IPR is inextricably intertwined with the system of racial capitalism – only through facilitating dialogue and investment in radical solution-making can we challenge those notions of racialized epistemology

CONCLUSION This article endeavors to name and provisionally map the field of Critical Race IP, an area of study which describes that scholarship concerned with the intersections of race and intellectual property law. In doing so, it situates Critical Race IP in a larger socio-cultural context, in which racial capitalism is a constant but evolving feature of the historical landscape. We contend that the emergence of the Information Economy, after the era of Fordism, resulted in a repackaging of familiar racial projects in and through intellectual properties and pushes for intellectual property maximalism. Critical Race IP represents a relatively new and rapidly growing direction in CRT scholarship, it is an exemplar of the ways the latter must constantly evolve to accommodate changing economic and cultural conditions and racial formations. In articulating Critical Race IP as an area of study, our goal is not necessarily to suggest particular methodologies or even fixed unifying questions that define the interdisciplinary movement. Rather, we are concerned with naming and describing prevalent themes and core tenets in a set of scholarly works that interrogate the inequalities which emerge at the intersections of intellectual property and intersectional racial identities. We hope that project can be a generative move for scholars who wish to research, write, and practice in this area.

In setting forth a history of post-Fordism and the rise of Critical Race IP, we show that, as a product of modernity/coloniality, intellectual property law is always already invested in whiteness and racial inequality in ways which necessitate both examination and undoing. Scholars in a variety of disciplines have started to undertake such examinations, with their works engaging a set of themes which we have highlighted here. Continuing to examine questions related to defining (intellectual) property, understanding intellectual property’s stories, the public domain, framing and reframing “piracy” and “counterfeiting,” distributive justice, access to knowledge, managing traditional knowledge, and contemplating intellectual properties is an important task, one which we urge scholars to continue to take up in new and innovative ways. We also highlight the significance of personal relationships and public feelings in developing this area of study. One way to facilitate dialogue and scholarship in Critical Race IP is to invest in community building and intimacy making, cornerstones of the growth and development of CRT, both of which play a valuable role in cultivating generative interpersonal connections and structures of feeling through which new ideas can flourish. Conferences and workshops as well as collaborative projects which bring together senior and junior scholars play a significant role in cultivating and retaining Critical Race IP scholars. Finally, in concluding with a discussion of the decolonial turn, we offer a framework for moving beyond the radically unequal systems produced from the vantage point of law and economics, which has been historically complicit in intellectual property law’s theoretical and practical centering of whiteness. Decolonization, a process that began to unfold after World War II, is not only a physical process but an epistemological one, which requires addressing intellectual property’s embeddedness within practices and ideologies of modernity/coloniality as well as the connections between the latter and racism and neocolonialism. Here, we offer decolonization as a means of beginning to contemplate the remaking of intellectual property law, in ways that not only radically embrace Otherness but make space for non-European ways of thinking, making, and owning knowledge. As we imagine it, Critical Race IP is a space for creating models for the politics of reparation—not simply equal rights or distributive justice—through which oppressed groups can heal the wounds of racism and colonialism.