?MLA 13 2, 1 ] RobertJ.C. Young 187
Chapter Chronological Order ::r.. ~ theories and NIA "Representation and the Colonial Text: A Critical Exploration of Some Forms e methodologies ::. of Mimeticism" (written in 1980; published in 1984 in The Theory of Reading, •• edited by Frank Gloversmith, Harvester Press I Barnes and Noble Books, " ~ pp. 93-122) ~ I 3 "The Other Question" (first published in 1983 in Screen, vol. 24, pp. 18-35) "" ! The Dislocationsof 3 CulturalTranslation 4 "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse" (first ,,.•,. published in 1984 in October, vol. 28, pp. 125-33) 0 Q;. 5 "Sly Civility" (first published in 1985 in October, vol. 34, pp. 71-80) 0 THETITLE THE LOCATION OF CULTURESUGGESTS THAT THE BOOK'S AU· 6 "Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a ~ ROBERT J. C. YOUNG THOR, HOMI K. BHABHA,PLACES AN OVERRIDINGIMPORTANCE ON A Tree outside Delhi, May 1817" (presented at the 1984 Essex Conference on the " •~ Sociology of Literature and first published in 1985 in Critical Inquiry, vol. 12, c~lture's spatial and geographic situation. Lest Bhabha's readers get pp. 144-65) too fixated on culture's site and locality, however, the title's emphasis NIA "Remembering Farron: Self, Psyche and the Colonial Condition" (published in on place is soon qualified by an epigraph from the book's most-cited 1986 as the foreword to Black Skin, White Masks, by Frantz Farron, Pluto Press, author, Frantz Farron, that emphasizes temporality: "The architecture pp. vii-xxvi) of this work is rooted in the temporal. Every human problem must 1 "The Commitment to Theory" (first published in 1988 in New Formations, be considered from the standpoint of time'' (qtd. in Bhabha xiv).' So, vol. 5, pp. 5-23) while culture must be located, the architecture of The Location of Cul 2 "Interrogating Identity: The Postcolonial Prerogative" (first published in 1990 in ture is rooted in the temporal. The place and time of its moments of Anatomy of Racism, edited by D. T. Goldberg, U of Minnesota P, pp. 183-209) production are affirmed throughout its essays with a wealth of con 7 ''.Articulating the Archaic: Notes on Colonial Nonsense" (first published in temporary references and opening comments like c'InBritain, in the 1990 in Literary Theory Today, edited by Peter Collier and Helga Geyer-Ryan, 1980s ... " (27). No book of theory is more self-consciously embedded Cornell UP, pp. 203-18) in its own space and time. The Location of Culture, published in 1994, 8 "DissemiNation: Time, Narrative) and the Margins of the Modern Nation)) is a very English book, written from within the political, cultural, and (first published in 1990 in Nation and Narration, by Homi Bhabha, Routledge, intellectual world of the London of the 1980s and early 1990s, in which pp. 291-322) migrant activists from the Caribbean and South Asia such as Bhabha, NIA "Third Space" (an interview published in 1990 in Identity: Community, Culture, Salman Rushdie, and Stuart Hall were challenging the verities of a Difference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford, Lawrence and Wishart, pp. 207-21) long-established, socialist, masculinist, English intellectual and politi 12 '"Race,' Time and the Revision of Modernity" (first published in 1991 in cal culture.' The brilliant innovation of The Location of Culture was to Neocolonialism, a special issue of The Oxford Literary Review, edited by Robert create a new language, a new articulation and understanding of minor J. C. Young, vol. 13, nos. 1-2, pp. 193-219) ity positions-which is why the response to it has been so overwhelm NIA "A Question of Survival-Nations and Psychic States" (published in 1991 ing, from academics, artists, and many others. The work that went into in Psychoanalysis and Cultural Theory: Thresholds, edited by James Donald, The Location of Culture was intimately related to Bhabha's own milieu Macmillan Education, pp. 89-103) and time: the book is the product of his decennium mirabile in London. Introduction Previously unpublished (drafted by 1991) ROBERTJ.C. YOUNG is Julius Silver Profes The chapters of The Location of Culture were-with a few excep 10 "By Bread Alone: Signs of Violence" (previously unpublished; drafted by 1991) sorof Englishand ComparativeLiterature tions-published as individual essays from 1983 to 1991. Reorder 9 "The Postcolonial and the Postmodern" (previously unpublished; drafted in at NewYork Universityand dean of arts ing the book's chapters according to the chronological sequence of 1992) and humanities at New York Univer these essays can help us understand the forms of its temporality. The sity Abu Dhabi. His most recentbooks "How Newness Enters the World: Postcolonial Times and the Trials of four previously unpublished essays in the book were drafted during 11 are EmpireColony Postcofony (Wiley Cultural Translation" (previously unpublished; drafted in 1991-93) Blackwell,2015) and, with JeanKhalfa, 1991-93.' The following list also includes some relevant texts ·pub FrantzFonon: lcrits sur /'alienationet la lished in the 1980s and early 1990s that did not become part of The The architectural structure of The Location ics of contemporary culture. The book begins libert.e, 188 The Dislocationsof CulturalTranslation [ PMLA 13 2. 1 J RobertJ.C. Young • and on mimicry argue that however fixed to establish his career in the United States.' theorization through his best-known concept, remaining the same: "the Bible translated the representation of cultural difference, A fellowship brought him to Princeton Uni hybridity, which was inspired by the fiction of into Hindi, propagated by Dutch or native "'0 .,.0 and however strong the drive to fix colonial versity in 1992, and he moved permanently to Rushdie, whose finest work came out of the catechists, is still the English book" (108). 