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In Ghana, adinkra and kente textiles derive their significance from their association with both Asante and Ghanaian cultural nationalism. Adinkra, made by stenciling patterns with black dye, and kente, a type of strip weaving, each convey the bearer's identity, social status, and even emotional state. Yet both textiles have been widely mass-produced outside Ghana without any compensation to the originators of the designs. In The Copyright Thing Doesn't Work Here, Boatema Boateng focuses on the appropriation and protection of adinkra and kente cloth in order to examine the broader implications of the use of intellectual property law to preserve folklore and other traditional forms of knowledge.
In Ghana, adinkra and kente textiles derive their significance from their association with both Asante and Ghanaian cultural nationalism. Adinkra, made by stenciling patterns with black dye, and kente, a type of strip weaving, each convey the bearer's identity, social status, and even emotional state. Yet both textiles have been widely mass-produced outside Ghana without any compensation to the originators of the designs. In The Copyright Thing Doesn't Work Here, Boatema Boateng focuses on the appropriation and protection of adinkra and kente cloth in order to examine the broader implications of the use of intellectual property law to preserve folklore and other traditional forms of knowledge.
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
Boatema Boateng is associate professor of communication at the University of California, San Diego.
"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
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