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 settled to the liminal quadruplets 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 maintain that colonization is non just a conscious body of association (Saids manifest Orientalism) but also the unconscious positivity of envisage and desire (Bhabhas latent Orientalism) (Young, White Mythologies 181).Bhabha used that vantage stay of liminal spaces to study the phenomenon of ethnical translation in his essay How new-fashionedness Enters the man which was make in a collection of essays titled under The perspective of destination (1994). The liminal zone that the postcolonial immigrant occupies is the guiding question of this essay. Bhabh a explains I used architecture liter each(prenominal)y as a reference, using the attic, the boiler room, and the stairwell to make associations between sealed 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 directs this framework to evaluate 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 hold up in the liminal space. He asserts, For Jameson, the possibility of becoming historical demands a containment of this contrastive social time. (217)Bhabha elaborates upon the concept of liminal space with the help of the idea of blasphemy, as it comes verboten in Salman Rushdies Satanic Verses andunderlines the controversy of the Rushdie Affair2. Bhabha says, Blasphemy is not save a misrepresentation of the sacred by the secula r it is a minute 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 arguing 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 claim that Rushdie is not abroad at all. Politically and professionally he is at home.(Wars 65) Brennan adds that Rushdies knowledge of Islam is limited to some childhood experiences and a course that he did at Cambridge University. If we look at Rushdie from this perspective, then Rushdie would cease to inhabit what Bhabha calls the liminal space between two cultures and instead be massive to and speak for the imperial west.Nevertheless, unconnected from Rushdies fiction, Bhabha employs various other kinds of evidence to support his theoretical tin in this essay. The first of which is the epigraph3 from Walter asa dulciss On Languag e as Such in this essay asa dulcis suggests that translation is the origin of all knowledge The oral communication 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 edition 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 mean (about her fiances last 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 zero point crosses from one to the other in its original form, without a certain detail of cultural translation.This essay is organized in three sections New World Borders, Foreign Relations and conjunction Matters. However, it is strung together by the coarse idea of liminality. The first section draws a parallel between Marlows lie and Jamesons possibleness of the postmodern, which Bhabha calls his theme park. Both of these, consort to Bhabhas framework, are attempts to keep the conversation of humankind going and to retain the neo-pragmatic universe. (212) Bhabha elucidates his criticism of Jameson by re-visiting the metrical composition 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 succeeding(prenominal) section, Bhabha scrutinises Jamesons postmodern city through the subject position of migrants and minorities. He challenges the importance given to form relations in the Marxist confabulation by shifting the focus to nonage groups. It is i mportant to note that minority is a not just a matter of quantity, 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 opposite 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 full to signify, the right to naming, is itself an act of cultural translation. (234). H e suggests a breakthrough in the form of the spaces that lie between above and below and heaven and sanatorium. 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 todays ever-globalising context but many other theorists have criticized his theoretical exemplar 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 conjecture itself becomes a marketplace of ideas. (70). Viewed from a Marxist standpoint, Bhabhas theories may take care 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 boost as w ell as a sense of a long past.Ahmeds criticism can be taken a step further to conduct a theoretical study of the strength of Bhabhas arguments. In Nation and Narration Bhabha announced that his intention was to charter the insights of poststructuralist theories of narrative knowledge in order to evoke this ambivalent moulding of the nation-space. (4) Catherine Belsey in Poststructuralism explains that the simple inference of poststructuralism is that language is differential and not denotive in nature. (9) Taking from Saussures theory on language, it studies language synchronically where the signifier is not referentially tied to the signified. On the other hand, it is evident from Benjamins essays6 that he views language as a diachronic organisation 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 lang uage is referential, where the word has or once had a direct affiliation with the thing it represents.These two models of language seem like blocks from different puzzles, which do not really fit with one another. This poses a serious challenge to the effectiveness of Bhabhas theoretical groundwork, as he does not engineer 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, in particular 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 slight introduction. New York Oxford University Press, 2002. Benjamin, Walter, and Knut Tarnowski. Doctrine of the Si milar (1933). New German Critique 17 1979 65-69 . On Language as Such and on the 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 some other Tales. Oxford Worlds Classics, 1990. Deleuze, Gilles. Kafka Toward a Minor Literature. Theory and History of Li terature. Vol. 30. Minneapolis University of manganese Press, 1986. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham 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).