0 representation in the colonizer's imaginary, Chicago in 1994. While it is possible to see the same 1980s London from which The Location The Bible, he shows, is translated more by its .c ... colonial difference uncannily contrives to gradual intrusion of North American culture, of Culture was produced. As it is for Rushdie, new context than by any new language into e• represent itself otherwise through means that particularly the writings of Toni Morrison and hybridity for Bhabha is a theory of cultural which it has been rendered. Its primary form .,. disconcert the viewer or reader. In his histori the foregrounding of the question of race, in mixture designed to contest the idea of an of translation has been to precipitate the am 3 c 5 •~ cal essays analyzing Indian colonial history the later chapters of The Location of Culture, English monoculture or, in the case of co bivalent dynamics of colonial culture. ::r • 0 that gesture toward the preoccupations of the most of the theoretical innovation in the book lonial India, the simple antithesis of Indian It was not until 1988 that Bhabha be .. 0 ~ subaltern studies historians- "Sly Civility" had been developed in the intellectual milieu and English as discrete forms existing side gan to use translation as a foundational 0 0 (1985),"Signs Taken for Wonders" (1985),and of Oxford and London in the 1980s, so that in by side. Bhabha formulated hybridity most .c• conceptual metaphor. He introduced it " ... "By Bread Alone" (1991)-.Bhabha shows the many ways Bhabha could be described, in his cogently in 1985, in "Signs Taken for Won in the context of the negotiation between • complex processes by which the introduction own phrase, as a cultural translator of the po ders," where it is advanced in relation to the theoretico-political positions, presenting it as of the cultural difference embodied in colo litical idiom of British intellectual culture for insertion of an English version of Christianity offering new ground between them. An early nialism does not amount to a passive form an American audience. Once he relocated to into an Indian environment. The originality statement in "The Commitment to Theory" of misrepresentation but enables cultural the United States, that position, in which he of Bhabha's argument about hybridity is the (1988) makes the point clearly: resistance and agency among the colonized. was writing from inside one political and the idea that instead of pointing to the way that His later essays turn from colonial represen oretical culture and translating it for another, colliding cultures produce a fusion of differ The language of critique is effective not be tation to the question of difference in more in it but not of it, inevitably changed. Bhabha ent elements, hybridity for Bhabha describes cause it keeps forever separate the terms of contemporary concerns, as he considers the brought his own distinctive interpretation of the new, distinctive forms that arise when in the master and the slave, the mercantilist possibility of agency for the minority cultural the British politics of difference to the United tractably different cultures collide. The per and the Marxist, but to the extent to which theorist, critic, or artist. He shifts, therefore, States. Though the United States had a strong formative enactment of cultural difference is it overcomes the given grounds of opposition and opens up a space of "translation":a place from looking for agency through analysis theoretical culture, much admired in Britain, thus essentially creative, an argument fully ofhybridity, figuratively speaking, where the and interpretation of forms of representation it did not have a cogent way of linking that elaborated in the last chapter of The Location construction of a political object that is new, to a metadiscourse in which his own theo directly to contemporary political issues-it of Culture, "How Newness Enters the World" neither the one nor the Other, properly alien retical language becomes both a description remained more literary or philosophical, ap (1991-93). This late essay shows how Bhabha's ates our political expectations, and changes, of transformational change in the dynamics parently irrelevant to the concerns of con attention has turned from the question of cul as it must, the very forms of our recognition of contemporary culture and an example of temporary society. Theory's remoteness from tural representation to a metadiscursive lan of the "moment" of politics. (25) that intervention. Hybridity and doubleness politics and society in the United States was guage that both theorizes the processes of his progress from being discernible on the page the basis of the critique made by those such as own conceptual creativity and establishes a Here translation negotiates and transforms to the cultural idiom of minority artists and Frank Lentricchia and, following him, Edward further way of thinking about the apparently the differences between rival theoretico commentators who are trying, Bhabha ar Said (Young, "Edward Said"). Bhabha's impact irresolvable differences between theoretico political positions; Bhabha would later in gues, to achieve postcolonial cultural trans in the United States was the result of his abil political positions that featured in the London voke the idea of cultural translation to make lations of Western modernity, transforming ity to connect his audience members to their debates of the 1980s. Bhabha now broaches a similar argument with respect to compet and revising our idea of that modernity by own previously unarticulated political con this metadiscursive component through the ing cultures operating in the same environ foregrounding the questions of race, slavery, cerns. Hasty readers read him more critically, concept of cultural translation, which had ment. In this passage Bhabha emphasizes his and colonialism. as ifhe were offering another form of theoreti emerged from, and implicitly referred to, the thesis that the most effective forms of critique Though the essays in The Location of Cul cal abstraction comparable to those of the Yale context of the ethnically and linguistically are not simply opposition and reversal. Cri ture were written in the intellectual milieu of school. But Bhabha was never a de Man, argu mixed London of the early 1990s. tique "overcomes" antitheses in a Hegelian or London, from an early stage in his career Bha ing for the separation of reality from thought The concept of translation is absent from Marxist fashion, to produce not a resolution bha was also keyed in to contemporary debates and representation. For him, it was the op Bhabha's earliest essays. It first appears in or negation in the mode of an Aujhebungthat in the United States. In December 1983, at the posite: he was campaigning for their urgent "Signs Taken for Wonders," in the context of preserves and cancels both but something invitation of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, connection-the problem was that they did the most substantial elaboration ofhybridity. "new, neither the one nor the Other." Notice Bhabha spoke at the MLA convention on a not correlate. Curiously characterizing the Christian Bible how hybridity becomes a way of figuratively panel with Spivak, Edward Said, and William Bhabha the cultural translator gradually as the "English book," Bhabha describes its speaking translation: a "space" of transla Pietz, and from that moment Bhabha began theorized his own practice. He developed that being translated into Indian vernaculars but tion is identified as a "place" of hybridity. All The Dislocationsof CulturalTranslation [PMLA 132.1 1 RobertJ. C. Young 191 • • three become part of the same process. The competing positions by displacing, transfer it is untranslatable . ... Translation can only mate form of domesticating translation, since .. fundamental spatial metaf·hor implicit in the ring, or translating them to somewhere else, the material translated reemerges in a form Q be achieved by subjecting the cultural pro idea of translation in English is exploited so a place that enables forms of recognition that .,,Q ductions (myth, arts, rituals, or whatever), the that bears little or no resemblance to its origi Q that the expansive process of translation be challenge the terms of both. This negotiation things that give these lives their immediate nal. As a result of these critiques, anthropolo comes its primary creative and defining ac is not translation as such, however, since that look of strangeness, to a universalizing anal gists no longer think of "translating culture"; =• tivity rather than its source or final output. would be to convert position A into posi ysis that, in dissolving the immediacy, dis typically, they no longer use the word transla .. It 3 What does such critique achieve? produces, tion B, but rather the transference or passage solves the strangeness" ("World" 33).' Unlike tion, or indeed culture, at all. ro ~ we are told, a new form of "recognition"-the across the no-man's-land that marks their Levi-Strauss, who saw translation as having a Bhabha thus revived the idea of cultural :,- 0 • very issue that Bhabha had begun with in differences. Bhabha captures this figuratively domesticating effect, Geertz sought to repre translation just as Asad was pronouncing its .. • 1980 ("Representation" 99). While the rep by turning the negotiating process into some Q •Q sent the foreignness oflanguages in the form death in anthropology. Bhabha would have 0 resentations of the colonial text only offered thing at once spatial and temporal, as if the of the particular strangeness of differences heard Asad give a version of his paper on '!!. .c• ro ~ recognition that confirmed a colonial point of two competing positions are enabled through in the universal of culture, as Bhabha-and cultural translation at the 1984 Essex Confer • view, the hybrid, or translatimJa!, critique be translation to meet across the long bridge of much later, following his footsteps, Dipesh ence on the Sociology of Literature, at which comes the means whereby static, fixed forms spies that stretches between them. Translation Chakrabarty-would also argue. Bhabha, Bhabha gave the original version of his essay can be dislodged and new modes of identifica becomes equated not with the transformation however, did not follow Geertz's next move "Signs Taken for Wonders," and he would tion and understanding developed. The devel from source to target language but with the namely, his admission that at another level have seen Asad's paper printed in the pub opment of this critical "third space" changes dialectical act of metamorphosis that compre "culture" itself is the universal term through lished proceedings of the conference. Asad, the possibilities of politics through the devel hends both languages. It does not move the which the anthropologist "translates" the in speaking together with John Dixon, empha opment of modified or hitherto unthought-of elements upward onto a new plane where they dividual practices of the society being stud sized the asymmetric power relation between positions that operate outside the box. become resolved in a new form but shoves ied, in order to make differences equivalent. the anthropologist as cultural translator and In "The Commitment to Theory," trans them sideways into a space where all the orig This poses the question: does not the concep the society