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(subtitle: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era)

I looked for this after reading The Black Dancing Body, since I do lindy and wanted to know more about the history of lindy hop, particularly how cultural appropriation, cultural theft and racial politics play into it.

This book basically covers the swing era race politics, as you can tell from the handy subtitle. Dixon Gottschild defines the Swing Era as covering 1920-something to 1947; I can't remember the exact dates and I returned the books. She mentioned exactly what events she was using to bookmark it. I think 1947 was the closing of the Savoy Ballroom, and I don't remember the start date. I do know she makes it earlier than most people define the swing era to include the development of swing music in the 1920s. I checked Wikipedia, which has the dates from 1935-1946. Their start date is Benny Goodman's performance in the Palomar Ballroom, which they credit with "bringing the music to the rest of the country."

I think this issue of dates neatly sums up the problems Dixon Gottschild examines; black artists like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong were the ones who pioneered swing music and popularized it in the black community. Black dancers started the lindy hop. Dixon Gottschild makes a point of how the music and the dance reinforced and reinvigorated each other; the dancers would take cues from the band and the band would do the same. And yet, the date that gets pinpointed is the one in which a white artist performs and "introduces" the music to the "rest of the country," ignoring the fact that Ellington and Armstrong and etc. had been touring before him and assuming that "the rest of the country" meant "white people."

And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Dixon Gottschild uses the career of ballroom dancer Margot Webb to illuminate racial politics in the time. Margot Webb and her partner danced waltz and did waltz interpretations. Webb was light enough to pass as white occasionally, though she never did, and her partner was often mistaken to be Spanish (acceptable and Continentally exotic). But because they identified themselves as black, they were paid less, booked less, booked as less popular places, not allowed to stay in hotels next to their bookings, shown off as spectacle, and etc. And because they weren't dancing a "black" dance (like lindy or tap), white people were even less interested in seeing them. "Dancing black" basically meant dancing fast and dancing sexy; the white audience were fine with the white appropriation of black dance, but not the black appropriation/adoption of white dance.

The other side to "dancing black" was that lindy hoppers and tap dancers in particular ended up dancing faster and faster to make it more difficult for white people to steal their moves. So it didn't matter what you danced; either you'd be unappreciated or you'd be appropriated from. Furthermore, when white people did take their moves, the white dancers were able to get better bookings, more pay and more publicity than the original dancers.

And I could go on, and on, and on. Dixon Gottschild talks about the centrality of Harlem to the swing era, the attempts of some black artists to escape racism by going to Europe (and still being the exotic Other there), the psychological cost of passing for black artists who wanted to be able to make more of a living, how black artists were hit worse when the popularity of swing began to die down, and always always always the theft. She mentions integration and the negative effect it had on the black community: while integration's intent was all well and good, because racism didn't disappear, it effectively killed off many black-centered theaters and locales as performers went to white theaters to try to get better pay, and it wasn't like dancers like Webb were getting many more jobs from white places. Instead, she just had to compete with white dancers even more. And did I mention the theft?

I read this slowly because it made me so angry. Pretty much everything you can think of was thrown to prevent black artists from succeeding, and then some; that some did is a testament to their skill and courage and persistence, not proof that the system worked.

I didn't get as much information on lindy hop as I wanted from this book. Lindy hop and swing music framed the era, but Dixon Gottschild looks more closely at Margot Webb's career and uses it as a jumping point to discuss the realities of a touring dancer's life. Not a fault of the book, as Dixon Gottschild covers the big lindy moments and introduces the Savoy and etc., but just a note that I'm still hungry to know more about the history of lindy hop.

Definitely recommended for anyone who wants a concrete example of cultural appropriation and theft in action, though with the caveat that this felt more subject-specific than The Black Dancing Body. I'm not as sure if it'll appeal as much to people who aren't interested in dance or swing music and jazz.

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Description: The panel on cultural appropriation at WisCon last year raised issues that were hotly discussed online, and the panel that this forum follows is likely to do the same. This open forum is meant to give you the chance to explore these issues and how they matter to you. Through passionate discussion we can improve our awareness and find the common understanding that lies beneath our disagreements. The open forum will be facilitated by Alan Bostick, who has been practicing Worldwork since 2003. Worldwork is a process-oriented approach to group facilitation and conflict developed by psychologist Arnold Mindell (author of Sitting in the Fire and The Deep Democracy of Open Forums) and collaborators. Attendees are strongly urged to also attend the immediately preceding panel discussion on cultural appropriation.

