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Bhabhas Mimicry and Man: Destabilizing the Colonial Paradigm

A Painted, wraith-like presentation of Bertha's character as portrayed in Wide Sargasso Sea

Last updated 17 June 2007

The mimicry of the post-colonial subject is therefore always potentially destabilizing to colonial
discourse, and locates an area of considerable political and cultural uncertainty in the structure of
imperial dominance. (Key Concepts, p142)

While immersed in the totalising lexicon of colonial discourse, with its propagation of
adamantine racial binary oppositions, suppressed groups find their identities constructed on their
behalf, compelling them to enact the roles attributed them by their imperial masters. Using
disciplinary techniques that have been extensively analysed by Michel Foucault, the metropolitan
powers envisaged a situation in which their colonies would be fully self-regulating and self-
policing. This would be achieved through an ostensibly symbiotic relationship, in which the
native population would abandon the less civilised customs and cultural heritage, and assimilate
into a larger colonial collective. The colonised state would thus become a benevolent replica of
the home nation, with resistance insidiously abrogated by the imposition of a new identity. In this
sense, the colonised subject effectively colludes in his/her own subjugation without the
(explicitly visible, but nonetheless latent) threat of physical coercion. A panoptical arrangement
of bodies in space, and minds in collusive harmony would perpetuate the rule of the colonial
power, inculcating a passivity within its subjects.

It programmes, at the level of an elementary and easily transferable mechanism, the basic
functioning of a society penetrated through and through with disciplinary mechanisms.
(Discipline and Punish, p209)

This is a comprehensive strategy of normalisation, with a succession of compliant satellite states

contributing to the holistic enhancement of the mother countrys fortunes. In this paradigm, the
native population will use the doctrines of the hegemonic power to construct their own identities
as subjects of Empire, rather than autonomous individuals subjugated in an unequal power
relationship. However, as Homi Bhabha has so meticulously demonstrated, when the civilising
light is refracted through the prism of actual lived experience, new and subversive forms of
resistance can be enacted using the very weapons that were intended to repress and mould. The
abyssal gaze is thus imposed upon the colonizer.

In his essay Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse, Bhabha suggests
that the very techniques that broadcast the dominance and impenetrability of the Imperial
discourse, actually expose its inherent weaknesses that ultimately destroy itself from within. He
states that:

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It is as if the very emergence of the 'colonial' is dependent for its representation upon some
strategic limitation or prohibition within the authoritative discourse itself. The success of colonial
appropriation depends on a proliferation of inappropriate objects that ensure its strategic failure,
so that mimicry is at once resemblance and menace. (Mimicry and Man; hereafter M&M)

In order to sustain the monochromatic, explicitly prejudicial value system that provides Empire
with its locomotive force, there must always remain a chiasmic distance between the exploited
colonies and the superior colonisers. When a territory is defined merely in terms of its economic
value, with minimal or no consideration of its inhabitants as true human beings, it is a relatively
simple task to treat them inhumanely and drain the area of anything with a market value. The
dividing line between the metropolitan centre and the colonial periphery is reinforced by the
continual objectification of its peoples as Other, something distinctly different from everything
that the Imperial power embodies. However, mimicry profoundly destabilises this standard, as it
threatens to nebulise the central island of authority into an archipelago of undifferentiated states,
threatening the official justification of the white mans burden. In V.S. Naipauls memorable
moniker, these Mimic men will have all the outward appearance of the colonial power, except
for the profane, impenetrable boundary that is the essentialism which defines the Imperial ethos.
This is what is so paradoxically seditious about cultural transplantation. There is no longer an
authentic, original, pure controlling force- everything will be contaminated/ empowered by the
subversive force of imitation. The Other will have become a diluted equal- however, the
mother country will be more equal than others. While replicating, with significant
modifications of its own, the physical and symbolic infrastructure of its coloniser in a prolonged
initiation ritual, it can never be expected to develop a nation free from external administration.
mimicry represents an ironic compromisealmost the same, but not quite. (M&M)

Bhabha, in his characteristically dense and erudite manner, continues:

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. (M&M)

