Introduction: narrating the nation
Homi K. Bhabha
1
Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only
fully realize their horizons in the mind’s eye. Such an image of the nation
— or narration — might seem impossibly romantic and excessively metaphorical,
but it is from those traditions of political thought and literary
language that the nation emerges as a powerful historical idea in the west.
An idea whose cultural compulsion lies in the impossible unity of the
nation as a symbolic force. This is not to deny the attempt by nationalist
discourses persistently to produce the idea of the nation as a continuous
narrative of national progress, the narcissism of self-generation, the
primeval present of the Volk. Nor have such political ideas been
definitively superseded by those new realities of internationalism, multinationalism,
or even ‘late capitalism’, once we acknowledge that the
rhetoric of these global terms is most often underwritten in that grim
prose of power that each nation can wield within its own sphere of
influence. What I want to emphasize in that large and liminal image of the
nation with which I began is a particular ambivalence that haunts the idea
of the nation, the language of those who write of it and the lives of those
who live it. It is an ambivalence that emerges from a growing awareness
that, despite the certainty with which historians speak of the ‘origins’ of
nation as a sign of the ‘modernity’ of society, the cultural temporality of
the nation inscribes a much more transitional social reality. Benedict
Anderson, whose Imagined Communities significantly paved the way for this
book, expresses the nation’s ambivalent emergence with great clarity:
The century of the Enlightenment, of rationalist secularism, brought
with it its own modern darkness. . . . [Few] things were (are) suited to
this end better than the idea of nation. If nation states are widely
considered to be ‘new’ and ‘historical’, the nation states to which they
give political expression always loom out of an immemorial past and . . .
glide into a limitless future. What I am proposing is that Nationalism has
to be understood, by aligning it not with self-consciously held political
ideologies, but with large cultural systems that preceded it, out of which
— as well as against which — it came into being. (19)
The nation’s ‘coming into being’ as a system of cultural signification, as
2 Homi K. Bhabha
the representation of social life rather than the discipline of social polity,
emphasizes this instability of knowledge. For instance, the most
interesting accounts of the national idea, whether they come from the
Tory Right, the Liberal high ground, or the New Left, seem to concur
on the ambivalent tension that defines the ‘society’ of the nation. Michael
Oakeshott’s ‘Character of a modern European state’ is perhaps the most
brilliant conservative account of the equivocal nature of the modern
nation. The national space is, in his view, constituted from competing
dispositions of human association as societas (the acknowledgement of
moral rules and conventions of conduct) and universitas (the acknowledgement
of common purpose and substantive end). In the absence of their
merging into a new identity they have survived as competing dogmas —
societas cum universitate — ‘imposing] a particular ambivalence upon all the
institutions of a modern state and a specific ambiguity upon its
vocabulary of discourse’.1 In Hannah Arendt’s view, the society of the
nation in the modern world is ‘that curiously hybrid realm where private
interests assume public significance’ and the two realms flow unceasingly
and uncertainly into each other ‘like waves in the never-ending stream
of the life-process itself’.2 No less certain is Tom Nairn, in naming the
nation ‘the modern Janus’, that the ‘uneven development’ of capitalism
inscribes both progression and regression, political rationality and irrationality
in the very genetic code of the nation. This is a structural fact
to which there are no exceptions and ‘in this sense, it is an exact (not a
rhetorical) statement about nationalism to say that it is by nature
ambivalent’.3
It is the cultural representation of this ambivalence of modern society
that is explored in this book. If the ambivalent figure of the nation is a
problem of its transitional history, its conceptual indeterminacy, its
wavering between vocabularies, then what effect does this have on
narratives and discourses that signify a sense of ‘nationness’: the heimlich
pleasures of the hearth, the unheimlich terror of the space or race of the
Other; the comfort of social belonging, the hidden injuries of class; the
customs of taste, the powers of political affiliation; the sense of social
order, the sensibility of sexuality; the blindness of bureaucracy, the strait
insight of institutions; the quality of justice, the common sense of
injustice; the langue of the law and the parole of the people.
