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

[justinelavaworm.livejournal.com]

This topic fascinates me, but I never go on these panels or even attend them cause the arguments around them tend to drive me crazy. (Though Judith Berman is someone I really enjoy chewing this stuff over with. She's smart as.)

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.

[justinelavaworm.livejournal.com]

Ooops. That should be "I've NEVER lived anywhere else . . . "

[oyceter]

Yeah... the entire issue of cultural authenticity is always one of those bugaboos that worries me, though I suspect from the other side.

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.

[justinelavaworm.livejournal.com]

That's part of the problem with this kind of conversation: So many people are no longer just one thing. Or even just two. It's the non-hyphenated identities that are increasingly becoming rare. I have so many friends who were born in one place, grew up in another (or several), then wound up spending their adult lives somewhere else. Who are Spanish-Australians, Australian-Mexicans, American-Dutch etc. etc. etc.

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!

[harriet-spy.livejournal.com]

Several panelists also mentioned that they felt they didn't have a culture

I think right there is where I would've given up on that panel.

[littlebutfierce]

Augh. This is why I skipped this panel. It sounds somewhat similar to last year's panel, which irked me mightily. Thanks for writing this up & reassuring me that I was better off going to whatever other program item I went to instead...

[justinelavaworm.livejournal.com]

Ahmen.

So many people need to hear this:

You have an accent and you have a culture. Most likely more than one. Everybody does.

Whatsmore there ain't no one that doesn't have "mixed" blood.

/rant

[harriet-spy.livejournal.com]

I'm actually a little confused as to how you could get to the point of participating on an earnest panel about the "right" kind of cultural appropriation and *not* already have done the mental work required to learn to recognize that your default isn't actually universal. I tend to regard that as step *one* of the process of achieving adult thinking about race/class/religion/gender/ethnicity. Do only Ethnic People have Culture? Sounds like exoticization to me.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

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

[oyceter]

Yeeaahhh... I was hoping it'd be more thoughtful, but I guess not =(.

[oyceter]

Yeah... I'm not sure about that either. I was particularly troubled by the fact that some of the panelists who claimed they had no culture seemed to think that this made it more difficult for them to inappropriately appropriate other cultures.

[oyceter]

I'm glad you're enjoying them!

[oyceter]

Yes, very much so! There's a book out called Third Culture Kids, which talks about children growing up in a culture their parents aren't from and then moving back into their parents' culture. I wouldn't particularly recommend the book, but I remember being so happy that there was an actual name for what I was when someone mentioned it to me.

[justinelavaworm.livejournal.com]

WTF? If you don't have a culture how do you even know how to brush your teeth, let alone write a story?

[justinelavaworm.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure about that name though. Third Culture implies you can only be a mix of three cultures, you know? I really like hyphenated identities. I think I stole it from Nalo. Dunno where she got it from.

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.)

[harriet-spy.livejournal.com]

That's...quite remarkable.

[rilina.livejournal.com]

What I appreciate about the term "third culture kids"--being one myself--is that it distinguishes between experiences that a lot of people would want to lump into one category. For example: I'm the daughter of Korean immigrants. I was born in the states, but when I was a teen my family moved to Korea. (I resist saying "moved back" because that's only true for my parents; I had never been to Korea--or even on a plane--before that move.) My experience of being a Korean American is thus appreciably different from those of my older siblings; they were in college by the time my family moved, so they never experienced living in Korea. Korea's a place that my brother and sister have only visited; I've lived there--it's one of the handful of places that I think of as "home."

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.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Yeah, when Oyce told me about it I immediately thought, "Hey! There's a name for what I am!"

[seajules]

Several panelists also mentioned that they felt they didn't have a culture

Every time I encounter this, it boggles my mind, and I encounter it all the time, among people who should know better. Among people who do know better, if they stop and think for a minute. Part of the problem, I think, is that people conflate ethnicity with culture (which the panel itself seems to have done), and they think they have no ethnicity because they're white Americans. They're wrong, even if their ancestors did their level best to rid themselves of any trace of ethnicity after coming to America, but let me address culture a bit. I was born into an LDS (Mormon) family. I was raised in the LDS church. I'm still a member, though I have a lot of issues with the prevalent culture of the church. My dad joined the military when I was seven. When I moved out on my own, I experienced culture shock because life is different as a civilian. I married a civilian, who joined the Navy after a few years of marriage, and lemme tell ya, it's been a relief to get back to the culture in which I grew up.

I have cousins who have lived their whole lives in the rural town in which I was born, and only lived for nine months before my parents moved. Ethnically, we come from the same stock, but culturally? What about my adopted cousins, who came to live with my aunts and uncles as babies in that same rural town, growing up without moving away? Ethnically, my family is pretty uniformly of Northern European stock. My cousins are Chinese-American. Culturally, who's closer to my blood cousins, my adopted cousins or myself?

A lot of people in the U. S. tend to refer to themselves by region, religion, where they went to school, sexual orientation, profession, favorite pastime, ethnic heritage, gender, age, marital status. Each of these things involves at least one culture. I would have thought specwriters, of all people, would get that.

As for ethnicity...I don't even know where to start. One advantage of LDS culture, I guess, you learn to value the knowledge of where you came from, even if the place itself is not so nice.

