About this event

All art, including fashion, had a long history of acquiring influences from various cultures, but where was the line between cultural appreciation and cultural misappropriation? At what point did respect for other cultures lead to or become an exploitation of cultural imagery? The event hosted an engaging dialogue that recognized the difference between appreciation and appropriation. Panelists Viet Thanh Nguyen, Josh Kun, Melissa Chan, and Aditi Mayer added their perspectives to this historical yet timely conversation.

Viet Thanh Nguyen
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer was a New York Times bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Other honors included the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the American Library Association, the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, a Gold Medal in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and the Asian/Pacific American Literature Award from the Asian/Pacific American Librarian Association. His other books were Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction) and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. He was a University Professor, the Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and a Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He had been interviewed by Tavis Smiley, Charlie Rose, Seth Meyers, and Terry Gross, among many others. His current book was the bestselling short story collection The Refugees. Most recently, he had been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, and le Prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book in France) for The Sympathizer. He was a critic-at-large for the Los Angeles Times and a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times.

Josh Kun
Josh Kun was the Director of the Annenberg School for Communication, Chair in Cross-Cultural Communication, and Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at USC. He was a 2016 MacArthur Fellow, and the winner of a 2018 Berlin Prize and a 2006 American Book Award. As an artist and curator, he had worked with SFMOMA, the California African American Museum, the Grammy Museum, the Los Angeles Public Library, the Hammer Museum, and The Getty Foundation, among others. As a critic and journalist, Kun had contributed to the New York Times, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Magazine, and other publications. He was the author and editor of several books, including Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (UC Press, 2005); Tijuana Dreaming: Life and Art at the Global Border (Duke UP, 2012, co-edited with Fiamma Montezemolo); Songs in the Key of Los Angeles (Angel City Press, 2013); To Live and Dine in L.A.: Menus and the Making of the Modern City (Angel City Press, 2015); The Tide Was Always High: The Music of Latin America in Los Angeles (UC Press, 2017), and most recently Double Vision: The Photography of George Rodriguez (Hat & Beard, 2018). He was currently writing a book on music, migration, and freedom of movement in the 21st century.

Melissa Chan
Melissa Chan was a Ph.D. candidate in East Asian Studies at USC Dornsife. She had spent the past four years studying modern Chinese-language literature and cinema, particularly in Asia’s World City. Her dissertation focused on Hong Kong martial arts films throughout the past seven decades, with a particular focus on how they communicated political ideas. Chan’s work focused on one of the major functions of art: its social relevance. In Hong Kong, where a strong local sense of identity was often in tension with an increasingly assertive Chinese state, martial arts films could shape social and political views. Chan explained that martial arts films were often used to communicate a sense of unity and a common Chinese identity, such as the use of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan as signifiers of “Chinese-ness.” Before USC Dornsife, Chan earned a degree in English at the University of California, Irvine.

Aditi Mayer
Aditi Mayer was a photographer and journalist whose work explored the intersections of artistic expression and social action. Her website Adimay began as an online platform to document photography work but had since evolved into an editorial platform that looked at the ties between style, sustainability, and social justice. With a focus on sustainable fashion, Adimay examined the fashion industry through a lens of intersectional feminism, providing commentary through visual and written mediums.