Bhabha’s proposal on the Third Space is quite interesting because it speaks directly to our current crisis: the inability to question what surrounds us, our environments, contexts, relationships, even our kinships. We seem to be losing the capacity for a more reflective, critical way of thinking, for genuinely wondering about things. And that brings me back to the idea of curiosity, not from an innocent point of view, but from a deliberate, political one. Taking a good look at where you live, how you live, who you live with, and how you occupy places, just as Pope mentioned in his video about the crawling performance, from that place, we might begin to recover a curiosity that dares to pose questions.
In that sense, the third space as a philosophy is powerful: it allows us to question how much of our self-identity, our self-perception, and how we perceive others, is shaped by colonized histories, hierarchies, and politics. And it’s also worth noting that one of the most compelling critiques of Bhabha comes from a woman, which opens up the question of whether his proposal can actually translate into concrete agency. Can it manifest through direct action, even if just a grain of salt in the daily life of communities? How can it actively reshape this world through words?
We’re told we have personal freedom by sharing our thoughts and processes, through online interconnection, for instance, which some theorists call modern third spaces. These platforms could be sites of transculturality. But they’re not quite free. They’re controlled by First World interests, the colonizer’s power persisting, where our identities become products to keep selling. So in this context, Bhabha’s proposal often falls short. Because what’s happening now is that powerful nations aren’t just interested in selling us products, they’re using us as data. Data to understand what captures our attention, what fuels our consumption.
And this brings us to the politics of exhaustion: the more we consume (ideologically, spiritually, communicatively) the more we feel we can never have enough. We run out of space to develop new forms of curiosity, to question, to recover wonder. And those are the very foundations for building resistance and change.
So we must ask ourselves: can the Third Space truly be the place where difference happens? And when difference does happen, it’s not comfortable. It feels strange. You feel a kind of estrangement from yourself. Conflict emerges. And interestingly, communities (especially communities of resistance) are built by going through conflict, not around it. That’s something I haven’t found in Bhabha’s proposal. It leans toward ideological discourse, but what we need now is to recover storytelling practices, narratives rather than discourses. Not to build new ideologies, but to return to a philosophical attitude of questioning, of cultivating curiosity.
Another layer: Bhabha writes from a privileged position. His way of communicating the Third Space and Hybridity comes from that place, something we should read between the lines when engaging with his ideas.
Finally, one of the most important points I find in his work, perhaps between the lines, is that he suggests it’s not a priority to question the origins of the cultures that meet in the Third Space. For me, that’s problematic. Because if we’re to prioritize what emerges in that space, we cannot invisibilize where those cultures come from. They come from somewhere. And in many South American countries, the absence of memory practices is precisely what keeps history repeating itself. It’s the inability to process inherited trauma: the things that happen to us daily. That’s the crack where institutions, bureaucracies, and power slip in to normalize what should never be normal: living in endangered zones, exposed to violence, post-traumatic stress, chaos. Because chaos serves institutions, and their bureaucracies are structures that thrive on it. That, too, must be considered.
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