definition of appropriation in creative writing

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Appropriation.

• Julie Sanders Julie Sanders School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1049
• Published online: 29 July 2019

Literary texts have long been understood as generative of other texts and of artistic responses that stretch across time and culture. Adaptation studies seeks to explore the cultural contexts for these afterlives and the contributions they make to the literary canon. Writers such as William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens were being adapted almost as soon as their work emerged on stage or in print and there can be no doubt that this accretive aspect to their writing ensures their literary survival. Adaptation is, then, both a response to, a reinforcer of, and a potential shaper of canon and has had particular impact as a process through the multimedia and global affordances of the 20th century onwards, from novels to theatre, from poetry to music, and from film to digital content. The aesthetic pleasure of recognizing an “original” referenced in a secondary version can be considered central to the cultural power of literature and the arts.

Appropriation as a concept though moves far beyond intertextuality and introduces ideas of active critical commentary, of creative re-interpretation and of “writing back” to the original. Often defined in terms of a hostile takeover or possession, both the theory and practice of appropriation have been informed by the activist scholarship of postcolonialism, poststructuralism, feminism, and queer theory. Artistic responses can be understood as products of specific cultural politics and moments and as informed responses to perceived injustices and asymmetries of power. The empowering aspects of re-visionary writing, that has seen, for example, fairytales reclaimed for female protagonists, or voices returned to silenced or marginalized individuals and communities, through reconceived plots and the provision of alternative points of view, provide a predominantly positive history. There are, however, aspects of borrowing and appropriation that are more problematic, raising ethical questions about who has the right to speak for or on behalf of others or indeed to access, and potentially rewrite, cultural heritage.

There has been debate in the arena of intercultural performance about the “right” of Western theatre directors to embed aspects of Asian culture into their work and in a number of highly controversial examples, the “right” of White artists to access the cultural references of First Nation or Black Asian and Minority Ethnic communities has been contested, leading in extreme cases to the agreed destruction of artworks. The concept of “cultural appropriation” poses important questions about the availability of artforms across cultural boundaries and about issues of access and inclusion but in turn demands approaches that perform cultural sensitivity and respect the question of provenance as well as intergenerational and cross-cultural justice.

• intertextuality
• cultural appropriation
• intercultural performance
• postcolonial
• remediation
• interdisciplinarity
• point of view

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Appropriation & Attribution

Attribution is giving credit where credit is due. Appropriation is the complex borrowing of ideas, images, symbols, sounds, and identity from others.

Discussion Questions

1. What is the relationship between attribution and appropriation? How are they similar? How are they different?

2. The video acknowledges that artistic progress may not be possible without incorporating important developments from the past. Do you agree? Why or why not?

3. How can artists use others’ creative works in an ethical manner? When is appropriation unethical?

4. Case law suggests that someone cannot claim intellectual property rights after throwing away the original work. Do you agree with this position? Why or why not?

5. Have you ever pirated or copied works protected by copyright? What harms did you cause? Do you feel you were ethically justified to do so? Why or why not?

6. Think of an example of something you consider to be a “rip-off” and something you think is an innovative repurposing of another’s work. What makes them different? Could your conclusions be shaped by your own interests?

7. Fair use is a doctrine that allows for limited use of copyrighted materials without acquiring permission, for purposes such as teaching, journalism, parody, or critique. Do you agree with these parameters? Are there other instances that should constitute fair use?

8. According to the terms and conditions of YouTube, the company says it may use any works uploaded as it chooses, but will not claim credit for creation of the piece. Do you think this is ethically permissible? Why or why not? Would you feel comfortable with YouTube using a video you created in an advertisement for the company?

Case Studies

Blurred Lines of Copyright

Marvin Gaye’s Estate won a lawsuit against Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams for the hit song “Blurred Lines,” which had a similar feel to one of his songs.

Appropriating “Hope”

Fairey’s portrait of Barack Obama raised debate over the extent to which an artist can use and modify another’s artistic work, yet still call it one’s own.

Christina Fallin: “Appropriate Culturation?”

After Fallin posted a picture of herself wearing a Plain’s headdress on social media, uproar emerged over cultural appropriation and Fallin’s intentions.

Teaching Notes

This video introduces the general ethics concepts of appropriation and attribution. Attribution is giving credit where credit is due. Appropriation is the complex borrowing of ideas, images, symbols, sounds, and identity from others.

Cultural appropriation is the use of elements of one culture by another culture, such as music, dress, imagery, or behavior and ceremony. To learn more about this in relation to stereotypes and media representations watch Representation .

Issues of artistic and intellectual attribution are often related to copyright laws and intellectual property policies. For a better understanding of the relationship between law and ethics, watch Legal Rights & Ethical Responsibilities .

Appropriating or using others’ work without proper attribution can cause reputational and financial harm, among others. To learn more about various types of harm, watch Causing Harm .

The case studies covered on this page explore issues of cultural appropriation, artistic appropriation, and legal and artistic attribution. “Christina Fallin: “Appropriate Culturation?”” examines the intentions of a musician after she posted a controversial picture on social media and was criticized of cultural appropriation. “Appropriating “Hope”” details the trial over Shepard Fairey’s portrait of Barack Obama and the extent to which an artist can use and modify another’s artistic work. ““Blurred Lines” of Copyright” examines the legal debates over proper attribution in the Marvin Gaye Estate’s lawsuit against Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams.

Terms defined in our ethics glossary that are related to the video and case studies include: diffusion of responsibility, integrity, justice, morals, self-serving bias, and values.

For more information on concepts covered in this and other videos, as well as activities to help think through these concepts, see Deni Elliott’s workbook  Ethical Challenges: Building an Ethics Toolkit , which may be downloaded for free as a PDF. This workbook explores what ethics is and what it means to be ethical, offering readers a variety of exercises to identify their own values and reason through ethical conflicts.

Additional Resources

Askegaard, Søren, and Giana M. Eckhardt. 2012. “Glocal Yoga: Re-appropriation in the Indian Consumptionscape.” Marketing Theory 12 (1): 45-60.

Berson, Josh. 2010. “Intellectual Property and Cultural Appropriation.” Reviews in Anthropology 39 (3): 201-228.

Craig, David. 2006. “Description and Attribution.” In The Ethics of the Story: Using Narrative Techniques Responsibly in Journalism . Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing.

Lessig, Lawrence. 2008. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy . New York: The Penguin Press.

Luke, Belinda, and Kate Kearins. 2012. “Attribution of Words versus Attribution of Responsibilities: Academic Plagiarism and University Practice.” Organization 19 (6): 881-889.

Merryman, John Henry, Albert E. Elsen, and Stephen K. Urice. 2014. Law, Ethics, and the Visual Arts . Alphen aan den Rijn, The Netherlands: Kluwer Law International.

Ursin, Reanna A. 2014. “Cultural Appropriation for Mainstream Consumption: The Musical Adaptation of Dessa Rose .” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 47 (1): 91-109.

Young, James O., and Conrad G. Brunk (Editors). 2009. The Ethics of Cultural Appropriation . Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Transcript of Narration

Written and Narrated by

Deni Elliott , Ph.D., M.A. Department of Journalism & Media Studies College of Arts and Sciences The University of South Florida at St. Petersburg

“As young children, we learned that everyone has the right to control the use of their property. Keep it, share it, give it away; it seemed that simple. But as adults, we find ourselves trying to navigate through physical and virtual worlds, where issues of intellectual property and ownership are much more complex. Much of what is ethical and unethical in the area of intellectual property has to do with following the law. While laws governing appropriation and attribution are struggling to keep up and add clarity in our rapidly evolving world, ethical analysis can help guide the way.

Attribution means giving credit where credit is due. In theory, the author of any published work has a right to control how his or her intellectual property is used. But in practice, most people click agree when signing on to websites such as YouTube without ever being aware that they’re signing over their rights to their material to the corporation that owns the site.

We all know that we’re not supposed to plagiarize our papers. But what about artists or musicians who learn their craft by copying famous predecessors? Would we call that stealing? Or influence?

Music professor and computer scientist David Cope created a computer program that produces “original” compositions in the style of Mozart or Bach, for instance, but it’s not. Two CDs have been produced and sold with no legal action taken because the copyrights to the individual works expired long ago.

In another case, Composer John Oswald created sound collages, using samples of previously recorded works. He claimed that the sound collages were original compositions. He listed all his sources, but did not get permissions to use them. Record companies filed lawsuits, and ultimately, unsold copies of his albums were destroyed.

Ethically speaking, using others’ intellectual property for one’s own gain without permission is stealing. But appropriation is more complex. Appropriation can mean borrowing ideas, images, symbols, sounds and identity from others. Many would argue that progress in art, music, and architecture wouldn’t even be possible without incorporating important artistic developments of the past.

Sometimes appropriation is ethically permissible and other times not. For example, many of our government buildings and banks have appropriated ancient Greek architectural features, such as columns and capitals, to project images we associate with democracy, wealth, and freedom. On the other hand, controversial instances of cultural appropriation abound, such as the NFL’s use of Native American symbols like the logo for the Washington Redskins.

When it comes to appropriation and attribution, the laws may still be murky, but ethical behavior doesn’t have to be. If what you want to use doesn’t belong to you, then use it only in ways that the owner permits. If it’s impossible to ask for permission, then ask yourself how you would want the creation to be used or attributed if it were your own. And if ownership itself is the subject of debate, then the use should be subjected to a systematic moral analysis to determine what harms the appropriation might cause and whether they are justified.”

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Article Contents

1. introduction, 2. categories of cultural appropriation, 3. what is minor literature, 4. intertextuality and appropriation, 5. the ethics and aesthetics of cultural appropriation.

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The Ethics and Aesthetics of Intertextual Writing: Cultural Appropriation and Minor Literature

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Paul Haynes, The Ethics and Aesthetics of Intertextual Writing: Cultural Appropriation and Minor Literature, The British Journal of Aesthetics , Volume 61, Issue 3, July 2021, Pages 291–306, https://doi.org/10.1093/aesthj/ayab001

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Cultural appropriation, as both concept and practice, is a hugely controversial issue. It is of particular importance to the arts because creativity is often found at the intersection of cultural boundaries. Much of the popular discourse on cultural appropriation focusses on the commercial use of indigenous or marginalized cultures by mainstream or dominant cultures. There is, however, growing awareness that cultural appropriation is a complicated issue encompassing cultural exchange in all its forms. Creativity emerging from cultural interdependence is far from a reciprocal exchange. This insight indicates that ethical and political implications are at stake. Consequently, the arts are being examined with greater attention in order to assess these implications. This article will focus on appropriation in literature, and examine the way appropriative strategies are being used to resist dominant cultural standards. These strategies and their implications will be analyzed through the lens of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of minor literature.

Any genre is never more interesting than when being broken in some way…not what the story is about but its very existence. ( Moore, 2017 )

Both words in the phrase ‘cultural appropriation’ are ideologically loaded, which is further intensified as they become merged into a single concept. This concept is controversial and fundamentally political—as, indeed, is culture itself.

Culture is necessarily shared. It is also continually undergoing transformation, not least through relationships with other cultures or in addressing alternative values to those on which it is structured (see Kulchyski, 1997 ; Matthes, 2016 ; Kramvig and Flemmen, 2019 ). The implications for neatly defining culture are clear:

[T]he definition of culture has a contested history. Not only do cultures change over time, influenced by economic and political forces, climatic and geographic changes, and the importation of ideas, but the very notion of culture itself also is dynamically changing over time and space – the product of ongoing human interaction. This means that we accept the term as ambiguous and suggestive rather than as analytically precise. ( Baldwin et al., 2008 , p. 23)

The interaction of practices and values from different cultures is, therefore, never a neutral process. Drawing out the ethical and political implications of cultural exchange is thus a challenge. This challenge has been addressed in a number of ways, including categorizing different types of exchange ( Rogers, 2006 ), categorizing the object of exchange ( Young, 2000 , 2005 ) or identifying types of ethical consequences of cultural exchange practices themselves ( Heyd, 2003 ). This article will take a different approach and evaluate cultural exchange within the arts along a fault-line that divides exchange practices between i) appropriation that serves the interests of existing cultural inequalities and ii) appropriative practices used to challenge existing modes of dominance. The focus of the evaluation will be literature—in particular, the ethics and aesthetics of intertextual writing as identified through the lens of minor literature, a concept developed by Deleuze and Guattari (1986) . The insights obtained by using the minor literature concept will help to enrich the concept of cultural appropriation and assess its ethical implications. In particular, it helps to clarify the relevance of status, advantage and opportunity as being asymmetrical features of cultural exchange, and it can be applied to identify strategies to address these asymmetries. Evaluating appropriative strategies within a variety of intertextual literary settings will thus enable these insights to be examined and applied to other cases. Before this evaluation can commence, the notion of cultural appropriation needs to be examined in a little more detail.

Cultural appropriation can be approached in different ways. The variety of different practices classified as instances of cultural appropriation means that stipulating a definition is problematic (see Jackson, 2019 ). Helene Shugart (1997) observes that appropriation occurs when features perceived to belong to a specific culture are used to further the interest of those not sharing that cultural heritage:

Any instance in which a group borrows or imitates the strategies of another—even when the tactic is not intended to deconstruct or distort the other’s meanings and experiences—thus would constitute appropriation. ( Shugart, 1997 , pp. 210–211)

Expanding on this definition is helpful in positioning the concept at this initial stage. In this way, if culture is defined (even if imprecisely) in terms of the complex network of practices, knowledge and beliefs that emerge and are shared through social interaction (see Baldwin et al., 2008 , pp. 23–24), then cultural appropriation can thus be characterized as an unauthorized use or imitation of characteristics, symbols, artefacts, genres, rituals or technologies derived from these networks, but removed from their cultural setting and original purpose (see also Rogers, 2006). Characterized this way, a number of relevant themes and practices can be identified—although as an emerging concept, presenting a systematic approach to these themes and practices presents a challenge. Peter Kulchyski warns of attempting to apply an exhaustive or systematic schematic of categories or instances (Kulchyski, 1997); nevertheless, there are some common themes of relevance to the arts, including the following categories: cross-cultural aesthetic appreciation ( Heyd, 2003 ); the fictional (re)production of marginalized voices ( Moraru, 2000 ); appropriation in popular visual culture ( Wetmore, 2000 ); reciprocal creative exchange ( Sinkoff, 2000 ; Goldstein-Gidoni, 2003 ; Dong-Hoo, 2006 ); transculturation in the arts ( Lionnet, 1992 ) and performance and protest ( Hoyes, 2004 ; Galindo and Medina, 2009 ; Carriger, 2018 ). The article will return to some of these topics shortly but will firstly address attempts to provide structure to the patterns observed within this diversity.

Richard Rogers (2006) has developed a framework with which to position the concept of cultural appropriation based on four categories: exchange, dominance, exploitation and transculturation. The different categories are used to evaluate the ethics of different types of cultural exchange and are constituted by social, political and economic contexts such as considerations of power relations between cultures, hegemonic concerns, resistance and the hybrid nature of cultural development. Cultural exchange is characterized by reciprocal cultural influence in the absence of specific differences in power relations. Cultural dominance occurs when features derived from a dominant culture are imposed on individuals from a subordinate culture. Cultural exploitation occurs when people from a dominant culture take or imitate features or entities from a subordinate culture without permission or without providing compensation. Finally, transculturation is categorized as a hybridization of different cultural elements from multiple sources, particularly where the product of the relationship represents a new cultural form.

Rogers describes the logic and relevance of these categories in detail (see Rogers, 2006 , pp. 479–497), providing a helpful series of archetypes to assess the conditions that predetermine exchange relationships. Despite these strengths, this approach has its limitations, particularly in relation to the arts. Rogers’ assumption of the operation of a binary structure of power as a force of cultural imposition (or the evasion of ‘fair compensation’) both simplifies the systemic aspects of power, and risks presenting culture in an essentialist or reified way. As a framework, it is powerful in assessing explicitly commercial relationships but less insightful in evaluating more nuanced creativity emerging within cultural exchange.

A contrasting approach is to place less emphasis on the nature of the cultural encounter and more on the entities enabled or exchanged through the cross-cultural encounter. The framework developed by James Young, for example, distinguishes between different classes of entities appropriated. Young identifies five categories (material appropriation; non-material appropriation; stylistic appropriation; motif appropriation and subject appropriation). In contrast with Rogers’ approach, Young’s categories focus more explicitly on themes relevant to artistic production. Material appropriation involves transferring ownership of a tangible object from members of one culture (those creating the entity) to members of another culture (those appropriating the entity). Non-material appropriation occurs through the reproduction of non-tangible works by members of another culture. Stylistic appropriation occurs when members of one culture use stylistic elements used by or in common with the works of another culture. Motif appropriation occurs when the influence of another culture is considerable in creating a new work rather than the new work being created in the same style as the works of that culture. Subject appropriation concerns cases when members of one culture represent members or aspects of another culture ( Young, 2000 , pp. 302–303). The framework is further enhanced by considering the offensiveness of contrasting examples and mitigated by factors such as context, social value and freedom of expression. The strength of Young’s categorization is to give clarity to the many different ways in which exchange risks being objectionable, particularly in the creation and circulation of artistic technique, art and artefacts, and in the broader context of authenticity, representation, cultural heritage and intellectual property rights. Young’s approach is also limited by this focus. By exposing the conditions relevant to the framing of cultural appropriation, Young’s categorization also demonstrates the inadequacy of attempting to unify the multiplicity of cultural encounters and boundaries (and the commodification of cultural content) through the reception of typically dissonant or totemic artefacts. Focussing on exceptional exchange patterns (hawking/hoarding stolen relics, stylistic plagiarism, stereotyping, carnivalesque profanation, etc.) means Young’s approach fails to focus on the more pressing implications of cultural exchange and broader issues, such as racism or rights based on heritage (see, for example, Heyd, 2003 ; Jackson, 2019 , pp. 1–9). In addition, Young’s way of framing cultural interaction reveals exactly the type of appropriative representation—for example, addressing who determines consent or which individuals are authentically ‘insiders’—that it was invoked to question (see Matthes, 2016 ). It also assumes a discourse of victimhood that is both oversimplified and ‘justifiably unacceptable to many indigenous people’ ( Cuthbert, 1998 , p. 257).

A third approach to categorize forms of appropriation and exchange is presented by Thomas Heyd (2003) . Heyd’s focus has the potential to offer additional insight relevant to this article, as it is derived from research on art and aesthetics ( Heyd, 2003 , p. 37). Heyd emphasizes the need to distinguish between three categories of risk that occur with acts of appropriation. The first risk is moral and occurs when appropriation is unauthorized and threatens the income or rights of disadvantaged or indigenous groups or artists. The second risk is cognitive and occurs when a different value context is imposed on a creative process that threatens the authenticity of the cultural artefacts (and culture) appropriated. The third risk is ontological and occurs through a misrepresented portrayal of the culture producing the appropriated entities, which ultimately threatens their cultural identity. (see Heyd, 2003 , pp. 37–38). There is, however, a fourth risk—one with which Heyd seems unaware, but for which his approach is complicit. This is the risk of defining the creativity of artists in terms of their heritage, namely interpreting a work of art by an artist from a marginalized culture predominantly in terms of their marginalized status irrespective of its relevance to their art . This deterministic coupling of creativity to heritage is problematic for a variety of reasons. The most obvious objection is that it limits the creative work to an imposed standard, often in terms of a stereotypical representation of its marginalized origin, or dictating the criteria for authenticity. The disqualification of Genevieve Nnaji’s film Lionheart from the 2020 Academy Awards ‘International Feature Film’ category for having insufficient Igbo dialogue (and too much English) exemplifies this final point well, regardless that the film reflects an authentic contextual use of different languages for business purposes in Nigeria, which is itself a prominent theme of the film ( Whitten, 2019 ). Viewed in terms of the authenticity that such creativity ‘owes’ to its marginalized cultural patterns additionally removes the potential for the intended subversion of such standards. Removing opportunities to resist or subvert prevailing standards is another aspect of cultural domination, appropriating or closing down ‘strategies of discourse and public performances of culture beyond the stultifying binaries of right/wrong or appreciation/appropriation’ ( Carriger, 2018 , pp. 165), strategies examined later in this article.

An alternative approach is to address the growing body of case studies that present the scope of cultural appropriation in its broadest form and position them in terms of how they reproduce or resist forms of cultural dominance. This will also help to identify strategies—such as performance, redeployment, learning, engagement or re-identification—able to serve the purpose of resistance or subversion, or to produce lines of flight to address marginalization, exclusion, invisibility and powerlessness. What potentially unites such examples is that they might serve to provide evidence of the operation of cultural expropriation —not merely to resist cultural domination or address establishments of power, but to develop mechanisms of cultural innovation available to empower even the most marginalized of social groups. For this reason, there is the need for a revised perspective that distinguishes between processes of cultural appropriation and strategies of cultural expropriation, and to explain their relevance and implications. To do so, the article will now turn to this theme and attempt to redefine the relationship underpinning the revised perspective in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of minor literature.

To answer the question that Deleuze and Guattari ask—‘What is minor literature?’—is to address the broader questions implied by the powers of becoming that it reveals. More specifically, the minor literature concept will address the question of how to construct a form of writing from a language that is not one’s own. In order to address the challenges implied by cultural appropriation, the minor literature concept will also need to be linked to the aesthetic and ethical contexts for which cultural narratives, myths and representation are key themes—issues to be examined in the final section of this article. To address this topic and make these connections more explicit, it will be helpful to begin with Deleuze and Guattari’s framing of the distinction between minoritarian and majoritarian, through which the minor literature concept is positioned.

Minoritarian in this sense is not an indicator of (numerical) minority or ethnic minority but is characterized in its difference with an embodiment or approximation of a standard that defines a majority. It is this difference from the abstract (majority-serving) standard that separates, and sets apart, the minority. Majority assumes a state of power and domination as the standard measure ( Deleuze and Guattari, 1988 , p. 105). An example of such a standard is the requirement of membership of the Académie Française in order to create ‘official’ academic art in late nineteenth-century France. Membership offered prestige and a position, but required adherence to its conventions (encompassing majority, i.e. White, male, elitist, values). Such faithfulness to these conventions produced art now perceived to be conservative, bourgeois, contrived and lacking in innovation. In a similar way, in adhering to prevailing conventions, the majoritarian character is a constant and homogeneous system. In this regard, majority is expressive of identity (i.e. inert and invariable). This is in contrast with minorities, which serve as subsystems dependent on, but invisible within, the system. Minoritarian, in this sense, is seen by Deleuze and Guattari as ‘a potential, creative and created, becoming’ ( Deleuze and Guattari, 1988 , pp. 105–106). To operationalize this relationship, Deleuze and Guattari go beyond a majority/minority duality, adding a third category or state: ‘becoming-minor’—namely a creative process of becoming different or diverging from the abstract standard that defines majority.

