Have you ever talked about cultural appropriation in atla? Do you talk about that type of stuff?
I love the cultural research for atla and stuff but sometimes I wonder what's appreciation and what's appropriation in the series, yknow? :(
This is going to be my most liberal-arts-college-essay-ish post to date. You've been warned...
First off, I'm going to go with the Wikipedia definition of the word:
Cultural appropriation is the adoption of an element or elements of culture or identity by members of another culture or identity in a manner perceived as inappropriate or unacknowledged.
Within that broad definition, I'd like to propose two sub-types of cultural appropriation:
Social cultural appropriation
Economic cultural appropriation
While something can be both types of appropriation, the intents are different. Social cultural appropriation is when someone appropriates a culture for their own personal enjoyment. To me, this is the more subjective of the two types.
For example, in my experience, Asians in Asia generally aren't bothered by non-Asians wearing the traditional clothing. They view it as cultural appreciation, as people putting in the effort to enjoy another culture. This is a perfectly understandable and valid take.
However, Asians in Western countries will generally feel these actions are more appropriative, because we are a marginalized identity in Western nations. We're forced to reckon with not being entirely accepted by the mainstream culture (hegemony), resulting in our underrepresentation in Western media and issues facing our community being disregarded by broader society. We also have to deal with the features and culture we were born with being mocked and discriminated against by the hegemony. As such, we're going to be more attuned to the societal power imbalance at play, when a non-Asian (usually white) gets social capital for the same features or cultural markers that marginalize Asians. The implicit message is that people of Asian descent are innately devalued by Western society. These are the kind of feelings and nuances we're trying to capture when we say something feels like "cultural appropriation". And it is also valid to feel this way.
This is why I say that social cultural appropriation is subjective. Whether an act is appreciative or appropriative is determined by the person perceiving the act. In the context of ATLA, I view it as a mixture of both but also perceive it as more appreciative than appropriative. I've posted before that ATLA is very much a product of capitalizing on pop culture trends in the early-to-mid 2000s. At the same time, the amount of effort that went into depicting different Asian cultures and time periods was leagues above any other Western cartoon of the period. So, for me, the good outweighs the bad. But it's ultimately up to your personal sensibilities. And, for those wanting to engage with other cultures, all you can really do is try and read the room of who your audience is going to be. It also never hurts to cite your sources.
On the other hand, economic cultural appropriation is pretty straightforward: It's when a hegemonic institution takes the culture of a marginalized group, repackages it, and profits from it. In turn, the marginalized group receives no financial benefit from the appropriation. They may even face social pressure to disengage from the very cultural product they created, due to the cultural creation becoming intertwined with and falsely credited to the hegemonic culture. The most famous example of this would be rock and roll music, thanks to Elvis.
And, unfortunately, Avatar: The Last Airbender was very much a work of economic cultural appropriation. It was a story that was unambiguously inspired by Asian/Indigenous culture and history, yet the primary beneficiaries of the show's success were white. The institution that produced it was mostly white (Nickelodeon), the showrunners were white (Bryke), the OST composers were white, a majority of the VAs were white, and most of the writers were white.
Of course, when people ask if something is cultural appropriation, they're not simply asking for you to validate what they're observing. There's also the implied question of "Is it morally irresponsible for me to enjoy this piece of media?" To that, I would say that we can't really undo the problematic aspects of the source material. However, we can look at how the media property is being handled in the current day.
In that respect, I will give Bryke credit. In the modern day, Bryke have used this Asian/Indigenous-inspired franchise they've created to help carve out career opportunities for POC; most notably, through the casting in the Netflix adaption and the voice casting for the upcoming animated movie. Additionally, supplementary materials like the Chronicle of the Avatar novels have been authored by Asian writers and the Water Tribe costumes in the Netflix adaption were created by actual Indigenous craftspeople.
This is similar to how I approach my enjoyment of ATLA. Rather than dismiss the franchise for its problematic elements, I prefer to take a reparative reading approach and use the property as a jumping off point for bringing attention to various Asian/Indigenous cultures and histories.
