Superb article on debates around cultural appropriation. Rich, thoughtful and deeply useful.
In the era of global capitalism, imagining the lives of others is a crucial form of solidarity.
www.dissentmagazine.org
I think there's an essential lack of perspective here.
For me these defences against charges of appropriation always seem to focus on the potential loss of freedom of expression, rather than seeking to truly understand the perspective of the cultural originators.
The crime of cultural expression is not that people are drawing inspiration from new places - that's always been a wonderful thing (obviously); it's that often times the originators simply have not had the opportunity to profit from, or sometimes even celebrate that culture themselves in the wider society.
The pain is not that White America discovered, and fell in love with rhythm and blues; the pain is that so many Black writers and musicians were left penniless and discarded in its wake.
Now I happen to think that cussing out White women who choose to wear cornrows is a terrible shame - a nearside targeting of people who actually want to engage and participate in a culture they admire. But I get the pain. It goes a bit like this I imagine -
I get bombarded with images of White beauty from the first steps of childhood, held up against it, judged by it, struggle with it, imitate it. Finally I find a way to remove myself from that loop of deliberate societal racist uglification by creating my own styles, my own aesthetics, and by honouring my own natural beauty. And then you - casually take it on - while still benefiting from all of the 'White beauty' prejudices and access that you had bestowed on you in the first place!
That's an example of a charge of 'cultural appropriation' that I'm not 100% behind, but I can still fully understand why it provokes such a powerful response.
This stuff is no joke. The article talks about people being told to 'stay in their lane', and then brings up Dana Schutz. It would benefit from making reference to the fact that the Till killing was a dark 'artwork' itself - a deliberate signalling to Black Men in particular to
'stay in their lane', through the medium of murder and mutilation. The pain of that event for Black people worldwide is clearly unfathomable to many in the wider society. I'm forced to ask - if a gentile artist decided to include gruesome depictions of holocaust victims in their work, do you think it would deserve to stand unchallenged?
That's the kind of measure of emotional response that Black people around the world have towards the Emmett Till murder. In my opinion it was a clumsy intervention by Ms Schutz.
The article orbits around the pain felt by artists suddenly having to curtail their instincts and hem in their expression, but falls short in recognising the depth and breadth of pain felt by the donor communities.
You end up in some pretty ludicrous places - appropriation as a bedrock of American cultural development - well, yes, but as if that has led to an enlightened society!
Indeed, for all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences, the so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other.
Well, maybe, if you conveniently completely ignore the massive economic and stakeholder differences
.
The last part of the article is actually the part I find most objectionable. A kind of well-we're-all-at-it-anyway dismissal of super-exploitation as an excusable by-product of living in a capitalist society. There are much worse things going on it says - textile workers, union-busting, etc.
No. Something is either an exploitative practice or it isn't (though of course there always needs to be room to argue the toss). The whataboutery that follows does nothing to dilute it. There is an explicit recognition in the article that inequality and power imbalance are being leveraged in many of these cultural transactions. Not only is this the kind of thing that should alert socialist concerns anyway, it is really disturbing to see a culture emerge on the left to further try to negate and silence these concerns. Where people feel exploited it's vital that voices are at the very least seriously considered. It's a shame that even needs to be reiterated.
I'll go a little further and say that this kind of perspective blindness litters a lot of the thinking around identity politics for me. It's always about deferring our immediate needs in the wake of some imagined greater good. In the meantime, the people making the critical analysis already have access to many of the things we are desperately trying to organise for.
Like the quoted Lauren Michele Jackson (whose snippets seem to make the most sense to me) says:
“Appropriation is everywhere, and is also inevitable. . . .
But that doesn't mean it is without responsibility or a duty of awareness.
classunity.org
repeaterbooks.com
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