Bhabha’s Mimicry and Hybridity in Plain English-Amardeep Singh

When the terms “mimicry” and “hybridity” are invoked in literary criticism, or in classrooms
looking at literature from Asia, Africa, or the Caribbean, as well as their respective diasporas,
there is usually a footnote somewhere to two essays by Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and
Man,” and “Signs Taken For Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority Under a Tree
Outside Delhi, May 1817.” But students who look at those essays, or glosses of those essays in
books like Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts, generally come away only more confused.
Though his usage of a term like “hybridity” is quite original, Bhabha’s terminology is closely
derived from ideas and terminology from Freud and French thinkers like Jacques Derrida, and
Jacques Lacan. I do respect the sophistication of Bhabha’s thinking -- and the following is not
meant to be an attack on his work -- but I do not think his essays were ever meant to be read as
pedagogical reference points.

What I propose to do here is define these complex terms, mimicry and hybridity, in plain
English, using references from specific cultural contexts, as well as the literature itself. The point
is not to tie the ideas up nicely, the way one might for an Encyclopedia entry, for example.
Rather, my hope is to provide a starting point for initiating conversations about these concepts
that might lead to a more productive discussion than Bhabha's essays have in my own
experiences teaching this material.

MIMICRY

Let’s start with mimicry, the easier of the two concepts. Mimicry in colonial and postcolonial
literature is most commonly seen when members of a colonized society (say, Indians or
Africans) imitate the language, dress, politics, or cultural attitude of their colonizers (say, the
British or the French). Under colonialism and in the context of immigration, mimicry is seen as
an opportunistic pattern of behavior: one copies the person in power, because one hopes to have
access to that same power oneself. Presumably, while copying the master, one has to
intentionally suppress one’s own cultural identity, though in some cases immigrants and colonial
subjects are left so confused by their cultural encounter with a dominant foreign culture that
there may not be a clear preexisting identity to suppress.

Mimicry is often seen as something shameful, and a black or brown person engaging in mimicry
is usually derided by other members of his or her group for doing so. (There are quite a number
of colloquial insults that refer to mimicry, such as “coconut” – to describe a brown person who
behaves like he’s white, or “oreo,” which is the same but usually applied to a black person.
Applied in reverse, a term that is sometimes used is “wigger.” [See more on "reverse mimicry"
below.]) Though mimicry is a very important concept in thinking about the relationship between
colonizing and colonized peoples, and many people have historically been derided as mimics or
mimic-men, it is interesting that almost no one ever describes themselves as positively engaged
in mimicry: it is always something that someone else is doing.

Mimicry is frequently invoked with reference to the “been-to,” someone who has traveled to the
west, and then returned "home," seemingly completely transformed. Frantz Fanon mocked the
affected pretentiousness of Martinician "been-tos" in Black Skin, White Masks, and the cultural
confusion of the been-to Nyasha (and her family) in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions is
one of the central issues in that novel. The characters in Nervous Conditions who have not had
the same experience of travel in the west find the desire of those who have returned to impose
their English values, language, and religion on everyone else bewildering and offensive.

Mimicry, however, is not all bad. In his essay “Of Mimicry and Man,” Bhabha described
mimicry as sometimes unintentionally subversive. In Bhabha’s way of thinking, which is derived
from Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive reading of J.L. Austin’s idea of the “performative,”
mimicry is a kind of performance that exposes the artificiality of all symbolic expressions of
power. In other words, if an Indian, desiring to mimic the English, becomes obsessed with some
particular codes associated with Englishness, such as the British colonial obsession with the sola
topee, his performance of those codes might show how hollow the codes really are. While that
may well be plausible, in fact, in colonial and postcolonial literature this particular dynamic is
not seen very often, in large part, one suspects, because it is quite unlikely that a person would
consciously employ this method of subversion when there are often many more direct methods.
Indeed, it is hard to think of even a single example in postcolonial literature where this very
particular kind of subversion is in effect.

There is another, much more straightforward way in which mimicry can actually be subversive
or empowering –- when it involves the copying of “western” concepts of justice, freedom, and
the rule of law. One sees an example of this in Forster’s A Passage to India, with a relatively
minor character named Mr. Amritrao, a lawyer from Calcutta, whom the British Anglo-Indians
dread. They dread him not because he is unfair; indeed, what is threatening about him is
precisely the fact that he has learned enough of the principles of British law to realize that those
principles should, in all fairness apply to Indians as much as to the British. As a foreign-
educated, English speaking Indian lawyer in colonial India, he might be mocked as a “mimic
man” or a “babu,” but it may be that that mockery covers over a defensive fear that the British
legal system is not quite as fair as it should be.

