Introduction

Hybridity Redux

Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses opens with Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha tumbling earthward after their London-bound flight AI-420 explodes with a “big bang” over the English Channel. As they fall toward “the slow, congealed currents of the English Sleeve,” Farishta breaks into a popular Hindi film tune, “translating the old song into English in semi-conscious deference to the uprushing host-nation”: “O my shoes are Japanese . . . These trousers English, if you please. On my head, red Russian hat—My heart’s Indian—for all that” (5). The jingoistic jingle from the 1955 film Shree 420 (Mr. 420) establishes a meaningful gap between surface appearance and core identity by confining what is foreign to the sartorial drag. Easy on, easy off. The irony of “semi-conscious” translation into English eludes Farishta as he chants Bollywood’s nationalist fantasy of essential inviolability. The narrator, however, likens the English Channel to a “birth canal . . . the appointed zone of their watery reincarnation,” even if the two tumblers “did not become aware of the moment at which the processes of their transmutation began” (4–5). The terms “reincarnation,” “mutation,” and “big bang” suggest that the relationship between mimicry, hybridity, and performance—in other words, form and content—requires closer scrutiny of assumptions about the nature/culture divide. Rushdie’s references to 420—the section of the Indian Penal Code involving crimes of cheating and deception—in the flight number as well as the film title pointedly intertwine singer, song, and swindle, asking us to look out for a major fraud requiring further investigation.

In the same novel, Rushdie traces the making of the “English-medium” Indian to Thomas Macaulay’s 1835 Parliamentary “Minute on Indian Education,” a doctrine founded in similar suppositions of deterministic difference and inviolable core, but nonetheless invested in certain forms of Anglicization: “We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect” (The Satanic Verses, 58, 249).1 “Colonial mimicry,” as Homi Bhabha explains the project, “is the desire for a reformed, recognizable other” who would remain other (The Location of Culture, 86; emphasis added). What made this reformed other recognizable? What were the building blocks of this reformation? Although mimicry arguably magnified racial divides, the civilizing mission was designed to allow the English to distinguish the minute-made subject of the civilizing mission from millions of others under colonial rule. However poorly defined or understood by both colonizer and colonized, and however contested, fetishized, and partial in form, ideas of “English . . . taste, opinions, morals, and intellect” were nevertheless translated into recognizable behaviors and judgments loosely associated with Englishness, and thereby with modernity.2 Moreover, in identifying taste as the first in a list of modifiable attributes, Macaulay was unwittingly blurring the nature/culture boundary. If taste, according to Pierre Bourdieu, governs “all forms of incorporation, choosing and modifying everything that the body ingests and digests and assimilates, physiologically and psychologically,” and it is “culture turned into nature, that is embodied,” we need to account for what it means to accord with practices and lifeways connected to Englishness (Distinction, 190).3 I submit that colonial hybridity, robustly conceptualized in postcolonial theory to challenge essentialized notions of identity in favor of a third space of encounter and translation, nonetheless also involved significant interference in the colonized native’s biological and physiological being. A full reckoning with the biophysiological dimensions of hybridity requires us to confront the implicitly reincarnative politics of the so-called civilizing mission in imperial modernity.

In the wake of the repudiation of deterministic racial differences in the life sciences today, I revisit the concept of hybridity in this book to include consideration of biological plasticity and epigenetic factors in evaluating the significance of intercultural contact. On the understanding that sex is only one mode of bodily penetration and reproduction, biological hybridity implies forms of mixture that are neither confined to sexual congress alone nor rooted in essentialized racial differences. If the racist science of its time assumed that genetics locked in the differences between races, the invitation to colonial mimicry, I argue, implied an as-yet scientifically unverified but implicit belief in human bioplasticity and aesthetic reformation. Colonial investment in racial border patrol based in ideas of deterministic difference was complicated by imperial designs on impressionable, plastic body-minds at the level of ideology as well as the micromanagement of the subject’s biophysiology, or what author Hari Kunzru calls the “grammar of behavior, a social language” (The Impressionist, 335). For better and for worse, the imperial civilizing mission would not only recalibrate knowledge systems but also bodily aesthetics and comportment in matters as fundamental as how to eat, speak, sit, shit, or spit. The reincarnative logic of the civilizing mission discloses itself even in a cursory survey of practices associated with “Englishness.” Those related to diet, bearing, ingestions, or forms of evacuation are more obviously bodily, whereas others—pertaining to language, speech, and accents, for instance—seem less so, but language, too, is lined with flesh.4 Incarnate moments of speech unfold in the coordination of breath, diaphragm, lip, palate, head tilts, eyebrow lifts, vocalization, airflow, and hand gestures.5 The touted notion of identity as performance of forms also requires psychic, physical, muscular, and neuronal conjunction, pointing clearly to the biopoetic entailments of hybridity and mimicry. The twisting of tongues into a second language, regulation of plosive breath to produce prestigious versions of the English accent, the muscular labor of mastering new postures, the altering of body chemistry through the ingestion of new foods or the application of new products, and scores of other corporeal revisions speak resonantly of the incarnate, physical scene of hybridity.6 Human biology interacts with forms, ideas, objects, things, and commodities pushed upon and into the body and mind, with and without the subject’s awareness, demanding a theory of performativity and a conception of hybridity attuned to the indissociability of “matter and meaning” (Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 3).

The physical scene of hybridity involves the sensate, biological body interacting with a world founded in dominative rationality. Adorno frequently turns to the “incarnate moment” (leibhafte Moment) of experience because it reveals the extent to which our behaviors as well as our instincts and urges have been socially regulated (Negative Dialektik, 201; translation mine). I translate “leibhafte Moment” as the “incarnate moment” instead of the more commonly used “physical moment” in order to emphasize the involvement of the carnal, life-filled sensorium in experience.7 Attention to these moments discloses the neurophysiological load of acculturation. Parsing the grammar of “comportment,” from the Latin com- (together) + portare (to carry), reveals the burdens of hybridity and mimicry: what the body must endure to become more becoming (Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “comportment”). The incarnate moment directs us, moreover, to a realization of the extent to which our behaviors and our judgments of the world, our selves, and others are animated in the flesh, and the ways in which ideology and the mind itself are “body-minded,” as neuroscientist Antonio Damasio describes it. In the relay between “racism’s two logics, the biological and the cultural,” and in moments when form impinges on cognition and flesh takes form, human plasticity, mimicry of privileged aesthetic forms, the development of habits, and the carnal foundations of knowledge, behavior, and motivation emerge as key factors in thinking about what makes us human (Said, “Always on Top,” 6).

This book returns to the figure of the racial hybrid—long designated the biological hybrid through historically generated categories—to put pressure on traditional notions of biological hybridity in light of today’s understanding of plasticity and body-minded cognition. Writ large in the figure of the racial hybrid is the drama of the inherited and malleable body in the permeable border between nature and culture. The signature themes of this book, pursued through readings of the sociocultural worlds of hybrid characters in Julian Barnes’s novel Arthur and George, Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist, and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, derive from vexing the question of the biological and physiological dimensions of hybridity in particular and the question of the human in general. Although their genealogical histories are distinct, and the differences between them are simultaneously maintained and denied in postcolonial studies, what racial and nonracial cultural hybrids potentially share is the experience of the body-mind under revision at the porous borders between race, biology, and culture in the sociobiological laboratory of empire. By implication, then, paged by history and inseminated by the logic of imperial modernity, cultural and racial hybrids are both biologically reincarnated. Located in a complicated subcontinental context, the figure of the hybrid disclosed in this book demonstrates various kinds of psychophysiological formation in excess of the fact of racial mixture. These include adaptive behaviors in response to the struggle for recognition by superiors and the need to distinguish the self from those deemed inferior. Comportment in accordance with privileged aesthetic forms inadvertently reveals the sedimented logic of civilizational, racial, classist, and species hierarchism.

A turn to the plasticity of living forms brings the eternal braid of biology, culture, and aesthetic forms back into renewed focus. Taking into consideration “the thinking of the body” (William Butler Yeats’s phrase) as simultaneously biological and historical returns the salience of race to culture, culture to race, and civilization and its aesthetic preoccupation with form and the formation of plastic minds and bodies to both. In this reading, hybridity emerges as the bio-logic of identity crafted for successful passage in the modern world, defined by a state of war against nature, and a modification of behaviors that remind us of our biological, animal being. The displacement of biologically deterministic forms of racial thinking into new formulas for adjudicating biosocial evolution based on the grammar of comportment and behavior as social language directs attention, moreover, to the politics of hybridity and mimicry among the colonized. Together, these readings reappraise the postcolonial concept of hybridity and explore its persistent salience in globalization.

Despite the origins of “hybridity” in botany and zoology in reference to mixture between species, and subsequent use in debates about race in anthropology and biology, the term began to take a culturalist and linguistic turn after the conclusive exposure of race as fiction.8 The postcolonial turn in discussions of hybridity is most closely associated with the work of Bhabha. Mikhail Bakhtin’s conceptualization of hybridization (gibridizacija) as “the mixing, within a single concrete utterance, of two or more different linguistic consciousnesses, often widely separated in time and social space,” supplied the structural formula for resistance within language, subsequently acquiring a poststructuralist gloss in Bhabha’s work (The Dialogic Imagination, 429).9 These departures from traditional usage have been indispensable for exposing the ruse of purist essentialisms, turning hybridity into a master trope for investigating intercultural contact.10 The subsequent appropriation of hybridity as the Lieblingswort (favored term) of globalization, however, threatens to reduce the term to banality at a global moment driven by the tendency to subsume difference in sameness.11 Disregard for the relationship between word and history, moreover, also signals impatience with history tout court.12 In the wake of this semantic gerrymandering, a term that invites direct engagement with questions of biology and flesh has increasingly moved away from both, thereby successfully avoiding the associated whiff of essentialism, but also discouraging further interest in alternative conceptions of biological hybridization at the very moment they are most needed.13 In this book’s advised return to the intercourse of biology, culture, and the body, colonial contact emerges as a salient, instructive precursor to the nexus of capital, corporation, and the biopolitics of hybridity in the global present. Hybridity may well be “the cultural logic of globalization,” as Marwan Kraidy’s book title suggests, but it must also be understood as the covert bio-logic of the rule of capital and corporation. On this understanding, the pliant, bio-mentally plastic and permeable body is a battlefield no less worthy of our urgent attention than the biologically deterministic body of bad science and worse politics that long served as the traditional focus of antiracist discourse.

