Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest
Average customer rating: 4 out of 5 stars
  • It was fascinating!
Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest
Anne McClintock
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0415908906

Book Description

Imperial Leather chronicles the dangerous liaisons between gender, race and class that shaped British imperialism and its bloody dismantling. Spanning the century between Victorian Britain and the current struggle for power in South Africa, the book takes up the complex relationships between race and sexuality, fetishism and money, gender and violence, domesticity and the imperial market, and the gendering of nationalism within the zones of imperial and anti-imperial power.

Anne McClintock explores the sexualizing of the terra incognita, the imperial myth of the empty lands, the dirt fetish and the "civilizing mission", sexuality and labor, advertising and commodity racism, the Victorian invention of the idle woman, feminism and racial difference, and anti-apartheid culture in the current transformation of national power.

Using feminist, post-colonial, psychoanalytic and socialist theories, Imperial Leather argues that the categories of gender, race and class do not exist inisolation, but emerge in intimate relation to one another. Drawing on diverse cultural forms--novels, advertising, diaries, poetry oral history, and mass commodity spectacle--the book examines imperialism not only as a poetics of ambivalence, but as a politics of violence. Rejecting traditional binaries of self/other, man/woman, colonizer/colonized, Anne McClintock calls instead for a more informed and complex understanding of catgories of social power and identity.

Customer Reviews:

4 out of 5 stars It was fascinating!.......2003-08-20

I don't agree with the reviewer for Library Journal because I found McClintock's book thorough and solid. She situates the book in a very clever way in the myriad of "isms" and scholarly debates on post-colonialism. She argues that one cannot talk about colonialism without at the same time investigate how gender,race, sexuality, class etc, has shaped the colonial discourse and discussion.
I would recommend this book to people interested in feminist, gender, postcolonial studies but also to anyone who wants a more indepth and creative analysis of the current debate on postcolonialism and gender.
100 Ways America Is Screwing Up the World
Average customer rating: 4 out of 5 stars
  • Quite informative
  • An encyclopedic rundown of the American disease.
  • Needed by those who want to be in the know
  • Screwing Down the Screw-Ups
100 Ways America Is Screwing Up the World
John Tirman
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0061133019
Release Date: 2006-08-08

Book Description

What do George W. Bush, Wal-Mart, Halliburton, gangsta rap, and SUVs have in common? They're all among the hundred ways in which America is screwing up the world. The country that was responsible for many, if not most, of the twentieth century's most important scientific and technological advancements now demonizes its scientists and thinkers in the twenty-first, while dumbing down its youth with anti-Darwin/pro-"Intelligent Design" propaganda. The longtime paragon of personal freedoms now supports torture and illegal wiretapping—spreading its principles and policies at gunpoint while ruthlessly bombing the world with Big Macs and Mickey Mouse ears.

At once serious-minded and satirical, John Tirman's 100 Ways America Is Screwing Up the World is an insightful, unabashed, entertaining, and distressing look at where we've gone terribly wrong—from the destruction of the environment to the promotion of abhorrent personal health and eating habits to the "wussification" of the free press—an alternately admonishing and amusing call to arms for patriotic Blue America.

Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars Quite informative.......2007-02-11

I've read most of this book and I've enjoyed what I have read. The points John Tirman makes are valid ones and I think a lot of people should read this book.

The chapters are, necessarily short, and Mr. Tirman gets to the point quickly and concisely.

For those interested in combatting Americanism, this book is a good place to start.

4 out of 5 stars An encyclopedic rundown of the American disease........2006-11-02

Any well-read person knows all that is between the covers of this book. Having said that however, because of its brevity and concise topics, this marvelous compendium of 21st century uniquely American disease symptoms qualifies as an extremely useful source book for the new millennium.

All of the familiar suspects are here: Las Vegas #85, consumerism #45, Reaganism #8 & #17, Wall Mart #10, etc, etc, etc. Obviously the reader will have thoughts about what was left out and what should not be there at all. The inclusion of SUVs #28 will no doubt cause as much outcry in America as was caused here when our former Prime Minister publically catigated these monsters some months ago for the same reasoms. Tirman was diplomatic enough not to even mention the engine driving many of his 100-the the onerous American style of capitalism or the Free Market or free enterprise, or whatever moniker the beast hides under. Virtually everyone of Tirman's 100 disease symptoms was mothered by this one evil-at least as it exists in the American variety.

