18 african appropriations
sequences that I focus on particularly in this book. No doubt, legal issues
are at stake when African cultural producers appropriate, for example,
Cameron’s Titanic, by turning the movie into a quarry for their own pro-
ductions. The ease with which this is done is reminiscent of traditional
forms of creation that have been recently labeled “open source” (Noyes
2010: 2) or “Read/Write,” in contrast to “Read/Only,” culture (Lessig
2008: 28)—terminology that highlights the fact that popular creativity in
the digital age has its antecedents in historical forms of creation.^6 While
the changing regimes of ownership rights in cultural property in Africa
(Comaroff and Comaroff 2009; Diawara 2011) and the legal dimensions of
cultural appropriation are fascinating topics in themselves, for the present
study I privilege an inquiry into the semantic and medial dimensions of
cultural appropriation.^7 I thus adopt a refined concept of appropriation,
which defines the word not exclusively in legal terms but as hermeneutic
practice. Arnd Schneider (2003) advanced this reconceptualization. He
frames appropriation as a practice of understanding and interpretation,
with reference to the French philosopher, Paul R icoeur (1981), whom I
quote through Schneider: “An interpretation is not authentic unless it
c u l m i nates i n some for m of appropr iat ion (A neig nu ng) i f by t hat ter m we
understand the process by which one makes one’s own (eigen) what was
initially other or alien (fremd)” (178, in Schneider 2006: 26; German terms
in original). W hile R icoeur focuses on the operations of understanding
by the interpreting subject, who following R icoeur, ideally reaches “a
new self-understanding” through appropriation, Schneider claims that
“anthropology, which owes by its very nature... to the producing, ‘origi-
nating’ cultures, cannot stop here.” This is because Schneider, like Ziff
and Rao, locates cultural appropriation exclusively within the domain of
“the powerful” (26), whereas I seek to establish it as a term that applies
equally to such practices, if carried out by people who are conventionally
considered less powerful—that is, for the very phenomena which hith-
erto have been labeled “cultural assimilation.” Perhaps it makes sense to
bracket the seemingly commonsensical ethical (and therefore political)
dimensions of appropriation talk for a moment. W hile Schneider (2006)
continues his discussion, searching for a concept that reconciles “the ele-
ment of ‘understanding’” with the “element of agency” (i.e., the agency
of the creator of the artifact that is being appropriated), I am concerned