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Contemporary Cultural Theory

fundamental split in the construction of otherness, which itself
led to a peculiar ambivalence. Colonial discourse, wrote Bhabha,
‘produces the colonized as a social reality which is at once an
“other” and yet entirely knowable and visible’ (pp. 70–1). The
result is a characteristic ‘hybridity’, or ‘in-betweenness’, greater
than or at least different from the sum of its colonising and
colonised parts. Insofar as the colonising power attempted to
‘reform’ the subjectivity of its colonised subjects, what Bhabha
calls colonial ‘mimicry’ became central to the form of this hybrid-
ity: an ‘ironic compromise’ between domination and difference,
which produced an Other that is almost, but not quite the same.
Mimicry is thus the sign of a ‘double articulation’, according to
Bhabha: ‘a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline,
which “appropriates” the Other as it visualizes power’; but also
‘the sign of the inappropriate...a difference or recalcitrance
which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power,
intensifies surveillance, and poses an immanent threat to...
“normalized” knowledges and disciplinary powers’ (p. 86). The
result of this inevitably flawed ‘colonial mimesis’ is thus a ‘strate-
gic failure’ in which, to cite the Indian case, ‘to be Anglicized is
emphatically not to be English’ (pp. 86–7). The colonial encounter
tends towards its own deconstruction, therefore, as it turns ‘from
mimicry—a difference that is almost nothing but not quite—
to menace—a difference that is almost total but not quite’ (p. 91).

Gayatri Spivak
At the level of practical politics, such critiques of European
misrepresentation might seem to suggest the need for a counter-
assertion of an authentically postcolonial identity. This move is
precluded by the logic of post-structuralism, however, for if Euro-
peanness and non-Europeanness are each constituted within and
through discourse, then there can be no extradiscursively ‘real’
postcolonial identity to which a counter-cultural politics might
appeal for validation. For Said himself, this was much less of a
problem than for later theorists. His work has never been simply
(or even complexly) post-structuralist: there is a great deal of
healthy eclecticism in his writing and many other influences at

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