The Location of Theory: A Discussion with Homi Bhabha

Abstract

On Friday April 30th, 2010, the noted postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha entered into discussion with Alejandro Haber, Yannis Hamilakis and Uzma Rizvi, as part of the opening plenary session of TAG 2010, the Theoretical Archaeology Group conference at Brown University. The session was moderated by Nick Shepherd, and convened by Omur Harmansah on behalf of the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World. The theme for the plenary session was The Location of Theory (a full statement of the theme is given below). Haber, Hamilakis and Rizvi were asked to prepare 1000–2000 word statements in response to the theme. These were circulated in the weeks before TAG2010. Homi Bhabha gave a detailed and thoughtful response, in which he addressed each of the statements, and enlarged on the place and meaning of a project of theory in archaeology. In this issue of Archaeologies, we publish the statements by Haber, Hamilakis and Rizvi, produced in response to the session brief. The outline for the plenary session on The Location of Theory was multi-authored, and was workshopped by a group meeting in the Joukowsky Institute in the months leading up to TAG 2010. The full text of this statement follows: The TAG 2010 meeting at Brown University will open to debate the supposed universal applicability of Archaeological Theory (in the singular), given the emergent reaction and critique from scholars from various localities in the world which have long been generating diverse archaeological practices and theories (in the plural). Given archaeology’s long history and intimate entanglements with imperialist, colonialist and even racist discourses, archaeological practice and theory have always been deeply political as an agent of change in the global scale and within histories of places. In the last few decades, archaeologists and archaeological theorists have been increasingly engaged with tracing the genealogies of the discipline in colonial modernity and reflecting on its powerfully political status in the postcolonial world (e.g. Hamilakis and Duke 2007; Liebmann and Rizvi 2008). Archaeological theory itself, with its theories of the center (such as processualism and postprocessualism) arguably has a globalizing tendency to Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress ( 2012) DOI 10.1007/s11759-012-9199-7