Textual Practice

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Bhabha, hybridity and identity

Antony Easthope

To cite this article: Antony Easthope (1998) Bhabha, hybridity and identity, Textual Practice, 12:2,
341-348, DOI: 10.1080/09502369808582312

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Antony Easthope
Bhabha, hybridity and identity

The words 'Orient' and 'Occident' originate simply in the Latin words for
sun rising (oriens) and sun setting (occidens). In his ground-breaking work
Orientalism (1978), Edward Said shows how a massive and ancient
discursive regime took these essentially mobile positions and fixed them in
relation to an imaginary centre in Europe. The 'Orient' became an object
which could be known by a European subject as it could not know itself.
Homi Bhabha made a crucial and necessary intervention when he
suggested a limitation in Said's account, notably that 'There is always
. . . the suggestion that colonial power and discourse is possessed entirely
by the coloniser'.1 In response Bhabha proposed that the effort of
Orientalizing must always fail since the colonial subject is constructed in
'a repertoire of conflictual positions'; these render him or her 'the site of
both fixity and fantasy'2 in a process which cannot but be uneven, divided,
incomplete, and therefore potentially resistant.
Bhabha discusses a number of mechanisms which threaten colonial
domination, including fetishism, paranoia, sly civility, paranoia, drawing
Robert Young's criticism that 'the restless seriality'3 of Bhabha's over-
lapping theorizations leaves 'the problem of agency' up in the air.4 I would
emphasize that Bhabha's project founds itself as an adversarial discourse,
that it comes about by playing off ambivalence of various kinds against a
fixity he rightly ascribes to Said's conceptualization.
In his collection of essays, The Location of Culture? Bhabha claims
there is a space 'in-between the designations of identity' and that 'this
interstitial passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of
a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or
imposed hierarchy' (p. 4).
Hybridity can have three meanings - in terms of biology, ethnicity
and culture. In its etymology it meant the offspring of a tame sow and a
wild boar, hybrida, and this genetic component provides the first meaning.

Textual Practice 12(2), 1998, 341-348 © 1998 Routledge 0950-236X

Textual Practice

It is still assumed that two members of a species count as members of the

same species if they can produce offspring together, but the product of a
union between an Alsatian and a spaniel is a mongrel, an example of
genetic hybridity.6 Apart from its dire political applications, this line
of analysis runs into severe difficulty over the problem of definition, a
difficulty massively increased once DNA is taken into account.
A second definition of hybridity might be understood to mean an
individual 'having access to two or more ethnic identities', somebody like
Homi Bhabha himself who is brought up as a Parsee in a predominantly
Hindu culture and who then takes an identity within Western anglophone
culture. But again there are problems here. Does hybridity in an ethnic
definition suppose that the two ethnic identities joined together were
formerly pure in themselves? Second question: What is ethnicity? Like
'race', 'ethnicity' has no agreed definition — as Hutchinson and Smith say in
their Introduction to their Oxford reader on ethnicity, 'The meaning of the
term is . . . uncertain'.7 Would hybridity in this usage specify someone like
myself who had an English father and an Irish mother? Or someone born
into a working-class background who went on to university, acquiring two
cultural identities? As Alan Sinfield remarks, 'it is quite hard to envisage a
culture that is not hybrid'.8 At this point the concept of hybridity begins to
lose definition, for who or what is not hybrid? And if everything's hybrid,
the term would cancel all the way through.
Homi Bhabha develops his notion of hybridity from Mikhail
Bakhtin, who uses it to discriminate texts with a 'single voice' (lyrical
poems) from those with a 'double voice' (such as novels, whose narrator
cites characters speaking in their own voice — these texts are hybridic). As
with his critique of Said, Bhabha's account of hybridity can be understood
as an adversarial definition; that is, it is very clear what hybridity is defined
against, what is not hybridic.
The non-hybridic has two related features. One is a commitment
to 'unitary' or 'originary' identity, identity as 'presence', identity there-
fore represented by the supposedly transcendental ego. Well set out by
Descartes, this notion of the subject supposes that thinking is to be equated
with being and that its very essence is an undivided, self-controlling
self-consciousness: what Bhabha refers to as 'the "individual"', that is, the
support for the 'universalist aspiration' of'civil society' (p. 10).
Second, Bhabha believes this Cartesian concept of subjectivity is at
the very centre of a Western, Eurocentric definition of culture, and
necessary support for it. One might be tempted to think of this Euro-
centrism as white and male, but Bhabha avoids the risk of essentialism
attaching to such terms;9 instead (following the way Kristeva theorizes
gender), he argues that it is the enemy who claims essence, unity and
singleness of identity — so everything that may be mobilized against such

