Sie sind auf Seite 1von 10

Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse Author(s): Homi Bhabha Source: October, Vol.

28, Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis (Spring, 1984), pp. 125-133 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778467 . Accessed: 20/07/2013 12:33
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to October.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 129.100.249.53 on Sat, 20 Jul 2013 12:33:09 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse*

HOMI

BHABHA

in sofar as it is reveals Mimicry something be what distinct might calledan itself from is camthatis behind.The effect ofmimicry harmonizIt is nota question of ouflage .... a mottled butagainst the background, ingwith like mottledexactly ofbecoming background, inhuman the technique practised ofcamouflage warfare. -Jacques Lacan, "The Line and Light," Of theGaze. at thistime It is outofseasonto question of the on every policy ofconferring day, original a mimic British represenEmpire colony ofthe But ifthe tation the British Constitution. of has sometimes creature so endowed forgotten its real insignificance and under the fancied and maces, and all the importance ofspeakers and ceremonies paraphernalia oftheimperial has dared todefy the mother counlegislature, shehas tothank the try, herselffor folly ofconsuch ona condition ferring privileges ofsociety has no earthly a posithat claimtoso exalted tion.Afundamental tohave principle appears been in oursystem or overlooked forgotten of - that colonial colonial dependence. policy of To givetoa colony the forms ofindependence is a mockery; shewouldnotbea colony fora an indepenhourifshecouldmaintain single dent station. Sir Edward Cust, . . "Reflections on West AfricanAffairs addressed to the Colonial Office," Hatchard, London 1839.
-

This content downloaded from 129.100.249.53 on Sat, 20 Jul 2013 12:33:09 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

126

OCTOBER

The discourse of post-Enlightenment English colonialism oftenspeaks in a tongue that is forked,not false. If colonialism takes power in the name of of farce. For the it repeatedlyexercisesits authority throughthe figures history, epic intentionof the civilizingmission, "human and not whollyhuman" in the of the Divine" 1 oftenprofamous words of Lord Rosebery, "writby the finger duces a textrichin the traditionsof trompe l'oeil,irony,mimicry,and repetition. In this comic turn fromthe high ideals of the colonial imagination to its low mimeticliteraryeffects, mimicryemerges as one of the most elusive and effective strategiesof colonial power and knowledge. Withinthatconflictual economy ofcolonial discourse which Edward Said2 describes as the tension between the synchronicpanoptical vision of domination- the demand for identity,stasis- and the counter-pressureof the diamimicryrepresentsan ironic comprochange, difference chrony of history of the marginalizingvision of mise. If I may adapt Samuel Weber's formulation castration,3then colonial mimicryis the desire for a reformed,recognizable that is almost the same,butnot Other, as a subject quite.Which is to say, ofa difference in order to that the discourse of mimicryis constructedaround an ambivalence; its its must be effective, excess, its continually produce slippage, mimicry The authorityof that mode of colonial discourse that I have called difference. mimicryis thereforestrickenby an indeterminacy:mimicryemerges as the that is itselfa process of disavowal. Mimicry is, of a difference representation of reform, of a double the articulation;a complex strategy thus, regulation, sign and discipline, which"appropriates"the Other as it visualizes power. Mimicry or recalcitrance is also the sign of the inappropriate, however, a difference which coheres the dominant strategicfunctionof colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an immanent threatto both "normalized"knowledges and disciplinarypowers. of mimicryon the authorityof colonial discourse is profound The effect and disturbing.For in "normalizing"the colonial state or subject, the dream of civilityalienates its own language of libertyand produces post-Enlightenment another knowledge of its norms. The ambivalence which thus informsthis strategyis discernible, for example, in Locke's Second Treatise which splits to reveal the limitationsof libertyin his double use of the word "slave": first as the locus of a legitimateformof ownership,then as the simply,descriptively
* This paper was firstpresented as a contribution to a panel on "Colonialist and PostColonialist Discourse," organized by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak for the Modern Language Association Convention in New York, December 1983. I would like to thank ProfessorSpivak for inviting me to participate on the panel and Dr. Stephan Feuchtwang for his advice in the preparation of the paper. 1. Cited in Eric Stokes, The PoliticalIdeas ofEnglishImperialism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1960, pp. 17-18. New York, Pantheon Books, 1978, p. 240. Edward Said, Orientalism, 2. Samuel Weber: "The Sideshow, Or: Remarks on a Canny Moment," ModernLanguage 3. Notes,vol. 88, no. 6 (1973), p. 1112.