Moderator: Alan Bostick

Please see my write up on the first panel for terms and caveats. A further caveat is that I am identifying the race of the speakers here because I think it was very important in the discussion. Please note that I am not advocating racial essentialism, but rather noting that because our society is a racist one, race still matters, much as I wish it didn't. (I think I need to record all my terms and caveats and just replay them every time! Or put them into a separate post so I can just link to it as a shortcut, heh.)

This discussion was very odd. Despite the description, most of the audience for the first part of the panel ended up leaving, so the audience was a) much smaller and b) pretty diferent. Also, as mentioned, this was intended to be a discussion with no panelists. The chairs in the room were rearranged as a circle (or, more accurately, a misshapen ellipse).

Most notably, the racial composition of the room changed dramatically, with maybe 6 or so POC among 20 some people (please correct me on this! I am horrible at estimating numbers in my head), and the lack of POC really affected the discussion.

In general, while the discussion started out with cultural appropriation and covered much of the same Cultural Appropriation 101 territory that the panel did, the discssion largely ended with White Guilt 101. Pretty much everyone in the room tried to be very thoughtful and considerate and non-confrontational, which I very much appreciated, but I got the sense that everyone, POC and non-POC alike, felt extremely uncomfortable and unsafe.

( Cut for length )

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Typing this one up first, since I suspect it's the one people are most eager to read about.

Description: As part of an ongoing discussion of the issue of cultural appropriation, this year's panel will address what is perhaps the most controversial, and certainly the most discussed, aspect of cultural appropriation in fiction: the use or exploitation of cultures across racial, ethnic, or national lines. Writers and activists who concern themselves in their work with issues of dominant and marginal cultures will discuss the use in narrative of markers and artifacts of cultures that are not the authors' own. Should this be done at all? Where do the limits fall? How is it well done and how poorly done? Sponsored by the Carl Brandon Society.

Panelists: Candra Gill (mod), K. Tempest Bradford, M. J. Hardman, Yoon Ha Lee, Nnedi Nkemdili Okorafor-Mbahu, Victor Jason Raymond

The panel description here is very different from the one suggested, for which I am infinitely grateful. Also, Claire Light had organized the panel and was supposed to moderate it, but she unfortnately came down sick and was unable to attend the con.

( Terms and caveats )

Gill explained how Light wanted the panel to be run: the panel would largely consist of the panelists talking and discussing with each other and audience participation would be limited to the very end. By and large, they kept with this, although there were a few audience remarks here and there. This was because there was a whole other programming slot devoted to the discussion afterward that was going to be moderated by someone else.

This panel felt very different from last year's; I think all the people on the panel were POC except possibly MJ Hardman, whose introduction I clearly didn't pay enough attention to. The breakdown was black (CG, KTB, NO-M), Asian (YHL) and Native American (VJR, MJH?). There were also a lot of POC in the audience; the room was full and there were a number of people standing at the back or sitting on the floor in the front.

( More notes )

Wow, this is also really long. I will have to put my reactions to the discussion afterward in another post.

ETA: transcript

ETA2: ktempest's write up

ETA3: Fixed Kublai Khan reference, added link

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This felt very different from my first Wiscon, and a lot of it was because of the Great Cultural Appropriation Debate of DOOM from last year.

Reading last year's post, the most notable things were how out of place and how voiceless I felt. Part of it was because it was my first Wiscon, part of it was because it was the first time I'd met several LJ people in person, part of it was because I don't have the same SF/F reading background that a lot of people do, and part of it was because I was Asian.

This year, I knew the rough format, I was on two panels, and I was meeting several people again. Also, more people who I've hung out with in person went too. But for me, the largest difference was that I was still pissed off from last year and determined not to have that happen again. I admittedly had a bit of a "fuck it all, why not?" attitude; I figured it was going to end up being public here on LJ anyway, and if I was going to start the next big flamewar, I might as well speak up at a few things as well ;). The other really major factor was that I (and several other people I talked to, POC and white) felt that there was a larger percentage of POC at the con.

( Race )

ETA (entire section): ( Otherness )

( Fooding )

( Book loot )

( More awesomeness )

In conclusion: I had tons of fun, my brain only exploded once or twice, I met lots of cool people who I had only seen before online, I ate a lot, and I wish it were next year already! I must remember to submit a panel idea for something on shoujo manga, because I was very sad about only being able to talk manga with a few people.

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I realized that my 2006 in review post didn't really mention the Great Cultural Appropriation Debate of DOOM or International Blog Against Racism Week even as I was writing it. I wasn't sure how to put them into the meme -- how can I claim finally reading up on racism and race as an accomplishment?

