ABSTRACT
Homi K. Bhabha's main aim in the essays that make up The Location of Culture is to challenge fundamental tenets of Western ontology. Bhabha aimed to destabilize apparently stable markers of identity, such as nationality, gender, and class, and to think about them as the "sites of collaboration and contestation" that make up an unstable, hybrid self or society. Bhabha thus seeks to undermine the logic of academic discourse and upset the neat order of dialectical argument. Bhabha is attempting to show that colonial discourse, which claims to be coherent and inevitable, is actually unstable and fragmented. His writing reflects this argument by refusing any final or definitive interpretation of his ideas. Many of Bhabha's key ideas are developments from thinkers in other fields than postcolonialism. Bhabha shows how, because they rely on a binary of opposition to the colonized "Other", the ideas of colonization can only ever be a "partial presence" in the identity of either colonizer or colonized.
