Homi Bhabha (Cultural Theory)

This paper takes as its starting point Homi Bhabha's explanation of culture and diversity in his essay The Location of Culture (1994), in which he denotes cultural meaning as existing in a transitional space between clashing cultures and, associatively, between competing histories. The cultural space to which Bhabha refers offers a path to a reinvention of the hybrid self (and nation) beyond the more restrictive parameters of what Foucault has termed "the inscribed surface of events" (Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" 344) that the body represents. With reference to Bhabha's delineation of spatial awareness and Foucault's observations of power discourse and the body as a site of knowledge and discursion but also as an inhibiting site of colonisation, and in light of previous English-language Malaysian fiction, I will examine the ways in which Tan Twan Eng (1972-) investigates the conundrum of memory and historical inscription, and his textual approach to the vexed questions of self-determinism and postcolonial agency in his novels, The Gift of Rain (2007) and The Garden of the Evening Mists (2012).

Dimasa pandemic seperti sekarang ini semakin banyak yang membuka usaha kuliner, dimasa pandemic ini banyak sekali para pembisnis wisata kuliner harus berlomba lomba untuk membuat sesuatu kuliner yang menarik supaya pembeli tertarik untuk membeli makanannya. Yang dimana salah satunya ada pembisnis kuliner yang memberi nama seblak mewek dan memiliki jargon "yang makan pasti mewek". Yaitu makanan seblak dengan campuran ceker ayam, sosis, dan bakso dan rasa pedas yang sangat gila, makannya tersebut jargon dari makanan ini "yang makan pasti mewek". Tempat makan seblak mewek ini beralamatkan di Jl. Mangun Jaya I, Tambun Selatan. Tempat makan ini buka pada pukul 10:00-21:00 WIB. Menu yang disediakan di tempat makan seblak mewek ini juga banyak variannya, namun yang terkenal di tempat seblak mewek ini rasa yang begitu pedas. Dan tentunya untuk masalah harga seblak mewek ini pun sangat ramah di dompet pelajar, harga yang disediakan seblak mewek ini mulai dari Rp.10.000-20.000 saja yang dimana itu sangat murah dengan rasa seblak yang tidak akan mengecewakan pembelinya. Tempat makan seblak ini tidak hanya memperhatikan soal rasa dari makanan itu sendiri, tempat makan seblak ini pun sangat memperhatikan secara desain tempat makannya, yang sehingga membuat para pembeli yang ingin makan di tempat pun sangat nyaman. Dan juga tempat makan seblak mewek ini pun memiliki 2 lantai, pembeli yang ingin makan di tempat bisa menikmati seblak yang amat sangat pedas ini dilantai 2 dengan pemandangan yang bagus dan juga yang pastinya sejuk. Ini merupakan factor salah satu tempat makan seblak mewek ini sangat amat ramai pengunjung, dengan rasa seblak yang enak dan juga tempat nyaman ini dan harga yang ramah di dompet pelajar menjadi salah satu point penting untuk tempat makan seblak mewek ini. Bagi kalian para pencinta makanan pedas, tempat makan seblak mewek ini harus kalian coba karena selain rasanya yang enak dengan rasa pedasnya yang bias bikin mewek, tempatnya

This paper addresses the issue of cultural identity within Portuguese postcolonial writing in Mozambican Paulina Chiziane’s Niketche: A Tale on Polygamy. With reference to Homi Bhabha’s concepts of the performative and the pedagogical in the production of the nation as narration, it explores Niketche on the levels of national representation and cultural difference. Deriving national identity from variety, Chiziane produces a counter-narrative that, while working against FRELIMO’s state socialism, also reveals the process through which the gendered exotic is produced, exchanged and consumed by the Portuguese metropolitan elite. I investigate how the book transforms the regionally gendered border into an object of imaginative marketing: just as the performative is interwoven with the pedagogical, so too is the language of resistance entangled with the language of commerce. This is particularly explicit in Chiziane’s geographic reformulations of Mozambique, where regional borders are defined based on gendered stereotypical distinctiveness, producing what I term as the book’s ‘bodygraphies’ defining womanhood throughout Mozambique.

