And, they rely on static notion of Asian-Americanism that utilizes criterions
of supposed “sameness” as the basis for coalitions. This is an
exclusionary form of diversionary politics that reifies the same dangerous
stacicity of identity it seeks to criticize – turns case.
Bahri,
. 1998.
Deepi ka
“With Kal eidosc ope Eyes: The Potential (D ang ers) of Identi tarian C oalitions.” In A Part Yet Apart: South Asi ans in Asi an Americ a, edited by Lavi na Dhi ngra Shankar and Raji ni Sri kanth. Phil adelphia: T empl e U ni versity Press ./N V
Historically, resistance has been mounted in reactive rather than proactive ways.
The diasporic individual "discovers" the identity that [they] [have] already
been given for purposes of containment and management. While this identity is
reshaped and retooled for particular purposes, as might be evident in the
remaking of "Oriental" as "Asian American" identity, or even in the use of a faux
category like "Asia," it is nevertheless reliant on categories that cannot challenge
completely the divisive and managerial ideology that produced them.
if an
oppressive history has obliged us to seek the same categories that were used “to
oppress, the new cultural politics must include measures of protest against them.
Our goal must be to
be free of
constructions that consolidate the power of the center by defining the margins.
we must consider that ethnic coalitions based on the criterion of ''sameness,"
are also foundationally dependent on a declaration of difference certainly from
the dominant society, but from other minority groups as well.
net result of overreliance on such cultural identities is capitulation to
diversionary politics that obscure the principles at stake, compound our
complicity, and leave us vulnerable to manipulative constituencies.
to keep in sight the ultimate goal of undoing “categories designed to keep
us in place these are the materials that make for kaleidoscopic and futuristic
vision.”
The
vic tim mus t play the g ame ac cor ding to r ules ins tituted by the oppr ess or.
thus
he or she
has
A kal eidosc opic visi on can allow us to recog nize that
Perfor manc e of c ategoric al identity for str ategic political purpos es may i ndeed be unavoidable but cannot be the goal for the l ong ter m.
Even as we use these categories to combat the problems of the moment, we cannot ignore the reification that is inherent in their deployment.
ultimatel y
transc end the c ategori es i mpos ed by c olonial and i mperial hegemonies, to stri ve to
In this same vein,
however that might be defi ned,
While groups like " Asi an Americ an" c ar ve out their s ociopolitical nic hes in Anglo-American c ultural politics, they ar e also defi ning themsel ves withi n the s ame c ategorical grooves that have thwarted c onsiderations of samenes s with other mi noritiz ed groups . Th e
This danger is most visibl e i n politic al arenas : " Soci al sci entists ar e quic k to remi nd us that ethnic voting behavior was an d is i mportant i n Americ an politics and often transc ends clas s or
regional lines" (Di nnerstein and R eimers 152). It seems gratuitous to point out that not all members of our tribe ar e our friends , nor thos e of others our natural enemies, but this is pr ecis el y the danger of coalitional grou pi ng without c areful examinati on of organiz ati onal criteria. Li kewise, it may seem entirel y too obvious, but perhaps therefor e mos t eas y to overlook, that in the fac e of persistent racis m, the histor y of " Asian Americ a" will tell us, i t is not unnatural to defi ne oneself away from the group most commonl y targeted.” “A princi pled acti vis m requir es that our res ponsi bility to other minorities in this c ountr y be fac ed al ongsi de our c oncer ns as " Asian" mi noriti es, that di fferences not be forgotten in our pr eoccupation wi th samenes s, 30 that we disting uish among our various reas ons for groupi ng,31 and that our s hort-ter m and long-term objec ti ves be considered tog ether. A dynamic vi ew of i nterethnic rel ati ons , the ability to ni mbl y s pot moments when diff erenc es c an and must be diss ol ved i nto a principl ed unity for the moment, the abjur ation of eas y
dichotomies and too c as uall y and unpr oblematic ally yoked c oalitions, and the ability
The browning of bodies is a performative process that reifies
characteristics of deviancy and danger, which replicates itself in our
discussions of South Asian-ness within the context of Model Minority
scholarship. Browner Asians are distanced from “Asian-Americanness”
due to their perceived performance of deviancy. The impact is that the
brown body is perpetually articulated as a security threat to both the nation
and to staticized Asian American identity that functions as the basis for the
politics of the 1AC. Therefore the ROB is to signal an ethical orientation to
the 1AC.
Patel,
G. Tina “Sur veillanc e, Sus picion and Stigma: Br own Bodies i n a T error-Panic Cli mate”
2012
[https://ojs .librar y.queens u.c a/index.php/sur veillance -and-soci ety/articl e/vi ew/s tigma/4570]/N V
Linked into debates about citizenship and multiculturalism, a particular type of
hostility has emerged, which selectively presents brown bodies’—as especially
dangerous (
the browning of bodies is a strategy of identification
Browning in this sense is a process,
one BM E c ategor y—‘
Razac k 2008). As Burman (2010) and Semati (2010) note,
wi del y i n order to j ustify new polic y fr amewor ks’ ( Bur man 2010: 203). Lug o-Lugo and Bl oods worth- Lug o (2010: 239) note how s ome mistakenl y percei ve the browning of bodies from a more c elebrator y s tanc e, ass uming that it will be embrac ed within and passi vel y acc epted by the mai nstr eam. They go on to argue that rather, what is ac tuall y occ urring in a post- 9/11 environment, is that a growing alloc ati on of ‘br own’ labels has created fear and i ns ecurity— what they c all the ‘br owni ng of terror’ (Lugo- Lug o and Bloods worth-Lugo 2010: 240). 8
, whic h ‘s eeks to sort the all y from the enemy, the model minority / infor mant / “good M usli m” from suspect / extr emist / “bad M uslim” , but als o to cast the net of s us picion
unlike other racialised identities, like ‘black’ or ‘white’. This is because ‘brown’ is
not tied to a specific racial or ethnic group
Rather ‘brown’ represents ‘the
perceived performative aspects of deviance and danger’
Browning does this by highlighting notions of brown difference that are cultural,
non-essential, and unlike past violence
to present all brown bodies as outsiders. This allows for a wider casting of
the surveillance net.
, with a s har ed cultur e or his tor y ( Bur man 2010; H arewood 2010).
(Silva 2010: 169). It is about artic ulating the perc ei ved sec urity thr eats of the nati onal i maginar y, whi ch originates fr om raci alised constr ucti ons of the danger ous ‘other’— merging iss ues of i mmigrati on and terroris m. It ac ts to ‘r elegiti mise state racis m’ (Bhattachar yya 2008: 75) .
against other BME groups (s uch as Africans). Yet, at the same time, it c ontinues to li nk the brown body with a partic ular s et of s ocial meani ngs (Bhattac har yya 2008: 58). F or exampl e, c onsider the use of ter ms s uc h as C anadian-born (Musli m) as opposed to Canadi an, to mar k out that although one may be born i n that c ountr y, they are never reall y part of that c ountr y (Fis k 2006 i n Bur man 2010: 201; R az ac k 2008). Si milarl y, the us e of ter ms suc h as ‘ homegrown terrorist’ and ‘enemy within’ whic h were heavil y us ed followi ng the 7/7 attac ks,
moves beyond the li nk between terroris m and i mmigrati on, s o
South Asian identity is consistently marginalized within Asian American
scholarship. Our criticism is twofold:
1. We criticize their usage of the Model Minority Myth as a paradigm for
understanding violence against ALL Asians, specifically the brown body.
Their scholarship and performance cannot account for the particular forms
of violence that brown Asians face – this is manifested in this round in
things like the authors they read as well as the cultural basis for their
performance and methodology. Ask yourselves how many brown authors,
literature or scholarship was actually read in the 1AC – their theoretical
inclusion of the brown body is an example of an “add South Asians and
stir” politics that marginalize the brown body, strip us of our identities and
creates a form of intra-Asian coalitional politics that relies on divisive
categories of whiteness to demarcate browness as unwanted and inferior –
turns case. [insert specific analysis of 1AC’s method/performance]
2. We also challenge their articulation of Asian American identity as a
whole. SQUO Asian American identity and politics staticize and localize
Asianness as being specific to East and Southeast Asians – their
historical/genealogical analysis of Asian American is specific to the
violence SOUTHEAST/EAST ASIANS which means a) there is a terminal
inaccessibility DA to the aff b) they exclude an analysis of South Asians
but claim we can use their method c) reify whiteness by reinforcing
characterizations of the brown body as deviant and as something
Asianness ought distance themselves from.
Extend Farah - our praxis of injecting forms of brown knowledge
production and performances of diasporic subjectivity into the debate
space is one that forces confrontation with traditional forms of Asian
American literature that are heavily East Asian populated – this means we
are always already forcing a re-evaluation of meaning itself that
destabilizes the epistemic assumptions of the 1AC. Prefer the alternative –
we reject the pandiasporization of the 1AC where South Asian’s are
essentially add on. Endorsing specific embodied experiences
pedagogically transforms how we interact with Asian disapora within the
debate space – we challenge hegemonic diasporic discourse as a form of
transborder poetics that begins from the starting point of shared
EXPERIENCES rather than commonalities of identification. Our
performance is a dialogic re-negotiation of brown positionality within the
debate space that creates counter-narratives to the presentation of the
1AC. A few net benefits:
1. Catharsis – key to releasing anger about being marginalized within the
identitarian category we’ve been assigned
2. Performative self-reflexivity – we interrogate our own privilege and
positionality within the debate space and within Asian American identity as
a whole
South Asian Americans are consistently excluded and tokenized from
Asian American scholarship – their theory cannot account for physical,
cultural and linguistically dissimalirites that comprise South Asian violence
Dave,
Shil pa et al. “De- Pri vileging Positi ons: Indian Americans, South Asi an Americans, and the Politics of Asian Americ an Studies” Journal of Asian American Studi es, Volume 3, N umber 1, Februar y
2000,
pp. 67-100 (Articl e) , Pawan D hingra, Sunai na Mair a, Partha M az umdar, Lavi na D hingra Shankar, J ai deep Si ngh, Raji ni Sri kanth/NV
the goals of the Asian American movement was the fashioning of a pan-Asian
ethnic identity that would facilitate political organizing
attempts at
fostering unity among Asian Americans often exclude South Asian Americans
There also remains a stark dichotomy
between South and East Asian immigrants residing within the U.S. This fissure
stems, in part, from physical dissimilarity
Most Americans,
would never associate people from India with those from China, Japan, or Korea.
where South Asian Americans join pan-Asian
coalitions, they tend to be marginalized or tokenized, much as they are in
academia, instead of assuming prominent leadership positions.
Among
pri mar y
participants i n
, enabli ng Asi an Americans to exercis e greater influenc e i n the public s pher e. While notabl e exc eptions exist,
, or tr eat them as a li minal enti ty, whic h is dealt
with tokenistic ally. Gl ancing at vari ous texts employed i n ethnic and Asi an American s tudi es c ours es , one is l eft feeli ng that South Asians are all but excl uded fr om the pur view of any s erious discussion on Asian Americ a. Sever al his toric al factors have contri buted to the obsc ure status of South Asian Americ ans , both in ac ademi a and the greater American s oci ety. F or one, the South Asian Americ an popul ati on has been qui te s mall until rel ati vel y r ecentl y, due to discri minator y i mmigrati on legislati on and the s hor t period of subs tanti ve migrati on.
8
between them. Even homogenizing perc eptions by outsi ders (a “ they all look ali ke” s yndr ome), cited as a possi ble sourc e of group unity by Yen Le Es piritu, s erve as a di vis or of South Asians from the “M ong oloi d races .”
the
includi ng Asi an Americans,
9
Cons equentl y, not even raci al vi olenc e, often an i mpetus to the for mati on of panethnic c oalitions, pr ovides a suitable avenue for i ntegrating South Asi an Americans with their Asian Americ an comr ades . T his mirrors the manner in whic h physical appearance dis ting uishes Pilipi no Americ ans from other Asian Americ ans. Fur ther mor e, r eligious differ ences between South Asi ans and other Asi ans exac erbate the c ultural and linguis tic barriers between them. In ins tanc es
Your scholarship doesn’t take into account how South Asians fit into the
racial schema of the United States – we can’t be placed into white
categories of race thus rendering us invisible in both your theory and
method
Kibria, . 1998.
Nazli
“The R acial Gap: South Asian Americ an Identity and the Asian Americ an Movement.” In A Part Yet Apart: South Asi ans i n Asian Americ a, edi ted by Lavina D hingra Shankar and R ajini Sri kanth. Philadel phia: Temple Uni versity Pr ess./NV
Aren't Indians Caucasians?
Their features are white; except for
their skin color they're basically white."
As far as race, it's
clear that you're not white or black or Asian. So what does that leave us with?
“Such situations serve to remind me constantly of the questions that
After s everal mi nutes , I was rewarded for my patienc e with a barr age of comments: "
I remember r eading somewhere that Indians from India ar e fr om the s ame raci al stoc k as Europeans.
3 "But the s ki n c olor is what matters. Asian Indi ans have dark s ki n. N o one i n Americ a woul d ever look at Pr ofessor Ki bria and say that s he is white." "T he onl y thi ng I know ab out this is fr om watc hing Mississi ppi Mas al a. And from that it s eemed to me that Indians don't see thems el ves as blac k.""
How do you feel about Lati no?" (followed by
laughter). It's a ridic ul ous questi on. I don't see why we have to put “these l abels on people. We don't have to acc ept th e s ystem.”
surround the racial classification of South Asians in the United States. Especially
apparent is the breach within the racial category of "Asian."
Those persons who lack a clear-cut "race" because they are not easily
placed into available racial categories (such as "Black," "White,'' or "Asian") are
likely to be a source of some unease
. For such "raceless"
persons, more important perhaps than the danger of causing social discomfort
and awkwardness is the risk of being ignored, of being invisible because of their
inability to fit into established racial schemes.
It is i nter esti ng that not one of my students descri bed me as Asi an.” “In the Uni ted States, r ac e is a c ommons ense aspect of reality, one that s er ves as a basic fr ame of refer enc e by whic h to order and i nterpr et s oci al rel ati ons and enc ounters (s ee O utl aw). R ac e is, further mor e,
vi ewed as " pure," and thus adequatel y defined by a limi ted and discr ete s et of categ ories (s ee Lee).
to others, who wonder about the exact s oci al identity of the pers on they have enc ountered. Suc h situations create a s ense of unc ertainty about "racial etiquette" or the r ules of "c orrect" r ac e beh avior
As Omi and Winant obser ve, "Wi thout a racial i dentity, one is in danger of havi ng no identity" ( 62).”
Blind calls for inclusivity and coalition building run the risk of
homogenizing and erasing South Asian culture in order to preserve the
static politics of Asian-Americanism.
Bahri, . 1998.
Deepi ka
“With Kalei doscope Eyes : T he Potential (Dangers) of Identitari an Coaliti ons .” In A Part Yet Apart: South Asians i n Asian Americ a, edited by Lavina D hingra Shankar and R ajini Sri kanth. Philadelphia: Templ e U ni versity Pr ess./NV
identitarian grouping can be a double-edged sword
it becomes difficult to assert the natural unity of the Asian American construct.
given the persistently unequal numerical spread and influence, how can one
insist on a natural pan-Asian set or bristle at the absence of South Asians from
the construct "Asian American" both in Asian American Studies and in the
popular imagination? The recent call for inclusivity,
draws our attention to
some discomfort about developing hegemonies within Asian American Studies.
Insisting that ''South Asian" is also "Asian" invokes two modalities: one that
asserts that "South Asian" is a distinct category with identifiably homogenizing
qualities (itself a problematic notion), and another that effaces disparate peoples
in the interest of an abstract grouping based on largely geographical
nomenclature.
“Those of us inves ted i n a responsi ve, responsibl e Asian Americ an coaliti on mus t not f orget the c hec kered histor y in whic h the politics of i denti ty was us ed agai nst our i nterests. N or c an we afford to ignor e the fact that
that mus t “be car efully wiel ded. Gi ven the di visi ons between the differ ent c ategories of " Asian," both those that were endemic and thos e that were pl anted and fostered,
somewhat
Too
of whic h this coll ecti on is one repr esentati on,
Inserting this subs et als o ass umes a pri or, unc onflicted Asian Americ an set, i n turn pr eceded by the s et " Asi an." We ar e c onfronted, then, with s everal l ayers of i nconsistenc y i n positing a uni fied s et.”
The 1AC is an example of strategic essentialism – they utilize the political
nomenclature of “Asian American” as a signifier of specific ethnographic
characteristics. This essentializes the Asian American experience and
forces South Asians to compete with other Asians for representation,
which reifies the “divide and conquer strategy” of Western imperialism –
functions as an indict to their method and a DA to the permutation
Shankar, L . 1998
avina D hingra
. “The Li mits of (South Asian) N ames and Labels : Pos tc olonial or Asian Americ an?” In A Par t Yet Apar t: South Asi ans in Asi an America, edited by Lavi na Dhi ngra Shankar and R ajini Srikanth. Phil adel phi a: T emple U ni versity Pres s./N V
,
essentialized Asian American identities efface
differences of national origin, generation, gender, political party, and class. "the
grouping 'Asian American' is not a natural or static category; it is a socially
constructed unity, a situationally specific position that we assume for political
reasons. It is 'strategic'
“The concept of "strategic essentialism"
suggests that it is possible to utilize specific signifiers of ethnic identity,
for
the purpose of contesting and disrupting discourses that exclude
in trying to bridge the gaps between South Asian
Or, by vyi ng with Eas t and South East Asians for repres entation, ar e South Asians i n Americ a making themsel ves vul nerable to the maj ority's ''di vide and c onquer" str ategy
whic h leaves mi noriti es to fight among thems el ves? In her frequentl y cited ess ay "H eterogeneity, H ybridi ty, M ulti plicity: M ar ki ng Asi an American Differ enc es ," Lis a Lowe war ns agai nst
that
Lowe powerfull y argues that
in Gayatri Spi vak's sens e" (39). Lowe's paradigm for constr ucti ng Asian group identity c an be applied to the c as e of South Asi an Americans, i n order to r eveal the s trategic ess entialis m at stake in pr ojects s uc h as this book:”
suc h as Asian Americ an [read South Asian Americ an],
Asian Americans [re ad South Asian Americ ans ], while si multaneousl y revealing the i nter nal c ontr adictions and slippag es of Asi an American [r ead S outh Asi an American] so as to i nsur e that s uc h
ess entialis ms will” “not be r epr oduc ed and proliferated by the ver y apparatus es we s eek to dis empower (39).” “Ac ts of self-i dentific ati on and s elf-nominati on ar e thus not without the ris ks and dang ers of also essenti alizing and fi xing i dentiti es by naming and perfor mi ng them i nto existence. T his c ollec tion's basic tenet,
Americans and all other Asian Americans', reifies the binary schema .
in South Asia is not a unified, homogeneous nation, either.
schema seems to set up a nati onalist politics of i dehtity. But South Asi a is not one nati on; in fact, Indi a, the l argest and most populous c ountr y
Must the label " South Asi an Americans i n/and/vers us Asian American" establis h an either/or pr opositi on? D oes bei ng one precl ude being the other? T he bi nar y
How, then, can South Asians in America r ec oncil e their conflict-ridden his tori es i n Asia and at the s ame ti me attempt to be united i n Americ a
1. Links are DAs to the perm – specifically we are winning links to your
performance/presentation within the debate space, don’t let them sever out
of that
2. Cooption DA – the perm is a cooption of our alternative which is an
embodied performance
3. Footnoting DA
The Aff’s use of “Asian Americans” ignores the diverse experience of
various individuals and ethnicities in favor of painting a coherent,
homogenous picture. This turns case – means they continue the myth of
Asian Homogenization.
Osajima, 1995,
Keith
“Postmoder n Pos sibilities: T heor etic al and Politic al Direc tions for Asian Americ an Studies”, Amerasia Journal, http://ucl ajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.17953/amer.21.1- 2.pj92k27g 43811214//JY
Asian America” now signifies an extremely diverse
entity, composed of people from widely different cultural, ethnic, gender,
educational, class, generational, and political backgrounds.
the representations of Asian American culture and identity
in novels and films are often dominated by conceptualizations which essentialize
and homogenize the Asian American experience, producing images that
oversimplify a complex phenomena.
“what is referred to as ‘Asian America’ is clearly a heterogeneous entity”7 and
Asian American identity is better understood as a matter of ”cultural hybridity”
than of simple binary categories. ”The boundaries and definitions of Asian
American culture are continually shifting and being contested from pressures
both ”inside” and ”outside” the Asian origin c~mmunity.”
The postmoder n directi on towar d i nclusi on, multiplicity, and heterogeneity is partic ularl y well-suited to an anal ysis of the contemporar y Asi an American experi enc e. The tre mendous influx of i mmigrants and refug ees over the past thirty years has dramatic all y alter ed the compositi on of the Asi an Am erican population. ”
Postmodern theories, whic h foc us on the c ompl exl y c onstr ucted nature of s ocial conditions and i dentities , c an pr ovide a frame wor k for understandi ng the dynamic c hanges in the Asi an American experi enc e. We need not go far to realiz e the anal ytic benefits of postmodern perspecti ves .
Lisa Lowe’s ar ticle ”H eterogeneity, H ybridity, Multi plicity: Mar ki ng Asi an American Di fferences”6 is an exc ellent exampl e of how postmodern perspecti ves can c ontribute to i nsightful anal yses of Asian Americ ans. T aki ng a critical stanc e agai nst moder nist metanarrati ves, Lowe ar gues that
She notes, for exampl e, that many Asian American novels cas t c ultural iss ues excl usi vel y in terms of ”generati onal c onflict a nd filial r elation(s) .”7
Similarly,
discussions of Asi an American i denti ty often si mplis ticall y charac teriz e i dentity iss ues in bi nar y terms- as conflicts between thos e who identify clos el y wi th the i mmigrant or nationalis t posi tions versus thos e who are more America niz ed and as simil ated.* Avoidi ng the homog enizi ng effects of the mas ter narrati ves, Lowe advoc ates an anal ysis that examines the multi plicity and c omplexi ty of the Asian Americ an experienc e. She
maintai ns that
The affirmative essentializes the model minority experience – that results in
homogenization and recreation of a Eurocentric standpoint – turns case
Osajima 98
– a profes sor and Director of the R ac e and Ethnic Studies Pr ogram at the U ni versi ty of R edlands(Keith, “Pedagogic al C onsi der ations in Asi an American Studies”, Oc t, 1998, Journal of Asian American Studi es Vol ume 1, N umber 3, Proj ect M us e, D aehyun)
suggest that we rethink the "essentialist tendencies" that have strongly informed the
development of the field and teaching of our classes. Essentialism refers to efforts that
reduce the complex and diverse experiences of Asian Americans into a few governing
themes, patterns, narratives, or unifying concepts. In Asian American literature, for example, Lisa Lowe
argued that there has been a tendency to reduce the complexity of Asian experiences into
essentialist patterns of generational conflict and filial relations. 14 Shirley Hune observes that the
presentation of Asian American history is often dominated by a victimization paradigm,
where the main narrative portrays Asians as victimized by the racial oppression of
whites. 15 In the social sciences, the Asian American experience has often been reduced
to simplistic push-pull migration models, or universal patterns of assimilation, or
developmental models of identity. Those critics argue that essentialism oversimplifies and
homogenizes the Asian American experience and fails to analyze adequately the
complexity and diversity that has accompanied demographic change. Organizing our classes
They br oadl y
around such essentializing schemas limit
our ability to deal with the nuance and complexity of
the Asian American experience. The search for unifying themes problematically excludes
issues and unwittingly reinforces traditional, Eurocentric, disciplinary approaches to
inquiry. Elaine Kim describes the dilemma well in her candid assessment of her own approach to literary analysis: I looked for
unifying thematic threads and tidy resolutions that might ease the pain of displacement and heal the exile, heedless of what might
be missing from this homogenizing approach and oblivious to the parallels between what I was doing and the dominant culture
attempts to reduce Asian American experiences to developmental narratives about a movement from "primitive," "Eastern," and
foreign immigrant to "civilized," Western, and "Americanized" loyal citizen. 16 To counter the hold of reductionist,
homogenizing paradigms, Asian Americanists identify a number of ways to expand and
add complexity to how we think about Asian America. Peter Kwong, for example, revisits the
call for more attention to class dynamics. 17 He argues that a focus [End Page 274] on class will help us to
see and understand the conflicts between the "uptown" middle- and upper-class Asians
and the "downtown" working-class Asians. 18 Patricia Limerick adds that attention to class would
deepen our understanding of relations between racial groups. We would have to "reckon with the
events of 1933, when Mexican agricultural workers went on strike against Japanese berry
growers . . . who were themselves working hard against the unjust disadvantages of the
California Alien Land Law." 19 Along similar lines, we see expansion of Asian American studies in the area of gender
issues. The work on Asian American women is substantial and growing. Recently, this work has
been augmented by a focus on issues of sexuality and queer studies. This is an important breakthrough,
bringing into view topics that have been "regularly shrouded in particular forms of
silence in the Asian American community." 20 Central to work in this area are feminist and postmodern
theoretical insights that examine how our subjectivities and identities are socially constructed within contexts of powerful discourses
that define and shape social reality. Rather than treat identity as a fixed, singular entity, Asian
Americanists working here urge us to see how our identities are multiple and fluid,
situated and heterogeneous. An expanded Asian American studies is also moving away
from dichotomous categorizations which create problematic boundaries and limitations
in our analyses. For example, Shirley Hune challenges us to adopt more complex views of
racism to counter the dichotomous black/white model. She wrote: "A binary paradigm is
inadequate in a multiracial context. What is needed is a framework that incorporates
multiple racial groups and explores the complexity of current and future inter-group
dynamics." 21 Michael Omi and Howard Winant's work on "racial formations" has been particularly influential in this area. 22
Their attention to the historical, political, and discursive processes by which meanings of
race and racism are contested and constructed has helped to break from static
conceptualizations. Sau-ling Wong's notion of "denationalization," breaks from a domestic/foreign dichotomy that
sometimes separates and draws rigid lines between the experiences of Asians in the United States and their experiences and ties to
Asia. 23 She [End Page 275] argues that we must locate the Asian American experience as part of a
"global scattering of peoples of Asian origin"--what she refers to as a "diasporic perspective." 24
Underscoring many of the calls for an expanded and complex Asian American studies is
a renewed emphasis on cross-disciplinary approaches to inquiry.
Essentialism causes racial and cultural rigidity – turns case
Hong 7 – Professor at the Nanyang Business School of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1994 and had taught at the Hong Kong University of
Science and Technology from 1994 to 2002 before moving to University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
where she taught for eight years. She received the Otto Klineberg Intercultural and International Relations
Award in 2001, the Young Investigator Award (conferred by the International Society of Self and Identity)
in 2004, and is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. Her main research interests include
culture and cognition, self, identity, and intergroup relations. She is currently the editor of Advances in
Culture and Psychology, associate editor of Asian Journal of Social Psychology, and serving on the
editorial board of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. She has published over 100 journal
articles and book chapters(Ying-Yi, “Essentializing Race”, 2007,
http://www.ntu.edu.sg/home/YYHong/papers/journal/14%20Essentializing%20race.pdf, Daehyun)
implications of Chinese Americans’
essentialist belief about race at two levels: cognitive responses in cultural frame
switching (Study 1) and emotional reactivity when talking about bicultural experiences (Study 2). We found that
the more strongly bicultural individuals endorsed an essentialist belief about race, the more
likely they were to show cognitive difficulty when they had to switch rapidly between
different cultural frames, and the more likely they were to show emotional reactivity when
discussing matters that reminded them of their bicultural identity—that is, when its dual nature was under
GENERAL DISCUSSION In these two studies, we investigated the
consideration. These results support our predictions that bicultural individuals’ racial beliefs set up a framework of meaning within
which they relate to their ethnic and host cultures. That said, we are not advocating an assimilationist perspective that ethnic—
minority individuals who consider racial boundaries as rigid are maladjusted in American society as a result of their failure to
assimilate into the host culture. In fact, it has been suggested that essentialist discourse of race can have progressive implications
for minority groups facing pressure to assimilate (Verkuyten. 2003). What we do posit, however, is that individuals’
essentialist beliefs about race can influence how they structure their experiences in a
multicultural society, and that such beliefs influence psychological processes when
individuals have to deal with two apparently discrete cultures. Although essentialism was the core of
some of the pioneering theories in the field of intergroup relations (Allpori, 1954), this concept has not been given the attention it
(leserves until re cently (e.g., Gelman, 2003: Ilaslam et al., 2004; Prentice & Miller. 2006; Yzerbyt et al., 1998). Adding to this
literature, the present research demonstrates that essentializing race hinders bicultural individuals’
navigation between cultures. This new discovery is timely as many societies are undergoing rapid globalization and
their people are being exposed to multiple cultural traditions. A critical examination of lay essentialist beliefs about social groups is
crucial in understanding how such transitions can be most successfully accomplished.
Their notion of resistance through the ballot masks state power – they’re just an
illusion of change and empowerment – they make the problem worse and instill
an adaptive politics of being and effaces the institutional constraints that
reproduce structural violence
Brown 95 [1995, Wendy Brown is a professor at UC Berkeley, “States of Injury,” pp. 21-23]
For some, fueled by opprobrium toward regulatory norms or other mo- dalities of domination, the language of
"resistance" has taken up the ground vacated by a more expansive practice of freedom. For others, it is the
discourse of “empowerment” that carries the ghost of freedom's valence ¶ 22¶. Yet as many have noted, insofar
as resistance is an effect of the regime it opposes on the one hand, and insofar as its practitioners
often seek to void it of normativity to differentiate it from the (regulatory) nature of what it
opposes on the other, it is at best politically rebellious; at worst, politically amorphous. Resistance
stands against, not for; it is re-action to domination, rarely willing to admit to a desire for it, and it is
neutral with regard to possible political direction. Resistance is in no way constrained to a
radical or emancipatory aim. a fact that emerges clearly as soon as one analogizes Foucault's notion of resistance to its
companion terms in Freud or Nietzsche. Yet in some ways this point is less a critique of Foucault, who especially in his later
years made clear that his political commitments were not identical with his theoretical ones (and un- apologetically revised
the latter), than a sign of his misappropriation. For Foucault, resistance marks the presence of power and expands our
under- standing of its mechanics, but it is in this regard an analytical strategy rather than an expressly political one. "Where
there is power, there is resistance, and yet. or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of
exteriority to power. . . . (T]he strictly relational character of power relationships . . . depends upon a
multiplicity of points of resis- tance: these play the role of adversary, target, support, or handle in
power relations.*39 This appreciation of the extent to which resistance is by no means inherently
subversive of power also reminds us that it is only by recourse to a very non-Foucaultian moral evaluation of
power as bad or that which is to be overcome that it is possible to equate resistance with that which is good, progressive, or
seeking an end to domination. ¶ If popular and academic notions of resistance attach, however weakly at times, to a
tradition of protest, the other contemporary substitute for a discourse of freedom—“empowerment”—would seem to
correspond more closely to a tradition of idealist reconciliation. The language of resistance implicitly
acknowledges the extent to which protest always transpires inside the regime;
“empowerment,” in contrast, registers the possibility of generating one’s capacities , one’s “self-esteem,”
one’s life course, without capitulating to constraints by particular regimes of power. But in so doing, contemporary
discourses of empowerment too often signal an oddly adaptive and harmonious
relationship with domination insofar as they locate an individual’s sense of worth and
capacity in
the register of individual feelings, a register implicitly located on some- thing of an other
worldly plane vis-a-vis social and political power. In this regard, despite its apparent locution of
resistance to subjection, contem- porary discourses of empowerment partake strongly of liberal
solipsism—the radical decontextualization of the subject characteristic of¶ 23¶ liberal discourse that is key to the
fictional sovereign individualism of liberalism. Moreover, in its almost exclusive focus on subjects’
emotionalbearing and self-regard, empowerment is a formulation that converges with a regime’s own
legitimacy needs in masking the power of the regime.¶ This is not to suggest that talk of empowerment is
always only illusion or delusion. It is to argue, rather, that while the notion of empowerment articulates that feature of
freedom concerned with action, with being more than the consumer subject figured in discourses of rights and eco- nomic
democracy, contemporary deployments of that notion also draw so heavily on an undeconstructed
subjectivity that they risk
establishing a wide chasm between the (experience of)
empowerment and an actual capacity to shape the terms of political, social,
or economic life. Indeed, the possibility that one can “feel empowered”
without being so forms an important element of legitimacy for the
antidemocratic dimensions of liberalism.
Talking about the Model Minority disavowal Antiblackness as the structure
antagonism that created the Myth in the first place.
Ng 16 (Pamela Ng, a bachelor in Asian American Studies in Scripps College. “WTF is
#Modelminoritymutiny?: Solidarity, Embodiment, and Practice in Subverting Ascribed Asian American
Racial Positioning”; 2016/5/22;
http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1899&context=scripps_theses; p14)
In talking about the model minority myth as a manifestation of a divisive tactic
both internal and external to the Asian American and multiracial spaces,
respectively, what needs to be a considered about identity politics is that, oftentimes, it leads to
conversations that are more rooted in trying to prove Asian American oppression
rather than moving towards unlearning the internalization of antiblack models of
seeking liberation . While the latter placates a progressive stride towards better representation for
Asian Americans, which can arguably have positive material results, this positivity comes with a glass
ceiling that only mirrors the triangulation that has occurred throughout time.
The disavowal of the Model Minority Myth isn’t an attempt down white supremacy
is mistakes the symptom of the disease for the disease itself—their solvency is a
erasure of black Asian and posits their resistance as a disavowal of blackness.
Phạm 16 (Xoài Phạm is is a Vietnamese queer, gender non-conforming femme warrior “Ending AntiBlackness Needs to Be a Top Priority for Asian Americans – Here’s Why”; 2016/2/26;
http://everydayfeminism.com/2016/02/ending-anti-blackness-asian)
Anti-Blackness exists in every continent. It exists among all of our non-Black communities of color; it
exists among the people in our families; and it exists among us, individually, too. Which means it’s our
responsibility to continually fight to end anti-Blackness in every way we can. Among non-Black people of
color, there is the widespread notion that racial justice means being united against white supremacy. Yet,
non-Black people of color rarely address the question of how the abolition of white supremacy can never
be realized if rampant anti-Blackness among non-Black people goes unchecked. Time and again, Asian
American social justice warriors will readily fight white supremacy but in the same
breath reinforce anti-Black tropes or appropriate Black American cultures. To live in
the world that Black, Indigenous, and other people of color dream about requires a complete stop, utter
end, total destruction of anti-Blackness. And I say this not as someone who has unlearned anti-Blackness
but is unlearning, with the knowledge that the end of my oppression is bound up with Black liberation and
with the knowledge that Black folks deserve unconditional freedom regardless. There is no quick-andeasy microwaveable version of unlearning anti-Blackness. It is a lifelong, necessary commitment. Here
are some things I’ve noticed while unlearning. One of the ways that we Asian Americans attempt
to show that we are valuable under the Euro-American gaze is by distancing ourselves
from what we perceive to be Blackness – meaning we draw ourselves in stark contrast to the narrow
stereotypes that non-Black people have already assigned to Black people. In the context of the beauty
industry, this results in non-Black folks finding ways to bleach our skin, color our eyes and hair, and do
our makeup in ways that not only reaches towards whiteness but also distances us from Blackness. For
Asian Americans, the lighter the skin, the more beautiful you perceived to be. And across the Asian
continent, lighter skin is a mark of beauty, while darkness is equated to ugliness. Girls, especially, have
their bodies policed to make sure they conform to anti-Black ideas of beauty. As for income, Asian
Americans often struggle to attain financial and political wealth in order to move out of poor, Black
neighborhoods and prove to white people that we are not “like the Black folks.” As a result, we willfully
buy into the “model minority myth,” which is the puke-inducing idea that Asian Americans are the good,
hardworking example of what a minority should be. The term was coined by sociologist William Petersen
in 1966 to describe the success of Japanese Americans in the face of anti-Japanese sentiment. Despite
the fact that he was only describing a single ethnicity out of the many ethnicities in Asia – go read a map
to remind yourself of how fucking big Asia is – people then began using the term to refer to Asian
Americans as a whole. Yeah, people started using this model minority myth while talking about all
immigrants from the entire continent of Asia – that shit was ridiculous to say the least. This myth only
holds true if Asian Americans are willing to maintain that Black folks are a “bad minority.” The assigned
value of non-Black Asian Americans is entirely dependent on the lack of value they assign to Blackness.
But the truth is that in 2015, many communities of Asian Americans have begun to access the privileges
that have been traditionally associated with white Americans. The danger is in saying that Asian
Americans, as a whole, are a successful minority by capitalist standards, because there are many
Southeast Asians, for example, disproportionately living in poverty and with mental illness. There are
many undocumented Asians, too, who are not even taken into account in the rare cases that Asian
Americans are even included in race-oriented surveys. There are also South and West Asians who are
being victimized by the onslaught of Islamophobic hatred. The thing is that this model minority myth
did not consider at all that Black Asians exist, and that Black Asians are facing the
inconceivable violence of anti-Blackness, too. The colonial imposition of racial categories was not made
to uphold the complexities of bodies and identities. Where do Black Asians fit in the context of antiBlackness and a model minority? The most dangerous way that non-Black Asians distance
ourselves from Blackness is by conceptualizing the Asian American as
completely devoid of Blackness. When people hear “Asian,” the majority immediately think of a
pale-skinned person with straight, black hair – someone who looks like Lucy Liu. The image that Asians
and non-Asians have in their heads about who Asians are is not just woefully monolithic, but also
removed from Blackness. When Asian identity – how Asians understand ourselves in relation to the world
as racialized people – makes no room for Blackness, it results in the violent erasure of Black Asians from
the face of the earth. If Black Asians aren’t known to exist, there is no consideration for the violence they
face. There is no consideration to the multiplicities of Blackness that are reduced by non-Black folks.
When Black Asians are erased, non-Black Asians have an easier time creating distance
between ourselves and Blackness, gaining illusory value at the expense of Black people. One
of the functions of white supremacy and anti-Blackness is to simplify the histories, ancestries, and
identities of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color. This is why many people don’t know about
Blackness in Asia and among the diaspora. It’s much more convenient to believe that Blackness has no
place in Asian identity in order to more easily participate in the capitalist dynamics of whiteness. As a
result, misinformed accusations of cultural appropriation, for example, ensue. South Asians have accused
East Africans of appropriation for wearing headpieces, henna, and jewelry that are commonly associated
with South Asians. Despite being separated only by the Indian Ocean, the ties that connect South Asians
and East Africans are strained by non-Black Asians’ inclination to set the terms and conditions of how
they want to use Blackness. All ties to Blackness are erased when non-Black Asians feel
the need to monopolize our cultures, but there is no hesitation when non-Black
Asians across the world want to appropriate Black American cultures. What space can
Black Asians find in Asian communities when Blackness is unwanted and mistreated yet simultaneously
stolen and parodied? How can Black Asians, and Black folks as a whole, feel safe with non-Black Asians
when the perpetrator of the Charleston massacre wrote on his website that East Asians “are by nature
very racist and could be great allies of the White race?” Dear non-Black Asians, it has long been time to
shift our priorities. When the Black Lives Matter movement was beginning to be derailed by those who
were using #AsianLivesMatter, it was clear that these non-Black Asians didn’t realize that Black Asians
exist too and that if they actually gave a fuck about Asian people at all, they would support Black Asians
and Black Lives Matter. But aside from that self-serving reason, the derailing of Black Lives Matter also
hurts non-Black Asians because white supremacy relies on anti-Blackness to survive. A white
supremacist world is not sustainable without anti-Blackness fueling it. And because
white supremacy, and oppressive systems in general, rely on erasure, non-Black Asians forget that
before Europeans started the Atlantic slave trade, there was the Arab slave trade of East Africans.
Grappling with our anti-Blackness as Asian Americans has to take place both within and outside of a
white supremacist context, because non-Black people committing anti-Blackness predates European antiBlackness. This is not to say that non-Black Asians are more responsible than Europeans for antiBlackness; rather, I am pointing out the fact that non-Black Asians certainly did not need white people to
instruct them on how to be anti-Black. Claiming that anti-Blackness is a result of white
conditioning is shirking responsibility.
The Asian American Civil Rights Movement proves that institutional
engagement is possible and productive
Maeda 16 (Daryl Joji Maeda, associate professor at the University of Colorado, “The Asian
American Movement”, 2016
http://americanhistory.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.001.0001/acrefore9780199329175-e-21, DOA: 7/12/17)//AK
The Asian American Movement was a social movement for racial justice, most active
during the late 1960s through the mid-1970s, which brought together people of various
Asian ancestries in the United States who protested against racism and U.S. neoimperialism, demanded changes in institutions such as colleges and universities, organized
workers, and sought to provide social services such as housing, food, and healthcare to poor
people. As one of its signal achievements, the Movement created the category “Asian
American,” (coined by historian and activist Yuji Ichioka), which encompasses the multiple
Asian ethnic groups who have migrated to the United States. Its founding principle of
coalitional politics emphasizes solidarity among Asians of all ethnicities, multiracial
solidarity among Asian Americans as well as with African, Latino, and Native Americans
in the United States, and transnational solidarity with peoples around the globe impacted
by U.S. militarism.
The movement participated in solidarity work with other Third World peoples in the United
States, including the Third World Liberation Front strikes at San Francisco State College and
University of California, Berkeley. The Movement fought for housing rights for poor people in the
urban cores of San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, Seattle, and Philadelphia; it created
arts collectives, published newspapers and magazines, and protested vigorously against the
Vietnam War. It also extended to Honolulu, where activists sought to preserve land rights in
rural Hawai’i. It contributed to the larger radical movement for power and justice that critiqued
capitalism and neo-imperialism, which flourished during the 1960s and 1970s. Keywords: Asian
American Movement, racial justice, housing rights, neo-imperialism, anti-capitalism, Vietnam
War
By 1968, Asian immigrants and their descendants had been in the United States for over a
century and had engaged in various forms of resistance to racism for many decades. However,
the particular ideologies and forms of activism that characterized the “Asian American
movement” only emerged with the dawn of Third World movements for power and selfdetermination in the late 1960s. Previously, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, and Asian
Indians participated in divergent forms of political organizing. Class-based politics aimed to gain
better wages and working conditions; homeland politics attempted to bolster the international
standings of their nations of origins or free them from colonial rule; assimilationist politics
attempted to demonstrate that Asians were worthy of the rights and privileges of citizenship.
None of these forms built a sense of common cause among Asian immigrants of different
ethnicities, and homeland politics even exacerbated tensions. In the early to mid-1960s, a
number of Asian Americans participated individually in various New Left movements—including
the Free Speech Movement, Civil Rights movement, and anti-Vietnam War movement—that did
not directly address Asian American issues. In contrast to these earlier forms of political
activism, the Asian American movement emphasized Asian collectivity, arguing that Asians of
all ethnicities in the United States shared a common position of subjugation due to anti-Asian
racism, and furthermore, that Asians in the United States should oppose U.S. imperialism
abroad, especially in Asia. Drawing influences from the Black Power and antiwar movements,
the Asian American movement forged a coalitional politics that united Asians of varying
ethnicities and declared solidarity with other Third World people in the United States and
abroad. Segments of the movement struggled for community control of education,
provided social services and defended affordable housing in Asian ghettoes, organized
exploited workers, protested against U.S. imperialism, and built new multiethnic cultural
institutions. By the end of the 1970s, the contours of the movement shifted dramatically
enough to mark an end to the Asian American movement per se, though certainly not an end to
Asian American activism.1
Origins The Asian American movement grew out of two of the most significant social movements of the 1960s: the Black Power and anti-Vietnam War movements. Unsatisfied
with insistence on inclusion and civil rights, the Asian American movement demanded self-determination and power both for Asians in the United States and in Asia. The Red
Guard Party of San Francisco provides the clearest example of how engaging with Black Power helped Asian Americans build an understanding of their own racial positioning in
the United States. The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, established in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, rose to prominence as the vanguard organization among
radicals of color by the late 1960s. The Panthers melded radical politics with racial pride, advocating community control over institutions such as education and law enforcement
in black ghettos and demanding fair housing and employment, while celebrating the aesthetics of black people, black bodies, and black culture. This powerful mélange of ideas
impacted Chinese Americans in the ghetto of San Francisco Chinatown, which suffered from substandard education, housing, social services, and employment opportunities,
but an overabundance of police brutality. When a group of young people who congregated regularly at the Legitimate Ways pool hall on Jackson Street began to discuss how to
address these conditions, the Panthers took notice, visiting the pool hall, inviting the Chinatown youth to study sessions on political theory, and urging them to form an
organization. The Red Guard Party that arose was named after Mao’s youth cadre and largely mirrored the Panthers’ ideology and language, but with key adaptations. Where
the Panthers advocated power for “black” people, the Red Guards demanded it for “yellow” people, a sign that the largely Chinese American Red Guards had adopted a racial,
rather than ethnic rubric. Minister of Information Alex Hing articulated the commonalities shared by blacks and Asian Americans, who both experienced racism and exploitation
in the United States, and argued that the Panthers’ example of directly providing social services (such as the free breakfast program) provided a viable model for Chinatown.
Across the Bay, in Berkeley, a graduate student named Yuji Ichioka, who would go on to be an influential historian, coined the term “Asian American” when he co-founded the
Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA) as an explicitly pan-Asian organization in 1968. Seeking Asian Americans with progressive leanings, Ichioka and co-founder Emma
Gee pored through the roster of the antiwar Peace and Freedom Party, identifying all individuals with Asian last names and inviting them to join the new organization. AAPA
thus included Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino Americans, both American-born and immigrants, from the mainland and Hawaii. AAPA advocated for Asian American solidarity to
counter racism and imperialism and declared its camaraderie with other people of color in the United States and abroad. Richard Aoki, undoubtedly the most colorful member of
the group, served as a Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party prior to helping to form AAPA. On the East Coast, the formation of Asian Americans for Action (AAA), in 1969,
demonstrated again how the Asian American movement drew together the influences of Black Power and the antiwar movement. Two longtime leftist Nisei (second generation
Japanese American) women, Kazu Iijima and Minn Masuda, noted approvingly that the anti-racist and anti-imperialist politics preached by Black Power advocates like H. Rap
Brown were also accompanied by a strong dose of racial pride. They saw Black Power as an antidote to the pro-assimilationist fever that had struck many Japanese Americans
after their experiences in concentration camps during World War II. They sought ways to convey this sense of pride to the next generation in their own community. Significantly,
Iijima’s son Chris urged them to reach out to all Asians, regardless of ethnicity. Iijima and Masuda’s recruitment strategy resembled Ichioka’s in that they organized within the
antiwar movement by approaching every individual Asian they spotted at Vietnam protests. The best-known AAA member was Yuri Kochiyama, whose legendary radicalism
formed through her relationship with Malcolm X, whom she counted as a personal friend. Because it arose from encounters with Black Power and antiwar protests, the Asian
American movement eschewed the Civil Rights framework in favor of pursuing self-determination for Asian Americans and all other Third World people in the United States, and
opposing what it deemed to be a genocidal, anti-Asian war in Indochina.
Activism on Campus A radical coalitional impulse characterized the Asian American
movement from its inception onward, driving it to create multiethnic Asian organizations and
pursue alliances with other people of color. The movement’s actions aimed at
revolutionizing higher education, clearly displayed this emphasis on building solidarity.
Asian Americans participated in student strikes at San Francisco State College (1968–
1969) and Cal Berkeley (1969), in both cases as members of Third World Liberation Fronts
(TWLF) (although the Berkeley version was inspired by its counterpart at SF State and shared
its ideals, there were no organizational ties between the two).2 Students at the largely
commuter campus of San Francisco State were politically active throughout the 1960s,
protesting against the war, capital punishment, government repression, and racial
discrimination. Perhaps most importantly, students operated tutoring and recruitment
programs for youth in neighborhoods such as the predominantly black Fillmore, the Mission,
and Chinatown. In the spring semester of 1968, three Asian American organizations—AAPA
(discussed above), Intercollegiate Chinese for Social Action (ICSA), and Pilipino American
Collegiate Endeavor (PACE)—joined the Black Student Union, Latin American Student
Organization (LASO), and Mexican American Student Confederation (MASC) to form the TWLF.
The largely Japanese American members of the San Francisco chapter of AAPA, which shared
the anti-racist and anti-imperialist politics of the original Berkeley chapter, worked on community
issues such as opposing urban redevelopment in Japan town. At the ICSA office on Clay Street,
members tutored Chinatown youth and recruited them to apply for college. PACE members
located their office in the Mission district, where they recruited Filipino high school students and
community members to State and organized within the community. Like the other members of
the TWLF coalition, all three of the Asian American groups sought to connect the college to the
community, increase access for their community members, and transform the meaning of a
college education.
There are empirical examples of Asian American institutional engagement
– the 1974 Confucius Plaza protests prove
AAFE ND (ASIAN AMERICANS FOR EQUALITY, pan-Asian organization, “Our History”,
http://www.aafe.org/who-we-are/our-history, DOA: 7/21/17)//AK
For Asian Americans for Equality, it all began in the streets of Chinatown in 1974. Moved to
action by a developer who refused to hire Asian workers for the massive Confucius Plaza
construction project, local activists raised their voices, staged months of protests and
finally prevailed. In so doing, they created a powerful grassroots movement that has
endured for four decades.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, tumultuous national and world events were having a profound
effect on Manhattan’s Chinatown. After strict immigration quotas were lifted in 1965, a large
number of Chinese immigrants poured into the historic neighborhood, remaking the
traditional ethnic enclave. Already difficult living and working conditions — including
overcrowding and exploitation by employers — became worse in a community that had
always been neglected by City Hall. At the same time, the Asian civil rights movement was
gaining momentum, partially inspired by the black civil rights campaigns of the ’60s. Many
young, idealistic New Yorkers of Chinese descent, some of them radical leftists, began
focusing on Chinatown’s many troubling issues and decided the time had come to demand
equal rights and equal access to city services.
Throughout Chinatown, the injustices at Confucius Plaza were causing great outrage. The
DeMatteis Corp., in charge of building the government-funded project, rejected pleas
from the youthful activists, then known as Asian Americans for Equal Employment, to honor
the city’s fair- hiring policies. Protests began May 16 and continued to pick up momentum
through the fall. Picketers carried signs with slogans such as, “The Asians built the railroad;
Why not Confucius Plaza?” Dozens were arrested.
A June 1 New York Times report noted, “The meticulously organized protest, similar to those
that have been taking place at sites in black and Latino areas for 11 years in the city, is
something new to Chinatown. While residents have often complained of discrimination and
short-changing on city services, public protest has been rare.”
Reflecting on the dramatic events of 40 years ago, AAFE Executive Director Chris Kui says
protest among New York Asians wasn’t just rare, it was unheard of at that time. “I remember the
Asian community was afraid to speak up about issues they faced… lack of access to equal
employment or services.”
DeMatteis Corp. eventually relented, agreeing to hire 27 minority workers, Asians among
them. It was a major victory for the community and immediately established Asian
Americans for Equal Employment as an organization that people could rely on when they
had nowhere else to turn. The volunteers established an office in Chinatown, which
quickly became a resource center for tenants facing harassment, those encountering
immigration issues and workers being mistreated. There were more protests, too, against
illegal sweatshops and deplorable conditions in local garment factories.
Specifically, Asian engagement in the law can lead to social change
Liu 7/23 (GOODWIN LIU, California Supreme Court justice, “There are more Asian American
lawyers than ever — but not in the top ranks”, 7/23/17 http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/laoe-liu-asian-american-lawyers-20170723-story.html, DOA: 7/23/17)//AK
For most of our nation’s history, Asians were excluded from the legal profession. But much has
changed in recent decades. From 1985 to 2005, Asian Americans were the fastest growing
minority group in the bar. Today, there are more than 50,000 Asian American lawyers,
compared with 10,000 in 1990. More than 7,000 Asian Americans are now studying law, up
from 2,300 in 1986.
And yet, Asian Americans have made limited progress in reaching the top ranks of the profession. Although Asian Americans are the largest minority group in big firms, they
have the highest attrition rate and rank lowest in the ratio of partners to associates. Asian Americans comprise 6% of the U.S. population, but only 3% of federal judges and 2%
of state judges. Three out of 94 U.S. attorneys in 2016 were Asian American; only four out of 2,437 elected district attorneys in 2014 were Asian American. These data may
partly reflect Asian Americans’ relative newcomer status and lack of seniority in the legal profession. But there are other challenges as well. A new study that a team of Yale law
students and I co-authored, which included a national survey of more than 600 Asian American lawyers, found that Asian Americans identify lack of access to mentors and
contacts as a primary barrier to career advancement. Notably, 95% of our survey respondents had no parent with a law degree. Law is unfamiliar terrain to many Asian
American families, including mine. The first lawyer I ever met was my congressman, the late Robert T. Matsui, who sponsored me to be a page in the U.S. House of
Representative. If it weren’t for Bob, I’m not sure I would have considered law or become a judge. In addition, over half of our survey respondents said they “sometimes” or
“often” experience implicit discrimination in the workplace. Some reported incidents in which colleagues or court personnel did not recognize them as lawyers. Female attorneys,
in particular, reported being mistaken in court for the translator, court reporter, paralegal, client or even a client’s girlfriend. Although Asian Americans are regarded as having
the “hard skills” required for competent lawyering, they are often thought to lack “soft skills.” Our survey respondents said they are perceived as hard-working, responsible and
careful, but not as empathetic, assertive or creative. Asian Americans are stereotypically the “worker bees” in law firms; many struggle in promotion processes that involve
subjective criteria such as likability, gravitas and leadership potential. As one survey respondent said, “Somehow I am the only one staying back to cover the team assignments
when the others went out for yoga and wine.” Our study also found that few Asian Americans went to law school in order to gain a pathway into government or politics.
Compared with other racial or ethnic groups, Asian Americans gravitate toward law firms and business settings, and they are least likely to work in government early in their
careers. Few become top prosecutors, elected officials or judges.
Greater penetration into public leadership roles is critical if the growing number of Asian
American attorneys is to translate into greater influence throughout society. With issues
such as immigration, education, voting rights and national security in the headlines, the quality
of our public policies depends on everyone having a seat at the table, including Asian
Americans.
Public service is also important to dispelling the stereotype of Asian Americans as
perpetual foreigners. Bob Matsui was 6 months old when he and his family were incarcerated
at Tule Lake as part of the internment of people with Japanese ancestry during World War II .
Despite that experience, or perhaps because of it, Bob entered public service and left no doubt
about the love and loyalty he felt toward his country.
There is no single way to create a more inclusive legal profession. But the first step is
awareness. Asian Americans have often been neglected because of their small numbers,
and monitoring progress is essential in law firms and other institutions where lawyers work.
Beyond that, senior attorneys of all ethnic groups can be more intentional in mentoring Asian
American colleagues. In addition to Bob, I have been fortunate to have mentors from various
backgrounds, including the two federal judges for whom I clerked. The common denominator
was that they took a sustained interest in my career and were willing to use their wisdom,
contacts or clout to help me.
We also have to change perceptions of the roles that Asian Americans can play in our
society. Having watched countless episodes of the television series “Law & Order,” I am struck
that this popular portrayal of the American justice system never seemed to cast an Asian
American as an attorney or a judge. The only regular Asian American character was a forensic
scientist.
Critique cannot rely simply on withdrawal but must have a praxis to engage
the state to succeed – not doing so cedes the political to the right
Mouffe 9 (CHANTAL MOUFFE, prominent Belgian political theorist, “The Importance of
Engaging the State”, 2009 pages 233~237, DOA: 7/14/17)//AK
In both Hardt and Negri, and Virno, there is therefore emphasis upon ‘critique as withdrawal’.
They all call for the development of a non-state public sphere. They call for self-organisation,
experimentation, non-representative and extra-parliamentary politics. They see [think of]
forms of traditional representative politics as inherently oppressive. So they do not seek
to engage with them, in order to challenge them. They seek to get rid of them altogether.
This disengagement is, for such influential personalities in radical politics today, the key to
every political position in the world. The Multitude must recognise imperial sovereignty itself as the enemy and discover adequate means of subverting its
power. Whereas in the disciplinary era I spoke about earlier, sabotage was the fundamental form of political resistance, these authors claim that, today, it should be desertion. It
is indeed through desertion, through the evacuation of the places of power, that they think that battles against Empire might be won. Desertion and exodus are, for these
important thinkers, a powerful form of class struggle against imperial postmodernity.
According to Hardt and Negri, and Virno, radical politics in the past was dominated by the notion of ‘the people’. This was, according to them, a unity, acting with one will. And
this unity is linked to the existence of the state. The Multitude, on the contrary, shuns political unity. It is not representable because it is an active self-organising agent that can
never achieve the status of a juridical personage. It can never converge in a general will, because the present globalisation of capital and workers’ struggles will not permit this.
It is anti-state and anti-popular. Hardt and Negri claim that the Multitude cannot be conceived any more in terms of a sovereign authority that is representative of the people.
withdrawal from existing
institutions. This is something which characterises much of radical politics today. The
emphasis is not upon challenging the state. Radical politics today is often characterised
by a mood, a sense and a feeling, that the state itself is inherently the problem.
