cultural appropriation in my life

[cimorene]

Here's the last time real life smacked me in the face with cultural appropriation and I had to think about it.

The internal documentation of a major Swedish clothing chain talks about their new advertising campaign for spring/summer called "Marrakech." The documentation explains that the campaign consists of a little video loop of their blonde and blue-eyed Swedish spokesmodel walking through the streets of Marrakech (one of the most famous cities in the North African Kingdom of Morocco) - surrounded by local colour - wandering up into and through the ruins of a Moroccan castle - dressed in ethnic garments. (Now, these are items from the Swedish megachain's line, so I need hardly say that while they are probably "ethnic", the chances are vanishingly small that they are either of Moroccan style or manufacture). That's right: we've taken this super-blond Viking chick who represents SWEDEN (even though Sweden and the rest of the Nordic countries have significant immigrant populations from Africa and the Middle East, not to mention that they then sell their shit all up and down Eastern Europe where nobody is remotely Swedish) - and then we have dressed this chick in vague "ethnic" garments that seem exotic to us although we don't actually know where there from, because all of you non-Northern-Europeans are really the same, right? And then we have flown her in a plane to actual Africa to appeal to your desire to vacation somewhere warm, to take advantage of the natural romance of the exotic - but don't worry, we have cleared all the icky or scary foreign and African things about Morocco away, like for example, actual residents of Marrakech!

Yay, right? Well, strangely enough, I was bitching about this to Brother Windows the other day and he seemed to totally get it, but just now when Wax said that she didn't want to see anything called Slumdog Millionaire because hello, SLUM DOG? and her Indian-American best friend, he said "What?" and "So, what, are you mad because it was made by white people?" and when she tried to explain that hate speech is never okay and it's too late to go in "reclaiming it" (which, protip, you can't do unless you are OF THE GROUP IN QUESTION) after you've introduced yourself with "HATE SPEECH MILLIONAIRE"... yeah, when she said that, remarkably concisely, he said... "Yawn." Oh, and also that you can't judge whether it was okay for them to use hate speech or not until you watch the movie, to see if they use it respectfully enough or something, I assume. I don't know. I don't get it.

Comments

[elfiepike.livejournal.com]

i actually hadn't heard the term at all (to my recollection) before the movie came out; seeing the examples in the urban dictionary ("That bastard slumdogs put a scratch on my BMW."), i can identify it now as a slur but since i would never have recognized it as such beforehand (i mean, obviously it's slang, i got that much), well. i'm not sure where i'm going with this. it is difficult to recalibrate your sensors.

i do find it really interesting that the book that slumdog millionaire was based on was originally titled Q & A (i understand from it's wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_%26_A_(novel)) that is has since been retitled); i can't help but wonder at what point the name was changed, and on whose authority. what was the decision-making process, in other words. (i assume to get more middle-class persons like myself interested: the exoticness not just of india but of poverty, the rags-to-riches storyline, etc--all emphasized in the title alone.)

i'm not sure if this comment made any sense, but i wanted to respond simply because the distance i have from slumdog being hate speech is just--it wasn't even a word i knew! which doesn't make it not hate speech, obviously, nor does it make right that wax's friend responded as he did.

[emmuzka.livejournal.com]

Eh, the slumdog in the movie isn't meant to be a hate speech name for indians, but a hate speech name for current and former slum residents that indians themselves used. It's a remembrance from the caste system, the belief that if you are from a slum, you can never end up with a success or knowledge.

As a whole, the movie is intentionally advertised wrong. It's not a rags-to-riches feel-good movie, but a dramatic growth story of three people that started with nothing, not even parents.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Yes, exactly... it's still hate speech.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

"Dog" in an epithet is generally a slur. The "buddy"-connotations in US hiphop are recent and unique.