Wiscon - Cultural Appropriation panel
Wed, May. 31st, 2006 12:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oyceterModerator: Nisi Shawl
Panelists: Yoon Ha Lee, Gregory Frost, Judith E. Berman, Ekaterina Sedia, Theresa Carter
Ahhh, cultural appropriation, a topic near and dear to my heart.
Alas, the panel left me wanting to spork something, to co-opt![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
yhlee's words.
This isn't going to be a report on the panel per se, largely because I took no notes. So it will mostly be me reacting.
It's probably extremely flame-worthy to note this, but 4 out of 6 of the panelists were white. I am noting this not because I think race automatically qualifies or disqualifies someone from talking about cultural appropriation, but because the tone of the panel felt very apologetic yet very entitled with regard to cultural appropriation. I will get into this later.
The panel started by saying that this was a topic discussed at WisCon every year. The agreement on what "bad" cultural appropriation was took place early on, with Berman giving the extreme example of scientists patenting the drug gained from the bark of a tree, the knowledge being gained via native tribes in the area. I don't remember if any "good" examples were given, but everyone basically agreed that the writer should be respectful, should research, etc.
I'm speaking of the panel as an entire entity, which is not proper representation. Shawl largely asked questions, Yoon didn't say that much, I disagreed a great deal with Frost, Sedia and Carter, and I thought Berman had very interesting things to say, had it not been a very late hour at night.
I started having problems when panelists began to talk about respecting the culture and having an appropriate level of reverence when writing about it, coupled with issues of gaining permission from the culture and the issue of renumeration, monetary or otherwise.
1. I agree re: respecting a culture, but I wish the panelists had gone deeper into the issue of when reverence crosses into making excuses for a culture (hello, Japanese scholarship!).
2. I have many issues with the thing about gaining permission, not in the least limited to who has this so-called authority, to the assumption that all people from a minority culture are the same and the assumption that there even is such thing as a monolithic culture.
3. I wish more panelists had thought about the idea that they aren't necessarily even representing a culture, just a very specific facet of a culture.
4. The issue of renumeration is extremely iffy with me, particularly with the touchy power dynamics inherent in that.
I think there was a little too much agreement on the panel, and I wish someone had been there to shake things up a little. Also, because so much of the panel seemed to be on how to make the cultural appropriation you are doing into "good" cultural appropriation and not questioning the underlying assumptions inherent in that and power differentials and all that interesting stuff.
Someone mentioned that you only have to worry about this for living cultures and not for dead cultures, which opens another can of worms entirely. I don't think the other panelists disagreed, but I may have missed it in my fuming. Although, it was limited to the mythology, so... I dunno.
Much of the discussion was also limited to co-opting the mythologies of different cultures, and while I do think that is a form of cultural appropriation, rewriting mythologies for some reason feels very different from writing on different cultures. I think this is because I'm of a mind that mythologies exist to be told and retold. Of course, this is simplifying the entire issue, particularly with the existence of bowlderized fairy tales and etc. But many of the issues I have with cultural appropriation lies in the representation or misrepresentation of different cultures.
While I by no means will say that anything gives a writer permission to write about anything, be it aliens, fantasy, or another culture, I had a very large problem with how quickly the panel agreed to this. There was a sense that the writer only had to get permission or to be respectful, and all issues of cultural appropriation would be solved. One panelist seemed to imply that simply getting the permission from an Egyptian family made it so that all facets of Egyptian culture representated in her book were ok.
Several panelists also mentioned that they felt they didn't have a culture -- in later discussion, Mely mentioned that people always seem to forget that "white American" is a culture, but that it just doesn't seem like one because it's the majority culture in this country. The assumption that "white American" isn't a culture is also problematic to me from a global POV. I think that "white American" is sometimes seen as the majority global culture. This is a very iffy statement on about a gazillion levels, obviously, but the prevalence of American popular culture and the very complicated politics and cultural negotiation involved in said prevalence isn't something that can be disregarded.
I asked the panelists about this, and Carter responded with a comment that American pop culture was like the atomic bomb. The panelists quickly retracted this, and I think Frost commented that they weren't creating American pop culture, esp. compared to Mission Impossible III or something like that. I think that was fairly disingenuous. Maybe no one on the panel is responsible for American pop culture, but that does affect how their work is perceived, just from the (unfair) fact that it is written by an American, or someone perceived to be an American. Panelists brought up examples of Bollywood and the manga/anime boom as ways in which American culture wasn't default, but I still don't agree with them. I still think when you go around the world, the general assumption is that stars from American pop culture (music, movies, etc.) will be known, while the stars from other pop cultures generally will not. I'm not saying that this is anyone's fault, but that it is a factor and that it does influence the lens through which people read things.
