TINSLEY NEGATIVE
AT: Black Queerness
Black Queerness necessitates presence of a black queer subject – their
representations and theoretical defense of black queerness always fails
Gill Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies @ UT-Austin 2012 Lyndon K.
“Situating Black, Situating Queer: Black Queer Diaspora Studies and the Art of Embodied
Listening” Transforming Anthropology 20.1 EBSCO
If a Black queer diasporic consciousness encourages the kinds of perspectival shifts that
permit different visions of queer possibility to emerge from the impermanent places Black
queer people inhabit and the fertile impermanence that inhabits Black queerness, then it
must not be satisfied with discursive treatments of Black queer subjects , Black queer
subjectivity or even the juridical, moral and theoretical contexts in which Black queers
find themselves. Black queer diaspora studies remains incomplete without the appearance
of Black queers not simply as representational abstractions, but as situated, speaking
subjects.4 This praxis of Black queer presence is intended to insistently foreground the
material reality, quotidian experiences and cultural products of Black queer peoples.
Anthropologist Gloria Wekker has offered her work as a call for rooted, contextconscious analyses of Black diasporic same-sex
community (as well as sexual practices) that do not trample blossoming specificities in the haste to cultivate a haphazard global samesex sexuality. And this call is at once part of a delicate symbiosis between a critique of transnational sexuality studies and a desire to
elaborate a very specifically situated sexual subjectivity. As Wekker explains, attending to this subjecthood demands that one listen
closely:
One possible fruitful way to open windows to local conceptions of personhood is to listen
carefully to what people have to say about themselves and what terms they use to make
these statements. Collecting and studying a contextualized lexicon of the self can provide an understanding of the ways
subjectivity is locally conceptualized. [Wekker 1997:333]
AT: Diaspora
The framing of the Black Atlantic is too restricted – overlooks questions of
imperialism and capitalism
Zeleza Prof of African Studies and History, Pennsylvania State University 2005 Paul Tiyambe
“Rewriting the African Diaspora: Beyond the Black Atlantic” African Affairs EBSCOhost
Notwithstanding its considerable insights and contributions to diaspora studies and cultural studies, The Black Atlantic has
been faulted for oversimplifying the African American experience and the role of Africa
and African connections in its collective memory, imagination and thought; for androcentrism in
privileging male figures in the construction of Atlantic blackness and modernity, despite its ritual gestures to gender; for
universalizing the racialized ‘minority’ experience of African Americans (in most Caribbean islands
African-descended people constitute the majority); for foreclosing the relationships and connections among the black diasporic
cultures themselves beyond the Anglophone world (the largest African diaspora population is in Brazil and speaks Portuguese) and
between them and African cultures; for
its postmodernist phobias against essentialism, real and
imaginary, strategic or slight, while at the same time desperately seeking a ‘black’, not a
‘white’, or ‘multicultural’ Atlantic; for its exclusionary epistemic cultural politics in its
Eurocentric excision and disdain for Africa; and for mystifying modernity as the primary object of black
Atlantic critique barring questions of imperialism and capitalism.4
It is somewhat ironic that The Black Atlantic, which constantly rails against the snobbery of
African American analytical exceptionalism and seeks to underscore the enlightenment that travel in Europe
bestowed upon the provincial horizons of W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, and other African American icons, should end up
being a monument to American self-referential conceit and myopia in its obsession with the
cultural inventions of the African American diaspora. This is a tribute as much to the
seductive power of African American expressive culture itself, including the very notions of
diaspora or blackness, as to the hegemony of US imperialism, on whose multinational
corporate wings it is marketed to the rest of the world, especially the Anglophone world and, in this case, the
British Isles.
AT: Diaspora - ext
Reject diaspora framing
Zeleza Prof of African Studies and History, Pennsylvania State University 2005 Paul Tiyambe
“Rewriting the African Diaspora: Beyond the Black Atlantic” African Affairs EBSCOhost
It is not easy, but we must try to transcend the discursive politics of the term ‘diaspora’, which has,
one author complains, ‘imposed a U.S. and English language-centered model of black identity on
the complex experiences of populations of African descent’.10 After all, the term ‘African
diaspora’ only emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, but African diasporas existed long before
then in different parts of the world, and African peoples were mobilized using other terms,
such as Pan-Africanism.11 Part of the difficulty is that many diaspora scholars, if they are
not already ethnocentric in thinking that the experiences of their chosen community are
representative of the African diaspora in its totality, are linguistically challenged, unversed in the
many languages, and hence the literatures and discourses, of the African diasporas in the
Americas, let alone in other parts of the world.
There are several conceptual difficulties in defining the African diaspora, indeed in defining
the term ‘diaspora’. Contemporary Anglophone theorizations — for I have not investigated the
discourses in other languages and intellectual traditions — of the term ‘diaspora’ tend to be preoccupied with
problematizing the relationship between diaspora and nation and the dualities or
multiplicities of diasporic identity or subjectivity, and they are inclined to be condemnatory
or celebratory of transnational mobility and hybridity.12 In many cases, the term ‘diaspora’ is
used in a fuzzy, ahistorical and uncritical way in which all manner of movements and
migrations between, and even within, countries are embraced in its generous conceptual
bosom, and no adequate attention is paid to the historical conditions and experiences that
produce diasporic communities and consciousness, or the lack thereof.
Focus on American diaspora is based on epistemic hegemony
Zeleza Prof of African Studies and History, Pennsylvania State University 2005 Paul Tiyambe
“Rewriting the African Diaspora: Beyond the Black Atlantic” African Affairs EBSCOhost
There have been numerous dispersals associated with African peoples over time. Colin
Palmer has identified at least six, three in prehistoric and ancient times (beginning with the great
exodus that began about 100,000 years ago from the continent to other continents), and three in modern times,
including those associated with the Indian Ocean slave trade to Asia, the Atlantic slave
trade to the Americas, and the contemporary movement of Africans and peoples of African
descent to various parts of the globe.18 Our tendency to privilege the modern diasporic
streams, especially the last two, is a tribute to the presentist orientation of much
contemporary scholarship and the epistemic and economic hegemony of the Euro-American
world system which spawned these diasporas and created what Tiffany Patterson and Robin Kelly call
‘global race and gender hierarchies’ within which African diasporas are situated and often
analyzed.19
No inherency – the American diaspora is complicated and explored now
Zeleza Prof of African Studies and History, Pennsylvania State University 2005 Paul Tiyambe
“Rewriting the African Diaspora: Beyond the Black Atlantic” African Affairs EBSCOhost
If the limited quantity and quality of information poses the main challenge in reconstructing the histories of African diasporas in the
Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean worlds, in the Atlantic world it is the sheer volume that is daunting. Yet, from
a global
perspective the historic African diaspora in the Atlantic is a lot easier to comprehend,
notwithstanding all its internal differentiations, because, despite Van Sertima’s assertion that some came before Columbus,37 it
was constructed in fairly recent times and was the product of the European slave trade and
subjected to forms of exploitation and racialization as in perhaps no other slave system
before. Studies of the Atlantic diasporas are often encrusted in the linguistic and national
mythologies of the various countries that make up the region.
As indicated earlier, the diaspora in the United States often stands at the pedestal, the one against
which to judge the identities of the other diasporas. The fact that Brazil has the largest
African diaspora in the Americas, indeed in the world, is often lost in the clamour of
exceptionalisms, of America’s Anglo-Saxon multiculturalism and Brazil’s lusotropical ‘racial democracy’. The relative
overabundance of knowledge about the African American diaspora is in part a product of the staggering size of the American
university system and in part a reflection of the successes and failures of the civil rights movement.
IDENTITY TURNS
Turn – Essentialism  Disciplinary Power
Turn – the politicization of identity requires categorization – generates
disciplinary regimes which neutralize differences within identity categories and
reinscribes relations of domination
Brown, 1995 (Wendy, Professor of Political Science and Rhetoric at UC-Berkeley, States of
Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity, published by Princeton UP, p. 65-66)
Contemporary politicized identity is also potentially reiterative of regulatory,¶ disciplinary society
in its configuration of a disciplinary subject.¶ It is both produced by and potentially accelerates the
production of that¶ aspect of disciplinary society which "ceaselessly characterizes, classifies,¶ and
specializes," which works through "surveillance, continuous registration,¶ perpetual assessment,
and classification," through a social machinery¶ "that is both immense and minute. "19 An example from
the¶ world of local politics makes clear politicized identity's imbrication in ¶ disciplinary power, as well as the way in which, as
Foucault reminds us,¶ disciplinary power "infiltrates" rather than replaces liberal juridical¶ modalities. 20¶ Recently, the city council of
my town reviewed an ordinance, devised¶ and promulgated by a broad coalition of identity-based political groups,¶ which aimed to
ban discrimination in employment, housing, and public¶ accommodations on the basis of "sexual orientation, transsexuality, age,¶
height, weight, personal appearance, physical characteristics, race, color,¶ creed, religion, national origin, ancestry, disability, marital
status, sex, or¶ gender. "21 Here is a perfect instance of the universal juridical ideal of¶ liberalism and the normalizing principle of
disciplinary regimes conjoined¶ and taken up within the discourse of politicized identity. This¶ ordinance-variously called the "purple
hair ordinance" or the "ugly ordinance" by state and national news media-aims to count every difference¶ as no difference, as part of
the seamless whole, but also to count¶ every potentially subversive rejection of culturally enforced norms as¶ themselves normal, as
normalizable, and as normativizable through law.¶ Indeed, through the definitional, procedural, and remedies
sections of¶ this ordinance (e.g., "sexual orientation shall mean known or assumed¶ homosexuality, heterosexuality, or bisexuality")
persons are reduced to¶ observable social attributes and practices defined empirically,
positivistically,¶ as if their existence were intrinsic and factual, rather than¶ effects of discursive
and institutional power; and these positivist definitions¶ of persons as their attributes and practices
are written into law,¶ ensuring that persons describable according to them will now become¶
regulated through them. Bentham couldn't have done it better. Indeed,¶ here is a perfect instance of how the language of
recognition becomes the¶ language of unfreedom, how articulation in language, in the context of¶ liberal and
disciplinary discourse, becomes a vehicle of subordination¶ through individualization,
normalization, and regulation, even as it¶ strives to produce visibility and acceptance. Here, also, is a
perfect instance¶ of the way in which "differences" that are the effects of social¶ power are neutralized
through their articulation as attributes and their¶ circulation through liberal administrative
discourse: what do we make of¶ a document that renders as juridical equivalents the denial of employment¶ to an African
American, an obese woman, and a white middleclass¶ youth festooned with tattoos, a pierced tongue, and fuchsia hair?
Disciplinary power is coercive and violent – causes people to internalize their
self-worth solely in terms of their productive capacities
Foucault, 1975 (Michel, Discipline and Punish – Second Vintage Books Edition, 1995, p.
152-153)
4. The body-object articulation. Discipline
defines each of the relations that the body must have with the
object that it manipulates. Between them, it outlines a meticulous meshing. ‘Bring the weapon forward. In three stages. Raise the
rifle with the right hand, bringing it close to the body so as to hold it perpendicular with the right knee, the end of the barrel at the eye
level, grasping it by striking it with the right hand, the arm held close to the body at waist height. At the second stage, bring the rifle in
front of you with the left hand, the barrel in the middle between the two eyes, vertical, the right hand grasping it at the small of the
butt, the arm outstretched, the trigger-guard resting on the first finger, the left hand at the height of the notch, the thumb lying along
the barrel against the moulding. At the third stage, let go of the rifle with the left hand, which falls along the thigh, raising the rifle
with the right hand, the lock outwards and opposite the chest, the right arm half flexed, the elbow close to the body, the thumb lying
against the lock, resting against the first screw, the hammer resting on the first finger, the barrel perpendicular’ (‘Ordonnance du
janvier 1766…, titre XI, article 2’). ¶ This is an example of what might be called the instrumental coding of the
body. It consists in the breakdown of the total gesture into two parallel series: that of the parts of the body, to be used (right hand,
left hand, different fingers of the hand, knee, eye, elbow, etc.) and that of the parts of the object manipulated (barrel, notch, hammer,
screw, etc.); then the two sets of parts are correlated together according to a number of simple gestures (rest, bend); lastly, it fixes the
canonical succession in which each of these correlations occupies a particular place. This obligatory syntax is what the military
theoreticians of the eighteenth century called 'manoeuvre'. The
traditional recipe gives place to explicit and
obligatory prescriptions. Over the whole surface of contact between the body and the object it handles, power is introduced,
fastening them to one another. It constitutes a body-weapon, body-tool, body-machine complex. One is as far
as possible from those forms of subjection that demanded of the body only signs or products, forms of expression or the result of
labour. The regulation imposed by power is at the same time the law of construction of the
operation. Thus disciplinary power appears to have the function not so much of deduction as of
synthesis, not so much of exploitation of the product as of coercive link with the apparatus of
production.
Essentialism Link – “woman”
Turn – Their insistence on an essential category of “woman” promotes a form
of positivism which locks in difference and promotes an externalized,
disciplinary politics
Brown, 1995 (Wendy, Professor of Political Science and Rhetoric at UC-Berkeley, States of
Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity, published by Princeton UP, p. 41-42)
But this is precisely the point at which many contemporary North
Atlantic feminists hesitate and equivocate: while insisting on the constructed¶ character of gender, most also
seek to preserve some variant of¶ consciousness-raising as a mode of discerning and delivering the
"truth"¶ about women. Consider Catharine MacKinnon's insistence that women¶ are entirely the products
of men's construction and her ontologically¶ contradictory project of developing a jurisprudence based on "an account¶ of the
world from women's point of view. " Consider the similar problematic¶ in other theories of "the feminist
standpoint," the sharp but frequently¶ elided tensions between adhering to social construction theory¶ on one hand, and
epistemologically privileging women's accounts of social¶ life on the other. "'The world from women's point of
view" and "the¶ feminist standpoint" attempt resolution of the postfoundational epistemology problem by deriving from within
women's experience the¶ grounding for women's accounts. But this resolution requires suspending¶ recognition
that women's "experience" is thoroughly constructed,¶ historically and culturally varied, and
interpreted without end. Within¶ feminist standpoint theory as well as much other modernist feminist theory,¶
consciousness-raising thus operates as feminism's epistemologically¶ positivist moment. The
material excavated there, like the material uncovered¶ in psychoanalysis or delivered in confession, is valued as the
hidden¶ truth of women's existence-true because it is hidden, and hidden because¶ women's subordination functions in
part through silencing, marginalization,¶ and privatization. 22¶ Indeed, those familiar with Foucault's genealogy of confession will¶
have discerned in this argument an implied homology between the¶ epistemological-political operations of consciousness-raising and
those¶ he assigns to confessional discourse. In his account of modern sexuality¶ as structured by such discourse, Foucault argues that
confession - inaugurated¶ by the Catholic Church as a technique of power that works¶ by exposure and individuation-produces "truth"
as a secret contained¶ within. Confessional revelations are thus construed as liberation from¶ repression or secrecy, and truth-telling
about our desires or experiences is¶ construed as deliverance from the power that silences and represses them¶ (rather than as itself a
site and effect of regulatory power). What Foucault¶ terms the "internal ruse of confession" is reducible to this reversal of ¶ power and
freedom: "Confession frees, but power reduces one to silence;¶ truth does not belong to the order of power, but shares an original
affinity¶ with freedom. "24 In believing truth-telling about our experiences to¶ be our liberation Foucault
suggests, we forget that this truth has been¶ established as the secret to our souls not by us but by
those who would¶ discipline us through that truth.
1NC Turn – Identity Policing
And, the aff’s form of identity politics is in fact depoliticizing because it locks in
power structures – A police apparatus is required in order to account for each
identity
Zizek 99 [Slavoj, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies, Ljubljana, Slovenia, The
Ticklish Subject, pgs. 208-09, 1999]
This is politics proper: the moment in which a particular demand is not simply part of the negotiation of interests but aims at some
thing more, and starts to function as the metaphoric condensation of the global restructuring of the entire social space. There is a clear
contrast between this subjectivization and today's proliferation of postmodern 'identity politics' whose goal is
the exact opposite, that is, precisely the assertion of one's particular identity, of one's proper
place within the social structure. The postmodern identity politics of particular (ethnic, sexual, etc.)
lifestyles perfectly fits the depoliticized notion of society, in which ever particular group is
'accounted for', has its specific status (of victim) acknowledged through affirmative action or other
measures destined to guarantee social justice. The fact that this kind of justice meted out to
victimized minorities requires an intricate police apparatus (for identifying the group in question,
for punishing offenders against its rights – how legally to define sexual harassment or racial inquiry?, and so on – for
providing the preferential treatment which should compensate for the wrong this group has suffered) is deeply significant:
what is usually praised as ‘postmodern politics’ (the pursuit of particular issues whose resolution must be negotiated
within the ‘rational’ global order allocating its particular component its proper place) is thus effectively the end of
politics proper.
2NC Turn – Identity  Policing
Extend Zizek 99 – Identity politics which is based on assertion of a particular
identity – like that of the affirmative – is actually DEPOLITICIZING because it
locks in a PROPER place for the particular identity category within the social
structure – makes proper politics impossible. Also, in order to ensure progress
for the identity category, an intricate POLICE APPARATUS is required – for
example to determine who falls within the identity and punish those who
offenders against it. This turns the case because the police apparatus is one of
the main tools used to keep minorities disempowered.
And, this police apparatus depoliticizes even the most progressive movements
– demands like the aff can never reach the universal
Dean 2005 [Jodi, Associate Professor of Political Theory at Hobart & William Smith, Zizek
against Democracy, 2005, jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/files/zizek_against_
democracy_new_version.doc]
We can approach the same point from a different direction. Identity politics today emphasizes the specificity of
each particular identity and experience. Particular differences are supposed to be acknowledged,
respected. As Zizek points out, the notion of social justice that corresponds to this view depends on
asserting the rights of and redressing the wrongs inflicted upon victims. Institutionally, then,
identity politics “requires an intricate police apparatus (for identifying the group in question, for punishing
offenders against its rights . . . , for providing the preferential treatment which should compensate for the wrong this group has
suffered.” Rather than opening up a terrain of political struggle, identity politics works through
a
whole series of depoliticizing moves to locate, separate, and redress wrongs. Systemic problems
are reformulated as personal issues. No particular wrong or harm can then stand in for the
“universal wrong.” Multiculturalism is thus a dimension of post-politics insofar as it prevents the
universalization of particular demands.
Identity mystifies exploitation and is not political enough
Myers 3 [Tony, Lecturer in English at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, “Slavoj Žižek”, pg.
124, 2003]
Todays postmodern politics of multiple subjectivities is precisely not political enough, in so far as it
silently presupposes a non-thematized, 'naturalized’ framework of economic relations. (CHU: 108) In
other words, for zizek, the new identity politics succeeds only at the expense of itself. It operates within
the parameters of capitalism but does not seek to challenge them, thereby missing what should be
the real target of politics. As an example, zizek cites studies of illegal aliens working on American farms which conclude that
economic exploitation is a result of racial intolerance. By so doing, studies such as these and identity politics generally,
mystify the real reasons for exploitation around the world which, Zizek argues, is actually a
characteristic of capitalism.
Turn – ID Pltx  Universal Humanism
Turn – politicized identity relies on a negation of an ostensible universalism –
reinstalls a white, masculine humanism which dooms their project to failure
Brown, 1995 (Wendy, Professor of Political Science and Rhetoric at UC-Berkeley, States of
Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity, published by Princeton UP, p. 64-65)
Contemporary politicized identity in the United States contests the terms¶ of liberal discourse
insofar as it challenges liberalism's universal "we" as a¶ strategic fiction of historically hegemonic groups and
asserts liberalism's¶ "I" as social-both relational and constructed by power-rather than¶ contingent, private, or autarkic. Yet it
reiterates the terms of liberal discourse¶ insofar as it posits a sovereign and unified "I" that is
disenfranchised by an exclusive "we." Indeed, I have suggested that politicized identity emerges and
obtains its unifying coherence through the politicization of¶ exclusion from an ostensible
universal, as a protest against exclusion: a protest premised on the fiction of an inclusive/
universal¶ community, a protest that thus reinstalls the humanist ideal-and a specific white,¶
middle-class, masculinist expression of this ideal-insofar as it premises itself upon exclusion from
it. Put the other way around, politicized identities¶ generated out of liberal, disciplinary societies, insofar as they are premised
on exclusion from a universal ideal, require that ideal, as their exclusion from it, for their own continuing
existence as identities.
SPECTACLE TURNS
1NC Turn - Spectacle
The violent spectacle of the 1AC is an inviting but dangerous scene for
identification. Representations of brutal spectacle exacerbates the separation
of black subjecthood from white subjecthood, turning the case.
Hartman 1997 (Saidiya, Associate prof of English at Cal Berk. Scenes of Subjection p. 20-1.
SPP)
As well, we need ask why the site of suffering so readily lends itself to inviting¶ identification.
Why is pain the conduit of identification? This question may seem to¶ beg the obvious, given the violent domination
and dishonor constitutive of enslavement,¶ the acclaimed transformative capacities of pain in sentimental culture, the¶ prevalence of
public displays of suffering inclusive of the pageantry of the trade, the¶ spectacle of punishment, circulating reports of slavery's
horrors, the runaway success¶ of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the passage through the "bloodstained gate,"¶ which was a convention of the
slave narrative, all of which contributed to the idea¶ that the feelings and consciousness of the enslaved were most available at this
site.¶ However, what I am trying to suggest is that if the scene of beating readily lends¶ itself to an
identification with the enslaved, it does so at the risk of fixing and¶ naturalizing this condition of
pained embodiment and, in complete defiance of¶ Rankin's good intention, increases the difficulty
of beholding black suffering since¶ the endeavor to bring pain close exploits the spectacle of the
body in pain and oddly¶ confirms the spectral character of suffering and the inability to witness
the captive's¶ pain. If, on one hand, pain extends humanity to the dispossessed and the ability to¶ sustain suffering leads to
transcendence, on the other, the spectral and spectacular¶ character of this suffering, or, in other words, the shocking and
ghostly presence of¶ pain, effaces and restricts black sentience.¶ As Rankin himself states, in order for this
suffering to induce a reaction and stir¶ feelings, it must be brought close. Yet if sentiment or
morality are "inextricably tied¶ to human proximity," to quote Zygmunt Bauman, the problem is that in
the very¶ effort to "bring it near" and "inspect it closely" it is dissipated. According to¶ Bauman, "Morality
conform[s] to the law of optical perspective. It looms large and ¶ thick close to the eye. " 7 So, then, how does suffering elude or
escape us in the very¶ effort to bring it near? It does so precisely because it can only be brought near by way¶ of
a
proxy and by way of Rankin's indignation and imagination. If the black body is¶ the vehicle of the other's power,
pleasure, and profit, then it is no less true that it is¶ the white or near-white body that makes the
captive's suffering visible and discernible.¶ 8 Indeed, the elusiveness of black suffering can be attributed to a racist
optics in¶ which black flesh is itself identified as the source of opacity, the denial of black¶ humanity,
and the effacement of sentience integral to the wanton use of the captive¶ body.9 And as noted earlier,
this is further complicated by the repressive underside¶ of an optics of morality that insists upon the other as a mirror of the self and
that in¶ order to recognize suffering must substitute the self for the other.¶ While Rankin attempts to ameliorate the insufficiency of
feeling before the spectacle¶ of the other's suffering, this insufficiency is, in fact, displaced rather than ¶ remedied by his standing in.
Likewise, this attempt exacerbates the distance between¶ the readers and those suffering by literally
removing the slave from view as pain is¶ brought close. Moreover, we need to consider whether
the identification forged at¶ the site of suffering confirms black humanity at the peril of
reinforcing racist assumptions¶ of limited sentience, in that the humanity of the enslaved and the
violence¶ of the institution can only be brought into view by extreme examples of incineration¶
and dismemberment or by placing white bodies at risk. What does it mean that the¶ violence of slavery or the
pained existence of the enslaved, if discernible, is only so¶ in the most heinous and grotesque examples and not in the quotidian
routines of¶ slavery?r0 As well, is not the difficulty of empathy related to both the devaluation ¶ and the valuation of black life?
2NC Turn - Spectacle
The aff contains spectacular representations of violence, which always trumps
quotidian representations, meaning their 1AC turns itself. The inclusion of
spectacle perpetuates the rubric of white pleasure and paternalism
Hartman 1997 (Saidiya, Associate prof of English at Cal Berk. Scenes of Subjection p. 3-4.
SPP)
The "terrible spectacle" that introduced Frederick Douglass to slavery¶ was the beating of his Aunt Hester. It is one of the most wellknown scenes of torture¶ in the literature of slavery, perhaps second only to Uncle Tom's murder at the hands ¶ of Simon Legree. By
locating this "horrible exhibition" in the first chapter of his¶ 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Douglass establishes
the centrality¶ of violence to the making of the slave and identifies it as an original generative act ¶ equivalent to the statement “I was
born."' The passage through the blood-stained¶ gate is an inaugural moment in the formation of the enslaved. In this regard, it is a ¶
primal scene. By this I mean that the terrible spectacle dramatizes the origin of the¶ subject and
demonstrates that to be a slave is to be under the brutal power and¶ authority of another; this is
confirmed by the event's placement in the opening¶ chapter on genealogy. 2¶ I have chosen not to reproduce
Douglass's account of the beating of Aunt Hester¶ in order to call attention to the ease with which
such scenes are usually reiterated, the¶ casualness with which they are circulated, and the
consequences of this routine¶ display of the slave's ravaged body. Rather than inciting indignation,
too often they¶ immure us to pain by virtue of their familiarity-the oft-repeated or restored
character¶ of these accounts and our distance from them are signaled by the theatrical¶ language usually resorted to in
describing these instances-and especially because¶ they reinforce the spectacular character of black suffering.
What interests me are the¶ ways we are called upon to participate in such scenes. Are we witnesses who confirm ¶ the truth of what
happened in the face of the world-destroying capacities of pain, the¶ distortions of torture, the sheer unrepresentability of terror, and
the repression of the¶ dominant accounts?3 Or are we voyeurs fascinated with and repelled by exhibitions ¶ of terror and sufferance?
What does the exposure of the violated body yield? Proof of ¶ black sentience or the inhumanity of the "peculiar institution"? Or does
the pain of¶ the other merely provide us with the opportunity for self-reflection? At issue here is¶ the precariousness of
empathy and the uncertain line between witness and spectator.¶ Only more obscene than the
brutality unleashed at the whipping post is the demand¶ that this suffering be materialized and
evidenced by the display of the tortured body¶ or endless recitations of the ghastly and the terrible.
In light of this, how does one¶ give expression to these outrages without exacerbating the indifference to suffering¶ that is the
consequence of the benumbing spectacle or contend with the narcissistic ¶ identification that obliterates the other or the prurience that
too often is the response¶ to such displays? This was the challenge faced by Douglass and other foes of¶ slavery, and this is the task I
take up here.¶ Therefore, rather than try to convey the routinized violence of slavery and its¶ aftermath
through invocations of the shocking and the terrible, I have chosen to look¶ elsewhere and
consider those scenes in which terror can hardly be discerned-slaves¶ dancing in the quarters, the
outrageous darky antics of the minstrel stage, the¶ constitution of humanity in slave law, and the
fashioning of the self-possessed¶ individual. By defamiliarizing the familiar, l hope to illuminate the terror
of the¶ mundane and quotidian rather than exploit the shocking spectacle. What concerns¶ me here
is the diffusion of terror and the violence perpetrated under the rubric of¶ pleasure, paternalism,
and property. Consequently, the scenes of subjection examined¶ here focus on the enactment of subjugation and the constitution
of the subject¶ and include the blows delivered to Topsy and Zip Coon on the popular stage, slaves ¶ coerced to dance in the
marketplace, the simulation of will in slave law, the fashioning¶ of identity, and the processes of individuation and normalization.
1NC Alternative to Spectacle
Stories about slavery should avoid the spectacle and instead represent the
more subtle or quotidian practices of violence. The following is an example of
an alternative to spectacular representations of slave violence
Hartman 1997 (Saidiya, Associate prof of English at Cal Berk. Scenes of Subjection p. 37-8.
SPP)
Contrary to our expectations, gaiety articulates the brutal calculations of the trade.¶ The selfbetrayal enacted by stepping it lively and enthusiastically assisting in one's¶ sale underscores the
affiliations of spectacle and sufferance. And, accordingly, fun¶ and frolic become the vehicles of the
slave's self-betrayal and survival. 67 By stepping¶ it lively and "acting smart," the captive was
made the agent of his or her¶ dissolution. 68 The body of the slave, dancing and on display,
seemingly revealed a¶ comfort with bondage and a natural disposition for servitude. Those
observing the¶ singing and dancing and the comic antics of the auctioneer seemed to revel in the¶
festive atmosphere of the trade and thus attracted spectators not intending to purchase¶ slaves.
According to Cato Carter, "They used to cry the niggers off just like so¶ much cattle and we didn't think no different of it. ...
Everybody liked to hear¶ them cry off niggers. The cryer was a clown and made funny talk and kept everybody¶ laughing. " 69
Catherine Slim remembered seeing a coftle of slaves chained¶ together, going south, some were singing and some were crying.70
Mary Gaffney¶ ironically described the "fun" of the trade as "all the hollering and bawling. "71 ¶ Others, like James Martin, remarked
upon the coerced theatricality of the trade:¶ "And we sees others sol[d] on the auction block. They're put in stalls like pens for ¶ cattle
and there's a curtain, sometimes just a sheet in front of them, so the bidders¶ can't see the stock too soon. The overseer's standin' just
outside with a big black¶ snake whip and a pepper box pistol in his hand. Then they pulls the curtain up and ¶ the bidders crowd 'round.
The overseer tells the age of the slaves and what they can ¶ do .... Then the overseer makes 'em walk across the
platform. He makes 'em¶ hop, he makes 'em trot, he makes 'em jump. "72 Polly Shine recalled being driven¶
with others like cattle to the marketplace: "Our master would put us in the road ¶ ahead of them and they would be on horses behind us
as we traveled and they would¶ follow and we had to travel pert, no laggin behind if we did, he always had whip that ¶ he would tap us
with boy! when he hit us across the legs we could step real lively and ¶ I don't mean maybe either;"73 True to form, this
theater of the marketplace wed¶ festivity and the exchange of captive bodies. The distribution of
rum or brandy and¶ slaves dancing, laughing, and generally "striking it up lively" entertained
spectators¶ and give meaning to the phrase "theater of the marketplace." James Curry¶ noted the disparity
between the journey to market and the "studied nicety" of the¶ slave. When the coftle is being driven, "no attention is paid to the
decency of their¶ appearance. They go bare-headed and bare-footed, with any rag they can themselves¶ find wrapped around their
bodies. But the driver has clothing prepared for them to¶ put on, just before they reach the market, and they are forced to array
themselves¶ with studied nicety for their exposure at public sale. "74 ¶ The stimulating effects of intoxicants, the
simulation of good times, and the to-and-¶ fro of half-naked bodies on display all acted to incite
the flow of capital. The¶ centrality of amusement to the slave trade is confirmed by an article in the New¶ Orleans Daily
Picayune: "Amusements seldom prove attractive here unless music is¶ brought to the aid of other inducements to spend money. So
much is this the custom¶ and so well is this understood, that even an auctioneer can scarely ra[lly] a crowd ¶ without the aid of the man
with the drum. We do not feel called upon personally to¶ be responsible for the character of all the music, but it is a solemn fact, that
to rise in¶ the world it is necessary to make a big noise.' ' 75 Jollification was as standard to the¶ trade as greasing black bodies to
create an enhanced and youthful appearance. As¶ well, this spectacle reconciled the self-evident truths of a liberal social orderliberty,¶
equality, and property-with the existence of chattel slavery through¶ the coerced enactment of indifference and the orchestration of
diversions. As¶ L. M. Mills stated, "When a negro was put on the block he had to help sell himself ¶ by telling what he could do. If he
refused to sell himself and acted sullen, he was¶ sure to be stripped and given thirty lashes. " 76 By the same token, these
displays of¶ excess enjoyment seemed to suggest that the same natural law that established the¶
liberty of all men also authorized slavery since the natural inclination of the enslaved¶ was good
cheer and they seemingly endured horrendous circumstances with ease.¶ Counterpoised to the
intensity of this laughter were the lamentations of the enslaved.¶ Dave Bryd recalled that ''when one of
them buyers bought a slave you never¶ did hear such bawling and hollering in your life that would
take place because they¶ did not want to leave each other as we probably would not see them
again. " 77 As¶ well, the shame and humiliation experienced in being paraded and sold Hke cattle at ¶ the market, in addition to being
disrobed publicly, provide a stark contrast to the¶ festive goings-on of the traders. Ethel Dougherty stated that at slave sales women ¶
were forced to stand half-naked for hours while crowds of rough-drinking men¶ bargained for them, examining their teeth, heads,
hands, et cetera, at frequent¶ intervals to test their endurance. 78 According to Edward Lycurgas, enslaved women ¶ "always looked so
shame[d] and pitiful up on dat stand wid all dem men standin'¶ dere lookin' at em wid what dey had on dey minds shinin' in they eyes.
"79 Shining¶ in their eyes and expressed in "indecent proposals" and "disgusting questions,"¶ according to Tabb Gross, was the power,
acquired and enjoyed by the owner, to¶ use slave women as he pleased. 80 Millie Simpkins stated that before they were¶ sold they had
to take all their clothes off, although she refused to take hers off, and ¶ roll around to prove that they were physically fit and without
broken bones or¶ sores." Usually any reluctance or refusal to disrobe was met with the whip.82 When¶ Mattie Gilmore's sister Rachel
was sold, she was made to pull off her clothes. Mattie remembered crying until she could cry no more, although her tears were useless.
2NC Alternative to Spectacle
The 1NC presented an example of an alternative story which avoids the
spectacle of slavery and instead focuses on the quotidian, or every day more
subtle forms of violence. Slaves were forced to perform strength and happiness
on the selling block, so as to increase their value by proving their willingness
and even happiness to submit to slave masters. This reified the notion that
slaves were not humans, were naturally inferior, and were inclined to
submission.
Our alternative is mutually exclusive – Any inclusion of spectacular violence
obfuscates the more mundane and socially endurable forms of violence. Their
author concludes that you should prefer the alternative over the aff
Hartman 1997 (Saidiya, Associate prof of English at Cal Berk. Scenes of Subjection p. 42-3.
SPP)
The parade of shackled bodies to market captured not only the debasements¶ of slavery but also its
diversions. Yet the convergence of pleasure and terror so¶ striking in the humiliating exhibitions
and defiling pageantry of the trade was also¶ present in "innocent amusements." The slave dancing
a reel at the big house or¶ stepping it up lively in the coffte similarly transformed subjugation into a
pleasing¶ display for the master, albeit disguised, to use Pierre Bourdieu's terms, by the "veil¶ of enchanted relationships.
