Terms of cultural engagement, whether antagonistic or affiliative, are produced performatively.

The representation of difference must not be hastily read as the reflection of pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in the fixed tablet of tradition. The social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation. The right to signify from the periphery of authorized power and privilege does not depend on persistence of tradition; it is resourced by the power of tradition to be reinscribed through the conditions of contingency and contradictoriness that attend upon the lives of those who are in the minority. The recognition that tradition bestows is a partial form of identification. In restaging the past it introduces other, incommensurable cultural temporalities into the invention of tradition. This process estranges any immediate access to an originary identity or a received tradition. The borderline engagements of cultural difference may as often be consensual as conflictual; they may confound our definitions of tradition and modernity; realign the customary boundaries between the private and the public, high and low; and challenge normative expectations of development and progress. (Bhabha, p. 2) *** Where, once, the transmission of national traditions was the major theme of a wold literature, perhaps we can now suggest that transnational histories of migrants, the colonized, or political refugees---these border and frontier conditions---may be the terrains of world literature. The centre of such a study would neither be the sovereignty of national cultures, nor the universalism of human culture, but a focus on those freak social and cultural displacements that Morrison and Gordimer represent in their unhomely7 fictions. Which leads us to ask: can the perplexity of the unhomely, intrapersonal world lead to an international theme? (Bhabha, p. 12) *** My reading of colonial discourse suggests that the pont of intervention should shift from the ready recognition of images as positive or negative, to an understanding of the processes of subjectification made possible (and plausible) through stereotypical discourseIn order to understand the productivity of colonial power it is crucial to construct its regime of truth, not to subject its representations to a normalizing judgment. Only then does it become possible to understand the productive ambivalence of the object of desire and derision, an articulation of difference contained within the fantasy of origin and identity. What such a reading reveals are the boundaries from the space of that otherness. Bhabha, p. 67) *** I want to take my stand on the shifting margins of cultural displacement---that confounds any profound or authentic sense of a national culture or an organic intellectual---and ask what the function of a committed theoretical perspective 1

might be, once the cultural and historical hybridity of the postcolonial world is taken as the paradigmatic place of departure. (Bhabha, p. 21) colonial fantasy *** The stereotype, then, as the primary point of subjetification in colonial discourse, for both colonizer and colonized, is the scene of a similar fantasy and defence---the desire for an originality which is again threatened by the differences of race, colour, and culture. My contention is splendidly caught in Fanons title Black Skin, White Masks where the disavowal of difference turns the colonial subject into a misfit000a grotesque mimicry or doubling that threatens to split the soul and whole, undifferentiated skin of the ego. The stereotype is not a simplification because it is a false representation of a given reality. It is a simplification because it is an arrested, fixated form of representation that, in denying the play of difference (which the negation through the Other permits), constitutes a problem for the representation of the subject in significations of psychic and social relations. (Bhabha, p. 75) *** Stereotype An important feature of colonial discourse is its dependence on the concept of fixity in the ideological construction of otherness. Fixity, as the sign of cultura l/historical/ racial difference in the discourse of colonialism, is a paradoxical mode of representation: it connotes rigidity and an unchanging order as well as disorder, degeneracy and daemonic repetition. Likewise the stereotype, which is its major discursive strategy, is a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always in place, already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated The absence of such a perspective has its own history of political expediency. To recognize the stereotype as an ambivalent mode of knowledge and power demands a theoretical and political response that challenges deterministic or functionalist modes of conceiving of the [end of p. 66] relationship between discourse and politics. The analytic of ambivalence questions dogmatic and moralistic positions on the meaning of oppression and discrimination. My reading of colonial discourse suggests that the point of intervention should shift form the ready recognition of images as positive or negative to an understanding of the processes of subjectification made possible (and plausible) through stereotypical discourse. To judge the stereotyped image on the basis of a prior political normativity is to dismiss it, not to displace it, which is only possible by engaging with its effectivity; with the repertoire of positions of power and resistance, domination and dependence that constructs colonial identification subject (both colonizer and colonized).In order to understand the productiovity of colonial power it is crucial to construct its regime of truth, not to subject its representations 2

to a normalizing judgment. Only then does it become possible to understand the productive ambivalence of the object of colonial discourse---that otherness which is at once an object of desire and derision, an articulation of difference contained within the fantasy of origin and identity. What such a reading reveals are the boundaries of colonial discourse and it enables a transgression of these limits from the space of that otherness. (Bhabha, pp. 66-67) *** It resembles a form of narrative whereby the productivity and cirvulation of subjects and signs are bound in a reformed and unrecognizable totality. It employs a system of representation, a regime of truth, that is structurally similar to realism. And it is in order to intervene with that system of representation that Edward Said proposes a semiotic of Orientalist power, examining the varied European discourses which constitute the Prient as a unified racial, geographical, political and cultural zone of the world. Saids analysis is revealing of, and relevant to, colonial discourse:
Philosophically, then, the kind of language, thught, and vision that I have been calling orientalism very generally is a form or radical realism; anyone employing orientalism, which is the habit for dealing with questions, objects, qualities and regions deemed Oriental, will designate, name, point too, fix, what he is talking or thinking about with a word or phrase, which then is considered either to have acquired, or simply to be, realityThe tense they employ is the timeless eternal; they convey an impression of repetition and strength For all these functions it is frequently enough to use the simple copula is. (see note #7 by Bhabha)

