In the spirit of collaboration, I want to pick up on Izzy’s post from Friday on the Met Gala and write a bit about the documentary The First Monday in May that some of us talked about at the unconference and what I got from it, particularly that which is relevant to our module.
I would definitely agree with Izzy that it is much more than a documentary about clothes, and deals with a number of issues on a range of topics – fashion as a form of fine art, its place inside and/or outside of the museum and as an expression of the social, cultural and political circumstances in which it is created (something apparent in the surge of face masks being marketed by fashion brands today and something also due to be explored in more detail in this year’s exhibition About Time: Fashion and Duration).
One of the key issues that the documentary deals with, which Izzy mentioned and that struck me most, in the context of an exhibition to which the Met Gala serves as the opening, entitled China: Through the Looking Glass, is the question of when cultural appreciation becomes cultural appropriation. For this event, accusations of the latter began almost immediately after the announcement of the theme, and throughout the documentary, the key figures involved in the curation of the exhibition withstand these suggestions of appropriating Chinese culture and history, as it comes to dominate external conversation in the build up to the event.
The practice of orientalism and cultural exploitation of ‘the East’ throughout history have been well documented and exposed in literature, both academic and popular, in recent years. Coincidentally, I’m reading a book just now called ‘Salaryman’ by Meg Pei, which tells the story of a Japanese businessman, Jun Shimada, transferred to work in America and details the complexities of the process in adapting to the different social and cultural climate, both in a personal and professional context. In the opening, Shimada addresses the reader directly and remarks on American understandings of Japanese culture saying ‘You may resent us, you may make fun of us; you may like our food and quaint customs, think of Mount Fuji and geisha girls, Toyotas, transistors, temples or perhaps World War II and Pearl Harbour’. Importantly, breaking the fourth wall, he says ‘Who are we? Do you care?’. Shimada, with these questions, suggests that the stereotypical characterisation of Japan is the extent to which ‘the West’ knows and cares to know about Japan, in this book, and ‘the East’, more broadly.
Although the book considers a different aspect of this transnational reception of culture from Asia to North America from the documentary, and each comes from a different point of view on the issue, both address many of the same concerns and issues regarding the recognition and contestation of cultural difference in a transnational setting. However, unlike many of the other characters in Pei’s book, who fail to recognise their preconceptions about Japan as such, Andrew Bolton, the chief curator of the exhibition, makes clear in the documentary and as is evident in the title of the exhibition China: Through the Looking Glass, the exhibition’s intention is to consider those Western perspectives of China as perspectives and their expressions in fashion throughout history; indeed, to confront those perhaps stereotypical and orientalist interpretations of Chinese culture and society in fashion, and consider the reasons for and implications of doing so. As Izzy said, ‘Every year the Met Gala has provided a snapshot of what is important to art, culture, fashion and more than just high society. Despite being decadent, it sheds light on important issues, taking a risk and a stand. It has adapted when called insular, Eurocentric and will only continue to do so’. The documentary reflects this mission particularly well, portrays fashion as an enlightening lens through which we can view such a transnational process and its history, and presents an interesting case study for many of the aspects of transnational history we have been considering this semester.
——
Looking over my blog posts from across this semester, including this one, they appear quite sporadic, quite chaotic in terms of the range of content they’ve addressed, from the early days of the Coronavirus and the transnational movement of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex to more relevant material on the translation of transnational concepts and the model of feminism for the writing of transnational lives. Perhaps this range is representative of the nature of this semester. But, more positively and constructively, I think they represent how applicable the methods we have learned in this module are both to the history we study and the world we live in today.