Location of Culture (1994): Bhabha uses concepts such as mimicry, interstice, hybridity, and liminality—all influenced by semiotics and Lacanian psychoanalysis—to argue that cultural production is always most productive where it is most ambivalent.

Nation and Narration (1990): Bhabha argues against the tendency to essentialize Third World countries into a homogenous identity. Instead, he claims that all sense of nationhood is narrativized. He argues that there is always ambivalence at the site of colonial dominance.