“Race, Time and the Revision of Modernity” by Homi K. Bhabha: Summary and Critique

1. Fanon’s Phenomenological Performance:

• Bhabha begins by invoking Frantz Fanon’s essay “The Fact of Blackness” to explore the experience of being marginalized and diasporic, focusing on how racism impacts the perception and ontology of the Black individual.
• Fanon’s work challenges the idea of modernity by exposing the ethnocentric and hierarchical structures that define humanity within Western culture.
• The concept of “belatedness”—the notion that Black people are always perceived as coming too late to history—is central to Fanon’s critique, which questions the linear, progressivist myth of modernity.

2. The Temporality of Modernity:

• Bhabha discusses how Fanon’s notion of time-lag, a disjunctive temporality, reveals the contradictions within modernity.
• This time-lag disrupts the idea that modernity is a continuous, homogenous progression, instead highlighting the marginal and liminal spaces that are often overlooked in postmodern theory.
• Bhabha argues that Fanon’s work disturbs the concept of Man as a universal symbol, showing that the experiences of colonized and marginalized peoples expose the limitations and ethnocentric biases of Western modernity.

3. The Discourse of Race and Modernity:

• Bhabha critiques the “cognitivist” consciousness of Western modernity, which reduces the human experience to rational, objective knowledge.
• He suggests that this reductionist view ignores the complex, contradictory experiences of marginalized groups, particularly in colonial and postcolonial contexts.
• The article explores how race is often sidelined in discussions of modernity, treated as an archaic or pre-modern phenomenon, rather than as an integral aspect of contemporary social and political life.

4. Postcolonial Critique and the Reinscription of Modernity:

• Bhabha emphasizes the importance of postcolonial critique in reshaping our understanding of modernity. He argues that postcolonial narratives introduce new, hybrid forms of identity and social organization that challenge the dominant narratives of Western modernity.
• He highlights the work of scholars like Houston Baker, Paul Gilroy, and others who reinterpret modernist movements through the lens of diasporic and postcolonial experiences.
• Bhabha introduces the concept of catachresis—the use of words in an incorrect or strained way—to describe how postcolonial subjects appropriate and transform the language and symbols of modernity.

5. Foucault, Anderson, and the Critique of Eurocentrism:

• Bhabha critiques Michel Foucault and Benedict Anderson for their eurocentric approaches to modernity. He argues that they fail to fully account for the colonial and postcolonial dimensions of modernity, particularly the ways in which race and colonialism disrupt the linear narratives of progress and nationhood.
• Foucault’s spatial critique of power and sexuality, and Anderson’s notion of the imagined community, are both limited by their neglect of the temporal disjunctions and cultural hybridity introduced by colonialism.

6. Time-Lag and the Postcolonial Present:

• Bhabha argues that the concept of time-lag is crucial for understanding the postcolonial condition. This temporal disjunction challenges the linear, teleological narratives of modernity and opens up space for alternative forms of identity and social organization.
• The postcolonial present is seen as a space where the past and the future are constantly renegotiated, creating new possibilities for cultural and political agency.
• Bhabha suggests that this postcolonial time-lag allows for a critical rethinking of modernity, moving beyond the binary oppositions of past/present and inside/outside.

7. Cultural Translation and the Future of Modernity:

• The article concludes by emphasizing the role of cultural translation in the ongoing process of redefining modernity. Bhabha argues that modernity cannot be fully understood without accounting for the postcolonial experiences that challenge and reshape its core assumptions.
• He advocates for a contra-modernity—a modernity that is constantly contested and redefined through the interactions between different cultural and historical contexts.

1. Critique of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

• Temporal Disjunction and Colonial Anxiety: Bhabha’s concept of time-lag can be used to critique Conrad’s Heart of Darkness by examining how the narrative reflects the temporal and cultural disjunctions of colonialism. The novel’s portrayal of Africa as a “timeless” and “primitive” space echoes the ethnocentric and racist assumptions of Western modernity. Through Bhabha’s lens, Conrad’s work can be seen as reinforcing the colonial idea that the colonized world is perpetually “belated” compared to the West.
• Reference: Bhabha discusses the “belatedness” of the colonized subject in modernity and the cultural contradiction it reveals: “Fanon destroys two time-schemes in which the historicity of the human is thought. He rejects the belatedness of the Black man because it is only the opposite of the framing of the white man as universal, normative…” (p. 195).

2. Critique of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart

• Cultural Hybridity and the Disruption of Modernity: Achebe’s Things Fall Apart can be critiqued through Bhabha’s notion of cultural hybridity and the time-lag of modernity. The novel highlights the clash between traditional Igbo society and the forces of British colonialism, revealing the complex temporalities at play in the colonial encounter. Bhabha’s framework allows for a reading of Achebe’s work as a critique of the imposed linear narrative of progress and modernity, showing how the Igbo people are caught in a disjunctive temporality that challenges Western notions of historical development.
• Reference: Bhabha emphasizes the importance of cultural difference in the construction of modernity: “It is this synchronous and spatial representation of cultural difference that must be reworked as a framework for cultural otherness within the general dialectic of doubling that postmodernism proposes” (p. 198).

3. Critique of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

• Racial Ontology and the Temporality of Modernity: Bhabha’s critique of the ontology of the Black subject in modernity can be applied to Ellison’s Invisible Man. The novel’s protagonist experiences a dislocation in time and identity, symbolizing the belatedness and invisibility imposed on Black individuals by a modernity that privileges whiteness. Through Bhabha’s lens, Invisible Man can be seen as a powerful exploration of how racialized subjects are excluded from the linear progress of modernity and are instead trapped in a temporal caesura that denies their full humanity.
• Reference: Bhabha discusses how the belatedness of the Black man disrupts modernity’s temporal frameworks: “Fanon’s discourse of the ‘human’ emerges from that temporal ‘break’ or caesura effected in the continuist, progressivist myth of Man” (p. 194).

4. Critique of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

• Postcolonial Temporality and the Rewriting of Modernity: Wide Sargasso Sea can be critiqued through Bhabha’s ideas of postcolonial temporality and cultural translation. Rhys’s novel reimagines the backstory of the “madwoman in the attic” from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, highlighting the colonial and racial dynamics that underpin the original text. Bhabha’s framework allows for a reading of Rhys’s novel as a challenge to the Eurocentric narrative of modernity, revealing the cultural hybridity and temporal disjunction experienced by Antoinette/Bertha as she navigates her identity in a colonial world.
• Reference: Bhabha discusses how postcolonial critique transforms the narratives of modernity: “The power of the postcolonial translation of modernity rests in its performative, deformative structure that does not simply revalue the ‘contents’ of a cultural tradition, or transpose values ‘cross-culturally’ or multiculturally” (p. 199).