Exploring Bhabha's Hybridity: Challenge to Cultural Hierarchy

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Bhabha’s hybridity challenges the certainty of the hierarchical notion that it must have the superiority and inferiority, controller and the controlled in cultural collision. Conversely, Bhabha suggests that all the cultural relation is ambiguous, full of exceeding, hybrid, and potential of subversion. In Bhabha’s narration, hybridity lets the boundary become a place of advantage to resist and interrupt the discourse of race, nation, and hegemony. As Bhabha delineates, it is “a turning of boundaries and limits into the in-between spaces through which the meanings of cultural and political authority are negotiated” (Bhabha 1990, 4). For Bhabha, hybridity is developed from this “in-between” space of the colonizer’s culture and the colonized’s …show more content…

The meaning of the utterance is quite literally neither the one or the other….there is no way that the content of the proposition will reveal the structure of its positionality; no way that context can be mimetically read off from the content. (Bhabha 1994, …show more content…

“The Third Space of enunciation” disrupts the consistency between the meaning and the reference, “makes the structure of meaning and reference an ambivalent process,” which consequently leads to the challenge of “our sense of the historical identity of culture as a homogenizing, unifying force, authenticated by the originary Past.” As a result, although the third space is “unrepresentable in itself,” it, in Bhabha’s words, “constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew.” This ability of enunciation, crossing the limit of time, lays a foundation for the postcolonial writing and reading to overthrow the authority of the colonial discourse and articulate for self. In many postcolonial writings, “it is the problem of how, in signifying the present, something comes to be repeated, relocated and translated in the name of tradition, in the guise of a pastness that is not necessarily a faithful sign of historical memory but a strategy of representing authority in terms of the artifice of archaic” (Bhabha 1994, 35). Through deconstructing, rereading, and modifying traditions from their own

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