Introduction: Knowledge Anti-Imperialism in a Propertied World

In 2023, the University of Pittsburgh School of Law hosted the fourth Race + IP conference, with a theme of the Imperial Scholar Revisited. The most well attended Race + IP conference yet, Race +IP welcomed more than 300 registrants in person or via Zoom to consider race, colonialism, and nationalism as organizing architectures in intellectual property rights regimes in the United States and globally. This introduction situates the phrase “imperial scholar,” as coined by Professor Richard Delgado, and illustrates how it serves as a generative starting point for considering how intellectual properties, e.g., copyrights, patents, trademarks, rights of publicity, and trade secrets, are structured in domination and subordination. By foregrounding Critical Race Theory’s articulations, contemporary and historical, of “antisubordination” and “antidomination” principles alongside a vision of “abolitionist intellectual property,” it offers possible paths to imagining more liberatory forms of intellectual property and lays the conceptual groundwork for Race + IP ’25 : Abolitionist Futures.