What does "appropriation" mean?
What does ‘appropriation’ mean?
Excerpts
from Young, James. Cultural Appropriation and the Arts. New York: Wiley-Blackwell;
2010.
Young identifies five types of cultural appropriation: object, content, style, motif, and subject
appropriation. The following excerpts focus on subject appropriation.
In many discussions of cultural appropriation, concerns have been raised about outsiders who represent in their artworks individuals or institutions from another culture (7).
When this sort of [subject] appropriation occurs no artistic product of a culture is appropriated. Instead artists appropriate a subject matter, namely another culture of some aspects of its members. I will call this subject appropriation since a subject
matter is being appropriated. Subject appropriation has sometimes been called ‘voice appropriation’, particularly when outsiders represent the lives of insiders in the first person (7).
[However, the] act of representing a culture is not an act of appropriating from it…. Artists represent their own experience in their works. In representing their experience, artists represent what is already theirs. They do not represent the experience of anyone else. When artists represent their experience of other cultures, the insiders are left with their experiences. They are not appropriated. Other cultures fall within the experience of artists, so, in representing other cultures, artists do not have to appropriate anyone’s experience, even if that were possible (8).
Although nothing is taken by subject appropriation, and the term is misleading, the representation of other cultures is often discussed in the content in which cultural appropriation is addressed. This is understandable, given that subject appropriation
gives rise to questions that are parallel in certain ways to those that arise from other forms of appropriation. Even if nothing is taken by subject appropriation, acts of representing cultures other than one’s own can still be suspect from an
aesthetic or moral perspective. Since outsiders do not have access to the experience of insiders, one might argue, outsiders are bound to misrepresent the culture of insiders. Since the works of outsiders distort the insiders’ culture, they may be thought to have aesthetic flaws. Since artists could misrepresent the culture of others in a harmful or offensive manner, subject appropriation could also be morally objectionable (9).