Minor literature emerges from this conceptual relationship. For Deleuze and Guattari, creativity in literature extends its authority through a minoritarian mode. Minor literature does not attempt to meet the standard but instead attempts to subvert or revise the standard: ‘minor no longer designates specific literatures but the revolutionary conditions for every literature within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature’ ( Deleuze and Guattari, 1986 , pp. 17–18). In this regard, all great literature is minor literature to the extent that it creates its own standard. The example of Franz Kafka is used to illustrate the point. Kafka was a Czech and a Jew who wrote in German—a language that, although foreign to his being, was also a channel for the creation of identity. For Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka was a great writer because he wrote without a standard view of the interpersonal problems of people. In this way, Kafka’s work does not represent an established identity, but is prefigurative in giving a voice to that which is not given: a ‘people to come’—that is, a people whose identity is a work in progress, in a state of creation and transformation.

In conceptualizing the contours of minor literature, Deleuze and Guattari identify three key characteristics: the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy and the collective assemblage of annunciation. ( Deleuze and Guattari, 1986 , p. 18). Examples from literature will help to unpack these features, and these will be assembled and discussed in Section 4. Before this, a small number of observations should suffice as an introduction to the theme.

The characteristics of minor literature can be contrasted with those of major literature. A major literature works within a set of literary and discursive standards in order to foreground and narrate the way individual concerns join with other individual concerns within a social environment. These conventions, as much as the social and political setting, remain in the background. The storyline might be anchored in a specific location, but in major literature, this setting serves as the context to explore the subjective experience and relationships developed between the cast of characters we encounter. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin ( 1852 ) will serve as an example of major literature. The novel conforms to its epoch’s conventions of a well-written, structurally sophisticated and emotionally engaging story. The social setting of the novel is mid nineteenth-century Southern USA, defined by the condition of slavery. The novel’s theme is the immorality of slavery, but the narrative structure itself focusses primarily on the relationships between the Shelby family, the St. Clare family, their slaves and their experiences as these relationships change. The novel expresses its anti-slavery narrative through conventional tropes, literary devices and stock characters (cruel slave trader, enlightened slave owner, Uncle Tom, etc.) in a way that appealed to the sensibilities of its predominantly White, Christian readership.

In contrast, minor literature is concerned with the social ‘assemblages’ themselves, which are comprised not merely of characters but also include other equally important entities. Deleuze and Guattari conceptualize this in three ways, particularly with reference to minor literature as a reversal of the conventional interpretation of storytelling. Firstly, this is done by presenting a perspective that is usually invisible or suppressed as the central focus while, at the same time, conventionally dominant codes are handled as though they were alien or unfamiliar. The second way this is achieved is through a reversal of emphasis, specifically in the sense that the cast of characters express social and political forces, and these forces themselves are the subject(s) of the performance. Finally, this is approached by thinking of authorship as the adoption of collective value: the writer does not conform to literary conventions and genres, but instead expresses the collective sentiments of the socio-political reality of the character’s setting.

While these characteristics are almost by definition genre-defying, an example of an approach to literature that combines these features is that of intertextuality. Such writings, irrespective of other qualities they may possess, can be appreciated in enriching, modifying and creating hybrid distortions to the narrative that, in turn, produce that which is not already recognized, suggesting new avenues of becoming and new questions yet to be addressed. In an example to be examined further in the following section, Ishmael Reed’s 1976 novel Flight to Canada illustrates minor literature characteristics, and does so through in a deliberate—and intertextual—contrast with the major literature features of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin . Flight to Canada examines how American culture narrates the history of the American Civil War. Reed uses real and fictional events from the 1850s and 1860s—including characters appropriated from Stowe’s novel and the corresponding historical figures inspiring them, coupled with the narrator’s world of the 1970s—to satirize this narrative. Conceptualized in this way, it becomes clearer why intertextuality as minor literature plays a potentially important role: such literature is a type of appropriation that resists ethical and aesthetic dominance in order to explore the possibilities of new standards. The following sections will unpack the characteristics of minor literature and exemplify this argument in more detail.

The concept of minor literature is relevant here because of the changing nature of production promotion, exchange and consumption of literature. There is little need to rehearse the argument that social media platforms are changing the way information circulates with implications for the changing nature of the production and consumption of text. The point of most relevance here is that the means and circulation of writing are immense and, by implication, access to culturally specific myths, stories and history, the diversity of styles, approaches to aesthetics and authorship available has expanded. If, in addition, there are a limited number of distinctive plotlines feeding into Western literature (see, for example, Booker, 2004 ), then this diversity is typically channelled through a rather limited set of tropes but one potentially enriched by engaging with non-Western writing or storytelling traditions. Appropriating or adapting a pre-existing location and accompanying set of characters offers different degrees of engagement with the original material and includes a variety of strategies: détournement, fan fiction, honkadori, pastiche, transmedia and type-scene, to name a few. Each is appropriative in taking an existing story or narrative device and using it as the basis of a new story or a continuation or hybridization of the original. Using a strategy of appropriation enables issues to be elaborated and extended because other aspects of the story are already developed or the individuals established. In this way, the voices repeated within intertextual work repeat to transform the work: thus repeating the power of difference, the conditions from which the original work emerged. The work appropriates, but its transformation could equally embody an expropriation, as defined earlier.

As conceptualized this way, the focus of appropriation is to make visible the complex bonds between characters and entities within the story’s social settings that are otherwise overlooked. This is not simply a matter of replacing one voice for another, but of creating a hybrid voice. Such hybrid voices alter the text by eliciting a diversity of styles, pushing back against dominant conventions and questioning the very defining features of literary success. Consequently, this facet of minor literature also implies the emergence of new approaches to literary aesthetics, politics and ethics, as Lev Grossman suggests: ‘[Breaking down walls] used to be the work of the avant garde, but in many ways fanfiction has stepped in to take on that role. If the mainstream has been slow to honor it, well, that’s usually the fate of aesthetic revolutions’ ( Grossman, 2013 : xiii). This does not mean that minor literature can be reduced to features of intertextuality, nor that minor literature is necessarily intertextual. Instead, examining intertextual literature through the lens of minor literature can distinguish acts of appropriation in terms of ethical responsibility, offer opportunities for challenging political dominance and contribute to improved aesthetic transparency by challenging the aesthetic standards that support culturally dominant conventions. Once established, this approach can be applied more specifically to examine other forms of cultural appropriation.

To illustrate this insight a little more, some of the features of appropriation in literature will need to be examined. To provide some exemplification and further insights into the cultural aspects of such appropriation, the notion of intertextuality will be used to illustrate the three key characteristics of minor literature introduced in the previous section.

The first characteristic presented by Deleuze and Guattari describes minor literature as the case in which ‘language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization’ ( Deleuze and Guattari, 1986 , p. 16). Consequently, invisible or otherwise suppressed perspectives become repositioned as the point of emphasis and, as such, are able to challenge dominant codes and conventions, which, as a result, become rendered as foreign or incoherent.

While there is a diversity of motives, styles and modes of expression to be found within intertextual literature, a key theme is that of reversal of foreground/background. Returning to Ishmael Reed’s 1976 novel Flight to Canada will help to illustrate this characteristic, as the flight itself is both literally and figuratively a deterritorialization. In the novel, Reed addresses the way Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin appropriates the narrative framework of Josiah Henson’s autobiography ( Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave ) ( Henson, 1849 ) by reappropriating the story to its rightful owners, the former slaves themselves. Stowe’s novel rescued Henson’s account of his life from obscurity, but at the cost of distortion and sensationalism serving the codes, conventions and expectations of a predominantly White readership, as expressed through the lens of its White characters. Reed’s corrective is a counter-distortion of history by telling Henson’s story from the slave’s perspective but using deliberate anachronism and combining real and fictitious events in ways that reverse expectations and use literature itself for the purpose of liberation. In the novel, the lives of powerful and notable historical individuals (Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Stowe, for example) are fictionalized, being presented as stereotypical figures, incoherent drunks and trite dupes for the reader’s ridicule, while the characters representing Henson, the slaves and slave descendants he encountered in his life are given depth and insightfulness, particularly in voicing their reflections on the historical conditions for emancipation.

In reflecting on a very different approach to reappropriation, Françoise Lionnet’s view that Francophone women novelists of colour offer insights into ‘border zones’ of culture provides another example of this first characteristic ( Lionnet, 1992 ). Examples of the deterritorialization of language are demonstrated by Lionnet’s observation that at the periphery of cultural discourses is a heteroglossia, a hybrid language that is a site of creative resistance to dominant conceptual paradigms. The creative literary practices that are employed by writers of African heritage occupying these border zones reveal, for Lionnet, processes of adaptation, appropriation and contestation, which shape identity in colonial and postcolonial contexts. The established conventions of storytelling found in the literature of the colonial power are invoked by postcolonial border-zone writings, often for the purpose of being subverted, in particular: ‘to delegitimate the cultural hegemony of “French” culture over “Francophone” realities’ ( Lionnet, 1992 , p. 116).

The second characteristic identified by Deleuze and Guattari is that minor literature emphasizes social and political forces rather than focussing primarily on individual concerns joined with other individual concerns charted through a series of personal experiences, as is the case with major literature. Instead, Deleuze and Guattari make the following observation concerning this second characteristic: ‘its cramped spaces forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics. The individual concern thus becomes all the more necessary, indispensable, magnified because a whole other story is vibrating within it’ ( Deleuze and Guattari, 1986 , p. 17).

Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) offers a useful illustration of such political immediacy. In the novel Rhys interweaves feminist and postcolonial argument within an intertextual plot derived from, and intertwined with, Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre (1874). Rhys’ novel tells the story of Bertha Mason (under her real name Antoinette Cosway) from the character’s point of view. The story begins with an account of her childhood in Jamaica and recounts her honeymoon and unhappy marriage to Edward Rochester. The story charts her emigration to England and ultimately her confinement to ‘the attic’ of Thornfield Hall. The main character is, in many ways, the mirror of Jane Eyre but, as a Creole woman having lost her wealth and position in society and in a fragile state of mental health, is one that can be seen as having developed through an explicit engagement with the (political) forces of patriarchy, colonialism, racism, displacement, assimilation and slavery. It is within the cramped space shaped by these political forces that the madness of Bertha can be recognized and explained, and which confine her as much as her husband’s servants tasked with keeping her prisoner at Thornfield Hall. In a similar way, Hanan al-Shaykh’s One Thousand and One Nights: A Retelling ( 2011 ) and David Henry Hwang’s play M. Butterfly ( 1993 ) develop intertextual strategies to (re)appropriate stories and characters that have been refracted through orientalist retelling. Through the use of hybrid postcolonial cultural principles, each author shapes intertextual narratives with which to explore and oppose the social and political forces of dominance associated with cultural imperialism. Both al-Shaykh and Hwang, like Rhys, also used their texts to reappropriate from their source literature a series of mythologies with which to undermine the conservative values still present in ‘decolonized’ cultures. These myths become political forces to challenge discrimination and the exclusion of disadvantaged groups, such as women and LGBT communities, in their respective cultures.

The third defining characteristic of minor literature is that it affords the taking on of collective value. It is worth quoting at length from Deleuze and Guattari to clarify what this implies:

Indeed, precisely because talent isn’t abundant in a minor literature, there are no possibilities for an individuated enunciation that would belong to this or that ‘master’ and that could be separated from a collective enunciation. Indeed scarcity of talent is in fact beneficial and allows the concept of something other than a literature of masters; what each author says individually already constitutes a common action, and what he or she says or does is necessarily political, even if others are not in agreement. ( Deleuze and Guattari, 1986 , p. 17)

Intertextual literature is a type of writing for which the notion of talent varies according to the themes, styles and objectives that characterize the relationship between the new work and the canonical work. As derivative works, there are already the conditions for a collective enunciation, albeit perhaps a sense that is marginal, but it is equally a condition of great literature in forging ‘the means for another consciousness and another sensibility’ ( Deleuze and Guattari, 1986 , p. 17). In examining the conditions for great literature, Claire Colebrook, in her introduction to Deleuze and Guattari, uses James Joyce’s Dublin to illustrate this third aspect of minor literature, a Dublin Joyce portrays (in both Dubliners and Ulysses ; 2000a , 2000b ) through themes, techniques and characters appropriated from Homer’s Odyssey :

Joyce’s Dubliners repeats the voices of Dublin, not in order to stress their timelessness, but to disclose their fractured or machine-like quality – the way in which words and phrases become meaningless, dislocated and mutated through absolute deterritorialisation. What Joyce repeats is the power of difference. ( Colebrook, 2002 , p. 119)

Colebrook explains that Joyce’s Dublin is a (colonially appropriated) territory formed from the language of religious moralism and a bourgeois commercialism such that when ‘free-indirect style frees language from its ownership by any subject of enunciation, we can see the flow of language itself, its production of sense and nonsense, its virtual and creative power’ ( Colebrook, 2002 , p. 114). Colebrook’s observation is a useful illustration of this third characteristic of minor literature because, in avoiding any conformity to existing genres and their techniques and traditions, and instead expressing collective sentiments of a relocated territory, Joyce is able to recount and provide navigation points to track the social assemblages that the characters shape from an otherwise ordinary day in Dublin in 1904. The collective value embodied within the territory is thus further reinforced through parallels and echoes with the ten-year odyssey of Odysseus in his world.

Joyce appropriates, but not to repeat Hellenic cultural values. Instead, he repeats—renews—the power of difference from which Homer’s original story was created. It is also no coincidence that Homer, in providing the first written versions of sophisticated storytelling of its type, also provides scope for the first sophisticated intertextual literature, each disclosing the power of Homer’s epic to transform. These include Virgil’s Aeneid , which presents a narrative of the Trojan War and its consequences from the point of view of the vanquished (and their place in Rome’s founding myth) and Euripides’ play Trojan Women , an account of the events of the Trojan War from the point of view of female characters. Homer’s text continues to afford the repetition of difference, from Derek Walcott’s Omeros ( 1990 ), a postcolonial reworking of Homer relocated to the Caribbean, to Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls ( 2018 ) and Madeline Miller’s Circe , ( 2018 ), which like Euripides’ before them, portray the Trojan War from the perspective and experience of Homer’s (minor) female characters.

Taken collectively, these characteristics illustrate the potential for appropriative strategies to be implemented in the service of emancipatory storytelling, in particular by repurposing other cultural values. In this way—and unlike major literature, which remains attached to the service of power—storytelling as minor literature gives a voice, a collective value, and it recognizes the political and social conditions shaping its characters that, in turn, serves to rouse its readers. This observation that appropriation from other cultures can be liberating for marginal voices complicates many lines of critique used to denounce cultural appropriation as a unified practice. It is, however, also a powerful strategy, particularly in repurposing and disarming the language and values used to marginalize and exclude other cultural perspectives, as will be presented in the following sections. Examining the ethical and aesthetic consequences implied by the rethinking of literary works through the minor literature lens will therefore provide insight into distinguishing between cultural appropriation and cultural expropriation. This distinction is of particular relevance for examining creativity emerging from multiple cultural influences and in the broader debates concerning cultural exchange within the arts. It is to this theme that the article will now turn.

Creativity within the arts often involves engaging with an aesthetic cosmopolitan appreciation of culture, often in a way that perceives itself to be ‘morally responsible and aesthetically discerning’ ( Rings, 2019 , p. 161). Within this context, the use of appropriative strategies to further artistic creativity can be analyzed in many ways, but the lens of minor literature helps in focussing on clarifying different ethical and aesthetic implications related to the different approaches that define the cultural encounter.

Using this lens enables a distinction to be applied to strategies of intercultural engagement based on the implications of exchange: appropriation (or misappropriation) includes instances in which characteristic narratives, techniques, symbols and artefacts are taken or imitated in a way that diminishes the original sources. In contrast, expropriation includes the act of repurposing narratives, techniques, symbols and artefacts in ways designed to enhance the original or provide benefits for the common good. While these features are only part of the defining characteristics of these concepts, when prefixed with the word ‘cultural’, the difference is as contrasting as it is useful. Thus, cultural appropriation represents an unauthorized use or imitation of characteristics, techniques, and so on, from their cultural setting in a way that risks diminishing their cultural source and compromising their purpose. Cultural expropriation, in contrast, is an attempt to provide a broader access to cultural resources and spaces that have provided value for privileged beneficiaries so that others may experience these benefits in a way that has the potential to be mutually enhancing. As a pursuit of majoritarian interest, cultural appropriation preserves existing aesthetic standards, which benefit vested interests. Cultural expropriation, as exemplified by practices of minor literature, helps to question these standards, drawing attention to, or indeed challenging, the conditions that maintain vested interests and provide more opportunities for aesthetic pluralism, ultimately opening up the possibility of new standards of literature.

The minor literature paradigm also emphasizes that the ethical and aesthetic implications of cultural appropriation are interdependent, as are the implications of cultural expropriation. Appropriation and expropriation are not neutral processes; exchange is always dependent on factors beyond the immediate goals of the transaction or encounter. Instances of appropriation predominantly serving majoritarian interests are thus both ethically and aesthetically implicated. This is because exploiting cultural products developed by marginalized groups to serve the interests of dominant social groups reshapes them according to the logic of the commodity form (see Kulchyski, 1997 , p. 617). In this form, ownership is stripped from those with fewest resources, value is extracted and, rather than recognition and reconciliation, coercion is used to define (and impose) ethical and aesthetic standards. These standards might welcome or appreciate otherwise excluded female or minority ethnic artists and writers, but they do so, perhaps for tokenistic reasons, in the interest of the values determined by the dominant culture. In conforming to this logic, minority cultures can be mined or harvested in ways that support the interest of established power relations because the work of art derives its value not from its role as a cultural intermediary or its mode of communication, or in cultivating cultural appreciation, but as a circulating commodity.

In contrast, instances of expropriation occur when creativity associated with marginal cultures or dominated social groups is produced in accordance with cultural resources developed by dominant social groups in order to challenge the standards that maintain and legitimize such cultural dominance. The ethical and aesthetic implications are interdependent because, by addressing exclusion and inequality, this form of engagement provides opportunities for re-examining existing aesthetic standards, as exemplified by recent attempts to ‘decolonize’ the arts curriculum (see, for example, Prinsloo, 2016 ).

Additionally, the cultural appropriation/expropriation division is an important distinction that helps to position different aspects of cultural exchange. A majoritarian usage involves taking ownership of cultural phenomena without questioning the image or essence of its own sense of cultural identity. It expresses extensive multiplicity in that adding more instances does not change the nature of its identity. For example, European and American art of the past century owes a debt to non-Western cultural sources; however, the resulting Western art, as artistic creation, derives its value in being captured and filtered by ‘gate keepers’ and ‘arbiters of taste’ serving European and American cultural measures, namely the aesthetic frameworks and foundations that match/reduce the art work to established criteria, determining which artefacts are to be accepted as ‘fitting’ works of art and through which markets they are to be consumed. As Baudrillard observes:

Modern art wishes to be negative, critical, innovative and a perpetual surpassing, as well as immediately (or almost) assimilated, accepted, integrated, consumed. One must surrender to the evidence: art no longer contests anything, if it ever did … it never disturbs the order, which is also its own. ( Baudrillard, 2019 , p. 103)

In contrast, a minoritarian usage expresses intensive multiplicity—that is, it does not just match features already established, but each additional example alters the composition of the group. In this way, minoritarian practices will take cultural artefacts, practices, content or styles and use them in ways that help to shape the possibilities of their identity and make connections, which in turn shape other identities. For example, intertextual writing, such as Reed’s Flight to Canada discussed earlier or indeed fan fiction, expropriate the characters of a canonical work and insert them into novel relationships so that new aspects of identity or its setting can be elaborated and extended beyond its established world. In this way, the voices repeated within the intertextual work are not those of the author of the original or the derivative work, but are intermediaries, (re)writing the literary event that opens up new possibilities for the reader (see Attridge, 2004 , 2010 ). The voices of intertextual works repeat much that is ‘canon’ in order to transform it: repeating the power of difference by repeating the conditions from which the original work emerged, as the Joyce/Homer example demonstrates.

Such writing also subverts the logic of established ethical and aesthetic standards, undermining both the logic of the commodity and the conventions of categorizing talent. It does so by blurring market boundaries and disrupting market forces: much of this writing, as exemplified by fan fiction, is exchanged free of charge and often circulates in draft form or otherwise incomplete and frequently disseminated anonymously (or pseudonymously). In appropriating from established literature, such work often defies copyright and asserts its existence not by appealing to criteria established by literary criticism but by justifying its relevance in customizing and ‘supplementing’ established works. Indeed, it often defines itself in terms of its opposition to the values or implicit assumptions insinuated or implied within the original work. It is in this regards a ‘dangerous supplement’—‘It adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void’ ( Derrida, 1976 , p. 145) but as writer Joss Whedon observes: ‘Art isn’t your pet—it’s your kid. It grows up and talks back to you’ ( Whedon, 2012 ).

Focussing on the beneficiaries of appropriative practices is a useful device in ensuring that standards, both ethical and aesthetic, are reviewed so that intercultural engagement becomes an opportunity to enhance appreciation of perspectives derived from a variety of cultures and to enrich artistic creation. The negative issues identified with cultural appropriation cannot be addressed by majoritarian strategies such as tokenism, patronizing encouragement or quotas to refresh an otherwise pre-established artistic canon. Minoritarian approaches, such as expropriation or cultural/artistic transculturation are required to reflect an appropriate measure of responsibility and cultural awareness in defining an inclusive, meritocratic, creative, engaging and critical approach to artistic creation—namely a conception of the arts that contests and disturbs the order, reclaiming this role for the avant garde once more.

