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

Homi Bhabha is coming to the Schwarzman Centre on Sunday 15 November, where he'll be giving a keynote titled 'Woke, Revoke, and the Right to Narrate'. It's part of Utopia Now!, an international conference run by the Faculty of English that brings together writers and thinkers from different disciplines to look at the possibility of utopian imagining today, set against a backdrop of social, political and environmental crisis.

If you're not familiar with the name, Bhabha is a theorist whose work has provided one of the most enduring critical frameworks for understanding the postcolonial condition. His ideas around hybridity, mimicry and ambivalence gave rise to a new way of seeing modernity, and they've stayed influential across a lot of academic and cultural work. This talk is his contribution to the conference's wider conversation.

His keynote sits alongside those of Ali Smith and Kiran Desai, so the programme puts literary fiction in dialogue with philosophy and critical theory. The whole thing is rounded out with artwork by Marco Brambilla, so there's a visual side to the conference as well as the talks. If you're into the way literature and theory can talk to each other, this is exactly that kind of crossover.

The talk is at the Schwarzman Centre, Oxford Theatre, Oxford OX2 6AH, starting at 16:00 and running for 90 minutes. It's one of the keynotes of Utopia Now!, so it's a good place to catch Bhabha in person.