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Bhabha was born into a Parsi family from Mumbai, India. He is an alumnus of St. Mary's School (ISC, 1967—68), Mazagoan, Mumbai. He graduated with a B.A. from Elphinstone College at the University of Mumbai (formerly University of Bombay) and a M.A. 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. 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.

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.

Influences

Bhabha's work in postcolonial theory owes much to post-structuralism. Notable among Bhabha's influences include Jacques Derrida and deconstruction; Jacques Lacan and Lacanian psychoanalysis; and the works of Michel Foucault. CM2004 Article: Grimstad Interview with Homi Bhabha Additionally, in a 1995 interview with W.J.T. Mitchell, Bhabha stated that Edward Said is the writer who has most influenced his thought.

Bhabha has been criticized for using indecipherable jargon and dense prose. In 1998 the journal Philosophy and Literature awarded Bhabha second prize in its "Bad Writing Competition," which "celebrates bad writing from the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles." Bhabha was awarded the prize for a sentence in his The Location of Culture (Routledge, 1994), which reads:

If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to “normalize” formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.

Emeritus professor of English at Stanford University, Marjorie Perloff, said that her reaction to Bhabha's appointment at Harvard was one of "dismay," telling the New York Times "He doesn't have anything to say." While Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of media studies at New York University, commented on the meaning of Bhabha's writing: "One could finally argue that there is no meaning there, beyond the neologisms and Latinate buzzwords. Most of the time I don't know what he's talking about."

In a 2005 interview, Bhabha expressed annoyance at the expectation that philosophers use the "common language of the common person," while scientists are permitted to use language that is not immediately comprehensible.

Includes book editing duties, journal articles, and book chapters

• (Ed.) Nation and Narration, Routledge (1990; ISBN 0-415-01483-2)
• The Location of Culture, Routledge (1994; ISBN 0-415-05406-0)
• Edward Said Continuing the Conversation, co-ed. with W.J.T. Mitchell (originally an issue of Critical Inquiry), 2005. ISBN 0-226-53203-8
• "Cosmopolitanisms" in Public Culture 12.3, eds Sheldon I. Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, Carol Breckenridge, Arjun Appadurai, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, 2000.
• "In a Spirit of Calm Violence", 1993.
• "Modernity, Culture, and The Jew", eds Laura Marcus & Bryan Cheyette, 1998.
• "On Cultural Choice", 2000.
• "V.S. Naipaul", 2001
• "Democracy De-Realized", 2002.
• "On Writing Rights", 2003.
• "Making Difference: The Legacy of the Culture Wars", 2003.
• "Adagio", 2004.
• "Still Life", 2004.
• Foreword to The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, transl. Richard Philcox, 2004.
• "Framing Fanon", 2005.
• "Without Boundary", with Fereshteh Daftari and Orhan Pamuk, 2006.
• "The Black Savant and the Dark Princess", 2006.