"On the Third Space"

Provider: Kate Liu / 劉紀雯

Bhabha, Homi.  "The Third Space."  Rutherford, Jonathan ed.  Identity: Community, Culture, Difference.  London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990.

[This interview is seen by the editor as a response to the conflicts between fundamentalism and liberalism in the Satanic Verses controversies.]

The difference between cultural diversity and cultural difference

cultural diversity --

. . . there is always also a corresponding containment of it.   A transparent norm is constituted, a norm given by the host society or dominant culture, which says that 'these other cultures are fine, but we must be able to locate them within our own grid.'" (208)

cultural difference --

Different cultures, the difference between cultural practices, the difference in the construction of cultures within different groups, very often set up among and between themselves an incommensurability.  (Is this the alternative public sphere according to Prof. Hsia, Chu-joe? )

articulation and translation of cultures  --

--The articulation of cultures is possible not because of the familiarity or similarity of contents, but because all cultures are symbol-forming and subject-constituting, interpellative practices.
--By translation I first of all mean a process by which, in order to objectify cultural meaning, there always has to be a process of alienation and of secondariness in relation to itself.   . . . The 'originary' is always open to translation so that it can never be said to have a totalised prior moment of being or meaning -- an essence (210).

The third space

For me the importance of hybridity is not to be albe to trace two original moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity to me is the 'third space' which enables other positions to emerge.  This third space displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives.. .

(external) Literary Criticism Databank: Postmodernism and Urban Space ;
Postmodern Theories and Texts ;
Postmodern Space, Postcolonial Resistance  Spring, 1999