In one of the first substantial volumes on human variability and plasticity in the life sciences, D. F. Roberts suggests that the concept of plasticity is applied in “widely differing biological situations” that include “overall body form” as well as “details of body composition, soft tissue distribution, and the structure of the bony skeleton.” Biological plasticity can extend from the postnatal stage to adulthood and senescence, involve the impact of adaptive changes in one part of the body to others, and effect “greater changes in one individual than can the most intensive genetic selection of hereditary variation over many generations.” Roberts’s conclusions suggest an extra evolutionary mechanism that is “additional to natural selection” (“The Pervasiveness of Plasticity,” 12), with intriguing implications for a return to the politically and biologically vulnerable body in postcolonial reckoning with hybridity. In the humanities, Catherine Malabou’s sustained engagement with the Hegelian idea of plasticity as “a capacity to receive form and a capacity to produce form” has initiated a significant dialogue “between the role of genetic nondeterminism at work in the constitution of the brain and the possibility of a social and political nondeterminism, in a word, a new freedom, which is to say: a new meaning of history,” to use her own words.14 Along with mounting interest in biological plasticity in the life sciences, research in embodied cognition now routinely foregrounds the physical and affective machinery involved in realizing cognitive processes, requiring us to reengage with the role of the senses in encounters with difference.15 Related developments in extended cognition, moreover, prompt a reconceptualization of the idea of the human body-mind as coextensive with the physical, social, and cultural environment, revealing the significance of prosthetic and technological dilations attached to adaptable biological beings, and therefore of the impact of goods, products, and lifestyles introduced by empires old and new.16

If our inherent plasticity rescues us from a biologically deterministic fate, it also makes us a favored site for projection, manipulation, and product placement. Imperial “goods” such as new kinds of food, music, medicines, pills, drugs, contraceptives, sanitary regimes, and grooming materials not only transform cultures in contact in the abstract but also living bodies through taste transfer and new commodity aesthetics. The potential bidirectionality of the exchange of products and ideas does not cancel out the structural inequalities that characterize colonial relations. Underwritten by the civilizing mission, culture is at once dislocated and sedimented in a sensuous, pulsing fiction worked over by imperial history: habemus corpus.17 In Alimentary Tracts, Parama Roy has argued persuasively for an understanding of the “grammar of ingestion and avoidance” as germinative for an understanding of the ways in which “colonial transformation” is “situated simultaneously in theaters of the flesh and of the psyche, rather than the latter alone” (29). With its organic specificity, pliable musculature and neurology, environmental adaptability, susceptibility to authority and epigenetic factors, as well as its eminently revisable practices of ingestion, evacuation, and consumption, the plastic body-mind stands at the intersection of history, culture, and biology as an embattled embodiment of the dialogue between form and flesh.18 Not only does our biological plasticity make us pliable and manipulable, but otherwise neutral observations about the continuum between society, culture, technology, and the individual in theories of extended cognition imply that pejorative judgments about our bodily techniques and prosthetics predispose us to mimicry of privileged forms, as well as to the adoption of commodities associated with positive evaluations and power. In this reading, the biological scene of transformation emerges forcefully in incarnate moments as we revise our behaviors and habits in response to social evaluation, pointing to an additional evolutionary mechanism that involves sociogenic and epigenetic factors as well as forms of species supremacism inherent in the civilizing mission of imperial modernity.19 In sum, form is sedimented content.

Reclaiming human biology as neuropolitical and biocultural, Postcolonial Biology examines unsettled postcolonial subjectivities and new hierarchies born of the union of ideology, aesthetic forms, and power structures working through ductile, mutable body-minds in the imperial theater. This line of inquiry becomes more urgent as we confront “colonialism in its new forms,” in Fanon’s prescient words (The Wretched of the Earth, 235). The struggle for control over aesthetic forms associated with advanced civilization and modernity—in other words, the biopoetics of forms of living—continues in the disjunctive relay from colonialism to the rule of capital and corporation in globalization. In the name of global citizenship, a range of subject effects is being produced today through the global culture industry’s advertorial regimen, commodity aesthetics, and profit-minded body politics. The long season of the manipulation of biologically volatile subjects continues well after colonialism has ended. Then, as now, Empire reaches us where we live, all the way down to our gut. With this understanding, the “postcolonial” of Postcolonial Biology must be understood as what follows after colonization, albeit disjunctively—rather than as a particular moment of political decolonization. Postcolonial Biology, then, is the name we might give to the intersection of power, capital, and supremacist thinking expressed through the body-minded cognition, categorization, and manipulation of human life from early modern colonialisms to their newest season in globalization. In other words, it is the name we might give to the largest-scale ongoing experiment in human lives in history.20 When the different come to fear their own difference, when an appliance manufacturer can commandeer the idea of the good life in its logo, LG (“Life’s Good”), when the numbers of the wretched of the earth grow beyond counting, we are obliged to ask whether there is still time to reopen the horizon of history. In place of the perversion of life and lifeways by new and old empires that exalt capitalist personhood and supremacist behavior to an art form and not only tolerate but promote inequality, perhaps we might think of postcolonial biology as the name we might give to something different, to a utopian desire for imaginatively richer forms of good life as a shared but as-yet unrealized horizon of human longing.

In the main, this project responds to Davis and Morris’s “Biocultures Manifesto,” and its call to “join the biological and cultural” in a productive intersection of culture, history, and biology (411). More broadly, it is also responsive to Ian Baucom’s call to imagine “a new set of inquiries” in critical postcolonial studies, since “questions arising from the contemporary life sciences,” especially “biology, biomedicine, cognitive neuroscience, genomics, genetics, and ecology,” are “breaking the boundary walls of the humanities” (6).21 However, it draws its inspiration as much from a current interdisciplinary paradigm as an earlier tradition in critical theory that recognizes the birth of aesthetics in the body; invests in explorations of “the good life”; and conceives of human biology as the study of life lived in physically incarnate moments that are profoundly historical, for they are delimited by the structural conditions of the very possibility of experience (Adorno, Minima Moralia, 15). If “aesthetics is a discourse born in the body” as Terry Eagleton claims,22 and meaning is made in the “body-minded mind” as Antonio Damasio declares (putting a tradition associated with William James and Thomas Dewey into dialogue with experimental neurobiology),23 postcolonial studies have the opportunity to reconvene aesthetics, somatics, and cognition in a productive matrix to understand how the tyranny of aesthetic forms and the educability of plastic body-minds have been instrumental in the production of civilizational hierarchies in the past, as well as how they collude in the persistence of racial prejudice and the production of new divides in the present.24 The field’s traditional preoccupation with the intersection of culture, power, and politics, I argue, must urgently extend now to consideration of the politics of life as it is lived in the body and the mind.

The turn from race and biology to culture in most contemporary discussions of hybridity has obscured the historical entwinement of these terms. “The racial was always cultural,” Robert J. C. Young notes (Colonial Desire, 28).25 Although it would require a suppression of the historical relay between race and culture as each other’s understudy, as well as a disregard for the role of biology in underwriting both, implicit in the twentieth-century drift from the former to the latter was an increasing abstraction of the idea of culture as elusive and pluralistic, and a discursive narrowing of the idea of biology, promoting the confinement of body as organism to the laboratory, and an understandable legacy of caution regarding any language linking race, culture, or difference with biology.26 Despite the accepted understanding in the humanities that words are contested and concepts hijacked, we are inured to surrendering not only the word but also the concept of “biology” to science, thus instating a false divide between biology and culture on the one hand, and race and culture on the other, as if the former were the circumscribed preserve of science, and therefore objective and stable, while the latter was to be embraced as the legitimate province of the humanities, since it can be assumed to be less rigid, less categorical, and more open to interpretation. In fact, the move from race to culture in uses of the term “hybridity” offers no asylum from matters of the flesh since both deploy the discourse of our biological and “animal” prehistory, rely on sensory perception for evaluating individual and collective form, share the language of civilization and aesthetics, ally the idea of civilization with control over biological functions in one way or another, and deploy the mind–body split variously. Moreover, research in the health sciences increasingly exposes the fiction of race while investigating the ways in which the sociopolitical can nonetheless become biological.27 The sundering of the arts and the sciences, and segregated modes of body-talk in the soft arts and the hard sciences, with territorial entrenchments in language or the laboratory, are no less my target in calling for a bastard history of hybridity that crosses these disciplinary boundaries so we can acknowledge the mutual imbrications of culture, race, and biology in the making of human life today.28

