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Hybridity, Redux

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Deepika Bahri
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Extract

The ensuing remarks on Homi Bhabha's collection of essays The Location of Culture are framed by the following questions: Under what discursive conditions does a text arrive? How do conditions beyond the text determine its reception and circulation? And why is Bhabha routinely associated more with ambivalence, interstice, and liminality than with the ways in which they illuminate problems of race, the archive, history, or the affective bodily subject of history? To focus these ruminations, I will discuss the intervention, impact, and afterlife of The Location of Culture through the concept of hybridity, arguably one of the greatest hits of postcolonial studies and one closely associated with the work of Bhabha. Informed by Mikhail Bakhtin's propositions about hybridity in linguistic utterance; by Sigmund Freud's theories of ambivalence; by Walter Benjamin's discussions of history, event, and language; by Jacques Lacan's discourses on ego, language, and subjectivity; by Michel Foucault's investigations of history, knowledge, and power; and by Jacques Derrida's theories of différance, Bhabha's formulations have gained currency well beyond the humanities. Appropriations of hybridity in globalization discourse, however, often do not honor Bhabha's poststructural politics or its rooting in a complex history of ideas even as the critics of hybridity fail to recognize its inception in archival moments and particular enunciative contexts. Bhabha's work not only poses questions to history in a mode characteristic of deconstruction, it also commences in history in a clearly postcolonial modality. I want to review missed appointments with pressing questions of history and race in the global reception of Bhabha's concept of hybridity, an approach that constitutes an implicit plea for the recognition and reanimation of these questions in contemporary uses of the term hybridity in the discourse of globalization.

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 132 , Issue 1 , January 2017 , pp. 142 - 148
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2017

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