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