This season, I'll be mostly wearing ...
Photo (detail) by Spencer Platt
Those on the woke-left are usually very sensitive about the idea of cultural appropriation - i.e., the borrowing (or theft) of elements belonging to a minority culture by members of a majority culture and the parading of these elements in a manner that is both inauthentic and disrespectful in that it disregards any context of meaning.
It is, say those who speak out against it, another form of colonialism in which marginalised and oppressed peoples are robbed of
their identity and intellectual property rights, or reduced
to the humiliated status of exotic other [1].
However, many of these same people are happy to wear a keffiyeh in order to show their support of the Palestinians. For this, they say, is not cultural appropriation, it is rather an act of cultural celebration and political solidarity.
I have to admit, I'm not entirely convinced by this ...
For one suspects there's a certain hypocrisy at work here and the creation of a double standard based on the (questionable) belief that it's okay to don Arab headgear when one is on a protest march, but not when one is attending a fancy dress party.
In other words, if one is (posing as) an angry militant, fighting for social justice and to preserve the dream of Revolution - or if one acts in the sincere belief that one's ideology is grounded in Truth - then, apparently, all your actions can be justified.
But for those of us who recall Tom Wolfe's essay on radical chic [2], what we are witnessing now on university campuses in the West is just another form of posturing and performance on behalf of privileged young people searching for a fashionable cause via which they can signal their virtue; be that BLM or freeing Gaza.
As Kat Rosenfield writes, it's almost a parody of the student activism of the 1960s; more live action role playing in front of the TV cameras than real protest [3].
But it's also, of course, the chance to feel powerful and to pretend your life has some purpose; the opportunity for comraderie and community. But when this bonding exercise involves the bullying and intimidation of Jewish students, then maybe its time to remove the keffiyehs and stop larping for Palestine.
Notes
[1] Cultural appropriation is something I have discussed and written in defence of elsewhere on Torpedo the Ark. See, for example, the post published on 5 August 2016: click here.
[2] See the post 'Radical Chic: On Puncturing the Fourth Wall of Excess and Spectacle with AOC' (15 Sept 2021), in which I refer to Wolfe's essay from 1970: click here.
[3] Kat Rosenfield, 'Columbia is a parody of radical activism: LARPing students care more about partying than Palestine', UnHeard, (26 April 2024): click here.
For a related post to this one, click here.
Your opening point about cultural appropriation and political sympathy has something interesting in it. It's just a pity your post descends so quickly after that into dubious polemic about the trajectory of political protest and cynical/reductive bitterness about 'virtue-signalling' in a way that reads to me as a kind of po-faced posturing itself.
ReplyDeleteI've no clear idea where, why and how you are drawing a line between 'larping' and 60s political protest, or its ('good') historic and 'parodic' modern form. In fact, what is striking in the US in particular in light of the extraordinary authoritarianism of academic administrations and law enforcement is what these students are risking and/or actually experiencing: counter-protestor violence; arrest; suspension; expulsion etc. Another key element of these protests has been students' highly commendable and principled attempts to compel universities to withhold their tuition fees from Israeli-supporting arms-manufacturing companies - something you seem to overlook or be ignorant of.* In fact, their action exposes the frightening fragility of liberal freedom and the underlying hatred of academic institutions when faced by protest that if anything is too real.
Protest against totalitarian murder is not 'virtue-signalling', and assembling on the basis of conscience and collective resolution is to be applauded, not sneered at. Perhaps you would also like to explain the difference between having a 'real' purpose in life and pretending to have one and how you (or anyone) get to legislate this? To me, it reeks of superiority and contempt.
In the meantime, so that TTA's readers can be assisted to explore the topic in a balanced way, here are some video extracts of attacks on Palestinian protests in recent days by Jewish/Zionist sympathisers:
1. Racist/threatening intimidation by Trump flag- waving counter-protestor cretins toward pro-Palestinian rally at University of Mississippi:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOD8rsDl2xI
2. Pro-Israel mob attacks Palestinian encampment on UCLA campus:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmekbcw-_Vg
3. Pro-Palestinian protesters arrested at Yale:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNQaqf2oFp8
* In a historic agreement, Trinity College Dublin recently agreed to divest from all fiscal partnerships with the Israeli war machine. See below:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cv2jlp9yl7zo
Ooh, "cynical/reductive bitterness [and] po-faced posturing" - never any of that in your commentary of course ...
