Adagio

English and American Literature and Languag

Our Neighbours, Ourselves

Homi K. Bhabha delivered the 2010 Hegel lecture, evoking the spirit of Hegel in an attempt to understand contemporary issues of ethical witness, historical memory and the rights and representations of minorities in the cultural sphere. Who is our neighbour today? What does hospitality mean for our times? Why is the recognition of others such an agonizing encounter with the alterity of the self?The lecture examplifies how the "Third Space" - one of the key theories of Postcolonialism - helps us to establish a new understanding of cosmopolitanism and hospitality in a globalized world, based on the right of difference in equality

Our Neighbours, Ourselves

Homi K. Bhabha delivered the 2010 Hegel lecture, evoking the spirit of Hegel in an attempt to understand contemporary issues of ethical witness, historical memory and the rights and representations of minorities in the cultural sphere. Who is our neighbour today? What does hospitality mean for our times? Why is the recognition of others such an agonizing encounter with the alterity of the self?The lecture examplifies how the "Third Space" - one of the key theories of Postcolonialism - helps us to establish a new understanding of cosmopolitanism and hospitality in a globalized world, based on the right of difference in equality

Temporalities of race and translational memory

This Structured Conversation between Professor Premesh Lalu and Professor Homi Bhabha – one of the most important figures in contemporary post-colonial studies – is on the future of subaltern thought and humanities. This conversation, moderated by Professor Jean Baxen, was included in the Conversations with Global Thinkers series of Science Forum South Africa 2020

In another time and place: The Handmaiden as an adaptation

This article considers the South Korean auteur director Park Chan-wook’s latest film The Handmaiden, which is the film adaptation of British writer Sarah Waters’s third novel Fingersmith. Transporting the story of love and deception from Victorian England to 1930s Korea under Japanese colonial rule, the film offers a compelling case of transnational or cross-cultural adaptation. In the process of cultural relocation, the film gives prominence to the ethnic identities and hierarchies in colonial Korea, and in recounting the unfolding lesbian love story between a petty-thief-disguised-as-maid and a noble lady, the film provides a spectacular, visual ‘translation’ of the novel’s approach to the story of same-sex desire. Despite all the changes the film makes to the original novel, the author Waters claims that the film is ‘faithful’ to her work. Taking her comments as a framework, the article explores the ways in which the film carries over the transgressive allure of the original story, while addressing the issues of history and identity in another time and place

Postcolonial thresholds: gateways and borders

Introduction to a special issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing coedited by Janet Wilson and Daria Tunc