I mean, really. I am glad I did it, and I changed a lot because of it. But I don't feel it is an accomplishment because it feels like something I should have known, something I should have figured out a long time ago. And how can I claim IBARW as an achievement or as something I'm proud of when I feel like I am co-opting the voices of those talking about it for so long, except I just never noticed?

I'd like to clarify that I am not ashamed of doing what I did this year in terms of race or of what I said, that I am not saying IBARW wasn't worth it or didn't help. What I'm ashamed of is not that I did these things or posted on these things, but that I was not posting or thinking about these things a long time ago.

I am ashamed that it took so long, and I am ashamed that for a long time, I was a part of the chorus telling people: "It's not that bad" or "You're overreacting" or "Why must you keep talking about being a person of color?"

On a more practical note, a lot of what I wanted to keep doing in terms of blogging on and thinking about and reading up on race and racism ended up in smoke, thanks to real life exploding in my face around the same time IBARW was going on.

I've been rereading some of the old Great Cultural Appropriation Debate and IBARW posts, and -- I was about to say that I am amazed at how angry they still make me. But I am not amazed by that; I am not surprised anymore by how angry this topic continues to make me. And saying that I am amazed by it implies to me that I think I shouldn't be angry, which is still my knee-jerk reaction and has been for years and years, thanks to a general attempt on my end to not be angry (usually good), compounded by years of being told that being angry about race was being oversensitive (sucky beyond measure).

SO I wanted to say: I am still angry. Rereading these posts makes me furious that so much still has to be explained, that so much is still being handwaved away. It makes me want to scream and yell and cry in frustration, only I don't (at least, not in public) because that means I will be dismissed, and I cannot stand that any longer.

Furthermore, rereading these posts still hurts. Not just the normal sting that I feel when I'm argued with (hey, my ego is very large): when I read some of those comments, especially when they are people I know and respect, it still feels like a punch to the gut, half a year after. It is so visceral, this feeling. Every single one of those comments -- and I haven't even reread the comments because I can't, not even now, so it's just a six-month-old memory of the comments -- makes me want to give up and cry, makes me feel so betrayed and alone, makes me wonder if I should only ever broach the issue with people I trust.

I would like for this to be a "I will continue to post more and read more and think more" resolution, except I am not sure if I'll be able to follow up, since I didn't last year. But I wanted to put this in as an addendum to my year, because even though it was only a few weeks worth of drama on LJ, even though I still feel ashamed of having to say that 2006 was when I really started thinking about race and racism, even though I haven't been keeping up with posting and readings for much of the year, these events -- the cultural appropriation panel at Wiscon and the subsequent LJ debate, the Pirates debate, IBARW -- they changed me more than anything else that happened in the last year.

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Or, in which I make myself extremely unpopular and get flamed through the roof.

I am limiting this to America because I live here now and because the majority of people who've been commenting seem to be from there. This isn't because I think America is most important (because I don't), but because I need to limit the scope of this somehow. I apologize to those living elsewhere, and I really want to make a more global post about this later, unless people are absolutely sick of me going on and on and on about this.

1. There has been much discussion of cultural authenticity and the problems of cultural authenticity in the comments of my previous post, yhlee's post, cofax7's post, and rilina's post. I feel conflicted about this -- discussion of cultural authenticity is by necessity related to cultural appropriation, but I am very uneasy as to how it has somewhat usurped the discussion of appropriation. This uneasiness is further cemented by the fact that a lot of discussion of cultural authenticity has to do with minority cultures adopting the dominant culture, or questions along the line of "If I can only write about my own culture/race/ethnicity without cultural appropriation, what can I write about?" And from the comments, it does seem like a majority of the people asking these questions are from European/American descent. I am not finger pointing, I swear. I know that's a horribly passive-aggressive way to say it, but I really don't want to call people out because I think it's unproductive, and because I am reading through all four threads and trying to suss out common themes.
   
   Which leads to...


2. Even if there is no such thing as cultural authenticity, the question of cultural appropriation is still present. Furthermore, I am not saying that you can only write about what culture/race/ethnicity that you belong to. Instead, I am saying that the problems inherent in cultural appropriation exist and will very likely exist for many, many decades to come. Also, the very act of writing about another culture, particularly one in which you are a part of the dominant culture that has a history of subjugating minority cultures, that very act is problematic.
   
   It is even more problematic when you look at means of colonization in the past and how much of colonization involves language and schooling and learning the mythos and culture of the colonizers.
   
   This is not limited to white American and/or European culture (see: Japanese culture with regard to Korean culture), but because white American and/or European culture was so often the colonizer in the past few centuries, I think deflecting the issue back to minority cultures avoids the larger issue.
   
