1Over the past decade, accusations of cultural appropriation have regularly escalated into heated debate among policymakers and in the media. This edition of Appartenances & Altérités seeks to clarify the nature of these issues by drawing on the humanities and social sciences without fuelling the controversies that these topics tend to generate. Our choice is to acknowledge without necessarily endorsing the indignation felt by certain minority populations who consider themselves dispossessed of cultural elements they deem their property. The theoretical and methodological challenge is to recognize the cultural dimension of the fundamental inequality of social relations, particularly those resulting from the history of European expansion (colonization, the slave trade and slavery, and the racialization of populations identified as non-white in the global North). The aim is to avoid adopting the often essentialist and racialized conceptions that underlie many accusations of cultural appropriation, such as the definition of homogeneous and clearly circumscribed minority and majority groups. This is precisely what the contributions in this edition are seeking to achieve.

2By way of introduction to the case studies, it seems useful to provide some background information and definitions, and before that, to trace back as far as possible the genealogy of the accusatory dimension of the notion of cultural appropriation. We will attempt to examine the heuristic potential of the notion, initially introduced as a category of practice in the context of debates in the media and in politics, as mentioned above, without necessarily making it a permanently fixed category of analysis. We will identify the phenomena it designates and the analytical framework underlying its conceptualization. In other words, we will analyze the way the expression is used to partly define its boundaries. More modestly, these introductory reflections should, at the very least, expose the tensions and issues at stake in accusations of cultural appropriation and the socio-anthropological questions they evoke. These include inequalities and racial prejudice originating from colonial and slave history, the cultural transfers and objective appropriations that occurred in that context, often understood via the concept of creolization, and the tensions and conflicts associated with them in the cultural sphere.

Genealogy of a controversy in the media and politics

3Even before the notion became widely used in the 1990s, several accusations of “theft” were voiced in the artistic and literary world, opposing personalities supposedly representing a dominant and generally “white” Western population against one or more ethno-racial minorities who felt they had been dispossessed. After winning the Prix Goncourt in 1959 for Le Dernier des justes (The Last of the Just, 1960), André Schwarz-Bart, who is Jewish and married to a Guadeloupean woman with whom he had already co-written a novel, published La Mulâtresse Solitude (A Woman Named Solitude, 1973) in 1972. His legitimacy in evoking Guadeloupe’s past by rescuing from oblivion a heroine of the resistance to slavery was contested by some of his West Indian peers (and by African-American critics in the United States). He was accused of being external to the country in terms of origin, history, and the experience of racialization.

4Once established, the notion of cultural appropriation served to identify and condemn any use considered illegitimate of cultural elements thought to belong to the dominated. The British art critic Kenneth Coutts-Smith (1976) seems to have been the first to use the expression, without however making it the main focus of his writings (he speaks more generally of “cultural colonialism”). Coutts-Smith offers a resolutely Marxist and anti-colonialist analysis of the elitist, ethnocentric conception of culture imposed by the European bourgeois classes. For him, appropriated exogenous elements defined as commodities and acquired as part of the socialization and formal education of the upper classes serve to constantly renew Western high culture. They not only include remnants of the past, but also the artifacts, ways of life and exotic phenotypes of conquered or colonized peoples that are grasped, reproduced, imitated, assimilated, and staged, in architecture, painting or literature (Coutts-Smith 1976: 6-7). It is not easy to assess how Coutts-Smith’s article was received and the specific role it played in the dissemination of the notion of cultural appropriation as it is used today. His argument nonetheless coincides for the most part with the controversies that began to emerge in the English-speaking world in the 1980s. One instance concerned the seemingly inappropriate use of “African braids” by “white” actress, Bo Derek.

7At the same period, the French press was reporting similar controversies in the United States, notably concerning American stars (Beyoncé, Katy Perry and Madonna). As early as 2014, Brett Bailey’s show Exhibit B performed at the Théâtre Gérard Philippe in Saint-Denis, and later at the 104 theater in Paris, sparked controversy even though no reference was made to cultural appropriation. Despite the anti-racist premise of the performance, which addressed the theme of human zoos and was staged in a deliberately provocative way, a very harsh campaign against the work was mounted in London where a petition circulated demanding that the performance be banned. A violent demonstration made it impossible to hold the first performance and generated a major controversy. The exhibition was cancelled in the fall of 2014.

