What is cultural appropriation and why is it a problem?

[Fire]

I'm ashamed to admit I don't really understand what it is. I see people complaining about it but as someone who will never be the victim of it I don't really understand why its a problem or how it makes people feel. I see the term used when say, a white person decides to wear dreadlocks but I don't understand why that is a problem or what affect it has.

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

OK, this is a far from perfect example, but dig this: What does a Che t-shirt mean at this point? If we see some skater bro in a mass-produced Che t-shirt, we're not going to say, "Oh! he's committed to internationalist communist revolution!"
Appropriation drains symbols of their meaning and power: it takes real cultural struggles and histories, and turns them into commodities. Now, once something is a commodity, we have to look at who has the buying power. As the saying goes, money is democratic par excellence - it doesn't matter who you are, one dollar is one vote. In practice, this means that capitalists and the overwhelmingly white labour aristocracy get the "votes" on what a cultural symbol means.
If twerking was your expression of a black women's sexuality against white supremacist "beauty", it won't stay that way once its meaning is up for grabs to the best heeled. If the feathered headress was a powerful ceremonial symbol of community authority, you can bet it ceases to be so when some white hipster douche picks it up from the mall.
These symbols can't be abstracted from the real social relationships from which they emerge - they have power, and are related to the way a community reproduces itself in material terms. When they are turned into market commodities, it's a fundamentally violent act of accumulation that undermines the capacity of communities to constitute themselves outside of or against the community of capital.

[Os Cangaceiros]

Haha, god forbid white people appropriate twerking! :lol:

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

OK, this is a far from perfect example, but dig this: What does a Che t-shirt mean at this point? If we see some skater bro in a mass-produced Che t-shirt, we're not going to say, "Oh! he's committed to internationalist communist revolution!"
Appropriation drains symbols of their meaning and power: it takes real cultural struggles and histories, and turns them into commodities. Now, once something is a commodity, we have to look at who has the buying power. As the saying goes, money is democratic par excellence - it doesn't matter who you are, one dollar is one vote. In practice, this means that capitalists and the overwhelmingly white labour aristocracy get the "votes" on what a cultural symbol means.
If twerking was your expression of a black women's sexuality against white supremacist "beauty", it won't stay that way once its meaning is up for grabs to the best heeled. If the feathered headress was a powerful ceremonial symbol of community authority, you can bet it ceases to be so when some white hipster douche picks it up from the mall.
These symbols can't be abstracted from the real social relationships from which they emerge - they have power, and are related to the way a community reproduces itself in material terms. When they are turned into market commodities, it's a fundamentally violent act of accumulation that undermines the capacity of communities to constitute themselves outside of or against the community of capital.

Surely, communists are "against" capitalism in the sense that they aim to replace the current mode of production, and the attendant society, with a more progressive one, not because they think previous social forms are preferable, as liberal, nationalist and religious "anti-capitalists" do. Yet, here you outright defend forms of social organisation that precede, and are more regressive than, the "cash nexus" of the modern society. Why should it concern us that traditional authority is being undermined? That seems like a development we should welcome, since it destroys the "unity" between the native (or Black or...) proletariat and the oppressing classes, allowing for a militant proletarian struggle against racism free from the stupidity of popular fronts and tailing all sorts of liberals.

"Appropriation" seems to be one of those notions certain sections of the left have picked up from the radical-liberal milieu, to be honest. That happens more often than it should - which is zero.

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

Surely, communists are "against" capitalism in the sense that they aim to replace the current mode of production, and the attendant society, with a more progressive one, not because they think previous social forms are preferable, as liberal, nationalist and religious "anti-capitalists" do. Yet, here you outright defend forms of social organisation that precede, and are more regressive than, the "cash nexus" of the modern society. Why should it concern us that traditional authority is being undermined? That seems like a development we should welcome, since it destroys the "unity" between the native (or Black or...) proletariat and the oppressing classes, allowing for a militant proletarian struggle against racism free from the stupidity of popular fronts and tailing all sorts of liberals.

"Appropriation" seems to be one of those notions certain sections of the left have picked up from the radical-liberal milieu, to be honest. That happens more often than it should - which is zero.

So, first I'm going to point you to this excellent article (http://kersplebedeb.com/posts/racist-anti-imperialism/) that sums up, far better than I could, what's problematic about the eurocentric notions you're putting forward, and their failure to really grapple with class in the neo-colonial situiation.

