Trademark law is founded upon the monetization and branding of black bodies and uses hierarchical structures and stereotypical images to perpetuate structures of oppression.

still-developing America interpellate its consumers into emerging capitalist markets and racial hierarchies. Put more succinctly, “[t]he ‘incorporation of America’ was integrally related to the corporeality of others,” 18 specifically racially different others. As Lauren Berlant writes, trademarks connect buyers with particularized understandings of identity and nation, creating connections through which consumer goods acquire affective meaning. By the 1900s, “product consciousness had become so crucial a part of national history and popular self-identity that the public’s relation to business took on a patriotic value.” 19 During this period, trademarks performed the important social task of mediating hierarchies of difference and establishing a “racial order of things.” 20 Images of mammies and black beasts, in particular, did the cultural work of justifying the need for racist social organization that continued to deny the egalitarian treatment of former slaves.21 Even today, trademarking and advertising function as important forms of identity branding—in both senses of the term—creating and circulating ideologies around commercial products but also in marking certain bodies as different. Given the ways in which trademarks brand bodies, it follows that bodies have the capacity to rebrand trademarks. As in law, “in the process of privileging a rational, male dominant voice, western rhetoric has in turn focused on the mind to the exclusion of the body.” 22 People of color theorizing, including critical race theory and black feminist thought, have been integral to the process of developing a “deep and embodied understanding not only of the limits and dangers of a legal strategy but of the history of slavery, colonisation and racism which informs the politics and the legality of race in America.” 23 According to Raymie McKerrow, turning to corporeal rhetoric is thus important not only “if we are to broaden the definition of rhetoric to include its practice in the lived experience of those outside what has been termed an administrative rhetoric” 24 but also to make legible the “particular experiences and epistemologies that provide philosophies about reality different from those available to other groups,” 25 here in the context of trademark law. Rhetorical scholars have taken up McKerrow’s call, considering how the body fits into rhetorical theory,26 the relationships between bodies, social protest, and public argumentation,27 and the ways in which embodied performances implicate questions of identity.28 Disidentification is a useful frame for understanding how minoritarian groups perform within particular ideological constraints—particularly those around race, law, and capitalism—and use embodied modes of resistance to intervene in oppressive regimes of power. Disidentification is “a third mode of dealing with dominant ideology, one that neither opts to assimilate within such a structure nor strictly opposes it. . .a strategy that works on and against dominant ideology. . . laboring to enact permanent structural change while at the same time valuing the importance of local or everyday struggles of resistance.” 29 Further, it is an intersectional framework with broad applicability. For instance, a rich and growing body of literature in communication seeks to understand the range of world-making possibilities brought into being by the disidentifying subject.30 Scholarship theorizing disidentification and citizenship is particularly helpful here as it highlights the ways in which embodied performances can partially rework legal and cultural regimes around group membership.31 The examples of disidentification I engage implicate majoritarian definitions of property— including intellectual property—and memory, particularly as they are normalized by and through trademark law. Stereotypical images of mammies and black beasts reinforce narratives of black bodies as property, using trademarked images to create the cultural conditions in which continued oppression of former slaves is culturally and politically possible. In addition to creating a visual hierarchy of race, as Coombe contends, and linking brands with national identity, as Berlant maintains, intellectual property is, as Stephen Best argues, an indirect outgrowth of the logics of slavery. Fugitive slave laws conceptually justified the ownership of intangible human properties, that is, slave labor, thus laying the foundations for the ownership of similarly fugitive products of personhood, such as “voice, countenance, and ideas and thoughts.” 32 In tracing the historical evolution of intellectual property, Best notes that “[j]urists concluded, in short, that the legal relations of property are between people and not, as had earlier been thought, between people and things.” 33 Invoking Best’s analysis offers insight into how trademark law, as part of a larger corpus of intellectual property law, arises from the monetization of the ineffable performances of black bodies. Corporeal performances that highlight (black) bodily autonomy are, then, an important means of interrupting the ideological work of fugitive slave laws, intellectual property laws, and (white) commodification of bodies of color. The two cases that I discuss short circuit the theoretical link that Best identifies, creating space for people of color to respond to the historical memories and narratives reinforced through intellectual property law. Williams’s prosopopeic disidentification becomes a mechanism for disarticulating black women from histories of obedient servitude and asexuality while Lynch’s (de)propertizing disidentification contests narratives of black men as beasts to be owned, policed, and disciplined. As Lovalerie King argues, American law operates as a site of memory and one that necessarily provokes the question “Whose history will prevail?” 34 In the foregoing sections, I examine how Williams and Lynch, while working within the context of trademark law, rework important understandings of property and memory related to blackness.