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Narrating the modern-day ‘rise’ of China in IR and beyond A third wave of revisionist/status quo literature came with post-Cold-War debates over the US-led world order and emergence of ‘rising powers’. Authors in this wave utilize the logic of the PTT to interrogate the contemporary ‘rise’ of China in particular (see for example Lim 2015; Goldstein 2007). As Lemke (1997, 32) explains, threats to the post-war ‘Long Peace’ have now seemingly emerged, notably from ‘Chinese growth unaccompanied by a change in attitude toward the status quo’. To assuage these threats, ‘the United States and other leading satisfied Great Powers should continue patient cooperation with [China, and others such as Russia] … to encourage democratization and liberalization’. For Gerald Segal (1996, 108), ‘China is a powerful, unstable non-status quo power.’ China is also now argued to be demonstrating ‘significant revisionist objectives’ in the South China Sea (Lim et al. 2017) as well as by creating the AIIB (Wilson 2017, 150). Graham Allison writes that ‘war between the U.S. and China is more likely than recognized at the moment’, as his interpretation of the historical record stipulates that, in the majority of cases ‘in which a rising power has confronted a ruling power, the result has been bloodshed’ (Allison 2015).5 Beyond the PTT, a significant subliterature explores whether rising powers in general, and especially a rapidly rising China, represent revisionist or status quo powers (see for example Ding 2010; Feng 2009; Kastner and Saunders 2012). We return to the role of these narratives in the policy realm in the next sub-section on public narratives. Third-wave IR debates around rising powers, then, quietly sustain the logics of the ordering narratives of morality and civilizational progress central to the first and second waves, perpetuating largely unquestioned understandings that international revisionism must inevitably emanate from beyond the Western core of international order. To begin with, the term ‘rising power’ is not neutral, bringing powerful connotations of instability and danger absent in such alternatives as ‘modernizing’ or ‘developing’. Crucially, the term ‘rising’, like ‘revisionist’, powers has most typically been used to refer only to nonWestern states (see Turner 2014, 152–154). As noted earlier, the EU is rarely labelled ‘revisionist’ despite revisionism forming part of its self-identity. Explorations of the US as revisionist are also relatively absent, though counternarratives exist, as examined shortly. The selective formations and constraining boundaries of mainstream conceptual IR narratives prevent the inclusion of the US and EU because the term does not logically fit the known character or plotline. The assumption here is not of an unproblematic separation between the ‘West’ and ‘non-West’, or of timeless challenges the latter poses to the former. Fears over a ‘rising’ India, for instance, rarely enter US security discourse as do those of a ‘rising’ China, despite numerous material similarities and both typically being identified as residing beyond the West. Moreover, and as already shown, earlier waves of IR revisionism–status-quo debate interrogated the vulnerabilities of the Anglo-American/Western order to Imperial and Nazi Germany. That Germany is now routinely located within the West, alongside members of the ‘Anglo-American world’, demonstrates the fluidity of such imagined geographies. Indeed, India’s broad absence from US threat discourses is explained partly by its (re)construction as a pseudo-member of the Western world (Turner 2016). Similarly, while post-1945 Japan quickly became seen as part of the Western Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) world, by the 1970s and 1980s it was ‘orientalized’ because its economic growth generated concerns of a challenge to US economic hegemony (Nymalm 2017). Today, it is those actors commonly labelled ‘nonWestern’, in particular China, that have in many ways been seamlessly maneuvered into spaces of IR debate once occupied by Wilhelmine and Nazi Germany. Members of ‘the West’ escape such interrogation, while China, like others before it, is now ideationally tied to well-rehearsed discourses of the enemy because its imagined Otherness makes it seemingly logical to do so (see Rousseau 2006). Mainstream scholarly/conceptual narratives of a ‘rising’ China are thus in important ways autobiographical narratives of Western authorship, with their meanings contingent on the worldview of a particular, prevailing (Western) disciplinary tradition.6 The ‘cognitive map’ of this tradition locates uncertainty and disorder, and an unravelling of gains made by the so-called liberal world order, as coming not from the central characters within it but from the global peripheries. China has become locked within narrativized understandings of what constitutes international order, on the one hand, and disorder (or chaos/ backwardness/barbarism), on the other, and not only within academic circles. For centuries within wider US politics and society, China has been represented as lacking the essential standards of civilization and as a corresponding threat to US security and its enlightened, progressive values (Turner 2013). Chengxin Pan points to self-reflecting Western narrations of the ‘China threat’ when he argues that the ‘threat’ derives at least partly from the American self. ‘Thus, to fully understand the U.S. “China threat” argument, it is essential to recognize its autobiographical nature’ (Pan 2004, 313). This equally applies to expectations of China developing according to the Western model of liberal democratic capitalism. This kind of convergence thinking has been a recurrent theme in US China policy (Nymalm 2013). As highlighted earlier, among those who directly interrogate the question of whether ‘rising’ China exists as a revisionist or a status quo actor, most agree that it more closely resembles the latter. Despite this, it is China and other ‘rising powers’ that are routinely interrogated as potential sources of instability. This apparent contradiction is enabled by the power of narratives to steer and select our knowledges of the world and its constituent actors. First- and second-wave IR debates around international revisionism and the status quo cemented the disciplinary (conceptual) narrative of an imperial/ unsatisfied non-Western threat to a stable Anglo-American/Western world order. Third-wave debates over China’s ‘rise’ align with, and reinforce, this story by retaining its authors as the central protagonists, most notably the US, before introducing China as the latest outsider to a functioning system, which it necessarily threatens to destabilize. The findings of the recent sub-literature within these debates on the explicit question of China as a revisionist or a status quo actor have not disrupted the more ingrained, overarching ‘truth’ that China should remain the principal object of study.

