Digging Deeper

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."

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

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

"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."

Aymeric Mansoux​​​​​​​ (2013), How deep is your source?

In the text "How deep is your source" (2013), Aymeric Mansoux tracks the history of open source software and reflects on the translation of free software licences applied to the field of cultural production. He reflects on this through practical aspects and touches on the problems with a simplifying and universal one-size-fits-all approach.

Boatema Boateng (2011), "The Copyright Thing Doesn't Work Here". University of Minnesota Press.

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 reuse.

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)

Cross-reading + cross hearing: 

• Critical Race IP SoundCloud: UCLA, Season 6, Episode 4 (2021) Exploring Critical Race IP. With Dean Deidre Keller and Kimberly Tignor
  
• Anjali Vats, Deirdre A. Keller (2018)​​​​​​​, Critical Race IP, PDF
• Harris, Cheryl (1993) Whiteness as Property, Harvard Law Review, PDF
  
• Harris, Cheryl (2020) Reflections on Whiteness as Property, Harvard L Review 134 PDF

Angela Okune (2019), Self-Review of Citational Practice. Download PDF

Angela Okune's list of questions is very helpful to reflect the potential biases of our own citational practices before publishing a text or other work.
See also, Leslie Chan, Angela Okune, Rebecca Hillyer, Denisse Albornoz, and Alejandro Posada, (eds) Contextualising Openness

Angela Okune, LSE Blogpost 'Decolonizing scholarly data and publishing infrastructures' (2019)

Abigail De Kosnik. “Licensing and Licentiousness.” In Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom, 307–14. The MIT Press, 2016. PDF

This chapter on rogue reuse in fan fiction might help to think about what positions might give us confidence to practice reuse and decide that it is OK. On what ground can we make such decisions? How is responsibility for gatekeeping and custodianship taken up? From commitment to loyalty, a sense of belonging and licentiousness (rather than licencing), Abigail De Kosnik explores where ethical authority could be situated, beyond individual authorship.

Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2014), "R-Words: Refusing Research". In Humanizing research: decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities, pages 223-248.PDF

Eve Tuck' and Wayne Yang's text offers a way to think about the many reasons for not doing research, not sharing or not reusing materials. The text is written by and for practitioners in social sciences. Can we translate the cases and claims made in the text to cultural practice (in and outside academia) and see in which ways they could help to articulate a feminist and decolonial approach to a practice of sharing and reuse?

"It needs to be said that we are not arguing for silence. Stories are meant to be passed along appropriately, especially among loved ones, but not all of them as social science research. Although such knowledge is often a source of wisdom that informs the perspectives in our writing, we do not intend to share them as social science research. It is enough that we know them." (page 234)