These paragraphs helped me great deal to understand Bhabha and Spivak and what their deconstruction does to the postcolonial theory

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?