Imitation Nation: Red, White, and Blackface in Early and Antebellum US Literature

By Jason Richards

How did early Americans define themselves? The American exceptionalist perspective tells us that the young republic rejected Europeans, Native Americans, and African Americans in order to isolate a national culture and a white national identity. Imitativeness at this time was often seen as antithetical to self and national creation, but Jason Richards argues that imitation was in fact central to such creation. Imitation Nation shows how whites simultaneously imitated and therefore absorbed the cultures they so readily disavowed, as well as how Indians and blacks emulated the power and privilege of whiteness while they mocked and resisted white authority.

By examining the republic’s foundational literature--including works by Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, and Martin Delany--Richards argues that the national desire for cultural uniqueness and racial purity was in constant conflict with the national need to imitate the racial and cultural other for self-definition. The book offers a new model for understanding the ways in which the nation’s identity and literature took shape during the early phases of the American republic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Dec 26, 2017
• ISBN: 9780813940656

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University of Virginia Press

© 2017 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2017

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Richards, Jason, 1968– author.

Title: Imitation nation : red, white, and blackface in early and Antebellum US literature / Jason Richards.

Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017025187 | ISBN 9780813940649 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813940656 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: American fiction—19th century—History and criticism. | Race in literature. | Minorities in literature. | National characteristics, American, in literature.

Classification: LCC PS374.R32 R53 2017 | DDC 813.009/355—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017025187

Cover art: The Destruction of Tea at Boston Harbor, N. Currier, 1846, hand-colored lithograph. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

For Rashna and Madeleine

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Fail in Originality, Succeed in Imitation

1The New Republic’s Two Frontiers: Redface Desire, European Mimicry, and Edgar Huntly

2Localizing the Early Republic: Washington Irving and Blackface Culture

3Cooper’s Anglo-Saxon Masquerade: Redface, Whiteface, and The Pioneers

4Blackface Minstrelsy and the Making of African American Selfhood in Uncle Tom’s Cabin

5Melville’s (Inter)National Burlesque: Whiteface, Blackface, and Benito Cereno

6Blackface Violence and the Early African American Novel

Epilogue: Absorbing Mimesis

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To the teachers, colleagues, friends, family, and institutions that helped make this book a reality I owe an immeasurable debt of gratitude: one that my words will no doubt fail to fully express. This project began as a dissertation directed by Malini Johar Schueller at the University of Florida. Malini taught me how to develop an argument and introduced me to the racial performance idioms that propel this book. She has been an inspiring scholar, generous mentor, and lovely friend over the years. Many thanks go to David Leverenz, Stephanie Smith, and Louise Newman, who read the dissertation and then pushed me to widen its horizon. I hope I’ve made good on their advice. To David, who gave meticulous attention to this project early on, I am especially thankful. At the University of Florida, I was lucky to receive the Alumni Fellowship, which provided me time to read, write, and pursue an idea.

At Auburn University, where I taught out of graduate school, Jim Ryan and Bill Wandless became generous friends and colleagues, while at SUNY Brockport I benefited greatly from conversations with Janie Hinds and Jennifer Haytock. At Rhodes College, where I’ve now been for several years, I work in an extraordinary English department with exceptional scholars, artists, teachers, and human beings. Many of them have read and remarked on parts of this project; all of them have been the most supportive friends and inspiring colleagues a person could wish for. Working with Raquel Baker, Amy Benson, Gordon Bigelow, Marshall Boswell, Keith Corson, Rebecca Finlayson, Lori Garner, Ernest Gibson, Judy Haas, Scott Newstok, Leslie Petty, Seth Rudy, Brian Shaffer, Caki Wilkinson, and Lorie Yearwood is what makes this a dream job on a daily basis. The same goes for my students: teaching them is one of the great joys of my life.

I cannot say enough about my experience with the University of Virginia Press. To Cathie Brettschneider, who took initial interest in this project before retiring, I owe many thanks, and a deep debt of gratitude to the amazing Eric Brandt, my editor, who moved this project from stage to stage with remarkable skill, sensitivity, and encouragement. A very special thanks to the three anonymous readers for the Press and to the Faculty Editorial Board, who all provided excellent suggestions and crucial criticisms that helped significantly during the process of revision. To the other fabulous staff members at UVaP—particularly Ellen Satrom and Bonnie Gill—a huge thanks for bringing this book into its material form. Outside the Press, I want to thank my scrupulous copyeditor, George Roupe, and the meticulous Scott Garner, who indexed the book.