Ultimately, the counter-narratives that exist have not yet significantly challenged the discipline’s dominant conceptual narratives. Ordering narratives of morality and progress have created a binary of positive/benevolent and negative/threatening, brands of international revisionist motivations and behaviours towards an imagined status quo. Positive and/or benevolent revisionism is within the rules, taken for granted and rarely labelled as such. It is typified by the ‘normative power’ of the EU and a similar (though, as indicated above, less extreme) comparative lack of interest in a revisionist US. As in-house revisionism by the principally Western architects of the system, such revisionism’s purpose is narrated as benign and aimed at fine-tuning an inherently progressive order from which, while not flawless, the world is understood to profit and advance. Negative/threatening revisionism is considered disruptive not merely to a stable system but to the progress and advancement that system is designed to bring. Negative revisionism means instability, regression and a real or potential reversal of gains. Attached to actors like China, it is deemed worthy of interrogation, generating the need for debate about world peace (Buzan 2010) and the survival of the international system (Ikenberry 2008). Neither has resistance prevented conceptual narratives of revisionism and the status quo from disseminating into wider public (especially governmental) narratives. The Trump administration labels China (and Russia) a ‘revisionist power’ in both its 2017 National Security Strategy (NSS) (White House 2017a) and its 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS) (Department of Defense 2018). This label is justified on the basis that China aims ‘to shape a world antithetical to U.S. values and interests … displace the US in the Indo-Pacific region and reorder the region in its favour’ (White House 2017a, 25). When the NDS speaks of ‘a resilient, but weakening, post-WWII international order’ undermined by China and Russia, it points to potential global regression and a dismantling of ‘the longstanding rules-based international order’ (Department of Defense 2018, 1–2, emphasis in original; see Breuer and Johnston 2019). ‘In short, they are contesting our geopolitical advantages and trying to change the international order in their favour’ (White House 2017a, 27). To support its claims of China as nefariously revisionist with designs to reshape the global landscape, the NSS cites China’s attempts to export its state-centric economic model and enhance its military capabilities, and its use of data and surveillance. Yet, throughout the same document, comparably ‘revisionist’ motivations and behaviours are presented as essential elements of a benevolent US policy programme. The theme of ‘advancing American influence’ recurs. To do this, it is argued, the US should ‘play a catalytic role in promoting private-sector-led economic growth’, build and deploy ‘the most effective military in the world’ and ‘continuously pursue strategic intelligence’. The American aim of ‘advancing religious freedom’ is also promoted (White House 2017a, 4, 3, 32, 41). To reiterate an earlier point, narratives are prescriptive, bringing understandings of how the world should be as an inextricable component of the policy-making process, their ‘truths’ and logic enabling certain practices while precluding others. ‘Narratives do not cause action. Instead, they … authorize, enable, and justify specific practices and policies … Over time, the narratives and the practices they authorize come to be taken as natural, granted, and the only conceivable ones.’ Importantly, narratives also resonate more, with greater potential to become dominant or commonsensical, when they can latch on to pre-existing narratives (Autesserre 2012, 207). The aim here, then, is not to draw a causal link between conceptual or ordering narratives, on the one hand, and public/government narratives or foreign policy decisions on the other. It is to show where the narrativized worldviews of the Trump administration connect, or ‘latch on’, to those of the scholarly IR literature, and to examine the political practices they enable. In 2017, US National Security Advisor HR McMaster argued that revisionist powers like China seek to ‘subvert the global order that undergirds our common … economic prosperity’ (White House 2017b). At least in part on the basis of this type of understanding of negative revisionism, or subversion, towards a system that has brought wealth and prosperity, from July 2018 Washington began applying wide-ranging tariffs on Chinese imports (The Economist 2018). These public narratives worked also to preclude a continuation of what the NSS refers to as Washington’s post-Cold-War ‘strategic complacency’ in global affairs. ‘Given the new features of the geopolitical environment the United States must renew key capabilities to address the challenges we face’ (White House 2017a, 26, 28). In March 2018 the US Congress approved Trump’s military spending bill which proposed a US$61 billion increase to the national defense budget (Myre 2018). US Pacific Command was also rebranded the Indo-Pacific Command, to better encapsulate the view not only that China’s ‘rise’ brings the need for material support from key partners such as India, but also that the US–India partnership is one of ‘responsible stewards’ of international ‘peace and stability’ (Ministry of External Affairs 2017; see also Turner 2016). Whatever one’s normative position on US/Western liberalism versus Chinese state-centrism, the tensions within the 2017 NSS around China as an explicitly negatively revisionist actor and the US as implicitly positively revisionist demonstrate the ‘successful’ operations of public narratives. Comparable behaviours in one actor can be morally promoted in the name of upholding the status quo and ensuring global progress, while in others can be portrayed as immoral and regressive. These apparent contradictions are reconciled by the overarching power of largely unquestioned ordering, or meta-, narratives in which the sources of (Western) order and potential (non-Western) chaos are already ‘known’. China’s ambitions to expand its capabilities and influence, moreover, constitute negative revisionism not simply because they emanate from the non-West, but because China’s so-called state-driven project runs counter to beliefs in democratic-capitalist American ideals. China is thus not ‘converging’ as expected; the perceived threat from authoritarianism is referenced heavily throughout both the NSS and NDS. While the US is cast as a benevolent guide for China’s inclusion in the post-war liberal international order, it is China that is frustrating these attempts: ‘For decades, U.S. policy was rooted in the belief that support for China’s rise and for its integration into the post-war international order would liberalize China. Contrary to our hopes, China expanded its power at the expense of the sovereignty of others’ (White House 2017a, 25).

As examined throughout the remainder of the article, the dominant story of a historically Western-centric IR has been that of an essentially moral and progressive world order formulated and sustained by the West (or, before then, an Anglo-American world), on the one hand, and that of a non-West that jeopardizes the stability and advancements the West has enabled, on the other. These ‘ordering narratives’ of morality and progress are forms of metanarratives which encompass social actors including IR scholars, having become ‘lodged in the theoretical core of social theory’ (Somers and Gibson 1994, 63). Ingrained and largely unchallenged, they offer a story of international revisionism and the status quo which comes with a dual logic. Like all narratives, they bring order by steering and regulating debate around the rise and fall of great powers. However, as metanarratives, they also establish truths about international order itself—about what it is, how it came about, the condition it is in and where it is going. Notions of international order bind and give meaning to the concepts of revisionism and the status quo and, as shown in due course, must be central to the process of extricating those concepts from the narrative constraints that have been imposed. By reinterpreting the concepts of revisionism and the status quo as narratives, we show how they bring a particular way of sense making, with inherently performative, rather than merely descriptive, functions. The power of narratives lies in their effects, and the aim here is to reveal the formations and consequences of the narratives we explore. We examine the scholar as narrator operating through the creation and deployment of powerful conceptual IR narratives that not only represent, but also select and restrain, our knowledges of the world and the identities and motivations of the actors within it. We further show how these narratives transcend the discipline, connecting to and permeating political practice (see Winkler 2019; Gustafsson et al. 2019). The following section details how scholarly debate on revisionism and the status quo has been historically organized by conceptual narratives, enabling IR theorists to advance and sustain stories of international revisionism principally as a form of non-Western disruption of a Western status quo that has benevolent and moral foundations and represents civilizational progress.

