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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.

\u2018Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realise their horizons in the mind\u2019s eye. Such an image of the nation \u2013 or narration \u2013 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.\u2019 So begins Nation and Narration, first published in 1990. For Professor Bhabha, one of the world\u2019s leading cultural theorists, known for his work on hybridity, mimicry, difference, ambivalence and the \u2018Third Space\u2019, \u2018literature is the repository of culture, tradition, the life in language itself.\u2019

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