Homi K. Bhabha's The Location of Culture is one of the foundational texts of the academic discipline of postcolonialism, a school of thought that offers a critical analysis of the social and cultural legacies of the colonial period. Colonialism is the policy of claiming and exploiting "foreign" territories—an action that brings with it cultural, political, and social consequences for the colony's original inhabitants. The Location of Culture is in many ways a response to the Palestinian American scholar Edward Said, whose 1978 book Orientalism is usually taken as being the text that inaugurated postcolonial studies as an academic discipline. Many commentators have seen Bhabha's insistence on the dislocation of culture as a direct result of his own background. The influence of Bhabha's family and educational background on his intellectual output is difficult to quantify. In his insistence on the transnational characteristics of all cultures, it is at least possible to see some reflections on his own origin.