In light of the decision in Golan, discussed below, Tam reads as a First Amendment double standard that upholds the links between whiteness and property. The Supreme Court, on the one hand, rules that it is acceptable to remove material from the public domain, largely for the benefit of largely white corporate content holders, but that trademarks must remain contentneutral, for the benefit of a free market that benefits white interests in the guise of protecting people of color. This contradiction is emblematic of the manner in which postracial creatorship rhetorics operate through racial baitand-switch tactics that structurally protect whiteness through sentimental and nostalgic notions of American creatorship and the American Dream. INDIAN PATENT INSOLENCE AS COUNTERING HUMAN PROGRESS Similar bait-and-switch tactics are evident in postracial/hyperracial patent discourse. While, domestically, the United States appeared to invest in colorblind creatorship, including in the realm of scientific and technological innovation, internationally, multinational pharmaceutical companies moved to enforce TRIPS in constraining, (neo)colonial ways that purportedly work under race neutral terms. For instance, in Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc. (hereinafter Myriad), a case that is traditionally read as a blow to biotechnology, gene patents, and even capitalism, the Supreme Court refused to protect naturally occurring genomic DNA (gDNA) sequences, but protected lab-produced complementary DNA (cDNA) sequences used in breast cancer and ovarian cancer screening. That decision has complex but significant implications for race. When read in the trajectory of Chakrabarty and Moore, Myriad continues the scientific colonization of the public domain through its reiteration of race liberal definitions of nature/science and expertise—and their attendant racial scripts. 69 The case endorses a vision of inventorship as a process that unfolds in a laboratory, at the hands of expert scientists. As Laura Foster writes, “Patent ownership is contingent on maintaining binaries of nature and culture, thus items discovered in nature are not patentable, only man-made cultural inventions.” 70 The result of this nature/culture distinction, as demonstrated in chapter 2’s discussion of race liberal creatorship, is often to obscure the racial subjectivity implicit in definitions of both nature and culture. For instance, the Supreme Court declared that patentable subject matter must be “markedly different” 71 from its natural form. Yet, like doctrinal definitions in copyright law, this phrase invokes culturally and racially specific notions of (white) expertise, which require manipulation of natural material. Myriad also stands for the proposition that some bodies, often bodies of color, ought to be the objects, not agents, of patents. By endorsing cDNA patents, Myriad aligns itself with gene sequencing and genetic testing, practices that often target and exploit already vulnerable populations. While perceptually jarring, the Supreme Court’s decision to protect only cDNA produced through reverse transcription affected only 25 percent of Myriad’s patents and is likely to have very little long-term effect on either the company or the overall growth of biotechnology. 72 With limited exception, the postracial intellectual property citizen, despite the alleged colorblindness of the category of creatorship, had access to the protective capacities of patent law only when working through preexisting and predominantly white rubrics of nature, science, and expertise. As Jonathan Kahn has argued, expertise barriers in patent law also create space for naturalizing genetic race, through the characterization of certain “deviant” gene sequences as associated with particular racial groups and not others. 73 Myriad is, as the American Civil Liberties Union declared soon after the decision, 74 a perceptual win for those who are opposed to patents on genetic material insofar as it overturns the long-standing precedent established in Chakrabarty that gDNA is patentable. However, the victory is a hollow one for undoing racialized nature/science distinctions. The case further entrenches the doctrines of expertise in the context of patent law that allow traditional knowledge to be exploited. 75 In another consistent racially problematic move, rhetorics of postracial creatorship stoked racial panics about people of color in the developing world stealing valuable intellectual properties and fueled economic unease at the implications of such acts. 76 Yet nations, with whom the United States has important economic, military, and diplomatic ties, were not categorically exiled from engagement. Instead, they were constructed as chronically suspect, in Homi Bhabha’s terms the mimetic barbarians that were perpetually “almost, but not quite,” 77 yet not so much of a lost cause as to be completely abandoned. Indeed, abandonment would forsake the structure upon which modern (neo)colonialism and neoliberalism are built, specifically through their reliance on a colonial periphery for the definition and operation of the (neo)colonial core. With sufficient praise and discipline from the United States, hyperracial infringers (usually allied democracies such as India), like well-behaved children, could mature into adults with the capacity, with caveats, to fully participate in global affairs. 