If you have issues with the particulars of Zooeylive's post, I suggest you take them up with her, at her blog, rather than here, where you can muster your white friends to back up your feelings of injured entitlement.
As a white woman, I feel that I am being discouraged from a deeper understanding of other cultures' creative works by people from the very cultures those works are from. Hence, I feel discouraged from cultivating an ability to appreciate the works and/or relate to them in the (limited) ways that I might be able to.
So "understanding" requires appropriation? I.e. an entitlement to exploit and benefit from the use of those works according to your own wishes.
The rest of that passage is a meditation on your own anxieties about having your sense of entitlement curtailed. Those aren't the responsibility of people of colour, they're your responsibility. I find it perplexing that your thoughts about the issue are so self-involved as to completely exclude any consideration of the needs of people whose work you would be appropriating.
Many people, both white and poc, have answered those anxieties, as a quick Google search about "white privilege and cultural appropriation" would reveal a wealth of relevant, up-to-date, and comprehensive material about the issues. It's not my job to educate you about your whiteness and your privilege. If you spent half the energy you've just spent expounding your racial anxieties on actually listening to anti-racist critique, you might figure something out.
Does anyone of any skin color have a personal obligation to anyone else of a different skin color, based simply on the color of the skin and its associated historical/cultural/linguistic heritage/baggage?
It's called anti-racism. And it's not about skin.
I feel like it's important--maybe even paramount--to keep the fact that this is one white woman artist's personal interpretation of another culture's epic in mind when watching it
You were not only advocating watching it, but organising a screening of it. Are you prepared to take responsibility for how each and every person who walks into the cinema sees it, acts upon it, and treats the people of colour (particularly South Asian people) in their lives? Are you prepared to redistribute the rewards (both material and psychic) of this act of appropriation towards eradicating the inequalities which make it so problematic? Are you aware that the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house?
Yes, that's hard work. But Empire wasn't built in a day, and dismantling it will probably take longer.
no subject
As a white woman, I feel that I am being discouraged from a deeper understanding of other cultures' creative works by people from the very cultures those works are from. Hence, I feel discouraged from cultivating an ability to appreciate the works and/or relate to them in the (limited) ways that I might be able to.
So "understanding" requires appropriation? I.e. an entitlement to exploit and benefit from the use of those works according to your own wishes.
And I think your anxieties are a product of your rather extensive personal biases.
The rest of that passage is a meditation on your own anxieties about having your sense of entitlement curtailed. Those aren't the responsibility of people of colour, they're your responsibility. I find it perplexing that your thoughts about the issue are so self-involved as to completely exclude any consideration of the needs of people whose work you would be appropriating.
Many people, both white and poc, have answered those anxieties, as a quick Google search about "white privilege and cultural appropriation" would reveal a wealth of relevant, up-to-date, and comprehensive material about the issues. It's not my job to educate you about your whiteness and your privilege. If you spent half the energy you've just spent expounding your racial anxieties on actually listening to anti-racist critique, you might figure something out.
Look, your feelings are not new or special:
http://www.vectormagazine.co.uk/article.asp?articleID=29
http://www.crsi.mq.edu.au/people/staff/documents/Gaynesh-PostcolonialStudies.pdf
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/SydLRev/1997/30.html
http://www.irosf.com/q/zine/article/10087
http://www.writingtheother.com/
Does anyone of any skin color have a personal obligation to anyone else of a different skin color, based simply on the color of the skin and its associated historical/cultural/linguistic heritage/baggage?
It's called anti-racism. And it's not about skin.
I feel like it's important--maybe even paramount--to keep the fact that this is one white woman artist's personal interpretation of another culture's epic in mind when watching it
You were not only advocating watching it, but organising a screening of it. Are you prepared to take responsibility for how each and every person who walks into the cinema sees it, acts upon it, and treats the people of colour (particularly South Asian people) in their lives? Are you prepared to redistribute the rewards (both material and psychic) of this act of appropriation towards eradicating the inequalities which make it so problematic? Are you aware that the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house?
Yes, that's hard work. But Empire wasn't built in a day, and dismantling it will probably take longer.