This content downloaded from 129.100.249.53 on Sat, 20 Jul 2013 12:33:09 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

TheAmbivalence of ColonialDiscourse

127

trope foran intolerable, illegitimateexercise of power. What is articulated in between thatdistance between the two uses is the absolute, imagined difference the "Colonial" State of Carolina and the Original State of Nature. It is fromthis area between mimicryand mockery,where the reforming, civilizingmission is threatenedby the displacing gaze of itsdisciplinarydouble, thatmy instancesof colonial imitationcome. What theyall share is a discursive of mimicry process by which the excess or slippage produced by the ambivalence (almost the same, but notquite)does not merely "rupture"the discourse, but into an uncertainty which fixesthe colonial subject as a becomes transformed "partial"presence. By "partial"I mean both "incomplete"and "virtual."It is as if the very emergence of the "colonial" is dependent for its representationupon the authoritative some strategiclimitationor prohibitionwithin discourse itself. The success of colonial appropriationdepends on a proliferation of inappropriate objects that ensure its strategicfailure,so that mimicryis at once resemblance and menace. A classic text of such partialityis Charles Grant's "Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain"(1792)4 whichwas only superseded by James Mills's History ofIndia as the most influentialearly account of Indian manners and morals. Grant's dream of nineteenth-century an evangelical system of mission education conducted uncompromisinglyin English was partlya belief in political reformalong Christian lines and partly an awareness that the expansion of company rule in India required a systemof "interpellation"-a reformof manners, as Grant put it, thatwould provide the colonial with"a sense of personal identityas we know it." Caught between the desire for religious reformand the fear that the Indians might become turbulent for liberty,Grant implies that it is, in fact the "partial" diffusionof and the"partial"influenceof moral improvements whichwill conChristianity, structa particularly form of colonial is suggested What appropriate subjectivity. is a process of reformthroughwhich Christian doctrines might collude with divisive caste practices to preventdangerous political alliances. Inadvertently, Grant produces a knowledge of Christianityas a formof social controlwhich conflictswith the enunciatory assumptions which authorize his discourse. In that"partial reform" will produce an emptyformof"the imsuggesting,finally, of English manners which will induce them [the colonial subjects] to reitation main under our protection,"'5 Grant mocks his moral project and violates the Evidences of central missionary forbade any Christianity--a tenet--which tolerance of heathen faiths. The absurd extravagance of Macaulay's Infamous Minute(1835)- deeply influencedby Charles Grant's Observations- makes a mockeryofOriental learn4. Charles Grant, "Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain," SessionalPapers1812-13, X (282), East India Company. 5. Ibid., chap. 4, p. 104.

This content downloaded from 129.100.249.53 on Sat, 20 Jul 2013 12:33:09 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

128

OCTOBER

colonial subject. ing untilfaced withthe challenge of conceivingof a "reformed" of European humanismseems capable onlyofironizing Then the greattradition of European learning and colonial power, Macaulay itself.At the intersection between us and the can conceive of nothingother than "a class of interpreters millions whom we govern- a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect'6- in other words a mimic man raised "throughour English School," as a missionaryeducationist wrote in 1819, "to form a corps of translatorsand be employed in different departmentsof Labour."' The line of descent of the mimic man can be traced throughthe worksof Kipling, Forester,Orwell, Naipaul, and to his emergence, most recently,in Benedict Anderson's excellent essay on nationalism, as the ofa flawedcolonial mimesis,in anomalous Bipin Chandra Pal.8 He is the effect not to be English. which to be Anglicized, is emphatically The figureof mimicryis locatable withinwhat Anderson describes as "the inner incompatibilityof empire and nation."' It problematizes the signs of racial and cultural priority,so that the "national" is no longer naturalizable. a mode of represenWhat emerges between mimesis and mimicryis a writing, of history,quite simplymocks its tation, that marginalizes the monumentality power to be a model, thatpower which supposedly makes it imitable. Mimicry and in that diminishing perspective emerges repeatsrather than re-presents Decoud's displaced European vision of Sulaco as where follyseemed even harder to bear the endlessness of civil strife than its ignominy. . . the lawlessness of a populace of all colours and races, barbarism, irremediabletyranny.. . . America is ungovernable.10 Or Ralph Singh's apostasy in Naipaul's TheMimic Men: We pretended to be real, to be learning, to be preparing ourselves forlife,we mimic men of the New World, one unknowncornerof it, with all its remindersof the corruptionthat came so quickly to the
new.11

