Things I didn't say about the Kimono Protests ...

If you have been stuck near me at all over the last, like, three years, you've probably heard me talk about the Kimono Protests at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 2015. I just published an article about cultural appropriation, the international history of kimono, and those Kimono Protests that I was thinking of as the culmination of my thinking on all this stuff. Although of course, I don't know whether thinking about hot-button issues really 'culminates' at all. For one thing, the controversies keep coming-- every round of edits I found myself adding another one to the article-- and for another, there are more and more ways to bring these discussions and questions to the audiences that might need them and that are poised to continue and broaden the conversation. For example, I just finished talking to a class at UCLA on these kinds of issues after they saw Theatre Nohgaku's production of Blue Moon Over Memphis, a contemporary American noh play about Elvis; I ended up facilitating that hour long discussion with the freshmen theater majors after I overheard five of them talking about the show in very unhappy and disparaging terms as we left the demonstration and lecture workshop the day after the performance. I'm writing about Blue Moon Over Memphis in another blog post, but what's important to me about that here is that the terms by which these students were critiquing the noh play were terms of cultural authenticity and the proper ownership of culture. Which is important because those are important issues and we've made incredible progress in changing the terms of discussion around representation such that many young people (and up through at least people my age) are now sensitized to these issues. However, I think there are a lot of complicated holes in the logic and problematic assumptions we need to keep working on. I try to address these in my article (which I hope you'll read-- contact me if you need help accessing it!)



However, a couple of major thoughts I have about this complex of ideas fell out of my final article draft because the structure just didn't accommodate them, so I'm adding them here as an addendum to the article. Generally speaking, the first one is a more in-depth discussion of the problems with the concept of culture as property and the second one is a little more irreverent, but not unserious: is it the internet that's driving this doubling down on outrage and offense when it comes to cross-cultural representations (along with all kinds of other things)?

Here we go:




First: culture as property.
This idea was in the original article, but fell out because I couldn't successfully find a way to talk through it with the complexity I needed, so I guess I'll give it another go here.

So, to begin with: Appropriation is a word that is fundamentally associated with ownership and property. The OED’s first definition for appropriation is “The making of a thing private property.” This is where we get things like the Congressional Appropriations Committees, whose job it is to disburse money to whatever the government decides to pay for. Therefore, I guess we could call cultural appropriation something like, "the taking of a cultural property as one's own." Fair enough, there are lots of cultural properties that have been begged, borrowed, stolen, capitalized on, commodified, copied, and patented over the years, and we live deep in late late capitalism, where the monetary exchange value of just about anything is of import to most people-- and if it's not, you're just more likely to get that thing stolen from you and capitalized on by someone else. 

We are in a society that is now fully apprised of the ethical problems with, to name a couple examples, the Pergamon temple being in Berlin instead of Greece and the Rosetta Stone propped up in the British Museum instead of Egypt. We are perfectly capable of empathetically understanding how creepy it is that early American anthropologists took bodies of native people for 'study.' There is however, a difference between these examples and what we usually call 'cultural appropriation' today: performance. That is, it's easy to see how there's just one Pergamon, just one Rosetta Stone, and just one body of your ancestor. Those are things which can be owned, stolen, or extorted. When it comes to Halloween costumes, fashion (like that Utah girl's "qipao" prom dress), hairstyles, caricatures, and homages, I suggest it gets a lot more complicated, but this is in fact where we most often hear the phrase 'cultural appropriation' used. In the example of my article, a replica kimono was  provided for museum patrons to pose like the painting La Japonaise, an 1876 Monet painting of his wife, Camille, posing in a manner probably cribbed from other Japanese artworks.

In this and other performances of culture then, there's something different occurring than when we have a singular object or thing that contains the cultural valence. Performances cannot be thought of as property in the way that material things can be. Of course, there is an ownable kimono here and an ownable painting, but no one was protesting those things--the controversy occurred around what was being done with those things, by whom. The essence of the kimono was being thought of as a property vulnerable to theft and fraud.

Let me be clear here, by no means am I suggesting that performances cannot be damaging, hateful, stereotypical, stupid, or problematic. I am also not making any evaluations of the Kimono Wednesdays dress up activity either-- I will let the protestors and counter-protestors make all those arguments; they are amply documented both in my article and elsewhere. It's actually really not important to me whether Kimono Wednesdays should or shouldn't have happened. What I'm interested in here are the larger questions of what happens when we agree to think of cultural performances and representations as a kind of property, and how well that mode of thinking serves us (ie, serves justice and ethics).

