The deceptively anodyne term “cultural appropriation,” borrowed from academic jargon, doesn’t in itself convey the gravity it holds in certain circles. According to the online magazine Everyday Feminism, it describes “a particular power dynamic in which members of a dominant culture take elements from a culture of people who have been systematically oppressed by that dominant group.” The idea results in a rubric that determines who is and is not allowed to engage in particular behaviors. Can you cook pho? Can you teach yoga? Can you wear your hair in cornrows? It depends on which culture you belong to. If you belong to a “dominant culture,” you really shouldn’t do any of that....
It may come as some surprise on both sides of the battlefield, but the left has not always understood “cultural appropriation” as a form of oppression.... But when it first came into use, “cultural appropriation” denoted very nearly the opposite of its contemporary meaning.
The idea preceded the term, as a product of the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. For thinkers like Stuart Hall, cultural appropriation described the way subcultures were created. The contemporary objects of inquiry... were youth cultures in England: teddy boys, mods, skinheads and so on. But the precedents ran deeper. Indian food in England, Negro spirituals in America, bathhouses in 19th-century France – these were all contexts in which members of what we might now call “marginalized groups” used elements of a dominant culture in altered forms, generating their own communities that could hide in plain sight.
The phrase “cultural appropriation” became typical of academic cultural studies in the 1990’s... It was a cornerstone of the work of scholars... who used it to describe the “creative acts” of African slaves in 18th-century Virginia in the formation of an “oppositional culture.” George Lipsitz made similar use of the concept in his studies on African-American music... But the idea had been theorized in extensive detail in 1979, in Dick Hebdige’s foundational study, Subculture.
Hebdige, once a student at Birmingham, described mass-produced commodities as being “open to a double inflection.” As he elaborated:
These “humble objects” can be magically appropriated; “stolen” by subordinate groups and made to carry “secret” meanings: meanings which express, in code, a form of resistance to the order which guarantees their continued subordination.
Hebdige’s primary informants were punks in late-seventies London, a group that was constituted not by ethnicity, but by voluntary participation.
Subculture traces the spectrum of appropriation practiced by London punks, beginning with their most mundane symbol, safety pins. These innocent implements were “taken out of their domestic ‘utility’ context and worn as gruesome ornaments.” The book concludes with the most charged symbol the punks adopted, possibly the most charged symbol in western culture: the swastika.
Hebdige’s claim was that punks didn’t wear the swastika in representation of a right-wing ideology. Instead, it was a naive method of distancing themselves from the culture of their parents... Hebdige quotes a young punk... explaining that she wore a swastika simply because “punks just like to be hated.”
The passage of time allows us to draw some conclusions about potential outcomes of cultural appropriation. For many years, safety pins became inextricably associated with punks, perhaps even more so than with seamstresses. As for the swastika, it’s probably safe to say most former punks are not all that proud of having once worn one – its previous connotations were not so easily overwritten.
But forty years later, safety pins and swastikas are appearing again, for entirely different reasons....