‘Rising’ China attracts notable attention within the relevant international relations (IR) literature today, and among those who directly examine whether it is a revisionist or status quo actor, most agree that it more closely resembles the latter (for example, Johnston 2003; Davidson 2006; Ding 2010; Ikenberry 2011; Xiao 2015; Wilson 2017). Zhao (2018, 2) rejects the ‘status quo’ designation, but still argues that ‘it is not a revolutionary power discontented with and ready to replace the order’. Some scholars also critique IR theory for being overly deterministic and materialistic, taking for granted that rising powers will challenge the status quo (Thies and Nieman 2017, 2; Ward 2017, 281; Gries and Jing 2019). Often overlooked, they argue, is how ‘ideational factors’, such as socialization (Thies and Nieman 2017, 3, 15) and perceptions of status (Ward 2017) affect behaviour. Despite this emerging critique, however, the spotlight of scholarly and popular attention continues to fall upon China—and other ‘rising powers’— as a real or potential source of international revisionism. China, in short, is regarded as guilty until proven innocent (Turner 2014, 154) regardless of stated evidence to the contrary by scholars such as those identified above. Meanwhile, attention to Western revisionism in particular remains more limited, despite scholars of the US and Europe outlining the actions and ambitions of these actors towards revising and reshaping the structures of global affairs. Consider for example the European Union (EU), a core strength of which is said to lie in its designs ‘to reshape the contours of the international system’ (Rosecrance 1998, 15). Ian Manners (2002, 239) notes Brussels’s ‘willingness to disregard Westphalian conventions’ in its efforts ‘to shape conceptions of “normal” in international relations’. Indeed, the EU fulfils most of the criteria for revisionism suggested by Davidson (2006), for example by significantly expanding its territorial reach from six member states in 1951 to 28 today;1 transforming Europe’s markets and acting as a global ‘market power’ that ‘actively and consequentially influences today’s international system’ (Damro 2012, 697); and exporting its ideology via particular understandings of democracy, human rights and so on, acting as a ‘normative power’ (Merlingen 2007) or a ‘norm entrepreneur’ (Vadura 2015). In line with earlier definitions of revisionist powers, which centred around power accumulation, the EU has also elevated itself to ‘the status of emerging global power’ (Piening 1997) or even ‘superpower’ (Moravcsik 2014). Despite all this the EU has rarely, if ever, been labelled revisionist. The US today is deemed revisionist by some, though primarily as resulting from the policies and worldviews of the administration of Donald Trump (for example, Ikenberry 2017). The same has been argued of the US under the administration of George W. Bush (see Xiang 2001; Hurd 2007). Such allowances for the role of isolated, ‘rogue’ administrations or individuals, as deviations from imagined national norms, are rarely, if ever, extended to China and other ‘rising powers’. The notion of a hegemon or ‘established power’ on its own terms representing a primary disruptive force within the system it dominates is far less frequently considered (for example, Bukovansky 2016; Schweller 2015; Chan et al. 2018).

This is not a niche enterprise. Because all legal thought and practice necessarily takes place in and in relation to sound, an acoustic jurisprudence is as relevant to the law of property, evidence or immigration as the law of genocide, human rights or torts. But this diversity also makes it hard, and indeed undesirable, to offer a road-map in advance. There is no one story here, no single narrative capable of capturing or appraising the law–sound relation as a whole. Nevertheless, the four analytics outlined at the outset of this piece do provide something of a starting point. (1) The soundscape is always also a lawscape. We must attend to the role played by law in the production of our sonic worlds. (2) We can and should read legal texts for what they reveal about law’s sonic imagination: how legal institutions conceive sound from one context to the next. But law doesn’t just regulate sound. Legal practice itself is soundful. So (3) we should equally concern ourselves with the judicial soundscape, both the acoustic features of the courtroom, and the ways in which that environment was constructed, understood and perceived.41 Finally, because law’s conduct is soundful out of court as well as in it, (4) we should also address the many and changing modes of law’s acoustic expression: its juris-diction. In each instance, the necessary attitude is neither purely internal nor external, neither that of apologist nor critic. An acoustic jurisprudence requires both a knowledge of law and a certain distance from it: a matter of walking alongside, an interested listener. The purpose is not to absolve or condemn law then, but to hold legal institutions to account. Life and law are necessarily lived in sound. The wager of an acoustic jurisprudence is that those of us who think and work with law have a responsibility to pay attention.

The idea-expression dichotomy refers to the legal fact that, per $102(b) of the Copyright Act, expression is copyrightable but ideas are not. In part due to the collection practices of folklorists, e.g., Alan Lomax, Black musical innovations have consistently been treated as raw material for the taking, i.e., musical ideas outside of the scope of copyright law and not as tangible expressions deserving of copyright protection. # For Lomax, the mere act of collecting music by pressing record on a tape machine justified credit ranging from arranger to composer on blues sound recordings.# The fixation requirement refers to the legal fact that $101 of the Copyright Act requires creative works to be "fixed in a tangible medium of expression" to be copyrightable.

Because Black musicians often built upon familiar aural traditions while being denied access to legal tools and rights, such as literacy and ownership, their artistic works tended not to be fixed in any tangible medium of expression. Moreover, because courts have created a high bar for the protection of rhythm, which is central to many Black musical traditions, they have also de facto-privileged European creatorial cultures by centering melody and decentering beats. As Even those Black creators who did fix their work in the tangible medium of the sound record-ins, as required by the Copyright Act, could not claim copyright protection until the 1970s.

A recent outburst from the perhaps unlikely figure of Stephen Kinnock typifies this narrative. “What we need to see in the progressive Left”, argued Kinnock, “is an end to this identity politics”. In its place “we need to be talking far more about commonality rather than what differentiates from each other – let’s talk about what unites us.” Similar pronouncements have recently been made by Bernie Sanders, as well as a number of left-liberal commentators on both sides of the Atlantic. However, this unease about so-called “identity politics” has been a longstanding feature of left commentary and scholarship. In 1996 the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm lamented the corrosive effects of identity politics within the left,[ii] while more recently, a number of prominent radical left theorists – Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou and Jodi Dean, among others – cheered the resurgence of discussion of the idea of communism in the aftermath of the 2008 crash, in part because, for them, it marked the end of a divisive, deradicalised left in thrall to identity politics. This disdain for identity politics is not isolated to a few individuals: it is a widespread sensibility expressed by Marxists and left-liberals alike (indeed, there is probably not much else that Kinnock and Žižek would agree on).

But what, precisely, is this “identity politics” that inspires such animosity? At a basic level, “identity politics” refers to any politics that seeks to represent and/or advance the claims of a particular social group. But in the narratives outlined above, it has a more specific meaning: in left circles, “identity politics” is, as Nancy Fraser pointed out back in 1998, used largely as a derogatory term for feminism, anti-racism and anti-heterosexism. The implication was – and very often still is – that gender, race and sexuality are identity-based in the sense that they are seen as flimsy, superficial and, to use Judith Butler’s memorable phrase, ‘merely cultural’. This, of course, is to be contrasted with its constitutive outside, class. Class relations, in the eyes of the identity politics critic, exhibit a depth, profundity and materiality that ‘mere identity’ lacks. Furthermore, the alleged universalism of class is contrasted with the narrow, sectional concerns characteristic of so-called identity politics.

CONCLUSION This article endeavors to name and provisionally map the field of Critical Race IP, an area of study which describes that scholarship concerned with the intersections of race and intellectual property law. In doing so, it situates Critical Race IP in a larger socio-cultural context, in which racial capitalism is a constant but evolving feature of the historical landscape. We contend that the emergence of the Information Economy, after the era of Fordism, resulted in a repackaging of familiar racial projects in and through intellectual properties and pushes for intellectual property maximalism. Critical Race IP represents a relatively new and rapidly growing direction in CRT scholarship, it is an exemplar of the ways the latter must constantly evolve to accommodate changing economic and cultural conditions and racial formations. In articulating Critical Race IP as an area of study, our goal is not necessarily to suggest particular methodologies or even fixed unifying questions that define the interdisciplinary movement. Rather, we are concerned with naming and describing prevalent themes and core tenets in a set of scholarly works that interrogate the inequalities which emerge at the intersections of intellectual property and intersectional racial identities. We hope that project can be a generative move for scholars who wish to research, write, and practice in this area.

