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Zong Aff
Ocean K
FW
Cap
Anthro
1AC
The sea is slavery. . . . Sea receives a body as if that body has come to rest on a cushion, one that gives way to the body's
weight and folds around it like an envelope. Over three days 131 such bodies, no, 132, are flung at this sea.
Each lands with a sound that the sea absorbs and silences. Each opens a wound in this sea that heals
over each body without the evidence of a scar. . . . Sea refuses to grant that body the quiet of a grave in
the ground. Instead it rolls that body across its terrain, sends that body down into its depths. . . . Those
bodies have their lives written on salt water. The sea current turns pages of memory. One hundred and thirty
one souls roam the Atlantic with countless others. When the wind is heard it is their breath, their speech. The sea
is therefore home.... The Zong is on the high seas. Men, women and children are thrown overboard by the Captain and his
crew. There is no fear or shame in this piece of informa- tion. There is only the fact of the Zong and its unending
voyage and those deaths that cannot be undone. Where death has begun but remains unfinished because it recurs.
Where there is only the record of the sea. . . . Those spirits feed on the story of themselves. The past is laid
to rest when it is told.
Thus begins and ends D'Aguiar's Feeding the Ghosts.
The Zong is the paradigmatic event of Modernity – a perverse fusion of anti-blackness and the drive for
capital. We must understand the murder of 132 individuals not just as individuals horrors but a single
event that permanently altered the accumulation of history
Baucom (Professor of English at Duke) 5
(Ian, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History, Duke University Press Books, pg. 129-30)
One hundred thirty-three human beings thrown or driven overboard over a period of three days. One survivor. One
hundred thirty-two individual human beings methodically slaughtered, one by one by one. One killing
after another. One murder after another, imitating the one that had preceded it. One slave after another
brought on deck and then thrown into the fatal sea. Below deck, in his cabin, unwilling to either participate or
protest sat the retiring governor of the slave fort at Anamabo, Robert Stubbs, who, by the testimony entered into
evidence at the appeal, passed these three days by watching the bodies of the slaves falling past his
window ("Dedining to assist in the Consulrarion of the Officers or assisting himself in throwing the Slaves over- board
[he] went down into the Cabin and amused himself with seeing them out of the Cabin Window Plunging into the 5ea").28
One hundred thirty-three window-framed moments. One hundred thirty-three appearances and
reappearances of the same image. One hundred thirty-three repetitions of what even the attorney for the Liverpool
owners couJd not avoid calling "this melancholy event. "29 One hundred thirty-two deaths. One event.
One?
The logic of his decision to testify to the catastrophic truth of what had taken place aboard the Zong over the three days
from November 29 to December 1 178 obliged Sharp to count this event as one. He was not alone in this. Everyone who
spoke at the appeal evinced the same determination, a determination) perhaps, to limit the manifold horror of what they
were dis- cussing by unifying it, and also, frequently, predictably, by insisting on the anomalous character of this "singular
event" (Lord Mansfield), this "melan- choly event" (Solicitor Lee) for the owners), this novel and singular event" (Mr.
Heywood, fat the wlderwriters). The psychology underlying such, decision may be readily parsed. The ethics, however, are
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far from simple or simply suspect. There is ample and good reason to refuse an easy nominalism which would refuse to
recognize this as a coherent event, which would refuse to count this event as one, either as each of its moments of horror
relate to one another or as this event, as an event, relates to all the other eventualities of history, capital, and knowledge
which bear upon it and which it brings to light. Everything I have said to this point depends on our willingness to refuse
that nominalist refusal. But equally, and correspondingly, everything that will follow in the second section of this
book depends on our willingness to make another simultaneous decision; our willingness to attend to the perhaps unintended truth of the words of Lord Mansfield) Solicitor Lee, and Mr. Hey- wood; our willingness to recognize that
this is also a singular and a melancholy event., .or, perh~p~ more accurately, a melancholy conjunction of singular
atrocities, our Willingness to recognize that the number we need to find some way to comprehend is neither
One hundred thirty-three nor one hundred hirty-two but one, one, one.
Time does not pass, it accumulates – liberal notions of progress claims time can wash away what has
happened, can heal the wound in sea cut by the Zong, and constitute the persistent regime of racial social
death.
This dominant understanding of history dissolves the terror and violence of the past in an acceptance of
presents structures of white supremacy and racialized capitalism. Confronting the Zong as paradigmatic
of this history is the necessary starting point – it fractures time so that the future looks like incarceration,
disease, and exhaustion
Dillon (PhD in American Studies at Minnesota, now an Assistant Professor of Queer Studies at Hampshire College) 13
(Stephen, Fugitive Life: Race, Gender, and the Rise of the Neoliberal-Carceral State, A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA,
http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/153053/1/Dillon_umn_0130E_13833.pdf)
In Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History Ian Baucom argues for a conception of
history that undoes liberal notions of progress, change, and time. Baucom’s theory of history centers the massacre of 132
slaves aboard the slave ship The Zong in 1781. Over three days, the slaves were handcuffed and thrown overboard in order
to collect the insurance money that sealed their value even in death. For Baucom, the massacre is the paradigmatic
event of modernity. It encompasses the racial, financial, and epistemological regimes that have not
only failed to dissolve with the passage of time, but instead, have intensified so that our current
moment finds itself anticipated and enveloped by this event. As Baucom argues, “Time does not pass, it
accumulates.” Time does not wash away what has happened, dissolving terror and violence into the
progress of the future, nor is the past passively sedimented in the present. Rather, the past returns to the present in
expanded form so that the present “finds stored and accumulated within itself a nonsynchronous array of past times.”171
The present is possessed by the logics and protocols of racial capitalism’s past—by a perfectly routine
massacre that was and is repeated endlessly across space and time in the (post)colony, prison, frontier,
torture room, plantation, reservation, riot zone, and on and on. Racial terror returns from a past that is not an end
to take hold—of bodies, institutions, infrastructure, discourse, and libidinal life—and does not let go. In this
way, the past and present are not ontologically discrete categories, but rather, are complex human constructs. The present is
not a quarantined, autonomous thing.172 What was begun does not end but instead intensifies so that the past and present
become indistinguishable.
Baucom’s theory of time as accumulation has profound implications for how we understand the future.
Traditionally, the future is a space and time we do not know, a place of possibility, progress, and hope. The
emptiness of the future is imagined as a space of seamless progress: a myth of Marxist teleology, a capitalist dream, a
fantasy of nationalism and colonialism. When we imagine the future as the outcome of the passage of time,
the past falls away and the present disappears so that the future becomes relief from the
devastating weight of everything that has come before.173 Yet, if time does not pass but accumulates, then
the future is not the triumph of a tendency inscribed in the present. It is not the dissolution of the past or the undoing of the
present. If time does not pass but accumulates, then the future is not liberated from the constraints of
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yesterday, but rather, is the place where the wreckage of then and now lives on. When we think of time
against the temporal regimes of the state, heternormativity, the nation, and capital, time drags, reverses, compresses, and
accumulates. Engaging queerness as a force that distorts and undermines normative logics of sequence is to know that the
conditions of possibility for the atrocities of the past have not faded, but rather, have intensified.174 It is to deploy what
Jasbir Puar calls an “antecedent temporality” where one can see, feel, and engage the ghosts that are not yet here, but will
be tomorrow and the next day and the next.175 If time does not pass but accumulates, then the past is where the future is
anticipated, recollected, and demonstrated.176 If there is no progress, but instead repetition, modification,
intensification, reversals, and suspensions, then we know what the future will be. The future will be
what was before.
Following Baucom, we can understand the Women’s Army as working against a notion of history as progress, and in its
place, engaging the repetitions, accumulations, and intensifications of time as it circulates, suspends, and speeds up. For
them, the progress of state revolution means “cutbacks in daycare centers, ending of free abortions, forced sterilization of
minority women, discrimination against single women and lesbians in housing, and firing of single women in favor of men
with families.”177 The revolution is a new formation that reproduces and expands past forms of white supremacist and
heteropatriarchial regulation and subjection. Isabel, from the feminist radio station Radio Regazza, describes the
revolutionary state as such:
Angry unemployed people are rioting in the streets and the city is on fire with their rage. Now what do you think the
government plans to do about this situation besides beating them over the head with billy clubs? Do they plan to supply
them with jobs, with training programs, or with decent housing? Nah, uh uh. You know what they’re going to do? The
same bloody tactic they pulled before the revolution, remember, and I’m here to warn you, it’s going to happen again.
They’re already starting a shuffle board, an act on a grand scale where all the poor and the unemployed will be shoved
economically into the ghetto.
Isabel’s declaration that “it’s going to happen again” deploys an anticipatory logic that theorizes the past and present as a
“preemption of future possibilities.”179 The future and the present compress, collude, and collide because the
temporality of state violence is a time of repetition, intensification, and accumulation. Franz Fanon’s
concept of “historicity” is instructive here. For Fanon, the past is ontologically sutured to race so that when “I
discovered my blackness...I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency,
slave-ships, and above all else, above all: ‘Sho’ good eatin.’”180 For Fanon, white supremacy functions as a type of
temporal prison where black liberation is delayed and destroyed by the capacity of past traumas (rooted in colonization and
slavery) to affect, shape, and possess the present. Fanon looks to the past of European colonization and sees a mirror of the
future, an “endless past/present of colonial domination.”181 In other words, white supremacy is not just a spatial
technology that inhabits infrastructure and institutions; it is also a temporal regime that refuses to abide by the progress of
the law, language, or the passage of time. As Kara Keeling writes, “The past constricts the present so that the present is
simply the reappearance of the past.”182 And as Isabel makes clear, the state (whether pre or post-revolutionary) limits the
possibilities of the present and future by binding both in a closed circuit of reverberation, magnification, and accumulation.
When time accumulates it possesses, detains, and immobilizes. This is time as a form of capture. Isabel knows what is
coming because it has already happened—in the past that is the future that has already arrived. There is not relief from
knowing the past has vanished because the past is a warning of what is coming. It’s going to happen again.
Throughout Born in Flames, countless members of the Women’s Army declare, “this is our time.” The time of the
revolution was not the time to abolish white supremacy and heteropatriarchy. It was a time that left behind and captured
poor (queer) women of color through the progress of democracy and equality. In this way, “our time” (or revolutionary
time) and state time are two competing temporalities of violence in the film. State time extends and expands the violence of
the past, while “our time”—a time of the underground, a revolutionary time—is a temporal regime that exceeds and undoes
state time. Again, Fanon proves useful for understanding these differences. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon describes a
“time lag, or a difference of rhythm, between the leaders of a nationalist party and the mass of the people.”183 According
to Fanon, the rank and file of anti-colonial rebellions demand the complete and utter immediate destruction of the forms of
power that render them “more dead than alive,” while both colonial and nationalist governments attempt to manage,
temper, and restrain the demands of those who have no more time to give to the promises of a future that is always coming,
but never arrives.184 For example, in the film, the state promises that “in the future” there will be jobs, an end to sexual
violence, and racial and gender equality. But for Fanon, the “hopeless dregs of humanity” (or the wretched of the earth) are
filled with an “uncontrollable rage” and thus exist in a temporal regime apart from that of the party or the nation. This is a
time of intensity and immediacy (“the slaves of modern times are impatient”), where the future of the present as it is means
no future at all.185 Like the financial, epistemological, and racialized legacies of slavery Baucom sees
intensifying in our current moment, Fanon diagnoses the future of colonialism as the accumulation
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of the social, biological, and living death of the native. The native lives a death in life produced by the racism of
slavery and colonialism. The future’s horizon is the accumulation of past forms of racial terror and violence. In this way,
Baucom and Fanon draw connections between race and time that are crucial to questions of time and futurity. The
relationship between race, gender, death, and the future is central to the immediacy and spontaneity of the Women’s Army
and is foundational to the film’s critique of the state, time, and the future. We can turn to the Fanonian-inspired prison
writings of George Jackson to further explore the relationship between death, race, and time.
In his 1972 text Blood in My Eye, published shortly after he was shot and killed by guards at San Quentin prison, Jackson
wrote of racism, death, and revolution:
Their line is: ‘Ain’t nobody but black folks gonna die in the revolution.’ This argument completely overlooks the fact that
we have always done most of the dying, and still do: dying at the stake, through social neglect or in U.S. foreign wars. The
point is now to construct a situation where someone else will join in the dying. If it fails and we have to do most of the
dying anyway, we’re certainly no worse off than before.186
Here, Jackson argues that the social order of the United States is saturated with an anti- blackness that produces, in the
words of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated
vulnerability to premature death.”187 Jackson’s text is littered with polemical insights that link race and death in a way that
preemptively echoes Michel Foucault’s declaration that racism is the process of “introducing a break into the domain of life
that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die.”188 When Jackson, Gilmore, and
Foucault define race as the production of premature death, they make a connection between race and the future . Race is
the accumulation of premature death and dying. For Jackson, race fractures the future so that the
future looks like incarceration or the premature death of malnutrition, disease, and exhaustion.
For Jackson, the future was the not the hopefulness of unknown possibilities. It was the devastating
weight of knowing that death was coming cloaked in abandonment, neglect, incarceration, or murder.
In other words, according to Jackson, death was always already rushing toward the present of blackness. Within Jackson’s
analysis, the state is the primary mechanism for unevenly distributing racialized regimes of value and disposability.189
Following the writing of Fanon, Jackson argued that for this relationship to be abolished, “The government of the U.S.A
and all that it stands for, all that it represents, must be destroyed. This is the starting point, and the end.”
Thus, we affirm exploration of the oceanic wreckage of the Zong.
We must search for and bear witness to the historical wreckage of progress deposited into the ocean
under the bow of the Zong. Our understanding of the sea must begin here because without slavery there
is no history of that "sea". The wound those bodies "opened" in the Atlantic remains open. This event
retains its power to call forth those who find themselves obliged to testify to it, to be a witness again
We repeat this story, this 1AC over and over as a necessary and endless project. The labor of witness
remains perpetually unfinished and unending
Baucom (Professor of English at Duke) 5
(Ian, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History, Duke University Press Books, pg. 329-31)
As D'Aguiar's novel, like Glissant's Poetics, thus stages its "abyssal" descent into "the depths of the sea," what he
discovers (and what his epigraphs and allusions would have us understand him to discover) is not only a sign of
ending but an archive of the enduring, an array of "underwater signposts" which are both the
recurring, uncannily resurfacing signs of the racial terror and capital violence of the slave trade
and the signs of the unification of the disparate, the commonly inherited image and remains of a
history that endures as "something shared."" Thus, "unity," as the line from Brathwaite predicts: the unity of
the creolized where creolization implies both the uni- fication of the disparate and the diasporization of the unified —a
gathering in scattering. The singular image of abandonment thereby becomes an image of diasporic survival, an image, as
D'Aguiar has it, in which what seemed to figure the loss of home, "is therefore home."" What D'Aguiar uncovers in
the "subtle submarine expanse" of this underwater, ocean-spanning burial ground is therefore not only
a determination to survive and endure, but a proof of survival and endurance, proof manifest in the form of
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all these texts to which he alludes, proof manifest in the transverse, circum-Atlantie body of writing his novel evokes before
its first sentence is written, proof manifest in this "body" of writing which functions less as testimony to his erudition than
as a textual cenotaph to the dead, or, perhaps more precisely, as a textual effigy (as Joseph Roach has taught us to
understand that word) through which this past endures as the circulating, cross-Atlantic, writerly exchanges of it.
If the novel's epigraphs thus set D'Aguiar in conversation with his fellow writers, then so too does the novel's opening
sentence: "The sea is slavery." We have also seen that sentence before, or nearly so. Walcott's line is almost the same, but
not quite: "The sea is history." The sea is history. The sea is slavery. History is slavery. Or so, at least, D'Aguiar seems to
suggest in an opening line that once again disavows his text's originality, refuses the illusion of its own capacity to "open,"
while marking its transformation of the literary history to which it serially opens itself. But perhaps the doubling needs to
be read the other way around, or both ways at once. Not only, then, history is slavery. But, also, slavery is history: a
statement D'Aguiar's novel would have us read as both literally true and metaphorically untrue — literally true be- cause
Feeding the Ghosts shares with Omens, Beloved, and the Poetics of Relation the knowledge that without slavery there
is no history of that "sea" all these writers have been struggling to understand, no history of that modern
circum- Atlantic world that in some very real senses "begins" with slavery; meta- phorically untrue because
as all these writers understand neither history nor slavery are, in the colloquially figurative sense of the word, "history."
History is never, in this sense, "history," never something that is purely past, done, finished with, distant, all worn out. And
neither, D'Aguiar insists, is slavery, certainly not this repeating moment in the history of trans- Atlantic slavery, this
moment of drowning, and drowning, and drowning.
This does not mean that the novel somehow understands that these bodies are still falling into the water, still "floating
toward the sea's abysses," but that it apprehends that the wound those bodies "opened" in the Atlantic remains
open, that more than two centuries after it "occurred," this event retains its negative power to call forth those
who find themselves obliged to testify to it, to "be a witness again." There is of course something
tautological in offering the fact of D'Aguiar's novel as proof that this past endures "because," as D'Aguiar has it, "it recurs."
But if the fact of recurrence, repetition, and the oscillating return of the what-has-been into now-being can serve as an adequate basis for a long-durational history of modern capital (as, following Arrighi, Benjamin, and Jameson, I have argued),
then surely it is no more tautological to note that the recurrence of such a repeating event in the testa- mentary narrative of
D'Aguiar's novel (or Walcott's poetry, Glissant's poetics, Philip's verse, or Gilroy's theory) demonstrates in some very real
sense that this past is not in fact history, not yet done with, not yet worn out. Or perhaps the argument to make
is that history, like capital, is tautological, is that which proves itself by appealing to the accumulated sequence of
testimonies to itself.
