Homi K. Bhabha

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  print October 2016

  PROCESSIONAL ETHICS: WILLIAM KENTRIDGE’S MORE SWEETLY PLAY THE DANCE

  THE DAY DIES SUDDENLY in the heat of Bombay. The late breezes coming off the sea blow a shadowed light across a city that moves at the pace of its pedestrians—twenty-two million on the streets every day. Like nowhere else I have ever lived, the sound of feet marks the time of day, the mood of the hour. Small steps rushing to school in late morning; the dragging scrape of load-bearing men and women throughout the day; the shuffling thud and tread of bare feet everywhere, all the time. Late evening approaches and crowds slowly flatten into dark shapes moving against the last evening light; as if

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  print Summer 2016

  WRITING THE VOID: LANGUAGE, IDENTITY, AND MIGRATION

  AMONG THE MANY VIRTUES and vituperations that course through Ta-Nehisi Coates’s cri de coeur Between the World and Me, there exists a quieter argument about the importance of enunciation—poetry, dialogue, the act of writing—in interrogating one’s own humanity and learning to think like a humanist. “Poetry was the processing of my thoughts,” Coates writes, “until the slag of justification fell away and I was left with the cold steel truths of life.” He continues:

  I had forgotten my own self-interrogations. . . . I was only beginning to learn to be wary of my own humanity, of my own hurt

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  print Summer 2007

  IN CONVERSATION: DOMESTICITY AT WAR

  IN HER NEW BOOK, Domesticity at War, published by MIT Press this spring, architectural historian Beatriz Colomina writes that “war does not end but evolves, and so does architecture”—as does our fundamental experience of space, she might have added. Colomina’s study looks specifically at the cold-war era in the United States, where domestic environments in the wake of World War II were, she says, made totally modern both in material and mind-set—inscribed by military technologies being assimilated into daily life and by a changed awareness of global geopolitics requiring a normalization (or “

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  passages February 2004

  Edward Said

  When you think about it, when you think about Jew and Palestinian not separately, but as part of a symphony, there is something magnificently imposing about it. A very rich, also very tragic, also in many ways desperate history of extremes . . . that is yet to receive its due.
  —Edward W. Said¹
  

  THE UNTIMELINESS of Edward Said’s death was persistently mentioned in the press and poignantly remarked upon, again and again, by his friends. By the time he passed away in the early hours of September 25, Edward Said had survived a decade of disease, his leukemia always lying in wait for him, drenching

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  print April 2003

  MAKING DIFFERENCE: THE LEGACY OF THE CULTURE WARS

  “Catch the spirit of the decade?” she said. “Like how?”
  “Maybe,” I urged her, pouring some fizzy water, “just think back . . .”
  

  At first it was easy. Dates. Times. Places. Facts. The whole Afghanistan business started with the Soviet invasion in December 1979 and Zbigniew Brzezinski exhorting the mujahideen in the early '80s to fight back in the name of their God. The space shuttle Columbia was launched in '81, followed some years later by the Challenger disaster—shades of our times. Qaddafi was the much feared terrorist czar of those days, the pre-Sadaam on everybody's wanted list. In

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  print November 2001

  Reading 9-11-01

  IN THE DAYS immediately following the terrorist attacks of September 11, titles that promised answers in the face of the disaster threatened to keep retired General Electric CEO Jack Welch's straight-talking memoir out of the top slot on best-seller lists. Studies of the Taliban movement, Osama bin Laden's terrorist organization Al-Qaeda, and the ill-fated twin towers themselves predictably climbed the charts, but according to the New York Times, king of the hill was Nostradamus: At the online bookshop Amazon.com, three editions of the prophesies of the sixteenth-century mystic, into whose

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  print December 2000

  The art that inspired them in 2000

  Those of us who live and breathe contemporary art will hold to the idea that art does change, if not the world, then the way we live in it. But our “world” can be more insular than we care to admit. So to open our look back at 2000, we asked twenty-one “outsiders” we admire—from novelist J.G. Ballard to musician John Zorn—to tell us about the art that inspired them this year.

  Dave Eggers (novelist)
  About a year ago, I saw Marcel Dzama’s stuff in zingmagazine and fell madly in love. Then his show at David Zwirner just killed me. A hundred or so drawings (bears with handguns, whale-men
  

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  print December 1999

  BEST OF THE ’90s: BOOKS

  Homi K. Bhabha: The times are out of joint, perhaps never more so than when we are seduced by that decade-end desire to say, One last time, what was the great work of the ’90s? The ’90s began in the late late ’80s with the big bang of The Satanic Verses, and the decade dribbles on with small arms sniping around an elephant-dung madonna. In between times, we realize how powerful is the appeal to religious orthodoxy; how insecure our sense of the secular; how fragile any idea of global cultural understanding; how the politics of art rarely lies in the artifice itself, but all around it, in the

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  slant May 1998

  whiteness studies

  IT’S REMARKABLE HOW MUCH we express our political lives in the language of color—conservatives with blue, radicals with red, queers with pink, liberals with lilac; Indian Congress Party patriots de rigueur in white, African Nationalists in black, red, and green, avant-garde apparatchiks, unfortunately like fascists, in black. The lesson of this political palette may indeed go beyond flags and festoons. In the visual display of colors lie those “shades of opinion” that modern democratic societies see as their saving grace. But there is something even more significant about the association of

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  print December 1997

  Diana's Subjects

  A PHONE CALL FROM a friend in Milan brought the news that Gianni Versace had been shot in Miami. On Lake Como, where we spent some weeks this summer, an hour away from the Versace estate near Cernobbio and the resting place for his ashes, his tragic death was at once an incessant and evanescent item in the international news, and at the same time, a very local affair.

  “Gay-boom-boom,” said Franca, the perfumed and petite woman who cuts my hair, the next day, acting out the curbside assassination, horrified and hungry to talk.

  “A beautiful son of the lakes,” I said piously and provocatively, testing

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  print May 1997

  Hybridity

  Whose house is this?
  Whose night keeps out the light
  In here?
  Say, who owns this house?
  It’s not mine. I had another, sweeter, brighter
  With a view of lakes crossed in painted boats;
  Of fields wide as arms open for me.
  This house is strange.
  Its shadows lie.
  Say, tell me, why does its lock fit my key?
  

  —Toni Morrison, “Whose House is This?” 1992

  WHAT DOES IT MEAN to be at home in the world? Home may not be where the heart is, nor even the hearth. Home may be a place of estrangement that becomes the necessary space of engagement; it may represent a desire for accommodation marked by an attitude of

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

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  print March 1997

  Ebonics

  [Gary Dauphin]: So Black English is for secret stuff?

  Reesie: It’s not secret secret. But it’s private.
  —“Schoolyard Sages: New York City School Kids Weigh In on Ebonics,” The Village Voice
  

  RETURNING THIS WINTER to Chicago from Bombay with the sweet singsong of my native Bombay Bazaar English still sounding in my ears, I’m confronted with the latest American cultural brouhaha—the Ebonic plague. Like my friend and quasi-compatriot Mr. Rushdie, I am now quite convinced that writing about something can actually make it happen—to you. So there I am, Ms. Respected Reader, Dear Madam, as we are politely