The Lives of Others: When does imagination become appropriation?
harpers.org
harpers.org
Why use such an umbrella term when the negative instances are usually done with obvious malice? Why should people stifle their creativity because they are influenced by 'not their' culture. I wish people would stop using this term, and just call out people bent on intending harm, and not just for being insensitive to some made up norm.
With that said, a lot of the problem stems from the fact that a popular author from the "outside" culture is going to have a lot more influence on what others in the outside culture believe/understand about the "inside" culture.
As an example from my community, just about every movie written about transgender people by a cisgender person spends a lot of time showing the subject putting on makeup or wearing heels, implying that the essence of what it means to be a trans woman is wearing makeup or high heeled shoes... But it isn't the case.
That would almost be ok, but the popular movie is going to get a lot more airtime than an indie movie made by a trans person which shows what our real lives are like. In fact, that movie may not get made at all.
So it's worse having the popular movie out there, making money off of our lives, but misrepresenting them at the same time. (And this is all assuming that no harm was intended... it's still harmful, and it happens all the time.)
I also think that the problem is misrepresentation then, and not authorship.
An indie film about transgender people is far more likely to be representative of reality regardless of who writes the script because those films often self select for funding that doesn't come with the same kind of strings attached.
(somewhere I once ran across a discussion of "Starship Troopers" the book vs. "Starship Troopers" the movie, complete with a matrix of reactions depending upon how ironically one thought the ideas presented in each should be taken)
Though I think it should bear an asterisk: the stakes are higher for some people. Based on my experience, I think movies about musicians are often pretty stilted, but that kind of thing can be brushed off a little easier for me than misrepresenting a person's innate identity can be for them (as in the parent comment's position). And then—enter the always waiting host of philosophical questions.
edit: Felt like adding a little to my comment. I've always figured art was as much an exploration as an expression. I'm not sure anyone should be judged for a single work in that case—but there are abundant nuances to that kind of statement so don't hold it against me.s
Interestingly, this suggests that accurate portrayals of marginalized group X probably do exist, for most values of X. But their accuracy prevents them from becoming popular, so most people in the complement of X are either unaware these portrayals exist, or aren't interested in them. Popularity partly involves pandering to confirmation bias, so portrayals of X that land too far outside X[complement]'s biases are in danger of being dead on arrival in terms of popularity.
There also seems to be some evidence we can overcome this in the long run through a kind of successive approximation. Portrayals of (for example) homosexuality are more accurate today than they were two generations ago, partly because each successive popular portrayal built on the increasing accuracy of the previous one.
In time, we may see the same thing happen here, though that may come as small comfort to the folks who are living through the transition.
Any group can get together, make a film, put it up on YouTube, etc.
The thing is, membership in a group is no longer sacrosanct. Ask all the women who opposed men entering their space by being trans. Further, freedom of speech guarantees you can never have a monopoly or even majority of the portrayal of anything.
You do have some options though. Someone says “oh, I saw X movie, I know all about you”. Better than saying “that movie sucks” is “you really should check out Y. They really went out of their way to get it right”.
Black, Hispanic, etc portrayals have all gone through “lazy, stupid, subservient, gangster, normal guy in sweater with honest job, formerly criminal, now reformed older wiser person” till finally successfull, intelligent maybe lawyer, doctor, whatever person who is X first, ethnic second.
Having a few films at the ready is the best but most expensive solution I suspect.
It feels like you're talking about the views of cultural appropriation you bring to the table, but you aren't addressing "American Dirt" and the money that went into that book and the inaccuracies that reside in it* -- I think Russo treated this point quite lightly and quite deeply at the same time -- nor are you addressing the very real questions writers themselves have about representation, mis-steps, and the place of "own voices".
If you hang out with writers, for instance, you will find that many are concerned with how to 1) make their characters reflect the world they live in, which does have people from many ethnic/racial/religious/socioeconomic/gender backgrounds, and yet 2) write that diversity in a way that isn't fake, isn't offensive, isn't distracting for stupid reasons, etc. That's why this article was a good read. If you wanted to write a scene in which your black female main character was taking care of her hair before she goes to bed... would you know how? How would you learn? Would you understand the nuances?
