Homi Bhabha’s writing on postcolonial agency foregrounds discursive subjection, yet retrieves subaltern subterfuge. It reconstructs a critical politics despite and because of hegemonic and orientalist representational systems. And it demonstrates the (im)possibility of a stable subject, but still manages to assert creative and performative agency. The article endeavours to analyse these feats and paradoxes, relying both on Bhabha’s work and on some of the criticisms and controversies surrounding it. en