Divided into three parts, this book examines the relationship between law and culture from various perspectives, both theoretical and empirical. Part I outlines the framework for further considerations and includes new, innovative conceptualizations of two ideas that are essential to the topic of law and culture: legal culture and customary law. Both of these reappear later in the more empirically oriented chapters of Parts II and III. Part II includes chapters on the relationships between law, customs, and culture, drawing heavily on the tradition and achievements of the anthropology of law and touching on important problems of multiculturalism, legal pluralism, and cultural defense. It focuses on the more intangible meaning of culture, while Part III addresses its more material, tangible aspects and the issue of cultural production, as well as its intersection with law.

This essay traces the history, current state, and potential future of comparative literature. The great expansions have coincided with aspirations for international understanding. The term first emerged after the Napoleonic wars. The field soared in the late 19th century, became a discipline after the Second World War, and experienced its most vigorous growth (of departments and programs) in the U.S. during the Vietnam War.

Comparative literature has always worried its supporters as well as its skeptics. At the same time it has experienced a constant crisis within. In each episode it has responded by enlarging its purview and self-definition. Thus in the late 20th century it transcended the European literatures that had long been its bedrock to embrace East-West literary and cultural relations in ever-broader outward orbits, encompassing eventually first Edward Said's orientalism, then Homi Bhabha's deconstructivist postcolonialism, and finally Gayatri Spivak's eclecticism. The models that served during the extended pax americana seem poorly suited to terrorism, war, and globalization. Supranationalism cannot be lightly readjusted to fit transnationalism. But comparative literature can and will survive, so long as balances persist between theory and practice, so long as interdisciplinarity does not come at the cost of disciplinarity, and so long as the indivisible relationships uniting humanism, humanities, and humaneness are not forgotten. While comparative literature retains its emphases on language-training and critical skills, and while it satisfies desires of students to transcend boundaries culturally, interpretatively, and otherwise, it will not only always remain alive but even often thrive.

I am an American born faith-based Kuchipudi Hindu dancer and educator with Indian ancestry regardless of what I wear.  For the purposes of this article, I focus my attention on a dress narrative to explore an authentic self.  Here, clothing is an artifact that creates an image that provokes a phenomenological experience.  Dress choices become appropriate or inappropriate, religious or anti-religious depending upon the social constructions of culture.  Also, there is a feminist issue that provokes a social construction of “delicate” regardless of what I wear.  The feminist dilemma incites my main question for this discourse.  How can I maintain my authentic self as a faith-based Hindu dancer and educator regardless of my wardrobe?  What is the appropriate attire in a particular setting?  Does clothing provoke a certain phenomenological experience that requires consideration?  What kind of narrative do I write with my wardrobe choice?  Through a self-study that maintains a postcolonial theoretical framework, I propose a postcolonial theory of Cultural Becoming to develop a more authentic sense of self, based on my own lived experience of what it means to be me as a postcolonial educator who is simultaneously Eastern and Western.

تقدم هذه الورقة، قراءة عامة لنشوء النظرية المابعد الكولونيالية، بتركيز خاص على المقاربات النظرية التي قدمها النقاد المابعد الكولونياليون الهنود، وذلك لبلورة فكرة تتوخى ربط الإسهام النظري لمدرسة "دراسات التابع" في السجال الدائر حول إنتاج المعرفة في حقل الدراسات الصومالية، وسنمهّد لمداخلتنا الحديث عن حدود الخطاب المابعد الكولونيالي، وذلك لإعادة خرططة ذلك الخطاب، وكشف "الزمانية" التي تجمع الأسئلة التي يطرحها في مختلف سياقاته الجغرافية، وهو الأمر الذي يسمح لنا بممارسة هذا النوع من التفكير.

