HKB

"It was this: what one expects to find at the very center of life or literature - the summation of a Great Tradition, a touchstone of Taste - may only be the dream of the deprived, or the illusion of the powerless. The canonical 'center' may, indeed, be most interesting for its elusiveness, most compelling as an enigma of authority. What was missing from the traditionalist world of English literary study, as I encountered it, was a rich and paradoxical engagement with the persistence of what lay in an oblique or alien relation to the forces of centering. Writers who were off-center; literary texts that had been passed by; themes and topics that had lain dormant or unread in great works of literature - these were the angles of vision and visibility that enchanted me."

{ Homi K. Bhabha, "Looking Back, Moving Forward: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism," The Location of Culture, Routledge, 2004 }