I was working on comments on the previous post, but then Eredien made this new one, so I'm going to put my comments here. Whee!
Personally --- after reading zooeylive's article (which I appreciated) and mulling it over for a while, I don't think I can say much without seeing it and knowing what is actually in the film. A couple places in Paley's notes make me wince, and zooeylive and their commenters point out those places and others, but I think what matters most to me is how the film itself deals with the issues of colonialism and "eating the other" in its creation. Reading about it and looking at a couple of bits on YouTube, it seems like the many-voiced commentary over the top as part of the storytelling has the potential to open up interesting conversation about the process of working with the story and the potential harm for presenting it in an American market as many people's (mine included) first awareness of the Ramayana. On the other hand, maybe it doesn't at al. I don't feel qualified to say from the trailers or the text, even after reading the critique and Paley's blog, whether I find the film problematic or not, and whether the problems with it might outweigh or be outweighed by any artistic merit it might have. I don't take either zooeylive or the gushing fan letters as authoritative.
I do think that the fact that my first awareness of the Ramayana --- I'd seriously never heard about this before --- comes from a white woman retelling the story in terms of her own life is a problem and a symptom of colonialism. I am not convinced that Paley's discovering that story and working with it and through it is wrong. To say, for example, "if she found the story moving she could have distributed this other telling by a different author instead" feels a little hollow to me: Paley is an author/artist, not a publisher/distributor (although apparently she's taken some of that role on in order to display her art). They're really very different skillsets, and different drives, although they can also be intertwined. I also think "she should have gone and used the Iliad instead" is hollow: the story that hit her and that she researched (though perhaps not enough --- of course, who gets to set these metrics? ) is the story she wrote.
Thinking about this made me return to bell hooks's Art on My Mind: visual politics, specifically the pieces on Alison Saar; the details of Saar's work and why this is related are outside the scope of this LiveJournal comment, but worth reading about, in my opinion. (They were already dogeared, so apparently this isn't my first time coming back here.) hooks offers these thoughts not just about Saar but about appropriation in general:
"In the essay 'Minimal Selves,' the black British cultural critic Stuart Hall affirms this: 'It may be true that the self is always, in a sense, a fiction, just as the kind of "closures" which are required to create communities of identification --- nation, ethnic group, families, sexualities, etc. --- are arbitrary closures; and the forms of political action, whether movements, or parties, those too are temporary, partial, arbitrary. It is an immensely important gain when one recognizes that all identity is constructed across difference.' Given this reality, acts of appropriation are part of the process by which we make ourselves. Appropriating --- taking something for one's own use --- need not be synonymous with exploitation. This is especially true of cultural appropriation. The "use" one makes of what is appropriated is the crucial factor.
"These days is is often assumed that any act of appropriation wherein one ethnic group draws on experiences of an ethnic group to which they do not belong is suspect. Issues of authenticity are raised to devalue work that emerges from cultural borrowings. For a more expansive understanding of cultural appropriation to emerge in this society, critical thinkers would need to construct both a revised ontology and radically different theories of knowledge." (11-12)
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29/12/08 06:07 (UTC)Personally --- after reading zooeylive's article (which I appreciated) and mulling it over for a while, I don't think I can say much without seeing it and knowing what is actually in the film. A couple places in Paley's notes make me wince, and zooeylive and their commenters point out those places and others, but I think what matters most to me is how the film itself deals with the issues of colonialism and "eating the other" in its creation. Reading about it and looking at a couple of bits on YouTube, it seems like the many-voiced commentary over the top as part of the storytelling has the potential to open up interesting conversation about the process of working with the story and the potential harm for presenting it in an American market as many people's (mine included) first awareness of the Ramayana. On the other hand, maybe it doesn't at al. I don't feel qualified to say from the trailers or the text, even after reading the critique and Paley's blog, whether I find the film problematic or not, and whether the problems with it might outweigh or be outweighed by any artistic merit it might have. I don't take either zooeylive or the gushing fan letters as authoritative.
I do think that the fact that my first awareness of the Ramayana --- I'd seriously never heard about this before --- comes from a white woman retelling the story in terms of her own life is a problem and a symptom of colonialism. I am not convinced that Paley's discovering that story and working with it and through it is wrong. To say, for example, "if she found the story moving she could have distributed this other telling by a different author instead" feels a little hollow to me: Paley is an author/artist, not a publisher/distributor (although apparently she's taken some of that role on in order to display her art). They're really very different skillsets, and different drives, although they can also be intertwined. I also think "she should have gone and used the Iliad instead" is hollow: the story that hit her and that she researched (though perhaps not enough --- of course, who gets to set these metrics? ) is the story she wrote.
Thinking about this made me return to bell hooks's Art on My Mind: visual politics, specifically the pieces on Alison Saar; the details of Saar's work and why this is related are outside the scope of this LiveJournal comment, but worth reading about, in my opinion. (They were already dogeared, so apparently this isn't my first time coming back here.) hooks offers these thoughts not just about Saar but about appropriation in general:
"In the essay 'Minimal Selves,' the black British cultural critic Stuart Hall affirms this: 'It may be true that the self is always, in a sense, a fiction, just as the kind of "closures" which are required to create communities of identification --- nation, ethnic group, families, sexualities, etc. --- are arbitrary closures; and the forms of political action, whether movements, or parties, those too are temporary, partial, arbitrary. It is an immensely important gain when one recognizes that all identity is constructed across difference.' Given this reality, acts of appropriation are part of the process by which we make ourselves. Appropriating --- taking something for one's own use --- need not be synonymous with exploitation. This is especially true of cultural appropriation. The "use" one makes of what is appropriated is the crucial factor.
"These days is is often assumed that any act of appropriation wherein one ethnic group draws on experiences of an ethnic group to which they do not belong is suspect. Issues of authenticity are raised to devalue work that emerges from cultural borrowings. For a more expansive understanding of cultural appropriation to emerge in this society, critical thinkers would need to construct both a revised ontology and radically different theories of knowledge." (11-12)
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