Homi Bhabha and the Psychoanalytic Truth

Abstract

Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture is one of the foundational texts of postcolonial theory. Despite its significance for the field and the originality of its methods, few critics have remarked on it as a response to the specific problems of using psychoanalysis for anti-colonial and postcolonial ends which critics like Fanon and Nandy have already tried and failed to solve. Fanon offered us a way of understanding the colonized through a sociologically and politically situated psychoanalytic portrait. Nandy expanded the psychological view of colonialism to include the colonizers and also explored the ways in which the history of the colony could be represented more faithfully through certain psychoanalytic concepts. Bhabha builds on top of both of these projects in order to connect the history of colonialism with the history of Western modernity itself. In this chapter, I examine the specifically psychoanalytic aspect of Bhabha’s work in relation to the themes and issues I have explored in the work of Fanon and Nandy. Reading Bhabha in this context clarifies why he uses psychoanalysis and how he uses it to solve certain problems in writing about the colony and postcolonial critique. Having considered the specifically psychoanalytic aspect of Bhabha’s work, we can then begin to evaluate the potential and the pitfalls of his theoretical solutions more precisely.