Second, for those who lack attention span, I'm going to sum it up really quickly: The assumption that traditional indigenous social forms are inherently less progressive, and anti-proletarian, are fundamentally racist, sexist, colonial attitudes that refuse to grapple with the real (and particular!) relationships between peoples resisting colonialism and capital. Collapsing all peoples who attempt to retain their traditional forms of self-organization and reproduction against capitalism as somehow having less communist content or possibility than struggles that look and talk like traditional, Euro-American labour struggles is not only theoretically lazy, but fails to grapple meaningfully with the reactionary role played by settler-colonial workers vis-a-vis anticapitalist struggles led by colonized peoples (who - unsurprisingly - are in many cases are not "peasants", but proletarians, or impossible to categorize narrowly according to definitions emerging from Euro-American historical reference points).

Finally, that this attitude expresses itself in the idea that cultural appropriation is "liberal" demonstrates, case in point, a failure to listen to the voices of indigenous people playing leading roles in anticolonial and anticapitalist struggles. The idea that settlers' feelings of entitlement to the cultural objects of colonized peoples is fucked up didn't emerge from the university - it emerged from people who are struggling to build and maintain cultures of real, historically and materially rooted resistance to capital and colonialism.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

I really don't see the similarities between my post and the Aufheben essay - besides the most superficial (both texts oppose "traditional culture"). Where, for example, have I claimed that the indigenous people in the Americas are all peasants? I specifically noted that one of the advantages of the "cash nexus" mode of social organisation is that it destroys traditional bonds between native, Black, etc. proletariat, and other classes. Obviously, then, I think that there exists such a thing as a native and Black proletariat! In fact, in the United States, the Black proletariat forms the most militant layer of the proletariat, despite decades of effort by the radical liberals to dilute and crush that militancy.

And with due apologies, Marxism is quite incompatible with the milquetoast liberal notion that all cultures are equally progressive - or rather that progress does not exist. "Traditional" indigenous cultures are regressive since they are the reflexes of regressive modes of production - that is all. Likewise, much of "European" culture is a reflex of the feudal mode of production, and is likewise regressive. As for the experience of the European labour movement - which was, after all, the first conscious and organised labour movement - "attempts to retain ... traditional forms of self-organisation" are not absent from its history - from the fairly innocuous forms of guild socialism to the religious mania of a Weitling. Why pretend that anyone has singled out "non-Europeans"?

Finally, so what if the notion of "cultural appropriation" originated in the oppressed proletarian and plebeian masses? Communists should not tail developments in spontaneous proletarian consciousness but present to them a consistent communist project.

[ed miliband]

The intriguing thing about the language of 'appropriation' is that it leads to a terrible logjam of incoherence. Since few want to explicitly buy into a racial metaphysics, and no one wants to believe that culture is neatly segregated according to 'race', nationality, etc., the claim of 'appropriation' cannot be sustained. Culture is an open-ended process of cooperative creation, not a thing with definite, imporous boundaries. Cultural forms are not coherent, and their edges are more like shifting weather fronts than the neat, static lines of maps. They do not have an author; far less could their author be a certain 'race' or nationality somehow embodied. Cultural forms do not have an origin, a once-upon-a-time, and the search for origins is a sure route to absurdity. (If you doubt me, check this out). The notion that a representative of one culture can appropriate from another, each corresponding to a certain racial belonging, seems implausible outside the framework of a metaphysics of race.

http://www.leninology.com/2013/08/a-post-about-miley-cyrus.html

[Os Cangaceiros]

^Actually, in the case of twerking, I think we can pinpoint an exact origin. Can't it be traced back to 2 Live Crew?

[edwad]

an example of cultural appropriation would be like hipsters wearing feathered headdresses and bindis and things of that nature. basically it's reducing a culture down to an aesthetic and taking a giant shit on that culture just to make a fashion statement. there are plenty of other examples, but usually when people talk about cultural appropriation, they're talking about things like that.

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

Cultural forms have particular class content. Culture has a real material basis, and is shaped by struggle. Suggesting that culture is "collaborative" or "shared" in this context means glossing over relationships of violence and conflict. This is particularly so in that colonialism creates certain definite class relationships: the colonized subject, including the colonized proletarian, is created by a different set of particular relationships than the settler working class. It's not rocket science, and, in fact, it takes some pretty intense ideological blinders to not only erase this distinction, but to erase the relationship of culture and these material differences, on one hand, and culture and anticolonial struggle on the other.

