ABSTRACT
I have explained Bhabha’s analysis of the stereotype, emphasizing the anxiety that stereotypical representations betray in the colonizer’s sense of self-identity. However, for Bhabha’s analysis to illuminate the agency of the colonized, as well as the anxiety of the colonizer, that anxiety has to open a space for the colonized to resist colonial discourse. This chapter will demonstrate how anxiety is matched by mimicry, with the colonized adopting and adapting to the colonizer’s culture. Importantly, this mimicry is not slavish imitation, and the colonized is not being assimilated into the supposedly dominant or even superior culture. In fact, mimicry as Bhabha understands it is an exaggerated copying of language, culture, manners, and ideas. This exaggeration means that mimicry is repetition with difference, and so it is not evidence of the colonized’s servitude. In fact, this mimicry is also a form of mockery, and Bhabha’s post-colonial theory is a comic approach to colonial discourse, because it mocks and undermines the ongoing pretensions of colonialism and empire. As one example, Bhabha makes connections between the ‘comic timing’ of Jews and that of Parsis, the ethnic group to which he belongs (see JA). He suggests that both groups repeat stereotypical jokes about themselves, but that the repetition always transforms those jokes, and kick-starts the frozen circulation of stereotypes: joking becomes a form of resistance to colonial discourse. Mimicry in general is one response to the circulation of stereotypes.
