Mimicry

A buyer's observation that one or more people are consuming a product can lead that buyer to consume the product as well. The evidence supporting unconscious and unintentional (automatic) mimicry of consumption suggests that it is a pervasive and robust phenomenon. However, up until now most findings on the antecedents of mimicry have been obtained from lab studies. Using a field study, the current research shows that passengers in a train mimic the consumption behavior of other passengers. Two subsequent lab studies suggest that mimicry of consumption is all the more powerful the more people there are consuming and the more intense and consistent their consumption behavior is. However, the impact of the number of people on the willingness to engage in mimicry reaches a peak at approximately eight people and is relatively constant thereafter.

This article investigates the entanglement of knowledge regarding vegetable gardening in early colonial Bengal through the prism of the yearly vegetable exhibitions organized in Calcutta by the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India (AHSI, founded in 1820). The European members of the society thought that there were not enough vegetables grown in Bengal and that the commonly eaten vegetables were nutritionally inadequate. In order to 'improve' local vegetable cultivation, the society held a yearly exhibition in which Bengali gardeners received prizes for growing new vegetables, such as cauliflower and cabbage. To supply these exhibitions, the society ordered large shipments of seeds and then distributed them to malis (Bengali gardeners) around Calcutta. In the 1830s they extended this practice to their satellite societies across India. The end result was an increase in the cultivation of these vegetables, and eventually their absorption into local cuisine. Yet, Bengali gardeners continued to bring other vegetables to the exhibitions which were not from the AHSI seed. Eventually, the society's officers reacted to these unsolicited contributions by including awards for them. However, many members were anxious and unsure about these changes, constantly trying to make the vegetable exhibitions mimic the vegetable market at Covent Garden in London. In order to contain the changing exhibitions, they reiterated a divide between 'native' and 'foreign' vegetables by holding separate exhibitions for each. As such, this article reformulates the idea of mimicry, focusing more strongly on British ambivalence and anxiety as they tried to reiterate colonial boundaries with mixed success.

Objective: We quantified nonverbal synchrony-the coordination of patient's and therapist's movement-in a random sample of same-sex psychotherapy dyads. We contrasted nonverbal synchrony in these dyads with a control condition and assessed its association with session-level and overall psychotherapy outcome. Method: Using an automated objective video-analysis algorithm (Motion Energy Analysis, MEA), we calculated nonverbal synchrony in (N = 104) videotaped psychotherapy sessions from 70 Caucasian patients (37 female, 33 male, mean age = 36.5 years, SD = 10.2) treated at an outpatient psychotherapy clinic. The sample was randomly drawn from an archive (N = 301) of routinely videotaped psychotherapies. Patients and their therapists assessed session impact with self-report post-session questionnaires. A battery of preand post-symptomatology questionnaires measured therapy effectiveness. Results: We found that nonverbal synchrony is higher in genuine interactions contrasted with pseudointeractions (a control condition generated by a specifically designed shuffling procedure). Furthermore, nonverbal synchrony is associated with session-level process as well as therapy outcome: It is increased in sessions rated by patients as manifesting high relationship quality, and in patients experiencing high self-efficacy. Higher nonverbal synchrony characterized psychotherapies with higher symptom reduction. Conclusions: The results suggest that nonverbal synchrony embodies the patients' self-reported quality of the relationship and further variables of therapy process. This hitherto overlooked facet of therapeutic relationships might prove useful as an indicator of therapy progress and outcome.

The concepts of expression, expressiveness and expressionism present the key terms on which contemporary architectural and artistic works are based. Although these are essential esthetic categories, the explanations of these concepts are not clearly defined in scientific and theoretical texts. When the term expressionism is mentioned, it often implies the stylistic direction in architecture and the arts, which was created and lasted until the beginning of the XX century in northern Europe (especially in Germany and the Netherlands), and in which the artists have twisted the reality with exaggerated and energetic strokes to express their inner visions, ideas or emotions. However, contemporary theoretical discussions in the arts and architecture point to the manifestation of expressionism in other periods and contexts as well. The basic aim of the text is a critical discourse of interrelations among esthetic categories of expression, expressiveness and expressionism; reexamination of their positions and roles in the system of visual expression, as well as the examination of the starting hypothesis in research, according to which expressionism in architecture is a radical creative tendency with distinctive choleric-sanguine characteristics.

