Summary Of The Location Of Culture By Bart Bhabha

Despite his groundbreaking theory in postcolonial studies, Bhabha, as a controversial postcolonial theorist, has received a number of criticisms since the appearance of his seminal work The Location of Culture. I would like to illuminate this part mainly drawing from the book, Postcolonial Theory: Context, Practices, Politics, in which Bart Moore-Gilbert has, relatively, at large, criticized Bhabha’s theory, from his writing style to his application of theories.
Among those criticisms, the obvious one, to which almost all the people who have read his book has reached a consensus, is his “characteristically teasing, evasive, even quasi-mystical mode of expression” (Moore-Gilbert 114). His poetic language became well known after he won the second place of Philosophy and Literature Bad Writing Contest in 1998. For his complex and fragmented language which “seems designed to appeal primarily to the reader’s intuition,” the most well-intentioned explanation is that Bhabha uses this style of writing in purpose of making a strange feeling, avoiding the familiar “parameters of Western knowledge” (Huddart 10).
The second query to Bhabha by some critics is his unquestionable utilization of psychoanalytic theory. Robert Young has in his White Mythologies (2004) doubted that there is lack of analysis and critiques when Bhabha brings the “transcendental categories of psychoanalysis” to “the analysis of the historical phenomenon of colonialism” (184). Young, however, does not extend this