Of Mimicry and Man (Hashim Ali)

Homi Bhabha’s concept of hybridity is a quintessential tool for “radical analytical intervention.” According to this concept, it would be a mimetic effect of the Eurasian subject, rather than his racialized identity, that signals a possibility for postcolonial intervention: a moment that Bhabha calls hybridity. In Bhabha’s view, the mimic man was split between his desire to be white and the irreconcilable difference and thus “he circulated without being seen." Bhabha is fixated with the “unrepresentability” of the mimic men as the colonial situation entailed training the contradictory, hybrid figures to “respect” the colonial whites that can be contrasted with Fanon’s intervention: “the black man stops being an actional person for only the white man can represent his self-esteem” (Bhabha, 155). Perhaps, one can conceptualize these colonial situations as discursive sites of imperial scandal and crisis of empire: a scandal that disrupts and relativizes the totalizing and omnipresent “authority” of the “white” colonizer. As Bhabha points out: “Mimicry does not merely destroy narcissistic authority through the repetitious slippage of difference and desire. It is the process of the fixation of the colonial as a form of cross-classificatory, discriminatory knowledge in the defiles of an interdictory discourse, and necessarily raises the question of the authorization of colonial representations” (Bhabha, 157). Bhabha’s emphasis on “authorization” is fundamental to his critique of historical discipline as employing teleological, linear time and its complicity in the colonial project that mimicry subverts.

Questions:

1. In the post-colonial situations such as nation-state building, how does one reconcile the “unspeakability” of subaltern subjects with the very “loud” historically contingent social and national formations? How does one de-essentialize Bhabha’s “a priori blocs” of hybrid identities in the context of national, social narratives?