This is the “my culture is not your Halloween costume” issue.
While looking at Spirit Halloween last year, I saw a rabbi costume along with the priest and nun costumes. I felt offended and included at once.
Is this some kind of joke?
Only if they walk into a bar.
BTW, I always thought Isro was a better term than Jewfro – first, it is more analogous since it references a place, and it avoids Jew which can sometimes have a negative connotation.
Afro comes from “Afro-American”, and only secondarily from “Africa”, so I don’t see the problem with using the ethnicity vs the place. IMO, Isro doesn’t work nearly as well, it’s harder to tell what it’s riffing off of. I can see how Jewfro can have problems, though.
One of my neighbors, a member of the Lumbee tribe explained that each element of the ceremonial dress represents an achievement that had to be earned, sometimes at great cost, and that if you would be offended by someone wearing a mockup of the Congressional Medal of Honor you’d know why it’s considered offensive to throw on a bunch of beads and feathers to shout “Woo Woo!”.
IMHO there’s a distinction between dressing up as generic Black person or a generic Native American as opposed to a particular person or costume. I don’t see any problem with someone dressing up as a Catholic priest, a Viking warrior, Tom Brady, the Queen of the UK, the Pope, or Bugs Bunny, whether the person wearing the costume is of European descent or Black or Chinese or Indian or any other race or ethnicity. On the other hand, this means I also have no issue with a white person dressing up as Mulan, LeBron James, Black Panther, the King os Saudi Arabia, the Ayatollah, Pikachu, or any other non-European person or character.
That’s the thing. I think many white Americans would have no problem with someone who decided to dress up as a Marine for Halloween, complete with (presumably fake) Medal of Honor. People dress up as priests and Catholics don’t take offense. It’s not a matter of disrespecting any actual Marines who earned a Medal of Honor, or disrespecting a Catholic of sincere belief. It’s a matter of pretending to be someone you aren’t for one night of the year.
ETA: I’m a doctor. If someone dresses up as a doctor for Halloween, I’m not offended just because they didn’t go to medical school for four years with another three plus years in residency.
That’s not what I’ve seen. My experience has been that nine times out of ten (or more) it’s conservatives complaining about what they imagine some left-winger will claim is cultural appropriation.
For reference, here’s the transcript for that episode of the Imaginary Worlds podcast: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5f9f06c44dd1ed19b7080797/t/5fb1922fdd1d4d05205ae128/1605472816040/Transcript+of+Adulting+with+Cowboy+Bebop.pdf
Some of the relevant references to cultural appropriation show that the discussion was fairly nuanced:
It’s a fine line between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation – which is a serious issue. Just look at the history of Hollywood white washing anime or martial arts movies. And even Cowboy Bebop may have crossed that line. In one episode, we meet a group of characters that were inspired by Blaxploitation films of the 1970s. And Watanabe said, that episode was an homage to movies he loved, like Shaft. But there’s been a debate among the fans about how he handled that genre.
ROLAND: I actually have done a couple of talks about cultural appropriation over here in Japan, because a lot of, uh, Japanese have trouble understanding exactly what the problem is. Most people in Japan consider themselves Japanese, so you’re not really fighting over a national identity. And therefore, if you, if you go up on stage with cowboy boots and 10-gallon hats and uh, sing badly accented version of bluegrass in downtown Ginza in Tokyo, it’s not offensive to the audience at all. It’s charming. It can be funny. And if you get the, if you play a mean mandolin a, you get a lot of, uh, appreciative responses.
Matt Alt says the positive aspects of Cowboy Bebop, and the way it embraces
Western music and movies, fit into a long tradition of cultural exchanges.MATT: There’s this like ping pong of influences going back and forth between Japan and the West forever. I mean like it’s when, when the West first encounter Japanese woodblock prints, like it sparked basically the whole impressionism movement. You have people like Van Gogh and Degas, all of these people incorporating Japanese designs into their stuff. And then Japanese see that and it transforms their art and, you know, and so on and so on. I mean, I think those kinds of cross cultural interpretations where you’re, you know, taking things from abroad and return re-interpreting them through your own eyes and not in a, in a culturally appropriative way, but in a way, because you’re a huge fan yourself are where you get things that are truly transformative, like the original Matrix movies. I mean, the Wakowski siblings were obviously huge fans of, you know, Asian martial arts and anime and kind of digested, all of that stuff into this weird new form that they made into a hit movie.
