Volume 46, Issue 4, Winter 2008
Emily S. Lee
Pages 537-557
A Phenomenology for Homi Bhabha’s Postcolonial Metropolitan Subject
Homi Bhabha attends to the figure of the postcolonial metropolitan subject-a racialized subject who is not representative of the first world, yet a symbol of the metropolitan sphere. Bhabha describes their
daily lives as inextricably split or doubled. His analysis cannot account for the agonistic moments when one is caught in not knowing, in focusing attention, and in developing understanding. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology with the openness in the horizon of the gestaltian framework better accounts for such splits as moments on the horizon for becoming and grasping something new.