Fantasy, History and Authenticity

When medieval fantasies, such as the A Song of Ice and Fire series, are criticizes for being excessively violent, misogynistic and orientalist, fans of such stories tend to respond that the world simply was that way.  Far from being a criticism of the text, such questionable tendencies are seen by some fans as signs of realism and therefore deserve literary merit, not condemnation.  It is readily apparent however that this is a rather odd response in the face of such criticism.  When exactly was the world that way, and what world are they in fact referring to?  It is doubtful that they are referring to their own world history, since dragons, elves and wizards, and other fantasy tropes cannot seriously be considered historical phenomenon.  Even if one does believe in the existence of such beings to some extent, they can only ever be taken seriously as mythological, not historical, beings; their history is timeless and not subject to historical analysis or criticism. 

Only by subtracting away the fantasy elements of the story, could one possibly make a connection between the fantasy world of the text and our own world history.  Dragon slaying knights are historically accurate because they resemble the knights of medieval Europe in code and conduct, dragon slaying aside.  But our conception of past history is dubious and often ideologically constrained, limiting our view of the past.  Not only is it constrained by our present interest in the past but it is also limited by the source material through which we understand the past; if we only understand the medieval time period through European sources it is no wondering that it reflects and retains the prejudices of that place and time.  Yet if one is not referring to our own world, but the world of the fantasy story itself, the criticism of its world-building can always be pushed back further. 

No matter how deep the author builds the history of their world to justify its current condition, one can always ask why the world was built that particular way.  Merely giving the world a deeper history does not negate the justification for that world history in its entirety.  Like a God questioned about the nature of the world they created, an author is responsible for the form their world and story take; it cannot be excused as a projection of past history or as a mere creation of the imagination.  The former route ignores the way in which we imaginatively construct the past; the latter fails to recognize that we are ultimately responsible for the worlds we create, not matter the amount of explanation we pour into them, and that our literary worlds reflect our self.  No matter how much authors build their fictional worlds, they are not merely worlds unto themselves, but are stories that they have intended to focus on with a message threaded through the narrative.  Even if Westeros did exist, there would still be the question as to why it is worth writing about, why the stories of morally abominable individuals is worth giving voice to.  And if their stories are told, there is the further question of how such narratives reflect upon the image of their creator.

In fantasy, one is ultimately responsible for the fictional world one has created.  One cannot absolve one’s self through reliance upon faux historical authenticity since one is creating their own history for their fictional world.  But it is crucial to consider that fantasy worlds are not merely written into being but are also read into being.  After all, they are written to be read.  We as readers are responsible for the worlds we read about, and we must critically engage the genre as readers; if the author is not excused by merely saying that is the way this world or this people is, the reader is not permitted to accept the world as that way or its people as that way.  Literature, even and especially fantasy literature, is never simply about its own self contained world since it is written and read within the imaginative confines of this world that we live in.  Even though we may never be able to escape our world through fantasy, we are able to reflect back upon it from an imagined vantage point, unencumbered by the burden of our historically-mediated identities.  We can confront the injustices of violence, misogyny and orientalism when we are willing to break away from conformity to our prejudicial histories and to fantasize about the possibilities open to people.  

Through fantasy we can confront the injustices of our world precisely because we do not have to conform to the historical expectations of this world and the way it constrains our identity.  One writes and reads fantasy literature, not even pseudo-historic fantasy, in relation to our history but the history of the fantasy genre itself.  Each new work should be written and read in critical conversation with the genre’s history, not merely to improve upon the inherited flaws of the fantasy genre itself but to give us a fantastic perspective from which we can improve upon the flawed world we have inherited and inhabit.  One steps outside of our limited world through the literature of fantasy, not to escape this world, but to better perceive it. 

Fans of fantasy are criticized for not living in the real world and being deluded by their imaginations and not appreciating real history, but I think this only applies to immature members of the community.  Mature writers and readers of fantasy recognize that what we think of as real history is itself a fantasy written into our identities by various ideologies.  But if history is fantasy then perhaps the fantasy genre can, if not provide us with an alternative history, at least provide us with the means to understand how our historical narratives constrain our identities and prejudice us against others.  Fantasy might not conform to history but that hardly means it doesn’t appreciate or critically engage with history.  Fantasy fans are not inauthentic because they do not conform to history, they are authentic precisely because they make their identity for themselves and do not need it imposed upon them.  Fantasy fans know that their favorite fantasies are just stories; it is everyone else that is ignorant that they are living in the greatest fantasy of all, the delusional monolith of History. 

Occult Science Fiction, an Original Sub-Genre?

A great deal of my blog has been devoted to examining how the science fiction and fantasy genre’s can progress, by both internalizing more progressive political ideals and by progressing beyond recycling the exhausted binary of medieval-oriented fantasy and future-oriented science fiction.  Fantasy does not have to simply be about wizards, castles elves and dragon nor does science fiction need to be committed to robots, aliens, scientists and space-ships.  I think it is perfectly legitimate to have a futuristic fantasy story and equally permissible to have a medieval science fiction narrative.  What distinguishes the two genres is not the historical period in which they are situated (fantasy is in the past while science fiction is in the future), nor even the rationale of their world-building (fantasy is magical and irrational while science fiction is scientific and rational). 

What I do think distinguishes the two genres from one another is how we understand the history of their world in relation to our own.  If we can construct a narrative “bridge” from our world-history to the imagined history within the text, then the story is science fiction; but if the world-history of the text cannot be reconciled with our own history, then the story is a fantasy.  I have addressed this in significantly greater detail in my essay “Subversive Speculation of the Future of Scientific andFantastic Speculative Fiction.”  In this essay I want to briefly detail a unique and unexplored (to my knowledge) sub-genre of science fiction that deviates from the standard model.

I believe the standard model of science fiction to be future oriented and revolve around the imagery of aliens, spaceships, experiments, robotics, space exploration, human augmentation, genetic modification, etc.  Not only is such imagery (near) future-oriented but it is also externally-oriented in the sense that the genre is about going out into the world and exploring new worlds and experimenting with as-yet-understood phenomenon.  Even when the world-building lacks scientific credibility and could more accurately be described as pseudo-scientific sci-fi magic (nano-bot magic, genetics magic, alien techno-magic, etc) I still believe that the genre narrative tends to revolve around exploring and experimenting with the world.  I believe that one can incorporate such a focus onto any historical time period and one could still consider the story science fiction proper. 

