The Dislocations of Cultural Translation

Abstract

The title The Location of Culture suggests that the book's author, Homi K. Bhabha, places an overriding importance on a culture's spatial and geographic situation. Lest Bhabha's readers get too fixated on culture's site and locality, however, the title's emphasis on place is soon qualified by an epigraph from the book's most-cited author, Frantz Fanon, that emphasizes temporality: “The architecture of this work is rooted in the temporal. Every human problem must be considered from the standpoint of time” (qtd. in Bhabha xiv). So, while culture must be located, the architecture of The Location of Culture is rooted in the temporal. The place and time of its moments of production are affirmed throughout its essays with a wealth of contemporary references and opening comments like “In Britain, in the 1980s …” (27). No book of theory is more self-consciously embedded in its own space and time. The Location of Culture, published in 1994, is a very English book, written from within the political, cultural, and intellectual world of the London of the 1980s and early 1990s, in which migrant activists from the Caribbean and South Asia such as Bhabha, Salman Rushdie, and Stuart Hall were challenging the verities of a long-established, socialist, masculinist, English intellectual and political culture. The brilliant innovation of The Location of Culture was to create a new language, a new articulation and understanding of minority positions—which is why the response to it has been so overwhelming, from academics, artists, and many others. The work that went into The Location of Culture was intimately related to Bhabha's own milieu and time: the book is the product of his decennium mirabile in London.