The year 2024 will mark a thirty-year anniversary of Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture [LoC], first published as a gathering of essays, primarily written between 1983 and 1991, and published as a collection in 1994. LoC's publication was nothing short of an ‘event’ that not only inaugurated a new method of reading, interpreting, and engaging with the post-colony but also provided a new set of vocabulary for understanding the post-colonial situation. From deploying psychoanalytic concepts like “ambivalence” [a la Freud] and “mimicry” [a la Lacan], to using deconstructive concepts like “dissemination” and “negotiation” [a la Derrida], LoC brought into play a “dense web of allusions and elaborations” in interpreting the colonial past and the world that it brought forth (Rose 365). It was the text which, according to Kavita Daiya’s report on her 2015 MLA roundtable on LoC, “testifies to expulsion wrought by global regimes of finance, ecological destruction, and war marked as they are by race, gender, religion, class...and other signs of difference” (Daiya 154).


However, the inventiveness of Bhabha’s readings and interpretations didn’t go uncriticized, and, even at the time, LoC came under fire both from his fellow post-colonialists as well as those whom Bhabha has grouped, rather disparagingly, as “left orthodoxy.” Critics like Arif Dirlik charged Bhabha with “linguistic manipulation for historical and social explanation” (Dirlik 333). Benita Perry accused Bhabha of being a “privileged postcolonial [who] is prone to denigrate affiliations to class, ethnicity, and emergent nation-state" (Perry 21). Even scholars like Robert J.C. Young who found in Bhabha many points of inventiveness, sensed a certain “oblivious[ness] to larger political perspective” (Young 194).


Situated amidst Bhabha's followers and detractors, the current seminar attempts to re-think/ re-locate LoC within the canvas of contemporary postcolonial theory. In doing so, some of the questions that this seminar is particularly interested in asking and inquiring are:

• Amongst the plethora of concepts and reading methodology that Bhabha develops in his LoC [hybridity, mimicry, ambivalence, translation, boundary/liminal state, to name a few], what are the concepts that are still relevant in understanding the postcolonial condition today?


• Bhabha argued that the “colonial discourse operated as a structure of writing”. If so, how are we to think/re-think colonial archives in the wake of Bhabha’s intervention?


• If we are to take Bhabha’s critics seriously, what are the ways in which we can make Bhabha’s theories more materialist in their infrastructure?


• Can the new postcolonial writing be comprehended with the theoretical infrastructure of Homi Bhabha? How, and in what ways, does the new post-colonial fiction demand from us a re-thinking and re-engagement with Bhabha’s LoC?