Cultural appropriation in magic is something that hasn’t really been addressed much and perhaps ought to. I’m actually guilty of it myself too a tiny degree in one of my routines. A lot of people don’t really know what cultural appropriation is though and it’s both a big topic to get into and something I can only really give a tiny insight into, given that as a white woman with roots into the ancient history of Yorkshire, the only thing that has ever appropriated my culture is The Last of The Summer Wine¹.
But today I want to blunder through a topic which magic has a terribly history with. That topic is Orientalism.
Content warning on this post for examples of some stuff that’s kinda racist.
In the part of the UK where I grew up the term “Oriental” was actually considered extremely politically correct, as we have a cultural history of labelling any person or cultural artefact which appears to have Eastern Asian origin as “Chinese” which presumably annoys the hell out of anyone of non-Chinese ethnicity when they see their national identity being misattributed.
In the wider world however the term “Oriental” is itself considered highly offensive, particularly in America. Whereas here the vagueness of the term was a way to avoid mistakenly labelling the output of a whole continent as Chinese, in America the term is recognised as a way to distance cultural products from their actual origin. I’m not sure what exactly happened in the history of our linguistic development to split the meaning like that but I’d bet it has something to do with white folks using the word to label knockoffs of Asian culture.
The most blatant example of this is movies or TV shows in which Asian characters are played by white actors in make-up, doing caricatured accents and talking gibberish when they’re meant to be speaking their native tongue, but it goes all the way down to tiny things like books on “Oriental” cooking which are just a bunch of unattributed noodle recipes with a mishmash of Chinese Japanese and Korean sounding names, and “Oriental” art which contains no actual Asian tradition but is a foreign attempt to mimic an aesthetic.
A big part of Orientalism, which is a word meaning the appropriation of Asian culture, can be seen in magic, both historically and right up to this day. Think of how many white magicians you’ve seen who put on a floral or dragon emblazoned silk robe, a stick on droopy moustache, and a funny hat, in order to declare themselves an ancient conjuror who will display mysteries of the East². How many times you’ve seen the Chinese sticks, the Chinese linking rings, the Chinese rice bowls, or standard apparatus decorated with garish symbols that meant to look like Chinese characters with varying success. How often have you heard of fictional magician names like Foo Ling Yoo, or Won Hung Lo?
It’s kind of sad that two hugely influential magicians were known solely by their made up Asian personas: Chung Ling Soo and Ali Bongo³.
I feel unqualified to state whether Jeff McBride’s use of Japanese aesthetic in his work is appropriative or not. When interviewed he seems pretty well read on Japanese culture and his biggest inspiration is a genuine Japanese magician called Shimada, but how much of that knowledge transfers into his act and how much he made up on weeb terms I’m not sure.
For my own sins I use two tidbits of generally accepted Chinese lore as a springboard in my ring on string routine, mentioning that Chinese coins have holes in them so it’s just as easy to use a cord to carry money as to use a purse. I don’t actually know if this is true, but I have seen a lot of Chinese decoration made of coins tied up with ribbons, and they were sold to me by actual Chinese people. It doesn’t really let me off the hook but I feel like my tiny infraction is insignificant in comparison to performers in slippers and nightgowns making up stories about emperor’s advisers called Mi Fool Yoo. There’s one guy I know whose patter for the Chinese sticks includes the phrase “Slant eyed maiden” and I’m pretty sure he didn’t make it up himself, which means it’s actually in print somewhere.
It’s hard to understand what it must feel like to be misrepresented in this way if you’re from a culture that hasn’t really been through it. There are examples of it going the other way but they mostly just seem kind of silly, because they’re so few and far between that the examples seem silly in their isolation, rather than the culture they mimic being presented in a foolish way.
Like this:
A song by an Italian Singer in which the words are absolute nonsense written to sound like American pop lyrics. When you watch it it seems funny because the one guy sounds ridiculous. That’s not the same sensation as living in a country where the accepted understanding of your cultural origin is that you sound like “ching chong ying yang rikki tikky takky flied lice” even when speaking the local language.
It probably seems a bit weird for me to fight this battle. It’s something that has fascinated me for a while but I was recently inspired to think about it in a slightly different way. The phrase Wabi Sabi in the title of this article refers to a Japanese aesthetic of embracing imperfections and it’s closely tied to Kintsugi (a shorter word for Kintsukuroi) an artistic technique of repairing broken ceramics with golden seams, highlighting their history of damage and restoration.
I saw an inspirational picture posted on Facebook about Kintsugi, and about how western culture can learn a lot from it. The comments were all full of self indulgent musing on how wasteful western culture is. Of course not every broken cup in Japan is repaired with gold laced cement. I’d go so far as to say hardly any are. Most are thrown away and replaced, just like everywhere else. The aesthetic of embracing imperfections is a niche artistic idea which has gained recent traction on social media⁴. I like to imagine middle class Japanese teenagers looking at a picture of Duchamp’s Fountain and saying “Western culture is so beautiful, even the most basic mundane objects are considered artistically worthy of inclusion in a gallery.”
Except, you know, in Japanese.
There’s a certain school of thought that the way to defeat prejudice is to ignore the differences that define us, shed labels and strive towards the enlightenment of colourblind ignorance. But like the Kintsukuroi tradition, I think more can be gained by recognising the past damage within our culture. Specifically in this case the culture of magic, which was heavily affected by the colonialist ideals of the 19th century.
William Ellsworth Robinson’s decision to masquerade as a Chinese conjuror under the name of Chung Ling Soo didn’t occur in a vacuum. He did it to capitalise on a national interest in the rare snippets of culture seen as exotic and alien. That culture is no longer a black box, and it’s embarrassing to take a tiny piece of it to lend credence to an entirely fictional construct.
I really need a new premise for my ring on string routine.
¹ Okay so I’ve tried to make this post as internationally accessible as possible but Last of the Summer Wine might be a bit of an obscure reference to open with. It’s a sitcom set in the Yorkshire moors which I didn’t think about much until I moved south and suddenly I was frequently being asked if I’d ever gone down a hill in a bathtub.
² “of the east” being essentially the same meaning as “Oriental”, a blanket term to pass off a number of routines about silk, rice and boxes with dragons painted on them.
³ I know in magical company it is tantamount to sacrilege to question the likes of Ali Bongo, given how influential his thinking was and it could be argued that his over the top style was intended to lampoon and ridicule the earlier conjurors who mimicked the Chinese style, but I don’t know enough to make a judgement call there.
⁴ Lets face it, now that Japan (and the rest of the world) has Pinterest, there are probably people out there breaking objects on purpose just to make Kintsugi for their instagram likes. Before long I imagine it will be like the upcycling life hack craze of buying products you don’t want because they come in specific packaging, throwing away the contents and then cutting apart whats left to make a trowel you won’t use just because some guy on youtube said it was cool.