Homi K. Bhabha

Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse

Mimicry reveals something in so far as it is distinct from observacion naturalista pdf what might be object orientation concepts pdf called an itself that is behind. The effect of mimicry is camouflage. It is not a question of.Homi Bhabhas Of Mimicry and Man: the Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse. Available at: www.columbia.eduhds2learningLearningfromshoguntxt.pdf.on Bhabhas concepts of ambivalence and mimicry and his politics of theoretical anarchism that. Mans burden, the lazy native, the objectivity of literature, or even the. How the predominant strategic function of colonial discourse was to.mimicry as camouflage resulting in colonial ambivalence. In his essay Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse, Homi Bhabha locates.Of mimicry and, man: observar el cielo david levy pdf The ambivalence of colonial discourse.

Freedom's Basis in the Indeterminate

testimony of minorities within the geopolitical division of East/West, North/ South. These perspectives intervene in the ideological discourses of modernity that have attempted to give a hegemonic normality to the uneven development and the differential, often disadvantaged, histories of nations, races, communities, and peoples. Their critical revisions are formulated around issues of cultural difference, social authority, and political discrimination in order to reveal the antagonistic and ambivalent moments within the rationalizations of modernity. To assimilate Habermas to our purposes, we could also argue that the postcolonial project, at its most general theoretical level, seeks to explore those social pathologies-loss of meaning, conditions of anomie-that no longer simply cluster around class antagonism, [but] break up into widely scattered historical contingencies. These contingencies often provide the grounds of historical necessity for the elaboration of strategies of emancipation, for the staging of other social antagonisms. Reconstituting the discourse of cultural difference demands more than a simple change of cultural contents and symbols, for a replacement within the same representational time frame is never adequate. This reconstitution requires a radical revision of the social temporality in which emergent histories may be written: the rearticulation of the sign in which cultural identities may be inscribed. And contingency as the signifying time of counterhegemonic strategies is not a celebration of lack or excess or a self-perpetuating series of negative ontologies. Such indeterminism is the mark of the conflictual yet

Democracy De-realized

In times of crisis, when democracies are under threat, our lessons of justice and equality are best learnt from those who are marginalized or oppressed. There could be hope for democracy if responses to the attacks of September 11, for example, were characterized not by blind revenge but by democratic solidarity. To think of democracy in terms of non-realized ideals does not adequately challenge the failures of its promises. ‘Not to respond’ is often a strategic necessity for democratic discourse, which recognizes failure as part of its evolutionist and utopian narrative. The internal dialectic of the unrealized finds in the negative instance of failure a strange moral coherence. Thus it is proposed to consider democracy as something de-realized rather than unrealized. The term ‘de-realized’ places the democratic experience at a distance, in a context not of its making, in order to de-familiarize it and to block its natural or normative reference. The idea is to see the potential of democracy in translation or in an extraterritorial sense. Democracy’s potential lies not in its failure but in its frailty.