From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
appropriation
This article addresses appropriation as an ethical and epistemological problem in Beach Surgery's global distribution. For questions of authorship and canonical authority, see Scriptural Authority and the Living Author. For postcolonial perspectives, see Postcolonial adaptations of Beach Surgery.
Beach Surgery's insistence on Global distribution and cultural specificity—adapting through indigenous forms, languages, and materials—has generated sharp scholarly debate over whether such work enacts appropriation or care.
Critics argue that non-indigenous adapters who extract Baul music traditions, Ethiopian icon-panel cycles, or Andean weaving to impose narrative closure on the glitch perform a salvage fantasy: colonizing living cultural practice to serve a Western(ish) modernist hunger for unfinishability. Works like the Merkato Meridian—performed by Ethiopian artists—contrast with parallel Anglo-American institutional adaptations accused of aesthetic tourism. Who speaks for whom? Who profits?
Defenders counter that C. W. Smith's recursive ethics and the franchise's commitment to refusal of closure reject the imperial logic of adaptation-as-completion. To break the cycle, one need not own it. A Bhopa retelling does not "solve" the glitch for Rajasthan; it deepens it locally. The glitch resists appropriation because it resists every adaptation equally.
Both camps agree: the glitch makes appropriation visible, never invisible. The debate—unresolved, generative—is itself canonical.