Hybrid Culture

Hybrid Cultures of the Globalizing World: The Inetavibility of Cultural Appropriation

Cultural appropriation, the borrowing of another culture’s values, is often juxtaposed with the exploitation of a minority’s culture by the dominant. The mergence and convergence of cultures are/is? overlooked as one taking an oppressed culture’s properties without the authority to do so. What this viewpoint fails to see is that “cultural appropriation” paves the way for “transculturation”, the formation of hybrid cultures. Evaluating this exchange as stealing or appropriating merely ignores the fact that the world is formed by different cultures. In a globalizing world, the diffusion of values between cultures is both inevitable and crucial to the existence

A culture is too complex to oversimply its properties to a stereotypical level. John Branch, in his cartoon, exemplifies the bias of humans on different cultures that correlates with cultural clichés (Source C). Many of us tend to associate certain cultures with popularized components: the kimono for the Japanese culture, the fiesta for the Mexican, the cornrows for the African-American. At this point, cultural appropriation that contributes to transculturation shifts to become an assault. Reva Bhatt, in her article named “Dear Coldplay&Beyonce: India Is Not An Orientalist Fantasy” published in Huffington Post, criticizes the artists for belittling and disrespecting the Indian culture by using the cliched “Bollywood Queen” versus the slums (Source E). Bhatt’s criticism points out the fine line between cultural exchange and cultural exploitation: convergence of cultures should be done with respect to one another in order to be beneficial. Jesse Williams, in his BET Awards speech on racism, adds on saying that “this invention called whiteness uses and abuses us, burying black people out of sight and out of mind, while extracting our culture [...] and then trying us on like costumes before discarding ourbodies like rinds of strange fruit” (Source F). “Extracting” a culture and eliminating its origins not only opposes the idea of integrated cultures, it also undermines the identity of a community. The undermining ends up in a superficial adoption of the culture. The diffusion of cultural values should expand to show that there is more to the culture than meets the eye; otherwise it’s nothing but an imitation of the culture’s stereotyped