47 pages • 1 hour read
The Location of Culture
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Chapters 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “By Bread Alone: Signs of Violence in the Mid-Nineteenth Century”
Bhabha discusses the connections between the violence of southern enslavement in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and signs of violence in northern and central India in the 1850s and 60s. He does so to investigate the intersection of economic hardship, colonial policies, and social unrest and to examine how marginalized or insurgent subjects create collective agency.
Bhabha explores how colonial exploitation and economic policies exacerbated poverty in colonized areas, which created widespread discontent and violence. Bhabha connects the material struggles of the colonized peoples to deeper cultural, psychological, and symbolic forms of violence. This analysis sheds light on how colonial systems of power dehumanize subjects and provoke resistance. In this situation, violence is both an expression of despair and a form of agency.
Bhabha also explores the concept of rumor and its performative power, examining how rumor and panic “double as sites of enunciation that weave their stories around the disjunctive ‘present’ or the ‘not-there’ of discourse” (286). He examines how panic spreads and how it both holds native peoples together and binds them with their masters, if antagonistically.
Chapter 11 Summary: “How Newness Enters the World: Postmodern Space, Postcolonial Times, and the Trials of Cultural Translation”
Bhabha examines the concept of “newness” within the frameworks of postcolonialism and postmodernity, examining how cultural exchanges can create new meanings, identities, and possibilities. Interactions between cultures create newness, especially interactions shaped by colonial histories. Newness creates hybrid cultural forms through cross-cultural translation, and these forms help challenge the concept of static cultural identities and narratives. Ultimately, however, Bhabha does not see newness as something unprecedented; it is instead a reconfiguration of existing cultural elements in new and unpredictable ways.
Bhabha introduces the concept of cultural translation, positing it as a central process creating new cultural forms. Cultural translation involves both the transference of meanings from one cultural context to another, and the re-creation and re-signification (or revision) of those meanings within their new cultural context. The process involves misinterpretations and distortions, which point to the differences between cultures that can’t be fully reconciled and which generate tension. Bhabha advocates for appreciation of cultural translation as a process that not only produces new identities, but also reshapes global power dynamics.
Chapter 12 Summary: “Conclusion: ‘Race,’ Time and the Revision of Modernity”
Bhabha opens Chapter 12 with a critique of the linear model of modernity dominating Western thought since the Enlightenment. This model emphasizes a straightforward sense of progress, moving from the “primitive” to the “modern,” of which European civilization is considered the pinnacle. Bhabha points out that this model ignores or distorts the histories of colonized peoples and renders their experiences invisible, reinforcing colonial hierarchies. Bhabha promotes revising these narratives to create a more inclusive understanding of modernity and the global experiences of colonized peoples.
Chapter 12 also explores the relationship between race and temporality. Bhabha argues that race (as a social construct) is intertwined with notions of time and history, particularly because, in colonial contexts, race was used not only as a marker of physical difference but also as a way to position certain groups of people as more “primitive” than the colonizers. Western colonizers used the rationale of certain groups of people lagging behind in their development to justify colonial rule. Bhabha suggests that the colonial experience produced many different temporalities rather than one universal, linear path toward modernity, and that the disjunctive temporalities reflect the uneven ways colonial power and resistance have unfolded across the globe.
He proposes a more inclusive understanding of modernity that recognizes the contributions of colonial voices and experiences in shaping both the present and the future. Colonial histories must be integrated into the “story” of modernity as central to the development of modern global structures, rather than as footnotes or exceptions. Colonial powers did not shape modernity alone; modernity instead involved a contested process of resistance, hybridization, and adaptation in the relationships between colonizers and colonized peoples. Bhabha’s conception of modernity is pluralistic and non-linear, embracing the diversity of cultural identities and historical experiences. This revision of modernity must also confront the continued impacts of colonialism, including global inequity, cultural assimilation, racial discrimination, and economic exploitation.
