The cases recount moments when conflicts or dissensus arises around sharing and reuse in collective practices. We have drawn them from our own experiences and contexts, some were told to us by friends and colleagues, and others we have retold from public accounts. We invite you to use these cases to bring some nuance to the often-polarised extremes of “universal entitlement” (permission to appropriate freely) and “universal restrictiveness” (cultural appropriation is impermissible), a binary that is problematised by C. Thi Nguyen, who also contributed five cases from his own context in the US.
We wrote the cases as short vignettes omitting names, institutions or places on purpose. Their specificity is without detail to allow them to trigger actions, reflections and change of perspective in different contexts. As a collection, they function as a toolbox filled with newly combinable building blocks that can contribute to the construction of more complex accounts of reuse. These collected accounts of lived situations went through an iterative process of telling, re-telling, editing and re-editing. It would be counterintuitive to sign them as authors; rather we see it as our role to take responsibility as narrators.
Reuse Case: Cultural Appropriation
An EU-funded participatory project on critical pedagogies in the arts is named “Teaching to Transgress Toolbox” after a well-known book by Afro-American feminist activist teacher and author bell hooks. Participants in the project question whether the re/use of this title is a form of unethical cultural appropriation: Is it ethical to use this title for a project organised by white folks in three European art schools? The bell hooks Foundation in Paris is asked to give an opinion. The foundation supports the reuse of the book title for the educational project. That opinion appeases the nervousness in the group. But this process leaves others to wonder why the bell hooks Foundation has been readily accepted as the authority in resolving the concerns, or whether there would have been other ways to address the concerns.
Reuse Case: Conceptual Poetry
A conceptual poet decides to recite official documents in a performance at a poetry festival. These documents describe in detail the autopsy of a teenager who was recently shot by the police. The performance of the autopsy of a Black teenager by a White established poet, presented as a piece of conceptual poetry, creates an outrage. The poet does not apologize and insists that he “took a publicly available document from an American tragedy that was witnessed first-hand (in this case by the doctor performing the autopsy) and simply read it.” The autopsy documents are available in the public domain.
Reuse Case: Non-Promiscuous Sharing
The Labriola National American Indian Data Center describes itself as an “Indigenous library center led by an all-Indigenous staff”. On their website, under the header “Information is Sacred…” they mention how as part of their work, the center develops protocols for cultural and Tribal sovereignty, aiming for Indigenous ownership of knowledge. The conditions for reuse of the library’s material are being articulated by librarians or custodians, rather than by their authors. To signal these conditions, librarians put orange tags in books which they consider containing misrepresentations of Indigenous peoples, and blue tags in those which include knowledge that shouldn’t be shared “promiscuously.” There is no information on the website about what “non-promiscuous sharing” would entail.
Reuse Case: Unsolicited Collaboration
In the course of a long-term project on book piracy, two artist researchers visit several pirate book markets. Leaving the markets with a big bag full of pirate copies, they start to compare the pirated versions with the official copies. It seems the pirates not only took control over the objects, but also the content: in one of the pirate copies (an autobiographical novel by a well-known journalist and TV presenter), somebody has borrowed the official author’s voice to sneak in two more fictionalized chapters about the author’s life without asking for authorization from the author or publisher. The extra chapters are good enough to pass undetected by a reader. Should this act of infiltrating the author’s voice be seen as a critique of normalized concept of individual authorship as something proprietary and stable? Is this an unsolicited collaboration proposing authorship as dialogical and participative? What is the motivation behind inhabiting someone else’s voice? There is no cultural capital, nor financial gain, since the pirate author remains anonymous. Buyers don’t want to read a chapter by an anonymous author, when they buy a book, say from a well-known author. After all, local friends were extremely surprised and slightly unsettled to see altered books. How many modified books have they been reading over the years?
Reuse Case: Declining Responsibility
A group of artists explicitly refuses to copyright their materials. They are happy for anyone to reuse, copy and transform their works in any context, for any purpose, but they insist that if only one detail would be changed, they want their name to be removed. The group does not want to be associated with reused work in any way, as they feel they cannot take responsibility for such derivatives.
Reuse Case: Shared Practice
A known academic publishes a book on an Open Access platform, detailing an artistic research methodology they’ve developed through several years of research. The methodology they describe mostly refines and reworks models for thinking about concepts that are already circulating in performance practice, such as the experimental conditions of a practice and the trouble with documenting and capturing bodies through video. Other practitioners read the book and “run with” these ideas, reusing them as a starting point. While the conceptual and practical ecosystem of the book itself is based on a shared practice, the academic asks that their name be mentioned and properly cited every time the described methodology is used.
Reuse Case: Wearing au dai
The practice of wearing au dai—Vietnamese formal long dress—has sometimes been taken on by white Americans. Recently a French designer had a runway show in Los Angeles, in which American, mostly white and black models, walked the runway wearing au dai. This sparked a storm of protest from Asian American activists, as a particularly egregious form of cultural appropriation—especially since it was coming from a French designer. Now, Tom is getting married to Nancy in Los Angeles. Tom is a white American, Nancy is a Vietnamese American. Nancy participated in those protests. But Nancy’s Vietnamese family strongly wishes that Tom would wear an au dai at their wedding. What should they do, and why? And should it matter if any photos will be posted on Instagram?
