포스트 민족 시대 혼종과 틈새의 정치학 : 호미 바바 읽기

The Politics of Hybridity and In - Betweenness in the Post - National Period : A Critical Reading of Homi Bhabha

The article tries to perform critical examination of the politics of hybridity and in-betweenness in the post-national period. Today's cultural change seems to be more vehement and radical than that of the past. Its influences are so crucial and immediate that we have difficulties finding a way to cope with them. Facing them, national cultures have experienced serious crisis or been rapidly undermined. Even if national or ethnic cultures appear to arise as a plausible alternative, it is nothing more than a symptom of the crisis of national cultures. In the modern national culture, the ideas of boundary or in-betweenness meant the ‘end’ or ‘failure’ of a culture, or the deserted zone from which the creativity of culture could never come. Now in the postmodern and post-national condition of globalization, however, the ideas become essential concepts for rethinking transnational and hybrid cultural phenomena. So they can play a very important role in both reflecting the limitation of national cultures and constructing a new paradigm of cultural theory. This article tries to read Homi Bhabha's ideas of hybridity and in-betweenness critically in order to rethink the politics of hybridity and in-betweenness. There have been many debates around Bhabha's theory. Some of criticizers, on the one hand, regard Bhabha's theory as having limitation in considering the present in which national cultures are being weakened or incorporated into the culture logic of transnational capitals. According to them, Bhabha's concepts have already been disqualified and co-opted into the transnational culture of capital: by paying excessive attention to the colonial and unconscious dimension of dominationresistance even if in the postcolonial relationship, his theory tends to lose sight of the global change led by capital and doesn't tell radical changes in the postcolonial culture from the transnational change of capital. On the other hand, other theorists argues for the usefulness of his theory because it can become an important tool in both deconstructing the false naturalness f national cultures and restructuring a cultural theory for the post-national period. This article tries to perform a critical appropriation of Bhabha's theory without supporting either position. His idea of the translational space of hybridity and in-betweenness is to rethink the unconscious structure of postcolonial discourses and deconstruct the one-sided domination by colonizers within colonialist discourses. It, however, has a serious limit in making a conscious subject for realizing the unconscious of colonial discourses. In his theory, the position of the conscious subject, as is shown in Franz Fanon, remains obscure. Nevertheless, his third space of hybridity and translation can be very useful in correcting the mistaken logic of the cultural imperialism that the culture of the center will dominate that of the periphery or Third world and as a result make various cultures homogeneous. This article tries to appropriate the positive sense of the translational space and consider the subject-making process for playing leading roles in that space.