Cultural appropriation and assorted other topics
Wed, Apr. 6th, 2005 12:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oyceterBecause I am feeling Victorian (haha! I appropriate you, O imperialist culture of the past!):
In which I type a heck of a lot on cultural appropriation, cultural authenticity, imperialism, anime, manga, fandom, East Asian Studies, and Taiwan, with the gratuitous use of parenthetical interjections and multiple tangents and wish that I could have included feminism and gender studies to include all of my academic interests in one gigantic post.
I was going to start writing about this in response to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
coffee_and_ink's post and her comments here, except I realized it would get so lengthy that I should probably stick it in my lj.
Actually, a lot of it sparked thoughts beginning with the problems inherent in using a certain genre or type of literature/art/pop culture/what have you to extrapolate the psychology of an entire nation of people. Or an entire nation of schoolgirls, if you're talking specifically about shoujo manga studies. Much of this is also sparked by the fact that almost all of the scholarship that I've read on manga and anime has been about why manga and anime are somehow intrinsically "Japanese" and how they can be used to make telling arguments about the Japanese psyche. This is particularly the case when people can make a connection between culture and sex and/or gender, and so there does seem to be a great deal of focus on the extreme pornographic nature of anime and manga as well as the strangeness of an entire subgenre written for women by women (or for shoujo by women) dealing with two beautiful boys having sex with each other and how it indicates a certain perversion in the way the Japanese deal with sex and why the entire nation is completely messed up in terms of gender roles. I suspect that all these scholars have never spent a day or two on the internet with all the meta about slash, or they would see that this subgenre on male-male love by women for a female audience isn't exactly a specifically Japanese incidence.
I am in no way saying that slash equates shounen ai, because it doesn't and there are some distinctively different tropes between the two, largely because (I generalize horribly here) slash seems to be more based on romance novel conventions and shounen ai is based more on shoujo manga conventions.
But anyway, I still think it is rather silly to point to anime and manga and say, "Look! This means blah about Japan/Japanese culture/the Japanese!" One, it's pointing at not just a genre, but an entire group of genres in two very different media, which is just sloppy. Two, even when the argument about shounen ai being an indication of Japanese shoujo's fear of sexuality and their desire to stay in the sexually ambiguous space between childhood and womanhood limits the discussion of the genre to shounen ai (more of a subgenre, I would say, but I am splitting hairs now), it almost invariably completely ignores the fact that wow, shounen ai is a genre populated by many, many authors and has officially been in existence for about thirty years and as a consequence, has had at least one generation of authors and probably several generations of readers. Never mind the differences that thirty years can bring in a culture, never mind the differences of social and economic class, of region, of education level, of individual preference. Also, never mind that shounen ai (and much of manga and anime) borrows from assorted Western/classical and Chinese mythology and literature, even if it is on a shallow level. Anyway, to stop ranting, I think it is just sloppy scholarship to point at a body of work and make not a judgment about the pool of authors/creators of the work or the time period or whatnot, but a huge generalization about the psychology of the readers of the work, especially when said scholars don't even bother doing something easy like asking some of the readers and instead apply weird Freudian theories or somesuch. Plus, witness the huge fandom uproar whenever someone says "Slash means that female fans are afraid of their own sexuality!" and expand that statement to include an entire nation of people, and then see how it sounds.
Anyway, this was a really long way to get to whatcoffee_and_ink was saying about cultural appropriation of the arts and just how problematic the notion of cultural appropriation is. I haven't read up much on this at all, but on a personal level, I'm very conflicted about it. I think Mely got around to the topic when she said something about culture being something learned, not something inherent in someone's genes or heritage or sopped up with breast milk or whatever. And I very much agree with the thought that there is no national ownership of ideas, and the reader in me is all for the "all art is mine" approach. I think the notion of the impenetrability of Japanese literature or Islamic literature or Oriental or insert-culture-here is pretty stupid. On the other hand, I think it is difficult learning an entirely new canon of literature that differs completely from the canon you are familiar with, and since so much of literature does allude and refer to older works, yeah, it's hard. I mean, it was weird enough for me learning how to read romances without rolling my eyes and learning the tropes and the language and etc., much less learning an entirely different mass of literary works (or art or music or whatever you like). Ergo, as I found out the hard way, you cannot just show someone anime and expect them to know what everything means. Amazingly, people who have not seen chibi form before are very weirded out by people randomly turning into smaller, cuter versions of themselves ;).
I think, though, the flip side of this learning curve is the tendency to view it as an impossibly steep slope, or a slope that only a selected few people can climb, which is what I think happens in a good deal of East Asian studies academics and in anime/manga fandom. Er. I speak as someone who majored in EAS but wasn't particularly enmeshed in her small department and as someone whose last experience in the anime/manga fandom was six years ago, so grain of salt! I sort of want to equate scholarly jargon with fangirl/fanboy speak, as a certain code into a culture. Except I do think scholarly jargon has a place, because when I say things like "Japan," I really mean "the notion of Japan-the-nation in the early twenty-first century with the caveat that it is composed of many individuals of varying statuses and thoughts and opinions and what really is nation anyway but this is too long of an explanation to say every time so I will just say Japan." Or "the West" meaning "what Japanese discourse around the late nineteenth century referred to all the European and American nations by." It's hard to have a discussion without first defining all the terms. And in a way, that is what fans do -- think of all the meta discussions on what "slash" means, what "canon" and "fanon" are and all the arguments that happen when people talk about these things without realizing that their definitions of the terms are different. In anime/manga fandom the terms seem to be "yaoi" and "shounen ai" and whatnot, and I've seen several cycles of people claiming different linguistic origins for "yaoi."
