SUNDAY, 19 OCTOBER 2025

Or should I have used ‘appropriation’? This was much less of a concern when I was growing up: books would simply describe the arrival of Japanese prints in Europe after Japan opened up to the world and their deep influence on some of the Impressionists and painters like Van Gogh; or the effect of ‘primitive’ art on Modernism, with Picasso’s discovery of African masks and Matisse’s trips to Morocco suggesting a way forward for European painting, allowing it to break free of the chains of its Classical past; or Gauguin’s rejection of the sophistication of Paris for the simple peasant life of Britanny and ultimately migration to the South Pacific. But these things were rarely seen as problematic until the works of thinkers like Du Bois and Fanon became better-known in the social and intellectual cauldron of the 1960s and forced the west to reconsider its role during the colonial period and its attitudes towards what was then called the Third World. The subsequent development of postcolonial theory inspired partly by the civil rights movement in the US took this feeling from the streets and placed it in academia, including universities in non-western countries. At the same time, many people in the most powerful nations of the world began to feel less secure in their cultural supremacy, lose confidence in their innate superiority, and question their historical legacy.

Nowadays, for many people, borrowing between cultures bears the stain of appropriation because of the unequal power relations that operate between nations and cultures. This has led to attacks on the centrality of the western canon and the assumption that western music, literature and painting are automatically superior to those of other countries and cultures. At the same time there has been a desire to rediscover work that has been marginalised within the west, such as the art of native Americans and Australians. Traditionalists reject this, with many on the cultural right dismissing it as ‘woke’, fashionable self-hatred on the part of a liberal western elite. But the debate will not be silenced and the general public is sometimes now aware of these issues. It is no longer just a debate among academics or a dispute between political ideologies.

The first thing to recognise is that cultural exchange has happened throughout history, and even in pre-history, although the modern sweep of globalisation has been far more extensive and has occurred at a faster pace. Whenever two cultures meet, either through trade or through conflict, borrowing occurs. Often this is the result of imperial advance and the most obvious transfer of one culture to another is that from colonist to colonised, as for example the speaking of European languages in Africa and South America or the influence of Norman French on Anglo-Saxon. But sometimes it is simply that a feature of one culture is superior to another in the sense that it is technologically more advanced or makes life better in some way, such as the current symbols for numbers that originated in India, spread to the Islamic world, and then replaced Roman numerals in Christian Europe because they made calculation so much easier.

The post-war years in the west saw a wave of cultural borrowing by the counterculture, much of it taken from Asia, with its pictures in the popular press of the Beatles travelling to India to study meditation under Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and the more arcane interest in Chinese calligraphy among painters like Kline and Motherwell. Looking back at this raiding of Asian cultures tempts one to use ‘appropriation’ as a description of what happened, since at a popular level it was often little more than a hippie flirtation with a fantasised East which was perceived to be more ‘spiritual’, but there was genuine respect from the Abstract Expressionist painters mentioned above and avant-garde musicians such as Cage and La Monte Young. Zen in particular influenced artists in all fields but also became part of popular culture with its concept of satori or sudden enlightenment, which was ideal for the emergent age of mass consumerism in which Zen was simply another product, since in its populist version there was no need to spend a lifetime of self-discipline preparing for that magic moment when you realised the meaning of life, the universe and everything.

The 1960s also saw a huge increase in interest of texts like the I Ching, the Tao Te Ching, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead. As a teenager, I read translations of them all, and my interest in the I Ching became a lifelong fascination and permanent bond. Nearly sixty years on, I know the English text almost by heart, but I still have the sense that I view it as a westerner and cannot fully feel it in my bones. In a way, though, this doesn’t matter because the I Ching is pliable enough to be adapted to a different culture, which is similar to how I feel about Japanese prints and African masks. The truth is that most cultural borrowings will to some extent be only superficially taken on board or fundamentally distorted because they will always be understood from the perspective of the mother culture. However, this does not rule out an element of universalism in human nature since it would seem logical to suppose that our biological similarities will result in psychological and cognitive resemblances, but our specific culture is embedded deeply within us and this can easily result in misreadings and misunderstandings.

