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/1WEBPAGE.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/enec981/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/enec981/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 3rd dimension of the visual image
Non-hybridity
Hybridity
Western, European
Race, ethnicity, colonial
subjectivity
Cartesian subjectivity
Derridean difference
--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 constituted by
“différance” (deferral + difference)
--Cultural difference = “inbetween” spaces = “interstices”
between fixed identifications
--Identity as “presence,” a
discourse that privileges one
side of a binary by effacing
its denigrated other
--Identity represented by the
supposedly transcendental
ego
(Summarized from Easthope)
• 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.