1.
Cold War Pedagogy/Threat Construction a.
Chengxin Pan—An extremely good 1NC and 2NC frontline that critiques the positing of
China as a threat. This threat construction is a result of Cold War-based rhetoric and mind-sets. Applies to any argument with a China Scenario. b.
Tony Fang—Applies to any argument that relies on Cold War threat construction and ideas that culture is like an onion, with distinct layers. Says that culture is more like an ocean, with no boundaries and no limits and blurred distinctions.
2.
Queer Atlantic a.
Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley—Amazing cards detailing the black struggle across the
Middle Passage. She speaks of the “queer” bonds that they formed while crossing, and how it functioned as a way to resist the stripping of their identity on the slave ships. The last card is especially good on how not just queer black people can read this argument.
3.
Agonism and Democracy a.
Joel Olson—To bring about real change, a fanatical approach of social change must be undertaken. This avoids the entrapments of “liberal democracy” and the status quo, and its attempts to stifle true change.
4.
Speaking for Others/Personal Location/Personal Narratives a.
Shari Stone-Meditore—False claims of neutrality lead to the exclusion of marginalized groups of all types, by giving those in power (the judge, the majority) the right to distance themselves from their privilege without divorcing themselves from it. This leads to the exclusion of per formative affs with any amount of personal narrative or experience. b.
Josh Gregory and Kasim Alimahomed—Personal narratives and first-person perspective has a unique space in debate. It allows for the liberation of oppressed groups. c.
Violet Ketels—Morals must be placed above politics. When we distance personal experience and connection from our arguments, we doom humanity to destruction by disavowing ourselves from our arguments. d.
Andrea Smith—Confessions of personal privilege or social location where you function as the “oppressor” are bad because they function as manifestations of Western
Colonialism and settler mentality.
5.
Dark Mountain/Reconnection with Nature a.
Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine—These authors advocate for the uncivilization of writing. This involves breaking the illusion of normal and bringing about true social change.

Author Qualifications
I am a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Deakin University. I was educated at Peking University
(LL.B, LL.M) and the Australian National University (PhD, Political Science and International Relations). I have held visiting positions at the University of Melbourne, the Hong Kong University of Science and
Technology, and Peking University. I am a member of the International Studies Association (ISA),
Australian Institute of International Affairs, and have been on the editorial board of Series in International
Relations Classics (World Affairs Press, Beijing). I have given invited talks and presentations at Adelaide,
Asialink, CityU, Durham, HKU, Monash, PKU, Swedish Institute of International Affairs, and UQ.
My research focuses broadly on International Relations and China. One of my main research interests is in understanding Western representations of China in general and the 'rise of China' in particular. On this topic, my book entitled Knowledge, Desire and Power in Global Politics: Western Representations of
China's Rise was published by Edward Elgar in 2012.
My current research is concerned with the understanding of China as a global construct, social constructions of Chinese power, and mutual responsiveness in the formation of China's international relations. My publications have appeared in Alternatives, The China Review, Journal of Chinese Political
Science, Griffith Asia Quarterly, Journal of Contemporary China, The Pacific Review, Political Science as well as a number of edited volumes and Chinese academic journals. These publications cover a wide range of topics including Chinese politics, Chinese foreign policy, the Taiwan question, traditional
Chinese thought on conflict resolution and responsible government, Chinese perspectives on the Asian
Century, American representations of the China threat, Australia's debates on China and its China literacy, Australia-China relations, US-China relations, and EU-China relations.
(Found on His Linkedin Page)

1NC Frontline
CONSTRUCTING CHINA AS A THREAT IS NOT AN OBJECTIVE PRACTICE
Pan ‘4
Chengxin Pan is a professor of international and political studies at Deakin University, ““The ‘China Threat’ in American Self-
Imagination: the Discursive Construction of Other as Power Politics,” 1 June 2004, http://www.articlearchives.com/asia/northern-asia-china/796470-1.html
China and its relationship with the United States has long been a fascinating subject of study in the mainstream U.S. international relations community
. This is reflected, for example, in the current heated debates over whether China is primarily a strategic threat to or a market bonanza for the United States and whether containment or engagement is the best way to deal with it. While
U.S. China scholars
argue fiercely over "what China precisely is," their debates have been underpinned by some common ground, especially in terms of a positivist epistemology. Firstly, they believe that China is ultimately a knowable object, whose reality can be, and ought to be, empirically revealed by scientific means
. For example, after expressing his dissatisfaction with often conflicting Western perceptions of China, David M. Lampton, former president of the National
Committee on U.S.-China Relations, suggests that "it is time to step back and look at where China is today, where it might be going, and what consequences that direction will hold for the rest of the world." Like many other China scholars, Lampton views his object of study as essentially "something we can stand back from and observe with clinical detachment." Secondly, associated with the first assumption, it is commonly believed that China scholars merely serve as "disinterested observers" and that their studies of China are neutral, passive descriptions of reality
. And thirdly, in pondering whether China poses a threat or offers an opportunity to the United States, they rarely raise the question of "what the United States is."
That is, the meaning of the United States is believed to be certain and beyond doubt.
I do not dismiss altogether the conventional ways of debating China. It is not the purpose of this article to venture my own "observation" of "where China is today," nor to join the "containment" versus "engagement" debate per se. Rather, I want to contribute to a novel dimension of the China debate by questioning the seemingly unproblematic assumptions shared by most China scholars in the mainstream IR community in the United States. To perform this task, I will focus attention on a particularly significant component of the China debate; namely, the "China threat" literature. More specifically, I want to argue that
U.S. conceptions of China as a threatening other are always intrinsically linked to how U.S. policymakers/mainstream China specialists see themselves (as representatives of the indispensable, security-conscious nation
, for example). As such, they are not value-free, objective descriptions of an independent, preexisting Chinese reality out there, but are better understood as a kind of normative, meaning-giving practice that often legitimates power politics in U.S.-China relations and helps transform the "China threat" into social reality
. In other words, it is self-fulfilling in practice, and is always part of the
"China threat" problem it purports merely to describe
. In doing so, I seek to bring to the fore two interconnected themes of self/other constructions and of theory as practice inherent in the "China threat" literature—themes that have been overridden and rendered largely invisible by those common positivist assumptions.

THE “CHINA THREAT” IS NOT A MODERN SENTIMENT
Pan ‘4
Chengxin Pan is a professor of international and political studies at Deakin University, ““The ‘China Threat’ in American Self-
Imagination: the Discursive Construction of Other as Power Politics,” 1 June 2004, http://www.articlearchives.com/asia/northern-asia-china/796470-1.html
That China constitutes a growing “threat” to the United States is arguably one of the most important
‘discoveries’ by U.S. IR scholars in the post-Cold War era
. For many, this “threat” is obvious for a variety of reasons concerning economic, military, cultural, and political dimensions. First and foremost, much of today's alarm about the ‘rise of
China’ resolves around the phenomenal development of the Chinese economy during the past twentyfive years: Its overall size has more than quadrupled since 1978
. China expert Nicholas Lardy of the Brookings Institution suggested that ‘the pace of
China's industrial development and trade expansion
is unparalleled in modern economic history.’ He went on: "While this has led to unprecedented improvements in Chinese incomes and living standards, it also poses challenges for other countries.“ One such challenge is thought to be job losses in the United States
. A recent study done for a U.S. congressional panel found that at least 760,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs have migrated to China since 1992.7
Associated with this economic boom is
China’s growing trade surplus with the United States
, which, according to Tim magazine journalists Richard Bernstein and Ross Munro, increased nearly tenfold from $3.5 billion in 1988 to roughly
$33.8 billion in 1995. This trade imbalance, as they put it, is a function of a Chinese strategy to target certain industries and to undersell American competition via a system of subsidies and high tariffs
. And that is why the deficit is harmful to the American economy and likely to become an area of ever greater conflict in bilateral relations in the future.‘ For many, also frightening is a prospect of the emergence of so- called ‘Greater China’
(a vast economic zone consisting of main-land China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan). As Harry Harding points out, ‘Although [Greater China] was originally intended in
[a] benign economic sense, . . . in some quarters it evokes much more aggressive analogies, such as the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere or Greater Germany." ~ in this context, some believe that China's economic challenge inevitably gives rise to a simultaneous military threat
. As Denny Roy argues: ‘
A stronger, wealthier China would have greater wherewithal to increase its arsenal of nuclear-armed ICBMs and to increase their lethality through improvements in range, accuracy, and survivability. If China continues its rate of economic expansion, absolute growth in Chinese nuclear capabilities should be expected to increase
. " Furthermore, U.S. Congressman
Bob Schaflfer claimed that China's military buildup, already under way at an alarming rate, was aimed at the United States." In addition to what they see as a worrying economic and military expansion, many U.S. China scholars believe that there exist still other dimensions to the ‘China threat‘ problem, such as China's “Middle Kingdom" mentality, unresolved historical grievances, and an undemocratic government
." Warren I. Cohen argues that
“probably the most ethnocentric people in the world, the Chinese considered their realm the center of the universe, the

Middle Kingdom, and regarded all cultural differences as signs of inferiority."" As a result, it is argued, the outside world has good reason to be concerned that “China will seek to reestablish in some form the political and cultural hegemony that it enjoyed in Asia during the Ming and early Qing dynasties?"
At another level, from a “democratic peace” standpoint, a China under the rule of an authoritarian regime is predisposed to behave irresponsibly.
As Bernstein and Munro put it: If the history of the last two hundred years is any guide, the more democratic countries become, the less likely they are to fight wars against each other. The more dictatorial they are, the more war prone they become. Indeed, if the current Beijing regime continues to engage in military adventurism—as it did in the Taiwan Strait in 1996—there will be a real chance of at least limited naval or air clashes with the United States." Subscribing to the same logic, Denny Roy asserts that ‘the establishment of a liberal democracy in China is extremely unlikely in the foreseeable future… Without democratization within, there is no basis for expecting more pacific behavior without.'
However, for other observers, even if China does become democratized, the threat may still remain. Postulating what he calls the “democratic paradox” phenomenon, Samuel Huntington suggests that democratization is as likely to encourage international conflict as it is to promote peace
." Indeed, many China watchers believe that an increase in market freedom has already led to an upsurge in Chinese nationalism, the only thing that allegedly provides the glue to hold contemporary China together." It is argued that such nationalist sentiment, coupled with memories of its past humiliation and thwarted grandeur, will make China an increasingly dis- satisfied, revisionist power—hence, a threat to the international status quo.
WE MUST RECOGNIZE THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NATURE OF THE “CHINA THREAT”
Pan ‘4
Chengxin Pan is a professor of international and political studies at Deakin University, ““The ‘China Threat’ in American Self-
Imagination: the Discursive Construction of Other as Power Politics,” 1 June 2004, http://www.articlearchives.com/asia/northern-asia-china/796470-1.html
The United States has since been construed as the manifestation of the law of nature, with its ideas and institutions described not as historically particular but as truly universal
. For example, in his second inaugural address in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson declared that U.S. principles were “not the principles of a province or of a single continent. We have known and boasted all along that they were the principles of a liberated mankind?” In short, “The US is utopia achieved.” It represents the “End of
History.” What does this U.S. self-knowledge have to do with the way in which it comes to know others in general and China in particular? To put it simply, this self-knowledge is always a powerful analytical framework within which other societies are to be known.
By envisioning a linear process of historical development with itself at its apex, the United States places other nations on a common evolutionary slope and sees them as inevitably traveling toward the end of history that is

the United States
. For example, as a vast, ancient nation on the other side of the Pacific, China is frequently taken as a mirror image of the U.S. self
. As Michael Hunt points out, we imagine ourselves locked in a special relationship with the Chinese, whose apparent moderation and pragmatism mirror our own most prized attributes and validate our own longings for a world made over in our own image
. If China with its old and radically different culture can be won, where can we not prevail?
Yet, in a world of diversity, contingency, and unpredictability, which is irreducible to universal sameness or absolute certainty, this kind of U.S. knowledge of others often proves frustratingly elusive
. In this context, rather than questioning the validity of their own universalist assumptions, the people of the United States believe that those who are different should be held responsible for the lack of universal sameness. Indeed, because “we” are universal, those who refuse or who are unable to become like “us” are no longer just “others,” but are by definition the negation of universality, or the other
. In this way, the other is always built into this universalized
“American” self, just as ‘Primitive’... is a category, not an object, of Western thought,” so the threat of the other is not some kind of “external reality” discovered by U.S. strategic analysts, but a ready-made category of thought within this particular way of U.S. self-imagination
. Consequently, there is always a need for the United States to find a specific other to fill into the totalized category of otherness
. In the early days of
American history, it was Europe, or the “Old World,” that was invoked as its primary other, threatening to corrupt the “New World.” Shortly after World War II, in the eyes of U.S. strategists, the Soviet Union emerged as a major deviance from, hence an archenemy of, their universal path toward progress via the free market and liberal democracy. And after the demise of the Soviet Union, the vacancy of other was to be filled by China, the “best candidate” the United States could find in the post-Cold War, unipolar world. Not until the September ll attacks in New York and Washington had China’s candidature been suspended, to be replaced by international terrorism in general and Saddam's Iraq in particular.
At first glance, as the “China threat” literature has told us, China seems to fall perfectly into the “threat” category, particularly given its growing power. However, China's power as such does not speak for itself in terms of an emerging threat
. By any reasonable measure,
China remains a largely poor country edged with only a sliver of affluence along its coastal areas. Nor is China's sheer size a self-evident confirmation of the “China threat” thesis, as other countries like India, Brazil, and Australia are almost as big as China
.
Instead,
China as a “threat” has much to do with the particular mode of U.S. self-imagination
. As Steve Chan notes: China is an object of attention not only because of its huge size, ancient legacy, or current or projected relative national power...
The importance of China has to do with perceptions, especially those regarding the potential that Beijing will become an example, source, or model that contradicts Western liberalism as the reigning paradigm
. In an era of supposed universalizing cosmopolitanism,
China
demonstrates the potency and persistence of nationalism, and embodies an alternative to Western and especially U.S. conceptions of democracy and capitalism. China is a reminder that history is not close to an
end. Certainly, I do not deny China’s potential for strategic misbehavior in the global context, nor do I claim the “essential peace- fulness” of Chinese culture.“ Having said that, my main point here is that there is no such thing as
“Chinese reality” that can automatically speak for itself, for example, as a “threat.”
Rather, the “China threat” is essentially a specifically social meaning given to China by its U.S. observers, a meaning that cannot be disconnected from the dominant U.S. self-construction
. Thus, to fully understand the U.S. “China threat” argument, it is essential to recognize its autobiographical nature.

2NC Overview
THE AFFIRMATIVE HAS FALSELY CONNECTED THE SUPPOSED OTHERNESS OF CHINA
WITH MILITARY CONFLICT
Reductionist approaches to international relations come at the expense of appreciating China as a dynamic, multifaceted country. The 1AC signals a retreat towards UNCONDITIONAL SECURITY and CERTAINTY, a fear embodied in out current foreign policy. This position DANGERSOULY ANCHORS realpolitik thinking, nationalistic extremism, and hardline stances vis-à-vis China at the HEART of USFG action. More importantly, American securitization efforts will likely intensify Chinese feelings of INSECURITY, causing an EXPANSION of China’s arsenal.
THE “OTHER” IS PART AND PARCEL OF AMERICA’S NATIONAL IDENTITY
Pan ‘4
Chengxin Pan is a professor of international and political studies at Deakin University, ““The ‘China Threat’ in American Self-
Imagination: the Discursive Construction of Other as Power Politics,” 1 June 2004, http://www.articlearchives.com/asia/northern-asia-china/796470-1.html
Indeed, the construction of other is not only a product of U.S. self-imagination, but often a necessary foil to it
. For example, by taking this particular representation of China as Chinese reality per se
, those scholars are able to assert their self-identity as “mature,” “rational” realists capable of knowing the “hard facts” of international politics, in distinction from those “idealists” whose views are said to be grounded more in
“an article of faith” than in “historical experience
" On the other hand, given that history is apparently not “progressively” linear, the invocation of a certain other not only helps explain away such historical uncertainties or “anomalies” and maintain the credibility of the allegedly universal path trodden by the United States, but also serves to highlight U.S. “indispensability.” As Samuel Huntington puts it, “
If being an American means being committed to the principles of liberty, democracy, individualism, and private property, and if there is no evil empire out there threatening those principles, what indeed does it mean to be an American, and what becomes of American national interests
” In this way, it seems that the constructions of the particular U.S. self and its other are always intertwined and mutually reinforcing
.
Some may suggest that there is nothing particularly wrong with this since psychologists generally agree that “individuals and groups define their identity by differentiating themselves from and placing themselves in opposition to others."45 This is perhaps true. As the Swiss linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure tells us, meaning itself depends on difference and differentiation.“ Yet, to understand the U.S. dichotomized constructions of self/other in this light is to normalize them and render them unproblematic, because it is also apparent that not all

identity-defining practices necessarily perceive others in terms of either universal sameness or absolute otherness and that difference need not equate to threat
.
NEOREALISM SITUATES CHINA AS A PARADOX BETWEEN UNCERTAINTY AND
ATTEMPTED PREDICTABILITY
Pan ‘4
Chengxin Pan is a professor of international and political studies at Deakin University, ““The ‘China Threat’ in American Self-
Imagination: the Discursive Construction of Other as Power Politics,” 1 June 2004, http://www.articlearchives.com/asia/northern-asia-china/796470-1.html
Having examined how the
“China threat” literature
is enabled by and serves the purpose of a particular U.S. self-construction, I want to turn now to the issue of how this literature represents a discursive construction of other, instead of an “objective” account of Chinese reality.
This, I argue, has less to do with its portrayal of China as a threat per se than with its essentialization and totalization of China as an externally knowable object
, independent of historically contingent contexts or dynamic international interactions. In this sense, the discursive construction of China as a threatening other cannot be detached from (neo)realism, a positivist, ahistorical framework of analysis within which global life is reduced to endless interstate rivalry for power and survival
. As many critical IR scholars have noted, (neo)realism is not a transcendent description of global reality but is predicated on the modernist Western identity, which, in the quest for scientific certainty, has come to define itself essentially as the sovereign territorial nation-state.
This realist self-identity of Western states leads to the constitution of anarchy as the sphere of insecurity, disorder, and war
. In an anarchical system, as (neo)realists argue, “the gain of one side is often considered to be the loss of the other,"45 and “All other states are potential threats?" In order to survive in such a system, states inevitably pursue power or capability. In doing so, these realist claims represent what R. B.|. Walker calls “a specific historical articulation of relations of universality/particularity and self/Other." The (neo)realist paradigm has dominated the U.S. IR discipline in general and the U.S. China studies field in particular. As Kurt Campbell notes, after the end of the Cold War, a whole new crop of China experts “are much more likely to have a background in strategic studies or international relations than China itself
." As a result
, for those experts to know China is nothing more or less than to undertake a geopolitical analysis of it, often by asking only a few questions such as how China will
“behave” in a strategic sense and how it may affect the regional or global balance of power, with a particular emphasis on China's military power or capabilities
. As Thomas]. Christensen notes, “Although many have focused on intentions as well as capabilities, the most prevalent component of the [China threat] debate is the assessment of China's overall future military power compared with that of the United States and other
East Asian regional powers
."49
Consequently, almost by default, China emerges as an absolute other and a threat thanks to this (neo)realist prism. The (neo)realist emphasis on survival and security in inter- national relations dovetails perfectly with the U.S. self-imagination, because for the United States to define itself as the indispensable nation in a world of anarchy is often to demand absolute security
. As

