Gwen Stefani and other celebs accused of cultural appropriation
Gwen Stefani gives bizarre response to Harajuku Lovers backlash: "I'm Japanese and I didn't know it"
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CELEBRITY Controversy
Pop culture is a melting pot where cultures and customs fuse and coexist. However, when borrowing is done in bad taste, it's called something a little different: cultural appropriation. It's been a hot topic in recent years, and power dynamics between majority and minority cultures are now being discussed more openly than ever.
Gwen Stefani is one of the most famous cases of cultural appropriation, and even all these years after her Harajuku Girls era, she remains steadfast in her defence of it. Most recently, the singer spoke to an Asian-American journalist from Allure who asked about the backlash from her Harajuku era, to which Stefani responded by telling a story about how her father worked at Yamaha and went back and forth between California and Japan. "That was my Japanese influence and that was a culture that was so rich with tradition, yet so futuristic [with] so much attention to art and detail and discipline and it was fascinating to me," she said.
Stefani explained that she was later able to travel to Harajuku herself. "I said, 'My God, I'm Japanese and I didn't know it.'" The reporter says Stefani claimed she was Japanese twice in the interview, though she also claimed there was an "innocence" to her relationship with Japanese culture, for which she says she's a "super fan."
"If [people are] going to criticize me for being a fan of something beautiful and sharing that, then I just think that doesn't feel right," Stefani said. "I think it was a beautiful time of creativity… a time of the ping-pong match between Harajuku culture and American culture." She added, "[It] should be okay to be inspired by other cultures because if we're not allowed then that's dividing people, right?" Stefani's stance on the matter has been increasingly criticized for its failure to acknowledge the power imbalance and commodification that underlines the accusations of cultural appropriation against her by Asian communities.
Cultural appropriation can be pretty divisive, so click on and check out some other cultural appropriation cases.
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