In setting forth a history of post-Fordism and the rise of Critical Race IP, we show that, as a product of modernity/coloniality, intellectual property law is always already invested in whiteness and racial inequality in ways which necessitate both examination and undoing. Scholars in a variety of disciplines have started to undertake such examinations, with their works engaging a set of themes which we have highlighted here. Continuing to examine questions related to defining (intellectual) property, understanding intellectual property’s stories, the public domain, framing and reframing “piracy” and “counterfeiting,” distributive justice, access to knowledge, managing traditional knowledge, and contemplating intellectual properties is an important task, one which we urge scholars to continue to take up in new and innovative ways. We also highlight the significance of personal relationships and public feelings in developing this area of study. One way to facilitate dialogue and scholarship in Critical Race IP is to invest in community building and intimacy making, cornerstones of the growth and development of CRT, both of which play a valuable role in cultivating generative interpersonal connections and structures of feeling through which new ideas can flourish. Conferences and workshops as well as collaborative projects which bring together senior and junior scholars play a significant role in cultivating and retaining Critical Race IP scholars. Finally, in concluding with a discussion of the decolonial turn, we offer a framework for moving beyond the radically unequal systems produced from the vantage point of law and economics, which has been historically complicit in intellectual property law’s theoretical and practical centering of whiteness. Decolonization, a process that began to unfold after World War II, is not only a physical process but an epistemological one, which requires addressing intellectual property’s embeddedness within practices and ideologies of modernity/coloniality as well as the connections between the latter and racism and neocolonialism. Here, we offer decolonization as a means of beginning to contemplate the remaking of intellectual property law, in ways that not only radically embrace Otherness but make space for non-European ways of thinking, making, and owning knowledge. As we imagine it, Critical Race IP is a space for creating models for the politics of reparation—not simply equal rights or distributive justice—through which oppressed groups can heal the wounds of racism and colonialism.

As evident in the FFRN!, consequential agency is essential to the production of white benevolence during reparative giving. White people who see anti-Black racism as deeply violent can only imagine their whiteness to be non-harmful if they believe that they are doing what they can to address this violence and that their actions are meaningful and consequential. In short, a position of white benevolence becomes possible when white people acknowledge the harm of racism and believe themselves to be addressing it. As such, white people can only come to a position of white benevolence through a liberal humanist framework of agency which positions their individual actions as consequential.

Most simply, the liberal humanist subject is imagined as an autonomous, decisive figure who has the capacity to make rational decisions based upon knowledge. In her explanation of the liberal humanist notion of agency, Nadine Elhers (2012) writes, “The constituting subject is seen to be the masterful owner of property in his own person. Consequently, this individual (inevitably cast as ‘man’) has been thought of as selfdetermining and capable of exercising agency through the rational operation of free will” (p. 107). Here, Elhers connects the exercise of agency to the masterful ownership of property. To be agential within the framework of liberal humanism, an individual must have the capacity to exercise decisive control over the property in their possession — such as when voluntarily contributing to reparations funds.

In attempting to apprehend the difference that Indigenous dispossession makes to Marxist understandings of land, labor, accumulation, and property, Rob Nichols addresses what appears to be a contradiction outside of Indigenous studies: If the Earth cannot be owned, how can land be stolen from its rightful owners? He argues that, first, dispossession “transforms nonproprietary relations into proprietary ones” and that, second, the dispossessed “are figured as ‘original owners’ but only retroactively, that is, refracted backward through the process itself.”

As he elaborates, “It is thus not (only) about the transfer of property but the transformation into property.” Naming this process “recursive dispossession,” Nichols pinpoints why Indigenous lands, stolen into property and possession, are so difficult to apprehend outside the systems of property and possession. As he explains, recursive dispossession works through “transformation,” “transference,” and “retroactive attribution.” Indigenous peoples’ relations to land are transformed (from a relation of responsibility to a relation of rights) only so that land-as-a-property relation can be transferred or sold to settlers.

We must remember that material change-making need not necessarily be dramatic, and the expectation of change as solely sudden and cataclysmic is unreasonable. Building a new and innovative Left should be a primary concern, but it is important to remain free from the constraints of Left sectarian dogma, cults of personality, and selfish jostling to be recognized as “movement leaders.” We can organize humbly and horizontally and resist the stratification of more easily destructible movements past, and we do not need leaders in any classical sense. While infighting and schisms that plagued movements of the past provide useful examples to avoid, past successes also need to be examined without romanticizing them. If our only purpose is to mimic the revolutionaries of previous generations rather than to improve upon their theory and methods, then we risk repeating their errors and reproducing their harms. Some may argue that the need for a more singular and centralized movement is rooted. But we have seen how mass movements have been splintered and destroyed by the state’s targeting and elimination of movement leaders. We have also seen (and continue to see) the elitism, community disconnect, and pandering to systems of power that come with individuals positioning and communicating themselves as movement leaders. Given the almost innate corruptibility of movement leadership in these ways, it is worth earnestly interrogating whether we need these conventional structures at all and, if so, how we could benefit from more horizontal and autonomous organizing.

