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Born in Mumbai, India in 1949
Mimicry is when colonized people imitate the culture of the oppressor. Stems from the oppressors desire to have a recognizable, "other."
"The colonists' desire is inverted as the colonial appropriation now produces a partial vision of the colonizer's presence; a gaze from the Other is the counterpart to the colonizer's gaze that shares the insight of genealogical gaze which frees the marginalized individual and breaks the unity of man's being through which he had extended his sovereignty. Thus, the observer becomes the observed and 'partial' representation rearticulates the whole notion of identity and alienates it from essence"
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
According to Bhabha, culture is made up by perceptions that oppose another culture. Colonized people experience discomfort because they have two or more cultural identities (that of the colonizer and that which they or their ancestors were born into).
"The effect of mimicry on authority of colonial discourse is profound and disturbing. For in "'normalizing"' the colonial state or subject, the dream of post-Enlightenment civility alienates its own language of liberty and produces another knowledge of its norms [….] It is from this area between mimicry and mockery, where the reforming, civilizing mission is threatened by the displacing gaze of its disciplinary double, that my instances of colonial imitation come. What they all share is a discursive process by which the excess or slippage produced by the ambivalence of mimicry (almost the same, but not quite) does not merely "'rupture"' the discourse, but becomes transformed into an uncertainty which fixed the colonial subject as a "'partial"' presence. By "'partial"' I mean both "'incomplete"' and "'virtual"'. It is as if the very emergence of the "'colonial"' is dependent for its representation upon some strategic limitation or prohibition within the authoritative discourse itself. The success of colonial appropriation depends on a proliferation of inappropriate objects that ensure its strategic failure, so that mimicry is at once resemblance and menace."
Homi Bhabha criticizes cultural diversity, which categorizes and compares cultures, and urges people to instead strive for cultural difference, which is a process of identification that does not rely on the perception of people in power.
Bhabha describes the third space as a space that is created when two or more cultures interact. He says it, "challenges our sense of the historical identity of culture as a homogenizing, unifying force, authenticated by the originary past, kept alive in the national tradition of the People."
("Of Mimicry and Man" from The Location of Culture)
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.