They therefore argue that new forms of politics, which are non-representative, are needed. They advocate a
Critique as engagement I will now turn to presenting the way I envisage the form of social criticism best suited to radical politics today. I agree with Hardt and Negri that it is
important to understand the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. But I consider that the dynamics of this transition is better apprehended within the framework of the
approach outlined in the book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001). What I want to stress is that many factors
have contributed to this transition from Fordism to post-Fordism, and that it is necessary to recognise its complex nature. My problem with Hardt and Negri’s view is that, by
putting so much emphasis on the workers’ struggles, they tend to see this transition as if it was driven by one single logic: the workers’ resistance to the forces of capitalism in
the post-Fordist era. They put too much emphasis upon immaterial labour. In their view, capitalism can only be reactive and they refuse to accept the creative role played both
by capital and by labour. To put it another way, they deny the positive role of political struggle. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics we
use the word ‘hegemony’ to describe the way in which meaning is given to institutions or practices: for example, the way in which a given institution or practice is defined as
‘oppressive to women’, ‘racist’ or ‘environmentally destructive’. We also point out that every hegemonic order is therefore susceptible to being challenged by counter-hegemonic
practices – feminist, anti-racist, environmentalist, for example. This is illustrated by the plethora of new social movements which presently exist in radical politics today
(Christian, anti-war, counter-globalisation, Muslim, and so on). Clearly not all of these are workers’ struggles. In their various ways they have nevertheless attempted to
influence and have influenced a new hegemonic order. This means that when we talk about ‘the political’, we do not lose sight of the ever present possibility of heterogeneity
and antagonism within society. There are many different ways of being antagonistic to a dominant order in a heterogeneous society – it need not only refer to the workers’
struggles. I submit that it is necessary to introduce this hegemonic dimension when one envisages the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. This means abandoning the view
that a single logic (workers’ struggles) is at work in the evolution of the work process; as well as acknowledging the pro-active role played by capital. In order to do this we can
find interesting insights in the work of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello who, in their book The New Spirit of Capitalism (2005), bring to light the way in which capitalists manage
to use the demands for autonomy of the new movements that developed in the 1960s, harnessing them in the development of the post-Fordist networked economy and
transforming them into new forms of control. They use the term ‘artistic critique’ to refer to how the strategies of the counter-culture (the search for authenticity, the ideal of
selfmanagement and the anti-hierarchical exigency) were used to promote the conditions required by the new mode of capitalist regulation, replacing the disciplinary framework
characteristic of the Fordist period. From my point of view, what is interesting in this approach is that it shows how an important dimension of the transition from Fordism to postFordism involves rearticulating existing discourses and practices in new ways. It allows us to visualise the transition from Fordism to post- Fordism in terms of a hegemonic
intervention. To be sure, Boltanski and Chiapello never use this vocabulary, but their analysis is a clear example of what Gramsci called ‘hegemony through neutralisation’ or
‘passive revolution’. This refers to a situation where demands which challenge the hegemonic order are recuperated by the existing system, which is achieved by satisfying
them in a way that neutralises their subversive potential. When we apprehend the transition from Fordism to post- Fordism within such a framework, we can understand it as a
hegemonic move by capital to re-establish its leading role and restore its challenged legitimacy. We did not witness a revolution, in Marx’s sense of the term. Rather, there have
been many different interventions, challenging dominant hegemonic practices.
It is clear that, once we envisage social reality in terms of ‘hegemonic’ and ‘counterhegemonic’ practices, radical politics is not about withdrawing completely from existing
institutions. Rather, we have no other choice but to engage with hegemonic practices, in
order to challenge them. This is crucial; otherwise we will be faced with a chaotic situation.
Moreover, if we do not engage with and challenge the existing order, if we instead choose to
simply escape the state completely, we leave the door open for others to take control of
systems of authority and regulation. Indeed there are many historical (and not so historical)
examples of this. When the Left shows little interest, Right-wing and authoritarian groups are
only too happy to take over the state.
The strategy of exodus could be seen as the reformulation of the idea of communism, as it was found in Marx. There are many points in common between the two perspectives.
To be sure, for Hardt and Negri it is no longer the proletariat, but the Multitude which is the privileged political subject. But in both cases the state is seen as a monolithic
apparatus of domination that cannot be transformed. It has to ‘wither away’ in order to leave room for a reconciled society beyond law, power and sovereignty. In reality, as I’ve
already noted, others are often perfectly willing to take control. If my approach – supporting new social movements and counterhegemonic practices – has been called ‘postMarxist’ by many, it is precisely because I have challenged the very possibility of such a reconciled society. To acknowledge the ever present possibility of antagonism to the
existing order implies recognising that heterogeneity cannot be eliminated. As far as politics is concerned, this means the need to envisage it in terms of a hegemonic struggle
between conflicting hegemonic projects attempting to incarnate the universal and to define the symbolic parameters of social life. A successful hegemony fixes the meaning of
institutions and social practices and defines the ‘common sense’ through which a given conception of reality is established. However, such a result is always contingent,
precarious and susceptible to being challenged by counter-hegemonic interventions. Politics always takes place in a field criss-crossed by antagonisms. A properly political
intervention is always one that engages with a certain aspect of the existing hegemony. It can never be merely oppositional or conceived as desertion, because it aims to
challenge the existing order, so that it may reidentify and feel more comfortable with that order.
Another important aspect of a hegemonic politics lies in establishing linkages between
various demands (such as environmentalists, feminists, anti-racist groups), so as to transform
them into claims that will challenge the existing structure of power relations. This is a
further reason why critique involves engagement, rather than disengagement. It is clear that the
different demands that exist in our societies are often in conflict with each other. This is why they need to be articulated politically, which obviously involves the creation of a
collective will, a ‘we’. This, in turn, requires the determination of a ‘them’. This obvious and simple point is missed by the various advocates of the Multitude. For they seem to
believe that the Multitude possesses a natural unity which does not need political articulation. Hardt and Negri see ‘the People’ as homogeneous and expressed in a unitary
general will, rather than divided by different political conflicts. Counter-hegemonic practices, by contrast, do not eliminate differences. Rather, they are what could be called an
‘ensemble of differences’, all coming together, only at a given moment, against a common adversary. Such as when different groups from many backgrounds come together to
protest against a war perpetuated by a state, or when environmentalists, feminists, anti-racists and others come together to challenge dominant models of development and
progress. In these cases, the adversary cannot be defined in broad general terms like ‘Empire’, or for that matter ‘Capitalism’. It is instead contingent upon the particular
Put another way, the
construction of political demands is dependent upon the specific relations of power that need to
be targeted and transformed, in order to create the conditions for a new hegemony. This is
clearly not an exodus from politics. It is not ‘critique as withdrawal’, but ‘critique as
engagement’. It is a ‘war of position’ that needs to be launched, often across a range of sites,
involving the coming together of a range of interests. This can only be done by establishing links
between social movements, political parties and trade unions, for example. The aim is to create
a common bond and collective will, engaging with a wide range of sites, and often institutions,
with the aim of transforming them. This, in my view, is how we should conceive the nature of
radical politics.
circumstances in question – the specific states, international institutions or governmental practices that are to be challenged.
Poetics of alterity validate the essentialist notion of Asian American
difference, solidifying a complicity within existing values of the cultural
dominant liberal multiculturalism
Yao 7 (Steven G. Professor of Literature at Hamilton College, Winter 2007, “Reviewed
Work(s): The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian American Poetry by Xiaojing Zhou,”
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/30029836.pdf?refreqid=search%3A80c743116fec79183bbd84a
4ab4bf57f) AL
The sustained
discussions of various poems by writers of Asian descent in the US collectively
provide a useful contribution to American ethnic literary scholarship. At the same time, however,
the study suffers from considerable repetitiveness. For in relying so heavily on a Levinasian
theoretical frame, basically Zhou attributes the same cultural politics to all the poets she
considers. Thus, she writes in her conclusion: The significance of Asian American poets' development of an ethics and poetics
of alterity concerns much more than the celebrated enrichment and wider creative possibilities of difference. Insisting on speaking
as the other, allowing the voices of the other and others to be heard, and tak- ing into account the alterity of the other in their poems,
Asian American poets such as Li-young Lee, Marilyn Chin, David Mura, Kimiko Hahn, Timothy Liu, John Yau, and Myung Mi Kim,
among others, re-frame the questions of otherness raised by feminists, poststructuralists, and theo- rists of cultural studies and
postcolonial studies, with its historical weight and current exigency. (279) The sheer breadth of this conclusion begs a number of
important questions. Most notably: Why
the emphasis on these poets in particu- lar, especially in light of
the all too briefly mentioned possible "oth- ers?" Also, how to account for the differences in
reception among the poets that Zhou does choose to discuss? Why, for example, have
testimonial poets such as Lee, Chin, Mura, Hahn, and Liu consistently received more attention
from both popular and scholarly audiences than abstract writers such as Yau and Kim? And in a
related vein, what about the possibility of complicity with the existing values of the cultural
dominant, most especially under the terms of our cur- rent ideological environment of
liberal multiculturalism ? The absence of such a possibility in Zhou's study courts the
danger of validating an ultimately essentialist conception of Asian American difference .
Furthermore, in employing an overtly philosophical analytic frame, Zhou makes Asian American poetry seem an
entirely contemporary phenomenon. Her study overlooks the earlier historical tradition of verse
by people of Asian descent in the US, which includes early pro- test verse in English by familiar
and solidly canonical figures such as Carlos Bulosan, as well as poetry produced in direct connection
with the Asian American movement. Accordingly, she neglects the central role that poetry
played, often based on its expressly oral qualities, in the political and cultural struggles that
helped give rise to the identity category of "Asian American" itself. As with any critical work that helps
initiate a field, then, Zhou's study raises at least as many ques- tions as it presumes to answer.
Narration and the politics of justice perpetuates exclusion
Ang 11 (Sze, Professor at the University of Hong Kong, “The Politics of Victimization and the
Model Minority, Michigan State University Press, 11(3), p. 135) ALH
In this novel, the
double process of abstraction found in Hata’s constant performance of model
citizenship constructs race relations as a paradox of presence and nonpresence. Kkutaeh’s body had
become a racial object even as her “race” was denied—as Captain Ono claimed, her bloodline was “the most pure Japanese” and
not Korean (Lee 1999, 268). Kkutaeh’s racial identity as Korean reduces her to a sexual object in the Japanese war camp, but her
beauty leads the men to consider her not only Japanese but “the most pure Japanese” in a double movement that objectifies even
as it grants subjectivity according to the logic of racial hierarchies, where Japan is superior to all other Asian races. Japan’s panAsian project, then, was one that was Japanese even as it claimed a commonality across all Asian countries and cultures. Even
though Hata himself resembles what Girard calls a “successful scapegoat” because he does not descry the social processes that
Racial violence
continues to be perpetuated by the very victims who suffer under it. As an institution that can
victimize him, Hata also participates in the same mechanism that victimizes other racial minorities.
administer “legitimate violence,” the state cannot do so without justification, and according to
Girard’s thesis, victims of that violence sustain the state’s legitimacy on the basis of their
acquiescence. Subsequently, ethical claims perform not only the role of corroborating the subject’s agency but also that of
conferring legitimacy to state violence against racial minorities. As a study of the interpellation of Asian Americans into ideas of race
and racial hierarchies in this making invisible of racial violence,
Hata embraces the stereotypes of the model
minority that the town projects onto him—and thus makes invisible racial violence on the level of
narration—but Hata’s performance of the model-minority-turnedscapegoat leads to an
unresolved conclusion. Wai Chee Dimock’s (1997) work on the historicity and textuality of
justice in nineteenth-century American literature argues that the language of justice is
predisposed to do violence to that which it tries to describe—and consequently, also through the
nature of its judgments and prescriptions—when it abrogates diff erences into equivalences,
and it is the literary that returns the question and problem of unevenness to debates about how
justice can be imagined (8). In Hata’s elegy of his own life at the end of the novel, the resolution that he
imagines is neither strictly a form of exclusion nor of assimilation. His departure does not
address the racial stereotypes that “disturb” him, and he never explains what causes him to feel
that his time in the town is “close to done” (Lee 1999, 21). But the novel also exposes a contradiction where Hata is
“what this place is all about” even as his time has to come “naturally” to an end (136). Hata’s choice to leave the town at the end of
the novel is implicitly an ethical response—Hata leaves because of his complicity in Sunny’s past misfortunes—but it is not clear
what exactly has “naturally” come to an end, and to what end: Perhaps I’ll travel to where Sunny wouldn’t go, to the south and west
and maybe farther still, across the oceans, to land on former shores. But I think it won’t be any kind of pilgrimage. I won’t be seeking
out my destiny or fate. I won’t attempt to find comfort in the visage of a creator or the forgiving dead. Let me simply bear my flesh,
and blood, and bones. I will fly a flag. Tomorrow, when this house is alive and full, I will be outside looking in. I will be already on a
walk someplace, in this town or the next one or one five thousand miles away. I will circle around and arrive again. Come almost
home. (Lee 1999, 355–56) Hata’s imminent departure at the end of the novel promises to put to rest the repressed anxieties
Narration does not raise the question of how
“justice” could possibly be imagined otherwise.12 Instead, it is far more powerfully a meditation
on the failures of the political imagination of justice because it raises the ancillary,
uncomfortable question of victims who are complicit with the very system that interpellates them
as victims of representation’s homogenizing impulse.
produced by the impossibility of resolution to the cycle of violence.
The rhetoric of the “myth” essentializes the Asian American experience
Hartlep & Porfilio 15 (Nicholas D. & Brad J., Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations
at Metropolitan State University, “Killing the Model Minority Stereotype: Asian American
Counterstories and Complicity”) ALH
Much of the literature about the model minority myth is focused on determining its accuracy, its effect on Asians, or its function as a
much of the
scholarship rhetoric surrounding the model minority myth is entangled in the politics of identity
representation and has evolved into fierce debates about the degree to which AAPIs are
complicit in perpetuating the stereotype. In this phenomenological study, we were not focused on (although we do
mechanism for sustaining racial hierarchy and thus structural oppression and injustices. Consequently,
remain concerned about) the effect of the model minority stereotype on Asians, but were instead rather curious about the current
discourse regarding complicity. To this end, we
felt it important to explore, not whether the MMM accurately
represents Asians, but rather, Asian views of stereotypically model characteristics. We also felt
it pertinent to investigate Asian perspectives about what is model. Our query enabled us to differentiate
White interpretations of Asian ways of being in the world and Asian-specific views of the construct "model." Through these
we have come to
understand that unpack- ing complicity and delineating it from the whole of culture is critical.
Otherwise we risk promoting essentialism in complicity rhetoric, and miss the opportunity to fully
embrace possibilities that stem from organizing our ways of knowing and being around
complexity and intersectionality. In other words, the rhetoric associated with complicity currently
does not take enough into account epistemo- logical drivers of culture and thus of behavior,
phenomenological interviews about the model minority myth, along with our own reflexive inquiries
identity, and psychology. In our phenomenological study social (spiritual, philosophical, and
cultural), political, and economical influences shed light on the drivers and intersectionalities that
un- derlie complicity. Given the magnitude and pervasiveness of the model minority myth, it is impossible to consider
complicity among AAPIs without considering the social, political, and economical epistemologies that underlie the experiences of
AAPls. To this end, complicit behavior among AAPls is inextricable from the issue of migration and its influence on identity, values,
and behavior. A
critical ex- amination of complicity among AAPls, therefore, has to involve peering
through the lenses of migration, politics, economics, and values together and not solely through
the rhetoric of race and racial relations in the U.S. In closing, we offer three suggestions for consideration in
future studies and scholarship in relation to complicity and the model minority myth. SUGGESTION 1: REFRAME THE WORK AND
THEREFORE THE SALIENT QUESTIONS The
framing of Asian experience in the United States as a myth
complicates the discourse and confounds efforts to engage in actionable dialogue about what is
possible and what must change. Myth suggests that something is false, unreal, or imagined. It
suggests that somehow the AAPI experience is not real rather than underscoring that the AAPI
experience is highly complex and requires deeper analysis. Marriage of the construct model minority with
myth puts the AAPI in a no-win situation-to be model means that one is either acting in a way that is not authentically Asian, or that
one is complicit in promoting oppression of Asians. While it is clear from the literature that the addition of myth to the construct of
model minority was intended to capture "an unproved or false collective belief that is used to justify a social institution" (Random
House, 2014), its use in this manner seems isolated to highly educated (i.e., academics) or politically informed individuals. Recall
that only one of our participants-who incidentally was ad- opted and raised by White parents-could offer an unprompted definition of
the term, even though all of our participants were highly educated. Discovering
that nearly all of the participants
we chose to interview did not recognize the term really' put the question of complexity into
perspective and pro- moted for each of us, as authors and as Asian scholars, a sense of doubt
about whether complexity and the current discourse associated with the model minority myth is
useful or has culturally authentic relevance. For those who are involved in daily decision-making at the local level
(e.g., administrators, human resource people, practitioners across all disciplines) and to the general public, we argue the use of
myth makes things complicated. Furthermore,
efforts over the years by Asians and other scholars to
dismantle the myth have resulted in the unintended consequence of within-group blame which
arguably underlies the complicity de- bate. Consequently, these dynamics converge to work
against the manifest in- tention of the complicity debate – raising awareness to inspire collective
action against social injustices. We suggest a shift to more explicit dialogue and study about the
needs and experiences of Asians living in the United States. As mentioned in brief at the beginning of this
chapter, the Asian community living in the United States is highly diverse, complex, and in varying states of need physically,
emotionally, and socially. As such, we
aim to inspire rhetoric driven by action leading to design and
development of solutions to these pressing health and social issues faced by our community,
rather than rhetoric driven by reaction to systemic and institu- tional oppression and
discrimination.
Afro-Orientalism arrives as the Third World’s praxis for deconstructing
capitalism and colonization. The League and Imperialism and the Bandung
Conference represents the beginning of a demand for solidarity against
conditions of capitalism and colonialism.
Hernandez and Steen ’06 (Professor English and American Studies Julius Maximilians
Universität Würzburg, Germany. Ph.D., Stanford University. Professor Steen writes and teaches
about race and performance, primarily in the intersection of the African American and Asian
American worlds. “AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics “, Foreword, 2006, NAE)
At the League against Imperialism meeting in Brussels in 1928, leaders from three continents
(Africa, Asia, and South America) had already dis- cussed their discrete ailments and had
crafted common dreams. They had heard of each other’s struggles and had found that they had
come to similar strategic and ideological conclusions. When independence finally dawned in the 1940s and
At Ban- dung,
these leaders met and forged an agenda for the international arena in opposition to the
“freedom” of advanced capitalism (the First World) and to the “leadership” of the Soviet Union
(the Second World). As the Third World, these regimes sought to produce international
cooperation for the widest possible development over narrow economic profit and for peace
over nuclear confrontation. This energy appealed to Richard Wright.2 As the host of the Bandung Conference,
Indonesia’s President Achmet Sukarno welcomed the delegates and reminded them of the basis for
Afro- Asian unity: “We are of many different nations, we are of many different social
backgrounds and cultural patterns. Our ways of life are different. Our national characters, or
colors or motifs—call it what you will—are different. Our racial stock is different, and even the
color of our skin is dif- ferent.” All this is true, but “what does that matter?” What united Africa and Asia,
Sukarno noted, was “a common detestation of colonialism in whatever form it appears . . . a
common detestation of racialism . . . a com- mon determination to preserve and stabilize peace
in the world.”3 Richard Wright sat in the hall, mesmerized by the proceedings. As he listened to Sukarno, he later wrote, “I
began to sense a deep and organic relation here in Bandung between race and religion, two of
the most power- ful and irrational forces in human nature. Sukarno was not evoking these twin demons; he
was not trying to create them; he was trying to organize them. . . . The reality of race and
religion was there, swollen, sensitive, tur- bulent.”4 Social traditions and identities had to be worn
through, dealt with, reorganized. They could not be ignored or discarded. For Sukarno, and Wright, the
foundation of AfroAsian solidarity could not be in these skins, for they had to be the carapace to
be outgrown. The displacement from the Bandung political quake flooded over into political
movements within the advanced industrial states, as well as across the formerly colonized
world. Examples within the United States of this are abundant: there is the fierce attempt to forge commonality
among the Black Panthers, the Red Guard, and the Young Lords, and there is the ex- ample of
the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA). These movements identified themselves as the
“Third World” in political solidarity with that dynamic of national liberation, whether it emerged from the
Bandung currents or the courage of the barefoot Vietnamese and Guinean-Bissau liberation warriors.5 Yuri Kochiyama, the
radical activist, offers the history of AfroAsian connection on this very platform, to learn each other’s
com- bined histories to break down “barriers, obstacles and phobias.”6 Bandung provided a
major inspiration as well as an epistemological framework for those early scholars and activists
who worked both to forge connections across lines of artificial, but historical, race and to study
the history of these interactions. In chapbooks and in political journals, in solidarity marches and in the margins of
1950s, the leaders of the various national libera- tion movements took comfort in the successes of each other.
books, these interactions became impor- tant for their union in a planetary anticolonialist struggle.7 Fifty years have passed since
Bandung, and much has changed since then.8 Freedom’s future lay within the project of the national liberation state. With the
cannibalization of the state under dictates from the Inter- national Monetary Fund (IMF), the national liberation agenda has been
largely compromised. Most of the formerly colonized and subjugated na- tions produced minimally processed raw materials for the
world market, and because of the unfair term of trade that would prevail as a result of this historical disadvantage, these countries
would always be indebted to their former colonial and now current imperial overlords. To break out of this vise, the
new
nations needed capital. With few resources, these coun- tries first had to borrow and then went
into debt. Into the breech came the IMF, with an agenda not simply to create fiscal stability but
to overturn the national liberation and Third World agenda of state construction and to subjugate
the darker nations to capitalist globalization. A major conse- quence of the disembowelment of
the state was that “nationalism” itself became transformed. The secular anticolonial Bandung
era nationalism fell before the rise of a cruel cultural nationalism that drew on forms of social
solidarity provided by either religion, reconstructed racism, or un- diluted class power.
The Chinese alien generates the CONTRASTING Black Christianized former
slave. Slavery becomes NECESSARY as a civilizing institution that
TRANSFORMS heathens and creates distance from the UNASSIMILABLE
Oriental. Imagining PRIVILEGES enjoyed by the alien, DENIED to the Black
citizen is a counterintuitive discourse that ignores the NEGROIZATION of
the Chinese and or the ASIANIZATION of Blacks. Chinese Exclusion, Black
Segregation both play into Orientalist figurations of domestication and
Asian cultural difference. Blacks facilitate ASSIMILATION generating a
Black Orientalist discourse understood as RACIAL UPLIFT,
MORAL/POLITICAL and CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT only to lay a justified
foundational rhetoric of the anti-Chinese movement. Black subjects now
constitute their HUMANITY and CITIZENSHIP through gendered
Enlightenment discourses of MORALITY, EHTICALITY and RATIONALITY
as a struggle for INCLUSION. We must move beyond racist/antiracist
principles and interrogate how the institution of citizenship constitutes a
narrow discursive field of NEGOTIATION of EXCLUSION
JUN asst. professor of African American Studies and English @ Univ. of Illinois Chicago 2k6
(Helen H.-currently completing a relational study of how Asian Americans and African
Americans differentially emerged into U.S. citizenship during the 19th and 20th centuries;
BLACK ORIENTALISM: 19th Century Narratives of Race and U.S. Citizenship; AMERICAN
QUARTERLY, Volume 58, Number 4, December;
http://courses.washington.edu/com597j/student%20presentations/Jun.pdf; (db)
Orientalist
construction of the Chinese alien generates its contrasting other in the figure of the properly
developed, black, Christianized former slave. Reverend Blakeslee’s rather predictable and ubiquitous
discourse of the unassimilable Oriental is particularly disturbing in that chattel slavery is figured
as a necessary civilizing institution that “successfully” transforms African heathens into modern
American citizens. Twenty years later, Supreme Court Justice Harlan also deploys this black/Chinese racial
tandem in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), when he challenges the Court’s majority ruling by constructing the
Chinese immigrant as the negative instance of national belonging . There is a race so different from our own
In his testimony before the senate in 1877, a white minister makes an argument for Chinese exclusion in which his
that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States . . . But by the statute in question, a Chinaman
can ride in the same passenger coach with white citizens of the United States, while citizens of the black race in Louisiana, many of
whom perhaps risked their lives for the preservation of the Union, who are entitled by law, to participate in the political control of the
state and nation, who are not excluded, by law or by reason of their race, from public stations of any kind, and who have all the legal
rights that belong to white citizens, are yet to be declared criminals, liable to imprisonment, if they ride in a public coach occupied by
citizens of the white race.2 Harlan’s attempt to dramatize the injustice of Jim Crow segregation works by imagining
privileges unfairly enjoyed by Chinese aliens in order to powerfully illustrate what was being
wrongfully denied to black citizens.3 In other words, Harlan’s rhetoric deploys Orientalist difference in
order to assimilate U.S. blacks into a universalized American national identity. Both Blakeslee’s and
Harlan’s statements surprisingly suggest that in the late nineteenth century, the juxtaposition of Chinese immigrants and the black
community could somehow generate a naturalized, commonsensical recognition of the deeply American character of black domestic
subjects.4 This discourse of provisional black inclusion/Chinese exclusion is initially
counterintuitive given the manner in which today we often observe how in the nineteenth century,
blacks and Chinese were represented as similarly loathsome, or degraded in terms of the “other,”
that is, the “Negroization of the Chinese” or the “Asianization of blacks.” Of course, Harlan’s and
Blakeslee’s public statements on race and citizenship spoke to radically different questions and
motivations—one endorsing Chinese exclusion and the other arguing against the legality of
black/white racial segregation. The differences, however, behind such similar Orientalist
figurations within these narratives of black domestication are all the more suggestive of the
significance of Chinese exclusion and American Orientalism within nineteenth-century discourses
of black citizenship. This article examines how the nineteenth-century black press waged struggles for political inclusion
within this dominant discursive context of racialized citizenship, as the anti-Chinese movement critically defined the
racial, cultural, and political boundaries of the United States. An analysis of black newspapers across the
country reveals how Orientalist discourses of Asian cultural difference ambiguously facilitated the
assimilation of black Americans to ideologies of political modernity and consolidated black
identification as U.S. national subjects. Nineteenth-century discourses of “black Orientalism” can be best
understood as a specific formation of racial uplift, generating narratives of black moral, political,
and cultural development, which in turn reified the Orientalist logic of the anti-Chinese movement.
This argument deemphasizes notions of black “intentions,” “perceptions,” or “attitudes” in order
to foreground the narrative demands on U.S. black subjects to constitute their humanity and
citizenship through racialized and gendered Enlightenment discourses of morality, ethicality, and
rationality. In other words, this essay foregrounds how the institution of citizenship produces an
imperative for racialized subjects to tell particular stories about themselves and others in the
struggle for inclusion. Such a focus suggests that racist or antiracist principles are not the most
relevant terms for interpreting nineteenth-century black press representations of the Chinese, but rather
that the institution of citizenship constitutes a narrow discursive field within which differentially
racialized groups are forced to negotiate their exclusion in relationship to others.
The institution of citizenship forces Asian and black people to negotiate
their inclusion in relation to others – a historicity of these ties is necessary
to interrogate the way that citizenship has historically warped and distorted
Afro-Asian relations
The Chinese alien generates the CONTRASTING Black Christianized former slave. Slavery becomes
NECESSARY as a civilizing institution that TRANSFORMS heathens and creates distance from the
UNASSIMILABLE Oriental. Imagining PRIVILEGES enjoyed by the alien, DENIED to the Black citizen is a
counterintuitive discourse that ignores the NEGROIZATION of the Chinese and or the ASIANIZATION of
Blacks. Chinese Exclusion, Black Segregation both play into Orientalist figurations of domestication and Asian
cultural difference. Blacks facilitate ASSIMILATION generating a Black Orientalist discourse understood as
RACIAL UPLIFT, MORAL/POLITICAL and CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT only to lay a justified foundational
rhetoric of the anti-Chinese movement. Black subjects now constitute their HUMANITY and CITIZENSHIP
through gendered Enlightenment discourses of MORALITY, EHTICALITY and RATIONALITY as a struggle for
INCLUSION. We must move beyond racist/antiracist principles and interrogate how the institution of
citizenship constitutes a narrow discursive field of NEGOTIATION of EXCLUSION
JUN asst. professor of African American Studies and English @ Univ. of Illinois Chicago 2k6 (Helen H.-currently completing a
relational study of how Asian Americans and African Americans differentially emerged into U.S. citizenship during the 19 th and 20th
centuries; BLACK ORIENTALISM: 19th Century Narratives of Race and U.S. Citizenship; AMERICAN QUARTERLY, Volume 58,
Number 4, December; http://courses.washington.edu/com597j/student%20presentations/Jun.pdf; (db)
In his testimony before the senate in 1877, a white minister makes an argument for Chinese exclusion in which his Orientalist
construction of the Chinese alien generates its contrasting other in the figure of the properly
developed, black, Christianized former slave. Reverend Blakeslee’s rather predictable and ubiquitous
discourse of the unassimilable Oriental is particularly disturbing in that chattel slavery is figured
as a necessary civilizing institution that “successfully” transforms African heathens into modern
American citizens. Twenty years later, Supreme Court Justice Harlan also deploys this black/Chinese racial
tandem in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), when he challenges the Court’s majority ruling by constructing the
Chinese immigrant as the negative instance of national belonging . There is a race so different from our own
that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States . . . But by the statute in question, a Chinaman
can ride in the same passenger coach with white citizens of the United States, while citizens of the black race in Louisiana, many of
whom perhaps risked their lives for the preservation of the Union, who are entitled by law, to participate in the political control of the
state and nation, who are not excluded, by law or by reason of their race, from public stations of any kind, and who have all the legal
rights that belong to white citizens, are yet to be declared criminals, liable to imprisonment, if they ride in a public coach occupied by
citizens of the white race.2 Harlan’s attempt to dramatize the injustice of Jim Crow segregation works by imagining
privileges unfairly enjoyed by Chinese aliens in order to powerfully illustrate what was being
wrongfully denied to black citizens.3 In other words, Harlan’s rhetoric deploys Orientalist difference in
order to assimilate U.S. blacks into a universalized American national identity. Both Blakeslee’s and
Harlan’s statements surprisingly suggest that in the late nineteenth century, the juxtaposition of Chinese immigrants and the black
community could somehow generate a naturalized, commonsensical recognition of the deeply American character of black domestic
subjects.4 This discourse of provisional black inclusion/Chinese exclusion is initially
counterintuitive given the manner in which today we often observe how in the nineteenth century,
blacks and Chinese were represented as similarly loathsome, or degraded in terms of the “other,”
that is, the “Negroization of the Chinese” or the “Asianization of blacks.” Of course, Harlan’s and
Blakeslee’s public statements on race and citizenship spoke to radically different questions and
motivations—one endorsing Chinese exclusion and the other arguing against the legality of
black/white racial segregation. The differences, however, behind such similar Orientalist
figurations within these narratives of black domestication are all the more suggestive of the
significance of Chinese exclusion and American Orientalism within nineteenth-century discourses
of black citizenship. This article examines how the nineteenth-century black press waged struggles for political inclusion
within this dominant discursive context of racialized citizenship, as the anti-Chinese movement critically defined the
racial, cultural, and political boundaries of the United States. An analysis of black newspapers across the
country reveals how Orientalist discourses of Asian cultural difference ambiguously facilitated the
assimilation of black Americans to ideologies of political modernity and consolidated black
identification as U.S. national subjects. Nineteenth-century discourses of “black Orientalism” can be best
understood as a specific formation of racial uplift, generating narratives of black moral, political,
and cultural development, which in turn reified the Orientalist logic of the anti-Chinese movement.
This argument deemphasizes notions of black “intentions,” “perceptions,” or “attitudes” in order
to foreground the narrative demands on U.S. black subjects to constitute their humanity and
citizenship through racialized and gendered Enlightenment discourses of morality, ethicality, and
rationality. In other words, this essay foregrounds how the institution of citizenship produces an
imperative for racialized subjects to tell particular stories about themselves and others in the
struggle for inclusion. Such a focus suggests that racist or antiracist principles are not the most
relevant terms for interpreting nineteenth-century black press representations of the Chinese, but rather
that the institution of citizenship constitutes a narrow discursive field within which differentially
racialized groups are forced to negotiate their exclusion in relationship to others.
Reverend Blakeslee, Special Report to the Senate on Chinese Immigration, 1877
(copied from Helen H. Jun“Black Orientalism: 19th Century Narratives of Race and U.S. Citizenship;” American Quarterly, Vol 58, No. 4, December 2006)
But now observe the practical superiority of slavery over Chinese immigration, as an impelling
force for good. Slavery compelled the heathen to give up idolatry, and they did it. The Chinese
have no such compulsion and they do not do it . . . Slavery compelled the adoption of Christian
forms of worship, resulting in universal Christianization. The Chinese have no such influence
tending to their conversion, and rarely—one or two in a thousand—become Christian. . . . Slavery
took the heathens and by force made them Americans in feeling, tastes, habits, language,
sympathy, religion and spirit; first fitting them for citizenship, and then giving them the vote. The
Chinese feel no such force, but remaining in character and life the same as they were in Old
China, unprepared for citizenship and adverse in spirit to our institutions.
Independent movements fail. These movements only serve to gain political
mobility at the cost of further otherization of other identity groups.
Hernandez and Steen ’06 (Professor English and American Studies Julius Maximilians
Universität Würzburg, Germany. Ph.D., Stanford University. Professor Steen writes and teaches
about race and performance, primarily in the intersection of the African American and Asian
American worlds. “AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics “, Foreword, 2006, NAE)
To insist that identity categories are political and not natural-cultural opens many possibilities,
but this is not a sufficient exit from the traps set by the ideology of bureaucratic multiculturalism.
Self-consciously con- structed communities could also operate for inclusion and upward mobility at the cost of others. The most painful example of this is in how Asian Americans frequently
mobilize the discourse of the “model minority” to our benefit. In the 1960s, as the U.S.
government welcomed highly skilled Asian immigrants into the country (and kept out Asians with
fewer tech- nical skills), the media, egged on by elected officials, compared the experi- ences of
Asians to African Americans. The specific context for this com- parison was the provision of
social welfare schemes for the newly enfran- chised populations of color, who had only now
been allowed entry into the five-decade-long social wage schemes. Since the Civil Rights Act
had made it impossible to block people of color, notably African Americans, from access to the
aspects of the welfare state, the media and the politi- cians began to denigrate them for their
use of these services. Asians did not use them, so why should African Americans? The Asian
American, like the Jewish American ten years before, had become the “model minority” for those who would deign to access their
rights. That
Asians had bene- fited because of state selection (and not natural selection) did not
interfere with this racist narrative. To champion Asian America without a well- developed
understanding of this scenario would result in a collapse of one’s multicultural pride in anti-Black
racism. This is why one has to tread carefully in the discourse of bureaucratic multiculturalism. Is it capable of being cognizant of
such slippages?
Chattel slavery set the stage for the indentured servitude and oppression
of Asian minorities in the US that were constantly marginalized through
conditions parallel to that of chattel slavery itself even creating the “coolie”
as the otherization of Asian-Americans.
Prashad ’01 (Vijay Prashad is director and associate professor of international studies at
Trinity College and the author of The Karma of Brown Folk. He lives in Northampton,
Massachusetts. “Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: AFRO-ASIAN CONNECTIONS AND THE
MYTH OF CULTURAL PURITY “, pgs. 72-73, 2001, NAE)
The word coolie entered the European lexicon in the context of imperialism to index a person of
inferior status who simply labors for hire. Whereas the European laborer, by the nineteenth century, was seen as a
juridical citizen who could formally bargain for his (sometimes, her) rights as a seller of labor power, the coolie was seen as
racially suited for various forms of hard labor in tropical conditions. Colonial anthropologists and
planters argued that the constitution of the coolie allowed him or her to better handle the heat
and humidity. While the Europeans, we are told, had a sense of judgment, the coolie was easily
inflamed by the passions of the sunshine and of unreason. Europeans who moved from the
trades and the fields to the factories had to sell their labor as a commodity, where each hour of
work time earned them a set (sometimes negotiated) wage. The labor of Asians, like that of
Africans and Amerindians, however, was not commodified in an identical fashion. Instead it was
‘‘animalized,’’ and the productive efforts of the workers were treated by white supremacy as the
rote part of their ill-fated primitive ex- istence.5 When the first Chinese and Indian workers came
on the plantations, the stench of slavery was not far gone from the work process or from the
slaves’ residential quarters. These ‘‘coolie slaves’’ said of their lives that they were ‘‘bound’’ (and
when freed, they were known as khula, or ‘‘opened from bondage’’).6 In the nineteenth century, commercial pressures
forced peas- ants off the land in both India and China. Historian Thomas Metcalf esti- mates that in northern
India, the catchment area for many of the indentured workers, ‘‘notices of eviction were being
issued at the rate of 60,000 annually
with the object not of clearing the land but of
forcing the ten- ant to submit to an enhanced rent.’’7 Meanwhile in China the upheaval of the
Taiping Rebellion
–
and other assorted acts of defiance, tore through the innards of the
Ch’ing regime. The effects of ‘‘gunboat diplo- macy’’ of the European traders who encircled
China had a marked impact on the agrarian life in the interior, from which millions of people
escaped to Southeast Asia and to the Americas.8 In the Caribbean and southern Af- rica, the Indians and Chinese
came under a rigid legal instrument that pro- vided, according to historian Walton Look-Lai, a curious legal anomaly—a civil
contract enforceable mainly with criminal sanctions, historically a hybrid creature of the
nineteenth century planta- tion need to replace Black labor with some alternative form of bound
la- bor, not as extreme as chattel slavery, but certainly not free in the increas- ingly accepted
metropolitan liberal sense of the term.9 In North America, whether in Canada or the United States, even if the
Asian immigrated voluntarily, the work regime was such that, as the San Francisco Chronicle put it in 1879,
‘‘when the coolie arrives he is as rigidly under the control of the contractor who brought him as
ever an African slave was un- der his master in South Carolina or Louisiana.’’10 Often tricked into
inden- ture, the Asian did not know the language of the new country, was consigned to a
plantation for at least five years (with reindenture common), lived in conditions akin to slavery,
worked not only for a wage, but under the threat of severe punitive sanctions and indebtedness,
and was not allowed free movement out of the plantation (as in the Caribbean) or of the
province (as in southern Africa). Confinement, racist violence, and the demands of production
erased most of the liberal claims of capitalism.
Chinese responses to protests in Baltimore demonstrate the global nature
of antiblackness – black people are stereotyped as criminals and all black
people and African people are homogenized while the Chinese government
refuses to acknowledge the violence it commits – the alt is key to challenge
these dynamics
Rothschild in 15 <Viola. Fulbright Scholar at Zhejiang University in Jinhua where she is
pursuing research on African entrepreneurs in China. She is a recent graduate of Bowdoin
College in the United States and currently blogs on her experiences in China on her website,
Sinophiles. May 6th, 2015. “Online Reaction to Baltimore Protests Reveals Much About Chinese
Tension with African Immigrants” ChinaFile. https://www.chinafile.com/reportingopinion/media/online-reaction-baltimore-protests-reveals-much-about-chinese-tension>
Several days ago, a Chinese friend and I were discussing the protests in Baltimore that erupted in response
to the death of resident Freddie Gray in connection with his April 12 arrest by city police officers, who have since been charged with
My friend said he was first surprised that such a level of civil unrest could occur in
the United States. But “when I saw that all the people protesting and getting arrested were black
people,” he added, “it made more sense. That would never happen with white people.” (I was unable to
convince him otherwise.) My friend is well educated and is, in most respects, a reasonable person. But like many other
Chinese, he has a facile preconceived set of notions about black people that stem from a
historical lack of contact. There’s little or no effort here to distinguish between Africans,
African-Americans, African-Europeans, Afro-Caribbeans, or recent African migrants to China.
They all fall under a homogenous umbrella—hei ren, or “black person”—attended by a
variety of sweeping stereotypes, including a proclivity for violence and crime. A Minority in the
Middle Kingdom: My Experience Being Black in China Chinese media has not ignored recent events in
Baltimore, an exception to its usual practice of playing down or ignoring reports involving social unrest. It was something
altogether different from the U.S. media’s coverage of grief, rage, and frustration about Freddie
Gray’s death, the protests and riots in response to it, and the responses to those responses. Consistently criticized
crimes including manslaughter and murder.
by the United States for its human rights abuses, China seems to be taking pleasure in
pointing out American hypocrisy. On April 30, the Communist Party’s major news organ, the People’s Daily,
published a scathing commentary. “Each time, when the hatreds old and new of U.S. racial contradictions
boil over,” the article read, “it clearly tells the world that the declaration ‘all are born equal’ in this
so-called ‘field of dreams’ still has yet to take root.” Naturally, there is no mention of China’s
own issues with ethnic tensions and cultural discrimination, from cracking down on the
Muslim Uighur minority in Xinjiang to persecuting Buddhist monks in Tibet. More interesting
than the column itself was the spate of revealing and troubling responses from Chinese netizens that it generated. (As a general
rule, only aging Party members actually read the People’s Daily.) Netizen
commentary to the (relatively
boilerplate) Baltimore reporting on the major online news portals, from NetEase, to Sina News, to QQ News, was
overwhelmingly negative and often downright ugly. While comment sections are inherently polarizing and
generally only attract people eager to express strong opinions, the sheer number of posts and the amount of
support they garnered in likes and shares indicate that the comments reflect, to some degree,
wider cultural attitudes. Who Are the Chinese in Africa? Eric Olander, Cobus van Staden & more I currently live in
Jinhua, a prefecture-level city of 5.3 million in central China, on a Fulbright grant researching African student-entrepreneurs in
China. Most of my research contacts are Africans who study in greater Zhejiang province while also
working in the nearby trade cities of Yiwu, which has China’s second-largest African population, and Guangzhou, which has the
largest. They
tell me they encounter a wide array of responses when it comes to the color of their
skin. These fall on a spectrum ranging from awkward curiosity—requests to touch their hair are
relatively common—to overt racism. What I saw online was broadly consistent with my findings in the field. The
majority of netizen comments focused on the race of the protestors, not the underlying reasons
for the protests, or the fact that they occurred Stateside. And they were nasty. More than one user
chalked the behavior up to “black people being black people,” while posts referring to “black
devils” were not hard to find. One user complained that black people “lack self-discipline and
family values,” adding, “this group is pouring into China. I hope the government will take steps to
prevent this.” A growing number of black people—in particular, traders from African countries—are indeed moving into China.
Guangzhou, a massive city in the country’s south, houses Asia’s largest African population. According to local officials in
Guangzhou, 16,000 Africans legally resided in the city in 2014. Experts estimate the total number of Africans living in Guangzhou—
legally and illegally—lies somewhere between 20,000 and 200,000. Debate is fierce about just how many Africans live there, and no
one knows how many Africans live in China overall, but few dispute that the steady influx of African immigrants into Guangzhou
Africans are routinely
characterized as illegal workers responsible for a rise in robbery, drug dealing, gang activity,
and general disturbances of the peace, and are subject to random visa inspections by local
police. The African community has taken to the streets to demonstrate against unfair treatment—
since the late 1990s has led to growing tension between local and African communities.
in 2009 following the death of a Nigerian man who jumped from a window trying to escape a police raid, then again in 2012 when an
African man died mysteriously in police custody. Many comments on articles about the Baltimore protests mentioned these African
immigrants, drawing an implicit connection between one and the other. Commenters called them “out of control,” and a “hidden
danger to the future public safety of our country.” Another warned, “Black people love to make trouble.” There were far worse
comments, not fit for print. Many were written out of a professed concern for Guangzhou. Although there are no available statistics
Some
commenters pushed back. One wrote, “Black people are willing to go out on the street and
protest and die for their compatriots. What about us?” (Protesting and civil organizing in China is often harshly
punished.) Another reminded readers, “Your ancestors also came from Africa.” Yet even these
relatively enlightened users did not point out the fundamental disconnect between a protest on the
streets of Baltimore, and a larger discussion of Africans from Africa—which, of course, is a mind-bogglingly
for African crime in Guangzhou, crimes committed by foreigners tend to attract disproportionate media attention.
diverse continent with 54 countries, over 1 billion people, and, according to the African Language Program at Harvard University,
“anywhere between 1,000 and 2,000 languages.” My research work suggests that this diversity is lost on Chinese observers.
Domestic media coverage of Baltimore and the resulting xenophobic outpouring in China’s
online community has simply surfaced pre-existing and deep-seated racial attitudes that belie
burgeoning Sino-African political and economic ties, which include extensive Chinese-funded infrastructure projects all over Africa
and the establishment of the “China-Africa New Strategic Partnership” in 2006.
Although China’s government and
government-driven media pay increasing attention to China and Africa’s friendship in
institutional and government rhetoric—to hear Chinese authorities tell it, the trade partnership is
based on “political equality and mutual trust, economic win-win cooperation, and cultural
exchanges and mutual learning”—it is not reflected in popular sentiment and interpersonal
interactions. “I have been in China working and studying for four years, but I still feel like a stranger here,” one studententrepreneur from Sudan told me. He’s the recipient of a Chinese Government Scholarship, a soft-power initiative that
has funded thousands of African students to study at Chinese universities. “I feel grateful for this opportunity, but it’s
like they pay for us to come to a place where no one wants us to be.”
The alternative is Third World Consciousness. A praxis that formulates
national identities as a site for revolution to better understand different
struggles as a better form of collectivization.
Evangelista ‘82(Susan Evangelista is the Founder of Roots of Health and currently serves
as the organization’s Deputy Director. Prior to the founding of Roots of Health, Susan worked as
a Peace Corps volunteer in the Philippines and went on to teach at the Ateneo de Manila
University for 30 years. While a faculty member at Ateneo, she also worked in Nigeria’s
University of Maiduguri, in a Burmese Refugee Camp in Thailand, in Cambodia’s Royal
University of Phnom Penh, and in Osaka Gaidai, Japan. She has published academic books
and articles as well as creative pieces – both fiction and nonfiction – and handled various
administrational jobs in the university, notably Chair of Interdisciplinary Studies. She also
worked with ACELT, an outreach organization that conducts teacher training all over the
Philippines. “Carlos Bulosan and Third World Consciousness ”, pgs. 45-47, 1982, NAE)
The concept of third world consciousness dates back to 1961 when Frantz Fanon published The
Wretched of the Earth, but the stirrings of this consciousness preceded the term, and go back, in fact, to 1917 to the
October Revolution in Russia, for it was with this revolution that the third world came into being.2
Before this time, the world was divided into two: the developed, imperialist countries, and the backward colonies and semi-colonies
of these developed countries.
After the revolution the division became tripartite, with the imperialist
countries making up the first world, the socialist countries the second world, and the newcolonies (now independent but still economically tied to the imperialist countries) the third world.
Later the concept was somewhat modified, until today it encompasses all the impoverished
countries of the world, poor because of the on-going effects of the past colo- nial relationship,
whether those countries are now under socialist regimes (China, Vietnam) or under military
dictatorships (much of South America and Africa) or under "democratic" one-man rule (the
Philippines). It is, then, the designation for that part of the world which is still struggling against the
forces of imperialism and neo-colonialism. Third world consciousness is, then, first of all,
consciousness of nationalist identity vis-a-vis the colonizing power, coupled with understanding
of the nature of exploitation to which the national- ist group has been subjected. It also involves
engagement in a pro- cess of praxis through which the forces of oppression can be countered.
This praxis is made up of the elements of active strug- gle and reflective thinking, and, often,
writing, directed towards national liberation and the radical transformation of society. But despite
the emphasis on nationalism, there is also a growing recog- nition of the oneness of the
struggles of all oppressed nations and peoples: history both particularizes and generalizes, and
while each struggle is unique, the forces of colonialism and imperialism are one in a very real
sense. Third world writing can be loosely characterized as "revolutionary realism,3 differentiated from
the forms of critical realism that characterized much of nineteenth and twentieth century western literature, which seems frequently
to deal with sickness, decay, and the general pessimistic discontent of overdeveloped societies. Bulosan was interested in the
critical realists in America - he read Dreiser, Anderson, Lewis, Faulkner, Hemingway, Caldwell, and Steinbeck. He saw that these
writers recognized "the extent of the lie that corrupted the American dream," but they fell short
of his expectations: I had hoped to find in these writers a weapon strong enough to blast the
walls that imprisoned the American soul. But they were merely des- cribing the disease - they
did not reveal any evidence that they knew how to eradicate it.4 Whereas the critical realists blame
the decay of the social fabric on materialism, loss of religious and other traditional values,
revolutionary realists see the situation in more purely political or historical terms. They are, of
course, dealing with an entirely different type of situation, one in which colonialism and severe
oppression are the dominant characteristics. The major themes of revolutionary realism are in a
sense more optimistic than those of critical realism, since they deal with the awakening of
individuals and groups to an understanding of their dehumanization by the oppressive (usually
colonial) political system. With this understanding comes a redirection of thought and action
towards a revolutionary praxis which is both liberating and rehumanizing. Third world writing
thus grows out of a particular type of historical experience, qualified by a perception of man as a
free political being capable of recreating and restructuring his own world. Third world
consciousness is thus largely a state of mind or a particular perception of the world and its
socio-political relation- ships, and as such it is logically separate from geographic location. Filipino
writers do not have it simply by virtue of being born in or writing in the Philippines, and neither are the more perceptive of first world
writers necessarily precluded from sharing it. It
is not, however, simply a matter of intellectual understanding,
since it involves elements of experiential knowledge of colonial oppression and a sense of
identity with an oppressed group. This would exclude, for instance, the radical white American
writer even if he happened to be poor. Still, there are groups in the United States with a definite
history of oppression that is also related to the colonial experience: blacks were pirated away to
the U.S. on British slave ships as a part of colonial trade, and Fili- pinos were lured to the U.S. as a part of the
American "colonial experiment" in the Philippines. Such peoples may share the elements of third world
consciousness: they are victims of imperial- ism, with their own national or ethnic identity, they
understand the nature of oppression, and they are engaged in a struggle for liberation as a
people.
Afro-Orientalism arrives as the Third World’s praxis fro deconstructing
capitalism and colonization. The League and Imperialism and the Bandung
Conference represents the beginning of a demand for solidarity against
conditions of capitalism and colonialism.
Hernandez and Steen ’06 (Professor English and American Studies Julius Maximilians
Universität Würzburg, Germany. Ph.D., Stanford University. Professor Steen writes and teaches
about race and performance, primarily in the intersection of the African American and Asian
American worlds. “AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics “, Foreword, 2006, NAE)
At the League against Imperialism meeting in Brussels in 1928, leaders from three continents
(Africa, Asia, and South America) had already dis- cussed their discrete ailments and had
crafted common dreams. They had heard of each other’s struggles and had found that they had
come to similar strategic and ideological conclusions. When independence finally dawned in the 1940s and
1950s, the leaders of the various national libera- tion movements took comfort in the successes of each other. At Ban- dung,
these leaders met and forged an agenda for the international arena in opposition to the
“freedom” of advanced capitalism (the First World) and to the “leadership” of the Soviet Union
(the Second World). As the Third World, these regimes sought to produce international
cooperation for the widest possible development over narrow economic profit and for peace
over nuclear confrontation. This energy appealed to Richard Wright.2 As the host of the Bandung Conference,
Indonesia’s President Achmet Sukarno welcomed the delegates and reminded them of the basis for
Afro- Asian unity: “We are of many different nations, we are of many different social
backgrounds and cultural patterns. Our ways of life are different. Our national characters, or
colors or motifs—call it what you will—are different. Our racial stock is different, and even the
color of our skin is dif- ferent.” All this is true, but “what does that matter?” What united Africa and Asia,
Sukarno noted, was “a common detestation of colonialism in whatever form it appears . . . a
common detestation of racialism . . . a com- mon determination to preserve and stabilize peace
in the world.”3 Richard Wright sat in the hall, mesmerized by the proceedings. As he listened to Sukarno, he later wrote, “I
began to sense a deep and organic relation here in Bandung between race and religion, two of
the most power- ful and irrational forces in human nature. Sukarno was not evoking these twin demons; he
was not trying to create them; he was trying to organize them. . . . The reality of race and
religion was there, swollen, sensitive, tur- bulent.”4 Social traditions and identities had to be worn
through, dealt with, reorganized. They could not be ignored or discarded. For Sukarno, and Wright, the
foundation of AfroAsian solidarity could not be in these skins, for they had to be the carapace to
be outgrown. The displacement from the Bandung political quake flooded over into political
movements within the advanced industrial states, as well as across the formerly colonized
world. Examples within the United States of this are abundant: there is the fierce attempt to forge commonality
among the Black Panthers, the Red Guard, and the Young Lords, and there is the ex- ample of
the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA). These movements identified themselves as the
“Third World” in political solidarity with that dynamic of national liberation, whether it emerged from the
Bandung currents or the courage of the barefoot Vietnamese and Guinean-Bissau liberation warriors.5 Yuri Kochiyama, the
radical activist, offers the history of AfroAsian connection on this very platform, to learn each other’s
com- bined histories to break down “barriers, obstacles and phobias.”6 Bandung provided a
major inspiration as well as an epistemological framework for those early scholars and activists
who worked both to forge connections across lines of artificial, but historical, race and to study
the history of these interactions. In chapbooks and in political journals, in solidarity marches and in the margins of
books, these interactions became impor- tant for their union in a planetary anticolonialist struggle.7 Fifty years have passed since
Bandung, and much has changed since then.8 Freedom’s future lay within the project of the national liberation state. With the
cannibalization of the state under dictates from the Inter- national Monetary Fund (IMF), the national liberation agenda has been
largely compromised. Most of the formerly colonized and subjugated na- tions produced minimally processed raw materials for the
world market, and because of the unfair term of trade that would prevail as a result of this historical disadvantage, these countries
the new
nations needed capital. With few resources, these coun- tries first had to borrow and then went
into debt. Into the breech came the IMF, with an agenda not simply to create fiscal stability but
to overturn the national liberation and Third World agenda of state construction and to subjugate
the darker nations to capitalist globalization. A major conse- quence of the disembowelment of
the state was that “nationalism” itself became transformed. The secular anticolonial Bandung
era nationalism fell before the rise of a cruel cultural nationalism that drew on forms of social
solidarity provided by either religion, reconstructed racism, or un- diluted class power.
would always be indebted to their former colonial and now current imperial overlords. To break out of this vise,
The alternative is a way to ENACT, ANALYZE, and CATALYZE a radical and revolutionary POLITICAL
and CULTURAL stance grounded in anti-imperialism and anti-oppression, DEVOID of Eurocentric and
white supremacist REFERENCE and IDEALS. Afro Asia is a strategic intersection, the IMPERATIVE to
imagine a NEW WORLD, a tradition with LONG ROOTS that binds the African Slave to the Asiatic
“coolie”. The Alternative embraces a historicity of COMMONALITY while simultaneously recognizing the
COMPLEXITY, CONTRADICTION AND CONFLICTS rooted in white supremacy through an
ORIENTALIST DISCOURSE. This DuBoisian DUAL ORIENTALISM addresses the common
MISUNDERSTANDINGS from Black/China ENGAGED INTERACTIONS that have resulted in nationalist
rivalries, mutually pervasive stereotypes and racial jealousies. The legacy of BANDUNG INFORMS and
HAUNTS or theorization of Afro Asian connections. The Alternative is an UNFLINCHING
PARADIGMATIC ANALYSIS to continue the ongoing, UNFINISHED legacy.
HO Chinese Revolutionary Socialist Activist & MULLEN Dir of American Studies @ Purdue 2k8 (Fred-baritone
saxophonist, composer, writer, producer, leader of the Afro Asian Music Ensemble & Bill V.-white male, professor of English author
of Afro-Orientalism and coeditor of W.E.B. Du Bois on Asia: Crossing the World Color Line; AFRO ASIA Revolutionary Political &
Cultural Connections Between African Americans and Asian Americans; pp. 2-5 db)
Fred himself came of age during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and he claims that his identity as Asian/Chinese American was
ignited by the upsurge of the Black Power movement in the United States. It was reading Malcolm X’s Autobiography while being
singled out for racial harassment in public school that forged his own sense of mutually shared oppressions. Like many other
United States activists of color, Ho first came to an affirmation of ethnic identity from the
inspiration and impact of radical and revolutionary African American politics and culture. This
discovery brought with it, however, a far larger challenge: namely, a way to enact, analyze, and
catalyze a radical and revolutionary political and cultural stance grounded in anti-imperialism and
anti-oppression and devoid of Eurocentric and white supremacist reference and ideals. For Ho, and
for other authors in this book, Afro Asia is a strategic intersection for thinking through an internationalist,
global paradigm that joins the world’s two largest continents and populations, as well as an antiimperialist, insurgent identity that is no longer majority white in orientation. Afro Asia, that is, is
the imperative to imagine a “new world” grounded upon two great ancient worlds as well as
radical and revolutionary anti-imperialist tradition. It is a tradition with long roots, one that
includes and links W.E.B. Du Bois, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, Malcolm X, Robert F. Williams, the
Black Panthers, the Asian Pacific American movement, Yuri Kochiyama, Ishmael Reed, Frank
chin, and Maxine Hong Kingston, to name just a few. These figures give a name and voice to the
international counterparts in the black and Asiatic worlds, and they have for two centuries
sustained a tradition of collaborative radical political and cultural connections heretofore
undocumented in the literature of the West. From the earliest days of the United States, Africans
and Asians in the Americas have been linked in a shared tradition of resistance to class and racial
exploitation and oppression. With the formal abolition of African slavery arose the Asiatic
“coolie” (or contract labor) trade that brought Asian laborers, often on the very same ships that
transported captured Africans, to the very same plantation societies in the West. In this common
and often overlapping diasporic experience, shared traditions of resistance and struggle have
developed for liberation and equality. African Americans and Asian Americans have mutually
influenced, borrowed from, and jointly innovated new forms in culture (from music to cuisine to clothing)
and politics (from shared movement ideologies to organizations). This intersecting ground of cultural borrowing and exchange
has been partly documented by classicists engaged by questions of the relationship between Greek and Rome on the one hand,
and the larger realm of the contemporary Middle East, from North Africa to the Mediterranean, on the other. Among the early
pioneers in this work was the African American classicist Frank Snowden. His books, Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of
Blacks and Blacks in Antiquity and Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience, describe the influences on Western art, literature,
and design of North African societies in particular. Snowden’s work sits squarely in the tradition of the Classics. Martin Bernal’s
influential multivolume book Black Athena provides a polemical cultural studies framework for understanding the influence of North
African and Mediterranean influence on Greco-Roman culture as a story of racist historiography extending to eighteenth-and
nineteenth-century European scholar’s efforts to downplay or eradicate the Afro Asian role in the production of Western culture.
