Mimic Men Research Articles

“Mimic Men” versus Conscientious Women in Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace

Abstract The paper attempts to read the narrative of colonial modernity which runs throughout Amitav Ghosh’s novel, The Glass Palace and then also examines how that modernity is gendered. I have shown how the novel unfolds the various layers of this modernity which exposes the abrasive opposition between the ideas of colonialism. This opposition is not limited to the ideological realm only but spills and then creates an uncomfortable silence between the native men and women, particularly in the bhadralok section (Western educated urban middle or upper middle class Bengali people). I have approached the text through the theories of Homi Bhabha, Partha Chatterjee, Michel Foucault principally.

Post-Colonial Review of V. S. Naipaul's Fiction

V.S Naipaul is acknowledged as one of the most talented writers dealing with postcolonial themes for his fictions. As a Nobel Prize winner author, he has written a number of fictions such as A House for Mr Biswas (1961), A Bend in the River (1979), Miguel Street (1959), An Area of Darkness (1964), In a Free State (1971), The Mimic Men (1967), India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990) and so on. The article presents a review of his postcolonial fictions with a thorough thematic analysis. Naipaul treats the themes of pessimism, identity crisis, social fragmentation, diaspora and internal struggles of immigrants. He also presents the futility of designing a new Westernised identity by discarding old roots. The political, social and cultural upheavals and its critical impact is also illustrated by the author.

Humberto Garcia. England Re-Oriented: How Central and South Asian Travelers Imagined the West, 1750–1857.

Through a series of original and close readings that reverses the usual order of things, Humberto Garcia argues that (white) East India Company men were the original mimic men who adopted Persianate manners to ingratiate themselves to India’s provincial rulers and business elites. Persian-speaking travelers such as Joseph Emin, Mirza Shaikh I’tesamuddin, Mirza Abu Talib Khan, and Dean Mahomet, who had become acquainted with officials of the East India Company were welcomed to England. Their encounters with British society at various levels were shaped by ideas of hospitality that were widespread in the Persianate cultures of Central and South Asia. Using a “decolonial analytic” (37), Garcia treats the history of the late eighteenth-century British Empire in India as contingent. Rather than position this moment as a precursor to the nineteenth-century presumption that (white) colonizers had a superior culture, Garcia’s arguments offer a corrective to the idea that Central and South Asian travelers felt uncomfortable or inferior in eighteenth-century London. Instead, these engagements between cultivated interlocutors were based on hospitality and homosociality. Until the early nineteenth century, “an imperial homosocial arcadia” thrived, defined by “Persian politeness, bravery, generosity, and true manliness” (15). As British competition for Indian territories escalated, the Englishman became increasingly aligned with an empire that was gendered in ways distinct from Persianate ideals of male friendship. As argued by Mrinalini Sinha, one of the co-editors of this book’s series, by the late nineteenth century, colonial societies were marked by racialized colonial masculinities that differentiated between the putative “manly Englishman” and “effeminate Bengali.” Garcia’s book explains the process by which these distinctions emerged. As he notes, many of these texts are centered on “the friction between sentimental manliness and military aggressiveness” (146).

Interrogating Ralph Singh as Floating Signifier: A Study of Displacement and Diaspora in V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men

Claude Levi Strauss coined the term 'floating signifier' by which he means “to represent an undetermined quantity of signification, in itself void of meaning and thus opt to receive any meaning” (Levi Strauss p. 56). Fundamentally, the term refers to the disorientation of the connection between the signifier and the signified in the Saussurian sense. Its reception as a non-linguistic sign is quite popular nowadays. This paper seeks to investigate the portrayal of Ralph Singh, the protagonist of V. S Naipaul’s novel; The Mimic Men (1967), and interpret all the possible factors that justify him as a non-linguistic floating signifier. Ralph Ranjit Kripal Singh or Ralph Singh is a Hindu born, lives in a fictitious Caribbean Island, Isabella. He later goes to England for his education, where he marries an English woman named Sandra. He comes back to Isabella and then travels back to England again. Ralph feels displaced from his real root to be a part of the country which he could not relate himself to and eventually metamorphoses into a ‘sign’. In the novel, wherever he travels, Ralph strives to make his life meaningful and significant. But every time his effort ends up in an insignificant way. So, throughout the novel, Ralph Singh behaves as a floating signifier but wishes to be signified. This paper also explores the relationship between displacement and diaspora, and its correlation to the floating signifier. The final purpose of this article is to ignite the discourse of the diaspora from an entirely different perspective.

