footnote# 6: cultural appropriation is about money
footnote# 6: cultural appropriation is about money
tl;dr: the problem is colonialism, and it doesn't care about You
Update (17.1.2020): I edited this post to reflect that I got the origins of kitenge and ankara prints wrong; kitenge is from East Africa, and ankara is from West Africa. The previous version mixed them up. Apologies, and thanks to Adriana for pointing it out!
Update (20.1.2021): Just a heads-up to note that the ILHAM Gift Shop no longer stocks Nala products — they did when they first opened in 2017, but currently do not. I’m not changing the text of the essay, but do want to note my error on this. Thanks for pointing it out, gift shop friends!
Update (24.1.2021): Part 2 is out! You can find it through this link. Enjoy!
What a week, eh?
first, a point of clarification: I know I said in that original post that “a white woman didn’t bring a batik renaissance to KL” but this wan’t something she claimed. It was something I conjectured because of the original tweet that led me to the article—sir, people are already wearing batik — so I apologise for that.
Anyway, this footnote isn’t really about That White Lady, it’s about the systemic problems that have led to this most recent edition of White People in Southeast Asia. I want to be clear in that I don’t believe in blaming her for being a symptom of our greater problems around commercialisation, cultural appropriation, racism and colonialism — but lol, she really knows how to step in it. (and yes, I know she apologised. lol.) And if you want to start an argument about reverse racism, take my advice: don’t.
And really, she is the one making a mint on her designs, and this newsletter is free — so who is really wining here?
I’m indebted to thinkers like Clarence Kwan, the author of the brilliant Chinese Protest Recipes zine (@thegodofcookery on Instagram); and public intellectual Rachel Cargle (@rachel.cargle on Instagram), for their wisdom, knowledge and education on issues of cultural appropriation, racism and capitalism. Strongly recommend following them on socials for better discussions on these topics.
By now, if you are a member of Twitterjaya, you have probably seen That Article: the one about the white lady designer who talks at length about her scattered, global upbringing and the circuitous route she took to launching her own company. 🤢 I intended this newsletter to be a gossipy scree about all the terrible ways in which white people living in Southeast Asia treat locals and their lives here — but that didn’t seem that helpful. At best, it would come off as a personal attack; at worse, a waste of time.
I figured it would instead be more fruitful to discuss the underlying systemic problems that have allotted this White Lady all the power and money she has since accumulated. It’s a less entertaining read than the gossipy scree would have been, but then this newsletter is all about 🌸 nuance 🌸. (But jom DM-ditepi).
The essay comes in two parts, the second will be about nostalgia, White delusions about Southeast Asia, and how it reenacts our own internalisation of colonialism and anti-blackness — it will come out mid-next week. Also, in the interest of full disclosure, I have written for SCMP before — specifically their lifestyle section — my work with them can be found on my Carrd at this link.
If you enjoy reading this, you can subscribe and receive future letters on myriad topics, including Tarot, life in Malaysia, and writing updates from me. Also if you know someone who might be interested in this work, go ahead and forward it to them or share it on your socials. it’s free of both money and the wages of colonialism!
Part 1: On the colonial gaze
I want to first talk a bit about Nala, and specifically its roots in a colonial perspective and the audience it seeks to court. Later, I’ll dive into how it fits within a long-running trend of White people coming to “save” cultures while simultaneously excluding the communities from which they spring, aka “cultural appropriation”.
If there is one thing you will take away from this two-part essay, it’s this: cultural appropriation is not a theoretical exercise to be pondered and worried over, endlessly debated in terms of its morals and practices. Cultural appropriation is about money, and I mean money in all senses of the word: hard cash, social cachet, reputation, influence, and the right to be considered an authority on a subject. When money enters into any equation, when it becomes the dominant driver, there is no quality of discourse or aesthetics that can override its influence. And to be sure: when cultural exchanges are primarily driven by capitalist needs, it will always, always result in the exploitation of non-White people.
Forget about the pretty arguments about “preserving cultures” and “respecting communities”, forget about authenticity conferred by limited experience or a permanent resident visa. It’s all about cash-money, baby.
