호미 바바의 탈민족주의와 이산적 상상력

Postnationalism and Diasporic Imagination in Romi Bhabha

Homi Bhabha in "DissemiNation" takes issue with the totality and homogeneity of "nationness." He directs attention to the possible conflict between the two temporalities of the nation: the archaic and the modern. As socio-political theorists pointed out well before Bhabha, nationalism has conjured up time immemorial as the origin of the nation in an attempt to confer historical legitimacy upon it. The alleged historical dimension of the nation, in conjunction with its claim to modernity, has earned it the nickname. Janus. This ambiguity is the moment which Bhabha seizes upon and reads subversiveness into. In so doing, he appropriates Derrida's theory of de construction. With its tern poral ambiguity translated into a deconstructionist language, the nation is thus transformed into a site of cultural undecidability where self-identity or self-sameness is constantly challenged by the officially unacknowledged alienness of ethnic minorities. By de-certainizing the categories of the nation and the people, Bhabha seems to accomplish his goal of undermining the authority of nationalism and the hegemonic group within the Western imagined community. However, a prominent problem with Bhabha's project is that the very diasporic imagination of his, which serves to disrupt the boundaries of the nation, will strip the ethnic minorities of a possibility of self-representation, not to mention a solid political position. In other words, Bhabha's postcolonial theory, due to its inherent 'post-centra' I tendency, does not stop at subverting the hegemonic discourse of the Western nation but also runs a risk of self-cancellation by gesturing further toward postnationalism. What is interesting to note regarding Bhabha's relationship with deconstruction is that he endeavors to distance himself from Oerrida despite his apparent indebtedness to the latter, which clearly is his response to the charge of ahistoricity often brought up against him. This paper discusses how an appropriation of poststructuralism affects Bhabha's theorization of the nation, especially, how radically it weakens the possibility of political engagement for postcolonialism.