Homi K. Bhabha

• Focuses on the dissonance in colonial discourses
• Concepts of ambivalence, hybridity and mimicry to explain how colonial works and how it can be undone

Signs Taken for Wonders

• Epigraph notes the I in English language which is written with a capital letter
• in the cultural writings of English colonialism, the myth of the discovery of the English book is very persistent after the early 19th century:
  • In 1817, Anund Messeh, an Indian cathechist, retells his encounter with a group of people fascinated with a Bible and its teachings
  • In 1902, Conrad’s Marlow, while travelling in the Congo, finds a book on seamanship
• Naipaul discovers this scene in Conrad’s book half a century later and writes about it, stating that the scene related to the political panic he was feeling when coming to India as a young student.
  • Instead of the fixed world he had imagined to find there, a kind of objectivity, he found how Conrad had offered a vision of the other which necessarily entailed its degradation
• In these texts, the discovery of the books:
  • suggest the triumph of colonialism
  • install the sign of appropriate representation
  • create the conditions for the beginning of a narrative
  • is a process of displacement (Entstellung)
    • however the books are presented as universally adequate: they communicate the immediate vision of the thing, without the discourse that accompanied it
• The books install the ideology linked to the Western sign: empiricism, idealism, mimeticism, monoculturalism
• This ideology maintains the tradition of the English national authority
  • revisionary narrative corresponds to the history of the disciplines of Commonwealth history and literature
  • For example, Messeh’s statement that all countries will receive the word represents a shift from a former educational practice which was more "orientalist", to a much more interventionist method to achieve a homogeneous India.
  • Conrad can entertain the ideological ambivalences that we find in his narrative because the ideal of English civil discourse exists (infused with English authority and the civilizing mission endorsed in the idea of British imperialism)
  • Naipaul translates Conrad from Africa to the Caribbean to maintain the tradition of civility, to transform the hopelessness of postcolonial history in an appeal for the autonomy of art
    • he becomes convinced of the unmediated nature of the Western book
• The discovery of the English book establishes a standard for imitation and a mode of civil authority and order
• What is English cannot be represented as a full presence, it is marked by its belatedness
  • the book acquires its meaning as a signifier of authority after the traumatic scenario of colonial difference returns the eye of power to a previous identity
    • but this identity cannot be original (because it is constructed by repetitions), nor identical (because it is defined by difference).
• Thus the colonial presence is always ambivalent, split between its apparent originality and authority and its construction in repetition and difference
• its effects are seen in the split subjects of the racist stereotype
• The problematic idea of "presence" in Derrida allows Bhabha to explain how the process of visibility and recognition in colonial discourse
  • never fails to be an authoritative acknowledgement
  • without ceasing to be a spacing between desire and fulfillment
• Content is fixed as an effect of the present and we meet not plenitude but the structured gaze of power whose objective is authority and whose subjects are historical
• Under a false appearance of the present, the signified seems to prevail over the signifier
• puts the addressee in the proper frame for some action or result
• disposal as bestowal (frame of reference) and disposal as inclination (frame of mind), along which runs a boundary of authorization
  • this boundary is shifting
• the surface of the english book stabilizes the agonistic colonial space, its appearence regulates the ambivalence between origin and displacement, discipline and desire, mimesis and repetition
• the field of truth emerges as a visible effect of knowledge/power after the regulatory and displacing vision of the true and the false
• this brings us to the ambivalence of the presence of authority
  • transparency signifies discursive closure
  • but this is achieved through a disclosure of its rules of recognition and the unmistakable referent of historical necessity
    • the immediate visibility of such a regime of recognition is resisted: this is the effect of an ambivalence
    • domination is achieved through a disavowal that denies the differánce of colonialist power, the chaos of its intervention as distortion
    • Colonialist authority however requires the production of differentiations in the subjected population
      • these must disallow a stable unitary assumption of collectivity
      • the part (colonialist foreign body) must be a representation of the whole (conquered country), but the right of representation is based on their radical difference
    • this requires a theory of the hybridization of discourse and power -in the discriminatory effects of the discourse of cultural colonialism, the reference of discrimination is always to a process of splitting as the condition of subjection
    • to be authoritative, the rules of recognition must reflect consensual opinion, to be powerful, it must breach these rules to represent the exorbitant objects of discrimination beyond its purview
    • Hybridity os the sign of the productivity of colonial power
      • the name for the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal: the production of discriminatory identities that secure the pure and original identity of authority
    • this reveals the ambivalence at the core of traditional discourses on authority and enables a form of subversion which is based on that uncertainty, and which turns the discursive conditions of dominance into the grounds of intervention.
    • if the acceptance of authority excludes evaluation of the content of an utterance and if its source rejects conflicting reasons and personal judgement… are the marks of authority less effective? Rather, effective in a different way
    • Hibridity is not a problem of genealogy or identity between two different cultures which can then be resolved as an issue of cultural relativism.
    • Instead, it is a problematic of colonial representation and individuation that reverses the effects of the colonial disavowal, so that the other denied knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority.
    • This process of hybridity is best described as a metonymy of presence
      • the hybrid object retains the semblance of the authoritative symbol but revalues the presence by resisting it as the signifier of displacement -after the intervention of difference.
      • the metonymic strategy produces the signifier of colonial mimicry: camouflage. It reveals something because it is different from what is behind, which might be called an itself.
        • discourse is a form of defensive warfare, and mimicry marks the moments of civil disobedience within the discipline of civility