Mimicry: The action, practice, or art of copying or closely imitating, or (in early use) of reproducing through mime; esp. imitation of the speech or mannerisms of another in order to entertain or ridicule.1

Identity: The quality or condition of being the same in substance, composition, nature, properties, or in particular qualities under consideration; absolute or essential sameness; oneness.2

Does mimicry, the practice of imitating an original, bolster the identity or oneness of the original? Or does it, in fact, unsettle any such claims to oneness? Any attempt to answer these questions should begin, I think, by addressing how the key cultural concepts at play—mimicry and identity—function in and across distinct cultural and historical contexts. Simultaneously, it seems important to attend to the shifting relationships between the two concepts, relationships that reflect and inform the contexts and imaginaries within which the concepts operate.

I’d like to start moving in that direction by first noting that “mimicry” is closely connected to the older term “mimesis” (from Gk. mimeisthai, which also means “to imitate”) and the exceptionally broad scope of that term.3 It isn’t controversial to claim that, in spite of their differences, both Plato and Aristotle are keenly aware of the role that the “mimetic arts”—poetry and music, for example—played in the civic and political lives of the ancient Greeks. At the same time, while Plato often struggles to include the mimetic arts in his idealist aesthetics of “beauty” and “Forms,” Aristotle is quite clear that mimesis is not just confined to poetry and music. For Aristotle, the ability to mimic is “natural to man from childhood, one of his advantages over the lower animals being this, that he is the most imitative creature in the world and learns at first by imitation.”4 To mimic, to be mimetic is to learn to be human.

Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan goes further. Man’s “desire… must be formulated as the Other’s desire,” writes Lacan in the 1960s.5 All desire is mimetic and is learned and experienced through linguistic and social exchanges with others. A similar understanding of desire as mediated and relational unfolds in the thinking of the historian and literary critic René Girard. In his 1961 book Deceit, Desire and the Novel, Girard examines the works of Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, and Proust to show how, in each text, human relationships are governed by intersubjective desires shaped by competitive imitation. Girard argues that in every novel that he examines, the protagonist’s desire hinges not only on the object of desire but the desire of a model or an idealized subject, and often several models in the social world represented by the narrative.6 For Girard, the rivalries between these literary protagonists and their models illustrate the triangulated nature of the desires that make us human.

The sociopolitical consequences of this rivalry—itself a fallout of the mimetic nature of desire—becomes the focus of Girard’s 1972 book Violence and the Sacred, a rather eclectic text that includes interpretations of Greek tragedies, 19th- and 20th-century anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and psychoanalytic theory.7 In this book, Girard argues that mimetic rivalry, even as it appears to enable individual self-assertion, also threatens to dissolve differences that sustain individual identities. If cultural order is primarily a “regulated system of distinctions in which the differences among individuals are used to establish their ‘identity’ and their mutual relationships” (49), then it is precisely this system that mimetic rivalry and the rivals’ “doubling” of each other threaten to eradicate.

How do societies and communities survive in the face of mimetic violence? Inspired by psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s argument about the origins of sacrificial rites in Totem and Taboo, Girard concludes that “any community that has fallen prey to violence or has been stricken by some overwhelming catastrophe hurls itself blindly into the search for a scapegoat. Its members instinctively seek an immediate and violent cure for the onslaught of unbearable violence and strive desperately to convince themselves that all their ills are the fault of a lone individual who can be easily disposed of” (79–80). The apparent “unity” or “identity” of a community, therefore, hinges on its production of a scapegoat as an “other,” a form of difference that must be both maintained and expunged. Identity becomes a fiction built upon the projection of mimetic violence onto the scapegoat-as-difference. The fiction of identity as sociocultural homogeneity belies the fundamental violence of mimetic desire and, paradoxically, the collective terror of losing difference through that violence. Nationalist otherings of the racial, ethnic, or the sexual other in disparate global contexts follow this paradoxical logic. Identity here is a means of sustaining difference, but by keeping that difference at bay.

