oyceter | Cultural appropriation, pt. 2

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Cultural appropriation, pt. 2

Or, in which I make myself extremely unpopular and get flamed through the roof.

I am limiting this to America because I live here now and because the majority of people who've been commenting seem to be from there. This isn't because I think America is most important (because I don't), but because I need to limit the scope of this somehow. I apologize to those living elsewhere, and I really want to make a more global post about this later, unless people are absolutely sick of me going on and on and on about this.

There has been much discussion of cultural authenticity and the problems of cultural authenticity in the comments of my previous post, yhlee's post, cofax7's post, and rilina's post. I feel conflicted about this -- discussion of cultural authenticity is by necessity related to cultural appropriation, but I am very uneasy as to how it has somewhat usurped the discussion of appropriation. This uneasiness is further cemented by the fact that a lot of discussion of cultural authenticity has to do with minority cultures adopting the dominant culture, or questions along the line of "If I can only write about my own culture/race/ethnicity without cultural appropriation, what can I write about?" And from the comments, it does seem like a majority of the people asking these questions are from European/American descent. I am not finger pointing, I swear. I know that's a horribly passive-aggressive way to say it, but I really don't want to call people out because I think it's unproductive, and because I am reading through all four threads and trying to suss out common themes.

Which leads to...

Even if there is no such thing as cultural authenticity, the question of cultural appropriation is still present. Furthermore, I am not saying that you can only write about what culture/race/ethnicity that you belong to. Instead, I am saying that the problems inherent in cultural appropriation exist and will very likely exist for many, many decades to come. Also, the very act of writing about another culture, particularly one in which you are a part of the dominant culture that has a history of subjugating minority cultures, that very act is problematic.

It is even more problematic when you look at means of colonization in the past and how much of colonization involves language and schooling and learning the mythos and culture of the colonizers.

This is not limited to white American and/or European culture (see: Japanese culture with regard to Korean culture), but because white American and/or European culture was so often the colonizer in the past few centuries, I think deflecting the issue back to minority cultures avoids the larger issue.

Does this suck? Yes.

Is this fair? No.

Does this mean you shouldn't write about it? No.

Does this mean you have to think about it? No. Feel free to ignore it if you want.

But even if you think you're writing in a vacuum, your readers are not reading in a vacuum. People read in historical context. I read Naomi Novik's Throne of Jade as a third culture kid with the (slight) knowledge of Qing Dynasty China and what happened to Qing Dynasty China, and even if Novik wrote without that in mind (which I don't think she did), that still doesn't make my reading experience any different.

And because rilina says it better than me and because I think it bears repeating many times:

"It's very hard for a minority culture to "coopt" something from a dominant culture. I'm sorry if this doesn't seem fair to dominant culture folks (and I'm not saying it's impossible), but I think this is true. When cultural things flow in that direction, it's usually less appropriation and more assimilation." [emphasis in the original]

Unpopular thought about assimilation: I think if you are a hyphenated American or an American of color, claiming American culture as your own is problematic. I wish this weren't so, and I struggled against this in college. But the fact is, if your skin color is different from that of people around you, no matter what you think you are, people will very often treat you differently. They may be well-meaning and be very cautious about the subject of race, or they could just say incredibly stupid things, but the issue of race is always there.

We aren't at the point where things are colorblind, and as such, cultural assimilation is problematic. No, I don't think this is fair, and yes, I think it is limiting, particularly when you don't want to feel different and are made to feel different. But again, sadly, things don't exist in a vacuum.

As an addendum to this: no, it isn't fair that minority authors are often corralled into minority fiction and said to write about the minority experience. On the other hand, since so few other people are writing about the minority experience, it's a lose-lose situation. I do think that limiting minority authors to the minority experience is very much like limiting female authors to the female experience, but... BUT! seeing the minority experience as a limiting factor can very much be as denigrating as the whole "OMG women writing about female things, the horror!"

Of course, if you look like the dominant culture but aren't from that culture, the issues are very different. But since there is much discussion about hyphenated Americans in the other comment threads, I would very much like to leave it out of this particular post and the comments to this post.