The Incarnate Moment

I turn to writings by Frantz Fanon and Theodor Adorno for an elaboration of the sociophenomenological production of experience and life under the yoke of Empire and Capital.29 In my reading of the ramifications of intercultural contact, hybridity emerges as a zone of contestation tied to the question of the good life, a topic Adorno explored at some length in Minima Moralia and adumbrated elsewhere in his writings, often with direct reference to social control over the body. Fanon’s ruminations on the colonized body in various writings constitute a politically situated, racially conscious response to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theories of the phenomenological body and its corporeal schema.30 Adorno, not traditionally thought of as a philosopher of the body, frequently turns to somatic considerations—in response to the Holocaust, for instance, or in exploring the commodification of the body under the rule of capital and instrumental rationality in Negative Dialectics, Minima Moralia, and with Max Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Adorno’s thoughts on the repression and distortion of the fleshy leibhafte Moment of experience and Fanon’s on a racially charged l’expérience vécue inform my investigation of colonial and neocolonial theaters of interaction, revealing undertheorized biophysiological dimensions of hybridity and mimicry (Negative Dialectics, 203; Negative Dialektik, 201; translation mine). Fanon makes an elaborate case for the sensory foundations of racism in his works, as well as the relationship of sensory cognition to the moral economy of the animal in colonial relations. Adorno, sometimes in conversation with Horkheimer, argues for sensation as “the crux of all epistemology”; the emergence of physicality “at the ontic pole of cognition, as the core of cognition”; and the repression of the sensory and corporeal as the product of a “conniving consciousness” (Negative Dialectics, 193–94; Metaphysics, 117). Cognition, experience, judgment, aesthetic evaluations of form, and dominative rationality are joined for Adorno in the living, incarnate moment that often goes unacknowledged. Although ideas, beliefs, and unconscious impulses are understood to belong to the psyche, “all mental things,” according to Adorno, can also be understood as “modified physical impulses” that begin with an urge (Negative Dialectics, 202). Adorno contends that in attending to these moments, we veer closer to knowledge about the human condition. His meditations on species supremacism and the role of the animal in philosophical considerations of the human supplement his scattered but frequent references to physiological and biological being as related concerns. In writings by Fanon and Adorno, the biological apparatuses involved in societal and intercultural contact become apparent, effectively recasting the theory of mind in terms that emphasize body-minded sensation and cognition.31 Together, they amplify the role of the senses and body-minded cognition and categorization, and the associated discomfort with animal being as the pretext of the urge to civilize.32

Horkheimer and Adorno invite us to examine the mechanics of the civilizing process, arguing that “all more recent culture,” by which they mean modernity, is colored by a “love-hate relationship with the body” (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 193). A problematic relationship to the biological body, its sounds, odors, excretions, urges, emissions, and expressions, informs the civilizational project. The relationship of the colonial civilizing mission to the politics of the plastic body becomes clearer if we place it within the larger context of the European civilizing process, which is characterized by discomfort with reminders of animality in our biological functions and the subsequent suppression, administration, and regulation of the sensorium as well as the mimetic instinct, with the consequent production of dominative relations on the basis of an aesthetics of sociality developed through these repressions. A long history of Cartesian dualism, the racialization and feminization of the senses, and an excessive identification of the native with the body and its crude biological functions in colonial accounts are part of a complicated biopolitical complex that also produced others within Europe.33 The leibhafte Moment of experience takes place within this extensively overdetermined structural logic of repression and reformation of both psyche and flesh.34

Pointing out that “the menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority,” Bhabha concludes that the “final irony” of mimicry lies in the fact that there is no “presence or identity behind its mask,” only “empty form” and “partial representation” (The Location of Culture, 87–88).35 This convincing explanation of the deconstruction of essential identity through the menace of mimicry strikes a necessary body blow at illusory notions of the integrity of differential identities. But more is demanded of us. Because “the most forgotten alien land is one’s own body,” as Walter Benjamin writes in his reading of Kafka, and the body conceals its workings from us, we are apt to overlook moments of hybridity and mimicry rooted in the flesh (Illuminations, 132).36 I argue that mimicry not only menaces the colonizer with reminders of this repression, but more alarmingly, it also begins a process of biological sclerosis and rigidification in the colonized mimic precisely through “empty form” as performance. We fail at our own peril to recognize “empty form” as the sclerosed version of a life that once lived more freely before it became rigid through repression. For Adorno and Horkheimer, civilization begins a process of sclerosing instinctive urges, expressions, and their moral possibilities. Fanon recognizes the peculiar manifestations of this process under conditions of imperial domination. Horkheimer and Adorno claim, “only culture treats the body as a thing that can be owned, only in culture has it been distinguished from mind, the quintessence of power and command, as the object, the dead thing, the corpus” (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 193). Culture, Adorno reminds us, has always been bound up with administration and relations of domination and control (The Culture Industry, 108, 113). Collective civilizational goals have always included education in aesthetic modalities of being in the world. The civilizing process, however, involves not only the grand arenas of expression—sculpture, painting, music, and civic structures—but also prescriptions and proscriptions involving the individual body’s expressions, behaviors, and dilatory extensions; the latter are key elements in assessing fitness and success in civilized society. The clash of civilizations therefore extends to questions of form in the kitchen and the bathroom (or bush) as much as in temples, museums, concerts, and courts.37

Mimicry and Eumemics

Sensory and aesthetic education—the terms of colonial mimicry and the cultivation of taste—and the adoption of cultural prosthetics and appropriate techniques of the body are part of cultural administration in every society. From Aristotle’s disquisition on the topic to Adorno and Benjamin’s, and to today’s neuropsychological research, imitation learning emerges as the engine of the “big bang” or “the great leap forward” in human evolution, casting mimicry simultaneously as a mode of cultural and biological subject formation.38 In his essay on the mimetic faculty, Walter Benjamin accords a primary role to mimesis in human existence:

Nature creates similarities. One need only think of mimicry. The highest capacity for producing similarities, however, is man’s. His gift of seeing resemblances is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else. Perhaps there is none of his higher functions in which his mimetic faculty does not play a decisive role. (Reflections, 333)

Crucial to the development of sociocognitive skills, the regulation of an inherent capacity for mimesis plays a vital role in the process of civilization, tahzeeb, or sabhyata,39 however differentially these ideas are conceived in diverse cultures.40 Mimicry is a mode of assimilation into any culture, including our own. Indeed, we are hybridized no less by our own culture—its ideals, thoughts, foods, proprietary aesthetics, and other bodily codes of movement and rest—than that of others.

When asked if Parsis are “characteristically Hindu or Muslim,” Bhabha describes them as a “hybridized community” (“their rituals pay formal respect to Hindu customs and rituals while articulating their own religious and ethnic identity”), and adds,

I don’t think it’s a deferral to think that the question of what it means to be Parsi is an open question; but supposing somebody said that, I would say that Parsis come together most communally over the dining table. Our cuisine is important to us—as you know from the hours I spend in my kitchen. (Quoted in Mitchell, “Translator,” 80)41

Indeed, the dining table with its commensal regime, foods, manner of eating—plate or banana leaf, utensils or with hands—may well be one location of culture.42 To grow up in a culture is to incline to its practices through habit and repetition.43 The body as both embodiment and interpreter of culture in a mutually dynamic relationship is never static, but it nonetheless tends toward compliance with its affiliational groups. Variously acculturated, the human body is a voluble, fleshy text that speaks both its common humanity and its distinction from others. As acculturated beings, we are guided by kinesthetic, vestibular, and muscle memory, so aptly captured in the idea of inclination—that which we habitually incline to—as we enact ourselves through dispositions sedimented by habit, even as we are vulnerable to new forms of acculturation.44 Marcel Mauss’s arguments for an understanding of difference through the techniques of the body, subsequently developed in the work of Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu, demand recognition of bodily acculturation and orientation through habit, contextual reinforcement, and reward.45 Beyond differences in skin color, the kinetic, postural, and aesthetically expressive body presents a complicated text of cultural lifeways. The body that speaks of its civilizational standing is flesh that is stylized. Its expressions in its arts as well as its behaviors, postures of sitting, eating, or defecating, verbal comportment, forms of work and play, and management of its emissions and effluences are performed and experienced in accord with aesthetic and sensory training. Whether individual or civilizational, aesthetic evaluations and judgments hinge on diverse notions of being well formed. An argument for acknowledging differences in variously stylized flesh undoubtedly carries the danger of suggesting that biological and bodily differences are part of cultural difference—hypostatizing biological difference anew—but why should our models of humanity rely on sameness rather than difference as their foundational premise?

Part of the paideia of the individual from childhood on, rewards and punishments associated with mimicry of privileged forms, as well as repression of devalued ones, influence subject formation in every culture, even though these forms may vary greatly in different parts of the world. The invitation to sanctioned mimicry comes from many quarters in our lives, with the most dominant and powerful most likely to gain our compliance. The human sensory apparatus joins with the body-minded mind in the evaluation of our own and other bodies in part as a consequence of our aesthetic training, one based on the preferred eumemic forms controlled by those variously in power. Mimicry—the copying and internalization of ratified forms of comportment and avoidance of those prohibited in a culture or prohibited to certain groups within a culture—operates as a form of “passing” implicit in the process of acculturation.

Mimicry, regulated by its prescriptive and proscriptive logic, is the engine that produces subject groups as well as their boundaries. Horkheimer and Adorno inject the short fuse of dominative rationality into these supposedly universal mechanisms across cultures, while Fanon introduces that of racial difference to Merleau-Ponty’s proposals regarding the allegedly universal phenomenological body. In the contact zones, conflict emerges over better or worse cultures and civilizations. Fanon’s adumbration of the colonizer’s judgmental evaluation is crucial to an understanding of colonial mimicry. Postcolonial concern with unmasking the disorder of colonial authority should not overtake due consideration of those who suffer its dominative, if anxious and unstable logic. In the subsumptive logic of empire, Fanon tells us that native “language, dress, techniques, are devalorized,” as “expropriation, spoliation, raids, objective murder, are matched by the sacking of cultural patterns” (Toward the African Revolution, 33). The colonial “enterprise of deculturation,” informed by the intertwined texts of race and sexuality, casts the native as intellectually and emotionally primitive, to be derided by psychologists through the symptomology of deviance detected in “a way of speaking, of walking” tantamount to aesthetic disability (31–33). Fanon unmasks the relationship between racism and culture, and the profound impact of the colonizer’s “pejorative judgment with respect to [the native’s] original forms of existing” (38). Dismissive of “the values borne by the culture, incarnated by men,” colonial subjugation “makes the native an object” in the hands of the occupying nation—“an object man” whose “desire to live, to continue, becomes more and more indecisive, more and more phantom-like” (34–35; emphasis added).