Mimicry becomes even more fundamentally human and biocultural in the oft-cited and repeatedly revised psychoanalytic theory of identity (or ego) formation in the “mirror stage.” While this theory is typically attributed to Lacan, we know that Lacan borrowed from several thinkers before him, including sociologist Roger Caillois and his intriguing 1935 account of “legendary psychasthenia”—the tendency of some animals to mimic their environment or other forms of life.8 In his account, Caillois notes that the Caligo butterfly can, when it wants, resemble a huge bird of prey. The legs of mantises can simulate flower petals. And these acts of imitation, Caillois wagers, are not necessarily defensive or offensive strategies against predators. In fact, this mimicry is a “dangerous luxury” that does not balk at (self-)annihilation: “geometer-moth caterpillars simulate shoots of shrubbery so well that gardeners cut them with their pruning shears” (25). For Caillois, animal mimicry is a means of self-shattering or self-dispossession. It is a form of “depersonalization by assimilation to space” (30) in which the boundaries between the self and the other are completely undone. But the human ego, Lacan argues in 1949, mimics otherness in a manner that simultaneously preserves and dissolves these boundaries.9 An infant’s ego is not constituted until they projectively identify with their mirror image. On the one hand, the ego can come into being only if the infant disavows the alterity of the image, or the differences between their physical body and the reflected image. On the other hand, every human subject must pay a price for this narcissistic mimicry—the fragmented, depersonalized, and repressed body of the drives returns repeatedly in human dreams (78). This body-in-pieces, for Lacan, is comparable to that of the animal that, while practicing camouflage, can no longer distinguish itself from the surrounding world. 

What’s worth noting here is the careful imprecision around Lacan’s use of the word “image.” The external image that establishes the egoic “I” need not be the reflection of the child’s own image in a mirror. It can be any external gestalt that resembles the “human form” and whose “power [prégnance] should be considered linked to the species” (76). A particularly telling passage appears in the middle of the 1949 essay where Lacan extends the example of the effect of the gestalt to the animal kingdom. He first mentions an example with the female pigeon, in which the gestalt that the pigeon needs to see for gonad maturation can be either “another member of its species” or its own reflection in the mirror. Lacan then goes on to suggest that, similarly, the migratory locust can move from being solitary to gregarious by noting a certain “resemblance” between itself, its own species, and any “image akin to its own” (77).

This general principle, that an external gestalt-as-image can bring about physical and/or psychic changes in an organism has important implications for our understanding of identity formation. But here we should not confine ourselves to Lacan. Also writing in 1949, Françoise Dolto (another psychoanalyst and, in fact, Lacan’s colleague) elegantly pushes past the specular emphasis of Lacan’s 1949 essay, arguing instead for the need to appreciate “the concept of the mirror as an object reflecting not only the visible, but also the audible, sensitive and intentional worlds.”10 As a clinician working with children with schizophrenia, Dolto proposes that we see the mirror or mirror image (that the child takes as a model) in more capacious terms, including, especially, the figure of the mother/caregiver as well as the language heard by and spoken around the child. And later, Lacan himself would revise his 1949 account, inserting the critical mediating function of the caregiver, or the signifier(s) that this figure furnishes while beholding and ratifying the child’s (mis)recognition of the image,11 in the form of (for example) “‘Yes, baby, that’s you!’ often uttered by ecstatic, admiring, or simply bemused parents.”12

Decolonial critiques have further enriched—directly and indirectly—the kaleidoscopic narrative of mirror stage mimicry. The anti-racist work of the psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon is pioneering in this regard. In his 1952 book, Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon shows us that in colonial France, the “fiction” of (racial) identity emerges not through the self’s seemingly smooth and unimpeded mimicry of its imaginary ideal (as some staunch Lacanians would have us believe) but rather through an explicit gap or scission between the mimicking self and its ideal.13 Thinking through internalized racism as one of the major psychic effects of systemic racialized hierarchies propping up French colonial capitalism, Fanon writes, “It might be argued that if the white man elaborates an imago of his fellow man, the same should be the case for the Antillean… But we would be forgetting that in the Antilles perception always occurs at the level of the imagination. One’s fellow man is perceived in white terms… It is not surprising to hear the mother of a family remark: ‘X… is the darkest of my children.’ In other words, the least white… It is in reference to the essence of the white man that every Antillean is destined to be perceived by his fellows” (141). It is useful to note how, for Fanon, the de-idealization of the black ego begins within the seemingly harmless setting of the family, where maternal speech—or familial and social speech more broadly—is a powerful mirror image with enduring effects. By mimicking this speech, the colonized black subject learns to admire a white ideal-image but without being permitted an easy identification with it. As an identity, blackness emerges as a fragmented entity, defined through both its proximity to and distance from the simultaneously linguistic, visual, and somatic ideal that is whiteness.14 