Portions of this project were presented at meetings organized by the American Literature Association, the Society for Early Americanists, and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies where audience members offered up smart critiques and valuable insights. Earlier versions of chapters 2, 4, and 5 first appeared, respectively, in ARIEL 35, no. 3–4 (2004); Novel 39, no. 2 (2006); and American Transcendental Quarterly 21, no. 2 (2007). I’m grateful to these journals for taking an interest in this work and for the use of this material.

To the many friends who offered support, open ears, and encouragement as I worked on this book, my gratitude runs deep. Daniel O’Grady and Evie Perry have helped and inspired me in ways that are too big to express here. Maggie Robertson and Seth Rudy as well as Lori and Scott Garner have offered extraordinary and sustaining friendship. Kerri and John Dugan have been fabulous over the years, and the distance between here and Norway can’t keep us from staying close. Kristi McKim, Mark Barr, and their son Henry have been rare, wonderful, generous comrades and a special part of our family. Eric Smith, who long ago inspired me to get my writing out there, has continued to inspire me as a scholar and an ally. Will McCaw has been a lifelong friend, lifelong confidant, and a model of selfless integrity.

This book wouldn’t exist without the love, support, and patience of my family. Patti and Mike Richards, my parents, have listened at length as I’ve described the delights, anxieties, and labors of the writing endeavor, while my brother Ryan served as a sounding board for the ideas in this book before they ever became ideas. My parents-in-law, Aban and Yazdi Wadia, have been extremely generous, crossing the globe to help my family on several occasions. My daughter Madeleine Jane Richards has brought new meaning to my life: she is the brightest, most animated, most hopeful being I have ever known, and she makes everything easier and lighter. Ultimately, my deepest debt and my deepest gratitude are reserved for my wife, Rashna Wadia Richards, whose endurance through a severe case of Crohn’s disease astonishes me every single day. Without Rashna, this book would be incomplete and unrealized, and I would be in a comparable state. Not only has she read and remarked on countless drafts of this project, she has supported me on every level as I brought it to completion. Rashna is my best friend and my best critic, the best part of my history and the best part of my future. I’m so incredibly glad she invited me in to watch Chaplin’s Modern Times all those years ago.

INTRODUCTION

Fail in Originality, Succeed in Imitation

Imitation Nation examines a range of US literary narratives, written between the Revolution and the Civil War, to illustrate how race, national identity, and the nation’s literature came into being through a complex and often conflicted process of imitation. Traditionally understood, this era decried imitation and strove for originality; imitation, after all, was said to impede national creation during the time of national emergence. The primal fear was that America would become a pale reflection of the Old World, a European offspring that looked too much like its parent. Thus nonimitation became the standard and ambition of the day. This kind of insular, purist thinking was driven by racial fears as well. White Americans sought distinction not only from Europeans but also from savage Indians and enslaved Africans, who became foils to a civilized, free, and white republic.¹ That, at least, is the traditional account of national origins. And while that account is rooted in historical realities, it really only tells half the story. The nation was, to be sure, grounded in the desire for racial and cultural purity, but that desire coexisted with the need to imitate the very Europeans, Indians, and Africans the republic consolidated itself against. The aim of this book is to understand this troubling contradiction—to reconcile, if possible, how America conceived of itself as a white racial space, while it was in reality a mimetic blend of Indian, European, and African influence. Remarkably, the notion that white national identity emerged through racial and cultural opposition has never addressed the following questions: If we could subtract European, Native, and African influence from the new nation, what would we be left with? Would there be any national culture at all?