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Understanding adaptation and appropriation in art and literature

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• 1 - Terms and objectives
• 2 - It's a reading rainbow
• 3 - King Kong and the mysteries of Pittsburgh
• 4 - Declaration and adaptation: At play in democracy
• 5 - Gangster films
• 6 - Independent practice
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Terms and objectives

If the goal is to teach students to read and write like writers, then they need to read and write like writers, which means they have to be constantly taking texts apart and examining them and then rearranging and reinventing them in new ways. They kind of do this when they interact online with social media. Memes and Gifs do this, but often time, the humor is not explained--the sign is not taken apart and distilled. 

The lessons and activities included here revolve around the following terms. Other terms might also be necessary for students to learn the language of analyzing adaptations and appropriations. The skills here are useful in AP and general education classes, as well as in language art electives such as Creative Writing and Film Studies. 

The cited terms are from Julie Sanders' book  Adaptation and Appropriation . Her book is about 160 pages long. I encountered it in graduate school, and it is definitely worth a gander. (All apologies: the word gander is pedantic, as is the word pedantic.)

Objective 

Students will be able to discuss and analyze how literature and art often borrow, adapt, and appropriate the ideas, forms, and styles of earliear artists, genres, and movements. Such skills are important for not only helping students appreciate writing as art but in helping them find pathways toward their own creative output. These are the ideas and skills that help writers become apprentices. 

Genre: a category of artistic composition, as in music or literarture, characterized by similarities in form, style, or subject matter. Genre theory is a structuralist approach ot interpreting literature that treats each genre as a mechanized system in need of particular parts (tropes and conventions)

Convention(s): The rules of a particular genre. These rules act as indicators or signs that a piece of a literature belongs to a particular genre. Indicators include but are not limited to: phrases, themes, quotations, explanations, archetypes, stereotypes, and situations that serve similar functions within a genre. When particular indicators defy convention, the result is often ironic. 

Homage: Similar to parody, but the intention is to honor more so than to mock. It's a tip of the cap to those whose art was influential to the art being created (or invented) in the present moment.

Pastiche: A work of art that is an imitation in style and structure of other art. Think of it as a collage.

Appropriation: Appropriation occurs when art essentially lifts a stylistic component or convention from a particular genre or work but "affects a more decisive journey away from the informing source into a wholly new cultural product and domain" (Sanders 26).

Adaptation:  Adaptation occurs when a text "signals a relationship with an informing sourcetext or original" (26). Methods of adaptation include: transposition, commentary, analogue. 

It's a reading rainbow

In his book  Mythologies, Roland Barthes writes: 

The reduction of reading to consumption is obviously responsible for the 'boredom' that many people feel when confronting the modern ('unreadable') text, or the avant- garde movie or painting: to suffer from boredom. means that one cannot produce the  text, play it, open it out,  make  it go.

I don't understand everything Barthes says, but I do latch onto the word "play" here and the idea that a text has something to " make  it go." This activity, hopefully, invites students to start doing so (although I've found that to keep them doing this requires constant creative work on behalf of the teacher throughout the year). 

Opening questions

-What is a door?

-What is a reading rainbow?

(Keep in mind here the answers don't really matter as long as students try, and a teacher can tell a lot about a student who is or isn't willing to entertain the small, simple questions.)

Adaptation versus appropriation

Provide students with Julie Sanders' definitions for the two terms. 

Have students watch the  1967 performance by The Doors on The Ed Sullivan Show . Hopefully, the experience is weird for them. The Doors were anachronistic and weird then, and they're even more so today. After watching the performance, have students discuss their reactions, ask questions, etc., but keep in mind the goal is not to have them really understand or appreciate The Doors. The goal is for the performance to be in their memory banks, to be part of a reservoir of random pop culture moments. 

Have students watch the opening credits fo the PBS show  Reading Rainbow. Go with the original version . Have students discuss and react just as you did with the performance by The Doors. 

Finally, have students watch Jimmy Fallon singing the theme song from  Reading Rainbow while impersonating Jim Morrison from The Doors. Here is where the work begins because what Fallon does here is take the supposed innocence and morality of children's literature and subverted it with the presence of a Jim Morrison caricature and all that The Doors and the 1960s counterculture represented or embodied. Is this performance an act of appropriation or adaptation? Have students support their answers with Julie Sanders' definitions. Have them consider qualifying their position. 

Obviously, the source materials here are dated, and as the Fallon text slips more and more into the past, other examples may have to be gleaned from the cultural zeitgeist. Thank goodness we have the internet!

King Kong and the mysteries of Pittsburgh

Have students watch scenes from the 1933 version of  King Kong, specifically the scene where Kong climbs the Empire State Building. Have students brainstorm subjects, topics, and themes this scene (or any other scenes) communicate to modern audiences. Does the film communicate the same concerns and fears and ideas to contemporary audience members as it did to audiences in the 1930s? This could be done as an informal discussion or as a journal entry. 

Have students read the climactic chase scene from Michael Chabon's 1988 debut novel  The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.  (I believe the scene in question can be found in the book's twenty-second chapter: "The Beast That Ate Cleveland.") Have students discuss (or have them provide written answers) where they assess whether the chapter is an homage to or a parody of  King Kong. Is it an adaptation or an appropriation? What's the purpose? What are the significances? How can the relationship between the two texts be interpreted? Is the connection between the chapter and the movie simply interesting or is it vital for understanding the text?

Other Chabon texts to consider

- The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay  (2000) shares some amazing relationships with comic books and Orson Welles'  Citizen Kane. The book is probably too long and dense for most high schoolers to deal with in a calendar school year, but it can be excerpted. 

- The Yiddish Policemen's Union  (2007) begins by announcing itself as belonging to a particular genre. How does it do this?

- The essays in Chabon's  Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands  are especially useful to these kinds of discussions. 

Declaration and adaptation: At play in democracy

The following sources could be used to demonstrate a more serious side to Barthes' idea of how texts "play." Past documents inform present documents. Values and laws from one time period shape and interact with values and laws from another time period. Tracing the concepts (and quite literally the terminology) of 'happiness,' 'property,' 'freedom,' 'liberty,' and 'independence' in the following documents can be tedious work that pay dividends by the end of the year in terms of how students can start to perceive the long arc of an idea. 

Excerpt Plato's "The Allegory of the Cave" from The Republic. Have students annotate the text or complete dialectical journals. Have students draw or construct models of the text. Discuss the differences between the text's purpose and its significances. Guide students through a close reading of the text's transition from allegory to politics. Guide students through a close reading of passage's conclusion. These are all options.   

Locate a brief text where John Locke discusses the individual's relationship with 'property.' I have often used passages from John Dunn's Locke: A Very Short Introduction for doing so. Have students discuss his possible meanings and its consequences. Have students place Locke's ideas in relation to Plato's, specifically Plato's admonishment of concrete, physical wealth. 

When analyzing The Declaration of Independence, be sure to include questions that place the text in conversation with Locke and Plato. Is Thomas Jefferson adapting or appropriating? Do his sentences pay homage or plagiarize? Does it matter? Does it lend credibility to his argument that his sources can be so easily identified in the fabric of his writing? Are these allusions or slips of the tongue? 

Ask similar questions regarding Elizabeth Cady Stanton's 1848 Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions. 

Finally, have students write their own delcarations and treatises. After having them select a cause, have them express whether they intend to adapt or appropriate the ideas and wordings of past thinkers. Does doing so make their own documents more or less radical? 

I oftentimes forget that these texts and readings do not have to be studied consecutively within a particular timespan. They can be spaced out and interleaved throughout the year. 

Gangster films

The problem with teaching genre conventions is that teachers often end up telling students these things you're noticing in the book are genre conventions. A more effective way to teach conventions is to have students observe, study, and analyze multiple texts from a particular genre. 

In a high school classroom, this task is almost impossible due to time limits. With short stories, this task is more possible. In Film Studies is where I feel I've had the most success reviewing a genre's evolution over time, and while what's posted here pertains to the Gangster Crime genre, I've completed similar exercises and lessons with other genres in mind. I think the key here, though, is to present students with texts from different decades or, in other words, generational texts that share sort of a parent-child relationship.  

First generation gangster films

Mervyn LeRoy's  Little Caesar  (1930)

William A. Wellman's  The Public Enemy (1932)

Howard Hawks'  Scarface  (1933)

New Hollywood gangster films

Francis Ford Coppola's  The Godfather  (1972)

Francis Ford Coppola's  The Godfather, Part II (1974)

Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas (1990)

The Coen Brothers'  Miller's Crossing (1990)

Mike Newell's  Donnie Brasco  (1997)

21st Century

Martin Scorsese's The Departed  (2006)

Ridley Scott's  American Gangster (2007)

J.C. Chandor's  A Most Violent Year  (2014)

Martin Scorsese's  The Irishman (2019)

Obviously some of these films contain mature content. In Film Studies, I've shown all of only some of them, and I have done so after parents signed permission slips. Some of these I have excerpted. I have also had students opt to watch them as choices for independent viewing projects. I picked these because I think any three could from different eras could be viewed in their entirities or excerpted to fill out the attached handout. 

Attached Resources

OER Genre Studies -- Gangster films  

File size 72.4 KB

Independent practice

Any sort of genre unit could conclude with an analysis that doubles as a synthesis of multiple texts, and this task is both useful and rigorous. However, ultimately, students probably need to perform the acts of adaptation and appropriation. This is what Jimmy Fallon does. This is what Michael Chabon does. And Quentin Tarrantino too. It's what Toni Morrison and William Faulkner did once upon a time, and it's what anyone involved with  Star Wars or employed by Pixar does. It's also what makes Jordan Peele's points of view so interesting and refreshing in movies like  Get Out and Us.   

- Have students select a well-known but older film and either adapt or appropriate it (as Chabon did with  King Kong). 

- Have students put into the practice the comedic techniques of Jimmy Fallon. 

-Have students see what happens to a genre's conventions if the gender roles of certain archetypes are altered. 

-Have students reinvent a genre's conventions. 

I'm leaving these options broad and general because these activities really, at least in my opinion, need to be student driven and selected. They need to be student adapted. 

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Appropriation and Design: A Tale of Two Concepts

‘ Appropriation is an unusual word for designers in that it has two very distinct meanings. Both are relevant to designers and both need careful consideration but for very different reasons.

Appropriation is either:

The use of pre-existing objects/images within a design or art with marginal amounts of transformation applies to them. Yet there is an understanding that this act of appropriation will introduce new context to the existing work.

The use of a product by its users in a way not intended by the designer.

Let’s look at each meaning in turn.

Meaning 1 – Appropriation as Using Pre-Existing Objects/Images

The appropriation of pre-existing objects and images has been used extensively in modern art and design. Pablo Picasso used objects which were not previously art, such as newspaper clippings (notably in his work Guitar, Newspaper, Glass and Bottle in 1913). These works placed the objects in new contexts without transforming the original concept.

Author/Copyright holder: Marcel Duchamp. Copyright terms and licence: Public Domain

Marcel Duchamp took the process further with his concept of “ready-made” which used objects produced by industry for ordinary use and transposed them into art through the use of “presentation and selection”. This wasn’t without controversy and one of his most famous works – a urinal placed on a pedestal was rejected by an exhibition panel because it was considered plagiarism.

Andy Warhol took the Campbell’s Soup images to create some of his most famous works.

Photographers, fashion designers, installation artists, etc. have all used appropriation of this kind and in more recent years so have web designers.

However, this form of appropriation is not without its risks.

There are real concerns regarding the copyright of work when it is appropriated. Andy Warhol, for example, who was one of the most famous artistic appropriators found himself on the receiving end of much litigation with respect to his appropriations. He lost a case when photographers objected to silk screen reproductions of their work produced by Warhol but won a case against Campbell’s Soup despite having clearly reproduced their image.

There is a ton of previous case law in appropriation cases, with respect to copyright, which it would not be appropriate to delve into here. It is, perhaps, best to take legal advice prior to appropriating another person’s art or design into your own designs. This is because legal jurisdictions and the treatment of copyright are not consistent from place to place and there are no “hard and fast” guidelines for appropriation and when it may be deemed copyright infringement.

Cultural Appropriation

More recently, there have been concerns raised about “cultural appropriation” in which designs incorporate items from other cultures. While, this may seem innocuous on the surface – it often gives rise to allegations of racism if the handling of such material is not seen to be sensitive.

When Charles Caleb Colton said; “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” he didn’t mean go ahead and appropriate someone else’s culture in the wrong way.

The star Beyonce has been accused of cultural appropriation by appearing in a Bollywood costume in a music video; some allege that she has been careless in her treatment of India’s cultural heritage. J K Rowling, the Harry Potter author, has recently been drawn into allegations of cultural appropriation by her handling of North American indigenous culture in her “History of Magic”. Also this year, the fashion brand H&M has found itself criticized for cultural appropriation of Jewish prayer scarves in a scarf sold by the company.

The key to avoiding cultural appropriation seems to be straightforward; ask members of the community you are appropriating from if they find it offensive or not. However, it is probably worth noting that in today’s ever-connected world – there’s always someone looking to take offence no matter your intentions. Cultural appropriation should be best handled sensitively at all times. Unlike in the image below…

Author/Copyright holder: Infrogmation. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY 2.5

Meaning 2 – User Appropriation By Using Objects in Ways they Were Not Intended By the Designer

While the first form of appropriation can be avoided by designers; the second cannot. It is very common for products to be taken by users and then used in ways they were not intended by the designers.

As an example, the author of this article needed a screwdriver to tighten a screw on a belt buckle. Unfortunately, he doesn’t own any screwdrivers. Worse, the problem occurred late at night when shops which sold screwdrivers were not open. He visited a local mart to see if he could find an alternative solution. He bought a pair of toenail clippers which had a steel nail file that could be rotated out from the clippers. The nail file was a thin straight piece of steel which was perfect to fit in the screw head and for rotating it.

This is good news for the designer of the nail clippers. The author’s appropriation of his design meant that he sold a pair of nail clippers which he would not otherwise have sold. It also extends the utility of nail clippers (the author also has a pair for clipping nails) beyond their original value.

User appropriation of designs is generally desirable. Unless the new use is of one of villainous intent (for example using a baseball bat to harm a person rather than to hit a baseball with) the new use is likely to create new sales and possible even new markets for a product. Designers should encourage this form of appropriation and be prepared to learn from it when iterating the design in future. In the image below you can see tubing which was inspired by the appropriation of the use of vehicle tires to carry out similar activities.

Author/Copyright holder: Georg klummp. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-SA 3.0

The Take Away

Appropriation has two meanings. The first, the reuse of pre-existing images or objects within new designs without transforming those images and objects can be very useful in creating new contexts for these ideas. However, it comes with the risk of copyright infringement and legal advice should be sought prior to making appropriated works public. There is also the risk of cultural appropriation when taking items of cultural significance and placing them in a new context.

The second, when users use a design in a way not intended by the designer, should be generally encouraged as it creates new sales and markets for a product. Designers can implement lessons from this kind of appropriation in future product releases.

References & Where to Learn More:

Course: Get Your Product Used: Adoption and Appropriation

An interesting paper on urban furniture design based on user appropriation

More on Duchamp’s art can be found here - Elger, D. (2006). Dadaism. Koln: Taschen, pp. 80

More on the Warhol copyright issues may be found here

And here - Grant,Daniel, The Business of Being an Artist (New York: Allworth Press, 1996), p. 14

More about Beyonce’s cultural appropriation can be found here

And JK Rowling’s here

And H&M here

Advice on when imitation becomes appropriation from the BBC can be found here

Hero Image: Author/Copyright holder: Maurizio Pesce. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY 2.0

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Whose life is it anyway? Novelists have their say on cultural appropriation

Jonathan Franzen claimed he won’t write about race because of limited ‘firsthand experience’, while Lionel Shriver hopes objection to ‘cultural appropriation is a passing fad’. So should there be boundaries on what a novelist can write about?

• Hari Kunzru

Clearly, if writers were barred from creating characters with attributes that we do not “own” (gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and so on), fiction would be impossible. Stories would be peopled by clones of the author. Since trespassing into otherness is a foundation of the novelist’s work, should we restrict ourselves in some way, so as to avoid doing violence to those who identify with our characters? The injunction to refrain from “cultural appropriation” sounds like a call for censorship, or at best a warning to self-censor, an infringement of the creative liberty to which so many surprising people profess themselves attached.

It is true that the politics of offence are used to shut down dissident voices of all kinds, frequently in minority communities, and the understanding of culture as a type of property to which ownership can be definitively assigned is, at the very least, problematic. Should the artist go forth boldly, without fear? Of course, but he or she should also tread with humility. Note that I do not say, “with care”. I don’t believe any subject matter should a priori be off limits to anyone, or that harm necessarily flows from the kind of ventriloquism that all novelists perform. Quite the opposite. Attempting to think one’s way into other subjectivities, other experiences, is an act of ethical urgency. For those who have never experienced the luxury of normativity, the warm and fuzzy feeling of being the world’s default setting, humility in the face of otherness seems like a minimal demand. Yet it appears that for some, the call to listen before speaking, to refrain from asserting immediate authority, is so unfamiliar that it feels outrageous. I’m being silenced! My freedom is being abridged! Norm is unaccustomed to humility because he has grown up as master of the house. All the hats are his to wear. For the deviant others, who came in by the kitchen door, it has always been expected, even demanded.

Good writers transgress without transgressing, in part because they are humble about what they do not know. They treat their own experience of the world as provisional. They do not presume. They respect people, not by leaving them alone in the inviolability of their cultural authenticity, but by becoming involved with them. They research. They engage in reciprocal relationships. It does not seem like a particular infringement of liberty to pass through the world without being its owner, unless someone else is continually asserting property rights over the ground beneath your feet. The panicked tone of the accusations of censorship leads me to suspect that what is being asserted has little to do with artistic freedom per se, and everything to do with a bitter fight to retain normative status, and the privileges that flow from it. The solution is simple, my fearful friends. Give up. Accept that some things are not for you, and others are not about you. You will find you have lost nothing. It may even feel like a weight off your shoulders. Put down that burden and pull up a chair. You might hear something you haven’t heard before. You will, at least, hear some new stories.

Kamila Shamsie

One of the novels I love is Peter Hobbs’s In the Orchard, the Swallows . It’s set entirely in the north of Pakistan – and is beautiful and true (a better word than “authentic”). If anyone tried to dispute Hobbs’s right to have written that book (and I should say, every Pakistani I know who has read it has expressed only admiration), I would be the first in line to defend him, and it. But the point about the book is that it’s wonderfully and sensitively written; it has no interest in peddling stereotypes, or making great claims about the place in which it’s located; there is no whiff of arrogance or entitlement. I don’t know what went on in Hobbs’s mind when he wrote it but I feel fairly confident it wasn’t: “How dare anyone dispute my right to write this?”

In fact, if you do start with an attitude that fails to understand that there are very powerful reasons for people to dispute your right to tell a story – reasons that stem from historical, political or social imbalances, you’ve already failed to understand the place and people who you purport to want to write about. That’s a pretty lousy beginning, and I wouldn’t want to read the fiction that comes out of it. Far better to understand the reasons, and perhaps even use those reasons as a way into character and story.

So by all means, let’s have a broadening of the imagination. That doesn’t mean you have to leave the patch of ground on which you live – but it would be helpful if you looked at who else is on that patch of ground with you. To continually return to the same subset of humanity, and declare that there is no one else who imaginatively engages you or who you know how to imaginatively engage with, strikes me as one of the most dispiriting things a writer can say.

In short: don’t set boundaries around your imagination. But don’t be lazy or presumptuous in your writing either. Not for reasons of “political correctness”, but for reasons of good fiction.

Aminatta Forna

Literature is an imaginative art. To suggest that a writer cannot depict characters unlike themself is patently absurd. Books would have to be peopled with characters exactly like the author. In my case, they would all be Scottish/Sierra Leonian women, who would be required to travel to each other’s countries (presumably Scotland and Sierra Leone), fall in love with each other, betray each other, befriend each other and occasionally shoot each other.

Lionel Shriver’s speech was crass and unhelpful; she turned an important creative question into “whites versus chippy minorities”. Yet writers from minority groups have spoken out at length about being expected only to address certain subjects. My last book was set in Croatia. In the year of publication I answered the question: “Why Croatia?” so many times I began simply to answer: “Why not?”

Jonathan Franzen’s remarks about not being able to write a black woman character because he has never been in love with a black woman made me squirm. He said he has to have experience of loving a category of person before he can write about them. That’s hard to believe for all sorts of practical reasons, but beyond that, writing is about imagining how others think and feel and how that informs their behaviour; it is about offering a different way of seeing and in so doing it creates empathy. I tell my creative writing students: “Don’t write what you know, write what you want to understand.” I write from a place of deep curiosity about the world.

Every writer is free to write about who and what they want, but that does not mean the work cannot be critiqued. People who belong to minority groups have had to live with limiting, irritating and insulting portrayals all our lives, as well as always dying before the end of the movie. I have thrown aside many modern novels because a white writer’s purpose in including a character of colour has been merely to make a point about race or reflect a white character’s value system. It’s bad writing, plain and simple. Shriver wants to be given points for trying. Well, I might do that for my undergraduates, but I won’t do it for a published author. Sorry.

Chris Cleave

Cultural appropriation is a valid concern to raise, and I’ve long been on record as respecting those who raise it. I do write across boundaries, though. While actively soliciting people’s right to reply (I’ve published all responses, good and bad, on my website for the last decade), I do my best, when I write, to be everyone.

In my novels I cross boundaries of gender, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality and class . That’s the best way I know to tell stories about our world, where those faultlines define our society. I show scenes from both sides, using one character to view another askance. Why? Because my characters’ eyes can be sharper than mine, since my own identity has no lock on a unitary or objective way of seeing things.

I do my research. Sometimes – as when interviewing refugees and torture survivors – I’ve learned things I wish I could unlearn. The violence of the world’s true stories can crack you open. You lose the shape you were moulded in. You take on other forms. How should one judge the healthiness of a writer like that, an empathist, a broken vessel? By the temperature of their work, I think. By its willingness to surrender heat to light.

A good novelist is a good observer – everything else is just style. A writer must be alive to what goes said and unsaid in the world, making themself small until only the reader is reflected in the work. A well-crafted novel is a mirror, and as a reader I don’t mind where the glass was made or how it got its silver. I require only that its reflection is fair.