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an idea of unity counts as radical. An intervention, Bhabha argues, is

progressive if it 'challenges our sense of the historical identity of culture as
a homogenising, unifying force, authenticated by the originary Past, kept
alive in the national tradition of the People' (p. 37).
In his 1968 essay 'Difference', Derrida explains difference by saying
what it is not:
it governs nothing, reigns over nothing, and nowhere exercises
any authority. . . there is no kingdom of differance, but diffimnce
instigates the subversion of every kingdom.10
In Derrida's account, difference is opposed to a sense of presence —
whenever an effect of presence is produced it is possible to relativize and
unsettle it by referring to the difference on which it rests. A preliminary
way to put this would be to say that whenever there is a signified there must
be a signifier; whenever there is anything like a coherent meaning it is
possible to point up the linguistic and discursive strategies on which
such meaning depends. Deployed like this, difference can subvert any
kingdom of supposed meaning, truth, certainty, coherence, whatever.
'Consequently', as Bhabha says, 'the colonial presence is always ambivalent,
split between its appearance as original and authoritative and its
articulation as repetition and difference' (p. 107).
Bhabha's hybridity is essentially Derridean difference applied to
colonialist texts - the presence of a dominant meaning in a dominant
culture can be called into question by referring to the hybridity or differ-
ence from which it emerges.
It is because of his reliance on Derridean difference that Bhabha
asks us to think about 'interstices'. For Derrida, difference is enacted by
deferral of meaning in time and the differentiation of meaning in space,
for example, in the way that (according to Saussure) phonemes are related
differentially to each other so that each retains a trace of the identity of
the other. Bhabha's term 'interstices'11 means to respond to Derrida's
account of difference as spatial differentiation. What articulates cultural
differences is defined as 'in-between' spaces (pp. 1, 2, 38), 'interstices' in
which 'domains of difference' may 'overlap' (p. 2), an 'interstitial passage
between fixed identifications' (p. 4) (a question here: What kind of
identification is assumed here if it is not 'fixed' at all?).
My problems with hybridity are very much the same as those with
Derridean difference. For brevity I'll put them in a list, leaving the hard
edges.
1 You can turn the idea of difference against anything. If 'differance
instigates the subversion of every kingdom', this leaves nothing
immune to the possibility of subversion, not even Bhabha's own texts.

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If you wanted you could show that what these affirm depends upon
what they leave marginalized and unspoken. Like Derrida, Bhabha
seeks to protect himself from this gesture by wrapping himself in an
elaborate style but if it makes sense it can also be undone, as can any
text (including of course this present one).
2 If Bhabha's hybridity-seeking mission can be as easily applied to any
text which affirms a truth, one has to ask in what sense does it apply
specifically to colonialist texts? By substituting 'hybridity' for 'difference'
Bhabha makes us think we are solidly on the ground of race, ethnicity
and colonial identity, but if the form of his argument is ubiquitous,
what special purchase does it have on the particular content of colonial-
ism? (On this, Bhabha is a long way from Said, whose analysis of
colonialism at every point indicates a historically specific content.)
3 Is the resistance which Bhabha detects in the attempt of colonialist
discourse a sign of the active resistance of the colonized? Or is the
ambivalence in fact an effect which could be detected in any text but
has been tracked down in the colonialist text by Bhabha himself? (This
query is posed by Robert Young.)12
4 Problems follow for Bhabha, as they do for Derrida, from the presence/
difference binary. Derrida offers no adequate account of presence; in
space it appears as spatial identity, in time it appears as a making
present, in discourse it manifests itself in the privileging of one side of
a binary which thus aims to efface its denigrated other. For Derrida,
presence, like metaphysics, is inescapable, but what causes it, what
gives it substance, what are its conditions of existence, Derrida does not
explain. Presence, it seems, exists only to vanish into difference, like
those subatomic particles which are present only for the millionth of a
second in which they are photographed and have no other existence.13
Such difficulties carry over into Homi Bhabha. Like Derrida he
refuses a notion of subjectivity which would explain, substantiate and
make sense of the identity hybridity undermines. His account of
identity is single and unitary — that is, he does not discriminate
between relative identity and absolute identity, between a coherence
which is necessary for anyone to be a speaking subject and a coherence
which in addition affirms itself as its own origin - the Cartesian or
transcendental ego (that distinction is introduced by Lacan when the
first essay of the English Edits describes how human beings must try to
achieve a stability as a speaking subject not possible for other species,
and then in the second essay, on aggressivity, attacks the 'narcissistic
tyranny' in which 'the promotion of the ego today culminates').14
OK, so Bhabha lacks an adequate account of presence: why does this
matter? It matters because his failure to relativize identity means he is
stuck with a notion of absolute identity which he is opposed to; he

