Yellow Skin, Which Mask?
The personal snapshots above are accounts from my mid-late teenage years, and in the years hence, I have swayed one way and the other; this cultural pendulum consuming me with self-loathing and pride in equal measure. Perhaps Homi Bhabha may yet offer some relief to this anguish, this Fanonian schizophrenia, this excruciating dialectic-with-no-end. Like me, Bhabha does not neatly fit into a prescribed box. As a Zoroastrian Parsi, sandwiched between the cultural conflict (often violent) of the Hindu and Muslim communities, he has had to constantly negotiate his identity. Thus, Bhabha does not write from a simplistic and binary position; he believes in the possibility of the negotiation of boundaries to transcend the supposedly irreconcilable differences between cultures (Abruna, 2003, p. 91). Might I also reach such a negotiated cultural identity?
For Bhabha (1994), the construction of identity within colonial discourse depends on the concept of fixity, which functions at the level of signs and signifiers to demarcate racial difference. The stereotype is fixity’s major discursive strategy, which restricts the interpretation of signs/signifiers to their fixed meanings: race becomes an “ineradicable sign of negative difference” (p. 108). I return to Fanon’s line, “Wherever he goes, the Negro remains a Negro” (Fanon, 2008, p. 133). Against this fixity, Bhabha uses the term ‘hybrid’ to denote the people found in the in-between spaces of these fixed identities. These in-between ‘third spaces’ offer the possibility of cultural hybridity that “entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 4). Indeed, for Bhabha, culture itself is never temporally and spatially fixed, but is in constant flux; culture in its purest form is found in the interstices. The concept of “homogenous national cultures […] or ‘organic’ ethnic communities […] are in the process of profound redefinition” (p. 5). Hybridity then is empowering and emancipatory; it allows the individual to play with their identities, to reconstruct themselves, and overcome stereotypes.
Bhabha therefore offers a sympathetic and subversive understanding of mimicry. For Bhabha (1984), mimicry “emerges as one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge” (p. 126). However, he is ambiguous as to whom it ultimately gives power – the coloniser or the colonised.
Colonial mimicry is the “desire for a reformed, recognizable Other […] that is almost the same, but not quite” (Bhabha, 1984, p. 126). The process is complex and negotiated. The coloniser desires the coloured man to become more like him, someone who reproduces his habits and values, but still, the coloniser maintains a clear sense of difference, for god forbid the white man and coloured man become equals! Thus, ironically, colonial mimicry must “continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference,” which Bhabha terms ‘ambivalence’ (p. 126). Ambivalence disrupts the simple relationship between coloniser and colonised; since it cannot produce ‘real Englishmen’, it produces subjects whose mimicry never strays far from mockery – a mode of representation that “mocks its power to be a model, that power which supposedly makes it imitable” (p. 128).
Bhabha illustrates with an example: writing in 1792, Charles Grant advocated that Christian doctrines and moral codes be fused with divisive caste practices to produce “partial” diffusion of ‘Britishness’ throughout India to construct an appropriate form of colonial subjectivity amenable to social control. If the Indian were to be fully ‘educated’, he would revolt against his coloniser. But inadvertently, Grant produces an image of Christianity that is patently un-Christian; he mocks the proselytising project and undermines the colonial mission (1984, p. 127). We see it still in the message to immigrants today – ‘Speak English, embrace Western values, integrate into our society, but keep out of our social clubs, don’t marry our women, and don’t you dare complain’. The West’s treatment of the Other “alienates its own language of liberty and produces another knowledge of its norms” (p. 126). Thus, in an ironic turn, the subject, the colonised who desires ‘authenticity’, finds that the authenticity of the original is destabilised through his mimicry; the colonial project thus generates the seeds of its own destruction.
So perhaps I can be less harsh on myself – I have not yet sold my soul to the white man. Though adopting British cultural habits and values, the result is not a faithful, obedient reproduction, but “at once resemblance and menace”, always potentially and strategically insurgent (Bhabha, 1984, p. 127). For in its ambivalence, mimicry transforms the “founding objects of the Western world” into “accidental objets trouvés of the colonial discourse”; the ideals of the West become meaningless “part-objects” (p. 132). In other words, mimicry is the performance that reveals the artificiality of Western power symbols.
Mimicry and ambivalence is then Bhabha’s way of turning the tables on colonial discourse. In the words of Robert J. C. Young (1995), the colonised, the periphery, the marginal, the doubtful constitutes the centre as an “equivocal, indefinite, indeterminate ambivalence”, creating cracks in the certainty of colonial dominance (p. 161). But we should not think of this as a simple reversal of the binary; both coloniser and colonised participate in this ambivalence. Indeed, Bhabha seems to suggest the very engagement between the culture of the coloniser and colonised inevitably leads to an ambivalence that dismantles the coloniser’s dominance. Here, I return to the concept of hybridity. Like Bhabha, I must resist the urge to polarise, resist identifying with the fixed ‘us versus them’. In his words, “Must we always polarise to polemicize?” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 28). A neatly compartmentalised identity is impossible; it would be at most a partial representation. I should seek out the in-between – the uneasy, restless space that allows for multiple subject positions (p. 2).
On another, simpler strand, I can approach mimicry as strategic appropriation, as how a dominated culture can use the tools of the dominant discourse to resist its political and cultural control. I think of Amrit Rao from E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924). Amrit Rao (an advocate) defends Aziz (an Indian doctor) against the charge of raping Adela (a British schoolmistress) by arguing that British justice and law should apply to Indians as to the British. He becomes feared by the colonial authorities for subverting their dominating power. I think of some of the founding figures of modern China – the likes of Sun Yat-Sen, Deng Xiaoping, and Zhou Enlai, all of whom received a Western education, which they appropriated in their struggles against imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism. Had I not received the education I had, and absorbed the values that I had, would I even be engaging in this critical self-inquiry?
There is also the question of language: I loathe to admit that my command of Mandarin and Chinese script lags behind my facility of English. The installation of Standard English as the norm, marginalising all other languages and variants as a method of control, does not escape my attention (Ashcroft et al., 1989, p. 7). But a central thesis of The Empire Writes Back (Ashcroft, et al., 1989) is that English and its discursive forms can be used to convey differing cultural experiences. By interpolating these accounts into the dominant modes of representation, they reach the widest possible audience. Thus, in the very act of writing this essay, have I not appropriated the language, with all its power and signification of authority, from the dominant culture?
Need I also self-flagellate for essentialising ‘yellowness’ and ‘Britishness’? Gayatri Spivak speaks of strategic essentialism. Although essentialism might reproduce problematic knowledges of the “other”, this temporary, strategic essentialism can be a strategy for the “other” to create solidarity and a sense of belonging to mobilise for social action (Ashcroft, 1998, pp. 159-160). Has the essentialising of myself as ‘Yellow’ not motivated me to embrace Chinese culture and history, to seek out my fellow “others”, and to cast off the self-loathing?