Cultural appropriation in translation: fashion, race, and the limits of critique

In a discussion of the native intellectual’s search for a national culture that existed before the colonial era, Frantz Fanon argues that colonialism ‘is not satisfied merely with holding people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content’; it also ‘turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it’ (Fanon, [1961] 2001, p. 169). Drawing on Fanon’s work, this paper aims to interrogate the usefulness of ‘cultural appropriation’ as a critical tool and a means of resistance against the persistent legacies of cultural imperialism in a Europe that is being reshaped by neoliberal forms of racial capitalism, white supremacy, and increasingly violent practices of border enforcement and immigration policing. Focusing, as a case study, on the ‘Afterlives of Slavery’ exhibition at the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, as well as on European fashion media discourses surrounding race and culture, this paper seeks to show how ‘cultural appropriation’ furnishes Europe with the privilege and power of producing its own critique—a critique which itself is Eurocentric and exclusionary.

---

About the Symposium: Focusing on European sartorial heritage, its collecting and its archiving practices, the conference Europe and Fashion: Questioning Identities and Cultures explores and contextualises spaces of cultural interactions, displacement and construction of national and transnational identities in the European landscape. In recent years there has been considerable scholarly attention to the inter-relationship between geographical and national identities on the one hand and cultural production on the other hand. Historians, art historians, anthropologists and philologists amongst others have focused on the role of geography, borders, territories and identities for the definition and demarcation of varied artefacts and practices. We contend that fashion will benefit from a similar approach. By assessing the current state of theory, history and practice-based research in the field of fashion studies, the conference will expand the existing knowledge on European identities and European cultures exploring the role of fashion in these cultural formations. The papers reconsider assumptions about the place of fashion in the definition of European cultures and offer new and critical perspectives on the role of fashion in relation to: individual and collective identities, European policies, colonialism and post-colonialism, cultural exchange and transmission, cultural displacement and appropriation, the fashion capital and nation, center and periphery. The papers also address heritage, archives formations and museums as catalyzers of cultural discourses, as well as explore identity formations in Europe in a wider socio-cultural context, both theoretically and historically. The conference Europe and Fashion: Questioning Identities and Cultures involves the world-leading academic institutions, archives and museums, thus encouraging discourse across disciplinary, institutional and national boundaries.