At the heart of the controversy

9The notion effectively gave rise to bitter controversy. All over the world, intellectuals, activists, and artists seized the issue and denounced the exploitation of colonized cultures. Others just as strongly denounced the concept as an intolerable attack on the freedom to create and circulate ideas, pointing to the essentialism and even a certain racialization lying at its foundation. They accused it of limiting, while at the same time trapping, cultural expression within the boundaries of an “us” separated from others, with exclusive property rights. In the same vein, questions were raised regarding the application of the notion of collective property to culture, which in turn can be linked to the notion of “theft”, which implies that spoliated groups no longer own the goods in question.

10The accusation of cultural appropriation is applied to both tangible and intangible elements. As regards tangible objects belonging mostly to folk art, the looting of artifacts has long been a known fact. Museums in Western countries (but also the homes of wealthy individuals) accumulate works from formerly colonized or subordinate countries (the Parthenon friezes in the British Museum; the African masks in the Musée du Quai Branly; the Asmat sculptures from West Papua for sale on the international art market (de Hontheim 2005)…), The accusation of appropriation has never been clearly formulated in this case (even if a number of original owners of these artefacts are currently demanding their return). When stored in public collections, the artifacts are now subject to restitution policies; when monopolized by private collectors, they raise the question of market value. Most recently, however, accusations of cultural appropriation have concerned intangible elements, such as reproducible forms and motifs (in the fashion industry), popular music and, more fundamentally, the past itself. The question of the legitimacy of drawing from a cultural corpus is expressed in different terms when the appropriation occurs within the institutionalization of endangered cultural objects or popular traditions. Their rehabilitation as part of patrimonialization dynamics or developmental projects is often perceived as folklorization or a loss of authenticity.

11These controversies about cultural appropriation play on the polysemy of the term appropriation itself, and on its negative and positive meaning:

1. The first meaning is to steal or capture: to take possession for one’s own exclusive use of a tangible or intangible object or common good, or of other human beings (the appropriation of enslaved black bodies or the appropriation of women’s bodies, as theorized by materialist feminism (Guillaumin 1978)).

2. The second meaning refers to reducing otherness: passing from the exogenous to the endogenous, from the foreign to the familiar, and making a text or language one’s own.

12The first meaning, according to the typology established by Richard Rogers, is one of the modalities of the generic notion of cultural appropriation, which he defines as the exploitation of marginalized and colonized cultures, alongside other modalities such as cultural exchange, cultural dominance, or transculturation (Rogers 2006). However, this objectivizing definition of cultural appropriation remains insufficient to explain the wide dissemination of the expression, if we do not take into account the accusatory rationale associated with it today. Objective acts of appropriation that may have occurred in the course of history have not always been perceived as such and may have been interpreted differently. The history of American popular music in the 20^th century offers an ideal context for examining the issue.

14It is worth noting that the notion of cultural appropriation may sometimes be applied to inferiorized groups (Derlon and Jeudy-Ballini 2015) who in turn appropriate the beliefs and practices of the dominant group (the French language as “spoils of war” for Algerian writer Kateb Yacine). The dominant group can then adopt this type of accusatory discourse to disqualify the practices of subordinate groups as bad imitations (mocking the “negro king” who appropriates the symbols of royal power by adapting its semantics to local codes), or to ridicule a petit bourgeois pretension to rise above one’s station (as in Molière’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme). The novelty of contemporary discourses on cultural appropriation lies in the inversion of the position of the person pronouncing these discourses in relations of domination. The political and normative force of the concept lies in publicly asserting the legitimacy of minorities to judge something illegitimate. The accusation of cultural appropriation turns the tables. The right to pass moral judgment on the cultural practices of others, once the privilege of the majority, is now claimed by minorities, in a reversal that reveals the full strength of the hegemonic discourse the West has imposed over the past centuries regarding the superiority of its own culture and the inferiorization of the culture of others. 