This notion of identity as a fragment, excess, or remainder also surfaces in a paradigmatic scene of anxious linguistic mimicry described early on in Fanon’s text: “The black man entering France reacts against the myth of the Martinican who swallows his r’s. He’ll go to work on it and enter into open conflict with it. He will make every effort not only to roll his r’s, but also to make them stand out. On the lookout for the slightest reactions of others, listening to himself speak and not trusting his own tongue… he will lock himself in his room and read for hours—desperately working on his diction” (5). In this instance, too, the mimic may or may not be able to “pass” as the ideal. The identity of the speaking and mimicking “I” remains caught between the promise of passing (that might, potentially, destabilize the authority of the ideal) and the anxiety of failure.

A number of postcolonial thinkers—including Michael Taussig and Homi K. Bhabha—have highlighted the semiotic indeterminacy and subversion of conventional power structures that mimicry can activate. “The wonder of mimesis lies in the copy drawing on the character and power of the original, to the point whereby the representation may even assume that character and that power,” writes Taussig in his provocative Mimesis and Alterity, an ethnographic and theoretical study of the ritual practices of the Cuna people of Panama.15 Taussig observes that even as the wooden figurines used by the Cuna shamans for healing and sympathetic magic resemble Western imagery, they are still able to embody, very powerfully, indigenous spiritual beliefs and practices. In other words, to the Cuna, mimesis is a means of embracing/retaining the other as well as radically altering the significance of the other. That’s why, for Taussig, racial and cultural identity is fundamentally, always already hybrid. 

The permeability that shapes identity is also the focus in Bhabha’s analysis of colonial mimicry.16 In Bhabha’s reading, colonial mimicry is necessarily defined through a difference between the minoritized colonized subject and the colonizer-as-image. While it is true that the colonizer insists on the need for difference to preserve racial inequalities in the service of empire—“you must act like me, but you can never be me”—the very insistence betrays a doubt or uncertainty about the imperviousness of the colonizing “I.” It is this doubt that makes mimicry “at once resemblance and menace” (127). The colonized can then exploit this doubt, strategically shifting from a disciplinary or an authoritative mimesis to a parodic mimicry: “What emerges between mimesis and mimicry is a writing, a mode of representation, that marginalizes the monumentality of history, quite simply mocks its power to be a model, that power which supposedly makes it imitable” (128). As mockery, mimicry lays bare the hollow neurotic and paranoid narcissism that is imperialist identity.

A parallel account of mimicry—of the “copy” revealing the hollowness of the “original”—can be found in Judith Butler’s queer rethinking of heteronormativity.17 Departing from analysis that attempts to separate the individual subject and its agency from social norms, Butler argues that these norms constitute the very basis of subjectivity. The materiality of the sexed and gendered subject, in Butler’s view, emerges through the repeated performance of heterosexual norms. At the same time, the same repetitions or reenactments that are supposed to solidify the norms also make them vulnerable and deeply unstable: “This instability is the deconstituting possibility in the very process of repetition, the power that undoes the very effects by which ‘sex’ is stabilized, the possibility to put the consolidation of the norms of ‘sex’ into a potentially productive crisis” (10). Subversive agency, while being fragile and unpredictable, erupts in and through this repetitious mimicry of the norm.

Neither the parody that Bhabha celebrates nor the instability that Butler uncovers has decisively ended empire and heterosexism, or halted their mutations in neocolonial patriarchies. How do we further augment our understanding of mimicry and its effects on identity after acknowledging this? How might we proceed beyond mimicry’s expositions? Taking Fanon’s cue, we should not conflate all lived experiences of identity with a narcissistic assurance (“That’s me!”) and see them instead as being constituted through a feeling of non-congruence (“I am [being told that I am] not like that.”), of being minoritized and devalued. As Pierre Macherey puts it in his reading of Fanon, these are social experiences of “not being a subject like the [dominant] others.”18 The Fanonian approach suggests that there is a relationship between partial or failed mimicry, capitalist value production, and the persistence of identity as a minoritizing “constraint.”19 From this point of view, identity is ideologically produced and managed otherness that dominates and limits with considerable violence the existence and self-representation of the identified subject. The precise nature of the relationship between the production of identity through a regulated and limited mimicry and the production of capitalist value becomes especially pertinent while tracing identity production in the racialized contexts of colonialism and slavery.