Bakha’s Identity as an Anglophilic Assimilado in the Context of a Colonized India: A Postcolonial Reading of Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable

This study aimed to illustrate how Bakha's Subalternity is intricately woven with the establishment of his identity as an assimilado as well as Anglophilic in the context of a colonized India, and also exhibit how this Anglophilia and assimilation of Bakha have been illustrated by Mulk Raj Anand within his literary production titled Untouchable by conducting a postcolonial investigation of the selected text. It followed the unstructured mode of inquiry that is the Qualitative approach of research. The style used to design this paper is exploratory and descriptive. The findings of the paper revealed the way Bakha gets succumbed into the spiral of the culture and tradition of the British imperialists and starts to identify himself as an Anglophilic assimilado as a result of his failure to realize the oppressive, autocratic, and dominating natures of the British authoritative figures and the effects of colonization in India due to his subaltern status within the society, which is the outcome of the Repressive Ideology practiced by the Indian Hindu community promoting class discriminations and caste-conflicts. The study further revealed how Bakha's Anglophilia and assimilation have found their outlets within the selected text through the employment of numerous significant postcolonial terms and concepts including ‘mimicry’, ‘mimic men’, and the psychopathological concept associated with colonialism that reveals the psychological effects of colonialism, which results in psychological inadequacy that eventually causes Anglophilia and makes a colonized person an assimilado. Lastly, this particular paper is helpful for academicians willing to gather more knowledge about the postcolonial notions like subalternity, Anglophilia, and assimilation and study how they are related to one another.

World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics

World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics

Mixed marriage in Ezra 9-10: The Disappearance of Ezra as a mimic man for the Persian Empire

In this paper, as I follow scholars’ socio-economic perspectives on Ezra 9-10, I will explore the mixed marriage issue in light of the post-colonial theory, especially Homi Bhabha’s post-colonial theory. I will argue that Ezra as a mimic man followed the Persian Empire’s political policy. The Empire prohibited intermarriage between the returnees and those who had not been in exile. However, Ezra was persecuted because of his coercive dissolution of marriage. In his commentary, Ezra-Nehemiah, Joseph Blenkinsopp assumes that Ezra was recalled by the Persian Empire since Ezra’s decision of dissolution of marriage caused political unrest in Yehud. However, he does not clarify how Ezra’s intermarriage prohibition is supported by the Persian Empire. Given the fact that Udjahorresnet, the Egyptian priest and special advisor to the Persian Empire on Egyptian affairs, banished the foreigners who had settled in the sanctuary of Neith in the third year of Darius, Ezra must have followed the prohibition of intermarriage by the Persian Empire. If I apply Homi Bhabha’s concept to Ezra’s political status, Ezra as a mimic man reveals his hybrids: he is part Pro-Persian and part Jewish elite. In an attempt to resolve the conflicts between the group of returnees and those who were not in exile, especially in regard to property disputes, the Persian Empire sent the Pro-Persian Ezra. However, by interpreting the Deuteronomic law in an extreme way, Ezra decided to separate the existing families. According to Ancient Near Eastern Law, a husband should return his wife’s dowry after their divorce. On account of this, Ezra must have stirred up considerable social controversy. In other words, Ezra’s hybridity functions as a menace to the Persian Empire.

