Mimicry Review of Related Theories 1. Elements of Fiction

17 Recent studies and theories on postcoloniality has developed attitude in comparing hybridity with rootedness or nation. Kortenaar has reminded that neither authenticity nor creolization is an inherently progressive or regressive position Kortenaar, 1995:40-41. Authenticity can be both enabling or destroying, as it is evident in some characters in postcolonial fictions. The task in scrutinizing postcolonial mixed identity, Loomba says, is then “to locate and evaluate their ideological, political and emotional valencies, as well as their intersections in the multiple histories of colonialism and postcoloniality” Loomba, 2005:153.

c. Mimicry

Colonial mimicry, as Bhabha suggests, is “the desire of a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite ” Bhabha, 2004:122. Mimicry as the strategy, however, affects both the colonial subjects and the legitimation of colonial authority. The ambivalence of mimicry, almost the same but not quite, makes the colonial subject and its authority share a somewhat ‘partial’ representation. Partial here, as Bhabha explains, means ‘incomplete’ or ‘virtual’: 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 Bhabha, 2004:123. The menace of mimicry, Bhabha urges, is the double vision it sets forth. Mimicry does not only discover the ambivalence of the colonial discourse but also disrupts its authority. Its threat, Bhabha would add, 18 comes from the prodigious and strategic production of conflictual, fantastic, discriminatory ‘identity effects’ in the play of a power that is elusive because it hides no essence, no ‘itself’ Bhabha, 2004:128- 129. In Bhabha’s comment, the desire to emerge as ‘authentic’ through mimicry is treated as “the final irony of partial representation” Bhabha, 2004:126. However, this partial presence also exists in the colonial subject. The native people who accept the invitation to be mobilised in the discourse of mimicry efface “[the] effect of a flawed colonial mimesis, in which to be Anglicized is emphatically not to be English” Bhabha, 2004:125. Despite any invocation of such characters, they put themselves in a discourse that refuses to be representational.

d. Althusserian Ideological Interpellation