![]() Instead, Bhabha suggests that the negotiation of cultural identity involves the continual interface and exchange of cultural performances that in turn produce a mutual and mutable recognition (or representation) of cultural difference. Nor can "colonizer" and "colonized" be viewed as separate entities that define themselves independently. In other words, Bhabha argues that cultural identities cannot be ascribed to pre-given, irreducible, scripted, ahistorical cultural traits that define the conventions of ethnicity. How are subjects formed 'in-between', or in excess of, the sum of the 'parts' of difference (usually intoned as race/class/gender,etc.)? How do strategies of representation or empowerment come to be formulated in the competing claims of communities where, despite shared histories of deprivation and discrimination, the exchange of values, meanings and priorities may not always be collaborative and dialogical, but may be profoundly antagonistic, conflictual and even incommensurable? (2) Bhabha attempts in his introduction to The Location of Culture to shed light upon the "liminal" negotiation of cultural identity across differences of race, class, gender, and cultural traditions: It is in the emergence of the interstices-the overlap and displacement of domains of difference-that the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated. How, for instance, can we neatly categorize the exilic predicaments of Salman Rushdie or Wole Soyinka in terms of "national" identity? In an effort to deal with these "in-between" categories of competing cultural differences, Homi K. Said's "secular" criticism of the Palestinian movement for self-determination-often share a concern for the term's limitations in conceptualizing the overlapping, migratory movements of cultural formations across a global division of labor. Postcolonial debates over "nationalism"-from Frantz Fanon's moving portrayal of colonial antagonism to Edward W. Bhabha: the Liminal Negotiation of Cultural Difference Bhabha: the Liminal Negotiation of Cultural Difference Homi K. ![]()
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