Introduction

This book was created for use in the course Humanities 102: Appropriation, Racism, and the Arts, at Minnesota State University Moorhead. It is an approved course in the Minnesota Transfer Curriculum, Goal Area 7: Human Diversity, Race, Power, and Justice in the United States.

This book is an introductory-level survey of its topic. The approach is interdisciplinary. It has been created as an introductory text for a lower division college course in the humanities.

The approach is example-focused, concentrating on the fine arts and popular arts of the United States. The arts are understood very broadly. They include a wide range of expressive communication, ranging from famous paintings and literary works to newspaper editorials and cartoons.

This book has three organizing principles.

(1) First, there is a focus is on artistic and cultural appropriation in the United States. Broadly understood, artistic appropriation is the borrowing and adaptation of earlier art in the process of creating new art. Throughout this book, phrases such as “cultural appropriation” and “voice appropriation” are used in a descriptive, non-evaluative way.

(2) Second, case studies in appropriation serve as a lens for understanding the dominant culture’s stance on race and racial identity. The case studies include fine art on display in America’s art museums, but they also include America’s popular arts. The convergence of appropriation and racism is on display in the mass-produced prints of the 19th century, in paintings hanging in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, in popular films, in social media, in the canon of great American literature, and throughout American popular music. Unfortunately, artistic appropriation has generated a persisting legacy of harmful racial stereotyping and discrimination.

(3) Third, appropriation provides a tactic of response and self-empowerment from non-dominant groups. appropriation is frequently used by non-dominant groups and subcultures as a tool of active resistance against stereotyping and discrimination.

Cultural appropriation creates a permanent historical record of the relationships between dominant cultures and other social groups, such as non-dominant ethnic groups and marginalized subcultures. It also creates an echo chamber, recirculating and amplifying social biases. As a result, patterns of appropriation reveal historical and persisting cultural attitudes and behaviors that involve both oppressive and resistive group dynamics.

By examining appropriation’s role in constructing racial categories and myths in American art and popular entertainment, it is also apparent that racial categories are not fixed. Racial distinctions imposed by one generation are modified by the next. The category of “White” Americans is especially fluid. However, it is important to stress from the start that these racial categories have no biological basis. They are, to a large extent, created by the production and circulation of stereotypes. They also require ongoing reinforcement, which is often done through copying and adapting earlier stereotypes (that is, through ongoing appropriation). However, appropriation and adaptation are used to criticize and resist ongoing stereotyping.

Readers are advised that portions of several chapters are adapted from books made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License. This material is clearly indicated as such at the beginning of those chapters. Consequently, this book is also being made available under that same license.

Outline

Chapter One explains the ideas of artistic appropriation, culture, and cultural appropriation.

Chapter Two explains the distinction between race and ethnicity and how the failure to distinguish them supports racism.

Chapter Three examines how early explorers and colonizers of the Americas used artistic and cultural appropriation to make sense of the Indigenous peoples they encountered, generating problematic content in the process.

Chapter Four examines how a a politically and culturally fractured American society used cultural appropriation to construct unifying myths in the 19th century.

Chapter Five examines how cultural appropriation supported the doctrine of Manifest Destiny as the United States encountered and displaced the Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains.

Chapter Six concentrates on content appropriation. Although it often involves exoticism, and often supports racist ideology about cultural differences, there are notable examples of content appropriation in the late 19th century in which artists use it to challenge prevailing anti-Black racism. Content appropriation is also present when non-dominant groups appropriate from the dominant culture and create a dialogic response to the borrowed material.

Chapter Seven focuses on voice appropriation, which is more narrowly defined than in some recent uses. Here, it is understood to be present in art and communication when it represents someone else’s point of view of someone else. Voice appropriation includes fictional characters who serve as representatives of racial groups. Several animated films created by the Walt Disney Company are used as initial examples. The chapter considers the claims that voice appropriation is always wrong, as well as the idea that it is a kind of theft.  The chapter presents an alternative view in which voice appropriation — including the use of established racial stereotypes — is sometimes used to challenge racism. Generally, the wrong of voice appropriation is less likely to be found in the impact of individual cases than in the cumulative harm that results from negative stereotypes of non-dominant groups.