There has been a trend in recent years for science fiction to become more near-future focused, exploring more the implications of more mundane technological and scientific advances for our future just over the horizon.  But one could even extend this logic back into past history.  Some forms of the steam-punk aesthetic and alternative history stories would fit into this form.  For example, what if the inventive mind of Leonardo Da Vinci had resulted in a Renaissance-era technological revolution which significantly altered the course of history there-after?  But such stories need not even be alternative history but could also be stories of hidden history: stories made possible because they occupy discrete spaces in our history that do not upset the order of our historical narrative.  For example, what if aliens crash-landed in medieval Europe and existed briefly among rural villagers who interpreted them to be angels (or demons).  Unfortunately the villages die after being exposed to an alien disease harbored by one of the aliens and fearing further contamination of the human population, the aliens hastily escape back into space.  Because the story closes with no wider consequences for our history it could be considered a part of history hidden from our awareness and thus would not be a truly alternative history of our world. 

This approach to history as one of layers is often employed in the urban-fantasy sub-genre of fantasy.  Situated within some contemporary cityscape (it seems like it is almost always London), there is a magical world hidden from the mundane population with its own history weaving around our own.  Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, China Mieville’s Kraken and JK Rowling’s Harry Potter come to mind as some of the most popular examples within this sub-genre.  Since these fantasy stories occur within our world, they are not secondary world fantasies.  This is true despite the inclusion of magic, a force that deviates from our understanding of the world we inhabit, since the magic of the world is hidden from the wider population.  The story serves as a secret glimpse with the narrative following an individual privileged with exposure to that magical world.  This world, in which you are reading this blog essay, could be that world, if only you could discover the magic occluded from your perception.  In the same way, the world is not truly alternative history, regardless of the inclusion of impossible magical elements, since the history and magic of the secret world are alike occult to the general population.  If the elves or vampires were walking around the city for everyone to see as is the case in some other forms of urban-fantasy then we would be dealing with a magical alternative-history of our world if not a secondary world entirely. 

Now transfer this logic of a hidden world within our contemporary environment from a fantasy setting to a science fiction one and you have the sub-genre of science fiction I am working to define.  For lack of better words, it will be called occult science fiction.  Rather than trolls living in secret in the sewers of Los Angeles or wizards working magic behind closed doors in New York City, there are robots and aliens living and working amongst us without our knowledge.  The future imagined by science fiction is already here, we simply are not aware that it is going on around us. 

A series that may come to mind for this sort of world-building is the Matrix trilogy of films since the world we think we inhabit is actually a computer simulation we are enslaved by for the benefit of sentient machines.  Yet this is an imperfect representation of what I am trying to convey since the trilogy reduces our world to a mere illusion and since it is revealed that the real world takes place in what we would recognize as the future relative to the world portrayed in the computer simulation.  A better example would be the Men in Black series of films since it involves a contemporary setting with aliens coexisting with humanity in secret except for the clandestine Men in Black agency which possesses technology far more advanced than we would consider possible.  In Men in Black the contemporary city is real, but there is an entire history of aliens on our planet hidden from us; the world, and its history, is far deeper and stranger than we understand it to be. 

As with all sub-genres, they occupy a niche that makes them revolve around more specific imagery appealing to a more specific audience.  Occult sci-fi is best focused upon technological advances that can be concealed from the general population and would thus likely incorporate some form of nano-technology, cloaking field or polymorphic capability.  Because such technology is concealed from the general population, the question arises as to why it is concealed and the narrative could be weaved around issues of technocratic or alien conspiracies, the dangers of technological progress or widespread proliferation of technology, and the conflict between the privacy and security of information.  Occult science fiction neither recognizes the world of science-fiction as a far-future possibility nor accepts technological advances in wide-ranging availability in our near future but portrays a disparity already present within our world that has been hidden from us. 

Perhaps the genre standard for science fiction is itself a tool of alien overlords or corporate and government elites to manage us.  If we focus upon the future as the site new technologies and hold onto the hope that such advances will be made widely available to us, then perhaps we will overlook the way in which technology controls us now and has shaped our perception of our own history, hiding its own influence from us.  Perhaps we will ignore that history and technology may progress without us and that the failure to question the narratives provided to us by those in power renders us impotent to their control.  Or perhaps such concerns merely make for entertaining, if not paranoid, speculation.  Either way, I see this as an open possibility for the science fiction genre to explore and experiment with further, and given that the focus of so much of the genre is exploration and experimentation I believe such progress to be inevitable.  Especially if economic and technological disparity increases along with government surveillance and dissatisfaction with those in power, I believe just such a sub-genre may become a refuge to escape into.   

Magic, Reality and Magical Realism

I recently finished reading Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death and it was as fantastic as the reviews lead me to believe. It takes place in a post-apocalyptic, yet magical, future Sudan and thus shares some aesthetic elements in common with both the science fiction and fantasy genre such as guns and computers and sorcery, spirits and dragon-like creatures respectively. Yet these elements were more literary than the speculative approach I am familiar with in the other science fiction or fantasy books I routinely read. I would consider magical realism the most appropriate genre label for the book. The experience of reading this entertaining and enlightening story got me thinking back to my previous essay, “The Magic of Writing and ReadingFantasy,” and the relationships between magic, fantasy and realism. Magical realism and fantasy each approach reality and negotiates the relationship between the numinous and mundane, albeit in uniquely distinct ways.  

The difference between magical realism and urban, alternative-history or retro-futuristic fantasy sub-genres is the importance they place upon the supernatural elements of the narrative.  Traditional fantasy functions as a magical world alternative to our own mundane world. This is even true when this other world shares its appearance with our own as is the case with the urban, alternative-history or retro-futuristic (steam-punk) sub-genres of fantasy. By contrast, magical realism represents our own world suffused with the supernatural. For the latter genres, the supernatural is of principal importance and the narrative is devoted to speculating on how the inclusion or intrusion of the supernatural would affect our mundane world. For magical realism the supernatural is naturalized back into the world as an assumption of it, equally mundane to the elements recognizable as part of our own world. Magical realism makes the magical mundane and enables us to see the natural as numinous. 

A great focus of the fantasy genre is the exploration of and negotiation between the natural and unnatural realms of the world, presupposing some form of division or barrier between the two. In epic and high fantasy this takes the form of a struggle between powers of good and evil in order to restore political, if not cosmic, balance in the world. Alternative-historical and retro-futuristic fantasy is concerned with the consequences of supernatural intrusions upon our historical past, while urban fantasy focuses upon the inclusion of the fantastic within our contemporary urban cityscape. In all such forms of fantasy, the supernatural is of primary importance and independently influential to the narrative; not only are magic systems and mythological creatures elaborated upon in greater detail but the narrative itself is driven by such examination. Magical realism reverses this relationship, making the mundane more important that the magical and utilizing the unreal more like a metaphor for political and cultural forces than an independent force to be comprehended. In traditional fantasy sub-genres, the presence of magic is problematic, whereas within the magical realism sub-genre it is perceived as perfectly acceptable. For magic to be accepted in the former it must be explained, whereas for the latter its very acceptance by the characters makes it intelligible for the reader. 