Invoking Homi Bhabha’s notion of mimicry as a supplement to Butler’s concept of gender performativity in the third section, I interrogate and theorize the ways in which the definitional contradiction of race (‘‘can be seen’’ versus ‘‘cannot be seen’’) produces race as performative reiteration. While there are two idealized genders under regimes of compulsory heterosexuality,
albeit with a very great power differential between them, there has historically been only one hegemonic and ideal race under racist regimes.6 This difference, I argue, has far-reaching implications, one of which is the need to rethink the desire/identification nexus, a nexus that operates differently in race and in gender. Understanding the particular relationship between desire and identification in the novella also helps us begin to gauge the critical question of disidentification.

The need to produce difference and sameness simultaneously in order to preserve imperial identity is key to Homi K. Bhabha’s discussion of colonial mimicry. In this discussion Bhabha explores the same sense of similarity in difference that the creature crafted in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the prehistoric giants of Geoffrey’s of Monmouth's pseudo history, the Historia regum Britanniae, are subject to: that of being moulded in the image of 'one's Maker', but with inevitable difference. Bhabha argues that colonial mimicry is ‘the desire for a reformed, recognisable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite’,  and that ‘to be Anglocized is emphatically not to be English.’ This process of mimicry, of a re-moulding of the imperial self, is not unlike the moulding of Frankenstein’s creature who is created as a reformed (literally) and recognisable ‘Other’. In the sense of Lacan's extimité, the colonial subject is Anglicized, at once at the inner core of the “Empire”, populating and fuelling its existence, but ultimately a foreign body, having no control over what they call home. The results of this mimicking process can be found in V. S Naipaul’s The Mimic Men, the narrator of which, Kripal (‘Cripple’) Singh, exists within a monstrous state of category crisis, constantly alluding to an uncanny sense that he is shipwrecked upon the island of his birth. This sense of shipwreck rises from the irresponsible reproduction of the colonial project, having produced nation upon nation of colonial subjects who exist in a middle passage of displacement. Postcolonial writers like Naipual write neither from a home - a centre - nor a margin, but from diaspora: the displacement of peoples. In 1982, Salman Rushdie wrote of postcolonial literatures in an article for The Times that ‘the Empire writes back to the Centre’, wittily alluding to the 1980 film, ‘Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back’. As Derek Walcott writes, ‘a disorientation is taking place because the native, the exotic, the victim, the noble savage is looking back, returning a stare’, allowing a re-centering of the gaze . The ‘returning stare’, reminiscent of the creature of Frankenstein, who so eloquently questions a moulding process that makes him, in Bhabha’s words, the ‘subject of a difference that is almost the same but not quite’, becomes a writing back, itself a moulding process. Indeed, postcolonial writers consider it their duty and privilege to solder together the fragmented and marginalized remains of the shipwrecked and mimicked identity of the colonial subject through the validating process of writing, as this dissertation will explore.

THE CONCEPT OF CULTURAL TRANSLATION FROM THE VIEWPOINT OF TRANSLATION STUDIES
A product of postcolonial theory, cultural translation, a term coined around the mid-twentieth century in British Social Anthropology, has recently been in use in a new context. Whilst Translation Studies extends its focus from language level to text, discourse and culture, new common grounds and cooperation opportunities with other disciplines become manifold. The advent and growing use of this new cultural translation however, creates problems that require conceptual refinement between Translation Studies and the ones appropriating the term. Significantly popular among some researchers in the field of Cultural Studies, this term carries with it the potential to conflate different processes such as signification, interpretation, intercultural communication and even cultural transformations and thus leading to ambiguity.
The goal of the present work is to demonstrate that the underlying basis of such confusion arises not as a result of metaphorical uses of the term translation, as commonly postulated, but a failure to notice the synecdochical relation between translation and interpretation. To this end, initially an overview of the historical background which has brought forth the concept of cultural translation is treated. Its reference, scope and mechanism are presented in relation to different academic fields where the term is used. Essential distinctions and similarities are shown between an approach from a Translation Studies perspective and others regarding how translation is conceptualized; followed by an assessment for potential problems that the term cultural translation might cause for Translation Studies itself.

