One of my favorites is that the racial composition of the backing studio musicians at Muscle Shoals for several classic quintessentially 'black' albums was primarily white. Also: how would 80s hip hop have changed if there was no Rick Rubin?
It all makes sense once you accept that these sour midwits hate music, art, food, and culture in general.
I check in every couple of days; it's hard to stay completely off of it and still keep up with "the conversation." Never fear, I have no account and never will again. But this one was such a big deal that I absorbed it through a Discord rather than finding it on Twitter directly.
The impending motte and bailey is as inevitable as the dawn: "cultural appropriation isn't actually all forms of cultural mixing and exchange! Cultural exchange is good. The term 'cultural appropriation' actually means [very narrow definition, involving genuinely offensive/problematic behavior]."
I should know, I used to be the one making that argument! Except, such narrow, thoughtful definitions were never the ones applied in reality. And besides, it was perfectly possible to describe why such behaviors were toxic without invoking "cultural appropriation", those magic words that flatten the world rather than reveal its complexities.
Here in the Truckee Meadows area, the traditional feathered headresses of the plains were unknown among the indigenous people here, the Paiutes, the Washoe and the Shoshone (I believe the latter used to enslave the former two and sell them to the Mexicans before the Anglos showed up, but I digress). However, in modern representations of Three Nations chiefs, they normally are wearing feathered headdresses. This is because, so I understand, an important local chief from the late 19th or early 20th century saw the plains headdresses, thought they were cool, and merrily culturally appropriated them for himself and his people. And this thoughtless cultural appropriation of a century ago manifests itself in many modern representations of the Three Nations.
Yes, but consider the violence to countless aboriginal and ancient cultures due to the Woke appropriation of that primordial body-affirming ritual – the tattoo.
I think there is a useful narrow definition, which is as the cultural equivalent to plagiarism - taking something from another culture without acknowledging the culture it came from and pretending (implicitly or explicitly) that it is your own.
It also has an easy and reliable test: if they credited their sources, then it's not cultural appropriation. If they didn't (and they actually were the sources), then it is.
There are some actually bad things that "cultural appropriation" refers to, but the phrase is utterly useless because it's been completely motte and bailed. I tend to say "cultural plagiarism" these days, because it isn't a pat phrase and it makes people think about what it means rather than just jump to one conclusion or the other.
When it's something like Pat Boone covering Little Richard, then there clearly is a problem. When it's Elvis covering Big Mama Thornton (and crediting her and talking about how great all the Black artists are that he's covered) then it should be clear that there isn't - everyone covered everyone else in the 1950s.
'It also has an easy and reliable test: if they credited their sources, then it's not cultural appropriation. If they didn't (and they actually were the sources), then it is.'
Stealing someone else's intellectual property is one thing (such as covering another person's song without credit). But how the hell are you going to "credit the source" for most things?
My family has a "stir fry" recipe. I have no idea where it originally came from. It's been modified again and again when handed down from my grandma to my mom to me. It bears little resemblance to anything Asian people would have come up with. If I wanted to publish a blog sharing my family's recipe, who am I supposed to credit? The Chinese, whose cuisine it resembles in only the most generous sense? The recipe tips on the back of soy sauce bottles and in Allrecipes comments?
When I write, I keep a list of things that directly inspire me about a piece: images, songs, poetry, movie scenes, video game scenes, etc. These lists are long and someone reading my work would likely have trouble identifying how some of the things inspired the final product. These lists are also only things I am consciously aware of being influenced by. Should I be required to call out everything I can think of in my acknowledgements? Or is it only things that don't belong to my culture? And how do I make that determination? For example, I'm a Irish and Scandinavian-descended third-gen American: do bands like Heilung or the Dubliners count as "my culture" or not?
It seems to be adding a lot of complexity and opportunities for gotchas for little gain.
Plagiarism and intellectual property are different things. I could publish a copy of Tale of Two Cities under my name and it would be completely legal. Still be plagiarism.
Equally, applying credit means it's not plagiarism - but it could still be a breach of IP.
As for, say, your stir fry: are you pretending that it's not Asian? No. So you're not pretending its yours. I'm not proposing a formal citation system, like you might require for an academic article, but there's a whole "stir fry originated in Asia" that's implicit and people will generally know that, so there's not a need to acknowledge. Now, if you're doing "I invented a new recipe for X" and it then turns out to be very similar to a traditional Uzbek recipe and you got away with it because there aren't any Uzbeks around, then that's the sort of thing I call cultural plagiarism. Or the Vietnamese restaurant that used to be in my city that was owned by a white couple who stayed in the back and did the cooking and hired all-Vietnamese staff so people thought it was authentically Vietnamese (got shut down for health code violations, actually).
Another example is "fusion" food. Calling it that is saying "this comes from multiple other traditions". So you don't then have to list all those traditions and detail everything, people can piece out your sources.
