The Location of Culture

In Chapter 7, Bhabha explores the notion of the “archaic” and how colonial discourse often uses it as a defining feature of colonized cultures to justify colonial domination. Bhabha’s key concept in this chapter is “nonsense,” or a way to describe the contradictions inherent in colonial discourse. Colonial narratives often fail to accurately capture or understand the cultures they attempt to represent, as reflected in famous literary phrases like “the Horror, the Horror!” (Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness) or “Boum, ouboum” (E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India). Colonial narratives often reveal their limitations of authority and knowledge through their misreadings of other cultures.

Bhabha reveals how even the concept of the “archaic” is nonsensical, since all cultures do not progress linearly, from “primitive” states to “civilized” ones. Colonial discourse, however, promotes its own culture as “enlightened” or “advanced.” In this way, the colonial idea of the archaic is actually a contradiction, as it insists on colonized peoples’ fixed identities and yet uses that fixed, archaic identity to justify constant colonial intervention and change.

Colonial power, Bhabha argues, tries to assert itself through language by reducing cultural difference to easy categories, but the contradictions within colonial discourse itself destabilizes these attempts.