Every evil in his book can be traced to a rampant market driven curse; there is too much of everything from bad Hollywood glamour #90 or gun stalls selling AK47s #37 to virtually anyone that wants one. Only days ago, Brazil voted down a proposition to curb gun sales. Why, because the National Rifleman's Association mounted a major campaign against the legislation-an American organization influncing political events in another country. Foreign interference like that would not be tolerated in Kansas or probably anywhere else in America.

This book brings all the problems together; if you read a newspaper and ever wonder how most of the world's problems started, get yourself this wonderful book and educate yourself. It will be money and time well spent.

4 out of 5 stars Needed by those who want to be in the know.......2006-10-16

The author sweeps across a very broad panorama of forces that cause America to damage both itself and others. Many of the topics covered are not (readily) found elsewhere, such as the limitations of NY Times and Washington Post reporting, the making of pre-adolescent girls into sex objects, and the highly questionable mushrooming of graduate schools. The book's format leads to succinct, understandable writing that repeatedly hits nails on the head and takes dead aim at the sick dysfunctionality wrought by George Bush and company. It also covers America's ideals, which are alive and well, even if eclipsed or in instances sabotaged by the destructive forces previously cited -- and are worth working to regain. Overall, well, and nicely, done.

4 out of 5 stars Screwing Down the Screw-Ups.......2006-09-05

This book, rather obviously, synopsizes the major flaws with, from, and metastasizing within American politics (primarily), culture, and society at large.

I agree with about 98% of what the author has to say. I just appreciated that so many of the hypocrisies and flaws erupting within American society that bother me are shared by Mr. Tirman and the reasons why one should be bothered are raised as concerns above being trivial and petty. (Love the Paris Hilton and celebrity worship entry).

Mr. Tirman wants to come off as objective, or at least apolitical, but his liberal leanings become more pronounced, and more painfully obvious as his list progresses. This in and of itself is not problematic, it's his occassional assertions that he is not swaying to far to the liberal side (or simply falling prey to conservative bashing ) which seem all the more ridiculous.

Otherwise, he comes off as rather fair and reasonable. Although, I can't agree with him that no-smoking laws in the US (and now creeping through Europe) are diminishing rights (especially coming from someone so adverse to wonton pollution and selfish acts that harm others-which is what smoking is.)

I really didn't like his glossing over of the immigration issue that is now confronting America. He, in elitist and ivory tower flair, dismisses illegal immigration as spats with people vying for jobs as car wash jockies and maids. For a man so concerned with the "global south" to reduce illegal immigration to this is a shame. He never delves into the exploitation of these illegal immigrants by the agribusinesses, the Wal-Marts, and the profit seeking at all cost conglomerates that suck them up and spit them out that he spends 90% of his time railing against. He doesn't believe (or at least doesn't lead us to believe that he does) that this period of unheralded illegal immigration has its roots in profiteering at the expense of not only the migrants, but the working class and middle class for the benefit of the few, the wealthy, and powerful. He laments poverty in America, education, healthcare, and the prison system, but never acknowledges the role of illegal immigration in all of this (depressed wages for Americans and migrants fueled by illegal immigration, overburden on public schools, etc..).
If he doesn't care about the low wage jobs (the only ones being created now in America) being handed over to the exploited migrants, what will he think of the spreading impoverishment of the domestic working class that is resulting?

Then there is his unsubstantiated, no, make that conjecture regarding Scots-Irish(?) and military loyalty. (I think he must have been talking to an uncredited Jim Webb).

Finally, (me being petty) this guy has it out for SUVs, and mostly the SUVs of jingoistic troop supporters with their yellow ribbon decals. I also have witnessed this correlation. Fine, but don't expose your disdain as a phobia by constantly referring to it to almost the point of being irrational.

Overall, Mr. Tirman presents the reasons, the facts, and the history behind the screw-ups he documents succintly and utterly.
Other than that, it's nice knowing that such an intellectual and open-minded person is bothered by the same things.

