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Post-Colonial Theorists
Bhabha, Homi K. (1949-)
Said, Edward W. (1935-2003)
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1942-)
Unlike most of the national Commonwealth critics discussed in the entries on national critical traditions in this encyclopedia, those of the new generation terming itself 'post-colonial', which emerged in the Western world after the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism (1979), migrated from the peripheries of the post-colonial world to work in the metropolitan centres. Their work questions constructions of nation and the national, focusing on wide-ranging analyses of colonial discourse and theoretical constructions of hybridity, marginality, mimicry and sub-alternity. Aijaz Ahmad situates this work, historically and politically, within a Marxist framework in his study In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (1992). The most important advocates of post-colonial theory and criticism to date have been Homi K. Bhabha, Edward Said and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
Bhabha, Homi K. (1949-)
Homi Bhabha's theoretical work began to appear in academic journals and conference proceedings in the early 1980s. Invoking Michel Foucault and Edward Said to provide strong theoretical models, Bhabha almost single-handedly initiated 'colonial discourse' as a specific mode of post-colonial study. While Bhabha draws on Foucault's power/ knowledge regime in order to situate colonial discourse as an ensemble of practices in the history of colonialism, he follows Said's critique of orientalism in probing imperialism's constitution of the colonial subject as subordinated yet powerful Other. However, Bhabha has enriched and complicated the discourse theory of Foucault and Said with psychological models drawn from Freud and Jacques Lacan and has used the work of Frantz Fanon, particularly Black Skin, White Masks (1969, trans. Charles Lam Markmann), to establish a link between the practices of colonial power and its psychologically inflected discursive forms.
Bhabha placed his seminal early essays in journals that specialized in theoretically urgent projects. 'The Other Question' (Screen 3, 1983) introduced his key concept of 'ambivalence', which he deploys to indicate the crucial space that colonial discourse opens for the formation of the colonial subject. The colonial stereotype, Bhabha argues, is ambivalent in that it betrays insecurity and vulnerability even as it objectifies and dominates; it is complex, not simple, representation. In another influential piece, 'Of Mimicry and Man' (October 8, 1984), Bhabha attaches ambivalence, as a mode, to the idea of...