About

Boatema Boateng is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at UC San Diego. Her research interests include Critical Legal Studies, Critical Race Studies, Transnational Gender Studies, Indigenous Studies, and African Diaspora Studies. She has authored the book 'The Copyright Thing Doesn't Work Here: Adinkra and Kente Cloth and Intellectual Property in Ghana,' which examines how intellectual property law intersects with histories of subjugation along lines of nation, gender, and race, and how different kinds of knowledge and culture are valued within legal frameworks. Her work also explores devalued conceptions of knowledge and subjectivity as resources for critically rethinking intellectual property law. Currently, her research focuses on race, gender, and authorship in U.S. quilting, as well as the indigeneities of Black people in Africa and the diaspora in relation to each other.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Gender studies
• Philosophy
• Law
• Anthropology
• Ecology
• Psychology
• Ethnology
• History

Selected publications

• Non-traditional Intellectual Property

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2026-03-25

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• <i>Black Networked Resistance: Strategic Articulations in the Digital Age</i> by Raven Maragh-Lloyd

  Communication Culture and Critique · 2026-03-03

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• Thinking Transculturally

  Communication and Race · 2024

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  • Psychology
  • Philosophy

  This article discusses Paula Chakravartty's influence as a scholar of communication and race. In addition to tracing the arc of her scholarship across two decades, it draws upon Chakravartty and her collaborator Yuezhi Zhao's concept of "transcultural political economy" (from their 2008 co-edited anthology Global Communications: Toward a Transcultural Political Economy) to offer a "transcultural" approach to the study of race in different locations. Taking Black indigeneities as its case – that is, the indigeneities of people of African descent on the continent and in the diaspora – the article considers how the idea of the "transcultural" might help in analyzing the fractured nature of race among Black peoples on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean and foster a deepened understanding of different Black indigeneities. It further proposes "negative spaces of empire" as a way of conceiving of related struggles by peoples in different parts of the world. Finally, the article considers the potential of the idea of the transcultural for healing the fracturing of race in different parts of Africa and the diaspora, and also for healing the negative spaces of empire where Black indigeneities reside.

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• Black Indigeneities, Contested Sovereignties

  American Indian Culture and Research Journal · 2023 · 2 citations

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  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Gender studies

  In this article, I examine race, indigeneity, and sovereignty in order to understand the relationship between them as they structure the lives of Black people on the continent of Africa and in the African diaspora. Specifically, I am interested in Black Indigeneities and explore the following questions: What are Black Indigeneities, beyond the connections between African-descended and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas, especially the U.S.? Indigeneity implies ties to land and heritage, but what does it look like when those ties have been weakened or severed? What does it look like for places and people living with the consequences of different but related histories of settler and indirect colonization and chattel slavery on both sides of the Atlantic? Rather than trying to arrive at definitive responses, I use these questions as a point of departure for outlining an analytical framework that identifies sovereignty as a crucial element in understanding the diversity of Black Indigenous histories and experience under different but related structures of power. I distinguish between indigeneities of remembering and indigeneities of recovery. I also seek to go beyond the concept of arrivantcy as a framework for understanding the indigeneities of African-descended peoples in the Americas.

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• Not African? Contested Origins of Wax Print and Its High-Fashion Appropriation

  Textile Museum journal. · 2021-01-01 · 1 citations

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  Abstract: In 2017, British fashion designer Stella McCartney’s 2018 spring collection, featuring clothing in prints widely regarded as African, was criticized by commentators as an act of cultural appropriation. Similar criticism emerged two years later when the House of Dior used African prints in its Resort 2020 collection. This was despite the fact that in the case of Dior, the fashion house worked with textile designers in Côte d’Ivoire. Some of the responses to the charges of appropriation included the claim that “African fabric…isn’t African” and noted the Dutch-mediated Indonesian origins of wax prints made for the African market and claimed by many as African culture; they also pointed to the provenance of the fabrics used in both collections in the Dutch corporation, Vlisco (in the case of McCartney), and its Ivorian subsidiary, Uniwax (in the case of Dior). Yet other voices questioned the relative merits of wax prints and handmade indigenous fabrics as markers of “African-ness.” Drawing on media coverage of the two collections and the debates they generated, as well as scholarship on the history of the prints, this article explores the contested origins of these textiles. It considers the labor of African market women in wax print’s aesthetic development, and the cultural contexts and consumption practices that inform its circulation and value in African societies and markets and beyond. Drawing comparisons with the history of handmade kente cloth from the Asante people of Ghana, and practices and values around the consumption and circulation of kente, the article seeks to identify criteria that can guide in responding to the contested origin claims around the prints in the McCartney collection of 2017 and the Dior collection of 2019. Using those criteria, it then examines the claims of appropriation in the specific instances of the two collections and, more generally, in the debates around the appropriation of African textiles.

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• Cultures of property

  2017-07-27

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• Cultures of property

  2017-07-31

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  In protecting culture, intellectual property (IP) laws appear to stand apart from culture. However, cultural and legal scholars have shown that IP laws are in fact cultural in reflecting very particular ideas about what kinds of work can be protected legally. This chapter outlines the shift from direct economic, military and political dominance of colonial territories to less direct forms of dominance in the second half of the twentieth century. It then briefly outlines the history of IP laws, focusing on their cultural specificity. The chapter describes that history in the context of the history of direct and indirect dominance of the global South during and after colonization. It also discusses the increasing importance of IP in the regimes through which dominance occurs as knowledge, information, and culture have become important economic commodities. The chapter outlines the history of cultural property (CP) laws as an additional site for the protection of culture.

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• Women Out of Africa

  Culture Studies &#x2194 Critical Methodologies · 2016-04-03 · 6 citations

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  This essay critically examines naming and knowing in relation to African women as subjects in a global 21st century. Proceeding from the premise that naming is an epistemological act, it critically examines the relation between naming and knowledge production about African women who move across boundaries as transnational subjects. It considers the constraints placed by such naming and knowledge production on African women’s subjectivity. Finally, it considers the ways that African women challenge and contradict the politics of naming, and the possibilities those contradictions offer for forging new epistemologies of gender and Africa in the 21st century.

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• Adinkra and Kente Cloth in History, Law, and Life

  Lincoln (University of Nebraska) · 2014-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Adinkra and kente cloth have changed significantly in the course of their history first as markers of Asante royal power and then of Ghanaian cultural distinction. Once handmade and reserved for the exclusive use of the Asante ruler, cheap mass-produced reproductions now proliferate in Ghanaian markets. In attempting to use intellectual property law to regulate their appropriation, the Ghanaian state has set the conditions for further changes in these fabrics, their designs, and their sources of authority. This paper examines the implications of changing political and regulatory contexts for the past present and future meanings of adinkra and kente cloth for the people who produce and use them.

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• The Hand of the Ancestors: Time, Cultural Production, and Intellectual Property Law

  Law & Society Review · 2013-10-21 · 6 citations

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  In successfully lobbying for the expansion of the copyright protection term, culture industries in the United States have used one of the temporal dimensions of intellectual property law to strengthen their control over the circulation of cultural goods. There is another less obvious way that time factors into the regulation of cultural products, and this has to do with the modes of temporality within which those products are made and their circulation regulated. In Ghana, where certain cultural products are protected as “folklore” under copyright law, cultural goods from one kind of temporality enter a regulatory framework that belongs to another. In this article, I examine these two ways of organizing time and argue that differences in ways of conceptualizing time also factor into the exercise of power over cultural products. I further argue that the Ghanaian case provides resources for radically rethinking intellectual property law.

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Frequent coauthors

• D. A. L. Brown

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