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••• Ann Brooks •••

‘unifies the subject of colonial enunciation in a fixed position as the passive object
of discursive domination’, he [Bhabha] highlights the multiple and contested nature
of colonialism’s discursive regime. In the process, Parry maintains that Bhabha
‘by showing the wider range of stereotypes and the shifting subject positions
assigned to the colonized in the colonialist text, … sets out to liberate the colonial
from its debased inscriptions as Europe’s monolithic and shackled Other, and into an
autonomous native “difference” ’ (Parry 1995: 41). While Bhabha recognizes the role
of the postcolonial intellectual in deconstructing the colonial metanarrative, it is the
subaltern voice which effects the change. As Parry observes: ‘[f]or Bhabha, the subaltern
has spoken, and his reading of the colonialist text recover a native voice …’ (ibid.)
(Parry 1995: 41).
Thus, whereas for Spivak the subaltern has no voice that can answer back ‘after the
planned epistemic violence of the imperialist project’ (ibid.), for Bhabha, colonial
discourse is subjected to ‘recurrent instances of transgression performed by the
native’ which are captured in Bhabha’s concepts of ‘mimicry’, ‘sly civility’ and
‘hybridity’. As Bulbeck notes: ‘mimicry, mockery and ironic reversals challenge the
West’s discourse without adopting fully the discourse of the subordinate colonised
groups (Bhabha, 1994: 81)’ (cited in Bulbeck, 1998: 53). Hybridity, for Bhabha, is pos-
sibly the most common and effective form of subversive opposition since it shows,
as Bhabha observes, the ‘necessary deformation and displacement of all sites of dis-
crimination and domination’. Hybridity is a term that Bhabha uses to describe the
notion of mixed or hybrid identities which encompass the contradictory history of
colonization, in contradistinction to the concept of a pure identity. Bulbeck claims
that Bhabha describes this process as ‘contramodernity rather than postmodernity’
(Bhabha, 1991: 59), a process which Stuart Hall notes ‘comes between well estab-
lished identities and breaks them up’ (Hall, in Terry, 1995: 60). One of the main crit-
icisms of Bhabha’s work has been his failure to address gender in his analysis, as
McClintock observes ‘[e]xcept for a cursory appearance in one paragraph, women
haunt Bhabha’s analysis as an elided shadow – deferred, displaced and disremem-
bered’ (McClintock, 1995: 362–3).
The concept of gender mimicry is significant in the work of the French feminist
Luce Irigarary (1985) who ‘suggests that in certain social contexts women perform
femininity as a necessary masquerade’ (McClintock, 1995: 62). Bhabha transposes
the idea of mimicry in the colonial context and explores mimicry as ‘one of the most
elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge’ (Bhabha, 1984:
126). It is Bhabha’s transposition of ‘aesthetic categories’ (irony, mimesis, parody)
framed within psychoanalytic discourse and deployed ‘in the context of empire’ that
is so original in Bhabha’s work. While recognizing the centrality of the concept of
mimicry in Bhabha’s analysis, McClintock notes that ‘for Bhabha here, colonial
authority appears to be displaced less by shifting social contradictions or the militant
strategies of the colonized than by the formal ambivalence of colonial representation
itself’ (McClintock, 1995: 63). She raises the important question of whether ambiva-
lence, while crucial in Bhabha’s work, ‘is sufficient to locate agency in the internal
fissures of discourse’ (ibid.). McClintock shows how Bhabha, in his essay ‘Signs Taken
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