78 Accompanying this desire to discipline hyperracial infringers is an underlying refusal to understand the structural conditions of development in the Global South. 79 As Aihwa Ong argues, “Neoliberalism as a technology of governing relies on calculative choices and technique in the domains of citizenship and of governing . . . Neoliberal governmentality results from the infiltration of market-driven truths and calculations into the domain of politics.” 80 In the context of intellectual property law, hyperracial infringers were represented as neoliberal rebels and intellectual property anti-citizens because of their inability and unwillingness to abide by distinctly Euro-American and (neo)colonial market logics of knowledge production. Characterized as having “illicit economies,” 81 the logics of production in the Global South are marked as not simply unfamiliar but also immoral, based on a refusal to engage knowledge and commodity production on neoliberal—read: America’s—terms. Defining which economies are licit/illicit is a profoundly racial and (neo)colonial practice that maintains American (whiteness) as property. When Edward Said originally spoke of Orientalism in the late 1970s, he described a discourse of Otherization in which the so-called Orient became an object of study, fascination, and exoticization for the Western subject. 82 Orientalism is a useful starting point for thinking through how the United States crafts intellectual property policy vis-à-vis India, particularly in the context of both nations’ attitudes toward patent law. Identifying democracy as a distinguishing factor between the colonizer and the colonized, a rhetorical practice that the United States appeals to often in the context of India, is a well-worn tactic of neo-Orientalism, the strand of Orientalism that focuses on the cultural backwardness of Islamic nations as the root cause of violent conflict. It has been, for decades, accepted racist and (neo)colonial wisdom in international relations that “the peoples of developing countries must now acknowledge that liberal democracy is the only plausible form of governance in the modern world.” 83 The production of a “new barbarism” 84 thesis in which the “backward cultures” 85 of Middle Eastern and Asian nations, as opposed to political and economic factors, serves to explain the inevitability of Oriental violence and highlight the consistent demonization of any and all deviations from Western neoliberal democracy. Intellectual property Orientalism, which I explore here, is another notable turn in Orientalist discourse that requires detailed investigation, study, and critique. Disputes over India’s policies around pharmaceuticals showcase US approaches to constructing and managing hyperracial infringement and the racial scripts invoked in its construction. By critiquing India for its “patent insolence,” a term I coin to describe representations of the country as obviously anti-democratic but also anti-global governance and anti-intellectual property, the United States draws upon racial scripts of Black and Brown people, particularly in colonial and slave contexts, as anti-citizens who refuse civilized society. The disciplinary politics of insolence are not independent from Orientalism but rather intersect with it. Orientalism and neo-Orientalism are “[p]ared to the bone,” legible as “species of a larger discourse of power that divides the world into ‘betters and lessers’ and thus facilitates the domination (or ‘orientalization’ or ‘colonization’) of any group.” 86 On the one hand, the United States frequently touts India as a shining example of democracy promotion gone right, a once colony that is now the world’s largest democratic nation. 87 A White House report titled “Democracy and Progress in India” demonstrates the historical consistency of this narrative: “Sixty-five years ago this week, India’s post-independence democratic constitution went into effect, paving the way for the country to become not only a democracy but the world’s largest democracy.” 88 Cooperation on regional security, climate change, and nuclear nonproliferation policy has made India one of the closest and most consistent U.S. allies, a fact that is routinely flagged in U.S. diplomatic and foreign policy rhetorics on both sides of the aisle. On the other hand, the United States also routinely chastises the Asian nation as epitomizing opportunistic infringement and using such claims as a (neo)colonial and racialized wedge to promote intellectual property policy. Beginning in 1972, under the leadership of Indira Gandhi and in accordance with the Indian Patents Act of 1970, until 1995, when the nation joined the World Trade Organization (WTO), India did not offer product patent protection for pharmaceuticals. Then, in a move that transformed the nation into the “pharmacy to the developing world,” 89 India began producing cheap, generic drugs and lobbying for exceptions to TRIPS that would allow the developing world to access those