Homi Bhabha’s Third Space and African identity

Abstract

This paper suggests a way of looking at postcolonial African identity as fluid, relational and always in flux. I explain this fluidity of identity by making a connection between Victor Turner’s concept of liminality and Homi Bhabha’s innovative formulation and application of the same idea in his text, The Location of Culture. The connection is important because, in espousing the vocabulary of liminality which gestures toward fluidity and allows particular spaces of meaning to emerge, both Turner and Bhabha are involved in what Stuart Hall calls ‘thinking at or beyond the limit’ (1996, 259), a thinking on the margins. I conclude the paper by arguing that it is this thinking on the margins that sheds light on African identity, especially as the continent gradually becomes part of the postmodern and globalized world.