Whereas much of the fun of fantasy is speculation upon systems of magic or fantastical species, magical realism appears as the absence of such introspective imagination. In the majority of the fantasy genre, the unreal is essential to understanding the place and plot of the story. This requires elaborate explanations to bridge the world-building estrangement of the reader between their world and the literary world. But it also entails that the characters themselves must understand, control, or utilize the unreal (magic typically) in order to drive the plot. But in the magical realist sub-genre the unreal is peripheral, not essential, to understanding the world and changing it.  In fact, magical realism entails an intentional refusal to understand the magical or fantastical elements of its world, simply accepting them as they present themselves. In magical realism the narrative and characters are indifferent to the fantastic when confronted by it, continuing on as if nothing extraordinary has occurred. Magical events are mundane affairs, deriving their metaphorical relationship to the lives of the characters and their struggles. In contrast, the magic of traditional fantasy tends to be extraordinary affairs that are themselves a challenge confronting the characters. Information and explanation for supernatural beings and happenings are intentionally ignored in magical realism. This withdrawal of wonder away from the supernatural is necessary to the policitized nature of magical realism for it focus the narrative on more mundane and immediate political or cultural struggles. But more importantly it eschews explanation in order to represent a world with inherent legitimacy, ideally liberated from our ideological limitations. 

Magical realism is not mere chaotic fancy however. Although its fantastical elements may lack systematic explanation and justification, it is not necessarily arbitrary or inconsistent.  The tears of children could consistently turn to butterflies or whenever someone dies all the sources of heat and light extinguish without the story sliding into a more traditional fantasy narrative. What is essential is that such regular occurrences are not justified by reference to a pseudo-scientific system of magical laws and forces but are simply accepted without inquiry much as one could mention crying or death itself without great detail. This is because mourning and mortality are universal aspects of the human condition we can appreciate without having to deconstruct them beyond their phenomenal experience. When magical realism portrays such experiences as fantastical it does so to highlight something inherent in that very real experience. Other forms of fantasy impose magic upon the mundane rather than drawing it out of it to thereby speculate upon how that experience changes the underlying reality. The fantastic in magical realism is not explained as if it were a reality itself, but rather serves to explain some other, more immediate and fundamental reality, usually cultural or political in nature. 

First-world fantasy genres such as science fiction, urban fantasy, alternative history or retro-futurism derive their realism from being set within our world or some alternative to it with any explanatory narrative that makes it intelligible as our own world. This is so even when this is impossible relative to our worldview; for example, urban fantasy is impossibly our world since it includes magical forces we do not predict to be possible within the world we inhabit. What is crucial is not how recognizable the world is to our own, but how possible that world is to us, even if its possibility is grounded by the logic of its own world-building. By contrast, since magical realism forsakes such elaborate explanatory justifications its realism is derived entirely from it being recognizable as our own world to some extent. The magic of fantasy literature makes new worlds, even when those worlds are considered fantastical alternative versions of our own world. In contrast, the magic of magical realism is in this world.     

The sub-genre of magical realism and other fantasy sub-genres each contain a contradiction and source of tension between the reader, their world and the world within the text, all of which revolves around an encounter with reality. Fantasy is realistic because of the way it explains its world according to rules we would recognize even when the world itself is impossibly distinct from our own. Fantasy strives to logically explain a world that violates the rules we understand. In contrast, magical realism ignores explanation and depends upon the indifference of its characters towards the supernatural in order to establish its realism. Magical realism seeks to represent the world sincerely through fantasies we may consider to lack all credibility. Put another way, in fantasy the world is explained to us in terms that we would understand even though the world may violate our understanding while in magical realism we are presented with the way our own world is understood by someone fantastically different from us.       

Magic in fantasy genres other than magical realism is systematic if not pseudo-scientific. It has established rules and regularities regarding who can perform it, when they can do so, what its predicted effects will be, etc. All of which presupposes a distinction made between mundane regularities of the world we would recognize and the fantastical ones we would not. Even if the magic was a science in method and was predicated upon predictability as much as scientific materialism itself presupposes, it still requires elaboration to be comprehended because its predictions are in conflict with those of our own sciences. For example, if sorcerers can fly or summon fire, the nature of such magic must be reconciled with our own understanding of gravity and thermodynamics. If not, the reader will likely be left unsatisfied and the critic will classify the work as mere fancy rather than consider it serious fantasy. 

It is wrong to draw a strict dichotomy between magical realism and the rest of fantasy as though the former was divorced from reality and the other one not. It is far better to situate their difference along a spectrum of realism. At one end of the spectrum is the more “experiential” fantasy of magical realism: reality enters into the narrative through the matter-of-fact disposition characters have towards the unreal who merely accept it as another mundane facet of their experience. At the other end is the “existential” fantasy of most other sub-genres: reality is provided through the elaborate explanations of its unreal elements which provide a parallel to the rule-governed nature of reality we are familiar with. For magical realism, magic serves as a metaphorical reproduction of some element in our reality such that the fantastic is an effect of our world. In traditional fantasy, the unreal possesses a reality inherent in itself and exists in its own system of causes and effects unique to its own world.    

Fantasies could exist well within these two polarities but some of them could be particularly alienating depending on how far the unreal deviates from our own familiar world.  Precisely because magical realism represses explanations of the fantastic, it depends upon some familiarity between the reader and the world of the story. Magical realism uncovers the magic within a world, our world, by extending features of it into fantastical metaphors while other forms of fantasy seek the unreal outside of our world in other worlds bound by their own logic and laws. A story that combined these techniques would struggle with the immediate experience of a world radically different from our own existence. Such a story would be a fascinating, if not frustrating struggle, to not only imagine a world other than our own, but to experience it as if one were embedded within that world.          

The fact that the fantastic is taken for granted in magical realism provides the realism of the sub-genre. The inclusion of magic makes the world impossible for us, but the immediacy of its presentation makes it possible for us to imagine ourselves within that world regardless.  Because the narrative does not recognize the fantastic as strange, we are not estranged from the world. But this requires that the world be intelligible to us without explanation, even if such a world is not believable. This presupposes some familiarity with the fantastical elements of the story and for this reason magical realism typically derives such elements from familiar, albeit marginalized, mythologies and folklore. If a character’s grandfather is a literal angel from heaven in a magical realist story, one can understand more or less what this may entail, even if such a person does not believe in angels. But if a fantasy story features an original race of shape-shifting metallic entities from the moon, the originality of such creatures independent of any grounding myth or folk story would be alienating and beg narrative explanation for the reader. 

Magical realism is more dependent upon established mythologies than traditional fantasy is to ground its credibility. But precisely because it represents the magic of mythology and fantasy of folk stories with immediacy, it lends credibility to such marginalized world views. In contrast, traditional fantasy, despite its tendency to focus its creativity within the confines of European medieval culture, is fundamentally unfettered by a dependence upon pre-established narratives of the fantastic. The best the other fantasy sub-genres offer is re-interpretations of the unreal or innovative representations of the magical; vampires can be re-imagined as sentient trees that feed upon those who threaten their forests or one can create a new race of intelligent necromantic octopi who raise corpses to serve as their surrogate bodies on land. The limitations are not pre-established by fidelity to history or mythology but arise spontaneously as each element of the world is imagined. 