lifesaving pharmaceuticals. The United States pushed back at India’s perceived intransigence in complying with international intellectual property law. That pushback, as with the practice that resulted in developing nations capitulating to international intellectual property regimes, often materialized in complaints filed with the WTO, economic threats, and coercive diplomacy. Instead of deescalating the conflict and reconciling their differences, the nations’ different readings of TRIPS culminated in a very public legal dispute with Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis in 2013. The lawsuit, decades in the making, began when Novartis submitted a patent application for the cancer treatment Glivec, whose active ingredient, Imatinib Mesylate, had already received product and process patent protection in the United States, in 1992. In the ten-year period from 1995 to 2005, during which India was preparing for TRIPS compliance, it created a “mailbox” rule for patent applications that were, under its new patent law, eligible for patent protection. Novartis’s patent was not reviewed until 2005, at which time the Chennai (Madras) Patent Office found that Glivec was not patentable in India. The Madras High Court and subsequently the Indian Supreme Court affirmed that decision. 90 The latter’s ruling in Novartis provoked strong reactions across the world. Developed nations, led by the United States, and pharmaceutical companies decried the decision, while global health organizations, including the World Health Organization, and activists celebrated the landmark pro- A2K outcome in the case. The decision’s refusal to extend patent protection to Glivec in India, because it did not make a meaningful improvement in efficacy to an existing drug, a hedge against a practice known in the industry as “evergreening,” 91 signaled the nation’s continuing refusal to comply with international law. The case soon became an important site for racialized criticism of India’s intellectual property law, particularly vis-à-vis the rhetorical construction of the nation as an Orientalized insolent democracy that defied emerging global intellectual property norms. This narrative is a pervasive one in public cultural discussions of India. Thomas Blom Hansen, for instance, describes imaginings of India as centered around “democratic deformities” 92 that posit the nation “as somehow incomplete and immature: full of corruption, vulgar manipulators, campaigning film stars, colorful imagery presented to impressionable illiterates not capable of making qualified choices.” 93 Kavita Philip notes a tendency to deploy this rhetoric in the context of infringement, chastising Asia for “infantile democracy.” 94 The Glivec dispute implicates both of these narratives, but it also points to a willful intransigence that the United States names in order to chastise India for flouting international patent agreements in a way that is knowing, lazy, and selfish. Neither democratic deformities nor infantile democracy, though useful and necessary terms, describes the subtext of insolence in U.S. patent critiques of India. “Patent insolence,” as rhetorical trope, draws on a set of colonial discourses in the context of intellectual property law, resulting in India’s being labeled as a dishonest broker, invested in power politics and thwarting progress on knowledge protection. “Criminal insolence,” 95 a term that can be traced back to the Greek polis, connotes a particularly virulent strain of incivility that suggests the character flaw of hubris. For Aristotle, insolence was “classified among slights that excite anger.” 96 He defined it as “a form of slighting that causes shame for the receiver and pleasure for the sender.” 97 To engage in insolence was to fail at the art of rhetoric, specifically the self-styling expected of those Greek men who participated in democratic oration as part of their citizenship duties. In describing fellow Athenian orator Meidias, Demosthenes identified his insolence in “the tone of his voice (loud-mouthed, bellowing, and haranguing), his gestures (snapping his fingers at justice), his stance and physical presence (breaking the doors of Demosthenes’ household, standing by the judges to intimidate them, and blocking the aisles), and his eyes (staring down at the rowdy section of the Assembly to silence them.” 98 Together, these characteristics suggest insolence as part of an “extradiscursive, presentational system that . . . points to a unified character.” 99 Perhaps most importantly, the performance of insolence is an existentially antidemocratic act, which implicates the willingness and the capacity to engage with others with a particularly Athenian understanding of decorum. The mere accusation of insolence negates any possibility of being read any other way. Instead, it points to inherent unequalness, a worse-than quality, which arises from complete lack of restraint and lack of civility. In a rhetorical double bind, “[if] a bully is humble and supplicating when threatened, it just adds to the punishment his characteristic arrogance and insolence deserves, for it proves that his hubris is deliberate and malicious rather than being simply his natural manner.” 