Both Decoud and Singh, and in theirdifferent ways Grant and Macaulay, are the parodists of history.Despite theirintentionsand invocations theyinscribe across a body politicthatrefusesto be the colonial texterratically, eccentrically
vol. II, ed. William T. B. Macaulay, "Minute on Education," in Sources 6. ofIndian Tradition, Theodore de Bary, New York, Columbia University Press, 1958, p. 49. Mr. Thomason's communication to the Church Missionary Society, September 5, 1819, in 7. The Missionary 1821, pp. 54-55. Register, Benedict Anderson, ImaginedCommunities, 8. London, Verso, 1983, p. 88. 9. Ibid., pp. 88-89. 10. Joseph Conrad, Nostromo, London, Penguin, 1979, p. 161. V. S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men, London, Penguin, 1967, p. 146. 11.

This content downloaded from 129.100.249.53 on Sat, 20 Jul 2013 12:33:09 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

The Ambivalence of ColonialDiscourse

129

in a narrativethat refusesto be representational.The desire to representative, as "authentic" through mimicry through a process of writing and emerge final of the irony partial representation. repetition-is is not the familiarexerciseof dependent colonial What I have called mimicry so that, as Fanon has observed,12 relations throughnarcissisticidentification the black man stops being an actional person foronly the whiteman can reprebehind its mask: sent his self-esteem. Mimicry conceals no presence or identity it is not what Cesaire describes as "colonization-thingification"13 behind which The menace ofmimicry is itsdouble therestandsthe essence of thepresence Africaine. vision which in disclosingthe ambivalence of colonial discourse also disruptsits authority.And it is a double-vision that is a resultof what I've described as the of the colonial object. Grant's colonial as partial representation/recognition partial imitator,Macaulay's translator,Naipaul's colonial politician as playof the New World, these are actor, Decoud as the scene setterof the opirabouffe the appropriate objects of a colonialist chain of command, authorized versions of otherness.But theyare also, as I have shown, the figuresof a doubling, the of colonial desire which alienates the modalityand part-objectsof a metonymy of those dominantdiscoursesin which theyemerge as "inappropriate" normality colonial subjects. A desire that, throughthe repetitionofpartial which presence, is the basis of mimicry,articulates those disturbances of cultural, racial, and that menace the narcissisticdemand of colonial authority. historicaldifference It is a desire thatreverses"in part"the colonial appropriationby now producing a partial vision of the colonizer's presence. A gaze of otherness,that shares the acuity of the genealogical gaze which, as Foucault describes it, liberates marginal elements and shattersthe unityof man's being throughwhich he extends his sovereignty.'4 I want to turn to this process by which the look of surveillancereturnsas the displacing gaze of the disciplined,where the observerbecomes the observed and "partial" representation rearticulates the whole notion of identity and alienates it from essence. But not before observing that even an exemplary in India acknowledges the history like Eric Stokes's The English Utilitarians anomalous gaze of otherness but finally disavows it in a contradictoryutterance: Certainly India played no central part in fashioningthe distinctive qualities of English civilisation. In many ways it acted as a disturbing force, a magnetic power placed at the periphery tending to distortthe natural development of Britain's character. . . .5
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White 12. Masks, London, Paladin, 1970, p. 109. 13. Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1972, p. 21 14. Michel Foucault, "Nietzche, Genealogy, History," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, p. 153. 15. Eric Stokes, TheEnglishUtilitarians and India, Oxford, Oxford UniversityPress, 1959, p. xi.

