I love it when people's only comeback is to say "well your nation are arseholes so you have no right to speak". Where did I or anybody else say NZ and Australia were superior to Americans or anybody else? Or did better on the cultural appropriation rap?
When I was a child I didn't understand my own privilege and could whine with the best of them about the famine and the 600 years of oppression and four green fields one of them in bondage and my aunty couldn't go to high school because she was a Catholic etc etc, oh and I'm a woman wah wah patriarchy and I was bullied in school boo hoo. But I am an adult now. And you know, we are living now, not 500 years ago or a thousand years ago or in 1850 or 1918 or 1972 or 1991. There is not one set of people on earth that has not harmed another set of people on earth, in some cases aggressively and at length. We can all find some victimhood in our ancestral makeup if we dig hard enough, and some time being an oppressive arsehole.
That is not the point. We need to look at the sociopolitical circumstances we operate in now, and to consider our roles as purchasers of, operators in and representatives of a globalised product that has at its heart, and continues to signify whether we like it or not, a chunk of culture from some fairly disenfranchised and impoverished parts of the world. That is all I ask. That we recognise the complex nature of our relationships to the dance and the music rather than look at it solely as something we bought at the supermarket and can "own", or as something we need to "save", or as a thing that we deserve total agency over because we "bought" it. It's not about "wah wah an Arab liked my dancing and showed me a move, therefore I can do what I like" or "it's my culture to do this or that therefore I can do what I like" or even "nobody can do this thing because it's not from their culture". It is not about simplistic judgment calls on who is better or worse or more or less special in the world. This whole thing is complicated. And we need to recognise that the power is not in balance. Just as the power is not in balance when you come from any country that needs to keep larger world powers on side in order to survive. We all come from places with differing relationships to the current world powers, and that in turn affects how we interact to some degree with our portable globalised bellydance culture.
I am not generally a flouncer but I feel I'm done here again.
When I was a child I didn't understand my own privilege and could whine with the best of them about the famine and the 600 years of oppression and four green fields one of them in bondage and my aunty couldn't go to high school because she was a Catholic etc etc, oh and I'm a woman wah wah patriarchy and I was bullied in school boo hoo. But I am an adult now. And you know, we are living now, not 500 years ago or a thousand years ago or in 1850 or 1918 or 1972 or 1991. There is not one set of people on earth that has not harmed another set of people on earth, in some cases aggressively and at length. We can all find some victimhood in our ancestral makeup if we dig hard enough, and some time being an oppressive arsehole.
That is not the point. We need to look at the sociopolitical circumstances we operate in now, and to consider our roles as purchasers of, operators in and representatives of a globalised product that has at its heart, and continues to signify whether we like it or not, a chunk of culture from some fairly disenfranchised and impoverished parts of the world. That is all I ask. That we recognise the complex nature of our relationships to the dance and the music rather than look at it solely as something we bought at the supermarket and can "own", or as something we need to "save", or as a thing that we deserve total agency over because we "bought" it. It's not about "wah wah an Arab liked my dancing and showed me a move, therefore I can do what I like" or "it's my culture to do this or that therefore I can do what I like" or even "nobody can do this thing because it's not from their culture". It is not about simplistic judgment calls on who is better or worse or more or less special in the world. This whole thing is complicated. And we need to recognise that the power is not in balance. Just as the power is not in balance when you come from any country that needs to keep larger world powers on side in order to survive. We all come from places with differing relationships to the current world powers, and that in turn affects how we interact to some degree with our portable globalised bellydance culture.
I am not generally a flouncer but I feel I'm done here again.