   Does this suck? Yes.
   
   Is this fair? No.
   
   Does this mean you shouldn't write about it? No.
   
   Does this mean you have to think about it? No. Feel free to ignore it if you want.
   
   But even if you think you're writing in a vacuum, your readers are not reading in a vacuum. People read in historical context. I read Naomi Novik's Throne of Jade as a third culture kid with the (slight) knowledge of Qing Dynasty China and what happened to Qing Dynasty China, and even if Novik wrote without that in mind (which I don't think she did), that still doesn't make my reading experience any different.


3. And because rilina says it better than me and because I think it bears repeating many times:
   
   "It's very hard for a minority culture to "coopt" something from a dominant culture. I'm sorry if this doesn't seem fair to dominant culture folks (and I'm not saying it's impossible), but I think this is true. When cultural things flow in that direction, it's usually less appropriation and more assimilation." [emphasis in the original]


4. Unpopular thought about assimilation: I think if you are a hyphenated American or an American of color, claiming American culture as your own is problematic. I wish this weren't so, and I struggled against this in college. But the fact is, if your skin color is different from that of people around you, no matter what you think you are, people will very often treat you differently. They may be well-meaning and be very cautious about the subject of race, or they could just say incredibly stupid things, but the issue of race is always there.
   
   We aren't at the point where things are colorblind, and as such, cultural assimilation is problematic. No, I don't think this is fair, and yes, I think it is limiting, particularly when you don't want to feel different and are made to feel different. But again, sadly, things don't exist in a vacuum.


5. As an addendum to this: no, it isn't fair that minority authors are often corralled into minority fiction and said to write about the minority experience. On the other hand, since so few other people are writing about the minority experience, it's a lose-lose situation. I do think that limiting minority authors to the minority experience is very much like limiting female authors to the female experience, but... BUT! seeing the minority experience as a limiting factor can very much be as denigrating as the whole "OMG women writing about female things, the horror!"


6. Of course, if you look like the dominant culture but aren't from that culture, the issues are very different. But since there is much discussion about hyphenated Americans in the other comment threads, I would very much like to leave it out of this particular post and the comments to this post.


7. And now, look, even this post has become about minorities writing about minorities and not about dominant cultures writing about minorities and the inherent problems therein.
   
   I'm sorry, I'm really angry about this, and like rilina says, I think many of the issues here are like feminist issues, in which all discussions seem to go back to the men and femininsts must continue to argue why feminism is still relevant. I know this is a horribly uncomfortable topic, probably more so than feminism on LJ, because most of the people I know on LJ are female, whereas most of the people I know on LJ are not minorities in terms of skin color.
   
   I am highlighting this not because I want to call out people, but because I think discussion of cultural appropriation keeps skirting around this fact. I am highlighting skin color because despite what I'd like the world to be like, it is still a very important factor and one that can divide people at first glance.


8. In conclusion, no one is ever going to tell you that cultural appropriation is ok or that there is a way for a dominant culture to write about a minority culture without these problems rising up. If they do say that, I'm sorry, they're lying or they're from the far future, in which there is no race disparity, no racism, and all nations are on equal economic, political and cultural standing.
   
   This does not mean you shouldn't write about it. Nor does it mean you should write about it. I mean, I personally wish everyone would write about it, or include minority characters, or do something to change things so that the default of a character is not white male. But in the end, it means that even though you may think you're writing in a vacuum, you aren't, and, more importantly, no one is reading in a vacuum. So no matter how you think you should deal with this issue or disengage from it, writing another Euro-centric fantasy is still contributing to the mass of Euro-centric, non-ethnic fantasies out there, and writing a non-Euro-centric fantasy will by necessity run up against these issues.
   
   I wish there were an easier way, but I don't think there is.

Also, does anyone know about critical theory regarding race like Joanna Russ' How to Suppress Women's Writing?

Ok, um, flame away.

ETA: yhlee responds

ETA 2: Most recent link round up that I know of

Also, I am going to answer comments. I just need time to think and time to stop being overwhelmed.

ETA 3: ladyjax on discourse on race

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Moderator: Nisi Shawl
Panelists: Yoon Ha Lee, Gregory Frost, Judith E. Berman, Ekaterina Sedia, Theresa Carter

Ahhh, cultural appropriation, a topic near and dear to my heart.

Alas, the panel left me wanting to spork something, to co-opt yhlee's words.

This isn't going to be a report on the panel per se, largely because I took no notes. So it will mostly be me reacting.