Nala was Ms Scheers’ brainchild, born in 2008 as a small pop-up business that eventually flourished into a viable business – she would go on to open her first outlet in upper-middle class mall Bangsar Village II and a second in George Town, Penang, while also retaining outposts in well-to-do shopping galleries like Isetan, pre-pandemic Robinsons, and the ILHAM Gallery’s gift shop.
Side note: Ironic no, that a woman who derides Southeast Asia’s mall culture would set up mostly in the bougiest malls in the country?
Ms Scheers says her products were made with a “distinctive Southeast Asian flavour”, a claim I have a major problem with, because her stuff is just not that distinctively Southeast Asian.
The cuts and styles of her dresses feel more like throwbacks to the (Western) forties, and largely fall into a category I like to call “White Lady in Southeast Asia Chic”. These dresses have names like the “Delhi Dress” or the “Luxembourg Dress” — two places that, last time I checked, are not Southeast Asian — and to my eye, have far more in common with African wax prints.
Side note: The history of African print is actually fairly fascinating. I read that batik printing techniques and samples were brought from Indonesia to the African continent by Dutch colonisers (which is why the technique is sometimes called “Dutch wax prints”). Eventually, of course, African designers would put their own spin on the technique, producing the vibrant textiles that the region is known for: kitenge in East Africa, and ankara prints in West Africa.
Just to illustrate my point, take this example of the Delhi Dress (RM599.00): its cut is a very run-of-the-mill shirtdress, and its design bears a striking resemblance to a handful of examples of kitenge and ankara prints.
I want to acknowledge that Ms Scheers does hand-paint her own designs, so I won’t take away from the genuine craftsmanship of that, but the connection between the styles and the influence of African wax prints is — to me anyway — pretty obvious, as is the lack of “distinctively” Southeast Asian flavours.
So what makes Nala Southeast Asian? Ms Scheers does not attempt to draw the historical line between Indonesia, Dutch colonial history and the Dutch African colonies — certainly she does not seem to connect the relationships between Indonesia and Malaysia, the cultural conversations and arguments that have shaped the nusantara’s relationship to textile, trade, and colonialism, much less her own heritage as a person of Dutch nationality.
Where does history intersect with commerce for her products? How do they distinguish a region with an infinitely rich history with cotton, cloth and clothing?
(Spoiler: they don’t).
On “White-Lady-in-Southeast-Asia Chic”
These companies’ marketing and branding have positioned themselves as having tapped into an essentialised Southeast Asian identity, as determined by the White adventurer demystifying the Exotic for consumption at home, which only they can do — and that experience and understanding then provides the spurious foundations that logically allows them to charge exorbitant prices for their products.
Ms Scheers’ brand and others like hers — I’m thinking of brands like Frankitas or the drop-shippers who peddle rattan bags — “self-orientalise” or “self-exoticise” their products in order to leverage what anthropologist Angela Jansen in Vestoj calls “powerful marketing tools” that allow designers to both fulfil the global consumer class’s desire to consume the exotic (e.g. White expats seeking themselves in Bali), while also reflecting for local consumers a sense of home, which most foreign brands don’t.
Side note: this might look like tying a specific origin story to a brand (i.e. “I grew up here!” “I fell in love with my husband’s culture!” “I did a semester abroad!”) or highlighting the (almost always minuscule) input of visibly non-White locals who “validate” them, or blogs with content built from details culled from National Geographic or Fromm’s.
Uniformly, White Lady in Asia Chic tends to rely on cliches about life in the tropics: vibrant patterns, usually botanical in nature; they have colourful fringe, or are daubed in rattan curlicues. Sometimes flowy, ideally can be worth without a bra, they suggest days living by the beach, swanning back forth from the spa to the shala. They do not remind you of Brussels, or London or Berlin or New York, those cold metropolises — though are redolent with a European sensibility — but of a sun-warmed idyll among an innocent people, that only the tasteful visit.
They claim to be “global” by making use of certain elements of the Orient — the cheongsam’s high slit, the unconstricted cut of a kaftan or kurung, vibrant cotton batiks from the East Coast — while simultaneously flattening distinction, history and identity inherent to those elements.
