Cultural Appropriation: Fashion, Race, and the Limits of Critique

The contemporary debate around fashion and cultural appropriation is a highly inflammatory, reactionary debate that defies any attempt at historical contextualisation. One can always argue, through in-depth historical investigation, that what is allegedly appropriated is not the exclusive property of a specific community but an already appropriated product of what Edward Said calls ‘overlapping territories, intertwined histories’, that is, ‘the interdependence of cultural terrains in which colonizer and colonized coexisted and battled each other through projections as well as rival geographies, narratives, and histories’ (Said 1993, p. xxii). In his analysis of production, Karl Marx explains how the members of society appropriate ‘the products of nature in accord with human needs . . . and finally, in consumption, the products become objects of gratification, of individual appropriation’ (Marx, 1978, p. 227). Marx also explores the appropriation of living labour by machinery, by objectified labour –an appropriation which together with the worker’s propertylessness is the fundamental condition of the bourgeois mode of production (Marx, 1978, p. 293). Thus, both Marx and Said are devoted to historicising appropriation, seeing it as a phenomenon determined by history –by colonialism in Said’s account and by the bourgeois mode of production in Marx’s writings.

Contemporary fashion media discourse around cultural appropriation, however, does not seem to be interested in historicising the phenomenon of culture. The debate as it keeps striking back through the volatile space of social media is momentary and very emotional, conveying a powerful sense of anger, excitement and possessiveness –a politics, in other words, of what Achille Mmembe calls viscerality (Nilsen, T. & Bangstad, S., 2019).

Thus, drawing on Marxist and post-colonial theory, this paper will explore the meaning of this shift from a historically embedded understanding of appropriation to an incendiary, everyday politics of experience and viscerality. In doing so, the paper will conceptualise appropriation in its relationship with affects and history, interrogating its critical value in terms of confronting fashion’s inequalities in the era of neoliberal racial capitalism.