There could not be any grand totalizing integration without massive suppression, which was a way of recirculating the effect of domination.
Displacement involved the invention of new forms of subjectivities, of pleasures, of intensities, of relationship, which
also implied the continuous renewal of a critical work that looked carefully and intensively at the very system of values to which one
referred in fabricating the tools of resistance. The risk of reproducing totalitarianism was always present and one would
have to confront, in whatever capacity one has, the controversial values likely to be taken on faith
as universal truths by one’s own culture. Minh Ha, 1991: 217
2.2. Colonial Subject or A Mimic Man
Identifying the sites of colonial resistance was interpreted as the site of resistance in the representation of British colonialism as a civilizing mission.
Through a representative „figures’, the foreground of dominant discourses rhetorical strategies from which the truth-claimed of counter narratives were
derived. The first figure was the mimic man or colonial subject. It was a contradictory
figure simultaneously reinforced the colonial authority and disturbed it Sharpe, 1989: 99. Colonial subject was used specifically for Western-educated native in
order to emphasize the subject status that a class of natives acquires by acceding to the authority of Western knowledge, the restriction of sovereignty to the
colonizers alone, and the denial subject status to natives belonging to the subordinate or subaltern classes.
The colonial subject was produced through a discourse of „civility’ straining to effect a closure in the case of subaltern, where the
violence of the colonial encounter was all the more visible. A
public display of civilized life were images that showed the natives being freed from despotic rule, raised from their ignorance, and
saved from cruel and barbarous practices. These sketches tell of the civilizing mission, which was primarily a story about the
colonizing culture as an emissary of light. Although the civilizing mission was generally associated with self conscious phase of
imperialism, the idea of colonialism as a moral obligation to spread Western civilization appeared long before imperialism was named
as such. The colonial subject was served as an ideological alibi for colonialism. Sharpe, 1989: 100
When the colonial violence was happened, it exceeded the limits of the civilizing mission. Further, the mythological proportions of the latter, the blinding
brightness of its light, eclipse other stories of an East-West encounter. To think of the relation between the discourse centring on the production of the colonial
subject and what it occluded as an eclipse was to see that the subaltern classes were not situated outside the civilizing project but were caught in the path of its
trajectory. The colonial subject who can answer the colonizers back was the product of the same vast ideological machinery that silences the subaltern.
Sharpe quoted Bhabh a’s thought in describing mimicry as a trope of partial
presence that masks a threatening racial difference only to reveal the excesses and slippages of colonial power and knowledge Bhabha, 1985: 179. He explained
that the menace of mimicry was its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority. The movement
between fixity of signification and its divisions or ambivalence of colonial discourse demonstrated that colonial authority was never total and complete and
its absence allowed the native intervention.
2.3. Colonization Systems
