Borrowed Power: Essays on Cultural Appropriation

Abstract

Borrowed Power juxtaposes sixteen essays on the appropriation of cultural practices and their products. The essayists write from positions representing diverse academic and artistic backgrounds, social locations, topical concerns, theoretical orientations, and analytical methods. This heterogeneity serves well the book's focus on contested issues of authenticity, representation, heritage, and intellectual property. It conjures up a vivid sense of just how malleable a notion the "traditional" is, and of the myriad things it can mean to practice, to study, or to sell tradition. This kaleidoscopic vision renders Borrowed Power a useful counterpart to books presenting sustained arguments by individual authors (e.g., Said 1978; Clifford 1988; Torgovnick 1997), as well as to compilations of essays contributed only by academic writers (e.g. Howes 1996). Even the contributors who propose overarching models for thinking about appropriation are well aware that conditions specific to each case inevitably complicate any general statement on the subject. Because of this, their essays are most convincing when they return ineluctably to cases. As editors Bruce Ziff and Pratima V. Rao write, "Context counts" (p. 13). Ziff and Rao begin by summarizing the various grounds and means for resistance to appropriation (pp. 8-16; cf. Warren 1989 on tangible cultural property). They then give pride of place to two essays on music. In "African-American Music: Dynamics ofAppropriation and Innovation," Perry A. Hall grapples with the inequity of the U'S, music industry's commercialization of subcultural forms. Hall emphasizes the impact of this process on African Americans. Along the way, he reappropriates ideas of "primordially African rhythms" (p. 42) and "essential Black rhythmic sense" (p. 46). Although at first glance this language may seem to reinscribe dominant stereotypes of a biologically racialized musicality, Hall locates these phrases in a historicized cultural domain characterized by social oppression, assimilationist pressures, and the oppositional marking of ethnicity by musical practice. The next essay is Anthony Seeger's "Ethnomusicology and Music Law," probably familiar to many from its previous appearance under a slightly different title in Ethnomusicology (1992). Seeger presents a nuanced consideration of ideas about the ownership of traditional. music, illustrating from several diverse vantage points the limitations of copyright law in an intercultural setting. He takes as his chief example the intricate tale of certain recordings he produced of Suya music. The editors give these two cultural analyses of music a prominent position in Borrowed Power. This acknowledges the centrality of musical appropriation to late twentieth-century mediated intercultural flows. It also situates the book in an interdisciplinary space between edited volumes focused chiefly on issues related to music (e.g., Baumann 1991) and those limited to nonmusical modes of cultural appropriation (e.g., Messenger 1989). This move towards a more visible...

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