Kristina Perkins
Repurposing an Argument
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Repurposing an Argument
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Sundays in Ecuador: Hyperreality, Appropriation, and Cultural Responsibilty
Step 1: Choosing a Subject
For our first Minor in Writing assignment, we were asked to repurpose an already-written piece for a different audience. On the surface, the task seemed simple—I’d just search through the recesses of my Google Drive until I found something vaguely promising. After a considerable amount of indecision, I landed here: a response paper that attempts to connect the theories of hyperreality, existentialism, and empathy in under 500 words. My motivations for choosing the piece were clear enough: the original audience was too limited, the word count was restricting, and I'd recently had a minor epiphany about hyperreality while on a trip to Ecuador. I had developed a new, activist lens and I was itching to use it (meaningfully). This assignment was my chance: an opportunity not only to rewrite this piece for a broader discourse community, but to produce accessible cultural criticism from an activist perspective.
Step 2: The First Attempt
I viewed my repurposing project as a simple matter of contextualizing, complicating, and expanding. But the task of contextualization is never as simple as it appears (this, perhaps, could be the moral of this portfolio). Indeed, the initial scope of my paper suddenly felt far too narrow for the sort of overhaul I sought to accomplish: I wanted to apply the concept of hyperreality not to literature, but to culture, using it as a tool for untangling the systems of cultural appropriation and voyeurism I encounter every day. Ultimately, writing this first draft was a leap of faith: I’m not a philosophy major. I’ve never taken a course in anthropology. I read Baudrillard two years ago, and probably understood about ten percent of it. Did I even have the authority, credibility, or authenticity to write a paper this philosophically involved?
Step 3: Editing and Finalizing
After turning 500-word response paper into a 10-page term essay, I realized that my credibility depended not on my prior coursework but on the solidity of my arguments—I could write this piece, but it would have to stand up to criticism. But as my paper expanded and shape-shifted and morphed, I thought myself into corner after corner, frequently getting stuck. My drafts required me to rethink authenticity and challenge the scope of Baudrillard; to identify concrete examples—products of appropriation, if you will—in order to release my essay from the hypothetical; and to come face-to-face with my own insurmountable privilege.
After these elaborations, my final draft looks almost unrecognizable from my original paper. Even still, the two pieces end in very much the same place: my belief that empathy and thoughtfulness are the only ways we can truly subvert the forces of hyperreality and appropriation.