Fake it like you mean it

Bootlegging—cheap knock-offs, copyright infringement, bad taste. The term drips with disdain, a shorthand for inauthenticity in a world obsessed with originality. But for many across the Global South, replication is not merely an act of imitation. It’s a form of cultural power. Turning the material remnants of empire into something distinctly local, bootlegging can subvert hierarchies of taste and ownership imposed by colonial and capitalist forces. As an act of reworking, it challenges what counts as authentic and who gets to decide. Although, as Walter Benjamin argues, replication strips objects of their “aura” their soul, their quality of personality.

So, when local artisans and makers engage in acts of copying, are they democratising culture or flattening it? Are they reclaiming symbols or reinforcing the supremacy of the original? Whether it’s the tricked-out Jeepneys of the Philippines, the garish film posters of Ghana, or the rise of pared-back furniture in Sri Lanka, these acts of replication expose the tension between resourcefulness and homogenisation, creative defiance and economic dependency.

Metal, paint, and protest

On the cover of his latest album Mahal, Toro y Moi leans out of a deep purple Jeep, its iridescent body margined in candy cane stripes, a silver horse ornament perched proudly on the bonnet. The half-Filipino artist pays homage to the Jeepney, a uniquely Filipino creation born from surplus military Jeeps left behind by the Americans after the Second World War. Stripped and reconfigured, these vehicles have become the foundation of post-war public transport. “Its parts may have come from the United States military, but its function and existence are distinctly Filipino,” says journalist Elle Yap.

More than transport, Jeepneys are moving canvases—ornate and rejecting minimalism in favour of spectacle. Drivers paint their vehicles with religious iconography, NBA logos, or hometown landscapes, creating highly personal yet deeply communal works of art. Yap notes, “Western car culture tends to be boring. It’s all very sleek, very minimalist.” But the Jeepney? It embraces exuberance. It’s camp. If the empire imposed control over land and movement, the Jeepney resists. “They are more utilitarian than what meets the eye,” she continues. All-terrain and endlessly customisable, they adapt to crumbling roads and shifting cities, serving those left out of ‘modern’ infrastructure.

“The menace of mimicry,” writes Homi K. Bhabha, is its “double vision”, where colonial symbols are repeated but twisted until unrecognisable. The Jeepney is precisely this—a military vehicle turned into something defiant, chaotic, uncontainable. However, government attempts to modernise transportation threaten to erase the presence of Jeepneys, replacing them with standardised vehicles. According to Jaycee De Leon Burgess, founder of London Jeepney, efforts to phase out the vehicle “have sparked discontent within the jeepney drivers’ community”, with strikes and protests leading to a stalemate as drivers resist the loss of both their livelihood and identity.

For many, modernisation has always been a coded word—a tool for flattening local histories in favour of uniformity. The Jeepney’s fate reflects a broader question: when the Global South’s creative adaptations are no longer deemed necessary, do they disappear? The Jeepney was never just a vehicle. It was a negotiation with history, transforming colonial destruction and objects of oppression into tools with purpose. Its disappearance would therefore mark not only the loss of a transport system, but also a uniquely Filipino act of strength.

Blockbusters, but make it local

Similarly, hand-painted Ghanaian film posters dismantle hierarchies of taste, rejecting polished aesthetics in favour of hyperbole, playful visuals deeply connected to local traditions. Deadly Prey Gallery is a Ghanaian film poster studio co-led by Brian Chankin in Chicago and Robert Kofi in Accra. In the hands of their Ghanaian artists, Hollywood films are stretched, distorted, and spectacularly reimagined. Take Space Jam via in-house
artist Stoger’s version, with Michael Jordan gripping a handgun—an absurd yet audacious addition. “The bootleg poster is more important than the film itself,”reflects Chankin.

Hand-painted posters emerged in Ghana in the 80s and 90s as mobile cinemas brought Hollywood and Nollywood to rural audiences. Armed with VCRs, generators, and stacks of martial arts and action films, operators set up screenings in villages far removed from Accra’s slick advertising. Instead, they commissioned artists to create posters using flour sacks as canvases. “It was a form of decentralisation,” explains Kofi. “Entertainment was only available in the capital cities, not the villages.”