15This new accusatory discourse regarding cultural appropriation belongs to a context in which culture has become a globalized standard for determining belonging and difference (Alévèque and Chandivert 2023). It is part of the new ethical and political practices of groups long held in a subordinate position, who consider culture as a means to assert their singularity and self-awareness and to express their demands. This new way of perceiving culture is reflected in their claim of a monopoly on narratives about themselves, of control over the use of tangible or intangible goods and the production of historical narratives. These claims presuppose a position of insider and outsider and a boundary between them based on a relationship between “owners” and “borrowers” of a culture, which can then be easily essentialized. This establishes a discontinuity based on the relationship of ownership between a group and its culture, which is clearly a powerful determinant of cultural identity and its essentialization. But this critique can be nuanced if we consider that what is at stake in accusatory discourses of cultural appropriation is not so much the ownership of culture as the legitimacy of controlling its use. As Kenan Malik (2017) has pointed out, what lies at the heart of the accusation of cultural appropriation is the relationship between control (“gatekeeping”) and identity. Culture in this case is not so much a substantive information but a sign of the racial hierarchies forged in different situations of domination, to which the dominant group is blind and which these borrowings confirm, and a sign of the inequality in value between the culture of the “owner” and “borrower” groups (confirmed a contrario by the argument of counter-discourses: “to appropriate your culture is to recognize its value”). 

16The spread of the expression thus seems to coincide with a general tendency to give visibility to minorities and with their desire to establish themselves as narrators of their own history, forgotten or confiscated by official history, linked with the emergence of a new “post-colonial” anti-racist movement (Picot 2019, Bouadjadja 2020). Accusations of cultural appropriation effectively include “settling scores with the past”, which makes the concept an eminently political one. As we can see from the different articles in this issue, they echo oppressions of the past and reactivate the memory of that past, often “patrimonialized”, that needs to be reappropriated. When this memorial dimension is not factored in, the counter-discourse that considers cultural sharing as the universalist abstraction of the free circulation of human productions, seems completely one-sided.

Cultural appropriation or creolization?

17It is obvious that multiple appropriations throughout history lie at the foundation of cultural change. The use of a culture’s symbols, techniques and rituals by external groups is explicit or implicit in all the terms (acculturation, assimilation, syncretism, transculturation, métissage) that express the full range of encounters and interpenetrations between cultures. This standard presupposition has been challenged by the conception currently in fashion of cultures as combinations of elements in perpetual circulation, which according to James Clifford (1996 [1988]), did not exist before coming into contact with each other, but were shaped by each other, appropriating and restraining the constant movement of people and things. The emphasis on experiences of double or multiple attachment, on the importance of the forces of movement against the affirmation of original purities (Drummond [1980], Amselle [1990], Appadurai [1996]) implies that the presupposition of fixed cultural entities should be rejected, in favor of exchange systems that already form relationships. Accusations of cultural appropriation therefore run counter to this perspective similar to the notion of creolization, mentioned above. Creolization seems to be in complete opposition with discourses on appropriation, and yet it also breaks with the hegemony of Western European cultures.

18Creolization is often presented as anti-appropriation and seems to support the “universalist” argument according to which nobody owns culture. Creolization effectively introduces a conception of culture and identity that may seem opposed to cultural essentialism. There is no discontinuity but an integrated cultural continuum comprising cultural traits which form a repository of references from which individuals can always draw, whatever their positioning in the social or racial field. While valuing the product of the local mélange, as opposed to the hegemony of European culture, it is nevertheless not necessarily restricted to local characteristics specific to a given group. While similar notions, such as syncretism, are used to explain the interweaving of cultural practices and beliefs, creolization (which specifically grew out of the violence of the confrontation between different populations in a context of colonialism and slavery) also has a political purpose as an ideal of relations between peoples.

21This raises two problems. First, given the historical context of slavery and post-slavery in which creolization occurred, this cultural phenomenon is generally based on asymmetrical relations between social groups, and may be associated with racial and cultural domination. It may occur along a “bastard” mode, as described by Édouard Glissant. In such case, the dominant and the dominated groups share cultural practices that become creolized without any recognition of the equal value of the different contributions. Second, is there a heuristic value in transposing a notion developed to analyze Creole societies to other contexts? Migration and globalization lead to confrontations between diverse populations, and their violence may in some respects be reminiscent of the trade of African and Indian captives and laborers during the colonial (post-)slavery period. Creolization, in that case, may allow us to analyze, at least in part, the unpredictable effects of these encounters. The danger would be to smooth out differences between very different historical contexts and social and cultural phenomena (Claveyrolas 2022).

