Wednesday, March 13, 2019
From Cultural Appropriation to Self-Representation
HowlRound Theatre Commons: In artistic and literary discourses, Romani people are so often negatively represented. Our stories are frequently appropriated by non-Roma people, and many times the characters presented are stereotypical, falling into the archetype of villains who, by the end of the story, are severely punished. To counteract this narrative, over the last few years my collective Giuvlipen and I have been generating a repertoire of plays that focus on our Roma identity, each one displaying a different worldview of Romani people living in Romania.
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2 comments:
I have always had mixed-feelings about the concept of cultural appropriation. On one hand, it speaks to me of how cultures involve the exchange of important aspects and results in the overall growth of all of the cultures involved. But the catch in this method is that, almost always, the majority culture takes aspects from another culture in a misrepresented form, distorting the significance of the adaptation in the first place. In the end, the adaptation just becomes an ornament and not a significant something.
This article recalls a practice that tries to solve this problem. The problem, identified by the culture that is misrepresented, is turned around into a proper way of representing themselves: they make sure to not indulge in any stereotypes that have been formed for them by other cultures. They attempt to showcase their culture to its true, face value.
Their attempt is worth appreciating, just because it takes a lot of courage and effort to change an engraved perception about a culture.
This article was extremely interesting to me because I think there’s an important distinction between representation and cultural appropriation, which tends to get blurred in the theatre a lot. I think a lot of playwrights have been trying to do better about representing different minorities in their plays, ranging from the LGBTQ+ community to the disabled community, too many different ethnic minorities around the globe. The problem is, when playwrights write in these identities that need to be represented, and then casting directors to cast people that are not a part of those communities to play those parts, it starts to cross the line of being cultural appropriation. The other problematic version of this issue is when playwrights try to represent these minorities but do so by writing in stereotypes of these minorities, instead of just having characters be those minorities. This article points out how this happens often with the Roma people, constantly being stereotyped and therefore not properly represented.
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