introduction 11viewed as a creative practice aiming at transformation rather than mere
reproduction (54–57). Through imitation, artists were thought to become
inspired by their precursors and to participate in their talent. From the
Renaissance to the eighteenth century, imitation continued to inform
European art practices, before it was devalued by the romantic notion of
the artist as a “genius” who sought inspiration from within rather than
the work of others.
Much of this latter European uneasiness with imitation is also present
in the writing of postcolonial theorists who were troubled by the figure
of the colonial African who dons European clothes and copies cultural
practices associated with the colonizer. In his treatise Black Skin, White
Masks, Frantz Fanon (1967) interprets such imitative behavior in psy-
chological terms, as an expression of an inferiority complex bestowed
on black people living under colonial conditions. In their fight for the
revalorization of African cultural practices, African nationalists were
equally embarrassed by those they considered to have a “coconut prob-
lem” and whose very conduct they considered “to confirm the claim of
the racist colonizer: that ‘African’ ways were inferior to ‘European’ ones”
(Ferguson 2002: 553). Significantly, postcolonial theorists refer to such
phenomena as mimicry, rather than mimesis. W hile both terms share the
same Greek root and may be roughly translated as imitation, mimicry, via
its conceptualization in biology (cf. Pasteur 1982), has come to denote a
mode of representation that is associated with camouflage, duping, and
subversion.^2 Homi Bhabha (1984), in his influential essay Of Mimicry and
Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse, draws on Jacques Lacan and
states: “Mimicry is like camouflage, not a harmonization or repression of
difference, but a form of resemblance that differs/defends presence by dis-
playing it in part, metonymically” (131). For him, mimicry is an effect of a
“flawed colonial mimesis” (128). W hile the British Empire was driven by a
“mimetic imperative,” as Graham Huggan (1997/1998: 95) calls “the desire
to reproduce its culture in the colonies as so many faithful copies of the
originary model,” it rather produced the mimicry of its colonial subjects.
Bhabha (1984: 128) observes the emergence of a mode of representation
“between mimesis and mimicry” that is subversive, in as much as it mocks
the power of the colonizer’s culture to act as a model. W hile Bhabha re-