Mark Reads Discworld

[high eight]

According to 'about.com" cultural appropriation is: - Taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else's culture without permission. This can include unauthorised use of another culture's dance, dress, music, language, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, religious symbols, etc.

Some people take it too far, though.... http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/ent...-video_uk_56fb81e5e4b0c5bd919a7016?edition=uk

 

[raisindot]

According to 'about.com" cultural appropriation is: -Taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else's culture without permission. This can include unauthorised use of another culture's dance, dress, music, language, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, religious symbols, etc.

That's silly. Who do I go to in the Indian community to get legal permission to make curry? Who in the Black community do I negotiate with to get the right to play jazz music, the blues or make hip hop records? I don't even remember anyone asking me for permission to use Yiddish words, play Klezmer music or open a deli? Who in the Norwegian community do I have to sign a contract with to make Lutefisk--er, nevermind.

 

[high eight]

Yes, I wondered about food as well.

Mark has already had a go at PTerry for making a joke about rap and hip/hop in Soul Music (You do have to be black, apparently.),

Other items of cultural appropriation attacked in the US recently include belly dancing, yoga and Gilbert & Sullivan's 'Mikado'

 

[Penfold]

Maybe I'm wrong but it's starting to seem like cultural appropriation is just the latest trendy fashion thing for the easily offended.

Having said that, I did feel a bit uncomfortable watching a white Polish guy trying to speak Jamaican during a dub/reggae session that I was photographing. (He was the 'musician'/singer), btw.) I wasn't offended but the whole accent was an epic fail.

 

[high eight]

Maybe I'm wrong but it's starting to seem like cultural appropriation is just the latest trendy fashion thing for the easily offended.

Me too. A lot of this goes on on tumblir which seems to be home of the easily offended on the net these days.

Having said that, I did feel a bit uncomfortable watching a white Polish guy trying to speak Jamaican during a dub/reggae session that I was photographing. (He was the 'musician'/singer), btw.) I wasn't offended but the whole accent was an epic fail.

Sounds like some of the middle-European 'Irish' folk groups you get on YouTube - Accents from hell

 

[RathDarkblade]

Yes, I wondered about food as well.

Mark has already had a go at PTerry for making a joke about rap and hip/hop in Soul Music (You do have to be black, apparently.),

Other items of cultural appropriation attacked in the US recently include belly dancing, yoga and Gilbert & Sullivan's 'Mikado'

That's silly. What's wrong with G&S's The Mikado? It's not like it attacks the Japanese - it attacks the western (read: late 19th-century British) notions of what Japan is all about!

Bear in mind that Japan was pretty much a closed country from the early 1600s to the 1870s or thereabouts, and the western world (with the exception of scholars) was only re-learning about it after that, and you'll see why this operetta seems crass. It's actually very clever, but people need to understand the cultural background in which it is set.

Sigh. I presume that this backlash against it is because it's perceived as being politically incorrect?

 

[high eight]

Yes, I wondered about food as well.

Mark has already had a go at PTerry for making a joke about rap and hip/hop in Soul Music (You do have to be black, apparently.),

Other items of cultural appropriation attacked in the US recently include belly dancing, yoga and Gilbert & Sullivan's 'Mikado'

That's silly. What's wrong with G&S's The Mikado? It's not like it attacks the Japanese - it attacks the western (read: late 19th-century British) notions of what Japan is all about!

Bear in mind that Japan was pretty much a closed country from the early 1600s to the 1870s or thereabouts, and the western world (with the exception of scholars) was only re-learning about it after that, and you'll see why this operetta seems crass. It's actually very clever, but people need to understand the cultural background in which it is set.

Sigh. I presume that this backlash against it is because it's perceived as being politically incorrect?

It is Europeans dressing up as Japanese that seems to be the main objection. "LIke a minstrel show" somebody said.

 

[RathDarkblade]

Yes, I wondered about food as well.

Mark has already had a go at PTerry for making a joke about rap and hip/hop in Soul Music (You do have to be black, apparently.),

Other items of cultural appropriation attacked in the US recently include belly dancing, yoga and Gilbert & Sullivan's 'Mikado'

That's silly. What's wrong with G&S's The Mikado? It's not like it attacks the Japanese - it attacks the western (read: late 19th-century British) notions of what Japan is all about!

Bear in mind that Japan was pretty much a closed country from the early 1600s to the 1870s or thereabouts, and the western world (with the exception of scholars) was only re-learning about it after that, and you'll see why this operetta seems crass. It's actually very clever, but people need to understand the cultural background in which it is set.

Sigh. I presume that this backlash against it is because it's perceived as being politically incorrect?

It is Europeans dressing up as Japanese that seems to be the main objection. "LIke a minstrel show" somebody said.

That's even sillier. If you're going to attack a stage show because the European performers dress up as Japanese, why attack The Mikado and not Puccini's Madame Butterfly? And why not attack Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio), set in Persia, where the performers are dressed up as Persians - or Puccini's Turandot, where the performers are dressed in Chinese costumes - or Verdi's Aida, where the performers are dressed in "ancient Egyptian" costumes - etc., etc., etc.?