Revising ideas that first appeared in a speech before the First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in Paris in September 1956 (later published in Toward the African Revolution), Fanon goes on to outline the connections between biology, racism, and culture in The Wretched of the Earth: “every effort is made to bring the colonized person to admit the inferiority of his culture which has been transformed into instinctive patterns of behavior” and “in the last extreme, the confused and imperfect character of his own biological structure” (236). Fanon reminds us that “it is not necessary to be wounded by a bullet in order to suffer from the fact of war in body as well as in mind” (290). Sensing the reaction of the white boy to his “[skin as] uniform” in Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon decides that it is “indeed ugly,” going on to ask, “who can tell me what beauty is?” (114). In response, Fanon implies that the native is prompted to undertake an ambitiously scaled reformation, as the black man’s “metaphysics, or, less pretentiously, his customs and the sources on which they are based, were wiped out because they were in conflict with a civilization that he did not know and that imposed itself upon him” (Black Skin, White Masks, 110).

The native body split apart under imperial eyes is reenvisioned as a multiply disabled, dysplastic body, lacking in the collective and individual graces of civilization. Fanon’s knowing black speaker reveals this conjunction:

I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: “Sho’ good eatin’.” (Black Skin, White Masks, 112)

Fanon’s reference is to a tirailleur (African soldier in the colonial infantry) declaring his enjoyment of a heavily marketed French breakfast food in an advertisement. “Y a bon Banania,” he is imagined to say, in an uncouth version of the more standard, “C’est bon Banania.” Of all that offends, “et surtout, et surtout” (above all, above all), repeated twice, this comment on an offense to linguistic as well as euphagic etiquette brings colonial contempt to rest in the buccal cavity, demanding a recognition of the politics of prejudice in its retail, fleshy particulars.46 Ingestive and expressive regimes are both underwritten by colonial intervention; the mouth and word of mouth together incriminate the tirailleur. Crude of speech, aesthetically disabled, the tirailleur is a figure in need of superior nutrition and ameliorative prosthetics—bodily, lingual, and mental. The description discloses the figure of an absent judge and the sensory foundations of racism; it hints, moreover, at the motivations of a future subject who will seek to disarm prejudice by recalibrating behaviors and speech patterns to lessen the sensory impact of difference from imperial aesthetic norms.

In a sensitive reading of the black body’s muscular tension in Fanon’s writing, Darieck Scott explores his interest in “how to read the [blackened] double-body’s flinches at the moment that the external stimulus which cleaves it in two flicks across its boundaries” (Extravagant Abjection, 64). According to Scott, “the muscles, in contraction or tension, are a metaphor referring to some reservoir of resistance to the colonizer’s acts of subjugation and enslavement” in what amounts to a bodily performance of “political ‘refusal’” (64–65, 70). Fanon recognizes the fact of “the native’s reticence, the expression in muscular form of his rigidity and his refusal with regard to colonial authority” (The Wretched of the Earth, 291). At the same time, the muscular tonus and corporeal torsions of the twitchy native in a state of compliance with Western lifeways that have triumphed aggressively over native forms of existence constitute an important, alternative text, I argue, in our reading of Fanon’s muscles. While Fanon claims that the “native’s muscles are always tensed” because “he is not convinced of his inferiority,” it is also the “impulse to take the settler’s place” that “implies a tonicity of muscles” (53). Fanon’s well-known claims about the native’s envious dream of “putting himself in the place of the settler” indicate active desire, but in an earlier text he emphasizes the anxieties that precede and inform it (52): “The racialized social group tries to imitate the oppressor and thereby to deracialize itself. The ‘inferior race’ denies itself as a different race. It shares with the ‘superior race’ the convictions, doctrines, and other attitudes concerning it” (Toward the African Revolution, 38). Under “the name of assimilation,” “the oppressor . . . manages to impose on the native new ways of seeing, and . . . a pejorative judgment with respect to his original forms of existing” (38). The native’s self-revision and the neuroses precipitated by it manifest in his mentality as well as his bodily comportment, posture, emotional expression, and sensorial recalibration: “Having judged, condemned, abandoned his cultural forms, his language, his food habits, his sexual behavior, his way of sitting down, of resting, of laughing, of enjoying himself, the oppressed flings himself upon the imposed culture with the desperation of a drowning man” (39). In the same essay, Fanon speculates on the selective return to nativist traditions, but his stance there, as in The Wretched of the Earth, is to scrupulously avoid false nostalgia for an earlier, romanticized native culture while nonetheless bemoaning its sclerosis. It is not surprising that the dreams of muscular prowess, the native’s resistance, and “the tonicity of muscles” implicit in “the impulse to take the settler’s place” in The Wretched of the Earth are part of the same dialectic. Fanon’s muscles, therefore, suggest both subjugation and resistance in a conflicted response to the power and style of the colonial civilizing mission (53).

Bhabha’s expansive range of choices for the native constitutes a species of evasion when he asserts, “it is difficult to agree entirely with Fanon that the psychic choice is to ‘turn white or disappear.’ There is the more ambivalent, third choice: camouflage, mimicry, black skin / white masks” (Black Skin, White Masks, 100; The Location of Culture, 120). This ambivalent, third choice is understood as subversive for three reasons: first, because it “disrupts” the authority of colonial discourse by disclosing “its ambivalence”; second, because “mimicry marks . . . moments of civil disobedience within the discipline of civility: signs of spectacular resistance”; and finally, because “mimicry conceals no presence or identity behind its mask” (The Location of Culture, 88, 121, 88). While Bhabha initiates a legitimate quarrel with essentialism, one wonders why he downplays the significance of what Fanon describes as the “social structures” that are the “real source of the [black man’s] conflict” with regard to the choices available (Black Skin, White Masks, 100). Moreover, if we understand mimicry of preferred aesthetic forms as a means of learning through repetition, and if we understand color as code for multiple attributes of identity, mimicry for the colonized group is a sort of turning white through repeated muscular and neuronal training. Bhabha, otherwise alert to it, makes too little of the imbalance of power between white and black in the passage quoted above, and discounts the creeping suspicion of the “inferiorized group . . . that its misfortunes resulted directly from its racial and cultural characteristics,” as Fanon explains (Toward the African Revolution, 38). Fanon is intent, in other words, on exposing the affective register of shame and anxiety that prompts the desire for whiteness, initiating revisions that are not merely formal but more profoundly transformative. Fanon’s ultimate objective is “to put . . . [the black man] in a position to choose action (or passivity) with respect to the real source of the conflict—that is toward the social structures . . . once his motivations have been brought into consciousness” (Black Skin, White Masks, 100; emphasis added). It is, after all, the inferiorized group that more consistently dons the mask and resorts to mimicry, however subversively it does so. Mimicry of native forms is rare among colonizers. In Indian Traffic, Parama Roy describes the colonizer gone native as someone who “put a dangerous distance between himself and the cultural appurtenances of the west, particularly ‘civilization’ and Christianity” (30). Until the unlikely reversal of dominative rationality and “the real source of conflict,” the native’s repudiation of “his own cultural style” and “his total and unconditional adoption of the new cultural models” made available by colonization have momentous implications for hybridity lived in the flesh as much as in the mind (Toward the African Revolution, 38–42). In this understanding, mimicry becomes the site of bodying forth a response to the imperial call to flesh and psyche, amounting to a bioformal conversion narrative. The conversion is undertaken in the hope of disarming colonial prejudice—or reducing it—as well as in the hope of reward and recognition for becoming a perceptibly reformed other distinguishable from other natives. Fanon describes the anxious Martinican immigrant to Paris who practices “rolling his R”: “suspicious of his own tongue—a wretchedly lazy organ—he will lock himself into his room and read aloud for hours—desperately determined to learn diction” (Black Skin, White Masks, 21). The bodybildungsroman of colonial hybridity and mimicry turns out to be a violent text made poignant by its longing for acceptance and recognition.

Metonymic Aesthetics

Bhabha suggests that “partial,” “incomplete,” and “virtual” representations strain the idea and authority of Englishness, making colonial mimicry “at once resemblance and menace”; in this disruptive mode, “hybridity is heresy” (The Location of Culture, 86, 226). Bhabha’s conception of mimicry as camouflage against a mottled background, drawing on Lacan and a zoological example, emphasizes its partial and fragmented nature (90, 121). This exposure of the deception of essential, whole identities, however, does not clarify sufficiently the politics of a metonymic aesthetics of identity. That pejorative judgment and mimicry both operate on the logic of the partial offers no immunity from the particular burden of hybridity borne by those with underprivileged positions on the civilizational and aesthetic ladder. A metonymic aesthetics of identity—patched together from multiple, incomplete, and piecemeal representations of “Englishness”—nonetheless produces the pulsive fiction that we recognize as the Westernized or Anglicized postcolonial subject. Although colonial hybridity does not add up to an English self, it generates a series of subject effects that nonetheless cobble together an alternative sociogenic category among the colonized, that of the Anglicized subject whose corporeal schema and vestibular orientation have been recomposed in contact with empire. In a bid to reintroduce consideration of the body politics of hybridity, I have emphasized the idea of hybridity in the flesh as implying something biological in a sense that is other than or beyond sexual mixture. The logic of the partial challenges the ruse of the whole, but it is also pernicious because it is the very engine of the civilizing mission, which targets the body in its piecemeal, retail particulars at the level of muscle, tongue, glottis, viscera, and myriad administrations of the sensorium and bodily expression.

