Book cover of The Location of Culture

Book description

Rethinking questions of identity, social agency and national affiliation, Bhabha provides a working, if controversial, theory of cultural hybridity - one that goes far beyond previous attempts by others. In The Location of Culture, he uses concepts such as mimicry, interstice, hybridity, and liminality to argue that cultural production is…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Location of Culture as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Not strictly centered on translation and not exactly a conventional book, this collection of essays is often considered the birthplace of the now widely-used (though often misunderstood) concept of “cultural translation.”

Bhabha is a notoriously demanding author, and reading this book can, at times, feel like entering a conversation already in progress. Bhabha will move from Salman Rushdie, through Joseph Conrad or Walter Benjamin, to Fredric Jameson and Jacques Derrida, often within the space of a single paragraph or page. But Bhabha’s intellectual rigour justifies the effort. This challenging but rewarding book unleashes the radical potential of translation studies.

For…

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