Journal of African Cultural Studies

Vol. 21, No. 1, June 2009, 2332

Homi Bhabhas Third Space and African identity

Fetson Kalua
University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa
This paper suggests a way of looking at postcolonial African identity as fluid, relational and
always in flux. I explain this fluidity of identity by making a connection between Victor
Turners concept of liminality and Homi Bhabhas innovative formulation and application
of the same idea in his text, The Location of Culture. The connection is important because,
in espousing the vocabulary of liminality which gestures toward fluidity and allows
particular spaces of meaning to emerge, both Turner and Bhabha are involved in what
Stuart Hall calls thinking at or beyond the limit (1996, 259), a thinking on the margins. I
conclude the paper by arguing that it is this thinking on the margins that sheds light on
African identity, especially as the continent gradually becomes part of the postmodern and
globalized world.

1. Theorising liminality within postcolonialism

In The Location of Culture (2004), Homi Bhabha develops Victor Turners key idea of
liminality, together with its related symbolic registers (such as rite of passage, limen, communitas, and antistructure) that are located in ritual, to explain the vexed, non-dualistic and shifting
nature of identity in the modern (largely postcolonial) world. According to Homi Bhabha, the
postcolonial perspective, which in his formulation is fronted by a Turnerian symbolic model
of liminal social drama, is not just idle speculation, nor mere reflection, nor just a form of
criticism, but a process of celebrating dynamic spaces of cultural change characterized by
shifting identities. For Bhabha, theory, in this case liminality, is a response to and a real
moment of intervention in peoples daily lives as they try to grapple with the cosmic eddies
of change around them. Because of such change, the notion of culture is not defined holistically
but as enunciation.
Initially used by Van Gennep in his tripartite taxonomy of separation; margin (or limen);
and reaggregation (Turner 1992, 48) which he saw as characteristic of all rites of passage, liminality, or limen, simply means the middle state, a stage of transition, or a border1 zone. Intrigued
by Genneps formulation, Victor Turner adopted the middle notion of transition, what Gloria
Anzaldua also calls nepantla, meaning a consciousness of borderlands,2 seeing it as central in
explaining the nature and importance of various forms of space that can be identified in
human cultural experience. What prompted Turner to arrogate a cultural significance to liminality, these culturally invisible zones, is the contrapuntal3 character and transformative nature of
ritual, which necessitates the emergence of those border spaces. Turner writes:
Here I would like to repeat the Orphic level of ritual, which transcends both structure and antistructure, the oppositions. . .become irrelevant, a new arbitrariness appears in the relation between
signifier and signified things cease to signify other things, for everything is, the Saussurean
significative dualism yields to a basal non-dualism where signifier and signified dissolve into
indiscriminable existence (1992, 157)

