Dictionary

mimic man en · NOUN

Etymology

Coined by Indian critical theorist Homi K. Bhabha in 1984 in his article Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse by back-formation from mimic men.

Meanings

1. Post-colonial person trained up to be “almost the same, but not quite” as an individual of the pre-independence colonist, resulting in ambivalence or alienation
   • The line of descent of the mimic man can be traced through the works of Kipling, Forster, Orwell, Naipaul, and to his emergence, most recently, in Benedict Anderson's excellent work on nationalism, as the anomalous Bipin Chandra Pal. He is the effect of a flawed colonial mimesis, in which to be Anglicized is emphatically not to be English. 1984, Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse”, in October, volume 28, number Spring, page 128:
   • "...I suggest by way of an intertextual reading with C. L. R. James’s nonfictional works, Naipaul inventively links the colonial story of a mimic man with the communal history of the mimic men,..." 2016, Dexu Zhang, “Representational Ethics: The Mimic Men and the Mimic Men”, in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, volume 57, number 1, →DOI, page 30:
2. A man exhibiting the attributes of mimic men

Forms