James Chace and Caleb Carr note, “ for over two centuries the aspiration toward an eventual condition of absolute security has been viewed as central to an effective American foreign policy
."5° And this self-identification in turn leads to the definition of not only “tangible” foreign powers but global contingency and uncertainty per se as threats
. For example, former U.S. President George H. W. Bush repeatedly said that “the enemy [of America] is unpredictability. The enemy is instability.” Similarly, arguing for the continuation of U.S. Cold War alliances, a high-ranking Pentagon official asked, “if we pull out, who knows what nervousness will result?" Thus understood, by its very uncertain character, China would now automatically constitute a threat to the United States. For example, Bernstein and Munro believe that ‘China's political unpredictability, the always-present possibility that it will fall into a state of domestic disunion and factional fighting,” constitutes a source of danger." In like manner, Richard Betts and Thomas Christensen write: If the PLA [People's Liberation Army] remains second-rate, should the world breathe a sigh of relief? Not entirely... Drawing China into the web of global interdependence may do more to encourage peace than war, but it cannot guarantee that the pursuit of heartfelt political interests will be blocked by a fear of economic consequences… U.S. efforts to create a stable balance across the Taiwan Strait might deter the use of force under certain circumstances, but certainly not all.“ The upshot, therefore, is that since China displays no absolute certainty for peace, it must be, by definition, an uncertainty, and hence, a threat. In the same way, a multitude of other unpredictable factors (such as ethnic rivalry, local insurgencies, overpopulation, drug trafficking, environmental degradation, rogue states, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and international terrorism) have also been labeled as ‘threats’ to U.S. security
. Yet, it seems that in the post-Cold
War environment, China represents a kind of uncertainty par excellence. ‘Whatever the prospects for a more peaceful, more democratic, and more just world order, nothing seems more uncertain today than the future of post-Deng China
," argues Samuel Kim. And such an archetypical uncertainty is crucial to the enterprise of U.S. selfconstruction, because it seems that only an uncertainty with potentially global consequences such as China could justify U.S. indispensability or its continued world dominance. In this sense, Bruce Cumings aptly suggested in 1996 that
China
(as a threat) was basically “a metaphor for an enormously expensive Pentagon that has lost its bearings and that requires a formidable ‘renegade state’ to define its mission
(Islam is rather vague, and Iran lacks necessary weights)."

2NC - Stone-Mediatore
THEIR DISCONNECTED OBJECTIVE NARRATION TOWARDS INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
HAS REAL CONSEQUENCES
Under the guise of professional responsibility we promote an IRRESPONSIBLE inattention to living beings and a concomitant ethics of CALLOUSNESS and
INDIFFERENCE burying violence in technical abstractions while providing a
CONVENIENT ALIBI for turning our back to PAIN.
Stone-Mediator ‘7
Shari Stone-Mediatore is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Ohio Wesleyan University Challenging Academic Norms: An
Epistemology for Feminist and Multicultural Classrooms http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nwsa_journal/v019/19.2stonemediatore.htmls
Even if objectivity is a myth, the valorization of traits associated with objectivity can have real—and dangerous—historical effects. In particular, an unqualified valorization of distance and detachment promotes the kind of moral numbness that facilitates institutionalized violence
. Certainly, a theorist should have some degree of distance from her subject matter insofar as her knowledge claims should not be immediate personal reactions but well considered and publicly accountable reflections. However, when we confuse absolute emotional and geographic distance from one's subject matter with "objectivity," we forget that such distance is itself a social location, namely, one of isolation from social problems. As a result, when we sanctify sheltered social standpoints as "professional distance," we privilege the voices of those who can remove themselves from social ills while we undervalue the voices of those who experience social suffering more directly.
Likewise, when we valorize detachment, we overlook the qualities of the world that are known through physical and emotional closeness
. Dedicated forest defender Joan Norman indicated the importance of knowledge gained through closeness to phenomena when she attributed her appreciation for forests to her walks in the woods with her grandson. "You cannot [End Page
57] just read about wild places," she says, "you have to go there" (O'Shea 2005, 42). Social critics Arundhati Roy and Paul Farmer practice a similar creed when they travel, respectively, to Adivasi communities in India and to rural Latin America to walk among and offer support to people subjected to economic violence. Only "compassion and solidarity," says Farmer, allow a writer to break the conditioned silence of subjugated people and to hear expressions of pain and struggle that await sympathetic ears (2003, 27).
5
Ultimately, when we

confuse distance and detachment with rigor, we promote, under the guise of professional responsibility, an irresponsible inattention to living beings and a concomitant ethics of callousness and indifference
. Nazi administrators exemplified such contradictions of objectivity when they assumed an "objective attitude" toward the death camps, attending to technicalities of mass execution as coolly as if they were managing a bank (Arendt 1992, 69). Although ordinary academics and bureaucrats are less directly involved in murder, our disciplined aloofness can
similarly bury violence in technical abstractions while our conscience defers to "professionalism."
For instance, purportedly objective French reporters and United Nations members refrained from taking a stand on French colonialism in Algeria, only to model apathy in the face of colonial violence, while today's "experts, from anthropologists to international health specialists choose to collude" with economic violence by ignoring it in the name of "neutrality"
(Fanon 1963, 77–8; Farmer 2003, 10, 17).
"Objective" discourses facilitate
this charade, as when planners of India's big dams shield themselves from ethical questions raised by the displacement of hundreds of thousands of individuals by reducing these people to the category
"Project Affected People," or simply "PAP," a term which conveniently "mutate[s] muscle and blood into cold statistics" (Roy 1999, 32). For Nazi bureaucrats, French colonial reporters, and contemporary analysts alike, objectivity provides a convenient alibi for turning our back to pain and suppressing compassionate impulses that would otherwise be troubled by violence
.
WE STRAIGHT TURN THEIR NOTION OF OBJECTIVITY
Stone-Mediator ‘7
Shari Stone-Mediatore is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Ohio Wesleyan University Challenging Academic Norms: An
Epistemology for Feminist and Multicultural Classrooms http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nwsa_journal/v019/19.2stonemediatore.html
Granted, accurate empirical analysis of the measurable dimensions of our world is a crucial component of credible knowledge. Thus, even critics of objectivity, including Fanon, Farmer, Arendt, Roy, and Galeano support their claims, insofar as possible, with carefully documented historical data. However, when we treat empirical data not merely as one element of knowledge but as the hallmark of objectivity, we favor the perspective of those groups who more often have their concerns documented in data and their worldviews institutionalized in the frameworks that structure data
.
Significantly, for instance, the U.S. government has ample data on economic growth rates but no central data on police violence, the human costs of war, the relation between health and poverty, or the destructive effects of industry waste products, with the latter having left their marks mainly in unofficial testimonies.
7
When we consider a text replete with statistics to be objective and dismiss personal testimony, we not only silence perspectives unpopular with official record-keeping institutions but suppress questions about why some phenomena have been registered in data while others have not.
The Bush administration's failure to record civilian casualties in the Iraq War 8 attests to the urgency of looking beyond "hard data" to the politics that underlie data availability.
The confusion of ample data with objectivity also tends to privilege the perspective of dominant groups insofar as the latter have greater influence over the conceptual frameworks in which data are interpreted
. For instance, French medical, psychiatric, and legal professionals in colonial Algeria viewed data on Algerian violent crime in terms of a worldview that abstracted social phenomena from history and naturalized social communities, thereby allowing them to regard the data as evidence "that the Algerian was a born criminal" (Fanon 1963, 296). When the same data were viewed by Algerians in the context of their resistance to colonialism, it could be seen as a symptom of colonial social relations.
Nevertheless, [End Page 59] the interpretation of the French professionals (and not the Algerians) informed the seemingly objective medical societies and legal institutions.
Furthermore, even before data are framed historically, they are structured by the categories and procedures by which "the raw material of the world" is "processed as data," and such research processes tend to be formulated by scholars and bureaucrats with a view to implementing policies and regulating people
(Smith 1987, 161–4; 1990, 53–5, 85–92, 116–30).
This dependence of hard data on ruling ways of dividing up and governing people is evident
, for instance, when newscasters report on the number of
"illegal aliens" crossing the border, working "American" jobs, and attending "American" schools, for these supposed "facts" are produced by

agencies concerned to regulate the activities of Mexican immigrants and whose category "illegal alien" reflects the dominant culture's assumptions about the sanctity of national borders and the dependence of rights on national citizenship.

2NC - Fang
CULTURE HAS A LIFE OF ITS OWN
This marks the difference between an “onion” and “ocean” approach to culture.
Culture has no core of values and beliefs that determine outer layers of behavior. We can see and make note of ripples on the surface of China’s culture, but intellectuals must not forget the totality and the entire life process of that culture that exist
BENEATH the surface.
Fang ‘6
Tony Fang is internationally respected researcher in cross-cultural Management and Chinese Business Studies, currently leading an international research team to conduct a global project entitled Yin Yang: A New Perspective on Culture” the purpose of the project is to adopt a holistic, dynamic, and dialectical (Yin Yang) paradigm to study the dynamics of culture and management behavior in the age of globalization; worked as Shipbuilding Technical Superintendent and Ship Investment manager for
Chinese and Scandinavian shipping companies; also worked as a seaman (chief engineer assistant) working onboard large multipurpose cargo container vessel trading from China to Europe and vice versa; he is also a professor of Business
Administration at the Stockholm University School of Business, Sweden; FROM ONION TO OCEAN: Paradox and Change in
National Cultures; INTERNATIONAL STUDIES OF MANAGEMENT AND ORGANIZATION, vol. 35, no. 4, Winter 2005-6, pp. 71-90 http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/40397646.pdf?acceptTC=true&jpdConfirm=true
The temporal process has been brutally ignored in the dominant paradigm of national cultures. To capture the "moment" of national culture, we need to return culture to its natural context of time.
National cultures are living organisms not time-free "fossils." It is useful to conceive of culture as having a life of its own
. Seen or historically, every culture has a
longitudinally dynamic life full of energies, sentiments, dramas, and contradictions. In its entire life span, every culture encompasses an ocean of infinite potential value orientations
...... {+V, +V2, +V3, +V4, +V5 +Vn -V,, -V2, -V3, -V4, -V5, -Vn}.
At any given point, many cultural values have been endorsed, promoted, and legitimized, while other "value cousins" are dampened, suppressed, and destroyed. To be genuinely interested in a culture, we must examine the culture's own life, we must care about different phases of that life, we must study the dramas and ups and downs of cultural values, and we must understand the "moment" of culture
. During China's Cultural
Revolution (1966-76), Confucianism as a philosophy was vehemently assaulted. In schools across China, pupils were taught to produce
"revolutionary" poems and cartoons to demonize Confucius and attack Confucian values. Familial and professional values were destroyed by the-then ruling political ideologies. Market, capital, money, and all material incentives were taken as feudalist and capitalist corruptions. Today, however, many Chinese (for good and for bad) value money-orientation, capitalism, professionalism, knowledge, innovation, creativity,

individualism, quality of life, and "sex and the city." Why were such values as money-orientation and individualism not valued during the Maoist era ( 1949-76)? Because these and many other values were "suppressed," "beaten," "jailed," and "destroyed." Hofstede's original IBM data collection was "held twice, around 1968 and around 1972" (Hofstede 1980, 1 1) in which China was not included. Had the data also been gathered in China at that time, the index of China would be fundamentally different from what is "estimated" today (see "estimated" index about Chinese culture in Hofstede and Hofstede 2005). China's Cultural Revolution is used here to illustrate the ups and downs of Chinese values in one period of the life of Chinese culture. A look at the development of Chinese culture and society from a historical perspective seems to support Rokeach's (1973) proposition that no values are time free. We can identify numerous "moments" of the life of Chinese culture where some values are shared temporarily while other values come and go.
Culture's internal change mechanism
(yin-yang) is one reason. Other reasons include the impacts of changes in ecological environments, ideological preferences, social systems and institutions, globalization and foreign direct investment, technologies, and contingencies (e.g., epidemics, wars). To study the "moment" of culture requires a serious scrutiny of national culture from a change perspective.
"Change" is not a new term in the study of organizational culture, but the change perspective has been extremely underdeveloped in the research on national culture and international cross- cultural management. A fundamental reason lies in the static "onion" approach to culture that asserts that the core of the "onion" (values and beliefs) is stable over time. This inner core also supposedly determines the layers of the "onion" (behaviors and artifacts). However, the relationship between values and beliefs on one side, and behaviors and artifacts on the other, is a dynamic one. Not only are behaviors shaped by beliefs and values, but they can proactively shape new beliefs and values, thereby germinating the process of culture change
. Bern's (1970) research on cognitive and behavioral foundations of beliefs relates directly to this key point.
A fundamental finding is that beliefs follow behaviors
. Citing Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance, Bern explained that: [If] an individual is induced to engage in behavior inconsistent with his beliefs or attitudes, he will experience the discomfort of "cognitive dissonance," which will motivate him to seek a resolution of that inconsistency. One way he can do this is to convince himself that he actually believes in what he has done, that he actually holds the beliefs or attitudes implied by his behavior. (1970,54-55) Bern concluded that "one of the most effective ways to 'change the hearts and minds of men' is to change their behavior" (1970, 54). Hofstede (1980, 2001) made a passing reference on this point without deeper investigation into the implications of Bern's (1970) research finding (beliefs following behaviors) for cross-cultural theory building in the age of globalization:
When cultures interact with each other, a behavioral change process begins which, in turn, eventually ignites a value change process among the interacting cultures.
Studying the changing nature of culture does not reject the notion of stability
. Rokeach argued: "
If values were completely stable, individual and social change would be impossible. If values were completely unstable, continuity of human personality and society would be impossible. Any conception of human values, if it is to be fruitful, must be able to account for the enduring character of values as well as for their changing character"
(1973, 5-6).
Instead of refuting the notion of stability, we need to put it in a larger dynamic context, seeing stability and change as the yin and yang of culture, which create, encompass, and succeed each other over time. Relying on context-free and time-free cultural indexes to understand culture would make our cross- cultural scholarship stagnate
at Stereotypie levels, regardless of the degree of sophistication used to construct such indexes. The discussions so far allow us to craft a new metaphor for understanding the dynamics of culture.
Culture can be compared to an ocean. In a given context at a given time, we identify visible values and behaviors just like we identify visible wave patterns on the surface of the ocean. Nevertheless, the culture we see at this moment does not represent the totality and the entire life process of that culture.
The ocean embraces not just visible wave patterns on its surface
(compared to visible cultural values and behaviors) but also numerous ebbs and flows underneath of amazing depth
(comparable to "hibernating," unseen and unknown cultural values and behaviors).
Given internal mechanisms (yin-yang) and external forces (e.g., globalization, institutional, economic, technological, situational factors), invisible and "un- conscious" values and behaviors (ebbs and flows) beneath the water surface can be stimulated, powered, activated, promoted, and legitimized to come up to the ocean's surface to become the visible and guiding value patterns at the next historical moment
. For example, the spirit of Chinese capitalism had long been perceived as something that belonged only to the Chinese diaspora rather than to mainland "Communist" China. However, Deng Xiaoping's famous tour in southern China in early 1992 and

his slogan "To get rich is glorious!" catalyzed an enormous cultural change process in mainland China, making the spirit of Chinese capitalism an integral and essential part of today's "Communist" China.