Oslanjajući se na stavove poznatog umetničkog kritičara Herberta Rida (Herbert Read), po kome realizam, idealizam i ekspresionizam nisu posebni pravci u umetnosti, već predstavljaju stalne osnovne činioce u svim umetnostima, u ovom radu se razmatra mogućnost postojanja elementarnih stvaralačkih opredeljenja i u arhitekturi. Polazeći od osnovnih vidova opažanja i predstavljanja sveta oko nas, putem komparativne analize i primera iz drugih oblasti, izložena je teza da bi adekvatan pandan Ridovim osnovnim činiocima u umetnosti - realizmu, idealizmu i ekspresionizmu, u arhitekturi bili pojmovi mimezisa (mimikrije), asocijativnosti i ekspresije. U zavisnosti od društveno-političkih, kulturno-istorijskih i drugih okolnosti, neki od ovih činilaca s vremena na vreme izlaze na površinu i zaogrnuti miljeom vremena, javljaju se u nekom novom ili starom obliku, koji možemo prepoznati kao umetnički pravac ili stil.

Invoking Homi Bhabha’s notion of mimicry as a supplement to Butler’s concept of gender performativity in the third section, I interrogate and theorize the ways in which the definitional contradiction of race (‘‘can be seen’’ versus ‘‘cannot be seen’’) produces race as performative reiteration. While there are two idealized genders under regimes of compulsory heterosexuality,
albeit with a very great power differential between them, there has historically been only one hegemonic and ideal race under racist regimes.6 This difference, I argue, has far-reaching implications, one of which is the need to rethink the desire/identification nexus, a nexus that operates differently in race and in gender. Understanding the particular relationship between desire and identification in the novella also helps us begin to gauge the critical question of disidentification.

As a distinct feature of human social interactions, spontaneous mimicry has been widely investigated in the past decade. Research suggests that mimicry is a subtle and flexible social behavior which plays an important role for communication and affiliation. However, fundamental questions like why and how people mimic still remain unclear. In this paper, we evaluate past theories of why people mimic and the brain systems that implement mimicry in social psychology and cognitive neuroscience. By reviewing recent behavioral and neuroimaging studies on the control of mimicry by social signals, we conclude that the subtlety and sophistication of mimicry in social contexts reflect a social top-down response modulation (STORM) which increases one's social advantage and this mechanism is most likely implemented by medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). We suggest that this STORM account of mimicry is important for our understanding of social behavior and social cognition, and provides implications for future research in autism.

We might not notice it, but a lot of human behaviour is acquired through imitation: from language, to cultural habits, to aesthetic and political tastes. This human propensity to imitate is central to the arts but also shapes subjectivity, culture and politics, as Dr Nidesh Lawtoo,
Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded project, Homo Mimeticus (HOM), explains.

This essay argues that Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go reshapes colonial subjec- tivity through a sense of loss.
By borrowing Homi Bhabha’s notion of mimicry, which char- acterizes colonial subjectivity as a state of ambivalence between assimilation and dissimilation, I explore how the clones’ collective retrospection posits Norfolk as the site of subject-forming loss and how Kathy’s narrative voice gradually signals the emptying
of self.

A book chapter thinking through the limits of visibility in the work of queer performance artists in South Africa: FAKA, Dean Hutton and Athi-Patra Ruga. The chapter sketches out the possibilities and limits of identity based art to gesture towards the political.

Working through several pieces that stage the failure of the South Africa political promise, in relation to  'land and the 'rainbow nation', I argue that a relationship between land as political category and a queer politics of identity emerges across the works discussed. I suggest that queer identity is staged at the limit point of the political, and in this act 'queers' the politics of promise.

