437 / 450
Desiring Brotherhood
437
(Halperin, 2012: 422). Anacleto’s involvement in high culture
certainly includes enjoyment and escape; being a “highbrow” and
enjoying highbrow things with his mistress also enhance his sense
of being “different.” As McCullers writes: “It was common
knowledge that [Anacleto] thought the Lord had blundered grossly
in the making of everyone except himself and Madame Alison
—
the
sole exceptions to this were people behind footlights, midgets,
great artists, and such-like fabulous folk” (McCullers, 2001c:
333-334).
Moreover, Anacleto’s delight in highbrow culture is slightly
different from that of Lieutenant Weincheck. We have Anacleto
with brown skin dance, speak, and paint under his white mask. In
other words, his race complicates his adoration of Western high
culture, in which the master paradigm becomes a site of hybridity
and mimicry. His use of the master language overthrows the
colonists’ myth of the authenticity of “origins” and debunks the
Christian belief of logocentrism. This split identity embodies Homi
Bhabha’s “colonial mimicry” that works to lay bare the
ambivalence of colonial discourse and to disrupt its authority.
Almost the same but not quite, the ambivalence of mimicry is
“potentially and strategically an insurgent counter-appeal” (Bhabha,
2004: 91). As Bhabha puts it: “Under cover of camouflage,
mimicry, like the fetish, is a part-object that radically revalues the
normative knowledges of the priority of race, writing, history. For
the fetish mimes the forms of authority at the point at which it
deauthorizes them” (91). Therefore, the rational, enlightened
claims of the colonists’ enunciatory authority are continuously
violated. This is revealed in the anger and frantic disturbances of
Langdon whenever he finds Anacleto walking as a ballet dancer or
speaking in French. When Anacleto makes these intercultural,
hybrid enunciations, he both challenges the boundaries of colonial
discourse, and subtly changes its terms by setting up another
specifically colonial space of the negotiations and interrogations of
cultural authority. The master language/culture is now ready for a