Who Can Represent Whom?
Humanism vs. Nativism in the Arts and Academia
Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto (“nothing human is foreign to me”), wrote Terence 2,000 years ago.
These words have become the motto of liberal humanists the world over, who believe that there is no experience or orientation with which we cannot empathize or make common cause. It provides the license by which writers can create fictional protagonists, and actors can play characters, whose lives differ from their own.
A rich man can play a poor man. An old woman woman can play a king. A Christian can play a Jew. A Jew can play a Nazi. A similar ideal may be operative in academic departments like Judaic Studies, Russian Studies, and Africana Studies. One needn’t be a Jew to be a scholar of the Talmud, a Russian to study Russian history, or African American to write about the Harlem Renaissance.
And yet, in our age of identity politics, there is a counter-veiling argument that says that certain groups cannot represent other groups for various ethical reasons. The argument from equity (a form of consequentialism) says that until the ability to represent others is equally distributed, under-represented groups, alone, should represent themselves. In theory, we should all be liberal humanists, free to play at whatever we want, but so long as it is mostly straight white men who espouse liberal humanism we should hold it under suspicion. The argument from “cultural appropriation” (a form of deontology) holds that it’s morally wrong for a member of a group deemed oppressive to represent someone from a marginalized or oppressed group, full stop.
A Black man can play a white man, but the reverse is widely considered racist. A woman can play a man, but not the other way around. A trans person can play a cisgendered person, but not vice versa. The argument from “appropriation” is a form of nativism which posits a fundamental wall between different people. Some human things were foreign to Terence, but his “privilege” obscured his ability to recognize it. It is wrong for the oppressor to profit from representing the oppressed. If academia—which was forged on the myth of the dispassionate, objective scholar—follows this trend to its conclusion, we should expect identity to become a formal prerequisite for writing about a subject. If the liberal humanist is cosmopolitan, its critics are “indigenous” (even as they may strongly disagree amongst themselves about who can claim indigineity).
If you take the cultural appropriation argument to its extreme, though, why stop at the incommensurability of group experiences? Aren’t we back to the fundamental problem of the incommensurability of experience itself, which is a problem in the philosophy of perception? How can two people point at a blue sky and call it “blue”? Do they really see the same blue? There is no end to our ability to say “You can’t possibly know what it’s like to walk in my shoes.”
Regardless of where you come down on the spectrum between “all forms of good-faith efforts at representation are OK” and “only group X can represent itself”—ask yourself it it’s based in a philosophy of communication. And, if it isn’t, on what basis have you staked your claim?
P.S. Here’s my new mega thread on Spinoza.
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