I’m reading “The Location of Culture” by Homi K. Bhabha, and frankly, it is a hot mess. 

Either that, or I am the hot mess, and I don’t know what’s actually happening. It was so bad I didn’t understand so much of it that at some point I actually messaged Shahril (Hamdan – he recommended the book) and asked him if he really liked the book. 

…In retrospect, that was a kind of a stupid question, because he recommended the book and he alluded as much 🤣

Well, it is what it is. Maybe I’m dumb or whatever, but anyway, it was just not registering for a very long time. I had to go ahead and push through ChatGPT for a bit in order to even understand what the man was talking about. 

For now, what I seem to understand is that culture doesn’t come about just by an imperious subject and the thing that they treat as an object, couched in the typical language of the colonizer and the colonized and in the happy middle that they occupy.

A good example seems to be that of a school where the colonizer is a teacher and the colonized is a student. The teacher may teach a few English phrases, and the student may receive it. They may then learn and imitate what the teacher says. A few twists occur, and before you know it, little interesting nuances come out because of the imperfect transmission between the teacher and the student. The teacher cannot fully know what the student has learned, and the student may not fully receive what was conveyed, or what was conveyed may have been translated in context, amongst other things; frames shift what is understood, meanings transmute, and a hybridity of things results. 

I think I am really not doing justice to what was said, and somehow I feel like my capacity at this moment is limited. Well, we will see if my understanding becomes a little better – until tomorrow!