There's a reason that the scene where Annalise Keating removes her wig in How to Get Away With Murder happened in a show conceived of and run by a black woman. I don't think most white guys know the first thing about Black women's hair! And the question there is not about appropriation, it's about getting the details of a character and scene right. If you were driven to write the story of your black woman fighter pilot or whatever and a Black woman training at Vance Air Force Base read it, 'Would [your character] feel real to them? Or would they laugh her out of the [plane], and [you] along with her? Because, come on. Who is this middle-aged American writer who clearly never spent a minute in a[n air force base], or in a [fighter pilot's seat], or probably even [being a Black woman]? What gives him the right to intrude so arrogantly into our lives? Why doesn’t he understand that [her] story simply isn’t his to tell?' And are those the right questions?
* there are some poignant and pointed articles about American Dirt as well as some hilarious twitter takedowns making fun of the inaccurate Spanglish and the 'machete' in the book that's very small and folds like a penknife...
The question he seems to be wrestling with is where the boundary is in his own mind between doing so for right or wrong reasons. It is not as obvious as blatant ill-intent: the desires for fame and commercial success, while perfectly reasonable on their own and necessary for a writer who makes a living from their craft, could blind the author to ways in which they fail to do justice to the experience of others.
My guess though is that for most authors the problems of ill-intent are rare, and that a failure of execution is far more likely the real issue. Writing believable characters of any stripe is tough work.
Blackface is only incidentally poison, because white depictions of black people were harmonious with white treatment of black people. Any condemnation of minstrelsy in my opinion should cover most current popular music and dance. From my perspective, if blackface is "obviously malicious", so is Britney Spears and Lady Gaga.
So I wonder how you can so confidently draw the line there, without being suspicious at all (in fact finding the thought distasteful) that majority interpretations of other marginalized groups would normally end up reinforcing that marginalization?
I do feel that cultural appropriation of black Americans is such a deeply baked part of US culture, and by extension US-imitating world culture, over the past 200 years, that insisting that people stop is not a thing that is possible, and may not even be justifiable. Aping a caricature of black American culture is as intrinsic to most non-black people as actual black culture is to black people. You would think there were more than 40 million of us around: there are far more people pretending to be us at any moment than actually being us. Things that we do are seized upon so quickly that non-black sales determine black distribution.
> just call out people bent on intending harm
You can't actually believe this. This is about harm prevention, not punishment. I don't think it's my job to judge intention.
Straight Outta Surrey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bj7J7vXCf5w
I am fine with it. But then again, he does acknowledge his sources:
Hip Hop Was To Blame After All: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkES4anCYOw
My words might not have been nuanced enough.
The obvious problem I see with blackface, is the inherent condescendence and mockery in it. When you say someone is stupid and lazy, it's pretty clear it's not intended as a complement. It's deragatory. In this sense I find it "intending to do harm". The intention is to peripitate a deragatory notion about an entire population. I can't see a way this is painted as positive. Even if it is accompanied by 'compliments' like crafty and fun.
It's obvious to the performer and crowd that lazy and stupid is morally bad (according to their moral code) so the negativity is not incidental as you say.
> You can't actually believe this. This is about harm prevention, not punishment. I don't think it's my job to judge intention
First, I see calling out as a way to prevent harm. Because it sets the norm that this 'bad thing' is bad. Regarding intention, I may have miswrote. Like in the example above, it's clear that the blackface performance was making negative claims about a whole population. I say clear, because the participating parties agree that lazy and stupid are morally bad. It's easy to test. call them lazy and stupid and see how they react.
I also think it follows that painting a marginalized population as morally bad is marginalizing. Not the fact that it is white performers in black face.
I don't really understand how the actual act of appropriation is bad in it self. As you say, black American culture is a major part of American culture. Taking this sentence alone, it's hard to understand how that is a bad thing.
The bad thing, is the social 'revenue' isn't collected by originators. Again, the problem is not appropriation, it's the dissonance between the value generated by black American culture and the black American economic and social status.
I hope I was clearer now. English is not my first language so be gentle :)
Russo also wrote a book that revealed very private details of his late mother's life. Did he owe her still-living friends and relatives silence until they too were gone? The conclusion is: no, authors write about what seizes their attention. But he doesn't really seek to absolve himself. It's more like an addict talking about addiction: "I took another drink, because that's the compulsion I felt."
The well-received story about a Belgian nun was received mostly among his English-language readers in the United States. Not nuns or Belgians. What was the Belgian nun reception like? Russo doesn't know. He suspects it would be less enthusiastic, because they would spot the cracks in his story more readily. The closer the readers are to the life experience of the characters, and the further the author is from his characters, the more the author risks readers' trust in trying to write those characters.