Author Qualifications
Tony Fang (PhD, 1999, Industrial Marketing, Linköping University, Sweden) is Professor of Business
Administration at Stockholm University School of Business. He is also Visiting Professor at Asia Research
Centre, Copenhagen Business School. Tony Fang holds his PhD in Industrial Marketing from Linköping
University, Sweden. Tony Fang has also been Visiting Scholar in the Political Science Department,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, host professor Lucian W. Pye).
Tony Fang is an internationally respected researcher in cross-cultural management and Chinese business studies. His research papers such as “Yin Yang: A New Perspective on Culture” (2012), “From Onion to
Ocean” (2005-2006), and “A Critique of Hofstede’s Fifth National Culture Dimension” (2003) are well received within research community. Tony Fang is also the author of the books Chinese Business
Negotiating Style (Thousand Oaks: Sage) and Att göra affärer i dagens Kina (“Doing Business in Today's
China", Stockholm: SNS). More publications can be found athttp://su-se.academia.edu/TonyFang.
Professor Tony Fang is currently leading an international research team in its start-up phase to conduct a global project “Yin Yang: A New Perspective on Culture”. The purpose of the project is to adopt a holistic, dynamic, and dialectical (Yin Yang) paradigm to study the dynamics of culture and management behaviour in the age of globalization. The first international conference from the project took place at
Stockholm University School of Business during June 7-11, 2012
(http://fek.su.se/en/Research/Subdisciplines/Management--Organisation/YIN-YANG-A-newperspective-on-culture/).
Prior to becoming an academic, Tony Fang worked as Shipbuilding Technical Superintendent and Ship
Investment Manager for Chinese (1987-1991) and Scandinavian (1993-1995) shipping companies. He also worked as a seaman (chief engineer assistant) working onboard large multipurpose cargo container vessel trading from China to Europe and vice versa.

Notes
SMALL EXPLANATION OF THIS ARTICLE
The purpose of this paper is to propose an alternative approach to the study of national cultures and international cross-cultural management in the era of globalization
THE ONION METAPHOR:
Describes the dominate paradigm for measuring and interrogating culture and suggests that it follows a cold war, nation state, framing of analysis that rests on four pillar. Like an
Onion these can be referred to as layers (symbols, heroes, rituals, and values). The onion comparison allows us to understand cultural interrogation on five levels.
1. culture as onions can be seen and simplified as discreet nation-states
2. each onion/culture is distinct and separate like the boundaries that separate nations
3. on the outer layers of the onion we see practices of culture (symbols, heroes, and rituals) and when we peel it to the core we see the values.
4. Values shape behaviors of a given culture
5. Just like onions come in different sizes/weights, categories of culture can be measured and differentiated allowing for contested mutually exclusive traits (big/small, individualistic/collectivist, feminine/masculine etc.)
6. different onions collide, clash and create conflicts based off of the measurable distinctions.
DIALECTIC THINKING/ (Concept of the YIN/YANG and embracing the paradoxes)
THE OCEAN METAPHOR
Embracing the paradox of cultural transformation
CULTURAL TRANSFORMATION IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION
This is analogous to the change from the unchanging. Can be used to interrogate the kritiks of globalization that assume dominate cultures interact and violently consume the host culture.
I also think a way to use these cards is in conjunction with a security kritik regarding a war with another country ex. Pan or against an asia pivot advantage.

Cards
The dominant paradigm for cultures is an onion, distinct entities that clash whenever they come together, a deterministic mindset from the cold war. In reality, the modern age is a time of a paradox, the dialectic bipolarity of cultures mix together.
FANG prof of Business Administration @ Stockholm University School of Business, Sweden
2k6
Tony-internationally respected researcher in cross-cultural Management and Chinese Business Studies, currently leading an international research team to conduct a global project entitled Yin Yang: A New Perspective on
Culture” the purpose of the project is to adopt a holistic, dynamic, and dialectical (Yin Yang) paradigm to study the dynamics of culture and management behavior in the age of globalization; worked as Shipbuilding Technical
Superintendent and Ship Investment manager for Chinese and Scandinavian shipping companies; also worked as a seaman (chief engineer assistant) working onboard large multipurpose cargo container vessel trading from China to
Europe and vice versa; FROM ONION TO OCEAN: Paradox and Change in National Cultures; INTERNATIONAL
STUDIES OF MANAGEMENT AND ORGANIZATION, vol. 35, no. 4, Winter 2005-6, pp. 71-90 http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/40397646.pdf?acceptTC=true&jpdConfirm=true
The "onion"
Metaphors craft our thinking in distinctive ways. They are management, organization, culture, and society also used to study
(Gannon 2001, 2004; Kao 1997; Lakoff and Johnson 1980;
Morgan 1986; Ortony 1975; Redding 1994).
"Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature ... the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor"
(Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1). Ortony defines metaphor as "a means of comparing two terms" (1975). According to Lakoff and Johnson,
"The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another"
(1980, 5). Gannon defines
"cultural metaphor"
as "any activity, phenomenon, or institution which members of a given culture consider important and with which they identify emotionally and/or cognitively" and holds that metaphor
"represents the underlying values expressive of the culture itself
(2004, xiii).
Hofstede has created an "onion" metaphor to understand culture (see Hofstede 1991, 9; Hofstede and Hofstede 2005, 7; a similar model was also proposed in Trompenaars 1994). Hofstede indicates that culture manifests itself in four different levels that can be illustrated "as the skins of an onion"
(Hof- stede 1991, 7): symbols, heroes, rituals, and values. This "onion" metaphor of culture is probably the best illustration of the bipolar paradigm. Comparing culture to "onion" offers a number of important analogies. First, the complex, woolly, and fluid phenomena of national cultures are tackled through simplification, as cultures are reduced into and isolated from each other in terms of discrete "onions" - politically defined and artificially created nation-states.
Second, each "onion" has its clearly defined profile, similar to the national boundaries of politically defined and artificially created nation-states. The importance of nationality and nation-state as the basic unit of analysis of national culture has been persistently emphasized. Third, on the outer surfaces of "onion," we see symbols, heroes, and rituals that are called "practices" of culture
by Hofstede
(1991, 8).
To understand a culture more deeply, we need to peel the "onion" layer by layer to touch its core. At the core lie the basic assumptions, values, and beliefs that guide human behaviors. Fourth, values and beliefs determine behaviors.
While the outer layers of the "onion" come and go, the core of the "onion" stands firm. In other words, the behavioral - part of culture may change, but the
"software" of culture that its values - is, deep-seated will not, because values remain stable:
"By the age of 10, most of the child's basic values have been programmed into his or her mind" (Hofstede 2001, 394).
Fifth, just as "onions" have different sizes and can be categorized into "big" and
"small," national cultures are deterministically different and can be measured, indexed, and distinguished from each other in terms of cultural dimensions. An
"onion" cannot be both - "big" and "small" similarly, national culture cannot be both "individualist" and "collectivism" both "feminine" and "masculine," both
"long-term oriented" and "short-term oriented," and so forth. Finally, when different "onions" meet, they will collide. Similarly, when different national

cultures meet, they will collide. Cultural differences will be accentuated, and cross-cultural clashes and conflicts will take place, because each culture has its own indigenous stable history, beliefs, norms, and value systems that hardly change over time. This "onion" metaphor of culture offers a telling example of the
"functionalist"
(Burrell and Morgan 1979) and "deterministic"
(McSweeney 2002) paradigm in social science research that seeks objectivity, measurement, and prediction. An
"analytical" logic runs through the paradigm, because unity must be divided into parts to seek absolute truth. The same logic forms the classical foundation of
Western science
(Popper 1959/2002).
The "onion" metaphor suggests that culture can be researched, and initial understanding, however insufficient it may be, can be achieved through simplification and stereotyping.
By doing so, it offers "the first best guess" about certain cultures. Besides, nationality is at least one (though incomplete) component of culture, which some studies have suggested (e.g., Zan- der and
Romani 2004) does matter when it comes to cross-cultural leadership.
Nevertheless, using the "onion" mentality to map out and compare national cultures is not without problems. Whereas the dominant paradigm bipolarizes national cultures in terms of "either/or" cultural dimensions, such as femininity versus masculinity and collectivism versus individualism, evidence from various national cultures
(discussed later) shows that culture is intrinsically "both/and," that is, embracing both orientations.
Proponents of the bipolar paradigm do not assert that all national cultures are sitting at the extreme ends of each cultural dimension, and many cultures have country index scores lying somewhere between the two poles. Yet,
by using bipolar terminologies and definitions
and indexing national cultures along the spectrum of cultural dimensions, the dominant paradigm seems to have missed a fundamental dialectical perspective that cultures, like all other universal phenomena, intrinsically embrace paradoxes and change.
A culture's strong tendency toward one extreme of a bipolar dimension
(e.g., femininity) does not preclude its opposite
(e.g., masculinity).
Culture assumes capacities to reconcile the opposite poles of all cultural dimensions and can thus be both "feminine" and "masculine," both "long-term" and "short-term," both "individualist" and "col- lectivist," and so forth, in a dynamic process of change and transformation. This "both/and" perspective of culture is grounded in a dialectical and paradoxical view of universal phenomena
as suggested by yin-yang.
The paradox of Yin/Yang can also be applied to the concept of cultures, where one side of the bipolarity cannot exist without the other. Thus both facets of a culture coexist, nurturing each other and the concept of culture cannot be reduced to simply an “onion” of having a singular core of values.
FANG prof of Business Administration @ Stockholm University School of Business, Sweden
2k6
Tony-internationally respected researcher in cross-cultural Management and Chinese Business Studies, currently leading an international research team to conduct a global project entitled Yin Yang: A New Perspective on
Culture” the purpose of the project is to adopt a holistic, dynamic, and dialectical (Yin Yang) paradigm to study the dynamics of culture and management behavior in the age of globalization; worked as Shipbuilding Technical
Superintendent and Ship Investment manager for Chinese and Scandinavian shipping companies; also worked as a seaman (chief engineer assistant) working onboard large multipurpose cargo container vessel trading from China to
Europe and vice versa; FROM ONION TO OCEAN: Paradox and Change in National Cultures; INTERNATIONAL
STUDIES OF MANAGEMENT AND ORGANIZATION, vol. 35, no. 4, Winter 2005-6, pp. 71-90 http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/40397646.pdf?acceptTC=true&jpdConfirm=true
Dialectical thinking and Yin- Yang
Dialectical thinking focusing on a dynamic integration of paradoxes was devel- oped in a number of influential Western writings
, including those of Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx. In modern times, Simmel (1997) developed a dialecti- cal approach to analyzing the dynamics of interconnectedness and conflicts in social phenomena. Love and hatred, harmony and conflict, and attraction and repulsion are two interdependent sides of the same process; that is, social units and behaviors are created and developed dialectically. Similarly, Maslow researched the interconnectedness of human psychology and noted: "What had been considered in the past to be polarities or opposites or dichotomies were so only in unhealthy people. In healthy people, these dichotomies were resolved, the polarities disappeared, and many oppositions thought to be intrinsic merged and coalesced with

each other to form unities" (Maslow 1954, 233).
A central concept in dialectical thinking is paradox.
Paradox is defined as "contradictory yet interrelated elements - elements that seem logical in isolation but absurd and irrational when appearing simultaneously"
(Lewis 2000, 760).
It is characterized by "the simultaneous presence of contradic- tory, even mutually exclusive elements"
(Cameron and Quinn 1988, 2). of paradox is gaining increasing attention in organization research
The concept
(e.g., Clegg 2002).
Embracing paradoxes or holding that opposite forces ex- ist simultaneously and accepting that opposites coexist and can reverse their positions at a given time in history, is fundamentally reflected in the yin-yang philosophy
(see Figure 1). The yin-yang image, arguably the best-known symbol in East Asia (Cooper 1990), is of a circle equally divided by a curved line forming the black and white areas. The black and the white areas stand for two opposite energies in the universe called yin and yang, respectively. Yin represents female elements (the moon, night, water, weakness, darkness, mystery, softness, and passivity), whereas yang represents male elements (the sun, day, fire, strength, brightness, clearness, hardness, and activity). The image implies that yin and yang coexist in everything, and that every- thing embraces yin and yang.
There exists neither absolute yin nor absolute yang (the black dot in the white and the white dot in the black).
Opposites contain within them the seeds of the other and together form a dynamic and changing unity
(Chen 2001).
In short, yin and yang cannot survive without each other, and they complement each other, depend on each other, exist in each other, give birth to each other, and succeed each other at different points in time. Yin and yang, water and fire, the moon and the sun, and so forth, are waning and waxing, coming and going, opening and closing, all in the process of ceaseless change and transformation.
As Ji, Nisbett, and Su explained: The idea of change and transformation between two opposite states is the main theme of the / Ching ... or Book of Changes. The book not only dis- cusses change in one direction (from young to old or from small to large), but also discusses changes from one extreme to another extreme. For example, when a moon is full, it starts to wane; when a moon is new, it starts to wax. This is the relationship between yin and yang: When yin reaches its extreme, it becomes yang; when yang reaches its extreme, it becomes yin. The pure yin is hidden in yang, and the pure yang is hidden in yin . . .
Therefore, yin and yang are dependent on each other, and transformations between the two occur when one of them becomes extreme. (Ji,
Nisbett, and Su 2001, 450)
Yin-yang suggests that human beings, organizations, and cultures intrinsically embrace paradoxes for their sheer existence and healthy development. Culture is "both/and" instead of "either/or." We are both yin and yang, feminine and masculine, long-term and short-term, individualistic and collectivistic, monochronic and polychronic, and high-context and low-context, depending on situation, context, and time.
As yin and yang produce each other, a culture's tendency toward one extreme of a bipolar dimension (e.g., femininity) creates and fosters the opposite tendency (e.g., masculinity) of the same culture. These insights are crucial for answering our research questions about the mechanisms of the coexistence of paradoxical values and behaviors within national cultures and the new identity of national cultures in the age of globalization.
From the vantage point of yinyang and dialectical thinking, I have iden- tified three themes important for stimulating new research directions in the study of national cultures and international cross-cultural management: (1) the paradoxical nature of culture, (2) the "moment" of culture, and (3) the new identity of national cultures in the era of globalization. These themes address sequentially the three research questions identified above.
The “onion” paradigm for cultures ignores the temporal aspect of cultures, that there are not static values based on a core. Rather, cultures should be compared to an ocean, ever changing and we are only glimpsing a snapshot of one wave, one ripple.
FANG prof of Business Administration @ Stockholm University School of Business, Sweden
2k6
Tony-internationally respected researcher in cross-cultural Management and Chinese Business Studies, currently leading an international research team to conduct a global project entitled Yin Yang: A New Perspective on
Culture” the purpose of the project is to adopt a holistic, dynamic, and dialectical (Yin Yang) paradigm to study the dynamics of culture and management behavior in the age of globalization; worked as Shipbuilding Technical
Superintendent and Ship Investment manager for Chinese and Scandinavian shipping companies; also worked as a

seaman (chief engineer assistant) working onboard large multipurpose cargo container vessel trading from China to
Europe and vice versa; FROM ONION TO OCEAN: Paradox and Change in National Cultures; INTERNATIONAL
STUDIES OF MANAGEMENT AND ORGANIZATION, vol. 35, no. 4, Winter 2005-6, pp. 71-90 http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/40397646.pdf?acceptTC=true&jpdConfirm=true
Culture has a life of its own
The temporal process has been brutally ignored in the dominant paradigm of national cultures. To capture the "moment" of national culture, we need to return culture to its natural context of time. National cultures are living organisms not time-free "fossils." It is useful to conceive of culture as having a life of its own.
Seen or historically, every culture has a longitudinally dynamic life full of energies, sentiments, dramas, and contradictions. In its entire life span, every culture encompasses an ocean of infinite potential value orientations
. . . . . . {+V,, +V2, +V3, +V4, +V5 +Vn -V,, -V2, -V3, -V4, -V5, -Vn}.
At any given point, many cultural values have been endorsed, promoted, and legitimized, while other "value cousins" are dampened, suppressed, and destroyed. To be genuinely interested in a culture, we must examine the culture's own life, we must care about different phases of that life, we must study the dramas and ups and downs of cultural values, and we must understand the "moment" of culture.
During
China's Cultural Revolution (1966-76), Confucianism as a philosophy was vehemently assaulted. In schools across China, pupils were taught to produce "revolutionary" poems and cartoons to demonize Confucius and attack Confucian values. Familial and professional values were destroyed by the-then ruling political ideologies. Market, capital, money, and all material incentives were taken as feudalist and capitalist corruptions. Today, however, many Chinese (for good and for bad) value money-orientation, capitalism, professionalism, knowledge, innovation, creativity, individualism, quality of life, and "sex and the city." Why were such values as money-orientation and individualism not valued during the Maoist era ( 1949-76)? Because these and many other values were "suppressed," "beaten," "jailed," and "destroyed."
Hofstede's original IBM data collection was "held twice, around 1968 and around 1972" (Hofstede 1980, 1 1) in which China was not included.
Had the data also been gathered in China at that time, the index of China would be fundamentally different from what is "estimated" today (see
"estimated" index about Chinese culture in Hofstede and Hofstede 2005).
China's Cultural Revolution is used here to illustrate the ups and downs of Chinese values in one period of the life of Chinese culture. A look at the development of Chinese culture and society from a historical perspective seems to support Rokeach's (1973) proposition that no values are time free.
We can identify numerous "moments" of the life
of Chinese culture where some values are shared temporarily while other values come and go.
Culture's internal change mechanism
(yin-yang) is one reason. Other reasons include the impacts of changes in ecological environments, ideological preferences, social systems and institutions, globalization and foreign direct investment, technologies, and contingencies (e.g., epidemics, wars). To study the "moment" of culture requires a serious scrutiny of national culture from a change perspective.
"Change" is not a new term in the study of organizational culture, but the change perspective has been extremely underdeveloped in the research on national culture and international cross- cultural management. A fundamental reason lies in the static "onion" ap- proach to culture that asserts that the core of the "onion"
(values and beliefs) is stable over time.
1
This inner core also supposedly determines the layers of the "onion" (behaviors and artifacts). However, the relationship between values and beliefs on one side, and behaviors and artifacts on the other, is a dynamic one. Not only are behaviors shaped by beliefs and values, but they can proactively shape new beliefs and values, thereby germinating the pro- cess of culture change.
Bern's (1970) research on cognitive and behavioral foundations of beliefs relates directly to this key point. A fundamental finding is that beliefs follow behaviors.
Citing Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance, Bern explained that: [If] an individual is induced to engage in behavior inconsistent with his beliefs or attitudes, he will experience the discomfort of "cognitive dissonance," which will motivate him to seek a resolution of that inconsistency. One way he can do this is to convince himself that he actually believes in what he has done, that he actually holds the beliefs or attitudes implied by his behavior.
(1970,54-55) Bern concluded that "one of the most effective ways to 'change the hearts and minds of men' is to change their behavior" (1970,
54). Hofstede (1980, 2001) made a passing reference on this point without deeper investigation into the implications of Bern's (1970) research finding (beliefs following behaviors) for cross-cultural theory building in the age of globalization:
When cultures interact with each other, a behavioral change process begins which, in turn, eventually ignites a value change process among the interacting cultures. Studying the changing nature of culture does not reject the notion of stabilty.
Rokeach argued:
"If values were completely stable, individual and social change would be impossible.

