An increasingly important term in后殖民理论, because it has come to describe the ambivalent relationship between colonizer and colonized. When colonial discourse encourages the colonized subject to ‘mimic’ the colonizer, by adopting the colonizer’s cultural habits, assumptions, institutions and values, the result is never a simple reproduction of those traits. Rather, the result is a ‘blurred copy’ of the colonizer that can be quite threatening. This is because mimicry is never very far from mockery, since it can appear to parody whatever it mimics. Mimicry therefore locates a crack in the certainty of colonial dominance, an uncertainty in its control of the behaviour of the colonized.

模仿通常是帝国政策的公开目标。麦考雷勋爵（Lord Macaulay）1835分钟前往议会嘲笑东方学习，并主张印度的英语艺术和学习的复制（从战略上讲，英语文学的教学）。但是，要实现这种模仿的方法表明帝国主义的潜在弱点。For Macaulay suggested that the riches of European learning should be imparted by ‘a class of interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern – a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, opinions, in morals, and in intellect’ (Macaulay 1835). In other words, not only was the mimicry of European learning to be hybridized and therefore ambivalent, but Macaulay seems to suggest that imperial discourse is compelled to make it so in order for it to work.

模仿一词至关重要Homi Bhabha对矛盾of colonial discourse. For him, the consequence of suggestions like Macaulay’s is that mimicry is the process by which the colonized subject is reproduced as ‘almost the same, but not quite’ (Bhabha 1994: 86). The copying of the colonizing culture, behaviour, manners and values by the colonized contains both mockery and a certain ‘menace’, ‘so that mimicry is at once resemblance and menace’ (86). Mimicry reveals the limitation in the authority of colonial discourse, almost as though colonial authority inevitably embodies the seeds of its own destruction.The line of descent of the ‘mimic man’ that emerges in Macaulay’s writing,claims Bhabha, can be traced through the works of吉普林,Forster,Orwell和奈普尔, and is the effect of ‘a flawed colonial mimesis in which to be Anglicized is emphatically not to be English’ (1994: 87).

这对后殖民研究的后果非常深刻，因为这种殖民力量中的这种缺陷是写作的，也就是说，后殖民写作，其矛盾性是对殖民地权威的“威胁”。模仿的威胁并不在于它隐藏在面具后面的某些真实身份，而是来自“双重视野，在披露殖民话语的矛盾之时也破坏了其权威”（88）。因此，后殖民写作的“威胁”并不一定从某种自动反对派到殖民话语，而是由于这种殖民权威的破坏而源于其模仿也可能是嘲笑的事实。而Macaulay的口译员或奈普尔’模仿男人’（下面讨论）是殖民指挥链的适当对象，它们也是“不适当”的殖民主体，因为他们行为中的动作是最终可能超出了殖民权威的控制之外的东西。这种“不适当的”打扰了主导话语本身的正常性。因此，模仿中固有的威胁不是来自明显的抵抗，而是由于它不断暗示的身份不像殖民者一样。殖民主体的这种身份 - “几乎相同但不是白人”（89）意味着殖民文化在潜在和战略上总是叛乱的。

模仿既可以是矛盾的，也可以是多层的。在他的小说中模仿男人，V.S。奈普尔在描述房东时，对模仿的复杂性的开头非常微妙：

我每周给夏洛克先生支付三几内亚三几内亚，并带有一个高大的，多重的书形房间，带有棺材般的衣柜。对于夏洛克先生来说，每周15次三几内亚的接收者，是一个情妇的拥有者和用布制成的西服，所以我觉得自己可以吃，除了钦佩之外，我什么都没有。。。。我认为夏洛克先生看起来像律师，商人或政客一样。他有习惯抚摸着耳朵的尖头，倾斜了头。我以为手势很有吸引力。我复制了。我知道最近在欧洲发生的事件；他们折磨了我；尽管我试图每周生活七磅，但我向夏洛克先生提供了我最充实，沉默的同情心。 (Naipaul 1967: 7)

这段具有讽刺意味的段落揭示了霸权和模仿工作的方式。尽管标题表明模仿殖民者的趋势存在贬低，但在这段经文中出现了模仿的复杂性和潜在叛乱。The narrator not only copies the habits of the landlord, but mimics the guilt of a post-war Europe concerning the Jews, a guilt that is embedded also in a cultural familiarity with the implications of the name ‘Shylock’ (the Jew who demanded repayment of a pound of flesh in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice). He is encouraged to mimic a compassion for the one exploiting him.But the very irony of the passage suggests an inversion, a mockery just under the surface; not a mockery of Shylock but of the whole process of colonization that is being enacted in the narrator’s mimicry and cultural understanding.The mimicry of the post-colonial subject is therefore always potentially destabilizing to colonial discourse, and locates an area of considerable political and cultural uncertainty in the structure of imperial dominance.

进一步阅读：Bhabha 1984a，1994;Castro-Klarén1999;Huggan 1994，1997;McQuillan 2002;Parry 1987。
资源：Ashcroft, Bill.后殖民研究中的关键概念。伦敦：Routledge，1998年。

类别：文学批评,俄罗斯乌克兰比分直播,后殖民主义

标签：Ambivalence,E.M. Forster,弗朗兹·法农,George Orwell,Homi K Bhabha,麦考雷勋爵,Macaulay's Minutes,Mimicry,后殖民理论的模仿,Mimicry Postcolonial Theory,后殖民模仿,后殖民理论,吉卜林,Shylock,威尼斯商人,模仿男人,vs naipaul