Sigh. People who complain about stage shows don't know what they're talking about. The Mikado, as I have pointed out, does not attack the Japanese - but what the European idea of Japan is. I've performed The Mikado over a dozen times, and no-one has ever complained. The Japanese Prince Komatsu Akihito visited London and saw an 1886 production, and took no offence. When Prince Fushimi Sadanaru made a state visit in 1907, the British government banned performances of The Mikado from London for six weeks, fearing that the play might offend him – a manoeuvre that backfired when the prince complained that he had hoped to see the show during his stay. A Japanese journalist covering the prince's stay attended a proscribed performance and confessed himself "deeply and pleasingly disappointed." Expecting "real insults" to his country, he had found only "bright music and much fun."

The Mikado does not portray any of the characters as being racially inferior or indeed fundamentally any different from British people. The point of the opera is to reflect British culture through the lens of an invented "other", a fantasy Japan that has only the most superficial resemblance to reality. For example, the starting point for the plot of the show is an invented 'Japanese' law against flirting, which makes sense only as a reference to the sexual prudishness of the British culture of the time.

Some people don't have enough to complain about.

 

[high eight]

There is tons of anti-Mikado stuff on the web (mostly from the US). Here is a particularly daft article (not the daftest, though, by a long chalk)

https://charentonthespian.wordpress...ropriation-whitewashing-and-white-heartbreak/

 

[Tonyblack]

It makes me shudder to think of what people would make of The Black and White Minstrel Show that was on TV when I was a kid.

 

[Penfold]

To be fair, The Black and White Minstrel Show was pretty naff and cannot be compared to Gilbert & Sullivan. For the youngsters and overseas boardies here is a short documentary about it which includes the reaction when shown to a modern audience;

Black & White Minstrels

 

[Tonyblack]

I remember Lenny Henry used to appear on the show.

 

[high eight]

Well it has started. i thought the first outrage would come with Colon remembering a previous patrician who wore a dress.

Nope - they are moaning about the 'gay hippo joke', WHAT gay hippo joke?

BTW - I just LURVE the assumption that everything PTerry wrote in his entire life was supposed to be humorous....

 

[=Tamar]

The false assumptions are beyond counting, including the overall assumption that everything a _character_ says was necessarily believed by the _author_. If I could automatically block certain commenters from my screen, I would; as it is, certain threads become DNR. I don't have the ebook but I believe Mark has decided not to read Detritus's accent as written. That may lead to some difficulties later. (Wait'll he meets Igor.)

 

[Tonyblack]

I don't go near the comments these days. I watch the video and read Mark's comments - which I often find insightful - but the comments are a cesspit.

 

[high eight]

The false assumptions are beyond counting, including the overall assumption that everything a _character_ says was necessarily believed by the _author_. If I could automatically block certain commenters from my screen, I would; as it is, certain threads become DNR. I don't have the ebook but I believe Mark has decided not to read Detritus's accent as written. That may lead to some difficulties later. (Wait'll he meets Igor.)

And (as someone once said about Kipling) "To describe is not necessarily to condone"

I'm waiting for Jingo. I bet Mark refuses to say ;towelhead - and the comments............

 

[=Tamar]

So far, so good. Cheery's coming out quietly seems to be the main focus.

 

[RathDarkblade]

The false assumptions are beyond counting, including the overall assumption that everything a _character_ says was necessarily believed by the _author_. If I could automatically block certain commenters from my screen, I would; as it is, certain threads become DNR. I don't have the ebook but I believe Mark has decided not to read Detritus's accent as written. That may lead to some difficulties later. (Wait'll he meets Igor.)

Sigh. I've been writing both prose and poetry ever since I finished high school. If I believed everything I wrote, I would be in two minds about EVERYTHING. :twisted:

In the words of Sir Humphrey: "Bernard, I have served eleven governments in the past thirty years. If I had believed in all their policies, I would have been passionately committed to keeping out of the Common Market, and passionately committed to going into it. I would have been utterly convinced of the rightness of nationalising steel - and of denationalising it, and renationalising it. On capital punishment, I'd have been a fervent retentionist and an ardent abolishionist. I would've been a Keynesian and a Friedmanite, a grammar school preserver and destroyer, a nationalisation freak and a privatisation maniac; but above all, I would have been a stark, staring, raving schizophrenic."

 

[=Tamar]

Sometimes a character is just a character, not a symbol of anything.

 

[=Tamar]

Huh. He is definitely refusing to read Detritus's accent as written. That means he is buying into the stereotype that the accent automatically means the character is stupid, and ignoring pTerry's attempt to show a character with a stereotypical heavy accent as being intelligent. That's a kind of whitewashing. Doing it to a Brooklyn/Northern New Jersey accent is just as bad as doing it to a Southeastern US accent.