And now, look, even this post has become about minorities writing about minorities and not about dominant cultures writing about minorities and the inherent problems therein.

I'm sorry, I'm really angry about this, and like rilina says, I think many of the issues here are like feminist issues, in which all discussions seem to go back to the men and femininsts must continue to argue why feminism is still relevant. I know this is a horribly uncomfortable topic, probably more so than feminism on LJ, because most of the people I know on LJ are female, whereas most of the people I know on LJ are not minorities in terms of skin color.

I am highlighting this not because I want to call out people, but because I think discussion of cultural appropriation keeps skirting around this fact. I am highlighting skin color because despite what I'd like the world to be like, it is still a very important factor and one that can divide people at first glance.

In conclusion, no one is ever going to tell you that cultural appropriation is ok or that there is a way for a dominant culture to write about a minority culture without these problems rising up. If they do say that, I'm sorry, they're lying or they're from the far future, in which there is no race disparity, no racism, and all nations are on equal economic, political and cultural standing.

This does not mean you shouldn't write about it. Nor does it mean you should write about it. I mean, I personally wish everyone would write about it, or include minority characters, or do something to change things so that the default of a character is not white male. But in the end, it means that even though you may think you're writing in a vacuum, you aren't, and, more importantly, no one is reading in a vacuum. So no matter how you think you should deal with this issue or disengage from it, writing another Euro-centric fantasy is still contributing to the mass of Euro-centric, non-ethnic fantasies out there, and writing a non-Euro-centric fantasy will by necessity run up against these issues.

I wish there were an easier way, but I don't think there is.

Also, does anyone know about critical theory regarding race like Joanna Russ' How to Suppress Women's Writing?

Ok, um, flame away.

ETA:

yhlee responds

ETA 2: Most recent link round up that I know of

Also, I am going to answer comments. I just need time to think and time to stop being overwhelmed.

ETA 3:

ladyjax on discourse on race

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Re: the last question, Greg Tate's Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture might be a good place to start.

Thank you!! I realized at Wiscon how ashamed I was that I know nearly no feminist theory. And then I realized I know even less about race theory.

Sigh.

The title of that book (which I haven't read) is a brilliant summation of the problem.

The lurkers support you in e-mail! Er, I mean, this non-lurker supports you in comments!

Seriously, I'd like to respond at length; can't do so at the moment because am at work. But so much of what you've written resonates to me, especially, "But even if you think you're writing in a vacuum, your readers are not reading in a vacuum. People read in historical context."

More anon.

And from the comments, it does seem like a majority of the people asking these questions are from European/American descent. I am not finger pointing, I swear. I know that's a horribly passive-aggressive way to say it, but I really don't want to call people out because I think it's unproductive, and because I am reading through all four threads and trying to suss out common themes.

I actually think--and I am not saying you should feel obligated to do it!--but I actually think calling people out might very well be helpful. From my European-American perspective--and yes, I'm aware that means I'm speaking from a position of privilege--specifics are helpful. Saying "here's something to worry about, that you may well have no visceral understanding of because of your position of privilege--okay, go worry now!" sends me straight down the road to "well, fuck it then, I can't do anything right, so I won't bother," and I know that's not where you want the conversation to go. Whereas saying "look, here's something bad, right here," that helps.

I'm not saying you have to do this. I'm certainly not saying that you have an obligation to become LJ Queen Educator On Cultural Issues. But I wanted to respond to what I read as concern that people will feel attacked if you get into specifics, because I'm not sure that that's true. Certainly I feel much more comfortable with specifics than I do with what can feel like a kind of nebulous "hey, there are monsters in the forest there, so... be careful! But totally go in the forest anyway!" Does that make sense?