Wilson Moses, in his book Afrotopia, provides his own historiography for this debate, noting that nineteenth-century Afrocentrists
and Egyptocentrists in the United States likewise struggled to make visible the influences of African thought and culture on antiquity
debates. Later, G. M. James’s Stolen Legacy gave a name to the accusations of cultural “pirating” described by Bernal, an
argument that W.E.B Du Bois also made vigorously in his chapter “Asia in Africa” in the expanded edition of his book The World of
Africa, first published in 1946. Du Bois’s own large body of writing on Asian politics and history is perhaps
the most overlooked legacy of his capacious intellectual career and a sign of the ethnocentrism
that has constrained the analysis of Afro Asian exchange. Indeed, the publication of Vijay Prashad’s two
important books The Karma of Brown Folk and Everybody was Kung-Fu Fighting helped to
reanimate attention to Afro Asian intersections. Prashad used the term “polyculturalism” to characterized the long,
repressed but vital tradition of Afro Asian encounter and exchange, particularly among the working classes. While the focus of this
anthology is likewise on shared and common struggles as well as the linkages, connections, cross-cultural borrowing, and mutual
solidarity, it is important to recognize the complexities, contradictions, and conflicts between black
and Asian peoples in the United States. It is also important to provide a proper framework and
analysis of the systemic causes for such complexities as well as the political function served by
the manipulation of race, the promotion of nationalist divisions and rivalries, and the inculcation
of mutually pervasive stereotypes and racial jealousies. Indeed, Du Bois himself was perhaps the first to
recognize the nefariousness of these divisions and misunderstandings. For example, in his 1935 essay “Indians and American
Negroes” Du Bois complained that black Americans were provided almost no information on Asia, especially India, and thus had no
context for seeing their own racial struggles in the necessary context of anticolonialism. Likewise, South Asians, fed a steady
Western diet of imperialist rhetoric, were absent a positive understanding of African Americans and Africans. Du Bois’s ability to
recognize this dual orientalism capable of dismantling and forestalling Afro Asian unity also
illuminates the work done by the scholars Reginald Kearney and Mark Gallichio. They note that during the 1930s and 1940s
subgroups of black Americans, primarily from the working classes, were drawn to Afro Asian solidarity and even infatuation with
Japanese imperialism as an imaginative means of cross-racial alliance. Gerald Horne, in his impressive book Race War! White
Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire, situates these desires and at times misunderstandings within
the broad context of white supremacy. Horne argues that the importation of British and U.S. forms of
racial supremacy across the Pan-Pacific region came home to roost both in the racial supremacist
rhetoric undergirding Japanese imperialism during the 1930s as well as in the various nationalist, crossnationalist, and otherwise anti-racist Afro Asian dreams of alliance. Put simply, race, racism, and
capitalism have conspired, according to Horne, to both produce and manipulate the black world’s
understanding of Asia and the Asian world’s understanding of the black “West.” And yet the
dominant form of black-Asian alliance across the twentieth century is a carefully considered
strategic anti-essentialism rooted in analysis of political, economic, and racial conditions across
the colored world produced under white supremacy. This is the clear legacy of the so-called
Bandung era of 1955 to 1973 that arguably countered and corrected many of the advances made in the Afro Asian solidarity
movements of the 1930s by linking them to emergent anticolonial struggles around the world. Richard Wright understood this
movement well when he traveled from Paris to Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955 to attend the Afro Asian meeting of twenty-nine
decolonizing heads of state. His book on the event, The Color Curtain, is itself a contradictory example of Afro Asia’s themes: a
vigorous support for anticolonial solidarity, an indictment of white supremacy, a cry to the wretched of the earth, and yet an oddly
anti-Communist and at times orientalist rendering of his own dislocation from both the “Eastern” and “Western” worlds during his
American exile. Bandung informs and haunts any and all efforts to theorize Afro Asia. It is both the
watershed and high-water mark of black-Asian affiliation and the unfinished and imperfect dream
of a road still being pursued and paved by the authors represented in this book.
Bandung humanism creates global revolutionary ties against capitalism
and imperialism by revising Marxist analysis of class to account for the
conditions of nonwhite, oppressed people
Mullen in 4 <Bill. Professor of English and American Studies at Purdue. “Transnational
Correspondence: Robert F. Williams, Detroit, and the Bandung Era” Afro-Orientalism. University
of Minnesota Press. (2004). Pgs 73-111. CS>
It is tempting to dismiss the autodidactic ambitions of RAM, and to an extent Williams, particularly since it is difficult to know how
much the latter sanctioned the interpretation of his ideas by the former. Yet their contingent relationship is itself an important
indicator of the quest between distant allies to articulate proximity and likeness in what they perceive as revolutionary situations. In
coming to understand this challenge for themselves, African
American radicals after 1965, in conjunction with
select Asian counterparts, began to look for even-greater specificity in the objective conditions
underlying their search for political correspondence. In Detroit, the deepening economic problems in the city, the
intensiWcation of U.S. war efforts in Vietnam, and the outbreak of China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966 inspired
new organizational approaches to questions of politics and culture. Veterans of the Grassroots Leadership Conference of 1963, for
example, founded the Inner City Organizing Committee in the fall of 1966. The ICOC adopted a founding constitution on October 2,
which likened the conditions of Detroit residents to the “dispossessed of the earth.”47 The ICOC sought to provide black Detroiters
with a “consciousness of . . . history and social identity” and to “encourage cultural activities” intended to carry out the “complete and
human reorganization of human life.”48 The
echoes of what RAM had called in 1965 “Bandung humanism”
were not accidental. James Boggs, a founder of the ICOC, was a key adviser and contributor to RAM in Detroit and,
according to Max Stanford, served briefly as “ideological chairman.” Bandung humanism was a theory of self- and
social transformation borrowing from Mao the notion that “human nature” was a bourgeois
fallacy to be dispatched by a total transformation of society: “Genuine love of mankind will be
born only when class distinctions have been eliminated throughout the world.”49 In 1965, after its
second Afro-American Student Movement Conference, RAM laid out its fullest conception of this idea in the essay “The Relationship
of Revolutionary Afro-American Movement to the Bandung Revolution.” The essay was a kind of companion piece to “The World
Black Revolution.”
It defined Bandung humanism as a “revolutionary revision of Western or
traditional Marxism to relate revolutionary ideology adequately to the unprecedented
political, socio-economic, technological, psycho-cultural developments occurring in the
post World War II era.”50 The essay described Bandung humanism, or its synonym “revolutionary black internationalism,”
as the synthesis of the conflict between the “Yanqui” imperialist thesis and the anti-imperialist humanist Bandung antithesis. The
precondition for the latter is a “socialist ‘classless’ world democracy” intent on destroying oppression in all its forms. The
prophetic mission of Bandung humanism, the essay argued, was implicit in the modernist music
of Bird, Miles, and Coltrane. “The task of the Revolutionary Afro-American Movement,” it wrote,
“is to express via political action the dynamism embodied in Afro-American music.”51
Afro-Asian collaboration is a deconstructive tool to combat racial, cultural
and geographic binaries
Mullen 2004 (Bill, “Making Monkey Signify: Fred Ho’s Revolutionary Vision Quest”, University
of Minnesota, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttt3z3.9)
Ho’s revolutionary vision quest ultimately understands Afro-Asian collaboration as a
deconstructive tool for destroying racial, cultural, and geographic binaries undergirding
Orientalism and the Western metaphysic that is its foundation and platform. At the level of
practice, Ho’s Afro-Asian Multicultural Music provides an aesthetic third way beyond the limits of
both Euro-centered commercial ideas of world music and liberal multiculturalism’s strategies of
cultural containment—Ho refers to this as a journey “beyond” both East and West. New AfroAsian Multicultural Music is thus best understood as Ho’s sui generis genre for a new Third
World proletarian internationalism. At the same time, Ho’s savvy manipulations of contemporary
commercial forms, from kung fu Wlms to comic books, offers a decisively post-Bandung (but not
postmodern) revision of prior models of revolutionary culture, from Soviet socialist realism to
Yenan. Ho’s dramatic operas and martial arts productions gleefully exploit the slapstick and
anarchist spirit of fairy tales and children’s cartoons in order to stake out the broadest possible
terrain for his art. Mass work and mass culture are the reconcilable antinomies of his guerrilla
musical theater. Close study of Ho’s life and work thus helps to disclose not only an important
contemporary legacy of the black world revolution theorized by earlier generations of AfroAsian
activists and theorists, like those in Detroit and at Bandung, but to consider what the cultural
revolutions of a twenty-Wrst-century AfroOrientalism might be.
Black orientalism seeks to forge global coalitions and dismantle white
supremacy and colonialism
Kim in 10 <Nami. “Engaging Afro/black-Orientalism: A Proposal” Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and
Religion Volume 1, Issue 7 (June 2010). Pgs 1-22. CS>
Some theologians and religious studies scholars who have examined the relationships between
religion, especially Christianity, and empire have noted that the imperialist role of the United
States around the world is intrinsically related to its racist policy against people of color within its
own borders. More than a century ago, African American political activists and intellectuals addressed
the interconnectedness between the national and international contexts and critiqued U.S.
imperialist expansion at the expense of colonized and marginalized people both locally and
globally. Scholars in Black Studies, American Studies, and cultural studies have recently paid close attention to
a trajectory of what some call Afro/black-Orientalism or AfroAsian encounters in the work of African
American intellectuals, writers, artists, and political activists from the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries.1 Scholars in
African American intellectuals and activists expressed
political solidarity between people of African descent and people of Asian descent by
denouncing the Western imperialism, colonialism, and racism that had created what W. E. B. Du
Bois called the “world color lines.” What scholars now call Afro/black-Orientalism or AfroAsian
encounters is not only anticolonial, antiracist, and anti-imperialist in its stance but also a search
for Afro-Asian connections and coalitions.
those fields have examined the various ways in which
Black orientalism creates connections between black and Asian
exploitation that allows for strategic coalitions against a racist citizenship
system and white supremacist nationalism that seeks to divide and
conquer
Kim in 10 <Nami. “Engaging Afro/black-Orientalism: A Proposal” Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and
Religion Volume 1, Issue 7 (June 2010). Pgs 1-22. CS>
In her study of black attitudes toward the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 through analysis of black newspapers in the nineteenth century, Helen H. Jun
shows how Orientalist
discourses of Chinese cultural difference facilitated the “assimilation of black
Americans to ideologies of political modernity and consolidated black identification as U.S.
national subject” while reifying the Orientalist logic of the anti-Chinese movement.18 For instance, she
quotes historian Arnold Shankman who observed that, “from 1880-1935 almost every time the Chinese were mentioned in the black press, it was in
connection with intrigue, prostitution, murder, the sale of opium or children for money . . . superstitious practices, shootings or tong wars.”19 As Jun
argues, it was crucial for black Americans to emphasize the “Christian formation of the black national subject in explicating black qualification for
citizenship, which, consequently, Orientalizes, or discursively disciplines the Chinese and Indian as inadequate to political modernity.”20 Although
black Orientalist discourse on Chinese difference was employed to articulate the
“Americanness” of black people in opposition to “Asians,” whose religious and cultural
differences rendered them unfit to be considered “Americans,” black Americans realized that
when federal legislation excludes one group of people based on race it could do the same to
them, thus negatively affecting their own collective endeavor to claim the full rights of U.S.
citizenship.21 Many black Americans protested the Chinese Exclusion Act as a result.22 This
legacy of Afro/black-Orientalism illustrates the following points. First, uncritical adherence to “Americanness” would not
help racial/ethnic minority groups in their claiming of full U.S. citizenship. Second, Christianity became a double-edged sword—one
that challenged white supremacy and another that reinscribed American Orientalism. Last, black political support of Chinese
immigration was not based on racial identification with the Chinese, whose gendered racial and
immigrant formations were different from those of African Americans, but based on a common
political struggle against white supremacist nationalism that had excluded racial/ethnic
minority groups from claiming the full rights of citizenship in the United States.
Starting with racialized identities like the black body is a net better form of
understanding how the world stage operates in the context of colonization.
Hernandez and Steen ’06 (Professor English and American Studies Julius Maximilians
Universität Würzburg, Germany. Ph.D., Stanford University. Professor Steen writes and teaches
about race and performance, primarily in the intersection of the African American and Asian
American worlds. “AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics “, pgs. 261, 2006, NAE)
Throughout the twentieth century, African Americans have looked beyond the United States to
the world stage. Seeing themselves as part of a non- white world majority—in some cases, such as W.
E. B. Du Bois and Rich- ard Wright, even as the vanguard of that majority—they associated them- selves
with anticolonialist and democratic struggles in many areas of the world. The power of their
identification can be demonstrated in a number of instances, such as African Americans’
sympathy for India’s campaign for independence from British rule in the first half of the twentieth
cen- tury (and, conversely, the influence of Gandhi’s theories of nonviolent struggle on African American civil rights activists),
their moral and finan- cial support for Ethiopia following the Italian invasion in 1935, and later
their concern for South Africa and the leadership of the anti-Apartheid movement in the United
States during the 1980s. A number of recent his- torical studies, notably those of Brenda Gayle Plummer, Penny
von Esch- en, and Thomas Borstelmann, have underlined the role of internationalist thought in the African
American community and its role in shaping not only black community attitudes but also
government policy toward other nations, particularly in the nonwhite world.1 More specialized
studies, no- tably those of Sudarshan Kapur, Reginald Kearney, and Mark Gallichio, have revolved around Black
internationalism in its connection with Asia.2 The political activism of Paul Robeson during the
1930s and 1940s, and in particular his cultural and political engagement with East Asia and with
the Asian diaspora, represents a fascinating case study of Black interna- tionalism. Robeson was
probably the most popular and visible African American of the 1930s and 1940s. He was a celebrated stage actor, the first black
movie star, an internationally famous folk singer, a champion ath- lete, a lawyer, a powerful speaker, and a linguist conversant in
anywhere from ten to twenty-five languages. Robeson was and continues
to be pri- marily known for his interest
in international politics, chiefly as an uncrit- ical supporter and admirer of the Soviet Union and
of the U.S. Commu- nist Party. Because of his sympathy for communism, plus his advocacy of
civil rights, Robeson suffered severe repression during the Cold War years when he was vilified in the press and targeted for
boycotts by conservative groups. When Robeson gave a concert at Peekskill, New York, in 1949, con- certgoers were attacked and
beaten by right-wing vigilantes. During the 1950s, Robeson was blacklisted, harassed by the FBI, and denied a passport by the
State Department. As a result, Robeson (who had been the highest- paid black entertainer in the nation during the prewar years)
was effec- tively unemployed for ten years, while his health was ruined by the ordeal.
FAILURE TO DISCUSS RACE LEAVES UNCHECKED A FOUNDATIONAL
ORIENTALIST VIOLENCE
There is rich and in depth history of CHINESE/BLACK relations that exists in the US that redefines the nature
of US/CHINA engagement. Black representations ENGAGED with a discursive field of AMERICAN
ORIENTALIST ideologies that found expression in the anti-Chinese movement culminating in the CHINESE
EXCLUSION ACT. The INVASIVE YELLOW PERIL that posed GRAVE threats to SURVIVAL were
discursively decimated with images of Chinatown ghettos with OPIUM CRAZED, LASCIVIOUS SEXUAL
PREDATORS who carried ASIATIC DISEASES. Blacks ENGAGED with such stereotypes to NARRATE Black
aptitude for citizenship. The BACKWARD ORIENTAL works to UNDERSCORE the story of black modern
development.
JUN asst. professor of African American Studies and English @ Univ. of Illinois Chicago 2k6 (Helen H.-currently
completing a relational study of how Asian Americans and African Americans differentially emerged into U.S. citizenship during the
19th and 20th centuries; BLACK ORIENTALISM: 19th Century Narratives of Race and U.S. Citizenship; AMERICAN QUARTERLY,
Volume 58, Number 4, December; http://courses.washington.edu/com597j/student%20presentations/Jun.pdf; (db)
The Heathen Chinese Black press representations of Chinese alterity engaged with a discursive field of
American Orientalist ideologies that found expression as the anti-Chinese movement in the midnineteenth century. Anti-Chinese political agitation emerged in the mid-1850s along the West Coast, fueled by competing
white immigrant workers who racially defined free labor in antagonism to blacks and the Chinese.15 Initially a regional and
class-based formation, anti-Chinese legislation became part of the national political platform that
ultimately culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first and only time a specific
ethnic group was legally barred from immigrating to the United States. White labor, clergymen,
and nativists generally constructed Chinese immigrants as an invasive yellow peril that posed a
grave moral and economic threat to the survival of the white working man and the American
family; “Can we compete with a barbarous race, devoid of energy and careless of the State’s weal? Sunk in their own
debasement, having no voice in government, how long would it be ere ruin would swamp the capitalist and poor man
together?”16 Anti-Chinese sentiments were not merely racialized expressions of a white workingclass ideology, however, but were tied to a larger discourse of American Orientalism that cut across
class lines.17 In his study of disease and racial classification in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Nayan Shah points to how
journalists, politicians, and health officials worked in tandem to produce “a way of knowing”
Chinatown as an alien space of filth, disease, and contamination. As Shah argues, “the cartography of
Chinatown that was developed in government investigations, newspaper reports, and travelogues, both established ‘knowledge’ of
the Chinese race and aided in the making and remaking of Chinatown.”18 Hence, white public health officials
“scientifically” corroborated the dominant press’s sensational descriptions of Chinatown as
“ankle-deep in loathsome slush, with ceilings dripping with percolations of other nastiness above,
[and] with walls slimy with the clamminess of Asiatic diseases.” 19 The overwhelmingly male
composition of the Chinese immigrant community, secured through exclusionary legislation
prohibiting the immigration of Chinese women, was central to the discourse of moral panic in
areas surrounding Chinatown ghettos. Images of Chinese men as depraved opium addicts and
lascivious sexual predators of innocent young white girls dominated an American Orientalist
discourse that constituted Chinatown and its residents as alien contaminations of the white
national body. Black press representations of Chinatown ghettos and its inhabitants also
consistently constructed these spaces and persons as embodiments of premodern, alien
difference.20 The number and frequency of articles about the Chinese is noteworthy, in that the vast majority of U.S.
blacks never directly encountered the Chinese who began immigrating in significant numbers in the 1850s and who
were geographically concentrated in the West.21 Much of the coverage in the black press prior to 1882 concerned
legislative/political matters, although most stories were sensationalist, such as those in the New Orleans Tribune,
which described an exotic Chinatown temple where priests “shout, yell, groan, spin around amid
the racket of gongs, orums, and fiddlers, and smoke opium until they are quite drunk.” 22 The Topeka
Tribune reprinted an article that described the moral depravity of an opium den in Chicago’s Chinese quarter, “where some were
sprawling on a filthy floor, and others had rolled into dirty bunks, and all were contemplating a glorious orgie [sic],”23 while the
Washington Bee gave front-page coverage to “The Chinese in New York: Peculiarities of the Orientals Described.”24 In his study of
the black press, historian Arnold Shankman observes that “from 1880–1935 almost every time the Chinese were
mentioned in the black press, it was in connection with intrigue, prostitution, murder, the sale of
opium or children for money . . . superstitious practices, shootings or tong wars.” 25 Stories on
Chinese cultural difference even predated the arrival of Chinese immigrants to the United States.
As early as 1827, the first issue of Freedom’s Journal printed an article titled “Chinese Fashions”
that described Chinese foot binding as a “well-known” and “ridiculous” custom in China.26 The description includes a
good amount of empirical detail, as in the following: “The length was only two inches and three-fourths; the breadth of the base of
the heel seven-eighths of an inch; the breadth of the broadest part of the foot, one and one-fourth of an inch; and the diameter of the
ankle three inches above the heel, one and seven-eighths of an inch.”27 The highly empiricist, scientific language of ethnographic
observation sharply contrasts with the incomprehensible, primitive Oriental practice that the article describes. Freedom’s
Journal, the first black newspaper to be published in the United States, was a relatively shortlived, but historically significant, press that was dedicated to the defense of free blacks and to the
abolition of slavery by disseminating “useful knowledge among our brethren, and to their moral
and religious improvement . . . and to vindicate our brethren, when oppressed.” Other stories in this
inaugural issue are more clearly related to the paper’s stated commitments. For instance, “Memoirs of Capt. Paul Cuffe,” “People of
Colour,” “Cure For Drunkeness,” and “Advantages of Choosing a Wife by Proxy,” work to emphasize male leadership, racial
solidarity, temperance, and family—crucial elements in narrating black aptitude for citizenship. Hence, the
seemingly random, peripheral article on a backward “Oriental” practice works to underscore the
story of black modern development in which “useful knowledge” and “moral and religious improvement” are indelibly
tied to the paper’s commitment to the rights of free blacks and the abolition of slavery.
“SILENCE” QUESTIONS THE VALIDITY OF THEIR CRITICAL THOUGHTS
ON ENGAGEMENT
The literary scholarship on contact between Blacks and Chinese Immigrant is historical rich.
The black press provided a Black public discourse allowing the identity of a Black national
community and the technical means for RE-PRESENTING an IMAGINED community.
Educated Blacks ENGAGED in cultural politics of CITIZENSHIP, NEGOTIATING the
POLITICAL, CULTURAL, and SOCIAL VIOLENCE of white supremacy. Tropes of Chinese
UNDERDEVELOPMENT enable the discursive production of Black modern subjects. The
material history of WHITE SUPREMACIST VIOLENCE constitutes the CONTRADICTIONS of
black citizenship and yet AMERICA remains a POWERFUL Orientalist trope for Black
Americans even in the absence of an explicitly “POLTICAL” DISCOURSE. ORIENTALISM
narrates the alien cultural formation of the Chinese Immigrant in order to NEGOTIATE Black
Exclusion. Black Orientalist discourses of disidentification were not merely NATIVIST rather
serve as an INDEX of Black positionality within the institution of CITIZENSHIP relative to the
Chinese who were not INCORPORATED as political subjects.
JUN asst. professor of African American Studies and English @ Univ. of Illinois Chicago 2k6 (Helen H.-currently
completing a relational study of how Asian Americans and African Americans differentially emerged into U.S. citizenship during the
19th and 20th centuries; BLACK ORIENTALISM: 19th Century Narratives of Race and U.S. Citizenship; AMERICAN QUARTERLY,
Volume 58, Number 4, December; http://courses.washington.edu/com597j/student%20presentations/Jun.pdf; (db)
As a cultural institution, the black press had a highly significant role in defining black national identity,
and nineteenth-century black newspapers were particularly invested in narratives of racial uplift
and development. Benedict Anderson has linked the emergence of print capitalism to the production of nationalist
consciousness, arguing that the newspaper produced an experience of simultaneity that enabled imagined “horizontal” identification
among strangers across broad geographical areas.28 Larger, national black presses regularly received news from “correspondents”
across the country and reprinted articles from both black and dominant white media considered relevant to a black national
population. This production and consumption of print media not only created an arena for black public
discourse but also was constitutive of the very experience of identifying as a subject of a black
national community. The discourses of development, progress, and self-improvement that are so
central in Freedom’s Journal are absolutely key throughout the nineteenth-century black press,
which was a particularly effective institution for the production and dissemination of ideologies of
racial uplift.29 Most black newspapers and periodicals aspired to produce narratives of black
racial progress while attacking racist legislation and policies that threatened to impede the
development of the race. If we understand the black press as the technical means for “re-presenting” the
kind of imagined community that defines black racial identity, then the process by which that identity is defined
is always a contestation among competing and heterogeneous interests that are homogenized under the unifying rubric of “race.”
The nineteenth-century black press cannot be understood as a monolithic institution possessing a cohesive racial or class ideology;
however, the material reality that the majority of editors were educated black men with sufficient financial resources critically informs
how black national identity was narrated through print media. As African Americanist historians such as Kevin Gaines and Jane
Rhodes have noted, these editors, by and large “promoted the virtues of education, individual progress, and racial uplift as the
means for African Americans to transcend the debilitating legacy of slavery and racial oppression.”30 Therefore, while the
institutional formation of the nineteenth-century black press is characterized by competing interests and conflicts, ideologies of racial
uplift constituted the discursive terrain where such differences were articulated and debated.31 Kevin Gaines has discussed how
educated blacks engaged in a cultural politics of citizenship that promoted a developmental
ideology of racial progress emphasizing black moral and cultural propriety. Negotiating the
political, cultural, and social violence of white supremacy, ideologies of racial uplift encouraged
the emulation of what Gaines tentatively calls “middle class” values and ideals, which were the
authoritative signifiers of respectability and humanity.32 While racist discourses, therefore,
constructed blacks as immoral, irrational, and violent savages incapable of self-regulation, the
educated black community responded by embracing values of temperance, thrift, chastity, and
patriarchal domesticity as a means of proving their worthiness and entitlement to citizenship.
Embracing Victorian morality, or performing heteronormativity enabled black communities to
move as far away from the stereotypes as they could, to provide their tormentors with no
evidence for their charges, and to strategically claim a moral superiority. 33 What is most useful about
Gaines’s analysis is the theorization of how the violent denial of black political and economic enfranchisement facilitates the
formation of a cultural politics that symbolically embodies citizenship . While Gaines’s study begins at the
end of Radical Reconstruction, his theorization of racial uplift provides insight into black Orientalism as a related form
of nineteenth-century cultural politics. Tropes of Chinese underdevelopment enabled the discursive
production of black modern subjects who were capable of incorporation into a narrative of
Western historical progress, even in the face of brutal material contradictions that countered the
very notion of “Western civilization.” The material history of white supremacist violence that
saturated the political, economic, and social spheres of nineteenth-century America constitutes the
“contradictions of black citizenship” to which I continually refer. The abolition of slavery did not resolve
these contradictions, nor did the institution of citizenship , which was formally granted to black persons with the
passage of the Fourteenth Amendment (1866). Immediately after the ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments,
almost all of the former Confederate states quickly instituted black codes that criminalized blacks in ways that served as substitutes
for slavery.34 Hence, various state laws required that these recently “freed” subjects sign work contracts with plantations (often the
same ones they worked as slaves) and to have these papers with them at all times. Black persons could be stopped and questioned
at any time, and the absence of a work contract was criminalized as “vagrancy,” at which point one was arrested and put to work
through the convict lease system. Numerous studies have shown how systematic economic and political disenfranchisement left
many of the “freedmen” as vulnerable to exploitation and violence as they were during slavery.35 These postbellum political,
economic, and social relations were enforced through campaigns of racial terror that maintained
the privilege of whiteness through the brutal regulation of black bodies. The well-known work of Ida B.
Wells, for instance, has demonstrated how the widespread practice of lynching in the South was a crucial means of maintaining the
economic, political, and social authority of white supremacist patriarchy.36 African American feminist critic Hazel Carby notes that,
in addition to the practice of lynching, “the institutionalized rape of black women” was also “an instrument of political terror . . . in the
South.”37 From the end of the Civil War to the turn of the century, there were countless acts of violence against
black persons, in addition to the hundreds of documented lynchings enacted as public rituals of torture that used the imagined
violations of white women to reconstitute the patriarchal and capitalist authority of white men.38 It is within this context of
racial terrorism that ideologies of racial uplift emerged as strategies of survival against intense
dehumanization. Religious ideologies of Christian morality were absolutely central to discourses
of racial uplift that sought to contest the historical violence that denied U.S. blacks their humanity
and citizenship. As Reverend Blakeslee’s statements implied, Christianity was critically linked to nineteenth-century discourses
of black citizenship, in that the Christian conversion of the African heathen was understood as the foundation of moral development
and ethical citizenship.39 Subsequently, ideologies of racial uplift seeking to produce a “civilized” black subject emphatically
promoted Christian propriety and moral self-improvement in an effort to refute dominant characterizations of blacks as depraved and
immoral savages.40 Racial uplift constituted black Christian subjects, therefore, as part of a larger effort to represent the modern
development of blacks under Western civilization.41 The developmental ideologies of American modernity
demanded Christian morality as the precondition for the transformation of the primitive slave into
the modern political subject. This imperative would subsequently have profound implications for
black understandings of Chinese racial difference. The heathenism that the Chinese came to
signify in nineteenth-century America was a powerful Orientalist trope for black Americans , whose
assertions of humanity and claims to citizenship had been largely predicated on negotiating discourses of Christian morality.
Appeals to Christian ideologies have been crucial to black critiques of white supremacy since the eighteenth century, becoming an
important means of refuting their object status in black struggles for recognition as legal subjects of the state. Abolitionist discourse
relied predominantly on religious ideology, arguing that slavery violated fundamental principles of Christianity and engendered sinful
and immoral relations among both slaves and their masters. Additionally, the American school of ethnology created damaging,
hierarchical classifications of racial groups, which they claimed had emerged from various and unequal origins, subsequently
undermining the theological basis of a universal humanity, which had provided U.S. blacks with a fragile, yet important legitimating
discourse in their struggle against racialized exploitation. After the formal abolition of U.S. slavery, Christian doctrine and
monogenesis posed the greatest theoretical challenge to scientific racism as various disciplines sought to provide a scientific basis
for white supremacy and manifest destiny.42 Religious discourses, therefore, continued to be relevant for U.S. blacks in relation to
citizenship and to modern institutions such as the university. The following news story delineates fundamental connections between
black Christian morality and political aptitude in the nineteenth century and underscores how racialized groups have been
differentially located in relation to religious and other cultural institutions of the U.S. state. This article from the Pacific Appeal, a
black newspaper in San Francisco, makes an explicit argument for black rights of testimony and deploys an antiracist critique that
distances black development from the heathen Chinese and Indian: In the same oppressive spirit they deprived the Indian and
Mongolian of their right of oath . . . they oppressed them and reduced them to the same social and political level of the Negro. This
was inhumane, barbarous, and unjust, but a more plausible excuse might be offered for depriving the Indian and the Chinese of
their oaths than the Colored American: they being heathens and not comprehending the nature and obligation of our oath or
affirmation . . . The Negro is a Christian: there is a strong religious sentiment in his nature, a feeling of awe and reverence for the
sanctity of an oath which renders his judicial testimony sacred to him . . . perjury is abhorrent to his soul; —he looks upon it as the
unforgiven sin.43 The Indian and Chinese immigrant are represented as atavistic yet wrongfully oppressed subjects of
discrimination, and are empathetically characterized as underdeveloped heathens who are nonetheless entitled to recognition by the
courts. While the article harshly condemns the “inhumane” treatment of “uncomprehending” Native Americans and the Chinese, it
consolidates the legitimacy of black male rights to citizenship by describing, in contrast, the proper ethical formation of the black
subject who has developed the modern capacity to appropriately engage state institutions. This discursive disidentification
must not be interpreted as some kind of hypocritical inconsistency that contradicts the article’s critique of racist exclusion.
Emphasizing the Christian formation of the black national subject is an ideological imperative in
narrating black aptitude for citizenship, which, by consequence, Orientalizes, or discursively
disciplines the Chinese and Indian as inadequate to political modernity. Recalling Gaines’s analysis, black
Orientalism is operative as a cultural politics of citizenship even in the absence of an explicitly
“political” discourse, such as the case of Freedom’s Journal and its seemingly “apolitical” article on Chinese foot-binding.
This next article, from Frederick Douglass’ Paper, is submitted by a San Francisco “correspondent” and chronicles the “progress
made by the colored people in this city,” describing the three black churches, the school, and the literary association that have
“given tone and character to Society.”44 The emphasis on black religious, educational, and cultural institutions in this article reflects
their crucial ideological significance in the ethical formation of proper subjectivities that the article attempts to demonstrate. The
narrator shifts abruptly from the black community’s “large number of respectable ladies and their influence” to conclude its
correspondence with an ethnographic description of Chinese immigrants. San Francisco presents many features that no city in the
Union presents. Its population is composed of almost every nation under heaven. Here is to be seen at a single glance every nation
in minature [sic]. —The Chinese form about one-eighth of the population. They exhibit a most grotesque appearance. Their
“unmentionables” are either exceedingly roomy or very close fitting. The heads of the males are shaved, with the exception of the
top, the hair from which is formed into a plaited tail, resembling “pig tail tobacco.” Their habits are filthy, and their features totally
devoid of expression. The whites are greatly alarmed at their rapid increase. They are very badly treated here. Every boy considers
them lawful prey for his boyish pranks. They have no friends, unless it is the colored people, who treat everybody well, even their
enemies. But I must close this already too long letter.45 The representation of the Chinese immigrant’s “grotesque” and “filthy”
appearance, undergarments, and habits are in sharp juxtaposition with the proper formation of the black community’s “intelligent
audiences,” “handsome” churches, “respectable ladies,” and “eminently qualified . . . gentlemen” who speak with “eloquence” and
“chaste and elegant” language. Once again, these polarized representations cannot be reductively interpreted as an instance of
racism or anti-Chinese sentiments, which the article strongly criticizes and disavows, even asserting that the Chinese are befriended
by only “the colored people.”46 As in the Pacific Appeal, this article expresses clear empathy toward the “persecuted” Chinese, even
as it simultaneously objectifies Chinese immigrants through an anthropological gaze that methodically recounts their foreign signs of
bodily and cultural difference.47 This Orientalist account generates neither a “negative or positive”
representation, but narrates the alien cultural formation of the Chinese immigrant to negotiate
black exclusion, which the article previously addressed in an otherwise celebratory testimonial: “We suffer many deprivations,
however. We have no oath against any white man or Chinaman. We are debarred from the polls. The Legislature refused to accept
our petition for the right to testify in courts of justice against the whites; but not withstanding all these drawbacks, we are steadily
progressing in all that pertains to our welfare.”48 In response to the degradation of black disenfranchisement, the article’s Orientalist
gaze is constitutive of a modern black subject of the West just as the refined churches, school, and literary association stand in as
markers of black development and civilization. While papers such as the Pacific Appeal and Frederick Douglass’ Paper had
expressed earlier sympathetic positions regarding the Chinese, by 1873 the black press in California emphasized the negative
impact of Chinese immigrants on the black community and the nation as a whole. These papers consistently narrated the cultural
and moral underdevelopment of the Chinese in an effort to distance blacks from the dangerous implications of anti-Chinese
legislation that occupied the political discourse of California.49 One telling article published in 1867 denied any link between the
black and Chinese situations, arguing that “there is no analogy between the cases” since “the negro is a native American, loyal to
the Government . . . American in all his ideas . . . and a believer of the truths of Christianity” who “ask[s] for the rights of citizenship
as [his] just due.”50 Discourses of the Chinese as a racial problem were not just confined to California as evidenced by the New
Orleans Lousianian which stated that “the Negro question was being replaced by that of the Chinese”51 As the anti-Chinese
movement gained political momentum throughout the nation, it became increasingly necessary
and commonplace that black claims to citizenship articulate Orientalist disidentification with
Chinese immigrants.52 The formulaic narration of black military service, Christian morality, and
nationalist identification that constructed blacks as American subjects would become a repetitive
and frequent articulation with respect to discourses of Chinese exclusion. Black Orientalist
discourses of disidentification were not merely nativist ideologies, since they were deployed to
demonstrate the assimilability of black immigrants. One article rhetorically dismissed the notion of Chinese
immigration as a “problem” in the context of discussing the modification of naturalization laws that would allow immigrants of African
descent to become naturalized citizens. Arguing that such legislative changes had little relevance with respect to the Chinese, the
article characterized West Indian immigrants as “already Americans; their habits, customs, and associations are identical with ours .
. . They have practically renounced their allegiance to their original government and are truly Americanized . . . the same
advantages should be extended to the colored alien as are enjoyed by white foreigners.”53 The article contrasts the Chinese as
foreigner with black immigrants from the West Indies whose formation under European colonialism has made their “habits, customs,
and associations . . . identical with ours” and therefore easily assimilable into the U.S. national body. It is particularly striking that the
allegiance of West Indies black immigrants “to their original government” is linked to a colonial state whose importation of African
slave labor has produced a “Western” black colonial subject, who is “known for . . . adherence to our customs and institutions.” The
suppressed ambiguity surrounding the black immigrant’s national identification is an index of
how the history of the African slave trade and Euro-American colonialism positioned blacks in the
Americas in a radically different relationship to the institution of citizenship from the Chinese,
who were not incorporated as cultural or political subjects of the West during the nineteenth
century.
Afro Asian encounters are erased in order to further white dominance and
pit blacks and Asians against each other – Afro Orientalism requires
constant reorientation to itself which disrupts the black white binary and
creates the possibility for strategic coalitions against violence
Kim in 10 <Nami. “Engaging Afro/black-Orientalism: A Proposal” Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and
Religion Volume 1, Issue 7 (June 2010). Pgs 1-22. CS>
To many, the Bandung era of Afro-Asian solidarity represented a high point of the antiimperialist
and antiracist struggles of people of Asian and African descent. Fifty years later, however, the
spirit and political significance of the Bandung era seems to have faded. Vijay Prashad also notes that
although “AfroAsian solidarity” emerged in the Bandung era as a political stand against colonialism, the foundation for that solidarity
is “now largely eroded, with Africa and Asia interested in each other’s resources and capital, where the bold pronouncements for a
The task of engaging Afro/blackOrientalism may seem challenging today because the context in which we raise concerns and
questions is different from that of the early to mid-twentieth century during which African American activists and intellectuals
radical reconfiguration of the international political economy has vanished.”31
had formed political solidarity. Also, people are no longer primarily concerned with the third-world anti-colonial struggle for nationstate sovereignty and the color line of Jim Crow racial segregation in the United States where African American activists and
Yet, as black feminist Patricia Hill Collins
stresses, the racial hierarchies Du Bois observed a century ago continue to exist not only on a
local level but also on a global scale.32 We now face what Hill Collins calls “new racism,” which
is “transnational” due to the global market economy and global mass media.33 Racialized and
gendered globalization continues to produce color lines in the twenty-first century. Also, while
intellectuals began their search for global solidarity among people of color.
admitting that the “excavations of AfroAsian solidarity might be nostalgic and anachronistic,”34 Prashad nonetheless maintains that
the “epistemological and historical archive of solidarity” and “memory of the interactions” must be brought to light.35 In a similar
vein, Mullen states, “AfroAsian
solidarity needs a constant reorientation to itself. The constant
threat of historical erasure of the coalition building of ethnic communities necessitates
an urgent, disciplined commitment to a ‘useable’ AfroAsian past.”36 By challenging white
supremacy, which has persistently pit one racial/ethnic minority group against another,
Afro/black-Orientalism may shed new light on the forgotten history of interactions and coalitions
among African, African Americans, and Asians and Asian North Americans in their concerted
efforts to resist racism, colonialism, and U.S. imperialism.37 Engaging Afro/black-Orientalism is
not a naïve attempt to romanticize the relationship between people of African descent and Asian
descent when the relationship between these groups has been strenuous if not totally hostile as
shown in incidents such as the Los Angeles Riot of 1992 and the ongoing plight of biracial children between African American
Rather, engaging Afro/black-Orientalism needs to be
understood as an effort to underscore the “political solidarity” that has characterized various
forms of Afro-Asian connections and coalition, including black American protests against the
Chinese Exclusion Act and other discriminatory U.S. immigration policies. In turn, this helps
disrupt the black and white racial binary that has characterized racism and racial formations in
mainstream U.S. culture. In what follows, I will briefly discuss some of the implications of engaging Afro/black-Orientalism
fathers and “Asian” mothers on U.S. military bases in Asia.
for doing interdisciplinary religious/theological studies from an Asian Pacific North American feminist perspective by highlighting
shared interests between the two.
INCOMPLETE and PERVERTED, decolonization has FAILED but has
created a political space, the structuring dimensions of racism finds itself
REPRODUCED, EXPANDED and RE-ACTIVATED redefined by immigration
and the formation of nation-states throughout the IMMENSE periphery of
the planet with their EXPLOSIVE antagonisms between capitalist
bourgeoisies and WRETCHED MASSES. A PLETHORA of DEVASTATING
racisms is CONTINUALLY feeding the stereotypes of white racism as
humanity is SPLIT into INCOMPATIABLE MASSES and the division
between sub-human and super-human is a structural but VIOLENTLY
unstable one.
BALIBAR teaches philosophy @ the University of Paris 2k5
Etienne-; RACE, NATION, CLASS: Ambiguous identities; published 1988 reprinted 1992,1993,1995,1996,1998,2000,2002,2005; p.
43-44.
When the pace of the decolonization process increased, these contradictions took on a new form. To judge it by its own ideals,
decolonization has failed, the process being both incomplete and perverted. It has, however, in
combination with other relatively independent events (the coming of the age of planetary weapons systems and
communication networks), created new political space. This is not merely a space in which strategies are formed, and
capital, technologies and messages circulate, but a space in which entire populations subject to the law of the market come into
contact physically and symbolically. Thus the equivocal interiority-exteriority configuration which had, since
the period of colonial conquest, formed one of the structuring dimensions of racism, finds itself
reproduced, expanded and re-activated. It is within’ effects which are produced by immigration
from the former colonies or quasi-colonies into the capitalist ‘centres’. But this form of
interiorization of the exterior which marks out the horizon against which the representations of
‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are played out cannot be separated, other than abstractly, from apparently
antithetical forms of exteriorization of the interior. And in particular it cannot be separated from
those which result from the formation – after the more or less complete departure of the colonizers – of states
which claim to be national (but only become so very unequally) throughout the immense periphery of the
planet, with their explosive antagonisms between capitalist bourgeoisies or ‘Westernized’ state
bourgeoisies and wretched masses, thrown back by this very fact upon ‘traditionalism’. Benedict
Anderson maintains that decolonization has not, so to speak, expressed itself in the third World by the
development of what a particular propaganda calls ‘counter-racism’ (anti-White or anti-European).
Let us concede that this was written before the recent developments in Islamic fundamentalism, the contribution of which to the
flows of ‘xenophobia’ in our present conjuncture will certainly have to be assessed. Anderson’s argument is, however, incomplete,
for, though there may not be a ‘Third-Worldist’ counter-racism in Africa, Asia or Latin America,
there is a plethora of devastating racisms, both institutional and popular, between ‘nations’,
‘ethnic groups’ and ‘communities’. And the spectacle of these racisms, in its turn deformed by
global communications, is continually feeding the stereotypes of White racism by keeping alive
the old idea that three-quarters of humanity are incapable of governing themselves. Doubtless the
background to these mimetic effects is constituted by the replacement of the old world of colonizing nations and their sphere of
manoeuvre (the rest of humanity) by a new world which is formally organized into equivalent nation states
(each represented in international institutions) but traversed by the constantly shifting frontier – irreducible to
the frontiers between states – between two humanities which seem incommensurable, namely the
underdevelopment and that of overdevelopment. In appearance, humanity has been unified by the
suppression of imperial hierarchies; in fact, however, it is only today that humanity exists as
such, though split into tendentially incompatible masses. In the space of the world-economy,
which has effectively become that of world politics and world ideology, the division between
subhumans and super-humans is a structural but violently unstable one. Previously, the notion humanity
was merely an abstraction. But, to the question ‘What is man?’ which – however aberrant its forms may appear to us – is insistently
present in racist thought, there is today no response in which this split is not at work.
The perm empirically fails. Movements for liberation that attempt to
incorporate every other system of oppression no matter how sincere the
motivation causes these movements to collapse.
HO Chinese Revolutionary Socialist Activist & MULLEN Dir of American Studies @ Purdue 2k8 (Fred-baritone
saxophonist, composer, writer, producer, leader of the Afro Asian Music Ensemble & Bill V.-white male, professor of English author
of Afro-Orientalism and coeditor of W.E.B. Du Bois on Asia: Crossing the World Color Line; AFRO ASIA Revolutionary Political &
Cultural Connections Between African Americans and Asian Americans; pp.5-8 db)
Fred Ho writes: “The Black Power era in U.S. social history (circa the late 1960s) included many other
social movements-queer liberation, the Asian movement, the Chicano movement, and the
women’s liberation movement, among others -that asserted the principles, so powerfully articulated and advocated
by Malcolm X, of self-respect, self-defense, and self-determination. While these movements asserted particularistic
demands and self-aware pride and the assertion of autonomous identities, the dominant leaders
of these groups were radical and revolutionary and, therefore, targeted “the system” and
promoted unity and alliances among oppressed peoples rather than isolationism, protectionism,
and narrow chauvinism. While efforts to unite and develop a concerted revolutionary Left united
front were many and sincere, they were short-lived, limited, and fraught with conflicts,
contradictions and failures. This was especially true in the case of the New communist movement when organizations
that came out of the black, Asian, Puerto Rican, Chicano and white Left merged and united into “multinational” organizations, with
many either falling apart due to internecine splits or fading away due to their inability to sink roots and expand. While it is neither the
focus nor role of this anthology to analyze the rise and fall of the United States New left, it is important to recognize that by the
Reagan-Bush years of the 1980s and early 1990s, many of the radical and revolutionary initiatives had imploded, disappeared, and
become marginalized due to a combination of internal errors and failures as well as the overall right-wing onslaught to retake the
political, social, and cultural initiative that the Left had briefly seized. The U.S. elites, perhaps in learning more from the sixties
quickly deployed an array of strategies and tactics that
combined the “stick” and the “carrot” to repress, crush, and co-opt the energies that had erupted.
The documentation of the violent repression, military assault, and incarceration of radicals is well
assembled in accounts about the FBI’s COINTELPRO (Counter-Intelligence Program) as well as in the counter-insurgency and
destabilization programs of the CIA in other countries. Less documented and analyzed are how the various
movements and their leaders were co-opted, tempted, and seduced by reformism, careerism, and
a host of distractions, eviscerations, and compromises and dilutions. The tactics of co-optation
and containment employed domestically have included divide and conquer, the promotion of
neoconservative ideologues, and the general discrediting and disappearing of social
consciousness for a cultural conditioning that promotes hyperindividualism, consumerism, and
instant gratification. The African American radical and revolutionary movement has, since its explosion, suffered
and early-seventies experience than did the U.S. Left,
assassination, incarceration, and calumny. The expansion of the black middle class has been one of the most significant gains won
from the hard-fought civil rights and Black Power struggles. As concessions and response to revolutionary
demands for full equality and empowerment, federal government-instituted policies and programs
such as affirmative action recruitment and hiring were instituted. The expansion of a black elite beholden to
government and corporate admittance has spawned reformist and neoconservative black
leadership, often in direct consequence and designed to supplant the black Left. The appointment of
Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme court, and the rise of neoconservative black ideologues such as Thomas Sowell, Shelby
Steele, Clarence Pendleton, Stanley Crouch, Alan Keyes, and others, reflect a new generation of media pundits who support the
neoconservative agenda of minimizing or erasing racism and the saliency of race by attacking special programs and supporting the
overall drumbeat of U.S. Imperialism. Along with the rise of black neoconservatives, which is the direct
political and intellectual wing of black franchise capitalism, is the rise of an essentialist black
fundamentalism, articulated in part as Afrocentrism and represented by Louis Farrakhan and Molefi Asante. Another very
influential sector, based primarily in academia and in intellectural power, is an integrationist
celebrity strata with well-known and well-paid intellectuals. Many of the neoconservatives, along
with their counterparts in the Afrocentrist sphere, have promoted an attitude of black protectionism for
the small gains secured by these middle classes. A “black versus other minorities” endgame has
been constructed in the competition for status, resources, and token power, reflected in debates
and divisions between Afrocentrism versus multiculturalism and between the black community as
consumer versus the Korean or Asian merchant as outside parasites. What is also noteworthy is that within
the African American community, cleavages, fault lines, contradictions, and conflicts are also promulgated and fanned by both
neoconservatives and black essentialist-fundamentalists-namely, black men versus black feminism and self-responsibility versus
blaming the system and racism, as well as the rise of variants black masculinist capitalism. In the maintenance of ruling power, the
tactic of divide and conquer has been very effective especially in conditions of limited and narrow
political consciousness on the part of the oppressed. Between Africans and Asians in the United States,
divisions are accentuated through competition over resources and positioning vis-à-vis the institutional funding troughs in vastly
dissimilar terrains ranging from colleges and universities to inner-city ghettos. The concessions such as ethnic studies
programs or minority affairs offices or student cultural centers are
increasingly embracing isolationism and
protectionism in a defensive circle-the-wagons mentality for the small, hard-won gains on college
campuses. The dramatic increases in the Latino and Asian/Pacific student presence has intensified
competition over limited student government and administration funds and support for these programs. Pressure to
reallocate funds, once perceived as black entitlements and preserves, to be shared with “other”
minorities has fueled resentment and suspicion on the part of African Americans. The history of
collaboration and common struggle that brought about these concessions in the first place is
often “lost” or “forgotten” as demagogues from both black and other minorities vie for mostfavored minority status with the dominant administration.
RACIAL OPPOSITION TO THE STATUS QUO IS NOT A JUSTIFICATION FOR THE PLAN –
HISTORY PROVES
Black Opposition to the CHINESE EXCLUSION ACT reveals how Federal Legislation makes Blacks
VULNERABLE to EXCLUSION within the American State and threatens “Black Citizenship.” The fact that
there is a RACIAL advantage to the plan or that Blacks in America would SUPPORT the plan because of
the nature of the status quo does not resolve the LINK LEVEL of the criticism. Just as Black critiques of
the Exclusion Act did not OPPOSE immigration restrictions, Racial opposition to policies changed by the
Affirmative do not unravel the historical dynamics of Orientalist discourse. Only the ALTERNATIVE
resolves the DISTANCING of RACIALIZATION.
JUN asst. professor of African American Studies and English @ Univ. of Illinois Chicago 2k6 (Helen H.-currently
completing a relational study of how Asian Americans and African Americans differentially emerged into U.S. citizenship during the
19th and 20th centuries; BLACK ORIENTALISM: 19th Century Narratives of Race and U.S. Citizenship; AMERICAN QUARTERLY,
Volume 58, Number 4, December; http://courses.washington.edu/com597j/student%20presentations/Jun.pdf; (db)
Although black Orientalism was a means of narrating the development of black subjects into
American modernity, the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 did not consolidate black
national identity, but rather exposed the tenuous status of black citizenship itself. Hence, when
the anti-Chinese movement garnered national support for federal legislation to prohibit Chinese
immigration, the black press voiced almost unanimous opposition to this unprecedented form of
race-based immigration exclusion.54 As the Christian Observer stated, “one of the most hopeful signs of the times is the
unanimity of the press, especially the religious, in opposition to the Chinese bill.”55 While the San Francisco Elevator was one of the
few exceptions and was chastised in the black press for having “failed to stand up for equal rights,” other black papers on the West
Coast condemned Chinese exclusion.56 Historians who have studied black press representations of Chinese immigrants have
found this pervasive opposition either surprisingly anomalous or a commendable sign of the black community’s alliance with another
racially oppressed group.57 If we understand the ideological relationship of black Orientalism to
discourses of black modernity and citizenship, black press opposition to the Chinese Exclusion
Act is neither a “curious” aberration nor transparent evidence of the black community’s
“dedication to the image of America as a composite nation of diverse peoples.” 58 The discursive
limits of black Orientalism as a means of narrating the modern development of the black American
subject were exceeded when the Chinese Exclusion Act unequivocally signified the racial
reification of U.S. citizenship that undermined aspirations of black national incorporation. In other
words, while an Orientalist discourse on Chinese alien difference was a form of cultural politics
that could underscore the Americanness of black citizens, the Chinese Exclusion Act was itself a
clear threat to the circumscribed legal rights already undermining black citizenship. Hence, black
Americans rightly felt threatened by the notion that federal legislation employing racially
exclusionary language with respect to Chinese immigrants would be aimed at them next. Frederick
Douglass waged the most prominent and vocal critiques of the anti-Chinese movement, recognizing the dangerous consequences
of race-based exclusion for liberal principles of American democracy.59 Douglass’s New Era criticized both Republican and
Democratic politicians for supporting the anti-Chinese movement in an effort to garner the political support of trade unions.60
Douglass was hardly alone, however, and the religious and secular black press alike strongly condemned the Chinese Exclusion Act
and recognized its racist implications for blacks whose recent political gains had been violently contested by white ethnics: Only a
few years ago the cry was, not “The Chinese must go,” but “The niggers must go;” and it comes from the same strata of society.
There is not a man to-day who rails out against the yellow man from China but would equally rail out against the black man if
opportunity only afforded. Nor have they given up all hope of that opportunity coming in the near future.61 The “same strata of
society” is a clear reference to the white working class and its political institutions, which not only exercised considerable power
within the Democratic Party, but also practiced racist union policies that culminated in violent hate-strikes and riots targeting black
laborers.62 Black Americans were particularly antagonized by Irish immigrants, whose political, economic, and cultural incorporation
were often at the expense of black displacement.63 Therefore, the proponents of Chinese exclusion—the white ethnic working
class—were largely regarded as the enemies of black workers throughout the country. Black critiques of the Chinese
Exclusion Act did not necessarily oppose the general idea of immigration restrictions, which were
often advocated within the black press, but rather criticized the political power of white labor to mobilize
federal legislation that was racially exclusive. Hence, several papers urged creative solutions to slowing Chinese
immigration, such as prohibiting the common practice of sending the deceased back to China, which would not require federal
legislation that employed exclusionary race-based language and yet might achieve the same desired results.64 It would be
imprecise, therefore, to understand black press opposition to the Chinese Exclusion Act as
evidence of black subjective identification with the Chinese, whose alien and immigrant
formations were in cultural, linguistic, and religious contradiction to black national identity. Many
articles opposing Chinese exclusion were careful to simultaneously narrate black Orientalist disidentification, stating, “we honestly
confess that we have no sympathy for the Chinese. Their habits, customs, modes of living, manner of worship . . . is an abhorrence
to us.”65 Despite the overwhelming evidence of black opposition to Chinese exclusionary
legislation, black press fascination with Chinese immigrants and Chinatown ghettos as grotesque
sites of immorality, filth, and alien difference was a discourse that consistently shaped black
“ways of knowing” Chinese racial difference from the 1850s well into the twentieth century. The Chinese Exclusion
Act’s interruption of black Orientalism suggests that while the possibilities for black and Asian identification were often highly
constrained (or even formed in mutual exclusion) due to specific historical processes of racialization, such identification was not a
necessary condition for nineteenth-century black opposition to the Chinese Exclusion Act. Race emerged as the contradiction to the
promise of equality as “universal citizens,” underscoring the utter vulnerability of the status of black Americans as subjects of the
state. Hence, it should be neither surprising nor disappointing that after the ratification of the
Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, black press Orientalism persisted and even intensified, with a
particularly strong emphasis on Chinatowns as depraved sites of criminality and sexual vice. 66
While nineteenth-century black Orientalism might have been an effective means of provisionally
underscoring the deeply “American” character of blacks in the United States, this discourse of
inclusion had stark limitations. Black press concerns that the Chinese Exclusion Act would be
followed by more race-based legislation were dramatically substantiated less than a decade later
by the Supreme Court’s decision that racial segregation was an entitlement of white citizenship. If
the Chinese Exclusion Act defined the U.S. citizen against the Oriental alien, the constitutionality
of Plessy v. Ferguson suggested that although U.S. blacks were not Orientalized immigrants, the
reification of black racial difference would remain at the very core of American national identity.
Global solidarity during the 50s and 60s can inform strategies to resist
oppression today – the aff reinvigorates a Third World consciousness
necessary to confront global imperialism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy
Kim in 10 <Nami. “Engaging Afro/black-Orientalism: A Proposal” Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and
Religion Volume 1, Issue 7 (June 2010). Pgs 1-22. CS>
In November 2006, more than thirty African leaders and Chinese gathered at the first SinoAfrican summit (Forum on China-Africa Co-operation), which was held in Beijing to enhance economic and
technical cooperation between China and African nations. Chinese private and state companies
have been building roads, dams, hospitals, and running factories and telecommunications
systems across the African continent. As a return on its investment, China has demanded
African resources like oil, mineral, timber, cotton, and so on. While increasing cooperation between
China and African nations has increased economic opportunities for African nations, it has also brought unforeseen
tensions, for example, between local people and “imported” Chinese and other laborers from Asia
who work in Chinese-owned and -run companies in Africa. Competition over cheap labor has led to what is called “the
new face of the global race to the bottom.”30 When newly independent Asian and African nations met for the first time in Bandung in 1955 they could
not have predicted whether the outcome of their newfound collaboration would be positive or negative. Nor could W. E. B. Du Bois have foreseen the
possible tensions that might arise when he wrote “China and Africa” and “I Sing to China” during his visit to China at the age of 91 in 1959. To
many, the Bandung era of Afro-Asian solidarity represented a high point of the anti-imperialist
and antiracist struggles of people of Asian and African descent. Fifty years later, however, the
spirit and political significance of the Bandung era seems to have faded. Vijay Prashad also notes that
although “AfroAsian solidarity” emerged in the Bandung era as a political stand against colonialism, the foundation for that solidarity is “now largely
eroded, with Africa and Asia interested in each other’s resources and capital, where the bold pronouncements for a radical reconfiguration of the
The task of engaging Afro/black-Orientalism may seem
challenging today because the context in which we raise concerns and questions is
different from that of the early to mid-twentieth century during which African American
activists and intellectuals had formed political solidarity. Also, people are no longer primarily
concerned with the third-world anti-colonial struggle for nation-state sovereignty and the color
line of Jim Crow racial segregation in the United States where African American activists and
intellectuals began their search for global solidarity among people of color. Yet, as black feminist Patricia
Hill Collins stresses, the racial hierarchies Du Bois observed a century ago continue to
exist not only on a local level but also on a global scale.32 We now face what Hill Collins
calls “new racism,” which is “transnational” due to the global market economy and global mass
media.33 Racialized and gendered globalization continues to produce color lines in the twenty-first century. Also, while admitting that the
international political economy has vanished.”31
“excavations of AfroAsian solidarity might be nostalgic and anachronistic,”34 Prashad nonetheless maintains that the “epistemological and historical
“AfroAsian solidarity
needs a constant reorientation to itself. The constant threat of historical erasure of the
coalition building of ethnic communities necessitates an urgent, disciplined commitment
to a ‘useable’ AfroAsian past.”36 By challenging white supremacy, which has persistently pit
one racial/ethnic minority group against another, Afro/black-Orientalism may shed new light
on the forgotten history of interactions and coalitions among African, African Americans,
and Asians and Asian North Americans in their concerted efforts to resist racism,
colonialism, and U.S. imperialism. Engaging Afro/black-Orientalism is not a naïve attempt to
romanticize the relationship between people of African descent and Asian descent when the
archive of solidarity” and “memory of the interactions” must be brought to light.35 In a similar vein, Mullen states,
relationship between these groups has been strenuous if not totally hostile as shown in incidents such as the Los Angeles Riot of 1992 and the
Rather, engaging
Afro/black-Orientalism needs to be understood as an effort to underscore the “political solidarity”
that has characterized various forms of Afro-Asian connections and coalition, including black
American protests against the Chinese Exclusion Act and other discriminatory U.S. immigration
policies. In turn, this helps disrupt the black and white racial binary that has characterized racism and racial formations in mainstream U.S. culture.
ongoing plight of biracial children between African American fathers and “Asian” mothers on U.S. military bases in Asia.
