- This page is about the critical theorist, Homi K. Bhabha. For the physicist, see Homi J. Bhabha.
Homi K. Bhabha, (born 1949), is a major post-colonialist theorist, currently teaching at Harvard University.
He was born in Mumbai, India. His family is of the Parsi minority. He graduated at University of Mumbai (Elphinstone College) for his Bachelor degree, and Oxford University (Christ Church) for his Master degree and Doctorate. He has been a senior fellow at Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago.
Bhabha is one of the leading voices in post-colonial theory. His work is heavily influenced by Western poststructuralism, most notably the writings of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault.
In his influential book Nation and Narration (1990) Bhabha challenges the tendency to treat Third World countries as a homogeneous block. This leads, he argues, to the assumption that there was a shared identity amongst ex-colonial states.
Bhabha argues that all sense of nationhood is discursively constructed: it is narrativized. One of his major contributions to post-colonial studies was the identification of ambivalence in colonial dominance. In Location of Culture (1994), Bhabha uses concepts influenced by semiotics and Lacanian psychoanalysis: mimicry, interstice or hybridity. Using these concepts, Bhabha argues that cultural production is most productive exactly when it is also most ambivalent.
Bhabha is sometimes criticized for using indecipherable jargon. Nevertheless, Bhabha is a popular speaker and has been invited to many universities, including:
He is one of the few humanist academics invited to speak at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
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