being studied: "there is a prevail lation is repeatedly invoked to describe an inal elements continue to operate together ac tual category of culture itself imply a form of ing trend for the language of the dominated ongoing process of dislocation between cording to their diverse, heterogeneous terms. translation-that is, a mediation between a cultures to accommodate to the demands and theoretico-political positions. Bhabha uses Bhabha introduced the term "cultural particular and a universal? concepts of the dominating culture. Equally, versions of the phrase "negotiation or trans translation" into his work two years later, in The idea of equating cultural interpreta there are powerful resistances to making any lation" four times in the essay (26, 30, 38, 38), "DissemiNation" (1990). He was fully aware tion with the transformations between dis comparable adjustments within the discur as well as "translation and displacement" that the concept of cultural translation al crete languages was also analyzed by Talal sive practices of European scholarship" (171). (26) and "translation or transformation" ready possessed a long and contested tradi Asad in his well-known essay "The Concept of The controlling culture, they maintained, (32), in arguing "that each position is always tion in cultural anthropology, going back Cultural Translation in British Social Anthro citing Walter Benjamin's famous 1923 essay a process of translation and transference of to E. E. Evans-Pritchard.' Cultural anthro pology" (1986). Asad focuses on the perennial "The Task of the Translator," does not for meaning" (26). He writes, in an intralingual pologists used the concept in different ways. concern in anthropology of how the anthro eignize itself by integrating any aspects of translation of the passage cited above: Claude Levi-Strauss, following Roman Jakob pologist mediates the implicit meanings of the the culture that it is studying. Other cultures son's translational principle of "equivalence "primitive thought" of "savages" to present it remain entirely distant from the conceptual My illustration attempts to display the im in difference" (Jakobson 233), sought to trans in terms comprehensible to the "sophisticated" and discursive apparatus of anthropology. In portance of the hybrid moment of political late the cultural differences that he analyzed change. Here the transformational value of Western reader: how, in other words, to trans an argument comparable to Geertz's, and in into human universals (Myth and Structural change lies in the rearticulation, or translation, late the ways and language of the "primitive" general terms to Said's in Orienta/ism, Asad of elements that are neither the One (unitary Anthropology). He was attacked for this strat for comprehension by the recondite academic and Dixon asserted that cultural translation working class) nor the Other (the politics of egy, however, by Clifford Geertz, who argued mind. Cultural translation thus becomes a in anthropology is a discourse of power and gender) but something else besides which con that "what Levi-Strauss has made for himself means of negotiating the gap in understand appropriation that destroys the particularity tests the terms and territories of both. {28) is an infernal culture machine. It annuls his ing and in time between primitive and mod of the culture it translates. This might have tory, reduces sentiment to a shadow of the in ern cultures, mediating what Johannes Fabian been more than enough to toll the death Although it is based on a binary, translation tellect, and replaces the particular minds of has criticized as anthropology's "denial of co knell of the concept. However, in a brilliant allows for a move away from a politics of po particular savages in particular jungles with evalness" between Western and non-Western inversion of their argument, Bhabha retrieved larity because it offers an ongoing, interactive the Savage Mind immanent in us all" ("Ce cultures (31), transforming the primitive into and rewrote it. For Asad and Dixon the an dialogic operation. The way to resolve po rebral Savage" 355). Levi-Strauss, Geertz ar the academic language of Western rationality. thropologists translate the so-called primi litical differences is to negotiate between the gued, was a "translator of culture, even when This kind of translation is, perhaps, the ulti- tive culture for their Western audience. For - ---.------T RobertJ. C. Young 193 13 2. l ] The Dislocationsof CulturalTranslation [PMLA newness enters the world. It is the great possi a state of cultural hybridity, negotiating cul apprehension of difference, to perform the • Bhabha the direction of the translation is bility that mass migration gives the world, and • tural differences every day, they also "deploy act of cultural translation. In the act of trans reversed: the "natives" become the new mi lation the "given" content becomes alien and I have tried to embrace it. TheSatanic Versesis ... their borderline conditions" to "translate •"' grants, who then translate their culture into estranged; and that, in its turn, leaves the for change-by-fusion, change-by-conjoining. .,,• . .. the social imaginary" of the metropolis It is a love-song to our mongrel selves . ~ that of the new host community. This means language of translation Aufgabe, always con ~ • (6).10 Cultures are continually developing in c,, .c.. that subaltern migrants, not anthropologists, fronted by its double, the untranslatable (Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands 394)" become the mediators, actively intervening in relation to other cultures that produce "hy alien and foreign. (164) 3 E• the hegemonic culture with which they find brid sites of meanings" that open up fissures Bhabha supports Rushdie by identifying the ,,.