Table of Contents

Introduction: Indexes of Culture and Power
1. The Tongue Does Not Rot: Authorship, Ancestors, and Cloth
2. The Women Don’t Know Anything! Gender, Cloth Production, and Appropriation
3. Your Face Doesn’t Go Anywhere: Cultural Production and Legal Subjectivity
4. We Run a Single Country: The Politics of Appropriation
5. This Work Cannot Be Rushed: Global Flows, Global Regulation
Conclusion: Why Should the Copyright Thing Work Here?
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the Author

Boatema Boateng is associate professor of communication at the University of California, San Diego.

Reviews

"Boatema Boateng’s use of life histories to humanize discussions of law, policy, and the exigencies of modernity is as refreshing as the wide analytical net she casts to include the North American African diaspora and reflect upon key concerns such as cultural nationalism on both sides of the Atlantic." —Kwasi Konadu, City University of New York

"This fine-grained historical and ethnographic inquiry into the social life of Ghanaian textiles is–quite simply and by several degrees of magnitude–the best study anywhere of how Western tropes of intellectual property fail to grasp the complexity of systems in which the traditional arts are practiced today. It tells a cautionary tale with urgent implications for IP scholarship, and it should be required reading for policy-makers in world capitals and at international organizations." —Peter Jaszi, American University