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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.
