Cultural Diversity and Cultural DifferencesHomi K.

Bhabha 2
The reason a cultural text or system of meaning cannot be sufficient unto itself is that the act of cultural
enunciation—the place of utterance—is crossed by the difference of writing or écriture. This has less to do with
what anthropologists might describe as varying attitudes to symbolic systems within different cultures than with
the structure of symbolic representation—not the content of the symbol or its “social function,” but the structure
of symbolization. It is this “difference” in language that is crucial to the production of meaning and ensures, at
the same time, that meaning is never simply mimetic and transparent.
The linguistic difference that informs any cultural performance is dramatized in the common semiotic account of
the disjuncture between the subject of a proposition (énoncé) and the subject of enunciation, which is not
represented in the statement but which is the acknowledgment of its discursive embeddedness and address, its
cultural positionality, its reference to a present time and a specific space. The pact of interpretation is never
simply an act of communication between the I and the You designated in the statement. The production of
meaning requires that these two places be mobilized in the passage through a Third Space, which represents
both the general conditions of language and the specific implication of the utterance in a performative and
institutional strategy of which it cannot “in itself” be conscious. What this unconscious relation introduces is an
ambivalence in the act of interpretation …
The intervention of the Third Space, which makes the structure of meaning and reference an ambivalent process,
destroys this mirror of representation in which cultural knowledge is continuously revealed as an integrated,
open, expanding code. Such an intervention quite properly challenges our sense of the historical identity of
culture as a homogenizing, unifying force, authenticated by the originary Past, kept alive in the national tradition
of the People. In other words, the disruptive temporality of enunciation displaces the narrative of the Western
nation which Benedict Anderson so perceptively describes as being written in homogeneous, serial time.3
It is only when we understand that all cultural statements and systems are constructed in this contradictory and
ambivalent space of enunciation, that we begin to understand why hierarchical claims to the inherent originality
or “purity” of cultures are untenable, even before we resort to empirical historical instances that demonstrate
their hybridity. Fanon’s vision of revolutionary cultural and political change as a “fluctuating movement” of
occult instability could not be articulated as cultural practice without an acknowledgment of this indeterminate
space of the subject(s) of enunciation. It is that Third Space, though unrepresentable in itself, which constitutes
the discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial
unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized, and read anew.
Fanon’s moving metaphor—when reinterpreted for a theory of cultural signification—enables us to see not only
the necessity of theory, but also the restrictive notions of cultural identity with which we burden our visions of
political change. For Fanon, the liberatory “people” who initiate the productive instability of revolutionary
cultural change are themselves the bearers of a hybrid identity. They are caught in the discontinuous time of
translation and negotiation, in the sense in which I have been attempting to recast these works. In the moment of
liberatory struggle, the Algerian people destroy the continuities and constancies of the “nationalist” tradition
which provided a safeguard against colonial cultural imposition. They are now free to negotiate and translate
their cultural identities in a discontinuous intertextual temporality of cultural difference. The native intellectual
who identifies the people with the “true national culture” will be disappointed. The people are now the very
principle of “dialectical reorganization” and they construct their culture from the national text translated into
modern Western forms of information technology, language, and dress. The changed political and historical site
of enunciation transforms the meanings of the colonial inheritance into the liberatory signs of a free people of
the future.

“I have been stressing a certain void or misgiving attending every assimilation of contraries—I have been
stressing this in order to expose what seems to me a fantastic mythological congruence of elements. [ … ] 4 And if
indeed therefore any real sense is to be made of material change it can only occur with an acceptance of
a concurrent void and with a willingness to descend into that void wherein, as it were, one may begin to come
into confrontation with a specter of invocation whose freedom to participate in an alien territory and wilderness
has become a necessity for one’s reason or salvation.”5
This meditation by the great Guyanese writer Wilson Harris on the void of misgiving in the textuality of colonial
history reveals the cultural and historical dimension of that Third Space of enunciation which I have made the
precondition for the articulation of cultural difference. He sees it as accompanying the “assimilation of
contraries” and creating that occult instability which presages powerful cultural changes. It is significant that the
productive capacities of this Third Space have a colonial or postcolonial provenance. For a willingness to descend
into that alien territory—where I have led you—may reveal that the theoretical recognition of the split-space of
enunciation may open the way to conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism or
multiculturalism of the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity. To
that end we should remember that it is the “inter”—the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the in-
between, the space of the entre that Derrida has opened up in writing itself—that carries the burden of the
meaning of culture. It makes it possible to begin envisaging national, antinationalist, histories of the “people.” It
is in this space that we will find those words with which we can speak of Ourselves and Others. And by exploring
this hybridity, this “Third Space,” we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves.