What atrocity will the culturally insensitive appropriators think of next? East Asian cellists? Swedish chess players? The Japanese putting on Shakespeare? Jews playing Christians’ Christian music, such as Mozart’s masses? Arriviste Jewish physicists using work done for centuries by Christians? Russian Jews writing about Anglo-American law? Indians writing computer programs, using languages and concepts pioneered by Americans and Europeans?I thought of another analogy: men who appropriate the appearance and stylings that originate among women. Steeped — as we are these days — in LGBT propaganda, no one seems willing to object to males presenting themselves as female (or females presenting themselves as males).
I'd like to hear the Salon author (a novelist named Randa Jarrar) engage with that variation on the appropriation/authenticity problem. Are we free to create our personal identity using elements that we see in others or are we stuck in our place of origin and offensive to the authentic possessors of that identity if we adopt their attributes as our own?
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