If values were completely unstable, continuity of human personality and society would be impossible. Any conception of human values, if it is to be fruitful, must be able to account for the enduring character of values as well as for their changing character"
(1973, 5-6).
Instead of refuting the notion of stability, we need to put it in a larger dynamic context, seeing stability and change as the yin and yang of culture, which create, encompass, and succeed each other over time. Relying on context-free and time-free cultural indexes to understand culture would make our cross- cultural scholarship stagnate
at Stereotypie levels, regardless of the degree of sophistication used to construct such indexes. The discussions so far allow us to craft a new metaphor for understanding the dynamics of culture.
Culture can be compared to an ocean. In a given context at a given time, we identify visible values and behaviors just like we identify visible wave patterns on the surface of the ocean.
Nevertheless, the culture we see at this moment does not represent the totality and the entire life process of that culture. The ocean embraces not just visible wave pat- terns on its surface
(compared to visible cultural values and behaviors) but also numerous ebbs and flows underneath of amazing depth
(comparable to "hibernating," unseen and unknown cultural values and behaviors).
Given internal mechanisms (yin-yang) and external forces
(e.g., globalization, institutional, economic, technological, situational factors), invisible and "un- conscious" values and behaviors (ebbs and flows) beneath the water surface can be stimulated, powered, activated, promoted, and legitimized to come up to the ocean's surface to become the visible and guiding value patterns at the next historical moment.
For example, the spirit of Chinese capitalism had long been perceived as something that belonged only to the Chinese diaspora rather than to mainland "Communist" China. However, Deng Xiaoping's famous tour in southern China in early 1992 and his slogan "To get rich is glorious!" catalyzed an enormous cultural change process in mainland China, making the spirit of
Chinese capitalism an integral and essential part of today's "Communist" China.
The “onion” paradigm was based on a cold war mentality. Now that the age of globalization has arrived, the onion paradigm becomes less useful. When multicultural nations are present everywhere, a cultural collision becomes impossible.
FANG prof of Business Administration @ Stockholm University School of Business, Sweden
2k6
Tony-internationally respected researcher in cross-cultural Management and Chinese Business Studies, currently leading an international research team to conduct a global project entitled Yin Yang: A New Perspective on
Culture” the purpose of the project is to adopt a holistic, dynamic, and dialectical (Yin Yang) paradigm to study the dynamics of culture and management behavior in the age of globalization; worked as Shipbuilding Technical
Superintendent and Ship Investment manager for Chinese and Scandinavian shipping companies; also worked as a seaman (chief engineer assistant) working onboard large multipurpose cargo container vessel trading from China to
Europe and vice versa; FROM ONION TO OCEAN: Paradox and Change in National Cultures; INTERNATIONAL
STUDIES OF MANAGEMENT AND ORGANIZATION, vol. 35, no. 4, Winter 2005-6, pp. 71-90 http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/40397646.pdf?acceptTC=true&jpdConfirm=true
Understanding the new identity of national culture in the era of globalization
How to understand the new identity of national cultures in the age of globalization is the third theme. We discussed the "onion" earlier. One additional point is that the "onion" way of seeing culture is a product of the cold war era during which national cultures were like "black boxes"
( self-contained, tangible, and rigid "onions" doing.
).
Few cultures knew what other cultures were thinking and
Within this cold war context, we genuinely see the courage and foresight of Hofstede's (1980) Culture's Consequences. The original empirical data on which this work was grounded were collected in the middle of the cold war (around 1968 and 1972). In an age without the
Internet and e-mail but with cold war sentiments and separations, Hofstede conducted his unique empirical investigations at IBM subsidiaries in fifty-three countries and regions By measuring "distances" between a large number of "black boxes," Hofstede masterfully succeeded in convincing the cross-cultural community of the importance of national cultural differences. Moreover, Hofstede revo- lutionarily challenged the universal applicability of the then U.S.-dominated management theories (Hofstede 1993). By focusing on cultural differences among nationstates, Hofstede (1980) historically contributed to cross-cultural theory building in his times and to the awakening of the minds of practitioners to cultural differences across national borders.
With the end of the cold war and even during the early days of modern globalization of industries, technology, capital, human resources, and information
in much of the 1990s, it was, however, not the message of "The Globalization of Markets" (Levitt 1983) but, rather, that of Culture's Consequences (Hof- stede 1980) that attracted the most attention.
Exotic, sensational, shocking, and

bizarre cultural differences of all kinds were heard and experienced when encountering people from different "black boxes." significance of the
Hofstede paradigm,
Here we also see the which predicts the collisions of national cultures.
But the question now is: What do national cultures look like today after numerous
"collisions," "clashes," and "conflicts" with one another? Today, we have entered the era of globalization, which has fundamentally changed our cross-cultural milieu. Globalization in its modern form is not a passing trend but, rather, a brandnew international system that has replaced the cold war system, as it embodies the spread and integration of capital, technol- ogy, information, and people across national borders
(Friedman 1999).
One of the most significant consequences of globalization is that national cultures are not rigid "black boxes" any longer but are becoming increasingly transparent, fluid, elastic, virtual, and mobile.
Foreign direct investment (FDI), the Internet and mobile technology, and so forth, are increasingly connecting us and creating shared experiences no matter where, when, or who we are.
If we accept that culture is learned and not inherited, and that it derives from one's social environment, not from one's genes
(Hofstede 1991, 5), we can see that increasingly shared and learned experience of borderless today's education, information, markets, capital, products, and services created and nurtured by globalization and new technology legitimizes the necessity and urgency to research the new identity of national culture.
Today's unprecedented interactions between nations create behavioral changes in respective nations, which, in turn, bring about changes in values and beliefs in these nations
, if reasoned from Bern's (1970) theory that behaviors can influence beliefs. Multinational firms, often carriers of their own national values, collide, in certain contexts at certain points, with the local values and traditions. But few cultures die because of cultural collisions. Culture survives, and life goes on. More important, if we perceive culture as having a life of its own, we will see that national cultures do not seem to stop learning.
Foreign firms interact with and learn from the local environment and simultaneously their own national values and corporate practices to the local bring market, thereby contributing to the cultural change process on both sides.
A specific culture learns not only from its forebears as an extension of old traditions but also from its dynamic interactions with other cultures to give birth to "new traditions," new beliefs, and new behaviors.
This argument is, in effect, in line with the theory of Salk that "negotiating culture" (Brannen and 2000) is, new culture creation/negotiation/formation through interactions between different national cultures, although the theory was originally introduced in organizational settings Brazil has been portrayed in the literature as a polychronic culture where punctuality and fixed schedules are not regarded as important. Northern Brazilian areas such as Salvador may display such a polychronic propensity, but in places such as São Paulo, Curitiba, and Porto Alegre, the three large cities in southern Brazil, businesspeople are getting increasingly conscious about time, planning, and scheduling. An important reason is that the southern regions of Brazil are more exposed to the process of globalization and foreign direct investment than are other regions. As a result of increasing interactions with multinational corporations, many of which are relatively monochronic (planning, scheduling, and punctuality) in their ways of doing business, businesspeople in São Paulo, Curitiba, and Porto
Alegre are becoming more monochronic. Businesses frequently emphasize monochronic behavior even if only Brazilian businesspeople are involved. In Salvador, it is acceptable to be one or even two hours late for a business meeting, because such a delay is expected. But today if you tend to arrive one to two hours late for a business meeting in São Paulo, you would not be considered serious and sincere. Nay lor observed:
"Virtually every nation-state of the world is a multicultural one made up of a number of groups. ... As cultural groups increase their interactions and dependencies, every one of them will have to change some of their beliefs and behaviors"
(1996, 93, 208). opposite components that interact with each other to form a dynamic and changing unity.
The yin-yang thinking implies that everything embraces
It is useful to borrow the concept of "cultural groups" from sociology (Nay lor 1996) to study national cultures in terms of the dynamic interplays between various cultural groups within and across national boundaries in the era of globalization.
Individuals, institutions, organizations, brands, professional communities, civil societies, ethnic groups, borderless cultural symbols, emerging global culture
(Bird and Stevens 2003),
even virtual figures, and so forth, can all be potential cultural groupings for studying the dynamics of national cultures.
International executives who have been educated and socialized in various MBA programs that are increasingly similar throughout the world represent an example of a cultural grouping.
In today's globalized world of cross-cultural management, cultural groupings are becoming increasingly powerful and mobile, exerting influences both within and beyond politically defined national boundaries.
The new identity of national culture may be understood as a product of the dynamic interplays between four major culture groupings: (1) nationality or nation-state-specific

culture grouping, which is an arguably diminishingly relevant culture grouping; (2) region-specific or ethnic-specific culture grouping, which is an increasingly important culture grouping shared by people regardless of nationality; (3) organization- and industry-specific culture grouping, which is an increasingly important culture grouping shared by people of the same organization or industry regardless of nationality; and (4) global culture grouping, which is an increasingly important culture grouping that can be initiated by any individual or community and shared by self-selected memberships globally, irrespective of nationality, such as the culture of global professional and business communities (see Bird and Stevens 2003).
Will globalization lead to nations becoming more and more alike? Yes and No. Yes, because, increasingly, nations are sharing a basic characteristic: They are exposed to and embrace various cultural groupings in the globalized world.
Globalization has pushed markets toward "global commonality"
(Levitt 1983, 93). Many firms standardize their policies, procedures, and human resource practices across nations (Punnett and Shenkar 2003).
No, because the converging forces of globalization would produce myriads of new types of differences among nations than those based on nationality or nation-state. The scale, size, configuration, continuity, pervasiveness, strengths, mobility, and radiations of various cultural groupings in various national cultures will remain different, and the ways in which they interplay will remain different.
Culture should be likened to an Ocean, a region where there are no boundaries, forever changing, rather than the static onion. Employing this method will enrich the debates and discussions over the dynamics of culture.
FANG prof of Business Administration @ Stockholm University School of Business, Sweden
2k6
Tony-internationally respected researcher in cross-cultural Management and Chinese Business Studies, currently leading an international research team to conduct a global project entitled Yin Yang: A New Perspective on
Culture” the purpose of the project is to adopt a holistic, dynamic, and dialectical (Yin Yang) paradigm to study the dynamics of culture and management behavior in the age of globalization; worked as Shipbuilding Technical
Superintendent and Ship Investment manager for Chinese and Scandinavian shipping companies; also worked as a seaman (chief engineer assistant) working onboard large multipurpose cargo container vessel trading from China to
Europe and vice versa; FROM ONION TO OCEAN: Paradox and Change in National Cultures; INTERNATIONAL
STUDIES OF MANAGEMENT AND ORGANIZATION, vol. 35, no. 4, Winter 2005-6, pp. 71-90 http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/40397646.pdf?acceptTC=true&jpdConfirm=true
Conclusions
The bipolarized and static paradigm of national culture and the "onion" metaphor symbolizing this paradigm were critiqued in this paper. The issues raised and critiques offered of Hofstede's works apply equally to the closely related research streams in the bipolar or dimensional tradition of studying national cultures (e.g., House et al. 2004; Trompenaars 1994
). In the era of globalization, merely following the bipolar paradigm by employing different cultural dimensions and increasing the number of societies to be investigated does not seem to be able to advance our knowledge of national culture and international cross-cultural management. To enrich the current debates on dynamics of culture, I proposed a dialectical approach to the study of national cultures. At the core of this approach lies a paradoxical view of culture and human behavior. Yin-yang forms the philosophical foundation of this new approach.
Three themes leading to new research directions have been discussed in order to understand (1) the paradoxical nature of culture, (2) the "moment" of culture, and (3) the new identity of national culture in the era of globalization. It has been proposed that if there exist . . values and "+V,," "+V2," "+V3," "+V4," "+V5," ."+Vn" behaviors in a culture, there must coexist "-Vp" "-V2," "-V3," "-V4," "-V5," " . . ."-V values and behaviors in the same culture depending on situation, context, and time.
This analysis
has also suggested a shift of our research focus from the traditionally defined notion of national culture to the dynamic interplays among various cultural groupings within and beyond national boundaries to capture the new identity of national culture in the era of globalization.
The new identity of national culture is seen as a product of the dynamic interplays between four major culture groupings: (1) nationality or nation-state-specific culture grouping; (2) regionspecific or ethnic-specific culture grouping; (3) organization- and industry-specific culture grouping; and (4) global culture grouping, which is an increasingly important culture grouping. In this paper, culture is likened to an ocean. The ocean has no boundaries, and its various waters are both separate and shared, both different and similar, and both independent and dependent.
Let us end this
analysis by calling this way of seeing culture an "ocean" metaphor of culture.

Author Qualifications
Associate Professor Tinsley looks at same-sex desire in Caribbean literature
Associate Professor of English Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley is teaching a freshmen seminar on Post-
Colonial and Anti-Racist Coming of Age Narratives this fall. Her introductory bio for students notes that when Tinsley was a girl, she wanted to be a writer, dancer, and mother--all of which goals, Tinsley writes, she still finds exciting. In recent years, the California native has performed with the Twin Cities modern
Indian dance company Ananya Dance Theatre. She has a baby daughter. And last summer she published her first book, the elegantly incisive Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism Between Women in Caribbean
Literature (Duke University Press).
"The book started in some ways from an answer I got in 1996," Tinsley recalls, "when I asked a prominent professor of Caribbean lit about titles in Caribbean 'lesbian' literature. She told me that that didn't exist in the Caribbean, probably because homosexuality didn't exist in Africa until European colonization. I knew all of that was wrong but couldn't prove it . . . and so started to be on the lookout for evidence not only that same-sex desire existed and had been given words in the Caribbean, but that there was a longrooted tradition of both."
Moving from early 20th century Afro-Surinamese mati song performances to contemporary Caribbean-
Canadian poet Dionne Brand, Tinsley investigates texts in which women writers "redeploy" woman-asnature tropes to imagine the landscape and other women belonging not to a colonial master but to themselves. During the writing process, Tinsley met some unique challenges: "First, really thinking more and more deeply about what 'woman' means in an African diaspora context," Tinsley explains, "how chattel slavery changes the stakes of reclaiming that word, how radically and powerfully it becomes divorced from biology. And, second, rethinking what it means to write academic prose: trying to find pleasure in the prose, to look for how to make a sentence beautiful . . . to write creatively about creative texts."
That she has succeeded is clear in the words of prominent Caribbean anthropologist Gloria Wekker, who calls Thiefing Sugar "[l]uscious, abundant, and rich." Next up for Tinsley, who was promoted with tenure last spring, is the monograph Desiring the Blue Lagoon: Sea Crossings and Fluid Identities in Caribbean
Literature , which focuses on contemporary Caribbean authors. She is also venturing into fiction writing, with a novel in progress about women shipbuilders in World War II.