The stir fry my family makes is demonstrably not Asian though: it might resemble, in a general sense, some Asian dishes and uses some ingredients common to Asian cuisine, but if I had to guess the original recipe came from some white person writing in a newspaper in the 60s trying to imitate the exotic dish she'd just had. You can only call it Asian by applying some version of a "one-drop" rule and saying that anything Western that is even slightly resembling or influenced by something not-Western is in fact entirely not Western. It is culturally far more influenced by dishes like stroganoff or hotdish than anything from Asia. It's kind of absurd to call it Asian. And yet, because it contains soy sauce and rice, some would call it "cultural appropriation" not to call out the almost-entirely-absent Asian influence in this dish.
(And then, when you dig into even "authentic" recipes, you run into heaps of trouble. For example, peppers and tomatoes, ubiquitous in European and Asian cuisines nowadays, were domesticated and first grown by Native Americans--so must every "authentic" Thai dish calling for chili oil and every authentic Italian recipe calling for tomato paste pay homage to the Native Americans that first grew peppers? It gets silly so quickly. Who benefits?)
I think I agree with you, that this stir fry isn't cultural appropriation. Really my point was that there was a bad thing that this phrase at one point was trying to point at, and then a bunch of people extended it to the point that it's not useful at all, and that I'd like to reclaim the useful core by sticking a new name on it.
The core is useful for shaming White people and for no other purpose. It's embarrassing that you're trying to demarcate high, direct-heat sauteing as off-limits for White people unless they prostrate themselves before the nearest Asian.
"Bad things" have bad effects. What possible bad effects can there ever be from what is widely (or even narrowly) regarded as "cultural appropriation?"
As for authenticity discourse. Yes, it's not a simple binary. Everything has other sources. One of my favourite examples is ratatouille: at the time it originated, Provençal culture was still separate from French. Now, Provençal is part of French. So, is it French or not?
But, just because it's not a binary, doesn't mean that there's not a scale of some sort. Some things are more authentic than others.
haha, I was just trying to think of American dishes that are "vegetables mixed in a starch", because that's basically all it is. It's not a good recipe lol. I only like it because my mom made it when I was little.
The gist is get a bag of frozen veggies, a can of baby corn, a can of bamboo shoots, and a can of water chestnuts. Rinse 'em in a colander under cool water until they're not frozen anymore. Stick some white rice in the rice cooker. Get meat of some kind, doesn't really matter what--we used ground beef as often as not. Brown it, then dump in all the veggies. Cook 'em until they're like half-done. Make a sauce out of soy sauce, chicken broth or equivalent, a couple eggs, and a few shakes of onion powder, garlic powder, ginger, and a tiny bit of chili powder (sometimes we add worcestershire sauce too because why the hell not). Dump the sauce and the rice over everything and chuck it in the oven until everything's done and the egg isn't runny anymore.
"As for, say, your stir fry: are you pretending that it's not Asian? No. So you're not pretending its yours."
I'll saute vegetables at a high heat with a generous amount of oil and a small amount of aromatics, adding sauce late in the preparation, without calling it Asian. Such techniques are common in European kitchens and have been for well over a century, long before either stir fry or the wok entered the European culinary consciousness.
Today is the anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley and you are right. He always gave credit. My favorite Elvis cover is of Tony Joe White's Poke/Polk Salad Annie. And I don't know that Tony Joe minded that Brooke Benton made the more famous version of Tony Joe's "Rainy Night in Georgia." Tony Joe was another share cropper. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrT-TQTLoiw
Please forgive me, a fellow Elvis appreciator, for piping up to point out that the anniversary is the 16th, which I know only because it falls on my birthday. I spent many a lazy celebratory afternoon as a kid watching parts of the Elvis movie marathon on some UHF channel while helping my mom make my cake. (Feeling both nostalgic and old now.)
Meh. You're straining the soup a little thin. Steal a tune? Copyright law deals with it. Steal a style? It's just what humans do.
Now, you can call Pat Boone and Elvis's managers racist. Or the radio DJ's who wouldn't play black records racist. But the artists themselves usually don't try to sound like people they hate.
The bottom line problem in my estimation is A) treating cultural productions (food, art, clothes, etc) like a form of intellectual property and then B) imagining that racial or ethnic groups could be coherently defined enough to exercise ownership over these intellectual properties. Once that framework for looking at these matters is established no amount of defining exchange versus appropriation will ever be able to stop appropriation from subsuming the entire discourse.
In general I think our notions of property have gotten way worse over the last decade and shape arguments on stuff like this way more than we realize. Spot on.
I think that's absolutely correct, the way all the old forms of social fabric have been commodified into transactional exchanges of money is absolutely terrifying.
I suspect much of this comes from the near-deification of "IP" in online culture, and the concurrent way youth especially build identities around crap like Marvel movies and Harry Potter. Thanks to Disney's lawyers, we're going on three or so generations of Westerners who have lived with the idea that our biggest, most important cultural products are owned by somebody, generally a faceless corporation. And plenty of them seem to think that's good – I have no joke had run-ins online with people who in all seriousness don't see the value of a public domain and genuinely believe that corporations have a perfect right to own culture forever.
Marinated as they have in that mindset, is it any surprise we see a movement to treat all of culture as IP? It's literally the only framework some people have ever known.