Email: kaluafa@unisa.ac.za

ISSN 1369-6815 print/ISSN 1469-9346 online

# 2009 Journal of African Cultural Studies
DOI: 10.1080/13696810902986417
http://www.informaworld.com

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Fetson Kalua

Of interest in Turners description of ritual in the above quotation is the special emphasis he
places on the Orphic stage, a boundary qualified by the verb is, which carries the polysemous
magic that does away with the idea of structure, giving ritual liminality an ontological, ethical
and symbolic potency that exults in arbitrariness, defies all reification and produces multiple,
connotative signifieds.4 As Turner puts it, [a]ction and intersubjectivity dominate ritual
(1992, 66). Intersubjectivity here refers to a dynamic process whose symbolic significance
can be inferred from the observable behaviour of the initiates as they respond and adapt to
internal as well as external changes in their environment.
To be sure, Turners notion of liminality or the threshold is often graspable at a most rarefied
level of cognition as a dialectical process that lacks a constitutive materiality, the dialectic
without transcendence (Bhabha 1996, 199). Homi Bhabha argues for the non-constitutive
space of liminality, in particular Turners deployment and introduction of a dialogic antagonism,
paradoxes and contradictions, as implied in the following words and clauses: is, arbitrariness,
dissolve into indiscriminable existence all of which designate the status of in-betweenness,
and contextualize it in the light of colonial discourse.
Victor Turner arrived at the concept of liminality in his extensive and far-reaching study of
the rituals or rites of passage practised by the Ndembu people of Central Africa. In the course of
examining these rites which indicate and constitute transitions between states (1967, 93),
Turner observed that the entire ritual process revolves around one term: limen or liminality
the preeminence and dominance of the median or in-between stage during which time ritual
initiates go through a period of disorientation and inhabit new forms of identity at any point
in time, slipping in and out of determinate identity at will and generally displaying protean,
ambiguous and sometimes diametrically opposed attributes such as alienation, confusion, amorphousness, ambiguity and/or individuality, among other things. More importantly, Turner was
fascinated by the multivocal character of socio-cultural symbols within the Ndembu ritual, a
phenomenon which led him to proclaim that he had rediscovered Sigmund Freud.5 By this,
Turner meant that the conscious and unconscious behaviours of those initiates involved in
Ndembu ritual showed the kinds of signification comparable to Freuds symbolic interpretation
of dreams. Like Freuds dreams and their multivocal nature, Turner perceived Ndembu ritual
(with symbols that lend themselves to multireferentiality, polysemy, cultural sublimation and
projection) as nothing but the operations of Freuds psychoanalytic idea of the unconscious.
For Turner, therefore, liminality transcends structure and becomes post-Cartesian.
Differently put, as a culturally busy middle stage and the pivot of action, the limen becomes a
kind of displacement resulting in the slippage of signification that is celebrated in the articulation of difference (Bhabha 2004, 235). It is this slippage that makes it virtually impossible for
cultural meaning to move freely and completely between any two or more systems of cultural
differentiation, and consequently, the truth of culture must always be called into question. For
Turner, the attributes of liminality or of liminal or liminoid personae (threshold people) are
necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the
network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space (Turner
1969, 95). Thus liminality is that moment when the past has lost its grip and the future has
not yet taken definite shape (Turner 1992, 133). While it may be a moment of restlessness,
unleashed by an unknowable future, it certainly is also an expanded and ex-centric site of
experience and empowerment (Bhabha 2004, 6) revealed in the possibilities for dissonance
and dissidence in the life of the initiate. In other words, liminality represents a phase in the
life of a subject an individual, a community, or a nation which belies any attempts at
settled assumptions about its identity because of inherent contradictions and instabilities that
often come to haunt the subject. It is the transformative nature of ritual which left Turner
enamoured of the idea of liminality.

Journal of African Cultural Studies

25

In his seminal text, The Location of Culture (2004), Homi Bhabha draws on, adheres to and
appropriates Victor Turners idea of liminality, articulating it as a disembodied and protean form
of signification or meaning-making which derives from and is a consequence of the postcolonial
condition or colonial discourse and related, interlocking poststructuralist/postmodernist
discourses.
The border space which Turner describes as the place when things cease to signify other
things, for everything is becomes the boundary which Homi Bhabha calls the realm of the
beyond (2004, 1); the beyond as a contested space, the borderlines of the present(2004, 7);
the moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference
and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion. For there is a sense
of disorientation, a disturbance of direction, in the beyond(2004, 2). Like an irruption, Homi
Bhabhas idea of liminality as the beyond is not an overdetermined space but one loaded with
ambiguity; it represents an act of unleashing that post-dialectical moment when people reject
structures and hegemonies and occupy any one of the heterogeneous spaces where they negotiate
narratives of their existences as well as of particular spaces of meanings and different identities
within the postcolonial condition. Often understood at the level of abstraction, this is a precarious
condition to experience, characterized as it is by indescribable existence (Turner), a sense of
disorientation and a disturbance of direction (Bhabha). As well as entailing confusion and
paradox, this disjunction points up the immense freedoms which come about when contradictions
are synthesized and overrun in the Third Space.
Homi Bhabha theorizes the Third Space of confusion and paradox, or liminality, within the
context of (post)colonialism. As will be shown later in this paper, Bhabha achieves this feat by
developing a postcolonial theory that draws on and exceeds the far-sighted and far-reaching
views of Frantz Fanon and Edward Said,6 while being at variance with the perspectives
put forward by partisan thinkers, in particular the writers of The Decolonization of African
Literature (Chinweizu and Madubuike 1980). By grounding his version of postcolonialism in
liminality or the Third Space, Bhabha is able to contextualize the vexed nature of the postcolonial condition and provide a counterpoint to identity issues.
Thanks to both Hall and Bhabhas deep awareness that any calls for a return to pure and
uncontaminated cultural origins merely obfuscate the reality of the deep-rooted and largely irrevocable cultural effects of the process of transculturation, which has taken place and defines the
protracted experience of colonisation, it is not always practical to associate culture with place. In
other words, the colonizer and colonized are so very deeply implicated in one another that any
discourse about origins smacks of paradoxes. In anticipation of Homi Bhabhas detractors, for
example, some of whom believe that return is possible, Hall writes:
In the re-staged narrative of the post-colonial, colonisation assumes the place and significance of a
major extended and ruptural world-historical event. By colonisation, the postcolonial references
something more than direct rule over certain areas of the world by the imperial powers.. . .[I]t is
signifying the whole process of expansion, exploration, conquest, colonisation and imperial
hegemonisation which constituted the outer face, the constitutive outside, of European and then
Western capitalist modernity after 1492. (1996, 249)