Possible Aesthetics
Ships were the living means by which the points within that Atlantic world were joined. They were mobile elements that stood for the shifting spaces in between the fixed places that they connected. . . . For all these reasons, the ship is the first of the novel chronotypes pre supposed by my attempts to rethink modernity versus the history of the black Atlantic. — Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic
Water is the first thing in my imagination. Over the reaches of the eyes at Guaya when
I was a little girl, I knew that there was still more water. All beginning in water, all ending in water. Turquoise, aquamarine, deep green, deep blue, ink blue, navy, blueblack cerulean water. . . . Water is the first thing in my memory. The sea sounded like a thousand secrets, all whispered at the same time. In the daytime it was indistinguishable to me from air. . . . The same substance that carried voices or smells, music or emotion. — Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return
I, and my lesbian sisters and gay brothers . . . are not a new fashion. . . . We return to the sea and the shores and once upon a time, which transposes into this time, which it always was. . . . the past simultaneously forever embedded in the present, in the pain and inevitable horrors confronted by conscientious unblinking memory, in the tragedies and occasional triumphs of history always raveled by so much needless suffering, by the unbearable human misery that we must not, for our collective sakes and the continued growth of this body we call “humanity,” ever be denied. – Thomas
Glave, Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent
And larger and larger and ever larger than me, O sea: water: waves and foam. . . . How the sea would take I and wrap I deep in it. How it would drown I, mash I up, wash I into bits. . . . And so I does say now that I know the sea this same sea like I does know the back of me hand, says I: these currents, these waves, these foams. . . . Let this sea not take I, but let it talk to I. Let it sing. The sea, the sea. Yes, water. Waves. Wetness, poundsurf, that I does love. — Thomas Glave, Words to Our Now

Cards
The ocean is a unique site of paradox and irony. It embodies a site of dereliction and exploitation but also a site of extreme beauty and resistance to this exploitation.
Conceptualizing the ocean as such allows for an interrogation of the formation of queer identities and the reasoning behind it.
TINSLEY
Dept of English, African American and African Studies @ University of Minnesota
2k8
Omise’eke Natasha-; BLACK ATLANTIC, QUEER ATLANTIC: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage; GLQ: A
Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol 14, Number 2-3, pp. 191-215; http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v014/14.2-3.tinsley.pdf
And water, ocean water is the first thing in the unstable confluence of race, nationality, sexuality, and gender
I want to imagine
here.
This wateriness is metaphor, and history too. The brown-skinned, fluid-bodied experiences now called blackness and queerness surfaced in intercontinental, maritime contacts hundreds of years ago
: in the seventeenth century, in the Atlantic Ocean. You see, the black Atlantic has always been the queer Atlantic.
What Paul Gilroy never told us is how queer relationships were forged on merchant and pirate ships
, where Europeans and Africans slept with fellow — and I mean same-sex — sailors.
And, more powerfully and silently
, how queer relationships emerged in the holds of slave ships
that crossed between West Africa and the Caribbean archipelago. I began to learn this black Atlantic when I was studying relationships between women in Suriname and delved into the etymology of the word mati
. This is the word
Creole women use for their female lovers: figuratively mi mati is “my girl,” but literally it means mate, as in shipmate — she who survived the Middle Passage with me.
Sedimented layers of experience lodge in this small word. During the
Middle Passage,
as colonial chronicles, oral tradition, and anthropological studies tell us, captive African women created erotic bonds with other women in the sex-segregated holds, and captive
African men created bonds with other men. In so doing, they resisted the commodification of their bought and sold bodies by feeling and feeling for their cooccupants on these ships.
I evoke this history now not to claim the slave ship as the origin of the black queer Atlantic.
The ocean obscures all origins, and neither ship nor Atlantic can be a place of origin.
Not of blackness, though perhaps Africans first became negros and negers during involuntary sea transport; not of queerness, though perhaps some Africans were first intimate with same-sex shipmates then. Instead, in relationship to blackness, queerness, and black queerness, the Atlantic is the site of
what the anthropologist Kale Fajardo calls
“crosscurrents.” Oceans
Indigenous Peoples, fisherpeople, seafarers, sailors, tourists, workers, and athletes. Oceans
and seas and seas are important sites for differently situated people.
are sites of inequality and exploitation — resource extraction, pollution, militarization, atomic testing, and genocide. At the same time, oceans and seas are sites of beauty and pleasure — solitude, sensuality, desire, and resistance. Oceanic and maritime realms are also spaces of transnational and diasporic communities, heterogeneous trajectories of globalizations, and other racial, gender, class, and sexual formations. Conceptualizing the complex possibilities and power dynamics of the maritime, thinking through transoceanic crosscurrents.
Fajardo posits the necessity of
These are theoretical and ethnographic borderlands at sea, where elements or currents of historical, conceptual, and embodied maritime experience come together to transform racialized, gendered, classed, and sexualized selves. The queer black Atlantic
I discuss here navigates these crosscurrents as it brings together enslaved and African, brutality and desire, genocide and resistance. Here, fluidity is not an easy metaphor for queer and racially hybrid identities but for concrete, painful, and liberatory experience.
It is

the kind of queer of color space that Roderick Ferguson calls for in Aberrations in Black, one that
reflects the materiality of black queer experience while refusing its transparency
.2
The ocean itself is a source of evidence in this round. It whispers the stories of the diasporic populations, telling their stories and pain and feelings as they were transformed into enslaved people. We must collapse the lines between the
“documented and intuited, material and metaphoric, past and present” to allow for the voices of the oppressed populations to be heard.
TINSLEY
Dept of English, African American and African Studies @ University of Minnesota
2k8
Omise’eke Natasha-; BLACK ATLANTIC, QUEER ATLANTIC: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage; GLQ: A
Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol 14, Number 2-3, pp. 191-215; http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v014/14.2-3.tinsley.pdf
If the black queer Atlantic brings together such long-lowing history, why is black queer studies situated as a dazzlingly new “discovery” in academia — a hybrid, mermaidlike imagination that has yet to find its land legs? In the last five years, black queer and queer of color critiques have navigated innovative directions in African diaspora studies as scholars like Ferguson and E. Patrick Johnson push the discipline to map intersections between racialized and sexualized bodies.
Unfortunately, Eurocentric queer theorists and heterocentric race theorists have engaged their discourses of resistant black queerness as a new fashion — a glitzy, postmodern invention borrowed and adapted from Euro-American queer theory.
In contrast,
as interventions like the New-York Historical
Society’s exhibit Slavery in New York demonstrate, the Middle Passage and slave experience continue to be evoked as authentic originary sites of African diaspora identities and discourses.
3
This stark split between the “newest” and “oldest” sites of blackness relects larger political trends that polarize queer versus diasporic and immigrant issues by moralizing and domesticating sexuality as an undermining of tradition, on the one hand, while racializing and publicizing global southern diasporas as threats to the integrity of a nation of
(fictively)
European immigrants, on the other.
My discussion here proposes to intervene in this polarization by bridging imaginations of the “choice” of black queerness and the forced migration of the Middle Passage.
What would it mean for both queer and African diaspora studies to take seriously the possibility that, as forcefully as the Atlantic and Caribbean flow together, so too do the turbulent fluidities of blackness and queerness? What new geography
— or as Fajardo proposes, oceanography — of sexual, gendered, transnational, and racial identities might emerge through reading for black queer history and theory in the traumatic dislocation of the Middle Passage?
Atlantic oceanographies
4 In what follows, I explore such queer black by comparing two narrative spaces. One is a site where an imagination of this Atlantic struggles to emerge: in academic theorizing, specifically
in water metaphors of African diaspora and queer theory
. The second is a site where such imaginations emerge through struggle
: in Caribbean creative writing, specifically in Ana- Maurine Lara’s tale of queer migration in Erzulie’s Skirt (2006) and Dionne Brand’s relections on the Middle Passage in A Map to the
Door of No Return (2001). I turn to these literary texts as a queer, unconventional, and imaginative archive of the black Atlantic.
5 And the literary texts turn to ocean waters themselves as an archive, an ever-present, ever-reformulating record of the unimaginable.
Lara and Brand plumb the archival ocean materially, as space that churns with physical remnants, dis(re)membered bodies of the Middle Passage
, and they plumb it metaphorically, as opaque space to convey the drowned, disremembered, ebbing and lowing histories of violence and healing in the African diaspora.
“Water overflows with memory,”
writes M. Jacqui
Alexander, delving into the Middle Passage in Pedagogies of Crossing. “Emotional memory. Bodily memory. Sacred memory.”6
Developing a black feminist epistemology to uncover submerged histories — particularly those stories of Africans’ forced ocean crossings that traditional historiography cannot validate
— Alexander eloquently argues that searchers must explore outside narrow conceptions of the “factual” to get there. Such explorations would involve muddying divisions between documented and intuited, material and metaphoric, past and present so that “who is remembered — and how — is continually being transformed through a web of interpretive systems . . .

collapsing, ultimately, the demarcation of the prescriptive past, present, and future of linear time.”
7 While Alexander searches out such crossings in Afro-Atlantic ceremony, Lara and Brand explore similarly fluid embodied-imaginary, historical-contemporary spaces through the literal and figurative passages of their historical fictions.
The subaltern can speak in submarine space, but it is hard to hear her or his underwater voice, whispering
(as Brand writes) a thousand secrets that at once wash closer and remain opaque, resisting closure.
The Atlantic Ocean is the true sight of the creation of the modern, queer black identity. The other team ignores this integral portion of identities, stripping away the very being of many individuals. It is also a deliberate erasing of history and the phantom ships that brought oppression to this country.
TINSLEY
Dept of English, African American and African Studies @ University of Minnesota
2k8
Omise’eke Natasha-; BLACK ATLANTIC, QUEER ATLANTIC: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage; GLQ: A
Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol 14, Number 2-3, pp. 191-215; http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v014/14.2-3.tinsley.pdf
In the past fifteen years postcolonial studies effected sea changes in scholarly images of the global south, smashing and wearing away essentialist conceptions of race and nationality with the insistent pounding force of ocean waters.
Rigorously theorizing identities that have always already been in lux and rethinking black “insularity” from England and Manhattan to Martinique and Cuba, imaginative captains of Atlantic
and Caribbean studies have called prominently on oceanic metaphors.
conceptual geographies figure oceans and seas as a presence that is history, a history that is present.
In
the watershed
Their
The Black Atlantic, Gilroy evokes the Atlantic as the trope through which he imagines the emergence of black modernities.
of Atlantic crossings underpins his engagement black
in the Union Jack is no novelty
with contemporary multiracial Britain, where the
introduced by recent immigrants
A past but a continuation of centuries of transoceanic interchanges. Calling on the ship as the first image of this black
Atlantic, Gilroy begins by stipulating that ships and oceans are not merely abstract figures but “cultural and political units” that “refer us back to the middle passage, to the half- remembered micro politics of the slave trade.”
8
He underscores that seminal African diaspora figures
like Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Robert Wedder- burn, and Crispus Attucks worked with and as sailors
(why omit Harriet Jacobs, Mary Seacole, and other sailing women?),
and notes that the physical mobility enabled by the ocean was fundamental to their intellectual motility. Yet while many of these masculine sailor-intellectuals resurface in
Gilroy’s later discussions, the history of their sea voyages does not.
the Atlantic itself — as concrete maritime space rather than conceptual principle for remapping blackness — drop out of his text immediately
Both ships and
after this paragraph.
Neither the Middle Passage nor the Atlantic appear in the index, remaining phantom metaphors rather than concrete historical presences. Gilroy’s ghost ships and dark waters traverse
five memorable pages of his introduction, then slip into nowhereness.
Sexuality and racial experience are intertwined in the context of discussions of the black diaspora and the Middle Passage. Speaking about sex and sexuality is inherently a discussion about race and the struggle of diasporic populations.
TINSLEY
Dept of English, African American and African Studies @ University of Minnesota
2k8
Omise’eke Natasha-; BLACK ATLANTIC, QUEER ATLANTIC: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage; GLQ: A
Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol 14, Number 2-3, pp. 191-215; http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v014/14.2-3.tinsley.pdf
In the equally influential The Repeating Island, Antonio Benítez-Rojo navigates contemporary Caribbean identity through a postmodern theorization of the sea as the ultimate space of diffusion, a watery body whose history continually splashes into the present
. The “geographic accident” of the Antilles —

situated where Atlantic meets Caribbean and migrants from Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas cross and converge — beats out the rhythm of repeating histories, repeating islands. Mining the metaphoric possibilities of the sea
, Benítez-Rojo finds that it gives the entire area, including its continental foci, the character of an archipelago, that is, a discontinuous conjunction
(of what?): unstable condensations, turbulences, whirlpools, claps of bubbles, frayed seaweed, sunken galleons, crashing breakers, lying fish, seagull squawks, down- pours, nighttime phosphorescences, eddies and pools, uncertain voyages of signiication.
9
Ocean and sea remain at once insistently present and insistently abstracted
as he flourishingly, intriguingly bypasses “real” migrant trajectories to chart figurative marine confluences, alternative trajectories of globalization that pass through Caribbean history to connect “the Niger with the Mississippi, the China
Sea with the Orinoco, the Parthenon with a fried food stand in an alley in Paramaribo.” Spiraling maps where the pre-, trans-, and postnational intersect, Benítez-Rojo’s voyages are shipless crossings where “the peoples of the sea, or better, the Peoples of the Sea proliferate incessantly while differentiating themselves from one another, traveling together toward the infinite.”
10
Appearing and disappearing as briefly as the ship, sexuality also surfaces music
in Gilroy’s concluding discussion of in the black Atlantic. But here again, sexuality (like seafaring) is not so much an embodied experience as a metaphor. Sex, it turns out, is almost as omnipresent in black Atlantic storytelling as salt water on an island. Initially, Gilroy places narratives of sexuality in competition with histories of race, as he notes that
“conflictual representation of sexuality has vied with the discourse of racial emancipation to constitute the inner core of black expressive cultures.”
11 But later, tension between these two melts away as Gilroy concludes that, actually, talking about sex is another way to talk about race.
Black love stories in popular songs and elsewhere, he writes, are
“narratives of love and loss [that] transcode other forms of yearning and mourning associated with histories of dispersal and exile.”12
Sex is not about sex, then; it is about pain. While the Atlantic — rather than remain primarily a site of diasporic trauma — is optimistically metaphorized as space that expands the horizons of black consciousness, sex is pessimistically metaphorized as a sorrow song that never yields deep pleasure.
Gilroy’s black Atlantic seems equally resistant to victimizing and sexualizing its mariners, as if both impulses were too much part of colonial discourse to warrant sustained attention.
If Gilroy’s
Atlantic is frigid, Benítez-Rojo’s Caribbean overflows with hyperfeeling female sexuality. Recentering the resistantly nonphallic Peoples of the
Sea, Benítez-Rojo foregrounds a vaginalized Caribbean as he proclaims:
The Atlantic is today the Atlantic (the navel of capitalism) because Europe
, in its mercantilist laboratory, conceived of the project of inseminating the Caribbean womb with the blood of Africa; the Atlantic is today the Atlantic . . . because it is the painfully delivered child of the Caribbean, whose vagina was stretched between continental clamps.
. . . After the blood and salt water spurts, quickly sew up torn flesh and apply the antiseptic tinctures, the gauze and surgical plaster; then the febrile wait through the forming of a scar: suppurating, always suppurating.13
Here sexual violence and painful reproduction are simultaneously abstracted and reinscribed in regional imaginations; projected onto the water by which Caribbean women arrived in the archipelago, they conceive a disturbing image that spreads women’s metaphoric legs in unsettling ways.
Yet the suppurating wound can heal, almost magically. A few pages later, the vaginal sea opens into a metaphor for liberatory pleasure and pleasurable liberation as
Benítez-Rojo imagines the region’s femininity as “its lux, its diffuse sensuality, its generative force, its capacity to nourish and conserve (juices, spring, pollen, rain, seed, shoot, ritual sacriice).”14 Bleeding, orgasming, or both, Benítez-Rojo’s cunnic Caribbean overexposes the sexualized bodies that Gilroy denies.
Like the sea, the space between women’s legs is at once insistently present and insistently ethereal; like the sea, the space between women’s legs becomes a metaphor to mine.

