The Location of Culture

by Bhabha; Homi K

• ISBN13: 9780415336390
• ISBN10: 0415336392
• Edition: 2nd
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2004-09-29
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Terry Eagleton once wrote in the Guardian, 'Few post-colonial writers can rival Homi Bhabha in his exhilarated sense of alternative possibilities'. In rethinking questions of identity, social agency and national affiliation, Bhabha provides a working, if controversial, theory of cultural hybridity, one that goes far beyond previous attempts by others. A scholar who writes and teaches about South Asian literature and contemporary art with incredible virtuosity, he discusses writers as diverse as Morrison, Gordimer, and Conrad. In The Location of Culture, Bhabha uses concepts such as mimicry, interstice, hybridity, and liminality to argue that cultural production is always most productive where it is most ambivalent. Speaking in a voice that combines intellectual ease with the belief that theory itself can contribute to practical political change, Bhabha has become one of the leading post-colonial theorists of this era.

Table of Contents

Preface to the Routledge Classics Edition	ix
Acknowledgements	xxvi
Introduction: Locations of culture	1	(27)
The commitment to theory	28	(29)
Interrogating identity: Frantz Fanon and the postcolonial prerogative	57	(37)
The other question: Stereotype, discrimination and the discourse of colonialism	94	(27)
Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse	121	(11)
Sly civility	132	(13)
Signs taken for wonders: Questions of ambivalence and authority under a tree outside Delhi, May 1817	145	(30)
Articulating the archaic: Cultural difference and colonial nonsense	175	(24)
Dissemination: Time, narrative and the margins of the modern nation	199	(46)
The postcolonial and the postmodern: The question of agency	245	(38)
By bread alone: Signs of violence in the mid-nineteenth century	283	(20)
How newness enters the world: Postmodern space, postcolonial times and the trials of cultural translation	303	(35)
Conclusion: `Race', time and the revision of modernity	338	(30)
Notes	368	(29)
Index	397