The weekend after your death, everyone converges at your apartment. I get the call, but wait a day to catch my bearings before catching a flight from Chicago to New York. A cab through the Village to your building where your doorman doesn’t stop us and we walk right in. When the elevator hits your floor, the familiar sound of a party pouring through the opening doors and into the empty space beside us where you used to be. I don’t know why it surprised me that it would be a party. Even though, or maybe because it belonged to your employer, your apartment was our party’s headquarters. It was something you stole back to give to those who didn’t have a home. Now, in the wake of your death, every room is full of people who are full with the loss of you. Someone puts a drink in my hand. This is just the first of an endless string of parties. Our party was the formation of a new communist party. The party: an organic entity, a living, breathing being, a gathering together of the multiple in the one, an obscure order, a whole which is not one, a many that is singular, a kind of provisional “we” at difference with itself from the inside out. The party, writes Fred Moten, “could be called the house party but don’t let that mislead you into thinking that house implies ownership; this house party is of and for the dispossessed, the ones who disavow possession, the ones who, in having been possessed of the spirit of dispossession, disrupt themselves.” The party is as much a site of refuge as it is the site of revolutionary planning, but “even though the party is, and takes place in, and takes place as, a kind of refuge, refuge still indicates that those who take it are refugees and people tend not to want to have to live like that.” The party, as refuge, is a place to catch one’s breath when you can’t breathe. It is a way of staying alive and of keeping each other alive. In your case, it was a way of sustaining your life after your death. And it was akin to what you called the punk rock commons or the “commons of the incommensurate.” Our parties go on for days, for years. They would begin around ten a.m., when the hangover was starting to wear off and we’d roll from one gathering to the next: cocktails, a memorial, breakfast with drinks, lunch with drinks, a family dinner, an impromptu gathering at some­ one’s house, a joint on the balcony, a talk in the hallway. Repeat. After your first memorial, we pick up drinks to take to a friend’s apartment and converge with an endless flood of smiling faces smiling sometimes. They verge, fall, pull toward and apart from each other. All the wars are briefly suspended and for a few flickering moments, as Wallace Stevens might have said, “We collect ourselves, out of all the indifferences, into one thing.” Though we were collected out of indifference by the shock of your death, we remain in difference from each other, which is to say that were not quite one thing but instead a singular being made up of the many, or what Jean-Luc Nancy calls being-singular-plural: “Being cannot be anything but being-with-one-another, circulating in the with and as the with of this singularly plural coexistence.” So rather than the coercive “we” that dominated the communist parties of historical communism, we became a “we” in difference from itself, gathered together in the wake of your death. I’ll be honest, I was kind of devastated. After your death I spent a lot of time trying to find you in the places you used to hide and especially the songs you used to listen to. The first thing I put on was the Germs (you loved Darby Crash) but that didn’t last long. I never shared your attachment to punk. Being manifestly uncool, my relationship to punk was pretty much Siouxsie Sioux, to whom I cathected around the age of twelve. There was something about her rejection of the domestic, suburban, and normal that made sense to teenage me—a queer black, brown, and blue boy adrift and alone in Northern Colorado. I don’t think you had strong feelings for Siouxsie one way or the other, but there is more than a passing resemblance between my teenage attachment to Siouxsie and yours to Crash. Both began as bad objects in their scenes: Crash in Los Angeles and Siouxsie in London. They were unlikely figures for two queer of color kids to identify with, least of all because both attempted (and failed) to appropriate (ironically or otherwise) the symbols of white supremacy by employing the swastika in their early acts. The swastika was something Siouxsie tried to atone for and that Crash refused to atone for and didn’t have time to do anyway because he, like you, died too young. Siouxsies name was itself an appropriation of the tribal name of the Sioux people, another chapter in the ongoing dispossession of the already dispossessed. We shouldn’t forget these transgressions, their unnerving entanglements with the violence of whiteness and white supremacy, but something about them nonetheless helped us sustain life in spite of the odds stacked against us. And the odds are stacked against queer teen­ agers of color in these United States. Darby’s and Siouxsie’s performances became the stage for what you described as the punk rock commons, “a being with, in which various disaffected, antisocial actants found networks of affiliation and belonging that allowed them to think and act otherwise, together, in a social field that was mostly interested in dismantling their desire for different relations within the social.’” In this punk essay, you cited Tavia Nyong’o, who argues that the word “punk” owes a debt to blackness, queerness, and the violent measures through which a phobic world responds to both. Siouxsie acknowledged a part of that debt when describing the queerness of the parties that gave birth to Londons early punk scene: It was a club for misfits, almost. Anyone that didn’t conform. There was male gays, female gays, bisexuals, non-sexuals, everything. No-one was criticized for their sexual preferences. The only thing that was looked down on was being plain boring, that reminded them of suburbia. Notice here how Siouxsie’s party resonates with the one described by Moten: “This is the party of the ones who are not self-possessed, the non-self-possessive anindividuals. This is the party of the ones in whom the trace of having been possessed keeps turning into this obsessive compulsive drive for the total disorder that is continually given in continually giving themselves away.” Which is a way of saying that our party owes a debt to the black radical tradition as much as to the radical tradition of black and brown queer house parties on Chicago s South and West sides. Unlike Crash, Siouxsie survived the early 1980s and with her survival came the emergence of a new sound characterized by thick, textured melodies, lush orchestration, and heavily processed vocals. Some people described it as post-punk and others described it as goth, but everyone seemed to agree that it lingered in the darkness—perhaps an unacknowledged way of acknowledging her debt to blackness. Like blackness, Siouxsie’s darkness wasn’t merely negative space. Her dark­ ness was from the underside, the B-Side, the upside-down world of the normative, retrenched, dystopian, suburban, white, neoliberal hell that took hold in Thatcher’s Britain and Reagan’s United States. Siouxsie’s darkness was a pharmakon to the annihilating “light” cast by the shining city on the hill. It was dense, dark negation as the negation of the negation. Darkness, for the members of Siouxsie’s party, was a place where the freaks could gather, take cover, and keep each other alive as the “light” tried to burn them out of their holes and snuff them out of existence. If their party was increasingly imperiled by the normative regimes of social comportment demanded by Thatcher and Reagan, the 1986 song “Party’s Fall” tells the story of the breakdown and falling apart as a condition of possibility. In the song, the collapse of each party becomes the condition for the emergence of something new the next night: “Your parties fall around you Another night beckons to you Your parties fall around you Another night beckons to you” That the party falls apart only to come back another night is why, following Moten, “the party I’m announcing is serially announced.” In “Party’s Fall” the present is always returning to itself, as Siouxsie points us toward a future in which the very thing that has fallen apart (the party) reconstitutes itself. Which is a good thing, it turns out, because the party is the one thing standing between the subject of her address and annihilating loneliness. About a year after your death, a friend and I are talking about you in a bar. He looks at his drink and says, “I used to be alone. And then I met him and I wasn’t alone. Now he’s gone and I’m alone again.” The party is a way of ameliorating loneliness, and the endlessly renewable capacity to throw another party becomes Siouxsie’s condition for a practice of being with in which the misfit’s loneliness becomes the conditions for a relation of being together in difference and discord with other misfits that are lonely and (un)like her. I suspect that this is why we threw so many parties after you died. They were a way of bringing you back to us, of making us a little less alone again. Ours was not a political party, like The Communist Party. Political parties endure, but they often endure through coercion, violence, and force. Instead, I mean our communist party as a name for what Siouxsie describes as the endlessly renewable chain of events performed into being by a plurality of broken people who are trying to keep each other alive. For you. Crash’s performances were an antidote to (but not a denial of) loneliness. Loneliness is common, and it is often crushing for queers and trans people of color. But it can also be a condition for the emergence of queer sociality and the undercommons. While it would be easy to assume that your punk essays are about the white boys in them (Crash in particular), it would be more accurate to say that they are about the work to which queers of color put these performances while struggling to stay alive, get free, and open up other ways of being (and surviving) in the world together. “Through my deep friendships with other disaffected Cuban queer teens who rejected both Cuban exile culture and local mainstream gringo popular culture,” you wrote in Cruising Utopia, “and through what I call the utopia critique function of punk rock, I was able to imagine a time and a place that was not yet there, a place where I tried to live.”” Today, we place an emphasis on “tried.” Near the end of Siouxsie’s song, she utters the phrase “maybe you’re alone,” breathlessly as if it were an aside. But this is the kind of aside that matters so she repeats it again, supporting the voice with the fullness of a wail. As she sings this bridge to nowhere, you would have noticed that the lyrics reach melodic resolution, which has been otherwise absent in a song that lingers in the minor key. Siouxsies wail stretches across the lyric, her voice breaking on the word happiness : My happiness depends on knowing / this friend is never alone / on your own.” I can’t help but imagine that as she begs her friend not to cry, applying her signature wail to the lyric and promising “a party on our own,” that she’s singing to a much younger version of you or me or some other teenage queer and trans black and brown boy and girl perched on the precipice of self-obliteration. Her wanting for a commons (to be with and take care of a friend in need) is Siouxsie’s precondition for a life in happiness. It was yours as well. If I follow you, Siouxsie, and Moten in suggesting that the party has some kind of relationship to the making of the (under)commons, I am also following Nancy when he writes that it is death that gives birth to community. After all, our communist party was formed in the wake of your death. “It is death—but if one is permitted to say so it is not a tragic death, or else, if it is more accurate to say it this way, it is not mythic death, or death followed by a resurrection, or the death that plunges into a pure abyss; it is death as sharing and as exposure,” he writes, “it is death as the unworking that unites us.” Our party was born from your death. So in the wake of your death we threw parties to resurrect you. Though yours was a death without resurrection, performance and parties were a way of sustaining you, bringing you back, and keeping you alive. Your death was tragic, brutal in its suddenness. But in spite of what people might think, there was nothing mythic about it. It was mundane. You were another gay brown man dead before fifty. To say that queer and trans of color death is mundane is not to diminish their horror, but on the contrary to name the shocking fact of this kind of deaths everydayness. Trans and queer of color life is lived in constant and close proximity to death. “In any major North American city,” writes Rinaldo Walcott, the numerous missing black women (presumed murdered), the many ‘missing’ and murdered trans-women, the violent verbal and physical conditions of black life often leading to the deaths of gay men, lesbian women, and trans people remain a significant component of how black life is lived in the constant intimacy of violence on the road to death. Death is not ahead of blackness as a future shared with others; death is our life, lived in the present.” For similar reasons Christina Sharpe describes black life thus: "I want... to declare that we are Black peoples in the wake with no state or nation to protect us, with no citizenship bound to be respected, and to position us in the modalities of Black life lived in, as, under, despite Black death.” If I think of your death in relation to the forms of black life and death named by Walcott and Sharpe, it is not to suggest that they are commensurable. This would distract us from the way the history of black death in the Americas from the Middle Passage forward produces a present in which, as Walcott insists, “Black people die differently.” But what I could see clearly in the wake of your departure is that black and brown queer and trans death, like the deaths of women of color, produced by different yet overlapping histories of colonialism, capital accumulation, white supremacy, and cis-heteropatriarchy, share something with each other not in spite of but because of their difference. I want to suggest that black and brown people’s emancipation from these conditions are mutually implicated, not in spite of but in relation to our incommensurability. What we share is that under such conditions, which are far beyond our ability to control them, survival can be hard. So, if I call your death mundane, it’s not to underplay the importance of your life. It’s only meant to serve as a bitter acknowledgment of the ubiquitous and disproportionate distribution of death toward queers, women, and trans people of color. Dying for different reasons, often dying before really living, but dying nonetheless. It can be as hard to survive as it is to live on in the wake of those who didn’t. But you taught me that performance is imbued with a weak power of resurrection, or at least the power to sustain some fragment of lost life in the presence of a collective present. Performance, you wrote, is what allows minoritarian subjects to “take our dead with us to the various battles we must wage in their names—and in our names. And performance is also a way of drawing people together. Throwing parties was a way of resurrecting you and keeping you alive. Being with each other was a way of being with you. In the wake of your death we became common to each other. We became communists.

