Redefining Mimicry: Quoting Techniques and the Role of Readers in Locally Published Ghanaian Fiction

Abstract

Migration and mimicry have become key concepts in recent theoretical debates about the flows of people, ideas, and ideologies in the postcolonial world. Globalization theorists tend to focus upon the effects of Western popular culture as it permeates postcolonial societies. In response to the spread of mass-communications networks from Western cities into far-flung ex-colonial societies, theorists such as Ulf Hannerz and Arjun Appadurai have sought to assess?in general and transcultural terms?the impact of imported popular genres upon local populations. When metropolitan art forms are absorbed and mimicked by consumers for whom they were not produced, these theo? rists ask if we are witnessing another, more invidious form of colonialism, a type of invasion that occupies the very imaginations and fantasies of new audiences (Hannerz, Cultural Complexity 236); or perhaps, as Appadurai suggests, cultural imports from the West are being radically transformed by their performances in new contexts (Disjuncture and Difference 327). Other postcolonial theorists, including Edward Said and Homi Bhabha, have focused recently upon cultural flows in the opposite direc? tion. Different in so many other respects, both Said and Bhabha trace the impact of postcolonial migrations upon ideas and ideologies in metropol? itan countries. Through the experience of displacement, Bhabha writes, the migrant takes up a position in the zones in-between cultural certainties, introducing doubt into homogeneous concepts such as national identity and national history (Location of Culture 1). Composed ofa con? trapuntal ensemble of influences, the migrant is, in Said's words, a nomad who passes to and fro on the thresholds of other people's homelands (Culture and Imperialism xxix). This migratory condition is consid? ered to exemplify postcolonial subjectivity. The migrant's experience of being divorced from a community and homeland is being re-described as the prototypical freedom. Displacement forms the critical channel through which newness enters the world (Bhabha, Location of Culture, 212-35). These theorists of postcoloniality all reject the idea that the world's cultures are distinct, clearly bounded units which fit together in a mosaic covering the earth's surface. The image of world culture as a mosaic, or a harmonious global village, has given way in recent years to an image of the twentieth-century world as a whirlpool of commingling and disjunctive ideologies, technologies, peoples, media, and meanings (see Appadurai, Disjuncture and Difference 328). World cultures are now viewed as chaotic and heterogeneous. Boundary metaphors such as center and periphery, which prevailed in the 1980s, have been replaced with images of movement and multiplicity. The post of postcolonialism marks the loss of totalizing assumptions about culture, meaning, identity, and history.