By Kenan Malik on Dec 2017, ArtReview
Extracts:
“Maqbool Fida Husain is perhaps India’s greatest artist of the twentieth
century. His work linked ancient and modern traditions and helped transform
Indian modernism. But not everyone appreciated Husain’s work. His depictions of
Hindu deities, often naked, outraged Hindu nationalists who questioned his right,
as someone of Muslim background, to depict figures sacred to Hindus, accusing
him of ‘hurting religious feelings’. His home and gallery were
ransacked, many of his paintings destroyed. He faced lawsuits, including ones
for ‘promoting enmity between different groups’. The harassment spread beyond
India’s borders. In 2006, London’s Asia House Gallery shut an exhibition of his
work after protests and the defacement of two paintings. Husain, who died in
2011, was forced to live his last years in exile, in London and Qatar.
Were he still alive today, M.F. Husain’s Hindu critics might well be
accusing him not of sacrilege but of ‘cultural appropriation’ – the
‘theft’ of images and ideas that truly belong to another culture and that he
had no right to take without permission.
The idea of cultural appropriation has, in recent years, moved from
being an abstruse academic and legal concept to a mainstream political issue.
(...)
So, what is cultural appropriation and why has it become such a
contentious issue? Susan Scafidi, professor of law at Fordham University,
defines it as ‘taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural
expressions, or artefacts from someone else’s culture without permission’.
This can include the ‘unauthorized use of another culture’s dance, dress,
music, language, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, religious symbols,
etc.’
But what is it for knowledge or expression or a cuisine to ‘belong’ to a
culture? And who gives permission for someone from another culture to use
such knowledge or forms? (...)
What really lies behind the debate about cultural appropriation is not
ownership but gatekeeping – the making of rules or an etiquette to determine
how a particular cultural form may be used and by whom. What critics of
cultural appropriation want to establish is that certain people have the right
to determine who can use such knowledge or forms, because at the heart of
criticism of cultural appropriation is the relationship between gatekeeping
and identity.
One of the key arguments of many such critics is that one speaks through
one’s identity; that one speaks, as writer Nesrine Malik has put it, ‘as a’:
‘as a woman’, ‘as a Muslim’, ‘as an immigrant’. And those who are not ‘as a’
must take their cue from those who are, especially if they happen to be
privileged by being white or male or straight. ‘Lived experience’, as Malik has
put it, ‘is on its way to becoming the superior and most veracious form of
truth.’ And as the novelist Kamila Shamsie has observed, ‘What started as a
thoughtful post-colonial critique of certain types of imperial texts somehow
became a peculiar orthodoxy that essentially denies the possibility of
imaginative engagement with anyone outside your little circle.’
What is really being appropriated, in other words, is not culture but
the right to police cultures and experiences, a right appropriated by those who
license themselves to be arbiters of the correct forms cultural borrowing.
Such policing is deeply problematic, both artistically and politically. It
deadens creativity and it assaults imagination. The importance of imagination
is that we can take ourselves beyond where we are, beyond our own narrow
perspectives, to imagine other peoples, other worlds, other experiences.
Without the ability to do that, both artistic creativity and progressive
politics shrivel. (...)
Many critics of cultural appropriation insist that they are opposed not
to cultural engagement, but to racism. They want to protect marginalised
cultures and ensure that such cultures speak for themselves and are not simply
to be seen through the eyes of more privileged groups. (...)
It is true that cultural engagement does not take place on a level playing
field, but is shaped by racism and inequality. Racism ensured that the great black
pioneers of rock ‘n’ roll never received their due, whereas many white artists,
from Elvis Presley onwards, were feted as cultural icons. Yet, as the poet
Amiri Baraka once observed, the issue here is not that of cultural
appropriation at all: ‘The problem is that if The Beatles tell me that they
learned everything they know from Blind Willie [Johnson], I want to know why
Blind Willie is still running an elevator in Jackson, Mississippi. It’s that
kind of inequality that is abusive, not the actual appropriation of culture
because that’s normal.’
Preventing the Beatles from drawing on the work of Blind Willie Johnson
or other black singers would have done little to improve black peoples’ lives.
It would not have overthrown Jim Crow laws in the 1950s. It would not rid
America of discrimination in the labour market today. (...)
