DissemiNation

Time, Narrative, and

the Margins of the
Modern Nation
Listiyanti Jaya Arum
19/449376/PSA/08645
 The Time of the Nation
 His experience of living in different countries brought the notion of gatherings.
The gatherings of “exiles, emigres, and refugees” were the result from
dispersals.
 “The nation fills the void left in the uprooting of communities and kin, and turns
that loss into the language of metaphor. Metaphor, as the etymology of word
suggests, transfers the meaning of home and belonging, across the ‘middle
passage’, or the central European steppes, across those distances, and cultural
differences, that span the imagined community of the nation-people” (Bhabha,
200).
 He suggested that the narrative strategy of a nation is to categorize the sexuality,
class, and difference as constructed instead of an object.
 “We need another time of writing that will be able to inscribe the ambivalent and
chiasmatic intersections of time and place that constitute the problematic
‘modern’ experience of the Western nation” (Bhabha, 202-203).
 The Space of the People
 Bhabha put the position of the people in a nation that although
they do not necessarily know each other, they are bound and
share one thing in common.
 “Counter-narratives of the nation that continually evoke and
erase its totalizing boundaries – both actual and conceptual –
disturb those ideological manoeuvres through which ‘imagined
communities’ are given essentialist identities. For the political
unity of the nation consists in a continual displacement of the
anxiety of its irredeemably plural modern space – representing
the nation’s modern territoriality is turned into the archaic,
atavistic temporality of Traditionalism” (Bhabha, 213).
 Of Margins and Minorities
 By considering the works of Foucault, Discipline and
Punish, Bhabha assumed that the marginal people of a
culture are the real individual. Focusing on the margins, he
tried to explore what can the people share about their
“cultural identity and political solidarity” come up as a result
in a national culture.
 He, specifically, focuses on the colonized and woman. He
claimed that the arguments of postcolonial and feminist of
Fanon and Kristeva brings the question to us that history
works as a national narratives that depict the people as one
entity, thus he asked us to consider how we can understand
the forms of social contradiction. The idea of pluralism has
become so unclear that it fades the heterogeneity in the
social life, that Bhabha discussed the discourse of the
feminist method “add the women and stir”.
 Social Anonimity and Cultural Anomie
 The focus of this chapter is about how the people in the
world would synchronize themselves into one standard,
instead of using their own standard. Time is the example of
elaborating the synchronized people in modern time.
 The idea of time zone, 24 hours and all that has one
purpose which is to create standard of the people. This
notion of making standard is quite close to hegemony that
people will tend to follow the standard unless they will be
out of the synchronization.
 In this modern world, the more important is about whose
standard to follow instead of making your own standard.
 Cultural Difference
 This part deals with the signs and signification which may
be different in all over the world, like the way linguistic
differences or precisely semiotics which create the border
to one another.
 To signify a word, various description or assumption occurs
inside the signifier because of their, maybe, cultural
background or knowledge of anything.
 Bhabha (235) wrote “In the act of translation the ‘given’
content becomes alien and estranged; and that, in its turn,
leaves the language of translation Aufgabe, always
confronted by its double, the untranslatable – alien and
foreign.”
 The English Weather
 It is about the concept of locality and temporality which Bhabha used weather,
the English weather, as an example. He compared the weather in England to
the weather in India or Africa.
 Bhabha discuss the connection between the center and the peripheral,
although the connection may give the sense of subjective, in this case is the
will of England. Furthermore, the weather of England is the center of the
empire thus it has the cultural import. The weather for some part of the literary
works has influenced the authors.
 The cultural dominance also take part in the literature. To conclude this
chapter, Bhabha (243) stated “To end with the English weather is to invoke, at
once, the most changeable and immanent signs of national difference. It
encourages memories of the ‘deep’ nation crafted in chalk and limestone; the
quilted downs; the moors menaced by the wind; the quiet cathedral towns; that
corner of a foreign field that is forever England.”