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Ambivalence enters the game when Bhabha claims that this discourse
depends on the recognition anddisavowal of racial/cultural/historical
differences. The colonized are on the one hand constructed as the other;
(the other, as we have seen in Mary Douglas text, relates to that which
defies our categories); on the other hand, the colonized is something that
is produced through the discourse of the colonizer with the aim of
controlling the other. In this sense, the colonized (the other) is entirely
knowable and visible (71), which means that a fundamental difference of
the other is disavowed (cf. entry on disavowal). The implication of
Bhabhas argument is that you can never fully know another person, let
alone a whole people; there is always something that exceeds what you
think the other is or how you construe the other. This excess is what is
denied in disavowal.
Bhabha uses the term regime of truth (cf. note on regime of truth) to
suggest that the colonizer intends to control the colonized through finding
out everything about him and at the same time using that knowledge to
define the colonized in a certain way. He links this idea to what Edward
Said has called Orientalism in his groundbreaking book of the same title
(1978). Orientalist power is a strategy whereby whatever is known about
the colonized by the colonizer is used to construct an identity of the
colonized in a supposedly coherent way. Thus European discourses
constitute the Orient as a unified racial, geographical, political and
cultural zone of the world (71).
But it is only Bhabhas next step that fully explores the impact of
ambivalence. Employing an argument that mixes psychoanalytical with
semiotic aspects (a very typical strategy among poststructuralist and
post-colonialist thinkers), Bhabha aims to show that the discourse that
constructs self and other does, in fact, not work smoothly at all. He
already hinted at this in the beginning of the essay when he said that
repetition actually endangered the stereotype because it shows that what
the stereotype claims cannot be proven and instead must be repeated.
We can look at this is semiotic terms. The stereotype as sign (the signifier
would be, for instance, black, and the signified, for instance, wild,
savage, brutish) depends on its own repetition. If the sign is not
repeated, the connection between signifier and signified becomes
unstable. But on the other hand, what the need for repetition shows is
that the link between signifier and signified is unstable to begin with. This
instability endangers the efficaciousness of colonial discourse in
constructing black as wild and savage.
We can now see in a clearer light how this relates to the stereotype. The
person or group that is the target of the stereotype and the one who is
making use of the stereotype (i.e., both colonizer and colonized) are said
to beessentially or ontologically coherent, without admitting the possibility
of change or differentiation. But this coherence is nothing but a fantasy of
wholeness. This becomes understandable through an analogy to the
situation of infants. For the infant, any sort of split or difference feels like
a catastrophe because it means that he is separated from his mother. The
fantasy of coherence thus goes back to the infantile whish of being and
remaining one with the mother. Bhabha sometimes refers to this fantasy
of coherence as the Imaginary (cf. note on Imginary), thereby using
the concept of French psychoanalytic Jacques Lacan. To put the whole
matter in a nutshell: It is discourse that first sets up the differentiation
between, e.g., black and white. But it is also because of language that
this differentiation remains unstable (see the semiotic argument above).
More precisely, in Lacans theory it is the entry into language (he refers to
it as the Symbolic order) that forbids the union with the mother. We can
equate this entry into language with the moment that Freud describes
when the little boy sees that his mother does not have a penis. Both
moments are about difference. Language works through differences, and
the boy is confronted with sexual difference. To bring this back to the
stereotype, this is the moment when one realizes that the coherence of
the stereotype is purely imaginary, that within the category of blacks, to
stick to that example, there is difference.
We have now reached the final step of Bhabhas argument. In his opinion,
in the stereotype the multiple belief structure of fetishism (I believe that
the mother has no penis but I also do not believe it) is actually embraced
and made use of. Bhabha summarizes the ambivalence articulated in
stereotypical discourse: The black is both savage (cannibal) and yet the
most obedient and dignified of servants (the bearer of food); he is the
embodiment of rampant sexuality and yet innocent as a child; he is
mystical, primitive, simple-minded and yet the most worldly and
accomplished liar, and manipulator of social forces. In each case, what is
being dramatized is a separation (82).
Bhabhas evaluation of stereotypical discourse thus ends up on an
ambivalent note itself. On the one hand, stereotypical discourse is a
means of wielding power. On the other hand, it turns out that this
discourse allows for the expression of two beliefs at once. It goes beyond
the misrecognition that is taking place in Lacans imaginary (cf. note on
imaginary) in that here knowledge emerges as non-repressive one is
almost tempted to think that Bhabha means non-oppressive here. The
fact that Bhabha is re-enacting the ambivalence that he is writing about
can be attributed to a fashionable (though often disconcerting) trend in
cultural criticism whereby what is written is reflected in how it is written.