Cultural appropriation, pt. 2

Jun 01, 2006 11:11

Or, in which I make myself extremely unpopular and get flamed through the roof ( Read more... )

race/ethnicity/culture: asian-ness, wiscon, race/ethnicity/culture, great cultural appropriation debate of d

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coffeeandink June 1 2006, 18:18:56 UTC
Re: the last question, Greg Tate's Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture might be a good place to start.

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oyceter June 1 2006, 18:20:00 UTC
Thank you!! I realized at Wiscon how ashamed I was that I know nearly no feminist theory. And then I realized I know even less about race theory.

Sigh.

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coffeeandink June 1 2006, 18:28:50 UTC
Well, if it will help, these are some of the books that I still have from college:

Gloria Anzaldua, La Frontera/Borderlands
Gloria Anzaldua, Making Face, Making Soul/Cariendas
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought
Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America
Donna Haraway, Simians, Sex, and Cyborgs
Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science
Chandra Mohanty, Third World Women & the Politics of Feminism
Cherie Moraga & Gloria Anzaldua (eds.), This Bridge Called My Back (there's a followup called This Bridge We Call Home)
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark
Linda Nicholson, Feminism/Postmodernism
Minnie Bruce Pratt, Rebellion
Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mother's Gardens and Living by the Word

... and probably more I can't remember off the top of my head. For sf in particular, I'd recommend Russ, Delany, Sarah Lefanu, Gwyneth Jones, and Jenny Wolmark.

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oyceter June 1 2006, 18:31:52 UTC
And thank you again!!

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rilina June 1 2006, 18:25:17 UTC
The lurkers support you in e-mail! Er, I mean, this non-lurker supports you in comments!

Seriously, I'd like to respond at length; can't do so at the moment because am at work. But so much of what you've written resonates to me, especially, "But even if you think you're writing in a vacuum, your readers are not reading in a vacuum. People read in historical context."

More anon.

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oyceter June 1 2006, 18:32:58 UTC
Hee!

Yes, I would love this to go on, and I'm glad the topic is on LJ right now, though I'm still frustrated about where it's going in other threads.

Looking forward to your response.

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rilina June 1 2006, 19:06:34 UTC
Well, if the conversation is going to turn from the meta to the concrete, I think I'll have to write up my spiel on McKinley's Damar books. (Though I still grumble over having to reread them in order to write even a remotely fair or useful essay.)

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katie_m June 1 2006, 18:27:47 UTC
And from the comments, it does seem like a majority of the people asking these questions are from European/American descent. I am not finger pointing, I swear. I know that's a horribly passive-aggressive way to say it, but I really don't want to call people out because I think it's unproductive, and because I am reading through all four threads and trying to suss out common themes.

I actually think--and I am not saying you should feel obligated to do it!--but I actually think calling people out might very well be helpful. From my European-American perspective--and yes, I'm aware that means I'm speaking from a position of privilege--specifics are helpful. Saying "here's something to worry about, that you may well have no visceral understanding of because of your position of privilege--okay, go worry now!" sends me straight down the road to "well, fuck it then, I can't do anything right, so I won't bother," and I know that's not where you want the conversation to go. Whereas saying "look, here's something bad, right here," that ( ... )

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rachelmanija June 1 2006, 18:39:49 UTC
I think you're right, and what would be really helpful would be to shift the discussion toward the concrete as opposed to the meta, by providing examples of specific things in specific works that people feel are examples of cultural appropriation, and how that works in those specific books or movies or whatever, and how the people discussing them feel about it.

I get that it's a touchy subject and people frequently don't want to publicly criticize works in their own field, but even if no one wants to talk about books, examples from TV and movies would be useful.

(I believe Yoon and Oyce are doing this right now-- with books!)

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oyceter June 3 2006, 03:20:56 UTC
Yes, we will try! At least, I will!

I think I'll start with Novik, because... Qing dynasty China!

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katie_m June 5 2006, 03:34:31 UTC
people frequently don't want to publicly criticize works in their own field

This is the problem with people knowing where LJ is, dammit.

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rachelmanija June 1 2006, 18:34:41 UTC
This is totally tangential, but this reminds me of when we were in Mariposa and you remarked that you were probably the only Asian in the county and I said, "Well, I think my Dad and I are the only Jews in the county." But of course, there's a big difference between not being from the dominant culture but looking like you do (that is, in an area that does have a lot of Jews, like New York City, I would guess that random passers-by probably know what group I belong to, but in Mariposa, I would guess that people would just think I'm white (Are Jews white? I would say socially yes, culturally no)) and having everyone in the restaurant being able to see that you're a minority ( ... )

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oursin June 1 2006, 18:58:58 UTC
'Whiteness' itself is a construct - in recent discussion somewhere (I think misia's lj on panic over the white middle classes not breeding and being SWAMPED by philoprogenitive persons of other colours, I remarked that the Irish used to occup that position of Other. Also, within European context, people from around the Mediterranean often occupied a v liminal position, sometimes white and sometimes darker.

But yes, it's often hard to distinguish in large modern cities unless people are over-tuned to what they consider to be markers of The Other.

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rachelmanija June 1 2006, 19:04:30 UTC
I think this is probably drifting into "put it in the other post" territory, but that's the thought I was poking at. A person of Middle Eastern descent is considered white in some contexts, but probably not when they're in line at an American airport. And that is definitely off-topic here, so I will leave it at that.

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kaiweilau June 1 2006, 19:34:14 UTC
The converse of that is that "blackness" is also a cultural construct. The Ghanian philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has written extensively about how the idea of "Africa" and "Africans" and "black solidarity" is essentially an invention of the west and the New World. He teaches at Princeton and does alot of work on race, culture, and identity with Henry Louis Gates Jr.

When Nelson Mandela's daughter came in the early 90s as a guest lecturer at the university I attend, my African history professor ended up sitting next to her. During the banquet, she leaned over him and asked "What is this "Afrocentrism" I keep hearing about?"

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cofax7 June 1 2006, 18:36:30 UTC
I'm at work too (and just did a huge post) so no time to respond in detail. But I do not feel threatened or attacked, and I am grateful to you for making this post.

Some problems don't HAVE solutions.

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oyceter June 3 2006, 03:28:16 UTC
Eeee, I'm so jealous you've already read the third Temeraire book! Bookmarking the post till I get to the third book.

I wish I had a magic wand that made all these complicated issues of race and nationality and ethnicity and history and economics and stuff go away. Heh.

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