I'm not sure if it's the combination of fandom terminology and the new cultural context, but the anime and manga fandom seems to be particularly suscept to the notion that you need credentials to watch anime or read manga (or just the GWing fandom ~1999?). I guess it's like this in most fandoms -- in sci-fi/fantasy, there's a canon of works that you should have read to be "well-read" (it was interesting seeing this at Norwescon!) and it's a way to identify members within the group. But it seemed like in every single argument on mailing lists in the Gundam Wing fandom, someone would invariably pop up and say, "Blah means blah and I know this because I took Japanese for a year!" Or because my Japanese friend said so, or because I went to Japan, or because I lived in Japan for eight years, or because I have done homestay, or because I wrote a paper on it (hee, that's mine). And I sort of wonder why people feel the need to justify their knowledge or their theories in this way. On the other hand, I'm not arguing, because this feeling of constantly not knowing enough is what lead me to do East Asian Studies, which I adore. And it's just particularly funny because (here is where I gratuitously flash my creds) I majored in this, took four and a half years of Japanese and did a two-month homestay there, wrote my thesis specifically on shoujo manga and anime and manga scholarship and to be honest, I feel like I have only gotten a hint of the answer. Actually, I think the answer is just, "It's complicated." Anyway, it does seem that people that I've seen getting into anime and into my department start out feeling like they don't know much, gain a little knowledge and start overgeneralizing or making huge statements of truth, then start splitting hairs and saying I don't know to everything. And then, finally, the big professors who have spent decades doing this have answers, but with about ten bazillion complications and exceptions and footnotes that they are generalizing.
Ok, I completely lost my point somewhere in there. I think I was actually going to talk about cultural appropriation. Anyway, all this was supposed to say something about how people can guard a culture or an artform as "theirs" or as something you have to be initiated into or have some sort of special knowledge to do. And while I would not say that you should go into an unknown canon and immediately start saying it's stupid because it doesn't conform to your canon, I would also say that these artforms, they are not mysterious things that need to be decoded by a Tibetan monk who lives in the center of the earth. And because of this, I think it is rather silly to say one artform is intrinsically Japanese/Chinese/American/blah, because saying that means that 1) culture is genetic 2) culture is monolithic 3) only people within the culture can understand it. This is where I start taking offense as a reader, because basically it's telling me that I shouldn't be going off reading other cultures' texts and whatnot because I'll never understand them anyway! And hey! I like reading, so I don't like it when anyone tells me I shouldn't read something.
Plus, having sort of grown up in two cultures, I personally think that nationality and culture and all that stuff are boundaries that people make up for themselves to make it easier to put the world in categories. Because in the end, how do you untangle the parts of me that are Chinese and American from what is just me and from what I got from reading books and growing up in Taiwan and going to college in America?
Again, I get off the point. This is where I put the big "but" in on why I think the opposite assumption, that all culture belongs to everyone and that it completely doesn't matter who uses what artforms, is also too simplistic (again, Mely says this better than me... I just say it with more words and confusion!). Aside from the problem of appropriating physical cultural treasure (i.e. the Egyptian collection in the British Museum), which I think most people can see the problematics of, I think the bigger problem with this assumption is that it is really idealistic and unfortunately ignores about two centuries or so of nationalism and the formation of national identities hand in hand with colonialism and imperialism. (Wow, I used "problem" three times in that sentence. Technically one use was "problematic." I like that word ^_^.)
I've had a really hard time formulating these thoughts and articulating them, particularly when I was a little FOB from Taiwan via America going back to live in America for the first time in eight years. I didn't want to lose my ability to speak Chinese, and in America, I started regretting not knowing more about "my" culture (or, more accurately, my parents' culture), and as such, I really took offense to people implying or suggesting that I should be more American or that my Chinese foods or etc. were weird. And I would constantly flip this in my head -- if I met an American in Taiwan, I would probably be irked if said American didn't want to try Taiwan things and wanted to stay as American as possible. And as such, I thought it was rather unfair of me to feel irked at my friends, who were really only suggesting that I fit in a little better with the culture I was living in (which isn't a stupid suggestion, all things considering). But the problem with this is that there is this huge notion of American cultural hegemony which underlies all these cultural discussions, and while my American friends in college may argue that it's not fair at all to blame America for this, which is true, because no one is force feeding culture these days (one hopes), they are also not the ones living in a world in which knowledge of American culture seems to be the established baseline. It feels really alienating.