Okay, back to it. To continue with cultural properties, of course we have the notions of 'intellectual property,' 'trademark,' and 'copyright' that are used to attribute ownable, property status to immaterial things and ideas. And racial identity has also been conceived of as such: In the groundbreaking 1993 Harvard Law Review work, “Whiteness as Property,” legal scholar Cheryl Harris uses US legal decisions regarding Native Americans and Black Americans to articulate how whiteness has been conceived in the law as possessable property, liable to damage from (for example) those who fraudulently claim it for themselves, like Homer Plessy, in the 1896 Plessy v Ferguson case. Harris demonstrates how whiteness has been used as a property tradable for privileges like employment preference, access to land (as in 19th century cases disenfranchising Native people) and so on. Although Harris details how other racial designations have not functioned as property in the way whiteness has, it seems to me that with the advent of certain programs meant to address racial imbalance and representation, such as Affirmative Action, non-white ‘identities’ have also become more and more recognizable as properties with value that could be damaged, like a copyright, by unauthorized, fraudulent imitations. Certainly that painfully sizable faction in the US who feel that white people are now discriminated against in America have the sense that ‘minority identity’ is now a valuable commodity tradable for perceived advantages in hiring and university admissions, no matter whether or not statistics bear out this conviction. [Another caveat: again, I am not making a claim for the rightness or wrongness of such conceptions, only observing that we can certainly see such a dynamic at play today--there is no debate around the fact that some people believe that minority identity has allowed some people to access special advantages in competitions for jobs, education, and media representation.]

Further, as we live in a neoliberal capitalist society and paradigm, it is not at all illogical or unexpected that 'property' would be a default manner of conceiving of ethnic or racial identity. Neoliberalism is fundamentally about applying free market capitalist ideas to more and more aspects of life. For example, self-branding and marketing is now a thing, as if we are not just producers in the capitalist market but also its products, so it's not a great leap to observe that it has become easier and easier to imagine one's demographic identity features as resources to be cultivated into a product. It's not weird at all to look at the media and commercial landscape and see that 'culture' (here I'm thinking particularly of ethnically, nationally, and racially marked notions of culture) sells and has branding cachet: from the highest to lowest cultures, art and antiques to professional sports mascots, money is being made and value is being accrued -- both monetary and cultural capital-- by the sorts of things and ideas I'm talking about, like 'traditional clothing' (ie in this case, KIMONO), minoritarian knowledge (like ties to previously underground art practices like maybe jazz or blues), and political stances (how many celebrities got additional fans from going to Standing Rock or campaigning for or against certain politicians or policies).

That is, it seems to me that because we live in a pervasive neoliberal society, there is a pervasive atmosphere that inclines us to see everything in economic/market terms. Sorta the old adage that if you're holding a hammer, everything you see looks like a nail. Okay, so the problem with all that is, I think, that these immaterial and performative modes of cultural 'property' do not conform well to our habits of thought about ownership and property-- which is why, I think, these controversies about 'appropriation' are always so fraught and unsatisfying. It's because the way we try to comprehend culture, cultural symbols, and performances just don't work like ownable, thievable property. I do not think it's a coincidence that some of the most fraught legal issues are those around trademark, copyright, royalties, and intellectual property. Mickey Mouse, for example, when redrawn or detourned or otherwise used in an 'unauthorized' way impacts the Walt Disney estate's property interest in him in a very convoluted, inchoate way, not in the way stealing someone's stereo impacts the victim. So too do hurtful or even complimentary representations of "culture" function in an unpredictable and complex way. The argument put forward by kimono protestors was that trying on a kimono and/or posing for an photo in it (some people made distinctions between these two actions) constituted the enactment of an offensive stereotype, an action (or we might say performance) that was therefore racist, Orientalist, and/or exoticized. But it was just as easy for the counter-protestors to insist that good representations, about I presume the eternal beauty and value of kimono workmanship and artistry and the general value of Japaneseness, were being aired. But how could we insist that the same thing happens when every different person tries on the kimono? How do we know anything having to do with race or culture was happening at all?

Now I'm sort of back into territory from the article--basically, there are a million problems with thinking of culture as ownable property, and I'm interested in thinking of other ways to think of culture because the nature of performance is highly antithetical to property rights. Again, that doesn't mean that I think images and representations can't be hurtful or haven't been used in oppressive ways-- of course they have been, but it means that I see a lot of ways in which our habits of talking about culture 'belonging to' some people and not others obscure the issues instead of illuminating them. Here are some examples of problems with thinking of culture as "your own" or "someone else's":

