Reflections on Amandla Stenberg “Calling Out” Kylie Jenner for Cultural Appropriation.
My reaction to calling out other folks for cultural appropriation is mainly to laugh, and then to sigh.
Do they not understand, I wonder, how contingent and how young so very many “ancient” cultural traditions are? How quickly they spread? How human cultures always have and always will borrow, pilfer and adopt bits of other cultures?
Always have, and always, always will.
This whole cultural “appropriation” obsession and calling out people for it is at best a distraction to anything useful and at worst actively harmful — especially when you use it to bully and shame young people.
Those outraged by “appropriation” represent the end of art. Two of the most important ways by which art innovates is a) borrowing from other traditions b) rebelling against one’s own traditions.
But the kind of person who gets upset by appropriation also has far too much group loyalty to ever criticize the established order within the group.
Tbhis can clearly be seen (heard) in recorded black music in the US. From Crazy Blues by Mamie Smith, the first record intended for a primarily black audience, to the early 90’s there was constant borrowing from other traditions and rebellion against prevailing formulas. That’s why black music was so explosively creative and inspiring for so long. Things kind of stalled in the early 90s when young black musicians stopped rebelling against their elders (for whatever reason) and there hasn’t been anything really new since experimental rap fizzled out in the early to mid 90s.
What about electronic music? A lot of that sounds pretty new to me, though electronic music really began in the 1960s.
But I do agree that innovation has plateaued for the most part.