•~ .,, 1 c themselves confronted. Cultural translation of transformative possibility.1 The act of translation will embed its differ processes that the novelist describes with his • • 0 • thus operates like hybridization, which, ac Bhabha develops this idea of cultural ence in what has been translated, leaving an own account of cultural translation, build "" translation by returning to Benjamin's "The ing on an idea already invoked in The Sa • • cording to Bhabha, involves an agential pro unassimilable residue of cultural difference: "..!• Task of the Translator." Despite citing Ro tanic Verses, where the narrator asks, ((How • cess of intervention and interaction within the untranslatable thus uncannily transforms ~• .c.. the power dynamics of copflicting contem dolphe Gasche's account of Benjamin's spiri the target culture. does newness come into the world? How is it porary cultures. Bhabha counters traditional tual or idealist understanding of the nature The most sustained elaboration of the born? Of what fusions, translations, conjoin sociological theories of migrancy that involve oflanguage and translation, Bhabha chooses idea of cultural translation as a form of ings is it made?" (8).14 Bhabha then conflates ideas of assimilation or acculturation: in his to read Benjamin in more materialist, norma agency, transforming one system through his own concept of a "third space" with Rush account, the migrant transforms the receiv tive terms. What he takes from Benjamin are another, appears in the last essay written for die's idea that migration and immigration are ing culture, not vice versa. As a result, the less the latter's own idiosyncratic ideas about The Location of Culture, "How Newness En transforming our cultures ("New professors, dominant culture gets culturally translated translation than those found in Benjamin's ters the World: Postcolonial Times and the new painters, the lot. It's a bloody revolution" by the migrant. Bhabha's theory of cultural quotation from Rudolf Pannwitz, also in Trials of Cultural Translation" (1991-93). [Rushdie, Satanic Verses 270]): instead of as translation is thus one in which the trans voked by Asad and Dixon, which poses the al Bhabha's title invokes an event that had re similation, or nativism, the hybridity of the lation is, in anthropological terms, back to ternatives of domesticating and foreignizing cently animated the London world in which third space produces innovative forms of what front or, to put it in more traditional transla translation, a time-honored antithesis of pos he lived-the fatwa pronounced on Rush Bhabha calls "the borderline negotiations tional language, foreignizing. sibilities in translation theory that goes back die. The controversy began in January 1989 of cultural translation" (223). The subject of While he does not challenge the concept at least to Friedrich Schleiermacher's essay when a group of Muslims in Bradford, En cultural difference becomes the resisting un of culture as such, Bhabha argues that cul "On the Different Methods of Translating" gland, burned a copy of The Satanic Verses translatable element in cultural translation. ture opens up a space of difference, which en (1813) and that has been more recently cham in a public protest against it. The following Bhabha then follows Rushdie directly by iden ables us to experience forms of alterity rather pioned, in 1993, by Lawrence Venuti. 12 Bha month, Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a tifying the newness of cultural translations than become fixed in oppositional bunkers.' bha's cultural translation is essentially based fatwa calling on all Muslims to kill Rushdie with the act of blasphemy. In Bhabha's ac Culture is the in-between, embodying het on the idea of a foreignizing translation, in and anyone involved in publishing the book. count, Rushdie and his characters are ascribed erogeneous experiences that do not add up which the untranslatable components of the Rushdie went into hiding. In "How Newness the agency of the migrant encountering a de to a homogeneous totality, enabling the ar language of the source text are infiltrated Enters the World," cultural translation forms terminate tradition, for which, Bhabha argues, ticulation of the voices that are customarily into the texture of the target language: so the a central part of Bhabha's discussion of the "hybridity is heresy."" Bhabha then directly repressed. Bhabha also suggests that as sym migrants' cultural translation intervenes by fatwa and his defense of Rushdie. identifies blasphemy, together with heresy, as bolic interpellative practices, all cultures are interweaving elements of their culture into The title of Bhabha's article is an unac the form of the migrant's "transgressive act of always articulated with each other as open those of the dominant culture. Through this knowledged quotation from a passage in cultural translation" (226). systems. Culture holds together different foreignizing procedure newness comes into Rushdie's 1990 essay on the Satanic Verses . While Rushdie's transgressive poetics cultures while remaining incomplete and so the world, in culture just as in language. Cul controversy, "In Good Faith," in which Rush perfectly fit Bhabha's earlier arguments for gives us the experience of their difference.' tural translation is not simply about moving die defends himself on the grounds that the agential strategies of the migrant, what Such internally differentiated culture can also the source culture into the target culture but gets lost here is that while Rushdie's oppo provide the context for agential intervention about translating the target culture into a The Satanic Versescelebrates hybridity, impu