In the submitted project the phenomenon of cultural appropriation is linked to Identity Politics. In a deeper phase of the research it is important to take into consideration if cultural appropriation is ascribable to that of Identity Politics, in its most ideological forms, or how far removed it is. It is crucial to contextualize the origin of this term in the political and cultural context of Canada in the early 1980s. Here cultural appropriation is indistinguishable from the issue of colonial oppression perpetrated against Native Americans, both the physical and cultural genocide against first inhabitants of North America.
Quebec, the province on which the research focuses by studying cases of cultural appropriation in theatre, has claimed a national identity that is problematically related to this phenomenon. Quebec’s nationalistic francophone self-determination is based on its self-understanding of been an oppressed minority against English-speaking people. But today there is an awareness that this nationalistic self-determination - especially developed an expended trough the arts, and in particular theatre, in the 1970s and 1980s -, has been at the expense of other cultural minorities (both black and indigenous peoples), who have suffered the imposition of linguistic and national boundaries, and have been relegated to invisibility.
This aspect distinguishes Quebec from the rest of Canada and makes it a unique place to study the phenomenon of cultural appropriation, in relation to the difference between the political agenda of Quebec’s interculturalism and Canadian multiculturalism.
The methodological perspective to be adopted to study this phenomenon, from an aesthetic and a social and political point of view, is what is offered by Performance Studies.
Traditional theatre studies do not provide an adequate understanding of the phenomenon, as they are still linked to a mimetic paradigm of representation, which runs through twentieth-century theatre. This paradigm seems to find its fulfilment at the end of the millennium with the full expression of performative practices that affirm presence and consider action as embodiment of self-representation, revealing social and political dynamics.
Presence and representation imply two different ways of posing the relationship between identity and otherness, and identity and difference, which are all at the heart of theatrical art. The paradigm of presence, of 'self-exposure', linked to the expression of a minority consciousness, rejects the representation which implies a universal, decontextualised, hierarchically dominant worldview. The self-exposure that presence claims, rejecting the delegation implied by representation, is based on the questioning of traditional practices of character interpretation, i. e. putting oneself in the place of the other, which in theatre are based on this worldview.
The Quebec artistic context is an ideal laboratory and model for studying the aesthetics and ethics issues raised by a politically intercultural and multicultural perspective.