This study focusses on British South Asian diaspora history, specifically diasporic film and its portrayals of class, gender, race, sexuality and generational divide. Using postcolonial and Marxist analytical technique, this research aims to gain insight into way South Asian filmmakers portray their experiences and what this tells researchers about the diasporic community, how these portrayals have changed over time, and how accurately they relay the experiences of the diaspora and are received by audiences. The results are a range of ambiguous hybrid identities and experiences which, whilst authentic, simultaneously reproduce many cultural and class-based stereotypes.

Das Standardlehrbuch zu Postkolonialer Theorie in dritter Auflage.
Diese Einführung erschließt das weite Feld postkolonialer Theoriebildung über eine kritische Debatte der Schriften der drei prominentesten postkolonialen Stimmen – Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak und Homi Bhabha.

Die aktualisierte dritte Auflage unterzieht insbesondere die neuen Schriften Spivaks und Bhabhas einer kritischen Würdigung und erlaubt einen aktuellen Überblick über diese bedeutenden Theoriewerke.

Die dritte Auflage setzt sich zugleich mit den gegenwärtigen Diskussionen um Globalisierung, Religion, Menschenrechte und Dekolonisierung auseinander und gibt einen Überblick über die aktuellen Debatten in den Postcolonial Studies.

Das Standard-Lehrbuch zum Thema Postkoloniale Theorie gibt einen Überblick über die wichtigsten Theorien und Debatten in den Postcolonial Studies und bereitet diese systematisch für das Studium der Kulturwissenschaften auf.

Scholarly debates over immigration and “diaspora” have shifted in recent years to pluralistic approaches of critics such as Bhabha and Hall who argue that the “hybridity” and “in-betweenness” of immigrants’ life might function as a suitable ground for the social and cultural improvement of their life-conditions. Drawing on such ideas, writers of the present article contend that Jhumpa Lahiri presents a double-sided outlook about the “third space” of diasporic life in her stories, while most critics have considered her attitude toward immigration a negative one. We argue that though Lahiri portrays immigrants’ problems in her stories, a meticulous appraisal of her work reveals the fact that she opposes too much insistence on traditional definitions of home and motherland, and instead pays tribute to the fluidity and flexibility of hybrid identity. She foregrounds the efficiency and fertility of the “third space” of diasporic life in several cases in her fiction by giving centrality and priority to those characters that are flexible, renounce the restricting customs of the left motherland, venture experiencing the inexperienced, and consequently can match themselves with their changed social position to achieve the best out of it.

This study endeavors to scrutinize one of the most lucrative animated films of all time the world over, Zootopia (2016). Being a Disney production, the main notions behind the venture come across as innocent. Seemingly the picture depicts the normative flexibility of power in a community, Zootopia; nevertheless, this paper revolves substantially around the movie's depiction of the abject conditions resulting from the inferior's taking over the society (the sheep, the prey, and the colonized) followed by the overthrowing of the lion mayor (the predator and the colonizer). The power dynamics and its hierarchical quality can be analyzed through Homi Bhabha's percepts on post colonialism; identical theories may be applied so as to elaborate on the profound layers of colonizer's normalized ideologies in Zootopia, the ideal utopian community and the movie per se.

This dissertation advocates for a repertoire approach to analysis of language, culture, and identity in postcolonial literature, showcasing the theory by applying it to three francophone postcolonial novels: Une si longue lettre by Mariama Bâ, Les Soleils des indépendances by Ahmadou Kourouma, and Pelourinho by Tierno Monénembo. It begins by applying the sociolinguistic concept of linguistic repertoire to language analysis in the three novels, problematising the mother-tongue ideologies that inform the vast majority of studies previously conducted in the area. It then explores how such a fluid approach to language can complement analysis of culture and identity in postcolonial literature, drawing parallels between the repertoire approach and the theories of Homi Bhabha and Edouard Glissant. The theoretical focus throughout the dissertation is oriented towards asserting the delegitimization of (post)colonial binaries in western academia.