Well, if it will help, these are some of the books that I still have from college:

Gloria Anzaldua, La Frontera/Borderlands
Gloria Anzaldua, Making Face, Making Soul/Cariendas
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought
Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America
Donna Haraway, Simians, Sex, and Cyborgs
Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science
Chandra Mohanty, Third World Women & the Politics of Feminism
Cherie Moraga & Gloria Anzaldua (eds.), This Bridge Called My Back (there's a followup called This Bridge We Call Home)
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark
Linda Nicholson, Feminism/Postmodernism
Minnie Bruce Pratt, Rebellion
Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mother's Gardens and Living by the Word

... and probably more I can't remember off the top of my head. For sf in particular, I'd recommend Russ, Delany, Sarah Lefanu, Gwyneth Jones, and Jenny Wolmark.

And thank you again!!

Hee!

Yes, I would love this to go on, and I'm glad the topic is on LJ right now, though I'm still frustrated about where it's going in other threads.

Looking forward to your response.

This is totally tangential, but this reminds me of when we were in Mariposa and you remarked that you were probably the only Asian in the county and I said, "Well, I think my Dad and I are the only Jews in the county." But of course, there's a big difference between not being from the dominant culture but looking like you do (that is, in an area that does have a lot of Jews, like New York City, I would guess that random passers-by probably know what group I belong to, but in Mariposa, I would guess that people would just think I'm white (Are Jews white? I would say socially yes, culturally no)) and having everyone in the restaurant being able to see that you're a minority.

Which is something I haven't experienced in a real way since I was a kid in India-- really, if you pretty much look like the dominant group in the country you live in, you do not get the experience of being a minority just because you, say, spend a couple of days being the only person of your ethnicity in the vicinity.

Sorry, total tangent! I would be a horrible participant on one of those panels because I would keep getting tangled up in my own and rather unusual experience of race and being a minority and not being a minority. I think I was trying to say that I am finding this discussion thought-provoking.

I'm at work too (and just did a huge post) so no time to respond in detail. But I do not feel threatened or attacked, and I am grateful to you for making this post.

Some problems don't HAVE solutions.

I think if you are a hyphenated American or an American of color, claiming American culture as your own is problematic.

I can sort of see this, but as an Irish emigrant I have huge problems with nth generation Irish-Americans claiming to be Irish without the first clue of what they are talking about, that doesn't work either.

I never feel comfortable talking about race in a NorAm context, as I spent the first twenty years of my life in a country with essentially no non-Caucasians [ nobody in their right mind would have immigrated to Ireland then, for economic reasons alone ], and with its own set of rigid pigeonholes as to whether one was Catholic or Protestant [ and I still have perfect radar for which one would be perceived as in Ireland, though almost all the US Catholics I know read as Protestants on that ] and as the way things work in Montreal appears to not map onto US perceptions at all. [ In that, for example, when Chinese community leaders talk about "the two cultures", they mean Montreal's Anglophone Chinese and Montreal's Francophone Chinese. And that one is rarely on a full Metro car or a bus of which more than a third of the people are any single distinct ethnicity. And that couples both of whom are from the same ethnic group seem quaintly old-fashioned. ]

I've been here closing on four and a half years, and now seem to have reached the point where once I open my mouth and start talking French I'm not immediately given away as Anglophone, which is nice. The unexamined default is "functionally bilingual". Not that there's much fuss about Anglo/Franco here, but what fuss there is seems to have largely subsumed any other distinction as an issue for making a fuss about.

I think you're right, and what would be really helpful would be to shift the discussion toward the concrete as opposed to the meta, by providing examples of specific things in specific works that people feel are examples of cultural appropriation, and how that works in those specific books or movies or whatever, and how the people discussing them feel about it.

I get that it's a touchy subject and people frequently don't want to publicly criticize works in their own field, but even if no one wants to talk about books, examples from TV and movies would be useful.

(I believe Yoon and Oyce are doing this right now-- with books!)

Yes, that does make sense, thank you!

(and thank you for the line on LJ Queen Educator on Cultural Issues, right now it's feeling very like I am some sort of whistle blower or something)

I think my list of things to worry about is:

(and I'm very sorry, this is incredibly ranty)

1. Don't make all conversations about race conversations about whiteness and how all people are becoming racially diverse. Sure, they may be, but skin color still does make a difference, no matter how much people would like to think it doesn't.

