Mimicry Matters: Postcolonial Borrowing and Backfiring

Abstract

This article explores how postcolonial literary criticism’s borrowing of its different forms of cultural (such as poststructural and postmodern) and materialist/Marxist resistance from Europe, with which it has attempted to counter colonial and neocolonial hegemonic dominations, ultimately works as a boomerang to write back to the once-colonized people in one way or another. For this purpose, this paper will use Homi Bhabha’s theory of mimicry in which the borrowing of European language simultaneously leads to the subversion of colonial domination as well as a subversion of own self. Like Bhabha’s mimicry, postcolonial criticism often tends to focus more on its indebtedness to Europe rather than on attempts to subvert European ideologies which became complicit in colonial domination. Like Bhabha’s theory, postcolonial borrowing of ideas of resistance from Europe focuses more on once-colonized peoples’ inferiority and failure only to produce a kind of self-subversion. Bhabha’s immigrant subject attempts a self-assertion from a hybrid identity position and finally acknowledges an inescapable marginalization. This article will show when later postcolonial criticism often borrows from Europe to ironically assert cultural difference, native agency or local specificity, it turns out once again to lead to self-subversion. By using an observation of a number of recent postcolonial books and articles and with reference to a number of influential postcolonial writers, theorists and critics this paper aims to raise concern about the development of postcolonial self-subversion in certain key areas of postcolonial appropriation of European poststructural, postmodern and Marxist politics.