So just to help out an old white guy who never graduated from college, is wearing a cheongsam to a high school prom "genuinely offensive/problematic behavior?" Because that's how "cultural appropriation" appeared on my radar. And if that is a "reasonable" example of cultural appropriation, then the entire concept is idiotic (IMHO).
I don't recall the details and frankly don't care enough to look them up. So I will default to generosity and say "probably morally fine, despite offending bourgeois norms of taste". And I am certainly not here to justify bourgeois norms of taste.
If I'm forgetting some weird detail involving yellowface or a corny fake accent or some shit, my opinion would change, but life's too short for unpaid internet archaeology.
There was tremendous support for "Cheongsam girl" from ... China, whereas the people complaining were mostly based in the US, and as far as I know mostly white.
Just a reminder: the cheongsam is a Chinese appropriation of French styles, invented 100 years ago when Chinese women first started becoming aware of French fashion. As such, it's the ultimate Euro-Asian fusion garment -- which is what made that particular fracas so ridiculous.
(I'm off to Vietnam in the morning. I hope to have an ao dai -- the Vietnamese version of a cheongsam, which is slit up the sides to the hip and worn with wide trousers -- made while I'm there. And yes, blue-eyed, blonde me will wear the hell out of it when I get back.)
I wrote my thesis on Strange Fruit. It was written by a Jewish man and performed by his wife before Ella Fitzgerald collaborated with him. I often think of that when I see woke people adamantly "standing with Palestine." When it comes to jazz production in early 20th century, Jewish people and Black people share credit.
A while back I was losing hair and looking for ways to conceal it. My Nigerian American friend told me to watch some videos to learn the traditional Nigerian head wrapping. I guess she didn't know that's not allowed. Reminds me of an article I read where someone was worried about letting their kid wear an Asian cultural garment gifted to them by close friends of that culture. Is this really what its come to?
I'm sad that cultural appropriation is now open to widespread ridicule. I was planning to spend my retirement, after selling my current business, attacking high school girls on Twitter for wearing cheongsams to the prom. What other avocation could possibility be as satisfying? My only regret until now was that my parents hadn't lived long enough to see me engaging in this important work, which would have made them tremendously proud.
And now this. It's all going away? I guess I'll have to get into model railroading after all.
One of the first big cultural appropriation blowups I can remember was students at a SLAC getting mad that their cafeteria was serving banh mi, a "traditional Vietnamese food" - which is made on French baguette.
The version I heard was that the banh mi was being made on regular sliced bread rather than a baguette and they were complaining that it was a cheap ham sandwich being sold as banh mi (and priced much higher) and they wanted either actual banh mi or them to call it a ham sandwich and stop charging a premium.
But, as with so many of these stories, there are so many versions from so many people that the truth is almost impossible to find.
I always think of these lines from Fisher's exiting the Vampire's Castle:
"The first law of the Vampires’ Castle is: individualise and privatise everything. While in theory it claims to be in favour of structural critique, in practice it never focuses on anything except individual behaviour... Remember: condemning individuals is always more important than paying attention to impersonal structures."
There might be some "legitimate" version of cultural appropriation. One that has material harm that could be fixed with policy. However, in progress, it's just scolding individuals.
Does anyone remember the backlash to the movie La La Land? Was definitely cultural appropriation related. Something about how the main protagonist is super into jazz, but he's white. Was truly a stupid time.
I mean, it was also clear how utterly mercenary these accusations were once people looked through her timeline and saw that it was full of her posting tweets "filipino food is fucking disgusting".
The whole point is a person railing against cultural appropriation when her own personal experience is "I don't like my personal culture (Filipino), so I'm going to adopt a different one instead (Canadian)"
the "Cadillac Car" bit in Dreamgirls remains the best articulation of what the general angst abt cultural appropriation is really all about. it's not just "the white version of this song sucks," but rather "the white boys made the song worse and then somehow made way more money off the song." the resentment is really, deeply about the money.
i think the angst abt cultural appropriation is sensible when reduced to its narrowest, moderate terms: cultural exchange is great and (in any case) inevitable, it just sucks to see the commercial rewards for cultural appropriation, at the level of media personalities, flow so deterministically toward the proverbial Alison Roman. ppl agonizing abt authenticity are kidding themselves. but if the commercial rewards flowed differently, i think we'd be having a different conversation.
Yes. I do think that, in music specifically and in some other realms, there has been real and substantial progress in this direction, and I think the particularly salutary effect has not just that Black artists are getting more of the pie but that there are substantially more working Black producers, engineers, etc than there once was. I also don't doubt that there are problems where photogenic white ladies can have an easier time pitching and selling a cookbook than people from other origins. The problem is that it's been so relentlessly generalized, and invoked in pure bad faith so often, that the narrow sense of ensuring that there's equality for everyone and recognition of artistic influence has been swallowed by "white people shouldn't write recipes for how to make dumplings and noodles."
absolutely, it's one of those issues where partisans take a sensible gripe about commerce and dumb it down into a much weaker and pettier gripe about authenticity and taste.
