Embodied Trademarks: Mimesis and Alterity on American Commercial Frontiers

Abstract

Trademarks play a central role in what we might call the visual culture of a nation, engaging in issues over intellectual property and increasingly commodified public spheres. The controversy over Golly, the trademarked mascot of Robertson’s Marmalade, speaks to practical debates over the commodification of colonial desire; the relationship between the postmodern and the postcolonial is enacted in the representational exchange of the market. I will draw upon both the historical and contemporary U.S. examples to illustrate that when – as in the Golly anecdote – trademarks represent an embodied otherness with imperialist precedents, social struggles over their spread and meaning add more nuanced dimensions to our understandings of contemporary relationships between mimesis and alterity.

Keywords: Trademark, Legal history, Postmodern, Postcolonial