Week 12 Postcolonial Subjectivity I Bhabha Homi K

Week 12 (Post-)colonial Subjectivity

• I. Bhabha, Homi K. • II. Fanon, Frantz

• Bhabha, Homi K. “Interrogating Identity: The Post Colonial Prerogative” Identity: A Reader. Eds. Paul du Gay, Jessica Evans, and Peter Redman. London: Sage, 2000. 94 -101.

Realist, mimetic • Perspective of depth To see the connection A=B, correspondence A vertical model I Language Signifier Reality/Presence/Mirror Essence/Unity/Autonomy signified

• Bhabha asks: How do we see a missing person, or look at Invisibleness in the previous model? (96)

• To see a missing person is to transgress the subject’s transitive demand for a direct object of selfreflection. • The “I” in the position of mastery is, at that same time, the place of its absence, its re-presentation. (96)

Mimicry • Robinson Crusoe --- Friday -a mimic man -black skin/white masks -metonymy of colonial desire -inappropriate colonial subjects -disrupting authoritative representations of colonial subjectivity • Mimicry repeats. . . and in that very act of repetition, originality is lost, and centrality de-centered. http: //www. english. emory. edu/Bahri/1 WEBPAGE. HTML

The Uncanny • The German word "unheimlich" is considered untranslatable; our rough English equivalent, "uncanny", is itself difficult to define. This indescribable quality is actually an integral part of our understanding of the uncanny experience, which is terrifying precisely because it can not be adequately explained. • Rather than attempting a definition, most critics resort to describing the uncanny experience, usually by way of the dream-like visions of doubling and death that invariably seem to accompany it. http: //www. engl. virginia. edu/enec 981/Group/chris. uncanny. html

The Uncanny • According to Freud's description, the uncanny "derives its terror not from something externally alien or unknown but--on the contrary--from something strangely familiar which defeats our efforts to separate ourselves from it" (Morris). • Freud discusses how an author can evoke an uncanny response on the part of the reader by straddling the line between reality and unreality within the fiction itself. http: //www. engl. virginia. edu/enec 981/Group/chris. uncanny. html

Self An image Field of vision I Not I Other Signification Spatialization of the subject The space of writing What exceeds the image The moment of interrogation Trace of resistance The 3 rd dimension of the visual image

Non-hybridity Hybridity Western, European Race, ethnicity, colonial subjectivity Derridean difference Cartesian subjectivity --A coherent identity --Claims essence, unity and singleness of identity The presence of a dominant culture can be called into question by referring to the hybridity or difference from which it emerges --Identity as “presence, ” a --Identity as constituted by discourse that privileges one “différance” (deferral + side of a binary by effacing its difference) denigrated other --Cultural difference = “in--Identity represented by the between” spaces = “interstices” supposedly transcendental between fixed identifications ego

• The space of difference and otherness is a historically and culturally constituted borderland between the perceptual/conscious and the unconscious. (De Lauretis 56)

• The image—as point of identification—marks the site of an ambivalence. Its representation is always spatially split– it makes present something that is absent—and temporally deferred. . . (100).

• The very question of identification only emerges in between disavowal and designation. (99) • The access to the image of identity is only ever possible in the negation of any sense of originality or plenitude, through the principle of displacement and differentiation (absence/presence, representation/repetition) that always renders it a liminal reality. (100) Marginally perceptible

• The image is at once a metaphoric substitution, an illusion of presence and by that same token a metonym, a sign of its absence and loss. (100)

• Problems

• Homi Bhabha. . . charts the hybrid subject as a split and a mobile subject, located in ‘third space: ’ an ‘inbetween space’ that disrupts binary oppositions between ‘self’ and ‘other. ’ As he writes, travelling into 'third space' 'may open the way to conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture's hybridity. To that end we should remember that it is the 'inter' - the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the in-between space - that carries the burden of the meaning of culture' (Bhabha, 1994: 38). http: //home. alphalink. com. au/~agilbert/aijour~1. html

• While the ‘hype of hybridity’ disrupts essentialist, authentic and apparently stable notions of culture, home and identity, it continues to invoke racial divisions that underpinned colonial discourse often without interrogating racial divisions in colonial and postcolonial context. Although metaphorical references to hybridity abound, the material histories and geographies of people of mixed descent remain largely absent from much postcolonial theorizing. http: //home. alphalink. com. au/~agilbert/aijour~1. html

• The space of difference and otherness is a historically and culturally constituted borderland between the perceptual/conscious and the unconscious. (De Lauretis 56)

• Fanon, Frantz. “The Negro and Psychopathology. ” Identity: A Reader. Eds. Paul du Gay, Jessica Evans, and Peter Redman. London: Sage, 2000. 202 -221.

• The doubled character of the stereotype that Bhabha sees at work in colonial discourse, affecting both— unequally—the colonizer and the colonized, is highlighted in Fanon: the black man’s internal foreign body with which identification is disavowed is, to be sure, the racist stereotype of the black men. (De Lauretis 61)

• Fanon inflects his medical and psychological practice with the understanding that racism generates harmful psychological constructs that both blind the black man to his subjection to a universalized white norm and alienate his consciousness. A racist culture prohibits psychological health in the black man. • http: //www. english. emory. edu/Bahri/Fanon. html

• For Fanon, being colonized by a language has larger implications for one's consciousness. . Speaking French means that one accepts, or is coerced into accepting, the collective consciousness of the French, which identifies blackness with evil and sin. • In an attempt to escape the association of blackness with evil, the black man dons a white mask, or thinks of himself as a universal subject equally participating in a society that advocates an equality supposedly abstracted from personal appearance. http: //www. english. emory. edu/Bahri/Fanon. html

• Cultural values are internalized. . . into consciousness, creating a fundamental disjuncture between the black man's consciousness and his body. Under these conditions, the black man is necessarily alienated from himself. http: //www. english. emory. edu/Bahri/Fanon. html

• Fanon insists, however, that the category "white" depends for its stability on its negation, "black. " Neither exists without the other, and both come into being at the moment of imperial conquest. Thus, Fanon locates the historical point at which certain psychological formations became possible, and he provides an important analysis of how historically-bound cultural systems, such as the Orientalist discourse Edward Said describes, can perpetuate themselves as psychology. http: //www. english. emory. edu/Bahri/Fanon. html

References De Lauretis, Teresa. “Difference Embodied: Reflections on Black Skin, White Masks. ” Parallax 8. 2 (2002): 54 -68. Easthope, Antony. “Bhabha, Hybridity and Identity. ” Textual Practice 12. 2 (1998): 341 -48.