Homi K. Bhabha

Homi K. Bhabha (born 1949) is an Indian postcolonial theorist. He currently teaches at Harvard University where he is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and Language and Director of the Humanities Center.

Early life

Bhabha was born into a Parsi family from Mumbai, India. He is an alumnus of St. Mary's High School (ISC,1967-68), Mazagoan, Mumbai . He graduated with a B.A. from Elphinstone College at the University of Mumbai (formerly University of Bombay) and a M.A. and D.Phil. in English Literature from Christ Church, Oxford University.

Career

After lecturing in the Department of English at the University of Sussex for more than ten years, Bhabha received a senior fellowship at Princeton University where he was also made Old Dominion Visiting Professor. He was Steinberg Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania where he delivered the Richard Wright Lecture Series. At Dartmouth College, Bhabha was a faculty fellow at the School of Criticism and Theory. From 1997 to 2001 he served as Chester D. Tripp Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. In 2001-02, he served as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at University College, London. He has been the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University since 2001. Bhabha also serves on the Editorial Collective of Public Culture, an academic journal published by Duke University Press.

Influences

Bhabha's work in postcolonial theory owes much to poststructuralism. Notable among Bhabha's influences include Jacques Derrida and deconstruction; Jacques Lacan and Lacanian psychoanalysis; and the works of Michel Foucault.^[1]^[2] Additionally, in a 1995 interview with W.J.T. Mitchell, Bhabha stated that Edward Said is the writer who has most influenced his thought.^[1]

Works

Nation and Narration (editor 1990)

In Nation and Narration, Bhabha challenges the tendency to treat post-colonial countries as a homogeneous block. This leads, he argues, to the assumption that there is and was a shared identity amongst ex-colonial states. Bhabha argues that all senses of nationhood are narrativized.
Bhabha then goes on to identify a relationship of antagonism and ambivalence between colonizers and the colonized.

The Location of Culture (1994)

In The Location of Culture, Bhabha advocates a fundamental realignment of the methodology of cultural analysis in the West away from metaphysics and toward the "performative" and "enunciatory present"^[3] Such a shift, he claims, provides a basis for the West to maintain less violent relationships with other cultures. In Bhabha's view, the source of the Western compulsion to colonize is due in large part to traditional Western representations of foreign cultures.
Bhabha's argument attacks the Western production and implementation of certain binary oppositions. The oppositions targeted by Bhabha include center/margin, civilized/savage, First/ Third worlds, West/East, North/South, capital/labour and enlightened/ignorant. Bhabha proceeds by destabilizing the binaries insofar as the first term of the binary is allowed to unthinkingly dominate the second.
Once the binaries are destabilized, Bhabha argues that cultures can be understood to interact, transgress, and transform each other in a much more complex manner than the traditional binary oppositions can allow. According to Bhabha, hybridity and "linguistic multivocality" have the potential to intervene and dislocate the process of colonization through the reinterpretation of political discourse.

Selected works

Books by Bhabha

(1994) The Location of Culture ISBN 0-415-05406-0

Books edited by Bhabha

(1990) Nation and Narration (editor) ISBN 0-415-01483-2
(2005) Edward Said Continuing the Conversation, co-ed. with W.J.T. Mitchell (originally an issue of Critical Inquiry) ISBN 0-226-53203-8

Journal issue co-edited by Bhabha

(2000) "Cosmopolitanisms" in Public Culture 12.3, eds Sheldon I. Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, Carol Breckenridge, Arjun Appadurai, & Dipesh Chakrabarty.

Journal articles & book chapters

(1993) In a Spirit of Calm Violence
(1998) Modernity, Culture, and The Jew, eds Laura Marcus & Bryan Cheyette
(2000) On Cultural Choice
(2001) V.S. Naipaul
(2002) Democracy De-Realized
(2003) On Writing Rights
(2003) Making Difference: The Legacy of the Culture Wars
(2004) Adagio
(2004) Still Life
(2004) 'Foreword' to The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, transl. Richard Philcox
(2005) Framing Fanon
(2006) Without Boundary, with Fereshteh Daftari & Orhan Pamuk
(2006) The Black Savant and the Dark Princess

Senin, 28 Desember 2009

Homi K. Bhabha

Early life

Career

Influences