Homi K. Bhabha (born 1949) is a postcolonial theorist, currently teaching at Harvard University. Bhabha was born into a Parsi family from Mumbai, India. He graduated with a B.A. from the University of Mumbai (Elphinstone College) and a M.A. and D.Phil. from Christ Church, Oxford. After lecturing in the Department of English at the University of Sussex for over ten years, he 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 he 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. He has been the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University since 2001.
Bhabha was key note speaker at the UNESCO Forum on Higher Education, Research and Knowledge Colloquium on Research and Higher Education Policy, Paris, France, 1-3 December 2004. Bhabha is a leading voice in postcolonial studies and is highly influenced by Western poststructuralist theorists, notably Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault. In >Nation and Narration (1990), he argues against the tendency to essentialize Third World countries into a homogenous identity. Instead, he claims that all sense of nationhood is narrativized. He has also made a major contribution to postcolonial studies by pointing out how there is always ambivalence at the site of colonial dominance. In The 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.
Keynote Speaker and Session Chair at Session 1: Narrating Heritage
What claims can we make on the past―our “own” or somebody else’s? I will try and address the question of the ownership of cultural sites and symbols as a problem of provenance rather than origin. If you think about “provenance” as a phenomenological issue rather than a matter of possession, then it is about reconstructing the journey of an object or a site―a tryst with time, use, description, relocation, displacement. Provenance, then, relates to the cultural itinerary and cultural iterability of the site or subject of heritage, while heritage itself turns from a notion of inheritance or lineage, to an opportunity to track the revisionary networks and narratives that constitute the values of collective identification. Such an approach to the objects and practices of public memory would be much more open to the inclusion of ‘minoritarian’ perspectives and values in revising our sense of the past, and in recreating a concept of “heritage” that represents a horizon that is in the future, a process towards our aspiration for a shared and diverse society.