"91 These "gentler forms" extended and maintained the¶ relations of domination through
euphemism and concealment. Innocent amusements¶ constituted a form of symbolic violence-that
is, a "form of domination which is¶ exercised through the communication in which it is disguised."¶ When viewed in this
light, the most invasive forms of slavery's violence lie not in¶ these exhibitions of' 'extreme''
suffering or in what we see but in what we don't see.¶ Shocking displays too easily obfuscate the
more mundane and socially endurable¶ forms of terror. 92 In the benign scenes of plantation life
(which comprised much of¶ the Southern and, ironically, abolitionist literature of slavery) reciprocity and recreation¶
obscure the quotidian routine of violence. The bucolic scenes of plantation life¶ and the innocent amusements of the
enslaved, contrary to our expectations, succeeded¶ not in mollifying terror but in assuring and sustaining its presence. ¶ Rather than
glance at the most striking spectacle with revulsion or through tearfilled¶ eyes, we do better to cast
our glance at the more mundane displays of power¶ and the border where it is difficult to discern
domination from recreation. Bold¶ instances of cruelty are too easily acknowledged and forgotten,
and cries quieted to¶ an endurable hum. By disassembling the "benign" scene, we confront the
everyday¶ practice of domination, the nonevent, as it were. Is the scene Of slaves dancing and¶ fiddling for their
masters any less inhumane than that of slaves sobbing and dancing¶ on the auction block? If so, why? Is the effect of power any less
prohibitive? Or¶ coercive? Or does pleasure mitigate coercion? Is the boundary between terror and ¶ pleasure clearer in the market than
in the quarters or at the "big house"? Are the¶ most enduring forms of cruelty those seemingly benign? Is the perfect picture of the¶
crime the one in which the crime goes undetected? If we imagine for a moment a ¶ dusky fiddler entertaining at the big house, master
cutting a figure among the¶ dancing slaves, the mistress egging him on with her laughter, what do we see?¶ "Dance you damned
niggers, dance," Epps would shout. Usually his whip in his hand, ¶ ready to fall about the ears of the presumptuous thrall, who dared
rest a moment, or even¶ to stop to catch his breath. When he himself was exhausted, there would be a brief ¶ cessation, but it would be
very brief. With a slash, crack and flourish of the whip, he¶ would shout again, "Dance, niggers dance," and away they would go once
more, pellmell,¶ while I, spurred by an occasional sharp touch of the lash, sat in a comer, extracting ¶ from my violin a marvelous quick
stepping tune. . . . Frequently, we were thus detained ¶ until almost morning. Bent with excessive toil-actually suffering for a little¶
refreshing rest, and feeling rather as if we would cast ourselves upon the earth and weep, ¶ many a night in the house of Edwin Epps
have his unhappy slaves been made to dance¶ and laugh. 93¶ This passage from Solomon Northrup's Twelve Years a Slave
exemplifies the permeability¶ of pleasure and punishment in the ceremonies of slavery. The humiliations ¶ delivered the conscripts of
Master Epps 's terrorizing bacchanals and the brutal¶ command to merrymaking suggest that the theatricality of the Negro emerges
only in¶ the aftermath of the body's brutal dramatic placement-in short, after the body has¶ been made subject to the will of the
master.9• The uproarious behavior of Epps,¶ slashing limbs with his whip while gaily dancing a quick step with the slaves, casts a ¶
different light on the dusky fiddler in the golden days of Southern glory. And the¶ spree, as narrated by Northrup, resonates with the
evil of twice-told tales about¶ fiddlers abducted by Satan and the fiendish revels of hell. ¶ Behind the facade of innocent
amusements lay the violence the master class¶ assiduously denied; but what else could jigs danced
in command performances be¶ but the gentle indices of domination? It was as much the duty of
slaves "to devote¶ themselves to the pleasure of their masters" as to work for the master's benefit,¶
commented Jacob Stroyer.95 He noted rather cryptically that "no one can describe¶ the intense emotion in the
negro's soul on these occasions when they were trying to¶ please their masters and mistresses. " 96
Such performances cast the slave as contented¶ bondsman and elide the difference between
volition and violation. However,¶ as Northrup's narrative indicated, the contented slave appeared only after he had ¶ been
whipped into subjection. In short, Sambo did not engender the stagecraft of ¶ slavery, as apologists would have it, but was one of its
effects.
ROLE OF JUDGE TURNS
1NC Turn – White Pleasure
Turn – the ballot is offered to the judge as a means for the judge to identify or
experience black suffering. An aff ballot allows the white judge to take pleasure
in the suffering of the black body. The investment in the ballot is dependent on
the notion of the black body as fungible – turns the case
Hartman 1997 (Saidiya, Associate prof of English at Cal Berk. Scenes of Subjection p. 25-6.
SPP)
Rankin was not alone in his desire to slip into blackness and experience the¶ suffering of slavery
"firsthand," so to speak. On the contrary, the popularity of¶ Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Octoroon
indicates the willingness of others to suffer,¶ too. The elasticity of blackness and its capacious affects enabled such
flights and¶ becomings. Moreover, in this case, the figurative capacities of blackness and the¶ fungibility of the
commodity are directly linked. The fungibility of the commodity,¶ specifically its abstractness and
immateriality, enabled the black body or blackface¶ mask to serve as the vehicle of white selfexploration, renunciation, and enjoyment.¶ 22 Therefore, the ability to put on blackness must be
considered in the context¶ of chattel slavery and the economy of enjoyment founded thereupon.
Antebellum ·¶ formations of pleasure, even those of the North, need to be considered in relation to¶ the affective dimensions of chattel
slavery since enjoyment is virtually unimaginable¶ without recourse to the black body and the subjection of the captive, the diversions ¶
engendered by the dispossession of the enslaved, or the fantasies launched by the¶ myriad uses of the black body. For this reason the
formal features of this economy of¶ pleasure and the politics of enjoyment are considered in regard to the literal and ¶ figurative
occupation and possession of the body. This reading attempts to elucidate¶ the means by which the wanton
use of and the violence directed toward the black¶ body come to be identified as its pleasure and
dangers-that is, the expectations of¶ slave property are ontologized as the innate capacities and
inner feelings of the¶ enslaved, and moreover, the ascription of excess and enjoyment to the
African¶ effaces the violence perpetrated against the enslaved. In light of these issues, the¶ schematic analysis of
minstrelsy and melodrama that follows focuses on the convergence¶ of violence and pleasure, which is identified as one of the primary
attributes of¶ this economy of enjoyment, rather than providing a close reading of the texts of¶ minstrelsy and melodrama. Scant
attention is paid to the white spectator's identification ¶ with blackface characters. Instead, the major issue explored is the relation ¶
between pleasure and violence-that is, the facility of blackness in the other's self-fashioning¶ and the role of pleasure in securing the
mechanisms of racial subjection.¶ In other words, this economy of enjoyment is interrogated through a
consideration¶ of the dynamics of possession and close scrutiny of the object of property and its¶
uses.
2NC Turn – White Pleasure
Turn – A politics of recognition is coopted by the dominant system and
reinstates relations of propriety – the aff could ONLY solve via an abandonment
of the desire for subject recognition. Investment in this recognition trades off
with a material struggle, which is the only way to remedy the aff impacts
Hartman 1997 (Saidiya, Associate prof of English at Cal Berk. Scenes of Subjection p. 93-4.
SPP)
Although the public good served as the arbiter of care and coercion, the precarious ¶ status of the slave within this sphere raises
questions about the meaning of the slave¶ person, the protections advanced on the slave's behalf, and the limited concerns of ¶ public
decency. Contrary to pronouncements that sentiment Would abate brutality, ¶ feelings intensified the violence of law and posed dire
consequences for the calculation¶ of black humanity, for the dual existence of the slave as object of property and ¶ person required that
the feelings endowed to the enslaved be greatly circumscribed. ¶ While the slave was recognized as a sentient being, the degree of
sentience had to be¶ cautiously calibrated in order to avoid intensifying the antagonisms of the social¶ order. How could property and
person be reconciled on the ground of mutual¶ benevolence and affection? How could the dual invocation of humanity and interest ¶ be
sustained?¶ The dual existence of the slave as person and property was generated by the slave ¶ mode
of production.52 The law attempted to resolve the contradiction between the¶ slave as property and the slave as
person/laborer or, at the very least, to minimize¶ this tension by attending to the slave as both a form of
property and a person. This¶ effort was instrumental in maintaining the dominance of the slaveowning class,¶ particularly in a period of national crisis concerning the institution. The increasing¶
recognition of the slave person in the period 1830-1860 was an effort to combat the¶ abolitionist polemic about the degradations of
chattel status and the slave's lack of¶ rights. 53 In any case, the dual invocation of slave law was neither a matter of an ¶ essential
ethical contradiction nor a conflict between bourgeois and slave relations¶ but an expression of the multivalence of subjection. The
dual invocation quite easily¶ accommodated the restricted recognition of the slave as person and the violence¶ necessary to the
accumulation of profit and the management of a captive population, ¶ since the figuration of the humane in slave law
was totally consonant with the¶ domination of the enslaved. The constitution of the slave as
person was not at odds¶ with the structural demands of the system, nor did it necessarily challenge
the social¶ relations of the antebellum world.¶ Rather, the dual invocation of law designated the
limits of rights of ownership and¶ extended and constricted these rights as was necessary for the
preservation of the¶ institution. On one hand, there was increased liability for white violence committed¶ against slaves; and
on the other, the law continued to decriminalize the violence¶ thought necessary to the preservation of the institution and the
submission and¶ obedience of the slave. If anything, the dual invocation of law generated the prohibitions¶ and interdictions designed
to regulate the violent excesses of slavery and at¶ the same time extended this violence in the garb of sentiment. The
recognition of the¶ slave as subject and the figuration of the captive person in law served to
explicate the¶ meaning of dominion. To be subject in this manner was no less brutalizing
than¶ being an object of property. 54¶ In the arena of affect, the body was no less vulnerable to the demands and the¶
excesses of power. The bestowal that granted the slave a circumscribed and fragmented¶ identity as
person in turn shrouded the violence of such a beneficent and¶ humane gesture. Bluntly stated, the
violence of subjection concealed and extended¶ itself through the outstretched hand of legislated concern. The slave was
considered¶ a subject only insofar as he was criminal(ized), wounded body, or mortified flesh.¶
This construction of the subject seems rather at odds with a proclaimed concern for ¶ the "total
person."55 However, it does not mean that the efforts to regulate the¶ abuses of slavery were any less "genuine" but that in the very
efforts to protect the¶ enslaved from the ravages of the institution, a mutilation of another order was set in ¶ motion. Protection was an
exemplary dissimulation for it savagely truncated the¶ dimensions of existence, inasmuch as the effort to safeguard slave life
recognized¶ the slave as subject only as he violated the law or was violated (wounded flesh or¶ pained body). Thus rendered, "person"
signified little more than a pained body or a¶ recalcitrant in need of punishment. 56¶ The designation of person was
inescapably bound to violence, and the effort to¶ protect embodied a degree of violence no less
severe than the excesses being regulated.¶ Despite the law's proclaimed concern for slave life or
recognition of black¶ humanity, minimal standards of existence determined personhood,/or the
recognition¶ of the slave as person depended upon the calculation of interest and injury. The¶ law
constituted the subject as a muted pained body or a trespasser to be punished; this ¶ agonized embodiment of subjectivity certainly
intensified the dreadful objectification¶ of chattel status. Paradoxically, this designation of subjectivity utterly
negated the¶ possibility of a nonpunitive, inviolate, or pleasurable embodiment, and instead the¶
black captive vanished in the chasm between object, criminal, pained body, and¶ mortified flesh.57
The law's exposition of sentiment culminated in a violent shuttling¶ of the subject between varied conditions of harm, juggled between
the plantation and¶ the state and dispersed across categories of property, injury, and punishment.
AT: INTERSECTIONALITY
Their call for intersectionality is just a strategy of erasing the root of the 1AC
harms
Darder Prof of Education at Claremont, & Torres, Prof of Public Policy and Comp Latino
Studies at CSU-Long Beach, 1999 Antonia and Rodolfo, Shattering the Race Lens, from Critical
Ethnicity pages 176-177
The failure of scholars to confront this dimension in their analysis of contemporary society as a
racialized phenomenon and their tendency to continue treating class as merely one of a
multiplicity of (equally valid) perspectives, which may or may not "intersect" with the process of
racialization, are serious shortcomings. In addressing this issue, we must recognize that identity
politics, which generally gloss over class differences and/or ignore class contradictions, have
often been used by radical scholars and activists within African American, Latino, and other subordinate
cultural communities in an effort to build a political base. Here, fabricated constructions of "race" are
objectified and mediated as truth to ignite political support, divorced from the realities of class
struggle. By so doing, they have unwittingly perpetuated the vacuous and dangerous notion that
the political and economic are separate spheres of society which can function independently-a
view that firmly anchors and sustains prevailing class relations of power in society.
Ramon Grosfoguel and Chloe S. Georas posit that "social identities are constructed and reproduced in complex and
entangled political, economic, and symbolic hierarchy."14 Given this complex entanglement, what is needed is a
more dynamic and fluid notion of how we think about different cultural identities within the
context of contemporary capitalist social formations. Such a perspective of identity would support
our efforts to shatter static and frozen notions that perpetuate ahistorical, apolitical, and classless
views of culturally pluralistic societies. How we analytically accomplish this is no easy matter. But however
this task is approached, we must keep in mind Wood's concern:
We should not confuse respect for the plurality of human experience and social struggles with a
complete dissolution of historical causality, where there is nothing but diversity, difference and
contingency, no unifying structures, no logic of process, no capitalism and therefore no negation
of it, no universal project of human emancipation.15
Hence, if we are to effectively challenge the horrendous economic impacts of globalization on
racialized communities, we must recognize that a politics of identity is grossly inept and unsuited
for building and sustaining collective political movements for social justice and economic
democracy. Instead, what we need is to fundamentally reframe the very terrain that gives life to our
political understanding of what it means to live, work, and struggle in a society with widening
class differentiation and ever-increasing racialized inequality. Through such an analytical process
of reframing, we can expand the terms by which identities are considered, examined, and defined,
recognizing racialized relations of power are fundamentally shaped by the profound
organizational and spatial transformations of the capitalist economy.
The analysis of intersectionality that the 1AC engages in is impossible - we can’t
account for every infinite possibilities of intersection.
Cunningham 1998 [E. Christi, Connecticut Law Review , Winter, 30 Conn. L. Rev.
441]
A third limitation of intersectionality is that it makes little room for forms of discrimination
that are not formally recognized. Beyond considerations of discrimination based on race, gender,
national origin, religion, age, able-bodiedness, sexual orientation, color, and class,
discrimination on other bases is not commonly addressed. Yet who would doubt the existence of
discrimination based on accent, n284 beauty, [*500] weight, n285 hairstyle, height, ethnicity, n286 and "others." n287 At its
core, intersectionality as a theory is limited by its groupcentered focus. Group definition or group confinement
is the essence of discrimination and the antithesis of the human process of self-invention. This Article is the first in a series that will
attempt to imagine a paradigm of wholism beyond intersectionality. Wholism, in many respects a theory of radical individualism,
asserts that there are no intersections. Wholism differs from intersectionality carried to its furthest extreme in that
wholism's individual is self-defined while the individual at an exponential permutation of
intersectionality is defined by the intersections of oppressive societal constructions. An
intersection occurs where one thing and a separate thing connect. Wholism argues that
separation is a social construction, that elements of identity have meaning in the context of a specific individual.
Identity, however it exists and on whatever terms, n288 exists as it does within individuals so that no
definition has power to impose meaning upon another individual. So, to the extent that race, for
example, has meaning, it has meaning in individual terms. Black means what it does in the context of an
individual person (the culmination of that individual's experiences and ancestral
inheritance), and that meaning may not and probably does not and probably will not exist anywhere else.
Another person therefore is not the intersection of meaning taken from the first or the
"more" privileged. That person is a self-defined whole.
The intersectional approach in the status quo is too passive and responsive, and
merely relies upon a rhetoric of “wait your turn and we might get there” – a new,
radicalized interpretation of intersectionality in which identities are always
inexplicably interconnected as opposed just having the potential to intersect is
necessary.
Kocięda 13 [Aphrodite Kocięda is a graduate student in Communication at the University of South
Florida and a contributor to the Vegan Feminist Network. Her current graduate research focuses on
feminist activism in a postfeminist rape culture climate. 9/26/13
http://feministcurrent.com/8065/marginalization-is-messy-beyond-intersectionality/]
1)
First of all, the actual framework that intersectionality operates from is problematic. I would
intersectionality operates from a white supremacist patriarchal foundation. Therefore,
all populations excluded from the mainstream normative space, focus on how they’re
excluded, not why the space is inherently exclusionary. Bitch magazine ran an article on intersectionality
wherein the writer states: “’intersectionality’ becomes code for ‘wait your turn.’ Rather than being a reflection
of a highly inclusive movement that integrates different lived experiences and priorities, it is used to say ‘just as soon as
we get our needs taken care of, we’ll turn to yours.’” Through intersectionality, we are
caught up in a discussion over who is “left out” of the current model because the actual model itself is
exclusionary. On top of that, intersectionality is very reactionary. As such, I don’t believe it was ever
meant to be transformative or radical. Intersectionality functions like the notion of
“diversity.” Think about “diversity” programs in academic institutions, wherein diversity is understood as
“non-white” skin. With this logic, programs recruit people of colour to their white classrooms,
even though the knowledge’s still remain white. One could then argue that diversity, in this instance, reinforces
argue that
whiteness, just with a “progressive” face. Diversity is born out of this white framework and in embracing this superficial idea of
“diversity”, we are inevitably embracing whiteness. Diversity was merely a reaction to white supremacy. It was
never meant to be critical. If you just Google “diversity”, you can see how superficial it is. It basically means “adding brown people
into the white framework,” and in this way, whiteness is strengthened .
Intersectionality is the same. It is merely a
response, not a solution; born out of a frustration with whiteness, sexism, etc.2) Intersectionality is
incomplete. It is only interested in charting how groups are currently oppressed, but doesn’t
offer possibilities for systemic transformation. It must be radicalized. In fact, it naturalizes oppressed
identities, stating that oftentimes these oppressed identities can intersect (race, gender, etc.), but
does not problematize how these identities are created. Intersectionality relies on the static,
fixed oppressed identity. That’s the problem. 3) I think it’s problematic that we view race, gender
and class as independent systems that have the “potential” to collide and intersect as
intersectional scholars purport, rather than systems that simultaneously and fluidly operate in
conjunction with one another. In fact, I would argue that they constitute one another in a given social order.
We’re supposed to act as though certain identities are fixed and can then intersect. I think we
need to “radicalize” intersectionality so that we no longer view these systems of organization as separate entities, but as dynamic
interpenetrating realities that exist within one another simultaneously. In an article titled: “I am a woman and a human: a Marxist
Feminist critique of intersectionality theory,” the author, Eve Mitchell states: theories of an ‘interlocking matrix of oppressions,’
simply create a list of naturalized identities, abstracted from their material and historical context…Simply reducing this struggle to
mere quantity, equality of distribution, or ‘representation,’ reinforces identity as a static, naturalized category. Since
intersectionality doesn’t challenge these “fixed” identities but operates off of them, we
unquestionably cite the grand trio: race, gender, and class, as though they each have their own roads that
are neatly paved, where we can easily walk on them and understand how they operate. For some of us, the embodiment of
this trio places us in a unique position where the roads do not merge into one, but are one
from the beginning, and the research should reflect that. According to anthropologist Wesley Garrett, “Perhaps a
better analogy would be that they are different lanes on the same highway, rather than
separate roads that sporadically intersect.”
The emphasis on difference that is foundational to intersectionality is the same
thing that causes its stagnation – people and groups are too busy playing
“Oppression Olympics” to ever get anything done.
Rectenwald 13 [December 12, 2013; Michael Rectenwald is an author and a member of the
editorial committee for The North Star; http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=11411 What’s Wrong
With Identity Politics (and Intersectionality Theory)? A Response to Mark Fisher’s “Exiting the
Vampire Castle” (And Its Critics)]
Fisher never explicitly refers to intersectionality theory, but it lurks just beneath surface of his contempt in “Exiting the Vampire
Castle.” Developed in the 1970s and ‘80s within feminism, intersectionality
seeks to understand how power
intersects identities along various axes, including those of race, gender, sexuality, or sexual
preference, etc. It aims to locate the articulations of power as it traverses various subordinated
peoples in different, multiple ways. Suggestive of a radical critique of patriarchy, capitalism,
white supremacy and other forms of domination, it complicates any sense of gender, sex,
class, or race as homogenous wholes. And it problematizes any hierarchy of one categorical
determination over others. As such, it appears to serve as a method of analysis for opposing
oppressions of all kinds. Intersectionality should, it seems, work to deepen our understanding of the composition of class
society, and to add to the means for overcoming it. But operating under the same schema as a more simplified
identity politics, intersectionality theory serves to isolate multiple and seemingly endless
identity standpoints, without sufficiently articulating them with each other, or the forms of
domination. The upshot in political practice is a static pluralism of reified social categories,
each vying for more-subaltern-than-thou status on a field of one-downsmanship. While it may be
useful for sociologists attempting to describe groups and their struggles with power, as a political theory, it is useless, or worse.
This is because, by ending with the identification and isolation of its various constituencies , it in
fact serves to sever the connections that it supposedly sought to understand and strengthen.
The practical upshot of intersectionality theory is the perpetual articulation of difference,
resulting in fragmentation and the stagnation of political activity that Fisher bemoans.
AT: EXPLORATION
Exploring the possibilities of resistance within the academy is what allows for
the cooption and reentrenchment of hegemonic norms.
Moten and Harney 2004 (Fred and Stefano, The University and the Undercommons: Seven
Theses, Social Text 22.2, Summer)
“To the university I’ll steal, and there I’ll steal,” to borrow from Pistol at the end of Henry V, as he would
surely borrow from us. This is the only possible relationship to the American university
today. This may be true of universities everywhere. It may have to be true of the university in general. But certainly, this
much is true in the United States: it cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge , and
it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment. In the face of
these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To
abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy
encampment, to be in but not of—this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university.
Worry about the university. This is the injunction today in the United States, one with a
long history. Call for its restoration like Harold Bloom or Stanley Fish or Gerald Graff. Call for its reform like Derek
Bok or Bill Readings or Cary Nelson. Call out to it as it calls to you. But for the subversive intellectual, all of this
goes on upstairs, in polite company, among the rational men. After all, the subversive intellectual came
under false pretenses, with bad documents, out of love. Her labor is as necessary as it
is unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings . And
on top of all that, she disappears. She disappears into the underground, the downlow
lowdown maroon community of the university, into the Undercommons of
Enlightenment , where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the
revolution is still black, still strong .What is that work and what is its social capacity for both reproducing the
university and producing fugitivity? If one were to say teaching, one wouldbe performing the work of the university. Teaching is
merely a profession and an operation of what Jacques Derrida calls the onto-/auto-encyclopediccircle of the Universitas. But it
is useful to invoke this operation to glimpsethe hole in the fence where labor enters, to glimpse its hiring hall, it snight
quarters. The university needs teaching labor, despite itself, or as itself, self-identical with and thereby erased by it. It is not
teaching then that holds this social capacity, but something that produces the not visible other side of teaching, a thinking
through the skin of teaching toward a collective orientation to the knowledge object as future project, and a commitment to
what we want to call the prophetic organization. But it is teaching that brings us in. Before there are grants, research,
conferences, books, and journals there is the experience of being taught and of teaching. Before the research post with no
teaching, before the graduate students to mark the exams, before the string of sabbaticals, before the permanent reduction in
teaching load, the appointment to run the Center, the consignment of pedagogy to a discipline called education, before the
course designed to be a new book, teaching happened. The moment of teaching for food is therefore often mistakenly taken to
be a stage, as if eventually, one should not teach for food. If the stage persists, there is a social pathology in the university. But
if the teaching is successfullypassed on, the stage is surpassed, and teaching is consigned to those who are known to remain in
the stage, the sociopathological labor of the university. Kant interestingly calls such a stage “self-incurred minority.” He tries to
contrast it with having the “determination and courage to use one’s intelligence without being guided by another.” “Have the
courage to use your own intelligence.” But what would it mean if teaching or rather what we might call “the beyond of teaching”
is precisely what one is asked to get beyond, to stop taking sustenance? And what of those minoritieswho refuse, the tribe of
moles who will not come back from beyond2 (that which is beyond “the beyond of teaching”), as if they will not be subjects,as
if they want to think as objects, as minority? Certainly, the perfect subjects of communication, those successfully beyond
teaching, will see themas waste. But their collective labor will always call into question who truly is taking the orders of the
Enlightenment. The waste lives for those moments 102 Moten/Harneybeyond2 teaching when you give away the unexpected
beautiful phrase— unexpected, no one has asked, beautiful, it will never come back. Is being the biopower of the
Enlightenment truly better than this? Perhaps the biopower of the Enlightenment know this, or perhaps it is ust reacting to the
objecthood of this labor as it must. But even as it depends on these moles, these refugees, they will call them uncollegial,
impractical, naive, unprofessional. And one may be given one last chanceto be pragmatic—why steal when one can have it all,
they will ask. But if one hides from this interpellation, neither agrees nor disagrees but goes with hands full into the
underground of the university, into the Undercommons—this will be regarded as theft, as a criminal act. And it is at the same
time, the only possible act. In that Undercommons of the university one can see that it is not a matter of teaching versus
research or even the beyond of teaching versusthe individualization of research . To enter this space
is to
inhabit the ruptural and enraptured disclosure of the commons that fugitive
enlightenment enacts, the criminal, matricidal, queer, in the cistern, on the stroll of
the stolen life, the life stolen by enlightenment and stolen back, where the commons
give refuge, where the refuge gives commons. What the beyond2 of teaching is really about is not
finishing oneself, not passing, not completing; it’s about allowing subjectivity to be unlawfully
overcome by others, a radical passion and passivity such that one becomes unfit for
subjection, because one does not possess the kind of agency that can hold the
regulatory forces of subjecthood, and one cannot initiate the auto-interpellative
torque that biopower subjection requires and rewards. It is not so much the teaching as it is the
prophecy in the organization of the act of teaching.
Attempts at researching the identity and experiences of others turns them into
interpreters of the subaltern’s voice – causing the subaltern’s experiences to be
subsumed for their own gain.
Eve Tuck and K Wayne Yang 2012
Eve Tuck is Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations and Coordinator of Native American Studies at the State University of
New York at New Paltz. K Wayne Yang is the ethnic studies professor at the University of California San Diego and received his
PHD in Social and Cultural Studies from the University of California Berkeley. Chapter 12 R-Words: Refusing Research;
file:///C:/Users/CameronsCastle/Downloads/TuckandYangRWordsRefusingResearch.pdf
One major colonial task of social science research that has emerged is to pose as voicebox,
ventriloquist, interpreter of subaltern voice. Gayatri Spivak’s important monograph, Can the Subaltern Speak?
(2010), is a foundational text in post-colonial studies prompting a variety of scholarly responses, spin-offs, and counterquestions,
including does the subaltern speak? Can the colonizer/settler listen? Can the subaltern be heard? Can the subaltern act? In our view,
Spivak’s question in the monograph, said more transparently, is can the subaltern speak in/to the academy? Our reading of the essay
prompts our own duet of questions, which we move in and out of in this essay: What does the academy do? What does social science
research do? Though one might approach these questions empirically, we emphasize the usefulness of engaging these questions
pedagogically; that is, posing the question not just to determine the answer, but because the rich conversations that will lead to an
answer are meaningful. The question—What does or can research do?—is not a cynical question, but one that tries to understand more
about research as a human activity The question is similar to questions we might ask of other human activities, such as, why do we
work? Why do we dance? Why do we do ceremony? At first, the responses might be very pragmatic, but they give way to more
philosophical reflections.
Returning to Spivak’s
question, in Can the Subaltern Speak? Spivak casts Foucault and Deleuze
as “hegemonic radicals” (2010, p. 23) who unwittingly align themselves with bourgeois
sociologists who fill the place of ideology with a continuistic “unconscious” or a
parasubjective “culture” . . . . In the name of desire, they tacitly reintroduce the undivided
subject into the discourse of power . . . (pp. 26–27) Observing Foucault and Deleuze’s almost romantic admiration for
the “reality” of the factory, the school, the barracks, the prison, the police station, and their insistence that the masses know these
(more) real realities perfectly well, far better than intellectuals, and “certainly say it very well,” (Deleuze, as cited in Spivak, 2010, p.
27), Spivak delivers this analysis: “The
ventriloquism of the speaking subaltern is the left intellectual’s
stock-in-trade” (2010, p. 27). Spivak critiques the position of the intellectual who is invested in
the ventriloquism of the speaking subaltern for the banality of what serves as evidence of
such “speech,” and for the ways in which intellectuals take opportunity to conflate the work
and struggle of the subaltern with the work of the intellectual, which only serves to make
more significant/authentic their own work (p. 29). All of it is part of a scheme of selfaggrandizing.
The retelling of stories in the academy allow them to be misconstrued and
commodified.
Eve Tuck and K Wayne Yang 2012
Eve Tuck is Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations and Coordinator of Native American Studies at the State University of
New York at New Paltz. K Wayne Yang is the ethnic studies professor at the University of California San Diego and received his
PHD in Social and Cultural Studies from the University of California Berkeley. Chapter 12 R-Words: Refusing Research;
file:///C:/Users/CameronsCastle/Downloads/TuckandYangRWordsRefusingResearch.pdf
Across academic disciplines, examples of ethical misconduct in human research are
abundant. Rebecca Skloot’s (2010) account of the experiences of Henrietta Lacks and her children, after cells from Ms. Lacks’s
cervix were harvested after her death in 1951, without consent, and reproduced in laboratories by the millions, if not billions, portrays
the ways in which families can be haunted by decisions made by researchers, long after the facts. More recently, the Havasupai tribe,
who live in the Grand Canyon, won a settlement from Arizona State University because of the deceptive practices of a biomedical
researcher, Therese Markow (Harmon, 2010). Dr. Markow
had permission from the tribe to collect blood
samples to study diabetes, but did not have permission to use the samples in the numerous
other genetic studies on schizophrenia and on the geographic origins of the tribe that she conducted with her students .
Years after the samples had been drawn, members of the tribe learned that their blood had
been used to test a variety of theories and conditions—some of which contradicted their own
generational knowledge regarding sovereign claims to land. The samples, kept in a freezer
on campus, became the stuff upon which researchers earned tenure and promotion, and
their doctoral degrees. More than two dozen publications were based on the samples (Harmon, 2010).
Though one might read these cases as instances of misconduct with which only those in the
biomedical or biological sciences must be concerned, it is important to point out that the
misuse of human cells, blood, or tissue is not only about the handling of such materials, but
also about the ways in which those materials are used to construct particular stories and
narratives about an individual, family, tribe, or community. The misconduct is in the
fabrication, telling, and retelling of stories. Academe is very much about the generation and
swapping of stories, and there are some stories that the academy has not yet proven itself
responsible enough to hear. We are writing about a particular form of loquaciousness of the
academy, one that thrives on specific representations of power and oppression, and rarefied
portrayals of dysfunction and pain.
One might ask what is meant by the academy, and by the academy being undeserving or unworthy of some stories or forms of
knowledge. For some, the academy refers to institutions of research and higher education, and the individuals that inhabit them. For
others, the term applies to the relationships between institutions of research and higher education, the nation-state, private and
governmental funders, and all involved individuals. When we invoke the
academy, or academe, we are invoking a
community of practice that is focused upon the propagation and promulgation of (settler
colonial) knowledge. Thus, when we say that there are some forms of knowledge that the
academy does not deserve, it is because we have observed the academy as a community of
practice that, as a whole: Stockpiles examples of injustice, yet will not make explicit a
commitment to social justice; Produces knowledge shaped by the imperatives of the nationstate, while claiming neutrality and universality in knowledge production; Accumulates
intellectual and financial capital, while informants give a part of themselves away; Absorbs
or repudiates competing knowledge systems, while claiming limitless horizons.
It is not the aff’s permission to sign away the stories of the 1ac to the power
vacuum of the academy.
Eve Tuck and K Wayne Yang 2012
Eve Tuck is Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations and Coordinator of Native American Studies at the State University of
New York at New Paltz. K Wayne Yang is the ethnic studies professor at the University of California San Diego and received his
PHD in Social and Cultural Studies from the University of California Berkeley. Chapter 12 R-Words: Refusing Research;
file:///C:/Users/CameronsCastle/Downloads/TuckandYangRWordsRefusingResearch.pdf
As social science researchers, there are stories that are entrusted to us, stories that are told to us
because research is a human activity, and we make meaningful relationships with
participants in our work. At times we come to individuals and communities with promises of proper procedure and
confidentiality-anonymity in hand, and are told, “Oh, we’re not worried about that; we trust you!” Or, “You don’t need to tell us all
that; we know you will do the right thing by us.” Doing
social science research is intimate work, worked
that is strained by a tension between informants’ expectations that something useful or
helpful will come from the divulging of (deep) secrets, and the academy’s voracious hunger
for the secrets.
This is not just a question of getting permission to tell a story through a signature on an IRB-approved participant consent form.
Permission is an individualizing discourse—it situates collective wisdom as individual
property to be signed away. Tissue samples, blood draws, and cheek swabs are not only our
own; the DNA contained in them is shared by our relatives, our ancestors, our future
generations (most evident when blood samples are misused as bounty for biopiracy.) This is equally true of stories.
Furthermore, power is protected by such a collapse of ethics into litigation-proof
relationships between individual and research institutions. Power, which deserves the most
careful scrutiny, will never sign such a permission slip.
Focus on pain dehumanizes the subject
Tuck and Yang assistant professor of educational foundations at the State University of New
York and assistant professor of ethnic studies at the University of California San Diego 2014 Eve
and K. Wayne “R-Words: Researching Research” p227
https://faculty.newpaltz.edu/evetuck/files/2013/12/Tuck-and-Yang-R-Words_RefusingResearch.pdf
Similarly, at the center of the analysis in this chapter is a concern with the fixation social science
research has exhibited in eliciting pain stories from com- munities that are not White, not
wealthy, and not straight. Academe's demonstrated fascination with telling and retelling
narratives of pain is troubling, both for its voyeurism and for its consumptive implacability.
Imagining "itself to be a voice, and in some disciplinary iterations, the voice of the colonised" (Simpson, 2007, p.
67, emphasis in the original) is not just a rare historical occurrence in anthropology and related fields. We observe that much of
the work of the academy is to reproduce stories of oppression in its own voice. At first, this may
read as an intolerant condemnation of the academy, one that refuses to forgive past blunders and see how things have changed in
recent decades. However, it is our view that while many individual scholars have chosen to pursue other lines of inquiry than the pain
narratives typical of their disciplines, novice
researchers emerge from doctoral programs eager to
launch pain-based inquiry projects because they believe that such approaches embody what
it means to do social science. The collection of pain narratives and the theories of change
that champion the value of such narratives are so prevalent in the social sciences that one
might surmise that they are indeed what the academy is about.
In the instance of slavery pain based focus allowed for the slave to further be
oppressed
Tuck and Yang assistant professor of educational foundations at the State University of New
York and assistant professor of ethnic studies at the University of California San Diego 2014 Eve
and K. Wayne “R-Words: Researching Research” p227-228
https://faculty.newpaltz.edu/evetuck/files/2013/12/Tuck-and-Yang-R-Words_RefusingResearch.pdf
Hooks's words resonate with our observation of how much of social science research is concerned with
providing recognition to the presumed voiceless, a recognition that is enamored with
knowing through pain. Further, this passage describes the ways in which the researcher's voice is
constituted by, Iegitimated [End Page 227] by, animated by the voices on the margins. The
researcher-self is made anew by telling back the story of the marginalized subaltem subject.
Hooks works to untangle the almost imperceptible differences between forces that silence
and forces that seemingly liberate by inviting those on the margins to speak, to tell their stories.
Yet the forces that invite those on the margins to speak also say, "Do not speak in a voice of
resistance. Only speak from that space in the margin that is a sign of deprivation, a wound,
an unfulfilled longing. Only speak your pain" (hooks, 1990, p. 343). The costs of a politics of recognition that is
rooted in naming pain have been critiqued by recent decolonizing and feminist scholars (Hartman, 1997, 2007; Tuck, 2009). In Scenes
of Subjection, Sadiya Hartman (I997) discusses how recognizing
the personhood of slaves enhanced the
power of the Southern slave- owning class. Supplicating narratives of former slaves were
deployed effectively by abolitionists, mainly White, well-to-do, Northern women, to generate portraits of
abuse that ergo recognize slaves as human (Hartman, 2007). In response, new laws afforded
minimal standards of existence, "making personhood coterminous with injury" (Hartman, I997, p. 93), while
simultaneously authorizing necessary violence to suppress slave agency. The slave emerges
as a legal person only when seen as criminal or "a violated body in need of limited forms of
protection" (p. 55). Recognition "humanizes" the slave, but is predicated upon her or his abjection. You are in pain,
therefore you are. "[T]he recognition of humanity require[s] the event of excessive violence,
cruelty beyond the limits of the socially tolerable, in order to acknowledge and protect the
slave's person" (p. 55). Furthermore, Hartman describes how slave-as-victim as human accordingly establishes slave-as-agent as
criminal. Applying Hartman's analysis, we note how the agency of Margaret Garner or Nat Turner can only
be viewed as outsider violence that humane society must reject while simultaneously
upholding the legitimated violence of the state to punish such outsider violence. Hartman asks, "is
it possible that such recognition effectively forecloses agency as the object of punishment . . . Or is this limited conferral of humanity
merely a reinscription of subjugation and pained existence?" (p. 55).
