolonial 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 is the supporterof a model of liminality which may be known for dramatizingthe interstitial space connectingtheory and practice,--a liminal spacedoesn’tseparate,rather mediates for their mutual exchange and respectivemeanings. Bhabha states(perhaps for defendinghimself) that the European theoretical frameworks are not definitelyintellectual constructsignoringthe political situation of the bereaved Third World. A critic has no rights tomake a choicebetween \"politics\" and \"theory\" because bothare mutually reciprocal; \"theory,\" on the contrary is an instrument of ideology, that narrates and while doing sodevelops the \"political\" circumstance of the Third World oppression. It can be stated otherwise, like he treats the\"liminal\" space amongnational constituencies, Bhabha has shown immense respect forjuxtaposing \"politics\" and \"theory\" with an aim to identifywhere they overrunand the waythe concernbetween them in successiongenerateshybridity: 241 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Bhabha inthis essay hasaccomplished a lot of things. But the major focus is ontwosubjects and issues: the problemis on discourse involving political and ideological and then the differentiation present between culturaldifference anddiversity. The initial question of Bhabha could be summarized as: \"Are the vested interests of \"Western\" theory is necessarily connivingwith the supremacyrole of the Wester beinga power bloc?\" Again,in this statement, Bhabha makes attemptto uplift the bigoted nature of each system to become irrational.Curiously, Bhabha makes a note ofthe social use of allnotingworth of and has given meaning to allthe fields relyon attention drawnfrom society. How each function is so significantto Bhabha. For the functionality of each suggests meaning and position within a society, culture, nation and so on. They are both forms of discourse and to that extent they produce rather than reflect their objects of reference. The difference between them lies in their operational qualities. The leaflet containsa specific descriptiveand organizational purpose, temporally meant forthe event; the ideology theorymakes it endowmentto those implantedpolitical ideas and principles which in turn notify the right to go for a strike. The latter doesn’tdefend the former; nor it necessarily precedes.It exists alongsidewith it, -the one beingan enabling sectionof the other such asthe recto and verse of a paper sheet,to use a general semiotic analogy in the unusual. This relationshipcontext of politics. The concern here is with the process of \"intervening ideologically', as Stuart Hall describes in the role of \"imagining\" or representation in the practice of politics in his response to the British election of 1987. As per the statement byHall, the ideaof hegemony indicatesabout politics of identifyingthe imaginary. Further,Bhabha illustrates about the politics and how it is related to ideology, thereby he tries tobring out significantpoints forencountering. There lies aspace, where there is presence of discourse and ideology along with language and the representation,where Bhabha would like to focus on. This approach leadsus to an exhilaratingand derelictmomentin the 'recognition' of the bond between politics andtheory; and startlesthe orthodoxdivision between them. Such kind of movement getsinitiated, if we look through the relationship as determined by the rule of repeatable materiality to whichFoucault explains describes it as the methodby which statements from aninstitution could betranslated intothe discourse of another. In this regard,Bhabha makes attemptto conveythe relationship between politics and theory and both are interdependent.Bhabha whilerecollecting todifference by Derrida, summarizesthis relationship as \"the difference of the same.\" This is the aspectBhabha starts elaboratingon the relationship itself. He initiates by going throughthe nature of theory: language, semiotics, ideology,representation, and so on. Theory, \"in a doubly inscribed move, simultaneously seeks to subvert and replace.\" The attempt made in theory is related 242 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

