Not often I post a response to an article here, well, it always seems a little like hearing one-side of a conversation. But their comment system relies on Facebook (!), and given the fact I block the shit out of big bad Google and Fakebook I can’t actually comment.
This article on ‘The Difference Between Cultural Exchange and Cultural Appropriation’ highlights some of the complexities even talking about this subject – we usually talk here about the sort of mashup cultural appropriation, but certainly if you take, remix, modify and combine any artistic work it never comes without baggage. But also, I get a little wary of policing, putting limits on taking from other cultures – because usually the most exciting inventions and artistic works for me have been taking from disparate cultures, sometimes by people within those cultures but not always, and then creating something completely new, a mongrel of both.
Jarune Uwujaren says: “using someone else’s cultural symbols to satisfy a personal need for self-expression is an exercise in privilege.”
That’s why I find those recently fashionable Maori tattoos really odd, I mean Celtic ones at a push here in the UK but those are just weird unless you are indeed part Maori…which they usually aren’t. Ditto Chinese, Japanese ones for Westerners. Yes it’s not a one-way street, but it just seems, well, whiff of embarrassing imperial exoticism actually. Then again I would possibly have a Latin or Ancient Greek tattoo, but to quote Mike Skinner I might be 53rd Generation Roman, I mean they did actually colonise here…unlike the Maoris.
“Don’t overstay your welcome. Don’t pretend to be a part of the household. Don’t make yourself out to be an honored guest whom the householders should be grateful to entertain and educate for hours on end.”
Interestingly I feel the way about the kilt, I like to visit there by wearing it but never suggest I am Scottish, or that I somehow ‘know’ what that is like, although I have more right that some since I have a Scots partner and the whole ‘clansman from other places can wear the tartan of their partner’ thing, although this was before gay marriage and I’m not married (17 years though :-P).
Actually the modern kilt was invented by an Englishman, so it’s far from some random exotic appropriation from a distant land. I do think about it a LOT when I wear it, though. But the UK is a very big melting pot, and I think culture here would be more the sadder if say, white youth didn’t copy black or indian youth, or vice versa. It makes things much more dynamic, and creates a new identity for everyone, a vibrant British multicultural idea.
And most people’s idea where things ‘came from’ like with language are completely wrong, anyway…there aren’t convenient little family trees, genealogical lines of culture, it’s always been a chaotic happy mess. And also most of these identities are constructions, sitting on some really creaky frameworks until someone claims it’s ‘authentic’ and ‘genuine’ and then it all comes crashing down.
So I do worry that these discussions of appropriation might stop the really interesting hybridisation of culture – a kind of mashup that doesn’t come from chin-stroking or worrying who did what – so you have drum and bass, Chicken tikka masala, chop suey – are those African/Jamaican, Indian or Chinese? Or something else? (note: they were all invented by ex-pat populations or inspired by those away from their home countries, combining local tastes or ideas with those that were ‘foreign’)
And to me it is just as embarrassing seeing someone being Afro-Centric wearing African clothes with little knowledge of the actual culture (more a perceived invented idea of it, rather than real, c.f. Kwanzaa for instance) as it is a girl in a headdress or Bindi…it works all ways, you don’t get a pass because your ancestors from there a long time ago. I could wear farmer’s yokel clothes or 1/8th Irish national dress but it would be the same idea as Hameau was to the French court of Louis 14th. A ridiculous fantasy, and although we play with these identities all the time, but if we choose to ignore the vast expanse of class, time and social hierarchy between us and them then it becomes crass and offensive, or just cringe-worthy.
That’s because you’re adopting the exotic or nostalgic in a drag/drop motion…not creating something new, or of our time and place. I feel the same way about most of the girls doing the ‘hippy chic’ in fact, it looks like a theatre costume, and highlights how alien they are to the ‘free love’ notion.
Also I’m not sure that most of the ‘hybrids’ I can think of were that ‘respectful’ in fact – less you think the hiphoppers, breakdancers, skinheads, punks, drum and bassheads, Beatles etc. were sitting their musing on the nature of appropriation while they got their Cultural Studies degrees that daddy paid for? I bet though there was people saying from some other community that it was A Bad Thing and Kids Today Need To Be More Respectful. Yes people have for a long time taken crass parts of culture, sometimes for profit – this will happen as much in a Cape Township or a Brazilian Favela as much as a Home Counties Festival goer – it can make you cringe and think: do you even know about that? As ‘Starchild’ Emily/Elizabeth/Etc elbows you out of the way to get to see her favourite band, flowers in hair but attitude in fierce flow?
Hell this appropriation even happens in my LGBTQ community, with people playing all kinds of strange metrosexual/curious games to seem exotic or sexier, or the co-opting of disco, NRG and house music for mass profit – can we have those back now? Oh what do you say? I dont own them and they were built on black, urban, American roots? No shit. Ones they nicked from white and black jazz, which was nicked from gospel, which was nicked from folk music, blues and country….etc etc. We can all play the ‘who came first?’ game back to the big bang, but it’s not useful, neither is it creative, like the oppression olympics.
This is also a part of the cultural back and forth, from Gangnam Style to Geisha Girls. Liberals can tut as much as they want, but I suspect and hope the next generations the world over will just have fun with it, and maybe learn something along the way – since playing is the gateway to learning, maybe they might learn something of the culture when they put on the mask? Be assured, just like language will run around the roadblocks of the linguists laughing manically (sorry Academie Francais), culture is the same. You can’t police it, nor should you try unless you want to be another joyless hashtag activist, and it’s fiddling while Rome, sorry Gaza, burns.
It’s part of how a culture grows, it synthesises, collects, filters, cross-pollinates and moves forward. Most of the time it seems to be people are criticising where it is clumsily done, I suspect for more snobbish taste, fashion and class reasons than they admit, but everyone is the result of such appropriation…it seems odd that certain times and contexts it’s ‘OK’ but others not? Who judges that? I hope not the bloggerati, the screaming Twitter types – that’s the worst kind of jury. #hashtag #fauxrage that #daddybought, #culturalstudies #nestbuilding #yellowpress #rentagob #patriarchy-bad-apart-from-my-boss #emptyvessel #differentkindofprivilege #newgatekeeper #newMaryWhitehouse #tokendiversity #whatsclass?
As John McWhorter recently said in ‘You Can’t ‘Steal’ a Culture: In Defense of Cultural Appropriation’: “All we need to know is that we will never arrest it, and that a stipulation that brown people in America must be shielded from it will serve no purpose except to provide people with something to be upset about. It will keep happening.”
[Image by Jen Musari, from the original article]
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