Prefer a desire based framework. It doesn’t deny pain but instead focuses on all
experiences in order to have a more complex understanding
Tuck and Yang assistant professor of educational foundations at the State University of New
York and assistant professor of ethnic studies at the University of California San Diego 2014 Eve
and K. Wayne “R-Words: Researching Research” p231
https://faculty.newpaltz.edu/evetuck/files/2013/12/Tuck-and-Yang-R-Words_RefusingResearch.pdf
Alongside analyses of pain and damage-centered research, Eve (Tuck 2009, 20I0) has theorized desire-based
research as not the antonym but rather the antidote for damage-focused narratives. Pain narratives
are always incomplete. They bemoan the food deserts, but forget to see the food innovations; they lament the concrete
jungles and miss the roses and the tobacco from concrete. Desire-centered research does not deny the
experience of tragedy, trauma, and pain, but positions the knowing derived from such
experiences as wise. This is not about seeing the bright side of hard times, or even believing
that everything happens for a reason. Utilizing a desire-based framework is about working
inside a more complex and dynamic understanding of what one, or a community, comes to
know in (a) lived life. Iogics of pain focus on events, sometimes hiding structure, always
adhering to a teleological trajectory of pain, brokenness, repair, or inseparability-from
unbroken, to broken, and then to unbroken again. Logics of pain require time to be
organized as linear and rigid, in which the pained body (or community or people) is set back or
delayed on some kind of path of humanization, and now must catch up (but never can) to the
settler/unpained/abled body (or community or people or society or philosophy or knowledge system). In this way, the Iogics
of pain has superseded the now outmoded racism of an explicit racial hierarchy with a
much more politically tolerable racism of a developmental hierarchy.' Under a developmental
hierarchy, in which some were undeterred by pain and oppression, and others were waylaid by their victimry and subalternity,
damage- centered research reifies a settler temporality and helps suppress other understandings of
time. Desire-based frameworks, by contrast, look to the past and the future to situate analyses.
Desire is about longing, about a present that is enriched by both the past and the future; it is
integral to our humanness. It is not only the painful elements of social and psychic realities,
but also the textured acumen and hope. (Tuck, 20l0, p. 644) In this way, desire is time-warping. The logics of
desire is asynchronous just as it is distemporal, living in the gaps between the ticking
machinery of disciplinary institutions. To be clear, again, we are not making an argument against
the existence of pain, or for the erasure of memory, experience, and wisdom that comes with
suffering. Rather, we see the collecting of narratives of pain by social scientists to already be
a double erasure, whereby pain is documented in order to be erased, often by eradicating
the communities that are supposedly injured and supplanting them with hopeful stories of
progress into a better, Whiter, world. Vizenor talks about such "the consumer notion of a 'hopeful book," and we
would add hopeful or feel-good research, as "a denial of tragic wisdom" bent on imagining "a social science paradise of tribal victims"
(1993, p. I4)- Desire interrupts this metanarrative of damaged communities and White progress.
The academy currently exploits those being researched and studied for their
own personal gain
Tuck and Yang assistant professor of educational foundations at the State University of New
York and assistant professor of ethnic studies at the University of California San Diego 2014 Eve
and K. Wayne “R-Words: Researching Research” p232
https://faculty.newpaltz.edu/evetuck/files/2013/12/Tuck-and-Yang-R-Words_RefusingResearch.pdf
Across academic disciplines, examples of ethical misconduct in human research are
abundant. Rebecca Skloot’s (2010) account of the experiences of Henrietta Lacks and her children, after cells from Ms.
Lacks’s cervix were harvested after her death in 1951, without consent, and reproduced in
laboratories by the millions, if not billions, portrays the ways in which families can be
haunted by decisions made by researchers, long after the facts. More recently, the Havasupai tribe, who
live in the Grand Canyon, won a settlement from Arizona State University because of the deceptive
practices of a biomedical researcher, Therese Markow (Harmon, 2010). Dr. Markow had permission
from the tribe to collect blood samples to study diabetes, but did not have permission to use
the samples in the numerous other genetic studies on schizophrenia and on the geographic
origins of the tribe that she conducted with her students. Years after the samples had been
drawn, members of the tribe learned that their blood had been used to test a variety of
theories and conditions—some of which contradicted their own generational knowledge
regarding sovereign claims to land. The samples, kept in a freezer on campus, became the stuff upon
which researchers earned tenure and promotion, and their doctoral degrees. More than two dozen publications
were based on the samples (Harmon, 2010). Though one might read these cases as instances of misconduct with which only those in
the biomedical or biological sciences must be concerned,
it is important to point out that the misuse of human
cells, blood, or tissue is not only about the handling of such materials, but also about the
ways in which those materials are used to construct particular stories and narratives about
an individual, family, tribe, or community. The misconduct is in the fabrication, telling, and
retelling of stories. Academe is very much about the generation and swapping of stories, and
there are some stories that the academy has not yet proven itself responsible enough to hear.
We are writing about a particular form of loquaciousness of the academy, one that thrives on specific
representations of power and oppression, and rarefied portrayals of dysfunction and pain. One might ask what is
meant by the academy, and by the academy being undeserving or unworthy of some stories or forms of knowledge. For some, the
academy refers to institutions of research and higher education, and the individuals that inhabit them. For others, the term applies to
the relationships between institutions of research and higher education, the nation-state, private and governmental funders, and all
involved individuals. When
we invoke the academy, or academe, we are invoking a community of
practice that is focused upon the propagation and promulgation of (settler colonial) knowledge.
Thus, when we say that there are some forms of knowledge that the academy does not deserve, it is because we have observed the
academy as a community of practice that, as a whole:
The knowledge that the academy produces only focuses on the gain of the
researcher which over looks the actual story being told
Tuck and Yang assistant professor of educational foundations at the State University of New
York and assistant professor of ethnic studies at the University of California San Diego 2014 Eve
and K. Wayne “R-Words: Researching Research” p234
https://faculty.newpaltz.edu/evetuck/files/2013/12/Tuck-and-Yang-R-Words_RefusingResearch.pdf
There are also stories that we overhear, because when our research is going well, we are really in peoples’ lives. Though it is
tempting, and though it would be easy to do so, these stories are not simply y/ours to take. In our work, we come across stories,
vignettes, moments, turns of phrase, pauses, that would humiliate participants to share, or are too sensationalist to publish.
Novice researchers in doctoral and master’s programs are often encouraged to do research on what or who is most available to
them. People who are underrepresented in the academy by social location—race or ethnicity,
indigeneity, class, gender, sexuality, or ability—frequently experience a pressure to become
the n/ Native informant, and might begin to suspect that some members of the academy
perceive them as a route of easy access to communities that have so far largely eluded
researchers. Doctoral programs, dissertations, and the master’s thesis process tacitly
encourage novice researchers to reach for low-hanging fruit. These are stories and data that require
little effort—and what we know from years and years of academic colonialism is that it is
easy to do research on people in pain. That kind of voyeurism practically writes itself. “Just get the dissertation
or thesis finished,” novice researchers are told. The theorem of lowhanging fruit stands for pretenured faculty too: “Just
publish, just produce; research in the way you want to after tenure, later.” This is how the
academy reproduces its own irrepressible irresponsibility. Adding to the complexity, many
of us also bring to our work in the academy our family and community legacies of having
been researched. As the researched, we carry stories from grandmothers’ laps and breaths,
from below deck, from on the run, from inside closets, from exclaves. We carry the proof of
oppression on our backs, under our fingernails; and we carry the proof of our survivance
(Vizenor, 2008) in our photo boxes, our calluses, our wombs, our dreams. These stories, too, are
not always ours to give away, though they are sometimes the very us of us. It needs to be said that
we are not arguing for silence. Stories are meant to be passed along appropriately,
especially among loved ones, but not all of them as social science research. Although such
knowledge is often a source of wisdom that informs the perspectives in our writing, we do
not intend to share them as social science research. It is enough that we know them.
Narratives lose their value when shared with the academy
Tuck and Yang assistant professor of educational foundations at the State University of New
York and assistant professor of ethnic studies at the University of California San Diego 2014 Eve
and K. Wayne “R-Words: Researching Research” p235
https://faculty.newpaltz.edu/evetuck/files/2013/12/Tuck-and-Yang-R-Words_RefusingResearch.pdf
Moreover, some narratives die a little when contained within the metanarrative of social
science. Richardson (2011) theorizes Gerald Vizenor’s concept of trickster knowledge and the play of shadows to articulate a
“shadow curriculum” that exceeds the material objects of reference—where much meaning is made in silence
surrounding the words, where memories are not simply reflections of a referent experience
but dynamic in themselves. “The shadow is the silence that inherits the words; shadows are
the motions that mean the silence” (Vizenor, 1993, p.7). Extending Richardson’s analysis of Vizenor’s work,
beneath the intent gaze of the social scientific lens, shadow stories lose their silences, their
play of meaning. The stories extracted from the shadows by social science research
frequently become relics of cultural anthropological descriptions of “tradition” and
difference from occidental cultures. Vizenor observes these to be the “denials of tribal wisdom in the
literature of dominance, and the morass of social science theories” (Vizenor, 1993, p. 8). Said another
way, the academy as an apparatus of settler colonial knowledge already domesticates, denies, and dominates
other forms of knowledge. It too refuses. It sets limits, but disguises itself as limitless. Frederic
Jameson (1981) writes, “[H]istory is what hurts. It is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective
praxis” (p. 102). For Jameson, history is a master narrative of inevitability, the logic of teleos and totality: All events are
interconnected and all lead toward the same horizon of progress. The relentlessness of the master narrative is what hurts people who
find themselves on the outside or the underside of that narrative. History as master narrative appropriates the voices, stories, and
histories of all Others, thus limiting their representational possibilities, their expression as epistemological paradigms in themselves.
Academic knowledge is particular and privileged, yet disguises itself as universal and
common; it is settler colonial; it already refuses desire; it sets limits to potentially dangerous
Other knowledges; it does so through erasure, but importantly also through inclusion, and
its own imperceptibility. Jameson’s observation also positions desire as a counterlogic to the history that hurts. Desire
invites the ghosts that history wants exorcised, and compels us to imagine the possible in what was written as impossible; desire is
haunted. Read this way, desire expands personal as well as collective praxis.
Speaking for others bad because you can never speak from their specific
location
Alcoff Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center 1995 Linda
Martín “THE PROBLEM OF SPEAKING FOR OTHERS”
http://www.alcoff.com/content/speaothers.html
Feminist discourse is not the only site in which the problem of speaking for others has been acknowledged and addressed. In
anthropology there is similar discussion about whether it is possible to speak for others
either adequately or justifiably. Trinh T. Minh-ha explains the grounds for skepticism when she says that
anthropology is "mainly a conversation of `us' with `us' about `them,' of the white man with
the white man about the primitive-nature man...in which `them' is silenced. `Them' always
stands on the other side of the hill, naked and speechless...`them' is only admitted among
`us', the discussing subjects, when accompanied or introduced by an `us'..."4 Given this analysis,
¶
even ethnographies written by progressive anthropologists are a priori regressive because of the structural features of anthropological
discursive practice.¶ The recognition that there is a problem in speaking for others has followed from the widespread acceptance of
two claims. First,
there has been a growing awareness that where one speaks from affects both
the meaning and truth of what one says, and thus that one cannot assume an ability to
transcend her location. In other words, a speaker's location (which I take here to refer to her
social location or social identity) has an epistemically significant impact on that speaker's
claims, and can serve either to authorize or dis-authorize one's speech. The creation of Women's
Studies and African American Studies departments were founded on this very belief: that both the study of and the
advocacy for the oppressed must come to be done principally by the oppressed themselves,
and that we must finally acknowledge that systematic divergences in social location between
speakers and those spoken for will have a significant effect on the content of what is said. The
unspoken premise here is simply that a speaker's location is epistemically salient. I shall explore this issue further in the next section.¶
The second claim holds that not only is location epistemically salient, but certain privileged locations are discursively dangerous.5 In
particular, the practice of privileged persons speaking for or on behalf of less privileged persons has actually resulted (in many cases)
in increasing or reenforcing the oppression of the group spoken for. This was part of the argument made against Anne Cameron's
speaking for Native women: Cameron's intentions were never in question, but the effects of her writing were argued to be harmful to
the needs of Native authors because it is Cameron rather than they who will be listened to and whose books will be bought by readers
interested in Native women. Persons
from dominant groups who speak for others are often treated
as authenticating presences that confer legitimacy and credibility on the demands of
subjugated speakers; such speaking for others does nothing to disrupt the discursive
hierarchies that operate in public spaces. For this reason, the work of privileged authors
who speak on behalf of the oppressed is becoming increasingly criticized by members of
those oppressed groups themselves.6
Speaking for others bad because it crowds out the others voice. Instead of
speaking for others we should be listening to others
Alcoff Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center 1995 Linda
Martín “THE PROBLEM OF SPEAKING FOR OTHERS”
http://www.alcoff.com/content/speaothers.html
The final response to the problem of speaking for others that I will consider occurs in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's rich essay "Can
the Subaltern Speak?"14 Spivak rejects a total retreat from speaking for others, and she criticizes the "self-abnegating intellectual"
pose that Foucault and Deleuze adopt when they reject speaking for others on the grounds that their position assumes the oppressed
can transparently represent their own true interests. According to Spivak, Foucault and Deleuze's self-abnegation serves only to
conceal the actual authorizing power of the retreating intellectuals, who in their very retreat help to consolidate a particular conception
of experience (as transparent and self-knowing). Thus, to
promote "listening to" as opposed to speaking for
essentializes the oppressed as non-ideologically constructed subjects. But Spivak is also critical of
speaking for which engages in dangerous re-presentations. In the end Spivak prefers a "speaking to," in which
the intellectual neither abnegates his or her discursive role nor presumes an authenticity of the oppressed, but still allows for the
possibility that the oppressed will produce a "countersentence" that can then suggest a new historical narrative. ¶ Spivak's arguments
show that a simple solution can not be found in for the oppressed or less privileged being able to speak for themselves, since their
speech will not necessarily be either liberatory or reflective of their "true interests", if such exist. I agree with her on this point but I
would emphasize also that ignoring the subaltern's or oppressed person's speech is, as she herself notes, "to continue the imperialist
project."15 Even
if the oppressed person's speech is not liberatory in its content, it remains the
case that the very act of speaking itself constitutes a subject that challenges and subverts the
opposition between the knowing agent and the object of knowledge, an opposition which has
served as a key player in the reproduction of imperialist modes of discourse. Thus, the problem
with speaking for others exists in the very structure of discursive practice, irrespective of its content, and subverting the hierarchical
rituals of speaking will always have some liberatory effects.¶ I agree, then, that we
should strive to create wherever
possible the conditions for dialogue and the practice of speaking with and to rather than
speaking for others. Often the possibility of dialogue is left unexplored or inadequately
pursued by more privileged persons. Spaces in which it may seem as if it is impossible to engage in dialogic
encounters need to be transformed in order to do so, such as classrooms, hospitals, workplaces, welfare agencies, universities,
institutions for international development and aid, and governments. It has long been noted that existing communication technologies
have the potential to produce these kinds of interaction even though research and development teams have not found it advantageous
under capitalism to do so.¶ However, while there is much theoretical and practical work to be done to develop such alternatives, the
practice of speaking for others remains the best option in some existing situations. An absolute retreat weakens political effectivity, is
based on a metaphysical illusion, and often effects only an obscuring of the intellectual's power. There
can be no complete
or definitive solution to the problem of speaking for others, but there is a possibility that its
dangers can be decreased. The remainder of this paper will try to contribute toward developing that possibility.
Speaking for others bad because they can never truly understand the position
they are speaking from and what they are speaking about
Alcoff Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center 1991 “The
Problem of Speaking for Others” pp14-16 jstor
Let me return now to the formulation of the problem of speaking for others. There are two premises
implied by the articulation of the problem, and unpacking these should advance our understanding of the issues involved. Premise 1:
The "ritual of speaking" (as defined above) in which an utterance is located, always bears on
meaning and truth such that there is no possibility of rendering positionality, location, or
context irrelevant to content. [End Page 14] The phrase "bears on" here should indicate some variable amount of
influence short of determination or fixing. One important implication of this first premise is that we can no longer
determine the validity of a given instance of speaking for others simply by asking whether
or not the speaker has done sufficient research to justify his or her claims. Adequate research will be
a necessary but insufficient criterion of evaluation. Now let us look at the second premise. Premise 2: Certain contexts and
locations are allied with structures of oppression, and certain others are allied with
resistance to oppression. Therefore all are not politically equal, and, given that politics is connected to truth,
all are not epistemically equal. The claim here that "politics is connected to truth" follows necessarily from premise 1.
Rituals of speaking are politically constituted by power relations of domination, exploitation, and subordination. Who is speaking,
who is spoken of, and who listens is a result, as well as an act, of political struggle. Simply put, the
discursive context is a
political arena. To the extent that this context bears on meaning, and meaning is in some
sense the object of truth, we cannot make an epistemic evaluation of the claim without
simultaneously assessing the politics of the situation. According to the first premise, though we cannot
maintain a neutral voice we may at least all claim the right and legitimacy to speak. But the
second premise disauthorizes some voices on grounds which are simultaneously political and epistemic. The conjunction of
premises 1 and 2 suggest that the speaker loses some portion of his or her control over the meaning
and truth of his or her utterance. Given that the context of hearers is partially determinant, the speaker is not
the master or mistress of the situation. Speakers may seek to regain control here by taking into account the context of
their speech, but they can never know everything about this context and with written and
electronic communication it is becoming increasingly difficult to know anything at all about
the context of reception. This loss of control may be taken by some speakers to mean [End Page15] that no speaker can be
held accountable for their discursive actions. However, a partial loss of control does not entail a complete loss of accountability.
Clearly, the
problematic of speaking for has at its center a concern with accountability and
responsibility. Acknowledging the problem of speaking for others cannot result in eliminating a speaker's accountability. In the
next section I shall consider some possible responses to the problem of speaking for.
AT: COMPLICATION
The slave exists in the grammar of suffering in which it can’t be understood by
other positionalities, that prevents any possibility of intersectionality with the
black body because you can never understand the slave or what it’s like to be a
slave.
Pak 2012 (Yumi, PhD in literature from UC-San Diego, “Outside Relationality: Autobiographical Deformations and the
Literary Lineage of Afro-pessimism in 20th and 21st Century African American Literature,” Dissertation through Proquest)
Because the four authors I examine focus intensively on untangling and retangling the nexus of race, gender, and sexuality in autobiographical narratives,
this project originally relied most heavily on the frameworks provided by queer theory and performance studies, as the structural organization and
methodology behind both disciplines offered the characteristic of being “‘inter’ – in between... intergenric [sic], interdisciplinary, intercultural – and
therefore inherently unstable” (“What is Performance Studies Anyway?” 360). My abstract ideation of the dissertation was one which conceptualized the
unloosening of the authors’ respective texts from the ways in which they have been read in particular genres. Yet the investigative progression of my
research redirected me to question the despondency I found within Toomer, Himes, Baldwin and Jones’ novels, a despondency and sorrow that seemed to
reach beyond the individual and collective purportedly represented in these works. What
does it mean, they seem to speculate, to suffer
beyond the individual, beyond the collective, and into the far reaches of paradigmatic structure?
What does it mean to exist beyond “social oppression” and veer instead into what Frank B. Wilderson, III calls
“structural suffering” (Red, White & Black 36)? Briefly, Wilderson utilizes what he calls Frantz Fanon’s splitting of “the hair[s] between
social oppression and structural suffering”; in other words, Wilderson refutes the possibility of analogizing blackness
with any other positionality in the world. Others may be oppressed, indeed, may suffer experientially,
but only the black, the paradigmatic slave, suffers structurally. Afro-pessimism, the theoretical means by which I
attempt to answer this query, provides the integral term and parameters with which I bind together queer theory, performance studies, and autobiography
studies in order to propose a re-examination of these authors and their texts. The
structural suffering of blackness seeps into
all elements of American history, culture, and life, and thus I begin my discussion with an analysis of Hortense Spillers’
To theorize blackness is to
begin with the slave ship, in a space that is in actuality no place.7 In discussing the transportation of
concept of an American grammar in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.”
human cargo across the Middle Passage, Spillers writes that this physical theft of bodies was “a willful and violent (and unimaginable from this distance)
in this mass gathering and
transportation, what becomes illuminated is not only the complete and total deracination of native
from soil, but rather the evisceration of subjectivity from blackness, the evacuation of will and
desire from the body; in other words, we see that even before the black body there is flesh, “that zero
degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography” (67). Black flesh,
which arrives in the United States to be manipulated and utilized as slave bodies, is “a primary
narrative” with its “seared, divided, ripped-apartness, riveted to the ship’s hole, fallen, or
‘escaped’ overboard” (67). These markings – “lacerations, woundings, fissures, tears, scars, openings, ruptures, lesions, rendings,
punctures of the flesh” – are indicative of the sheer scale of the structural violence amassed against
blackness, and from this beginning Spillers culls an “American grammar” that grounds itself in the “rupture and a radically different kind of cultural
continuation,” a grammar that is the fabric of blackness in the United States (67, 68). As Wilderson
observes, “Africans went into the ships and came out as Blacks” (Red, White & Black 38). In other words, in
the same moment they are (re)born as blacks, they are doomed to death as slaves. This rupture, I argue, is
severing of the captive body from its motive will, its active desire” (Spillers 67). She contends here that
evident in the definitions of slavery set forth by Orlando Patterson in his seminal volume, Slavery and Social Death: natal alienation, general dishonor
and openness to gratuitous violence. The captive body, which is constructed with torn flesh, is laid bare to any and all, and it is critical to note here that
Patterson, in line with Afro-pessimists,
does not align slavery with labor. The slave can – and did – work, but
what defines him/her as such is that as a dishonored and violated object , the master’s whims for him/her to work, or
not work, can be carried out without ramifications. Rather, the
slave’s powerlessness is heightened to the greatest
possible capacity, wherein s/he is marked by social death and the “permanent, violent
domination” of their selves (Patterson 13). Spillers’ “radically different kind of cultural continuation” finds an articulation of the object
status of blackness in the United States, one which impugns the separation of “slave” and “black.” As Jared Sexton and Huey Copeland inquire, “[h]ow
might it feel to be... a scandal to ontology, an outrage to every marker of the human? What, in the final analysis, does it mean to suffer?” (Sexton and
Copeland 53). Blackness
functions as a scandal to ontology because, as Wilderson states, black suffering forms
the ethical backbone of civil society. He writes, [c]hattel slavery did not simply reterritorialize the ontology of the African. It
also created the Human out of cultural disparate identities from Europe to the East... Put another way, through chattel slavery the world
gave birth and coherence to both its joys of domesticity and to its struggles of political discontent,
and with these joys and struggles, the Human was born, but not before it murdered the Black,
forging a symbiosis between the political ontology of Humanity and the social death of Blacks.
(Red, White & Black 20 – 21) Again, the African is made black, and in this murder both ontological and physical, humanity gains its coherence. It is
not my intention (nor of other Afro-pessimists) to argue that violence has only ever been
committed against black individuals and communities in the United States, or in the world, but rather that the
structural suffering that defines blackness, the violence enacted against blackness to maintain its
positioning outside of civil society, that demarcates the black as slave, has no horizontal
equivalent and, indeed, provides the logical ethos of existence for all othered subjectivities ; by this I
mean that all other subjects (and I use this word quite intentionally) retain a body and not the zero degree of flesh. As
Sexton writes, “we might say of the colonized: you may lose your motherland, but you will not ‘lose your mother’ (Hartman 2007)” (“The Curtain of the
Sky” 14). This is precisely why Sexton offers the succinct definition of Afro-pessimism as “a political ontology dividing the Slave from the world of the
Afro-pessimists contest the idea that the
modern world is one wherein the price of labor determines the price of being equally for all
people. In this capitalistic reading of the world, we summon blacks back into civil society by
utilizing Marxism to assume “a subaltern structured by capital, not by white supremacy” (“Gramsci’s Black Marx” 1). While it is
undeniable, of course, that black bodies and labor were used to aid in the economic growth of the
United States, we return again to the point that what defines enslavement is accumulation and
fungibility, alongside natal alienation, general dishonor, and openness to gratuitous violence; the
slave, then, is not constituted as part of the class struggle.8 While it is true “that labor power is exploited and that the
Human in a constitutive way” (“The Social Life of Social Death” 23). Furthermore,
worker is alienated in it,” it is also true that “workers labor on the commodity, they are not the commodity itself is, their labor power is” (Red, White &
Black 50). The slave is, then, invisible within this matrix, and, to a more detrimental effect, invisible within the ontology of lived subjects entirely. The
slave cannot be defined as loss – as can the postcolonial subject, the woman, or the immigrant –
but can only be configured as lack, as there is no potential for synthesis within a rubric of
antagonism. Wilderson sets up the phrase “rubric of antagonism” in opposition to “rubric of conflict” to clarify the positionality of blacks
outside relationality. The former is “an irreconcilable struggle between entities, or positions, the resolution of
which is not dialectical but entails the obliteration of one of the positions,” whereas the latter is “a rubric of
problems that can be posed and conceptually solved” (Red, White & Black 5). He continues, “[i]f a Black is the very antithesis of a Human subject... then
his or her paradigmatic exile is not simply a function of repressive practices on the part of institutions” (9). Integrating Hegel and Marx, and returning to
Spillers, Wilderson argues that within this grammar of suffering, the slave is not a laborer but what he calls “anti- Human, against which Humanity
In contrast to imagining the black other in
opposition to whiteness, Wilderson and other Afro-pessimists theorize blackness as being absent
in the dialectic, as “anti-Human.”
establishes, maintains, and renews its coherence, its corporeal integrity” (11).
We must insist on the singularity of slavery to scale up the call of total
abolitionism.
Sexton 2011 [Jared, associate professor of African American studies and film and media
studies at the University of California, Irvine, “The Social Life of Social Death: On AfroPessimism and Black Optimism” InTensions Fall/Winter
http://www.yorku.ca/intent/issue5/articles/jaredsexton.php]
[28] This article is an attempt to think through an ambivalence that invests the differentiated field of black studies. Maybe we share it
and maybe we don’t, or maybe we don’t know it, or don’t show it. And maybe we can’t. But this isn’t just a personal story, in any
case. It is a meditation on the conditions of an intellectual practice among those that pose the greatest problem for intellectual practice.
I have only been able to outline two associated points: 1) the paradigmatic analysis of afro-pessimism and the black optimism of
performance studies relate through a set-theoretic difference rather than dialectical opposition or deconstruction; 2) afro-
pessimism remains illegible—and unduly susceptible to dismissal—without attending to the economy of
enunciation that sustains it and to the discursive-material formation in which it intervenes.
That discursive-material formation is global in scale, approximating the terms of “the antiblack world”
(Gordon 2000), and that economy of enunciation resists the attenuation of black freedom struggle
against the convergence of colorblindness, multiracialism, and what I introduced in a recent article as “people-ofcolor-blindness” (Sexton 2010a). There is something like a rule of inverse proportion at work here: how radical
a reconstruction you seek relates to how fully you regard the absoluteness of power, whether
you conceive of the constituted power of the slave estate as prior or understand it as a reactive apparatus of capture. In short,
slavery must be theorized maximally if its abolition is to reach the proper level. The
singularity of slavery is the prerequisite of its universality. Otherwise, we succumb to the
forces of mitigation that would transform the world through a coalition of a thousand tiny
causes. [29] As a way of stepping into it, again, and of concluding with anticipation, I’ll ask directly: Are the epigraphs in
contradiction? Do we have here two incommensurable approaches to black studies, or perhaps some other relation? Let us assume,
with Wilderson, it is the case that every gesture, every performance of blackness, every act or action, critical or creative, rhetorical or
aesthetic, is haunted by this sense of grammar and ghosts, of a structure and a memory of its (still) coming into being through and as
violence. Does this haunting imply, much less ensure, that there is not and can be no fugitive movement of escape, as Moten has it?
Does afro-pessimism fail to hear the resonance of black optimism? Or might something else be at work. Of course, when Wilderson
writes that “performance meets ontology,” he is saying quite a bit more than that. Though he is attempting to think the two registers
together—the performative and the ontological—he is indicating not so much that ontology is not performative, but rather more so
that performativity does not, in fact, have disruptive power at the level or in the way that it has been theorized to date. More radically
still, he is suggesting that this theorization remains insufficiently elaborated. That, at least, is how I read the animating gesture of the
intervention and interlocution. [30] Adjudicating the question may require that this sense of permanent violence, if not the violence
itself, become intelligible. But can it be rendered available to thought or even become knowledge? This
is Wilderson’s intervention:
to illuminate the ways in which we do not, cannot, or will not know anything about this
violence, the ways in which our analyses miss the paradigm for the instance, the example, the
incident, the anecdote. Is this knowledge, or sense, something that operates at the point where thought breaks down, at its
limit? Some may chafe at the notion of permanence here, because it seems not to admit of historicity or, more radically, of a certain
impossibility of permanence. But we are talking about permanence in the pedestrian sense that something “lasts or remains without
essential change.” It is the logic of change as permutation. The contention arises, then, over what it means to inhabit
this permanence and, in related fashion, how it is to be inhabited. Can there be knowledge of a grammar (of suffering), of a structure
(of vulnerability)? If so, is it available to articulation, can it be said, or is it an unbearable, unspeakable knowledge? Can
it even
be experienced as such, expressed, accounted for practically or theoretically? Or is there only
“knowledge of the experience of freedom [from grammar, structure, or ghosts], even when that knowledge precedes experience”
(Moten 2004: 303)?xvi [31] This is another way of asking and bringing into the open a question that might otherwise by choked out
by a whispering campaign or low-intensity conflict or depoliticizing collegiality: Does (the theorization of) social death negate (the
theorization of) social life, and is social life the negation (in theory) of that negation (in theory)? Put differently, does the persistence
of a prior—but originally displaced and heterogeneous—(black) social life against the (antiblack) social death that establishes itself
against it demand more than the fullness of an account? I’m asking a question of procedure here, of course, but also one of politics.
Must one always think blackness to think antiblackness, as it were, a blackness that is against and before antiblackness, an antiantiblackness that is also an ante-antiblackness? Can one gain adequate understanding of antiblackness—its history and politics, its
mythos, its psychodynamics—if one does not appreciate how blackness, so to speak, calls it into being? Can one mount a critique of
antiblackness without also celebrating blackness? Can one pursue the object of black studies without also affirming its aim?
Moreover, can one pursue the former without doing so in the name of and as the latter? [32] What I take to be a certain aggression, or
perhaps anxiety, in the deconstruction of the structure of vulnerability and the grammar of suffering that undergird afro-pessimism is
not a sign of pathology in the moral register, but rather a matter of the apprehension of psychic—and political—reality in the properly
psychoanalytic sense: an effect of misrecognition, a problem of register and symbolization, an optical illusion or echo that
dissimulates the source and force of the propagation. It is a confusion of one for two and two for one, the projection of an internal
differentiation onto an external surface, the conversion of impossibility into prohibition. Wilderson’s is an analysis of the law in its
operation as “police power and racial prerogative both under and after slavery” (Wagner 2009: 243). So too is Moten’s analysis, at
least that just-less-than-half of the intellectual labor committed to the object of black studies as critique of (the antiblackness of)
Western civilization. But Moten is just that much more interested in how black social life steals away or escapes from the law, how it
frustrates the police power and, in so doing, calls that very policing into being in the first place. The policing of black freedom, then, is
aimed less at its dreaded prospect, apocalyptic rhetoric notwithstanding, than at its irreducible precedence. The logical and ontological
priority of the unorthodox self-predicating activity of blackness, the “improvisatory exteriority” or “improvisational immanence” that
blackness is, renders the law dependent upon what it polices. This is not the noble agency of resistance. It is a reticence or reluctance
that we might not know if it were not pushing back, so long as we know that this pushing back is really a pushing forward. So you see,
in this perverse sense, black social death is black social life. The object of black studies is the aim of black studies. The
most
radical negation of the antiblack world is the most radical affirmation of a blackened world.
Afro-pessimism is “not but nothing other than” black optimism.xv
CAP K
1NC Turn – Desire Ballot / Big Other
NOTE: This turn is only to be read if going for the cap K alternative
The affirmatives attempt at a radical pedagogy cannot be progressive because
it simply re-inscribes unconscious passionate attachment to oppressive power
structures created through their pedagogy. By failing to account for lack
politics, the aff will fail to reach the level of an ethical act because it will remain
constrained by the ideology of Capital
Cho and Lewis, 2005 (Daniel Cho, Doctoral Candidate in the school of Education
specializing in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory at the University of California, Los Angeles,
Tyson Lewis, Doctoral Candidate in the school of Education specializing in Cultural Studies and
Critical Theory at the University of California, Los Angeles, september 2005, “The Persistent
Life of Oppression: the Unconscious, Power, and Subjectivity”, Interchange, Vol. 36/3, 313-329,
accessed via Springerlink [AJT])
Because he conceives of the student as an object of oppression, throughout Pedagogy of the Oppressed,
Freire (1970) mis-recognizes the productivity of banking pedagogy, which works on and through
the body to form a particular passionate attachment that is dependent upon and constituted within
relations of power and domination. When transforming education from banking to problem-posing, the obstacle
that the critical educator faces is not so much that the oppressed want to become the oppressors, as Freire speculates,
but rather that they instead desire to remain the object4. Simply put, if subjectivity is a passionate attachment
formed through power relations, then the subject will have a vested unconscious and irrational
bond with the relations of power that support his or her identity even if this identity is seemingly
counter intuitive to the interests of social justice or economic emancipation. As Butler (1997) articulates: In order to be, we
might say, we must become recognizable, but to challenge the norms by which recognition is conferred is, in some ways, to risk one’s very being, to become questionable in one’s
to abandon a certain set of power relations would be to
desubjectivize or abandon the self – a prospect that generates the anxiety of mis-recognition.¶
When Freire argues that the oppressed have a fear of freedom, he is only partially correct. More precisely, the
oppressed, tethered to their object status, have a fear of radical loss – a sense of psychic loss even
if they materially have nothing to lose. Stated differently, the oppressed may have an irrational fear
of freedom from their lack – a lack predicated on the continued existence of the object/subject
dialectic prevalent within a capitalist society and replicated through the banking model of
education. And this is why power, once it has been internalized on an unconscious level, is so problematic. As Foucault (1990):¶ What makes power hold good, what
ontology, to risk one’s very recognizability as a subject. (p. 18) ¶ Thus,
makes it accepted, is simply the fact that is doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge,
produces discourse. (p. 119) ¶ Because
disciplinary power does not simply repress but rather constructs subjects through their
subjugation, the ties that bind the oppressed to their state of oppression cannot easily be cast aside.
In sum, the internalization and identification with the oppressive power relations constituted in a
banking pedagogy may very well block the efforts of the critical educator to raise the
consciousness of the oppressed to a level of revolutionary action. Thus the psychic life of power
introduces a tension or contradiction between unconscious irrational investments and conscious objective interests. ¶
Through attachments, power has a psychic life, begging the question of resistance. This is to say, if even a direct
opposition to power can be co-opted by its taking up of residence in the psyche as an attachment to
the forms of power that lead to its very existence, then, how can one properly resist powerful institutions? In his commentary on Butler,
Slavoj Zizek (1999) writes, “She is well aware, of course, that the site of this resistance cannot be simply and directly
identified as the Unconscious: the existing order of Power is also supported by unconscious
‘passionate attachments’ ” (p. 260). In other words, Zizek articulates Butler’s notion of a passionate attachment to the Lacanian concept of the fundamental
fantasy, which structures our conscious and unconscious faculties. For Zizek, ¶ the act of resistance cannot simply reside in the
play of signifiers within the normalized parameters of this fantasy; such acts amount to hysterical
activity and can not, ultimately, be considered an Act proper. Rather, the Act proper disrupts the
fundamental fantasy itself and hence restructures the entire field of possibilities. Zizek (1999) writes,¶
An ethical act is not only ‘beyond the reality principle’ (in the sense of ‘running against the current,’ of
insisting on its Cause – Thing without regard to reality); rather, it designates an intervention that changes the
very co-ordinates of the ‘reality principle.’ (p. 167)
2NC Turn – Desire Ballot / Big Other
Extend the Cho and Lewis evidence from the 1NC - The aff’s pedagogy fails
because they view the ballot as essential to the realization of their project.
