Hybridity, mimicry, and ambivalence

1. Basic biography about Homi Bhabha

Homi K. Bhabha (/ˈbɑːbɑː/; born 1949) is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and Language, and the Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. He is one of the most important figures in contemporary post-colonial studies, and has developed a number of the field's neologisms and key concepts, such as hybridity, mimicry, difference, and ambivalence. Such terms describe ways in which colonised peoples have resisted the power of the coloniser, according to Bhabha's theory. In 2012, he received the Padma Bhushan award in the field of literature and education from the Indian government.

After lecturing in the Department of English at the University of Sussex for more than ten years, Bhabha received a senior fellowship at Princeton University where he was also made Old Dominion Visiting Professor. He was Steinberg Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania where he delivered the Richard Wright Lecture Series. At Dartmouth College, Bhabha was a faculty fellow at the School of Criticism and Theory. From 1997 to 2001 he served as Chester D. Tripp Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. In 2001–02, he served as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at University College, London. He has been the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University since 2001. Bhabha also serves on the Editorial Collective of Public Culture, an academic journal published by Duke University Press. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan award by the Government of India in 2012.

2. The notion of mimicry

In general connotation, ‘mimicry’ refers to the imitation of one species by another. Webster’s New World College Dictionary further defines the term as “close resemblance, in colour, form, or behaviour of oneorganism to another or to some object in its environment … it serves to disguise or conceal the organism frompredators.” The disguising of the organism in the process of mimicry brings the term closer to the warfaredevice of camouflaging which, according to Webster’s Dictionary, implies “the disguising of troops, ships,guns, etc. to conceal them from the enemy, as by the use of paint, nets, or leaves in patterns merging with thebackground.” Jacques Lacan establishes the relation between mimicry and camouflage in his essay ‘The Lineand Light”:

Mimcry reveals something in so far as it is distinct from what might be called an itself that is behind. The effectof mimicry is camouflage…. It is not a question of harmonizing with the background, but against a mottledbackground, of becoming mottled— exactly like the technique of camouflage practiced in human warfare.(Bhabha 1994: 121)

Bhabha’s analysis of mimicry in his essay ‘Of Mimicry and Man’ is largely based on the Lacanian vision of mimicry as camouflage resulting in colonial ambivalence. He sees the colonizer as a snake in the grass who, speaks in "a tongue that is forked," and produces a mimetic representation that "... emerges as one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge"(Bhabha 1994: 122).

In postcolonial studies ‘mimicry’ is considered as unsettling imitations that are characteristic of postcolonial cultures. It is a desire to severe the ties with ‘self’ in order to move towards ‘other’. Salim, the hero of Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, expresses his penchant for colonial mimicry when he wishes to desert his roots. He says: “I wanted to break away. To break away from my family and community also meant breaking away from my unspoken commitment....” (Naipaul 1980: 31)

3. The notion of Ambivalence

For Homi K. Bhabha, “colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable ‘Other’, as a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite” (Bhabha1994: 122). He is the foremost contemporary critic who has tried to unveil the contradictions inherent in colonial discourse in order to highlight the colonizer's ambivalence with respect to his attitude towards the colonized Other and vice versa. He continues: “The menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority. And it is a double vision that is a result of what I've described as the partial representation/ recognition of the colonial object.” (Bhabha1994: 126)

In his essay “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” Homi Bhabha locates ‘mimicry’ as one of the most elusive and effective strategies in colonial discourse which centres around civilizing mission based on the notion of ‘human and not wholly human’. In the pretext of this civilizing mission Charles Grant propagates “evangelical system of mission education conducted uncompromisingly in English language”(Bhabha1994: 124) in his “Observations on the state of Society among the Asiatic Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain” (1792) and Macaulay visualizes the bright future for the colonial rule in his "Minute on Indian Education" (1835) through “a class of interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern—a class of persons Indian in blood and colour but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect,” (Bhabha 1994: 124-25) in other words the mimic men.

