Free Thinking:Homi Bhabha: On Memory and Migration

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 15 May 2019

⏱️ 75 minutes

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Summary

With an audience at the British Library, Professor Bhabha gives a short talk and discusses ideas about nations and a postcolonial approach to politics, literature and history. Shahidha Bari hosts in a Free Thinking event organised with the Royal Society of Literature.

‘Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realise their horizons in the mind’s eye. Such an image of the nation – or narration – might seem impossibly romantic and excessively metaphorical, but it is from those traditions of political thought and literary language that the nation emerges as a powerful historical idea in the west.’ So begins Nation and Narration, first published in 1990. For Professor Bhabha, one of the world’s leading cultural theorists, known for his work on hybridity, mimicry, difference, ambivalence and the ‘Third Space’, ‘literature is the repository of culture, tradition, the life in language itself.’

Homi K Bhabha is the Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center, and Senior Advisor to the President and Provost at Harvard University. His works exploring postcolonial theory, contemporary art, and cosmopolitanism, include Nation and Narration and The Location of Culture, which was reprinted as a Routledge Classic in 2004.

Producer: Zahid Warley

Transcript

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0:37.2	Hello, I'm Shah Hadabari. Welcome to BBC Radio 3's Arts and Ideas discussion program,
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0:59.9	Hello, I'm composer Michael Barkley and I just want to let you know about my podcast, which I
1:05.2	think you might enjoy. It's called Private Passions. Every week, a different guest chooses
1:10.0	the classical music they're passionate
1:12.1	about. People like Alan Bennett, Jan Ravens, Grayson Perry. And what I love about it is how much
1:17.9	people reveal of themselves when they're talking about and listening to the music which moves them.
1:24.1	Just search for private passions in BBC Sounds. Download the free app now. In 1990, he observed,
1:32.3	there is a particular ambivalence that haunts the idea of the nation in the language of those who write it
1:38.1	and the lives of those who live it. That ambivalence makes sense in terms of the life of my guest
1:43.7	tonight, Professor Homit K.
1:45.0	Baba.
1:46.0	He was born in Bombay, but into a family with Parsi or Zoroastrian roots.
1:50.0	He was given an elegant English education, but at an elite Indian college.
1:55.0	He studied at Oxford, but then taught at Harvard.
	...

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