Dissertation Project

Creativity of the Copy: Collaborative and Distributed Authorship within Contemporary Cultures of Sharing

This project explores the literary and cultural impact of media piracy and open-access projects in our contemporary era of digital networks–specifically focusing on the challenge posed by the domestication of piracy in South Asian postcolonial contexts to Eurocentric conceptions of literary property, authorship/authorial rights, and individualistic creativity. Building upon literary-historical accounts of the twin emergence of the ‘author’ and the (literary) ‘pirate’ as discursive constructs within cultural and legal debates following the spread of print cultures in early-modern Europe, and their maturation through the Romanticist period, I shall consider challenges to the same from twentieth-century literary theory and piracy studies.

The aim is to work towards an account of authorship that doesn’t disavow the collaborative and appropriative dimensions of the necessarily-intertextual labour underlying creativity, utilizing (and thus further refining) this theoretical framework via close examination of the language deployed in current debates surrounding literary piracy and public access. This will be augmented by case studies of contemporary ‘pirate’ and open-access communities (like KaraGarga and Sahapedia), examining their role in bridging gaps of cultural capital and infrastructural access within postcolonial societies and thereby fostering collaborative forms of creativity by enabling participation within global medial flows. How does the seemingly uncreative act of ‘non-transformative copying’ (piracy) form the basis upon which transformative creativity can flourish?

My project thus aims to theorize the interdependence between literary creativity, appropriation, and access, while sketching the ethical and epistemological ramifications of burgeoning ‘pirate’ modernities and ‘cultures of sharing’ (particularly in South Asia). Riding the wave of digital media and the Internet, they offer alternative (and potentially more inclusive) modes of re-imagining circuits of cultural production and distribution, property and personhood, precisely via their opposition to the hegemonic discourses of copyright and intellectual property which have shaped the classical Romanticist formulation of authorship as a solitary exercise–detached from and independent of the public domain. What does it mean to be an author, and a pirate, in the digital networked age? To what extent is the creative process solitary-autonomous and/or predicated upon collaboration-appropriation? How should we (re)think the lines demarcating original/derivative, copyright/open access, private property/public domain, etc. when it comes to cultural texts, in ways meaningful to digital cultures in our contemporary globalized world?

Biography 

Shaswata Ray is currently a Doctoral Fellow at the University of Potsdam, working within the “From Bystander to Actor: Literature, Collaboration, and Participation” project situated within the “Collaborations” research unit. Prior to this he graduated from The English and Foreign Languages University in Hyderabad with an MA in Literary and Cultural Studies. His MA dissertation studied piracy in the digital age, considering its discursive history and the ethical implications surrounding its characteristic cultures of sharing, following a Kantian framework of ethics. He also holds a BA English (Major) from the Indira Gandhi National Open University, with a minor focus in Contemporary Western Philosophy and Epistemology. He also enjoys watching, analyzing and writing on cinema, and has helped co-write Whispers of Fire & Water which was selected for competition at the 2023 Locarno Film Festival.

Research Interests

• Literary Theory
• Cultural Studies
• Lacanian Psychoanalysis
• Critical Theory
• Structural Linguistics
• Film/Media Studies
• Continental Philosophy
• Feminist Theory

Publications

Ray, Shaswata. "My Beloved Private Property: A Feminist Critique of Monogamy and Romantic Love." American College Journal of English Language and Literature (ACJELL) Vol. 13 (2023): 37-50. ISSN: 17252278876X. https://americancollege.edu.in/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/AC-jell-2023.pdf

Presentations

“I Signify, Therefore I Am: The Lacanian Split Subject and a Linguistic Framework of Consciousness and Qualia” at Mind Matters: Literature, Cinema, and Culture (International Conference) organised by the Dept. of English, Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata, Jan. 2024