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Antony Easthope
To cite this article: Antony Easthope (1998) Bhabha, hybridity and identity, Textual Practice, 12:2,
341-348, DOI: 10.1080/09502369808582312
The words 'Orient' and 'Occident' originate simply in the Latin words for
sun rising (oriens) and sun setting (occidens). In his ground-breaking work
Orientalism (1978), Edward Said shows how a massive and ancient
discursive regime took these essentially mobile positions and fixed them in
relation to an imaginary centre in Europe. The 'Orient' became an object
which could be known by a European subject as it could not know itself.
Homi Bhabha made a crucial and necessary intervention when he
suggested a limitation in Said's account, notably that 'There is always
. . . the suggestion that colonial power and discourse is possessed entirely
by the coloniser'.1 In response Bhabha proposed that the effort of
Orientalizing must always fail since the colonial subject is constructed in
'a repertoire of conflictual positions'; these render him or her 'the site of
both fixity and fantasy'2 in a process which cannot but be uneven, divided,
incomplete, and therefore potentially resistant.
Bhabha discusses a number of mechanisms which threaten colonial
domination, including fetishism, paranoia, sly civility, paranoia, drawing
Robert Young's criticism that 'the restless seriality'3 of Bhabha's over-
lapping theorizations leaves 'the problem of agency' up in the air.4 I would
emphasize that Bhabha's project founds itself as an adversarial discourse,
that it comes about by playing off ambivalence of various kinds against a
fixity he rightly ascribes to Said's conceptualization.
In his collection of essays, The Location of Culture? Bhabha claims
there is a space 'in-between the designations of identity' and that 'this
interstitial passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of
a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or
imposed hierarchy' (p. 4).
Hybridity can have three meanings - in terms of biology, ethnicity
and culture. In its etymology it meant the offspring of a tame sow and a
wild boar, hybrida, and this genetic component provides the first meaning.
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Antony Easthope Bhabha, hybridity and identity
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Textual Practice
If you wanted you could show that what these affirm depends upon
what they leave marginalized and unspoken. Like Derrida, Bhabha
seeks to protect himself from this gesture by wrapping himself in an
elaborate style but if it makes sense it can also be undone, as can any
text (including of course this present one).
2 If Bhabha's hybridity-seeking mission can be as easily applied to any
text which affirms a truth, one has to ask in what sense does it apply
specifically to colonialist texts? By substituting 'hybridity' for 'difference'
Bhabha makes us think we are solidly on the ground of race, ethnicity
and colonial identity, but if the form of his argument is ubiquitous,
what special purchase does it have on the particular content of colonial-
ism? (On this, Bhabha is a long way from Said, whose analysis of
colonialism at every point indicates a historically specific content.)
3 Is the resistance which Bhabha detects in the attempt of colonialist
discourse a sign of the active resistance of the colonized? Or is the
ambivalence in fact an effect which could be detected in any text but
has been tracked down in the colonialist text by Bhabha himself? (This
query is posed by Robert Young.)12
4 Problems follow for Bhabha, as they do for Derrida, from the presence/
difference binary. Derrida offers no adequate account of presence; in
space it appears as spatial identity, in time it appears as a making
present, in discourse it manifests itself in the privileging of one side of
a binary which thus aims to efface its denigrated other. For Derrida,
presence, like metaphysics, is inescapable, but what causes it, what
gives it substance, what are its conditions of existence, Derrida does not
explain. Presence, it seems, exists only to vanish into difference, like
those subatomic particles which are present only for the millionth of a
second in which they are photographed and have no other existence.13
Such difficulties carry over into Homi Bhabha. Like Derrida he
refuses a notion of subjectivity which would explain, substantiate and
make sense of the identity hybridity undermines. His account of
identity is single and unitary — that is, he does not discriminate
between relative identity and absolute identity, between a coherence
which is necessary for anyone to be a speaking subject and a coherence
which in addition affirms itself as its own origin - the Cartesian or
transcendental ego (that distinction is introduced by Lacan when the
first essay of the English Edits describes how human beings must try to
achieve a stability as a speaking subject not possible for other species,
and then in the second essay, on aggressivity, attacks the 'narcissistic
tyranny' in which 'the promotion of the ego today culminates').14
OK, so Bhabha lacks an adequate account of presence: why does this
matter? It matters because his failure to relativize identity means he is
stuck with a notion of absolute identity which he is opposed to; he
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Antony Easthope Bhabha, hybridity and identity
Notes
1 Homi Bhabha, 'Difference, discrimination and the discourse of colonialism',
in Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen and Diana Loxley, ed. The
Politics of Theory (Essex: University of Essex, 1983), p. 200. This essay is not
reprinted in The Location of Culture.
2 Ibid., p. 204.
3 Robert Young, White Mythologies (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 147.
4 Ibid., p. 149.
5 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge,
1994); all page references are to this edition.
6 See Robert Young, 'Hybridity and diaspora', in Colonial Desire (London:
Routledge, 1995).
7 John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith, Introduction, in Hutchinson and
Smith, ed. Ethnicity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 4.
8 Alan Sinfield, 'Diaspora and hybridity: queer identities and the ethnicity
model', Textual Practice, 10(2) (summer 1996), p. 278.
9 At a price: as Ania Loomba points out, the colonial subject in Bhabha's work
'is remarkably free of gender, class, caste or other distinctions'; see 'Over-
worlding the "Third World"', Oxford Literary Review, 13 (1991), p. 182.
10 Jacques Derrida, 'Différance', in Writing and Difference, trans Alan Bass
(Brighton: Harvester, 1982), p. 22.
11 'Interstice' is borrowed from Levinas; see p. 15 and fn. p. 258.
12 See Young, White Mythologies, pp. 149-52.
13 In Logics of Disintegration (London: Verso, 1987) Peter Dews comments on
the corresponding speech/ writing opposition that Derrida 'is unable to
explain how the experience of meaning is able to occur at all' and offers 'no
alternative between the illusory immediacy of speech and the endless delays of
writing' (pp. 98-9).
14 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, trans Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), p. 27.
15 A debate such as that provoked recently by David Miller, for example, who
makes a strong and detailed argument that, in the conditions of modernity,
nation tepresents the most positive drive towards democracy actually on offer;
see On Nationality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
16 See Ernesto Laclau, "The time is out of joint"', Diacritics, 23(2) (summer
1995), p. 93: 'Precisely because of the undecidability inherent in constitutive
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