Cultural appropriation: de laatste mode in politieke correctheid

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Cultural appropriation is the adoption or use of elements of one culture by members of another culture. Cultural appropriation is seen by some as controversial, notably when elements of a minority culture are used by members of the cultural majority; this is seen as wrongfully oppressing the minority culture or stripping it of its group identity and intellectual property rights. This view of cultural appropriation is sometimes termed "cultural misappropriation". According to critics of the practice, cultural (mis)appropriation differs from acculturation or assimilation in that the "appropriation" or "misappropriation" refers to the adoption of these cultural elements in a colonial manner: elements are copied from a minority culture by members of the dominant culture, and these elements are used outside of their original cultural context—sometimes even against the expressed, stated wishes of representatives of the originating culture.

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Marc Jacobs defends himself in dreadlocks-on-catwalk row

The designer says he ‘does not see colour’ after being accused of racial insensitivity for having mainly white models wear dreadlocks

The fashion designer Marc Jacobs has defended himself against allegations of racial insensitivity after he used dreadlocks in his New York fashion show but cast mainly white models to wear them.

While some criticised what they saw as a case of cultural appropriation, Jacobs said he saw only people, not their race. “[To] all who cry ‘cultural appropriation’ or whatever nonsense about any race or skin colour wearing their hair in any particular style or manner – funny how you don’t criticise women of colour for straightening their hair,” the designer said.

He addressed the allegations in the comments attached to one of a series of images from his New York show on Thursday, which were posted on his Instagram account. “I respect and am inspired by people and how they look. I don’t see colour or race – I see people. I’m sorry to read that so many people are so narrow minded … Love is the answer. Appreciation of all and inspiration from anywhere is a beautiful thing. Think about it,” he wrote.

Many people responded to the images of supermodels including Gigi and Bella Hadid, Karlie Kloss and Jourdan Dunn, by asking why Jacobs had decided not to cast more black models when he was showcasing a hairstyle they closely associated with black culture. And they attacked his comparison with the attitudes towards people from black and ethnic minority backgrounds straightening their hair. The pressure many feel to do so is in itself a form of racism, they argued.

One Instagram user, whose handle was king.kourtt, wrote: “Saying ‘I don’t see colour’ is honestly just a way of avoiding the obvious issue at hand. Racism and culture appropriation so exist! By avoiding the problem you are the problem. Please remember that. By having these conversations, in a respectful manner of course, we can turn this situation into a positive learning opportunity.”

Another, using the handle orangevg, asked: “If you don’t see colour then why are your models 95% white?”

And a third, Golbone, wrote: “I really hope you take the time to research and understand the nuances that differentiate cultural ‘appreciation’ and ‘appropriation’. As an artist I know that the lines can blur as inspiration hits but the fact that you have been so resistant to hear the outcry from a large mass of your fans and followers is just sad and disappointing.”

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Lionel Shriver right, protesters wrong at Brisbane Writers Festival

Brisbane has a writers' festival – who knew? Ah. the outlier's enduring yearning (and failure) to present as avant-garde! A doomed enterprise. After all, a writers' festival would surely require geographic proximity to a catchment of people who can read.

A Sydney Morning Herald report, run prominently on Fairfax websites, nigh on breaks the internet on Sunday. "US author's Brisbane Writers Festival speech prompts walk-out." Interest piqued, I click and read on. The US author is Lionel Shriver, but remarkably, not a word of her speech is included in the article. All I can glean is that two people – two! – walked out of it.

One is "celebrated Australian writer" Yassmin Abdel-Magied. I have never heard of this person (which hardly precludes them from any warranted acclaim). Her website tells me she has expressed her opinions to many radio, print and TV fora (including, the pinnacle of the talking head genre, Q&A). She gave a TEDx talk. She has not written novels, celebrated or otherwise; but aged 24, she did publish her "coming-of-age" memoir, Yassmin's Story. So basically Holly Ransom in a headscarf. "Asking to be respected  –  is that asking for too much?" she blogged after her statement exit. "Apparently, in the world of fiction, it is."