For Said, the copula seems to be the point at which western rationalism preserves the boundaries of sense for itself. Of this, too, Said is aware when he hints continually at a polarity or division at the very centre of Orientalism. It is, on the one hand, a topic of learning, discovery, practice; on the other, it is the site of dreams, images, fantasies of myths, obsessions and requirements. It is a static system of synchronic essentialism, a knowledge of signifiers of stability such as the lexicographic and the encyclopaedic. However, this site is continually under threat from diachronic forms of history and narrative, signs of instability. And, finally, this line of thinking is given a shape analogical to the dreamwork when Said refers explicitly to a distinction between an unconscious positivuty which he terms latent Orientalism, and the stated knowledges and views about the Orient which he calls manifest Orientalism. (Bhabha, p. 71) *** The closure and coherence attributed to the unconscious pole of colonial discourse and the unproblematized notion of the subject, restrict the effectivity of both power and knowledge. It is not possible to see how power functions productively an incitement and interdiction. Nor would it be possible, without the attribution of ambivalence to relations of power/knowledge, to calculate the traumatic impact of the return of the oppressed---those terrifying stereotypes of savagery, cannibalism, lust and anarchy which are the signal points of identification and alienation, scenes 3

of fear and desire, in colonial texts. It is precisely this function of the stereotype as phobia and fetish that, according to Fanon, threatens the closure of the racial/ [end of p. 72] epidermal schema for the colonial subject and opens the royal road to colonial fantasy. (Bhabha, pp. 71-72) *** There is both a structural and functional justification for reading the racial stereotype of colonial discourse in terms of fetishism. My rereading of Said establishes the structural link. Fetishism, as the disavowal of difference, is that repetitious scene around the problems of castration. The recognition of sexual difference---as the precondition for the circulation of the chain of absence and presence n the realm of the Symbolic---is disavowed by the fixation of an object that masks that difference and restores an original presence. The functional link between the fixation of the fetish and the stereotype (or the stereotype as fetish) is even more relevant. For fetishism is always a play or vacillation between the archaic affirmation of wholeness/similarity---in Freuds terms: All men have penises; for us Some do not have the same skin/race/culture. Within discourse, the fetish represents the simultaneous play between metaphor as substitution (masking absence and difference) and [end of p. 74] metonymy (which contiguously registers the perceived lack). The fetish or stereotype gives access to an identity which is predicated as much on mastery and pleasure as it is on anxiety and defence, for it is a form of multiple and contradictory belief in its recognition of difference and disavowal of it. This conflict of pleasure/unpleasure, mastery/defece, knowledge/disavowal, absence/presence, has a fundamental significance for colonial discourse. For the scene of fetishism is also the scene of reactivation and repetition of primal fantasy---the subjects desire for a pure origin that is always threatened by its division, for the subject must be gendered to be engendered, to be spoken. The stereotype then, as the primary point of subjectification in colonial discourse for both colonizer and colonized, is the scene of a similar fantasy and defence---the desire for an originality which is again threatened by the differences of race, colour, and culture. My contention is splendidly caught in Fanons title Black Skin, White Masks where the disavowal of difference turns the colonial subject into a misfit---a grotesque mimicry or doubling that threatens to split the soul and whole, undifferentiated skin of the ego. The stereotype is not a simplification because it is a false representation of a given reality. It is a simplification because it is an arrested, fixated form of representation that, in denying the play of difference which the negation through the Other permits), constitutes a problem for the representation of the subject in significations of psychic and social relations. (Bhabha, pp. 74-75) *** Mimicry