There's also a characterization-gap risk regarding authors and other authors as well as regarding authors and readers. If Russo sells novels with characterizations of Belgian nuns or black men, what does that do to the literary prospects of actual Belgian nuns or black men who are trying to sell their first manuscript? Can he end up non-maliciously but thoroughly quashing their publishability just by showing up first, even if his nuns are less authentic than those written by an actual nun? Quite possibly, yes. Russo posits that the struggle for position among authors has become more desperate in recent years. Publishers aren't as patient about investing in new talent because they are facing more financial pressure. That means that established authors like himself can casually, even accidentally, displace authors who could draw better portraits of certain kinds of characters. That's unfortunate for those would-be authors and for the reading public.
Authors do variable amounts of research to background their characters. Sometimes shockingly little. Many HN readers can probably relate to encountering an eyeball-rolling "hacking" scene in a thriller. It's possible that a diligent author can write a character of a certain background just as well never having lived it, but the odds are not in their favor.
The not-having-lived-it problem leads to some interesting challenges with historical fiction. Nobody alive today has been a 14th century French knight. Which authors really try to do their research and don't just treat time and place as set dressing for generic drama? How much work am I going to do as a reader to discover these harder-working authors? Sometimes I wonder: should I just dive in to scholarly source material about medieval history instead of reading novels set there? Sometimes the answer is "yes, just read history."
When the whole thing is fiction, you don't need to fuss about which parts are historically accurate.
Historical fiction must necessarily be a blending of truth and lies, and as such it has never held my interest.
This is an important point. On some level, it seems like Russo believes that right and wrong are not the most important thing here. It really all comes down to this: I had the power to do so, and I wanted to, so I did. But, at least he is thoughtful about it, and recognizes how fraught the situation is.
I don't know if he is even wrong. A lot of things in life are about power. A lot of times, something that is within your power to do will make other people unhappy. You can be paralyzed by thinking about all the different ways that someone might disapprove of what you do. There's no final arbiter to tell you when you should consider those people's feelings above your own desires. On the other hand, prosocial behavior is also important. It's something we all have to balance for ourselves.
This critical sentence is artfully written in the passive voice. Who decides if the story is misbegotten, inaccurate, offensive, etc.?
The author? The majority of people who share a characteristic with one of the characters in the story? A sliver of said population, who are very active on Twitter?
In an essay this long, I expected that this critical question would not have been glossed over.
> This critical sentence is artfully written in the passive voice. Who decides if the story is misbegotten, inaccurate, offensive, etc.?
I think it’s not actually in the passive voice, except possibly that “become clear”. It seems as if you may be reading it as if the author is acting out of fear of others’ judgement, but notice that Russo doesn’t say “I’d have to stop if it was offensive”—a fear of others’ reactions—but rather “I’d have to [stop] if it … was misbegotten”, which I take in the sense of ‘ill conceived’. That is an internal judgement, not an external one, and in this context I think the answer to your question is clear: Russo, being the only one who knows for sure how he conceived his story, is the one who decides if it is ill conceived.
But we're now sort of off-topic, methinks.
[1] Etymology Online: "bastard, illegitimate, unlawfully or irregularly begotten," 1550s, past-participle adjective from obsolete misbeget "beget wrongly or unlawfully" (c. 1300), from mis- (1) "badly, wrongly" + beget
So the easy filter of "author Y is not X, and therefore should not write about X because X will be misrepresented" doesn't stand. The second objections seems to be about market failures: "author Y is not X, and therefore is taking an opportunity from authors who do belong to group X." Personally, I don't think art is zero-sum. I don't believe that, for every book that was published by a well known author, a lesser known author was rejected. And I'd like to point out that, while publishers may still be important, we live in an age when artists can publish their work online and go directly to their readers. Those that build a following will get picked up. Those that don't may use that feedback to reflect on their style. The urge to write doesn't guarantee anyone a living.
Regardless, the concept of "cultural appropriation" is absurd and dangerously ignorant.
Thinking about it makes me want some Korean Street tacos right now. Which are amazing, by the way.
I share your sense that "cultural appropriation" is an absurd notion. But I'm unable to provide any objective reasons for (or against) my views on this.
Does anyone know of a good, principled way to debate questions like "Is 'cultural appropriation' a concept that belongs in our ethical systems?"