Ughhh... Paris Hilton???
We're doomed!
Imperial Persuaders: Images of Africa and Asia in British Advertising (Studies in Imperialism)
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    Imperial Persuaders: Images of Africa and Asia in British Advertising (Studies in Imperialism)
    Anandi Ramamurthy
    Manufacturer: Manchester University Press
    ProductGroup: Book
    Binding: Paperback

    IllustrationIllustration | Commercial | Graphic Design | Design & Decorative Arts | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
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    ASIN: 0719063795

    Book Description

    During the time of the British Empire 1880-1960, advertising pervaded every aspect of British life. It was also the period which witnessed the rise of the British Empire. This is the first book to trace the historically changing image of non-white people in British advertising during the colonial period. The book reveals the historical and production context of many well-known advertising icons, as well as the specific commercial interests that various companies' images projected. It also develops a detailed textual analysis of the images.
    British Culture and the End of Empire (Studies in Imperialism)
    Average customer rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    • The Course from Empire
    British Culture and the End of Empire (Studies in Imperialism)

    Manufacturer: Manchester University Press
    ProductGroup: Book
    Binding: Paperback

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    ASIN: 0719060486

    Book Description

    The demise of the British Empire in the three decades following the Second World War is a theme that has been well traversed in studies of post-war British politics, economics and foreign relations. Yet there has been strikingly little attention to the question of how these dramatic changes in Britain's relationships with the wider world were reflected in British culture. This volume addresses this central issue, arguing that the social and cultural impact of decolonisation had as significant an effect on the imperial centre as on the colonial periphery. Far from being a matter of indifference or resigned acceptance as is often suggested, the fall of the British Empire came as a profound shock to the British national imagination, and resonated widely in British popular culture.

    Customer Reviews:

    4 out of 5 stars The Course from Empire.......2005-11-17

    British Culture and the End of Empire is full of intriguing and informative essays that cope with the legacy of the British Empire. The names of some of the contributors - Peter Hansen, Shompa Lahiri, or Hsu-Ming Teo, for example - promise a range of voices from around the globe, and the essays do not disappoint. Topics range from travel to film to cricket, and they analyze in depth their given topics within the context of British decolonization. Likewise, the point of view varies from pride in the British Empire to opprobrium over its aftermath. In this book, British heroes from bygone eras find themselves posthumously featured in films, and modern explorers seek to emulate their forefathers by finding exotic lands untainted by Western Civilization. The essays have a serious tone, and may seem a bit dry at times, but they provide valuable insights into the recent decades of British consciousness.

    Imagined Olympians: Body Culture and Colonial Representation in Rwanda
    Average customer rating: Not rated
      Imagined Olympians: Body Culture and Colonial Representation in Rwanda
      John Bale
      Manufacturer: University of Minnesota Press
      ProductGroup: Book
      Binding: Paperback

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      ASIN: 081663386X

      Book Description

      Observing the Rwandan cultural practice of gusimbuka, widely described as Tutsi high jumping, Europeans discerned a natural ability to jump and predicted that Tutsi would dominate world sports-or so the story goes. And, as John Bale makes clear in this book, it is just that-a story, a Western representation that recast cultural practice as competitive sport and made of the Tutsi high jumper an "imaginary athlete." Bale explores the colonial representation of gusimbuka, revealing the Tutsi sportsman and prospective Olympian as an invention with broad implications for understanding the workings of the Western gaze.

      In written accounts and photographs, many published here for the first time, Bale uncovers a bewildering variety of images-evidence of the equivocal nature of the Western view of Rwandan body culture. Through a consideration of different, often conflicting rhetorical modes, Bale shows how these images were deployed to increase the cultural and political distance between Tutsi and Hutu, and to bring the Tutsi closer to the European. An intriguing and sobering case study, Imagined Olympians provides valuable insight into how the West both idealizes and vilifies the non-Western body.