And what, in this regard, does D'Aguiar's conception of history prove? T h a t history is its own future, its own
answer, its own predicate; that history is not "history," not a property of the past but the property the
present inherits as its structuring material and the property (both affective and instrumental) the past holds in the
present. The question, D'Aguiar thus suggests, is not whether the present is or is not host to its various "pasts," but whether
the now will or will not accept the property it has inherited in its what-has-beens. To all those who say "slavery is
history," D'Aguiar's novel responds: precisely, and not at all. Slavery is the Atlantic's what-has-been,
is what begins this scene of modernity's beginning. But what has begun, he reminds us, does not end. To begin
might be difficult; to end, impossible. For no matter how strenu- ously we might forget what was begun, or
wish to call an end to it, what-has- been is, cannot be undone, cannot cease to alter all the future-presents
that flow out of it. Time does not pass or progress, it accumulates, even in the work of forgetting or ending, even in the
immense labor it takes to surrender what- has-been, or to make reparation on it, or to address its ill effects. That the law has
changed is immaterial to thisfact. That the bodies are no longer in the air, in the water, in the pounds claimed by William
and John Gregson's trial lawyers is beside the point. That Fred D'Aguiar has written a historical novel and M. NourbeSe
Philip, a collection of poetry, or that I have written a book about the Zong massacre are equally insignificant in this regard.
That past endures not because a novelist, a poet, or an academic has paid some present attention to it but because the
present from which attention is paid has been made, fashioned, designed by it and by everything else that has been. We
cannot, of course, take all these what-has-beens into account. Thought fails before that task. Nor can any of us, even Derek
Walcott, I believe, assent to Omeros's assertion that this, or any other such "past," is our "only" inheritance.
Rather we can learn the lesson of D'Aguiar's novel, the lesson that inheres within the formal determination of a narrative
that like Sharp's submission to the Lords Commissioners finds itself obliged to tell the story of the massacre multiple times:
first in a synoptic preface, then in a set of harrowing chapters in which each of the murders is counted off one after the
other, then again in an account of the ensuing trials, once more through the memory of a solitary survivor, and finally, again
in the text's epilogue. Submitting ourselves to that detailed recounting and recounting and recounting, we can learn again
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the melancholy lesson this structured commitment to recurrence demands of us. And what is that lesson? Turning his eye to
the abyss to which the slaves' bodies were abandoned, D'Aguiar puts it this way: "The sea was everywhere and nowhere ...
an end without ending."'
That is the novel's lesson and its melancholy secret, even if it is a secret spoken in conflict with the text's more recognizably
mournful moment of ending. How does the novel end? So: "The Zong is on the high seas. Men, women and children are
thrown overboard by the Captain and his crew. There is no fear or shame in this piece of informa- tion. There is only the
fact of the Zong and its unending voyage and those deaths that cannot be undone. Where death has begun but remains
unfinished because it recurs. Where there is only the record of the sea. . . . Those spirits feed on the story of themselves.
The past is laid to rest when it is told."" Ending by laying to rest the past it has found living within its own moment of
writing, D'Aguiar's text here imagines an end with ending, a past it can live after, a beginning ended. But everything that
lies between D'Aguiar's words of beginning and ending, everything that falls between "The sea is slavery" and "The past is
laid to rest when it is told," denies the desire of those final words.
(Repetition/Witness)
For like Philip's Zong!, Feeding the Ghost's fundamental historical burden is to articulate itself as a sustained meditation
both on the artifice of beginning and on the impossibility of historical ending, and to do so, entirely appositely, through a
rewriting of the resuscitative conceit Sir Walter Scott set at the heart of the historical novel's philosophy of history. While
D'Aguiar literalizes that conceit, building the narrative core of his novel on the story of the one jettisoned slave hauled halfalive back onto the deck of the Zong and revived by the crew's forcible ministration of food and water, Philip metaphorizes
the possibilities of resuscitation by reviving the legal transcripts documenting the massacre (all her poems draw exclusively
on the language of those texts). For both D'Aguiar and Philip, however, the labor of resuscitation remains perpetually unfinished and unending rather than preliminary (as it is for Scott). Where Scott provisionally
resuscitates the dead, the better to have done with them and the better to bury them, both D'Aguiar and Philip revive
the dead, or the words the law draped over the bodies of the dead, the better to acknowl- edge that the time of
dying does not sunder or break itself off from the time of living but fills life with its painful weight.
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"This is, not was," Philip insists.' To which verdict D'Aguiar adds the testimony of his time-heavy scene of resuscitation:
"They fed and watered me by feeding a funnel down my throat. I was not my name. I was not my body. I became my own
secret, lost somewhere. Time stood still in my veins. Days slid into nights. Light and dark were the same to me. The Zong
rose and dipped the same or not at all, I couldn't tell the difference. 1 did not blink. I was fed. . . . Food and water were
forced down me. 1 was cleaned, stretched and turned. Shadows passed before my eyes but I did not blink. Time became a
funnel fed into me."' Captivated by and obsessed with this scene of live giving torture and the torture of living on, Feeding
the Ghosts not only recog- nizes itself in this image of force-feeding but indicates that if it is to eschew the classical
historical novel's impartial and spectatorial relationship to the history it records, it must do so by electing to become "a
witness again." But if to witness is to feed the dead, then, D'Aguiar understands, Feeding the Ghosts' work of witness, its
labor of resuscitation must be at odds with the burial fantasy of its own words of ending and with the mournfully liberal
predisposi- tions of the genre into which it breathes new life.
And so what comes before the end serves paradoxically to confirm the lesson while altering the sense of those final words.
For if we recall that telling is also relating, that the past told here is laid to rest when, and only when, it is related, and
recall, further, what Qlissant has taught us, recall that relation is not about forgetting but about living on within
the abysmal, within that real state of exception Benjamin sets before us as the historian's task, then the
meaning of
D'Aguiar's final words changes. To lay the past to rest thus means
not that we should forget it but that we
have no choice but to relate it, no
choice but to live on within the full knowledge and unending
of it. Time does
not pass but accumulates. Why? Because what has been begun does not end but
endures. Because this fatal Atlantic "beginning" of the modern is more
properly understood as an
ending without end. Because history comes to us
not only as flash or revelation but piling up.
Because this is, not was. Because
this is the Atlantic, now. Because all of it is now, it is always now, even
for you who never was there.
We must begin with what we know and how we know it – connecting the present to the the absence left
by the millions who lie at the bottom of the ocean is crucial to combat racial capitalism’s financialization
of life and death
Dillon (PhD in American Studies at Minnesota, now an Assistant Professor of Queer Studies at Hampshire College) 13
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(Stephen, Fugitive Life: Race, Gender, and the Rise of the Neoliberal-Carceral State, A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA,
http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/153053/1/Dillon_umn_0130E_13833.pdf)
When Dessa speaks, she refuses slavery’s politics of accounting and methods of measuring value by naming the forgotten,
by remembering what Nemi could not and would not see as having value or significance for the historical record. Dessa
Rose remembers the dead whose names were never written down and thus names the absences that shape out present. For
instance, in a fight with Rufel, the white women who lets runaway slaves stay on her farm provided they work her fields for
free and who cannot remember the name of the enslaved woman who raised her, Dessa recalls the names of the dead “until
speech became too painful.”100
Dessa heaved herself to her knees, flinging her words in the white woman’s face. ‘Mammy gave birth to ten chi’ren that
come in the world living.’ She counted them off on her fingers. ‘The first one Rose after herself; the second one died before
the white folks named it. Mammy called her Minta after a cousin she met once. Seth was the first child lived to go into the
fields. Little Rose died while mammy was carrying Amos— carried off by the diphtheria. Thank God, He spared Seth.’
Remembering the names now the way mammy used to tell them, lest they forget, she would say; lest her poor, lost children
die to living memory as they had in her world...Even buried under years of silence, Dessa could not forget.101
Here, Dessa contests the ways that racial capitalism’s financialization of life produces death and loss.
She remembers what Nemi’s history and the market’s ledgers erase and forget. We can contrast Dessa’s
remembering of names and lives recorded nowhere else with the entanglement of death, knowledge, and the market in the
ledgers of slave ships and plantations. According to Ian Baucom, the slaves who died in the hold of a ship or the
turbulence of the sea are unknowable: “We know almost nothing of them...Not as individuals. As ‘types’ they are at
least partially knowable, or imaginable.”102 An unimaginable number of slaves did not survive the passage.
However, their deaths and value live on in the records of an emergent global capitalism and the
ontology of an ascending racial order.
February 4: One slave purchased: a man.
February 5: The captain orders the crew to check and clean their guns; purchases
one woman
February 7: One woman.
February 9: One woman.
February 13: Two men.
February 14: Canoe sent
upshore for water; one man and one woman. February 15: One man.
Febuary17: First child purchased, a boy; the captain
also buys a woman.103
Or simply the name of death.
Dysentery. Insanity. Consumption. Ditto.
Ditto. Ditto. Ditto. 104
As evidenced by Williams and Davis, an engagement with slavery’s afterlife means we must make sense of
what we know and how we know it, and who we are and how we got here, but it also means making
sense of that which never was. It means looking at dust for a trace of the past and connecting the present to
the absence of memory. Slavery lives on in what we can see and feel, but also in what feels like
nothing, in the absence left by the millions who lie at the bottom of the ocean or under rows of cotton
and rice. Within such an analytic—one provided by black feminism—one must see what is not there, feel the trace of a
form of power that cannot be named, and as Williams argues, one must remember what was never written down. This is the
project of Dessa Rose. If one of the purposes of fact is to constrain thought, limit its power to the proof of records and
documented events, then imagination is the tool required to confront the unknowable. If history is more than a flash
or revelation, if it is a piling up, if time does not pass but accumulates, than one must be able to
search the wreckage, but also see what was destroyed along the way.105
By remembering the never recorded details, intricacies, and intimacies of the life of a rebel slave, Williams positions fiction
as an archive of facts that have been disappeared while also mobilizing fact to contest the fictions produced by the
neoliberal- carceral state. Williams’s fiction and Davis’s reflective essay contest the knowledge (and lack of knowledge)
produced by Nemi’s research and slavery more broadly. By engaging the unthinkable, the unthought, and the
forcefully forgotten, black feminism levels a critique of the regimes of knowledge that structure the
state and capitalism. Dessa Rose contests the power of white supremacy, the market, and speculative reason to
produce the unknowable by remembering the past through imagination. In addition, it apprehends the assemblage of
biopolitical and necropolitical power composed by the life of chattel- slavery and its afterlife in the
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prison and beyond. Davis and Williams connect the absence of death and forgetting to the ground we stand on. As the
power of the market resurged in the 1970s and 80s, Williams reminds us where that power came from and what it was able
to do. By operating within another epistemological economy, black feminism is able to make connections between the
prison and slavery, and as we will see, neoliberalism and slavery. Davis and Williams offer us a history of the present that
does not exist elsewhere. They refuse to let the unknowable relegate slavery to the realm of the
unthinkable. They engage the past through its very forgetting—a forgetting that is foundational to the
neoliberal-carceral state.
Our affirmation has a direct effect on the material conditions of modern life – our method of historical
analysis is crucial to a practice of daily life that can deal with the real effects of white supremacy
Baucom (Professor of English at Duke) 5
(Ian, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History, Duke University Press Books, pg. 325-26)
What originally stirs in the water and what is then, subsequently, pulled out of its sediment are not,
therefore, exactly the same thing. For if the first image (of the whitewashed bones of all the dead) links
a distant past to a present moment of danger in a recognizably Bcnjaminian fashion, then the second image
(of the Atlantic now) is more fully in line with Glissant's errant vision of the world, more fully an image that
marks a past which endures than one which uncovers an aporetic past with which the present corresponds, more fully
an image of an inherited history than an image of a distant history reilluminated by a flash of ethical desire and design. It is
therefore not the rupture of death or the moment of drowning that Omens ultimately under- stands itself to inherit, but the
persistence of what death has wrought and the enduring resolution to live on within the very territory
of the abyss, to assume some property in its fatal waters, and to make of a time that has not passed but filled
the present with its overwhelming, accumulated weight, a modern way of being in the world. To
inherit this "now" is to discover in the image of the drowned not only the terrible key to a philosophy of
history but the secret to an enduring practice of modern life.
***Stuff***
What Happened?
Baucom (Professor of English at Duke) 5
(Ian, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History, Duke University Press Books, pg. 129)
But what are those details? We, at least, have not yet encountered them. 'Whatever their inevitable differences, Sharp's nine
or fourteen successive versions of the massacre agree on this basic history:
On September 6,1781, the Zong weighed anchor and sailed for Jamaica from the island of St. Thomas, off the west coast of
Africa. There were 440 slaveson board and a crew of 17 men.
On November 27, the ship came in sight of Jamaica, but Collingwood ordered the Zong back out to sea, subsequently
claiming that he had mistaken Jamaica for Hispaniola. At the time over sixty of the slaves and seven of the crew had died of
disease, and many of the remaining slaves were in ill health (and thus unlikely to fetch a good price on the Jamaican
market).
On November 29, and no longer in sight of] aruaica, Collingwood called a meeting of his ship's officers (J ames Kelsal
among them), informed them that the vessel's water supply was running dangerously low and that in accord with the
latitude given a ship's master by the jettison and general average principles of its marine insurance contract he intended to
throw overboard that portion of his cargo necessary to preserve the life of the rest. The massacre began that
day. Fifty-four of tbe sickest slaves were singled out and thrown, handcuffed,
into the ocean.
On November 30, forty-three more slaves were thrown overboard. One of
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these, while in the water, managed to catch hold of one of the ship's ropes and to drag himself up to a porthole, through
which he climbed back into the ship. Members of the crew, finding him some hours later, either hid him or re- turned him
to the holds. The various accounts all assume that he survived.
On December, rain began to fall, and the crew collected six casks of water, sufficient for eleven days drinking' allowance in
addition to whatever already remained on board. Collingwood ordered the murders to proceed regardless. Twenty-six more
slaves were brought on deck. Sixteen were cast overboard. The last ten, as crew members were about to seize hold of them
jumped overboard rather than being thrown. They also drowned.
Benjamin History
Baucom (Professor of English at Duke) 5
(Ian, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History, Duke University Press Books, pg. 125)
This seems a largely accurate reading of Benjamin, though it is worth noting that for Benjamin we are all, in the broadest
sense ' subjects of the catastrophes of history, and the act of decision is thus not the singular responsibility of a Victim as
Victim but a collective responsibility of subjects as the decisive agents of history. How, we might then ask, is that agency
exercised, that decision made?The "Theses" outline the perception, the Anodes demonstrates the method: Benjamin reveals
his decision in writing Anodes; accumulating fragments of human history drawn not from future time but
from the archives of the what-has-been; arraying and juxtaposing these fragments alongside one
another in the interest of producing the resultant dialectical image - "that wherein what has been comes
together in a flash with the now to form a constellation." Benjamin's dialectical images are his decision, his
determination to discern from the multitude of what presents itself a series of truth events, his motivated, partisan resolution
to seize hold of one or other of the fragments or shards of wreckage piling up at the feet of the backward- glancing angel of
history and to discover in this a truth event, a demonstration of the coinc.idence of now-being with what-has-been, an
intimation of the future agreement between "past generations and the present oce.?" a signum rememorativum,
demonstrarivurn, prognostikon.
Kant-Benjamin-Badiou: between these three my understanding of the form of the event as apparition and reapparition,
symptomatic anomaly, sign, image, and decision is balanced, as from them (though above all from Ben- jamin) the
compositional theory and method of this text is borrowed. What remains is to turn, once more, from the form of the event,
the image, decision, sign, to what is also under discussion here: an image, an event, a symptomatic anomaly, a signum
remernorativurn, demonstrativum, prognostikon. What remains is what is long past overdue: a return to the
Zong, the sign it writes into the history of the modem, the state of history it reveals. And one way to begin to read that sign
is to return, at last, to the decision that Kant's contem- pOI1HY Granville Sharp made in identifying not the French
Revolution but the limg massacre as the age's decisive truth event, the decision he made in put- ting pen to paper and
dispatching to the Lords Commissioners of the Adm..i- ralry his account of this event and the awful truth it demonstrated.
*
Bur first one more brief word on the truth event. For Badiou, as for Kant, the truth event is consistently utopic. Not so for
Sharp, for Benjamin, or for this text. The event under consideration here is a truth event in the full sense. The truth
discernible in it, however, is the truth of catastrophe.
Financial Capital is key
Baucom (Professor of English at Duke) 5
(Ian, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History, Duke University Press Books, pg. 139-40)
We have not yet, I believe, grasped the consequences of this, not yet appre-
ciated what it means for slavery to name an
extension not only of commodity capitalism into the domain of the human, but the colonization of human subjectivity by
finance capital. The Zong trials constitute an event in the
history of capital net because they treat slaves as commodities
but because they
treat slaves as commodities that have become the subject of insurance, treat them, in Zizek's terms, not as
objects to be exchanged but as the "empty bearers" of an abstract, theoretical, but entirely real quantum of value,
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treat
them as little more than promissory notes, bills-of-exchange, or some other markers of a "specie value," treat them as
suppositional entities whose value is
tied not to their continued, embodied, material existence but to their specula-
tive,
recuperable loss value. The Zong trials constitute an event not because they further subject the world to the principle of
exchange but because they subject it to the hegemony of that which superordinates exchange: the general equivalents of
finance capital.
