Borders Aff—1AC (No Plan Text)
Contention One is On the Border
Borders exist wherever two or more cultures edge each other - they are experienced
as social and physical barriers which advance a multitude of conflictual power
relations
Mendoza, 2k8, Elva Fabiola Orozco, Master of Arts in Political Science, Borderlands Theory: Producing
Border Epistemologies with Gloria Anzaldua, April 24,
2008, http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-05062008175949/unrestricted/Final_thesis_corrected.pdf
The psychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands, and the spiritual borderlands are not particular to the southwest. In fact,
the borderlands
are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of
different races occupy the same territory, where the lower, middle and upper classes touch (Anzaldua, 1987: preface). In the
above paragraph, we are confronted with a notion of Borderlands that does not exist physically but which
are, nonetheless, influential and powerful. These Borderlands have been created with the intention of establishing
differentially, that is, they are socially produced to create hierarchies seeking to seize control over the fate of certain groups or, trying to keep
others at distance. As previously explained, the
very notion of a border implies people construct binary categories
such as us and them, which, most of the time, are incompatible since the us gets privileged over them. These Borders are the
consequence of the incapability of certain groups to deal with difference and to incorporate it as
something that is immanent, not a detriment, to the human condition. The theorization of these ideological
Borderlands is more complicated given their immateriality. In other words, people who create them may declare that they do not exist, since
they do not occupy a physical space. However, these
Borderlands are felt on a daily basis and as social products,
they are the carriers of power relations and political agendas as we will further see.
Despite the innate fluidity of the US-Mexico borderlands, the distinction between
“inside” and “outside” the border remains ethically and culturally pervasive.
Discourses of emergency are used to delegitimize multiculturalism and sanction the
massacre of illegal migrants.
Giorgi and Pinkus 2006 (Gabriel, Assistant Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at the
University of Southern California, Karen, Professor of Italian, French, and Comparative Literature at the
University of Southern California, “Zones of Exception: Biopolitical Territories in the Neoliberal Era”,
Johns Hopkins University Press, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/diacritics/v036/36.2giorgi.html#bio1 oliver g)
Contemporary discourses on economic, social, and cultural exclusion are deeply associated, especially
in the media, with images of militarized, fiercely controlled borders and coastlines, as well as with
recurrent commonplaces about the widening gap between rich and poor, between the "privileged"
and "wretched." But however much these boundaries and these social maps can be presented as fixed
in order to satisfy the anxieties of the audience (anxieties, in turn, systematically reproduced and
stimulated by the media), they are also extremely precarious and unstable. The very insistence on
phrases such as "fortress Europe," the proposals for a "double" or "triple fence" on the US-Mexico
border, or the claims for more security and vigilance in upper- and middle-class neighborhoods in the
cities—all are symptomatic of defensive reactions to an increasingly unstable economy of
inclusion/exclusion and inside/outside. It is as if the effort to reinforce the borders between territories
and between groups and populations were menaced not only by the quantitative increase of people
trying to cross borders or of poverty and "social danger," but also, and perhaps more decisively, by the
closeness or immediacy of an "outside" that should be kept out, fenced, constantly pushed away—an
"outside" thus that cannot be understood exclusively in spatial or territorial terms, but that points
toward an economy where territories, politics, and life intertwine in specific ways. Our media are
characterized by a rhetorics of emergency: images of packed migrants in the Centers of Temporary
Permanence being prepared to be returned to their countries of origin, or directly—as in Ceuta and
Melilla, the Spanish cities in North Africa—being physically rejected, and in some cases killed, by
border patrols; of indigents increasingly visible and present (and thus persecuted) in cities throughout
the globe. The concurrent instability and violence rupturing different territorial and social boundaries
point toward a dynamic in which what takes place is not only a social conflict between rich and poor,
or between privileged and unprivileged, but also a tension—and an ambivalence—at the level of the
inscription of bodies, and of life itself, in the social and political order.¶ The "outside," then, although
represented and "materialized" in spatial terms, seems to point toward to another dimension that is
not exclusively territorial, geopolitical, or cultural, but fundamentally biopolitical: the dimension or the
level at which human life is inscribed, constituted, recognized, and defined within a given sociopolitical
order. What is deployed through the rhetorics and the politics of borders and boundaries, what the
media stages in the spectacle of the territorial security and perpetual danger, be it at a transnational or
an urban scale, is a split or division at which "human life" is separated from the unrecognizable, the
residual, life reduced to its "merely biological" status—"bare life," to use Agamben's expression, which
is in many ways identified with the diverse forms of poverty and indigence so deeply intensified in the
neoliberal era.
This obsession with the border creates a reflexive surveillance state where the body
politic must systematically purge itself of all racial impurity in order to function
smoothly
Salter 2004 (Mark B., School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, Ontario, “Passports, Mobility,
and Security: How smart can the border be?” http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.15283577.2004.00158.x/full - oliver g)
At the border, all visitors, including Americans, have a greatly circumscribed set of rights. Border officials have
wide powers of search, seizure, detention, and of course, the ability to exclude travelers from the country. Once
admitted into the country, however, one's rights, including the right to due process, come into effect. Under this system, the intense
application of state power through the examination at the border substitutes for wider police powers of surveillance once inside American
territory. Simply, an examination at the border cannot deter or detect a motivated criminal. Limits in intelligence-gathering and informationsharing will inevitably lead to the admission of more terrorists. The openness on which America prides itself proves to be a weakness in terms
of terrorist activities. Thus, controls
have been tightened at the border and the surveillance of “high-risk”
nationals will be extended domestically. Because the examination of the 9/11 terrorists failed, the Homeland Security
Department and other federal law enforcement agencies aim to continue the surveillance of “high-risk” individuals within American territory.
The transition from “undesirable” visitors to “high-risk” marks a significant shift in discourse. The exclusion of
undesirable visitors indicates knowledge of the individual, if only as undesirable. However, defining individuals as “high-risk” indicates a lack of
precise knowledge, suggesting
only suspicions based on statistics, sociology, and narratives . As the government
a cycle of insecurity that leads to the increase of police powers
and bureaucratic structures of control. Bigo (2002) has made this argument in the European context, but we believe that it can
defines individuals as “high-risk,” it encourages
be extended to the post-9/11 American context also. For example, after the capture of Abdullah Al Muhajir (born Jose Padilla), Attorney
General John Ashcroft said, “Al Qaeda officials knew that as a citizen of the United States holding a valid U.S. passport, Al Muhajir would be able
to travel freely in the U.S. without drawing attention to himself” (2002b). Al Muhajir was “high-risk” precisely because of his mobility, not
because of something that had been proven in court. Ashcroft petitioned to have Al Muhajir declared an enemy combatant, leading to a severe
circumscription of his rights, which would normally be unconceivable.¶ Whereas
previous border security regimes focused
on the actual examination between the agent of the government and the traveler, the surveillance regime aims to
make the agents of the government present but invisible so that travelers police themselves . By
surveillance we invoke the work of Foucault who describes an architecture of power and authority by which individuals come to police
themselves in addition to being policed from outside (1977:189).8 This surveillance strategy
operates most efficiently when
“surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action [consequently] the
perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary” (Foucault, 1977:201). The topography of
these surveillance strategies have been studied productively by Lyon (2001, 2003) and Bigo. This surveillance system applies to
the border security regime, and in the case of the US-VISIT, to the entire mobile population of border-crossers.¶
In addition to an extended examination at the border, the US-VISIT special registration program continues the work of
domestic monitoring of high-risk visitors. Aliens are initially fingerprinted and photographed at the border.
They must report any change in their employment, schooling, or residence details to the government within ten days, and must also report in
person to an BCIS official after one month and one year, where they are interviewed and are compared to the records of their fingerprints and
photograph, after which their are also recorded. The function of the program is to define, regulate, and identify foreign visitors in the country.
While the extended examination strengthens the discernment functions of the contemporary border regime,
the collection and
verification of biometric information and residence details indicate a shift in the mode of policing
from examination to surveillance .¶ This surveillance regime imitates the 1994 Californian Proposition 187 that
required all state employees to act as de facto immigration inspectors and the Illegal Immigration Reform and
Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 that offered a mechanism by which anyone could report illegal
immigrants or their employers. The proposed Terrorist Information and Prevention System (TIPS) creates a national neighborhood watch
program. Through a toll-free telephone number American transportation workers, truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains,
utility employees, and other members of the USA Citizen Corps may identify suspected terrorists, who will then be questioned by authorities.¶
Tom Ridge, the head of Homeland Security, has also launched a public awareness campaign. The
Citizens' Preparedness Guide
encourages every citizen to be “vigilant” toward suspicious individuals, packages, and situations. The guide enlists
all 280 million Americans into the war on terror. For example, Shiels reported programs that trained airline passengers to restrain hijackers
(2002); and USA Today ran a feature “Here's what to do if you're hijacked,” in which an expert on terrorist attacks suggested: “You want to take
a good look at who's getting on board. Do your own screening and profiling. You want to look into their eyes. You can tell a lot about people by
looking in their eyes. Are they shifty? Are they nervous?” (Sloan, 2002). This is epitomized in the campaign slogan: “Don't be afraid, be ready.”9
We would argue that the campaign in fact urges citizens to be afraid in an “economy of danger.” Simply put, buying
duct tape and extra water does not attack the roots of global terrorism—rather it places American citizens in the position of continuous threat
against which they can only be ready to victims. The
primary functions of this public campaign are to distract the populace
from the external war on terror (which seems unable to reach its goals—witness the absence of Saddam Hussein or Osama bin
Laden) and to enlist the populace's help in policing the national population. Reinforcing the notion that all citizens
are watching each other leads each individual to attempt to appear as “normal” as possible. Examination has been supplanted
by a surveillance regime, in which every citizen is both watched and a watcher.
The biopolitical valuation of populations legitimizes all genocide and war
Elden 2002 (Prof of Politics @ U Warwick boundary 2 29.1 p. 148-9)
A break or cut (coupure) is fundamental to racism: a division or incision between those who must live and those
who must die. The "biological continuum of the human species" is fragmented by the apparition of races, which
are seen as distinguished, hierarchized, qualified as good or inferior, and so forth. The species is subdivided into
subgroups that are thought of as races. In a sense, then, just as the continuum of geometry becomes divisible in
Descartes, 39 the human continuum is divided, that is, made calculable and orderable, two centuries later. As
Anderson has persuasively argued, to suggest that racism has its roots in nationalism is a mistake. He suggests that
"the dreams of racism actually have their origin in ideologies of class, rather than in those of nation: above all in
claims to divinity among rulers and to ‘blue' or ‘white' blood and breeding among aristocracies." 40 As Stoler has
noted, for Foucault, it is the other way around: "A discourse of class derives from an earlier discourse of races." 41
But it is a more subtle distinction than [End Page 147] that. What Foucault suggests is that discourses of class have
their roots in the war of races, but so, too, does modern racism; what is different is the biological spin put on the
concepts. 42 But as well as emphasizing the biological, modern racism puts this another way: to survive, to live, one
must be prepared to massacre one's enemies, a relation of war. As a relation of war, this is no different from the
earlier war of races that Foucault has spent so much of the course explaining. But when coupled with the
mechanisms of mathematics and medicine in bio-power, this can be conceived of in entirely different ways. Biopower is able to establish, between my life and the death of the other, a relation that is not warlike or
confrontational but biological: "The more inferior species tend to disappear, the more abnormal individuals can
be eliminated, the less the species will be degenerated, the more I—not as an individual but as a species—will
live, will be strong, will be vigorous, will be able to proliferate." The death of the other does not just make me
safer personally, but the death of the other, of the bad, inferior race or the degenerate or abnormal, makes life
in general healthier and purer (FDS, 227–28). "The existence in question is no longer of sovereignty, juridical; but
that of the population, biological. If genocide is truly the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a return
today of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the
race, and the large-scale phenomena of population" (VS, 180; WK, 136). "If the power of normalization wishes to
exercise the ancient sovereign right of killing, it must pass through racism. And if, inversely, a sovereign power,
that is to say a power with the right of life and death, wishes to function with the instruments, mechanisms, and
technology of normalization, it must also pass through racism" (FDS, 228). This holds for indirect death—the
exposure to death—as much as for direct killing. While not Darwinism, this biological sense of power is based on
evolutionism and enables a thinking of colonial relations, the necessity of wars, criminality, phenomena of
madness and mental illness, class divisions, and so forth. The link to colonialism is central: This form of modern
state racism develops first with colonial genocide. The theme of the political enemy is extrapolated biologically.
But what is important in the shift at the end of the nineteenth century is that war is no longer simply a way of
securing one race by eliminating the other but of regenerating that race (FDS, 228–30). As Foucault puts it in La
volonté de savoir: [End Page 148] Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended;
they are waged on behalf of the existence of all; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale
slaughter in the name of life necessity. Massacres have become vital [vitaux—understood in a dual sense, both as
essential and biological]. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have
been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed. (VS, 180; WK, 136) The shift Foucault thinks is
interesting is what might be called a shift from sanguinity to sexuality: sanguinity, in that it had an instrumental
role (the shedding of blood) and a symbolic role (purity of blood, differences of blood); sexuality, when
mechanisms of power are directed to the body, to life. The theme of race is present in both, but in a different form
(VS, 194; WK, 147). We have moved from "a symbolics of blood to an analytics of sexuality. Clearly, nothing was
more on the side of the law, death, transgression, the symbolic, and sovereignty than blood; just as sexuality was
on the side of the norm, knowledge, life, meaning, the disciplines and regulations" (VS, 195; WK, 148). In Nazism,
the two are combined. Eugenics and medical/mathematical techniques are coupled with the fantasy of blood and
the ideal of the purity of the race. Foucault notes that there was immediate control of procreation and genetics in
the Nazi regime, and that regulation, security, and assurance were imposed over the disciplined, ordered society;
but at the same time, the old sovereign power of killing traversed the entire society. This was not simply confined
to the state, nor simply to the SA or the SS, but ultimately to everyone, as, through denunciation, everyone could
have this power over their neighbor (FDS, 231). While destruction of other races was central to Nazism, the other
side of it was the exposure of the German race itself to death, an absolute and universal risk of death. The entire
German population was exposed to death, and Foucault suggests that this was one of the fundamental duties of
Nazi obedience. Only this exposure of the entire population to the universal risk of death could constitute the
Germans as the superior race, regenerated in the face of those races either totally exterminated or completely
subjugated. We have, therefore, in Nazism, both the absolute generalization of bio-power and the generalization
of the sovereign right of death. Two mechanisms—one classical, archaic; one new—coincide exactly. A racist state,
a murdering state, a suicidal state. Accompanying the final solution was the order of April 1945 that called for the
destruction of the conditions of life of the German [End Page 149] people themselves. A final solution for other
races, an absolute suicide for the German race (FDS, 231–32).
Contention Two is Meztisa Consciousness
The US-Mexico border must be understood as a ‘heterotopia’ rather than a ‘topia,’ as
a non-place rather than a place. In contrast to the Euclidian paradigm of symmetry
and closure, the geometry of the borderlands is marked by fractal growth and fractal
decay, by disarray and gradiation. This ambiguity cannot be explained away by a
single historical narrative, but must be preserved through the continuous telling and
retelling of diverse cultural pasts.
Morales 1995 (Alejandro, Professor of Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine,
“Dynamic identities in heterotopia,” Bilingual Review, Sepember-December, Vol. 20 Issue 3,
http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?sid=ffbe01ad-af3b-4bcb-83306b3827271a3f%40sessionmgr114&vid=1&hid=122&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl
#db=aph&AN=9610220106.)
¶ Davis's description alludes
to a new meaning of urbanism in a border region. The idea has changed from urban, pertaining to a city with a
center, planned on the ideal of utopia, to a vast multicultural population concentration that transcends city limits and anachronistic urban
models. Today urban population is concentrated from Los
Angeles to San Diego/Tijuana, two "super-cores" that continuously
reach out toward each other filling the spaces between with a multitude of independent collective "topias"
evolving into heterotopia. Los Angeles and San Diego/Tijuana together constitute a new urban model, a heterotopia.¶ ¶ Gloria
Anzaldua in Borderlands, La Frontera, The New Mestiza describes the unique border culture that arises in the border
region as the noir aspects of heterotopia:¶ ¶ The U.S.-Mexico border is "una herida abierta" where the
Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the
lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country--a border culture. Borders are set up to define
the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A borderland is a vague and undetermined
place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition.[ 2]¶ ¶ Michel
Foucault's "Heterotopia," an idea that attempts to bring order and understanding to a space accommodating a wealth of
displacement of different entities, explains border culture.¶ ¶ Heterotopia: disorder in which fragments of a large
number of possible orders glitter separately in the dimension, without law or geometry, of the
heteroclite . . . in such a state, things are laid, placed, arranged in sites so very different from one another that it is
impossible to find a place of residence for them . . .[ 3]¶ ¶ Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia explains the
border culture experienced daily in the urban zone between Santa Barbara, California, and Tijuana, Mexico.
We live in a time and space in which borders, both literal and figurative, exist everywhere. Borders made of concrete, asphalt,
aluminum, barbwire, and water, which mark the dividing line of one community in relation to another and mark the demographic, racial,
ethnic, economic, and political separation of people, are
the physical borders of heterotopia. Metaphorical borders
are symbolized by the divisions and limits of culture, language, food, traditions, influence, and power. Psychological borders
are manifested in metaphors of fear, desire, love, and hatred.¶ ¶ A border maps limits; it keeps people in and out of an area; it
marks the ending of a safe zone and the beginning of an unsafe zone. To confront a border and, more so, to
cross a border presumes great risk. In general, people fear and are afraid to cross borders. People will not leave their safe zone, will not
venture into what they consider an unsafe zone. People cling to the dream of utopia and fail to recognize that they create
and live in heterotopia.¶ ¶ The image of people desperately running, crossing the border, heading north,
journeying to utopia, but discovering heterotopia illuminates much of the landscape we inhabit. When
the "Third World" is no longer maintained at a distance "out there" but begins to appear "in here", when the
encounter between diverse cultures, histories, religions and languages no longer occurs along the peripheries, in the
"contact zones" as Mary Louise Pratt calls them, but emerges at the center of our daily lives, in the cities and cultures of the so-called
"advanced", or "First", world, then we can perhaps begin to talk of a significant interruption in the preceding sense of our lives, cultures,
languages and futures.[ 4]¶ ¶ This world, this experience requires a new mode of thinking,¶ ¶ a
mode of thinking that is
neither fixed nor stable, but is one that is open to the prospect of a continual return to events, to their re-elaboration and
revision. This retelling, re-citing and re-siting of what passes for historical and cultural knowledge
depend upon the recalling and re-membering of earlier fragments and traces that flare up and flash
in our present . . . These fragments that remain as fragments: splinters of light that illuminate our journey while
simultaneously casting questioning shadows along the path.[ 5]¶ ¶ People are learning to live in
heterotopia and must constantly develop new survival strategies. Southern California, from Tijuana to Santa Barbara, is a
perplexing urban area constituted by a continuum of shapeless cities with no center, no core of a single identity.
Southern California is a profusion of cultural enclaves, a multitude of othernesses, developing together and creating
literal and metaphorical borders. It is an unending, unfinished process of continuous movement, of
ceaseless change, of always becoming, of perpetual transformation, complicated by a cryptic omnipresent uniformity.¶ ¶ The
heterotopian ambience of Southern California, the ceaseless creation of fantasy, mythology, and mythography is generated from three principal
entities: Hollywood, Disneyland, and the border. Hollywood and Disneyland produce the fantasy and the dreams that urban heteroclites live
out vicariously. The
border creates the mythology and mythography recorded in the newspapers, the radio, and the
in a frontier that runs through your tongue, religion, music, dress, food,
architecture, appearance, and life and that manifests itself in multiple ontologies calls for the
acquisition of new survival habits.[ 6]¶ ¶ "This drama rarely freely chosen is also the drama of the stranger."[ 7] The inhabitants of
nightly local news.¶ ¶ Living
heterotopia are rendered strangers to each other and to themselves. Crossing the border, heading north, the Mexican is immediately separated
from the point of origin, from the genesis of identity. In a land covered with a webbed veil of freeways the individual Mexican moving north is
separated, cutoff from the motherland. Here the stranger must struggle to make him/herself at home. Here the stranger is constantly asked to
define, explain, and understand himself/herself. Life
in the chaos of heterotopia is a perpetual act of self-definition
gradually deterritorializing the individual. The individual becomes an ambiguity.¶ ¶ Chicanos have become
trapped in the process of self-definition and have splintered, shattered their identity, made themselves an ambiguity, strangers in their own
land, constantly moving like migrants, not knowing who they are, where they come from, nor where they are going. They fail to understand
that identity is not fixed, that nothing
is certain in the Southwestern heterotopia border zone.
Therefore, rather than simply condemning borders or embracing them, we propose
the 1AC as a site for rethinking prevailing notions of territoriality and carving space for
future inquiry. The question should not be whether the US-Mexico border is good or
bad, but whether a specific conceptualization of the border is constructive or
destructive in the context of global justice.
Agnew 2008 (John, Department of Geography, UCLA, Los Angeles, “Borders on the mind: re-framing
border thinking,” Ethics & Global Politics 1, no. 4,
http://ethicsandglobalpolitics.net/index.php/egp/article/view/1892/1985 - oliver g)
In my view, borders have always been more equivocal practically and ethically in their origins and in their effects than the two dominant types
of story allow. I would suggest that the overarching normative question in re-framing understanding of borders is how much borders enhance
or restrict the pursuit of a decent life. They have always been open to question, if not to all who would cross them. The paths they follow are
often quite arbitrary and without any sort of ‘natural’ justification. Their socio-political significance is very recent (much more recent,
for example, than Sahlins's sixteenth century) and this relates perhaps as much to the increased infrastructural power of some states and lack
of it in others, increased gradients of economic development across borders around the world, and improved ease of travel as to the identity
functions they perform and that are emphasized so much in both of the stories. In
moving beyond the either/or perspective,
we need recourse to some concepts that aid in understanding the ambiguity of borders.¶ In a recent article,
Mark Salter makes imaginative use of Michel Foucault's ideas of ‘heterotopia’ and ‘confessionary complex’ to
understand the bordering activities that take place at airports.56 Borders are encountered at locations
within (airports and immigrant policing at workplaces) and well beyond (immigration posts at foreign ports and airports) any
particular map borders. Heterotopias are locations that because of their very specificity, problematize
the various functions typically associated with ‘like’ locations; in this case bordering locations other than airports.57
These are unusual places. They are sometimes referred to as a type of ‘non-place’ in which the rules of everyday life
that prevail elsewhere across places within a national territory are replaced by some very particular and peculiar
ones. A confessionary complex refers to the docility and anxiety typically engendered, at least in Western
cultures, by the gauntlet that must be run past agents of the state in places such as airports. This dual focus
takes us away from the simple obsession with borders as easily guarded land borders characteristic of
much border thinking (and anti-border thinking) and towards the complexity of what borders do and
how they are managed for both territorial and networked spaces. Two particularly important features of the article
lie in its countering both excessively laudatory accounts of airports as transversal places in which inside and outside are invariably confused and
the similarly frequent failure to note the relative inefficiencies with which airports fulfill their security functions because of their inherent
contradictions (screening for objects versus identifying dangerous persons, etc.) and all of the other activities they carry out, such as
transportation and, increasingly, shopping, by those not subject to containment and deportation. In other words, border
crossings such
as airports are not always as easily grounded or readily transgressed as the two dominant stories ,
respectively, would have us believe.¶ Of course, borders have always had such focal points, from Ellis Island NY as a port of entry for
European immigrants to the US, to Checkpoint Charlie between the two Berlins during the Cold War. All checkpoints, not just airports, have
simply become more complex in the range of functions they perform. Beyond them, along the border, not much happens most of the time.
Indeed, most borders remain unfenced and largely undefended outside of the checkpoints to which people crowd because of routes and modes
of transport that focus them there. In a number of respects, therefore, it is not entirely clear to me that airports differ fundamentally from
other border checkpoints (except, perhaps, in the shopping) and should be placed in this wider context. What
airport do suggest is
how much bordering is beyond the land borders of states per se. Rather than taking place only at borders on a map,
bordering practices are much more widely diffused geographically.¶ What I have in mind about the practical and
ethical equivocality of borders can be related to four points that should be placed in this broader context about airports and other border
checkpoints. First off, the security functions of airports are part of what can be called ‘territorial regimes’, constituting a wide range of
state-based inclusionary and exclusionary practices that are more and less discriminatory and effective in given areas, compare financial
transactions and container traffic across borders, for example, with eligibility for certain social and political rights by people that follow from
establishing legal territorial residence.58 With respect to
human border crossing, which country's passport (and
happen to hold and where it stands in the global pecking order becomes the
crucial variable determining the experience of passing from one territory to another, be it at an airport gate, a ship's
associated paperwork) you
gangplank, or a land-border crossing. Although an important, and frequently neglected, site of territorial control, the airport should be kept
within this larger theoretical frame of reference. In other words, the possibilities
of transversal practice or transgression
and ‘global citizenship’ should not be exaggerated. They are available, if at all, to relatively few, above all to the privileged
employees of multinational companies and skilled immigrants of one sort or another. In addition, these days border controls extend well
beyond borders per se into workplaces and neighborhoods in the interior of the state.59 This not only makes the whole national territory into a
border zone, but also potentially criminalizes the entire population in the face of enforcement of identity checks and so on. Immigration
checks at foreign airports extend the reach of some authorities well beyond their own putative borders.60¶ In
addition, as is clear from the American media rhetoric about ‘broken borders’ , the fanatical CNN news anchor Lou
Dobbs uses this phrase regularly to refer specifically to the US-Mexico border, and my second point, the map image of
the borders of the state still exercises a major influence on the territorial imagination of whose security is at
stake and who most threatens it.61 Many of us still live in a world where political borders are the most
important signs on a world map. Even though airports, for example, may well be major sites for the arrival of contested migrants
and possible terrorists, the most popular idea is that of the former running, swimming, or otherwise penetrating land and sea borders. This
powerful image of the border as a guardian of personal security akin to a security perimeter or fence around one's home underwrites much of
the hardening of border controls around the US and the European Union in recent years.62 Yet, of course, this is totally misleading; not only in
the fact that most undocumented aliens/those without papers/clandestini are not security threats (at least not in the sense frequently
considered as involved in terrorist plots) and once they arrive fulfill a variety of economic functions that would otherwise go unfulfilled, but that
the overwhelming majority of terrorist attacks around the world have involved legal visitors from ‘friendly’ countries or local citizens.
The notion of trespass or unregulated violation appears to provide the primary ethical basis to the imaginative emphasis on the physical border
per se as ‘the face of the nation to the world’, so to speak. Rarely is it immigrants tout court who are openly in question, it is those
without legal recognition. Of course, it is their very illegality that is attractive to employers and consumers because of the lack of qualification
for public services and the ever-present threat of deportation as a disciplinary measure. No one talks much about how difficult it usually is to be
a legal immigrant. Yet, the discourse frequently is more ambiguous in simultaneously always seeming to worry about the cultural threat that
foreign immigrants of whatever legal status pose to the national identity because blood and family ties often count so much (either officially or
unofficially) in most definitions of who ‘really belongs’ within the national territory.63 Even in countries which officially claim more
‘open’ definitions of citizenship than is typically the norm, such as France and the US, nativist movements have little doubt about who is
more and who is less deserving of recognition as French or American. Debates about who does and who does not belong draw attention to
both the fluid and the contested character of national identities.64¶ Perhaps even
more importantly, however, borders, including
functions. A third point, therefore, is that though borders are about classifying
identities, they are also about sorting and sifting goods and people to enhance or maintain unequal cross-border
exchanges.65 They are not simply about a security-identity nexus as both dominant stories about
their sites at airports, serve vital economic
borders tend to allege. Cheap labor on one side facilitates cheaper products for more affluent consumers on the other. Though the
idea of a global economy has become widely accepted, in fact much economic activity is still overwhelmingly within national borders and most
firms are still effectively reliant on national models of business structure and spatial organization.66 There are very few truly global companies
and they are mostly Swiss (or from other small countries). More particularly, borders still stand guard over massive differences in standards of
living that, though shrinking somewhat as within-nation differences have grown in recent years, are still largely defined precisely at national
borders. The US-Mexico border— ‘the tortilla curtain’—is emblematic in this regard. The extreme
income gradient that it marks invites people to cross it whatever the barriers they encounter on the way. Alain Badiou makes the overall point
eloquently as follows:¶ The fall of the Berlin wall was supposed to signal the advent of the single world of freedom and democracy. Twenty
years later, it is clear that the world's wall has simply shifted: instead of separating East and West it now divides the rich capitalist North from
the poor and devastated South. New
walls are being constructed all over the world: between Palestinians and Israelis,
between Mexico and the United States, between Africa and the Spanish enclaves, between the pleasures of
wealth and the desires of the poor, whether they be peasants in villages or urban dwellers in favelas,
banlieues, estates, hostels, squats and shantytowns. The price of the supposedly unified world of
capital is the brutal division of human existence into regions separated by police dogs, bureaucratic
controls, naval patrols, barbed wire and expulsions.67¶ Fourthly, and finally, policing borders still has a
powerful normative justification in the defense of that territorial sovereignty which serves to underpin both
liberal and democratic claims to (Lockean) popular rule. Now such claims may frequently be empirically fictive, particularly in the case of
imperial and large nation-states, but the logic of the argument is that, absent effective worldwide government, the highest authority available
is that of existing states.68 How such states police their borders, of course, should be subject to transparent and open regulation. But why it is
popularly legitimate to engage in policing functions in the way they are carried out cannot
simply be put down to mass
docility in the face of an omnipotent (because it is omniscient) state apparatus. National populations do
worry about their borders because their democracy (or other, familiar, politics) depends on it. The border is a
continuing marker of a national (or supranational) political order even as people, in Europe at least, can now cross it for lunch.69 The problem
here is that democratic
theory and practice is not yet up to dealing with the complexities of a world in which
territories and flows must necessarily co-exist. If one can argue, as does Arash Abizadeh, that ‘the demos of democratic
theory is in principle unbounded’, this still begs the question of who is ‘foreigner’ and who is ‘citizen’ in a world that is
still practically divided by borders.70 As Sofia Nässtrom puts the problem succinctly: ‘it is one thing to argue that globalization has
opened the door to a problem within modern political thought, quite another to argue that globalization is the origin of this
problem’.71 Until political community is redefined in some way as not being co-extensive with nation-state, we will be stuck with much
of business as usual.¶ Currently then,
given the strong arguments about what borders do and the problems that
they also entail, a more productive ethic than thinking either just with or just against them would be
to re-frame the discussion in terms of the impacts that borders have; what they do both for and to
people . From this perspective, we can both recognize the necessary roles of borders and the barriers
to improved welfare that they create. In the first place, however, this requires re-framing thinking about
borders away from the emphasis on national citizenship towards a model of what Dora Kostakopoulou calls ‘civic
registration’ Under this model, the only condition for residence would be demonstrated willingness to live according to democratic rule
plus some set requirements for residency and the absence of a serious criminal record. Such a citizenship model requires a
reconceptualization of territorial space as a ‘dwelling space’ for residents and, thus, a move away from the
nationalist narratives which cultivate ‘the belief that territory is a form of property to be owned by a
particular national group, either because the latter has established a “first occupancy” claim or because it regards this
territory as a formative part of its identity’.73 In a world in which wars and systematic violations of human
rights push millions to seek asylum across borders every year, this rethinking is imperative .74¶ In the
second place, and by way of example, from this viewpoint it is reasonable ‘to prefer global redistributive justice to
open borders. To put it bluntly, it is better to shift resources to people rather than permitting people to
shift themselves towards resources’.75 Currently much migration from country-to-country is the result of the desire to
improve economic well-being and enhance the life-chances of offspring. Yet, people often prefer to stay put, for familial,
social, and political reasons, if they can. There seems no good basis, therefore, to eulogize and institutionalize
movement as inherently preferable to staying put. If adequate mechanisms were developed to stimulate
development in situ, many people who currently move would not. Not only people in destination countries
associate their identities with territory.¶ Using the standard of a decent life, therefore, can lead beyond
the present impasse between the two dominant views of borders towards a perspective that reframes borders as having both negative and positive effects and that focuses on how people can both
benefit from borders and avoid their most harmful effects. In political vision as in everyday practice, therefore,
borders remain as ambiguously relevant as ever, even as we work to enhance their positive and limit
their negative effects.
Thus, we advocate Mestiza consciousness: a dynamic epistemic strategy that weaves
between all boundaries, dichotomies, and absolutes in order to create real political
and social change. Through the development of “la facultad” – a faculty for seamlessly
traversing between various systems identity and belonging – we can acquire the tools
to defy coloniality and forge a more open structure of social relations.
Rodriguez 2011 (Encarnacion Gutierrez , Senior Lecturer in Transcultural Studies at the University of
Manchester, “Decolonizing Postcolonial Rhetoric,” http://www.migrazine.at/artikel/decolonizingpostcolonial-rhetoric-english.)
Gloria Anzaldúa's notion of borderlands underlines the epistemic condition which she defines as "la
facultad", "the capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities, to see the deeper
structure below the surface". This "faculty" arises out of existential experiences of abjection and
subjugation at the juncture of different systems of domination, when as Anzaldúa argues "when you're
against the wall – when you have all these oppression coming at you – you develop this extra faculty".¶
"La facultad" discerns a special faculty emerging out of the epistemic and ontological conditions of
living at the borderlands between the United States and Mexico, epitomizing the intersection
between the fluidity and invasive force of capital, on the one side, and the violence of military border
control stopping the flow of people, on the other; in short, between imperialism and coloniality. Under
these conditions a specific knowledge is produced, acquired through the struggle for liberation, a
knowledge conditioned by the historical and material circumstances circumventing this context.¶ "La
facultad" as Anzaldúa describes in her later work is shaped in the "in-between space", where
boundaries break down, where identity categories dissolve and new ways of understanding ourselves,
the world and the cosmos emerge, The Nahuatl word Nepantla is the "liminal state between worlds,
between realities, between systems of knowledge". This is the space inhabited by the subject at the
borderlands, a subject that Anzaldúa metaphorically conceives as the "borderwoman" – the "mestiza".