This research reviews Foucault's idea about discourse and power, Said's view about the Orient and Bhabha's perception regarding stereotype. Benefitting from Foucault's ideologies, postcolonial theorists like Edward Said and Homi Bhabha illustrate how colonial discourse circulates. They insist that Western episteme on knowledge, science and understanding has empowered the Occident/ West to control and command the Orient/ East. Said's insight toward Orientalism sheds light on how the occident represent and dominate the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively in the past centuries whose effects are still prevalent. Bhabha builds on Said's work linking Saidian and Foucauldian discursivity. This research illustrates how the discourse of marginalization is presented and how it shapes the postcolonial stereotype. The marginalization is portrayed by the colonial power over colonized nations. This research addresses one of the noticeable postcolonial issues: colonial discourse. It reveals that the representation of Middle Easterners is a continuation of Western accumulations of negative stereotypes and prejudices that are circulated for decades. It provides a detailed debate to describe postcolonial theory and colonial discourse.

Key words: Fragmentation, Racism, the Perfect Identity, Feminist writing, African American, “Living dead”, the Other.

Palabras Clave: Fragmentación, racismo, la identidad perfecta, escritura feminista, afroamerican@, “muerto viviente”, el otro.


Abstract
Funnyhouse highlights the struggle of Sarah whose black skin evinces a lack of identity and a lack of social placement in the dominant society. She projects her self onto various selves who punish and betray her, leading her to reject Blackness and femaleness as well, and eventually commits suicide. An example of extreme violence, it exposes the same conflicts African American women are still faced with. For Sarah, a “living dead” in Balibar´s words, life becomes “worse than death or more difficult to live than death itself and her failed attempt to “fit in” can be considered, in Bhabha´s terms, another form of colonized Other. Despite the media claims that racism is over, we may be facing a new kind of discrimination which relies heavily on the manipulation of ideas. Funnyhouse is still a valid reminder of how much we still need to achieve in terms of truly appreciating diversity among us.

This paper elaborates on the idea of Homi K. Bhabha that teaching English serves as a tool for the colonizing of certain culture. In particularly, Bhabha speaks about the importance of the English book as a sacred commodity fetish that not coercively forces certain culture silently accept the domination of the other culture. However, Fanon develops this idea by saying that language itself serves as a tool of constructing power-relations between Master (the colonizer) and Slave (the native). In sum, this paper will suggest that language itself as a tool of the epistemological domination serves as a powerful mechanism for the colonization of the certain territory combined with economical imperialism, when the possibility of your visibility as a native depends on the studying of the language of the Master.

*UPDATED DRAFT* Recently, Graeco-barbarian antithetical polarities have undergone significant reassessment, with post-colonialist interpretations illuminating mutual cultural developments. The problems of studying spatial and temporal cultural interaction through the lens of competing ethnic groupings - now understood to represent social rather than genetic constructions – is likewise widely recognised. Relations between the Lydian kingdom and the East Greek polis of Miletos have previously been defined by antagonism, as represented in Herodotus' Lydian logos (1.6-94), focusing on conflict between the two. Nevertheless, novel understandings are possible through a close reading of Herodotus' text, focusing on its underlying structure and thematic topoi and reading beyond the literary constructions that pervade Herodotus' process of composition to reveal a complex underlying political and socio-cultural symbiosis. To achieve this, Herodotus' overarching narrative and its contemporary interpretation will be examined, illuminating his account of Lydian aggression and seeking to re-evaluate the scope and purpose of Lydian military activity in Western Anatolia during the Archaic period (c.700-500 B.C.). Furthermore, analysis of the importance of Mermnad patronage at Branchidai-Didyma and other sanctuaries is necessary to understand the competing cultural interfaces between the two polities. Finally, it is essential to reflect on the literary and material evidence for individuals and ideas crossing between the two and their role in furthering our understanding of the multiplicity of omni-directional interactions between Lydia and Miletos. This will facilitate a clearer picture of the temporal reality of political and cultural life in Miletos and Lydia in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, and Herodotus' role in shaping subsequent interpretations and meta-narratives.

