[This past week
we held the 50th
Anniversary NeMLA Convention in Washington, DC. It was a great time as
ever, and this week I’ll highlight a few of the many standout moments and
conversations for me. Lemme know
if you’d like to hear or chat more about the NeMLA Board,
the American
Area, next year’s convention in Boston,
or anything else!]
On three
stand-out phrases from Homi Bhabha’s
bracing and inspiring keynote
address.
1)
Disappointed hope: The central focus of Bhabha’s
talk was a reimagining of our current moment’s unfolding histories of migration
and displacement, and his recurring image and phrase for those histories was
“disappointed hope” (or, as he put it in one moment, “migration holds hope
hostage”). Although of course the emphasis on disappointment is tough for this
critical optimist (and advocate
of hard-won hope) to hear, the phrase also reflects a key tenet of Bhabha’s
talk and his current projects: his argument for the vital need of making the
humanity and desires of migrants (rather than false worries about “crisis”)
central to our responses and policies. So even if we see their hopes as
disappointed or held hostage, we are nonetheless focusing on the hopes and
perspectives that motivate these individuals and communities, and working to
imagine solidarity based (as Bhabha argued throughout) on a recognition of
their alterity to our own situation yet a concurrent empathy with their situation.
2)
Concentration and internment camps: The
principal voice with which Bhabha put his own in conversation throughout the
talk was Hannah Arendt. That
included a key thread about her concept of “the banality of evil” as it appears
in our own era, among many other engagements with Arendt’s ideas and arguments.
Those engagements also meant that Bhabha was able to use both Arendt’s voice and
her world (especially that of World War II) to further develop his own
perspective on the 21st century world and its challenges, however. And
in one particular phrase, which I believe was partly echoing Arendt’s words but
also extending them with Bhabha’s own perspective, he connected the 1940s to our
own moment pitch-perfectly: describing a world in which those defined as “other”
are put in “concentration camps by their foes and internment camps by their
friends.” All too terribly true.
3)
Despair and Repair: As those first two items
illustrate, Bhabha’s talk was, as I put it above and to say the least, bracing
in its consistent engagement with some of the darkest moments and elements of
our world, past and present. “I dwell in despair,” he put it succinctly and
accurately at one point. Yet he followed that phrase with a recognition that he
is “mindful of the need for repair,” and I can’t imagine a more concise duality
through which to express my own goals of highlighting the darkest histories but
working toward the light. As Hannah Arendt herself once put it, “In dark times
[a phrase she used consistently to describe her epoch], we search for courage.”
Indeed we do—and as I’ve argued at length, we cannot find such courage by
eliding or ignoring the darkness, but rather through and beyond it. While that
means I might quibble a bit with Bhabha’s use of “dwell,” I certainly recognize
the need to acknowledge and engage with our despair—and then to work together
on the vital need and goal of repair. I can think of few talks I’ve ever heard
that made the case for each element of that equation more eloquently than did
Homi Bhabha’s NeMLA 2019 keynote address.
Next recap
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. NeMLA
reflections to share?
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