Cultural Appropriation and Cancel Culture: A Global Survey
Abstract
A cultural practice that might be once unique to a particular set of people can go global. In a globalizing world, cultural diffusion has become a widespread phenomenon. This global dispersal has led to clash of cultures, giving rise to defenders - people who want to defend their culture from outsiders they view as threats i.e. outsiders with no plans to give credit to origins of the borrowed culture. This leads us to the concept of 'appropriation', which, literally, means to take something and adapt it for use in another context. This sets the background for the emergence of the concept of 'cultural appropriation'. While cultural appropriation may be novel in theory, it is not so in praxis. It can be seen in the things that constitute our day to day life. This is unlike the shallowness of the definition that most people, especially active social media users, use. Recently, it is mostly used in accusation, and is perceived as malicious intent, even in cases where none is intended. The misinterpretation of cultural appropriation is being used as an outlet for online jungle justice, ‘cancel culture’. A situation where people take law into their hands and backlash individual or group that say or perform actions that are deemed unacceptable. This paper scrutinizes the misuse of cultural appropriation as a concept and how it causes more cases of cancel culture. This study finds that cancel culture is heightened with the increased misuse of the concept cultural appropriation online and tries to proffer solution to this rising phenomena.
Key words: global, culture, appropriation
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