I guess my question is where are we in 2021? During my childhood there weren't bigger cultural icons than Oprah, Michael Jordan, Michael Jackson, Russell Simmons, and Bill Cosby, all of whom translated their fame into vast fortunes. Then came Beyonce, Jay Z, Tiger Woods, Williams sisters, etc. etc. etc.
Wasn't the first black US billionaire Robert L. Johnson? It seems like there is a racially broad range of cultural salesmen.
David Chang is the celebrity chef of his generation ironically spooning out non-authentic versions of, for example, Taiwanese street food. Is it OK for Chang to sling his version of Chinese and Japanese food even though he's Korean? Is he appropriating? Or by our parochial racialized standards, is he 'Asian enough'?
All of this has become incomprehensible and deranged. And with regards to these historical tableaux, it seems we are just fetishizing something from the past that doesn't bear that much weight any more.
def agree it's become impossible, incomprehensible, deranged, ahistorical, and ironically hyper-American, and whatever else we want to call it, i just do think it's worth noting that this all-consuming psychedelic mold has grown around the seed of a once-sensible resentment with once-practical remedies.
I think that's the point I was trying to make when I talked about "cultural plagiarism".
There's nothing wrong with a white person participating in a black culture. There is a problem with taking a black culture and having all the mainstream performers be white and the black people who originally created it being sidelined. But, as far as I can tell, the last musical genre that originated with mostly-black performers and became known as a mostly-white genre is rock. In the 1950s and 1960s.
Eminem is a white guy in a black genre. But no-one thinks to accuse him of cultural appropriation, because, well, I guess because he's the only one (near enough).
I think the worry is when the copy replaces the original in the popular imagination, but that's only possible as an aggregate phenomenon. One more white guy rapping doesn't make hip-hop a white genre. One more white guy singing rock doesn't make rock a white genre. But too many white guys do. Harder to assign individual responsibility to that, though.
Sure, you can blame Pat Boone for recording bad copies of songs originally released by black artists, and then having better distribution because he was white and on a major label and making a lot of money off their backs. Fine, do that. But the overall story of the whitening of rock is a much more complicated one than that, and involves a lot of people who were just hearing music they liked and then making more in the same style. Which is exactly what Eminem did without it being a problem. How do you blame an individual for there being too many people like him? You can't. But it can still be a problem in the aggregate, perhaps.
I can imagine someone telling my Polish mother in law that she appropriated dumplings and noodles. She'd smack them with her rolling pin until they apologized.
The cosseted academics are the ones profiting from this stuff, but you can’t make money if there’s no market for your product. I suspect calling out so-called cultural appropriation is especially popular among the kind of overeducated, but by no means elite, white progressives who think they’re worldly because they read NYT or whatever but are eager to reframe their quiet discomfort with people who don’t look or act like them as a virtue. By invoking cultural appropriation, Talusan is appropriating one of the worst aspects of white American culture.
So I agree with the core idea of cultural appropriation as "nonsensical, unrealistic to the point of absurdity, contradicted by all of human history" but I think you might be oversimplifying things when you say "invoked 100% of the time as a way to play petty dominance politics over others."
I think most of the people making cultural appropriation claims are people who've constructed their identity on being sources of knowledge on a certain thing. And if white people can be noodle experts, you're taking something away from the Asian American noodle experts, since we can't all be experts right? It's a zero sum game. You can call that dominance politics, but I think it's probably a little more innocuous and more of a defensive stance than a dominant one.
I forget where I originally saw this posted, somewhere on twitter I think, but the contrast between Asian Americans calling Panda Express poison and their Asian born parents saying "this is pretty good" tells a great story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fo59LlkTDe4 . People born in Asia don't have any self-doubts about their expertise of Asian culture and they don't have to play any dumb "authenticity" games, they can just say if they like something or not.
You're agreeing with yourself. Treating expertise as a zero-sum turf war leads necessarily to what you deny - that cultural appropriation is invoked only to dominate.
One of my favorites is that the racial composition of the backing studio musicians at Muscle Shoals for several classic quintessentially 'black' albums was primarily white. Also: how would 80s hip hop have changed if there was no Rick Rubin?
It all makes sense once you accept that these sour midwits hate music, art, food, and culture in general.
The Swampers are legend.
I thought you were off Twitter.
It’s fine if you’re back but try and keep in mind that Twitter isn’t reality.
I check in every couple of days; it's hard to stay completely off of it and still keep up with "the conversation." Never fear, I have no account and never will again. But this one was such a big deal that I absorbed it through a Discord rather than finding it on Twitter directly.
Any discord worth recommending?
The impending motte and bailey is as inevitable as the dawn: "cultural appropriation isn't actually all forms of cultural mixing and exchange! Cultural exchange is good. The term 'cultural appropriation' actually means [very narrow definition, involving genuinely offensive/problematic behavior]."
I should know, I used to be the one making that argument! Except, such narrow, thoughtful definitions were never the ones applied in reality. And besides, it was perfectly possible to describe why such behaviors were toxic without invoking "cultural appropriation", those magic words that flatten the world rather than reveal its complexities.
