Double vision
May. 6th, 2010 20:35I was reading this Threadbared post by Mimi Thi Nguyen on cultural appropriation and came across the following:
Given the Diana-Gabaldon-hates-fanfic brouhaha that has the interwebz riveted, my thoughts immediately went to these posts:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bookshop on the fannish, non-profit economy and sheafrotherdon's Stones. Glass Houses. News at 11.
That said, I absolutely, absolutely don't want to somehow give the impression that I am conflating the low status of fanfic in some but not all pro-writer circles with cultural appropriation, because I am not: they are completely different (..."issues" seems too small a word for cultural appropriation...) phenomena, the groups affected by each are for the most part not the same, and what's at stake in each is not commensurate (there are differences of scale worth nothing here too). But the potential applicability of Fusco's observations as formulated by Nguyen about the one to the other is striking to me nonetheless; the mechanisms seem to operate similarly. I am going to quote Nguyen quoting Fusco in closing, and add her books to my list, because she very clearly has a good idea about the proper response:
P.S. Threadbared is an academic blog on "beauty" and "fashion". Whoever thinks those are just women's stuff, and/or inherently less valuable, is missing out on some breathtakingly good thinking.
[Coco] Fusco also tackles the divide that assigns creativity to acts of appropriation of “exotic” or “other” cultural forms performed by privileged persons, and simultaneously decries as derivative those acts of parody, recycling, creolization, and adaptation of imposed cultural forms performed by non-privileged persons. In this troubling formulation, she argues, the privileged person is granted a sense of self-making or creative agency, while the non-privileged person is either a mimic or tragically “unnatural” and “inauthentic.”
Given the Diana-Gabaldon-hates-fanfic brouhaha that has the interwebz riveted, my thoughts immediately went to these posts:
bookshop on the fannish, non-profit economy and sheafrotherdon's Stones. Glass Houses. News at 11. That said, I absolutely, absolutely don't want to somehow give the impression that I am conflating the low status of fanfic in some but not all pro-writer circles with cultural appropriation, because I am not: they are completely different (..."issues" seems too small a word for cultural appropriation...) phenomena, the groups affected by each are for the most part not the same, and what's at stake in each is not commensurate (there are differences of scale worth nothing here too). But the potential applicability of Fusco's observations as formulated by Nguyen about the one to the other is striking to me nonetheless; the mechanisms seem to operate similarly. I am going to quote Nguyen quoting Fusco in closing, and add her books to my list, because she very clearly has a good idea about the proper response:
What is at stake in the defensive reactions to appropriation is the call to cease fetishizing the gesture of crossing as inherently transgressive, so that we can develop a language that accounts for who is crossing, and that can analyze the significance of each act. Unless we have an interpretative vocabulary that can distinguish among the expropriative gestures of the subaltern, the coercive strategies that colonizers levy against the colonized, and dominant cultural appropriative acts of commodification of marginalized cultures, we run the perpetual risk of treating appropriation as if the act itself had some existence prior to its manifestations in a world that remains, despite globalism, the information highway, and civil rights movements, pitifully undemocratic in the distribution of cultural goods and wealth. (77)
P.S. Threadbared is an academic blog on "beauty" and "fashion". Whoever thinks those are just women's stuff, and/or inherently less valuable, is missing out on some breathtakingly good thinking.