These qualities makes them special, unique, exotic, justifying their price tags, but they also have the effect of narrowly defining — in the case of Southeast Asia — a region of 600 million people and thousands of overlapping cultures into a monolith largely confined to a White expat’s experience of urban life in specific corners of the city, with a specific kind of person, with a specific type of dress.
This is what the Western colonial instincts is all about: distilling a rich tapestry of multitudes into single, malleable object that they can control. It’s why the British enacted a “divide and conquer” policy in Malaya — that old Malaya White people love so much, which crushed everyone who was unlike them — whose effects are still rippling across our histories. It’s what Crazy Rich Asians did to Malaysia and Singapore, which I wrote about here a couple of years ago.
This gaze isn’t limited to White people, by the way, though they are its most common enactors: rich Americans of all colours will do it (as this tweet thread will tell you) because imperialism is a powerful drug which will allow Westerners to always view its antithesis as something smaller, something exotic, something to be consumed.
The colonial gaze will never see a people made of distinctive individuals — the schoolchildren and government servants who wear kurungs everyday, or the office workers who have always worn traditional dress (not “costumes”) on Fridays — because they insist on a narrative where a multicultural country can be easily sorted into fixed boxes. Anything that does not conform, that does not signal a melting pot culture as they define it, does not compute.
Which is why clothing worn by actual locals will never be enough for the White people who come to live here: it does not signal enough the wearer’s global identity. It’s too pedestrian, too dull, too poor.
Note: I love the stuff by WHIMSIGIRL, who have brought a modern sensibility to kurungs, and whose colour palette I just always drool over.
The clothes sold and bought by the people who see brands like Nala as revolutionary always prioritise a colonial mindset, which is driven by money and a taste for a mythical alternate history where the British did us a favour. It’s the same instinct that drives people to romanticise staycations at the Majestic Hotel, where doormen dress in safari whites and bow at the hip — that’s why places like the Smokehouse, Frasers’ Hill, and high tea parlours do brisk business. Money loves to dress itself up in the attire of the coloniser, not the colonised.
Which tells you everything you need to know about how conscious colonisers are about their own power.
Nala's world is one inhabited by the people who buy things in excess and with little deliberation — it exists on the thin line between barely affordable and budget busting.
It’s not made for the people who actually have to live in this city, who have no choice but to endure its grinding pressure, and whose cultures, lives and poverty created the objects that White people claim to love and love to claim so much. The people who are derided for forgetting and disrespecting what we have. The people who do not have the luxury of pondering and ruminating on their cultural inheritance because they are too busy trying to afford life in a Kuala Lumpur made more expensive by expats and bad government policies.
Made in Malaysia, but not made for Malaysians.
cultural appropriation is about money
Ms Scheers’ product line, perhaps unwittingly, is part of a historic trend of White women appropriating elements from cultures that are not their own and selling products at cutthroat prices that only the rich can afford — among them are, just to name a few, The Mahjong Line; Ripe Nutrition; Alison Roman. This is a problem most notably in yoga, where the effects of cultural appropriation have been extensively documented, discussed and dissected.
In each of the cases I cited before, the person(s) in question has discovered a way in which to appropriate select elements from a culture and — this is key — monetise them while also downplaying their source, or refocusing the narrative to centre Whiteness. Absolutely central to all of this is the movement of money: who sets the prices, who buys it, who profits from it, who does not.
For instance, take The Mahjong Line, a Dallas-based company set up by three White women who wanted to “refresh” mahjong for a younger (Whiter) generation of players. Oh man, did the internet come for them. A lot has been written about TML, in far more eloquent terms than I could muster, but what’s stood out to me has been the insane pricing of the products: a minimum US$325 to US$425 (ma’am, that’s RM1,300-1,700) for a set of tiles turned out in garish tones, the typical designs completely redone to the point of being unrecognisable (and, therefore, unplayable). I don’t know about you, but it doesn’t look like a sincere attempt to zhuzh up mahjong — it looks like an attempt to make a quick buck off something that is both culturally meaningful, but also a cliched cultural symbol.
