[The concept of “cultural appropriation,” the adoption or use of elements of one culture by members of another culture, is an idea that’s gained some currency lately, causing some acrimony among some who consider that their customs are being coöpted by those with no standing to use or even understand them and defensiveness by others, especially artists from many fields, who feel their creativity and free expression is being curtailed and impeded by shortsightedness in our multi-cultural society.
[I’m presenting two articles
about this phenomenon—not that cultural appropriation is in any way new: no
less a figure than William Shakespeare practiced it half a millennium ago
(consider Othello and Shylock)—from different publications. First comes a discussion by Cathy Young from
the Washington
Post, posted to its website on 21 August
2015. (This article was referenced in an
editorial from the National Coalition Against Censorship, “The War on Cultural
Appropriation,” which I posted in “Fighting for Free Expression” on 5 February
2016.) This will be followed by a recent
New York Times op-ed article by journalist and author Lionel Shiver.]
“TO THE NEW CULTURE COPS,
EVERYTHING IS APPROPRIATION”
by Cathy Young
A few months ago, I read “The Orphan’s Tales” by Catherynne
Valente. The fantasy novel draws on myths and folklore from many cultures,
including, to my delight, fairy tales from my Russian childhood. Curious about
the author, I looked her up online and was startled to find several
social-media discussions bashing her for “cultural appropriation.”
There was a post sneering at “how she totally gets a pass to
write about Slavic cultures because her husband is Russian,” with a response
noting that her spouse isn’t even a proper Russian, because he has lived in the
United States since age 10. In another thread, Valente was denounced for her
Japanese-style LiveJournal username, yuki-onna, adopted while she lived in
Japan as a military wife. In response to such criticism, a browbeaten Valente
eventually dropped the “problematic” moniker.
Welcome to the new war on cultural appropriation. At one
time, such critiques were leveled against truly offensive art — work that
trafficked in demeaning caricatures, such as blackface, 19th-century minstrel
shows or ethnological expositions, which literally put indigenous people on
display, often in cages. But these accusations have become a common attack
against any artist or artwork that incorporates ideas from another culture, no
matter how thoughtfully or positively. A work can reinvent the material or even
serve as a tribute, but no matter. If artists dabble outside their own cultural
experiences, they’ve committed a creative sin.
To take just a few recent examples: After the 2013 American
Music Awards, Katy Perry was criticized for dressing like a geisha while
performing her hit single “Unconditionally.” Last year, Arab American writer
Randa Jarrar accused Caucasian women who practice belly dancing of “white
appropriation of Eastern dance.” Daily Beast entertainment writer Amy Zimmerman
wrote that pop star Iggy Azalea perpetrated “cultural crimes” by imitating
African American rap styles.
And this summer, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has been
dogged by charges of cultural insensitivity and racism for its “Kimono
Wednesdays.” At the event, visitors were invited to try on a replica of the
kimono worn by Claude Monet’s wife, Camille, in the painting “La Japonaise.”
The historically accurate kimonos were made in Japan for this very purpose.
Still, Asian American activists and their supporters besieged the exhibit with
signs like “Try on the kimono: Learn what it’s like to be a racist imperialist
today!” Others railed against “Yellow-Face @ the MFA” on Facebook. The museum eventually
apologized and changed the program so that the kimonos were available for
viewing only. Still, activists complained that the display invited a “creepy
Orientalist gaze.”
These protests have an obvious potential to chill creativity
and artistic expression. But they are equally bad for diversity, raising the
troubling specter of cultural cleansing. When we attack people for stepping
outside their own cultural experiences, we hinder our ability to develop
empathy and cross-cultural understanding.
The concept of cultural appropriation emerged in academia in
the late 1970s and 1980s as part of the scholarly critique of colonialism. By
the mid-1990s, it had gained a solid place in academic discourse, particularly
in the field of sociology.
Some of this critique was rightly directed at literal
cultural theft — the pilfering of art and artifacts by colonial powers — or
glaring injustices, such as white entertainers in the pre-civil rights years
profiting off black musical styles while black performers’ careers were hobbled
by racism. Critics such as Edward Said offered valuable insight into
Orientalism, the West’s tendency to fetishize Asians as exotic stereotypes.
But the hunt for wrongdoing has run amok. The recent
anti-appropriation rhetoric has targeted creative products from art to
literature to clothing. Nothing is too petty for the new culture cops: I have
seen them rebuke a Filipina woman who purchased a bracelet with a yin-yang
symbol at a fair and earnestly discuss whether it’s appropriation to eat Japanese,
Indian or Thai food. Even Selena Gomez, a Latina artist, was assailed a couple
of years ago for sporting a Hindu forehead dot, or bindi, in a Bollywood-style
performance.
