Vats, "The Color of Creatorship"

Stanford University Press has released The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, and the Making of Americans, by Anjali Vats (Boston College). A description from the Press:

The Color of Creatorship examines how copyright, trademark, and patent discourses work together to form American ideals around race, citizenship, and property.

Working through key moments in intellectual property history since 1790, Anjali Vats reveals that even as they have seemingly evolved, American understandings of who is a creator and who is an infringer have remained remarkably racially conservative and consistent over time. Vats examines archival, legal, political, and popular culture texts to demonstrate how intellectual properties developed alongside definitions of the "good citizen," "bad citizen," and intellectual labor in racialized ways. Offering readers a theory of critical race intellectual property, Vats historicizes the figure of the citizen-creator, the white male maker who was incorporated into the national ideology as a key contributor to the nation's moral and economic development. She also traces the emergence of racial panics around infringement, arguing that the post-racial creator exists in opposition to the figure of the hyper-racial infringer, a national enemy who is the opposite of the hardworking, innovative American creator.

The Color of Creatorship contributes to a rapidly-developing conversation in critical race intellectual property. Vats argues that once anti-racist activists grapple with the underlying racial structures of intellectual property law, they can better advocate for strategies that resist the underlying drivers of racially disparate copyright, patent, and trademark policy.

Advance praise:

"Building on the work of racial justice and intellectual property pioneers, Anjali Vats elevates the conversation to important new registers, including concerns of equitable distribution and post-racial identity claims. Vats shows how IP and contested citizenship have evolved to embed centuries of systemic racial injustices, reaching into the past to imagine a new and exciting future for creatorship." —Jessica Silbey, Northeastern University

"American law defined black human beings as chattel, deprived Asian Americans the right to own property, and justified the appropriation of Native lands. Anjali Vats's riveting book reveals how intellectual property is rife with racial bias and actively creates racialized notions of citizenship and humanity. From the Marvin Gaye plagiarism suit to Prince's radical protest against copyright as modern slavery, Vats explores the racial biases that underlie rhetoric around ingenuity, citizenship, property, and the public domain. A tour de force." —Madhavi Sunder

More information is available here.

H/t: New Books Network, where you can find an interview with the author. 

-- Karen Tani