As for Semendyaev's assertion that it's not racist to assert that settler-colonial eurocapitalism is "progressive" in relation to the struggles of the colonized (including, or especially, their cultural characteristics), I will allow my clarification of his position to speak for itself.

As a note: I think it's hilarious that "Liberalism!" is getting slung around like liberals have a monopoly on critiques of white supremacy. For the record, my framework is indebted primarily to work from the Maoist/anti-imperialist tradition of J. Sakai, Butch Lee, and others on one hand, and militant indigenous resistance (Gord Hill, the Zapatistas, Frantz Fannon, etc.) on the other. Perhaps if your theoretical tradition is overwhelmingly dominated by white European men, you might want to step back and consider the particular historical character of liberalism, and its relationship to, well, white European men.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

As for Semendyaev's assertion that it's not racist to assert that settler-colonial eurocapitalism is "progressive" in relation to the struggles of the colonized (including, or especially, their cultural characteristics), I will allow my clarification of his position to speak for itself.

Is it really necessary to continuously misrepresent my position? I never said that every struggle of the native and other oppressed peoples is regressive. Again, I specifically pointed out the existence of a significant and militant proletarian element in such peoples. Obviously I think their struggle against capitalism and special oppression is progressive! But this does not make the social forms that existed before capitalism and semifeudalism in the Americas, for example, progressive compared to modern feudalism. This is really a basic tenet of Marxism.


As a note: I think it's hilarious that "Liberalism!" is getting slung around like liberals have a monopoly on critiques of white supremacy. For the record, my framework is indebted primarily to work from the Maoist/anti-imperialist tradition of J. Sakai, Butch Lee, and others on one hand, and militant indigenous resistance (Gord Hill, the Zapatistas, Frantz Fannon, etc.) on the other. Perhaps if your theoretical tradition is overwhelmingly dominated by white European men, you might want to step back and consider the particular historical character of liberalism, and its relationship to, well, white European men.

I never said that you are a liberal, or that everyone who uses the term "appropriation" is a liberal - only that the term was appropriated from the liberal milieu. As for white European men, well, what would you have us do? Such individuals usually had access to education and the relative security that is necessary for theoretical work - which is not to say that individuals from other groups made no contribution to Trotskyist (for example) thought. For every Sakai there is a C. L. R. James.

[ed miliband]

^Actually, in the case of twerking, I think we can pinpoint an exact origin. Can't it be traced back to 2 Live Crew?

yeah, that's true.

the fundamental point remains that it's dumb to bind culture to race as something somehow intrinsic and unique, no matter how much maoist handwaving you do.

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

yeah, that's true.

the fundamental point remains that it's dumb to bind culture to race as something somehow intrinsic and unique, no matter how much maoist handwaving you do.

OK, but you're missing the point - race as a social construct doesn't emerge out of a subjective inclination of some people to discriminate against others on the basis of skin colour; it isn't some sort of historical "misunderstanding" (like European scientists "mistakenly" went all Linnaeus on people). It arises out of real fundamental contradictions rooted in class and colonialism. Culture, in turn, has to be understood in this context. Culture isn't just like, "Oh, different people eat different food and wear different clothing," with no roots in underlying social relationships of re/production. It's "dumb" to bind culture to race insofar as neither is by any means static - this is the "mistake" by narrow "cultural" nationalists, and (would-be) neo-colonial elites - but it's just the flip side of the same coin to posit race and culture ahistorically as you're doing.


Is it really necessary to continuously misrepresent my position? I never said that every struggle of the native and other oppressed peoples is regressive. Again, I specifically pointed out the existence of a significant and militant proletarian element in such peoples. Obviously I think their struggle against capitalism and special oppression is progressive! But this does not make the social forms that existed before capitalism and semifeudalism in the Americas, for example, progressive compared to modern feudalism. This is really a basic tenet of Marxism.

OK, for one, we're not dealing with social forms that existed prior to colonialism, as though colonialism is a fait accompli and not an ongoing project. We're dealing with existing insurgent cultural and productive formations that persist within indigenous communities in struggle. The militant proletarian elements aren't just brown "specially oppressed" sections of the working class - the reproduction of colonized subjects is particular in a class sense, and has particular cultural expressions. The relationship between capital and these expressions is one of violent antagonism, the former constantly expropriating ("appropriating") the latter, as the latter strives to constantly reconstitute itself in opposition to capital. Characterizing these struggles as emerging from "before capitalism" - as having a "feudal" or "semi-feudal" character because of their relationship to the traditions of colonized peoples - is wildly unmaterialist, and in practice, white supremacist. It suggests that cultural forms coded as not-white are stagnant, and retain a "backward" character, even when they are particular to relationships that are rooted in present conditions. This same charge would never be leveled against, for example, the cultural production of the white left - unless you are, in fact, critiquing the hammer and sickle and red flag as relics of semi-feudal consciousness, the party form as a backward product of bourgeois revolutions, etc. Point being, there is a nuance applied to the white left that, in practice, is not being applied to anti-capitalist struggles waged by colonized peoples.


