The Color of Creatorship

Rezensionen / Stimmen

"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, Georgetown University Law Center "Anjali Vats delivers a damning polemic on the racist scripts and tropes that have animated American intellectual property law and rhetoric, shaping understandings of citizenship and structures of national feeling in three distinct eras of racial political economy. The Color of Creatorship is destined to be a touchstone and lightning rod in critical race legal theory for years to come."-Rosemary J. Coombe, author of The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation and the Law "Vats's powerful analysis draws mainly from laws and legal cases in the United States, moving roughly chronologically from the eighteenth century to the present. But her argument has international reach."-Shobita Parthasarathy, Nature