Here we collected some key texts and podcasts for those who want to dig deeper. They are drawn from the one-year Limits to Openness reading group that explored issues of universalism related to the idea of openness, as often presented in Open Content, Free Culture and dominant Open Access publishing. Drawn from different fields, such as philosophy, Black studies, Free Culture, Critical Race Studies and Critical IP, among others, the range of texts and podcasts approach the question of what decolonial, feminist practices of reuse would look like from different perspectives. Here, we also included selected texts that informed the prompts or conversations. An index or reference list can be found under Reused Resources.

 

Authenticity Obsession, or Conceptualism as Minstrel Show

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

Starting from Kenneth Goldsmiths’s appropriation of the autopsy of police-murdered Michael Brown as a piece of conceptual poetry, Ken Chen asks challenging questions about how 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 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 instrumentalise.

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.

 

The Restless Dead: Necrowriting and Disappropriation

Cristina Rivera Garza. The Restless Dead: Necrowriting and Disappropriation. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. 2020.

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 reuse?

Disappropriation has involved, and still involves, the critical renunciation of what capital-L Literature does and has always done: appropriating others’ voices and experiences for its own benefit and its own hierarchies of influence. Disappropriation has involved, and still involves, exposing the mechanisms that permit an unequal exchange of labor: the labor that uses the language of collective experience for the author’s individual gain. The comprehensive goal of disappropriation was, and is, to return all writing to its plural origin. (p. 4)

 

How Deep Is Your Source?

Aymeric Mansoux​​​​​​​, “How Deep Is Your Source?“. 2013.

In the text “How Deep Is Your Source”, 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.

 

Footnotes (Books and Papers Scattered about the Floor)

Katherine McKittrick. “Footnotes (Books and Papers Scattered about the Floor)”. In Dear Science and Other Stories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2021. pp. 14–32.

In this chapter, McKittrick reflects on how research is animated by citations, endnotes, footnotes, references, bibliographies, texts and narratives, parentheses, sources and pages. How to reference Black thought and methodologies that resist being contained within text?

 

“But that was my idea!”

Susan Kelly. “’But that was my idea!’ Problems of Authorship and Validation in Contemporary Practices of Creative Dissent”. Parallax. vol. 19. no. 2. 2013. pp. 53–69.

Susan’s article was very helpful to understand the “vexed issue of authorship”, the subjectivation processes and the pulls and forces that kick in when collective work of creative dissent in social movements is brought into the category of art and its institutional frameworks.

Trained to operate as hyperindividuals in a competitive and brand-oriented set of institutional and market hierarchies, many artists often have no idea how to actually work with others or how to begin to break out of regimes of value linked to cultural capital. Many artists and activists who participate in creative dissent often say that they are not interested in claiming the category of art or its institutional framework as a means of defining their practice. Yet, the persistence of the authorship question within the often temporary groups I have encountered […] illustrates how the values and power dynamics of the art world often underpins the antagonisms between individuals that limit the potential of collective political action. (p. 1)

 

Boatema Boateng. The Copyright Thing Doesn’t Work Here. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2011.

We selected this text because of its critical approach to the issues that arise when a globalised, 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 mainly having been 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. (p. 167)  

Cross-reading and listening:  

 

Self-Review of Citational Practice

Angela Okune. “Self-Review of Citational Practice”. 2019.

Angela Okune’s list of questions is very helpful for reflecting on the potential biases of our own citational practices before publishing a text or other work. See also Angela Okune. “Decolonizing scholarly data and publishing infrastructures”. LSE Blogpost. 29 May 2019.

 

Licensing and Licentiousness

Abigail De Kosnik. “Licensing and Licentiousness”. In Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2016.

This chapter on rogue reuse in fan fiction may help us think about what positions might give us confidence to practise reuse and decide that it is OK. On what grounds 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 licensing), Abigail De Kosnik explores where ethical authority could be situated beyond individual authorship.

