George Bernard Shaw's John Bull's Other Island and Homi K. Bhabha: The Colonizer and the Other in the Third Space

Abstract

This article aims at a reevaluation of colonial readings of George Bernard Shaw's John Bull's Other Island with regard to its power relationships between the colonizer and the colonized (the Other) and hopes to disavow the traditionally straightforward analysis of the power relations in which the colonizer is considered as the absolute power. This play shows how "colonial mimicry strategy", proposed by Homi K. Bhabha, functions in the hands of both the colonizer and the colonized, through which they mutually exert power and project their desires and fears onto each other and how the identities of the main English figure, Broadbent, and the main Irishmen, Larry and Keegan, are formed in the presence of the Other, by too perfectly or imperfectly (two resistance strategies proposed by Bhabha) imitating the Other.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n4s2p324