Exactly right.
"We're just saying don't wear Indian headdresses to Coachella!"
[later that day on Tumblr]
"Braveheart culturally appropriates warpaint from the Comanches"
Funny you should mention Indian headdresses.
Here in the Truckee Meadows area, the traditional feathered headresses of the plains were unknown among the indigenous people here, the Paiutes, the Washoe and the Shoshone (I believe the latter used to enslave the former two and sell them to the Mexicans before the Anglos showed up, but I digress). However, in modern representations of Three Nations chiefs, they normally are wearing feathered headdresses. This is because, so I understand, an important local chief from the late 19th or early 20th century saw the plains headdresses, thought they were cool, and merrily culturally appropriated them for himself and his people. And this thoughtless cultural appropriation of a century ago manifests itself in many modern representations of the Three Nations.
Shameful!
A disgrace! Be better!
Yes, but consider the violence to countless aboriginal and ancient cultures due to the Woke appropriation of that primordial body-affirming ritual – the tattoo.
I think there is a useful narrow definition, which is as the cultural equivalent to plagiarism - taking something from another culture without acknowledging the culture it came from and pretending (implicitly or explicitly) that it is your own.
It also has an easy and reliable test: if they credited their sources, then it's not cultural appropriation. If they didn't (and they actually were the sources), then it is.
There are some actually bad things that "cultural appropriation" refers to, but the phrase is utterly useless because it's been completely motte and bailed. I tend to say "cultural plagiarism" these days, because it isn't a pat phrase and it makes people think about what it means rather than just jump to one conclusion or the other.
When it's something like Pat Boone covering Little Richard, then there clearly is a problem. When it's Elvis covering Big Mama Thornton (and crediting her and talking about how great all the Black artists are that he's covered) then it should be clear that there isn't - everyone covered everyone else in the 1950s.
'It also has an easy and reliable test: if they credited their sources, then it's not cultural appropriation. If they didn't (and they actually were the sources), then it is.'
Not everything should be an academic exercise.
There have been no good bands since Zep and Floyd.
Lies - because Black Sabbath was formed after both.
Black Sabbath wasn't a very good band but they had one great album: Vol. 4
Their first album rules
I say again: Hanson!
True story - I met their touring guitarist at a hotel bar in Guildford, UK about four years ago. He said the brothers are actually pretty cool.
That's heartwarming.
Stealing someone else's intellectual property is one thing (such as covering another person's song without credit). But how the hell are you going to "credit the source" for most things?
My family has a "stir fry" recipe. I have no idea where it originally came from. It's been modified again and again when handed down from my grandma to my mom to me. It bears little resemblance to anything Asian people would have come up with. If I wanted to publish a blog sharing my family's recipe, who am I supposed to credit? The Chinese, whose cuisine it resembles in only the most generous sense? The recipe tips on the back of soy sauce bottles and in Allrecipes comments?
When I write, I keep a list of things that directly inspire me about a piece: images, songs, poetry, movie scenes, video game scenes, etc. These lists are long and someone reading my work would likely have trouble identifying how some of the things inspired the final product. These lists are also only things I am consciously aware of being influenced by. Should I be required to call out everything I can think of in my acknowledgements? Or is it only things that don't belong to my culture? And how do I make that determination? For example, I'm a Irish and Scandinavian-descended third-gen American: do bands like Heilung or the Dubliners count as "my culture" or not?
It seems to be adding a lot of complexity and opportunities for gotchas for little gain.
Plagiarism and intellectual property are different things. I could publish a copy of Tale of Two Cities under my name and it would be completely legal. Still be plagiarism.
Equally, applying credit means it's not plagiarism - but it could still be a breach of IP.
As for, say, your stir fry: are you pretending that it's not Asian? No. So you're not pretending its yours. I'm not proposing a formal citation system, like you might require for an academic article, but there's a whole "stir fry originated in Asia" that's implicit and people will generally know that, so there's not a need to acknowledge. Now, if you're doing "I invented a new recipe for X" and it then turns out to be very similar to a traditional Uzbek recipe and you got away with it because there aren't any Uzbeks around, then that's the sort of thing I call cultural plagiarism. Or the Vietnamese restaurant that used to be in my city that was owned by a white couple who stayed in the back and did the cooking and hired all-Vietnamese staff so people thought it was authentically Vietnamese (got shut down for health code violations, actually).
Another example is "fusion" food. Calling it that is saying "this comes from multiple other traditions". So you don't then have to list all those traditions and detail everything, people can piece out your sources.
The stir fry my family makes is demonstrably not Asian though: it might resemble, in a general sense, some Asian dishes and uses some ingredients common to Asian cuisine, but if I had to guess the original recipe came from some white person writing in a newspaper in the 60s trying to imitate the exotic dish she'd just had. You can only call it Asian by applying some version of a "one-drop" rule and saying that anything Western that is even slightly resembling or influenced by something not-Western is in fact entirely not Western. It is culturally far more influenced by dishes like stroganoff or hotdish than anything from Asia. It's kind of absurd to call it Asian. And yet, because it contains soy sauce and rice, some would call it "cultural appropriation" not to call out the almost-entirely-absent Asian influence in this dish.