GENDER AND RACE IN THE MODERNIST MIDDLEBROW

This article marks a decisive step towards the recovery of the French woman writer, journalist, and aviation pioneer Louise Faure-Favier, who today is virtually forgotten. The article begins by situating the author, and her recovery, within wider international currents of recent feminist scholarship into neglected and lost modernist “middlebrow” women writers. I then move to analyse Faure-Favier’s innovative modernist exploration of the themes of gender and race, focusing on Blanche et Noir (1928), a novel which connects feminism, race, and aviation technology in startlingly original ways; this section of the analysis also directly engages with historical and theoretical discussions of the phenomenon of the “human zoo.” The final phase of analysis considers at length how Faure-Favier’s novel anticipates Bhabha’s mimicry through its identification of the subversive potential of a generation who, in the postcolonial era, will be understood after Bhabha as mimic men. Faure-Favier’s colonial novel offers potential for a significant expansion of Bhabha’s postcolonial – and uniquely masculine – model through consideration of how gender might interact with mimicry, advancing an argument for a strategic coalition between white women and black men which simultaneously reveals the innovations and contradictions which structure her novel and wider thinking. Faure-Favier’s novel emerges as remarkable in its preoccupation with foregrounding the subversive agency of both women and colonized men. More broadly, this consideration of mimicry in the French colonial context generates new frameworks for the interpretation of complex historical figures. Through the rediscovery of Blanche et Noir, this article offers a decisive account of the previously unrecognized achievements of female modernist authors across Europe who engaged with categories of gender, race, and class in groundbreaking ways, thus leading to a significant shift in the existing understanding of gender, race, and modernism.

Nehemiah as a Mimic Man under the Achaemenid Empire: A Postcolonial Reading of Nehemiah 5

In this article, I argue that Nehemiah obliquely criticizes the Achaemenid Empire’s polity over subaltern societies in Neh 5. I will first explore Homi Bhabha’s main ideas such as stereotypes, ambivalence, mimicry, and hybridity. Then, I will apply his theories to understand Nehemiah as a mimic man. Nehemiah’s hybrid identity as a Persian official and a Jew results in the mimicry of the colonized. The mimicry functions as a mockery against the Achaemenid Empire. Since Nehemiah knows the ethical statements in Darius’ testament in DNb and the Persian kings’ luxurious table, he not only appropriates the Achaemenid imperial ideology, but also criticizes the Achaemenid dynasty’s heavy taxation on the subaltern in Neh 5.

Identity and Power Relationship in The Mimic Men

Identity and Power Relationship in The Mimic Men

VS Naipaul’s The Mimic Men; Degeneration of Values

Colonization has been an exploitative trend that has dominated some parts of the world for several centuries. It is common for the colonizer state to impose economic and political pressure on the colonized state, as well as pressure on the religion, language, and culture of that society in question. V. S. Naipaul is a Trinidadian writer whose country has been colonized for centuries. In this framework, his works frequently mirror the colonial and postcolonial periods. The Mimic Men is an important work in terms of witnessing both the colonial and postcolonial periods. The semi-autobiographical life of Ralph Singh, the protagonist of the story, takes place in the fictional island of Isabella. With Singh's grandparents being indentured servants who migrated to Isabella from India and the island being in the Caribbean, it has a lot in common with Naipaul's actual life. As a result of living detached from their traditional values, societies that have been colonized for a long time have had their religion, language, and culture distorted, as well as failing to build a healthy character. This study aims to focus on the value corruption caused by the colonial process in the novel.

Australian Trompe l’Oeil and mimicry: illusionism and identity in the era of colonial modernity

ABSTRACT In ‘Of Mimicry and Man’, Homi K. Bhabha hints at a connection between discourses surrounding perspectival representation and those surrounding colonialism by noting that trompe l’oeil, alongside irony, repetition and mimicry, is a trait with which colonial texts are replete. The inclusion of a textbook ‘mimic man’ in a mid nineteenth-century Australian trompe l’oeil painting suggests that the link between illusionism, mimicry and colonialism mentioned in Bhabha’s oft-cited essay warrants further investigation. Centring on C.H.T. Costantini’s 1857 Trompe l’oeil (Figure 1), this article explores nineteenth-century Australian visual culture in terms of ‘Of Mimicry and Man’, and in doing so demonstrates the versatility of Bhabha’s framework wiithout ignoring the challenges posed by shifting from a linguistic to a visual register. Namely, by moving beyond the literary scope of his essay, the discussion highlights the difficulty of separating the racialised difference at the core of Bhabha’s arguments from the social, historical and geographic reproduction of European differences across the times and spaces of colonial modernity. The discussion also presents colonial trompe l’oeil as a means by which to reflect on the operations of illusionism itself. Specifically, it suggests the extent to which illusionism, not to mention visuality more broadly speaking, may be considered historically, politically and sociologically contingent.

