Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-hgkh8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T13:32:54.019Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Dislocations of Cultural Translation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Extract

The title The Location of Culture suggests that the book's author, Homi K. Bhabha, places an overriding importance on a culture's spatial and geographic situation. Lest Bhabha's readers get too fixated on culture's site and locality, however, the title's emphasis on place is soon qualified by an epigraph from the book's most-cited author, Frantz Fanon, that emphasizes temporality: “The architecture of this work is rooted in the temporal. Every human problem must be considered from the standpoint of time” (qtd. in Bhabha xiv). So, while culture must be located, the architecture of The Location of Culture is rooted in the temporal. The place and time of its moments of production are affirmed throughout its essays with a wealth of contemporary references and opening comments like “In Britain, in the 1980s …” (27). No book of theory is more self-consciously embedded in its own space and time. The Location of Culture, published in 1994, is a very English book, written from within the political, cultural, and intellectual world of the London of the 1980s and early 1990s, in which migrant activists from the Caribbean and South Asia such as Bhabha, Salman Rushdie, and Stuart Hall were challenging the verities of a long-established, socialist, masculinist, English intellectual and political culture. The brilliant innovation of The Location of Culture was to create a new language, a new articulation and understanding of minority positions—which is why the response to it has been so overwhelming, from academics, artists, and many others. The work that went into The Location of Culture was intimately related to Bhabha's own milieu and time: the book is the product of his decennium mirabile in London.

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2017

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Asad, Talal. “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology.” Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by Clifford, J. and Marcus, G. E., U of California P, 1986, pp. 141–64.Google Scholar
Asad, Talal, and Dixon, John. “Translating Europe's Others.” Europe and Its Others: Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature, July 1984, edited by Francis Barker et al., vol. 1, U of Essex P, 1985, pp. 170–93.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” Illuminations, Translated by Zohn, Harry, Fontana, 1973, pp. 6982.Google Scholar
Bhabha, Homi K.Black Voices in Defence of Salman Rushdie.” The Rushdie File, edited by Appignanesi, Lisa and Maitland, Sara, ICA Documents / Fourth Estate, 1989, pp. 112–14.Google Scholar
Bhabha, Homi K.The Commitment to Theory.” New Formations, vol. 5, Summer 1988, pp. 523.Google Scholar
Bhabha, Homi K.Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism.” The Politics of Theory, edited by Barker, Francis et al., U of Essex P, 1983, pp. 194211.Google Scholar
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.Google Scholar
Bhabha, Homi K.Representation and the Colonial Text: A Critical Exploration of Some Forms of Mimeticism.” The Theory of Reading, edited by Gloversmith, Frank, Harvester Press / Barnes and Noble Books, 1984, pp. 93122.Google Scholar
Buck-Morss, Susan. Hegel, Haiti, and Human History. U of Pittsburgh P, 2009.Google Scholar
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton UP, 2000.Google Scholar
Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. Columbia UP, 1983.Google Scholar
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Markmann, Charles Lam, Paladin Press, 1970.Google Scholar
Gasché, Rodolphe. “Saturnine Vision and the Question of Difference: Reflections on Walter Benjamin's Theory of Language.” Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature, vol. 11, no. 1, 1986, pp. 6990.Google Scholar
Geertz, Cliford, “The Cerebral Savage: On the Work of Claude Lévi-Strauss.” The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, Basic Books, 1973, pp. 345–59.Google Scholar
Geertz, Cliford. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. 3rd ed., Basic Books, 2000.Google Scholar
Geertz, Cliford. “The World in a Text: How to Read Tristes Tropiques.” Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author, Stanford UP, 1988, pp. 2548.Google Scholar
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Verso, 1993.Google Scholar
Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, edited by Rutherford, Jonathan, Lawrence and Wishart, 1990, pp. 222–37.Google Scholar
Hall, Stuart. “New Ethnicities.” Black Film / British Cinema, edited by Mercer, Kobena, Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1988, pp. 2731. ICA Documents 7.Google Scholar
Jakobson, Roman. “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation.” On Translation, edited by Brower, Reuben A., Harvard UP, 1959, pp. 232–39.Google Scholar
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke UP, 1991.Google Scholar
Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism. U of Chicago P, 1980.Google Scholar
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Myth and Meaning. Routledge, 1978.Google Scholar
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology. Translated by Jacobson, Claire and Schoepf, Brooke Grundfest, Allen Lane, 1968.Google Scholar
Program of the Centennial Convention of the Modern Language Association of America. Special issue of PMLA, vol. 98, no. 6, Nov. 1983.Google Scholar
Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991. Granta, 1991.Google Scholar
Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. Viking, 1988.Google Scholar
Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. Chatto and Windus, 1993.Google Scholar
Schleiermacher, Friedrich. “Ueber die verschiedenen Methoden des Uebersezens.” 1813. Das Problem des Übersetzens, edited by Störig, Hans Joachim, Wissenschaftliche Buchges, 1963, pp. 3870.Google Scholar
Suleri, Sara. The Rhetoric of English India. U of Chicago P, 1992.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Venuti, Lawrence. “Translation as Cultural Politics: Regimes of Domestication in English.” Textual Practice, vol. 7, 1993, pp. 208–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Young, Robert J. C.Edward Said: Opponent of Post-colonial Theory.” Edward Said's Translocations: Readings, Ruptures, Legacies, edited by Döring, Tobias and Stein, Mark, Routledge, 2012, pp. 2343.Google Scholar
Young, Robert J. C.Fanon and the Enigma of Cultural Translation.” Translation: A Transdisciplinary Journal, vol. 1, 2012, pp. 91100.Google Scholar
Young, Robert J. C.Hybridity and Cultural Translation.” Trans-humanities, vol. 5, no. 1, 2012, pp. 155–75.Google Scholar
Young, Robert J. C. The Idea of English Ethnicity. Blackwell Publishers, 2008.Google Scholar
Young, Robert J. C.The Void of Misgiving.” Communicating in the Third Space, edited by Ikas, Karin and Wagner, Gerhard, Routledge, 2008, pp. 8195.Google Scholar
Young, Robert J. C. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. 1990. 2.d ed., Routledge, 2004.Google Scholar