Luke Collingwood's catastrophic decision signals the completion and the bringing to light of this financial (and
financializing) revolution. His step-by- step determination to treat the slaves aboard his ship as bearers not simply of a
commodified exchange value but of an utterly dematerialized, utterly specula- tive, and utterly trnnsactable, enforceable,
and recuperable pecuniary value represents the symptomatic manifestation of this revolution. Precisely be- cause his act
was regarded as an anomaly, precisely because his decision was treated as an exception which "a general nonnative
schema" could neverthe- less incorporate within its system of rule, it functions as the test case and truth event of the
situation it brings to light (as in Zizek's terms, that "which, mi perceived by the system as a local 'abnormality,'
effectivelycondensetshe gJobal 'abnormality' of the system as such"). Precisely because the casuisticsystem of
jurisprudence operative in Lord Mansfield's courtroom couldapply its general principles to this aberrant case in which those
principles findthem- selves most absolutely demonstrated, this case can be seen to serveasoneof those "events" in which the
age sees itself revealed, as a counter-signum remernorarivum, dernonstrativum, prognostikon by which this age of
speculative revolutions is brought to light. Sharp recognized this. And it is because he recognized it that this act of
decision, his determination to bring this eventto life, demanded that he bear outraged witness not only to the slaughter
aboard the Zong but to the horrible transaction that slaughter betokened, to the culmination of this event in a hearing not
on the murder but on the valueof the Zong's drowned slaves.
Insurance, Zong and Voyage
Baucom (Professor of English at Duke) 5
(Ian, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History, Duke University Press Books, pg. 111-12)
In his list of "the great variety of commodities which at different times become the subjects of insumnee," Weskett
includes:
Under Class I. Least Hazardous: Alabaster, Beads, Brass, Bricks, Bugle, Bullion, Cane, Canvas, Coals, Coin and Medals,
Copper, Copperas, COni I, Cork, Cowries, Culm, Deals, Elephants Teeth, Gold and Silver Plate, Hom Ware, Iron, Lead,
Liquors, Logwood, Mahogany, Marble, Masts, Oil, Ores, Pewter, Pinch, Plank, Staves, Stone, Tar, Tiles, Timber, Tin,
Wooden Ware.
Under Class 2. Common Hazardous: Brushes, Butter, Candles, Cards, Catlings, Cattle, Chariots, China, Coaches,
Cochineal, Crockery, Feathers, Glass, Glue, Hair, Hats, Hogs Bristles, Hops, Horse Furniture, Hosiery, House- hold
Furniture, Kelp, Leather Manufactures, Lime, Linens, Marrs and Matting, Painters Colours, Parchment, Plaster of Paris,
Quills, Rice, Rosin, Sedans, Silks, Slaves, Soap, Tallow, Tarras, Tobacco Pipes, Tortoiseshell, Toys, Vellum, Vermicelli,
Wax, Wearing-Apparel, Whalebone, Woolens, Yam.
Under Class 3; More Hazardous: Flax, Hemp, Hides, Skins, Sugar, To- bacco....
What do all these things have in common: alabaster, beads, brass, bricks, new- born infants, coral, cowries, one year aids,
glass, glue, hair, oi], goods seized by pirates, lime, linens, goods thrown into the sea, parchment, quills, carrying the Virgin
Mary home, rice, rosin, two year olds, sedans, silks, slaves, soap, vermicelli?
What do all the things in this grotesque
Borgesian list have in common?
The money form, the invisible equal sign that insurance places alongside each one of them, the speculative epistemology
that over the course of the cenrnry drew each of them within its ever expanding territory of address, converted each of them
into not only a type of thing, person, or event, but into a negotiable type of money, attached to each of them a premium, an
insurance evaluation, and an average value, imagining for each of them an afterlife within the speculative territory of the
"what would have been" and treating this imaginary existence as the condition of their worth. Each item addedto the list,
each item that "at some time or another became the subject of insur- ance," signaled another victory for finance capital, a
further demonstrationof the flexibility of its imagination, a further extension of its empire of value. Like the lieutenant's
foot, clerk's eyes, captain's bladder and lungs converted into so many compensatory shillings, guineas, and pounds by the
Lords Com- missioners of the Admiralty, these candles, silks, infants, holy processions,and slaves entered the list
ofvthings'' on which the money form had gone to work, that it could subject to itself, that it could convert into an ocean-
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crossing network of loans, debts, bonds, and bills of exchange, an archipelagic eddyof circulating paper money, a circumAtlantic cycle of accumulation.
What do all these things have in common? The financial entrepdts of an Atlantic cycle of capital accumulation; the shipping
ports whose vessels carried these "things" from one center of the Atlantic archipelago to another; the Exchanges in which
the profits generated by their transport and sale continued to accumulate; the credit networks that had transformed these
"goods" into paper money; the marine insurance industry whose "typicalizing" theory of value had licensed and secured the
existence of this trans-Atlantic finance capitalism.
And Liverpool was one of this world's capitals. And the Gregsons were this city's mayors. And the voyage of the Zong was
one of the "arcades" in which it put itself on display.
***Mechanics***
Root Causes Key
Ben-Moshe (PhD in Sociology from Syracuse) 11
(Liat, "Genealogies of Resistance to Incarceration: Abolition Politics within Deinstitutionalization and Anti-Prison, Activism in the
U.S." (2011). Sociology - Dissertations. Paper 70)
Throughout my work I aim to demonstrate the connections between prison abolition and deinstitutionalization. In the
following chapter, Landscapes of incarceration, I focus on the ways prisons and institutions are connected and interrelated.
I further argue that because they are connected, the study of the movements that resist these institutions cannot be
separated from one another. This chapter seeks to map out landscapes of incarceration in both historical and ideological
ways. It will sketch both the past and the future of institutions, analyzing them from their inception until the closure of
some of them (my examples will focus on the landscape of Upstate New York). In order to understand our current dogma
of incarceration, it seems important to start at the root, the point in which alternatives were available but the path to
imprisonment triumphed. Without understanding their endurance over time and space, it is impossible to grasp any current
struggles that attempt to take them down. Therefore, this chapter sketches an alternative historiography of prisons and
institutions in an attempt to paint some of the perils of these systems that were present from their inception. I therefore
map the trajectory of such institutions from rehabilitating to custodial; show they ways in which they were (and are)
embedded in notions of danger; created for economic gain; and influenced by increased medicalization, racist and eugenic
impetuses that inflict them to this day. The trend of psychiatric and developmental disability centers turning into prisons
(such as the case in Rome, New York) will be used briefly to highlight the cyclical nature of social control. Finally, I
analyze this conflation of crime and disability and the move between various forms of incarceration through a discussion
of modern (penal and medical) notions of danger, as related to eugenics, psychiatry and criminology.
Better
Ben-Moshe (PhD in Sociology from Syracuse) 11
(Liat, "Genealogies of Resistance to Incarceration: Abolition Politics within Deinstitutionalization and Anti-Prison, Activism in the
U.S." (2011). Sociology - Dissertations. Paper 70)
The last component of genealogy in the quote above is most important to my project, as one of my sites is the present, not
the past. There is a need to seek out those moments where a change was imagined, perceived and
outlined but ultimately discredited and forgotten. Genealogical work allows one to investigate moments of
possibility in the past, not just historical events in the traditional sense. We live now in a moment in which
resistance to the current penal system, and prison abolition as a practice, is very much a minority view. It
is unclear whether it will gain momentum and whether and how the penal system will change, not to mention be
abolished. It is apparent to many activists in this movement that the goal of abolition is a long term one,
and that they will not see this change in their lifetimes. Therefore, this research is about the future, as much as it is about
the past or present. Genealogy allows the researcher to investigate imagined possibilities and conjure up
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of alternatives to the current world order and carefully construct not just an alternative historiography
but also a futuristic narrative of what could have been. Genealogy allows me to critically investigate instances
of possibility, both in the past and present, looking at deinstitutionalization as a tactic, which some see as incredibly
successful in closing down repressive institutions; an ideology that sought to change the way people with disabilities are
perceived and treated; and an unfulfilled promise seen by activists, policy makers and social scientists. Genealogy also
elucidates the contingencies in the present and future, as seen in current prison abolition work and the, yet unrealized,
vision of a non-punitive and nonsegregationist society.
Genealogy “must be sensitive to their [singularity of events] recurrence, not in order to trace the gradual curve of their
evolution, but to isolate the different scenes where they are engaged in different roles” (Foucault 1977). This is a crucial
aspect of constructing a genealogy of resistance to incarceration. Genealogical work begs us not to think about things in an
evolutionary way, and not perceive the closure of institutions as a sign of progress. It would also be a rather superficial
analysis to claim that prisons replaced institutions (although geographically that is often the case), and therefore there is a
linear evolution in which people with psychiatric disabilities move from hospitals to jails, a claim which will be
problematized in chapter 6. Any linear or progress narrative misses the ways in which the past is entangled with the
present, as well as the webs of power, which are always dispersed and multilayered. The interconnectedness of prisons and
institutions as mechanisms of control is what needs to be studied, in this case- through understanding the resistance to both
institutions and prisons. Another aspect of being attentive to the “singularity of events‟ recurrence” (Foucault 1977: 140)
is to trace the fault lines of a discourse without resorting to totalizing discourses or truth-knowledge. For instance,
deinstitutionalization activism, prison abolition and anti-psychiatry are not monolithic discourses, as there are many
fragments within each movement/ideology. Some are intersecting and some even contradictory, but they all should be
studied if one is to reach a more comprehensive understanding of incarceration and its resistance.
A2: Cap K – Slavery K2 Universalizing Cap/Modernity
Baucom (Professor of English at Duke) 5
(Ian, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History, Duke University Press Books, pg. 61-4)
How does this "modernity" universalize itself?
In more ways than I am competent to answer. But one of the ways in which it does so, one of the primary ways in which it
inaugurates its claims upon the global, one of the crucial ways in which this speculative revolution
disseminates itself, is through the development of an Atlantic cycle of accumulation. And the engine of
that speculative regime of accumulation was the trans- Atlantic slave trade. And among the capitals of that
regime was William Gregson's Liverpool. And the ground zero of his city was the Liverpool Exchange and the
transnational paper money market it regulated.
How did the trans-Atlantic slave trade license the global spread of finance capital? How did its value forms, the
epistemology appropriate to those value forms, the mode of public subjectivity consequent on that speculative
epistemology, license an Atlantic cycle of accumulation that came to find one of its headquarters in the city of Liverpool?
How do such questions bear upon the long massacre and the riches William Gregson and his partners claimed the massacre
had secured for them? How do Zizek's value form and subject $ haunt the legal proceedings and actuarial imaginary that
attended .that event? How does the juridical encoding of that value form render this event an utterly
paradigmatic, utterly typical, utterly foundational event of our long twentieth century?
By way of answer I return again to the Liverpool archives, both for what is particular to them and for what the particular
documents they contain typify. I have in mind two sources that I have already mentioned: William Gregson’s shipping
records and that anonymous 1797 pamplet on the frezy desire the slave trade had elicited amoung the city’s inhabitant. The
bulk of the pamphlet is concerned with detailing how profit is extracted from the three- way trade in commodities. At irs
close, however, its author pauses to consider the novel money forms which had both licensed this trade and emerged at the
center of a supplementary economy which created wealth by speculating in and trading on the circulation of these money
forms:
It may be advanced, that this return [on an investment in a trading voyage]is not regular and successive; it is admitted, that
a return cannot be made an- nually on the same ship with certainty, because in some instances an African voyage exceeds
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twelve months .... [Nevertheless] those capital houses [which are the primary financiers of the trade] ... must be allowed to
have yearly regu- lar returns, uniform successive annual adventures producing successive annual remittances; this fact the
more clearly appears from the modern method of treating and remitting a Guinea cargo: no sooner is an account sales
closed [in the Caribbean or the Americas] than the nett proceeds are remitted by bills, which bills are accepted by what is
now termed guarantee, and instantly circu- lated on a faith in the acceptor, and endorser only; these bills are notwithstanding established on a credit extensive as they appear precarious, three years is their present average run, which it is said is
intended to be still increased one year more. This proceeding, while it benefits the factor and guarantee [the sales agent in
the Caribbean or the Americas], appears to place the receiver in a very equivocal situation, when we consider the state of
public credit, and the instability which commerce lately experienced in houses of the first eminence and reputation in the
kingdom: [Nevertheless] these bills are numerous in the town of Liverpool, and in general circulation on a discount
therefore answer the purpose of receiver in the first instance, being taken in payment on the faith of acceptor and indorser
without hesitation or diffidence."
Despite its awkward syntax tills is an extraordinary description of what the author calls the "modern method of treating and
remitting a Guinea cargo." For within just two or three sentences the pamphlet not only sketches the financial system
that had been invented to transform the irregularity and unpredictability of a single slave voyage into a
"regular, successive" and even network of capital circulation, it also encapsulates the fundamental
logic of the financial revolution that had transformed British life over the course of the century, thereby indicating
how something like Marx’s full formula for capital could collapse into its abridged money-into-money form as the
commodity trade of the “Guinea cargo” found itself enabled by and giving way to a trade in the
financial instruments with which that cargo is remitted. For the Liver pool merchants, at the heart of all of these
processes was the need for what the pamphlet calls the "capital houses" most thoroughly invested in the trade to at once
systematize and accelerate trans-Atlantic profit flows, to subordinate the trade's uneven calendar of capital return to their
regular diet of capital need. And what made it possible for them to extract and reinvest capital from the trade at a quicker
and more systematic fate was a credir-driveu national and international banking system that had grown ever vaster and
more complex sincethe establishment of the bank of England in 1694 and, more particularly still,the cross-Atlantic and
intrametropolitan circulation of paper money in the form of bills of exchange.t?
The system, as sketched by the pamphlet, was fairly simple: on reaching the slave markets of the Caribbean or the
Americas, a vessel would assign its cargo to a local factor or sales agent. These were often, but not always, busi- ness
partners of the ship's British owners. William Gregson and his sons seem to have dealt primarily with agents provided by
Thomas Case, one of their regular business associates in Liverpool. That factor would then sell the slaves (by auction,
parcel, scramble, or other means) and then, after deducting his commission, "remit" the proceeds of the sale in the form of
an interest- bearing bill of exchange. This bill amounted to a promise, or "guarantee," to pay the full amount, with the
agreed-upon interest, at the end of a specified period, typically from one to three years - though there were also shorterterm bills dated for three to Sl.X months. The Caribbean or American factor had thus not so much sold the slaves on behalf
of their Liverpool "owners" as borrowed an amount equivalent to the sales proceeds from the Liverpool merchants and
agreed to repay that amount with interest. The Liverpool businessmen invested in the trade had, by the same procedure,
transformed what looked like a simple trade in commodities to a trade in loans. They were not just selling slaves on the far
side of the Atlantic, they were lending money across the Atlantic. And, as significantly, they were lending money
they did not yet possess or only possessed in the form of the slaves. The slaves were thus treated not
only as a type of commodiyy but as a type of interest-bearing money. They functioned in this system
simultaneously as commodities for sale and as the reserve deposits of a loosely organized, decentered, but vast transAtlantic banking system: deposits made at the moment of sale and in- d i t hort term bonds. This is at once obscene and
vital to understanding the full capital logic of the slave trade, to coming to terms with what it meant for this trade to have
found a way to treat human beings not only as if they were a type of commodity bus as a flexible, negotiable, transact able
form of money. Absent this financial revolution in the business operations of the slave trade, absent this
seemingly banal invention of a "modern method of remitting a Guinea cargo," absent this contract to
treat human beings asa species of money, there would have been no incentive for Captain Luke
Collingwood to do what he did, to confidently massacre 132 slaves aboard the Zong, secure in the conviction
that in doing so he was not destroying his employer's commodities but hastening their transformation
into money.
Collingwood's actions may seem to constitute the reductio ad absurdum of this "modern method," its foreseeable, perhaps
inevitable, last proposition. The increased money to be made from it, however, both predated andsur- vived his act. For by
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this simple shift in debiting and crediting procedures, the profit the Liverpool merchants could make from a slaving voyage
wasno longer restricted to the positive difference between the price they had paidto acquire slaves in Africa and the price
they fetched in Charleston or Kingston, but was augmented by the rate of interest guaranteed by the bill the factor had
assigned to them. As the pamphlet attests, the advantages of this procedure were not unidirectional. "Benefit" flowed in all
directions, The benefit to the factor came from his ability to defer or spread out payment to the Liverpool capital houses
over the full period of a bill's "run" rather than inrerrnitterulyor all at once (which might not be possible if he had other
significant debts outstanding at the rime of sale) and thus to regularize his cash Bow. The first benefits to the Liverpool
investors came from the interest on the bill and from the greater speed with which they received a return on their investment
in a slave voyage. If they had simply invested the sales proceeds in a cargo of sugar or rum (which, to be sure, merchants
continued to do-this "modem method" of" remitting a Guinea cargo" supplemented but did not replace the older triangular
trade in commodities), their "return" would have been de- layed by the time it took to purchase and load this cargo in the
Caribbean and the additional time it took to unload distribute, and sell it in Britain. The factor’s bill, on the other hand,
could be sent back Britain on the next available ship.