The "mestiza" figure is a kind of a trickster, somebody that unites the moon and the sun, the night and
the day. She has mestiza consciousness, created at the crossroads of simultaneous systems of
domination, in which ambivalent lines of belonging and the ambiguous position of inside-outsider are
created. She describes herself as a "mestiza", someone who "is in all cultures at the same time, alma
entre dos mundos, tres, cuatro, me zumba la cabeza con lo contradictorio. Estoy norteada por todas
las voces que me hablan simultáneamente". It is this state of consciousness that Anzaldúa describes as
the epistemic condition of the borderlands. This consciousness is caught in the paradox of the border
as the site of rigid boundaries and the trespassing of them, at the same time.¶ Whilst "la facultad" is
imbued with the experience of dispossession, persecution and violence, living at the borderlands also
unleashes new strategies of coping and transgressing boundaries. Transgression represents the
driving force of border consciousness, an aspect that Walter Mignolo develops further in regard to
"border thinking". Border thinking accentuates the "de-linking from the colonial matrix of power".¶ It
traces the threshold between modernity and coloniality in that it acknowledges the centrality of
Western traditions of thought for the development of modern sciences and the dominant
conceptualization of the world, at the same time that it makes clear the limitations and epistemic
violence of this perspective.¶ Anzaldúa suggests that we "disengage from the dominant culture, write
it off altogether as a lost cause, and cross the border into a wholly new territory”. This transgressive
and transversal movement in which contradictions are dissolved into myriad infinite series of
differences resonates with Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's rhizomatic movement. But, in contrast to
Deleuze and Guattari's concept of deterritorialization as nomadic thinking, Anzaldúa's notion of
Nepantla-borderlands comprises the experience of forced and violent displacement, enforced by
border and migration regimes, in which the ontology of "mestiza" knowledge is based. The heuristic
standpoint for knowledge is not the rhizomatic movement of ideas and practices, but the constant
tension between agentic transgression and violent sublimation. At this threshold, the "new common
logic of knowing: border thinking”, composed of the "pluriversality" of local colonial histories
entangled with imperial modernity arises. Thus, "critical border thinking is the method that connects
pluriversality (…) into a universal project of delinking from modern rationality and building other
possible worlds. Critical border thinking involves and implies both the imperial and colonial
difference".
And, contextualizing this method to the US-Mexico Border is uniquely important
Mendoza, 2k8, Elva Fabiola Orozco, Master of Arts in Political Science, Borderlands Theory: Producing
Border Epistemologies with Gloria Anzaldua, April 24,
2008, http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-05062008175949/unrestricted/Final_thesis_corrected.pdf
This thesis is an attempt to understand better the relations of power and resistance between different
groups, as mediated by their interaction through borders. Contrary to current notions of globalization
that presuppose an increasingly homogenized economic system, I consider that the strong emphasis
on notions of difference has its roots in the colonial period that produced the current international
system.12 If, as Hannah Arendt contends, the human condition should be about seeking humankind’s
political action, the extent to which this goal has been achieved is null if we consider that the
contemporary international system continues to be based on the set of relations created by
colonization. If we were to follow Etienne Balibar on the argument that the notions of interiority and
exteriority, which form the basis of the representation of the border, are undergoing a veritable
earthquake,î (Balibar, 2004: 5) then current conflicts over the border would not have the resonance
within governments that they do. At the same time, borders are undergoing a profound change in
meaning,(Balibar, 2004) and their relevance for issues of security are increasingly significant. This thesis
is mainly about how borders are drawn and redrawn. Also important for this study is the basis on which
borders are demarcated and by whom. In this vein, the significance of the present study lies within the
fact that borders are political entities and, as such, they carry political agendas for different groups
who seek to advance a variety of political issues. Thus, borders constitute a fertile ground for political
analysis since they: Are not only geographic but also political and subjective (e.g. cultural) and
epistemic and contrary to frontiers the very concept of border implies the existence of people,
languages, religion and knowledge on both sides linked through relations established by the coloniality
of powerÖ Borders in this sense are not natural outcome of a natural or divine historical process
inhuman history, but were created in the very constitution of the modern/colonial world (Mignolo and
Tlostanova, 2006: 208) Since the concept of frontiers or borders was created as a political instrument
aimed to physical but also ideological differences, in this study I am primarily concerned with the
Borderlands as a theory that addresses the self as a space through which social processes and
identities are constructed and contested; changed and resisted (Marshall and Rossman, 2006). This
does not mean, however, that we will not pay attention to different notions of borderlands. In fact, as
argued in the second chapter, we need to understand the social and political constitution of the
geographical borderlands between Mexico and United States in order to understand why a
Borderlands theory (the topic of the third chapter) had to be produced in the first place . A recurrent
concern of this study is the use of borders re-appropriated by marginalized groups as spaces of
resistance. Because the dominant culture has created its convenient version of reality (Anzaldua and
Keating, 2000: 229), one that aims not only to privilege the interests of certain groups, but also to
override the rights of others, we cannot be content just to explore the possibilities of selfemancipation that emotional Borderlands may offer. In addition, we need to go even further to see
what instruments within society are used to produce systematically otherness with the aim to restrict
and to exclude people from having access to resources. In this logic, Anzalduaís approach to the
Borderlands will take us into a complex terrain where the self is constantly receiving the influence of
multiple and contradictory actors, whose ongoing, sometimes autonomous, transformational
influences set up a path to break free from traditional paradigms of class, race, gender, and sexuality.
Lastly, we do not deny our own social location or privilege, but rather embrace the
particularity of our own epistemic experience as a starting point for emancipatory
coalition building. Mestiza is not an ethnicity but a state of mind, and no other state
of mind provides a better theoretical lens through which to view the border.
Mendoza, 2k8, Elva Fabiola Orozco, Master of Arts in Political Science, Borderlands Theory: Producing
Border Epistemologies with Gloria Anzaldua, April 24,
2008, http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-05062008175949/unrestricted/Final_thesis_corrected.pdf
The final process in the Borderlands theory is La conciencia de la mestiza or the Borderlands
consciousness as Anzald˙a calls it. A long way had to be walked in order to arrive at this stage, yet the
confusion that she experienced in nepantla, the agony that she suffered in Coatlicue, and the crushing
burden of picking up the pieces in Coyolxauhqui have all produced important outcomes which are
materialized in the new mestiza, a consciousness that speaks of resistance. ¶ The new mestiza is a space
of hybridity, of multiplicity, which means that it is not exclusive of ¶ Mexican-Americans/Chicanos,
Latin Americans, Indigenous, or Indians. Even white males can have a mestiza consciousness since this
is a state of mind. Having a mestiza consciousness means that all the previous processes have
prepared the self to engage, to abandon previous feelings of victimization, and to replace them with
reason and political action, where reason is to be regarded as the capacity to understand our own
position vis-à-vis those institutions that represent us and demands that we question them constantly.
Thus, the person who previously lived as a colonized being, as someone devaluated and stigmatized by
the logic of domination no longer accepts to play that role, no longer accepts impositions and
marginalization. She instead uses her voice to define herself, to speak for herself and to open new
spaces for herself. The mestiza consciousness is now her new identity and she enacts it and performs
it on a daily basis. The new mestiza hence is capable of transformation and evolution and her new
identity makes her unique. The attributions of this new identity Anzaldua describes in Borderlands: The
new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity. She learns to
be an Indian in Mexican culture, to be a Mexican from an Anglo point of view. She learns to juggle
cultures. She has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode nothing is trusted out, the
good the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned. Not only she sustains
contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else (Anzaldua, 1987: 79). In the new
mestiza, feelings of fear and shame together with the wound caused by the separation and subsequent
distinction of white/colored, male/female, civilized/barbarians, etc., are healed with a new value system
(Anzaldua, 1987: 3) in which metaphors are used to reverse the negative stereotypes socially imposed
on people by inserting new meanings onto them. Going through the Borderlands helps her to redefine
her position not only in her own eyes, but also in the society. Now, she is no longer the voiceless,
tamed woman that would not dare to challenge others; to be sure, she is ready to do so, and in turn,
she is feared and no longer the one who fears. Yet having a better notion of our own identity is not
enough, since the transformation one has suffered does not come without compromises. One of these
compromises is to seek the transformation of the overall social structure. Hence, the new mestiza
becomes necessarily a political actor as a product of the newly gained identity, who needs to work in
favor of creating emancipatory spaces, building communities of solidarity, teaching resistance,
transforming institutions, and so on and so forth. Anzald˙a shows this political consciousness in the new
mestiza when she states, it is not enough to stand in the opposite river bank, shouting questions,
challenging patriarchal, white conventions (Anzald˙a, 1987: 78). Later in that same paragraph, she
declares that one’s role as a new mestiza is to act and not to react from what stance, positioning,
profession, etc., one may have. However, action must be politically engaged. This struggle is mapped in
this way: The first step is to take inventory. Despojando, desgranando, quitando paja this step is a
conscious rupture with all oppressive traditions of all cultures and religions. She communicates that
rupture, documents the struggle. She reinterprets history, and using the new symbols, she shapes
new myths. She adopts new perspectives toward the dark-skinned, women and queers. She
strengthens her tolerance for ambiguity. She is willing to share, to make herself vulnerable to foreign
ways of seeing and thinking. She surrenders all notions of safety of the familiar. She is able to
transform herself (Anzald˙a, 1987: 82-83). Thus, a new consciousness implies a political activism, which
for Anzald˙a was manifested through her writing. Her broader project is to attain political change since
this type of change is the kind that can really make the difference in a person’s life.
Borders Aff—1AC (With Plantext)
Contention One is On the Border
Borders exist wherever two or more cultures edge each other - they are experienced
as social and physical barriers which advance a multitude of conflictual power
relations
Mendoza, 2k8, Elva Fabiola Orozco, Master of Arts in Political Science, Borderlands Theory: Producing
Border Epistemologies with Gloria Anzaldua, April 24,
2008, http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-05062008175949/unrestricted/Final_thesis_corrected.pdf
The psychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands, and the spiritual borderlands are not particular to the southwest. In fact,
the borderlands
are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of
different races occupy the same territory, where the lower, middle and upper classes touch (Anzaldua, 1987: preface). In the
above paragraph, we are confronted with a notion of Borderlands that does not exist physically but which
are, nonetheless, influential and powerful. These Borderlands have been created with the intention of establishing
differentially, that is, they are socially produced to create hierarchies seeking to seize control over the fate of certain groups or, trying to keep
others at distance. As previously explained, the
very notion of a border implies people construct binary categories
such as us and them, which, most of the time, are incompatible since the us gets privileged over them. These Borders are the
consequence of the incapability of certain groups to deal with difference and to incorporate it as
something that is immanent, not a detriment, to the human condition. The theorization of these ideological
Borderlands is more complicated given their immateriality. In other words, people who create them may declare that they do not exist, since
they do not occupy a physical space. However, these
Borderlands are felt on a daily basis and as social products,
they are the carriers of power relations and political agendas as we will further see.
Despite the innate fluidity of the US-Mexico borderlands, the distinction between
“inside” and “outside” the border remains ethically and culturally pervasive.
Discourses of emergency are used to delegitimize multiculturalism and sanction the
massacre of illegal migrants.
Giorgi and Pinkus 2006 (Gabriel, Assistant Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at the
University of Southern California, Karen, Professor of Italian, French, and Comparative Literature at the
University of Southern California, “Zones of Exception: Biopolitical Territories in the Neoliberal Era”,
Johns Hopkins University Press, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/diacritics/v036/36.2giorgi.html#bio1 oliver g)
Contemporary discourses on economic, social, and cultural exclusion are deeply associated, especially
in the media, with images of militarized, fiercely controlled borders and coastlines, as well as with
recurrent commonplaces about the widening gap between rich and poor, between the "privileged"
and "wretched." But however much these boundaries and these social maps can be presented as fixed
in order to satisfy the anxieties of the audience (anxieties, in turn, systematically reproduced and
stimulated by the media), they are also extremely precarious and unstable. The very insistence on
phrases such as "fortress Europe," the proposals for a "double" or "triple fence" on the US-Mexico
border, or the claims for more security and vigilance in upper- and middle-class neighborhoods in the
cities—all are symptomatic of defensive reactions to an increasingly unstable economy of
inclusion/exclusion and inside/outside. It is as if the effort to reinforce the borders between territories
and between groups and populations were menaced not only by the quantitative increase of people
trying to cross borders or of poverty and "social danger," but also, and perhaps more decisively, by the
closeness or immediacy of an "outside" that should be kept out, fenced, constantly pushed away—an
"outside" thus that cannot be understood exclusively in spatial or territorial terms, but that points
toward an economy where territories, politics, and life intertwine in specific ways. Our media are
characterized by a rhetorics of emergency: images of packed migrants in the Centers of Temporary
Permanence being prepared to be returned to their countries of origin, or directly—as in Ceuta and
Melilla, the Spanish cities in North Africa—being physically rejected, and in some cases killed, by
border patrols; of indigents increasingly visible and present (and thus persecuted) in cities throughout
the globe. The concurrent instability and violence rupturing different territorial and social boundaries
point toward a dynamic in which what takes place is not only a social conflict between rich and poor,
or between privileged and unprivileged, but also a tension—and an ambivalence—at the level of the
inscription of bodies, and of life itself, in the social and political order.¶ The "outside," then, although
represented and "materialized" in spatial terms, seems to point toward to another dimension that is
not exclusively territorial, geopolitical, or cultural, but fundamentally biopolitical: the dimension or the
level at which human life is inscribed, constituted, recognized, and defined within a given sociopolitical
order. What is deployed through the rhetorics and the politics of borders and boundaries, what the
media stages in the spectacle of the territorial security and perpetual danger, be it at a transnational or
an urban scale, is a split or division at which "human life" is separated from the unrecognizable, the
residual, life reduced to its "merely biological" status—"bare life," to use Agamben's expression, which
is in many ways identified with the diverse forms of poverty and indigence so deeply intensified in the
neoliberal era.
This obsession with the border creates a reflexive surveillance state where the body
politic must systematically purge itself of all racial impurity in order to function
smoothly
Salter 2004 (Mark B., School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, Ontario, “Passports, Mobility,
and Security: How smart can the border be?” http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.15283577.2004.00158.x/full - oliver g)
At the border, all visitors, including Americans, have a greatly circumscribed set of rights. Border officials have
wide powers of search, seizure, detention, and of course, the ability to exclude travelers from the country. Once
admitted into the country, however, one's rights, including the right to due process, come into effect. Under this system, the intense
application of state power through the examination at the border substitutes for wider police powers of surveillance once inside American
territory. Simply, an examination at the border cannot deter or detect a motivated criminal. Limits in intelligence-gathering and informationsharing will inevitably lead to the admission of more terrorists. The openness on which America prides itself proves to be a weakness in terms
of terrorist activities. Thus, controls
have been tightened at the border and the surveillance of “high-risk”
nationals will be extended domestically. Because the examination of the 9/11 terrorists failed, the Homeland Security
Department and other federal law enforcement agencies aim to continue the surveillance of “high-risk” individuals within American territory.
The transition from “undesirable” visitors to “high-risk” marks a significant shift in discourse. The exclusion of
undesirable visitors indicates knowledge of the individual, if only as undesirable. However, defining individuals as “high-risk” indicates a lack of
precise knowledge, suggesting
only suspicions based on statistics, sociology, and narratives . As the government
a cycle of insecurity that leads to the increase of police powers
and bureaucratic structures of control. Bigo (2002) has made this argument in the European context, but we believe that it can
defines individuals as “high-risk,” it encourages
be extended to the post-9/11 American context also. For example, after the capture of Abdullah Al Muhajir (born Jose Padilla), Attorney
General John Ashcroft said, “Al Qaeda officials knew that as a citizen of the United States holding a valid U.S. passport, Al Muhajir would be able
to travel freely in the U.S. without drawing attention to himself” (2002b). Al Muhajir was “high-risk” precisely because of his mobility, not
because of something that had been proven in court. Ashcroft petitioned to have Al Muhajir declared an enemy combatant, leading to a severe
circumscription of his rights, which would normally be unconceivable.¶ Whereas
previous border security regimes focused
on the actual examination between the agent of the government and the traveler, the surveillance regime aims to
make the agents of the government present but invisible so that travelers police themselves . By
surveillance we invoke the work of Foucault who describes an architecture of power and authority by which individuals come to police
themselves in addition to being policed from outside (1977:189).8 This surveillance strategy
operates most efficiently when
“surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action [consequently] the
perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary” (Foucault, 1977:201). The topography of
these surveillance strategies have been studied productively by Lyon (2001, 2003) and Bigo. This surveillance system applies to
the border security regime, and in the case of the US-VISIT, to the entire mobile population of border-crossers.¶
In addition to an extended examination at the border, the US-VISIT special registration program continues the work of
domestic monitoring of high-risk visitors. Aliens are initially fingerprinted and photographed at the border.
They must report any change in their employment, schooling, or residence details to the government within ten days, and must also report in
person to an BCIS official after one month and one year, where they are interviewed and are compared to the records of their fingerprints and
photograph, after which their are also recorded. The function of the program is to define, regulate, and identify foreign visitors in the country.
While the extended examination strengthens the discernment functions of the contemporary border regime,
the collection and
verification of biometric information and residence details indicate a shift in the mode of policing
from examination to surveillance .¶ This surveillance regime imitates the 1994 Californian Proposition 187 that
required all state employees to act as de facto immigration inspectors and the Illegal Immigration Reform and
Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 that offered a mechanism by which anyone could report illegal
immigrants or their employers. The proposed Terrorist Information and Prevention System (TIPS) creates a national neighborhood watch
program. Through a toll-free telephone number American transportation workers, truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains,
utility employees, and other members of the USA Citizen Corps may identify suspected terrorists, who will then be questioned by authorities.¶
Tom Ridge, the head of Homeland Security, has also launched a public awareness campaign. The
Citizens' Preparedness Guide
encourages every citizen to be “vigilant” toward suspicious individuals, packages, and situations. The guide enlists
all 280 million Americans into the war on terror. For example, Shiels reported programs that trained airline passengers to restrain hijackers
(2002); and USA Today ran a feature “Here's what to do if you're hijacked,” in which an expert on terrorist attacks suggested: “You want to take
a good look at who's getting on board. Do your own screening and profiling. You want to look into their eyes. You can tell a lot about people by
looking in their eyes. Are they shifty? Are they nervous?” (Sloan, 2002). This is epitomized in the campaign slogan: “Don't be afraid, be ready.”9
We would argue that the campaign in fact urges citizens to be afraid in an “economy of danger.” Simply put, buying
duct tape and extra water does not attack the roots of global terrorism—rather it places American citizens in the position of continuous threat
against which they can only be ready to victims. The
primary functions of this public campaign are to distract the populace
from the external war on terror (which seems unable to reach its goals—witness the absence of Saddam Hussein or Osama bin
Laden) and to enlist the populace's help in policing the national population. Reinforcing the notion that all citizens
are watching each other leads each individual to attempt to appear as “normal” as possible. Examination has been supplanted
by a surveillance regime, in which every citizen is both watched and a watcher.
The biopolitical valuation of populations legitimizes all genocide and war
Elden 2002 (Prof of Politics @ U Warwick boundary 2 29.1 p. 148-9)
A break or cut (coupure) is fundamental to racism: a division or incision between those who must live and those
who must die. The "biological continuum of the human species" is fragmented by the apparition of races, which
are seen as distinguished, hierarchized, qualified as good or inferior, and so forth. The species is subdivided into
subgroups that are thought of as races. In a sense, then, just as the continuum of geometry becomes divisible in
Descartes, 39 the human continuum is divided, that is, made calculable and orderable, two centuries later. As
Anderson has persuasively argued, to suggest that racism has its roots in nationalism is a mistake. He suggests that
"the dreams of racism actually have their origin in ideologies of class, rather than in those of nation: above all in
claims to divinity among rulers and to ‘blue' or ‘white' blood and breeding among aristocracies." 40 As Stoler has
noted, for Foucault, it is the other way around: "A discourse of class derives from an earlier discourse of races." 41
But it is a more subtle distinction than [End Page 147] that. What Foucault suggests is that discourses of class have
their roots in the war of races, but so, too, does modern racism; what is different is the biological spin put on the
concepts. 42 But as well as emphasizing the biological, modern racism puts this another way: to survive, to live, one
must be prepared to massacre one's enemies, a relation of war. As a relation of war, this is no different from the
earlier war of races that Foucault has spent so much of the course explaining. But when coupled with the
mechanisms of mathematics and medicine in bio-power, this can be conceived of in entirely different ways. Biopower is able to establish, between my life and the death of the other, a relation that is not warlike or
confrontational but biological: "The more inferior species tend to disappear, the more abnormal individuals can
be eliminated, the less the species will be degenerated, the more I—not as an individual but as a species—will
live, will be strong, will be vigorous, will be able to proliferate." The death of the other does not just make me
safer personally, but the death of the other, of the bad, inferior race or the degenerate or abnormal, makes life
in general healthier and purer (FDS, 227–28). "The existence in question is no longer of sovereignty, juridical; but
that of the population, biological. If genocide is truly the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a return
today of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the
race, and the large-scale phenomena of population" (VS, 180; WK, 136). "If the power of normalization wishes to
exercise the ancient sovereign right of killing, it must pass through racism. And if, inversely, a sovereign power,
that is to say a power with the right of life and death, wishes to function with the instruments, mechanisms, and
technology of normalization, it must also pass through racism" (FDS, 228). This holds for indirect death—the
exposure to death—as much as for direct killing. While not Darwinism, this biological sense of power is based on
evolutionism and enables a thinking of colonial relations, the necessity of wars, criminality, phenomena of
madness and mental illness, class divisions, and so forth. The link to colonialism is central: This form of modern
state racism develops first with colonial genocide. The theme of the political enemy is extrapolated biologically.
But what is important in the shift at the end of the nineteenth century is that war is no longer simply a way of
securing one race by eliminating the other but of regenerating that race (FDS, 228–30). As Foucault puts it in La
volonté de savoir: [End Page 148] Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended;
they are waged on behalf of the existence of all; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale
slaughter in the name of life necessity. Massacres have become vital [vitaux—understood in a dual sense, both as
essential and biological]. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have
been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed. (VS, 180; WK, 136) The shift Foucault thinks is
interesting is what might be called a shift from sanguinity to sexuality: sanguinity, in that it had an instrumental
role (the shedding of blood) and a symbolic role (purity of blood, differences of blood); sexuality, when
mechanisms of power are directed to the body, to life. The theme of race is present in both, but in a different form
(VS, 194; WK, 147). We have moved from "a symbolics of blood to an analytics of sexuality. Clearly, nothing was
more on the side of the law, death, transgression, the symbolic, and sovereignty than blood; just as sexuality was
on the side of the norm, knowledge, life, meaning, the disciplines and regulations" (VS, 195; WK, 148). In Nazism,
the two are combined. Eugenics and medical/mathematical techniques are coupled with the fantasy of blood and
the ideal of the purity of the race. Foucault notes that there was immediate control of procreation and genetics in
the Nazi regime, and that regulation, security, and assurance were imposed over the disciplined, ordered society;
but at the same time, the old sovereign power of killing traversed the entire society. This was not simply confined
to the state, nor simply to the SA or the SS, but ultimately to everyone, as, through denunciation, everyone could
have this power over their neighbor (FDS, 231). While destruction of other races was central to Nazism, the other
side of it was the exposure of the German race itself to death, an absolute and universal risk of death. The entire
German population was exposed to death, and Foucault suggests that this was one of the fundamental duties of
Nazi obedience. Only this exposure of the entire population to the universal risk of death could constitute the
Germans as the superior race, regenerated in the face of those races either totally exterminated or completely
subjugated. We have, therefore, in Nazism, both the absolute generalization of bio-power and the generalization
of the sovereign right of death. Two mechanisms—one classical, archaic; one new—coincide exactly. A racist state,
a murdering state, a suicidal state. Accompanying the final solution was the order of April 1945 that called for the
destruction of the conditions of life of the German [End Page 149] people themselves. A final solution for other
races, an absolute suicide for the German race (FDS, 231–32).
Contention Two is Meztisa Consciousness
The US-Mexico border must be understood as a ‘heterotopia’ rather than a ‘topia,’ as
a non-place rather than a place. In contrast to the Euclidian paradigm of symmetry
and closure, the geometry of the borderlands is marked by fractal growth and fractal
decay, by disarray and gradiation. This ambiguity cannot be explained away by a
single historical narrative, but must be preserved through the continuous telling and
retelling of diverse cultural pasts.
Morales 1995 (Alejandro, Professor of Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine,
“Dynamic identities in heterotopia,” Bilingual Review, Sepember-December, Vol. 20 Issue 3,
http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?sid=ffbe01ad-af3b-4bcb-83306b3827271a3f%40sessionmgr114&vid=1&hid=122&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl
#db=aph&AN=9610220106.)
¶ Davis's description alludes
to a new meaning of urbanism in a border region. The idea has changed from urban, pertaining to a city with a
center, planned on the ideal of utopia, to a vast multicultural population concentration that transcends city limits and anachronistic urban
models. Today urban population is concentrated from Los
Angeles to San Diego/Tijuana, two "super-cores" that continuously
reach out toward each other filling the spaces between with a multitude of independent collective "topias"
evolving into heterotopia. Los Angeles and San Diego/Tijuana together constitute a new urban model, a heterotopia.¶ ¶ Gloria
Anzaldua in Borderlands, La Frontera, The New Mestiza describes the unique border culture that arises in the border
region as the noir aspects of heterotopia:¶ ¶ The U.S.-Mexico border is "una herida abierta" where the
Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the
lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country--a border culture. Borders are set up to define
the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A borderland is a vague and undetermined
place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition.[ 2]¶ ¶ Michel
Foucault's "Heterotopia," an idea that attempts to bring order and understanding to a space accommodating a wealth of
displacement of different entities, explains border culture.¶ ¶ Heterotopia: disorder in which fragments of a large
number of possible orders glitter separately in the dimension, without law or geometry, of the
heteroclite . . . in such a state, things are laid, placed, arranged in sites so very different from one another that it is
impossible to find a place of residence for them . . .[ 3]¶ ¶ Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia explains the
border culture experienced daily in the urban zone between Santa Barbara, California, and Tijuana, Mexico.
We live in a time and space in which borders, both literal and figurative, exist everywhere. Borders made of concrete, asphalt,
aluminum, barbwire, and water, which mark the dividing line of one community in relation to another and mark the demographic, racial,
ethnic, economic, and political separation of people, are
the physical borders of heterotopia. Metaphorical borders
are symbolized by the divisions and limits of culture, language, food, traditions, influence, and power. Psychological borders
are manifested in metaphors of fear, desire, love, and hatred.¶ ¶ A border maps limits; it keeps people in and out of an area; it
marks the ending of a safe zone and the beginning of an unsafe zone. To confront a border and, more so, to
cross a border presumes great risk. In general, people fear and are afraid to cross borders. People will not leave their safe zone, will not
venture into what they consider an unsafe zone. People cling to the dream of utopia and fail to recognize that they create
and live in heterotopia.¶ ¶ The image of people desperately running, crossing the border, heading north,
journeying to utopia, but discovering heterotopia illuminates much of the landscape we inhabit. When
the "Third World" is no longer maintained at a distance "out there" but begins to appear "in here", when the
encounter between diverse cultures, histories, religions and languages no longer occurs along the peripheries, in the
"contact zones" as Mary Louise Pratt calls them, but emerges at the center of our daily lives, in the cities and cultures of the so-called
"advanced", or "First", world, then we can perhaps begin to talk of a significant interruption in the preceding sense of our lives, cultures,
languages and futures.[ 4]¶ ¶ This world, this experience requires a new mode of thinking,¶ ¶ a
mode of thinking that is
neither fixed nor stable, but is one that is open to the prospect of a continual return to events, to their re-elaboration and
revision. This retelling, re-citing and re-siting of what passes for historical and cultural knowledge
depend upon the recalling and re-membering of earlier fragments and traces that flare up and flash
in our present . . . These fragments that remain as fragments: splinters of light that illuminate our journey while
simultaneously casting questioning shadows along the path.[ 5]¶ ¶ People are learning to live in
heterotopia and must constantly develop new survival strategies. Southern California, from Tijuana to Santa Barbara, is a
perplexing urban area constituted by a continuum of shapeless cities with no center, no core of a single identity.
Southern California is a profusion of cultural enclaves, a multitude of othernesses, developing together and creating
literal and metaphorical borders. It is an unending, unfinished process of continuous movement, of
ceaseless change, of always becoming, of perpetual transformation, complicated by a cryptic omnipresent uniformity.¶ ¶ The
heterotopian ambience of Southern California, the ceaseless creation of fantasy, mythology, and mythography is generated from three principal
entities: Hollywood, Disneyland, and the border. Hollywood and Disneyland produce the fantasy and the dreams that urban heteroclites live
out vicariously. The
border creates the mythology and mythography recorded in the newspapers, the radio, and the
in a frontier that runs through your tongue, religion, music, dress, food,
architecture, appearance, and life and that manifests itself in multiple ontologies calls for the
acquisition of new survival habits.[ 6]¶ ¶ "This drama rarely freely chosen is also the drama of the stranger."[ 7] The inhabitants of
nightly local news.¶ ¶ Living
heterotopia are rendered strangers to each other and to themselves. Crossing the border, heading north, the Mexican is immediately separated
from the point of origin, from the genesis of identity. In a land covered with a webbed veil of freeways the individual Mexican moving north is
separated, cutoff from the motherland. Here the stranger must struggle to make him/herself at home. Here the stranger is constantly asked to
define, explain, and understand himself/herself. Life
in the chaos of heterotopia is a perpetual act of self-definition
gradually deterritorializing the individual. The individual becomes an ambiguity.¶ ¶ Chicanos have become
trapped in the process of self-definition and have splintered, shattered their identity, made themselves an ambiguity, strangers in their own
land, constantly moving like migrants, not knowing who they are, where they come from, nor where they are going. They fail to understand
that identity is not fixed, that nothing
is certain in the Southwestern heterotopia border zone.
Therefore, rather than simply condemning borders or embracing them, we propose
the 1AC as a site for rethinking prevailing notions of territoriality and carving space for
future inquiry. The question should not be whether the US-Mexico border is good or
bad, but whether a specific conceptualization of the border is constructive or
destructive in the context of global justice.
Agnew 2008 (John, Department of Geography, UCLA, Los Angeles, “Borders on the mind: re-framing
border thinking,” Ethics & Global Politics 1, no. 4,
http://ethicsandglobalpolitics.net/index.php/egp/article/view/1892/1985 - oliver g)
In my view, borders have always been more equivocal practically and ethically in their origins and in their effects than the two dominant types
of story allow. I would suggest that the overarching normative question in re-framing understanding of borders is how much borders enhance
or restrict the pursuit of a decent life. They have always been open to question, if not to all who would cross them. The paths they follow are
often quite arbitrary and without any sort of ‘natural’ justification. Their socio-political significance is very recent (much more recent,
for example, than Sahlins's sixteenth century) and this relates perhaps as much to the increased infrastructural power of some states and lack
of it in others, increased gradients of economic development across borders around the world, and improved ease of travel as to the identity
functions they perform and that are emphasized so much in both of the stories. In
moving beyond the either/or perspective,
we need recourse to some concepts that aid in understanding the ambiguity of borders.¶ In a recent article,
Mark Salter makes imaginative use of Michel Foucault's ideas of ‘heterotopia’ and ‘confessionary complex’ to
understand the bordering activities that take place at airports.56 Borders are encountered at locations
within (airports and immigrant policing at workplaces) and well beyond (immigration posts at foreign ports and airports) any
particular map borders. Heterotopias are locations that because of their very specificity, problematize
the various functions typically associated with ‘like’ locations; in this case bordering locations other than airports.57
These are unusual places. They are sometimes referred to as a type of ‘non-place’ in which the rules of everyday life
that prevail elsewhere across places within a national territory are replaced by some very particular and peculiar
ones. A confessionary complex refers to the docility and anxiety typically engendered, at least in Western
cultures, by the gauntlet that must be run past agents of the state in places such as airports. This dual focus
takes us away from the simple obsession with borders as easily guarded land borders characteristic of
much border thinking (and anti-border thinking) and towards the complexity of what borders do and
how they are managed for both territorial and networked spaces. Two particularly important features of the article
lie in its countering both excessively laudatory accounts of airports as transversal places in which inside and outside are invariably confused and
the similarly frequent failure to note the relative inefficiencies with which airports fulfill their security functions because of their inherent
contradictions (screening for objects versus identifying dangerous persons, etc.) and all of the other activities they carry out, such as
transportation and, increasingly, shopping, by those not subject to containment and deportation. In other words, border
crossings such
as airports are not always as easily grounded or readily transgressed as the two dominant stories ,
respectively, would have us believe.¶ Of course, borders have always had such focal points, from Ellis Island NY as a port of entry for
European immigrants to the US, to Checkpoint Charlie between the two Berlins during the Cold War. All checkpoints, not just airports, have
simply become more complex in the range of functions they perform. Beyond them, along the border, not much happens most of the time.