Their desire for the judge’s approval via the ballot is a passionate attachment to
the very system of power and domination that they are attempting to resist.
This internalization of power prevents critical educators from elevating to the
level of a shift in consciousness – opposition will simply be co-opted and by
power. Only the alternative can solve because a proper act disrupts the
fundamental fantasy itself, restructuring the field of possibilities which can
allow us to break free from the restraints of capital.
The system of capital creates an ethical dilemma: ethics will never be political if
we don’t insist on risking the impossible - i.e. a successful revolution against
capitalism which RESISTS THE DESIRE for the power that resides in the big other
– the negative radically restructures the ethico-political imagination to include
the possibility of successful actions against domination
Zizek and Daly 4 (Slavoj and Glyn, Conversations with Zizek page 18-19)
a confrontation with the obscenities of abundance capitalism also requires a
transformation of the ethico-political imagination. It is no longer a question of developing ethical
guidelines within the existing political framework (the various institutional and corporate ‘ethical
committees’) but of developing a politicization of ethics; an ethics of the Real.8 The starting point here
is an insistence on the unconditional autonomy of the subject; of accepting that as human beings
we are ultimately responsible for our actions and being-in-the-world up to and including the
constructions of the capitalist system itself. Far from simple norm-breaking or refining / reinforcing existing
social protocol, an ethics of the Real tends to emerge through norm-breaking and in finding new directions
that, by definition, involve traumatic changes: i.e. the Real in genuine ethical challenge. An ethics of the Real
does not simply defer to the impossible (or infinite Otherness) as an unsurpassable horizon that
already marks every act as a failure, incomplete and so on. Rather, such an ethics is one that fully
accepts contingency but which is nonetheless prepared to risk the impossible in the sense of
breaking out of standardized positions. We might say that it is an ethics which is not only politically motivated
but which also draws its strength from the political itself. For Zizek an ethics of the Real (or Real ethics) means
that we cannot rely on any form of symbolic Other that would endorse our (in)decisions and
(in)actions: for example, the ‘neutral’ financial data of the stockmarkets; the expert knowledge of Beck’s ‘new
For Zizek,
modernity’ scientists, the economic and military councils of the New World Order; the various (formal and informal)
tribunals of political correctness; or any of the mysterious laws of God, nature or the market. What Zizek affirms
is a radical culture of ethical identification for the left in which the alternative forms of militancy
must first of all be militant with themselves. That is to say, they must be militant in the fundamental
ethical sense of not relying on any external/higher authority and in the development of a political
imagination that, like Zizek’s own thought, exhorts us to risk the impossible.
Reject the aff and their permutation – any degree of acceptance of the Big
Other colonizes the entirety of the aff’s gesture
Zizek 7 [Slavoj, Senior Researcher at the University of Ljublijana, Slovenia and Prof. of
Philosophy and Sociology @ European Grad Institute, How to Read Lacan, Ch. 2 Empty
Gestures and Performatives, 2007]
There are, however, many features of the "big Other" which get lost in this simplified notion. For
Lacan, the reality of
human beings is constituted by three mutually entangled levels: the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and
the Real. This triad can be nicely illustrated by the game of chess. The rules one has to follow in
order to play it are its symbolic dimension: from the purely formal symbolic standpoint, "knight" is defined only by
the moves this figure can make. This level is clearly different from the imaginary one, namely the way
different pieces are shaped and characterized by their names (king, queen, knight), and it is easy to envision a game
with the same rules, but with a different imaginary, in which this figure would be called "messenger" or "runner" or whatever. Finally,
real is the entire complex set of contingent circumstances which affect the course of the game: the
intelligence of the players, the unpredictable intrusions that may disconcert one of the players or directly cut the
game short The big Other operates at a symbolic level. What, then, is this symbolic order composed of? When we
speak (or listen, for hat matter), we never merely interact with others; our speech activity is grounded on our
accepting of and relying on a complex network of rules and other kinds of presuppositions. First,
there are the grammatical rules I have to master blindly and spontaneously: if I were to bear in mind all the time these rules, my
speech would come to a halt. Then there is the background of participating in the same life-world which enables me and my partner in
conversation to understand each other. The rules that I follow are marked by a deep split: there are rules (and meanings) that I follow
blindly, out of custom, but of which, upon reflection, I can become at least partially aware (such as common grammatical rules), and
there are rules that I follow, meanings that haunt me, unbeknownst to me (such as unconscious prohibitions). Then there are rules and
meanings I am aware of, but have to act on the outside as if I am not aware of them - dirty or obscene innuendos which one passes
over in silence in order to maintain the proper appearances. This symbolic space acts like a standard against which
I can measure myself. This is why the big Other can be personified or reified in a single agent:
"God" who watches over me from beyond and over all real individuals or the Cause which addresses me (Freedom,
Communism, Nation) and for which I am ready to give my life. While talking, I am never merely
a "small other" (individual) interacting with other "small others," the big Other always has to be
there.
Cap Links – Identity
The incorporation of identity into politics is not resistance – rather it
strengthens the symbolic fiction of the political by keeping up appearances
Zizek 99 [Slavoj, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies, Ljubljana, Slovenia, The
Ticklish Subject, pgs. 195-96, 1999]
The distinction between appearance and the postmodern notion of simulacrum as no longer
clearly distinguishable from the Real is crucial here.27 The political as the domain of appearance (opposed to the
social reality of class and other distinctions, that is, of society as the articulated social body) has nothing in common with the
postmodern notion that we are entering the era of universalized simulacra in which reality itself becomes indistinguishable from its
simulated double. The nostalgic longing for the authentic experience of being lost in the deluge of
simulacra (detectable in Virilio), as well as the postmodern assertion of the Brave New World of
universalized simulacra as the sign that we are finally getting rid of the metaphysical obsession
with authentic Being (detectable in Vattimo), both miss the distinction between simulacrum and
appearance: what gets lost in today's 'plague of simulations' is not the firm, true, non-simulated
Real, but appearance itself. To put it in Lacanian terms: simulacrum is imaginary (illusion), while
appearance is symbolic (fiction); when the specific dimension of symbolic appearance starts to disintegrate, the Imaginary
and the Real become more and more indistinguishable. The key to today's universe of simulacra, in which the Real is less and less
distinguishable from its imaginary simulation, lies in the retreat of ‘symbolic efficiency'. In sociopolitical terms, this domain of
appearance (of symbolic fiction) is none other than that of politics as distinct from the social body
subdivided into parts. There is 'appearance' in so far as a part not included in the Whole of the
Social Body (or included/ excluded in a way against which it protests) symbolizes its position as that of a Wrong,
claiming, against other parts, that it stands for the universality of egaliberte here we are dealing
with appearance in contrast to the 'reality' of the structured social body. The old conservative
motto of 'keeping up appearances' thus takes a new twist today: it no longer stands for the 'wisdom' accordingto which it is better not to disturb the rules of social etiquette too much, since social chaos might ensue. Today, the effort to
'keep up appearances' stands, rather, for the effort to maintain the properly political space against
the onslaught of the postmodern all-embracing social body with its multitude of particular
identities.28
Cap Links - Race
Race and economy are inseparable. A politics of racial affirmation that centers
on discursive and symbolic racism fetishizes identity and reifies structural
oppression. We must intervene on the level of the material and systemic to
challenge the exploitative structure of racialized capitalism
Young 6 [Robert, “Putting Materialism back into Race Theory:
Toward a Transformative Theory of Race”
http://redcritique.org/WinterSpring2006/puttingmaterialismbackintoracetheory.htm]
the discourse of the subject operates as an ideological strategy for fetishizing the black
experience and, consequently, it positions black subjectivity beyond the reach of Marxism. For example,
in the Afrocentric Idea, Asante dismisses Marxism because it is Eurocentric (8), but are the core concepts of Marxism,
such as class and mode of production, only relevant for European social formations? Are African
and African-American social histories/relations unshaped by class structures? Asante assumes
that class hierarchies do not structure African or the African-American social experiences, and
this reveals the class politics of Afrocentricity: it makes class invisible. Asante's assumption,
which erases materialism, enables him to offer the idealist formulation that the "word creates
reality" (70). The political translation of such idealism is not surprisingly very conservative. Asante directs us away from
critiquing capitalist institutions, in a manner similar to the ideological protocol of the Million Man March, and calls
for vigilance against symbolic oppression. As Asante tellingly puts it, "symbol imperialism, rather than
institutional racism, is the major social problem facing multicultural societies" (56). In the realm of
Indeed,
African-American philosophy, Howard McGary Jr. also deploys the discourse of the (black) subject to mark the limits of Marxism.
For instance, in a recent interview, McGary offers this humanist rejection of Marxism: "I don't think that the
levels of alienation experienced by Black people are rooted primarily in economic relations"
(Interview 90). For McGary, black alienation exceeds the logic of Marxist theory and thus McGary's
idealist assertion that "the sense of alienation experienced by Black people in the US is also
rooted in the whole idea of what it means to be a human being and how that has been understood"
(Interview 90). McGary confuses causes and effects and then misreads Marxism as a descriptive
modality. Marxism is not concerned as much with descriptive accounts, the effects, as much as it is with explanatory accounts.
That is, it is concerned with the cause of social alienation because such an explanatory account acts as a guide for praxis. Social
alienation is an historical effect and its explanation does not reside in the experience itself;
therefore, it needs explanation and such an explanation emerges from the transpersonal space of concepts. In
theorizing the specificity of black alienation, McGary reveals his contradictory ideological
coordinates. First, he argues that black alienation results from cultural "beliefs". Then, he suggests
that these cultural "norms" and "practices" develop from slavery and Jim Crow, which are
fundamentally economic relations for the historically specific exploitation of black people. If
these cultural norms endogenously emerge from the economic systems of slavery and Jim Crow,
as McGary correctly suggests, then and contrary to McGary's expressed position, black alienation is very
much rooted in economic relations. McGary's desire to place black subjectivity beyond Marxism
creates contradictions in his text. McGary asserts that the economic structures of slavery and Jim Crow shape cultural norms.
Thus in a post-slavery, post-Jim Crow era, there would still be an economic structure maintaining contemporary oppressive norms—
from McGary's logic this must be the case. However, McGary remains silent on the contemporary economic
system structuring black alienation: capitalism. Apparently, it is legitimate to foreground and critique
the historical connection between economics and alienation but any inquiry into the present day
connection between economics and alienation is off limits. This other economic structure—capitalism—
remains the unsaid in McGary's discourse, and consequently he provides ideological support for
capitalism—the exploitative infrastructure which produces and maintains alienation for blacks as
well as for all working people. In a very revealing moment, a moment that confirms my reading of McGary's pro-capitalist position, he
asserts that "it is possible for African-Americans to combat or overcome this form of alienation described by recent writers without overthrowing
capitalism" (20). Here, in a most lucid way, we see the ideological connection between the superstructure (philosophy) and the base (capitalism).
Philosophy provides ideological support for capitalism, and, in this instance, we can also see how philosophy carries out class politics at the level of
theory (Althusser Lenin 18). McGary points out "that Black people have been used in ways that white people have not" (91). His observation may be true,
but it does not mean that whites have not also been "used"; yes, whites may be "used" differently, but they are still "used" because that is the logic of
McGary's interview signals what I
disconnects black alienation from other social relations; hence, it
ultimately reifies race, and, in doing so, suppresses materialist inquiries into the class logic of
race. That is to say, the meaning of race is not to be found within its own internal dynamics but rather
in dialectical relation to and as an ideological justification of the exploitative wage-labor
economy. This isolationist position finds a fuller and, no less problematic, articulation in Charles W. Mills' The Racial Contract, a text which
exploitative regimes—people are "used", that is to say, their labor is commodified and exchanged for profit.
call an "isolationist" view. This view
undermines the possibility for a transracial transformative political project. Mills evinces the ideological assumptions and consequent politics of the
isolationist view in a long endnote to chapter 1. Mills privileges race oppression, but, in doing so, he must suppress other forms of oppression, such as
gender and class. Mills acknowledges that there are gender and class relations within the white population, but he still privileges race, as if the black
community is not similarly divided along gender and class lines. Hence, the ideological necessity for Mills to execute a double move: he must
marginalize class difference within the white community and suppress it within the black community. Consequently, Mills removes the possibility of
connecting white supremacy, a political-cultural structure, to its underlying economic base.
Cap Links - Blackness
And, Blackness will be commodified, which destroys the potential for authentic
solidarity and the momentum of revolution against capital
Gasper 10 (Matthew Gasper, Critical Consciousness, “Identity Commodification and
Negation” April 19 2010 http://matthewgasper.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/59/)
The commodification of individual and group identities isuseful for the maintenance of social and
capitalist structures. When an identity is commodified, it loses what makes it unique and
desirable. Ironically, the materialization of identity has a devaluing affect that can strip identity of
its authenticity, turning it into another product that can be acquired. In bell hooks’ view, this is
true for black identity: “Commodification of blackness strips away that component of
cultural genealogy that links living memory and history in ways that subvert and
undermine the status quo.” For hooks, this removes any sense of unity through the negation
of historical context. When the identity of blackness is commodified, individuals that are not
authentically affiliated with blackness are able to buy that identity, which degrades the
unifying affect group solidarity can have. Shared interest is no longer the cohesion for
groups, but rather an assumption that membership in an identity can bolster individualism,
adding to one’s uniqueness. This process of commodification is a double-edged sword; in
addition to devaluing group identity, it causes members that have the appearance of any
identity to suddenly value that identity. hooks helps to clarify this aspect:¶ “Ironically, white
consumer demand for the commodification of blackness has led more assimilated nonblack-identified black folks who have class privilege to engage themselves with interpreting
and reinventing the blackness they once repudiated.Ӧ Black identity, as it becomes more
valued by mainstream society, also becomes more valuable to those that can use it to their
advantage. When being part of a group is materialistically advantageous, anyone that can
assimilate that identity will. Creating profit from identity becomes a business that is easy to
maintain because all it requires is continued reproduction of that perceived identity. If rap
music is perceived as contributing to black identity, then rap music can be packaged with
that identity and sold as such, making black identity easily accessible. hooks sums up:¶ “I
would add that the contemporary commodification of blackness has become a dynamic part
of that system of cultural oppression. Opportunistic longings for fame, wealth, and power
now lead many black critical thinkers, writers, academics, and/or intellectuals to participate in
the production and marketing of black culture in ways that are complicit with the existing
oppressive-exploitative structure. That complicity begins with the equation of black
capitalism with black self-determination.”¶ Anything seen as “black” is marketed as social
capital to create economic capital. The complexity of identity is destroyed for profit. In
addition, capitalist structures need to commodify potential dissenting voices so radical ideas
cannot be disseminated across any group that has potential to create revolutionary
solidarity. Assimilating identities that could challenge existing structures helps keep
social/economic change from aggressively pursuing any radical vision. Commodification makes
identity unauthentic, and subsequently mainstream. Anything that can be bought and sold
cannot be critical of a system which allows for these identity transactions. Materialistic
transformation of identity is effective in creating profit while silencing countercultural
identities that challenge the status quo.¶
Blackness is and will be commodified, providing a cloak under which antiblackness can be justified and concealed – the depoliticization of the economy
thus turns the affirmative’s attempts at transformation
bell hooks 2005
(Media Education Foundation Transcript, 2005, “bell hooks: culturual criticism &
transformation” http://www.mediaed.org/assets/products/402/transcript_402.pdf)
I believe that American culture is obsessed with transgression. And to¶ the degree that blackness
remains a primary sign of transgression, one could talk about American culture and
mainstream culture as being obsessed with blackness, but it is blackness primarily in a
commodified form that can then be possessed, owned, controlled, and shaped by the
consumer and not with an engagement in black culture that might require one to be a
participant and therefore to be in some way transformed by what you are consuming as
opposed to being merely a buyer. Anecdotally that to me¶ is the difference between a young
white male from the suburb who’s consuming black music in the form of rap and who’s
wearing the same kind of clothes as other, you¶ know, hip hop musicians but then in fact
when he encounters a young black male on the streets feels the same racialized fear and
demonizes that person as any white person who’s had no contact with that music, so that
there's no correlation often between the¶ consumption of the commodity that is blackness
and the culture from which that¶ commodity comes, or that provides the resource base and
that's no different again from¶ us thinking of Third World countries.¶ There's a way in which
white culture is perceived as too Wonder Bread right now, not¶ edgy enough, not dangerous
enough. Let's get some of those endangered species¶ people to be exotic for us and it's really
simply, I think, a more upscale version of¶ primitivism, resurging. When blackness is the sign of
transgression that is most desired it allow whiteness to remain static, to remain
conservative, and it's conservative thrust to go unnoticed. So as we're having a mounting
Fascism in the United States that is¶ perpetuated increasingly by liberal young, moneyed,
liberal, white people, if they are¶ wearing black clothes or listening to black music, they can
be perceived as¶ transgressive, as radical, when in fact, once again, we see a separation
between¶ material aspirations and cultural and social interests. So that at any point in time
they¶ can drop their interest in blackness and do whatever they need to do to reinforce
their¶ class interests, the interest of white supremacy, the interest of capitalism and¶
imperialism and I think that this is frightening because it's so deep and profound. It really¶
suggests the way in which fantasy will I think, more and more mediate Fascism as it has¶ always
done in the past. Pretend that you're going somewhere that you're not really¶ going and you
can stay in place and be ready to serve the state when the state calls¶ you because you really
haven't left home. And I think that's a lot of what's happening.
Cap Links – Intersectionality
Intersectionality as a lens is dangerous because its plurality disables an analysis
which positions capitalism as a constitutive force for other forms of oppression
Mclaren and Farhmandpur, 2005. (Peter, PhD, prof of education at UCLA, and Ramin,
PhD, prof of educational policy at Portland State. Teaching Against Global Capitalism and the
New Imperialism: A Critical Pedagogy. Page 176. SPP)
We believe not that class struggle is outmoded but rather that it constitutes one of the crucial
missing dimensions of contemporary educational criticism (McLaren 1998b). We are rejecting neo-Weberian
concept of class based on consumption-based patterns, status, and occupational hierarchies that tell us little about the relationship
between social classes. Along with British Marxist educators Dave Hill and Mike Cole, we reject technicist redudions of class into
"fractions" or segments that hide or disguise common interests such as common consciousness among these groups comprising the
working class in opposition to the exploiting capitalist class (Hill and Cole 2001).
We feel it is important for the educational researcher to recognize both the political and the
pedagogical import of the dilemma put forward by Ellen Meiksins Wood (1994): "Once you replace the
concept of capitalism with an undifferentiated plurality of sexual identities and special
oppressions, socialism as the antithesis to capitalism loses all meaning" (29). Here the critical
educational researcher challenges the relativism of the gender-race-class grid of reflexive
positionality by recognizing that class antagonism or struggle is not simply one in a series of
social antagonisms but rather constitutes the part of this series that sustains the horizon of the
series itself. In other words, class struggle is the specific antagonism that assigns rank to and modifies
the particularities of the other antagonisms in the series ( Zizek 1999).
Cap Links – Counter-Hegemonic Discourses
Privileging counter-hegemonic discourses as a method of deconstruction is
flawed – it simply replaces the system of domination it wishes to replace via
the reification of capital
Mclaren and Farhmandpur, 2005. (Peter, PhD, prof of education at UCLA, and Ramin,
PhD, prof of educational policy at Portland State. Teaching Against Global Capitalism and the
New Imperialism: A Critical Pedagogy. Page 109-110. SPP)
Polycentric social and political spaces can be created by deconstructing the center/periphery and
dominant/marginalized dichotomies that underwrite many critical approaches to social reform.
The idea is not to move marginalized voices from the periphery to the center since behind this
move marginalized voices are no more "authentic" than dominant voices and are vulnerable to
reinscription into the "centrist" ideologies of the neoliberal capitalist state; And while the view of
marginalized groups is fundamental in providing the initial counterstatement to the dominant ideology, it i s not
necessarily less distorted than the view of those who occupy the center. Yet a political
commitment to social change and equality gives marginalized groups more political urgency and
saliency. Flores and McPhail (1997) explain thusly:
By simply replacing "dominant" voices with "marginalized" voices, critics can perpetuate notions
of identity that presume an essential authenticity, subscribe to monolithic notions of race, gender,
or ethnicity, or privilege a particular position with "the community." These voices can become as
constraining and as counterproductive as those they are intended to replace, often even excluding
people within those communities whose voices are ostensibly represented, but who are not being
heard. Such voices can also shut down any move toward empathic dialogue. We therefore cannot assume that the
marginalized voice is the liberatory voice. (115)
What is required in order to move toward an emancipatory and transformative framework is a critical consciousness accompanied by
critical self-reflexivity (McLaren 1997). Self-reflexivity is a process that identifies the source of oppression,
both from the outside and from within, through participation in a dialectical critique of one's own
positionality in the larger totalizing system of oppression and the silencing of others. Again it is worth
quoting Flores and McPhail (1997) in detail:
Cap Impact – Racism
Even if it is not the root cause of racism, Capital creates the conditions for racist
domination to continue: the logic of the market will subsume any identitybased struggle and turn it into profit and exploitation. The invisible hands of
the market will applaud the affirmative for failing to disrupt its mode of
domination
San Juan 3 [E., Fulbright Lecturer @ Univ. of Leuven, Belgium, “Marxism and the Race/Class
Problematic: A Re-Articulation,”2003, http://clogic.eserver.org/2003/sanjuan.html. SPP]
It seems obvious that racism cannot be dissolved by instances of status mobility when socio-historical
circumstances change gradually or are transformed by unforeseen interventions. The black
bourgeoisie continues to be harassed and stigmatized by liberal or multiculturalist practices of
racism, not because they drive Porsches or conspicuously flaunt all the indices of wealth. Class exploitation cannot
replace or stand for racism because it is the condition of possibility for it. It is what enables the
racializing of selected markers, whether physiological or cultural, to maintain, deepen and
reinforce alienation, mystifying reality by modes of commodification, fetishism, and reification
characterizing the routine of quotidian life. Race and class are dialectically conjoined in the
reproduction of capitalist relations of exploitation and domination. well as the principle of selfdetermination for oppressed or "submerged" nations espoused by Lenin, exemplify dialectical attempts to historicize the collective
agency for socialist transformation. Within the framework of the global division of labor between metropolitan center and colonized
periphery, a Marxist program of national liberation is meant to take into account the extraction of surplus value from colonized
peoples through unequal exchange as well as through direct colonial exploitation in "Free Trade Zones," illegal traffic in prostitution,
mail-order brides, and contractual domestics (at present, the Philippines provides the bulk of the latter, about ten million persons
and growing). National oppression
has a concrete reality not entirely reducible to class exploitation
but incomprehensible apart from it; that is, it cannot be adequately understood without the
domination of the racialized peoples in the dependent formations by the colonizing/imperialist
power, with the imperial nation-state acting as the exploiting class, as it were (see San Juan 1998; 2002).
32. Racism arose with the creation and expansion of the capitalist world economy (Wolf 1982; Balibar
and Wallerstein, 1991). Solidarities conceived as racial or ethnic groups acquire meaning and value in
terms of their place within the social organization of production and reproduction of the
ideological-political order; ideologies of racism as collective social evaluation of solidarities arise
to reinforce structural constraints which preserve the exploited and oppressed position of these
"racial" solidarities. Such patterns of economic and political segmentation mutate in response to
the impact of changing economic and political relationships (Geshwender and Levine 1994). Overall, there is
no denying the fact that national-liberation movements and indigenous groups fighting for sovereignty, together with
heterogeneous alliances and coalitions, cannot be fully understood without a critical analysis of the production of surplus value and
its expropriation by the propertied class--that is, capital accumulation. As John Rex noted, different
ethnic groups are
placed in relations of cooperation, symbiosis or conflict by the fact that as groups they have
different economic and political functions.Within this changing class order of [colonial societies], the language of
racial difference frequently becomes the means whereby men allocate each other to different social and economic positions. What
the type of analysis used here suggests is that the
exploitation of clearly marked groups in a variety of
different ways is integral to capitalism and that ethnic groups unite and act together because
they have been subjected to distinct and differentiated types of exploitation. Race relations and racial
conflict are necessarily structured by political and economic factors of a more generalized sort (1983, 403-05, 407). Hence race
relations and race conflict are necessarily structured by the larger totality of the political
economy of a given society, as well as by modifications in the structure of the world economy.
Corporate profit-making via class exploitation on an international/globalized scale, at bottom, still
remains the logic of the world system of finance capitalism based on historically changing
structures and retooled practices of domination and subordination.
Cap Impact – Whiteness / Slavery
Whiteness emerged as an identity category in order to sustain the plantation
via granting white indentured servants special privileges
Mclaren and Farhmandpur, 2005 (Peter, PhD, prof of education at UCLA, and Ramin,
PhD, prof of educational policy at Portland State. Teaching Against Global Capitalism and the
New Imperialism: A Critical Pedagogy. Page 139-140. SPP)
In order to fracture intraclass consciousness between European indentured servants and African
slaves, the plantocracy offered the indentured servants a place in the corporate infrastructure of
the plantocracy where they were given the role of policing the behavior of the Africans. This also
included the right to citizenship and a "white" identity. The theologian Thandeka (1999) identifies this as a form
of “white classism.”' Offering white identity to indentured Europeans allowed them to identify
"racially" with the plantation owners. In addition, it manufactured a class illusion by having poor
whites identify with the class interests of plantation owners without enjoying any of their
economic privileges. Eventually, white racism allowed poor whites to blame Africans for their
economic hardships while harmonizing the class conflict between plantation owners and poor
whites. While the African slaves were fully aware that they were victims of white racism, poor Europeans failed to
recognize that they were the victims of white classism.
By granting racial/corporate membership to the European bond laborer who had the responsibility
of preventing rebellion against the dominant center, the corporate state that emerged out of the
plantocracy was able to survive and flourish. Poor white laborers were offered membership in the
corporate plantocracy in order to control the subalterned nonwhite labor force. Whites were thus given a
double role: as workers and as white people. White laborers were given membership at the center of the
corporate plantation structure while still serving as a marginalized labor force. By using
whiteness as a means of guaranteeing allegiance, the plantocracy secured its hegemony through
white solidarity and the integration of labor relations (wage labor, prison labor, and so on) into the white
confraternal society, or what Martinot (2000) calls the "overarching white social machine" (50). Whiteness or white
solidarity became an "administrative apparatus" of the slave/class economy that served as a "matrix
of social cohesion" that located whites "in a structural relation to each other" (52).
Whiteness is a symptom of capitalist social relations – the construction of racial
categories such as black and white emerged historically out of the perceived
necessity to accumulate capital
Mclaren and Farhmandpur, 2005 (Peter, PhD, prof of education at UCLA, and Ramin,
PhD, prof of educational policy at Portland State. Teaching Against Global Capitalism and the
New Imperialism: A Critical Pedagogy. Page 105-106. SPP)
The concept of whiteness was introduced in modern history beginning with the Spanish conquest
of the "New World" in the early sixteenth century and later reinforced with the practice of slavery
in the United States. We need to remember that racial concepts are historically embedded in the
specificity of social relations of capitalist production, a point Schiller (1997) articulates clearly, stating that "the
construction of race is the product of particular relations of domination in particular places,
periods of time, and social locations" (449). Complementing Schiller's position, Winant (1997) suggests that "like any
other complex beliefs and practices, whiteness is imbedded in a highly articulated social structure and system of signification; rather
than trying to repudiate it, we shall have to rearticulate it" (48). However, the question still remains: how can a racial category be
rearticulated?
We believe that the rearticulation of the concept of whiteness can be attained only by its
eradication (McLaren 1997), which itself can occur only if accompanied coterminously by the
transformation of those capitalist social relations on which the concept is premised (McLaren 1997). This
is because the
social construction of whiteness is always articulated from a position of privilege and
power in relation to marginalized ethnic groups. Schiller (1997) asserts that the abolition of the concept of race is a necessary
first step toward the eradication of racism(s): Race is a construction that is lived, structuring society and the daily
experiences, possibilities, perceptions, and identity of each individual; it is not about people
socially defined as black or of color. To the extent that race structures society, all people are
"raced,” and there is no blackness without the construction and experiences
of whiteness, no Indian without a white man, no mulatto without a system of deciding who is
truly white. (449)
Following Theodore W. Allen (1994, 1997), Jonathan Scott (1998), and McLaren and Munoz (2000), we support the claim that
whiteness is, first and foremost, a "sociogenic" (having to do with social forces and relations)
rather than a "phylogenic" (having to do with phenotype or skin color) phenomenon and is
fundamentally linked to the practice of Anglo-European and U.S. colonialism. For instance, in colonial
Virginia, roughly between 1676 and 1705, there existed no distinction in status between “black” and “white” bond laborers.
Whiteness was a status position introduced by the seventeenth-century Anglo-American and U.S.
ruling class – largely the oligarchy of owners of large coonial plantations – who for purely
political and economic purposes endowed indentured Europeans (at the time de facto slave) with
civil and social privileges that greatly exceeded those of their fellow African bondsmen.
Historical Materialism Alt > Intersectionality
The aff’s basis in postmodern notions of identity is mutually exclusive with a
historical materialist framework. Only the alternative’s framework prevents
reification and can orient itself towards universal social justice
Mclaren and Farhmandpur, 2005 (Peter, PhD, prof of education at UCLA, and Ramin,
PhD, prof of educational policy at Portland State. Teaching Against Global Capitalism and the
New Imperialism: A Critical Pedagogy. Page 86-87. SPP)
The treatment of class as yet another arbitrary floating signifier among race, class, and identity,
and the taboo usage of concepts such as "base" and "superstructure" has led postmodernists to
expunge the notions of capitalist exploitation and imperialism from their lexicon and replace
them with more politically benign discourses of "difference" and "identity politics." Even selfproclaimed progressive postmodernists fare no better in articulating a persuasive critique of capitalism. Roslyn Wallach Balogh and
Leonard Mell (1994) remark that "the best that this tradition can offer is a rearrangement of the existing distribution of power-ideally,
some kind of vague hope for egalitarianism or radical democracy" (85). Because postmodern politics has failed to
develop a sustained critique of class inequalities, racism, sexism, and economic inequality are
thus framed superficially within fragmented discourses articulated around the holy trinity of race,
class, and gender. Bologh and Mell culminate their argument with the assertion that "if postmodernism wants to
confront colonization and the production of otherness, it must confront capital. If it wants to
deconstruct universal categories, it might begin with the categories of political economy-as did
Marx. Those are the most universal categories in which power resides" (86}. lt follows that we
need to critically examine and rearticulate from a Marxist perspective the dynamic mechanisms
that allow capitalist social relations of exploitation to persist.
Developing and envisioning an anticapitalist pedagogy requires a common yet open-ended
historical materialist framework of equality and social justice. The meaning of equality and
justice are not predetermined, nor do they float freely in some effervescent semiotic ether; rather,
they are embedded within the specificity of social, economic, and political relations. In fact,
historical specificity of the concept of equality denies neither its universal quality nor its objective
significance. Rather, it is a standard by which we are able to judge political arguments or social
practices, and it is a measure by which we can objectively gauge historical and social progress
(Malik 1996).
The antiessentialism and antiuniversalism of conservative postmodernism considers race, class,
and gender to be indeterminate and relatively unstable identities by which we represent ourselves.
However, race, class, and gender are not merely fashionable costumes we wear in our daily social relations but constitute historically
grounded social practices within the material relations of production. As Ahmad ( 1998) explains at length, “ There is the idea
of discreteness of identities, cultural, ethnic, or national; a kind of remorseless differentiatialism,
whereby I am not permitted the claim that I may understand your identity but I am supposed to simply
respect whatever you say are the requirements of your identity. In this ideology, any number of people celebrate
hardened boundaries between self and other, denounce, what they understand as the
"universalism" of the enlightenment, rationalism, and so on, while also fully participating in the
globalization of consumption patterns and the packaging of identities as so many exhibits. At the
same time and often from the same people, we also have the propagation of the idea of infinite hybridity,
migrancy, choice of alternate or multiple identities, as if new selves could be fashioned in the instant out of any clay that one could lay
one's hand on, and as if cultures had no real historical density and identities could be simply made up, sui generis out of the global
traffic and malleability of elements. taken from all over the world. (103) In sum, we need to fashion identities that
partake of a universal commitment to social equality. This also means that an ethics of social
justice must more clearly underwrite the current work being done in identity politics.
AT: Perm – Sequencing
Overcoming capitalist relations of production is a prerequisite to struggles
against other forms of oppression
Mclaren and Farhmandpur, 2005 (Peter, PhD, prof of education at UCLA, and Ramin,
PhD, prof of educational policy at Portland State. Teaching Against Global Capitalism and the
New Imperialism: A Critical Pedagogy. Page 175. SPP)
What Boris Kagarlitsky (2000) calls a "strategic hierarchy of goals" grounded in the' overthrow of the social
hierarchy of capitalist society is a measure that we take seriously. We acknowledge that political
struggle for race, class, gender, and sexual equality is a tightly interwoven struggle. But we
understand class politics as the engine of our struggle for proletarian hegemony. As Robert McChesney
(1996) asserts,
Radicals are opposed to all forms of oppression and it is ludicrous to debate which of sexism, racism, "classism,” or homophobia is
most terrible, as if we were in some zero-sum game. Socialists have traditionally emphasized class-and continue
to do so today-because the engine of a capitalist society is profit maximization-- and class
struggle. Moreover, it is only through class politics that human liberation can truly be reached. (45)
In acknowledging this, we
do not follow postmodernists in calling for an equivalence among various
struggles. Rather, we call for a strategic integration of different yet equally important struggles. Recognizing that the legacy of
racism and sexism is far from over (in fact, in many ways it is intensifying), we offer possible ways in which race and
gender antagonisms can be addressed and overcome within the larger project of class struggle. As
Adolph Reed Jr. (2000) maintains, "Recent debates that juxtapose identity politics or cultural politics to class politics are miscast.
Cultural politics and identity politics are class politics" (xxii). The ways in which the contradiction between capital
and labor is lived at the level of everyday life are almost certainly racialized and gendered. The
modalities in which class exploitation are lived have specific consequences related to race,
sexuality, age, and religion, and these must be placed at center stage in the struggle against
oppression. We want to make clear that we are not subordinating race, ethnic, and gender
struggles to class struggle. We simply are saying that without overcoming capitalist relations of
production, other struggles will have little chance of succeeding. Yet to make such an assertion is to identify a
structured silence within many postmodernized versions of critical pedagogy: the disappearance of class struggle.
Capitalism > Intersectionality
The gender and social structures in Capitalism need to be evaluated before
Intersectionality
Eve Mitchell December 2, 2013 “I am a Woman and a Human: A Marxist-Feminist Critique of Intersectionality Theory”
<http://libcom.org/library/i-am-woman-human-marxist-feminist-critique-intersectionality-theory-eve-mitchell>
In order to understand “identity” and “intersectionality theory,” we must have an
understanding of the movement of capital (meaning the total social relations of production in this current mode of
production) that led to their development in the 1960s and 1970s in the US. More specifically, since
“intersectionality theory” primarily developed in response to second wave feminism, we must look at how gender relations
under capitalism developed. In the movement from feudalism to capitalism, the
gendered division of labor, and therefore gender relations within the class began to
take a new form that corresponded to the needs of capital. Some of these new
relations included the following: (1) The development of the wage. The wage is the
capitalist form of coercion. As Maria Mies explains in her book, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, the wage
replaced serf and slave ownership as the method to coerce alienated labor (meaning labor
that the worker does for someone else). Under capitalism, those who produce (workers) do not own
the means of production, so they must go to work for those who own the means of
production (capitalists). Workers must therefore sell the only thing they own, their
ability to labor, or their labor power, to the capitalist. This is key because workers are not paid for their
sensuous living labor, the act of producing, but the ability to labor. The labor-labor power split gives rise to the appearance of an equal exchange of value;
it appears as though the worker is paid for the amount of value she produces but in essence she is paid only for her ability to labor for a given period of
time.