To begin understanding imitation’s conflicted role in the founding of the national culture, we might first turn to Ralph Waldo Emerson, the New England transcendentalist who launched his literary career by extolling the virtues of originality while attacking what he saw as originality’s arch enemy: imitation. Emerson’s resistance to imitation animates much of his early work, with the clearest example appearing in Self-Reliance, where he famously proclaims that imitation is suicide.² Since Emerson believes in the radical expression of unique selfhood, copying the ideas of others is lethal to self-creation. Emerson’s quest for original expression was, however, nothing new. Enlightenment philosophers like René Descartes and Immanuel Kant as well as Romantics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth had been praising the value of original insight long before Emerson did. Never one to shy away from contradiction, Emerson poached freely on these writers to forge his own brand of American self-reliance. But the influence of Europe was not the only thing shaping Emerson’s anti-imitative thought. Domestically speaking, his essay repackages the fiercely independent, anticolonial feelings of the Revolutionary era. Emerson’s philosophy of self-reliance, then, emerges from a fascinating paradox: he who warns of death by mimesis is himself engaged in an act of promiscuous imitation.

This inconsistency would shape the direction of Emerson studies, and it would shape the direction of American literary studies more generally. The inward-looking Emerson, the one who campaigned against imitation and the mind of the past—the one who told the nation it had listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe³—gave rise to what we might call the nationalist school of Emerson. Emerson’s frequent attacks on imitation in favor of native newness made him the premier spokesperson for American literary nationalism, a movement that (as the story goes) ached for an independent, exceptionalist culture of its own.⁴ Yet it is the outward-looking Emerson—the one who transcended national boundaries by imitating, absorbing, and transforming a vast array of global knowledge—who has garnered more attention of late, as the humanities have become more international in scope. What we might call the transnational Emerson has dispelled the cultural xenophobia he came to embody.⁵

These two contradictory approaches describe the direction American literary studies has taken as well. Whereas locating the distinctively national in formative US literature was once a critical obsession, more recent scholarship has shown how the literature of the new nation was constructed in relation to transnational contexts and geographies. If American scholars once obsessed over what was exceptional or non-imitative in American literature, today Robert Levine’s comment on the subject seems more germane: contrary to notions that the nation’s early authors eschewed European models, Levine insists that most American literary nationalists of the early period saw imitation as a form of literary talent, even genius.⁶ As the study of American literature has become denationalized in recent decades, imitation, particularly the imitation of British culture, has acquired a more exalted role in understanding the tangled ontology of American letters. That being said, as we seek to widen our understanding of American literature’s cultural complexity, we should not deny that the nation’s early writers also and vigorously resisted imitation and that the desire for nonimitation did in fact motivate literary nationalism. Herman Melville aggressively mimicked British literary models; he also wrote that it is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation.⁷ The nation’s early writers were culturally receptive, to be sure, but they could also be fiercely insular.

Nonetheless, the scholarly challenges to such insularity have produced some of the most exciting criticism in American literary studies in recent decades, and Imitation Nation builds on this more recent body of criticism. Working against the national and scholarly fable that America was unburdened by the European past, critics have shown how the young republic was very much embedded in and overdetermined by the history it seemed to escape: how a settler nation like America was actually colonizing in practice and still European (or colonized) in thought. Regarding the nation’s colonialist roots, Edward Watts has helped to dispel the notion that the colonies broke cleanly from England when they became a republic, showing how early national leaders adopted models of colonial oppression in order to stabilize a precarious new nation.⁸ Similarly, as Andy Doolen has argued, Republican ideals very well might have inspired the Founding Fathers and their vision of national institutions; nevertheless, their own investment in the operations of empire ensured that the new nation-state could only be constructed from within the shell of the old empire.⁹

If exposing the republic as a copycat empire undermines the myth of American exceptionalism, revisionist work on American literary nationalism has disrupted the myth of America’s cultural autonomy. Lawrence Buell helped to pioneer this critical reappraisal. By examining the postcolonial nature and transatlantic texture of antebellum writing, he emphasized the hybrid construction of American literature.¹⁰ More comprehensively, Wai Chee Dimock has challenged American insularity by expanding the spatial/geographical and temporal/historical understanding of the field. For too long, she writes, American literature has been seen as a world apart, sufficient unto itself, not burdened by the chronology and geography outside the nation.¹¹ Then we have Leonard Tennenhouse’s aptly titled The Importance of Feeling English. A long-standing narrative tells us that the new nation’s citizens eagerly sought to define themselves against the British, but Tennenhouse argues that they actually retained a strong identification with English culture.¹² All of these revisionary scholars, by highlighting the republic’s imperialist agenda and its transnational entanglements, challenge the foundational myths of American autochthony, exposing how the nation emerged from a range of transcultural mimeses. From them, we learn that to limit our understanding of American literature to a conventionally temporal, hermetically sealed cisatlantic analysis is, quite simply, to limit our understanding of American literature.

