ABSTRACT
Central to Homi K. Bhabha's The Location of Culture is the idea that the identities of colonizers and colonized are inherently unstable, fractured, and hybrid. Bhabha orders and interrelates his key themes through a repetition that involves subtle alterations in emphasis, tone, and theoretical approach. In many ways, he approaches the notion of ordering ideas logically with suspicion, since he wants to challenge and engage his reader, not present a fixed set of ideas. Bhabha illustrates this idea with reference to the Martinique-born theorist Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks and an exploration of what Bhabha sees as the fundamental ambivalence of supposedly stable and coherent colonial discourses and identities. Bhabha's approach to theory and his unusual writing style was a practical application of his insights. Rather than simply attempting to persuade, Bhabha wants to show the many ways in which an idea might unfold, encouraging his readers to extend or recombine his ideas in new ways.
