Word.ws English Dictionary

mimic man

mimic man noun: post-colonial person trained up to be “almost the same, but not quite” as an individual of the pre-independence colonist, resulting in ambivalence or alienation.

Noun

mimic man (plural mimic men)

  1. Post-colonial person trained up to be “almost the same, but not quite” as an individual of the pre-independence colonist, resulting in ambivalence or alienation
    • The line of descent of the mimic man can be traced through the works of Kipling, Forster, Orwell, Naipaul, and to his emergence, most recently, in Benedict Anderson's excellent work on nationalism, as the anomalous Bipin Chandra Pal. He is the effect of a flawed colonial mimesis, in which to be...1984, Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse”, in October, volume 28, number Spring, page 128
    • "...I suggest by way of an intertextual reading with C. L. R. James’s nonfictional works, Naipaul inventively links the colonial story of a mimic man with the communal history of the mimic men,..."2016, Dexu Zhang, “Representational Ethics: The Mimic Men and the Mimic Men”, in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, volume 57, number 1, →DOI, page 30
  2. A man exhibiting the attributes of mimic men

Forms of mimic man

pluralmimic men

Origin of mimic man

Coined by Indian critical theorist Homi K. Bhabha in 1984 in his article Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse by back-formation from mimic men.

Questions about mimic man

What does mimic man mean?
Mimic man means post-colonial person trained up to be “almost the same, but not quite” as an individual of the pre-independence colonist, resulting in ambivalence or alienation.
What part of speech is mimic man?
Mimic man is a noun.
What is the plural of mimic man?
The plural of mimic man is mimic men.

Words near mimic man in the dictionary

  1. mimic beetles
  2. mimic function
  3. mimic functions
  4. mimic glass lizard
  5. mimic glass lizards
  6. mimic man
  7. mimic men
  8. mimic octopi
  9. mimic octopus
  10. mimic octopuses
  11. mimic thrush

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mimic man (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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