Coincidentally I ran across a clipping (NYT 17 Nov) I had filed away in my mestizaje (aka hybridity) materials back in 2001. Subtitle: Do Any of Homi K. Bhabha's Devoted Disciples Know What He's Talking About? Marjorie Perloff, emeritus professor at Stanford said, "he doesn't have anything to say."
So far, I think I do get his central thoughts, at least has he has expressed himself in the Preface and Introduction (and the first part of Chapter 1).
As far as I can make out, it helped me to read his work more like poetry than prose...and I take each page as a poem, letting it evoke a central idea--hybridity.
I had no idea that my own work on mestizaje (Latin American and Mexican cultural blending between the Spanish and Indigenous - and also between Anglo and Mexican in the borderlands) would parallel this so much. I realize there are no new ideas, but the figure I am working with did his writing in the 70s. This is what I see Bhabha saying: Essentially, new peoples and cultures are born at every encounter between 'others'. This cultural space is a location of renewal, liberation, creativity, and power.
Favorite part so far: The prostitute penis pocket poem about religious identity. Who am I?
Enough for now.
2 comments:
He also won an award for the worst academic writing. Wikipedia gives the winning sentence from Location of culture.
I agree: read it as poetry, kind of: poetry is normally better written.
I agree: it is the emergent nature of what comes from the encounter of the hegemonic and the other. Part of what I get as well is the attempt to break the duality of the hegemonic and the other, and the recurssive cycle of dominant and dominated as they push against one another. I'll try to post on chapter one tonight or tomorrow. I am trying to go to school soccer game tonight.
Also, I keep getting distracted by his phrases. Start thinking about them and they send me away from what he was talking about. In a class with R. Bomer we were reading Vygotsky, and Bomer's suggestion when things got tough was to read faster. I think that keeps one from bogging down in the jargon of Bhabha.
Post a Comment