4. The concept of hybridity

The term hybridity has become one of the most recurrent concepts in postcolonial cultural criticism. It is meant to foreclose the diverse forms of purity encompassed within essentialist theories. Several key thinkers in the realm of hybridity includes among others Homi Bhabha, Robert Young, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, who draw upon related concepts from Deleuze, Derrida, Marx, Fanon and Bakhtin to name a few.(Ref) In particular, Bhabha has developed his concept of hybridity from literary and cultural theory to describe the construction of culture and identity within conditions of colonial antagonism and equity (Meredith, 1998; Bhabha, 1994; Bhabha, 1996).

In socio-cultural milieu, hybridity is used as an explicative term and ‘hybridity’ became a useful tool in forming a discourse of ‘racial mixing’ which was seen as an aberration in the end of 18th century. The kind of hybrid during this era was largely referring to inter marriage of ‘black’ and ‘white’ and the offspring were identified as the hybrid product. It has also been referred to as an abuse term in colonial discourse for those who are products of miscegenation or mixed-breeds.Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin (2006) assert that hybridity occurs in post-colonial societies as a result of economic and political expansion and control and when the coloniser ‘diluted’ indigenous peoples’ (the colonised) social practices and assimilate them to a new social mold. They also further explain that hybridity extends until after the period of imperialism when patterns of immigrations from rural to urban region and from other imperial areas of influence. However, with the end imperialism, with the rising of immigration and economic liberalisation, the term hybridity has profoundly been used in many different dimensions and is one of the most disputed terms in postcolonial studies. It can take many forms including cultural, political and linguistics.

It is important to note that hybridity can be interpreted in many different accounts from a slight hybrid to the extreme of culture clash. In the postcolonial studies the term ‘hybrid’ commonly refers to ‘the creation of new trans-cultural forms within the contact zone produced by colonisation’ (Ashcroft et al.,2003). One other dimension of this term is the ‘hybrid talk’ which is associated with the emergence of postcolonial discourse and its critique of cultural imperialism.

In the linguistics setting, Bakhtin (1981) puts forward the notion of linguistic hybridity. He, according to Young (1995) delineates the way in which language, even within a single sentence, can be doubled-voiced. Bakhtin affirms that linguistic hybridity mixes two social languages within the limits of a single utterance but differentiated by other factors of those social utterances. Simplistically, it describes the ability ‘to be simultaneously the same but different’ (ibid:20). Young further postulates that for Bakhtin, hybridity describes the process of the authorial unmasking of another’s speech, through a language that is ‘double-accented’ and ‘double-styled’.

Bakhtin (1981) divides his linguistic hybridity into two; intentional hybridity and unconscious or organic hybridity. The former occurs when a voice has the ability to ironise and unmask the other within the same utterance. The organic hybridity , on the other hand occurs when two languages fused together:

…. the languages change historically primarily by hybridization, by means of a mixing of various languages co-existing within the boundaries of a single dialect, a single national language, a single branch, a single group of different branches, in the historical as well as paleontological past of languages. (Ibid:358).

Understanding Bhabha’s concept of hybridity in relation to cultural diversity

Bhabha’s conception of hybridity is developed from literary and cultural theory by which he identifies that the governing bodies (coloniser) translate the identity of the colonised (the other) in tandem with the essentialist beliefs. This action of ‘translation’ however does not produce something that is known to the coloniser or the colonised but essentially new (Papastergiadis, 1997). Bhabha believes that it is this new blurred boundaries or spaces in-between subject-position that are identified as the locality of the disruption and displacement of predominant influence of colonial narratives and cultural structures and practice.

Bhabha (1994) claims that the difference in cultural practices within different groups, however rational a person is, is actually very difficult and even impossible and counterproductive, to try and fit together different forms of culture and to pretend that they can easily coexist. 

The concept of the third space is central and useful in analysing this current study in terms of its ‘interstitial positioning’ between cultural and ethnic identity with that of a negotiated identity (shared identity).

Bhabha believes that the process of cultural hybridity gives rise to new and unidentifiable, a new era of negotiation of meaning and representation. For him controversies are inevitable and unavoidable in a multicultural society as negotiations happen almost in all circumstances including socio-politics and economy down to minute affairs such as in classrooms context. The implication of western colonial legacy which had changed cultural ideology of a former colonised nation is central to the modern discourse of negotiation and instead of questioning the legality of certain cultural status assigned to immigrant cultures, it is inevitable but to accept, admire and celebrate diversity in ways which are appropriately befitting the society as a whole.