White But not Quite: Normalizing Colonial Conquests through Spatial Mimicry

Mimicry's role in the way social identities are constructed and deconstructed has considerably enriched our understanding of various power relations. However, as a spatial practice, mimicry has received scant consideration. In what ways can space itself become an object of mimicry? What strategies and practices are involved in the process and what is their political objective? The current paper deals with these questions by focusing on the processes of mimetic spatial production bent on turning Mount Hermon, an occupied territory under Israel's control, into “an ordinary” western ski resort. Yet this concerted effort to normalize a colonial space encountered different kinds of tensions and contradictions that provide a test case to the convoluted ways in which mimicry of space, and not just in space, continually generates various forms of slippage, excess and ambivalences