Title: Self-fashioning, Colonial Habitus, and Double Exclusion: V. S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men
Abstract: Ralph Singh, the hero/narrator of The Mimic Man, recounts what on the face of it appears to be an innocuous, even amusing, instance of a mis-remembering: My first memory of school is of taking an to the teacher. This puzzles me. We had no apples on Isabella. It must have been an orange; yet my memory insists on the apple. The is clearly at fault, but the edited version is all I have.1 Let us imagine the setting. The school run by the colonialists. The boy reading, or perhaps writing an essay invoking the practice of taking an to the teacher. The editing and its per sistence a testimony to the school as one of the apparatuses of colo nial power, as a site of subjectification. V. S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men constructs a narrative of this subjectification process from the perspective of a subject whose identity is produced by the kind of asymmetrical power implied in the substitution of the apple for the orange—the metropolitan object/practice for the colonial one. The oppression caused by derived significance is what a post colonial writer/intellectual struggles against, an oppression subtle
Publication Year: 1989
Publication Date: 1989-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 5
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