As usual this morning I was listening to the radio with half an ear while getting the breakfast. Suddenly my attention was brought into focus by the discussion that was going on about a recently-published novel.* The point of controversy seemed to be that the novel in question had been written by a white writer, but dealt in part with the experience of a black family. “Hey! That’s good!” I thought. Apparently not, according to the interviewee.
The novelist was being accused of “cultural appropriation.” This is a sin about which we hear quite a lot these days. I think its began in this country (as far as I am aware) with criticism levelled against an earlier tradition in the theatre, now abandoned, of white actors “blacking up” to play black characters. Sir Lawrence Olivier’s celebrated but controversial portrayal of Shakespeare’s Othello is the a case in point. Nobody casting a play nowadays would contemplate doing that, which I support. We have a plentiful supply of good actors of various ethnicities without having to resort to that kind of thing. This seems, to my mind, to be in quite a different league from the point being argued on the radio.
This is a compelex subject, and perhaps one that doesn’t lend itself to examination in a blog posting, but it is on my mind, and it is relevant to my general concerns. I want to make two points.
First of all, I believe that one purpose of literature (and by implication the other arts) is to enable the reader/viewer to inhabit a different world of experience, and to see things from a different point of view. This applies also to writers and artists themselves, in creating their work. It is possible, of course, that they may not do this very well. If that is the case then our exploration of the reasons for their having fallen short might become a part of our own education in this area. Tom Sawyer was written by a white man, and it is a part of the interest and value of reading Mark Twain’s story is precisely that we are able to interrogate his attempt to inhabit the lives and experience of black Americans of his time. I think you would have to be in a pretty strange mind to assert that, because Twain was white he should never have attempted this, dismissing his writing as “cultural appropriation”.
I think also that there is a deeper and more general objection to the idea of cultural appropriation. Regular readers will know that in my first career I was a university teacher and researcher in the fields of sociology and anthropology. Wearing that hat I want to insist that all culture consists of processes of appropriation of one kind or another. Every culture on earth is probably an amalgam of influences, motifs, symbols, practices and so on that have been derived originally from “somebody else’s” culture. Let’s face it, the human race has been moving about the planet and mixing for more than 40,000 years. Every element of culture has a history in which it has been detached from some context other than the present.
To assert that any group has a monopoly on the use of certain specific cultural material seems to me to beg an awful lot of questions.
A recent picture by me “quotes” the “lamb and flag” symbol of the Knights Templar. Can I be upbraided by the citizens of Malta on the grounds of “cultural appropriation”? This idea, so fashionable at the moment, runs counter to the principle of artistic freedom, and the sooner it is forgotten the better. “Hands off my culture?” No! Hands off my freedom to explore all aspects of the human condition.
*Because I missed the beginning of there item I don’t know either who was the speaker being interviewed or the title of the novel. That’s the drawback of the broadcast media, of course, in comparison with print. It isn’t possible simply to turn back to the previous page.