Readers are mostly ignored in this debate, but the worldly and widely read reader has a hinterland, is quick to spot an agenda and is willing to call out fakes. Readers are more heterogeneous than writers will ever be, and in their multiplicity a book finds its measure of truth.

I do think there is such a thing as shared emotional truth and that its discovery is the purpose of the novel. That’s why people of many different cultures will sometimes cry at the end of an honest book. Even after the characters’ voices have faded, if those voices led me – the reader – to discover a truth for myself, then that experience will move me. It might even crack the mould I was made in.

Fiction doesn’t appropriate, it creates. That’s the wonder of it. Fiction proves that humanity can think of things that never were and then make them – in this case, not a new government, or a new way of designing cities, or a cure for cancer, but a narrative that can involve any reader in a further imaginative act. When the writer writes, or the reader reads, they’re consenting to be someone other than themselves. The reader of properly crafted work can share emotional and psychological space with a character. This is a practice of empathy, which might not seem as big a deal as good government, or more civilised cities, or cancer cures, but functional fiction is part of the culture that helps create those things, too. Believing in the power of human imagination and experiencing empathy gives you reasons to act and invent on behalf of others.

Currently, the Eng Lit business and our critical establishment prefers to define all writing as autobiographical, journalistic. It isn’t. It never was, and reducing it in such a manner denies us our ability to imagine. Without regular exercise of that ability we abdicate our rights to conscious change.

Inexperienced authors – and uncomprehending observers – can become bewildered when facing the question at the heart of fictional writing: “How do I write someone who isn’t me? I’m not old/young/Asian/anyone other than myself – how can I seem to be?” Bewilderment is natural, but it’s never enough. The appropriate response to character is awe. And then the appropriate response to the creation of any fictional character is a dedication to every possible effort that will let them live effectively for the reader. The human being the writer tries to represent and the human being who is the reader require the author to create accessible humanity. The character must be specific and individual enough to communicate universally.

Every life has to be respected, may be racked by injustice, is deserving of sensitivity – so we write about every life. That’s the only rule and our human duty. Backing away from that duty hands the world to the demagogues and bigots, those who would prefer us not to speak to each other, accurately represented as irreplaceably complex individuals who both reveal and transcend group identities. The passion in that helps create a culture that keeps us safe.

Stella Duffy

In my new novel, London Lies Beneath , as with the 13 other novels I have written, the characters are of different classes, different ethnicities, different genders, different sexualities, different abilities. Not in order to tick boxes, but because that’s how the world is. I’ve written characters that are BAME, white, female, male, disabled, able-bodied, LGBT (individually, not lumped together), from every social class and in several different time periods. I don’t live in a world with only one group of people and I’m not interested in writing about only one group of people.

In The Room of Lost Things , the two protagonists are an older white working-class man and a younger British Asian man. Set in south London, where I live, the book has a large range of characters, especially in terms of race and ethnicity – and more than one reviewer commented that I was “exposing readers’ prejudices” by not stating immediately if a character was black or mixed race or Asian. I really wasn’t. I mentioned race or ethnicity – including that of white characters – when it was relevant to the story. However, if a reviewer assumes that a white writer will only write white characters then they certainly need to look at their preconceptions.

“Write what you know” is a tired maxim that most writers abandon eventually, “write who you are” is even more restrictive. I want to write and read work that is as multifaceted as our society. I think it’s vital we write widely and inclusively to help shift publishing from the mostly middle class, mostly white place it is now. Men need to write women knowing that they are writing from a place of privilege – that they are likely to earn more than women and are more likely to be reviewed. White writers need to write BAME characters knowing there are many more white writers published. The same for straight people, and able-bodied people, middle-class people, and on.

We can write who we are not and do it well if we write with passion, strength – and care. We’re bound to get it wrong sometimes, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. If we want our writing to reflect the truth, then our characters and their experiences must be as diverse as the world in which we live.

Linda Grant

The modern novelist is caught in a contradiction, not of our own making, involving demands from the reader that are almost impossible to resolve. Why are there no black characters in your fiction, why does this novel not reflect contemporary British society? But how dare you, a white writer, appropriate the lives and stories of black people you know nothing about? Faced with a no-win situation, most white novelists accept the lesser charge of staying in their safety zone rather than be accused of getting it badly wrong. There is a true and difficult complexity to this problem that neither side fully accepts. The whole point of fiction is that you make it up, but at the same time readers have become passionate for authenticity, for hearing the truth of other voices, other lives (and for treating them, at times, like autobiography or non-fiction, the novel as learning aid, in history and geography).

It was theoretically possible for me to have had the chutzpah to travel to Jamaica and do months of research into the lives of the Windrush generation, but nothing I wrote would have the depth of reality of Andrea Levy’s Small Island , the novel that told the story of the women I used to see in church-going hats and pristine white gloves standing at the bus stop in Brixton. I was asked whether I thought that any non-Jewish novelist had ever really nailed a Jewish character, which implied a universality of the Jewish condition that doesn’t exist, a condition of Otherness. For the talky male American Jews of Philip Roth are not the same people as the timid female Marylebone introverts of Anita Brookner. One writes out of deep knowledge of one’s interior world. The something that one has to say is the thing that one knows, but married to that is intense curiosity about the lives of others – about what the person sitting opposite you on the tube is thinking. The origin of fiction is telling a story, about yourself or others. In practical terms we are mostly appropriating, ruthlessly, the lives of our families and our friends, but that’s not the same as cultural appropriation because it has no political freight. So in answer to the debate I don’t know, I really don’t know. I hope fiction gets through it alive.

Naomi Alderman

Of course fiction writers can write whatever they want, no matter their backgrounds. I’ve written male characters, people older than me, people gayer than me, people who lived and died 2,000 years ago. My new novel The Power has a 21-year-old male Nigerian journalist as a viewpoint character as well as a New England politician in her 50s.

But here’s the thing: you have to try to do it well. You have to be familiar with whatever tropes might apply to your character: racist, sexist, homophobic, sizeist, ableist, antisemitic and anything else. It’s not OK, for example, to make your Chinese character shifty and inscrutable or your fat character stupid and lazy: you need to have learned enough to understand where these false ideas come from and why it’s so pernicious to replicate them. Do better. Treat your characters as human beings. Write them as people not ideas or stereotypes.

Here’s another thing – you need to accept that you’ll fail at some level, and be humble when you do. I come from the Orthodox Jewish world: I could write you an essay on the precise messages communicated by the clothing of each individual person on the Golders Green Road. I can’t do the same for people in Lagos. I do my research, I work hard, and I accept that I’ll get some things wrong. I hope people will point out my mistakes to me, and then I’ll apologise and try to do better next time. People criticising your writing is not a violation of your freedom of speech, it is a gift freely given and should be accepted with gratitude.

And if a few people decide they only want to read books about minority groups written by members of that group, I think that’s a perfectly reasonable preference. It’s not one I share, but I can certainly understand why a person might feel a rule like that would broaden and deepen their reading for a time.

No one has a right to be read. No one has a right to be above criticism. When you publish a book, you enter the ring and you’re going to take some punches. The sting when they hit tells you that you’re where you want to be.

Philip Hensher

The only thing worth saying about the issue of cultural appropriation is that it has nothing to do with identity, and everything about quality. Good writing can do whatever it feels like doing. Bad writing can’t do anything. A bad writer can’t tell you anything about his or her own culture, let alone anyone else’s. A really good writer can throw themself into worlds they may only have glimpsed, and light them up.

There is no point in getting much exercised about very bad writing: it puts a stop to itself in time. But any attempt to put a stop to very good writing, on the grounds of prejudice, or of extra-literary moral grounds, is deplorable because it might succeed. Not everything that deserves a hearing gets that hearing.

I don’t think we should dismiss these concerns being labelled as “cultural appropriation”, however. There is something discreditable about a straight woman giving her obviously inadequate version of gay male relations, or a rich American arts graduate giving his researched version of the country of his great-grandfathers, or a middle-class Londoner explaining what it is like to be an impoverished Nigerian immigrant. There’s no doubt that prize juries have elevated such productions above the superior but disadvantaged accounts by gay male authors, Gujarati novelists, or that Nigerian immigrant himself. Those accounts may be lost forever.

Authors should try harder; the industry should try harder; and nobody should assume that any book has any kind of right to its own subject. It has to be earned, whether it is a matter of a straight white woman living in Devon writing about straight white women living in Devon, or a gay man living in Switzerland in 2012 writing about a Bengali family in Dhaka in the 1970s. I see no reason why writers should assume that any territory is theirs by inheritance. The key point is that as few extra-literary concerns as possible should stand in the way of good writers – not the claim that no one should ever write about experience not their own, nor the sustenance of ancient privileges of race, education, sexuality and class.

Anyone proposing to use “cultural appropriation” as a taboo for writers is taking action against Kim , Salammbô , The Grass Is Singing , A Bend in the River , The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman . Putting a kybosh on their future equivalents, too.

I thought this debate – about which categories of human beings are free to write novels about which other categories of human beings – had peaked about a decade ago, ending in a decisive “no boundaries” vote. But no, the old argument is back.

Actually it’s OK that it’s back, because it’s a serious debate that can’t just be shrugged off. Writers are lucky bastards. We have the invaluable chance to make our versions of reality public, and when these versions seem false to other people who don’t have the same chance, it’s fair for us to take their point to heart.

Why do writers write novels? On one level to have fun and feel free; but on another, to explore, to discover. One of the things we most enjoy exploring is other people’s inner worlds, and so we make characters. Every character is in a way an invention, so a “lie”; in another way, every character contains part of ourselves, but they also lead us down the mysterious passage to another life we long to understand. We feel our way into our characters until, effectively, we are them as we write them. This is very like the definition of empathy, or its German origin word, einfühlung , “feeling our way into another”. All of us in some way are trying to understand, trying to see what we hold in common. We want to avoid building a narrow fictional world peopled with characters who are vain mirror-images of ourselves, so we walk the mile of the novel in a variety of different characters’ shoes. But living through a fictional character is never as good as knowing actual joy or love, and never as bad as suffering actual pain or discrimination. With the freedom to inhabit different others, therefore, comes a price. The price is humility about what we know, a willingness to show our characters to their models and hear the critical comments they make.

Two of my novels, the political comedies My Cleaner and My Driver , had a Ugandan central character, Mary Tendo, often written in the first person. I started writing the pair of novels in Uganda and surrounded by Ugandans, but of course I was not Ugandan. When I finished, back in the UK, I showed them to writer friends I had made in Uganda, Hilda Twongyeirwe and Jackee Batanda. They critiqued my work at length, and I listened. I feel an ongoing commitment to the Ugandan Women Writers’ Association they belong to, Femrite, of which I am one of two external members.

I am just off to the Calpe conference on Gibraltar’s Neanderthals. They are the heroes of my next novel. I have 3% Neanderthal DNA, which is quite high, but that’s not the point. I believe Neanderthals are essentially like us, like me, but only by learning about how they lived, and who they were, can I make others believe that too.

Nikesh Shukla

Here are some tips for writing “the other”. Do your research. Do it properly. Make sure someone from the “other” community reads your work before it gets read by someone with publishing power. Especially if the person with publishing power isn’t from that community. Don’t get defensive if people tell you that you got it wrong. Don’t think you can hide behind “it’s fiction and I can do what I want” because that tends to err on the side of fetishisation. I think we have the right to tell stories that are different from our own backgrounds, heritages, races, if we do them responsibly. I don’t know why this is a hard thing to understand. Also, ask yourself: why am I telling this story? Why are there no stories out there written by people from that community? Did I find it easier to write about this because I filtered it through a white gaze and thus made it palatable for a largely white publishing industry? And most of all, and this bears repeating, don’t get defensive. Because you may be making a larger conversation about marginalised communities, and their ability to tell their own stories in their own voices, all about yourself.

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Struggling in Workshop with the Question of Cultural Appropriation

Paisley rekdal’s letters to a student.

You asked at the end of last class whether I had an essay I might share with you about cultural appropriation. You asked because of the tense note on which our workshop ended the discussion of your poem, a monologue in the voice of a Black nurse who worked in your white grandmother’s home in Georgia. Your poem was meant to be a complex double portrait of both the Black caregiver and your white grandmother, and the racist logic and history that bound them both. Did you, a young white person, the child of people you freely admitted had been shaped by racist beliefs, have any claim or relationship to this voice? Our workshop worried this question for an hour without resolving it. And while our discussion never devolved, as I was concerned it might, into open hostility, it also didn’t make anyone feel better for having participated in it, nor did it settle the questions your poem raised to anyone’s satisfaction. You still wanted, you said, an answer. Frankly, so do I.

I could tell by your subdued demeanor when you approached me that you were afraid your poem had caused pain, and that there might be some future, perhaps public, fallout for it. Perhaps there will be. I assume there won’t, because your classmates took the poem and you with pretty good humor, respect, and patience, even when they disagreed—​sometimes vehemently—​with the poem itself. All of us acknowledged that authorial intentions don’t finally matter to how we read a creative work that fails, but what does it mean for a poem like yours to fail, exactly? And what are the implications if we said your poem had succeeded? When we write in the voice of people unlike ourselves, what do we risk besides the possibility of getting certain facts, histories, and perspectives wrong? And was your poem, to certain audiences, perhaps always meant, if not to fail, then to be seen as an ethical lapse?

You should know how many other students I’ve taught over the years whose work has raised the same questions, X. You should know, too, how much I respect the ways you took your classmates’ criticism during our discussion. You didn’t lash out or sulk, you didn’t try to justify or explain anything away. You sat and listened, perhaps the hardest thing to do when a group of strangers ponders whether your words and images, and by implication you, are inherently racist. Your desire to “get it right,” as you expressed yesterday afternoon, was everywhere evident in your response to your classmates’ concerns, and it requires that I now find the right essay to address your question around the ethics of creative expression. While I have a number of articles and books I recommend reading, I can’t think of one that speaks to a young writer trying to probe the limitations of her imagination, one who is both open-​minded about the question of appropriation and also, reasonably, terrified. I know when you and other students ask me for such an essay, you are asking if I can find the single argument that would either rationalize or dismiss the practice; you are asking me to tell you how cultural appropriation is generally defined, why and if writers think it’s always wrong, whether it’s been done well before in literature and how. This is an essay I imagine the other students in our class would want to read after our conversation; it’s an essay that I, as a writer, have never found.

Like many writers today, I believe writing in the voice of someone outside my subject position surely crosses a line, but which one, exactly? Writing is mastered over the course of a life, and perhaps you suspect the truth of mastery, which is that it’s achieved by both practicing and unlearning the lessons teachers like me drill into you at school, lessons that, while they lay the groundwork for producing good stories and poems, prove insufficient for creating our greatest work, which often disrupts the messages we’ve been taught.

As writers, we absorb much of our technique through reading, more so than through class discussion, and yet books, too, fall short when it comes to determining just what is the right kind of appropriation to attempt, since so much of writing is appropriative, and so much of appropriative writing is historically contextualized. Here is where the workshop might have stepped in with good advice, but as you yourself have seen, people would rather gnaw off the fingers of their right hand than talk through the tangled arguments around cultural appropriation.

Because what we’re really talking about with cultural appropriation, X, is identity, and while we all have identities, few of us are prepared to unravel the Gordian knot of social realities, history, and fantasy that constitute a self and its attendant ideas of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or even physical or mental ability, let alone discuss what an accurate representation of any of these selves might look like on the page. And the more you and I think about identity, the more we might discover that cultural appropriation is less a question of “staying in one’s lane,” as one of your classmates put it, than an evolving conversation we must have around privilege and aesthetic fashion in literary practice.

In a literary world dominated by both writing-​workshop culture and social media, many writers hone their aesthetics under the intoxicating influence of ego and shame: how to win your instructor’s or classmates’ approval, how to avoid vilification on Twitter, how to get a book published before you turn twenty-​five. But ego and shame reject nuance in favor of outrage or thinkpieces gone viral on the Internet, which purport to offer guidance but more often than not mine our own latent seams of insecurity, bolstering the suspicion that, no matter what choice we make, what ideas we agree with and what writers we strive to imitate, that choice is always wrong. It’s another reason I think our class discussion about cultural appropriation felt so fraught; not only do we each see very smart people around us quick and free to judge, we see them quick to make these judgments public, and to make their object of judgment—​ourselves, potentially—​the object of derision.

The first thing to understand is that the term “appropriation” simply means the use of a preexisting object or image that you’ve repurposed without fundamentally changing it. Appropriation is an accepted, widespread practice in both music and art, and it’s also commonly used in literature. Before I talk about specific works of literature, however, I want to talk about instances of appropriation you might have experienced in popular culture at large, so that I can show you some of the complexities hidden within the general concept of cultural appropriation.

In music, appropriation forms the aesthetic basis of hip-​hop, which samples from other artists and street sounds as references that provide the listener musical texture and ambience, which you can see in tracks by artists like Nas, Dopp Gang, Kanye West, or De La Soul. In art, you see appropriation in works by Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Cornell, Jeff Koons, and Robert Rauschenberg. Appropriation in art changes the object’s meaning by changing the context through which the viewer sees, hears, or reads the object itself. The urinal in the bathroom stall, for example, is a toilet; on the wall of an art museum, it’s conceptual art. In literature, those contextual changes are sometimes harder to accept, because as readers we’ve been conditioned to value stories that are fundamentally tied to authorship, thus to specific identities. No one, however, is the author of a urinal or a soup can; these are mass-​produced objects meant to be used by everyone.

Perhaps, reading these letters, you suspect you’ve already come across an example of appropriation. Perhaps you heard other students from my seminar arguing about Meredith’s poem, so you know that I’ve transformed part of that classroom event into a literary analogy to suit my discussion with you. That’s part of the power I possess as a writer: I take things presented to me in one context, whether literary, personal, or historical, and rewrite or reimagine them for my own ends. I doubt you saw my use of that classroom event as any kind of cultural theft, understanding it to be something more akin to anecdote or embellishment. As the scholar Pascal Nicklas notes in his book Adaptation and Cultural Appropriation , “appropriate” carries within it the Latin word “proprius,” which means “something that is characteristic, that is part of oneself.” In the case of my class seminar, I’ve demonstrated that one of its essential characteristics is its public nature; in that, I might use and alter its facts to suit a larger narrative purpose.

Literary theorists call this kind of appropriation “adaptation,” and you see this in literature all the time.

When adaptation occurs in literature, it’s usually when a writer refashions for her own original work particular artistic elements of another work, such as plot, theme, literary or technical devices, subject matters, or symbolic motifs. Shakespeare, in his play Titus Andronicus , appropriates Ovid’s own retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Philomela. Margaret Atwood appropriates the plot and subject matter of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest in her novel Hag Seed , just as she appropriates the motifs of Grimm’s fairy tales in her collection of short stories, The Robber Bride . Derek Walcott appropriates The Odyssey for his own epic poem, “Omeros,” just as Pat Barker appropriates the story of Briseis from The Iliad for her novel The Silence of the Girls . Conceptual poets like Kenneth Goldsmith and Craig Dworkin copy news articles and weather and traffic reports word for word as a way of frustrating the limits we have conventionally set between “creative” and “uncreative” writing. Postmodern writers like David Shields (or T. S. Eliot) might appropriate the language of a variety of texts by collaging them into a new but unified literary work, as Shields does in his manifesto Reality Hunger , and Eliot does in “The Waste Land.” George R. R. Martin appropriates the events of historical accounts of the Hundred Years’ War in his series Game of Thrones . And every year, dozens of novels and films appropriate Pride and Prejudice in an attempt to re-​create, and reimagine, the world of Jane Austen.

All of these works are examples of literary adaptation. The critic Julie Sanders, in her book Adaptation and Appropriation , calls adaptation and appropriation “side by side” practices, with adaptation defined as work that’s “closer in degree” to the original text or source than one that’s merely appropriative. According to Sanders, an adapted work gestures to a relationship with a specific source text that allows readers to identify what she calls “movements of proximation or cross-​generic interpretation.” Appropriation, however, requires comprehensive rethinking of the original work’s expression and meaning. It is, as she says, “a more decisive journey away from the informing source into a wholly new cultural product and domain.” Basically, adapted works derive their pleasure from the fact that we recognize the original source. Appropriative works don’t require that we recognize these sources at all. Appropriation may be part of adaptation, but while they are similar, the two are different from each other based upon the degree of difference from their original source.

Adaptation, in this sense, shades uncomfortably into plagiarism, and here you should look to the American University School of Communication’s Center for Social Media “Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Poetry” to clarify questions you might have about the transformational purpose of appropriated material. Simply put, is your work using the original source for a different purpose than the original, or does it repeat the work word for word or structure for structure, to re-​create “the same intent and value as the original”? Appropriative and adapted works, even as they mine another source for inspiration, work toward the goal of producing their own original meanings and products. They also make a nod—​whether explicitly, through clear attribution; or implicitly, through recognizable symbols, titles, and phrases—​to their original sources.

There are readers who might disdain adaptations as much as appropriations, and likely for some of the same reasons, which is the privilege writers place on originality and also the connection they make between authorship and intellectual property. For writers, a published creative work is property that can be owned, sold, and purchased, and it possesses material as well as cultural value.

But what about artistic elements that we see as tied to specific cultures but aren’t practically able to be sold or purchased, like songs or religious myths? If certain stories or aesthetic elements are associated with a culture, or if a culture argues that it collectively created these aesthetic elements or stories, does it follow that the culture then legally owns these elements? Sadly, copyright law focuses on specific or concrete artistic works and the execution of an idea. Cultural control of stories and literary motifs is an issue of ethical, not legal ownership. Stories belong to cultures based on recitation, practice, shared knowledge, and memory. A writer may want to keep her stories within the boundaries of her own community, but she can’t practically—​or easily—​enforce this desire in the courts. But even if there is no legal claim a culture might make against an author, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have an ethical claim. Ethical artists avoid appropriation not out of fear of being sued but out of fear of harming others through insensitive depictions.

In general, an appropriative artistic act can include taking a material object from one context and using it in another, or performing certain songs and stories originally authored by another artist, or using artistic elements from another artwork in your own art. These, however, are not the kind of appropriative practices I suspect you’re asking about. You aren’t worried about artistic influence or postmodern collage or adaptation so much as about what constitutes cultural appropriation.

