Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man”
Response — Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man”
Homi Bhabha, a scholar of English and American literature and seminal theorist in post-colonial studies, writes “Of Mimicry and Man” in 1984 for the critical art journal October. Bhabha outlines description of farcical figurations of colonial power in literature and the colonial discourse, including illusion, irony, reputation and mimicry.1 In what follows, he argues that mimicry is the “most elusive and effective” through its ability to mediate the competing concerns of stable identity and dynamic history.2
Bhabha prefaces his essay with a passage from Jacques Lacan’s “Of the Gaze”, in which Lacan relates mimicry to the mottled camouflage of human warfare.3 Reframed through Bhabha’s argument, mimicry is not a pure and exact “harmonizing,” but a partial and incomplete practice of imprecise identity—neither that of the original, nor of the colonized context. Mimicry, Bhabha argues, is the “desire for a reformed, recognizable Other.”4 This Other, however, is constructed to be ambivalently partial or incomplete. Bhabha creates a strong association of Mimicry with “the Partial”—mimicry as a partial appropriation. This is a key feature of the mimic, that it is not complete or whole, but rather that it leaves enough room for ambivalence, confusion, and incomplete association with that which is being mimed. It redefines to a point without overtaking entirely. The subject is reformed, regulated, and disciplined in a way that is both indeterminate — without universal or established definition — and contradictory, taking on just enough of a form to be recognizable while representing that form in excess. All along, the colonial power denies the role of mimicry, leaving just enough of the original to deny any hand in its reformation. Bhabha sees this as a highly-sophisticated and self-aware strategy of control.
This power comes in the ability of this partial — ambivalent — quality of the mimicry to “fix the colonial subject as a ‘partial’ presence” itself.5 That is, by establishing a new identity, a partial Other — not fully uncivilized, not fully civilized — through an incomplete reformation of the colonial subject, the colonial power sets up a failure — particularly in the form of Christian moral failure — so as to guarantee dependence. Gross imitation makes apparent a need for subjugation.
For Bhabha, this reveals a great cynicism in European humanism, in which, as in John Locke most notably, the virtues of liberty and the morality of slavery are presented without irony. Or in Macaulayism, an education system which would Anglicize a class of Indian persons adequately enough to serve the colonial powers as intermediaries, though never enough to be English.6 Bhabha traces this strategy through literary and real histories of English colonialism, particularly, as appropriate to his field of study, in the Indian colonies. We should not assume, however, that this occurs only through systems of education, religion, or in English literature. What of this partial reformation? Bhabha uncovers the “menacing” feature of such a strategy, that is that behind the partial otherness, remains an unaltered identity that reveals a “partial vision of the colonizer’s presence.”7 In effect, Bhabha recognizes the returned gaze of the Other as having a real affect on the discourse of power and standing as a mirror upon which the presence of colonized and a colonizing power is made apparent. Bhabha calls this the “metonymies of presence.”8
Bhabha’s essay reveals some of the foundational ways that power is constructed and practiced through textual discourse across the English colonial empire. But it also deconstructs and contaminates these colonial narratives on its way to reconstructing a counter-narrative to colonial power. That is to say, it does not merely reinsert subjugation narratives within a colonial history, it “raises the question of the authorization of colonial representations” itself.9 It reorders what we have recognized in our colonial past as much as what we have written in our colonial histories.
For us, it frames the photograph as part of that discourse, and reveals an important visual artifact of both the project of Mimicry and metonymy of presence. Bhabha’s theory authorizes the colonial-era photograph as part of the history that resulted in a colonial discourse of narcissism and paranoia “that repeat furiously, uncontrollably.”10
As has already been hinted at in the introduction to our course, the African sitter — a metonymy of uncivilized African-ness on the level of the Simian Black or Lying Asiatic — recorded in the photograph, contains a split narratives, one as what Bhabha calls the founding objects of the Western world, and the second, as the objets trouvés of the colonized subject and his kingdom, though they are perhaps, both less accidental and granted more meaning than the undoubtedly true account of wrapper paper Bibles.
We must take care, then, not to suppose that we have the authority to reinsert into the narrative of the photograph, into the photographer, and into the narrative of the sitter, a lost, or previously untold discourse. Rather, we may only be recognizing the prevailing narrative’s own desire and guilt. We are not doing a service to the object so much as recognizing our own blindness.