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It's not the job of the left, or anyone else, to freeze cultural relations at a specific moment in history. In cases where "cultural appropriation" is explicitly racist it should be called out and opposed but you can't really stop people from borrowing images, ideas, clothing, food or music from other groups. Trying to do so will just make you sound like an out of touch scold. I'd suggest that a better focus is the underlying relationships of power that make cultural appropriation so uneven. For instance, the real problem with white people "appropriating" the sound of black musicians in the 1950s was that black musicians didn't have the same access to musical recording studios or mass audiences. The way to fix that is to attack racism and economic inequality, not to try and police who is allowed to play certain types of music. A lot of the implications of this discourse on cultural appropriation seem massively conservative if they are carried through to their logical conclusions. I have no desire to help defend "traditional" cultures that are often themselves highly ethnocentric and sexist. As long as the underlying power relationships are relatively balanced I don't really care who steals from who because literally every culture that exists is an amalgam of past cultures.
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Apr 27, 2015 02:31
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 00:55 |
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