Also insurance
Baucom (Professor of English at Duke) 5
(Ian, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History, Duke University Press Books, pg. 99-100)
A finance capitalism that traces its origins to the establishment of a modern systemof banking in the later decades of the
seventeenth century may, by the eighteenth century, have become literally unimaginable without the support insurance
provided it. Absent the slave trade, however, eighteenth-century insurance could not have been what it was-either as a
means of ordering imaginary value or as a foundation for accumulating bankable wealth. The cowrie may have fed the
slave trade, but the slave trade fed the insurance industry which ill its turn nourished the financial revolution which inaugurated an Atlantic cycle of accumulation. The role that insurance played in securing Britain's rum-of-the-century financial
revolution is fairly straight- forward. If insurance value, as I have suggested, is a general epistemological precondition and
guarantee for finance capitalism, the practice of insurance, asP. G. M. Dickson makes clear throughout his history of the
financial revolu- tion, was crucial both to "sti01ulat[ing] investment in domestic and foreign trade" (by reducing the risk of
such investment) and to providing speculators with another major industry in which to invest." Barely existent through the
seventeenth century, and extremely loosely organized at the beginning of the eighteenth by a range of ad hoc brokers and
underwriters, insurance had, by the 172.05, taken on a far more coherent form. Its four centers were the consortium of
underwriters based at Lloyd's Coffee House, the Sun Fire Office, the Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation, and the
London As- . the last three of which had major stock presences on Exchange Alley, the last two as chartered companies
established by a 1720 act of Parliament. (The potential wealth to be made from the insurance tradewas sufficient to
convince agents for the Royal Exchange and London Assurance companiestogiveKingGeorgea"gift"of600,000
poundsinexchangeforhis support in granting the charters, an investment which, at least in the short run, proved worthwhile:
in the first year that they were traded on the Ex- change, the stock of the two companies rose from an initial price of 5
guineas coover 250 pounds per share.)"
History Good / A2: FW
Ben-Moshe (PhD in Sociology from Syracuse) 11
(Liat, "Genealogies of Resistance to Incarceration: Abolition Politics within Deinstitutionalization and Anti-Prison, Activism in the
U.S." (2011). Sociology - Dissertations. Paper 70)
It seems that, unlike Foucault, activists develop an attachment to ideas of progress, because “a better world is possible.”
Indeed, Brown (2001) asserts that activists claim that without a progressive vision, what is the point of working for change?
But genealogy does not prescribe political aims, or draft formulas for alternative futures. Its aim is to make clearer
our current visions of the future, how and why they came into dominance, and the ways they operate in a manner
reminiscent to those they came to replace. In one of his works, on pastoral power and governmentality, Foucault links
policy (and its studies) with policing (and the state). The preoccupation with policy, Foucault posits, is not merely
a deficit of reform politics, but a symptom of contemporary thought, which does not question the
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bureaucratic administration of everyday life by the state (biopolitics) (Brown 2001). Thus, a political
commitment focused on policy changes or any specific prescription for change would further
reinforce the administration of everyday life by the state.
The mode of effective history, though, is political in nature. The present
political options seem constrained by
their histories, but these histories are open to ruptures, and tales of impossibility. The political also comes
into play by choosing genealogical locales and the answers they generate. What is happening now, and what is this now in
which we are living? And how are we defined, as subjects, in this time? What kind of subjects have we become and how?
The type of questions asked, the kind of openings that are sought and most of all, what is done with them is the subject of
political inclinations, desires, power and pure chance (Brown 2001).
Genealogy is also political in its essence, in the ways it transforms those conducting and utilizing it. In its extreme,
genealogy calls for a change from within. It is a political tool in the sense that it encourages us to question
what we took for granted before, and begs us to be what we have not been before. It is “an agitation within”
(Kendall and Wickham 1999). Nietzsche‟s original aim in devising the genealogical method, later revised by Foucault, is to
create a distance between ourselves and our knowledge, a space of questioning and defamiliarization from both
epistemology (what we know) and ontology (what we are) (Brown 2001).
In summary, genealogy, as Brown recounts, opens up the terrain for postprogressive and postunitary politics,
as well as postidentity politics, but does not prescribe their replacement. But genealogy does open up new
conversations and formulations of our present circumstances. By using genealogy as his methodology Foucault rejects
temporal logic (as in notions of progress) in favor of spatial ones (power as circulating and disciplinary). Spatial assignment
is perceived as a technique of power. Thus, Foucault‟s work moves us, as scholars and activists, from typologies of time to
geography of power (Brown 2001). I hope my work can expand genealogy to of not just instruments of power but the
topography of their resistance. For that end, the next chapter will start charting the genealogy of deinstitutionalization and
prison abolition not just as historical events, but as forms of disqualified knowledges.
History Good
Baucom (Professor of English at Duke) 5
(Ian, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History, Duke University Press Books, pg. 317-20)
For Benjamin, as I have indicated, tile "task of confronting and producing that real state of exception is coincident with a
quasi-testamentary theory of the event (or truth event) and with an interested reconceptualization of historical time: a
reapprehension of time which insists that the moment of now- being in which we take up the work of historical
responsibility (and historical " 'II b t to or "after" the violent moments Interest) IS not onrologica y su sequeut co, , of the
what-has-been to which we task or attach ourselves, but exists in a arional correspondence with these distant mononsynchronous and Ieng- dur . .. . . .
. i cl . tI e task of historical responsibility IS coincident merits. .F'or Bcnjarrun,
, I
ith th "TI rat IS. 1 .' . J" wcll-known instruction that the work of histor- h Id of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of
norsimp ywu; e 'I ... ieses
lea materialism IS to seize 0 • ith th th f tile image that informs his fuller explication of danger,"
but with t e eory 0
. b cl the I'Theses" and the Arcades Project. This is that"flash"ofmemoryIII 0 1 .
.. . . th uTheses": "The
past call be seized only as an how Benjamin puts It III e . ..
" tl e instant when It cannot be recogruzed and IS Image which
flashes up at 1 . .
articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it 'the way it really
never seen again . , ' To
was' (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to
retain that image . . . History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homoge- u neous empty time, but time filled by
the presence of the now \Jeitzeit\."
this, one last time, is the formulation he advances in the Arcades: "Each 'now' is the
now of a particular recognizabiliry. In it, truth is charged to the bursting point with time. . . . It is not that what is past casts
its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes
together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.""
II'
The set of rhetorical equations in play here is at once evident and complex. I would parse them so: In response to the
knowledge that the state of excep- tion is, in fact, the rule of modern history, the task of historical thought is to avow now-
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being's responsibility to and correspondence with the past states of exception that have produced it. To acknowledge this
task is to assume a vigilance of memory: to hold oneself ready to seize hold of the ruinous past as it flashes up in the form
of an image. Seizing that image, the present thus seizes hold of its past and constellates itself with it (or, as Glissant might
have it, relates itself to it). To produce the real state of exception (and so realize the relational constellation of now-being
with what-has-been-and so, furdier, fulfill our responsibility to and awaken the redemptive promise of-A materialist
conception of history) is, thus, coincident with the task of seizing hold of an image of the past as it flashes up. The crucial
link between historical percep- tion (that the state of exception is in fact the rule) and historicist responsibility (the
production of the real state of exception as task) is, thus, the "image as it flashes up." The exceptional image is the task.
And the task is the interested seizing of that flashing image.
And it is on this point that Benjamin and Glissant are most alike and most dissimilar. For if, on Benjamin's account, what I
have been calling the labor of historical witness or cosmopolitan interestedness assumes the form of a re- sponsibility to an
image (of the state of exception) flashing up in a moment of epistemological danger (the long dangerous moment of a
modern philosophy of time which holds the past to be, indeed, past) then, for Glissant, an errant, relational, interested
politics of the globe also begins with a responsibility toward (and the redemptive promise of) an exceptional image, but the
nature of that image is not to flash up into awareness but instead to endure as the alluvial bed of modernity. To the extent
that the time of the past survives, nonsynchronously, into the present, for Glissant (and this indeed is his funda- mental
point of departure from Benjamin) that time survives not as that which Glissant's Poetics of Relation stages one of its most
significant if also one of its most allusive exchanges and debates. For while Glissant shares with Agamben the
understanding that the state of exception is foundational to the sovereign emergence of the modern and joins Schmitt in
identifying the New World slave plantation as a (or, in fact, the) exemplary space in which modernity thus encamps itself, it
is Benjamin's counterintuitive reading of the state of excep- tion as both the dystopic type of the modern and the territory or
ground of a redemptive "task" and possibility of historical knowledge and experience that most fully accords with Glissant's
exceptional poetics ot exchange. In under- standing the abysmal spaces of the slave ship, slave plantation, and underwater
slave burial ground as not only evidencing the exceptional sovereign power of trans-Atlantic capital and trans-Atlantic race
terror but also as seeding the alluvial ground of a transverse, relational mode of being in the world whose elaboration is the
task of his Poetics, Glissant, in other words, shares with Benjamin the paradoxical insight that the labor of an engaged
philosophy of history is not to free the present of the violence of the past but to discover in the very brutality of what-hasbeen the responsibility and promise of a trans- verse, relational now-being. As Benjamin has it in the eighth of his "Theses
on the Philosophy of History": "The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that 'the state of exception' in which we live is the
rule. We must arrive at a concept of history that corresponds to this fact. Then we will have the production of the real state
of exception before us as a task.""
For Benjamin, as I have indicated, the "task of confronting and producing that real state of exception is coincident with a
quasi-testamentary theory of the event (or truth event) and with an interested reconceptualization of histor- ical time: a
reapprehension of time which insists that the moment of now- being in which we take up the work of historical
responsibility (and historical interest) is not ontologically subsequent to, or "after," the violent moments of the what-hasbeen to which we task or attach ourselves, but exists in a nonsynchronous and long-durational correspondence with these
distant mo- ments. For Benjamin, that is, the task of historical responsibility is coincident not simply with the "Theses' "
well-known instruction that the work of histor- ical materialism is to "seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment
of danger," but with the theory of the image that informs his fuller explication of that "flash" of memory in both the
"Theses" and the Arcades Project. This is how Benjamin puts it in the "Theses": "The past can be seized only as an image
which flashes up at the instant when it cannot be recognized and is never seen again . . . To articulate the past historically
does not mean to flashes up but, rather, as that which accumulates: "We no longer reveal totality within ourselves by
lightning flashes. We approach it through the accumula- tion of sediments. The poetics of duration . . . reappears to take up
the relay from the poetics of the moment. Lightning flashes are the shivers of one who desires or dreams of a totality that is
impossible or yet to come; duration urges on those who attempt to live this totality, when dawn shows through the linked
histories of peoples." "
At one level the difference between Glissant and Benjamin might be re- duced to a mere difference in rhetoric and
terminology: where Benjamin speaks of a what-has-been that flashes into awareness, Glissant speaks of a past that
accumulates. But rhetoric matters, terminology guards significance. And the care with which Glissant rejects the discourse
of the flashing image in favor of a grammar of sediment and accumulation certainly indicates that to his mind there is a
meaningful difference between one rhetoric of nonsyn- chronous time and the other. As the passage I have just cited
indicates, Glis- sant regards the lightning flash as a figure of desire, the not-yet, and the impossible. Accumulation,
conversely, exists in his work as a figure of neces- sity, the unending, and the unavoidable. On his reading, in other words,
the flash of the Benjaminian image may illuminate a ruinous past and cast its light on a future which will constellate itself
with that past and take some property in it, but that future has not yet come. It is instead dreamed or invoked. The past with
which a poetics of duration corresponds does not, however, await the future advent of a coming practice of historical
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materialism in order to deto- nate the charge of what-has-been. Rather, for Glissant the what-has-been is, and it is lived, and
it is lived as the total environment linking together the "histories of peoples." Where Benjamin's project may thus be
identified as primarily ethical and messianic, Glissant figures his work as primarily onto- logical and descriptive.
There is another way of putting this, one which attends to the difference between Benjamin's essential modernism and
Glissant's thoroughgoing deter- mination to articulate a counterdiscourse of modernity. The poetics of the moment and the
poetics of duration, Glissant indicates, both set themselves off in relation to a totality. The totalizing impulse of the
lightning flash is, however, recognizably modernist —recognizably universal in its aspirations but contingent in its mode of
realization. The lightning flash might come at any time, in any place, and it might illuminate any image of what-has-been.
Its totality is thus at once methodological and Utopian. The totality encompassed by Glissant's poetics of accumulation is,
by contrast, recognizably modern recognizably global in its descriptive ambition but particular in its historiciz- ing range.
The modernity it reveals accumulates from a particular time and a particular place. Its relation to totality is thus
historiographic and, in the sense in which I used the word in the second section of this book, realist. Where Benjamin's
flashing image thus brings to light something to know and some- thing to dream (the total if impossible coming of an
ethical and redemptive modernist knowledge of history), Glissant's images reveal something to en- dure, something which
itself endures, or, more resonantly, something which accumulates: time. Though not just any time. Not just an abstract
measure of time endlessly and indifferently adding up, but, rather, a modern order of time, the time of modernity: which
piles up from an exceptional historical catastrophe.
And that catastrophe is the catastrophe of the Atlantic abyss. Or at least that is the case for Glissant's Poetics
ofRelation which establishes the terms of a sedimented, accumulative philosophy of history not only as the general grammar of a globally interested theory of time but through the inescapably ver- nacular vocabulary of a determinate experience
of history. For even as Glis- sant engages in what might be understood as an abstract if allusive theoretical debate with
Benjamin on the nature of historical time, he consistently articu- lates his understanding of temporal duration by grounding
his conception of sedimentary, alluvial accumulation in a singular historical image.
What image?
By now, there can be no surprise.
The first appearance of Glissant's theory ot sedimentary or alluvial accumulation accompanies his initial (re)sighting of the image of the drowning slave in the opening chapter of the Poetics of
Relation: "Experience of the abyss lies inside and outside the abyss. The torment of those who never
escaped it: straight from the belly of the slave ship into the violet belly of the ocean depths they
went. But their ordeal did not die; it quickened into this continuous/discontinuous thing: the panic of the new land,
the haunting of the former land, finally the alliance with the imposed land, suffered and re- deemed. The unconscious
memory of the abyss saved as the alluvium for these 15 metamorphoses." Glissant's final inflection of his interested
philosophy of history (in the last chapter of the Poetics) once more associates the accumula- tive temporality of relation
with the image of the drowning ground: " I have always imagined that these depths navigate a path beneath the
sea in the west and the ocean in the east and that, though we are separated, each in our own Plantation,
the now green balls and chains have rolled beneath from one island to the next, weaving shared rivers
that we shall open up. . . . So what comes over us then is neither flash nor revelation but piling •up." '' W h a t should
we make of this association of a global philosophy of temporal accumulation with the discrete image of the drowning
slave? A number of things, but, minimally, these: if, for Glissant, modernity is the globalization of relation, then a relational modernity also has a ground, and that ground is alluvial, Atlantic, and submarine. If time does not pass (or even
recover itself in a lightning flash) but accumulates, then the segment of time we call modernity piles up from
a starting point, and that starting point is the ramified system of transatlantic slavery, and that system is
crystallized in three enduring images: the image of the plantation, the image of the slave ship, and the image of the
drowning slave. These are Glissant's "images," and his Poetics may be understood as his response to the weight of these
modern images as task.
A2: K of History
Baucom (Professor of English at Duke) 5
(Ian, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History, Duke University Press Books, pg. 323-5)
As his essay " 'You Who Never Was There': Slavery and the New Histori- cism, Deconstruction and the Holocaust" makes
clear, Benn Michaels is far from sanguine about the influence which he understands such black ghost sto- ries (alongside a
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set of testimonial holocaust narratives) to have exerted over our contemporaneity's philosophy of history. T h e particular
targets Benn Michaels attacks in the essay — Morrison's Beloved, Greenblattian new histori- cism, poststructural trauma
theory, holocaust remembrance, and testimony discourses, all of which he fairly convincingly links to "the ghost story, the
story in which the dead speak" — are, therefore, subordinate to his more gen- eral critique of contemporary engagements
with the persistence of the past. The deep grammar which holds all these discourses together may find its common
expression in the figure of the ghost, but its fundamental code, Benn-Michaels argues, is "the effort to make the past
present... the transfor- mation of history into memory, the deployment of history in the constitution 1
of identity." " It is,
accordingly, the figure of the past that truly attracts Benn Michaels's animus and inspires his frustration with those
holocaust-testimony and slavery-influenced discourses whose central feature, he suggests, is a com- mon fetishization of
the past. "Without the idea of a history that is remem- bered or forgotten," he notes, "the events of the past can have only a
limited relevance to the present. . . . It is only when it is re-imagined as the fabric of our own experience that the past can
become the key to our own identity.... It is only when the events of the past can be imagined not only to have consequences for the present but to live on in the present that they can become part 19 of our own experience and testify to who
we are." Benn Michaels's funda
mental purpose is to contend that such claims are the product of a mystified thinking, to
demonstrate that the past has no more real existence in the pres- ent than do the various black and Jewish ghosts through
which it has in- 20 creasingly come to speak its troubled message.