      John Bale is visiting professor of sports studies at Aarhus University, Denmark, and professor of sports geography at Keele University, U.K.
      Imperialism and Popular Culture (Studies in Imperialism)
      Average customer rating: Not rated
        Imperialism and Popular Culture (Studies in Imperialism)

        Manufacturer: Manchester University Press
        ProductGroup: Book
        Binding: Paperback

        Popular CulturePopular Culture | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books
        CultureCulture | Sociology | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books
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        3. Cultures of Empire: A Reader: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the 19th and 20th Centuries Cultures of Empire: A Reader: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the 19th and 20th Centuries
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        ASIN: 0719018684

        Book Description

        Popular culture is invariably a vehicle for the dominant ideas of its age. Never was this more true than in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when it reflected the nationalist and imperialist ideologies current throughout Europe. When they were being entertained or educated the British basked in their imperial glory and developed a powerful notion of their own superiority. This book examines the various media through which nationalist ideas were conveyed in late Victorian and Edwardian times--in the theatre, "ethnic" shows, juvenile literature, education, and the iconography of popular art. Several chapters look beyond the first world war when the most popular media, cinema and broadcasting, continued to convey an essentially late nineteenth-century world view, while government agencies like the Empire Marketing Board sought to convince the public of the economic value of empire. Youth organizations, which had propagated imperialist and militarist attitudes before the war, struggled to adapt to the new internationalist climate.
        American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America (Critical American Studies)
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          American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America (Critical American Studies)
          Allan Punzalan Isaac
          Manufacturer: Univ Of Minnesota Press
          ProductGroup: Book
          Binding: Paperback

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          5. Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora

          ASIN: 0816642745

          Book Description

          In 1997, when the New York Times described Filipino American serial killer Andrew Cunanan as appearing “to be everywhere and nowhere,” Allan Punzalan Isaac recognized confusion about the Filipino presence in the United States, symptomatic of American imperialism’s invisibility to itself. In American Tropics, Isaac explores American fantasies about the Philippines and other “unincorporated” parts of the U.S. nation that obscure the contradictions of a democratic country possessing colonies. Isaac boldly examines the American empire’s images of the Philippines in turn-of-the-century legal debates over Puerto Rico, Progressive-era popular literature set in Latin American borderlands, and midcentury Hollywood cinema staged in Hawai‘i and the Pacific islands. Isaac scrutinizes media coverage of the Cunanan case, Boy Scout adventure novels, and Hollywood films such as The Real Glory (1939) and Blue Hawaii (1961) to argue that territorial sites of occupation are an important part of American identity. American Tropics further reveals the imperial imagination’s role in shaping national meaning in novels such as Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart (1946) and Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters (1990), Filipino American novels forced to articulate the empire’s enfolded but disavowed borders. Tracing the American empire from the beginning of the twentieth century to Philippine liberation and the U.S. civil rights movement, American Tropics lays bare Filipino Americans’ unique form of belonging marked indelibly by imperialism and at odds with U.S. racial politics and culture. Allan Punzalan Isaac is assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University.
          Weapons of Mass Distraction: Soft Power and American Empire
          Average customer rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
          • very interesting book!!!!
          • Boring
          • No politics here.
          Weapons of Mass Distraction: Soft Power and American Empire
          Matthew Fraser
          Manufacturer: Thomas Dunne Books
          ProductGroup: Book
          Binding: Hardcover

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          5. Everything Bad is Good for You Everything Bad is Good for You

          ASIN: 031233849X
          Release Date: 2005-02-10

          Book Description

          In its march to becoming the world's first hyper-power, the United States has been as dependent on its soft power - the allure of American lifestyles and culture - as it has been on the hard power of military might. In Weapons of Mass Distraction, Matthew Fraser examines the role of American pop cultural industries in international affairs.

          Fraser focuses on the major areas of soft power - movies, television, pop music, and fast food - and traces the origins, history and current influence of these on U.S. foreign policy. He describes how the American film, television, and music industries enjoy a ubiquitous global presence that has made them indispensable to the U.S. government, which has often gone so far as to fund them directly, including the White House-sponsored radio station in the Middle East launched with the hopes of winning over Muslim youths with American pop songs.