In what follows, I will briefly discuss some of the implications of engaging Afro/black-Orientalism for doing interdisciplinary religious/theological studies
by looking at how
African American intellectuals and political activists employed an Afro/black-Orientalist “critique”
to engage American nationalism and national identity, religious/theological studies from an
Asian Pacific North American feminist perspective can find ways in which it can critically engage
American nationalism and American identity in the context of U.S. empire building. Observing the recent
from an Asian Pacific North American feminist perspective by highlighting shared interests between the two. First,
fervor of American nationalism--in other words, “excessive or fanatical devotion to a nation and its interest, often associated with a belief that one
country is superior to all others”38--in the midst of ongoing U.S. war against Iraq, feminist scholar in religion Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza calls for a
critical analysis of American capitalist nationalism as a structure of domination.39 The end goal of such analysis, however, is not just to critique and
what is equally needed is to
articulate “alternative forms of national identity and global order and responsibility.”40 In her response to
analyze American nationalism and national identity. Rather, as Sharon D. Welch has rightly put it,
Schüssler Fiorenza’s urgent call to engage a critical analysis of American nationalism as a structure of domination, Welch defines “critique” as a form
of “patriotism and an affirmation of a complex identity as national and global citizens.”41 Such
critique is found in the works of
Du Bois and other African American intellectuals, who understood their fate under U.S. racist
domestic policy in relation to others who suffer under Western imperial exploitation. For instance,
when Du Bois talked about “the world problem of the color line” in 1914, he was linking the fate
of African Americans to the race problem in the world. Likewise, African American anti-colonial
activists of the 1940s strongly argued that their struggles against Jim Crow were inseparably
bound to the struggles of African and Asian peoples for independence from colonialism.42 As Penny
M. Von Eschen puts it, African Americans’ critique of American empire was closely related to their critique of colonialism elsewhere, and offering a
critique of American empire did not preclude them from being in solidarity with other colonized people.43 Even when African Americans began
embracing American foreign policy by emphasizing their American citizenship and cutting off international links of common struggle in the hope of
fostering domestic civil rights toward the end of 1950s, Du Bois remarked that black Americans were “becoming Americans. But then what Americans
to become?”44 Such
deployment of “critique” by African American intellectuals and political
activists suggests a further use of critique as a way to engage American nationalism and
American identity in the twenty-first century, for such critique of Americanness was an
indictment of the abstract notion of human being in Western intellectual and political
discourses, which in fact meant white, Western, Christian, propertied men. While Afro/blackOrientalism contributed to debunking such notions of what it meant to be “human,” its critique of American nationalism and national identity did not
scrutinize this predominantly male perspective. In engaging with Afro/black-Orientalism, religious/theological studies from an Asian Pacific North
American feminist perspective can further deconstruct such a concept of human subjectivity that is heteronormative and masculine, which will, in turn,
help contest other abstract notions, such as freedom, liberty, justice, and equality, in Western intellectual and political traditions.
We cannot be stuck in endless theorization. The combination of theory and
praxis is key to not only deconstructing white supremacy and racism but
also to the construction of a new world.
BARNDT Director of Crossroads, a non-profit organization 2k7 (Joseph-has been a parish
pastor and an antiracism trainer and organizer for thirty years, much of the latter work being
done with Crossroads Ministry, Chicago, which he directed for eighteen years; “Understanding
and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century Challenge To White America;” pp.219-220)
To study racism is to study walls. In every chapter of this book, we have looked at barriers and fences, restraints and limitations, ghettos and prisons, bars and curtains. We
have examined a prison of racism that confines us all-people of color and white people alike. Victimizers as well as victims are in
shackles. The walls of the prison forcibly separate communities of color and white communities from each other, as well
as divide communities of color from each other. In our separate prisons we are all shut off from
each other. The constraints imposed on people of color by subservience, powerlessness, and
poverty are inhuman and injust; but the effects of uncontrolled power, privilege, and greed that are the marks of our white prison inevitably destroy white people as well. To
dismantle racism is to tear down walls. The walls of racism can be dismantled. We are not
condemned to an inexorable fate, but are offered the vision and the possibility of freedom. Brick
by brick, stone by stone, the prison of individual, institutional, and cultural racism can be
destroyed. It is an organizing task that can be accomplished. You and I are urgently called to join the efforts of those who know it is time to
tear down, once and for all the walls of racism. The walls of racism must be dismantled. Facing up to these realities offers
new possibilities, but refusing to face them threatens yet great dangers. The results of centuries
of national and worldwide colonial conquest and racial domination, of military buildups and
violent aggression, of over-consumption and environmental destruction may be reaching a point of
no return. The moment of self-destruction seems to be drawing every more near, nationally and globally. A small and predominately white minority of the
global population derives its power and privilege from the sufferings of the vast majority of
peoples of color. For the sake of the world and ourselves, we dare not allow it to continue.
Dismantling racism also means building something new. It means building an antiracist society.
The bricks that were used to build the walls of the prison must now be used for a better
purpose. Just as we must tear down wall brick by brick, so also we must build new structures of
power and justice. Although we still need many more reminders that we cannot build a
multiracial and multicultural society without tearing down the walls of racism, this negative reminder must be turned
around and stated in reverse: we cannot tear down the walls without building new antiracist structures of power in
our institutions and communities. Transforming and building anti-racist institutions is the path to a racism-free society.
The Boggses combined theory and praxis, creating movements that sought
to embrace dialectical humanism that centered a black struggle against
capitalism while also understanding the intersections between race, class,
and gender.
Mullen ’04 (Mullen, Bill V. "“Philosophy Must Be Proletarian”: The Dialectical Humanism of
Grace Lee and James Boggs." Afro-Orientalism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 2004. 113-62.
Project MUSE [Johns Hopkins UP]. Web. 30 June 2016.)
the Boggses proposed a Black Revolutionary Party with three objectives: to take power for
the purposes of bringing about change in the social, economic, and political institutions of
society; to “establish and keep before the movement and society as a whole the revolutionary
humanist objectives of the Black Revolution”; and to develop a revolutionary strategy to achieve
these goals dialectically by “building on the struggles, sacrifices and achievements of the past,
and learning from previous mistakes and shortcomings” (2). The BRP would reflect the
combined “dynamic of a national struggle for self-determination and a social struggle to resolve
the contradictions of an advanced capitalist society” (9). This synthesis of national and social
struggle was the fundamental dialectic of black revolutionary nationalism. The movement,
coming at a moment when the productive forces were “already sufficiently developed to
establish a material basis for communism,” would pursue the redistribution of resources from
ability, according to need: education, transportation, work, technology, child development,
medical care, and welfare would all be reconceived to meet especially the needs of the vast
majority in poor urban areas (18–21). In general, the BRP would attack racism, alienation, and
inequality through ridding society of “tendencies towards elitism and individualism” and by
fostering local community control of resources and planning (24). These steps were linked, using the Bandung
era logic of correspondence, to the BRP’s larger goal of challenging U.S. imperialism : the U.S. government had
“become the chief obstacle to four-fifths of mankind struggling to rid themselves of colonial and
neo-colonial exploitation” (24). In response, Black Power would “recognize the right and duty of all nations
to establish the kind of society which they deem suitable to their needs” (25). It would especially
recognize the rights of people in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East who likewise “are discovering and perfecting the secret of how to develop the new
Thus
type of human beings” capable of world revolution (39). It would give “a sense of their growing power to improve their conditions of life through struggle and which enable them to create dual or parallel power
Struggle therefore must be on issues and terrains which enable the Black
community to create a form of liberated area out of what are at present occupied areas” (33). The
city would thus indeed become again the black man’s land, and the black revolution would be a
revolution of “the majority of the world’s people of which the Black Revolution in the United
States is an integral part” (39). Manifesto for a Black Revolutionary Party was both a culmination of
Boggsian theorizing of U.S. Black Power and another point of dialectical transition in their work.
It was an attempt to identify coherent leader-ship for the internal schisms and contradictions
within Black Power in response to events particularly of 1965 (Malcolm X), 1967 (Detroit and
Newark), and 1968 (Martin Luther King). At the same time, it anticipated a need to respond to
new eruptions and disruptions in the social moment that the Boggses described: the rise of parallel ethnic nationalisms among Chicano and Asian
structures out of struggle.
youth; feminist dissent from both Black Power and the larger Anglo student Left; the concurrence of new Third World movements and consciousness as represented by the 1969 Third World Conference at San
Francisco State University. After 1969, the Boggses’ work would resonate with each of these new developments. It would gather itself again to attempt to reconcile the manifold local and global manifestations of
Boggsian dialectical humanism, which would encompass more firmly an inclusion
of gender and particularly Asian ethnicity in their theory and practice. This third stage of Boggsism would point to a reincarnation
change. It would also coincide with a new turn in
and revision of many of their earlier themes and ideas.
They have the wrong starting point – their move to situate the conversation to the
position of Asian immigrants renders global anti-blackness anon issue – this starting
point of the Pacific passage ignores the original violence of the Middle Passage
Copeland and Sexton 3 [2003, Raw Life: An Introduction Jared Sexton
AND
Humanities Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, Ethnic Studies]
It is at this impasse and with such questions that the essays collected here begin: with the
notion derived from Fanon, of the impossibility of representing race, either for the slave or the master,
outside of an entrenched visual schema predicated on the fungibility of the black slave that this
reckoning comes to the fore at this moment and that it connects cultural practitioners working
across a range of disciplines –art, history, literature, film, critical theory –not only suggests the longevity of
Fanon’s insight, but also underlines the pressing need to think the structural and
structuring function of racial difference for our symbolic economies. For it is that very function which
contemporary racial theory more often than not seeks to leap over , in the process revealing its own
ineffectuality, a kind of willful blindness that cannot be overstated. In its single-minded capacity
to concentrate on everything except that which matters most in the restructuring of white
supremacy, such theory is undoubtedly more egregious than intellectual faux pas or public
disservice. It is a modality of complicity, or better, fraud. But the fraudulence of this diverse intellectual
project is not only analytic; it is also ethical. Besieged by the conservative restoration, the Left finds itself today
enamored of political pragmatism and in thrall to the lures of counter-hegemonic populism. From
the emergent networks of anti-globalization to the reinvigorated peace movement, from the
embattled environmentalist campaigns to the desperate efforts at urban police reform, the
official rhetoric is multiracial and the organizational logic is coalition. Yet, for whatever energies are
dispensed in elaborating the new complexity of race in the age of globality, the radical imagination
inexorably comes to rest on the assumption of horizontality, that is ot say, a progressive communityin-struggle, even if only a possible one. Indeed, it has become commonplace in the U.S. to call
for a paradigm shift with respect to racial theory and the politics of anti-racism. This clarion call
resonates in the ivory towers of academe, in the pages of the most useless print media outlets, certainly in the alternative
press, and in the policy papers and strategic deliberations of progressive non-profit institutes and community-based organizations. What we are told, in
a variety of tones and tenors, is that race matters are no longer –if they ever were – “simply black and white” at the least, the focus of such a Manichean
lens is deemed inadequate to apprehend the current and historical relatity of U.S. racial formation (to say nothing of the Americas more generally or other
this dichotomous view is rendered as politically stunting and, moreover, as
effectively excluding “discussion of the colors in the middle, now inexorable parts of the
Black/White spectrum.” We now enjoy a vast literature in the social sciences and humanities
detailing the vexed position (or positions), between the black and the white. “Neither black nor
white” thus indicates not only the articulation of multiracial (or Mixed race) identity claims in the
post-civil rights era, but also the contemporary reformulations of critique and political mobilization among Asian Americans, Pacific
Islanders, Chicana/os, Latina/os, and Native American peoples. Of course, racial discourse in what would become the U.S.,
from the colonial era onward, has always been multi-polar, so to speak, and the psychodynamics of
race have always been quite complex; the lines of force and the relations of racial power have been reconfigured regularly across
a multiplicity of times and spaces. In fact, the notion of a black/white paradigm is something of a theoretical
fiction, deployed for a wide range of purposes. In our attempts to displace it, then, we do well to recognize
it as a recent emergence, involved in an imaginary lure that says more about the historical preoccupations of white supremacy than it
does about, say, the blind insistence of black scholars, activists, or communities. When perusing the critical literature on the
“explanatory difficulty” of present-day racial politics, one frequently wonders exactly to whom the
demand to go “beyond black and white” is being addressed. Also puzzling is the singularly
incoherent nature of the reasoning demonstrated in current race talk, a failure, that is, to
offer cogent accounts of the implications of this newfound (or, more precisely, rediscovered) complexity. Taken together,
these twin ambiguities beg a key question: what economies of enunciation are involved in this
broadly atterned discursive gesture to put an end to “biracial theorizing”? Legal scholar Mari Matsuda offers a
provocative thought on this score. During a symposium on critical race theory at the Yale Law School in
regions of the world) At its worst,
1997 she claimed: [When we] say we need to move beyond Black and white, this is what a whole
lot of people say or feel or think: “thank goodness we can get off that paradigm, because those
black people made me feel so uncomfortable. I know all about Blacks, but I really don’t know
anything about Asians, and while we’re deconstructing that Black-white paradigm, we also need
to reconsider the category of race altogether, since race, as you know, is a constructed
category, and thank god I don’t have to take those angry black people seriously
anymore.” Importantly, the comment is drawn from an otherwise sympathetic mediation on
a particular danger attendant to the desire for new analyses, and the often anxious drive for multiracial coalition,
namely, the persistent risk of forgetting the centrality of anti-blackness to global white supremacy.
Fanon, again, is prescient: “Wherever he goes, the negro remains a Negro” (B, 173). Wherever;
there is no outside. Too often we forget, here in the U.S. especially, that there are blacks everywhere. When so
many speak of the peculiarity of race as a North American obsession (one hears of the odd rigidity of the
Anglo-Saxon racial formation), it is important to think about black people as situated in those myriad
locales supposedly outside of or alternate to the black-white binary. Lewis Gordon, philosopher and
leading contemporary commentator on Fanon, writes: Although there are people who function as “the blacks” of particular contexts, there is a group of
people who function as the blacks everywhere. They are called, in now-archaic language –Negroes. Negroes are the blacks of everywhere, the black of
The
historical specificity of blackness as a point from which the greatest distance must be
forged entails its status as metaphor.
blacks, the blackest blacks. Blackness functions as the prime racial signifier. It is the element that enters a room and frightens Reason out…
They parallel black suffering to Asian suffering – every attempt to position the black by
the way of analogy is parasitic upon the black body
Wilderson 10 [Frank B. Wilderson, Associate Professor of African American Studies and
Drama at the University of California & former member of the Umkhonto we Sizwe, Red, White
and Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms]
This is one of several moments in Black Skin, White Masks when Fanon splits the hair between social oppression and structural
suffering, making it possible to theorize the impossibility of a Black ontology (thus allowing us to meditate on how the Black suffers)
without being chained to the philosophical and rhetorical demands of analogy, demands which the evidentiary register of social
oppression (i.e., how many Jews died in the ovens, how many Blacks were lost in the Middle Passage) normally imposes upon such
meditations. The ruse of analogy erroneously locates the Black in the world—a place where
s/he has not been since the dawning of Blackness. This attempt to position the Black in the
world by way of analogy is not only a mystification, and often erasure, of Blackness’s grammar of
suffering (accumulation and fungibility or the status of being non-Human) but simultaneously also
a provision for civil society, promising an enabling modality for Human ethical dilemmas. It is a
mystification and an erasure because, whereas Masters may share the same fantasies as Slaves, and Slaves can speak as
though they have the same interests as Masters, their respective grammars of suffering are irreconcilable.
In dragging his interlocutors kicking and screaming through “Fact of Blackness,” or what Ronald Judy has translated more pointedly
as “The Lived Experience of the Black,” Fanon is not attempting to play “oppression Olympics” and thus
draw conclusions that Blacks are at the top of every empirical hierarchy of social discrimination, though that case has also been
made.xv Having established that, yes, the Jew is oppressed (and, yes, the Black is oppressed) Fanon refuses to let the lived
experience of oppression dictate the terms of his meditations on suffering. He writes: [The Jew] belongs to the race of those [who]
since the beginning of time have never known cannibalism. What an idea, to eat one’s father! Simple enough one has only not to be
a nigger [emphasis mine]…[I]n my case everything takes on a new guise. I am the slave not of an idea others have of me but of my
own appearance. (Black Skin, White Masks 115-16) Two tensions are at work here. One operates under the labor of
ethical dilemmas-- “simple enough one has only not to be a nigger.”xvi This, I submit, is the essence of being for the White
and non-Black position: ontology scaled down to a global common denominator. The other tension is found in the impossibility of
ethical dilemmas for the Black: “I am,” Fanon writes, “a slave not of an idea others have of me but of my own appearance.” Being can
thus be thought of, in the first ontological instance, as nonniggerness; and slavery then as niggerness. The visual field, “my own
appearance,” is the cut, the mechanism that elaborates the division between the non-niggerness and slavery,
the difference between the living and the dead. Whereas Humans exist on some plane of
being and thus can become existentially present through some struggle for/of/through
recognition, Blacks cannot attain the plane of recognition (West 82). Spillers, Fanon, and Hartman maintain
that the violence that has positioned and repetitively re-positions the Black as a void of historical
movement is without analog in the suffering dynamics of the ontologically alive. The violence that turns
the African into a thing is without analog because it does not simply oppress the Black through tactile and empirical technologies of
the gratuitous violence
of the Black’s first ontological instance, the Middle Passage, “wiped out [his/her] metaphysics…his
oppression, like the “little family quarrels” which for Fanon exemplify the Jewish Holocaust. Rather,
[her] customs and sources on which they are based” (BSWM 110). Jews went into Auschwitz and came out as Jews. Africans went
into the ships and came out as Blacks. The former is a Human holocaust; the latter is a Human and a metaphysical holocaust. That
is why it makes little sense to attempt analogy: the Jews have the Dead (the Muselmenn) among them; the Dead have the Blacks
among them. This violence which turns a body into flesh, ripped apart literally and imaginatively,
destroys the possibility of ontology because it positions the Black within an infinite and
indeterminately horrifying and open vulnerability, an object made available (which is to say fungible)
for any subject. As such, “the black has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man”
(110) or, more precisely, in the eyes of Humanity.
There is an impact to all of these links – obscuring the structural position of blackness
causes their coalitional politics to fail – this explicitly indicts their method which is
BASED upon intersectionality/coalitions – only the alt solves
Sexton ’10 [Jared Sexton, Associate professor of African American studies and film and media
studies at the University of California, Irvine, 2010, “People-of-Color-Blindness; Notes on the
Afterlife of Slavery,” http://socialtext.dukejournals.org/content/28/2_103/31.full.pdf]
If the oppression of nonblack people of color in, and perhaps beyond, the United States seems
conditional to the historic instance and functions at a more restricted empirical scope,
antiblackness seems invariant and limitless (which does not mean that the former is somehow
negligible and short-lived or that the latter is exhaustive and unchanging ). If pursued with some consistency,
the sort of comparative analysis outlined above would likely impact the formulation of political strategy and modify the demeanor of our
political culture. In fact, it might denature the comparative instinct altogether in favor of a relational analysis
more adequate to the task. Yet all of this is obviated by the silencing mechanism par excellence in
Left political and intellectual circles today: “Don’t play Oppression Olympics!” The Oppression
Olympics dogma levels a charge amounting to little more than a leftist version of “playing the
race card.” To fuss with details of compara- tive (or relational) analysis is to play into the hands of divide-and-conquer tactics and to promote a
callous immorality.72 However, as in its conserva- tive complement, one notes in this catchphrase the unwarranted translation of an inquiring position of comparison into an insidious posture of competition, the translation
of ethical critique into unethical attack. This point allows us to understand better the intimate
relationship between the censure of black inquiry and the recurrent analogizing to black suffering
mentioned above: they bear a common refusal to admit to significant dif- ferences of
structural position born of discrepant histories between blacks and their political allies, actual
or potential. We might, finally, name this refusal people-of-color-blindness, a form of colorblindness
inherent to the concept of “people of color” to the precise extent that it misunderstands the specificity of
antiblackness and presumes or insists upon the mono- lithic character of victimization under white
supremacy73 — thinking (the afterlife of) slavery as a form of exploitation or colonization or a species of racial oppression among others.74 The
upshot of this predicament is that obscuring the structural position of the category of blackness will inevitably
undermine multiracial coalition building as a politics of radical opposition and, to that extent, force
the question of black liberation back to the center of discussion. Every analysis that attempts
to understand the complexities of racial rule and the machinations of the racial state without
accounting for black existence within its framework—which does not mean simply listing it among a chain of equivalents
or returning to it as an afterthought—is doomed to miss what is essential about the situation. Black existence
does not represent the total reality of the racial formation — it is not the beginning and the end of
the story—but it does relate to the totality; it indicates the (repressed) truth of the political and
economic system. That is to say, the whole range of positions within the racial formation is most fully understood from this vantage point, not
unlike the way in which the range of gender and sexual variance under patriarchal and heteronormative regimes is most fully understood through lenses
that are feminist and queer.75 What is lost for the study of black existence in the proposal for a decentered, “postblack” paradigm is a proper analysis of
the true scale and nature of black suffer- ing and of the struggles — political, aesthetic, intellectual, and so on — that have sought to transform and undo
it. What is lost for the study of nonblack nonwhite existence is a proper analysis of the true scale and nature of its material and symbolic power relative
This is why every attempt to defend the rights and liberties of the latest
victims of state repression will fail to make substantial gains inso- far as it forfeits or sidelines
the fate of blacks, the prototypical targets of the panoply of police practices and the juridical
infrastructure built up around them. Without blacks on board, the only viable political option
and the only effective defense against the intensifying cross fire will involve greater alliance with
an antiblack civil society and further capitulation to the magnification of state power. At the
to the category of blackness.76
apex of the midcentury social movements, Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton wrote in their 1968 clas- sic, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, that
black freedom entails “the necessarily total revamping of the society.”77 For Hartman, thinking of the
entanglements of the African diaspora in this context, the necessarily total revamping of the society is more
appropriately envisioned as the creation of an entirely new world: I knew that no matter how far from home I
traveled, I would never be able to leave my past behind. I would never be able to imagine being the kind of person who had not been made and marked
Terror was “captivity without the possibility of
flight,” inescapable violence, precarious life. There was no going back to a time or place
before slavery, and going beyond it no doubt would entail nothing less momentous than yet
another revolution.7
by slavery. I was black and a history of terror had produced that identity.
Their call for radical change is a narcissistic, infinitely regressive process that denies the
effects of material political change, devolves into nihilism and ignores the complexities
of personhood outside of suffering – turns case – their politics will be re-deployed by
future militants and coalitions that will re-entrench oppression and fracture movements
Mbembe 15
(Philosopher and author of “Necropolitics”, “Achille Mbembe on The State of South African
Political Life”, http://africasacountry.com/2015/09/achille-mbembe-on-the-state-of-south-africanpolitics/, TMP)
In these times of urgency, when weak and lazy minds would like us to oppose “thought” to “direct
action”; and when, precisely because of this propensity for “thoughtless action”, everything is
framed in the nihilistic terms of power for the sake of power – in such times what follows might
mistakenly be construed as contemptuous. And yet, as new struggles unfold, hard questions
have to be asked. They have to be asked if, in an infernal cycle of repetition but no difference,
one form of damaged life is not simply to be replaced by another. The force of affect Indeed the
ground is fast shifting and a huge storm seems to be building up on the horizon. May 68?
Soweto 76? Or something entirely different? The winds blowing from our campuses can be felt
afar, in a different idiom, in those territories of abandonment where the violence of poverty
and demoralization having become the norm, many have nothing to lose and are now more
than ever willing to risk a fight. They simply can no longer wait, having waited for too long now.
Out there, from almost every corner of this vast land seems to stretch a chain of young men and
women rigid with tension. As tension slowly swells up, it becomes ever more important to hold on
to the things that truly matter. A new cultural temperament is gradually engulfing post-apartheid
urban South Africa. For the time being, it goes by the name “decolonization” – in truth a psychic
state more than a political project in the strict sense of the term. Whatever the case, everything
seems to indicate that ours is a crucial moment in the redefinition of what counts as “social
protagonism” in this country. Mobilizations over crucial matters such as access to health care,
sanitation, housing, clean water or electricity might still be conducted in the name of the implicit
promise inherent to the struggle years – that life after freedom will be “better” for all. But fewer
and fewer actually believe it. And as the belief in that promise fast recedes, raw affect, raw
emotions and raw feelings are harnessed and recycled back into the political itself. In the
process, new voices increasingly render old ones inaudible, while anger, rage and eventually
muted grief seem to be the new markers of identity and agency. Psychic bonds – in particular
bonds of pain and bonds of suffering – more than lived material contradictions are becoming
the real stuff of political inter-subjectivity. “I am my pain” – how many times have I heard this
statement in the months since #RhodesMustFall emerged? “I am my suffering” and this
subjective experience is so incommensurable that “unless you have gone through the same trial,
you will never understand my condition” – the fusion of self and suffering in this astonishing
age of solipsism and narcissism. So it is that the relative cultural hegemony the African National
Congress (ANC) exercised on black South African imagination during the years of the struggle is
fast waning. In the bloody miasma of the Zuma years, these years of stagnation, rent-seeking and
mediocrity parading as leadership, there is hardly any center left standing as institutions after
institutions crumble under the weight of corruption, a predatory new black élite and the cynicism
of former oppressors. In the bloody miasma of the Zuma years, the discourse of black power,
self-affirmation and worldliness of the early 1990s is in danger of being replaced by the
discourse of fracture, injury and victimization – identity politics and the resentment that
always is its corollary. Rainbowism and its most important articles of faith – truth, reconciliation
and forgiveness – is fading. Reduced to a totemic commodity figure mostly destined to assuage
whites’ fears, Nelson Mandela himself is on trial. Some of the key pillars of the 1994
dispensation – a constitutional democracy, a market society, non-racialism – are also under
scrutiny. They are now perceived as disabling devices with no animating potency, at least in
the eyes of those who are determined to no longer wait. We are past the time of promises.
Now is the time to settle accounts. But how do we make sure that one noise machine is not simply
replacing another? Settling Accounts The fact is this – nobody is saying nothing has changed.
To say nothing has changed would be akin to indulging in willful blindness. Hyperboles
notwithstanding, South Africa today is not the “colony” Frantz Fanon is writing about in his
Wretched of the Earth. If we cannot find a proper name for what we are actually facing, then rather
than simply borrowing one from a different time, we should keep searching. What we are
hearing is that there have not been enough meaningful, decisive, radical change, not only in
terms of the life chances of the black poor, but – and this is the novelty – in terms of the future
prospects of the black middle class. What is being said is that twenty years after freedom, we
have not disrupted enough the structures that maintain and reproduce “white power and
supremacy”; that this is the reason why too many amongst us are trapped in a “bad life” that
keeps wearing them out and down; that this wearing out and down of black life has been going
on for too long and must now be brought to an end by all means necessary (the right to
violence?). We are being told that we have not radically overturned the particular sets of
interests that are produced and reproduced through white privilege in institutions of public
and private life – in law firms, in financial institutions such as banking and insurance, in
advertising and industry, in terms of land redistribution, in media, universities, languages
and culture in general. “Whiteness”, “white power”, “white supremacy”, “white monopoly capital”
is firmly back on the political and cultural agenda and to be white in South Africa now is to face
a new-old kind of trial although with new judges – the so-called “born-free”. Politics of impatience
But behind whites trial looms a broader indictment of South African social and political order.
South Africa is fast approaching its Fanonian moment. A mass of structurally disenfranchised
people have the feeling of being treated as “foreigners” on their own land. Convinced that
the doors of opportunity are closing, they are asking for firmer demarcations between “citizens”
(those who belong) and “foreigners” (those who must be excluded). They are convinced that as
the doors of opportunity keep closing, those who won’t be able to “get in” right now might be left
out for generations to come – thus the social stampede, the rush to “get in” before it gets too late,
the willingness to risk a fight because waiting is no longer a viable option. The old politics
of waiting is therefore gradually replaced by a new politics of impatience and, if necessary, of
disruption. Brashness, disruption and a new anti-decorum ethos are meant to bring down the
pretence of normality and the logics of normalization in this most “abnormal” society. Steve Biko,
Frantz Fanon and a plethora of black feminist, queer, postcolonial, decolonial and critical
race theorists are being reloaded in the service of a new form of militancy less
accommodationist and more trenchant both in form and content. The age of impatience is
an age when a lot is said – all sorts of things we had hardly heard about during the last twenty
years; some ugly, outrageous, toxic things, including calls for murder, atrocious things that
speak to everything except to the project of freedom, in this age of fantasy and hysteria, when
the gap between psychic realities and actual material realities has never been so wide, and
the digital world only serves as an amplifier of every single moment, event and accident.
The age of urgency is also an age when new wounded bodies erupt and undertake to actually
occupy spaces they used to simply haunt. They are now piling up, swearing and cursing,
speaking with excrements, asking to be heard. They speak in allegories and analogies – the
“colony”, the “plantation”, the “house Negro”, the “field Negro”, blurring all boundaries,
embracing confusion, mixing times and spaces, at the risk of anachronism. They are claiming
all kinds of rights – the right to violence; the right to disrupt and jam that which is parading
as normal; the right to insult, intimidate and bully those who do not agree with them; the right
to be angry, enraged; the right to go to war in the hope of recovering what was lost through
conquest; the right to hate, to wreak vengeance, to smash something, it doesn’t matter what,
as long as it looks “white”. All these new “rights” are supposed to achieve one thing we are told
the 1994 “peaceful settlement” did not achieve – decolonization and retributive justice, the only
way to restore a modicum of dignity to victims of the injuries of yesterday and today.
Demythologize Whiteness
Mbembe 15
(Philosopher and author of “Necropolitics”, “Achille Mbembe on The State of South African
Political Life”, http://africasacountry.com/2015/09/achille-mbembe-on-the-state-of-south-africanpolitics/, TMP)
some hard questions must be asked. Why are we invested in turning whiteness, pain
and suffering into such erotogenic objects? Could it be that the concentration of our libido
on whiteness, pain and suffering is after all typical of the narcissistic investments so
privileged by this neoliberal age? To frame the issues in these terms does not mean
embracing a position of moral relativism. How could it be? After all, in relation to our history, too many
lives were destroyed in the name of whiteness. Furthermore, the structural repetition of past
sufferings in the present is beyond any reasonable doubt. Whiteness as a necrophiliac power structure
and a primary shaper of a global system of unequal redistribution of life chances will not die a
natural death. But to properly engineer its death – and thus the end of the nightmare it has been for a large portion
of the humanity – we urgently need to demythologize it. If we fail to properly demythologize
whiteness, whiteness – as the machine in which a huge portion of the humanity has become
entangled in spite of itself – will end up claiming us. As a result of whiteness having claimed
us; as a result of having let ourselves be possessed by it in the manner of an evil spirit ,
we will inflict upon ourselves injuries of which whiteness, at its most ferocious, would scarcely have
been capable. Indeed for whiteness to properly operate as the destructive force it is in the
material sphere, it needs to capture its victim’s imagination and turn it into a poison well of
hatred. For victims of white racism to hold on to the things that truly matter, they must
incessantly fight against the kind of hatred which never fails to destroy, in the first instance, the man or
woman who hates while leaving the structure of whiteness itself intact. As a poisonous fiction
that passes for a fact, whiteness seeks to institutionalize itself as an event by any means
necessary. This it does by colonizing the entire realms of desire and of the imagination. To
demythologize whiteness, it will not be enough to force “bad whites” into silence or into
confessing guilt and/or complicity. This is too cheap. To puncture and deflate the fictions of
whiteness will require an entirely different regime of desire, new approaches in the
constitution of material, aesthetic and symbolic capital, another discourse on value, on what
matters and why. The demythologization of whiteness also requires that we develop a more
complex understanding of South African versions of whiteness here and now. This is the only country on Earth in which a
And yet,
In order to keep its privileges intact in the post1994 era, South African whiteness has sought to intensify its capacity to invest in what we should call
the resources of the offshore. It has attempted to fence itself off, to re-maximize its
privileges through self-enclaving and the logics of privatization. These logics of offshoring and self-enclaving are
typical of this neoliberal age. The unfolding new/old trial of whiteness won’t produce much if whites are forced
into a position in which the only thing they are ever allowed to say in our public sphere is:
“Look, I am so sorry”. It won’t produce much if through our actions and modes of thinking, we
end up forcing back into the white ghetto those whites who have spent most of their lives trying to
fight against the dominant versions of whiteness we so abhor. Furthermore, we must take seriously the fact that “to be black” in South Africa
revolution took place which resulted in not one single former oppressor losing anything.
now is not exactly the same as “to be black” in Europe or in the Americas. After all, we are the majority here. Of course to be a majority is a bit more than the simple expression
of numbers. But surely something has to be made out of this sheer weight of numbers. We can use this numerical force to create different dominant standards by which our
society live; paradigms of what truly matters and why; entirely new social forms; new imaginaries of interior life and the life of the mind. We are also in control of arguably the
most powerful State on the African Continent. This is a State that wields enormous financial and economic power. In theory, not much prevents it from redirecting the flows of
wealth in its hands in entirely new trajectories. As it has been done in places such as Malaysia or Singapore, something has to be made out of this sheer amount of wealth –
something more creative and more decisive than our hapless “black economic empowerment” schemes the main function of which is to sustain the lifestyles of the new élite.
The neurotic misery of our age Finally, it is crucial for us to understand that we are a bit more
than just “suffering subjects”. “Social death” is not the defining feature of our history.
The fact is that we are still here – of course at a very high price and most likely in a
terrible state, but we are here. We are here – and hopefully we will be here for a very long time – not
as anybody else’s creation, but as our own-creation. To demythologize whiteness is to
dry up the mythic, symbolic and immaterial resources without which it can no longer
dabble in self-righteousness or in the morbid delight with which, as James Baldwin put it, it contemplates
“the extent and power of its own wickedness.” It is to not be put in a position in which we die
hating somebody else. On the other hand, politicizing pain is not the same thing as advocating
dolorism. In fact, it must be galling to put ourselves in a position such that those who look at us
cannot but pity us victims. One way of destroying white racism is to prevent whiteness from
becoming a deep fantasmatic object of our unconscious. We need to let go off our libidinal
investments in whiteness if we are to squarely confront the dilemmas of white privilege.
Baldwin understood this better than any other thinker. “In order really to hate white people”, he wrote, “one has to blot so much
out of the mind – and the heart – that this hatred itself becomes an exhausting and selfdestructive pose” (Notes of a Native Son, 112). This is what we have to find out for ourselves – in a black majority country in
which blacks are in power, what is the cost of our attachment to whiteness, this mirror object of our
fear and our envy, our hate and our attraction, our repulsion and our aspirations? Part of
what racism has always tried to do is to damage its victims’ capacity to help themselves. For instance,
racism has encouraged its victims to perceive themselves as powerless, that is, as victims even
when they were actively engaged in myriad acts of self-assertion. Ironically among the emerging black middle
class, current narratives of selfhood and identity are saturated by the tropes of pain and
suffering. The latter have become the register through which many now represent themselves to themselves and to
the world. To give account of who they are, or to explain themselves and their behavior to others, they
increasingly tend to frame their life stories in terms of how much they have been injured by
the forces of racism, bigotry and patriarchy. Often under the pretext that the personal is political, this type of autobiographical and at times
self-indulgent “petit bourgeois” discourse has replaced structural analysis. Personal feelings now suffice. There is no need to
mount a proper argument. Not only wounds and injuries can’t they be shared, their interpretation
cannot be challenged by any known rational discourse. Why? Because, it is alleged, black
experience transcends human vocabulary to the point where it cannot be named. This
kind of argument is dangerous. The self is made at the point of encounter with an Other.
There is no self that is limited to itself. The Other is our origin by definition. What makes us
human is our capacity to share our condition – including our wounds and injuries – with others. Anticipatory
politics – as opposed to retrospective politics – is about reaching out to others. It is never about self-enclosure.
The best of black radical thought has been about how we make sure that in the work of
repair, certain compensations do not become pathological phenomena. It has been about
nurturing the capacity to resume a human life in the aftermath of irreparable loss. Invoking Frantz
Fanon, Steve Biko and countless others will come to nothing if this ethics of becoming-with-
others is not the cornerstone of the new cycle of struggles. There will be no plausible critique
of whiteness, white privilege, white monopoly capitalism that does not start from the assumption that
whiteness has become this accursed part of ourselves we are deeply attached to, in spite
of it threatening our own very future well-being.
The AFF’s bid for inclusion is appropriated by the system to enhance the divide between
a revolutionary, and a non revolutionary – splinters their movement and makes the
problem worse – turns case
Thobani 14
SUNERA THOBANI, Dr. Sunera Thobani is Associate Professor at the Institute for Gender,
Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia,. Her research focuses
on critical race, postcolonial and feminist theory, globalization, citizenship, migration, Muslim
women, the War on Terror, and media. "Queer Necropolitics". 2014. Pgs. Xv – xvi.
The Empire of Terror offers a stark choice to its objects of power: incorporation or
extermination. Its forms of sovereignty intend the taking of no survivors: loyalty or death.
Violence and whiteness constitute the intractable foundation of colonial sovereignty and its
processes of subjection, argued Fanon (1961) in his radical anticolonial praxis. Drawing on
Fanon's insights, Mbembe (2001) points out that in the 'terror formation' that is the colony,
power takes the form of commandment as it incorporates colonizing subjects into its
murderous projects of conquest. Embedded in the depths of such stubbornly brutal terrain,
power in the postcolony assumes the form of necropolitics as 'it makes the murder of the
enemy its primary and absolute objective' (Mbembe 2003: 12). In the 21st-century
post/colonial formation that is the 'war on terror', the simultaneous constitution of the West and
its many rests relies no less on occupation, invasion and genocide, albeit in changing
configurations and with emergent practices enacted by differentially positioned subjects.
For, as Mbembe has astutely noted, 'modernity was at the origin of multiple concepts of
sovereignty' (2003: 13). In other words, while liberal democracy celebrates its citizen-subjects,
the mark of extermination that infuses its racial logic of power gives rise to the `Indian'
reserve, the slave plantation, the native quarter, the Bantustan, the Nazi camp, as well as
the slums, prisons and refugee camps proliferating around the world (Thobani 2012).
Western militarized states, their nationals and private mercenaries now form willing coalitions as
readily as they organize death squads; Western feminists recalibrate their alignments with
their states as they set out to rescue Muslim women or to protect themselves from their
narcissistically construed forms of precariousnesses; and Muslim women and men
supplicants to the West speak in the name of feminism and liberal democracy to indict
Islam, along with their families and communities, providing vital alibis for torture and
collective punishment. All the while, Muslim men around the world are demonized as
misogynist homophobes even as they are incarcerated, deported, raped, tortured and targeted
for assassination; Muslim women and queers are raped, killed, bombed and compelled to
surrender unconditionally to Western gender regimes if they are to survive. As for the
Muslims killed in the hundreds of thousands by bombs, drones and militias, they do not even
appear as human in the register of the war, featuring only as collateral damage — if at all. What
avenues, then, for contestation? How to strengthen the forces committed to ending the violence
that characterizes the contemporary geopolitical moment? What possibilities for the politics of
radical transformation'? For justice? Queer Necropoiliics makes a particularly timely and
critically engaged intervention. Mapping out how deployments of sexuality, gender, race and
desire inform the self-constituting practices of unlikely imperialist subjects — queer,
feminist, left, and yes, even critical theorists and philosophers — as they simultaneously
advance the reach of the Western empire, the authors of this book highlight how these
practices also mark out entire 'queerly racialized populations' for occupation, subjugation or
elimination (Puar 2007). Examining the particularities of the instances where 'queer vitalities
become cannibalistic on the disposing and abandonment of others', the authors help to disrupt a
critical axis on which pivot the imperial heteronormative, homonormative and transnormative
politics of violence and pleasure (Introduction: p. 2). What comes into view when
homonationalism is named homoracism? When feminism is defined as imperialist? When
human rights are conceived of as recolonization? When queer and trans politics are identified
as parasitic? The power of whiteness comes into sharp focus, the everydayness of the
institution of white supremacy is exposed in all its stark (in)visibilities. The authors of Queer
Neeropolilies provide the conceptual and analytical tools vital to the politics of resistance against
the deathly trajectories of power that mark these times.
They have mischaracterized Whiteness, and further legitimized it in this space – the alternative
is mutually exclusive, it requires a reinterpretation of whiteness where historical narratives are
demythologized
Mbembe 15,
(Achille Mbembe is a philosopher and author of “Necropolitics”, “Decolonizing Knowledge and
the Question of the Archive”, http://wiser.wits.ac.za/system/files/Achille%20Mbembe%20%20Decolonizing%20Knowledge%20and%20the%20Question%20of%20the%20Archive.pdf,
TMP
One such issue has just been dealt with – and successfully - at the University of Cape Town. To
those who are still in denial, it might be worth reiterating that Cecil Rhodes belonged to the
race of men who were convinced that to be black is a liability. During his time and life in
Southern Africa, he used his considerable power – political and financial - to make black people all over
Southern Africa pay a bloody price for his beliefs. His statue – and those of countless others who shared
the same conviction - has nothing to do on a public university campus 20 years after freedom.
The debate therefore should have never been about whether or not it should be brought down. All along, the debate should
have been about why did it take so long to do so. To bring Rhodes’ statue down is far from
erasing history, and nobody should be asking us to be eternally indebted to Rhodes for having
“donated” his money and for having bequeathed “his” land to the University. If anything, we should be
asking how did he acquire the land in the first instance. Arguably other options were available and could have been considered,
including that which was put forward late in the process by retired Judge Albie Sachs whose contribution to the symbolic remaking
But bringing Rhodes’ statue down is one of the many
legitimate ways in which we can, today in South Africa, demythologize that history and put it to
rest – which is precisely the work memory properly understood is supposed to accomplish. For memory to fulfill this
function long after the Truth and Reconciliation paradigm has run out of steam, the
demythologizing of certain versions of history must go hand in hand with the demythologizing of
whiteness. This is not because whiteness is the same as history. Human history, by definition, is
history beyond whiteness. Human history is about the future. Whiteness is about entrapment.
Whiteness is at its best when it turns into a myth. It is the most corrosive and the most
lethal when it makes us believe that it is everywhere; that everything originates from it and it has no outside.
We are therefore calling for the demythologization of whiteness because democracy in South
Africa will either be built on the ruins of those versions of whiteness that produced
Rhodes or it will fail. In other words, those versions of whiteness that produced men like Rhodes
must be recalled and de-commissioned if we have to put history to rest, free ourselves from
our own entrapment in white mythologies and open a future for all It might then be that the statue of
of what is today Constitution Hill is well recognized.
Rhodes and the statues of countless men of his ilk that are littering the South African landscape properly belong to a museum - an
institution that, with few here and now. exceptions, has hardly been subjected to the kind of thorough critique required by
these times of ours in South Africa. Yet, a
museum properly understood is not a dumping place. It is not a place
where we recycle history’s waste. It is first and foremost an epistemic space. A stronger
option would therefore be the creation of a new kind of institution, partly a park and partly a
graveyard, where statues of people who spent most of their lives defacing everything the
name “black” stood for would be put to rest. Putting them to rest in those new places would
in turn allow us to move on and recreate the kind of new public spaces required by our new
democratic project.
xFrom the ascension of the Arabian Slave Trade which fueled the T’ang
dynasty, blackness as commodity has circulated as a phantasmic spectre
within the Chinese social order. Through its reduction to bestial inhumanity
within racialized systems of naming, the mystic K’un-lun-nu, the darkskinned Kwei-nu laid the foundation for the economic emergence of the
Chinese Imperial state.
Hsing-Lang 1930 (Chang Hsing-lang – Professor at Catholic University of Peking in
Chinese and African American Humanities, “The Importation Of Negro Slaves To China Under
The Tang Dynasty (A. D. 618-901)”, Catholic University of Peking Bulletin No. 7 December,
1930 pages 37-59, http://library.uoregon.edu/ec/e-asia/read/tangslave-3.pdf - ERW)
The majority of the inhabitants of the South Sea Islands are black-skinned. It is not only
the people of Chen-la who are black; there are others who are even blacker. Kun-lun of the Two
Peaks is a small island of the South Sea where only dragons and no human beings page 40 dwell.
Though situated near Chenla, it is not a dependency there-of. Why are the terms K'un-lun and Chen-la used to designate black
people? It is because all ships must pass K'un-lun on voyages to and from the South Sea, and hence its name is familiar to
mariners who naturally extend this
designation to denote all savages of the South Seas. In this way the
name came to signify black people in general. The analogous use of Chen-la is due to the fact that this
country was very powerful during T'ang times, having subjugated all the various tribes of South
Sea Islanders." In a note, the same author further says: The Sung Shih ("Dynastic History of Sung") tells us that the Persian
envoys to China were accompanied by attendants who had sunken eyes and black skin and who were called K'un-lunnu. It is evident that these black Persian slaves were Hindoos. Thus it would appear that the term K'un-lun is here
used to designate the K'unlun of the West." It is my personal opinion that Fei Hsin, a writer of the early Ming
dynasty, was responsible for the corruption that changed K'un Tun Shan ("Condur". "Pulo Condore") into K'un-lun. In his Hsing Chai
Sheng Lan ("Description of the Beautiful Isles"), he says: "This mountain rises very high in the midst of the sea, and forms as it were
a triangle with Chan-ch'eng and the islands of Du. The mountain is a lofty rectangular eminence that extends over a large area.
The surrounding sea is known as the K'un-lun Ocean. All trading vessels bound for the Western
Sea pass this point after a voyage of seven days, provided the winds be favorable. The sailors
have a rhyme that runs thus: 'Northbound the Seven Isles we fear; Southbound we dread K'unlun; If rudder break or compass veer, Nor ship nor crew return.' "Nothing remarkable is to be
seen on this island. The inhabitants neither build houses nor cook their food. They eat fruit, fish,
and shrimps, and they live either in caves or in nests built in the trees." According to Western scholars of
modern times, K'un-lun is the largest of a group of islands, its length being about 12 English miles. The group comprises other
islands, the next two in size being each about three English miles in length, and there are about six ,smaller islands besides. The
modern name of the largest island is Pulo Condore. It has an excellent harbor, fresh water, and luxuriant vegetation. The
inhabitants, who number about eight hundred, are of Cochin China stock. The islands are under the control of the French authorities
of Saigon. It is absurd to supp ose that these small islands could supply such an enormous number of black slaves to so many
lands, in both East and West, during the T'ang dynasty. The notion, too, that K'un-lun Slaves were natives of Chen-la is equally
groundless; for the people of Chen-la being of the Malay race have the same complexion as the Cantonese and the Annamites. The
suggestion that K'un-lun
came to designate black men in general, because "all ships must
pass K'un-lun island on voyages to and from the South Sea," is nothing more than a conjecture. On the
other hand, we have no reason to suppose that the K'un-lun Slaves derived their name from the K'un-lun Shan of the West; for the
From the earliest times, and no Chinese work has ever
described its inhabitants as black-skinned. Inasmuch as it is clear from T'ang literature that the term K'unlun is not a Chinese one, we may take it for granted that it is a transliteration of some Foreign name. The fol'owing passage
occurs in Book II of Chu Yu's Ping Chiu K'o T'an ("Notes on P'ing Chiu") : " Many wealthy people of Canton keep
latter region has been familiar to the Chinese from
Kwei-nu ('devil slaves'). These are endowed with prodigious strength and can carry burdens
weighing several hundred catties. Their language and tastes differ from ours, but they are docile and
do not run away. They are also spoken of as yeh-jen ('savages'). Their skin is inky black, their lips red,
their teeth white, and their hair is woolly and tawny. They are of both sexes. Their native haunts are the
mountains beyond the sea. They eat their food raw. After being captured, they are fed on cooked food, which gives them
the diarrhea. While in this condition they are said to be 'renewing their entrails.' Some of them die of the process, but those who
survive become domesticated, and learn in time to understand human language, although unable to speak it themselves. Those
of these savages who come from maritime regions,
can dive into water without closing their eyes, and the same
are called K'un-lun-nu." In Book CDXC of the Sung Shih ("Dynastic History of Sung") where it speaks of Arabia, we read:
"In the second year of T'ai-P'ing' Hsing Kuo (i.e. A.D. 977), Arabia sent the ambassador P'u-sze-na, the viceambassador Moho-mo
('Mahmud'), and the judge P'u-lo, with the products of their country as presents. Their attendants had sunken eyes and black skin
and they were called K'un-lun-nu." (IV) The Native Land of the K'un-lun Slaves Having determined the signification of the term K'unlun-nu, we must next determine the land of their origin and the race to which they belonged. We
may dismiss without
further ado the suggestion that the K'un-lun-nu were natives of Arabia. The Ho-ling Kuo Tiao
("Topography of the Land of Ho-ling") contained in Book CCXXII of the Hsin Tang Shu ("New Dynastic History of T'ang") says: "In
the eighth year of the Yuan Ho period (A.D. 813), the land of Ho-ling presented four Seng-chih slaves." In Book III of Chiu Ch'u-fei's
Ling-wai Tai-ta ("Notes on the Lands beyond the Mountains") there is to be found a section that deals with a land named K'un-lun
Ts'eng-ch'i; here, among other things, it says: "Many
savages dwell on the islands. They have lacquer-black
being used as a bait, and they are captured by the thousands, food being used as a bait, and
they are subsequently sold into slavery." In the first part of Chao Ju-k'uo's Chu Fan Chih ("Information about
Barbarians"), there is one section which treats of the various lands beyond the sea, and which says among other things: "The Land
of K'un-lun Ts'eng-ch'i is situated on the shores of the Southwestern Sea behind a screen of large islands. In this land are to be
found gigantic Rukhs, enormous birds whose wings outstretched darken the sun and turn day into night. They prey upon wild
camels, which they swallow at a single gulp. The quills of the feathers which they shed, are cut into sections by the natives to serve
as water-casks. The products of page 42 the land consist of elephant tusks and rhinoceros' horns. To the west there is an island
peopled with savages whose complexion is like black lacquer and whose tresses resemble wriggling tadpoles. They
are
captured by using food as a bait, and are sold at great profit to the Arabs as slaves. The Arabs entrust
them with their keys, knowing that they will be faithful be-cause they have no kith nor kin." From the last two
quotations we obtain detailed information regarding the place from which the Arabs got their slaves. Seng-chih and Ts'eng-ch'i are
identical with the Zinj of Cosmas' Topographia Christiana. On the maps and in the geographical works of the present day this place
is designated as Zanzibar. Marco Polo, in Book III, Chapter 34, of his Travels, calls the locality Zanghibar, "which being interpreted
means The Region of the Blacks.'" The Arabs give the name of Zanzibar to that portion of East Africa that stretches from the Juba
River to Cape Delgado, eleven degrees south of the equator. According to Abulfeda, the King of Zinj resided at Monbasa. In the
parlance of modern Europeans the name of Zanzibar has been restricted to a small island. In Book III, Chapter 33, of Marco Polo's
Travels, where he speaks of the Island of Madagascar, we have the following passage: "In this Island, and in another beyond it
called Zanghibar, about which we shall tell you afterwards, there are more elephants than in any country in the world. The amount of
traffic in elephants' teeth in these two Islands is something astonishing." Further on we read: "Tis said that in those other Islands to
the south, which the ships are unable to visit because this strong current prevents their return, is found the bird Gryphon, which
appears there at certain seasons. The description given of it is however entirely different from what our stories and pictures make it.
For persons who had been there and had seen it, told Messer Marco, Polo that it was for all the world like an eagle, but one indeed
of enormous size; so big in fact that its wings covered an extent of 30 paces, and its quills were 12 paces long, and thick in
proportion. And it is so strong that it will seize an elephant in its talons and carry him high into the air, and drop him so that he is
smashed to pieces; having so killed him the bird gryphon swoops down on him and eats him at leisure. The people of those isles
call the bird Ruck, and it has no other name. So I wot not if this be the real gryphon, or if there be another manner of bird as great.
But this I can tell you for certain, that they are not half lion and half bird as our stories do relate; but enormous as they be they are
fashioned just like an eagle." Later he adds : "They brought (as I have heard) to the Great Kaan a feather of the said Ruc, which
was stated to measure ninety spans, whilst the quill part was two palms in circumference, a marvellous object!" In Chapter 34 of the
same Book. we read : "Zanghibar
is a great and noble Island, with a compass of some 2000 miles.
The people are all idolaters, and have a king and a language of their own, and pay tribute to
nobody. They are both tall and stout, but not tall in proportion to their stoutness. for if they were, being so stout and brawny, they
would be absolutely like giants; and they are so strong that they will carry for four men and eat for five. page 43 "They are all
black, and go stark naked, with only a little covering for decency. Their hair is as black as
pepper, and so frizzly that even with water you can scarcely straighten it. And their mouths are
so large, their noses so turned up, their lips so thick, their eyes so big and bloodshot that they
look like very devils; they are in fact so hideously ugly that the world has nothing to show more horrid. "Elephants are
produced in this country in wonderful profusion. There are also lions that are black and quite different from ours. And their sheep
and wethers are all exactly alike in color ; the body all white and the head black ; no other kind of sheep is found there, you may rest
assured . . . . The
women of this Island are the ugliest in the world, with their great mouths
and big eyes and thick noses; their breasts too are four times bigger than those of any other
women ; a very disgusting sight." Marco Polo's description of Madagascar and Zanzibar agrees perfectly with Chao Ju-k'uo's
Ts'eng-ch'i is a Chinese rendering of Zinj, or Zenj,
"Region of the Blacks." Hence we have every
reason to believe that the prefix K'un-lun signifies "black" for which it is a Chinese rendering of either
the Arabic or the Persian. Hui Ch'ao speaking of Persia in his previously quoted work says that the Persians were wont to
description of K'un-lun Ts'eng-ch'i. And it is beyond all doubt that
or Zanzi, or Zanghi. Zanghibar, according to Marco Polo, means the
go to K'un-lun for gold. This agrees with what Cosmas records regarding the people of Axum who go to Africa for gold." Hence we
have the strongest reasons for identifying K'unlun with Africa.
This chattel status provided a vestibule through which the Chinese elite
could degrade slaves under conventions of Social Darwinism. Slaves
oscillated between the positions of the “superhuman wonder” and the
“savage beast”, finalizing the designation of a complete Other.
Wilenski 2002 (Julie Wilenski – Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
University of Pennsylvania, “Sino-Platonic Papers”, July, 2002, http://sinoplatonic.org/complete/spp122_chinese_africa.pdf - ERW)
Chinese sources from the Song dynasty create a more defInite link than Tang sources between the kunlun
slaves and the Arabs, who continued to dominate the East African slave trade. An account offoreign
trade in Guangzhou, Zhu Yu's 1119 Pingzhou ketan ~?J+II:iJ~ (Notes on Pingzhou), repeats some of the earlier images of the
Zhu Yu depicts the blackskinned "devil slaves jl~:X" or "wild people !fA" as nothing more than beasts. Just as fictional and
nonfiction sources from the Tang differ in their portrayals of people with dark skin, we would expect Zhu
kunlun, but like earlier nonfiction sources, lacks the supernatural element of the Tang stories.54
Yu's account to differ from images of the kunlun in popular Song fiction. Unfortunately, however, I have found no fictional sources
Zhu Yu provides a
of slaves who are superhuman in strength but subhuman in intellect and
habit: Many of the wealthy households in Guangzhou raise devil slaves. They definitely have
strength and can carry several hundred catties of weight. Their languages and preferences are not
the same as ours, [but] their temperament is honest and they do not attempt to run away. They are also called
wild people. Their coloring is black like ink, their lips are red and their teeth white, their hair is
curly and yellowish (huang Ji).57 There are both females and males. They were born in the mountains beyond the sea.
