Australian Trompe l’Oeil and mimicry: illusionism and identity in the era of colonial modernity

ABSTRACT In ‘Of Mimicry and Man’, Homi K. Bhabha hints at a connection between discourses surrounding perspectival representation and those surrounding colonialism by noting that trompe l’oeil, alongside irony, repetition and mimicry, is a trait with which colonial texts are replete. The inclusion of a textbook ‘mimic man’ in a mid nineteenth-century Australian trompe l’oeil painting suggests that the link between illusionism, mimicry and colonialism mentioned in Bhabha’s oft-cited essay warrants further investigation. Centring on C.H.T. Costantini’s 1857 Trompe l’oeil (Figure 1), this article explores nineteenth-century Australian visual culture in terms of ‘Of Mimicry and Man’, and in doing so demonstrates the versatility of Bhabha’s framework wiithout ignoring the challenges posed by shifting from a linguistic to a visual register. Namely, by moving beyond the literary scope of his essay, the discussion highlights the difficulty of separating the racialised difference at the core of Bhabha’s arguments from the social, historical and geographic reproduction of European differences across the times and spaces of colonial modernity. The discussion also presents colonial trompe l’oeil as a means by which to reflect on the operations of illusionism itself. Specifically, it suggests the extent to which illusionism, not to mention visuality more broadly speaking, may be considered historically, politically and sociologically contingent.