100 The implications of insolence for contemporary readings of race and civility are accordingly significant. Translated into racial and (neo)colonial contexts, insolence becomes a marker of insubordination and rebellion. It not only points to democratic incapacity, it showcases the inhumanity of the colonial subject. In the American South, insolence was a marker of resistance, which had to be managed and contained. Though it was an effective tool of protest in the face of slavery, it was also “‘sufficient cause’ at law for a white person’s beating and maiming of a slave.” 101 Insolence was a meaningful rhetoric, against which settler colonists positioned themselves. As Allison Shutt argues: “The colonial civilising project was bound up with manners,” 102 specifically, “the poor manners of the dominated, glossed most often as insolence.” 103 In the time of Demosthenes, insolence was at odds with the functioning of the polis. However, it also threatened the prestige and honor of settler colonists, particularly “critical issues of state-building, most notably the debate over how to dominate unruly Africans within the constraints of colonial civility.” 104 Yet the boundaries of insolence were blurry ones: much like pornography in the U.S. Supreme Court, settler colonists “knew it when they saw it.” Insolence was a subjective act, defined by the fragility of whiteness, particularly white masculinity, and arbitrarily and capriciously wielded. Unlike “intransigent,” “democratic deformities,” or “infantile democracy,” the term “insolence” provides a theoretical frame for understanding U.S.-Indo intellectual property negotiations as spaces for continuing hegemonic contestation over racial and (neo)colonial power. India’s entrée into the WTO did not mark a new era in U.S.-Indo relations. Rather, it marked the continuation of the push and pull of colonial modes of interaction, with American cultural fragility serving as justification to berate and punish India for its insubordination. As in the logics of slave and colonial subject insolence, India’s behavior with respect to intellectual property provides a justification for treating the nation as willfully refusing to comply with international norms and creating a subject/object positionality that erases the historical colonial and structural economic reasons for doing so. This is not to say that India was not also trying to gain the upper hand in pharmaceutical negotiations. India was certainly trying to outmaneuver the United States in a practical legal sense. However, the latter resorted to familiar racial and colonial tropes to discredit India’s attempts to do so. The language of Indian economic roguishness serves to render the nation different and Other, in a frame that also casts it not as invested in remaking neoliberal intellectual property regimes but as a “lesser” country that cannot achieve democracy perfection. This projection of American identity is reminiscent of the Cold War, in which democracy served as a counterpoint to communism, an ideology whose spread provoked fear and anxiety. The U.S. government plays the role of the parental figure, counseling India to “both take its rightful place in international rule-setting and to accept the responsibilities that come with it.” 105 India cannot play by its own rules because the rules have already been set over a long history, in this case by primarily European and North American powers. The language of insolence, specifically colonial intransigence, is evident in U.S. discourses with and about India on intellectual property issues. India has been on the Special 301 Priority Watch List, a trade tool that the United States Trade Representative (USTR) uses to shame countries that refuse to comply with TRIPS and other international trade agreements, since the 1980s. In recent years, as the document has become longer and more substantive, criticisms of India have focused not only on infringement but also on exploitation of the developing nation provisions in TRIPS. In 2005, the United States pledged its commitment to “effective and appropriate use of the TRIPS health solution to facilitate life-saving medicines by countries in need.” 106 However, American actions revealed a desire to coerce developing nations into a narrow reading of provisions for access to pharmaceuticals contained in TRIPS after a deeply hypocritical history of strong-arming them into international intellectual property agreements with less than favorable, or even fair, terms. The lawsuit in Novartis affirmed that the United States and India had wildly different readings of TRIPS. In 2013, after years of persistent opposition by Novartis, the Supreme Court of India determined that the drug Glivec was not patentable in India. In short, because the beta crystalline form of Imatinib Mesylate, even though it increased bioavailability, did not represent a notable improvement in therapeutic efficacy over the prior formulation of the medication, no “inventive step” was required to create the drug and it could not be patented. The Indian Supreme Court relied on the controversial Section 3(d) of the Indian Patents Act of 1970, which excludes the following from the definition of patentable inventions: The mere discovery of a new form of a known substance which does not result in the enhancement of the known efficacy of that substance or the mere discovery of any new property or new use for a known substance or of the mere use of a known process, machine or apparatus unless such known process results in a new product or employs at least one new reactant. 