That is only part of the story, however, for American imitativeness was not limited to transnational borrowings alone. And while this book builds on the critical reorientation suggested above, it also salvages the idea that American cultural nationalists struggled to define themselves against Europeans, even as they copied them. What is fascinating about American anti-Europeanism is how it turned to another kind of mimesis to express itself: for it was by imitating Native and African Americans that the nation could distinguish itself from the Old World. The Founding Fathers famously drew on John Locke, Montesquieu, and other Europeans to formulate notions of democratic freedom, but the indigenous Indian and the enslaved African also helped them articulate ideas of freedom as well as resistance to empire. The white perception that Indians were self-sufficient, naturally free, and unrestrained by institutions gave shape to national conceptions of liberty, while the image of Africans in chains reminded the colonies of their own political bondage to England. Thus, during the Boston Tea Party, a group of revolutionaries dressed up as Mohawk Indians to signify their independence and claim their natural right to the land, while another rebel, Thomas Paine, aligned the colonies’ bondage with slavery to add moral force to his argument. [I]f being bound [to England] is not slavery, he argued, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth.¹³ With stunning irony, whites identified with those they internally colonized in order to resist the British who had colonized them.

If the nation and its people saw imitation as an existential threat while paradoxically creating themselves through imitative acts, what might that say about the vexed yet productive powers of imitativeness? Imitation Nation addresses that question by arguing that American identity, especially in its more formative years, took shape through ambivalent acts of racial and cultural imitation, acts that produced an impressively hybrid national identity. This study arises from the fact that the emerging United States was, on the one hand, a colonial power with its own colonized peoples and, on the other hand, a postcolonial entity still in thrall to Britain’s cultural colonization. When I use the term postcolonial in this book, I do so to indicate in general terms the American republic after political (not cultural) separation from England; I also do so recognizing the republic’s status as a nation rooted in white settler colonialism—a nation that would eventually grow into a neocolonial global superpower—and with an awareness of the controversial role postcolonial studies has played in American literary studies.¹⁴ My use of the term in many respects derives from Alan Lawson, Anna Johnston, Malini Johar Schueller, Edward Watts, and others who have conceptualized what we now call settler postcolonial theory, a school within postcolonial studies that offers ways of understanding the ambivalent logic of a settler nation like the United States.¹⁵ How might we understand a former British colony like the United States that was not native to the land it inhabited? How might we understand settler authors who sought to legitimize themselves through British models while translating the indigenous authority of the Native into a new national identity? How might we understand the doubleness of an emerging nation that was simultaneously an empire and a cultural colony of Europe? These are questions settler postcolonial theory takes up.

Thus, when addressing white-authored US literature, especially the literature of the early republic, my use of postcolonial often carries with it the implication of settler postcolonial ambivalence. As Johnston and Lawson describe it, [T]here are always two kinds of authority and always two kinds of authenticity that the settler subject is (con)signed to desire and to disavow¹⁶ (i.e., the authority of European imperial culture and the authority of the Native). Yet while settler theory is particularly concerned with the settler’s negotiation of the European and the indigenous, Imitation Nation argues that emerging US writers also sought a third form of cultural authority in African Americans, who, like the Native, became non-European models for local and national identity. Sandwiched between the Old and New Worlds, postcolonial American settlers had no choice but to imitate and resist Europeans, Indians, and African Americans for new definition. When they resisted one group, they often did so by identifying with another. Yet mimetic acts were not just a strategy for the white republican settler. There is a long history of Indians and blacks performing whiteness for the freedom, privilege, and power it signified. In a new nation where Native, white, and African Americans encountered and borrowed from one another on a daily basis, identity was created, however unequally, through a complex series of mimetic relationships.

