Intellectual property is built on a racial episteme that operates through Eurocentric citizenship ideals to justify the legal exclusion of nonnormative forms of knowledge.

Intellectual property citizenship is more than a description of the ties between intellectual property and citizenship discourse: it is a grid of intelligibility that reveals how the American racial episteme operates by and through the ideals of citizenship around which copyright, patent, and trademark law are imagined. For Foucault, a grid of intelligibility is a schema that helps to make sense of social orders.23 In this context, intellectual property citizenship is a grid of intelligibility that aids in understanding how intellectual property and citizenship discourse coalesce to protect whiteness in copyright, patent, and trademark spaces. Thinking about citizenship as an ordering discursive formation through which intellectual property law is constructed reveals that race continues to be not just a superficial issue that determines the outcome of legal cases but an a priori racial ordering of the structures of knowledge production. I argue that the outcome of individual legal cases involving creators of color is less important than how doctrinal standards were forged through epistemically raced conceptions of citizenship. The coalescence of intellectual property and citizenship produced doctrinal language that continues to systematically privilege whiteness even today. More specifically, America’s racial episteme is “the strategic apparatus which permits separating out from among the statements which are possible those that will be acceptable within.”24 Understanding citizenship as a “strategic rhetoric of whiteness,” 25 in the words of Thomas Nakayama and Robert Krizek, transforms the object of study from the racial outcome in individual cases to the racial 8 Introduction logics of doctrine itself. Though the race of the plaintiffs and defendants in intellectual property cases is helpful in locating moments of racial crisis, it is not dispositive in thinking about how race works in those moments. The concept of intellectual property citizenship, as I have intimated through the binary of the good citizen/bad citizen, presupposes an actor, i.e., the intellectual property citizen. The remainder of the book contemplates how American public culture tends to imagine and implicitly invoke idealized intellectual property citizens as actors in narratives about the nation and its well-being. The good intellectual property citizen is shaped by invisible Euro-American norms of white masculinity and constructed in contrast to the bad intellectual property citizen. Familiar binaries of self/ Other and good/evil transform intellectual property rhetoric into a tool for reinforcing structural inequality domestically and internationally.