As many of your classmates noted in workshop, cultural appropriation occurs when an artist, or collector, appropriates objects or aesthetic practices from a culture or community different from her own for her own use. This may include being inspired by stylistic elements or stories from another culture’s artworks, but it also includes collecting and exhibiting ritual objects from other cultures, such as a natural history museum’s display of indigenous people’s skeletons. It also includes the taking of another culture’s artworks wholesale as one’s own, which is what the British Museum did with the Elgin marbles or the Musée du Quai Branly did with African objects taken from France’s former African colonies.

The philosopher James O. Young, in his book Cultural Appropriation and the Arts , breaks down cultural appropriation into two general categories: subject appropriation and content appropriation. Content appropriation may also be called motif appropriation, and it occurs when artists from one culture are influenced by artists from another but without creating works in the original artists’ exact style. You can see this with Paul Simon, who uses musical elements gleaned from South African townships on his album Graceland , or in Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” which is influenced by African carved masks. In literature, you see this in Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf , which takes on the Akan people’s Anansi myths.

Subject appropriation, however, occurs when a writer depicts a real culture or community other than her own, whether by focusing her work on particular events, people, or practices that exist within that culture or community, or by writing in the voice of a specific member of that community. We see this in Gauguin’s Tahiti paintings, for example; or in “Kim,” when Rudyard Kipling writes from the perspective of a young Indian boy.

Subject appropriation is what the writer Lionel Shriver defended in her impassioned and angrily received keynote address at the 2016 Brisbane Writers Festival. In it, Shriver declared that she was “hopeful the concept of ‘cultural appropriation’ is a passing fad,” insisting that all fiction was at heart inauthentic, and that it was both the writer’s right and duty to imagine the lives of those different from themselves: what we call “appropriation,” then, wasn’t theft but the essence of fiction itself. Shriver’s argument duplicates (or perhaps appropriates) Margaret Drabble’s 2004 argument that “appropriation is what novelists do. Whatever we write is, knowingly or unknowingly, a borrowing. Nothing comes from nowhere.”

Drabble, who created Guyanese and Jewish characters for her novel The Witch of Exmore and an 18th-​century Korean royal protagonist for The Red Queen , later walked these comments back in a 2017 Publishers Weekly article, saying, “You can’t just barge in there and assume you have got the right to tell other people’s stories. You have to react sensitively to other people.” Drabble’s hesitation does not seem to be shared by Shriver, however; two years after her talk in Brisbane, in the March issue of Prospect , Shriver amplified her argument, insisting that our “call out” culture was slowly creating a literature that would ultimately be “timid, homogenous, and dreary.”

“The whole apparatus of delivering literature to its audience [now],” Shriver wrote, “is signaling an intention to subject fiction to rigid ideological purity tests, unrelated to artistry, excellence and even entertainment, that miss the point of what our books are for.” For Shriver, to concern ourselves with “political correctness” doesn’t just produce art that bores, it narrows the writer’s artistic vision, shrinking the reader’s own capacity for imaginative empathy as a result.

As you might imagine, Shriver’s comments outraged a lot of people, and it didn’t help that she delivered her remarks wearing a Mexican sombrero. But while the public backlash to Shriver’s speech is understandable, it’s something that, for the moment, I want to set aside. You may take issue with Shriver’s claims, but it is a fact that appropriation is deeply tied to artistic practice, whether through the adaptation and appropriation of another artist’s content or through the appropriation of cultural subjects themselves. One of the reasons that Shriver’s claims sounded so outrageous was that she herself bundled together a variety of appropriative practices into the same category of “cultural appropriation,” thus to defend rewriting King Lear was potentially also to defend the writing of Uncle Remus. But there’s a difference between adapting a widely shared story and the burlesquing of a particular artifact we consider unique to a specific culture, and that difference might best be articulated by the legal scholar Susan Scafidi in her book Who Owns Culture? Appropriation and Authenticity in American Law , who argues that cultural appropriation is the taking of someone else’s “intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts” in order to “suit [our] own tastes, express [our] own individuality, or simply make a profit” (italics mine).

It’s this combined problem of cultural privilege, profit, and self-​aggrandizement that must be considered when we appropriate items from other cultures.

__________________________________

Adapted from Appropriate: A Provocation . Copyright (c) 2021 by Paisley Rekdal. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

Paisley Rekdal

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Appropriation

Appropriation in art and art history refers to the practice of artists using pre-existing objects or images in their art with little transformation of the original

Salvador Dalí Lobster Telephone (1938) Tate

© Salvador Dali, Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation/DACS, London 2024

Appropriation can be tracked back to the cubist collages and constructions of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque made from 1912 on, in which real objects such as newspapers were included to represent themselves. The practice was developed much further in the readymades created by the French artist Marcel Duchamp from 1915. Most notorious of these was Fountain , a men’s urinal signed, titled, and presented on a pedestal. Later, surrealism also made extensive use of appropriation in collages and objects such as Salvador Dalí ’s Lobster Telephone . In the late 1950s appropriated images and objects appear extensively in the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg , and in pop art .

However, the term seems to have come into use specifically in relation to certain American artists in the 1980s, notably Sherrie Levine and the artists of the Neo-Geo group particularly Jeff Koons . Sherrie Levine reproduced as her own work other works of art, including paintings by Claude Monet and Kasimir Malevich . Her aim was to create a new situation, and therefore a new meaning or set of meanings, for a familiar image.

Appropriation art raises questions of originality, authenticity and authorship, and belongs to the long modernist tradition of art that questions the nature or definition of art itself. Appropriation artists were influenced by the 1934 essay by the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction , and received contemporary support from the American critic Rosalind Krauss in her 1985 book The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths .

Appropriation has been used extensively by artists since the 1980s.

Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.

related terms and concepts

Cubism was a revolutionary new approach to representing reality invented in around 1907–08 by artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. They brought different views of subjects (usually objects or figures) together in the same picture, resulting in paintings that appear fragmented and abstracted

Collage describes both the technique and the resulting work of art in which pieces of paper, photographs, fabric and other ephemera are arranged and stuck down onto a supporting surface

The term readymade was first used by French artist Marcel Duchamp to describe the works of art he made from manufactured objects. It has since often been applied more generally to artworks by other artists made in this way

A twentieth-century literary, philosophical and artistic movement that explored the workings of the mind, championing the irrational, the poetic and the revolutionary

Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the 1950s and flourished in the 1960s in America and Britain, drawing inspiration from sources in popular and commercial culture. Different cultures and countries contributed to the movement during the 1960s and 70s

Short for neo-geometric conceptualism, the term neo-geo came into use in the early 1980s in America to describe the work of artists who criticized the mechanisation and commercialism of the modern world

Modernism refers to a global movement in society and culture that from the early decades of the twentieth century sought a new alignment with the experience and values of modern industrial life. Building on late nineteenth-century precedents, artists around the world used new imagery, materials and techniques to create artworks that they felt better reflected the realities and hopes of modern societies.

selected artists in the collection

Pablo picasso, salvador dalí, marcel duchamp, sherrie levine, georges braque, jasper johns, robert rauschenberg, selected artworks in the collection, lobster telephone, bottle of vieux marc, glass, guitar and newspaper, new hoover convertibles, green, red, brown, new shelton wet/dry 10 gallon displaced doubledecker.

Uncreative Writing: Redefining Language and Authorship in the Digital Age

By maria popova.

A recent interview on The Awl reminded me of a wonderful book by Kenneth Goldsmith — MoMA’s first poetry laureate, founder of the massive grassroots audio archive Ubu Web , and professor at my alma mater, UPenn’s Kelly Writers House — titled Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age ( public library ; UK ). Much like Vannevar Bush did in 1945 when he envisioned the future of knowledge and presaged the value of what he poetically termed “trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record,” Goldsmith examines the importance of sorting existing ideas and makes a case for the cultural value of stealing like an artist , particularly as we’re building our new literary canon.

Goldsmith writes in the introduction:

In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, ‘The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.’ I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as ‘The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.’ It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through the thicket of information — how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it — is what distinguishes my writing from yours.

He samples a beautiful concept that broadens our definition of genius :

Literary critic Marjorie Perloff has recently begun using the term unoriginal genius to describe this tendency emerging in literature. Her idea is that, because of changes brought on by technology and the Internet, our notion of genius — a romantic isolated figure — is outdated. An updated notion of genius would have to center around one’s mastery of information and its dissemination. Perloff has coined a term, moving information , to signify both the act of pushing language around as well as the act of being emotionally moved by that process. She posits that today’s writer resembles more a programmer than a tortured genius, brilliantly conceptualizing, constructing, executing, and maintaining a writing machine.

(Though, one might argue, information is only valuable when it’s synthesized into knowledge, which is then in turn transmuted into wisdom — so, perhaps, an even better concept would be moving wisdom .)

Goldsmith goes on to examine how technology has sparked a new culture of transformation as authorship :

Today, technology has exacerbated these mechanistic tendencies in writing … inciting younger writers to take their cues from the workings of technology and the Web as ways of constructing literature. As a result, writers are exploring ways of writing that have been thought, traditionally, to be outside the scope of literary practice: word processing, databasing, recycling, appropriation, intentional plagiarism, identity ciphering, and intensive programming, to name but a few. […] There’s been an explosion of writers employing strategies of copying and appropriation over the past few years, with the computer encouraging writers to mimic its workings. When cutting and pasting are integral to the writing process, i would be mad to imagine that writers wouldn’t exploit these functions in extreme ways that weren’t intended by their creators.

Except, of course, none of this is new. We already know that as far back as the Middle Ages, authors were making remarkable florilegia , the Tumblrs of their day, by literally cutting and pasting text from existing manuscripts to create entirely new contexts.

Still, Goldsmith is careful not to disparage traditional literature but laments the stale values it has instilled in us:

I’m not saying that such writing should be discarded. . . . But I’m sensing that literature — infinite in its potential of ranges and expression — is in a rut, tending to hit the same note again and again, confining itself to the narrowest of spectrums, resulting in a practice that has fallen out of step and unable to take part in arguably the most vital and exciting cultural discourses of our time. I find this to be a profoundly sad moment — and a great lost opportunity for literary creativity to revitalize itself in ways it hasn’t imagined. Perhaps one reason writing is stuck might be the way creative writing is taught. In regard to the many sophisticated ideas concerning media, identity, and sampling developed over the past century, books about how to be a creative writer have completely missed the boat, relying on clichéd notions of what it means to be ‘creative.’

For the past several years, Goldsmith has been teaching a Penn class after which the book is titled, inverting the paradigm of traditional “creative writing” courses. His students are penalized for any semblance of originality and “creativity,” and rewarded for plagiarism, repurposing, sampling, and outright stealing. But as counterproductive and blasphemous as this may sound, it turns out to be a gateway to something unusual yet inevitable, that certain slot machine quality of creativity :

The secret: the suppression of self-expression is impossible. Even when we do something as seemingly ‘uncreative’ as retyping a few pages, we express ourselves in a variety of ways. The act of choosing and reframing tells us as much about ourselves as our story about our mother’s cancer operation. It’s just that we’ve never been taught to value such choices. After a semester of forcibly suppressing a student’s ‘creativity’ by making them plagiarize and transcribe, she will approach me with a sad face at the end of the semester, telling me how disappointed she was because, in fact, what we had accomplished was not uncreative at all; by not being ‘creative,’ she produced the most creative body of work writing in her life. By taking an opposite approach to creativity — the most trite, overused, and ill-defined concept in a writer’s training — she had emerged renewed and rejuvenated, on fire and in love again with writing.

Goldsmith echoes legendary designer Charles Eames , who famously advised to “innovate only as a last resort,” and writes:

Having worked in advertising for many years as a ‘creative director,’ I can tell you that, despite what cultural pundits might say, creativity — as [it has] been defined by our culture with its endless parade of formulaic novels, memoirs, and films — is the thing to flee from, not only as a member of the ‘creative class’ but also as a member of the ‘artistic class.’ Living when technology is changing the rules of the game in every aspect of our lives, it’s time to question and tear down such clichés and lay them on the floor in front of us, then reconstruct these smoldering embers into something new, something contemporary, something — finally — relevant.

In addressing the most common contestations to his ideas about accepting all language as poetry by mere reframing — about what happens to the notion of authorship, about how careers and canons are to be established, about whether the heart of literature is reducible to mere algorithms — Goldsmith seconds a sentiment French polymath Henri Poincaré shared more then a century ago when he noted that to create is merely to choose wisely from the existing pool of ideas:

What becomes important is what you — the author — [decide] to choose. Success lies in knowing what to include and — more important — what to leave out. If all language can be transformed into poetry by mere reframing — an exciting possibility — then she who reframes words in the most charged and convincing way will be judged the best. I agree that the moment we throw judgment and quality out the window we’re in trouble. Democracy is fine for YouTube, but it’s generally a recipe for disaster when it comes to art. While all the words may be created equal — and thus treated — the way in which they’re assembled isn’t; it’s impossible to suspend judgment and folly to dismiss quality. Mimesis and replication [don’t] eradicate authorship, rather they simply place new demands on authors who must take these new conditions into account as part and parcel of the landscape when conceiving of a work of art: if you don’t want it copied, don’t put it online.

Ultimately, he argues that all of this is about the evolution — rather than the destruction — of authorship :

In 1959 the poet and artist Brion Gysin claimed that writing was fifty years behind painting. And he might still be right: in the art world, since impressionism, the avant-garde has been the mainstream. Innovation and risk taking have been consistently rewarded. But, in spite of the successes of modernism, literature has remained on two parallel tracks, the mainstream and the avant-garde, with the two rarely intersecting. Yet the conditions of digital culture have unexpectedly forced a collision, scrambling the once-sure footing of both camps. Suddenly, we all find ourselves in the same boat grappling with new questions concerning authorship, originality, and the way meaning is forged.

The rest of Uncreative Writing goes on to explore the history of appropriation in art, the emerging interchangeability between words and images in digital culture, the challenges of defining one’s identity in the vastness of the online environment, and many other pressing facets of what it means to be a writer — or, even more broadly, a creator — in the age of the internet. Complement it with the equally subversive How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read .

Photographs: Cameron Wittig (top); Grand Life Hotels (bottom)

— Published February 13, 2013 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/02/13/uncreative-writing-kenneth-goldsmith/ —

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Content Appropriation: A Deeper Look

Theodore Gracyk

Chapter Goals

• Define content appropriation
• Define exoticism
• Understand how content appropriation has supported racism
• Define dominant culture ally
• Explore failures of allyship
• Explore examples of successful allyship
• Define dialogism in relation to appropriation
• Understand how dialogism can challenge racism

6.1. Content Appropriation: Reviewing the Basics

This chapter goes into more detail about content appropriation. It discusses ways in which it has supported racism in the United States. But it also examines ways in which content appropriation has be used to challenge the dominant culture.

Content appropriation and voice appropriation are distinct forms of cultural appropriation. In practice, however, they are frequently bundled together. To summarize the difference, content appropriation occurs when someone presents information that is drawn from another source. In this sense, our lives are full of content appropriation. People constantly share information that they did not originate. The focus of this book is appropriation within the arts, where appropriated information or  content is often encoded in an appropriated story or image.  Content appropriation is cultural appropriation when the material originated in, and was taken from, a different culture. Voice appropriation is similar, but it is characterized by the way that the material claims to offer insight into the worldview and belief system of another culture. This is most often done by portraying representative members of another culture, so the beliefs and values of selected individuals stand for those of the whole group. (For a more detailed discussion, see Chapter 1, Sections 1.6 and 1.8.)

In practice, content appropriation can be separated from voice appropriation by removing all references to the originating culture. This process is common in the contemporary world of mass entertainment, especially film-making and television.

• The Broadway musical West Side Story (1957) and subsequent hit film (1961) are updates of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet .  New York City of the 1950s replaces 15th-century Verona, Italy.
• Other Americanized updates of Shakespeare include the film 10 Things I Hate About You (1999) and Anne Tyler’s novel Vinegar Girl (2016). Both are appropriations of The Taming of the Shrew .
• 12 Monkeys (1995) is a remake of the French experimental film La Jetée (1962) that thoroughly Americanizes it.
• The Departed (2006) is a remake of the Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs (2002), replacing the Chinese criminal syndicate of the original with an Irish Mafia gang in Boston.
• The Spanish television series La casa de papel (2017) was purged of all Spanish content when re-tooled as Money Heist: Korea – Joint Economic Area (2022).
• The popular television series The Office (2005–13) Americanized the British original (2001–3) of the same name.

By removing all references to the cultures that created the original content, these acts of thematic and narrative appropriation are free from voice appropriation. This method of appropriation supports the common but doubtful claim that art aims to express universal truths about the human condition.

However, a great deal of content appropriation is not disguised. Cultural origins are frequently highlighted rather than hidden. Audience awareness of cultural appropriation can be part of the point of appropriating it. In such cases, the new material implicitly promises to inform about what is distinctively “foreign” — that is, strange and unusual —  in the other culture. Display of cultural difference is a goal of appropriating the content, and therefore shapes the selection of the content.  Examples of this kind of content appropriation were discussed in Chapter 5, with the documentary pictures of Indigenous Americans made by George Catlin and Edward S. Curtis. (For example, see figures 5.2 and 5.24.) Some writers give a more specific label to this kind of content appropriation: it is subject appropriation (Young 2010).

6.2. Exoticism

When cultural appropriation highlights what is different or unusual in another culture, it often promotes exoticism. Edward Said is well known for his study of a major type of European exoticism, Orientalism (Said 1978).

For many centuries, European art and popular art featured settings in “the Orient” (any and every society of the Middle East, Asia and the Far East). Said explores European literature to show how Orientalism constructed an imaginary and exotic “Orient.” This fad for Oriental content was well established by the late 18th century. For example, in the era when opera was popular music theater, two of Mozart’s operas are based on Orientalism: The Abduction from the Seraglio (1782) and The Magic Flute (1791). Their plots presuppose that there is a deep opposition between European and Oriental societies. But there is something more to Orientalism: the opposition of cultures is coupled with a racist assumption on the part of the European artist and audience that the Eastern “other” is racially — that is, naturally and unavoidably — inferior (Said 1978, pp. 41, 133, 313).

The problem is not confined to fictional works like operas and novels. It can occur in visual representations. Documentation is seldom a neutral activity. As explained in Chapters 3 and 5, documentation frequently functions in the service of a social and political agenda. Within the context of Orientalism, non-fictional content appropriation routinely emphasized how these lands and people were remarkable, mysterious, and “hopelessly” strange (Said 1978, pp. 1, 51, 166). (See the example of van Gogh in Chapter 1, Section 1.4.) For example, visual representations of women frequently found excuses to show them naked or minimally clothed, demonstrating the low moral standards of the Orient. (See figure 6.1.) (See also Chapter 3, figures 3.4 and 3.13, and the discussion of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly in Chapter 1, Section 1.8.)

Everything that Said says about Orientalism — European representation of the Orient — has strong parallels in patterns of American cultural appropriation. Content appropriation on the part of the dominant culture often aims at exoticism, highlighting cultural differences between a non-dominant group and the dominant culture (hooks 1992). Later examples in this chapter will suggest that content appropriation can also be used in a positive way. However, cultural appropriation frequently seeks the exotic by emphasizing what is (from the perspective of the dominant culture) remarkable and strange. In doing so, material that might be regarded as merely documentary should be understood as a method by which the dominant culture reinforces its distance from — and, implicitly, superiority over — a non-dominant group. (See figure 6.2.)

6.3. Misunderstood Intentions and Failed Allyship

There is a famous proverb, dating back to the Middle Ages, that says hell is full of well-meaning people. In the most common American version, the proverb says, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

When exoticism is an element of cultural appropriation, even the most sympathetic and fair-minded author or artist is likely to reinforce the prejudices of the dominant culture. As an example, consider two White authors — Mark Twain and Bret Harte — who reported on the California gold rush in the middle of the 19th century. Both authors called attention to the mistreatment of Chinese immigrants.

Gold was discovered in California in 1848, and it was found in an accessible form. It was present in the beds of the many rivers that carried melting snow down from the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The area had only recently been seized by the United States in a “local” uprising that was backed by the U.S. military. In 1848, the population profile was overwhelmingly Indigenous. Estimates of the Indigenous population range from 160,000 to 300,000. There were perhaps 6,000 Mexican Hispanics and fewer than 1,000 non-Hispanic White people. The gold rush brought about a rapid change: within two years, the population of the state may have doubled. While the majority of the new immigrants came from within the United States, it is estimated that one in three immigrants were men from China. To limit their competition with White gold seekers, “foreign” miners were heavily taxed. The tax had its desired effect: most of the Chinese immigrants turned to other forms of manual labor. San Francisco was the major port serving the mining boom, and many Chinese immigrants started businesses there, such as shops, laundries, and restaurants. Chinese immigration continued for thirty years, totaling 300,000 or more.

Two Americans who migrated to California later became famous authors: Mark Twain and Bret Harte. Both men started their writing careers there as newspaper writers. In 1864, Harte hired Twain as a writer for The Californian , a weekly publication edited by Harte. Both men later published books about their time in the mining camps. They both recognized that the Chinese community was of interest to readers back East, and they produced early examples of Orientalism in an American context. Of these, Harte’s was the more consequential.

Both Twain and Harte respected the Chinese immigrants and tried to support them through their newspaper writings. Twain discussed their social status in relation to the class differences in the White population, emphasizing that the Chinese population was better educated and more civilized than the average White gold miner. Harte attempted to convey sympathy for the barriers facing Chinese immigrants by writing a satirical poem, “Plain Language from Truthful James” (1870). His poem was rapidly republished in newspapers throughout the United States, often with illustrations, using a title he did not supply, “The Heathen Chinee.” (See figures 6.3 and 6.4.) With that name, it was set to music and became a popular song. By the end of the year, Harte was one of the most famous and best paid writers in the United States.