2. African identity
It must be made clear that the concept of the fluid nature of identity has not yet penetrated the
social, political or popular consciousness of the Africans (mostly black) who inhabit the geographical landmass called Africa. Thus, for many people, a true and pure African identity is
not only possible but realizable, even in todays globalized and globalizing world. But as I
argue, invoking the term Africa suggests a fixity of identity or cultural unity, and yet the

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Fetson Kalua

underlying motif remains the opposite: the shifting nature of African identity. As a sign, Africa
is a non-normative concept which implies other categories of discourse. To use Derridean terminology, Africa is a shifting sign that bears the traces of the Other or others. It is the supplement of the origin, and that its identity is thus predicated on the notion of the supplement
of the origin, that is the failing origin and which is not yet derived (1967, 328). In other
words, one need not look at Africa in terms of race or blackness essentialized but rather, like
the shifting Derrida signified, the idea of Africa (whether the shape on the map or its largely
black race) as being situated on the intersection of different races. This means that the core
values of being African (in this case being black) may be celebrated in literary texts, but with
a caveat: purist notions need not be accepted unquestioningly in the light of modernity and
globalization.
In Africa, and elsewhere in the colonized world, the polemics about identity have usually
revolved around two diametrically opposed concepts, Afrocentrism as against Eurocentricism.
The Afrocentric debate, which interrogates the discourse of imperialism and decolonization,
concerns a search for an essential cultural purity (Ashcroft et al. 2004, 40). The debate,
having been set in motion by Chinua Achebe in the 1970s, was taken up by various thinkers of
the time, including Ngug wa Thiongo who, in the spirit of decolonising African literature, and
in order to reach a non-foreign audience, wrote Devil on the Cross in Gikuyu, his mother tongue.
It is important to note that the quest for a primordial and unique African cultural and political
identity has always derived its energy from, first, the geographical reality that constitutes the
continent of Africa as a unitary entity, and secondly, from the debate about the black people
being the majority race and sharing similar, in some cases identical, cultures and traditions.
However, this view has been refuted by Anthony Appiah, for whom the peoples of Africa
have a good deal less in common than is usually assumed (1992, 17). I contend in this
paper, by invoking the idea of liminality, that the quest for a pure African identity remains an
undertaking which fails to take into account the hard reality of Africa as an existence that has
largely been a function of colonialism, just as the logic of blackness is loaded with slippage
and can itself be disrupted given that, like whiteness or yellowness, black identities are multiple
and heterogeneous.
Anthony Appiah, writing in his famous text In My Fathers House: Africa in the Philosophy
of Culture (1992), argues that there has never been a name referring specifically to the whole of
the continent. For him, the very invention of Africa (as something more than a geographical
entity) must be understood, ultimately, as an outgrowth of European racialism; the notion of
Pan-Africanism was founded on the notion of the African, which was, in turn, founded not on
any genuine cultural commonality but. . .on the very European concept of the Negro (1992,
62). As will be shown later, Appiahs view is telling, as what had once been a mere colonial
construct proceeded to assume the kind of signification that would exert such a profound influence on the identities of the people living on the continent. In short, once colonialism had created
Africa, the black majority populations embraced the identity in a typically essentialist fashion.
Appiahs argument has had resounding echoes in Mudimbe, who asserts that Africa is a
product of the West and was conceived and conveyed through conflicting systems of knowledge
(1994, xi). This evokes an African identity that is lodged in an ambivalence which makes it both
confusing and, most certainly, confused. Conveying this ambivalence, Mudimbe writes:
Let us note that the very name of the continent is itself a major problem. The Greeks named it Libya
and used to call any black person an Aithiops. The confusion begins with the Romans. They had a
province in their empire known as Africa, and their intellectuals used the same word for the tertia
orbis terrari pars . . ., that is, the continent as we know it, being third, after Europe and Asia. With the
European discovery of the continent in the fifteenth century, the confusion becomes complete
(1994, xi).7