Literary realism is not simply a function of what is presented within the narrative of the story but how that narrative itself is told to us, especially when it is told through the characters within the world of the story. Realism is not limited to the depiction of “real” objects we recognize as part of our own lives, but encompasses the way that literary characters recognize and interact with the objects of their own world in a realistic manner. What unifies magical realism and other genres of fantasy is how they depict magic realistically. The narrative and the characters of the story take the world they inhabit seriously; they are capable of interacting with the magic in the world and consider it important to their struggles, even if it is only in a derivative and metaphorical sense as is the case with magical realism. Magical realism is realistic because it presents the fantastic as mere mundane facts of experience the characters encounter. Other forms of fantasy are realistic because they investigate the existence of magic in the world as a systematic force with rules and regularities. Magical realism allows us to appreciate a different way of seeing our world, while fantasy allows us to appreciate a different world entirely.

The Magic of Writing and Reading Fantasy

Over the past year or so I have been struggling with writing fantasy literature and because fantasy is such a misunderstood form of literary art.  Fantasy is often contrasted with science fiction, with the latter genre considered superior to that latter.  I disagree both with the conceptualization of the genres as absolute opposites as well as positioning one superior to the other as I have argued elsewhere.  I find some criticism of the genre warranted, insofar as fantasy is morally irresponsible and culturally insensitive as I have argued in previous essays on the subject.  But I do not accept the criticism that fantasy is literature only fit for children, while science fiction is, at least potentially, acceptable for adults.  I assume that fantasy is criticized as childish because of its playfulness with reality and its fascination with magic, judged as an immature and irrational mode of perceiving the world. 

All fictional literature is fantastical in a banal sense.  Literary fictions invent people, places and events as part of the narrative experience and even the most historical forms of literature must be original with their thematic structure and character dialogue.  Fantasy is a genre of fictional literature but unlike historical fictions which attempt to reflect our real world or science fiction which attempts to imagine some alternative to our world (usually but not necessarily set in the future), fantasy fiction imagines some unique world all its own.  Even when a fantasy story is situated in some point parallel to our world history, it necessarily cannot be our world since by its nature fantasy involves an impossible deviation from our world history; a World War II story involving a cabal of Nazi necromancers in a secret war with a circle of British druids is fantasy, despite its historical setting, because of its inclusion of magic which is not historical, at least according to our current understanding of the world.  So while all fiction is creative with reality by imagining ways that the world was, is or could be, and is therefore fantastical to an extent, it is only the fantasy genre itself which consciously avoids consideration of this world in all its historic possibility and instead invites us to imagine the history of an entirely unique alternative world.    

Fantasy is a still developing, and of all genres it has the most potential for development since it is not constrained by a concern for historical realism.  Much of fantasy has been, and continues to be, fantastical versions of feudal Europe replete with all the cultural and moral problems endemic to romanticizing that society.  Fantasy writers are just beginning to explore the edge of the genre and push its boundaries further by writing in sub-genres such as steam-punk, science-fantasy, new weird or urban fantasy.  As I have argued in detail in other essays, fantasy is not, and should not be, limited to the tropes of knights, dragons, dwarves and elves but includes anything that deviating from historical continuity with our world view.  Fantasy is incredibly flexible in its imaginative potential; it encompasses underwater empires of sentient insects to spaceships powered by the souls of dead gods to time-travelling demons of a trans-dimensional hive-mind.   But nothing is more magical in a fantasy narrative than a system of magic; magic is not merely a part of a fantasy world but is a fantastical way of acting in, if not creating, that world itself.    

Although an authentic fantasy story can be written without magic, I think its inclusion in the narrative provides a unique opportunity for understanding the genre.  Magic systems can aid in explaining the appeal of the fantasy genre as a whole but can also exonerate it from judgment as irrational immaturity.  Rather than being the very thing that condemns fantasy to criticism, magic can liberate the literature from it.  But first, what is magic? Magic, broadly defined, is the causal manipulation of the world through ritual symbols, gestures or words.  Systems of fantasy magic are fundamentally systems of language.  But instead of merely describing the world, they command, alter or create the world itself. When a mage’s gesture or incantation conjures a familiar or creates a flame, that act of magic is an act of communication in some sense between the mage and the world.  It is a communication that compels the world to conform to our desires, to understand us.  If the belief in magic is intelligible it is as the belief that language, if not literature particularly, can change the world. 

I came to this epiphany as I began to write fantasy stories; as I was writing about magic I became aware that I was practicing magic itself, albeit in a modern and mundane form.  I commit myself to my ritual of finding a quiet coffee-shop, open my laptop and type out worlds that come to form original worlds in themselves.  Writing is most true when it emerges from the intimacy of personal experience and I believe that fantasy, despite its defiance to historicity, is no different.  But the personal experiences that inform the magic of the fantasy genre is the wonder of writing itself, of creating worlds unto themselves through mere words.  I imagine that the authentic fantasy writer or reader is uniquely able to live within their fictional world insofar as the art of writing and reading about it provides the very alchemy to transform it from mere fantasy to reality.  For readers or writers of other of other genres, the continuity between the narrative and our own history takes primacy and provides the element of realism, doing much of the work for the reader themselves.  But for the fantasy genre, reality is ironically supplied by the imagination itself since the more magical the world is, the more it mirrors the art of literary language.  Just as the mage must master words of magic power to shape the world to his desires, so too does must the writer and reader of fantasy wield the precise words so she may articulate her imaginings.    

Just as fantasy is concerned with its own imagined worlds and not our own world extrinsic to it, so too is the very power of that very imagination intrinsic to the text itself.  It arises spontaneously from the parallels between the capacity of the writer or reader to create the world through words and the world within the text itself to be responsive to the communicative power of magic.  Fantasy neither depends upon our world to be understood nor to be imagined, but is perfectly capable of being self-contained.  In this way is the genre inherently interesting simply for its singular creativity of world-building.  Fantasy literature appeals to the creatively inclined soul and many of those who critique it for its immaturity I suspect are simply immature in their own capacity for imagination.  For those possessed of such a capacity though, the appeal of fantasy is apparent insofar as one appreciates the creativity of writing in general, of which fantasy is paragon and an elaborate system of magic is its pinnacle.  And to any critic who alleges that it is easy to write fantasy precisely because it is unregulated by historic reality, I find this claim simply incredulous.  Great fantasies require not only immense imagination but also a delicate attention to words so that one can articulate that imagination.  One must be especially creative and careful when crafting out an elaborate system of magic for the world one is writing since magic is not merely a description of that world but is the language of the world itself.