Excerpt from Mark Twain, Roughing It

Of course there was a large Chinese population in … every town and city on the Pacific coast. They are a harmless race when white men either let them alone or treat them no worse than dogs; in fact they are almost entirely harmless anyhow, for they seldom think of resenting the vilest insults or the cruelest injuries. They are quiet, peaceable, tractable, free from drunkenness, and they are as industrious as the day is long. A disorderly Chinaman is rare, and a lazy one does not exist. So long as a Chinaman has strength to use his hands he needs no support from anybody; white men often complain of want of work, but a Chinaman offers no such complaint; he always manages to find something to do. He is a great convenience to everybody—even to the worst class of white men, for he bears the most of their sins, suffering fines for their petty thefts, imprisonment for their robberies, and death for their murders. Any white man can swear a Chinaman’s life away in the courts, but no Chinaman can testify against a white man. Ours is the “land of the free”—nobody denies that—nobody challenges it. (Maybe it is because we won’t let other people testify.) As I write, news comes that in broad daylight in San Francisco, some boys have stoned an inoffensive Chinaman to death, and that although a large crowd witnessed the shameful deed, no one interfered. …

Accompanied by a fellow reporter, we made a trip through our Chinese quarter the other night. The Chinese have built their portion of the city to suit themselves; and as they keep neither carriages nor wagons, their streets are not wide enough, as a general thing, to admit of the passage of vehicles. …

We ate chow-chow with chop-sticks in the celestial restaurants; our comrade chided the moon-eyed damsels in front of the houses for their want of feminine reserve; we received protecting Josh-lights from our hosts and “dickered” for a pagan God or two. Finally, we were impressed with the genius of a Chinese book-keeper; he figured up his accounts on a machine like a gridiron with buttons strung on its bars; the different rows represented units, tens, hundreds and thousands. He fingered them with incredible rapidity—in fact, he pushed them from place to place as fast as a musical professor’s fingers travel over the keys of a piano.

Bret Harte, Plain Language from Truthful James (1870)

Which I wish to remark, And my language is plain, That for ways that are dark And for tricks that are vain, The heathen Chinee is peculiar, Which the same I would rise to explain.

Ah Sin was his name; And I shall not deny, In regard to the same, What that name might imply; But his smile it was pensive and childlike, As I frequent remarked to Bill Nye. …

Which we had a small game, And Ah Sin took a hand: It was Euchre. The same He did not understand; But he smiled as he sat by the table, With the smile that was childlike and bland.

Yet the cards they were stocked In a way that I grieve, And my feelings were shocked At the state of Nye’s sleeve, Which was stuffed full of aces and bowers, And the same with intent to deceive.

But the hands that were played By that heathen Chinee, And the points that he made, Were quite frightful to see,— Till at last he put down a right bower, Which the same Nye had dealt unto me.

Then I looked up at Nye, And he gazed upon me; And he rose with a sigh, And said, “Can this be? We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor,”— And he went for that heathen Chinee.

In the scene that ensued I did not take a hand, But the floor it was strewed Like the leaves on the strand With the cards that Ah Sin had been hiding, In the game “he did not understand.”

In his sleeves, which were long, He had twenty-four packs,— Which was coming it strong, Yet I state but the facts; …

Which is why I remark, And my language is plain, That for ways that are dark And for tricks that are vain, The heathen Chinee is peculiar,— Which the same I am free to maintain.

[Explanation: The men are playing the once-popular card game Euchre. The White men gamble with Ah Sin believing he “did not understand” the rules of Euchre. Five cards are dealt to each player and these are used in five rounds. The highest card laid down in each round wins the “trick.” A “bower” is a jack and it is the high card in the game of Eucher. The jacks are also ranked in case two are played in the same round. The highest jack is called the “right bower.” Ah Sin plays the same right bower that the narrator is holding in his hand, revealing that Ah Sin is cheating.]

There is a very small bit of voice appropriation in Twain’s description of the Chinese immigrants: “they seldom think of resenting” the injustices they suffer. Otherwise, these samples of their writing are examples of content appropriation.

Where Twain is direct in his support, Harte is more indirect. 19th-century readers would immediately understand “Bill Nye” to be an Irish name. Therefore, Harte tells a story featuring two immigrant groups who are in competition for unskilled jobs as manual laborers: “cheap labor.” This reading is supported by the fact that Harte had already raised the same issue in an editorial, observing that the “quickwitted, patient, obedient, and faithful” Chinese were “gradually deposing the Irish from their old, recognized positions in the ranks of labor” (quoted in Romeo 2006, p. 112). Harte is trying to make the point that Bill Nye and the “truthful” narrator are hypocrites. Ah Sin is not “peculiar” at all. Nye and Ah Sin are basically the same. Both have extra cards up their sleeves. Yet Ah Sin is physically assaulted by Nye as the narrator stands by and does nothing. The dominant culture permits Billy Nye to cheat Ah Sin — and, by implication, all Chinese immigrants — but Bill Nye is held to a different standard.

Harte’s poem is pure content appropriation. It contains no voice appropriation. Ah Sin does not speak and we are guided by the viewpoint of the White narrator. (Looking to cash in on the success of the poem, voice appropriation was added to the content appropriation when Harte co-wrote the play Ah Sin with Mark Twain in 1877.)

Despite his good intentions, Harte’s poem backfired. As such, it serves as a lesson why exoticism is dangerous even when it is meant to make a positive point. Harte tried to present the relative status of Chinese and Irish immigrants as a way of ridiculing the dominant culture’s racial prejudices. The dominant culture renamed the poem “The Heathen Chinee” and read it as confirmation of their anti-Chinese bias. In addition to finding the poem amusing, 19th-century Americans took it seriously as evidence that Chinese people are sneaky and deceitful competitors who do not play fair with other groups. The poem became a rallying cry of anti-Chinese racism, and it was even entered as evidence in Congress to support a ban on Chinese immigration (Lanzendorfer 2022).

Where the real-world reception of “Plain Language from Truthful James” diverged from Harte’s intentions, Twain’s documentation of Chinese immigration has problems, too. Twain was both a newspaper reporter and a humorist. As shown in the short excerpt from Roughing It , Twain played up exoticism, which tends to undercut his serious purpose. Like Harte, Twain emphasizes the hypocrisy of the dominant culture. Twain describes Chinese immigrants as a kind of model minority, and then suggests that, for that very reason, obstacles are created so that they will not succeed. At the same time, Twain is clearly working within — and so reinforcing — the racialized thinking of his times. He presupposes that cultural traits have a biological basis, and tries to defend Chinese immigration based on inherent, positive characteristics of their “race.”

Twain and Harte adopted the role of ally, which is “any member of a privileged or dominating group using their position to advocate for [a] nonprivileged, oppressed group” (Fried 2019, p. 447). Harte failed as an ally, and Twain had problems as one, too.  Cases of this type illustrate Homi Bhabha’s warning, “We can never quite control [cultural appropriations] and their signification. They exceed intention” ( Artforum 2017).

However, it would be a mistaken, hasty generalization to conclude that allyship cannot succeed through content appropriation. At best, these cases suggest that exoticism tends to work against allyship.

6.4. Successful Allyship: Winslow Homer

In contrast to Twain and Harte, Winslow Homer offers an example of successful allyship through content appropriation. Homer was a prominent visual artist of the 19th century. He got his start creating images of the Civil War, many of which were sketched at the front lines and then published in Harper’s Weekly Illustrated Magazine . After the war, he produced expensive art in the form of oil paintings, many of which were then adapted as black and white drawings and mass-produced as illustrations in Harper’s Weekly . This magazine was the most widely read publication in the United States during this time period. As a result, he became one of the best-known American artists of his time. The dominant culture embraced him as one of their own, and an early art critic went so far as to link him to an imagined Anglo-Saxon past: ““Like the men of Viking blood, he rises to his best estate in the stress of the hurricane” (Downes 1900, p. 106).

On the one hand, Homer’s significance is that he constructed a vision of the dominant culture that seems to celebrate a highly traditional version of White America. As the art critic Holland Cotter puts it, Homer made his fortune by producing what the audience wanted: “comforting visions of an imagined age of rural innocence” (Cotter 2013). For many in the dominant culture, he is the painter of the one-room schoolhouse, children playing snap the whip, New England fishermen hauling in their catch, and young men sailing for pleasure on a summer’s day. (See figure 6.5.)

On the other hand, Homer produced a body of work that is less celebratory about the United States. Shifting his focus away from the dominant culture, he used content appropriation to create a sharply critical form of social commentary. Across the span of the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras that followed the Civil War, he produced a set of insightful and sympathetic images of Black American life. Given Homer’s position in the dominant culture, these are works of cultural appropriation. Shortly after his death, if not before, Homer’s content appropriations were recognized and applauded as positive acts of allyship. Furthermore, he designed images that avoided the misunderstanding and misuse that befell Harte’s poem about the Chinese immigrant, Ah Sin. One of Homer’s paintings, The Gulf Stream , is considered one of most significant of all American artworks. Before discussing that painting, two others deserve attention.

A Visit from the Old Mistress (1876) should be approached with the knowledge that Homer created it a decade after the Civil War and the legal abolishment of slavery. (See figure 6.6.) The White mistress, on the right, was once an enslaver of the other women in the picture, who are now emancipated.

Although the timing might be a coincidence, Homer created this image as the policies of Reconstruction were being rolled back. Reconstruction was the period of 12 years following the Civil War, during which the Federal Government took positive steps to secure the rights of formerly enslaved Black people. Withdrawing Federal troops and oversight from the South in 1877, the United States government would no longer protect Black Americans and guard their rights as equal citizens. In an essay about this painting, Sarah Senette summarizes Homer’s achievement.

In A Visit Form the Old Mistress , … the women look at each other as though staring across a battlefield. Their faces register a range of emotions, sadness, anger, and even resignation. … [the] group of African American women … appear rooted in place. … Far from expressing a new relationship that emerged after the Civil War, A Visit from the Old Mistress depicts an unfortunate continuity in the lives of formerly enslaved women in the American South and hints at the ultimate failure of Radical Reconstruction. … The fact that the African American women remained in close enough proximity to receive an informal visit from ‘the old mistress’ is particularly significant, as recently freed women often worked in the same spaces and performed the same services for white employers before and after the Civil War. … [T]he women of color appear poor, a fact that reflects African American women’s continued poverty after the Civil War and the failure of Reconstruction to fundamentally change living conditions for women of color. … Homer’s somber use of color, his bifurcated composition, and the cabin’s dreary interior … likely signifies both his observations and the continuing political, social, and economic reality of formerly enslaved women after the Civil War. (Senette 2015)

Given the timing, Homer’s Dressing for the Carnival of 1877 must also be understood as an exploration of race relations in America. (See figure 6.7.) It shows two women sewing a Harlequin costume onto a man while six children patiently watch. The image was created from sketches that Homer made of an emancipated Black family in Virginia. Black Americans with a Caribbean background had transferred aspects of their traditional pre-Lent carnival celebrations to the 4th of July. (Notice the small flag held by the boy on the right.) Like A Visit from the Old Mistress , this painting was made at the dawn of the Jim Crow era and the new system of legal segregation, and the painter likely intends that we should view it in those terms. Celebration of carnival is a Roman Catholic practice common in the Caribbean and New Orleans, but otherwise unknown in the Protestant South. As a consequence, the practice of dressing as a Harlequin was unusual even among Black Americans. To openly continue their traditions, carnival practitioners moved them to holidays that were supported by the Protestant White majority.

Given Homer’s decision to showcase an unusual Black Southern custom, Dressing for the Carnival is, to some extent, an example of exoticism. However, there is no condescension in Homer’s portrayal of this cultural practice. His interest in showing real people engaged in their lives stands in stark contrast to the ridiculous Black stereotypes of the ongoing minstrel tradition. (See Chapter 4, figures 4.9 through 4.12.) This is not to say that Homer was immune from the influence of that tradition. One early work, Defiance: Inviting a Shot Before Petersburg (1864), contains a number of figures. One of whom is a Black musician playing banjo who looks very much like a performer in a minstrel show. However, we do not find these stereotypes in the work Homer produced after the Civil War.

As with the two examples just discussed, Homer’s most important representations of Black life were oil paintings. Because they challenged familiar stereotypes, they were not reproduced in newspapers or magazines. Although they were not widely known during his lifetime, some White Southerners threatened him with violence for producing them (Downes 1911, pp. 85-86). Black audiences who could see these paintings on display in New York City responded positively to them. They were praised by Alain Locke, a prominent Black philosopher and art critic. Writing about Homer’s work 25 years after his death, Locke singled out one painting for special praise: “ The Gulf Stream began the artistic emancipation of the Negro subject in American art,” possessing a degree of “human sympathy and understanding” not found in the work of any of Homer’s contemporaries (Locke 1936, p. 46).

Coming from such an influential Black writer, Locke’s praise is significant. Earlier, Section 6.3 introduced Jeremy Fried’s notion of dominant culture allyship. Expanding on that idea, Fried says that an artist must pass a basic test to qualify as genuine ally of a non-dominant group. The test “is acceptance by the relevant people and communities within the dominated group.  … One becomes an ally by being identified as such by the community one aims to support” (Fried 2019, p. 452). Homer’s painting clearly passes this test due to Locke’s praise for it.

Strange Fruit

Another example of a genuine ally is Abel Meeropol and his 1937 poem, “Strange Fruit.” Written by a Russian-Jewish high school teacher in New York, the poem is a work of content appropriation that aimed to raise awareness of the barbaric Southern practice of lynching Black men as a method of enforcing Jim Crow segregation. Here is the opening of the poem:

Southern trees bear a strange fruit Blood on the leaves and blood at the root Black body swinging in the Southern breeze Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

Meeropol’s success as an ally was confirmed by his next step, which was to set his poem to music. He then offered the song to jazz singer Billie Holiday, whose 1939 recording was the best selling recording of her career. As a Black singer making records for a Black audience, Holiday’s success with “Strange Fruit” certifies Meeropol as a genuine ally.

Beyond acceptance from the relevant community, allyship can be measured in terms of its impact as a political gesture (Fried 2019). Impact depends on whether it successfully communicates its critique to the dominant culture. Political impact is difficult to measure. Given that Time magazine declared it “Song of the Century” in 1999, “Strange Fruit” passes this test (Lynskey 2011).

Political impact is difficult to determine for an artist such as Homer. His cultural position and other work are closely identified with the dominant culture, and his works of allyship were not popular successes. Despite these obstacles, Homer created a body of work involving cultural appropriation that meets Addison Gayle’s criteria for conveying Black culture in art. According to Gayle, content appropriation should “recognize and insist upon the validity of an African American culture that encompasses not only the retentions of the African cultures from which the enslaved population was drawn, but also the unique culture that the enslaved developed out of the conditions and imperatives of their lives in the U.S.” (summary of Gayle in Shockley 2011, p. 4; see also Gayle 1994). Homer’s Dressing for the Carnival satisfies these demands to a high degree.

Locke’s early praise for The Gulf Stream is significant because it was largely dismissed as ugly and unpleasant during Homer’s lifetime. (See figure 6.8.) Until a museum bought it, it was for sale for more than five years without a buyer. As with many complex artworks, The Gulf Stream has been interpreted in several ways. The only one of these that will be discussed here is the interpretation that takes the painting at face value: this is a representation of a Black man at the dawn of the 20th century. Given Homer’s audience and the decision to create an oil painting, the image is (presumably) intended to be seen by a White, well-off audience. However, there is no sense that the man on the boat is speaking to the viewer in any way — there is no dimension of voice appropriation. Nonetheless, Homer has created a complex symbol about Black and White America.

Homer created The Gulf Stream after a time sketching in the Bahamas, but the title leaves the location of the scene open to interpretation. This small fishing boat could have sailed from Cuba, or Florida, or even North Carolina. The boat has been battered by a storm, and the man is threatened by sharks and by the approach of another storm. He has no mast or sail, so no power. He cannot steer – the rudder is gone. He is adrift and at the mercy of others. There is the potential for rescue — a ship is on the horizon at left. But will they see him even if he spots them and signals? Stalks of sugar cane are on the deck beside him, reminding the viewer that the sugar industry of the Americas was a major reason for the slave trade. So, this image does not symbolize, as some would have it, “man against nature.” As Albert Boime says, “Homer’s besieged fisherman is an allegory of black people’s victimization at the end of the nineteenth century” (Boime 1990, p. 36). The man’s posture is ambiguous. He might be resigned. He might be defiant. Either way, the painting “conveys the paradoxical destiny of ‘freed’ black people in modern society” (Boime 1990, p. 46.) The Gulf Stream vividly demonstrates that cultural appropriation is compatible with being an artistic ally of non-dominant groups.

6.5. Employing Dual Appropriations

The examples of Twain and Harte suggest that allyship can easily go wrong, while the example of Homer shows that it can succeed. Despite Locke’s high praise, it would be wrong to think that Homer was singular in achieving allyship in visual art in the second half of the 19th century. One of Homer’s contemporaries used dual appropriation to the same end. In dual appropriation,  an artist appropriates from two different cultures at the same time. Consequently, this approach can put three cultures into dialogue. Thomas Satterwhite Noble’s painting Margaret Garner is an example of using dual appropriation to achieve a complex cultural interplay. (See figure 6.9.) In showing a tragic moment in the life of Garner, Noble engages in content appropriation. And it is cultural appropriation, because a White man is illustrating a moment in the life of a Black woman. The basic design of the image is appropriated, as well — from yet another culture. There is a question of whether her hand gesture is voice appropriation, but that can be set aside because the overall point of the image is the content appropriation that places it in the genre of “true crime” documentation. As explained above in relation to the content appropriation of exoticism, presentation of Garner’s perspective is not the actual goal. Noble is illustrating her story in order to make his own statement about the fragile, undecided status of recently emancipated slaves.

Noble’s painting became widely known because a reproduction was published in Harper’s Weekly , the same weekly magazine that made Winslow Homer a household name. Harper’s Weekly renamed the image The Modern Medea . Painted immediately following the Civil War, the picture illustrates the story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who fled north to Ohio in 1856. Under the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1850, free states were required to cooperate in the capture and return of enslaved people. When Garner was located near Cincinnati, she decided to kill her children with a butcher knife rather than let them be taken and returned to enslavement. She had killed one child and wounded two others when slave hunters broke into the house and seized her. Her tragic story was widely publicized in Northern newspapers when it led to a court case that debated whether the state of Ohio could charge her with murder, which would require a court ruling that Garner was a free woman. Noble’s picture is a content appropriation of the most dramatic moment of her story, illustrating the arrival of the posse and their disruption of her desperate act.

By reminding the public of Garner’s story a decade after it took place, Noble is engaging in allyship in the same way that Homer did with A Visit from the Old Mistress and Dressing for the Carnival . Both artists are portraying real people and inviting viewers to interpret their pictures in relation to American politics following the ending of the Civil War. Noble’s picture was produced a few years earlier than the pair by Homer. Noble painted his at the beginning of Reconstruction, while Homer painted his two as it came to an end. In relation to current events, “the political and cultural context for Noble’s rendering was fundamentally different from surrounding Margaret Garner’s actions in Cincinnati. In a nation partway through ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment, the conflict over slavery and abolition had given way to an equally fierce debate over equality, black autonomy, and the terms of Reconstruction” (Reinhardt 2010, p. 262). Although slavery had been outlawed, the former Confederate states were uncooperative, passing laws that would establish legal segregation. In response to this problem and other issues, The Reconstruction Act of 1867 required the rebel states to guarantee voting rights for Black men as a condition for rejoining the United States with voting rights for White men. Garner’s image was painted and shown during the debate surrounding adoption and implementation of that law.

Thus, in 1867 the dominant culture would have understood Noble’s image as an endorsement of the Reconstruction Act. It was created as a reminder that slavery was a brutal institution and so terrible that murder was plausibly seen as a lesser evil than having one’s children grow up enslaved. Without exactly excusing Garner, Noble guided interpretation of her action by building the image around a second cultural appropriation. Many viewers would have immediately recognized the motif or design appropriation guiding Noble’s  placement and poses for the adult figures in the picture. Their placement and poses are a cultural appropriation from a famous painting, The Oath of the Horatii. (See figure 6.10.) Like Noble’s own painting, this French painting of 1784 was popularized in engraved reproductions.

The Oath of the Horatii concentrates on four figures. On the left, three brothers pledge to defend Rome to their father, the figure on the right.  Noble’s image employs a copycat grouping. Other than her arm placement and the direction of her gaze, Garner has the body stance of the father. The slave hunters have the body stances of the brothers. Since the similarity is not coincidental, Garner’s visual allusion to The Oath must be a prompt to think about the connection between the two stories.

The Oath was understood in its time — and ever since — as a reminder that there is an ongoing struggle to secure the rights and privileges of liberty. Although it is a history painting about ancient Rome, David’s painting was understood to support the French Revolution, a political event of his own time. By using motif appropriation to make a connection between Garner and The Oath , Noble is asking the audience to interpret this  horrifying moment in Garner’s story as another act in the historical defense of liberty. The 14th Amendment must be ratified and the rights of the formerly enslaved secured, Noble is suggesting, or the United States will cause further tragedies of this kind.

There is an additional bit of cultural appropriation here, from yet another culture. Noble tiled his image Margaret Garner , but someone at Harper’s Weekly added the words The Modern Medea (Boime 1990, pp. 146-47). What does the expanded title mean? Who was Medea? In ancient Greek stories, Medea was the lover of Jason, but he betrayed her to marry someone else. In rage, Medea murdered their children with a knife. In the version of the story that has come down to us in a play by Euripides, the gods actually assist Medea, implying that they forgave her wrongdoing because she did it in response to a wrong done to her. Here, again, cultural appropriation implies that it would be wrong to simply condemn Garner. We cannot judge her unless we understand what drove her to do such a terrible thing.

By gesturing back to the time just before the Civil War and emancipation, Noble engages in content appropriation. He then deepens its meaning with another cultural appropriation, a motif appropriation from Jacques-Louis David’s well-known painting. Sharing Noble’s work with a larger audience, Harper’s Weekly adds further content appropriation by giving the image a new title. With or without the Medea reference, Noble’s painting makes him an ally of the millions of Black Americans who awaited their fate at the hands of a country undecided about its commitment to freedom and equality for Black people.

