Book Review: The Cunning of Rights: Law, Life, Biocultures
| Date | 01 June 2019 |
| Author | Mizanur Rahaman |
| Published date | 01 June 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663919834197 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
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but his broad view of policing issues, memory and transitional justice rightly locates the
future of republican ‘critical engagement’ with the PSNI at the deepest levels of the
Northern Irish polity, negotiating crucial national and social questions.
ALAN NORRIE
University of Warwick, UK
Reference
Lacey B (2016) Discover Derry. Derry: Guildhall Press.
RAJSHREE CHANDRA, The Cunning of Rights: Law, Life, Biocultures. New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2016, pp. xxxiv þ 244, ISBN 9780199459766, INR 850 (hbk).
If we consider the emergence of new forms of property rights in the past few decades,
then the expanding reach and exclusionary attitude of Euro-American intellectual prop-
erty law will become increasingly clear. Specifically, the issues of biological patents and
breeders’ rights have received enormous attention in contemporary literature on intel-
lectual property. Equally important is the concern surrounding farmers’ rights and col-
lective claims over biogenetic resources and local knowledge that have received
recognition in international, regional and national legal documents. In fact, the latter
group of rights are intended to protect the interests of those marginalized by the Euro-
American intellectual property system. Yet the ‘inclusionary rights regime’ remains
paradoxical because of its hidden exclusionary agendas. And this ambivalence is what
Rajshree Chandra intends to reveal in The Cunning of Rights: Law, Life, Biocultures.
At the outset, the concerns raised in the book are not new. That been said, the novelty
lies in Chandra’s nuanced theoretical approach. There is a tendency in contemporary
literature to designate intellectual property rights (IPR) as ‘universal’ because of its global
reach. And, on the other hand, farmers’ and community rights are described as ‘local’
because they belong to distinct epistemic cultures. Thus, drawing from recent writings on
‘biocapitalism’, Chandra deploys the analytic ‘biocultural’ to provide a critical account of
a dense network of legal entitlements that are diverse yet closely interrelated because they
lie ‘at the intersections of culture and biology’ (p. xxv). The ‘biocultural’ framework, she
argues, looks into the cluster of rights as an ‘assemblage’ (p. xxiv) rather than treating
individual, group and collective rights as distinct and separate categories. The main
inspiration comes from Michel Foucault (critique), Sheila Jasanoff (co-production) and
Homi Bhabha (sly civility) (pp. xxiii–xxvii). The book is organized into two parts and
contains six substantive chapters. While Part I examines the ‘making of biotic property’
through Jasanoff’s idiom of ‘co-production’ (p. 1), Part II looks into ‘the jurisdiction of
rights’, mainly through the lens of jurisdictional thinking (p. 81).
Reflecting on the word ‘invention’, Derrida annotates that an invention, as it emerges,
ought to overflow, transgress, negate and overstep the status, meaning, and legitimacy
we assign to it. A sobriety of tone is axiomatically present in his...
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