How Newness Enters The World w3p6j

Anand 1

Rachit Anand Professor Subarno Chattarji M.Phil. English — Research Methodology 2013 14-10-2013 A Critical Analysis of Homi K. Bhabha's "How Newness Enters The World: Postmodern space, postcolonial times and the trials of cultural translation" 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" (Politics 1983), 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" (Politics 200). His theory suggests that colonization is not just a "conscious body of knowledge (Said's manifest Orientalism) but also the 'unconscious positivity' of fantasy and desire (Bhabha's latent Orientalism)" (Young, White Mythologies 181). Bhabha used that vantage point — of liminal spaces — to study the phenomenon of cultural translation in his essay "How Newness Enters the World" which was published in a collection of essays titled under The Location of Culture (1994). The liminal zone, that the postcolonial immigrant occupies, is the guiding question of this essay. Bhabha explains: I used architecture literally as a reference, using the attic, the boiler room, 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.... (Location 3-4) 1

According to Bhabha, this binary was crucial to Edward Said's Orientalism.

Anand 2

In "How Newness Enters the World" Bhabha directs this framework to critique Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1990). 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 possibility of becoming historical demands a containment of this disjunctive social time" ("Newness "217). Bhabha elaborates upon the concept of liminal space with the help of the idea of blasphemy, as it comes out in Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses (1988) and underlines the controversy of the Rushdie affair2. Bhabha says, "Blasphemy is not merely a misrepresentation of the sacred by the secular; it is a moment when the subject-matter or the content of cultural tradition is being overwhelmed, or alienated, in the act of translation" ("Newness" 225). In essence, Bhabha is arguing that the very act of inhabiting the liminal space — whether by Rushdie or his characters — is blasphemy. Apart from Rushdie's fiction, Bhabha employs other kinds of evidence as well to his theoretical stand in this essay. The first of which is the epigraph3 from Walter Benjamin's "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man", where Benjamin suggests that translation is the origin of all knowledge: "The language of things can into language of knowledge and name only through translation" (70-71). It is the gap between the original and the translated text that Bhabha as the liminal space. To illustrate this use of translation in cultural Bhabha cites Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902). He argues that Marlow's lie to the intended (about her fiancé's last words) is an example of cultural translation where "Marlow does not merely repress the 'truth' 2

In 1989 Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie on of Blasphemy and The Satanic Verses was banned In many Islamic countries as well as secular countries like India and South Africa. 3 Translation es through continua of transformation, not abstract ideas of identity and similarity.

Anand 3

... 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 one to the other in its original form, without a certain degree of cultural translation. The organization of this essay is crucial and systematic as Bhabha picks a trail from Conrad, complicates it with Fredric Jameson, and finally goes towards a resolution with Derek Walcott. It is organized in three sections: "New World Borders", "Foreign Relations" and "Community Matters". The first section draws a parallel between Marlow's lie and Jameson's theory of the postmodern, which Bhabha calls his "theme park". Both of these, according to Bhabha's framework, are attempts to keep the "conversation of humankind going" and "to preserve the neo-pragmatic universe" ("Newness" 212). Bhabha elucidates his criticism of Jameson by revisiting the poem 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 . In the next section, Bhabha scrutinises Jameson's postmodern city through the subject position of migrants and minorities. He challenges the importance given 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 quantity, but as Deleuze and Guattari point out in "Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature" (1986), 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 Chatterjee's "A Response to Taylor's 'Modes of Civil Society'" (1990) as evidence. Bhabha comments, "Community disturbs the grand globalizing narrative of capital, displaces the emphasis on production in 'class' collectivity..." ("Newness" 4

Postmodernism Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Anand 4

230). In other words, minority subject position of belonging to a community punctures the larger Marxist narrative of class-consciousness as an immigrant who derives his subject position from his community cannot just be categorized and studied from a class perspective; Bhabha further calls community the "antagonist supplement of modernity" ("Newness" 231). Bhabha concludes the essay by proposing an alternative perspective through Derek Walcott's poems. Bhabha draws a bridge between the central concerns of naming in Walcott's 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" ("Newness" 234). He suggests a breakthrough in the form of the spaces that lie between 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. As significant a breakthrough as Bhabha has provided it is important to note that his theories are not entirely free from criticism. The Indian Marxist critic Aijaz Ahmad argues against Bhabha on two grounds, firstly that he uses a "... a theoretical melange which randomly invokes Levi-Strauss in one phrase, Foucault in another, Lacan in yet another" (Theory 68). He asserts that in such a framework "theory itself becomes a marketplace of ideas..." (70). Secondly, that it leaves no room for resistance and action for the lesser privileged. He adds that Bhabha's theories are irrelevant for a majority of the population that has been denied access to the benefits of "modernity" (69). Ahmed's first point of criticism can be taken a step further to conduct a theoretical study of the effectiveness of Bhabha's theoretical framework. In Nation and Narration (1990), 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 nationspace...." (4). If Bhabha's invocation of poststructuralism is contrasted with another theorist

Anand 5

that Bhabha invokes — Benjamin — then we see a possible contradiction in his theoretical framework. Catherine Belsey, in Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction (2002), explains that the simple inference of poststructuralism is that language is "differential" and not "referential" in nature (9). Taking from Saussure's 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 Benjamin's essays5 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" ("Doctrine" 68). In other words, Benjamin's 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 really fit with one another. This poses a serious challenge to the effectiveness of Bhabha's theoretical groundwork, as he does not address this rift between the two models and employs them simultaneously. However, we cannot discount Bhabha's breakthrough on this ground, as his theories 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, as is apparent from his reading of Walcott's poems.

Works Cited

5

"Doctrine of the Similar" (1979) and "On Language as such and the Language of Man" (1996)

Anand 6

Ahmad, Aijaz. In theory: Classes, nations, literatures. London: Verso, 1994. Belsey, Catherine. Poststructuralism: A very short introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Benjamin, Walter, and Tarnowski, Knut. "Doctrine of the Similar (1933)." New German Critique 17, Special Walter Benjamin Issue (1979): 65-69 ---. "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man." Walter Benjamin Selected Writings: 1913-1926, Volume 1. Ed. M. P. Bullock, M. W. Jennings and H. Eiland 1996: 62-74 Bhabha, Homi K. "Difference, Discrimination, and the Discourse of Colonialism." The Politics of Theory: Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature, July 1982, Volume 1982. Ed. Francis Barker et al. Colchester: University of Essex, 1983: 194-211. ---. "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. London: Routledge, 2004. Chatterjee, Partha. "A Response to Taylor's “Modes of Civil Society”." Public Culture 3.1 1990: 119-132. Deleuze, Gilles. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Theory and History of Literature. Vol. 30. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Anand 7

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. Young, Robert. White Mythologies: History Writing and the West. London and New York: Routledge (1991).