Journal of African Cultural Studies

27

The Romans designation of Africa for one of their provinces (whether the province was located
somewhere in North Africa or outside the continent) is instructive here in terms of representing
the people who lived in that province as Africans, the Afri or Africani (1994, 26), shedding
light on the colonial provenance of the continent. As Mudimbe rightly observes, there is little
doubt that what we have come to know as Africa is a mere act of naming, perhaps nothing
more than an Anglicized lexical item, referring exclusively to the coastal regions of the Mediterranean empire. To a large extent, this part of the continent lies outside the mainstream ideas of
African identity, because it fails to take into account the black (south of the Sahara) majority of
the landmass populations which represents the crucially important other of African identity
informing this debate. However, this partial representation of Africa and its inhabitants pales
into insignificance when compared to the Africa that eventually assumed a boundless constitution, the Africa whose cartographic reality is located in colonialism. This Africa refers to
the entire locality or landmass as we know it today, an indisputably loose association of geographical space which is now the entire continent, and which became inexorably implicated in
the colonial scheme of things, beginning with voyages of exploration right up to the continents
partition in 1884. This latter Africa, often associated with discourses of Africanism and Africanness, one which exists to justify the civilizing mission, remains an imperial invention. Patrick
Brantlinger (2002) contends that
The myth of the Dark Continent was thus a Victorian invention. As part of the larger discourse
about empire, it was shaped by political and economic pressures and also by a psychology of
blaming the victim through which Europeans projected many of their own darkest impulses onto
Africans. The product of transition or transvaluation from abolitionism to imperialism, the
myth of the Dark Continent defined slavery as the offspring of tribal savagery. . .(Brantlinger
2002, in Moore 2004, 80).

The myth of the Dark Continent, the invented Africa, would later spur some radical African
scholars and politicians to begin an engagement with the so-called Africanist discourse and
related notions of nativism. In other words, during explorations and occupations of the continent
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the notion of Africa, as a stable entity, began to take
shape and was fossilized and concretized. Victorian explorers such as David Livingstone and
Henry Stanley, for example, seen largely as bestowers of Christian light, depicted the continent
of Africa as dark, and its people variously as innocent, simple, children, savages, to use
merely a few terms. For his part, Stanley wrote a book entitled In Darkest Africa. Once this
mythical Africa had been created by the colonial enterprise and inscribed in the imaginary
of the West, the figment began to grow, reaching its apotheosis at the Berlin conference of
1884 where the continent was cut up and divided among European, imperialist powers. It
was this ideology of difference, or othering, using language intent upon inscribing Africa in
invidious and stereotypical terms, that would keep the debate raging many years later.
Still in the nineteenth century the discourse of African identity began to assume ethnocentric
dimensions when Reverend Crummell, a black slave based in the diaspora, brought up the
subject as a black man; this time his Africa was seen as the motherland of the Negro race
(Appiah 1992, 5). Using the black race as the rallying point, and the continent perceived as a
preexisting identity in terms of the black race, Crummell perceived a common destiny and
identity for the peoples of Africa.8
As imperialism began to wane and give way to self-determination after the end of the Second
World War, the debate about Africa was taken up through movements such as Pan-Africanism,
Negritude, and recently the African renaissance all contested metaphorics which were forged
out of and grounded in the need for a unique political and cultural identity. This reified and
naturalized status of the continent the need to endorse and valorize black African individuality
and personality, emphasizing differences between blacks and other races and therefore using

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Fetson Kalua

race as the signifier of continental unity has not gone away. As Ferkiss puts it, [t]he first
impetus to Pan-Africanism was racial and came from outside (Ferkiss 1966, 130). This is
corroborated by Anthony Appiah, who attributes the origins of Pan-Africanism to black people
in the diaspora in the late nineteenth century:
Alexander Crummel and Edward Wilmot Blyden began the intellectual articulation of a Pan-African
ideology, but it was W.E.B. Du Bois who laid the practical foundations of the Pan-African
movement (Appiah 1992, 28).