The article argues that Mustafa's sexual exploits in England do not reflect a vindictive attitude from a colonized subject, who seeks to castigate the British colonizer, as generally assumed. Drawing on Homi Bhabha's conceptualization of the ambivalence of colonial mimicry as a mode that disrupts authority, Mustafa's violent acts mark his latent desire to be completely westernized as he considers aggression to be part of the colonizer's constituent identity. His aim is not, as often assumed, to retaliate against the colonizer but to seamlessly assimilate with the western world through mimesis, which he manifests as his fellow students call him the "Black Englishman." By examining his education and life through the eyes of others who have known him well and by setting him as the foil of the unnamed narrator, Mustafa comes to represent a slippage in the mimetic discourse of colonial mimicry, a puppet in the hands of English puppeteers.

This paper considers Homi Bhabha's notion of hybridity and a cultural third space in his seminal 1994 work 'The Location of Culture'. It argues that Bhabha's concept of hybridisation is predicated upon the ever-changing location of culture and, most importantly, offers the possibility of repositioning and empowering the marginal voice within mainstream discourse.

Die koloniale Beherrschung stellt ein wirkmächtiges Ereignis solchen Ausmaßes dar, dass es nicht verwundert, dass postkoloniale Studien aktuell zu den einflussreichsten kritischen Interventionen zählen.
Postkoloniale Theorie zielt darauf ab, die verschiedenen Ebenen kolonialer Begegnungen in textlicher, figuraler, räumlicher, historischer, politischer und wirtschaftlicher Perspektive zu analysieren. Der Fokus liegt dabei nie auf einzelnen Regionen oder Disziplinen – vielmehr wird versucht, die sozio-historischen Interdependenzen und Verflechtungen zwischen den Ländern des »Südens« und des »Nordens« herauszuarbeiten.
Gleichwohl widersetzt sich der Begriff »postkolonial« einer exakten Markierung: Weder bezeichnet er einen spezifisch-historischen Zeitraum noch einen konkreten Inhalt oder ein klar bestimmbares politisches Programm.
Diese Einführung eröffnet das weite und dynamische Feld postkolonialer Theoriebildung über eine kritische Debatte der Schriften der drei prominentesten postkolonialen Stimmen – Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak und Homi Bhabha. Die stark überarbeitete und aktualisierte zweite Auflage unterzieht insbesondere die neuen Schriften Spivaks und Bhabhas einer kritischen Würdigung, setzt sich aber auch ausführlich mit den gegenwärtigen Diskussionen um Globalisierung, Religion, Menschenrechte, transnationale Gerechtigkeit, internationales Recht, Entwicklungspolitiken und Dekolonisierung auseinander.


»Mit der ersten Auflage ›Postkoloniale Theorie‹ von María do Mar Castro Varela und Nikita Dhawan ist diese kritische Theorierichtung im deutschsprachigen Raum angekommen. Die komplett überarbeitete und deutlich erweiterte zweite Auflage integriert nun die wichtigsten Weiterentwicklungen postkolonialer Theorie. Sie richtet sich an Einsteiger/-innen und Kenner/-innen postkolonialer Theorie gleichermaßen. Ein Muss für alle, die sich kritisch mit Gesellschaftstheorien beschäftigen.«
(Shalini Randeria, Rektorin, Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, Wien & Professorin, The Graduate Institute, Genf)

»Dies ist eine klare und kompetente Darstellung der Hauptrichtungen postkolonialer Theorie.«
(Anil Bhatti, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi)