During the Middle Passage, same-sex bonds of friendship, pain, and feeling became forms of resistance against their condition. These relationships were carried by the currents of the Atlantic and formed in the eddies of the Caribbean. These “queer” relationships allowed for the oppressed to reclaim their identities and resist dehumanization.
TINSLEY
Dept of English, African American and African Studies @ University of Minnesota
2k8
Omise’eke Natasha-; BLACK ATLANTIC, QUEER ATLANTIC: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage; GLQ: A
Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol 14, Number 2-3, pp. 191-215; http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v014/14.2-3.tinsley.pdf
These tropes of the black Atlantic, of Peoples of the Sea
, do call to me as powerful enunciations of crosscurrents of African diaspora identity, and
I evoke
them in respect and solidarity. And yet as Gilroy
, Benítez-Rojo, Edouard Glissant, and others call on maritime metaphors without maritime histories and evoke sexualized bodies as figures rather than experiences, their writing out of materiality stops short of the most radical potential of such oceanic imaginations.
15
There are other Atlantic and
Caribbean histories that these scholars could have evoked to make sense of the present, other material details of maritime crossings they could have drawn on to make their metaphors richer conceptual tools. As Africans became diasporic,
Atlantic and Caribbean, sex and sexuality did not only impact imaginations; they impacted bodies. Not at all an opening to infinite possibilities, the sea was initially a site of painful fluidities for many Africans. The first sight of the ocean was often a vision of fear
, as Equiano remembers when slave traders marched him to the coast: I was beyond measure astonished at this, as I had never before seen any water larger than a pond or a rivulet, and my surprise was mingled with no small fear. . . . The first object which saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast was the sea, and a slave ship, which was then riding at anchor, and waiting for its cargo. These filled me with astonishment, which was soon converted to terror.16
Once loaded onto the slave ships, Africans became fluid bodies under the force of brutality. Tightly or loosely packed in sexsegregated holds — men chained together at the ankles while women were sometimes left unchained
— surrounded by churning, unseen waters, these brutalized bodies themselves became liquid, oozing. Ship’s surgeon Alexander Falconbridge records days when “wet and blowing weather having occasioned the portholes to be shut and the grating to be covered, luxes and fevers among the negroes ensued. . . . The deck was so covered with the blood and mucus which had proceeded from them in consequence of the lux, that it resembled a slaughterhouse.”17 Lara adds to this imagination in a character’s vision of a slave ship: “Women’s menstrual blood stained the floor around her, pus crusting at the edges of the chattel wounds. . . . She could feel her body rise in a wave of urine and blood, the stench so wretched as to make her choke on her own breath.”18
On this Atlantic, then, black body waters
, corporeal efluvia, and the stains of gendered and reproductive bodies were among the first sites of colonization. But this bloody Atlantic was also the site of collaboration and resistance.
In the early eighteenth century, ship captains like John Newton and James
Barbot repeatedly record with horror how despite such conditions slaves conspired to rebel against captors. At the same time, unnamed rebellions took place not in violent but in erotic resistance, in interpersonal relationships enslaved Africans formed with those imprisoned
and oozing beside them.
Sally and Richard Price’s research on Saramacca maroons documents mati as
“a highly charged volitional relationship . . . that dates back to the Middle Passage
— matis were originally
‘shipmates,’ those who had survived the journey out from Africa together . . . those who had experienced the trauma of enslavement and transport together.
Colonial chronicles suggest that shipmate relationships were prominent
”19
in other parts of the Caribbean as well. Médéric Moreau de Saint-Méry reports mati-like partnerships between enslaved women in prerevolutionary Haiti in his
Description . . . de l’Isle Saint Domingue (1797), and in The History . . . of the British West-Indies (1794) Bryan Edwards remarks: “This is a striking circumstance; the term shipmate is understood
among [West Indian slaves] as signifying a relationship of the most endearing nature; perhaps as recalling the time when the sufferers were cut off together from their common country and kindred, and awakening reciprocal sympathy from the remembrance of mutual afliction.”
20
Expanding these observations, the anthropologist Gloria Wekker notes the significance of bonds between shipmates throughout the Afro-
Atlantic:
In different parts of the Diaspora the relationship between people who came over to the “New” World on the same ship remained a peculiarity of this

experience.
The Brazilian “malungo,” the Trinidadian “malongue,” the Haitian
“batiment” and the Surinamese “sippi” and “mati” are all examples of this special, non-biological bond between two people of the same sex.
21 As fragmentarily recorded here, the emergence of intense shipmate relationships in the water-rocked, no-person’sland of slave holds created a black Atlantic same- sex eroticism: a feeling of, feeling for the kidnapped that asserted the sentience of the bodies that slavers attempted to transform into brute matter. This Atlantic and these erotic relationships are neither metaphors nor sources of disempowerment. Instead, they are one way that fluid black bodies refused to accept that the liquidation of their social selves — the colonization of oceanic and body waters — meant the liquidation of their sentient selves.
Some mati and malungo were probably sexual connections, others not. Yet regardless of whether intimate sexual contact took place between enslaved
Africans in the Atlantic or after landing, relationships between shipmates read as queer relationships. Queer not in the sense of a “gay” or same-sex loving identity waiting to be excavated from the ocean floor but as a praxis of resistance.
Queer in the sense of marking disruption to the violence of normative order and powerfully so: connect- ing in ways that commodified flesh was never supposed to, loving your own kind when your kind was supposed to cease to exist, forging interpersonal connections that counteract imperial desires for Africans’ living deaths.
Reading for shipmates does not offer to clarify, to tell a documentable story of Atlantic, Caribbean, immigrant, or “gay” pasts. Instead it disrupts provocatively. Fomented in Atlantic cross- currents, black queerness itself becomes a crosscurrent through which to view hybrid, resistant subjectivities — opaquely, not transparently. Perhaps,
as Brand writes, black queers really have no ancestry except the black water.
22
But diving into this water stands to transform
African diaspora scholarship
in ways as surprising as Equiano’s first glimpse of the sea.

The alternative is to embrace La Mar, to embrace the queer slave relationships formed on the oceans and to reunite the stories of black suffering back to their source: THE
OCEAN
TINSLEY
Dept of English, African American and African Studies @ University of Minnesota
2k8
Omise’eke Natasha-; BLACK ATLANTIC, QUEER ATLANTIC: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage; GLQ: A
Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol 14, Number 2-3, pp. 191-215; http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v014/14.2-3.tinsley.pdf
La Mar is the black Atlantic in iridescent lambí
(conch), embodied and queer.
This figure that eclipses moon and stars and brings women sweet water and love is the
novel’s most eroticized character — a material body who whispers in Micaela’s ear, whose waters she enters, whose depths she longs to explore, whose sexuality is neither overexposed nor hidden.
I see her as an image of the queer black Atlantic
not primarily because she arouses the sensuality of another femi- nine character, though, nor even because her appearance to Micaela performs a femme desire that needs no masculinist gaze (à la Benítez-
Rojo) to validate its apparition. Instead
La Mar’s queerness churns silverly in her overlow, in the sea- like capacity to desire beyond the brutality of history, nationality,

enslavement, and immigration that she models for drowned shipmates and endangered yola- mates. Neither disembodied metaphor nor oozing wound, her fluid desire becomes a resistant, creative praxis that
, as Brand describes diasporic art, experiments with being “celebratory, even with the horrible,” lowing together unexpected erotic linkages even, especially, in spaces of global violence and inequity.
27 No matter what devastation she traverses
La Mar keeps desiring
, and this is the queer feeling that metaphorically and materially connects her to African diaspora immigrants past and present.
La Mar as she appears
here
is not only a mirror for black Atlantic queerness; she is a black Atlantic that mirrors queerly. Her song creates figures of comparison where terms are not equated but rather diffracted and recomposed, reflected in a broken mirror whose fractures are part of their meaning-creation.
Let me point to two examples of “mis-mirrored” terms in this passage: languages
(Spanish/English) and couples (yolabound/shipwrecked). In the second paragraph a centered, italicized Spanish-language poem — whose distinct visual arrangement recalls the vêvés (figures drawn on the ground in Voudoun ceremonies) that
La Mar sings of
— interrupts standard English prose; although the next paragraph offers an indirect, still bilingual translation (“Amor, I long for your kisses”), this translation remains notably inexact. Amplifying this chain of repetition with difference, the words of the poem are then revealed to be “really” spoken in the drowned slaves’ unrepresentable “languages that escaped the trappings of sound”
: instead of speaking two languages that mirror each other,
La Mar’s song contains
three intertwined yet unequatable lenguas, proliferating and connecting across difference with each translation. Similarly, the star-eyed lovers at the bottom of the sea — those thrown overboard during the Middle Passage without their presence being definitively liquidated
— do “twin” sea-crossing lovers Miriam and Micaela, but also do not. Miriam and Micaela remain on the waters’ surface while the iron- clad lovers remain submerged and the love of the former helps them stay afloat while the amor of the latter comforts them in their sinking.
The present repeats the past with a difference, and the spectacular figure of La Mar that joins them appears as the surplus — the overflow, the temporal and cultural gap that cannot be dissolved by their connection. La Mar whispers this in our ears, too: in queer diasporic imagining, the gap — the material difference — always matters and must be part of any figuration that makes meaningful connection possible.
The maritime metaphors of Gilroy
and Benítez-Rojo move toward a kind of closure, the Atlantic transmuting into a horizon of hybridity
and the cunnic Caribbean healing orgasmically in order to become the vehicles these authors desire for diasporic and regional identities. Yet such closure is made possible only by washing over important materialities and multiplicities in visions of diaspora and region. La Mar’s unclosable, untranslatable language of beauty and pain churns differently, crossing instead in turbulent, excessive currents of diffracting meanings.
As Micaela floats literally suspended in water between Africa, the Caribbean, and North America,
La Mar’s queer mirroring provides a medium for conceiving what it means for diasporic Africans to emerge from her waters “whole and broken”: brutalized and feeling, connected to the past and separate from it, divided from other diasporic migrants and linked to them. To think the black queer Atlantic, not only must its metaphors be mate- rially informed; they must be internally discontinuous, allowing for differences and inequalities between situated subjects that are always already part of both diaspora and queerness. They must creatively figure what Rinaldo Walcott imag- ines as
“a rethinking of community that might allow for different ways of coher- ing into some form of recognizable political entity . . . [where] we must confront singularities without the willed effort to make them cohere into oneness; we must struggle to make a community of singularities.”
28
The black Atlantic is not just any ocean, and what is queer about its fluid amor is that it is always churning, always different even from itself.

Queer theory gains its roots from the suffering of enslaved people on their voyages across the ocean. Any discussion of queer theory is a discussion of race. The queer movement is even based off of the geography of the black Caribbean. They are o single islands, but an archipelago of island chains, all linked together and united, just as the different bodies that encompass the queer community are all intertwined but separate.
TINSLEY
Dept of English, African American and African Studies @ University of Minnesota
2k8
Omise’eke Natasha-; BLACK ATLANTIC, QUEER ATLANTIC: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage; GLQ: A
Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol 14, Number 2-3, pp. 191-215; http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v014/14.2-3.tinsley.pdf
And in the last fifteen years queer theory has harnessed the repetitive, unpredictable energy of currents, waves, and foam to smash and wash into bits many I’s — from the gendered self to the sexed body, from heterocentric feminist speech to homonormative gay discourse. In this field where groundlessness is celebrated, writers also explicitly or implicitly rely on metaphors of fluidity, which provide an undercurrent for expanding formulations of gender and sexual mobility.
Judith Butler’s praise of the resistant power of drag’s fluid genders and sexualities in the pivotal Gender Trouble is echoed by many a queer theoretical text:
“Perpetual displacement constitutes a fluidity of identities that suggests an openness to resignification and recontextualization; parodic proliferation deprives hegemonic culture and its critics of the right to claim naturalized or essentialist gender identities.”
29
This proliferation multiplies the genders and sexualities explored by queer theory beyond women and men, gay and straight. They soon include
, as Eve Sedgwick puts it,
“pushy femmes, radical faeries, fantasists, drags, clones, leather folk, ladies in tuxedoes, feminist women or feminist men, masturbators, bull- daggers, divas, Snap! queens, butch bottoms, storytellers, transsexuals, aunties, wannabes.”
30
No deviant is a desert isle here, but part of an archipelago rushed together by a common sea of queerness.
Does this queer sea have a color, though?
As the cascading, un-color-coded sentences
of Butler and Sedgwick suggest,
in the early 1990s prominent queer theorists denaturalized conventional gender and sexuality while renaturalizing global northernness and unmarked whiteness, initially unreferenced as if they were as neutral as fresh water. In
both
theorists’ early genderscapes, the bodies and selves rendered fluid are first and foremost gendered and sexualized, only faintly marked by other locations — only secondarily racialized, nationalized, classed.
When Butler acknowledges that codes of (presumably white) racial purity undergird the gender norms disturbed in her initial consideration of “fluidity of identities,” she does so belatedly and between parentheses (as part of a long list of clarifications to her discussion of drag in the 1999 preface to Gender Trouble).31 Sedgwick’s list, somewhat differently, momentarily parts the waves of queer theory’s uncommented whiteness as race fades in subtly with the African American – associated terms bulldagger and Snap! queen.
Not only is this faint racialization limited to the black-white landscape of the contemporary global north, keeping terms like mahu, mati, tomboy, tongzhi unlistable, but the particularities of this possible racialization remain as unspeciied as the color of the leather favored by “leather folk” or the jacket cut of the “ladies in tuxedoes.” The list’s sheer heterogeneity sweeps the bulldagger’s racial particularities into the same washing currents as the butch bottom’s sexual particularities. theorists are innovative, rigorous scholars whose work focuses on a
These queer predominantly white global north but who do — often in introductions — acknowledge how racialization intersects the construction and deconstruc- tion of ossiied genders and sexualities.
Shortly after her list in Tendencies’ introduction, Sedgwick contends that
“a lot of the most exciting recent work around ‘queer’ spins the term outward along dimensions that can’t be subsumed under gender and sexuality at all: the ways that race, ethnicity, postcolonial national- ity criss-cross with these and other identity-constituting, identity-fracturing dis- courses.”
32 This is not her work in a text that goes on to

deftly engage Jane Aus- ten and Sigmund Freud, but she does gesture toward the importance of “other” scholars taking it up. Similarly, in the preface to the tenth anniversary edition of Gender Trouble, Butler remarks that
“racial presumptions invariably underwrite the discourse on gender in ways that need to be made explicit” that if she rewrote the book she would include a discussion of racialized sexuality. and race
, she suggests that
“the question to ask is not whether the theory of
and concedes
In thinking through performativity performativity is transposable onto race, but what happens to the theory when it tries to come to grips with race.”
33 But of course there is not just one question to ask of the meeting point between
Butler’s theory and race, and those I would pose would be different still. Namely, what happens when queer theories start with explicit formulations of racialized sexuality and sexualized race, rather than add them in after theories like performativity have already been elaborated? How does this change in point of departure change the tidal pattern of queer theory? How might it shift the field’s dominant metaphors, decentering performativity’s stages and unearthing other topoi?
“Metaphors lose their metaphoricity as they congeal through time into concepts,”
Butler aptly remarks in this preface. And in a rare autobiographical moment, the short text offers one image of literal liquidity that informs the metaphoric fluidity (threatening to congeal into a concept) in this foundational text of queer theory. Just after her discussion of performativity, Butler provides an insight into the literal starting place for Gender Trouble. Explaining how her involvement in lesbian and gay politics on the East Coast of the United States informed her writing of this academic text, she recounts: “At the same time that I was ensconced in the academy, I was also living a life outside those walls, and though Gender Trouble is an academic book, it began, for me, with a crossing-over, sitting on Rehoboth Beach, wondering whether I could link the different sides of my life.”34 Meaning “place for all,” Rehoboth is an Atlantic resort town that boasts beautiful, Caribbean – bright white sand beaches and has become one of the Northeast’s premier gay and lesbian summer getaways. As Butler suggests, it is situated at a crosscurrent: “Water, water everywhere. . . . Bounded on the east by the mighty Atlantic Ocean, and on the west by Rehoboth Bay and Indian
River Bay,” gushes a promotional Web site.35 This crosscurrent has a black Atlantic history, from the eighteenth-century docking of slave ships in Delaware’s harbors to a maritime version of the underground railroad that passed through the state’s waters in the nineteenth century. But by the late twentieth century that history had been largely washed out of sight. Over 98 percent of the city’s population is now white and, as
Alexs Pate’s West of Rehoboth depicts, people of color remain semi-invisible, concentrated in segregated neighborhoods.36 So when Butler sits at the “crossing- over” of Rehoboth Beach, the difference that prominently marked its shores would be that of sexuality — the beach-combing gay and lesbian tourists who make the resort what it is, a site of play and mobility for sexual rather than racial “others.” Now, if this is where one of queer theory’s most influential texts emerged and a site that (Butler suggests) has metaphoric valences, I want to extend that metaphor by saying: frequently, prominent queer theorists continue to work from Rehoboth Beach. This is an important place from which to work, certainly, a site steeped in possibilities for meaningful confluences between thinking sexuality and thinking race. But theorists have a tendency to wait (figuratively) for queers of color
to arrive on Rehoboth’s shores in the hopes that they will join the sexuality- centered signifying games already set up . . . in the hopes they will take up theories of performativity and rework them through race
, for example.
And they wait rather than seriously engage how some of queer theory’s fundamental prem- ises — including its emphasis on abstract rather than concrete crossings-over specificity —
, its references to places like Rehoboth without engagement with their geographic and cultural need to change in order to make possible deeply productive meetings between sexuality and race. That is, they welcome the appearance of queer of color scholarship without rigorously confronting the exclusionary prac- tices that marginalize queer global southern experiences. To become an expan- sively decolonizing practice, queer theory must adjust its vision to see what has been submerged in the process of unmarking whiteness and global northernness: the black Atlantic
, New England Bay, and Indian River of queer crossings-over, the intersecting beach topoi of slavery and liberation, coerced work and unconventional play, unmarked whiteness and invisible blackness, flesh exposed for vacation and for auction.
Rehoboth’s layered present and past exemplifies the need to engage specific, situated histories and the difference they make. only literally transparent, and the imagination of fluidity inspired by
Water is
the Rehoboth or the
San Francisco bays may not be the same as that inspired by the southern Atlantic
or the eastern Caribbean.
Nor may its metaphorics be as playful as waves of punk bands, snap! queens, butch bottoms. . . . Just as travel does not offer the same image of freedom to the gay undocumented immigrant that it does to the queer cosmopolitan, conceptualizations of the fluid change when we approach islands where the sea simultaneously carries the violent history of the Middle Passage, a present of yolas and tourist cruises, and a possible future of interisland connections.

