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In the aftermath of the revisionisms of the New Left and the national "identity" confusions that followed upon the Algerian War and the Vietnam War, in US and Western European "theory" a seemingly new space opened to address (and manage) the antagonisms in the post-war social division of labor that had reached an unprecedented intensity. (Post)colonial theory which emerged as an academically "Left" substitute for "Area Studies" primarily sponsored by the US State Department) and "Oriental Studies" (supported by the "Foreign Affairs" ministries of European governments) soon became one of the most "popular" modes of inquiry. (Post)colonial theory combined in various measure the theoretical "rigor" of (post)structuralism and the "activist" energies of the equally new field of "Cultural Studies." Since the late 1970s the field has formed its canon (Said's Orientalism, Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, Anderson's Imagined Communities, Spivak's The Postcolonial Critic, Young's White Mythologies.) and is now an established discipline on the contemporary interdisciplinary academic scene. It is in this space that Homi K. Bhabha's first book The Location of Culture is itself "located" in terms of a supposedly "innovative" "move away from the singularities of 'class' or 'gender' as primary conceptual and organizational categories" (1). As a result, in line with the "post-history," "post-gender," "post-production," "post-necessity," "post-exploitation;" in short, "post-al"(1) "spirit of revision and reconstruction" (3) that is currently articulating the condition of social and cultural theory, his various writings are offered as a contribution toward the project of "reform"ing the existing via the destabilization of established discursive (representational) boundaries.
The book is a collection of twelve of Bhabha's essays written over the past decade, a selection which includes most of Bhabha's older and well known writings on the formation of an (anti)colonial subjectivity. Among these are his analysis of racial "stereotypes" in terms of the Freudian theory of fetishism, his theorization of "mimicry"--the production of the colonized as "a subject of difference that is almost the same but not quite" (86)--as a mode of disruption of colonial authority, his reading of several texts of British colonial administration to indicate a fracturing of colonial strategies of surveillance, as well as "Signs Taken For Wonders"--the text which introduced his "trademark" concept of "hybridity" describing the pluralization of colonial discourse. His more recent...