With the Hegel Lecture 2010, held by Homi K. Bhabha, the Dahlem Humanities Center is launching the Open Access publication of the series. In his talk, Bhabha evokes the spirit of Hegel in an attempt to understand contemporary issues of ethical witness, historical memory and the rights and representations of minorities in the cultural sphere. Who is our neighbour today? What does hospitality mean for our times? Why is the recognition of others such an agonizing encounter with (...) the alterity of the self? The lecture examplifies how the “Third Space” - one of the key theories of Postcolonialism - helps us to establish a new understanding of cosmopolitanism and hospitality in a globalized world, based on the right of difference in equality. (shrink)

In times of crisis, when democracies are under threat, our lessons of justice and equality are best learnt from those who are marginalized or oppressed. There could be hope for democracy if responses to the attacks of September 11, for example, were characterized not by blind revenge but by democratic solidarity. To think of democracy in terms of non-realized ideals does not adequately challenge the failures of its promises. ‘Not to respond’ is often a strategic necessity for democratic discourse, which (...) recognizes failure as part of its evolutionist and utopian narrative. The internal dialectic of the unrealized finds in the negative instance of failure a strange moral coherence. Thus it is proposed to consider democracy as something de-realized rather than unrealized. The term ‘de-realized’ places the democratic experience at a distance, in a context not of its making, in order to de-familiarize it and to block its natural or normative reference. The idea is to see the potential of democracy in translation or in an extraterritorial sense. Democracy’s potential lies not in its failure but in its frailty. (shrink)

How can the question of authority, the power and presence of the English, be posed in the interstices of a double inscription? I have no wish to replace an idealist myth—the metaphoric English book—with a historicist one—the colonialist project of English civility. Such a reductive reading would deny what is obvious, that the representation of colonial authority depends less on a universal symbol of English identity than on its productivity as a sign of difference. Yet in my use of “English” (...) there is a “transparency” of reference that registers a certain obvious presence: the Bible translated into Hindi, propagated by Dutch or native catechists, is still the English book; a Polish émigré, deeply influenced by Gustave Flaubert, writing about Africa, produces an English classic. What is there about such a process of visibility and recognition that never fails to be an authoritative acknowledgement without ceasing to be a “spacing between desire and fulfillment, between perpetuation and its recollection … [a] medium [which] has nothing to do with a center” ?This question demands a departure from Derrida’s objectives in “The Double Session”; a turning away from the vicissitudes of interpretation in the mimetic act of reading to the question of the effects of power, the inscription of strategies of individuation and domination in those “dividing practices” which construct the colonial space—a departure from Derrida which is also a return to those moments in his essay when he acknowledges the problematic of “presence” as a certain quality of discursive transparency which he describes as “the production of mere reality-effects” or “the effect of content” or as the problematic relation between the “medium of writing and the determination of each textual unit.” In the rich ruses and rebukes with which he shows up the “false appearance of the present,” Derrida fails to decipher the specific and determinate system of address that is signified by the “effect of content” . It is precisely such a strategy of address—the immediate presence of the English—that engages the questions of authority that I want to raise. When the ocular metaphors of presence refer to the process by which content is fixed as an “effect of the present,” we encounter not plenitude but the structured gaze of power whose objective is authority, whose “subjects” are historical. Homi K. Bhabha is lecturer in English literature and literary theory at the University of Sussex. He is working at present on Power and Spectacle: Colonial Discourse and the English Novel and is commissioning and editing a collection of essays entitled Nation and Narration: Post-structuralism and the Culture of National Identity. He is also writing the introduction to the new English edition of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. (shrink)

In the name of hybridity and of « cultural difference », contrasted here from « cultural diversity », the author proposes a critique of the relativist liberalism which currently justifies the « multiculturalist » policies favoured in the UK, showing how such policies are linked with an ethnocentered form of universalism.

This is a tribute to Ulrich Beck and a rumination on his legacy in work on cosmopolitanism, translation, anxiety, and memory. Historical transitions and symbolic transmissions open up urgent questions about the connection between the structure of collective memory and the system of cosmopolitical thought. Public memory is embedded in an affective matrix of anxiety which is capable of creating the conciliatory conditions of political virtue and of fueling the terror of political passion. The vicious and sudden turn of cosmopolitan (...) memory from reconciliation to revenge is less surprising if anxiety is seen as the translational moment that mediates relations between remembering and forgetting. Anxiety forces the discourse of cosmopolitan memory to confront its own alterity, negotiating a knife-edge balance between sympathy and antipathy. The ethics of cosmopolitanism is an anxious ethics of the past that refuses to die, confronting a future that will not wait to be born. (shrink)