[justinelavaworm.livejournal.com]

I was being a total literalest and worrying that 3 cultures wasn't adequate to explain it. I mostly had in mind a friend who was born in England of Australian parents (one Indonesian-Australian the other Anglo-Celtic Australian) and spent her early years in England and Australia (up to around ten) and then was mostly educated in various middle eastern and African countries (ones with oil) and then spent her late teen years and early twenties in Australia and Spain. She speaks Indonesian, Arabic, Spanish, French and Australian English. So third culture doesn't exactly fit. Of course, I'd have to ask her, but I lost touch.

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.

[annaalamode.livejournal.com]

I think for me, besides all the issues that you raised, that the issue of how to be respectful to a culture is fairly critical. I'm not a fiction writer but I have spent a chunk of time researching a country very different from my own. How do you respectfully treat that culture? What part of your reaction to a given culture is a personal reaction and what part is largely a cultural reaction?

Is respect the assumption of neutrality and an attempt to check your White American values at the door? Is is an assumption of deference? Because that doesn't seem to be the answer given the hip-hop communities long standing tradition of mocking suburban white teenagers who listen to hip-hop and a attempt a more "ghetto" manner.

But then the issue of deference gets caught up in so many issues about power and control and history and race. Who gets to say that an appropriation is okay? Who gets to decide who can take the bark from the tree? Is it tribal? Is it local? Is it the state? Is it an individual land owner?

So what is respectful? Is it an assumption of that cultures values? Is it a critical stance towards that culture? But how does one separate that critical stance from ones own biases? Who defines what the culture is?

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to come into your journal and ask a bunch of questions.

[londonkds.livejournal.com]

How exactly did they mean that? Was it genuinely seeing "white American" as the default or was it seeing "white American" culture as all hamburgers and George Bush Jr and reality TV and things that only nasty ignorant people like?

[londonkds.livejournal.com]

I also suspect that, as someone was mentioning in the comments on one of the other posts, people are scared off discussing white American culture for fear of being interpreted as or giving comfort to white supremacism. Like my theory that the particularly visceral and total hostility to English patriotism on the English left wing is the belief that historically there is no English patriotism that is not an expression of imperialism and domination of others.

[marfisa.livejournal.com]

Sounds like an interesting but rather frustrating panel. Your comments on the appropriation of Chinese culture in anime and manga reminded me of some of the things the presenter said at a (one-person) panel on non-Japanese characters in anime at AnimeNEXT in New Jersey a couple of years ago. He cited a number of examples--the most well-known, at least to me, being Shampoo from "Ranma 1/2"--of how Chinese characters in anime tend to be portrayed in what could be described as a sort of stage-Chinese manner, in terms of "traditional"/"ethnic" dress, exoticism, etc. Apparently a fair number of such characters--again, Shampoo was the most notorious example--are also depicted as speaking pidgin Japanese. He never actually mentioned Wufei from "Gundam Wing," whom I believe does at least escape the pidgin-Japanese treatment (although I can't be sure, since I've never seen the series in Japanese and don't speak Japanese myself anyway--not to mention the fact that it's an open question what language the characters on that show are supposed to be speaking to each other when they're talking to other characters who are from different colonies or ethnic backgrounds). Although in retrospect Wufei's standoffishness and habit of ranting about honor and injustice probably reflects some sort of Japanese stereotypes about "traditional" Chineseness.

In view of your earlier posts about romances, you might want to check out Kim Wong Keltner's chick lit novel "The Dim Sum of All Things." (There's also a sequel, "Buddha Baby," but I haven't read it yet.) The protagonist, Lindsey Owyang, spends a lot of time dealing with dating-related cultural appropriation issues like white guys who have a thing for Asian women, but don't even have the sense to realize that "konnichiwa, Chinese princess" is not the perfect all-purpose greeting for any attractive woman who appears to fit their preferred ethnic profile. Then there's the guy with the Chinese-character tattoo who keeps following her through Chinatown in San Francisco and trying to pick her up until she finally resorts to telling him that his tattoo actually says something like "I am an idiot" in Chinese. At this the guy storms off, fuming, "That bastard! It was supposed to say 'courage'!" Even if it does, the joke is on him--in reality Lindsey herself has no idea what the characters in the guy's tattoo mean, since she spent most of her after-school Chinese classes goofing off and can barely read a Chinese menu.

[kaiweilau.livejournal.com]

I'm Asian American as well, a graduate student in history, and I spent this past semester looking at ideas of "culture" and "contamination" from the "African" perspective (which is a Western-created category in itself). Kwame Anthony Appiah, a very influential philosopher at Princeton who is of Ghanian descent wrote a book recently called "Cosmopolitanism" which talked about ideas of "cultural contamination." In it, he talked about how cultures are not fixed, are always changing, and that just because Asanti in Kumasi drink Coke, watch Dynasty, listen to Michael Jackson and become Christians, doesn't make them any less Asanti then Asanti in the distant past.

The Sunday NYTimes Magazine published an excerpt of the book here (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/magazine/01cosmopolitan.html?ex=1293771600&en=065751ceb5e1741c&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss), which prompted me to go out, and get the book. It's a good book, but kind of long-winded (but whoever heard of a philosopher who wasn't?).

Personally, as some one born and raised in America, I've come to the conclusion that I'm American. Just because I eat with chopsticks at home, celebrate Chinese New Year, and have random cravings for dim sum, doesn't make me any less American; in fact, my very actions are what makes dim sum, and Chinese New Year "American holidays." To some extent, everyone borrows from everyone else, and borders and lines exist more in our minds then in reality.