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Murat Çağlıyan

ELIT 614 – Literary Theory in Practice

Assist. Prof. Dr. Nurten Birlik

12.06.2012

Homi Bhabha’s “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse”

Homi Bhabha, who is an outstanding figure in contemporary post-colonial studies, has

had several contributions to the development of post-colonial theory. In fact, Bhabha himself

can be regarded as ―a product of the multicultural processes about which he theorizes‖

(Shumar 495) because he was born in 1949 in a Parsi family in Mumbai, India, and at

undergraduate level, he studied at the University of Mumbai. Then he received his M.A. and

D.Phil. in English Literature from the University of Oxford. He taught at the University of

Sussex in the UK, and he is now the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American

Literature at Harvard University.

Bhabha‘s ―Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse‖ is an

important essay because in it, Bhabha ―introduces mimicry as a new term capturing a

fundamental ambivalence that characterises the construction of the colonial subject in certain

forms of stereotyping‖ (Fuchs 138).

Bhabha begins his essay with a quotation from Lacan:

Mimicry reveals something in so far as it is distinct from what might

be called an itself that is behind. 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

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the technique of camouflage practised in human warfare. (in Bhabha

125)

Bhabha, by quoting from Lacan, refers to the Lacanian vision of mimicry as

camouflage, and he seems to show that his concept of mimicry in this essay will be based on

mimicry as camouflage resulting in colonial ambivalence. Bhabha sees the colonizer as a

snake in the grass who, speaks in ―a tongue that is forked,‖ and produces a mimetic

representation which ―emerges as one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial

power and knowledge‖ (in Kumar 119).

Mimicry is ―an ambiguous presence in the cultural politics of colonialism‖ (Ferguson

553). Mimicry at first seems appealing to the colonizer who promotes it because it seems to

be good to have the natives mimic their colonial masters and he thinks that it shows and

increases his power over the colonized. However, as Bhabha says:

Mimicry is the desire for a reformed recognizable other, as a subject

of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite […] the discourse

of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be

effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its

difference […] mimicry is therefore stricken by indeterminacy: [it]

emerges as the representation of a difference that is itself a process of

disavowal. Mimicry also poses an imminent threat to both ‗normalized‘

knowledges and disciplinary powers. (Bhabha 126)

Bhabha‘s view of the ambivalence of colonial discourse, in which the colonized

subject is reproduced as ―almost the same, but not quite‖ is directly related to his concept of

mimicry (Bhabha 126). The colonizer‘s culture, behaviour, manners and values which are
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copied by the colonized contains both mockery and a certain ―menace‖, which means:

―[M]imicry is at once resemblance and menace‖ (Bhabha 127). Thus, mimicry holds a mirror

to the limitations of the authority of colonial discourse.

Bhabha argues that mimicry has a serious and disturbing effect on the authority of

colonial discourse because while ―normalizing‖ the colonial state or subject, it ―alienates its

own language of liberty and produces another knowledge of its norms‖ (Bhabha 127). So, the

―civilizing mission‖ is threatened (Bhabha 126). As Bhabha says, ―the excess or slippage

produced by the ambivalence of mimicry (almost the same, but not quite) does not merely

‗rupture‘ the discourse, but becomes transformed into an uncertainty which fixes the colonial

subject as a ‗partial‘ presence‖ (Bhabha 127).

After this point, Bhabha contends that the ―mimic man‖ is […] the effect of a flawed

colonial mimesis, in which to be Anglicized is emphatically not to be English‖ (Bhabha 128).

In this way, he tries to show how the colonial authorities, as part of the ―civilising mission‖,

want their colonized subjects to imitate the manners, language, and society of the colonizer,

and he sheds light upon the fact that they want this imitation only to be partial, so that their

colonized subjects remain separate and still need the British rule.