Magic as a language by which the fantasy world comprehends and obeys commands is both a creative achievement of the fantasy writer as well as a limit upon the potential creativity of the reader.  Systematic magic is simultaneously an example of superior world-building by envisioning a fantastic ways in which the world can be changed while the rules of that system help constrain the flight of fancies that are inspired in the reader.  The challenge of building a magic system, and fantastic world-building in general, is to create something original and interesting enough that it inspires the reader to invoke their own imagination while also being  systematically detailed enough to avoid arbitrary creativity.  World-building must avoid being so vague that the narrative lacks coherence and comprehensibility.  But it must also ensure that it is not reduced to a restrictive totality of exhaustive explanations and info-dumps that deplete the imagination and interest of the reader.  Our own world defies exhaustive description and it is equally foolish to attempt the same with a fantasy.  World-building should not become so self-indulgent that it stagnates the creativity of the reader to imagine the world for them self.  World-building that constrains the reader with exhaustive explanations and narrow possibilities is like the shadow of some dark god that eclipses all hope of freedom.  To create such a world is to practice not merely bad literature but it is to invoke black magic and dominate, rather than liberate, the spirit of others.  Fantasy worlds are read as much as they are written into existence and for the magic of literature to operate the reader must be able to speak the language of the writer, they must be made an initiate of the imagination.        

The magical writings within fantasy literature serve as a mirror to the mystification and enthusiasm of the fantasy text itself.  This mirror image may even come to be crystallized within meta-fantastic literature: fantasy stories about fantasy stories themselves.  For example, a fantasy story may feature a magic system where mages can summon mythical creatures from the texts of fables or fantasy creatures are disappearing in the world because the books about them are being burned by religious fundamentalists.  Other examples could include an evil god controlling people by editing the book of their lives stolen from the library of the gods or there could be a fantasy story where wizards can hop between worlds by literally escaping into texts about those worlds themselves.  In each example, there is the primary fantasy narrative, but within the story is a secondary level of fantasy literature tied in with the magic system of the primary text.  Such self-reference may not only be entertaining commentary but enlightening criticism of the fantasy genre as well.  One may use it to speculate on the structure of imagination, the importance of literature to society or the responsibility of writers to the lives of their fictional creations.  It may also allow the author to situate their work within the history of fantasy genre so that they can juxtapose the world of their writing to that of another writer within the former. 

Meta-fantasy also allows the text to break the fourth wall, so to speak, by reminding the reader that the world of the story is not a complete reality unto itself meant to be indulged in solely for its own sake but is a construct integrated with a narrative and ideology whose significance transcends the confines of the text.  Fantasy enthusiasts are often criticized for being compulsively obsessed with the nature of the fictional world they have escaped into but are inept, ignorant or indifferent to the real world around them.  Caricature though this may be, I do think it to be a legitimate concern of the genre.  It should be recognized that all fiction, and not just fantasy, is vulnerable to this sort of indulgence; fantasy simply receives more criticism because it doesn’t purport to be historical in content.  The magic of meta-fantasy can be employed to ameliorate some of the anxiety over fictional over-indulgence in creative ways not available to other genres of literature. By referencing the fantasy text as a text, criticizing obsessive escapism or clarifying the nature of fantasy and imagination through meta-fantastical magic, the author provides explicit disavowal towards irresponsible escapism that an attentive reader would recognize and internalize.    

Fantasy is criticized as escapist, as seeking solace from the injustices of the world in the illusions of literature.  If anything, fantasy is the least capable of providing this form of escapism since it is preoccupied with an inherently impossible world.  It is other genres of literature, with all their pretension to represent reality, that provide illusory comfort.  One enters into a fantasy, not to live within it, but to look back upon our world from its vantage point, so that we may change this world.  The magic fantasy provides is not a retreat from this world but an intrusion into this world.  Fantasy literature is not merely a product of the written imagination but reading it is an instruction in exercising one’s imagination.  One learns how to weave words together to create alternative worlds just as a sorcerer learns the spells necessary to exercise his will upon the world.  The refusal to learn from one’s fantasies is a betrayal of the genre.  Fantasy enthusiasts who find nothing in it but the indulgence of an illusion are akin to men suffering under the spells of a sorcerer, ignorant of their curse.  By putting our dreams of liberation into words we give them the opportunity to live in the mind of others and thereby change their world and our own.  Despite being words for another world, impossible for us, the ideals we struggle for are not impossible but are rather necessary across worlds.  That is the magic of moral vision: it is not constrained by the world, but commands how the world is to be shaped. 

Simply because fantasy is disconnected to the history of our world does not mean that it cannot change our history.  The immense and progressively normalized popularity of the genre is a testament to its potential to inspire change through mass movement.  It may be that the genre’s very playfulness with the narratives of our histories provides what is needed to change our history rather than merely escape from it.  Fantastic stories allow us to occupy perspectives radically different than our own disregard the burden of history that encumbers our capacity to empathize with others.  And by being estranged from identifying with our own narratives we may come to see that they are themselves arbitrary fantasies, forced upon us by the violence of history.  The magical aspect of fantasy reveals the inherently ideological nature of reality; just as the mage’s words of power shape the world, so too does the power of the ideologue’s words shape our world.  Fantasy gives shape to the monstrous ideologies that threaten our lives by literalizing them into the grotesqueries forms that they are.  We are awoken from the spell of our false consciousness and dispel the illusory ideologies that control us through the rationalizations of history and science.  Fantasy, through its free-flow of creativity collapses our conditioned patterns and prejudices of thought.  It does not provide the answers, but it may provide a portal to glimpse them through.    

It is with unfortunate irony that the fantasy genre has been accused of sub-literary quality.  Unfortunate because there is a great wealth of aesthetic creativity and moral imagination that occupies much of the writing and ironic because fantasy, of all genres, takes literature the most seriously and invest it with the most subversive potential.  Other genres of fictional literature write about our world as a given; the very credulity of science fiction depends upon the pseudo-inevitability of its projected future.  The effect of this is to relegate literature to the role of reproducing our world and confining our imagination to it.  Even science fiction, much lauded for its progressive optimism, proceeds to imagine the future as a projection from our current perspective and thereby constructions the future from within those constrains of privilege and power.  No wonder then that so much of the imagined futures of science fiction are preoccupied with the colonialism and militarism of white saviors battling against some alien other we have projected those very same sins upon.  Fantasy, for all its flagrant infidelity to reality, may be the best suited to bestow upon us the wisdom that we do indeed live in a magical world.  One only need find the right words to summon its secret power. 

Culturally Appropriate Cultural Appropriation

Cultural appropriation can be defined as taking the cultural knowledge, ritual or items of a cultural community, specifically a minority community, without their permission.  This is wrong because it deprives the minority community of the empowering uniqueness of their own culture against that of the dominant culture which has appropriated their culture into itself.  This process can perpetuated minority stereotypes by modeling the impression of minority culture and can normalize oppression by redefining such inequality as a part of the culture rather than a conflict between two cultures.  Cultural appropriation is routinely discussed in relation to white privilege for it is the latter that enables the former and the former that reinforces the latter.  

