Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Print.
In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha fleshes out the idea that art/the aesthetic and culture can function as an ex-temporal space for the creation of collectivities at the interstices where the excesses of race, class and gender binaries cohese. Asserting culture as a dynamic process of the production of meaning and value, Bhabha reorients the “post” common to designations of critical theories from gesturing not sequentially to the future but to transforming the present into ‘the beyond’, “an expanded and ex-centric site of experience and empowerment” (4). Invoking Benjamin, he proposes “a conception of the present as the ‘time of now’” that transcends the “homogenous course of history” to an extra-temporal, ex-centric beyond. In a nod to the tension between universality and particularity in the formation of identities, Bhabha locates this beyond in the negotiation and social articulation of differences from the minority perspective–one whose tradition is “reinscribed through the conditions of contingency and contradictoriness” to point toward a potential transcendence of the power relations of core/periphery. In the cultural hybridity that arises in the production of identity by communities at the interstices of identitarian binaries and the margins of the socioeconomic sphere, Bhabha locates an “otherwise than modernity” whose transcendence of chronological time and fixed geographical space resist the capitalist oppression of globalization and hold the potential for a non-identitarian social formation that enables the reinscription of cultural differences in a non-divisive capacity. In culture, he asserts, we find an “uneven, incomplete production of meaning and value, often composed of incommensurable demands and practices, produced in the act of social survival” a strategy that is “both transnational and translational” (172).
globecultureform 