THE TEMPEST FROM COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL LENS

The paper focuses on how the colonizers who in this play are Prospero and Miranda in particular, endeavor to inflict their own socio-cultural precept including their language to make the colonized fully unprotected in The Tempest as a colonial play, but eventually fail to fulfill this attempt. In addition, the high importance of learning the language of the colonizer by the colonized gets illuminated which finally contributes to Caliban so as to undermine the roots of the colonizer in the colony. This article fully evaluates affected literary works by The Tempest, the importance of transferring the colonizer’s language to the colony, and the main colonizer and his manners and attitudes towards the colonized; it also brings forth postcolonial concepts including Mimicry, Orientalism, the double consciousness of the colonized and his unhomeliness. Furthermore, it features the dirge situation of mimic men who come across a disappointing dead end from both colonizers and the colonized. After all, this article reflects on the ever-presence of ambivalence and mimicry in colonial discourse and also the vital importance of violence as an inseparable part of the decolonization.KEYWORDS: Colonialism, Postcolonialism, Ambivalence, Mimicry, Language, Violence

The Value of Intertextuality in Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners and Naipaul’s The Mimic Men

Studies on comparative literature have been fragmentary concentrating on one or two aspects of the thematic concerns of novels without emphasizing the concepts of divergent and convergent intertextuality. This paper aims to revisit Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners re-reading it in dialogue with Naipaul’s novel The Mimic Men. The selected novels are controversial. Criticism deployed on all fronts conveys the pluralities and oppositions that are in fact the novels’ hallmarks. Yet, the aspects criticized attest to, and confirm, the authors’ taking of the less trodden track. The comparative analysis within the scope of this paper will show that Naipaul’s and Selvon’s fictional representations of creolized Trinidadian and English societies highlight specific cultural and linguistic aspects and that intertextuality is either convergent or divergent. For instance, the structure of Naipaul’s text takes as much from Caribbean orature and the wake of Caribbean plantation culture. However, Selvon’s novel takes the form of flashbacks. Naipaul innovates and transforms Selvon’s structure to generate a Caribbean context, par excellence. Traces of Selvon’s style are present in Naipaul’s corrosive voice of representing Caribbean identity. Naipaul brings to an apotheosis the creative force already illustrated in the remarkable works of Selvon. This paper aims to track these traces and foreground the idea that texts can speak to each other. More significantly, this paper assesses the main characters’ fates to re-question the status of creoles, a status deliberately put between parentheses, denying them the right to voice their hybrid identities. Above all, the close textual reading of Galahad’s and Singh’s stories is meant to value the trope of intertextuality.

The Mimic Man in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss

Spread over continents, countries and cultures, Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006) takes us on a tour de force into the realms of multiculturalism and hybridity in Indian culture. It focuses on the changing face of India, amidst East - West encounter, globalization and glocalization. The novel as a postcolonial text puts forth, the authority politics of cultural imperialism, even after the independence of India. This paper appraises the novel using Homi. K. Bhabha’s theory of mimicry, hybridity and ambivalence. It concentrates on the mimic man of the novel Judge Jemubhai Patel. This paper focuses on the hybridization of culture along with the making of reformed hybrids who are in a constant conflict with their identity, language and culture on account of the praxis between the culture of the colonized and the colonizer during and after colonization of the colonized. This paper recommends proper mapping of mimicry and hybridity with indigenous culture, values and ethics. It advocates sowing and stringing in cultural amalgamation and westernization in indigenous Indian culture and ethos for a better life and better Indian society.