Il saggio evoca lo spirito di Hegel, nel tentativo di comprendere le problematiche contemporanee legate alla testimonianza etica, alla memoria storica, ai diritti e alle rappresentazioni delle minoranze all'interno della sfera culturale. Chi č oggi il nostro vicino? Cosa significa ospitalitÀ di questi tempi? Perché il riconoscimento degli altri diviene spesso un incontro straziante con l'alteritÀ del sé? L'articolo esemplifica come il ‘Terzo Spazio' - uno dei concetti chiave del postcolonialismo - puň aiutarci a costruire una nuova concezione di ospitalitÀ (...) all'interno di un mondo globalizzato e cosmopolita, una concezione che poggia sul diritto alla differenza nell'uguaglianza. (shrink)

Bhabha, Georges Didi-Huberman, David Morgan and Lee Siegel, as well as a series of focused contributions by Yve-Alain Bois, Wendy Doniger, Kenneth Frampton, Martin E. Marty, John Hallmark Neff, Annemarie Schimmel, and Helen Tworkov consider how rapture resonate's both in a cultural context and within the experience of a single human being.

fusion theory challenges efforts to see theory as inhibiting by presenting an approach that is innovative, eclectic, and subtle in order to draw out competing and constellating ideas and opinions. This collected volume of essays examines fusion theory and demonstrates how the theory can be applied to the reading of various works of Indian English novelists.

Homi Bhabha attends to the figure of the postcolonial metropolitan subject-a racialized subject who is not representative of the first world, yet a symbol of the metropolitan sphere. Bhabha describes theirdaily lives as inextricably split or doubled. His analysis cannot account for the agonistic moments when one is caught in not knowing, in focusing attention, and in developing understanding. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology with the openness in the horizon of the gestaltian framework better accounts for such splits as (...) moments on the horizon for becoming and grasping something new. (shrink)

The essay takes up the issue of postcolonial representation in terms of a critique of European modernism that has been symptomatic of much postcolonial theoretical debates in the recent years. It tries to enumerate the epistemic changes within the paradigm of postcolonial theoretical writing that began tentatively with the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978 and has taken a curious postmodern turn in recent years with the writings of Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha. The essay primarily focuses (...) on Bhabha’s concepts of ambivalence and mimicry and his politics of theoretical anarchism that take the representation debate to a newer height vis-à-vis modes of religious nationalism and Freudian psychoanalysis. It is interesting to see how Bhabha locates these within a postmodern paradigm. (shrink)

As chamadas políticas de identidade estão hoje enfatizadas entre os debates educacionais em esfera global-local, reiterando, na luta discursiva, significantes como currículo, cultura, alteridade e diferença. A aposta em termos como diálogo e tolerância não tem sido casual. No Brasil, as demandas da diferença vêm sendo objeto de múltiplas articulações políticas, sobretudo, desde os anos pós-ditadura militar em meio a estratégias e tensões que ressignificam, segundo o contexto, acordos e dissensos. Em jogos de poder, questões circunscritas pela ênfase em raça/ (...) etnia, gênero e sexualidade, principalmente, tem ocupado espaços de discussões. O objetivo deste trabalho, nesse contexto, indubitavelmente conflituoso, é argumentar em defesa da compreensão dos processos híbridos de subjetivação, ampliando espaços para a diferença e para a ambivalência, em vez do enfoque na luta entre opostos com base em sujeitos pré-dados. Assim, distanciando-me da dialética hegeliana, procurei tecer no presente texto um diálogo com o pesquisador indo-britânico Homi Bhabha, bem como algumas das suas bases epistemológicas e filosóficas, cujo escopo teórico e político tem sido reler e ressignificar os debates da diversidade e do multiculturalismo sob a ótica pós-colonial dos fluxos e do hibridismo. Nesse sentido, currículo está longe de ser pensado por limites eficientistas e instrumentais, tal como documento, como grade curricular, como base estrutural. Em uma abordagem não realista, currículo é pensado como uma política cultural, constitutivo pela contingência, entendido como a própria luta pela enunciação do que vem a ser currículo, a qual se dá, inexoravelmente, no terceiro espaço ou nos interstícios, conforme propõe Bhabha. Palavras-chave: currículo. Subjetivação. Política. Diferença. Política cultural. (shrink)