          A Coca-Cola lobbyist once famously declared that "The best barometer of the relationship of the U.S. and any other country is the way Coca-Cola is treated." Fraser proves this claim isn't to be taken lightly. He charts the global spread of the fast food industry, the role of Coca-Cola and McDonald's in American foreign policy and the recent rise of their opponents: the anti-globalization movement.

          Do things really go better with Coca-Cola? Fraser's answer is a resounding yes. While American soft power remains a contentious issue, he believes it promotes values and beliefs that are ultimately good for the rest of the world. Still, what are the future implications of American soft power? Will national identities decline as the world order is transformed into a state of "electronic feudalism" where there is no central power? Weapons of Mass Distraction provides an engaging, enlightening, and provocative look at the future of American foreign policy and popular culture in the 21st century.

          Customer Reviews:

          5 out of 5 stars very interesting book!!!!.......2006-05-13

          This book is an awe by any means. Chronology of movies, TV, music and fast food in the U.S. Very valuable information inside, though. After I rented it from the local libary, I decided to get one for myself too.

          1 out of 5 stars Boring.......2006-04-01

          1- I'm sorry but i found it to be a very boring book.
          2- The author's opinion is not consistent with the title, which is somehow deceiving to sell.

          5 out of 5 stars No politics here........2005-07-11

          It was very refreshing to read a book with actual facts and figures, rather than one on someones opinion on how they (or their party) would do things. That said, it is surprising more people haven't taken notice to the amount of propaganda our government spreads, and with our taxes. While Fraser gives many examples of past activites he also cites some current ones, leaves you wanting to know what/who is influencing my opinions without trying to do just that himself.
          The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy (Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany)
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            The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy (Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany)

            Manufacturer: University of Michigan Press
            ProductGroup: Book
            Binding: Paperback

            Popular CulturePopular Culture | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books
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            1. Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770-1870 (Post-Contemporary Interventions) Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770-1870 (Post-Contemporary Interventions)
            2. Germany's Colonial Pasts (Texts and Contexts) Germany's Colonial Pasts (Texts and Contexts)
            3. Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Culture (Modern German Culture and Literature) Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Culture (Modern German Culture and Literature)
            4. German Women for Empire, 1884-1945 (Politics, History, and Culture) German Women for Empire, 1884-1945 (Politics, History, and Culture)

            ASIN: 047206682X

            Book Description

            "Race relations" are a controversial topic in today's Germany. Have Germans learned from the past? How far back must one go to understand the tensions, prejudices, and strategies that have marked race relations in the recently unified nation? The Imperialist Imagination explores the German preoccupation with racial and ethnic differences throughout the past two centuries, in a colonial and "postcolonial" context.
            Germany's belated national unification in 1870, its short colonial period (1884-1918), and the loss of its colonies as a consequence of World War I, rather than through wars of liberation, generated very different colonial and postcolonial conditions from those in Britain and France. This volume's sixteen essays investigate how, as a consequence of these conditions, Germans imagined their relationship to racial and ethnic others: how they supported and contested colonization during the colonial period, how their colonial fantasies fed into the Nazis' racial and expansionary policies after the loss of German colonies, and how they represent their relationship to German minorities and "foreigners" within and outside Germany today.
            The contributors include scholars in literature, history, art history, political science, philosophy, ethnography, film, popular culture, photography, and theater. The anthology will appeal not only to Germanists but to all those interested in postcolonial and cultural studies.
            Sara Friedrichsmeyer is Professor of German, University of Cincinnati. Sara Lennox is Professor of German, University of Massachusetts. Susanne Zantop is Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Dartmouth College.
            The Location of Culture
            Average customer rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
            • Even The Little People Are Free
            • The enunciatory present
            • I'd rather stick my hand in a blender than read this again
            • Mimicry, Mockery, Menace
            • Even though this is one of the most highly regarded ...
            The Location of Culture
            Homi K. Bhabha
            Manufacturer: Routledge
            ProductGroup: Book
            Binding: Hardcover

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            ASIN: 0415016355

            Book Description

            In Location of Culture , Homi Bhabha sets out the conceptual imperative and political consistency of the post-colonial intellectual project. In a provocative series of essays, Bhabha explains why the post-colonial critique has altered forever the landscape of postmodern discourse.

