Mimicry and Ambivalent Identity of Indian American Woman in Samina Ali’s Madras On Rainy Days

ABSTRACT

Mimicry in colonial and postcolonial literature is most commonly seen when members of a colonized society (say, Indians or Africans) imitate the language, dress, politics, or cultural attitude of their colonizers (say, the British or the French). Under colonialism and in the context of immigration, mimicry is seen as an opportunistic pattern of behavior: someone imitates the person in power; because one hopes to have access as the same to the power one. Presumably,

while imitating the master, one has to intentionally suppress one’s own cultural identity, though in some cases immigrants and colonial subjects are left so confused by their cultural encounter with a dominant foreign culture that there may not be a clear preexisting identity to suppress. This research focuses on analyzing mimicry and ambivalent identity of American Indian woman in Samina Ali’s Madras on Rainy Days which shows the mimicry and ambivalent identity viewed by main character.

This study is aimed at finding out how mimicry occurs on American Indian woman on Samina Ali’s Madras on Rainy Days using Homi K Bhabha’s theory f mimicry and how ambivalent identity happens to the Main Character in Samina Ali's Madras on Rainy Days. This study is descriptive qualitative. The researcher collects the data by reading the novel many times by doing some steps. First is scamming reading, second is marking off the data that related to the research problem. Third is selecting the data and collect the data. Understanding the novel remark the data are deal with the research problem and the researcher identifies the data based on Homi K Bhabha’s theory.

The concept of "mimicry" is used to depict the process of imitation or borrowing of cultural elements. The phenomenon of "mimicry" is not showing the dependence of the colonized to the colonized, but imitators enjoy and play with the ambivalence that occurs in the imitation process. The researcher uses the postcolonial approach during the study and applies the theory of mimicry in postolonial approach because the theory of mimicry is one of the postcolonial theory that explain about the imitation that does by the Eastern people to the Western people.

The finding shows that the main character uses mimicry when she lives in America. She does the mimicry of the colonizers culture; it means that the main character imitates the Western culture. Because of the mimicry the main character gets ambivalent identity in cultural and religious aspect. Ambivalent identity means that the main character has different identity between living in India as an Indian and in America as an American. The ambivalent identity can be identified by comparing the cultural attitude between as an American woman and Indian woman. This research is important because it shows the ambivalent identity happens in the immigrants or people who live in two countries. This presents research is different with the other research because this is show the detail mimicry on the main character and the identity of the main character is ambivalence because of that mimicry. The researcher suggests the further researchers to analyze the postcolonial studies generally include in mimicry and ambivalence case since it is not revealed yet in this study.