Chapters 10-12 Analysis
Bhabha continues to interrogate The Ongoing Impact of Colonial Legacies in these final chapters. He explores the negotiation of cultural identity and the continued dominance of colonial legacies through violence, historical narratives, and the spaces in which identities are negotiated. These chapters draw together crucial threads of postcolonial theory, with Bhabha reflecting on how colonialism and modernity have shaped not only the political, but also the cultural and spatial dimensions of contemporary life.
One of the most significant themes in this section is The Negotiation of Cultural Identity and Hybridity in the aftermath of colonialism. Bhabha examines how economic hardship and colonial exploitation led to violent uprisings in colonized societies. The cultural hybridity of colonized peoples is reflected in how uprisings, such as the Indian Rebellion of 1857, were often responses that simultaneously drew on both colonial and indigenous frameworks. In those moments of violence, colonial subjects attempted to assert their autonomy, but they were not merely rejecting colonial authority: They were redefining their cultural and political identities through acts of resistance that mixed both colonial and indigenous symbols.
This hybrid response to colonialism, however, is ambivalent and fraught with contradictions. In Bhabha’s conception, violence is not just an expression of resistance but also a site of cultural negotiation, where identities are shaped and reshaped in real time. Bread, as a symbol of both basic needs and violence, represents that negotiation. It acts as a symbol for how colonial subjects are reduced to economic units, but it is also an emblem of how these very reductions—what Bhabha calls “the signs of violence”—can provoke new forms of identity and power. Through these acts of resistance, colonized peoples forge new hybrid identities that reject colonial definitions while still being influenced by colonial systems, continually reworking both colonial and Indigenous cultural practices.
Bhabha also discusses how postcolonial subjects negotiate cultural translation in the context of modernity. He links hybridity to the trial of cultural translation, arguing that colonial histories are inscribed not just in political and social practices but in temporal and spatial dimensions as well. Bhabha uses “newness,” a concept central to postmodern thought, to explore how colonial subjects cannot simply return to an untainted past but must instead navigate the ruptures and discontinuities produced by colonial histories.
The postcolonial subject is positioned between competing temporalities, with the colonial experience fracturing the smooth progression of history. Cultural translation becomes a method for negotiating this tension and a means of moving through different time periods and cultural contexts while reinterpreting the legacies of colonialism. This negotiation creates a hybridized space, in which identities are in constant flux and historical ruptures cannot be easily fixed or reconciled. The violence and disjunctions in cultural translation are as much a part of this process as the search for new forms of belonging or identity.
Bhabha critiques the linear narratives of modernity that place colonial histories outside the realm of progress. Postcolonial identities have been shaped by colonial legacies and cannot be understood through the simplistic lens of modernity versus backwardness. Instead, postcolonial subjectivities form in spaces of constant cultural translation. This process is never neutral; it is embedded in hierarchies of power that continue to shape contemporary political and cultural practices. Even as colonial subjects redefine their identities, they do so within the very structures of colonialism, complicating any easy notion of freedom or autonomy. This tension marks the persistent impact of colonial legacies on postcolonial societies, creating cultural forms that are always hybrid and always emerging from the interstices between old and new.
Bhabha’s Conclusion further complicates the question of postcolonial identity by emphasizing the need for a revision in how modernity, race, and time are understood. Bhabha critiques the binary categories of race and culture that have been so central to colonial discourses, rounding out his discussion of Deconstructing Binaries in Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse. He emphasizes that modernity, in the context of colonialism, was built on the reification of race, with racial differences being used to justify the exploitation and domination of colonized peoples.
Bhabha urges a more complex understanding of the relationships between colonialism and postcolonial subjectivity. The colonial experience, he argues, creates a temporal rupture that challenges conventional narratives of progress and development. He calls for a revision of modernity that accounts for the legacies of colonialism and race in shaping contemporary identities. This revision should break down the binaries that construct racialized subjects and traditional narratives of modernity. Such a revision, he suggests, is itself an act of decolonizing history.
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