107 The Court found that, despite expert evidence of the greater bioavailablility of the beta crystal form of Imatinib Mesylate over the free base form, “we are completely unable to see how Imatinib Mesylate can be said to be a new product, having come into being through an ‘invention’ that has a feature that involves technical advance over the existing knowledge and that would make the invention not obvious to a person skilled in the art.” 108 The Court further noted that Imatinib Mesylate was already a known substance as per the terms of Section 3(d), having been disclosed in a prior patent application. Citing the dangers of evergreening pharmaceuticals, the high cost of proprietary formulas of Glivec, and the intent of the statute, the Court found that both statutory interpretation and public policy required denying Novartis’s patent. 109 In articulating its justification for defining invention in a more restrictive manner than the United States did, the Court pointed to Section 5, Article 27 of the TRIPS Agreement, which states: “Members may exclude from patentability inventions, the prevention within their territory of the commercial exploitation of which is necessary to protect ordre public or morality, including to protect human, animal or plant life or health.” 110 India claimed to be acting in complete accordance with TRIPS, on behalf of those in the Global South who needed access to affordable pharmaceuticals. The U.S. government and industry response to the outcome in Novartis was predictably negative. Both the divisiveness of Novartis and the typecasting of India as anti-democratic villain were evident in Novartis’s postlitigation discursive strategy. Ranjit Shahani, managing director of Novartis India, lamented, “How can we be expected to come up with new cures if the developing world runs roughshod over our IP rights?” 111 Novartis’s objections are as expected, given its position as a global corporation whose profits depend on selling patented medications as well as the perception that intellectual property rights can and will be enforced universally. However, the manner in which the company pitted and is pitting itself against India—indeed, against most of the developing world—is notable, especially as a rhetorical maneuver rooted in while civility. While there are certainly critics who contend that India simply circumvented TRIPS in a bad faith, there are compelling arguments that the country, particularly given the “crowbar diplomacy” 112 that the United States used to secure international intellectual property agreements, simply outmaneuvered its Western allies. Accepting the latter argument, however, would require recognizing India as equal to the U.S., not a state engaged in incomplete mimicry. Even in the least generous reading of Section 3(d), however, does not justify the campaign of systematic racial derogation and dehumanization through which the U.S. has approached a fundamentally economic question. Yogesh Pai, among others, encourages international recognition of patent diversity. This is one alternative to narratives of patent insolence. 113 As it stands, Novartis, in addition to making an important volley in the conversation about global access to patented pharmaceuticals, has become part of a larger rhetorical strategy of casting India as a noncompliant player in international intellectual property politics, a nation that aids and abets counterfeiting through its role as past and present pharmacy to the world. U.S. government rhetorics, namely the 2013 Special 301 Report, which responds to India’s refusal to extend patent protection to Glivec, echo Novartis’s complaints. The report condescendingly chastises India for its non-democratic practices, stating: “The criteria, rationale, and operation of such [patent evaluation] measures are often nontransparent or not fully disclosed to patients or to pharmaceutical and medical device companies seeking to market their products. USTR encourages trading partners to provide appropriate mechanisms for transparency, procedural and due process protections, and opportunities for public engagement in the context of their relevant health care systems.” 114 Yet such claims are often disingenuous moving targets that fail to recognize the power politics of (neo)colonialism and reflect profound racial and economic resentment at losing at one’s own game. 115 Despite Novartis’s sound legal basis and profound hypocrisy on issues of transparency, due process, and health care, the United States continues to criticize the outcome of Novartis as antidemocratic and unfair. One recent article on Indo-U.S. relations stated, “There are compelling reasons the leaders of the world’s largest democracies would find common cause” 116 while another stated, “The [Indian government’s new intellectual property] policy emerges as the Indian government faces sustained pressure over patent protection.” 