It is instructive, at this point, to turn to Jean-Joseph Goux’s psychoanalytic reading of the production of exchange value in a capitalist system.20 Goux argues that just as the ego has no existence without its mimicry of an ideal image, so too, the commodity cannot come into circulation—or cannot acquire exchange value—without its complete identification with another idealized commodity. As Goux writes, quoting Lacan: 

We know that “the subject, in its sense of self, identifies with the image of the other” and further that “it is first of all in the other that the subject identifies and experiences itself.”

Goux continues, now quoting Marx: 

“no commodity can function as equivalent for itself, can make of its own bodily shape an expression of its own value,” but every commodity must, to express its value, “enter into relation with some other commodity considered equivalent, converting the bodily shape of that other commodity into the form of its own value,” 

Then turning back to Lacan, Goux says:

likewise the form and the formation of the ego must always occur through “an erotic relationship in which the (human) individual fixes upon an image that alienates himself.” The ego has no existence, as such, apart from this specular relation of identification (14).

The use of the word “erotic” is highly suggestive here, calling attention to the fierce intimacy between the ego and their model. By reading Marx alongside Lacan, Goux isn’t merely positing an analogy between capitalist value production and ego formation. For Goux, the human subject itself cannot escape the process of commodification: “It is with the human being as with the commodity” (14). The human subject acquires identity-as-value just as the commodity acquires value by mimicking a specular ideal, that which Lacan calls the ideal-I and Goux (following Marx) calls the “universal equivalent” or “general equivalent,” a socially determined standard against which value is measured (16).

With Goux’s theory of capitalist mimicry, then, we’ve moved far beyond G.W.F. Hegel’s idealist conception of the master-slave dialectic, the constitution of an authoritarian self-consciousness and a subjugated self-consciousness through their recognition of and struggle with each other.21 Capitalism transmits itself by convincing the subjugated subject that they too can mimic and become the “master,” that their “happiness” lies in their bodily conversion into the general equivalent and the inhabitation of its mastery.

Returning to Fanon’s mid-century colonial scene of value production, however, we notice that there are deep fissures in this process of conversion through imitation. We will recall, very much in keeping with what Goux describes, Fanon’s Martinican attempts to acquire exchange value by mimicking the attributes of a general equivalent. But there are important differences between Goux’s and Fanon’s accounts of capitalist mimicry. First, in Goux, the history of the subject prior to this moment of mimicry seems to be irrelevant to the process of identification or acquisition of value. There seems to be no sense of self prior to this moment of specular mimicry that yields the self-as-value. In contrast, in Fanon, the Martinican’s attempt to swallow his r’s to sound “properly” French is, in fact, an attempt to camouflage part of his individual history as a languaged subject, and to move past (however partially) the constraints and prejudices imposed on his minoritized and devalued colonial identity. This is the identity of the colonial black subject with and as an “accent,” shaped by prejudices that both affect and exceed the subject’s individual history. Second, in Goux, the human subject’s specular identification with its ideal seems to be a fait accompli. Value production appears to be an exceptionally even and smooth process, regardless of the subject’s social position. In contrast, for Fanon, the success of mimicry (as noted earlier) is never guaranteed. While perfect imitation or parody remains a possibility, it is impossible to ignore the reality of the “non-native” speaker who cannot trust and is always haunted by his own accent. The anxiety of the Francophone migrant—while symptomatic of a certain amount of linguistic and cultural capital that more subaltern colonized subjects will likely not have—reveals, nevertheless, a fissure in the apparently smooth process of obtaining equivalence. Thus, Fanon’s scene of mimicry uncovers the falsity of the narrative of perfect equivalence underlying Goux’s account.22 More generally, Fanon’s critique also aligns with the Marxist and feminist emphasis on the unevenness of capitalist exchange (see Irigaray below). 

