Hybridity - Translation Journal

Extracted text from Hybridity.pdf:

Hybridity HOMI K. BHaBHa

From: The Location of Culture (1994) London New York: Routledge.

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translation / inaugural issue / 2011

f hybridity is heresy, then to blaspheme is to dream. To dream not of the past or present, nor the continuous present; it is not the nostalgic dream of tradition, nor the Utopian dream of modern progress; it is the dream of translation as survival as Derrida translates the time of Benjamins concept of the after-life of translation, as survivre, the act of living on borderlines. Rushdie translates this into the migrants dream of Homi K. Bhabha is the survival: an initiatory interstices; an empow- Anne F. Rothenberg ering condition of hybridity; an emergence Professor of the that turns return into reinscription or Humanities in the Department of English, redescription; an iteration that is not belated, Director of the but iconic and insurgent. For the migrants Mahindra Humanities survival depends, as Rushdie put it, on dis- Center, and Senior Advisor on the Humanities to the President and Provost covering how newness enters the world. The at Harvard University. He is the author focus is on making the linkages through the of numerous works exploring postcolonial unstable elements of literature and lifethe theory, cultural change and power, and among other themes. dangerous tryst with the untranslatable cosmopolitanism, His works include Nation and Narration rather than arriving at ready-made names. and The Location of Culture. He has two The newness of migrant or minority forthcoming books titled A Global Measure discourse has to be discovered in medias res: a and The Right to Narrate. Bhabha most recently contributed essays to exhibition newness that is not part of the progressivist catalogues on the work of Anish Kapoor, division between past and present, or the Raqib Shaw, and Shahzia Sikander archaic and the modern; nor is it a newness and interviews with Akbar Padamsee and on the work of ORLAN. that can be contained in the mimesis of orig- He serves as an advisor at key art inal and copy. In both these cases, the image institutions, as well as on the Steering of the new iconic rather than enunciatory; in Committee of the Aga Khan Architectural He is a Trustee of the UNESCO World both instances, temporal difference is repre- Prize. Report on Cultural Diversity and the Chair sented as epistemological or mimetic dis- of the World Economic Forums Global tance from an original source. The newness Agenda Council on Human Rights. of cultural translation is akin to what Walter Educated at the University of Bombay and the University of Oxford, Bhabha was Benjamin describes as the foreignness of lan- profiled by Newsweek as one of 100 guagesthat problem of representation Americans for the Next [21st] Century.

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Homi K. Bhabha

Hybridity translation / inaugural issue / 2011

native to representation itself. If Paul de Man focused on the metonymy of translation, I want to foreground the foreignness of cultural translation. With the concept of foreignness Benjamin comes closest to describing the performativity of translation as the staging of cultural difference. The argument begins with the suggestion that though Brot and pain intend the same object, bread, their discursive and cultural modes of signification are in conflict with each other, striving to exclude each other. The complementary of language as communication must be understood as emerging from the constant state of contestation and flux caused by the differential of social and cultural signification. This process of complementary as the agonistic supplement is the seed of the untranslatablethe foreign element in the midst of the performance of cultural translation. And it is this seed that turns into the famous, overworked analogy in the Benjamin essay: unlike the original where fruit and skin form a certain unity, in the act of translation the content or subject matter is made disjunct, overwhelmed and alienated by the form of signification, like a royal robe with ample folds. Unlike Derrida and de Man, I am less interested in the metonymic fragmentation of the original. I am more engaged with the foreign element that reveals the interstitial; insists in the textile superfluity of folds and wrinkles; and becomes the unstable element of linkage, the indeterminate temporality of the in-between, that has to be engaged in creating the conditions through which newness comes into the world. The foreign element destroys the originals structures of reference and sense communication as well not simply by negating it but by negotiating the disjunction in which successive cultural temporalities are preserved in the work of history and at the same time cancelled The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed. And through this dialectic of cultural negation-as-negotiation, this splitting of skin and fruit through the agency of foreignness, the purpose is, as Rudolf Pannwitz says, not to turn Hindi, Greek, English into German [but] instead to turn German into Hindi, Greek, English. Translation is the performative nature of cultural communication. It is language in actu (enunciation, positionality) rather than language in situ (nonc, or propositionality). And the sign of translation continually tells, or tolls the different times and spaces between cultural authority and its performative practices. The time of translation consists in that movement of meaning, the principle and practice of a communication that, in the words of de Man puts the original in motion to decanonise it, giving it the movement of fragmentation, a wandering of errance, a kind of permanent exile. (pp. 227-228)

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