Date: Thu, 11 Feb 1999 13:33:28 -0500 (EST)
From: Joseph Flanagan III <flanagan-AT-odin.english.udel.edu>
Subject: Re: Homi K. Bhabha's Writing -Reply


Actually the comparison of Bhabha and Said highlights some of the problems
involving the discussion between, for want of a better term, theoroists
and critics. While I have learned much from Said, I think that his use of
terms and concepts is often so loose--he makes them do too much critical
work--that his essays do become somewhat unintelligible--not in the sense
that we don't understand literally what he is saying but in the sense that
he gives the same term has so many contradictory meanings. Orientalism,
for instance,is riddled with the problems of an epistemological approach
and a performative one, his notion of "criticism" is so vague that I don't
have the slightest idea what he means, etc. Bhabha's writing is certainly
difficult, but he is, at least in terms of analysis, more consistent than
Said. He does expect much from his readers, but mostly that is a
familarity with different discourses and approaches--he's actually more
interdiscplinary than Said because of that respect for language and
terminology. I don't mean to defend Bhabha--I do have a lot of problems
with his work, but that is when he refuses to engage certain fundamental
issues (i.e. how the analysis of gender fits into his analysis of the
colonial stereotype).  But difficulty is, I would argue, part of the
problem of thinking differently.  By the way, why is it only theorists in
the humanities who get charged with being jargonistic and too difficult?
Last time I tried to read actual publications in theoretical physics (not
those written for the general audience), I had quite a difficult time
following it. Of course, I blamed them for writing in a language that
purposively excluded me from their community ;-) Joe F




     --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---