Indeed, most borders remain unfenced and largely undefended outside of the checkpoints to which people crowd because of routes and modes
of transport that focus them there. In a number of respects, therefore, it is not entirely clear to me that airports differ fundamentally from
other border checkpoints (except, perhaps, in the shopping) and should be placed in this wider context. What
airport do suggest is
how much bordering is beyond the land borders of states per se. Rather than taking place only at borders on a map,
bordering practices are much more widely diffused geographically.¶ What I have in mind about the practical and
ethical equivocality of borders can be related to four points that should be placed in this broader context about airports and other border
checkpoints. First off, the security functions of airports are part of what can be called ‘territorial regimes’, constituting a wide range of
state-based inclusionary and exclusionary practices that are more and less discriminatory and effective in given areas, compare financial
transactions and container traffic across borders, for example, with eligibility for certain social and political rights by people that follow from
establishing legal territorial residence.58 With respect to
human border crossing, which country's passport (and
happen to hold and where it stands in the global pecking order becomes the
crucial variable determining the experience of passing from one territory to another, be it at an airport gate, a ship's
associated paperwork) you
gangplank, or a land-border crossing. Although an important, and frequently neglected, site of territorial control, the airport should be kept
within this larger theoretical frame of reference. In other words, the possibilities
of transversal practice or transgression
and ‘global citizenship’ should not be exaggerated. They are available, if at all, to relatively few, above all to the privileged
employees of multinational companies and skilled immigrants of one sort or another. In addition, these days border controls extend well
beyond borders per se into workplaces and neighborhoods in the interior of the state.59 This not only makes the whole national territory into a
border zone, but also potentially criminalizes the entire population in the face of enforcement of identity checks and so on. Immigration
checks at foreign airports extend the reach of some authorities well beyond their own putative borders.60¶ In
addition, as is clear from the American media rhetoric about ‘broken borders’ , the fanatical CNN news anchor Lou
Dobbs uses this phrase regularly to refer specifically to the US-Mexico border, and my second point, the map image of
the borders of the state still exercises a major influence on the territorial imagination of whose security is at
stake and who most threatens it.61 Many of us still live in a world where political borders are the most
important signs on a world map. Even though airports, for example, may well be major sites for the arrival of contested migrants
and possible terrorists, the most popular idea is that of the former running, swimming, or otherwise penetrating land and sea borders. This
powerful image of the border as a guardian of personal security akin to a security perimeter or fence around one's home underwrites much of
the hardening of border controls around the US and the European Union in recent years.62 Yet, of course, this is totally misleading; not only in
the fact that most undocumented aliens/those without papers/clandestini are not security threats (at least not in the sense frequently
considered as involved in terrorist plots) and once they arrive fulfill a variety of economic functions that would otherwise go unfulfilled, but that
the overwhelming majority of terrorist attacks around the world have involved legal visitors from ‘friendly’ countries or local citizens.
The notion of trespass or unregulated violation appears to provide the primary ethical basis to the imaginative emphasis on the physical border
per se as ‘the face of the nation to the world’, so to speak. Rarely is it immigrants tout court who are openly in question, it is those
without legal recognition. Of course, it is their very illegality that is attractive to employers and consumers because of the lack of qualification
for public services and the ever-present threat of deportation as a disciplinary measure. No one talks much about how difficult it usually is to be
a legal immigrant. Yet, the discourse frequently is more ambiguous in simultaneously always seeming to worry about the cultural threat that
foreign immigrants of whatever legal status pose to the national identity because blood and family ties often count so much (either officially or
unofficially) in most definitions of who ‘really belongs’ within the national territory.63 Even in countries which officially claim more
‘open’ definitions of citizenship than is typically the norm, such as France and the US, nativist movements have little doubt about who is
more and who is less deserving of recognition as French or American. Debates about who does and who does not belong draw attention to
both the fluid and the contested character of national identities.64¶ Perhaps even
more importantly, however, borders, including
functions. A third point, therefore, is that though borders are about classifying
identities, they are also about sorting and sifting goods and people to enhance or maintain unequal cross-border
exchanges.65 They are not simply about a security-identity nexus as both dominant stories about
their sites at airports, serve vital economic
borders tend to allege. Cheap labor on one side facilitates cheaper products for more affluent consumers on the other. Though the
idea of a global economy has become widely accepted, in fact much economic activity is still overwhelmingly within national borders and most
firms are still effectively reliant on national models of business structure and spatial organization.66 There are very few truly global companies
and they are mostly Swiss (or from other small countries). More particularly, borders still stand guard over massive differences in standards of
living that, though shrinking somewhat as within-nation differences have grown in recent years, are still largely defined precisely at national
borders. The US-Mexico border— ‘the tortilla curtain’—is emblematic in this regard. The extreme
income gradient that it marks invites people to cross it whatever the barriers they encounter on the way. Alain Badiou makes the overall point
eloquently as follows:¶ The fall of the Berlin wall was supposed to signal the advent of the single world of freedom and democracy. Twenty
years later, it is clear that the world's wall has simply shifted: instead of separating East and West it now divides the rich capitalist North from
the poor and devastated South. New
walls are being constructed all over the world: between Palestinians and Israelis,
between Mexico and the United States, between Africa and the Spanish enclaves, between the pleasures of
wealth and the desires of the poor, whether they be peasants in villages or urban dwellers in favelas,
banlieues, estates, hostels, squats and shantytowns. The price of the supposedly unified world of
capital is the brutal division of human existence into regions separated by police dogs, bureaucratic
controls, naval patrols, barbed wire and expulsions.67¶ Fourthly, and finally, policing borders still has a
powerful normative justification in the defense of that territorial sovereignty which serves to underpin both
liberal and democratic claims to (Lockean) popular rule. Now such claims may frequently be empirically fictive, particularly in the case of
imperial and large nation-states, but the logic of the argument is that, absent effective worldwide government, the highest authority available
is that of existing states.68 How such states police their borders, of course, should be subject to transparent and open regulation. But why it is
popularly legitimate to engage in policing functions in the way they are carried out cannot
simply be put down to mass
docility in the face of an omnipotent (because it is omniscient) state apparatus. National populations do
worry about their borders because their democracy (or other, familiar, politics) depends on it. The border is a
continuing marker of a national (or supranational) political order even as people, in Europe at least, can now cross it for lunch.69 The problem
here is that democratic
theory and practice is not yet up to dealing with the complexities of a world in which
territories and flows must necessarily co-exist. If one can argue, as does Arash Abizadeh, that ‘the demos of democratic
theory is in principle unbounded’, this still begs the question of who is ‘foreigner’ and who is ‘citizen’ in a world that is
still practically divided by borders.70 As Sofia Nässtrom puts the problem succinctly: ‘it is one thing to argue that globalization has
opened the door to a problem within modern political thought, quite another to argue that globalization is the origin of this
problem’.71 Until political community is redefined in some way as not being co-extensive with nation-state, we will be stuck with much
of business as usual.¶ Currently then,
given the strong arguments about what borders do and the problems that
they also entail, a more productive ethic than thinking either just with or just against them would be
to re-frame the discussion in terms of the impacts that borders have; what they do both for and to
people . From this perspective, we can both recognize the necessary roles of borders and the barriers
to improved welfare that they create. In the first place, however, this requires re-framing thinking about
borders away from the emphasis on national citizenship towards a model of what Dora Kostakopoulou calls ‘civic
registration’ Under this model, the only condition for residence would be demonstrated willingness to live according to democratic rule
plus some set requirements for residency and the absence of a serious criminal record. Such a citizenship model requires a
reconceptualization of territorial space as a ‘dwelling space’ for residents and, thus, a move away from the
nationalist narratives which cultivate ‘the belief that territory is a form of property to be owned by a
particular national group, either because the latter has established a “first occupancy” claim or because it regards this
territory as a formative part of its identity’.73 In a world in which wars and systematic violations of human
rights push millions to seek asylum across borders every year, this rethinking is imperative .74¶ In the
second place, and by way of example, from this viewpoint it is reasonable ‘to prefer global redistributive justice to
open borders. To put it bluntly, it is better to shift resources to people rather than permitting people to
shift themselves towards resources’.75 Currently much migration from country-to-country is the result of the desire to
improve economic well-being and enhance the life-chances of offspring. Yet, people often prefer to stay put, for familial,
social, and political reasons, if they can. There seems no good basis, therefore, to eulogize and institutionalize
movement as inherently preferable to staying put. If adequate mechanisms were developed to stimulate
development in situ, many people who currently move would not. Not only people in destination countries
associate their identities with territory.¶ Using the standard of a decent life, therefore, can lead beyond
the present impasse between the two dominant views of borders towards a perspective that reframes borders as having both negative and positive effects and that focuses on how people can both
benefit from borders and avoid their most harmful effects. In political vision as in everyday practice, therefore,
borders remain as ambiguously relevant as ever, even as we work to enhance their positive and limit
their negative effects.
Thus, we advocate Mestiza consciousness: a dynamic epistemic strategy that weaves
between all boundaries, dichotomies, and absolutes in order to create real political
and social change. Through the development of “la facultad” – a faculty for seamlessly
traversing between various systems identity and belonging – we can acquire the tools
to defy coloniality and forge a more open structure of social relations.
Rodriguez 2011 (Encarnacion Gutierrez , Senior Lecturer in Transcultural Studies at the University of
Manchester, “Decolonizing Postcolonial Rhetoric,” http://www.migrazine.at/artikel/decolonizingpostcolonial-rhetoric-english.)
Gloria Anzaldúa's notion of borderlands underlines the epistemic condition which she defines as "la
facultad", "the capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities, to see the deeper
structure below the surface". This "faculty" arises out of existential experiences of abjection and
subjugation at the juncture of different systems of domination, when as Anzaldúa argues "when you're
against the wall – when you have all these oppression coming at you – you develop this extra faculty".¶
"La facultad" discerns a special faculty emerging out of the epistemic and ontological conditions of
living at the borderlands between the United States and Mexico, epitomizing the intersection
between the fluidity and invasive force of capital, on the one side, and the violence of military border
control stopping the flow of people, on the other; in short, between imperialism and coloniality. Under
these conditions a specific knowledge is produced, acquired through the struggle for liberation, a
knowledge conditioned by the historical and material circumstances circumventing this context.¶ "La
facultad" as Anzaldúa describes in her later work is shaped in the "in-between space", where
boundaries break down, where identity categories dissolve and new ways of understanding ourselves,
the world and the cosmos emerge, The Nahuatl word Nepantla is the "liminal state between worlds,
between realities, between systems of knowledge". This is the space inhabited by the subject at the
borderlands, a subject that Anzaldúa metaphorically conceives as the "borderwoman" – the "mestiza".
The "mestiza" figure is a kind of a trickster, somebody that unites the moon and the sun, the night and
the day. She has mestiza consciousness, created at the crossroads of simultaneous systems of
domination, in which ambivalent lines of belonging and the ambiguous position of inside-outsider are
created. She describes herself as a "mestiza", someone who "is in all cultures at the same time, alma
entre dos mundos, tres, cuatro, me zumba la cabeza con lo contradictorio. Estoy norteada por todas
las voces que me hablan simultáneamente". It is this state of consciousness that Anzaldúa describes as
the epistemic condition of the borderlands. This consciousness is caught in the paradox of the border
as the site of rigid boundaries and the trespassing of them, at the same time.¶ Whilst "la facultad" is
imbued with the experience of dispossession, persecution and violence, living at the borderlands also
unleashes new strategies of coping and transgressing boundaries. Transgression represents the
driving force of border consciousness, an aspect that Walter Mignolo develops further in regard to
"border thinking". Border thinking accentuates the "de-linking from the colonial matrix of power".¶ It
traces the threshold between modernity and coloniality in that it acknowledges the centrality of
Western traditions of thought for the development of modern sciences and the dominant
conceptualization of the world, at the same time that it makes clear the limitations and epistemic
violence of this perspective.¶ Anzaldúa suggests that we "disengage from the dominant culture, write
it off altogether as a lost cause, and cross the border into a wholly new territory”. This transgressive
and transversal movement in which contradictions are dissolved into myriad infinite series of
differences resonates with Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's rhizomatic movement. But, in contrast to
Deleuze and Guattari's concept of deterritorialization as nomadic thinking, Anzaldúa's notion of
Nepantla-borderlands comprises the experience of forced and violent displacement, enforced by
border and migration regimes, in which the ontology of "mestiza" knowledge is based. The heuristic
standpoint for knowledge is not the rhizomatic movement of ideas and practices, but the constant
tension between agentic transgression and violent sublimation. At this threshold, the "new common
logic of knowing: border thinking”, composed of the "pluriversality" of local colonial histories
entangled with imperial modernity arises. Thus, "critical border thinking is the method that connects
pluriversality (…) into a universal project of delinking from modern rationality and building other
possible worlds. Critical border thinking involves and implies both the imperial and colonial
difference".
And, contextualizing this method to the US-Mexico Border is uniquely important
Mendoza, 2k8, Elva Fabiola Orozco, Master of Arts in Political Science, Borderlands Theory: Producing
Border Epistemologies with Gloria Anzaldua, April 24,
2008, http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-05062008175949/unrestricted/Final_thesis_corrected.pdf
This thesis is an attempt to understand better the relations of power and resistance between different
groups, as mediated by their interaction through borders. Contrary to current notions of globalization
that presuppose an increasingly homogenized economic system, I consider that the strong emphasis
on notions of difference has its roots in the colonial period that produced the current international
system.12 If, as Hannah Arendt contends, the human condition should be about seeking humankind’s
political action, the extent to which this goal has been achieved is null if we consider that the
contemporary international system continues to be based on the set of relations created by
colonization. If we were to follow Etienne Balibar on the argument that the notions of interiority and
exteriority, which form the basis of the representation of the border, are undergoing a veritable
earthquake,î (Balibar, 2004: 5) then current conflicts over the border would not have the resonance
within governments that they do. At the same time, borders are undergoing a profound change in
meaning,(Balibar, 2004) and their relevance for issues of security are increasingly significant. This thesis
is mainly about how borders are drawn and redrawn. Also important for this study is the basis on which
borders are demarcated and by whom. In this vein, the significance of the present study lies within the
fact that borders are political entities and, as such, they carry political agendas for different groups
who seek to advance a variety of political issues. Thus, borders constitute a fertile ground for political
analysis since they: Are not only geographic but also political and subjective (e.g. cultural) and
epistemic and contrary to frontiers the very concept of border implies the existence of people,
languages, religion and knowledge on both sides linked through relations established by the coloniality
of powerÖ Borders in this sense are not natural outcome of a natural or divine historical process
inhuman history, but were created in the very constitution of the modern/colonial world (Mignolo and
Tlostanova, 2006: 208) Since the concept of frontiers or borders was created as a political instrument
aimed to physical but also ideological differences, in this study I am primarily concerned with the
Borderlands as a theory that addresses the self as a space through which social processes and
identities are constructed and contested; changed and resisted (Marshall and Rossman, 2006). This
does not mean, however, that we will not pay attention to different notions of borderlands. In fact, as
argued in the second chapter, we need to understand the social and political constitution of the
geographical borderlands between Mexico and United States in order to understand why a
Borderlands theory (the topic of the third chapter) had to be produced in the first place . A recurrent
concern of this study is the use of borders re-appropriated by marginalized groups as spaces of
resistance. Because the dominant culture has created its convenient version of reality (Anzaldua and
Keating, 2000: 229), one that aims not only to privilege the interests of certain groups, but also to
override the rights of others, we cannot be content just to explore the possibilities of selfemancipation that emotional Borderlands may offer. In addition, we need to go even further to see
what instruments within society are used to produce systematically otherness with the aim to restrict
and to exclude people from having access to resources. In this logic, Anzalduaís approach to the
Borderlands will take us into a complex terrain where the self is constantly receiving the influence of
multiple and contradictory actors, whose ongoing, sometimes autonomous, transformational
influences set up a path to break free from traditional paradigms of class, race, gender, and sexuality.
Lastly, we do not deny our own social location or privilege, but rather embrace the
particularity of our own epistemic experience as a starting point for emancipatory
coalition building. Mestiza is not an ethnicity but a state of mind, and no other state
of mind provides a better theoretical lens through which to view the border.
Mendoza, 2k8, Elva Fabiola Orozco, Master of Arts in Political Science, Borderlands Theory: Producing
Border Epistemologies with Gloria Anzaldua, April 24,
2008, http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-05062008175949/unrestricted/Final_thesis_corrected.pdf
The final process in the Borderlands theory is La conciencia de la mestiza or the Borderlands
consciousness as Anzald˙a calls it. A long way had to be walked in order to arrive at this stage, yet the
confusion that she experienced in nepantla, the agony that she suffered in Coatlicue, and the crushing
burden of picking up the pieces in Coyolxauhqui have all produced important outcomes which are
materialized in the new mestiza, a consciousness that speaks of resistance. ¶ The new mestiza is a space
of hybridity, of multiplicity, which means that it is not exclusive of ¶ Mexican-Americans/Chicanos,
Latin Americans, Indigenous, or Indians. Even white males can have a mestiza consciousness since this
is a state of mind. Having a mestiza consciousness means that all the previous processes have
prepared the self to engage, to abandon previous feelings of victimization, and to replace them with
reason and political action, where reason is to be regarded as the capacity to understand our own
position vis-à-vis those institutions that represent us and demands that we question them constantly.
Thus, the person who previously lived as a colonized being, as someone devaluated and stigmatized by
the logic of domination no longer accepts to play that role, no longer accepts impositions and
marginalization. She instead uses her voice to define herself, to speak for herself and to open new
spaces for herself. The mestiza consciousness is now her new identity and she enacts it and performs
it on a daily basis. The new mestiza hence is capable of transformation and evolution and her new
identity makes her unique. The attributions of this new identity Anzaldua describes in Borderlands: The
new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity. She learns to
be an Indian in Mexican culture, to be a Mexican from an Anglo point of view. She learns to juggle
cultures. She has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode nothing is trusted out, the
good the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned. Not only she sustains
contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else (Anzaldua, 1987: 79). In the new
mestiza, feelings of fear and shame together with the wound caused by the separation and subsequent
distinction of white/colored, male/female, civilized/barbarians, etc., are healed with a new value system
(Anzaldua, 1987: 3) in which metaphors are used to reverse the negative stereotypes socially imposed
on people by inserting new meanings onto them. Going through the Borderlands helps her to redefine
her position not only in her own eyes, but also in the society. Now, she is no longer the voiceless,
tamed woman that would not dare to challenge others; to be sure, she is ready to do so, and in turn,
she is feared and no longer the one who fears. Yet having a better notion of our own identity is not
enough, since the transformation one has suffered does not come without compromises. One of these
compromises is to seek the transformation of the overall social structure. Hence, the new mestiza
becomes necessarily a political actor as a product of the newly gained identity, who needs to work in
favor of creating emancipatory spaces, building communities of solidarity, teaching resistance,
transforming institutions, and so on and so forth. Anzald˙a shows this political consciousness in the new
mestiza when she states, it is not enough to stand in the opposite river bank, shouting questions,
challenging patriarchal, white conventions (Anzald˙a, 1987: 78). Later in that same paragraph, she
declares that one’s role as a new mestiza is to act and not to react from what stance, positioning,
profession, etc., one may have. However, action must be politically engaged. This struggle is mapped in
this way: The first step is to take inventory. Despojando, desgranando, quitando paja this step is a
conscious rupture with all oppressive traditions of all cultures and religions. She communicates that
rupture, documents the struggle. She reinterprets history, and using the new symbols, she shapes
new myths. She adopts new perspectives toward the dark-skinned, women and queers. She
strengthens her tolerance for ambiguity. She is willing to share, to make herself vulnerable to foreign
ways of seeing and thinking. She surrenders all notions of safety of the familiar. She is able to
transform herself (Anzald˙a, 1987: 82-83). Thus, a new consciousness implies a political activism, which
for Anzald˙a was manifested through her writing. Her broader project is to attain political change since
this type of change is the kind that can really make the difference in a person’s life.
Plantext
Thus the plan, the United States federal government should economically engage with
Mexico to dissolve the US-Mexico Border.
Contention 3 is Solvency
And that solves
Hayter 2000 [Teresa, writer and activist on migration and anti-racism issues. She has been active in the Campaign to Close Campsfield
since the immigration prison was opened, “open borders the case against immigration”]
If freedom to migrate meant that movements of people were so large that they led to catastrophic disruption, chaos and decline in living standards in the rich
countries, then, however admirable the ideal, it would be understandable that it should be opposed. But the
abolition of immigration
controls, although it would doubtless lead to some increase in migration, would not have an overwhelming effect on numbers.
This is, first, because immigration controls do not work. In spite of the ever-increasing paraphernalia of repressive measures, during the 1990s
the numbers of asylum seekers have remained roughly constant. European governments and their officials are beginning to recognise that immigration controls will
never be made to work. They are
engaged in a last-ditch defence of what remains of national sovereignty, in a period of growing power of
to maintain freedom of movement for capital and prevent the
movement of labour will not indefinitely resist the pressures of so-called ‘globalisation’. The water metaphors
commonly applied to immigrants can be applied to controls: controls are like a dam; when one hole is blocked, another one
appears somewhere else. Migrants and those who facilitate their migration resort to staggering feats of ingenuity, courage and endurance to assert
their right to move and to flee. The question is how much suffering will be imposed on innocent people, and how
much racism will be stoked up, in a vain attempt to deny the right to freedom of movement before
governments finally abandon the effort. Second, officials despair at their inability to deport people.
Having put refugees and migrants through months and sometimes years of suffering and uncertainty, possibly in detention
centres and prisons, governments then cannot deport the great majority of those to whom they refuse the
right to stay. This is because the governments of their countries of origin will not provide them with papers or agree to readmit
international private capital. The attempt
them, because they have developed family links in Europe, because they cannot be found, or even because protesters succeed in stopping their air flights. There are
not enough detention centres to lock up all those whose cases are turned down, and most countries apart from Britain have time limits on detention and must
often release people before they can deport them. Even in Britain, lawyers have successfully used habeas corpus to get people released if they do not have
documents enabling them to be deported. Governments
may therefore end up releasing them onto the streets, sometimes with
no access to any form of public support and no permission to work, thus turning them into, at best, illegal
workers. At a meeting in Oxford a group of European officials discussed seriously how much denial of health facilities would be compatible with international
human rights obligations. In the Netherlands, according to a Dutch official, ‘they are just dumped on the streets’, in
an attempt literally to starve them out, or perhaps deliberately to create an illegal and exploitable
workforce. The policies which are well established in the United States, and now appear to be increasingly contemplated in Europe,
are to use the migrants’ (illegal and therefore cheap) labour, but deprive them of social and political rights. Third,
the numbers of people who would migrate if they were free to do so are often exaggerated. Some have
argued that population increases and environmental catastrophes are such that, unless something is done, there
will be massive population movements from poor countries to rich countries. Others appear to believe that if people were
allowed to move freely, 400 million Indians would emigrate en masse to the rich countries in search of jobs. Orthodox
free market theory suggests that, if there was free movement of labour, there would be large-scale movements of
workers until eventually wages were equalised throughout the world. Neither of these things is likely to
happen. While some enterprising people move because there are jobs and the possibility of higher pay in the rich countries, this does not mean that the entire
population of the Third World would do so, or even a significant proportion of it. Britain, with great reluctance, offered 20,000 visas to Hong Kong citizens; 10,000 of
them were taken up. In situations
where there are no immigration controls, such as from the Commonwealth to Britain in the 1950s,
from Puerto Rico and Cuba to the United States and from French Overseas Departments to France, migration has been large but represents
only a small proportion of the population of both receiving and most sending countries. Between 1950 and 1980, for
example, 0.6 per cent of the population of the Caribbean emigrated per year, taking advantage of the absence of restrictions in former colonial powers and the
United States. Bob Sutcliffe in Nacido en otra parte has ventured an estimate that, on the assumption that these Caribbean rates of emigration were repeated
worldwide, there would be an extra 24 million migrants per year, leading to a growth of 2.4 per cent per year in the population of the industrialised countries.
Provided such an increase
was fairly evenly distributed, which would imply international agreement to
abolish controls, and in particular agreement among European countries, such an increase could well come to be seen as a useful
means of counteracting declines in the birth rate and ageing populations. But it seems unlikely in any case that people
would migrate from other areas at such high rates. Much of the Caribbean emigration took place in years when unemployment was high in the Caribbean and much
lower in the countries of destination than it is now. Migration
from the small islands of the Caribbean, where opportunities are relatively
few, was
facilitated by the existence of communities in the recipient countries and common languages
and education systems. In many areas which do not have these characteristics there has been virtually no
emigration. During the postwar period of free entry for Commonwealth citizens, which was also a period of job abundance in Britain, migration was only
from a small number of areas. It also rose and fell in relation to the numbers of job vacancies, in response to information from already established communities. On
the whole most
people do not want to uproot themselves, abandon their families, and suffer the
hardships and risks of migration to a strange and possibly hostile place in order to do the dirty work of
the natives. And, surprising though it may seem to racists quaking at the prospect of invading hordes, they like
their own countries and cultures. In Journey Without a Destination Rohini Hensman quotes the Tamil refugees she
interviewed giving depressing descriptions of their experiences of deprivation and racism in Britain, and expressing their wish to go back to Sri Lanka as soon as it
was safe to do so. Even those who had found conditions in Britain more bearable still wanted to return to their families, the climate, the social warmth and
neighbourliness, and perhaps their jobs, land and properties in Sri Lanka. ‘The overwhelming majority’ of her interviewees, she says, ‘expressed
a desire
to go back if peace was restored.’ Many others did not leave at all, saying they would prefer to die in
their own country rather than flee to a strange and hostile land.
Borders Aff—2AC Answers Case
Border
Anzaldúa Bad- Feghali
1. The Borderland is always the condition of the other- from a standpoint of
identity and geopolitical relationships; the mestizo is tied to nomadism as they
fail to relate to any specific side of the border. And we embrace an
intersectional methodology that solves for homogenization- their Feghali
evidence does not assume a heterotopia
2. Borderland theory is not exclusionary- it is “created at the crossroads of
simultaneous systems of domination, in which ambivalent lines of belonging
and the ambiguous position of inside-outsider is created”. Essentialism is
impossible due to a framework that is founded upon constant confrontations
with the self and other- that’s Mendoza
3. Her use of indigenous Mexican terms is justified- she uses these terms in light
of academic and critical conclusions and there’s no disadvantage to her
statements
4. She is not writing from an Americanized perspective- she continually utilizes
poetry and other forms of expression about her life growing up in the
Borderlands
Vaquera-Vasquez
1. We do not displace the border’s cultural reality- our evidence cites personal
experiences and past examples from those who have lived near or at the border
2. Semiotic analysis checks the link- universalism is impossible in a world where
linguistic devices, such as metaphors, are the paradigmatic objective of our
reconceptualization. And your author agrees: the evidence is in the context of
deconstruction
3. We do not associate the border with a specific person or demographic- it’s just
reflected as a status of the “Other”
4. Perpetual and open discussions gut their claim of invisibility- extend the
analysis of the Mendoza evidence: The dominant culture has created its
convenient version of reality one that aims not only to privilege the interests of
certain groups, but also to override the rights of other
Semiotics
Postcolonialism Turns
1. Anzaldúa does not attempt to resurrect the precolonial aspects of her culture
outside of theory- rather, she reflects on experiences to become more
spiritually active in the future
Keating ‘8 [AnaLouise Keating has a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of Illinois, Chicago and currently serves as the
Professor of Women’s Studies at the Texas Woman’s University, “I’m a citizen of the universe": Gloria Anzaldúa's Spiritual Activism
as Catalyst for Social Change]
I want to address this objection at length because it reflects such a typical reaction to Anzaldúa's spiritualized politics. To be sure, in
several passages in BorderlandsILa Frontera Anzaldúa does seem to romanticize indigeneity. However, a more
thorough reading of this text, coupled with an investigation of her later writings, offers a very different
interpretation. Although revisionist mythmaking does play a role in her spiritual activism, Anzaldúa does not try to
resurrect "old gods," reclaim an "authentic" her personal agency, her ability to learn from even the most
negative life events. Anzaldúa offers the most extensive discussion to date' of her theory and praxis of spiritual activism in "now
let us shift . . . the path of conocimiento . . . inner work, public acts." As the title implies, in this essay Anzaldúa urges herself and her
readers to enact transformation (or "shift") by focusing simultaneously on self-change ("inner acts") and outwardly directed social
activism ("public acts"). In one of the essay's final sections, appropriately titled "shifting realities . . . acting out the vision or spiritual
activism," she describes how spiritual activism enabled her to address individual and collective needs
simultaneously: You reflect on experiences that caused you, at critical points of transformation, to adopt
spiritual activism. When you started traveling and doing speaking gigs, the harried, hectic, frenzied pace of the activist stressed
you out, subjecting you to a pervasive form of modern violence.... To deal with personal concerns while also confronting larger
issues in the public arena, you began using spiritual tools to cope with racial and gender oppression and other modern maladies—
not so much the seven deadly sins, but the small acts of desconocimientos: ignorance, frustrations, tendencies toward selfdestructiveness, feelings of betrayal and powerless- ness, and poverty of spirit and imagination.'"
2. Their San Juan evidence is contingent on postcolonialism acknowledging
cultural differences as the basis of subjugation- this oversimplifies the analysis
of the 1AC which includes discussions of economy, citizenship, and imperialism.
And we work to prevent the escalation of dualisms- extend the 1AC Irvine
evidence in context of semiotics on this question
3. Empirically denied- other postcolonial movements should have triggered the
link
4. Border thinking accentuates the "de-linking from the colonial matrix of power".
It traces the threshold between modernity and coloniality in that it
acknowledges the centrality of Western traditions of thought
Idealism
1. Equivocation is a defining characteristic of Mestiza consciousnesscontradictions and intersections are not seen as detractions from the thought
system as a whole, but rather opportunities to reaffirm their own pluralistic
vista
2. All arguments in debate are theoretically idealistic: contentions such as
irrational impact claims and international fiat permeate the thinking of the
community
Borders Aff—2AC Answers T
Counterinterpretation: the economy of the material exchange has been substituted
with the knowledge economy of the present- the affirmative substantially increases its
pedagogical engagement with Mexico by problematizing cultural and market
distinctions
Powell and Snellman ‘4 [School of Education and Department of Sociology, Stanford University, February 20, 2004,
“The Knowledge Economy”, http://www.stanford.edu/group/song/papers/powell_snellman.pdf]
We define the knowledge economy as production and services based on knowledge-intensive activities that contribute to an
accelerated pace of technological and scientific advance as well as equally rapid obsolescence. The key components of a
knowledge economy include a greater reliance on intellectual capabilities than on physical inputs or
natural resources, combined with efforts to integrate improvements in every stage of the production
process, from the R&D lab to the factoryfloor to the interface with customers. These changes are reflected in the
increasing relative share of the gross domestic product that is attributable to “intangible” capital
(Abramovitz & David 1996). Of course, many alternative labels and definitions are more expansive than ours, but we choose to keep
the focus on the production of novel ideas that subsequently lead to new or improved goods and services and organizational
practices. Since the 1970s, many researchers have noted the transition that has occurred in advanced
industrial nations from a manufacturing-based to services-driven economy. This change often goes by the labels
postindustrial or post-Fordist (Bell 1973, Hirschorn 1984, Block 1990). Such a stark view of economic transformation misses an even
more profound change in which the distinction between manufacturing and services has been rendered moot .
Consider the automobile, the icon of the “old” Fordist, manufacturing economy. A new car today is less and less the product of
metal fabrication and more a smart machine that uses computer technology to integrate safety, emissions, entertainment, and
performance. The computer games, produced on assembly lines in Asian factories, with which teenage boys are so addled are
sophisticated information processing devices, with both speed and graphics capability that exceed the largest supercomputer of a
decade ago. Amazon.com, with its innovative use of collaborative filtering that tells consumers what people with similar tastes are
watching, listening to, and reading, depends simultaneously on a warehousing system out of the factory era and on an Internet
based retail operation. These varied illustrations point not only to the blurring of the manufacturing-services
distinction but also to the very considerable extent that knowledge can be embodied in both goods and
services. Economists have noted that these changes in production are part of a broader shift from
tangible goods to intangible or information goods (Shapiro & Varian 1999). The replacement of answering machines by
voice mail and multivolume encyclopedias by CD-ROMS are but two illustrations of this transition.
Language relies on denotative ambiguity and inherently proliferates connotationsintention of meaning is impossible to actualize.
Kennedy ’97 [DUNCAN KENNEDY, A CRITIQUE OF ADJUDICATION: FIN DE SIÈCLE (1997), “A CRITIQUE OF SEMITOICS,
http://eslking.com/library2/collections/semiotics/general/kennedy_semiotics_of_critique.pdf”
You Can Neither Say What You Mean nor Mean What You Say The first, which seems to have been first beautifully
articulated by Lévi-Strauss in The Savage Mind, 93 can be simplified down to: you can never say what you mean and you can never
mean what you say. You can never say what you mean because you have to say it in language, which makes
available only one particular repository of signs and rules for expressing yourself . A particular thing you have
in mind to represent is particular in the sense of irreducible to any pregiven set of elements. “The real,” by definition, is that
which exceeds, can’t be grasped by, unpredictably disrupts any attempt to reduce it to what can be
represented in the langue in question. What you do when you try to express yourself is to “jerry build” some utterance
out of the pregiven elements of langue, rather than “engineering” your utterance to fit exactly your meaning. (This is the famous
category of bricolage). You can never mean what you say because once you’ve produced the representation it floats
out into the world as an utterance whose interpretation by those who register it as speech you can’t
control. The signifiers that compose the utterance are loaded with denotative ambiguity and
proliferate connotations . Your sentence will mean all kinds of things you not only never intended, but
also could never have imagined in advance no matter how careful you were to guard against
misinterpretation (of an utterance that was already a misrepresentation of what you meant). It seems appropriate to call this
irrationalism in semiotics because the two points unmoor the utterance, in whatever langue, from the speaker and from any
particular audience. It becomes a “thing” in the world, like a rock, or a cloud, accessible to anyone who comes upon it and
interpretable by them according to whatever system of meanings they end up incorporating it into. But there is a little more to it
than that, so long as the utterance is understood as an utterance—that is, so long as the people who deal with it once it is out there
interpret it as the production of an other who intended to communicate something.