Benn Michaels is an extraordinarily subtle critic, and I
find largely con- vincing the portrait he paints of our ghost-crowded age. Indeed, much of the argument of this book has
been that our "moment" can be nothing other than so haunted. But if Benn Michaels is correct in discerning a hauntological
impulse in much contemporary writing and thought (and in attributing much of the energy behind this impulse to recent
attempts to wrestle with the histories of slavery and the holocaust), he does not, I believe, entirely grasp the import of this
ghost-mindedness (certainly not in the case of the slave narra- tives that provide his critical starting point). And he fails to
do so because he demands as the starting postulate of critique the stability of the very categories texts such as Morrison's
Beloved, Walcott's Omens, or Glissant's Poetics exist to complicate or to refuse: the categories of a stable, recognizable, and
discrete past and present. Benn Michaels's critique relies on the self-evident, pre- ordained existence of a past and a present,
assumes that these are in fact ontologically sound and separate things (rather than complex constructs in their own right),
and proceeds accordingly, failing ever to address the pos- sibility that the object of a novel such as Beloved is not to
conflate these terms but to suspend them, not to make the past present but to reconceive our basic notions of temporality,
periodicity, and contemporaneity. To the extent that the past and the present survive as provisionally operative terms within
Be- loved, Walcott's Omens, Glissant's Poetics (or, more particularly still, the Guya- nese writer Fred D'Aguiar's novelistic
recounting of the Zong massacre, Feed- ing the Ghosts, and M. NourbeSe Philip's collection of poetry Zong! which I have
been drawing on in the epigraphs of earlier chapters), they do so not because these ghost stories seek to recapture the past
for the present, but because they demand a thorough reconceptualization of our notion ofthe present. It is not the status of
the past that is at issue in Beloved, Omeros, Feedin the Ghosts, Poetics of Relation, Zong!, or the broader black-Atlantic
philosophy of history such texts exemplify, but, rather, the nature, the extent, the elas- ticity, the scope, the very existence
of the present in which Hegel and his heirs have taught us to believe.
Beloved, and the texts for which Benn Michaels makes Morrison's novel a substitute (he draws the phrase "For you who
never was there" from the novel), are not concerned with the return of the past. Their interest is in our conception of the
contemporary. "All of it is now, it is always now," Morrison's narrative insists as it, like Omeros and Glissant's Poetics,
assumes the burden of 21 addressing the horrors of the middle passage.
Writing the "now" under the sign of this "always,"
Beloved codes itself as something written after the "pres- ent," as a narrative that emerges on the far side of a progressive,
Enlighten- ment understanding of the present as a delimited, contained, autonomous thing. It writes itself as a narrative in
which the present implies more than the delimited now, more than the immediately contemporary, more than the mo- ment;
a narrative in which time does not pass or progress, but gathers within an ever more extensive, ever more copious "now"
embodied in the ghosdy figure of Beloved herself. And it is precisely in this sense that Walcott's Omeros shares with
Beloved not only the literary figure of the ghost but the counter- Enlightenment philosophy of history that specter
emblematizes. For Achille inherits more than his father's shade. Inheriting that ghost, he also inherits what Walcott calls
"the Atlantic now," a figure best parsed as one in which "the Atlantic" functions both as a noun or a proper name and as an
adjectival qualifier of "now." What Achille thus inherits is, therefore, both a geography of history and a form of time, a type
of contemporaneity, a complex, enig- matic, Atlantic "now." That "now," like Morrison's own "now," like Glis- sant's
poetics of "duration," again implies a contemporaneity radically distinct from Benn Michaels' self-evident, narrow-band
"present" or from those se- quentially unfolding "slices" of contemporary time Althusser identifies with a Hegelian and
post-Hegelian philosophy of history whose truth claims Benn Michael's seems to have taken at face value. It implies a now
that accumulates within itself the moment of loss, the long after-history of loss, and the mo- ment of confrontation with
loss.
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A2: Spectatorship
Baucom (Professor of English at Duke) 5
(Ian, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History, Duke University Press Books, pg. 131-2)
Mr. Haywood, in presenting his evidence to Mansfield's court, paused three times to admit that he had "never felt a more
violent Impression on my mind upon the introduction of any Case whatever in this Court than I do now,"!' Lord Mansfield,
in summing up the case, felt himself obliged to inform his auditors that whatever the law might oblige him to rule, "it
shocks one very much.")2 Solicitor Lee, for the owners, found it necessary to acknowledge that the "Act" in question
"cannot be described or spoke of without exciting in any that have heard some degree of Horror. "33 At the end of the three
fatal days, Kelsal apparently found himself unable to perform any further duties aboard
ship and retired to his cabin. Even Luke Collingwood, testimony indicated, became "delirious" after the last slave was
drowned and had to be relieved of his command. H\iVhy? Why these repeated admissions? 'Why does Sharp force his
readers to encounter and reencounter and reencounter this shock, this horror, this violent impression on the mind? For no
other reason, surely, than to reproduce the shock of the event as an affect of reading, to cultivate in the
minds of the belated "spectators of this event" not, as Kant would have it, "a universal yet disinterested sympathy for the
players on one side against those on the other side," but a universal and interested sympathy, an exactly melan- choly
sympathy for the entirely real, entirely not abstract, entirely not "typi- cal," entirely singular human beings thrown one by
one by one into the sea."
*
What if we were to regard history, Cathy Caruth asks, as the history of a trauma? What would such a decision betoken?
Among other things, she ar- gues, it would demand that we learn to submit ourselves to a reiterative prac- tice of listening,
that we learn to substitute, for a Kantian ethics whose orga- nizing condition of possibility is a recognition in others of a
capacity for the experience of the sublime, :1 receptivity to the voice speaking from the "wound" of another: "Trauma is
always the story of a wound that cries out,
that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of :1 reality or truth that is not otherwise available. This truth, in its delayed
appearance and in its belated address. cann t be linked only to what is known, but also to what remains unknown in our
very actions and our language."?" Trauma, thus understood, speaks irs "truth" not only in much the same fashion as
Badiou's truth event articulates its message, it speaks also with the voice of melancholy. Caruth tends not to use the term,
but trauma theory, as she develops it, is undoubtedly also a theory of melancholy, a theory devoted to the unexchangeable
sin- gularity of loss and what has been lost, a theory which in Nicolas Abrahamand
Maria Torok's tenus incorporates its objects of loss rather than inrrojecting them, resolves itself to encrypt within its
expressive text the exquisite corpse or corpses of its lamented dead and to guard them there." Sharp's submission is such a
cryptonymic text, such a traumatic text, such a text devoted both to
preserving the singularity ofloss and to listening to the voices speaking from the wound of this loss over and over and over
again. This is true in more ways than bear discussion now (that discussion belongs, more properly, to the sec- ond section
of this book). Let me then name just one way, perhaps the least
certain way, in which this is so.
Reform Bad
Dillon (PhD in American Studies at Minnesota, now an Assistant Professor of Queer Studies at Hampshire College) 13
(Stephen, Fugitive Life: Race, Gender, and the Rise of the Neoliberal-Carceral State, A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA,
http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/153053/1/Dillon_umn_0130E_13833.pdf)
Critically, Jackson did not understand the end of the future of the social order as particularly different from his present
because “I’ve lived with repression every moment of my life, a repression so formidable that any movement on my part can
only bring relief.”191 Jackson’s understanding of the future arose from his critique of reform. Derived from his
correspondence with Angela Davis, Jackson argued that the essence of fascism was reform—more specifically, “economic
reform.”192 Every reform that modified or improved the operations of global capitalism and white supremacy only
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extended the life of the social order. And the life of the social order, according to Jackson and Fanon, is parasitic on the
control, exploitation, incarceration, and premature death of black people. The creation of a new world could not rely on
“long term politics” because patience, reform, and change meant nothing to “the person who expects to die tomorrow.”193
For Jackson, the imminence of tomorrow is a time those without a future cannot risk. The future was not coming and so the
present could not wait.
A2: Anti-blackness K
Yes Cap Root
Baucom (Professor of English at Duke) 5
(Ian, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History, Duke University Press Books, pg. 53)
The African heads circling the Liverpool Exchange bear witness to the enormous profitability of a circum-Atlantic trade in
commodities, a triangular trade we are accustomed to thinking of almost exclusively as a trade in goods: a trade in textiles
and other midlands merchandise on the first vector of ex- change, of human property in the passage from Africa to the
Caribbean and the Americas, and of rum, sugar, coffee, and tobacco from the far side of the Atlantic back to Britain. There
is nothing wrong with this picture. It is an accurate outline representation of the major circuits of the commodity culture
that, in terms of pure temporal longevity, dominated this as any other cycle of accumulation. What it disregards, however,
is something else the African heads on the Liverpool Exchange at least metaphorically figure: the finance culture that
preceded, enabled, and secured this circuit of cross-Atlantic com- modity exchange; the bank, stock, credit, insurance, and
loan-driven money forms of value that underwrote this cycle of accumulation, presided over its rise, and, as Arrighi's
general model predicts, have returned to dominate what Braude! calls its moment of "autumn." The trade in commodities
may be the most tangible form taken by the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the long twen- tieth century it has bequeathed us,
but its conditions of possibility are the speculative, abstract, money-into-money trades that Liverpool, in duplicating
London, inherited from the rurn-of-the-century financial revolution. And chief among these were the trades in insurance,
stocks, bills, and all the variant forms of "paper money" derived from the establishment of a modern, credit- issuing system
of banking.
Progress Bad Impact
A risk of this link means we access the root cause of the Aff
Dillon (PhD in American Studies at Minnesota, now an Assistant Professor of Queer Studies at Hampshire College) 13
(Stephen, Fugitive Life: Race, Gender, and the Rise of the Neoliberal-Carceral State, A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA,
http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/153053/1/Dillon_umn_0130E_13833.pdf)
In addition, the
racial violence of law and order and the governance of the market were naturalized
through their attachment to the temporality of progress. Nixon constructed the welfare state as irrational,
backwards, and inhibiting the teleological development of the nation. Progress made the prison and the market
seem inevitable— the future needed them. Under state time, the discourse of progress rendered
permissible the violence of the market and the terror of the prison. In other words, the future as the
discursive space progress leads to the justification of new formations of racial violence. Under the
logic of law and order, social and biological death were the constitutive and necessary byproducts of the future’s progress.
Thus, by connecting the welfare state and political rebellion to the unfreedom of individuality, law and order made the
violence of the market and the prison a new norm. And temporality was critical to this maneuver.
***T***
2AC Framework
Our interpretation value of education and pedagogy is its orientation towards the abolition of global
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colonial genocide – the alternative is extinction
Rodríguez 10
(Dylan, The Disorientation of the Teaching Act: Abolition as Pedagogical Position, Radical Teacher, Number
88, Summer 2010, MUSE)
we are institutionally hailed to the service of genocide management, in which our
pedagogical labor is variously engaged in mitigating, valorizing, critiquing, redeeming, justifying, lamenting,
and otherwise reproducing or tolerating the profound and systemic violence of the global-historical U.S.
nation build- ing project. As “radical” teachers, we are politically hailed to betray genocide man- agement
in order to embrace the urgent challenge of genocide abolition. The short-term survival of those
populations rendered most immediately vulnerable to the mundane and spectacular violence of this
system, and the long-term survival of most of the planet’s human population (particularly those descended
from survivors of enslavement, colonization, conquest, and economic exploitation), is significantly dependent on
our willingness to embrace this form of pedagogical audacity.
As teachers,
A2 Education
Their education is bad –
Saps critical energy from students, destroys political imagination and reproduces a colonial thought. You
should refuse to become a night rider, hunting down those who don’t think right
Harney and Moten 13
(Stefano and Fred, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, pg.119-20)
Stefano: Yeah, I feel that’s true. What I think is that each one is a different way to get at a similar set of questions, to think
about the general antagonism, to think about blackness, to think about the un- dercommons. I think the impulse for me and
Fred is always to try and move towards the stuff that we like, and to move towards the mode of living that we like. We
know that sometimes that involves mov- ing through certain kinds of critique of what’s holding us back. But, for me, each
time, what’s going on is that I’m trying to elaborate a different mode of living together with others, of being with others,
not just with other people but with other things and other kinds of senses. At one point, for me anyway, I felt very strongly
that this kind of policy world was emerging everywhere – and I wanted to talk with Fred about how to find our stuff again
amidst all this kind of policy work in which everybody seemed from every spot at any moment to be making policy. I had
this image in my head of a kind of return to a world in which every self-determined individual had the
right to make brutal policy on the spot for every person who was not self- determined, which
essentially is a colonial or slave situation – and the kind of ubiquity of policy, which all of a sudden, didn’t
emanate anymore just from government but from fucking policy shops in every university, and from
independent policy shops, and from bloggers, etc. These policy people to me are like night riders. So, I felt at that
moment it was necessary to deal with it in terms of, what would you say is going on that occasioned that kind of frenzied
attack, this total mobilisation of the ‘fixed’? What provoked this? That’s why we ended up talking about planning. But
there’s also a part where Fred is very directly able to address blackness in a piece. So, we were able to start with
something that we were feeling was an elaboration of our mode of living, our inherited black radical tradition. Then, that
piece ends up with a kind of caution around governance.
At least from my point of view, I’m always approaching Fred, hanging out with Fred, to say, we know that there are things we like, so how can we
elaborate them this time, not just for each other but also for other people, to say to others let’s keep fighting, keep doing our thing. So, it’s true that it isn’t
an argument that builds. To me, it’s picking up different toys to see if we can get back to what we’re really interested in. Not to say that that doesn’t
change. I have a richer understanding of social life than I did a few years ago. When I started working with Fred, social life, to me, had a lot to do with
friendship, and it had a lot to do with refusal – refusal to do certain kinds of things. And then gradually I got more and more interested in this term,
‘preservation,’ where I started to think about, “well, refusal’s something that we do because of them, what do we do because of ourselves?” Recently,
I’ve started to think more about elaborations of care and love. So, my so- cial world is getting bigger with our work. But, each piece for me is still
another way to come at what we love and what’s keeping us from what we love. So, it isn’t in that sense a scientific investigation that starts at one end
and finishes at the other end.
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Fred: It’s funny, this
ubiquity of policy making, the constant deputisation of academic laborers into the
apparatuses of police power. And they are like night riders, paddy rollers, everybody’s on patrol, trying to
capture the ones who are trying to get out – especially themselves, trying to capture their own fugitivity. That’s
actually the first place at which policy is directed. I think that a huge part of it has to do sim- ply with, let’s call it, a
certain reduction of intellectual life – to reduce study into critique, and then at the same time, a really, really horrific,
brutal reduction of critique to debunking, which operates under the general assumption that naturalised academic misery
loves company in its isolation, like some kind of warped communal alienation in which people are tied together not by
blood or a common language but by the bad feeling they compete over. And so, what ends up happening is you get
whole lot of people who, as Stefano was suggest- ing, spend a whole lot of time thinking about stuff that
a
they don’t want to do, thinking about stuff that they don’t want to be, rather than beginning with, and
acting out, what they want.
A2 Advocacy skills
Content comes before skills – adding advocates to the existing institutional Left will fail and only
reproduce domestic warfare
Rodríguez 9
(Dylan, The Terms of Engagement: Warfare, White Locality, and Abolition, 2010 36: 151 Crit Sociol, MUSE)
In so many ways, the US progressive/left establishment is filling the void created by what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has called
the violent ‘abandonments’ of the state, which for- feits and implodes its own social welfare capacities (which were
already insufficient at best) while transforming and (productively) exploding its domestic warmaking functionalities –
which Gilmore (2007b: 44–5) says are guided by a ‘frightening willingness to engage in human sacrifice’. Yet, at the same
time that the state has been openly galvanizing itself to declare and wage violent struggle against strategically targeted
local populations, the establishment left remains relatively unwilling and therefore institutionally unable to
address the questions of social survival, grass roots mobilization, radical social justice, and social
transformation on the concrete and everyday terms of the very domestic war(s) that the state has so openly
and repeatedly declared as the premises of its own coherence. Given that domestic warfare composes both the common
narrative language and concrete material production of the state, the question remains as to why the establishment left has
not understood this statecraft as the state of emergency that the condition so openly, institu- tionally encompasses (war!).
Perhaps it is because critical intellectuals, scholar activists, and progressive organizers are
underestimating the skill and reach of the state as a pedagogical (teaching) apparatus, that they have
generally undertheorized how the state so skillfully generates (and often politically accommodates)
sanctioned spaces of political contradiction that engulf ‘dissent’ and counter-state, antiracist, and
antiviolence organizing.
We produce the best advocacy skills –Baltimore’s Leaders of the Beautiful Struggle prove that the most direct
community impact that debaters are currently having comes from people who did not defend the resolution. All
their arguments beg the question of whether the liberalism is an effective political formation in the first
place.
And Research, speaking and argumentative skills are inevitable – as speakers, writers and researchers there
is nothing unique about defending the USfg, we all do the same debates and have the same drive to win. You
can be a lazy policy debater and read the same heg cards every year.
Energy DA – skills are irrelevant if the drive and motivation for change aren’t there. This is a prereq to any
skills impact –Debaters gets sucked up into the meat grinder of capitalism and power cause they have no energy
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to fight.