Hegemonic spaces and entities attempt to destroy these voices and stories of suffering embodied and told by the lapping waves. They do this through their organized development and exploration of La Mar and her many mystic beauties.
These mute the crying and the moans and the screams of the slave ships.
TINSLEY
Dept of English, African American and African Studies @ University of Minnesota
2k8
Omise’eke Natasha-; BLACK ATLANTIC, QUEER ATLANTIC: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage; GLQ: A
Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol 14, Number 2-3, pp. 191-215; http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v014/14.2-3.tinsley.pdf
Also composed at the turn of the century, Brand’s Map to the Door of No Return charts space to explore these complexities. The thirty-year literary career of this Trinidadian-born, Toronto-resident poet, novelist, essayist, filmmaker, and activist narrates continual migration among
Atlantic and Caribbean seascapes, crossings-over that connect sites like Delaware’s Rehoboth or Toronto’s Bathurst to Cuba’s Santiago and
Trinidad’s Blanchisseuse. The chief landing points of her work transmigrate between Grenada, then Trinidad, now Ontario. Brand’s writing in the 1980s is propelled, haunted by her vision of the Grenadan shore stormed by U.S. troops in 1983, walking distance from the office where she worked as an information officer for the People’s Development Agency under the New Jewel government. Her work returns again and again to waters that absorbed the bloodshed of this invasion, combing Caribbean beaches to attempt to put many sides of her political life together: tidal scenes of revolutionary hope, invasion, betrayal, death, eroti- cism, and possibility. These last wash in prominently when, in 1990 — the same year that Gender Troubl e and Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet revolutionized sexuality studies — Brand publishes No Language Is
Neutral. This award-winning collection of poems is heralded by Michelle Cliff as the first anglophone Caribbean text to explore fully love between women in a West Indian setting, the black queer Atlantic of Trinidad’s north coast. 37 But, resistant to being caught in the nostalgia of a return to her native land, by the late 1990s Brand’s geographic and thematic focus moves yet again to the shores of Lake Ontario, where she now lives in the sea of West Indian and other diasporics that has become Toronto. This northern migration further complicates the crossed currents she witnesses, as the Canada cycle reflects gathering discomfort with writing from any identity — whether revolutionary, activist, black, lesbian, or otherwise. As she explains in an interview, “The book is a map . . . [to] a new kind of identity and existence” that challenges isolated, nationally or otherwise bounded constructions of racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual identity. Its trajectory answers her post-Grenada, post-homeland question: “So now, who am I? I really want to think about that. My objections lie with the people who hang onto what they call identities for the most awful reasons, and those are the reasons of exclusion. I’m trying to be very careful how I say it. I don’t want to say that we don’t have a history, but what we hold onto has to be part of a much larger terrain.”38 As it explores this terrain, her Map does not emerge as a text as immediately given to queer reading as either Gender Trouble or No Language Is Neutral. Yet its queers many crossings-over oceanography
, and indeed Brand once generously thanked me for reading “that book that way.”39 Instead of foregrounding fluxes of gender or sexuality this work rushes into larger bodies, larger openings. The text is a tactile, shifting oceanography of African diaspora experience imagined at an unremitting intersection between maritime materialities and metaphors.
This intersection is physically dominated by the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, those waters from which blacks emerge whole and broken, and psychically dominated by the Door of No Return, the
“real, imaginary, and imagined” portal through which Africans left the continent in slave ships’ holds.
40 Brand’s Map through the “sea in between” is fluidly genred writing that moves between childhood memories and family stories, ships’ logs and colonial maritime chronicles, and contemporary echoes of the slave trade in the conflux of immigrants from the Caribbean, North America, Europe, and Africa that form their own human sea in Toronto.41 Its creative project is one Brand identifies as always underway in diaspora: to record disruptions
that continue on the other side of the door and “reclaim the black body from that domesticated, captive, open space” it has become individual bodies, it offers
what Chela Sandoval calls
.42 This project is fundamentally queer, in a black Atlantic, crosscurrents way. Rather than eroticize
a “social erotics”: a compass that traces historical linkages that were never sup- posed to be visible, remembers connections that counteract imperial desires for global southern disaggregation, and puts together the fragmented experiences of those whose lives, were never supposed to “qualify as the ‘human’ and the ‘livable.’ ”
as Butler writes,
43 Like the texts of Butler and Sedgwick, Brand’s work also generates lists that crash onto her pages like waves — but join unexpected terms in concatenations that recall the chains of slave ships more than those of sexual play. Toward the end of her Map, Brand imagines the continued haunting of the black Atlan- tic by those literally and figuratively drowned in the Middle Passage, those she calls the marooned of the diaspora. For these marooned she writes a ruttier
: which
is
, she explains,
“a long poem containing navigational instructions which sailors learned by heart . . . the routes and tides, the stars and maybe the taste and flavour of the waters, the coolness, the saltiness; all for finding one’s way at sea.
”44 Reconfiguring these colonial maritime lists, her ruttier traces how misdirections become the way for diasporic Africans — always painfully, always partially.
She describes unsexed, irreducibly opaque figures
who at once the marooned
as refuse to stay submerged and refuse to appear in clearly recognizable bodies. Like many ghosts, their bodies seemed

waterlogged, distorted beyond naturalizable gender and other identities:
Desolation castaway, abandoned in the world. They was, is, wandered, wanders as spirits who dead cut, banished, seclude, refuse, shut the door, derelict, relinquished, apart. . . . And it doesn’t matter where in the world, this spirit is no citizen, is no national, no one who is christened, no sex, this spirit is washed of all this lading, bag and baggage
, jhaji bundle
, georgie bindle, lock stock, knapsack, and barrel, and only holds its own weight which is nothing, which is memoryless and tough with remembrances, heavy with lightness, aching with grins.
45
“This spirit . .
. is no sex”; this spirit is a singular, plural, and genderless they that “was, is,” in a grammatical unmarking that parallels the absence of gender
in Creole third-person pronouns.
This genderlessness is perhaps an ocean reflection of the negative equality of sexes experienced in plantation labor that brutalized men and women without discrimination — a gender queerness that calls into ques- tion facile linkages between gender trouble and liberation. But more than this
, the fluid identities of
Brand’s black queer Atlantic simultaneously efface gender and nationality, ethnicity, citizenship, religion, their maroons “no citizen, no national, no one christened, no sex.” This is a lyric litany of negatives whose rhythmic, sonoric, and conceptual linkages speak a cross- current of dissolved and reconfigured black selfhoods . . . a tide where woman- hood, economic status, motherhood
, Yorubaness, (for example) are all disrupted from previous significations at the same time — black queer time.
kind of ongoing, multiple black Atlantic resignification is thematized and performed through these lists where words jostle against each other
This unexpectedly, breaking open and reconfiguring meanings. The conventional baggage of language is shuffled and shed as the spirit is washed of “bag and baggage
, jhaji
bundle,
geor- gie bindle, lock stock, knapsack, and barrel.” At the end of this washing, maroons’ sexless and otherwise unmarked bodies emerge as the legacy of geographically and historically specific waters, the Atlantic of the Middle
Passage.
Their brown bodies are gender fluid not because they choose parodic proliferations but because they have been “washed of all this lading, bag and baggage” by a social liquidation that is not the willful or playful fluidity of
Butler’s drag queens and
Sedg- wick’s
butch bottoms.
I am compelled by Butler’s growing insistence, from the 1999 preface to
Gender Trouble to the engaging Undoing Gender, that gender theory should address more material concerns — issues of survival for the trans- gendered and others whose
“unintelligible” bodies threaten their very lives.
46 But Brand’s embodied images of the black queer Atlantic remind us that such survival is not a concern that can be reduced to the present,
that black gender queers are always already surviving a past of multiple, intersecting violences. The specificity of these waters, these images, this literary language is at once
a map to the door of no return and a map to a black queer alternative to canonical gender theory. Yet the route of un-Return is not only one of violence; it is also one of queer erotics.
Just before the ruttier for the marooned, Brand includes another kind of ruttier titled
“Arriving at Desire.” But just as Brand’s ruttier for the marooned never goes in expected directions, the desire she charts here never becomes sexual or even interpersonal. After a description of childhood reading experiences that introduced her to desires both political and erotic, the narrator recounts how she came to write her novel At the Full and Change of the Moon. Like Butler on Rehoboth Beach, Brand conceived her text at a crossing-over between land and water, between experience of the real and vision of the (im)possible. Her inspi- ration came while contemplating maritime artifacts in a Port of Spain museum overlooking the sea, and her converging descriptions of the museum’s inside and outside become the Map’s most erotic description: As you crest the hill, there is the ocean, the Atlantic
, and there a fresh wide breeze relieving the deep lush of heat. From atop this hill you can see over the whole town. Huge black cannons overlook the ocean, the har- bour, and the town’s perimeter. If you look right, if your eyes could round the point, you would see the Atlantic
Caribbean in a wet blue embrace.
and the
If you come here at night you will surprise lovers, naked or cloth- ing askew, groping hurriedly or dangerously languorous, draped against the black gleaming cannons of George III.47 Before we ever come to these lovers, Brand at once gestures toward and leaves opaque two queer desires: the Atlantic’s desire for the Caribbean
it meets in a wet blue embrace
, and the narrator’s desire for the ocean she describes so erotically.
This desire is queerly gendered, since ocean, sea, and Brand — rolling and writing in opposition to the black cannons — would
all normatively be feminized. It is also queer in a black Atlantic way, since it ascribes

feeling to bodies — of water and of African females — that, in colonizers’ and slave traders’ maps of the world, were never supposed to feel. The queerness of
this sensuality
is the drive Brand describes two paragraphs earlier: the diasporic search to “put the senses back together again,” a sensual re-membering that George III’s cannons, the policing of sea and of diasporic bodies, cannot stop.
48
What puts together Atlantic and Caribbean, viewers and lovers in this passage is another list, a string of conditionals: “If you look . . . if your eyes could round . . . you would see. . . . If you come . . . you will surprise.” Like the ruttier’s litany of negatives, this conjunction of if . . . would, if . . . will traces some complexities of the black queer time the Map moves through.
The embrace of Atlantic and
Caribbean
, of lovers in front of cannons, is not written as a present reality that
narrator or readers can see but as past and future possibilities they could see if and when their consciousness and body move creatively to “find one’s way at sea,” to arrive at a desire — for sentient pasts, livable futures — to which there are no ready maps.
This desire promises to emerge at a site of oceanographic and historical uncertainty and violence that the reader’s eyes cannot quite reach the point” you would see it, but can they?):
(“if your eyes could round the harbor where Atlantic meets Caribbean, where ships docked after a Middle Passage that did not end. Neither Atlantic nor Caribbean yet both, this unseen site is one where diaspora’s radical blurring can also harbor new routes to being, routes neither shielded nor boxed in by doors of hegemonic space, time, and identity. It is the space for rewiring the senses
that Alexander calls for,
a crossroads/crosscurrents of “expansive memory refusing to be housed in any single place, bound by the limits of time, enclosed within the outlines of a map, encased in the physicality of the body, or imprisoned as exhibit in a museum.”
49 One of Butler’s important observations in Gender Trouble is that all subjects put together fictionally solid subjectivities from fluid, unstable experiences
, and Brand’s Map supports this idea. Earlier in the text she observes,
“There are ways of constructing the world — that is, of putting it together each morning, what it should look like piece by piece. . . . Before that everything is liquid, ubiquitous and mute. We accumulate information over our lives which bring various things into solidity, into view.” liquidity
is how insistently she weaves
these
50 What proves innovative in Brand’s black queer Atlantic explorations of figurative fluidity together with poignant material engagements with the waters that shape raced, nationalized, classed, gendered, and sexualized selves in different moments and sites of diaspora.
Understanding the particularity of the liquids that we put together daily the project of A Map to the Door of No Return, a project that allows the marooned of the diaspora another is kind of queer coupling: the possibility of putting the world together and putting the senses back together at the same time.
As Wekker writes of her search for stories of women’s sexuality in the African diaspora
, finding these stories involves collecting the curving, chipped, conch shell – like “pieces of [black women’s] conceptions of being human” that have been dispersed in the waters of forced transatlantic migrations and that individuals and commu- nities rearrange in creatively transculturated ways.
51
The key to making black queer sense of such self-pieces is not turning to race-, class-, or geographically unmarked models of sexuality and humanity the European Enlightenment philosophy that justified slavery in the first place —
— based in but tracing as carefully as possible the particular, specific, always marked contours, the contested beachscapes of
African diaspora histories of gender and sexuality. So in the black queer time and place of the door of no return, fluid desire is neither purely metaphor nor purely luxury. Instead — like the blue embrace of two bodies of water — its connections and crosscurrents look to speak through and beyond the washed lading, the multiply effaced identities of the Middle Passage.
Finally, Brand’s ruttiers chart how the marooned come to sail as maroons, continually stealing back the space where they live. This is my ocean, but it is speaking another language, since its accent changes around different islands — Derek Walcott, Midsummer

La Mar embraces all. The ocean speaks many languages. Black queer theory is not an exclusive argument. We must continue finding intersections between black suffering and queer theory with other forms of oppression to continue growing like an ocean.
TINSLEY
Dept of English, African American and African Studies @ University of Minnesota
2k8
Omise’eke Natasha-; BLACK ATLANTIC, QUEER ATLANTIC: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage; GLQ: A
Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol 14, Number 2-3, pp. 191-215; http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v014/14.2-3.tinsley.pdf
The ocean does speak many languages
, and I am only a novice linguist. So I have tried to present academic writing that is fluid, that in some way explores what it would mean to perform the oceanness that it thematizes. I have tried to broach more whispered secrets than I could draw out and raise more questions than can be answered, to pick apart metaphors, put them together without closure. At this point, then, I do not want to conclude or pretend to. Instead, I want to end with thoughts on some of the challenges that the Atlantic offers the border waters of African diaspora, queer, and queer African diaspora studies.
The long-navigated Atlantic tells us that
, like Brand’s resurrection of the marooned, queer Africana studies must explore what it means to conceive our field historically and materially.
Like Lara and Brand, as we navigate the postmodern we must look for the fissures that show how the anti- and ante-modern continue to conigure black queer broken-andwholeness. At the same time, the meaningfully multiblued Atlantic tells us that we must continue to navigate our field metaphorically.
contended in The Wretched of the Earth,
As Frantz Fanon metaphors provide conceptual bridges between the lived and the possible that use language queerly to map other roads of becoming.
My point is never that we should strip theory of watery metaphors but that we should return to the materiality of water to make its metaphors mean more complexly, shaking off settling into frozen figures.
The territory-less
Atlantic
also tells us that
, like the song between Micaela and la Mar, black queer studies must speak transnationally. When black becomes only Afri- can American, black queer theory becomes insular; as the crosscurrents between Atlantic and Caribbean, Atlantic and Mediterranean, Atlantic and Indian Ocean are richest in marine life, so they will be richest in depth of theorizing.
52
Most simply, our challenge is to be like the ocean: spreading outward, running through bays and fingers, while remaining heavy, stinging, a force against our hands.

Author Qualifications
Joel Olson (1967 – 2012) worked as a political science associate professor at Northern Arizona University and a social justice activist. He died last Spring and is survived by his wife and their three children. Olson graduated with a PhD in political theory from the University of Minnesota. Inspired by the work of abolitionists and African-American Sociologist WEB DuBois, his dissertation examined the interconnection between race and democracy. From his dissertation, he published his book The
Abolition of White Democracy (2004, University of Minnesota Press). At the time of his death, he was building a theory of fanaticism or extremism that would explain the politics of Pro Life assassins, abolitionists, green anarchists, and Al Qaeda. The work was titled American Zealot: Fanaticism and
Democracy in the United States. He taught political theory courses at Arizona State University West prior to becoming a professor at NAU in 2003. At NAU, he taught courses in American political thought, ancient political thought, critical theory, critical race theory, fanaticism, modern political thought,
Marxism, and political ideologies. The College of Social and Behavioral Sciences awarded him the
Outstanding Teaching Award for the 2004-2005 school year. In student eyes, he was one of the most popular and challenging professors in the Department of Politics and International Affairs and consistently received high teaching evaluations. He also served as an advisor for the Graduate
Association of Political Science, an advocacy and social group, and a Steering Committee member for the
Ethnic Studies program. For Olson, politics in an ivory tower was insufficient. Politics meant being on the streets, going door-to-door, building community support, never creating intellectual-worker or activisttheorist divides. Over his life, he worked in and helped found groups like Bring the Ruckus, Cop Watch, and the Repeal Coalition. In 2008, in response to an increased oppression of immigrants and those perceived to be immigrants, Olson with many other members of the Flagstaff, AZ, community helped cofound the Repeal Coalition. The group focuses on repealing all anti-immigration legislation and providing support for the immigrant community. As their web states, the group is “an organization committed to repealing over 60 anti-immigrant laws and bills that have been passed or considered by Arizona politicians in the past few years. We demand the repeal of all laws — federal, state, and local — that degrade and discriminate against undocumented individuals and that deny U.S. citizens their lawful rights.” The group continues their struggle after his death. Perhaps not a summation, but a good way to think of Olson, was the quote he scribbled on a piece of paper and kept in his office, one that his family and friends turned into a plaque on a memorial outdoor classroom between the SBS and SBS West buildings at NAU: “What is the most damage I can do, given my biography, abilities, and commitments, to the racial order and rule of capital?”
(Found @ http://www.olsonmemorialconference.org/who-is-joel-olson/)

