Mimicry in Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners and J. M Coetzee’s Waiting for The Barbarians

Abstract

Mimicry has become an important concept the postcolonial literature as it has been used to describe the ambivalent relationship between the colonizers and the colonized. In the postcolonial perspective, the colonized subject “mimics” the colonizer, by adopting his cultural habits, assumptions, institutions and values. The result is never a simple reproduction of those traits; rather, it is a “blurred copy” of the colonizer that can be quite threatening. This is because mimicry is synonymous to irony and mockery, since it appears to parody the object it mimics. To Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture, mimicry is one of two critical terms, along with “hybridity”, which are fundamental in postcolonial literature. According to him, after a long relationship with the coloniser the colonised has ambivalent feelings toward the coloniser: some good feelings, some desire for what they have, some bad feelings, and some repulsion at what they are. Although mimicry discloses ambivalence, representation through a metonymy of presence, and the threat of the partial gaze, there is “the potential for mimicry to be both resemblance and menace”, as “colonial authority … destabilizes itself by the impossibility of replicating itself perfectly” (Bhabha, 86).