And because of this, American appropriation of Chinese culture via kanji tattoos and feng shui kits and necklaces saying "Joy" with Chinese characters is different from Taiwan pop singers using nonsense English lyrics. It's also why I dislike laughing at Engrish. Even though now America is not colonizing Taiwan (nor has it ever), it's still hard to forget the Opium War in China and how England and America and assorted other powers took over parts of China slowly but surely and forced unfair treaties and trade regulations. This didn't happen to me. It didn't happen to my parents, or maybe even my grandparents, but this is what I read in the history books, and this is what still affects the unfair economic balance and living standards of the world today. And no, I don't think this is a conscious thing -- I mean, I don't go around saying, "Hey, you can't use that tattoo because a hundred years ago, the people who lived in the country you are currently a citizen of (never mind where your ancestors were then) ran roughshod over the country where my ancestors are from, even though I've only visited it once!" But because of how that history affects countries who were colonized even today, there is that implicit background when I express annoyance at how people are using these ideas and whatnot from Chinese culture (another short term vocab word to indicate some sort of monolithic culture thing that exists only so I can talk about it without using ten billion words). Furthermore, it is uncomfortably close to the exploitation of colonies for the gain of the colonist countries, even though that was at least a century ago.
And this is why I don't particularly worry about the "purity" of American culture and why I worry about Chinese culture. Actually, I don't really, but I bet other people do because when so much American pop culture is consumed in Taiwan (most movies shown in Taiwan are American, frex), there is that implicit view that it is losing "cultural authenticity" for that of the dominant culture (not even going to touch on the fuzziness of actual cultural authenticity). For a less loaded example for people reading this (who I am guessing will be at least 50% American), my friend from Taiwan's parents were a little irked when she got into anime and manga and decided to learn Japanese and be an EAS major. As you know, Bob, Japan occupied Taiwan from about 1900 to post-WWII, during which they made children there learn Japanese, etc. etc. took all the good rice back to Japan to sell, etc. etc. My Chinese teachers used to tell me sad stories about a whole generation of children who grew up unable to speak to their parents because of this enforced learning of Japanese, or parents could only talk to their children in the language forced onto them by their occupiers. My grandparents' generation still has a good deal of people who speak Japanese. Most history books say it was a relatively kind occupation, but occupation is still occupation. And so, it must be very, very strange for that generation to see their grandchildren growing up completely enamoured of Japanese popular culture, of anime and manga, and going off to learn Japanese because of this.
This is sort of weird, because I feel this is stuff I should know as an EAS major and as someone sort of stuck between two cultures, and yet, I think this is the first time I've written all this down somewhere in a way that I could actually agree with. Well, the agreement being dependent upon a zillion parentheticals and insertations and exceptions, of course, because I am an EAS major ;). Anyhow, I don't really have a point, unless "It's all very complicated" is a point. I remember the fandom wars about race and that type of appropriation, and how that debate takes place in literary fiction as well (frex, Amy Tan as a "Chinese-American" writer and the notion that "-American" writers should only write about "-American" people and the "-American" experience). All the stuff I had above about colonization and imperialism and the consumption of culture (and food, but that's another post) as the expression of colonization isn't a stick to bash people on the head with. I may personally think feng shui books and books on Oriental mysticism and kanji jewelry are stupid, but you know, my being Chinese doesn't make me more authoritative on that matter than anyone else. I may be able to say that the kanji translation is more accurate, but again, that is not inherent upon my being Chinese... it's more inherent on my speaking Mandarin. I feel like this is a "duh" point, except I have seen so many assertions of expertise in my brief time in the GWing fandom that maybe other people don't agree with this.
IMHO, it's going to be impossible to hit on cultural authenticity of any sort, unless you mean the authentic experience of a pig farmer in 796 AD Tang Dynasty China, in a little village five miles to the south of Xian. And given the fact that I can't even make heads or tails of my own life while I'm living it, I don't know how historians can claim cultural authenticity. The more this is generalized (class-wise, geographically, time-wise), the hazier it gets. And it seems that most people use cultural authenticity to imply that certain cultures (aka, cultures that aren't their own) are static. While the generalization is helpful if you're studying the culture or trying to talk about it in scholarly discourse and already understand the inherent problems of the term, I think the general use of the term tends to be to divide people, to say that I'm more culturally authentic than you.
Back to cultural appropriation. I think it is ok. I really do. I also think it is perfectly ok to do it without thinking of centuries of history, since people do tend to go through life like that ;). Besides, even if I didn't think it were ok, it would happen anyway; not that anyone cares what I think in the large scale. Also, culture changes, and a culture that doesn't change is dead, and culture often changes by appropriating bits and pieces of other cultures, dominant or not, colonist or colonized. And being a reader at heart, I really would rather have a changing, living culture because that's exciting and fun and intellectually stimulating, even as I would like to have a clearer understanding of other, dying cultures or of the forms that certain cultures took a century ago. But I think that it is also silly to go about knowingly appropriating cultures even with the best of intentions and then disingenously claiming ignorance to all this background and history and weight, or to go about doing it without researching and then disclaiming the need for historical/cultural accuracy. I mean, obviously one can go about doing it, but in that direction lies flack.
Wow, I don't know if that made sense to anyone else, but it felt good to get that all out there! Anyhoo, that's my own personal philosophy about this sort of stuff, take it as you will.