Giroux ‘4(Henry, Global TV Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, “Public Pedagogy and the Politics of Neoliberalism: making the political more pedagogical”, Policy Futures in Education, Volume 2, Numbers 3 & 4, 2004,
http://www.cws.illinois.edu/IPRHDigitalLiteracies/GirouxPublicPFinE2004.pdf)
By linking education to the project of an unrealized democracy, cultural studies theorists who work in higher education can
make clear that the issue is not whether higher education has become contaminated with politics, but rather that it is more
importantly about recognizing that education is already a space of politics, power, and authority. At the same time, they can
make clear their opposition to those approaches to pedagogy that reduce it to a methodology like ‘teaching of the
conflicts’ or, relatedly, to simply opening up a culture of questioning . Both of these positions not only fail to
highlight the larger political, normative, and ideological considerations that inform such views of education and pedagogy,
but they also collapse the purpose and meaning of higher education , the role of educators as engaged scholars,
and the possibility of pedagogy itself into a rather short-sighted and sometimes insular notion of method,
albeit one that narrowly emphasizes argumentation and dialogue . There is a disquieting refusal in such
discourses to raise broader questions about the social, economic, and political forces shaping the very
terrain of higher education – particularly unbridled market forces, or racist and sexist forces that unequally value diverse groups of students within relations of academic power – or
about what it might mean to engage pedagogy as a basis not merely for understanding, but also for participating in the larger world. There is also a general misunderstanding of how teacher authority can be
Graff
believes that any notion of critical pedagogy that is self-conscious about its politics and engages students
in ways that offer them the possibility for becoming critical – or what Lani Guinier calls the need to educate
used to create the pedagogical conditions for critical forms of education without necessarily falling into the trap of simply indoctrinating students.[22] For instance, liberal educator Gerald
students ‘to participate in civic life, and to encourage graduates to give back to the community, which through taxes, made
their education possible’ [23] – either leaves students out of the conversation or presupposes too much and
simply represents a form of pedagogical tyranny. While Graff advocates strongly that educators create the educational practices that open up the possibility of
questioning among students, he refuses to connect pedagogical conditions that challenge how they think at the moment to the next step of prompting them to think about changing the world around them so
Lipsitz criticizes academics such as Graff, who believe that connecting
academic work to social change is at best a burden and at worst a collapse into a crude form of propagandizing,
as to expand and deepen its democratic possibilities. George
suggesting that they are subconsciously educated to accept cynicism about the ability of ordinary people
to change the conditions under which they live.[24] Teaching students how to argue , draw on their own
experiences, or engage in rigorous dialogue says nothing about why they should engage in these actions in
the first place . How the culture of argumentation and questioning relates to giving students the tools they
need to fight oppressive forms of power , make the world a more meaningful and just place, and develop a sense
of social responsibility is missing
in work like Graff’s because this is part of the discourse of political education, which Graff simply equates to indoctrination or speaking to
the converted.[25] Here, propaganda and critical pedagogy collapse into each other. Propaganda is generally used to misrepresent knowledge, promote biased knowledge, or produce a view of politics that
. While no pedagogical intervention should fall to the level of propaganda, a
pedagogy that attempts to empower critical citizens cannot and should not avoid politics. Pedagogy must address the
appears beyond question and critical engagement
relationship between politics and agency, knowledge and power, subject positions and values, and learning and social change while always being open to debate, resistance, and a culture of questioning.
Liberal educators committed to simply raising questions have no language for linking learning to forms of public scholarship that would enable students to consider the important relationship between
democratic public life and education, politics and learning. Disabled by a depoliticizing, if not slavish, allegiance to a teaching methodology, they have little idea of how to encourage students pedagogically
to enter the sphere of the political, which enables students to think about how they might participate in a democracy by taking what they learn ‘into new locations – a third grade classroom, a public library, a
legislator’s office, a park’ [26], or, for that matter, by taking on collaborative projects that address the myriad of problems citizens face in a diminishing democracy. In spite of the professional pretense to
, academics need to do more pedagogically than simply teach students how to be adept at forms of
neutrality
argumentation . Students need to argue and question, but they need much more from their educational experience. The
pedagogy of argumentation in and of itself guarantees nothing , but it is an essential step towards opening up the
space of resistance towards authority, teaching students to think critically about the world around them, and recognizing
interpretation and dialogue as a condition for social intervention and transformation in the service of an unrealized
democratic order. As Amy Gutmann argues, education is always political because it is connected to the
acquisition of agency and the ability to struggle with ongoing relations of power, and is a precondition
for creating informed and critical citizens .[27] This is a notion of education that is tied not to the alleged
neutrality of teaching methods but to a vision of pedagogy which is directive and interventionist
on the side of
reproducing a democratic society. Democratic societies need educated citizens who are steeped in more than the skills of argumentation. And it is precisely this democratic project that affirms the critical
function of education and refuses to narrow its goals and aspirations to methodological considerations. This is what makes critical pedagogy different from training. And it is precisely the failure to connect
learning to its democratic functions and goals that provides rationales for pedagogical approaches which strip the meaning of what it means to be educated from its critical and democratic possibilities.
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A2 Switch Sides
Their switch sides arguments are vacuous –
a. Education inevitable – school, pre-round research and strategizing against our opponents mean that we
do not have to actually read the arguments in debate in order to understand them. Any argument that you
have to actually defend the federal government in order to understand it is facile.
b. We control uniqueness – politics is failing now because of an over emphasis on contingency and
flexibility, rigid ideology is not the problem
Harney and Moten 13
(Stefano and Fred, the Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, pg. 75)
As resistance from above, policy is a new class phenomenon because the act of making policy for others , of
pronouncing others as incorrect, is at the same time an audition for a post-fordist economy that deputies believe
rewards those who embrace change but which, in reality, arrests them in contingency, flexibility, and that
administered precarity that imagines itself to be immune from what Judith Butler might call our undercommon
precariousness. This economy is powered by constant and automatic insistence upon the externalization
of risk, the placement at an externally imposed risk of all life, so that work against risk can be
harvested without end.
Policy is the form that opportunism takes in this environment, as the embrace of the radically extra-economic, political
character of command today. It is a demonstration of the will to contingency, the willingness to be made
contingent and to make contingent all around you. It is a demonstration designed to separate you from others, in
the interest of a universality reduced to private property that is not yours, that is the fiction of your own advantage.
Opportunism sees no other way, has no alternative, but separates itself by its own vision, its ability to see the future of its
own survival in this turmoil against those who cannot imagine surviving in this turmoil (even if they must do so all the
time). The ones who survive the brutality of mere survival are said by policy to lack vision, to be stuck in an essentialist
way of life, and, in the most extreme cases, to be without interests, on the one hand, and incapable of disinterestedness, on
the other. Every utterance of policy, no matte its intent or content, is first and foremost a demonstration
of one’s ability to be close to the top in the hierarchy of the post-fordist economy.
c. This internal link turns portable skills – flexible switch side policy debate means the debate
communities output is just more neocons and investment bankers
Spanos 11(http://kdebate.com/spanos.html Interview of William V. Spanos with Christopher Spurlock, 2011, Dr. Spanos
distinguished professor of English and Comparative Literature at the SUNY Binghamton and well known in the competitive world of
high school and intercollegiate academic debate, C.A.)
CS: Many of the most charged criticisms of your comments on debate stem from the charge that you have had very little
experience with debate and are not qualified to comment on it. We've taken the position often that our insular
activity could use some outside criticism, but others remain skeptical of the view that disinterested,
'switch-side,' debate, where debaters can take any position on an issue, will actually produce more
neoconservatives like Cheney and Rumsfeld. They cite policy debaters who practiced this and went on to champion
rights for Guantanamo Bay detainees after debate and law school. Surely you don't believe that all debaters will become
neocons simply from following this model. But what should we be most on guard against in order to avoid the worst of the
imminent global disaster that the neocons are undoubtedly leading us to? WVS: The danger of being a total insider is
that the eye of such a person becomes blind to alternative possibilities. The extreme manifestation of this
being at one with the system, of remaining inside the frame, as it were, is, as Hannah Arendt, decisively
demonstrated long ago, Adolph Eichmann. That's why she and Said, among many poststructuralists, believed that to
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be an authentic intellectual --to see what disinterested inquiry can't see-- one has to be an exile (or a pariah) from a
homeland-- one who is both apart of and apart from the dominant culture. Unlike Socrates, for example, Hippias, Socrates'
interlocutor in the dialogue "Hippias Major" (he is, for Arendt, the model for Eichmann), is at one with himself. When he
goes home at night "he remains one." He is, in other words, incapable of thinking. When Socrates, the exilic
consciousness, goes home, on the other hand, he is not alone; he is "by himself." He is two-in-one. He has to face this
other self. He has to think. Insofar as its logic is faithfully pursued, the framework of the debate system,
to use your quite appropriate initial language, does, indeed, produce horrifically thoughtless Eichmanns,
which is to say, a political class whose thinking, whether it's called Republican or Democratic, is
thoughtless in that it is totally separated from and indifferent to the existential realities of the world it is
representing. It's no accident, in my mind, that those who govern us in America --our alleged
representatives, whether Republican, Neo-Con, or Democrat-- constitute such a "political class." This
governing class has, in large part, their origins, in a preparatoary relay consisting of the high school and
college debate circuit, political science departments, and the law profession. The moral of this story is
that the debate world needs more outsiders -- or, rather, inside outsiders -- if its ultimate purpose is to
prepare young people to change the world rather than to reproduce it.
Policing DA – Refuse the Neg’s demand for a Yes or No on the resolution – Their demand that your
ballot call the debate classroom to order destroys the liberatory nature of education
Halberstam 13
(Jack, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study - Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, pg. 9-10)
Moten and Harney want to gesture to another place, a wild place that is not simply the left over space
that limns real and regulated zones of polite society; rather, it is a wild place that continuously produces its own
unregulated wildness. The zone we enter through Moten and Harney is ongoing and exists in the present and, as
Harney puts it, “some kind of demand was already being enacted, fulfilled in the call itself.” While describing the London
Riots of 2011, Harney suggests that the riots and insurrections do not separate out “the request, the demand
and the call” – rather, they enact the one in the other: “I think the call, in the way I would understand it, the call, as in the
call and response, the response is already there before the call goes out. You’re already in something.” You are already in
it. For Moten too, you are always already in the thing that you call for and that calls you. What’s more, the call is
always a call to dis-order and this disorder or wild- ness shows up in many places: in jazz, in
improvisation, in noise. The disordered sounds that we refer to as cacophony will always be cast as “extra-musical,”
as Moten puts it, precisely because we hear some- thing in them that reminds us that our desire for harmony is arbitrary
and in another world, harmony would sound incomprehensible. Lis- tening to cacophony and noise tells us that there is a
wild beyond to the structures we inhabit and that inhabit us.
And when we are called to this other place, the wild beyond, “beyond the beyond” in Moten and Harney’s apt terminology,
we have to give ourselves over to a certain kind of craziness. Moten reminds us that even as Fanon took an anti-colonial
stance, he knew that it “looks cra- zy” but, Fanon, as a psychiatrist, also knew not to accept this organic division between
the rational and the crazy and he knew that it would be crazy for him not to take that stance in a world that had assigned to
him the role of the unreal, the primitive and the wild. Fanon, ac- cording to Moten, wants not the end of colonialism but the
end of the standpoint from which colonialism makes sense. In order to bring colonialism to an end then, one
does not speak truth to power, one has to inhabit the crazy, nonsensical, ranting language of the other,
the other who has been rendered a nonentity by colonialism. Indeed, blackness, for Moten and Harney by way
of Fanon, is the willingness to be in the space that has been abandoned by colonialism, by rule, by order. Moten takes us
there, saying of Fanon finally: “Eventually, I believe, he comes to believe in the world, which is to say the other world,
where we inhabit and maybe even cultivate this absence, this place which shows up here and now, in the sovereign’s space
and time, as absence, darkness, death, things which are not (as John Donne would say).”
The path to the wild beyond is paved with refusal. In The Undercommons if we begin anywhere, we begin
with the right to refuse what has been refused to you. Citing Gayatri Spivak, Moten and Harney call this
refusal the “first right” and it is a game-changing kind of refusal in that it signals the refusal of the
choices as offered. We can under- stand this refusal in terms that Chandan Reddy lays out in Freedom With Violence
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(2011) – for Reddy, gay marriage is the option that can- not be opposed in the ballot box. While we can circulate multiple
cri- tiques of gay marriage in terms of its institutionalization of intimacy, when you arrive at the ballot box, pen in
hand, you only get to check “yes” or “no” and the no, in this case, could be more damning than the
yes. And so, you must refuse the choice as offered.
Moten and Harney also study what it would mean to refuse what they term “the call to order.” And what would it mean,
furthermore, to refuse to call others to order, to refuse interpellation and the reinstantiation of the law.
When we refuse, Moten and Harney suggest, we create dissonance and more importantly, we allow
dissonance to continue – when we enter a classroom and we refuse to call it to order, we are allowing
study to continue, dissonant study perhaps, disorgan- ized study, but study that precedes our call and will
continue after we have left the room. Or, when we listen to music, we must refuse the idea that music happens only when
the musician enters and picks up an instrument; music is also the anticipation of the performance and the noises of
appreciation it generates and the speaking that happens through and around it, making it and loving it, being in it while listening. And so, when we refuse the call to order – the teacher pick- ing up the book, the conductor raising his baton, the
speaker asking for silence, the torturer tightening the noose – we refuse order as the distinction between noise and music,
chatter and knowledge, pain and truth.
And the impact to this is the maintenance of white supremacy – the forsable imposition of pedagogy is the
key site
Schnyder (PhD @ UT) 8
(Damien Michael, First Strike: The Effect of the Prison Regime Upon Public Education and Black Masculinity
in Los Angeles County, California by Damien Michael Schnyder, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the
Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin 2008)
Thus in order to contain the threat of Blackness, the Herculean managers of the hydra-like attack upon society are
teachers (Linebaugh & Rediker, 2000). 47 Within the development of civil society, the function of teachers is to both
categorize states of being and enclose Blackness. The categorization is clear by the actions of Ms. Fox while processes of
enclosure are exemplified in Mr. Keynes’ classroom. Students are prevented from interjecting alternative versions of
economic systems within the framework of the discussion. Students must perform the perfunctory duty of
work (basic memorization and recitation skills) not to only to be awarded with a passing grade, but not to be penalized.
The result is a silencing of Black voices whose life experiences are in direct contradiction with hegemonic constructions
of economy (i.e. supply and demand) that was taught by Mr. Keynes. There was no space to analyze the racial structure
that frames economic modes of relation, nor was there opportunity to engage in dialogue with regards to the economics of
why many of the students had to work to support their families. Mr. Keynes’ classroom management and pedagogical
style exemplifies the need of white supremacy to control, define and enclose racialized subjects. The primary objective of
Mr. Keynes in addition to Mr. Davis and Ms. Fox was to socialize the students as productive workers in order to fit
within the hierarchal confines of civil society. The main thrust behind this socialization effort was to define the
students as subjects and remove the possibility for self-identification that was not located within a
white supremacist conception of being – for a self-assertion outside of these parameters is the greatest
threat to white supremacist modes of social (re)production.
The veil of nobility and morality that cloaks the teaching profession has to be understood as a tool utilized by the state to
maintain its power. Inside of the walls of SCHS, teachers operated within a genealogy of Black subjugation that seeks to
enclose all sites of Black self-expression and thought/action and as stated by Wilderson ultimately “destroy the Black
body.” In it’s current manifestation, the process of Black subjugation functions within the logic of the prison regime as
outlined by Dylan Rodríguez. Within this logic, teachers serve as agents of dissemination, discipline and
socialization in order to preserve the economic, political, racial, sexual and gendered hierarchies
established by the United States nation project. Further, during times of economic “crises” Ruth Wilson Gilmore
notes that the veil of white privilege is removed as the logic of white supremacy that frames American nationalism is
fully revealed (Gilmore, 1993).
In order to untangle the multifaceted issues within public education, it is incumbent to analyze the root causes of
inequality and inequity. In agreement with scholars such as Erica R. Meiners who advocate that white supremacy is
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the root cause, even
teachers with the best of intentions have to realize that their role is vital to the
maintenance of state domination of Black subjects.
***Anthro Ans***
Perm Key
And must form linkages – must oppose racism in order to challenge speciesism AND links of omission are
bad because we can’t be activists in all movements at the same time
Francione (Law Prof @ Rutgers, director of the Rutgers Animal Rights Law Clinic at Rutgers School of Law)
10
(Gary, Interview With Gary L. Francione, http://www.abolitionistapproach.com/media/pdf/vegan-sanctuary20100107.pdf)
I have for decades now been trying to link human rights and animal rights. In fact, the course that Anna Charlton and I
teach at Rutgers University is called “Human Rights and Animal Rights.” Speciesism is immoral because it is like
racism, sexism, heterosexism, etc. We cannot oppose speciesism without opposing these other
forms of discrimination. I am not saying that we have to be activists in all movements; no one has
that sort of time. But we should at least in our daily lives reject all discrimination. I am terribly disappointed that the
animal “movement” (I do not like using that term because I do not really think that any “movement” exists), particularly
PETA, uses sexism supposedly to promote animal rights. Apart from the fact that sexism is inherently objectionable, its
use makes no sense. The problem we are dealing with is the commodification of non humans; as long as
we commodify women, we are going to continue to commodify non humans. So the exploitation of
one group supposedly to help another is both morally and strategically problematic.
Voting against the Aff is the worst option – the perm’s process of criticism and revision is key
Adams 11 (Carol J., an American writer, feminist, and animal rights advocate, July 2011, “Sister Species:
Women, Animals, and Social Justice”(p18))
But activists must not work against one another in their single-minded dedication to one specific cause.