Indeed, the example of Amritrao in Forster’s novel might lead to a broader political discussion:
many anti-colonial nationalist movements in Asia and Africa emerged out of what might be
thought of as mimicry of western political ideas. The historian Partha Chatterjee argued that
Indian nationalism emerged as a “a derivative discourse” –- a copy of western nationalism
adapted to the Indian context. Over time, of course, the derivative ideas of justice, democracy,
and equality, as they were used by activists, tended to get adapted to a local culture. Perhaps the
person who did this best was Mohandas K. Gandhi. Gandhi took symbols of Indian asceticism
and simplicity (such as traditional Indian dress and fabric) along with progressive western
concepts of socialism, and used that new fusion of ideas to mobilize the masses of ordinary
Indians, most of whom had had little direct contact with the British. Through Gandhi, Indian
nationalism, which may have started as a “derivative” of nationalism in the west, became
something distinctively and uniquely Indian.

As a final note before moving on to hybridity, it might be worthwhile to say a little

about reverse mimicry, which in the colonial context was often referred to as "going
native." Though mimicry is almost always used in postcolonial studies with reference to
colonials and immigrant minorities imitating white cultural and linguistic norms (let’s call this
“passing up”), mimicry could also be reversed, especially since there are so many examples, in
the history of British colonialism especially, of British subjects who either disguised themselves
as Indians or Africans, or fantasized of doing so. The most famous example of this kind of
reverse mimicry (“passing down”) might be Richard Francis Burton, who often attempted to
disguise himself as Arab or Indian during his time as a colonial administrator. In literature, the
most influential example of affirmatively “passing down” might be Rudyard Kipling’s Kim,
where Kipling invents a white child (the son of an Irish solidier in British India), who grows up
wild, as it were, on the streets of Lahore, outside of the reach of British society. Though
Kipling’s interest in “passing down” does not overcome the numerous mean-spirited and racialist
statements Kipling made about Indians throughout his career, the thought of being able to break
out of his identity as an Anglo-Indian and live “like a native” does seemingly reflect a real
affection and a sense of excitement about Indian culture.

For other writers, the possibility of "going native" was seen as a threat or a danger to be
confronted; the prospect that Kurtz has "gone native" is certainly one of the animating anxieties
in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, for example.

* * *

HYBRIDITY

By contrast to mimicry, which is a relatively fixed and limited idea, postcolonial hybridity can be
quite slippery and broad. At a basic level, hybridity refers to any mixing of east and western
culture. Within colonial and postcolonial literature, it most commonly refers to colonial subjects
from Asia or Africa who have found a balance between eastern and western cultural attributes.
However, in Homi Bhabha’s initial usage of the term in his essay “Signs Taken For Wonders,”
he clearly thought of hybridity as a subversive tool whereby colonized people might challenge
various forms of oppression (Bhabha’s example is of the British missionaries’ imposition of the
Bible in rural India in the 19th century.).

However, the term hybridity, which relies on a metaphor from biology, is commonly used in
much broader ways, to refer to any kind of cultural mixing or mingling between East and West.
As it is commonly used, this more general sense of hybridity has many limitations. Hybridity
defined as cultural mixing in general does not help us explicitly account for the many different
paths by which someone can come to embody a mix of eastern and western attributes, nor does it
differentiate between people who have consciously striven to achieve a mixed or balanced
identity and those who accidentally reflect it. Hybridity defined this way also seems like a rather
awkward term to describe people who are racially mixed, such as “Eurasians” in the British Raj
in India, or biracial or multiracial people all around the postcolonial world. Fourth, though it is
more commonly deployed in the context of Indian or African societies that take on influences
from the west, one needs to account for how hybridity, like mimicry, can run in “reverse,” that is
to say, it can describe how western cultures can be inflected by Asian or African elements
("chutneyfied," as it were). Finally, it seems important to note that there can be very different
registers of hybridity, from slight mixing to very aggressive instances of culture-clash.
For all those reasons, it may not be that useful to speak of hybridity in general. What might
be more helpful is thinking about different hybridities –- a set of differentiated sub-
categories: 1) racial, 2) linguistic, 3) literary, 4) cultural, and 5) religious. The main sub-
categories are really (2), (3), and (4), where (2) and (3) overlap closely. In what follows I will
explain why (1) is not really very relevant in most cases. And sub-category (5) might be of
secondary importance for some readers, though I would argue that it should be taken quite
seriously.