What’s ironic about the ubiquitous mimetic acts at this time is that from the late eighteenth century through the Romantic period there was a backlash against imitation—or classical imitatio—which, according to Matthew Potolsky, had for centuries been a central principle of literary production. In fact, the skillful imitation of role models, writes Potolsky, and the ability to make something new out of old traditions was key to literary success.¹⁷ By the late eighteenth century, however, intellectuals inspired by the anti-imitative writings of Descartes and Kant were arguing that imitation was a crippling form of plagiarism that repressed one’s genius and deadened self-expression. The decline of imitatio and rise of the cult of genius were spurred by the Enlightenment belief in individual potential, a democratic urge that sparked the Age of Revolution and the Romantic exaltation of the self, all of which ran on a pro-independence passion that resisted imitation, conformity, and dependence: things that seemed to inhibit self-rule and national development free of monarchial tyranny. That the people in the United States at this time were highly mimetic partly explains why their imitativeness was so conflicted. This book argues that in an era when mimesis was often suspect and vilified, the new nation was working out its identity in the only way imaginable: through ambivalent mimetic acts.

My argument grows from several imbricated schools of thought: (1) critical race theory, to explore how racial performances such as red, white, and blackface shaped American racial constructions; (2) postcolonial theory, to illustrate how mimicry, ambivalence, and hybridity register the conflicted economy of national identity; (3) settler postcolonial theory, to illuminate how white republican authors sought the authority and legitimacy of both Europe and the New World; (4) scholarship on American literary nationalism, to understand the racial investments of early cultural nationalism; and (5) the transnational turn in American studies, to reveal and understand the transatlantic entanglements of American literary production. While all of these schools touch in various ways on the subject of imitation, until now there has not been a sustained exploration of how early and antebellum US identity evolved almost entirely through and against imitation. The central point of my argument is that such identity formation is, as I’ve suggested, always ambivalent; it is driven by the same two impulses that push and pull a writer like Emerson. Time and again, America’s emerging postcolonial writers eschew European models so as to nativize their writing, while in the same breath they mimic those selfsame models. These dueling impulses structure racial imitation as well. The fact that white Americans copied Native Americans but didn’t really want to be them and copied African Americans but didn’t really want to be them either is a central contradiction of emerging national identity. This paradox also informs how Indians and blacks imitated each other as well as mimicked white culture. Ultimately, what this book offers is a nuanced way of exploring how imitation actually worked in the nation’s formative literature: instead of taking sides in the debate over whether American identity was original or mimetic, it contends that a creative tension exists between these two poles, through which all American identity emerges. If there is anything exceptional about American identity, it does not arise from its purely indigenous elements; nor is it something that is somehow born ex nihilo; instead it is the cultural fusions these imitations produce—what Edgar Allan Poe would call the originality of combination.¹⁸

This book focuses on the literature of the early national and antebellum periods because the years that fell between the Revolution and the Civil War witnessed, most urgently, people trying on a range of racial and cultural guises on the new national stage. America has always been a mimetic culture: settlers were known to go native, Natives mimicked settlers, blacks masqueraded as colonists, and colonists imitated blacks going back to the earliest days of settlement and slavery. But in its emerging years the nation’s imitative gestures were stronger than at any other point in its history. These gestures were especially intense in former British Americans who were privileged to reinvent themselves as postcolonial citizens. Prior to the Revolutionary era, white imitations of Indians and blacks were not invested as they later would be in creating a new identity; and that is because the colonists were, for the most part, secure in their role as English subjects.¹⁹ While American colonials would sometimes identify with the racial other—in 1705 Robert Beverly proclaimed, I am an Indian to highlight his American Englishness—most would have empathized with Ben Franklin’s 1760 assertion, I am a Briton.²⁰ Until the colonies became a nation in search of a national culture, the desire to fashion a culture of their own didn’t exist in the way it would after independence. There wasn’t the same need to imitate Indians or blacks to differentiate from the English. There was no need to mimic the English either, precisely because the colonists saw themselves as British.²¹

Following political independence white Americans continued to see themselves in many respects as culturally English, yet they turned more and more to Indians and blacks as local models for a new national identity. No wonder redface and blackface theatrics—informally on the street at first, then formally on the stage later on—gained cultural momentum as whites identified with Native and African Americans to articulate cultural distinctiveness, while they also disidentified with them to define their sense of superior whiteness and to establish an exclusive white nationalism. At the same time, the white mimicry of European models, both political and artistic, became a source of cultural pride as well as a sign of postcolonial anxiety.

