Decentering the Patent: Opportunities to Reframe American Innovation Rhetorics

ABSTRACT

Rhetoricians have long critiqued gendered (Gurak; Koerber) and racial (Banks; Haas) biases in rhetorics of science and technology. However, we have yet to fully consider how the patent, as a genre, perpetuates these biases both in the constraints it places on contemporary definitions of invention and innovation and in how it distorts historical narratives about who invented in the past. Delineating the patent’s limitations as an index of inventive activity, this article advocates for more expansive understandings of invention. It argues that American patents have, since the nineteenth century, affirmed a dominant “rhetoric of innovation” that has since functioned as much as a marker of privilege as it has an index of inventiveness. Using the example of early twentieth-century Black hair culture, this article suggests other ways of recovering historical inventiveness among groups of Americans possessing their own, alternative “rhetorics of innovation” that reflect their culturally situated strategies for empowerment.

KEYWORDS:

• African American rhetorics
• innovation rhetorics
• patents
• rhetorics of science and technology

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Oldenziel details this shift in her book, Making Technology Masculine, tracking its progress through late nineteenth-century arguments about invention.

² Hence Baker’s reminder that his was “a record of fifty years” since Emancipation.

³ For instance, Charlotte Smith petitioned Congress to pay a patent examiner to locate all of the US patents granted to women, a task which took ten days to complete and which historian Autumn Stanley later discovered to be vastly underestimated because of the examiner’s biases (“Patent Office Clerk as Conjurer” 123–24).

⁴ Swanson describes the prevailing assumption that this practice promotes innovation (363).

⁵ See for instance Granstrand and Holgersson’s literature review on the subject, in which they define the innovation ecosystem as “the evolving set of actors, activities, and artifacts, and the institutions and relations, including complementary and substitute relations, that are important for the innovative performance of an actor or a population of actors” (1).

⁶ In the early 1950s, the category of “non-obviousness” was added to the list of criteria (Durack 495).

⁷ In Self Made, the recent Netflix documentary about Walker’s life, the invention of her hair grower is reduced to a brief scene containing no dialogue, in which she stands alone, stirring something in a pot on a stove. The next scene has her selling her product successfully on the streets of St. Louis.

⁸ For example, Walker biographer Bundles speculates that working as a washerwoman acquainted one closely with the properties of lye, a common ingredient in hair products.

⁹ VanHaitsma considers similarly inaccessible speechmaking events, arguing that abolitionist speaker Sallie Holley’s career can be recovered through what she calls “digital surrogates,” including announcements of her engagements similar to those advertising hair culture demonstrations. VanHaitsma uses such announcements to construct spatial and temporal maps of Holley’s speaking engagements, offering a creative and productive use of archival abundance that enables new possibilities for recovering marginalized rhetors (41).