A Critical Analysis of Homi K. Bhabha’s “How Newness Enters The World” Essay

The Indian theorist Homi K. Bhabha shifted the limelight from the binary1 of the colonizer and the colonized to the liminal spaces in-between in the domain of Postcolonial studies. In Difference, Discrimination, and the Discourse of Colonialism, he stated, There is always, in Said, the suggestion that colonial power is possessed entirely by the colonizer which is a historical and theoretical simplification (200). He asserted that colonization is not just a sure body of cognition (Saids manifest Orientalism) but also the unconscious positivity of fantasy and swear (Bhabhas latent Orientalism) (Young, White Mythologies 181).Bhabha used that vantage point of liminal spaces to break down the phenomenon of cultural supplanting in his experiment How Newness Enters the public which was published in a collection of essays titled under The Location of refinement (1994). The liminal z unmatchable that the postcolonial immigrant occupies is the guiding question of this essay. Bhabha ex plains I used architecture liter eachy as a reference, apply the attic, the boiler way, and the stairwell to make associations between certain binary divisions such as higher and lower. The stairwell became a liminal space, a pathway between the upper and lower areas. (3-4)In How Newness Bhabha machinates this framework to critique Fredric Jamesons Postmodernism Or, The cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. He argues that the category of Postmodern assumes a neat categorization of subject positions, which leaves no room for subjects to exist in the liminal space. He asserts, For Jameson, the porta of becoming historical demands a containment of this disjunctive tender time. (217)Bhabha elaborates upon the concept of liminal space with the help of the idea of blasphemy, as it comes out in Salman Rushdies Satanic Verses andunderlines the contest of the Rushdie Affair2. Bhabha says, Blasphemy is not merely a misrepresentation of the sacred by the secular it is a twinkling when the subject-matter or the content of cultural tradition is being overwhelmed, or alienated, in the act of translation. (225) In essence, Bhabha is line that the very act of inhabiting the liminal space whether by Rushdie or his characters is blasphemy.However, it is necessary to consider that critics like Timothy Brennan consume that Rushdie is not abroad at all. Politically and professionally he is at home.(Wars 65) Brennan adds that Rushdies knowledge of Islam is extra to some childhood experiences and a course that he did at Cambridge University. If we look at Rushdie from this perspective, then Rushdie would resign to inhabit what Bhabha calls the liminal space between two cultures and instead belong to and speak for the imperial west.Nevertheless, apart from Rushdies fiction, Bhabha employs variant natural(prenominal) kinds of evidence to support his theoretical stand in this essay. The first of which is the epigraph3 from Walter Benjamins On Language as Such in this essa y Benjamin suggests that translation is the origin of all knowledge The language of things can pass into language of knowledge and name only through translation (70-71). It is the gap between the original and the translated text that Bhabha terms as the liminal space.To illustrate this use of translation in cultural terms Bhabha cites Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness. He argues that Marlows lie to the intended (about her fiances remainder words) is an example of cultural translation where Marlow does not merely repress the truth as much as he enacts a poetics of translation. (212). Marlow inhabits the in-between space of the colony and the western metropolis, where nothing crosses from 1 to the other in its original form, without a certain degree of cultural translation.This essay is organized in three sections New human beings Borders, Foreign Relations and Community Matters. However, it is strung together by the vernacular idea of liminality. The first section draws a parall el between Marlows lie and Jamesons opening of the postmodern, which Bhabha calls his theme park. Both of these, according to Bhabhas framework, are attempts to keep the conversation of humankind leaving and to preserve the neo-pragmatic universe. (212) Bhabha elucidates his blame of Jameson by re-visiting the poem mainland China, which Jameson had earlier commented upon in his book4. He contests Jameson for not appropriating the newness of China but translating it back into certain familiar terms. He destabilizes Jamesons periodization and claims that communities cannot be explained in pre-modernist terms, the history of communities parallels the history of modernity.In the next section, Bhabha scrutinises Jamesons postmodern city through the subject position of migrants and minorities. He challenges the greatness prone to class relations in the Marxist discourse by shifting the focus to minority groups. It is important to note that minority is a not just a matter of quantit y, but as Deleuze and Guattari point out in Kafka Toward a Minor Literature, it is a matter of subject position.The last section poses the last challenge to Jameson, as Bhabha