This content downloaded from 129.100.249.53 on Sat, 20 Jul 2013 12:33:09 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

130

OCTOBER

What is the nature of the hidden threat of the partial gaze? How does mimicryemerge as the subject of the scopic drive and the object of colonial surveillance? How is desire disciplined, authoritydisplaced? If we turnto a Freudian figure to address theseissues ofcolonial textuality, that form of differencethat is mimicry-almost the same but not quite-will become clear. Writing of the partial nature of fantasy,caught inappropriately, between the unconscious and the preconscious,making problematic,like mimicry,the very notion of "origins,"Freud has this to say: Their mixed and splitoriginis what decides theirfate.We may compare themwithindividuals of mixed race who taken all round resemble white men but who betraytheircoloured descent by some striking featureor other and on that account are excluded fromsociety and enjoy none of the privileges.16 the visibility Almost the samebutnotwhite:. of mimicryis always produced at It is a formof colonial discourse thatis utteredinter the site of interdiction. dicta: a discourse at the crossroads of what is known and permissibleand that which though known must be kept concealed; a discourse utteredbetween the lines and as such both against the rules and within them. The question of the is thereforealways also a problem of authority. representationof difference thatreveals so littlebut The "desire"of mimicry,which is Freud's striking feature is not merelythat impossibility of the Other which makes such a big difference, - an of The desire colonial resists interdictory mimicry repeatedly signification. an it has not have but object, desire-may strategicobjectiveswhich I shall call the metonymy ofpresence. beThose inappropriate signifiersof colonial discourse- the difference tween being English and being Anglicized; the identitybetween stereotypes the discriminatory identities which, throughrepetition,also become different; constructedacross traditional cultural norms and classifications,the Simian Black, the Lying Asiatic- all these are metonymies of presence. They are of the strategiesof desire in discourse that make the anomalous representation colonized somethingotherthan a process of "the returnof the repressed,"what characterized as collective catharsis.17These instances Fanon unsatisfactorily and multiple of metonymyare the nonrepressiveproductionsof contradictory belief. They cross the boundaries of the culture of enunciation through a strategicconfusionof the metaphoricand metonymicaxes of the cultural prothat is almost duction of meaning. For each of these instances of "a difference creates a crisis forthe cultural priority the same but not quite" inadvertently as the process of repression and substitutionwhich given to the metaphoric difference between paradigmatic systemsand classifications.In negotiates the
16. 17. Sigmund Freud, "The Unconscious" (1915), SE, XIV, pp. 190-191. Fanon, p. 103.

This content downloaded from 129.100.249.53 on Sat, 20 Jul 2013 12:33:09 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

TheAmbivalence of ColonialDiscourse

131

of identityand meaning is rearticulatedalong the mimicry,the representation axis of metonymy.As Lacan reminds us, mimicryis like camouflage, not a harmonization or repression of difference,but a form of resemblance that differs/defends presence by displaying it in part, metonymically.Its threat, I would add, comes fromthe prodigious and strategicproductionof conflictual, in the play of a power that is elusive effects" fantastic,discriminatory "identity because it hides no essence, no "itself." And that formof resemblance is the most to as Edward testifies in his terrifying thing behold, Long ofJamaica History (1774). At the end of a tortured,negrophobicpassage, that shifts anxiouslybetween piety, prevarication, and perversion, the text finallyconfronts its fear; other than the of its "in resemblance nothing repetition part": are all authors as the vilest of human kind, (Negroes) representedby to which they have littlemore pretensionof resemblance thanwhat arises exterior fromtheir forms (my italics).18 From such a colonial encounterbetween the white presence and its black semblance, there emerges the question of the ambivalence of mimicryas a of problematicof colonial subjection. For if Sade's scandalous theatricalization then the language repeatedlyremindsus thatdiscourse can claim "no priority," workof Edward Said will not let us forget thatthe"ethnocentric and erraticwill to power fromwhich textscan spring"''19 is itselfa theaterof war. Mimicry, as the metonymyof presence is, indeed, such an erratic, eccentric strategyof authorityin colonial discourse. Mimicry does not merely destroynarcissistic and desire. It is the proauthority throughthe repetitiousslippage of difference cess of thefixation of the colonial as a formofcross-classificatory, discriminatory discourse, and therefore knowledge in the defilesof an interdictory necessarily raises the question of the authorization of colonial representations. A question of authority that goes beyond the subject's lack of priority(castration) to a historicalcrisis in the conceptualityof colonial man as an object of regulatory power, as the subject of racial, cultural, national representation. "This culture . . . fixed in its colonial status," Fanon suggests,"(is) both presentand mummified,it testified against its members. It definesthem in fact - almost but not without appeal.'"20 The ambivalence of mimicry quite - sugthat the fetishized colonial culture is and an ingests potentially strategically What I have called its are surgent counter-appeal. "identity-effects," always crucially split. Under cover of camouflage, mimicry,like the fetish,is a partof race, object that radically revalues the normativeknowledgesof the priority writing,history. For the fetishmimes the formsof authorityat the point at
18. Edward Long, A History ofJamaica, 1774, vol. II, p. 353. 19. Edward Said, "The Text, the World, the Critic," in TextualStrategies, ed. J. V. Harari, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1979, p. 184. 20. Frantz Fanon, "Racism and Culture," in Toward theAfrican Revolution, London, Pelican, 1967, p. 44.