Also, I wanted people to talk about what happens when you have many people of another ethnicity/culture writing about an ethnicity/culture to an audience of the writer's own ethnicity/culture. I am not arguing for cultural authenticity, largely because I feel it's a sliding scale and nothing is 100% authentic, but I do have a problem with all views of a single culture in a genre coming from another culture. It starts to feel like colonization and the appropriation of language and story and brings up the always thorny issues of voice and representation. I'd like to note that this doesn't mean a story shouldn't be written, but... I just wish the panelists had thought about it more.
I wanted discussion on exoticization and viewing other cultures as "Other" and how to deal with that in writing. I also wanted discussion on how to critique culture in writing, because I think always adopting reverence toward a culture isn't always the answer. Actually, I think many of these issues apply to historical novels as well, of course, sans the tricky issue of colonization and current power differentials. How do you portray someone from a different culture without necessarily sanctioning a worldview? How do you make a character sympathetic without making them a 21-century American?
Someone in the audience of Native American descent ended up making a long comment on how if people weren't asked to help a minority culture, they shouldn't help or write about it. While I understand the sense of outrage and of a culture being used, I don't think making people stop writing about a culture they aren't a part of is helpful, nor does it assist with getting past the whole cultural appropriation issue.
Someone else in the audience said something about Japanese manga borrowing from American culture all the time and equated that to American fiction borrowing from Japanese culture. I had many issues with this, first and foremost being that it isn't the same because of the past history between the countries and again, power differentials with regard to politics and economics and etc.
Mely said later that she doesn't have issues with Japanese appropriating American culture, but she does have issue with the exoticization of blacks in manga, which I agree with. Ditto with the appropriation of Chinese culture (why, oh why, do all Chinese people have to be dressed in Chung Li style clothing in anime and manga?! Grr!).
I could blather on about this for pages and pages more, because this is a topic near and dear to my heart and one that affects me on a day to day basis. Am I authentic? What culture am I? What does it mean when I read and automatically assume that all the characters are white when I'm Asian? How does this affect me? What about when I focus on Asian representation, or when I make the assumption that "Asian" equates "East Asian" (I am trying very hard to break this habit)? Or when I focus on Asian and don't look at other cultures and ethnicities? Or, what does being enamoured of Japanese culture mean to me personally, how does Japan's history with Taiwan and China affect this, and what should I do?
I don't have any answers, only more questions.
yhlee on this panel
gaudior's past post on cultural appropriation
cofax's thoughts
My old post on cultural appropriation
ETA (5/28/07): Chronological link roundup for the Great Cultural Appropriation Debate of DOOM, sparked by this post and the ones linked above.
Panelists: Yoon Ha Lee, Gregory Frost, Judith E. Berman, Ekaterina Sedia, Theresa Carter
Ahhh, cultural appropriation, a topic near and dear to my heart.
Alas, the panel left me wanting to spork something, to co-opt
yhlee's words.This isn't going to be a report on the panel per se, largely because I took no notes. So it will mostly be me reacting.
It's probably extremely flame-worthy to note this, but 4 out of 6 of the panelists were white. I am noting this not because I think race automatically qualifies or disqualifies someone from talking about cultural appropriation, but because the tone of the panel felt very apologetic yet very entitled with regard to cultural appropriation. I will get into this later.
The panel started by saying that this was a topic discussed at WisCon every year. The agreement on what "bad" cultural appropriation was took place early on, with Berman giving the extreme example of scientists patenting the drug gained from the bark of a tree, the knowledge being gained via native tribes in the area. I don't remember if any "good" examples were given, but everyone basically agreed that the writer should be respectful, should research, etc.
I'm speaking of the panel as an entire entity, which is not proper representation. Shawl largely asked questions, Yoon didn't say that much, I disagreed a great deal with Frost, Sedia and Carter, and I thought Berman had very interesting things to say, had it not been a very late hour at night.
I started having problems when panelists began to talk about respecting the culture and having an appropriate level of reverence when writing about it, coupled with issues of gaining permission from the culture and the issue of renumeration, monetary or otherwise.
1. I agree re: respecting a culture, but I wish the panelists had gone deeper into the issue of when reverence crosses into making excuses for a culture (hello, Japanese scholarship!).
2. I have many issues with the thing about gaining permission, not in the least limited to who has this so-called authority, to the assumption that all people from a minority culture are the same and the assumption that there even is such thing as a monolithic culture.
3. I wish more panelists had thought about the idea that they aren't necessarily even representing a culture, just a very specific facet of a culture.