In this article, we address the question of how to explain the difference between traditional design, engineering, and technology, which have exploited nature and put increasing pressure on Earth’s carrying capacity since the industrial revolution, and biomimetic design, which claims to explore nature’s sustainable solutions and promises to be regenerative by design. To answer this question, we reflect on the concept of mimesis, as it assumes a continuity between the natural environment as a regenerative model and measure for sustainable design that is imitated and reproduced in biomimetic design, engineering, and technology. We first discuss how mimesis is conceptualized in the philosophical tradition to show that the concept cannot be understood with reference to classical categories like imitation and invention, but rather introduces a completely new category. We conceptualize mimesis in terms of two interdependent boundary conditions: differentiation and participation. We apply this conceptualization in the context of biomimicry and develop four characteristics of biomimicry as regenerative design, engineering, and technology: technological mimesis is a participative differentiation of nature; it supplements natural mimesis in biomimetic design; the participative differentiation of technological mimesis is constitutive of nature; the participative differentiation of technological mimesis is always limited.

During the colonial days, colonized people would mimic their colonialist masters, to gain acceptance. But they would soon realize, that in spite of their mimicry, they were still regarded as the lesser and inferior Other. In reaction, the colonized people would return towards their own roots, culture and indigenous identity. Mohsin Hamid in The Reluctant Fundamentalist has tackled the issues of mimicry and the quest for identity on the part of people from the so called developing cultures in the present day context. Hamid has shown that America has assumed the status of neo-colonial power, and behaves like a colonialist country and culture. The people from developing cultures mimic and adopt the American culture in order to gain acceptance, but are treated as lesser and inferior Other. In frustration, they espouse extremist ideas and assume extreme shades of indigenous identity. This article explores the issues of mimicry and identity in the context of American and Pakistani interaction, through the analysis of the novel in the light of Postcolonial critical approaches.

The present study builds on earlier work by which introduced the generative notion of threshold concepts within (and across) disciplines, in the sense of transforming the internal view of subject matter or part thereof. In this earlier work such concepts were further linked to forms of knowledge that are 'troublesome', after the work of Perkins (1999). It was argued that these twinned sets of ideas may define critical moments of irreversible conceptual transformation in the educational experiences of learners, and their teachers. The present study aims (a) to examine the extent to which such phenomena can be located within personal understandings of discipline-specific epistemological discourses, (b) to develop more extensively notions of liminality within learning that were raised in the first paper, and (c) to propose a conceptual framework within which teachers may advance their own reflective practice.

The article presents the definitions and discusses the theories of mimicry as applied to human society. The author proposes a new term as the most fully encompassing all the phenomena of mimicry in the communication process – sociolinguistic mimicry, which denotes conscious or unconscious imitation of the interlocutor in the process of verbal and/or nonverbal communication.

В статье приводятся определения и рассматриваются теории мимикрии применительно к человеческому обществу. Автором предлагается и обосновывается новый термин как наиболее полно охватывающий все явления мимикрии в процессе общения – социолингвистическая мимикрия, обозначающий сознательное или бессознательное подражание собеседнику в процессе вербального и/или невербального общения. Ключевые слова: коммуникативная мимикрия, социолингвистическая мимикрия, вербальная коммуникация, невербальная коммуникация, теория коммуникативной адаптации.

An updated and expanded version of an essay I first posted as a blog post in 2009. I now engage more directly with Bhabha himself, without getting too bogged down in the theory. This essay is intended as a teaching tool for postcolonial literature classes.

Zarażenie afektywne jest procesem transferu emocji bądź nastroju pomiędzy osobami. Jak dotąd na łamach polskiej literatury naukowej nie stało się ono przedmiotem odrębnej refleksji, mimo iż badania prowadzone w innych krajach (głównie w Stanach Zjednoczonych) pokazują jego ogromną wagę dla zrozumienia zmian samopoczucia, jakie pojawiają się w obecności innych ludzi. Celem artykułu jest zatem charakterystyka zarażenia afektywnego. Szczególny nacisk położony został na rozróżnienie dwóch rodzajów tego procesu – zarażenia emocjonalnego i zarażenia nastrojem – oraz leżących u ich podstaw mechanizmów. Omawiane są też przejawy i konsekwencje rozprzestrzeniania stanów afektywnych drogą zarażenia, a także psychologiczne wyznaczniki podatności na transfer emocji i nastrojów.