In post-Revolutionary America, the African American mimicry of whiteness became more defining as well, for the nation’s enslaved now had a free white majority, whose identity was founded on principles of liberty, as a model for imagining their own freedom. Mimicking whites enabled blacks to ascend symbolically in the racial hierarchy and assert themselves into American society in ways that were typically forbidden. If whites produced their argument for independence through African Americans, the latter transformed themselves by mimicking privileged whiteness. In the late eighteenth century, for example, African Americans in South Carolina were copying whites through country dances, cakewalks, and boulevard promenading, which allowed them to adopt the accents of white privilege and rehearse for their eventual role as free republican citizens.²² Native Americans mimicked whites as well, but given the rapid destruction of their cultures by frontier expansion, they also and often fiercely resisted white culture.²³ Of course, African and Native Americans didn’t imitate whites alone. There’s the story of Okah Tubbee, who was born a slave in Mississippi and then liberated himself by taking on an Indian identity, which gave him mobility he did not have as a New World African.²⁴

A larger goal of this book is to show how the racial and cultural mimeses that occurred between the Revolution and the Civil War were not only about literary production and identity formation: one might even say that imitation helped the new nation constitute itself as an imperial power in its own right. By mimicking the oppressive apparatuses of European colonialism and by controlling how Natives and blacks were represented in the public imaginary, imitation contributed to the rise of white colonial supremacy within the United States. As I will illustrate, although white performances of redface and blackface contain subversive energies, register cross-racial identification, and show that race is merely a construct, these performances also work to consolidate a powerful white nationalism, forged in opposition to Indians and blacks, that served the ideological and economic needs of US imperial culture. And while the whiteface mimicries enacted by America’s subalterns allowed the marginalized to challenge racial hierarchies and exploit the nation’s myths and ideals for social advancement, these whiteface acts often registered a perpetuation of and conformity to the interests of Anglo American empire.

Mimesis, Imitation, Mimicry

Since this book’s focus is racial and cultural mimesis, I will now elaborate the concept of mimesis and its related terms: imitation and mimicry.²⁵ As will become clear, mimesis and imitation are general, often interchangeable terms that describe various kinds of imitation, whereas mimicry, a more specialized term, occurs when the culturally marginalized copy the dominant culture. Mimesis has played a crucial role in literary and artistic theory from ancient times up to the present day. Foundational to nearly any debate about representation and identity formation, this concept received its most influential theorization from Plato. In his dialogue the Republic, Plato argues that art (especially poetry) is a form of mimesis that tries but ultimately fails to accurately depict reality, thereby leading its audience away from the truth.²⁶ Plato’s discussion of representational poetry in book 10 of the Republic offers a withering critique of artistic mimesis, which he derides as a shallow reproduction of the natural world—a world that is decidedly inferior to the divine realm. An idealist, Plato espouses the theory of forms, a belief that original ideas and types exist in a state of immutable perfection beyond the material world. Since all earthly entities are but pale reflections of their original forms, any artistic rendering of these things is, according to Plato, two generations away from reality.²⁷ As such, representational poetry is a kind of diluted plagiarism, offering little more than a copy of a copy of an original. Plato’s polemic helped to establish the binaries of copy and original, of imitation and genius that would later inspire the Romantic rebellion against classical imitatio. More intimately, his attack on representational inaccuracy resonates in the criticism of America’s most popular form of racial imitation, blackface minstrelsy, which has been condemned for taking control of African American representation and generating stereotypes that often distorted or misrepresented reality.

Plato fostered a skepticism toward mimesis that will likely never go away. We might even credit him with the anxieties that drove early cultural nationalists and American literary scholars in their quest for the nonimitative ideal. Yet as the long and productive history of imitatio suggests, mimesis can be a highly creative process, and the constructive energies of mimesis are why the concept would later be seen as a central part of identity production, as psychoanalysts, anthropologists, and postcolonial as well as critical race and gender theorists would argue that mimesis is foundational to forming any kind of identity. These various groups, either directly or indirectly, took their ideas from the French social theorist Gabriel Tarde, whose influential work The Laws of Imitation illustrates how people shape one another’s identities through imitation. [W]herever there is a social relation between two living beings, writes Tarde, there we have imitation.²⁸ Tarde not only highlights the mimetic foundations of people and culture; he also emphasizes how the imitative process is an ambivalent one: There are two ways of imitating, he writes, to act exactly as one’s model, or to do exactly the contrary.²⁹ For Tarde, everything is imitation,