Whose Culture Is It?

It has been argued that culture itself is born from appropriation. Recently, though, there have been some painful and complex debates about what is fair or foul when it comes to literature, fashion and art.

“Underlying the idea of appropriation is the sense that something — or someone — is just there for the taking: A style of dress, a personal narrative, an entire continent,” Anna Holmes wrote in The Times. “You can’t always prove appropriation. But you usually know it when you see it.”

Plenty of people thought they saw it in an editorial by Hal Niedzviecki, who lost his job as editor of the magazine Write because of it. In it, he said: “Anyone, anywhere, should be encouraged to imagine other peoples, other cultures, other identities. I’d go so far as to say there should even be an award for doing so — the Appropriation Prize for best book by an author who writes about people who aren’t even remotely like her or him.”

Were there such an award, there might also need to be a category for fashion so Chanel could enter its $1,325 boomerang featuring its double C logo. This inflamed the internet, The Times reported, prompting one observer to comment on Twitter: “Cultural appropriation sure is getting expensive these days.”

The French fashion brand issued an apology, saying “it was not our intention to disrespect the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community and the significance of the boomerang as a cultural object.”

Chanel didn’t stop selling the boomerang, but at least nobody would confuse its glossy black wood-andresin version of the ancient weapon with art, where the lines are more blurry and more difficult to debate.

Should a white woman paint a picture of a black child? Can a photographer tell the truth through his lens if he’s shooting a culture other than his own? The author Kenan Malik defended this kind of appropriation in The Times, saying it’s more of a messy interaction than theft.

“Nobody owns a culture,” he wrote, “but everyone inhabits one, and in inhabiting a culture, one finds the tools for reaching out to other cultures.” He added, “It is difficult to see how creating gated cultures helps promote social justice.”

Teju Cole doesn’t call for any walls to be built, but he wrote in The Times that there is a responsibility that’s taken when co- opting such things, calling it invasive and often violent. He said the argument that artists have a responsibility to tell one another’s stories is “seductive but flawed” and added: “The responsibility toward other people’s stories is real and inescapable, but that doesn’t mean that appropria- tion is the way to satisfy that responsibility. In fact, the opposite is true: Telling the stories in which we are complicit outsiders has to be done with imagination and skepticism.”

But an outsider may have an inherent advantage, the author Rivka Galchen wrote in The Times. “One reason art tends to come from looking outward and not just inward is that we’re always speaking from a shaky authority,” she wrote, “even when narrating our own experiences — maybe especially when narrating just ourselves.”

She cited the French author Gustave Flaubert and the Russian author Leo Tolstoy as examples of people who appropriated so well that nobody seems to care.

“To be entirely against taking anything from another culture,”Ms. Galchen wrote, “would be to condemn everything to memoir — and of all the genres of literature, I think memoir deserves the reputation for being the least true.”