6.6. Appropriation and White Ethnic Americans

As explained in Chapter 4, Section 4.7, and above in Section 6.3, Irish immigrants were not immediately accepted as members of the dominant White culture. A wave of Irish immigrants began to pour into the United States after famine struck Ireland in the 1840s. Many of them found work as unskilled physical laborers, such as leveling ground for new roads and digging the Erie Canal. After the United States government decided to fund a transcontinental railroad linking California and the East in 1862, Irish immigrants supplied the bulk of the labor force of the line heading west across the central plains. At the same time, a second rail line, the Central Pacific, headed east into the mountains to meet them. The Central Pacific actively recruited its labor force in China, bringing in a fresh wave of young men to supplement the generation that had arrived to support the gold rush. Although the country wanted cheap manual labor, many people saw both immigrant groups as threats to the dominant culture. One popular political cartoon showed the two groups headed toward each other across the continent, gobbling up Uncle Sam. (See figure 6.11.) The railroads they were building can be seen in the background. Notice that this is a variation of Bret Harte’s poem about the cheating gamblers: Irish laborers compete with Chinese laborers.

This cartoon references “foreigners” and it does not directly state that the men are Irish and Chinese. Instead, it engages in content appropriation that most Americans would immediately recognize as stereotypes for those two groups. In the case of the figure on the right, the long hair braid or queue was a standard stereotype that signified Chinese ethnicity. However, the Irish laborer also conforms to a stereotype that appears in countless drawings in the 19th century. Just as the Chinese man is stereotyped by the bamboo cone hat on the ground beside him, the Irish man is assigned a distinctive style of cap. The Irishman’s face is notably monkey-like. This stereotype was a content appropriation in which American artists copied from English drawings and cartoons that pictured the Irish as a backward race. (See figure 6.12.) Historically, the English takeover of Ireland originated the model of settler-colonization that the English later used in North America. In both cases, the English stressed the racial inferiority of the ancestral landholders and replaced them with settlers who would engage in agricultural development.

Through content appropriation, the English stereotype of monkey-faced Irish people was widely adopted in the United States. (See figure 6.13. See also Chapter 2, Figure 2.13.) An American humor magazine commented that this comparison was not an insult to the Irish, but to monkeys ( Life 1893, p. 303).

The point of this dehumanizing content appropriation was to affirm that the Irish were racially, and not merely ethnically, different. One reason was that the country’s English heritage included centuries of racist mistreatment of the Irish. Another factor was that the Protestant culture of the United States was hostile to the immigration of Roman Catholics. The complaints and warnings that were raised about Irish immigrants became a blueprint that is still used in the United States — although now against other groups.

The standardization of anti-Irish racism is clearly illustrated by a “humor” piece by one of the most popular authors of the 19th century, Louisa May Alcott. She is best known for the novel Little Women (1868-69). Because that novel is so progressive on the topic of women, it may surprise its fans to learn that Alcott supported the “nativist” anti-Irish movement, and that she did so using racial stereotyping. In the essay “The Servant-Girl Problem” (1874), Alcott uncritically adopted prevailing stereotypes and advised her readers against hiring Irish women for housekeeping jobs. If they followed her advice, Alcott promised, her readers could find good help among native-born “American women.”

Excerpt from “The Servant-Girl Problem: How Louisa M. Alcott Solves It

… Last spring, it became my turn to keep house for a very mixed family of old and young, with very different tastes, tempers and pursuits. For several years Irish incapables have reigned in our kitchen, and general discomfort has pervaded the house. The girl then serving had been with us a year, and was an unusually intelligent person, but the faults of her race seemed to be unconquerable, and the winter had been a most trying one all around. My first edict was, “Biddy must go.” “You won’t get anyone else, mum, so early in the season,” said Biddy, with much satisfaction at my approaching downfall. “Then I’ll do the work myself, so you can pack up,” was my undaunted reply. Biddy departed, sure of an early recall, and for a month I did do the work myself, looking about meantime for help. “No Irish need apply,” was my answer to the half-dozen girls who, spite of Biddy’s prophecy, did come to take the place. …

I found a delicate little woman of thirty, perhaps, neat, modest, cheerful and ladylike. She made no promises, but said, “I’ll come and try;” so I engaged her at three dollars a week, to take charge of the kitchen department. She came, and with her coming peace fell upon our perturbed family … alas, my little S. did go, because she only came for the summer and preferred the city in winter.

Cheered by my first success, I tried again, and found no lack of excellent American women longing for a home and eager to accept the rights, not privileges, which I offered them. … . These women long for homes, are well fitted for these cares, love children, are glad to help busy mothers and lighten domestic burdens, if, with their small wages, they receive respect, sympathy and the kindness that is genuine, not patronizing or forced. Let them feel that they confer a favor in living with you, that you are equals, and that the fact of a few dollars a week does not build up a wall between two women who need each other.

Alcott says that the Irish are a “race” of “incapables.” She does not say why. She is counting on her readers to be aware of the stereotype that the Irish are short-tempered, violent drunks. An image published in the humor magazine Puck can serve as an illustration of Alcott’s unspecified experiences with Biddy. (See figure 6.14.) Alcott says that the desirable qualities of an employee cannot be found among the Irish. Her ideal employee is “neat, modest, cheerful and ladylike.” Presumably, Biddy was the opposite of each of those qualifications. (Incidentally, “Biddy” was probably not her name. It was a generic nickname applied to all Irish women by members of the dominant culture, and therefore functioned like a racial slur.)

Alcott’s further message is that the secret to good help is a social relationship in which the employee will “receive respect, sympathy and the kindness that is genuine, not patronizing or forced. Let them feel that they confer a favor in living with you, that you are equals.” Alcott is saying that “American” women have a “right” to be treated as equals. By implication, this was impossible with her Irish cook and, by extension, other Irish women. From Alcott’s perspective, the Irish are racially inferior, and cannot and should not be treated as equals. The social relationship that is needed in the household cannot be extended to Irish help. Therefore, “No Irish need apply.” Other than its authorship by Alcott, this anti-Irish essay is unremarkable. It is simply one of many 19th-century content appropriations portraying the Irish as racially unfit for assimilation into White America.

These standardized, negative stereotypes of Irish immigrants originated in England Their appropriation by Americans shows that 19th-century thinking about race does not match its current social construction. However, the idea that the Irish were a distinct racial group and “not quite” White gradually faded, giving way to the idea that the Irish are fully White and merely ethnically distinct (Heinz 2013). Americans have not been consistent about who is, and who is not, welcome in the dominant culture.

6.7. Copycat Appropriation: Sherrie Levine

Until this point, cultural appropriation has almost always been framed in terms of the dominant culture’s appropriations from non-dominant cultures that have a distinct ethnic or ancestral identity. However, subcultures can also form and carry forward without reference to shared ancestry. We speak of the culture of medicine, the culture of science, and the culture of academia. Medical doctors, research scientists, and university professors have traditionally been members of the country’s dominant culture. Nonetheless, each of those fields has established values and practices that are handed down between generations and which conflict, in many ways, with the values and practices of the dominant culture. This is particularly the case given the strong strain of anti-intellectualism in the dominant culture (Hofstadter 1963). However, because these subcultures have high status in American society, they are not oppressed groups.

Creative artists, writers, and musicians can also be viewed as loosely organized into distinct subcultures. However, at least since the importation of “the Bohemian” artistic lifestyle from France in the mid-1800s, these groups have generally been regarded as out of step with the dominant culture. (See figure 6.15.) As a subculture, the artistic underclass has been seen as rebellious, subversive, and anti-establishment. As such, they are socially constructed as one or more distinct non-dominant or subordinate cultures. This distinctive cultural zone is often called “the artworld” (Danto 1964).

In many contexts, women function as members of a non-dominant culture. This is true even in the case of women who otherwise belong to the dominant culture. To be clear, women are here understood in relation to gender. As a social construct, gender operates much like race. Collectively, society distinguishes between social roles that are permitted and prohibited to members of these groups, and negative consequences — up to and including violence — are used to enforce conformity. This pattern of discriminatory treatment is then justified by appeal to shared “natural” or biological characteristics that are not actually aligned with inherent tendencies and behavioral traits. As with race, gender expectations are developed, codified, and circulated in numerous cultural products, and in both fine art and popular art.

For example, the United States has operated with the social norm that adults will marry and establish their own self-supporting homes. From a global and historical perspective, this expectation is culturally unusual. It was a relatively unique pattern of family life that developed in the Protestant culture of northwest Europe. Protestant immigrants from that region established it as an element of the dominant culture of  the colonies that became the United States (Smith 1993). On this model of family life, the man is “head” of an independent “nuclear” family, and he is the “breadwinner.” The wife is expected to bear children and to devote herself to the role of “homemaker.” The husband is the decision-maker and the wife is expected to obey those decisions.

As in many examples previously discussed, these cultural norms are frequently communicated through the repetition of stereotypes that convey subtle messages. Consider the domestic scene of “Old Age,” the fourth in the Seasons of Life set of prints mass-produced in the 19th century. (See figure 6.16.) This scene is an idealization. At the time the picture was created, the United States was experiencing high rates of widowhood and abandonment of wives. In the South, the rate of widowhood was about 1 in 3 for White women who had married (Hacker, Hilde, Jones 2010). In the image, a sled is visible through the window, so the setting is not the South. An elderly couple sits by the fire. The husband holds a newspaper, showing his ongoing connection with the world outside the house even after he has, presumably, retired. His wife is knitting. A young girl — a granddaughter, no doubt — is positioned so as to literally look up to the male figure. His attention and approval are prioritized. He is the head of the house, while his wife has no rest from chores to maintain the household.

One of the social roles that has long been denied to women is that of creative artist. Once the dominant culture’s expectation that women remain at home met up with the 19th-century idea of the artist as a footloose-and-fancy-free Bohemian, the category of “woman artist” counted few examples. Linda Nochlin, an art historian, documented the social barriers to women’s participation in the modern artworld in the essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (Nochlin 1971). She answered the question in her title by observing that there cannot be “great” women artists — ones with the status of Leonardo da Vinci, Vincent Van Gogh, and Pablo Picasso — in a culture that won’t allow women to devote their lives to full-time pursuit of art.

Things improved during the 20th century in one way. The number of women artists is now roughly equal to the number of men (National Endowment for the Arts 2019). However, their earnings and employment status are not at the same level. Within the artworld, women face more barriers than men. In the 1980s, a group of American women artists working collectively as the Guerilla Girls made it their mission to highlight these barriers for women artists. For example, they created posters that shamed The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.  They pointed out that the museum ignored living women artists. When purchasing art by recent and living artists, 95% of the purchases were of male artists (Freeland 84-85). Things have not improved since then. Museums and collectors simply do not purchase art by women at the same rate that they purchase art by men, and when they do, they pay far less. A recent study found that when we exclude the cost of the most expensive art by male artists, such as paintings by da Vinci, art by living women artists sells for about 60% of what men receive (Elsesser 2022).

With this cultural background in mind, it is not surprising that women artists have used art appropriation to criticize the artworld itself. One of the most interesting examples is the photography of Sherrie Levine, who uses content appropriation to call attention to the cultural barriers that hold back women artists. Levine did not invent the technique she uses. However, her version of it is so blatant and obvious that it serves as a model for thinking about appropriation as a powerful tool for artists with non-dominant identities.

The technique used by Levine is the mirror opposite of exoticism. It involves the appropriation of familiar content from the dominant culture by someone who is a member of a non-dominant group. In this way, it reverses the power dynamic that occurs in most cultural appropriation. This appropriation from the dominant culture is carried out with the full expectation that the audience will know that it is a reverse form of cultural appropriation. As such, it is a tactic for challenging norms and values endorsed by the dominant culture.

In Levine’s case, the appropriation is direct and minimally transformative. She used photography to stage content appropriation from a male artist in a way that challenges viewers to think about her position as a woman in a male-dominated artworld. The best-known examples of her work are the photos exhibited in 1981 in the series After Walker Evans (see figure 6.17.) Evans was hired by the Farm Security Administration, a department of the U.S. government, in the 1930s. He was one of many artists hired to document ordinary Americans, especially those who were struggling due to the economic troubles of the Great Depression. Because these were works commissioned by the Federal Government, the Library of Congress makes some of them available without copyright restriction under the fair use doctrine. Levine used a book of Evans’ photos and photographed his photos. She then displayed a set of these as her own work. Although they looked almost identical, she was exhibiting her photographs, not his. (Her work is protected by copyright, and therefore a new original digital photograph is shown in the right panel instead of one of hers.)

Levine’s point in making such  direct copies of another artist’s work is to call attention to the social construction of art in modern life. That is, it calls attention to the way that social institutions create a category of “artist” along with associated rules about what counts as art and who gets to be an artist — and who does not. In this way, it also calls attention to the social determination that Evans was male and Levine is female.

Faced with such a direct and blatant content appropriation, the viewer is also invited to confront the issue of why U.S. law treats the two photographs differently. Why is one his, and the other hers? This question leads to the bigger issue. What does it mean to put an artist’s name on a work? What are the social implications? One of the implications is that we live in a society where a man’s name is worth more than a woman’s name. Against the claim that Evans was doing something original in making art, but Levine was not, it is important to notice that the Evans photograph is already an act of cultural appropriation, bordering on exoticism, in showing struggling Southern farmers. To a certain extent, Levine is simply doing what Evans did. (Notice the parallel here to Bret Harte’s juxtaposition of Bill Nye and Ah Sin.) The point of Levine’s appropriation is that there is a difference, but it is not visual. It is a difference rooted in, and addressing, the overlapping norms of gender, money, and social recognition in Western culture.

6.8. Music Performance: Nina Simone and Jimi Hendrix

Sherrie Levine was not the first artist to launch a protest by appropriating content from the dominant culture. The technique has been used countless times by others, and it is often used in cases that the dominant culture classifies as mere entertainment. The primary value of focusing on Levine is that the After Walker Evans series is minimally transformative. The important differences are not visible. They arise from the invisible social constructions that distinguish art from the rest of life. In this way, Levine’s work showcases her “outsider” status: she relies on audience awareness of her non-dominant cultural position. Audience awareness of her status is what allows her to use cultural appropriation to challenge the dominant culture.

With this in mind, this section examines a pair of similar examples, but ones involving music rather than visual copying. In the case of music, content can be strictly musical content, that is, the music apart from any words. With many well-known songs, listeners can recognize what it is in less than one second, even before any words are sung. If someone of one culture performs music created in another, it is automatically cultural appropriation of content. At the very least, it involves appropriation of the musical content. If there are words but those words do not signal that the song comes from a different culture, the appropriation can be content appropriation without being voice appropriation. The American song “Happy Birthday to You” is sung by people in many distinct cultures, but these appropriations are not likely to be categorized as voice appropriation. People are using content to give voice to their own celebration.

In cases where there are no obvious signs of voice appropriation, a song appropriation by a performer who belongs to a non-dominant group can function very much like Levine’s After Walker Evans series. It can make a political statement simply by being re-authored from a different cultural position. We can find a number of examples of this during the 1960s, when Black Americans used both political and media tools to campaign for the ending of segregation and exclusion. Performances by Nina Simone and Jimi Hendrix provide two clear examples of this kind of musical content appropriation.

Nina Simone was the stage name of Eunice Wayman, a Black pianist and singer who mixed together jazz, classical, blues, and mainstream popular music. As Daphne Brooks explains, “she forged her own form of musical integration and performative agitation … and [challenged] cultural expectations of where black women can and should articulate their voices” (Brooks 2011, p. 179). For example, during a 1964 concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall that was released as the recording In Concert , Simone performed the song “Pirate Jenny.” The song originated in a German stage musical of 1928, The Threepenny Opera , with music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Bertolt Brecht. Their musical was itself a cultural appropriation of an English musical, The Beggar’s Opera, and therefore the story is set in London. However, German audiences certainly understood The Threepenny Opera as a portrait and celebration the underclass of Berlin that was meant to challenge the expectations and hypocrisy of the middle and upper classes of German society. “Pirate Jenny” is a song of revenge. Jenny is an abused, underpaid maid. She sings a fantasy of revenge in which she reveals that she secretly commands a pirate ship that will soon arrive, and the pirates will slaughter everyone she dislikes in the hotel.

It might be thought that an American performance of this song is both voice appropriation and content appropriation. After all, Simone is representing someone else’s voice. However, that voice is a fictional character, Jenny, and there is no voice appropriation as normally understood. There is nothing in the song that ties it to its originating place and time, Germany of the 1920s. The key cultural references — a hotel maid and pirates — are not alien to Simone’s own social background and cultural heritage. There were, after all, female pirates. (See figure 6.18.) Simone was born and raised in North Carolina, and piracy was part of the history of North Carolina, producing one of history’s most famous pirates, Blackbeard. Many slaves and escaped slaves were among known pirates, and there is even a legendary woman pirate from Haiti, Jacquotte Delahaye, reputedly born of a French father and Black Haitian mother. However, aside from all that, the voice represented in a performance of “Pirate Jenny” is simply that of a maid engaged in daydreaming, and anyone who knows a small amount of history might daydream of pirates. There is nothing in the song that is foreign to anything in Simone’s life, and so there is no basis for treating her performance as voice appropriation.

Like Levine’s photographs, the impact of the appropriation depends on audience understanding of who appropriates from whom. In Simone’s case, many in her Carnegie Hall audience may have seen The Threepenny Opera a few years before during its lengthy off-Broadway run in New York. In this way, her performance of “Pirate Jenny” offered a richer experience for those who understood that something created by someone in a more privileged position was being used as political and social protest by someone in a less privileged position. However, for listeners who do not know that “Pirate Jenny” was from a famous play co-written by a German poet and a German musician, one could listen to a recording of the performance and think that Simone composed and performed a song that she wrote herself. It would still have a powerful political impact.

Other than to sing that the hotel is in a “crummy Southern town,” Simone sticks to the lyrics as translated into English for American stage performances. However, coming from Simone,  Jenny is assigned a racialized identity. Simone is presenting the character of a Black maid who is fed up with segregation and her mistreatment. The pirates arrive and round up everyone in the hotel, and she gets her revenge:

And they’re chainin’ up people And they’re bringin’ them to me Askin’ me “Kill them now, or later?” I’ll say, “Right now, right now!” Then they pile up the bodies And I’ll say “That’ll learn ya!”

In The Threepenny Opera , the song is about class conflict. Sung by Simone, class conflict is still there, but now it is clearly connected to both feminism and racial conflict. Her performance announces that being a Black woman in the United States places one in a non-dominant group within a non-dominant group. One music critic describes the performance as “ astonishing … It is a theatrical piece that she sings as if she means every word, her vocal dripping with venomous relish as it delivers its saga of murderous revenge: listening to it feels like being pinned to a wall” (Petridis 2023). Fifty years before the founding of the Black Lives Matter movement, Simone used cultural appropriation to highlight multiple issues that motivated that movement. She was also suggesting that rage is a justified response to American racism.

In a more famous example of musical content appropriation, Jimi Hendrix engaged in a complex cultural appropriation as part of his performance at the Woodstock Festival on August 18, 1969. The 3-day festival was one of the first large, multi-day outdoor festivals presenting popular music, and it drew an audience estimated at more than 400,000. The music performances were filmed, leading to a documentary film, Woodstock (1970). The film won an Academy Award (“Oscar”) and has been seen by many millions of people. The festival itself had been a financial disaster, but the film was one of the most profitable movies of its era.

There is general agreement that Hendrix was one of the festival’s highlights. (See figure 6.19.) He was the last musician to play, and much of the audience had departed, heading home. (The festival ran longer than planned. It had been scheduled to end the night before he played.) Rather than focus on one of his hit songs or originals, the filmmakers showcased his bold act of content appropriation. Playing electric guitar, Hendrix performed a solo instrumental version of the American national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner.” (See Chapter 4, Section 4.2.) The performance is readily recognizable as the anthem despite Hendrix’s use of distortion, bent notes, and introduction of other music alongside the familiar melody. This additional music introduces references to warfare and the military. At one point he uses the guitar to make sounds that mimic screaming, and at another point he makes it sound like machine gun fire. Just after the point where the lyric says “bombs bursting in air,” he disrupts the musical flow to create the sound of bomb explosions with his guitar.

Toward the end of the performance, Hendrix introduces the opening notes of “Taps,” the military bugle call that signals the end of the day. It is frequently played at military funerals and memorial services in a metaphorical announcement that “Day is done … All is well, safely rest” (to quote the unofficial words associated with the bugle call). Hendrix is clearly calling attention to the military casualties in Vietnam. In the summer of 1969, roughly 250 young American men were dying there each week.

It was clear to everyone who heard it that Hendrix was using the anthem to call attention to the ongoing American involvement in Viet Nam. The military draft was highly unpopular with the age group that attended the Woodstock Festival. The United States had recently expanded the war from Viet Nam to neighboring Cambodia with bombings that violated international law. A few weeks after Woodstock, an estimated 15 million Americans participated in a coordinated national protest in which they skipped work and school to march in public against the war. The war was one of the major political issues of the time, and by playing the militaristic anthem and injecting it with a commentary of sound effects, Hendrix was understood by everyone to be using the national anthem to make a statement against current national policies.

Reflecting on this performance 50 years after it happened, Paul Grimstad remarks, “What Hendrix did with ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock, in August of 1969, was … among other things, an act of protest whose power and convincingness were inseparable from its identity as a fiercely nonconformist act of individual expression” (Grimstad 2021). However, expression takes place in a social context. In the same way that Levine’s After Walker Evans series offers a critical perspective framed by the broader feminist movement, Hendrix and Simone offered a critical perspective framed by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Their performances were not simply individual expression. They were Black protest.  Mark Clague, a music professor who specializes in the history of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” stresses this point about Hendrix’s performance: “He’s an African American, mixed-race artist who came from a traditional black rhythm and blues background,” says Clague. “At the time, the civil rights movement was playing out. People had just lived through the race riots of the ’60s and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. … So, you have a sort of reverence and revolution at the same time. His performance is both a protest and a fireworks display” (Hawkins 2019). Seen in this way, Hendrix was staging a very public, popular-culture appropriation from the dominant culture. He was simultaneously restating and questioning the anthem from a non-dominant social position.

The Hendrix performance is an example of dialogism, a communication strategy identified and named by Mikhail Bakhtin. Dialogism occurs when a communication creates a dialogue between distinct points of view by inserting two or more perspectives into the same communication or artwork (Bakhtin 1981). Dialogism is slightly different from the cultural interplay found in Noble’s painting of Margaret Garner. All of the cultural components of Noble’s image are advancing the point that the United States should support Reconstruction and live up to its ideal of liberty for all. In contrast, Bakhtin called attention to dialogism as a communication strategy in which distinct perspectives are presented alongside each other. They are not integrated, but remain at odds with one another. Dialogism is therefore a useful tool for highlighting conflicts between the dominant culture and other perspectives.

