Mimicry and Its Discontents: Examining Bhabha's Multiculturalism as Mimicry and Hybridity

In October of 2010, the German Prime Minister, Angela Merkel, declared, “German multiculturalism is dead” (Connolly, 1). In February of this year, French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared in a televised debate that multiculturalism has failed, saying that “(The French) have been too concerned about the identity of the person who was arriving and not enough about the identity of the country that was receiving him.”i British Prime Minister David Cameron, in the same month, in a speech in Munich, also said that “the doctrine of state multiculturalism” has failed.ii Beginning April 2011, France expanded its former policy of banning headscarves in French public schools that took effect in September 2004 to make it state law prohibiting the use of the hijab and the burka or head covering in public spaces.iii However, because the French practice equal opportunity, the ban also extends to large crosses and Jewish skullcaps. Offenders face a fine of 150 Euros and a citizenship course. However, people forcing the women to wear the veil face a heavier fine and possible jail time of up to two years.

Though this is not a direct rumination of the failures or successes of multiculturalism, this paper addresses what, possibly, multiculturalism truly is as it is understood in contemporary society. Furthermore, it hypothesizes that it is in fact a form of disguised mimicry and a type of hybridity in the interstitial or ‘third space’ as interpreted by Bhabha. Additionally, this paper addresses Bhabha the theorist, those opposed to Bhabha—particularly the scholar Marjorie Perloff—and how this damages or enhances Bhabha’s own validity as a practicing scholar.

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It is impossible these days to walk into any graduate program or even an undergraduate program without encountering Homi Bhabha. The man that has made his career on locating culture, disavowing the beyond in the study of post-whatsits in our current age as well as documenting his observations and encounters of the third-space kind is still going. There is no contemporary discussion without conjuring the historic ghosts and fractured masks of mimicry that fill the gap of our – whoever we are in whatever context we exist – collective and individual memories. It is this gap that Bhabha is interested in. Though his interest sprang from a plethora of sources such as the post-colonial discourses of Africa, African-America, the Caribbean and India; his readings of V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, Frantz Fanon, the poet Adrienne Rich; and contemporary artists like photographer Allan Sekula, his archaeological excavation of the beyond still possesses value from a general perspective. That is, it is almost algebraic. It is a formula that can be plugged into our modern globalist pillaged village of a world. His theories are a direct consequence of the narratives of his own personal history.

Who is he? As Niesen de Abruna writes, “He has never written from a simplistic sense of one group’s claims in opposition to another group’s, but from a belief in the potential possibility of negotiation of borderlands and boundaries as a way of getting beyond allegedly irreconcilable differences between cultures.” (91). She writes this in reference to Bhabha’s background of constantly negotiating his origins. He is a Zoroastrian Parsi, a minority sandwiched between the cultural and identity wars between Hindus and Moslems. She writes, “As practitioners of Zoroastrianism, the Parsis lived in a cultural space that negotiated the political, social and economic boundaries between the competing claims of Hindu and Moslem communities” (91). In addition to the Hindu and Moslem notions of identity, there is the British element that exists simply because India was one of the biggest British colonies. “Parsis,” Bhabha mentions in an interview, “were the middle persons between various Indian communities and the British.” (Mitchell, 80) When asked whether Parsis are characteristically Moslem or Hindu, Bhabha replies: “I like to joke that Parsis are Nietzscheans because they follow the prophet Zoroaster.” (Mitchell, 80) He adds, “They have also been a hybridized community: often their rituals pay formal respect to Hindu customs and rituals while articulating their own religious and ethnic identity.” He also mentions that what is interesting about Parsis is “their sense of a negotiated cultural identity.” He gives a number of about 100,000 Parsis in the world today, divided among the continents making their identity an interesting arena of discussion. Since they do not come from a multitudinous community, their identity comes from aligning with specific religious ideas -- and that, according to Bhabha, only for a small minority.