In Black Skin, White Masks, the look of the white man, falling upon black skin, inaugurates a simultaneous session of a “thousand details, anecdotes, stories” (111). Prejudice and native reform both involve the metonymies of presence: tom-toms, “nigger underwear” with “nigger smell,” big feet, white teeth, poor speech. Grounding his remarks in an epistemology of the senses rather than in a rational Enlightenment project, Fanon understands that the triggers of prejudice lie beyond reason for “in vivo and in vitro the Negro had been proved analogous to the white man . . . with the same morphology [and] histology as the white man” (119). It has long been understood that it is not enough to understand or combat racism by challenging its genetic bases in biology. Fanon stakes his arguments to the biological dimensions of cultural body politics as he coimplicates the societal and discursive idea of race with sensory cognition. In more recent memory, one recalls that French president Jacques Chirac’s notorious speech against immigrants in 1991 when he was the mayor of Paris referred pointedly to their “noise” and “odor” (“le bruit et l’odeur”) as the last straw in testing the limits of French tolerance, highlighting the link between sensory and affective triggers in prejudicial judgments. Addressing a crowd of supporters on France’s emergent immigration issues, Chirac thundered, “What happens when a hardworking French worker” finds as neighbors “a piled-up family with a father, three or four spouses and twenty children earning 50,000 FF via benefits?” He concluded with his punch line, “If you add to that the noise and the smell, well the French worker, he goes crazy.”47 Sensory triggers—music, smell, food, posture, accent—are incarnate forms of stereotypes and clichés under pressure in regimes of assimilation focused precisely on small parts of identity.

In the long run—and it is the long run that is of consequence—today’s discourse of assimilation, which is a sanitized version of the older “civilizing mission,” tacitly builds its case on the grounds of reducing perceptions of difference from the mainstream sensorium through retail therapy and remediation—deodorants, accent reduction, and so forth—as much as opinions, morals, and intellect. The fetish of the skin is multisited, pointing not only to color, but also to postural, phonetic, and scented identity, with every retail particular available for judgment, control, and emendation. Colonial mimicry, then, is no less pernicious because it is based on the logic of the partial or focused on metonymic aesthetics. The microphysics of imperial power—vestibular reorientation and a renovated corporeal schema—necessarily take place bit by bit, as it were, in simultaneously ideological and motor actions that can become habitual through repetition over time. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault quotes eighteenth-century criminologist Joseph Michel Antoine Servan on the importance of inculcating the habitual conjunction of ideas to enforce compliance. I would suggest that this form of social engineering is founded in manipulating the subject’s neurobiological plasticity: “On the supple fibres of the brain is founded the most stable of Empires,” because new neural pathways develop as the subject is exposed to ideas and forms associated with privilege and reward, and discouraged away from those that elicit punishment or prejudice (Servan, Discours sur L’Administration, 35; translation mine).48 In a project that is simultaneously aesthetic and political, the “subtle coercion” of the civilizing mission operates through a manipulation of the hybrid body’s “movements, gestures, attitudes”—a reformation, I argue, that extends from thought to neural firing, glottis to gut, and neural substrate to muscular micromovement (Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 105, 137). The biopolitics of the civilizing mission relies on a metonymic aesthetics that withholds the satisfactions of integral identity and fixates instead on bits and parts in a synecdochic mode—targeting psyche and flesh together to produce neurobiologically altered mimics copying the norms of an order that disdains the native, but disdains some natives more than others. Even though it cannot change color, the colonized body can become more becoming through the adoption of regimes of regulation invested in making alien bodies more bearable to the overlords while investing them more visibly with power among their own. For the exclusive few who were chosen and rewarded in colonial times, others would have continued even more obsessively, driven by an unpredictable, variable schedule of rewards while enduring the contempt colonizers often reserved for the native who tried too hard.

The politics of discriminatory eumemics—the biosocial indoctrination and engineering of others in matters of good form to make a better, more civilized body defined by those in power—is part of the new shape taken by racial thinking in modernity. The invitation to eumemics, the mimicry of allegedly good form, exploits the body-mind’s plasticity as well as its search for reward. The mimicry of the dominant by the dominated must thus be understood multiply: as an attempt to mimic and thus experience the enjoyment of those in power; as enjoyment located in forms of comportment associated with those in power; and finally, as instrumental mimicry driven by the desire for advancement and the neurosocial rewards of assimilation to the dominative order, at first through the selective, if unpredictable, approval of the colonizer, and later by a postcolonial nation that continues to be enamored with the aesthetic forms of comportment associated with those who ruled over them. “The not quite / not white” minute-made postcolonials, often mocked for their hysterical overcompliance with Anglophilic aesthetics in colonial literature, nonetheless go on to reap the rewards of assimilating to forms associated with the colonizers (Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 92).

Manufactured piecemeal by empire, a certain class of persons has gone on to reproduce the hierarchical structure and aesthetic logic of the civilizing mission within the nation, while serving as its recognizable, modern representatives abroad, albeit with variable success. Arguably, the acquisition of aesthetic forms associated with modernity and the brandishing of goods and prosthetics associated with success permit forms of passing not necessarily as white but as a “better” sort of native in interactions with others as well as among their own. Moreover, it is not unusual for this elite to acquire, along with these dissembled semblances, disdain for those unconverted within the nation, so that colonial contempt is replicated and naturalized in the social discourse of the colonized. In time, cultural, aesthetic, and comportmental memes associated with power and status filter down through the mediators without necessarily erasing old or new divides. Bhabha reads “signs of spectacular resistance” in the native’s “masque of mimicry” in the “realm of discourse . . . as a form of defensive warfare” (The Location of Culture, 121). In the logic of relations within the postcolonial nation and among the colonized more generally, mimicry of privileged forms can also be understood as a form of offensive warfare. Fanon spots the propensity of the colonized to surpass and dominate their own others, those “less intelligent than I, blacker than I, less respectable than I” (Black Skin, White Masks, 211).

Hysterical compliance with privileged aesthetic forms derived from colonial contact therefore has a corollary: disgust for the unassimilated among the colonized. Those seen as enjoying the earthly rewards of assimilation to such norms subtly reinforce the command to assimilate, to become less other to the mainstream, and more sensually and comportmentally compliant with the expressive forms of the regnant order.

Animal Prehistory and Postanimal Aesthetics, Prosthetics, and Technics

If whiteness as a norm constitutes the big Other of postcolonial subject formation, a silent other is the animal—and animal prehistory as part of biotic, bodily being. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno argue for an understanding of civilization as the repression and redirection of practices associated with our shared “biological prehistory” or “animal prehistory” (148, 156). In their work, the urge to formulate the self beyond the conditions of Nur-lebenden (merely living) animal existence emerges as the engine of history. They remind us, “In popular fairy tales the metamorphosis of humans into animals is a recurring punishment. To be imprisoned in an animal body is regarded as damnation” (205). Horkheimer and Adorno repeatedly interpellate the body and its animal prehistory as the object of discipline in the course of Europe’s civilizing process and prejudice in encounters with others, including their own others. Dominion over the animal self and over nature, they suggest, is on a continuum with the domination of humans by humans. “The animal to be devoured,” Adorno says, is evil, for it is the “not-I, l’autrui” that “reminds us of nature” and so “is inferior.” “The unity of the self-preserving thought,” he says, “may thus devour” the “not-I” reminiscent of the evil animal “without misgivings” (Negative Dialectics, 22–23). If Derrida’s elaboration of l’animot directs attention to human propriety in terms of speech and techne, their work appends a consideration of human propriety explicitly with regard to a postanimal state reliant both on the suppression and disguisement of biological being and the call of nature, as well as the acquisition of tools, weapons, and things.

Along with an investment in postanimal aesthetics and technics, the idea of the human conceptualized as postanimal manifests variously in the following ways: in upright man’s posture; Cartesian dualism; the projection of animality, emotion, and sensory excess onto different others; prejudicial cognition of others parlayed into intellectual theory and racial science; and the impulse to civilize those whose difference appears disgusting and intolerable as a sensory reminder of our crude, biological being.49 The microhistory of racism is nestled within a long history of the simultaneous significance and devaluation of the senses in the struggle against the animal self and bare life. Allying perception and projection, Horkheimer and Adorno explain that the “projection of sense impressions is a legacy of [our] animal prehistory, a mechanism for the purposes of defense and obtaining food, an extension of the readiness for combat with which higher species reacted actively or passively to movements, regardless of the intention of the object” (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 154). If mimesis is inherent and innate, so too is “the blind instrument of hostility . . . in animal prehistory,” which continues to fight the rest of nature (156).50 The trained postanimal uses sensory apparatuses and animal instinct to turn on the other who demonstrates insufficient control over biological being or differently stylized ways of living in and through the body. The blind hostile organ of animal prehistory is activated when “in the sickness of the individual,” a “sharpened intellectual apparatus is turned once more upon humanity.” The sick individual relates to others “just as within humanity, the more advanced races have confronted the more primitive, the technically superior nations the more backward” (156–57).

The colonial experiment is a potent arena for animal studies founded in examination of the multiple ways in which the animal and animality are adduced in the discourse of the civilizing mission. In my assessment, not only does this mission derive its aesthetics of form and formation from the capacity for sensation and perception that is part of the biological apparatuses of the humanimal but it also categorizes the difference of the other as defined by the inability to rise above bare animal life because the other lacks recognizably postanimal aesthetics, prosthetics, and technics. In a graphic metaphor that exposes the dominative politics of those in possession of the supposedly right prosthetics, Horkheimer and Adorno ask why, “in this epoch . . . machines, chemicals and organizational principles” should “not be seen as a part of it [the human species] as teeth are a part of the bear, since they serve the same purpose and merely function better?” (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 184). Although technologies, techniques, and prosthetics feature prominently in discussions of the posthuman, the Frankfurt School thinkers prompt us to consider their role in conceptualizing the human through postanimal subject formation; this modern subjectivity, they argue, is typified by instrumental rationality, control over bodily expressions, emissions, and behaviors, as well as the making and possession of things. “Things and their makers,” as Shiva notes in Midnight’s Children, “rule the world,” while things and their possession drive history (307). By extension, at the intersection of empire and capital, aesthetic reformation takes place in the process of taste transfer in the dual arenas of formal and commodity aesthetics.

