The+Location+of+Culture

//Homi Bhabha,// The Location of Culture //(London: Routledge, 1994), selection on “DissemiNation.”// **Alternative Title:** How writing on nations oversimplifies multiple cultural identities and causes a perception of conflict between a nation’s core at its peripheral communities **1.** **Introduction:** Bhabha asks how it is possible to simultaneously speak of the nation as both an ancient and modern entity. The problem of defining modernity is exemplified in the defining of a nation: the issue of time is not clear. When does a nation start and end? What are the links of a nation with any past, present or future? **2.** **Chapter purpose: To examine perspectives on writing about nations** 3. **Nation as Narrative** – **Time bound:** If you consider that a nation is not a time-bound entity, then a nation necessarily becomes a “narrative.” In other words, how people view the nation is told and retold. Time and events obviously will obviously continue as day becomes night. So a nation cannot simply arise out of modernity, because modernity itself is a social construct. However, Bhabha questions the thesis in Baktin’s analysis of Goethe that a nation arises like a ghost when the common history of a locality of people literally seeing and experiencing life the same way “surmounts” into something specific: “National time becomes concrete and visible in the chronotype of the local, particular, graphic, from beginning to end.” 4. **Nation as Narrative – Complex Time:** But for Bhabha, the idea of a nation as visibly fixed in time and space is difficult. From Freud he gathers the idea of “the uncanny”. The same surmounting of consciousness as in Baktin’s time-and-place-bound nation, but when arising from oppressive circumstances causes a reactive uncertainty and sense of split community self-visualization. From Freud’s assertion of “the uncanny” Bhabha proposes a duality at work in narrating a nation: a duality between a community’s ancient shared history and modern forces of oppression, such as slavery and colonization. The concept of time as a continuum of history culminating in a nation given the right conditions of modernity is thus complicated by parallel community-wide interpretations of events that do not jive with that ongoing common vision. As Bhabha concludes this section: “In the production of the nationa l as narration there is a split between the continuist, accumulative temporality of the pedagogical, and the repetitious, recursive strategy of the performative. It is through this process of splitting that the conceptual ambivalence of modern society becomes the site of writing the nation” (215). 5. **Margins of a Nation**: Using such phrases as Fanon’s “occult instability” (the impossibility of broadly applying the continuist and performative nationhood across a culture) and Kristeva’s “demassification of difference” (the idea of multiple timeframes of identity within a people) Bhabha alludes to the dangers of his earlier proposition of a nation that is at once cumulative (ancient) and modern (reactive/performative). It can be interpreted to mean that the “pedagogical” and performative imaginary processes of community subsume all variants (e.g. race, gender) within a culture. When nations are written in simplified terms, “the disjunctive times of Fanon and Kristeva can be turned into the discourses of emergent cultural identities, within a non-pluralistic politics of difference” (217). Therefore the place of minorities in writing on nations is secondary, and any action by this marginal group interrupts the wholeness of the nation, causing it to reevaluate its integrity.
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