Comparison of Ngugi wa Thiongo and Homi K. Bhabha

Comparison of Ngugi wa Thiongo and Homi K. Bhabha

Comparison of Ngugi wa Thiongo and Homi K. Bhabha

In Signs Taken for Wonders Homi K. Bhabha has infused thinking about nationality, ethnicity, and politics with poststructuralist theories of identity and indeterminacy. It provides powerful arguments for the importance of theory, for the link between theory and politics, and for the use of poststructuralist theory in the anti-imperialist cause of postcolonial studies. Besides Post colonialism, The Commitment to Theory also addresses another field of critical debate. In its advocacy of poststructuralist theory, Bhabha tacitly responds to many critics of the 1980s and 1990s. His attacks came both from within the academy and from outside. Like Paul de Man's Resistance to Theory, which asserts theory's philosophical inevitability, The Commitment to Theory offers a staunch defense; but unlike the Man, Bhabha argues for theory's political relevance. While rooted in contemporary debates, The Commitment to Theory also takes part in a larger tradition of defenses of literary practices, which starts with Aristotle's defense of poetry in the Poetics and extends to 19th and 20th defenses of criticism, such as Oscar Wilde's claims for the artistic value of criticism, The Critic as Artist. Such works shield literature and criticism against accusations that they lack utility, social relevance, and moral good. Bhabha updates the tradition by declaring the political efficacy of literary theory.

This debate and Bhabha has frequently been criticized for his embrace of theory at the expense of practice, his dense jargon, and his copiously allusive writing style. His sharpest critics have come from the Left, criticizing his views of politics as textual. Bhabha's concept of hybridity applies more aptly to privileged postcolonial intellectuals who have gained success in the Western world, like Bhabha himself, than to those in colonial ...