Returning to face the machine, which shifts and spreads ceaselessly across the globe, accumulating and disposing (the disposables, which increasingly seems as a category to increase), refusal seems a certain (im)possibility. Not naïve to the enemy, knowing its illusory incoherence, reminded all too often of the hard materiality of its unreal impositions, the decolonial insurgent refuses capitalism in service of a memory of something else, refusing to forget the (im)possibility of autonomous and shared living—refusing to forget, that is, what remains evident everywhere around them, the irrepressible interconnectivity and cooperation that remains both before and beyond (always under and around) enclosure (eternally as its condition of possibility, as that which enclosure follows to (fail to) enclose). Illusive though the enemy might be, it persists with force and fabrications of fatalism, false desires and fake stories that for some reason won’t fade away, foreclosing the future for those who thought they saw it first, frozen forever in the hold(s) of the here-and-now, the flat and frenzied fever-dream of neoliberal techno-capital. Refusing capitalism and the coerced and cursed containment it carries over all, the dominance it assumes over seemingly every facet of life and living, the commodification and territorialisation of all things it brings relentlessly—seems indeed to require more or less a step away (and towards) the world as we (un)know it. No wonder (for) the West, as the critical histories articulated at the outset assert irrefutably: no wonder. Denying before all else (the all but lost wonders of) his own insurgent and imaginative interiority, Modernity’s weary Man wandered out (from itself), emerging from Europe’s Dark Ages on an awakening predicated primarily upon consumptive constructions of whiteness and purity, on virulent ideologies of fungibility and flesh—that is, on anti-blackness—that came before and variously found their ways into Marx’s early and magisterial but nonetheless narrowly-conceived theorisations of capital, accumulation, labour and exploitation.

Put differently: if decolonisation remains our horizon, it is insufficient to refuse capitalism only to affirm communism, leaving untouched and unthought the hold(s) by which Marx was held, those by which our inherited Marxisms continue to hold even the idea of communal or shared living at all. Marx got a lot right, but he didn’t discover the idea of collectivism. Held by modernity, historical materialism, the universalist assumptions of bourgeois Europe, and the dream for better, Marx remains one of the most incisive observers of capital. His ideas have found widespread articulation, inspiring and overlapping with the freedom struggles of ‘colonised’ and ‘oppressed’ peoples around the world. However, his theories remain incomplete—worse, the exclusions at the heart of Marxism remain invisible, the unthought spectre of the Black (slave), the primitive accumulation of slavery that had kicked off years before the first capitalist.