I never said that you are a liberal, or that everyone who uses the term "appropriation" is a liberal - only that the term was appropriated from the liberal milieu. As for white European men, well, what would you have us do? Such individuals usually had access to education and the relative security that is necessary for theoretical work - which is not to say that individuals from other groups made no contribution to Trotskyist (for example) thought. For every Sakai there is a C. L. R. James.

LOL. Yeah, I bet you really see eye-to-eye with the theoretical contributions of C.L.R. James. How about state capitalism in the USSR? How about rejecting the vanguard party? His disagreements with Trotsky on the "Negro Question"? Is there seriously not a theorist you can cite, a theorist whose contributions you actually value, who isn't a white man?
Also, if you view "education" (I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this, but I don't think you mean the shop floor) and security as necessary for theoretical work, doesn't this de facto exclude most proletarians (who are, not coincidentally, women and people of colour)? I'm skeptical that this is a solid basis for a real dialectical relationship between theory and practice, in terms of proletarian politics.

[Lacrimi de Chiciură]

The intriguing thing about the language of 'appropriation' is that it leads to a terrible logjam of incoherence. Since few want to explicitly buy into a racial metaphysics, and no one wants to believe that culture is neatly segregated according to 'race', nationality, etc., the claim of 'appropriation' cannot be sustained. Culture is an open-ended process of cooperative creation, not a thing with definite, imporous boundaries. Cultural forms are not coherent, and their edges are more like shifting weather fronts than the neat, static lines of maps. They do not have an author; far less could their author be a certain 'race' or nationality somehow embodied. Cultural forms do not have an origin, a once-upon-a-time, and the search for origins is a sure route to absurdity. (If you doubt me, check this out). The notion that a representative of one culture can appropriate from another, each corresponding to a certain racial belonging, seems implausible outside the framework of a metaphysics of race.

http://www.leninology.com/2013/08/a-post-about-miley-cyrus.html

It's more incoherent to interact in social contexts informed by racial oppression and reject the pursuit of unifying dynamics which a people relies on to self determine. Essentialism glosses over the nuances of the different experiences of the individuals who make up a people, but anti-essentialism rejects the bonds that give meaning to their collective experience; anti-anti-essentialism therefore is not a regression to the first but means recognizing a people as composed of communities that are both similar and different, as well as the rhetorical utility of generalizing in certain contexts. The hybrid nature of diaspora cultures sometimes makes blurred lines (:blink:) between folk authenticity and pop culture betrayal, but that doesn't invalidate emotions of betrayal or anger that a person might feel when their culture is degraded, appropriated, or packaged for consumption by people who are ignorant about it. For example, Zora Neale Hurston thought the Fisk Jubilee Singers who brought the "negro spiritual" to Britain in the 19th century betrayed the authenticity of the music they were representing. And isn't it clear that that cultural form had a particular origin?

[Rurkel]

Certain forms of "culture sharing" definitely do not arise only of the benevolent desire to make cultures of all peoples available to everyone. Colonialism of the Victorian era resulted in "Oriental-style" buildings in Europe that had a blatant "Europe is the universal master of the world" subtext in them.

I don't think that stuff like these buildings are wholly bad, though. It's should be possible to "re-appropriate" quite a lot of it to "open-ended process of cooperative creation", IMO, although there're things that are irredeemable, like use of racial caricatures in the names and brands of various clubs/establishments/etc.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

OK, for one, we're not dealing with social forms that existed prior to colonialism, as though colonialism is a fait accompli and not an ongoing project. We're dealing with existing insurgent cultural and productive formations that persist within indigenous communities in struggle. The militant proletarian elements aren't just brown "specially oppressed" sections of the working class - the reproduction of colonized subjects is particular in a class sense, and has particular cultural expressions. The relationship between capital and these expressions is one of violent antagonism, the former constantly expropriating ("appropriating") the latter, as the latter strives to constantly reconstitute itself in opposition to capital. Characterizing these struggles as emerging from "before capitalism" - as having a "feudal" or "semi-feudal" character because of their relationship to the traditions of colonized peoples - is wildly unmaterialist, and in practice, white supremacist. It suggests that cultural forms coded as not-white are stagnant, and retain a "backward" character, even when they are particular to relationships that are rooted in present conditions. This same charge would never be leveled against, for example, the cultural production of the white left - unless you are, in fact, critiquing the hammer and sickle and red flag as relics of semi-feudal consciousness, the party form as a backward product of bourgeois revolutions, etc. Point being, there is a nuance applied to the white left that, in practice, is not being applied to anti-capitalist struggles waged by colonized peoples.

