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Analysis Of Bhabha's Of Mimicry And Man

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Bhabha draws the concept of mimicry from Lacan and uses it into the relationship of the colonialism. In his “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse”, Bhabha has explored the role of mimicry as “one of the most effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge” in colonial discourse (Gupta 5), and implicitly suggested its “subversive role in postcolonial discourse” (10).
Mimicry, in colonial discourse, refers to a strategy of acculturation in colonies taken by the western colonist. In order to let the culture of the colonial power be recognized, the colonized people were forced to study and imitate the suzerain in terms of the language, culture, and all kinds of institutional systems. This strategy can satisfy not only …show more content…

These Indians, in some ways, have become Englishness, in the sense of which the colonizer felt at ease. But simultaneously, the emergence of “mimic man” who was not as the same as the colonizer, but the “partial representation” (88) brought uneasy to the colonizer (87). Contrary to the reassurance, the colonizer in this process could see an eccentric and dislocated self image. As a result, the thing one is familiar with would somehow change when it is placed to an unfamiliar area. Mimicry subverts the identity of the represented other, which thus shakes the authority of the colonizer. By this process, according to Bhabha, “the look of surveillance returns as the displacing gaze of the disciplined, where the observer becomes the observed and ‘partial’ representation rearticulates the whole notion of identity and alienates it from essence” …show more content…

“The epic intention of the civilizing mission” in this process, reveals Homi Bhabha, “often produces a text rich in the traditions of Trompe-l 'œil, irony, mimicry and repetition.” “The high ideals” of the Enlightenment, dismantled by the desire of the colonialism for the other, appear to be a farce. What is more ironic is the partial mimicry of the colonized people. Due to the identity produced by the partial mimicry and hybridity, the mimic man the colonizer creates looks like a savage with a European mask, as Bhabha cited, “human and not wholly human” (85). It not only makes the colonial discourse invalid, but also lets the colonizer feel that he looks into a “distorting mirror” while facing to the mimic, which becomes a mock and a satire towards self. This satire could make contribution to the realization of the deconstructive reading and writing towards the authority of colonial discourse, and thus letting mimicry take its importance in the postcolonial reading and writing. If it is unconscious and ambiguous for the colonized to mimic and ironize the colonizer in the colonial period, then in postcolonial writing, it can be said that mimicry is used to “make fun of what we don’t like in the West and can counter attack it” (Gupta 10). In this

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