It's probably extremely flame-worthy to note this, but 4 out of 6 of the panelists were white. I am noting this not because I think race automatically qualifies or disqualifies someone from talking about cultural appropriation, but because the tone of the panel felt very apologetic yet very entitled with regard to cultural appropriation. I will get into this later.

The panel started by saying that this was a topic discussed at WisCon every year. The agreement on what "bad" cultural appropriation was took place early on, with Berman giving the extreme example of scientists patenting the drug gained from the bark of a tree, the knowledge being gained via native tribes in the area. I don't remember if any "good" examples were given, but everyone basically agreed that the writer should be respectful, should research, etc.

I'm speaking of the panel as an entire entity, which is not proper representation. Shawl largely asked questions, Yoon didn't say that much, I disagreed a great deal with Frost, Sedia and Carter, and I thought Berman had very interesting things to say, had it not been a very late hour at night.

I started having problems when panelists began to talk about respecting the culture and having an appropriate level of reverence when writing about it, coupled with issues of gaining permission from the culture and the issue of renumeration, monetary or otherwise.

1. I agree re: respecting a culture, but I wish the panelists had gone deeper into the issue of when reverence crosses into making excuses for a culture (hello, Japanese scholarship!).

2. I have many issues with the thing about gaining permission, not in the least limited to who has this so-called authority, to the assumption that all people from a minority culture are the same and the assumption that there even is such thing as a monolithic culture.

3. I wish more panelists had thought about the idea that they aren't necessarily even representing a culture, just a very specific facet of a culture.

4. The issue of renumeration is extremely iffy with me, particularly with the touchy power dynamics inherent in that.

I think there was a little too much agreement on the panel, and I wish someone had been there to shake things up a little. Also, because so much of the panel seemed to be on how to make the cultural appropriation you are doing into "good" cultural appropriation and not questioning the underlying assumptions inherent in that and power differentials and all that interesting stuff.

Someone mentioned that you only have to worry about this for living cultures and not for dead cultures, which opens another can of worms entirely. I don't think the other panelists disagreed, but I may have missed it in my fuming. Although, it was limited to the mythology, so... I dunno.

Much of the discussion was also limited to co-opting the mythologies of different cultures, and while I do think that is a form of cultural appropriation, rewriting mythologies for some reason feels very different from writing on different cultures. I think this is because I'm of a mind that mythologies exist to be told and retold. Of course, this is simplifying the entire issue, particularly with the existence of bowlderized fairy tales and etc. But many of the issues I have with cultural appropriation lies in the representation or misrepresentation of different cultures.

While I by no means will say that anything gives a writer permission to write about anything, be it aliens, fantasy, or another culture, I had a very large problem with how quickly the panel agreed to this. There was a sense that the writer only had to get permission or to be respectful, and all issues of cultural appropriation would be solved. One panelist seemed to imply that simply getting the permission from an Egyptian family made it so that all facets of Egyptian culture representated in her book were ok.

Several panelists also mentioned that they felt they didn't have a culture -- in later discussion, Mely mentioned that people always seem to forget that "white American" is a culture, but that it just doesn't seem like one because it's the majority culture in this country. The assumption that "white American" isn't a culture is also problematic to me from a global POV. I think that "white American" is sometimes seen as the majority global culture. This is a very iffy statement on about a gazillion levels, obviously, but the prevalence of American popular culture and the very complicated politics and cultural negotiation involved in said prevalence isn't something that can be disregarded.

I asked the panelists about this, and Carter responded with a comment that American pop culture was like the atomic bomb. The panelists quickly retracted this, and I think Frost commented that they weren't creating American pop culture, esp. compared to Mission Impossible III or something like that. I think that was fairly disingenuous. Maybe no one on the panel is responsible for American pop culture, but that does affect how their work is perceived, just from the (unfair) fact that it is written by an American, or someone perceived to be an American. Panelists brought up examples of Bollywood and the manga/anime boom as ways in which American culture wasn't default, but I still don't agree with them. I still think when you go around the world, the general assumption is that stars from American pop culture (music, movies, etc.) will be known, while the stars from other pop cultures generally will not. I'm not saying that this is anyone's fault, but that it is a factor and that it does influence the lens through which people read things.

Also, I wanted people to talk about what happens when you have many people of another ethnicity/culture writing about an ethnicity/culture to an audience of the writer's own ethnicity/culture. I am not arguing for cultural authenticity, largely because I feel it's a sliding scale and nothing is 100% authentic, but I do have a problem with all views of a single culture in a genre coming from another culture. It starts to feel like colonization and the appropriation of language and story and brings up the always thorny issues of voice and representation. I'd like to note that this doesn't mean a story shouldn't be written, but... I just wish the panelists had thought about it more.

