Double vision

[starlady]

I was reading this Threadbared post by Mimi Thi Nguyen on cultural appropriation and came across the following:

[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.

Comments

[troisroyaumes]

Thanks for the link; it's a very good article. It reminds me of this PBS documentary on copyright issues with hip hop remix culture, where they had a lot of (white male) musicians decry sampling as not truly creative, while they had a lot of (young black/Latino male) DJs talk about being sued and no longer being able to afford to legally produce the music that they'd been making. The racial dynamic was very clear and commented on briefly in the video.

[starlady]

Yesterday's edition of the World Cafe had a fascinating talk with RJD2 going over how he creates sample-based music: it is shit-tons of work and if it's not creative I don't know what is (and he was frank about not being able to afford to be able to get permissions for his stuff per copyright law).

But, yeah. The cultural capital (and the default assumption of moral authority) are all on the wrong sides of these imbalances.

[langwidere]

Hey, I haven’t been around much because of work (or, actually, "work"), but I just saw this and had to comment. Because: Dude! ♥

1.) Wow, that was some funny. I actually own one of her books! Someone told me it was gay, and I would read a book called People Watching Paint Dry if it was gay, but I have never actually gotten around to reading it. I will remedy this shortly, so I can write a 6,000-word fanfiction based on it. Which is punctuated with extremely pornographic sex scenes. Some of which may or may not involve gorillas.

2.) Does she actually not appreciate the difference between people and fictional characters?

3.) I’ve heard, over the years, that a bunch of different, random authors hate fanfiction, especially fanfiction based on their glorious, rarified literary novels. My reaction is generally… and? So? If you can’t stand the thought of dirty, dirty fantards playing with your precious imagination children, don’t sell them to us. Once I buy a book, I can think anything I want about it. And then, watch me as I write those thoughts down. And push the "Post" button. And now let’s spend a couple of hours carefully differentiating between fanfiction and, say, The da Vinci Code.

4.) Does she actually not see any relationship between people writing fanfiction based on her novels, and herself writing novels based on the historical record? Because that makes me sad for her.

5.) Having said that, I kind of feel a little oogie when people sell fanart prints on DeviantArt or sell fanfiction in convention zines. Because I guess I’m a hypocrite?

Anyway, this will not cease to be interesting anytime soon. Thanks for the link.

[starlady]

Apparently also her Jamie character is based on Jamie who was a companion of the second Doctor. Yeah, I lol'ed about that for a good five minutes.

Having said that, I kind of feel a little oogie when people sell fanart prints on DeviantArt or sell fanfiction in convention zines. Because I guess I’m a hypocrite?

I have those instincts too, and I question them, but I've not worked through it systematically. I think there is a lot of value placed w/in fandom on the fannish economy not being "capitalist" or for-profit. But at the same time...at the same time, I don't like limits. This came up in a big way last month when the OTW asked for feedback on the idea of original fic on the AO3.

[merin-chan.livejournal.com]

Wow, thanks for this! I'm trying to get a conference presentation together right now on the film Sita Sings the Blues (http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/) and issues of privilege and exoticism are just what I'm struggling with. You should check out Sita, if you haven't seen it. It's right at the intersection of fandom and cultural globalization issues. On the one hand, the animator, Nina Paley, has taken a lot of flak for "appropriating" the Ramayana as an American woman. But on the other hand, she's determined not to commodify the film's content, releasing it online for free and asking everyone to copy, share, and remix it. If she assumes the stance of entitlement that Nguyen (quoting Rosalind Krauss) critiques, that artists should be free to express themselves as they want, she also insists that anyone can be an "artist" through transformative works.

As you say, cultural appropriation and fanworks aren't the same thing. But I agree that something about the basic model is comparable. Anyone who creates things using other things (and what else can we do?) stands in multiple relations to power, privileged in some ways and disadvantaged in others. Fans, too, are complicit in some dominant discourses, but collaborate to work against others. That's the kind of thing we need to work through, in order to determine "the significance of each act" of cultural crossing beyond just saying "some people can use this text, and some people can't."

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

Anyone who creates things using other things (and what else can we do?) stands in multiple relations to power, privileged in some ways and disadvantaged in others. Fans, too, are complicit in some dominant discourses, but collaborate to work against others.

Oo, gold star; I like that phrasing.

I keep meaning to sit down and watch Sita; I downloaded it at least a year ago. Maybe I will queue-jump it to the front of my stack of anime.