Kenan Malik has a wonderful essay at Art Review on “cultural appropriation” and why it’s a pernicious concept.
The very term ‘cultural appropriation’ is inappropriate. Cultures work not through appropriation but through messy interaction. Writers and artists, indeed all human beings, necessarily engage with the experiences of others. Nobody owns a culture, but everyone inhabits one (or several), and in inhabiting a culture, one finds the tools for reaching out to other cultures.
Cultural interaction is necessarily messy because the world is messy. Some of that messiness is good: the complexity and diversity of the world. Some of it is damaging: the racial, sexual and economic inequalities that disfigure our world.
Such damaging messiness will not be cleaned up by limiting cultural interaction, or by confining it within a particular etiquette. In reframing political and economic issues as cultural ones, or as issues of identity, campaigns against cultural appropriation obscure the roots of racism, and make it harder to challenge it. In constraining what Adam Shatz called ‘acts of radical sympathy, and imaginative identification… across racial lines’, they make such challenges more difficult still.
The campaigns against cultural appropriation are bad for creative art. And they are bad for progressive politics. They seek to police interaction and constrain imagination. For the sake of both of art and politics we need less policing and constraints, more interaction and imagination.
That’s what I think. I get how borrowings can be done badly, but I think it’s a terrible impoverishing mistake to go from that to the insistence that all borrowing and interaction is a trespass.
Comments
10 responses to “Nobody owns a culture”
Okay, Mueller could not be more obvious if he hung a sign saying “TRAP” around Flynn’s neck. Why does he think Flynn made a deal in the first place? Trump can’t issue pardons for state crimes. Mueller is practically begging Trump to fire him and pardon Flynn.
Flynn’s crimes are state crimes?
Ophelia — Not the ones he pled guilty to, no. But the ones Mueller didn’t charge him with — and that aren’t covered by their deal? Some of them (such as the kidnapping plot) almost certainly could be charged by state prosecutors.
Here’s a Slate article that tries to read between the lines.
Wait, are we all commenting on the wrong post?
Yeah. Sorry. Once again reading B&W on a smartphone…
I really enjoyed Malik’s essay. Very well put.
I’ve always thought cultural appropriation to be a misnomer. Cultural misappropriation, on the other hand, could be problematic.
Or am I appropriating the regressives’ offence by saying that?
A canadian angle on this.
‘Grey Owl’ is camping in my beaver lodge…
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/newman-coleman-artists-open-letter-indigenous-appropriation-1.4437958?cmp=rss
This is more about psychology and perceptions rather than culture.
Heavy-handed ‘racialized’ crap (frat parties with ‘wetback’ themes, blackface, etc.) does need a category. But the ‘appropriation’ theme has turned into a rhetorical blank check for silencing anyone for not fitting a pigeon hole.
The proliferation of bogus ‘twue narrative’ stories, Demidenko, Frey, The Education of Little Tree, etc. would not have happened without the demand for fake ‘authenticity.’ Pop culture seems to require a single, prefabricated view of every topic. Schindler’s List is a step up from Gone With the Wind, but the shallowness that makes either one the Official Feeling Generator is a bad symptom.
If cultural appropriation is a crime, do the Christians have to give back Xmas?