Oldal 78 [78]
OCR
NIKOLA TUTEK point out in their essay that cultural appropriation is largely preconditioned by politics, history and power games of all sorts. Under such conditions, this term is going through a constant process of redefinition and readjustment in a process that Ziff and Rao refer to as "moral algebra." In this instance, we are referring to the morals of the writer, which is in itself a very questionable way of conducting literary research. In his crucial work The World as Will and Idea, A. Schopenhauer explains that “we should not require a moral philosopher to be exceptionally moral.” And indeed, this claim is correct, if nothing else, from the sheer practical point of view of the creation of cultural material. So, why should we assume a moral parallel between writers of fiction and their work? It is only stories, after all, good or bad stories. Basic questions behind cultural appropriation (such as taking, cultural practices, belonging, morality, etc.) remain far out of the reach of the theory of literature in the narrow sense. If a certain text contains elements that are openly offensive to one cultural group, and is classified as hate speech (or rather hate writing) by the informed majority belonging to all cultural groups, then that text is automatically discredited as either bad literature or not literature at all. If authors of certain texts appropriate elements of other cultures, and the resulting text might be seen as offensive to only one cultural group, then this can produce two results: bad or good literature, with very little space left for ethical or moral considerations. This simply means that the theory of literature already possesses innate mechanisms which determine what should be practiced and what should be avoided in the production of literary texts of quality and integrity. Artistic freedom, poetic license, the freedom of creation, on the other hand, have to be preserved at any cost. Furthermore, even if the study of Ethics could provide a precise definition of cultural appropriation, I have my doubts about the restrictive application of that definition within the theory of art. In the words of James O. Young, “cultural appropriation is important to the flourishing of the arts in the contemporary world”! Every work of art is basically the re-interpretation of something, be it physical or emotional reality or other art, making the reinterpretation in the artssynonymous with cultural appropriation in the arts. As far as literature is concerned, this can be clearly seen in the adaptation of literary works (re-interpretation being the basis for every adaptation). Pascal Nicklas and Oliver Lindner note in their introductory essay to Adaptation and Cultural Appropriation: Literature, Film and the Arts that Julie Sanders sees adaptation and cultural appropriation as “siblings, if not non-identical 13 Ziff — Rao (eds.), Borrowed, 5. 14 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, London, Everyman, 1997, xviii. 55 James O. Young, Cultural Appropriation and the Arts, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, 28. + 76 +