In which I type a heck of a lot on cultural appropriation, cultural authenticity, imperialism, anime, manga, fandom, East Asian Studies, and Taiwan, with the gratuitous use of parenthetical interjections and multiple tangents and wish that I could have included feminism and gender studies to include all of my academic interests in one gigantic post.
I was going to start writing about this in response to
coffee_and_ink's post and her comments here, except I realized it would get so lengthy that I should probably stick it in my lj. Actually, a lot of it sparked thoughts beginning with the problems inherent in using a certain genre or type of literature/art/pop culture/what have you to extrapolate the psychology of an entire nation of people. Or an entire nation of schoolgirls, if you're talking specifically about shoujo manga studies. Much of this is also sparked by the fact that almost all of the scholarship that I've read on manga and anime has been about why manga and anime are somehow intrinsically "Japanese" and how they can be used to make telling arguments about the Japanese psyche. This is particularly the case when people can make a connection between culture and sex and/or gender, and so there does seem to be a great deal of focus on the extreme pornographic nature of anime and manga as well as the strangeness of an entire subgenre written for women by women (or for shoujo by women) dealing with two beautiful boys having sex with each other and how it indicates a certain perversion in the way the Japanese deal with sex and why the entire nation is completely messed up in terms of gender roles. I suspect that all these scholars have never spent a day or two on the internet with all the meta about slash, or they would see that this subgenre on male-male love by women for a female audience isn't exactly a specifically Japanese incidence.
I am in no way saying that slash equates shounen ai, because it doesn't and there are some distinctively different tropes between the two, largely because (I generalize horribly here) slash seems to be more based on romance novel conventions and shounen ai is based more on shoujo manga conventions.
But anyway, I still think it is rather silly to point to anime and manga and say, "Look! This means blah about Japan/Japanese culture/the Japanese!" One, it's pointing at not just a genre, but an entire group of genres in two very different media, which is just sloppy. Two, even when the argument about shounen ai being an indication of Japanese shoujo's fear of sexuality and their desire to stay in the sexually ambiguous space between childhood and womanhood limits the discussion of the genre to shounen ai (more of a subgenre, I would say, but I am splitting hairs now), it almost invariably completely ignores the fact that wow, shounen ai is a genre populated by many, many authors and has officially been in existence for about thirty years and as a consequence, has had at least one generation of authors and probably several generations of readers. Never mind the differences that thirty years can bring in a culture, never mind the differences of social and economic class, of region, of education level, of individual preference. Also, never mind that shounen ai (and much of manga and anime) borrows from assorted Western/classical and Chinese mythology and literature, even if it is on a shallow level. Anyway, to stop ranting, I think it is just sloppy scholarship to point at a body of work and make not a judgment about the pool of authors/creators of the work or the time period or whatnot, but a huge generalization about the psychology of the readers of the work, especially when said scholars don't even bother doing something easy like asking some of the readers and instead apply weird Freudian theories or somesuch. Plus, witness the huge fandom uproar whenever someone says "Slash means that female fans are afraid of their own sexuality!" and expand that statement to include an entire nation of people, and then see how it sounds.
Anyway, this was a really long way to get to what
coffee_and_ink was saying about cultural appropriation of the arts and just how problematic the notion of cultural appropriation is. I haven't read up much on this at all, but on a personal level, I'm very conflicted about it. I think Mely got around to the topic when she said something about culture being something learned, not something inherent in someone's genes or heritage or sopped up with breast milk or whatever. And I very much agree with the thought that there is no national ownership of ideas, and the reader in me is all for the "all art is mine" approach. I think the notion of the impenetrability of Japanese literature or Islamic literature or Oriental or insert-culture-here is pretty stupid. On the other hand, I think it is difficult learning an entirely new canon of literature that differs completely from the canon you are familiar with, and since so much of literature does allude and refer to older works, yeah, it's hard. I mean, it was weird enough for me learning how to read romances without rolling my eyes and learning the tropes and the language and etc., much less learning an entirely different mass of literary works (or art or music or whatever you like). Ergo, as I found out the hard way, you cannot just show someone anime and expect them to know what everything means. Amazingly, people who have not seen chibi form before are very weirded out by people randomly turning into smaller, cuter versions of themselves ;). I think, though, the flip side of this learning curve is the tendency to view it as an impossibly steep slope, or a slope that only a selected few people can climb, which is what I think happens in a good deal of East Asian studies academics and in anime/manga fandom. Er. I speak as someone who majored in EAS but wasn't particularly enmeshed in her small department and as someone whose last experience in the anime/manga fandom was six years ago, so grain of salt! I sort of want to equate scholarly jargon with fangirl/fanboy speak, as a certain code into a culture. Except I do think scholarly jargon has a place, because when I say things like "Japan," I really mean "the notion of Japan-the-nation in the early twenty-first century with the caveat that it is composed of many individuals of varying statuses and thoughts and opinions and what really is nation anyway but this is too long of an explanation to say every time so I will just say Japan." Or "the West" meaning "what Japanese discourse around the late nineteenth century referred to all the European and American nations by." It's hard to have a discussion without first defining all the terms. And in a way, that is what fans do -- think of all the meta discussions on what "slash" means, what "canon" and "fanon" are and all the arguments that happen when people talk about these things without realizing that their definitions of the terms are different. In anime/manga fandom the terms seem to be "yaoi" and "shounen ai" and whatnot, and I've seen several cycles of people claiming different linguistic origins for "yaoi."
