Parodies of Ownership: Hip-Hop Aesthetics and Intellectual Property Law
252
Parodies of Ownership: Hip-Hop Aesthetics and Intellectual Property Law
252eBook
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Overview
"Richard Schur offers a provocative view of contemporary African American cultural politics and the relationship between African American cultural production and intellectual property law."
---Mark Anthony Neal, Duke University
"Whites used to own blacks. Now, they accomplish much the same thing by insisting that they 'own' ownership. Blacks shouldn't let them. A culture that makes all artists play by its rules will end up controlling new ideas and stifling change. Richard Schur's fine book explains why."
---Richard Delgado, Seattle University
What is the relationship between hip-hop and African American culture in the post--Civil Rights era? Does hip-hop share a criticism of American culture or stand as an isolated and unique phenomenon? How have African American texts responded to the increasing role intellectual property law plays in regulating images, sounds, words, and logos? Parodies of Ownership examines how contemporary African American writers, artists, and musicians have developed an artistic form that Schur terms "hip-hop aesthetics." This book offers an in-depth examination of a wide range of contemporary African American painters and writers, including Anna Deavere Smith, Toni Morrison, Adrian Piper, Colson Whitehead, Michael Ray Charles, Alice Randall, and Fred Wilson. Their absence from conversations about African American culture has caused a misunderstanding about the nature of contemporary cultural issues and resulted in neglect of their innovative responses to the post--Civil Rights era. By considering their work as a cross-disciplinary and specifically African American cultural movement, Schur shows how a new paradigm for artistic creation has developed.
Parodies of Ownership offers a broad analysis of post--Civil Rights era culture and provides the necessary context for understanding contemporary debates within American studies, African American studies, intellectual property law, African American literature, art history, and hip-hop studies. Weaving together law, literature, art, and music, Schur deftly clarifies the conceptual issues that unify contemporary African American culture, empowering this generation of artists, writers, and musicians to criticize how racism continues to affect our country.
Richard L. Schur is Director, Interdisciplinary Studies Center, and Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Drury University. Visit the author's website: http://www2.drury.edu/rschur/index.htm.
Cover illustration: Atlas, by Fred Wilson. © Fred Wilson, courtesy Pace Wildenstein, New York.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780472900442 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Michigan Press |
| Publication date: | 06/04/2009 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 252 |
| Sales rank: | 946,943 |
| File size: | 425 KB |
About the Author
Richard L. Schur is Director, Interdisciplinary Studies Center, and Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Drury University.
Read an Excerpt
Parodies of Ownership
Hip-Hop Aesthetics and Intellectual Property LawBy Richard L. Schur
The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2009 Richard L. SchurAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-05060-4
Chapter One
From Chattel to Intellectual Property: Legal Foundations of African American Cultural Critique
Copyright and intellectual property are the real estate of the future. —Dexter Scott King, Growing Up King Many critics charge that the King family has neglected King's social and moral legacy in favor of exploiting for themselves his commercial appeal. —Michael Eric Dyson, I May Not Get There with You
The U.S. Postal Service has issued over 150 stamps of African Americans. From Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman to Malcolm X and Charlie Parker, the images of African American leaders, musicians, athletes, scientists, and business leaders have been captured on stamps of all sizes and denominations. The watershed year for this representational emphasis is 1980. Between 1940 and 1980, about twenty African Americans appeared on postage stamps. In the last quarter-century, nearly seven times that number of African Americans have appeared on postage stamps and postcards. Despite the continued existence of racial hierarchy and white supremacist thought in American life, what does this sudden explosion of images from African American history mean? How does this shift in American popular visual culture demand a rereading of the very tradition of African American cultural criticism these stamps seek to represent? How does the "materialization" of this tradition of dissent alter the very meaning of the original messages for contemporary readers? Does this commodification of such figures reveal absences, gaps, or new ways of reading and understanding these canonized figures?
The hip-hop and Post-Soul generations (who came of age after the March on Washington, but before the rise of commercialized hip-hop) encountered the great leaders of African American history not only within their homes and churches but within American popular culture as well. Unlike earlier generations, who learned about the accomplishments of Douglass, Jacobs, Cooper, Washington, and Du Bois primarily within the confines of the African American community, more recent generations have encountered the canonized versions of King and Malcolm X, alongside the African American community's memories. If their parents and grandparents knew their words, the hip-hop generation is just as likely to recognize the images of Martin and Malcolm as their ideas. On the one hand, this increased visibility demonstrates a shift in American culture because most people consider it "normal" to recognize African American heroes. On the other hand, more images within American visual culture do not necessarily translate into a broader-based commitment to end racism or white supremacy. Ironically, the civic recognition of King and others has persuaded many whites that racism is a thing of the past. The increased visibility of African American leaders may also cause the hip-hop generation to grow cynical about Civil Rights Movement heroes because the apparent widespread acceptance of their efforts has not helped to realize their visions of freedom and equality for African Americans.
