ABSTRACT
In many ways, postcolonialism is in fact a successor to earlier intellectual movements that had similarly challenged the categorization of nations and peoples on a spectrum between civility and savagery. One of the justifications for colonialism was the idea that "more developed" or "civilized" nations were duty-bound to rule over nations of cultures that were seen as less developed, or savage, in order to help them develop. For Homi K. Bhabha, this was not a weakness, and in The Location of Culture he suggests that postcolonial thought must embrace constant changeability. The essays in The Location of Culture can be read as a response to the influential psychiatrist and cultural theorist Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks and Said's Orientalism. Bhabha also combined the intellectual tradition of Foucault and Derrida with some of the psychoanalytic insights of Sigmund Freud, the founder of the psychoanalytic tradition, and of Jacques Lacan, a psychoanalyst who made an important contribution to poststructuralist theory.