White people occupy positions of power that allow them to redefine their own culture and those of minorities for oppressive exploitation, often in the form of imperialism and colonialism, making their dominating culture more invisible and therefore more impenetrable to resistance.  If the oppressor appears to be the same as the oppressed they are not only harder to recognize and criticize but they are also able to redefine minority culture by the superficial semblance of being a member to it.  This covert oppression is all the more offensive when minority culture is redefined through representations of negative stereotypes by those in power.

Discussions of cultural appropriation operate as if one could comprehend a culture scientifically as a discreet empirical unit that can be abstracted out of the ongoing progress of cultural assimilation for analysis.  Because a culture is historically mediated and history is an interpretive reduction of events, culture is continually being re-defined across time according to the priorities and experiences of its current historical context.  Cultures borrow from one another in order to preserve themselves.  Even the most reductively fundamentalist interpretations of a tradition are inherently appropriative and interpretative.  They reduce an entire cultural history down to those elements which resonate with contemporary concerns and dynamics of power between other cultures and defend such elements through the appropriation of foreign technology and ideology.  

One can only understand a culture through its current context but one can more honestly and respectfully negotiate with it.  The cultural fundamentalists do not have an honest or respectful relationship to their culture because they believe that they are preserving it against foreign influence even as they are erasing recognition of it and preserving what remains through the very foreign influences they fear.  One must perpetually negotiate between one’s inherited tradition, authority and the commodities of one’s collective history.  Such negotiation arises from within a culture in relation to others and this process precludes it from being abstracted out of its current context as a distinct item of scrutiny. 

Cultural items are often treated by those discussing cultural appropriation as if they all operate as commodities of identity-political investment, as if each item in a culture could be reduced to a mere ideological representation of the cultural community.  Each item is likely to have a plurality of interpretations to its cultural significance and is likely to transcend any local culture.  Items of any given culture are ironically likely to belong to some other culture that had already been appropriated into its own (pasta being an identifiable aspect of Italian culture despite having it traced back to Chinese culture).  So when one culture complains against another that it is being appropriated, it is probably a conflict over the appropriation of some third, likely forgotten culture; the appropriation of one of the cultures simply appears more innocent as its appropriation has been forgotten by history and has become accepted as an essential part of the dominant culture.  

Even if cultural appropriation was ended it would be difficult to determine who belongs to what group and what belongs to each group and who has the authority to define these limits, especially since these tend to define one another. And if an item has a plurality of interpretations, then once appropriated, who determines its meaning and who determines the significance of it being appropriated based on such meaning?  Who has the authority to define the boundary of a cultural identity is ambiguous and may be relative to the values and beliefs within each culture which would themselves be defined by those recognized as legitimately authoritative within the community.  It is commonly said that for cultural assimilation to be appropriation, one must be invited into a culture in order to participate in it.  But this requires someone with the authority to invite one into the culture, and one must be sensitive to such variance.  To assume that anyone speaks with authority for their culture would be presumptuous on their part and one’s own. 

One must be sensitive to the context of ritual or artifact and who is available to legitimate its adoption.  So too must accusations of illegitimate cultural appropriation be tempered by personal understanding; without understanding the significance of the item to the person, one cannot be confident that their adoption of it is insincere.  Perhaps the white woman wearing a bindi is in fact a Hindu convert or the white man in a keffiyeh has a Palestinian wife with family in the West Bank.  So much discussion of cultural appropriation occurs around the internet which makes spectacles of de-contextualized images and video such that a seemingly offensive example of cultural appropriation may actually be a meaningful gesture of solidarity.  This inattentive disregard for a nuanced understanding of cultural assimilation and participation has only served to reinforce an oppositional binary between people of white privilege and people of color.        

The rhetoric of cultural appropriation places emphasis on cultural appropriation as analogous to theft; it is the theft of a minority people’s cultural heritage.  And while such rhetoric is superficially convincing, further scrutiny proves that it is insubstantial and often incoherent in many contexts.  Understanding cultural appropriation as theft presupposes that culture is to be understood as a finite resource possessed exclusively by a particular population that can be exchanged, freely or through coercion, between populations.  If culture was not finite, if it was not bound to any particular people, and if it cannot be exchanged, then the analogy to theft breaks down.  

As said before, cultures reflexively change over time by selectively emphasizing their accumulated traditional histories, emphasizing and transforming particular elements over others.  Such a process occurs within the context of the community’s contemporary interests in relation to other communities such that any given culture may, and indeed must, incorporate elements, often in the form of technological artifact or political ideology, from other cultures, in order to preserve its own communal identity.  No culture can be considered in absolute isolation from the influence of other cultures since there will always been some overlap between it and others and thus culture is not bound to any one community, but multiple cultures may be present within the same community with each culture overlapping in shared knowledge, rituals, or artifacts.    

Even if a culture can be understood in abstraction as a finite number of ideas, customs, rituals and artifacts, there is nevertheless infinite potential for the interpretation of these items and their infinite relations between one another across time and place within the identifying community.  The idea that one can exchange these items between cultures becomes obviously incoherent in most cases since exchange requires the transfer of something from one person to another for something else, with each party losing an item in exchange for gaining another.  Particular political institutions and arrangements must be in place for cultural appropriation as a mode of cultural theft to be coherently criticized.  Only if the exchange of culture is unequal between parties and presupposes some restriction on the cultural expression of the minority by the majority is it intelligible.  

White Americans innovating upon African American music and dance is in itself should not be condemned unless it occurs in a context where African Americans are not allowed to express their own culture in a way that white American are allowed to express what they have appropriated from them.  Otherwise the appropriation is not a deprivation of the minority culture but merely an imitation or interpretation of it that expands upon it rather than restricting it.  Cultural appropriation may be fraudulent or deviant but it is not blatant theft unless it necessarily entails that once adopted by another culture, the original culture is unable to participate in their own traditions to the same degree.  There is no loss of a culture when it is practiced, worn or used by other people, even when done radically differently; it is simply an expansion of that culture or a redefinition of it.              

The threat of cultural appropriation is said to coincide with the pressure towards cultural assimilation into the majority culture.  People of color not only feel that they are being deprived of their culture as it is being made a commodity of white culture but that they must adopt white culture itself as their dominant form of expression, abandoning their more traditional community beliefs and customs.  A Chinese immigrant to America may simultaneously feel that their culture has been appropriated into parody through Chinese restaurants and television stereotypes while simultaneously feeling that they cannot authentically express Chinese culture as they received it because it is too exotic or offensive to conform to the stereotypes expected by Americans.  In making such claims it is crucial that one distinguish between white culture and the culture of people with white privilege.  White culture is synonymous with the ideology of capitalism and is the cynical denial of having a culture because every element of culture is a commodity that can be purchased and sold as a means of self-expression and empowerment without any measure of identification with it.  People of white privilege are those who are considered white and are thus in an advantageous position in society thanks to their rejection of identification with any particular culture in favor of a generic and cynical distance to any tradition except for the commodification and appropriation of other traditions.  

