Homi Bhabha on Mimicry

"Mimicry is, thus, the sign of a double articulation: a complex strategy of reform, regulation, and discipline, which 'appropriates' the Other as it visualizes power. Mimicry is also a sign of the inappropriate, however, a difference or recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an immanent threat to both 'normalized' knowledges and disciplinary powers. (...) [The subjects of colonization] are also the figures of a doubling, the part-objects of a metonymy of colonial desire which alienates the modality and normality of those dominant discourses in which they emerge as 'inappropriate' colonial subjects"
What may emerge from Bhabha's essay is a characteristic of inauthenticity, repetitiveness, hollowness of the echo represented by colonized cultures in contrast to colonizer cultures which may be seen as vital and creative. But the 'conqueror' does not have complete powers over the 'victim', and the pattern of mimicry is not unidirectional in all cases. Since acording to a poststucturalist postulate every repetition also involves difference, it may also be a subversive defense mechanism.
Undermined from within by instability and double-standards and from without by colonial success, the Self/Other equation of colonization is conflicted. The Old World-Europe- as the colonizer- imposed its culture on the colonized territory, on half the world, in other words. But a colonized space such as the New World-America, in time, has become more than an inferior and infantile version, it has become a space of regeneration, exceeding the limits of the Old World. The New World has assumed the role of colonizer in its turn, it has visualized power and, while remaining an object of colonial desire, it has extended its own influence over other territories. The greed of its own colonial desire extends far and wide.
The actual thoughts that came to mind reading the quote above from Homi Bhabha were related to the Romanian culture, no matter how far off it might seem from such relations between colonizers and the colonized. Yes, the Romans did colonize the Dacians. Yes, our territories were in turn occupied by the Ottoman Empire (whose mode of ruling occupied territories, though is not classified as colonization) and by the Austrian-Hungarian Empire (much closer to the colonization mode of acting). What it did make me think of was present day commodified colonization - or Americanization. On TV, we watch American movies, series and shows. The Internet provides in itself another medium which requires a knowledge of the English language. English is taught in most, if not all, schools. We celebrate Halloween, Valentine's Day and the firework show on the 4th of July is simply more impressive than any I have seen on the 1st of December. We are not Anglicized in a British way, but Americanized. Slowly, but surely.
We mimic and emulate a society/culture we want to identify with since our own is disfunctional and is characterized by issues we are unwilling to tackle. We believe that by copying another culture which has solved some of the problems confronting us today, we will simply solve them. Quite unlikely, isn't it? The solutions for our problems need to stem from our own society, solutions discovered in other cultures will not function in our own.
I am not offering a solution, simply noticing some puzzling facts. And they are puzzling indeed. In Eastern Europe there is a country dreaming the American dream, although on waking up it will realize that it is unreachable, unattainable. Young people dream of going to America - the land of all possibilities: they want a better life, they want jobs that actually pay. They desire the vastness of the American continent, and once there they vow never to return, stripping our own country of its values. Thus, those who could dream better dreams and enact them in their own country, the generations to come, become so engrossed in their own dreams that they desert the dream of the country as alien to them; therefore the colonial desire of the New World prevails in stealing away those that might implement changes later on in our culture/society.