I'm not sure if it's the combination of fandom terminology and the new cultural context, but the anime and manga fandom seems to be particularly suscept to the notion that you need credentials to watch anime or read manga (or just the GWing fandom ~1999?). I guess it's like this in most fandoms -- in sci-fi/fantasy, there's a canon of works that you should have read to be "well-read" (it was interesting seeing this at Norwescon!) and it's a way to identify members within the group. But it seemed like in every single argument on mailing lists in the Gundam Wing fandom, someone would invariably pop up and say, "Blah means blah and I know this because I took Japanese for a year!" Or because my Japanese friend said so, or because I went to Japan, or because I lived in Japan for eight years, or because I have done homestay, or because I wrote a paper on it (hee, that's mine). And I sort of wonder why people feel the need to justify their knowledge or their theories in this way. On the other hand, I'm not arguing, because this feeling of constantly not knowing enough is what lead me to do East Asian Studies, which I adore. And it's just particularly funny because (here is where I gratuitously flash my creds) I majored in this, took four and a half years of Japanese and did a two-month homestay there, wrote my thesis specifically on shoujo manga and anime and manga scholarship and to be honest, I feel like I have only gotten a hint of the answer. Actually, I think the answer is just, "It's complicated." Anyway, it does seem that people that I've seen getting into anime and into my department start out feeling like they don't know much, gain a little knowledge and start overgeneralizing or making huge statements of truth, then start splitting hairs and saying I don't know to everything. And then, finally, the big professors who have spent decades doing this have answers, but with about ten bazillion complications and exceptions and footnotes that they are generalizing.
Ok, I completely lost my point somewhere in there. I think I was actually going to talk about cultural appropriation. Anyway, all this was supposed to say something about how people can guard a culture or an artform as "theirs" or as something you have to be initiated into or have some sort of special knowledge to do. And while I would not say that you should go into an unknown canon and immediately start saying it's stupid because it doesn't conform to your canon, I would also say that these artforms, they are not mysterious things that need to be decoded by a Tibetan monk who lives in the center of the earth. And because of this, I think it is rather silly to say one artform is intrinsically Japanese/Chinese/American/blah, because saying that means that 1) culture is genetic 2) culture is monolithic 3) only people within the culture can understand it. This is where I start taking offense as a reader, because basically it's telling me that I shouldn't be going off reading other cultures' texts and whatnot because I'll never understand them anyway! And hey! I like reading, so I don't like it when anyone tells me I shouldn't read something.
Plus, having sort of grown up in two cultures, I personally think that nationality and culture and all that stuff are boundaries that people make up for themselves to make it easier to put the world in categories. Because in the end, how do you untangle the parts of me that are Chinese and American from what is just me and from what I got from reading books and growing up in Taiwan and going to college in America?
Again, I get off the point. This is where I put the big "but" in on why I think the opposite assumption, that all culture belongs to everyone and that it completely doesn't matter who uses what artforms, is also too simplistic (again, Mely says this better than me... I just say it with more words and confusion!). Aside from the problem of appropriating physical cultural treasure (i.e. the Egyptian collection in the British Museum), which I think most people can see the problematics of, I think the bigger problem with this assumption is that it is really idealistic and unfortunately ignores about two centuries or so of nationalism and the formation of national identities hand in hand with colonialism and imperialism. (Wow, I used "problem" three times in that sentence. Technically one use was "problematic." I like that word ^_^.)
I've had a really hard time formulating these thoughts and articulating them, particularly when I was a little FOB from Taiwan via America going back to live in America for the first time in eight years. I didn't want to lose my ability to speak Chinese, and in America, I started regretting not knowing more about "my" culture (or, more accurately, my parents' culture), and as such, I really took offense to people implying or suggesting that I should be more American or that my Chinese foods or etc. were weird. And I would constantly flip this in my head -- if I met an American in Taiwan, I would probably be irked if said American didn't want to try Taiwan things and wanted to stay as American as possible. And as such, I thought it was rather unfair of me to feel irked at my friends, who were really only suggesting that I fit in a little better with the culture I was living in (which isn't a stupid suggestion, all things considering). But the problem with this is that there is this huge notion of American cultural hegemony which underlies all these cultural discussions, and while my American friends in college may argue that it's not fair at all to blame America for this, which is true, because no one is force feeding culture these days (one hopes), they are also not the ones living in a world in which knowledge of American culture seems to be the established baseline. It feels really alienating.