The central premise of this paper is to examine how Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein enacts the interminable master-slave dialectic. It will begin by temporally locating Frankenstein within the historical context of slavery, imperialism, and racism embroiled within Mary Shelley’s nineteenth-century British society. While doing so, it will mainly uncover the racial stereotypes, Manichean binaries and colonial anxieties embedded within Frankenstein and the characters’ perceptions of the Creature. The paper will then investigate how the master-slave dialectic is played out through the republican framework of the novel. It will undertake a contrasting analysis of the dialectic as propounded by Hegel and revisioned by Fanon. It will mainly examine Fanon’s postcolonial revisioning of the Hegelian dialectic to understand how it enhances and limits the subjectivity of Frankenstein and the Creature. To arrive at a better understanding of this dialectic, the second half of this paper will analyse how Bhabha’s concept of mimicry can be used as a tool to study the mechanisms used by Frankenstein’s Creature to negotiate his position within the spaces inhabited by his master and protectors. It will unpack how the education which the Creature accesses, is responsible for his ability to mimic, manipulate and revolt against his master. In conclusion, the paper will attempt to understand the result of the interminable revolt between Frankenstein and the Creature who oscillate between both the extremes of the master-slave dialectic.

This paper deals with the literary term ‘magic realism', also known as ‘magical realism’, elaboratingonhowitappliesasapostcolonialdeviceinYannMartel’sLifeof Pi and its importance to the novel’s narrative. The novel can also be classified as a 21st-century Robinsonade — “a fictitious narrative of often fantastic adventures in real or imaginary distant places” (“Robinsonade”), that is “appropriated, translated, re-historicized, read and written anew” (Bhabha, Third Space 207), in which the protagonist Pi finds himself stranded in an ocean after a shipwreck with survivors on his lifeboat.

Aurora Fernández Polanco, “Cuerpos crispados: tiempo, capital y mímesis como resistencia”, en I. Durante, Ana Garcia Alarcón, M. A. Hernández (eds.), Contratiempos. Gramáticas de la temporalidad en el arte reciente, Murcia, Cendeac, 2016, pp 55-66

The he-hare's feet go hop and skip, the she-hare's eyes are muddled and fuddled. Two hares running side by side close to the ground; How can they tell if I am he or she?" The end of the Ballad of Mulan, the sixth century poem based on the legendary Chinese figure of the woman who impersonates a man and joins the army, illustrates the false sense of binary gender notions and their symbolic representations.

Este ensayo examina la intersección entre la traducción / construcción alegórica de alteridad indígena y la manifestación de una agencia criolla en loas de Sor Juana que preceden a los autos "El Cetro de José" (1692) y "El divino Narciso" (1690). Además, propone que lo que se ha llamado el surgimiento de la conciencia criolla, o simplemente ‘agencias criollas,’ puede definirse como "un conjunto de estrategias simbólicas de disputa y negociación del poder, apoyadas en discursos de particularismos americanos, y destinadas a autorizarse e inscribirse en el orden universal teocrático y cultural del imperio." Si estas loas muestran un americanismo o indicio de la “emergencia de una conciencia criolla” no es porque “recuperen” o “reivindiquen” ningún aspecto de la cultura indígena, sino porque traducen la alteridad americana (el canibalismo) en el universalismo católico imperial. “El tropo cultural del canibalismo del discurso criollo de Sor Juana tienen lugar en un “entre-lugar” que se refiere a América pero que se representa en España, que participa en lo metropolitano pero desde la periferia y, en fin, que reclama un lugar en la mismidad del Imperio desde la afirmación de una diferencia abstracta, en una suerte de occidentalismo excéntrico.”

