Incrementalistic approaches fail and recreate violence against abjected others

Anjali Vats, “The Color of Creatorship”, Stanford University Press, Pages 191-192, 2020

The frames of creatorship, citizenship, and nation have been organizing ones for my discussion of race and intellectual property. Copyright, patent, and trademark discourses have been intertwined with them for centuries, often through the reiteration of familiar racial scripts. Chapter 4 explored the notion of rewriting the existing racial scripts of intellectual property law and mobilizing new racial feelings as a potentially productive means of unmaking invisible white norms around creatorship and personhood. Each of the three examples discussed—Prince’s seizure of creatorship as a space for Black creativity and personhood, India’s pushback against Western commodification of cultural property, and Marshawn Lynch’s deployment of Black bestiality as a means of contesting ownership of Black bodies—demonstrates the practical impacts of performative resistance to intellectual property law’s conceptions of race and economic structures. Despite the possibilities that such moments of contestation offer, however, they are also fundamentally limited by cultural and material systems that perpetuate inequality. In particular, imagining that the whiteness of capitalism, liberalism, and citizenship can be undone through equal rights ignores the fundamental ideological investments of those systems and the failures of the civil rights movement. Even while recognizing the “epistemic violence”1 involved in calling out inclusionary politics, Amy Brandzel notes that incrementalist approaches are fundamentally limited because

these aspirations for inclusion re-create violence against vulnerable peoples. As a process, normative inclusion entrenches notions of proper versus improper, natural versus abnormal and normative versus abject. There is no such thing as a movement for inclusion and citizenship for some that does not further the vulnerability and disenfranchisement of others . . . longing for inclusion and citizenship reinforce violence against abjected others.2

Brandzel, who like Saidiya Hartman, Jasbir Puar, Roderick Ferguson, and David Eng, condemns citizenship, acknowledges the need for a “politics of presence,”3 which engages in radical critique while nonetheless acknowledging the trauma of normative exclusion. In other words, she is cognizant of the imperative to both respectfully examine how inclusionary politics are integral to “navigating the visceral registers of pain, violence, and social death within the limiting structures of citizenship”4 and fundamentally limited as singular avenues for pursuing emancipatory politics. In the practical space of law, racial and economic equity must come together with concrete agendas for policy reform