The Interstitial Perspective: A Review Essay on Homi Bhabha's The Location of Culture

Abstract

In this essay the work of Homi Bhabha is discussed. The complexity of Bhabha's writing might be seen as symptomatic of the critically ineffectual obsession with textuality that many geographers have recently criticised. However, I argue that there are a number of reasons for Bhabha's convoluted textual style. I suggest that he is performing a subject position symptomatic of the contradictions of post/colonial discourse, contradictions he is also at the same time analysing. This performance has implications for geographers' current discussions of situated knowledge and self-reflection. It also has implications for the thcorisation of space, because Bhabha argues that the politics of subjectivity arc also the politics of spatiality. The essay ends with a discussion of the relation between Bhabha's politics of subjectivity and the politics of material corporeality.

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