• If culture rightfully belongs to certain people, then if a person "from that culture" gives you permission to do something, it's okay. (But people are individuals, and getting permission from one person doesn't mean someone else who feels a claim won't disagree.)
• Cultural items have effects for more than their "rightful owners." In the Kimono Protests, most Japanese and Japanese Americans supported the kimono try-on event, so the claims of 'cultural appropriation' ended up being lodged against the wishes of most Japanese-descended people while purporting to be in support of them. The Asian American protestors very rightly pointed out that Orientalist stereotypes tend to ignore national specificity and therefore affect all Asian-descended people, but the very logic of "rightful ownership" makes it harder to support that argument instead of easier. 
• Culture is not inert, and one performance does not replace other performances-- it proliferates. Different performances have different volumes, if you will. A major part of the problem when it comes to cultural appropriation is that historically more powerful groups have defined less powerful groups by means of representing them-- for example blackface minstrelsy or yellowface portrayals like in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado had outsized impacts on the way Black and Asian people were treated and imagined by the majority. Performances like those, which appropriate the power of self-definition from one group and arrogates it to another without any parity, are of course very dangerous. Ie, performances with an outsize volume, that can drown out other representations of cultures, groups, people, etc, have been a problem for a long time. Monet's painting La Japonaise is arguably a product of just such a process: produced at the height of France's Japonist craze, Monet's image arguably had more power to define an image of Asian femininity than actual Asian women (and men) did. However, this is by no means the only thing that La Japonaise is doing. La Japonaise has also been happily adopted and proliferated by the very Japanese people it effaced. Take for example Rilakkuma,
  
  the cute Sanrio bear who was released in a special La Japonaise version in conjunction with the same touring exhibition that yielded the replica kimono that caused the furor in Boston. Clearly, in Japan (and this is not a surprise), few people have the feeling that Monet's Japonist painting can endanger other competing images of themselves. However, it certainly seems that such a conviction is part of the protestors' mindset at the Boston MFA. It is very true that the contexts of La Japonaise in Japan and La Japonaise and a dress up kimono event in Boston are different, and those differing contexts should be part of the discussion of doing or not doing it. Where I continue to have questions is about how we evaluate the proliferating performances of culture that this painting, and so many other aspects of contemporary life, continue to inspire. Why was there an assumption on the part of the protestors that a dressing up performance could only be mocking and not be a genuine learning experience? How can we better articulate between representations that replace and define others and ones that continue to complicate, fill out, and add to our understandings of people, cultures, and the past? How can we differentiate between "bad" representations and just "silly," "awkward," "useless," or even "good" ones when the actual reasons and effects for each individual performance are so wildly disparate, unpredictable, and unknowable, even by those who carry them out? And how can we continue to encourage and strive toward cross-cultural understanding, care, and learning while still recognizing imbalances of power and pushing for a critique of bad or problematic images? 

I'm thinking a first step is to start to let go of the notion of culture as property. That doesn't mean that we stop critiquing representations and performances, it just means that we don't critique them from the standpoint of trying to attribute a rightful owner to culture. To me, the future looks like an increasingly mixed up, nebulous world of mixed-race and culture people with increasingly anti-essentialist 'identities' (at which point will they even be 'identities' as much as, say, 'identifications' or 'affiliations'?) in an increasingly globalized world. There is less and less room for doubling down (as we've been seeing in the last few years) on essentialized identities which are imagined to provide the platform from which one is authorized to speak. (I'm thinking for example of how common it is now to declare before saying anything about social justice something like, 'As a white woman, I'm speaking now only to the white women in the room...' or, 'As an X person, I can never understand X other type of person'.) It is great that so many people got the message that individual experiences shape your point of view and vision of the world-- let's not forget that!-- but that's not where this ends. I don't at all think that one's demographic background forecloses their ability to understand something of other people's experience or at least to try to understand! Too often that preamble, 'As an X, I can't understand others...' now serves as a reason not to. I frankly can't live in a world where the default assumption is that we can't understand each other and we shouldn't mix, because that undercuts the impetus to even try. I do believe that we never fully understand each other, that there are all kinds of awkwardnesses and weirdnesses and failures that come with interpersonal and intergroup attempts at connection, but that is not a reason not to appreciate each other, learn about each other, connect and enjoy each other in all the ways we can. (I mean, I don't even believe that we ever even understand ourselves fully, and that is certainly not a fact often discussed in these debates about 'identity.') And an extreme squeamishness and/or revulsion that's been developing around intercultural performance (like the Kimono Protests, or like I recently witnessed about the transnational American noh play, Blue Moon Over Memphis) I think makes those goals harder to advance toward. Still, I can't stand by when I see any slide toward separatism, especially if it presents itself on the 'progressive' side of the political/social spectrum where we're ostensibly trying to end racism, sexism, and prejudice based on individuals' failures and refusals to inhabit rigidly policed roles dictated by labels like 'race, 'gender,' 'sexual orientation,' etc.

And this, I think, finally brings me to the second point:

Is the problem really the Internet?

