Cultural Appropriation in Fashion and Entertainment

Abstract

In Cultural Appropriation in Fashion and Entertainment, Yuniya Kawamura and Jung-Whan Marc de Jong provide the most comprehensive survey to date of the underlying theories and analyses of cultural appropriation. De Jong contributes analysis of the entertainment industry in Chapter 4 while Kawamura addresses academic studies, the fashion industry, and globalization in the remainder of the book. This ambitious work strives to compile, organize, and analyze scholarly work, numerous examples, and social and technological influences on culture and cultural appropriation in fashion, music, and television as they have evolved throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In the first two chapters, Kawamura introduces readers to schools of cultural theory and prevalent scholars, such as Pierre Bourdieu, Thorstein Veblen, and Georg Simmel, who drove fashion and cultural studies in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The reader gains an understanding of the western framework within which the fashion and entertainment industries developed. The author then provides an overview of research on cultural appropriation and analysis by prominent figures in the field, including legal scholar Susan Scafidi and cultural theorist James O. Young. This book serves as an excellent resource for anyone seeking to gain a more comprehensive perspective on theories and frameworks with which to understand cultural appropriation in both scholarly and public discourse. The complex and multipronged analysis in Chapters 3 and 4 benefits from photographic examples of appropriated styles and cultures. In Chapter 3, Kawamura utilizes the conceptual typology framework to organize and analyze cultural appropriation within the fashion industry. Numerous examples, both historic and current, make clear the industry’s propensity to commoditize cultures of the world. The author draws on the notion of biological, cultural, and sartorial hierarchies to show how western and non-western cultures have