Patent law is inextricable from colonial narratives of inventiveness and the expansion of Manifest Destiny.
Vats, 20—Assistant Professor of Communication and African and African Diaspora Studies and Assistant Professor of Law at Boston College (Anjali, “The Intellectual Property Citizen,” The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, and the Making of Americans, Chapter 1, pp. 33-34, dml)
Like copyright law, patent law is more than simply a legal construct. It is instead a rhetorical and cultural formation through which national identity and citizenship were and are constituted. The relationship of inventing to the developing nation’s very idea of itself and the American Dream points to the importance of patenting in mediating culture. As Dan Burk and Jessica Reyman contend, “patents play an important social role in industrialized societies.”30 Patents are certainly artifacts of technological society. They are also—as Fouché and Vostral, among others—demonstrate, artifacts of a racialized society. Brian Frye’s recent essay “Invention of a Slave” notes how decisions to patent or not to patent the inventions of enslaved persons implicated larger conversations about slavery, abolition, and territoriality in the nation.31 For instance, protecting the inventions of enslaved persons could be read as an endorsement of abolition, upsetting the balance between slave states and free states in the young nation.
That patents were explicit and implicit mediators of national conversations about citizenship, personhood, and slavery should not be surprising, particularly given America’s desire to articulate its identity around work ethic, ingenuity, discovery, and progress. The concept of “discovery,” as used here, has both material and immaterial implications. With respect to the latter, the nation’s quest for knowledge was part of a larger investment in Enlightenment narratives of linear progress. With respect to the former, the nation’s commitment to inventiveness was driven by and contributed to territorial expansion. Manifest Destiny relied on invention, specifically technologies that could make it possible to traverse the new nation. As such, “the idealism of Manifest Destiny would become entwined with America’s growing obsession with technological progress . . . whenever progress was invoked, technology was its basis.”32 In these respects, patents are sociolegal constructions with significant racial implications. Not only were many people of color denied the right to protect their inventions, they were viewed as obstacles to the nation’s inherent mission of advancing progress and civilizing the uncivilized.