Those fighting to protect horses must not eat cattle. We do well to specialize, we do not do so well if we specialize
without knowledge of interlocking oppressions—or without the application of that knowledge.¶ Audre
Lorde notes that "the quality of Light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live,
and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives" ("From" 583). I have found this to be very true:
"Deep personal and social change requires self-criticism" (Birkeland 49). Social justice advocates must
"revision"—look again—"in order to correct or improve" advocacy and our lives more generally
(Adams, "Introduction" 5). We must all "reach down into that deep place of knowledge" so that we can
"touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears," and thereby
expand the circle of justice (Lorde, "From" 588). All of us have more to learn about interlocking oppressions. I have
just begun this somewhat startling journey, and I am unhappy to remember where I stood just a few years ago. I have been
part of the problem—I still am, but I am working for change within, and I know that this inner change will enhance my
ability to invite change to the larger world. Martin Luther King found that a "[sjhallow understanding from people of good
will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will" {M. King 404). Those who seek greater
justice in our world need to work toward a deeper understanding of oppressions. Activists need to
develop the kind of understanding that will lead to a lifestyle—a way of being—that works against all
oppressions.
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Perm (Long) + A2: Root Cause
Must do an analysis of the prison – inmates are not dehumanized, they are deanimalized. They are
reduced to a social status below that of some non-human animals
Guenther (Associate Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt) 13
(Lisa, Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives, pg. 139-140)
In her 2002 paper "From the Convict Lease System to the Super- Max Prison," Angela Davis argues that the format for
current penal policies, based 011 control rather than rehabilitation, is not the lofty humanitarianism of the early penitentiary
system but the control of black bodies under slavery: the domination of disposable nonpersons or quasi persons (Davis
2002). As I argued in chapter 3, slaves occu- pied a curious position in U.S. law: they were considered property with
respect to civil rights, but persons with respect to criminal responsibil- ity. During slavery, slaves were already treated
as domestic animals; they were bought, sold, inspected, and put to work according to the demands of the slave owner
and overseer. After the abolition of slavery, the link between African American personhood and
criminality was not dissolved but, rather, intensified by the convict lease system, which targeted freed
slaves with disproportionately harsh sentences for the petty theft of food and farm animals. For example, in 1876,
Mississippi passed what was known as the Pig Law, which granted sentences of up to five years in a state prison for the
theft of a farm animal or any other property worth ten dollars or more (Oshinsky 1996,40-41). The convict lease
system perpetuated and exacerbated this simultaneous dehumanization and racialization, treating
prisoners not jut as animals but as less than animals. A 1909 legislative committee in Texas reported
that lithe life of a [Texas] convict is not as valuable in the eyes of the sergeants and guards and
contractors as that of a dog" (quoted in Oshinsky 1996,61). A 1934 critique of the convict lease y tern com- pared the
iron cages in which convicts were transported to "those used for circus animals," except that these
cages "did not have the privacy which would be given to a respectable lion, tiger or bear" (quoted in
Oshinsky 1996, 59). Even the bodily wastes-and the wasted bodies- of prisoners were appropriated and sold for profit under
the convict lease system:
In 1871,state convicts were laying track and mining coal from Memphis to Knoxville. Each morning their urine was
collected and sold to local tanneries by the barrel. When they died, their unclaimed bodies were purchased by the Medical
School at Nashville for the students to practice on. (Oshinsky 1996,58)
I argue that under conditions like these, prisoners are not only de-humanized, they are de-animalized. Not
only their human dignity but also their dignity as living beings is violated and exploited. They are treated not
only as laborers with productive capacities to be exploited but also as natural resources with material bodies to be exploited
for their own sake, once their productive capacities have been exhausted.
While the last convict lease system was abolished in 1928, the exploitation of prison labor continues today. In
U.S. federal prisons and in most state prisons, all able-bodied prisoners are required to work. They are paid between $0.17
and $1.15 per hour to produce goods such as furniture, clothing, and license plates and to run such day-to-day operations of
the prison as food services, laundry, and even book- keeping. State prisoners in Georgia and Texas do not have the right to
be paid anything for their work (E. Brown 2010). In many states, private corporation such as Victoria's Secret, Starbucks,
Nintendo, Microsoft, and Eddie Bauer contract prison labor to perform light industrial work, paying inmate between $1 and
$3 an hour (Prison Policy Initiative 2003; S hwartzapfel 2009). But labor is not the only resource exploited by the current
prison industrial complex; the sheer existence of prisoners constitutes a source of profit for private prison corporations that
receive government contracts to manage and maintain pri oncrs.Jn her discu sion of the connections between the convict
lease system and the current prison industrial complex, Angela Davis qu tes teven Donzinger's 1996 report The Real War
on Crime:
In the criminal justice field, the raw material is prisoners, and industry will do what is neessary to guarantee a steady
supply. For the supply of prisoners to grow, criminal justice policies must ensure a sufficient number of incarcerated
Americans regardless of whether crime is rising or the incarceration is necessary. (Quoted in Davis 2002, 68)
Davis argues that to the extent that "black male bodies are considered dispensable," they are targeted for
exploitation as raw material for the prison industrial complex (2002, 69)."
A Washington State prison officer interviewed by Lorna Rhodes confirms this pattern when he compares the intake of new
prisoners to the task of receiving merchandise in a warehouse: "We are just like the guys who work loading docks-we're
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trying to move stuff" (quoted in Rhodes 2004, 101). Mark Medley, a maximum-security inmate at the Maryland
Penitentiary, argues that prisoners are moved into different cells as part of a managerial plan rather than [or the sake of
rehabilita- tion or even security: "It's just that they have to liquidate their inven- tory as a matter of storage space" (Baxter et
al. 2005, 215). And Laura Whitehorn, a political prisoner who spent fourteen years behind bars for her alleged involvement
in the Resistance Conspiracy case, agrees: " The overcrowding means that people are treated like problems and
like baggage" (Buck and Whitehorn 2005, 26l)."
Maybe could be a new card here 141-2
It is against this background of simultaneous dehumanization and de-animalization that the inmates of Attica and Georgia
both invoke and refuse their treatment as animals and as slaves. Not only are prisoners treated as less than human
in the current prison industrial com- plex, but they are also treated as less than animal; they are reduced
to raw material for incarceration, physical mechanisms to be fed, worked, and controlled for profit. As I will
demonstrate in the next section, this is a condition that human prisoners share with nonhuman animals in the
Current animal industrial complex. Even animals are treated as less than animals in laboratories and
factory farms. They are treated as meat to be harvested and flesh to be experimented upon; they are confined to
warehouse-like conditions where they cannot move freely or perform the most minimal gestures proper to their species;
they are stocked and exchanged for profit, then dumped when global economic conditions make it no longer lucrative to
maintain them.
The de-animalization of animal life is a condition that nonhuman animals share with many human
animals caught in the prison indus- trial complex-particularly with those who have been racialized as
black or brown and as more closely associated with nonhuman animality in the context of U.S. white supremacy.
Allen Hornblum has reconstructed the details of medical experimentation on prisoners, most of whom were African
American at Philadelphia's Holmesburg Prison [rom the 1940s to 1974.The skin on their backs was marked off
with a grid for the testing of everything from skin creams, perfumes, and detergents to radioactive
isotopes, dioxin, and chemical warfare agents. While participants were paid a minimal amount for their services,
they were not informed of the health risks or the pain they might undergo. Participants experienced what many nonhuman
animals experience in similar experimental situations: blisters, rashes, skin-peeling, permanent scarring, chronic illness, and
premature death. And they were perceived, as nonhuman animals are often perceived, as de-animalized flesh by the chief
experimenter, Dr. Albert M. Klingman, who recalled his first visit to the prison in this way: "All I saw
before me was acres of skin. It was like a farmer seeing a fertile field for the first time' (quoted in
Hornblum 1998, xx).
What is it like to be the target not only of dehumanization but of a de-animalizing treatment that
reduces one's corporeal existence to “acres of skin" or a mechanism to be reprogrammed? Denise Jones,
an African American inmate at Valley State Prison for Women, ana- lyzes her own situation in this way in a 1997 interview
with Cassandra Shaylor: "They treat us like animals. No, you wouldn't treat an animal the way they do us here. I
am sure they don't treat their dogs the way they treat us" (quoted in Shaylor 1998, 396; see also Dayan 200S,
72). By simultaneously rejecting her abusive treatment by the guards and distinguishing this treatment from that accorded
to a dog or other animals, Jones both acknowledges the guards' logic of dehumanization and suggests that something else
is going on here, something that is not quite captured by the phrase "treated like an animal." On the one
hand, (black) prisoners are reduced to animals and so dehumanized; but on the other hand, precisely as
dehumanized animals in a context that reduces most nonhuman animals t resources for human
consumption and profit, while promoting others to the status of pets or honorary humans, (black)
prisoners are further de-animalized, treated worse than (only the most privileged, anthropomorphized)
animals.
In his 1991 prison memoir 1/1tlte Belly oftlte Beast, Chinese-Irish prisoner]a k Henry Abbott compares his own
experience of intensive confinement to a radical dehumanization and reification, to the point of ontological
violence:
It is only a matter of time, if you love life too mu h or fear violence too much, before you become u thi"~, no longer a man
Vou nn end up scurrying about like a rodent, lending yourself to every conceivable low, evil, degrading act anyone tells
you to do-either pigs or prisoners. There is a boundary in each man .... But when a man goes beyond the last essential
boundary, it alters his ontology, so to speak. (67)
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For Abbott, the
prison system is not just degrading or dehumanizing; it is a violence against the
ontological structure of life itself. Abbott expresses this violence in an extraordinary statement: " Solitary
confinement in prison can alter the ontological makeup of a stone" (45). Solitary confinement does not simply
dehumanize prisoners, cutting them off from the social relations that sustain them as social animals, and it does not only
alter their very existence as living beings, pushing them beyond the boundary between humans and
animals toward the nonliving status of a stone; solitary confinement is a violence so radical that it
could even alter the ontology of a stone.
What does it mean for one's ontology to be altered by the experience of intensive incarceration? In what sense might one be
both reduced to the status of an animal and reduced to something less than an animal, a piece of meat or even a stone) an
inanimate token to be exchanged for profit? How are even prison guards and wardens reduced to the status of
"pigs" in relation to the prisoners they keep under conditions of dehumanization and de-animalization?
What is an animal, such that it could be de-animalized by intensive confinement, and in what sense
does the animality of human beings expose those who are already structurally dehumanized by racism
to a further de-animalization?
And to what extent can the discourse of specifically human rights help us address the complicity between dehumanization
and de-animaliza-tion in the context of the U.S. prison system?
In order to understand how inmates are both
dehumanized and de-animalized through intensive confinement in ioday's control prisons, we need to
compare the dynamics of the prison industrial complex and the animal industrial complex, reflecting
on the ontology of animal life that thi abusive treatment implies, even while reducing the animal to
what it is not.
Alt  Racism
Only perm solves – Failure to attack the carceral regime means the alt shifts animals above humans on
the ontological hierarchy and ensures eradication
Pugliese (an Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney) 13
(Joseph, State Violence and the Execution of Law, pg. 97)
Precisely because everything is always already at stake in the continued mobiliza- tion of biopolitical caesurae, the
seeking of new articulations of life that will be valorized as more ‘authentic’ will merely reproduce the
machine without having eliminated its capacity for violence as ensured by the re-articulation of the biopolitical cut. Looking back at the biopolitical infrastructure of the Nazi state, one can clearly see the
imbrication of ecology, the regime of animal rights, and the racio- speciesist branding of Jews as
collectively exemplifying the dangers of seeking more ‘authentic’ articulations of animals and humans
that are predicated on the biopolitical division and its capacity for inversions and recalibrations while
leaving the violent order of the biopolitical regime intact. The Nazis effectively called for a more ‘authentic’
relation to nature (‘blood and soil’) that was buttressed by animal rights (Reich Animal Protection laws) and the rights of
nature (Reich Law on the Protection of Nature).22 Animals and nature were thereby recalibrated up the
speciesist scale at the expense of Jews. Deploying the violence of racio- speciesism, the Nazis animalized
Jews as ‘rats,’ ‘vermin’ and other low life forms, situated them at the bottom of the biopolitical
hierarchy, and then proceeded to enact the very cruelty and exterminatory violence (cattle car transport,
herding in camps replicating stockyards and the industrialized killing procedures of animal slaughterhouses) that they
had outlawed against animals. The Nazi state also exemplifies the manner in which the regime of (animal)
rights can be perfectly accommodated within the most genocidal forms of state violence. This is so,
precisely because the prior concept of human rights is always-already founded on the human/animal biopolitical caesura
and its asymmetry of power – otherwise the very categories of ‘human’ and ‘animal’ rights would fail to achieve cultural
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intelligibility. The paternal distribution of rights to non-human animals still pivots on this asymmetrical
priori. Even as it extends its seemingly benevolent regime of rights and protections to animals, rights discourse, by
disavowing this violent a priori, merely reproduces the species war by other means.
a
Colorblindness DA
The alternative’s color blindness means it fails and simply shifts violence from animals onto black and
brown humans
Harper (PhD Candidate at University of California- Davis in the field of Critical Food Geographies) 10
(Amie Breeze, Race as a “Feeble Matter” in Veganism: Interrogating whiteness, geopolitical privilege, and
consumption philosophy of “cruelty-free” products, Journal for Critical Animal Studies, Volume VIII, Issue 3,
2010, http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/JCAS-Special-Issue-Women-of-ColorNovember-FINAL-2010.pdf)
The combination of images of white people being the animal rights activists coupled with images that
advocate vegan products with sugar and chocolate that are unfairly harvested by the labor of non-white
racialized people embodies, for me, a contradictory ethos of who practices veganism and how. What is
odd to me is that this is the praxis behind "cruelty-free eating" (hence, the name of the Vegan Outreach starter guide).
Throughout the entire starter guide, there is not one mention of the avoidance of vegan products not designated as fair
trade, sweatshop-free, or free of current day human slavery practices. Therefore, what type of geopolitically racialized
"ethics" are being produced and disseminated? In a 2005 interview with Satya Magazine, Sheila Hamanaka and Tracy
Basile write: It‘s one thing for a white person to pass out vegan flyers. But attempts by white AR activists to set
the agenda for other cultures bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the historical pattern of
suppression by dominant nations. Instead of exporting "democracy," AR activists are exporting their cultural
concepts of the proper relationship between human and nonhuman animals (Hamanaka 2005). In the case of the Vegan
Outreach guide, is a white racialized, middle-classed neoliberal USA concept of proper vegan products being exported? Is
this a consequence of white epistemologies of ignorance, "post-racialness," and modernity? Of practicing AR/VEG
activism without fully realizing how all oppressions are interlocking (Harper, 2010; Smith, 2007), and that it may be just
as "cruel" to eat animals as it is to eat food and textiles produced by enslaved humans on a cocoa, sugar, or cotton
plantations?
Once again, I am not criticizing AR/VEG people in the USA who consume products such as Silk or Soy Delicious. My
critique is that there are those (white and non-white) who believe "race is a feeble matter" in animal rights
activism. Such people are producing and practicing their own "post-racial" epistemologies and praxis
of AR/VEG "cruelty free ethics." Simultaneously, such "post-racial" approaches ignore dependence on the
exploited labor of non-white racialized minorities living outside of the USA, who are producing
materials for vegan products, such as those harvesting sugar in the Dominican Republic. The USA has a major
dependence on cane sugar from the Dominican Republic. A dependence that ends up in vegan food products, many of
these tasty vegan treats are not labeled as being free of human cruelty practices.
In Dominican Republic, Uncle Tom‘s Cabin never did disappear. Close to private luxury resort beaches, hidden by an
impenetrable curtain of sugar cane, there are wooden insalubrious barracks grouped in Bateys. These improvised
villages, with no water, no electricity, shelter [black] Haitian families. After you enter the Bateys, you cannot escape its
misery: men work until exhaustion in the sugar cane plantation, women try to ensure their families‘ survival, children born
from Haitian parents are condemned to be slaves themselves.
Each year, approximately 20,000 Haitians cross the border into the Dominican Republic to work on
sugar cane plantations, whereupon they are subject to forced labor, restrictions of freedom,
inadequate living environments and dangerous working conditions. The U.S. is the largest consumer of
Dominican Republic sugar (Gautier, 2007). Once again, I am not criticizing the choice to consume products made from
exploitative labor by non-white racialized people in the global South. My concern is the impact of certain AR/VEG
people‘s denial and/or ignorance of the fact that "race matters", all while wearing an unfair trade cotton tee
shirt with pro-animal rights or pro veganism imagery on it.
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Much of the global supply of cotton, a vegan alternative to animal based fibers, is harvested through
the forced labor of the Uzbekistani people (Grabka, 2007). Children are not exempt from this abominable practice
of slavery-like labor. "In October 2004, a minister admitted that at least 44,000 pupils and students were harvesting the
cotton [in Uzbekistan]" (Grabka, 2007). Unless the "animal cruelty free" cotton sweater has a label that indicates it is
sourced through a fair trade entity and is sweatshop free, there is no guarantee that the garment is free of human
suffering and/or slavery. Once again, the people involved in unfair cotton labor are not white racialized and/or class
privileged people living in the USA (Grabka, 2007). This is no "feeble matter."
A2: Speciesm Root Cause
Detainee are repeatedly placed lower than non-human animals – all degradation is contingent and there
isn’t a root cause
Pugliese (an Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney) 13
(Joseph, State Violence and the Execution of Law, pg. 94-5)
Whereas in Disneyland the animal characters (mice, dogs, ducks) are stripped of the alterity of their animality and are
domesticated and anthropomorphized so as to create a magical affinity between humans and animals, in Guantánamo the
human prisoners are, through the biopolitical caesura, animalized in order to mark their preclusion from the legal category
of human-rights-bearing person. This is graphically documented in the WikiLeaked interrogation log of
Detainee 063 (subsequently revealed to be Mohammed al-Qahtani, whose charges were dropped due to the fact he was
tortured, yet who still remains imprisoned at Guantánamo), in which the Guantánamo guards clinically record the following
entries:
1115: . . . Told detainee that a dog is held in higher esteem because dogs know right from wrong and know to
protect innocent people from bad people. Began teaching the detainee lessons such as stay, come, and bark to
elevate his social status up to that of a dog. Detainee became very agitated.
