The affirmative case argues that intellectual property law is structured through a colonial episteme that operates under white privilege and has enabled the democratization of knowledge production since British colonization of India in the 1700s. It contends that this system upholds whiteness while devaluing the knowledge and creations of racialized bodies.
The affirmative presents several key points to support this argument:
First, it asserts that South Asians are negatively coded as “filthy job stealers” and their culture is exoticized and tokenized in a way that reinforces a narrative of “exotic mysticism.” This culminates in what the affirmative terms the “New Oriental Age” where white markets appropriate and profit from South Asian culture.
Second, the affirmative argues that intellectual property law enables the patenting of traditional knowledge, ignoring its origins and contributions from marginalized groups. The result is the silencing of non-Western voices in an endless cycle of dispossession. Policymaking upholds a system of whiteness where certain types of knowledge are valued over others. “Excellence” is linked to whiteness, while anything useful created by people of color is “purified” and “refined” for the global economy, devaluing creation by racialized bodies.
Third, the affirmative contends that debates around citizenship for South Asians are structured around depersonalization and a history of racialized segregation in the aftermath of colonialism. Legal regimes preserve power for the white male subject.
In response to this situation, the affirmative advocates for “Indian Catachresis” as a generative method of abstraction that works within the slippages of history to disrupt dominant narratives of South Asian life. It positions the affirmative’s reorientation to knowledge and language as a prior question to understanding the Human, using fugitive practices to empower Indians.
The affirmative argues that speech acts and fugitive storytelling are a form of intervention against Western norms and economies that uphold racial capitalism. It asserts that the reading of the 1AC is key to empowering anti-capitalist and decolonial discourse in the debate space and beyond.
The affirmative draws on arguments that the law and legal discourse are performative – they produce subjects and social meaning through linguistic utterances. Racialization occurs through an interplay of legal performativity and embodied performances. Subjection to the law is both a legal/political process and a theatrical/aesthetic one that mixes across the body.
In acts of what Rey Chow calls “coercive mimeticism,” minoritized subjects respond to interpellation into subordinated identities through self-referential performances in an attempt to liberate themselves. However, this inadvertently contributes to maintaining dominant structures. When misrecognized groups seek legal recognition, the law can codify that misrecognition with the force of precedent, whereby “the price of protection is incarceration.”
In summary, the affirmative indicts intellectual property law as a colonial system that devalues non-Western knowledge while upholding whiteness. It advocates Indian Catachresis as a disruptive rhetorical move to reclaim agency and resist these oppressive logics. The 1AC itself serves as a speech act to empower anti-colonial discourse against the performative violence of the law’s racialization of subjects.
Citations:
[1] https://ppl-ai-file-upload.s3.amazonaws.com/web/direct-files/1168016/afc68bc4-e977-43e6-b3b3-65801b1f280e/India-K-Aff.pdf