They eat uncooked food. When they are captured, they are fed cooked food, which gives them
diarrhea. This is called "changing their bowels." This causes some of them to become sick and die. Those who do not die
can be domesticated (xu~).58 Those who have been domesticated for a long time can understand
human language, although they cannot speak it themselves. A type ofwild man who comes from a place near
the sea and who can enter the water without closing his eyes is called a kunlun slave.59 In his description of these "devil
slaves," Zhu Yu uses vocabulary to describe animals. He writes that many of the wealthy households "raise"
from the Song about the kunlun or others with dark skin that allow a similar comparison across genres.55
lengthy description
them, and he uses the gender terms one would use for animals rather than the human "male" and "female.,,6o He also writes that
these slaves are viewed as
domesticated animals. Their nonsensical languages cann~t be human languages. After all, only a few
these slaves are "reared on" rather than "fed" cooked food once captured, implying that
of these slaves can understand - but never speak - human languages, and only after a long period of "being domesticated." Perhaps
the "devil slaves" do not resist their captors and endure the
painful process of "changing their bowels" in order to become "domesticated" into their roles
as slaves in a civilized society. Zhu Yu's comment about the inability of the "devil slaves" to digest cooked food also
"honest" because they do not know any better,
reveals a Chinese prejudice against the non-Chinese practice of eating raw food. Food and dietary practices signified social status
in premodern China; the Chinese traditionally divided non-Chinese into two categories, shengfan 1:.* and shufan ~*, meaning "raw"
and "cooked" foreigners.61 The Chinese considered the "raw'; foreigners as "savage and resisting," whereas the "cooked"
foreigners were "tame and submissive."62 Zhu Yu emphasizes this distinction, writing that many of the ~'devil slaves" actually died
from eating cooked food, suggesting the slaves' inability to participate in even the most basic social interactions of Chinese
civilization. This passage repeats elements of Huilin's description of the kunlun during the Tang but embellishes the negative
qualities Huilin attributed to them. Going even further than Huilin, Zhu
Yu claims that the languages of the "devil
slaves" are not even human. Like Huilin, Zhu Yu disti.nguishes the kunlun from other races of people with black skin. Not
all of the "devil slaves" he describes are kunlun. That category is reserved for only those 'who live near the sea and can open their
Zhu Yu also reinforces this
image by describing the ability ofthe "devil slaves" to repair leaks oftrading ships under water: If the
eyes in the water, echoing the recurring image from the Tang ofthe kunlun's skill in the water.
boat suddenly develops a leak that cannot be reached from the inside to fix, they order "devil slaves" to take knives and cotton
wadding and go overboard to fix it themselves, since the "devil shives" are good swimmers and enter the water withoutclosing their
eyes.63 This passage occurs in the context of Zhu's discussion of foreign traders in Guangzhou, suggesting that these slaves were
on foreign ships and that the "devil slaves" he discusses earlier also came from foreign traders. The description of the kunlun fixing
both fictional and nonfiction images from Tang and
Song of the kunlun as strong swimmers. Zhu Yu does not identity the owners ofthe devil slaves, but other Chinese
leaks on foreign trade ships may explain the origins of
sources in the Song indicate a connection between the Arabs and the kunlun, The Song shi *~ (History of the Song) reports that
kunlun slaves accompanied Arab envoys to the Chinese court in 977: "The Arabs (da shi) sent the ambassador Pusina, the viceambassador Mohemuo, and the judge Puluo, to present as tribute items from their country. Their servants had deep-set eyes and
black bodies and were called kunlun slaves." 64 The Arabs did not present their slaves as exotic objects of curiosity, suggesting that
such slaves routinely accompanied Arab officials. The historical context suggests that the
kunlun "devil slaves" Zhu Yu
describes were probably the Arabs' East African.slaves and not the kunlun Southeast Asians ofthe Tang,
although Zhu Yu did not seem to make this connection in 1119. It was not until the late twelfth century that certain Chinese
geographers did so, as the next chapter explains.
The etymological schism of the Chinese from the ‘devil slaves’ created a
social fabric of Afro-orientalism through which the templates of economic
exchange became coherent – blackness as object and non-black as
sovereign subject. This tactic of westernization served to eject the slave
from the fabric of social reality and was exported as a canon for the
international spectrum of antiblackness.
Rutledge 14 (Gregory E. Ruthelberg – Professor at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Received
Masters in Afro-American studies and English Literature from University of Florida, JD/MAMC
(1992), University of Wisconsin—Madison, MA (1999), University of Wisconsin—Madison, PhD
(2005), “Race, Slavery, and the Re-evaluation of the T'ang Canon” - Volume 16 Issue 6
(December 2014) Article 8,
http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2532&context=clcweb – ERW)
-Etymology is the study of words, meanings, and connotations.
Given the uniqueness of Wilensky's "The
since it deploys
Magical Kunlun," the politics of its critical methodology deserves keen attention
a peculiar Orientalist technique, one that entirely omits a slavery-attuned
perspective. Consequently, proper interpretation of such lore would, at minimum, include close readings sensitive to key
issues elided by Chang and Wilensky: African epic traditions and the unique place of the exceptional
Other, sexuality and gender politics, labor and the culture of the slave trade, and the question of religion
and the psycho-social consequences of chattel slavery. Because its cultural comparison (T'ang Dynasty,
Arab empire, and East African kingdoms and cultures) focuses on ancient stories of slave-heroes, "The Magical Kunlun"
apprehends a comparative temporality. Indexed to ancient East African and Asian temporalities largely unknown to Western
scholars, Wilensky's study is challenged by a most critical methodological question: given its temperospatial magnitude, how
expansive should one's database of knowledge be if this folkloric fiction is to be properly read? This question is perhaps the defining
question confronted by literary scholars in East Asia. For example, at the annual English Language and Literature Association of
Korea International Conference held in November 2013 at Sookmyung Women's University in Seoul, Eric Hayot delivered a keynote
entitled "Scale, Data, and World Literature" addressed to the conference's topic of "Micro versus Macro Literatures in English."
Hayot attended to literary critics' methodology—traditionally at odds with interrogations of methodological assumptions, biases, and
research questions—in light of Franco Moretti's critique of literary scholars' canonized method of close reading and the sudden rise
of the Gregory E. Rutledge, "Race, Slavery, and the Re-evaluation of the T'ang Canon" page 4 of 11 Special Issue Western Canons
in a Changing East Asia. Ed. Simon C. Estok digital humanities and world literature. "The
Magical Kunlun" anticipated
questions of this nature in East Asia, for the "ontology" of the literary object Hayot suggested, not only
denotes the formal components of the text, but also identity politics. Wilensky's interest and Hayot's
expertise in East Asian Studies highlight the rising importance of East Asian "ontology" to Western literary scholars. In a
globalized world in which East Asia—with or without China as a superpower—will play a central
role in emergent world literature canons, issues of identity are paramount. Significantly, kunlun
etymology speaks to the place East Africa held, and holds, in ancient and modern China at a time when
its relationship to Africa legitimately raises questions about cultural exchange and neocolonialism. The racial hostility Wilensky documents among a "mob of more than 3000 Chinese students" toward the
African "black devils" in 1988, in significant part because of interracial dating (43-44), seems to parallel much of the
African American experience. Her implicit question—Was kunlun in Chinese culture
equivalent to nigger in the U.S., and is it the source or correlative of racial hostility to Africans
among contemporary Chinese today?—goes right to the heart of complex issues regarding racial
oppression, aesthetics, and culture as globalization unfolds. Wilensky makes this clear as she delineates her
research focus, questions, and methodology: The first chapter section of this paper seeks to explain how Chinese people
perceived these black slaves by analyzing representations of people with dark skin in fictional and
nonfiction sources from the fifth century through the Song dynasty, tracing the evolution of the meanings and
connotations of the term kunlun 崑 崙. This mysterious and poorly understood word first applied to darkskinned Chinese and then expanded over time to encompass multiple meanings, all connoting
dark skin. This chapter examines the meaning of the term kunlun in nonfiction before and during the Tang; fictional tales about
magical, superhuman kunlun slaves from the Tang fiction compendium Taiping guangji 太 平 廣 記 (Extensive Gleanings of the
Reign of Great Tranquility); and finally, representations of the kunlun from a nonfiction writer from the Song, Zhu Yu 朱彧 … Were
these Tang and Song images of the kunlun based on direct contact between Chinese and African peoples? When did the Chinese
make a conceptual link between the kunlun slaves in China and the countries and peoples of East Africa? (2) Wilensky's study
is a watershed unlike the studies concerned with historicizing the enslavement of East Africans in China and the etymological focus
of the study extends from nonfiction to include her interpretation of race in fiction, a "valuable source because its popularity reveals
widespread cultural perceptions of people with dark skin" (2). Although Wilensky foregrounds historical and nonfiction accounts in
her study, on grounds of reliability her article is, a priori, aligned with methodology fundamental to literary critique. At its core,
Wilensky's study raises a philological question central to the method used by literary scholars: what does the etymology of a word
reveal about writers' authorial intent and readers' understanding that we can use to interpret a text and its context? For English
literature scholars, the Oxford English Dictionary is considered authoritative both for its exhaustive inclusion of multiple senses of a
given word and for its etymology. The close reading method developed in recent decades often turns upon critical insights into
denotations, connotations, and etymologies of words comprising a key passage from a literary
text. While "scale jumping" is possible even within one sentence, as Hayot suggested, textual close reading is often criticized as an
apolitical micro-logical exercise based on the critic's privileging interpretations of one or a few texts without regard for the macrological context (history, politics, and class), or even the author's intent. The battle over whether politics and aesthetics should mix is,
of course, old and entrenched. But Wilensky's kunlun etymology
constitutes an altogether different species of
interpretation that might be called a "closed" reading of literary texts. In other words, while tracing the racial
meaning of kunlun—from "the Tang dynasty, [when] Arab traders brought a number of East
African slaves to China" (1)—provides the raison d'être for Wilensky's investigation, the semantic content and literary
strategies evident in the stories are "closed" to interpretation. The method is the message, for Wilensky's construction of kunlun
slaves, confines and defines their status as
kunlun chattel. Far too little attention is given by her to considering whether the stories might contradict literal constructions that
etymology associated with East Africans, even of the most exceptional
simply equate kunlun and slave. While Wilensky rhetorically foregrounds "fictional tales about magical kunlun slaves from the
Taiping guangji … a massive Song period collection of Tang and earlier tales" (5), this is misleading. Although in keeping with her
her core methodological superstructure relies upon a
fiction-nonfiction divide that maps onto another: while noting that "these fictional tales were widely read
at the time of their publication, revealing common images Gregory E. Rutledge, "Race, Slavery, and the Re-evaluation of
the T'ang Canon" page 5 of 11 of the kunlun that reflect popular perceptions of people with dark skin,"
Wilensky privileges the objective, scholarly viewpoints—found in "a nonfiction source from the Song"—that
ultimately treat East Africans as "foreign 'devil slaves'" (5). "Perceptions" are the soft power of Wilensky's
earlier identification of these tales as a "valuable source,"
methodology, which initially valorizes but ultimately negates the "common" and " popular
perceptions"—valorizes their
existence as a reflection of how the masses think, but negates their substance as an aspect of human
culture meriting attention in its own rights—in favor of nonfiction, which is more reliable for its authors' knowledge and facts.
Chinese culture and literature were already considered "heathen" by late-nineteenth-century US-Americans, (Lutz 9-21), but USAmerican Orientalist policy filled the power vacuum WWII created, with a critical difference: while centuries of Western European
Orientalism, Said argues, depended on a "broad catholic" approach, for the U.S. it was "but an administrative one, a matter for
policy" (290). Said speaks here with reference to the Middle or Near East, Islam in particular, but his analysis is relevant insofar as it
reflects the advent of US-American East Asian academic culture and policy that predated and, more importantly, dominated after
World War II: One of the striking aspects of the new American social-science attention to the Orient is its singular avoidance of
literature. You can read through reams of expert writing on the modern Near East and never encounter a single reference to
literature. What seems to matter far more to the regional expert are "facts," of which a literary text is perhaps a disturber. The net
Orient is to keep the region and
its people conceptually emasculated, reduced to "attitudes," "trends," statistics: in short,
dehumanized. Since an Arab poet or novelist—and there are many—writes of his experiences, of his values, of his humanity
effect of this remarkable omission in modern American awareness of the Arab or Islamic
(however strange that may be), he effectively disrupts the various patterns (images, clichés, abstractions) by which the Orient is
represented. A literary text speaks more or less directly of a living reality … The non-philological study of
esoteric Oriental languages is useful for obvious rudimentary strategic reasons; but it is also useful for giving a cachet of authority,
almost a mystique, to the "expert" who appears able to deal with hopelessly obscure material with firsthand skill. In the socialscience order of things, language study is a mere tool for higher aims, certainly not for reading literary texts. (Said 290-91)
Chinese society’s equation of K’un-lun-nu as a signifier of blackness
morphed into a hieroglyphic imposed upon the flesh – an atomizing of the
captive epidermal schema which marked difference across generations.
Weheilye 14(Alexander G. Weheliye - professor of African American studies at Northwestern
University, Habeas Viscus: Racialized Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of
the Human, pgs. 31-34 – ERW)
Spillers concentrates on the processes through which slaves are transformed into bare life/flesh
and then subjected to the pleasure of the bodied subject, arguing, “before the ‘body’ there is ‘flesh,’ that zero
degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of
discourse or the reflexes of iconography…. We regard this human and social irreparability as high crimes against the
flesh, as the person of African females and males registered the wounding.”21 Flesh, while representing both a
temporal and conceptual antecedent to the body, is not a biological occurrence seeing that its
creation requires an elaborate apparatus consisting of “the calculated work of iron, whips, chains, knives, the canine
patrol, the bullet” (“Mama's Baby,” 207), among many other factors, including courts of law.22 If the body represents legal
personhood qua selfpossession, then the flesh designates those dimensions of human life cleaved by the working together of
depravation and deprivation. In order for this cruel ruse to succeed, however, subjects must be transformed into flesh before being
granted the illusion of possessing a body. What Spillers refers to as the
“hieroglyphics of the flesh” created by these
instruments is transmitted to the succeeding generations of black subjects who have been “liberated”
and granted body in the aftermath of de jure enslavement. The hieroglyphics of the flesh do not vanish once
affixed to proper personhood (the body); rather they endure as a pesky potential vital to the
maneuverings of “cultural seeing by skin color” (“Mama's Baby,” 207). Racializing assemblages
translate the lacerations left on the captive body by apparatuses of political violence to a domain
rooted in the visual truth-value accorded to quasibiological distinctions between different human
groupings. Thus, rather than entering a clearing zone of indistinction, we are thrown into the vortex of hierarchical indicators:
racializing assemblages. In
the absence of kin, family, gender, belonging, language, personhood,
property, and official records, among many other factors, what remains is the flesh, the living,
speaking, thinking, feeling, and imagining flesh: the ether that holds together the world of Man while at
the same time forming the condition of possibility for this world's demise. It's the end of the world—don't
you know that yet? While Wynter's resistance to the universalization of gendered categories associated with bourgeois whiteness in
certain strands of feminism, which I discussed in chapter 1, is understandable, her genealogy of modernity, which sees a
“mutational shift from the primacy of the anatomical model of sexual difference as the referential model of mimetic ordering, to that
of the physiognomic model of racial/cultural difference” in the Renaissance, remains less convincing, because it leads to the
repudiation of gender analytics as such.23 This aspect of Wynter's thinking fails to persuade in the way the other elements of her
race (physiognomy)
the systematizing principle according to which the Homo sapiens
species is categorized into full humans, not-quitehumans, and nonhumans. The shift Wynter
global analytics of the human do, since it assumes that beginning with the colonization of the Americas,
dislodges gender/sex (anatomy) as
diagnoses, though surely present in the history of modernity, cannot be encompassed by the distinction between physiognomy and
anatomy, even if not construed as either categorical or complete, because neither anatomy nor sexual difference recede like
silhouettes sketched in the soil at the shores that delimit the Drexciyan waters of the Middle Passage.24 Instead, sexual difference
remains an intoxicating sociogenically instituted mode of mimetic structuring in modernity, though always tied to specific variants of
(un)gendering. Wynter's dismissal of gender/sex as forceful indicators of the hierarchical ordering of our species thus seems to
discard sexual difference with the proverbial bathwater; and it also largely leaves intact the morphological dimorphism upon which
the modern west constructs gendered stratification. In this context, it is useful to distinguish between physiognomy as inferring from
an individual's external appearance, particularly “a person's facial features or expression[, their] character or ethnic origin,” while
anatomy designates “the bodily structure of humans, animals, and other living organisms,” and physiology analyzes how organisms
or bodily parts (e.g., the brain) function and behave.25 Wynter's statement assumes a substantial variance between physiognomy
and anatomy, even though the former is unthinkable without some recourse to the latter, at the same time as it does not account for
the many attempts at creating an isomorphic echo chamber between racial and anatomical difference, as was the case with Sarah
in the sphere of racial and sexual difference,
anatomy and physiognomy form a continuum in a larger modern assemblage that requires the
physiognomic territorialization of anatomic qualities. Moreover, if, according to Wynter, there exists no universal
Baartman, the so-called Venus Hottentot, for instance. Put differently,
instantiation of gender, then how can racial differentiation persist without being modulated by gender or sexuality? To be clear, I am
not after an academic commonsense invocation of the necessary intersectionality of all “axes of subjugation” but of one that takes
Wynter's insights about how race
inflects human physiology in colonial modernity seriously, while still asking
how, even if it is not the primary model of hierarchical differentiation, sexual difference might figure into this
theory of the human. How do we think gender categories based upon the anatomical foundation of sexual distinction through
the lens of racialization, and vice versa? How do we account for what Spillers calls “female flesh ‘ungendered’ ” birthed by the
Middle Passage (“Mama's Baby,” 207), which continues to affect all black subjects?26 As black feminist theorists Hazel Carby, Julia
Oparah, Claudia Tate, Evelynn Hammonds, Patricia Hill Collins, Angela Davis, Darlene Clark Hine, and Cathy Cohen, among many
others, have pointed out, black subjects’ genders and sexualities operate differently from those found in the mainstream of the world
of Man.27 Namely, in
the same way that black people appear as either nonhuman or magically
hyperhuman within the universe of Man, black subjects are imbued with either a surplus
(hyperfemininity or hypermasculinity) of gender and sexuality or a complete lack thereof (desexualization).
However, regardless whether deficit or surplus, what remains significant is that the histories of racial slavery, colonialism, Jim Crow,
the prison, and the like, which all represent different racializing
assemblages in Man's extensive armory, have
constitutively incapacitated black subjects’ ability to conform to hegemonic gender and sexuality norms,
and often excessively so. Drawing on examples from racial slavery and the more recent pathologization of the black
family in the infamous Moynihan report, Cathy Cohen and Spillers ascertain how the prohibition of marriage among slaves and the
complete erasure of traditional kinship arrangements during and subsequent to the Middle Passage underwrite the policing and
disparaging of those black genders and sexualities “outside of heteronormative privilege, in particular those perceived as
threatening systems of white supremacy, male domination, and capitalist advancement.”28 Thus, circling back to Wynter's distrust
of gender-focused inquiries, it is imperative to consider how the translation of sexual difference to de facto nonnormative genders
barring of black
people from the category of the human-as-Man. Which is to say that taking on the semblance of full
humanity requires apposite gender and sexuality provisos that cannot be taken for granted in postslavery black
cultures. Indeed, this is why I believe we need both Wynter and Spillers to come to a fuller understanding of how racializing
and sexualities within black communities (the ungendered flesh) suggests a fundamental component in the
assemblages operate, since the sociogenic anchoring of racial difference in physiology and the banning of black subjects from the
domain of the human occur in and through gender and sexuality. Retrospectively describing the concept of the hieroglyphics of the
Spillers maintains that she was attempting not only to
pinpoint “one of diasporic slavery's technologies of violence through marking, but also to
propose that ‘beyond’ the violating hand that laid on the stigmata of a recognition that was a
misrecognition, or the regard that was disregard, there was a semiosis of procedure that had enabled
such a moment in the first place.” Spillers concludes, “The marking, the branding, the whipping—all Instruments of
flesh in the introduction to her 2003 collection of essays,
a terrorist regime—were more deeply that—to get in somebody's face in that way would have to be centuries in the making that
would have had little to do, though it is difficult to believe, with
the biochemistry of pigmentation, hair
texture, lip thickness, and the indicial measure of the nostrils, but everything to do with those
‘unacknowledged legislators’ of a discursive and an economic discipline.”29 Despite having no real basis in
biochemistry, the hieroglyphics of the flesh requires grounding in the biological sphere so as to
facilitate—even as it conceals and because it masks—the political, economic, social, and cultural disciplining
(semiosis of procedure) of the Homo sapiens species into assemblages of the human, not-quitehuman, and nonhuman; this is what I am referring to as racialization. The “profitable ‘atomizing’ of
the captive body” (and the bodies of the colonized, tortured, imprisoned, interned, etc.) puts into place the
conditions of possibility for the creation and maintenance of racializing assemblages and
most decidedly not the suspension of racialized divisions in a biopolitical zone of
indistinction (“Mama's Baby,” 208). As a result, the flesh epitomizes a central modern assemblage of racialization that
highlights how bare life is not only a product of previously established distinctions but also, and more significantly, aids in the
perpetuation of hierarchical categorizations along the lines of nationality, gender, religion, race,
culture, sexuality, and so on.30 In its focus on both the genesis and the aftermath of zoe's specifically modern
politicization, Spillers's conceptualization of the flesh shines a spotlight on slavery's alternate
passages to the formation of bare life. In other words, the flesh is not an abject zone of exclusion that culminates in
death but an alternate instantiation of humanity that does not rest on the mirage of western Man as the mirror image of human life
as such. Analogously, Luce Irigaray argues that within phallogocentric structures, women, “as commodities, are a mirror of value of
and for man.”31 Here the different groups excluded from the category of proper humanity encounter only a scopic echo of their
deviance from—and therefore reinscribe—the superiority of western Man, reflecting their own value as ontological lack and western
Man's value as properly human. Thus, as Spillers remarks, “[the
black American woman] became instead the principal
point of passage between the human and the non-human world. Her issue became the focus of a
cunning difference—visually, psychologically, ontologically—as the route by which the dominant
modes decided the distinction between humanity and ‘other.’ At this level of radical discontinuity in the ‘great
chain of being,’ black is vestibular to culture.”32 And being vestibular to culture means that gendered blackness—though excluded
from culture, and frequently violently so—is a passage to the human in western modernity because, in giving flesh to the word of
Man, the flesh comes to define the phenomenology of Man, which is always already lived as unadulterated physiology. As a result,
the flesh rests at that precarious threshold where the person metamorphoses into the group and “the individual-in-the-mass and the
mass-in-the-individual mark an iconic thickness: a concerted function whose abiding centrality is embodied in the flesh,” and which
is why—as we shall see later—the
flesh resists the legal idiom of personhood as property.33 For Maurice
the flesh
functions as an integral component of being, which is “not a fact or a sum of facts, and yet adherent to
Merleau-Ponty, the flesh “is not matter, is not mind, is not substance”; rather, in his phenomenological theorization,
location and to the now.”34 If the flesh represents an element in the vein of the classical quadfecta of earth, wind, (water,) and fire,
it appears as a vital prop in the world of Man's dramaturgy of Being . Following Merleau-Ponty, Elizabeth
Grosz holds that the relationality of the flesh—its nonsubstantive substance—materializes through “an inherent
intertwining of subject and world,” creating a “new ontology, one which supersedes the ontological distinction between the animate
and the inanimate, between the animal and the human,…in ways that might also suit the interests of feminists,” since the
hierarchical differentiation between reason and enfleshment is “complicit with the hierarchy which positions one kind of subject
(male, white, capitalist) in the position of superiority over others.”35
China’s contemporary scramble for Africa in competition with the US is
another exemplification of our argument insofar as it locks into violent,
Sinophobic imperial narratives that have extended from the paternalism of
the premodern era—Chinese economic interactions are inseparable from
the West’s neoliberal project, rendering African governments and people
as passive instruments of global colonialism.
Ayers 13 (Alison J. Ayers, Simon Fraser University (SFU), Political Science, Sociology &
Anthropology. “Beyond Myths, Lies and Stereotypes: The Political Economy of a ‘New Scramble
for Africa,’” New Political Economy, 18:2, 227-257 - ERW)
Commentators across the political spectrum have increasingly drawn attention to a ‘new scramble for
Africa’. This ‘new scramble’ marks the latest chapter of imperialist engagement, with not only Western states
and corporations but also those of ‘emerging economies’ (such as China, Russia, Brazil, India and Malaysia) seeking to
consolidate their access to African resources and markets. The ‘new scramble for Africa’ involves therefore
significant politico-economic transformations related to shifts in global politico-economic power. Accordingly, a burgeoning literature
has emerged to make sense of the current historical conjuncture. Indeed, as Roger Southall and Henning Melber argue, ‘something
big is happening’ in contemporary Africa and ‘there is an urgent need for us as analysts to seek to understand it’ (2009: xxiv).
of the burgeoning literature on the ‘new scramble for Africa’ is
premised upon problematic substantive, theoretical and ontological claims and debates. In
particular, the article seeks to challenge two commonplace and related narratives. Firstly, the highly questionable
representations of the scale and perceived threat of emerging powers’ (particularly China’s)
involvement in Africa, in contrast to the silences, hypocrisy and paternalistic representation
of the historical role of the West. As such, the West’s relations with Africa are construed as essentially
beneficent, in contrast to the putatively opportunistic, exploitative and deleterious role of the
emerging powers, thereby obfuscating the West’s ongoing neocolonial relationship with Africa.
Second, and relatedly, debate and analysis are framed predominantly within an ahistoric statist
framework of analysis, particularly that of inter-state rivalry between China and other ‘emerging’
states vs. Western powers. Absent or neglected in such accounts are profound changes in the
global political economy within which the ‘new scramble for Africa’ is to be more adequately
located. Without contextualising the rise of China (and other emerging states) in the neoliberal capitalist
global order, ‘it is too easy to single out the country without addressing the structural and
institutional forces that are driving not only China, but also other emerging powers, to look with
covetous eyes at Africa’s natural resources and markets’ (Luk 2008: 13). This article interjects in such
debates through critique of these two commonplace but highly problematic narratives. In so doing, it seeks to
contribute to a more adequate analysis of politico-economic transformations in the twenty-first world
order, and Africa’s place within it. Yellow peril, dark continent, white man’s burden Much of the discussion and debate
around the ‘new scramble for Africa’ focuses on China’s engagement with Africa. Such accounts are
characteristic of a wider discourse on the rise of China internationally and the so-called ‘China
threat’ evident in policy-making, social science and mass public discourse (Gertz 2000; Yee and Storey
2002; Bernstein and Munro 1997; Mosher 2000; Mearsheimer 2006; Naı´m 2007; Curtis 2008). Such representations give
‘the impression that the African continent, and much of the rest of the world, is in the process of
being “devoured” by China’, with descriptors such as ‘voracious’, ‘ravenous’ and ‘insatiable appetite for natural resources’
However, as this article elaborates, much
used to characterise China’s new role (Guerrero and Manji 2008: 1; Mohan and Power 2008). Within the academic literature Robert
Rotberg argues, for example, that China is ‘opportunistic’, ‘extractive and exploitive.’ ‘China’s very rapaciousness – its seeming
insatiable demand for liquid forms of energy, and for the raw materials that feed its widening industrial maw – responds to subSaharan Africa’s relatively abundant supplies of unprocessed metals, diamonds, and gold’ (Rotberg 2008: viii– ix). Similarly, Peter
Navarro, in The Coming China Wars, illuminates the so-called dark sides of China’s leap into ‘globalisation’, including China’s
‘amoral’ involvement in Africa, arguing that ‘China’s tentacles reach throughout Africa’ in its quest to access oil and other natural
resources. China’s Africa strategy, he concludes ‘is a threat that will colonise and economically enslave the vast majority of the
continent’s population that lives outside the elite circles. It is an imperialist marriage manufactured in China and made in hell’
(Navarro 2007: 100). Similar
concerns are echoed in Western foreign policy positions, particularly
within the United States. The Council on Foreign Relations Report, More Than Humanitarianism: A Strategic US Approach
Toward Africa, for example, highlights the threat of China on the continent (CFR 2006). Similarly, US Congress officials
have voiced concerns ‘that the Chinese intend to aid and abet African dictators, gain a
stronghold on precious African natural resources, and undo much of the progress that has been
made on democracy and governance in the last 15 years in African nations’ (Rep. Christopher Smith,
quoted in Naidu and Davies 2006: 69). Meanwhile, sensationalistic and Sinophobic accounts in the Western media routinely invoke
the specter of Chinese expansion, including Chinese rapacity in Africa (Brown and Sriram 2008). Reviewing the UK print media,
Emma Mawdsley reveals that such accounts consistently depict China as ‘ruthless’, ‘unscrupulous’, ‘amoral, greedy and coldly
indifferent’ (Mawdsley 2008: 517, 523). While French journalists Serge Michel and Michel Beuret in China Safari: On the Trail of
Beijing’s Expansion in Africa, liken Beijing’s role to that of the Godfather: ‘Borrow from the Chinese and you are drawn into the
bosom of its – highly profitable – family. Beijing is the Godfather, engaged in everything from textiles to infrastructure to uranium and
By contrast, the operations
of Western capital with the same ends are notably absent from such accounts (Mawdsley 2008; Melber
2009), or are ‘described with anodyne phrases such as “development”, “investment”, “employment
generation”’ (Guerrero and Manji 2008: 1). As such, commonplace accounts claim that Western powers have developed a new
oil. His bids are all interlinked and his motivation is constant’ (Michel and Beuret 2009: 108).
‘vision of foreign partnership with Africa’ based on ‘a shared agenda for change’ with the West undertaking ‘ameliorative initiatives’
across Africa (Alden 2007: 93–94; Rotberg 2008: 18). Both
the silences on the role of the West, together with
the ahistoric distortions and flawed understanding of the West’s ongoing neocolonial
relationship with Africa characteristic of such approaches, are highly problematic. Not least, as Kwesi
Kwaa Prah (2007) has argued, it is hypocritical of Western states to raise concerns about China’s role in Africa, given their long
history of exploitative relations with Africa, which continue to the present day. Yet Western
powers continue to
arrogate to themselves the project of ‘spreading “enlightenment” and culture to barbarous
natives ... [whilst] seeking to convince us about how bad and evil rapacious Chinese
“mercantilists” are for Africa’, all the while ‘continuing to rampage through Africa in search of
markets to conquer and “mad mullahs” to vanquish’ (Adebajo 2008: 227). As such, it is necessary to
shatter the ‘Orientalist’ myth that often describes China’s role as that of a ‘yellow peril’ seeking
to monopolise markets, coddle caudillos and condone human rights’ abuses on the continent;
while Western powers ... are portrayed in contrast almost as knights in shining armour, seeking
to assist Africa’s economic recovery, spread democracy and contribute to conflict-management
efforts (Adebajo 2008: 227) The engagement of China and that of other so-called ‘emerging states’ with Africa has undoubtedly
undergone significant changes, particularly over the last decade, with notable consequences within and beyond Africa. However, a
fuller and more nuanced understanding is required if we are to understand contemporary shifts in the centres of politico-economic
power within the twenty-first-century worldorder, and Africa’s place within it. This necessarily includes analysis of the contemporary
history of Western imperialism on the continent and the continuing dominance of Western capital, albeit recognising that a
This
spatial reorganisation of global capitalism and its implications for and beyond Africa are
addressed in the subsequent section. This section interrogates commonplace Western claims regarding the scale and
significant spatial reorganisation of global capitalism is occurring with the rise of the BRICs and other ‘emerging’ states.
threat of China and other emerging powers in Africa, and, relatedly, subjects the ongoing role of the West in Africa to critical
scrutiny.
Thus we affirm the USFG should increase economic engagement through
demanding that the PRC let the ghosts k’un-lun-nu speak as a form of
apportioning reparations.
This genealogical contact with the past of Chinese sovereignty stands as
an impossible demand that exhausts the idea of instutional recapture for
black life. Structural antiblackness encoded within the norms of economic
engagement, from chattel slavery to modern neocolonial projects, makes it
necessary to resist the inconceivable nature of how black flesh as object
registers within symbolic economies of meaning. Through the ejection of
black flesh from humanity, neoliberalism par excellence became possible
insofar as African peoples were equated to standing reserves and
pathologies for the Western and Chinese order. Instead of affirming selfcorrecting engagement through the beaurocratic means of the topic, the
affirmative stands as a pursuit of autonomy beyond the social coding of
contemporary reality.
Thus we allow the commodity to speak – Niko huru. Mimi tena kitu. Mimi
tena kitu. I am free. I am no longer object. I am no longer object.
Moten 08 (“In the Break: The Aesthetics of Black Radical Tradition”; Fred Moten; University of
Minnesota Press Minneapolis - ERW)
In his critical deployment of such music and speech, Douglass discovers a hermeneutic that is
simultaneously broken and expanded by an operation akin to what Jacques Derrida refers to as
“invagination.”5 This cut and augmented hermeneutic circle is structured by a double
movement. The Wrst element is the transference of a radically exterior aurality that disrupts
and resists certain formations of identity and interpretation by challenging the
reducibility of phonic matter to verbal meaning or conventional musical form. The second is
the assertion of what Nathaniel Mackey calls “‘broken’ claim(s) to connection”6 between Africa
and African America that seek to suture corollary, asymptotically divergent ruptures—maternal
estrangement and the thwarted romance of the sexes—that he refers to as “wounded kinship”
and the “the sexual ‘cut.’”7 This assertion marks an engagement with a more attenuated, more
internally determined, exteriority and a courtship with an always already unavailable and
substitutive origin. It would work by way of an imaginative restoration of the Wgure of the
mother to a realm determined not only by verbal meaning and conventional musical form but by
a nostalgic specularity and a necessarily endogamous, simultaneously 6 – RESISTANCE OF
THE OBJECT virginal and reproductive sexuality. These twin impulses animate a forceful
operation in Douglass’s work, something like a revaluation of that revaluation of value that was
set in motion by four of Douglass’s “contemporaries”—Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Saussure.
Above all, they open the possibility of a critique of the valuation of meaning over content
and the reduction of phonic matter and syntactic “degeneracy” in the early modern search for a
universal language and the late modern search for a universal science of language. This
disruption of the Enlightenment linguistic project is of fundamental importance since it allows a
rearrangement of the relationship between notions of human freedom and notions of human
essence. More speciWcally, the emergence from political, economic, and sexual objection of the
radical materiality and syntax that animates black performances indicates a freedom drive that
is expressed always and everywhere throughout their graphic (re)production. In Caribbean
Discourse Edouard Glissant writes: From the outset (that is from the moment Creole is forged
as a medium of communication between slave and master), the spoken imposes on the slave
its particular syntax. For Caribbean man, the word is Wrst and foremost sound. Noise is
essential to speech. Din is discourse. . . . Since speech was forbidden, slaves camouflaged the
word under the provocative intensity of the scream. It was taken to be nothing but the call of a
wild animal. This is how the dispossessed man organized his speech by weaving it into the
apparently meaningless texture of extreme noise.8 Lingering with Glissant’s formulations
produces certain insights. The Wrst is that the temporal condensation and acceleration of the
trajectory of black performances, which is to say black history, is a real problem and a real
chance for the philosophy of history. The second is that the animative materiality—the aesthetic,
political, sexual, and racial force— of the ensemble of objects that we might call black
performances, black history, blackness, is a real problem and a real chance for the philosophy
RESISTANCE OF THE OBJECT – 7 of human being (which would necessarily bear and be
irreducible to what is called, or what somebody might hope someday to call, subjectivity). One of
the implications of blackness, if it is set to work in and on such philosophy, is that those
manifestations of the future in the degraded present that C. L. R. James described can never be
understood simply as illusory. The knowledge of the future in the present is bound up with what
is given in something Marx could only subjunctively imagine: the commodity who speaks.
Here is the relevant passage from volume 1 of Capital, at the end of the chapter on “The
Commodity,” at the end of the section called “The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret.”
But, to avoid anticipating, we will content ourselves here with one more example relating to the
commodity-form itself. If commodities could speak they would say this: our use-value may
interest men, but it does not belong to us as objects. What does belong to us as objects,
however, is our value. Our own intercourse as commodities proves it. We relate to each other
merely as exchange-values. Now listen how those commodities speak through the mouth of the
economist: “Value (i.e., exchange-value) is a property of things, riches (i.e., usevalue) of man.
Value in this sense necessarily implies exchanges, riches do not.” “Riches (use-value) are the
attribute of man, value is the attribute of commodities. A man or a community is rich, a pearl or a
diamond is valuable. . . . A pearl or a diamond is valuable as a pearl or diamond.” So far no
chemist has ever discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or a diamond. The economists
who have discovered this chemical substance, and who lay special claim to critical acumen,
nevertheless Wnd that the use-value of material objects belongs to them independently of their
material properties, while their value, on the other hand, forms a part of them as objects. What
conWrms them in this view is the peculiar circumstance that the use-value of a thing is realized
without exchange, i.e. in a social process. Who would not call to mind at this point the advice
given by the good Dogberry to the night-watchman Seacoal? 8 – RESISTANCE OF THE
OBJECT “To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but reading and writing comes by
nature.”9 The difWculty of this passage is partly due to its dual ventriloquizations. Marx
produces a discourse of his own to put into the mouth of dumb commodities before he
reproduces what he Wgures as the impossible speech of commodities magically given through
the mouths of classical economists. The difWculty of the passage is intensiWed when Marx
goes on to critique both instances of imagined speech. These instances contradict one another
but Marx comes down neither on the side of speech he produces nor on that of the speech of
classical economists that he reproduces. Instead he traverses what he conceives of as the
empty space between these formulations, that space being the impossible material substance of
the commodity’s impossible speech. In this regard, what is at stake is not what the commodity
says but that the commodity says or, more properly, that the commodity, in its inability to say,
must be made to say. It is, more precisely, the idea of the commodity’s speech that Marx
critiques, and this is because he believes neither in the fact nor in the possibility of such
speech. Nevertheless, this critique of the idea of the commodity’s speech only becomes
operative by way of a deconstruction of the specific meaning of those impossible or
unreal propositions imposed upon the commodity from outside. The words Marx puts into
the commodity’s mouth are these: “our use value . . . does not belong to us as objects. What
does belong to us as objects, however, is our value,” where value equals exchange value. Marx
has the commodity go on to assert that commodities only relate to one another as exchangevalues, that this is proven by the necessarily social intercourse in which commodities might be
said to discover themselves. Therefore, the commodity discovers herself, comes to know
herself, only as a function of having been exchanged, having been embedded in a mode of
sociality that is shaped by exchange. The words of the commodity that are spoken through the
mouths of the classical economists are roughly these: riches (i.e., use-value) are independent of
the materiality of objects, but value, which is to say RESISTANCE OF THE OBJECT – 9
exchange-value, is a material part of the object. “A man or a commodity is rich, a pearl or a
diamond is valuable.” This is because a pearl or a diamond is exchangeable. Though he agrees
with the classical economists when they assert that value necessarily implies exchange, Marx
chafes at the notion that value is an inherent part of the object. “No chemist,” he argues, “has
discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or a diamond.” For Marx, this chemical substance
called exchange-value has not been found because it does not exist. More precisely, Marx
facetiously places this discovery in an unachievable future without having considered the
conditions under which such a discovery might be made. Those conditions are precisely the fact
of the commodity’s speech, which Marx dismisses in his critique of the very idea. “So far no
chemist has ever discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or a diamond” because pearls or
diamonds have not been heard to speak. The impossible chemical substance of the object’s
(exchange-)value is the fact—the material, graphic, phonic substance—of the object’s speech.
Speech will have been the cutting augmentation of the already existing chemistry of objects, but
the object’s speech, the commodity’s speech, is impossible, that impossibility being the
Wnal refutation of whatever the commodity will have said. Marx argues that the classical
economists believe “that the usevalue of material objects belongs to them independently of their
material properties.” He further asserts that they are conWned in this view by the nonsocial
realization of use-value—the fact that its realization does not come by way of exchange. When
he makes these assertions, Marx moves in an already well-established choreography of
approach and withdrawal from a possibility of discovery that Douglass already recited: the
(exchange-)value of the speaking commodity exists also, as it were, before exchange.
Moreover, it exists precisely as the capacity for exchange and the capacity for a literary,
performative, phonographic disruption of the protocols of exchange. This dual possibility
comes by a nature that is and at the same time is social and historical, a nature that is given as
a kind of anticipatory sociality and historicity. To think the possibility of an (exchange-)value that
is prior to exchange, and to think the reproductive and incantatory assertion of 10 –
RESISTANCE OF THE OBJECT that possibility as the objection to exchange that is exchange’s
condition of possibility, is to put oneself in the way of an ongoing line of discovery, of coming
upon, of invention. The discovery of the chemical substance that is produced in and by Marx’s
counterfactual is the achievement of Douglass’s line given in and as the theory and practice of
everyday life where the spectacular and the mundane encounter one another all the time. It is
an achievement we’ll see given in the primal scene of Aunt Hester’s objection to exchange, an
achievement given in speech, literary phonography, and their disruption. What is sounded
through Douglass is a theory of value—an objective and objectional, productive and
reproductive ontology—whose primitive axiom is that commodities speak. The impossible
example is given in order to avoid anticipation, but it works to establish the impossibility of such
avoidance. Indeed, the example, in her reality, in the materiality of her speech as breath and
sound, anticipates Marx. This sound was already a recording, just as our access to it is made
possible only by way of recordings. We move within a series of phonographic anticipations,
encrypted messages, sent and sending on frequencies Marx tunes to accidentally, for effect,
without the necessary preparation. However, this absence of preparation or foresight in Marx—
an anticipatory refusal to anticipate, an obversive or anti- and anteimprovisation—is condition of
possibility of a richly augmented encounter with the chain of messages the (re)sounding speech
of the commodity cuts and carries. The intensity and density of what could be thought here as
his alternative modes of preparation make possible a whole other experience of the music of the
event of the object’s speech. Moving, then, in the critical remixing of nonconvergent tracks,
modes of preparation, traditions, we can think how the commodity who speaks, in speaking, in
the sound—the inspirited materiality—of that speech, constitutes a kind of temporal warp
that disrupts and augments not only Marx but the mode of subjectivity that the ultimate
object of his critique, capital, both allows and disallows. All of this moves toward the secret
Marx revealed by way of the music he subjunctively mutes. Such aurality is, in fact, what Marx
called the “sensuous outburst of [our] essential activity.”10 It is a passion wherein “the senses
have . . . RESISTANCE OF THE OBJECT – 11 become theoreticians in their immediate
practice.”11 The commodity whose speech sounds embodies the critique of value, of private
property, of the sign. Such embodiment is also bound to the (critique of ) reading and writing,
oft conceived by clowns and intellectuals as the natural attributes of whoever would hope to be
known as human.
[HE CONTINUES]
Part of the project this drive animates is the improvisation through the opposition of spirit and
matter that is instantiated when the object, the commodity, sounds. Marx’s counterfactual (“If the
commodity could speak, it would say . . .”) is broken by a commodity and by the trace of a
subjectivity structure born in objection that he neither realizes nor anticipates. There is
something more here than alienation and fetishization that works, with regard to Marx, as a
preWgurative critique. However, according to Ferdinand de Saussure, and in extension of
Marx’s analytic, the value of the sign is arbitrary, conventional, differential, neither intrinsic nor
iconic, not reducible to but rather only discernible in the reduction of phonic substance. In any
case, it is impossible that sound, as a material element, should in itself be part of the language.
Sound is merely something ancillary, a material the language uses. All conventional values
have the characteristic of being distinct from the tangible element which serves as their vehicle.
It is not the metal in a coin which determines its value. A crown piece nominally worth Wve
francs contains only half that sum in silver. Its value varies somewhat according to the efWgy it
bears. It is worth rather more or rather less on different sides of a political frontier.
Considerations of the same order are even more pertinent to linguistic signals. Linguistic signals
are not in essence phonetic. They are not physical in any way. They are constituted solely by
differences which distinguish one such sound pattern from another.12 The value of the sign, its
necessary relation to the possibility of (a universal science of and a universal) language, is only
given in the absence or supercession of, or the abstraction from, sounded speech— its
essential materiality is rendered ancillary by the crossing of an immaterial border or by a
differentializing inscription. Similarly, the truth about the value of the commodity is tied
precisely to the impossibility of its speaking, for if the commodity could speak it would
have intrinsic value, it would be infused with a certain spirit, a certain value given not
from the outside, and would, therefore, contradict the thesis on value—that it is not
intrinsic—that Marx assigns it. The speaking RESISTANCE OF THE OBJECT – 13 commodity
thus cuts Marx; but the shrieking commodity cuts Saussure, thereby cutting Marx doubly: this by
way of an irruption of phonic substance that cuts and augments meaning with a phonographic,
rematerializing inscription. That irruption breaks down the distinction between what is intrinsic
and what is given by or of the outside; here what is given inside is that which is out-from-theoutside, a spirit manifest in its material expense or aspiration. For Saussure such speech is
degraded, say, by accent, a deuniversalizing, material difference; for Chomsky it is degraded by
a deuniversalizing agrammaticality, but Glissant knows that “the [scarred] spoken imposes on
the slave its particular syntax.” These material degradations—Wssures or invaginations of a
foreclosed universality, a heroic but bounded eroticism—are black performances. There occurs
in such performances a revaluation or reconstruction of value, one disruptive of the oppositions
of speech and writing, and spirit and matter.
This is an affirmation of survivalist pedagogy in the face of materialist,
libidinal, and linguistic violence – this invokes a politic of reclamation
which counteracts the meaninglessness of black life.
Gumbs 10 (Alexis Gumbs - black queer feminist, Phd. Duke University, academic, organizer, revolutionary – ERW)
Survival. The condition of bare life. The mythology of differential fitness. The continuity of property and properties.
But survival is more than this. Survival, as it emerges as a key word in the theory and poetics of Audre Lorde and June
Jordan is a poetic term. It provides the basis for the reconsideration of its own meaning,
and the reconsideration of the meaning of “life,” that which “survival” queerly extends
despite everything. Survival is a pedagogy: secret and forbidden knowledge that we
pass on, educating each other into a set of skills and beliefs based on the queer
premise that our lives are valuable in a way that the economization of our labor, and
the price of our flesh in the market of racism deny. Survival is a mode of inquiry,
providing a repertoire of critical insights, gained from discerning what approach to a political
and economic framework we can afford from one moment to the next. Survival is an
afterlife; by continuing to exist we challenge the processes that somehow failed to kill us this
time. Survival is a performance, a set of aesthetic invocations that produce belief and
resonance. Survival is a poetic intervention into the simplistic conclusion of the political
narrative: we were never meant to survive. The “we” that was never meant to survive is a
challenge to the gospel of individualism. The content of that “we” is at stake because survival redefines who we
are. For those of us who constitute the collection of people addressed by Audre Lorde’s ‘A Litany for Survival,” the
meanings of our lives have been slandered within an economy that uses narratives of racial
inferiority, gender determinism, and sexual subjectivity to devalue our bodies, our breathing,
our time. If we are survivors, who “we” are is the question of survival, and whether we survive
depends on the generation of a set of relationships that prioritizes who we are to each other through our queer acts of loving the
possible collectivity represented in each of our bodies. 2 Survival is a queer act for oppressed communities
because it interrupts the social reproduction of the sanctioned deaths of those who
were never meant to survive. In this chapter I argue that survival as a fact, a possibility, an act, a
tactic and an approach, is a performative and poetic intervention into a meaning of life that
the narrative of capitalism reproduces: the belief that a differential monetary value can be
assigned to the very time of our lives and our labor based on stories about what race…
The Affirmative’s method reveals the diasporic and global machinations of
racialization that inform Chinese sociality. This is key to visualizing the
color line as a global heuristic of difference.
Feldman 2016 (Keith P. Feldman – Assistant Professor Comparative Ethnic Studies UC
Berkeley; Theories of Race, Nation, and Empire; Cultural Theory; African, Arab, and Jewish
Diasporas; Visual Culture Studies; Transnational American Studies- Ph.D., University of
Washington, 2008 (with honors) M.A., The George Washington University, 2003, B.A., Brown
University, 2000 (cum laude) “On Relationality, On Blackness: A Listening Post” – ERW)
The relational as a critical concept thus surfaces in part as a way to account descriptively and
analytically for connections, linkages, and articulations across the institutionalization of
difference in disciplines and the nation-state cartographies they reference. As much a seeing as
a doing, the interconnections revealed by a relational methodology are otherwise hidden or
buried by modern frames of the nation-state, the scale and scope of research agendas, and the
disciplines and interdisciplines that draw on genealogies of comparison themselves. “Delinking”
from a comparative methodology invites shifting from an “ontology of essence” to what Walter
Mignolo calls a “relational ontology.” Relationality disrupts the positivist pretense of race,
gender, and sexuality as in the first or the last instance sociological facts. Relationality enables
us to think the doing of difference, difference as it constitutes and evades the capture of the
world (Puar). Relationality invites the development of literacies that can read circuitries of power
across uneven terrains (Layoun). Scholars interrogate archives and objects in ways that reveal
relational imaginaries in their contexts of emergence — from the archives of Anglophone
liberalism in the construction of colonial domination and imperial management (Lowe), to the
material formulations of “strange affinity” encoded in U.S. women of color feminisms and queer
of color critique (Hong and Ferguson), to the impetus of transnational feminisms to frame
differentially arrayed and always already linked contexts of struggle (Alexander and Mohanty).
Genealogy renders such relations in their particular and provisional dispersion, and thus their
relation to the differentiated contexts of their emergence. The predicates of a relational
methodology invite us to uncover, reveal, desediment, unveil, and excavate, prompting us to
account for entanglement and its obfuscation or burial. From another angle, liberal capitalism
strives to produce individuated subjects properly calibrated for the rational management of their
possessions, including their possessions of self and of others and possessions qua
property, as abstractions commensurable through the equilibrations of value (Singh).
Relationality uncovers those interconnections that liberal capitalism seeks to obscure, revealing
the violence that appends recognition, unbound from redistribution, in arcs of settler colonial
capitalism (Coulthard), racial capitalism (Melamed), and the juridical armature of neoliberalism
(Cacho).
[HE CONTINUES]
Where and how, then, are we to think Blackness in relation? Such a question could be
answered in advance by the ante-relationality sedimented in the antiBlack ordering of the
modern world. At the same time, Blackness also elucidates a field formation suffused with
descriptive and analytical concerns with a deep and enduring relation to the contours of a
modernity animated by the lacerating trade winds of diaspora. Indeed, Black life emerges
out of always already heterogeneous “overlapping diasporas” (Lewis), a horizon at once
stilled, fixed, and determined from without and at the same time, as Harney and Moten evince in
the above epigraph, enacted in excess, beyond and beneath the regulatory functions of state
and capital. As Glissant elaborates (see epigraph), the channels of Black diaspora are both the
condition of and the counterpoint to modern globality. It is a heteroglossic languaging that
routinely announces and enunciates the practice and theory of the impossible on the uneven
terrain of the transatlantic world. The study of Blackness forecasts insights into diasporic
relationalities even as it renders the structural and systemic foundations of capitalist/colonial
modernity as concerned fundamentally with anti-relationality. Coloniality binds diaspora to
institutionalizations of violence and forces diaspora into the frame of the nation-state, deploying
an epistemic containment policy that buries, obscures, and delimits relationality’s unbounded
potentiality. Diaspora, as Stuart Hall reminds us, signals the interconnections of difference.
The dispersion at its mercurial core renders diaspora in persistent apposition to the violence of
the nation-state, a condition that is simultaneously a mark of the unhomely and the worldly. The
positivist presentiments that give the lie to what once might have been called liberal
multiculturalism and now often travels under the name “diversity” have begun to fall away
(Ahmed). Its hegemony was never complete, to be sure. It was always contested, and hence
always worked over and through. Those policies for representation that obscure plans for
redistribution have been targeted by heterogeneous forms of resistance to state-sanctioned
anti-Blackness expressed intimately, affectively, bodily, structurally, an anti-Blackness that
is both cause and consequence of the ongoing violence of capital accumulation (Kish and
Leroy). In their respective contributions to this forum, Therí Pickens and Vincent Schleitwiler
foreground contemporary movements to contest anti-Black state violence, as well as the
pressing invitations to relationality — connection, solidarity, linkage, resonance — that such
movements evince. They also identify a relation to Blackness as a sign and scene of futurity, of
hosting forms of relation yet to come. Pickens underscores how Arab American cultural
production that relates to Blackness confronts the impulses both to universalism and to
exceptionalism, as well as to the volatility of an anti-Black antagonism that circumscribes entry
into U.S. civil society. Arab American fiction invites exploring the possibilities of relation to
Blackness with eyes wide open to these tensions. For Pickens, the Arab American literary
relation to Blackness has the capacity to interrupt the exceptionalist linear narrative of progress
that organizes conventional immigrant narratives and yields alternative insights into formations
of affect, kinship, and history. By theorizing Blackness as a “when” as much as a “what,”
Pickens reveals the potentialities as yet encrypted in Arab American literary and cultural
narratives. Schleitwiler takes the contemporary flourishing of collective action against antiBlack
state violence as an invitation to engage the ethically troubled matrix of comparison required to
write through the modalities of lynching that underwrite but also exceed their denomination as
such. With Du Bois’s turn-of-the-century “colorline” heuristic in mind, Schleitwiler formulates
imperialism as animated by a will both to rule over and to do justice to difference. While both
Comparative Literature and Comparative Ethnic Studies have critically investigated the former
for some time now, the latter invocation of “imperialism’s racial justice” allows us to see how
practices of imperial rule are catalyzed not just through spectacular domination, torture, and
violence, but also through an articulated investment in the inclusion of hierarchically
differentiated humanity in liberal educative and juridical institutions. That is, imperialism always
seeks to regulate the terms through which difference is included. Rather than cede the field of
comparison wholly, Schleitwiler calls on us to attend to comparison’s “demons”: those “figure[s]
of unpredictability and indeterminacy lurking within the knowledge of a world ordered by
competing imperialisms that can never finally guarantee the universality to which they aspire.”
Because imperialism’s comparative imaginary is always partial, incomplete, and haunted,
Schleitwiler finds in that always-provisional claim to totalizing its rule over difference potential
critical lines of flight. Genealogies of American empire, as Pickens and Schleitwiler provide,
crystallize the problematic of Blackness and relation. Provincializing these genealogies is
another matter altogether, and, in her contribution to the forum, Shu-mei Shih takes up precisely
this task. In extending a method of “relational comparison,” Shih identifies the “Global 1960s” as
the explosive flashpoint that reveals a decolonial arc of transnational and comparative
epistemes producing imagined geographies rich with symbolic and material articulations of antiimperialism. Part of that thread signifies China in general, and Maoism in particular, as
quintessentially animating a generative Third Worldism for the times. This is the China
embraced by Du Bois in 1959, a site through which revolutionary racial brotherhood signified as
Afro-Asian solidarity was to be conceived. Yet, a practice of “relational comparison,” as Shih
argues here, reveals another crucial thread in stark counterpoint to Du Bois. To the South of
China (both geographically and epistemically) lay violent minoritizations, such as of the Hoa
in Vietnam and Chinese Malaysians, predicated not simply on the long shadow of
European colonialism but also on the active imperial race-making emerging out of China.
The geographic impetus of the color line as the figure par excellence of racial solidarities is
persistently interrupted by a rendering of the South of the South that reveals its fractures,
frictions, and racial contradictions.
618 B.C.E: The T’ang dynasty under the rule of Li Yuan dawns in to the
world. The Chinese Golden age has been born, the dynasty for the ages
has finally arrived and a collective empirical order has been secured. The
borders of the nation grow at a fever pitch until contact with the Middle
East has been reached.
696 B.C.E: Chinese linkages of commerce begin to grow ever so steadily.
Sparse contact with Arabian traders soon evolves into a committed relation
of commerce and the coasts of East Africa, the mystical Zangibar, the
“Region of the Blacks” transformed into a luring space of interest. The
“things” that they exchanged, they went by many names: Zanj or sengji if
they were Bantu, Hindoos if they were Persian, Kwei-nu if they were
transferred for work in Guangzhou. Voyage after voyage to their “wild
lands” made contact more frequent. Meticulous observation took hold as
literary texts were created to fabricate their essence, understand what they
meant, and witness what they did –
“Their eyes were ravaging red, with their enormous noses turned up their
lips were so big, their hair is woolly and tawny, so thickly mottled. They eat
fruit, fish, and shrimps, and they live either in caves or in nests built in the
trees. They don’t speak any recognizable human language. They go stark
naked with little cover for decency. They can swim under water without
closing their eyes, and they are strong beyond measure, capable of
carrying several weights of cattle. The women of this Island are the ugliest
in the world, with their great mouths and big eyes and thick noses; their
breasts are four times bigger than those of any other women.[sic.]”
-Book II of Chu Yu's Ping Chiu K'o T'an ("Notes on P'ing Chiu"), Chao Ju-k'uo's description of
K'un-lun, and Zhu Yu's Pingzhou ketan (“Notes on Pingzhou”)
There were so many of them – what is it that they should be called?
Overlapping labels of the past became reduced to a single word – K’un-lunnu, the dark-skinned peoples, the “devil slave” shall be their name.
Hence arose the marking of the African as chattel, superhuman in strength
but subhuman in intellect. The k’un-lun became nothing more than wild
beasts, the “savages” of the South Seas, primitive animals who were only
valuable insofar as they were domesticated within the economic order.
The etymological schism of the Chinese from the ‘devil slaves’ created a
social fabric of Afro-orientalism through which the templates of economic
exchange became coherent – blackness as object and non-black as
sovereign subject. This tactic of westernization served to eject the slave
from the fabric of social reality and was exported as a canon for the
international spectrum of antiblackness.
Rutledge 14 (Gregory E. Ruthelberg – Professor at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Received
Masters in Afro-American studies and English Literature from University of Florida, JD/MAMC
(1992), University of Wisconsin—Madison, MA (1999), University of Wisconsin—Madison, PhD
(2005), “Race, Slavery, and the Re-evaluation of the T'ang Canon” - Volume 16 Issue 6
(December 2014) Article 8,
http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2532&context=clcweb – ERW)
-Etymology is the study of words, meanings, and connotations.
Given the uniqueness of Wilensky's "The
since it deploys
Magical Kunlun," the politics of its critical methodology deserves keen attention
a peculiar Orientalist technique, one that entirely omits a slavery-attuned
perspective. Consequently, proper interpretation of such lore would, at minimum, include close readings sensitive to key
issues elided by Chang and Wilensky: African epic traditions and the unique place of the exceptional
Other, sexuality and gender politics, labor and the culture of the slave trade, and the question of religion
and the psycho-social consequences of chattel slavery. Because its cultural comparison (T'ang Dynasty,
Arab empire, and East African kingdoms and cultures) focuses on ancient stories of slave-heroes, "The Magical Kunlun"
apprehends a comparative temporality. Indexed to ancient East African and Asian temporalities largely unknown to Western
scholars, Wilensky's study is challenged by a most critical methodological question: given its temperospatial magnitude, how
expansive should one's database of knowledge be if this folkloric fiction is to be properly read? This question is perhaps the defining
question confronted by literary scholars in East Asia. For example, at the annual English Language and Literature Association of
Korea International Conference held in November 2013 at Sookmyung Women's University in Seoul, Eric Hayot delivered a keynote
entitled "Scale, Data, and World Literature" addressed to the conference's topic of "Micro versus Macro Literatures in English."