Haunting my reading of this log entry was the Nazi command issued by guards to their dogs in order to attack the prisoners
of the concentration camps: ‘Man, bite the dog.’8 A series of racio-speciesist inversions scores the entirety of
the al-Qahtani interrogation log:
1300: . . . Dog tricks continued and detainee stated he should be treated like a man . . . Interrogator showed photos of 9/11
victims and told detainees he should bark happy for these people. Interrogator showed photos of Al Qaida terrorists and told
detainee he should growl at these people.9
Whereas in Disneyland the anthropomorphized animals have free run of the theme park, in Guantánamo the animalized
humans are, in Suvendrini Perera’s words, imprisoned in ‘exposed chain-link pens more reminiscent of cages than cells.’10
This is a penalogical practice that has been exported from such domestic US supermax prisons as Pelican Bay State Prison,
California, where prisoners have been locked naked in outdoor ‘cages made of woven metal mesh the size of a telephone
booth . . . even during inclement weather . . . as if animals in a zoo.’11 A former detainee, James Yee (a chaplain at
Guantánamo who was wrongly accused of conspiracy and imprisoned in the very prison in which he had worked before
being exonerated and released) describes his prison as ‘like an outdoor cattle stable.’12 Mohammed al-Qahtani documents
how he was ‘forced to bark like a dog, wear a leash like a dog . . . and pick up piles of trash with his hands cuffed while
being called “pig.”’13 Murat Kurnaz, imprisoned for five years in Guantánamo, only to be found innocent and eventually
released, writes: ‘An animal has more space in its cage in a zoo and is given more to eat. I can hardly put into
words what that actually means.’14 This series of inversions, enabled by the violent logic of the biopolitical
caesura, is perhaps most graphically evidenced by the fact that while the detainees at Guantánamo
are denied basic legal rights, the iguanas that inhabit the camp are protected by US law under
the Endangered Species Act. As a technology of power predicated on the hierarchization of life, the biopolitical
caesura recalibrates and assigns its subjects along this hierarchy according to the exigencies of the regime that deploys it. In
this case, the US government has deemed Guantánamo’s detainees to be lower forms of life than the reptiles that inhabit the
island. Mahvish Rukhsana Khan, a lawyer who volun- teered to translate for the prisoners, remarks: ‘The prisoners at
Guantánamo are entitled to fewer protections than the iguanas.’15 During the interrogation sessions at Camp X-Ray,
interrogators reflexively invoke the biopolitical caesura in order to underscore the detainee’s exclusion from the category of
‘the human’:
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0100: Detainee began to cry during pride and ego down . . . He was reminded that he was less than human and that animals
had more freedom and love than he does. He was taken outside to see a family of banana rats. The banana rats were moving
around freely, playing, eating, showing concern for one another. Detainee was compared to the family of
banana rats and reinforced that they had more love, freedom, and concern than he had. Detainee
began to cry during the comparison.16
Alt Fails – Racism
Exclusive focus on non-human oppression covers up racial violence
Harper 13, Amie Lousie, Doctor of Philosophy in Geography at the University of California Davis, “Vegan
Consciousness and the Commodity Chain: On the Neoliberal, Afrocentric, and Decolonial Politics of ‘CrueltyFree,’” pgs 31-33
NAFTA was conceived in order to create the world’s largest free market, integrating the economic sectors of U.S.A.,
Canada, and Mexico. Unfortunately, what NAFTA did was also 31 allow market interests to trump basic human rights of
already vulnerable populations, such as indigenous Mexican laborers. NAFTA represents how global industry
employs racist and sexist stereotypes about females to maximize profit. There is an institutionalized belief
that females make better tomato harvesters and maquiladora laborers (for tomato packing plants). This is not only
sexual division of labor; it is racialized-sexual division of labor. Indigenous females are hired to work
outside in the fields, harvesting the tomatoes. However, none of the sorters or packers is Indigenous but
rather are lighter-skinned mestizas (Barndt 2002). Already using Mexico’s racist, colorist, and sexist beliefs about
Indigenous people (Morris 2001), tomato corporations use the trope that Indigenous women are ‘closer to the
land’ and nature. Hence, these women “should” be able to endure tremendous amounts of sun
exposure, as well as pesticides sprayed onto the fields. They are also paid ten times less than the mestizas
in the packing plants. Housed in deplorable huts, without water, electricity, stores, or transport, they come as families to
work in the fields and move from harvest to harvest. The women bear the brunt of this lack of infrastructure-cooking and
washing, taking care of kids (even while working in the field), and dealing with their own exhaustion and the poor health
engendered by the conditions of extreme poverty. Because their own regions offer even less opportunity, they are forced to
suffer these jobs and the racist treatment built into them. (Barndt 2002: 87) NAFTA and the WTO are newer and everexpanding mechanisms to help achieve global economic power for the USA, which began to cast transnational political
economic issues in a newly racialized mold. This process reached new heights at the 2001 UN World Conference on
Racism in Durban, South Africa, where the US did its best to undermine and marginalize demand for global racial justice.
(Winant 2009: 37) Within the socio-historical context of European and American
colonialism/imperialism, to undermine global racial justice means that it is still ‘ethical’ to enslave and
exploit a highly 32 disproportionate number of non-white people of the global South for the economic
and social interests of a largely modern white middle to upper class global North and their corporate
interests (Grosfoguel and Cervantes-Rodriguez 2002). NAFTA is an example of sustaining an underlying narrative that
there are permissible spaces of racialized-gendered suffering. Simultaneously, the vegan cheese pizzas that the VSG
advocates, suggests that it is not acceptable that cows suffer in "farming spaces" to produce milk for cheese
(hence, the creation of vegan cheese for the pizza). Advocating vegan cheese pizza as "cruelty-free" allows
PETA and its followers to be consciously anti-speciesist. Simultaneously, they are unconsciously
uncritical, or unaware, of the racist spaces and economic policies (i.e. NAFTA) that make so many
vegan commodities like tomatoes possible. It is noteworthy that the VSG or PETA.org do not provide one or
two lines that ask readers to ask food companies about the quality of life of the people who harvest
their ingredients: they are only encouraged to think about the quality of life of animals.
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Alt is coopted by neoliberalism – shifts oppression onto the racialized poor
Harper 13, Amie Lousie, Doctor of Philosophy in Geography at the University of California Davis, “Vegan
Consciousness and the Commodity Chain: On the Neoliberal, Afrocentric, and Decolonial Politics of ‘CrueltyFree,’” Pgs 41-42
The latest supporter of Turtle Mountain products is the Brees family. Pictured on the website is NFL quarterback Drew
Brees. Brees is holding nine different types of So Delicious® products as his wife feeds him a chocolate covered frozen
treat. Turtle Mountain writes, “The donation amount is completely uncapped. So indulge away! The more delicious, creamy
‘ice cream’ you bite, lick & scoop, the more good we do together!” (So Delicious 2012). Hence, one is receiving double
satisfaction from the taste of the dessert and by “knowing” that their dollars are supporting a “good cause.” To encourage
one to buy even more Turtle Mountain products, 0.75% of net sales will go to the Brees family’s BreesDream foundation
charity. Below is how Turtle Mountain describes their products: At Turtle Mountain, LLC we are keenly aware of how
foods affect a person’s well-being and quality of life. As we listen to the needs and desires of our customers, we have
learned that the success of our products is as much about what they do not contain as it is about what they do contain. To
this end, we use only the highest quality ingredients, and employ the most stringent testing, production, and packaging
methods. (So Delicious 2012b) If they are keenly away of how food affects a person’s well-being, what “person” are they
referring to? Why isn’t the consumer educated about the “needs and desire of our commodity chain
laborers” or the health of the communities from which these ingredients are extracted, harvested,
and commoditized? The answer lies in geopolitical consumer privilege: USA, Korea, and Canada are where
their products are sold. The ‘person’ that truly matters is a consumer who dictates what the neoliberal
market should provide for them. The “well-being” and “quality of life” of the harvesters of ingredients
that have long been associated with racialized slavery (sugar, vanilla, coffee and cocoa beans) are completely
invisible on this PETA promoted website (as well as in the VSG itself). Now, this must not be interpreted as Turtle
Mountain not knowing or caring about the true roots of these ingredients. The email I received from customer service
implies that they are aware of issues of slavery in cocoa harvesting. However, the absence of these
images and information on Turtle Mountain’s site maintains the mythology of ethical purity that
buying their product creates. Even though PETA does promote itself to be dedicated to and making
transparent how animals suffer for human gratification, they don’t educate their supporters to think
what “cruelty- free” means within a neo-liberalist consumer-capitalist economy. As a matter of fact,
PETA’s Vegan Shopping Guide, pedagogy of “cruelty-free” consumption, simultaneously succeeds and fails at what PETA
set out to do: to no longer stay silent about cruelty. Because the guide focuses on the vantage point of the consumer as a
potential animal rights activist, the “winner” ends up being the consumer. He or she is “educated” that
buying vegan products equals saving the cow, pig, chicken, or fish. This is true, as drinking coconut milk over
cow milk means the cow has been spared. However, the guide fails the humans who harvests the vegan ingredients found in
the products promoted by VSG. By not providing any information to the “winner” about the commodity
chain, VSG signifies how their post-humanist approach to veganism actually masks a post-racial
consumer culture invested in not really “knowing” where products originate. A by-product of
neoliberalism, post-racialism not only epitomizes PETA and its VSG, it also 
maintains structured ignorance about the significance of race and whiteness as organizing principles of
the commodity chain.
The alternative is a type of white logic that assumes that all human beings have historically had the same
access to “humanity” and excludes anti-black dehumanization
Harper 13, Amie Lousie, Doctor of Philosophy in Geography at the University of California Davis, “Vegan
Consciousness and the Commodity Chain: On the Neoliberal, Afrocentric, and Decolonial Politics of ‘CrueltyFree,’” Pgs 46-48
launched an extremely controversial campaign. Title “Animal Liberation” the campaign
paralleled the root causes of human suffering to the same causes as non-human animal suffering: "othering," domination,
In 2005, PETA
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power, and discrimination (Bailey 2007:39). Their campaign did not only rely on text to convey their message, it
employed images of Jewish Holocaust, Native American genocide, and anti-Black racism. Some of
these images used were that of Black people in slavery and Black men having been lynched (Bailey 2007).
In response to the NAACP who found the use of the images to be racist (Harris 2009), Newkirk responded, "We’re all
animals, so get over it" (Kim 2011). Though a post-humanist oriented response, the desire to have all
humans embrace “we are all animals”, versus ‘human’, is a type of ‘white logic.’ Newkirk’s response
assumed that every human being has had the same access to, and history of, “humanity” as the
collectivity of white and middle class human beings in the USA (Deckha 2012). Since European
colonialism, to undergo the process of white racial formation has meant that whites will be treated as
‘human’; that they are not an ‘animal’ (Collins 2004 and 2006; Harris 2009; Deckha 2012). However, Black people in the USA
collectively equate being referred to or compared to an animal as ‘dehumanizing.’ During colonialism, ‘animal’ and ‘subhuman’
were used to describe and justify the exploitation of Africans for slavery (Bailey 2007; Harris 2009). Decades
of such colonial abuse have influenced a collective Black consciousness to be "on edge," "enraged," and
always fighting to prove to whites that Blacks are human (Fanon 2004; Harris 2009). Animals - and for African Americans,
especially primates - activate, I think, this urge to disassociate on the part of people of color, based on the intuition that our dignity is always provisional.
PETA's animal liberation campaigns, from this vantage point, are "white." They assume a comfort in associating
oneself with animals and animal issues that people of color can only assume with difficulty. (Harris 2009:
27) PETA’s 2005 response wasn’t just a white racialized vantage point; it was a discourse of rhetorical whiteness or ‘white
talk’ (Frankenberg 1993; Warren 2003). As such, PETA "functions as a discourse, a fluid sea of values, beliefs, and
practices that individuals draw upon, consciously and unconsciously, to exert cultural power and
maintain a racial system that keeps whiteness safe as the cultural center" (Warren 2003:22). Post-humanism masks
such a racial system that keeps neoliberal whiteness safe as the [invisible] global cultural center. Those, such as the NAACP, who seek to expose the white
standpoint of PETA, are socially placed as 'impure' thinkers because they chose to expose this rhetorical body of whiteness that underlies PETA’s
activism. PETA’s
response to the NAACP also reflects popular and contemporary views about racism in
the USA: now that we live in a post-Civil Rights era, race and racism are no longer significant
impediments for non-white people (Goldberg 2008; 2012). A manifestation of neoliberalism, such popular
conceptions of race are referred to as ‘post-racial’ or ‘post- racialism.’ The problem that arises from such
dominant conceptions of 21st century racial dynamics, is that if anyone contests that USA is a ‘post-racial’ state, they are
accused of using race as an excuse; they are ‘playing the race card’ (see Bonilla-Silva 2006; Gallagher 2008; Goldberg 2009). In a sense,
Newkirk’s response was not just post-humanist; it was a ‘post-racial’ one. ‘Animals’ could have easily been replaced with:
“We are all ‘post-racial’, so get over it.” This is no surprise, as the canon of post-humanism ignores the
significance of race, colonialism, and whiteness on how one comes to their animal liberation
consciousness (Deckha 2012).
Perm Solves – Revision Good
Only the perm is able to solve multiple axis of oppression
Kemmerer (associate professor of philosophy and religions at Montana State University Billings) 11
(Lisa, Introduction to in Sister Species: Women, Animals, And Social Justice, eds. Lisa Kemmerer, pg. 38)
Activists quickly learn that it is impossible to be thoroughly educated on all relevant matters; we cannot "address
everything fully at the same time" (Lee 48). By definition, we cannot simultaneously offer an all-out battle against sexism
and racism, or prostitution and marital rape, or the veal industry and the egg industry. By definition, an all-out battle
requires exclusive attention, and most activists tend to specialize, to launch an all-out attack on just one
aspect of the many linked oppressions. Specialization enhances effectiveness, so activists tend to specialize.
But activists must not work against one another in their single-minded dedication to one specific cause.
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[Emphasis Original – DQ] Those fighting to protect horses must not eat cattle. We d well to specialize, we do not do so
well if we specialize without knowledge of interlocking oppressions—or without the application of that knowledge.
Audre Lorde notes that "the quality of Light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we
live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives" ("From" 583). I have found this to be very
true: "Deep personal and social change requires self-criticism" (Birkeland 49). Social justice advocates must "revision"—
look again—"in order to correct or improve" advocacy and our lives more generally (Adams, "Introduction" 5). We must all
"reach down into that deep place of knowledge" so that we can "touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives
there. See whose face it wears," and thereby expand the circle of justice (Lorde, "From" 588). All of us have more to learn
about interlocking oppressions. I have just begun this somewhat startling journey, and I am unhappy to remember where I
stood just a few years ago. I have been part of the problem—I still am, but I am working for change within, and I know that
this inner change will enhance my ability to invite change to the larger world. Martin Luther King found that a "[sjhallow
understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will" {M.
King 404). Those who seek greater justice in our world need to work toward a deeper understanding of oppressions.
Activists need to develop the kind of understanding that will lead to a lifestyle—a way of being—that works against all
oppressions.
It is also important that each of us "be fully aware of the limitations of our specific agendas" {Lee 48).
This requires us to be open to change as a response to what other social justice activists say—
especially those advocating against parallel interlocking oppressions. We cannot end just one form of
oppression, so we need to be on board with other activists. If we are not, we doom social justice activists to
perpetually pulling up the innumerable shoots that spring from the very deep roots of
oppression. Furthermore, blindness to one's own privilege and ignorance of the struggles that others
face (in a homophobic, racist, ageist, ableist, sexist society) are major impediments to social justice
activism. Those who are privileged must give way so that others can take the lead, bringing new social justice concerns
and methods to the activist's table.
A2: Speciesism = Starting Point
All oppressions must be attacked at the same time – cant place one above others
Adams 11 (Carol J., an American writer, feminist, and animal rights advocate, July 2011, “Sister Species:
Women, Animals, and Social Justice”(p11))
Neither can activists afford to struggle against one group of "Not A" individuals while remaining
ignorant of other oppressed groups. While no one can speak for all who are oppressed, neither can
social justice advocates work from isolated corners, divided and fragmented, yet hoping to bring deep
and lasting change: The "liberation of all oppressed groups must be addressed simultaneously" (Gaard,
"Living" 5). Increasingly, groups of feminists are coming to see that the "struggle for women's
liberation is inextricably linked to abolition of all oppression" (Gruen 82). Indeed, many people have
come to understand that feminism cannot move forward without addressing other isms—especially isms
that are manifest within the ranks of feminist circles: "Racism, the belief in the inher- ent superiority of one race over all
others and thereby the right to dominance. Sexism, the belief in the inherent superiority of one sex over the other and
thereby the right to dominance. Ageism. Heterosexism. Elitism. Classism"¶ (Lorde, "Age" 527). Many social justice
activists—many feminists—continue to work against one form of oppression while feeding the flames
of another, without noticing that the blowtorch behind the flames must be turned off before we can
have any hope of putting out the resultant fires.
CASE ARGUMENTS: PRACTICE
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