3 books found
by Homi K. Bhabha, Kimberle Crenshaw, Margaret A. Burnham, Paula Giddings, A. Leon Higginbotham, Claudia Brodsky Lacour, Wahneema H. Lubiano, Manning Marable, Nellie Y. McKay, Nell Irvin Painter, Gayle Pemberton, Andrew Ross, Christine Stansell, Carol Miller Swain, Michael Thelwell, Kendall Thomas, Cornel West, Patricia J. Williams
1992 · Pantheon
Eighteen essays by prominent scholars reflect on the cultural, historical, political, personal, legal, sexual, and linguistic implications of the Thomas hearings and Hill's accusations
Bhabha, in his preface, writes 'Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully encounter their horizons in the mind's eye'. From this seemingly impossibly metaphorical beginning, this volume confronts the realities of the concept of nationhood as it is lived and the profound ambivalence of language as it is written. From Gillian Beer's reading of Virginia Woolf, Rachel Bowlby's cultural history of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Francis Mulhern's study of Leaviste's 'English ethics'; to Doris Sommer's study of the 'magical realism' of Latin American fiction and Sneja Gunew's analysis of Australian writing, Nation and Narration is a celebration of the fact that English is no longer an English national consciousness, which is not nationalist, but is the only thing that will give us an international dimension.
Rethinking questions of identity, social agency and national affiliation, Bhabha provides a working, if controversial, theory of cultural hybridity - one that goes far beyond previous attempts by others. In The Location of Culture, he uses concepts such as mimicry, interstice, hybridity, and liminality to argue that cultural production is always most productive where it is most ambivalent. Speaking in a voice that combines intellectual ease with the belief that theory itself can contribute to practical political change, Bhabha has become one of the leading post-colonial theorists of this era.