1. Racial hybridity. The term "hybridity" derives from biology, where hybrids are defined as
reflecting the merger of two genetic streams, so it might seem logical to talk about hybridity in
terms of race. But in fact applying the term this way does not seem productive. Most formerly
colonial societies have their very specific, localized words to describe people of mixed race
ancestry, and the term “hybrid” is generally not used in the context of race. (Indeed, using this
term this way might be offensive to people of mixed ancestry.)

In the Indian context, for example, there is an established community of “Eurasians,” who were
marked as a separate community by the British after interracial marriage was banned, and who as
a result held themselves as a clearly demarcated community even after Indian independence
(when most Eurasians left the country). In Latin America, the term “mestizo” is often used to
describe people of mixed European, African, and Native American descent. The idea of “racial
hybridity” today seems awkward, in large part because it clearly relies on the idea, inherited
from nineteenth-century race science, that racial difference is an empirically-verifiable reality. In
fact, it is unclear that racial markers such as “African” or “Asian” have any precise meaning.
Today, the norm amongst most scholars, which I agree with, is to deemphasize biological or
genetic race in favor of “culture.”

Ironically, though the biological basis for the concept of hybridity seems to invite a discussion of
race, it seems inappropriate to actually apply it to biracial or multiracial for the afore-mentioned
reasons.

2. Linguistic hybridity. Linguistic hybridity can refer to elements from foreign languages that
enter into a given language, whether it’s the adoption of English words into Asian or African
languages, or the advent of Asian or African words into English. To talk about linguistic
hybridity, one benefits from reference to terms from linguistics, including the ideas of slang,
patois, pidgin, and dialect. Over the course of the long history of British colonialism in India,
quite a number of Indian words entered British speech, first amongst the white “Anglo-Indians,”
but over time these words entered the English language more broadly. Today, words like
“pajamas,” bungalow,” and “mulligatawny” are often used without an awareness that they derive
from Indian languages. Similarly, words like “mumbo-jumbo” have entered the English language
from African languages.

As a result of colonialism, the English language has become established in Ireland as well as
African, Caribbean, and Asian societies formerly colonized by England (just as French has
become established in societies in Africa and the Caribbean that were formerly colonized by
France). This fact was historically quite controversial, and it still produces some measure of
anxiety throughout the postcolonial world, though most African and Asian countries now
embrace English-language education as the language of international commerce. Aside from the
fact that English is seen by some as an imposed language, the lingering problem is that in many
cases writers who use English in Asia or Africa are using a language different from the one most
likely spoken by their main characters. Achebe addresses this problem as follows:

For an African writing in English is not without its serious setbacks. He often finds himself
describing situations or modes of thought which have no direct equivalent in the English way of
life. Caught in that situation he can do one of two things. He can try and contain what he wants
to say within the limits of conventional English or he can try to push back those limits to
accommodate his ideas ... I submit that those who can do the work of extending the frontiers of
English so as to accommodate African thought-patterns must do it through their mastery of
English and not out of innocence (Chinua Achebe)

Works by people who have incomplete mastery of English, like Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine
Drinkard, are sometimes cited as examples of linguistic hybridity. But Achebe’s point here is
that such works are less likely to be meaningful or interesting than those by people who have
demonstrable mastery of English, but who are aware that one might wish to “extend the
frontiers” of the language beyond Standard Written English in order to come closer to capturing
the voices and thoughts of people living outside of Europe or North America.

There are many examples of linguistic hybridity that one could mention. James Joyce’s Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man has a famous example of anxiety about the status of English.
Stephen Dedalus, an English-speaking Irishman in Dublin at the turn of the century, encounters a
British priest, and frets that “the language we are speaking is his before it is mine.” But for
Joyce, for whom there was no option but to write in English, and it becomes clear even within
Joyce’s novel it becomes clear that Stephen has as much right to English as any native-born
Englishman. In Africa, beginning in the 1970s, quite a number of prominent intellectuals
rebelled against English. The Kenyan novelist Ngugi w’a Thiong’o, who started his career
writing novels in English, decided to give up that practice in favor of writing in his native
Kikuyu. Arguing against Ngugi, Achebe defended his use of English as a language that many
Africans might have in common (for that matter, Achebe argued, even within Nigeria, there are
so many languages that English might be the only national language of the country.) Other
interesting approaches to linguistic hybridity include the use of pidgin in Ken Saro-
Wiwa’s Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English, and Edward Kamau Braithwaite’s concept of
“nation language,” which entails the use of Caribbean patois elements as a liberatory gesture.