DeleteI would've thought that, as a football fan, you might have been attuned to spotting simulation ...
Amusing to see you write of liberal freedom (and its fragility) in light of your support for intifada and revolution.
If protesting against violent totalitarian governments is to be applauded, then why not speak out about the politico-military movement governing the Gaza Strip since 2007 (and which has refused to hold elections since this date)?
If, as you have insisted elsewhere, there is a clear and absolute distinction to be made between Jews and Zionists then why now do you bring the two terms together, separated only by a stroke in the phrase "Jewish/Zionist sympathisers"?
Finally, see the recent post which addresses the actions of Trinity College Dublin:
https://torpedotheark.blogspot.com/2024/05/a-brief-history-of-irishjewish.html
So much for your stated desire to let your commentators have the last word - I guess your claim to be as 'bored' as you say you are in your Gideon Falter posts on these topics is as disingenuous as I thought, and actually you're just as triggered as you sound by my ongoing criticism. The latest comment here reads to me as more of your usual table-turning and petty point-scoring than anything else.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, and unsurprisingly, the situation re the Palestinian Authority and elections is much more complex than you present (as a starting point, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Palestine) - not aided by the Israelis' pesky, decades-long propensities to imprison, depopulate, terrorise and exterminate those who might be lucky enough to vote in them. As you must know, there is also the international issue concerning the mere political recognition of Gaza as a sovereign entity (currently only 142 of the 193 UN member states do so) in any event. Good to know you believe democracy conquers all, however.
For my part, I have already stated elsewhere that it is for the Palestinian people as a whole to determine to what extent, if at all, their interests and future are represented by Hamas, and I would be in favour of greater democratisation of their territories once the menace of Israeli militarism and murderous expansionism has been curtailed, which is of course the main driver of radicalisation in Gaza right now. However, I have never written anywhere in direct support for 'intifada', as you claim, so this is further evidence for your preferring polemic and provocation over nuance and detail and your refusal/inability to read properly.
Finally, I have seen the mealy-mouthed and insulting post about the successful student action at TCD, which I may make brief comment on in due course, though I found it pretty unappetising (as much, I suspect, as you intended me to).
Shall we add these to the growing list of negative character traits I possess: disingenuous; petty; mealy-mouthed. Oh, and an 'inability to read properly'.
Delete(What's that saying about attacking the opponent rather than the ball ...?)
"I have never written anywhere in direct support for 'intifada' ..." I note the subtle (some might say sly) insertion of the word 'direct' in this sentence.
For whilst maybe that's technically true, you have, Simon, openly declared your support for pro-Palestinian protestors who regularly chant (as I'm sure you're aware): 'There is only one solution - intifada, revolution!'
Finally, how odd you should imagine the recent post on the students larping for Palestine at TCD was intended to be 'unappetising' to you ...
Thank you also for highlighting the Arabic word 'intifada' in this context, which I wanted to briefly also pick up on, and whose meanings - historic and contemporary - are far more complex than you appear to be aware. In fact, it has also become as luridly distorted in the Western context as the word 'jihad' (meaning 'struggle'). Critically minded readers of TTA who are interested to explore the complexity here may find it rewarding to look at this scholarly and engaging article by Mira Fox (responding to the Trump-supporting Elise Stefanik's moronic and deeply dangerous statement to Congress that 'intifada' was to be automatically equated with genocide - a line of attack she also pursued in her interrogation of Harvard University President Claudine Gay), writing on forward.com, the Jewish online journal/organisation.
DeleteStefanik v Gay
https://stefanik.house.gov/2023/12/icymi-stefanik-demands-answers-from-harvard-president-claudine-gay-on-harvard-s-failure-to-condemn-antisemitism-and-anti-israel-attacks-on-campus
Mira Fox on the complex term 'intifada'
https://forward.com/culture/573654/intifada-arabic-israeli-hamas-war-meaning-linguistics/#:~:text=Intifada%20connotes%20an%20uprising%20against,the%20monarchy%20at%20the%20time.
Of course, words often have layers of meaning.