A diferença como valor humano: Ensaio sobre as contribuições do pensamento de Boaventura Sousa Santos, Gilles Deleuze e Homi Bhabha para o Paradigma da Inclusão Resumo: A economia e a particularização marcam a sociedade contemporânea como importantes vetores para a ampliação das desigualdades sociais e produção de variados mecanismos de exclusão social. A diferença é parâmetro para categorizar e apartar pessoas à invisibilidade social. O presente ensaio tem como objetivo o diálogo junto aos autores Boaventura Sousa Santos, Gilles (...) Deleuze e Homi Bhabha e seus respectivos pensamentos como contributores para o entendimento da diferença como valor humano no contexto do paradigma da inclusão. Nos caminhos e entre-lugares da descolonização de nosso ser, é preciso desnaturalizar as barbáries produzidas pelo colonizador e aceitar as diferenças como próprias da espécie humana para a invenção de nossa educação e sociedade.Palavras-chave: Inclusão. Diferença. Educação. Descolonização. Apoio: CNPq DIFFERENCE AS HUMAN VALUE: Essay on the contributions of the thoughts of Boaventura Sousa Santos, Gilles Deleuze and Homi Bhabha to the Inclusion Paradigm: Economics and particularization mark contemporary society as important vectors for widening social inequalities and producing various mechanisms of social exclusion. The difference is a parameter to categorize and separate people to social invisibility. This essay aims to dialogue with the authors Boaventura Sousa Santos, Gilles Deleuze and Homi Bhabha and their respective thoughts as contributors to the understanding of difference as a human value in the context of the inclusion paradigm. In the ways and places between the decolonization of our being, we must denaturalize the barbarism produced by the colonizer and accept the differences as proper to the human species for the invention of our education and society.Keywords: Inclusion. Difference. Education. Decolonization. DIFERENCIA COMO VALOR HUMANO: Ensayo sobre las contribuciones de los pensamientos de Boaventura Sousa Santos, Gilles Deleuze y Homi Bhabha al paradigma de la inclusión Resumen: La economía y la particularización marcan a la sociedad contemporánea como vectores importantes para ampliar las desigualdades sociales y producir diversos mecanismos de exclusión social. La diferencia es un parámetro para clasificar y separar a las personas de la invisibilidad social. Este ensayo tiene como objetivo dialogar con los autores Boaventura Sousa Santos, Gilles Deleuze y Homi Bhabha y sus respectivos pensamientos como contribuyentes a la comprensión de la diferencia como un valor humano en el contexto del paradigma de inclusión. En los modos y lugares entre la descolonización de nuestro ser, debemos desnaturalizar la barbarie producida por el colonizador y aceptar las diferencias como propias de la especie humana para la invención de nuestra educación y sociedad.Palabras clave: Inclusión. Diferencia. Educación. Descolonización. Data de registro: 21/09/2019Data de aceite: 22/07/2020. (shrink)

In this paper, I tried to bring two domains of thought together, namely postcolonial theory and feminist theory, by doing a comparative analysis of the concept of mimicry in the works of Homi K. Bhabha and Luce Irigaray.

Homi Bhabha's attempts to recuperate Frantz Fanon's “black man” as a figure of resistance and subversion have relied on the simple fact of this figure's existence: because the black man's identity is irrevocably divided, Bhabha claims that its mere existence calls the unity of a normative identity into question. This essay broadly questions Bhabha's reading of Fanon by asking exactly how it is that the subject's potential for subversion can be realized in action, and suggests – (...) drawing from Jacques Lacan's work as well from the work of Jean-Paul Sartre – a new model for the figure of Fanon's black man which retains the possibility for a free subjectivity oriented toward resistance. The tacit belief that resistance must arise as a consciously developed response is belied by the suggestion that there are psychic tensions that might produce a subversive subjective orientation involuntarily, spontaneously. (shrink)

This volume examines specifically the contribution of Homi K. Bhabha to the discourse and practice of architecture.

Homi Bhabha brings attention to the figure of the postcolonial metropolitan subject—a third world subject who resides in the first world. Bhabha describes the experiences of the “colonial” subject as ambivalently split. As much as his work is insightful, Bhabha's descriptions of the daily life of postcolonial metropolitan subjects as split and doubled is problematic. His analysis lends only to the possibility of these splittings/doublings as schizophrenically wholly arising. His analysis cannot account for the agonistic moments (...) when the colonial subject is caught in not knowing, and in developing understanding about present circumstances. A framework with an account of context and horizons, such as in phenomenology, can better depict the experiences of the postcolonial metropolitan subject. Maurice Merleau-Ponty follows a gestaltian contact with the world, which advances that the “most basic unit of experience is that of figure-on-a-background.” One perceives the figure/theme because of and within the background/horizon. In this horizonal framework, human experiences are ambiguously open. The openness in the horizon of the gestaltian framework better accounts for the conditions Bhabha refers to as splitting. The ambivalence can be understood not simply as conundrums that defy understanding but as ambiguous moments for expanding, developing, and growing. (shrink)

