Art in the After-Culture by Davis Ben;

Author:Davis, Ben;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haymarket Books

Social Movements and the Movement of Culture (1)

In the art world and well beyond, “cultural appropriation” has been one of the dominating themes of mainstream cultural criticism in recent years, emerging centerstage in the media concurrent with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. It has by now transformed what it means to be an engaged political artist and transformed how culture in general is circulated, marketed, and criticized, often in very positive ways. Yet the conversation around the topic is extraordinarily unwieldy.14 The term has been used to condemn everything from the bitter historic injustice of the white-run music industry ripping off Black musicians to non-Hindu people practicing yoga today; from white Jewish scholar Jessica Krug, a self-described “decolonial historian of Black political thought,” assuming the completely made-up Afro-Latinx identity of “Jess la Bombalera”15 to a white teenager from Utah wearing a thrift-store cheongsam to prom.16 While the most common interpretation of the term focused in particular on a dominant, usually European or European-American culture’s theft and commercial degradation of Black and Indigenous culture, the more recent surge of popular debate has created a new level of vigilance around maintaining clear borders between cultures of all kinds, at all levels. White celebrities like Iggy Azalea, Katy Perry, and Justin Timberlake were the subject of heated charges of cultural appropriation, nonwhite celebrities including Awkwafina, Beyoncé, Jennifer Lopez, Bruno Mars, Nicki Minaj, and Pharrell Williams all came to be accused of appropriation of different kinds as well, prompting talk that the term had attained a new level of all-purpose generality.17 The trend of weighted blankets has been labeled cultural appropriation of autistic culture.18 So thoroughly has the theme permeated psychic life that Pam Grossman, host of a popular podcast on modern-day witchcraft, found herself addressing “cultural appropriation in the mystical community” by advising a listener about whether she was allowed to worship the goddess Lilith despite her lack of Jewish heritage. “I cannot continue wholeheartedly in my devotion while this question hangs in my mind,” the woman wrote. You would think the fact that, by the listener’s account, Lilith had personally appeared to her in a red cloak with the message “You have asked for me and here I am” would have cleared up the uncertainty.19

It is tempting, in the face of the extreme amounts of attention demanded by the subject in the click-hungry, high-speed world of online debate, to say we should simply focus energy elsewhere. It’s therefore necessary to begin by going back to the last period of left gains, the 1960s, to be reminded that symbols and the popular standards set for how they circulate between communities do actually matter for “real” movements.

“Symbol-making is a necessary part of any social movement; it provides a quick, convenient way of proclaiming one’s views to the world,” feminist activist Jo Freeman wrote, remembering the efforts, at a women’s liberation conference outside of Chicago in 1968, to create a resonant symbol to give visibility to a movement that had yet to truly gain widespread attention.

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