Reuse Case: Kimono Runway
A museum in California, as part of Asian American Heritage Month, puts on display a set of kimonos and invites museum attendees to try them on. Asian American activists protest the event as a form of cultural appropriation, and point to the runway event, above. Most of the activists were born in America and come from a variety of Asian ethnicities. There is, however, a counterprotest, by Japanese-born immigrants, who point out that kimonos are, in Japanese culture, a gift object, intentionally created to be worn by outsiders. What should the museum do?
Reuse Case: Whose Authority
Suppose you are a British white person, who is in love with different African textile patterns. You are aware that there have been several criticisms, by black British people, complaining that the cultural appropriation of African textile patterns is a painful kind of appropriation, especially insulting given the history of British colonization. However, you locate an online shop that sells a particularly beautiful textile. The shop’s online FAQ states that the pattern is distinctive to the shop owner’s particular village, and that the shop owner encourages everybody, no matter their racial or cultural heritage, to buy and wear this beautiful fabric. Should you purchase it, and if you do, in what contexts might you wear it?
Reuse Case: Time and Quality
A large cooperation project dedicated to collective practices and decentralisation of power with a focus on performing arts receives significant financial support from the European Union. At the start of the project, partners and participating artists try to come up with more equitable yet feasible modalities of remunerating the artists for their work. They ask, what should be remunerated? Is time the sole basis of measuring input? Should all the artists be paid a set amount for each time unit (day, week…) they spend working in the project? But what about being remunerated for the quality of the contribution to the project rather than the quantity of it? What is quality? According to which standards? Who decides? Eventually, the collective of partners and artists decides on a flat fee, with no difference of age, country of residence, academic or otherwise qualifications or socio-economic status. The engagement, dedication and labour of proposing and eventually implementing the alternative forms of participation in the activities where the artist was not able to be physically present were deemed equally worthy of the weekly honorarium.
Reuse Case: Shallow Appropriation
Debates are raging inside various American Latino communities about the permissibility of non-Latino people displaying Day of the Dead decorations on their lawns and homes around the appropriate holiday. Roughly, a majority of Latino academics and cultural writers have argued that it is a problematic form of cultural appropriation, that partakes superficially in a deep cultural tradition. (The objection isn’t to, say, a non-Latino person thoughtfully participating in a Day of the Dead parade, after learning about the history. The objection is to non-Latino people randomly buying cheap Day of the Dead lawn ornaments and sticking them in their lawns with the vague thought that they look kinda cool.) And roughly, a majority of non-academic Latinos think this is fussy and dumb, and many have expressed an affection for seeing signs of their culture spread. Suppose you are not Latino, and your five-year-old sees a Day of the Dead skull at the grocery store and thinks it’s beautiful and wants to put it on your lawn. Should you? (PS: there is a similar divide over whether the correct term is “Latinx” or “Latino,” so the language of this prompt is up for similar worries.)
Reuse Case: Balancing Concerns
Many mixed-martial artists, of every racial and cultural background—especially women fighters—have started adopting the hairstyle of cornrows, tight, low braids. These are traditionally a Black hairstyle. Many Black Americans have expressed that these seem to strike them as insulting cultural appropriation. Black hairstyles have been one of the classical loci of cultural appropriation concerns. The general worry is that Black people who wear such hairstyles are subject to various forms of discrimination and bias, and often accused of being “unprofessional.” But white people who wear such styles appear “edgy” and “cool.” On the other hand, the mixed martial artists simply say that the hairstyle is maximally functional in the MMA ring, and many white MMA fighters who wear such cornrows say that they are wearing them in solidarity with their close friends, who are Black MMA fighters. How do we balance these concerns?
Reuse Case: Folktales
An editor publishes a collection of folktales, reusing several stories from another collection that was published a few years earlier. Believing these folktales belong to the public domain, the editor assumes they can be reused by anyone. The persons named as authors of the previous collection decide to sue the editor, claiming that they have done all the work of gathering and compositing the folktales, and that therefore they should be considered the rightful authors. They win the court case.
Reuse Case: Teaching Assignments
Art students in a seminar are tasked to develop assignments for teaching in the arts. One student asks whether it was OK to (re)use assignments from other students in their own teaching. The seminar group decides it was OK and agreed subsequently on setting up an open-source pool to share and support each other by not having to reinvent the wheel. Pitching this plan to another student group, the authorial status and ownership of teaching assignments is being discussed and asserted, with the rationale that individuals have put labour into developing the teaching assignments. Does anyone lose when sharing their teaching ideas, or is it a way to support others and get supported in return?
Reuse Case: Restitution
A group of Western ethnographic museums prepare the restitution of all objects that had been stolen under colonial rule to their countries of origin. Before the objects return, the museums set out to digitize the objects, and to archive their metadata. The plan is that this data will be released in the Public Domain so that everyone, including afro-descent people in Europe who are distant to these objects, will have access to files. Some lawyers critique this plan because they do not think the colonizing countries should be the ones to release this data. It should be the decision of the rightful owners in the countries of origin who decide, including whether some data is not to be released at all.