Always based on race, the Pan-African movement was taken up by Kwame Nkrumah, following
his partys landslide victory in the elections that led Ghana to independence in 1957; he used the
concept to portray the continent as a paradigm of difference vis-a`-vis its colonial powers.
Negritude another movement which argued for a consolidated version of African identity
emerged from the works and operations of students, intellectuals and writers from the French
colonies and was also linked with Afro-American blacks in Europe. The advocates of this
movement sought to create a culture African in tone and content (Ferkiss 1966, 157), and like
Pan-Africanism before it, the impulse was the black races rejection of the Other (Mphahlele
1974, 85).
As recently as the 1990s, President Thabo Mbeki launched his own vision of African
renewal; again the terms of reference were patterned largely on the two movements discussed
above. In his famous speech entitled I am an African9 delivered to the South African
Parliament in 1996, Mbeki launched a cultural and political plan for Africa known as the
African Renaissance. While the European renaissance had been a spontaneous unfolding,
lasting for close to two centuries, and as a result of intersecting historical processes involving
the arts, science, politics, economics, theology and so on (Tomaselli 1999, 43), Mbekis African
renaissance remains a programme, a rallying cry.
It is quite difficult to pinpoint the gist of Mbekis idea of African awakening. However, like
its precursors Pan-Africanism and Negritude, built into the objectives of this movement are sentiments expressed by particular catchphrases such as African specifics, changing Africas
place in the world economy, the rediscovery of Africas creative past to recapture the
peoples cultures, to mention a few, which point to the fact that Mbekis plan adopts
and embraces an exclusive and unitary African identity. Put another way, like the rhetorics of
Negritude and Pan-Africanism before it, Mbekis renaissance programme is about reclaiming
the lost traditions of a past African glory (Mistry 2001, 12). In other words, by categorically
privileging the black African way of life, this renaissance remains a quintessential example of
a cultural-political programme that parades a monolithic and purist view of African culture
and identity. As a discourse therefore, this particular renaissance gestures towards conscientizing
the African/black intelligentsia regarding the problems and challenges faced by the continent in
the wake of globalization.
It is instructive to note that the central impulses in all the three movements discussed so far
are tradition and race, the need to endorse the doctrine of the black African personality, emphasizing the differences between blacks and other races. This celebration of African identity first,
through the excessive glorification of the charm of blackness, secondly, the appeal to the
continents mystique, and finally the spatial location may be seen as simplistic and in
danger of reducing African identity to forms of racial essentialism or chauvinism. Describing
it variously as Africanism, Africanness, African nationalism and African particularism,
Anthony Appiah argues that such monolithic and fetishistic perceptions of Africa fail to take
cognizance of the constructed nature of the modern African identity (Appiah 1992, 61), an
identity that cannot be severed from the continents colonial legacy. Appiah expresses this
succinctly:

Journal of African Cultural Studies

29

If an African identity is to empower us,. . .what is required is. . .that we acknowledge first of all that
race and history and metaphysics do not enforce an identity: that we can choose, within broad limits
set by ecological, political, and economic realities, what it will mean to be an African in the coming
years (1992, 176).

