7. Epilogue

The mechanism of colonial mimicry so brilliantly and persuasively elaborated by Homi Bhabha and Frantz Fanon has, as the foregoing chapters might suggest, a remarkable degree of versatility and usefulness for a critical understanding not only of the colonial situation but also of the postcolonial aftermath that looks simultaneously backward and forward. Post/colonial mimicry is not only the scene of agonistic racial encounter but, importantly and sometimes unexpectedly, a locus of traffic marked by the multiple mediations of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, class, and competing nationalisms. Acting on this hypothesis, this work has attempted to trouble the somewhat circumscribed and sometimes too-hopeful character of the work on colonial subjugation and global encounter. Setting the powerfully suggestive notion of colonial mimicry to work in new—that is, non-European—contexts (while also resituating it within familiar ones) shows us the ways in which indigenous models of identity formation (whether it be religious discipleship, gendered nationalism, or the modalities of movie stardom) are often traversed by it, but in ways that might be functional to the interests of Indian nationalisms. This is by no means to claim that anticolonial resistance or nationalism (which are not the same thing) and colonial discourse are governed by identical protocols. The discourses of anticolonial mobilization and colonial domination cannot simply be read off each other; the evidence of the reorientation of imperial tropes on colonial and national ground serves as a salutary warning against the reduction and thoughtless commingling of categories. Yet the evidence of Indian nationalism in its varied forms also suggests (and this is something toward which both Partha Chatterjee’s notion of nationalism as a derivative discourse and Sara Suleri’s work on “English India” gesture, albeit in terms distinct from each other and from my own) that colonial tropes and colonial processes of subjectification have a powerful explanatory force and a tenacious afterlife, though often in unfamiliar forms, in the discourses of the opposition. If this work can be said to perform the task of dislodging and rendering uncanny relationships between a colonizing west and a colonized rest, it does so by detailing the ways in which the production of the tropes and stereotypes of colonialism was never entirely, or entirely securely, a British project. What a revisioning of Indian nationalism through the mimetic trope also opens up is the considerable and productive libidinal charge that informs and vexes the encounter of the historical actor and sociopolitical formations. The practice of mimicry forms the ground, as it were, upon which a dizzying array of gendered and erotically charged desires and identifications are enunciated and enacted. Detached from its originary home in the figure of the elite, Anglicized male, the trope thus permits a reexamination of the operations of gender in colonialism and nationalism, enabling us, for instance, to note the structural significance of the mimic woman (whether western or Indian, Hindu or Muslim) for these projects.

The field of colonial and postcolonial studies has turned its attention in recent years not so much to the mapping of distinct politicojuridical, economic, cultural, and psychic domains designated as colonial or as metropolitan but to the intertwined, indeed mutually constitutive, character of nation and colony and of nation formation and empire building. Thus it is that the reconfiguration of the mimic wo/man within the discourses of the imperial, the national, and the transnational can cue us into the multiple and sometimes unexpected global dislocations, contestations, and transformations of the gendered colonial (and national) encounter. Resituated and remade in a variety of contexts, and standing in in many ways for the constitutive predicament of the postcolonial critic (who is wracked by a keen and characteristically postcolonial anxiety of influence), s/he haunts both colonialism and postcoloniality as the figure of lack and the emblem of desire who will not go quietly into the colonial grave.