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In his influential collection of essays, The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha seeks carefully to preempt any criticism of the self-professed radicalism of his cultural politics from what he views as the old anti-Imperialist, Marxist Left. In “The Commitment to Theory” he disarmingly acknowledges that “in the language of political economy,” it is “legitimate” to represent relations of exploitation and domination in terms of First and Third worlds, and to affirm the existence of “vicious circuits of surplus value linking First world capital and Third world labor” (20). Furthermore, he admits that Western critical theory has often functioned as “ideological Eurocentricity” and served “to contain the effects of difference” (31) in order to establish and maintain the hegemony of the First over the Third worlds.
But Bhabha also rejects the notion of a necessary collusion between Western theory and the hegemony of the West as a power bloc. He believes that Postmodernism in general, and Derridean deconstruction in particular, are central to progressive politics in the Postcolonial era, and that it is essential for Progressives to abandon outmoded, presumably Marxist and Modernist Anticolonialisms which associated knowledge with truth and progress, and political practice with knowledge. It is a “sign of political maturity,” Bhabha insists, to move beyond the “division between theory and radicalism” (21). We must move beyond the politics of binary oppositions by which liberation becomes a “totalizing, Utopian vision of Being and History seeking to transcend the contradictions and ambivalences constituting the very structure of human subjectivity and cultural representation” (19). The language of critique must give up the idea of truth altogether: “My work does not contain the truth, the ‘truth’ is always marked and informed by the ambivalence of the process of emergence” (22). Influenced by theorists such as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985), who assert the independence