In similar vein, Jyoti Mistry has offered a caveat with regard to Mbekis renaissance, finding the
vision untenable. For not only is it non-translatable, writes Mistry, it is a term steeped in
the discourses of Western Enlightenment. . ..To propose the term renaissance carries with it
the historical, cultural and philosophical implications of the Western/Northern World (2001,
13). Put another way, the renaissance debate undercuts itself by using those terms of reference
which suggest its imbrication in colonial discourse. Therefore, as Mistry argues, Mbekis idea
presupposes an essentialized African identity across the vastness of a continent with numerous
languages, ethnicities and further divided by religion (2001, 14). The above views have been
corroborated by Ahluwalia who asserts that the idea of an African renaissance. . .appears
fraught with difficulty. It appears to be locked into unquestionably European epistemology
which renders the idea of a uniquely African renewal problematic (Ahluwalia 2002, 227).
And as Tomaselli argues, since there is no single Africa (Tomaselli 1999, 46), there can
never be a. . .continent-wide renaissance (1999, 45).10
As for Achille Mbembe, Africa exists only as an absent object, an absence that those who try
to decipher it only accentuate (2001, 241). Mbembes compelling figuration of Africa as a
chimera and a rhetorical construction is vividly captured in the incarnation of the continent
looking at itself in the mirror of nature and finding out how just phantasmic and multivocal it
is. As Mbembe argues,
if the mirror does attest to a real presence that is, at the same time, an untenable figure, this mirror
cannot tell us what participates in the figures background, foreground, and perspectives in what
we might call its magma, that is, its volume, content, and flesh. The mirror is silent when it comes
to telling how the figure subjugates itself, paints itself, and where it is circumscribed, indeed cannot
be circumscribed. In fact, both in the light of the advancing world and in everyday interaction with
life, Africa appears as simultaneously a diabolical discovery, an inanimate image, and a living sign.
As such, what might be called its immediate being-in-the world does not necessarily coincide
with what the mirror shows. This does not mean the sign is completely free with regard to what it
designates or that there is, here, only a simulacrum (2001, 240).

The sense of equivocality surrounding the image produced by the mirror demonstrates the
complexity of representing the sign (of Africa) as holism, as an irreducible whole. The mirror
is a testimony to the nature of this sign which shows gaps and thus challenges its assumed
fixity and undercuts its metaphysical authority. As a text and sign that ought to survive the
encroaching capital modernity, or advancing world, Africa will be obliged to keep changing,
and deferring in a typical Derridean sense. As a function of the colonial enterprise as well as
belonging to the world, Africa can be understood in just those simulacral, expressive and
connotative images strikingly conjured up by Achille Mbembe and Jacques Derrida.
A similar view has been expressed by Edward Saids (1993) reflections on culture:
Gone are the binary oppositions of the nationalist and imperialist enterprise. Instead we begin to
sense that old authority cannot simply be replaced by new authority, but that new alignments
made across borders, types, nations, and essences are coming into view, and it is those new alignments that now provoke and challenge the fundamentally and static notion of identity (1993, xxviii)

3. Conclusion
This paper has shown that culture, arising from peoples actions, including their capacity to
reinvent and reconstitute themselves in the quotidian narrative of their existences, cannot be a
totality. To extrapolate Saids argument, then, attempts at achieving an authentic African

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Fetson Kalua

identity in terms of plenitude, regarding culture as pure and unalloyed, seem untenable.
Mobilizing Derridean deconstructive strategies, Appiah argues that notions of a pure African
identity should always take into account the existence of differance, to use Derridas famous
term, as well as difference, as part of the underlying principles of African cultures and civilizations: it conceals it [sic] under an ideological but. . .false cloak of cultural monolithism (Appiah
in Gates 1984, 120). Granted, Africa has always existed only on the map, and in metaphors which
suggest its semantic constructedness and intermittent colonial enactments. But the fact that
Africas identity is not fixed allows for a liminal view of the whole continent whose identities
keep shifting in and out of ontological focus, intra- and internationally.

