1、Nation and Narration edited by Homi K. Bhabha Nation and Narration m London and New York First published 1990 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Reprinted 1993, 1994, 1995, 1999 (twice),
2、 2000 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor the comfort of social belonging, the hidden injuries of class; the customs of taste, the powers of political affiliation; the sense of social order, the sensibility of sexuality; the blindness of bureaucracy, the strait insight of institutions; the quality
3、 of justice, the common sense of injustice; the langue of the law and the parole of the people. The emergence of the political rationality of the nation as a form of narrative textual strategies, metaphoric displacements, sub-texts and figurative strategems has its own history.4 It is suggested in B
4、enedict Andersons view of the space and time of the modern nation as embodied in the narrative culture of the realist novel, and explored in Tom Nairns reading of Enoch Powells post-imperial racism which is based on the symbol-fetishism that infests his febrile, neo-romantic poetry. To encounter the
5、 nation as it is written displays a temporality of culture and social consciousness more in tune with the partial, overdetermined process by which textual meaning is produced through the articulation of difference in language; more in keeping with the problem of closure which plays enigmatically in
6、the discourse of the sign. Such an approach Introduction 3 contests the traditional authority of those national objects of knowledge Tradition, People, the Reason of State, High Culture, for instance whose pedagogical value often relies on their representation as holistic concepts located within an
7、evolutionary narrative of historical continuity. Traditional histories do not take the nation at its own word, but, for the most part, they do assume that the problem lies with the interpretation of events that have a certain transparency or privileged visibility. To study the nation through its nar
8、rative address does not merely draw attention to its language and rhetoric; it also attempts to alter the concep tual object itself. If the problematic closure of textuality questions the totalization of national culture, then its positive value lies in displaying the wide dissemination through whic
9、h we construct the field of meanings and symbols associated with national life. This is a project that has a certain currency within those forms of critique associated with cultural studies. Despite the considerable advance this represents, there is a tendency to read the Nation rather restrictively
10、; either, as the ideological apparatus of state power, somewhat redefined by a hasty, functionalist reading of Foucault or Bakhtin; or, in a more Utopian inversion, as the incipient or emergent expression of the national-popular sentiment preserved in a radical memory. These approaches are valuable
11、in drawing our attention to those easily obscured, but highly significant, recesses of the national culture from which alternative constituencies of peoples and oppositional analytic capacities may emerge youth, the everyday, nostalgia, new ethnicities, new social movements, the politics of differen
12、ce. They assign new meanings and different directions to the process of historical change. The most progressive development from such positions take a discursive conception of ideology ideology (like language) is conceptualised in terms of the articulation of elements. As Volosinov said, the ideolog
13、ical sign is always multi-accentual and Janus- faced.5 But in the heat of political argument the doubling of the sign can often be stilled. The Janus face of ideology is taken at face value and its meaning fixed, in the last instance, on one side of the divide between ideology and material condition
14、s. It is the project of Nation and Narration to explore the Janus-faced ambivalence of language itself in the construction of the Janus-faced discourse of the nation. This turns the familiar two-faced god into a figure of prodigious doubling that investigates the nation-space in the process of the a
15、rticulation of elements: where meanings may be partial because they are in medics res; and history may be half-made because it is in the process of being made; and the image of cultural authority may be ambivalent because it is caught, uncertainly, in the act of composing its powerful image. Without
16、 such an understanding of the performativity of language in the narratives of the nation, it would be difficult to understand why Edward Said prescribes a kind of analytic pluralism as the form of critical attention appropriate to the cultural effects of the nation. For the nation, as a form of cultural elaboration (in the Gramscian sense), is an agency of ambivalent narration that holds culture at its most productive position, as a force for subordination, fracturing, diffusing,