Hayot attended to literary critics' methodology—traditionally at odds with interrogations of methodological assumptions, biases, and
research questions—in light of Franco Moretti's critique of literary scholars' canonized method of close reading and the sudden rise
of the Gregory E. Rutledge, "Race, Slavery, and the Re-evaluation of the T'ang Canon" page 4 of 11 Special Issue Western Canons
in a Changing East Asia. Ed. Simon C. Estok digital humanities and world literature. "The
Magical Kunlun" anticipated
questions of this nature in East Asia, for the "ontology" of the literary object Hayot suggested, not only
denotes the formal components of the text, but also identity politics. Wilensky's interest and Hayot's
expertise in East Asian Studies highlight the rising importance of East Asian "ontology" to Western literary scholars. In a
globalized world in which East Asia—with or without China as a superpower—will play a central
role in emergent world literature canons, issues of identity are paramount. Significantly, kunlun
etymology speaks to the place East Africa held, and holds, in ancient and modern China at a time when
its relationship to Africa legitimately raises questions about cultural exchange and neocolonialism. The racial hostility Wilensky documents among a "mob of more than 3000 Chinese students" toward the
African "black devils" in 1988, in significant part because of interracial dating (43-44), seems to parallel much of the
African American experience. Her implicit question—Was kunlun in Chinese culture
equivalent to nigger in the U.S., and is it the source or correlative of racial hostility to Africans
among contemporary Chinese today?—goes right to the heart of complex issues regarding racial
oppression, aesthetics, and culture as globalization unfolds. Wilensky makes this clear as she delineates her
research focus, questions, and methodology: The first chapter section of this paper seeks to explain how Chinese people
perceived these black slaves by analyzing representations of people with dark skin in fictional and
nonfiction sources from the fifth century through the Song dynasty, tracing the evolution of the meanings and
connotations of the term kunlun 崑 崙. This mysterious and poorly understood word first applied to darkskinned Chinese and then expanded over time to encompass multiple meanings, all connoting
dark skin. This chapter examines the meaning of the term kunlun in nonfiction before and during the Tang; fictional tales about
magical, superhuman kunlun slaves from the Tang fiction compendium Taiping guangji 太 平 廣 記 (Extensive Gleanings of the
Reign of Great Tranquility); and finally, representations of the kunlun from a nonfiction writer from the Song, Zhu Yu 朱彧 … Were
these Tang and Song images of the kunlun based on direct contact between Chinese and African peoples? When did the Chinese
make a conceptual link between the kunlun slaves in China and the countries and peoples of East Africa? (2) Wilensky's study
is a watershed unlike the studies concerned with historicizing the enslavement of East Africans in China and the etymological focus
of the study extends from nonfiction to include her interpretation of race in fiction, a "valuable source because its popularity reveals
widespread cultural perceptions of people with dark skin" (2). Although Wilensky foregrounds historical and nonfiction accounts in
her study, on grounds of reliability her article is, a priori, aligned with methodology fundamental to literary critique. At its core,
Wilensky's study raises a philological question central to the method used by literary scholars: what does the etymology of a word
reveal about writers' authorial intent and readers' understanding that we can use to interpret a text and its context? For English
literature scholars, the Oxford English Dictionary is considered authoritative both for its exhaustive inclusion of multiple senses of a
given word and for its etymology. The close reading method developed in recent decades often turns upon critical insights into
denotations, connotations, and etymologies of words comprising a key passage from a literary
text. While "scale jumping" is possible even within one sentence, as Hayot suggested, textual close reading is often criticized as an
apolitical micro-logical exercise based on the critic's privileging interpretations of one or a few texts without regard for the macrological context (history, politics, and class), or even the author's intent. The battle over whether politics and aesthetics should mix is,
of course, old and entrenched. But Wilensky's kunlun etymology
constitutes an altogether different species of
interpretation that might be called a "closed" reading of literary texts. In other words, while tracing the racial
meaning of kunlun—from "the Tang dynasty, [when] Arab traders brought a number of East
African slaves to China" (1)—provides the raison d'être for Wilensky's investigation, the semantic content and literary
strategies evident in the stories are "closed" to interpretation. The method is the message, for Wilensky's construction of kunlun
slaves, confines and defines their status as
kunlun chattel. Far too little attention is given by her to considering whether the stories might contradict literal constructions that
etymology associated with East Africans, even of the most exceptional
simply equate kunlun and slave. While Wilensky rhetorically foregrounds "fictional tales about magical kunlun slaves from the
Taiping guangji … a massive Song period collection of Tang and earlier tales" (5), this is misleading. Although in keeping with her
earlier identification of these tales as a "valuable source,"
her core methodological superstructure relies upon a
fiction-nonfiction divide that maps onto another: while noting that "these fictional tales were widely read
at the time of their publication, revealing common images Gregory E. Rutledge, "Race, Slavery, and the Re-evaluation of
the T'ang Canon" page 5 of 11 of the kunlun that reflect popular perceptions of people with dark skin,"
Wilensky privileges the objective, scholarly viewpoints—found in "a nonfiction source from the Song"—that
ultimately treat East Africans as "foreign 'devil slaves'" (5). "Perceptions" are the soft power of Wilensky's
methodology, which initially valorizes but ultimately negates the "common" and "popular perceptions"—valorizes their
existence as a reflection of how the masses think, but negates their substance as an aspect of human
culture meriting attention in its own rights—in favor of nonfiction, which is more reliable for its authors' knowledge and facts.
Chinese culture and literature were already considered "heathen" by late-nineteenth-century US-Americans, (Lutz 9-21), but USAmerican Orientalist policy filled the power vacuum WWII created, with a critical difference: while centuries of Western European
Orientalism, Said argues, depended on a "broad catholic" approach, for the U.S. it was "but an administrative one, a matter for
policy" (290). Said speaks here with reference to the Middle or Near East, Islam in particular, but his analysis is relevant insofar as it
reflects the advent of US-American East Asian academic culture and policy that predated and, more importantly, dominated after
World War II: One of the striking aspects of the new American social-science attention to the Orient is its singular avoidance of
literature. You can read through reams of expert writing on the modern Near East and never encounter a single reference to
literature. What seems to matter far more to the regional expert are "facts," of which a literary text is perhaps a disturber. The net
Orient is to keep the region and
its people conceptually emasculated, reduced to "attitudes," "trends," statistics: in short,
dehumanized. Since an Arab poet or novelist—and there are many—writes of his experiences, of his values, of his humanity
effect of this remarkable omission in modern American awareness of the Arab or Islamic
(however strange that may be), he effectively disrupts the various patterns (images, clichés, abstractions) by which the Orient is
represented. A literary text speaks more or less directly of a living reality … The non-philological study of
esoteric Oriental languages is useful for obvious rudimentary strategic reasons; but it is also useful for giving a cachet of authority,
almost a mystique, to the "expert" who appears able to deal with hopelessly obscure material with firsthand skill. In the socialscience order of things, language study is a mere tool for higher aims, certainly not for reading literary texts. (Said 290-91)
Chinese society’s equation of K’un-lun-nu as a signifier of blackness
morphed into a hieroglyphic imposed upon the flesh – an atomizing of the
captive epidermal schema which marked difference across generations.
Weheilye 14(Alexander G. Weheliye - professor of African American studies at Northwestern
University, Habeas Viscus: Racialized Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of
the Human, pgs. 31-34 – ERW)
Spillers concentrates on the processes through which slaves are transformed into bare life/flesh
and then subjected to the pleasure of the bodied subject, arguing, “before the ‘body’ there is ‘flesh,’ that zero
degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of
discourse or the reflexes of iconography…. We regard this human and social irreparability as high crimes against the
flesh, as the person of African females and males registered the wounding.”21 Flesh, while representing both a
temporal and conceptual antecedent to the body, is not a biological occurrence seeing that its
creation requires an elaborate apparatus consisting of “the calculated work of iron, whips, chains, knives, the canine
patrol, the bullet” (“Mama's Baby,” 207), among many other factors, including courts of law.22 If the body represents legal
personhood qua selfpossession, then the flesh designates those dimensions of human life cleaved by the working together of
depravation and deprivation. In order for this cruel ruse to succeed, however, subjects must be transformed into flesh before being
granted the illusion of possessing a body. What Spillers refers to as the
“hieroglyphics of the flesh” created by these
instruments is transmitted to the succeeding generations of black subjects who have been “liberated”
and granted body in the aftermath of de jure enslavement. The hieroglyphics of the flesh do not vanish once
affixed to proper personhood (the body); rather they endure as a pesky potential vital to the
maneuverings of “cultural seeing by skin color” (“Mama's Baby,” 207). Racializing assemblages
translate the lacerations left on the captive body by apparatuses of political violence to a domain
rooted in the visual truth-value accorded to quasibiological distinctions between different human
groupings. Thus, rather than entering a clearing zone of indistinction, we are thrown into the vortex of hierarchical indicators:
racializing assemblages. In
the absence of kin, family, gender, belonging, language, personhood,
property, and official records, among many other factors, what remains is the flesh, the living,
speaking, thinking, feeling, and imagining flesh: the ether that holds together the world of Man while at
the same time forming the condition of possibility for this world's demise. It's the end of the world—don't
you know that yet? While Wynter's resistance to the universalization of gendered categories associated with bourgeois whiteness in
certain strands of feminism, which I discussed in chapter 1, is understandable, her genealogy of modernity, which sees a
“mutational shift from the primacy of the anatomical model of sexual difference as the referential model of mimetic ordering, to that
of the physiognomic model of racial/cultural difference” in the Renaissance, remains less convincing, because it leads to the
repudiation of gender analytics as such.23 This aspect of Wynter's thinking fails to persuade in the way the other elements of her
race (physiognomy)
dislodges gender/sex (anatomy) as the systematizing principle according to which the Homo sapiens
species is categorized into full humans, not-quitehumans, and nonhumans. The shift Wynter
global analytics of the human do, since it assumes that beginning with the colonization of the Americas,
diagnoses, though surely present in the history of modernity, cannot be encompassed by the distinction between physiognomy and
anatomy, even if not construed as either categorical or complete, because neither anatomy nor sexual difference recede like
silhouettes sketched in the soil at the shores that delimit the Drexciyan waters of the Middle Passage.24 Instead, sexual difference
remains an intoxicating sociogenically instituted mode of mimetic structuring in modernity, though always tied to specific variants of
(un)gendering. Wynter's dismissal of gender/sex as forceful indicators of the hierarchical ordering of our species thus seems to
discard sexual difference with the proverbial bathwater; and it also largely leaves intact the morphological dimorphism upon which
the modern west constructs gendered stratification. In this context, it is useful to distinguish between physiognomy as inferring from
an individual's external appearance, particularly “a person's facial features or expression[, their] character or ethnic origin,” while
anatomy designates “the bodily structure of humans, animals, and other living organisms,” and physiology analyzes how organisms
or bodily parts (e.g., the brain) function and behave.25 Wynter's statement assumes a substantial variance between physiognomy
and anatomy, even though the former is unthinkable without some recourse to the latter, at the same time as it does not account for
the many attempts at creating an isomorphic echo chamber between racial and anatomical difference, as was the case with Sarah
Baartman, the so-called Venus Hottentot, for instance. Put differently, in
the sphere of racial and sexual difference,
anatomy and physiognomy form a continuum in a larger modern assemblage that requires the
physiognomic territorialization of anatomic qualities. Moreover, if, according to Wynter, there exists no universal
instantiation of gender, then how can racial differentiation persist without being modulated by gender or sexuality? To be clear, I am
not after an academic commonsense invocation of the necessary intersectionality of all “axes of subjugation” but of one that takes
Wynter's insights about how race
inflects human physiology in colonial modernity seriously, while still asking
how, even if it is not the primary model of hierarchical differentiation, sexual difference might figure into this
theory of the human. How do we think gender categories based upon the anatomical foundation of sexual distinction through
the lens of racialization, and vice versa? How do we account for what Spillers calls “female flesh ‘ungendered’ ” birthed by the
Middle Passage (“Mama's Baby,” 207), which continues to affect all black subjects?26 As black feminist theorists Hazel Carby, Julia
Oparah, Claudia Tate, Evelynn Hammonds, Patricia Hill Collins, Angela Davis, Darlene Clark Hine, and Cathy Cohen, among many
others, have pointed out, black subjects’ genders and sexualities operate differently from those found in the mainstream of the world
of Man.27 Namely, in
the same way that black people appear as either nonhuman or magically
hyperhuman within the universe of Man, black subjects are imbued with either a surplus
(hyperfemininity or hypermasculinity) of gender and sexuality or a complete lack thereof (desexualization).
However, regardless whether deficit or surplus, what remains significant is that the histories of racial slavery, colonialism, Jim Crow,
the prison, and the like, which all represent different racializing
assemblages in Man's extensive armory, have
constitutively incapacitated black subjects’ ability to conform to hegemonic gender and sexuality norms,
and often excessively so. Drawing on examples from racial slavery and the more recent pathologization of the black
family in the infamous Moynihan report, Cathy Cohen and Spillers ascertain how the prohibition of marriage among slaves and the
complete erasure of traditional kinship arrangements during and subsequent to the Middle Passage underwrite the policing and
disparaging of those black genders and sexualities “outside of heteronormative privilege, in particular those perceived as
threatening systems of white supremacy, male domination, and capitalist advancement.”28 Thus, circling back to Wynter's distrust
of gender-focused inquiries, it is imperative to consider how the translation of sexual difference to de facto nonnormative genders
barring of black
people from the category of the human-as-Man. Which is to say that taking on the semblance of full
humanity requires apposite gender and sexuality provisos that cannot be taken for granted in postslavery black
cultures. Indeed, this is why I believe we need both Wynter and Spillers to come to a fuller understanding of how racializing
and sexualities within black communities (the ungendered flesh) suggests a fundamental component in the
assemblages operate, since the sociogenic anchoring of racial difference in physiology and the banning of black subjects from the
domain of the human occur in and through gender and sexuality. Retrospectively describing the concept of the hieroglyphics of the
flesh in the introduction to her 2003 collection of essays,
Spillers maintains that she was attempting not only to
pinpoint “one of diasporic slavery's technologies of violence through marking, but also to
propose that ‘beyond’ the violating hand that laid on the stigmata of a recognition that was a
misrecognition, or the regard that was disregard, there was a semiosis of procedure that had enabled
such a moment in the first place.” Spillers concludes, “The marking, the branding, the whipping—all Instruments of
a terrorist regime—were more deeply that—to get in somebody's face in that way would have to be centuries in the making that
would have had little to do, though it is difficult to believe, with
the biochemistry of pigmentation, hair
texture, lip thickness, and the indicial measure of the nostrils, but everything to do with those
‘unacknowledged legislators’ of a discursive and an economic discipline.”29 Despite having no real basis in
biochemistry, the hieroglyphics of the flesh requires grounding in the biological sphere so as to
facilitate—even as it conceals and because it masks—the political, economic, social, and cultural disciplining
(semiosis of procedure) of the Homo sapiens species into assemblages of the human, not-quitehuman, and nonhuman; this is what I am referring to as racialization. The “profitable ‘atomizing’ of
the captive body” (and the bodies of the colonized, tortured, imprisoned, interned, etc.) puts into place the
conditions of possibility for the creation and maintenance of racializing assemblages and
most decidedly not the suspension of racialized divisions in a biopolitical zone of
indistinction (“Mama's Baby,” 208). As a result, the flesh epitomizes a central modern assemblage of racialization that
highlights how bare life is not only a product of previously established distinctions but also, and more significantly, aids in the
perpetuation of hierarchical categorizations along the lines of nationality, gender, religion, race,
culture, sexuality, and so on.30 In its focus on both the genesis and the aftermath of zoe's specifically modern
politicization, Spillers's conceptualization of the flesh shines a spotlight on slavery's alternate
passages to the formation of bare life. In other words, the flesh is not an abject zone of exclusion that culminates in
death but an alternate instantiation of humanity that does not rest on the mirage of western Man as the mirror image of human life
as such. Analogously, Luce Irigaray argues that within phallogocentric structures, women, “as commodities, are a mirror of value of
and for man.”31 Here the different groups excluded from the category of proper humanity encounter only a scopic echo of their
deviance from—and therefore reinscribe—the superiority of western Man, reflecting their own value as ontological lack and western
Man's value as properly human. Thus, as Spillers remarks, “[the
black American woman] became instead the principal
point of passage between the human and the non-human world. Her issue became the focus of a
cunning difference—visually, psychologically, ontologically—as the route by which the dominant
modes decided the distinction between humanity and ‘other.’ At this level of radical discontinuity in the ‘great
chain of being,’ black is vestibular to culture.”32 And being vestibular to culture means that gendered blackness—though excluded
from culture, and frequently violently so—is a passage to the human in western modernity because, in giving flesh to the word of
Man, the flesh comes to define the phenomenology of Man, which is always already lived as unadulterated physiology. As a result,
the flesh rests at that precarious threshold where the person metamorphoses into the group and “the individual-in-the-mass and the
mass-in-the-individual mark an iconic thickness: a concerted function whose abiding centrality is embodied in the flesh,” and which
is why—as we shall see later—the
flesh resists the legal idiom of personhood as property.33 For Maurice
the flesh
functions as an integral component of being, which is “not a fact or a sum of facts, and yet adherent to
Merleau-Ponty, the flesh “is not matter, is not mind, is not substance”; rather, in his phenomenological theorization,
location and to the now.”34 If the flesh represents an element in the vein of the classical quadfecta of earth, wind, (water,) and fire,
it appears as a vital prop in the world of Man's dramaturgy of Being . Following Merleau-Ponty, Elizabeth
Grosz holds that the relationality of the flesh—its nonsubstantive substance—materializes through “an inherent
intertwining of subject and world,” creating a “new ontology, one which supersedes the ontological distinction between the animate
and the inanimate, between the animal and the human,…in ways that might also suit the interests of feminists,” since the
hierarchical differentiation between reason and enfleshment is “complicit with the hierarchy which positions one kind of subject
(male, white, capitalist) in the position of superiority over others.”35
China’s contemporary scramble for Africa in competition with the US is an
extension of our argument insofar as it locks into violent, Sinophobic
imperial narrative that has extended from the paternalism of the premodern
era—Chinese economic interactions are inseparable from the West’s
neoliberal project, rendering African governments and people as passive
instruments of global colonialism.
Ayers 13 (Alison J. Ayers, Simon Fraser University (SFU), Political Science, Sociology &
Anthropology. “Beyond Myths, Lies and Stereotypes: The Political Economy of a ‘New Scramble
for Africa,’” New Political Economy, 18:2, 227-257 - ERW)
Commentators across the political spectrum have increasingly drawn attention to a ‘new scramble for
Africa’. This ‘new scramble’ marks the latest chapter of imperialist engagement, with not only Western states
and corporations but also those of ‘emerging economies’ (such as China, Russia, Brazil, India and Malaysia) seeking to
consolidate their access to African resources and markets. The ‘new scramble for Africa’ involves therefore
significant politico-economic transformations related to shifts in global politico-economic power. Accordingly, a burgeoning literature
has emerged to make sense of the current historical conjuncture. Indeed, as Roger Southall and Henning Melber argue, ‘something
big is happening’ in contemporary Africa and ‘there is an urgent need for us as analysts to seek to understand it’ (2009: xxiv).
of the burgeoning literature on the ‘new scramble for Africa’ is
premised upon problematic substantive, theoretical and ontological claims and debates. In
particular, the article seeks to challenge two commonplace and related narratives. Firstly, the highly questionable
representations of the scale and perceived threat of emerging powers’ (particularly China’s)
involvement in Africa, in contrast to the silences, hypocrisy and paternalistic representation
of the historical role of the West. As such, the West’s relations with Africa are construed as essentially
beneficent, in contrast to the putatively opportunistic, exploitative and deleterious role of the
emerging powers, thereby obfuscating the West’s ongoing neocolonial relationship with Africa.
Second, and relatedly, debate and analysis are framed predominantly within an ahistoric statist
framework of analysis, particularly that of inter-state rivalry between China and other ‘emerging’
states vs. Western powers. Absent or neglected in such accounts are profound changes in the
global political economy within which the ‘new scramble for Africa’ is to be more adequately
located. Without contextualising the rise of China (and other emerging states) in the neoliberal capitalist
global order, ‘it is too easy to single out the country without addressing the structural and
institutional forces that are driving not only China, but also other emerging powers, to look with
covetous eyes at Africa’s natural resources and markets’ (Luk 2008: 13). This article interjects in such
debates through critique of these two commonplace but highly problematic narratives. In so doing, it seeks to
contribute to a more adequate analysis of politico-economic transformations in the twenty-first world
order, and Africa’s place within it. Yellow peril, dark continent, white man’s burden Much of the discussion and debate
around the ‘new scramble for Africa’ focuses on China’s engagement with Africa. Such accounts are
characteristic of a wider discourse on the rise of China internationally and the so-called ‘China
threat’ evident in policy-making, social science and mass public discourse (Gertz 2000; Yee and Storey
2002; Bernstein and Munro 1997; Mosher 2000; Mearsheimer 2006; Naı´m 2007; Curtis 2008). Such representations give
‘the impression that the African continent, and much of the rest of the world, is in the process of
being “devoured” by China’, with descriptors such as ‘voracious’, ‘ravenous’ and ‘insatiable appetite for natural resources’
However, as this article elaborates, much
used to characterise China’s new role (Guerrero and Manji 2008: 1; Mohan and Power 2008). Within the academic literature Robert
Rotberg argues, for example, that China is ‘opportunistic’, ‘extractive and exploitive.’ ‘China’s very rapaciousness – its seeming
insatiable demand for liquid forms of energy, and for the raw materials that feed its widening industrial maw – responds to subSaharan Africa’s relatively abundant supplies of unprocessed metals, diamonds, and gold’ (Rotberg 2008: viii– ix). Similarly, Peter
Navarro, in The Coming China Wars, illuminates the so-called dark sides of China’s leap into ‘globalisation’, including China’s
‘amoral’ involvement in Africa, arguing that ‘China’s tentacles reach throughout Africa’ in its quest to access oil and other natural
resources. China’s Africa strategy, he concludes ‘is a threat that will colonise and economically enslave the vast majority of the
continent’s population that lives outside the elite circles. It is an imperialist marriage manufactured in China and made in hell’
(Navarro 2007: 100). Similar
concerns are echoed in Western foreign policy positions, particularly
within the United States. The Council on Foreign Relations Report, More Than Humanitarianism: A Strategic US Approach
Toward Africa, for example, highlights the threat of China on the continent (CFR 2006). Similarly, US Congress officials
have voiced concerns ‘that the Chinese intend to aid and abet African dictators, gain a
stronghold on precious African natural resources, and undo much of the progress that has been
made on democracy and governance in the last 15 years in African nations’ (Rep. Christopher Smith,
quoted in Naidu and Davies 2006: 69). Meanwhile, sensationalistic and Sinophobic accounts in the Western media routinely invoke
the specter of Chinese expansion, including Chinese rapacity in Africa (Brown and Sriram 2008). Reviewing the UK print media,
Emma Mawdsley reveals that such accounts consistently depict China as ‘ruthless’, ‘unscrupulous’, ‘amoral, greedy and coldly
indifferent’ (Mawdsley 2008: 517, 523). While French journalists Serge Michel and Michel Beuret in China Safari: On the Trail of
Beijing’s Expansion in Africa, liken Beijing’s role to that of the Godfather: ‘Borrow from the Chinese and you are drawn into the
bosom of its – highly profitable – family. Beijing is the Godfather, engaged in everything from textiles to infrastructure to uranium and
By contrast, the operations
of Western capital with the same ends are notably absent from such accounts (Mawdsley 2008; Melber
2009), or are ‘described with anodyne phrases such as “development”, “investment”, “employment
generation”’ (Guerrero and Manji 2008: 1). As such, commonplace accounts claim that Western powers have developed a new
oil. His bids are all interlinked and his motivation is constant’ (Michel and Beuret 2009: 108).
‘vision of foreign partnership with Africa’ based on ‘a shared agenda for change’ with the West undertaking ‘ameliorative initiatives’
across Africa (Alden 2007: 93–94; Rotberg 2008: 18). Both
the silences on the role of the West, together with
the ahistoric distortions and flawed understanding of the West’s ongoing neocolonial
relationship with Africa characteristic of such approaches, are highly problematic. Not least, as Kwesi
Kwaa Prah (2007) has argued, it is hypocritical of Western states to raise concerns about China’s role in Africa, given their long
history of exploitative relations with Africa, which continue to the present day. Yet Western
powers continue to
arrogate to themselves the project of ‘spreading “enlightenment” and culture to barbarous
natives ... [whilst] seeking to convince us about how bad and evil rapacious Chinese
“mercantilists” are for Africa’, all the while ‘continuing to rampage through Africa in search of
markets to conquer and “mad mullahs” to vanquish’ (Adebajo 2008: 227). As such, it is necessary to
shatter the ‘Orientalist’ myth that often describes China’s role as that of a ‘yellow peril’ seeking
to monopolise markets, coddle caudillos and condone human rights’ abuses on the continent;
while Western powers ... are portrayed in contrast almost as knights in shining armour, seeking
to assist Africa’s economic recovery, spread democracy and contribute to conflict-management
efforts (Adebajo 2008: 227) The engagement of China and that of other so-called ‘emerging states’ with Africa has undoubtedly
undergone significant changes, particularly over the last decade, with notable consequences within and beyond Africa. However, a
fuller and more nuanced understanding is required if we are to understand contemporary shifts in the centres of politico-economic
power within the twenty-first-century worldorder, and Africa’s place within it. This necessarily includes analysis of the contemporary
history of Western imperialism on the continent and the continuing dominance of Western capital, albeit recognising that a
This
spatial reorganisation of global capitalism and its implications for and beyond Africa are
addressed in the subsequent section. This section interrogates commonplace Western claims regarding the scale and
significant spatial reorganisation of global capitalism is occurring with the rise of the BRICs and other ‘emerging’ states.
threat of China and other emerging powers in Africa, and, relatedly, subjects the ongoing role of the West in Africa to critical
scrutiny.
Thus we affirm the USFG should increase economic engagement through
demanding that the PRC let the ghosts k’un-lun-nu speak as a form of
apportioning reparations.
This genealogical contact with the past of Chinese sovereignty stands as
an impossible demand that exhausts the idea of instutional recapture for
black life. Structural antiblackness encoded within the norms of economic
engagement, from chattel slavery to modern neocolonial projects, makes it
necessary to resist the inconceivable nature of how black flesh as object
registers within symbolic economies of meaning. Through the ejection of
black flesh from humanity, neoliberalism par excellence became possible
insofar as African peoples were equated to standing reserves and
pathologies for the Western and Chinese order. Instead of affirming selfcorrecting engagement through the beaurocratic means of the topic, the
affirmative stands as a pursuit of autonomy beyond the social coding of
contemporary reality.
Thus we allow the commodity to speak – Niko huru. Mimi tena kitu. Mimi
tena kitu. I am free. I am no longer object. I am no longer object.
Moten 08 (“In the Break: The Aesthetics of Black Radical Tradition”; Fred Moten; University of
Minnesota Press Minneapolis - ERW)
In his critical deployment of such music and speech, Douglass discovers a hermeneutic that is
simultaneously broken and expanded by an operation akin to what Jacques Derrida refers to as
“invagination.”5 This cut and augmented hermeneutic circle is structured by a double
movement. The Wrst element is the transference of a radically exterior aurality that disrupts
and resists certain formations of identity and interpretation by challenging the
reducibility of phonic matter to verbal meaning or conventional musical form. The second is
the assertion of what Nathaniel Mackey calls “‘broken’ claim(s) to connection”6 between Africa
and African America that seek to suture corollary, asymptotically divergent ruptures—maternal
estrangement and the thwarted romance of the sexes—that he refers to as “wounded kinship”
and the “the sexual ‘cut.’”7 This assertion marks an engagement with a more attenuated, more
internally determined, exteriority and a courtship with an always already unavailable and
substitutive origin. It would work by way of an imaginative restoration of the Wgure of the
mother to a realm determined not only by verbal meaning and conventional musical form but by
a nostalgic specularity and a necessarily endogamous, simultaneously 6 – RESISTANCE OF
THE OBJECT virginal and reproductive sexuality. These twin impulses animate a forceful
operation in Douglass’s work, something like a revaluation of that revaluation of value that was
set in motion by four of Douglass’s “contemporaries”—Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Saussure.
Above all, they open the possibility of a critique of the valuation of meaning over content
and the reduction of phonic matter and syntactic “degeneracy” in the early modern search for a
universal language and the late modern search for a universal science of language. This
disruption of the Enlightenment linguistic project is of fundamental importance since it allows a
rearrangement of the relationship between notions of human freedom and notions of human
essence. More speciWcally, the emergence from political, economic, and sexual objection of the
radical materiality and syntax that animates black performances indicates a freedom drive that
is expressed always and everywhere throughout their graphic (re)production. In Caribbean
Discourse Edouard Glissant writes: From the outset (that is from the moment Creole is forged
as a medium of communication between slave and master), the spoken imposes on the slave
its particular syntax. For Caribbean man, the word is Wrst and foremost sound. Noise is
essential to speech. Din is discourse. . . . Since speech was forbidden, slaves camouflaged the
word under the provocative intensity of the scream. It was taken to be nothing but the call of a
wild animal. This is how the dispossessed man organized his speech by weaving it into the
apparently meaningless texture of extreme noise.8 Lingering with Glissant’s formulations
produces certain insights. The Wrst is that the temporal condensation and acceleration of the
trajectory of black performances, which is to say black history, is a real problem and a real
chance for the philosophy of history. The second is that the animative materiality—the aesthetic,
political, sexual, and racial force— of the ensemble of objects that we might call black
performances, black history, blackness, is a real problem and a real chance for the philosophy
RESISTANCE OF THE OBJECT – 7 of human being (which would necessarily bear and be
irreducible to what is called, or what somebody might hope someday to call, subjectivity). One of
the implications of blackness, if it is set to work in and on such philosophy, is that those
manifestations of the future in the degraded present that C. L. R. James described can never be
understood simply as illusory. The knowledge of the future in the present is bound up with what
is given in something Marx could only subjunctively imagine: the commodity who speaks.
Here is the relevant passage from volume 1 of Capital, at the end of the chapter on “The
Commodity,” at the end of the section called “The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret.”
But, to avoid anticipating, we will content ourselves here with one more example relating to the
commodity-form itself. If commodities could speak they would say this: our use-value may
interest men, but it does not belong to us as objects. What does belong to us as objects,
however, is our value. Our own intercourse as commodities proves it. We relate to each other
merely as exchange-values. Now listen how those commodities speak through the mouth of the
economist: “Value (i.e., exchange-value) is a property of things, riches (i.e., usevalue) of man.
Value in this sense necessarily implies exchanges, riches do not.” “Riches (use-value) are the
attribute of man, value is the attribute of commodities. A man or a community is rich, a pearl or a
diamond is valuable. . . . A pearl or a diamond is valuable as a pearl or diamond.” So far no
chemist has ever discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or a diamond. The economists
who have discovered this chemical substance, and who lay special claim to critical acumen,
nevertheless Wnd that the use-value of material objects belongs to them independently of their
material properties, while their value, on the other hand, forms a part of them as objects. What
conWrms them in this view is the peculiar circumstance that the use-value of a thing is realized
without exchange, i.e. in a social process. Who would not call to mind at this point the advice
given by the good Dogberry to the night-watchman Seacoal? 8 – RESISTANCE OF THE
OBJECT “To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but reading and writing comes by
nature.”9 The difWculty of this passage is partly due to its dual ventriloquizations. Marx
produces a discourse of his own to put into the mouth of dumb commodities before he
reproduces what he Wgures as the impossible speech of commodities magically given through
the mouths of classical economists. The difWculty of the passage is intensiWed when Marx
goes on to critique both instances of imagined speech. These instances contradict one another
but Marx comes down neither on the side of speech he produces nor on that of the speech of
classical economists that he reproduces. Instead he traverses what he conceives of as the
empty space between these formulations, that space being the impossible material substance of
the commodity’s impossible speech. In this regard, what is at stake is not what the commodity
says but that the commodity says or, more properly, that the commodity, in its inability to say,
must be made to say. It is, more precisely, the idea of the commodity’s speech that Marx
critiques, and this is because he believes neither in the fact nor in the possibility of such
speech. Nevertheless, this critique of the idea of the commodity’s speech only becomes
operative by way of a deconstruction of the specific meaning of those impossible or
unreal propositions imposed upon the commodity from outside. The words Marx puts into
the commodity’s mouth are these: “our use value . . . does not belong to us as objects. What
does belong to us as objects, however, is our value,” where value equals exchange value. Marx
has the commodity go on to assert that commodities only relate to one another as exchangevalues, that this is proven by the necessarily social intercourse in which commodities might be
said to discover themselves. Therefore, the commodity discovers herself, comes to know
herself, only as a function of having been exchanged, having been embedded in a mode of
sociality that is shaped by exchange. The words of the commodity that are spoken through the
mouths of the classical economists are roughly these: riches (i.e., use-value) are independent of
the materiality of objects, but value, which is to say RESISTANCE OF THE OBJECT – 9
exchange-value, is a material part of the object. “A man or a commodity is rich, a pearl or a
diamond is valuable.” This is because a pearl or a diamond is exchangeable. Though he agrees
with the classical economists when they assert that value necessarily implies exchange, Marx
chafes at the notion that value is an inherent part of the object. “No chemist,” he argues, “has
discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or a diamond.” For Marx, this chemical substance
called exchange-value has not been found because it does not exist. More precisely, Marx
facetiously places this discovery in an unachievable future without having considered the
conditions under which such a discovery might be made. Those conditions are precisely the fact
of the commodity’s speech, which Marx dismisses in his critique of the very idea. “So far no
chemist has ever discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or a diamond” because pearls or
diamonds have not been heard to speak. The impossible chemical substance of the object’s
(exchange-)value is the fact—the material, graphic, phonic substance—of the object’s speech.
Speech will have been the cutting augmentation of the already existing chemistry of objects, but
the object’s speech, the commodity’s speech, is impossible, that impossibility being the
Wnal refutation of whatever the commodity will have said. Marx argues that the classical
economists believe “that the usevalue of material objects belongs to them independently of their
material properties.” He further asserts that they are conWned in this view by the nonsocial
realization of use-value—the fact that its realization does not come by way of exchange. When
he makes these assertions, Marx moves in an already well-established choreography of
approach and withdrawal from a possibility of discovery that Douglass already recited: the
(exchange-)value of the speaking commodity exists also, as it were, before exchange.
Moreover, it exists precisely as the capacity for exchange and the capacity for a literary,
performative, phonographic disruption of the protocols of exchange. This dual possibility
comes by a nature that is and at the same time is social and historical, a nature that is given as
a kind of anticipatory sociality and historicity. To think the possibility of an (exchange-)value that
is prior to exchange, and to think the reproductive and incantatory assertion of 10 –
RESISTANCE OF THE OBJECT that possibility as the objection to exchange that is exchange’s
condition of possibility, is to put oneself in the way of an ongoing line of discovery, of coming
upon, of invention. The discovery of the chemical substance that is produced in and by Marx’s
counterfactual is the achievement of Douglass’s line given in and as the theory and practice of
everyday life where the spectacular and the mundane encounter one another all the time. It is
an achievement we’ll see given in the primal scene of Aunt Hester’s objection to exchange, an
achievement given in speech, literary phonography, and their disruption. What is sounded
through Douglass is a theory of value—an objective and objectional, productive and
reproductive ontology—whose primitive axiom is that commodities speak. The impossible
example is given in order to avoid anticipation, but it works to establish the impossibility of such
avoidance. Indeed, the example, in her reality, in the materiality of her speech as breath and
sound, anticipates Marx. This sound was already a recording, just as our access to it is made
possible only by way of recordings. We move within a series of phonographic anticipations,
encrypted messages, sent and sending on frequencies Marx tunes to accidentally, for effect,
without the necessary preparation. However, this absence of preparation or foresight in Marx—
an anticipatory refusal to anticipate, an obversive or anti- and anteimprovisation—is condition of
possibility of a richly augmented encounter with the chain of messages the (re)sounding speech
of the commodity cuts and carries. The intensity and density of what could be thought here as
his alternative modes of preparation make possible a whole other experience of the music of the
event of the object’s speech. Moving, then, in the critical remixing of nonconvergent tracks,
modes of preparation, traditions, we can think how the commodity who speaks, in speaking, in
the sound—the inspirited materiality—of that speech, constitutes a kind of temporal warp
that disrupts and augments not only Marx but the mode of subjectivity that the ultimate
object of his critique, capital, both allows and disallows. All of this moves toward the secret
Marx revealed by way of the music he subjunctively mutes. Such aurality is, in fact, what Marx
called the “sensuous outburst of [our] essential activity.”10 It is a passion wherein “the senses
have . . . RESISTANCE OF THE OBJECT – 11 become theoreticians in their immediate
practice.”11 The commodity whose speech sounds embodies the critique of value, of private
property, of the sign. Such embodiment is also bound to the (critique of ) reading and writing,
oft conceived by clowns and intellectuals as the natural attributes of whoever would hope to be
known as human.
[HE CONTINUES]
Part of the project this drive animates is the improvisation through the opposition of spirit and
matter that is instantiated when the object, the commodity, sounds. Marx’s counterfactual (“If the
commodity could speak, it would say . . .”) is broken by a commodity and by the trace of a
subjectivity structure born in objection that he neither realizes nor anticipates. There is
something more here than alienation and fetishization that works, with regard to Marx, as a
preWgurative critique. However, according to Ferdinand de Saussure, and in extension of
Marx’s analytic, the value of the sign is arbitrary, conventional, differential, neither intrinsic nor
iconic, not reducible to but rather only discernible in the reduction of phonic substance. In any
case, it is impossible that sound, as a material element, should in itself be part of the language.
Sound is merely something ancillary, a material the language uses. All conventional values
have the characteristic of being distinct from the tangible element which serves as their vehicle.
It is not the metal in a coin which determines its value. A crown piece nominally worth Wve
francs contains only half that sum in silver. Its value varies somewhat according to the efWgy it
bears. It is worth rather more or rather less on different sides of a political frontier.
Considerations of the same order are even more pertinent to linguistic signals. Linguistic signals
are not in essence phonetic. They are not physical in any way. They are constituted solely by
differences which distinguish one such sound pattern from another.12 The value of the sign, its
necessary relation to the possibility of (a universal science of and a universal) language, is only
given in the absence or supercession of, or the abstraction from, sounded speech— its
essential materiality is rendered ancillary by the crossing of an immaterial border or by a
differentializing inscription. Similarly, the truth about the value of the commodity is tied
precisely to the impossibility of its speaking, for if the commodity could speak it would
have intrinsic value, it would be infused with a certain spirit, a certain value given not
from the outside, and would, therefore, contradict the thesis on value—that it is not
intrinsic—that Marx assigns it. The speaking RESISTANCE OF THE OBJECT – 13 commodity
thus cuts Marx; but the shrieking commodity cuts Saussure, thereby cutting Marx doubly: this by
way of an irruption of phonic substance that cuts and augments meaning with a phonographic,
rematerializing inscription. That irruption breaks down the distinction between what is intrinsic
and what is given by or of the outside; here what is given inside is that which is out-from-theoutside, a spirit manifest in its material expense or aspiration. For Saussure such speech is
degraded, say, by accent, a deuniversalizing, material difference; for Chomsky it is degraded by
a deuniversalizing agrammaticality, but Glissant knows that “the [scarred] spoken imposes on
the slave its particular syntax.” These material degradations—Wssures or invaginations of a
foreclosed universality, a heroic but bounded eroticism—are black performances. There occurs
in such performances a revaluation or reconstruction of value, one disruptive of the oppositions
of speech and writing, and spirit and matter.
Our method of poesies is an affirmation of survivalist pedagogy in the face
of materialist, libidinal, and linguistic violence – this invokes a politic of
reclamation which counteracts the meaninglessness of black life.
Gumbs 10 (Alexis Gumbs - black queer feminist, Phd. Duke University, academic, organizer, revolutionary – ERW)
Survival. The condition of bare life. The mythology of differential fitness. The continuity of property and properties.
But survival is more than this. Survival, as it emerges as a key word in the theory and poetics of Audre Lorde and June
Jordan is a poetic term. It provides the basis for the reconsideration of its own meaning,
and the reconsideration of the meaning of “life,” that which “survival” queerly extends
despite everything. Survival is a pedagogy: secret and forbidden knowledge that we
pass on, educating each other into a set of skills and beliefs based on the queer
premise that our lives are valuable in a way that the economization of our labor, and
the price of our flesh in the market of racism deny. Survival is a mode of inquiry,
providing a repertoire of critical insights, gained from discerning what approach to a political
and economic framework we can afford from one moment to the next. Survival is an
afterlife; by continuing to exist we challenge the processes that somehow failed to kill us this
time. Survival is a performance, a set of aesthetic invocations that produce belief and
resonance. Survival is a poetic intervention into the simplistic conclusion of the political
narrative: we were never meant to survive. The “we” that was never meant to survive is a
challenge to the gospel of individualism. The content of that “we” is at stake because survival redefines who we
are. For those of us who constitute the collection of people addressed by Audre Lorde’s ‘A Litany for Survival,” the
meanings of our lives have been slandered within an economy that uses narratives of racial
inferiority, gender determinism, and sexual subjectivity to devalue our bodies, our breathing,
our time. If we are survivors, who “we” are is the question of survival, and whether we survive
depends on the generation of a set of relationships that prioritizes who we are to each other through our queer acts of loving the
possible collectivity represented in each of our bodies.2
Survival is a queer act for oppressed communities
because it interrupts the social reproduction of the sanctioned deaths of those who
were never meant to survive. In this chapter I argue that survival as a fact, a possibility, an act, a
tactic and an approach, is a performative and poetic intervention into a meaning of life that
the narrative of capitalism reproduces: the belief that a differential monetary value can be
assigned to the very time of our lives and our labor based on stories about what race…
The Affirmative’s method reveals the diasporic and global machinations of
racialization that inform Chinese sociality. This is key to visualizing the
color line as a global heuristic of difference.
Feldman 2016 (Keith P. Feldman – Assistant Professor Comparative Ethnic Studies UC
Berkeley; Theories of Race, Nation, and Empire; Cultural Theory; African, Arab, and Jewish
Diasporas; Visual Culture Studies; Transnational American Studies- Ph.D., University of
Washington, 2008 (with honors) M.A., The George Washington University, 2003, B.A., Brown
University, 2000 (cum laude) “On Relationality, On Blackness: A Listening Post” – ERW)
The relational as a critical concept thus surfaces in part as a way to account descriptively and
analytically for connections, linkages, and articulations across the institutionalization of
difference in disciplines and the nation-state cartographies they reference. As much a seeing as
a doing, the interconnections revealed by a relational methodology are otherwise hidden or
buried by modern frames of the nation-state, the scale and scope of research agendas, and the
disciplines and interdisciplines that draw on genealogies of comparison themselves. “Delinking”
from a comparative methodology invites shifting from an “ontology of essence” to what Walter
Mignolo calls a “relational ontology.” Relationality disrupts the positivist pretense of race,
gender, and sexuality as in the first or the last instance sociological facts. Relationality enables
us to think the doing of difference, difference as it constitutes and evades the capture of the
world (Puar). Relationality invites the development of literacies that can read circuitries of power
across uneven terrains (Layoun). Scholars interrogate archives and objects in ways that reveal
relational imaginaries in their contexts of emergence — from the archives of Anglophone
liberalism in the construction of colonial domination and imperial management (Lowe), to the
material formulations of “strange affinity” encoded in U.S. women of color feminisms and queer
of color critique (Hong and Ferguson), to the impetus of transnational feminisms to frame
differentially arrayed and always already linked contexts of struggle (Alexander and Mohanty).
Genealogy renders such relations in their particular and provisional dispersion, and thus their
relation to the differentiated contexts of their emergence. The predicates of a relational
methodology invite us to uncover, reveal, desediment, unveil, and excavate, prompting us to
account for entanglement and its obfuscation or burial. From another angle, liberal capitalism
strives to produce individuated subjects properly calibrated for the rational management of their
possessions, including their possessions of self and of others and possessions qua
property, as abstractions commensurable through the equilibrations of value (Singh).
Relationality uncovers those interconnections that liberal capitalism seeks to obscure, revealing
the violence that appends recognition, unbound from redistribution, in arcs of settler colonial
capitalism (Coulthard), racial capitalism (Melamed), and the juridical armature of neoliberalism
(Cacho).
[HE CONTINUES]
Where and how, then, are we to think Blackness in relation? Such a question could be
answered in advance by the ante-relationality sedimented in the antiBlack ordering of the
modern world. At the same time, Blackness also elucidates a field formation suffused with
descriptive and analytical concerns with a deep and enduring relation to the contours of a
modernity animated by the lacerating trade winds of diaspora. Indeed, Black life emerges
out of always already heterogeneous “overlapping diasporas” (Lewis), a horizon at once
stilled, fixed, and determined from without and at the same time, as Harney and Moten evince in
the above epigraph, enacted in excess, beyond and beneath the regulatory functions of state
and capital. As Glissant elaborates (see epigraph), the channels of Black diaspora are both the
condition of and the counterpoint to modern globality. It is a heteroglossic languaging that
routinely announces and enunciates the practice and theory of the impossible on the uneven
terrain of the transatlantic world. The study of Blackness forecasts insights into diasporic
relationalities even as it renders the structural and systemic foundations of capitalist/colonial
modernity as concerned fundamentally with anti-relationality. Coloniality binds diaspora to
institutionalizations of violence and forces diaspora into the frame of the nation-state, deploying
an epistemic containment policy that buries, obscures, and delimits relationality’s unbounded
potentiality. Diaspora, as Stuart Hall reminds us, signals the interconnections of difference.
The dispersion at its mercurial core renders diaspora in persistent apposition to the violence of
the nation-state, a condition that is simultaneously a mark of the unhomely and the worldly. The
positivist presentiments that give the lie to what once might have been called liberal
multiculturalism and now often travels under the name “diversity” have begun to fall away
(Ahmed). Its hegemony was never complete, to be sure. It was always contested, and hence
always worked over and through. Those policies for representation that obscure plans for
redistribution have been targeted by heterogeneous forms of resistance to state-sanctioned
anti-Blackness expressed intimately, affectively, bodily, structurally, an anti-Blackness that
is both cause and consequence of the ongoing violence of capital accumulation (Kish and
Leroy). In their respective contributions to this forum, Therí Pickens and Vincent Schleitwiler
foreground contemporary movements to contest anti-Black state violence, as well as the
pressing invitations to relationality — connection, solidarity, linkage, resonance — that such
movements evince. They also identify a relation to Blackness as a sign and scene of futurity, of
hosting forms of relation yet to come. Pickens underscores how Arab American cultural
production that relates to Blackness confronts the impulses both to universalism and to
exceptionalism, as well as to the volatility of an anti-Black antagonism that circumscribes entry
into U.S. civil society. Arab American fiction invites exploring the possibilities of relation to
Blackness with eyes wide open to these tensions. For Pickens, the Arab American literary
relation to Blackness has the capacity to interrupt the exceptionalist linear narrative of progress
that organizes conventional immigrant narratives and yields alternative insights into formations
of affect, kinship, and history. By theorizing Blackness as a “when” as much as a “what,”
Pickens reveals the potentialities as yet encrypted in Arab American literary and cultural
narratives. Schleitwiler takes the contemporary flourishing of collective action against antiBlack
state violence as an invitation to engage the ethically troubled matrix of comparison required to
write through the modalities of lynching that underwrite but also exceed their denomination as
such. With Du Bois’s turn-of-the-century “colorline” heuristic in mind, Schleitwiler formulates
imperialism as animated by a will both to rule over and to do justice to difference. While both
Comparative Literature and Comparative Ethnic Studies have critically investigated the former
for some time now, the latter invocation of “imperialism’s racial justice” allows us to see how
practices of imperial rule are catalyzed not just through spectacular domination, torture, and
violence, but also through an articulated investment in the inclusion of hierarchically
differentiated humanity in liberal educative and juridical institutions. That is, imperialism always
seeks to regulate the terms through which difference is included. Rather than cede the field of
comparison wholly, Schleitwiler calls on us to attend to comparison’s “demons”: those “figure[s]
of unpredictability and indeterminacy lurking within the knowledge of a world ordered by
competing imperialisms that can never finally guarantee the universality to which they aspire.”
Because imperialism’s comparative imaginary is always partial, incomplete, and haunted,
Schleitwiler finds in that always-provisional claim to totalizing its rule over difference potential
critical lines of flight. Genealogies of American empire, as Pickens and Schleitwiler provide,
crystallize the problematic of Blackness and relation. Provincializing these genealogies is
another matter altogether, and, in her contribution to the forum, Shu-mei Shih takes up precisely
this task. In extending a method of “relational comparison,” Shih identifies the “Global 1960s” as
the explosive flashpoint that reveals a decolonial arc of transnational and comparative
epistemes producing imagined geographies rich with symbolic and material articulations of antiimperialism. Part of that thread signifies China in general, and Maoism in particular, as
quintessentially animating a generative Third Worldism for the times. This is the China
embraced by Du Bois in 1959, a site through which revolutionary racial brotherhood signified as
Afro-Asian solidarity was to be conceived. Yet, a practice of “relational comparison,” as Shih
argues here, reveals another crucial thread in stark counterpoint to Du Bois. To the South of
China (both geographically and epistemically) lay violent minoritizations, such as of the Hoa
in Vietnam and Chinese Malaysians, predicated not simply on the long shadow of
European colonialism but also on the active imperial race-making emerging out of China.
The geographic impetus of the color line as the figure par excellence of racial solidarities is
persistently interrupted by a rendering of the South of the South that reveals its fractures,
frictions, and racial contradictions.
The alternative is critical syncretism where subalterns identify with one another to
form hybrid subjectivities. This is key to break away from isolated movements
against colonialism.
Chen 10 (Kuan-Hsing Chen, professor in the Graduate Institute for Social
Research and Cultural Studies, and also the coordinator of the Center for
Asia-Pacific/ Cultural Studies, National Chiao Tung University, “Asia as
Method: Toward Deimperialization”, http://reader.dukeupress.edu/asia-asmethod/122?ajax, 2010) CJun
The direction of identification put forward by a critical syncretism is out-ward; the intent is to
become others, to actively interiorize elements of others into the subjectivity of the self so as to
move beyond the boundaries and divisive positions historically constructed by colonial power
relations in the form of patriarchy, capitalism, racism, chauvinism, heterosexism, or nationalistic
xenophobia. Becoming others is to become female, ab-original, homosexual, transsexual,
working class, and poor; it is to become animal, third world, and African. Critical
syncretism is a cultural strategy of identification for subaltern subject groups. Here "others"
refers not just to racial, ethnic, and national categories but also includes class, sex and gender, and geographical positions. Viewed in light of the
homologous relation between colonial identi-fication and identity politics, critical syncretism provides two clear im-peratives. First,
critical
identity politics needs to shift and to multiply its objects of identification so that structural
divisions can be breached, making it possible to seek alliances outside one's own limited frame.
Sec-ond, the articulating agent, critical for building connections across struc-tures, needs to be
especially conscious of cultivating and even occupying identities defined by multiple structures.
By operating simultaneously within different structures, the articulating agent is able to
link different subject positions into an overarching struggle. In Culture and Imperialism, Said argues that
"imperialism consolidated the mixture of cultures and identities on a global scale. But its worst and most paradoxical gift was to allow people to believe
Imperialism has indeed produced
hybrid subjectivities, which made impossible a return to an uncontaminated self. And it has
that they were only, mainly, exclusively, white, or Black, or Western, or Oriental" (Said 1993, 336).
further pushed the world structure toward neoliberal globalization, deepening the hy-bridity of
the already hybrid subject. Confronting the various forces of globalization, national identity has emerged at this moment of history as a
privileged axis of identification. Where are you from? How long are you going to stay here? When are you going back to your country? Global
bureaucracy, through the universal apparatus of ID cards and passports, constructs one's identity according to the nation-state one belongs to. In the
essay "'The Question of Cultural Identity," Stuart Hall proposes a list of the contradictory effects of globalization: r. Cultural homogeneity and the globalpostmodern breaks down na-tional identity. z. Resistance to globalization has deepened national and local iden-tity. 3. National identity is in decline,
but new forms of hybrid identity are gaining their positions. (Hall ruciza, no) Hall's first proposition is indeed happening. The autonomy of national
sovereignty and territory has been challenged by the worldwide flows of capital, technology, and people. But the second proposition is also true: the
global rise of nationalism is in part a response to the formation of global capital. Hall's third proposition points to the emergence of new identities,
represented by the identity politics of new social movements, including the formation of new immigrant communities that challenge dominant ethnic
compositions. Under such conditions, if the contemporary decolonization move-ment is to escape both from identification with the colonizer and from
the nativist movement's narcissistic tendency toward the splitting of the subject, what decolonized or postcolonial object of identification re-mains?
What would such a liberating form of subjectivity look like? The proposal for a critical syncretism does not pretend to provide a conclusive answer, but it
does honor and reflect the need for a change from passivity to an active shifting of the objects of identification. Critical syncretism attempts to push this
possibility in a more liberating direction. Said's con-clusion to Culture and Imperialism is instructive: No
one can deny the persisting
continuities of long traditions, sus-tained habitations, national languages, and cultural
geographies, but there seems no reason except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on their
separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all human life was about ... It is more rewarding—
and more difficult—to think con-cretely and sympathetically, contrapuntally, about others than
only about "us." But this also means not trying to rule others, not trying to classify them or put them in hierarchies, above all, not constantly
reiterating how "our" culture or country is number one (or not number one, for that matter). For the intellectual there is quite enough of value to do
without that. (Said 1993, 336) What Said points to, in my reading, are the sentiment and horizon of nationalism, both nearly impossible to transcend. It
is neither possible nor necessary to ask people to give up their national identity and pretend to be world citizens, or to cultivate a privileged position of
cosmopolitan-ism. But
only through a constant suspension of national interest as the first and
last priority can we begin to become others. Critical syncretism takes an alternative
understanding of subjectivity as its starting point. Only through multilayered practices
can one be-come others. The aim is not simply to rediscover the suppressed voices of
the multiple subjects within the social formation, but to generate a system of multiple
reference points that can break away from the self-reproducing neocolonial framework
that structures the trajectories and flow of desire.
Asian American” rhetoric reentrenches the model minority and orientalism
– it ignores personal and cultural differences
Gilani, 14
(Zan, Columbia Spectator, Minority Report,
http://columbiaspectator.com/eye/2014/04/10/minority-report, BEN)
Since arriving at Columbia, being
“Asian” has meant something different to me than what it meant
growing up in Karachi and London. There, the term referred exclusively to South Asians:
people of Pakistani, Indian, Bangladeshi, or Sri Lankan descent. Still, before I came to Columbia as an
international student, I knew that “Asian,” in the collective American imagination, was generally mapped onto East
and Southeast Asians. As a broad category, the term “Asian American” applies to people whose
ancestries vary geographically from the Maldives to Japan, which makes it difficult for
the term to convey significant information . “Asian American” will refer in particular to
East and Southeast Asians for the rest of this article, at the risk of homogenizing what is
an incredibly diverse population . At Columbia, we often use “Asian” as shorthand to refer to a set of general characteristics that
overlooks aspects of the larger Asian community that we hear less about. “ Asian” has come to mean one group, when
in reality, it is many. And when diversity initiatives lump all Asians together in one group,
they do a great injustice to the many distinct entities therein . ADVERTISEMENT Anatomy of a Stereotype
The fact that harmful Asian American stereotypes exist on our campus was made clear last spring, after Chad Washington, a defensive linebacker on
Columbia's football team, was arrested for an alleged hate crime against an Asian-American student—a charge which was later dismissed. WKCR
Sports captured screenshots of tweets from members of the Columbia football team, a number of which targeted Asian Americans. The outrage that
followed was intense—Columbia's Asian American Alliance declared the incident “a result of broader systemic issues of racism on our campus and in
our society,” and urged the community “to create radical anti-oppression, anti-hate and anti-violence programs throughout the university to combat a
culture which can lead to these types of incidents.” Students and student council leaders also created a petition, calling for the immediate removal of
offending parties from the football team's varsity roster and the creation of an independent commission to investigate racism in the athletic community.
In short, the Columbia community was enthralled by the situation—even more so when the NYPD got involved. But the same cannot be said for other
instances of racism towards Asians and Asian Americans on campus. Prejudice toward this group manifests itself in other ways that often go
unprosecuted—even unnoticed—because they have become so commonplace and casual. Peers have told me that they don't like studying in the
Science and Engineering Library because it has “too many Asians,” and that Asian students are “ruining the curve” in their classes. According to Gary
Okihiro, a Columbia professor of comparative ethnic studies, microaggressions toward Asian Americans today have their roots in a far more sinister
past. “There is the notion of what Edward Said has called Orientalism
in the West—that is, that people east of Greece are Orientals,
a discourse used to colonize and
control those folk,” Okihiro says. “These ideas have had real impacts on Asian-American lives
because they were the first group to be excluded by U.S. immigration laws. Before
Asians began migrating to the U.S., there were no immigration laws or illegal immigrants,
because all immigrants had come from Europe.” Since then, antagonistic feelings toward Asians have led to the idea of
and they are better represented by Europeans than themselves. As Said says, it is
“yellow peril”—the widely circulated idea that Asians pose a threat to Western civilization and Christianity. Such a mindset was particularly obvious in
Detroit during the 1970s, says Okihiro, when workers vilified Asians as super-competitors because Asian-made cars were outdoing domestic models.