I wanted discussion on exoticization and viewing other cultures as "Other" and how to deal with that in writing. I also wanted discussion on how to critique culture in writing, because I think always adopting reverence toward a culture isn't always the answer. Actually, I think many of these issues apply to historical novels as well, of course, sans the tricky issue of colonization and current power differentials. How do you portray someone from a different culture without necessarily sanctioning a worldview? How do you make a character sympathetic without making them a 21-century American?

Someone in the audience of Native American descent ended up making a long comment on how if people weren't asked to help a minority culture, they shouldn't help or write about it. While I understand the sense of outrage and of a culture being used, I don't think making people stop writing about a culture they aren't a part of is helpful, nor does it assist with getting past the whole cultural appropriation issue.

Someone else in the audience said something about Japanese manga borrowing from American culture all the time and equated that to American fiction borrowing from Japanese culture. I had many issues with this, first and foremost being that it isn't the same because of the past history between the countries and again, power differentials with regard to politics and economics and etc.

Mely said later that she doesn't have issues with Japanese appropriating American culture, but she does have issue with the exoticization of blacks in manga, which I agree with. Ditto with the appropriation of Chinese culture (why, oh why, do all Chinese people have to be dressed in Chung Li style clothing in anime and manga?! Grr!).

I could blather on about this for pages and pages more, because this is a topic near and dear to my heart and one that affects me on a day to day basis. Am I authentic? What culture am I? What does it mean when I read and automatically assume that all the characters are white when I'm Asian? How does this affect me? What about when I focus on Asian representation, or when I make the assumption that "Asian" equates "East Asian" (I am trying very hard to break this habit)? Or when I focus on Asian and don't look at other cultures and ethnicities? Or, what does being enamoured of Japanese culture mean to me personally, how does Japan's history with Taiwan and China affect this, and what should I do?

I don't have any answers, only more questions.

yhlee on this panel
gaudior's past post on cultural appropriation
cofax's thoughts
My old post on cultural appropriation

ETA (5/28/07): Chronological link roundup for the Great Cultural Appropriation Debate of DOOM, sparked by this post and the ones linked above.

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As a sort of addendum to the cultural appropriation post, there are some interesting at Salon. Gwenihana and then letters agreeing and disagreeing with the article (you have to watch a little ad to get in).

Read up a little bit on the invention of the Korean alphabet, thanks to yhlee, and it is so incredibly cool! The chapter was going on about how some of the alphabet shapes were formulated to imitate the shape of your mouth and tongue when you voice it, and then other small parts are added on if the sound is harder or softer or has a "y" in it or something more linguistically technical than I can accurately remember. But it makes so much sense! And it's so interesting looking at the similarities between some of the Korean alphabet with Japanese katakana, and ditto with the letter for the mouth shape looking like the Chinese character for "mouth" and the tooth shape looking like part of the Chinese character for "tooth."

And it was so nice that the article had the actual Hangul and the Chinese characters printed out, because I could read what Sejong was saying about the alphabet in literary Chinese! I mean, I only understand a very, very general bit of that, but still, so cool!

I'm forever irked about the simplified Chinese in mainland China, mostly because I find the fact that I can still read much of the inscriptions dating back to the Tang Dynasty (~700 AD) absolutely incredible. Obviously the syntax and the pronunciation has changed somewhat, analogous to something between Chaucerian and Shakesperian English, I would say, but it is just so neat! And also, the way they've gone about simplifying the characters makes no sense whatsoever, imho. For "ho (4)" meaning "after or later," they use the character pronounced the same but used as "empress." And everyone in Taiwan jokes about how they took out the radical for "heart" in the simplified character "love." Heh. I mean, obviously languages aren't static or anything, but... gah. They are just ugly and nonsensical to me. Ah well. Not that I am the grand arbiter of the Chinese language!

Anyhow, yes! I really must try and pick up Korean now, because I can see some of the analogues to Japanese (the object and subject markers, the "to be" marker at the end of many sentences sounding rather like the Japanese "iru/imasu"). And it's just so interesting reading the transcriptions of the pronunciation, because I can sort of see the similarity to the Chinese and the Japanese pronunciation, and I'm sure if I learned more it would fit together like this giant three-way puzzle and have I mentioned OMG SO COOL?! I was reading the article to put myself to sleep (no offense, yhlee, but I figured it would be a little dry and technical, and I ended up getting extremely excited and worked up about it. And I love that Korean has on and kun reading of kanji/han zi/hanja like Japanese! The parts on how the Koreans sort of navigated the use of classical Chinese and the migration toward mostly Hangul writing is also quite fascinating.

