Book Review: The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, and the Making of Americans
| Author | Elena Cooper |
| Published date | 01 December 2021 |
| Date | 01 December 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/09646639211023858 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
both in the consciousness of those most adversely affected by the status quo and as a
means of promoting a more positive future’. On pp. 111–112 he reports the findings of
‘The Initiative for Vulnerable Populations’at the Human Rights Centre in Berkeley,
California, surveying TJ programmes in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Rwanda,
Uganda and Iraq; and later Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African
Republic, Liberia and Cambodia. They found that ‘legal justice might not be a high prior-
ity or desired at all, and that the primacy of Western legal systems and assumptions
needed to be reviewed…. These criticisms implied a vast gap between the priorities of
affected populations and the dominant approaches of TJ’. Their priorities had shifted
to basic needs: food, agriculture, education and healthcare. In Nepal, the majority of
the victims were rural, poor and illiterate, unfamiliar with the discourse of rights, and
far more likely to talk of urgent daily needs.
Furthermore, while the ‘second generation’of TJ, in the 1980s and 1990s, was ‘over-
whelmingly associated with liberalism’, to begin with quite explicitly (p. 143), while
becoming more implicit although dominant, there have more recently been inputs into
the debates from critical theory, development studies, gender studies and ‘various
forms of radical and heterodox ideas’. The consensus has been fragmented.
Newman cites a number of the publications of Padraig McAuliffe, who maintained in
2017 in his Transformative Transitional Justice and the Malleability of Post-Conflict
States that there had been a ‘transformative turn’in the subject of TJ. He questioned
how deep-seated economic injustice can be effectively addressed in real-world post-
conflict scenarios.
Newman adds (p. 155) that from this perspective ‘…TJ, through restoration of liberal
legitimacy, is quite insufficient: what is needed is a structural transformation that seeks to
overcome the cumulative injustices that have been perpetuated through history and are
constantly reinforced’.
It only remains to recommend this book as an excellent introduction to and critique of
this ever-growing field –despite or rather because of Newman’s reservations and, in the
end, conditional support for Transitional Justice.
BILL BOWRING
Birkbeck College, University of London, UK
ORCID iD
Bill Bowring https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6400-1067
ANJALI VATS, The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, and the Making of Americans.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020, pp. 273, ISBN: 9781503603301, £74.00 Hardback,
£22.90 Paperback, £20.13 e-book.
The claim that intellectual property law both includes and excludes –that only some types
of labour ‘count’for intellectual property protection –has been a central premise of much
critical scholarship, particularly regarding copyright law (e.g. Woodmansee and Jaszi,
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