ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a ‘second wave’ of postcolonial theory, characterized by a shift in debates around how others are represented, to who is able to bring themselves into representation and on whose terms. The first section of the chapter focuses on Homi Bhabha’s literary theoretical approach, suggesting how it paved the way for a critical appreciation of the politics of the speaking colonial subject, of her/his destabilizing potential in the face of colonial power’s representational stultifications. The second section of the chapter points to the dialogue and intersections of Bhabha’s work with important developments that were taking place in British Cultural Studies from the early 1980s. Here, the work of Stuart Hall, his colleagues and students, has pointed to the political potential of forms of postcolonial cultural production in the face of colonial power. In the third section of the chapter, I work through one example of these representational and postcolonial politics of culture and identity in the British context: British-Asian dance music from the 1990s.