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Because I am feeling Victorian (haha! I appropriate you, O imperialist culture of the past!):
In which I type a heck of a lot on cultural appropriation, cultural authenticity, imperialism, anime, manga, fandom, East Asian Studies, and Taiwan, with the gratuitous use of parenthetical interjections and multiple tangents and wish that I could have included feminism and gender studies to include all of my academic interests in one gigantic post.

I was going to start writing about this in response to coffeeandink's post and her comments here, except I realized it would get so lengthy that I should probably stick it in my lj.

Actually, a lot of it sparked thoughts beginning with the problems inherent in using a certain genre or type of literature/art/pop culture/what have you to extrapolate the psychology of an entire nation of people. Or an entire nation of schoolgirls, if you're talking specifically about shoujo manga studies. Much of this is also sparked by the fact that almost all of the scholarship that I've read on manga and anime has been about why manga and anime are somehow intrinsically "Japanese" and how they can be used to make telling arguments about the Japanese psyche. This is particularly the case when people can make a connection between culture and sex and/or gender, and so there does seem to be a great deal of focus on the extreme pornographic nature of anime and manga as well as the strangeness of an entire subgenre written for women by women (or for shoujo by women) dealing with two beautiful boys having sex with each other and how it indicates a certain perversion in the way the Japanese deal with sex and why the entire nation is completely messed up in terms of gender roles. I suspect that all these scholars have never spent a day or two on the internet with all the meta about slash, or they would see that this subgenre on male-male love by women for a female audience isn't exactly a specifically Japanese incidence.

I am in no way saying that slash equates shounen ai, because it doesn't and there are some distinctively different tropes between the two, largely because (I generalize horribly here) slash seems to be more based on romance novel conventions and shounen ai is based more on shoujo manga conventions.

But anyway, I still think it is rather silly to point to anime and manga and say, "Look! This means blah about Japan/Japanese culture/the Japanese!" One, it's pointing at not just a genre, but an entire group of genres in two very different media, which is just sloppy. Two, even when the argument about shounen ai being an indication of Japanese shoujo's fear of sexuality and their desire to stay in the sexually ambiguous space between childhood and womanhood limits the discussion of the genre to shounen ai (more of a subgenre, I would say, but I am splitting hairs now), it almost invariably completely ignores the fact that wow, shounen ai is a genre populated by many, many authors and has officially been in existence for about thirty years and as a consequence, has had at least one generation of authors and probably several generations of readers. Never mind the differences that thirty years can bring in a culture, never mind the differences of social and economic class, of region, of education level, of individual preference. Also, never mind that shounen ai (and much of manga and anime) borrows from assorted Western/classical and Chinese mythology and literature, even if it is on a shallow level. Anyway, to stop ranting, I think it is just sloppy scholarship to point at a body of work and make not a judgment about the pool of authors/creators of the work or the time period or whatnot, but a huge generalization about the psychology of the readers of the work, especially when said scholars don't even bother doing something easy like asking some of the readers and instead apply weird Freudian theories or somesuch. Plus, witness the huge fandom uproar whenever someone says "Slash means that female fans are afraid of their own sexuality!" and expand that statement to include an entire nation of people, and then see how it sounds.

Anyway, this was a really long way to get to what coffeeandink was saying about cultural appropriation of the arts and just how problematic the notion of cultural appropriation is. I haven't read up much on this at all, but on a personal level, I'm very conflicted about it. I think Mely got around to the topic when she said something about culture being something learned, not something inherent in someone's genes or heritage or sopped up with breast milk or whatever. And I very much agree with the thought that there is no national ownership of ideas, and the reader in me is all for the "all art is mine" approach. I think the notion of the impenetrability of Japanese literature or Islamic literature or Oriental or insert-culture-here is pretty stupid. On the other hand, I think it is difficult learning an entirely new canon of literature that differs completely from the canon you are familiar with, and since so much of literature does allude and refer to older works, yeah, it's hard. I mean, it was weird enough for me learning how to read romances without rolling my eyes and learning the tropes and the language and etc., much less learning an entirely different mass of literary works (or art or music or whatever you like). Ergo, as I found out the hard way, you cannot just show someone anime and expect them to know what everything means. Amazingly, people who have not seen chibi form before are very weirded out by people randomly turning into smaller, cuter versions of themselves ;).