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is therefore driven back on to a binary opposition: either full identity

or no identity at all, only difference. Working from a basis in an
adversarial discourse, Bhabha privileges difference over identity and
effectively treats hybridity as a transcendental signified. His remains an
act of inversion rather than deconstruction.
5 Accordingly, privileging difference, Bhabha invites us to try to live
in difference, in a state of pure hybridity, actually in the 'interstices'. We
are to pose the question of community 'from the interstitial perspective'
(p. 3) and invited 'to inhabit an intervening space' (p. 7). I invite you to
hesitate before trying this, for what is being recommended is only too
like the state of psychosis. The sad old man muttering to himself on the
top of the bus has fallen into the gaps coherent identity would conceal —
he indeed inhabits an 'interstitial passage between fixed identifications'.
6 For textual analysis (and the impact of The Location of Culture has been
registered mainly in literary criticism) the consequence of this avowed
position is to make life very easy for critics of all ages. Since every text
consists of an order of signifiers in a sliding and uneven relation with
the meanings they open on to, since every effect of presence aimed for
arises from the actual effacement of difference, every text can be
demonstrated as hybridic. Two major difficulties ensue from this. First,
since texts can only be approached on the basis of an opposition
between presence (unitary and originary) and difference, in principle
no discrimination can be made between (a) those texts which seek
to promote presence as a position for the transcendental ego (say,
Middlemarch by George Eliot) and (b) those which, though establishing
a degree of coherence for the subject, accept that it can never be more
than temporary (say, To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf). Second, the
argument blocks analysis of the textual conditions of existence of the
very different forms of imaginary coherence texts contrive.
7 Bhabha's adherence to the presence/ difference opposition is redefined
as an opposition between the Cartesian subject and hybridity; and
that notion of the individual is taken as necessary support for the
'universalist aspiration' of 'civil society' as embodied in the nation-state.
Bhabha's position prejudges the nation-state and prevents him from
entering into any debate over its historical nature15 since in effect the
nation-state and any form of state politics can only be understood as
making a claim to presence (origin, homogeneity) which must be
unsettled in favour of difference. This, valuably, compels us to attend
to cultural hybridity in the form of marginalized and subordinated
ethnic groupings but at the cost of an evacuation of the centre (the
protracted battle for the franchise, forms of elected government and
parliamentary politics, the whole struggle since 1789 for the rights of
man and woman — a struggle which had incalculable importance in the

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process of decolonization from Ghandi to Mandela). If he is consistent