There is the assertion that somehow these people understand these objects — and their marketability — better than their inheritors.
In the free market, companies compete with one another by innovating and producing cheaper or better products. If you can make something people want better, you can theoretically charge more for it — relatedly, the more money you can fork out for something, the greater the social power you hold.
Toronto-based Ripe Nutrition’s "broth bar” — selling 3L of broth for CAD$18, which is whopping RM57, friends — was attempting to do to BIPOC food what the entire wellness industry did to yoga (as per Clarence Kwan’s takedown on IG): strip it of its historical context through design and marketing, amplify those branding changes as product improvements, and sell them back into their rich White communities (and to some extent, rich POC) at exorbitant costs.
Cultural appropriation is about money: these companies and their (White) founders, in their own words, are claiming to produce better versions of the originals — healthier, cooler, nicer, prettier, more modern, more authentic versions — many of which are older than the countries they come from, at price points that far exceed anything the original communities could ever hope to earn for themselves, or bring themselves to spend.
My problem with the whole deal — with Scheers, with the Mahjong Line, with Ripe Nutrition, and yes, even with chef-writer Alison Roman, who I adore — is that they see themselves beyond the realm of commerce. They think they have adequately cloaked themselves in the language of global citizenship and aesthetics, of moral superiority, of cultural appreciation — they are not so involved with the grubby business of making money, they’re doing this work for the Betterment of Society(TM) — so they are free to sell their Westernised knock-offs of our cultural heritage for a prime buck.
What always ends up happening is a watering down of these cultures — effectively denuding them of nuance — in order to suit a White palate, aesthetic, or desire, while simultaneously ignoring their origins and the contributions of non-White people. They enrich themselves with the cultures of other peoples, and refuse to acknowledge the history, the trade-winds, the connections.
It’s the audacity in that refusal, that blindness to their own culpability, which is most frustrating. To use Ms Scheers’ words, White people are on “crusade(s)” for a culture that we, the regulars, who do not care about.
The language of colonialism is stacked throughout the companies’ marketing, as well as that of Nala’s product lines: we are Of Here, and not. We understand the Other, but we speak in cut-glass refinement. We are the same but better. We have taken what was imperfect and dressed it up in the silken language of ownership, theft and capitalism. We seek to make as much money as we possibly can off the skins, labour, history and blood of the people of this country who we do not see ourselves in solidarity with.
Nala’s story is built atop visions from my childhood: terrazzo tiles in my aunty’s long-demolished house; the delicate diamonds in my fei-yi’s windows; the brilliant enamel flowers adorning trays; the dusty ornaments that are being packed away as the old gives way to the new. Taken by themselves, they're just stuff—with memory and community, they form the Malaysia I know. The one I don’t see in Ms Scheers’ work.
“Old Malaya is an inspiration in itself…simpler, laid back, yet more colourful times…cultural traditions were held proud and high,” her website proclaims.
The claim here is that these are things that Malaysians have forgotten, that we have rejected our past because we did not understand its value. I’m here to tell you that we understand all too well the cost of development and progress and feeding hungry people. I’m here to tell you that idealised “old Malaya" never existed for most of us: people were poorer, they died faster, they couldn’t afford food or clothes or an education. Those slim joget girls were (are) largely sexually objectified, almost certainty sexually abused. Women barely had rights.
These things are still happening, but don’t bullshit me that it used to be better. Ask yourself: better for who?
White people took everything, divided us with laws and language, and we are still sifting through the damage. Most people cannot afford “cultural” products that are being peddled as the answers to the degradation of our collective souls, or the time and space to moan about a world de-centering a White-centric perspective — what condescending crap, what dishonesty.
Maybe there is something sincere in there to be found, but I doubt any of that sincerity was meant for any of us living in the actual Kuala Lumpur.
Until next time, beloveds.
Yours, from the void,
Sam
out of curiosity have u met the other owners u listed in your article before doing this write up? You might be surprised, maybe take the time meet them and find out a bit more. Noted everyone is free to voice out their opinion but a little fact check might go a long way.
Thank you for writing this. Extremely thoughtful! - Carissa