Author: Frank Schulze-Engler, Pavan Kumar Malreddy, John Njenga Karugia.

This conversation with the renowned critic and theorist Homi K. Bhabha took place in Frankfurt/Main on November 2, 2016, on the occasion of the Third Annual Conference of the Africa’s Asian Options (AFRASO) project at Goethe University titled “Afrasian Transformations: Beyond Grand Narratives”, where Homi Bhabha delivered a keynote lecture, “Intimations of the Afterlife: On Migration, Memory and the Dialectics of Translation”. Here, he elaborates on the themes of that keynote, which had drawn on the work of Walter Benjamin, V.S. Naipaul and Hannah Arendt to capture the migratory affects of the Syrian refugee crisis. He discusses the enabling impact of anxiety, the dialectics of its translation, and the polarity of the contemporary migrant condition best described in the Benjaminian language of history as montage, or, in Bhabha’s own coinage, as a “camera mortis”. He refers throughout to key concepts in his recent thinking, such as “scales of affect”, “natality/fatality” and “camera mortis”.