Homi Bhabha, '"Woke", Revoke, and the Right to Narrate'

Homi Bhabha is the theorist whose work has provided us with the most enduring critical framework we have to account for the postcolonial condition.

His conception of hybridity, of mimicry, of ambivalence, gave rise, in its extraordinary explanatory force, to a new way of seeing modernity.

His keynote will address the crisis we face now in the Humanities as critics and educators – and explore the continued force of utopian thinking in the midst of that crisis.

About Utopia Now! Conference

This international conference sets out to explore the possibility of utopian imagining today, at a time when many of our social, political and environmental conditions are in crisis.

The conference brings together writers and thinkers from across disciplines, to produce a mobile critical picture of the condition of utopian thought now. The keynotes (Ali Smith, Kiran Desai, Homi Bhabha) bring literary fiction into dialogue with philosophy and critical theory. The panels bring together thinkers from the environmental humanities, the medical humanities, linguistics, film studies, literary studies and political theory, among other disciplinary formations.

In exploring the possibility of utopian thought today, the conference will offer a fresh reflection on the ways in which our aesthetic, critical and discursive forms are able to summon pictures of a better world.

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