Bhabha does not then exaggerate when he writes, “Learning to work with the contradictory strains of languages lived, and the languages learned, has the potential for a remarkable critical and creative impulse.” His theory of locating culture is not a mere academic exercise; it is an exegesis of a life and personal and collective histories that are continually negotiated.

His theories are influenced heavily by Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Edward Said, Michel Foucault and particularly the work of Walter Benjamin. Bhabha says of Benjamin’s work, “(he) has led me to speculate on differential temporal movements within the process of dialectical thinking and the supplementary or interstitial ‘conditionality’ that opens up alongside the transcendent tendency of dialectical contradiction -- I have called this a ‘third space,’ or a ‘time lag’.” (Mitchell, 82) This process of temporal movement, interstitial conditionality and transcendent tendency is also a space of ambiguity, where meaning is slippery. This speculation has led him to define the Third Space and the possibilities (and ambiguities) that occur in that space.

Speaking of the transcendent tendency of dialectical contradiction, I will take this moment to discuss Bhabha in the context of the supposed failure of multiculturalism in Europe. The term multiculturalism is really another politically-correct term for the word Mimicry. According to Homi Bhabha, “mimicry emerges as the representation of a difference that is itself a process of disavowal.” (122) Is this representation of a difference simply a process of denial or retraction? According to Bhabha, it is not simply denial for the sake of denial but rather a process of disavowal. The process here is complex and negotiated. He adds, “(m)imicry is, thus the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, which ‘appropriates’ the other as it visualizes power.” (122) Mimicry is a double articulation because it exists on both sides of, say, the colonizer and the colonized or, in other terms, the self and the other. There is something simultaneously expressed from and on both sides. The subject splits, becoming the originator and the performer mimicking authenticity. Authenticity is not just a state of being but also a type of construction and representation of culture and identity. Bhabha, however, still qualifies this notion because he does not see this representation as representation qua representation.

Hence, in the case of the current European dilemma, there is a dialectic that emerges when the European Self as indicated by the State heads of Europe enunciated the difference between an “us” (the European citizen) and a “them” (the Foreign Immigrant). Bhabha writes, “What emerges between mimesis and mimicry is a writing, a mode of representation, that marginalizes the monumentality of history, quite simply mocks its power to be a model, that power which supposedly makes it imitable.” (125) There are two things to elucidate here.

First, the writing he refers to recalls Benedict Anderson’s notion of a community articulated when a common language was found in what Anderson refers to as “print-as-commodity.” What Anderson means is that the reproducibility and dissemination of print knowledge (through the printing press) changed how Europe and her inhabitants saw themselves. (Anderson, 52-53) However, from Bhabha’s reckoning, writing is not a mere form of a textual apparatus. He says, “(T)hose of us who have been involved in the scriptural, text-based arts have begun to see the sign in a much more affective context.” (Mitchell, 84) The sign that he refers to is writing or perhaps the act of writing. He adds, “We have begun to see the whole place of visuality, morality, and affectivity in writing -- writing's bodily, corporeal attributes, writing or language as part of the unconscious, writing as part of temporal deferral, writing as part of social identification, writing, rhetoric, and narrative as the bases of ethical judgment.” (Mitchell, 84) In his words, “(t)he nature of the sign has been opened up for us.”

Second, the marginalization he speaks of is actually a subversive element at work because the source of power, the original or the authentic (let’s say, the European citizen), is destabilized or, in Bhabha’s terms, ‘mocked.’ Then he adds, “Mimicry repeats rather than re-presents….(t)he desire to emerge as authentic through mimicry – through a process of writing and repetition - is the final irony of partial representation.” (author’s emphasis) (125-126) Hence, according to Bhabha, the subject on the other side of the dialectic, the performer of mimicry, desires authenticity as well but participates in a mirroring of authenticity, which, in itself is a partial representation of the ‘authentic’. In the case of the Foreign Immigrant in Europe, the unveiling to be more like the “us” of the European citizenry means just that. It is a partial identity. The unveiling of the body means, to be somewhat accessible, giving partial access to European identity.