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

[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.