The Politics of Hybridity-Mimicry in Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist and Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat
This chapter critiques the continued influence of Homi Bhabha’s theories of hybridity and mimicry in the colonial context, while putting Bhabha’s ideas into dialogue with those of Roberto Retamar. Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist and Marlene van Niekerks’ Agaat offer nuanced revisions of both theorists’ positions. They elaborate versions of hybridity and mimicry that are intensely attuned to the interplay between historical forces and subjective experience; they grasp the limited yet real agency of colonized selves in fashioning responses to colonial power; and they situate colonialist textuality in a dynamic relation both to extra-discursive institutions of domination and to subjective interiority. These shared commitments result in fictional historiographies that emphasize the politically variable effects of hybridity-mimicry rather than the inevitable subversion described by Bhabha or the linguistic guerrilla warfare outlined by Retamar.