Aesthetic forms developed out of uneasiness with bare, biological animal life, the ensuing program of sensory repression and redirection in the civilizing process, and the obsession with good form—in forms of government and sociality in the nation as much as those of individual comportment—emerge forcefully in colonial metrics of civilizational and human status at home and abroad. Colonial manipulation of the capacity to receive and generate forms of thinking and living—colonial mimicry and hybridity, in other words—must therefore be located within a preceding history in which upright stature had come to define the human, creating a tacit backdrop for the mind–body split, the denigration of those seen as less cerebral or closer to nature and the earth, and the projection of socially taboo behaviors associated with Nur-lebenden animal life from subject to object. Reminders of animal nature—smell, hairiness, dirt, closeness to the ground in postures of sitting—or physical features that remind people of any of these—noses or lips perceived as large, or short stature (with darker, shorter people perceived as closer to the earth)—can constitute triggers to prejudice. In noting the distinction between “squatting mankind and sitting mankind,” Mauss points to the markings of sociocultural, economic, and political status on the body in relation to the biological echoes and effects of postural form and comportment (“Techniques of the Body,” 81).51 In his discussion on the possibility of the disappearance of distinctions between the races of man through hybridization, Darwin dwells on the mixture of Aryans with others, citing Mr. Hunter’s description of the Santali, or hill tribes, of India in an implicit valorization of the taller, nobler of the two types after several years of mixture in the Indian subcontinent: “hundreds of imperceptible gradations may be traced ‘from the black, squat tribes of the mountains to the tall olive-coloured Brahman, with his intellectual brow, calm eyes, and high but narrow head;’ so that it is necessary in courts of justice to ask the witnesses whether they are Santalis or Hindoos” (The Descent of Man, 241). Color, stature, and squatting ally the former with those closer to the ground and the lighter and taller with rationality, intellect, and calm.52

In surveying the violent march of history, Horkheimer and Adorno assign a foundational role to civilization’s unease with the body and its animality:

The compulsion toward cruelty and destruction stems from the organic repression of proximity to the body, much as, according to Freud’s inspired intuition, disgust came into being when, with the adoption of the upright stance and the greater distance from the earth, the sense of smell, which attracted the male animal to the menstruating female, fell victim to organic repression. In Western civilization, and probably in any civilization, what pertains to the body is tabooed, a subject of attraction and revulsion. (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 193)53

Horkheimer and Adorno draw a direct connection between suspicion of the flesh and humankind’s developmental progress:

The phobias and idiosyncrasies of today, the character traits which are most despised and derided, can be deciphered as marks of a huge advance in human development. From the disgust aroused by excrement and human flesh to the contempt for fanaticism, idleness, and poverty, both spiritual and material, a line connects behavioral forms which were once adequate and necessary to those which are abominated. This line is at once that of destruction and of civilization. (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 72–73)

A long history links civilization, domination, and the suppression and redirection of the mimetic faculty. The desire to become other—to cede the self to the object—has been under sustained assault in the course of civilization: “Civilization has replaced the organic adaptation to others and mimetic behavior proper, by organized control of mimesis. . . . Uncontrolled mimesis is outlawed . . . leading finally to the kind of teaching which does not allow children to behave as children . . . [as] the condition of civilization” (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 180). Signs of tabooed mimetic traits appearing in others invite disgust and mockery in modes that conceal unconscious desire, and recognition that “what repels . . . as alien is all too familiar” (148–49). Michael Taussig claims, “racism is the parade ground where the civilized rehearse this love-hate relation with their repressed sensuosity” (Mimesis, 67). Repressed and distorted, the mimetic urge becomes a source of some of the anxieties that bedevil interpersonal encounters, resulting in relations of dominance. Confronting the brutality of fascism, Horkheimer and Adorno claim that anti-Semitism was based on a false projection, “a pathic character trait” related to repressed form (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 154). In other words, repressed urges, desires, and sensory needs become available for projection on the weaker and relatively powerless objects of the evaluative gaze: “impulses which are not acknowledged by the subject and yet are his, are attributed to the object—the prospective victim” (154). In their view, “the nucleus of all civilizing rationality” involves “the denial of nature in man for the sake of domination over non-human nature and over other men” (54). The war on the self precedes the domination and war on the other. Given this history of mimetic and sensory repression, the sensory enjoyment of cultural others can simultaneously evoke longing and cruelty, a response born of the repressions that seem to forbid the subject a similar enjoyment. In this understanding, mockery of the expressive forms of the weak by the powerful conceals the latter’s desire for mimicry, that is, the longing to become other and surrender subjectivity to experience “extimacy,” the condition of repressing the other in the self in projectional fantasies.

In his essay on extimacy, a concept derived from Jacques Lacan, Jacques-Alain Miller explores alterity within the subject through the category of jouissance. It is precisely the other’s enjoyment, and the other’s way of enjoying, he argues, that elicits hatred: “We may well think that racism exists because our Islamic neighbor is too noisy when he has parties. However, what is really at stake is that he takes his jouissance in a way different from ours. Thus the other’s proximity exacerbates racism” (“Extimité,” 79). Referencing Miller, Žižek emphasizes that “what really bothers us about the ‘other’ is the peculiar way he organizes his enjoyment, precisely the surplus, the ‘excess’ that pertains to this way: the smell of ‘their’ food, ‘their’ noisy songs and dances, ‘their’ strange manners” (Tarrying with the Negative, 203). Chirac’s snuffling nose and raised antennae for “le bruit et l’odeur” of the immigrant is an example of the repressive logic that defines extimacy. Resentful of the other’s undeserved plus-de-jouir, or what Žižek calls “the surplus” or “excess,” the subject turns repressed desire for pleasure into hatred for the other’s access to it. It is in “the confrontation of incompatible modes of jouissance” that intolerance festers (Miller, “Extimité,” 80). Bourdieu suggests that in the civilizational register, disgust is “the ambivalent experience of the horrible seduction of the disgusting and of enjoyment which performs a sort of reduction to animality, corporeality, the belly and sex” (Distinction, 489). Objects that impose consumption and enjoyment on us arouse disgust with reminders of our fleshy animality. Sensational reactions of disgust at the other’s way of living and being result from the long history of repressive sensory administration associated with the idea of civilization, according to Adorno, who describes “the system in which the sovereign mind imagined itself transfigured” as rooted in a “primal history in the pre-mental, the animal life of the species.” The other’s seemingly unregulated indulgence of behaviors long repressed in the self creates psychic dissonance through the recollection of “the animal life of the species” shared with the object of judgment and derision. Projecting evil on the “not-I” and raging at “all that reminds us of nature,” rage at the victim “is rationalized by projection . . . in the advance to humanity,” prompting Adorno to conclude, “the system is the belly turned mind” (Negative Dialectics, 22–23). Primal hunger, redirected anger, projectional fantasies, and rational man’s investment in the primacy of his intellect collude to produce a system marked by dominative rationality and a tortured relationship with the animal.

The imposition of the conceptual mind’s dominance on biological urges and physiological life is the very stuff of civilization, and its long history of oppressing those who invoke the “not-I” in the “I” struggling to imagine itself as “the sovereign mind” (Negative Dialectics, 22). Adorno directs us to “the dialectic of culture and barbarism” (Prisms, 34), which is also resonant in Benjamin’s proclamation that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (Illuminations, 256) to recall the imbrication of primal history with the productions of the rational animal and its claims to exclusive breeding and culture. Sexual repression and the mortification of the flesh, part of the civilizational process, and according to Marcuse in Eros and Civilization, of capitalist production and Christian asceticism, are part of the history of civilization as well as that of antimiscegenation legislation and its regulation of desire in the colonial context. In almost every culture, civilizational norms invest heavily in recommendations and prohibitions related to sexual behavior so as to control sexual expressions and bodily positions, even within alleged heteronormativity, not to mention homosexual, transgender, or other sexual practices. The zoon politikon who becomes recognizable as a civil subject bearing the right to freedom is paradoxically born out of a “primal history” that it continues to suppress (Negative Dialectics, 22). Domination of the other turns out to be part of the repression of the self.54

In mapping the distance of the human from the animal in the realms of consciousness, psychology, and being in the world, it is the biological core of being that is increasingly suppressed as the alterity within. This version of the institution of speciesism in conceptualizing the human becomes spectacularly visible in passages of écriture excrément (scatology) in two “primal” scenes in the jungle in Kunzru’s novel The Impressionist. The first features a gathering of high-ranking British colonial officers and local princes on a tiger hunt. The second is located in Fotseland, an “almost pristine” site in West Africa, where an assorted group of geographers, surveyors, and others are gathered under the aegis of Fotse expert and Oxford anthropologist, Professor Chapel. Both sites present the opportunity to explore the intricacies of intercultural contact in venues that are remote from the amenities of civilization and niceties of cultural (and toilet) training as the parties are stricken by diarrhea. In these liminal spaces of encounter, one might read not only the third space between cultures but also that between civilization and what it must repress to produce human culture. In Midnight’s Children, Rushdie depicts the Sunderbans as a space marked by a similar suspension of civilizational norms in the jungle, the locus classicus of premodernity associated with the animal.

The ambivalence of the human–animal relationship is not limited to disdain of bare life, the suppression of the life-filled incarnate moment, the warmth of feeling, or the inculcation of postanimal aesthetics and acquisition of technics and things. In the colonial encounter, it also surfaces in the paradoxes of habitual, unquestioned carnivory among the colonizers; the categorization of native meat eaters and vegetarians using the language of muscular prowess or weakness, and the colonial sport of the hunt alongside investment in wildlife preserves; the inclination toward pastoral care, and even love, of animals; and the condemnation of those, especially different others, who do not treat animals well. It surfaces in anxieties about humane slaughtering practices alongside the slaughter of indigenous populations. A kind of love of the animal combines with hatred for the animal other as one of the many paradoxes of dominative rationality. “The precondition of the fascists’ pious love of animals, nature, and children,” Horkheimer and Adorno remind us, “is the lust of the hunter”; “the idle stroking of children’s hair and animal pelts signifies: this hand can destroy” (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 210). Adorno indicts Kantian ethics, “which accords affection, not respect to animals,” and can only “muster disdain” for a morality founded in the imperative: “to try to live so that one may believe himself to have been a good animal” (Negative Dialectics, 299). Arguably, the civilizing mission might be understood as an attempt to resolve these ambivalent impulses partially by “caring” for the underdeveloped other through pastoral care and indoctrination in postanimal sensibilities and technologies of living that include a conflicted stance regarding animals simultaneously as pets, protein, and tools in service of humans. These themes come dramatically to light in Arthur and George, Julian Barnes’s retelling of the real-life story of the indictment of a half-Indian lawyer, George Edalji, on charges of animal mutilation in turn-of-the-century England, and the role Sir Arthur Conan Doyle played in real life attempting to clear George’s name of guilt for a crime unimaginable to animal-loving Englishmen.