In this way, Fanon leads us toward thinking about mimicry not merely as the most “human” faculty but also as a systemic imperative on which capitalism and its profoundly asymmetrical and racialized system of equivalence thrive: “The black man is comparaison. That is the first truth. He is comparaison in the sense that he is constantly preoccupied with self-assertion and the ego-ideal” (185–86). In other words, the exchange value of the identity-as-fragment that engages in mimicry is expressed neither as pure conformity nor as “menace” but rather as a differential with an anxiety of inadequation. And linguistic, visual, and somatic blackness that cannot, as use value, participate in the process of exchange is the source of this anxiety. In these scenes of mimicry, then, identity emerges as a violent and coercive ricochet between use value and exchange value, within a structure of equivalence that keeps the former at the mercy of the latter.23 

Feminist philosopher and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray makes this Fanonian critique of mimicry even more succinctly when, in the late 1970s, she writes, “​​So commodities speak. To be sure, mostly dialects and patois, languages hard for ‘subjects’ to understand. The important thing is that they be preoccupied with their respective values, that their remarks confirm the exchangers’ plans for them.”24 Irigaray, in fact, directly targets the fiction that capitalism operates by allowing all commodities to acquire perfect equivalence: “Commodities among themselves are thus not equal, nor alike, nor different. They only become so when they are compared by and for man. And the prosopopoeia of the relation of commodities among themselves is a projection through which producers-exchangers make them reenact before their eyes their operations of specula(riza)tion” (177). So, the “resemblance” between the ego and their mirror image, Irigaray contends, is a fabrication controlled by man, specifically the (bourgeois and white) patriarchal capitalist order. While (bourgeois white) men perfectly mimic and see their “fellow” men within each other, the racially and sexually marginalized must continually grapple with differences that are built into the masculinist and imperialist system of equivalence. It, therefore, makes sense that (the identity of) the “woman” is also an oscillating fragment: “Women-as-commodities are thus subject to a schism that divides them into the categories of usefulness and exchange value; into matter-body and an envelope that is precious but impenetrable, ungraspable, and not susceptible to appropriation by women themselves; into private use and social use” (176). Racialized capitalism, it turns out, is nourished on the one hand by an elitist and white male privilege of mimetic desire, and on the other hand by the scapegoated classed, racialized, ethnicized, and sexualized differences that such desire and the attendant mimetic violence engender.

It seems crucial, then, to think of capitalism as being enabled by a form of mimicry that at once includes and exceeds the mimic, the subject of identity as a minoritizing constraint. “The resemblance is all in the eye of the beholder,” wrote Caillois while calling out some rather anthropocentric readings of mimicry in the animal world.25 This dominance of the “beholder” takes a chilling form in what philosopher and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter describes (through the work of Marxist historian C.L.R. James) as the “pieza framework,” which represents a realignment of the mode of production in relation to the mode of colonial domination.26 As Wynter writes:

The pieza was the name given by the Portuguese, during the slave trade, to the African who functioned as the standard measure. He was a man of twenty-five years, approximately, in good health, calculated to give a certain amount of physical labor. He served as the general equivalent of physical labor value against which all the others could be measured—with, for example, three teenagers equaling one pieza, and older men and women thrown in a job lot as refuse (81). 

In this moment that represents, quite starkly, modern capitalism’s murky origins in the transatlantic slave trade, it is the slave seller or the slave buyer as the “beholder” who determines which slaves are equivalent to—or will be able to mimic—the pieza. Capitalism, we know, did not invent slavery. But slavery under modern capitalism formalized the process of “commodification” that the pieza framework exemplifies. If commodification is the process by which an African subject is identified as a distinctly racialized and vendible black slave, then this process involves a mimicry that is governed less by what the slave himself actually does or thinks and more by what Stephanie Smallwood calls the “discursive domain of market rhetoric” that would include, for instance, the unpredictable consequences of the haggling between the slave trader and the buyer.27 This is also an instance of mimicry in which the identities of both the pieza (the racialized male “ideal image”) and its “inferior” mimics (racialized teenagers, women, and seniors) are circumscribed within a carefully planned and obviously violent system of minoritization.

While this kind of mimetic violence may have ended with pre-capitalist slavery, we’ve already noted how capitalist equivalence aggressively feeds on mimetic failure and marginalized differences generated through that failure. Several contemporary scholars have compellingly demonstrated how advanced neoliberalism profits from the self-mimicry of the racially and ethnically marginalized. The labors involved in this phase, as these scholars also point out, are not just physical but also markedly cultural. Neoliberalism promises the marginalized subject of identity that they can resist oppression through their marginalized culture and, potentially, even make that cultural identity a source of profit by repeatedly performing themselves and insisting on their “authenticity.”