Institutions of the native people have, of course, been changed by colonialism. Even so, they originated in previous social epochs, and are marked by their origin. But this is not something peculiar to the colonial areas. Religion, for example, retains much of its feudal character in much of Europe. For a time, there existed in European capitalism guilds that still bore traces of their feudal origin. If Europe and other areas are comparatively free of such survivals, it is due to the uneven development of global capitalism.

Of course, these institutions exist in the present, and they figure in the class struggle that defines modern society. Yet it seems to me that they function primarily as retardants of the class struggle, binding the native and black proletariat to "their" bourgeoisie and semi-feudal strata. And this is clear, I think, from incidents such as the one in Wounded Creek, where the plebeian masses of the Native Americans played a revolutionary role in opposition to "their" elders and the president.

Of course, a lot of subjectively revolutionary members of the indigenous peoples and special colour-castes will adopt some mixture of revolutionary sentiment and reactionary ideology based on the extant precapitalist forms or even capitalist notions. But this reactionary ideology hinders their revolutionary struggle.

As for Europe, again you don't seem to be reading my posts, since I have given examples of analogous occurrences in Europe - guild socialism and the religious mania of Weitling. I could give other examples. The hammer and sickle is a symbol of the smichka, which, how should I put it, did not happen in the feudal period. Nonetheless, I don't think it is sacred or anything like that. And the party-form is indeed a development tied to the birth of capitalism - but we happen to be living in the capitalist society!

And surely you don't mean to say that the native proletarians are a separate class from the white proletarians? That seem un-Marxist, given that they have no independent relation to the means of production.


LOL. Yeah, I bet you really see eye-to-eye with the theoretical contributions of C.L.R. James. Points for picking a pretty great theorist to tokenize, but . . . How about state capitalism in the USSR? How about rejecting the vanguard party? His disagreements with Trotsky on the "Negro Question"? Is there seriously not a theorist you can cite, a theorist whose contributions you actually value, who isn't a white man?

I said that C. L. R. James had "made... contributions to Trotskyist thought". And I stand by that assessment. In fact he made major contributions to Trotskyist thought, perhaps more than Cliff, who is usually regarded as the father of the "state capitalist" line. Must I agree with someone to value their contribution? That seems like a very sketchy criterion.

As for people I agree with, most of them were indeed white heterosexual men - in the circumstances, one could hardly expect anything else. Yet even so, the contributions of, for example, E. Samarakkody to the fight against Pabloist revisionism can't simply be dismissed.


Also, if you view "education" (I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this, but I don't think you mean the shop floor) and security as necessary for theoretical work, doesn't this de facto exclude most proletarians (who are, not coincidentally, women and people of colour)? I'm skeptical that this is a solid basis for a real dialectical relationship between theory and practice, in terms of proletarian politics.

Well, yes, the proletariat in general and particularly the specially oppressed groups are disadvantaged in this regard; that is unfortunate, of course, but not the fault of the socialist movement (which is not to say that the boneheaded opinions of certain socialists - what time is it? it's Wohlforth-bashing time - don't turn away cadres from the specially oppressed groups). The dialectics, I think, doesn't take place in the individual but within the fighting propaganda-group.

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

For starters, I think you mean Wounded Knee. Further, given that it was a conflict between AIM/Traditionalists, and the Indian Reorganization Act (ie non-traditional!) leadership of the Oglala Nation, you clearly don't know what the fuck you're talking about. I think this example indicates very well the seriousness of your study and understanding of the colonial situation in the Americas, and is reflected in your simplistic understanding of culture and class in context.
In the future, I would suggest not spouting off hackneyed rhetoric when you haven't bothered to understand the realities of a particular historical situation. Otherwise, we'll end up in situations like this where you spout state-sponsored colonial lies concerning the governance of indigenous nations. I'm willing to believe this is ignorance, and not malice, but . . . seriously, stfu until you've done your homework.