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APPROPRIATION_CULT
May 14, 2018
A NYT piece from 2015 which is apparently is intended to straddle
all sides and avoid giving offense to anyone, though it just ends
up seeming weirdly vapid and shilly-shallying:
Parul Sehgal, "Is Cultural Appropriation Always Wrong?"
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/magazine/is-cultural-appropriation-always-wrong.html
I guess the question-mark-title dodge should've been my first clue.
"It's a truth only selectively acknowledged that all
cultures are mongrel."
Check.
"We sometimes describe this mingling as 'cross-pollination'
or 'cross-fertilization'-- benign, bucolic metaphors that
obscure the force of these encounters. When we wish to
speak more plainly, we talk of 'appropriation'-- a word now
associated with the white Western world's co-opting of
minority cultures."
And here we have the first dizzying
reversal: on the one hand we have *this* See, the question is "is cultural
but let's shove something in our other exchange okay?" and if you're
hand fast so we can look balanced. answer is "sometimes yes, sometimes
no" I'm am going to ask you when
it's one or the other and why and
how do you know?
By the way: A few years back "appropriation" was often spoken
of with approval by pomo proselytizers. It was their standard mode
of operation, actually: cut-ups, collages, etc...
"Questions about the right to your creation and labor,
the right to your identity, emerge out of old wounds
in America ... "
The question in my mind: who gets to say they *own* something?
Who gets to play cultural gate-keeper?
Because it often seems to me that these great cultural defenders
are overreaching in their claims of ownership-- they themselves
are engaged in a culture-grab when they demand that other people
keep their hands off.
This Bell Hooks is a new one on me, though evidently it's supposed
to be refered to all over the place:
"... the same quotes from Bell Hooks, whose essays from the
early '90s on pop culture, and specifically on Madonna, have
been a template for discussions of how white people 'colonize'
black identity to feel transgressive ..."
Did it have to wait as late
as Madonna? What happened to If you care, my take is that it was
white folks scoring hits with ridiculous that black people couldn't break
blues songs? into the music charts, not that white people
could. Going after white people for being
interested in black music would be attacking
the problem from the wrong side.
Why exactly would it require "colonization"
for black culture to feel "transgressive"?
Once again, this is backwards: if it felt
transgressive, it's because black people were
regarded as outcasts.
Refusing to touch their
culture would be an even
stronger confirmation of
their status as outcasts.
He's got a cavalcade of one-off examples (so-and-so
complained about somebody-or-other), but this one
sounds like it *might* be a culture-wide objection:
"And South Asian women, objecting to the fad
for 'ethnic' wear at music festivals like
Coachella, continued a social-media campaign
to 'reclaim the bindi,' sharing photographs
of themselves, their mothers and grandmothers
wearing bindis, with captions like 'My
culture is not a costume.'"
Then he asks *the* question:
"Is this just the latest
flowering of 'outrage culture'?"
Yes, Virginia, it really could be a load of internet-enabled bollocks.
But for this fellow, that's a rhetorical, his actual answer is:
"Not necessarily."
He then magnanimously conceeds:
"'The line between cultural appropriation and cultural
exchange is always going to be blurred," Stenberg
acknowledges in her video. But it has never been easier
to proceed with good faith and Google, to seek out and
respect context. Social media, these critics suggest,
allow us too much access to other people's lives and
other people's opinions to plead ignorance when it
comes to causing offense."
Actually, you could plead "too much information": You could just
conclude that there's always someone out there who wants to Be
Offended and another few hundred folks who want to take offense
at the offense.
And you could ask yourself what gives you the right to dictate
to someone about Your Culture, and if we're going to be all
nice-and-polite you might ask yourself if you should tone down
the attacks over trivial symbolic offenses.
This one is great, I can't for the life of me imagine what he
thinks this point means:
"We can't forget that South Asian bindis became trendy in
the mid-'90s, not long after South Asians in New Jersey were
being targeted by a hate group that called itself
Dotbusters, referencing the bindi, which some South Asian
women stopped wearing out of fear of being attacked."
See, this *sounds* like the kind of thing you'd bring up if you
wanted to *defend* the white bindi as being some sort of gesture
of solidarity (like Zuckerberg showing up in a hoody...). But
actually the immediately following remark makes it sound like
that's *not* how you're take this:
"Seen in this light, 'appropriation' seems less
provocative than pitiably uninformed and stale."
Seen in this light, you can't think your way out
of a paper-bag unless there's a flashing arrow
labeled "politically correct" on the exit planted (and reviewing current
by someone in your tribe (after carefully usage of the term
researching the history of paper-bags and "politicaly correct" to
ensuring that there's no cultural offense make sure it hasn't been
involved in exiting them) terminally corrupted by
the alt-right).
"It seems possible that we might, someday,
learn to keep our hands to ourselves where
other people's cultures are concerned."
It seems possible that you might, someday, actually
acknowledge the problems in your position, instead
of just gesturing toward them to show how reasonable
you are, and then pretending you've dealt with them.
Let me remind you: "all cultures
are mongrel".
And how about that bit about how the line
between appropriation and exchange are
always blurred?
These guys remind me of libertarians juggling the meaning of
ownership so they can accuse the bad guys of being "looters"
("Taxation is theft!"):
"But then that might do another kind of harm. In an essay
in the magazine Guernica, the Pakistani novelist Kamila
Shamsie called for more, not less, imaginative engagement
with her country: 'The moment you say a male American
writer can't write about a female Pakistani, you are
saying, Don't tell those stories. Worse, you're saying:
As an American male you can't understand a Pakistani
woman. She is enigmatic, inscrutable, unknowable. She's
other. Leave her and her nation to its Otherness. Write
them out of your history.' "
Yeah, there you go. So which fucking is it? Oh, I am so
*conflicted* and *ambivalent*-- but maybe you wouldn't be if you
just faced it: even nice people who are posturing about cultural
colonialism may have their heads up their colons.
"Can some kinds of appropriation shatter stereotypes?"
Another fine *question* which maybe deserves an *answer*.
"And what conversations about appropriation make clear
is that our imaginations are unruly kingdoms governed
by fears and fantasies. They are never neutral."
What a nice, pious-sounding closing sentiment. If only I could
tell what it means. Has anyone been claiming our imaginations
are "neutral"?
Maybe if you stopped trying so hard to sound "neutral" you'd
actually get somewhere with all this heavy thinking.
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