Moving beyond Edward Said: Homi Bhabha and the Problem of Postcolonial Representation

Moving beyond Edward Said: Homi Bhabha and the Problem of Postcolonial Representation

Postcolonialism

representation

Edward Said

Homi Bhabha

Gayatri Spivak

postmodernism

Third World/First World

mimicry

religious nationalism

ambivalence

The essay takes up the issue of postcolonial representation in terms of a critique of European modernism that has been symptomatic of much postcolonial theoretical debates in the recent years. It tries to enumerate the epistemic changes within the paradigm of postcolonial theoretical writing that began tentatively with the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978 and has taken a curious postmodern turn in recent years with the writings of Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha. The essay primarily focuses on Bhabha’s concepts of ambivalence and mimicry and his politics of theoretical anarchism that take the representation debate to a newer height vis-ŕ-vis modes of religious nationalism and Freudian psychoanalysis. It is interesting to see how Bhabha locates these within a postmodern paradigm.

Chakrabarti, Sumit

International Studies. Interdisciplinary Political and Cultural Journal; Vol. 14 No. 1 (2012); 5-21

International Studies. Interdisciplinary Political and Cultural Journal; Tom 14 Nr 1 (2012); 5-21

2300-8695

1641-4233

Lodz University Press

2012-11-01

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0

application/pdf

eng

info:eu-repo/semantics/article

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion