ABSTRACT
This chapter explains why Bhabha uses the concept of ‘the uncanny’ to characterize the post-colonial experience. This explanation draws on his understanding of stereotypes and mimicry, outlined in the previous two chapters. Chapter 3 explained that the colonizer creates monstrous stereotypes that, far from reassuring him of his authority, actually point to anxiety at the heart of his identity. Chapter 4 then suggested that this anxiety enables the colonized population to resist colonial authority through mimicry, a strategy of doubling or repetition. With these two aspects of his work, Bhabha provides a full picture of the colonial psychic economy, in which both colonized and colonizer are involved. Drawn from psychoanalysis, the idea of the uncanny is one important way Bhabha describes this economy of monstrous doubling. As I have suggested, the use of psychoanalytic concepts is central to his work, and this is because post-colonial criticism is itself a project aiming to analyse the repressed ideas and histories that allowed the West to dominate so much of the world.