1NC authors conclude affirmative- total economic engagement rests upon the
liberation of the proletariat as a perquisite to economic growth- we are a critical step
towards development in Mexico
DOS ‘1 (United States Department of State, January, 20, 2001, “What is total economic engagement?”, http://20012009.state.gov/e/eeb/92986.htm)
Total economic engagement looks beyond the current practice of using financial development assistance
as the only ox at the plow. We know that developing countries own the keys to their own economic
success. Just as democracy relies on the educated and active common man, so a healthy economy rests
on the liberated individual. Ronald Reagan summed it up well: “We who live in free market societies believe that growth,
prosperity and ultimately human fulfillment, are created from the bottom up, not the government down. “Only when the
human spirit is allowed to invent and create, only when individuals are given a personal stake in deciding
economic policies and benefiting from their success – Only then can societies remain economically alive,
dynamic, progressive, and free.” Our goal, therefore, must be the creation of the right conditions for
individual economic growth and success. We must cultivate conditions for private sector growth, investment and trade.
This cannot be accomplished through Official Development Assistance (ODA) funds alone. Foreign assistance must support a
developing country’s own effort to improve their economic climate. Total economic engagement is putting all of the
players to the same plow. EEB is harnessing trade and economic policy formation, proper governance, and ODA activities
together. The bureau also integrates the American individual. Working with U.S. citizen-partners participating in developing
economies abroad is a key element of total economic engagement. An accurate accounting of a nation’s total engagement must
include economic policies as well as, trade, remittances, and foreign direct investment. In these areas, the U.S. leads the world in
total economic engagement with the developing world. The private donations of American citizens, military emergency aid and
peacekeeping and government assistance provide the primary sources for development financing. In all of EEB’s endeavors with
State regional bureaus, the White House, and other economic agencies (e.g., USTR, Treasury), we promote Total Economic
Engagement as the standard for assessing our country and regional economic strategies because we have seen that this holistic
economic strategy delivers tangible results.
Pedagogical Borders DA- monolithic perspectives on language crowd out
intersectional or revolutionary actions that question
Defense—
1. Not a reason to vote negative- potential abuse should not be a voter, the
negative had complete access to the affirmative and all possible strategies that
would be advantageous
2. The opposite of our affirmative, a complete closing of the border, would be
untopical- ergo; we are germane to the resolution. Prefer reasonability on this
question, no reason why we stifle clash
3. Your interpretation evidence from the DOS cites diverting American resources
“into our regional and country strategies”- that precludes any foreign economic
engagement
4. Their WWC evidence never actually differentiates engagement from border
management- it cites the plan as an essential aspect of development
Borders Aff—2AC Answers Framework
2AC Framework (Language)
Pedagogical Borders DA- the delineation between acceptable and unacceptable
discourse is an arbitrary distinction that embraces the dualistic thought that the aff
criticizes
WE AFFIRM THE RESOLUTION AS A FANATICAL, PERFORMATIVE AGITATIONThe resolutional question is the initiation of discussion of THE NATION, THE UNITED
STATES FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, how we affirm that discussion is a replication of how
we AFFIRM the nation, what we choose to discuss how we choose to affirm constructs
a path, a social reality of what the United States Federal Government means. We in
essence perform the agent in the resolution through every speech through every
articulation of argument.
White debaters continue to have competitive advantages in academic debate due to
opportunities to share their interpretation of the world through cultural capital- what
is at stake is not grammatical correctness but rather creating a social standard for
language
Polson, 2012, [Co-Director, teacher, and founder of ConneXions Community Leadership Academy and Social Justice Dictation scholar,
Dana; ““Longing for Theory:” Performance Debate in Action”; PG: 144-146]
In this chapter, I have examined how limited resources, the workings of social capital, and racial considerations seem to assist in the
reproduction of the policy debate community. Privileged white debaters attending privileged schools continue to have
advantages in economic and social capital and in whiteness itself that seem to translate into ongoing competitive
success, which in terms of rep and continued social networking, fosters still more advantage. Continuing to use
Bourdieu’s framework, I will now consider how cultural capital, in particular linguistic capital, furthers this cycle of reproduction. Perhaps most
difficult to translate into usable (economic) capital is cultural capital, which includes “scarce symbolic goods, skills, and titles”
including academic credentials (Wacquant, 2007, p. 268). While many of the burdens in the section on economic capital could
be lessened with an infusion of cash, and while the examples of the value of social capital given here could be
overcome or at least mitigated with some dedicated networking time and a key network member or two, a lack of
cultural capital is less easy to remedy. For one thing, acquisition of cultural capital (which can be turned into economic capital)
depends on having enough economic capital to be able to spend enough time to acquire the cultural capital. Acquisition of cultural
capital is not easily done in schools; in fact, Bourdieu argues that schooling plays a large role in reproducing social
structures by assisting in the reproduction of culture. The educational system contributes to the “the reproduction
of the structure of power relationships and symbolic relationships between the classes, by contributing to the
reproduction of the structure of the distribution of cultural capital among these classes” (Bourdieu, 1973, p. 487). In
contrast to the U.S. educational system’s goal of transmitting a culture that “is considered as being the undivided property of the whole
society,” Bourdieu says that this cultural wealth “only really belongs...to those endowed with the means of
appropriating it for themselves” through possession of the “code” used to understand and use cultural signs
(Bourdieu, 1973, p. 488). Instead of being as easily exchanged as cash, then, one’s cultural capital is only as good as one’s ability to skillfully
deploy it; it cannot be exchanged between people. Bourdieu says that there are at least two problems with this hope that the educational
system can avoid reinforcing these initial inequalities. First, in actuality, schools rarely do so: “By doing away with giving explicitly to everyone
what it implicitly demands of everyone, the educational system demands of everyone alike that they have what it does not give” (Bourdieu,
1973). In other words, schools have the same requirements of all students and yet do not act to remediate differences
in cultural capital amongst students. Second, there is a premium placed on characteristics acquired through
acculturation: “such subtle modalities in the relationship of culture and language as affluence, elegance,
naturalness, or distinction”—as opposed to “dispositions produced by the school and paradoxically devalued, by
the school itself, as being “academic” (Bourdieu, 1973, p. 494). Cultural capital expressed seemingly without effort is seen as more
valuable than the kind that is painstakingly produced. The person who appears at ease in expensive dress clothing, for example, is noted to be
old money in contrast with 147 the person who sits stiffly ill at ease, worried about messing up their clothing. We can note again a link between
cultural and social capital—the possession of cultural capital and ease with which a person deploys it signals to others
that they are “our sort” and potentially acceptable new members of a particular social capital network . The person at
ease with cultural capital won’t adulterate the network or place more demands than she brings in benefits (Bourdieu, 1986). Cultural capital is
expressed in various forms, such as taste and linguistic capital, which I deal with primarily in this section. Bourdieu says that linguistic
differences are a “retranslation of social differences” (Bourdieu, 1982, p. 54). What is at stake in linguistic legitimacy and the use
of standard language, then, is not really grammatical correctness; rather, it is social legitimacy and perception of
social class. Schools help legitimate the dominant language form as “standard” by requiring it for academic
qualifications and by claiming the standard language and the qualifications are the route to the job market
(Bourdieu, 1982, p. 49). As such, schools act as gatekeepers.
Their LIMITATIONS on our specific discourse on transportation infrastructure ignores
complications of white supremacy and continues RACIST and MEANINGLESS
educational practices
Gillborn 2k5 David Gillborn, Professor of Critical Race Studies at the University of London in Education
Journal of Education Policy, Vol. 20, No. 4, July 2005, pp. 485–505, DOA: 12-4-2011
https://www4.nau.edu/cee/orgs/serd/docs/gillborn.pdf In particular, I draw on ‘whiteness studies’ and
the application of critical race theory (CRT). These perspectives offer a new and radical way of
conceptualizing the role of racism in education. Although the US literature has paid little or no regard
to issues outside North America, I argue that a similar understanding of racism (as a multifaceted,
deeply embedded, often taken-for-granted aspect of power relations) lies at the heart of recent
attempts to understand institutional racism in the UK. Having set out the conceptual terrain in the first
half of the paper, I then apply this approach to recent changes in the English education system to reveal
the central role accorded the defence (and extension) of race inequity. Finally, the paper touches on the
question of racism and intentionality: although race inequity may not be a planned and deliberate goal
of education policy neither is it accidental. The patterning of racial advantage and inequity is
structured in domination and its continuation represents a form of tacit intentionality on the part of
white powerholders and policy-makers. It is in this sense that education policy is an act of white
supremacy. Following others in the CRT tradition, therefore, the paper’s analysis concludes that the
most dangerous form of ‘white supremacy’ is not the obvious and extreme fascistic posturing of small
neo-nazi groups, but rather the taken-for-granted routine privileging of white interests that goes
unremarked in the political mainstream
Counterinterpretation: We should have a discussion of the topic not a topical
discussion. The resolution cannot be abandoned but should serve as an invitation to
dialogue that can preserve a balance between the “clash of civilizations” now
occurring within debate.
Galloway Asst Prof and Director of Debate @ Samford 2k7
Ryan-former GMU debater; Dinner and Conversation at the Argumentative Table: Reconceptualizing
Debate as an Argumentative Dialogue; CONTEMPORARY ARGUMENTATION AND DEBATE; Vol. 28; p. 1-3.
By definition, debate coaches are contentious and the history of modern debate has been marked by an interplay of collegiality and competition (Bruschke, 2004, p. 82). However, modern debate has amped up natural
levels of antagonism so that it now exists in a clash between one group that employs an argumentative style
heavily centered on evidence and speed against another that seeks to criticize the form and style of these
debates. Debates between the two factions are frequently conceived as a clash of civilizations (Solt, 2004,
p.44). Rhetoric from both sides often reaches a fever pitch. Tim O’Donnell of Mary Washington University’s
judging philosophy says that, “right now…there is a war going on…and the very future of policy debate as an
educationally and competitively coherent activity hangs in the balance” (2008). The other side of the coin is
equally forthright. Asha Cerian offered in her judge philosophy “to vote on Ks [kritiks] and alternative forms of
debate. And that’s it” (2007). Similarly, Andy Ellis has posted a series of you-tube videos to e-debate calling for
a more radical approach. In one video entitled “Unifying the opposition,” Ellis describes debate as a war and
calls for insurgents seeking to overthrow existing debate practices (Ellis, 2008b).
While these views are
extreme, long-time observers have noted changes in the tone and tenor of debate discussions. Jeff Parcher
observed that the fragmentation of the 2004 National Debate Tournament “seemed viscerally different” than
previous disputes (2004, p. 89). These disagreements seem highly personalized and “wrought with
frustrations, anxiety, resistance, and backlash” (Zompetti, 2004, p. 27). One coach noted that the difference
between the current era of factionalization and controversies of the past is that, “no one left counter-warrant
debates in tears.” Much of the controversy involves the resolution itself, and whether teams should have to
defend the resolution, or whether they can mount a broader criticism of the activity (Snider, 2003). Steve
Woods notes that, “Academic debate is now entering a third state, a critical turn in the activity. The
identifying element of this change is that abandonment of the role playing that the construct of fiat enabled”
(Woods, 2003, p. 87). This journal previously (2004) addressed issues regarding the growing divide in policy
debate. However, the role of the debate resolution in the clash of civilizations was largely ignored. Here, I
defend the notion that activist approaches of critical debaters can best flourish if grounded in topical
advocacy defined in terms of the resolution. This approach encourages the pedagogical benefits of debates
about discourse and representations while preserving the educational advantages of switch-side debate.
Debaters’ increased reliance on speech act and performativity theory in debates generates a need to step
back and re-conceptualize the false dilemma of the “policy only” or “kritik only” perspective. Policy debate’s
theoretical foundations should find root in an overarching theory of debate that incorporates both policy
and critical exchanges. Here, I will seek to conceptualize debate as a dialogue, following the theoretical
foundations of Mikhail Bakhtin (1990) and Star Muir (1993) that connects the benefits of dialogical modes of
argument to competitive debate. Ideally, the resolution should function to negotiate traditional and activist
approaches. Taking the resolution as an invitation to a dialogue about a particular set of ideas would
preserve the affirmative team’s obligation to uphold the debate resolution. At the same time, this approach
licenses debaters to argue both discursive and performative advantages. While this view is broader than
many policy teams would like, and certainly more limited than many critical teams would prefer, this approach
captures the advantages of both modes of debate while maintaining the stable axis point of argumentation
for a full clash of ideas around these values. Here, I begin with an introduction to the dialogic model, which I
will relate to the history of switch-side debate and the current controversy. Then, I will defend my conception
of debate as a dialogical exchange. Finally, I will answer potential criticisms to the debate as a dialogue
construct.
The visibility of race within American society must be considered as an integral aspect
of policy making. We live in a society where it is no longer acceptable to continue as
we always have, ignoring how our identity impacts broader institutional structures.
Their restrictions on our interrogation of the resolution represent manifestations of
ideologies of DOMINATION and WHITE SUPREMACY, which inevitably makes our
discussions MEANINGLESS AND HOMOGENIZING
McIntosh, ’88 McIntosh, Peggy: 1988, Associate director of the Wellesley Collage Center for Research
on Women; White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack Disapproving of the system won't be
enough to change them.
I was taught to think that racism could end if white individuals changed their attitude. But a "white"
skin in the United States opens many doors for whites whether or not we approve of the way
dominance has been conferred on us. Individual acts can palliate but cannot end, these problems. To
redesign social systems we need first to acknowledge their colossal unseen dimensions. The silences
and denials surrounding privilege are the key political surrounding privilege are the key political tool
here. They keep the thinking about quality or equity incomplete, protecting unearned advantage and
conferred dominance by making these subject taboo. My schooling gave me no training in seeing
myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture. I
was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will.
My schooling followed the pattern my colleague Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out: whites are taught
to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we
work to benefit others, this is seen as work that will allow "them" to be more like "us."
The "objective" approach is not inherently better or more fair. Rather, it is accepted
because it embodies the sense of the stronger party, who centuries ago found
themselves in a position to dictate what permission meant. Allowing ourselves to be
drawn into reflexive, predictable arguments about fairness, ENSURE SERIAL POLICY
FAILURE and JUSTIFY MARGINALIZATION
2AC Framework (proper)
1. Counter-interpretation: the affirmative should be allowed to performatively and
methodologically affirm the resolution.
2. We meet our interpretation:
The border is an “economic sanction”
Askari 3 – Hossein, et al, Professor of International Business at George Washington University, Case
Studies of U.S. Economic Sanctions: The Chinese, Cuban, and Iranian Experience, p. 91-92
Mechanisms That Could Be Used to Implement an Economic Sanction
The distinctive characteristic of economic sanctions is that they constrain some aspect of international
commerce to negatively affect another country’s economy. It is common for researchers and analysts
to broadly focus on trade sanctions or finance sanctions. However, if one starts with the full range of activities and
components of international commerce, the choices are much broader and richer. For instance,
1. Capital flow controls (direct investment, portfolio investment, bank credit, trade financing, bonds)
2. Asset control (asset freeze)
3. Export controls (total or selective)
4. Import controls (total or selective)
5. Commercial (trade) policy restrictions (e.g., tariffs, quotas, normal trade- relations status, mostfavored-nation status)
6. Reduction of financing and other benefits from international and multilateral organizations
7. Travel restrictions
8. Restrictions on air links
9. Restrictions on technology transfer
10. Restrictions and limitations on tax credit and guarantees
11. Restrictions on foreign aid
12. Limitations on data and technical data transfer
13. Immigration (labor) controls
14. Restrictions on transfer of management expertise
Any one (or a combination) of these mechanisms could be part of an economic sanction.
And, relaxation of border controls is contextually defined as “economic engagement”
– prefer government definitions
US. Chamber of Commerce 2011 (“¶ U.S. Chamber to Lead Trade Delegation to Mexico¶ ,”
http://www.uschamber.com/node/14287/%252Fjune - oliver g)
WASHINGTON, D.C.—In an effort to highlight the importance of economic engagement between the
United States and Mexico, Myron Brilliant, senior vice president for International Affairs at the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce, will be leading a two-day trade delegation to Mexico City on January 10-11.
This trip comes just days after the administration released a framework to resolve the U.S.-Mexico
cross-border trucking dispute.¶ “There is no more critical time for the relationship between the
United States and Mexico,” said Brilliant. “This exercise is about taking the next step in our economic
partnership and the United States fulfilling its obligations under NAFTA.Ӧ Among other goals, the
delegation will press for a mutually agreeable solution to the debate over allowing safe, carefully
inspected trucks to operate across the U.S.-Mexico border.¶ “We welcome the news that the
administration is taking a first step toward resolving the long-running U.S.-Mexico trucking dispute,”
Brilliant said. “The Chamber will work with the administration, Congress, and the Mexican government
to implement a modern cross-border transportation system that provides certainty for trucking
companies and shippers throughout North America.”¶ “Because Mexico is second only to Canada as a
market for U.S. exports, millions of American jobs are at stake in the U.S.-Mexico partnership,”
Brilliant said. He pointed to the Chamber’s recent study that found more than 6 million American jobs
depend on trade with Mexico and 1.7 million of these jobs are tied to NAFTA.
3. Borders DA: the enforcement of acceptable vs unacceptable patterns of knowledge
production within debate mirrors the US border patrol’s use of surveillance as a
technology of containment. This is not a mere analogy or correlation, but a direct
discursive relation between all forms of exclusionary violence - our Giorgio and Pinkus
evidence says that any attempt to secure the a social body from the outside world i.e. the negative’s dedication to safeguarding ‘traditional policy debate’ from a slew of
existential threats – creates an economy of exclusion which our Foucault evidence
impacts with fascism, eugenics, and the indiscriminate massacre of deviant
individuals.
4. We’ll permute their interpretation: like the US borderlands, debate can never be
reduced to a homogeneous and abstract space - it is a heterotopia, saturated by a
plurality of local worlds and yet irreducible to any one of its components. The
increasing pervasiveness of non-traditional debate proves that they have no link
uniqueness – difference already exists, it’s simply a question of learning to relate to
this difference in a more productive way. As Moralez says,
Living in a frontier that runs through your tongue, religion, music, dress, food, architecture,
appearance, and life and that manifests itself in multiple ontologies calls for the acquisition of new
survival habits…
Life in the chaos of heterotopia is a perpetual act of self-definition gradually deterritorializing the
individual. The individual becomes an ambiguity.
And, the perm solves best: static and inflexible boundaries are the enemy of creative
transformation. The coexistence of seemingly incompatible cultural paradigms is the
only path towards authentic dialogical engagement.
Pena 1993 (Guillermo Gomez, Chicano performance artist, writer, activist, and educator, “the border
is . . . (a manifesto),” http://zonezero.com/magazine/essays/distant/zxeno2.html - oliver g)
Border Culture is a polysemantic term.¶ Stepping outside of one's culture is equivalent to walking
outside of the law.¶ Border culture means boycott, complot, ilegalidad, clandestinidad, contrabando,
transgresión, desobediencia binacional; en otras palabras, to smuggle dangerous poetry and utopian
visions from one culture to another, desde allá, hasta acá.¶ But it also means hybrid art forms for new
contents-in-gestation; spray mural, techno-altar, poetry-in-tongues, audio graffiti, punkarachi, video
corrido, anti-bolero, anti-todo: la migra (border patrol), art world, police, monocultura; en otras
palabras y tierras, an art against the monolingües, tapados, nacionalistas, ex-teticistas en extinción, per
omnia saecula speculorum. . . .¶ But it also means to be fluid in English, Spanish, Spanglish, and
Ingleñol, 'cause Spanglish is the language of border diplomacy.¶ But it also means transcultural
friendship and collaboration among races, sexes, and generations.¶ But it also means to practice
creative appropriation, expropriation, and subversion of dominant cultural forms.¶ But it also means
a new cartography; a brand-new map to host the new project; the democratization of the East; the
socialization of the West; the Third-Worldization of the North, and the First-Worldization of the
South.¶ But it also means a multiplicity of voices away from the center, different geo-cultural
relations among more culturally akin regions: Tepito--San Diejuana, San Pancho--Nuyorrico, Miami-Quebec, San Antonio--Berlin, your home town and mine, digamos, a new internationalism ex centris.¶
But it also means regresar y volver a partir: to return and depart once again, 'cause border culture is a
Sisyphean experience and to arrive is just an illusion.¶ But it also means a new terminology for new
hybrid identities and métiers constantly metamorphosing; sudacá, not sudaca; Chicarrican, not
Hispanic; mestizaje, not miscegenation; social thinker not bohemian; accionista, not performer;
intercultural, not postmodern.¶ But it also means to develop new models to interpret the world-incrisis, the only world we know.¶ But it also means to push the borders of countries and languages or,
better said, to find new languages to express the fluctuating borders.¶ But it also means
experimenting with the fringes between art and society, legalidad and illegality, English and español,
male and female, North and South, self and other; and subverting these relationships.¶ But it also
means to speak from the crevasse, desde acá, desde el medio. The border is the juncture, not the
edge, and monoculturalism has been expelled to the margins .¶ But it also means glasnost, not
government censorship, for censorship is the opposite of border culture.¶ But it also means to analyze
critically all that lies on the current table of debates: multiculturalism, the Latino "boom," "ethnic art,"
controversial art, even border culture.¶ But it also means to question and transgress border culture.
What today is powerful and necessary, tomorrow is arcane and ridiculous; what today is border
culture, tomorrow is institutional art, not vice versa.¶ But it also means to escape the current cooptation of border culture.¶ But it also means to look at the past and the future at the same time.
1492 was the beginning of a genocidal era. 1992 will mark the beginning of a new era: America postColombina, Arteamérica sin fronteras. Soon, a new internationalism will have to gravitate around the
spinal cord of this continent--not Europe, not just the North, not just white, not only you, compañero
del otro lado de la frontera, el lenguaje y el océano.
5. We meet – we occupy the space between legality and illegality within the
resolution. If their interpretation is the border, we are the borderlands.
Lindahl 2008 (Hans, Department of Philosophy, Tilburg University The Netherlands, “Border Crossings
by Immigrants: Legality, Illegality, and Alegality,” Res Publica: A Journal of Moral, Legal and Social
Philosophy, http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11158-008-9051-5/fulltext.html - oliver g)
At one level, of course, the distinction between legal order and disorder amounts to the distinction between, respectively, legal and illegal acts.
On this reading, legal
disorder ensues when human behavior breaches a legal norm, that is, when it breaches any of the four
kinds of boundaries instituted by a legal order. There is, however, a second form of legal disorder, which is linked to a problem I
deliberately passed over in silence when analyzing the basic features of legal order, as captured in collective self-legislation. In effect, my
account there took for granted that the fourfold Grenzsetzung that gives rise to a collective has already taken place, such that acts of positing
its boundaries merely reposit these. But this assumption conceals the fact that, by definition, acts that create legal orders cannot themselves be
a part thereof.8¶ The key recital of the Preamble to the Treaty of Rome neatly illustrates this paradox: ‘determined to lay the foundations of an
ever closer union among the peoples of Europe.’ The recital not only posits unity as the future vanishing point of the integrative process but
also claims that there already was a union at the time of laying its legal foundation in the Treaty of Rome, a community of peoples who, by
virtue of their shared interests, can go further together, engaging in a process of legal and economic integration. So, the wording of the recital
implies that the Treaty of Rome builds on a prior limitation of the who, what, where, and when of political community, merely providing this
bounded community with an institutional setting and specific goals. But to accept that the Treaty does no more than reposit boundaries would
be to forget that while the six founding Member States claimed to represent European unity, they had received no legal mandate to this effect
from all possibly affected parties, whether states or individuals, nor could they have, because the Treaty provides an initial delimitation of who
is an affected party. By taking the initiative of founding the European polity, the signatories seize Europe: they posit ab initio the who, what,
where, and when of the European legal order. This paradox reappears, unabated, in the circularity that governs European immigration policy:
while the European polity claims a right to inclusion and exclusion for itself because Europe is the place of its citizens, a seizure gives rise to
Europe and to European citizens, to begin with.9 This paradox is crucial for our purposes because it points to a second form of disorder. Indeed,
the founding acts of legal order are themselves neither legal nor illegal because both terms of this binary
distinction already presuppose a legal order as the condition for their intelligibility. Instead, foundational acts are
alegal because they institute the distinction itself between legality and illegality. Only retrospectively, if
they catch on, can they come to manifest themselves, albeit precariously and incompletely, as legal acts. To the extent that
such acts posit the fourfold boundaries that determine a political community, each of these ways of drawing the distinction
between legality and illegality exhibits a form of alegality. Indeed, those who institute the distinction
between member and non-member are acivic, for they are neither members nor non-members; the acts
that identify which rights are available in a legal order are anomic, for they are not themselves the exercise of a right or competence, or in
breach thereof; the
closures that distinguish inside from outside are atopic, by dint of being neither inside
nor outside a polity; and the acts that project and retroject the historical time of a collective are achronic, for they give rise to the
temporal arc spanning the past, present, and future of a collective. These considerations have a direct bearing on collective self-legislation.
The alegality of foundational acts implies that these acts, by dint of positing the fourfold boundaries of a legal order, do
not fall on either side of the master distinction between selfhood and alterity; on the contrary, they are acts
that introduce the cleavage in the very process of claiming to represent a collective. If the individuals whom
such acts invoke as members of a group attribute these to themselves as their own acts, the distinction between selfhood and alterity takes
hold, albeit incompletely and provisionally, such that alegal acts appear retrospectively as having been legal, as acts of collective self-legislation.
Accordingly, the conditions that govern the inception of a legal order also call forth disorder, during that order’s later career, in the form of
behavior that is not only illegal but also alegal. I mean by this behavior that contests the fourfold distinction between legality and illegality, as
drawn by the legal order, intimating another way of distinguishing between these terms. Alegal
acts expose the gap between
actual and possible law; they not only break the law but also transgress it. Importantly, the ‘a’ of alegality doesn’t
mean the other of legality, for if such were the case then alegal acts could never manifest themselves as such to a legal order. Instead, it means
that such
acts disrupt a legal order by revealing another legality, other possibilities of drawing the
distinction between legality and illegality in the legal order they contest. More precisely, alegal acts
contest a legal order by intimating a possible legality of illegality, and a possible illegality of legality.
The notion of ‘economic’ immigrants, which has gained widespread currency in the debate about European immigration policy,
illustrates this point. Authorities continuously point to the fact that the former take advantage of and abuse political asylum laws to
gain entry into the European polity, only to disappear into clandestine and illegal participation in the common market. Yet, to the extent that
the Treaty of Rome not only separates an internal market from an external market, but also includes both in a global market, the Treaty
indirectly acknowledges that all participants in the global market have an interest in the European polity positing the legal boundary between
the internal and external markets in a way that preserves the commonality of the global market.10 The entry
into the European polity
of economic immigrants from poor countries can be seen as intimating that the polity regulates and promotes the
internal market vis-à-vis the external market in a manner that doesn’t safeguard the commonality of
the global market in which it claims to take up its place. By holding the European polity to its claim that the realization of the internal
market is part and parcel of the realization of a common global market, the border crossings of economic immigrants from poor
countries are alegal: they intimate a possible legality of what becomes illegal participation in the internal
market and the possible illegality of the legal acts by which the European polity has posited the normative
distinction between the internal and external markets. Immigration, on this reading, has the potential to
disorder the law by contesting the commonality claimed for a legal order. In the same way that the act that
posits the spatial borders of a polity can never be entirely brought under the aegis of the law,
challenges to those borders resist, to a lesser or greater extent, legal qualification in terms of the jus
includendi et excludendi a political community claims for itself. More generally, what renders immigration eminently
disorderly is its capacity to transgress, at one stroke, the four kinds of boundaries that determine legal order, and
therewith the distinction between collective selfhood and alterity, by questioning the legal
determination of citizenship, the rights made available by the law, the commonality of legal space, and
the normative sense of the ongoing project that holds together a collective history as the unity of its past, present, and future. The strong form
of disorder provoked by alegal acts casts new light on Cassirer’s characterization of order. To the extent that the basic achievement of legal
order is to limit the unlimited, exclusion has a positive significance, for without it no legal order would be possible; but this achievement is
irreducibly ambiguous, for exclusiveness also ensures that no
legal order ever succeeds in consolidating itself
fully. Although there can be no political community unless member can be distinguished from non-member, rights from legally irrelevant
claims, inside from outside, and a collective history from times that are beyond time, no legal order ever fully succeeds in bringing these
distinctions themselves into the fold of legality. In a word, legal orders are irredeemably contingent.11
6. We are more switch side - an aff choice framework forces debaters to explore
unfamiliar ideological terrain rather than simply reading the same econ impact with a
slightly tweaked link scenario on both aff and neg – under their interpretation, reading
cards defending switch-side debate becomes a replacement for actually switching
sides.
7. Border pedagogy is key to challenge authority and facilitate a democratic society best internal link to advocacy skills
Giroux ‘91 (Henry A. Giroux, cultural critic, Professor of cultural studies, pedagogy, critical theory, higher education and media studies,
“Border Pedagogy as Postmodern resistance”, 1991)
Border pedagogy also stresses the necessity for
providing students with the opportunity to engage critically the
strengths and limitations of the cultural and social codes that define their own histories and narratives . Partiality becomes,
in this case, the basis for recognizing the limits built into all disclosures. At issue here is not merely the need for students
to
develop a healthy skepticism towards all discourses of authority, but also to recognize how authority and power
can be transformed in the interest of creating a democratic society. Within this disclosure, students engage
knowledge as a border-crosser, as a person moving in and out of borders constructed around coordinates of
difference and power. These are not only physical borders, they are cultural borders historically constructed and
socially organized within maps of rules and regulations that serve to either limit or enable particular identities,
individual capacities, and social forms. In this case, students cross over into borders of meaning, maps of
knowledge, social relations, and values that are increasingly being negotiated and rewritten as the codes and
regulations which organize then become destabilized and reshaped. Border pedagogy decenters as it remaps. The terrain of
learning becomes inextricably linked to the shifting parameters of place, identity, history, and power. By reconstructing the traditional
radical emphasis of mapping domination to the politically strategic issue of engaging the ways in which
knowledge can be remapped, reterritorialized, and decentered, in the wider interests of rewriting the borders
and coordinates of an oppositional cultural politics, educators can redefine the teacher-student relationship in
ways that allow students to draw upon their own personal experiences as real knowledge. At one level this means
giving students the opportunity to speak, to locate themselves in history, and to become subjects in the construction of their identities and the
wider society. It also means defining voice not merely as an opportunity to speak, but to engage critically with the
ideology and substance of speech, writing, and other forms of cultural production . In this case, “coming to voice” for
students from both dominant and subordinate cultures means engaging in rigorous discussions of various cultural texts, drawing upon one’s
personal experience, and confronting the process through which ethnicity and power can be rethought as a political
narrative that challenges racism as part of [a] broader struggle to democratize social, political, and economic
life. In part, this means looking at the various ways in which race implicates relations of domination, resistance, suffering, and power within
various social practices and how these are taken up in multiple ways by students who occupy different ethnic, social, and gender locations.
8. There’s a link differential because only our education is unique to debate- they can
become informed policymakers by watching the TV and reading the paper, but only
debate allows for a dialogue between radically distinct perspectives – this
confrontation with otherness is precisely what their evidence identifies as valuable
about switch side debate.
9. Default to reasonability - even if we aren’t a topical discussion, we are a discussion
of the topic. Competing interpretations leads to a race to the bottom and excludes
areas of aff ground that are intrinsic to the literature base but not the wording of the
resolution.
1AR Framework (proper)
AT Aff =/= Economic
the economy of the material exchange has been substituted with the knowledge
economy of the present- the affirmative substantially increases its pedagogical
engagement with Mexico by problematizing cultural and market distinctions
Powell and Snellman ‘4 [School of Education and Department of Sociology, Stanford University, February 20, 2004,
“The Knowledge Economy”, http://www.stanford.edu/group/song/papers/powell_snellman.pdf]
We define the knowledge economy as production and services based on knowledge-intensive activities that contribute to an
accelerated pace of technological and scientific advance as well as equally rapid obsolescence. The key components of a
knowledge economy include a greater reliance on intellectual capabilities than on physical inputs or
natural resources, combined with efforts to integrate improvements in every stage of the production
process, from the R&D lab to the factoryfloor to the interface with customers. These changes are reflected in the
increasing relative share of the gross domestic product that is attributable to “intangible” capital
(Abramovitz & David 1996). Of course, many alternative labels and definitions are more expansive than ours, but we choose to keep
the focus on the production of novel ideas that subsequently lead to new or improved goods and services and organizational
practices. Since the 1970s, many researchers have noted the transition that has occurred in advanced
industrial nations from a manufacturing-based to services-driven economy. This change often goes by the labels
postindustrial or post-Fordist (Bell 1973, Hirschorn 1984, Block 1990). Such a stark view of economic transformation misses an even
more profound change in which the distinction between manufacturing and services has been rendered moot .
Consider the automobile, the icon of the “old” Fordist, manufacturing economy. A new car today is less and less the product of
metal fabrication and more a smart machine that uses computer technology to integrate safety, emissions, entertainment, and
performance. The computer games, produced on assembly lines in Asian factories, with which teenage boys are so addled are
sophisticated information processing devices, with both speed and graphics capability that exceed the largest supercomputer of a
decade ago. Amazon.com, with its innovative use of collaborative filtering that tells consumers what people with similar tastes are
watching, listening to, and reading, depends simultaneously on a warehousing system out of the factory era and on an Internet
based retail operation. These varied illustrations point not only to the blurring of the manufacturing-services
distinction but also to the very considerable extent that knowledge can be embodied in both goods and
services. Economists have noted that these changes in production are part of a broader shift from
tangible goods to intangible or information goods (Shapiro & Varian 1999). The replacement of answering machines by
voice mail and multivolume encyclopedias by CD-ROMS are but two illustrations of this transition.
