Home > Homi Bhabha

Homi K. Bhabha 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 semioticsSemiotics (also spelled Semeiotics is the study of signs and sign systems. Scope and main concepts General theories of signs are called semiotics''. Semiotics is the investigation of apprehension, prediction and meaning; how it is that we apprehend the wo and Lacanian psychoanalysisPsychoanalysis is the revelation of unconscious relations, in a systematic way through an associative process. The fundamental subject matter of psychoanalysis is the unconscious patterns of life revealed through the analysand's (the patient's) free assoc: 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:

• the Clarendon Lectures at the University of LondonThe University of London founded in 1836, is a federation of colleges which together constitute one of the world's largest universities. Somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of all UK students attend one of its colleges, which include some of the most pres (2001, 2002)
• the Presidential Lecture at Stanford UniversityFor other meanings of Stanford see Stanford (disambiguation). Stanford University is a privately funded university in Stanford, California. It is located approximately 35 miles southeast of San Francisco, in an unincorporated part of Santa Clara County ad (2000)
• the du Bois Lectures at Harvard University (1999)
• the Annual Interdisciplinary Lecture at the SOASSchool of Oriental and African Studies Motto "Knowledge is Power. Established 1916 Location Bloomsbury, London, United Kingdom Students 3,000 total Homepage http://www. uk The School of Oriental and African Studies (often abbreviated to SOAS was founded i (1995)
• the Richard Wright lecture series at the University of Pennsylvania (1991)

He is one of the few humanist academics invited to speak at the World Economic ForumThe World Economic Forum (WEF) is an annual meeting among chief executives of the world's richest corporations, some national political leaders (presidents, prime ministers and others), and selected intellectuals and journalists, about 2000 people in all, in Davos.