Homi K. Bhabha - The state of unpreparedness

I started thinking about the term “unprepared” because it’s a term that is not often reflected upon yet is popularly used in the public discourse.

About Homi K. Bhabha

"I’m the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. I work on questions of race and representation.

I work on the politics of affiliation, the literature and culture of groups who are minorities, the ethics of refugees. The questions of dignity in art, culture and politics are very important for me. My work as a whole is aimed towards understanding the present moment because the past refuses to die and the future refuses to wait to be born."

Why study unpreparedness?

I started thinking about the term “unprepared” because it’s a term that is not often reflected upon yet is popularly used in the public discourse. We were unprepared for 9/11, and 9/11 has become a turning point for work on risk assessment and risk studies and being unprepared. We were unprepared for Trump’s victory, for it being so massive. We were unprepared for a number of things, including things that are forgotten.

One of the greatest moments of industrial havoc was in Bhopal in 1984, when the citizens and the population of Bhopal went to sleep and they got up, having been woken by the nightmare of the Union Carbide explosion. From one moment to the next, people had died. People had lost their eyesight. They were completely unprepared.

These moments of unpreparedness really need to be studied, which is why I’m beginning to work on this term, the “unprepared”, as opposed to risk assessment. Risk assessment very often assumes that you know what the whole set of correlations of a possible risk might be. From a position of modelling and statistics, you make a risk assessment. The “unprepared” is to be shocked, to be sudden, to experience a moment and not know how it’s going to go.

Key Points

• There are two kinds of unpreparedness: anxiety-induced unpreparedness and deliberate, political unpreparedness, which enables governments to do as they wish.
• Black Lives Matter protesters exemplify an emergent community against ethno-populist-nationalist majoritarianism.
• Protesters worldwide have translated Black Lives Matter into their own situation – an example of the “translation of globalisation”.