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roosmarleen's review
5.0
I did not even grasp the introduction of this book when I first tried to read it. I tried again once I'd gotten more into researching cultural "in-betweenness" and was pleasantly surprised. I found that even the introduction said so much I was trying to say - but more elaborately & eloquently, of course. Looking forward to reading all of this one day.
kastelpls's review
1.0
“The problem of progress is not simply an unveiling of human perfectibility, not simply the hermeneutic of progress. In the performance of human doing, through the veil, emerges a figure of cultural time where perfectibility is not ineluctably tied to the myth of progressivism ... What is crucial to such a vision of the future is the belief that we must not merely change the narratives of our histories, but transform our sense of what it means to live, to be, in other times and different spaces, both human and historical.” (1994, pp. 367)
What a bizarre conclusion to a text has a few interesting ideas but is extremely convoluted in explanations. Hybridity is an interesting idea, but I feel that it could be explored (and potentially has been explored under different names like ‘double consciousness’ in DuBois’s Souls of Black Follks) and it certainly isn’t worth the effort to read the whole damn thing. Hybridity is also crucially underexplored, despite being an important cornerstone for Bhabha’s argument against Marxist and other historicisr readings.
Plus there’s a lot of explaining Fanon’s work like a sixth grade book report. It’s atrocious at explaining something simple, but it knows how to buff it up in obscure terminology.
The chapters worth reading are: “The other question” (Chapter 3), ”Of mimicry and man” (Chapter 4), “Sly civility” (Chapter 5), Signs taken for wonders” (Chapter 6), and possibly “Articulating the archaic” (Chapter 7). The bolded ones are chapters I would use to cite from Bhabha for scholarly work because that’s at his clearest (debatably) in his exploration of the concepts on hybridity.
Though I find that the Wikipedia article on Bhabha the clearest discussion on the themes of those chapters.
Sigh... How is this a real book published? The argument is incoherent, but it has like two or three good ideas. That just can’t be a good reason to publish something, right?
RIGHT?
What a bizarre conclusion to a text has a few interesting ideas but is extremely convoluted in explanations. Hybridity is an interesting idea, but I feel that it could be explored (and potentially has been explored under different names like ‘double consciousness’ in DuBois’s Souls of Black Follks) and it certainly isn’t worth the effort to read the whole damn thing. Hybridity is also crucially underexplored, despite being an important cornerstone for Bhabha’s argument against Marxist and other historicisr readings.
Plus there’s a lot of explaining Fanon’s work like a sixth grade book report. It’s atrocious at explaining something simple, but it knows how to buff it up in obscure terminology.
The chapters worth reading are: “The other question” (Chapter 3), ”Of mimicry and man” (Chapter 4), “Sly civility” (Chapter 5), Signs taken for wonders” (Chapter 6), and possibly “Articulating the archaic” (Chapter 7). The bolded ones are chapters I would use to cite from Bhabha for scholarly work because that’s at his clearest (debatably) in his exploration of the concepts on hybridity.
Though I find that the Wikipedia article on Bhabha the clearest discussion on the themes of those chapters.
Sigh... How is this a real book published? The argument is incoherent, but it has like two or three good ideas. That just can’t be a good reason to publish something, right?
RIGHT?
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