            Location of Culture examines the displacement of the colonist's ligitimizing cultural authority; the margins of Western "civility" put under colonial stress; the complex cultural and political boundaries which exist between the spheres of gender, race, class, and sexuality; the place of language, psychic affect, and narrative discourse in the construction of social authority and cultural identity.

            Bhabha investigates a diverse range of texts in a bold attempt to specify the moment and the place of both colonial and post-colonial perspectives. He discusses writers such as Toni Morrison, Nadine Gordimer, and Salman Rushdie; historical documents such as those on theIndian Mutiny and by missionaries; race riots and nationhood; and he builds on the work of important cultural theorists such as Frantz Fanon and Edward Said.

            Customer Reviews:

            4 out of 5 stars Even The Little People Are Free .......2007-06-04

            Bhabha writes dense, pretentious prose, which is commonplace now among the humanists who feel inferior to scientists, but he does have something to say. This little book does two things: it is in the end a celebration of literature (and not of theory for its own sake) and it defends the little brown people, such as Indians, against the claim of others, such as Edward Said, that whites oppressed them by denying them a voice. Bhabha argues in effect that the oppression created a new voice that subverted the oppressors. Bhabha has little patience for the sob-sister school of academic discourse which seeks out victims of racism. This is a sustained critique of liberal academic bad faith.

            5 out of 5 stars The enunciatory present.......2006-02-16

            In The Location of Culture, Bhabha argues for a fundamental realignment of the methodology of cultural analysis away from ontology toward the "performative" and "enunciatory present" (p.178). Such a shift, he claims, provides a basis for the negotiation of cultural difference rather than its automatic repression or negation in the face of irreconcilable oppositions. Bhabha's emphasis on the enunciative production of meaning places the emphasis of critical inquiry on issues of representation or signification, thereby producing "a temporality that makes it possible to conceive of the articulation of antagonistic or contradictory elements" (p.25).

            This argument represents a critical attack on the Western production of binary oppositions, traditionally defined in terms of centre and margin, civilised and savage, enlightened and ignorant. Bhabha questions the easy recourse to consolidated dualisms by repudiating fixed and authentic centres of truth, suggesting that cultures interact, transgress and transform each other in a much more complex manner than typical binary oppositions allow.

            According to him, hybridity and linguistic multivocality have the potential to intervene and dislocate the process of domination through the re-interpretation and re-deployment of received discourse, thus re-focusing critical attention towards the "agonistic space" (181) which exists on the borders of difference, along the edges of alterity, where cultures meet. Bhabha celebrates cultural heterogeneity and the subversive effects of hybridisation.

            3 out of 5 stars I'd rather stick my hand in a blender than read this again.......2004-05-26

            The fact that this book is influential is generally beyond argument. What astonishes me, however, is that so many people had the endurance to sit through the horrific writing; the author's style is obnoxious in the extreme. The first paragraph, for example, notes that the question of culture is the "trope of our times," characterized by "a tenebrous sense of survival." These concepts are not mind-bending. An everday, or as Homi would say, "colloquial" vocabularly would sufficiently articulate his thesis, yet he seems hellbent on packing his work with obscure language like he needs show off or prove something. Again, his ideas are influential, but he makes reading them as painful as possible.

            1 out of 5 stars Mimicry, Mockery, Menace.......2003-01-21

            Ambivalence is a key term in Bhabha's Location of Culture. Accordingly, Bhabha's prose might be considered poetry or gibberish, but certainly not scholarship. There is no thesis, no argument, no evidence. That is not to say that Bhabha wouldn't be capable of such writing. Every once in a while, the reader can catch a glimpse of Bhabha's Other: the lucid thinker of post-colonialism. In order to compensate for the lack of clarity, structure and, yes, basic congruity between subjects, verbs and objects, Bhabha enacts the thoughts he fails to express. Indeed, his text is a performance of itself. Take, for instance, his chapter on mimicry. Whatever intelligent thoughts other scholars have derived from this concept, you will not find them in Bhabha's book. But he indeed shows you what he means, as he goes through the motions of scholarship. First, he makes a number of general statements that sound like a thesis. Then he puts a in a few convoluted sentence structures that make no sense-grammatically or otherwise. And finally he slams in a quote or two to prove a point-what point doesn't matter, for he did not make one in the first place. As a reader you will have to decide whether his work is a mimicry (in his definition "almost but not quite") of scholarship or its menace (according to Bhabha, 'not at all but still a little'). About one thing, though, he leaves no ambivalence: he "quite simply mocks its power to be a model." Harvard volunteered to be the evidence.