with his general arguments, all that must simply reaffirm a unified sense
of (would-be) homogenous national identity which is anti-hybridic.
One of the most decisive political events in Britain was the miners'
strike of 1984-5. Bhabha gives a nuanced endorsement of the miners
because they pit 'the working man' against 'the new Thatcherite city
gent' (p. 27). But his concern is with 'the necessity of heterogeneity'
and so he moves rapidly to concentrate on ways that wives of miners,
first seen as helpers, had achieved a new empowerment through their
part of the fight.
We don't have to choose between centre and margins as arenas for
struggle. But the political lesson I (and others) in Britain have drawn
from the long years of Tory government (1979-97) is the determining
priority of national politics (it was of course the Conservative govern-
ment at Westminster which engineered the miners' strike in the first
place). No ultra-leftist 'politics of heterogeneity' based in a 'privileging
of difference' can substitute for the possession of state power.
8 Texts incite desire, and it's worth enquiring what desires Bhabha's
work may encourage. I would put forward overlapping answers. As
far as concerns textuality, the call to demonstrate the (inescapable)
hybridity in a piece of writing and thus to 'transform the present into an
expanded and ex-centric site of experience' (p. 4) coincides with one of
the deeper pleasures of the time. The work of Eliot and Pound, Picasso
and Duchamp, is replete with hybridity as an unanticipated interface
between two discourses or meanings conventionally separated. Modern-
ism (and literary criticism since then) has made it attractive to read
'against the grain', to turn any 'text of pleasure' into a 'text of bliss'.
When Bhabha affirms that refusal of 'fixed identifications' might allow us
to entertain difference without an 'assumed or imposed hierarchy', that
moving beyond the Cartesian ego might open up a subjectivity more able
to tolerate difference, he is repeating a version of wishful thinking that
is widespread among those concerned with post-structuialist theory.
That it is Utopian can be suggested in two ways. Theories of the ego and
aggression imply that speaking subjects must have a coherent identity, that
any identity is won at the expense of the other, and thus there can be no
escape from an alterity which always represents a potential threat to the
subject's stability ('entertaining difference' is as likely to lead to aggression
as a world without hierarchy). Another is suggested by Ernesto Laclau
(responding to Derrida's account of the spectre) when he points out that
no single ethical or political consequence such as the end of hierarchy is
necessarily imposed by openness to alterity.16 There was certainly no less
hierarchy in the world before Descartes than there is now.

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It has been a basis of the argument here that hybridity has no

definition except in relation to non-hybridity, that the opposition between
difference and absolute presence needs to be relativized by introducing
more than one conception of identity, that a coherent, speaking subject
cannot live in the gaps between identities. Inhabiting interstices is
pleasurable only so long as someone else is doing it for you. The desire for
Bhabha's writing, then, consists of a fantasy of mastery, the mastery of a
subject supposed to know, who can remain sure of themselves even when
confronted with the appearance of hybridity on all sides — in culture, in
texts, in their own subjectivity.

Notes
1 Homi Bhabha, 'Difference, discrimination and the discourse of colonialism',
in Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen and Diana Loxley, ed. The
Politics of Theory (Essex: University of Essex, 1983), p. 200. This essay is not
reprinted in The Location of Culture.
2 Ibid., p. 204.
3 Robert Young, White Mythologies (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 147.
4 Ibid., p. 149.
5 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge,
1994); all page references are to this edition.
6 See Robert Young, 'Hybridity and diaspora', in Colonial Desire (London:
Routledge, 1995).
7 John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith, Introduction, in Hutchinson and
Smith, ed. Ethnicity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 4.
8 Alan Sinfield, 'Diaspora and hybridity: queer identities and the ethnicity
model', Textual Practice, 10(2) (summer 1996), p. 278.
9 At a price: as Ania Loomba points out, the colonial subject in Bhabha's work
'is remarkably free of gender, class, caste or other distinctions'; see 'Over-
worlding the "Third World"', Oxford Literary Review, 13 (1991), p. 182.
10 Jacques Derrida, 'Différance', in Writing and Difference, trans Alan Bass
(Brighton: Harvester, 1982), p. 22.
11 'Interstice' is borrowed from Levinas; see p. 15 and fn. p. 258.
12 See Young, White Mythologies, pp. 149-52.
13 In Logics of Disintegration (London: Verso, 1987) Peter Dews comments on
the corresponding speech/ writing opposition that Derrida 'is unable to
explain how the experience of meaning is able to occur at all' and offers 'no
alternative between the illusory immediacy of speech and the endless delays of
writing' (pp. 98-9).
14 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, trans Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), p. 27.
15 A debate such as that provoked recently by David Miller, for example, who
makes a strong and detailed argument that, in the conditions of modernity,
nation tepresents the most positive drive towards democracy actually on offer;
see On Nationality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
16 See Ernesto Laclau, "The time is out of joint"', Diacritics, 23(2) (summer
1995), p. 93: 'Precisely because of the undecidability inherent in constitutive

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openness, ethico-political moves different from or even opposite to a "to

come" can be made - for instance, since there is ultimate undecidability and,
as a result no immanent tendency of the structure to closure and full presence,
closure has to be artificially brought about from the outside. In that way a case
for totalitarianism can be presented starting from deconstructionist premises.'

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