DeleteBut I'm not sure those who carried out suicide bombings during the Second Intifada - or their victims - would share your scholarly concern with linguistic complexity ...
Words are not just words, or, if you prefer, and as Beckett stated, words are all we have. As such, they're complex vehicles that can be debased and distorted as weapons, and it's you who picked up on the word 'intifada' in any case, so I am reflecting the implications (and, to use your word, responsibilities) of doing so back to you. My point is that ignorance of (and, worse, resistance to) this historical, cultural and political complexity, while significantly limiting the sophistication and reach of any cultural analysis, is part of the problem in sponsoring your broad-brush polemics, and also potentially sets the scene for losses of nuances and shades of interpretation elsewhere. Worryingly, you'd sooner pick up and snap away at a typographic error on my part around the name of Rosa Parks (which was also irrelevant to any of the argumentation), whereas, when you're given the opportunity to explore and respond to the real complexity surrounding a crucial and controversial term with reference to contemporary informed thinking (not merely 'my' thinking), you lack the patience, passion and humility to do so. I know you're just writing a blog, one that is often fascinating and bitingly bright, but it's just not good enough. It's also the kind of thing, I suggest, that means individuals like yourselves get lured into Islamophobic/far right thinking through identification of all Muslims with fundamentalist terrorism by means of a crudification of the above stated controversies and complexities.
DeleteAs I always emphasise in my role as an EAP teacher, the cultivation of curiosity, complexity and criticality are the watchwords of any intelligent writing. Hopefully, some of my generous commentary, in its own modest ways, is an attempt to stimulate this for other readers at least.
PS Re 'Jewish/Zionist', and on an interesting point of notational precision, the forward slash used as an 'exclusive/disjunctive or' is well attested:
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash_(punctuation)#XOR
What you (I would suggest narcissistically) characterise as attacks on your person are actually critiques of your writing (its tone as much as its content) in the context of your role as TTA's sole writer, which I try as far as possible to append to concrete observations and arguments about same - the ones, as I've further observed, you tend to bat back to/at me when you don't want to deal with them. Of course, at the same time, these are the (to some extent) subjective remarks of one reader, and as such you and other readers can and will take or leave them as you see fit and/or the limits of your own propensity/capacity for self-reflection.
ReplyDeleteAs you like to present yourself as a proponent of literary style, I'm glad you recognise my capacity for subtlety in writing (or 'slyness' in your own equivocal - some might say back-handed - alternative). In this domain, it takes one to know one, I would suggest, as I see a lot of this kind of thing in your own cleverness and hair-splitting on TTA and in private emails. Either way, I like the idea of one of my guardian animals being by implication the cunning fox, thinking here of Ted Hughes' 'Thought-Fox', whose nose moves 'Cold [and] 'delicately as the dark snow'.
Sympathy with a political approach (and even then, never wholly uncritically, or closing one's eyes and ears to a degree of complexity) obviously does not mean endorsing all of its participants' statements or slogans. As an enthusiast of Nietzsche and Lawrence who often identifies 'his' views with theirs, does this mean you agree with and endorse all of their literary and/or philosophical statements, for example? Moreover, as someone who engages far more in polemics and provocation than argument/counter-argument (which, as you've recently told TTA readers, 'bores' you after as a few as four or five comments that challenge you), and as you're clearly aware, a degree of strategic one-sidedness (and even sometimes even a measure of exaggeration) is sometimes needed in service of a repressed or violated position or group, as Kierkegaard and Derrida in their different ways understood. For example, in the UK, the self-evidently Islamophobic media bias that results in the over-reporting of alleged anti-semitism in the Labour Party under a traditional left-wing leader while allowing a former and clearly corrupt Tory Prime Minister who referred to British Islamic women as resembling 'letterboxes' to evade the rule of law and remain in a job means that 'even-handedness' in one's own criticality is actually collusive with same and wilfully stupid.
PS As a Dublin (now Dublin outskirts) dweller, and given that I myself recently drew your attention to the TCD student actions if memory serves, I'm surprised at your surprise that I should make a personal connection to your post about same.
So now I'm a narcissist as well ...! Oh well, never mind, I'll leave a nice flower behind me when I die.
DeleteSly is a good word, isn't it? From Old Norse slǿgr (meaning cunning and capable of striking) and from Proto-Germanic slōgiz (meaning lively and agile of mind).