            3 out of 5 stars Even though this is one of the most highly regarded ..........2003-01-11

            ...theory books of the 1990s, its fame and reputation seem overblown. None of the other reviews posted here have really stated what Bhabha tries to accomplish in "The Location of Culture," so I'll give it a crack, even though I'm no expert on postcolonial theory.

            To save you all some time, many of Bhabha's key points are made in the first two pages of his book. For instance: "In-between spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood--singular or communal--that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society" (p. 1-2). Elsewhere, in-betweenness is easily the key concept in the book, as well as the notion of HYBRIDITY. The reason the modernist model of Colonialism is doomed to fail is not only because it needs the Other (the colonized) to validate its own supremacy (and to fulfill its desires), but also because it engages in what Bhabha refers to as "contra-modernity": modernity in "colonial conditions where its imposition is itself the denial of historical freedom, civic autonomy and the 'ethical' choice of refashioning" (p. 241). Bhabha finds that by examining the borderlines between Colonial power and Colonial oppression, a truer history of global populations can be obtained. In one of the finer passages in the book, Bhabha examines a scene from Salman Rushdie's controversial 1988 novel "The Satanic Verses" and descibes how the postcolonial body--shaped by an outside nationalist culture--is representative of the colonizer, yet the colonizers "can never let the national history look at itself narcissistically in the eye" (p. 168).

            Now let me preface my explanation by saying this is what I THINK Bhabha is getting at. It's not that his prose is "confusing," as other reviewers have stated here--although it is exceedingly "academic" (and there is nothing wrong with that, in and of itself)--but it is mired in the theoryspeak of the West that Bhabha seems so insistent upon de-centralizing. Bhabha uses the theories of the European male elite with so much blind faith that it easily undermines much of what he is trying to accomplish. Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida are all over this book. These "founders of discourse" (as Foucault called Marx and Freud--and could posthumously call himself given his exhaltation in the academy after his death in 1984) represent an alternate (i.e. "left") critical practice, yet completely dominate Western discussions of theory in literary circles. Is not Bhabha, an Indian scholar, colonized by these minds?

            Also, Bhabha's insistence upon in-betweenness at times really seems to undermine his (apparent) intentions. He seems, on the one hand, to claim that it is precisely through in-betweenness that the oppressors dominate the oppressed. Yet, it also seems that this in-betweenness gives the oppressed the opportunity to resist the oppressors. We seem to be back at step zero. Is anything really being said here?

            He should have followed better the example of Frantz Fanon, who appears early and often as a primary source in "The Location of Culture." Fanon was surely no stranger to the Western tradition, but was able to write in a critical-poetical-personal style that was accessible to non-academics, a style that had real fire. Bhabha, with all his emphasis on the work of postcolonial theory--which, in his words, seeks to "revise those nationalist or 'nativist' pedagogies that set up the relation of Third World and First World in a binary structure of opposition" (p. 173)--continually relies on the concept of "doubling" (likely a Lacanian theory) as well as his notion of in-betweenness (or liminality, as he calls it) in such a manner that no distinct point of view really emerges. The theoryspeak seems to subsume any important observations he might be willing to make.

            While this book has some wonderful moments in it, I would estimate that about 25 of the books 250 pages really says something. I'm worried that this book has been canonized because the mainly white scholars that run the Academy need their theories stated in a dense manner by an Indian man to give them validity. I know that kind of thinking is very conspiratorial, but it is only a concern. I've not read any other Bhabha, or other postcolonial theorists like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak or Arjun Appadurai, but I cannot recommend this an easy gateway into this material. I would recommend the writings of Fanon, though his writing precedes the moment of postcolonial theory by some three or four decades, as a better introduction.

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