Identity Crisis in V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men

This paper explores the identity crisis of the protagonist Ralph Singh in the novel The Mimic Men by V.S. Naipaul. With the increasing trend of migration of people in the postwar era, the immigrants who leave their lands and settle in the host lands face multiple problems such as the identity crisis. Ralph Singh who is depicted as the protagonist in the novel suffers from the trauma because of his loss of identity crisis, which gets reflected through his writing of memoirs that indicates the construction of an authentic and dignified identity for postcolonial individuals like his own. His memoirs show howhis ancestors had migrated to Isabella, a British colony in the Caribbean, a long time ago. He embraces his reality of being a colonized individual, but is reluctant to embrace his hybrid identity. He regards mimicry and hybridity as negative forces to weaken and endanger the colonized ones’ identity. In course of dealing with the identity crisis of Ralph Singh, the postcolonial theorists such as Homi K. Bhabha, Stuart Hall and Edward Said and the critics such as SamanAbdulquadir H.D., Dr S. Sophia Christinia etc. are used. Thus, this paper deals with the identity crisis of Ralph Singh which is caused by mimicry, displacement, alienation, rootlessness and hybridity.PostcolonialNovel

A Study of Alienation of Migrants in the Select Novels of V. S. Naipaul

V. S. Naipaul's fiction as well as non-fiction demonstrates the autobiographical materials plus these overlapping statements work to present a vivid bank account of this author's own enigma of survival and growth together with the affliction as well as condition of the expatriates within the colonial as well as post-colonial era. V. S. Naipaul is the ideal writer who is searching for the origins of his and also surveying India through the distinctive viewpoint of under an outsider, a cosmopolitan Caribbean brand new resident of England, but of Indian beginnings attempting to comprehend out the complexities on the culture of ours. This research considers displacement in Naipaul's The Mimic Men, A House of Mr Biswas, The Mystic Masseur and A Bend in the River as a traumatic experience. This paper analyses all of the pain and sufferings of migrants in four novels. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the topic of the study, it explores the psychological and historical dimensions of the displacement in the novel, along with its literary representations in terms of identity, culture, survival and stress disorder. In order to complete the theme of present research paper effectively, the main aim is usually to go over the benefits of Diasporic sensibility of Naipaul that cannot be just overlooked in the life of his.

The Reconstruction of Identity in V.S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men and in Caryl Phillips'In the Falling Snow: Life and narration

The Reconstruction of Identity in V.S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men and in Caryl Phillips'In the Falling Snow: Life and narration

Postcolonial Identity Crisis in the Mimic Men a Novel by V.S.Naipaul

This paper investigates the concepts of Identity and estrangement in the postcolonial novel entitled The Mimic Men by V.S. Naipaul. In Naipaul’s The Mimic Men, Ralph Singh has showed different aspects that reflects his nature of a “prototypical colonial character” who is quite commonly estranged with the biased and pluralistic society he has inhaled most of his breaths in it. For Ralph, identity is a core issue that is depicted by his mimicry of European or Western views on different aspects of life. Also, Ralph’s self identification is in strong conflict with that of the Western world. For following the footsteps of colonialists, he has abandoned his home, family and even his self-identity only for the sake of mimicking the West. He has married an Englishwoman and has gone through formal education in the West. The alienation of his identity has resulted in the scattering of his personal being thereby leading towards vulnerability and corruption of his inner self.

The Politics of Home and Identity in V.S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men

The motive of "home" and "identity" seems to be a recurrent one in African-Diasporan literature, especially the literature of the Caribbeans. This study presents V. S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men as a postcolonial novel that depicts the effects of colonialism on colonized people. The article clarifies the influence of colonialism on identity and how it affects the social, political, and psychological aspects of the people of a small Caribbean Island. The study highlights the manifestations related to the impact of colonization on self-identity and psychological confusion. The paper concludes that characters are emblematic of home and identity crisis and attest to the mimicry of displaced men.