Abstract
In my paper, which will be structured around the key work of Homi Bhabha, the book “The Location of Culture”, I will explore how Homi Bhabha’s theories have shifted and influenced the discourses and debates around globalisation and migration. Finally I will also illustrate how Bhabha’s work has enabled my own research in the areas of intercultural performance and the hybrid forms of writing that sit between theory and fiction.
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Notes
- 1.
A Journal titled Tricontinental was launched from the Havana Conference. It included contributions from Amilcar Gabral, Franz Fanon, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and Jean Paul Sartre among others (vgl. Young 2003, p. 17).
- 2.
In this paper I use the experience of modernity in the nineteenth century and the corresponding emergence of the European Enlightenment as a formation that also called into existence a form of violent racial ordering and subjugation that justified, via Social Darwinist theories and the practices of Eugenics, ideas of white European racial superiority. These racial classification schema, originally put into practice in the colonies to justify European rule and the ‘civilising’ mission, reached the pinnacle of their destructive and dehumanising capacity in the Holocaust and the implementation of ‘the final solution’ under Hitler. When speaking in this paper about colonially inspired negative racial stereotypes and violent racial subjugation, I am in fact reading colonialism and its aftermath as an extended historical framework that actually couches its most violent manifestation, the Holocaust, within its trajectory. Although Anti-Semitism as a legitimising practice of racial violence has roots that go back in to antiquity, its particular divisions of ‘us’ and ‘them’ are also intricately interwoven with a more contemporary history of colonialism, and as such, represent a particular challenge to academic reconstructions and theory making as well as to historical memory. Here I am taking my lead from Michel Rothberg’s concept of ‘multidirectional memory’ which ‘posits collective memory as partially disengaged from exclusive versions of cultural identity and acknowledges how remembrance both cuts across and binds together diverse spatial, temporal, and cultural sites’ (vgl. Rothberg 2009, p. 11).
- 3.
I have consciously included the ‘gender binary’ in my discussion here because I see it as indivisibly entangled with racial/geographical and temporal binary oppositions. Bhabha is often critiqued for being ‘gender blind’. See “Critiquing Bhabha” later in this essay.
- 4.
Ann Laura Stoler in her book Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule, describes the fear of racial miscegenation as a form of ambivalence that undermined the boundaries separating coloniser from colonised: what did it say about the European superiority when Eurasian “fair-skinned children were running barefoot in native villages?” (Stoler 2002, p. 70).
- 5.
“Monstrosität kennzeichnet hybride Andere, weil sie eine basale Zugehörigkeitsordnung verwirren. Und in dem Maße, in dem die Inszenierung natio-ethno-kultureller Reinheit den Versuch bezeichnet, eine universale Ordnung herzustellen, müssen Unreinheitserscheinungen der Hybridität zutiefst irritieren” (Mecheril 2009, p. 29).
- 6.
“‘Entweder-Oder-Logiken’ oder ‘Einbahnstraßenmodellen’ zu denken, sondern sollte die ‘Dialektik’, die Ambivalenz und die Ungleichzeitigkeit der Globalisierung nachvollziehen können” (cited in Reuter, J., & Villa, P. I. 2010, p. 38).
- 7.
Although Ha sees the potential benefits of hybridity as a new “turn in the social sciences” to break with the homogenising, totalising strategies of European modernity, he is critical of the ‘hype’ surrounding an unquestioned, ‘fetishistic’ celebration and capitalistic reproduction of hybridity as a marketing strategy (Ha 2005, p. 56). I will elaborate on this point in the section ‘Çritiquing Bhabha’.
- 8.
To illustrate this statement Ha, in a subsequent book, provides the example of hybrid HipHop musicians with educated middleclass backgrounds who have to fake Ghetto-stories and a criminal past in order to be perceived as authentic in the eyes of the market driven white audience. The more sexist and violent the lyrics, the more authentically they are perceived, which leads to the oppressive re-inscription of the racially charged stereotype of hyper-sexualised, criminally dangerous, animalistic black man (vgl. Ha 2010, p. 235).
- 9.
Disappearing without a trace is a deliberate, but in the frame of this short consideration perhaps also a necessary simplification. Nevertheless, what I am pointing to here are the historical processes that established a global hierarchy of race and gender that positioned white, European women together with colonised men and women as “existing in a permanently anterior time within modernity” (McClintock 1995, p. 42). Ann McClintock argues that in the Victorian cult of domesticity (which she parallels to the colonial civilising mission): “animals, women and colonised peoples were wrested from their putatively ‘natural’ yet, ironically, ‘unreasonable’ state of ‘savagery’ and induced through the domestic progress narrative into a hierarchical relation to white men.” In other words, women and the colonised, due to their perceived ‘irrational’, ‘emotional’, ‘natural’, ‘embodied’ states, were seen to have not yet progressed to the modern age of the civilised, rational European male who inhabits the top branches of the “family tree of man” (McClintock 1995, p. 42). This visual representation of European male superiority was deployed and consumed at a glance as a ‘panoptic commodity spectacle’ in turn-of-the-century events and texts, such as human exhibits at Universal Expositions, ‘semi-scientific’ textbooks, and postcards (vgl. McClintock 1995, p. 37).
- 10.
See, for example, Walter Mignolo, with his Modernidad Colonidad project that contests the knowledge production of colonial modernity and demands an alternative epistemology that he has called Border Thinking. Similarly, Mexican theorist Enrique Dussel, with his conceptual term Transmodernity, aims to complete the process of decolonisation by critiquing modernity and demanding a new interpretation of it that includes previously excluded minorities and cultures (vgl. Kerner 2012, p. 154 f.; Mignolo 2012).
- 11.
This kind of writing in-between inspired by Barthes and other poststructuralist thinkers emerged in many places, but particularly so in Australia and Canada. Gloria Anzaldúa, a sixth generation Mexicano from Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, best known for Borderlands/Al Frontera: The new Mestiza (1987), writes in a hybrid combination of poetry and prose that she calls “autohistoria-teorïa, a term she coined to describe women-of-color interventions into, and transformations of, traditional western biographical forms” that includes both life story, self-reflection, a blend of memoir, history, storytelling, myth, and other forms of theorising (vgl. Keating 2009, p. 9).
- 12.
- 13.
“…als eher lästige Nabelschau (oder schlimmer; Verknechtung durch die ominöse political correctness)” (Reuter, J., & Villa, P. I. 2010, p. 13).
- 14.
“Wie lassen sich die politischen Effekte der von Bhabha skizzierten Formen der Subversion bestimmen”? (Kerner 2012, p. 163).
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van der Haagen-Wulff, M. (2015). Dancing the In-Between with Homi Bhabha. Becoming Minor as a Resource and Instrument of Postcolonial Migration Research. In: Reuter, J., Mecheril, P. (eds) Schlüsselwerke der Migrationsforschung. Interkulturelle Studien. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-02116-0_23
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