Cultural Appropriation — advanced seminar for extra credit.

[catsidhe]

Definition: It is Cultural Appropriation when one culture takes characters and stories from another culture and

1. use them ignorantly and insultingly in different contexts, or
2. retell those stories, in such a way as to ignore, negate, or even reverse the understanding of their meaning

This is made even more insulting when the appropriating culture (or representative; i.e., the author) turns around and lectures the original culture that that culture had it wrong all along, and the reinterpretation is, in fact, the correct and authoritative version. Or that the appropriation was done without knowledge of any any adverse interpretation, and therefore as an act without deliberate insult, it is therefore not insulting, just shut up and stop whingeing about it, if it's not important to me then it shouldn't be important to you, can't you see your accusations of insensitivity are hurtful to me?

Thesis: most classic Western movies are examples of Cultural Appropriation, in that they take the very concept of the Native American and contextualise them as The Other, barbarians and natural forces to be survived, conquered or annihilated; individually interchangeable.

Thesis: the Disney film Pocahontas is an example of Cultural Appropriation. (White Anglo America telling Native Americans about the history of early English/Native American Interaction, and the Native American rôle in it.)

Thesis: the Disney film The Little Mermaid is an example of Cultural Appropriation. (Taking a Danish fairy story, removing it from context, and then giving it a happy ending and sequels, which negating the point and moral of the original story.)

Thesis: the Disney film The Hunchback of Notre Dame is an example of Cultural Appropriation. (Taking a classic French novel of romance and tragedy, and giving it not only comic relief, but a happy ending (!) and sequels (!!), implicitly telling lovers of the Hugo original, ‘it's OK, but it could be better if we just change the ending completely and undo most of the tragedy, and add talking gargoyles clowns.’)



Discuss.

Comments

[lindsay40k.livejournal.com]

I recall recently reading in Why Do People Hate America? about how a production of Journey To The West seemingly replaced the character of Tripitaka with an American.

[omnot.livejournal.com]

I agree. What you have described is the reason that I kind of flinch at the knowledge that one day I will watch that "Australia" movie, which I expect to be loaded with just that kind of codswallop revisionism.

I find my sensitivity to this issue problematic because I do have a true* story or two that are begging to be told, and which I would like to flesh out in a semi-fictionalised way to assist dissemination... except that I do not feel that I have adequate 'ownership' of those events to entitle me to write about them.


*for a value of "true" equal to "story related to me as true by the local oral history repository as we drank our beer"

[catsidhe.livejournal.com]

It is, I think, possible to tell a story which is not your own, so long as you say so. “This is a story, as was told to me, and I tell it to you.”

It's not the simple telling of a story that is Cultural Appropriation, it is the theft of the story. It is when you take someone's story and tell it as if it were your own.


That's why the ‘Discuss’ part, though. Is it possible to tell someone else's story without stealing it? Obviously if they agree with the idea of you telling their story, then you have their blessing, but what if they don't? Black Americans can get upset when White Americans tell Black stories, but it's not just that, I think. My impression is that it is when the White author looks like they are presuming to speak on behalf of Black people that gets on their goat, possibly even more than when the story told is simply hostile. And when the response when called on it is “no I didn't”, that rubs salt in.

[lindsay40k.livejournal.com]

A little over a year ago I spoke at an African-Caribbean society meeting about the history of the slave trade, civil rights movement and the situation facing less developed countries in Africa. Everyone seemed very happy to hear what I had to say, and many wanted to hear a little more afterwards. I think the most important thing is to be respectful to both the subject matter and the audience.

I'm put in mind of when the (white) satirists John Bird and John Fortune recently performed a sketch in which Bird, in general's uniform but not in any way blacked-up, played the part of a corrupt president of an unnamed African republic, delivering his lines with a strong Afrikaans accent that didn't appear to be an exaggerated charcature. It struck me as quite a bold move, considering how white people making jokes about horrible assholes who happen to have dark skin is something of a taboo in left-wing British comedy, which has to contend with the history of racist "entertainment" like Bernard Manning and the Black and White Minstrel Show.

[catsidhe.livejournal.com]

There is a big difference between “This is not my story, but I am telling as best I know”, and “This may as well be my story, and I can change what I like.”

The whole White people poking fun at Black dictators was probably seen (with some truth) as less satirising Idi Amin (say), than using him to make a point about how all black black African leaders are ridiculous figures, aping their white betters badly.

Now, on the other hand, we can contrast Mugabe against Mandela.

