Bhabha, Homi (1949—)
An Indian-born, but American-based literary critic and theorist, Bhabha is one of the three most prominent collocation theorists of recent times, along with Said, Edward and Spivak, Gayatri. Of Parsee descent (an Indian minority group that originally migrated from Persia in the 8th century), Bhabha was born and raised in Mumbai. He took his undergraduate degree from the University of Mumbai, then went to Oxford to complete his DPhil on V.S. Naipaul. Thereafter he taught at the University of Sussex for a decade before relocating to the US where he has held a series of prestigious appointments culminating in his decision to join Harvard in 2001. Bhabha is very far from being a prolific author: to date, he has only published one monograph (though several more are said to be in the pipeline), The Location of Culture (1994), which collects several previously published essays. Despite his comparatively meagre output, Bhabha’s work has had an astonishingly broad impact. Difficult though his writing famously is, his combination of post-structuralism theory, postmodern sensibility, and collocation themes resonates strongly with the critical concerns of the present moment. Bhabha’s basic argument, tested via the interrogation of a rich variety of literary and artistic texts, is that culture cannot any longer (if it ever could) be conceived in monolithic terms, but has to be thought rather in terms of hybridity. Culturally, thanks to movement of peoples, ideas, capital, and commodities made possible by the forces and processes of globalization, ‘we’ are never wholly of or in one place. Our sense of self and location is a product of a combination of factors that are never entirely local or ‘native’ in origin. To take only one example, more than two thirds of all toys and clothing retailed in the US today are manufactured in China, yet those toys and clothes are not recognizably Chinese in form or design. For Bhabha, this hybridity is ambivalent: it means that power is always limited in its ability to determine identities and control representations. Bhabha thus criticizes Said’s Orientalism thesis for portraying the effects of power as singular and inexorable and not taking into account the postmodern subject’s ability to mimicry and therefore transmute what is expected of them. Further Reading: E. Byrne Homi K. Bhabha (2009). D. Huddart Homi K. Bhabha (2006). Bildungsroman (development novel) A sub-genre of novel focusing on the personal development of the protagonist, usually from childhood through to adulthood. The prototype is J. W. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjarhre (Willhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 1795—6), but the form was widely adopted in Europe throughout the nineteenth century. Other famous examples include: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850) and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895). As these examples suggest, the development is not merely personal, inasmuch as it generally takes the form of both a move away from rural origins towards the modern city and an upward movement from one social class to another. In this regard, the personal history can be read as an allegory of a particular trajectory within a national history. Further Reading: M. Bakhtin Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (1986). F. Moretti The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (new edn, 2000).