When is cultural appropriation, cultural appropriation?

African American culture is (not) just for black people alone to enjoy and cherish. Culture is for everybody. But there's a distinction between appreciating a culture and appropriating it.

Spike Lee

A minor controversy emerged this past Halloween at a University of Toronto costume party when the award for ‘best costume’ went to four white guys dressed as the Jamaican Bobsled Team. Not content with merely wearing gaudy spandex tights, the four decided to put on the dreads... and go in Black-face. That’s right, in 2009; there were still four university-educated white people in a downtown urban campus who thought it would be a good idea to go out in Black-face! Knowing the horrible history of Black-face, hopefully, we can all agree how blatantly racist this award-winning (!) costume was; but what’s much more difficult is confronting racism when it’s not quite so obvious.

While ‘cultural appropriation’, like all terms born in academia defies an easy and concise definition, it generally denotes the assimilation of a minority culture by a more dominant one. Sometimes it’s obvious, like the Washington Redskins football team. But sometimes it’s a little hazy, like in art. Filmmaker Spike Lee has been especially vocal in criticizing his fellow filmmakers, Quentin Tarantino in particular, for what he believes to be Tarantino’s penchant for cultural appropriation. Tarantino, a fan of 70s Kung-fu and Blaxploitation films, has peppered his movies with numerous references to the Chinese and African-American movies of his past. But where some see homage, others see cultural appropriation, and where some see tribute, others see theft.

Even the makers of science-fiction are not immune to the charge of cultural appropriation. Take George Lucas, maker of the Star Wars franchise for instance. Lucas has long openly acknowledged Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s influence on his work. But the parallels between Kurosawa’s film The Hidden Fortress and Lucas’ Star Wars films run so deep, that many have accused Lucas of appropriating the beloved Japanese’ filmmaker’s work. Kevin Wetmore, a professor of theatre at Loyola Marymount University (and noted Star Wars ‘scholar’) details the numerous examples of Japanese culture appropriated from Kurosawa’s films and dropped into Star Wars, including elements of Eastern philosophy, and Japanese names and styles of dress. (Think ‘Obi-Wan Kenobi’ preaching about ‘the force’ in a long flowing kimono-like robe...)

The only problem with this theory is that Kurosawa’s work, for all its samurais and kimonos, wasn’t very ‘Japanese’. Despite Kurosawa’s prestige and popularity in America, Kurosawa’s films were long derided in his home country as too western. Kurosawa, whose best known works were adapted from Shakespeare, and whose style was heavily influenced by the works of American filmmakers like John Ford (Kurosawa even emulated Ford’s style of dress) was largely shunned by Japanese audiences, and did not gain acceptance in his home country until well into his old age. So, was Lucas really appropriating Japanese culture in his films, when his main influence was so heavily influenced by western filmmakers? And at what point does homage and admiration become appropriation anyway?

A few months ago I had a discussion with a friend about our favourite martial arts films, specifically, ones of the Wuxia tradition. While not an expert on the subject, I put forth what I thought was the best Wuxia martial arts film I’d ever seen, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. My friend was aghast. Not because he thought Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was a bad film, but because the film was made by Ang Lee, a Taiwanese Diaspora living in America. He preferred the films of Tsui Hark. Why? Because Hark was a Chinese filmmaker still living and working in Hong Kong. (Let’s put aside the fact that Hark learned his craft at the University of Texas film school for a moment...)

In other words, my friend was associating the quality of a filmmaker and their work with its ‘cultural purity.’ How could you prefer the work of a less-Chinese filmmaker, like Lee, to one who was supposedly more Chinese, like Hark?

Of course, this argument leads to the slipperiest of slippery slopes. For example, is it right to like a filmmaker like Wong Kar-Wai, whose films are largely considered to have started the entire Hong Kong art-film movement? Impossible, if you consider the fact that Wong’s movies were hugely influenced by French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. (To the point that Wong, like Kurosawa with Ford, emulated Godard’s style of dress.)

And what about that Godard? Godard, considered the quintessential French film director of our time, was influenced far more by the work of numerous Hollywood filmmakers like Nicholas Ray and Howard Hawks, than any actual French artist. Can we still appreciate his work, knowing that?

Of course when Godard, a white Frenchman, takes from Hawks, a white American, it feels a little different than when a white artist borrows from an artist of colour. The power relationship is completely different, and the action can’t help but have a tinge of colonialist mentality to it. And while I cannot refute that criticism completely, I feel uncomfortable faulting a film’s quality because the filmmaker refused to stay within their box of prescribed identity. Does that mean a straight Black artist can never create a piece of work which deals with gay themes? Or a Hispanic man can never make a film about the physically disabled? To penalize an artist for the mere fact he looked outside what he lived, penalizes us all.