AT Predictable Limits
Predictable limits are impossible - language relies on denotative ambiguity and
inevitably proliferates connotations
Kennedy ’97 [DUNCAN KENNEDY, A CRITIQUE OF ADJUDICATION: FIN DE SIÈCLE (1997), “A CRITIQUE OF SEMITOICS,
http://eslking.com/library2/collections/semiotics/general/kennedy_semiotics_of_critique.pdf”
You Can Neither Say What You Mean nor Mean What You Say The first, which seems to have been first beautifully
articulated by Lévi-Strauss in The Savage Mind, 93 can be simplified down to: you can never say what you mean and you can never
mean what you say. You can never say what you mean because you have to say it in language, which makes
available only one particular repository of signs and rules for expressing yourself . A particular thing you have
in mind to represent is particular in the sense of irreducible to any pregiven set of elements. “The real,” by definition, is that
which exceeds, can’t be grasped by, unpredictably disrupts any attempt to reduce it to what can be
represented in the langue in question. What you do when you try to express yourself is to “jerry build” some utterance
out of the pregiven elements of langue, rather than “engineering” your utterance to fit exactly your meaning. (This is the famous
category of bricolage). You can never mean what you say because once you’ve produced the representation it floats
out into the world as an utterance whose interpretation by those who register it as speech you can’t
control. The signifiers that compose the utterance are loaded with denotative ambiguity and
proliferate connotations . Your sentence will mean all kinds of things you not only never intended, but
also could never have imagined in advance no matter how careful you were to guard against
misinterpretation (of an utterance that was already a misrepresentation of what you meant). It seems appropriate to call this
irrationalism in semiotics because the two points unmoor the utterance, in whatever langue, from the speaker and from any
particular audience. It becomes a “thing” in the world, like a rock, or a cloud, accessible to anyone who comes upon it and
interpretable by them according to whatever system of meanings they end up incorporating it into. But there is a little more to it
than that, so long as the utterance is understood as an utterance—that is, so long as the people who deal with it once it is out there
interpret it as the production of an other who intended to communicate something.
Colorblindness DA
<tag>
Elenes 1997 (C. Alejandra, Assistant Professor, Women's Studies, Arizona State University West,
“RECLAIMING THE BORDERLANDS: CHICANA/O IDENTITY, DIFFERENCE, AND CRITICAL PEDAGOGY,”
Educational Theory Summer 1997, Vol. 47, Issue 3,
http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?sid=99ff77c7-7ddc-4ff9-a4293c3ce5b6ef78%40sessionmgr14&vid=2&hid=28&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#d
b=aph&AN=9709114571 - oliver g)
Differences are, although constituted, inevitable. Much of the problematic of this discussion over
differences it that until recently only those who were marked as different were considered in the
theorization of difference. If differences are going to be constituted in nonessentialist ways, it is
necessary to mark, deconstruct, and decenter whiteness and privilege. Both Giroux and McLaren argue
that white is an identity that must be marked and considered in conceptualizations of difference.
Giroux marks himself by naming his social position:¶ My own politics of location as a white, academic
male positions me to speak to issues of racism and gender by self-consciously recognizing my own
interests in taking up these practices as part of a broader political project to expand the scope and
meaning of democratic struggle and a politics of solidarity. Border crossing in this instance is part of an
attempt to further rupture a politics of historical silence and theoretical erasure that serves to repress
and marginalize the voices of the Other (BC, p. 125).¶ Giroux indeed stands in solidarity with people of
color and women, a solidarity that is welcome in these conservative times. However, as people of color
are working to deconstruct essentialist constructions of subaltern identities, it is necessary to
disempower white male identities. That is, progressive educators who are in solidarity with people of
color must recognize their own positions of privilege and mark them as such. Giroux names his
privileged position, but does not deconstruct it. Similarly, McLaren's construction of border identities
does not elaborate on his own position as a border identity. Yet his notion of border identities as
hybrids is based on constructions of identity that are always in flux. Thus, from a progressive or radical
standpoint, the work of critical pedagogy does advance and support radical moves to transform
educational practices that will enhance the educational advancement of the Chicana/o communities.
In an era of constant attacks on minority communities the positions of critical pedagogy are welcome.
However, in order to continue advancing a "truly" democratic notion of education it is necessary to
decenter the subject positions of those who hold or symbolize power in this society. In this sense,
Giroux and McLaren's appropriation of the discourse of the Borderlands runs the risk of not taking into
account that there still is an asymmetrical position between whiteness and Chicanas/os (as well as other
minorities).
Extra cards
The border has fetishized the distinction between the American “self” and the
Mexican “other”. Language based on these policies escalates into gratuitous
discrimination.
Irvine ‘5 [2005, Martin Irvine is a Founding Director and Associate Professor of Communication and the Culture & Technology Program at
Georgetown University, Media Theory and Semiotics: Key Terms and Concepts, http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/theory/theorykeyterms.html]
Many systems of meaning are based on binary structures (masculine/ feminine; black/white; natural/artificial), two
contrary conceptual categories that also entail or presuppose each other. Semiotic interpretation involves exposing the
culturally arbitrary nature of this binary opposition and describing the deeper consequences of this
structure throughout a culture. Hegemony of ideologies that protect the governing and ownership class is not a matter of
force, coercion, or obvious deliberate manipulation. It functions so well because it relies on the willing consent of
those with less power and wealth to accept a dominant ideology, to see the world and act according the view of
those above. Examples of mainstream ideologies that circulate in the media and protect hegemonic power: Free speech (as a belief, when few
have power in what they voice) Individuality (great for marketing, since consumerism requires the simultaneous presentation of unique
personal choices and identities and the need to look and buy like everyone else in an identity group) Freedom of choice (part of our
individuality beliefs, also the main assumption in consumer culture and marketing: the ideology of the shopping mall) In this view of hegemony
and culture, social behavior is over determined by multiple identity factors like race, social class, sex and gender, and nationality, which are
encoded in hierarchies of power, significance, and economic value. Discourse constitutive of its objects; objects of knowledge do not preexist
the discourse/discursive practices/disciplines, which constitute them, make them visible, "objectify" them as such. This is not to say that real-
world material facts don't exist, but that they don't have any meaning to us, aren't knowable, aren't communicable,
outside of a discursive-conceptual field. "History is only known to us in narrative form." (Jameson) Interpretation is the main
outcome of the semiotic process, or semiosis. Interpretation is the discursive result or output of positing meaning in any sign system. An
extension of the theory of semiosis (Peirce, Eco)--the temporal sequences of sign relations in generating meaning--is the notion of the
homology of form in sign systems: interpretations often take the same form as the set of signs being interpreted. For example, the
interpretation of a text usually takes the form of another text; the interpretation of an art object can be found in subsequent art works or
supplementary texts. The important point is to see acts of interpretation, making meaning, as occurring within a system of symbolic
relationships. An interpretation is a supplement to a prior set of signs. An
interpretation is not an opinion but an act of
positing meaning in a culturally significant expression or work. In the terms of semiotics, nothing is prior to
interpretation except intelligibility--something is presented as meaning something, it has the signature of significance, the grounds of
intelligibility, language community recognition, interpretive community recognition, a sense that something is or isn't "in our language."
Semiology/Semiotics: The theory and description of sign systems. Foundational assumption: "All symbolic systems in a culture function like a
second-order language or text." And like a language, any symbolic system is assumed to be complete and extensive at any given moment in
history (the synchronic dimension). The
description of sign systems from language to visual media and larger human constructions
an analysis of interpretation, the structure of social values, and the ideological uses of
all kinds of information we are surrounded by in daily life. The important point is to see all this meaning-making and
like cities allows
symbolic activity as rule-governed, learned, and constructed as opposed to natural or given in reality. Individual people in a culture may have
greater or lesser knowledge or access to "the cultural encyclopedia" (Eco) of symbolic relationships and contents. The daily use of available
signs and symbols in cultural encoding and decoding is an issue of a person's "competence," not a question about the sign system itself. If we
think about cultural signs of all kinds as a second-order language, we can investigate a kind of semiotic deep structure, a grammar of meaning, a
repertoire of codes, acquired by members of a culture in ways similar to, but distinct from, internalizing the grammar of one's own native
language. (See Chomsky on deep structure and grammar; Peirce, de Saussure, Barthes, Lotman, and Eco on semiology or semiotics as a system.)
Multimedia Semiotics/Multimodal Semiotics/Social Semiotics In the everyday use of languages and signs, we combine several kinds of physical
media in communicating and making meaning--from voice and printed texts to mass media images, music, movies, computer Web content, and
digital multimedia. The various material means of conveying meaning (sometimes called communication "modalities") often overlap and pass
on or interpret meaning from other concurrent media in our culture. We can talk or write about a movie, watch TV news that interprets an
event, watch a TV mass media genre like a sit-com that requires knowledge of the codes for this genre, and listen to music, write email, and
read over multimedia Web pages all at the same time. We are constantly sending, receiving, and making meaning in various kinds of media,
often conveying and interpreting meaning from one medium to another. This practice points to the existence of our larger contemporary and
inherited semiotic system, or what some have termed a semiosphere, the whole universe of available and possible meanings in a cultural
system. Social Semiotics takes the meaning-making process, "semiosis", to be more fundamental than the system of meaning-relations among
signs themselves, which are considered only the resources to be deployed in making meaning. Social
semiotics examines semiotic
practices, specific to a culture and community, for the making of various kinds of texts and meanings
in various situational contexts and contexts of culturally meaningful activity.
The Border is the unspoken demand for cultural assimilation, signifiers evident in
immigrants’ communicative and visual behavior determines the subjectivity of
customs agents and the ability to pass.
Erbert et al ‘9 [Larry Erbert has a PhD in communicative studies from the University of Iowa and works as a Associate professor at
the University of Colorado, Denver. Michael Lechuga has a B.A. in English fromS t. Mary’s University and a M.A. in Communication from the
University of Texas. Jeannette Monsivais is a doctoral student at NMSU. "Border Crossings: A Semiotic Analysis of the United States-Mexico
Border" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, TBA, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, May 22,
2008 <Not Available>. 2013-05-07 <http://citation.allacademic.com/meta/p232061_index.html>/]
The border scene functions to create hegemonic identities of those attempting to cross into the
United States. The border-crossers must convey a hegemonic identity in the communicative act of
identifying self and other as a means of gaining access into the United States by way of the bridge. The
myth of the border will ultimately define the fluidity of this social, economic, and political construct, but also how these symbols work in
relation to the framing of the other on the border. The
framing of the other also functions as a justification for strict
border policies, and contributes to the perpetuation of violence that can ensue from the border-crossers' endeavor
in crossing al otro lado (to the other side.) Expressed by many is the harassment the border crosser may experience when she or he does not
represent the favorable identifying symbols of the dominant group: U.S. American. Once the border crosser arrives at the checkpoint, the
customs agent will interpret various signifiers representative of the border crosser's identity. For
example, the following signifiers work to determine the border crosser's access to the U.S. American side of the bridge: (a) license
plates (Texas or Chihuahua); (b) citizenship (U.S. citizen or Mexican national); (c) language choice (English or Spanish); and (d)
place of residence (El Paso or Cd. Juárez). One interviewee responds, “I answer them is Spanish, they will ask me more questions and
they will make me open the trunk and they will ask me more questions…” she adds that when she speaks in English, and only mentions a
visit to Mexico, she rarely has problems crossing. Another border crosser asserts that officers use
language as a test for those
entering into the country. She claims that responding in English is a test that is used because “they (customs officials) need to know
how much you know, and if in fact you are a student.” Another border crossing occurrence highlighted by the interviewees is that if their
signifiers of identification reflect that of the dominant, or favorable culture, U.S. American, the
customs agents treat them more fairly. For example, one Mexican resident born in the United States, explains this difference
in treatment, "if you cross in the car with Texas plates you get…a quicker revision than…if I cross like in my car with Mexican national plates,
then we'll definitely have to stop and I'll definitely have to answer questions, even if I say U.S. citizen…when I cross with my mother, and she
is a Mexican national, the same thing, they ask us more questions than if I cross alone." Therefore, if the
border crosser's
identification is more representative of the unfavorable culture, Mexican, the border crosser finds
that his or her chances for a greater revision process increase.
The “native” and “immigrant” distinction implies the favorability of the domestic
American. Complex socioeconomic relations are embedded within the terminology of
the resolution.
McLaren ‘95 [1995, Peter McLaren is a Professor in the Division of Urban Schooling at the University of California, he is also the author
and editor of forty-five books relating to critical pedagogy, “White Terror and Oppositional Agency: Towards a Critical Multiculturalism”, Pg. 45]
Western language and thought are constructed as a system of differences organized de facto and de Jure as
binary oppositions—white/black, good/bad, normal/deviant, etc.—with the primary term being privileged and
designated as the defining term or the norm of cultural meaning, creating a dependent hierarchy. Yet
the secondary term does not really exist outside the first, but, in effect, exists inside of it, even though the phallocentric logic of white
supremacist ideology makes you think it exists outside and in opposition to the first term. The critical multiculturalist critique argues that the
relationship between signifier and signified is insecure and unstable. Signs
are part of an ideological struggle that
attempts to create a particular regime of representation that serves to legitimate a certain cultural
reality. For instance, we have witnessed a struggle in our society over the meaning of terms such as
"negro," "black." and "African American." According to Teresa Ebert (1991a), our current ways of seeing and
acting are being disciplined for us through forms of signification, that is, through modes of
intelligibility and ideological frames of sense making. Rejecting the Saussurian semiotics of signifying practices (and its
continuing use in contemporary post-structuralism) as "historical operations of language and tropes," Ebert characterizes signifying practices as
"an ensemble of material operations involved in economic and political relations" (p. 117). She maintains, rightly in my view, that
socioeconomic relations of power require distinctions to be made among groups through forms of
signification in order to organize subjects according to the unequal distribution of privilege and power.
Only discussions over the meaning of language can be begin to develop personal
agency and question apartheid discourses
Gqola, ‘1 [March 2007, Phumla Gqola is a Associate Professor, School of Literature & Language Studies, WITS April 2006 - February 2007:
Focus Area Leader, OpenSpeak Portfolio, Meraka Institute, Tshwane September 2005 - March 2006: Chief Research Specialist, Society, Culture
and Identities Research Project, Human Sciences Research Council HSRC) February 2003 - August 2005: Senior Lecturer, Department of English
and Classical Culture, University of the Free State (UFS) October 1999 - January 2003 "Defining people: Analysing power, language and
representation in metaphors of the New South Africa." Transformation 47 (2001)]
There are multiple entry points into a discussion of the discourses, which feed into new-South-Africanese. As a locality characterised by
heterogeneity, South Africanness depends on the continuation of other identities because 'we are never only South Africans' (Erasmus 1996).
Stuart Hall (1996) suggests that identity is never complete but is defined, inscribed and accessible in language .
Several other scholars have argued convincingly for the relationship between language and identity. Annemarie van Niekerk (1998) has noted
the manner in which systems of dominance
inscribe themselves primarily though language. Thus, engagement
with identity requires several practices of formation where systems of power are constructed,
resisted, subverted and mediated in and through linguistic agency (Kadalie 1995, Mbembe 2000, Wicomb 1998).
These processes of resistance and subversion are not altogether free of the anxieties of the systems of dominance which they reject. It is
necessary to recognise that, [t]reating the emergence of a new identity as a discursive event is [...] to refuse a separation between 'experience'
and language and to insist instead on the productive quality of discourse [...] Subjects
are constituted discursively,
experience is a linguistic event (it does not happen outside established meanings), but neither is it confined to a fixed order of
meaning (Joan Scott in Sawhney 1996:8). Although a free South Africa is unencumbered by many of the manifestations of apartheid,
apartheid language continues to determine the manner in which we speak against its discursive
construction. The language of apartheid definition and control had always been challenged by the
liberation movements so that, in South Africa, at least, the parameters of language have always been contested terrain. The Black
Consciousness Movement, for instance, recognised instantly that apartheid was predicated on division and the enforced
legitimisation of these disunities through language. Rejecting apartheid division and naming, it
deconstructed 'non-white' identities and reclaimed 'black' as a racial signifier which united all those cordoned
off into banrustans or labelled 'Coloured' and Indian. The signifier and identity 'black' became an affirmation of pride
and opened up possibilities of unity among the racially oppressed. In different vein, the non-racist politics of the
African National Congress, the Communist Party (later SACP) and Unity Movement sought to challenge apartheid logic. Whereas the
mechanisms of the apartheid state were used extensively to enforce separation between the 'races',
these organisations destabilised the 95 Defining people Phumla Gqola basis of apartheid logic. Apartheid did not initiate
the divide-and-rule modus operandi but inherited it from a colonial administration. However, separation was central to the
naming of the previous government's policies. In a democratic South Africa naming remains dynamic; reclamation and
redefinition present new possibilities as evidenced, for example, by the shifting contemporary uses of'c/Coloured' and 'b/Black' (Kadalie 1995,
Wicomb 1998). Having resisted abrasive representation for several decades, new
ways of describing, prescribing and
defining have come to the fore. Notwithstanding the new spirit of openness and a dispensation which
is enabling, it would be naive to assume that discourses of racism, sexism, classism and heterosexism
crucial to white supremacist capitalist patriarchy would disappear overnight.
The judge has an essential role in the round as the Model Reader- the meaning of
the resolution can constantly be changed and adapted based on interpretations
presented within this debate- a stable locus is impossible to perceive
Guillemette and Cossette ‘6 [Lucie Guillemette and Josiane Cossette, Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, « Textual
Cooperation », in Louis Hébert (dir.), Signo [online], 2006, http://www.signosemio.com/eco/textual-cooperation.asp]
Umberto Eco's theory of textual cooperation gives the reader an essential role in the process of
making meaning. The text creates a Model Reader capable of actualising the various meaningcontents in order to decode the possible worlds of the narrative. This reader fills in the many gaps in the text, which is
never completely explicit, using anything from simple linguistic inference to a more complex deductive reasoning that applies to the entire
narrative. The
text is a fabric woven from signs. It is open and interpretable, but it must be viewed as a
coherent whole. It creates its Model Reader, and it is more than the sum of the author's words and
the reader's meaning. The text is essentially "a lazy machine that demands the bold cooperation of
the reader to fill in a whole series of gaps" of unsaid or already said missing elements (translation of Eco, 1985, 29). By its
coherence, a text may reduce the possibility of arriving at certain interpretations. Within the system of linguistic conventions, if someone writes
"Mary is eating a _____ right now", we deduce that the missing word will be a noun, and that this noun will certainly not be "truck". The reader
– or receiver – must exercise semiotic judgment, meaning that "in
order to 'understand' the meaning of a text, especially
if it is indirect, the receiver has to apply processes of interpretive cooperation" (translation of Eco, 1988, 71).
Borders Aff—2AC Answers Afropessimism
We do not endorse the state itself – instead we think that the state enacted and will
continue to enact racist policies – the demand of reconceptualization embraces
learning about the tactics of the state, without utilizing it as the basis of our advocacy
Acknowledging black suffering is the prerequisite to genuine political engagement by
providing legitimacy to a structurally racist government – the alternative’s failure to
provide liberation reestablishes social antagonism and leads to racialized violence.
Perm – do the plan and all non-competitive parts of the alternative.
Double bind – either the perm solves and the plan is possible within the alternative
OR the alt’s rejection of civil society means that debates over the border are never
possible and they both cant solve AND they link to our turns.
DOUBLEBIND – EITHER the alternative EXPLICITLY DEFINES what pessimism is in
practice, which takes away personal agency, causing their movements to fail OR they
apply pessimism in theory and allow others to define their own political powers,
causing disagreement on the revolution, leading to a battlefield to find a solution
culminating in mass war.
This is a reason why the permutation’s middleground is best – permutation has
individual agency through the checks of the government, solves the risk of totalitarian
revolutions.
The invocation of social death as ontologically inevitable inscribes a pessimism
towards politics, which makes agency impossible and oversimplifies the history of
resistance – only hope for the future can be successful.
Brown, ‘9 Vincent, Prof. of History and African and African-American Studies @ Harvard Univ.,
December, "Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery," American Historical Review, p. 12311249
Specters of the Atlantic is a compellingly sophisticated study of the relation be- tween the epistemologies
underwriting both modern slavery and modern capitalism, but the book’s discussion of the politics of anti-slavery
is fundamentally incomplete. While Baucom brilliantly traces the development of “melancholy realism” as an oppositional discourse that ran counter to the logic of slavery and finance capital, he has very little to say about the
enslaved themselves. Social death, so well suited to the tragic perspective, stands in for the experience of
enslavement . While this heightens the reader’s sense of the way Atlantic slavery haunts the present , Baucom
largely fails to acknowledge that the enslaved performed melancholy acts of accounting not unlike those that he
shows to be a fundamental component of abolitionist and human rights discourses, or that those acts could be a
basic element of slaves’ oppositional activities. In many ways, the effectiveness of his text depends upon the
silence of slaves— it is easier to describe the continuity of structures of power when one down- plays
countervailing forces such as the political activity of the weak . So Baucom’s deep insights into the structural
features of Atlantic slave trading and its afterlife come with a cost. Without engagement with the politics of the
enslaved, slavery’s history serves as an effective charge leveled against modernity and capitalism, but not as an
uneven and evolving process of human interaction, and certainly not as a locus of conflict in which the enslaved
sometimes won small but important victories.11¶ Specters of the Atlantic is self-consciously a work of theory
(despite Baucom’s prodigious archival research), and social death may be largely unproblematic as a matter of
theory, or even law. In these arenas, as David Brion Davis has argued, “the slave has no legitimate, independent
being, no place in the cosmos except as an instrument of her or his master’s will.”12 But the concept often
becomes a general description of actual social life in slavery. Vincent Carretta, for example, in his authoritative biography of the abolitionist writer and former slave Olaudah Equiano, agrees with Patterson that
because enslaved Africans and their descendants were “stripped of their personal identities and history, [they]
were forced to suffer what has been aptly called ‘social death.’ ” The self-fashioning enabled by writing and print
“allowed Equiano to resurrect himself publicly” from the condition that had been imposed by his enslavement.13
The living conditions of slavery in eighteenth-century Jamaica, one slave society with which Equiano had
experience, are described in rich detail in Trevor Burnard’s unflinching examination of the career of Thomas
Thistle- wood, an English migrant who became an overseer and landholder in Jamaica, and who kept a diary there
from 1750 to 1786. Through Thistlewood’s descriptions of his life among slaves, Burnard glimpses a “world of
uncertainty,” where the enslaved were always vulnerable to repeated depredations that actually led to “significant
slave dehumanization as masters sought, with considerable success, to obliterate slaves’ personal histories.”
Burnard consequently concurs with Patterson: “slavery completely stripped slaves of their cultural heritage,
brutalized them, and rendered ordinary life and normal relationships extremely difficult.”14 This was slavery, after
all, and much more than a transfer of migrants from Africa to America.15 Yet one wonders, after reading Burnard’s
indispensable account, how slaves in Jamaica or- ganized some of British America’s greatest political events during
Thistlewood’s time and after, including the Coromantee Wars of the 1760s, the 1776 Hanover conspiracy, and the
Baptist War of 1831–1832. Surely they must have found some way to turn the “disorganization, instability, and
chaos” of slavery into collective forms of belonging and striving, making connections when confronted with alienation and finding dignity in the face of dishonor. Rather than pathologizing slaves by allowing the condition of
social death to stand for the experience of life in slavery, then, it might be more helpful to focus on what the
enslaved actually made of their situation. Among the most insightful texts to explore the experiential meaning of
Afro- Atlantic slavery (for both the slaves and their descendants) are two recent books by Saidiya Hartman and
Stephanie Smallwood. Rather than eschewing the concept of social death, as might be expected from writing that
begins by considering the per- spective of the enslaved, these two authors use the idea in penetrating ways. Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route and Smallwood’s Saltwater Slavery: A Middle
Passage from Africa to American Diaspora extend social death beyond a general description of slavery as a
condition and imagine it as an experience of self. Here both the promise and the problem with the concept are
most fully apparent.16¶ Both authors seek a deeper understanding of the experience of enslavement and its
consequences for the past, present, and future of black life than we generally find in histories of slavery. In
Hartman’s account especially, slavery is not only an object of study, but also the focus of a personal memoir. She
travels along a slave route in Ghana, from its coastal forts to the backcountry hinterlands, symbolically reversing
the first stage of the trek now commonly called the Middle Passage. In searching prose, she meditates on the
history of slavery in Africa to explore the precarious nature of belonging to the social category “African
American.” Rendering her re- markable facility with social theory in elegant and affective terms, Hartman asks the
question that nags all identities, but especially those forged by the descendants of slaves: What identifications,
imagined affinities, mythical narratives, and acts of re- membering and forgetting hold the category together?
Confronting her own alienation from any story that would yield a knowable genealogy or a comfortable identity,
Hartman wrestles with what it means to be a stranger in one’s putative motherland, to be denied country, kin, and
identity, and to forget one’s past—to be an orphan.17 Ultimately, as the title suggests, Lose Your Mother is an
injunction to accept dis- possession as the basis of black self-definition.¶ Such a judgment is warranted, in
Hartman’s account, by the implications of social death both for the experience of enslavement and for slavery’s
afterlife in the present. As Patterson delineated in sociological terms the death of social personhood and the
reincorporation of individuals into slavery, Hartman sets out on a personal quest to “retrace the process by which
lives were destroyed and slaves born.”18 When she contends with what it meant to be a slave, she frequently
invokes Patterson’s idiom: “Seized from home, sold in the market, and severed from kin, the slave was for all
intents and purposes dead, no less so than had he been killed in combat. No less so than had she never belonged
to the world.” By making men, women, and children into commodities, enslavement destroyed lineages, tethering
people to own- ers rather than families, and in this way it “annulled lives, transforming men and women into dead
matter, and then resuscitated them for servitude.” Admittedly, the enslaved “lived and breathed, but they were
dead in the social world of men.”19 As it turns out, this kind of alienation is also part of what it presently means to
be African American. “The transience of the slave’s existence,” for example, still leaves its traces in how black
people imagine and speak of home:¶ We never tire of dreaming of a place that we can call home, a place better
than here, wherever here might be . . . We stay there, but we don’t live there . . . Staying is living in a country
without exercising any claims on its resources. It is the perilous condition of existing in a world in which you have
no investments. It is having never resided in a place that you can say is yours. It is being “of the house” but not
having a stake in it. Staying implies transient quarters, a makeshift domicile, a temporary shelter, but no
attachment or affiliation. This sense of not belonging and of being an extraneous element is at the heart of
slavery.20¶ “We may have forgotten our country,” Hartman writes, “but we haven’t forgotten our
dispossession.”21¶ Like Baucom, Hartman sees the history of slavery as a constituent part of a tragic present .
Atlantic slavery continues to be manifested in black people’s skewed life chances, poor education and health,
and high rates of incarceration, poverty, and premature death . Disregarding the commonplace temporalities of
professional historians, whose literary conventions are generally predicated on a formal distinction between past,
present, and future, Hartman addresses slavery as a problem that spans all three. The afterlife of slavery inhabits
the nature of belonging, which in turn guides the “freedom dreams” that shape prospects for change. “If slavery
persists as an issue in the political life of black America,” she writes, “it is not because of an antiquated obsession
with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a
racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago.”22¶ A professor of English and
comparative literature, Hartman is in many respects in a better position than most historians to understand events
such as the funeral aboard the Hudibras. This is because for all of her evident erudition, her scholarship is
harnessed not so much to a performance of mastery over the facts of what hap- pened, which might substitute
precision for understanding, as to an act of mourning, even yearning. She writes with a depth of introspection and
personal anguish that is transgressive of professional boundaries but absolutely appropriate to the task. Reading
Hartman, one wonders how a historian could ever write dispassionately about slavery without feeling complicit
and ashamed. For dispassionate accounting—exemplified by the ledgers of slave traders—has been a great
weapon of the powerful, an episteme that made the grossest violations of personhood acceptable, even
necessary. This is the kind of bookkeeping that bore fruit upon the Zong. “It made it easier for a trader to
countenance yet another dead black body or for a captain to dump a shipload of captives into the sea in order to
collect the insurance, since it wasn’t possible to kill cargo or to murder a thing already denied life. Death was
simply part of the workings of the trade.” The archive of slavery, then, is “a mortuary.” Not content to total up the
body count, Hartman offers elegy, echoing in her own way the lamentations of the women aboard the Hudibras.
Like them, she is concerned with the dead and what they mean to the living. “I was desperate to reclaim the
dead,” she writes, “to reckon with the lives undone and obliterated in the making of human commodities.”23 ¶ It is
this mournful quality of Lose Your Mother that elevates it above so many histories of slavery, but the same sense
of lament seems to require that Hartman overlook small but significant political victories like the one described
by Butter- worth. Even as Hartman seems to agree with Paul Gilroy on the “value of seeing the consciousness of
the slave as involving an extended act of mourning,” she remains so focused on her own commemorations that her
text makes little space for a consideration of how the enslaved struggled with alienation and the fragility of
belonging, or of the mourning rites they used to confront their condition.24 All of the ques- tions she raises about
the meaning of slavery in the present—both highly personal and insistently political—might as well be asked about
the meaning of slavery to slaves themselves, that is, if one begins by closely examining their social and political
lives rather than assuming their lack of social being. Here Hartman is undone by her reliance on Orlando
Patterson’s totalizing definition of slavery. She asserts that “no solace can be found in the death of the slave,
no higher ground can be located, no perspective can be found from which death serves a greater good or becomes
any- thing other than what it is.”25 If she is correct, the events on the Hudibras were of negligible importance. And
indeed, Hartman’s understandable emphasis on the personal damage wrought by slavery encourages her to
disavow two generations of social history that have demonstrated slaves’ remarkable capacity to forge fragile
com- munities, preserve cultural inheritance, and resist the predations of slaveholders . This in turn precludes her
from describing the ways that violence, dislocation, and death actually generate culture, politics, and
consequential action by the enslaved.26¶ This limitation is particularly evident in a stunning chapter that Hartman
calls “The Dead Book.” Here she creatively reimagines the events that occurred on the voyage of the slave ship
Recovery, bound, like the Hudibras, from the Bight of Biafra to Grenada, when Captain John Kimber hung an
enslaved girl naked from the mizzen stay and beat her, ultimately to her death, for being “sulky”: she was sick and
could not dance when so ordered. As Hartman notes, the event would have been unre- markable had not Captain
Kimber been tried for murder on the testimony of the ship’s surgeon, a brief transcript of the trial been published,
and the woman’s death been offered up as allegory by the abolitionist William Wilberforce and the graphic satirist
Isaac Cruikshank. Hartman re-creates the murder and the surge of words it inspired, representing the perspectives
of the captain, the surgeon, and the aboli tionist, for each of whom the girl was a cipher “outfitted in a different
guise,” and then she puts herself in the position of the victim, substituting her own voice for the unknowable
thoughts of the girl. Imagining the experience as her own and wistfully representing her demise as a suicide—a
final act of agency—Hartman hopes, by this bold device, to save the girl from oblivion. Or perhaps her hope is to
prove the impossibility of ever doing so, because by failing, she concedes that the girl cannot be put to rest. It is a
compelling move, but there is something missing. Hartman discerns a convincing subject position for all of the
participants in the events sur- rounding the death of the girl, except for the other slaves who watched the woman
die and carried the memory with them to the Americas, presumably to tell others, plausibly even survivors of the
Hudibras, who must have drawn from such stories a basic perspective on the history of the Atlantic world. For the
enslaved spectators, Hartman imagines only a fatalistic detachment: “The women were assembled a few feet
away, but it might well have been a thousand. They held back from the girl, steering clear of her bad luck,
pestilence, and recklessness. Some said she had lost her mind. What could they do, anyway? The women danced
and sang as she lay dying.Ӧ Hartman ends her odyssey among the Gwolu, descendants of peoples who fled the
slave raids and who, as communities of refugees, shared her sense of dispos- session. “Newcomers were welcome.
It didn’t matter that they weren’t kin because genealogy didn’t matter”; rather, “building community did.” Lose
Your Mother con- cludes with a moving description of a particular one of their songs, a lament for those who were
lost, which resonated deeply with her sense of slavery’s meaning in the present. And yet Hartman has more
difficulty hearing similar cries intoned in the past by slaves who managed to find themselves.27¶ Saltwater Slavery
has much in common with Lose Your Mother. Smallwood’s study of the slave trade from the Gold Coast to the
British Americas in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries likewise redeems the experience of the
people traded like so many bolts of cloth, “who were represented merely as ciphers in the political arithmetic,”
and therefore “feature in the documentary record not as subjects of a social history but as objects or
quantities.”28 Each text offers a penetrating analysis of the market logic that turned people into goods. Both
books work with the concept of social death. However, Smallwood examines the problem of social death for the
enslaved even more closely than Hartman does.29¶ Like Hartman, Smallwood sees social death as a by-product of
commodification. “If in the regime of the market Africans’ most socially relevant feature was their
exchangeability,” she argues, “for Africans as immigrants the most socially relevant feature was their isolation,
their desperate need to restore some measure of social life to counterbalance the alienation engendered by their
social death.” But Small- wood’s approach is different in a subtle way. Whereas for Hartman, as for others, social
death is an accomplished state of being, Smallwood veers between a notion of social death as an actual condition
produced by violent dislocation and social death as a compelling threat. On the one hand, she argues, captivity
on the Atlantic littoral was a social death. Exchangeable persons “inhabited a new category of mar- ginalization,
one not of extreme alienation within the community, but rather of ab- solute exclusion from any community.” She
seems to accept the idea of enslaved commodities as finished products for whom there could be no socially
relevant relationships: “the slave cargo constituted the antithesis of community.” Yet elsewhere she contends that
captives were only “menaced” with social death. “At every point along the passage from African to New World
markets,” she writes, “we find a stark contest between slave traders and slaves, between the traders’ will to
commodify people and the captives’ will to remain fully recognizable as human subjects.”30 Here, I think,
Smallwood captures the truth of the idea: social death was a receding ho- rizon—the farther slaveholders moved
toward the goal of complete mastery, the more they found that struggles with their human property would
continue, even into the most elemental realms: birth, hunger, health, fellowship, sex, death, and time.¶ If social
death did not define the slaves’ condition, it did frame their vision of apocalypse. In a harrowing chapter on the
meaning of death (that is, physical death) during the Atlantic passage, Smallwood is clear that the captives could
have no frame of reference for the experience aboard the slave ships, but she also shows how des- perate they
were to make one. If they could not reassemble some meaningful way to map their social worlds, “slaves could
foresee only further descent into an endless purgatory.” The women aboard the Hudibras were not in fact the
living dead; they were the mothers of gasping new societies. Their view of the danger that confronted them
made their mourning rites vitally important, putting these at the center of the women’s emerging lives as
slaves—and as a result at the heart of the struggles that would define them . As Smallwood argues, this was first
and foremost a battle over their presence in time, to define their place among ancestors, kin, friends, and future
progeny. “The connection Africans needed was a narrative continuity between past and present—an
epistemological means of connecting the dots between there and here, then and now, to craft a coherent story
out of incoherent experience.” That is precisely what the women on the Hudibras fought to accomplish.
