10 african appropriations
“are only imitators; they copy images of virtue and the like, but the truth
they never reach” (600e). On the basis of its deceptive nature, Plato dis-
misses mimesis, as opposed to truth, and bans it from his utopian state.
Plato’s disciple, Aristotle (1987), writes in defense of mimesis. In his
Poetics (360–320 bc), he develops the idea that mimesis, which becomes
synonymous with art, enables spectators not only feelings of pleasure
but also understanding. This is achieved through an effect of distancing,
brought about by the very mediality of art: “We take pleasure in contem-
plating the most precise images of things whose sight in itself causes us
pain—such as the appearance of the basest animals, or of corpses” (34).
The single topic elaborated most in the Poetics is tragedy. W hile Plato
(2008) dismisses tragedy for “feeding and watering the passions instead
of drying them up” (606d), Aristotle assigns the “arousal of pity and fear,”
tragedy’s most distinctive element, a positive meaning because it effects
“the katharsis of such emotions” (37). Katharsis should not be under-
stood as “a notion of pure outlet or emotional release,” contends Stephen
Halliwell (1987), one of Aristotle’s most prominent interpreters, but rather
as “a powerful emotional experience which not only gives our natural
feelings of pity and fear full play, but does so in a way which conduces to
their rightful functioning as part of our understanding of, and response to,
events in the human world” (90). For Aristotle, emotions do not exclude
cognitive experiences of the world but rather operate as a part of reason.
Tragedy invites pity from its audience because spectators sympathize with
the dramatic characters, and it elicits fear because spectators recognize
that what happens to the fictional characters could also happen to them.
This fear, however, is pleasurable, as it is mediated by the staged play and
thus kept at a safe distance, allowing for contemplation.
In ancient Roman and Renaissance thought, mimesis took on yet
another meaning. As Matthew Potolsky (2006: 7) explains, the notion
of “rhetorical imitation”—that is, “the imitation of exemplars and role
models”—was instrumental in supplementing “the Greek focus on art as
an imitation of nature with theories about the way artists should imitate
one another.” In the Latin, imitatio, mimesis was advocated as an artistic
practice, a way to learn from a canon of classical works. There is a rich
body of ancient treatises on the subject, which indicates that imitation was