uncanny mimicry

is a copy of a cultural practice that is both familiar and foreign and at once is a copy destined to fall short and an aggressive appropriation that imaginatively exceeds the model.

under these conditions, what has most frequently developed is appropriation in the form of an 'uncanny mimicry' a condition, to put it tongue in cheek, in which Sigmund Freud meets Homi Bhabha. By uncanny, I mean Freud's original sense of the unnerving sensation of encountering something both familiar and foreign at the same time. As I argued above, since the 1860s, Americans have exuberantly exported the game, all the while worrying constantly if those beyond the smell of hot dogs and the strains of our national anthem can and should play it properly. (Kelly 2007 : 193-4) . .. What does baseball glocalization look like from the other side' Baseball was taken to Japan and elsewhere in a spirit of enthusiastic mimicry, at least as Homi Bhabha (1984) used the term for how colonial and neo-colonial subjects appropriated their master's practices with equal measure of anxiety and anger. 'Mimicry' is both the pale copy destined to fall short of an original and an aggressive appropriation that imaginatively exceeds the model. It is playful disruption and intentional distortion. (Kelly 2007 : 194)

uncanny mimicry, n.All

uncanny mimicry