The love–hate relationship with the body, its animality, and indeed the animal, also take more straightforward forms in projecting the other as animal. On a biocultural evolutionary scale, the production of bourgeois enlightenment subjectivity has invested in a suppression of features associated with the animal and the feminine, and disdain of cultural groups associated with effeminacy and insufficient distance from bodily nature.55 Founded in a Cartesian dualism that predates Descartes, the association of the body, emotion, and sensory excess with women and other lesser human animals is a powerful strand in the production of colonial difference. Relations of domination under empire thus prevail within a complex set of factors: fear of nature, animal, and woman; belief in the body as other to the rational mind; and contempt for those who are thought to bear a retarded relationship to modernity.

Fanon’s repeated exposure of the casting of natives as animalistic, biological, and beastly in Black Skin, White Masks and his refusal of this casting in The Wretched of the Earth introduce the peculiar difference of race into the long history of the making of the human, that is, the zoon politikon born for meaningful citizenship.56 Fanon’s oft-cited passage in the latter outlines the colonial project of recasting human others as animals:

The terms the settler uses when he mentions the native are zoological terms. He speaks of the yellow man’s reptilian motions, of the stink of the native quarter, of breeding swarms, of foulness, of spawn, of gesticulations. When the settler seeks to describe the native fully in exact terms he constantly refers to the bestiary. (42)

In the former, he repeatedly refers to the “Negro” as the bringer of biology, one who “symbolizes the biological” (167). Elsewhere, he explains how the native is depicted as an animal-child, an embodiment of repressed urges to the white colonizer, incapable even of understanding his own experience of pain: “Whereas the doctors say: ‘The pain in their case is protopathic, poorly differentiated, diffuse as in an animal, it is a general malaise rather than a localized pain’; The patients say: ‘They ask me what is wrong with me, as if I were the doctor’” (A Dying Colonialism, 127). Fanon cites Carothers of the World Health Organization: “The African makes very little use of his frontal lobes,” being most akin to a “lobotomized European” (302). In a much-quoted statement from The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon outlines the native’s resistance to this characterization: “For he knows he is not an animal, and it is precisely when he recognizes his humanity that he begins to sharpen the weapons with which he will secure his victory” (43).

Such is the impact of investing in a conception of the human through postanimal subject formation that the colonized subject is left bewildered and conflicted about a proper response to the logic that entraps him as animal other. The regnant order obliges the native to embrace a formula in which bodily being, emotion, and all alleged signs of the animal self, including ways of eating, laughing, feeling, and enjoying life, must be erased in the quest to achieve the status of human. In the metaphysical schematics of the colonized, becoming human relies on becoming not-animal using models of subjectivity defined by enlightenment and imperial modernity. Fanon’s response to colonial violence is charged with a rueful irony in its rejection of the animal, a move that he replicates in his discussion of emotions versus reason in a Manichean racial scheme. Fanon’s writings document the colonial stage of the making of the modern subject conflicted and troubled by the overheated expression of emotions. Susan Buck-Morss writes that “Kant’s transcendental subject purges himself of the senses which endanger autonomy not only because they unavoidably entangle him in the world, but, specifically, because they make him passive (‘languid’ [schmelzend] is Kant’s word) instead of active (‘vigorous’ [wacker]), susceptible, like ‘Oriental voluptuaries,’ to sympathy and tears” (“Aesthetics and Anaesthetics,” 29–30). Fanon’s deeply ambiguous response to colonial descriptions of the “Negro” as emotion embodied, and the celebration of emotion and bodily being by writers of the negritude movement, is symptomatic of the politics of the body/mind divide put in place by Cartesian and colonial logic. Seeming to mock it, Fanon instantiates and uncovers values that have stood against reason in racist science. Fanon’s double gesture—his recognition of attempts made by writers such as Aimé Césaire and Leopold Senghor to write black values and bodily affect back into a civilizational register, and his ironic distance from the language in which such a move is made possible—compel us to confront the dilemma of the postcolonial subject caught between two equally conflicted modes of being: an affectively charged emotional being that has been discredited or a valued intellectual subjectivity that has overcome the heat of emotion but has also lost the warmth of the humanimal. Fanon rewrites colonial descriptions of the “Negro” as primitive with arch references to Senghor: “Yes, we are—we Negroes—backward, simple, free in our behavior. That is because for us the body is not something opposed to what you call the mind. We are in the world. And long live the couple, Man and Earth!” (Black Skin, White Masks, 126–27). The romanticism of this coupling, celebrated elsewhere in German and English romanticism without the discomfort that accompanies Fanon’s restatement, is followed by a borrowed clip from Senghor: “Emotion is completely Negro as reason is Greek” (127). In Fanon’s rehearsal of different responses to the denigration of the black man, at one stage this “Negro” is a poet, a feminized creature not afraid to be allied to something like the animal that is one with nature, and at others even a reminder to mechanized whites of the humanness of all humanity glimpsed through the lens of the biological animal (129). But he cannot forget that these features are seen as “typical of people that have not kept pace with the evolution of the human race. Or, if one prefers, this is humanity at its lowest” (126). “I had to choose,” he declares, and then questions himself, “What do I mean? I had no choice” (126). The tortured text of the self is torn between unviable polarities, hunted and haunted by a history in which the possibilities are prematurely foreclosed and every option denies the “Negro’s” humanity, even when the West turns to him for inspiration and rehabilitation in a cold world from which neither emotion nor reason offers deliverance.

An additional strand connecting Fanon’s work with that of the Frankfurt School thus involves what I would describe as the thermal dynamics of the making of the human—and its less human other—on the basis of a sliding scale between the human as cognitive being and animal being. Here I adduce the idea of the heat of emotion against the ideal of a temperate character. In a move that is suggestive for postcolonial studies, a thermal dynamics of race, sex, and class relations in the production of the civilized subject leads Adorno to formulate the notion of “bourgeois coldness,” a subjectivity developed through a calculated distance from the warmth of the bodily being, the ardor of emotions, and susceptibility to affect, especially in response to suffering. Those insufficiently converted to this temperamental coolness suffer opprobrium: “Anyone who is not cold, who does not chill himself as in the vulgar figure of speech the murderer ‘chills’ his victims, must feel condemned” (Negative Dialectics, 347). Fearing that the body and its sensual being will interfere with a developmental project founded in instrumental rationality, the bourgeois subject becomes a thing that does not feel the suffering of others or of the self, sits in judgment of others, and preaches a creed dependent on rationalizing suffering as inevitable to grander civilization aims. Senses, emotions, feelings, and animal warmth are anathema to the rational Enlightenment subject.

Playing it cool is playing dead; repressing the merely biological, animal instinct and turning away from suffering, the hollowed subject suppresses the impulse to respond to suffering and rationalizes the suppression. The colonial civilizing mission offers the native a model for modern subjectivity that approximates a form of death. In its final irony, colonial mimicry is tantamount to Mimesis ans Tote (mimesis of death) as the mimetic impulse is channeled into rigid, repressed forms founded in self-alienation from nature in the production of a repressed, deadened, sclerosed subject in whom “there is life no longer” (Adorno, Minima Moralia, 15). In a bootless attempt at attaining full humanity, what the native mimics is a dead, concept-driven object, more körper (corpus as object to be possessed) than leib (living body). “The reason that represses mimesis . . . is itself mimesis: of death” (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 44; emphasis added). “Imitation enters the service of power when even the human being becomes an anthropomorphism for human beings” producing a subject who, instead of seeking a happy life, mimics forms associated with the exercise of power, aping a model who has already sacrificed the longing for a fulfilled life to become the privileged subject produced by mastery over nature (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 45). The biosocial consequences of this exercise entail a conflicted state of morbid scission, a Haßliebe (love–hate) relationship with the body, and “compulsive aversion” toward everything that seems to exceed the purposeful and reminds us of our animal nature because it “has not been absorbed into utility by passing through the cleansing channels of conceptual order” (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 148). Colonial mimicry of empty forms turns the body into an object for control. “No matter how trained and fit it may be,” the body under the power of instrumental and dominative rationality “remains a cadaver. . . . [Its] transformation into dead matter, indicated by the affinity of corpus to corpse” is a “part of the perennial process which turned nature into stuff, material” (194). Postcolonial mimic-men are destined to join the processional of decomposing modern subjects in whom “life does not live” at the end of history.57 They are, like their modular predecessors, “victims of the same conditions and the same disappointed hope” as the ghosts of the past, as Horkheimer and Adorno conclude in their theory of ghosts (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 178), uncanny reminders of the death that the allegedly sovereign, “thoroughly emptied subject” has already suffered (Žižek, “Hegel,” 222). In Midnight’s Children, it is the dispossessed twin Shiva who notes that “the world . . . is things,” and “today, what people are is just another kind of thing” (307). In the end, Adorno and Fanon’s is not an argument for the recovery of a pristine self in the search for freedom but an explanation of the process of individuation and socialization under imperial modernity as mimicry of empty forms associated with false ideas of a good life, even as the colonized object man’s desire to live becomes more and more “phantom-like,” in Fanon’s memorable phrase (Toward the African Revolution, 35).

