Understanding appropriation as a creative practice
Reimagining is a broad term for any imaginative re-interpretation, adaptation, or remix of a pre-existing motif, image, or work, whether the reimagined work is factual/historical or fictional. For example, a poster for a Harry Potter movie in which all the characters are black could be called a “reimagining” of the franchise. In a broad sense, Read More …
Cultural appropriaton is the adoption, borrowing, or theft of elements created by or belonging to one culture or socially-coded identity by those belonging to a different one. This is the most general and abstract sense, but the term is mainly used in situations where people with a more privileged identity borrow or steal from those Read More …
A form of cultural appropriation in which historical cultural contexts are ignored in favour of suggesting that current cultural norms have always been present, or are more valid than the context of the original. This is a form of anachronism and decontextualization, and at times it could even be viewed as recuperative since it could Read More …
Recuperation, in this technical sense, was the word the Situationists chose to refer to the process by which politically radical positions, creations, and images are spun, taken over, absorbed, defused, and then commodified within mainstream commercial culture and bourgeois society. This turns them into part of the continuing Spectacle of the capitalist mass media machine, Read More …
A term sometimes used by critics for the tendency of white appropriators of African American culture to change it to make it “more white,” which usually means “more suitable for middle class white people with family values etc who may not feel like they can or want to relate to African American experience.” Though this Read More …
A term that can be used to refer to issues of cultural appropriation that may arise in creative work. The idea is connected to identity politics, which involves people re-appropriating their socially coded identities (e.g., straight black man) and taking control of the definition of them and their presentation in mainstream culture. If a group Read More …
A catch-all term for music that is created largely or totally with technology and studio equipment, for instance synthesizers, samplers, drum machines, and the virtual equivalents of those now available for home computers. Producers began taking a larger role in the creation of recorded music in the 1960s. For instance, there are albums by the Read More …
A term coined by Julia Kristeva and enthusiastically adopted by literary critics in the late 20th century to describe how texts refer and allude to one another. Such practices as quotation, allusion, translation, and parody fall under this blanket term, and the general phenomenon of the influence of one writer on another can be talked Read More …
Irony occurs in a situation where one thing is stated or assumed but another thing is true. It has become a “go to” strategy in much of Western culture for seeming hip. As a form of expression, it generally involves overstatement or understatement, or sarcasm, and the recognition by the spectator that you mean something Read More …
In the original Russian, Остранение [ostranenie, also translated enstrangement, making strange, strangefication). The soviet literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky used this word to refer to the power of art to make us perceive familiar things in a fresh way, or to actually see them again. Shklovsky thought all the best art does this, but some members Read More …