It is try-or-die to performatively counter IPR – only our contestation creates seepages to challenge broader racial and colonial projects

Anjali Vats, “The Color of Creatorship”, Stanford University Press, Pages 155-156, 2020

Debora Halbert writes, “The work of asserting alternatives to intellectual property is an interpretive battle. Intellectual property remains in the process of definition—there is a struggle to define the scope and meaning of the law.”1 Examining the particularities of the struggle is useful for both imagining new ways of relating to intellectual property law and mapping new strategies for activism. The question of how resistance to intellectual property’s racial scripts works is an important one—and one upon which Lawrence Liang’s concept of porous legalities sheds light.2 Liang contends that (racial) capitalism produces residual humans—including migrants, squatters, and pirates—whose labor value is rendered obsolete. In doing so, it creates space for seepages, “the action of many currents of fluid material leaching on to a stable structure, entering and spreading through it by way of pores.”3

Seepages, by way of performative acts of resistance, erode (racial) capitalism and “gradually disaggregate its solidity.”4 The romantic academic ideal of willful resistance from a conscious understanding of politics and culture is far less common than unintentional transgressions that produce anti-racist and anti-colonial effects. The latter acts, when extrapolated across urban spaces, “[create] new conditions in which structures become fragile and are rendered difficult to sustain.”5

Liang uses the concept of seepages to theorize the porousness of law, which he argues are created through “a profound distrust of the usual normative myths of the rule of law, such as rights, equality, access to justice, etc.”6 The concept of porous legalities provides a frame for understanding how alternative intellectual property worldmaking can take root in quotidian performances.7 Transgressive performances that create new “performative repertoires,”8 in Isaac West’s words, have the potential to exploit the gaps in the law in ways that produce new legalities.

If (racial) capitalism and law can be eroded through the iterative performances of individuals, groups, and institutions, so too can the categories of race, national identity, and citizenship through which capitalism and law operate. This chapter focuses on understanding how creators of color have contested racial scripts around creatorship/infringement, mobilizing them in ways that undermine the racial scripts and racial feelings that animate them. Often, as Liang suggests, these strategies involve remaking capitalism or using it against itself and reorganizing public feelings in racially radical configurations.