Speaking of sly phrases ...
When you speak of 'alleged anti-semitism in the Labour Party under a traditional left-wing leader', do you refer to the fact that the Equality and Human Rights Commission investigation found (in their 2020 report) that the party was responsible for 'unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination' and that the leadership of the party (under Corbyn) were guilty of 'serious failings' ...?
Do you challenge or reject these findings? Is it 'wilfully stupid' of me to have thought that they were rightfully accepted by most parties?
Am I simply colluding with a Jewish-controlled - or as you code it 'self-evidently Islamophobic' - British media by thinking that there is a problem on the left with antisemitism?
There are positive and negative aspects to narcissism, of course, and I guess in such cases one is forced to take the rough with the smooth (or cut one's losses and walk away).
ReplyDeleteHow can a party be guilty of anything? It's composed of individuals who may or may not be guilty or this or that misdeed, which also depends, of course, of the operational/legal definitions. There have also been a huge number of rebuttals, qualifications and critiques of the 'findings' to which you allude, including from a number of Jewish groups, some of which have also reemphasised the cultural tendency in the UK (especially given its right-wing media bias) and elsewhere to wilfully conflate Jewishness and Zionism.
Personally, I am much more concerned with the largely unexamined Islamophobia on the UK political right, which the BBC and many other organisations have linked to the fuelling of the British far right (https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-47280082), the lack of a legal definition of which even now clearly undermines legal protections for British Muslims. Still, as you probably think most of them are shouting messages of hatred under banners in Trafalgar Square with the result that a troublemaking Jewish guy can't cross the road exactly where he wants, I shouldn't imagine you share such concerns.
How can a party be guilty? Isn't it called collective responsibility? I thought you subscribed to notions such as institutional racism ...?
DeleteIn other words: it's not always just the individual member of a party that carries out the offence who should be held criminally accountable. Other people can play a part in the crime (or facilitate it) and they too can be liable for it in law (despite not committing the crime itself).
Political parties are not really the same as legal companies or other institutions - though they might contain just as much, or even more, corruption and cast even longer shadows. The Labour Party, having a much bigger membership than the minority members club of snobs and upper crusts that is the Tories, for example, is more like a broad church and therefore much more internally contested, as well as having, as I've pointed out, to suffer a far higher level of prejudice and bias in the UK with its media's established hatred of the Left. And even if they were, so be it. I'm much more interested in the sovereignty of individuals (acting individually or cooperatively) than secular transcendence, which is why I'd only start to get interested in politics if it cast off completely its idiotic/whipped party system, and people stood on their own behalf (and shed their own, albeit smaller, shadows).
DeleteGlad to learn that you're now a supporter of notions of legalism, responsibility and accountability etc. (despite attacking these in others at other junctures), as well as making clear that your stated dislike of nationalism(s) is something you make a striking exception for in the case of Israel (even extending to implicitly endorsing their Biblical claims of 'sacred territory')! Its' bewildering beyond bewildering, but let TTA's readers draw their own conclusions.
ReplyDeleteClearly, TTA is truly nihilistic behind its seductive polemics, which I guess is some kind of insane achievement. It doesn't believe in anything while claiming and counter-claiming belief in just about everything.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-69020237
ReplyDeleteRe 'larping for Palestine', readers of TTA hopefully have enough clarity of mind to recognise that the real menace is the IDF's criminal enactment of its own war game, now that the BBC has blown its cover by displaying its soldiers' humiliating draping of Palestinian detainees in the shameful flag of Israel. What turns one's stomach is hardly the actions of the (still commendable) student protest movement around the world but the way in which Israeli soldiers - a tendency of the soldier everywhere, meaning 'one who obeys the commands of and contends in the cause of another' (https://www.etymonline.com/word/soldier) - have become dead in their heads and thugs in their hearts. As the true 'larpers' and professionalised 'useful idiots' of their violent colonial cause (and unlike the students), they get paid for their murderous war games, aided and abetted by the US, the UK, Germany and France, whose arms-flogging hostilities are precisely what emboldens the IDF to rub Palestinian noses in its own abuses with its appalling uploads to social media. Larping for Palestine? It's a bit like pointing at the moon and mistaking her for the tip of your finger!