This essay is based on Harvard's Prize Catch, a Delphic Postcolonialist By Emily Eakin, New York Times, p. A 21, Saturday, November 17, 2001. backup

Harvard just managed to hire Homi K. Bhabha away from the University of Chicago into their African Studies program, with a joint appointment in English. In the first paragraph of the story we read:

"When I heard that, I was dismayed," said Marjorie Perloff, an emeritus professor of English at Stanford University. "For Harvard to be thrilled to be hiring Homi Bhabha — he doesn't have anything to say."

Here we go again! What's an undergraduate to think about these academy battles? Just a little further on we read:

"Mr. Bhabha is dogged by critics who say his followers have been bewitched by his indecipherable jargon. In 1998, Mr. Bhabha won second place (Judith Butler, a gender theorist at Berkeley, took the top prize) in the annual Bad Writing Contest . . . . "

It's information control folks. Those who achieve high rank in the academic establishment are so impressed with their own erudition that they can no longer manage to speak to us ordinary folks. So they go on and on and on, lost happily in their jargon. Edward Said is pretty clear. I can actually read his work. But even the Hab list confuses me by midnight. And an occasional squawk of "what ARE they trying to say" is heard in the wee hours of the morning at my house.

For all the years I've been teaching moot court I keep hammering away at "say it simply." So did my law school teachers. If you want to be a scholar it's more fun and more effective if you say simply and clearly what you mean, so that others can understand you. Social change comes from understanding that there is a better way to go, and none of us will understand that if speak only jargon to each other.Term papers, by the way, encourage such jargon, which is another reason I don't like them.

Noam Chomsky levels this same charge against Foucault, claiming that he's amiable and erudite, but far too obscurantist. I tend to be on Chomsky's side. I like Jerome Bruner's comment that if you know your thesis well you can explain it clearly enough that a fourth grader can understand it. I like that standard. I wish the academy would adapt it.

But as a social theorist, I still have to deal with Foucault and Judith Butler and Homi K. Bhabha. I just put up a Teaching essay link to a good site on Foucault, and I'll get to Butler soon.

But Homi Bhabha does have something to say, whether he does it to the English Department's satisfaction or not. "His prose style owes something to the arcane literary theory he studied at Oxford — in particular, that of the French philosophers Derrida and Lacan. But his signature ideas — concepts like "hybridity," "negotiation" and "in-betweenness" — can just as readily be traced to his experience as a member of an ethnic minority in Bombay." Bhabha defines "in-betweeness" as the reality of cultural mix when one is drawing from many cultures in a structural context. And "hybridity" is cultural result of that mix. This recalls our discussion of how difficult it is to discover the local story of an indigenous people before colonization. "Hybridity" has intervened, and the indigenous can no longer retrieve their own story without great effort to peel away the colonization.

"Even if Bhabha's work is forbiddingly opaque, we should make no mistake that he is describing actual social phenomena in the colonial and postcolonial world," said Michael Bérubé, an English professor at Pennsylvania State University." How true! Just because it sounds like gobbleydegook doesn't mean we can ignore it, unless we're an Emeritus professor of English at Stanford or Noam Chomsky. Too bad we need sites like Dear Habermas to turn it into simple English, even if we're oversimplifying and limiting. At least that's enough to help you decide whether you need to struggle through more.

Discussion Topics

1. What does Homi Bhabha mean by "hybridization," and why is that important?
   jeanne's comments:

   Consider that "hybridization" sounds like a way to describe the interdependent relationship between the colonized and the colonizer, leading to some kind of hybrid culture which has taken a part of each. Consider "hybridization" as a kind of antidote to our dichotomizing everything into the "oppressed and the oppressor." Shades of constitutive theory.

2. How does the obscure academic writing damage public discourse?
   jeanne's comments:

   Consider that Habermas' dream of public discourse as the means to peaceful survival in the future requires that EVERY citizen be heard in good faith as to his validity claims. Consider how we are to formulate such validity claims if our thinkers do not take the trouble to make their knowledge and the complicated perspectives needed for that knowledge available to all of us. One who has been taught in a convergent fundamentalist manner has not been given the opportunity to build the skills of rational discourse. That does not mean that he/she cannot think rationaslly, but that he/she has not been given the requisite practice to become skilled at such discourse and can those be congitively and emotionally dominated by the one with those privileged skills. I still disagree with Spivak on that. I think we have been largely colonized by the withholding of such skills at rational discourse.

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