• Walking with the enemy
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Walking with the enemy

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This book is about artists and activists who have embraced mimicry as a subversive tactic and responded to ideologies by imitating their outward forms. Chapters discuss mimicry in reference to the ...
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  • 25 August 2026
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This book is about artists and activists who have embraced mimicry as a subversive tactic. Bringing together the contributions of seventeen writers, it addresses the ways in which artists have responded to power and ideology by imitating its outward forms. These contributors address in particular the current age of fantasy and political deception, and they consider the work of artists who have reacted by using dissimulation and make-believe themselves. Chapters include discussions of mimicry in reference to a number developments and debates: the post-truth era, the neoliberal consensus, the politics of race and gender, online subcultures, and the rise of the new right.
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Price: $140.00
Pages: 432
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Series: Rethinking Art's Histories
Publication Date: 25 August 2026
ISBN: 9781526169488
Format: Hardcover
BISACs: ART / Art & Politics, Theory of art, ART / Criticism & Theory, ART / History / Contemporary (1945-), Political activism / Political engagement
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Gediminas Gasparavicius is Associate Professor at The University of Akron

Maia Toteva is Associate Professor of Global Art and Visual Culture at Texas Tech University

Tom Williams is Assistant Professor of Art History at Belmont University

What is subversive mimicry? A guide to art in the post-truth era – Gediminas Gasparavicius, Maia Toteva, and Tom Williams

Part I: The state and its specters
1 Subversive economics and the art of refusal in Akasegawa Genpei’s Greater Japan Zero-Yen Note (1967) – Isabel Elson-Enriquez
2 The slapstick state: politics as play in a Modified India – Sayandeb Chowdhury
3 Probing the control zone: The NSK State in Time and the Irish Question – Conor McGrady
4 Mimicry and its subversive negative potentials – Marina Gržinic

Part II: The danger and promise of mimesis
5 A specter is haunting Spectre: Laibach, the right, and the specter of ultra-identification – Alexei Monroe
6 Irony and subversive mimicry in art and internet meme culture – Vera Mevorah
7 Walking with images: of spider crabs, bot aesthetic, and Hasan Elahi’s Tracking Transience – Sebastian Althoff
8 Mimesis and mimicry: contemporary art, commodification, and (post)critique – Steyn Bergs
9 Who’s afraid of post-internet mimicry? – Kostis Stafylakis

Part III: The politics of dissimulation
10 Not turning on, but putting on: lying as an aesthetico-political strategy – Craig J. Peariso
11 Parafiction and truthiness: Stephen Colbert and Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow – Sarah Archino
12 Sexy Semites, half-disguised soldiers, and fake passport stamps: levels of spectatorship in Palestinian and Israeli parafiction art – Keren Goldberg
13 Human capital: culture jamming and racial capitalism at the millennium – Carrie Lambert-Beatty

Part IV: Subversive mimicry in decolonial contexts
14 Overidentification, decolonization, and genderqueer artivism in contemporary South Africa – Matthias Pauwels
15 Samuel Fosso’s masquerade: history, colonial trauma, and healing in Emperor of Africa – Juan Carlos Guerrero-Hernández
16 The agency of irony and mimicry in the subversion of colonial legacies: contemporary ethnographic portraits by Pushpamala N. and Yuki Kihara – Anisha Verghese
17 “Ways to murder with a flag”: paradoxical discourse and subversive affirmation in the art of Odesa Conceptualists – Svitlana Biedarieva