(And then, when you dig into even "authentic" recipes, you run into heaps of trouble. For example, peppers and tomatoes, ubiquitous in European and Asian cuisines nowadays, were domesticated and first grown by Native Americans--so must every "authentic" Thai dish calling for chili oil and every authentic Italian recipe calling for tomato paste pay homage to the Native Americans that first grew peppers? It gets silly so quickly. Who benefits?)
I think I agree with you, that this stir fry isn't cultural appropriation. Really my point was that there was a bad thing that this phrase at one point was trying to point at, and then a bunch of people extended it to the point that it's not useful at all, and that I'd like to reclaim the useful core by sticking a new name on it.
The core is useful for shaming White people and for no other purpose. It's embarrassing that you're trying to demarcate high, direct-heat sauteing as off-limits for White people unless they prostrate themselves before the nearest Asian.
"Bad things" have bad effects. What possible bad effects can there ever be from what is widely (or even narrowly) regarded as "cultural appropriation?"
As for authenticity discourse. Yes, it's not a simple binary. Everything has other sources. One of my favourite examples is ratatouille: at the time it originated, Provençal culture was still separate from French. Now, Provençal is part of French. So, is it French or not?
But, just because it's not a binary, doesn't mean that there's not a scale of some sort. Some things are more authentic than others.
stroganoff, hotdish; well now i kinda want to try this stir fry........
haha, I was just trying to think of American dishes that are "vegetables mixed in a starch", because that's basically all it is. It's not a good recipe lol. I only like it because my mom made it when I was little.
The gist is get a bag of frozen veggies, a can of baby corn, a can of bamboo shoots, and a can of water chestnuts. Rinse 'em in a colander under cool water until they're not frozen anymore. Stick some white rice in the rice cooker. Get meat of some kind, doesn't really matter what--we used ground beef as often as not. Brown it, then dump in all the veggies. Cook 'em until they're like half-done. Make a sauce out of soy sauce, chicken broth or equivalent, a couple eggs, and a few shakes of onion powder, garlic powder, ginger, and a tiny bit of chili powder (sometimes we add worcestershire sauce too because why the hell not). Dump the sauce and the rice over everything and chuck it in the oven until everything's done and the egg isn't runny anymore.
The next wave of culinary greatness it is not.
"As for, say, your stir fry: are you pretending that it's not Asian? No. So you're not pretending its yours."
I'll saute vegetables at a high heat with a generous amount of oil and a small amount of aromatics, adding sauce late in the preparation, without calling it Asian. Such techniques are common in European kitchens and have been for well over a century, long before either stir fry or the wok entered the European culinary consciousness.
Today is the anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley and you are right. He always gave credit. My favorite Elvis cover is of Tony Joe White's Poke/Polk Salad Annie. And I don't know that Tony Joe minded that Brooke Benton made the more famous version of Tony Joe's "Rainy Night in Georgia." Tony Joe was another share cropper. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrT-TQTLoiw
Please forgive me, a fellow Elvis appreciator, for piping up to point out that the anniversary is the 16th, which I know only because it falls on my birthday. I spent many a lazy celebratory afternoon as a kid watching parts of the Elvis movie marathon on some UHF channel while helping my mom make my cake. (Feeling both nostalgic and old now.)
Meh. You're straining the soup a little thin. Steal a tune? Copyright law deals with it. Steal a style? It's just what humans do.
Now, you can call Pat Boone and Elvis's managers racist. Or the radio DJ's who wouldn't play black records racist. But the artists themselves usually don't try to sound like people they hate.
The bottom line problem in my estimation is A) treating cultural productions (food, art, clothes, etc) like a form of intellectual property and then B) imagining that racial or ethnic groups could be coherently defined enough to exercise ownership over these intellectual properties. Once that framework for looking at these matters is established no amount of defining exchange versus appropriation will ever be able to stop appropriation from subsuming the entire discourse.
In general I think our notions of property have gotten way worse over the last decade and shape arguments on stuff like this way more than we realize. Spot on.
I think that's absolutely correct, the way all the old forms of social fabric have been commodified into transactional exchanges of money is absolutely terrifying.
I suspect much of this comes from the near-deification of "IP" in online culture, and the concurrent way youth especially build identities around crap like Marvel movies and Harry Potter. Thanks to Disney's lawyers, we're going on three or so generations of Westerners who have lived with the idea that our biggest, most important cultural products are owned by somebody, generally a faceless corporation. And plenty of them seem to think that's good – I have no joke had run-ins online with people who in all seriousness don't see the value of a public domain and genuinely believe that corporations have a perfect right to own culture forever.
Marinated as they have in that mindset, is it any surprise we see a movement to treat all of culture as IP? It's literally the only framework some people have ever known.
So just to help out an old white guy who never graduated from college, is wearing a cheongsam to a high school prom "genuinely offensive/problematic behavior?" Because that's how "cultural appropriation" appeared on my radar. And if that is a "reasonable" example of cultural appropriation, then the entire concept is idiotic (IMHO).
