Sociocultural and Linguistic Reflections on Post-colonial Studies of H.K. Bhabha

Abstract

The article is devoted to the socio-cultural and linguistic analysis of the postcolonial theory of H.K. Bhabha, who attempted to explain the colonial discourse, based on the concepts of “hybrid space” and “the phenomenon of mimicry” in his work “The Location of Culture” (1994). According to him, the colonial discourse is a complex, ambivalent and often contradictory process. The movement in time and space does not allow different identities become frozen in the unity of opposite. The difficulty lies in the exact definition of hybridity, understood as a boundary between the fixed identities. Particular attention is paid to the interpretation of the concept of translation of H.K. Bhabha, who believes that the translational process goes through some previously established boundaries and therefore puts them into question. H.K. Bhabha argues that the process of translation leads to hybridity codes and verbal propositions, actualizing their semantics in the socio-cultural situation of the target language. In addition, the focus of research interest of the authors got some lexical and grammatical features of the monograph “The Location of Culture” as a representative sample of the type of the humanitarian scientific style with a primarily cognitive-dominant.

Keywords

• Post-colonial studies
• H.K. Bhabha
• monograph “The Location of Culture”
• translation
• primarily cognitive text