The emergence of the political ‘rationality’ of the nation as a form of
narrative — textual strategies, metaphoric displacements, sub-texts and
figurative strategems — has its own history.4 It is suggested in Benedict
Anderson’s view of the space and time of the modern nation as embodied
in the narrative culture of the realist novel, and explored in Tom Nairn’s
reading of Enoch Powell’s post-imperial racism which is based on the
‘symbol-fetishism’ that infests his febrile, neo-romantic poetry. To
encounter the nation as it is written displays a temporality of culture and
social consciousness more in tune with the partial, overdetermined
process by which textual meaning is produced through the articulation of
difference in language; more in keeping with the problem of closure
which plays enigmatically in the discourse of the sign. Such an approach
Introduction 3
contests the traditional authority of those national objects of knowledge
— Tradition, People, the Reason of State, High Culture, for instance —
whose pedagogical value often relies on their representation as holistic
concepts located within an evolutionary narrative of historical continuity.
Traditional histories do not take the nation at its own word, but, for the
most part, they do assume that the problem lies with the interpretation
of ‘events* that have a certain transparency or privileged visibility.
To study the nation through its narrative address does not merely draw
attention to its language and rhetoric; it also attempts to alter the conceptual
object itself. If the problematic ‘closure’ of textuality questions the
‘totalization’ of national culture, then its positive value lies in displaying
the wide dissemination through which we construct the field of meanings
and symbols associated with national life. This is a project that has a
certain currency within those forms of critique associated with ‘cultural
studies’. Despite the considerable advance this represents, there is a
tendency to read the Nation rather restrictively; either, as the ideological
apparatus of state power, somewhat redefined by a hasty, functionalist
reading of Foucault or Bakhtin; or, in a more utopian inversion, as the
incipient or emergent expression of the ‘national-popular’ sentiment
preserved in a radical memory. These approaches are valuable in drawing
our attention to those easily obscured, but highly significant, recesses of
the national culture from which alternative constituencies of peoples and
oppositional analytic capacities may emerge — youth, the everyday,
nostalgia, new ‘ethnicities’, new social movements, ‘the politics of
difference’. They assign new meanings and different directions to the
process of historical change. The most progressive development from
such positions take ‘a discursive conception of ideology — ideology (like
language) is conceptualised in terms of the articulation of elements. As
Volosinov said, the ideological sign is always multi-accentual and Janusfaced’.5
But in the heat of political argument the ‘doubling’ of the sign
can often be stilled. The Janus face of ideology is taken at face value and
its meaning fixed, in the last instance, on one side of the divide between
ideology and ‘material conditions’.
It is the project of Nation and Narration to explore the Janus-faced
ambivalence of language itself in the construction of the Janus-faced
discourse of the nation. This turns the familiar two-faced god into a
figure of prodigious doubling that investigates the nation-space in the
process of the articulation of elements: where meanings may be partial
because they are in medias res; and history may be half-made because it
is in the process of being made; and the image of cultural authority may
be ambivalent because it is caught, uncertainly, in the act of ‘composing’
its powerful image. Without such an understanding of the performativity
of language in the narratives of the nation, it would be difficult to
understand why Edward Said prescribes a kind of ‘analytic pluralism’ as
the form of critical attention appropriate to the cultural effects of the
nation. For the nation, as a form of cultural elaboration (in the Gramscian
sense), is an agency of ambivalent narration that holds culture at its most
productive position, as a force for ‘subordination, fracturing, diffusing,
4 Homi K. Bhabha
reproducing, as much as producing, creating, forcing, guiding’.6
I wrote to my contributors with a growing, if unfamiliar, sense of the
nation as one of the major structures of ideological ambivalence within
the cultural representations of ‘modernity’. My intention was that we
should develop, in a nice collaborative tension, a range of readings that
engaged the insights of poststructuralist theories of narrative knowledge
— textuality, discourse, enunciation, ecriture, ‘the unconscious as a
language’ to name only a few strategies — in order to evoke this
ambivalent margin of the nation-space. To reveal such a margin is, in the
first instance, to contest claims to cultural supremacy, whether these are
made from the ‘old’ post-imperialist metropolitan nations, or on behalf
of the ‘new’ independent nations of the periphery. The marginal or
‘minority’ is not the space of a celebratory, or utopian, selfmarginalization.
It is a much more substantial intervention into those
justifications of modernity —progress, homogeneity, cultural organicism,
the deep nation, the long past — that rationalize the authoritarian,
‘normalizing’ tendencies within cultures in the name of the national
interest or the ethnic prerogative. In this sense, then, the ambivalent,
antagonistic perspective of nation as narration will establish the cultural
boundaries of the nation so that they may be acknowledged as ‘containing’
thresholds of meaning that must be crossed, erased, and translated
in the process of cultural production.