If I may adapt Samuel Webers formulation of the marginalizing vision of castration, then colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite. Which is to say, that the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence, in order o be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference. The authority of that mode of colonial discourse that I have called mimicry is therefore stricken by an indeterminacy: mimicry emerges as the representation of a difference that is itself a process of disavowal. Mimicry is, thus the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, which appropriates the Other as it visualizes power. Mimicry is also the sign of the inappropriate, however, a difference or recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an immanent threat to both normalized knowledges and disciplinary powers. [] It is from this area between mimicry and mockery, where the reforming, civilizing mission is threatened by the displacing gaze of its disciplinary double, that my instances of colonial imitation come. What they all share is a discursive process by which the excess or slippage produced by the ambivalence of mimicry almost the same, but not quite does not merely rupture the discourse, but becomes transformed into an uncertainty which fixes the colonial subject as a partial presence. By partial I mean both incomplete and virtual. It is as if the very emergence of the colonial is dependent for its representation upon some strategic limitation or prohibition within the authoritative discourse itself. The success of colonial appropriation depends on a proliferation of inappropriate objects that ensures its strategic failure, so that mimicry is at once resemblance and menace. (Bhabha, p. 86) *** What I have called mimicry is not the familiar exercise of dependent colonial relations through narcissistic identification so that, as Fanon has observed, the black man stops being an actional person for only the white man can represent his selfesteem. Mimicry conceals no presence or identity behind its mask; it is not what Cesair describes as colonization-thingification behind which there stands the essence of the presence Africaine. 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 Ive described as partial imitator, Macaulays translator, Naipauls colonial politician as play-actor, Decoud as the scene setter of the opea bouffe of the New World, these are the appropriate objects of a colonialist chain of command authorized versions of otherness. But they are also, as I have shown, the figures of a doubling, the part-objects of a metonymy of colonial desire which alienates the modality and normality of those dominant discourses in which they emerge as inappropriate colonial subjects. A desire that, 5

through the repetition of partial presence, which is the basis of mimicry, articulates those disturbances of cultural, racial and historical difference that menace the narcissistic demand of colonial authority. It is a desire that reverses in part the colonial appropriation by now producing a partial version of the colonizers presence: a gaze [end of p. 88] of otherness, that shares the acuity of the genealogical gaze which, as Foucault describes it, liberates marginal elements and shatters the unity of mans being through which he extends his sovereignty. (Bhabha, pp. 88-89) *** Almost the same but not white: the visibility of mimicry is always produced at the site of interdiction. It is a form of colonial discourse that is uttered inter dicta: a discourse at the crossroads of what is known and permissible and that which though known must be kept concealed; a discourse uttered between the lines and as such both against the rules and within them. The question of the representation of difference is therefore always also a problem of authority. The desire of mimicry, which is Freuds striking feature that reveals so little but makes such a big difference, is not merely that impossibility of the Other which repeatedly resists signification. The desire of colonial mimicry---an interdictory desire--- may not have an object, but it has strategic objectives which I shall call the metonymy of presence. (Bhabha, p. 89) *** From such a colonial encounter between the white presence and its black semblance, there emerge the question of the ambivalence of mimicry as a problematic of colonial subjection. For if Sades scandalous theatricalization of language repeatedly reminds us that discourse can claim no priority, then the work of Edward Said will not let is forget that the ethnocentric and erratic will to power from which texts can spring? is itself a theatre of war. Mimicry, as the metonymy of presence is, indeed such an erratic, eccentric strategy of authority in colonial discourse. Mimicry does not merely destroy narcissistic authority through the repetititious slippage of difference and desire. It is the process of the fixation of the colonial as a form of cross-classificatory, discriminatory knowledge within an interdictory discourse and therefore necessarily raises the question of the authorization of colonial representations; a question of authority that goes beyond the subjects lack of priority (castration) to a historical crisis in the conceptuality of colonial man as an object of regulatory power, as the subject or racial, cultural, national representation. (Bhabha, p. 90) *** Under cover of camouflage, mimicry, like the fetish, is a part-object that radically revalues the normative knowledges of the priorty of race, writing, history. For the fetish mimes the forms of authority at the point at which it deauthorizes them. 6

Similarly, mimicry rearticulates presence in terms of its otherness, that which it disavows. There is a crucial difference between this colonial articulation of man and his doubles and that which Foucault describes as thinking the unthought which, for nineteenth-century Europe, is the ending of mans alienation by reconciling him with his essence. The colonial discourse that articulates an interdictory otherness is precisely the other scene of this nineteenth-century European desire for an authentic historical consciousness. (Bhabha, p. 91) Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. Look for definition of Bhabhas theories online Michael Warner and Amy Hollywood http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/criticism/toc/crt49.1.html

Theorists of secularis: running from Said through Asad and Viswanathan 5. Keyword search: literary secularism
6.

The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (2000) by James Wood 7. the sociology of Max Weber, political philosophy in the vein of Marx's On the Jewish Question, as well as broad trends in philosophy, such as the controversy over Nietzsches death of God. 8. Matthew Arnold 9. Try if UP diliman is subscribed to the New York Times 10. Relevant works: Conrads The Secret Agent, Don DeLillos Mao II

Works Cited
Bhabha, Homi. "Introduction: Locations of Culture." Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. 1-18. Bhabha, Homi. "The Other Question." Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture: Stereotype, discrimination, and the discourse of colonialism. London: Routledge, 1994. 66-84. Bhabha, Homi. "Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse." Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. 85-92.