Mimesis in a Global and Historical Context

Mimesis is a fundamental way of conceiving of the relationship between artistic expression and reality in Western thinking. It has been theorized in depth in the western context over the centuries since Plato and Aristotle. Nevertheless, an Aristotelian understanding of mimesis that understands the relationship between expression and reality as representational continues to dominate modern thought. Even the word “representation” itself betrays an Aristotelian conceptualization of literary expression, as Earl Miner has pointed out. We are looking for papers that reconsider the relationship between expression and reality, taking into account the consequences of non-Aristotelian or non-normatively Aristotelian approaches to the literary arts for the way they function. We are particularly interested in interrogating mimesis in practice and theory from non-European perspectives in both premodern and modern contexts. Such engagements could be direct, such as in the reception of Aristotle’s Poetics in Syriac, Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew, as well as Latin translations of those engagements. They could also be independent of Aristotle altogether but nevertheless relevant to the question of the relationship between art and reality (e.g., what Barbara Mundy has called “indigenous image theory” in the context of the Americas). We are open to any critical engagements with the concept of mimesis from any period and we especially encourage submissions relating to East Asia, West Asia, South Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Besides literature, the focus can include art, music, and performance. Possible topics include:

Is mimesis a universal concept? 
Is there a distinct theory of mimesis from the global south? 
Relationships or disjunctures between normative theories of mimesis and the vernacular or practical theories of representation contained, either implicitly or metapoetically, in particular genres or speech genres.
Methodological tensions between the phenomenology of literature (history of the senses, studies of literature and materiality, etc.) and the formal study of a system of conventions for representation understood as a language game.
Politics of regimes of representation: per Frank Ankersmit’s suggestion, do particular approaches to mimesis (aesthetic representation) correspond to different theories of spokespersonship (political representation)?