The range of Western beliefs that define intellectual and cultural property laws—that ideas can easily be separated from expressions, that expressions are the singular products of the individual minds of Romantic authors, and that these expressive works can be abstracted from the meaningful worlds in which they figure to circulate as the signs of unique personality, and that these expressive works can be abstracted from the meaningful worlds in which they figure to circulate as the signs of unique personality, that cultures have essences embodied in objects that represent unbroken traditions—are not universal values that express the full range of human possibility, but particular, interested fictions emergent from a history of colonialism that has disempowered most of the peoples on this planet.