I had a mini epiphany yesterday in the barbers when while waiting for my haircut I was re-reading a chapter from the book critical pedagogy and race and the chapter “Postcolonial literature and the curricular imagination: Wilson Harris and the pedagogical implications of the carnivalesque.”
I was interested in a paragraph by Hommi Bhabha where he defines his use of the word “hybridity”
hybridity: (i) the process of bringing together multiple things to make something new, and (ii) the product of that process. Underlying these two elements is the fundamental role of power in the context of hybridity: these processes seem to be concerned with and mechanisms of challenging power, and the product(s) may represent a new form(s) of power.
I was also flicking back to chapter in the book “questions of third cinema” where it talks about Stuart Hall’s need for articulation when I when to the beginning of the chapter I noticed who for the first time who wrote the essay Hommi Bhabha. When I searched for more information about him online I saw his ideas about the third space.
The third space, that space where oppressed and oppressor are able to come together, free (maybe only momentarily) of oppression itself, embodied in their particularity.
The Third Space acts as an ambiguous area that develops when two or more individuals/cultures interact. It “challenges our sense of the historical identity of culture as a homogenizing, unifying force, authenticated by the originary past, kept alive in the national tradition of the People”.
This reminded me of an interview about temporary autonomous zone where the interviewer mentioned the common theme of the meeting of two people creates a third place which was followed by the quote by Michel Serres “whenever there are two…. Hermes arrives”. The trickster has been an important part of my project 5am as highlighted in an earlier post which documents my encounter with a yogi. My unexpected meeting with the yogi created a space which gave me a new perspective of my surroundings.
The trickster’s who’s milieu lies within the “hybridity of the boundaries” can be best described in the joker’s monolog in the dark knight and the Joseph Campbell description. The “hybridity of the boundaries” is an area for chaos. old forms are broken up into the potentiality of something new.
As I thought about this my ears zoomed into the conversation with the barber and his client talking about a news item about people jumping of the Orwell Bridge. The barber from a South American background said why would someone want to kill themselves as there is some much to live for in this world. The client from a European background then mentioned about it is a mental condition about even if you are seen as successful in material terms you can still be depressed. As I was listening to this I was reading how “the third place” is related to
“In community building, the third place (or third space) is the social surroundings separate from the two usual social environments of home and the workplace.”
Free or inexpensive
Highly accessible
Involve regulars – those who habitually congregate there
Welcoming and comfortable
Both new friends and old should be found there.
I then realized that I was in a third place setting the Barbers listening to a hybridity of conversation.
Reflecting back on my invisible man videos I see now they were the act to open a door for “The Third Space” to cause chaos, opinion and whoever enters and leaves that space will come out of it altered for their next experience.
A hybrid genre of this kind say something about contemporary social problems, social contradictions: its politics are in its articulations, events articulation of inarticulate states of being- it has no quick solutions and may well have no immediate solutions at all. It offers challenge rather than solution in the first instance, and allow its audiences themselves to interpret its new spaces with relevant meanings of their own. It does not arrive delivering its meaning already fully-formed- rather it enables new meanings to be created and projected in dialogic encounters. -Robert J. C. Young
Power has to learn to tremble – Henry Giroux
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7cUiERYeEE#t=4371…
Agent of Chaos – The dark knight
