Latest news with #culturalappropriation
Daily Mail
16 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Fitness influencer Tammy Hembrow slammed for 'half naked' and 'disrespectful' attire in Egypt
Tammy Hembrow has been slammed by followers this week as she shared the very chic outfits she wore during her lavish trip to Egypt. The fitness influencer, 31, has been living it up in the transcontinental country, where modest attire is considered the cultural norm, posting several selfies to Instagram. However, some fans have taken exception to Tammy's desert ensembles, which often see her flashing her tattooed arms and midriff as she wears a headscarf. 'Pretty sure this is cultural appropriation cause you're not wearing that scarf to cover your body,' someone wrote beneath one of her many posts. 'A holiday to Egypt, while half naked, is possibly one the most time [sic] deaf things I've ever seen,' said another. From A-list scandals and red carpet mishaps to exclusive pictures and viral moments, subscribe to the DailyMail's new showbiz newsletter to stay in the loop. 'Your choice of clothing is actually quite offensive to the locals Your travel advisor should have told you about local etiquette,' a third commented. Another said beneath a photo of Tammy flashing her toned tummy in a crop top: 'I didn't know they let u show ur stomach in Egypt.' 'No hate but I'd have thought showing a lot of skin in a majority Muslim country would be considered disrespectful?' noted another user. Tammy also posted a reel of photos which saw her stripping down to a bikini and flaunted her figure as she lounged by the pool at her resort. 'I'm sure that what you are wearing is not suitable for Egypt,' someone said beneath the post. But Tammy assured her followers she was staying at a hotel which allowed her to wear a bikini at the beach and by the pool. 'We were told it's fine. People can wear bikinis at beach/pool,' she wrote. While there is no legal dress code in Egypt, it is considered respectful for tourists to follow the cultural norm of modest attire. While there is no legal dress code in Egypt, it is considered respectful for tourists to follow the cultural norm of modest attire Dressing modestly is highly encouraged, particularly for women travelling through temples or holy sites, to avoid unwanted attention Dressing modestly is highly encouraged, particularly for women travelling through temples or holy sites, to avoid unwanted attention. Visitors are also expected to cover their shoulders and knees with loose clothing. A glance at Tammy's photos shows she followed that rule of thumb, unless in a private setting with her friends and travel guide or at her hotel. Daily Mail Australia has reached out to Tammy for further comment. As of Saturday, Tammy has officially returned home to Australia and reunited with her children Wolf, 10, Saskia, eight, and Posey, five.
Al Jazeera
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Al Jazeera
Cultural Appreciation or Cultural Appropriation?
Where's the line between sharing a culture and stealing it? In a globalised world, borrowing is easy – but honoring is harder. We explore everything from re-branded recipes to re-imagined identities. What's at stake when heritage becomes a trend? Presenter: Stefanie Dekker Guests: Fadi Kattan – Chef and author Richie Richardson – Professor at Cornell University Nikki Apostolou – Content creator
Irish Times
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
American Dirt author Jeanine Cummins: ‘I felt like the entire world was against me but I knew I would emerge'
In 2020, after her book tour for American Dirt was cancelled owing to threats of violence, Jeanine Cummins found herself staying in the home of fellow author Ann Patchett, whose Nashville bookstore she had been visiting, and who thought it best she didn't stay in a hotel alone. As they tried to work out the best thing to quell the anxiety, the pair got talking about antidepressants. Cummins had once taken Lexapro, but didn't like how it made her feel. 'I didn't like that I didn't have access to the full range of my emotions,' she told the older author. And Patchett just looked at her, put a hand on one hip. 'Well,' she replied, wryly. 'Aren't you glad you have access to all of them now?' READ MORE The events surrounding publication of Cummins's third novel, American Dirt , are by now legend. First, the book sold in a multipublisher auction for a reported seven-figure sum. It was tipped as one of the hottest books of 2020 and chosen for Oprah's book club. For Cummins it was the kind of career jackpot most authors only ever dream of. But with the wave of good fortune came a tidal wave of backlash, when, in the fire cauldron of Trump's identity-politics-steeped US, she found herself at the centre of a debate over who gets to tell which stories. As a white American (her heritage is part-Irish, part-Puerto Rican), she was accused of cultural appropriation, insensitivity (an event that included barbed-wire flower arrangements caused especial furore), and of appropriating the work of Mexican authors. Many were also uncomfortable with an American being granted such a large sum for this Mexico-set story, when Mexican authors rarely if ever receive such large advances. With the online torrent reaching fever pitch, Cummins's extensive book tour was cancelled. Still, American Dirt went on to sell millions of copies, and was translated into 37 languages. [ 'It was a witch hunt': Jeanine Cummins's novel changed publishing. But not how she hoped Opens in new window ] 'My husband always says that it was like launching a cruise ship from the top of a cliff,' says Cummins when we meet in the Merrion Hotel in Dublin. 