Furthermore, the working day itself is split into two parts: necessary labor time and surplus labor time. Necessary labor time is the time it takes the
worker (on average) to produce enough value to buy all the commodities he needs to reproduce himself (everything from his dinner to his iPhone).
Surplus labor time is the time the worker works beyond the necessary labor time. Since the going rate for labor power (again, our capacity to labor – not
our actual living labor) is the value of all the commodities the worker needs to reproduce herself, surplus labor is value that goes straight into the
capitalist’s pocket. For example, let’s say I work in a Furby factory. I get paid $10 a day to work 10 hours, I produce 10 Furbies a day, and a Furby is
worth $10 each. The capitalist is only paying me for my ability to work 1 hour each day to produce enough value to reproduce myself (1 Furby = 1 hour’s
labor = $10). So my necessary labor time is 1 hour, and the surplus labor time I give to the capitalist is 9 hours (10-1). The wage obscures this fact. Recall
that under capitalism, it appears as though we are paid the equivalent value of what we produce. But, in essence, we are paid only for our necessary labor
time, or the minimum amount we need to reproduce ourselves. This was different under feudalism when it was very clear how much time humans spent
working for themselves, and how much time they spent working for someone else. For example, a serf might spend five hours a week tilling the land to
produce food for the feudal lord, and the rest of her time was her own. The development of the wage is key because it enforced a gendered division of
(2) A separation of production and reproduction. Along with commodity
production came a separation between production and reproduction. To be clear,
“reproduction” does not solely refer to baby making. It also includes meeting the
many various needs we have under capitalism, from cooking food and cleaning the
home, to listening to a partner vent about their shitty day and holding their hand, to
caring for the young, sick, elderly and disabled members of society. As capitalism
developed, generally speaking, productive (value-producing) labor corresponded to
the wage, and reproductive labor was unwaged (or extremely low waged), since in
appearance it produced no surplus value for the capitalist. This separation,
characterized by the wage, took on a specific gendered form under capitalism.
Women were largely excluded from productive sphere and therefore did not receive
labor.
a wage for the reproductive work they did. This gave men a certain amount of
power over women, and created antagonisms within the class based on a gendered
division of labor. Silvia Federici, in Caliban and the Witch, calls this the “patriarchy of
the wage” (97-100). (3) The contradictory development of the nuclear family. With the
development of capitalism and large-scale industry, the content of the nuclear
family took a contradictory turn. On the one hand, as pointed out by theorists such as Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa
in “The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community,” the nuclear family was strengthened by the
gendered division of labor characterized by the wage. Women and children were
excluded from the wage and relegated to reproductive work; men received a wage
and were relegated to productive work. This meant that men needed women and
children to reproduce them, and women and children needed men to bring in a
wage to reproduce the family as a whole (of course this wage was sometimes
supplemented by a woman’s low wage earnings as a domestic or other paid
reproductive worker). And so on the one hand, the development of capitalism strengthened the nuclear family. On the other hand;
however, capitalist relations also undermined the nuclear family. As James and Dalla Costa point out, the gendered division of labor is “rooted in
the framework of capitalist society itself: women at home and men in the factories and
office, separated from the other the whole day … Capital, while it elevates heterosexuality to a religion, at the same
time in practice makes it impossible for men and women to be in touch with each other, physically or emotionally — it undermines
heterosexuality as a sexual, economic, and social discipline” (James, Sex, Race and Class, 56). (4) The
development of “identity” and alienation. John D’Emilio runs with this concept of the
contradictory development of the nuclear family, arguing that “gay identity” (and we can
infer “female identity”) as a category developed through this contradictory movement of the
nuclear family. He argues for a distinction between gay behavior and gay identity,
stating. “There was, quite simply, no ‘social space’ in the colonial system of production
that allowed men and women to be gay. Survival was structured around participation
in the nuclear family. There were certain homosexual acts — sodomy among men, ‘lewdness’ among women
— in which individuals engaged, but family was so pervasive that colonial society lacked even the category of
homosexual or lesbian to describe a person … By the second half of the nineteenth century, this
situation was noticeably changing as the capitalist system of free labor took hold. Only
when individuals began to make their living through wage labor, instead of parts of an interdependent family unit, was it possible for homosexual desire
to coalesce into a personal identity — an identity based on the ability to remain outside the heterosexual family and to construct a personal life based on
D’Emilio’s understanding of “identity”
is key for understanding identity politics and intersectionality theory; however, I would slightly
the attraction to one’s own sex” (“Capitalism and the Gay Identity,” 104-105).
change his framework. In distinguishing between “behavior,” and “identity,” D’Emilio is touching on what could be broadened out to the Marxist
categories, “labor” and “alienation.” I digress in order to fill out this idea. For Marx, labor is an abstract category that defines human history. In his early
texts, Marx refers to labor as self- or life-activity. In “Estranged Labour,” Marx writes, “For in the first place labour, life-activity, productive life itself,
appears to man merely as a means of satisfying a need — the need to maintain the physical existence. Yet the productive life is the life of the species. It is
life-engendering life. The whole character of a species — its species character — is contained in the character of its life activity; and free conscious
activity is man’s species character. Life itself appears only as a means to life” (76). Life-activity, or labor, is an abstraction that transcends a specific
form, or a specific mode of production (capitalism, feudalism, tribalism, etc.). However, labor can only be understood within the context of these forms; it
is through these forms, the social organization of our labor, that humans engage in the ever-expanding process of satisfying our needs, introducing new
needs, and developing new ways of fulfilling our needs. Labor encompasses everything from our jobs under capitalism to tilling the land under feudalism,
to creating art and poetry, to having sex and raising children. Through labor and its many expressions, or forms, we engage with the world around us,
changing the world and changing ourselves in the process. Under capitalism, there is a separation between our labor and our conscious will. When Marx
says “Life itself appears only as a means to life,” he is pointing toward this contradiction. As noted above, under capitalis m, labor is divorced from the
means of production so we must work for those who own the means of production. We engage in the same form of labor all day every day, and we
receive a wage for this activity in order to exchange to meet our needs. We produce value in order to exchange for the use-values we need to survive. So
what appears under capitalism as a mere means to satisfy our needs (work), is in essence the activity of life itself (labor). Because of this schism between
our labor and our conscious will, our labor under capitalism is alienated, meaning it is not used for our own enrichment, instead, we give it away to the
capitalist. Our multi-sided labor becomes one-sided; our labor is reduced to work. In “The German Ideology,” Marx writes, “as soon as the distribution of
labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a
hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood” (53). We are not fully
enriched human beings, engaging in all forms of labor we wish to engage in, we are relegated into one form of labor in order to exchange to meet our
needs. We are call center workers, hair stylists, nurses, teachers, etc. This one-sidedness, as the precondition for meeting our needs, is unique to the
In applying Marx’s categories to D’Emilio’s explanation of
homosexuality, we could say that homosexual behaviors are an expression of labor,
or self-activity, and homosexual identity is a one-sided, alienated form of labor
unique to capitalism. It distinguishes the difference between a person who
consciously engages in homosexual acts, and one who is defined by one form of
labor: a homosexual. Women and people of color experience something similar in the development of capital; a shift from engaging in certain types
capitalist mode of production.
of labor to engaging in feminized, or racially relegated forms of labor. To put it another way, under capitalism, we are forced into a box: we are a bus
driver, or a hair stylist, or a woman. These different forms of labor, or different expressions of our life-activity (the way in which we interact with the
world around us) limit our ability to be multi-sided human beings.
AT: BORDERLANDS
***CASE DEBATE***
Affirmation of Mestizo consciousness assimilates minorities into a system of
dominance and intelligibility and brushes over racist violence
Bailey and Telles 2013 (Stanley, Professor of Sociology at UC Irvine- Edward, Professor of Sociology at
Princeton, “Understanding Latin American Beliefs about Racial Inequality”, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 118,
No. 6 (May 2013),
multicultural affirmation in much of Latin America, some scholars
have suggested that the hegemony of the mestizaje myth has been central to slowing ethnoracial
mobilization and challenges to the racial status quo, both in the past and today Hanchard 1994; Paschel 2010 . As
illustration, Wade 2003, p. 275 writes: “So long as mestizaje discourse is prevalent, it will be hard to link
racial identity to citizenship and rights” in Latin America. In a similar vein, Safa 2005, p. 317 remarks: “Because
Although the tide may be turning toward
of the co-optive strategy of mestizaje, which convinced mulattos they were more like whites than like their black brothers, there is also
a reluctance to create ½in Latin America confrontational racial blocs such as exist in the U.S.” The fact that many
Afrodescendants and indigenous peoples were gradually absorbed into amorphous national
mestizo populations, and that blackness and indigeneity were systematically ignored, provides a
partial explanation for Latin America’s scant record of multiculturalism Marx 1998; Paschel and Sawyer
2008. The widespread denial of systematic disadvantage suffered by racial and ethnic minorities is
another important mechanism through which, scholars argue, mestizaje slowed ethnoracial mobilization and
antiracism policy. Latin American mestizaje racial ideologies obfuscated the structural causes of
ethnoracial inequality, leading to “color blindness” Paschel 2010, p. 729 or “false consciousness”
Winant 1999, p. 99 that “denies the existence of any racism” Sidanius et al. 2001, p. 826 , even in the minds of
nonwhites themselves Twine 1998, p. 8 . Beck et al. 2011, p. 106 write that, in Ecuador, “mestizaje, and the wide swath of people who
clearly identify as mestizo, produces a perceptual prism in which it is quite easy to ignore, hide,
downgrade, and ultimately deny processes of prejudice and discrimination.” Perhaps clearest in
connecting myths of mestizaje with a claim that nonwhite Latin Americans are colorblind, Warren and Sue 2011, p. 50 write that,
across Latin America, “nonwhites” have “scant understanding of how race, both its contemporary and historical forms, is directly
linked to the particular configurations of the labor market, social welfare, taxation policies, housing, educational opportunities, and so
forth.” Using ethnographic research, these authors conclude: “In short, like U.S. whites, they ½Latin American
nonwhites do not link race to economic and social marginalization” p. 50 . While noting the
assimilationist core to these mestizaje myths in Latin America, we contend that their role as
hegemonic ideologies blinding Latin American populations to racial discrimination and
disadvantage, that is, conditioning their stratification beliefs, is an empirical question needing
further examination. While most research to date on mestizaje has been based on qualitative methods, large-sample survey
data may be uniquely suited to exploring generalized attitudinal orientations; to date, the absence of those data and analyses using
advanced survey methods constitute a gap in the literature. New survey data may simply confirm earlier ethnography, extending its
explanatory power; survey data could also reveal new patterns that complicate localized perspectives. With the goal of bringing the
lens of survey research to the study of Latin American racial attitudes, we look first at general framings for understanding the effects
of hegemonic racial ideologies on explanations for racial inequality before laying out a series of hypotheses about the Latin American
context.
The notion of “mestizaje” in debate claims to be all-inclusive, but in reality, all
the 1AC does is marginalize blackness and indigenousness for the sake of
hybridity
Wade 2005 [Peter Wade is a British anthropologist who specializes in issues of race and
ethnicity in Latin America. Peter Wade is a Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of
Manchester; Rethinking Mestizaje: Ideology and Lived Experience;
http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/peter.wade/articles/JLAS%20article.pdf]
This article explores a key concept in the complex of ideas around race, nation and
multiculturalism in latin America, that of mestizaje-essentially the notion of racial and cultural
mixture. I address mestizaje not just as a nation-building ideology - which has been the principal focus of scholarship on
the issue, but also
as a lived process that operates within the embodied person and within networks of
family and kinship relationships. I consider how people live the process of racial-cultural mixture
through musical change, as racially identified styles of popular music enter into their per- forming bodies, awakening or potentialities
in them; through religious practice, as racialised deities possess them and energise a dynamic and productive embodied diversity; and
through family relationships, as people enter into sexual and procreative relations with others identified as raciallyculturally different, to produce 'mixed' children. This approach emphasises the ways in which
mestizaje as a lived process, which encompasses, but is not limited to, ideology, involves the
maintenance of enduring spaces for racial-cultural difference alongside spaces of sameness and
homogeneity. Scholars have recognised that mestizaje does not have a single meaning within the
Latin American context, and contains within it tensions between sameness and difference, and
between inclusion and ex- clusion.' Yet a scholarly concern with mestizaje as ideology has tended to privilege two
assumptions: first, that nationalist ideologies of mestizaje are essentially about the creation of a
homogeneous mestizo (mixed) future, which are then opposed to subaltern constructions of the
nation as racially- culturally diverse; and second, that as a nationalist ideology appears to be an inclusive
process, in that everyone is eligible to become a mestizo, but in reality it is exclusive because it marginalises
blackness and in- digenousness, while valuing whiteness. Both assumptions are too simple. Firstly,
nationalist ideologies of mestizaje contain and encompass dynamics not only of
homogenisation but also of differentiation, maintaining permanent spaces, of a particular kind, for blackness and
indigenousness, and creating a mosaic image of national identity. The standard formulation which counterposes elite and subaltern,
and homogeneity and diversity is therefore unsatisfactory. If
one looks at mestizaje as a lived process, the
relationship between inclusion and exclusion is not best conceived of as one of superficial
mask and underlying reality. Rather it can be understood as the interweaving of two
processes, both of which have symbolic and structural reality. These, in turn, constitute a mosaic, at the level of the embodied
person and the family as well as the nation. The concept of mestizaje is not of interest only to Latin
Americans and Latin Americanists; in the USA and Europe increasing attention has been paid to
processes of racial and cultural mixture, usually referred to by a series of different terms such as hybridity,
syncretism, metissage, melange and creoli- salion, all or some of which may be related to other concepts, such as diaspora, which
evoke the kinds of migrations and movements that lead to mixture.' For
some theorists, mixture, hybridity and the
formation of diaspora have positive connotations of being able to break with essentialist ideas of identity and
destabilise hierarchical relations of power which often depend on rigid categorisations.' However, in this article I argue that
a Latin Americanist perspective on mestizaje can contest some of these more opti- mistic
ideas about processes of hybridity.
New Mestizaje theory reentrenches the very problems that it seeks to
eliminate: 3 warrants.
Turner 2014
[Turner, Jessie D. PhD in Chicana and Chicano Studies from UC Santa Barbara, Instructor of women’s and gender studies at
University of Southern Florida. “Reconsidering the Relationship Between New Mestizaje and New Multiraciality as Mixed-Raced
Identity Models”. Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies. 2014.]
New mestizaje theory is well-known for its discussion of liminality, multiplicity, fluidity, selfintegration, and self-creation, and
multiracial studies has undeniably employed this work in its own development. For example, several authors cite Anzaldúa in
theorizing multiracial identity.40 Such use of her work demonstrates the fundamental similarities between new mestiza/o and new
multiracial day-to-day experiences of self. Not only can the latter inherit from the former, but the former can also learn from
extensions of the original theory, such as its central applicability to contemporarily mixed people who do not singularly identify as
Chicana/o.
While both new mestiza/o and new multiracial identity constructions have great liberatory
motivations and potential, they can also support racial erasure, essentialism, binaries, and
white supremacy. For instance, for all of Anzaldúa’s theorization of identity fluidity and
multiplicity, it has been argued that she preferences a romanticized bygone indigenous
identity that exists at the cost of erasing a present indigenous subjectivity.41 In a similar vein,
several scholars critique and warn of the dangers of factions of the multiracial movement’s
inattention to racism and white supremacy, or even its employment of white supremacist
ideologies in order to escape blackness.42 Furthermore, it has been suggested that multiracial
identity discourse, while aiming to break down racial binaries, actually creates a new binary
between multiracial- and monoracial-identified people.43
Theories of multiracial identity rely on heteronormative assumptions
Turner 2014
[Turner, Jessie D. PhD in Chicana and Chicano Studies from UC Santa Barbara, Instructor of women’s and gender studies at
University of Southern Florida. “Reconsidering the Relationship Between New Mestizaje and New Multiraciality as Mixed-Raced
Identity Models”. Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies. 2014.]
While conceptions of new mestizaje emphasize Mexican indigeneous and Spanish mixing,
they also move beyond ethnoracial terms to critically and consistently prioritize
considerations of gender and sexuality.53 In fact, these theorists are foundational to not only Chicana feminism, but also to
queer studies. Conversely, mixings within the context of sexuality are not yet adequately attended
to or centrally framed in discourses of new multiracial identity. It is important to mention that there are,
however, a handful of scholars who challenge the heteronormativity implicit in mixedrace
theorization.54 Not surprisingly, the scope of this work emphasizes parallels between biracial and bisexual experiences and identities specifically,
though some work does extend to gay, lesbian, and queer sexualities more broadly. It can be argued that heterosexuality is normative
within mixed race studies because conceptions of racial mixing and being first- or secondgeneration mixed race are largely based in biological conceptions of race and reproduction.
The primary battles revolved around questions of legal heteronormative marriage, families,
and racial proscription. This national discourse was emphasized not only for African Americans, but also for Mexican Americans and
other racial groups. For Mexican Americans, however, there was not the same inevitable sense of permanence.55 Furthermore, though Chicano
nationalism did promote in-group procreation, new mestizaje is no longer delimited in such a way. Even as the focus on biological ethnoracial mixing in
multiracial studies is understandable given the social and legal history of race in the United States, the field can learn from new mestizaje theorization by
prioritizing a more intersectional analysis of mixed-race identity that does not continue to reproduce predominantly heteronormative, and many times
without gendered analysis, understandings of race and self that singularize possibilities of being.
Mestizaje identity is antiblack
Lovell Banks 2006
[Lovell Banks, Taunya University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. “Mestizaje and the Mexican Mestizo Self: No Hay
Sangre Negra, so There is no Blackness” Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal Vol 15 No 2. 2006.]
According to English professor Suzanne Bost, the words mestiza and mestizaje are unstable terms
whose definitions varies depending on the context. Bost writes that the invocation of mestizaje by
contemporary scholars “as a universal emblem for new frontiers of Americanness …
potentially undermines universalist identity categories” because the term cannot escape the
historical baggage that accompanied this mixture of races. Carole Boyce Davies, another English
professor, is more explicit about the internal contradictions of these terms. She argues that often
mestizo or mestiza is used as a term of separation to distance individuals from people who
identify or are identified “as ‘African,’ ‘Afro-‘ or ‘Black.’” Bost is more explicit on this point saying that
the embrace by American academics of mestizaje is suspect because it tends to privilege
lighter-skinned people while ignoring “the continued oppression of darker-skinned peoples
as the dominant culture seeks out the familiar (the whiteness) within the other.”
Mestizaje identity, or an inherently biracial identity, recreates a binary and
otherizes monoracial people
Dunning 2004
[Dunning, Stefanie. “Mixing it Up: Multiracial Subjects: Brown Like Me: Explorations of a Shifting Self”. University of Texas Press.
2004.]
Root offers explication alongside each of her rights. For
the first right, the right not to justify one’s
existence, she writes, “Questions such as . . . ‘Are your parents married?’ indicate the stereotypes that make up the
schema by which the other attempts to make meaning of the multiracial person’s
experiences” (7). She emphasizes the term “other” by italicizing it, drawing attention to her
otherizing of those not of mixed race, and therefore problematically aligns herself against
all those whom she terms monoracial, or other.By doing so, she reinscribes the us/them
dichotomy she argues that multiracial people undercut. If it is true, as Root argues, that
“ Multiracial people blur the boundaries between the ‘us’ and ‘them ,’” then why re-create
an “us” (as racially mixed) and “them” (as monoracial) binary that risks reproducing all of
the other troubling constructions which arise from such a division? My vision of revolution,
and of resistance, is one in which no one is otherized. I do not want the right to otherize, nor
do I want to shake off the shackles of racism (nor can I) while other others continue to
suffer.
Anzaldua’s Mestiza consciousness romanticizes pre-Columbian indigenous
identities, erasing difference
Yarbro-Bejarano 1994
[Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne PhD in Spanish at Harvard, BA in German Professor of Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford
Unviersity. “Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La frontera: Cultural Studies. “Difference.” And the Non-Unitary Subject”. Cultural
Critique, No. 28. 1994.]
Borderlands maps a sense of "the plurality of self" (Alarc6n, "Theoretical" 366), which Anzaldua
calls mestiza or border con- sciousness. This consciousness emerges from a subjectivity struc- tured by multiple
determinants-gender, class, sexuality, and con- tradictory membership in competing cultures and racial identities. Sandoval has
theorized this sense of political identity that allows no single conceptualization of our position in society as a skill devel- oped by
those marginalized in the categories of race, sex, or class for reading the shifting of the webs of power ("Report" 66-67). She sees the
term "women of color" not as a single unity but as a conscious strategy, a new kind of community based on the strength of diversities
as the source of a new kind of political movement. Her theory legitimates the multiplicity of tactical responses to the mobile
circulation of power and meaning and posits a new, shifting subjectivity capable of reconfiguring and recentering itself, de- pending
on the forms of oppression to be confronted. Anzaldua
enacts this consciousness in Borderlands as a
constantly shifting pro- cess or activity of breaking down binary dualisms and creating the
third space, the in-between, border, or interstice that allows contra- dictions to co-exist in
the production of the new element (mestizaje, or hybridity). Crucial in her project are the
ways "race" works in the complex "interdefining" and "interacting" among the various
aspects of her identity.8 Her essay "La Prieta" (the dark-skinned girl or woman), published in Bridge,
already introduced the con- cerns she will explore in Borderlands: her relationship to her
dark Indian self and the denial of the indigenous in Chicano/Mexicano culture. It is the
representation of the indigenous in the text that has evoked the most critical response from
Chicana/o and non- Chicana/o readers alike. Primary among these concerns are what are
seen as the text's essentializing tendencies, most notably in the reference to "the In- dian
woman" and the privileging of the pre-Columbian deity Coat- licue, which obscures the
plight of present day Native women in the Americas.9 This wariness toward the invocation of "Indi- anness"
and the pre-Columbian pantheon must be contextualized in the contemporary critique of the cultural nationalism of the Chi- cano
Movement, which engineered a romanticized linking be- tween Chicanos and indigenous cultures as part of the process of
constructing a Chicano identity. Many of us are engaged in an on- going interrogation of the singular Chicano cultural identity posited by dominant masculinist and heterosexist discourses of the Chicano Movement and the role indigenismo played in this exclusionary process.10
*** Cede the Collective***
1NC
Their focus on the inner struggle for liberation is doomed to fail. Institutional,
political and collective struggles are essential to liberatory resistance
Orozco-Mendoza PhD Student Department of Political Science @ UMass-Amherst 2008
Elva Fabiola “Borderlands Theory: Producing Border Epistemologies with Gloria Anzaldúa”
Masters Thesis submitted to Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-05062008-175949/unrestricted/Final_thesis_corrected.pdf
By making the struggle inner, Anzaldúa puts an excessive responsibility on the individual
herself in finding her liberation. Yet, since people experience freedom, or its absence, in the
public sphere, in the quest for liberation, the inner self has to realize that the struggle is not
only against the inner demons, fears, or traumas, but also against society and its social and
political institutions, i.e. the state and the economic sector. In this realm, it is important to remember that identity
construction is not an exclusive personal matter, but rather it involves an individual’s
perception of herself and her interaction vis-à-vis those against she defines herself. In other
words, since Borderlands theory attempts to liberate the self from imposed identities, one
needs to be clear that such liberation would not be possible if one does not directly
confront the structure of power that participate directly in shaping one’s identity in one way or
another. Thus, although Anzaldúa states that the struggle is to be directed against the dominant
culture (white males), Anzaldúa misses the opportunity to challenge the institutions that the
white culture created to institutionalize domination. In doing so, Anzaldúa also misses the
opportunity to challenge one of the most important entities that creates, regulates, and
promotes those institutions, namely, the state. The state apparatus widely advanced the ideologies of the Monroe
Doctrine, the Manifest Destiny, the Proposition 187, etc. While commenting on Patchen Markell’s Bound by Recognition, VazquezArroyo argues that:
The state is frequently a constitutive actor in the politicization of identity, either by its own
logics of legitimation or by means of its role in the political economy. It is not innocent to
the managing and racialization of identities in capitalist societies either. In fact, the recognition of its
legitimacy often relies on the production and management of differences (Vazquez-Arroyo, 2004: 9).
Thus, if
the state plays a prominent role in politicizing identities, any theory or projects of
resistance directed to change or create a new identity needs not only to call accountable the
figure state, but also to confront it and seek to influence it in a direct form. It is through the
state that domination is legitimized and worked out even in the so-called democratic states. State’s apparatuses
through their institutions, policies, rules, laws, etc., have an important participation in determining what is legal and what is not, what
is just and what is not and also whose rights get to be protected and whose not. Consequently, in
seeking significant
freedom, it is important to pay close attention to those political institutions that represent
us and critically evaluate their complicity in promoting the privilege or oppression of
certain groups. Thus, although I do consider the freedom of the self important, it is hard to argue against
Arendt on this point since the freedom of the colonized has been erased in the public sphere,
meaning that it is in the public space where freedom must be sought, fought, and
recuperated. In this vein, colonized people must not only resist domination, imposition and the
like. They must insert themselves in the city, in schools, in hospitals, in congresses, in government offices, in bars, in galleries. In
short, the colonized must exist in every single place that claims to be public since it is there
where freedom matters. However, in favor of Anzaldúa I will say that she did not fail to see the relevance of having
freedom in public spaces for stating that would be untrue. Yet, her concern was first in liberating the self in order for that self to
determine what kind of freedom was more important.
The fluidity of their struggle trades off with structural analysis – turns the case
Venator-Santiago Assistant Professor Latino Politics, Public Law, and Political Theory @
UConn 2008 Charles R. “Huntington's White Patriotism and Anzaldua's Brown Nationalism”
FIU Law Review 33 Hein Online
Like Huntington's Anglo-Protestant founding myth, Anzaldua
suggests that the core culture of Chicanos can
be traced to the Aztec homeland, and, more importantly, all Chicanos should rescue this
core culture that has been threatened by artificial physical, cultural, and psychological
borders.
Anzaldua's representation of the founding racial myth describes the "Aztecas del norte" as a single nation or indigenous tribe, which
today would be known as Chicanos.4 ° More importantly, Anzaldua's
narrative also calls for the re-conquest
of the mythical homeland: "We have a tradition of migration, a tradition of long walks. Today we are witnessing la
Migraci6n de los pueblos mexicanos, the return odyssey to the historical/mythological Atzldn. This time, traffic is from south to
north."'41 Ironically, despite
her recognition of the brutal nature of the Aztec empire, Anzaldfia is
willing to use this historical representation of the indigenous subject as the starting point of
the founding of Atzlan.42 Rather than taking the contemporary ethos of the Indian, the
Mexican, or the Chicana as a starting point for a politics that responds to present needs and
concrete forms of oppression, Anzaldua chooses an alien myth.43 This myth, like most myths,
neglects to engage the present on its own terms, and ultimately leaves us with a story that
depoliticizes the struggle of Chicanas and Latino/as more generally. Stated differently, rather than
framing a political position that engages oppressive and exploitative institutions, the reader
is left with a therapeutic option-acquire a new consciousness.
For Anzaldua, "nothing happens in the 'real' world unless it first happens in the images in our heads." 44 Even economic
exploitation is subordinated to the cultural and psychological realms in her narrative. Much
like Huntington argues, Anzaldfia writes:
Chicanos and other people of color suffer economically for not acculturating. This voluntary (yet forced) alienation makes for
psychological conflict, a kind of dual identity-we don't identify with the Anglo-American cultural values and we don't totally identify
with the Mexican cultural values. We are a synergy of two cultures with various degrees of Mexicanness or Angloness.45
Again, rather
than engaging a politics of concrete, material exploitation, the reader is left with
ambiguities and fluid metaphors that will somehow empower the oppressed. I would like to see
how this new consciousness would empower a migrant who is being treated like an animal by a foreman in a sweatshop and/or a
border patrol agent. Anzaldua's
argument becomes nothing more than a poetic inspiration that
seeks to create a new age consciousness in an ambiguous realm that is not just mythical, but
also disengaged from the concrete material experiences of the exploited and oppressed. The
institutional status quo is not challenged by this narrative.
Prefigurative strategies fail to address global catastrophes – engaging the state
is key to remedy catastrophic impacts external to the aff
Schwartz Professor of Sociology at SUNY Stony Brook & Young PhD candidate in history
at SUNY Stony Brook 2012 Michael & Kevin “Can prefigurative politics prevail? The
implications for movement strategy in John Holloway's Crack Capitalism” Journal of Classic
Sociology 12:220 Sage Publishing
Holloway sometimes seems to suggest that the movement should act as though the state does
not exist, creating prefigurative and counter-insitutional structures that do not interact with
the government. The classical theorists disagree with this view. As Marx suggested in The Eighteenth Brumaire of
Louis Bonaparte (1963 [1852]), capitalist states are not simply executive committees of the ruling class but sites of contestation whose
degree of subservience to ruling-class interests is variable and subject to change based on outside pressures (compare Poulantzas,
1978). Lenin (1965 [1920]) emphasized that the
revolutionary must be willing to engage with reactionary
institutions as a way of advancing the revolutionary struggle. And Rosa Luxemburg (1925 [1906]) argued
that political demands were necessary and appropriate even at peak moments of working-class initiative. We are not sure whether
Holloway would disagree with these propositions, since he does not offer a sustained analysis of the relationship of the struggle to the
state. But we feel that the classical theorists are correct in arguing that the
judicious engagement of the state is an
essential part of the movement’s toolkit.
Radical activists around the world have often practiced this philosophy with success. In the 1930s the US Communist Party played a
vital role in building the labor movement that won major concessions like the right to organize and substantial social welfare
provisions, combining on-the-ground actions like sit-down and rent strikes (which fit comfortably into Holloway’s template) with
demands for altered state policy such as recognition of unions and rent control (Stepan-Norris and Zeitlin, 2002). The US Civil Rights
movement of the 1950s and 1960s combined direct liberatory actions with a clever manipulation of state forces, pitting segregationist
southern governments against the federal judiciary and executive (Robnett, 1997). Peasant movements in Mexico, Bolivia, Ecuador,
Colombia, and other Latin American countries have compelled the state to enact land reforms by combining a range of legal and
extralegal tactics (Becker, 2008: 128–131; Gotkowitz, 2007; Zamosc, 1986).
Furthermore, Holloway does not adequately address the incontrovertible reality that many
revolutionary regimes have
greatly ameliorated human suffering, even if they have deemphasized or suppressed the quest for a ‘self-determining
society.’ The Cuban Revolution has made strides against poverty, malnutrition, infant mortality, and other forms of suffering that put
wealthier countries to shame. The 1979 revolution in Nicaragua, and elected left regimes in countries like Chile (1970–1973) and
Venezuela (1999–present), have also brought impressive social gains, at least for a time. Holloway seems a little too quick to dismiss
these reforms, even if he does warn against ‘condemning reformism’ (p. 35) and acknowledges in passing that the Cuban Revolution
brought some valuable changes.
The need to work through the existing state system is perhaps nowhere clearer than on the
issues of climate change and nuclear proliferation, both of which could result in
catastrophic human suffering long before there is any realistic chance of erecting the
alternative institutions capable of addressing them. Holloway acknowledges the urgency of these two issues
but arrives at a contradictory and problematic solution:
The imminence of catastrophe seems to push us towards a positive conception of totality, some idea that we need a world state.
Certainly, some form of global coordination would be desirable in a post-capitalist society, but the forms of global coordination that
presently exist are so bound up with capital and the pursuit of profit that they offer little hope of a solution. It is becoming more and
more clear that any solution to the problem of climate change can come only from a radical change in the way that we live, and that
change cannot come from a state or some sort of world body, but only from the rejection of abstract labour, from our own assumption
of responsibility for the way we live. (p. 210, emphasis added)
Clearly international governance bodies like the United Nations have generally failed to ensure global
peace, justice, and environmental sustainability; the UN, for one, has typically either been captive to the wealthy and powerful in the
rich nations or been too weak to enforce regulatory or punitive rulings against those interests. Nowhere has this pattern been more
evident than in the record of the Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which in seventeen
meetings has failed to produce an enforceable global deal on emissions reductions that would stave off devastating climate change.13
But when scientists are giving the world just a few short decades to avert potentially
catastrophic climate change, is it really sufficient to exhort individuals to assume
‘responsibility for the way we live’ and hope that alternative institutions will somehow
replace corporations before it is too late? The realistic progressive has little choice but to
continue targeting states and international institutions given the dire urgency of global
warming. We desperately need to reduce net carbon emissions, and right now only states have the power to
sign treaties, enforce emissions reductions, and redirect national investment. We must target states,
international bodies, and polluters through a variety of means – civil disobedience, boycotts, legislative struggle, the monitoring of
carbon-offset trading, and so on — at the same time that we construct alternatives for the future (Hahnel, 2011: 157–242).
Modern states are indeed corrupt, and fundamentally so, but until we have adequate
alternative institutions in place we can ill afford to forsake all interaction with them.
Unqualified antistatism ignores real possibilities for improving people’s lives through
engagement with states and other dominant institutions, and at its worst can end up empowering the
private corporations and financial institutions that are even less accountable than
government. Moreover, states are not monolithic, but rather are constituted from a mélange of
mutually contradictory institutions encompassing multiple levels of government. The United
States is extreme in the extent to which corporations control politics, but not all levels of government are equally dominated by
corporate money. A thousand protesters targeting the president will probably have no effect, but a thousand protesters targeting the
local school board or city council might well move the needle at least a little in a liberatory direction. While the US movement for
universal healthcare has had little success at the federal level, a grassroots struggle in the state of Vermont has recently won a statelevel universal healthcare bill.14 Many movements have succeeded in part by exploiting the conflicts between differing components
of government, as the US Civil Rights movement did in the 1960s (Robnett, 1997), and as various anti-colonial and indigenous
movements in Latin America have been doing for centuries (Serulnikov, 2003; Stern, 1993 [1982]). At
times the state
apparatus might even be harnessed to sponsor prefigurative institutions, as seems to be
suggested by the Venezuelan communal councils and the adoption of participatory
budgeting schemes by city and regional governments in countries like Brazil, India, and
Spain (Baiocchi, 2005; Ellner, 2009).
Collective Key - Extension
Their failure to link individual and collective struggle  failure
Orozco-Mendoza PhD Student Department of Political Science @ UMass-Amherst 2008
Elva Fabiola “Borderlands Theory: Producing Border Epistemologies with Gloria Anzaldúa”
Masters Thesis submitted to Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-05062008-175949/unrestricted/Final_thesis_corrected.pdf
Anzaldúa theorized self-liberation by developing a set of cognitive processes oriented to produce a resisting identity in the oppressed.
With this process, Anzaldúa appealed to the recognition, transformation, exposition, and exchange of self-epistemologies that work
towards a self-metamorphosis that allows the self to resist domination and eventually to bear liberation. Although as a resistance
project, the Borderlands theory is not only healing but also empowering, Anzaldúas
formulation is restricted by
the subject it speaks. Anzaldúa is addressing the colonized and the people whose identity has been bordered by the dominant
power. In Borderlands, she is trying to tear those borders down in order to join the loose ends in ones
identity to be able to function as a whole being again. However, Anzaldúa is addressing the
self as an individual, as a single being that needs to cure him/herself before becoming
political. This is precisely the message she gives us when she states: The struggle is inner. The struggle has always been inner, and
is played out in the outer terrains. Awareness of our situation must come before inner changes, which in turn comes before changes in
society (Anzaldúa, 1987: 87). From this explanation, we learn that Anzaldúa
does not conceive social change
unless the essence of a person changes, unless one has been exposed to the fears of the soul
and has learned how to block them.