I still have no visibility of the appalling infelicities Shriver has committed in her speech.

The second protester, Yen-Rong Woong, is a festival volunteer – dissidence being a most awkward proclivity in an usher. "As a semi-aspiring writer myself, and one who has sunk a significant amount of time and brain power to discussing subversive women and Othered characters in non-Western societies, Shriver's address was alarming, to say the least," she, too, later blogged.

What are "Othered characters", I wonder? There is a very real chance I lack both the time and brain power to understand the concept.

By Tuesday, The Guardian has published Shriver's address in full.

The self-described iconoclast had defended "cultural appropriation", rabid hostility to which now has a chokehold on Western universities, with its "safe spaces" and "trigger warnings" and human Snowflakes. Maine students who wore sombreros to a Mexican-themed tequila party are disciplined for their "act of ethnic stereotyping". Ohio students forced "culturally appropriated" sushi off the menu of their dining hall. And so on.

It's one thing on coddled campuses, but how can you impose this preposterous dogma – by whose measure it is offensive for any man to write a woman, any straight person to write a gay person, any white person to write a non-white person and any able person to write a disabled one – on fiction, which is "self-confessedly fake, about people who don't exist and events that didn't happen"? The ultimate endpoint, Shriver concludes: "all that's left is memoir."

But according to Abdel-Magied, "it's not always okay if a white guy writes the story of a Nigerian woman because the actual Nigerian woman can't get published or reviewed to begin with". The actual Nigerian woman? The one he made up? This has to be a f***ing wind-up, surely?

Yen-Rong agrees. "The publishing industry is chock full of white men … the subaltern continue to be silenced, and still cannot speak." Actually, the publishing industry is chock full of white women, but we guess they're bad too, being, like Shriver herself, insufficiently subaltern.

It's the most extraordinary bullshit, none of it new. Shriver (who in We Need to Talk About Kevin dared appropriate the perspective of a mass murderer's maternally frigid parent) is merely responding to the same diversity extremism that riled the likes of Tom Wolfe, Robert Hughes and Allan Bloom 30 years ago; responding to an ideology that would sentence half of our canon to the bonfire, delegitimising Thomas Keneally's Jimmie Blacksmith and his Auschwitz Jews, Peter Carey's Ned Kelly and Richard Flanagan's POWs on the Burma Railway. Those characters, it stipulates, were stolen, their authors – stinking of privilege – oppressors.

Gift of imagination

By this thinking, Australia's only notable novels are: We of the Never Never, The Getting of Wisdom and My Brilliant Career (Miles Franklin a 16-year-old girl on the land, as Other in 1901 as today's voiceless Nigerian). If a male author could be tolerated, maybe Cloudstreet. Brisbane boy David Malouf (gay at least, but regrettably white) would've stopped at Johnno.

Clive James recalled this week, on Howard on Menzies, that Les Murray "was so clever that he didn't have to go abroad to know what the world was like". That's a gift of imagination I am both proud to feast on and to share a passport with. We all should be.

Here we are, a generation since Paul Keating railed against the cultural cringe, and a handful of dilettantes wedded to intellectualised victimhood would confine our most boundless voices, yesterday's and tomorrow's, to only coming-of-age memoir (a genre for which their personal preference is evincible). Those who disagree they equate with Pauline Hanson and Andrew Bolt, to "racial supremacy" and to genocide. Ironically, it is the prohibition of artistic composition outside personal experience that is most tyrannical, its logical conclusion an inbred oeuvre devoid of self-criticism or external perspective, devolving to onefold banality. Just ask ISIS.

Alas, now I must return to my debut novel: the story of a (white, male) failed talking head grappling with the brutality of life on the margins of subaltern Otherness. It'll be tough, but I reckon my powers of imagination will just get there. And won't it fly off the shelves…

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Op zaterdag 17 september 2016 19:30 schreef zeer het volgende:
Het ontgaat mij altijd volledig hoe dit soort anekdotische jankbal interpretaties van uitspraken van mensen of gebeurtenissen de officiële definitie van racisme zou veranderen.

