Why are people so sensitive about cultural appropriation?

Recent controversy over who exactly is entitled to translate the work of American poet Amanda Gorman has left many people scratching their heads.

Writer Marieke Lucas Rijneveld who had been booked for the Dutch translation resigned from the job following criticism that a black writer was not chosen. This was despite the fact that Rijneveld had been picked by Gorman herself, though seemingly none of the Netherlands' black spoken word poets was presented as an option.

Since then the Catalan translator for the poem that the American writer read at US president Joe Biden’s inauguration has said he has been removed from the job because he had the wrong “profile”.

In the relatively non-commercial world of poetry, turning down any translator seems like bad business, and you might be tempted to write off the whole palaver as just another social media pile-on. But it’s important to understand just why the sensitivity to cultural appropriation exists.

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According to author Lipika Pelham, controversies like that surrounding Gorman can't be separated from historical inequalities and the under-representation of minorities in the arts.

Projected distortions

In her book Passing: An Alternative History of Identity, the British-Bengali writer explores the colonial roots of cultural appropriation - which in the English-speaking world generally meant British writers slumming it with the natives for a while in order to project back onto them a distorted version of their own culture. This kind of “reverse passing”, as Pelham calls it, could be found from Dublin to New Delhi.

Today the more common phenomenon is “pass-casting”. This, she explains, is where there is either repackaging of roles “subverting the original narrative – for example, a Japanese story is whitewashed for the western audience – or casting privileged-identity actors to play minority roles”.

So, no, the Afro-Irish singer Tolü Makay remixing The Saw Doctors’ N17 is not the same as, say, a rich, playboy dilettante performing The Hill We Climb. The Nigerian-born Makay grew up in the midlands and her reworking of the Irish emigration anthem gave it an international meaning. It is not entirely clear what would be achieved by someone in a privileged position imitating the voice of the dispossessed.

The debates are seldom easily settled but, says Pelham, “Many in the ‘horrified’ block in this battle over cultural ownership seem to be missing the real issue at stake here, which is the complex morality of who has the right to present themselves as what in our performance culture.”

Her book takes its name from a practice typically associated with racial segregation in the US that is, coincidentally, the subject of new movie Passing, starring Ruth Negga. However, Pelham broadens her inquiry to include other types of "identity shift". A BBC reporter for over a decade before turning to writing and filmmaking, she explores the matter further as this week's Unthinkable guest.

Your book takes its name from the idea of “passing” from one identity to another. To what extend does shame, or striving for acceptance, underpin that process?

Lipika Pelham: “Passing is the act of living or imitating a life other than the one you’ve been assigned by society. This usually refers to the process of going from one lower-status identity to another higher-status one for safety or opportunity.

“Shame is there, at least initially, when passing is done for survival. In American history, white-passing evolved from the temporary identity shift put on by escaping slaves or slave descendants to become a permanent double life . . .

“Passing blurs one’s former self, so you find yourself privately in a sunken place of disconnect and disorientation. In most cases it doesn’t start as a deliberate choice to begin a deception.

“Appearance is key to how we assign other people an identity, and often those who are wrongly perceived as a member of a dominant or privileged group – a queer person assumed to be straight, a light-skinned bi-racial person assumed to be white – will go along with his mislabelling, to gain social freedom that would otherwise be beyond reach, while internalising a deep sense of indignity and self-loathing.

“But young people today are shifting the conversation. ‘Authentic’ is about accepting and owning your perceived imperfections. Traditional notions of ‘regular’ or ‘normal’ are being challenged by the new generation.”

On the tricky area of cultural appropriation, there are no easy answers. But are there some ground rules we can follow?

“There are no absolute markers to measure our being or belonging, nothing is fixed . . . But in this struggle, there must be self-awareness.

“There must be a genuine effort to understand the historical extractive mentalities as residue of colonialism to make sense of today’s outcry. Imperial powers saw as their prerogative to go exploit not only the literal natural resources of subjugated peoples from Ireland to India, they also felt entitled to examine, control and even impersonate those people’s cultures. They were often not sincerely identifying with the native culture.

“When today’s descendants cry ‘cultural appropriation’, they point to the historical imbalance of power and cultural extractive mentalities.

“Clearly lines must be drawn between identifying, passing and trespassing. Identity imitation becomes an identity trespass when done without empathy and awareness of the past.”

Is there a risk that crying “cultural appropriation” at every turn is going to drive us further apart rather than bring us closer together?

“Having choice is a privilege. In an ideal world, anyone can perform any identity, put on any accent, style your hair the way you like, pass – or in this context ‘perform’ any identity. But ‘performing’ a historically lower-status identity by the privileged becomes problematic, or a form of appropriation, when done out of choice, or whim, by someone who inherently has more privilege than the persons they’re imitating.

“We cannot achieve a post-identity, post-race world without first addressing the stereotypes and intersecting hierarchies of race, gender, sexuality, class and so on. In all passing, in the concept’s original sense, there’s a power dynamic at play. We must first acknowledge it in order to overcome it.”

How important is it for populations to acknowledge or atone for wrongdoing in the past?

“Collective self-awareness is a key part of all of this . . . Those who have been displaced by historical events such as colonialism, slavery, cultural hegemony of the West, have had to inhabit a permanent rupture of selfhood. Their descendants in the West today have re-emerged with a burning sense of ownership of their long-trampled heritage – remembered or invented – to affirm an identity as equals.

“If you must use the phrase, ‘collective atonement’, I would suggest, let us call it ‘collective admission’ of past misconduct by our forebears against the forebears of those who cry cultural appropriation when a white person puts on an Afro, or cooks on prime-time television Caribbean food – when these minority cultural traits are repackaged and they suddenly become trendy.

“Dressing up as someone who was mocked until recently, for the very look you’re trying to emulate, is only going to rekindle painful memories and foment resentment.”

Passing: An Alternative History of Identity by Lipika Pelham is published by Hurst