nents may be the upholders of tradition, they by the angels of progress, the cultural trans new form: rity, intermingling, the transformation that were first- or second-generation migrants comes of new and unexpected combinations lators who will open up the potential het too, rather less entitled and privileged than of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, erogeneous spaces within and between the And it is from this foreign perspective that Rushdie. The controversy arose because symbolic systems of different cultures. Those it becomes possible to inscribe the specific movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Melange, migrants were rejecting Rushdie's cultural living on the borderlines between different locality of cultural systems-their incom hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how translations as blasphemous, not identifying cultures, above all migrants, not only exist in mensurable differences-and through that -=--:-_[ ---- ! ---- I- The Dislocations of Cultural Translation 194 [ PMLA 13 2. 1 ] Robert J. C. Young 195 with them. The ensuing fatwa, moreover, sig In identifying cultural translation with nity that followed in the wake of its appearance discussion in Local Knowledge of understanding between naled an era in which cultural and religious blasphemy, Bhabha seems to miss the fact that twenty years ago." At the same time, however, different cultures (59). tenets, while articulated locally, formed part a section of the Muslim minority in Britain, 7. Bhabhahimselfhad already made a comparable ar as the book itself obliquely acknowledges, gument in "Representation and the Colonial Text" (1980), of a global movement: the fatwa was the first mostly poor and working-class, had written other, more militant challenges to Western mo about the fate of colonial texts losing their particularity example of the global, nonlocational cultural back in terms very different from those of dernity have arisen from other places and other in the process of attaining literary universality (114). • 0.• disjunction of what is now referred to as Is metropolitan intellectuals and had explicitly times, untranslatables that Western cultural 8. "To that end," Bhabha writes in the original ending 3 .,, lamism. The opposition to Rushdie's book rejected their cultural politics of the 1980s. translators cannot simply deflect to their own to "The Commitment to Theory," "we should remember c that it is the 'inter' -the cutting edge of translation and • began in Britain and then developed across While the Iranian Revolution of 1979 did not :r.. • values. The irresolvable differences that Bhabha negotiation, the in-between, the space of the entre that • the countries of the global South, form register hugely with local British politics, the • • so persuasively renegotiated have returned in a Derrida has opened up in writing itself-that carries the .. ing a tricontinental movement (in Africa, Rushdie fatwa of 1989 certainly did. Rushdie burden of the meaning of culture. It makes it possible •"" 0 radically new, undreamed-of form . 0 • Asia, and Latin America) that challenged was never to regain the literary greatness and to begin envisaging national, antinationalist, histories ".!. .c of the 'people.' It is in this space that we will find those > .. the secular precepts of Western modernity. social relevance of his London years. He may ~ words with which we can speak of Ourselves and Oth Those who defended Rushdie were the up have survived the fatwa but it certainly seems ers. And by exploring this hybridity, this 'Third Space,' holders of the Western liberal tradition, the to have killed him as a novelist. The new poli we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the same constituency that had been encourag tics first signaled by The Satanic Verses contro NOTES others of our selves" {"Commitment" 22). 9. "Cultures are only constituted in relation to that ing the cultural translation of mainstream versy effectively shifted the politico-cultural In discussing works that Bhabha refers to or quotes from otherness internal to their own symbol-forming activ British culture. Equating cultural translation agenda away from the diasporic Caribbean in The Location of Culture, I have, when possible, cited ity which makes them decentered structur~s-th[r)ough the same editions used by him or contemporarywith the with heresy and blasphemy while focusing model of Stuart Hall ("Cultural Identity" and that displacement or liminality [there) opens up the p"os time line of The Location of Culture. on detailed interpretations of Rushdie's text, "New Ethnicities"), of hybridized performa sibility of articulating different, even incommensurable l. Unless otherwise indicated, all citations ofBhabha Bhabha seems oblivious to the larger politi cultural practices and priorities" (Bhabha, "Third Space" tive identities, to a starker world in which dif refer to 'TheLocation of Culture. 