tosupplant, re-present and replace etc. in contextto the thing that strivesto remove. Thoughthis relationship looksobvious, suggesta proposition as requested byBhabha: he desiresus to \"revaluatethe logics behindcausality and determinacy inwhich we acknowledge the 'political' as a form of permutation and strategic action committedto bring social transformation.\" Furthermore, the 'political'theory that drawsattention to is assignedthrough a discerningof the logics in the backdrop of causality: it appears that Bhabha is appealingus to think again that the waywe make approach and cognizant ofpolitical discourse and subject as ascertainedby networkof identificationbent on alterity, heterogeneity and otherness.By revaluatingthese categories as ascertainedand intimately related tohistory, we might noticegrowing relationship between political and ideological discourse as opposed to preceding and following. The textual procedureof political feud initiates a conflictingprocess of understanding the inner motives;the delegateof the discourse becomes, simultaneouslyutterance, inverted and projected object of the altercationturned against itself. ... What is the attention to rhetoric and writing exposesis the discursive ambivalence instrumental inmaking'the political' possible. From this viewpoint,the problematic of political judgment can’tbe represented as an epistemological issueof appearance and reality or it could be theory and practice or word and thing. It can’tbe represented either as a dialectical issueor a symptomatic contradiction that formsthe materiality of the 'real'. In contrast,we getaware of the ambivalent juxtaposition, the dangerous interstitial connectionaccounting the factual and projective aspects.Beyond that, there is acrucial function containingthe textual and the rhetorical. With all these troubling of thesecategories, through the contentionof rethinking the casual logics(understanding the significanceof writing and textuality), that paves way to have anunderstanding that the 'political' beinga calculated form of societal transformation and affection,Bhabha providesa good explanation of the troubling of these categories: Thisto-and-fro and the fort/da of the symbolic process involvingpolitical negotiation formsa politics of address. Its importance is more thanthe unsettling of the essentialism/ logocentrism of a received political normsin the name of afree play of the signifier. Have its origin from this call to rethinking and re-evaluating on thecategories related topolitical and ideological discourse, Bhabha tries to try that these categoriesdepend on alterity and on an agonistic environment of \"cultural difference\" and \"cultural diversity\".It appears that there is an initial difficulty inunderstanding these issues emergingfrom the idea of onebefore another, therebyleads to pre-establishment.Here Bhabhaemphasizes on the fact that majority of the acceptance of these categories relied onan understanding ofone category might negatingor supersedingthe other. Rather,Bhabha urges fora third space: a negotiationhe 243 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

calledearlier in referring to a\"to and fro.\" Bhabha is very critical about for his views ona singleness of terms. Yet,he is in favour ofa heterogeneity of categories. Bhabha has discussedon the terms of cultural difference and cultural diversity in majority part of the essay. He defendsan argument for thinking of things in multiplicity andheterogeneity with regards tothinking of cultures, politics, peoples, histories,and ideology as developing together, at the same timesustaining one another, and allthis operateswithin a specified limitof ambivalence. The focus of concept of cultural difference ison the problem related tothe ambivalence of cultural jurisdiction: the endeavourto dominate in the interest of a cultural supremacy which is itself produced only in the realm of differentiation. Again,it is the authorization needsof culture as a knowledge torefertruth, which is anissue in the concept and moment of expression.The enunciative process gives an introduction ofa split in the performative present aboutcultural identification, which indicates a split between the traditional culturalist demanding for a model, a community, a tradition,a stable system ofreference. It alsoincludes the requisitenegation of the assurance in the expressionof the latestcultural demands, strategies, and meanings in the present political system, as a means of practice to dominate or resist. The major stake here iscultural identification issue in a post-colonial world.Bhabha majorly speaks aboutdealing with representation of historical emergence and enunciation of identity whichin turn simultaneously is created out of a sort of alterity. Still,this creation andenunciation is eligiblein the writing processor textualityprohibitingit from any typeof ability forstanding alone. The relationis the signifier to the signified. Again,the fact that Bhabha inquiries aboutthe notion of provided conceptsagainst created subject and objects at the same time and that tooin the alterity process.Bhabha givesa final clarification oncultural diversity and cultural difference. Supposing cultural diversity comes under thecategory of comparative ethics, then aesthetics or ethnology and cultural difference is a signification process inwhich cultural statements or culturaldifferentiation,discriminate and authorize the production in the areas ofreference, force,applicability and capacity. The focus by Bhabha ison the differentiation between cultural difference and cultural diversity followshis concepts of hybridity, side by sidethis assertion of rethinkingthe logics of causality.Moreover, this rethinking proposesthe factof maintaining a single notion of cultural identityis highlytroublesome when one reviewsthe truth behindpolitical and ideological discourse. 244 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