While criticizing Anzaldúas mestiza consciousness, Maria Lugones argues that Anzaldúa fails to link the psychology
of oppression and resistance to collective resistance, therefore, weakening the sociality that
Anzaldúa herself documents in resistance. For Lugones, Unless resistance is a social activity, the
resistor is doomed to failure in the creation of a new universe of meaning, a new identity, a rata mestiza. Meaning that is
not in response to and looking for response fails as meaning (Lugones, 2005: 97). While I agree with Lugones critique of Anzaldúa’s
failure to see resistance as a collective activity, I do it for different reasons since, in my view, resistance at the individual level is still
resistance. As it is well known, both Michel de Certeau and James C. Scott theorized about the practice of everyday life and resistance
in everyday life respectively. Michel de Certeau for instance considered that the “weak” employs innumerable practices through which
users re-appropriate the space organized by techniques of socio cultural production” (de Certeau, 1984: xiv). de Certeau contends that
common people have at hand numerous tactics, which are used to accommodate the oppressor system according to ones convenience.
Similarly, Scott states that “weak” individuals do not passively submit themselves to the commands of dominant groups but rather
they engage in ordinary, individual practices to mitigate or dissent impositions from those who hold power (Scott, 1985). But contrary
to Lugones, both de Certeau and Scott do not consider that individual means practiced by a single individual, but rather, “that the
decision to resist is engaged self-motivated, selfinterested, and seeking primarily personal gains. It is manifested through acts of
insubordination, evasion, offensive defiance, and defensive disobedience (Scott, 1985; Dunaway, 2003). At the same time, “this is a
unique species of collective action because none of this resistance could achieve its purposes unless it is acted as a generalized,
unspoken complicity” (Scott, 1985: 447, enphasis added). My own interpretation is that by making the struggle inner, Anzaldúa is
trying to force the colonized to believe that the de-colonial shift is possible and change can actually happen since in her view, “nothing
happens in the ’real’ world unless it first happens in the images in our heads” (Anzaldúa, 1987: 87).
The logic that Anzaldúa follows in the above quote, is that in order for people to seek freedom, they need to believe that freedom
exists in the first place and have a notion of what that freedom looks like, otherwise, they can lose the point of the struggle not
knowing why they are fighting. In this logic, if freedom is first experienced at the inner level, then it is possible to have an idea of
what freedom in society is, yet, as Lugones argues:
As I understand the liberatory project, the inner and the collective struggles are not separable; they are moments or sides of the
liberatory process a dismissal of the inner struggle dismisses liberatory subjectivity. A dismissal of the collective moment robs the
struggle of the self-in-between of any liberatory meaning (Lugones, 2005: 97)
Lugones considers that the inner and the collectivity are forcibly linked since the lack of one of the two moments would tear apart the
whole project of liberation. In this regard, if the inner transformation does not occur, meaningful change would be misleading, and if
this inner transformation is not linked to a collectivity, the struggle will also fail because it lacks the support of a bigger entity and,
besides that, if liberation does not reach all it is not liberation at all. Here, Lugones still considers that the number makes the
difference and that liberation is more likely to occur if liberation is sought, for instance, by a social movement. While I do not follow
Lugones on her argument, I do consider that theorizing
the Borderlands as an inner struggle is
problematic since, as Hannah Arendt states, it is a mistake to take freedom to be primarily an inner,
contemplative or private phenomenon, for it is in fact active, worldly and public (Arendt, 1998).
In Arendt’s terms, freedom is experienced in our interaction with others, by seeing ourselves
being directed towards a specific end or by being able to make up choices free from any
constraint or imposition. In consequence, while we may feel free or liberated when dealing with
the self, in our social interactions this freedom may not be there at all since many human
actions are guided by any type of necessity.
Interestingly both Anzaldúa and Arendt consider action as one of the most empowering tools at
the hands of humans since both consider that the moment of empowerment comes with action. For
Anzaldúa, action means taking the initiative, to propose, which is also the opposite of to react, while for Arendt action means to begin
or not being constrained and bounded by others.
But despite differences, the authors resemblance in the relevance of action for human freedom, in what is of concern in the treatment
of the public and private spheres, Arendt
has no tolerance for the private realm (the inner) when it
comes to political aims, since for Arendt, action is a public category, a worldly practice that is
experienced in our daily interaction with one another and as such it is a practice exercised
in public spaces or the city (Arendt, 1998). The key point here is that people do not live isolated from one
another, but rather we live in society. We live our experiences and give them meaning in
society; in relation to those with whom we share plans and that is the reason why freedom
does not work so well at the inner level. In addition, as Henri Lefebvre argues, an critical assessment the
social life “ought ‘by a process of rational integration… to pass from the individual to the
social’ –and, ultimately materialize itself in collective action toward social justice” (Lefebvre
1992: 148, as quoted in Bartolovich and Lazarus, 2002: 6). While we would like to think of our souls as being
free from any influence, we cannot escape the fact that we live in society and it is there
where freedom is relevant.
Engaging institutional debate is necessary to solve the material impacts of the
aff – with immigration reform being coopted by the far right it is essential to
inject policy debate with institutional solutions
Venator-Santiago Assistant Professor Latino Politics, Public Law, and Political Theory @
UConn 2008 Charles R. “Huntington's White Patriotism and Anzaldua's Brown Nationalism”
FIU Law Review 33 Hein Online
Unfortunately, the work of academics and
poets like Huntington and Anzaldfia provide normative arguments that contribute to
various legal and public policy debates. At this particular time when immigration reform is on the
legislative agenda and when right-wing rhetoric has been shaping the contours of the limits
for legal reform, it is imperative that scholars engage these debates. A LatCrit approach could use as a
Over the years, LatCrit has been encouraging a conversation across disciplines.
starting point the relationship between these debates and the law, race, and nationalism.
Neither Huntington nor Anzaldua's arguments offer much in the form of a conceptual
critique of law. Huntington's argument is reminiscent of a right-wing, original intent approach to the interpretation of law.
Huntington's argument would encourage us to look at the "original" principles and interpretations embraced by the founding "fathers"
as a guide to interpreting the constitution. His argument would ignore the important and radical transformations of both the
constitutional text and the interpretation of the law that have resulted from long and protracted struggles. Huntington's argument
neglects to consider how these socio-legal changes have been part of a mutually constitutive story of nation-state building that has
abandoned the founding principles of his white Anglo-Saxon protestant patriotic identity. Simply put, the history of changes in law
and society are descriptive of a new and constantly changing United States-American identity.
In contrast, Anzaldua's argument seems to suggest a focus on the penumbras of the law. Anzaldua's
argument suggests
that there is a need to break with the fixed dualities present in law in order to open up a
more fluid space to re-think the law. Law can become something else that is more malleable and open to multiple
sources beyond black letter law and the positivist influences of a formalist approach. This conception, however, leaves us
with a quandary, namely, to what extent will this fluidity lend itself to take measure position
on questions of justice. Stated differently, to what extent can the law be used to prohibit
injustices? Yet, Anzaldua also suggests that law, here understood as a concrete institution,
may become irrelevant when the new mestiza consciousness takes hold of the borderland
subject. Perhaps Anzaldua's critique may lead to an anarchic conception of society where law no longer matters. The ambiguities
in Anzaldfla's narrative leave open either of these possibilities.
Borderlands Doesn’t Solve - Extension
Borderland doesn’t solve – most likely to replicate status quo hierarchies
Orozco-Mendoza PhD Student Department of Political Science @ UMass-Amherst 2008
Elva Fabiola “Borderlands Theory: Producing Border Epistemologies with Gloria Anzaldúa”
Masters Thesis submitted to Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-05062008-175949/unrestricted/Final_thesis_corrected.pdf
From another perspective, it assumed that Anzaldúa’s theory would automatically take us
to a safe land, namely, that the Borderlands now transformed into a place that has become familiar, agreeable, and even safe.
Since the aim is to heal the self, to put it together, to make it knowledgeable, it is implied that this reconciliation at
the inner level will follow the processes in Borderlands with the desired outcomes. In this
regard, awareness in the sense Anzaldúa intended, should not be taken for granted, since it is
probable that the exposition to the Borderlands may lead us to reject the epistemologies of
the other and to identify largely with western knowledge. One may decide that the west is
better, white is better, capitalism is better than everything else that exists around. In sum, the
colonized may wish to remain colonized, no matter how irrational or nonsensical that
decision would be. Lugones also sees this risk when she states, we feel the temptation to stay within the
"confines of the normal" since reality and we in it are familiar to ourselves. We always may feel
the temptation to engage in political activity without this preparation [Borderlands processes], as if oppression did not touch our selves
(Lugones, 2005: 92). Perhaps
the colonized decides that despite all the things that have been
imposed on her, colonization is better. It is possible that she decides that she is too angry,
that she wants to take revenge and revolts against the system instead of negotiating or
mediating, or she can decide that the theory does not make a big difference to her life so she
puts the theory aside. The possibilities that identity suffers a transformation are there, yes,
but it does not mean that these will be positive for the self for this can be a false agency.
As a theory that addresses the inner self, the Borderlands theory can possibly, although not forcibly, work towards the empowerment
and liberation from different forms of oppression, and towards the undermining of western epistemologies that claim for them the
right to explain the world rightly. However, although
Borderlands theory directly confronts those who
hold power, we cannot assume that the system that one tries to confront is a democratic one.
That is, Anzaldúa calls white-Anglos to assume historical responsibility for forcing Mexico to cede half of its territory, for vandalizing
Mexicans after the war forcing them to leave behind their lands, for taking their corporations to Mexico and Latin-America to use
Latin Americans as a source of cheap labor, for having Mexican-Americans/Chicanos and illegal immigrants in the United States
doing the hard work in exchange for few dollars, for extracting Mexico’s wealth out of Mexico leaving the country impoverished, for
doing all these things based on the argument that their neighbors were inferior. In
Borderlands Anzaldúa calls
America accountable for being an oppressor in almost the entire world, and, in doing so she
assumed that the democratic values of this country would respond to her call, yet neither
United States nor Western Europe have ever shown any intention to heal the open wound
by publicly recognizing that colonialism and economic exploitation are something negative.
On the contrary, colonialism, imperialism, and now globalization are for the most part
justified in the name of freedom, democracy, God, reason, etc. As Mignolo and Tlostanova state,
“[Border resisting projects] have yet to find a way in which ‘either-or’ is a deadlock, which
seems to be maintained by the success of capitalism in wearing different masks (liberal. Islamic,
etc)” (Mignolo and Tlostanova, 2006: 217).
Institutions Solve
Institutional engagement is key to material change
Schwartz Professor of Sociology at SUNY Stony Brook & Young PhD candidate in history
at SUNY Stony Brook 2012 Michael & Kevin “Can prefigurative politics prevail? The
implications for movement strategy in John Holloway's Crack Capitalism” Journal of Classic
Sociology 12:220 Sage Publishing
Institutions are also necessary as soon as the cracks begin to coalesce into durable
formations; they will be vital to ensuring accountability, equity, and efficiency in
distributing resources, even when the distribution system is not tyrannized by markets. The
trick to avoiding devolution of the process into the trading of abstract labor is relentless democracy. The historical
experiences of the Paris Commune, the Spanish anarchists, the Zapatistas, worker-run
factories in Argentina, indigenous communities around the world, and diverse other
liberatory experiments offer a rough guide of what those institutions might look like. Economic
and social planning should be participatory and involve workers’, consumers’, and community councils. Individuals should have input
in the degree to which they are affected by particular decisions. Representation should be revolving and any delegates subject to
immediate recall (Albert and Hahnel, 1991, 1992; Lavaca Collective, 2007 [2004]; Sitrin, 2006). These are just loose guidelines, and
liberatory movements will not all adopt the same forms. But there
must be a self-conscious effort to construct
these sorts of structures at the earliest moment in the process of coalescing liberatory
actions. Experimenting with alternative institutions in the present can empower
participants, prove that another way of living is possible, and become the most powerful
tool for extending the cracks into fractures.
As we construct these alternatives, we must simultaneously work for reforms in dominant institutions, both
to achieve tangible improvements in living conditions and to protect incipient liberatory
formations from attacks by the state and other elite interests. Survival requires pressing for needed
reforms in the functioning of dominant institutions, both to stop repression and to reduce
the continued encroachment of abstract labor and its associated tyrannies. Our antipathy
toward states, markets, and other illegitimate institutions must be accompanied by a
constant reassessment of what strategies and tactics are likely to be most effective in
improving people’s lives (both in the material sense and in the sense of expanding their areas of self-actuation) in
the here and now.16
Holloway’s vision of liberation through the construction of ‘cracks’ is compelling and, we think, practicable. But it must
involve self-conscious commitment to large-scale collective action that is capable of moving
the national and global needle in a liberatory direction, a process that requires large
organizations and institutions capable of confronting and reforming established institutions.
***Borderlands Cap Links***
Link – 1NC
Borderlands framing  liberalism and capitalism
Venator-Santiago Assistant Professor Latino Politics, Public Law, and Political Theory @
UConn 2008 Charles R. “Huntington's White Patriotism and Anzaldua's Brown Nationalism”
FIU Law Review 33 Hein Online
While it is beyond the scope of this paper to rehash the counter critiques of the LatCrit approach,52 I do want to suggest that the
focus on anti-essentialism and the multiple dimensions of subordination leave a door open
to a critique of racism and xenophobia that can draw on a traditional Marxist left. This
approach, however, demands that categories of oppression should not be reduced to mere class
relations. Rather, what is at stake is a concern with multiple relations of power and an
understanding of context in multiple ways. Huntington's racist and xenophobic narrative provides us with yet
another example of the ways in which right-wing positions continue to legitimate ideologies of human subordination in the name of
white Anglo-Saxon protestant patriotism in a capitalist system. Anzaldua's
argument neglects to challenge the
role of capitalism in shaping the contours of racial, albeit hybrid, national space. Both
narratives draw on essentialist constructions of race and the reification of a nationalist
narrative in ways that continue to perpetuate a liberal ethos, an ethos that has found a
constant companion in capitalist forms of subordination and exploitation. The LatCrit
approach can offer potential insights into the ways that both Huntington's and Anzaldua's
narratives reproduce capitalist constructions of race and nation, and how these can become
normative guides for the development of legal ideologies.
Link – Ext
Their theory reifies capitalism via obsession with status quo social constructions
Venator-Santiago Assistant Professor Latino Politics, Public Law, and Political Theory @
UConn 2008 Charles R. “Huntington's White Patriotism and Anzaldua's Brown Nationalism”
FIU Law Review 33 Hein Online
Despite the problems present in Huntington's defense of a white Anglo- Saxon Protestant patriotic identity, his argument
echoes similar conceptual arguments used by Chicana nationalists like Gloria Anzaldua. Although the
political premises of Huntington and Anzaldfia's narratives have different goals, it is readily evident that both rely on a
nationalist ideological framework to achieve the respective ends of their arguments. In fact,
both Huntington and Anzaldua end up defending a nationalist narrative that continues to
reproduce a petty-bourgeoisie form of capitalism through the reification of essentialist
social constructions. Ironically, rather than engaging concrete material injustices, both
Huntington and Anzaldua resort to founding racial myths and ideological psychobabble in order to
substantiate what turns out to be a project that reifies a capitalist status quo. In the interest of
space, I limit my discussion to two fundamental points that illustrate my argument, namely, the use of racial, founding myths and the
social construction of a consciousness that avoids the present. I argue that a
critical approach rooted in a leftist tradition
should not lose sight of the influence of capitalism in shaping the contours of subordinated
and exploited identities.
Huntington's anxieties with Mexicans and immigrants of Latin American heritage seem to be fueled by a sort of
"underclass", nationalist rhetoric that describes most Latin American immigrants as "poor, unskilled, and not well educated"
and seeking to colonize spaces within the United States.28 His main anxiety centers on the idea that Mexican immigrants, in
particular, will seek to create an autonomous region in the Southwest that will secede from the United States, which will lead to a civil
war between white nativists and immigrants. Ironically,
Chicana writers like Gloria Anzaldua, as well as others,
have not only defended the nationalist rhetoric underpinning Huntington's argument, but
have embraced the nationalist borderlands debate as a central part of a subaltern narrative.
Of course, it must be remembered that, while the political objectives may differ between Huntington and
Anzaldua's narratives, at a conceptual level both rely on a similar set of myths and
rhetorical claims.
The consciousness they create is just a celebration of hegemonic liberalism – a
call for tolerance and nothing more
Venator-Santiago Assistant Professor Latino Politics, Public Law, and Political Theory @
UConn 2008 Charles R. “Huntington's White Patriotism and Anzaldua's Brown Nationalism”
FIU Law Review 33 Hein Online
Anzaldua argues that her notion of race opposes the "theory of the pure Aryan," and "the policy of racial purity that white America
practices. 46 Drawing
on an essentialist narrative of genomics, Anzaldua offers the possibility of
a new mixed or mestiza race that provides the basis for a new ideological, cultural, and
biological cross-pollination that will, in turn, lead to the creation of a new consciousness.
Presumably, this mixture can be read as the creation of a "cosmic race" that will heal the fragmented psyche of borderland inhabitants
and will encourage a liberal vision of tolerance. Yet,
this new cosmic race is rooted in a borderland, an
exceptional and mythical place that is in between nations.
The problem with this narrative is that it continues to hinge on an essentialist notion of a
race, albeit a cosmic one that is located in an ambiguous national space, the borderland
space between the U.S. and Mexico. The ambiguity, the fluidity, and the mobility of this
identity become fixed in this borderland abstraction. The question remains, who can be
accepted as a good citizen in this fluid, albeit national place? Can an individual who does not have the
cosmic, genetic heritage find a democratic sense of equality in this national space? Is the individual forced to assimilate in order to
lead a meaningful life there? Will
market-oriented and capitalist structures be challenged in this
space? Anzaldua's text suggests that at the end of the day her argument is yet another effort
to reform a Western liberal system by creating a more tolerant national space. This
borderland space is merely a celebratory space within a hegemonic liberal culture, the
status quo.
Their nationalism  capitalism and turns the case
Venator-Santiago Assistant Professor Latino Politics, Public Law, and Political Theory @
UConn 2008 Charles R. “Huntington's White Patriotism and Anzaldua's Brown Nationalism”
FIU Law Review 33 Hein Online
My concern here, however, is not with Huntington's shoddy defense of patriotic ideologies, but rather with the ways in which this
argument reproduces Latino/a borderlands narrative such as those articulated by Chicana writers like Gloria Anzaldua. It
is ironic
that Huntington's argument echoes the arguments of Chicana writers like Anzaldua and other Chicano
nationalists. 34 Of course, at the core of my argument, lies a blanket rejection of nationalism as the
best way to organize a political community in both the present as well as in the future. I am
convinced that it is possible to demonstrate how nationalist narratives reproduce undesirable forms of
exploitation, subjugation, subordination, and oppression. This cultural narrative inherently
domesticates political dissent and creates the conditions that exempt the state or Federal
government from using public funds to address the structural inequalities that underpin the
exploitation and subordination of immigrants and Latino/as more generally. It is readily
evident that both Anzaldua and Huntington accept capitalism as an ideological premise of
their mythic nations, but my point is to suggest that at a conceptual level there is little difference
between Huntington's WASP patriotic national identity and Anzaldua's Atzlan/borderlands
myth.
Mestizaje culture and history has contributed to capitalism just as much as
Western forms of knowledge through the concept of commodity culture –
present in Latin America even prior to Western colonization
Cook 04
[Cook, Scott UT and AU BA and economics, graduate work in economics at University of
Wisconsin, graduate diploma in social sciences at the University of Puerto Rico & phD in
anthropology at University of Pittsburgh, taught anthropology at MSU, University of Conneticut,
directed center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, director of Puerto Rican and Latino
Studies Institute at University of Conneticut. “Understanding Commodity Cultures: Explorations
in Economic Anthropology with Case Studies from Mexico”. Rowman & Littlefield. 2004.]
The concept of commodity culture(s) suggests new directions for twenty-first-century
economic anthropological inquiry in Mesoamerican/Mexican studies and reminds us that
capitalist development had an indigenous seedbed that was not implanted by the Spanish
or other foreign sources . Rather than representing a complete break with the Wolfian paradigm, the commodity culture(s)
approach reprioritizes certain of that paradigm’s constituent elements so that more attention is given to endogenous commodity
development on a global scale and specific commodity development in the Mesoamerican region and, particularly, with the
complexities of their sixteenth-century entanglement and subsequent combined and uneven development. The story of how that
subsequent combined and uneven development became Mexican capitalism must include the Mesoamerican commodity-cultural
experience as well as the European capitalist experience that interrupted and was instrumental in transforming it. There
is no
question that, as Wolf emphasizes, asymmetries of power were structurally decisive but that
indigenous cultural forms, elements, and agency helped shape the Mesoamerican
commoditization process. Precapitalist forms of commodity production developed
endogenously in ancient Mexico; indigenous petty commodity and capitalist forms
continued to develop after the Spanish Conquest throughout the colonial period and have
done so down to the present. Mexican capitalism today is as much a product of mestizaje as
is the Mexican population . It is a mixed capitalism thoroughly penetrated by commodity
logic of market exchange and capital accumulation of indigenous and foreign, precapitalist
and capitalist, origins. These realities are often overlooked in discourse about the Mexican
economy.
Cap Key
Cap first – aff doesn’t solve
Orozco-Mendoza PhD Student Department of Political Science @ UMass-Amherst 2008
Elva Fabiola “Borderlands Theory: Producing Border Epistemologies with Gloria Anzaldúa”
Masters Thesis submitted to Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-05062008-175949/unrestricted/Final_thesis_corrected.pdf
Although one might accept the idea that some governments are democratic, capital is not,
and that is the main obstacle that stays in the path towards liberation. Peruvian philosopher, Annibal
Quijano (2000), argues that the capitalist form of exploitation relies on the racialization of beings to
maximize its benefits. According to him, since the discovery of the new world, the capitalist
system, thus capitalists, have been accumulating wealth at the expenses of the labor
provided by those who have been placed at the bottom of the racial hierarchy by means of
their color. Quijano argues that the contemporary system of capitalism continues to apply the same principles of exploitation.
However, when it comes to capital accumulation David Harvey argues that: capitalists [have the ability] to adapt to
new conditions: indeed one of the more outstanding things about capitalist historical
geography is precisely its flexibility and adaptability (Harvey and Harvey, 2006: 81). Additionally, Matthew
S. Weinert affirms that global political life does not seem to lend itself to democracy, [since] major democracies like the United States
and Great Britain have intervened in democracies abroad to advance their own particular interests (Weinert, 2005). In this context, one
can argue that as
long as the capitalist system continues to hold its current hegemony, it is very
probable that it will remain undemocratic, meaning that accountability to the Third World and all
the people who have been dispossessed, exploited, and wounded by it may never come, unless
of course democracy becomes a precondition for wealth accumulation. In this sense, as a theory of resistance, the
Borderlands is at its best when focusing at the inner level in order to achieve the liberation of the self,
however, when transporting this project to the political realm, at its best, this theory
achieves self liberation and self-decolonization since the theory is bounded by the powers it
seeks to confront. To achieve significant freedom, the theory would need to be recognized
and validated by those who are confronted by the theory, however, as Anzaldúa stated about the
coyolxahuqui state. The life and the writing are a work in process, which means that this Borderlands theory is also a work in
progress and as such, it needs to be improved and worked out constantly since absolute freedom, just as
democracy, is something that can never be made absolutely present once and for all
(Michaelsen and Shershow, 2007: 58). In this sense, Borderlands theory gives us the formula to fix one of
the areas that needs to be fixed, i.e. the inner self; yet, there are many other channels for domination
that cannot be disregarded as part of the struggle since these channels are used to legitimize
domination.
AT: COOLITUDE
***CASE DEBATE***
Coolitude Specific
Coolitude depoliticizes approaches by focusing on a nostalgia for cultural
affirmation and ignoring the political contexts identities are placed in.
Ravi 2008 [Srilata Ravi. Professor of French and Francophone Literature at the University of
Edmonton. “Cultivating Indianness: The Indian Labourer in Mauritian Imaginary.” ‘L’ici et
l’ailleurs’: Postcolonial Literatures of the Francophone Indian Ocean e-France : an on-line
Journal of French Studies, vol. 2, 2008 ISSN 1756-0535 ]
In effect, as a composite identity that privileges survival over suffering, Torabully defines ‘coolitude’ as
being both the reconstitution of the memory of the Creole-coolie conflict and the establishment of a poetics of racial and cultural
mixing based on an ‘Indian element.’10 He argues that the coolie’s initial ‘repli identitaire’ was a reaction to the group’s rejection by
the island’s Creole society. Therefore, the coolie’s only way to negate the traumatic sea voyage was to construct his ‘Indianité’ by
using mythical India as the ultimate referent. Torabully’s poetry, on the other hand, establishes a poetic reaffirmation of the voyage
and he perceives the figure of the coolie as ‘in-between’ in an ongoing process of exchange across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean
regions. ‘Coolitude’ posits ‘an encounter, an exchange of histories, of poetics of visions of the world, between those of African and of
Indian descent, without excluding other sources.’11 This vision appears powerful and liberating in its attempt to transcend racial and
ethnic categorisation in plural societies. However, as Brinda Mehta in Diasporic (Dis)locations points out, Torabully’s
vision
which privileges the ‘personal is poetical’ approach becomes easily transformed into a
‘displaced imaginary construction of nostalgia’.12 His concept of ‘coolitude’ as a hybrid
identity perceived from an ‘Indian’ angle is not very different from the romanticised
Mauritian identity as reflected in Camille de Rauville’s13 indianocéanisme, Jean-Georges Prosper’s créolie
indienocéaniste14 and Edouard Maunick’s métis royaume. 15 Furthermore, the cultural Indianisation that Torabully seeks to reconceptualise begs the theorisation of a cultural Africanisation of the island that scholars like William Miles feelis inadequately carved
out in Mauritius.16 Either way, depoliticised
agendas of cultural affirmation in contemporary society
that do not take into account specific socio-historical and geo-political contexts of the
formation of ‘hybrid identities’ can only lead to further ethnicisation of individuals in
plural societies. In fact, Torabully’s coolitude is premised both on the politics of Creole-coolie conflict and on the emblematic
interchangeability of the two terms17. Actually speaking, the two terms are not interchangeable as historian Vinesh Hookoomsing is
quick to point out. In Mauritius the term ‘creole’ has different linguistic, cultural and ethnic trajectories and therefore the coolie and
He considers the coolie as a historical
persona, a culturally specific figure of the past and disagrees with Torabully’s choice of
coolie as an ahistorical emblem of a culturally composite present. ‘Coolie’ was a generic
term used for any contracted colonial labour as there were also African and Chinese coolies
on the island of Mauritius.
the Creole cannot be considered as interchangeable emblematic figures.18
Coolitude’s depoliticized cultural approach denies the historical agency of the
coolie body and fails to reveal the silences of colonial history.
Mehta 2004 [Brinda Mehta. Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Mills College. Diasporic (Dis)Locations: IndoCaribbean Women Writers Negotiate the Kala Pani (Kingston, Jamaica: University Press of the West Indies, 2004), pg. 56]
Khal Torabully coins the term coolitude in the Indo-Mauritian context as a nativistic reaffirmation of Indian literary and cultural
identity in the second half of this century. Associating coolitude with a kaleidoscopic identity that mirrors internal fragmentation
and cultural displacement, Torabully posits it as a cultural compensation, a celebration of difference that goes beyond ethnicity to
embrace creolization and a cultural métissage of experiences. 39 However, Torabully's attempts
to create an Indianized
version of Negritude by stressing a cultural positivity that distances itself from racialized
positivity (unlike Negritude)negates the temporality of political agency. A depoliticized
agenda of cultural affirmation reinscribes coolitude within a historical lack of agency that
does not lead to the inscription of ancestral memory or give voice to the silences created by
colonial history. 40 By advocating the “personal is poetical” approach, coolitude becomes a
displaced imaginary construction of nostalgia and not an agent of political self-control, as
promulgated by Negritude.
University Bad
Displacing Eurocentrism is impossible within academic spaces-only recognizing
this can create a productive politics outside the university
Chakrabarty 1992 [Dipesh. Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History, South Asian
Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for
"Indian" Pasts?” Representations, No. 37, Special Issue: Imperial Fantasies and Postcolonial Histories (Winter, 1992), pp. 126. University of California Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2928652]
And, finally-since "Europe" cannot after all be provincialized within the institutional site of
the university whose knowledge protocols will always take us back to the terrain where all
contours follow that of my hyperreal Europe-the project of provincializing Europe must
realize within itself its own impossibility. It therefore looks to a history that embodies this
politics of despair. It will have been clear by now that this is not a call for cultural
relativism or for atavistic, nativist histories. Nor is this a program for a simple rejection of modernity, which
would be, in many situations, politically suicidal. I ask for a history that deliber ately makes visible, within the very structure of its
narrative forms, its own repres sive strategies and practices, the part it plays in collusion with the narratives of citizenships in
assimilating to the projects of the modern state all other possibili ties of human solidarity.
The politics of despair will
require of such history that it lays bare to its readers the reasons why such a predicament is
necessarily ines capable. This is a history that will attempt the impossible: to look toward its
own death by tracing that which resists and escapes the best human effort at transla tion
across cultural and other semiotic systems, so that the world may once again be imagined as
radically heterogeneous. This, as I have said, is impossible within the knowledge protocols of
academic history, for the globality of academia is not independent of the globality that the
European modern has created. To attempt to provincialize this "Europe" is to see the modern as inevitably contested, to
write over the given and privileged narratives of citizenship other narratives of human connections that draw sustenance from
dreamed-up pasts and futures where col lectivities are defined neither by the rituals of citizenship nor by the nightmare of "tradition"
that "modernity" creates. There
are of course no (infra)structural sites where such dreams could
lodge themselves. Yet they will recur so long as the themes of citizenship and the nation state dominate our narratives of
historical transition, for these dreams are what the modern represses in order to be.
Nationalism Turn
The 1AC’s attempt to articulate Indian history remains within nationalistic
frames which can only define India in a subordinate relationship to Europe and
separates theoretical discussions from the experiences of the subaltern in a
move of speaking for the other
Chakrabarty 1992 [Dipesh. Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History, South Asian
Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for
"Indian" Pasts?” Representations, No. 37, Special Issue: Imperial Fantasies and Postcolonial Histories (Winter, 1992), pp. 126. University of California Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2928652]
There is then this double bind through which the subject of "Indian" history articulates itself.
On the one hand, it is both the subject and the object of modernity, because it stands for an assumed
unity called the "Indian people" that is always split into two-a modernizing elite and a yetto-be-modernized peasantry. As such a split subject, however, it speaks from within a
metanarrative that cele brates the nation state; and of this metanarrative the theoretical
subject can only be a hyperreal "Europe," a "Europe" constructed by the tales that both imperi alism and nationalism have
told the colonized. The mode of self-representation that the "Indian" can adopt here is what Homi Bhabha
has justly called "mimetic."51 Indian history, even in the most dedicated socialist or nationalist hands, remains a mimicry of a certain
"modern" subject of "European" history and is bound to represent a sad figure of lack and
failure. The transition narrative will always remain "grievously incomplete." On the other
hand, maneuvers are made within the space of the mimetic- and therefore within the
project called "Indian" history-to represent the "dif ference" and the "originality" of the
"Indian," and it is in this cause that the anti historical devices of memory and the
antihistorical "histories" of the subaltern classes are appropriated. Thus peasant/worker constructions of
"mythical" king doms and "mythical" pasts/futures find a place in texts designated "Indian" his tory precisely through a procedure that
subordinates these narratives to the rules of evidence and to the secular, linear calendar
that the writing of "history" must follow. The antihistorical, antimodern subject, therefore,
cannot speak itself as "theory" within the knowledge procedures of the university even
when these knowledge procedures acknowledge and "document" its existence . Much like Spi vak's
"subaltern" (or the anthropologist's peasant who can only have a quoted existence in a larger statement that belongs to the anthropologist alone), this
sub ject can only be spoken for and spoken of by the transition narrative that will always
ultimately privilege the modern (i.e., "Europe").52
Diasporic politics presumes a united people that replicates exclusionary
nationalism
Ang 2003 [Ien. Professor of Cultural Studies at the Institute for Culture and Society at the
University of Western Sydney. “2003, ‘Together-in-difference: Beyond Diaspora, into
Hybridity’, Asian Studies Review, 27(2): 141-154. ]
While the transnationalism of diasporas is often taken as an implicit point of critique of the
territorial boundedness and internally homogenising perspective of the nation-state, the
limits of diaspora lie precisely in its own assumed boundedness, its inevitable tendency to
stress its internal coherence and unity, logically set apart from “others”. Diasporic
formations transgress the boundaries of the nation-state on behalf of a globally dispersed
“people”—for example, “the Chinese”—but paradoxically this transgression can only be
achieved by drawing a boundary around the diaspora, “the Chinese people” themselves. It is therefore
important, in my view, to recognise the double-edgedness of diasporic identity: it can be the
site of both support and oppression, emancipation and confinement, solidarity and division.
Let me first pause at the increasing popularity of the term diaspora itself. While this term was once reserved as a descriptor for the
historical dispersion of Jewish, Greek and Armenian peoples, today it tends to be used much more generically to refer to almost any
group living outside its country of origin, be it Italians outside Italy, Africans in the Caribbean, North America or Western Europe,
Cubans in Miami and Madrid, Koreans in Japan, or Chinese all over the world. Indeed, as Kachig Tololyan remarks, “the
significant transformation of the last few decades is the move towards re-naming as
diasporas ... communities of dispersion ... which were known by other names until the late
1960s: as exile groups, overseas communities, ethnic and racial minorities, and so forth” (Tololyan 1996, 3). To put it
differently, the burgeoning language and consciousness of diaspora is itself a manifestation
and effect of intensifying cultural globalisation. While migrations of people have taken place for centuries and
have been a major force in the creation of the modern world of nation-states since the nineteenth century, it is only in the past few
decades—with the increased possibilities of keeping in touch with the old homeland and with coethnics in other parts of the world
migrant groups have
become collectively more inclined to see themselves not as minorities within nation- states,
but as members of global diasporas that span national boundaries. For example, while “overseas
through faster and cheaper jet transport, mass media and electronic telecommunications—that
Chinese” used to be the common English term to describe the dispersed migrant Chinese communities around the world that were
usually referred to in local terms, in the past decade or so they have been increasingly frequently described collectively and unifyingly,
in global terms, as “Chinese diaspora”.
The focus on diaspora creates new forms of exclusionary and nationalist politics
oriented around particular identities and can’t take into account the positions
of diasporic subjects who do not identify with fully with the diaspora.
Ang 2003 [Ien. Professor of Cultural Studies at the Institute for Culture and Society at the
University of Western Sydney. “2003, ‘Together-in-difference: Beyond Diaspora, into
Hybridity’, Asian Studies Review, 27(2): 141-154. ]
However, there is something deeply problematic about such celebrations of diaspora. A narrow focus on diaspora will
not help but hinder a more truly transnational, cosmopolitan imagination of what it means
to live in the world “as a single place”, to use Roland Robertson’s characterisation of the globalised world (1992). My
theoretical starting point is that just like nations, diasporas are not natural entities but “imagined
communities” (Anderson 1983). As such, I will conclude that the transnationalism of diaspora is actually
proto-nationalist in its outlook, because no matter how global its reach, its imaginary orbit
is demarcated ultimately by the closure effected by the category of the diasporic identity
itself. In this sense, the politics of diaspora is exclusionary as much as it is inclusionary, just
like that of the nation. Let’s look then at the Chinese diaspora. In the economic realm, the rising power of what Ong and
Nonini (1997) call “modern Chinese transnationalism”—whose subjects are jetsetting businessmen crisscrossing the Asia-Pacific to
enhance their commercial empires—has received much attention. This transnational Chinese capitalist class, mythically held together
by supposedly unique Chinese cultural characteristics such as guanxi, has grown substantially since the opening up of mainland China
in the mid-1980s (see, for example, Chan 2000). The creation of new overseas Chinese business networks operating on a global scale
has accelerated in the 1990s as traditional overseas Chinese voluntary associations, in the past organised mainly under principles of
native place, kinship and dialect and dedicated to traditional obligations such as ancestor worship, have been transformed into modern,
globally operating organisations specifically committed to expanding economic opportunities for overseas Chinese business people
across national boundaries (Liu 1998). But the strengthening of global Chinese identification goes far beyond the level of economic
cooperation and trade connections: it is a transnational cultural movement involving many ethnic Chinese whose concerns are mainly
of a personal- political nature, dealing with basic issues of identity and belonging. An example of this is one of the most well-known
popular Chinese diaspora institutions in recent years, the website Huaren (http://www.huaren.org). The site’s main stated objective is
“to promote kinship and understanding among all Overseas Chinese”—a task hugely facilitated by the quintessential technology of
contemporary transnationalism: the Internet. The site’s homepage depicts the Chinese diasporic experience specifically in terms of
loss of identity, and stresses the need and opportunity to restore it through the electronic assertion of a pro to familial, ethnic/racial
community: Chinese are estimated to be living in over 136 different countries, making it perhaps the most widespread ethnic group in
the world. Such diversity is indeed awe-inspiring. Yet, it is the same diversity which creates gulfs among peoples. We often encounter
ChineseAmericans or Chinese-Canadians who know or care little of their counterparts elsewhere. Such ignorance and indifference
should be corrected (http://www.huaren.org, About Us). Put briefly, then, Huaren’s activist desire is to unite the Chinese Diaspora (it
is not insignificant that the word diaspora is generally capitalised in Huaren’s editorial statements). It wishes to counter the
fragmenting effects of centuries-long spatial scattering through a reaffirmation of historical continuity and the perpetuity of a protofamilial blood connection that crosses the geographical borders and dividing lines imposed by nation-states. Unlike the business
networks, which can be said to have instrumental reasons to capitalise on co-ethnic identification (i.e., economic opportunity), for
Huaren the affirmation of diasporic Chinese identity is an end in itself: in this sense, it practises pure identity politics on a global scale.
