Questions of our time
A novel about slavery, a play about refugees, a film about homosexuality, a work of art dealing with a minority group have become such sensitive topics as to determine a cultural turning point in the entire creative industry . Not so much for the subject as for the identity of the artists. How does, and is it right?, a white author to talk about slavery? How does a director, and is it right?, born and raised in New York from a bourgeois wasp family, make a film about migrants? It is possible that someone will deal with a theme that he has not experienced directly without being branded with a very serious fault, especially by the radical left fringes of American universities, that is, that of cultural appropriation. A real cultural crime because appropriating experiences that do not belong to one's life, one's environment or part of one's cultural tradition to make any narrative out of it is equivalent to a sneaky and disgusting form of spoliation and oppression of those who are the object of that abusive storytelling.
The psychoanalyst Massimo Recalcati held a television broadcast on the experience of motherhood which he spoke about in a long and interesting monologue, with a wealth of detail and description of intimate sensations. At the end, a spectator present in the studio very politely asked Recalcati how a man could talk about motherhood without being able to have direct experience of it. A legitimate question to which the Milanese philosopher gave a plausible answer: "Because I do this job". All hell would probably have happened in the United States if a character similar to Recalcati had dealt with a similar topic in public. The meToo movement would have risen to the barricades and perhaps the cultural stripper on duty would have had some difficulty in continuing his profession or even shopping at the supermarket.
A serious and delicate topic
Of course the issue of cultural appropriation is a very serious issue in those lands, such as the Americas, Australia or New Zealand, where native populations have effectively been stripped of their identity and their culture. And in fact those nations, without too much fanfare, are carrying out an industrious repentance. In New Zealand the supreme court has recognized that all sea and water resources belong to the Maori and the Pakeha must respect this belonging. Even in Tanzania, where the indigenous population has become extinct, there is a need to remedy this course of history, albeit a belated but commendable one.
But, in general, what has been has been is history and history is. Today cultures have contaminated each other to such an extent that it is difficult to clearly discern the different belongings. In searching for them, recovering and protecting them, an undoubtedly legitimate operation, there is the risk of exceeding and ending up breaking one of the postulates of liberal democratic civilizations which is freedom of expression. A liberal think-tank like the London magazine "The Economist" underlines this risk inherent in the issue of cultural appropriation and continually warns of the possible authoritarian drifts of a revisionist and bellicose attitude of radical left and alt-right groups towards of sensitive issues related to minorities and their relationship with the majorities. For example, Trump got a lot of votes with the refrain that whites are being held back by the liberal establishment from other ethnic components of the American population.
What is happening is that the concept of cultural appropriation is becoming dogma and spreading far beyond the loud-mouthed, presenteeism activists to include the cultural institutions that permeate the creative industry, such as publishers and production companies that are beginning to keep away from subjects that might attract the scarlet letter. Publishers are very nervous when they receive a proposal that could have that connotation: they fear negative reviews, bad publicity and loss of reputation. By now it is clear that social media, which forge a very broad opinion, are controlled by radicalized groups or by logics that follow more sensationalism than accuracy of information.
A dangerous enlargement
A writer like Lionel Shriver, who now lives in Great Britain of which he has also taken citizenship, in a cited 2016 speech, Fiction and Identity Politics, in Brisbane in Australia refuted the thesis of cultural appropriation, hoping that it would be a "passing whim". In a subsequent post we will publish, in Italian translation, the intervention of the Anglo-American writer, who has been the subject of violent criticism for her latest novel, The Mandibles (I Mandible. Una famiglia, 2029-2047, just released in Italy) , where a Latin American president drags America into the abyss and where one of the protagonists, the African American Luella, suffering from dementia, loses her reason and expresses herself through improbable rhymes. Elena Gooray, journalist and deputy editor of the Pacific Standard a liberal magazine published by "The Social Justice Foundation" of Santa Barbara in California, wrote that Luella is the sketch of a black woman dehumanized by the disease for the primary purpose of revealing something about a white male in a position of power. What if she was like that too? It's Fiction!
Since 2016, things have gotten worse and the controversy has not been limited only to books or to the academic field. The culture editor of the British magazine "The Economist" Andrew Miller has compiled a short catalog of the alleged cases of cultural appropriation that have sparked a twitterstorm. He was a white American poet who used the African-American vernacular in some of his poems; it was a show in Montreal where white artists sang songs about slavery; he was a white English chef who cooked Jamaican-themed dishes; she was a young Utah high school student who wore a Chinese-style dress to prom.
It's not that these cultural denunciations, carried on the winds of social media, are entirely without any foundation. Creatives and people must be diligent and not sloppy in their forays into other cultures and their foray must avoid lazy stereotypes, often disrespectful of diversity and of history itself. Someone, dammit!, could take it really badly or maybe take an innocent joke literally. Cultural colonialism, like colonialism tout-court, is a reprehensible phenomenon, but it must be extirpated in the battle of ideas, not by stoning. The point is that social media, with their viral mechanism, favor the latter more than the former. With 280 characters available, what sensible argument can be developed, if not cooked up with slogans, invectives or courtesies.
Is self-censorship better?
In its substance the idea that speaking, portraying and creating narratives about places or people that do not belong to one's cultural tradition or even one's personal experience is a kind of cultural colonialism it is, in itself, crazy. If men hadn't been allowed to talk about women we wouldn't have had Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina. If, on the other hand, it had been women who had received the same ban, we would not have had Hilary Mantel's magnificent trilogy on Thomas Cromwell, the Tudor politician and courtier, a work which has won the world's greatest literary award for two consecutive years. No one has so far accused the combative English writer of cultural appropriation, but it may only be a matter of time if one decides to follow this dogma to its extreme and logical consequences which are brutally binary. At this point, purism would require the abandonment of the index of a noble and ancient art such as parody. Mel Brooks films should be incinerated like The Last Tango. Even satire could be blacklisted. Then it would be cultural desertification: “Desertum fecerunt et pacem appellaverunt”. Political correctness is a serious matter, but its borders are only poorly drawn and fences a demanding exercise as were the capitalist ones. Furthermore, the politically correct in the end has the opposite effect of what it proposes to fight, radicalises ideas and introduces censorship, or even worse self-censorship, samizdat. One of Silicon Valley's most speculative and visionary minds, Peter Thiel, has decided to endorse Trump because he is sickened by the silly litany of political correctness, the Valley's gospel.
If political correctness becomes a dogma, at that point there would be only one option left for creatives, to talk about themselves and represent themselves. In this case, self-censorship could filter only works, or rather masterpieces, such as My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante or My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard, even if the latter could incur the accusation of having appropriated the stories of other people, such as family, friends and acquaintances. And in fact, the writer from Bergen did not lack headaches.
The point is that the engine of art and literature is contamination of experiences and cultures and the exit from the dominant canon. The phobia of cultural appropriation nullifies this path of understanding and transmission of experiences different from one's own.
The dogma of cultural appropriation would really make us more of an asshole than we already are.
