“Of Mimicry and Man: the Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse” Francesca Ferrante Literatura Anglesa i Imperi 2009-2010

Homi Bhaba (1949) Indian theorist of Postcolonialism

Bhabha’s biography He was born in 1949 in a Parsi family in Mumbay (India). The Parsis, a minority with a worldwide population of approximately 160,000, are Zoroastrians who migrated from Persia to India in the eighth century to avoid persecution. A principal characteristic of Parsi identity is its cultural/linguistic hybridity, which accompanies an economic mobility and international experience.

Bhabha’s own educational background demonstrates this mobility: he first studied at the University of Bombay, before moving to the University of Oxford. His teaching career has continued this mobility, taking in the University of Sussex in the UK, before crossing the Atlantic to Chicago and then Harvard. He is now Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature at Harvard University. Homi K. Bhabha is best known for his central contribution to the development of post-colonial theory The Literary Encyclopedia

What is Postcolonialism?

A reaction to Colonialism?

Postcolonialism is the social, political, economical and cultural practises which arise in response and resitance to Colonialism. (Lye) It can be seen as a deconstruction of the binary opposition created by Colonialism to subordinate the colonized as uncivilized, bad and decandent. “Postcolonial" rather than indicating only a specific and materially historical event, seems to describe the second half of the twentieth-century in general as a period in the aftermath of the heyday of colonialism. Even more generically, the term "postcolonial" is used to signify a position against Imperialism and Eurocentrism. Main issues: identity, gender, race, racism and ethnicity

Post colonial studies Main theorists Edward Said (1935-2003) Orientalism (1978)

Post colonial studies Main theorists Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1943) The Post-Colonial Critic (1990)

The location of cultures (1994) This book assembles several of Homi Bhabha's most significant essays. Bhabha is perhaps most well-known for his theory of cultural hybridity, which he develops in "Signs Taken For Wonders" and several other essays included in this collection Bhabha argues that hybridity results from various forms of colonization, which lead to cultural collisions and interchanges. In the attempt to assert colonial power in order to create anglicized subjects, "[t]he trace of what is disavowed is not repressed but repeated as something different--a mutation, a hybrid" (p. 111) Philosophy and Literature 19.1 (1995) 196-197

The location of cultures (1994) ". . . the colonial presence is always ambivalent, split between its presence as original and authoritative and its articulation as repetition and difference" (107). "Hybridity is a problematic of colonial representation and individuation that reverses the effects of the colonialist disavowal, so that other 'denied' knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority -- its rule of recognition" (114).   . . . "This partializing process of hybridity is best described as a metonymy of presence" (115) The Location of Culture.  NY: Routledge, 1994.

Of Mimicry and Man (1984) “Colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite.” Bhabha, Of mimicry and Man By adopting the language and forms of the empire, the colonised subjects can reflect back to the colonisers a distorted image of their world which is unsettling to their authority. It is not just about copying or imitation, but about displacement; reflecting back an image that is subtly but distinctively different. Postcolonial Science Fiction, Dr Michelle Reid (Oxford University Library Services)

“The mimic man is…the effect of a flawed colonial mimesis, in which to be Anglicized is emphatically not to be English" (87) In his article "Of Mimicry and Man" (1984), Homi Bhabha discusses how, as part of the so called "civilising mission", the colonial authorities wanted their colonised subjects to imitate the manners, language, and society of the imperial centre. However, they wished this imitation only to be partial, so their colonised subjects remained separate and still requiring British rule. Postcolonial Science Fiction, Dr Michelle Reid (Oxford University Library Services)

On the one hand, Bhabha sees the colonizer as a snake in the grass who, speaks in "a tongue that is forked," and produces a mimetic representation that "... emerges as one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge " (Bhabha 85). Bhabha recognizes then that colonial power carefully establishes highly-sophisticated strategies of control and dominance. Mimicry, Ambivalence and Hybridity

On the other hand, Bhabha immediately diverts his pertinent analysis by shifting the superlative certainty of the colonizer and the strategic effectiveness of his political intentions into an alarming uncertainty. By producing a partial vision of the colonizer's presence (88), de-stabilize the colonial subjectivity, unsettle its authoritative centrality, and corrupt its discursive purity. Actually, he adds, mimicry repeats rather than re-presents....(author's emphases ), and in that very act of repetition, originality is lost, and centrality de-centred. Mimicry, Ambivalence and Hybridity

What is left, according to Bhabha, is the trace, the impure, the artificial, the second-hand. Bhabha analyses the slippages in colonial political discourse, and reveals that the janus-faced attitudes towards the colonized lead to the production of a mimicry that presents itself more in the form of a "menace " than "resemblance"; more in the form of a rupture than consolidation. Mimicry, Ambivalence and Hybridity

Mimicry is at once resemblance and menace. The menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority. And it is a double vision that is a result of what I've described as the partial representation/recognition of the colonial object. Bhabha, Of mimicry and Man

The effect of mimicry is camouflage The effect of mimicry is camouflage.... It is not a question of harmonizing with the background, but against a mottled background, of becoming mottled - exactly like the technique of camouflage practised in human warfare. Jacques Lacan, "The line and light', Of the Gaze.

Questions Lacan reminds us, mimicry is like camouflage, not a harmonization of repression of difference, but a form of resemblance, that differs from or defends presence by displaying it in part, metonymically. Bhabha, Of mimicry and Man If we consider mimicry not only as a kind of colonial subjugation but also as a response of the colonized, shall we connet mimicry to drag? At what point do we cross the line from mimicry to mockery? Blog the obcure

Mimicry, as the metonymy of presence is, indeed, such an erratic, eccentric strategy of authority in colonial discourse. Bhabha, Of mimicry and Man We can see that mimicry is the eccentric strategy of colonial authority but, the effect of mimicry is a repetition that threats and de-constructs the colonizer authorship. Is mimicry as a strategy of colonial control or the activity of the colonized? Blog the obcure

Do you think the concept of mimicry can be related to Heart of Darkness? Why? Do you think the ambivalence between being Anglicized and being English is evident in A passage to India?

Bibliography The Location of Culture Bibliography The Location of Culture.  NY: Routledge, 1994 Webography The Literary Encyclopedia http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5184 Mimicry, Ambivalence and Hybridity http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/1WEBPAGE.HTML Philosophy and Literature 19.1 (1995) 196-197 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/philosophy_and_literature/v019/19.1br_bhabha.html The Obscure http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.livewild.org/CostaRica/Pics/a6024.jpg&imgrefurl=http://blogobscure.blogspot.com/2008/07/mimicry-and-whole-subjects.html&usg=__4AvvDhYk7tzbYN6_ATbzYVLAx5g=&h=925&w=1188&sz=213&hl=it&s

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