The ‘locality’ of national culture is neither unified nor unitary in
relation to itself, nor must it be seen simply as ‘other’ in relation to what
is outside or beyond it. The boundary is Janus-faced and the problem of
outside/inside must always itself be a process of hybridity, incorporating
new ‘people’ in relation to the body politic, generating other sites of
meaning and, inevitably, in the political process, producing unmanned
sites of political antagonism and unpredictable forces for political
representation. The address to nation as narration stresses the insistence
of political power and cultural authority in what Derrida describes as the
‘irreducible excess of the syntactic over the semantic’.7 What emerges as
an effect of such ‘incomplete signification’ is a turning of boundaries and
limits into the in-between spaces through which the meanings of cultural
and political authority are negotiated. It is from such narrative positions
between cultures and nations, theories and texts, the political, the poetic
and the painterly, the past and the present, that Nation and Narration seeks
to affirm and extend Frantz Fanon’s revolutionary credo: ‘National
consciousness, which is not nationalism, is the only thing that will give
us an international dimension’.8 It is this international dimension both
within the margins of the nation-space and in the boundaries in-between
nations and peoples that the authors of this book have sought to represent
in their essays. The representative emblem of this book might be a
chiasmatic ‘figure’ of cultural difference whereby the anti-nationalist,
ambivalent nation-space becomes the crossroads to a new transnational
culture. The ‘other* is never outside or beyond us; it emerges forcefully,
within cultural discourse, when we think we speak most intimately and
indigenously ‘between ourselves*.
Introduction 5
Without attempting to precis individual essays, I would like briefly to
elaborate this movement, within Nation and Narration, from the
problematic unity of the nation to the articulation of cultural difference
in the construction of an international perspective. The story could start
in many places: with David Simpson’s reading of the multiform ‘body’
of Whitman’s American populism and his avoidance of metaphor which
is also an avoidance of the problems of integration and cultural
difference; or Doris Sommer’s exploration of the language of love and
productive sexuality that allegorizes and organizes the early historical
narratives of Latin America which are disavowed by the later ‘Boom’
novelists; or John Barrell’s exploration of the tensions between the civic
humanist theory of painting and the ‘discourse of custom’ as they are
drawn together in the ideology of the ‘ornamental’ in art, and its
complex mediation of Englishness; or Sneja Gunew’s portrayal of an
Australian literature split between an Anglo-Celtic public sphere and a
multiculturalist counter-public sphere. It is the excluded voices of
migrants and the marginalized that Gunew represents, bringing them
back to disturb and interrupt the writing of the Australian canon.
In each of these ‘foundational fictions’ the origins of national traditions
turn out to be as much acts of affiliation and establishment as they are
moments of disavowal, displacement, exclusion, and cultural contestation.
In this function of national history as Entstellung, the forces of social
antagonism or contradiction cannot be transcended or dialectically
surmounted. There is a suggestion that the constitutive contradictions of
the national text are discontinuous and ‘interruptive’.9 This is Geoff
Bennington’s starting point as he puns (with a certain postmodern prescience)
on the ‘postal politics’ of national frontiers to suggest that ‘Frontiers
are articulations, boundaries are, constitutively, crossed and
transgressed’. It is across such boundaries, both historical and
pedagogical, that Martin Thom places Renan’s celebrated essay ‘What is
a nation?’. He provides a careful genealogy of the national idea as it
emerges mythically from the Germanic tribes, and more recently in the
interrelations between the struggle to consolidate the Third Republic and
the emergence of Durkheimian sociology.
What kind of a cultural space is the nation with its transgressive boundaries
and its ‘interruptive’ interiority? Each essay answers this question
differently but there is a moment in Simon During’s exposition of the
‘civil imaginary’ when he suggests that ‘part of the modern domination
of the life-world by style and civility .. . is a process of the feminisation
of society’. This insight is explored in two very different contexts, Gillian
Beer’s reading of Virginia Woolf and Rachel Bowlby’s study of Uncle
Tom's Cabin. Gillian Beer takes the perspective of the aeroplane — war
machine, dream symbol, icon of the 1930s poets —to emphasize Woolf’s
reflections on the island race, and space; its multiple marginal significations
— ‘land and water margins, home, body, individualism’ —
providing another inflection to her quarrels with patriarchy and
imperialism. Rachel Bowlby writes the cultural history of readings of
Uncle Tom's Cabin, that debate the feminization of American cultural
6 Homi K. Bhabha
values while producing a more complex interpretation of her own. The
narrative of American freedom, she suggests, displays the same ambivalence
that constructs the contradictory nature of femininity in the text.
