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CULTURAL APPROPRIATION IN TWO SHORT STORIES BY ALICE MUNRO...
twins.” Nicklas and Lindner continue: “Particularly cultural appropriation
implies a move towards the new version rather than a move away from
the ‘original’. The process of adaptation as appropriation, thus, tends to be
characterized in this context as the creation of new cultural capital.” This
statement is also valid for the adaptation of literary characters.
None of the characters in the two Munro’s short stories are firmly anchored
in any fixed cultural circle; they are all characters in a constant state of change.
Munro has provided each character with basic features acquired through
cultural appropriation and then exposed them to continuous assimilation,
thus creating a newly derived cultural reality. This can clearly be seen in the
fact that Maria in “Five Points” assimilates to Canadian culture at a much
faster pace than her parents, but she largely remains governed by their
traditionalist laws, and in the fact that Charlotte in “The Albanian Virgin”
becomes assimilated into Albanian society but never entirely denounces
her Canadianess, while her husband Gjurdhi becomes assimilated to the
Canadian culture but never entirely denounces his Albanian identity which
means that all three characters become representatives of a new and hybrid
‘culture in between’.
Hence, cultural appropriation in literature is largely a matter of quality
writing, common sense and good taste. Furthermore, appropriation in
literature mostly means re-interpretation, which is very important for
literature and especially so for modern literature, and, finally, it is closely
related to literary adaptation and, as such, indivisible from most of literary
practice.
Benign Cultural Romanticism
Ina similar way to Ziff and Rao, James O. Young differentiates between cultural
appropriation in the arts as theft (of usually physical objects of culture), and
cultural appropriation as a profoundly offensive conduct of the artist or the
offensive nature of an artistic product. He continues by stating that “other
[than theft] acts of cultural appropriation are morally benign. Some works
of art are aesthetic failures precisely because an artist has appropriated
content in a clumsy and ineffective manner.”'* This claim verbalizes one of the
starting points of my analyses. While Munro’s cultural appropriation in the
two analyzed short stories is surely a product of a benign artistic process, the
effectiveness of her cultural re-interpretation is certainly open to discussion.
Pascal Nicklas — Oliver Lindner, Adaptation and Cultural Appropriation: Literature, Film
and the Arts, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 2012, 4.
7 Ibid. 6.
Young, Cultural Appropriation, 28.
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