The location of culture by Homi Bhabha

Friday 29 January 2016

Reading: The location of culture by Homi Bhabha

                                                                            Fig.1

Homi K. Bhabha is a Professor of English and American Literature and Language and Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard University.

He is important thinker of post-colonial studies and his key concepts are hybridity, mimicry, difference and ambivalence.

The location of culture by Homi Bhabha was presented to my colleagues by me and a colleague (Arvin).

The presentation started with the question ‘What is National identity’? According to Oxford dictionary National Identity is a sense of a nation as a cohesive whole, as represented by distinctive traditions, culture, and language. Subsequently, we present the key concepts of the book.

What is colonisation?

Colonisation: is an ongoing process of control by which a central system of power dominates the surrounding land and its components (people, animals etc.). The term is derived from the Latin word colere, which means "to inhabit".

What is post-colonialism?

Postcolonialism is the study of the legacy of the era of European, and sometimes American, direct global domination, which ended roughly in the mid-20th century, and the residual political, socio-economic, and psychological effects of that colonial history. For Homi Bhabha the focus is on the politics, emotions and values that exist in the space between the colonizer and the colonized (Bhabha 1994)

What is hybridity?

The word hybrid meaning composed of mixed elements, to describe post- colonial people and experiences. He focus on the collective effects of colonization on peoples and cultures.

According to the book Bhabha for architects, 2010, to understand hybridity is important because it explains the interaction between different groups. Moreover, is a result caused by colonialism and contemporary globalization. It is also a process in which cultural elements change in relation to themselves and to one another.(rearticulation).

Bhabha 2010 believes that neither languages, nor cultures, nor identities are static or homogeneous and mention that cultures, identities and languages can never be full mix but are fragment.

Mimicry- Ambivalence

‘Almost the same but not quite’ Bhabha 1994

Mimicry is based on the Lacanian vision of mimicry as camouflage resulting in colonial ambivalence. Is not question of harmonizing of repression of difference but a form of resemblance that is differs from. Mimicry appears when members of a colonized society imitate and take on the culture of the colonizers.

Bhabha said that mimicry is the metonym of presence.

Almost the same but not quite- “colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable ‘Other’, as a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite” Bhabha, 1994

Bhabha explains ambivalence as a discourse of colonialism that is contradict between the colonisers’ desire itself  repeated in the colonised and the rejection of that repeated other (the translation or the copy) in order to keep their authority. To what extent, the colonisers are also internally in conflict between their wish to repeat themselves in the colonsed and the anxiety of their disappearance as a result of repetition because if the ‘Other’ turns into the same difference is eliminated as are the grounds to claim superiority over it.

Third Space

First space: all forms of direct spatial experience that can be measured and represented (home)

Second space: cognitive processes as well as modes of construction which gives birth of geographical imagination (virtual)

Third space: In this increasingly globalised world, cultures from opposite sides of the globe are crashing and collided with each other and this is creating the third space where people must continuously navigate and articulate their own identities. It is a space in which colonial authority is challenge and hybrid identities are created. Bhabha stresses that it is a site of tension of competing powers and of insurmountable differences.  In this “in-between” space, new cultural identities are formed, reformed, and constantly in a state of becoming. Artists work in “the third space”

The colleague of me (Arvin) chose to show a video of his city Teheran, Iran in order to give as an example of how a city can lose its initial architectural identity due to colonasation and globalization. Link: https://vimeo.com/143320922

Reference:

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location Of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994

Hernández, Felipe. Bhabha For Architects. London: Routledge, 2010

Figures:

Fig1.  http://english.fas.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/homi-bhabha-the-location-of-culture.jpg