White culture is a threat to all cultures, even those who benefit from white privilege since the precondition for the privilege is the disintegration of their cultural identity.  What people of color rightly fear is the appropriation of and assimilation into white culture, not the culture of white people such as the Irish, Italian, and Jewish, etc.  It is not so much a conflict between cultures appropriating and assimilating one another, but between sincere cultural identities and an insincere commercialization of those identities.  Thus white people, insofar as they recognize that their privilege is predicated upon the repression of their own particular traditional heritages, are potential allies of people of color in their struggle against cultural appropriation.  It is not the identity of the appropriator that should be cause to offense, but the mode of appropriation.  It is too easy and too dangerous to fall into the trap of identity politics and immediately accuse a white person of oppressive cultural appropriation simply because they are white.  This unnecessarily antagonizes potential white allies whose white privilege affords them a degree of freedom that is practical to the struggles of people of color and can afford them a cultural space of appreciation not otherwise afforded to them when their culture is strictly segregated from the culture of white people.    

Being offended by the cultural juxtaposition of a white person for merely sporting dreadlocks or wearing Native American patterns is the reduction of ethics into aesthetics.  There is no moral consideration of the rights of the white person or the culture that they have appropriated to determine whether it was legitimate or not but there is merely the tasteless image of a white person adopting elements of another culture considered inappropriate for them.   This represents a slippery slope towards racism since it judges one superficially based on their racial and cultural identification regardless of how they value or respect other cultures.  Ironically, this insistence on cultural purity from the corruption of white appropriation mirrors the concerns of white bigots who fear that people of color are infiltrating their culture.  This is also reminiscent of other-obsessed fundamentalism insofar as it is overly obsessed with the other’s culture and rather than maintaining a focus on the significance of one’s own traditions; what is considered important is that white people do not engage with the culture of people of color not that people of color have their culture acquire greater exposure or that it be positively received and reinterpreted in other cultures.  


When white people ignore the significance behind an element of another culture, or make claims of false claims of authenticity for profit, or when they appropriate symbols of resistance to depoliticize them, then they are no longer allies because they are reinforcing the oppressive commodification of culture.    This reactionary strategy of closing of interaction between one’s culture and others is unlikely to preserve itself and far more likely to only reinforce stereotypes, exotification and fossilization of the community further through lack of exposure.  Communities must be willing to endure the transient trauma of appropriation, accommodation and assimilation between their culture and others if they are to maintain relevant to their contemporary contexts.

Insofar as the white privilege of cultural appropriation is a reflective of white culture, then the appropriation of culture from people of color appears to be without problem.  To claim that it is problematic would require that elements of one culture appropriated by another be abandoned to the exclusive right of their original community.  To fail to do so would be hypocritical for it would require one culture, white culture, to abandon the appropriation of other cultures while allowing all of those other cultures to continue in their appropriation of one another.  One could only claim that items incorporated into white culture are not white if the concept of cultural theft makes sense, and since it has been argued previously that it does not absent a direct relation to oppression, one cannot determine the limits of white culture from outside of it.  Only white people can determine what white culture is, just as only people of color can negotiate the limits of their own culture.  

If white culture is expansive and inclusive of minority customs and creations then all the better for it, assuming that such expansion does not require the original culture to disavow ownership .  If white people started to wear the kimono or bindi or keffiyeh while recognizing that these originated in other cultures and are still significant to them, then there would not be a contrast between mundane white culture and exotic non-white cultures but degrees of participation in cultures, with white culture being on the periphery of experience.  What is offensive is when a white person attempts to be a non-white person by means of adopting stereotyped behavior and costume, even if such behavior is meant to be flattering.  Another culture is not a costume; it is not something that one “puts on” as if the underlying universal was white culture.  A white person may appropriate and even participate in Arab culture, as I do with my Syrian girlfriend and her family, but I will never be Arab and it would be offensive if I attempted through over-identification to act as if I were.       

The binary opposition between a people of white privilege majority and a people of color minority is ironic since it reproduces the logic of commodification inherent in harmful practices of cultural appropriation.  This is because it reduces a cultural item to a commodity devoid of significance beyond signifying the cultural community itself just as a capitalist commodity is a symbol of expression for the individual consumer.  This produces a further binary between cultural significance and cultural representation, the former being the meaning and significance of any given practice or artifact to a community and the latter being the practical or material form it takes.  

Those in power conscientious to the perils of cultural appropriation do appropriate minority culture to the extent to which they internalize the significance of these rituals and artifacts but they do not practically or materially express this since they understand it to be offensive.  The individual who refuses to wear a bindi or participate in belly-dancing out of the fear that it will be offensive to the Hindu or Arab communities respectively, stands halfway within each culture; they have appropriated an understanding of the bindi or belly-dancing as of exclusive significance to each population, and in identifying themselves as outside of this population, refuse to participate in their customs.  This is paradoxical since the interpretation of the bindi or belly-dancing as such arises from within its own local culture, but the refusal of each makes apparent that one stands outside the culture as a contradiction to it. 

What cultural assimilation discourse often overlooks is the possibility of people of color commodifying their own culture.  This doesn’t have to simply be examples of people of color selling their culture in order to economically sustain itself in an increasingly globalized capitalist economy.  This already presupposes that the cultural item is devoid of sacred significance and thus can be traded like any other profane item in a market economy.  So even if Indian women are not buying and selling bindis in a capitalist economy, they can still understand the bindi without any relation to the sacred as a mere aesthetic commodity for their own self-expression.  Indeed, this process of commodification is what allowed people of white privilege, the Irish, Jewish, Italian, etc., to be considered white and occupy a position of power in society.  By divesting themselves of cultural signifiers that distinguished them from those who already possessed the privilege of white identity, they too could be incorporated into white identity.  And while some people of color may never be considered a white person, they may nevertheless commit the same sacrilegious commodification of their cultural heritage.  

While this process could be traced back to white colonialism and imperialism and the intrusive pressure to conform to capitalism, it is nevertheless true that the commodification of a culture may be in place before white people even begin to engage in the cultural appropriation of it.  If people of color are to resist the appropriation of their culture as commodities of capitalist fetishism and the cult of individual self-expression, then they must be responsible in ensuring that the significance of their cultural items remain explicit.  If there is no longer anything particularly sacred about the bindi in South Asian culture itself, then the adoption of it by white people as a token of beauty is of no significance since there would be no misrepresentation of it.  To insist otherwise would be simply bigoted against white people adopting elements of other cultures.