I've been thinking about the Kimono Protests as an academic topic of research and writing for three years, and a million attendant 'controversies' of an analogue nature have arisen. Obviously, I thought about these issues and idly tracked these controversies before this. We could imagine many or most clothing and costume related cultural appropriation controversies as a kind of casting controversy: the Utah high schooler in the red second-hand qipao is the wrong body (actor) for the costume (role). The [always assumed] white museum patrons are wrong in the replica uchikake kimono at the MFA. Many are casting controversies: Scarlett Johansson shouldn't be Motoko Kusanagi. Tilda Swinton shouldn't be Tibetan(ish). However, there are seriously different valences for these different 'roles' and 'actors' because putting on a kimono for a minute in the MFA has a far different level of visibility than the live action $110million Ghost in the Shell, and we might use our analytic minds to evaluate them differently............

............ but not on the internet, where an Instagram post puts that high school girl instantaneously in front of the first guy in California who decides to call her out, which broadcasts the image to millions and tens of millions of others who all also have an instant reaction and can spit it out and amplify the whole thing more. For sure, the controversy of the Kimono Protests lived and was fostered on the Internet, for sure that Utah prom dress was an Internet phenomenon. And I'm torn on the import and judgement on that. On one hand, the Internet brings new ideas, important foreign influences and so on to an individual faster and from farther away, and that is obviously something I'm in favor of. For example, I encountered critical race theory and the concept of whiteness first on the Internet (on a livejournal page my friend Christina started!) and had my first, worst fragile white person freak outs there and I'm so glad I did and I got through that and became a person who thinks very differently about those issues now. On the other hand, I can't help but have a strong feeling that it's the disjointed, tl;dr, soundbite nature of this manner of communicating that makes outrage the primary affect of so much of this talk. Could it be the way we tend to talk to and with each other about these issues that also feeds the more troubling dynamics of 'wokeness': black and white hardline judgements, the hierarchical self-positioning of the judges and the judged (I think the tendency toward engaging in an 'oppression olympics' goes with this striation of individuals discussing and being discussed), shaming instead of education (or shaming as education), and a pervasive atmosphere of pessimism, trauma and unhappiness? I'm not saying that wokeness is troubling, I'm saying I see (and, I mean, obvs I'm not alone here, see here, here and/or here amongst others) some dynamics that I don't want to replicate and that I don't think are valuable to our ultimate goal of reducing and ending oppression, prejudice, and injustice. 

Now, I am not trying to 1) tell people how they have to feel about their own personal experiences or 2) dismiss the real sense of trauma, frustration, fear, anger, etc that individuals feel and 3) I would never ever suggest that there isn't a time and place for venting, for fury, for indignation, for banding together with those of like mind and agreeing with each other. But neither could any of those attitudes be alone sufficient for the long, slow, partial and messy work of trying to persuade people, 'convict' people (to borrow the Christian use of the term, as in convince, not the legal sense of criminal conviction), and move more hearts toward a compassion and appreciation that traverses, heals and finally overwhelms the boundaries so heavily drawn between us on the basis of race, ethnicity, sex, gender, class, geography, nation, etc etc etc. It doesn't even seem that hard-- we are surrounded by examples of it at the individual level every single day, throughout history. People cross boundaries, understand each other, appreciate each other, and smooth, erase, and fix imbalances, injustices, and painful legacies in small (partial, temporary, imperfect) ways all the time. I'm thinking for example of my grandparents, a white woman from Alabama and a Chinese man who went down to the courthouse in Memphis in 1950 to get their marriage license. When my grandfather came to filling out his section, he checked the box by "Colored" instead of "White," but the clerk erased his 'mistake' and reprimanded him, because, of course, there was no marrying my grandmother without having checked the other of the two wrong boxes. Eventually that kind of official legal discrimination would end, but I look to them--and that anonymous clerk-- as examples of how those changes happen all the time without, in advance of, and beyond the official. 

If my goals are those small, imperfect, temporary, partial, messy modes of reconciling us with each other, of acknowledging and coming to terms with all the ways in which race, gender, identity, and individuality are performative, illusory, and damaging and working toward modes of reducing harm, oppression, trauma and misery, then I don't see how to do that without centering compassion, complexity, and flexibility into the way I see cultural borrowings, intercultural, interpersonal communication, and representation. It feels like a weird conclusion to suggest, 'it's the Internet, stupid' but I am really wondering that. Which isn't to say we're going to stop using the Internet, but is most definitely to say, maybe we should be reflexive about how we're using our tools and determine whether and how this tool is having an effect on our discourse (I mean, duh, haven't we already determined that the medium comprises a lot of the message?)

Ok, whew. This feels long, and also I have a book to finish drafting, so I'll just totally not edit (for now) and pull the trigger now. If you read this far, HEY! Maybe we're already detourning the internet bias toward short, simple, and bitter. I would love to talk to you, via Internet, sure, but also in person, and if you teach or research on these topics too, especially if you decide to teach my article, please please let me know and let's go from there?!