Homi Bhabha, a postcolonial scholar influenced by the work of Franz Fanon and Edward Said, indicates that identities stimulate a need to negotiate in spaces that result in the remaking of boundaries. There is a call to expose the limitations of the East and the West in an effort to acknowledge the space in-between that interconnects the past traditions and history, with the present and the future. This study applies Homi Bhabha’s theory of hybridity to determine (...) whether the term liturgical is appropriate to describe Kuchipudi Indian classical Hindu dance. Presented are the elements of Kuchipudi dance and liturgical dance, and then contemplative dance is discussed as an appropriate medium in the space of hybridity between Kuchipudi dance and liturgical dance. (shrink)

The escalation of contemporary distress migration has coincided with an intensification of intolerance, xenophobia and nativism precipitating enormous human suffering among the migrant and refugee community. This chapter examines some instances of the growing exclusionary trend in current refugee and migration policy and explores alternative strategic opportunities to enforce the human rights and humanitarian entitlements for distress migrants established by international norms.

-/- Abstract: The present paper investigates the empowering force of hybridity in female diasporant in Bharati Mukherjee’s outstanding novel Jasmine. The novel depicts Jasmine’s journey of transformation from a passive, traditional girl at the mercy of fate in a village in India to an active, modern, and most importantly cross-cultural hybrid woman in America. All through the novel, her identity is transformed in line with shifts in her name from Jyoti to Jasmine to Jazzy to Jane. Accordingly, she stands in-between (...) two cultures, shuttles between identities, welds opposing identities, enters the third space and emerges as a hybrid. The present study in the light of Homi Bhabha's insights seeks to demonstrate that immigrating, experiencing displacement and in-betweenness, and being positioned in the third space pave the way for Jasmine’s becoming a hybrid and being liberated. Besides, the study is to depict by creating a hybrid character, Bharati Mukherjee, the author, alludes to her own very hybridity. -/- . (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the novels of Jean Rhys embody a significant use of myths, which can be interpreted in terms of the postcolonial as a historical category. The paper does not argue that Rhys was invariably a postcolonial writer but that the postcolonial as a category casts light on her work as a novelist. In addition to employing semiotics and postcolonial theory, this paper also enlists Homi Bhabha's appropriation of Lacan as a (...) tool in reading. The postcolonial text that gradually emerges in Rhys's novels is shown to inform the various "semiotic mythologies" that dominate her work as a whole. (shrink)

Homi Bhabha's idea of hybridity is one of postcolonialism's most keenly debated — and most widely misunderstood — concepts. My article provides some elucidation in the increasingly reductive debates over hybridity in postcolonial studies, suggesting that what is commonly overlooked in these debates is hybridity's complex relationship to temporality. I suggest that this relationship is not given the credit it deserves often enough, resulting in skewed discussions of hybridity as simply (and mistakenly) another form of syncretism. In focusing (...) on the `time of hybridity' in the context of a bicultural politics in Aotearoa/New Zealand, I draw renewed attention to hybridity's investment in temporality as that which both enables a postcolonial politics and shifts these politics into the realm of (Levinasian) ethics, creating an as yet largely unexplored phenomenon which Leela Gandhi has referred to, in a fortuitous phrase, as an `ethics of hybridity'. Key Words: biculturalism • ethics • hybridity • Maori • politics • postcolonial • temporality. (shrink)

This article critiques Homi Bhabha's proposal that mimicry, as a transgressive performance of ambivalence, disrupts the colonial violence of the stereotype, and as such, generates emancipatory conditions for postcolonial subjects. I am critical of this naming of mimicry as enabling a possible liberation from colonial violence not only because it fails to address the loss of belonging that significantly marks the experience of being so violated, but also because it seems to intensify this loss in the hybridity and (...) fragmentation that it celebrates. Through the work of María Lugones and Mariana Ortega, I propose a reimagined sense of Sartrean bad faith as one that corrects for this failure. This account of bad faith—as subversive, anticolonial practice—legitimizes my longing for a stability made impossible by the violent ambivalence that pervades both the colonial and postcolonial condition. Lugones's accounts of multiplicity and ontological plurality, as well as Ortega's conception of hometactics, help me argue that this reimagined conception of bad faith ought to be considered productive when it comes to existential strategies that pursue the possibility of free black life. (shrink)