Generations of American writers have approached Asian cultures with the best of intentions but repeatedly missed the mark. How can we rescue Asian artists and thinkers like Hokusai from our own desire to experience them as foreign? How can we experience Hokusai not as the Japanese artist, not as one of the roots of European Japonisme, not as a spiritual guide, but just as a person who made some art?
For the Ploughshares blog, Tim Ellison explores the ways in which Asian art has been appropriated by American writers like Thoreau and Kerouac and how writers like Mary Ruefle are saving it.
One response
For one thing, “appropriation” is simply what artists do. If you don’t believe me, take a look at Japanese anime and manga. They use “gratuitous English” (check out tvtropes for that one), American-looking characters and names (Toren Smith, in particular, in Gunbuster is named after a famous American anime and manga importer and translator, and is responsible for a significant amount of Japanese anime being made available to the American market.) There’s a famous quote from T.S. Eliot: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” This is true in painting, writing, music, anime and manga and likely every other artistic endeavor. Asian art doesn’t need to be saved from American artists, any more than Jules Verne’s “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” needed to be saved from being turned into “Nadia: Secret of the Blue Water”, which was in turn reimported by Disney as “Atlantis: The Lost Empire.” So long as copyright isn’t violated, artists are free to borrow and steal from each other, each time hopefully creating something new and invigorating that can serve as inspiration for future artists down the road.
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