Incredulity towards meta-narratives

Heavily influenced by Edward Said, Bhabha identifies as problematic the relationship between two totalising concepts of “culture” and the “state”, and this association, “often aggressive”, engendering a “degree of xenophobia” - He affirms that cultures are tolerated but within a kind of Althusserian ideological “grid” which effectively marginalises minorities by never ceasing to define them in terms of some dominant order.

In Deconstruction however this dominant order is illusory. Taking the Male/Female opposition in D.H Lawrence’s Son’s and Lovers as an example, where Mrs Morel plays a fully domesticated role in contrast to Walter Morels aggressively masculine working class depiction. For Derrida these “dichotomous categories” are intertwined because nothing can be purely distinct. It follows therefore that the male identity is inextricably bound up with the female identity. What Deconstruction is directly challenging is the Saussaurian idea of “difference” which assumes that one signifier is clearly distinct from the other.

This “theoretically innovative” approach in both feminist and postcolonial theory includes refusing to accept the “dialectical structure of European ideological confrontations”, (and in the case of postcolonialism) “borrowed from the very components of its racist syllogism” and represents a profound shift. For theorists to develop a more effective understanding of systems of patriarchy and imperialism, Bhabha proposes going beyond narratives of “orginary and initial subjectivities” and explore “cultural hybridities” and “new signs of identity” in society. Where theorists like Edward Said employed underlying binaries of East/West which are difficult to go beyond, Bhabha attempts to dismantle this and form an understanding of human culture as fluid and constantly being influenced by mutual “collaboration” and “contestation”. In this sense Bhabha demonstrates “incredulity toward metanarratives” a typical trend in poststructuralist thought.

Since it imports ideas of philosophy, psychology and history in order to understand literature, poststructuralism engages texts at different levels. Bhabha locates culture in a history of the world based on cosmopolitanism and continuous migration influencing all societies. This idea of culture being “hybrid” and multi-dimensional can be captured by the status of Heathcliff in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. The fact that the text has little or no engagement with Heathcliff’s origins despite his background displays a tacit acceptance that “hybridity” is a part of culture.

It is here where Bhabha seems to depart from Edward Said. Where Said tends to focus on the mechanics of power in imperialism and the imposed stereotypes of the Orient, depicted by the West as ancient, mysterious and despotic; Bhabha, recalling Derridean deconstruction, both co-operates and contaminates these ideological binaries by showing how, through writers like Salman Rushdie and Toni Morrison, increasingly “‘national’” cultures are “being produced from the perspective of disenfranchised minorities”.

Uprisings against colonialism are not necessarily a result of, as Said would put it, the “grand-narratives of Emancipation and Enlightenment”, but represent instead the disassociation or deterioration of the “narrative function” and the empowerment of the “beyond” or ‘present’, “that moment blasted out of the continuum of history”. Frantz Fanon, a champion of the Algerian revolution, echoes this disillusionment with the humanist grand narratives of Europe, a Europe for Fanon that is “never done talking of Man, yet murders men everywhere they find them”. The sentiment captures one aspect of the “crisis” of grand narratives which poststructuralism tends to address and solidify.


The paradoxical nature of post-structuralism might be its own undoing. It will inevitably undermine itself by claiming no inherent privilege or validity even as it simultaneously undermines all other belief systems which do claim essential validity. As such we see this break down of moral and authorial absolutism the implications of which are vast and varying. It may be more effective to subvert meta-narratives of Capitalism for instance which is currently under profound pressure, by uncovering the contradictions in the overall structure and undermining it from within. Alternatively a rejection of any totalising belief system, by placing meaning in a “mobile, decentred location”, a kind of atopia, may stifle any endeavour to propose serious alternatives to our understanding of the world, of literature and notions of history and ‘truth’. What is apparent is that through poststructuralism, ‘theory’, “having deconstructed just about everything else”, had “finally succeeded in deconstructing itself”.