Or take the 1954 film Seven Samurai. The director Akira Kurosawa was inspired by Hollywood Westerns, but Seven Samurai was so popular in the U.S, it lead to an American remake, The Magnificent Seven. Cowboy Bebop actually referenced that feedback loop in an episode where the crew discovered a ridiculous bounty hunter named Andy, who put on the full cowboy schtick.
The other reason I wanted to watch Cowboy Bebop is because there’s a live action version coming out on Netflix next year. The history of Hollywood adapting anime has been disastrous. But the live action version is going to star John Cho – which is a positive sign they’re not white-washing it. And that made me wonder, if we look at the history of Cowboy Bebop, and how it was made, could the show service as a guide to how cross-cultural exchanges can work?
I have an issue with something said in the podcast. They sas Japanese woodcuts were the cause of Impressionism. Years ago in Art Appreciation*, the professor taught us that the invention of the camera was the cause of Impressionism. That Impressionists no longer felt the need to be ‘photo realistic’ but were instead driven to capture how the subject made them feel.
*It was a fun class taught by a very capable, knowledgable man who obviously enjoyed teaching it. I trust him over some guy on a podcast.
Certainly both can be true.
I advise the OP to check out the Takarazuka production of “Rose Of Versailles” and get back to us on exactly how troubled Japan is on casting whoever to be in whatever whenever.
“The invention of the camera caused Impressionism” is… not wrong, but vastly simplified. There were a lot of things feeding into the rise of Impressionism, just as there are in any major historical movement. But taking that assertion at face value, it’s not enough to simply move away from realism, you need something to move towards - “Let’s not do realism anymore” doesn’t fill a canvas. When the early impressionists were looking for ways to shake up the European art establishment, a lot of them looked to influences from outside of Europe. Claude Monet and Edgar Degas, in particular, drew heavily on elements from Japanese painting and woodcuts, in a movement that became known as Japonism.
I own several iterations of GITS – not including the manga. I do not own the live-action version, despite Scarlett Johansson.
'Nuff said.
I don’t think about this much. There was a Canadian university that held yoga classes for students until some complained this was cultural appropriation. No, not in any meaningful way. People have always borrowed good practices from other cultures, and all cultures have done this. There needs to be considerable insensitivity or a degree of malice for the phrase to have any meaning to me.
As for the example given originally; know nothing about it, nor care to.
Though I never understood the complaints there about Johansson. Part of Ghost in the Shell is that while Kusanagi is originally Japanese she’s also in a full body prosthesis since childhood (with only her brain and spinal cord being organic), so that she could legitimately look like anybody if the prosthesis were changed. (Self identity and effects are of course a different issue.) Whether or not the plot changes are good doesn’t mean that Johansson getting the part is inherently bad.
Anime is not a good fit for this argument because it has traditionally been all about putting westerners into Japanese settings for entertainment. IMO, this was done on purpose because Japanese audiences would not have accepted Asian people (known for showing little emotion as well as being very tolerant and almost too apologetic) doing all the “crazy” things they wanted to have them do. The obnoxious, but often lovable western style characters just made for better entertainment.
It’s an interesting question: if the Japanese people themselves are portraying the characters as western, what happens when they go live action?
I know a guy who’s into a lot of woo alt health stuff, including Reiki. Someone got on his case for the Reiki stuff, accusing him of cultural appropriation. Which I found hilarious, because they both believed that reiki was an objectively real thing with measurable medical benefits. It would be like arguing that only white people can use penicillin because Alexander Flemming found it first. By calling it “culture,” the guy was effectively admitting it was made up.
Not just this, but for yoga specifically, there were many Indian heads of yoga schools who actively promoted their schools in the West.