If aesthetics is the capacity for sensation and perception, human self-making defined by mimicry of postanimal aesthetics unwittingly entails a deadening and perversion of these faculties. Susan Buck-Morss points to the senses as our “biological apparatus,” claiming that aesthetics has intrinsically less to do with beauty, art, or truth, and should be placed instead “within the field of animal instincts” (“Aesthetics and Anaesthetics,” 6–7). The emptying of the subject implies the repressive regulations of the animal capacity for sensation and bodily feeling in the course of a process of anaesthetization on the one hand and the perversion of instincts and the sensorium on the other. In the current stage of global capital and its attendant regime of neoliberal hybridity, the thermal dynamics of personhood finds expression in a contradictory logic: what is hot is what is cool and vice versa. Drawn increasingly to dead forms and the cold comforts of capitalist personhood and its commodity culture, today’s cool subject presents a conjunction of person, commodity, and empty forms. “Personality,” Horkheimer and Adorno note, “means hardly more than dazzling white teeth and freedom from body odor and emotions” (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 136). The “compulsive imitation by consumers of cultural commodities” is a mark of “the triumph of advertising in the culture industry” (136). Along with a display of formal aesthetics signaling cultural and social capital, the better sort of human is also identified by the acquisition of capital qua capital in imperial modernity in a world of “things things things” (Midnight’s Children, 526). The conjunction of personhood with empty forms and dead commodities as markers of more human identity in the developmental regimes of modernity furnishes rich material for an object-oriented postcolonial studies sensitive to race and class differences.

Hybridity, Internal Colonialism, and Globalization

The politics of colonial hybridity as simultaneously racist, classist, neuropolitical, and biocultural is broadly applicable. Examples of spectacular mimicry and characters hybridized by the taste transfer of commodities and forms can be readily adduced in literary representations ranging from Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah, Hanan Al-Shaykh’s Only in London, Jill Ker Conway’s The Road from Coorain, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, Andrea Levy’s A Small Island, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, or Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories about immigrants in the United States, to select texts randomly for a course one might teach on postcolonial or “global” women writers. Many a literary text on metropolitan migrant identity today will expose the biopoetics of assimilation as the long shadow cast by a body-minded colonial civilizing mission founded in preemptive notions of beauties of body and mind.

Historical variables nonetheless complicate wholesale generalizations about the civilizing mission and its contemporary forms. As I explain in the following chapter, there are instructive lessons in attending to the particular complications of the civilizing mission and colonial hybridity in an allegedly “once great civilization,” namely, India (Goetz, The Art of India, 205). A serious reconsideration of the politics of hybridity requires a reckoning with the politics of race and class among the colonized and not simply between colonizer and colonized. Attention to the dynamics of hybridity among the colonized reveals new forms of hierarchical thinking in modernity in particular sociopolitical contexts to better illuminate the problem of class inequality on a global scale.

With stray references to a few comparative examples, this book focuses on fictions concerned with India and Indians to explore the differential politics of hybridity between and among colonized peoples beyond the usual lens of white and other. This focus allows me to locate intercultural traffic within particular histories of race, class, and chromatism. References to the civilizing mission are apt to obscure its local variations. Along with race as the distinctive postcolonial dimension of the Western project of biopolitics and anatomo-politics described by Foucault, native hierarchies—of class, caste, and civilizational standing in India, for example—present specific, historically contingent variables of the civilizing mission. Colonial racial hybridity, moreover, demands analysis not only of usual problems with racial typology, but also confusions peculiar to subcontinental theaters of mixture.58 Although the Indian Constitution attempts to stabilize colonial interraciality under the nominal “Anglo-Indian,” this is a notoriously complicated category.59 Postcolonial Biology does not attempt to excavate the history of Anglo-Indians at any length, or stake a claim to “Anglo-Indian literature” as its province of study as such,60 although particular moments in the novels chosen for this study turn to this history to examine the concepts of diaspora, nation, mimicry, and hybridity, from the vantage point of the racial hybrid.

The differential politics of race in discourses of hybridity deserves special attention. In Slavery and the Culture of Taste, Simon Gikandi has demonstrated that “the establishment of a realm of taste, or even the valorization of ideals of beauty, depended on systematic acts of excluding those considered to be outside the systems of explanation that were being established as social norms” (37). Gikandi’s identification of the figure of blackness as a counterpoint to ideas of aesthetic beauty is pertinent to this study, I argue, even though it involves characters not considered black in usual typology, because of the particular role of blackness in the racial politics of hybridity and mimicry in South Asian identity politics. Blackness may well be the magnetic pole of differentiation from whiteness, but it is not unusual for accounts of race to be formulated along the axis of a desire for whiteness without a consideration of how this desire maps itself directionally with regard to blackness. The role of brown bodies in the consolidation of colonial racial hierarchies aside, anxiety among nonwhite, nonblack individuals about being confused with blacks surfaces in all the novels under discussion in this book. The desire for Englishness in the brown/white encounter is belied by anxieties about the not quite / not black casting of the Indian, exposing blackness as an underreported polarity in colonial relations in the subcontinental scene. In this dispensation, the presentation of brownness as a more acceptable form of blackness illuminates a differential calculus of race founded in part on skin color and in part on the logic of aesthetic form and a display of what I have called postanimal prosthetics and technics on a civilizational ladder. As Vivek Bald demonstrates in Bengali Harlem, among the options for passing as other than African American in the American South was passing as Hindu: “for those who were darker skinned, posing as ‘Hindu’ or ‘East Indian’ was a recurring and prominent theme.” Bald admits that “we will probably never know which black southerner first employed this ruse, first discovered that it was possible to move across from the line between ‘Negro’ and ‘Hindoo,’ from a denigrated to an exotic otherness, from an unacceptable to a nominally acceptable blackness,” but he speculates that Bengali peddlers in the South probably demonstrated the advantages of displaying a civilizationally better shade of black, at least before Jim Crow altered the circumstances substantially (50).

Apart from racial hierarchies, the peculiarities of class composition in particular historical contexts present further challenges to an understanding of the colonial civilizing mission. Because of the particular complications of class and caste,61 this study of the impact of the colonial civilizing mission resists any suggestion that it may have produced a singular ideological and biological subject. The earlier discussion of mimicry and discriminatory eumemics highlights the fact that the civilizing mission invested from the beginning in reproducing the hierarchies that characterized its own disjunctive formation. Macaulay’s minute not only legislated a built-in class hierarchy, it was founded by it. It is well understood that the representatives of empire were themselves divided by reasons of class, ethnicity, status, education, and rank. Colonial whiteness was defined by “a class of superior settlers” negatively circumscribed against subordinate classes of poor whites who were also flooding into India (Mizutani, The Meaning of White, 21, 24).62 Farwell writes that in the diverse composition of the British Army, the

“other ranks”—the warrant officers, non-commissioned officers and privates were so different [from the higher-ranking officers] . . . that they seemed to be of two different races . . . their accents (even language in some cases), their habits, manner, tastes and, of course, financial circumstances were far apart. The British army operated on what was basically a caste system. (Mr. Kipling’s Army, 79)

Buettner explains that “behaviour and lifestyle made possible mainly by wealth . . . determined racial categorization as much as, if not more than ancestry” (“Problematic Spaces, Problematic Races,” 281). Whiteness in colonial India was a cultural category overdetermined by various factors beyond skin color. Economic and social mobility were prominent among them, in addition to behaviors and lifestyles associated with class privilege, factors that were also salient in evaluating and categorizing the native population. Furthermore, given the conflicted but powerful colonial belief in a shared Aryan heritage, the civilizing mission in India was developed in conversation with native hierarchical structures, while nonetheless reinforcing racial divisions.

Two conclusions follow from this understanding of internal diversity among colonizers and colonizeds. First, that existing class and caste privilege in the colony was refreshed and reconsolidated by the additional accretion of perceptible forms of modernization in lifestyle and thought while also contributing to their formation. Second, that aesthetic form—underwritten by a long history of the administration of the sensorium—and the display of postanimal aesthetics, prosthetics, and technics repeatedly emerge as the alternative logic of judgment and categorization in perceptions of difference between colonizer and colonized, even if racial differences have never been insignificant. The multiple sources, contexts, and contradictions of the civilizing mission and its impact notwithstanding, complex and interlocking hierarchies based on race, class, lineage, bodily comportment, and aesthetic form have nonetheless become part of the legacy of empire and its contribution to additional modes of social striation based on bioaesthetics. However uneven this process, aesthetic forms associated with colonial power have left their impression on plastic bodies and minds in a disjunctive but perceptible legacy in the arena of bodily habits, sensory lives, and corporeal inclinations as much as in ideology and psychology.

Fanon’s muscles, Adorno’s desensitized bourgeois subject, squatting Padma’s musculature, Saleem’s cultivation of pure accents, the art form of the spitters in Midnight’s Children, Pran’s exercises in producing the labial-dental fricative v, Lily’s warnings against head waggling and squatting in The Impressionist, George’s ultimately failed training in the metonymic aesthetics of Englishness and Horace’s success in Arthur and George, and the unrelenting seduction of “things things things” and capitalist personhood are coimplicated in an ongoing drama in the politics of empire, psyche, and flesh. Fanon notes that “vulgar racism in its biological form corresponds to the period of the crude exploitation of man’s arms and legs” (Toward the African Revolution, 35). Moreover, he adds, “the perfecting of the means of production inevitably . . . [camouflages] the techniques by which man is exploited, hence of the forms of racism” (36). Fanon’s comments prompt renewed consideration of imperialism as a key stage of capitalism, first in its exploitation of native resources, labor, and markets, and subsequently in its neoliberal phase in the alliance of person and capital through patterns of hyperconsumption on the one hand and disguisement of continued exploitation on the other. In the newest season of the nexus of empire, capital, and globalization, and the persistent assault on animal, biotic being, Postcolonial Biology calls for a theory of the human that can address the continued manipulation of plastic body-minds in the name of the very prospect it compromises: that of the “good life.”