Tiffin's argument here is that imperialism has not only had a profound impact on the "social and political structures of the twentieth century

But

The processes of artistic and literary decolonisation have involved a radical dis/mantling of European codes and a post-colonial subversion and appropriation of the dominant European discourses (Review)

"it has been the project of post-colonial writing to interrogate European discourses and discursive strategies from a privileged position within (and between) two worlds; to investigate the means by which Europe imposed and maintained its codes in the colonial domination" (my emphasis; 17-18).

Postcolonial Literature use discursive strategy

Postcolonial Literature is dynamic

Language is used to curse or subvert

Rereading and rewriting of European fictional and historical record are subversive manoeuvres

Wide Sargasso Sea By Jean Rhys.

The ultimate dilemma in applying representation and resistance theory to post-colonial literature rests in the notion that a novel, a literary form that arises in the western world of print culture, may challenge as well as perpetuate colonial institutions. It seems an unlikely paradox, yet the paradox is very real and very present in post-colonial literature

Jenny Sharpe uses the term mimic man to describe a figure who represents this paradox: "The mimic is a contradictory figure who simultaneously reinforces colonial authority and disturbs it" (99). The mimic man can be a character in a novel or even an author himself

The mimic man represents a byproduct of colonial civilization, not a entity separate from the colonial sphere. As result, the fact that he was produced with the colonial voice relegates the seemingly more important issue of whether the mimic speaks for or against colonial authority. Sharpe continues along this line of argument (Review)

Perhaps the sacrifice that one pays for becoming a voice or a symbol for a certain people or nation is the ultimate alienation from both his people and his audience.

Comments:

Bhabha argues that hybridity results from various forms of colonization, which lead to cultural collisions and interchanges. In the attempt to assert colonial power in order to create anglicized subjects“. [t]he trace of what is disavowed is not repressed but repeated as something different--a mutation, a hybrid" (p. 111) (Ellis)

Though Bhabha's narrative is at times opaque, at their best these terms convey a new framework for describing cultures and their productions. Bhabha emphasizes what he describes as culture's "in-between," for instance, the interstitial spaces within and among individuals and cultures, which do not maintain a single position but form identities in an on-going process

Rather than viewing theory as only an élite Occidental production or as apolitical, in Chapter One, "The Commitment to Theory," he suggests that politics work with and through theory and that theory and politics cannot be separate.

He endeavors to establish a "committed theoretical perspective," accounting for postcolonial positions, while evading "the politics of polarities" that deny hybrid cultures and histories (p. 21, 39).

In this way, his discussion of contact between cultures revises the narrative of progress or modernity, associated particularly with the Enlightenment. Bhabha reads the atrocities that were knowingly committed and sanctioned in the colonies as the "contramodernity" that belies traditional arguments about increasing civility and development of modernity.

Bhabha's work suggests that the process of making modernity and the past is continual and partial, and that political action (which would include writing theory, in his argument), can be effective if not total.

The pleasure of his work, as well as its difficulty, lies in his refusal to simplify cultures or endorse easy assumptions.

“Studies Serve for Delight for Ornament and for Ability”. Francis Bacon.