Readings, Podcasts, References

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

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 (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 (PDF, p.10)

"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