White Utopias. Amanda J. Lucia

reconnected to social media. As virtual documentation of the Burn and ethnic diversity on the playa increases, such altercations over cultural boundaries seem likely to impact the way the event is perceived.

      In the view of many participants, Burning Man exists as an alternate reality, separated from social conventions, where play and provocation performatively intertwine. In 1990, when participants first entered the Black Rock Desert, they “joined hands and stepped over a line drawn in the desert’s surface signifying their collective entry into another zone of experience.”⁴⁴ That line signified the separation of the playa from conventional social norms and parameters. Today, many Burners seek to maintain that line and challenge critics to leave politics in the default world, retaining the playa as a zone of unrestrained Radical Self-Expression. Many view Burning Man as an artistic space and vigorously defend the right of artists to express themselves without regulation. Ideally, Burning Man Project places regulations on art only when that art is imminently dangerous to participants.⁴⁵ However, this utopian vision remains only tenuously detached from the disciplining of cultural boundaries that occurs in the default world. As increasing numbers of people of color attend Burning Man, Radical Self-Expression that they find to be racist may be a deterrent to their involvement, thus limiting the potential for the Radical Inclusion of nonwhite participants; both are listed among Burning Man’s 10 Principles.

      In 2018 at Burning Man, I participated in a tea ceremony called Tea and Turbans at the Appropriated Dragon camp in the French Quarter Village. I walked up the red stairs of the Chinese-styled pagoda to the top-floor sitting area, where I was greeted by two white women in turbans. They directed me to select a cloth bundle from a table piled high with them in multiple colors and then to find a partner and take a seat at one of the café tables. In time, a Middle Eastern man greeted us, led the small crowd in a lesson on how to wrap our turbans around our heads in Moroccan fashion, and narrated the symbolism of the traditional tea service. We then enjoyed a tea service of three pours each, and I enjoyed an intimate conversation with my new friend Nomad, augmented by the caffeinated accelerations of my sensory perception. It was a magical playa moment of newfound connection and Immediacy (another one of the 10 Principles) as we talked about paranormal events, yoga, travel, Bali, and Maori mythology. I lost track of time as we sat together, and a photographer snapped a picture of me at ease, gazing across the playa in my turban (see figure 6).

      6. Author portrait taken during a Tea and Turbans tea ceremony, Burning Man, 2017 (photo by Bootleg).

      When the ceremony was over, we took a group picture of all of us in turbans, and then I went back to the Black Rock Bakery to check on operations. When I entered the bakery, I encountered a group of six or seven of our campers, all of whom were Asian American. Immediately, I made a joke of having “gotten turbaned” and stripped my head of the turban. They all laughed but seemed relieved at my having called to the fore the questionable politics of the Tea and Turbans experience. Later, sitting in front of the bakery during a community meal, I spoke with Kevin, one of our Chinese American campers, who mentioned that initially he had been eating his meal on the steps of the Appropriated Dragon before he had become viscerally aware of the fraught optics of such a scene and had moved over to sit in front of the bakery, which has a traditional French Quarter New Orleans façade. We spoke a bit about the politics of cultural appropriation and the Appropriated Dragon. He thought that the Appropriated Dragon was an interesting idea but was “not smart enough” in its confrontation with the debates concerning cultural appropriation to be an effective performance art piece.⁴⁶

      Bacchus, one of the innovators behind the Appropriated Dragon, traces the concept back to his ideal of Burning Man as a city, Black Rock City. He envisioned the great cities of the world as having ethnic neighborhoods and sought to create a kind of Chinatown, which became the Appropriated Dragon. When I asked him about his vision for the Appropriated Dragon and its relation to cultural appropriation, he explained: “I’m all about stealing everything. Steal everything from every culture. It’s all about what is tasteful. If it’s real and I found it—found objects are fine. That’s fine—if it’s not a performance like cosplay then I’m not into it because then you’re pretending to be something that you’re not. If it’s a real expression—like, fashion is real because fashion is an expression. But if it’s not and you just got it from some costume place, then it’s not cool. Then you’re just trying to dress up and become something you aren’t.” He explained that initially he had the idea to have a headdress burn barrel in front of the Appropriated Dragon targeting fashion models wearing headdresses on the playa—those who would strike a pose for Instagram in their warrior bonnet and declare, “I’m so free!”⁴⁷

      The Appropriated Dragon aims to be a “cultural exchange zone,” but the founders thought that educational materials asserting ethical standards on cultural appropriation would be too “heavy-handed.” Instead, Burners enter a Chinese pagoda space with a Chinese Buddhist altar and a placard above the broad staircase to the second floor that boasts the flags of multiple countries and mocks the idea of cultural appropriation with the tag line “From your culture to ours” (see figure 7). Like many performance pieces at Burning Man, the Appropriated Dragon is playing with and parodying a current cultural issue without indoctrinating participants into a specific moral code. It raises a question, provides an experience, and then leaves participants to have independent reactions.

      However, there is a fundamental critique at the heart of Bacchus’s vision of the Appropriated Dragon. When I spoke with him, he was concerned with the end result of moralistic claims of cultural appropriation. He saw the debate as an authoritarianism of the Left, wherein the liberal Left circles back and conflates with the ideology of the conservative Right. He explained: “The Far Right is obsessed with purity, that we should only fuck white people, eat white food, restore white culture. It’s the same idea on the Far Left, with the debates on cultural appropriation. Both have a conviction of ethnic purity, that we should stay within the confines of our own culture—only fuck white people, not eat phố, not cross cultural boundaries. Fuck that. The Appropriated Dragon is a project challenging both of those discourses—attempting to challenge us to think differently.”⁴⁸

      7. “From Your Culture to Ours” sign, Appropriated Dragon Camp, Burning Man, 2017 (photo by author).

      In contemporary American identity politics, the policers of cultural appropriation seem to maintain the ideal of authentic cultural essences that can be distilled, represented, and stolen. The notion of cultural appropriation reifies the boundaries of cultural insiders and outsiders and depends on the notion of cultural autonomy and even ethnic purity. As such, it risks causing harms of a similar kind of fascist essentialism to which critics are objecting.⁴⁹

      However, in society, there are some groups that are bounded, exclusive entities that forbid appropriation of their practices by outsiders. For example, impersonating a police officer, using a service animal if able-bodied, and taking on gay affect if straight are all understood to be cultural “wrongs” that violate boundaries of group membership. Violations have varying implications and consequences. For example, taking on a gay affect may be viewed as in poor taste, but impersonating a police officer is illegal. In Erich Matthes’s work, the perceived harm of cultural appropriation is that it “interacts with dominating systems so as to silence and speak for individuals who are already socially marginalized.”⁵⁰ When whites adopt the religious and cultural forms of marginalized peoples, they occupy spaces of representation that people of color might otherwise hold. They also identify within the historical legacy of the looting of the global South that was justified by imperialism. Those who make a profession from such forms of representation also siphon away financial rewards that people of color might otherwise have earned. Socially, the move toward mimesis performs an impotent form of alliance that obfuscates other means of direct political action that would express solidarity with the forms of injustice and discrimination that racialized others suffer. In cases wherein people of color are discriminated against for representing their cultural forms while whites do so with impunity, religious exoticism becomes an embodied