The Racial Politics of Imitation in the Nineteenth Century

Redrawing Afrocentrism: VisualNommoin George H. Ben Johnson's Editorial Cartoons

“…With Johnson's cartoons, audiences witness a transformation from reliance on upholding and imitating European tradition only to an appeal for African Americans to call upon their African heritage and identity for strength and affirmation. Kirt Wilson (2003) argued that before this point in history, the strategy of imitation was a highly respected dimension of education and sign of intelligence. Wilson described, though, that as African Americans began to use imitation as a strategy to demonstrate competence and to gain social acceptance, many European Americans began to argue that imitation was symptomatic of inferiority.…”

Art Controversy in theObamaWhiteHouse: Performing Tensions of Race in the Visual Politics of the Presidency

“…Questions of imitation dominate discourse about art. On the one hand, there is the colloquial sense that art should be wholly original and emerge from one's own imagination (Wilson , 90). On the other hand, there is the recognition that there is no such thing as wholly original invention, because creative expression often involves modeling, emulating, or learning from work that has come before.…”

“…In this context, the race of the artist very much mattered. Kirt Wilson () points out that in the U.S. context, imitation brings with it a fraught racial history. As a result, he cautions that discussions of Black imitation “should be contextualized within a specific racial history and discursive practice” (Wilson , 105).…”

March of the Pandas: Imitation and Intelligent Design

“…We see this most often in the process of socialization where initiates to a new speech community (e.g., law student, new converts to a religion) learn to 'speak the language' of the community" (Jasinski, 2001, 297). Kirt Wilson provides an insightful example of how this type of imitation works in an article on nineteenth century racial politics as well (Wilson, 2003). Using imitation as a way of becoming part of a group is applicable in respect to Pandas.…”

“…It is the type of imitation that does not just mimic or repeat superficial characteristics, but rather invents a rhetorical act based on an understanding of an original model. Rhetoricians have taken up this notion of copying and emulation for the purposes of understanding both texts and contexts (Leff, 1997;Murphy, 1997;Wilson, 2003), illustrating its usefulness as a concept in their work as rhetorical critics.…”