Notes
1. In Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (1989, 208), R. Rosaldo writes: More often
than we usually care to think, our everyday lives are crisscrossed by border zones, pockets, and irruptions of all kinds. Social borders frequently become salient around such lines as sexual orientation,
gender, class, race, ethnicity, nationality, age, politics, dress, food, or taste. Along with our
supposedly transparent cultural selves, such borderlands should be regarded not as analytically
empty transitional zones but as sites of creative cultural production.
2. Anzaldua (1987, 7798) introduces the concept of mestiza or a consciousness of borderlands as a dual
or multiple personality whereby a subject develops a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for
ambiguity (1987, 79) because its personality is plagued by psychic restlessness (1987, 78). In This
Bridge We Call Home (2002, xv), Anzaldua and Keating use the metaphor of bridges to explicate
the notion of nepantla as borderlands thus: Whenever I glimpse the arch of this bridge my breath
catches. Bridges are thresholds to other realities, archetypal, primal symbols of shifting consciousness.
They are passageways, conduits, and connectors that connote transitioning, crossing borders, and
changing perspectives. Bridges span liminal (threshold) spaces between worlds, spaces I call
nepantla . . . . Transformations occur in this in-between space, an unstable, unpredictable, precarious,
always in-transition space lacking clear boundaries. Nepantla. . .and living in this liminal zone means
being in a constant state of displacement. . ..Most of us dwell in nepantla so much of the time its
become sort of home.
3. While Victor Turner (1992, 75 6) uses the term to explain the transformational nature of ritual,
Edward Saids use has its origins in music to denote connectedness. Thus Turners use emphasizes
the notion of limen in ritual whereas the latters appropriating of the term gestures toward the
promotion of a textured universalism in which there is an interaction between the local and the global.
4. See V.W. Turner, Blazing the Trail: Way Marks in the Exploration of Symbols (1992, 329). In the first
chapter, entitled Encounter with Freud: The Making of a Comparative Symbologist, Victor Turner
saw the signification of socialcultural symbols identified in African ritual (in particular amongst
the Ndembu people where he worked for more than two years) as comparable to Freuds terms of
multivocality, multireferentiality, polysemy, cultural sublimation and projection terms which are
explained in Freuds Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and signal the idea of multiplicity. For
Turner, to observe Ndembu ritual and culture was to encounter the psychoanalytic notion of the unconscious at work. This is important in that the idea of liminality takes on poststructuralist characteristics
and dimensions.
5. It is important to note here that, trained in the School of Structural Functionalism, Victor Turner was a
student of scholars such as Comte, Feuerbach, Radcliffe Brown, and Malinowski who believed that
ritual symbols and processes merely confirmed the rigidity and efficacy of social structure. But
Turner was pleasantly amazed by the genius of the Ndembu culture, especially in its multivocal
capacity to transcend the WesternCartesian dualism implied in Western social structure. For somebody such as Turner whose social and educational upbringing had offered him nothing better than functional anthropology, liminality was like a breath of fresh air. Even more important was Turners
understanding of Ndembu ritual as mirroring Freuds multireferential mode of interpreting dreams.
In liminality, Turner discards the structuralist functionalist social formation in favour of the space
in-between.
6. Both Fanon (1961) and Said (1978, 1993) present the postcolonial condition as a deeply troubling one
in which knowledge is structured in terms of oppositional categories. Bhabhas theory aims to
transcend this worldview.

Journal of African Cultural Studies

31

7. Historian Valentine Mudimbe (1994 26) writes: In most dictionaries of the sixteenth century, it is
Latin nomenclature that reproduces itself. African is the equivalent of Afer, as substantive as well
as adjective, and simply designates any person from the continent regardless of his or her colour. It
literally translates Africanus. The renowned Roman Scipion, who was black, is historically known
as Africanus Scipio. . ..
8. Appiah (1992, 6) argues that in perceiving the continent of Africa as the final destiny of the black race,
black intellectuals such as Alexander Crummell are responsible for African ethnocentricism and
related Pan-African sentiments, which have always prompted many black people to use the continent
and the colour of their skin as sources of validation for living on the landmass of Africa.
9. It would seem that in this famous speech, Mbeki wished to open debate about what it means to be
African in the modern world. But for most black intellectuals in South Africa and the African continent,
Mbekis concept of the African renaissance has become a sine qua non for Pan-Africanism and the
restoration of black cultures most of which suffered degradation during colonialism.
10. Keyan Tomaselli (1999, 46) puts his case as follows: To claim a single Africa, a single experience and
an autonomous culture and intellectual heritage is to miss the crucial significance of Africa as the origin
of humankind, and to ignore the intellectual, cultural and social influences of mass migrations and
interactions through the millennia. We therefore also risk ignoring the effects of travelling theories,
and rearticulations of these theories into different historical contexts and societies, all over the world.

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