Osmanlı romanlarının birçoğu modernleşme veya yaygın bir şekilde tanımlandığı gibi “Avrupalılaşma” veya “Batılılaşma” sürecini konu edinirler. Osmanlı aydınları için modernleşme süreci yeni ufuklar açsa da bir yandan da modernleşmenin beraberinde getirdiği değişimler onları tedirgin etmiştir. İntibah ve Araba Sevdası gibi ilk Türk romanlarında da geleneksel değerler ve modernite arasında kalmış veya yolunu kaybetmiş gençlerin hikâyelerinden bahsedilir. Safveti Ziya’nın Salon Köşelerinde (1898) romanı da benzer bir hikâyeyi konu edinir. Romanda on dokuzuncu yüzyılın Şarkiyatçı ortamının ve istibdat yönetiminin Batılılaşmış Türk elit üzerindeki travmatik etkileri ve taklit eylemi mercek altına alınır. Şekip bu süreçte kafası karışmış modern elitin psikolojisini, toplum içinde yabancılaşmasını, psikolojik çıkmazlarını aktaran bir karakter olarak dönemin edebiyat karakterleri arasında öne çıkar. Bu açıdan Salon Köşelerinde’yle birlikte edebiyat tarihimizi yeniden düşünmek; Osmanlı edebiyatında modernleşme, Şarkiyatçılık ve Oksidentalizm gibi konuları inceleyen literatüre önemli katkılarda bulunabilir.

The present book analyses critically the tripartite mimicry model (consisting of the mimic, model and receiver species) and develops semiotic tools for comparative analysis. It is proposed that mimicry has a double structure where sign relations in communication are in constant interplay with ecological relations between species. Multi-constructivism and toolbox-like conceptual methods are advocated for, as these allow taking into account both the participants’ Umwelten as well as cultural meanings related to specific mimicry cases.

From biosemiotic viewpoint, mimicry is a sign relation, where deceptively similar messages are perceived, interpreted and acted upon. Focusing on living subjects and their communication opens up new ways to understand mimicry. Such view helps to explain the diversity of mimicry as well as mimicry studies and treat these in a single framework. On a meta-level, a semiotic view allows critical reflection on the use of mimicry concept in modern biology.

The author further discusses interpretations of mimicry in contemporary semiotics, analyses mimicry as communicative interaction, relates mimicry to iconic signs and focuses on abstract resemblances in mimicry. Theoretical discussions are illustrated with detailed excursions into practical mimicry cases in nature (brood parasitism, eyespots, myrmecomorphy, etc.). The book concludes with a conviction that mimicry should be treated in a broader semiotic-ecological context as it presumes the existence of ecological codes and other sign conventions in the ecosystem.

The paper discusses Derrida's concept of hospitality which perfectly describes the experience of loosing the sense of feeling at home and reveals the disintegrating entrance of the Otherness into a coherent home space. Jacques Derrida's theory makes it possible to deconstruct the familiar home space, which, however, does not constitute in any case its destruction. Revealing a complex and ambiguous nature of the challenge of hospitality, he perceives the sense of feeling at home as one of the necessary conditions of a stable subject. This is the subject that most fears the Otherness which could disrupt, unsettle their permanent structure and a sense of certainty. Therefore, the Author follows closely the fear of strangeness and the nostalgic longing for the sense of feeling at home as depicted by David Lynch and Michael Haneke in their films. Then he passes on to the field of contemporary art which not only reveals the fact that something has happened to the house we have known so far, but it also allows for creative deconstruction of the feeling at home. The artistic works selected by the Author break the binary oppositions: one’s own/someone else’s, familiar/strange (Jessica Sue Layton), close/distant (Shizuka Yokomizo) and finally the most important one: interior/exterior (Marja Pirilä, Eve Dent).

The book explores the emergence and proliferation of the scientific myth of human mimicry in literature and the human sciences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The biological term mimicry originally describes the deceptive resemblance of an insect to another species or its environment. Around 1900 men of letters as well as biologists, physicians, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, anthropologists, and sociologists probed the question of human mimicry and its function for societal coexistence: human beings are attributed the biological ability of perfectly adapting to their social environment to the point that they are physically and psychologically indiscernible from their peers.