210-11; cf. Location 162-63). cal perspectives that would become a domi ference, hybridity, and in-betweens no longer 2, In a longer, unpublished version of this essay, I ex 10. In the introduction, cited here, Bhabha uses the nant feature of the politics of the twenty-first served as the definitive markers of progressive amine Bhabha's early writings in the context of the theo term cultural translation only once, and somewhat dif retical, cultural, and political milieus in which Bhabha century after 9/11. The espousal of difference cultural and political issues. In the face of the ferently, to characterize the photographs of Allan Sekula worked in Oxford and London from 1970 to 1984. and its hybrid effects became less germane in "implacable antagonism" of the public dem (1951-2013), who "takes the borderline condition of cul 3. The penultimate essay in the book, "How New a radicalized world in which such forms of onstrations against Rushdie's cultural transla tural translation to its global limit in Fish Story [1989-95], ness Enters the World," cites two published works-Sara modernity, whether countercultural or not, tion (Bhabha, "Black Voices" ll2), the theory his photographic project on harbours" (8). Fish Story, as Suleri's The Rhetoric of English India (1992) and Edward an exhibition catalog at the Santa Monica Museum of Art I, were being rejected. Summarily dismissing itself became alienated and estranged, leaving Said's Culture and Imperialism (1993)-both of which described it in 1996, "explored the historical, sociopoliti the objections to The Satanic Verses as "the its language of cultural translation confronted Bhabha describes as "recent" (272). This late essay, along cal, aesthetic, and literary connections among such far righteous indignation of Magus and Mullah" by its dark double, the untranslatable-some with the other three previously unpublished essays in flung port cities as New York, Rotterdam, Los Angeles, 'TheLocation of Culture, are not pa.rt of the dissertation and claiming that "cultural translation de Hong Kong, and Seoul. Consisting of a sequence of 105 thing truly alien and foreign-for which it version of the book, which includes "Representation and sacralizes [such] transparent assumptions of large-scale, color photographs interspersed with narrative had no language or understanding and to the Colonial Text" and ''A Question of Survival-Nations panels authored by Sekula, as well as two slide projections, cultural supremacy" (228), Bhabha moves on which it had no response. and Psychic States" (DPhil dissertation completed in Fish Story wove an intricate web of visual and verbal as to a discussion of feminist antifundamental Bhabha's theory of cultural translation as 1991 at Oxford University). My own analysis ofBhabha in sociations among panoramic views of the sea, detailed ist discourse. What remains unaddressed is a form of blasphemy perhaps best character White Mythologies, published in 1990, discusses Bhabha's close-ups of nautical devices, cargo containers, ware work up to that date, and therefore not the later chapters the question of whose cultural supremacy is izes the "performative, deformative structure" houses, sailors, and shipyard workers, locating the indi of The Location of Culture. vidual elements in an ever-shifting cross-current of global being desacralized and by whom, and the fact of his own theoretical practice (241). Even 4. The contrast between the title of Said's talk at the . exchange: of goods, money, knowledge, and power." It is that resistance to Rushdie's idea of hybrid when Bhabha reads others, he translates them convention, "Postcolonial Discourse," and Bhabha's, not entirely clear how the hybrid cultural conditions that ity was being articulated by Muslims across into his own terms, colliding with them and "Stereotype and Fantasy: The Ambivalence of Colonial Bhabha describes earlier for the migrant apply to the work the world for whom cultural translation had transfiguring them to say something new and Discourse," nicely points to the differences between the of a white Marxist photographer demonstrating the pro two critics' approaches (Program 1030). cesses of globalized commercial traffic and exchange. become symptomat_ic of the West's habitual unexpected. Throughout The Location of Cul 5. If this was how English culture appeared to some 11. Compare the idea of using the instability of cul 1 claims to cultural supremacy, of the West's ture the reader encounters remarks such as 'To in the 1980s, it was nevertheless highly stratified (Young, ture as a means for its transformation with the argu unequal, disrespectful, and patronizing rela bend Jiirgen Habermas to our purposes ... " Idea). ments ofFanon (Young, "Fanon"). tion to the non-West. The structural position (171).The book is truly transformative, ending 6. The following paragraph draws on some material 12. Benjamin's quotation from Pannwitz, in the Harry of cultural translation had been returned to by reaffirming its challenge to normative ideas from my article "Hybridity and Cultural Translation." Zohn translation of "The Task of the Translator" that On Evans-Pritchard as the origi4ator of the metaphor Bhabha cites (228), reads, "Our translations, even the best the same power structure criticized by Asad of Western modernity-a manifesto of the re of translation in anthropology, see Geertz, Local Knowl ones, proceed from a wrong premise. They want to turn and Geertz. visionary process of postcolonial contramoder- edge 9. In "'Articulating the Archaic," Bhabha cites Geertz's Hindi, Greek, English into German instead of turning The Dislocationsof CulturalTranslation [PMLA 1. 3 2. 1 ] Robert J.C.Young 197 ~ • German into Hindi, Greek, English .. , . The basic error of --. "The Commitment to Theory." New Formations, --. The Satanic Verses. Viking, 1988, ings, Ruptures, Legacies, edited by Tobias D6ring and the translator is that he preserves the state in which.his own vol. 5, Summer 1988, pp. 5-23. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. Chatto and Mark Stein, Routledge, 2012, pp. 23-43. 0 language happens to be instead of allowing his language to " --. "Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Windus, 1993. --. "Fanon and the Enigma of Cultural Translation." 0 be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue" (qtd. in Ben .., Colonialism." The Politics of Theory, edited by Francis Schleiermacher, Friedrich. "Ueber die verschiedenen Translation: A Transdisciplinary Journal, vol. 1, 2012, 0 jamin 80-81), By contrast, Bhabha writes that "[tJhe Bible Barker et al., U of Essex P, 1983, pp. 194-211. Methoden des Uebersezens." 