From the hip-hop generation's viewpoint, the translation of the Civil Rights Movement into stamps or other commodities creates an ambiguity about the movement itself. Coupled with the general ironic attitude toward politicians, athletes, and Hollywood stars, this has led to widespread cynicism about social activists and activism. For example, the main character of Barbershop (Eddie, played by Cedric the Entertainer) calls Martin Luther King a "ho" because of his adulterous behavior and states that "Rosa Parks ain't do nothin' but sit her black ass down." These comments (and the ones critical of Jesse Jackson as well) reflect disenchantment with the Civil Rights Movement, its tactics, and its vision because the movement and its main figures have become unquestionable, especially as white leaders from across the political spectrum genuflect at the past while increasingly ignoring the continued legacy of racial hierarchy in American culture.
This chapter provides an intentionally revisionist account of African American cultural criticism. My goal here is to trace the origins of the hip-hop generation's approach to property law and why materialism and propertizing one's identity, at least on the surface, appear to be more appealing than social activism for many young African Americans. Building on the work of many hip-hop commentators who have examined, criticized, and defended hip-hop's materialism, I seek to place hip-hop's attitude toward property in a historical context. My purpose is not to rehearse the arguments made so ably by Derrick Alridge, Regina Austin, Yvonne Bynoe, Jeff Chang, Nelson George, Robin Kelley, James Peterson, Ted Swedenburg, S. Craig Watkins, and Kristine Wright on this topic. Rather, I hope to find a broader historical explanation for this "return" to property rights and contextualize it as part of the ebb and flow of African American cultural criticism. Todd Boyd has begun this project by articulating the dawning self-consciousness among the hip-hop generation. Regina Blackburn has also initiated the project of revising African American cultural history through the lens offered by hip-hop. This chapter, in essence, is equal parts archaeology, genealogy, and hermeneutics. Using the material practices and frequent materialism of hip-hop as a primary analytic, I reread the classic texts of African American studies to help them speak to the challenges of the post–Civil Rights era.
Stephen Best has recently argued that slave law in the nineteenth century laid the foundation for the contemporary propertization of life via intellectual property law. In this chapter, I seek to extend his account and show how African American culture has increasingly placed property law at the center of cultural criticism. Rather than providing a definitive reading of any one text or period, I am trying to stitch together remnants of historical memory and develop a narrative to explain recent shifts in African American cultural production. This new/old narrative breaks up African American intellectual history into three periods based on the main question the period posed for property law. The first period (1780–1880) asked who could own property. While there was a range of writings, sermons, and speeches during this period, I am specifically interested in how some of the most famous slave narratives addressed this question about the subject in property law. The second period (1880–1964) begins with the enactment of Jim Crow laws and caused African Americans to struggle with the question of where could African Americans own property and the spatial logic of property law. These questions about the geography of race can be found in the debates between Du Bois and Washington and between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. The last period (1964 to the present) represents the beginnings of a new era in which the question becomes who owns the imaginary domain out of which African Americans form cultural identity. In this section, I explore the lawsuit between Rosa Parks and Outkast. The post–Civil Rights era has been marked by multiculturalism and identity politics. The legal battle over Parks's name suggests how the ownership over the symbols and metaphors of American and African American life has become a central issue in African American cultural criticism. My rereading of African American history through the lens of property implies both continuity and change between generations or historical periods. While admittedly painting with a broad historical brush, my goal here is to provide a historical context for hip-hop aesthetics and its attitude about property.
Slave Narratives
Slave narratives depict the monstrous cruelty of slavery, enabling formerly enslaved African Americans to write themselves into American culture and providing a forum for demonstrating how slavery tainted the entire country with immorality. According to Robert Stepto, "The strident, moral voice of the former slave recounting, exposing, appealing, apostrophizing, and above all remembering is the single most impressive feature of a slave narrative." These highly crafted narratives allowed certain talented writers, like Frederick Douglass, to assume a high level of authorial control in spite of the many generic restrictions and engage in social, cultural, and political criticism. Hazel Carby notes that "in the slave narratives written by black women the authors placed in the foreground their active roles as historical agents." Carby's study also demonstrates that African American women used the slave narrative both to assert control over racial and gender stereotypes and to create, via writing, a more authentic self. Henry Louis Gates argues that because slave narratives frequently were honed and perfected on the speaking podium prior to being written down, the texts incorporate both authorial intent and audience response. Gates contends that from the beginning, slave narratives constituted revisionist accounts of African American history. Hip-hop's rereading of slave narratives thus merely serves as the latest iteration of revisionist criticism.
