Homi Bhabha’s Contribution and Critics

Abstract

Although Bhabha is critical of the oversimplification of the binaries of East and West and colonizer and colonized in Said’s early work (as both “poles” are hybrid and implicated in each other), their locus of enunciation and intellectual positions can be considered similar as both examine processes that divide, categorize, and dominate the world. However, their approaches differ in focus: while Said focuses on differences and oppositions between colonized and colonizer, Bhabha generally examines points of similarities (Childs and Williams 1996). He combines psychoanalysis and post-structuralism to approach colonial discourse (as the discourse of the colonizer— not referring temporally to all discourse existent during colonization), whose objective he defines as being “to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and inclusion” (Bhabha 1994, 70). Therefore, he suggests that postcolonial critique bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social authority within the modern world order [and that] they formulate their critical revisions around issues of cultural difference, social authority and political discrimination in order to reveal the antagonistic and ambivalent moments within the rationalizations of modernity. (171) KeywordsCultural DifferenceCultural DiversityUneven ForceDegenerate TypeSocial AuthorityThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.