Bhabha. Selections
“the discourses of ‘minorities’ within the geopolitical divisions of East and West, North and South” (245). How does Bhabha mean “minorities”? In the American sense, or more in the sense of political minorities, i.e., dissenters? Or does Bhabha mean it as a minority group, as in the “Muslim minority in India”?
“There is even a growing conviction that the affective experience of social marginality—as it emerges in non-canonical cultural forms—transforms our critical strategies. It forces us to confront the concept of culture outside objects d’arts or beyond the canonization of the ‘idea’ of aesthetics, to engage with culture as an uneven, incomplete production of meaning and value, often composed of incommensurable demands and practices, produced in the act of social survival. Culture reaches out to create a symbolic textuality, to give the alienating everyday an aura of selfhood, a promise of pleasure” (247).
“Culture is transnational because such spatial histories of displacement—now accompanied by the territorial ambitions of ‘global’ media technologies—make the question of how culture signifies, or what is signified by culture, a rather complex issue” (247).
Does the concept of postcolonialism apply to people of color in the US? The ruling power that either enticed or forced them here is still in power.
“The transnational dimension of cultural transformation—migration, Diaspora, displacement, relocation—makes the process of cultural translation a complex form of signification. The natural(ized), unifying discourse of ‘nation’, ‘peoples’, or authentic ‘folk’ tradition, those embedded myths of culture’s particularity, cannot be readily referenced. The great, though, unsettling, advantage of this position is that it makes you increasingly aware of the construction of culture and the invention of tradition” (247-248).
So there is the positive side to the transnational dimension of culture: the socially constructed aspects of society is highly visible. Also, if everything is contrived it is, therefore, textual. It is written and re-written every minute of every day to stay current, to stay as the operating schema in peoples’ lives. Sorta like the dominant hegemony in Marxist theory.
“The very language of cultural community needs to be rethought from a postcolonial perspective, in a move similar to the profound shift in the language of sexuality, the self and cultural community, effected by feminists in the 1970s and the gay community in the 1980s” (251). So, here, is Bhabha arguing for an idea of community not based in the contrived folk culture often cited as the “real” culture of a subaltern people? If so, what are the rallying points for a people if he doesn’t invoke strategic essentialism?
lo·go·cen·trism ˌloʊ
gəˈsɛntrɪzəm – Show Spelled Pronunciation[loh-guh-sen-triz-uhm] Pronunciation Key – Show IPA Pronunciation
–noun
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1. |
a method of literary analysis in which words and language are regarded as a fundamental expression of external reality, excluding nonlinguistic factors such as historical context. |
Logocentrism fails in postmodernity, and this isn’t where Bhabha critic comes from; he’s using “the subaltern history of the margins of modernity” (252).
“Minimal rationality, as the activity of articulation embodied in the language metaphor, alters the subject of culture from and epistemological function to an enunciative practice…the enunciative attempts repeatedly to reinscreibe the political claim to cultural priority hierarchy (high/low, ours/theirs) in the social institution of the signifying activity…The enunciative is a more dialogic process that attempts to track displacements and realignments that are the effects of cultural antagonisms and articulations—subverting the rationale of the hegemonic moment and relocating alternative, hybrid sites of cultural negotiation” ( 254-255).
Stereotomy
Ste`re*ot”o*my\, n. [Stereo- + Gr. ? to cut: cf. F. st['e]r['e]otomie.] The science or art of cutting solids into certain figures or sections, as arches, and the like; especially, the art of stonecutting.
By 262 Bhabha is calling for a type disruption of time, of memory, of history. Actually, he seems to be saying this is the way of the world in the postcolonial sense. There is no transcendental signified or universal truth; however, there is change and difference and multiple creations and recreations of experiential reality. Since there are multiple versions, there is only the performative—there is no center or central “realness” that makes experiential the same for every person. Normalcy is a performance everyone consents to so as to make sense of that specific place and time in a particular cultural milieu.
Is it possible to conceive of historical agency in that disjunctive, indeterminate moment of discourse outside the sentence? Is the whole thing no more than a theoretical fantasy that reduces any form of political critique to daydream? (262).
Go back over 263.
cat·a·chre·sis: The misapplication of a word or phrase, as the use of blatant to mean “flagrant.”
By 265 he seems to be speaking about something close to a border existence; like A and the idea of identity for Chicanos/as in ETC’s work. In this way the “splitting of the time lag outside the sentence” is the ability to stand outside culture conceived as epistemic (remember here, too, that culture is contrived and therefore a text, so this means that standing outside the sentence means standing outside a culture’s episteme). This means you can see culture as enunciative, and you can speak as a subject since you are calling out, interrogating, the culture. “[T]he agent, constituted in the subject’s return, is in the dialogic position of calculation, negotiation, interrogation” (266).
in·ter·sub·jec·tive 
Audio Help ˌɪntərsəbˈdʒɛktɪv – Show Spelled Pronunciation[in-ter-suhb-jek-tiv] Pronunciation Key – Show IPA Pronunciation
–adjective Philosophy.
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comprehensible to, relating to, or used by a number of persons, as a concept or language. |
I’m a bit confused by the closing. From my perspective, Bhabha seems to be saying that Foucault’s ideas concerning the dehistoricization of Man and the dehistoricization of peoples in different places is polemic. It seems they would somehow work together; the universalization of Western Europeans led to the mental gymnastics that could sustain the racism and xenophobia needed to justify this erasure of the “others’” histories.