117 Patent protection remains a wedge used to portray India as a failed international team player. As the Special 301 Report demonstrates, in the context of intellectual property, India, despite its democratic governance, is treated as a nation that is inherently suspect for its failure to enforce patent law not in a manner consistent with law but in a manner consistent with U.S. practices. The Indian government’s refusal to adopt U.S. intellectual property standards, which are distinguishable from those articulated under TRIPS, is treated as India’s refusal to embrace the nation’s democratic potential and its place among the world’s superpowers. India’s insolence is patent both in the sense that it is flagrant and obvious and in the context of the law of inventorship. Not only is the nation refusing to ally itself with the United States, it is also refusing the (neo)colonial manner in which America leads and the rest of the (uncivilized and barbaric) world follows. As such, American critiques of Indian patent policy reflect age-old anti-Black and anti-Brown racial scripts that originate in particularly white and European understandings of the polis, civility, and their workings. The issue here is less about the validity of India’s argument in Novartis than the racial and (neo)colonial double standards around who is permitted to access the power to define in the context of patent law. The Obama administration’s simultaneous narratives of India as ally/obstacle speak to the relative positionality of the two countries as well as their relative—and racialized—places in international relations. More than a familiar international relations strategy of power politics, these rhetorics rely on an underlying narrative of racialized progress, in which an imagined Western trajectory of steady development operates as invisible ideal. India, because it refuses to comply with American pharmaceutical patent aims, becomes a target of rhetorics of irresponsibility. The détente in previously rocky US-India relations cannot smooth over continuing epistemological differences in patent law. Novartis, then, is not simply a contravention of international intellectual property norms; it is also a battle in a larger war over the postcolonial realities of A2K and the authority to decide whose versions of democracy and capitalism will prevail. As Mari Korepela points out, “Westerners ‘imagine’ India according to their own needs.” 118 Novartis and its attendant commentary reflect a need to paint India as a colonial upstart that, though democratic, refuses to abide by American patent norms. In the American imagination, those are norms upon which the national identity of the United States as a country of inventors and innovators poised to achieve the American Dream is built. The narrative of inventorship distinguishes Americans from Other—here Asian—nations. Lawrence Liang explains that Asian infringement is consistently pitted against American standards of innovativeness; the only way the former can be found momentarily not suspicious is by complying with the latter. Asians lack true imagination. They are forever infringers in Jefferson’s framing and spectral threats to American economic stability in Valenti’s imaginings. Indeed, even if India complies with TRIPS, it will be through U.S.-led paternalism, attached to the narrative that India could not become a world power without American role modeling and pressure. 119 The Obama administration and the USTR set up a race neutral argument for changing Indian laws that appeals to the purported rules of realpolitik and neoliberal democratic governance. In doing so, the USTR erases the internal and external relationalities and realities that militate for flexible inventorship norms. Precarious bodies, both in India and across the developing world, are rendered secondary to the aims of a distinctly American democracy and the market. India’s refusal to embrace U.S. patent standards is coded as unfairness, stubbornness, shortsightedness, and impertinence, as evidenced by references to “IPR regime deficiencies” 120 and the systematic inequalities they produce. These terms, however, are not neutral ones. They are steeped in the language of coloniality, as theorists like Franz Fanon and Albert Memmi demonstrate. More importantly, they echo racial scripts that not only mark Indians as lazy and opportunistic thieves but also position them as being outside of the regime of human progress. Despite the flexibility of TRIPS patent provisions for nations like India, the U.S. claims sole authority to interpret the relationships between the exercise of that flexibility and the practical workings of neoliberal democracy. This is not to say that India is exclusively a nation of integrity and moral virtue, as it is certainly embroiled in its own complicated nationalist politics. However, Indian commitment to producing pharmaceuticals, even if overbroad, is a politically prudent and socially responsible approach to intellectual property that originates less from insolence and more from a desire to compete, as the United States did, on a