Homi K. Bhabha

Homi Kharshedji Bhabha (born 1 November 1949) is an Indian scholar and critical theorist.

He is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University.

He is one of the most important figures in contemporary postcolonial studies, and has developed a number of the field's neologisms and key concepts, such as hybridity, mimicry, difference, and ambivalence.

Such terms describe ways in which colonised people have resisted the power of the coloniser, according to Bhabha's 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.

He served on the Humanities jury for the Infosys Prize for three years.

In 2012, he received the Padma Bhushan award in the field of literature and education from the Indian government.

He is married to attorney and Harvard lecturer Jacqueline Bhabha, and they have three children.

Born in Bombay, India, into a Parsi family, Bhabha graduated with a B.A. from Elphinstone College at the University of Mumbai and an M.A., M.Phil., and D.Phil. in English Literature from Christ Church, Oxford University.

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.

He was awarded the Padma Bhushan award by the Government of India in 2012.

One of his central ideas is that of "hybridisation," which, taking up from Edward Said's work, describes the emergence of new cultural forms from multiculturalism.

Instead of seeing colonialism as something locked in the past, Bhabha shows how its histories and cultures constantly intrude on the present, demanding that we transform our understanding of cross-cultural relations.

His work transformed the study of colonialism by applying post-structuralist methodologies to colonial texts.

The idea of ambivalence sees culture as consisting of opposing perceptions and dimensions.

Bhabha claims that this ambivalence—this duality that presents a split in the identity of the colonized other—allows for beings who are a hybrid of their own cultural identity and the colonizer's cultural identity.

Ambivalence contributes to the reason why colonial power is characterized by its belatedness.

Colonial signifiers of authority only acquire their meanings after the "traumatic scenario of colonial difference, cultural or racial, returns the eye of power to some prior archaic image or identity. Paradoxically, however, such an image can neither be 'original'—by virtue of the act of repetition that constructs it—nor identical—by virtue of the difference that defines it."

Accordingly, the colonial presence remains ambivalent, split between its appearance as original and authoritative and its articulation as repetition and difference.

This opens up the two dimensions of colonial discourse: that which is characterized by invention and mastery and that of displacement and fantasy.

Bhabha presents cultural difference as an alternative to cultural diversity.

In cultural diversity, a culture is an "object of empirical knowledge" and pre-exists the knower while cultural difference sees culture as the point at which two or more cultures meet and it is also where most problems occur, discursively constructed rather than pre-given, a "process of enunciation of culture as 'knowledgeable.'" Enunciation is the act of utterance or expression of a culture that takes place in the Third Space.

Since culture is never pre-given, it must be uttered.

It is through enunciation that cultural difference is discovered and recognized.

The enunciative process introduces a divide between the traditions of a stable system of reference and the negation of the certitude of culture in the articulation of new cultural, meanings, strategies, in the political present, as a practice of domination, or resistance.

Consequently, cultural difference is a process of identification, while cultural diversity is comparative and categorized.

Moreover, it is that possibility of difference and articulation that could free the signifier of skin/culture from the fixations of racial typology, however, the stereotype impedes the circulation and articulation of the signifier of "race" as anything other than that.

An important aspect of colonial and post-colonial discourse is their dependence on the concept of "fixity" in the construction of otherness.

Fixity implies repetition, rigidity and an unchanging order as well as disorder.

The stereotype depends on this notion of fixity.

The stereotype creates an "identity" that stems as much from mastery and pleasure as it does from anxiety and defense of the dominant, "for it is a form of multiple and contradictory beliefs in its recognition of difference and disavowal of it."

Like Bhabha's concept of hybridity, mimicry is a metonym of presence.

Mimicry appears when members of a colonized society imitate and take on the culture of the colonizers.

Jacques Lacan asserts, "The effect of mimicry is camouflage...it is not a question of harmonizing with the background, but against a mottled background, of becoming mottled."

Colonial mimicry comes from the colonist's desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is, as Bhabha writes, "almost the same, but not quite."