Oldal 77 [77]
CULTURAL APPROPRIATION IN TWO SHORT STORIES BY ALICE MUNRO...
Munro’s depiction of the character of Gjurdhi in “The Albanian Virgin”,
a character who is assimilating to Canadian culture but never really tries or
succeeds in controlling the intrinsic impulses of his original culture.
Finally, Ziff and Rao elaborate on yet another very important issue in
understanding cultural appropriation, and that is politics, or, rather the
power games behind it. In that sense, authors claim that the main issues of
cultural appropriation today are “about minority groups and subjects (the
disempowered, colonized, peripheral, or subordinate) who are seeking to
claim and protect the right to a cultural heritage.” This claim is interesting
in regard to the analysis of the Croatian and Albanian characters in the two
Alice Munro stories. Firstly, because both Croatian and Albanian culture
feature specific national and cultural struggles, which, although different
thematically, actually function within (both Croatian and Albanian,
respectively) shared mentalities in very similar ways. In relation to this, Alice
Munro has touched upon the two important issues of politics and power in
both societies: Catholic faith in “Five Points” (religious people being the group
which is in constant need of reconfirmation ever since the beginning of the
1990s), and peripherality and even exoticism in “The Albanian Virgin” (the
idea of isolation and unrecognizability being one of the main frustrations of
modern Albanian society). Secondly, the term of cultural appropriation seems
to bear one very important and intellectually progressive practical feature
— its role is also to protect minorities from false interpretation and unfair
assimilation. Canada is a country of immigrants, and Albanian and Croatian
are relatively small minorities. It is reasonable to assume that they could be
seen as the more ‘exotic’ ones in Canada. Croatians and Albanians in Canada
definitely fall into the group of peripheral and probably not overexposed
minorities, who could even be sensitive to literary depictions of their cultures
(this sensitivity being probably the only solid argument in favour of cultural
appropriation in literature).
In my analyses of Munro’s two short stories, I will identify and explain
instances of cultural approximation at the level of meanings, plots and
characters, and explore the effects of that literary device on the overall
integrity of the texts. My method is comparative and interdisciplinary due to
the important input from cultural studies (and partially history).
Artistic Re-interpretation of Culture
The basic question behind the phenomenon of cultural appropriation in
literature, in my opinion, is not the issue of defining and identifying cultural
appropriation but rather the question of ethics and morality. Ziff and Rao
2 Ibid., 8.