Anjali Vats, "The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, and the Making of Americans" (Stanford UP, 2020)
b"The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, and the Making of Americans\\xa0\\xa0(Stanford University Press, 2020)\\xa0by Anjali Vats is an intricate and meticulously researched text on intellectual property history, race, and citizenship from the 1790s to the present. This is a complex narrative that engages multiple fields of knowledge including rhetoric, history, communication studies,\\xa0law, and critical race theory. With a focus on race and neo-coloniality in American intellectual property law, Vats argues that intellectual property and citizenship \\u201chave evolved and continue to evolve\\u2014in deeply intertwined and raced ways\\u201d as demonstrated in racial scripts or narratives about creators and infringers (2).\\nIn her history of intellectual property, Vats focuses on copyright, patent, and trademark discourses in her intricate analysis of how ideas about creator, citizenship, race and nation unfold over time. The text includes an \\u201cIntroduction\\u201d that discusses intellectual property as \\u201ca set of rhetorics\\u201d about citizenship and how \\u201crace and coloniality structure doctrinal practices in copyright, patent, and trademark law\\u201d (3). She uses the phrase \\u201cintellectual property citizen\\u201d to organize the text into four neat chapters that discuss how whiteness and property interests shape intellectual property law at times in the \\u201cguise of equality\\u201d and race neutral language.\\nThe first two chapters cover the development of ideas about intellectual property from the early Republic to the mid-twentieth century. Chapter One is titled \\u201cThe Intellectual Property Citizen\\u201d and it focuses on how whiteness became more formally linked with citizenship in the 1700s including some analysis of how the production of knowledge marked the boundaries of American citizenship. This is the era in which creatorship is cast as \\u201cfundamentally white\\u201d according to the author. Chapter Two is titled \\u201cThe Race Liberal Intellectual Property Citizen\\u201d and it concerns a discussion of how race liberal citizenship emerged in the post-World War II Era.\\nIn Chapter Three, \\u201cThe Post Racial Intellectual Property Citizen\\u201d Vats notes that the administration of Barack H. Obama passed a series of laws that helped to maintain a notion of white creatorship ultimately producing a post racial intellectual property citizen. The color of creatorship essentially remained white during the Obama Era. Lastly, in the final Chapter \\u201cRescripting Creatorship, Rescripting Citizenship\\u201d creators of color such as Prince Rogers Nelson pushed back against the racialist narratives in intellectual property law through performative acts of resistance and in the process contributed to the remaking of capitalism more generally.'\\nAnjali Vats is Assistant Professor of Communication and African and African Diaspora Studies and Assistant Professor of Law (by courtesy) at Boston College.\\nHettie V. Williams\\xa0Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of African American history in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University where she teaches courses in African American history and U.S. history. She has published book chapters, essays, and edited/authored five books. Her latest publications include Bury My Heart in a Free Land: Black Women Intellectuals in Modern U.S. History (Praeger, 2017) and, with Dr. G. Reginald Daniel, professor of historical sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Race and the Obama Phenomenon: The Vision of a More Perfect Multiracial Union (University Press of Mississippi 2014).\\xa0Follow me on twitter: @DrHettie2017\\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices\\nSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law"