coda 263observed copying the forms of dress and behavior shown in the movies.
Religious hardliners propagated symbolic acts, such as public immola-
tions of videocassettes, and Kano state, home of the Kany wood video
film industry, introduced censorship. The latter is a parallel to Plato’s call
for strict control of the arts in the Republic. Unlike Plato, however, whose
utopian state remained on paper only, the Kano state legislators aspired
to founding an ideal state for real. Though the foundations on which these
two states are built differ—reason here, religion there—their treatment
of the arts, of mimesis, is remarkably similar.
EXPLORING THE POSSIBLE, INVENTING
“AFROMODERNITY”Mimesis produces both similarity and difference. Throughout this
book, all examples of mimesis—either of other possible lives or the art-
works of others, and most often a combination of the two—are copies
with a difference. The cultural producers, whose appropriations of for-
eign works I discuss herein, alter their source material significantly to suit
their own purposes. The Hausa remake of Cameron’s Titanic, for example,
changes some of the characters and the imagery to adapt it to a new recep-
tion context, despite being faithful to its model in an overall sense. This is
in keeping with the Aristotelian conception of mimesis as “copying and
changing in one” (Gebauer and Wulf 1995: 54). And like Aristotle, for
whom the mimesis of tragedy is no longer defined as mere imitation of the
real (as in Plato) but comprehends “both the possible and the universal”
(54), African cultural producers have used the photo novel, the comic, the
video film, and the music video for their own explorations of the possible.
Since the blueprints of other possible lives developed on these media plat-
forms are in part inspired by foreign audiovisual media, they tend to take
on the characteristics of both the strange and the familiar.^1 In Tanzanian
video films, the Swahili-speaking characters are portrayed as living in
luxurious mansions full of opulent furniture reminiscent of Nolly wood
settings, and the Hausa-speaking lovers of Kanywood videos act in ways
which are more typical of Bolly wood cinema than of Nigerian every-
day life. I conceptualize such films as material results of the “symbolic