Speakers Berlin

Born in India, Homi Bhabha studied at the University of Bombay and at Oxford University, where he received his D.phil. in 1990. He is Professor for English and American Literature and Language, and African American Studies at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Previously, he has been Professor of English Language and Literature, Art History, and South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and Chester D. Tripp Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities at University of Chicago, Illinois. His publications include The Location of Culture (1994), Nation and Narration (1990), Negotiating the Power of Art to Transform Lives (1996), and a special issue of the periodical Critical Inquiry: Front Lines / Border Posts (Spring 1997). Bhabha is a regular contributor to Artforum Magazine and is currently working on a new book, A Measure of Dwelling: A History of Cosmopolitanism. His areas of research include Colonial and Post-Colonial Theory; Cosmopolitanism; 19th- and 20th Century British and English-Language Literatures. Bhabha has lectured widely and has delivered a number of distinguished lectures, including the DuBois Lectures at Harvard University, the Beckman lectures at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as the Amnesty Human Rights Lecture at Oxford University. Next year, he will give the Presidential Lecture at Stanford University and the Clarendon Lectures at Oxford University. Bhabha’s highly influential book The Location of Culture recently appeared in a German translation.

Born in China, Zhiyuan Cui has been Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and currently holds a position as Adjunct Professor of Economics at the Chinese People's University in Beijing and as Visiting Fellow at the East Asia Institute, University of Singapore (2001-2002). Cui is interested in comparative politics of China and East Asia as well as political economy and political philosophy in general. He is the co-author (with Adam Przeworski, et al.) of Sustainable Democracy (1993). He has edited the Roberto Mangabeira Unger-reader Politics, The Central Texts: Theory against Fate, (1997), and has contributed chapters to several books on transformation in former socialist countries in Eastern Europe. His book Wrestling with the Invisible Hand is forthcoming from Harvard University Press

Born in Argentina, Ernesto Laclau received his PhD at the University of Essex, Colchester, where he is Professor of Political Science at the Centre for Theoretical Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences. He was a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Toronto (1978), Chicago (1984) and York, Canada (1985) and at various Latin American universities. Laclau was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, DC (1989) and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1989-90. His current research topics include theory in a comparative perspective, the discursive construction of social antagonism, and deconstruction and politics.He has authored and co-authored many books , including Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985), New Reflections on the Revolution of our Time (1990), The Making of Political Identities (1994), Emancipations (1996), and Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (2000) with Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek.

Born in India, Harbans Mukhia, 62, is Professor of History and Rector at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Professor Mukhia was Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Simla, in 1971, Homi Bhabha Fellow in 1979-80, UGC National Lecturer in 1988 and again in 1995-96, and Senior Fellow at the International Institute of Asian Studies, Leiden, in 1997. He served as a Visiting Professor at the British Academy, London, in 1993, and has been the Directeur d’Étude Associé, EHESS in Paris since 1980. His early research focused primarily on medieval Indian historiography, resulting in his doctoral thesis Historians and Historiography during the Reign of Akbar. In the 70s and 80s, Mukhia worked on the theoretical and empirical premises of Feudalism in a comparative perspective. His 1981 essay, ‘Was there Feudalism in Indian History?’, published in The Journal of Peasant Studies, became the centre of an international debate, published as Feudalism and Non-European Societies in 1985, and later as The Feudalism Debate in 2000. In 1988-90, he co-edited with Maurice Aymard the translations of some 35 articles of French historians, published in India in two volumes as French Studies in History. Other publications include Communalism and the Writing of Indian History (1969), Perspectives on Medieval History (1993), and Religion, Religiosity, and Communalism (1996).

Born 1934 in western Nigeria, Wole Soyinka is Professor for Comparative Literature, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. Soyinka studied at Government College in Ibadan, Nigeria, and the University of Leeds, where he received his doctorate in 1973. He was a dramaturgist at the Royal Court Theatre in London 1958-1959 and, upon his return to Nigeria in 1960, founded the theatre group "The 1960 Masks" and in 1964 the "Orisun Theatre Company”. At the same time, he taught Drama and Literature at various Universities in Ibadan, Lagos, and Ife, where, since 1975, he has been Professor for Comparative Literature. He has periodically been Visiting Professor at the Universities of Cambridge, Sheffield, and Yale. During the civil war in Nigeria, Soyinka appealed in an article for cease-fire. For this he was arrested in 1967, accused of conspiring with the Biafra rebels, and was held as a political prisoner for 22 months until 1969. Soyinka has published about 20 works of drama, novels,and poetry, including The Swamp Dwellers (1963), The Trial of Brother Jero (1963), The Strong Breed (1963), The Road ( 1965), Madmen and Specialists (1971),Jero's Metamorphosis (1973), The Bacchae of Euripides (1973), Death and the King's Horseman (1975), A Play of Giants (1984) and Requiem for a Futurologist (1985). In 1972, he published his controversial prison memoires The Man Died: Prison Notes. His novels include The Interpreters (1965), Season of Anomy (1973), and the autobiographical texts Aké ( 1981), Isara (1989), and Ibadan (1994). Soyinka's poems are collected in Idanre, and Other Poems (1967), Poems from Prison (1969), A Shuttle in the Crypt (1972) and in the long poem, Ogun Abibiman (1976). Next to his literary essays, which are collected in, among others, Myth, Literature and the African World (1975), Soyinka is also an outspoken political voice, in publications such as The Open Sore of a Continent (1996), or The Burden of Memory, The Muse of Forgiveness (1998). Soyinka is the recipient of numerous awards, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1986, the first African writer to be honored by the Nobel Committee.