22Creolization probably functions better as a metaphor for describing analogies between different contexts (Giraud 2013) in which unique forms of very different cultural contributions intermingle despite strong racial inequalities or precisely because of the forms of domination that occur when different populations come into contact. In these contexts, the cultural dimension of this domination also comes into sharp focus. Creolization can no longer be seen as an antithesis to the culturalist and essentialist conceptions of the world that are generally associated with accusations of appropriation. Even in a creolized context, the question arises of domination and inequality in the control of cultural practices.

23In the articles collected in this issue, claims of cultural appropriation concern festive or religious rituals, know-how, or music. The debates they generate take place in different contexts, which gives them local relevance. These perspectives shed light more generally on the social issues behind the contemporary discourse on the legitimacy of cultural uses and on the shifting criteria and boundaries of membership that allow individuals to claim or contest these uses.

24Three contributions focus on Creole societies and provide an opportunity to examine discourses on appropriation and creolization and the capacity of both to shape identities. Focusing on Creole societies in the French- and English-speaking Caribbean and the Indian Ocean, they highlight the unexpected or paradoxical effects of the patrimonialization of cultural practices and knowledge: when popular cultural practices are re-emphasized, this may lead their former “owners” to redefine their contours and sources, it may reactivate the memory of the colonial and slave-owning past and of racial hierarchies, and it may also give rise to strategies of reappropriation.

25In the post-colonial context of contemporary Guadeloupe, Flore Pavy examines the case of the gwoup-a-po, heirs of groups originating from the lower strata of society that paraded during the carnival period. Faced with a process of institutionalization associated with their patrimonialization, they are developing new forms of spirituality, seemingly linked to an African origin. These dynamics are necessarily based on cultural borrowings from other Caribbean islands known for having remained closer to the African source. Members of these groups are seeking elsewhere for the authenticity of the cultural corpus they have lost. For these borrowings, Flore Pavy suggests the term “reappropriation” used by the performers themselves, as a detour into borrowed territories that allows them to reconnect with a past from which they have unfortunately been cut off.

26Pauline Amy de la Bretèque examines creolization through the lens of literary works written by Jamaica Kincaid, Michelle Cliff, Olive Senior, Marlon James and Paule Marshal. In this corpus, she compares the definitions of creolization. Far from any idealization, the various descriptions of Caribbean society in these books reveal the logics of domination and extreme violence within the racialization phenomenon. For example, the ecological environment is symbolically appropriated by imposing a scholarly taxonomy on it, and the religious practices and beliefs of enslaved people are strategically used to counter their resistance to the plantationist system. This resolutely critical redefinition of creolization as marked by cultural domination is illustrated by the perspective of the authors examined. In post-colonial studies, the intersection of literature, history and socio-anthropology sheds new light on the unique cultural transfers that can occur despite, or even because of, strong racial inequalities.

27Scholarly and popular uses of botanical species are the subject of further controversies over cultural appropriation. In the case of Reunion Island, Jim Sion shows how practical ethnobotanical knowledge has been emblematized as a cultural object promoted to showcase creoleness. Paradoxically, its rehabilitation runs against the ideology of creolization by bringing to the surface the contempt in which such knowledge was held when it was associated with subordinate groups. The celebration of diversity and métissage ultimately reveals the social and racial inequalities inherent in creolization.

28The other two articles, while not about Creole society, focus on racially segmented societies. Juliette Galonnier shows that despite universalist claims, Islam in the United States is not spared from accusations of cultural appropriation. Controversy centers around the identification of an authentic American Islamic culture, which raises conflicting debates on the relationship between religion and culture. The practice of Islam by white converts is the subject of divergent interpretations based on a dual perspective: it can be criticized as a cultural appropriation that coincides with racial and social hierarchies, but it seems legitimate when considered in a logic of expropriation that requires a liberation of the Muslim religion from its anchorage in the cultural traditions of the Arab world.

29In the field of music, Anaïs Vaillant observes the complex relationships between musicians from the West who have embraced Brazilian rhythms in groups known as batucadas, and musicians in Brazil who are the inventors and custodians of these rhythms. While in the early 2000s, the notion of cultural appropriation was not necessarily used in an accusatory way, looking at the data today reveals conflicts and strategies on both sides of the “exchange” to deal with a diffuse feeling of plunder superimposed on inequalities of class and race, and sheds light on how the intangible conception of culture reinforces the phenomenon of appropriation.