Cultural appropriation and the politics of difference

This thesis is a critical reflection on cultural appropriation. Specifically, I interrogate white cultural appropriation as a strategy for political change. Drawing from Linda Martin Alcoff and Chandra Mohanty, I define an effective politics as one that is attentive to the discourses that define a particular political context. Drawing from Stuart Hall and Jacques Derrida, I argue that white cultural appropriation achieves its political goals by creating a dissonance between recognizable white racial identity and recognizable nonwhite cultural practices. This dissonance is the source of the appropriative act's subversive potential. I further that this dissonance is grounded in a series of racist and colonialist discourses. As such, without critically naming and addressing these discourses, subversive white appropriative acts risk perpetuating them.