And because of this, American appropriation of Chinese culture via kanji tattoos and feng shui kits and necklaces saying "Joy" with Chinese characters is different from Taiwan pop singers using nonsense English lyrics. It's also why I dislike laughing at Engrish. Even though now America is not colonizing Taiwan (nor has it ever), it's still hard to forget the Opium War in China and how England and America and assorted other powers took over parts of China slowly but surely and forced unfair treaties and trade regulations. This didn't happen to me. It didn't happen to my parents, or maybe even my grandparents, but this is what I read in the history books, and this is what still affects the unfair economic balance and living standards of the world today. And no, I don't think this is a conscious thing -- I mean, I don't go around saying, "Hey, you can't use that tattoo because a hundred years ago, the people who lived in the country you are currently a citizen of (never mind where your ancestors were then) ran roughshod over the country where my ancestors are from, even though I've only visited it once!" But because of how that history affects countries who were colonized even today, there is that implicit background when I express annoyance at how people are using these ideas and whatnot from Chinese culture (another short term vocab word to indicate some sort of monolithic culture thing that exists only so I can talk about it without using ten billion words). Furthermore, it is uncomfortably close to the exploitation of colonies for the gain of the colonist countries, even though that was at least a century ago.
And this is why I don't particularly worry about the "purity" of American culture and why I worry about Chinese culture. Actually, I don't really, but I bet other people do because when so much American pop culture is consumed in Taiwan (most movies shown in Taiwan are American, frex), there is that implicit view that it is losing "cultural authenticity" for that of the dominant culture (not even going to touch on the fuzziness of actual cultural authenticity). For a less loaded example for people reading this (who I am guessing will be at least 50% American), my friend from Taiwan's parents were a little irked when she got into anime and manga and decided to learn Japanese and be an EAS major. As you know, Bob, Japan occupied Taiwan from about 1900 to post-WWII, during which they made children there learn Japanese, etc. etc. took all the good rice back to Japan to sell, etc. etc. My Chinese teachers used to tell me sad stories about a whole generation of children who grew up unable to speak to their parents because of this enforced learning of Japanese, or parents could only talk to their children in the language forced onto them by their occupiers. My grandparents' generation still has a good deal of people who speak Japanese. Most history books say it was a relatively kind occupation, but occupation is still occupation. And so, it must be very, very strange for that generation to see their grandchildren growing up completely enamoured of Japanese popular culture, of anime and manga, and going off to learn Japanese because of this.
This is sort of weird, because I feel this is stuff I should know as an EAS major and as someone sort of stuck between two cultures, and yet, I think this is the first time I've written all this down somewhere in a way that I could actually agree with. Well, the agreement being dependent upon a zillion parentheticals and insertations and exceptions, of course, because I am an EAS major ;). Anyhow, I don't really have a point, unless "It's all very complicated" is a point. I remember the fandom wars about race and that type of appropriation, and how that debate takes place in literary fiction as well (frex, Amy Tan as a "Chinese-American" writer and the notion that "-American" writers should only write about "-American" people and the "-American" experience). All the stuff I had above about colonization and imperialism and the consumption of culture (and food, but that's another post) as the expression of colonization isn't a stick to bash people on the head with. I may personally think feng shui books and books on Oriental mysticism and kanji jewelry are stupid, but you know, my being Chinese doesn't make me more authoritative on that matter than anyone else. I may be able to say that the kanji translation is more accurate, but again, that is not inherent upon my being Chinese... it's more inherent on my speaking Mandarin. I feel like this is a "duh" point, except I have seen so many assertions of expertise in my brief time in the GWing fandom that maybe other people don't agree with this.
IMHO, it's going to be impossible to hit on cultural authenticity of any sort, unless you mean the authentic experience of a pig farmer in 796 AD Tang Dynasty China, in a little village five miles to the south of Xian. And given the fact that I can't even make heads or tails of my own life while I'm living it, I don't know how historians can claim cultural authenticity. The more this is generalized (class-wise, geographically, time-wise), the hazier it gets. And it seems that most people use cultural authenticity to imply that certain cultures (aka, cultures that aren't their own) are static. While the generalization is helpful if you're studying the culture or trying to talk about it in scholarly discourse and already understand the inherent problems of the term, I think the general use of the term tends to be to divide people, to say that I'm more culturally authentic than you.
Back to cultural appropriation. I think it is ok. I really do. I also think it is perfectly ok to do it without thinking of centuries of history, since people do tend to go through life like that ;). Besides, even if I didn't think it were ok, it would happen anyway; not that anyone cares what I think in the large scale. Also, culture changes, and a culture that doesn't change is dead, and culture often changes by appropriating bits and pieces of other cultures, dominant or not, colonist or colonized. And being a reader at heart, I really would rather have a changing, living culture because that's exciting and fun and intellectually stimulating, even as I would like to have a clearer understanding of other, dying cultures or of the forms that certain cultures took a century ago. But I think that it is also silly to go about knowingly appropriating cultures even with the best of intentions and then disingenously claiming ignorance to all this background and history and weight, or to go about doing it without researching and then disclaiming the need for historical/cultural accuracy. I mean, obviously one can go about doing it, but in that direction lies flack.
Wow, I don't know if that made sense to anyone else, but it felt good to get that all out there! Anyhoo, that's my own personal philosophy about this sort of stuff, take it as you will.