I don't know if my definition is good, but I have a working definition of 'cultural appropriation' that says something can only be 'cultural appropriation' if it falls in the confluence of 1) erasure of the origins/failure to cite sources and 2) money being made, with additional penalties if it involves co-optation of a religious symbol or practice for the purpose of making money for people outside that culture. So for me, a white person running a generic sweat lodge for $2000 a visit would fit my definition. Generic yoga gets in there; Alison Roman's 'stew' would fit. Here's how I look at it: I can write a calculus textbook and sell it for money, but I can't claim I invented it and fail to give credit to Newton or Leibniz.
For instance, I don't think Korean tacos fit my definition of cultural appropriation because they do not 1) erase the contribution of the cultures involved (the very name 'cites the sources' and if you want to go learn more about Korean food or tacos, you can follow that culinary history back!).
The definition comes before you can debate whether the question belongs in our ethical systems. From there, how do you debate whether "Murder is wrong" belongs in our ethical systems? I would think you could follow the same path.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
MULTICULTURALISM, OR, THE CULTURAL LOGIC OF MULTINATIONAL CAPITALISM (1997)
https://newleftreview.org/issues/I225/articles/slavoj-zizek-...
The intro paragraph:
‘Those who still remember the good old days of Socialist Realism, are well aware of the key role played by the notion of the ‘typical’: truly progressive literature should depict ‘typical heroes in typical situations.’ Writers who presented a bleak picture of Soviet reality were not simply accused of lying; the accusation was rather that they provided a distorted reflection of social reality by depicting the remainders of the decadent past, instead of focusing on the phenomena which were ‘typical’ in the sense of expressing the underlying historical tendency of the progress towards Communism. Ridiculous as this notion may sound, its grain of truth resides in the fact that each universal ideological notion is always hegemonized by some particular content which colours its very universality and accounts for its efficiency[.]’
Žižek, Slavoj. Multiculturalism, or, the cultural logic of multinational capitalism. New Left Review, 1997.
https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:58909765
http://clarkbuckner.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/www.Zizek...
If it were true that there is no such thing as non appropriated culture, that would be a good starting point.
I don't know if that is the case but I suspect that it is ...
Looking at it from a free culture perspective the notion is an absurdity worse than even overreaching copyright although thankfully lacking its legal force. That something thousands of years old is still "under protection"? By those who don't even have a bill of sales or inheritance? It just compounds.
That said it is still possible that even if the framework is invalid that an objected action is still being dickish period.
Say for a few examples, Koreans would be more than justified in portraying Samurai as bloodthirsty hypocritical psychopaths given that well, they were that on their soil.
Or less extreme portrayals of the infamous failures of the mandarins and how their misplaced emphasises brought ruin.
[] Questions from this post about how to have deeper conversations about cultural appropriation: https://jamesmendezhodes.com/blog/2020/1/2/how-to-change-you...
I think that is ridiculous. You can talk to your own experience, you can educate others about your views, you can try to broaden what people consider normal and natural or tell them why actions come across as shitty to you, but telling people they are violating your rules is simply an inversion of the power dynamics. It may make you feel good but it doesn't help anyone understand you better or feel closer to you. What we need is fewer boundaries and more curiosity, not stronger distinctions between people.
Censorship is not the way to understanding.
(I often work with people who are not communicating in their mother tongue. When I spot an orthographical or grammatical "error", I try to treat that as a hint of what similar constructs in their mother tongue might be; I'm sure they do the same with my translation mistakes)
The idea that nobody but East Germans could write a fiction involving the Stasi is ridiculous, as is the idea that only East Germans are objective about it. And it’s not like it was a documentary any more that Doctor Strangelove (which also nailed it despite being imaginary) was. It’s fine that different people have different views, and I’d actually be very interested in an East German point of view.
But viewing History from outside is actually very valuable as well. There have been some American films on some historical events in my country, some of them good, some of them bad, but most of them interesting and instructive thanks to the foreign perspective.
How are you supposed to develop any form of empathy if you’re not allowed to put yourself in someone else’s shoes? How are you supposed to distance yourself and get a broader perspective if your point of view is the only one you accept?
Ultimately, malice is the problem, not the fact that people write about others. Some have Americans playing as foreigners. What’s the problem? There are lots of English playing Americans.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VKBgxOY5g8 is Sting's reminiscence[1] of how his song "Russians" came to be; having watched some USSR kid's TV[2] myself, I agree with him that the russians did, in fact, love their children too.
[1] Sorry it's a video, the article I originally read has gone down the memory hole.
[2] hint: YT search gives different results in latin and in cyrillic. Separating BRD from DDR will be more difficult.
I fell for the clickbait :)