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                               ••• Reconceptualizing Representation and Identity •••

                  for Wonders’, (1985), develops further the idea of mimicry, in this case less ‘as a
                  self-defeating colonial strategy than as a form of anti-colonial refusal’. As Bhabha
                  claims, mimicry now ‘marks those moments of civil disobedience within the disci-
                  pline of civility: signs of spectacular resistance’ (Bhabha, 1985: 162). As McClintock
                  notes, this brings Bhabha’s strategic positioning of mimicry closer to that
                  of Irigaray’s where mimicry is established ‘as a strategy of the disempowered’
                  (McClintock, 1995: 64).

                                         Mimicry – a gendered discourse?

                  The essentialism of Irigaray’s psychoanalytic position is well established in that she
                  ‘argues for mimicry as a specifically female strategy’ (ibid.). In so doing, she fails to
                  acknowledge the issues of race and class. Bhabha’s theorizing of mimicry elevates
                  race and in the process elides the concepts of gender and class. This elision creates a
                  model of gendered mimicry in Bhabha’s work, as McClintock notes, ‘Bhabha effec-
                  tively reinscribes mimicry as a male strategy without acknowledging its gendered
                  specificity’ (ibid.). Thus the ironic title of Bhabha’s work ‘Of Mimicry and Man’ is lit-
                  erally just that, a postcolonial discourse with men at its center. In the process,
                  McClintock observes ‘masculinity becomes the invisible norm of postcolonial dis-
                  course’ (McClintock, 1995: 64). One of the issues raised by McClintock in her analy-
                  sis of Bhabha’s conception of colonial mimicry and ambivalence is to what extent
                  the potential for subversion can be equated with historical agency. McClintock
                  claims: ‘Ambivalence may well be a critical aspect of subversion, but it is not a suffi-
                  cient agent of colonial failure’ (McClintock, 1995: 67).
                    The role of feminist and non-feminist postcolonial intellectuals has contributed
                  to a vigorous debate on issues of subjectivity and identity. The transcultural and
                  transnational dimensions of the debates are shown in both the character of the dias-
                  poric intellectual and in their transdisciplinary focus. Both feminist and non-
                  feminist diasporic intellectuals have made important contributions to debates on
                  subjectivity and representation, drawing on a range of interdisciplinary discourses
                  including cultural theory, feminism, postmodernism, poststructuralism and critical
                  ethnography.



                           Transculturalism and Transnationalism in the Development
                                of New Conceptions of Subjectivity and Identity


                  Globalization has led to the transnationalization of genders, classes, ethnicities and
                  ‘publics’ (Gole, 2002), however, as Dirlik (1999) notes, this has not occurred equally
                  among all groups and he concludes that while it may ‘be more valid to speak of transna-
                  tional classes or a transnational feminism’, attention to the concept of place is impor-
                  tant to understand the contradictory developments. Dirlik maintains that it is essential
                  in understanding any conceptualization of culture, in any anti-hegemonic or critical
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