ABSTRACT
The establishment of a cultural nationalism and hence an ethnic consciousness and identity in the postcolonial world is often explained with reference to the Hegelian theory that human beings acquire identity or self-consciousness only through contact with and recognition of an Other, of the realization of the self confronted with another self (Gandhi 16). The thoughts of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich von Hegel (1770-1831) on the construction of identity and his assumption of the creation of identity through the dialectic of one person’s concept of the other as self have had a significant impact on postcolonial theory. In fact, Hegel’s model of the master-slave-relationship underlies many postcolonial theories to explain the relationship between colonizer and colonized and to shed light on the slave’s (colonized’s) existence as shaped by the conquering other and the slave’s consequent attempt to reject the master’s (colonizer’s) dominance. At the same time, however, Hegel proposed that the slave (colonized) will imitate the master (colonizer) in the simultaneous process of refusal or rejection-for instance, in the “mimicry” (Gandhi 148) of the colonizer’s language-while trying to “rehumanize” himself and develop a sense of self and identity. Homi Bhabha defines “colonial mimicry” as “the desire for a reformed and recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same but not quite. Which is to say, that the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence” (361). It is important to note, however, that both colonized and colonizer have these ambivalent and conflicting feelings of attraction and repulsion toward one another that reflect the give and take of the dialectic between their selves and hence determine the creation of their respective but intertwined identities.