'It's always more complicated'
Wed, Apr. 6th, 2005 01:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
Wed, Apr. 6th, 2005 04:35 am (UTC)That is, I'm specifically writing an American shoujo manga, not an American comic book with art that looks like what you might see in a Japanese shoujo manga, and therefore I have a common vocabulary with my artist, and can play with shoujo concepts and images that will be familiar to my readers. I need (for instance) my readers to know what flowers in the background mean, what chibi is, why a character might suddenly grow puppy ears, why fighting does not necessarily mean violence, how fanservice works, and how gender roles and sexuality typically play out in shoujo, so I can do all that stuff my way, and have the reader know when I'm doing it differently, when I'm commenting on the normal use, etc.
(no subject)
Wed, Apr. 6th, 2005 04:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Wed, Apr. 6th, 2005 06:44 am (UTC)But then I'm a librarian and we thrive on taking information and organizing and categorizing it.
(no subject)
Wed, Apr. 6th, 2005 09:25 am (UTC)And for years my sister and I drank the Gatorade-equivalent Pocari Sweat, and grew up with it and never thought anything of the name until some of the Caucasian-Americans at our school remarked on the Ewwwwh factor. :-p
*returns to lurking*
(no subject)
Wed, Apr. 6th, 2005 10:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
Wed, Apr. 6th, 2005 11:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Wed, Apr. 6th, 2005 03:52 pm (UTC)OTOH--someday I want a random person I've just met to accuse me of appropriating the British Middle Ages, in lieu of the usual question (with that audible note of perplexity), "If you're in an English dept. [instead of doing something Practical], why don't you work on Asian American lit?"
Not really, but.... (Am part stuff, anyway, so the assumption that I should follow my mother's culture because it's the one I resemble more rankles doubly.)
This business of emulating authenticity is, however, why I'm in literature instead of history, as choice of discipline goes.
(no subject)
Wed, Apr. 6th, 2005 04:41 pm (UTC)I think it is, but then, that's pretty much a recurring theme in my own poetry and sermons (a/k/a "Pigeonholes are annoying places in which to be stuffed, no matter how hip or 'neat' the label" -- or, when I'm really annoyed, "If you like [insert Asian-flavored hobby here], that's peachy, but it doesn't mean I have to care."
I'm trying to work up the nerve (and energy) to learn conversational Japanese for a trip later this year. It's more complicated than it should be, because part of me feels guilty about not working on Taiwanese (the better to chat with my mother and grandmother) and Mandarin (the better to communicate with the rest of the family and their friends), even though I know it's not a zero sum thing, and there's the fact that my older paternal aunt (who spent much of her youth in Japan) will be thrilled. Intellectually, I know I just need to suck it up and just do what I can with the time I'm given (and virtually all of my relatives except my grandmother are fluent in English anyway, but I don't want to rely on that), but I can't seem to stop kicking the emotional baggage piled up on that particular cart.
(no subject)
Wed, Apr. 6th, 2005 05:33 pm (UTC)As a writer, I love the concept of genre, which has created so much interesting art. The knowledge, say, that there's something known as film noir and what its conventions are adds immeasurably to the experience of watching Chinatown or-- dammit-- that weird Robert Altman movie with Elliott Gould based on a Raymond Chandler book and written by Leigh Brackett, IIRC-- or Red Rock West. All the Coen Brothers movies are much more interesting and in some cases only comprehensible if you have a solid knowledge of US film genres.
Re: 'It's always more complicated'
Thu, Apr. 7th, 2005 09:55 am (UTC)(no subject)
Thu, Apr. 7th, 2005 07:59 pm (UTC)Yep. I've done that, too, and with American "manga" as well. For some reason you can just tell.
(no subject)
Thu, Apr. 7th, 2005 08:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Fri, Apr. 8th, 2005 03:47 am (UTC)Unless you mean just in fic, not in practice. Then yeah, you should get it checked.
(no subject)
Fri, Apr. 8th, 2005 03:51 am (UTC)(no subject)
Sat, Apr. 9th, 2005 12:14 am (UTC)I'm not sure if I've seen
(no subject)
Sat, Apr. 9th, 2005 12:15 am (UTC)(no subject)
Sat, Apr. 9th, 2005 12:17 am (UTC)And yeah! We had Pocari Sweat too!
(no subject)
Sat, Apr. 9th, 2005 12:21 am (UTC)I read something once about the significance of the use of random English (or, as it turns out, not so random) in lyrics and the like, except I am irked because I can't remember the conclusion it came to. I do wonder if it's a little like the fangirl/fanboy Japanese -- a marker of being "cool" somehow, or of knowing what's popular. And I do find it particularly ironic in light of the explosion in kanji/Chinese character decorations, especially when characters are obviously written by people who don't know how or translated strangely. I guess it's each culture's way of trying to reach out or go beyond what's everyday.
(no subject)
Sat, Apr. 9th, 2005 12:23 am (UTC)I think while I do giggle a bit about kanji necklaces and the like, I can also see it as a way for people to somehow get something exotic that isn't regular to them, and as long as that doesn't lead to stupid stereotyping or whatnot... *shrugs*
(no subject)
Sat, Apr. 9th, 2005 12:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Sat, Apr. 9th, 2005 12:25 am (UTC)(no subject)
Sat, Apr. 9th, 2005 12:42 am (UTC)Learning languages is so tough! I really wish I could polish up my Mandarin in particular because it was never that great to begin with and only seems to be getting rustier by the year. And I want to learn Cantonese because my mom's family speaks it, and pick up Korean some time because it's similar grammatically to Japanese and just because it seems like a cool language.
