Adele's act of
post-colonial
intimidation.
September 3rd 2020.
This week Adele used Bantu knots in her hair and wore a Jamaican flag bikini top in a post on soshalmedja. In all fairness to her, it was the weekend in which the Notting Hill carnival usually takes place, and it very probably seemed like a good idea at the time. After all, why not?
Cultural appropriation is why not.
This is a recent concept which is defined as when one culture adopts an element or elements of another – especially if the adopting culture is the more dominant. Evidently, this is a form of colonialism. The adopter, in not having experienced the subjugation and discrimination of the adoptee, should not exploit the identity or use the cultural practices, tokens or icons for his or her own ends.
Adele, you understand, wasn't embracing the spirit of carnival, expressing friendship or using her status to foster community spirit, but demonstrating her racial and cultural dominance in an act of post-colonial intimidation. Adele, as we all know, is well known for such activities.
The twitterati – particularly in the US - flocked into a dense murmuration, although there was little murmuring involved.
“If you haven’t quite understood cultural appropriation, look at Adele’s last Instagram post. She should go to jail no parole for this.”
“Bantu knots are NOT to be worn by white people in any context, period.”
“If 2020 couldn’t get anymore bizarre, Adele is giving us Bantu knots and cultural appropriation that nobody asked for. This officially marks all of the top white women in pop as problematic. Hate to see it.”
"I strongly advise you to educate yourself and check your white privilege, and to clarify what I’m referring to, it’s the appropriation of a hairstyle which does not belong to white people. It is not yours to wear.”
"sick and racist"
There was more. Much more.
On the other hand, one Emma Dabiri @EmmaDabiri wrote in a series of tweets that "cultural appropriation operates as part of a structural power dynamic where the ‘appropriating’ actors belong to an advantaged group. This group systematically extracts the cultural resources of a subordinate group, erasing the subordinate group’s involvement in the process.
The structurally advantaged group becomes the primary (financial) benefactor of an innovation that was not theirs. As far as I can see Adele isn’t erasing anyone or claiming this as her own, she is simply participating in a culture she is likely to have grown up in in Tottenham."
"Most of the responses I have seen from Jamaicans and black people more generally have had no problem with Adele’s hair and outfit ! However there are others who are unhappy with it (it’s almost as if black people don’t always agree with each other). Mdembe* reminds us the African past is characterised by mixing, blending & superimposing. In opposition to custom, he insists idea of ‘tradition’ never really existed & reminds us there's pre-colonial African modernity that has not been taken into account in contemporary creativity."
For me, this somewhat more informed and balanced comment gets to the nub of the matter. True cultural appropriation is a far more serious and pernicious process than simply dressing up – indeed it has very little to do with dressing up and it's a shame that it has been dumbed down and become a simplistic finger some will use all too quickly to point, and thereby signal that they are committed, active, right-on and altogether woke – and damn well not afraid to say so. (They may well live in fear of not saying so, but that's for another time).
Many high-profile people risked the ire of the woke by supporting Adele. Notably, this included Naomi Campbell, Popcaan, Tessa Thompson and Claudia Webb, MP for Leicester East who said "carnival is a contested event in which either the usual order of things are overthrown, unhinged and disturbed, or it can reinstitute and reinforce the very order its meant to overthrow. In this sense Adele embraces the spirit of carnival as an event which is qualified to do both.”
Surely the question to ask is simply whether or not Adele meant any harm or offence. Did she put her hair in knots and wear the flag bikini in order to upset people and to demonstrate her dominance?
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Of course she didn't, as is made clear by the text posted under the image which says Happy what would be Notting Hill Carnival my beloved London. There was no malice whatsoever and those who say there was are doing so for reasons best known to themselves.
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*Achille Mdembe is a historian and philosopher of international repute who is currently focused on something somewhat more important as to whether the wokefolk are offended or not, and about which we should all be concerned; the erosion of liberal democracy and how it will inexorably lead to more proscriptive and authoritarian forms of government.
