Mimicry and Whole Subjects?

Today I reread Bhabha's "Of Mimicry and Man," and understood less this time than ever before. Emily, consider this a call to arms-- I assume this is on your list and have great hopes that you can help me!  But be warned, what follows is really undigested.

In the essay, Bhabha argues that "colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite." His first example of colonial mimicry comes in the essay's epigraph, an excerpt from Sir Edward Cust's "Reflections on West African Affairs...1839."  Cust cites the policy of conferring "on every colony of the British Empire a mimic representation of the British constitution."  I take the time here to include this example because often, Bhabha's notion of mimicry gets (mis)read as a 'strategy' by which the colonized imitates the colonizer, in the hope of gaining access to colonial power.  But Bhabha is explicit that mimicry is rather "one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge."

Sure. But this becomes awfully muddled once Bhabha begins discussing the gaze.  If I've understood correctly, once colonial mimicry has accomplished its goal of "partial representation," the colonized posses a particular type of gaze that contains within it the seeds of subversion.  In other words, the colonizer grants/inflicts partial subjecthood on the (usually racialized) colonized individual.  The colonized 'other' then looks back at the colonizer with a gaze that "shares the acuity of the genealogical gaze," but is also markedly different, thus rendering the observer observed by this uncanny mimic man.  

Still following?  Me too, or so I thought.  (How) have we made the move from mimicry as a strategy of colonial control to mimicry as the activity of the colonized?  Moreover, Bhabha's formulation hints toward a conception of subjecthood that seems awfully retrograde.  I don't want to suggest that Bhabha envisions a pre-lapsarian moment in which the colonized subject is "whole" or somehow "unspoiled," but it does seem like Bhabha grants the possibility of "wholeness" to the colonizer, even if only as a "wholeness" that can be disrupted by the ambivalent gaze of the colonized.  When Bhabha writes that "partial representation re-articulates the whole notion of identity and alienates it from essence," I can't get around the surprising fact that such an argument depends upon a notion that identity has an essence.  Post-colonial theory appears to largely discard such an idea, so what are to make of Bhabha's work here?

I'm also interested in Bhabha's thoughts on camouflage--"As Lacan reminds us, mimicry is like camouflage, not a harmonization of repression of difference, but a form of resemblance, that differs from or defends presence by displaying it in part, metonymically." If we concede that mimicry is not simply a strategy of colonial subjugation, but also one of resistance, or at least response, on the part of the colonized, might we connect colonial mimicry to minstrelsy, to camp, or to drag? At what point do we cross the line from mimicry to mockery?