In some social-justice quarters, the demonization of
“appropriative” interests converges with ultra-reactionary ideas about racial
and cultural purity. I once read an anguished blog post by a well-meaning young
woman racked with doubt about her plans to pursue a graduate degree in Chinese
studies; after attending a talk on cultural appropriation, she was unsure that
it was morally permissible for a white person to study the field.
This is a skewed and blinkered view. Yes, most
cross-fertilization has taken place in a context of unequal power.
Historically, interactions between cultures often took the form of wars,
colonization, forced or calamity-driven migration and subordination or even
enslavement of minority groups. But it is absurd to single out the West as the
only culprit. Indeed, there is a paradoxical and perverse Western-centrism in
ignoring the history of Middle Eastern and Asian empires or the modern economic
and cultural clout of non-Western nations — for instance, the fact that one of
the top three entertainment companies in the U.S. market is Japanese-owned
Sony.
It is also far from clear that the appropriation police
speak for the people and communities whose cultural honor they claim to defend.
The kimono protest, for instance, found little support from Japanese Americans
living in the Boston area; indeed, many actively backed the museum’s exhibit,
as did the Japanese consulate.
Most critics of appropriation, including some anti-kimono
protesters, say they don’t oppose engagement with other cultures if it’s done
in a “culturally affirming” way. A Daily Dot article admonishes that “an
authentic cultural exchange should feel free and affirming, rather than
plagiarizing or thieving.” A recent post on the Tumblr “This Is Not China”
declares that “cultural appropriation is not merely the act of wearing or
partaking in cultural symbols & practices that do not belong to you, it’s a
system of exploitation & capitalisation on cultural symbols & practices
that do not a) originate from b) benefit c) circle back to the culture in
question.”
It makes sense to permit behaviors that encourage empathy
and genuine interest while discouraging those that caricature or mock a
sampled-from culture. But such litmus tests leave ample room for hair-splitting
and arbitrary judgments. One blogger’s partial defense of “Kimono Wednesdays”
suggests that while it was fine to let visitors try on the kimonos, allowing
them to be photographed while wearing them was a step too far. This fine
parsing of what crosses the line from appreciation into appropriation suggests
a religion with elaborate purity tests.
What will be declared “problematic” next? Picasso’s and
Matisse’s works inspired by African art? Puccini’s “Orientalist” operas,
“Madama Butterfly” and “Turandot”? Should we rid our homes of Japanese prints?
Should I take offense at other people’s Russian nesting dolls?
And while we’re at it, why shouldn’t a wide range of
cultural minorities within Western society demand control over access to their
heritage, too? Can Catholics claim appropriation when religious paintings of
Jesus or the Virgin Mary are exhibited in a secular context, or when movies
from “The Sound of Music” to “Sister Act” use nuns for entertainment?
Appropriation isn’t a crime. It’s a way to breathe new life
into culture. Peoples have borrowed, adopted, taken, infiltrated and reinvented
from time immemorial. The medieval Japanese absorbed major elements of Chinese
and Korean civilizations, while the cultural practices of modern-day Japan
include such Western borrowings as a secularized and reinvented Christmas.
Russian culture with its Slavic roots is also the product of Greek, Nordic,
Tatar and Mongol influences — and the rapid Westernization of the elites in the
18th century. America is the ultimate blended culture.
So don’t let anyone tell you that there is art, literature
or clothing that does not belong to you because of your racial, ethnic or
religious identity. In other words: Appropriate away.
* *
* *
“WILL THE LEFT SURVIVE THE MILLENNIALS?”
by Lionel Shriver
[Shriver’s essay comes from
the Op-Ed page of the New York Times of 23 September 2016. In response to this column, one reader asked,
“Why can’t the taking on of symbols of other cultures . . . be considered a
tribute, not a mockery?” I have the same
question.]
Midway through my opening address for the Brisbane Writers
Festival earlier this month, Yassmin Abdel-Magied, a Sudanese-born Australian
engineer and 25-year-old memoirist, walked out. Her indignant comments about
the event might have sunk into obscurity, along with my speech, had they not
been republished by The Guardian. Twenty minutes in, this audience member
apparently turned to her mother: “ ‘Mama, I can’t sit here,’ I said, the
corners of my mouth dragging downwards. ‘I cannot legitimize this.’ ” She continued:
“The faces around me blurred. As my heels thudded against the grey plastic of
the flooring, harmonizing with the beat of the adrenaline pumping through my
veins, my mind was blank save for one question. ‘How is this happening?’”
I’m asking the same thing.
Briefly, my address maintained that fiction writers should
be allowed to write fiction — thus should not let concerns about “cultural
appropriation” constrain our creation of characters from different backgrounds
than our own. I defended fiction as a vital vehicle for empathy. If we have
permission to write only about our own personal experience, there is no
fiction, but only memoir. Honestly, my thesis seemed so self-evident that I’d
worried the speech would be bland.
Nope — not in the topsy-turvy universe of identity politics.