[lindsay40k.livejournal.com]

I think it's an example of what Marx was talking about when he spoke of Darwinism in capitalism. It's not so much that the scriptwriters are consciously and deliberately following the old tradition of making sure any given story or report on historical finds amounts to blatant white-man's-burden propaganda with the unsubtle message that the western nuclear family unit is the benchmark by which all other cultures must be judged; it's that west-centrism and emotional dumbing down acts as a lowest common denominator of storytelling, with the Disney happy ending being where the biggest bucks are to be found.

Of course, this is not to overlook how this situation can be self-perpetuating; when children grow up surrounded by media such as this, with the most moving story they see being when a Pokémon is written out for good, it's unsurprising to see them go on to prefer similarly anaesthetised stuff for themselves and their children. In addition to my above example, the old Astro Boy series having the final episode cut for US broadcasting because it dealt with death comes to mind.

So, it's not a case of a few (or many) bad apples doing this, but rather it's an entire socio-economic system which gives rise to mass media acting as propagandist and censor to ensure that whichever layer of society throws the most money at it never has its preconceptions challenged or has to think of another point of view.

I suppose a related issue is the commercialisation of anti-capitalism; the classic example being the Che t-shirt, although more recently red stars and Soviet memorabilia seem to be getting popular in the 'alternative' markets (you know, the ones where being punk is defined by wearing pre-cut jeans that come fitted with safety pins that don't actually open). Again, conscious and deliberate attempt to undermine something, or simply the way capitalism automatically behaves?

[sjl.livejournal.com]

Disney does a lot of that sort of thing. Pinocchio. Aladdin. Beauty and the Beast. The Lion King. Hercules.

They're very fond of acting in that way - taking stories from the public domain, twisting them to suit their own ends without regards to the intention of the original, and then claiming them as their own.

[xi-o-teaz.livejournal.com]

I call that "Disney-fying" things, a la' "and they all lived Happily Ever After. The End. Until next year's sequel." But to be fair, I don't think Disney actually claims the originals as "their own," so much as takes original material and "makes their own version of it."

I do hafta give props to Disney for taking such Pagan stories and presenting them to the American public as early as the 50's, when the US was still quite overtly a Christian nation.

[omnot.livejournal.com]

On a similar theme of flattening dramatic content to minimise the 'risk of causing emotional scarring'; the mangling of "Swan Lake" into a palatable form to be presented as a "Barbie" movie. Whaaa... ?

[sjl.livejournal.com]

I seem to remember - but bear in mind that my memory may be misleading me - Disney going after, very aggressively, anybody that produced a film (or even talked about producing a film) based upon the same source material as one of their films. To be fair, it's possible that said productions had references to the Disney-specific source material.

I'm also less than impressed at the "happy ending" to (for example) "The Little Mermaid" - even as a relatively young teenager, when it came out, I was thinking, "Hang on, isn't the mermaid supposed to die at the end?!"

[catsidhe.livejournal.com]

Actually, even worse. She kept her legs, and married the prince and lived a long life, and every step on those legs for the rest of her life was like walking on knives and broken glass.

There are other versions where she dies. Charles de Lint wrote a version where the ‘prince’ is a vacillating twit, and by the time he decides that he really does love her, it's too late and she has dissolved into a puddle and died.

[sjl.livejournal.com]

I remember the knives and broken glass bit, but the version I had saw her die. Because she had no soul, she was forced to spend an age (can't remember how long offhand) drifting around the world as a spirit, gazing upon children. Each child that was a joy to its parents would reduce the time needed by one year; each child that was a burden, she would weep over, and each tear would add one day.

Ahh, right, I see now...

[cthulu-for-pm.livejournal.com]

It wouldn't surprise me if you were remembering Disney's actions clearly.

While they do produce good films (especially if you aren't aware of the original context/culture that they were taken from), their continual assault on the public domain really pisses me off.

Mangle the stories all you want, though we'd prefer you didn't (you are, after all, profit driven first and foremost, and happy endings obviously sell better), but don't prevent other people from telling the same stories their way.

Sorry, this whole thing just pushed several of my hot buttons... :-/

[catsidhe.livejournal.com]

Fantasia ended with a Christian hymn.

Fantasia 2000 (a Disney original concept which I would dearly love them to do more of) ended with Stravinsky's the Firebird, done as a flat-out pagan story of the resilience of Spring, what with the Spirit of spring being woken by the Horned Lord, accidentally waking the Firebird egg and being undone by the volcano, then rediscovering hope and triumphing after all. Completely, utterly Pagan, beginning to end.

[catsidhe.livejournal.com]

I think, on the contrary, that Disney make it their business model to own these stories.

