Homi Bhabha

As I have suggested above, the concepts of hybridity and third space are popular in education as they represent a kind of shorthand for Bhabha’s theories suggesting identities are multiple and that there are spaces that have revolutionary potential. While Bhabha has used these terms I have not focused on them in my essay because they have been part of the reification that Bruna and I are critical of. As Huddart (2006) himself suggests when Bhabha uses hybrid he tends to use the term hybridization to suggest an ongoing and open-ended process and not a closed reified category. For Bhabha there are liberatory possibilities opened up by the colonizer’s need to categorize and for those categories to ultimately be false and to implode on themselves. We are all and have always been hybrid. Identity, for Bhabha itself is a flawed term as it implies a level of fixity. What needs to be understood are the processes of hybridization and spatial transformations as they’re ongoing.

In another paper I have written, I suggest that there has been a kind of historical unfolding where structuralism yielded to poststructuralism in the late 1960s and then poststructuralism yielded to postmodernism in the 1980s. There were many problems with postmodernism as a theoretical movement including its desire to renounce all master narratives and give up explanation. (Bhabha himself, while using postmodern ideas, rejects the idea that we cannot explain history as his own postcolonial theory seeks to explain how Europe’s dominance was built on the back of colonized peoples.) This nihilistic tendency in postmodernism, I argue, yielded to a second round of poststructuralism which I call poststructuralism/2. Chronology is fluid as this is a movement of the “text” but I would put the beginnings of poststructuralism/2 somewhere in the late 1990s, the very moment when one could hear at elite colleges and universities a revival tent like call for the “death of postmodernism.” I would argue further that Bhabha has been an important theorist in the construction of poststructualism/2 and hence it is a less Eurocentric and more global theoretical movement.

For readers who have somehow missed the Star Trek industry, the Borg were a community marked by their relationship to technology. They were cyborgs, part human and part machine. They lived in collectives that were marked by a rabid need to “consume” all other cultural forms and technologies, which they called “assimilation.” Their watchword was “resistance is futile.”