Hip-hop's rereading of slavery and slave life is perhaps no more shocking than Booker T. Washington, who downplayed the hardships of slavery to promote the value of labor, but it nonetheless clashes with more established views and fosters tensions between generations of African Americans. Near the conclusion of Jake Lamar's The Last Integrationist (1996), Emma Person, one of the main characters, states quite bluntly that "what the slave wants is not freedom, but a slave of his own." Through Emma Person, Lamar argues that freedom is not the main goal of the slave—property ownership is. If Lamar alone had articulated such a position about slavery, it might be idiosyncratic to highlight it here. However, Edward P. Jones won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novel The Known World (2003), where he presents a complex portrait of antebellum life that includes a former slave becoming a slave owner himself. In Jones's fictional account, Henry Townsend, a freed slave and plantation owner, quickly adapts and adopts the attitudes toward property held by whites of the period. In the visual arts, the MacArthur Foundation presented Kara Walker with a prestigious "genius" grant for her black cut-paper silhouettes that resurrect forgotten images of African Americans from the South. Walker has been criticized for producing work that so closely resembles forms and images designed originally to demean and oppress African Americans. Because Walker's silhouettes tell complex stories, Thelma Golden once commented to Walker, "I imagine that there must be 500 pages of some sort of parody of a slave narrative lurking in your studio."
Do these fairly well-received instances of contemporary artists and writers rewriting slave life suggest how hip-hop is revising our understanding of slavery? Annette Dixon writes: "Adopting the antiquated medium of the silhouette, Walker turns it into a power tool with which she evokes the system of slavery, exploring themes of exploitation, accommodation, and complicity in the institution of slavery on the part of both the powerful and the oppressed." Novels about slavery written in the transition period between the Civil Rights era and the full-blown emergence of hip-hop aesthetics in the late 1980s, such as Ernest J. Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), Gayl Jones's Corregidora (1975), and Sherley Ann Williams's Dessa Rose (1986), retain a much more reverent attitude toward those who were enslaved and clearly criticize every aspect of racism from that era. More recent images and novels present a much more ambiguous image of slave life and the goals and hopes of enslaved African Americans. By analyzing a few select passages from three of the more important slave narratives, I will bring attention to several moments in these texts that critics have tended to overlook but that are likely to gain in importance as a result of the hip-hop challenge to African American cultural criticism.
Most scholars identify Olaudah Equiano's text as one of the earliest slave narratives. A hip-hop rereading of the text might, for instance, focus on the narrative's conclusion, after Equiano is free and is attempting to find success in a postliberation (at least for him) setting. The narrative's ultimate anecdote relates his efforts to serve the English government and aid a group of Africans the British wished to return to Africa. Initially, Equiano refused to join the mission but was ultimately convinced to participate. The misappropriation of funds by government officials, however, caused the ship to lack the basic requirements needed to complete the journey. A number of the Africans perished as a consequence of this misuse of public property. As a result of the improprieties, the government relieved Equiano of his position. Equiano then uses his narrative to protect his integrity and incorporates in his text a number of letters that demonstrate that his virtue was ultimately vindicated by later investigations.
A hip-hop reader is likely to focus on this passage because it confronts the dilemma of hip-hop culture: how does one maintain one's integrity (i.e., keep it real) in a material world? This concluding story from his narrative allows Equiano to remind his readers one last time that slavery constitutes barbarity and a form of theft. Equiano demands that English law take seriously its own property laws. Slavery circumvents property law properly understood and undermines the budding capitalist ethic. Equiano's argument is structurally similar to hip-hop's critique of contemporary property law because both reiterate the value of protecting property interests but question what can and cannot be owned. Even though the narrative as a whole is much more concerned with developing a critique of slavery and stating the case for abolition, its attention to property relations allows the book to speak in a different register to contemporary audiences, especially as it makes clear that the evil of slavery is that it is not a small step from the misappropriation of black bodies to the misappropriation of government property.
Similarly, Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl concludes by reinforcing the importance of reconstructed property law for African Americans. Although one might assume that a woman, such as Jacobs, who had been an object of property would demand a complete abolition of the propertization of life, Jacobs endorses ownership as long as the subject of property law (i.e., who can own things) is expanded to include African Americans. Under antebellum law, slave owners stole a slave's labor. To this, Jacobs responds, "When a man has his wages stolen from him, year after year, and the laws sanction and enforce the theft, how can he be expected to have more regard to honesty than the man who robs him?" She argues that property law will be just only if the right to own property (i.e., the power to exclude others from enjoying or reaping the benefits of an object) is guaranteed to those at the bottom of society as it is those at the top. A society that limits the rights of ownership to a specific class of men will necessarily be an unstable one because it will be, in effect, condoning theft. Jacobs's slave narrative concludes with the claim that "the dream of my life is not yet realized. I do not sit with my children in a home of my own. I still long for a hearthstone of my own, however humble. I wish it for my children's sake far more than for my own." The last scene suggests that freedom and property ownership are intertwined and that the realization of property ownership will help her achieve her ultimate dream. Jacobs's last wish, however, links property ownership with virtue because it is primarily for the sake of her children that she wishes to become a property owner. Within this context, freedom from slavery is not freedom enough. The final liberation occurs, at least textually, when the freed slave becomes an owner herself and can transmit her wealth to her children.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Parodies of Ownership by Richard L. Schur Copyright © 2009 by Richard L. Schur . Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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