4. The issue of renumeration is extremely iffy with me, particularly with the touchy power dynamics inherent in that.
I think there was a little too much agreement on the panel, and I wish someone had been there to shake things up a little. Also, because so much of the panel seemed to be on how to make the cultural appropriation you are doing into "good" cultural appropriation and not questioning the underlying assumptions inherent in that and power differentials and all that interesting stuff.
Someone mentioned that you only have to worry about this for living cultures and not for dead cultures, which opens another can of worms entirely. I don't think the other panelists disagreed, but I may have missed it in my fuming. Although, it was limited to the mythology, so... I dunno.
Much of the discussion was also limited to co-opting the mythologies of different cultures, and while I do think that is a form of cultural appropriation, rewriting mythologies for some reason feels very different from writing on different cultures. I think this is because I'm of a mind that mythologies exist to be told and retold. Of course, this is simplifying the entire issue, particularly with the existence of bowlderized fairy tales and etc. But many of the issues I have with cultural appropriation lies in the representation or misrepresentation of different cultures.
While I by no means will say that anything gives a writer permission to write about anything, be it aliens, fantasy, or another culture, I had a very large problem with how quickly the panel agreed to this. There was a sense that the writer only had to get permission or to be respectful, and all issues of cultural appropriation would be solved. One panelist seemed to imply that simply getting the permission from an Egyptian family made it so that all facets of Egyptian culture representated in her book were ok.
Several panelists also mentioned that they felt they didn't have a culture -- in later discussion, Mely mentioned that people always seem to forget that "white American" is a culture, but that it just doesn't seem like one because it's the majority culture in this country. The assumption that "white American" isn't a culture is also problematic to me from a global POV. I think that "white American" is sometimes seen as the majority global culture. This is a very iffy statement on about a gazillion levels, obviously, but the prevalence of American popular culture and the very complicated politics and cultural negotiation involved in said prevalence isn't something that can be disregarded.
I asked the panelists about this, and Carter responded with a comment that American pop culture was like the atomic bomb. The panelists quickly retracted this, and I think Frost commented that they weren't creating American pop culture, esp. compared to Mission Impossible III or something like that. I think that was fairly disingenuous. Maybe no one on the panel is responsible for American pop culture, but that does affect how their work is perceived, just from the (unfair) fact that it is written by an American, or someone perceived to be an American. Panelists brought up examples of Bollywood and the manga/anime boom as ways in which American culture wasn't default, but I still don't agree with them. I still think when you go around the world, the general assumption is that stars from American pop culture (music, movies, etc.) will be known, while the stars from other pop cultures generally will not. I'm not saying that this is anyone's fault, but that it is a factor and that it does influence the lens through which people read things.
Also, I wanted people to talk about what happens when you have many people of another ethnicity/culture writing about an ethnicity/culture to an audience of the writer's own ethnicity/culture. I am not arguing for cultural authenticity, largely because I feel it's a sliding scale and nothing is 100% authentic, but I do have a problem with all views of a single culture in a genre coming from another culture. It starts to feel like colonization and the appropriation of language and story and brings up the always thorny issues of voice and representation. I'd like to note that this doesn't mean a story shouldn't be written, but... I just wish the panelists had thought about it more.
I wanted discussion on exoticization and viewing other cultures as "Other" and how to deal with that in writing. I also wanted discussion on how to critique culture in writing, because I think always adopting reverence toward a culture isn't always the answer. Actually, I think many of these issues apply to historical novels as well, of course, sans the tricky issue of colonization and current power differentials. How do you portray someone from a different culture without necessarily sanctioning a worldview? How do you make a character sympathetic without making them a 21-century American?
Someone in the audience of Native American descent ended up making a long comment on how if people weren't asked to help a minority culture, they shouldn't help or write about it. While I understand the sense of outrage and of a culture being used, I don't think making people stop writing about a culture they aren't a part of is helpful, nor does it assist with getting past the whole cultural appropriation issue.
Someone else in the audience said something about Japanese manga borrowing from American culture all the time and equated that to American fiction borrowing from Japanese culture. I had many issues with this, first and foremost being that it isn't the same because of the past history between the countries and again, power differentials with regard to politics and economics and etc.
Mely said later that she doesn't have issues with Japanese appropriating American culture, but she does have issue with the exoticization of blacks in manga, which I agree with. Ditto with the appropriation of Chinese culture (why, oh why, do all Chinese people have to be dressed in Chung Li style clothing in anime and manga?! Grr!).
