2. • Macaulay’s “of a class of interpreters between us and the millions whom
we govern – a class of persons Indian in blood and colour but English in
taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect” –
• Macaulay "a class of interpreters between us and the millions whom we
govern”
• Frantz Fanon in the phrase, “black skin/white masks,”
• in other words a mimic man raised "through our English School," as a
missionary educationist wrote in 1819, "to form a corps of translators and
be employed in different departments of Labour.“
• makes a mockery of Oriental learning until faced with the challenge of
conceiving of a "reformed" colonial subject.
• To be Anglicized, is emphatically not to be English.
3. • Those inappropriate signifiers of colonial discourse-the difference
between being English and being Anglicized; the identity between
stereotypes which, through repetition, also become different; the
discriminatory identities constructed across traditional cultural norms
and classifications, the Simian Black, the Lying Asiatic--all these are
metonymies of presence.
• They are strategies of desire in discourse that make the anomalous
(paradoxical, unusual) representation of the colonized
• As Lacan reminds us, mimicry is like camouflage, not a harmonization
or repression of difference, but a form of resemblance that
differs/defends presence by displaying it in part, metonymically.
4. • Mimicry is traditionally seems to be something to be shameful ( Amar Deep
Singh)
• A slight element of satire and making fun of others
• Derisive term – to mimic the colonizer
• Mimicry according to Bhaba, perpetuated through colonial policy
• The idea was to create mimic men – how to create India subjects – to mimic the
habits esthetics and politics of the masters
• To make interpreters and translators – to create uncritical people
• That kind of mimicry through maCaulay famous minutes create a subjects -Bhaba
is making it not exclusively as negative trend
• Hot country like india and Pakistan , children are made to wear neck tie where as
it should of cold areas.
• Practical use of English is not mimicry but style of pronunciation of British is
mimicry
5. • Mimicry comes with slippages, excesses and difference
• The discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to
be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its
difference.
• Stricken by indeterminacy. No perfect def of mimicry – ambiguous –
ambivalence – whether to copy- allows to mimick but never full become
anglicized
• Signs of double articulation. They would us to be disciplined but no liberaty
– double standard
• Signs of inappropriateness
6. • Bhabha recognizes then that colonial power carefully establishes
highly-sophisticated strategies of control and dominance; that is,
while it is aware of its ephemerality ( lasting a very short time), it is also
anxious to create the means that guarantee its economic, political
and cultural endurance, through the conception,
• mimicry emerges as one of the most elusive and effective strategies
of colonial power and knowledge.
7. • Colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a
subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite.
• Mimicry emerges as the representation of a difference that is itself a
process of disavowal.
• Mimicry is, thus, the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of
reform, regulation, and discipline, which "appropriates" the Other as it
visualizes power.
• Mimicry is also the sign of the inappropriate, however, a difference or
recalcitrance which operates the dominant strategic function of colonial
power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an imminent threat to both
"normalized" knowledge and disciplinary powers.
8. • The effect of mimicry on the authority of colonial discourse is
profound and disturbing. For in "normalizing" the colonial state or
subject, the dream of post-Enlightenment civility alienates its own
language of liberty and produces another knowledge of its norms.
• The ambivalence which thus informs this strategy is discernible, for
example, in Locke's Second Treatise which splits to reveal the
limitations of liberty in his double use of the word "slave“
• It is from this area between mimicry and mockery, where the
reforming, civilizing mission is threatened by the displacing gaze of its
disciplinary double,
9. • Mimicry describe the ambivalence between the colonizer and
colonized
• Under cover of camouflage, mimicry, like the fetish, is a part object
that radically revalues the normative knowledges of the priority of
race, writing, and history.
• The ambivalence of colonial authority repeatedly turns from mimicry-
a difference that is almost nothing but not quite-to menace- a
difference that is almost total but not quite.
10. • In the ambivalent world of the "not quite/not white," on the margins
of metropolitan desire, the founding objects of the Western world
become the erratic, eccentric, accidental objets trouves ("found object )of the
colonial discourse- the part-objects of presence. It is then that the
body and the book loose their representational authority.
• Black skin splits under the racist gaze, displaced into signs of bestiality
(sexual relations between a human being and a lower animal), genitalia, grotesquerie (style of decorative
art characterized by fanciful or fantastic human and animal forms) which reveal the phobic myth of the
undifferentiated whole white body
