The blues, Elvis and a cheap Chinese dress / HUM 223 READ BEFORE FINAL EXAM (BTW, DID YOU NOTICE THE HINT?)

One of the concepts we've been dealing with in HUM 223 is cultural appropriation. It can be controversial, and there are subtle issues raised by it, but basically it's simple. It's what happens when something crosses over from one culture to another. It's one of those subjects the contributors to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, have argued about and changed from time to time in efforts to reach a consensus. But here's how Wikipedia defines it now:

Cultural appropriation is the adoption of some specific elements of one culture by a different cultural group. It denotes acculturation or assimilation, but often connotes a negative view towards acculturation from a minority culture by a dominant culture. It can include the introduction of forms of dress or personal adornment, music and art, religion, language, or social behavior. These elements, once removed from their indigenous cultural contexts, may take on meanings that are significantly divergent from, or merely less nuanced than, those they originally held. Or, they may be stripped of meaning altogether.

The Wikipedia article is worth reading all the way through. (Speaking of final exam hints, did you notice how I very thoughfully provided you with a link here?) It gives examples ranging from Elvis Presley and Eminem to Arab keffiyeh headdresses and "the use of real or imaginary elements of Native American culture" by non-Indians. (Chief Illiniwek has been edited out of it, at least for the time being.) But music is one of the primary forms of cultural appropriation all over the world. Certainly American popular music has been a product of cultural appropriation for nearly 200 years, as white musicians appropriated the sound of black spirituals, plantation cakewalks, ragtime, jazz, blues, R&B and, now, hip hop.

Is that a good thing? Is it a bad thing? Well, yes and no. It's good because the music that all of us enjoy is richer for it, but it's not so good when black artists -- or their cultural forms of expression -- get ripped off. Sometimes it's subtle, as occurred when a talented singer like Big Mama Thornton didn't make near as much money off of her jump blues version of "Hound Dog," which sold to a primarily black audience in 1952, as Elvis did when his cover of the same song reached massive white audiences and made No. 1 song on pop, R&B and country charts in 1956. Other times, it's in your face.

So cultural appropriation, like Keats' idea of beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

One of my favorite examples of cultural appropriation comes not from music, and not from America, but a book by an English journalist named Dennis Bloodworth. He was a foreign correspondent for The Observer, a London newspaper, who spent many years in China and married a Chinese woman named Ping. In a 1967 book titled "The Chinese Looking Glass," Bloodworth explored such myths as Chinese who "cannot distinguish between 'L' and 'R' ... laugh when they are sad, and cry when they are happy," and he gave a sympathetic description of Chinese culture from the viewpoint of someone who could appreciate both an insider's and an outsider's perspective. He recalls traveling with his wife:

The best illustration of the dangers of cultural poaching was provided by an English girl we saw on the Star Ferry in Hong Kong ten years ago, wearing a smart little cotton frock, the material plain except for the same string of Chinese characters repeated at intervals. Ping looked sad, and I asked her what was so funny. The stuff had evidently been hanging in a shop window, she said. I objected that there was nothing very odd about that. No, she said, except you see the characters say: "Good stuff inside: price cheap." (8-9)

Poaching, of course, is hunting without a license. Like beauty and cultural appropriation, it's in the eye of the beholder.