America itself becomes the dark continent, doubly echoing the ‘image’ of
Africa and Freud’s metaphor for feminine sexuality. George Harris, the
former slave, leaves for the new African state of Liberia.
It is when the western nation comes to be seen, in Conrad’s famous
phrase, as one of the dark corners of the earth, that we can begin to
explore new places from which to write histories of peoples and construct
theories of narration. Each time the question of cultural difference
emerges as a challenge to relativistic notions of the diversity of culture,
it reveals the margins of modernity. As a result, most of these essays
have ended up in another cultural location from where they started —
often taking up a ‘minority’ position. Francis Mulhern’s study of the
‘English ethics’ of Leavisian universalism pushes towards a reading of
Q.D. Leavis’s last public lecture in Cheltenham where she bemoans the
imperilled state of that England which bore the classical English novel;
an England, now, of council-house dwellers, unassimilated minorities,
sexual emancipation without responsibility. Suddenly the paranoid
system of ‘English reading’ stands revealed. James Snead ends his interrogation
of the ethics and aesthetics of western ‘nationalist’ universalism
with a reading of Ishmael Reed who ‘is revising a prior co-optation of
black culture, using a narrative principle that will undermine the very
assumptions that brought the prior appropriation about’. Timothy Brennan
produces a panoramic view of the western history of the national
idea and its narrative forms, finally to take his stand with those hybridizing
writers like Salman Rushdie whose glory and grotesquerie lie in their
celebration of the fact that English is no longer an English language.
This, as Brennan points out, leads to a more articulate awareness of the
post-colonial and neo-colonial conditions as authoritative positions from
which to speak Janus-faced to east and west. But these positions across
the frontiers of history, culture, and language, which we have been
exploring, are dangerous, if essential, political projects. Bruce Robbins’
reading of Dickens balances the risks of departing from the ‘ethical home
truths’ of humanistic experience with the advantages of developing a
knowledge of acting in a dispersed global system. Our attention to
‘aporia’ he suggests, should be counterpointed with an intentionality that
is inscribed in poros — practical, technical know-how that abjures the
rationalism of universals, while maintaining the practicality, and political
strategy, of dealing professionally with local situations that are
themselves defined as liminal and borderline.
America leads to Africa; the nations of Europe and Asia meet in
Australia; the margins of the nation displace the centre; the peoples of the
periphery return to rewrite the history and fiction of the metropolis. The
island story is told from the eye of the aeroplane which becomes that
‘ornament’ that holds the public and the private in suspense. The bastion
of Englishness crumbles at the sight of immigrants and factory workers.
The great Whitmanesque sensorium of America is exchanged for a
Introduction 7
Warhol blowup, a Kruger installation, or Mapplethorpe’s naked bodies.
‘Magical realism’ after the Latin American Boom, becomes the literary
language of the emergent post-colonial world. Amidst these exorbitant
images of the nation-space in its transnational dimension there are those
who have not yet found their nation: amongst them the Palestinians and
the Black South Africans. It is our loss that in making this book we were
unable to add their voices to ours. Their persistent questions remain to
remind us, in some form or measure, of what must be true for the rest
of us too: ‘When did we become “a people”? When did we stop being
one? Or are we in the process of becoming one? What do these big questions
have to do with our intimate relationships with each other and with
others?’10
Notes
1 M. Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975),
p. 201.
2 H. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958),
pp. 33—5 and passim.
3 T. Nairn, The Break-up of Britain (London: Verso, 1981), p. 348.
4 Patrick Wright’s On Living in an Old Country (London: Verso, 1985) and Paul
Gilroy’s There Ain't No Black in the UnionJack (London: Hutchinson, 1987) are
significant recent contributions to such an approach.
5 S. Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal (London: Verso, 1988), p. 9.
6 E. Said, The World, The Text and The Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1983), p. 171.
7 J. Derrida, Dissemination (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981), p. 221.
8 F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), p. 199.
9 G. Spivak, In Other Worlds (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 251.
10E. Said, After the Last Sky (London, Faber, 1986), p. 34.