pitches communities directly against class, using Partha Chatterjees A Response as evidence. Bhabha comments, Community disturbs the grand globalizing narrative of capital, displaces the emphasis on production in class collectivity (230). In other words, minority subject position of belonging to a community punctures the larger Marxist narrative of class-consciousness he calls community the antagonist supplement of modernity.Bhabha concludes the essay by proposing an alternative perspective through Derek Walcotts poems. Bhabha draws a bridge5 between the central concerns of naming in Walcotts poem (Names) and the central idea of his essay by asserting that the right to signify, the right to naming, is itself an act of cultural translation. (234). He suggests a breakthrough in the form of the spaces that lie be tween above and below and heaven and hell. He argues that the only possibility of an agency that enables one to posses something anew lies in the in-between spaces the liminal spaces.Concepts, such as liminality are indispensible in immediatelys ever-globalising context but many other theorists have criticized his theoretical model on various grounds. The Indian Marxist critic Aijaz Ahmad says that Bhabha uses a a theoretical melange which randomly invokes Levi-Strauss in one phrase, Foucault in another, Lacan in yet another. (68), he asserts that in such a framework theory itself becomes a marketplace of ideas. (70). Viewed from a Marxist standpoint, Bhabhas theories may seem as if they leave no room for resistance and action, Ahmad claims that Bhabha is irrelevant for a majority of the population that has been denied access to such benefits of modernity (69), and that Bhabha cuts access to come along as well as a sense of a long past.Ahmeds criticism can be taken a step furthe r to conduct a theoretical study of the effectiveness of Bhabhas arguments. In Nation and Narration Bhabha announced that his intention was to engage the insights of poststructuralist theories of narrative knowledge in order to evoke this ambivalent margin of the nation-space. (4) Catherine Belsey in Poststructuralism explains that the simple inference of poststructuralism is that language is derived function and not referential in nature. (9) Taking from Saussures theory on language, it studies language synchronically where the shape is not referentially tied to the signified. On the other hand, it is evident from Benjamins essays6 that he views language as a diachronic system where it represents the medium in which objects meet and enter into relationship with each other, no longer directly, as once in the mind of the augur or priest, but in their essences (68). In other words, Benjamins theory of language is referential, where the word has or once had a direct connection with the thing it represents.These two models of language seem like blocks from different puzzles, which do not rightfully fit with one another. This poses a serious challenge to the effectiveness of Bhabhas theoretical groundwork, as he does not address this rift between the two models and employs them simultaneously.However, we cannot discount Bhabhas breakthrough on this ground, as histheories are essential to make sense of the postcolonial condition of immigrants and diasporic Literature, especially in the ever-globalizing world that we inhabit. He has given an indispensible insight into the possibilities that lie in these liminal spaces.Works CitedAhmad, Aijaz. In theory Classes, nations, literatures. capital of the United Kingdom Verso, 1994. Belsey, Catherine. Poststructuralism A very in brief introduction. New York Oxford University Press, 2002. Benjamin, Walter, and Knut Tarnowski. Doctrine of the Similar (1933). New German Critique 17 1979 65-69 . On Language as Such and on t he Language of Man. Walter Benjamin selected writings 1 1996 62-74 Bhabha, Homi K. (1983a), Difference, Discrimination, and the Discourse of Colonialism The Politics of Theory. Ed. Francis Barker et al. Colchester University of Essex. . How Newness Enters the World Postmodern Space, Postcolonial Times and the Trials of Cultural Translation. The Location of Culture. London Routledge, 2004. 212-235. . Nation and narration. New York Routledge, 1990.. The Location of Culture. 1994. With a new preface by the author. London Routledge, 2004. Brennan, Timothy. Wars of position The cultural politics of left and right. New York Columbia University Press, 2006. Chatterjee, Partha. A Response to Taylors Modes of Civil Society. Public Culture 3.1 1990 119-132. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness and Other Tales. Oxford Worlds Classics, 1990. Deleuze, Gilles. Kafka Toward a Minor Literature. Theory and History of Literature. Vol. 30. Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Jameson, Fredric . Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. shorthorn Duke University Press, 1991. Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. 1988. London Vintage, 1998. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York Vintage 1979.Walcott, Derek. Collected Poems, 1948-1984. London Faber and Faber Limited, 1992. Young, Robert. White Mythologies History Writing and the West. London and New YorkRoutledge (1991).