ABSTRACT
The Indians interrogate the English presence their questions problematize the singular countenance of authority and expose its hybridity. Bhabha describes how colonial authority relies on a transparency of reference, cultural 'rules of recognition' which delimit meaning and which will be disrupted by other cultures' interpretations and inscriptions. Bhabha begins his introduction to the collection of essays he has edited under the title Nation and Narration by claiming the nation's ambivalent emergence. For Freud, ambivalence expresses the co-existence of the 'two classes of instincts', which are the sexual instincts and the 'death instinct'. The stereotype functions in the manner of, first, a metaphor, as a mask or substitute for the colonial subject it is supposedly similar to, and secondly, a metonym, representing the colonial subject by a number of its putative attributes. Mimicry repeats colonial authority as a presence that is 'partial', both incomplete and virtual, and so disturbs the power and difference on which that authority is based.