I think, though, the flip side of this learning curve is the tendency to view it as an impossibly steep slope, or a slope that only a selected few people can climb, which is what I think happens in a good deal of East Asian studies academics and in anime/manga fandom. Er. I speak as someone who majored in EAS but wasn't particularly enmeshed in her small department and as someone whose last experience in the anime/manga fandom was six years ago, so grain of salt! I sort of want to equate scholarly jargon with fangirl/fanboy speak, as a certain code into a culture. Except I do think scholarly jargon has a place, because when I say things like "Japan," I really mean "the notion of Japan-the-nation in the early twenty-first century with the caveat that it is composed of many individuals of varying statuses and thoughts and opinions and what really is nation anyway but this is too long of an explanation to say every time so I will just say Japan." Or "the West" meaning "what Japanese discourse around the late nineteenth century referred to all the European and American nations by." It's hard to have a discussion without first defining all the terms. And in a way, that is what fans do -- think of all the meta discussions on what "slash" means, what "canon" and "fanon" are and all the arguments that happen when people talk about these things without realizing that their definitions of the terms are different. In anime/manga fandom the terms seem to be "yaoi" and "shounen ai" and whatnot, and I've seen several cycles of people claiming different linguistic origins for "yaoi."

I'm not sure if it's the combination of fandom terminology and the new cultural context, but the anime and manga fandom seems to be particularly suscept to the notion that you need credentials to watch anime or read manga (or just the GWing fandom ~1999?). I guess it's like this in most fandoms -- in sci-fi/fantasy, there's a canon of works that you should have read to be "well-read" (it was interesting seeing this at Norwescon!) and it's a way to identify members within the group. But it seemed like in every single argument on mailing lists in the Gundam Wing fandom, someone would invariably pop up and say, "Blah means blah and I know this because I took Japanese for a year!" Or because my Japanese friend said so, or because I went to Japan, or because I lived in Japan for eight years, or because I have done homestay, or because I wrote a paper on it (hee, that's mine). And I sort of wonder why people feel the need to justify their knowledge or their theories in this way. On the other hand, I'm not arguing, because this feeling of constantly not knowing enough is what lead me to do East Asian Studies, which I adore. And it's just particularly funny because (here is where I gratuitously flash my creds) I majored in this, took four and a half years of Japanese and did a two-month homestay there, wrote my thesis specifically on shoujo manga and anime and manga scholarship and to be honest, I feel like I have only gotten a hint of the answer. Actually, I think the answer is just, "It's complicated." Anyway, it does seem that people that I've seen getting into anime and into my department start out feeling like they don't know much, gain a little knowledge and start overgeneralizing or making huge statements of truth, then start splitting hairs and saying I don't know to everything. And then, finally, the big professors who have spent decades doing this have answers, but with about ten bazillion complications and exceptions and footnotes that they are generalizing.

Ok, I completely lost my point somewhere in there. I think I was actually going to talk about cultural appropriation. Anyway, all this was supposed to say something about how people can guard a culture or an artform as "theirs" or as something you have to be initiated into or have some sort of special knowledge to do. And while I would not say that you should go into an unknown canon and immediately start saying it's stupid because it doesn't conform to your canon, I would also say that these artforms, they are not mysterious things that need to be decoded by a Tibetan monk who lives in the center of the earth. And because of this, I think it is rather silly to say one artform is intrinsically Japanese/Chinese/American/blah, because saying that means that 1) culture is genetic 2) culture is monolithic 3) only people within the culture can understand it. This is where I start taking offense as a reader, because basically it's telling me that I shouldn't be going off reading other cultures' texts and whatnot because I'll never understand them anyway! And hey! I like reading, so I don't like it when anyone tells me I shouldn't read something.

Plus, having sort of grown up in two cultures, I personally think that nationality and culture and all that stuff are boundaries that people make up for themselves to make it easier to put the world in categories. Because in the end, how do you untangle the parts of me that are Chinese and American from what is just me and from what I got from reading books and growing up in Taiwan and going to college in America?

Again, I get off the point. This is where I put the big "but" in on why I think the opposite assumption, that all culture belongs to everyone and that it completely doesn't matter who uses what artforms, is also too simplistic (again, Mely says this better than me... I just say it with more words and confusion!). Aside from the problem of appropriating physical cultural treasure (i.e. the Egyptian collection in the British Museum), which I think most people can see the problematics of, I think the bigger problem with this assumption is that it is really idealistic and unfortunately ignores about two centuries or so of nationalism and the formation of national identities hand in hand with colonialism and imperialism. (Wow, I used "problem" three times in that sentence. Technically one use was "problematic." I like that word ^_^.)

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