The purpose of this thesis was to explore why there are so few young Indigenous people from remote communities in Central Australia pursuing and completing a teacher education pathway. This problem is explored primarily through listening to the experiences of remote Indigenous teachers, including the barriers and supports they encountered in becoming qualified teachers themselves. The stories of the teachers are set against the historical, political and policy context of remote Indigenous teacher education in Australia with particular reference to the Northern Territory.
The study was conducted using a qualitative methodology, specifically narrative methodology. The intention of the researcher and teacher participants was to inhabit a Post-Colonial Knowledge space where the process of doing the research work together was equally as important as the research outcomes. What emerged was a generative research method, named here as ‘participatory narrative’. This new method generated specific insights into how to do research together in ‘good faith’. The method itself used a collective analysis process drawing on the teacher narratives. The thematic findings from this collective analysis were then further explored through theoretical and philosophical lenses with a specific consideration of the colonial legacy in Australia and the neo-colonial reality.
The research concludes that if we are to responsibly encourage young Indigenous people from remote communities into teacher education pathways then teacher education itself needs to move into a Post-Colonial Knowledge space. The thesis concludes with a proposed framework for conducting teacher education within this kind of knowledge space.

Chinua Achebe in his novels Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, and Arrow of God gives us a unique picture of life in Africa before the arrival of Christianity and colonization and afterwards. He shows how African people lost their traditional culture and values, replacing them with foreign beliefs. In this article, the way black people lived before the arrival of white people, how they encountered and reacted to white colonizers, in addition to how they converted to Christianity and subsequently to White culture, as portrayed in these novels, will be analyzed. The purpose of this study is to trace the roots of this rapid pace of colonialism back to when colonial subjects lost their original culture to the new-coming people and to what extent those colonized people were affectively actualizing their inferiority and subordination to the white society.

Chinua Achebe in his novel Things Fall Apart gives us a unique picture of life in Africa before the arrival of
Christianity and colonization and the era afterwards. He shows how African people lost their traditional culture and
values, replacing them with foreign beliefs. In this article, the way black people lived before the arrival of white people,
how they encountered and reacted to white colonizers, in addition to how they converted to Christianity and
subsequently to White culture, as portrayed in this novel, will be analyzed. The purpose of this study is to trace the roots
of this rapid pace of colonialism back to when colonial subjects lost their original culture to the new-coming people and
to what extent those colonized people were affectively actualizing their inferiority and subordination to the white
society. Frantz Fanon’s theories on the relation between language and culture or language and civilization, as well as his
discussion of White notion of Blacks and Blacks’ conception of themselves are discussed and analyzed in Achebe’s
masterpiece Things Fall Apart to prove that black people attempted to make up for their deep feeling of incompleteness
by imitating white people and forming a white personality in a black statue as a result of their own conscious volition.

In this paper we approach racism as one of the basic means for achieving national homogenization. Based on school essays written by immigrant students living in Greece, we investigate the ways these students describe the racist behaviors they suffer from and, thus, the homogenizing pressures they experience. The data of the study consist of 285 essays collected from 6 primary schools, 4 high schools and 8 lyceums situated in different parts of the Peloponnese (Southern Greece). The theoretical framework of our study is that of Critical Discourse Analysis which allows us to investigate the dominant assimilative and homogenizing impositions and, specifically, the role of racism in achieving homogenization. We will also explore the complex and hybrid ways immigrant students position themselves towards dominant discourses. To this end, we employ the Μodel of Three Dilemmas proposed by Bamberg (2011) in combination with the concepts of face threat (Brown & Levinson 1987) and mimicry (Bhabha 1994/2004). We demonstrate that legitimizing identities are attested in the vast majority of the essays of our data presumably as a result of the racist behaviors experienced by immigrant people. On the other hand, explicit descriptions of such behaviors appear only in few essays. We argue that in these few essays, and via referring to majority people's racist behaviors against immigrant students, the latter manage to build hybrid resistance identities.

In classical approaches to cognition, sensory, motor, and emotional experiences are stripped of domain-specific perceptual and sensorimotor information, and represented in a relatively abstract form. In contrast, the embodied cognition framework suggests that our representations retain the initial imprint of the manner in which information was acquired. In this paper, we argue that individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) display impairments in the temporal coordination of motor and conceptual information (as shown in gesture research) and striking deficits in the interpersonal mimicry of motor behaviors (as shown in yawning research) -findings we believe are consistent with an embodied account of ASD that includes, but goes beyond, social experiences and is driven in part by significant but subtle motor deficits. In this paper, we review the research examining an embodied cognition account of ASD, and discuss its implications.