Hollywood movies have always trodden a tightrope between the desire for the tang of the exotic that non-western cultures offer and the need to send audiences home with the taste of popcorn and coca-cola still swirling around their mouths. Some of the earliest movies swung heavily towards the latter and were occasionally basically racist, and I’m not just thinking of the famous example of Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), with its offensive blackface stereotypes of negroes and its portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan as a group of patriotic heroes. Seen from a modern perspective, the casual racism in some of these early movies shocks because it is so blatant and taken for granted.

Portrayals of East Asians tended to be more nuanced than this, however. It is true that in The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), which I think is a very good movie from a critical perspective but which is justifiably slated for its racism, the central Chinese character is portrayed as a sadistic creature of unimaginable evil who aims to unite all non-westerners into an army to overthrow and enslave the Caucasian race. In total contrast, though, in the various detective series featuring Charlie Chan, Mr Wong and Mr Moto, the Asian detectives are depicted as intelligent, resourceful and sophisticated. Even so, all three characters were played by white actors in yellowface, which suggests that Hollywood believed that audiences would not accept Asian-Americans playing the roles. This seemed to be vindicated when Keye Luke, born in China but who moved to America at a very young age, played the role of the central detective in Phantom of Chinatown and audiences kept away.

Any positive aspects in the portrayal of East Asians did not extend to African-Americans, however. In Charlie Chan at the Race Track (1936), for example, Chan is avuncular, his son Lee (played by Keye Luke) is as mom and apple pie as you can get in his use of vernacular American, but the black stable boy, Streamline, is a degrading stereotype of bulging eyes and broken grammar. In Hollywood films, therefore, there was a kind of hierarchy of colour, with whites at the top, East Asians below, then Mexicans and Latinos, Arabs, and finally blacks. Sadly, evaluations of race in non-western cultures often echoes this gradation if my personal experience of living in several Asian countries is anything to go by.

In addition, countries with a long cultural history, such as China and Japan, are usually rated highly, with Noh, Beijing Opera, and even the relatively modern form of Kabuki awarded elevated status. If a country is much poorer, especially if its history is short and oral rather than written, its culture is more likely to be assigned to the category of ‘primitive’. Places which become a tourist haven can buck this trend: for instance, Bali is now famous for its dances such as the Barong and the Kecak (although the latter was the brainchild of a German immigrant to Bali and is slightly less than one hundred years old, and even the venerable Barong has modern populist additions in response to what tourists want to see). The gamelan orchestra that accompanies the Barong dance has also become well-known, this time largely due to musicologists. Western scholars have played a key role in spreading familiarity with non-western cultures, but international tourism has done much more and also helped keep traditional forms alive in many countries as these nations struggle to unearth, or even invent, performances they can market as a tourist lure, with most local young people showing a total lack of interest in this semi-constructed history.

Contemporary globalisation is challenging the western hegemony which places itself at the top of the tree, however. These days K-pop and Japanese manga are renowned throughout the world, and to some extent are replacing the popular music, comics and movies of the US. From my experience of teaching Chinese undergrads and postgrads, I can confirm that most of them know far, far more about K-pop and manga than they do about the Beijing Opera, while some of them have never even heard of the I Ching, incredible as this may sound. But on second thoughts perhaps this is not so incredible: what do most undergrads in England know about Chaucer or Shakespeare, for example, except as something boring that they had to learn at school? (Assuming, of course, these writers are still on the curriculum and have not been replaced by J.K.Rowling.)

Pop culture tends to change at a much quicker pace than high culture, and in some ways is far more innovative and willing to take greater risks. This makes sense because part of the reason a canon exists is to conserve the culture of the past and to act as a kind of gatekeeper preventing the entry of popular forms into the long-term higher echelons until their worth is proven by the passage of time and they can morph into Culture with a capital C. With our modern love of distraction and constant change, we tend to decry this gatekeeping as elitism, but I personally believe there is value in this bedrock of tradition and that a balance between the shock of the new and the comfort of the old is much more likely to produce good Art than a restless dash for novelty and constant revolution which can easily descend into a slavish following of fashion.   