In this graveyard our actions will never touch, will never become the conduits of a movement, if we remain permanently barricaded within prescribed identity categories—our force will be dependent on the limited spaces of recognition built between us. Here we are at odds with one another socially, each of us: students, faculty, staff, homebums, activists, police, chancellors, administrators, bureaucrats, investors, politicians, faculty/ staff/ homebums/ activists/ police/ chancellors/ administrators/ bureaucrats/ investors/ politicians-to-be. That is, we are students, or students of color, or queer students of color, or faculty, or Philosophy Faculty, or Gender and Women Studies faculty, or we are custodians, or we are shift leaders—each with our own office, place, time, and given meaning. We form teams, clubs, fraternities, majors, departments, schools, unions, ideologies, identities, and subcultures—and thankfully each group gets its own designated burial plot. Who doesn’t participate in this graveyard? In the university we prostrate ourselves before a value of separation, which in reality translates to a value of domination. We spend money and energy trying to convince ourselves we’re brighter than everyone else. Somehow, we think, we possess some trait that means we deserve more than everyone else. We have measured ourselves and we have measured others. It should never feel terrible ordering others around, right? It should never feel terrible to diagnose people as an expert, manage them as a bureaucrat, test them as a professor, extract value from their capital as a businessman. It should feel good, gratifying, completing. It is our private wet dream for the future; everywhere, in everyone this same dream of domination. After all, we are intelligent, studious, young. We worked hard to be here, we deserve this. We are convinced, owned, broken. We know their values better than they do: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. This triumvirate of sacred values are ours of course, and in this moment of practiced theater—the fight between the university and its own students—we have used their words on their stages: Save public education! When those values are violated by the very institutions which are created to protect them, the veneer fades, the tired set collapses: and we call it injustice, we get indignant. We demand justice from them, for them to adhere to their values. What many have learned again and again is that these institutions don’t care for those values, not at all, not for all. And we are only beginning to understand that those values are not even our own. The values create popular images and ideals (healthcare, democracy, equality, happiness, individuality, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, public education) while they mean in practice the selling of commodified identities, the state’s monopoly on violence, the expansion of markets and capital accumulation, the rule of property, the rule of exclusions based on race, gender, class, and domination and humiliation in general. They sell the practice through the image. We’re taught we’ll live the images once we accept the practice. In this crisis the Chancellors and Presidents, the Regents and the British Petroleums, the politicians and the managers, they all intend to be true to their values and capitalize on the university economically and socially—which is to say, nothing has changed, it is only an escalation, a provocation. Their most recent attempt to reorganize wealth and capital is called a crisis so that we are more willing to accept their new terms as well as what was always dead in the university, to see just how dead we are willing to play, how non-existent, how compliant, how desirous. Every institution has of course our best interest in mind, so much so that we’re willing to pay, to enter debt contracts, to strike a submissive pose in the classroom, in the lab, in the seminar, in the dorm, and eventually or simultaneously in the workplace to pay back those debts. Each bulging institutional value longing to become more than its sentiment through us, each of our empty gestures of feigned-anxiety to appear under pressure, or of cool-ambivalence to appear accustomed to horror, every moment of student life, is the management of our consent to social death. Social death is our banal acceptance of an institution’s meaning for our own lack of meaning. It’s the positions we thoughtlessly enact. It’s the particular nature of being owned. Social rupture is the initial divorce between the owners and the owned. A social movement is a function of war. War contains the ability to create a new frame, to build a new tension for the agents at play, new dynamics in the battles both for the meaning and the material. When we move without a return to their tired meaning, to their tired configurations of the material, we are engaging in war. It is November 2009. For an end to the values of social death we need ruptures and self-propelled, unmanaged movements of wild bodies. We need, we desire occupations. We are an antagonistic dead. Talk to your friends, take over rooms, take over as many of these dead buildings. We will find one another.

We fight because the current system is antithetical to what we believe academia can be and what it claims for itself. We fight for ourselves, our colleagues, students, and families. We fight in hope that others will know they are not alone and they, too, can learn how to fight the system so we can stop fighting ourselves and each other. We fight to save the future not only of academia but society itself. Our victories and losses have meaning beyond the immediate sphere of academia. As challenging as the last point may sound, dismantling corrupt systems within academia will lead to a more just society, just as failing to do so will increase injustice in society. We know we are not alone in this fight. There is a movement toward a new kind of academy, even as there are forces aligning to entrench the capitalist-patriarchal academic system. Not every revolution must involve one person being supported by disposable rebel pilots to destroy a Death Star. We are not asking to be saved or claiming to be saviors but are acting to save ourselves and each other a little bit at a time. No one needs to be a hero—or, more likely, a martyr. Rather, we envision a revolution in which our defiance and strength will mirror the warriors that came before us and inspire all those that will follow to establish tangible change. This is a rhizomatic/grassroots revolution not about replacing white men with women of color at the head of the same failing structure but about decentralizing and democratizing power while redefining what “power” means. Hence, the first acts of resistance against the powers of oppression involve extending kindness, justice, and empathy to those in need.

Contributors to this volume who choose to remain in the academy are constructing an academy in which they can be happy and thrive. Those who choose to leave also continue to be dedicated to the fight. Ultimately, institutions or leaders dedicated to social justice must also be prepared to allow for their own end; to do otherwise is to allow self-preservation to pervert power.2 Allowing for one’s own power to come to an end or experience radical change is the hallmark of true justice, as social justice transformations such as the end of slavery or apartheid revealed. What the change looks like will vary based on specific institutional histories, local community variations, and other factors; therefore, rather than dictate one model for liberation of academia, we offer instead a variety of processes and principles that might help us collectively continually create multiple academias informed by local concerns and assets.

The demand far moral and ideological purity often results in the rejection of any hierarchy or organization. The question-can the master's tools be used to tear down the master's house?-ignores both the contingency of the relation between such tools and the master's power and, even more importantly, the fact that there may be no other tools available. Institutionalization is seen as a repressive impurity within the body politic rather than as a strategie and tactical, even empowering, necessity. It sometimes seems as if every progressive organization is condemned to recapitulate the same arguments and crisis, often leading to their collapse. 54 For example, Minkowitz has described a crisis in Act Up over the need for efficiency and arganization, professionalization and even hierarchy, 55 as if these inherently contradicted its commitment to democracy. This is particularly unfortunate since Act Up, whatever its limitations, has proven itself an effective and imaginative political strategist. The problems are obviously magnified with success, as membership, finances and activities grow.

This refusal of efficient operation and the moment of organization is intimately connected with the Left's appropriation and privileging of the local (as the site of democracy and resistance). This is yet another reason why structures of alliance are inadequate, since they often assume that an effective movement can be organized and sustained without such structuring. The Left needs to recognize the necessity of institutionalization 56 and of systems ofhierarchy, without falling back into its own authoritarianism. It needs to find reasonably democratic structures of institutionalization, even if they are impure and compromised.

Modern theories of property reject the assumption that property is "objectively definable or identifiable, apart from social context. ' 75 Charles Reich's ground-breaking work, The New Property,76 was an early effort to focus on the function of property and note the changing social relations reflected and constructed by new forms of property derived from the government. 77 Property in this broader sense encompassed jobs, entitlements, occupational licenses, contracts, subsidies, and indeed a whole host of intangibles that are the product of labor, time, and creativity, such as intellectual property, business goodwill, and enhanced earning potential from graduate degrees.78 Notwithstanding the dilution of new property since Goldberg v. Kelly79 and its progeny80 as well as continued attacks on the concept,81 the legacy of new property infuses the concept of property with questions of power, selection, and allocation. Reich's argument that property is not a natural right but a construction by society8 2 resonates in current theories of property that describe the allocation of property rights as a series of choices. This construction directs attention toward issues of relative power and social relations inherent in any definition of property. 3. Property and Expectations. - "Property is nothing but the basis of expectation," according to Bentham, "consist[ing] in an established expectation, in the persuasion of being able to draw such and such advantage from the thing possessed."8 3 The relationship between expectations and property remains highly significant,8 4 as the law "has recognized and protected even the expectation of rights as actual legal property. 8 5 This theory does not suggest that all value8 6 or all expectations give rise to property,8 7 but those expectations in tangible or intangible things that are valued and protected by the law are property. In fact, the difficulty lies not in identifying expectations as a part of property, but in distinguishing which expectations are reasonable and therefore merit the protection of the law as property.8 8 Although the existence of certain property rights may seem self-evident and the protection of certain expectations may seem essential for social stability,89 property is a legal construct by which selected private interests are protected and upheld. In creating property "rights," the law draws boundaries and enforces or reorders existing regimes of power. 90 The inequalities that are produced and reproduced are not givens or inevitabilities, but rather are conscious selections regarding the structuring of social relations. In this sense, it is contended that property rights and interests are not "natural," but are "creation[s] of law."91 In a society structured on racial subordination, white privilege became an expectation and, to apply Margaret Radin's concept, whiteness became the quintessential property for personhood. 92 The law constructed "whiteness" as an objective fact, although in reality it is an ideological proposition imposed through subordination. This move is the central feature of "reification": "Its basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a 'phantom objectivity,' an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people." 93 Whiteness was an "object" over which continued control was - and is - expected. The protection of these expectations is central because, as Radin notes: "If an object you now control is bound up in your future plans or in your anticipation of your future self, and it is partly these plans for your own continuity that make you a person, then your personhood depends on the realization of these expectations.