racially and economically level playing field. Even if, as some critics claim, India is too stable and too strong to justify exercising developing nation exceptions to TRIPS, such as the one for compulsory licenses, that decision ought to rest not with former colonies but with the formerly colonized as remedy for histories of domination. Appeals to Western democratic norms as more fair than those in the developing world reproduce discourses of progress and civilization that elevate the United States over other nations. Not only are such claims ethnocentric in ways that recall racial scripts about patents as a space for human progress, but they also erase the contextual development processes that nations such as India have devised in order to modernize in a postcolonial world. Narrativized within a distinctly American economic framing imagined to promote global progress and innovation, the trope of India as patently insolent centers the nation’s difference through implicit reference to its postcoloniality. The discourses of a former colony transformed into a democratic superpower through the embrace of norms of political participation, transparency, and free markets suggest outsider status, not equality in a world of international affairs. In the context of WTO and TRIPS, India’s externally imposed “rogue” persona highlights its intransigent refusal to be fully “civilized” in a system of racial capitalism. Despite passing a new, TRIPS-compliant intellectual property policy in May 2016, India reaffirmed the right to continue to use the developing country loopholes in TRIPS, including Section 3(d) of the Indian Patents Act, compulsory licensing, and parallel importation in protecting the most impoverished nations in the developing world. The United States, however, continues to criticize India for its embrace of such a regulation, flagging the nation’s unfair indigenous innovation policies. In the section detailing India’s place on the Priority Watch List, the USTR lauds bilateral negotiations that strengthen Indian intellectual property protection and promote entrepreneurial innovation but goes on to note that “[t]he pharmaceutical industry in particular faces a host of challenges related to IPR.” 121 U.S. objections focus on, among other issues, Section 3(d), the provision at issue in Novartis. India and its generic drug continue to be characterized in Special 301 Reports, statements from pharmaceutical companies, and news reports as arising from the active refusal to comply with accepted democratic norms, shameless exploitation of Western innovators, as well as unfair circumvention of the WTO and TRIPS systems. Doing so, of course, privileges an economic narrative of postracial creatorship over that of postcolonial modernization, rendering invisible the structural inequalities from which India emerged and their continuing implications. As Partha Chatterjee puts it: [T]he problem is that democracy, perhaps in most of the present-day world, cannot be brought into being, or even fought for, in the image of Western democracy as it exists today . . . it is not as though . . . the normative model itself remains universally valid and should be regarded as a beacon for aspiring democrats around the world. Rather, the problem is that the experience of postcolonial democracy is showing every day that those norms themselves must be rethought.” 122 The (mis)representation of India as insolent democracy fuels the racialization of infringement as well as the portrayal of Indians as intellectual property anti-citizens who are also the purported ringleaders of an intellectual property non-compliant and unruly developing world. 122 With this narrative of patent insolence comes a narrative of incomplete personhood, one that posits Indians as being incapable of full (white) humanity because they refuse the purportedly objective economic frameworks and they cannot take part in directing human progress. Frames of patent insolence, in the words of Shampa Biswas, raise “anxieties about instability and disorder” 123 that are justified through “a series of racialized constructions of Third World people.” 124 Raka Shome contends that racial hierarchy originates with “the organizing and commanding gaze of white eyes surveying ‘other worlds’ that seem to be permanently characterized by chaos and disorder.” 125 These tropes are the ones that must be dismantled in order to move beyond intellectual property Orientalism and into decolonial pharmaceutical governance. The consistent attempts by the United States to force India into compliance with an imagined set of neoliberal and democratic patent norms move us away from, rather than toward, such a goal. In this sense, the hyperracial infringer is, as Philip puts it, “a transactional nexus rather than an essence.” 126 The figure is more than a “heroic proletarian.” 127 Rather, it is a collectively imagined, racialized character in a larger story about creatorship, neoliberalism, and (neo)colonialism. Through Novartis, human progress is marked, again, as the domain of the (white) Global North, at the expense of the (Black and brown) Global South. The Indian government, as I show in chapter 4, resists that narrative.