I don't recall the details and frankly don't care enough to look them up. So I will default to generosity and say "probably morally fine, despite offending bourgeois norms of taste". And I am certainly not here to justify bourgeois norms of taste.
If I'm forgetting some weird detail involving yellowface or a corny fake accent or some shit, my opinion would change, but life's too short for unpaid internet archaeology.
This bourgeois thinks most women look great in a cheongsam.
There was tremendous support for "Cheongsam girl" from ... China, whereas the people complaining were mostly based in the US, and as far as I know mostly white.
Just a reminder: the cheongsam is a Chinese appropriation of French styles, invented 100 years ago when Chinese women first started becoming aware of French fashion. As such, it's the ultimate Euro-Asian fusion garment -- which is what made that particular fracas so ridiculous.
(I'm off to Vietnam in the morning. I hope to have an ao dai -- the Vietnamese version of a cheongsam, which is slit up the sides to the hip and worn with wide trousers -- made while I'm there. And yes, blue-eyed, blonde me will wear the hell out of it when I get back.)
Did not know that, and the media at the time conveniently never mentioned it either. Thanks for mentioning.
I wrote my thesis on Strange Fruit. It was written by a Jewish man and performed by his wife before Ella Fitzgerald collaborated with him. I often think of that when I see woke people adamantly "standing with Palestine." When it comes to jazz production in early 20th century, Jewish people and Black people share credit.
A while back I was losing hair and looking for ways to conceal it. My Nigerian American friend told me to watch some videos to learn the traditional Nigerian head wrapping. I guess she didn't know that's not allowed. Reminds me of an article I read where someone was worried about letting their kid wear an Asian cultural garment gifted to them by close friends of that culture. Is this really what its come to?
Also, I meant Billie Holiday, not Ella Fitzgerald. Mom brain kicked in.
I'm sad that cultural appropriation is now open to widespread ridicule. I was planning to spend my retirement, after selling my current business, attacking high school girls on Twitter for wearing cheongsams to the prom. What other avocation could possibility be as satisfying? My only regret until now was that my parents hadn't lived long enough to see me engaging in this important work, which would have made them tremendously proud.
And now this. It's all going away? I guess I'll have to get into model railroading after all.
Cultural appropriation - I guess I'll stop eating tempura.
From Wikipedia: "The dish was introduced by the Portuguese residing in Nagasaki through the fritter-cooking techniques in the 16th century."
One of the first big cultural appropriation blowups I can remember was students at a SLAC getting mad that their cafeteria was serving banh mi, a "traditional Vietnamese food" - which is made on French baguette.
The version I heard was that the banh mi was being made on regular sliced bread rather than a baguette and they were complaining that it was a cheap ham sandwich being sold as banh mi (and priced much higher) and they wanted either actual banh mi or them to call it a ham sandwich and stop charging a premium.
But, as with so many of these stories, there are so many versions from so many people that the truth is almost impossible to find.
My university's dining room appropriated prison culture.
The comments are golder than usual today.
The shock of kimono makers in Japan desperately trying to keep their craft alive, forced to scream out "APPROPRIATE OUR CULTURE PLEASE!"
https://uk.fashionnetwork.com/news/Japanese-kimono-makers-seek-to-revive-declining-industry,974601.html
"Roslyn Talusan is a Filipina Canadian anti-rape activist and feminist culture writer..."
Now there is someone with their finger on the pulse of the nation.
Someone must counter the pro-rape activists.
you're killing me, Erin.
I always think of these lines from Fisher's exiting the Vampire's Castle:
"The first law of the Vampires’ Castle is: individualise and privatise everything. While in theory it claims to be in favour of structural critique, in practice it never focuses on anything except individual behaviour... Remember: condemning individuals is always more important than paying attention to impersonal structures."
There might be some "legitimate" version of cultural appropriation. One that has material harm that could be fixed with policy. However, in progress, it's just scolding individuals.
Does anyone remember the backlash to the movie La La Land? Was definitely cultural appropriation related. Something about how the main protagonist is super into jazz, but he's white. Was truly a stupid time.
I mean, it was also clear how utterly mercenary these accusations were once people looked through her timeline and saw that it was full of her posting tweets "filipino food is fucking disgusting".
lol I had no idea
Filipino marinara sauce is gross though.
In fairness Filipino food can get pretty weird. There is some adventurous eating there and I'm glad I didn't really get to it until my late 30s.
The whole point is a person railing against cultural appropriation when her own personal experience is "I don't like my personal culture (Filipino), so I'm going to adopt a different one instead (Canadian)"
Canadians appear to have become particularly deranged.
the "Cadillac Car" bit in Dreamgirls remains the best articulation of what the general angst abt cultural appropriation is really all about. it's not just "the white version of this song sucks," but rather "the white boys made the song worse and then somehow made way more money off the song." the resentment is really, deeply about the money.
i think the angst abt cultural appropriation is sensible when reduced to its narrowest, moderate terms: cultural exchange is great and (in any case) inevitable, it just sucks to see the commercial rewards for cultural appropriation, at the level of media personalities, flow so deterministically toward the proverbial Alison Roman. ppl agonizing abt authenticity are kidding themselves. but if the commercial rewards flowed differently, i think we'd be having a different conversation.
