Short Abstract

In times characterised by constant and rapid change, people often seem to imitate. In this panel we ask what imitation is and how it can be instrumentalised as mimesis, allowing for strategies in the confrontation between critique, survival, political configurations and the appropriation of power.

Long Abstract

Ever since Jean Rouch's Les Maîtres fous, imitation has been approached with circumspection. The suggestion that the colonised were imitating their colonial masters, whether in acknowledgment of their subordinate status or as a form of resistance through mockery, was met with outrage from both colonised and coloniser. From Plato and Adorno to Derrida, Auerbach, Bhabha, Girard and Taussig, mimesis has since been read as a form of critique and resistance, as domination, as the transformation of the power of the other into the power of the self, or as imposed rather than chosen, never permitted to succeed.

Today imitation is omnipresent as never before, from language learning to fake news and faked commodities, tribute bands to wedding rituals, LLMs to meme cultures or respectability politics. This panel therefore invites contributions that problematise “imitation” and ask how mimetic strategies move and are moved by affects, materialities and political configurations: by fear, desire, resentment, confrontation, resistance or emulation; by bodies, images, infrastructures and resources; by relations of authority, solidarity and exclusion. We seek for empirically grounded and conceptually evocative contributions that might trace: What is mimesis today, and where does it start? How does the same act become homage, theft, a menace to the thing it copies, or none of these but survival, demanded of those who cannot afford to be conspicuous? How is imitation made possible for some and foreclosed for others? And when is it a way of becoming, through appropriation, or through a process of sociation?