This tendency to categorize Asians as the competitive “other” also manifests itself in microagressions on college campuses like ours, where— despite
Asian stereotypes
recall the myth of the “model minority,” which identifies Asian Americans as more likely to achieve success, and leads
in turn to the homogenization of all “Asians” in the American mind. Asian Americans seem to outperform
the value placed on diversity—harmful, homogenizing stereotypes still exist. The Model Minority Well-established
other ethnic groups by large margins across a number of metrics, such as median income and enrollment levels in higher education. Although Asians
constitute 4.43 percent of the nation's population, Asian-American students make up a staggering 40 to 70 percent of the student body at some of the
country's most selective public high schools, such as Stuyvesant High School and Hunter College High School in New York, and Thomas Jefferson
High School for Science and Technology in Virginia. Ostensibly, these percentages reveal some truth to the myth of the model minority. Entrenched
cultural values and a strong work ethic in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics are usually cited as the explanation for this AsianAmerican success. Notorious “tiger mom” and Yale professor Amy Chua has been a high-profile proponent of the idea that certain immigrant
communities achieve success by way of three distinguishing traits: a superiority complex, impulse control, and insecurity. Many of us want to believe
these generalizations are innocuous—that calling an Asian-American student an overachiever is no worse than a backhanded compliment. Certainly,
the stereotypes of being good at math and extremely hardworking do not seem as acute a problem as the other forms of racism prevalent in American
society, such as the structural violence and institutionalized racism often faced by African-American, Native American, and Hispanic communities. But
the catch-all label of “Asian,” or even “Asian American,” hides an incredible wealth of
diversity in terms of culture, socioeconomic background, ability, and even aspirations .
Although they may seem true—based on anecdotal evidence, or perhaps on perceptions of Asian-American students at a highly selective Ivy League
school—many homogenizing
stereotypes are simply unfounded.
“Asian American” generalizes experience
CNN, 7
(CNN, Your e-mails: Defining the Asian-American experience,
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/05/10/asian.heritage.ireports/index.html?iref=newssearch, BEN)
The term "Asian-American" encompasses an array of national origins, cultures,
languages, dialects, religions, generations and histories . It refers to experiences so
diverse that in many ways it defies definition. In a quest for understanding, CNN.com asked readers for their
perspectives on the Asian-American experience. The vast differences in the Asian-American community are
reflected in the different realities expressed in these responses. Here is a selection of e-mails, some of
which have been edited for length and clarity. Roger Dong from Alameda, California I am a fourth-generation American
and retired after 32 years of government service. I have no links to China, and my generation of
ethnic Chinese are pretty much Americanized. However, we cannot deny our ethnic
heritage, although some of us try to do so. That is foolish as others see us as an ethnic entity, just as we, like most other humans, size up people
(CNN) --
and make generalizations and stereotypes based on race, gender, and other purely visual and physical factors. Occasionally, it has irked me when a
few people still distrust me and question my loyalty to America and wonder if I have any allegiance to the Chinese govt. After 32 years of federal
government service -- 28 years as a military officer, and four years in the diplomatic corps -- serving our nation, I should not have to defend myself. ...
... We have made many contributions to America, but no one knows about the contributions, not even us. It will be extremely tragic if our fellow
Americans get irrational and Chinese Americans are [made scapegoats] for our frustrations in dealing with a China that is getting more powerful.
Chao Moua from Menomonie, Wisconsin Being an Asian in America is definitely culturally clashing
because you're living in a modern world where you need to assimilate in order to be successful. I am the first generation to be born in the U.S. and I am
happy that my parents had the chance to come to the United States. My family is Hmong and the Hmong people helped out in the
Vietnam War. This part of the war was called the "secret war." But without this part of the war I would not be here. Assimilating was very easy for me
because I went to an all white school in Wisconsin. But once I assimilated, I became pulled by my heritage and culture that my family has taught me.
But, then I am pulled by the American culture. It's
difficult to know where the line is or how to create a
compromise between each culture. Challenges for the next generation would be to keep some of the Hmong culture and not
become a race where the language and cultural things have become extinct. I'm already having a hard time with this because I have a lot of American
friends at school and with my Hmong friends we speak English a lot and only a little Hmong. Ravi
Ransi from Hainesport, New Jersey
There are a lot of other countries in Asia other than China, Japan, Philippines, etc . I am a
native of India (South Asia) and came to this country 10 years ago. The thing that bothers me is media
and people's perception of who is of Asian heritage. Almost all the times when we talk about Asians
in this country, we are talking about folks from Eastern Asian countries like China,
Japan, etc. I am always perceived as a Middle-Easterner (being a brown guy), and so are the people from other
Asian countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, etc. Trying to overcome this has been difficult, especially after 9/11. I just hope that my kids don't
face the kind of xenophobia that exists today. Conan Hom from Lexington, Massachusetts I was born here, and I speak only English, and yet many
expect me to know an Asian language. In fact I am often asked, "Where am I from? Or what am I?" When I answer U.S. (or American), I [am] told, "No
really, tell me." Yet a person who's last name is Schmidt in the U.S. isn't expected to speak German? If I am asked what am I and I do say Chinese or
Filipino, it's more construed to be where I was born. When someone says, "I'm Irish" we don't assume that person is born in Ireland most of the time.
Though born here there are those in the U.S. who would consider me not truly an American, yet they would assume a non-Asian who is born abroad to
be more of an American. Being of Asian heritage, I am not considered a minority in many things even though I really am. Also strangely enough, I have
been the object of racial slurs by the majority as well as other minorities -- including those which are larger than the Asian contingent. Steven
Cho from Diamond Bar, California Being of Korean descent, I always found it hard to prove my "Americaness" to non-Asian
Americans. Growing up in predominately white neighborhoods in Washington and Oregon, I'd always felt like an outsider no matter how hard I tried to
ignore racial differences. Moving to California was difficult in an entirely different way as now, I'd be surrounded by people who "looked" like me but
who wouldn't necessarily accept me. Although these people "looked" like me, I
still felt like an outsider around them as I
was ostracized for not being Asian enough. I feel as though many Asian-Americans go through this same identity crisis
that I've been dealing with my whole life. Fan Yang from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania My name is Fan and I am a Chinese-American. I came over to
North America when I was 5 years old with my parents, who came here to start their doctorate degrees. My parents made less than $20,000 Canadian
dollars from their graduate school stipend. To save money, we lived in the basement of a small apartment building. I attended kindergarten in an
elementary school with no ESL program and for months, I struggled to learn the new language. I eventually learned English, and life got back to normal
again. As the years went by, I moved from Montreal to an upper-middle-class suburb of Boston for the sixth grade. This transition was quite difficult for
me. At my new school, I was surprised at how arrogant some of the students were. I was Chinese-American, and that defined me whether I liked it or
not. I made many great friends, but some of the students felt necessary to subtly degrade me and to remind me of my race. For example, on a daily
basis, a few classmates would comment in a derogatory way about my facial features. "Did someone drop you on your face as a baby? Is that why it is
so flat?" This treatment went on for years, but I eventually became numb to it. In the middle of high school, my parents moved to Houston, Texas. I felt
right at home in Houston since many students in my high school were also Chinese-American. For the first time, being Chinese-American no longer
defined who I was. During my two years there, no one asked why my face was so flat. Life was great. After high school, I attended college at a school
that was almost 40 or 50 percent Asian- American. I pursued my studies and got into medical school. I did not stand out one bit and I loved it. Now, I
am a medical student living the American dream. My parents are both professors and they now live in a brand new four-bedroom house in an uppermiddle-class suburb in Philadelphia. This suburb reminds me so much of the Boston suburb where I experienced the subtle racism and prejudice, but
this time, I know that things are different. The journey to reach the American dream is a long and difficult one, but now that I am here, I am so thankful
for the life that my parents provided for me here in America. God bless America. John Sanda from Sweet, Idaho For me, being Asian in America is not
much different than being white. Of course there is the occasional racist incident or comment, but the vast majority of people seem to be colorblind.
This subject, however, is far too complex to discuss in a forum like this. It would take volumes of text or hours of conversation. I look in the mirror and I
am Japanese. I look outward and I am an American of no specific ethnic origin. God bless America. S.K. from Tucson, Arizona I am mixed -- White and
Asian-Indian. My mother emigrated here legally from India in the 1960s. I was born in 1975. In the late 70s we moved to Houston, Texas. Living in
Texas set a lot of my definitions to what I thought of being Asian. ... ... I remember sitting in a darkened living room and having my mother come and
ask me why I didn't want to go outside. I asked my mom, "Mom, when am I going to turn white"? I was so confused because I knew my father was
white and didn't know why I wasn't. I had been trying to avoid the sun so I could be lighter. So as a mixed-race Asian, who grew up in a "white" culture,
I felt somewhat rejected from that culture. On the flip side, if I were to tell an Indian from India that I were Indian they would at first not believe me. I
don't look like a typical Indian I guess. So, in some ways, I have felt disassociated from both cultures. Marquis Leu from Garland, Texas Being Asian in
America means acting as the "Model Minority," a term used by the "majority" of America, therefore setting an example of being the best of the worst.
Makoto Hirata from Paramus, New Jersey I am an Asian-American in the United States Army, and I am currently in Iraq. I am Japanese and the only
Asian person in my platoon. In the infantry, mostly everyone is white. They make fun of me a lot and joke with me a lot, but they are still pretty cool with
me. I feel they still do look at me differently then the other soldiers, but we still are all friends. Jessie
Park from Gabriel, California The
struggles of the Asian-American are that of any other American. All have gone through
the ever so present stages of poverty and discrimination. All have chased after the American dream.
However, the history of the Asian-American is an epic which cannot be shoved into that
simple category alone . Each demographic has had their own personal struggles while
integrating into American society, as if the label "Asian" had no bearing on their vastly
different experiences : the sweat of the Chinese workers during the construction of the
first transcontinental railroad, the Japanese- Americans' detention during World War II,
the missing recognition of Filipino WWII veterans, the Korean-Americans' dilemma as the
world settles a nuclear standoff on the Korean peninsula. These situations hardly had anything to with each
other, but it was all part of the American experience. ... We all must realize that each one of us has a rich history, that a simple label based on the color
of our skin is a poor sampling of history.
Not including content warnings or refusing to edit language when discussing potentially
distressing content can be extremely harmful and works to exclude people from
participating in discussions
Finch 16’ [Sam Dylan Finch, feminist writer, “When You Oppose Twigger Warnings You are
Really Saying these 8 Things”, Everyday Feminism, 6/9/16
http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/07/opposing-trigger-warnings/ LMcF (Content warning:
suicide , PTSD)]
I’ve heard a lot of debate around content warnings (popularly but problematically referred to as trigger warnings) – and I’ve got to say, I’m stunned.
Who knew a simple request could cause this much of a stir? If you’re not familiar, a
content warning is a very simple
statement at the beginning of an article, film, or comic that lets the audience know that
something potentially distressing will appear in the content they’re about to consume. Some pretty
common ones include sexual assault, alcohol consumption, or violence. If someone has trauma around one of these areas, and could find themselves
triggered by the material, it allows them to opt out or brace themselves before they have a traumatic reaction to it. For example, a dear friend of mine is
a suicide attempt survivor. In the years after her attempt, she tried to avoid articles and movies that had some kind of detailed reference to suicide.
Because she had post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a result of her attempt, engaging with anything that included suicide would cause a panic
attack and flashbacks, and it was very harmful for her mental health and recovery. For me, content warnings are sort of a no-brainer. As a writer, I want
to make sure that my content isn’t harming my audience, and that I’m sensitive to the needs of those who are still trying to heal from trauma or dealing
with a disability like PTSD, anxiety, or a phobia. Life is already difficult for survivors, so why make it harder? But there is a lot of resistance still, despite
it being a fairly simple request. So I want to explore that opposition – namely, what we’re actually saying to folks with disabilities and trauma when we
ignore or mock their requests for content warnings. You may not be literally saying these things, but the following might be implied whenever you
dismiss a survivor of trauma. 1. Adding a Couple of Words at the Beginning of My Content Is So Hard Many people talk about the inconvenience of
content warnings. As a writer, I’m calling bullshit on that. Even
if writing an additional sentence at the beginning of my
article were difficult (which it’s not), it will never compare to the inconvenience of a serious panic
attack, a flashback, or a dissociative episode that a survivor might have if they encounter a
trigger in my work. As writers, filmmakers, content creators, or even educators, we regularly encounter demands on our work. Some people
can ask for the most ridiculous things. But a sentence at the beginning of our work or syllabus? A sentence to help survivors
preserve their mental health? I’d say that’s the least bizarre or inconvenient request I’ve ever gotten. 2. PTSD? Lolz, Who Cares Many
of the folks who request content warnings are people dealing with PTSD. Symptoms of this disorder can be very
debilitating, including panic attacks, dissociation, flashbacks, hyperarousal, and difficulty
sleeping. Content warnings can be important for people with PTSD who are trying to avoid
content that may trigger one of their episodes. When people oppose content warnings – treating
them as though they are frivolous requests coming from oversensitive people – they completely
undermine the seriousness of conditions like PTSD. What you’re saying to survivors is that
PTSD isn’t a condition that you recognize or care about, and that you have no interest in helping
folks who are dealing with such a devastating disorder. Content warnings make content more
accessible for people with PTSD because it allows them to have fair warning and choose to
engage with that material when they’re in a place that allows them to do so. When you oppose
those warnings, you’re saying that PTSD isn’t a legitimate enough condition to warrant a slight
adjustment in how we present material so that folks dealing with this disorder can actually
participate when they’re ready and able. In other words, you’re suggesting that you just don’t care. And that’s pretty lousy. 3. I
Really Want to Make Your Already Difficult Life More Difficult I’ve heard a lot of folks who oppose content warnings saying to me, “Welcome to the real
world! If you can’t deal with this article, how are you going to deal with real life?” You don’t need to tell a survivor that “the real world” is hard, because
And your refusal to include content
warnings takes already difficult circumstances and makes them even harder. What’s the problem with
making writing, film, and (yes) classrooms more accessible for people with trauma? Even if the rest of the world is going to be
they already know that. They’re already living in it, trying to survive and trying to heal.
a challenge, why add an additional struggle onto their plate? It’s like forcing someone to wear
heavy weights while they run a marathon, under the guise that “running is hard, and if you can’t
deal with the weight, maybe you shouldn’t run a marathon!” Yes, the real world sucks. Survivors know that
better than anyone. So we should work hard to make safe spaces wherever it’s possible to do
so – especially when it’s as easy as adding a content warning. 4. Go Ahead, Have a Panic Attack Today If you’re not
interested in preventing a panic attack, especially when it’s so easy to avert, it kind of sounds to me like you don’t care if it happens. I’m just saying. 5. I
Don’t Think Making My Content Accessible Is All That Important Folks with disabilities like PTSD, anxiety, and phobias deserve to be able to make
It allows them to access your work or your
classroom – namely, by ensuring that they are in the right place to participate. We label the deep end of a
educated decisions about whether or not they engage with triggering content.
swimming pool, for example, so that folks who can’t swim can make a smart decision about whether or not they should be on that end of the pool. We
create ratings for movies so that parents can decide if their children should be watching violent films. We label foods that have allergens so that folks
with allergies can decide if they should eat that particular food. We would never tell someone who can’t swim that they’re “too sensitive” for asking how
deep the water is, tell a child “welcome to the real world” as we turn on a horror film, or tell someone with allergies to just “get over it” and eat some
peanut butter. Content warnings operate on the same principle. They’re there to prevent danger or distress, so that, like labeling the deep end of a
pool, people can make smart choices about where they’re going to swim (or, in this case, what they’re going to read or watch).
Content
warnings make content more accessible by allowing people to make the right choice and avoid
threatening situations that can jeopardize our mental health. It’s not unreasonable to ask for those warnings,
especially when they impact a great number of people. 6. Stigmatizing Mental Health Conditions Is a Cool Hobby of Mine Telling people with serious
disorders like PTSD, anxiety, or phobias to just “deal with it” or trivializing it by saying they’re being “too sensitive” upholds a lot of negative stereotypes
about what these mental health issues really look like. Mental illness is not about being too sensitive or about being politically correct. Mental illness is
a serious and valid struggle, and writing it off as silly or making a meme out of it completely trivializes what should be a very serious deal. When you
act like content warnings are just a silly request, what you’re really saying is that mental illness and the people who are surviving with it every day are
just “silly.” I don’t know about you, but I don’t think that night terrors and insomnia, repeated flashbacks of the worst moment in your life, and panic
attacks that leave your hands numb and your breathing restricted are all that funny. Instead of treating mental health struggles as a joke, we need to
treat it with the seriousness that it deserves. And if that’s a little inconvenient, so be it. 7. I Like to Ignore My Audience and My Impact If you don’t care
about the impact that your work has on the community that you are serving –whether it’s with your articles or your films or a lesson you give in your
classroom – what exactly is the point of what you’re doing? As a writer, I’m concerned if there are people who can’t access my content and learn from it
because each time that they try to, they are harmed by what I’ve put out into the world. As a writer, I’m concerned if my impact is way different than my
intention. I recognize that I won’t make every single person happy with my writing. There will always be individuals who are a bit disgruntled. But
I
also recognize that when a community calls on me to make my content better, I should tune in
and see if there’s a way that I can do it. Entire communities have called on us to include content
warnings because it’s a significant enough concern to unite around. Instead of ignoring that, I
feel that I and other content creators have a responsibility to tune in. We should think critically
about who our work is serving. And if our work is not accessible to everyone, and if there is a
community that is negatively impacted by what we’re doing, we should think about ways that we
can make our work better so that anyone and everyone can participate. There’s a big difference between
being displeased with your work and actually being harmed by it. And if there’s an easy way to prevent that harm, and to include more people in our
work, I think it’s worth doing. Otherwise, who are we serving? And more specifically, who are we excluding? 8. Your Trauma Doesn’t Matter to Me
Ultimately, the big takeaway that many folks have when you refuse to include content warnings is that the trauma that they have experienced isn’t
important to you. Whether it was a veteran who just barely made it out of combat alive, a black man who was the victim of a vicious hate crime, or a
woman who was violently sexually assaulted, what you’re saying to them is that what they’ve been through and what they need to survive is completely
and utterly unimportant to you. And if you aren’t the slightest bit concerned about that message, there’s some deeper reflection that needs to happen.
Because while no one is asking you to fix their struggles for them or hold their hand, what they are asking is that you care enough to write a single
sentence on that article or in that syllabus, just enough to give them the chance to opt out or put some self-care in place if they need to. Their request
isn’t ridiculous. What’s ridiculous is that people are still debating about this, as if your convenience trumps their trauma. *** So I’m a little passionate
about content warnings, if you couldn’t tell. I’m passionate because it can make a world of difference for folks who are already struggling. It’s so easy,
and yet it can be the difference between a decent day and a day ridden with panic and dysfunction. While we can’t reasonably have a content warning
for every single trigger that exists, I don’t think it’s difficult to have some guidelines – some very basic warnings that folks can abide by so that we can
prevent some of the harm that is done to survivors of trauma. Many platforms, including right here at Everyday Feminism, have already made the shift.
And guess what. It was no big deal. It’s not about censoring our work – a “heads up” doesn’t censor anything, just the way that labeling the deep end of
the pool doesn’t magically change the depth of the pool, or labeling allergens doesn’t change the ingredients in the food but rather, identifies them. I
am committed to including content warnings when I can because I believe that survivors deserve to make educated decisions so that they can manage
their health and wellbeing. When a community comes together and asks us to do right by them, I think we have an obligation to do our best to respond.
And honestly? With a measure that is so simple, the bottom line is that there’s just no good reason not to.
We as a debate community must find a way to approach discussions of violence without
isolating inviduals or policing language, inorder to create a space where everyone can
discuss strategies to combat colonialism, capitalism, white supremacy, abeilism, and
heteropatriarchy without cooption.
Smith 14’ [Andrae, “Beyond the Pros and Cons of Trigger Warnings: Collectivizing Healing”,
July 13, 2014, https://andrea366.wordpress.com/2014/07/13/beyond-the-pros-and-cons-oftrigger-warnings-collectivizing-healing/ LMcf]
When I used to work as an anti-violence crisis counselor full-time, a counselor in another agency confided in me that she was
currently being battered by her partner. She did not want anyone to know, however, because she feared losing her job. “People
won’t think I have my act together enough to be in this movement if they know what I am going through,” as she explained why she
did not think she could tell anyone. She was part of an anti-violence movement that she did not feel would support her. She had to
address this violence on her own. I was part of a larger collective that organized human rights/legal training for Native boarding
school survivors. Frequently, survivors would drive literally hundreds of miles to attend at considerable expense because they really
wanted this information. But when they arrived at the training, flashbacks from their years of boarding school abuse literally
prevented them from walking through the door. A healing movement for boarding school survivors was being created that did not
actually create space for survivors. I was teaching a class on gender/racial violence when I noticed that one student repeatedly look
disengaged and distant during the class. I presumed they were not interested in the material until one day they confided that one of
authors we had read had abused them. They had tried to keep this information to themselves because they wanted to be a “good”
student, but they were finding it too difficult to stay engaged in the class. I had created a learning space on racial/gender violence
where a survivor of violence could not participate. There
is a continuing debate about the politics and efficacy
of trigger warnings within activist, social media and academic spaces. There are merits to the
various arguments on all sides of this discussion. However, sometimes what is missed is the
larger context from which trigger warnings emerged. In particular, this intervention emerged from
the recognition by many of us in the anti-violence movement that we were building a movement
that continued to structurally marginalize survivors by privatizing healing. We had built
movements that were supposed to be led by bad-ass organizers who were “healed” and thus
had their acts together. If we in fact did not have our act together, this was an indication that we
had not healed sufficiently to be part of the movement. W e built movements around an idealized image of who
were supposed to be rather than the people we actually were. The result was that we created a gendered and
capitalist split in how we organized. Healing was relegated to the “private” sphere and became
unacknowledged labor that we had to do on our own with a therapist or a few friends. Once we
were healed, then we were allowed to enter the public sphere of organizing. Of course, since we
continued to have problems, we continued to destroy our own organizing efforts internally with
no space to even talk about what was going on. Indigenous organizer Heather Milton-Lightening once
prophetically declared at an Indigenous Women’s Network gathering many years ago that our movements were shunning people
who might have issues, such as substance abuse. She called on us all to embrace whoever wants to be part of our movements as
they are rather than as who we think they should be. The
challenge for us, she noted, is to build movement
structures that take into account the reality of how personal and collective trauma has impacted
all of us. Thus, trigger warnings cannot be viewed in isolation. Rather, they are part of a larger
complex of practices designed to de-privatize and collective healing. They came out of the
recognition that we are not unaffected by the political and intellectual work that we do. These
practices also recognized that the labor of healing has to be shared by all. Trigger warnings are
one of many practices that insist that one does not have to be silent about one’s healing journey
– that one’s healing can occupy public and collective spaces. And healing can only truly happen
when we take collective responsibility for creating structures and practices that enable healing.
Of course, all organizing strategies and practices can be co-opted. As Dian Million so brilliantly details in Therapeutic Nations, the
colonial state has attempted to co-opt indigenous healing movements by framing Indigenous nations as dysfunctional people
requiring therapeutic healing provided by the state rather than as nations requiring decolonization. And yet, as she also details, the
fact of this co-optation cannot make us lose sight of the interventions made by indigenous healing movements, particularly those
made by indigenous feminists. In particular, these movements have demonstrated that historical trauma impacts us on the individual
and collective level and that we cannot decolonize without centering the impact of trauma in our organizing. And as Million further
argues, rather than privatize our traumas, how can we rearticulate trauma as a place from which to develop what she calls “felt
theory”–a place from which to understand our social and political conditions? Thus, in the case of trigger warnings in particular, it is
certainly the case that this intervention can be and is misused. I have seen white students say they are “triggered” by having to hear
about racism. The intervention of trigger warnings also often shifts from asserting a public space to organize around trauma to
creating a safe space from it. But just as Christina Hanhardt shows us that there is no such thing as a “safe space,” Roxane
Gay shows us that there are no such things as “safe words.” Trigger warnings as well as ANY
organizing practice we develop will be co-opted in order individualize and domesticate its
potential impact on movement-building. But this reality should not make us lose sight of our
larger vision of building holistic movements for liberation. In the end, the question is not really
about the pros and cons of trigger words. The questions are around, what are the organizing
practices and strategies for building movements that recognize that settler colonialism,
capitalism, white supremacy and heteropatriarchy have not left us unscathed? How do we
create spaces to experiment with different strategies, as well as spaces to openly assess and
change these strategies as they inevitably become co-opted? How do we create movements
that make us collectively accountable for healing from individual and collective trauma? How do we
create critical intellectual spaces that recognize that intellectual work is not disembodied and without material effects? How do we
collectively reduce harm in our intellectual and political spaces? And finally, how can we build healing movements for liberation that
can include us as we actually are rather than as the peoples we are supposed to be?
\
Content Warnings are Good
Bailey Loverin 14’ [Bailey, Co-author and sponser of UCSB resolution on trigger warnings,
“Trigger Warnings Encourage Free Thought and Debate”, 5/19/2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/05/19/restraint-of-expression-on-collegecampuses/trigger-warnings-encourage-free-thought-and-debate LMcf]
"Trigger warnings" are a way of identifying what may cause someone who recently experienced
trauma or has post-traumatic stress disorder to relive their trauma. They are the equivalent of
content warnings on CDs, video games, movies or the nightly news, and are especially useful in
classes where traumatic content is unexpected. Campus discussions about trigger warnings have lead to healthy
and informative debates on P.T.S.D., mental health and classroom content. Supporters contend that they allow
survivors the chance to prepare to face the material, adding new perspectives. Without a trigger
warning, a survivor might black out, become hysterical or feel forced to leave the room. This
effectively stops their learning process. However, with the trigger warning they would be prepared to face
uncomfortable material and could better contribute to the discussions or opt to avoid them.
These warnings are less about protection and more about preparation, but the recent spread of
university and college students requesting trigger warnings has caused an unnecessary panic
over free speech. A Rutgers student encouraged trigger warnings for literary works. While criticism has focused on books
used as examples, the difficulties of implementing such an effort and the possibility of tainting readers' experiences, two facts have
been untouched: the student condemned censorship, and his idea never left the school paper’s opinion page. A task force of
administrators, faculty and students at Oberlin suggested professors use trigger warnings. While critics were right to address the
number of warnings and to encourage professors to avoid using triggering content altogether, they neglected to mention that
students and teachers were already tackling these concerns and have tabled the policy. The University of California, Santa
Barbara's student senate passed a resolution urging professors to use trigger warnings on syllabi. Critics have compared this
resolution to efforts at Rutgers and Oberlin, but this is entirely misleading. The U.C.S.B. resolution only applies to in-class content
like screenings or planned lectures and doesn’t ban the content or excuse students from learning it. Furthermore, the resolution will
Campus discussions about trigger warnings
have lead to widespread discussion and debate on P.T.S.D., mental health and classroom
content. So far, there is no official policy, no punishment for teachers and no censorship. Don’t lose sleep over fear mongering
not lead to a policy change without approval from the academic senate.
and slippery slope arguments.
Debate can’t solve conscientization— Osajima says you need non-judgemental support,
social setting, large number of asian-americans. Even if you have a coalition of asian people
in debate competition means half have to be neg half the time. Also the "affective" aspect of
conscientization supercharces the ahmed evidence
Osajima 7 (Keith Osajima is a professor and Director of the Race and Ethnic Studies Program at the
University of Redlands. REPLENISHING THE RANKS: Raising Critical Consciousness Among Asian
Americans; JOURNAL OF ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES (JAAS), February, Volume 10, No. 1; p. 64
First, respondents described the importance of obtaining information and conceptual tools that helped them to cognitively
understand how their lives and the lives of others are shaped by larger historical and social structural forces. An Asian American
Studies course on a college campus was the most common source of relevant information, but as we have seen exposure can take
place in many venues. People can learn from reading on their own, from student groups, and from multimedia sources. Second,
breaking through isolation and interrupting the tendency to explain their life experiences solely in
individual terms reflects a social dimension to conscientization . Contact and conversation with other Asian
Americans was often the most effective way to help respondents make connections between their
lives, the experiences of others, and information on the Asian American experience. Connections to key mentors
and peers provided a safe environment in which to think and question further . Third, respondents described
important affective aspects of conscientization. When respondents talked about important moments in their education or key social
support that made a difference, invariably they referred to how they felt about these experiences. They were angered by the
realization that their schooling had not taught them about racism or the Asian American experience. They
felt inspired by the experiences of other Asian Americans who struggled to overcome harsh conditions. They were excited to learn
more. Fourth, respondents’ commitment to Asian American issues was deepened when they transformed
understanding into action. Involvement in protests, organizing, programming, teaching, and research gave respondents a
chance to extend their knowledge and learn from efforts to make change. Finally, the study indicates that
conscientization occurs when the discrete elements work in combination. No respondent described his or her
conscientization in terms of a single element. It was not a purely intellectual or cognitive experience in a classroom, absent of social
or affective elements. Nor was it a purely social or affective experience without information and conceptual tools. Instead,
respondents described multifaceted and interrelated experiences that reinforced each other, inspiring
further thinking and commitment to action. For activists seeking to raise the critical consciousness of Asian
Americans, the study’s findings carry implications for practice. For some, combining elements in a single venue, like an introductory
course or a training program, will be the main focus. In these cases, the study suggests that the course or program should
offer substantive content and concepts to lay the cognitive foundation needed for people to see
themselves in relation to the world. It also should include social activities to break isolation and opportunities for people to
share stories with each other in a non-judgmental, safe environment. On a broader level, the study suggests that there is a value
in and need to offer a range of experiences across campus and community to increase the likelihood that
students will combine, on their own, elements that contribute to conscientization. Pressure to have one person,
course, or program that single-handedly transforms students’ lives subsides when we recognize that the interrelated process
of conscientization benefits from contributions across diverse segments of the communit y. The importance
of combining influences also casts new light on how different parts of the campus and community can
work collaboratively to raise critical consciousness . Breaking from binary constructions that often pit academic
programs against student life activities, or divide academe from community, the study shows how conscientization arises when
people are exposed to and combine lessons learned from a variety of sources. This process implies that increased
appreciation for the work done across campus and community, along with greater coordination of
influences, is an important dimension of conscientization.
The affirmative calls for the ballot in order to validate their subjectivity—
this results in judge consumption, where the judge votes aff just to feel
better about themselves and makes systemic change impossible
Tonn 05 Mari Boor, phd philosophy from the University of Kansas, associate professor of rhetoric and communication studies
at the University of Richmond, “Taking Conversation, Dialogue, and Therapy Public”, Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8.3 (2005) 405-430
Approaching public controversies through a conversational model informed by therapy also
enables political inaction in two respects. First, an open-ended process lacking mechanisms for
closure thwarts progress toward resolution. As Freeman writes of consciousness raising, an
unstructured, informal discussion [End Page 418] "leaves people with no place to go and the
lack of structure leaves them with no way of getting there."70 Second, the therapeutic impulse
to emphasize the self as both problem and solution ignores structural impediments
constraining individual
agency. "Therapy," Cloud argues, "offers consolation rather than compensation, individual adaptation rather than social change, and an experience of politics that is impoverished in its isolation from structural critique and collective action." Public discourse
emphasizing healing and coping, she claims, "locates blame and responsibility for solutions in the private sphere." Clinton's Conversation on Race not only exemplified the frequent wedding of public dialogue and therapeutic themes but also illustrated the failure of
a conversation-as-counseling model to achieve meaningful social reform. In his speech inaugurating the initiative, Clinton said, "Basing our self -esteem on the ability to look down on others is not the American way . . . Honest dialogue will not be easy at first . . .
Emotions may be rubbed raw, but we must begin." Tempering his stated goal of "concrete solutions" was the caveat that "power cannot compel" raci al "community," which "can come only from the human spirit."72 Following the president's cue to self-disclose
emotions, citizens chiefly aired personal experiences and perspectives during the various community dialogues. In keeping with their talk-show formats, the forums showcased what Orlando Patterson described as "performative 'race' talk," "public speech acts" of
denial, proclamation, defense, exhortation, and even apology, in short,
argument
performances of "self" that left little room for productive public
.73 Such personal evidence overshadowed the "facts" and "realities" Clinton also had promised to explore, including, for exam ple, statistics on discrimination patterns in employment, lending, and criminal justice or expert testimony on
cycles of dependency, poverty, illegitimacy, and violence. Whereas Clinton had encouraged "honest dialogue" in the name of "r esponsibility" and "community," Burke argues that "The Cathartic Principle" often produces the reverse. "[C]onfessional," he writes,
More to the point, "a thoroughly
'confessional' art may enact a kind of 'individual salvation at the expense of the group
"contains in itself a kind of 'personal irresponsibility,' as we may even relieve ourselves of private burdens by befouling the public medium."
,'" performing a "sinister
function, from the standpoint of overall-social necessities."74 Frustrated observers of the racial dialogue—many of them African Americans—echoed Burke's concerns. Patterson, for example, noted, "when a young Euro-American woman spent nearly five minutes
of our 'conversation' in Martha's Vineyard . . . publicly confessing her racial insensitivities, she was directly unburdening herself of all sorts of racial guilt feeling. There was nothing to argue about."75 Boston Globe columnist D errick Z. Jackson invoked the game
metaphor communication theorists often link to [End Page 419] skills in conversation,76 voicing suspicion of a talking cure for racial ailments that included neither exhaustive racial data nor concrete goals. "The game," wrote Jackson, "is to get 'rid' of responsibility
for racism while doing nothing to solve it."77 Contributing to the ineffectiveness of a therapeutic approach in redressing social problems is its common pairing with what Burke terms "incantatory" imagery, wherein rhetors invite persons to see themselves in an
idealized form.78 Comparing a current conflicted self against a future self individuals aspire to become is a therapeutic staple, a technique Clinton mimics in his speech on race. In one breath, he acknowledges persistent racial "discrimination and prejudice"; in
another, he overtly invites audience members to picture themselves in saintly fashion: "Can we be one America respecting, even celebrating, our differences, but embracing even more what we have in common?"79 But outside private therapy, this strategy rarely
results in honest self-disclosure, especially regarding thorny issues such as race. Andrew Hacker argues that individuals seldom speak candidly about race in public; rather, they express an "idealized" self with ideas and feelings they desire or, more commonly,
The hazard of blending the confessional with the incantatory,
Burke writes, is a "sentimental and hypocritical" false reassurance that society is on the
proper course, rendering remedial action unnecessary. This danger is compounded if the
problem initially has been couched as essentially attitudinal rather than structural
believe they should possess, a phenomenon evident even in anonymous polling.80
, as Clinton did: "We have torn down the
barriers in our laws. Now we must break down the barriers in our lives, our minds and our hearts." Indeed, in commenting on t he therapeutic bent of the Conversation on Race, William L. Taylor argues that the late Bayard Rustin's reservations about the s ocialpsychological approach to race were prescient: "Rustin said he could envision America being persuaded figuratively to lie down on the psychiatrist's couch to examine their feelings about race.
They would likely arise,
he said, pronouncing themselves either free or purged of any bias. And nothing would
have changed."
Introducing their performance into the competitive forum of debate reinscribes the ideology of war which targets the other.
Chow 06 Professor Comparative Lit at Brown, (Rey, “The Age of the World Target” p 40-42)
objective" production of knowledge
became the institutional practice that substantiated
the militaristic conception of the
world
despite the claims about the
disinterested nature of
higher learning
fully inscribed in the politics and ideology
of war.
the disciplining, research, and development of so-called academic information are
a strategic logic
the production of knowledge
shares the same scientific and military premises as war
it is doomed to fail in its avowed attempts to "know" the other cultures
As long as
knowledge is produced in this self-referential manner, as a circuit of targeting or getting the
other that ultimately consolidates the omnipotence and omnipresence of the sovereign
the other will have no choice but remain just a target whose existence justifies
destruction
such study will ultimately confirm
the self-referential function
that was unleashed by
the dropping of atomic bombs, with the U S
occupying the position of the bomber, and
other cultures always viewed as
target fields
"Knowledge," however
conscientiously gathered and however large in volume, will lead only to further silence and to
the silencing of diverse experiences.
Often under the modest and apparently innocuous agendas of fact gathering and documentation, the "scientific" and "
during peacetime about the various special
"areas"
and elaborated
as target.52 In other words,
apolitical and
the pursuits "I
, activities
undertaken under the rubric of area studies, such as language training, historiography, anthropology, economics, political science, and so forth, are
To that extent,
part and parcel of
. And yet, if
(with its vocabulary of aims and goals, research, data analysis, experimentation, and verification) in fact
‚—if, for instance, the ability to translate a difficult language can be regarded as equivalent to the ability to break
military codes‚—is it a surprise that
? Can "knowledge" that is derived
from the same kinds of bases as war put an end to the violence of warfare, or is such knowledge not simply warfare's accomplice, destined to destroy rather than preserve the forms of lives at which it aims its focus?
"self"/"eye"‚— the "I"‚—
that‚—
that is the United States,
one thing, its
only
by the bomber. As long as the focus of our study of Asia remains the United States, and as long as this focus is not accompanied by knowledge of what is happening elsewhere at other times as well as at the present,
once again
the
of virtual worlding
nited
the military and information
tates always
. In this manner, events whose historicity does not fall into the epistemically closed orbit of the atomic bomber‚—
such as the Chinese reactions to the war from a primarily anti-Japanese point of view that I alluded to at the beginning of this chapter‚—will never receive the attention that is due to them.
This is one reason why, as Harootunian remarks, area studies has been, since its inception, haunted by "the absence of a definable object"‚—and by "the problem
of the vanishing object."55 As Harootunian goes on to argue, for all its investment in the study of other languages and other cultures, area studies missed the opportunity, so aptly provided by Said's criticism of Oriental ism, to become the site where a genuinely
alternative form of knowledge production might have been possible. Although, as Harootunian writes, "Said's book represented an important intellectual challenge to the mission of area studies which, if accepted would have reshaped area studies and freed it from
its own reliance on the Cold War and the necessities of the national security state,"56 the challenge was too fundamentally d isruptive to the administrative and instrumentalist agendas so firmly routinized in area studies to be accepted by its practitioners. As a result,
Said's attempt to link an incipient neocolonial discourse to the history of area studies was almost immediately belittled, dismissed, and ignored, and his critique, for all its relevance to area studies' future orientation, simply "migrated to English studies to transform
the study of literature into a full-scale preoccupation with identity and its construction."57
Ressentiment DA- Defining resistance in opposition to the point of power
necessitates that power in order for the world of your social change to
occur- not only does that take out any risk of solvency, but it is the
directing of view outward rather than inward, which breeds ressentimentthe modes of resistance in the squo are net better.
Newman 2007 [Saul, Professor of Political Theory, lecturer, and writer, “FROM BAKUNIN TO LACAN: Antiauthoritarianism and the dislocation of power”, pg 48]
Can we not see, then, that in anarchist discourse the state is essential to the existence of
the revolutionary subject, just as the revolutionary subject is essential to the existence of
the state? The place of resistance depends upon the place of power, and vice versa. One
defines itself in opposition to the other. The purity of revolutionary identity is only
defined in contrast to the impurity of political power. Revolt against the state is always
prompted by the state. As Bakunin argues: “there is something in the nature of the state
which provokes rebellion.”140 While the relationship between the state and the
revolutionary subject is one of clearly defined opposition, the two antagonists could not
exist outside this relationship. They could not, in other words, exist without each other.
need to direct one’s view outward instead of
back to oneself—is the essence of ressentiment: in order to exist, slave morality always
first needs a hostile external world; it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in
order to act at all—its action is fundamentally reaction.”141 Nietzsche sees this outlook
as distinctly unhealthy, emanating from a position of weakness and sickness. Moreover,
Nietzsche talks of “anarchists” as the ones who are permeated with this morality of the
slave. While this is perhaps rather unfair of Nietzsche, it does point to a certain tenet of
ressentiment within Manichean philosophies such as anarchism. Pure revolutionary
identity in anarchist philosophy is constituted through its essential opposition to power.
However, like the “reactive man” that Nietzsche speaks of, revolutionary identity purports to be
unpolluted by power: human essence is seen as moral where power is immoral, natural where
power is artificial, pure where power is impure.
Nietzsche would call this a relationship of ressentiment: “this
Making the ballot a referendum on identity replicates exclusion and
psychic violence-Someone inevitably loses a debate, the ballot does not
and should not have the power to decide the validity of identity
Harris 13 — Scott Harris, Associate Specialist and Debate Coach at the University of Kansas,
holds a Ph.D. in Communication from Northwestern University, 2013 (“This Ballot,” Ballot from
the Final Round of the 2013 National Debate Tournament, Posted on the Global Debate blog,
April 6th, Available Online at http://globaldebateblog.blogspot.com/2013/04/scott-harris-writeslong-ballot-for-ndt.html, Accessed 08-31-2013)
This ballot has concerns about the messages this debate sends about what it means to be welcomed into the home of debate. Northwestern made an argument that spoke to
This debate seemed to suggest that the sign that
debate can be your home is entirely wrapped up in winning debates. The message seems
to be that the winner is accepted and the loser is rejected . I believe that the arguments Northwestern advanced in the
debate that being voted against is not a sign of personal rejection and that voting against an
argument should not be perceived as an act of psychic violence are important arguments to reflect on. To me
one of the most important lessons that debate teaches is that there is a difference between
our arguments and our personhood. One of the problems in out contemporary society is that people have trouble
differentiating between arguments and the identity of the person making the argument. If
you hate the argument you must hate the person making the argument because we have
trouble differentiating people from their arguments . The reason many arguments end up
in violent fights in society is the inability to separate people from their arguments . People
outside of debate (or the law) are often confused by how debaters (or lawyers) can argue passionately with one another
and then be friends after the argument. It is because we generally separate our
disagreements over arguments from our opinions about each other as people. There are two
concerns this ballot has about the implications of where this debate has positioned us as a community. First, the explosion of arguments
centered in identity makes it difficult to separate arguments from people. If I argue that a vote for me is a
vote for my ability to express my Quare identity it by definition constructs a reality that a vote against me is a
rejection of my identity . The nature of arguments centered in identity puts the other team in a fairly
precarious position in debates and places the judges in uncomfortable positions as well.
this concern that could have been more developed in the debate itself.
While discomfort may not necessarily be a bad thing it has significant implications for what debating and deciding debates means or is perceived to mean in socially constructed
realities. I hope we can get beyond a point where the only perceived route to victory for some minority debaters is to rail against exclusion in debate. The second concern is
the emphasis on winning as the sign evidence of debate being a home. The reality is that many
debaters do not win the majority of their debates . The majority of debaters will never win the NDT. The majority of debaters will
never attend the NDT
. Every debate has a loser . Losing should not be a sign of expulsion from the
home . Years ago on van trips we used to play a game which we called the green weenie award. We would take the results packet and have everyone in the van guess
who was the team that was the bottom seed of the tournament. The game may have had a certain amount of arrogant cruelty in it. I would sometimes wonder what it was that
we get so caught up sometimes in
defining our wins as successes and our losses as failures that we have lost sight of what
it is that makes debate a special home in the first place. Debate cannot only be a home
for the winner or it would
made the teams who didn’t win debates, who didn’t ever clear, come back the next week. As a community
by definition have become not a home for the majority of its participants. This ballot hopes that we can
learn to recognize that the experience of losing debates is part of being welcomed in debate as well.
Getting the opportunity to debate itself has tremendous value. The value is not contained in the win but is contained
in the experience itself. As a coach I have to remember sometimes that my failures are only failures if I view them as failures . I
need to make sure that I value all of my debaters equally whether they win their debates
or lose them. When my teams lose I need to not view them as losers or the judges who
voted against them as villains. Debate is an educational process. We often learn more
when we lose than when we win. Debate tends to attract hyper-competitive people who hate to lose. I hate to lose. I do not want to lose at
anything. Losing is an inevitable part of life . Debate needs to feel like a home for both the
winners and the losers because all of us experience losing in debate. Learning how to win with class and lose
with dignity is an important life lesson that I need to constantly work on myself . Learning to value the losses as much as the
wins is the hardest part for me but I believe it is vital if debate is really going to be a
home for all of its participants.
Trading autobiographical narrative for the ballot commodifies one’s
identity and has limited impact on the culture that one attempt’s to reform –
when autobiographical narrative “wins,” it subverts its own most radical
intentions by becoming an exemplar of the very culture under indictment
Coughlin 95—associate Professor of Law, Vanderbilt Law School. (Anne, REGULATING
THE SELF: AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PERFORMANCES IN OUTSIDER SCHOLARSHIP, 81 Va.
L. Rev. 1229)
Although Williams is quick to detect insensitivity and bigotry in remarks made by strangers, colleagues, and friends, her taste for irony fails her when it
comes to reflection on her relationship with her readers and the material benefits that her autobiographical performances have earned for her. n196
Perhaps Williams should be more inclined to thank, rather than reprimand, her editors for behaving as readers of autobiography invariably do. When
we examine this literary faux pas - the incongruity between Williams's condemnation of her editors and the professional benefits their publication
secured her - we detect yet another contradiction between the outsiders' use of autobiography and their desire to transform culture radically. Lejeune's
characterization of autobiography as a "contract" reminds us that autobiography
is a lucrative commodity . In our
culture, members of the reading public avidly consume personal stories, n197 which surely explains why first-rate
law journals and academic presses have been eager to market outsider narratives. No matter how unruly the self that it
records, an autobiographical performance transforms that self into a form of "property in
a moneyed economy " n198 and into a valuable intellectual [*1283] asset in an academy that requires its members to publish. n199
Accordingly, we must be skeptical of the assertion that the outsiders' splendid publication record is itself sufficient evidence of the success of their
endeavor. n200Certainly, publication of a best seller may transform its author's life, with the resulting commercial success and academic renown. n201
While writing a successful autobiography may
be momentous for the individual author, this success has a limited impact on culture . Indeed,
the transformation of outsider authors into "success stories" subverts outsiders' radical
As one critic of autobiography puts it, "failures do not get published." n202
intentions by constituting them as exemplary participants within contemporary culture,
willing to market even themselves to literary and academic consumers . n203 What good does this
transformation do for outsiders who are less fortunate and less articulate than middle-class law professors? n204 Although they style themselves
cultural critics, the [*1284] storytellers generally do not reflect on the meaning of their own commercial success, nor ponder its entanglement with the
cultural values they claim to resist. Rather, for
the most part, they seem content simply to take advantage
of the peculiarly American license, identified by Professor Sacvan Bercovitch, "to have your dissent and
make it too ." n205
The alternative is to turn off the television; A resistance in which the goal is
not to “expose” the flaws of the system but to stop participating in the first
place. The affirmative’s “broadcasting” of their movement only ensures
that it gets censured, commodified, and coopted by the structures
Victor Pelevin, Russian fiction writer, “Intel Inside”, AUTODAFE, Spring, 2003,
http://www.autodafe.org/autodafe/autodafe_03/art_15.htm accessed 9/16/04)
When I hear the expression “intellectual resistance” it reminds me of a souvenir I brought
back from Gran Canaria: a large, red fluffy towel with a portrait of Che Guevara. The phrase “intellectual
resistance” carries a host of noble connotations, amongst them an echo of nineteen-sixty-eight that stirs the blood pleasantly,
As a
certain remarkable Russian writer has expressed it, it is a means of “creating a noncontradictory unity of liberal values and revolutionary romanticism within the bounds of
a single sexually aroused consciousness”. I am not trying to say that I believe
intellectuals are dishonest. Or that I think they are cowards. Honesty and courage have
nothing to do with it. How can you be honest and courageous in answering a question
about which film you like best—Batman or Spiderman? But in this world of ours it is extremely rare for
anyone to trouble intellectuals about any other concerns. Intellect is capable of doing anything at all except
filling its owner’s belly without selling itself. And so for the modern-day intellectual it is
exactly as difficult and as necessary to comment on Pop-Reality as it is for a violinist
interned in a concentration camp to play at the guards’ party. So how can you win? It
couldn’t be easier. But resistance can only be successful in the internal human
dimension, because all openly declared forms of intellectual resistance will be
incorporated into the censorship as rapidly as new trends in fashion are taken up by
consumer chain-store designers. The intellectual’s practical victory does not lie in
“exposing television”—you can restart that exposure all over again any day of the week,
you will always find a pretext. Victory lies in turning the thing off. I call the quietness that
fills the room following this simple action the Third Pole —the point at which you realise
that all poles are inside your head, and your head’s just been in a cesspit. That farewell
click of the button on the TV, expelling the monopolar glow from the tube, is my heroic
contribution to the cause of global intellectual resistance.
making the resister feel somehow younger and sexier. At the same time it is entirely without risk, like sex in two condoms.
The 1AC appeals to the power of agential language to give the ballot itself
political force-this buys into a mode of thinking that over-invests in selfliberating discourse. Their notion the ballot can do anything is an appeal to
enchantment, and is a tactic to absolve the university of their crimes
outside these walls
Cloud and Gunn '10 Joshua Gunn & Dana L. Cloud, Department of Communication,
University of Texas at Austin, "Agentic Orientation as Magical Voluntarism" Communication
Theory 20 (2010) 50–78 © 2010 International Communication Association
Over a decade ago anthropologists Jean and John L. Comaroff (1999) advanced the
provocative thesis that globalization in late capitalism has led to ‘‘a dramatic
intensification . . . of appeals to enchantment,’’ often most discernable in industrializing countries such as
South Africa (p. 282). From ‘‘get rich quick’’ pyramid schemes to e-mail promises from
millionaire widows in Nigeria, ‘‘capitalism has an effervescent new spirit—a magical, neoProtestant zeitgeist—welling up close to its core’’ (p. 281). Of course, over a half-century ago Theodor
Adorno (1994) inveighed against astrology and soothsaying as indices of economic magic, underscoring the ability of capitalism to
promote the ‘‘doctrine of the existence of spirit’’ so central to bourgeois consciousness. ‘‘In the concept of mind-in-itself,’’ argued
Adorno, ‘‘consciousness has ontologically justified and perpetuated privilege by making it independent of the social principle by
Such ideology explodes in occultism: It is Idealism come full circle’’ (p.
133).What the Comaroffs point to is not the arrival of a new form of magical thinking,
then, but the intensification and proliferation of postenlightenment gullibility via
globalization—ironically in what is presumably the age of cynical reason (e.g., Sloterdijk, 1987).
which it is constituted.
As human beings, academics are just as susceptible to magical
thinking and narcissistic fantasies of omnipotence as everyone else.
Perhaps because at some level of communication scholars tend to
entertain a sense of the magical in the idea of communication (see Peters,
1999), we have been particularly prone to a philosophical belief in what
we term ‘‘magical voluntarism,’’ the notion that human agency is
better understood as the ability to control a given phenomenon
through the proper manipulation of thoughts and symbols (e.g.,
language). Going well beyond the straightforward idea that our thoughts necessarily influence our actions in transforming
the world around us, what we are calling magical voluntarism fosters a deliberate misrecognition of material recalcitrance, an
inability to recognize the structural, political, economic, cultural, and psychical limits of an individual’s ability to act in her own
magical voluntarism refuses to acknowledge that there is
a limit to the efficacy of symbolic action, beyond which persuasion
and thought alone fail to shift existing social relations. In popular culture,
interests. Furthermore,
magical voluntarism is typified by the bestselling book and DVD The Secret (Byrne, 2006;
Heriot, 2006), which teach the reader/viewer that ‘‘[y]our life right now is a reflection of
your thoughts. That includes all great things, and all the things you consider not so great. Since you attract to you what you
think about most, it is easy to see what your dominant thoughts have been on every subject of your life, because that is what you
experienced’’ (Byrne, 2006, p. 9). The ‘‘magical, neo-Protestant zeitgeist’’ typified by the raging success of The Secret (see McGee,
2007) indicates that enchantment is not limited to developing countries, but is also a crowning achievement of late capitalism in the
postindustrial world. Nor is magical thinking limited to popular culture. As a recent essay in this journal by Sonja K. Foss, William J.
Waters, and Bernard J. Armada (2007) demonstrates, magical thinking has some purchase in the field of communication studies
(see also Geisler, 2005; Villadsen, 2008).1 According to Foss, Waters, and Armada, human agency is simply a matter of
consciously choosing among differing interpretations of reality. We argue that the
understanding of agency
advanced by Foss, Waters, and Armada is informed by the same voluntarist ideology that
has enchanted The Secret’s millions of readers. Below we advance a conception of agency as an open
question in order to combat magical thinking in contemporary communication theory. Although we approach the concept of agency
from different theoretical standpoints (one of us from the perspective of psychoanalysis, the other, classicalMarxism), we
aremutually opposed to the (bourgeois) idealism of magical voluntarism in recent work in communication and rhetorical studies on
agency.2 Our primary vehicle of argument is a critique of Foss, Waters, and Armada’s essay, ‘‘Toward a Theory of Agentic
Orientation: Rhetoric and Agency in Run Lola Run,’’ which represents a magical-voluntaristic brand of practical reason (phronesis)
that is increasingly discredited among a number rhetorical scholars. We
are particularly alarmed by the
suggestion that even in ‘‘situations’’ such as ‘‘imprisonment or genocide . . . agents have
choices about how to perceive their conditions and their agency . . . [which] opens up
opportunities for innovating . . . in ways unavailable to those who construct themselves
as victims’’ (p. 33). The idea that one can choose an ‘‘agentic orientation’’ regardless of
context and despite material limitation not only ignores two decades of research within
the field of communication studies on agency and its limitations (and is thus
‘‘regressive’’ in more than one sense), but tacitly promotes a belief in wish-
fulfillment through visualization and the imagination, as well as a
commitment to radical individualism and autonomy. As a consequence,
embracing magical voluntarism leads to narcissistic complacency, regressive
infantilism, and elitist arrogance.
may establish authorial ¶ subjectivity as the new form of unassailable dogma, the new tale ¶ that wags our legal discourse.
The form of oppositional narratives reifies oppressive structures of
authority and privilege even when it challenges them. Rejecting the 1AC
creates a rupture that solves
Robson '97 Ruthann Robson, 1997, Professor of Law – City University of New York, 48
Hastings L.J. 1387, August, l/n
A second and related paradox is that the
oppositional stance of narrative may
not be oppositional at all. Barthes has famously stated that "narrative is international,
transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself." 136 Similarly, Hayden White has
stated that to even "raise the question of narrative itself is to invite reflection on the very nature
of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself." 137 By using narratives, we
often believe we are presenting a specific account as distinct from an abstract theory, but the
very structure of narrative may be undermining [*1413] its content, no matter how distinctive.
As Judith Roof argues, narrative "is a structural defense against a chaotic world" 138 and in its
attempt to impose order it may be more like a logical system than not. The beginning-middleend structure of narrative is the same structure employed in Enlightenment and modernist
pursuits of history, economics, science, and law. For example, one of Hegel's central notions
was that "history is the story of the development of human freedom." 139 This development is
inextricably bound to law and the formation of the nation-state, which in fact enables the
conditions for narrativity. As Robert Weisberg explicates Hegel's view: Only where there is law
can there be a subject or kind of event that lends itself to narrative, or a legal subject to serve as
the agent, agency, and subject of historical narrative. The urge to tell stories derives
either from a desire for national law and order or a desire to challenge
that law and order. . . . Hence, narrative deals with law, legality,
legitimacy, or more generally authority. The desire to narrate is the
desire to represent authority, whose legitimacy depends on
establishing certain grounding facts. 140 Such philosophizing, indeed all of
Hegel's philosophizing, typifies the grand narrative or metanarrative that postmodernism rejects.
141 Postmodernism's rejection, however, does not encompass "smaller" narratives, which are
often celebrated as a method to oppose scientific, abstract, or even legal systems. 142 Yet
these smaller narratives-by being narratives-replicate the structure of the grand narratives being
rejected, albeit on a smaller scale: my afternoon at a lesbian bar is substituted for the global
human struggle toward freedom. Yet even my small story of my afternoon at a lesbian bar
requires me to "emplot the events according to the principles informing the structures of
distinctive story types or genres." 143 This so-called [*1414] emplotment-structuring the events
with a beginning, middle, and end-will occur whether I later write the afternoon as a fictional
scene, whether I later "truthfully" narrate "what I did today" to my lover, or perhaps even as I
remain silent but simply understand/remember that specific afternoon at that specific bar. What I
am suggesting is that it may be the very act of emplotment, the narrativizing itself, that is
problematic, rather than simply the scale or subject of the narrative. Just as narrative seems
transhistorical, transcultural, and even "natural," so too does domination and subjection. What if
there is a link between the structures of narrative and the structures of domination? In other
words, what if a condition of lesbian emancipation is a state without a necessary end? Or as
Roof expresses it, a rejection of narrative may allow us to understand what
has always been there but which we have left uncounted because it did not
lead to "closure or production." 144 Or perhaps even more radical, what if the condition of
lesbian/queer emancipation is a state without any end? If "[e]very story is over
before it begins" because narratives "report a completed past they
cannot alter," 145 then lesbian/queer liberation in the here-and-now may demand a
rejection of narrative
Osajima is a Ruse of analogy.
