rhetorical project of impure politics – good warrants on value of decolonial rhetorical projects within a “colonized space” (debate under this topic), even when such actions are not “exclusively oppositional”. Impure politics as a method to tie together narratives of POC creatorship that don’t align with western cultural standards.

While scholars in a variety of disciplines have begun to work through the histories of intellectual property and race in particular instances, a great deal more work needs to be done in theorizing how copyrights, patents, and trademarks have played important roles in racial formation, how their racial scripts evolve and pervade public culture, in discursive and material ways, and how political economy is tied up with questions of race. Coming to grips with intellectual property law’s stubborn doctrinal and discursive resistance to creating narrative space for non-white creators and their full personhood renders legible those discourses that subtly but persistently normalize Enlightenment views of creatorship, infringement, and concomitantly race. In the United States and globally, the struggle over creating equitable intellectual property law is a struggle about the ways in which Americans imagine, feel, and commodify knowledge in intersectionally raced and (neo)colonial ways.

Reimagining intellectual property through the lens of decoloniality is also a rhetorical project, one in which a developing theory of Critical Race IP can assist. The examples of Prince’s name change, Lynch’s Beast Mode®, decolonial vernacular in the Yoga Wars, and dewesternization through the TKDL demonstrate the broad spectrum of resistive performances and practices through which people of color remake notions of creatorship, citizenship, and personhood. They also concretize decoloniality in ways that are helpful for thinking about praxis in all its material realities.

Decolonial theory posits, as a core practice of decolonization, the idea of delinking. Decolonizing intellectual property requires delinking it from the epistemological foundations of modernity/coloniality, particularly with respect to the category of creatorship and, relatedly, its articulations with citizenship and personhood. Darrel Wanzer-Serrano explains the practice of delinking decolonially as:

any practice, discursive or otherwise, that facilitates a divestment from modernity/coloniality and invents openings through which decolonial epistemics can emerge. . . . Delinking requires changes in both content and form . . . It requires being oriented toward shifts in our genealogies of thought, including drawing authority from colonized spaces/voices and resisting latent imperialisms—even when such resistance may not be exclusively oppositional.35

In this way, decolonial theory and praxis conceive of “epistemological reconstitution,”36 in order to facilitate the making of “another rationality which may legitimately pretend to some universality.”37

From this understanding of decolonial delinking, we can move between theory and practice to imagine how it might look to delink intellectual property law from its modern/colonial investments in creatorship/infringement. We can also imagine ways of undoing creatorship as it forms racial assemblages with national identity and citizenship, two categories that must also be decolonized. The praxis of decolonial delinking is far more complicated than the conceptualization of that which must be done, however. For instance, Prince and Lynch succeed in decolonial delinking even as they work to build space for Black capitalism to thrive. Similarly, the dewesternizing restructuring and spectacular nationalism that the TKDL prompts, even while encouraging the development of decolonial vernacular, is a move toward decolonial intellectual property. Yet both of these examples point to the tendency of resistance to be embedded within unsustainable systems and ideologies of racial capitalism and racial liberalism. Anti-racist and anticolonial scholars ought to contemplate how to take decolonization even further, past beyond existing imaginaries.

From Phillis Wheatley to Alice Randall, from 2 Live Crew to Simon Tam, intellectual property discourses in the United States have repeatedly questioned whether people of color possess adequate creativity, inventiveness, and capacity to create specifically in ways that fit within the racialized ideals of Americanness, citizenship, and personhood. All too often, the answer to this question has been a resounding “no.” Person of color creatorship continues to be coded as always already unoriginal or infringing as well as an inappropriate subject for court intervention. In A Dying Colonialism, Frantz Fanon observes: “An underdeveloped people must prove, by its fighting power, its ability to set itself up as a nation, and by the purity of every one of its acts, that it is, even to the smallest detail, the most lucid, the most self-controlled people.”38 The politics of people of color creation, including sampling, parody, and piracy, are repeatedly categorized as examples of the failure to live up to the politics of purity that Fanon describes as part of colonialism.

The failure to live up to impossible standards of purity is not the only factor that keeps people of color from occupying the category of creatorship. So too does the connection of those perceived failures with discourses, feelings, and practices of race and capitalism. I do not intend to suggest that a pure politics of resisting intellectual property discourses is required—or even exists. As Lawrence Grossberg reminds us, “impure politics”39 is bound to be the only path to revolution. Those who are against the racializing tendencies of intellectual property law must name and refuse the ways that people of color creatorship is held to different standards and accused of an impure politics of making that tautologically demonstrates an unfitness to create in the first place.

That fundamental double bind of white supremacy is one that ties together (neo)colonialism and internal colonialism oppressions. As Quijano explains: “European or Western culture imposed its paradigmatic image and its principal cognitive elements as the norm of orientation on all cultural development, particularly the intellectual and the artistic. That relationship consequently became a constitutive part of the conditions of reproduction of those societies and cultures that were pushed into Europeanization of everything or in part.”40 The “Europeanization of everything” can be undone through decolonial refusals of white supremacy.

Here, I come full circle, back to Hasian’s notion of character within law. Rhetorical cultures, per his understanding of legal decision making, both enable and constrain legal and racial narratives. One important function that each moment of resistance performs is the creation of new character arcs for people of color in the overarching mythos of American creatorship. Characters build the rhetorical cultures and narrative roles that people of color can occupy, even with respect to knowledge production. While it is tempting to dismiss extralegal interventions as “mere rhetoric,” those rhetorical interventions make possible the policy ones through which people of color can become creators, citizens, and persons who can transform racial capitalism.