The Copyright Thing Doesn't Work Here: Adinkra and Kente Cloth and Intellectual Property in Ghana (review)

In this book, communications scholar Boatema Boateng interrogates the applicability of intellectual property law for protecting and regulating cultural works, designated as "folklore" and "indigenous" or "traditional" knowledge, that have been subject to increasing appropriation as a result of industrialized technologies and contemporary processes of globalization. Boateng addresses this question with an in-depth case study focusing on the proliferation of mass-produced imitations of two Ghanaian textiles, hand-stamped adinkra and hand-woven kente.

During the mid-twentieth century, adinkra and kente textiles—long associated with ritual and ceremonial contexts in southern Ghana—gained new significance as expressions of nationalist, pan-African, and diasporic African pride and identity. Since the 1980s, despite legislation designed to protect and regulate Ghana's indigenous textile designs, manufacturers in Asia (especially China, India, Korea), neighboring Côte d'Ivoire, and Ghana itself have been producing inexpensive imitations of these emblematic textiles.

Boateng examines the post-colonial and neo-colonial power relations facilitating industrialized appropriations of local handicraft technologies, while also arguing for the value of grounding such analyses within localized histories and cultural contexts with the potential for challenging perceptions of "unrelieved victimhood." The creation and circulation of Ghanaian adinkra and kente, Boateng observes, are also influenced by the exercise and negotiation of localized power relations involving traditional authority, ethnicity, lineage, gender, and national authority and citizenship.

After a substantive introduction, the first chapter, "The Tongue Does Not Rot: Authorship, Ancestors, and Cloth," is an examination and evaluation of Ghana's two regulatory systems, "modern" intellectual property law and Asante textile artists' longstanding principles and practices of authorship and ownership. Simplistic understandings of "traditional" artistic production as communal and lacking individual authorship, Boateng argues, limit the applicability of intellectual property law, especially copyright law, for addressing the concerns of community-based artistic practice.

In the second chapter, "The Women Don't Know Anything! Gender, Cloth Production, and Appropriation," Boateng addresses the gendered privilege in men's control of adinkra and kente production, while revealing new gendered opportunities offered by the industrialized appropriation of these handcrafted textiles to Ghanaian women cloth traders, who control the market in manufactured textiles.

Chapter 3, "Your Face Doesn't Go Anywhere: Cultural Production and Legal Subjectivity," compares the differential access of Ghanaian cloth producers and musicians to the shaping and protection of Ghana's intellectual property law and demonstrates the contingent nature of intellectual property law, which is dependent on lobbying and active engagement with state policy-making institutions.

"We Run a Single Country: The Politics of Appropriation" examines ethnic, diasporic, and national identities as the basis for ownership claims of adinkra and kente textiles. Boateng notes that diasporic claims to African cultures and cultural products have provided a major market and stimulus for the global, industrialized appropriation of Ghanaian cloths. The fifth chapter, "This Work Cannot Be Rushed: Global Flows, Global Regulation," addresses issues in the circulation of the cloth, especially the challenge to restore the link between Ghanaian artisanal production sources and global markets.

In the concluding chapter, Boateng proposes an alternative model to intellectual property law more compatible to artisanal cultural production— the concept of "the commons" as developed in recent environmental activist scholarship and activism, which is being applied to other spheres of cultural production, such as the networked creativity of our digital age.

Boateng's densely layered analysis of these complex issues provides a thought-provoking investigation into the dynamics of globalization and cultural appropriation. Of special note is the author's use of life histories from adinkra and kente producers, artisanal perspectives rarely included in intellectual property debates, in determining local textile artists' principles and practices of authorship. The book would have been enriched by giving similar voice to consumers' perspectives concerning handcrafted and imitation adinkra and kente.

Boateng makes a compelling argument regarding the unsuitability of intellectual property law, based on principles of individual...