In one of his strangest cinema appearances, John Wayne played the founder of the Mongol Empire, Genghis Khan in 1956. Mickey Rooney appears comparably bizarre as a completely overbred acting Japanese in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (1961). Also curious, Jake Gyllenhaal gave the “Prince of Persia” in 2010, Christian Bale four years later gave Moses, and Gerard Butler gave the ancient Egyptian deity Seth in 2016. Natalie Wood played a Puerto Rican in West Side Story (1961) and Burt Lancaster played an Apache warrior in The Maasai (1954). The list of white actors playing non-white roles could be extended indefinitely. While this fact was previously not considered at all and people preferred to debate aesthetic aspects – Wayne’s performance in the badly acclaimed film “The Conqueror”, for example, was considered a complete failure – the now self-evident question is: are they allowed to do that?
The discussion about the children’s books for the film “The Young Chief Winnetou” recently showed once again what to expect as soon as the accusation of cultural appropriation or racism is raised. At the party conference of the Berlin Greens last year, Bettina Jarasch spoke about biographical influences. “What did you want to be before you wanted to be Governing Mayor?” Was one of the questions she was asked. The answer: “As a child, I would have liked to have been an Indian chief.” The immediate outburst of indignation was followed, of course, by the prompt apology: “I condemn my unthinking choice of words and my unthinking childhood memories, which can hurt others.”
The party congress then discussed how a harmless retrospect could so quickly turn into a scandal. Strictly speaking, as Jens Balzer notes in his essay “Ethics of Appropriation”, there was no discussion at the time because, quite foreseeably, two fronts were irreconcilably opposed: those who find the handling of Jarasch’s admission “hysterical, dogmatic and anti-democratic” , and those who can understand the resentment “because they view white people’s fascination with ‘Native Americanism’ within a larger historical framework that points beyond childhood and fairy tale fantasies into the centuries-old history of colonialism.” In this way, cultural appropriation quickly becomes the springboard for fundamental disputes, in which conservative contemporaries accuse the left of terminal obsession while the latter suspect racism in their opponents.
Culture arises from the appropriation of other cultures
Taking Susan Scafidi’s pertinent definition of “cultural appropriation” as a basis, questions soon arise: “Cultural appropriation, that is: when one uses someone else’s intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions or artifacts in order to use them to to serve one’s own taste, to express one’s own individuality or simply: to make a profit from it.” According to the American lawyer’s understanding, appropriation involves expropriation. Scafidi claims there is a right to ownership of knowledge and cultural expressions. On the one hand there are the owners as a unified collective subject, on the other hand the thieves, including the child disguised as an Indian. But how do you want to define where belonging begins and ends here? In Scafidi’s sense, a certain culture marks a realm to which one belongs completely – or to which one faces one as a stranger.
