Music and Place in Third Space

Music and Place in Third Space

Music and Place in Third Space

an essay about reading the introduction of Homi K. Bhabha’s The location of culture (1994)

Bhabha’s book The Location of Culture starts with a quote of Martin Heidegger (from Building, dwelling, thinking): ‘A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing.’ In the case of reading Homi Bhabha, there is centainly a border to cross. Not only is his concept of Third Space a very abstract and hard-to-grasp one, but Bhabha’s way of writing – full of indecipherable jargon, dense prose, neologisms and Romance loan words – is not very helpful either (especially for a non-native). Of course, this applies to a lesser extend to many postmodern theorists... I can hardly remember what life was like in the BA, before terms like "multiculturalism" and "the postcolonial" became commonplace! But these difficulties only make the struggle to get “beyond Bhabha” more challenging. To explain my excitement about this approach, I would like to quote Bhabha in his own words:  

“'Beyond' signifies spatial distance, marks progress, promises the future; but our intimations of exceeding the barrier or boundary - the very act of going beyond - are unknowable, unrepresentable, without a return to the 'present' which, in the process of repetition, becomes disjunct and displaced.”

 
In fact, by reading and discussing Bhabha, we are already adding to his ideas: as Bhabha does not consider culture a static enviroment, but rather a movement between different centres, we contribute to this discours with our essays and discussions. The definition of culture as coming and going – or Ida y Vuelta as we call it – gives a more equal balance between two centres in what we would call a hierarchy (such as majority vs minority or coloniser vs colonised), because it provides both sides with various opportunities to act, react and interact. Bhabha...