Kim 13 (Hyo Kim, assistant professor of English at Medgar Evers College, City University of New York, PhD from Stony Brook University, Fall
2013, ““The Ruse of Analogy”: Blackness in Asian American and Disability Studies,” Penumbra: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Critical and
Creative Inquiry Volume 1)
What Stubblefield emphasizes is that disability as a social construct cannot easily be detached from its imbricated positioning within a network
of material forces that include not only race but sexuality, class, and gender. Her study foregrounds the need for Disability studies to attend to
racialization as not a tangential focus but central to its overall theoretical and political project. Interestingly Stubblefield’s study of how
disability can dispossess whites of their “full personhood” under U.S. law seemingly lends support to what “Dismodernism” authorizes, which is
the idea that the suffering of blacks can be made equivalent to not only what disabled whites come to embody but also to all those other
Others represented under the category of “people of color.” In short, disability has the potential to democratize civil society by recalling how all
citizens are common in their humanity―that is, equally exposed to disability. Yet, if we read between the lines of Stubblefield’s summary of
how “feebleminded whites” can become “tainted,” the singularity of “blackness’s grammar of suffering” emerges. For what
distinguishes “blackness grammar of suffering” is how it does not operate according to the
assumptive logic of capability. In other words, to approach “blackness’s grammar of suffering,” Wilderson insists that
one must be able to imagine “an ethicality … so terrifying that, as a space to be inhabited and terror to be embraced” (41), it
resists language. It is a “grammar of suffering” based not upon the logic of a “lost” capacity but that of
a deontologized property, the Slave that is not “exploited and alienated” but rather “accumulated and
fungible.” The effect of this singular grammar on Asian American and Disability studies is significant, but the
impact of Wilderson’s critique on the “scholarly and aesthetic production” of the “Black theorist” is radical by comparison. As he writes: This
[“blackness’s grammar suffering”] makes the labor of disavowal in Black scholarly and aesthetic production doubly burdensome, for it is
triggered by a dread of both being ‘discovered,’ and of discovering oneself, as ontological incapacity. Thus, through
borrowed
institutionality―the feigned capacity to be essentially exploited and alienated (rather than
accumulated and fungible) in the first ontological instance (in other words, a fantasy to be just like everyone else, which
is a fantasy to be)―the work of Black film theory [and by extension Black studies] operates through a myriad of compensatory gestures in
which the Black theorists assumes subjective capacity to be universal and thus ‘finds’ it everywhere. (42) Placed within the frame of
“blackness’s grammar of suffering,” I want to examine the consequences of Davis’s attempt to render disability cosmopolitan. While the move
has the virtual effect of equalizing all bodies around human capacity to suffer―such an ethical cum political strategy requires the disavowal of
how concepts such as “human” and “civil society” in the U.S. have structurally depended on the production of social death, i.e. the Black (and
the Red). As it should be obvious by now, what is therefore unthinkable
in Davis’s attempt to make civil society cohere
around the universality of human suffering is the contingent nature of the term human itself. This in fact is what
Bells intuits but cannot name in his influential essay entitled “Introducing White Disability Studies: A Modest Proposal.” Bell’s hesitation is
partly attributable to how pain or suffering is both social (that is communicable, sharable by all humans in equal measure) and incommunicable
within Disability studies. That is, Disability studies’ uneven attention to the incommunicability of suffering is seemingly capable of
accommodating the unrepresentability that is constituent of “blackness’s grammar of suffering.” As Siebers insists, “[i]ndividuality derived from
the incommunicability of pain easily enforces a myth of hyperindividuality, a sense that each individual is locked in solitary confinement where
suffering is the only object of contemplation. People with disabilities are already too politically isolated for this myth to be attractive” (176). Yet
in an attempt to intervene in the poststructuralist tendency to idealize “physical pain” as site of either transcendent power or pleasure, Siebers
also adds, “… [p]hysical pain is [at once] highly individualistic, unpredictable, and raw as reality. Pain is not a resource of political change. It is
not a well of delight for the individual” (178). What is directly pertinent to the present essay is how the universal figure of the “individual”human marks the critical horizon of Disability theory. Or, to put a finer point to it via Widerson’s reading of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White
Mask, “… the Negro … ‘is comparison,’ nothing more and certainly nothing less, for what is less than comparison? … [And as such] ‘No one
knows yet who [the Negro] is, but he knows that fear will fill the world when the world finds out’” (42). We
find in the most
sophisticated Asian Americanist deployment of poststructuralist strategies of reading―such as the one
advanced in the influential work by Kandice Chuh―a similar call to abandon politics based on social identity.6 While I
am in agreement with both Davis’s and Chuh’s overarching critique of uniform identity, I find troubling their
wholesale critique of all identity formation as a priori essentialist. For such framing of social identity as necessarily
restrictive can only lead to the return of the repressed in our present era of colorblindness―the ideal of abstract citizenship. As she
writes: “‘Asian American’ … connotes the violence, exclusion, dislocation, and disenfranchisement that has attended
the codification of certain bodies as variously, Oriental, yellow, sometimes brown, inscrutable, devious, always alien. It speaks to the active
denial of personhood to the individuals inhabiting those bodies” (Chuh 27). In this, Chuh―along with Davis and Siebers―unwittingly
announces the displacement and the erasure of “blackness’s grammar of suffering,” as their strategies
of reading the presence or absence of justice within U.S. civil society is predicated upon exploitation and alienation of the
a priori human subject. Nevertheless, by embodying the self―Disability studies helps to shift (though only slightly) critical theory toward an
alternative ethicality that does not programmatically endorse the idea and ideals of abstract citizenship. For contrary to the liberal model of the
political subject that achieves “hyperindividuality” through social and material detachment, the alternative model of subjectivity that is
afforded through the disabled body is a self that is always already in the process of negotiating complex relations to the materiality of the
social. Thus, the embodied model of subjectivity helps to re-imagine “personhood” as relation itself, leading not to the reification or
essentialization of self, this relational model of subjectivity demands that any identity whatsoever be thought not as autonomous substance but
rather as a site, comprising of unfinished, mobile, heterogeneously constituted relations across an embodied hermeneutic horizon. It bears
mentioning here that it is this interconnected and radically open vision of “personhood” as relation that is foreclosed in the liberal model of
abstract citizenship. For in the liberal model of the self, the ideal is to attain singular indeterminacy through the negation of such social
relations, without which no self can hope to attain intelligibility. As Alcoff’s important work suggests: Social identities … are more properly
understood as sites from which we perceive, act, and engage with others. These sites are not simply locations or positions, but also
hermeneutic horizons comprised of experiences, basic beliefs, and communal values […] . We are not boxed in by them, constrained, restricted,
or held captive―unless … it makes sense to say that we are boxed in by the fact that we have bodies . … (287) Interestingly it is by attending to
how the self is embodied and embedded in social reality that clarifies the radical singularity of the Black’s structural non-relationality, which in
turn helps to bring into focus not only what Wilderson calls the “structural antagonisms” that contour U.S. civil society but also unexplored
ethico-political limits and possibilities of sub-fields such as Disability and Asian American studies. For according to Wilderson’s Red, White &
Black what gives internal coherence to such terms as “human” and “civil society” in the U.S. is the disavowal of the structural (historical)
relation blacks have with what is essentially non-human, a form of social death known as slavery. As he summarizes: During
the
emergence of new ontological relations in the modern world, from the late Middle Ages through the 1500s, many
different kinds of people experienced slavery. … But African, or more precisely Blackness, refers to an
individual who is by definition always already void of relationality. Thus modernity marks the emergence of a new
ontology because it is an era in which an entire race appears, people who, a priori, that is prior to the contingency of the ‘transgressive act’
(such as losing a war or being convicted of a crime), stand as socially dead in relation to the rest of the world. (17-8) Wilderson’s intervention
therefore hinges on isolating and exposing this dual operation by which civil society makes sense of itself to itself―the simultaneous disavowal
the desire to make blackness an analogue of disability amounts
to denying the structural relevancy of slavery to the formation of U.S. civil society. Wilderson’s reading of
Fanon helps to articulate the radical singularity of “blackness’s grammar of suffering,” as it emphasizes how “… the gratuitous violence
of the Black’s first ontological instance, the Middle Passage, ‘wiped out [his or her] metaphysics … his [or her] customs
and sources on which they are based.’ Jews went into Auschwitz and came out as Jews. Africans went into the
ships and came out as Blacks” (38). What Wilderson calls the “blackness’s grammar of suffering,” consequently, has
no analogue in either the assumptive figure of the “individual” that subtends Disability studies and those other Others within U.S.
civil society that have become included within the frame known as “people of color.” In this, “blackness’s
of and parasitic dependency on the Black. In other words,
grammar of suffering” gestures toward what is unnamable, a form of suffering that is in excess of any ethical language which is based upon the
universal figure of the human. This is how Wilderson radically undermines the desire to transpose “blackness’s grammar of suffering” into the
ethico-political language upon which civil society’s depends to make suffering (physical, psychic or otherwise) intelligible. As he writes: The
ruse of analogy erroneously locates Blacks in the world―a place where they have not been since the
dawn of Blackness. This attempt to position the Black in the world by way of analogy is not only a
mystification, and often erasure, of Blackness’s grammar of suffering (accumulation and fungibility or the status of being
non-Human) but simultaneously also a provision for civil society, promising an enabling modality for Human ethical
dilemmas. It is a mystification and an erasure because … their grammars of suffering are irreconcilable. (37)
Resisting the Aryan myth is undergirded by the affective desire to push away from
blackness.
M. Shadee Malaklou, 2016, "On the Chronopolitics of Skin-ego: Antiblackness, Desire and Identification in Bravo TV's Shahs
of Sunset," Rhizomes Issue 29, http://www.rhizomes.net/issue29/pdf/malaklou.pdf
[22] But rather than diversify what it means to be Iranian or signal to young viewers that queer sexualities do, in fact, exist in Iranian
contexts (an argument premised on multiplicity), Reza's visibility functions to prescribe/proscribe how one should embody (as ego)
and make knowable to the world (as image) what it means to be Iranian and gay at the same time, as the effect of seemingly
contradicting sociocultural scripts. Reza's emergence as a gay TV icon effectively shifts how the signifiers "gay" and "Iranian"are read
together and take root or circulate in global mediascapes receptive to the "whites of our eyes."[73] Reading "gay"and "Iranian" as
compatible rather than opposed subject positions is a rhetorical move as well as a political one: it positions gay Iranians as the "us,"
and anti-gay, anti-American and ostensibly religiously devout Iranians as the "them" in a global imperialist project. The
momentary collapse of this hard line between "us" and "them," in which the body
politic sympathizes with rather than pathologizes difference, is a trap; just as soon as it
expands, the boundary simultaneously contracts to reveal Western modernity's
racialized limits of inclusion—what Sexton describes as an "increasing willingness to
expand the boundaries of whiteness...whose only conditional limitation is the
exclusion of racial blackness."[74] Coincidentally, nonblack persons of color redeem their
human value in a colorblind society by virtue of "'a negation of [their] own anxious ego[s]'"
as persons of color. [75] Their passing white privilege is activated by a color line that invites
racially distinct persons into the folds of liberal pluralism by entrenching racial
blackness as a structural antagonism.[76] [23] While black persons of color do not
move through time, nonblack persons of color can and do progressively (if
contingently) move towards the sexed and gendered modernity natally foreclosed
to them, but they cannot arrive at modern types. Reza seeks to prove himself as the right kind of modern or post-modern gay, I
argue, so as not to be perceived by viewers as "tagging along, socially, politically, and economically, tagging along behind the
West."[77] Queers of color and especially those who fail to communicate bourgeois values are doubly marked (from without and also
from within) in ways that invest the work of thinking race and the work of thinking sex with the same politics of time. When charged
with "gay rage," Reza laments, I wasn't just like a little Persian kid trying to fit in. I was a little Persian gay kid that had no roadmap
for a life or a future. There were no gay Persian role models. I had no one to look up to. I had no one to talk to (41:25).[78] [24] The
intersectional nexus that Reza experiences as a chronopolitical crisis invaginates him twice, positioning him as homosexual by
choice and indiscriminately pansexual by Orientalist birthright, and provokes defensive posturing in episode 5, "Fresh Off the Boat,"
when Reza meets Sasha, a flamboyantly gay Iranian neighbor who comfortably inhabits racial schemas.[79] [25] Reza's on-screen
identifications as a gay man constitute a strategic alignment in which he seeks to be known as something (anything) other than a
person of color, but what I describe is not the unique experience of Iranian-American subjectivization. An
Afropessimist
study of Iran might begin with the observation that the country's name is a
transliteration of the French aryen, identifying the state as a "land of Aryans;"[80] or with the charge that since its
birth Iranian nationalism has claimed ethnicitywithout-race. Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, a puppet monarch who held the title
Aryanmehr ("Light of the Aryans") on the throne (1941—1979), launched the "White Revolution" in 1963 to "save" Iranians from
racial schemas and Iran from social and political degeneracy. He imposed mandatory dress and hygiene codes, built public schools
and libraries, extended healthcare to rural communities, invited unveiled women to vote in elections,[81] and privatized industry to
create a resilient middle class of factory owners, to say nothing of the sweeping reforms Mohammad Reza Shah sought as part of a
land redistribution program engineered to gain favor with the Iranian peasantry. His father, Reza Shah (1925 —1941), was the first
Pahlavi monarch to
suggest white mimicry as a modernization strategy; in a geopolitical
maneuver characteristic of Gharbzadeghi, Reza Shah sent a letter to the League of Nations in 1935 requesting the mostly
European member states to formally recognize Persia as Iran. This move reclassified Persia in Western
discourse (the only discourse to circulate globally as knowledge) as an Aryan/Iranian
nation but did little to shift the racial alignments within Iran or among Iranians. Instead, name
change institutionalized the racism already in circulation—by the 1890s, nationalists had traced
the origins of the Persian people to an Aryan bloodline[82] —remaking national identifications in a modern vernacular receptive to
Hitler's race war.
Their emphasis on race relations based on cultural exceptionalism obscures the
black/nonblack divide necessary to understand south Asian geopolitics.
Parisa Vaziri, December 2016: “Windridden: Historical Oblivion and the Nonvalue of Nonidentification”, in “Liquid Blackness” Volume 3,
Issue 6. http://liquidblackness.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/LB6-FINAL.pdf
The illustration of the ethnographic scene illuminates a recoiling from self-coherence grounded in the
experience of Indian Ocean world slavery and which contributes to deconstructing our modernday
understanding of race. This understanding, Denise Ferreira da Silva has recently shown, and as I will interpret below, is predicated
upon a philosophical alignment between interiority and historicity that braces the self-possessed subject.4 At the same time, zar’s connection
to slavery limits possibilities for the appraisal of its disruption to this alignment shoring up the subject. Distinct from any philosophical
understanding of race, blackness
defies the containment or relegation of slavery to history, as it questions
slavery’s restriction to spatio-temporal categories more generally. Under such conditions, alignment appears too
measured a configuration to account for the ways slavery exceeds expectations for historical return and memory. Sā‘idī was a self-avowed
amateur ethnographer. Not only was he untrained in the standardized protocols of anthropology—an institution that barely existed in Iran as a
disciplinary formation in the first place—but his vibrant career as a fiction writer renders even further spurious the truth-value of his text. I am
not particularly invested in that truth-value; rather, I am interested in this particular moment of strange vocal eruption as a tool for the
imagination, one which renders blackness as a kind of ambivalent displacement from place and time to be figured neither negatively nor
positively, if it can be figured at all. Katherine McKittrick writes about the complex connection between racial captivity and geography, implying
blackness always connotes a form of displacement—a spatial disjuncture that “surprises”
geographical expectation and fact.5 Writing of the relation between blackness and temporality, Hortense
Spillers poignantly articulates the historical stillness of racial captivity—a ruptured stagnancy sundering
blackness from the empty temporal flow of the human, ceaselessly sucking it back toward the violent
placidity of the past.6 This moment of wind identification speaks to an alternative relation to space and time
conditioned by the power and enigma of sensory perception: a kind of torpor of memory whose meaning remains
difficult to fully absorb, and whose judgment sits suspended. The diffusion of zar from continental Africa into the lands
of the Middle East and Mediterranean is more or less unanimously assumed to be linked to the Indian
Ocean slave trade, even while the narrative fabric of this history remains lined with irreparable holes
and frayed at each layer of fact.7 A lack of historical evidence for the existence of the zar ritual in the Middle East prior to the midnineteenth century is usually cited as primary justification for belief in its connection to African slavery (which thrived during that century), as is
the fact that the practice is often contained within cult-like environments, unlike the more publicoriented characteristics of spirit rituals in
many African territories. For Ehud Toledano, the
degree to which former slaves in the Ottoman empire were able
to maintain such traditions despite contempt and forceful prohibition by Ottoman officials and the
interdictions of Islam problematizes the popular “good treatment” thesis of Islamic slavery . Toledano
argues, rather, that the refusal to integrate evidences the hostility of an environment from which slaves sought respite through traditional
healing and community-building techniques.8 Anthropological
artifacts like the zar ritual, then, remain significant
for Indian Ocean world slavery scholars, who lack the robust and meticulously cataloged
documentation so crucial to compiling the vast knowledge we currently have about Atlantic world
slavery. This notorious paucity of information, however, is itself a critical question to history, rather than a poor answer to questions from
history. Zar and its barely legible relationship to the history of African slavery infuses the lack with courage to dream outside the demands of
normative historical fact. Historical
fact, even and perhaps when plentiful, as Spillers reminds students of Atlantic history, is
predetermined by the assumptions that are capable of thinking questions into existence in the first
instance.9 Precisely how Indian Ocean world slavery fits into the history of blackness remains unresolved. W. E. B. Dubois
characterized continental Africa as a bridge between the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, not only in
geographical but also economic and philosophical terms, indexing black thought’s early engagement
with this parallel space and antecedent chronology.10 Prior to the radical break Atlantic slavery introduced into
Africa’s history, the virtually singular external influence on the cultural and political economy of this continent came from
the Islamic world in the Middle East.11 That transatlantic slavery could not have flourished without its
exposure to the use, cultivation, and manufacture of sugar in Syria and Palestine during the Crusades is often unwittingly
redacted from the popular history of African slavery, rendering contestable the depiction of a “break” introduced by the
European reorientation of the trade, in contrast, for example, to the characterization of continuity.12 The millenia-long trade in
African slaves throughout the Indian Ocean only reinforces black studies’ highly complex engagement
with the concepts of temporality and duration. By introducing horizonless depth in time, this extension intervenes in the
exhausting quest for origin’s retrieval.13 If our conception of racial blackness is cultivated within and throughout
the nexus of Atlantic slavery and modernity’s material and epistemological manifestations, including the philosophical
enshrinement of historicity as the human’s “privileged ontological context,” a counterintuitive
thought arises: the black experience of forgetting, or nonidentification with history in the Indian
Ocean world, destabilizes the narrative of the racialization of blackness as it destabilizes our concept
of the human more generally.14 But if the possibilities for such nonidentification are circumscribed by that which is disclaimed, can
there be value in focusing on this quasi-fictional moment of destabilization? From what ground would it be possible to determine such value?
The Persian Gulf, and the south of Iran in particular, teems with various histories channeled through ethnic
identification: Ethiopian, Arab, Hindi, Baluchi, Kurdish, Persian, Zanzibari,
Somalian, etc. Having “‘long since forgotten to what tribes their ancestors belonged,’ a factor no
longer of any consequence,” claims Abdul Sheriff, most of these populations have intermixed to prismatic
degrees.15 Were one to ignore its non-linguistic manifestations, then on a purely empirical level, one could thus reduce
the instance of zar “glossolalia” to mere assimilation, or unconscious absorption, particularly
considering the various linguistic ingredients constituting the patois dialects spoken in the Khalij.
Idealizing such forms of assimilation would be a disingenuous perpetuation of the notion of “Indian
Ocean cosmopolitanism” that unwittingly succeeds in enshrouding perception of historical violence in
the “postcolonial” world—violence that is not in every instance derivative of colonialism as
postcolonial theory has historically understood it.16 Aware of the threat of idealization my curiosity poses, I highlight this
micro-moment of unpredictable sound and quasi-speech embedded in zar as a kind of organic, ephemeral historical trace presumably
unfiltered through intention. It is a moment in which history—perhaps someone else’s history of displacement—erupts through unpossessed
speech, and is left there, shared in a moment of surrender. Finally, I am interested less in the persistence of that historical trace, or of its
“deeper” nuances, than in the possible meanings of nonidentification or nonrelation to it. Nonidentification and disavowal of roots—specifically
of African roots—is a cause for unease amongst Indian Ocean world scholars, particularly those concerned with the parochial question of
“diaspora.” African slave descendants’ reluctance to associate with their African roots is indeed documented throughout the countries of the
Middle East and has been interpreted variously. Consensus assumes that because slaves
were encouraged to assimilate into
Middle Eastern and Eurasian societies much more assiduously than was the case in the Americas,
these individuals gradually forfeited direct connection with their familial and regional ties.17 The socalled “ascending miscegenation” thesis, argue scholars of slavery in Southeast
Asia, for example, is one of the greatest causes of cultural amnesia of slavery in
India.18 Providing a more discerning interpretation, Anie Montigny views the
situation in Oman as a result of negative images of Africa in the media and in
general society.19 And, adding to this view, Mathew Hopper notes nothing is
“gained” by highlighting one’s servile past in Eastern Arabia; thus, African ancestry is
very often intentionally and strategically obscured.20 The desire to disassociate or distance
oneself from blackness is a dominant and familiar theme for black studies.21 While
intentional dissociation is a valid and possibly sound interpretation of the rampant denegation, I would like to tap into a different course of
thought not conditioned by the notion of rejection, which already presupposes the naturalization of an unmediated intimacy between
interiority, on the one hand, and historicity, on the other. This tranquil bond is the condition of possibility for a certain conceptualization of
identity, perhaps the most prominent and widespread of modern civilization: a self or subject with a history that, from a sociopolitical
standpoint, is first and foremost linked to geography, or in the case of black people, of a displacement that is, of course, first conditioned by
expectation for placement. The question I want to ask, instead, is why we must begin with this expectation and assumption in the first place.
Instead, the alternative is TIDALECTICAL MATERIALISM – a historical rereading
of the affirmative from the hold of the slave ship that mourns the death of the
African and sits with black scholarship to acknowledge its fungibility – only
uniform solidarity around the ontological position of the slave can create black
social life within social death.
T. Mars McDougall, December 2016: “The Water is Waiting: Water Tidalectics, and Materiality”, in “Liquid Blackness”
Volume 3, Issue 6. http://liquidblackness.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/LB6-FINAL.pdf
Hortense Spillers writes, “African
persons in the ‘Middle Passage’ were literally suspended
in the ‘oceanic.’”17 Indeed, it is the contention of this essay that persons of African descent have
never stopped being suspended in the oceanic. The Middle Passage, rather than
haunting us, is still open (perhaps not to the trade of slaves, but to the flows of
capital, certainly), with water flowing forth in a constant, violent rush. While this
cyclic rush of water may initially appear as only a metaphorical representation of
the back-and-forth flow of Brathwaite’s tidalectic, it in fact can do more. In the final and
critical instance, it offers a way of directly addressing the various ways the opening of the oceanic chasm that is the Middle Passage
continues to live in the present.18 It is a layering of time, of worlds, of recordings, Water Waiting 58 liquid
blackness : volume three, issue six “The Middle Passage, rather than haunting us, is still open...with water flowing forth in a
constant, violent rush.” a “trans-oceanic movement-instasis.”19 While Brathwaite’s geopoetic tidalectics are primarily about islands,
specifically the Caribbean, they can and should be extended beyond these terms. Tidalectics
can apply to the tripolar spaces of the Atlantic Slave Trade in its present nation-state configurations.
Like a dialectical progression held in irreconcilable tension, tidalectics resist the Hegelian telos of progress through the negation of
negation only to arrive at a final synthesis.20 Black
matter is unambiguously present in the
tidalectical relation, as foundational ideologies, policies, and systems “weave
together, reshape, separate, flow back, and come forward again.”21 These ideas make
themselves known in the present, and inscribe themselves onto bodies and into lives, with material consequences. Responding to
Mark Fisher, it
is tidalectics, not hauntology, that can signal lives and bodies “stained by time,
where time can only be experienced as a broken fatal repetition.”22 Hauntology, while it can
be useful in talking of the psychic effects of broken and repeating temporalities, fails when it is called upon to account for the
material effects of the past in the present. While the
present is indeed “stained,” as hauntology maintains, it is not so
much by a ghostly presence, but by an ongoing process of drawing material and flesh into a
drowning cycle, crushing the black body. Black matter gets caught in the
irresistible strength of a tidal pull, Water Waiting 59 Figure 3. Lori Dell, Shaman’s Smoke, 2015, Mixed media
on canvas, 60x48in, Courtesy of Lori Dell. liquid blackness : volume three, issue six either settling on the alluvial floor as a sea tangle
or floating to the surface as a dead thing.23 The tides are never precisely the same, but the fact of their repetition is. They turn and
return, not perfectly cyclical, but with an accumulation of time, of material, and of water. In Lori Dell’s Shaman’s Smoke, the black
body is caught under the movement of the tides— present but worked over by the force of these historical waters (Figure 3).
Tidalectical materialism can be deployed as a historiographical and methodological tool that speaks to the failure of a conception of
an uncomplicated present when it comes to discussing and addressing the lasting and material effects of the Slave Trade. It
introduces a relation not only of sea and land, root and route, but also of capital and power to material blackness in a present still
stained by the Middle Passage, its epistemic schema, and the ontologies functions of the structure itself. The
vestiges of
slave patrols and laws protecting the murderers and brutalizers of black bodies
are not mere ghostly reminders, neither ambiguous nor immaterial. Moreover, the
wounded, dead, or mourning black body is not just haunted; it is crushed by
violence and its legitimation. The re-combinations of past structures and
institutions fill up the present. Like the waters of the tides, these structures crush
black bodies in the sweep of their violent movement. Blackness and black lives occupy a unique
position in this reading of the present. We are caught in the water of the tides as they flow and crush, create and destroy the social
seascape.25 Blackness is tangled in this liquid relation. Like water, it cycles, flows, and washes, while also carrying with it the
destructive force of hurricanes, flash floods, and riptides. It cleanses and purifies, putrefies and rots. Water here functions as a
metaphor for the action of tidalectics, with its own materiality, flow, and crush. Tidalectical materialism grants the psychic
experience of slavery as accurately described through the language of hauntology, but it also, and importantly, acknowledges how
this legacy affects so much more than psychic life. This essay has intended to mobilize a way of conceiving this experience that is
capable of addressing the question of a mechanism of social death that comes to life (and death) in the material world. In this
configuration, social death occurs through the figure of drowning, as the presence of the past works itself out materially. Working
through Édouard Glissant’s poetics of relation, Baucom writes, “The
slave trade refuses to detach itself
from slavery itself, nor the slave ship from the plantation, nor the plantation from
the ghetto and the Water Waiting flowing from it. The tidalectic “advances a notion of overlap and
repetition” to communicate the ways ideas and images combine and recombine continually, and the ways in which these recombinations—in which residues of the past include “eras wash[ing] over eras”—do not improve upon the past so much as demand a
rethinking of it.24 Tidalectical
materialism acknowledges that which lies outside of black
lives, yet continues to press down upon them. Even beyond acknowledgement, this
outside conceptual space—of the nation-state and its institutional and economic
frameworks—constitutes the tidalectical relation. For example, the tidalectical relation
demonstrates itself at work when we are confronted by black death and brutality
at the hands of police, and the failure of the state to indict, which further
legitimizes and entrenches the shantytown.”26 The “refusal to detach” plays into
the social death of the black body and is part of this ongoing tidalectic action—the
back and forth, present and past, entangled, overlapping, fatally attached. Finally, as
tidalectics is an obvious troubling of Hegelian dialectics, tidalectical materialism is an equally obvious critique of Marxist dialectical
materialism. Frank Wilderson has noted how the political project Water Waiting “The
march of history means
nothing underwater.”
We must be able to struggle against our identity it is a point of departure that must
expose the grammar of suffering that necessitates the ruse of the Human. The antipolitical program of the black must be a starting point for our analysis.
Aarons 2016 (K., Researcher in philosophy, “NO SELVES TO ABOLISH: AFROPESSIMISM, ANTI-POLITICS AND THE
END OF THE WORLD,” March 1, article first published in Hostisvol 2, http://anarchistnews.org/content/no-selves-abolishafropessimism-anti-politics-and-end-world
We might do well to ask whether, from an afropessimist point of view, insurrectional anarchism, queer theory and communisation
theory remain ‘humanist negations of the Human’? If so, is this necessarily so? My hypothesis is this: to the extent that they can
self-abolition. That is, to the extent that struggles actively
refuse to validate, affirm, or strengthen the forms of subjectivity presently produced
under capitalism, white supremacy and cis-sexist patriarchy, these struggles can be potentially aligned with – or at least, less
likely to stomp all over – the Black struggle against its own objecthood. [17]
Self-abolition therefore constitutes the only possible horizon for a non-Black struggle that
does not reinforce anti-Blackness. This leads to what might be characterised as a negative
identity politics. [18] Put differently, when read through an afropessimist logic (as I
understand it), what is vital in the queer, anarchist or communist tendencies
toward self-abolition is generally not their theorisation of race, which often remains unsatisfactory, [19] but their
tendency to locate the means and aims of revolutionary struggle in the
immediate self-abolition of and by their respectively oppressed group per se. Though this may take its point of
escape this, it is in the direction of a thought of
departure from a grammar of suffering marked by the exploitation of variable capital, or the marginalisation of one’s queer identity,
both of which constitute ‘Human grammars’ on Wilderson’s reading, by refusing to regard the plenitude of existing subjectivity
avoid
recomposing the human community around this same grammar and community, thereby opening
up the possibility for an overlap with the struggle against White supremacy
from other directions. Since it draws its affective coordinates not from Black
suffering (analogy) but from a disidentification with the human community
emerging from the position in which it occupies, self-abolition remains a
regulative idea rather than an actionable maxim. The role of it as an idea is to confer a sort of
negative coherency on empirical acts. Again, that this must be ideational rather than
empirically empathic is necessitated by the ‘ruse of analogy’, i.e. the fact that Black suffering cannot
appear phenomenally to non-Black bodies except on condition of being
‘structurally adjusted’ to non-Black grammars. Hence there is only an indirect or ideational
liaison between these paradigms, i.e. between the self-abolitionism of non-Black life and the anti-political
program of the slave that Wilderson (drawing from Césaire) distils into the phrase: ‘the end of the world’. As distinct
ideas, self-abolition and the end of the world are not synthetic or integral. Instead, they are perhaps best conceived of as
parallel vectors, parallel precisely insofar as their potential crossing constitutes a
presently unthinkable vanishing point in socio-historical conjuncture.
(labour power, or the marginalised subjectivity of queers, etc.) [20] as in need of affirmation, they at least potentially
The Role of the Judge and Ballot is to surrender to blackness. This imperative marks the only possible
revolutionary praxis. You do not have the jurisdiction to evaluate their scholarship
because it does not centralize antiblackness.
Brady and Murillo 2014 [Nicholas and John, “Black Imperative: A Forum on Solidarity in the Age of Coalition,”
January 26, 2014, http://outofnowhereblog.wordpress.com/2014/01/26/black-imperative-a-forum-on-solidarity-in-the-age-ofcoalition/, John Murillo III is a PhD student in the English department at Brown University, and a graduate of the University of
California, Irvine, with bachelor’s degrees in Cognitive Science and English. His research interests are broad, and include extensive
engagements with and within: Black Studies–particularly Afro-Pessimism–Narrative Theory; Theoretical Physics; Astrophysics;
Cosmology; and Neuroscience. Nicholas Brady is an activist-scholar from Baltimore, Maryland. He was also a recent graduate of
Johns Hopkins with a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and currently a doctoral student at the University of California-Irvine Culture
and Theory program. ]
“Surrender to blackness.” A grammatical imperative. Grammatical because
syntactically it marks a command to or demand of a generalized addressee: “(Everyone)
surrender to blackness.” Grammatical because the black flesh scarred and tattooed by these
illegible hieroglyphics enunciates at the level of symbolic and ontological world orders:
“Surrender to blackness” is a command at the level of the foundations of thought
and being themselves; grammatical. Imperative because if there is any hope for a
revolutionary praxis along any lines—race, class, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability—it
must centralize, which is to say look in the face of, which is to say begin to the work of real love for, the blackness
[preposition] which “an authentic upheaval might be born.” #BlackPowerYellowPeril failed to recognize
this imperative as legible, let alone heed and meet its command/demand. Created by Suey Park (@suey_park), the hashtag sought to
draw from and build upon the accomplishments of Black womyn activists on twitter and tumblr who have long mobilized to generate
productive and revolutionary interjections into the world’s violently antiblack discourses (see, for example,
#solidarityisforwhitewomen, and #blackmaleprivilege) through extended, communal commentary, usually in direct opposition to
the censoring strictures of any kind of respectability politics. Discussions about and within the hashtag can be found here, here, here,
here(though this is very hasty, a bit shortsighted, and still not doing much more than glancing at, as opposed to engaging blackness),
and here. But broadly, the intentions of the hashtag are founded upon a belief in the possibility of solidarity/coalition politics
between Blacks and Asians, seeking to challenge persistent “tensions” between the communities for the sake of a common struggle
against ‘white supremacy.’ For those nonblack
participants, the drive toward solidarity represents a
purely innocent and unquestioned, unquestionable, desire. All critiques of Asian antiblackness
are rendered as derailing the move toward solidarity, for they are to bring up the obvious – clearly we are all
human, we make mistakes, but to continuously bring up the “mistakes” and never “move on”
is to foreclose the possibility of solidarity. And what a wonderful thing the blacks of the conversation were
foreclosing – this solidarity thing. What a wonderful thing others were offering to us and we simply would not take. And yet, the
unthought question remains: have you truly earned the right to act in solidarity, to
form solidarity, to even believe in solidarity? And what is this solidarity thing we all hold near and dear to our hearts? Have we ever
experienced it or do we simply have images we have transformed into memories of a solidarity that never existed? I know Black
people and Asian people have worked together in the past, but have we ever formed a solid whole? And who is to blame for the fact
that we have never had solidarity? The hashtag implies that both “sides” play an equal part in the failure to form solidarity. In the
face of this, confessing our sins to each other forms the moment where we can form emotional bonds: “see, you were as racist as I,
and how unfortunate it is that we let old whitey come between us. Never again will whitey make us part.” This
is the logic
behind much of the Asian confessing – white supremacy duped us into being
antiblack racists – and also fed into the backlash aimed at blacks – “stop playing
oppression olympics, that’s what whitey wants.” It must be foregrounded here that
antiblackness cannot be simplified as “anti-black racism” and it is a singularity with no equivalent
force – “anti-Asian” racism is not the flipside of antiblackness nor is orientalism
or islamophobia. Antiblackness predates white supremacy by at least 300 years (and
much more than that depending on how we trace our history) and we can understand antiblackness as the
general tethering of the very concept of life to the ontological and unspeakable,
unthinkable force of black death. That statement is a place to begin to define antiblackness, it is not the end for
this force weaves itself in infinite variety throughout all corners of the globe, forming globe into world. This is not simply about the
little racist microaggressions that people listed in their tweets, this is about a global force that the world – not simply whites – bond
over and form their lives inside of and through. What #BlackPowerYellowPeril revealed, however, is that the
underside of
coalition politics remains a violent and virulent antiblackness. As blacks— John Murillo
III (@writedarkmatter), New Black School (@newblackschool), Nicholas Brady (@nubluez_nick), and others—raised questions
and comments in the spirit of that singular imperative—“Surrender to blackness”—
antiblackness emerged in the violence of the response levied against it; one need only visit the hashtag to bear witness.
From outright refusals to engage the antiblackness central to the histories and
politics of nonblack communities of color, to denials of the foundational, global,
and singular nature of antiblackness, and to the repeated calls to police and remove this disruptive blackness
and its imperative from the conversation, antiblackness exploded onto the scene. All of this in the
name of “coalition.” This is because “coalition” politics and possibilities are fetishized, not loved.
The fetish denies the necessary recognition of antiblackness at coalition’s heart , and
that antiblackness left unattended renders the imperative illegible. It is a fetishization, then, of antiblackness. The fetish object
at the heart of the coalition has always been black flesh – a fetishization where pleasure and terror
meet to create the bonds of solidarity people so desire. Here, we open a forum on how the hashtag
embodies this fetish, the distinction between fetish and love that must be made in excess of the hashtag and ones
like it, and the absolute imperativeness of the imperative. Instead of fetishizing the
object, you must surrender to blackness.
Antiblackness determines the scope of racism and colorism in South Asian
communities-BG 17
(Brown Girl Magazine, 4-6-17, Addressing South Asian Anti-Blackness: The Attacks on
Africans in India, https://www.browngirlmagazine.com/2017/04/addressing-antiblackness-attacks-india/, JKS)
Priya: This chat was born of a distress I felt at seeing the video of the Nigerian students being brutally beaten in Delhi. What was your reaction to this
incident/video? What did it bring up for you? Natasha: I was thoroughly disgusted but not surprised by this incident. India
has such a
deep-rooted history of anti-blackness, which is projected onto both individuals of
African descent and dark-skinned Indians. Anytime an incident like this takes place, I am not only ashamed by the
prevalence of bigotry in the Indian community, but I am also reminded of how far we have to go when it comes to achieving social equality. Priya: Side
note, speaking of video—this, for me, was as disturbing as the violence perpetrated by cops in America towards black men. What does the capturing
(and circulating) of videos after the fact do in instances like this? Five men in India were arrested for this particular attack; is this justice done by
publicization of the video? Sruveera: Whenever I see graphic images or videos chosen for the purpose of sensationalization, my first reaction is one of
scorn toward the media for circulating it and not having betterjudgment. Examples include the dead body of Aylan Kurdi, the little Syrian Boy escaping
from war-torn Syria, as well as the graphic videos of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and many other black and brown bodies who are victims of police
brutality. I think to myself—these individuals have families and people who care about them. Additionally, many viewers might have gone through
similar traumatic circumstances. Is circulating these graphic images and videos the most responsible way to spread awareness? Can we treat these
individuals with more dignity after their passing? In my opinion, we shouldn’t need violent images to spark outrage, our humanity should suffice. In an
ideal world, we shouldn’t need public outrage to expedite the justice process, but I’d be naive if I denied its effectiveness. We have to acknowledge that
these graphic images are powerful and can stir a visceral and emotional response but I think we need to do better and demand justice without needing
the click bait. Natasha: I find it disappointing that it takes people seeing violent images to recognize that a problem exists. It shouldn’t take
videos/images of attacks on minorities, whether it is in the form of racialized police brutality or attacks like this one in India, for people to wake up. If
people were to step outside their own bubbles, demonstrate genuine concern for the plight of others and take the time to listen to experiences outside of
their own, perhaps we would be able to progress as a society. Priya: We’ve talked among the staff about solidarity between South Asian (SA)
communities and movements like Black Lives Matter. What
is our role as SA advocates/activists? How do
we show solidarity without minimizing the experiences of our communities and/or
other marginalized communities? Maryam: I think a fundamental part as advocates/activists is to listen. Often, SA
communities get caught up in thinking about ourselves as people of color only, but
when it comes to discussing anti-blackness, I think we need to consider ourselves
‘non-black people of color.’ We may understand how racism works for us, but we
do not understand, in the slightest, what it is to be black. It’s difficult to be called
out for being racist as a person of color, but we need to be better about this. Black
students being beaten up in South Asia is far too common – and we see the ways in
which colorism and anti-blackness cohere together to create a hostile environment
for black people in our countries. We need to get better at being criticized by black people for not standing up, we need to
get better at talking to our own families and friends about what anti-blackness looks like, and the ways in which we are complicit in it. We need
to recognize our own position in anti-racism and use it to shut up when we need to,
speak up in defense of black people when we need to, and question each other
when we need to.
It’s necessary to forefront the uniqueness of antiblackness- any permutation or
attempt to explain South Asian colorism as parallel to antiblackness only coopts
the position of black people
Balram 18
(Dhruva Balram is an Indian-Canadian freelance journalist exploring interests in pop
culture, music, communities, societal issues, and South Asian identity, Dhruva is currently
based in London, UK. "Anti-blackness in South Asian communities – how do we break the
cycle?," Media Diversified, https://mediadiversified.org/2018/12/14/anti-blackness-insouth-asian-communities-how-do-we-break-the-cycle/, JKS)
Historically, one’s caste or social class is closely identified with skin colour. Brahmins, at the
top of the social hierarchy in the caste system, were traditionally fair while lower castes had darker complexions. Sweeping
generalisations of colour still being associated with caste [or class] is entrenched in the minds of the elderly, passed through
generations and seeps into the psyche. Companies seeking a profit in a vulnerable market decided to take advantage of these
insecurities. With a staggering 50-70 per cent share of the market in India, with the total market valued at over $200m USD, Fair
and Lovely is the highest selling skin whitening cream in India. Colourism is a form of racism. It affects people’s livelihoods daily
whether through employment prospects, potential marriage partners or abusive treatment by family members and friends. For the
diaspora, the mass of South Asian immigrants that have found themselves stretched out across the world, the closer you are to the
default – whiteness – the easier it is to assimilate into the default which, in the long-term, means success. “This
aspiration
towards fairness – whether in behaviour or actual bleaching of skin – drives
people towards a conditioned reading of bodies. This erases dark-skinned bodies,
creating an anti-Blackness mentality within the community.” In recent years, global superstar
Priyanka Chopra has made her mark in Hollywood. She talks about being “too ethnic” in America, but leaves behind a trail of using
her class and upper-caste privilege to step on others to enter stardom. She’s made a career of selling skin whitening creams; of
promoting the ideology of white is right and to be dark is bad. The fairness of one’s skin in India has long been associated with
success. Hundreds of online matrimonial profiles cite the fairness of one’s skin as a highly regarded prospect. It is ranked higher
than a university degree or professional status on potential brides’ profiles. This aspiration towards fairness – whether in behaviour
or actual bleaching of skin – drives people towards a conditioned reading of bodies. This erases dark-skinned bodies, creating an
anti-Blackness mentality within the community. This
conditioned belief is visible in the way our
community interacts with Black people; anti-Blackness works in a number of
painful ways. Though we may exist in tandem with Black people as being “othered”
in the white-hierarchal race ladder, we are not Black. Nor do we share the same
experiences or traumas as Black folk in a Western context. Yet, we will co-opt and
exploit Black culture for our own benefit – a theme that moves like an underlying
current through our daily actions.
Proven by modern South Asia – South Asian studies has an imperative to prioritize
their own antiblackness before focusing on themselves.
Sanjana Lakshmi, 4-6-2017, "South Asians, It’s Time to Call Out Our Antiblackness," Wear Your Voice,
https://wearyourvoicemag.com/identities/race/south-asians-antiblackness
Last week, my
Facebook newsfeed was filled with denunciations of the brutal attacks
by Indians against Nigerian students in Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh. But there
weren’t enough denunciations — just as there aren’t enough South Asians
confronting the anti-blackness that is inherent within our community. Four Nigerian
students were beaten with sticks after being accused of cannibalism and funneling
drugs to a 17-year-old Indian boy who died the weekend before the attacks. Accusing these
students of cannibalism is racist — it plays into the harmful stereotype of Africans as
uncivilized. The Association of African Students in India (AASI) told Africans in the
country to stay indoors last week, as they feared for their lives. The attacks last week
were not an isolated incident. Africans in India have been beaten and harassed by
Indians multiple times. On May 20, 2016, Masunda Kitada Oliver, a Congolese national, was brutally killed in south
Delhi. In March 2015, four Africans were allegedly attacked by a mob in Bangalore. African students report that they
have been told to “get out of the country,” to “go back home,” and called by various
racist names. When similar xenophobic remarks are made to Indians in the United
States, as in the recent shooting in Kansas against Srinivas Kuchibotla, India is quick to come out with
statements about the harmful nature of these racist attacks. However, when
attacks against Africans occur in India, the External Affairs Minister states that “it
is unfortunate that a criminal act triggered following the untimely death of a young
Indian student under suspicious circumstances has been termed as xenophobic
and racial.” It is not “unfortunate” that this attack was called xenophobic and
racial — it is the truth. If we fail to even acknowledge our racism, how will we even begin to confront and unlearn it?
Antiblackness shows up in the South Asian community in more ways than physical
attacks against Africans in the subcontinent. Parents tell their children to stay
inside — lest they spend too much time in the sun and grow darker. India alone has
a multi-billion dollar skin-whitening industry. When we value lighter-skinned people
more than darker-skinned people, that is antiblackness manifesting itself within
our communities. I know South Asians who were afraid for me when I told them I was moving to
Chicago for college, because there is a high population of Black folks here. This is racism; this is
antiblackness. South Asians, especially in the United States, also play into the “model minority”
myth in an attempt to reach whiteness. The myth is built on a foundation of antiblackness: it points to
minorities like South Asians in the United States and claims that because this minority is
doing well academically and economically, they must be better off than Black folks, who have higher
rates of poverty and less academic success. This myth ignores the large population of undocumented South Asians; it ignores
working-class South Asians; it ignores all of those South Asians who do not fit into the stereotype of the
academically and economically successful Asian. And it allows South Asians to internalize the belief
that we are better than Black folks. The model minority myth and the obsession
with skin-lightening in the South Asian community are not a different problem
than the attacks against Africans in the subcontinent. All of these things are rooted
in the antiblackness that is so prevalent within South Asian communities. South Asians
need to start taking this seriously. We need to confront our family members and friends when they make antiblack comments. We
need to tell them it’s not right to make derogatory comments about darker members of the family and community. We need to tell
them that they have no reason to fear Black folks just for being Black. And we need to make sure that our community calls out racism
for what it is, both in the U.S. and in the subcontinent. The attacks last week were racist and xenophobic. The students were attacked
because Indians believed that they were cannibals and drug-peddlers. This is racist. We
need to acknowledge that
— and we need to change it.
7. Autobiography DA: Trading autobiographical narrative for the
ballot commodifies one’s identity and has limited impact on the culture that one
attempt’s to reform – when autobiographical narrative “wins,” it subverts its own
most radical intentions by becoming an exemplar of the very culture under
indictment
Using the term "Asian" ignores and essentializes cultural, social, and economic
differences
Lowe 91 — Lisa Lowe, Ph.D. Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz¶ B.A. History, Stanford
University, 1991 ("‘‘Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences.’’¶
Diaspora 1," Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, Available Online at
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dsp/summary/v001/1.1.lowe.html, Accessed 04-01-15)
I begin my article with these particular examples drawn from Asian American cultural texts in order to
observe that what is referred to as ‘‘Asian America’’ is clearly a heterogeneous entity. From the
perspective of the majority culture, Asian Americans may very well be constructed as
different from, and other than, Euro-Americans. But from the perspectives of Asian
Americans, we are perhaps even more different, more diverse, among ourselves: being men and
women at different distances and generations from our ‘‘original’’ Asian cultures –
cultures as different as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Indian, and Vietnamese – Asian
Americans are born in the United States and born in Asia; of exclusively Asian parents
and of mixed race; urban and rural; refugee and nonrefugee; communist-identified
and anticommunist; fluent in English and non-English speaking; educated and working
class. As with other diasporas in the United States, the Asian immigrant collectivity is
unstable and changeable, with its cohesion complicated by intergenrationality, by
various degrees of identification and relation to a ‘‘homeland,’’ and by different
extents of assimilation to and distinction from ‘‘majority culture’’ in the United States.
Further, the historical contexts of particular waves of immigration within single groups contrast with one
another; the Japanese-Americans who were interned during World War II encountered quite different
social and economic barriers than those from Japan who arrive in southern California today. And the
composition of different waves of immigrants differs in gender, class, and region. For
example, the first groups of Chinese immigrants to the United States in 1850 were
from four villages in Canton province, male by a ratio of 10 to 1, and largely of peasant
backgrounds; the more recent Chinese immigrants are from Hong Kong, Taiwan, or the
People’s Republic (themselves quite heterogeneous and of discontinuous ‘‘origins’’),
or from the Chinese diaspora in other parts of Asia, such as Macao, Malaysia, or
Singapore, and they are more often educated and middleclass men and women. 5
Further, once arriving in the United States, very few Asian immigrant cultures remain discrete,
inpenetrable communities. The more recent groups mix, in varying degrees, with segments
of the existing groups; Asian Americans may intermarry with other ethnic groups, live
in neighborhoods adjacent to them, or work in the same businesses and on the same
factory assembly lines. The boundaries and definitions of Asian American culture are continually
shifting and being contested from pressures both ‘‘inside’’ and ‘‘outside’’ the Asian origin community. I
stress heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity in the characterization of Asian American culture as part
of a twofold argument about cultural politics, the ultimate aim of that argument being to disrupt the
current hegemonic relationship between ‘‘dominant’’ and ‘‘minority’’ positions. On the one hand,
my observation that Asian Americans are heterogeneous is part of a strategy to
destabilize the dominant discursive construction and determination of
AsianAmericans as a homogeneous group. Throughout the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, Asian immigration to the United States was managed by exclusion acts and
quotas that relied upon racialist constructions of Asians as homogeneous;6 the ‘‘model minority’’
myth and the informal quotas discriminating against Asians in university admissions
policies are contemporary versions of this homogenization of Asians.7 On the other
hand, I underscore Asian American heterogeneities (particularly class, gender, and national
differences among Asians) to contribute to a dialogue within Asian American discourse, to negotiate
with those modes of argumentation that continue to uphold a politics based on ethnic ‘‘identity.’’ In
this sense, I argue for the Asian American necessity – politically, intellectually, and
personally – to organize, resist, and theorize as Asian Americans, but at the same time
I inscribe this necessity within a discussion of the risks of a cultural politics that relies
upon the construction of sameness and the exclusion of differences.
Using the term reinforces the model minority and silence anti-racism.
Color Lines 11 — Color Lines, a race blog that also functions as an activist group — written by Julianne
Hing, staff writer, 2011 (“The Creation—and Consequences—of the Model Minority Myth,” Color Lines,
July 6th, accessible online at
http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/07/model_minority_myth_interview.html, accessed on 4-7-15)
Why Asian-Americans just can’t be seen as a monolithic group: There are huge disparities within this
population that make this title, “Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders,” sort of arbitrary. It’s a
geographic identifier; it’s not a socioeconomic status identifier, though in some ways it can be. The
experiences that each group has—the migration histories; the culture; the language; the circumstances
of arrival, from being refugees to being highly educated professional immigrants; and now you have a
second and third generation that’s facing different issues—mean everyone has very different challenges.
In a way you could say this about a lot of different populations and perhaps this is just a challenge of
data systems in general. For Latinos, you’ve got Cubans, who tend to be more highly educated, and
Puerto Ricans who don’t have the immigration issues that Mexicans or Central Americans have. But for
Asian-Americans, we end up having this conversation [about the need to disaggregate data] much more
because the differences are so much more pronounced. And when there isn’t information, then there
are just assumptions that people have to go on, and then the Tiger Moms of the world can keep going
on and on as long as they want. On the dangerous political utility of the model-minority myth: People
have to think about why this model-minority position came to be in the first place. It was to silence
other people of colors’ attempts at demanding equity. Everyone who cares about racial equity should
care about countering the model-minority myth because the whole purpose of it is to undermine claims
of racism. People will say, “Oh, you’re going to riot and say there are inequalities and that blacks and
Latinos face racism? Stop complaining, look at this non-white population over here. They’re doing fine.”
The model-minority myth tries to tell people: there are no structural barriers; it’s all in your mind. It’s
true that some Asian Americans are doing well. Sure. It’s true. But does that mean that we ignore the
people who aren’t doing well? What’s my responsibility, and what’s our responsibility as people who are
concerned about equity, knowing that there are specific groups facing distinct patterns of inequality? Do
we say to that Hmong kid who kind of looks like me because we both have black hair, it’s okay, her
struggles are not an urgent issue?
CP Text: The United States federal government should substantially reduce restrictions
on legal immigration to the United States by repudiating Chae Chan Ping v. United
States to overturn Trump v. Hawaii
SCOTUS relied on Justice Field’s Chinese Exclusion decision when it upheld the Trump
administration’s travel ban on the basis of plenary power in Trump v. Hawaii – We
read green
Leah Litman ‘18 is an assistant professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, June 26th, 2018,
New York Times, “Unchecked Power Is Still Dangerous No Matter What the Court Says,” from
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/26/opinion/travel-ban-hawaii-supreme-court.html, edited for
ableist language || EC
In explaining its 5-4 decision, the majority invoked a set of legal rules that limit the ability of the federal
courts to assess decisions related to immigration, and specifically, determinations about who may enter the United States.
These rules have their roots in century-old decisions embracing the “plenary-power doctrine,” which
gives the political branches, and in recent times the president in particular, something of a blank check over immigration
matters. ¶ That fearmongering set the stage for the court’s declaration that Congress and the executive
branch have almost a free hand over immigration and that courts would not second-guess their
decisions, even when they reek of xenophobia. The court repeated this reasoning four years later in Fong
Yue Ting v. United States, when it confronted a law requiring Chinese laborers to corroborate their
residence in the United States with at least one white witness. The court upheld the law, again emphasizing the
broad authority that political branches have over immigration and again interweaving that idea with
blatant racism: The court explained the “great embarrassment, from the suspicious nature” of Chinese
witnesses whose “loose notions … of the obligation of an oath” would infect judicial proceedings. ¶ The
racial — and racist — origins of the plenary-power doctrine are there for everyone to see. Those words appear in
the pages of Supreme Court opinions. Yet despite the history of the plenary-power doctrine, the court still relies on
it when giving the political branches such sweeping authority over immigration. ¶ The decision in Trump v.
Hawaii did so explicitly. The section of the opinion rejecting the plaintiffs’ First Amendment claim began
with an explanation about why the entry-ban case differs from other First Amendment challenges. The difference, the court said, is
that “the admission and exclusion of foreign nations is a ‘fundamental sovereign attribute exercised by
the Government’s political departments largely immune from judicial control.’” The court quoted a
passage from a prior case that relied on both the Chinese Exclusion Case and Fong Yue Ting to justify
the idea that immigration is insulated from judicial review. ¶ Plenary power includes the ideas that courts have a
limited ability to oversee immigration decisions by Congress and the president and that constitutional constraints on the government, like the
First Amendment, are weaker when it comes to immigration. ¶ The
court now justifies the broad authority of the political
branches over immigration in terms other than naked racism. But papering over the racial origins of the
political branches’ sweeping immigration authority can do only so much. While the ideas behind the plenarypower doctrine may no longer be acceptable (at least in certain circles), invoking the president’s near plenary authority over
immigration allowed the court, in effect, to turn a blind eye to racism. ¶ How else to interpret Mr. Trump’s announcement, as
a candidate, that he had a plan for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the United States. Or
his statement after signing the entry ban that “we all know what that means.”
Ramis and I endorse the entire 1AC, absent the use of the terms immigrant,
immigration, citizen, citizenship, and alien, in favor of the term movement or incomer.
The terminology we use is important---ascribing to the phrase “immigrant” gets
coopted for exclusion
D. Carolina Nunez 13. Associate Professor of Law, J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young
University. “War of the Words: Aliens, Immigrants, Citizens, and the Language of Exclusion.” Brigham
Young University Law Review. Vol. 2013 Issue 6, p1517-1562. 46p. Emory Libraries.
2. The vulnerable immigrant¶ The term "immigrant" does not carry the same dehumanizing connotations that "alien" carries. As discussed in
Part IV above, "immigrant," when compared to "alien," prompts images of communities, families, and people. When the term "immigrant" is
compared to "citizen," however, it becomes clear that the
term immigrant also can elicit images of vulnerable
outsiders. The term "immigrant" paints a picture of someone who is ethnically and culturally different,
economically disadvantaged, inexperienced, and even "illegal." This image appears explicitly and as a
metaphor throughout modern discussions of immigration.¶ a. Law and politics. Justice Brennan's opinion in
Plyler v. Doe serves as a particularly good example of how this metaphor permeates legal opinions. In
Plyler, the Court considered the constitutionality of a Texas statute that allowed local public schools to deny enrollment to undocumented
immigrant children.'*^ In an opinion celebrated by many immigration scholars, the Court ultimately struck down the statute as violative of the
Equal Protection clause. ^*^ While the holding was certainly a watershed, the language used to describe noncitizens in the opinion was
consistent with the prevailing narrative: immigrants are vulnerable outsiders. As Professor Cunningham-Parmeter has observed, ''''Plyler is
littered with metaphors of paternalism that cast immigrants as nameless actors who depend on the Supreme Court for protection."'*' Justice
Brennan describes unauthorized immigrants as "defenseless against any abuse, exploitation, or callous neglect."^^" He refers to a potential
"caste of undocumented resident aliens, encouraged by some to remain here as a source of cheap labor" ^^^ and a fijture "subclass of
illiterates within our boundaries, surely adding to the problems and costs of unemployment, welfare, and crime."'^^¶ The
opinion relied,
at least in part, on the distinction between the immigrant children, who had not volitionally crossed the
border, and their parents, who had. Placed in the context of the narrative that aliens are criminals and immigrants are
vulnerable, the children were depicted as "immigrants," and their parents as "aliens." In fact. Justice Brennan
avoided the term "illegal alien" when specifically referring to children. Instead, he frequently referred to them as "children" or "undocumented
children,"'^^ despite referring to unauthorized immigrants, generally, as "aliens."^^*¶ The
image of the vulnerable,
disadvantaged immigrant saturates news coverage and political debate on the issue of immigration. An
article on The Heritage Foundation's website bemoans the "current infiux of poorly educated immigrants" and warns that "immigration policy
in the U.S. [is] increasing rather than decreasing poverty."'''^ This, in turn, increases "governmental welfare, social service, and education
costs."^^'' A New York Times article describes the life of a Pakistani immigrant: "Speaking only limited English and with few friends, he had littie
to do and mainly stayed at home, a small rented room in an illegal basement apartment in Coney Island."^^^ The article goes on to describe a
study that catalogues the difticulties that older immigrants face: "Besides being one of the fastest-growing demographic groups, older
immigrants are also among the most vulnerable. 'Many in this group are not only poised to strain the social safety net but fall through it
entirely,' the study said."'^^¶ b. Popular culture. One of the most enduring portrayals of immigrants in movies and on television is as a poor and
overworked housekeeper or maid.'^' The movie "Spanglish," for example, depicts a poor immigrant mother who works two jobs to provide for
her daughter."^" A movie review in the Los Angeles Times describes one screenwriter's efforts to avoid making "another heart-rending saga
about poor, desperate Mexicans hellbent on crossing the border."'*'¶ c. Excluding immigrants. Of course, it
is true that many
immigrants are indeed in very vulnerable positions. Immigrants may face significant language, cultural,
and educational barriers to the achievement of their goals.'" But immigrants also bring a great deal of innovation, hard
work, and ambition with them.^*^ Indeed, a growing number of commentators have called for a shift in focus in
immigration regulations to allow for a freer fiow of innovative and entrepreneurial immigrants. ^^ Indeed,
the term "immigrant" does not capture the upside of immigration and can prompt imagery that overemphasizes vulnerability.¶ The emphasis on vulnerability and cultural differences can impede full
acceptance of immigrants as members of the broader community. The imagery associated with the
term "immigrant" contributes to the sentiment that immigrants drain resources and do not contribute
or participate.'*^ This, in turn, may help feed the efforts to exclude many classes of immigrants from
certain benefits.'**