Over time, the practical and commercial advantages of writing in English or French over local
languages have sometimes quietly settled the debate where writers might have a choice of
language (that is to say, writers who have a choice tend to choose the language with the largest
market). However, in India especially, vibrant and serious literature continues to be written in
Hindi as well as regional languages, though this writing is often overlooked by "postcolonial"
scholars, when it either remains untranslated or is translated badly.

3. Literary hybridity. What I am calling literary hybridity (hybridity at the level of narrative

form) is fundamental to what we now know as postcolonial literature. In part, basic modern
literary forms such as the novel and the short story are modes of writing invented in the West,
though they were readily adopted by colonial authors in Africa and Asia (the first Indian novels
were being published in the 1860s). But almost immediately after it emerged, the “foreign” genre
of the western novel became one of the primary ways by which Africans and Asians began to
collectively imagine a sense of national, cultural identity. The fact that the novel may have been
a borrowed form did not seem to be a limitation for the first generations of Asian and Africans
who used it; in fact, the novel has proven to be an incredibly flexible and open format.

Literary hybridity is often invoked with contemporary postcolonial literature that uses
experimental modes of narration, such as “magic realism.” The Indian writer Salman Rushdie
and African writers like Ben Okri have experimented with modes of storytelling that blend local
traditions and folk culture with experimental (postmodernist) ideas. A novel like
Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is an instance of literary hybridity in that mingles traditional
Indian texts like The Ramayana with a self-reflexive narrative frame that is usually associated
with European postmodernist writers like Italo Calvino.

Another way of thinking about literary hybridity relates to postcolonial literature’s response to
the Western Tradition (the Canon). While postcolonial writers have freely adapted western
literary forms for their own purposes, as with the question of language there remains some
anxiety with regard to how Canonical authors have represented (or misrepresented) Africa and
Asia in their works. As a result, postcolonial writers have often attempted to “write back” to the
British Canon with revisionist adaptations of classic works. Here are three well-known
examples:

--Aime Cesaire’s “black power” version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Une Tempete, with
Caliban playing a revolutionary black intellectual.
--Jean Rhys’s Caribbean-centered version of Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, which explores the
back-story of the white Caribbean Creole Bertha Mason.
--Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North is a kind of reversal (or revision) of Joseph
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

These three examples (and there are might be others... suggestions?) of postcolonial revisions
might be thought of as a form of literary hybridity. Cesaire, Rhys, and Salih take the basic plot
and form of British narratives that invoke Africa or the Caribbean, but write them from an
African or Caribbean point of view.

Another, slightly different example of literary hybridity might be Agha Shahid Ali’s concept of
an English-language ghazal (which I talked about here). In conceiving of this, Shahid Ali, as a
Kashmiri poet writing in English and living in the United States, wanted to legitimize his own
efforts at composing Ghazals in English. But he also clearly had in mind the idea that American
poets with no connection to South Asia or the Middle East might start to think of the Ghazal as
an English-language form they might adapt for themselves, like a Villanelle or a Sonnet.
4. Cultural hybridity. Culture, defined in terms of art, music, fashion, cuisine, and so on, might
be the broadest and perhaps also the easiest place to think about hybridity. Cultural hybridity is
also extremely widespread today, as one sees a proliferation of fusion cuisine, fusion cuisine, and
fusion musical forms. For most readers cultural hybridity is a given -– something we might
encounter without even giving a second thought, when we see an Indian-influenced design in a
blouse on sale at the Gap, or when we hear about Japanese (or Arab or German) hip hop.

However, historically, cultural hybridity has not always been quite as easy, nor has it been
uncontroversial. In colonial writing, hybridity was clearly less important in many ways than
mimicry. Late Victorian writers like Kipling, for instance, saw Indians who seemed to be a mix
of east and west as absurd, and mocked them in his stories as well as personal letters. For Kipling
and some of his peers, the English-educated “Babus” were engaged in crude mimicry rather than
a more intelligent kind of hybridity. For instance, on the occasion of the inauguration of Punjab
University in 1882, Kipling wrote the following in a letter to George Willes:

Just imagine a brown legged son of the east in the red and black gown of an M.A. as I saw him.
The effect is killing. I had an irreverent vision of the Common room in a Muhammedan get up.
At the end of the proceeding an excited bard began some Urdu verses composed in honour of the
occasion. It was a tour de force of his own—but I am sorry to say he was suppressed, that is to
say, they took him by the shoulders and sat him down again in his chair. Imagine that at Oxford!

