ABSTRACT

In ‘Of Mimicry and Man’, Homi K. Bhabha hints at a connection between discourses surrounding perspectival representation and those surrounding colonialism by noting that trompe l’oeil, alongside irony, repetition and mimicry, is a trait with which colonial texts are replete. The inclusion of a textbook ‘mimic man’ in a mid nineteenth-century Australian trompe l’oeil painting suggests that the link between illusionism, mimicry and colonialism mentioned in Bhabha’s oft-cited essay warrants further investigation.

Centring on C.H.T. Costantini’s 1857 Trompe l’oeil (Figure 1), this article explores nineteenth-century Australian visual culture in terms of ‘Of Mimicry and Man’, and in doing so demonstrates the versatility of Bhabha’s framework wiithout ignoring the challenges posed by shifting from a linguistic to a visual register. Namely, by moving beyond the literary scope of his essay, the discussion highlights the difficulty of separating the racialised difference at the core of Bhabha’s arguments from the social, historical and geographic reproduction of European differences across the times and spaces of colonial modernity.

The discussion also presents colonial trompe l’oeil as a means by which to reflect on the operations of illusionism itself. Specifically, it suggests the extent to which illusionism, not to mention visuality more broadly speaking, may be considered historically, politically and sociologically contingent.

摘要

在“模仿与人”中，Homi K. Bhabha 暗示了围绕透视再现的话语与围绕殖民主义的话语之间的联系，他指出，错视画，以及讽刺、重复和模仿，是殖民文本充满的特征。在 19 世纪中期的澳大利亚错视画中加入了教科书“模仿人”，这表明巴巴经常被引用的文章中提到的幻觉、模仿和殖民主义之间的联系值得进一步研究。

本文以 CHT Costantini 1857 年的 Trompe l'oeil（图 1）为中心，从“模仿与人”的角度探讨了 19 世纪澳大利亚的视觉文化，并在这样做的过程中展示了 Bhabha 框架的多功能性，同时也忽略了转变带来的挑战从语言到视觉记录。也就是说，通过超越他文章的文学范围，讨论突出了将巴巴论点核心的种族差异与殖民现代性时代和空间中欧洲差异的社会、历史和地理再生产区分开来的困难。

讨论还将殖民错视画作为反思幻觉本身运作的一种手段。具体来说，它表明了幻觉，更不用说更广义的视觉，在多大程度上可以被认为是历史、政治和社会学的偶然性。