260 african appropriations
and the imitated. Even if an actor plays himself or a painter draws a self-
portrait, mimesis is used as a distancing device, allowing the imitator to
view himself or herself as an “other.” Seen in this light, the imitation of
others who are experienced as embodying the essence of a different “cul-
ture” by cultural producers in Africa is only a gradual extension of the
basic binary constellation of any mimetical operation—ego representing
an alter. The mimesis of alter beings, such as spirits, animals, and human
others, has a long tradition in many African societies, where it was and
often still is enacted in a variety of performance genres, including rituals,
masquerades, dances, storytelling, and theater, as well as plastic arts. Au-
diovisual media—cinema, television, video and the hyper-medium of the
internet—have considerably multiplied encounters with representations
of alter ways of living. At the same time, audiovisual media technologies
provide new means of appropriating cultural difference through mimesis.
As I recapitulate below, some of the meanings attached to the older forms
of mimesis have been carried over into these new forms, which combine
the human mimetic faculty with that of mimetically capacious machines.
It is also important to note that I deal with two different but related no-
tions of mimesis: (1) people imitating (the manners of) other people and
(2) people imitating the (artistic) work of others. Sometimes, these two
notions converge. A film that emulates another film is a good example of
this. In this case people imitate other people’s artistic work, which consists
of imitating other people (or at least scripted templates of other people).
How mimesis and media are used, conceptualized, and evaluated in Af-
rica depends on the contingency of different social contexts. It is therefore
impossible to break down the range of meanings attached to mimesis and
media to a single definition. Hence, in the following I recapitulate differ-
ent notions of mimesis and media in Africa under five headings. I consider
each of these notions relevant beyond the particular examples outlined in
this book. Interestingly, I find a striking resonance between some of the
recurring themes of the previous chapters and Platonic and Aristotelian
thinking about mimesis. The two ancient philosophers offered me the
right impulses to distance myself from the material at hand, take a fresh
look at it, and eventually flesh out the following five notions of mimesis
and media in Africa.