There is also another point that should be referred to. Bhabha says: ―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 129). The colonizer, when

he sees the native mimicking him, sees himself but also a different person, which is ―double

vision‖. So the colonized sees himself both as the subject and the object. His authority is thus

challenged. Bhabha argues: ―Mimicry does not merely destroy narcissistic authority through

the repetitious slippage of difference and desire. […] [but] raises the question of the
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authorization of colonial representations‖ (Bhabha 131). So in a way the binary between the

colonizer and the colonized, the subject and object is blurred, and it creates ambivalence.

Most post-colonial critics agree that mimicry disrupts the colonial discourse by double

vision, double articulation or the forked tongue. Bhabha thinks that mimicry is characterized

by indeterminacy and a sign of double articulation. One of the most striking features of

colonial discourse is the dichotomy between ―self‖ and ―Other‖. Bhabha justifies mimicry of

the ―Other‖ because, for a colonial, ―Other‖ reflects power.

According to Bhabha, ―mimicry‖ is one of the most elusive and effective strategies in

colonial discourse which centres around civilizing mission based on the notion of ―human and

not wholly human‖ (Bhabha 126). At one point, he refers to Charles Grant‘s essay

―Observations on the state of Society among the Asiatic Society among the Asiatic Subjects

of Great Britain‖ (1812-13) and mentions ―Grant‘s dream of an evangelical system of mission

education conducted uncompromisingly in English‖ (Bhabha 127). Then he refers to

Macaulay‘s ―Minute on Indian Education‖ (1835) and underlines that he visualizes the bright

future for the colonial rule through ―a class of interpreters between us and the millions whom

we govern—a class of persons Indian in blood and colour but English in tastes, in opinions, in

morals and in intellect,‖ (Bhabha 128), that is to say the mimic men.

Towards the ends of his essay, Bhabha asserts that these postcolonial mimic men are

authorized versions of otherness, and thus part-objects of a colonial desire emerging as

inappropriate colonial subjects (Kumar 119-120). They face the trauma of the colonial

ambivalence resulting from ―mimicry‖ which has ―a difference that is almost nothing but not

quite— to menace—a difference that is almost total but not quite‖ (Bhabha 132). The ―self‖

versus ―Other‖ dichotomy results into continuous uncertainty, fluidity and permanent

disillusionment among the colonials, and their situation has become all the more shaky and
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wavering (Kumar 120). He also mentions ―not quite/not white‖ which is a phrase he employs

to describe the effects of mimicry on the colonised subjects. He says:

In the ambivalent world of the ―not quite/not white,‖ on the margins

of metropolitan desire, the founding objects of the Western world

become the erratic, eccentric, accidental objets trouvés of the colonial

discourse—the part-objects of presence. (Bhabha 132)

To conclude, in this essay, Bhabha argues that the slippage between ―white/not quite‖

turns into a menace of mimicry threatening the colonial discourse. The colonized cannot be

totally like the colonizer, and the colonizer does not wish him to be completely like himself

either. The colonizer sees a partial representation of himself when he looks at the colonized,

and the colonized is in an ambivalent position between mimicry and mockery because his

difference from the colonist also creates a parody-like effect. As a result mimicry enables the

colonized to live under the control of the colonial power, but at the same time he preserves his

difference to a certain level, which creates ambivalence.

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WORKS CITED

Bhabha, Homi. ―Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of the Colonial Discourse‖.
Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis, October, Vol. 28, (Spring, 1984), 125-133.

Ferguson, James G. ―Of Mimicry and Membership: Africans and the ‗New World
Society‘‖ Cult Anthropol 17, no 4, 2002.

Fuchs, Anne. A Space of Anxiety: Dislocation and Abjection in Modern German-

Jewish Literature. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999.

Kumar, Sanjiv. ―Bhabha‘s Notion of ‗Mimicry‘ and ‗Ambivalence‘ in v.s. Naipaul‘s

A Bend in the River‖ International Refereed Research Journal. Volume 2, Issue 4, Oct. 2011,
118-122.

Shumar, Wesley. ―Key Contributors: Homi Bhabha‖. Cultural Studies of Science

Education. Volume 5, Number 2 (2010), 495-506.