RESEARCH
CURRENT PROJECT
Today’s world is awash with color. From the hyperreal cherries, plums, and coral stacked atop the Chanel lipstick counter to the sea of iPhones that hypnotize us with the glow of their “retina” displays, contemporary commerce harnesses the spectrum in ways Americans a century ago could hardly have imagined.
Yet this visual abundance has also sparked conflict. When the famed sculptor, Anish Kapoor, announced that he had secured an exclusive license to Vantablack®, the world’s blackest synthetic material, he sent the Internet into an uproar. The popular Instagram hashtag #sharetheblack channeled the widespread alarm that rights to color were being sold to the highest bidder. Christian Furr, the youngest artist ever commissioned to paint the Queen, found Kapoor’s ambition to enclose the building blocks of creativity particularly troubling. “I’ve never heard of an artist monopolizing a material,” he remarked. “We should be able to use it. It isn’t right that it belongs to one man.” These comments reflect a public’s growing unease, at the heart of which lies the question: “Is it possible for a person, or perhaps even a corporation, to own a color?”
I argue the surprising answer is, indeed, yes. Beginning with the invention of synthetic dye production during the Second Industrial Revolution and concluding with the U.S. Supreme Court decision permitting color trademarks in 1995, the book offers a genealogy of color’s assimilation into the intellectual property regime over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The comparative historical research traces the various ways color became embedded in institutional regimes of valuation and appropriation—whether as a matter of cultural significance, aesthetic taste, or the manufacture, marketing, and pricing of goods.
The project also develops a new theoretical framework for the study of “propertization”— the social process by which previously unowned things are made appropriable as property. I theorize this process as a form of resource accumulation transacted through moral justification rather than, for example, market exchange. Building off my empirical research, I identify two types of normative distinctions that start legitimate chains of ownership. The first is classification—the determination of worthy objects of property rights. The second is attribution—the determination of deserving subjects of property rights.
Applying this framework to disputes in elementary-school classrooms, industrial chemical laboratories, artists’ studios, WWI battlefields, the floor of the Supreme Court, and the odd Chicago-area dry cleaner, the comparative historical analysis highlights the many ways that color becomes embedded in institutional regimes of valuation and appropriation—whether it be a matter of cultural significance, aesthetic taste, or the manufacture, marketing, and pricing of goods.
OTHER PROJECTS
My research agenda for the coming years continues to explore propertization as a social process.
Alongside my book manuscript, I have written two peer-reviewed articles based on my doctoral research. The first, “Property and Its Provenance,” recently received a revise and resubmit decision from the American Journal of Sociology. The second, “Blue Latitudes: Property of the Color Atlas,” has been contingently accepted by Social Studies of Science. Other research I have undertaken utilizes the conceptual framework of “propertization” to analyze new empirical data.
My forthcoming peer-reviewed chapter, “Owning the Hate: A Case Study of Moral Entrepreneurship in Contemporary Rock Music and the Trademarking of Racial Slurs,” shows how the work of moral entrepreneurship catalyzed the integration of racist trademarks into U.S. IP law and regulatory policy.
A new project in the pipeline explores debates around the propertization of outer space as a facet of capitalism’s increasingly interplanetary reach. I am a co-convenor of the interdisciplinary working group, “Confronting the Second Space Age: From Cosmic Speculation to Astro-Capitalism,” funded by the Levan Institute for the Humanities at USC. In this context, I am developing an article that examines how governmental entities and private enterprises justify the commercial exploitation of natural resources in outer space vis-à-vis private property rights.