Agora Speaker Series: “The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race & the Making of Americans”

Using methods drawn from critical race studies, rhetoric, media studies, and cultural studies, this book talk theorizes intellectual property citizenship//as an analytic for understanding the deep and abiding connections between race and copyright, patent, and trademark law. It contends that race, intellectual property, and citizenship, though they are no longer linked through formal exclusion, continue to be intertwined through the legally inflected language of “true imagination,” “human progress,” and the “consumer gaze.” These three concepts, which animate copyright, patent, and trademark law respectively, have operated for over 200 years to mark “good intellectual property citizens” and “bad intellectual property citizens” in racial terms. Creatorship, then, is not a colorblind category accessible to all but one that continues to be racially exclusionary, because of its association with citizenship and national identity.

Through the invocation of familiar racial scripts, creators are marked as capable or incapable of producing new and innovative knowledge. By marking periods of citizen creatorship, race liberal creatorship, and postracial creatorship, /The Color of Creatorship /shows, through examples such as the copyright controversies over hip hop and bioprospecting of traditional knowledge how race and intellectual property law came to be intertwined through citizenship in American law and remain so despite the purported race neutrality of copyrights, patents, and trademark.