The Location of Culture

Bhabha uses the term “ambivalence” to describe the contradictory nature of colonial relationships. Ambivalence refers to the simultaneous attraction and repulsion that colonizers and colonized feel toward one another, as well as the mixed emotions that arise from colonial power dynamics. This ambivalence disrupts the simplistic binary of colonizer and colonized, illustrating that both groups are implicated in a web of power, desire, and resistance. For Bhabha, colonial authority is perpetually unsettled by the unpredictable responses of the colonized rather than settled and absolute.

Ambivalence is central to Bhabha’s concept of hybridity, where the colonized subject, though constrained by colonial structures, also produces new, hybrid identities that destabilize colonial authority. This ambivalence is key to understanding the dynamic, fluid nature of cultural identity in postcolonial contexts, where cultural difference is not fixed but constantly negotiated. Bhabha’s work draws on earlier postcolonial thinkers like Frantz Fanon and Edward Said, but his focus on ambivalence offers a more nuanced, psychological approach to colonial power and subjectivity.

Bhabha’s concept of “hybridity” refers to the cultural mixture and blending that emerges from the encounter between colonizer and colonized. Hybridity disrupts the fixed identities traditionally attributed to both groups, emphasizing the in-between nature of postcolonial subjectivity.