- Lived:
- Born 1949, Bombay (now Mumbai), India · teaches at Harvard University
- Tradition:
- Postcolonial theory; psychoanalytic and poststructuralist cultural criticism
- The Big Idea:
- Cultures are never pure and colonial power is never as confident as it looks — identity is made in the in-between spaces where cultures meet, copy, and unsettle each other.
- In their words:
- "Almost the same, but not quite."
- If you remember one thing:
- The colonized person who imitates the colonizer isn't simply obeying — the imperfect copy quietly mocks the original and reveals that the original was never as solid as it claimed.