'It felt like winning the lottery until, all of a sudden, it wasn't. When it turned, it turned so quickly. It was like it curdled. And the experience of enduring the aftermath of the curdling was brutal.' She adds that the conversation over publishing's shortcomings were 'long overdue'. 'Should I have been the poster child for it? No.' Cummins appears, despite everything, happy and healthy as she sits in the outdoor terrace with large sunglasses on her face and her signature Latina-style hoop earrings hanging beneath her curls. We've met in the run-up to publication of her fourth novel, Speak to Me of Home, but she's also in Ireland on a family holiday – the aforementioned husband hails from Mayo, where the pair will spend some time, along with their teenage daughters, Aoife and Clodagh. 'I'm okay now,' she says of her mental state. 'It was not my first rodeo. It was not my first trauma. I've had lots of grief in my life, so I knew that I would emerge, somehow or another, from the other end of it. But in the moment, I felt like the entire world was against me.' [ Jeanine Cummins: 'I didn't know if I had the right to tell the story' Opens in new window ] The entire world with the exception of some crucial people, including Winfrey, who refused to capitulate to the pressure to withdraw her support for the book. 'Had she done that, I don't think I would be sitting here today – like, I don't think I would have been able to write another book,' says Cummins. Five years on the book she might not have written sits between us on the table. Speak to Me of Home is a family saga about three generations of women – Rafaela, who grew up in a wealthy family in Puerto Rico in the 1950s; her daughter Ruth, a social media influencer who moved to the US aged five; and Ruth's daughter, Daisy, who has returned to her ancestral homeland of Puerto Rico, and who, in the opening pages suffers a severe accident owing to a terrible hurricane. 'It's a fictional hurricane, that is very important,' says Cummins. 'People were mad [when they thought] I wrote about Hurricane Maria, which I did not do.' Beyond hurricanes, the book is about family, identity, class, displacement, the lives we leave behind, and the pull of home. The characters are based in part on Cummins's own family – Rafaela, in particular, mirrors Cummins's paternal grandmother, who grew up in a wealthy family in Puerto Rico, but who, aged 16, was shipped to a naval base in Trinidad to get a job, after her father lost his fortune. 'It was a very shocking circumstance for her to find herself in need of a 'j-o-b' and she never really recovered,' says Cummins. 'She spent the rest of her life being like 'Don't you know who I am?' And then it was even worse when they moved to the United States, because people treated her like she was Puerto Rican, and she was like 'I'm not that kind of Puerto Rican'.' These layers of prejudice were something Cummins found fascinating to unpack. 'It wasn't until I was like 30 that I [realised] well, there's probably a reason why she was so insistent on making sure everyone around her came from wealth, because she was constantly experiencing prejudice and racism in [the United States]. It was her way of signalling to people that she was a human being. And of course, she was also hella racist, and didn't recognise that in herself.' At the heart of the novel are the different, often conflicting, relationships these three women of different generations have with who they are, and what their culture, heritage and language mean to them. Cummins says that in writing the book, she was channelling 'a lot of the questions that were raised by the experience of the publication of American Dirt and sort of having my ethnicity adjudicated on Twitter'. 'I think when you're a person of mixed ethnicity, which is many Americans, it's a tricky thing to unpack, even when you're not being called on to the carpet by the New York Times. I always had a confusing relationship with my identity. I've always been super proud of my roots on both sides, but I didn't know how to articulate it. I'm generation X. We did not grow up with this kind of language of entitlement that younger generations have about insisting on their own identity.' My cousin Julie was a writer – she was incredibly talented … I think after she died ... I wanted to do the things that she could no longer do Born in Spain, Cummins moved around a lot as a child, owing to her father's naval career, but calls Gaithersburg, Maryland, her hometown. She had what she describes as 'a typical happy American childhood', infused with elements of Irish and Puerto Rican culture. When she was 19, her mother signed her up for the Rose of Tralee, and she competed as the Washington DC Rose. 