Cultural appropriation and representation is inarguably offensive when done to explicitly mock another culture, particularly what it considers religiously sacred.  When people wear black face, dress as Arab terrorists or Native American savages for Halloween or draw the prophet Mohammed of Islam in an insulting manner (I see nothing inherently offensive in drawing Mohammed as such given that it has some pious precedence in the history of Islam itself), there should be no room for debate that these practices are done with the explicit intention to demean and demoralize another community for the empowerment and amusement of one’s own.  

Also offensive are false claims to authenticity or ownership of items outside of one’s own culture; non-Native American artists passing off imitation art as authentic Native craftwork is one of the clearest examples of cultural appropriation since it does deprive a minority community precisely because an item is falsely claimed to be from that community.  I have often heard Arab Palestinians accuse Jewish Israelis of appropriating their cultural cuisine and claiming it as their own, i.e. hummus and falafel are Israeli and not Arab.  But to be honest, I have never heard a Jewish Israeli make this claim, and for them to do so would be absurd; the closest approximation came from an Israeli whose family came from Morocco and thus Middle Eastern food considered Arab cuisine was indeed part of her cultural heritage and not a mere invention of colonialist reinvention.  Nevertheless, the fear of the oppressor appropriating another culture and claiming it as theirs is real and finds its precedent in the very real theft of land and wealth by colonialism and imperialism. 

But cultural appropriation is not only done to mock or discredit another culture but may naively if not sincerely be done in an effort of solidarity with that culture.  White allies of oppressed minorities should not fetishize superficial identification with the suffering of such minority cultures.  By claiming to represent them, or worse yet, be a person of color “on the inside”, white liberals run the inevitable risk of misrepresenting minorities through offensive stereotypes.  Unfortunately, such fetishism often arises out of the discourse of cultural appropriation and white privilege itself.  White privilege and the ideology of capitalism it is associated with are infinitely reflexive, able to appropriate or commodify opposition to itself.  

Capitalism can sell Che Guevara or punk leather jackets to self-styled political radicals because they believe they are rebelling against the system they are actually buying into. So too are people of white privilege capable of idealizing the victimization of people of color and turning it into a perverse form of humility.  This ritualized form of self-deprecation is symptomatic of white-guilt ridden liberals who, in a desire to appear legitimate, attempt to cultivate an aura of personal oppression to measure up against the actual oppression of people of color.  Cultural appropriation cannot be justified when it remains superficial and ignorant or indifferent to the actual struggles of people of color.    

When symbols of resistance to colonial and imperial appropriation are themselves appropriated by the oppressor, the offense is particularly intense and absurd.  For Palestinians and those who support their interest of national autonomy, the traditional keffiyeh scarf has become a struggle against Israeli occupation and oppression (and unfortunately equated with the terrorist elements of said nationalist movement).  If Israeli settlers appropriated wearing the keffiyeh in the West Bank it would undermine the potency of the symbol for their cause(compare this strategy to Kanye West’s wearing a Confederate Flag decorated jacket to mock and strip the symbol’s association with the oppression of African Americans).  

Similarly, white people in general are often criticized for wearing the keffiyeh not only because they wear it simply as a depoliticized fashion accessory but because they can wear it as such without being labeled terrorist sympathizers.  Thus it is offensive not merely because the commodification of the keffiyeh into form of self-expression strips it of its revolutionary significance but those that do wear it for political purposes cannot do so freely without being accused of supporting violence and terrorism even though its cultural significance extends beyond such associations.  For this reason, white allies of oppressed people of color should be free to assimilate items of their culture into their own in order to give them wider representation in society insofar as those wearing them do not contribute to or reinforce those forces that oppress them to begin with.  Even if a white person wears a keffiyeh merely as a fashion accessory they are at least providing a depoliticized context for it that allows those that are wearing it for political reasons to do so incognito and thus avoid immediate identification and accusation of being (supportive of) terrorists.  People will still be free to understand the keffiyeh as a symbol of solidarity for Palestinian nationalism. 

Cultural appropriation is said to be problematic when it occurs in an unequal exchange between an oppressive majority culture against an oppressed minority culture.  Presumably this is because the supposed abstract theft of culture mirrors more concrete and traumatic imperial and colonial thefts of land, wealth, and the freedom and lives of their fellow people.  So when a White American appropriates African American or Native American culture it can be seen as reproducing the history of their oppression despite often appearing to be naively benevolent in intention.  But if this reproduction is to be normative, it must bear some immediate relation between the act of appropriation to the history of oppression; the act of appropriation itself must serve to reinforce oppression or coincide with it.  

If the instance of appropriation does not reinforce oppression, however, then the offense is merely emotionally and historically contingent to the victim; anyone can be offended by the appropriation of their culture by some minority for some historical offense by a member of that identity as history is replete with examples of some people oppressing one another.  This merely warrants pragmatic politeness towards those overly sensitive to the history of intercultural violence; if I know my Indian friend is sensitive to history of white colonialism in India, I would probably not wear a t-shirt with the Hindu god Ganesha on it.  But if I knew my friend had no such sensitivity, I would not be concerned since my shirt presumably has no connection to misrepresenting, discrediting or oppressing Hindu Indian culture.  

But to believe that one can condemn freely condemn another person for participating in their culture merely because at some point in history a member of that person’s culture oppressed a member of one’s own culture is simply racist and contrary to the ethic of criticizing cultural appropriation as a form of racist oppression.  There is a bias in cultural appropriation critiques to overemphasize of a narration of oppression; because the history of cultural relation is one of oppression one should resist the temptation of appropriation.  But history is not simply the remembering of the past but also the recognition of the future.  If one wants a future of mutual cultural respect one needs to focus on the narration of cultural cooperation and appreciation not oppression and appropriation.  And the initiation of such a narrative can be located in the act of cultural assimilation itself; by exchanging and experimenting with one another’s culture, we are engaging in creative cooperation, not restrictive oppression. 

Cultural appropriation is not beneficial if you do nothing to confront the injustices facing the culture you have appropriated from.  If you claim to care about the native culture, buy from within that community and make the effort to understand its history and its struggles.  Respect for other cultures necessities sensitivity to the significance, source and similarity of any cultural item.  One must question whether one’s adoption of it is done out of solidarity or whether it is merely out of mockery, fraudulence, or vanity and whether it was acquired freely from the community or whether its adoption was made possible by, and reinforces, the oppression of said community.  

Criticism of cultural appropriation must be personalized to understanding the relationship the individual has to the cultural item since cultural boundaries are indeterminate and subject to revision.  The significance of any cultural custom or artifact is also subject to revision so one must be willing to admit that a given item may have multiple interpretations and need not be restricted from acquiring more.  Members within a culture are just as capable of commodifying their own traditions as those outside of them and the way to combat this is to insist on the continued significance of these sacred rites and customs.  And if someone misrepresents or mocks some traditional form of knowledge, or custom or artifact then they liked do not understand it and it is their loss; they have deprived themselves access to the significance of one’s own culture, but one is still capable of enjoying its significance among one’s own community.