Trademarks are entrenched in the pretext of indigenous exploitation – the aff ignores the suffering and torment embedded in the civilization and commodification of the society of the Other while facilitating the dismemberment of the Other in surrogating the corporate violators. The alt is to engage the Other as the righteous owner and the reclaimant of property.

In other work (1995), I move forward through a century--to contemporary fields in which embodied distinctions are established and contested on frontiers on which the boundaries of the nation are still very much at stake. Struggles over publicity engaging the trademark "take place" in hybrid sites of national contention. Given the historical focus upon the "frontier" as defining the space and the possibility of American democracy, I focus on the frontier as liminal spaces in which nations, citizens, and their differential embodiments are negotiated. The trademark, I suggest, functions as one idiom in which such negotiations are expressed.

Owners of trademarks must always cope with the presence of the Other in the cultural spaces they attempt to colonize. Allegiances to Indian nations, other nation-states, and transnational migrant communities often provoke resistance by capitalism's Others to the bodily imagery by which they are othered in contemporary consumer society. One area of recent activism will suffice to illustrate. In the late twentieth century, we witness renewed struggles in the spaces where mimesis and alterity occupy the commercial terrain. Today, many Indian peoples find that Americans are primarily aware of their presence as the stereotyped images that circulate in sports team mascots, tomahawk chops, and old cartoons. The contemporary conditions of their lives and their political struggles are totally obscured by representations of them that are owned by others. The ubiquity of "Trader Vic's,,R Hawaii in North American commerce makes the contemporary realities of indigenous Hawaiian peoples invisible, so completely have their identities been subsumed (and consumed) by this mythic imagery.

Long after the Frito BanditoTM has been laid to rest, and Black Mammy's and Little Black Sambo's have ceased to signify on a American commercial terrain, Indians are still a privileged form of alterity in advertising. From Red ManR chewing tobacco, Indian SpiritR air RR freshener, Indian styleTM popcorn, Braves and RedskinsR, the body of the Indian marks the privileges of disembodied bourgeois subjects, those corporations that claim these marks of corporeal alterity as their own. Ironically, it appears that the most successful way for Indian peoples to challenge these stereotypical representations of themselves is to claim them—to claim the misrecognitions of others as their own property. From publicity rights suits through trademark expungement proceedings, Indian peoples are now using the proprietary forms of the bourgeois public sphere to assert a differential embodiment that is alter to or other than the fetishes of capitalist enchantment. They are likely to be most successful when claiming the signs of their own nations--Cherokees, Seminoles--for the law is most likely to show deference to these as markers of differential propriety.

The Indian body of mass media advertising will be much harder to remove--so ubiquitous has it become--and so invisible and unheard its real referents. If the mimetic faculty is the power to copy, imitate, yield into and become Other--and certainly any football, baseball or basketball game involving an "Indian" named team will provoke the activities of any number of cultural cross-dressers--it is also the case that the copy draws power from and influences the Original; the representation gains the power of the represented and the image affects what it is an image of. For Indian peoples, this means that their contemporary social needs and political claims are not recognized; they are so fully identified with (or subsumed by) the warbonnetted caricatures first mass produced in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and reproduced ever since in commerce. Victims of the frontier and symbols of its loss in the nation's imaginary, they have figured for so long as an absence that their contemporary presence struggles to find visibility and voice in American public spheres. Commercial imitations of their embodied alterity--prosthetic selves that belong to others--mark their continuing colonization in mass mediated culture, precluding full political engagement in the public sphere.

The mimesis and alterity embodied by the commodity sign attest to the difficulties of drawing the boundaries of nations and marking inclusion and exclusion on historic and emergent frontiers. They also testify to the politics of mass publicity in a consumer society. The bourgeois public sphere presupposes a universality and singularity of the human body that denies the ways history has written different bodies differentially, inscriptions that have often taken place in advertising itself. The bodily incorporation of the advertising image is different when the image one consumes is a stereotyped version of one's self.

For those whose bodies are marked by a history of commodification (blacks in America) and those whose bodies are marked by alternative histories of fetishism (women and native peoples), the mimesis of mass advertising must be altered in ever new and more imaginative ways. The mass commodity form characteristic of late capitalism offers and compels a transformation of the magic of mimesis and its relation to alterity, presenting possibilities for a new body politic of publicity. Ultimately Others must interrogate the cultural mimicry of alterity upon which capital thrives--altering the differences law makes.