For Kipling, the sight of a “brown legged son of the east” in formal British academic regalia is
mis-match that is, for him, inherently funny. (As a side note, biographers have pointed out that
part of Kipling’s tendency to mock highly educated Indians may have been motivated by his
anxiety about his own lack of a college education.) Interestingly, as Kipling continues in his
description he seems to grow more sympathetic to the speaker, who has chosen to present verses
in Urdu rather than English. Kipling seems to admire the verses (or at least, the choice to present
them in Urdu), and yet the speaker's presumably British peers “suppress” what he has to say all
the same, by forcing him, rather rudely, to sit down rather than complete his recitation.

By contrast to Kipling, E.M. Forster, in A Passage to India, clearly admires the way many
ambitious Indians in the latter days of the British Raj were able to use the English language and
make it their own. To continue the example of dress, Forster’s protagonist Dr. Aziz dresses quite
easily like an Englishman, without being perceived as anomalous by fair-minded people. Though
Ronny Heaslop is ready to mock Aziz for missing a collar stud in a famous early scene in the
novel, in actuality Aziz had given his collar-stud to Fielding. Still, Forster’s novel also shows the
sharp limits placed on the cultural interaction between Indians and sympathetic Englishmen at
the time he was writing.

As a general rule then, cultural hybridity under colonialism seems to be a close cousin of
mimicry. It is very difficult for an Indian or African, subjected to British rule, to adopt manners
or cultural values from the British without in some sense suppressing his or her own way of
being. Something similar might be said of a new immigrant in England or the United States:
there is strong pressure to quickly acculturate to the norms of the place where one lives, which
sometimes entails curbing a thick accent or changing one’s dress styles or habits. Books like
Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, and Rushdie’s The
Satanic Verses, all address the problem of acculturation, and tackle the fine line between
adapting as an immigrant to a new environment, and transforming so radically that one risks
giving up an essential part of who one is.

Once colonialism ends, however, cultural hybridity in major metropolitan centers, in the west as
Well as in Africa and Asia, becomes somewhat more neutral –- possibly a creative way of
expressing cosmopolitanism or eclecticism. Many people celebrate cultural hybridity as a way of
creating new artistic forms and developing new ideas. Cultures that stay still too long, many
artists and musicians would argue, ossify and die.

5. Religious hybridity. This final sub-category of hybridity I’ll mention seems important, in part
because religion (specifically, religious conversion) is such a widespread theme in colonial and
postcolonial literature. It also seems like a fitting place to end, since Homi Bhabha’s example of
hybridity in “Signs Taken For Wonders,” specifically invokes the imposition of the Christian
Bible in India. Bhabha notes that despite the fact that local Indians “under a tree, outside Delhi,”
readily accept the authority of the Missionary’s Book. And yet, despite that clear Authority, they
can only understand the Christianity they are being exposed to through their own cultural filters.
Perhaps, instead of becoming simple Christians, the local Hindus are simply adding the reference
point of Jesus to a very crowded Hindu pantheon. In thinking about religious hybridity, the
question is usually not whether or not someone converts to a foreign or imposed religious
belief system, but how different belief systems interact with traditional and local cultural-
religious frameworks.

The goal in invoking "religious hybridity," is not to pose people who practice a local religion as
"pure," while those who may have converted might be seen as hybrids. In fact, religious
traditions like Hinduism were heavily influenced by the encounter with British missionaries
under colonialism. Hindu leaders formed societies such as the Brahmo Samaj and the Arya
Samaj (and, in the Sikh tradition, the Singh Sabha movement), which instituted reforms and in
many ways aimed to recast the Hindu tradition in a way that made it more legible, and perhaps
more acceptable, to British missionaries as well as western scholars of religion. In short, by the
beginning of the twentieth century, the way Hinduism is practiced and interpreted by many
Hindus themselves reflects a certain amount of "religious hybridity."

Major works, such as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, or more recently, Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, centrally feature the issue of religious conversion. For Achebe’s
Okonkwo, his son Nwoye’s conversion to Christianity is seen as a loss and as a form of
subservience to foreign cultural values. Analogously, Kambili’s father, in Purple Hibiscus, is
seen as imposing a rigid kind of Christianity on his family, at the expense of personal loyalty or
familial love. But the novel argues that it is possible to be a “religious hybrid,” that is to say, an
African Christian, without giving up entirely on what makes one uniquely African, or in this
case, Nigerian.