There are legal limits as to what they can claim, and they go to the very edge and as far beyond as they can get away with, but that's not their whole plan. Their main business is to take classic stories, and make sure that when you think of Hercules, or the Little Mermaid, or Sleeping Beauty, or the Hunchback of Notre Dame, or Aladdin, or Pinnochio, or the Beauty and the Beast, you think of their version first and, if possible, only their version.

And while they can't own the story, they can own their representation of it, and if that is the only version people can think of (and when you remember that most of these are aimed directly at children), then they effectively do own the story, in terms of mindshare.

How many people see Ares and Pluto as an actively malevolent adversaries, rather than as a not-very-smart soldier and a Power who is bound by his own, inscrutable and inhuman rules, respectively?

Cause that's the problem. They're taking those pagan stories, repackaging them as their own, and in the process completely missing the point of the stories.

Exasperation and the Dissenting Opinion (or Welcome to the PoMo Dome)

[usuakari.livejournal.com]

It's no secret that a conscience can sometimes be a pest
It's no secret ambition bites the nails of success
Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief
All kill their inspiration and sing about their grief

(The Fly, U2)

Catsidhe, take a deep breath and relax. You're right in that Disney (and sundry others) mangle stories from other times and places. So do your favourite authors. Is it just possible that you don't mention them because you liketheir stuff, and are not so much a fan of Disney's?

Without the ability to change and blend ideas and stories do you think we would have new ones? Or simply endless, and very respectful, retellings of the same old ones over and over again? I think we need both myself. I also think we have both. In abundance.

Oh, and I can live with Disney ending the first Fantasia with Ave Maria, just as I can live with them ending the second with The Firebird Suite. The balance works fine. Arguably, the first Fantasia is a product of it's time and place, much as the legends of the TDD where for our ancestors or the exploits of the Monkey King where for Asia. In a century or less others will be appropriating images and concepts from Fantasia, taking them out of their original context and still others will be gritting teeth all over again.

Re: Exasperation and the Dissenting Opinion (or Welcome to the PoMo Dome)

[catsidhe.livejournal.com]

Actually, I'm not upset over this issue, I'm interested. Especially in what other people think about it.

I have seen, on other members of my flist, the fall out from various dramas on the topic of appropriation, whether white people telling black people what their stories mean, or white women telling transgenders what they really want, and things of that sort. And the problem is usually, from what I've seen, not the perceived appropriation alone, but when people point out “I'm offended by that,” the response is along the lines of “no you're not”, or “you are wrong about your own stories”, or similar statements of arrogance and wilful ignorance.

I had a moment of lucidity at 3:00am the other night, and thought that if a white SciFi author can insult black people by presuming to tell a story from their viewpoint, then Disney has done this fairly consistently over the decades, only instead of a privileged white person appropriating black culture, it was a quintessentially American corporation appropriating native-american culture, or Danish, or French, or English. At what point does the use of another culture in fiction become appropriation? What makes something appropriation, and when is it pastiche, or a creative pov, or a deliberate re-contextualisation? Is it necessarily appropriation if the source culture don't like it? What if it's true?

I personally love Fantasia, in all its incarnations. I wish there were more of them. It is something that is unique to Disney, and praiseworthy for any number of reasons. The Ave Maria is just as valid as the Firebird, and I wouldn't miss either of them (personally, I prefer the Firebird, but that's just my taste).

I just wanted to see where people drew the line. And my issues with things like what Disney did to Hunchback, or Aladdin, or the Little Mermaid, is the violence done to the stories rather than the insult to the culture from which they come. The existence of a sequel to the Hunchback of Notre Dame is an insult to Victor Hugo, but not necessarily to France.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_zombiemonkey/]

I think most of human culture is an appropriation, and often not a very considerate, sometimes even directly malicious appropriation at that. The human tradition of myth and legendry is one long pastiche of a pastiche, with little regard for the sanctity or integrity of the original. Religion is without doubt highly antagonistic cultural appropriation.

Consider: A small group of dissident Jews appropriate myths to create a need for a messiah at a specific time in Judea for the specific purpose of delivering them from oppression. These dissident's beliefs are later appropriated by Gentiles to make the belief system accessible to non-Jews. These Gentile's beliefs, alongside the early Jewish beliefs are later appropriated into the backdrop of another belief system that tells them they're both wrong. Even later, certain Americans start believing the Bible was written in English for white Americans. They launch global terrorism/jihad on anyone who disagrees with 'their' religion.

I don't know that this is right or wrong, I think it is rather an integral way that human beings approach fiction or belief. It causes problems, it foments enmity, but it also enables the relevance of tales to a new audience. Few stories ever remain static, even when free from external appropriation.

[drjon.livejournal.com]

Startlin' Stan Lee's The Mighty Thor.