Borders Aff—2AC Answers Capitalism
The distinction must be made between dialogical capital and physical capital- their
impact evidence is not in the context of intellectual investment, but rather material
and monetary investment
Alternative fails in the world of racially UNJUST immigration policy – alternatives to
capitalism do not account for minorities in our inner cities. Waiting on the revolution
would starve out the masses
United class struggles must occur through a racial framework of analysis
Meyer 2 [Meyer, Weinberg. Professor Emeritus in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American
Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. A Short History of American Capitalism. Chapter 12:
Conclusion. 2002 http://www.allshookdown.com/newhistory/CH12.htm]
Racism has stabilized capitalism in the United States in two ways. First, it provided individual capitalist businesses with short-run
solutions to worker movements for unionization. Second, it stimulated white workers to imagine that they shared class
interests with white employers. In neither case did employer stratagems include the granting of genuine equality of bargaining with
white workers. The purpose of racist artifice was not to award concessions to fellow whites but to create or perpetuate disunity
among workers of different racial or ethnic groups. Employers sought to pay the lowest price possible for this advantage.
Marxist theory and class-based struggles are rooted in patriarchy and overlook racism,
sexism, and nationalism.
Folbre 2001 [Nancy, Professor and former chair of of Economics at UMass; The Invisible Heart:
Economics and Family Values pg 211]
Their most conspicuous weakness was their lack of any real theory, as well as a naïve confidence that good intentions usually lead to good
results. In trying to remedy this weakness, however, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels went to the other extreme,
promoting a scientific approach that displaced human motives by the march of history and predicted a crisis of
capitalism. In their theory, social conflict was reduced to class membership: feudal lords versus peasants and capitalist
employers versus workers. An individuals’ interest were identical to those of other members of his class. Once class differences were eliminated
by the collectivization of ownership of the means of productions, they prophesied, harmony would prevail. This analysis overlooked the
historical significance of patriarchal control over women. Marx was thoroughly schooled in English political
economy. But it was precisely his reliance on this tradition that led him to focus on commodities—things bought and sold in the market—and
to consider all other forms of production quite literally “unproductive.” He viewed the time and effort that women devoted to
meeting the basic subsistence needs of workers and creating the next generation as aspects of nature, not
dimensions of society. In his large theory, labor creates all surpluses, but labor itself is unproduced. Essentially, according to Marx,
workers create themselves; they simply trade a portion of their wages for their means of subsistence. Marxist theory also plays
down the role of the kind of collective dynamics that cannot easily be explained in terms of control over
production and extraction of a surplus—forms of domination based on nation, race, and gender, rather than class .
Believing capitalism had an important historical role to play in generating technological change and alleviating economic scarcity, Marx
predicted that it would eventually succumb to a falling rate of profit. In his later years, he became far more preoccupied with the direction of
the capitalist crisis that the possible trajectory of socialism.
His constant emphasis on material economic conditions deflected
him from serious consideration of the difficulties of ensuring democratic governance.
Permutation – do the methodology of the 1AC through the ideology of the 1NC
A discussion of varying forms of oppression should not compete for the focus of
scholars. Rather, current ideological confusion prioritizes cooperation and
understanding.
Martinez 2k [Martínez graduated from Swarthmore College with a degree in English. Swarthmore then awarded Martínez with a
doctorate. She has written numerous books and articles on different topics relating to social movements in the Americas, 2000
http://www.indigenouspeople.net/blackwht.htm]
For a Latina to talk about recognizing the multi-colored varieties of racism is not, and should not be, yet another round in the
Oppression Olympics. We don't need more competition among different social groupings for that "Most Oppressed"
gold. We don't need more comparisons of suffering between women and Blacks, the disabled and the gay, Latino teenagers and
white seniors, or whatever. We don't need more surveys like the recent much publicized Harris Poll showing that different peoples of color are
prejudiced toward each other - a poll patently designed to demonstrate that us coloreds are no better than white folk. (The survey never asked
people about positive attitudes.) Rather, we need greater knowledge, understanding, and openness to learning about each
other's histories and present needs as a basis for working together. Nothing could seem more urgent in an era when increasing
impoverishment encourages a self-imposed separatism among people of color as a desperate attempt at community survival. Nothing
could seem more important as we search for new social change strategies in a time of ideological confusion . My call
to rethink concepts of racism in the U.S. today is being sounded elsewhere. Among academics, liberal foundation administrators, and activistintellectuals, you can hear talk of the need for a new "racial paradigm" or model. But new thinking seems to proceed in fits and
starts, as if dogged by a fear of stepping on toes, of feeling threatened, or of losing one's base . With a few notable
exceptions, even our progressive scholars of color do not make the leap from perfunctorily saluting a vague multi-culturalism to serious
analysis. We seem to have made little progress, if any, since Bob Blauner's 1972 book "Racial Oppression in America". Recognizing the limits of
the white-Black axis, Blauner critiqued White America's ignorance of and indifference to the Chicano/a experience with racism. Real opposition
to new paradigms also exists. There are academics scrambling for one flavor of ethnic studies funds versus another . There
are politicians who cultivate distrust of others to keep their own communities loyal. When we hear, for example, of Black/Latino friction,
dismay should be quickly followed by investigation. In cities like Los Angeles and New York, it may turn out that political figures scrapping for
patronage and payola have played a narrow nationalist game, whipping up economic anxiety and generating resentment that sets communities
against each other. So the goal here, in speaking about moving beyond a bi-polar concept of racism is to build stronger unity against white
supremacy. The goal is to see our similarities of experience and needs. If that goal sounds naive, think about the hundreds of organizations
formed by grassroots women of different colors coming together in recent years. Their growth is one of today's most energetic motions and it
spans all ages. Think about the multicultural environmental justice movement. Think about the coalitions to save schools. Small rainbows of our
own making are there, to brighten a long road through hellish times. It is in such practice, through daily struggle together, that we are most
likely to find the road to greater solidarity against a common enemy. But we also need a will to find it and ideas about where, including some
new theory.
Borders Neg—T-Economic Engagement
1NC
Interpretation—Economic Engagement seeks to integrate and coordinate all US economic
instruments and programs into our regional and country strategies
US DOS 1 (United states department of state, Released January, 20, 2001, “What is total economic engagement?”, http://20012009.state.gov/e/eeb/92986.htm Kevin Chen)
Total Economic Engagement seeks to integrate and coordinate all U.S. economic instruments and
programs into our regional and country strategies. The Bureau of Economic, Energy and Business
Affairs’ (EEB) broad cross-section of economic disciplines, interagency contacts, and expertise in
such areas as trade, finance, energy, development, transportation, and telecommunications help
ensure this coordination. EEB is actively involved in the entire range of international economic
issues affecting America’s security and well-being. Our priorities extend from securing reliable,
sustainable energy supplies to increasing market access for U.S. goods and services. Protection of
American interests, such as intellectual property rights, fair play in international business, and
shutting down terrorist access to financial networks, is not only part of our work, it is the
foundation on which our efforts rest. But promoting U.S. economic and security interests is not a
short-term endeavor; dealing creatively with emerging markets and alleviating poverty are
priorities that are even more important in the era of rapid globalization than they were in the
wake of World War II.
A. Violation—the aff does NOT integrate or coordinate US economic
instruments—they are border management, two completely separate things
WWC 9 (Woodrow Wilson Center, A Mexican institute, “The United States and Mexico: Towards a Strategic Partnership”, January
2009,
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/The%20U.S.%20and%20Mexico.%20Towards%20a%20Strategic%20Partnership.pdf Kevin
Chen)
A strategic partnership between the two countries will require both high-level foreign policy
attention in Washington and Mexico City and efforts to engage all government actors at the
federal, state, and local level involved in key policy decisions. It will be important to strengthen
existing structures for consultation but also to develop new ones that can promote and sustain
effective dialogue and problem-solving. Here are at least four areas that call out for priority
attention in the relationship and will require sustained dialogue and engagement : security
cooperation, economic integration, immigration, and border management.
B. Standards
a. Limits- By bypassing the terms “economic engagement” in the
resolution, the aff can explode the topic, making it bidirectional
b. Topic education- affs that are completely irrelevant from the words of
the topic decrease core of the topic education, and that’s the only
portable skill from debate
C. Voter for Fairness and Education
Borders Neg—Afropessimism
1NC
The U.S. society remains a racist system, and though the ideals that give it legitimacy
can be used by antiracist struggles to bring about its demise, no large-scale action has
been taken to rebuild this system of racism from the foundation up. This white
supremacist framework has successfully incorporated “other Americans” of color.
Feagin President of the American Sociological Association 2K
Joe-Prof of Sociology, Univ. of Fla. Gainesville; “RACIST AMERICA: Roots, Current Realities and Future
Reparations”; 235-236.
The liberal wing of the white elite has an inordinate fondness for setting up commissions to study matters of
racism in the United States. Over the last century at least a dozen major federal government commissions have
looked into problems of racial discrimination or racism. For example, in 1997 President Bill Clinton set up a
seven-member advisory board to start a “national conversation on race.” The advisory board heard much
important testimony about racial and ethnic discrimination across the nation. Its final report, One America in the
21st Century, incorporated important findings on racial stereotyping and discrimination but concluded with
mostly modest solutions. The report did not provide an integrated analysis of how and why institutional racism
still pervades the society, nor did it call for major restructuring of institutions to get rid of racism. Most important,
no serious congressional or presidential action was taken to implement the report’s more significant
recommendations, such as increasing enforcement of the civil rights laws. Today, U.S. society remains a racist
system. It was founded as such, and no large-scale action has ever been taken to rebuild this system of racism
from the foundation up. From the first decades European colonists incorporated land theft and slavery into the
political-economic structure of the new nation. After the Civil War slavery was replaced by the near slavery of
legal segregation in the South, while some legal and much de facto segregation continued in the North. These
institutional arrangements were designed to keep antiblack oppression firmly in place. Periodically, the racist
structure has been altered, particularly in the 1860s when slavery was abolished and in the 1960s when legal
segregation was replaced by the current system of more informal racial oppression. Other Americans of color
have been incorporated into U.S. society by whites operating from within this well-established white
supremacist framework. The American house of racism has been remodeled somewhat over time-generally in
response to protests from the oppressed-but its formidable foundation remains firmly in place. What is the
likelihood of societal change on the scale required to replace this racist foundation? On this point, there is some
pessimism among leading American intellectuals. For some time, African American analysts have pointed to the
great difficulty of bringing large-scale changes in the system of racism. In the 1940s sociologist Oliver C Cox noted
that “because the racial system in the United States is determined largely by the interests of a powerful political
class, no spectacular advance in the status of Negroes could be expected.” More recently, Derrick Bell has
contended that “[b]lack people will never gain full equality in this country. Even those herculean efforts we hail
as successful will produce no more than temporary ‘peaks of progress,’ short-lived victories that slide into
irrelevance as racial patterns adapt in ways that maintain white dominance.” Nonetheless, the racist patterns
and arrangements of U.S. society do regularly generate open resistance and organized opposition. These patterns
have been altered to some degree by antiracist movements in the past, and they can conceivably be changed
again. Historically, other societies have experienced large scale revolutions. Future domination of U.S. society by
whites is not automatic. Viewed over the long term, no hierarchical system is permanent, and such a
configuration must be constantly buttressed and diligently reinforced by its main beneficiaries. If we think
dialectically and discern the social contradictions lying the seeds of its eventual destruction. Thus, this system is
legitimated by widely proclaimed ideals of equality and democratic participation, ideals that have provided it
with some respect internally and internationally. While the equality ideals have been used to gloss over
persisting racial inequalities, they have also been adopted as bywords for movements of the oppressed. The
ideals of equality and democracy are taken very seriously by black Americans and other Americans of color and
have regularly spurred them to protest oppression. The honed-by-struggle ideals of equality, justice, and civil
rights are critical tenets of the antiracist theory that has emerged over centuries of protest, and they are
periodically implemented in antiracist strategies. They have served as a rallying point and have increased
solidarity. The situation of long-term racist oppression has pressed black Americans-and, sometimes, other
Americans of color-to unite for their own survival and periodically, for large-scale protest.
The prioritization of certain discourses is the ultimate form of nationalist violence,
using psychological terrorism to define the boundaries of acceptable discourse
creating systems of exclusion condemning groups of discourses to exile. This is the
worse form of onto-discursive violence that devalues human existence and allows for
the genocide of “worthless lives”
Butler ‘4 [2004, Judith Butler is a Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at U.C. Berkeley,
“Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence”, pg. xix-xxi]
Dissent and debate depend upon the inclusion of those who maintain critical views of state policy and
civic culture remaining part of a larger public discussion of the value of policies and politics . To charge
those who voice critical views with treason, terrorist-sympathizing, anti-Semitism, moral relativism,
postmodernism, juvenile behavior, collaboration, anachronistic Leftism, is to seek to destroy the credibility not of
the views that are held, but of the very persons who hold them. It produces the climate of fear in which to voice a
certain view is to risk being branded and shamed with heinous appellation. To continue to voice one’s views under
those conditions is not easy, since one must not only discount the truth of appellation, but brave the
stigma that seizes up from the public domain. Dissent is quelled, in part, through threatening the
speaking subject with an uninhabitable identification. Because it would be heinous to identify as
treasonous, as a collaborator, one fails to speak, or one speaks in throttled ways, in order to sidestep
the terrorizing identification that threatens to take hold. This strategy for quelling dissent and limiting
the reach of critical debate happens not only through a series of shaming tactics which have a certain
psychological terrorizations as their effect, but they work as well by producing what will and will not
count as a viable speaking subject and a reasonable opinion within the public domain. It is precisely
because one does not want to lose one’s status as a viable speaking being that ones does not say what
one thinks. Under social conditions that regulate identifications and the sense of viability to this
degree, censorship operates implicitly and forcefully. The line that circumscribes what is speakable
and what is livable also function as an instrument of censorship. To decide what views will count as
reasonable within the public domain, however, is to decide what will and will not count as the public
sphere of debate. And if someone holds vies that are not in line with the nationalist norm, that person
comes to lack credibility as a speaking person, and the media is not open to him or her (though the internet,
interestingly, is). The foreclosure of critique -empties the public domain of debate and democratic
contestation itself, so that debate becomes the exchange of views among the like-minded, and
criticism, which ought to be central to any democracy, becomes a fugitive and suspect activity . Public
Policy, including foreign policy, often seeks to restrain the public sphere from being open to certain forms of
debate and the circulation of media coverage. One way a hegemonic understanding of politics is achieved
is through circumscribing what will and will not be admissible as part of the of the public sphere itself.
Without disposing populations in such a way that war seems good and right and true, no war can
claim popular consent, and no administration can maintain popularity. To produce what will constitute
the public sphere, however, it is necessary to control the way in which people see, how they hear, what they see.
The constraints are not only on content—certain images of dead bodies in Iraq, for instance, are considered
unacceptable for public visual consumption—but on what “can” be heard, read, seen, felt, and known. The public
sphere of appearance is one way to establish what will count as reality, and what will not. It is also a
way of establishing whose lives can be marked as lives, and whose deaths will count as deaths. Our
capacity to feel and to apprehend hangs in the balance. But so, too, does the fate of the reality of certain
lives and deaths as well as the ability to think critically and publicly about the effects of war.
Anti-Blackness will remain an essential element in society even after the destruction
of white supremacy – a movement against anti-blackness specifically is key
Wilderson 2010. Frank Wilderson being interviewed on weekday jazz and justice. Interviews Jared Ball- phd from Cornell- professor at
Morgan state university. Doctor Todd Burroughs. Professor at Morgan State University. July 5th, 2010.aprox 1:20:00- 1:25:00 online http://www.voxunion.com/?p=2789
Burroughs: Frank, I wanted to kinda merge two things we wanted to talk about here. You know. World cup. And we watch the world cup in a
very different way, I think, than the majority population of this country watched the world cup. And what do you said in our last segment about
the fact that even third world unity may not give us the correct conception to view black oppression. I’d like you to talk about the world cup in
the context of what you said because you’re really saying that even the way we construct the third world political conception may be flawed.
Wilderson: Yes, I need to, because this is a book of political philosophy and film in that I said the first
100 pages are dealing with question of the rebar ,or the foundation of political movements, rights, so
your question is very pertinent there. To make this very clear to your listeners, I read Fanon Black Skin /
White Mask, and I read the Wretched of the Earth, and these two books are my mains tay.. and much of
red, white black …. Are my attempt to re read those book through some of my own thought. What I
want to make clear is that, I am for the Palestinians against the Israelis. If I was around in the 1950s I’d
be for the Algerians against the French. Just like fanon was. But what I want to bring into this is fanon’s
letter to his brother, read along side of fanon’s wretched of the earth. And one of the things he was
saying in his letters to his brothers is that the Algerians were not treating me as if I was an equal partner
in all this. Even some of the Algerians generals today where they are interviewed from that period say
that Fanon was not very vital to our struggle. I’ve traveled to Morocco. And once I was traveling with a
very light skin black women, and I could not go in and get a hotel anywhere in morocco. And the taxi
driver got tired of this and said. This women that your with specks French. put a head rag on her so her
afro is covered, have he go into the hotel that we just went into, have her order a room and then I can
go home for the night. He was tired of driving us all around. And it worked. By speaking French she
could present herself as Arab, and my presence was immediately established as Senegalese. So, one of
the things that everyone seems to know or everyone around the world, whether it’s Basra in Iraq or in
Spain or whether it’s Agader in morocco that we people, these people in these various countries, have
a problem with white supremacy, ok, once white supremacy has been dealt with, the society still has,
as it’s essential element, anti-blackness. And so I try to splice, splice a meditation on white
supremacy, from a meditation on anti-blackness. Without anti-blackness, you don’t have a world,
anywhere. That’s my argument. And I think that, anti-blackness, bringing it to the world cup, can take
again, building on fanon, two kind of trajectories. One trajectory is negro phobia, which is absolute
fear of the presence of blacks in our space. The other trajectory is negro philia. Which is like, collecting
Little Negro objects for your shelf (laughing). You Know. And Negro Philia, “I just LOVE black music”, “I
just LOVE Black People”, “I just LOVE African Dancing”, “I just LOVE African soccer”, negro philia is the
other side of the same coin as Negro phobia. They are mobilized by a paradigmatic condition in which
the slave, or the black, is available gratuitously, the slave or the black is available gratuitously to the
uses of others. Whether it is for the use of lynching, or for the use of pleasure. Negro phobia and Negro
phlia are the two twin modalities of anti-blackness that are, it’s not a discriminatory issue, you can’t do
legislation against it, negro phobia are absolutely necessary to the coherence and stability of any society
on this planet and without that you don’t have a world. And this is why our problem is an antagonism,
this is why the sports figure making multiple millions of dollars, have the same problem as Oscar Grant
here in Oakland, whose on his back shot and killed. The same problem. They are both objects of the
world, they are both not subject in the world.
2NC – Perm
Method – the 1NC poses a challenge to the methodology of the 1AC that cannot be
captured through a permutation. The methodological focus of this debate shifts the
nature of competition such that “Do Both” is an entirely different methodology that
the 2AC cannot advocate.
2. State – they use the USFG in their plan text.
Severance – sever out of USFG action – we can never get ground, voter for fairness.
3. Pedagogical colonialism – acceptance and rejection are radically opposed – no “in
the middle.”
Dascal ‘7 [Marcelo – PhD epistemology and literature and Professor of Philosophy at Tel Aviv
University; “Colonizing and decolonizing minds” p. 1-5, DS]
Nevertheless, however powerful the pressure of its means, social authority alone, without an epistemic
authority counterpart, isn’t sufficient, for it cannot per se generate the authority necessary for
succeeding in the colonization of minds. Success in this endeavor cannot be achieved by coercion and
fear alone, for it consists in inducing a set of beliefs in the colonized mind via some sort of inferential,
persuasive process – a process that is cognitive in nature. Its basic constituent is the implicit acceptance
by the colonized of a ‘rule of inference’ that automatically grants superiority to the colonizer’s
epistemic warrants or reasons when they clash with those of the colonized. By virtue of this rule, when
comparing the colonizer’s and his own grounds for holding a specific belief, the colonized will usually
tend to prefer the former’s reasons and consequently adopt the colonizer’s belief. In other words,
colonization of the mind is achieved when the colonized adopts the colonizer’s epistemic principle of
‘invidious comparison’. This means his implicit acceptance of the colonizer’s asymmetric distinction
between a ‘primitive’ mind – that of the colonized – and a ‘superior’ or ‘civilized’ one – that of the
colonizer. It is this acceptance that establishes a sort of implicit agreement between colonized and
colonizer which justifies the recurring inference by both to the effect that, in any matter involving
cognitive abilities, the former’s performance must be presumed to be inferior to the latter.
1.3 Of course, not always the colonization of mind is successful and yields acceptance and resignation by the colonized, although its rate of success can be considered typical, in so far as
it has been surprisingly high throughout history.i Another typical reaction of the colonized to the
colonization of mind drive of the colonizer, characteristic of the relatively recent ‘decolonization’
movement, is characterized by all out rejection and resistance. These two types of reaction are not
the only ones, but they deserve special attention because, though on the face of it contrary to each
other, they are widespread and equally ‘instinctive’ or ‘natural’.
Prima facie, the two reactions are indeed radically opposed.ii While the former acknowledges the
epistemic superiority of the colonizer and adopts it as a principle of colonized belief formation, the latter
denies the alleged asymmetry, argues that it is groundless because based on an ‘invidious
comparison’ procedure that is necessarily biased, and therefore refuses to ad opt the presumption of
epistemic inferiority of the colonized. While the former assumes the compatibility of adopting the
colonizer’s conceptual framework with the preservation of the colonized identity, the latter stresses
the incompatibility between these two attitudes, arguing that the adopted or adapted colonizer’s
mind ultimately expels the original mind of the colonized, and thereby obliterates the latter’s true or
authentic identity. As far as the political consequences are concerned, while the resigned acceptance
reaction does not recognize in the adoption of the colonizer’s beliefs and forms of thinking one of the
ways through which colonizers enhance their control over colonized behavior, the resistance reaction
denounces it as a means of acquiring control over the will of the colonized, thus becoming a powerful
tool of oppression, which must be combated.
4. The permutation restructures whiteness – questioning white supremacy is a
prerequisite
Martinot and Sexton, ’03 [2003, Steve Martinot is a profesor at San Francisco State University and
Jared Sexton has a PhD in ethnic studies from UC Berkeley, Director, African American Studies at UC
Irvine, “The Avant-garde of white supremacy,” http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~marto/avantguard.htm]
The foundations of US white supremacy are far from stable. Owing to the instability of white
supremacy, the social structures of whiteness must ever be re-secured in an obsessive fashion.
The process of re-inventing whiteness and white supremacy has always involved the state, and the state
has always involved the utmost paranoia. Vast political cataclysms such as the civil rights movements that
sought to shatter this invention have confronted the state as harbingers of sanity. Yet the state’s absorption and
co-optation of that opposition for the reconstruction of the white social order has been reoccurring before
our very eyes. White supremacy is not reconstructed simply for its own sake, but for the sake of the
social paranoia, the ethic of impunity, and the violent spectacles of racialization that it calls the
"maintenance of order" all of which constitute its essential dimensions. The cold, gray institutions of this
society—courts, schools, prisons, police, army, law, religion, the two-party system—become the arenas of this
brutality, its excess and spectacle, which they then normalize throughout the social field. It is not simply by
understanding the forms of state violence that the structures of hyper-injustice and their excess of hegemony
will be addressed. If they foster policing as their paradigm—including imprisonment, police occupations, commodified
governmental operations, a renewed Jim Crow, and a re-criminalization of race as their version of social order—then to merely
catalogue these institutional forms marks the moment at which understanding stops. To pretend to
understand at that point would be to affirm what denies understanding. Instead, we have to understand the state
and its order as a mode of anti-production that seeks precisely to cancel understanding through
its own common sense. For common sense, the opposite of injustice is justice; however, the opposite
of hyper-injustice is not justice. The existence of hyper-injustice implies that neither a consciousness of injustice nor the possibility of
justice any longer applies. Justice as such
is incommensurable with and wholly exterior to the relation
social existence and the ethic of impunity including the modes of gratuitous
violence that it fosters. The pervasiveness of state-sanctioned terror, police brutality, mass
incarceration, and the endless ambushes of white populism is where we must begin our
theorizing. Though state practices create and reproduce the subjects, discourses, and places that are
inseparable from them, we can no longer presuppose the subjects and subject positions nor the ideologies
between ordinary
and empiricisms of political and class forces. Rather, the analysis of a contingent yet comprehensive state terror becomes primary.
This is not to debate the traditional concerns of radical leftist politics that presuppose (and
close off) the question of structure, its tenacity, its systematic and inexplicable gratuitousness. The problem here
is how to dwell on the structures of pervasiveness, terror, and gratuitousness themselves rather than simply the
state as an apparatus. It is to ask how the state exists as a formation or confluence of processes with decentered agency, how the subjects of state authority—its agents, citizens, and captives—are produced in the
crucible of its ritualistic violence.
2NC – Silence Link
MAKE THEM DEFEND SILENCE AS AN ALTERNATIVE SPEECH ACT TO THE STATUS QUO
WE HAVE A RESPONSIBILITY TO MAKE WHITENESS VISIBLE
Must locate interactions and discursive spaces that implicate race and invoke the power of whiteness
and investigate intersections with gender and class. This is our job as rhetoricians that engage in the
activity of debate and our work as scholars that produce, construct and disseminate knowledge in the
intellectual debate community
Crenshaw ‘97 [1997, Carrie, PhD, Prof of Speech Comm @ Univ. Ala. former director of debate @
Univ. of Ala.; WESTERN JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION; Resisting Whiteness’ Rhetorical Silence; 61(3),
Summer; pp. 253-278]
This essay explores the rhetorical dimensions of whiteness in public political discourse from an
ideological perspective. It analyzes a debate between Carolyn Moseley Braun and Jesse Helms
over a patent extension for the United Daughters of the Confederacy insignia containing a
Confederate flag. in this essay I argue that rhetoricians must do the critical and self-reflexive
ideological work necessary to make whiteness visible and overturn its silences for the purpose
of resisting racism. To do this, scholars must locate interactions that implicate unspoken issues
of race, discursive spaces where the power of whiteness is invoked but its explicit terminology
is not, and investigate how these racialized constructions intersect with gender and class.
THEIR TACTICS ARE IRRELEVANT, OUR CRITICISM LINKS TO THEIR STRATEGIC CHOICES
Within Their article, Nakayama and Krizek make a distinction between tactics and strategies. Tactics are
more the actions carried out whereas the strategies are the actual motives to conduct and carry out
actions. Are argument is that whiteness is a rhetorical strategy and not tactical. The choice of the
affirmative to adapt to our methodology and framework to avoid the link is merely a strategy embedded
within whiteness that Nakayama and Krizek say allows whiteness to remain located at the center,
invisible and universal. We engage in an activity where genuine discussion becomes an expendable
commodity to the clever pre round strategies of debaters and coaches
THEIR PERFORMANCE IS A WAY TO CONDUCT AN INTERROGATION OF WHITENESS.
We need an ongoing discussion of the effects of whiteness on research and personal
and academic pursuits. We need sophisticated maps of the discursive field of
whiteness that can differentiate between the tactical and the strategic.
Nakayama and Krizek ‘95 [1995, Thomas K. Asst Prof, Dept of Communication @ Arizona State Univ
-& Robert L.- KRIZEK Asst Prof, Dept of Communication @ St. Louis Univ ; “WHITENESS: A Strategic
Rhetoric”; QUATERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH, 81, 291-309]
We see a particularly glaring imbalance in the reflexivity accorded the terms “white” and
“women”-an imbalance that has evolved through years of dialogue and inquiry about feminism
and its relation to communication studies. As Lana Rakow correctly observes in the preface to her
edited collection, “the terms ‘women’ and ‘feminist’ cannot be taken for granted; indeed, as
several authors discuss in their chapters, the terms are themselves the site for significant
epistemological, cultural, and political disagreements among those of us engaged in work on
gender and race” (vii-viii). While these inquiries have investigated gender concerns and their
complex relations to ideological issues, there has not been an equivalent interrogation of
whiteness and its relation to ideological concerns. One step in that direction is to examine
whiteness as the position from which scholars perform their studies. For example, Bette
Kauffman states, “this narrative is about white women; it excludes women of color and the
research from which it is drawn excluded women of color, albeit unwittingly, by virtue of its very
design” (200). Kaufman begins to map the discursive territory of whiteness when she tells us that
“white women have capitalized upon the margin of privilege so maintained, the attendant
economic, education, and cultural perquisites, in setting the agenda and claiming the benefits of
the contemporary women’s movement” (200). What is required is an ongoing discussion of the
effects of whiteness on our research and on our personal and academic pursuits. The imbalance
between discussions on gender and discussions on whiteness stems from a power differential
between that which is tactical and that which is strategic. What is required are more
sophisticated maps of the discursive field of whiteness.
The omission of whiteness as a discussion is disturbing - Absence is as important as
presence in evaluating symbolic action
Nakayama and Krizek ‘95 [1995, Thomas K. Asst Prof, Dept of Communication @ Arizona State Univ
-& Robert L.- KRIZEK Asst Prof, Dept of Communication @ St. Louis Univ ; “WHITENESS: A Strategic
Rhetoric”; QUATERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH, 81, 291-309]
First, reflexivity encourages consideration of that which has been silenced or invisible in academic
discussions. Thus, the “white” social practice of not discussing whiteness is especially
disturbing. Sleeter explains: “I suspect that our privileges and silences [about whiteness] are
invisible to us [whites] partly because numerically we constitute the majority of this nation and
collectively control a large portion of the nation’s resources and media, which enable us to
surround ourselves with our own varied experiences and to buffer ourselves from the
experiences, and the pain and rage of people of color” (6). Within the context of academic
writing that silences whiteness, what kinds of power relations are reproduced within our own
discipline? McKerrow, in one of his principles of critical rhetoric, notes that “absence is as
important presence in understanding and evaluating symbolic action” (“Theory and Praxis”
107). In what ways and under what conditions does the silencing of whiteness, its presumed
understanding, reproduce communication interactions between and among whites? Do our
academic practices and publications reinforce these white communication practices by not
interrogating whiteness? As we have shown above, whiteness is a complex, dynamic, and
power-laden assemblage that remains elusive. And, as Volosimov has noted, the ideological sign
is always already multi-accentual. To assume that readers of communication scholarship already
understand the multi-accentuality of whiteness is a mistake, for it presumes a white audience.
“White” here is ideological, as one must play the white game, it does not require that one be
“white”-discursively or scientifically.
Borders Neg—Capitalism
1NC
Their deferral from material analysis towards cultural critique destroys radical politics
and renders capitalism invisible, ensuring its continued dominance
Katz 2K [Adam, English Instructor at Onodaga Community College, “Postmodernism and
the Politics of Culture” pg 104-105]
attempts to conceptualize these cultural shifts have generally broken with the Marxist and
neo-Marxist assumptions of this earlier generation of theorists, especially those regarding the
predominance of production and economic processes in determining these changes. At the same time, they
have abandoned the project of the New Left, which, for all of its contradictions, remained committed to
combining economic and cultural emancipation. Theories of postmodernity, as a general cultural condition reflecting a
Contemporary
decisive break (assumed to have originated either in the wake of World War I1 or in the crisis of Western societies following the struggles of the 1960s and the
economic instability of the 1970s) with an earlier condition of modernity, usually
argue that distinctions between labor and signs,
material and intellectual production, base and superstructure, production and consumption are no
longer useful, since one of the defining characteristics of postmodernity is the reciprocal integration
and (in)determination of the cultural and the economic. In this chapter, I will examine the relations between theories of
postmodernity, postmodernism (as a set of ideological, cultural, and especially theoretical practices), and postmodern cultural studies. I will argue, in particular, that
the move
away from an understanding of culture in terms of its determination by the economic makes
a radical cultural critique impossible. This is because the autonomy of culture removes any external
standpoint from which one could theorize cultural products in relation to systemic contradictions. It
follows, then, that one can only critique culture from within, which, I argue, reduces cultural critique to the
function of pointing out the uselessness of outmoded cultural forms. This provides an important service
for the ruling class, by updating dominant institutions and developing more subtle and sophisticated
modes of domination. As I argued in the previous chapter, postmodern cultural studies rejects the categories of
theory and ideology in favor of those of experience and identity. This shifts the terrain of political
struggle from the social processes that produce subjectivity to the destabilization of restrictive
identities and their pluralization and empowerment (as I suggested, on the terms set by the dominant culture, not against that
culture). In this chapter, I will argue that postmodern theories of postmodernity work to delegitimate the categories
of materiality and production. This makes it possible to eliminate any social or critical theory that
attempts to explain the products of culture in terms of a hierarchy of determinations or through an
abstraction from the overall development of the relations and forces of those products. 'This means that
critique is limited to immanent critique. Totalizing critiques need to be grounded in some outside of the structures
producing the object of critique.-however; postmodernism insists that there can be no such outside,
thereby supporting the notion that any liberation must take place on the terrain of existing social
relations themselves, that is, without transforming those relations. The dominant theories of postmodernity wish to claim both
that the interpenetration of materiality and discursivity, production and reproduction makes systemic opposition aiming at structural transformation impossible and
that this situation opens up the possibility of local forms of emancipation that escape systemic determinations. Postmodern theory, based on the notion of
liberation through heterogeneity, thus follows from the understandings of postmodernity I will examine here. Furthermore, postmodern theory, as an immanent
critique of postmodernity, is able to present itself as the most effective response to the condition of postmodernity, In this way, postmodernism
attacks any notion of emancipation that results from the contestations between collective agencies
produced through the contradictory processes of material production.