In his book Global Diasporas Robin Cohen notes that “a member’s adherence to a diasporic community is demonstrated by an
acceptance of an inescapable link with their past migration history and a sense of co ethnicity with others of a similar background”
(Cohen 1997, ix). It is precisely this acceptance of one’s primordial Chineseness that Huaren wishes to strengthen or instil in anyone
who has some Chinese ancestry. From this point of view, any Chinese American or Chinese Canadian would do well, to all intents and
purposes, to be Chinese first, and American or Canadian only second, and so help bolster the internal cohesion and solidarity of the
global Chinese diasporic community. It is clear what
is involved in such diaspora politics. First of all, it is
based on the premise that ancestry is ultimately more important than present place of living
in determining one’s contemporary identity and sense of belonging. It is also premised on
the notion that the signifier “Chinese” alone, whatever its meaning, is sufficient to
differentiate between people who do and do not belong to this massive diasporic
community, and to somehow seal the shared identity of all those who do belong. One
perhaps unintended effect of this is the inevitable hardening of the boundary between
“Chinese” and “non-Chinese”. It is in this sense that the language of diaspora is
fundamentally proto-nationalist: it feeds into a transnational nationalismbased on the
presumption of internal ethnic sameness and external ethnic distinctiveness. Unlike the
nationalism of the nationstate, which premises itself on a national community which is
territorially bound, diasporic nationalism produces an imagined community that is
deterritorialised, but that is symbolically bounded nevertheless. Its borders are clearly denned, at least in
the imagination, and its actual and potential membership is finite: only certain people, notionally “Chinese” people, can belong to the
It is this particularist vision inherent in the diasporic imagination that Benedict
in “universal grounding”. In his view, it “represents a certain
contemporary vision of cosmopolitanism based on a quasi-planetary dispersion of bounded
identities”, attractive to some, Anderson suggests, because it makes them feel “entitled to belong
to ancient bounded communities that nonetheless stretch impressively across the planet in
the age of ‘globalization’” (Anderson 1998, 131). According to Anderson, this vision distorts
the way real social subjectivities are historically formed and transformed by global
migrations, because it assigns particular people a priori to particular diasporic groupings :
“Chinese diaspora”.
Anderson has scathingly criticised as lacking
“Wherever the ‘Chinese’ happen to end up—Jamaica, Hungary, or South Africa— they remain countable Chinese, and it matters little
if they also happen to be citizens of those nation-states” (Anderson 1998, 131). In short, the discourse of diaspora is authorised in
principle by a fundamental notion of closure: it postulates the existence of closed and limited, mutually exclusive universes of ethnic
sameness. Difference is absolutized.
Transculturation Bad
Transculturation doesn’t resist power – it assimilates into global and neocolonial forces
Millington Prof of Latin American Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK 2007 Mark
“Transculturation: Contrapuntal Notes to Critical Orthodoxy” Bulletin of Latin American
Research 26.2 EBSCOhost
In the light of some recent commentaries on transculturation, which have linked it with
autonomy and resistance to global and neo-colonial forces, it seems important to ask how
feasible in fact such autonomy and resistance are in a globalised world. A degree of scepticism
seems to me to be in order about how much autonomy might be achievable, and about the
extent to which the idea of a resistant self-identification might be mystificatory. These
questions are about where transculturation might take a society or culture, and about the
political efficacy of neoculturation. In his discussion of Ortiz and Angel Rama, 11 John Beverley argues that
they both conceive of transculturation as a teleology connected to modernity and the nationstate: ‘ For both Rama and Ortiz transculturation functions as a teleology, not without marks of violence and loss, but necessary in
the last instance for the formation of the modern nation-state and a national (or continental) identity that would be something other
than the sum of its parts, since the original identities are sublated in the process of transculturation itself ’ ( Beverley, 1999: 45 ). He
goes on to be even more explicit in relation to Rama: ‘ For Rama, transculturation is above all an instrument for achieving Latin
American cultural and economic modernity in the face of the obstacles to that modernity created by colonial and then neo-colonial
forms of dependency ’ ( Beverley, 1999: 45 ). Alberto Moreiras says something similar when he argues that, for
Rama,
successful transculturation is about assimilation to modernisation as unavoidable reality, as
world destiny ( Moreiras, 2001: 188 ). On these readings, Rama and Ortiz saw transculturation as a
necessary negotiation with and therefore acceptance of powerful global forces, presumably via
local adjustments (though neither Beverley nor Moreiras mentions the neoculturation that was central in Ortiz). Beverley ’ s and
Moreiras ’ readings identify effectively Latin America’s ambivalence, as it is caught between the desire for assimilation to global
trends and the desire for the (relative) autonomy which the condition of the nation-state implies. But Beverley goes beyond a critical
view of this way of positioning Latin America in external realities, and also underlines the shortcomings of the notion that the internal
effects of transculturation might be to further the ‘ “ incomplete ” project of Latin American modernity ’ ( Beverley, 1999: 46 ) by
increasing social integration. He is utterly dismissive when he says: ‘ The
idea of transculturation expresses in both
fantasy of class, gender, and racial reconciliation [ … ] ’( Beverley, 1999: 47 ).
The fundamental question that writers like Beverley and Moreiras raise is whether
transculturation in the contemporary world can challenge the hold of global modernisation.
Ortiz and Rama a
Now, perhaps even more than in Ortiz ’ s time, this is the framework which must be addressed. And the answer to that fundamental
question may depend on the location and nature of the transculturation that occurs. 12 But it may also be that the notion of ‘
challenging the hold of global modernisation ’ is simply overambitious. Much of the time, transculturation
is local, a
tactical adaptation to external forms, though nonetheless significant at that level. But this limitation reveals
what is the core of the question about the effectiveness of transculturation: namely whether
it is conceivable that it might operate strategically. The negative view would be that, current political and
economic structures being what they are, transculturation is and can aspire to be no more than a survival technique. On this view,
transculturation localizes and partially mitigates dominant political and economic realities. The positive view would be that, such is
the creativity and diversity of cultural practices, transcultural forms will constantly emerge to open up new spaces and possibilities,
including elements of critique and self-determination. 13 There are at least two ways in which the positive view might be argued, one
being via a conscious attempt to create a variant cultural logic or autonomy and the other via an emphasis on the potential impact of
subaltern cultures. I have doubts about both kinds of affirmative argument. In
the case of creating a variant cultural
logic, while the will to creativity is revealing and may cast light on the oppressive logic of
modernisation, the attempt to create a local specificity may be no more than a reaction to
dominant practices and as such may leave them in place or effectively reinforce them,
thereby changing nothing fundamental. In the case of emphasising subaltern cultures, there
may be a danger of assuming that those cultures embody some absolute difference or are
the repository of some ‘ untarnished truth ’ . Beyond these issues, there are ethical concerns to do
with presuming to represent subaltern points of view and to mobilise them for a broader
emancipatory cause. Nonetheless, both lines of argument serve the useful purpose of reminding us of the need to question
global cultural homogenisation and may enable the examination from a new perspective of the impact of global economic and political
realities.
Transculturation  infiltration and consumption of the periphery
Millington Prof of Latin American Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK 2007 Mark
“Transculturation: Contrapuntal Notes to Critical Orthodoxy” Bulletin of Latin American
Research 26.2 EBSCOhost
A sceptical approach might lead one to the view that transculturation is no more than an angle on the basic
process of conforming with modernisation, a process in which the effects of neoculturation
are at best relatively minor. One way of putting the claims for the reach of neoculturation to the test is to ask whether
there is evidence in the contemporary world that current examples of transculturation have any impact beyond Latin American
borders, in other words whether there is any real reciprocity in the cultural dynamic, and I would hazard a guess that a deep impact is
only felt where there is also migration. In
asking whether transculturation can aspire to any
fundamental impact, the point is to uncover the relative positions of power of the cultures
involved in any encounter. Such is the flexibility and strength of metropolitan cultures that
it is conceivable that, when they are not simply appropriating other cultures to turn their
products into consumer commodities, they could indeed absorb elements from the
periphery, adapt them, thereby strengthen themselves and return with a renewed capacity
to infiltrate or manipulate the periphery.
Focus on transculturation ignores the efficiency of dominant cultures – risks
appropriation
Millington Prof of Latin American Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK 2007 Mark
“Transculturation: Contrapuntal Notes to Critical Orthodoxy” Bulletin of Latin American
Research 26.2 EBSCOhost
Certain recent commentators (notably, Beverley, Moreiras, Larsen and Cornejo-Polar) have raised doubts about how transculturation
affects ways of thinking about and perceiving Latin America. Few, I imagine, would argue against the notion that a world in which
acculturation (as cultural take-over) was less routine and accepted would be a better place, but one
needs to be equally
careful about a rush to invest in the idea of transculturation as a panacea, given that it does
not occur in a vacuum and, as I have been at pains to underline, needs to be seen in its interweaving
with structures of power and the range of mutual influences between North and South.
There are diverse and uncontrollable flows of information and networks of cultural
interaction in operation today, but the questions are how those flows and networks operate,
how information is moving, where and how the influences are absorbed, how cultures institute and disseminate
value, what degree of deculturation is occurring and what kinds of neoculturation are
emerging. There has been some emphasis in recent discussions of transculturation on interaction, but I think that we need to be
clear about what we take that term to mean, because interaction may not imply equality and mutuality. Influences may
operate back and forth between cultures but be asymmetrical in quantity and quality, be
highly imbalanced and still take place with well oiled efficiency. Above all, therefore, and recalling
elements in Ortiz, we need to try to understand how these processes affect people ’ s lives and the social relations in which they live.
Moreover, that leaves us with the vital issue of what can be done about the imbalanced, asymmetrical influences where they impact
negatively on the lives of those in one of the cultures involved. In the Latin American context, I am not optimistic in the short term
about the prospects for a far-reaching challenge. It
seems to me overly optimistic to look to indigenous or
marginalised cultures as a basis for resistance – the experiences of the indigenous and the
marginalised are at best urgent reminders of what needs to be done. Any moves to oppose
dominant cultures need to find ways to go beyond a refl exive reaction to them: simple
opposition easily solidifies cultural relations into polarisations which ultimately reconfirm
the dominant as the driving force, without isolating the latter ’ s own heterogeneity and
internal contradictions. One needs to stress and stress again that all cultures are heterogeneous, potentially contradictory
and constantly in transformation, however slowly. Dominance is often partial and reliant on processes of
transculturation which are reciprocally, if differentially, transformative ( Coronil, 1996 ).
The search for transculturation creates losses, shifts, and blurs in meaning
Jutta Vinzent ’10
Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art and Visual Culture at the University of Birmingham In Search of Hybridity:
Inculturation, Interculturation and Transculturation in Contemporary Religious Art in Britain
_ The
search for inculturation, interculturation and transculturation also raises¶ issues.
While inculturation as part of its defi nition consciously overrides the¶ ‘other’, intercultural
compositions and transcultural symbols accept ‘losses’: In_ e Nativity — Wonder (Fig. 3)
the ox is explicitly sexualised and also shown¶ without the donkey52 and in _ ree Women
and an Angel Inside the Empty¶ Tomb — Love (Resurrection) (Fig. 4) the multiple hands,
with which Shiva is¶ usually represented, have been abandoned.¶ In addition to pictorial
‘losses’, shifts and blurs in meaning occur. A shift,¶ for example, is that despite its own place in Christian
iconography, _ e Grievers¶ (Fig. 5) represents ‘the crucifi xion’ for the artist.53 An example for a blur is ¶ the inclusion of Nataraja, the
dancing Shiva, in _ ree Women and an Angel¶ Inside the Empty Tomb (Fig. 4). While the angel announces the resurrection,¶ a
historical event in Christian theology, Shiva conventionally rather symbolizes¶ ‘the cosmic energy that fl ows through and sustains the
world and the¶ universe.’54¶ _ The
pictorial absences and denotative shifts and blurs prove what
Bhabha¶ testifi es theoretically for cultural signifi cation, namely that it is in process,55 and¶
thus allows for or even presupposes such ‘losses’, shifts and blurs. In a similar¶ way, one can say that
iconographies are constantly changing. _ e analysis of¶ the hybridity in Mackenzie’s work, has shown that, in visual
representations it¶ is possible, to some extent, to go beyond a mere description of hybridity by¶ distinguishing varying forms, which
are in our case, inculturation, interculturation ¶ and transculturation. _ ese instigate changes in iconographies, contributing¶ to a
dialogue of cultures, which, as I would argue, is not solely typical¶ of the contemporary (resulting from a claimed distinct
globalisation), but has¶ been inherent part of any iconography. However, in this sense, hybridity
is a¶ tautology: Jan
‘hybridisation of hybrid¶ iconographies’,56 which actually
question the existence of distinct cultures as¶ such. Pieterse argues that therefore ‘the
hybridisation perspective remains¶ meaningful only as a critique of essentialism’ and only
as long as essentialism¶ as a strategic force exists.57 And this is how this article would like to be understood:¶ as
Nederveen Pieterse would call it the
a discourse to unsettle essentialist understandings of iconographies.
The aff is ethnocentric, transculturalism cannot be limited to one specific
instance
GIRA, ‘13
The GIRA essentially places its research under the aegis of a reflection on transculturation and cultural hybridity processes. From this
viewpoint, the GIRA aims to think out the Americas using concepts trying to account for the consequences of the first encounter on
this continent between Europeans and Native Peoples, between masters from Europe and slaves from Africa. (Date accessed –
7/16/14) file:///C:/Users/camer_000/Desktop/Transculturation%20and%20Cultural%20Hybridity.htm
the term transculturation is more suited than any other
to the American context since the idea of a mere phenomenon of "deculturation-acculturation" (still possible or
thinkable within the national integration models of modern societies) is practically inapplicable in the various
societies of the continent, given the continental scope of the situations and issues
surrounding demographic and migratory movements, the shattering of national borders,
and the flow of media information and international as well as local cultural products.
Transculturation then becomes truly essential to the understanding of an American
continental specificity. It is through transculturation that cultural hybridity (understood as the
When talking about culture or cultural identities,
result of an ongoing process of transculturation), which is made out of "DIY creations", constructions, "negotiations", re-
becomes a central element of the developing
imaginary of the Americas. In this context, identity is therefore a matter of a plurality typical of the continental cultural
appropriations of identity as well as of new cultural synthesis,
uniqueness, as it was based on history. It can be thought out as a whole, and this without negating "ethnic", political and cultural
distinctive features.
Hybridity Bad
Hybridization presupposes the false purity of the originary cultures-results in an
ahistorical perspective that reinforces the western model of static and
otherized civilizations which are excluded from their strategy.
Wolf 2008 [Michaela. April 2008. Associate Professor at the Department of Translation
Studies, University of Graz. Translated by Kate Sturge. “Translation – Transculturation.
Measuring the perspectives of transcultural political action.” European institute for progressive
cultural politics. http://eipcp.net/transversal/0608/wolf/en]
As we see from the contribution of postcolonial theory to the study of the translation phenomenon as an emancipatory force (Homi
Bhabha here presented as a case in point), translation can be viewed as a reinterpretation, as a constant repositioning of transferred
signs which casts existing orders into question and leaves open many different possible contextualizations. Instead of arbitrary
attributions of meaning, context-dependent interpretations are made which break open previously fixed assumptions and, in their
continual creation of uncertainties, produce things that have never existed and that cannot be brought back to an original state. But do
these observations really stand up to critical scrutiny?
Does cultural hybridity help us reach a point where
we “now all understand each other” and “can successfully translate each other”?[12] Or is Jan
Nederveen Pieterse right to ask: “Hybridity, so what?”[13] To what degree can Bhabha’s concepts really be applied to the
translation-related questions I have raised here? With regard to the political relevance of what Bhabha says, a first step will be to note
that he sees difference as a category with a clear claim to power: “The
concept of cultural difference focuses on
the problem of the ambivalence of cultural authority: the attempt to dominate in the name
of a cultural supremacy which is itself produced only in the moment of differentiation”.[14]
This means that the positing of difference itself is what produces the attribution of superiority and inferiority, while the current public
debate on ‘cultural diversity’ and ‘multiculturalism’ perpetuates this pattern of western superiority. For Bhabha, accepting these
premises allows us to locate potential for change at the peripheries, where the ‘new arrivals’ marked by hybridity are able to use
subversion or mimicry to undermine the strategies of the powerful.[15] However, does that not in fact imply interpreting the world
from a central perspective, one that ignores or has lost sight of the periphery? And does it not lead to hybridity itself being ‘liquefied’?
Hybridity as the result of cultural translation claims to defeat western ethnocentrism: yet it
is precisely here that the danger arises of a western world striving towards uniformity, an
anti-ethnocentric model that threatens to become universalized and that, despite all its
sympathy for subversive strategies, rather fixes the western model than uncovers its
discursive contradictions. Not for nothing has the concept of hybridity been repeatedly
criticized in recent years. Hybridity, the arguments run, is rootless, serves only the elite,
does not reflect deeper social realities[16] and implies pure origins. Nikos Papastergiadis even goes as
far as to say that in optimistic ways of viewing hybridity, “hybrids were conceived as lubricants
in the clashes of culture; they were the negotiators who would secure a future free of
xenophobia”.[17] It is not possible to address all these points in detail here. For now I would like to pick out the question of
‘pure origins’, in the process also returning to translation. Terry Eagleton picks up the view – put forward also
by Edward Said – that all cultures are hybrid, that none is pure or constitutes a
homogeneous fabric,[18] pointing out that “hybridization presupposes purity. Strictly
speaking one can only hybridize a culture which is pure”. He does, citing Said, concede that “all
cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous,
extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic”.[19] Let us not forget, though, that precisely from a
historical perspective notions of so-called ‘pure origins’ and cultural affiliations claiming
homogeneity have been predominant for centuries: patriarchal attitudes have postulated
sharply drawn borders between genders; the aristocratic view postulated ‘blue blood’, while
the nationalist philologists around Herder saw language as a vessel for the genius of the nations, quite apart from the ‘racial’
perspective which postulated a clearly delineated hierarchy of ‘races’. The
appropriation of language and cultural
artefacts for national and nationalist projects is familiar enough from the very recent past
and our immediate neighbourhood as well.[20] The processes of hybridization that are
largely visible and perceptible (and to a great extent also recognized) today can, in contrast, be
interpreted as the result of enhanced awareness arising from massive changes in social and
economic structures. If we ask ourselves how far these processes of transformation imply cultural translation, here
understood as largely congruent with hybrid processes, or whether cultural translation is what makes these changes possible in the first
place, then the historical component must first be discussed. Historically,
does cultural translation only occur
at a particular moment – the moment when an ‘imagined purity’ has to be overcome?
Mixing and porosity between cultures is not a monopoly of the modern era, as is sometimes
claimed; the adoption of symbols and practices is a historically observable fact, and
engenders hybrid conditions of different kinds. More relevant here is the question of the
tension between the assertion, or construction, of western uniqueness – in the formations I
have set out – and the notion that “every society is ‘complex’, every culture is ‘polyphonic’
and ‘heteroglossic’, and every subject is entangled in an internal dialogue of interacting
voices”.[21] Here, detailed attention is required in each case to the power relations that condition the specific situation, helping
determine the interpretations and the selection mechanisms within these processes of cultural translation.
Hybridity is constructed in opposition to an ethnically identified and static
other-this maintains white racialized constructions of identity and progress
which exclude racially marked other which are unable to adopt a hybrid
position.
Sharma 2007 [Sanjay. Professor in the School of Social Sciences, Brunel University, UK.
“East is East and the pitfalls of Hybridity.” Darkmatter: Ruins of Imperial Culture. 10 Feb 2007.
http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2007/02/10/east-is-east-and-the-pitfalls-of-hybridity/]
However, you know that things aren’t so comfortable. We should never forget that the murder
of Stephen Lawrence and the abysmal institutional response explodes any liberal discourse
of cultural harmony or racial justice in Britain. Nevertheless, a new found cosmopolitanism which confidentially celebrates
‘the Curry’ as the national dish has been endorsed by New Labour and other cultural commentators seeking to embrace diversity. We live in an age of the
recognition of multi-culture. For example, the critical success and celebration of musicians such as Talvin Singh and Nitin Sawhney rightly acknowledges the
creative talents of young British Asians. A cynical stance would situate these developments in terms of the demands of expanding global capitalist markets.
Let’s face it,
ethnicity, diversity and difference have become commodified. Popstar Madonna donning a bindi and
embracing all things Eastern captures an increasing appetite for exotica in the West. But there’s rather more to it than that. The idea of multiculturalism, or
hybridity’ is fast becoming a desired cultural condition of the West . And in stark
contradiction, this exists alongside a seemingly incessant xenophobia which has been formative of
white Western culture and identity. Moreover, the creative condition of cultural hybridity is
offered as an antidote to cultural misunderstanding, conflict and even racism. ‘Hybridity’ is
another of those contested terms finding favour in both liberal and radical (academic)
circles, and has entered into popular cultural commentary. The term is used to describe and categorize
contemporary British Asian and black cultural productions such as art, film and music .
more specifically ‘
Hybridity marks a cultural state of mixing or syncretism. The future is one of fusion, different cultural elements coming together and producing something
novel. Ossified cultures are being left behind, boundaries are fractured as new cultural practices, identities and ways of being enter into the world. A radical
condition? It does seem to have the potential to challenge the invention of an exclusively white Britain, and racist ideas of cultural origins and national
belonging. Cultural movements which transgress fixed boundaries and have the potential to re-draw a nationalist and exclusionary Englishness do need to be
The disruption of cultural fixity allows us ethnically defined Others into the game of
the politics of presence as well as recognition. Hybridity, nevertheless, has more than one politics and trajectory, and it is the
hegemonic project of liberal cultural diversity which renders its utopian gestures rather suspect. Hybridity can be considered to be
the master signifier of East is East. It provides the means through which we comprehend
and empathize with the cultural anxieties of the Khan family. In particular, hybridity is the
embraced.
representational strategy which encodes the cultural condition of the miscegenated Khan
children. How do they deal with their father’s Pakistani Muslim cultural background in relation to their own white ‘cultural heritage’? The film’s
dramatic ending shows the children physically defending the mother from their father’s rage, and demanding that they should have individual freedom which is
not be governed by the dictates of an alien traditional Muslim culture. George Khan concedes and returns to working in his chip shop with his wife once again
at his side. Things return to normal, but no longer is there any room for his Muslim cultural background to be articulated. The fact that in the final analysis his
children ostensibly reject ‘Muslim culture’ isn’t really the problem, but on what basis does this rejection take place is. The cultural premise of East is East
hybridity which fails to address the grounds on which the dissonances of
cultural difference are played out in Britain. More disturbingly, through the figure of George Khan, it sets up a
dichotomy which can only but represent and situate Asian (Muslim) culture as something
traditional, ossified and pre-modern. George Khan played by the talented Om Puri is characterized as affectionate, yet a tyrannical
embodies a form of
flawed man unable to reconcile his own marriage to a white woman while insisting his children are brought up as proper Muslims. Puri’s wavering northern
working-class Pakistani-inflected accent indicates his discomfiture. While running a chip shop – ironically a central site of working-class northern culture – he is
unable to negotiate his cultural background with the demands of white Britain. Constantly seeking advice from the local Mosque – undoubtedly the site of a
preserved Islamic culture – he tragically tries to instill and reproduce a Muslim way of life which is oblivious to dominant cultural conditions. More significantly,
it fails to be negotiated with the hybrid lives of his children. Most of his children secretly eat pork sausages in his absence and Tariq, one of the brothers set up
to have an arranged marriage, possesses a white girlfriend and covertly sneaks off to go to the local disco where he is known as ‘Tony’ by racist bouncers. The
children’s condition of their hybridity doesn’t mean there is an intentional or outright rejection of Asian culture. One scene shows all the family enjoying
watching an Indian film during a trip to Bradford, and in another, the tough football playing daughter, Meenah dances exquisitely to the music of the classic
South Asian film Pakeezah whilst sweeping up fish bones. These few scenes do capture something of the nuances and negotiations of being British working-class
ridity is founded upon a dichotomy which constructs that which is
mixed, fused and dynamic as culturally progressive, and in contrast, that which is ethnically
fixed, authentic and bounded as culturally backward and almost primordial. You can guess where
Muslim culture fits in. The hybridity on offer means those Asians which cling to their ossified cultures
cannot seek entry into the modern world, being unable to negotiate the spaces of
progressive multi-culture. The hybridity on offer means those Asians which cling to their
ossified cultures cannot seek entry into the modern world, being unable to negotiate the
spaces of progressive multi-culture. To put it another way, the only good Asian is a ‘hybrid
Asian’. Note that there’s still no room for ‘hybrid Pakis’. It is an insidious liberal notion of cultural diversity which is increasingly becoming pervasive in
representations of hybridity. As the cultural critic Homi Bhabha highlights, in this construction of diversity, an invisible
white centre still persists which measures and locates other ‘minority’ cultures . Asian or Muslim
Asians. Nevertheless, the film’s hyb
culture has no grounds to be hybrid in itself, (as it comes ready formed by thousands of years of primitivism and religion). We could say that the hybridity of
East is East is ultimately one of cultural assimilation which leaves whiteness intact. At best the Khan children are ‘caught between two cultures’ in which there
is little space for negotiating elements of Asian culture, or exploring how this ‘culture’ historically emerges and changes. Just think about the title of the film,
East is East – it gives the game away. It’s only those transferable and translatable Asian elements which are acceptable to this form of assimilative hybridity.
To elaborate, we can turn to the example of the style media created ‘2nd Generation’
Asians, those represented as fashionably and effortlessly fusing all that is best from the East
with the modern Western way of being. They represent a kind of (usually middle-class) avant-garde, at the cutting edge of
cultural innovation while leaving elements of their traditional and unassimilatable parental culture behind. How ever much they may resist, talented folk such
as Talvin Singh, Nitin Sawhney, Meera Sayal and Hanif Kureshi are caught up in this discourse of hybridity. (The uncool and unknowable ethnic ‘Otherness’ of
the rest of Asian culture is jettisoned and left to the anthropologists to decipher). Perhaps I’m burdening East is East too much with a demand for a politically
correct form of hybridity. This however misses the point. My problem with the film is not with its content or negative depictions of Asian culture. In fact, there
is a need to develop artistic languages which explore the constant negotiations and ambivalences of British Asian culture. The cleavages of class, gender and
ethnicity have only really begun to be addressed over the last decade in Asian cultural productions. These explorations haven’t been carried out in isolation
from a dominant racist culture, but nor has it prevented our cultural conditions of emergence from being interrogated. Nevertheless, if we embrace the
language of a liberal hybridity, one that fails to address its own hegemonic formation and assimilative trajectory, cultural Otherness will remain marginalized.
hybridity that seeks to make knowable and representable elements of
Asian culture and ethnic difference in a form which remains selective and exclusionary. A new
East is East is symptomatic of a
racism – same old story.
The aff misinterprets where cultural hybridity originates from. It was not just to
recreate European cultural, it was also to maintain Native culture
GIRA, ‘13
The GIRA essentially places its research under the aegis of a reflection on transculturation and cultural hybridity processes. From this
viewpoint, the GIRA aims to think out the Americas using concepts trying to account for the consequences of the first encounter on
this continent between Europeans and Native Peoples, between masters from Europe and slaves from Africa. (Date accessed –
7/16/14) file:///C:/Users/camer_000/Desktop/Transculturation%20and%20Cultural%20Hybridity.htm
from this standpoint that it is essential to focus on the theme of the cultural
encounter between cultures of European origin and Indigenous populations while insisting
on the fact that the societies of the Americas have been established through a fundamental
process of transculturation resulting in cultural hybridity. This cultural hybridity comes not
only from the impossibility to reproduce exactly European cultures and their later borrowings
(implicit and/or explicit) from Native cultures in American soil, but also from the impossibility of keeping these
Native cultures intact. The signs of this fundamental cultural hybridity, which can be found very easily, among other
It is also, naturally,
places, at the symbolic level within the toponymy and nomenclature of various territories, are also more or less pronounced
depending on the contexts in other phenomenon such as the mixed composition of populations, the dietary practices, the
material culture, the later migratory phenomenon, the transformations in gender relations, the recognition of supra-ethnic
and supra-national Native affiliations and interests extending beyond traditionally recognized borders.
Hybridity fails to engage the political
Coombes and Brah Director of Gradute Studies in the School of History of Art, Film and
Visual Media Education at Birkbeck College, University of London; Director of Social Studies in
the Faculty of Continuing Education at Birkbeck College, University of London 2000 Annie E.
and Avtar “Hybridity and its Discontents: Politics, science, culture”
Hybridity is often discussed within the frame of debates on multiculturalism. One of the differences
between the ways hybridity and multiculturalism are addressed is that multiculturalism always
contains a policy dimension missing in the hybridity debates, where the term masquerades as a
solely cultural descriptor, and where, crucially, culture is often represented as autonomous from
any political or social determinations. Indeed one of the difficulties of the ways in which hybridity has been
mobilized in the cultural sphere is precisely that the institutional frameworks through which it circulates are insufficiently theorized
(Garcia (Ianclini 1990; Coombes 1992). The chapters in this volume are particularly attentive to this dimension of the debate. Most
importantly, in this volume we felt that it was essential to foreground the ways in which hybridity
is constituted and
contested through complex hierarchies of power, particularly when used as a term which
invokes the mixing of peoples and cultures (Brah 1992 ). Importantly, it is only through
recognizing the ways in which these terms have been given different and often conflicting
meanings at specific historical moments that we can understand the stakes in the present debates on
hybridity versus essentialism.
The Mestizaje movement fails to unite the people and instead reinforces the
already separated identites
Ileana Rodriguez Humanities Distinguished Professor of Spanish at Ohio State University
2001 “The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader” September 24, 2001 p 413
For the second half of this essay I turn to mestizaje and indigenismo in the context of theorizations of Chicana / o identity formations.
Chicanos appropriated the discourse of mestizaje in the early 1970s when we claimed Aztlan as an indigenous nation historically
anterior to the founding of the United States. Indeed, it is the concept of mestizaje that enabled us to claim a biological tie to this
Aztec origin story and to place it in the U.S. Southwest. Aztlan lent a moral and historical legitimacy to our claims for economic and
civil rights (Padilla). Aztlan constituted a space outside the U.S. nation, prior to the U.S. nation, from which to launch a critique of a
hegemonic and racist system of representation. Aztlan-based Chicano nationalism has been eloquently and exhaustively critiqued by
Chicana feminists and Chicana and Chicano poststructuralist scholars. Thus I will not rehash these arguments here. I would like to
refocus our attention on the residual effect of this era of nationalism: the continued use of mestizaje as a trope for Chicana / o identity
mestizaje is
incapable of suturing together the heterogeneous positionalities of Mexican, Indian, and
Chicana/o that coexist in the United States, or, more importantly, of offering effective political
subjectivity to these positionalities. We must recognize that when we appropriate the tropes of
mestizaje and indigenismo, we are necessarily operating within the logic of representation to
which these tropes belong. We must take seriously the Zapatista movement's critique of mestizaje and indigenismo
as parallel ideologies that incorporate the figure of Indian in the consolidation of a nationalist
identity in order to effectively exclude contemporary Indians. Thus, in our Chicano reappropriation of the
biologized terms of mestizaje and indigenismo, we are also always recuperating the Indian as an ancestral
past rather than recognizing contemporary Indians as coinhabitants not only of this
continent abstractly conceived, but of the neighborhoods and streets of hundreds of U.S. cities
and towns. Why, in other words, do Chicanos in Austin dance to Tejano music in one bar, mestizo
Mexican migrants in another, and indigenous Mexican migrants in none at all? In mestizaje,
we are reduced to searching for signs of our indigenous past and, more significantly, for a
collective political future in some inherent tie to the land - in our "cosmic green thumb," as Guillermo
and the presumed access to indigenous subjectivity that this biologized trope offers us. I would like to suggest that
Gomez Pefia, the border brujo, has so ironically put it. To recognize this process is not to deny our indigenous ancestry, rather, to
recognize this is to refuse to reduce indigenous subjectivity, and indeed Mexican mestizo
identity, to biologistic representation that, in discursive and political terms, always already places the
Indian under erasure.
The mestizaje movement leads to the erasure of natives
Ileana Rodriguez Humanities Distinguished Professor of Spanish at Ohio State University
2001 “The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader” September 24, 2001 pp 414-415
In this passage Anzaldtia's borderlands promises to unsettle the conventional usage of mestizaje for Chicanos as well. For if
Anzaldtia's borderland undoes
the artificial duality of a border, of the "us" and "them," it does so in the
service of recognizing the material violence of such artificial constructs. Thus, at this point in the text.
Anzaldtia could proceed to resituate the Chicana /o as mestizo, the Mexican as mestizo, and the Indian as Mexican within a
transnational frame that would address the power relations among such positionalities. In other words, whereas the mestizaje of Aztlan
in the 1970s allied Mexicanos and Chicanos through a common past-through a dead indigenous ancestry-the mestizaje of Anzaldtia's
borderlands could disrupt such assumption and place each of these positionalities in that
uneasy and "constant state of transition" within a capitalist world-system that depends on
our differences for its own reproduction. Instead of taking up her own provocative challenge to do this,
Anzaldtia quickly slips back into the historic usage of mestizaje, constructing Chimna/os in
the borderlands as the "us" against the Anglo "them." She rallies mestizaje to access an
indigenous ancestry that legitimates a prior claim to the Southwest for Chicanas and Chicanos, "The
oldest evidence of humankind in the United States-the Chicanos' ancient Indian ancestors-was found in Texas and has been dated
35,000 BC" (4). Ignoring
the contemporary Native American inhabitants of the Southwest and
their very different mytho-genealogies, Anzaldtia predictably claims this "oldest evidence of humankind" for
Chimnos as evidence of the occupation of the Southwest by the Indian ancestors of the Aztecs. Consequently, a page and a few
thousand years later, when the settlement of the Southwest by the Spaniards oceans in her book. She continues: "Our Spanish, Indian
and mestizo ancestors explored and settled parts of the United States Southwest as early as the sixteenth century. For every gold
hungry conquistador and soulhungry missionary who came north from Mexico, ten or twenty Indians and mestizos went along as
porters or in other capacities. For the Indians this constituted a retum to the place of origin, Aztlan. Thus making Chicanos originally
and secondarily indigenous to the Southwest" (5). Let us trace the cirmitous route by which mestizaje makes Chicanos "originally and
secondarily indigenous to the Southwest." According to Anzaldtia Chicanos are originally indigenous to the area because of our
biological tie to the first Indians who inhabited it some 37,000 years ago (her date), that mythical Indian tribe that traveled from
Aztlan in the South- west to Mexico City and subsequently formed the Empire. And we are secondarily indigenous through our
"tetum" to this homeland with the Span- iards as Indians and mestizos. Once again mestizaje is deployed to produce a biological tie
in
this system of representation, indigenous subjectivity is once again put under erasure. The
condition of possibility for Chicana/ o nostalgia over our indigenous subjectivity made evident in
this passage is the rarefication of indigenous peoples as past.
with pte-Aztec Indians rather than a political tie with contemporary U.S. Native American or Mexican Indians. Consequently,
***Cap Links***
Transculturation and hybridity risk reification of dominant ideologies 
capitalism
Millington Prof of Latin American Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK 2007 Mark
“Transculturation: Contrapuntal Notes to Critical Orthodoxy” Bulletin of Latin American
Research 26.2 EBSCOhost
The reflections in this article derive from concerns about the current condition of thinking about transculturation in relation to Latin
America. In much recent work on the region, particularly in metropolitan cultural studies, the
terms transculturation
and hybridisation have become frequent touchstones, and there has developed a striking
productivity associated with them. As with any term or concept there is a danger that overuse will
degenerate into orthodoxy and so produce a devaluation, which may be but one step away
from obsolescence. I wonder if we have not advanced some way through that process,
particularly as, in the case of transculturation, those using it frequently do not trouble to
define it, often making no more than gestural references to it. 2 Hence, it seems opportune to
ask what need is being answered by recourse to notions such as transculturation and
hybridisation, why discussion tends to gravitate towards them, and what job they are being
asked to perform in relation to global or regional cultural politics.