Combining seventeen years of ethnography among northwest coast indigenous people in Australia as well as the analysis of land claims and public records in the region, anthropologist Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s The Cunning of Recognition argues that neoliberal multiculturalism no longer requires the (neo-)colonized to mimic the (neo-)colonizer.28 Instead, the postcolonial Australian state demands that the indigenous people conform to an impossible ideal of indigeneity in order to be recognized by the state: “To be truly Aboriginal, indigenous persons must not only occupy a place in a semiotically determined social space, they must also identify with, desire to communicate (convey in words, practices, and feelings), and, to some satisfactory degree, lament the loss of the ancient customs that define(d) their difference” (48). While the act of mimicking to approximate an ethnic and cultural identity is clearly not the manual labor that defined chattel slavery, the beholder (the Australian government) continues to be the arbiter of the success of the mimicry and, therefore, its material benefits.

Writing in the context of U.S. cultural politics and reflecting on the autobiographical turn in U.S. diaspora literatures, Rey Chow has aptly named this subtly oppressive mode of self-representation a “coercive mimeticism,” one in which the minoritized subject—whether the Asian American or the African American or the Native American—is asked to endlessly imitate and disclose themselves culturally to prove their difference from the dominant white ideology.29 Chow argues that, while this miming of difference might seem like a “protest,” ultimately, the terms of this protest remain coercively bound to prevalent understandings of otherness regulated by racialized labor and capital. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s critique of the confessional turn in Western society—where self-referentiality has come to stand for an apparently unmediated non-representational “truth”—Chow writes: “In Foucault’s analysis, self-referential speaking is not only not the individual or unique way out of the errors of representation that it is often imagined to be; it is also the symptom of a collective subjection. To represent, to examine, to confess about oneself incessantly are compulsive acts that imagine the self as a refuge beyond the reach of power—an alibi from speaking (of anything), so to speak—when the self is simply a relaying vehicle for institutional forces of rational systematization at the individual level” (114–15). In Chow’s reading of Foucault, not only does the confession as a form of protest bind the subject to miming structures of power that domesticate resistant forms of self-representation, the latter also points to the subjection of entire groups to those same structures.

We should note, though, that it is difficult to pin down a single or even a primary beholder or arbiter of identity in these far more dispersed neoliberal contexts of cultural self-mimicry. It is this dispersion that buoys interracial, interethnic, as well as intraethnic rivalries, proliferating differences in the form of equivalents and maintaining the hierarchy of equivalents that now subtends racialized capitalism. Perhaps it would be generative, at this point, to start extrapolating from anthropologist Saba Mahmood’s emphasis on the heterogeneous politics of Islamic piety, and specifically her shift from a dualistic conception of either enacting or subverting norms, to an exploration of “the radically different ways in which the norm is supposed to be lived and inhabited.”30  In that sense, we are perhaps indeed witnessing mimicry that decenters singular claims to identity or oneness. But that decentering does not necessarily stem mimicry’s exclusionary or minoritizing effects. In fact, these effects can be perpetuated or recreated through the plurality of mimicry and of its adjudication. We can think here of the competing claims to minority ethnic as well as ethnonationalist authenticity alongside the persistence of structural racism and white nationalisms. The devaluation by the Hindu nationalist of the Indian Muslim as not being “Indian enough” banks on the same differentiated and hierarchical global system that needed to malign the Martinican for not being “French enough.”

***

Must we then see all struggles that are, to some degree, identity-bound as being entirely restricted by either mimetic violence or coercive mimeticism? Must the vector of identity always align with the vector of mimicry? Responding to a draft of this essay, Rijuta Mehta—a cherished friend and interlocutor—reminded me of postcolonial Indian feminist aesthetics and politics that could be called anti-mimetic, in that they unflinchingly refuse the mimeticisms enforced by a patriarchal and casteist nation-state. In Mahasweta Devi’s well-known Bengali short story “Draupadi,” set against a major peasant rebellion called the Naxalite revolt that began in the late 1960s in West Bengal in eastern India, the eponymous protagonist could be seen as one such anti-mimetic agent. In the final moments of the story, Draupadi—who is a tribal revolutionary fighting oppression by upper-caste landowners as well as violent repression by the Indian Army—refuses to cover up her naked and wounded body after she has been apprehended and raped multiple times by Indian soldiers. Draupadi confronts and even frightens the army chief Senanayak with her gestures and words of defiance that conclude the story: 

Draupadi shakes with an indomitable laughter that Senanayak simply cannot understand. Her ravaged lips bleed… Draupadi wipes the blood on her palm and says in a voice that is… terrifying, sky splitting… What’s the use of clothes? You can strip me, but how can you clothe me again? Are you a man?

