Of Mimicry and Man: the

Ambivalence of Colonial
Discourse
Francesca Ferrante
Literatura Anglesa i Imperi
2009-2010

Homi Bhaba (1949)

Indian theorist of Postcolonialism

Bhabhas 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.

Bhabhas 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 isthe 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.... 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. 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&imgr
efurl=http://blogobscure.blogspot.com/2008/07/mimicry-andwhole-

Thanks!!!