The Time of our Lives: The TORCH PUP Lecture Series 2025
A series of three lectures with Homi K. Bhabha the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and chair of the Program in History and Literature at Harvard University
Princeton University Press TORCH Lecture Series 2025
A series of three lectures with Homi K. Bhabha the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and chair of the Program in History and Literature at Harvard University.
What does it mean to live collectively in the afterlife of a catastrophe?
How do we frame the traumatic crises of the 21st century— life post-9/11, pandemics, ethno-nationalist autocracies, imperial invasions, border brutalities and refugee crises—in a vocabulary that encapsulates responsibility, accountability, agentic expression, and above all, the shifting registers of selfhood?
Through a series of three lectures The Time of our Life interrogates the public culture of ‘trauma’ in the current climate of inflammatory polarisation. Join Homi Bhabha as he deconstructs and reconfigures new schema for understanding the politics of identity, culture wars, and the on-going “war of wounds and words” that haunts the moral and political economy of the US, alongside anti-minoritarian racial or ethnic equivalents around the world.
The series consists of three lectures.
LECTURE 1:
LIVING IN THE AFTERLIFE : ON BEING UNPREPARED
Thursday 15 May, 5.30pm
How do the retroactive afterlives of slavery, decolonisation, or sexual violence, inform the purgatorial temporality of imminence and anxiety underwriting life in the 21st century?
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LECTURE 2.
TIME AFTER TIME: MIGRATION AND MONTAGE
Tuesday 20 May, 5.30pm
Interrogating movement and the translation of trauma in the advent of migration and embedded alterity.
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LECTURE 3.
THE ANXIOUS ACADEMY: AFTERLIFE, AFTERTHOUGHTS
Thursday 22 May, 5.30pm
Confronting the afterlife: reimagining and reconstructing definitions of political existence and advocacy in the path forward.
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