The festival immediately disavowed the address, though the organizers had
approved the thrust of the talk in advance. A “Right of Reply” session was
hastily organized. When, days later, The Guardian ran the speech, social media
went ballistic. Mainstream articles followed suit. I plan on printing out The
New Republic’s “Lionel Shriver Shouldn’t Write About Minorities” and taping it
above my desk as a chiding reminder.
Viewing the world and the self through the prism of
advantaged and disadvantaged groups, the identity-politics movement — in which
behavior like huffing out of speeches and stirring up online mobs is par for
the course — is an assertion of generational power. Among millennials and those
coming of age behind them, the race is on to see who can be more righteous and
aggrieved — who can replace the boring old civil rights generation with a
spikier brand.
When I was growing up in the ’60s and early ’70s,
conservatives were the enforcers of conformity. It was the right that was
suspicious, sniffing out Communists and scrutinizing public figures for signs
of sedition.
Now the role of oppressor has passed to the left. In
Australia, where I spoke, Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act makes it
unlawful to do or say anything likely to “offend, insult, humiliate or
intimidate,” providing alarming latitude in the restriction of free speech. It
is Australia’s conservatives arguing for the amendment of this law.
As a lifelong Democratic voter, I’m dismayed by the radical
left’s ever-growing list of dos and don’ts — by its impulse to control, to
instill self-censorship as well as to promote real censorship, and to deploy
sensitivity as an excuse to be brutally insensitive to any perceived enemy.
There are many people who see these frenzies about cultural appropriation,
trigger warnings, micro-aggressions and safe spaces as overtly crazy. The
shrill tyranny of the left helps to push them toward Donald Trump.
Ironically, only fellow liberals will be cowed by terror of
being branded a racist (a pejorative lobbed at me in recent days — one that,
however groundless, tends to stick). But there’s still such a thing as a real
bigot, and a real misogynist. In obsessing over micro-aggressions like the sin
of uttering the commonplace Americanism “you guys” to mean “you all,” activists
persecute fellow travelers who already care about equal rights.
Moreover, people who would hamper free speech always assume
that they’re designing a world in which only their enemies will have to shut
up. But free speech is fragile. Left-wing activists are just as dependent on
permission to speak their minds as their detractors.
In an era of weaponized sensitivity, participation in public
discourse is growing so perilous, so fraught with the danger of being caught
out for using the wrong word or failing to uphold the latest orthodoxy in
relation to disability, sexual orientation, economic class, race or ethnicity,
that many are apt to bow out. Perhaps intimidating their elders into silence is
the intention of the identity-politics cabal — and maybe my generation should
retreat to our living rooms and let the young people tear one another apart
over who seemed to imply that Asians are good at math.
But do we really want every intellectual conversation to be
scrupulously cleansed of any whiff of controversy? Will people, so worried
about inadvertently giving offense, avoid those with different backgrounds
altogether? Is that the kind of fiction we want — in which the novels of white
writers all depict John Cheever’s homogeneous Connecticut suburbs of the 1950s,
while the real world outside their covers becomes ever more diverse?
Ms. Abdel-Magied got the question right: How is this
happening? How did the left in the West come to embrace restriction, censorship
and the imposition of an orthodoxy at least as tyrannical as the
anti-Communist, pro-Christian conformism I grew up with? Liberals have
ominously relabeled themselves “progressives,” forsaking a noun that had its
roots in “liber,” meaning free. To progress is merely to go forward, and you
can go forward into a pit.
Protecting freedom of speech involves protecting the voices
of people with whom you may violently disagree. In my youth, liberals would
defend the right of neo-Nazis to march down Main Street. I cannot imagine
anyone on the left making that case today.
[Shriver, who resides in the
U.K., is the author, most recently, of the novel The Mandibles: A Family,
2029-2047. She’s written for the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Economist, and the Guardian. Her
novel We Need to Talk About Kevin,
which won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2005, was adapted into a 2011 film of
the same name starring Tilda Swinton.]
Good day,
ReplyDeleteMay I ask if who is the author of this article (Full name). Just for the purpose of citing the author. Thank You!
I'm hoping for an immediate response. :)
These articles are both republications and there is a byline and original source citation included for each piece. (Both newspapers have on-line editions and are available in most public and school libraries.)
Delete~Rick
Good evening,
ReplyDeleteThank you for the response. Since I'll be citing the firth paragraph under the title "Cultural Appropriation", may I know what is the full name of the owner or the one who updates this blog?
Thank you.
P.S. If it is private, you may also email me at cxiijay07@gmail.com
I don't use my full name on the blog; my byline is simply "Rick." You may cite the blog, of course: Rick On Theater. (I am the editor of ROT as well as the author of all articles that don't bear someone else's name; I also write all the introductions and any closing remarks that may appear with a post.)
Delete~Rick