I could blather on about this for pages and pages more, because this is a topic near and dear to my heart and one that affects me on a day to day basis. Am I authentic? What culture am I? What does it mean when I read and automatically assume that all the characters are white when I'm Asian? How does this affect me? What about when I focus on Asian representation, or when I make the assumption that "Asian" equates "East Asian" (I am trying very hard to break this habit)? Or when I focus on Asian and don't look at other cultures and ethnicities? Or, what does being enamoured of Japanese culture mean to me personally, how does Japan's history with Taiwan and China affect this, and what should I do?
I don't have any answers, only more questions.
yhlee on this panelgaudior's past post on cultural appropriationcofax's thoughtsMy old post on cultural appropriation
ETA (5/28/07): Chronological link roundup for the Great Cultural Appropriation Debate of DOOM, sparked by this post and the ones linked above.
(no subject)
Wed, May. 31st, 2006 09:20 pm (UTC)I've been copping it a bit since Magic or Madness was published in Australia. In the US it was well-received and there was much rabbitting on about the authenticity of my repres'ion of Australia. I am Australian so natch, right?
Nope. In Australia I've lost count of how many people tell me that Australians don't say x, y or z. Or that I've been out of Australia so long I've lost touch. (Excuse me? I spend a minimum of six months a year there. I've lived anywhere else for more than nine months straight and until I was in my mid-twenties I'd never lived anywhere else! This is part of a strongly held theory that so-called "ex pats" have no clue what's going on back home and thus cannot write about the country they come from. Firstly, I'm not---nor will I ever be---an ex-pat, and secondly, even if I was I call bullshit! I could not go home for ten years and I'd still know Sydney all the way down to my bones.)
This is a long-winded way of agreeing with you. There is no one "correct" view of any one culture. There is no central bureau from which to get permission to write about any particular culture. No matter how "authentic" you try to be someone's going to tell you that you fucked it up. I mean, I'm Australian writing about Australia and I'm being told that.
The whole thing makes my hair stand on end.
(no subject)
Wed, May. 31st, 2006 09:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Wed, May. 31st, 2006 09:37 pm (UTC)I write about cultural appropriation and Asian-ness a lot on my LJ, but I always feel like a huge fraud because while I lived in Taiwan for 8 years, I went to a bilingual school, speak mostly English, and didn't particularly make an attempt to be local, whatever that means. I feel American in Taiwan and Chinese in America, and that's not even getting into all the issues on being Chinese in Taiwan and not knowing Taiwanese, and etc.
I also think that there is this sense of representation when it comes to people not of one culture writing about another, not just limited to non-US ones (see Gaiman writing on America in American Gods). And of course, the issue gets even thornier if the culture is one that's often misrepresented or romanticized or exoticized or etc.
I think one of my favorite things about Magic or Madness was how foreign NY felt, how it was almost like a magical other dimension for a while to Reason.
(no subject)
Wed, May. 31st, 2006 10:11 pm (UTC)Though I fight it, if I do continue spending time in the US I'll wind up hyphenated myself. But never an ex-pat, damn it!
(no subject)
Wed, May. 31st, 2006 11:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Thu, Jun. 1st, 2006 12:20 am (UTC)One of my friends describes herself as being one of those people for whom the question "Where are you from?" requires an essay, not a place name. Another friend has four different passports . . .
I reckon the world would be a much better place if everyone thought of themselves as hyphenated. (She says while clinging desperately to her Sydneysider identity.)
(no subject)
Thu, Jun. 1st, 2006 12:56 am (UTC)So the term itself is meant to describe how I'm not Korean Korean, or American American, or even average Korean American, but another kind of Korean American. The third culture kid experience isn't just a mix of experience; it's also its own unique one, and I think that's the concept a lot of non-TCKs have trouble wrapping their brains around.
(no subject)
Thu, Jun. 1st, 2006 01:15 am (UTC)(no subject)
Thu, Jun. 1st, 2006 01:41 am (UTC)You're right though that hyphens are usually seen as a straight forward modification of one identity with another. Korean-American, Indonesian-Australian etc. I was thinking of it in the way that Nalo uses it when she says that she is multi-hyphenated, having lived in many different places.
You know, it would be great if there were a panel on this next year at WisCon instead of the cultural appropriation one. I'd love to sit in the audience and watch such a panel.
(no subject)
Fri, Jun. 2nd, 2006 06:12 am (UTC)Over here from a mention by
(no subject)
Sat, Jun. 3rd, 2006 06:37 am (UTC)I think the authors of the book said they termed it "third culture" even though they were talking about people with multiple cultural experiences because they thought that inability to decide where your home culture was was the "third culture."
Um, I could also be making that up because I sold the book.
(no subject)
Sat, Jun. 3rd, 2006 03:55 pm (UTC)