As such, dialogic mixing of appropriated content is an especially powerful technique for showcasing the voices of non-dominant groups and marginalized people. Most art, literature, and music created by members of a dominant culture will be monologic. That is, most of it will uncritically support the interests of the dominant culture. This point was raised earlier in this chapter in relation to exoticism (see Section 6.2). Exoticism seems to document a different culture, but it actually showcases the values and prejudices of the dominant culture. However, when dialogism interweaves content of the dominant culture with a second, conflicting “voice,” there is an opportunity to address the dominant culture from a perspective that is normally suppressed. This kind of dialogism is precisely what happened whenever Hendrix performed “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Basically, he staged a critical interrogation of the material appropriated from the dominant culture. Looking at Levine’s After Walker Evans series and Simone’s performance of “Pirate Jenny,” those works can be understood as using dialogism to inject a feminist voice into the artworld. The dialogism of the Hendrix performance is probably more obvious, presenting a clear contrast between the familiar melody and Hendrix’s alterations and additions.

Hendrix himself was not open about his intentions in playing — and playing with — the anthem. A few weeks after Woodstock, he was interviewed by popular television talk-show host Dick Cavett, who asked him about it.

Cavett: “when you mention the national anthem and talk about playing it in any unorthodox way, you immediately get a guaranteed percentage of hate mail from people …”

Hendrix: “That’s not unorthodox. That’s not unorthodox.”

Cavett: “It isn’t unorthodox?”

Hendrix: “No, no, I thought it was beautiful.” (exchange quoted in Moores 2019)

On the other hand, when he played the anthem in Los Angeles earlier in 1969, he introduced it by telling the audience that he was going to perform “a song that we was all brainwashed with” (Clague 2022, p. 215). Clearly, Hendrix meant his performances to be understood as a content appropriation from the dominant culture and a response to dominant norms and values.

6.9. Two Popular Songs from Tin Pan Alley

Pushing back in time, we can find other, similar appropriations. “Yes! We Have No Bananas” and “How ‘Ya Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm” were two very popular songs from Tin Pan Alley, the knickname for the New York City music publishing industry. Both songs were appropriated — although in rather different ways — by popular performers from non-dominant groups. In each case, the content appropriation created an opportunity for dialogic response in the period immediately after the World War I.

First, we will examine an intervention into the debate about whether to adopt “The Star-Spangled Banner” as the national anthem. Aware of the racism of its lyrics and the fact that pro-segregation forces were backing it, comedian Will Rogers argued that an alternative should be selected.

Rogers was one of the most popular entertainers in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. (See figure 6.20.) He was known primarily as a radio comedian and author who specialized in political humor. He appeared in 68 films before his untimely death in 1935 in an airplane crash. Born a member of the Cherokee Nation in what was still officially Indian Territory, Rogers worked as a cowboy and then as a rodeo performer. He specialized in rope tricks, some copied from performances by a Mexican performer, Vicente Oropeza (Ware 2015, p. 55).  He then transitioned to being an act in circus shows, touring cowboy exhibitions, and theater shows in which he combined his rope tricks with joke-telling. Although he wore a stereotypical cowboy outfit, he started his career with a stage name that identified his roots: The Cherokee Kid. After Oklahoma became a state, he capitalized on it by rebranding himself as “The Oklahoma Cowboy.” As a result, it is likely that much of his audience did not know of his ethnic identity. At the same time, this background was publicized — for example, stories about it were published when he donated to Cherokee charities — and anyone familiar with the Cherokee Nation could recognize that Rogers’ storytelling style and speech patterns were firmly rooted in that community (Ware 2015, p. 184).

Most of Rogers’ humor was highly topical, focusing on recent news stories. In a collection of essays published in 1924, Rogers discussed one of the most popular songs of the time, “Yes! We Have No Bananas.” The song itself is a piece of voice appropriation. Written by Frank Silver and Irving Cohn in 1923, its title appears to have been taken directly from the words of a Greek immigrant fruit vendor from whom Cohn bought fruit (Wichmann 2022). There was a banana shortage at the time due to crop failures in Central America, and the vendor is portrayed as trying to sell customers everything but bananas. In case anyone was slow to get it, the sheet music was illustrated with an image that made it clear that the song carried a hint of exoticism. (See figure 6.21.) The fruit vendor is presented as a Mediterranean immigrant, but not specifically Greek. The same artist drew a very similar figure to illustrate a song that was directly identified as Italian-themed.

Enter Will Rogers. By over-praising it, he pokes fun at the dominant culture’s embrace of voice appropriation. By directly quoting it, he engages in content appropriation from the dominant culture. By mixing together two voices — the voice of the song’s character, and his own  — his essay is a clear case of dialogism. He enters (but does not mention) the then-current debate about adopting the “Star-Spangled Banner” as the national anthem, proposing that a song written at the level of “Yes! We Have No Bananas” should be selected. Instead of naming it, he references the “Star-Spangled Banner” indirectly, as a militaristic song that is associated with the dominant culture’s patriotic priorities in the War of 1812, the Civil War, and World War I.

Excerpt from Will Rogers, “The Greatest Document in American Literature”

The subject for this brainy editorial is resolved that, “Is the Song ‘Yes! We Have no Bananas’ the greatest or the worst Song that America ever had?”

I have read quite a Iot in the papers about the degeneration of America by falling for a thing like it. … I claim that it is the greatest document that has been penned in the entire History of American Literature. And there is only one way to account for its popularity, and that is how you account for anything’s popularity, and that is because it has merit. Real down to earth merit, more than anything written in the last decade. The world was just hungry for something good and when this genius come along and got right down and wrote on a subject that every human being is familiar with, and that was vegetables, bologna, eggs and bananas. Why, he simply hit us where we live. …  You see, we had been eating these things all our lives but no one had ever thought of paying homage to them in words and harmony.  … If we had had a man like that to write our National Anthem somebody could learn it. It wouldn’t take three wars to learn the words. …

This boy has got the stuff. Get this one and then read all through Shakespeare and see if he ever scrambled up a mess of words like these,

“Try our walnuts and CO-CO- nuts, there ain’t many nuts like they.”

Now just off-hand you would think that it is purely a commercial song with no tinge of sentiment, but don’t you believe it. Read this:

“And you can take home for the WIM-mens, nice juicy per-sim-mons.”

Now that shows thoughtfulness for the fair sex and also excellent judgment in the choice of a delicacy. Then there is rhythm and harmony that would do credit to a Walt Whitman, so I defy you to show me a single song with so much downright merit to it as this has.

You know, it don’t take much to rank a man away up if he is just lucky in coining the right words. Now take for instance Horace Greeley, I think it was, or was it W. G. McAdoo, who said “Go West, young man.”‘ Now that took no original thought at the time it was uttered. There was no other place for a man to go, still it has lived. Now you mean to tell me that a commonplace remark like that has the real backbone of this one:

“Our Grapefruit I’ll bet you, is not going to wet you, we drain them out every day.”

Now which do you think it would take you the longest to think of, that or “Go West, Young Man”? … Now what was original about that? Anyone who had been in one could have told you that, and today he has one of the biggest statues in New York. According to that, what should this banana man get? He should be voted the Poet Lariet of America.

Now mind you, I am not upholding this man because I hold any briefs for the songwriters. I think they are in a class with the After Dinner speakers. They should be like vice used to be in some towns.  They should be segregated of to themselves and not allowed to associate with people at all, and should be made to sing these songs to each other. … But when one does come along and display real talent as this one has proven, I think he should be encouraged. Some man said years ago that he “cared not who fought their countries’ wars as long as he could write their songs.” But of the two our songs have been the most devastating. …

I would rather have been the author of that banana masterpiece than the author of the Constitution of the United States. No one has offered any amendments to it. It’s the only thing ever written in America that we haven’t changed, most of them for the worst.

In suggesting that this song is the best thing in American literature, and, more specifically, better poetry than anything by Walt Whitman, Rogers implies that American literature is basically overrated. Stripped of its overstatement, he may be quite serious about this evaluation. His quick transition from Whitman to Horace Greeley suggests that he is aware of Whitman’s support for the ideology of Manifest Destiny. (See Chapter 4, Section 4.6.) The reference to McAddo then links the two of them to a racist, pro-segregation politician of the time. Furthermore, Rogers was certainly aware that Manifest Destiny was alive and well. The creation of the state of Oklahoma had recently reduced the rights and sovereignty of his people, the Cherokee Nation, and of his homeland, Indian Territory. Greeley was dead, but McAddo and Manifest Destiny were not.

Rogers ridicules Greeley’s famous advice of “Go West, young man” as being less original than a joke about grapefruit. Greeley’s advice is, after all, an expression of the dominant culture’s colonial-settler mentality and their disrespect for America’s Indigenous peoples. So, Greeley offers no original thought. Since Greeley has been honored by society, Rogers reasons, even more honor belongs to the author(s) of “Yes! We Have No Bananas.” Toward the end of the essay, the mangled misspelling of “Poet Lariet” in place of “Poet Laureate” reminds readers of Rogers’ roots as a rope-trick performer. (A lariat is rope with a noose, used to lasso cattle.) By doing so, he alludes to his outsider status within the same “West” that Greeley references, confirming that he is playing upon his outsider stance in suggesting that “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the Constitution, and American literature are not all that they are cracked up to be.

Another popular song of the same era was appropriated by James Reese Europe, who was likely the best-known Black musician in New York in the opening decades of the 20th century. Written and published in 1919, “How Ya Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree)?” was recorded by Reese at the end of World War I when he led a military band drawn from the ranks of a Black infantry unit, the “Harlem Hell Fighters.” The Jim Crow era remained in full force and the U.S. Military was a racially segregated institution. After serving as goodwill ambassadors in France, where their music was in great demand, Europe and his band returned to the United States after the war. They toured the country, packing in crowds at every appearance. (See figure 6.22.) “How Ya Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm” was one of the group’s best-selling recordings.

The opening words of “How Ya Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm” and the illustration of the original sheet music show that the songwriters and music publisher thought of it as a story about White soldiers returning from the war. (See figure 6.23.) The illustration shows a farmer reading a letter. (A haystack is at the left.) By implication, the letter is from his son, who is serving in the military in France. The background image shows soldiers partying in Paris. All of the people in the image are pictured as White people. The farmer is named “Reuben.” In 1919, this was a name most often found in the German-American community.

“How Ya Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree)?”

Lyrics by Sam Lewis and Joe Young

First Verse:

“Reuben, Reuben, I’ve been thinking,” Said his wifey dear. “Now that all is peaceful and calm, The boys will soon be back on the farm.” Mister Reuben started winking and slowly rubbed his chin, He pulled his chair up close to mother, And he asked her with a grin:

Chorus (sung twice after each verse):

“How’ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm, After they’ve seen Paree? How’ya gonna keep ’em away from Broadway, Jazzin’ around and paintin’ the town? How ya gonna keep ’em away from harm? That’s a mystery; They’ll never want to see a rake or plow, And who the deuce can par-ley-vous a cow? How’ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm, After they’ve seen Paree’?

The song is clearly about the war’s end. Their son fought in France and has been spending his military leave time in Paris, “jazzin’ around.” After experiencing one of the most vibrant cities of Europe, how can he return to the life of a farmer? Although the words do not fully foresee the coming decade of The Roaring ‘20s, the song warns that changes are in store.

The reference to jazz makes the lyrics very up-to-date. The first recording by a jazz band had been issued only two years earlier, as a style appropriation by a White group copying the newest Black music. As party music, “jazz” was becoming synonymous with drinking and dancing in nightclubs.

James Reese Europe was an important figure in the ragtime era, and he was attuned to the stylistic changes that were characteristic of the newer music, jazz. Because the Hell Fighters Band remained a military band, Europe could not take the music fully into the realm of jazz. (Yet, notably, the band was often advertised as a jazz band.) Although 21st-century listeners will not hear his arrangement of “How ‘Ya Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm” as particularly jazzy, listeners in 1919 heard its syncopation, contrapuntal lines, and the vocal performance by Noble Sissle as contemporary Black music.

Consequently, Europe’s recording and performances of “How ‘Ya Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm” are content appropriations from the dominant culture by someone whom the culture assigns to a non-dominant group. Europe’s decision to record it and add it to the group’s performances must have been done with the hope that people would understand it in just that way. By jazzing it up, his arrangement enters into the tradition of appropriation that creates dialogism.

The resulting meaning of Europe’s appropriation is not hard to understand. Politicians “sold” America’s entry into World War I to the American public as a crusade for freedom. It was, President Wilson proclaimed, a “war for democracy.” It was a struggle for the rights and liberties of Europeans and Americans as free people (Lentz-Smith 2009, pp. 37-38). Many of the 200,000 Black service men who were sent to France to fight had done agricultural work before the war, just like the people in the song. The important difference was that their lives involved constant harassment and mistreatment through the legal segregation of the Jim Crow era. Sent overseas to fight for freedom and democracy, many Black soldiers experienced a level of freedom and respect that they had not experienced in their own country. Now they were returning home. We have seen Paris, too, the appropriated song announces. How do you expect to keep us down after what we have done for you and what we have seen elsewhere?

Properly understood as Black music presenting a Black perspective, no one can suppose that Europe is engaged in voice appropriation. He is not a Black musician presenting White culture. Instead, he is engaged in a subversive kind of cultural appropriation. He is a Black musician taking words and music already in use in the dominant culture and giving them back with a Black voice, demanding equality and justice for Black America. It sounds like happy entertainment, but it is deadly serious in its messaging.

Will Rogers directly compares “Yes! We Have No Bananas” and the Constitution of the United States and suggests that the Constitution might not be so wonderful. James Reese Europe used “How ‘Ya Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm” to make the same essential point. Rogers introduces dialogism by talking about a song, contrasting one voice with another. Like Simone and Hendrix, Europe engages in dialogism by performing a song.

Appropriation, Racism, and Art: Constructing American Identities Copyright © 2023 by Theodore Gracyk is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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James O. Young: Cultural appropriation and the arts

Blackwell Publishing, 2010, 168 pp, ISBN 978-1-4443-3271-1

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• Published: 25 March 2011
• Volume 35 , pages 233–236, ( 2011 )

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Cultural Appropriation and the Arts , by James O. Young, provides an analytical, comprehensive overview of ethical and aesthetic issues concerning cultural appropriation. In his monograph, Young addresses important culture-related questions such as cultural membership, ownership and responsibilities. Thinking in aesthetic and moral categories, Young aims to identify wrong and acceptable (objectionable vs. non-objectionable) types of cultural appropriation in the sphere of art. He concludes that ‘cultural appropriation is aesthetically successful more often than we are led to believe’ and that ‘cultural appropriation is wrongfully harmful or offensive less often than some people suggest’ (p. 152).

To begin with, a distinction of the different actors involved facilitates a definition of cultural appropriation, which is defined as the usage of items pertaining to a certain culture (insiders) by non-members of that culture (outsiders). Young understands the concept of culture in a very broad sense, as a collection of people with a sufficient number of common cultural traits. His focus is limited to cases of appropriation of culture as a whole, not when only one insider is affected. In a world with overlapping cultures, the challenge lies in identifying who belongs to a specific culture as well as what type of cultural items can be owned commonly and how. Although Young recognises that cultural ownership mostly depends on the legal regime of the particular culture, he examines this question from a philosophical view. Young discusses whether a culture can own items such as style, patterns, design, plots and motifs and whether these items can be freely appropriated. This discussion is, however, not appropriate in the sense that the ownership of property or intellectual property is lawfully restricted to individuals or a group of people, not to a particular culture; a culture cannot own anything.

The focus of the book is on the two main ways in which artists can appropriate culture—tangible (object) appropriation and intangible content and subject appropriation (stories, styles, motifs, design; subject matter). As object appropriation does not involve the production of new works, Young sees it as a kind of theft, while subject appropriation implies that outsiders experience a culture as if they were insiders, but that insiders can simultaneously continue to practice their culture.

Since moral objection against cultural appropriation can be bound to aesthetic premises, Young examines the objectionability of an act of cultural appropriation by an artist by discarding the aesthetic handicap thesis. He rejects the assumption that artistic works based on appropriated content or appropriated subject matter necessarily have aesthetic flaws. Moreover, Young criticises the idea that artists not living within certain cultural borders or possessing respective cultural backgrounds are not able to employ aesthetically successful content and subject matter from a culture that is not their own. Among successful innovation appropriators, Picasso and the Beatles are given as examples of those who re-created insiders’ content in a stylistically distinct and aesthetically successful way different from their own. Young assumes rightly that a successful work does not need to be produced by insiders; rather, it depends on the artist’s experience and familiarity with techniques.

However, besides the observable aesthetical properties of an artwork, the cultural context can also influence its aesthetical value. Influenced by Radford’s (p. 44) authenticity argumentation, Young follows the thesis that ‘the discovery that some painting is a forgery is not accompanied by any discovery of observable aesthetic flaws’. Moreover, the analysis refutes that outsiders’ content and subject appropriation results in inauthentic art works by identifying different sorts of authenticity, thus ascribing authenticity to outsiders’ works, as well. Accordingly, there is no reason to believe that outsiders are not able to produce authentic works [‘the best biography is not always autobiography’ (p. 61)]. It should be noted that whether a work of art by an outsider is authentic or not does not affect the aesthetic value at all. Authenticity without aesthetic value is possible as well as is aesthetic failure of authentic works.

After the verification that outsiders’ work can be aesthetically valuable as well, Young turns to the analysis of cultural appropriation as theft. At first sight, this may be surprising since he is interested in content appropriation by artists who produce aesthetically valuable new works of art. Nevertheless, this chapter aims to explore who should be eligible to own cultural property whilst taking different circumstances into account. Young’s main assertion is that styles, motifs and general plots cannot be owned by a certain culture and that they belong to the ‘artistic commons’ (p. 66), to a humanity in which everyone is free to appropriate it. Consequentially, he removes many obstacles from the artists’ content appropriation. While identifying possible grounds on which artworks can belong to a culture, Young points out that some cultures regulate the ownership of their property by laws or traditional practices. As this can be unjust, other factors must be considered when identifying the basis for ownership. At this stage, his analysis reaches a crucial point as he arrives at the cultural significance principle, which he himself developed. This could be of help when other ownership-related principles (preservation, access, integrity and proprietary principles) are in conflict with each other as well. The value-providing effect of a cultural item is the basis for the claim for property. In a cultural context, the value of an item can be anchored in aesthetic value, historical importance, ceremonial or religious significance, or other value to the members, who can then stake a claim to the item. Young asserts that ‘with care and attention, it will be possible to determine how much value something has for a culture’ (p. 93). Unfortunately, the matter is left open and no suggestions are made on how to assess cultural value. The cultural significance principle is also only related to tangible works due to Young’s belief that nobody can own less than a complete expression of an artistic item.

After analysing the possibility of owning cultural items and thus the possibility of culture-harming theft by object appropriation, Young identifies other wrongful acts with the potential to harm or profoundly offend a culture from a moral perspective. Among other things, the discussion of subject and content appropriation that leads to a misrepresentation of a certain culture takes central stage. This can result in discrimination thereafter, for instance, restricting economic opportunities of insiders. In his view, it is unlikely that a few incompetent artists are able to damage a culture. Although accurate representation can be morally wrong, Young suggests that the outsider’s perspective on certain issues can also be helpful. Again, aiming to defend the acts of cultural appropriation by artists, Young therefore assumes that subject appropriation does not wrongfully take an audience from insiders, since public audiences do not ‘belong’ to anyone. Acts of outsiders rather increase the opportunities for insiders: they open the market for products, so that the insider’s culture is not harmed due to a non-fixed demand for artworks. Further, cultural appropriation against the assimilation threat is defended. Convincingly, Young concludes that ‘cultural appropriation endangers a culture, not when others borrow from it, but when its members borrow too extensively from others’ (p. 153).

His assumption that insiders have the ‘primary responsibility’ (p. 120) to keep their culture alive is comprehensible. Although Young rightly points to instruments available that ‘ensure that their cultures are protected’ (p. 120) from appropriation, this is only partially valid, as, depending on a culture’s legal regime, not every culture is able to avoid damage by copied artwork. Another important issue that Young discusses is the simple use of aboriginal arts and crafts by non-aboriginals. These can be profoundly offensive if the products contain a special sacred or cultural significance. Young’s position is that not all acts of cultural appropriation that cause profound offence are immoral. In many instances, the prima facie case can be overcome. Likewise, an artwork can be expected to have a degree of social value that can counterbalance the offence felt by the members of a culture from which something has been appropriated. Moreover, freedom of expression tends to increase social value, and as long as the appropriation of sacred designs and subjects is part of realising artistic expression, it is not wrong.

All in all, Young claims that some content and subject appropriation can be a sort of assault, the moral nature of which is highly questionable. But most cultural appropriation neither interferes with the interests of individual members of cultures nor damages cultures, if appropriate requirements regarding time and place of cultural appropriation are respected. The suggestion is to be ‘as respectful as possible’, to avoid ‘unnecessary offence’ and ‘to be sensitive to the plight of minority cultures’ (p. 141).

Capturing the problematic relationship of culture and cultural appropriation in the modern world, where cultural claims are in the centre of many international debates, is a challenging task. Besides successfully defining cultural concepts as closely as possible, this book distinguishes itself by arguing in favour of removing the majority of obstacles to innovation and the creation of new works, as they are counterproductive. I am sceptical, however, of whether these culture-related questions can be solved without considering the precise legal circumstances of particular cultures; Young himself has highlighted the legal ‘morality’ of judgments several times.

Another concern worth mentioning is that in most of the cases, Young does not discuss the possible consequences of artists themselves seeking protection via intellectual property rights. It would be naive to assume that artists have no pecuniary incentives. Overall, the balance between the interests and values of insiders and outsiders is not sufficiently recognised. Young’s emphasis on the freedom of expression at the expense of cultural significance theory can at least be called controversial, mostly because the social value of the new creation cannot be clearly measured. Unfortunately, Young provides no suggestions regarding possible alternatives.

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Bicskei, M. James O. Young: Cultural appropriation and the arts. J Cult Econ 35 , 233–236 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-011-9137-3

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