The increase in cultural globalisation in a technological world has led to a concomitant increase in hybridity, where two or more forms are blended together into a new composite whole. One aspect of this at the everyday level is fusion food, which in my opinion often results in the bastardisation of two illustrious food cultures into an unholy blancmange. Allied to this is the internationalisation of various dishes, so that nowadays in any decent-sized city in the world one can eat French, Italian, Thai, Mexican, Turkish, Japanese, and a multitude of other cuisines, but people I have taught from all of these countries agree that when they eat this food abroad it never tastes the same as that in their home country. Perhaps I’m not the best person to pontificate about native food culture since I come from England, but we are exchanging quality and tradition for extra choice, and bona-fide food cultures are increasingly watered down, and in the absence of traditional cuisines with a long, proud history and well-established standards, money serves as the lowest common denominator as the way we rank our culinary experiences.

Technological advance has also played a central role in the merging of disparate cultures in a myriad of ways. Planes transport millions of people around the globe every single day and a host of electronic inventions – telephone, TV, video, sound recording, smartphones, and particularly the internet – mean that human beings nowadays are much more aware of what is happening thousands of miles away, even if their knowledge barely scratches the surface, and have access to the lifestyles of people from vastly different cultures. It can be argued, however, that much of this takes place under an umbrella which is broadly western, and a kind of bland, faceless anti-culture has emerged, typified by identikit airports and shopping malls which obscure minority cultures of smaller nations and non-western countries behind a virtual wall of Americana.   

It is no surprise that hybridity has become a key concept in postcolonial theory, although it is not automatically viewed as a negative development. Bhabha, for instance, rejects the assumption that the country which is militarily or economically dominant will necessarily become culturally dominant, even though this is something we see all around us in the rise of Starbucks and McDonald’s and Disney. But while this manifestation of power relations may largely pertain, Bhabha makes the Foucauldian caveat that colonisation will always lead to resistance and that the traffic of cultural exchange therefore travels both ways. The culture of the colonised will sneak into that of the coloniser, not least because the former always know more about the oppressor than the oppressor knows about them. To my mind, postcolonial theory tends to exaggerate the extent to which this happens, but the number of Indian restaurants in the UK, with chicken tikka masala now as British as fish and chips, plus the multicultural make-up of the inhabitants of many British cities, shows that this argument is not without some traction, especially if we look at it from a longer, historical perspective.

While it’s true that multi-national corporations will make the decisions that flood the markets of the world with goods and cultural icons, day-to-day cultural exchange generally happens at the microlevel of two people encountering each other, so it’s difficult for even the most powerful organisations to dictate the flow of culture. Just as with language change, millions of individuals end up deciding what will catch on and what will be cast aside, and although those with cultural capital may hold more sway, there is a limit to their ability to swim against the tide as is shown by attempts to police language, which inevitably fail (just ask the Académie Française). As is proved by some of the bizarre things that go viral on the internet, predicting what will catch on and what will be rejected is a mug’s game, although businesses still attempt it because of the huge potential profit which might accrue if they are lucky and skilful enough to surf the wave.

The amount and speed of cultural exchange in the contemporary globalised world has clearly had political consequences. In developed countries there has been a widespread reaction against the most significant effect of globalisation – mass migration – and right-wing parties with a purist concept of national identity are growing in influence all the time. There may be a limit to this growth, however, because countries have become so economically interdependent that the global system might collapse if nations become more protectionist, and many of the richest countries rely on a flow of immigrant workers to do the jobs and pay the taxes that fuel their higher standard of living and pay their ageing populations a decent pension. Squaring this circle may prove impossible in the long run and it is tempting to assume that economics will eventually triumph over ideology.

Ultimately, whether we describe this contemporary trend as cultural exchange, or borrowing, or appropriation says more about our own attitude than it does about the process itself. The meeting of two different cultures will always be an opportunity for exciting new directions in thinking and the emergence of fresh hybrids which take elements from both. Often these elements will be fundamentally misunderstood, as is clear from some of the artistic examples scattered throughout this essay, but as long as this misreading doesn’t stray too far from reality, the encounter can still be stimulating and productive. If the encounter is purely superficial, though, and there is merely a juxtaposition rather than a sharing of cultures, new shoots may never sprout and what could have been a fruitful moment might lead to mistrust or even mutual enmity. The crucial thing is what we do when disparate cultures come together: use it as a spur to creativity or turn it into a reason to engage in conflict.