Fundamentally these terms are now used to articulate a postcolonial stance of political resistance,
a will both to highlight movements of or the capacity for opposition within Latin America and to question the
perspectives of official or dominant thinking about the region. It is not always clear whether
resistance is simply uncovered – that is, revealed to exist as undeveloped potential – , or
whether the ‘ right ’ analytical method is required to construct it. But such a stance has a history that
can be traced back to the beginnings of modern Latin American Studies in the 1950s and 1960s, when analytical positions were taken
up against capitalism, the technocratic pursuit of modernization and the ravages wrought by them. The cause was autonomy and
selfdetermination, the means rigorous (and usually radical) academic analysis, the unanswered question the degree of impact of the
latter on the former. While some political realities may have changed since then, it remains clear that the global position of Latin
America, and above all many of its economic realities, cannot overall be said to have improved much. Nor can Latin American
countries be said to have followed the paths and resistance which radical analysis tended to propose, which may provide food for
thought about a response to that unanswered question.
The terms that I am focusing on might be seen as the latest tools deployed in the Humanities to prise open the snare in which Latin
America has been trapped, whether in political, cultural or identity terms. They seek to exercise some critical leverage on the
hierarchical binaries of imperialism/neo-colony, centre/periphery, identity/otherness, which apparently hold Latin America in their
iron grip. The sense is that what is produced by transculturation or hybridisation does not fi t within neat binaries, that it straddles,
mixes and disrupts. Though by no means exactly synonymous, the
nexus of terms from transculturation and
hybridisation to heterogeneity and mestizaje all manifest the will to subvert, transgress,
undermine, oppose or obstruct the workings of metropolitan and internal elite power and authority. But my point is
that these terms acquire their own authority; sooner or later all of them come to obey a logic
that consolidates their impact into the domesticated authority of a now mainstream cultural
studies, however much qualified as postcolonial. And, perhaps shattering even that compromised condition and emphasising the
sheer difficulty of resistance, we should bear in mind Terry Eagleton’s observation: ‘ No way of life in
history has been more in love with transgression and transformation, more enamoured of
the hybrid and pluralistic, than capitalism ’ ( Eagleton, 2003: 119 ). On this view, one might wonder
whether the pursuit of hybridisation and transculturation was ever more than a sanctioned
option. Hence, my purpose is to examine some of what is in play with these terms and to propose some thoughts in sceptical
counterpoint to mere acceptance of them.
WHITENESS K LINK
The notions of multiracialism and hybridity take an approach that only focuses
on confronting whiteness – that dooms the 1AC to just reifying whiteness and
causes an erasure of other identities, particularly so with blackness.
Sexton 2008 [Jared, associate professor of African American studies and film and media
studies at the University of California, Irvine, “Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the
Critique of multiracialism” 191-198 http://en.bookfi.org/book/1089005]
The epigraphs for this chapter dispute the multiracial project by remarking the destabilization of
political criticism by the temporal force of historicity and the peculiar display of desire revealed by the structural
dynamics of psychoanalytic experience. Insofar as multiracialism speaks of "the end of race," the
multiracial personality prides itself on causing trouble for the white supremacist rage for
order, an ostensible violation of racial discipline, a threat to enshrined notions of racial purity. Multiracial
identity is elusive and cannot be fixed, captured, or tethered. However, a troublesome,
fugitive presence has its consequences. For Linda Alcoff (1995), "A self that is internally heterogeneous
beyond repair or resolution becomes a candidate for pathology in a society where the
integration of self is taken to be necessary for mental health" (261). The multiracial is
convoluted by internal heterogeneity-"beyond repair or resolution"-but pathologizing the radical
otherness of "micro-diversity" (Zack 1995 a) has always required the political labor of articulation.
That link can be broken and reworked if the criteria of well-being are sufficiently scrutinized, or it can be affirmed and upheld by a
scripted debate within the prevailing terms of "mental health," driven by a conservative desire for repair and resolution. As we have
seen, multiracialism
is defined by the latter approach, a decision that ramifies on some of the largest
political questions of the present moment. The constituency of the multiracial "occupies quite literally a
'pre-post'erous space where it has to actualize, enfranchise, and empower its own 'identity' and
coextensively engage in the deconstruction of the very logic of 'identity' and its binary and
exclusionary politics." The abdication of this double duty promises that multiracialism will "result in
the formation of . . . yet another 'identical' and hegemonic structure" (Radikrishnan 1990, 50). As we
have seen, the empowerment of multiracial identity intensifies antiblack racism to the extent
that it retrenches concepts of biological race, espouses the social value of nonblackness, and
normalizes the field of sexuality-all to suggest the recent emergence of "oppressive black power." Pressing the
multiracial project on some of its most basic tenets, then, may complicate its heroic search-and-rescue mission. In Libidinal Economy,
Jean-Francois Lyotard (I993) asserts, amid an extended analysis of historical capitalism, the following provocation: "capital
cannot form a body." The upshot of capitals unformed, misshapen body-its lack of bodily integrity being no less than the
proliferating bodies whose unending labor constitutes its "nontotalized system"-is the production of "two
divergent movements always associated in a single vertigo." They are distinguished as, on the one hand, "a
movement of flight, of plunging into the bodiless, and thus of continual invention, of expansive additions or affirmations of new
pieces . . . a movement of tension" and, on the other, "a movement of institution of an organism, of an
organization and of organs of totalization and unification--a movement of reason." The crucial point, for Lyotard, is that "both kinds of
movement are there, effects as force in the non-finito . . . of capitalism" (102). The obvious parallels between Lyotard’s
schematization of capitals "divergent movements" and Gilles Delueze and Felix Guattaris (l987a, 1987b) heterodox theorization of
capital "schizophrenia"-its simultaneous production of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, decoding and recoding, and so on-is
deliberate insofar as the former book is offered as an affirmative elaboration of the latters earlier intervention. I draw from each the
attention they
bring to this double movement of dispersion and regulation, but with more
specific respect to the system of global white supremacy (Mills I998) or what is better described
as the antiblack world (Gordon l995a), both being inextricable from but irreducible to the
history of capitalism. In its attention to racial formation in the United States, the critique of multiracialism
proceeds from an understanding of antimiscegenation as a fundamental feature of antiblackness. The
following comments are offered as a rejoinder to the cliches of racism against which the multiracial movement and the field of
multiracial studies currently stage their political and intellectual battles. My contention is that multiracialism
fails to
appreciate, or refuses to acknowledge, the suppleness of racial whiteness-its elasticity and
expansiveness; its affinity for ambiguity, impurity, and complexity; its vital dependence on
the transgression of borders, continual alteration, and the incorporation of novel elements.
This has been the historical case, but its implications have become ever more apparent with the
reconfiguration of the color line in the post-civil rights era: from white/nonwhite to
black/nonblack. I begin by rephrasing Lyotards maxim this way: whiteness cannot form a body Despite this
inability, or perhaps because of it, it continually attempts to do so. In a sense, whiteness is the very
attempt to form this body, to manufacture a particular type of delimited body. Racial whiteness can be
understood as "a means for mastering the trauma of an experience without categories and
without unity, which has no positive content" (Shaviro I990, 3), a traumatically uncategorized, incoherent
that I call "the event of miscegenation"--an abject scene of excessive passion and violent
upheaval operating beyond or beneath the semblance of racialized order. We feel its pressure
dimly as the outside of racialization: a pure exteriority, "a movement of flight . . . a movement of
tension," the unbinding force of schizophrenia, the peregrinations of desire. It is a trauma wrought by
the sense that "we are all of mixed origin" well before any empiricist tabulations about the sameness of humanity,
the knowledge that categories of racial difference obtain only in the force of convention, a
pernicious and deadly cover story for the formation of power. The event of miscegenation
highlights the fundamental insecurity of racist reasoning and indicates the centrality of its
restriction for the preeminent fictions of Western modernity (Memmi 1999).' Some qualifications to bear in mind as
we proceed: miscegenation as man should not be confused with miscegenation as interracial sex
act: or the presence of multiracial people. The latter are lures produced as components of the
fiction of racial whiteness--refractions of a restricted economy that are mirrored and reinforced by multiracialisms loyal
opposition. Miscegenation as event is what cannot be represented, conceptualized, or
apprehended in either the interracial sexual encounter or the multiracial personality, but rather is that which
prevents either appearance from attaining a discernible image or a fixed and stable meaning, whether
as object of desire or aggression or both. I am attempting to supplement commonplace understandings of
race as a social category that, however unsuspectingly, reassert the myth of race as biology. I am not interested in how
the empirical history of sex across the color line or the demographic profile of multiracial people might somehow trouble naive
fantasies of racial purity or the social recognition of discrete racial categories. That framing of the debate merely extends the
interlocutory life of racist reason without undercutting its presumptions or dislodging its principles of organization. I
am talking
in a more radical sense about what undermines or dislodges the fantasy of interracial sexual
transgression and the attendant fantasy of the subversive multiracial. I am interested in
what wards against our thinking of interracial sex or multiracial people as things in and of
themselves. In discussing miscegenation and antimiscegenation under such revised terms, I
am objecting to that "psychological phenomenon that consists in the belief that the world
will open to the extent to which frontiers are broken down" (Fanon 1967, 2 l). In Black Skin, White
Masks, Fanon (1967) makes two fascinating statements about the construction of racial categories and the existential phenomenology
of the bodies supposed to represent those categories. He says first, "In
the white world, the man of color [sic]
encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is
solely a negating activity" (110). This argument from the famous fifth chapter, "The Lived Experience of the Black," is
only mistakenly familiar. Many read Fanon's observation as a straightforward (and silly translatable) lament about the deprivations of
colonial domination: the pain of a denial of access to the idealized self-images enjoyed by the white world, of having to identify
instead with images of monstrosity, incompleteness, and lack. Certainly, there are passages in I-'anon that would support this reading.
For example, his dramatization of the psychic violence he when arrested by the look given him by the young, white, French girl who
utters those searing, infamous words: "Look, a Negro!" The language of castration is profuse: The corporeal schema crumbled, its
place taken by a racial epidermal schema. . . .1 was given not one but two, three place . . . I existed triply: I occupied space. I moved
toward the other . . . and the evanescent other, hostile but not opaque, transparent, not there, disappearedNausea. . . . What else could it
be for me but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood? . . My body was given back
to me sprawled out, distorted, re-colored, clad in mourning on that white winter day. (1 I2) Fanon
goes on to speak of a
desire to refuse this disassembling force of the white look, to avoid the mournful shroud of
blackness, a conservative desire for repair or resolution. "I did not want this revision," he says. "All I wanted was to be a
man among other men." That is, to participate in the honorable world of whiteness, to not be deemed
animal, bad, mean, or ugly. A desire to not be slashed, dissected, cut to slices. But just as it seems Fanon is situating
whiteness on the side of plentitude, wholeness, security, and integrity, he offers a second qualifying statement: "At the extreme, I
should say that the
Negro, because of his body, impedes the closing of the postural schema of the white
man-at the point, naturally, at which the black man makes his entry into the phenomenal
world of the white man" (160). The white man too has trouble with the solidity of his body, the demarcation of its
boundaries of inside and outside. Whereas the white look tears the black body apart, the lacerated black body, in turn, intrudes upon
the corporeal territory of whiteness, disturbing its function, throwing its coordinates out of alignment"at the extreme." What
are
we to make of this bizarre scenario of interpenetration? How are we to think of the white
look as both dissecting and, as Fanon suggests, as fixing, as both scattering and imprisoning, dislocating and
objectifying? How to contain a body, an object, that is flung about, ripped to shreds, existing in triplicate? Within the universe of
antiblackness, the social and historical forces that materially and symbolically invent the black body also seek to destroy it. The
forces that seek to destroy the black body also seek to maintain it, to insist that it be there in
its place. As Fanon says, "within bounds . . . classified . . . tucked away." The very thing that grants whiteness
its social existence, blackness, is the very thing thatat the extreme, the edge, the verge of
race-prevents it from enjoying a stable life, that "gives . . . its classification as seeming."-' In
light of even a cursory history of racial formation in the United States, it goes without saying that, as Cornel West (1990) writes:
"'Whiteness' is a politically constructed category parasitic on 'Blackness'" (29). The material and
symbolic elaboration of racial whiteness as a cultural formation and a historic bloc is based firmly upon the domination-precisely, the
captivity--enforced through racial blackness. It
is rooted in the maintenance of blacks in the "position of
the unthought," fungible objects of accumulation and exchange, socially excluded but symbolically central
(Hartman 2003). That said, we restate that whiteness does not and cannot exist in its own right; it cannot form
a body. There is no concept of whiteness that is calm, fully present, and self-referential; there are
no positive qualities of whiteness, only differences between whiteness and its racial others, blackness in the paramount case. As
Jacques Derrida's (1984) much cited essay has it, One is but the other different and deferred, one differing and deferring the other. One
is the other in differance, one is the differance of the other. This
is why every apparently rigorous and
irreducible opposition . . . comes to be qualified at one moment of another, as a "theoretical fiction."
(I8) Perhaps Fanon prefigures this insight about the indeterminate play of racial difference in his own analysis when he warns: "We
shall go very slowly, for there are two camps: the white and the black. Stubbornly we shall investigate both metaphysics and we shall
find that they are often quite fluid" (1967, 8). However, there are a number of ways to specify the often fluid metaphysics of race
within the Manichaean delirium of the antiblack world. Again ,
it is not my desire to rehearse axioms of
deconstruction. Such sensibility is necessary but insufficient to a social theory of racialization, and
I believe Fanon points a way forward, contrary to reductive images of his work as exhausted by the rhetoric of binary
conflict. Despite decontextualized glosses on fantasies of violent reversal ascribed to Fanon (and recall here that he is often accused of
prescribing such when he is attempting to describe and to critique various political tendencies), he
is among those thinkers
who help us to understand the complex entanglement of terms in any seeming opposition. "In
an age when skeptical doubt has taken root in the world," he writes, "when . . . it is no longer possible to find the
sense of non-sense, it becomes harder to penetrate to a level where the categories of sense
and non-sense are not yet invoked" (9). We must attend precisely to this level of analysis-discerning "the
sense of non-sense"-if we are to unhook ourselves from the oppositional dynamics of the law
and a transgression that remains passionately attached to it.' In order to map out the countervailing forces of antiblackness, we
must traverse an affective terrain ontologically prior to the conceptual dichotomy, before the
either-or distinction, where there are not yet objects, only processes that produce the one in the other. We must, to mention
Deleuze and Guattari again, seek out the traces of multiplicity, the smooth spaces of becoming that
antiblackness "striates" in attempts to capture the social forces of desiring-production,
instituting race as an order of being.' To this end, I discuss the following points: first, the law of antimiscegenation as
the founding gesture of racial whiteness; second, the complicit transgression of this law,
referred to alternately as multiracialism, meztizaje. or "anti-antimiscegenation"; and third, the
event of miscegenation as that which enables and exceeds both antimiscegenation and the political project of multiracialism.
AT: PRISCILLA
Narratives Are Bad
Narratives in debate are bad and lack precision
McDonald & Jarman, ‘95
Kelly McDonald is the Director of Forensics at Washington University and is co-authoring a book on Debate Watch ’96. Jeffery
Jarman teaches at Elliott School of Communication at Wichita State University (Date accessed – 7/11/14 – C.M.)
http://debate.uvm.edu/NFL/rostrumlib/cxmcdonald0198.pdf
any
paradigmatic solution to the problems within debate practice through narrative, Gass advances
the expert model for argument construction and evaluation. He makes three basic arguments
against the narrative paradigm. First, Gass says the narrative paradigm lacks the precision needed
for academic debate. Grounding his argument in the differences between “pure” and “applied”
theories, Gass contends that “pure theories” do not require precision because they attempt to
“explain, understand, or interpret phenomena.”
Gass (1988) represents the strongest critique of the Application of a narrative paradigm in academic debate. Rejecting
Engaging in other’s narratives is a form of “artless confession” and only benefits
the researcher
Hoagland, ‘10
Sarah Lucia Hoagland is Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. She authored
Lesbian Ethics. She was also co-editor of For Lesbians Only, an anthology of writing on the topic of Lesbian Separatism, and Rereading the Canon: Feminist Interpretations of Mary Daly. (Date accessed – 7/11/14 – C.M.)
http://www.cavehill.uwi.edu/fhe/histphil/chips/archives/2009/docs/hoagland2009.aspx
A related issue concerns what the authorized knower is expecting in the way of performance
from those giving testimony. Is the presumption of authorized knowers that those giving
testimony will engage in what Doris Sommer calls “artless confession,” responding simply to the particular
questions the researcher has constructed? Or if a researcher is open to collecting narratives, is the
information gathered understood to be something to which s/he can apply research
methodologies, compiling some grid onto which the narrative is disciplined in order to provide the researcher with
“objective” means of selecting and deselecting, comparing and evaluating elements? Or is there what Doris Sommer calls an
“inquisitorial demand for knowable essences?”
Using the narratives of slaves silences the slaves voice
Keizer, ‘4
Associate Professor, English School of Humanities, Associate Professor, African American Studies School of Humanities, Ph.D.,
University of California, Berkeley, 1996, M.A., Stanford University, 1988, B.A., Princeton University, 1986. (Date accessed – 7/11/14
– C.M.)
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=UfB9Fmo_5PkC&oi=fnd&pg=PR11&dq=slave+static+identity&ots=N3RytRir7Y&si
g=QlOQUf6pUW66GPOsq-mOBX3tyoA#v=onepage&q=narrative&f=false
the first full-length study of a group of
contemporary narratives referencing slavery. Rushdy defines “Neo-slave narratives” as
“contemporary novels that assume form, adopt the conventions, and take on the firstperson voice of the antebellum slave narrative” (Rushdy 3). He analyzes these contemporary versions of the
Slave Narrative: Studies in the Social Logic of a Liberary Form (1999) was
first-person slave narrative in light of the social and cultural changes wrought by the Black Power and Black Arts Movements. In
contrast to Bell and Rushdy, I refer to these works as “ contemporary
narratives of slavery” to cast a wider
interpretive net than either of these critics do with their nearly identical neologisms. (Rushdy is, of course, borrowing and
refurbishing Bell’s term.) The influence of the U.S. and Caribbean slavery upon contemporary black literature is much greater than
scope of these works because of its focus on the movement
from enslavement to freedom, the trajectory of the traditional slave narrative. Rushdy focuses
even more narrowly on the influence of the antebellum slave narrative, analyzing only those contemporary
novels that clearly and explicitly reference nineteenth-century, first-person, literate slave
testimony. Though a number of writers are directly addressing the slave narrative, others
simply take the form for granted as a precursor to a twentieth-century discourse on slavery.
Bell and Rushdy acknowledge. Though Bell’s
Contemporary writers’ views of slavery are certainly informed by slave narratives and their speaking silences, yet many writers move
so far beyond the traditional narratives that their works are not bound that frame of reference. It is striking, for example, how few
contemporary narratives of slavery are written in the first person.
AFFIRMATION BAD
Affirmation Bad – 1NC
The politics of affirmation produce a weak ontology that lacks the political
moment necessary to produce a productive act. The aff divests the ability of
politics to be oppositional. Our alternative is to embrace radical negativity and
oppositional politics
Dean 2005 Jodi A politics of avoidance: the limits of weak ontology
http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/files/butler_and_ontology.doc
Some political theorists argue that the proper response to this fundamentalism is generosity.1
They elaborate ontologies and ethics that eschew fundamentals and urge an awareness of the
contestability of one’s own fundaments or a responsiveness to the limits and vulnerabilities that
necessarily condition the contexts in which we give an account of ourselves. I consider here work by
Stephen White and Judith Butler. White offers the notion of a weak ontology as a contextually attuned and politically
minded response to this moment of fundamentalist vitality.2 I argue that it is the wrong response, one that turns to
acceptance and affirmation at a juncture when the future of hopes for equality, democracy, and a
sustainable, common being-together demand a more critical, political, response. Critical, as
opposed to affirmative, theory is necessary today. White’s approach, one that finds common
ground among disparate thinkers, divests critical theories of their oppositional political edge. He
makes them congenial to current power relations at a moment when they need to be sharpened
and wielded as critically and antagonistically as possible. Butler, one of the thinkers White tames and
assimilates, can be read as responding to White’s project for weak ontology. I argue that her Spinoza lectures do this and more as they
develop a notion of ethical accountability that highlights the necessity of critique. But even as Butler’s critical ethics improves upon
White’s ontology, in these times of fundamentalist vigor, they remain too passive, too acquiescent
and compliant. They offer critique, yet avoid the risky political work of condemnation and
division, of specifically and decisively rejecting those religious, nationalist, militarist, and market
fundamentalisms that are today actively rewriting the very terms of personhood, the very
possibility of sustainable living, to benefit the wealthy, privileged few while the majority are
rendered criminal, illegal, diseased, disposable.
Their ethos of generosity results in global war and destruction via the war on
terrorism –only the alternative can solve
Jodi Dean, assc. Prof of political theory at Hobart and Williams smith 2007
Why Žižek for Political Theory? , http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/18/41, IJŽS Vol
1, No 1
Slavoj Žižek’s work is indispensable to any effort to break out of the present political impasse, an
impasse in which not only English speaking and European countries are caught but which threatens the entire world
(not least because of the English speaking countries’ global war on/of terror). Žižek’s version of dialectical
materialism (a combination of Hegel, Marx, and Lacan) enables political theorists to think better about passionate attachments to
domination and anxiety in the face of freedom. I begin by approaching this impasse as a barrier to thought, particularly Left thought as
it remains unable to think through or out of the current hegemony.
Contemporary Left theorists worry about dogmatism and fundamentalism. That is, they see fundamentalism as the
primary political problem today. In response, some emphasize diversity and tolerance. They may
approach diversity from the perspective of democratic debate, presenting a conception of politics premised on ideals of participation,
inclusion, equality, and mutual respect. Others emphasize the multiplicity of ways of being in the world and
the importance of an ethos of generosity towards those ways that may differ, radically, from our
own.
None provides an adequate response to right wing fundamentalists, nationalist ideologues, and
neoliberal capitalist globalizers. This motley crew of bad guys eschews debate and respect. It throws
generosity back up against the generous, forever accusing them of not being respectful and
generous enough. Its capitalist wing finds ever more creative and ingenious ways to profit. Diversity becomes
multiculturalism™: parents can buy colorful multilingual dolls; producers can make action films with global appeal; educators can
buy multicultural teaching kits designed to insure that their students are well-prepared to compete in a global economy. Likewise,
democratic debate is easily capitalized: citizens seeking information are ready eyeballs for
advertisers; politicians can champion the role of the Internet in keeping their constituencies connected, while
telecoms, ISPs, chip, hardware, and software providers wisely nod their heads and pocket their vastly increased
revenues. Against, this motley crew, generosity and tolerance won’t work. More precisely, as long as
left intellectuals reject anything that smacks of dogmatism, as long as we reject a politics of
conviction, as long as we refuse to draw a line in the sand and say enough is enough, the right
will continue its exploitation and repression of most of the world’s peoples. The problem of Left political
thought, then, is trying to theorize a politics that includes everything and everyone. But this isn’t politics. Politics involves division,
saying “yes” to some options and “no” to others. A willingness to take responsibility for the divisions inseparable from politics seems
to have been lost, or relegated to small, local, struggles. Particularly odd in radical pluralists’ and deliberative democrats’ focus on
fundamentalism is its alliance with the central tenets of the bad guys themselves. Neoconservatives and neoliberals agree that
fundamentalism is the most important political problem. Fundamentalism, they chorus, opposes the unfolding of freedom in the
world.
Affirmation Bad - Link
The politics of affirmation are in direct opposition to the ability for critique and
negativity. The affirmatives strategy is ignorant to the effects that our neoliberal economic regime has allowed fundamentalism to fill the gaps left by
their attempt at affirmation.
Dean 2005 Jodi A politics of avoidance: the limits of weak ontology
http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/files/butler_and_ontology.doc
White finds such affirmative gestures in the work of seemingly disparate thinkers—George Kateb, Charles Taylor, William Connolly,
and Judith Butler. He reads these liberal, communitarian, feminist, and post-Nietzschean thinkers as responding to universalist,
foundationalist, and essentialist claims. In so doing, he distills from them a common practice of tempering, easing, or defanging one’s
own theoretical position, a practice characteristic of what White refers to as a weak ontology. White understands weak ontologies to
involve a tentativeness or uncertainty in the face of the recognition of the contestability of one’s own fundaments, to account for
human being in terms of constituent attributes of “language, finitude, natality, and sources” (9), to emphasize cultivation rather than
argument, conversion, confrontation, or compulsion, and, to involve a kind of contextualized reflection, alteration, or folding of the
theory’s ethical-political aims back into its ontological position. Weak ontologies are thus theories that embrace
their own contestability and understand their theoretical task less in terms of presenting claims to
truth or irrefutable arguments than of nudging, suggesting, offering, or affirming practices and ways of thinking
as valuable, generous, and responsive to the multiplicities and contingencies of late-modern life.
What a lovely notion. What a nice, nice approach. With his account of weak ontologies, White is
elaborating a project of immanent affirmation, what we might understand as the opposite of the old
Frankfurt School idea of immanent critique. Rather than setting out a critique of the present, White
draws from differing projects to present a positive approach to the contemporary. In the conclusion, he
points to this “yes” to contemporary life as he reassures political liberals who could raise concerns that the ethos of weak ontology
might affect the basic constitutional structure of the liberal democratic state (153). There’s no need to worry, White reassures them:
“this ethos does not cast wholesale doubt upon constitutional structures. Rather it points us primarily toward different ways of living
those structures.” With such a move, White divests approaches like Butler’s of their critical edge in order to make them congenial to
current power relations.
In my view, critical, as opposed to affirmative, theory is necessary today. White’s position
assumes a political-economic consensus that no longer exists. He repeats without revising Charles
Taylor’s presumption that a felicitous ontological claim assumes the modern welfare state and
market economy (70). This assumption is deadly—and deadly wrong. It mistakes the tenacious
energy with which the Right in the US (and other countries) is transforming the state. The welfare state
has been crumbling since the seventies. Neoliberal economics has replaced the welfare state’s
generalized sense of social solidarity and the collective assumption of risk with the brutal
extremes of economic inequality and the heightened violence and fear of the society of control. In
the name of freedom and security, as if these concepts fit easily together, all three branches of the US government have acquiesced to
the use of torture. Consequently, we now must fight anew for human equality and dignity. We have to find new
arguments, arguments fitting for mobile populations in an integrated world, for just and sustained
economies, for common approaches to living together.
The affirmative dulls the radical potential of their act by attempt to gloss over
the stark and radical differences that are created by global economic
oppression. Their strategy is ultimately one of avoidance  fundamentalism
Dean 2005 Jodi A politics of avoidance: the limits of weak ontology
http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/files/butler_and_ontology.doc
The notion of a weak ontology could support engaged, oppositional politics. Given the prevalence of fundamentalism today,
contesting the political imposition of the religious fundaments of the Christian right and widely cultivating generosity toward sexual
minorities and the economically exploited and oppressed would be a dramatic, potentially revolutionary change. Similarly, the
affirmation of contingency could, and I’ll add should, inspire a political drive to struggle for change—things can be different; we do
not have to protect and defend the so-called free market at all costs. White avoids either of these political possibilities. He
displaces potential radicalism—which would necessitate strong claims, less generosity, and
division—with an interiorized cultivation of an ethos of generosity. Political and economic
struggles against fundamentalisms are thereby reformatted as the struggles of a subject against
itself.
It may be that White dulls the radical edge of his account of weak ontology because he doesn’t attend
to the way that the welfare state has collapsed. In affirming a kind of theoretical friendship among
theorists from differing traditions, he avoids the stark, intractable, and explicit divisions of
contemporary global politics. So even though weak ontology does not have to result in the acceptance of late-modern life,
its interiorized micropolitical emphasis on cultivating an affirmative sensibility avoids addressing
the choices, gaps, and exclusions constituting the space of politics. The ambiguity of White’s approach,
its ambivalent hovering between the affirmation of late modernity and affirmation as a political
practice, is thus indicative of the larger problem of avoidance. White misses the opportunity to
take a side, to offer generosity to practices of becoming that affirm sustaining life in common and
to reject political views anchored in religious and market fundamentalism.
Affirmation Bad - Vulnerability Link
Their ethic of vulnerability is apolitical because it avoids responsibility for
decisions, which is ultimately unethical.
Dean 2005 Jodi A politics of avoidance: the limits of weak ontology
http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/files/butler_and_ontology.doc
Despite her emphasis on the importance of critique, then, Butler’s ethics, like White’s weak ontology,
avoids politics. Just as White’s emphasis on affirming the contestability of one’s own fundaments fail to engage those who like
their fundaments, who embrace them, who live by them, who kill for them, so does Butler’s emphasis on the limits at the
basis of our ability to give an account of ourselves format the lack constitutive of the subject as an
opacity to be acknowledged ethically but avoided politically. Moreover, each approach, even as it asserts
the limits of knowledge, the conditions of contingency and unknowingness in which we find ourselves, seems somehow to
presume that such conditions call into question the possibility of politics. It’s as if what the
politics of avoidance wants most to avoid is responsibility for actions, for decisions and
condemnations, that will necessarily exceed the aims and intentions of those who find themselves
acting. But politics necessarily entails risking actions whose results cannot be guaranteed, making
decisions and exercising power under conditions where not every option can be pursued, where
some needs will go unaddressed, and where not every value should be respected or even
tolerated. Political decisions, indeed, the very decisions to politicize or to constitute a space or
identity as political, involve determinations of which practices and principles one wants to further
and which one wants to reject.
Affirmation Bad – Fascism Impact
The project of affirmation provides no mechanism to reject fascism. You should
orient your decision away from their sugar coating of political decisions and
towards a politics which necessitates responsibility for the dirty exclusionary
work of politics
Dean 2005 Jodi A politics of avoidance: the limits of weak ontology
http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/files/butler_and_ontology.doc
The first generation of the Frankfurt School developed critical theory in an effort to confront and explain fascism. For them, immanent
critique was crucial to this project as it enabled them to work from within what was given to grasp what came to be. At its best,
immanent critique was a practice of finding lost futures in enlightenment, loss possibilities for meaning and, perhaps, a freer, even
reconciled, relation to the world. White’s weak ontology turns immanent critique into immanent
affirmation as it finds in critical approaches to the present sources that affirm it. The ambiguity
that haunts his account of weak ontology contrasts mightily with the political and ethical positions
that gave the Frankfurt theorists their ethical bearings. Could we, should we, imagine a political
theory that confronted fascism with nudges, suggestions, and generosity rather than with
complete rejection and opposition?
Unknowingness conditions our politics as well as our ethics. Rather than an ontological condition
somehow compelling us to embrace the contestability and uncertainty of convictions (as if any
ethical or political position could follow directly from such an account) or an ethical acknowledgement that
renders what is unknown to me the same as what is unknown to the other, in politics unknowingness involves
responsibility for that which one cannot but do, for the exclusions and expulsions necessarily
implicated in the exercise of power. Yes, one should be willing and able to give an account of these decisions, just as
one should be willing and able to condemn and oppose what should be condemned and opposed.
Such will, such ability, is crucial if we are to oppose the market and religious fundamentalism
threatening the world today.
Radical negation is key to open the space for the alternative – only wiping the
slate clean can solve
Zizek 1999 (Slavoj, The Ticklish Subject, page 91-92, gjm)
the only way towards a
truly 'concrete' universality leads through the full assertion of the radical negativity by means of
which the universal negates its entire particular content: despite misleading appearances, it is the 'mute
With regard to the opposition between abstract and concrete Universality, this means that
universality’ of the neutral container of the particular content which is the predominant form of abstract universality. In other words,
the only way for a Universality to become 'concrete' is to stop being a neutral-abstract medium of
its particular content, and to include itself among its particular subspecies. What this means is that,
paradoxically, the first step towards 'concrete universality ' is the radical negation of the entire
particular content: only through such a negation does the Universal gain existence, become visible 'as
such'. Here let us recall Hegel's analysis of phrenology, which closes the chapter on 'Observing Reason' in his Phenomenology: Hegel
resorts to an explicit phallic metaphor in order to explain the opposition of the two possible readings of the proposition 'the Spirit is a
bone' (the vulgar-materialist 'reductionist' reading - the shape of our skull actually and directly determines the features of our mind and the speculative reading - the spirit is strong enough to assert its identity with the most utterly inert stuff, and to 'sublate' it - that is
to say, even the most utterly inert stuff cannot escape the Spirit's power of mediation). The vulgar-materialist reading is like the
approach which sees in the phallus only the organ of urination, while the speculative reading is also able to discern in it the much
higher function of insemination (i.e. precisely 'conception' as the biological anticipation of concept).
NEGATIVITY IS A PREREQUISITE – the alternative is a completely negative
gesture which is essential to any progressive politics – extend the Johnston
evidence – the alt is necessary to wipe the slate clean for ethical politics – more
evidence on this question
Zizek, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies, Ljubljana 1999 Slavoj, The Ticklish
Subject, page 153-154
It would therefore be tempting to risk a 'Badiouian-Pauline reading of the end of psychoanalysis, determining it as a
New Beginning, a symbolic 'rebirth' - the radical restructuring of the analysand's subjectivity in such a way that the
vicious cycle of the superego is suspended, left behind. Does not Lacan himself provide a number of hints that the end
of analysis opens up the domain of Love beyond Law, using the very Pauline terms to which Badiou refers?
Nevertheless, Lacan's way is not that of St Paul or Badiou: psychoanalysis is not 'psychosynthesis'; it does
not already posit a 'new harmony', a new Truth-Event; it - as it were - merely wipes the slate clean
for one. However, this 'merely' should be put in quotation marks, because it is Lacan's contention that, in this
negative gesture of 'wiping the slate clean', something (a void) is confronted which is already
'sutured' with the arrival of a new Truth-Event. For Lacan negativity, a negative gesture of
withdrawal precedes any positive gesture of enthusiastic identification with a Cause: negativity
functions as the condition of (im)possibility of the enthusiastic identification - that is to say, it lays
the ground, opens up space for it but is simultaneously obfuscated by it and undermines it. For this
reason, Lacan implicitly changes the balance between Death and Resurrection in favour of Death:
what 'Death' stands for at its most radical is not merely the passing of earthly life, but the 'night of
the world', the self-withdrawal, the absolute contraction of subjectivity, the severing of its links
with 'reality' - this is the 'wiping the slate clean' that opens up the domain of the symbolic New
Beginning, of the emergence of the 'New Harmony' sustained by a newly emerged MasterSignifier.
Millington Prof of Latin American Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK 2007 Mark
“Transculturation: Contrapuntal Notes to Critical Orthodoxy” Bulletin of Latin American
Research 26.2 EBSCOhost