Independently, their notion of borderlessness reifies capitalism
DeFazio 2002 [Kimberly, professor at University of Wisconsin, Romanticism, 19th Century British Literature, 19th Century American Literature, the City,
Visual Culture, Cultural Theory, “Whither Borders” http://www.redcritique.org/MayJune02/whitherborders.htm]
Until recently the leaders
of big business couldn't boast enough about the new "borderless" economy—a postnational world of global prosperity in which capital, labor, goods and services circulate freely —and its
limitless opportunities for travel, commerce, and communication. So borderless was this new world,
these triumphalist narratives suggested, that like all identities the border between rich and poor worldwide was being blurred
in a continuum of boundless consumption. As corporate consultant Kenichi Ohmae has argued, "as the 21st century approaches and as
what I call the four 'I's'—industry, investment, individuals, and information—flow relatively unimpeded across
national borders, the building-block concepts appropriate to a 19th-century, closed-country model of the world no longer hold" (The End of the Nation
State vii). Borderlessness had become a code for the new global freedom. Yet with the emergence of the so-called war on
terror, the borders have "returned" to the borderless economy, and "freedom" is being redefined. It appears that the Bush Administration is concerned with
nothing other than securing US borders, tightening controls and channeling billions of dollars of public funds to new and already existing national security, police
and intelligence departments. The borders, it seems, had become too "permeable". Suddenly we are told that the US borders are dangerously insecure, and the
preservation of American freedom now lies in the suspension of virtually all democratic rights, including far-reaching new surveillance technologies to police all
borders of the US, as a means of distinguishing "safe" immigrants from "dangerous" ones, "us" from "them", the "civilized" from the "barbarians". Immigrants are
under attack not only in the US, but throughout Europe (or "Fortress Europe", as it has become known), where a number of far-right politicians have come to
prominence on anti-immigrant policies, pulling with them to the right "new social democrats" such as Tony Blair. And in one of the most violent manifestations of
bordering, Israel has begun constructing a physical barrier further imprisoning Palestinians behind a 12 mile long security fence, separating "peace-loving" Israelis
from, as Israeli government official Effi Eitam put it recently, Palestinian "animals". The
borderlessness of the new economy now appears as
a deadly farce, with freedom another name for the free market. For, it is not only the recent corporate scandals that have
exposed the great economic crisis now shaking the foundations of society worldwide, but the actual decline of the living and working
conditions of the vast majority of the world's people, more and more of whom are forced to live
under increasingly desperate situations of poverty, hunger, illness, illiteracy and rampant destruction
caused by imperialist wars—while a tiny global ruling elite accumulates ever more wealth and control
over world resources. The borderless world, in short, was never without borders. It was always founded on
the border of exploitation; that is, the relation between the propertyless and the property owners. Those
what it always was:
who have only their labor to sell because they do not own the means of production on one side, and on the other those who own the means of production and
therefore compel all who do not to work for them, in exchange for wages which represent only a fraction of the value actually produced. The
"return" of
the border since September 11 represents the exacerbation of the antagonism between labor and capital: an
antagonism which exceeds all national borders. This relation between workers and owners is the
fundamental "border" hidden beneath the euphoric rhetoric of borderlessness—a rhetoric that has
found expression in the last decade not only in the managerial philosophy of corporate gurus and the
third-way policies of US and European state officials, but in the high-theory idiom of postmodern "hybridity" and the
more popular discourse of the Internet. What is at stake in the new emphasis on reinstituting borders (whether through the
"crisis" of the INS, the new surveillance technologies, the rolling back of civil rights, the exclusion and incarceration of non-citizens…) has little to do with actually
securing the US border or ensuring the security of citizens. Rather, it is
aimed at concealing the fundamental class conflict by
targeting as "other" any who do not conform to the US corporate agenda. It is primarily aimed at diverting
attention from what lies at the core of the global economic crisis—namely that it is a system built on the
ever-widening gap between rich and poor worldwide—while scaring working people into accepting the
suspension of the rights of some so that capital can better exploit the labor of the entire working class.
The return of the border is, in short, a cynical alibi for restructuring the national security state and reorganizing the workforce to make up for the lost profits in the
wake of the recession which began well before 9-11.
Capitalism facilitates all modes of global violence in order to sustain itself causing
perpetual systemic destruction.
Balibar 2004 [Etienne, Distinguished Professor of French & Italian and Comparative Literature at the University of California Irvine, “We the People of
Europe” pg 126-129]
I am aware of all these difficulties, but I would maintain that a reality lies behind the notion of something "unprecedented." Perhaps
it is simply the
fact that a number of heterogeneous methods or processes of extermination (by which I mean eliminating masses of
individuals inasmuch as they belong to objective or subjective groups) have themselves become "globalized,” that is, operate in a similar
manner everywhere in the world at the same time, and so progressively form a “chain,” giving full reality to what E. P. Thompson anticipated twenty
years ago with the name “exterminism.” In this series of connected processes, we must include, precisely because they are heterogeneous—they do not
have one and the same "cause," but they produce cumulative effects: 1. Wars (both “civil” and “foreign,” a distinction that is not easy to draw in many cases,
such as Yugoslavia or Chechnya). Communal rioting, with ethnic and/or religious ideologies of “cleansing.” 3. Famines
and other kinds of
poverty produced by the ruin of traditional and nontraditional economies. 4. Seemingly “natural” catastrophes,
which in fact are killing on a mass scale because they are overdetermined by social, economic, and
political structures, such as pandemics (for example, the difference in the distribution of AIDS and the possibilities of treatment between Europe
and North America on one side, Africa and some parts of Asia on the other), droughts, floods, or earth-quakes in the absence of
developed civil protection. In the end it would be my suggestion that the "Zlobalization" of various kinds of extreme
violence has produced a growing division of the "globalized" world into life zones and death zones .
Between these zones (which indeed are intricate and frequently reproduced within the boundaries of a single country or city) there exists a decisive
and fragile superborder, which raises fears and concerns about the unity and division of mankind[sic]—something like a global and local “enmity
“absolute”
line,” like the “amity line” that existed in the beginning of the modern European seizure of the world. It is this superborder, this enmity line, that becomes at the
same time an object of permanent show and a hot place for intervention but also for nonintervention. We might discuss whether the most worrying aspect of
present international politics is "humanitarian intervention" or "generalized nonintervention," or one coming after the other. Should We Consider Extreme Violence
to Be "Rational" or "Functional" from the Point of View of Market Capitalism (the "Liberal Economy")? This is a very difficult question—in fact, I think it is the most
difficult question—but it cannot be avoided; hence it is also the most intellectually challenging. Again, we should warn against a paralogism that is only too obvious
but nonetheless frequent: that of mistaking consequences for goals or purposes. (But is it really possible to discuss social systems in terms of purposes? On the
other hand, can we avoid reflecting on the immanent ends, or "logic," of a structure such as capitalism?) It seems to me, very schematically, that the difficulty arises
from the two opposite "global effects" that derive from the emergence of a chain of mass violence—as compared, for example, with what Marx called primitive
accumulation when he described the creation of the preconditions for capitalist accumulation in terms of the violent suppression of the poor. One
kind of
effect is simply to generalize material and moral insecurity for millions of potential workers, that is, to
induce a massive proletarianization or reproletarianization (a new phase of proletarianization that crucially involves a return of many to the proletarian condition
from which they had more or less escaped, given that insecurity is precisely the heart of the "proletarian condition"). This process
is contemporary
with an increased mobility of capital and also humans, and so it takes place across borders. But, seen
historically, it can also be distributed among several political varieties: 1. In the “North” it involves a partial or deep dismantling of the social policies and the
institutions of social citizenship created by the welfare state, what I call the "national social state," and therefore also a violent transition from welfare to workfare,
from the social state to the penal state (the United States showing the way in this respect, as was convincingly argued in a recent essay by Loïc Wacquant). 2. In the
"South," it involves destroying and inverting the “developmental” programs and policies, which admittedly did not suffice to produce the desired “takeoff” but
indicated a way to resist impoverishment. 3. In the "semiperiphery," to borrow Immanuel Wallerstein's category, it was connected with the collapse of the
dictatorial structure called "real existing socialism," which was based on scarcity and corruption, but again kept the polarization of riches and poverty within certain
limits. Let me suggest that
a common formal feature of all these processes resulting in the reproletarianization of the labor force is the fact
that they suppress or minimize the forms and possibilities of representation of the subaltern within
the state apparatus itself, or, if you prefer, the possibilities of more or less effective counterpower. With this remark I want to emphasize the political
aspect of processes that, in the first instance, seem to be mainly "economic." This political aspect, I think, is even more decisive when
we turn to the other scene, the other kind of result produced by massive violence, although the mechanism here is extremely mysterious.
Mysterious but real, unquestionably. I am thinking of a much more destructive tendency, destructive not of welfare or traditional was of life, but of t he
social bond itself and, in the end, of “bare life.” Let us think of Michel Foucault, who used to oppose two kinds of politics: “Let live” and
“let die.” In the face of the cumulative effects of different forms of extreme violence or cruelty that are
displayed in what I called the “death zones” of humanity, we are lead to admit that the current mode
of production and reproduction has become a mode of production for elimination, a reproduction of
populations that are not likely to be productively used or exploited but are always already
superfluous, and therefore can be only eliminated either through “political” or “natural” means—what
some Latin American sociologists call problacion chatarra, “garbage humans,” to be “thrown” away, out of the global city. If this is the case, the question arises once
again, what is the rationality of that? Or do we face an absolute triumph of irrationality? My suggestion would be: it is economically irrational (because it amounts
to a limitation of the scale of accumulation), but it is politically rational—or, better said, it can be interpreted in political terms. The fact is that history
does
not move simply in a circle, the circular pattern of successive phases of accumulation. Economic and political class struggles
have already taken place in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the result of limiting the possibilities of
exploitation, creating a balance of forces, and this event remains, so to speak, in the "memory" of the
system. The system (and probably also some of its theoreticians and politicians) "knows" that there is no exploitation
without class struggles, no class struggles without organization and representation of the exploited,
no representation and organization without a tendency toward political and social citizenship. This is
precisely what current capitalism cannot afford: there is no possibility of a "global social state" corresponding to the "national social states" in some parts of the
world during the last century. I mean, there is no political possibility. Therefore there is political resistance, very violent indeed, to every move in that direction.
Technological revolutions provide a positive but insufficient condition for the deproletarianization of
the actual or potential labor force. This time, direct political repression may also be insufficient.
Elimination or extermination has to take place, "passive" if possible, "active" if necessary; mutual elimination is "best," but it has to be
encouraged from outside. This is what allows me to suggest (and it already takes me to my third question) that if the "economy of global
violence" is not functional (because its immanent goals are indeed contradictory), it remains in a sense teleological: the
"same" populations are massively targeted (or the reverse: those populations that are targeted become progressively assimilated, they
look "the same"). They are qualitatively "deterritorialized,” as Gilles Deleuze would say, in an intensive rather than extensive
sense: they “live” on the edge of the city, under permanent threat of elimination, but also, conversely, they
live and are perceived as "nomads," even when they are fixed in their homelands, that is, their mere
existence, their quantity, their movements, their virtual claims of rights and citizenship are perceived
as a threat for "civilization."
The Alternative is to abandon capitalism entirely as a system
Mezzadra and Neilson 2008 [Sandro, Associate Professor of Political theory in the Department of Politics, Institutions, History at the
University of Bologna. He has been research fellow at the Humboldt Universität, Berlin; in the Centre for Cultural Research at the University of Western Sydney,
Brett - teaches cultural and social analysis at the University of Western Sydney, where he is also a member of the Centre for Cultural Research. “Border as Method,
or, the Multiplication of Labor” March, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0608/mezzadraneilson/en]
Central to any consideration of current global processes is the fact that the
world has become more open to flows of capital and
commodities but more closed to the circulation of human bodies. There is, however, one kind of commodity that is
inseparable from the human body and it is the peculiarity of this commodity that provides a key to understanding and unravelling this seemingly paradoxical
situation mention. We have in mind the
commodity of labor power, which at once describes a capacity of human
bodies and exists as a good traded in markets at various geographical scales. Not only is labor power a
commodity unlike any other, but also the markets in which it is exchanged are peculiar. This is because the role
of borders in shaping labor markets is particularly pronounced. The processes of filtering and
differentiation that occur at the border clearly shape labor forces in and across variegated spaces. But
there is also a peculiar tension within the abstract commodity form inherent to labor power which derives from the fact that it is inseparable
from living bodies. Unlike the case of a table, for instance, the border between the commodity form of labor power
and its ‘container’ must continuously be reaffirmed and retraced. This is why the political and legal
constitution of labor markets necessarily involves shifting regimes for the investment of power in life,
which lead for example to complicate the clear cut distinction between sovereignty and governmentality. It is also why
the dimension of labor struggle that emerges within the constitution of these markets implies a
confrontation with the question of the border. It is precisely the relation between labor power and struggle
that links the instances of border reinforcing and border crossing that we analyze in
different borderscapes (on this concept, cf. Rajaram – Grundy-Warr, eds. 2007). This is not to imply that we deal with a stable or linear set of relations
between labor forces, borders and political processes in various subjective and objective situations. Indeed, we seek to mark the constant and
unpredictable mutations in these arrangements by introducing the concept of the multiplication of
labor. On the one hand, this describes the intensification of the labor process and the tendency for work to
colonize the time of life. On the other hand, it accompanies as well as supplements the more familiar concept of the
international division of labor. By inverting this classical notion from political economy, we want above all to question the orthodoxy that
categorizes the global spectrum of labor according to international divisions or stable configurations such as the three worlds model or those elaborated around
seek to rethink the categories by which the hierarchisation of
labor is specified within labor markets, however they may be defined or bordered . At stake in the concept of the
binaries such as center/periphery or North/South. We also
multiplication of labor is an attempt to rethink the relation of labor to power (and indeed the classical conjunction of labor-power) in relation to the striation and
heterogeneity of space in the current transition of global capital. If we accept, with Nicholas De Genova (2008), the
inherent linkage of labor and
space, both as the conceptual and material coordinates of this transition, it follows that the nature of this link may change in
different scenarios. In particular, we want to note how the heterogenization of global space implies on the one hand an explosion of established nationstate geographies and on the other hand an implosion that forces seemingly discrete territories and actors into unexpected connections that facilitate processes of
production and labor exploitation. This leads to a situation that moves way beyond classical images of the international division of labor. It also supersedes what in
the late 1970s the German social scientists Froebel et al. (1980) called the ‘ new
international division of labor’, which involved the
shift of material production from developed to less developed nations with an enhanced role for the
multinational corporation and effects of deindustrialization and dependency. The concept of the international
division of labor has a complex genealogy dating from the debates of classical political economy. Suffice it to note here that at least since the 1920s and the 1930s
the concept would congeal to describe the division of the world into discrete labor markets delineated on the one hand by the borders of nation-states and on the
other by the separation between centre and periphery. The writings of Jacob Viner (Viner 1951) are particularly important in this respect. In calling into question the
notion of an international division of labor, we do not want to make the obvious point that the international system of states is now thoroughly overlaid by
transnational and global processes. To merely replace the adjective international with transnational or global is not sufficient as a theoretical move to derive
adequate conceptual means for the analysis of current processes of transition and their implications for migration, labor and border control. The reality
is
that transnational processes have always existed, and while the many efforts to trace their
augmentation in the past decades have some analytical and explanatory utility, there is a continued
need to account for the persistence, spectral or otherwise, of the nation-state. Whether one accepts Saskia Sassen’s
notion of a ‘tipping point’ at which the nation-state inserts itself into a new global logic of organization (Sassen 2006: 148ff) or the argument of Hardt and Negri by
which the nation-state has been displaced as the monopolist of sovereign power within the emerging ‘mixed constitution’ of Empire (2000: 304ff), there
is a
need to recognize that global capitalism assumes particular forms and adopts specific strategies and
practices in different sites . In its spread to China, for example, neoliberalism takes on particular forms that differ considerably from those
established in the context of the representative democracies of Europe and North America (Wang 2003). The proliferation of borders is related
to this complex differentiation of capitalism and points to a model of spatial articulation of capital’s
hegemony that is significantly different from the one epitomized by the concept of the international
division of labor and by the center-periphery model. If the border between center and periphery is not
the only or even the principal separating device in contemporary modes of shaping the geography of
production and exploitation as well as labor mobility control, it is also necessary to rethink and
complicate the primacy of division as a concept for describing the organization and exploitation of
labor. It is in this sense that we speak of a multiplication of labor that accompanies the proliferation of borders. It is crucial to note that
multiplication does not exclude division. Once again, we are not suggesting a substitution of concepts. Indeed, multiplication
implies division, or, even more strongly, we can say multiplication is a form of division. By speaking of
the multiplication of labor we want to point to the fact that division works in a fundamentally
different way than it does in the world as constructed within the frame of the international division of
labor. It tends itself to function through a continuous multiplication of control devices that correspond to the multiplication of labor regimes and the
subjectivities implied by them within each single space constructed as separate within models of the international division of labor. Corollary to this is the presence
of particular kinds of labor regimes across different global and local spaces. This
leads to a situation where the division of labor
must be considered within a multiplicity of overlapping sites that are themselves internally
heterogeneous.
2NC
UX Trick - Borders Inev w/out alt
Labor power recreates borders
Mezzadra and Neilson 2008 [Sandro, Associate Professor of Political theory in the Department of Politics, Institutions, History at the
University of Bologna. He has been research fellow at the Humboldt Universität, Berlin; in the Centre for Cultural Research at the University of Western Sydney,
Brett - teaches cultural and social analysis at the University of Western Sydney, where he is also a member of the Centre for Cultural Research. “Border as Method,
or, the Multiplication of Labor” March, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0608/mezzadraneilson/en]
In the many instances of this proliferation of borders that we analyze in our research, ranging from Africa to China’s internal borders, from the ‘external frontiers’ of
the EU to the US-Mexican border, from Australia’s ‘Pacific solution’ to the Bengali borderland, we
trace differential regimes of filtering
and stratification that function as means of stratification and control of migrant labor. With this
mobility and proliferation of borders, the divisions and hierarchies that are a necessary feature of the
organization of labor under capitalism acquire an unprecedented intensity and diffusion. To work with
the concept of the multiplication of labor is to recognize such divisions as not merely given but always
produced, imposed and reimposed, often in reaction to the movements of migration themselves.
There is at once a governable and ungovernable aspect to the operations of multiplication here. As
labor power travels, ducks and covers, traverses and remakes borders in various parts of the world, so
its mobility is also shaped by real and violent processes of subjectification, which increasingly take
place through the temporality of blocking, decelerating and accelerating as well as the correlate
processes of differential inclusion.
AT: Perm [politics]
1. Still links - cross-apply the link extension – the DeFazio evidence isolates the
way in which the aff uniquely sustains capitalism.
2. the alt will just be co-opted and subsumed by the system - the only way to fight
capitalism is to engage in totalized enmity. Any other approach upholds the
logic of capitalism, meaning methodology is a disad to the perm
3. If we win our method argument, competition is different - the debate is a
question of competing starting points, it would be logically incoherent to have
more than one - that gives our links uniqueness and means the perm is
severance - that's bad because it destroys neg ground and makes anything
competitive - that's a voting issue
4. Our epistemology arguments still apply – the false consciousness and flawed
understandings inherent in the 1AC mean they can’t access any solvency – their
adoption of anti-capitalism within the system is just the ruling class trying to
buddy up with the Marxists in order to dull the revolution
5. The perm fails to reject capital completely and instead still lingers within the
system – only total enmity against capitalism can avert extinction – that’s a
disad to the permutation
Zizek 2001 [Slavoj, senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy, “Repeating Lenin” http://www.lacan.com/replenin.htm]
Today, we
already can discern the signs of a kind of general unease - recall the series of events usually listed under the name of "Seattle."
The 10 years honeymoon of the triumphant global capitalism is over, the long-overdue "seven years itch"
is here - witness the panicky reactions of the big media, which - from the Time magazine to CNN - all of a sudden started to warn about the Marxists
manipulating the crowd of the "honest" protesters. The problem is now the strictly Leninist one - how to ACTUALIZE the media's
accusations: how to invent the organizational structure which will confer on this unrest the FORM of
the universal political demand. Otherwise, the momentum will be lost, and what will remain is the
marginal disturbance, perhaps organized as a new Greenpeace, with certain efficiency, but also strictly limited goals, marketing
strategy, etc. In other words, the key "Leninist" lesson today is: politics without the organizational FORM of the
party is politics without politics, so the answer to those who want just the (quite adequately named) "New SOCIAL
Movements" is the same as the answer of the Jacobins to the Girondin compromisers: "You want revolution without a revolution!" Today's
blockade is that there are two ways open for the socio-political engagement: either play the game of the system, engage in the
"long march through the institutions," or get active in new social movements, from feminism through
ecology to anti-racism. And, again, the limit of these movements is that they are not POLITICAL in the sense
of the Universal Singular: they are "one issue movements" which lack the dimension of the
universality , i.e. they do not relate to the social TOTALITY. Here, Lenin's reproach to liberals is crucial: they only EXPLOIT the working
52
classes' discontent to strengthen their position vis-a-vis the conservatives, instead of identifying with it to the end. Is this also not the case with today's
Left liberals? They like to evoke racism, ecology, workers' grievances, etc., to score points over the
conservatives WITHOUT ENDANGERING THE SYSTEM. Recall how, in Seattle, Bill Clinton himself deftly referred to the protesters on
the streets outside, reminding the gathered leaders inside the guarded palaces that they should listen to the message of the demonstrators (the message which, of
course, Clinton interpreted, depriving it of its subversive sting attributed to the dangerous extremists introducing chaos and violence into the majority of peaceful
the same with all New Social Movements, up to the Zapatistas in Chiapas: the systemic
politics is always ready to "listen to their demands," depriving them of their proper political sting. The
system is by definition ecumenical, open, tolerant, ready to "listen" to all - even if one insist on one's
demands, they are deprived of their universal political sting by the very form of negotiation. The true Third
protesters). It's
Way we have to look for is this third way between the institutionalized parliamentary politics and the new social movements.
Impacts
Capital crowds out minorities and makes racism inevitable
San Juan
03
20
[E. Fulbright Lecturer, University of Leuven“Marxism and the Race/Class Problematic: A Re-Articulation”
http://clogic.eserver.org/2003/sanjuan.html/accessed]
William Julius Wilson indicated some of these changes in the role of "race" in class-divided U.S. society, though he drew mistaken conclusions. He applied
stratification theory on the mapping of black-white contacts in U.S. society configured in three major stages: first, the plantation economy with its racial-caste
oppression; second, class conflict and racial oppression in the period of the end of Reconstruction up to the New Deal era; and third, the progressive transition from
race inequalities to class inequalities after World War II, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. Given
a hierarchical model of status roles,
Wilson intended to find out how "access to the means of production" (by which he means employment) can be
obtained by education. His concern is with opportunities for mobility provided by a segmented labor
market which generates a high-wage sector (salaried white-collar positions in government and corporation) and the
underclass. "Race" disappears because all barriers for blacks are gone with affirmative action, more
education, and so on. "Race" is no longer the cause of discrimination and segregation of the labor
market; rather, it is class, meaning education or symbolic capital, lifestyle, consumption power, and so
on. Gunnar Myrdal's American Creed has finally abolished racism only to re-inaugurate "classism," the rebarbative term of postmodern skeptics, without which
the classic American moral dilemma--the opposition between "high national and Christian precepts" and sordid practices of apartheid and other institutional forms
of racialized class injustice in everyday life--would be vacuous. 28. Unfortunately, the current debate between a class-based Affirmative Action instead of one based
on race assumes that class as status (attached chiefly to income or occupational location) is the normative obstacle to eliminating racism (see Gutmann 2000). In
short, racism
translates into a question of social mobility and the individualist "bootstrap" ethos of
competition (also known as neosocial Darwinism) in the "free market," the privileged locus of alienation and reification (Lukacs 1971). From the
perspective of liberal multiculturalism, "class" becomes an aspect of identity, like race and gender
susceptible of stylistic alteration. One is then reminded by Ellen Meiksins Wood: "Is it possible to imagine class
differences without exploitation and domination? The 'difference' that constitutes class as an 'identity'
is, by definition, a relationship of inequality and power, in a way that sexual or cultural 'difference'
need not be" (1995, 258). 29. It seems obvious that racism cannot be dissolved by instances of status mobility when sociohistorical circumstances change
gradually or are transformed by unforeseen interventions. The black bourgeoisie continues to be harassed and stigmatized by
liberal or multiculturalist practices of racism, not because they drive Porsches or conspicuously flaunt
all the indices of wealth. Class exploitation cannot replace or stand for racism because it is the
condition of possibility for it. It is what enables the racializing of selected markers, whether physiological or cultural, to maintain, deepen and
reinforce alienation, mystifying reality by modes of commodification, fetishism, and reification
characterizing the routine of quotidian life. Race and class are dialectically conjoined in the reproduction of capitalist relations of
exploitation and domination.
Capitalism’s preoccupation with endless accumulation will result in total ecological
destruction and extinction
John Bellamy Foster, professor of anthropology Dec. 2011, Capitalism and the Accumulation of
Catastrophe, Monthly Review, Vol. 63 Issue 07, http://monthlyreview.org/2011/12/01/capitalism-andthe-accumulation-of-catastrophe (Aug 2012)
Yet, the continued pursuit of Keynes’s convenient lie over the last eight decades has led to a world far
more polarized and beset with contradictions than he could have foreseen. It is a world prey to the
enormous unintended consequences of accumulation without limits: namely, global economic
stagnation, financial crisis, and planetary ecological destruction. Keynes, though aware of some of the
negative economic aspects of capitalist production, had no real understanding of the ecological perils—of which scientists had already
long been warning. Today
these perils are impossible to overlook. Faced with impending ecological
catastrophe, it is more necessary than ever to abandon Keynes’s convenient lie and espouse the
truth: that foul is foul and fair is fair. Capitalism, the society of “après moi le déluge!” is a
system that fouls its own nest—both the human-social conditions and the wider natural
environment on which it depends. The accumulation of capital is at the same time
accumulation of catastrophe, not only for a majority of the world’s people, but living species
generally. Hence, nothing is fairer—more just, more beautiful, and more necessary—today than the struggle to overthrow the
regime of capital and to create a system of substantive equality and sustainable human development; a socialism for the twenty-first
century.
Capitalism is the greatest threat to human survival.
MacUaid, 07 (Liam, “Savage Capitalism—The Ecosocialist Alternative,” August,
http://liammacuaid.files.wordpress.com/2007/08/savage-capitalism.pdf)
All this has happened not only because of the general priorities of any form of capitalism, but because of the present phase of ‘savage
capitalism’, stalking the earth with all sense of social responsibility abandoned, increasing amounts of
surveillance, violence, war and torture, and aimed at short term profits squeezed from the labour of the
poor, rather than the development of social solidarity, peace and the possibility for most people to live a happy life. It is now obvious that
this morbid phase of capitalism has brought upon humanity the biggest ever threat to its existence – the threat
of environmental catastrophe. The overall threat to humanity and the planet we sum up here under four headings – environmental
catastrophe, imperialist war and the crushing of the third world, savage capitalism in everyday life and the surveillance- security lockdown
state. They are all linked; they all are part of a single system of power and exploitation. ‘Neoliberalism’, with the added ingredient of US-style
neoconservatism, has degenerated into a new and more barbarous phase – ‘savage capitalism’. This
new phase of capitalism
forces an inevitable conclusion – only by a total transformation in politics and production, in other words a transformation
of our social relations, can a sustainable future for humanity be established. We are facing the biggest
crisis of human civilisation ever. No previous crisis has ever posed the existence human civilisation so
directly.
Racism is rooted in capitalistic practices – slaves are viewed are sub-beings exploited
for economic gain
Wilson 10 (Carter, professor of political science at the University of Toledo, The Dominant Class and the
Construction of Racial Oppression: A Neo-Marxist/Gramscian Approach to Race in the United States,
Google Scholars)
Contemporary scholars explain the
racially exclusionary behavior of white workers in terms of either the
advantage of whiteness or the impact of racist culture. Roediger, in Wages of Whiteness, insists that white workers gain
status and prestige in defining themselves as white.20 He argues that white working-class consciousness emerged as white
labor was contrasted with black labor. White labor was free; black labor was enslaved. White labor had
privileges and advantages; black labor had none. It is these advantages that constitute the wages of whiteness, an expression
Roediger borrows from Du Bois. Labor scholars insist that the greatest barrier to hiring blacks into the skilled
trades had been white workers. These scholars present examples of white unions excluding black
workers. Indeed, many white union constitutions contained language which explicitly excluded
blacks.21 Other scholars blame uneducated, low-income whites for racism and racial violence. They see
racial violence as operating on the fringe of society, executed by ignorant social misfits, alienated from
the mainstream.22 In either case, scholars insist that white workers created the form of racism
associated with industrial capitalism.
Material inequalities between races prove
Young 06 (Chair @ NYU; Robert, “Putting Materialism Back into the Race Theory: Toward a
Transformative Theory of Race”, redcritique.org )
In a sense then, race
encodes the totality of contemporary capitalist social relations, which is why race cuts
across a range of seemingly disparate social sites in contemporary US society. For instance, one can
mark race difference and its discriminatory effects in such diverse sites as health care, housing/real
estate, education, law, job market, and many other social sites. However, unlike many commentators who engage race
matters, I do not isolate these social sites and view race as a local problem, which would lead to reformist
measures along the lines of either legal reform or a cultural-ideological battle to win the hearts and
minds of people and thus keep the existing socio-economic arrangements intact; instead, I foreground the
relationality of these sites within the exchange mechanism of multinational capitalism. Consequently, I believe, the eradication of race
oppression also requires a totalizing political project: the transformation of existing capitalism—a system
which produces difference (the racial/gender division of labor) and accompanying ideological narratives that
justify the resulting social inequality. Hence, my project articulates a transformative theory of race—a theory that reclaims
revolutionary class politics in the interests of contributing toward a post-racist society. In other words, the transformation from
actually existing capitalism into socialism constitutes the condition of possibility for a post-racist
society—a society free from racial and all other forms of oppression.
The profit driven ideology of capitalism throws ethics aside in favor of economic
power and wealth – only the alternative can solve
Morgareidge 98 (Clayton, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Lewis and Clark College, “Why Capitalism
is Evil”, Radio Active Philosophy, Lewis and Clark Educational Papers,
http://legacy.lclark.edu/~clayton/commentaries/evil.html)
Now none of these philosophers are naive: none of them thinks that sympathy, love, or caring determines all, or even most, human behavior.
The 20th century proves otherwise. What they do offer, though, is the hope that human beings have the capacity to want the best for each
other. So now we must ask, What
forces are at work in our world to block or cripple the ethical response? This
question, of course, brings me back to capitalism. But before I go there, I want to acknowledge that capitalism is not the only
thing that blocks our ability to care. Exploitation and cruelty were around long before the economic system of capitalism came to be, and the
temptation to use and abuse others will probably survive in any future society that might supersede capitalism. Nevertheless, I want to claim,
the putting
the world at the disposal of those with capital has done more damage to the ethical life than
any thing else. To put it in religious terms, capital is the devil. To show why this is the case, let me turn to capital's greatest critic,
Karl Marx. Under capitalism, Marx writes, everything in nature and everything that human beings are and can
do becomes an object: a resource for, or an obstacle, to the expansion of production, the development
of technology, the growth of markets, and the circulation of money. For those who manage and live from capital,
nothing has value of its own. Mountain streams, clean air, human lives -- all mean nothing in themselves, but
are valuable only if they can be used to turn a profit. If capital looks at (not into) the human face, it sees
there only eyes through which brand names and advertising can enter and mouths that can demand and
consume food, drink, and tobacco products. If human faces express needs, then either products can be
manufactured to meet, or seem to meet, those needs, or else, if the needs are incompatible with the
growth of capital, then the faces expressing them must be unrepresented or silenced. Obviously what capitalist
enterprises do have consequences for the well being of human beings and the planet we live on. Capital profits from the production of food,
shelter, and all the necessities of life. The production of all these things uses human lives in the shape of labor, as well as the resources of the
earth. If
we care about life, if we see our obligations in each others faces, then we have to want all the
things capital does to be governed by that care, to be directed by the ethical concern for life. But feeding
people is not the aim of the food industry, or shelter the purpose of the housing industry. In medicine, making profits is becoming a more
important goal than caring for sick people. As capitalist enterprises these activities aim single-mindedly at the accumulation of capital, and such
purposes as caring for the sick or feeding the hungry becomes a mere means to an end, an instrument of corporate growth. Therefore ethics,
the overriding commitment to meeting human need, is left out of deliberations about what the
heavyweight institutions of our society are going to do. Moral convictions are expressed in churches, in living rooms, in
letters to the editor, sometimes even by politicians and widely read commentators, but almost always with an attitude of resignation to the
inevitable. People no longer say, "You can't stop progress," but only because they have learned not to call economic growth progress. They still
think they can't stop it. And they are right -- as long as the production of all our needs and the organization of our labor is carried out under
private ownership.
Only a minority ("idealists") can take seriously a way of thinking that counts for nothing in
real world decision making. Only when the end of capitalism is on the table will ethics have a seat at the
table.