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Cambridge University students in cultural appropriation row over Africa-themed formal dinner event

Student leading criticism takes issue with terms associated with ‘Disney animated movie’

The University of Cambridge has become involved in a cultural appropriation row after students organised an Africa-themed dinner using terms from Disney’s The Lion King.

The group from Queen’s College asked students in the invitation to the MCR Africa Formal if they would like to “travel far away,” adding: “Hakuna matata, here comes the solution.”

The invitation then highlighted a three-course dinner menu which would be offered on the night, and concluded: “Bring your rafikis along.”

In Swahili, ‘hakuna matata’ means ‘no worries’, while ‘rafiki’ translates into ‘friend’, two terms which became popular after the release of The Lion King in 1994.

Cambridge student, Alice Davidson, led the criticism in an online blog post in which she said the claims diners can “travel far away” meant that, in reality, they’d be “travelling to Cripps Dining Hall, which is incidentally only filled with portraits of white people.”

She also criticised the Facebook event’s “poorly chosen” cover photo of a tree in the Savannah at sunset, as well as the fact that only food from three countries was being offered “from a continent of over 50 nations.”

She further added that the term “hakuna matata” reads “something along the lines of Africa = Disney animated movie,” and wrote: “Perhaps if the initiative had come from members of the African Society of Cambridge University (ASCU) themselves, who could then determine the menu and terms of cultural exchange rather than being invited as a token afterthought.
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“In this sense, the Africa themed formal is most definitely cultural appropriation, but there are several ways this could have been avoided.”

The ASCU was then reportedly criticised by students who took to social media to question why the society was not involved in planning of the event.

According to The Telegraph, though, ASCU president, Halimatou Hima, confirmed Queen’s College had tried to work with them on the event, but that communications had “broken down” with the ASCU eventually withdrawing its support.

The Cambridge News reports that, in a statement, Ms Hima described how, given the “historical (and ongoing) prejudices” that have “defined interactions with the African continent and its peoples, I decided, as president of ASCU, it would be in our society’s best interest to withdraw.”

A member of ASCU, however, told The Tab the response has been “a little over-dramatic” which “really isn’t an enormous issue.”

The Independent has contacted the university for comment. However, several media reports have stated both the institution and Queen’s College have declined to do so.

In March, students at the university became embroiled in a similar row after leaders at a Pembroke College sparked debate over a decision to cancel an event themed ‘Around the World In 80 Days’ for fear it could cause offence.

Similarly, the University of Oxford sparked a race row of its own in November last year after two colleges outlined plans to hold end-of-year balls centered around the themes of ‘New Orleans’ and ‘The 1920s’.

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Op zaterdag 17 september 2016 19:57 schreef zeer het volgende:

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Ik herken echt helemaal niet dat met de zwarte piet discussie het ''ineens" racistisch geworden is om mensen op basis van hun huidkleur een bepaalde rol aan te meten die dienstbaar is aan een andere huidskleur. Dat is het altijd al geweest.

Dat er nu discussie losbarst of dat binnen de ethiek die wij met elkaar hebben past is een totaal ander verhaal.

Het valt mij ook op dat de kleinzerige rechtse groep mensen die zich hier allemaal zo expliciet over uit spreken ook altijd van uit een 'ai ik voel me betrapt'-rol spreken, waarbij zij het idee hebben zich te moeten verantwoorden dat ze vooral niet racistisch zijn, zonder dat zij dat op de allereerste plaats van beschuldigt zijn.

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Op zaterdag 17 september 2016 20:02 schreef zeer het volgende:

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Nogmaals: hoe veranderen dit soort anekdotische bewijzen de definitie van racisme?

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Op zaterdag 17 september 2016 20:08 schreef zeer het volgende:

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Wie zijn men?