 

R-Words: Refusing Research

Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. “R-Words: Refusing Research”. In Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities. Ed. Django Paris, Maisha T. Winn. London: Sage. 2014. pp. 223–48.

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 their text to cultural practices (in and outside academia) and see how 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. (p. 234) 

 

Contextualizing Openness: Situating Open Science

Leslie Chan, Angela Okune, Rebecca Hillyer, Denisse Albornoz, Alejandro Posada. Eds. Contextualizing Openness: Situating Open Science. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. 2019.

The book brings together collective learnings from the Open and Collaborative Science in Development Network (OCSDNet) that engaged in a participatory consultation with scientists, development practitioners and activists from 26 countries in the Global South. The book was an eye-opener in our research because it addresses the fiction with openness as a universal good.

Whose science is being open? By whom? Who is going to benefit from these new framings and practices? What are the risks? Will this lead to equality and equity of knowledge access and production by researchers in unequal settings? Will Open Science disrupt the existing global power structure of knowledge legitimation? Will it lead to further marginalization of knowledge from the Global South? How will Open Science contribute toward the Sustainable Development Goals? (p. 5)

 

The Transparency Thesis

Denise Ferreira da Silva. “The Transparency Thesis”. In Toward a Global Idea of Race. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2007.

The first chapter of Ferreira da Silva’s book helped us to understand the modern construction of the author as a free, self-determined, individual subject that is entitled to follow their intention, to construct themself as affecting others rather than being affected by others. It helped us to articulate the need to make a shift from intention to relation, which is at the basis with feminist and decolonial methodologies in the arts and abandons the modernist concept of the artist as a self-determined subject.

 

Cultural Appropriation and the Intimacy of Groups

C. Thi Nguyen and Matthew Strohl. “Cultural Appropriation and the Intimacy of Groups”. Philosophical Studies. vol. 176. no. 4. 1 April 2019. pp. 981–1002.

Thi Nguyen and Mathhew Strohl’s text was very helpful since it articulates the binary thinking of “universal entitlement” (you can appropriate freely from other cultures) on the one hand, and “universal restrictiveness” (cultural appropriation from marginalized groups is impermissible) on the other. In an email to the editors sent in April 2024, Thi Nguyen writes:

In thinking about cultural appropriation, what I came to think was that it was bad that one of the key problems was thinking in blanket terms: that cultural appropriation was always problematic or always OK. Instead, what Matt Strohl and I came to think was that some practices had particularly powerful meanings to particular groups. They were intimate practices, practices of group solidarity, that expressed something important about belonging to a group identity.

 

Collectively Setting Conditions for Re-Use

Élodie Mugrefya and Femke Snelting. “Collectively Setting Conditions for Re-Use”. MARCH International. March 2022.

This article situates the motivations, methodologies and context that led to the creation of  “Collective Conditions for Reuse (CC4r)“. The most important move CC4r makes is to invite users to take responsibility for (re-)use.

The CC4r favors re-use and generous access conditions. It considers hands-on circulation as a necessary and generative activation of current, historical and future authored materials. While you are free to (re-)use them, you are not free from taking the implications from (re-)use into account.

This call for careful attention from potential reusers is how CC4r wants to stay with the potential of Free Culture, but without the universal reliance on freedom bound by law.

 

Committing to Decolonial Feminist Practices of Reuse

Femke Snelting and Eva Weinmayr. “Committing to Decolonial Feminist Practices of Reuse”. “Publishing After Progress”. Culture Machine. vol. 23. 2024.

We include this article in this section, because it provides an in-depth discussion of CC4r and maps a series of proposals for making conditions for reuse explicit. It discusses a range of experimental Open Content licences, which attempt to regulate reuse through setting conditions, next to a range of manifestos, guiding principles and protocols developed mostly in the context of indigenous knowledge practices. Since these documents articulate values and agreements, they can function as toolkits to experiment with more equitable approaches to knowledge sharing.