Homi K.

Bhabha

( 1949)
Works
 Nation and Narration (1990)
 The Location of Culture (1994)
 The Black Servant and the Dark Princess (2006)
 On Global Memory: Reflections on Barbaric Transmission
(2009)
 Beyond Photography (2011)
Dissemination: Time, Narrative and
the Margins of the Modern Nation
 Nation
An imagined political Community (Benedict
Anderson)

 Aim of Nationalist discourse

To create a homogenous society

 Modes of Representation
1. Pedagogic
2. Performative
 Pedagogic Representation
 Construted historical narratives which glorify national
identities

 Claim fixed origins, continuous histories to link the present

people to their previous generations and the generations to
come

 Steady movement of time from past to present to future

“continuist, accumulative temporality”

 people are the ‘objescts’ of nationalist discourses

 Performative Representations

 Endless performance of national culture by its people

“The scraps, patches and rags of daily life

must be repeatedly turned into the signs
of a coherent national culture”

 Repetitious and recursive

 People are the ‘subject’ of natinalist discourses

 Conceptual Ambivilance
 Consequence of double narrative movement

1. Nation as a fixed originary

essence (homogenous)

2. Nation as a socially manufactured

devoid of a fixed origin (heterogenous),
excluded from national narratives,
(women, migrants, people from different race
and ethnicity, working class, peasants)
“The national memory is always the site of the
hybridity of histories, and the displacement of
narratives”
Bhabha
 Conclusion

Nationalist discourses
 fragile, split and contradictory
 not benevolent, inclusive

 illeberal, exculsive

 are always challenged

 Criticism
Bhabha didn’t answer

From where the agency of counter narratives arrive?

from marginality? Or
from within the nation mystically?