Ah, not enough time!
I've seen so much emotional baggage piled up on the learning of languages. For me, personally, not being able to speak Mandarin fluently has always been an embarrassment, and it's the thing that sets me apart the most in Taiwan.
(no subject)
Sat, Apr. 9th, 2005 01:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Sat, Apr. 9th, 2005 01:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Sat, Apr. 9th, 2005 01:42 am (UTC)(no subject)
Sun, Apr. 17th, 2005 04:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Sun, Apr. 17th, 2005 08:42 am (UTC)The recent gatorade commercials where athletes actually sweat gatorade have a pretty similar eww factor for me.
(no subject)
Sun, Apr. 17th, 2005 08:44 am (UTC)Yeah, there are some questions that seem simple but require long explanations due to the assumptions built into them. Like when people ask me, "Where are you from?"
And I don't know if they are asking, "What is your race/ethnicity?" or "What is your culture?" or "Where do you live?" or "Where were you born?" or "What state(s) are you a citizen of?" And all of those are possiblities, since many people cannot tell my race by looking at me (though many can). And depending on which of those 5 questions they mean, I have up to 6 possible answers.
But a lot of people just expect that those questions should have the same answer. If it were up to me, the answer would be, "Well, I was just standing over there, and then I walked over here, so I guess I'm from over there, being as that's the last place I've been." :P
(no subject)
Sun, Apr. 17th, 2005 08:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Sun, Apr. 17th, 2005 08:12 pm (UTC)And it is always odd when people actually mean "What race/ethnicity are you?" when they're asking "Where are you from?" Or if they mean "What language do you speak?" I'm hoping that people have more patience for long, complex answers, given globalization and the way many more people are moving around. I'm also lucky -- being in CA means that people tend to expect the longer, more circuitous answer more than usual.
(no subject)
Thu, Jan. 15th, 2009 10:49 am (UTC)On one hand, I agree with you about the fact that cultures are not static, but rather fluid and ever-changing. (In fact, you can see change in language, since the two are intrinsically tied together). On the other hand, I think there is a line that should be drawn when it comes to cultural appropriation - when it comes to things of a sacred nature, whether it be mandalas, daibutsu, shimakazari, torii, crucifixes or medicine wheels, using these things without understanding what they are is disrespectful and shouldn't be done.
That said, I think it would be sad if we did not learn and take good things from other cultures around the world. Look at the large international haiku/waka/renga communities. There's some really great poetry that has been created because of people's interest in that specific art. Similarly, there has been a greater interest in world music because musicians have used aspects (rhythmic patterns, instruments, etc.) of music outside of their genre in their own works. Emma is a surprisingly accurate period-manga set in late Victorian London, described in meticulous detail by the mangaka Mori Kaoru. It is rather popular and has won awards, but without Mori's love of England and British things, such a nice manga wouldn't exist (I liked it even if its a romance).
Myself, I grew up in the western United States. My dad's family is Anishinaabe (Native American), so I also learned a lot of things from that which have shaped how I look at the world. Similarly, I also grew up around a lot Latino kids and a fair amount of Asian-American kids. The people I grew up around also shaped me. I became interested in East Asia, especially China and Japan. I know I've appropriated a lot of both cultures into my own life, blending with my Anishinaabe/European-American background from my parents.
Oh, and when it comes to "Engrish" merchandise, I laugh it, not because I'm laughing at the person who came up with it, but because some of the things that come about are really odd or funny. I know my Japanese is so-so (and oddly Nagoya-ben), my Mandarin and Cantonese are horrific, and my Korean nigh on non-existent. I mean, sometimes I can barely piece together a sentence in French these days, and that was originally my first language growing up. And don't ask me to try to speak Anishibek - I think I know maybe twenty words.
I guess what I mean is - if you like a culture a lot and stuff, don't just take the things you like (kanji or dream catchers or what not) without trying to learn some more about it. Er, and I relate to pretty much everything you said, whether I agree completely or not.
(no subject)
Thu, Jan. 22nd, 2009 11:40 pm (UTC)Oh yes, I very much agree. It's very odd rereading this, since it's been a long time between now and when I wrote it, and quite a few bits want to make me slap old!me on the head. I think my line with regard to cultural appropriation has gotten much harder now, and what I look at most is the power positions of the culture appropriating with respect to the culture being appropriated. So while I think Japan appropriates from China in forms of how modern Chinese people are frequently portrayed in manga (as opposed to stories like Journey to the West and Confucian culture, which is an artifact of Chinese cultural dominance), I think their usage of British history or even of Christian symbology is less appropriative and more assimilative.
I mean, this is all very general and not looking at the specifics; I think there may be a case about the appropriation of Christian religious symbols, but I would still say that that line is much blurrier, than say, of trendy applications of the Kabbalah and etc.