Short Abstract

This panel explores how technological affordances shape digital mimicry as African-centred cultural production and artistic innovation. It interrogates the politics of identity, voice, power, and creativity alongside questions of authenticity, copyright, and authorship within the digital landscape.

Long Abstract

Mimicry, a long-standing cultural practice in Africa, from oral traditions to theatrical adaptation, has become a defining feature of contemporary digital culture across the continent, gaining new velocity, scale, and visibility. Content creators, influencers, and skit-makers routinely reproduce the speech, mannerisms, fashion, and public personae of prominent political, religious, and cultural figures. Films, music videos, and dances are also remade and streamed as new content. These mimetic performances often outpace their original referents in virality, raising critical questions about authorship, representation, and the political economy of attention. Speaking to the conference theme, African Prisms, this panel asks what becomes visible when imitation is treated not simply as copying but as cultural (re)production, commentary, and negotiation.

We invite papers interrogating mimicry as a constitutive feature of African digital culture. We seek contributions exploring how content remakes operate as tools of mimicry, how imitative art vectors cultural exchange, satire, and social critique, and how digital applications, animation, and artificial intelligence technologies reconfigure performing others online. We welcome contributions examining socio-cultural implications of algorithmically amplified replicas, including identity construction, celebrity culture, and the ethics of representation.

The panel foregrounds legal dimensions by asking where the boundary lies between creative appropriation and unauthorized copying. How does copyright law respond to a landscape where mimicry is both cultural practice and economic strategy? Through the prism of mimicry, this panel refracts digital trends and technologies into a spectrum spanning performance studies, media ethnography, digital humanities, law, and the creative economy across Africa and its diasporas.

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