'I ended up making lifelong friendships. One of my best friends was the girl who was the Paris Rose that year – she was the first ever black Rose. Her father is from Senegal, mom from Sligo. We were in each other's weddings. She visited me in December for my 50th birthday.' Later Cummins would return to Ireland and spend time bartending in Belfast (she had friends there from childhood, having hosted them as part of the Belfast Children's Summer Programme, which sent Troubles-era Belfast kids to stay with American families). She wrote 'terrible poetry' during this time, but it wasn't until she moved to New York to work in publishing that her writing began in earnest. 'I had this notion that I could infiltrate the publishing industry and learn about writing,' she says. 'And I found that everyone who was in publishing had that same idea ... But I would read a ton, and frequently I would be reading these books and [think], I know what this writer got paid, and I think I could do better, or at least as well.' Novels are the greatest generator of empathy we have available to us as human beings Her first book was a memoir, A Rip in Heaven , about a terrible tragedy that befell her family when she was 16: two of her cousins, Julie and Robin Kerry, were brutally raped and murdered in an assault that only Cummins's brother, Tom, survived. 'It was such a formative experience in my life that I have no way of knowing how I would be different if it hadn't happened,' she says, when asked how the incident shaped her. 'I will say, I don't think I would be a writer. My cousin Julie was a writer – she was incredibly talented ... I think after she died, I felt all the ways the world lost her. I wanted to do the things that she could no longer do.' Following A Rip in Heaven came two novels about Ireland: The Outside Boy, about a Traveller boy set in 1959, and The Crooked Branch, set during the Famine. Then came American Dirt, and with it, pandemonium. But the only thing to do was return to the quiet of the page and finally explore the Puerto Rican side of her heritage. Speak to Me of Home was written in the hours when her kids were at school, and during writing trips to Puerto Rico, where she might sit for 14 hours a day, cranking out word after word. For Cummins, novels are 'the greatest generator of empathy we have available to us as human beings', and the best space to explore difficult topics. 'What I love about a really good novel is it allows you to have a conversation without getting stuck in the vocabulary. You don't have to use words about identity to talk about identity – you talk about the characters and their experiences.' Speak to Me of Home is published by Tinder Press
BreakingNews.ie
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BreakingNews.ie
Peter Andre shocked by backlash over film in which he poses as Jamaican gangster
Reality TV star Peter Andre has said he felt 'a bit shocked' at the backlash over a film in which his character poses as a Jamaican gangster. Jafaican, directed by British-Nigerian filmmaker Fredi Nwaka, follows Andre's character, small-time crook Garry Buckle, as he immerses himself in Jamaican culture to con his way between London and the Caribbean island nation. Advertisement Nwaka said the film would be put on video hosting site Vimeo for 48 hours from midnight on Friday so that people could make up their 'own minds' about it, after accusations of cultural appropriation. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Peter Andre (@peterandre) Andre, 52, told ITV's This Morning: 'I think what I found strange is that we took a process of nearly three years from starting this to finishing, and we sat with legends like (Jamaican comedian and actor) Oliver Samuels, doing the read over, doing the script and actually filming it. 'And when we went to Judgement Yard, which is where Sizzla Kalonji, reggae icon, lives, and we were invited in there to do this film. The whole process, if there was any point where any one of them said to us, this is not right, don't it.' 'We would have stopped', Nwaka interjected. Advertisement Andre added: 'That's why we were a bit shocked, because we had all the approval from everyone all the way along, and we laughed, and we did take after take, because we were all laughing when we were doing it.' The trailer for the film shows Andre wearing fake dreadlocks and speaking with a dubbed Jamaican accent. He said: 'I'm Greek. I've said this before, when I see films where they play the stereotypical Greek with the hairy chest and the medallion and the big nose, and they do the accent. I find that hilarious. 'I find (it) offensive if someone's saying really horrible things about your culture. And so I was a little bit confused, but I understand.' Advertisement Mysterious Girl singer Andre also said that This Morning presenter Alison Hammond should act in the sequel. 'We are registering to work on a sequel to this. Different country, different characters,' he told her.