Originally published in Dazed MENA Issue 01 | Order Here

Without access to official promotional materials – or sometimes even the films themselves– artists filled in the blanks, conjuring grotesquely muscular action heroes, hyper-objectified heroines, and surreal elements like monstrous snakes lurking in the background. The result? An aesthetic unshackled from realism, where Hollywood’s cool detachment is refashioned into something excessive, unruly, and unmistakably Ghanaian. “If they get someone to watch the film, they’ve done their job,” says Chankin. Where Western design worships minimalism, Ghanaian posters revel in maximalism. Their camp excess, as Susa Sontag writes, “sees everything in quotation marks”, embracing irony to puncture the solemnity of imperialist aesthetics.

Exposing the self-seriousness and faux sacredness of mass entertainment media, their lawless compositions and joyful inaccuracies make it available for play. “There’s power in taking ownership of the stories others tell about us,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reminds us. These posters don’t just depict films—they create new versions, ones that belong to the people who paint them and distinctly local audiences. As Bhabha explains, mimicry is never just imitation—it unsettles the original, making it “almost but not quite”. Ghanaian film posters thrive in this space, distorting global entertainment symbols into something irreverent and entirely their own

The other side of the coin

While these examples celebrate the transformation of colonial relics into distinct cultural expressions, does globalisation’s drive towards homogenised design diminish cultural nuance? Or does it democratise creativity? If bootlegging disrupts hierarchies of taste, what happens when imitation ceases to subvert and, instead, reinforces a postcolonial economic order?

In Sri Lanka’s tourist towns, stepping into a café or hotel often feels like stepping into Bali or Europe. Foreign-owned businesses shape local aesthetics, and artisans have adapted swiftly to global demand, producing weatherproof Bauhaus-style metal tables and neutral-toned rattan lampshades. But this replication is not simply about aesthetics—it reveals deeper economic dependencies. The widespread reproduction of Western furniture reflects historian Achille Mbembe’s argument that capitalism and colonialism work in tandem to create systems where “what is imported is seen as superior, while the local is relegated to the margins”.

“As a designer, I’m really excited to see how far we can push the woodworkers and carpenters here,” says Avisha De Saram, a Colombo-based interior designer. Yet, she acknowledges, “Unless you are literally designing your own, it is very difficult to avoid replication.”

Businesses now operate exclusively on replication, functioning like bespoke tailors—but for whom? Historically, Sri Lanka had a rich woodworking tradition, but today, Scandinavian minimalism and mid-century modern dominate. “A lot of people are looking for exact replicas because they feel they cannot trust the carpenter,” she notes, revealing an undercurrent of devaluation where local artisanship is reduced to labour, not innovation.

Perhaps the answer lies in collaboration, reconfiguring global design’s relationship with local knowledge. Jake Barker and his partner Tabea Campbell Pauli, who live in Colombo, embraced this approach. Instead of demanding exact replicas, they invited local craftspeople to interpret their designs. The result was unique furniture that blends modern styles with Sri Lankan materials and techniques, such as handloom fabrics and interlocking wood systems.

“We trusted the makers,” reflects Barker, creating pieces that are both globally inspired and locally grounded. In this, collaboration resists homogenisation, allowing bootlegging to become reinvention rather than erasure. The challenge remains: can Sri Lanka’s furniture industry reclaim creative agency, or will it remain bound to an economic system in which imitation serves the interests of global capital, not local artisans?

Bootlegging is a paradox. It allows both resistance and complicity. It can be a radical act that disrupts imperialist hierarchies, celebrates camp as a subversive aesthetic, and reimagines cultural symbols. But it can also be a symptom of the forces that it seeks to resist, a byproduct of economic structures that favour imitation over invention. As Stuart Hall argues, cultural identity is not fixed but formed “at the unstable points of difference”, shaped through ongoing negotiation. Bootlegging lives in this space—messy, contradictory, neither wholly resistance nor submission. It doesn’t just blur the lines between authenticity and reproduction; it exposes why those lines exist in the first place.

Originally published in Dazed MENA Issue 01 | Order Here