No. 5: The Best Dinner Parties

“An ordinary evening can turn into an extraordinary exchange,” says Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and Language Homi K. Bhabha as he muses on his love for throwing dinner parties in his Cambridge home.

The world’s premier post-colonial literary theorist, Bhabha loves to entertain guests and ideas. He makes a mean shrimp with mint coriander and mango and duck with wild mushrooms for his soirees. And, he notes, “Harvard has a lot of great people to entertain.”

Since his arrival in 2001, Bhabha has been entertaining faculty and students in his home and the classroom. Those people—the faculty and the students—led Bhabha to believe Harvard has a “unique place” in the world.

But luring Bhabha here took the English department nearly two years, according to former English department chair and Cabot Professor of American Literature Lawrence Buell.

“Both Homi and [his wife] Jacqueline Bhabha had senior positions at the University of Chicago, which very much valued them. It’s never easy to move in mid-life,” Buell told The Crimson in 2000. “We had to show that we had a more attractive situation.”

Although Bhabha cites no “push factors” in his decision to leave the University of Chicago, he says that one of the “pull factors” was Harvard’s outstanding English department and its “exceptional” students.

For instance, last week Bhabha received an “amazing” e-mail from a student in his English 90 seminar, “The Postcolonial Classic.” Bhabha smiled widely as he said that she wrote that something he had said in class set off a “spark of rediscovery” in her love for literature.

He adds that it is not only his own students who have made an impression on him. “Students come to me from across the University,” he says emphatically. “This makes me feel that Harvard is a place of great speculative riches.”

Despite his love for fine dining, Bhabha did attend a student-faculty dinner this year to speak with a student. The Eliot House dining hall’s food “was not exciting,” but Bhabha adds that it was “perfectly edible.” (In his free time, Bhabha loves hanging out at Burdick’s, having lunch at Legal Seafoods, and eating breakfast at Henrietta’s Table.) Although he raves about the organic food at Berkeley College at Yale (where his son is an undergrad), Bhabha is quick and firm in his prediction for Saturday’s game: “The Big H.”

When it comes to picking the winning school­—his beloved Harvard—Bhabha further proves that he is an arbiter of extremely high taste.