CITIZENSHIP DA. The perm recreates colonial divisions by folding the alt into the subject categories of IP law. The alt alone is key.

Because claims to citizenship are always already, by virtue of managing questions of belonging, couched in terms of proving that those who are Other are not Other, they often involve drawing distinctions that reinforce existing exclusions instead of embracing humanness as a space of profound difference. Citizenship requires norms that are “brutally enforced against non-normative bodies, practices, behaviors, and forms of affiliation through oppositional, divide-and-conquer logics that set up nonnormative subjects to compete against each other in order to gain the privileged access to citizenship.”24

In the context of intellectual property, these divide-and-conquer logics are evident even in seemingly productive calls for inclusion. Prince’s appeals to protect Black creatorship—as well as popular cultural texts such as Empire and The Get Down that echo them—do so at the expense of “pirates,” even when those pirates exist in states of tremendous precarity. Indian and Indian American claims to have a cultural property interests in yoga feed virulent Hindu nationalism that justifies violence against Muslims.25 Lynch’s claims to own the labor of his Black body reinscribe the racial capitalism of both the NFL and the celebrity industrial complex that makes the cult of personality around his undoubtedly appealing Beast Mode persona profitable. Unless they confront and undo the underlying logics of copyright, patent, and trademark law, performative engagements with creatorship and citizenship can fall prey to the anti-affiliative and anti-intersectional labor sentiments that Brandzel critiques as problematic. Combating such problems requires addressing the humanness of people of color, their knowledge, and their rights to liveable and sustainable economic realities.