The devolution of the struggle for power from the centre to the periphery happens in three mutually dependent levels. First, there are power-allocating narratives made. As Joseph Conrad shows, they legitimise the dominance of the centre over the peripheries by circulating homemade “re-presentations” of the “other.” Second, the “grand narratives” are dismantled into small local ones without simultaneous dismantling of the universal “re-productions” of “the other” already existent within them. Third, the local narratives are taken to the peripheries where they are purged of their generalising “sentimental pretences” of unquestionable authority. It is John Maxwell Coetzee who, in Waiting for the Barbarians, devolves the power struggle to the peripheries to show that in the history of human conquest of the “dark” world “the outside” has been irreplaceable for this is where the authority begins. To avoid Conrad’s “tragic limitation,” he refrains from specifying what that “outside” might be. He leaves it up to the reader to decide.

The field of Postcolonial Studies has been gaining prominence since the
1970s. Some would date its rise in the Western academy from the
publication of Edward Said's influential critique of Western constructions
of the Orient in his 1978 book, Orientalism. The growing currency within
the academy of the term "postcolonial" (sometimes hyphenated) was
consolidated by the appearance in 1989 of The Empire Writes Back:
Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth
Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Since then, the use of cognate terms "Commonwealth" and
"Third World" that were used to describe the literature of Europe's former colonies has
become rarer. Although there is considerable debate over the precise parameters of the
field and the definition of the term "postcolonial," in a very general sense, it is the study
of the interactions between European nations and the societies they colonized in the
modern period. The European empire is said to have held sway over more than 85% of
the rest of the globe by the time of the First World War, having consolidated its control
over several centuries. The sheer extent and duration of the European empire and its
disintegration after the Second World War have led to widespread interest in postcolonial
literature and criticism in our own times.

This discussion addresses colonialism and some of its effects, which are a result of the greed of colonial empires and their forced infiltration on vulnerable countries in the world. There is a particular focus on theories which have arisen through colonial discourse and previous evaluation of colonialism. The argument for this discussion employs Homi K. Bhabha’s theory of the third space of enunciation. Bhabha (2004) utilises ideas on hybridity in colonialism, in order to develop a theory that refers to the generation of a non-representational space, wherein the utterance of culture occurs.

This theory engages with displaced, postcolonial artists Athi-Patra Ruga and Rotimi Fani-Kayode whose works act to demonstrate and perhaps actively validate Bhabha’s third space in practice. It explores how both artists refer themselves to the formulation of subjective, hybrid worlds where they may further address and challenge colonial histories and narratives from a new and entirely distinct dimension. However, for the task it is alone to condense yet explain in enough depth fragments of colonialism, hybridity and the third space, the discussion is restricted by official regulations and experiences limitations in being unable to thoroughly present the full complexity of the worlds articulated by the artists.

In this paper, I claim that the “third space” extends beyond Western hegemonic discourse on identity and self, demonstrating that identity is not a singular and a stable subject but a multiple and fluid one. This article demonstrates that the “third space”, while opening the avenues for pluralities and negotiations, unsettles and problematizes the issues of identity, belonging, and home in Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea. Discussions on why Antoinette’s position as a Creole in Jamaica problematizes her status and identity, and what barriers negate herself and her sense of belonging are central to this research. I further investigate the roles of Western hegemonic presence in Antoinette’s subjectivity, and her sense of liberation and autonomy. Antoinette’s position in a liminal space not only jeopardizes her identity, her longing for home and belonging, but also creates a hybrid identity that emerges in a moment of historical transformation in Jamaican history. Hybridity interrogates and deconstructs the Western hegemonic assumption of stable subjectivity and meaning. Destabilizing the notion of the Self and the Other as envisioned by Western mainstream narratives, hybridity proposes that the Self is constructed by multiple ideologies and multiple discourses. Antoinette’s occupation of a hybrid position in Wide Sargasso Sea dismantles the stable binaries of white/black, colonizer/colonized category of Western discourse and questions identity formation based on the West as the ‘Self’ and the non-West as the ‘Other’ as in Edward Said’s contention in Orientalism.