Chapter 8 - Said, Bhabha and the Colonized Subject

Summary

Homi K. Bhabha’s intr oduction to his collected essays, The Location of Culture, opens with an apprehension of the moment he is writing from as one marked by disorientation, with the ‘posts’ of postmodernism, postcolonialism and postfeminism on the one hand and the sense of restless movements, a moving back and forth, ‘here and there’, that has unhooked contemporary critical theory from fixed and primary organisational categories, and has produced constellations of ways of being that acknowledge “race, gender, generation, institutional location, geopolitical locale, sexual orientation”.¹ The central proposition established in this opening is the argument that it is “theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, … to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural difference.