According to Bhabha’s concept of mimicry, once colonized nations have a feeling to externalize the colonizer's culture. Therefore one can say that a link can be seen between two concepts in capitalist societies. Once exploited, otherized and alienated individuals had experienced a radical shift in their class, they mimic the culture of capitalist which will be called Marxist Mimicry in this paper. Since literature is a reflection of life, one can infer that Marxist mimicry can be the experience of individuals under the capitalist order. Thus, this paper intends to explain the concept of Marxist mimicry concerning class issues analyzing Pygmalion in an authentic aspect.

This article delineates some of the historical characteristics of medieval Iberia that make postcolonial studies especially appealing for a renovation of this multi‐disciplinary field, and it suggests specific openings for future research inflected by postcolonial studies. By discussing in particular the concepts of mimicry and transculturation, this piece exemplifies avenues for nuancing the notion of cultural contact, for rethinking the overused reliance on medieval Iberia’s “three cultures,” and it redirects attention to the fields of Latin American and colonial studies as sources of crucial theoretical debates.

Eschatological fantasies of divine judgment and retribution constitute a common feature of sacred literature and often serve to legitimate violence, both physical and rhetorical, against others. is paper examines allusions to Roman spectacles of violence-which operated part and parcel of imperialist strategies to dominate and intimidate subject populations-in descriptions of final judgment. It argues that these references constitute forms of colonial mimicry, which ambivalently appropriate Roman symbols of power for their own self fashioning. is process, however, is not uniform, but serves different purposes and strategies in different texts and contexts. is article explores examples of such mimicry and asks what it means for visions of the final judgment to reinscribe the very methods of domination that these fantasies seek to displace. Additionally, it considers the role of voyeurism implicit in public disciplinary displays and the implications that imagining eschatological justice as a blood spectacle has for theological conceptions of divine surveillance and control.

This article examines the phenomenon of American Muslim women’s self-representation through the medium of autobiography post-9/11, focusing on Sumbul Ali- Karamali’s The Muslim Next Door, Asma Gull Hasan’s Red, White, and Muslim and the edited collections I Speak for Myself and Love, InshAllah. Highlighting the operation of “Muslim media chic”, we challenge the assumption that Muslim women speak solely for themselves through emancipatory “truth-telling” narratives, arguing that self- narration tailored to the demands of explaining oneself to a non-Muslim audience results in gendered forms of ambassadorship that require critical examination. In addition to the problems of confessional representation, the authors also observe the writings’ invocation of American cultural supremacy and depoliticised individualism, the latter propelled by post-1990s mass-media modes of feminine visibility, including chick-lit.

Skin-lightening or 'fairness' creamswith their troubling colonial overtonesare big business in India, an over $200 million industry that comprises the largest segment of the country's skin cream market. Although corporations like Unilever have been widely criticized for profiting on colorism, they continue to produce advertisements that equate light skin with beauty, success, and empowerment. Through an analysis of the fairness motif in advertising and popular media, I first show how skin-lightening creams are positioned as alchemic agents of self-transformation. Secondly, as the use of skin lighteners continues to grow in the global South, I ask: how are we to understand this aspiration for lightness? Rather than viewing this kind of cultural mimicry as a form of false consciousness, I argue that it represents an anxious love for the 'other' that is conditioned by power relations.

This research will explore the result of studying different aspects of identity seeking and establishing it as a liminal-prone one in a hybridized atmosphere among the colonized in terms of post-colonial discourse, based on Bhabha’s theories in his book, The Location of Culture, and on Isabel Allende’s novel, The Japanese Lover (2015). This study strives to expose the way through which the colonized characters’ identities in the novel undergo radical transformation through the third space which is heavily laced with qualities like ambivalence, stereotype, mimicry, and unhomeliness. Isabel Allende is an author whose novels mostly are an attempt to delineate the process of identity shaping particularly in the USA, since identity has always been an obsession for human which is defined based on different properties, one of which refers to the nation, culture and the territories based on Bhabha’s notion of hybridity which stems from confrontation of the cultures of the oppressor and the ...