For Bhabha the ‘emblem
of the English book’ is one of the most important of the ‘signs taken for
wonders’ by which the coloniser controls the imagination and the aspirations of
the colonised, because the
book assumes a greater authority than the experience of the colonised peoples
themselves. But, as Bhabha argues, such authority simultaneously renders
the colonial presence ambivalent, since it only comes about by displacing those images of identity already
held by the colonised society[M1] . The colonial space is therefore
an agonistic space. Despite the ‘imitation’ and ‘mimicry’ with which
colonised peoples cope with the imperial presence, the relationship becomes one
of constant, if implicit, contestation and opposition. Indeed, such mimicry becomes
the very site of that conflict, a ‘transparency’, as Bhabha puts it, which is
dependent for its fixity on the underlying negative of imperial presence which
it seems to duplicate. For Bhabha ‘mimicry’ does not mean that opposition is
rejected, but rather that it is seen to encompass more than overt opposition.
Opposition is not simply reduced to intention, but is implicit in the very
production of dominance whose intervention as a ‘dislocatory presence’
paradoxically confirms the very thing it displaces. The resulting hybrid
modalities also challenge
the assumption of the ‘pure’ and the ‘authentic’, concepts upon which the
resistance to imperialism often stands. Indeed hybridity, rather than
indicating corruption or decline, may, as Bhabha argues, be the most common and
effective form of subversive opposition since it displays the ‘necessary deformation
and displacement of all sites of discrimination and domination’.
Spivak’s and
Bhabha’s analyses are important and very influential warnings of the
complexities of the task faced by post-colonial theory. But they have also
invited responses which see them and their approach as too deeply implicated in
European intellectual traditions, which older, more radical exponents of
post-colonial theory, such as Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi, had sought to
dismantle and set aside. The
debate is a struggle between those who want to align themselves with the
subaltern and those who insist that this attempt becomes at best only a refined
version of the very discourse it seeks to displace. All are agreed, in some sense,
that the main problem is how to effect agency[M2] for the post-colonial subject. But the
contentious issue of how this is to be attained remains unresolved.
[M1]Can
we understand this as the colonized reading/understanding of the colonizer’s
texts and meaning? The colonized mimic the West. But the very act of mimicry
dislocates and subverts the meanings intended by the colonizer’s discourse. The
notions of civilization, liberty and human freedom are taken from the colonizer’s
discourse but deployed in the nationalist struggle to fight Western
imperialism.
[M2]Or
is the question: is there an agency independent of the colonizer’s discourse
for the colonized to exercise it to a different end?