The law assumed the crucial task of racial classification, and accepted and embraced the then-current theories of race as biological fact. This core precept of race as a physically defined reality allowed the law to fulfill an essential function - to "parcel out social standing according to race" and to facilitate systematic discrimination by articulating "seemingly precise definitions of racial group membership.' 3 1 This allocation of race and rights continued a century after the abolition of slavery. The law relied on bounded, objective, and scientific definitions of race - what Neil Gotanda has called "historical race" 133 - to construct whiteness as not merely race, but race plus privilege. By making race determinant and the product of rationality and science, dominant and subordinate positions within the racial hierarchy were disguised as the product of natural law and biology 134 rather than as naked preferences.' 35 Whiteness as racialized privilege was then legitimated by science and was embraced in legal doctrine as "objective fact." Case law that attempted to define race frequently struggled over the precise fractional amount of Black "blood" - traceable Black ancestry - that would defeat a claim to whiteness. 136 Although the courts applied varying fractional formulas in different jurisdictions to define "Black" or, in the terms of the day, "Negro" or "colored," the law uniformly accepted the rule of hypodescent 137 - racial identity was governed by blood, and white was preferred.138

Undergraduate students often enter our classrooms convinced that the battles of the Civil Rights Era solved the issue of race in America. They are generally unacquainted with the long history of race in the United States and almost universally underestimate the structural forces which carry racial disparities into their new century. As sociologists and teachers, it is our responsibility to tell that story and explain those forces. Our new challenge is: How do we teach students the extent of racism in America when, from their point of view, the problem of the color-line has been solved? One option is to use a game. Sociologists have used games or simulations to spark the sociological imagination (Dorn, 1989; Jessup, 2001; Fisher 2008), to stimulate critical thinking (Pence 2009), and to introduce social stratification (Ender, 2004; Waldner & Kinney, 1999). When students from relatively privileged backgrounds “experience” a temporary bout of unfairness in a simulated game, it creates the opportunity to change their perspective (Coghlan & Huggins, 2004; Haddad & Lieberman, 2002). The injustice of the situation, if directly connected to broader theory, can lessen a student’s social distance from marginalized groups. A game may help a student to understand some of the previously inexplicable attitudes and behaviors of actors on either side of a power rela- tionship. Also, as this paper demonstrates, a properly constructed simulation can give the student a sense of the structural nature and lasting legacy of racial discrimination—a fuller sense of the “history and biography” of race in the United States (Mills, 1959). The great advantage of a game is that it is a completely controlled environment—there are no unexplained variables. In fairness to all the players, all rules are explicitly stated at the outset of game play and apply to all players equally (Waldner & Kinney, 1999). Ordinarily, in a competitive game this assumption of fairness supports an ideology of individualism. However, a pedagogical game is concerned with learning, not winning. In order to disentangle a complicated issue, the instructor may purposefully introduce inequality into an otherwise “just” world. Again, because all rules are explicit (even unfair ones), the problem exists in the game without confounding effects. This simplification allows students to easily focus on the nature and development of the problem. By extension, it is hoped that the game encourages students to reassess similar problems in the real world. Use of Pedagogical Games Dorn (1989) identifies multiple criteria for games or simulations to be effective in the classroom as pedagogical tools. He argues the games must: reflect reality; motivate students through "experience"; develop awareness of personal values through moral and ethical implications of the game; connect abstract concepts with concrete experiences; create a shared experience from which the students can draw; offer a form of debriefing to both address emotional issues and to connect theory to experiences. In the technique I describe below, I try to incorporate these ideas with Straus’ (1986) emphasis on simplicity for in-class games. In teaching and learning, the goal of simulation is the “experience” itself. Jessup (2001) argues that simulation should be the “experiential anchor for the elaboration of conceptual tools” (p.108). Therefore, this game is created to offer a chance for relatively privileged students to experience the unfairness of structural inequality. After temporary exposure to an analog of racial discrimination, students with no prior familiarity of racial discrimination will have a deeper understanding of the effects of racism on many levels. Pedagogical games are used to challenge our assumptions about how the world works (Waldner & Kinney, 1999). For example, the basic assumption of competitive games is fairness. This assumes that the world is fair (i.e., a meritocracy) and that individual effort or talent is the main factor in success (i.e., an ideology of individualism akin to Ross’ (1977) fundamental attribution error). In competitive games therefore, groups are treated equally and the best players win. But a pedagogical game may challenge the assumption of fairness directly by having structural inequality built into the game. The experience of a good player losing an unfair game creates cognitive dissonance—that cognitive dissonance is our teaching moment. I assume that students as game players can easily identify games that are “unfair” based on unequal outcomes for equivalent behavior. As a peda gogical tool, I want it to be relatively easy for them to spot the explicit rules which cause the inequality.

“Intellectual property’s economic structure is ‘always already’ raced,”42 because capitalism’s orientation to knowledge is always already raced. Betsy Rosenblatt, for instance, demonstrates about copyright law that “it rewards appropriation of materials perceived as primitive, raw, or ‘folk’ by purveyors of dominant culture, while punishing appropriation of materials that it associates with higher culture or views as already completed.”43 As such, copyright law operates as “the language of the colonizer.”44 Kara Swanson similarly shows about patent law that its “ideology of slavery reached into the technical bureaucracy of the patent office, an arena of law and of the administrative state frequently considered outside politics.”45 As such, patent law implicates “an ultimate claim of whiteness as intellectual property.”46 Knowledge, in both instances, is ordered in a manner that centers whiteness and its attendant estimations of the value of creation and knowledge. Trademark law too produces and entrenches visual economies of whiteness. Rosemary Coombe writes that trademarks “denied or downplayed the cultural and ethnic differences of some ‘Americans’” through “the medium of the consuming body and embodiment…of others whose claims to an American subjectivity were complicated by contemporary relations of subjugation.”47 Put differently, America’s visual culture, as constituted through trademark law, constituted whiteness as valuable by objectifying people of color. One way that the “scopic regime”48 of trademark law operated was through the articulation of people of color as primitive, i.e. from a time past. As Coombe puts it, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries “we see preoccupation with the frontiers of civilization and the containment of the primitive.”49 In the sections that follow, I explore how Harjo and Blackhorse not only reinforce temporally based race discrimination by portraying Native Americans as primitive but also illustrate how the manipulation of time through legal procedure can advantage certain litigants over others, with considerable racial and colonial consequences.50