Only mass social and political campaigns to transform the very
structures of society – such as the civil rights movement of the 1950s and
1960s – can bring about such change. Otherwise, social justice comes to be
seen not as the erasure of exploitative structures but merely as the
possibility of ‘cultural fairness’ within them. The campaigns against cultural
appropriation are an implicit acceptance that the playing field cannot be
levelled, and that the best we can do is fence off certain areas.
A key argument of those who abhor cultural appropriation is that if one
does make use of ideas or images or objects from other cultures, one should do
so only with ‘respect’. (...) There are certainly many cases of the
racist use of cultural forms, from minstrelsy onwards. Much art, though,
is necessarily disrespectful, even contemptuous, of cultures and traditions. (...)
The trouble with the notion of ‘disrespect’ is that it conflates several
issues: from outright racism, to the unthinking but not necessarily racist use
of ‘exotic’ cultural forms, to the deliberate challenge of cultural and
religious beliefs and rules. It also conflates respect for people with respect
for their cultures and traditions. Equality requires us to treat all people as
autonomous moral beings with equal rights and dignity. But while that requires
that we respect the right of others to hold different ideas and beliefs, it
does not require us to treat all their ideas and beliefs and traditions with
respect or deem all ideas and beliefs and traditions as being of equal worth.
The consequence of these two types of conflation is to make it easier
for those who do not want their cultural beliefs to be challenged to dismiss
all critiques as ‘disrespectful’ or ‘racist’. ‘Disrespect’ is the
contemporary secular version of ‘blasphemy’. And its impact is as pernicious.
Every society has its gatekeepers, whose role is to protect certain
institutions, maintain the privileges of particular groups and cordon off some
beliefs from challenge. Such gatekeepers protect not the marginalised but the
powerful. Racism itself is a form of gatekeeping, a means of denying racialised
groups equal rights, access and opportunities. In minority communities, the
gatekeepers are usually self-appointed guardians whose power rests on their
ability to define what is acceptable and what is beyond the bounds. (...)
Consider, for example, the case of Exhibit B, a show about ‘human zoos’
designed by South African Brett Bailey. It featured 12 ‘tableaux’ in which
motionless performers were exhibited as artefacts. These tableaux were drawn
from nineteenth-century racist freak shows, which Exhibit B took as the
starting point for an exploration of slavery, colonialism and present-day
racism.
In 2014, the show was to have been staged by London’s Barbican Centre
but was closed down because of protests that it was racist. The actors in the
show put out a statement insisting that ‘we are proud to be black performers in
this piece’ and that, far from being racist, Exhibit B was ‘a powerful tool in
the fight against racism’. To which one of the critics, the sociologist Kehinde
Andrews, in a debate with Exhibit B actor Stella Odunlami, replied, ‘black
artists do not have the authority to define what is and is not acceptable’. But
black sociologists apparently do.
The campaigns against cultural appropriation, like that against Exhibit
B, empower not those who suffer from racism or inequality but, in the acid
words of the African-American critic Adolph Reed, ‘the Guild of Racial
Spokespersonship’, those who take it on themselves to be the guardians
of the acceptable.
The very term ‘cultural appropriation’ is inappropriate. Cultures work
not through appropriation but through messy interaction. Writers and artists,
indeed all human beings, necessarily engage with the experiences of others. Nobody
owns a culture, but everyone inhabits one (or several), and in inhabiting a
culture, one finds the tools for reaching out to other cultures.
Cultural interaction is necessarily messy because the world is messy.
Some of that messiness is good: the complexity and diversity of the world. Some
of it is damaging: the racial, sexual and economic inequalities that disfigure
our world.
Such damaging messiness will not be cleaned up by limiting cultural
interaction, or by confining it within a particular etiquette. In reframing
political and economic issues as cultural ones, or as issues of identity,
campaigns against cultural appropriation obscure the roots of racism, and make
it harder to challenge it. In constraining what Adam Shatz called ‘acts of
radical sympathy, and imaginative identification… across racial lines’, they
make such challenges more difficult still.
The campaigns against cultural appropriation are bad for creative art.
And they are bad for progressive politics. They seek to police interaction and
constrain imagination. For the sake of both of art and politics we need less
policing and constraints, more interaction and imagination.”
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