Homi Bhabha
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- This page is about the critical theorist, Homi K. Bhabha. For the physicist, see Homi J. Bhabha.
Homi K. Bhabha (born 1949) is a postcolonial theorist, currently teaching at Harvard University, where he is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and Language.
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[edit] Biography
Bhabha was born into a Parsi family from Mumbai, India. He is an alumnus of St. Mary's High School (ISC,1967-68), Mazagoan, Mumbai . He graduated with a B.A. from the University of Mumbai (Elphinstone College) and a M.A. and D.Phil. from Christ Church, Oxford.
After lecturing in the Department of English at the University of Sussex for over ten years, Bhabha received a senior fellowship at Princeton University where he was also made Old Dominion Visiting Professor. He was Steinberg Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania where he delivered the Richard Wright Lecture Series. At Dartmouth College, Bhabha was a faculty fellow at the School of Criticism and Theory. From 1997 to 2001 he served as Chester D. Tripp Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. In 2001-02, he served as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at University College, London. He has been the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature at Harvard University since 2001.
[edit] Influences
Bhabha's work in postcolonial theory is heavily influenced by poststructuralism, most notably the writings of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault.
[edit] Book summaries
[edit] Nation and Narration (1990)
In Nation and Narration, Bhabha challenges the tendency to treat post-colonial countries as a homogeneous block. This leads, he argues, to the assumption that there is and was a shared identity amongst ex-colonial states. Bhabha argues that all senses of nationhood are narrativized. Bhabha then goes on to identify a level of ambivalence in colonial dominance.
[edit] The Location of Culture (1994)
In Location of Culture, Bhabha advocates for a fundamental realignment of the methodology of cultural analysis in the West away from Western metaphysics toward the "performative" and "enunciatory present"<ref>(1994) The Location of Culture p.178 </ref> Such a shift, he claims, provides a basis for the West to maintain less violent relationships with other cultures rather than relationships of domination and subjugation. In Bhabha's view, the source of the Western compulsion to dominate is due in large part to traditional Western representations of foreign cultures.
Bhabha's argument attacks the Western production and implementation of certain binary oppositions. The opppositions targeted by Bhabha include center/margin, civilized/savage, and enlightened/ignorant. Bhabha proceeds by destabilizing the binaries insofar as the first term of the binary is allowed to unthinkingly dominate the second.
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. According to Bhabha, hybridity and "linguistic multivocality" have the potential to intervene and dislocate the process of domination through the reinterpretation of political discourse.
[edit] Prose Style
Bhabha has been criticized for using indecipherable jargon and dense prose. In 1998 the journal, Philosophy and Literature, awarded Bhabha second prize in its "Bad Writing Competition", which "celebrates bad writing from the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles". Bhabha was awarded the prize for a sentence in his the Location of Culture (Routledge, 1994), which reads:
- If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to “normalize” formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.
The sentence prompted the National Post to ask "Why do so many academics write such gobbledegook? In part, it's snobbery. By writing in a complex language only specialists can understand, they exclude the rest of us. Some of it is mental laziness. These writers haven't worked their own ideas through, but by dressing up weak arguments in bombast and scholarly jargon, they hide the fact that they don't know what they mean, either."<ref>http://www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/Gallery/badwriting.html </ref> In a similar vein the National Review commented, "If Bhabha was capable of explaining his ideas cogently, he would either be teaching at some third-tier community college or he'd be writing for The Nation." [1]
But it would be a mistake to view discussion of Bhabha's prose as confined to middlebrow conservatives; Wittgenstein-biographer and emeritus professor of English at Stanford University, Marjorie Perloff, said that her reaction to Bhabha's appointment at Harvard was one of "dismay", telling the New York Times "He doesn't have anything to say." While Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of media studies at New York University, commented on the meaning of Bhabha's writing: "One could finally argue that there is no there there, beyond the neologisms and latinate buzzwords. Most of the time I don't know what he's talking about."[2]
Some on the Right, such as National Review-contributor Steve Sailer, consider Bhabha a fellow conservative who disguises his departure from the orthodoxy of Postcolonial Studies through his "muddled" prose. According to Sailer "This fabulously rich Parsi from Bombay writes in such a tortured prose style to cover up his commonsensical dissent from the Edward Said-orthodoxy of his field...To Homi Bhabha, it's obvious that colonialism wasn't all bad, and that Said's model of the world is stupid. But he's too smart and too careerist to come out and say it clearly."[3]
[edit] Selected works
[edit] Books by Bhabha
- (1990) Nation and Narration ISBN 0-415-01483-2
- (2000) On Cultural Choice
- (2001) V.S. Naipaul
- (2002) Democracy De-Realized
- (2003) On Writing Rights
- (2003) Making Difference: The Legacy of the Culture Wars
- (2004) Adagio
- (2004) Still Life
- (2004) The Location of Culture (1st edition 1994) ISBN 0-415-05406-0
- (2005) Framing Fanon
- (2006) The Black Savant and the Dark Princess
- (2007) Measure of Dwelling
- (2007) The Right to Narrate
[edit] Books edited by Bhabha
- (1984) Identity: The Real Me, ed. ISBN 0-905263-46-4
- (2002) Cosmopolitanism (Millennial Quartet.), ed.
- (2005) Edward Said Continuing the Conversation, ed. ISBN 0-226-53203-8
[edit] Journal articles & book chapters
- (1986) Black Skin, White Masks, with Frantz Fanon & C.L. Markham
- (1998) Modernity, Culture, and The Jew, with Laura Marcus & Bryan Cheyette
- (2004) The Third World of Theory, with Henry Louis Gates
- (2006) Without Boundary, with Fereshteh Daftari & Orhan Pamuk
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
[edit] Notes
<references/>de:Homi K. Bhabha it:Homi K. Bhabha he:הומי באבא ja:ホミ・K・バーバ