She looks around and chooses the front of Senanayak’s white bush shirt to spit a bloody gob and says, There isn’t a man here that I should be ashamed. I will not let you put my cloth on me. What more can you do? Come on, counter me—come on, counter me—? 

Draupadi pushes Senanayak with her two mangled breasts, and for the first time Senanayak is afraid to stand before an unarmed target, terribly afraid.31

What Draupadi thwarts so powerfully by taking control of her brutalized naked body is the masculinist state’s construction of the “woman” as the passive victim and as an image of submission and shame that all women—and especially subaltern women—are expected to mimic. If Irigaray sees the woman-as-commodity as being caught between a “matter-body and an envelope that is precious but…not susceptible to appropriation by women themselves” (see above), Draupadi repudiates that commodifiable “envelope,” that utterly patriarchal narrative of the woman as a shameable subject.32 Instead, she confronts her aggressors with her wounded but still rebellious and entirely illegible “matter-body.” As feminist critic Deepti Misri writes: “Draupadi’s body, which has been made and presumably known by so many, asserts its absolute unknowability in the end. Her theatrical disobedience appropriates the power of signification over her own raped body by rendering that body unreadable—resistant to patriarchal scripting while producing its own script.”33 Through its defiant rage, Draupadi’s sexed subalternity thus emerges as something that is unrecognizable through the lens of the coercive mimeticism enforced by the postcolonial repressive state apparatus. This insurgent female body that refuses to be “clothed,” to mimic the scripts of feminine modesty and shame after a certain limit of sexual violence has been crossed can’t be anything but terrifying to Senanayak, a stand-in for the masculinist state.

As Misri reminds us, however, this extraordinary literary act of anti-mimicry—its bold disassembling of the vectors of capitalist mimicry and identity—generated a new context for its iterations. Significant media coverage of a theatrical adaptation of Devi’s short story in Manipur in northeast India by the renowned Manipuri director Heisnam Kanhailal in the early 2000s contributed to the creation of an aesthetic and political imaginary in which the naked female body appeared and reappeared to confound and paralyze (even if temporarily) dominant Indian conceptions of femininity and womanliness. In 2004, twelve Manipuri women belonging to the Meitei ethnic group stripped naked in front of the Indian Army headquarters in the state’s capital Imphal to protest the rape and murder of Thangjam Manorama, a woman who had died recently while being interrogated by soldiers against charges of suspected militancy. And in 2007, a young woman named Pooja Chauhan walked through the streets of Rajkot in Gujarat in western India only in her underwear to draw public attention to police inaction against domestic abuse and violence from her in-laws (604–10). While each protest no doubt arose from a specific local context and had distinct motivations and effects, it nevertheless also borrowed from the imaginary shaped by—and, therefore, mimicked knowingly or unknowingly—the terrifying nudity of Draupadi in Devi’s story and its theatrical rendition.

This repeated staging of femininity refusing statist coercion and violence in postcolonial Indian feminist activism thus allows us to think of an anti-mimetic mimicry, one in which the sociopolitical identity, or perhaps more appropriately, the position asserted by the subaltern subject disrupts momentarily the dominant notion of identity built on exchange value, even as TV cameras may promptly rush to commodify and profit from that position. Here, anti-mimetic mimicry illuminates the existence of something that has not, and perhaps cannot, be commodified. These insubordinate acts are, therefore, also an outrageous refusal of the bourgeois, racist, sexist, and casteist dominance of capitalist value. Such mimicry mimics aesthetic comportment that, in the words of the philosopher Theodor Adorno, “does not imitate something but rather makes itself like itself.”34  Thus, the mimicry of aesthetic form becomes the basis for insurgencies against neoliberal mimicry.