Cultural appropriation and capitalism - Sandhya Nadadur, Core Post #5

The reading on Carmen Miranda struck a particular chord with me in terms of the way it explored how she, a Brazilian, came to stand in not only for all of South America, but also for Central America. She was a crucial part of the Fox machinery that used sweeping generalizations in the name of appealing to all of the financially able consumers in the Latin American markets. At the same time, she was a beautiful Brazilian woman instrumentalized to make all of (apparently) foreign Latin America that much less threatening. Nonetheless, she was being used in the name of cultural appropriation. To introduce the US to our neighbors, and to include Latin America in the US, at least on a cultural level.

This reading got me thinking about how we appropriate bollywood into popular american media today. It is, without a doubt, exoticized. And not necessarily for a bad reason, but I wonder if at a certain point efforts at appropriation just become sweeping generalizations. For Miranda, this line was crossed when she was used to represent a series of Latin American countries, each with their unique differences. In turn, this made all of Latin America seem like an ambiguous whole, which problematized the clarity with which the general American public viewed (the destructive) US foreign policy actions in several of the countries. So, within the context of bollywood, what impact does this kind of generalization have on the spectator (as in, US audiences), and in turn, how does this impact the country of origin (India)?

With respect to the former, I think the element of bollywood cinema that really stands out and has made its way into American culture is the dancing. So, knowing this, I would argue that when an American thinks of bollywood, the first thing they do think of are the elaborate, colorful dance pieces. And this isn't necessarily wrong, because a huge part of bollywood cinema is the dancing. But, I think the way in which this Western affinity towards bollywood dance representing all of bollywood has, in turn, effected the way that bollywood sees itself is problematic. Similar to the way in which Carmen Miranda donned bananas and other exotic imports from Latin America as a part of her costume, and how these fruits did end up becoming some of the most popular Latin American imports, bollywood dance is becoming one of the most important Indian cultural imports into the US.

This is interesting because, responding the the latter part of the question I posed earlier, the popularity of bollywood dance in the US has actually influenced the content of bollywood films, encouraging them (more than ever before) to film these dance sequences in exotic western countries or even set these films somewhere in the western world. In effect, I feel like they're becoming a lot less 'bollywood' and a lot more American. Obviously this is in part the result of a general trend of globalization, but a part of me can't help but think that bollywood is trying harder and harder to feed into the American capitalist structure and as a result losing a lot of it's own culture in the process. Ultimately, I wonder if it's possible for an outside culture to appropriate itself within an American context without feeling compelled to reap the (apparent) economic benefits that American society can provide by, quite literally, consuming them.