Hegel 13/13 with Homi Bhabha
Postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha engages with Hegelian thought and questions of hybridity, culture, and identity in Columbia's celebrated lecture series.
Why we picked this
Bhabha's concept of cultural hybridity has shaped how we think about identity for three decades — watching him engage directly with the Hegelian tradition he both draws from and challenges should be extraordinary.
Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture, published in 1994, introduced concepts — hybridity, mimicry, the third space — that became foundational to postcolonial studies and have since spread into cultural theory, architecture, and the arts. His work engages with the colonial encounter not as a simple story of domination and resistance but as a site of ambivalence where identities are unstable, boundaries are crossed, and meaning is always in negotiation. Hegel, with his account of historical development and his master-slave dialectic, is both a resource and a problem for that project.
At Columbia’s Hegel 13/13, Bhabha brings postcolonial theory into direct dialogue with the Hegelian tradition — asking what it means to read a thinker whose philosophy of history excluded most of humanity from its account of historical agency. This is not a straightforwardly critical session; Bhabha’s relationship to Hegel is too nuanced for simple refutation. The interest lies in the friction between a philosophy of universal history and a theory shaped by the experience of those written out of that history.
The 13/13 series closes its spring run with this session, which makes Bhabha’s contribution something of a coda — a chance to ask what the whole sequence of readings looks like from the vantage point of postcolonial thought. For audiences who have followed the series, this should reframe much of what came before. For those attending for the first time, Bhabha is a thinker worth encountering on his own terms, wherever you pick up the thread.