The interpretation is nota simpleact of communication betweenI and You as designated in the statement. The productionmeaning does require that these two places must be mobilized in the given passage bya Third Space torepresent language and the specific implication in general of the utterance involved a performative and institutional strategy inwhich it can’t'in itself' be conscious. As per the statementby Bhabha, the \"third space\" which is -another way to framethe liminal-- is actually an ambivalent and hybrid spacewhich are mentioned for theirexistence. Put it another way,writing ensuresmediationbetween theory and politics, not sheertheoretical discourse. Rather it countscultural exercises likenovels, music and cinema.As per the suggestion by Jacques Derridain Writing and Difference, writing doesn’tindirectlymake a record of social \"realities\" but precedes and facilitatesthem. It meansthere is a recognition of the differences present between signs and within textual systems. So, Bhabha reappropriates the notion of difference by Derrida to recommendcultural difference and its true representation and negotiation in writing. Having putthe question in advance, i.e.,\"what needsto be done\" regardingthe shakypedagogical legitimacy of postcolonial debates, in the subsequentpassage Bhabha contemplateswriting as a productive means of developing concepts ofthe differences amongcultures. 9.3 SUMMARY  In ‘The Commitment to Theory’ Bhabha indicated that theprocess involved inenunciation there is a clear dividebetween twotypes of time: conversely, the conventionalcultural demand involvinga fixed model, tradition and stable references (mythical time); at the same time,the space tonegotiate cultural demands, resistances (time of undecidability, time of liberation) and changes. .  Bhabha develops this idea of \"double time\" with regardsto the idea of the modern nation in his article 'Dissemination'. Here Bhabha moves from colonial discourse and the imperial situation to the condition of migration and diaspora in postcolonial nation states. It provides further clarity thatBhabha playsin Derridean fashion by usingthe word 'Dissemination', which isin line with his argument wherethe homogeneous portrayalof the modern Western nationgets displaced and \"disseminated\" throughother narratives like from the marginalized, minorities, and migrants.  The nation getsconstructed in twice the time required than normal,it is a double act involved inwriting that dividesthe national subject. There is a homogeneous time of a pedagogy of the nation that narrates and signifies the people as a historical sedimentation. But at the same time the nation has to construct it itself time and again from the patches of daily life in the performance of the narrative in the present. 245 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

 This performative \"introduces a temporality of the ‘in-between\". This double temporality involvingpedagogy includingperformance of the nation leads toa space from whichthe minority discourses emanates. Bhabha wants to give referenceto the Black Audio and Film Collective's Handsworth Songs for indicating thatthe way a filmfunctions as a performative act that leads to the intrigue question onthe pedagogy of the nation.  As per the analysis by Bhabha there are two moments as shown in the film related tothe1985 riotsin the Handsworth district of Birmingham, in England.One is the arrival of the migrant people in the 1950s and another isthe emergence of black British people in diaspora.This is the third cinema film aimingat raising the bar of cultural and political awareness related toBritish minorities.  The archival footage gives the hint of migrants arriving,with much hope whilesinging thenational anthem in English. Thus, the introductory part emphasizes on the pedagogical taleof the sedimented nation and theminority positions of the migrant in contemporary time. The riotimages of the 1985 reflect about thetimes have changed over the years andthe riots containing \"the ghosts of other stories\" have remained hidden within the context of national narrative.  The homogeneous time involving the nation’spedagogyentailsmuch\"effort\" of forgetting, the oblivion stateof the real origins of the narrative from the viewpoint of the Western nation. However, there are exclusions onthe violence of imperialism and\"Others\" role in the makingof the nation. It doesn’t includethe fact onthe history of the nation that took place abroad, i.e., happenings beyond the nation’s territory.  It is nearly impossible fornotreferring to another film showcasingthe ghosts fromvarious stories in the homogenized image of the nation, as per the statement by Michael Haneke's Cache (Hidden; 2005). There is much discussion and comments about the film. However,in contextto the concept by Bhabha on the double time of the nation, it becomes very appealingto see that this film is purelya literal act of exhibiting ghostsand doubling of time as shownin the image.  The television presented and actress working forthe French bourgeois television is deeplydisturbed due tothe video recordings of the house by anonymous people and they are getting thosein their mailbox.It leads to double upthe filmed image of their house with most of them are stealthvideo recordings.For identifying thesender of these images leading to thedisowned history of the Algerian War of Independence.  Bhabha has referredto the evocation of the English weather by Salman Rushdie in the Satanic Verses with an ending note: \"The trouble with the English was … in a word … their weather\". Bhabha has described about the notoriousEnglish weatherwhich is subjected to change always and gives anindication of national difference. 246 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