New York Times
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
In Her Follow-Up to ‘American Dirt,' Jeanine Cummins Turns to Puerto Rico
In January 2020, Jeanine Cummins's novel 'American Dirt,' about a Mexican mother and son who flee cartel violence in Acapulco for the United States, arrived to rapturous praise from the publishing world, became an Oprah's Book Club pick and went on to sell over four million copies in 40 languages. It was a literary event that quickly became a cause célèbre. Scathing critical response accused Cummins of stereotyping, cultural appropriation and racism in her thin depiction of the border and its inhabitants. The vitriol grew so intense that her publisher canceled her 40-city book tour. Cummins's new novel, 'Speak to Me of Home,' is ostensibly about Puerto Rico. Gone are the propulsive writing, drug lords and chase scenes. In their place are quieter epiphanies: evocative, poetic passages about characters falling in love and the close bond between parents and children. But despite the publisher's framing, the book is not, in fact, about Puerto Rico. It's about the internal lives of three generations of women in one Puerto Rican-Irish family, and their shared preoccupation with their own whiteness, from the 1960s to today. Born in San Juan, Rafaela marries a white naval officer from Missouri in 1968, and 10 years later he moves their young family to St. Louis. Their 7-year-old daughter, Ruth, tries to assimilate into her new life in the Midwest, forgetting most of her Spanish and smoothing the edges of the prejudice and xenophobia around her (including among her father's family). Two decades later, Ruth's own teenage daughter, Daisy, moves from Palisades, N.Y., to San Juan, where she's longed to live since her childhood visits back to her mother's birthplace. The narrative jumps in time and geography across these three women's histories, until a devastating accident brings them together in 2023. As I read I thought of the Puerto Rican poet Fernando Fortunato Vizcarrondo's poem '¿Y Tu Agüela, Aonde Ejtá?' ('And Where Is Your Grandma?'), addressed from a Black Puerto Rican man to a light-skinned one, whom he accuses of keeping his dark-skinned grandmother hidden in the kitchen. Puerto Ricans are well aware that, regardless of what we look like now, our ancestors bear evidence of the mixed-race heritage of the majority of our people. In contrast to Vizcarrondo's poem, 'Speak to Me of Home' conflates race with ethnicity, resting a significant part of the plot on the results of a stealthy DNA test. Ruth is mystified by her American-born children's insistence on their Puerto Rican identity (her son, Charlie Hayes, changes his name to Carlos Hayes-Acuña in seventh grade, because 'it's cool to be Puerto Rican'), and even denies her own: 'Do I need to remind you that I'm white, for God's sake? Look at me!' The novel views Puerto Rican culture from a distance, disconnected from the archipelago's colonial history and lacking the nuance of lived experience. Carlos claims Bad Bunny 'gets too much airplay,' without appreciating the artist's importance in contemporary Puerto Rican life. This disconnect is perhaps strongest in the snobby Rafa, who resents the hostile gaze of her white Missouri neighbors even as she marginalizes the only other Puerto Rican family she encounters there: 'That woman would not have been fit to sweep my father's floors in San Juan.' I simply couldn't extend poetic license to the author's sloppiness with detail, about Puerto Rico and otherwise — which, however petty, was enough to take me out of the story. A crucial plot point is the hurricane that begins the novel (in San Juan in June, when hurricanes are relatively rare in the Caribbean compared with, say, September); though Cummins's characters seem unaware of the ubiquitous local distinctions between a vaguada, a tropical storm, a hurricane, a cyclone. A single slice of fried plantain is mistakenly referred to as a 'tostone,' instead of a tostón. Facebook wasn't available in 1999, when Rafa uses the platform to search for a long-lost friend. The verisimilitude of Cummins's present-day Puerto Rico is superficial at best, and references — to alfajores, Yaucono coffee, pasteles and alcapurrias — seem to be plucked from Wikipedia to add authenticity. Cummins's story does involve a proverbial grandparent hidden in the kitchen, and the revelation comes across as an attempt to defend the author's own Latinidad. But skin color does not define identity; depth of experience does. As we say in Puerto Rico, No es lo mismo decirlo que hacerlo. Saying it is not the same as doing it.