Yes. I do think that, in music specifically and in some other realms, there has been real and substantial progress in this direction, and I think the particularly salutary effect has not just that Black artists are getting more of the pie but that there are substantially more working Black producers, engineers, etc than there once was. I also don't doubt that there are problems where photogenic white ladies can have an easier time pitching and selling a cookbook than people from other origins. The problem is that it's been so relentlessly generalized, and invoked in pure bad faith so often, that the narrow sense of ensuring that there's equality for everyone and recognition of artistic influence has been swallowed by "white people shouldn't write recipes for how to make dumplings and noodles."
absolutely, it's one of those issues where partisans take a sensible gripe about commerce and dumb it down into a much weaker and pettier gripe about authenticity and taste.
Valid for the 50s, 60s, and maybe 70s.
I guess my question is where are we in 2021? During my childhood there weren't bigger cultural icons than Oprah, Michael Jordan, Michael Jackson, Russell Simmons, and Bill Cosby, all of whom translated their fame into vast fortunes. Then came Beyonce, Jay Z, Tiger Woods, Williams sisters, etc. etc. etc.
Wasn't the first black US billionaire Robert L. Johnson? It seems like there is a racially broad range of cultural salesmen.
David Chang is the celebrity chef of his generation ironically spooning out non-authentic versions of, for example, Taiwanese street food. Is it OK for Chang to sling his version of Chinese and Japanese food even though he's Korean? Is he appropriating? Or by our parochial racialized standards, is he 'Asian enough'?
All of this has become incomprehensible and deranged. And with regards to these historical tableaux, it seems we are just fetishizing something from the past that doesn't bear that much weight any more.
def agree it's become impossible, incomprehensible, deranged, ahistorical, and ironically hyper-American, and whatever else we want to call it, i just do think it's worth noting that this all-consuming psychedelic mold has grown around the seed of a once-sensible resentment with once-practical remedies.
I think that's the point I was trying to make when I talked about "cultural plagiarism".
There's nothing wrong with a white person participating in a black culture. There is a problem with taking a black culture and having all the mainstream performers be white and the black people who originally created it being sidelined. But, as far as I can tell, the last musical genre that originated with mostly-black performers and became known as a mostly-white genre is rock. In the 1950s and 1960s.
Eminem is a white guy in a black genre. But no-one thinks to accuse him of cultural appropriation, because, well, I guess because he's the only one (near enough).
I think the worry is when the copy replaces the original in the popular imagination, but that's only possible as an aggregate phenomenon. One more white guy rapping doesn't make hip-hop a white genre. One more white guy singing rock doesn't make rock a white genre. But too many white guys do. Harder to assign individual responsibility to that, though.
Sure, you can blame Pat Boone for recording bad copies of songs originally released by black artists, and then having better distribution because he was white and on a major label and making a lot of money off their backs. Fine, do that. But the overall story of the whitening of rock is a much more complicated one than that, and involves a lot of people who were just hearing music they liked and then making more in the same style. Which is exactly what Eminem did without it being a problem. How do you blame an individual for there being too many people like him? You can't. But it can still be a problem in the aggregate, perhaps.
I can imagine someone telling my Polish mother in law that she appropriated dumplings and noodles. She'd smack them with her rolling pin until they apologized.
My Slovak grandmother as well!
The cosseted academics are the ones profiting from this stuff, but you can’t make money if there’s no market for your product. I suspect calling out so-called cultural appropriation is especially popular among the kind of overeducated, but by no means elite, white progressives who think they’re worldly because they read NYT or whatever but are eager to reframe their quiet discomfort with people who don’t look or act like them as a virtue. By invoking cultural appropriation, Talusan is appropriating one of the worst aspects of white American culture.
So I agree with the core idea of cultural appropriation as "nonsensical, unrealistic to the point of absurdity, contradicted by all of human history" but I think you might be oversimplifying things when you say "invoked 100% of the time as a way to play petty dominance politics over others."
I think most of the people making cultural appropriation claims are people who've constructed their identity on being sources of knowledge on a certain thing. And if white people can be noodle experts, you're taking something away from the Asian American noodle experts, since we can't all be experts right? It's a zero sum game. You can call that dominance politics, but I think it's probably a little more innocuous and more of a defensive stance than a dominant one.
I forget where I originally saw this posted, somewhere on twitter I think, but the contrast between Asian Americans calling Panda Express poison and their Asian born parents saying "this is pretty good" tells a great story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fo59LlkTDe4 . People born in Asia don't have any self-doubts about their expertise of Asian culture and they don't have to play any dumb "authenticity" games, they can just say if they like something or not.
You're agreeing with yourself. Treating expertise as a zero-sum turf war leads necessarily to what you deny - that cultural appropriation is invoked only to dominate.
Yes!