"He Milton Homer'd himself"parody, mimicry and postcolonial insurgency in Alice Munro's Who do you think you are?

Resumo

Alice Munro’s short story «Who Do You Think You Are?» (1978) has been widely interpreted as a paradigmatic instance of postcolonial and gender queries that parallel its nature as a bildungs/künstlerroman. Significantly, the question that entitles the story is also the ample frame for the deployment of parodic and mimic modes that challenge any colonialist subjectivity from the ambivalence of a settler territory. This paper traces the path delineated by the subversive intersection of parody and mimicry as directly oriented to postcolonial insurgency. The fracture that this double defiance generates in the body politics, however, unveils its limits from the onset. Accordingly, in the same form that power inherently contains its threat, these postcolonial strategies of intervention, while they do expose power imbalances, are futile when intent on an eventual transference of power.