ABSTRACT
The underlying themes of this essay are race, hybridity, and mimicry, ideas which are in constant circulation in contemporary discussions of colonial and postcolonial discourse and practice. The chapter begins with a scene described by the French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835, and turned by him into a sort of allegorical tableau. Journeying through the forests of Alabama he comes across the log cabin of a pioneer. From the earliest accounts of Indian-white encounters, the Indian woman was depicted as a ‘natural’ partner for the European discoverer. Best known in American literature through the many versions of Pocahontas and John Smith, the archetype can be found from the earliest images of the New World, and appears, for instance, in Mexico in the person of the helper of Cortes, La Malinche. While having a certain proportion of Indian blood might or might not be an active ingredient in one’s racial identity, then, for Blacks the situation is quite different.