1813. Das Problem des pp. 91-100. .c translated into Hindi, .. is still the English book» (108). ... --. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994. Ubersetzens, edited by Hans Joachim StOrig, Wissen --. "Hybridity and Cultural Translation." Trans E• 13. Imaginary Homelands, the collection in which "In --. "Representation and the Colonial Text: A Criti- schaftliche Buchges, 1963, pp. 38-70. humanities, vol. 5, no. 1, 2012, pp. 155-75. Good Faith" appeared, ended with the 1990 essay "Why .., cal Exploration of Some Forms of Mimeticism." The Suleri, Sara. The Rhetoric of English India. U of Chi --. The Idea of English Ethnicity. Blackwell Publish 3 I Have Embraced Islam." Rushdie subsequently revoked ~ c Theory of Reading, edited by Frank Gloversmith, cago P, 1992. ers, 2008. .. ~ his declaration of faith, and the essay was dropped from "::' Harvester Press I Barnes and Noble Books, 1984, Venuti, Lawrence. "Translation as Cultural Politics: Re --. "The Void of Misgiving." Communicating in the 0 ~ the 1992 edition. pp. 93-122 . gimes of Domestication in English." Textual Practice, Third Space, edited by Karin Ikas and Gerhard Wag • 0 ·~ 14. Bhabha first used the term third space at the end of vol. 7, 1993, pp. 208-23. "" 0 Buck-Morss, Susan. Hegel, Haiti, and Human History. ner, Routledge, 2008, pp. 81-95. 0 his essay "Sly Civility" (101), but he did not substantially • U of Pittsburgh P, 2009 . Young, Robert J. C. "Edward Said: Opponent of Post --. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. .c develop the idea of a third space until his interview with ... Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial colonial Theory." Edward Said's Translocations: Read- 1990. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2004. "~ Jonathan Rutherford, in 1990, the Year before he began ~ Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton UP, 2000. "How Newness Enters the World." In this later essay, Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology he introduces the concept through an uncharacteristi Makes Its Object. Columbia UP, 1983, cally extended discussion of Fredric Jameson's argument Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by about the unrepresentability of postmodern space, I fur Charles Lam Markmann, Paladin Press, 1970. ther analyze the concept of a third space in "Void." Gasche, Rodolphe. "Saturnine Vision and the Question of 15. "Rushdie repeatedly uses the word 'blasphemy' Difference: Reflections on Walter Benjamin's Theory in the migrant sections of the book to indicate a theat rical form of the staging of cross-genre, cross-cultural of Language." Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature, vol. 11, no. l, 1986, pp. 69-90. identities. Blasphemy is not merely a misrepresentation of the sacred by the secular; it is a moment when the Geertz, Clifford, "The Cerebral Savage: On the Work of subject-matter or the content of a cultural tradition is be Claude Levi-Strauss." The Interpretation of Cultures: ing overwhelmed, or alienated, in the act of translation" Selected Essays, Basic Books, 1973, pp. 345-59. (225; cf. Rushdie, Satanic Verses 272). Rushdie uses the -- -. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive word blaspheme/blasphemy nine times (225-26), but he Anthropology. 3rd ed., Basic Books, 2000. only uses heresy in relation to ideas of evolution (75, 251). --. "The World in a Text: How to Read Tristes Tro 16. A slightly earlier example, written from the same piques." Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Au I thor, Stanford UP, 1988, pp. 25-48. i location as The Location of Culture, would be Paul Gil roy's 'lhe Black Atlantic (1993), A more recent one, from Gilroy, Paul. ihe Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double 2009, would be Susan Buck-Morss's Hegel, Haiti, and Hu Consciousness. Verso, 1993. man History. Hall, Stuart. "Cultural Identity and Diaspora." Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford, Lawrence and Wishart, 1990, pp. 222-37. --. "New Ethnicities." Black Film I British Cinema, WORKSCITED edited by Kobena Mercer, Institute of Contemporary Asad, Talal. "The Concept of Cultural Translation in Brit Arts, 1988, pp. 27-31. ICA Documents 7. ish Social Anthropology." Writing Culture: The Poetics Jakobson, Roman. "On Linguistic Aspects of Transla and Politics of Ethnography, edited by J. Clifford and tion." On Translation, edited by Reuben A. Brower, G. E. Marcus, U of California P, 1986, pp. 141-64. Harvard UP, 1959, pp. 232-39. Asad, Talal, and John Dixon. "Translating Europe's Oth Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic ers," Europe and Its Others: Proceedings of the Essex 'of Late Capitalism. Duke UP, 1991. Conference on the Sociology of Literature, July 1984, Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism. U of Chi edited by Francis Barker et al., vol. 1, U of Essex P, cago P, 1980. 1985, pp. 170-93. Levi-Strauss, Claude. Myth and Meaning. Routledge, 1978. Benjamin, Walter. "The Task of the Translator." Illumi --. Structural Anthropology. Translated by Claire Jacob nations, translated by Harry Zohn, Fontana, 1973, son and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf, Allen Lane, 1968. pp. 69-82. Program of the Centennial Convention of the Modern Bhabha, Homi K. "Black Voices in Defence of Salman Language Association of America. Special issue of Rushdie." The Rushdie File, edited by Lisa Appigna PMLA, vol. 98, no. 6, Nov. 1983. nesi and Sara Maitland, ICA Documents I Fourth Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Estate, 1989, pp. 112-14. Criticism, 1981-1991. Granta, 1991.