The location of culture

Abstract

In rethinking questions of identity, social agency, and national affiliation, Bhabha provides a working, if controversial, theory of cultural hybridity, one that goes beyond previous attempts by others in trying to understand connections between colonialism and globalism. A scholar who writes about both metropolitan and diasporic literatures, as well as contemporary art, he discusses writers as diverse as Forster, Conrad, Gordimer, and Morrison. In The Location of Culture, Bhabha has reconceived concepts such as colonial mimicry, hybridity, and social liminality to argue that cultural production is always most productive where it is most ambivalent and transgressive.