Cultural Appropriation is Dead, Long Live Cultural Appropriation

[THEANGEL&THEGAMBLER]

I've seen some Africans accuse Black Americans of stealing African culture. I think this article does a good job of explaining how appropriation isnt inherently negative as some of the internet discourse would have you believe.

Cultural Appropriation is Dead, Long Live Cultural Appropriation

Grantland, in its annual recap of all things pop culture, declared that cultural appropriation “won 2013.” To Grantland, cultural appropriation and the cottage industry of thinkpieces and outrage cycles it had engendered, were more culturally significant than even the iconic Kanye West. Kanye himself caught the cultural appropriation bug with his ill-advised attempt to rebrand the Confederate flag — a move which itself spawned an avalanche of thinkpieces. Nope, not even Kanye could escape cultural appropriation’s discursive dominance in 2013.

So, that means the Left won, right? Not so fast. For the concept to achieve popularity, certain sacrifices had to be made, such as abandoning context, clarity, nuance, and any real semblance of insight and political utility. Grantland naming it the year’s pop culture winner was more of a backhanded compliment than genuine appreciation.

For big chunks of the year, the Internet felt like it’d just taken its first sociology class and was ready to take on the world with the tools gained from that mind-blowing freshman seminar… And the barrier for entry into a discussion about cultural appropriation is so amazingly low (“I don’t like this”), anyone can participate. Rembert Browne, Who Won 2013

The web really does feel a bit like Sociology 101 sometimes. We’ve all read one cultural appropriation thinkpiece or another at some point. They tend to come in waves. Miley Cyrus twerks onstage, so left-liberals write thinkpieces. Urban Outfitters comes out with yet another trashy imitation, so we write thinkpieces. Macklemore dudebros his way to the top of the charts, so we write more thinkpieces. The cultural appropriation thinkpiece has become an annual Halloween tradition, a way to push back against the inevitable scores of White people wearing blackface, headdresses, sombreros, and other symbols of their colonial hegemony.

Appropriation is Not Inherently Bad
In our Sociology 101 articulations of cultural appropriation it’s simply known as something bad andavoidable. However, appropriation is not only inevitable, it’s also desirable. Take this audio clip of the poet Amiri Baraka talking about appropriation within the arts for example (h/t Drew).

"All cultures learn from each other. The problem is that if The Beatles tell me that they learned everything they know from Blind Willie [Johnson], I want to know why Blind Willie is still running an elevator in Jackson, Mississippi. It’s that kind of inequality that is abusive, not the actual appropriation of culture because that’s normal. I don’t think you can have a Duke Ellington without say, digging, you know, Beethoven… Everybody digs each other… The question is can they find a standard of living through their use." Amiri Baraka, Cross-Cultural Poetics Episode #141

As Baraka points out, appropriation is fine. Cultural diffusion is a good thing, and appropriation is a part of it. We want mixture, we want expression, and we want creativity. What we don’t want is exploitation. The issue here is one of power, and more specifically, the power to exploit.

Baraka is attempting to draw our attention to the material reproduction of exploitation, a reality which exists beyond the mere act of appropriation. Appropriation can of course be a site of further material exploitation, but remember, Blind Willie Johnson was stuck on that elevator before The Beatles ever heard of him.

Emancipatory Appropriation
Kathleen Ashley’s essay The Cultural Process of Appropriation offers a summary of the shifting conceptualizations of both culture and appropriation within various academic disciplines. According to Ashley, who is herself quoting Mary Louise Pratt, the concept transculturation attempts to account for “the ways that ‘subordinated or marginalized groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture’.”

Ashley uses the history of Black slaves embracing the liberation narratives of the Biblical Joshua and Moses as an example of this kind of emancipatory appropriation in action. She notes that these stories were useful because “the resistant messages encoded as Old Testament figures ‘passed’ in the disguise of ‘authorized’ religion.” As Ashley notes, marginalized communities have themselves used appropriation in response to “inequality, power, and domination” — a strategy that is often overlooked by the contemporary Left.