Latest book:
The Suburb of Dissent: Cultural Politics in the United States and Canada during the 1930s (Duke University Press, 1998)

Paper Synopsis:
This paper addresses (a) the general and tricky role of American law in shaping global relations; (b) the blockading or "filtering" effect that American intellectual property law in particular has within the US; (c) sub-legal cultural transformations that have a transnational character and alter the landscape of property relations in culture; (d) prospects for a global "common law," that is, a global law based on scattered and often inconsistent practices and oriented towards the commons--rather than, say, towards tradition. Case studies include a famous case in American intellectual property law--Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders v. Pussycat Cinema--and the post-1960s surge of interest in yoga in the US. Yoga provides a concrete example of the ways that American proprietary practices filter and alter cultures of the body, while also revealing resources people have invented to skirt the pronounced limits of an owner-focused theory of law. Loosened from its recent cultural and religious history in India, American yoga is an invented pseudo-tradition that allows a critical anti-modern space to open up within American culture, in large part because of its mobilization of indigenous reservoirs of communal and anti-ownership practices of living labor, especially women's labor. Even as it undergoes rapid commodification and transformation into protected and individualized intellectual property, American yoga provides a strong case study of the way that "resistance precedes power," as Hardt and Negri remind us in Empire. The pathways of cultural transmission associated with American yoga during the 1960s constituted a form of globalization logically and historically prior to corporate globalization. It is from this layer of humus just beneath the surface that one perhaps finds sources for a global common law, one that does not routinely take individual and monopolistic private property in culture for granted.