ABSTRACT
Examination of the post-colonial subject is best approached by way of Homi Bhabha’s introduction to Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1986). What is most valuable about this analysis is the recognition of the split in the colonial world and the way that this split is seen to apply to both the coloniser and the colonised. Positions of dominance and domination are not easily compartmentalised, and echo each other. The fear/desire oscillation draws both subjects into a mirror-image. The notion of mimicry is manifested in the covert positioning of the colonised subject, who, while seeking to reproduce, subverts imperial power. Bhabha’s reading of Fanon highlights the intervention of colonialism in the formation of the subject. Psychoanalysis sees the human subject as formed in a dialectical relationship to the site of an imaginary Other (the Lacanian mirror-image). This site is now seen to be provided by the Other subject of colonialism-the Black or the native. However, the image of the Black man refracts and interrupts, rather than providing easily identifiable positions:
The Black presence ruins the representative nar rative presence of Western per sonhood: its past tethered to treacherous stereotypes of primitivism and degeneracy… (Bhabha, 1986, Foreword to Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks,
p. xii) The white man encounters his image as Other in confrontation with his Black double, to which he would like to ascribe a notion of pr imitiveness, or igin or savagery. This easy identification is belied, as the Black man reflects not the Other but the ambivalence of the mir ror-image: ‘The image is at once a metaphor ic substitution, an illusion of presence and by that same token a
metonymy, a sign of its absence and loss’ (Bhabha, 1986a, p. xviii). The image in the colonial mirror recreates the Black man as a twinning, a mimic or a double, and it is within this process of reflection that the identities of both coloniser and colonised are formed. Bhabha insists that colonial mimicry does not perform the task of a faithful reconstruction; instead it works as a refraction, and transforms the colonial situation, throwing back an unfamiliar, and even unrecognisable image into the colonial mirror.
