Mahalia Jackson link for HUM 223 final

On our final exam, I have quoted Chicago gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, who once said it made her “so sad and so sick” when she heard a gospel song performed in a nightclub “packed with white people who were laughing and eating and drinking and hand-clapping.” She added, "The dignity of a colored church and of all religion was being debased so that a few people could make some fast money." If you want to know more about what she was thinking that day, it's in an item I posted to Hogfiddle March 11 on "expropriation" and "commodification."

First, we should realize other gospel musicians see nothing wrong with singing in nightclubs. Some of them, in fact, say it's a way of proclaiming the gospel to sinners. And bluegrass bands always include a gospel number in every set. So it's one of those issues where people can have honest differences of opinion.

But while she didn't use the words, Mahalia Jackson clearly thought the gospel music was being commodified and expropriated for financial gain. A couple of big words here for simple concepts. Commodification just means taking something and making a commodity out of it. And a commodity is something you can buy and sell. A lot of the time it's used when things you don't ordinarily find in the marketplace -- in this case, religion -- are improperly bought and sold without due regard for the feeling of people to whom they have a deeper meaning. Expropriation is another word for something we're already familiar with -- cultural appropriation. It's what happens when an art form, or another form of cultural expression, crosses over from one culture to another.

But "expropriation" has more negative connotations. It's used most often in a context of European settlers taking things of spiritual or artistic value from colonized peoples -- for example the ancient Egyptian and Iraqi artifacts in the British Museum in London -- or of white Americans taking over American Indian dances and spiritual practices without giving due compensation to the people who originated them. The fight over "Chief Illiniwek," for example, was a fight over what many Native people saw as cultural expropriation.

On a lighter note, the English girl mentioned in Dennis Bloodworth's book (see below on Nov. 15) who wore a dress on a ferryboat in Hong Kong proclaiming in Chinese characters "Good stuff inside: price cheap" was expropriating something -- in this case, the material the dress was made of -- and losing something in the translation!