Abolitionist Creativity, Care, and the Shadow of Intellectual Property

This Article offers a theory and praxis of abolitionist creativity that situates and transforms the power of intellectual property in the political economy toward abolition. We begin by invoking the legacy of Sojourner Truth who, in addition to her better-known contributions, innovated radically with her copyright in the context of slavery abolition in the nineteenth-century United States. We show how Truth occupied the legal and economic structure that governs the expression of creativity towards her abolitionist goals. Inspired by her example, we argue that contemporary abolitionists can intervene in the intellectual property system in ways that unshackle creativity from its legal codification as a right to exclude. Reimagining creatorship not as a right to exclude but as a duty to care for each other and our ecological worlds, we offer strategies and examples of abolitionist creativity in two struggles: prison abolition in the United States and transnational solidarity with Palestinian liberation.