cultural appropriation

plural cultural appropriations

1. countableuncountablehuman sciencesThe (often financially) exploitative, oppressive and/or inaccurate cooption of elements of one culture by members of a different culture, often of those which have a history of stigmatisation.

   White Americans engaged in cultural appropriation when they performed dances involving blackface and mock Native American regalia.

   4 more examples

   What are the implications for our understanding of the ethics of cultural appropriation when the sound of a Pacific island women's choir becomes the hook of a club hit in Europe, without reward, recompense, or credit for that choir?

   2000, David Hesmondhalgh, in Born/Hesmondhalgh, Western Music and Its Others, p. 280

   Are yoga classes just bad cultural appropriation?

   2015, The Guardian, headline, 23 November

   Where, then, is the line that divides the simple pleasure of cultural fusion from cultural appropriation? One answer is that it becomes appropriation when one group's sense of "normal" inexplicably and unfairly dominates over another.

   2015 April 2, Navneet Alang, “Must We Forfeit Our Ghee?”, in Hazlitt, retrieved 14 May 2023

   The party guests were subsequently investigated by the college for ‘ethnic stereotyping’ and placed on ‘social probation’, while the students' general assembly denounced the event as an act of ‘cultural appropriation’.

   2016 November, Frances Wilson, “Whose Life Is It Anyway?”, in Literary Review