Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 9 Number 3, December 2008

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James O. Young. Cultural Appropriation and the Arts. Blackwell Publishing, 2008.

ISBN 9781405176569. $69.95 (hc). 

Reviewed by

Miriam Jordan and Julian Jason Haladyn

University of Western Ontario

“This essay is bound to be controversial,” James O. Young begins the preface of Cultural Appropriation and the Arts (ix). Although appropriation is a common strategy within most cultures, and has become a particularly potent mode of contemporary artistic practice, the act of taking something from a culture that is not one’s own and (re)using it as material for producing something else for one’s culture is, at its base, a highly political act. This can be seen even with seemingly innocuous appropriations; the borrowing of a patterned scarf, an item potentially replete with cultural and/or religious signification, can be perceived as offensive if the significance of the object is ignored or treated as meaningless. This is the basic problematic of appropriation: the decontextualization of objects that are typically stripped of their cultural, religious, and/or political meaning and re-inscribed with new purpose and meaning by the appropriating culture. Acts of appropriation are even more politically charged when “individuals from rich and powerful majority cultures…appropriate from disadvantaged indigenous and minority cultures” (ix). Yet, as Young unequivocally states: “I am sympathetic to the members of these cultures, but the source of most of their grievances is not cultural appropriation” (153).

Young’s primary objective in his book is to investigate the “ethical and aesthetic issues that arise when appropriation occurs in the context of the arts” (1-2). Yet, the controversial nature of appropriation – ethical, aesthetic, political, or otherwise – appears to be avoided at all cost within this study. From the outset, Young carefully delineates the parameters of his investigation and provides (multi-layered) definitions of the key terms “culture,” “appropriation,” and “art.” His definitions are problematic in that he relies solely upon Western definitions – primarily the Oxford English Dictionary – to define these terms and in doing so elides non-Western definitions of these concepts that would provide a rich and culturally diverse framework for examining cultural appropriation. In terms of cultural appropriation, he notes five varieties. The first is object appropriation, which “occurs when the possession of a tangible work of art…is transferred from members of one culture to members of another culture”; the second is content appropriation, which occurs when “an artist has made significant use of an idea first expressed in the work of an artist from another culture”; the third is style appropriation, which consists of “artists producing works with stylistic elements in common with the works of another culture”; the fourth is motif appropriation, which “is related to style appropriation but only basic motifs are appropriated”; the fifth is subject appropriation, in which “artists appropriate a subject matter, namely another culture or some of its members” (5-7). Through this elaborate breakdown, Young attempts to provide a framework for designating and defining the specific elements or aspects being appropriated. In addition, however, this categorization serves to elide many of the more difficult and controversial issues that surround the act of appropriation, particularly in the situation of dominant relations of power and knowledge. It is not enough to acknowledge particular opinions, discourses, or examples without examining in detail the implications that are being addressed. All too often, Young tips his hat to a controversial issue and then proceeds categorically to locate it outside his frame of reference. Even his numerous examples of modern and contemporary artists – such as Pablo Picasso and Sherrie Levine, whose works are notable for their politically motivated acts of appropriation ­­– ironically incite the controversial aspects of appropriation, even though Young does not himself acknowledge it. In other words, Young’s investigation into the ethical and aesthetic issues of appropriation in the arts is hampered by his unwillingness to see the politics at play when an artist appropriates, instead he prefers to focus on “aesthetics” as divorced from ethics.

In avoiding any overtly political or controversial discussion of appropriation in contemporary art, Young misses a valuable opportunity to examine the ways in which artists use appropriation as a means of addressing inequities that exist in contemporary culture. Given the literature focusing on this topic, which Young outlines in a series of four brief footnotes on page 2, there is an insufficient effort to discuss or take advantage of the texts he mentions, as well as the multitude of politically charged discussions that are instrumental to a proper understanding of appropriation and cultural exchange. For example, Homi K. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture discusses the myth of cultural purity and the manner in which all cultures take and exchange cultural material; this discussion could have greatly improved Young’s stance in terms of inequities of power and knowledge in relation to the inevitable cultural exchange and appropriation that occurs when all cultures come into contact. Even in his sole reference to Edward Said, Young fundamentally neglects to acknowledge the politics of Said’s project or the importance of the relationship between appropriation and colonial domination. As Young notes: “Said recognizes that artists from a given culture can have presuppositions and prejudices when they represent other cultures” (58). However, he goes on to speculate that the authors that Said discusses “would have been even greater had they not suffered from certain forms of cultural myopia” (58). Within this single paragraph we see a transition from a discussion of prejudice exhibited by outsiders, specifically colonizing prejudices towards colonized others, to a discussion of the greatness of these (prejudiced) authors. Although Young should be credited for referencing Said, the intensely political writer is put to the service of justifying what he spent a lifetime fighting. The act of taking from another culture must be an informed and responsible act, one that does not misrepresent a culture or elide the violence that is apparent in a number of forms of appropriation, most notably within ongoing situations of cultural dominance. While Young does acknowledge the dangers and harm caused by cultural appropriation, he does so through generalities that he plays down by repeatedly noting that this is not the focus of his study. But our question is, after removing all the contentious elements of appropriation, what is left to discuss? If cultural appropriation is, as Young states at the beginning of his preface, “often defensible on both aesthetic and moral grounds,” then why do people who have had their culture appropriated continually take offence (ix)?

If “cultural appropriation is wrongfully harmful or offensive less often than some people suggest” – the specific people who suggest this not being mentioned – then it is crucial for Young to clearly define what is so “unobjectionable” (152). In fact, he spends a good portion of his book attempting to frame an argument of cultural appropriation as “unobjectionable,” which ultimately and inevitably excludes all of the controversial aspects of his topic. For this reason he accomplishes his goal but fails to address the power of appropriation and its relationship to the arts. In our opinion, this book would have been a greater achievement and a more valuable contribution to the literature on appropriation if Young had not suffered from cultural myopia and focused so intently on excluding or belittling the cultural damage caused by appropriation. This review is bound to be controversial for the simple fact that we believe cultural appropriation is the source of grievances for any culture suffering from misrepresentation through the use and/or misuse of their cultural material, a grievance that is the primary motivation of many contemporary artists (such as Sherrie Levine) whose practices hinge on appropriation. However much Cultural Appropriation and the Arts strives to be ethical in its treatment of this controversial topic, ultimately this study is irresponsible in its attempt to justify appropriation as “unobjectionable” on the grounds that the ends, artworks of great “aesthetic value,” justify the means.