Wiscon - Cultural Appropriation panel

[oyceter]

Moderator: 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 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.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Thanks for these reports--they are interesting and nifty.

[oyceter]

I'm glad you're enjoying them!