Uniqueness
The fall of capitalism is inevitable with current trade practices
Random 07
Jack Random, Pacific Free Press Columnist, October 21, 2007 (Pacific Free Press, “Inevitable Decline of the World Economy”, July 15,
http://www.pacificfreepress.com/content/view/1778/81/ )
The fundamental purpose behind every globalization trade agreement has nothing to do with market
access; it has everything to do with labor exploitation. The collapse of labor within our borders is not an unfortunate
byproduct of a global economy; it is the intended and negotiated outcome.
As globalization has advanced, corporate profits have reached pornographic levels but the days of
unaccountable profiteering have an inevitable end. The corporate beast cannot overcome its
nature. It will not only bite the hand that feeds it, it will consume it down to the bone. Labor is the fuel of the global economy and labor will
have its revenge.
Like Enron before the fall, the
American economy is an elaborate shared illusion sustained by the common
interests of our corporate masters and debt holders. In the event no one noticed, while we were building a military
machine that will be obsolete within a decade, beneficiary nations like China, India and Japan have paid for our
excesses.
They are unlikely to call the debt as long as they continue to benefit but we have sacrificed all
leverage in nations partnered with China, including Burma, North Korea, Sudan and Iran. We can blow up as many nations as
we like, at the end of the tunnel the Chinese own us.
The day will come when millions of workers take to the streets in China and India, demanding living wages,
decent working standards and basic health care. Our response will be tepid and restrained as the
governments of those nations strike back with unrestrained violent oppression.
The secret will be revealed: America has long abandoned the working class and the rights of labor. Yet labor will have its revenge.
The behemoth behind the immigration crisis, the loss of health care and retirement benefits, the absence of decent jobs at decent wages is a
betrayal of the fundamental rights of labor even in the so called “enlightened” nations.
Exploitation labor is no more sustainable in
other nations than it is here. The longer the rights of labor are suppressed internationally, the greater
the upheaval in response.
Labor will have its day because its place in the economic equation is essential.
Ironically, the only development that can save the prosperity of illusion from exploding in worldwide chaos is the assertion of the universal
rights of labor before that inevitability arrives.
No one can predict the precise moment of historic change but we can predict the logical consequences of a course of action.
If we
continue to pretend that a vibrant, prosperous economy is possible without a healthy, prospering
working class, the consequences are as catastrophic as the permanent occupation of a Middle Eastern
nation.
Capitalism is completely unsustainable – the recession was a product of a structural
deficient system that will collapse.
Wallerstein 11 – senior research scholar at Yale [Immanuel, “The Global Economy Won’t Recover, Now
or Ever,” January-February 2011,
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/01/02/unconventional_wisdom?page=0,9,]
Virtually everyone everywhere-economists, politicians, pundits -- agrees
that the world has been in some kind of
economic trouble since at least 2008. And virtually everyone seems to believe that in the next few years the world
will somehow "recover" from these difficulties. After all, upturns always occur after downturns. The remedies recommended
vary considerably, but the idea that the system shall continue in its essential features is a deeply rooted faith. But it is wrong. All
systems have lives. When their processes move too far from equilibrium, they fluctuate chaotically and
bifurcate. Our existing system, what I call a capitalist world-economy, has been in existence for some 500 years and has for at
has functioned remarkably well. But like all systems, it has moved steadily
has moved too far from equilibrium, such that it is today in
structural crisis. The problem is that the basic costs of all production have risen remarkably. There are the personnel
least a century encompassed the entire globe. It
further and further from equilibrium. For a while now, it
expenses of all kinds -- for unskilled workers, for cadres, for top-level management. There are the costs incurred as producers pass on the costs
of their production to the rest of us -- for detoxification, for renewal of resources, for infrastructure. And the democratization of the world has
led to demands for more and more education, more and more health provisions, and more and more guarantees of lifetime income. To meet
these demands, there has been a significant increase in taxation of all kinds. Together, these costs have risen beyond the point that permits
serious capital accumulation. Why not then simply raise prices? Because there are limits beyond which one cannot push their level. It is called
the elasticity of demand. The result is a growing profit squeeze, which is reaching a point where the game is not worth the candle. What
we
are witnessing as a result is chaotic fluctuations of all kinds -- economic, political, sociocultural. These fluctuations cannot
easily be controlled by public policy. The result is ever greater uncertainty about all kinds of short-term
decision-making, as well as frantic realignments of every variety. Doubt feeds on itself as we search for ways out of the menacing
uncertainty posed by terrorism, climate change, pandemics, and nuclear proliferation. The only sure thing is that the present system cannot
continue. The
fundamental political struggle is over what kind of system will replace capitalism, not
whether it should survive. The choice is between a new system that replicates some of the present
system's essential features of hierarchy and polarization and one that is relatively democratic and
egalitarian. The extraordinary expansion of the world-economy in the postwar years (more or less 1945 to 1970) has been followed by a
long period of economic stagnation in which the basic source of gain has been rank speculation sustained by successive indebtednesses. The
latest financial crisis didn't bring down this system; it merely exposed it as hollow. Our
recent "difficulties" are merely the nextto-last bubble in a process of boom and bust the world-system has been undergoing since around 1970.
The last bubble will be state indebtednesses, including in the so-called emerging economies, leading to bankruptcies. Most people do
not recognize -- or refuse to recognize -- these realities. It is wrenching to accept that the historical system in
which we are living is in structural crisis and will not survive. Meanwhile, the system proceeds by its accepted
rules. We meet at G-20 sessions and seek a futile consensus. We speculate on the markets. We "develop" our
economies in whatever way we can. All this activity simply accentuates the structural crisis. The real action, the struggle
over what new system will be created, is elsewhere.
The finite resources of the planet make a system predicated on unlimited growth
impossible – the drive for profit makes all regulations and reforms useless
Robert Newman, author and political activist and speaker at Third World First. “Capitalism or a
habitable planet – you can’t have both.” February 2, 2006. http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=955
There is no meaningful response to climate change without massive social change. A cap on this
and a quota on the other won't do it. Tinker at the edges as we may, we cannot sustain earth's
life-support systems within the present economic system. Capitalism is not sustainable by its
very nature. It is predicated on infinitely expanding markets, faster consumption and bigger
production in a finite planet. And yet this ideological model remains the central organising
principle of our lives, and as long as it continues to be so it will automatically undo (with its
invisible hand) every single green initiative anybody cares to come up with. Much discussion of
energy, with never a word about power, leads to the fallacy of a low-impact, green capitalism
somehow put at the service of environmentalism. In reality, power concentrates around wealth.
Private ownership of trade and industry means that the decisive political force in the world is
private power. The corporation will outflank every puny law and regulation that seeks to
constrain its profitability. It therefore stands in the way of the functioning democracy needed to
tackle climate change. Only by breaking up corporate power and bringing it under social control
will we be able to overcome the global environmental crisis.
Link stuff
Their abstract descriptions of others that we need to save are a product of capitalistabstraction that allows us to ignore “The Other” when they are proximate to us and
allow suffering to continue.
Zizek 2
Slavoj Zizek, Professor of Sociology at the Institute for Sociology, Ljubljana University, 2002, Revolution
at the Gates, p. 205-07
Atom Egoyan’s film Exotica tackles the fragile status of the frontier that separates public from private space. When we share a
common space with outsiders — say, when a delivery man or a repair man enters our apartment — we politely ignore each other,
refraining from probing into the other’s privacy (what do they desire, what are their secret dreams?); Exotica, however, constantly
violates this frontier, suddenly establishing a more intimate contact between two people brought together by some official duty. The
Lacanian big Other is, among other things, one of the names for this Wall which enables us to maintain the proper distance,
guaranteeing that the other’s proximity will not overwhelm us — when we talk with a clerk, we “do not get personal”. (The paradox is
that this very Wall is not just negative: at the same time, it generates fantasies about what lurks behind it, about what the other really
desires.70) Our
late capitalist daily life involves an unprecedented disavowal of the other’s
experience: In order to pass a homeless person crouched in a doorway and keep walking, in
order to enjoy dinner when children are hungry, in order to rest at night when suffering is incessant —
atomized daily function demands that we systematically foreclose our affections for and
connections with others (in the words of dominant culture, our economy is comprised of individuals who respect each
other’s individuality). Behind the caricature of the bleeding-heart liberal is the truth of politics: how
you feel is how you act.71 Here we are dealing not with individual psychology, but with capitalist subjectivity
as a form of abstraction inscribed in and determined by the very nexus of “objective” social
relations: Indifference towards specific labours corresponds to a form of society in which individuals can with ease transfer from
one labour to another, and where the specific kind is a matter of chance for them, hence of indifference. Not only the category, labour,
but labour in reality has here become the means of creating wealth in general, and has ceased to be organically linked with particular
individuals in any specific form. Such a state of affairs is at its most developed in the most modern form of existence of bourgeois
society, in the United States. Here, then, for the first time, the point of departure of modern economics, namely the abstraction of the
category “labour”, “labour as such”, labour pure and simple, becomes true in practice.72 So, just as Marx described how, within the
market economy, abstraction is inscribed into individual experience itself (a worker directly experiences his particular profession as a
contingent actualization of his abstract capacity to work, not as an organic component of his personality; an “alienated” lover
experiences his sexual partner as a contingent fill-in that satisfied his need for sexual and/or emotional gratification; etc.),
abstraction is also inscribed into the way we relate to others at the most immediate level: we
ignore them in the fundamental sense of the word, reducing them to bearers of abstract social
functions. And the point here, of course, is that “systems of power necessitate specific emotional configurations”: the fundamental
“coldness” of the late capitalist subject is supplanted/concealed by the phantom of a rich private emotional life which serves as a
fantasy-screen protecting us from the shattering experience of the Real of other people’s suffering. Today, the old joke about a rich
man telling his servant “Throw out this destitute beggar — I’m so sensitive that I can’t stand seeing people suffer!” is more appropriate
than ever. The necessary price of this abstraction is that the very sphere of privacy gets “reified”, turned into a domain of calculated
satisfactions: is there anything more depressingly anti-erotic than the proverbial appeal of a yuppie to his partner: “Let’s spend some
quality time together!”? No wonder, then, that the obverse of this distance are brutal and humiliating intrusions into the other’s
intimate space: from confessionary talk-shows to cam-websites where we can observe other people defecating from the bottom of the
toilet bowl.
Alt Solvency
The alternative is a pre-requisite to solving for the affirmative – any other method
fails to eradicate the negative impacts of capitalism
Johnston '4
Adrian Johnston, interdisciplinary research fellow in psychoanalysis at Emory University, “The Cynic’s
Fetish: Slavoj Zizek and the Dynamics of Belief,” International Journal of Zizek Studies, Vol. 1 No. 0., 24
August 2007, pp. 93-94, accessed 1/27/10 http://www.zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/8/24
Perhaps the absence of a detailed practical roadmap in Žižek’s political writings isn’t a major shortcoming.
Maybe, at least for the time being, the most important task is simply the negativity of the critical
struggle, the effort to cure an intellectual constipation resulting from capitalist ideology and
thereby truly to open up the space for imagining authentic alternatives to the prevailing state of
the situation. Another definition of materialism offered by Žižek is that it amounts to accepting the internal inherence of what
fantasmatically appears as an external deadlock or hindrance127 (with fantasy itself being defined as the false externalization of
something within the subject, namely, the illusory projection of an inner obstacle128). From this perspective, seeing
through
ideological fantasies by learning how to think again outside the confines of current restrictions
has, in and of itself, the potential to operate as a form of real revolutionary practice (rather than
remaining just an instance of negative/critical intellectual reflection). Why is this the case? Recalling the earlier analysis of commodity
fetishism, the social efficacy of money as the universal medium of exchange (and the entire political economy grounded upon it)
ultimately relies upon nothing 93 more than a kind of “magic,” that is, the belief in money’s social efficacy by those using it in the
processes of exchange. Since the value of currency is, at bottom, reducible to the belief that it has the value attributed to it (and that
everyone believes that everyone else believes this as well), derailing
capitalism by destroying its essential
financial substance is, in a certain respect, as easy as dissolving the mere belief in this substance’s
powers. The “external” obstacle of the capitalist system exists exclusively on the condition that
subjects, whether consciously or unconsciously, “internally” believe in it—capitalism’s life-blood, money, is simply
a fetishistic crystallization of a belief in others’ belief in the socioperformative force emanating
from this same material. And yet, this point of capitalism’s frail vulnerability is simultaneously
the source of its enormous strength: Its vampiric symbiosis with individual human desire, and the fact that the latecapitalist cynic’s fetishism enables the disavowal of his/her de facto belief in capitalism, makes it highly unlikely
that people can be persuaded to stop believing and start thinking (especially since, as Žižek claims, many of
these people are convinced that they already have ceased believing). Or, the more disquieting possibility to entertain is that some
people today, even if one succeeds in exposing them to the underlying logic of their position, might respond in a manner resembling
that of the Judas-like character Cypher in the film The Matrix (Cypher opts to embrace enslavement by illusion rather than cope with
the discomfort of dwelling in the “desert of the real”): Faced with the choice between living the capitalist lie or grappling with certain
unpleasant truths, many individuals might very well deliberately decide to accept what they know full well to be a false pseudo-reality,
a deceptively comforting fiction (“Capitalist commodity fetishism or the truth? I choose fetishism.”)
We must resist the affirmative's call to action and instead engage in direct enmity
against capital - any reformism is co-opted and misunderstands power and the
political economy, turning solvency.
Slavoj Zizek, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies in Ljubljana, "Repeating Lenin," 2001,
accessed 1/28/10 http://www.lacan.com/replenin
One is therefore tempted to turn around Marx's thesis 11: the first task today is precisely NOT to succumb to the
temptation to act, to directly intervene and change things (which then inevitably ends in a cul de sac of debilitating
impossibility: "what can one do against the global capital?"), but to question the hegemonic ideological coordinates. If,
today, one follows a direct call to act, this act will not be performed in an empty space - it will be an act
WITHIN the hegemonic ideological coordinates: those who "really want to do something to help people" get involved in
(undoubtedly honorable) exploits like Medecins sans frontiere, Greenpeace, feminist and anti-racist campaigns, which are all not only tolerated,
but even supported by the media, even if they seemingly enter the economic territory (say, denouncing and boycotting companies which do
not respect ecological conditions or which use child labor) - they are tolerated and supported as long as they do not get too close to a certain
limit.
This kind of activity provides the perfect example of interpassivity2: of doing things not to achieve
something, but to PREVENT from something really happening, really changing. All the frenetic humanitarian,
politically correct, etc., activity fits the formula of "Let's go on changing something all the time so that, globally, things will remain the same!"
Let us take two predominant topics of today's American radical academia: postcolonial and queer (gay) studies. The problem of postcolonialism
is undoubtedly crucial; however, "postcolonial studies" tend to translate it into the multiculturalist problematic of the colonized minorities'
"right to narrate" their victimizing experience, of the power mechanisms which repress "otherness," so that, at the end of the day, we learn
that the root of the postcolonial exploitation is our intolerance towards the Other, and, furthermore, that this intolerance itself is rooted in our
intolerance towards the "Stranger in Ourselves," in our inability to confront what we repressed in and of ourselves - the
politicoeconomic struggle is thus imperceptibly transformed into a pseudo-psychoanalytic drama of the
subject unable to confront its inner traumas... The true corruption of the American academia is not primarily financial, it is not
only that they are able to buy many European critical intellectuals (myself included - up to a point), but conceptual: notions of the
"European" critical theory are imperceptibly translated into the benign universe of the Cultural
Studies chic. My personal experience is that practically all of the "radical" academics silently count on the long-term stability of the
American capitalist model, with the secure tenured position as their ultimate professional goal (a surprising number of them even play on the
stock market). If
there is a thing they are genuinely horrified of, it is a radical shattering of the (relatively) safe
life environment of the "symbolic classes" in the developed Western societies. Their excessive Politically Correct
zeal when dealing with sexism, racism, Third World sweatshops, etc., is thus ultimately a defense against their own innermost identification, a
kind of compulsive ritual whose hidden logic is: "Let's talk as much as possible about the necessity of a radical change to make it sure that
nothing will really change!" Symptomatic is here the journal October: when you ask one of the editors to what the title refers, they will halfconfidentially signal that it is, of course, THAT October - in this way, one can indulge in the jargonistic analyses of the modern art, with the
hidden assurance that one is somehow retaining the link with the radical revolutionary past... With regard to this radical chic, the first gesture
towards the Third Way ideologists and practitioners should be that of praise: they at least play their game in a straight way, and are honest in
their acceptance of the global capitalist coordinates, in contrast to the pseudo-radical academic Leftists who adopt towards the Third Way the
attitude of utter disdain, while their own radicality ultimately amounts to an empty gesture which obliges no one to anything determinate. It is
true that, today, it is the radical populist Right which is usually breaking the (still) predominant liberal-democratic consensus, gradually
rendering acceptable the hitherto excluded topics (the partial justification of Fascism, the need to constrain abstract citizenship on behalf of
ethnic identity, etc.). However, the hegemonic liberal democracy is using this fact to blackmail the Left radicals: "we shouldn't play with fire:
against the new Rightist onslaught, one should more than ever insist on the democratic consensus - any criticism of it willingly or unwillingly
helps the new Right!" This is the key line of separation:
one should reject this blackmail, taking the risk of disturbing
the liberal consensus, up to questioning the very notion of democracy.
Borders Neg—Case
Mestizian Consciousness
Adopting a mestiza or border consciousness erases all individuality. This transnational
form of thought would erase historical and cultural grounding of the borderlands.
Donadey 7 (Anne Donadey, PhD in European Studies and Women’s Studies,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/25115457 , “Overlapping and Interlocking Frames for Humanities Literature Studies:
Assia Djebar, Tsitsi Dangaremgba, Gloria Anzaldua,” 2007)
In an important essay on the centrality of Anzaldúa’s work, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano cautions against
“universalizing the theory of mestiza or border consciousness, which the text painstakingly grounds in
specific historical and cultural experiences” (1998, 13) in order to preclude “[a]ppropriative readings” in which
everyone becomes a mestiza and difference and specificity are erased (14; see also Phelan 1997;
Castillo 2006). While I agree with Yarbro-Bejarano that what Emma Pérez (1999) would call Anzaldúa’s
“decolonial imaginary” should not be flattened out by a post-modern translation of the concept of
borderlands that would erase its historical and cultural grounding by turning it into a disembodied
metaphor that all can come to claim, it is also important to remember that Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La
Frontera has at least two levels of address: one deals with the specificity of the Chicana/o history in
the U.S./Mexican borderlands; the other seeks to make a space for Chicanas/os and others whose
identities cannot be reduced to binaries in a variety of locations, including the academy .
Basically Anzaldua sux
Zalfa Feghali, March 2011 (Prof. University Of Nottingham,
http://www.bridgew.edu/soas/jiws/Vol12_no2/pdfs/6_Zalfa.pdf, Journal of International Women’s
Studies Special Issue Vol. 12 #2, Pg. 61)
Another critique and limitation of Anzaldúa‟s conception of the new mestizo figure is that she equates
the physical experience of living in the borderlands with the emotional and spiritual experiences of
other, more abstract borderlands. In this vein, Pablo Vila provides a cogent argument warning against
making an easy equivalence between the two, which would serve to homogenize the border, as if there
were only one border identity, border culture, or process of hybridization. I think, instead, that the
reality of the border […] goes well beyond that consecrated figure of border studies, the border
crosser. […] That is, the confusion of the American side of the border with the border itself, the
essentialization of the cultures that meet in the border encounter […] and the tendency to confuse the
sharing of a culture with the sharing of an identity (Border Identifications 4). It is Vila‟s last two
comments that I feel are most evident in Anzaldúa‟s account, with regard to the way she attempts to
transpose her analysis of a physical border area with borders that cannot be physically defined, as in for
example, the borders of ethnicity. While my analysis also looks at these borders, I try not to equate
them so simply so as not to lose sight of what makes them different. Vila‟s critique also has particular
implications on the way Anzaldúa sees whites. An interesting point, however is that the only whites
Anzaldúa does not dismiss as potential allies are those who are homosexuals. Significantly, she
recognizes that within whiteness there is inequality – it is as a result of marginalization, among other
things, that the homosexual is able to identify and “link people with each other – the Blacks with Jews
with Indians with Asians with whites with extraterrestrials” (Borderlands 106). In another connection to
Vila, it is also clear that Anzaldúa blurs the distinction between being part of a culture and sharing in
that identity, as I noted above. This is also evident in her use of the word “Gringo.” In fact, many on the
Mexican side of the border would accuse of Anzaldúa of not having the right to use the word
“Gringo”, given her position with relation to the border. Equally important in this context is
Anzaldúa‟s appropriation of the indigena. Anzaldúa reclaims the indigena as the Indian part of her
own mestizaje, and names it as a source and inspiration for her own resistance to oppression. In
including the indigena in her analysis, Anzaldúa critiques Chicano/a society for denying the indigenous
part of mestizaje. Yet this indigena is never elaborated on: Anzaldúa reclaims the indigena but does
not explain what she is reclaiming, exhibiting once again her tendency to lean towards essentialized
identities. While she clearly writes with an intention of inclusivity, she is unwittingly conveying a
message that could be construed to be equally problematic as those essentializing and racist groups
that she is writing against. This is perhaps because of Anzaldúa‟s own location. Despite the fact that
her analysis is rooted in the borderlands, she does not address the fact that she is, whether or not she
likes it, writing from the US side of the border. As such, she perhaps unconsciously falls prey to the
trappings of privilege and theory, which could make her text as questionable and problematic as any
other US text about the border. As Socorro Tabuenca notes: “In Anzaldúa‟s text…the geographic border
and the relationships between Mexico and the United States are essentialized. In it, US whites are
presented as “them” and minorities as “us.”… The border culture according to Anzaldúa, is also a
metaphorical culture narrated from the vantage point of the First World” (qtd. in Vila Ethnography at
the Border 311). Tabuenca is not trying to deny the importance of studying the “privileged” side of the
border; rather, his suggestion is that the border should be studied from both sides, simultaneously.
Accordingly, this analysis should hold true for both physical and psychic borders. Anzaldúa also speaks
from the vantage point of the multiply oppressed; as a nonwhite, queer woman, she is very conscious of
the fact that “the dark-skinned woman has been silenced, gagged, [and] caged…colonized by the
Spaniard, the Anglo, [and] by her own people” (Borderlands 44). While Anzaldúa names the source of
this colonization as male hegemony, she seems to be comparatively flexible towards this male
dominance (particularly in the borderlands) than towards as white dominance. In fact, Anzaldúa does
not use the same exclusionary logic I identified above against men, who she identifies as another
major source of domination of and against the mestiza. She does of course bear witness to the many
sites of oppression of women by both Anglo and non-Anglo men, and correctly identifies that culture,
society, and their rules are products of the male hierarchal network of oppression from the outset. As
she puts it, “dominant paradigms, predefined concepts that exist as unquestionable, unchallengeable,
are transmitted to us through culture. Culture is made by those in power – men” (38). Ultimately,
however, she recognizes, as Sonia Saldívar-Hull has put it, that “rules are manmade and can be unmade
with feminist logic” (“Introduction” 4). In this recognition is a space reserved for moving beyond the
male-female binary. Re-assessing man-made rules with feminist logic does not mean the rules will now
be made by women – rather, she takes it to mean that they will be fair and balanced to both sides. Why
then, can Anzaldúa not reserve this same space for moving beyond white versus non-white relations?
Anzaldua uses postcolonial theory to justify a lot of her understanding of the mestizo.
Zalfa Feghali, March 2011 (Prof. University Of Nottingham,
http://www.bridgew.edu/soas/jiws/Vol12_no2/pdfs/6_Zalfa.pdf, Journal of International Women’s
Studies Special Issue Vol. 12 #2, Pg. 61)
By utilizing both processes of identification and disidentification, the mestiza is able to reach out to
other groups and broaden the way she conceives of her own identity. Recall that as a theoretical
figure, the mestiza is not bound by categories of sex, gender, language, or location. She is, however,
committed to a feminist project and, for the purposes of my discussion, couched in a decidedly
postcolonial framework, with the understanding that the concept of the postcolonial is broader than
its traditional definition. Particular to both framings is the need to look to the past and recast history,
in a manner quite similar to what Anzaldúa prescribes for her mestiza. Recall that one step towards the
mestiza consciousness is to “put history through a sieve.” It is necessary, then, to historicize the mestiza
and the process of mestizaje. As José David Saldívar reflects: “historical questions are inseparable from
authentic self-understanding” (Border Matters 160), which is why, according to his account, history
must be uncovered and represented – so that the mestiza can know herself.
Turns and guts solvency, causes violence etc.
San Juan 1 (Epifanio San Juan Jr, Senior Fellow at the Center of Humanities at Wesleyan University,
“Nationalism, the Post Colonial State and Violence”, http://www.leftcurve.org/lc26webpages/Nationalism.html,
2001)
Lacking any historical anchorage, the argument of postcolonial theory generates inconsistencies due to an
exorbitant culturalism. Because they disregard the historical genealogy of the nation-state discussed by
Gellner, Anderson, Smith (1971), among others, postcolonial critics uphold the sphere of culture as the
decisive force in configuring social formations. Not that culture is irrelevant in explaining political
antagonisms. Rather, it is erroneous when such antagonisms are translated into nothing but the
tensions of cultural differences. The dogma of cultural difference (for Charles Taylor, the need and demand
for reczognition in a modern politics of identity; more later) becomes then the key to explaining colonialism,
racism, and postcolonial society. Ambivalence, hybridity, and interstitial or liminal space become privileged
signifiers over against homogenizing symbols and icons whose " authority of cultural synthesis" is the target
of attack. Ideology and discursive performances serve as the primary field of analysis over against
"localized materialism" and vulgar Marxism. Violence in postcolonial discourse is thus located in ideas
and cultural forces that unify, synthesize or generalize a range of experiences; such forces suppress
difference or negate multiple "others" not subsumed within totalities such as nation, class, gender,
etc. While some culturalist critics allow for different versions of the historic form of the nation, the reductive
dualism of their thinking manifests a distinct bias for a liberal framework of analysis: the choice is
either a nation based on an exclusionary myth of national unity centered on abstractions such as race,
religion or ethnic singularity; or a nation upholding plurality and multiculturalism (for example, Canada
or the United States). This fashionable vogue of pluralism and culturalism has already been proved inutile in
confronting inequalities of class, gender, and "race." Moreover, it cannot explain the appeal of nationalism as a
means of reconciling the antagonistic needs for order and for autonomy (Smith 1979) in the face of mechanistic
bureaucratism and the anarchic market of atomized consumers.
Solvency
Blurring the lines of identity can give a false sense of tolerance to violence caused by
globalization and therefore create a corporate multiculturalism.
Hames-Garcia, ’00 (Michael, Department Head and Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies Education,
“How to Tell a Mestizo from an Enchirito: Colonialism and National Culture in the Borderlands,”
Diacritics, Volume: 30(4), p. 110-111. DAP)
At times, Anzaldúa is clearly in line with theorists like the Cuban linguist and philosopher Roberto
Fernández Retamar, who argues that Latin Americans should choose cultural identification with
the most oppressed sectors of their societies [Fernández Retamar 27]. At other times, however,
Anzaldúa’s argument loses the specificity it needs, and there is little to distinguish the new
mestiza from the Enchirito® of late capitalism. This happens, for example, when she describes the
importance of gay men and lesbians as border crossers: “homosexuals have strong bonds with
the queer white, Black, Asian, Native American, Latino, and with the queer in Italy, Australia
and the rest of the planet. ... Our role is to link people with each other—the Blacks with Jews
with Indians with Asians with whites with extraterrestrials” [Borderlands 84–85]. The juggling of
cultures, blurring of cultural boundaries, and appropriation of modes of living characteristic of
profit-motivated corporate multiculturalism seem at times to resemble the practice of “the new
mestiza”:The new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for
ambiguity. She learns to be an Indian in Mexican culture, to be Mexican from an Anglo point of
view. She learns to juggle cultures. She has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic
mode—nothing is thrust out, the good the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing
abandoned. Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something
else. [79]. Anzaldúa is developing a new epistemology here, but one needs to be careful to ask,
what makes this new, what makes it different from capitalist contradiction and flux? Surely a
late capitalist epistemology also needs to sustain contradictions, to be plural, to juggle cultures,
and to tolerate ambiguity, and, although it does not ground itself in the resistance of the
oppressed, it has proved remarkably successful in adapting that resistance to its own purposes.
Anzaldúa has acknowledged this aspect of capitalist culture in the Keating interview,
characterizing it, similarly to Amin, as a homogenizing unity [Keating 110]. I will return to her
response to this capitalist homogenization in the next section. First, I want to engage seriously
with objections that some have raised to the ways Borderlands figures the new mestiza
epistemology
The Affirmative fails to solve – the process of mestiza consciousness is idealist and
Anzaldua’s herself fails to explain how it works
Hames-Garcia, ’00 (Michael, Department Head and Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies Education,
“How to Tell a Mestizo from an Enchirito: Colonialism and National Culture in the Borderlands,”
Diacritics, Volume: 30(4), p. 111-112)
Moreover, one might worry that Anzaldúa sometimes seems to relegate the possibilities for change to
vague, unspecified subconscious processes. She writes, for example, that the new mestiza can move
beyond choques by an "event which inverts or resolves the ambivalence," but she is "not sure exactly how. The
work takes place underground—subconsciously. It is work that the soul performs" [79]. She adds that this entails a
"massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness " [80]. I do not deny
that change needs to take place in the way we think [End Page 111] and how we conceptualize ourselves and the
world around us. However, exploitation and dualistic thinking are not necessarily linked. Consider, for
example, the orgy of indigenismo, mestizofilia, and hybridity which constitutes much of consumer culture in Mexico (and,
increasingly, in the United States under the rubrics of diversity and multiculturalism), even as actual indigenous peasants and
mestizo workers are kept in wretched poverty. She writes, for example, that "[t]he struggle is inner. . . . The struggle has
always been inner. . . . Nothing happens in the 'real' world unless it first happens in the images in our head" [87,
emphasis mine]. Passages like these make her description of the new mestiza seem at times overly
voluntarist and idealist, insofar as such moments contradict other places in her work that describe the
limitations placed on people's ability to do and think what they want and the need for material change in their conditions of
existence. 14 Elsewhere, she has stressed the point that "we can't just escape and say, 'Oh this is just a
play on some kind of stage and it doesn't really matter.' . . . it's a matter of life and death. So these things
can only be worked out in physical reality" [Keating 118].
A universal or metaphorical conception of borders silences the Mexican perspective
and displaces the cultural reality.
Vaquera-Vásquez 98 (Santiago Vaquera-Vasquez, Professor of US Latino/a cultures and Creative Writing in
Spanish at the University of Iowa, “(De)Constructing the US-Mexican Border”, 1998
http://webpub.allegheny.edu/group/LAS/LatinAmIssues/Articles/Vol14/LAI_vol_14_section_VI.html )
In contemporary cultural theory, the metaphor of the Borderlands has become a repository in which all
manners of cultural Otherness is contained. The assumption is that "border thinking" posits a
contestatory space for emerging cultures; it shapes the concepts of national and cultural
authenticity and promotes global and transnational processes. The border has become referred
to so often, as Trinh T. Minh-ha notes, that "it already runs the risk of being reduced to yet
another harmless catchword expropriated and popularized among progressive thinkers "
(2). And yet, the Borderlands metaphor resonates even more at the end of the century, when borders are
continually crossed and recrossed. In focusing on geographic borderlands, more specifically, the borderlands
between Mexico and the United States, metaphorical readings often displace the cultural reality of the
site in favor of a particular border vision. In cultural discourse on the US/Mexico Borderlands, the
dominant inscriptions are most often that of the Chicano and that of a global communal space. The region has
been variously encoded as Aztlán--the pre-Columbian mythic past which is the cornerstone of the Chicano
movement--and more recently as "Borderlands," the universal cultural construct representing the encounter of
diverse cultures, genders, social classes, and world-views. As observed by Claire Fox, the Borderlands has come
to replace Aztlán as "the metaphor of choice to designate a communal space" (61). This favoring of a
universal reading of the Borderlands in contemporary criticism tends towards the
collapsing of the distinct geographic differences between border regions and the
abrogation of the cultural production of writers and critics in that region for an authentication
of the border "reality" through a small number of primarily Chicano critics and writers. In
this appropriation of the border, the Mexican perspective is largely silenced; there has been
little interest in promoting the vision of the border as viewed from the northern Mexican border provinces. As
a result, the image of the borderlands that is generally preferred is far removed from the
multi-faceted reality of the site, a fact which puts into question the validity of the Borderlands
metaphor: To what degree does current discourse on the Borderlands illuminate the border region, and to
what degree does it obscure the very region to which much of this discourse is addressed?
Using the border as a metaphor increases the invisibility of the borderlands reality in
northern Mexico. This metaphor only increases negative conotations of the
borderlands.
Vaquera-Vásquez 98 (Santiago Vaquera-Vasquez, Professor of US Latino/a cultures and Creative Writing in
Spanish at the University of Iowa, “(De)Constructing the US-Mexican Border”, 1998
http://webpub.allegheny.edu/group/LAS/LatinAmIssues/Articles/Vol14/LAI_vol_14_section_VI.html )
While the vision of the border as a metaphor for a hybrid, communal zone may be appealing, it
has further advanced the displacement and "invisibilation" of the borderlands reality, and
particularly, of northern Mexico. As noted at the outset, and corroborated throughout the present
discussion, much of the Chicano cultural discourse has ignored the Mexican perspective.6 If
there is a conception of Mexico at all, it is as an echo, a cultural tie in the past-such a trace is
evident in the works of Anzaldúa and Mora-or as a zone of poverty and lawlessness, as in much
of the media portrayals, the political discourse out of Washington D.C. and Mexico City, and such works as Luis
Alberto Urrea's Across the Wire, in which the author documents the hardships of Tijuana's lower classes. While the
latter work is a powerful testimonial, exposing the terrible conditions of the poor on the border, it
also maintains the stereotypical image of Tijuana--and on a larger scale, the perception of the
border region--as a zone of corruption.7 A necessary component of the present Borderlands project. then,
is the in-depth study of northern Mexican border perspective.