Of Mimicry and Man

A Walk-Through of Of Mimicry and Man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse

The best way I can think of walking through Bhabha is an admission:  I never feel at ease reading, writing, or discussing Bhabha.  The first reason for this misgiving is quite simple.  Bhabha’s prose is difficult to read.  Of Mimicry and Man is not light, bedtime reading.  This does not, in-and-of-itself, become a reason not to pursue reading and re-reading his text as it has for many others (a quick search for Bhabha will reveal a legion of folks intent on critiquing his prose if not his thought).  My own work here is not an attempt to add yet another piece to that particular pile.  Rather, it is an erstwhile attempt to unpack a very rich and dense text to see what it reveals while seeking to add my own theoretical positions.

The second reason is twofold and perhaps more important to what I am attempting to do in the space of this blog.  Bhabha has a tendency to assume his reader has an intimacy with the texts he is examining and a tendency to refer to only parts of these texts and read them in a vacuum–a certain irony considering in this essay he takes up, among other issues of subjectivity, the notion of “partial presence” (88).  This is a long way of saying that before I can feel comfortable discussing Bhbaha’s work, I feel compelled to read what he is referencing right along with him.  There is something about rigor here and something about feeling comfortable in his prose.

Of Mimicry and Man starts with a piece from Jacques Lacan’s The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis; in particular, Bhabha references a chunk from “The line and the light” out of the section “Of the Gaze as objet Petit a.”  Though Bhabha’s use of Lacan will perhaps become under dispute, I don’t want to begin unfolding the use of Lacanian theory in Bhabha before every speaking the meat of his text.  Instead, I merely want to comment on the epigram as it lies on the page and will double back to it when Bhabha does in his own text.

The opening of the epigram is simply that “Mimicry reveals something in so far as it is distinct from what might be called an itself that is behind” and then compares mimicry to “camouflage in human warfare” (85).  Without Bhabha’s comment and deployment of Lacan in the text, what do we have?  We have a simple notion that mimicry reveals something only if it is different or distinct from what is behind the mimicry.  Further, mimicry functions as camouflage for the itself that is behind, different, and distinct.  At this moment, what Bhabha intends to do with this is unclear.

Juxtaposed against this piece from Lacan is a quote from Sir Edward Cust.  Unike the Lacan piece, what Cust has to say is able to be unfolded (for those interested, it can be accessed via the Recovered Histories website: Reflections on West African Affairs…).  Cust’s text is as it appears on the page of Bhabha’s work: it is a 45 page tract that rails against the Colonial Department for treating the native populations of the West Indies as British citizens.  In this regard, it is useful to extract examples from as Bhabha winds through his text and as a stand-alone example of the racist belief structure of colonial authority.

What is being done with mimicry in Bhabha’s text begins to take shape in the opening lines of Cust’s piece.  Cust points to the way in which colonial dependencies were given a “mimic representation of the British Constitution” (85).  In this regard, we are set for the idea that there is a difference or distinction between the way representation of the British Constitution and the British Constitution.

The opening of Bhabha’s text then asserts that in the time and the place of post-Enlightenment England, “colonialism speaks in a tongue that is forked, not false” (85).  This statement brings the reading to a full stop.  Perhaps this makes sense to everyone but me on first reading, but I maintain that it requires some explanation and some examination.  There is a long legacy of writing about the falsity of colonial discourse whether it is practical or theoretical and Bhabha cuts against this immediately.

In order to “get after” what Bhabha might mean here, it is instructive to look at a critique of Bhabha from Patrick Colm Hogan in Colonialism and Cultural Identity (a significant and relevant chunk of his text can be found online: Hogan’s Critique of Bhabha).