Homi K. Bhabha (b. 1949) was educated at the University of Bombay and the University of Oxford, and is the Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard University and Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities at University College, London. His works include Nation and Narration (1990), The Location of Culture (1993), Cosmopolitanism (co-edited with C. Breckenridge et al., 2002) and Edward Said (co-edited with W. J. T. Mitchell, 2005).

When historical visibility has faded, when the present tense of testimony loses its power to arrest, then the displacements of memory and the indirections of art offer us the image of our psychic survival. To live in an unhomely world, to find its ambivalences and ambiguities enacted in the house of fiction, or its sundering and splitting performed in the work of art, is also to affirm a profound desire of social solidarity: I am looking for the join … I want to join … I want to join.