Synopses & Reviews
Across the global South, new media technologies have brought about new forms of cultural production, distribution and reception. The spread of cassette recorders in the 1970s; the introduction of analogue and digital video formats in the 80s and 90s; the pervasive availability of recycled computer hardware; the global dissemination of the internet and mobile phones in the new millennium: all these have revolutionised the access of previously marginalised populations to the cultural flows of global modernity.
Yet this access also engenders a pirate occupation of the modern: it ducks and deranges the globalised designs of property, capitalism and personhood set by the North. Positioning itself against Eurocentric critiques by corporate lobbies, libertarian readings or classical Marxist interventions, this volume offers a profound postcolonial revaluation of the social, epistemic and aesthetic workings of piracy. It projects how postcolonial piracy persistently negotiates different trajectories of property and self at the crossroads of the global and the local.
Synopsis
In the economic South, access to global flows of goods, technology and ideas increasingly occurs through a culture of piracy, i.e. by sidetracking global juridical and economic norms. To date, academic discourse has addressed such practices of piracy predominately from three different angles, viewing them either in the light of criminal theft, as expressions of creative freedom, or as acts of anti-capitalist resistance. Against such overtly ideological readings, this volume promotes a re-orientation which focuses on postcolonial piracy primarily as a strategy of access to global modernity, without shying away from the ethical, legal, social, economic and aesthetic ramifications that this shift entails. Its aim is to show how both everyday and artistic strategies of copying and recycling in processes of production, distribution and reception have impacted on concepts of cultural property and artistic 'work' in the South, and facilitated a thorough reformulation of notions of authorship and originality with truly global reverberations.
About the Author
Lars Eckstein is Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures Outside of Britain and the U.S. at the University of Potsdam, Germany.
Anja Schwarz is Professor of Cultural Studies, University of Potsdam, Germany.
Table of Contents
1.Introduction
Lars Eckstein and Anja Schwarz University of Potsdam, Germany
Conceptions: The Domain of Postcolonial Piracy2. Revisiting the Pirate Kingdom
Ravi Sundaram, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, India
3. Piracy, Creativity and Infrastructure: Rethinking Access to Culture
Lawrence Liang, Researcher and Lawyer, Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore, India
4. BRIC, Emerging Economies and Global Piracy/Film Markets
Shujen Wang, Emerson College, Boston, USA
5. Everything is Under Control: Piracy, Culture and the Appropriation of
Technology by the Global Peripheries
Ronaldo Lemos, Center for Technology & Society, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Reflections: Reframing the Discourse of Postcolonial Piracy
6. Paradoxes of Postcolonial Copyright Critique
Ramon Lobato, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia
7. Interrogating Piracy: Race, Colonialism and Ownership
Adam Haupt, Centre for Film and Media Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa
8. Keep on Copyin' in the Free World? Genealogies of the Postcolonial Pirate Figure
Kavita Philipp, Department of Women's Studies, University of California, USA
9. Depropriation: The Real Pirate's Dilemma
Marcus Boon, York University, Toronto, Canada
Interventions: The Work of Postcolonial Piracy
10. A Proposal for Legalising Small-Scale Physical Copyright Piracy
Volker Grassmuck, Leuphana University Lueneburg, Germany
11. This Bridge Called Hiphop: Samples of Percussion, Piracy and Politics from
Brazil and Colombia
Dawn-Elissa Fischer, San Francisco State University, USA
12. Hacking and Difference: Reflections on Authorship in the Postcolonial Pirate
Domain
Satish Poduval, English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India
13. "Justice with my own hands": The Serious Play of Piracy in Bolivian Indigenous
Music Videos
Henry Stobart, Royal Holloway University of London