2. Worry about historical context. Worry about race relations as they are. The easy answer is to say "Fuck it!" but the ability to say "Fuck it" and go off and not worry is a privilege and should be acknowledged as such.

3. Stop trying to make the conversation about why there is no such thing as cultural authenticity! I know this! I am a living embodiment of this! But it doesn't make the question of cultural appropriation less relevant. Also, saying it while saying that you're a mix of "Anglo, German, Irish, etc." makes it feel like you're trying to say that you, too, are racially diverse (which you are), but ignoring the fact of skin color and racism and things people can tell without even having to say anything.

Er, I probably have a lot more ranty things... yes... Uh, was that helpful?

Ok, sorry, I'm going to be bitchy and tag this comment as a discussion that should go on in the other posts, where there is a lot of discussion on cultural authenticity.

I agree about the difficulty of cultural authenticity, but I really want this post's comments to be on race and minorities and how they are treated different from people who look like they're in the dominant culture, because the conversation keeps getting sidetracked to cultural authenticity.

Would love to discuss this with you in one of the other posts, though.

Oh, and Le Guin! And ...

I'll stop.

(Except I got the title of the Haraway wrong, and the two essays Mari mentioned over lunch are "A Cyborg Manifesto" (http://www.egs.edu/faculty/haraway/haraway-a-cyborg-manifesto.html) from Simians, Cyborgs, and Women and "Pornography for Women, by Women, with Love" (may have title slightly wrong) from Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans, and Perverts.

bell hooks does both, and I think she's wonderful. (From my white, non-US, working-class background. And many years of reading feminist theory.)

'Whiteness' itself is a construct - in recent discussion somewhere (I think

misia's lj on panic over the white middle classes not breeding and being SWAMPED by philoprogenitive persons of other colours, I remarked that the Irish used to occup that position of Other. Also, within European context, people from around the Mediterranean often occupied a v liminal position, sometimes white and sometimes darker.

But yes, it's often hard to distinguish in large modern cities unless people are over-tuned to what they consider to be markers of The Other.

No no, don't stop!!

This is wonderful and stuff I don't know!

Point fingers. We should have this discussion.

I think this is probably drifting into "put it in the other post" territory, but that's the thought I was poking at. A person of Middle Eastern descent is considered white in some contexts, but probably not when they're in line at an American airport. And that is definitely off-topic here, so I will leave it at that.

What Oyce said. I also really appreciate the list of references.

Well, if the conversation is going to turn from the meta to the concrete, I think I'll have to write up my spiel on McKinley's Damar books. (Though I still grumble over having to reread them in order to write even a remotely fair or useful essay.)

Ooh, if we're booklisting, can I throw in Amber Hollibaugh's My Dangerous Desires: a queer girl dreaming her way home?

Fantastic collection of pieces on gender/sexuality, the feminist Sex Wars of the 80s, and especially strong stuff on class (which is really under-addressed in a lot of the feminist literature). And it includes stuff she co-wrote with Cherie Moraga, Jewelle Gomez and others.

The converse of that is that "blackness" is also a cultural construct. The Ghanian philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has written extensively about how the idea of "Africa" and "Africans" and "black solidarity" is essentially an invention of the west and the New World. He teaches at Princeton and does alot of work on race, culture, and identity with Henry Louis Gates Jr.

When Nelson Mandela's daughter came in the early 90s as a guest lecturer at the university I attend, my African history professor ended up sitting next to her. During the banquet, she leaned over him and asked "What is this "Afrocentrism" I keep hearing about?"

I wish I could say more but I only get a few minutes on LJ at a time, and I can't make complex comments because of this.

If you want concrete examples, or starting points--even out of date starting points--or a discussion point, how about urban fantasy set in North America? So much of it uses the European myths, but how would all those fantastic creatures get to here? Also, in the ones that use Native beliefs, should they? I've seen a few of them that just use the Generic Tribe--this is presumably meant to not be offensive, but not every group has the same beliefs and boiling it down to 'standard Native' is just as offensive.

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Cultural appropriation, pt. 2

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