266 african appropriations
unmediated. If we substitute Aristotle’s “basest animals and corpses” for
“other ways of life” and likewise “tragedy” for “popular media,” we grasp
the (cathartic) effect the various imitations of other possible lives have
on their spectators. Gebauer and Wulf (1995) describe Aristotle’s view of
mimetic identification as follows:
The concern of tragedy is to offer the audience pleasure. This feeling arises
from the spectators’ re-experience of the tragic events, which broadens
their range of experience, knowing all the while that they themselves are
not entirely subject to what happens on stage. The pleasure taken in trag-
edy is linked to the desire to survive.... mimetic identification with the
horror expressed in tragedy suggests to Aristotle precisely the promise of
fortifying oneself against the “horrifying” and “pitiful.” (56)In my reading, mediatized imitations of other possible lives offer their
audiences pleasure and insights through a similar process. Though placed
on screens in front of the spectators, alterity is fixed, bound, and kept at a
sa fe d ista nce w it h i n such representat ions. The fi na l sentence i n t he e x t rac t
from Gebauer and Wulf might be rendered as follows: mimetic identifica-
tion with other possible lives as expressed in popular media suggests pre-
cisely the promise of fortifying spectators against other ways of life and ul-
timately also against altering their own ways of life. It is important to also
remember that it is a double-mediated and therefore somewhat diluted
alterity seen in the representations I discuss in this book. Representations
such as the Titanic comic, Lance Spearman look-reads, Hausa videos, and
Bongo movies are already translations of European, American, Indian,
and Nigerian ways of life, respectively, as they are adapted from media
originating in these alter social spaces. W hile my reading—in borrowing
from Aristotle—suggests that these diluted forms serve to contain alterity
even more so because of their substitutive nature (the audiences do not
have to undergo mimesis themselves, as others—actors—do it on their
behalf), the interpretation of local critics is just the opposite and thus
reminiscent of Plato’s critique of mimesis. The critics of Nigerian Hausa
videos, for example, consider such adaptations even more dangerous than
their foreign originals in terms of fostering imitation by their audiences.
According to their interpretation, the foreign originals, though problem-
atic in and of themselves, would be still far enough removed from local
reality to be contagious. Unlike the foreign originals, however, the local