This content downloaded from 129.100.249.53 on Sat, 20 Jul 2013 12:33:09 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

132

OCTOBER

which it deauthorizes them. Similarly,mimicryrearticulatespresence in terms that which it disavows. There is a crucial difference of its "otherness," between this colonialarticulationof man and his doubles and that which Foucault dethe unthought"21 scribes as "thinking which, fornineteenth-century Europe, is the ending of man's alienation by reconcilinghim withhis essence. The colonial discourse that articulatesan interdictory "otherness" is preciselythe "otherscene" of this nineteenth-century European desire for an authentic historical consciousness. The "unthought" across whichcolonial man is articulatedis thatprocess of confusionthatI have describedas themetonymy ofthe substitutive classificatory chain of ethical and cultural discourse. This results in the splitting of colonial discourse so thattwo attitudestowardsexternalrealitypersist;one takes reality into consideration while the other disavows it and replaces it by a product of desire that repeats, rearticulates"reality"as mimicry. So Edward Long can say withauthority, quoting variously, Hume, Eastwick, and Bishop Warburton in his support, that: Ludicrous as the opinion may seem I do not thinkthatan orangutang husband would be any dishonour to a Hottentotfemale.22 Such contradictoryarticulations of reality and desire- seen in racist statements, jokes, myths- are not caught in the doubtfulcircle of stereotypes, the returnof the repressed. They are the effects of a disavowal that denies the ofthe otherbut produces in its stead formsof authority differences and multiple beliefthat alienate the assumptions of "civil"discourse. If, fora while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetitionof guilt, theories, superstition,spurious authorities,and justification,pseudoscientific to "normalize"formally the classificationscan be seen as the desperate effort disturbance of a discourse of splittingthat violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatorymodality. The ambivalence of colonial authorityrepeatedly turns from mimicry-a differencethat is almost nothing but not that is almost total but not quite. And in that quite-to menace-a difference other scene of colonial power, where historyturns to farce and presence to "a part," can be seen the twin figuresof narcissismand paranoia that repeat furiously, uncontrollably. In the ambivalent world of the "not quite/notwhite," on the margins of of the Western world become the erobjects metropolitandesire, thefounding trouvis of the colonial discourse- the part-objects ratic,eccentric,accidentalobjets of presence. It is then that the body and the book loose theirrepresentational authority.Black skin splitsunder the racist gaze, displaced into signs of besti21. 22. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things,New York, Pantheon, 1970, part II, chap. 9. Long, p. 364.

This content downloaded from 129.100.249.53 on Sat, 20 Jul 2013 12:33:09 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

TheAmbivalence of ColonialDiscourse

133

ality, genitalia, grotesquerie,which reveal the phobic mythof the undifferentiated whole white body. And the holiest of books - the Bible - bearing both the dismemstandard of the cross and the standard of empire findsitselfstrangely bered. In May 1817 a missionarywrote fromBengal: Still everyonewould gladly receive a Bible. And why?- that he may lay it up as a curiosityfora fewpice; or use it forwaste paper. Such it is well known has been the common fate of these copies of the Bible. . . . Some have been bartered in the markets, others have been thrownin snuffshops and used as wrapping paper.23

23.

The Missionary Register, May 1817, p. 186.

This content downloaded from 129.100.249.53 on Sat, 20 Jul 2013 12:33:09 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Das könnte Ihnen auch gefallen