Readings, Podcasts, References

Ken Chen (11 June 2015) ‘Authenticity Obsession, or Conceptualism as Minstrel Show’, Asian American Writers’ Workshop

Starting from Kenneth Goldsmiths' appropriation of the autopsy of police-murdered Michael Brown as a piece of conceptual poetry, Ken Chen asks challenging questions about the way this incident was not an accident. From reading this text, we understood that an anti-colonial, feminist practice of Open Content would need to formulate “a politics of appropriation”. Without it, it risks repeating the colonial/white (?) gesture of treating the world as resource, as primary, “raw” material, dry text, pure content, pure evidence, anthropology), to render it dumbly into things, mere material to own; a site of violation; or simply something to instrumentalize."

"What is the line separating one writer as a poet of witness and another as a poet of expropriation — and what prevents either from being a producer of the kitsch of atrocity? Conceptual Poetry has no politics of appropriation. One could say that the movement’s major theoretical texts spend significantly more time discussing, say, John Cage, Sol Le Witt, and Walter Benjamin than they do the power relations of cultural exchange." Ken Chen

Cristina Rivera Garza (2020). The Restless Dead: Necrowriting and Disappropriation. Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Press.

We are curious how Garza's description of disappropriative practices could help us formulate a politics of re-use. Even if for Garza, disappropriation is based in writerly practice, what would disappropriation mean for other types of creative practice?

"Disappropriation critiques the appropriation of other’s voices for its own benefit, but instead: exposes the unequal exchange of labour that happens when collective experience is used for individual gain. What disappropriation does, is to restore the plurality of writing."

Boatema Boateng "The Copyright Thing Doesn't Work Here" (2011). 
We selected this text because of its critical approach of the issues that arise when a globalized, US-based Intellectual Property regime is imported and applied to cultural production in Ghana. Boateng brings perspectives from African Diaspora studies and Critical Race Theory to question the way copyright follows the fault lines of nation, gender, and race to regulate and produce both individual subjects and certain types of knowledge. Boatema Boateng is a legal scholar who has been contributing to the Critical Race IP community, a body of work that we have wanted to pay attention to as part of the reading group. While having been mainly developed by scholars in the US context, the understanding that race is a social construct embedded in legal systems and policies, seems crucial to figure out how it then gets embedded in Intellectual Property, especially, of course, in the context of Open Access, appropriation and re-use.

Intellectual property is based on understandings of the temporal and social contexts of cultural production that are bound up with modernity. These include the liberal concept of the autonomous, rational individual as the basic unit of society and the actions of that individual as distinct from the actions of all others. As a cultural producer, this individual is the essential subject of intellectual property law—the male or masculinized author or inventor whose ability and right to separate his work from all other such work and make proprietary claims over it is a function of his status as a modern subject. This separation is also temporal in demarcating the creative work of the individual from that of not only living authors but also deceased ones. (page 167)