1.

“What is theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond narratives
of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are
produced in the articulation of cultural differences. These ‘in-between’ spaces provide the
terrain for elaborating new strategies of selfhood - singular or communal - that initiate new
signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining
the idea of society itself”

“in-between” is intervalic, it’s the bridge - at times, rickety - as the conduit. maroons existed in the in-
between, the bordering border, the edge, the cut. escapees - by way of the underground railroad -
used sound, used song as the “in-between” while being “in-between” plantation and some such place
of liberation. stilled, caesura. gone while going, going while gone. on the move while moving,
moving while on the move.

 “What is at issue is the performative nature of differential identities: the regulation and
negotiation of those spaces that are continually, contingently, ‘opening out’, remaking the
boundaries, exposing the limits of any claim to a singular or autonomous sign of difference — be
it class, gender or race. Such assignations of social differences — where difference is neither
One nor the Other but something else besides, in-between — find their agency in a form of the
‘future’ where the past is not originary, where the present is not simply transitory. It is, if I may
stretch a point, an interstitial future, that emerges in-between the claims of the past and the
needs of the present.”

Bhabha concentrates on describing and explaining the process of cultural discourse when two seemingly
simple, opposing groups clash and articulate their differences from each other. The boundary where the
two groups clash, the “in-between spaces” mentioned above, is where and when “new signs of
identity,” i.e., culture in the Tate-ian sense as medium for societal meaning, is created, a culture which is
a hybrid of the two opposing cultures. Thus Bhabha’s body of work speaks of the process of creating
culture from the perspective of the in-between spaces, a liminal or “interstitial perspective,” as Perloff
calls it, especially as seen in postcolonial discourse because, perhaps, Bhabha himself is the hybrid
product from the in-between, the India of postcolonial, post-imperial Britain.

“As a category, community enables a division between the private and the public, the civil and
the familial; but as a performative discourse it enacts the impossibility of drawing an objective
line between the two.”
— Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (page 230)

 Bhabha begins to describe the process of creating culture by debunking the idea of a nation
or people as being holistic and pure. Says Bhabha,
Cultures are never unitary in themselves, nor simply dualistic in the relation of Self to Other. […]
The reason a cultural text or system of meaning cannot be sufficient unto itself is that the act of
cultural enunciation – the place of utterance – is crossed by the difference of writing. ….It is this
difference in the process of language that is crucial to the production of meaning and ensures, at
the same time, that meaning is never simply mimetic and transparent. (LC 36)

a national culture can never be holistic and pure because its meaning, like other products of language, is
open to ambivalence, open to interpretations by the audience which is different from the originator’s
intent. So, in the postcolonial discourse, the Colonizer’s culture, far from being the simple, oppressive
force upon the Colonized culture, is open to ambivalence. In explaining Edward Said’s description of
Orientalism, scholar Robert Young states that “Bhabha argues that even for the colonizer the
construction of a representation of the Other is by no means straight-forward” (Young, “Ambivalence,”
143). The Colonizer, in trying to objectify the Colonized, creates a stereotype of the Colonized in order
to reject it as inferior: “Colonial power produces the colonized as a fixed reality which is at once an
‘other’ and yet entirely knowable and visible” (“Other Question,” 93). The Colonizer creates an image of
the Colonized and thinks that this image is holistic and pure, i.e., not open to ambivalence. But
confrontation with the Colonized causes the Colonizer to see that this stereotype, which Bhabha says
“dramatizes the impossible desire for a pure, undifferentiated origin” is “an impossible object” (“Other
Question,” 103). The Colonized culture’s difference displaces the Colonizer’s own sense of unity and
makes the Colonizer aware of its split self, which desires the Colonized to validate the created
stereotype in order that it may see the Colonized as a fixed object.

 The effect of mimicry on the authority of colonial discourse is profound and

disturbing. For in ‘normalizing’ the colonial state or subject, the dream of post-
Enlightenment civility alienates its own language of liberty and produces another
knowledge of its norms…. The menace of mimicry is its double vision which in
disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority.

(LC 86, 88)

ifference of the Colonized will not allow itself to be objectified and, in fact, the Colonized mimics the
Colonizer, forcing the Colonizer to see itself as Object. Mimicry, perceived at first as “the most elusive
and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge” (LC 85) seems appealing to the Colonizer. It
seems to be good policy to have the natives mimic their colonial masters who “desire[s] for a reformed,
recognizable Other” (LC 86). The colonizer master, in seeing the native mimic him, sees himself but also
not-himself, which is “double vision,” such that the master is no longer the Subject but is also the
Object, where authority is not supposed to exist. “Mimicry does not merely destroy narcissistic
authority through the repetitious slippage of difference and desire. …[but] raises the question of the
authorization of colonial representations” (LC 90). Mimicry concretizes the ambivalence of both
Colonizer and Colonized such that one cannot say who is Subject and who is Object, who is Self and who
is Other. The simple binary is breaking down, creating something that is neither Colonizer nor
Colonized, because “the colonial presence is always ambivalent, split between its appearance as original
and authoritative and its articulation as repetition and difference” (LC 107), as seen in the Colonized’s
performance of mimicry before the stunned, “authoritative” Colonizer, whose pedagogy – i.e., his own
cultural education -- cannot explain why he is stunned and cannot account for the Colonizer’s difference
within the mimicry.

 “The production of meaning requires that these two places be mobilized in the passage
through a Third Space” (LC 36)

such that [cultural] “difference” is not so much a reflection of pre-given ethnic or cultural traits
set in the tablets of a “fixed” tradition as it is a complex ongoing negotiation – against
authorities, amongst minorities: the “right” to signify concerns, not so much the teleologies of
tradition as much as its powers of iteration, its forms of displacement and relocation, its ability to
signify symbolic and social relations outside of the mimetic transmission of cultural
contents. (“Frontlines/Borderposts,” 270)

Within this Third Space of the interstice, Colonizer and Colonized negotiate their cultural
difference and create a culture that is a hybrid, which “is the revaluation of the assumption of
colonial identity” of both Colonizer and Colonized (LC 112). So, in a sense, their negotiation is
dialectic, but a dialectic that still remains ambivalent.

 It is in the emergence of the interstices-the overlap and displacement of domains of difference-

that the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural
value are negotiated. . . . Terms of cultural engagement, whether antagonistic or affiliative, are
produced performatively. The representation of difference must not be hastily read as the
reflection of pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in the fixed tablet of tradition. The social
articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on-going negotiation that
seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation. (LC

Homi K. Bhabha's influential and widely disseminated essay "DissemiNation: Time, narrative and the
margins of the modern nation" is a powerful critique of what Bhabha takes to be inadequate "essentialist"
readings of nationhood-- readings that attempt to define and naturalize Third World "nations" by means
of the supposedly homogenous, holistic, and historically continuous traditions that falsely define and
ensure their subordinate status. Nations and cultures, he argues both here and throughout The Location of
Culture, must be understood as "narrative" constructions that arise from the "hybrid" interaction of
contending national and cultural constituencies