Postcolonial Piracy THEORY for GLOBAL AGE
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Postcolonial Piracy THEORY FOR GLOBAL AGE Series Editors: Gurminder K. Bhambra and Robin Cohen Editorial Board: Michael Burawoy (University of California Berkeley, USA), Neera Chandoke, (University of Delhi, India) Robin Cohen (University of Oxford, UK), Peo Hansen (Linköping University, Sweden) John Holmwood (University of Nottingham, UK), Walter Mignolo (Duke University, USA), Emma Porio (Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines), Boaventura de Sousa Santos (University of Coimbra, Portugal). Globalization is widely viewed as the current condition of the world, only recently come into being. There is little engagement with its long histories and how these histories continue to have an impact on current social, political, and economic configurations andunderstandings. Theory for a Global Age takes ‘the global’ as the already-always existing condition of the world and one that should have informed analysis in the past as well as informing analysis for the present and future. The series is not about globalization as such, but, rather, it addresses the impact a properly critical reflection on ‘the global’ might have on disciplines and different fields within the social sciences and humanities. It asks how we might understand our present and future differently if we start from a critical examination of the idea of the global as a political and interpretive device; and what consequences this would have for reconstructing our understandings of the past, including our disciplinary pasts. Each book in the series focuses on a particular theoretical issue or topic of empirical controversy and debate, addressing theory in a more comprehensive and interconnected manner in the process. With books commissioned from scholars from across the globe, the series explores understandings of the global – and global understandings – from diverse viewpoints. The series will be available in print, in eBook format and free online, through a Creative Commons licence, aiming to encourage academic engagement on a broad geographical scale and to further the reach of the debates and dialogues that the series develops. Also in the series: Forthcoming titles: Connected Sociologies The Black Pacific: Anticolonial Gurminder K. Bhambra Struggles and Oceanic Connections Robbie Shilliam On Sovereignty and Other Political Delusions John Dewey: The Global Joan Cocks Public and its Problems John Narayan Eurafrica: The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism Stark Utopia: Debt as a Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson Technology of Power Richard Robbins and Tim Di Muzio Cosmopolitanism and Antisemitism Robert Fine and Philip Spencer Debating Civilizations: Interrogating Civilizational Analysis in a Global Age Jeremy Smith Postcolonial Piracy Media Distribution and Cultural Production in the Global South Lars Eckstein and Anja Schwarz Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 © Lars Eckstein and Anja Schwarz, 2014 This work is published subject to a Creative Commons Attribution Non- commercial No Derivatives Licence. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher. For permission to publish commercial versions please contact Bloomsbury Academic. Lars Eckstein and Anja Schwarz have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as editors of this work. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the authors. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-1-4725-1944-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN Contents Series Editor’s Foreword vii Acknowledgements ix List of Contributors x Introduction: Towards a Postcolonial Critique of Modern Piracy 1 Part 1 Conceptions: The Domain of Postcolonial Piracy 1 Revisiting the Pirate Kingdom Ravi Sundaram 29 2 Beyond Representation: The Figure of the Pirate Lawrence Liang 49 3 On the Benefits of Piracy Volker Grassmuck 79 4 ‘Dreaming with BRICs?’ On Piracy and Film Markets in Emerging Economies Shujen Wang 99 Part 2 Reflections: Reframing the Discourse of Postcolonial Piracy 5 The Paradoxes of PiracyRamon Lobato 121 6 Depropriation: The Real Pirate’s Dilemma Marcus Boon 135 7 Keep on Copyin’ in the Free World? Genealogies of the Postcolonial Pirate Figure Kavita Philip 149 8 Interrogating Piracy: Race, Colonialism and Ownership Adam Haupt 179 Part 3 Selections: The Work of Postcolonial Piracy 9 To Kill an MC: Brazil’s New Music and its Discontents Ronaldo Lemos 195 10 ‘Justice With my Own Hands’: The Serious Play of Piracy in Bolivian Indigenous Music Videos Henry Stobart 215 vi Contents 11 Money Trouble in an African Art World: Copyright, Piracy and the Politics of Culture in Postcolonial Mali Ryan Thomas Skinner 243 12 Hacking and Difference: Reflections on Authorship in the Postcolonial Pirate Domain Satish Poduval 273 Index 293 Series Editor’s Foreword The current global situation of copyright and the challenges to it through piracy can only be understood by locating contemporary developments within a long history of imperial and capitalist relations. This, in brief, is the argument framing the exceptional book, Postcolonial Piracy: Media Distribution and Cultural Production in the Global South, edited by Lars Eckstein and Anja Schwarz. The assertion of personal authorship and proprietary rights, they argue, is under- pinned by complex legal commitments, most notably the 1994 TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) Agreement that established a global standard for copyright governance. At the same time, however, advances in technology – digital and other – have increased the possibilities of broader sections of the global population not only to consume, but also to create, adapt and redistribute media and communications. The ways in which this is happening, particularly in the global South, they suggest, can be best understood through the conceptual framing of ‘postcolonial piracy’ which draws attention to the deeper tensions between modernity and piracy. Eckstein and Schwarz bring together a group of renowned scholars to reflect on issues of ‘postcolonial piracy’ from and in different geographical contexts and in relation to diverse disciplinary commit- ments. As a whole, the book examines the many ways in which people from around the globe access forms of technology, media and related products outside of the standard logic of ‘property’ as defined within modernist conceptions of such engagements. The chapters focus on how people negotiate the global regimes of authority and property, work through different understandings of copy and piracy, or explore the tensions between notions of legality and criminality in this context. Rather than seeking to define piracy or come to a common agreement as to what it is, the collection offers a gripping account of what piracy does across various contexts in the global South. viii Series Editor’s Foreword One of the key concerns of the Theory for a Global Age series is to ask how we might understand our present and future differently if we start from a critical examination of the idea of the global as constitutive of our conceptual categories and paradigms. Postcolonial Piracy provides a wonderfully rich gathering of topics, themes and debates in address of such concerns. Each chapter brings something distinctive to the book and, together, the chapters offer a strong challenge to understandings of modernity and related concepts that do not take the global into consideration. The postcolonial framing is both a theoretical one and a situational one that enables the chapters to engage across a variety of themes and build a forceful account of the domains, discourse and work of postcolonial piracy. It is an excellent contribution to the debates on modernity, copyright and piracy and provides a number of openings for us to begin to think through these issues in a new light. Gurminder K. Bhambra Acknowledgements This volume has evolved from an international symposium on Postcolonial Piracy hosted by the University of Potsdam in cooper- ation with the Literaturwerkstatt, Berlin, and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, in December 2011. Our thanks go to the Volkswagen Foundation, who generously funded this event, and especially to our student staff who helped pull it off. In Carly McLaughlin we found an invaluable critical reader of the first draft of the manuscript that grew from selected conference papers and four additionally commis- sioned essays. We are very grateful to Elisabeth Wood for painstakingly compiling the index, and to our editors and readers at Bloomsbury and Fakenham Prepress for getting everything in shape. More than every- thing, our love goes to our partners and children for all the support and distractions that keep us sane – Djaynab, Zoë and Marley; and Tobi and Alois, who was born just three days after the symposium which started this project. List of Contributors Marcus Boon is Professor of English Literature at York University in Toronto.