 It elicitsEngland, but\"revives the memories of its demonic double: the heat and dust of India\" (ibid.). In that vein,Handsworth Songs stiflesLondon. Again,it isobvious that the English rain at the beginning and ending as described inA Passage to India has close encounterwith the heath in India which isan allegory of the double temporal inscriptions of the nation. 9.4 KEYWORDS  National Culture: A gathering of various temporalities—modern, colonial, postcolonial, and native.  Third Space: A postcolonial sociolinguistic theory of identity and community realized through language or education.  Third Cinema: a Latin American film movement that started in the 1960s–70s which decries neocolonialism, the capitalist system, and the Hollywood model of cinema as mere entertainment to make money.  Difference: Both a difference and an act of deferring, to characterize the way in which linguistic meaning is created rather than given; coined by Jacques Derrida.  Dissemi Nation: Coined by Bhabha, meaning ‘nation is never one’. 9.5 LEARNING ACTIVITY 1. The Colonial stereotypes could be analysed in the films Chocolat and Tabu using Bhabha’s theories. ……………………………………………………………………………………………. ……………………………………………………………………………………… 2. Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh questions the notion of borders and exclusivity when it comes to nation building. ……………………………………………………………………………………………. …………………………………………………………………………………………….. 9.6 UNIT END QUESTIONS A. Descriptive Questions Short Questions 1. What do you understand by Third Space? 2. How does Bhabha use Lacan’s and Derrida’s theory? 3. What is deconstruction? 247 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

4. What is national culture? 5. How does Bhabha theorize about film studies? Long Questions 1. What is meant by a “third space”? Explore in depth. 2. To what extent could Bhabha’s observations be applied to the study of African- American cultures? 3. Explore how Bhabha analyses the field of film studies using examples from the essay as well as a text of your choice. 4. Analyse Bhabha’s theory in the context of an Indian novel. 5. Analyse Bhabha’s theories in the context of the space of Third Cinema. B.Multiple Choice Questions 1. According to whom is the Notion of hegemony implies a politics of identification of the imaginary? a. Homi Bhabha b. Bill Ashcroft c. Stuart Hall d. Terry Eagleton 2. Who is the author of Satanic Verses? a. Salman Rushdie b. Michael Ondaatje c. V S Naipaul d. Anita Desai 3. Who is the author of A Passage to India? a. E M Forster b. Rudyard Kipling c. Macaulay d. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 4. According to whom, is there is a damaging and self-defeating assumption that, theory is necessarily the elite language of the socially and culturally privileged? a. Gayatri Spivak b. Jacques Derrida c. Homi K Bhabha d. Julia Kristeva 248 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

5. From which theorist has Bhabha referred the word ‘Difference’? a. Jacques Derrida b. Helen Cixous c. Claude Levi Strauss d. Jacques Lacan Answers 1-(c), 2-(a), 3-(a), 4-(c), 5-(a) 9.7 REFERENCES Textbooks  Edgar, Andrew and Peter Sedgwick. (2004) Key Concepts in Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge.  Hawley, John C. (ed.). (2004) Encyclopaedia of Postcolonial Studies. London: Greenwood Press.  Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (1989) The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures. London: Routledge.  Boehmer, Elleke (1995) Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors. Oxford: OUP.  Childs, Peter, and R. J. Patrick Williams (1997) An Introduction To PostColonial Theory. London: Prentice Hall.  Ghandi, Leela (1998) Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. King. References  Bruce (ed) (1996) New National and Post-Colonial Literatures: an Introduction. New York: Clarendon.  Loomba, Ania (1998) Colonialism-postcolonialism. London; New York: Routledge.  McLeod, John (2000) Beginning Postcolonialism. Manchester: Manchester University Press.  Moore-Gilbert, (1997) Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics. London: Verso.  Walder, Dennis (1998) Post-Colonial Literatures in English: History, Language, Theory. Oxford: Blackwell. 249 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

 Young, Robert (2001) Postcolonialism: an Historical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwells. Websites  http://www.postcolonialweb.org/  https://ecumenico.org/  https://www.eckleburg.org/ 250 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)