As soon as mechanisms of discourse are franchised to the subject colony, so too are the means
to subvert its values and create a chimerical, subversive metamorphoses- rather than simply
emulating the authorative system, it changes it, glocalizes it, attacks it. If a power is
transferable, it is no longer elevated beyond the reach of the disempowered. Further, the
transformation that occurs when the language is integrated into the native societys own idioms
can be very different from the painless assimilation that was perhaps envisaged- their own
individual interpretations and practices can actually enhance, or make more explicit the
differences innate in their unbalanced association. Instead of being forever conceptualised as an
inchoate version of the perfect whole, the subjected country may develop resentment that it is
condemned to reside at the bottom of feudal hierarchy, having a taste of independence while
being denied its full expression. This profound ambiguity, constituted through the Empires own
methods, generates a dangerous hybridity, capable of jeopardising the entire Imperial project.
The erosion of the walls between colonised/ colony has the ever potential to collapse completely,

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The ambivalence of colonial authority repeatedly turns from mimicry - a difference that is almost
nothing but not quite - to menace - a difference that is almost total but not quite. And in that other
scene of colonial power, where history turns to farce and presence to 'a part' can be seen the twin
figures of narcissism and paranoia that repeat furiously, uncontrollably. (M&M)

Bill Ashcroft has written extensively on the converse myth of essentialism within the native
countries, suggesting that propagating a myth of a hermetically sealed, ethnically and cultural
pure nation can be an effective short-term expedient in formulating strategies of resistance
against an occupying force. However, he contends that culture is as organic as the people who
give it life, a dynamic force that is always in a condition of absorption and production. In this
way the idea of a cultural purity that existed prior to the colonial incursion is as erroneous as it is
potentially fascistic. He compellingly argues that all cultural interactions indelibly change both
participants, irrespective of the nature of the relationship.

Discursive interpolation at this point begins to have a material effect, it never leaves the
dominant space intactits transformative power is (very often) dialogic and regenerative. (Post
Colonial Transformation, p54/55)

What is intended as a process of consolidation can often give life to new forms of
insurrectionism. The very existence of similarities with an axiomatic system predicated upon
extolling a dogmatic alterity fundamentally challenges the basis of such assertions, threatening
the imminent collapse of the entire system. This syncretic union of disparate modes of discourse
has a dangerous aspect, as well as the Utopian idea of cross-cultural exchange. Jean Rhys Wide
Sargasso Sea illustrates the acute difficulties that can occur when a subject finds that the
certainties that had been propagated for generations become volatile, replaced with anxieties and
alienation.

I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why was I ever
born again. (WSS, p166)

While Rhys appropriates the story of Jane Eyre and manipulates it to gave a material basis to the
one-sided othering of Bertha, the story refuses to cater to any desires for a harmonious ending.
Antoinette, a creole who became an internal migr in the only home that she has ever known,
was unable to reconcile (with her societ(ies)) the differences that separated her from true
identification with one particular group. This is not presented as a positive cultural exchange -
the process of resolving deep seated difficulties can often be a prolonged one, with no end in
sight. Both her and Rochesters lack of taxonomical certainties about their place in the world is
part of a larger problem of identity construction in a changing world. If the centre cannot hold,
what can the individual use to orientate herself with? Is she condemned to a schizophrenic
volatiliy, or can new possibilities emerge from the conflagration of the Imperial archetype- a
deconstruction or revitalisiation through globlization.

Wide Sargasso Sea (is radically ambiguous)Featuring a Creole narrator/ protagonist who is
neither black (Afro-Caribbean) nor white (European), and whose story mimics rather than
merely represents, the story of her literary predecessor, Rhys novel maintains a constant tension
between the obligation to reproduce its precursor text and the will to disobey it. The dialectic

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remains unresolved. (A Tale of Two Parrots: Walcott, Rhys and the Uses of Colonial Mimicry,
p657)

Works cited

Ashcroft, Bill et al. Post Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. London: Routledge, 2005

Foucault, Michael. Discipline and Punish. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1991

Bhabha, Homi K. Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse in The
Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Obtained at
http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/bhabha/mimicry.html

Ashcroft, Bill. Post-colonial Transformation. London: Routledge, 2001

Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2001

Huggan Graham A Tale of Two Parrots: Walcott, Rhys and the Uses of Colonial Mimicry
Contemporary Literature > Vol. 35, No. 4 (Winter, 1994), pp. 643-660 Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0010-7484%28199424%2935%3A4%3C643%3AATOTPW
%3E2.0.CO%3B2-P

This page was written by Gavin McGarry

This project was completed under the direction of Dr Leon Litvack as a requirement for the MA
degree in Modern Literary Studies in the School of English at the Queen's University of Belfast.
The site is evolving and will include contributions from future generations of MA students on
other writers and themes.

Email Dr Litvack with your comments: L.Litvack at qub.ac.uk

The Imperial Archive 2007

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