Cards
Current agonal forms of democracy only include the people who share a ‘common liberal ethical and political framework’. We must include fanaticism to move beyond the boundaries of liberalism
(Joel, Assc. Professor of Politics and Intl Affairs @ Northern Arizonia Univ.
-; Friends and
Enemies, Slaves and Masters: Fanaticism, Wendell Phillips, and the Limits of Democratic Theory ; THE JOURNAL
OF POLITICS, Vol. 71, No. 1, January; pp. 82-95.)
F anaticism presents one of the most important political problems since September 11, 2001. Curiously, however, this subject has largely evaded scrutiny by political theorists. The rise in extremist activity is often noted and decried, but contemporary democratic theorists have yet to analyze extremism, fanaticism, or zealotry as a political category.
(I consider the three terms to be essentially synonymous and will use them interchangeably.) Current debates between ‘‘deliberative’’ and ‘‘agonal’’ models of democracy concern whether public deliberation is irreducibly agonal or whether it should strive conceptually for consensus. Yet this debate obscures what these two branches of democratic theory share. Despite an appreciation for the role of conflict in politics, agonal democratic theory’s approach to political conflict is quite similar to its purportedly conflict averse rival. That is, both models overwhelmingly focus on conflict that takes place among parties who share a common liberal ethical and political framework that provides the principles and rules within which legitimate political contest takes place. Contemporary democratic theory lacks an account of fanaticism because it largely ignores conflicts over the framework itself—which is precisely the terrain that tends to breed zealots.
This narrow focus leads democratic theorists to assume that extremism is inherently antidemocratic because it rejects the ‘‘official’’ framework of political engagement. This assumption, however, presumes the inherent justice of the framework in question. Fanaticism no doubt often undermines democracy, particularly when conflicting parties share a similar ethico-political framework within which to resolve their disagreements. This is not necessarily the case, however, when the parties dispute the framework itself.
In such conflicts, I argue that zealotry can be a democratic tool if it rallies public opinion to expand the citizen body and its power. In struggles for hegemony between competing frameworks, zealotry can be as useful to radical democrats as it is to fundamentalists.
A theory that accounts for struggles for hegemony between competing ethico-political frameworks as well as the role of extremism in them can expand and enrich contemporary democratic theory at a time when extremism has become a prominent political force throughout the globe. One key source for such a theory, I argue, is the work of the great abolitionist agitator Wendell Phillips. With his fellow radicals in the American Anti-Slavery Society, Phillips sought to deepen
American democracy through what democratic theorists would now call agonal participation.
Yet the function of such contentious ‘‘talk,’’
as Phillips called it, was not to bring citizens on to the same moral and political playing field. Rather, it was to assert a set of uncompromising principles (immediate abolition and racial equality), to use them to divide the public sphere into friends of these principles (slaves and abolitionists) and enemies of them (masters), and to encourage conflict between them.
By using ‘‘talk’’ to agitate and mobilize public opinion in this Manichean fashion, Phillips employed a fanatical approach to politics.
By drawing lines, repudiating compromise, and pressuring the political middle to choose between slaves and masters, Phillips used extremism to install abolitionism as the new ‘‘common sense’’ of American public opinion. In so doing he expanded American democracy beyond the framework of the masters and , I suggest, perhaps beyond the boundaries of liberalism as well.
The fact that we are all abolitionists today confirms that there can be democratic potential in the fanatical encouragement of intractable conflict.
Liberal democracy focuses on small disagreements between people who share the same fundamental ideology. This excludes other voices, gutting its ability to be inclusionary.
(Joel, Assc. Professor of Politics and Intl Affairs @ Northern Arizonia Univ.-; Friends and
Enemies, Slaves and Masters: Fanaticism, Wendell Phillips, and the Limits of Democratic Theory ; THE JOURNAL
OF POLITICS, Vol. 71, No. 1, January; pp. 82-95.)
My argument begins by explaining how liberal theory tends to view conflict as a problem of accommodating diverse opinions within a political community.
Using Carl Schmitt’s critique of liberalism and his friends/enemies notion of politics, I show how this perspective tends to ignore conflicts over liberal principles themselves. In other words, liberal theory

tends to focus on disagreements among parties who share a common moral and political framework and much less so on conflicts over the framework itself.
Using Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson’s Democracy and
Disagreement, I show how models of deliberative democracy limit themselves to conflicts within a common framework.
I follow with a critique of the work of Chantal Mouffe, arguing that to the extent that agonal democratic theory neglects the concept of hegemony, it similarly fails to theorize conflict over the framework of political engagement, thus sidestepping the problem of irreconcilable conflict in politics. As a result, agonal democrats often commit the very same ‘‘evasion of the political’’ for which they criticize deliberative models.
I then turn to the work of Phillips to outline an alternative approach to the study of democracy, conflict, and fanaticism.
In his fight against the Slave Power, Phillips does not presume that all parties interact within the perimeter of a consensually agreed upon moral or political framework.
Nor does he try to construct such a framework. Rather, he accepts that conflict is often over the framework itself. Through an interpretation of his speeches, I argue that the purpose of fanatical political discourse or ‘‘talk’’
for Phillips is to agitate conflict, not moderate it.
His aim is to mobilize public opinion in uncompromising support of the framework he calls the ‘‘North’’ and against the framework of the ‘‘South’’ so that a new moral and political common sense can be forged . Phillips uses fanatical means to establish a radically democratic hegemony.
This new hegemony , I suggest in conclusion, goes beyond the vision of deliberative and agonal models.
Thus, in terms of ends as well as means, Phillips has much to contribute to contemporary democratic theory.
Fanaticism is uniquely key – by opposing mainstream compromise politics, it creates change by challenging and defeating its opponents
(Joel, Assc. Professor of Politics and Intl Affairs @ Northern Arizonia Univ.-; Friends and
Enemies, Slaves and Masters: Fanaticism, Wendell Phillips, and the Limits of Democratic Theory ; THE JOURNAL
OF POLITICS, Vol. 71, No. 1, January; pp. 82-95.)
Fanaticism is often regarded as an individual temperament, a condition caused by desperation and/or psychological instability that drives a person to engage in political activity that goes well beyond the mainstream.
Suicide bombers and other terrorists are the archetype of this temperament.1 It is much less recognized that fanaticism is also a strategy to achieve power. Fanaticism is the political mobilization of the refusal to compromise. It is an approach to politics that divides the world into friends and enemies in order to mobilize people in the service of a cause one is passionately committed to (Olson 2007). It is a form of engagement that seeks not to come to terms with an opponent but to defeat it.
It is this specifically political notion of fanaticism with which I am concerned.
Democracy is built on the idea of excluding certain groups to preserve ‘liberal democracy’
(Joel, Assc. Professor of Politics and Intl Affairs @ Northern Arizonia Univ.-; Friends and
Enemies, Slaves and Masters: Fanaticism, Wendell Phillips, and the Limits of Democratic Theory ; THE JOURNAL
OF POLITICS, Vol. 71, No. 1, January; pp. 82-95.)
Democratic theory’s difficulty in understanding political zealotry begins with a tension in liberal democracies.
A distinguishing feature of liberal democracies is freedom of opinion. In addition, like any state, liberal regimes must ensure a stable political community. The tension results when opinion threatens stability.
How is it possible to conserve the polity while permitting the expression of ideas that threaten its cohesion? This tension is well recognized by liberal theorists. Diversity of opinion is crucial for them because it respects individual liberty and generates ideas that can lead to social progress. Yet it can also disrupt the stability upon which freedom and progress rest.
As Richard Bellamy writes,
‘‘Pluralism is both the life-blood of democracy and its greatest challenge’’
(1999, 115). It is the double-edged sword of liberalism.
For liberals like Bellamy this is an enduring tension that democracies must constantly attend to. For critics of liberalism, however, it is an irresolvable contradiction that undermines the efficacy of liberalism in building stable states.
As the conservative legal scholar Carl Schmitt argues, liberalism rests on a plurality of ideas produced through the process of open discussion. Democracy, meanwhile, requires a set of commonly held ideas among citizens, and must exclude ideas that jeopardize citizens’ unity. Further, while liberalism presumes universal equality, democracy is necessarily exclusionary.
That is, democracy presumes equality among equals (i.e., among citizens) but inequality between unequals (i.e., between citizens and noncitizens).
Universal equality under liberalism is practically meaningless , Schmitt argues, because it is attached to no substantive power and it provides no substantive power.
When everyone is equal, equality is a grand but empty gesture. Democracy does give equality substance,

however, because it insists on certain exclusions (between citizens and noncitizens) that make equality meaningful for citizens. Ironically, inequality and exclusion, not free discussion and pluralism, make equality material.
‘‘Equality is only interesting and valuable politically so long as it has substance, and for that reason at least the possibility and the risk of inequality’’ (Schmitt 1985a, 9). Thus, Schmitt argues, liberalism and democracy are irreconcilable. Liberalism rests on discussion and openness—heterogeneity. Democracy rests on a community constituted by exclusions—homogeneity.
Liberalism prevents true conflict that leads to real change
(Joel, Assc. Professor of Politics and Intl Affairs @ Northern Arizonia Univ.-; Friends and
Enemies, Slaves and Masters: Fanaticism, Wendell Phillips, and the Limits of Democratic Theory ; THE JOURNAL
OF POLITICS, Vol. 71, No. 1, January; pp. 82-95 .
)
Democracy requires a homogeneity that the heterogeneity of liberalism perpetually undermines. Whether or not Schmitt is correct to argue that liberalism and democracy are permanently irreconcilable, his critique is important because it reveals the framework within which liberal democratic theory tends to analyze political conflict . Liberal theorists typically presume that political contention can be settled through models and techniques that moderate disagreement. There need be no fundamental, irresolvable conflicts; concord is possible so long as parties are willing to negotiate and compromise.
For Schmitt, this optimism fails to recognize the essentially dichotomous and antagonistic nature of politics.
He argues that politics at its most elemental is an activity that divides the world into friends and enemies , with the potential of physical combat between them. ‘‘Friends’’ are those with whom one shares a common identity, while an enemy is ‘‘the other, the stranger,’’ who is ‘‘existentially something different and alien’’ from oneself and one’s friends (1996, 26). Politics reflects the human tendency to distinguish between friends and enemies, a formulation in which combat is not inevitable but always latent. ‘‘War is neither the aim nor the purpose nor even the very content of politics. But as an ever present possibility it is the leading presupposition which determines in a characteristic way human action and thinking and thereby creates a specifically political behavior’’ (34). Liberalism , he charges, denies the inevitability of enemies. It assumes that no one need be excluded from the public sphere and that the potential for conflict need not be omnipresent. The essence of liberal politics is not conflict between friends and enemies but the resolution of differences among ‘‘the people,’’ who are all potential friends.
Liberal democracy relies on a consensus that excludes conflict and resistance
(Joel, Assc. Professor of Politics and Intl Affairs @ Northern Arizonia Univ.-; Friends and Enemies, Slaves and
Masters: Fanaticism, Wendell Phillips, and the Limits of Democratic Theory ; THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS, Vol.
71, No. 1, January; pp. 82-95.)
Liberal theorists , in consequence, tend to concentrate on conflicts in which the competing parties are not irreconcilably opposed because they share a similar conception of the ‘‘rules’’ by which conflict is played out.
That is, liberal theory tends to focus on conflicts that take place within the same ethico-political framework , by which I mean the principles, rules, values, and norms that structure how members of a polity express and resolve differences with each other. Parties may compete with each other on the political playing field, but they do not fight over the nature of the field itself.
In regards to liberalism, this field is constituted by the values of individual liberty and equality. As Chantal
Mouffe argues, liberal democracy requires a consensus among adversaries regarding these values (1999b, 756). While all must hold to these values, they nevertheless give rise to multiple meanings and interpretations. Thus, the liberal polity is constituted by a commitment to liberty and equality as well as by disagreement over their meaning and implementation (Mouffe 2000, 102).
Schmitt’s theory of politics, on the other hand , suggests a more expansive view of conflict . For him, conflict may take place not just within the same ethicopolitical framework but also over the legitimacy of the framework itself.
His model assumes no consensus on basic political values. Parties may conflict not only over the meaning of these values, but also the authority of the values themselves. With Schmitt, the playing field itself is in question.
Liberal democratic theory typically disregards understandings of politics such as Schmitt’s for being overly simplistic. A ‘‘friends versus enemies’’ model leaves little room for the subtleties of politics and fails to recognize that conflict is always contingent and amenable to compromise. The aim of liberal democratic theory is rather to moderate conflict so as to preclude a friends/enemies dichotomy.
It regards the emergence of Manicheanism as a failure of politics rather than its essence. As a result, when liberal theory does confront such a politic, frequently its first reaction is to exclude it.
For example, Bellamy writes,
‘‘A politics of reciprocity excludes fanatics who scorn the necessity of justifying themselves to others in terms the addressees can recognize, and insist instead that the truth can only be perceived if one adopts their

creed. Negotiation with such persons has no point because they do not themselves acknowledge the need for it. Crucially, they fail to demonstrate equal concern and respect for the opinion of others’’ (1999, 107).
Fanaticism is critical to keep certain ideas in the political sphere to prevent exclusion
(Joel, Assc. Professor of Politics and Intl Affairs @ Northern Arizonia Univ.-; Friends and
Enemies, Slaves and Masters: Fanaticism, Wendell Phillips, and the Limits of Democratic Theory ; THE JOURNAL
OF POLITICS, Vol. 71, No. 1, January; pp. 82-95.)
The problem with this argument is not the exclusion per se.
Actors who share a certain ethicopolitical framework are rational to exclude foes of that framework. Yet exclusion from a theoretical framework is easier than actual exclusion.
Laws against hate speech or that outlaw fascist political parties or that redefine political groups as ‘‘terrorist organizations’’ can inhibit extremist organizing or lock some extremists up. Yet these measures are rarely successful in eliminating fanatical organizations or ideas. Some extremists, such as Ian
Paisley in Northern Ireland and Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, participate in normal democratic politics without violating such laws, so it is unclear how a politics of reciprocity would exclude them. Laws prohibiting the use or threat of physical force exclude violent extremists, but not all extremists advocate violence. Further, some fanatics may make genuine contributions to democratic practice , as I argue below, and thus their exclusion would be detrimental to democratic theory. In other words, it is legitimate for a theory to exclude its enemies in order to preserve its integrity, but it must still consider the actual implications of such exclusion. Otherwise, democratic theory is threatened with irrelevance in a world in which myriad forms of extremism explicitly reject liberalism. Unfortunately, the two predominant models of democratic theory, deliberative and agonal, do not much consider these implications. Both tend to concentrate on conflict within a common, typically liberal, framework and both tend to reflexively exclude enemies of this framework as ‘‘extremists.’’ Neither has much to say about conflict between competing frameworks, and neither sufficiently accounts for the zealots such conflicts sometimes produce.
Current deliberative modes of democracy do not destabilize the current issues with the ethico-political framework.
(Joel, Assc. Professor of Politics and Intl Affairs @ Northern Arizonia Univ.-; Friends and
Enemies, Slaves and Masters: Fanaticism, Wendell Phillips, and the Limits of Democratic Theory ; THE JOURNAL
OF POLITICS, Vol. 71, No. 1, January; pp. 82-95.)
Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson argue in their important book Democracy and Disagreement that collective moral decisions about public policy should be made through deliberation, which allows citizens or their representatives to ‘‘reason together to reach mutually acceptable decisions’’ (1996, 1).2 Deliberation does not eliminate moral disagreement, they emphasize. It does not to enable citizens to arrive at the
‘‘correct’’ moral position. Rather, through deliberation citizens develop a common set of principles ‘‘that set the conditions of political discussion’’ (93). A key purpose of deliberation, in other words, is to develop an ethico-political framework through which moral conflict can be expressed in a constructive way that does not destabilize the polity.
When citizens and their representatives must justify through deliberation the decisions they make and the process by which they make them, the legitimacy of democracy is enhanced (52).
Key to developing this deliberative framework is the principle of reciprocity. Reciprocity for Gutmann and
Thompson is ‘‘a form of mutuality in the face of disagreement’’
(14). According to this principle, citizens should justify policies using reasoning that other citizens can accept, even if they disagree with the policy itself.
In other words, even when citizens disagree on fundamental or ‘‘first-order’’ moral beliefs, they should be able to agree on the basic principles that set the terms of discussion (‘‘second-order’’moral agreement). This encourages citizens to recognize and respect each other as moral agents, even when disagreeing about contentious issues (93). Reciprocity, then, is not always able to resolve moral disagreements but it
‘‘can provide standards for regulating the processes by which they may be resolved’’
(69).
Gutmann and Thompson’s goal, in other words, is not to use deliberation to solve contentious moral and political issues but to craft a consensus on how debate over them should take place.
3 They acknowledge that moral disagreement is a permanent part of democratic politics. The function of deliberative democracy is not to eliminate such disagreement but to develop practices that encourage citizens to treat each other with respect so that disagreements end up sustaining ‘‘social cooperation’’ rather than threatening the social fabric.
Deliberation and reciprocity help citizens live with their disagreements in ways that respect rather than demonize those they disagree with. They enable a citizen to say, ‘‘I may not agree with you but I respect you, and that is the basis for our developing a common framework within which to debate.
’’ In this way, deliberation strives for a common ethico-political framework, or ‘‘a morally justified consensus,’’ within which disagreement takes place.
Such a consensus will always be elusive yet it remains the ideal (42).
Reciprocity seeks to provide a way to base decisions on ‘‘reasons that can be justified to all parties who are motivated to find fair terms of social cooperation’’
(65). Stanley Fish criticizes this ‘‘fair terms’’ criterion as inherently subjective and invariably biased. Religious fundamentalists, for example, can hardly be expected to accept Gutmann and Thompson’s ‘‘fair terms,’’ which require respecting pluralism and empowering people to think critically—including, one presumes, about one’s religious beliefs. When secularism is an unstated assumption of

deliberative democracy, those who reject secularism are excluded from this ‘‘consensual’’ framework. Thus, Fish argues, deliberative democrats claim ‘‘the high ground of neutrality while performing exclusionary work’’ (1997, 2287). The problem with Gutmann and Thompson’s analysis, however, is not exclusion per se. Their theory is explicitly liberal and so cannot accommodate perspectives that undermine core liberal principles.
The real problem is that their theory does not consider the implications of such exclusions. What happens, for example, when fundamentalists excluded from the liberal framework challenge it?
Gutmann and Thompson recognize the existence of sharp, bipolar conflict, and they do not impulsively try to eliminate it. They do not seek to artificially reform the abortion debate, for example, by devising some as yet unnoticed middle ground (1996, 75). Rather, their goal in such conflicts is to bring the opponents together in a way that neutralizes extreme positions. This is evident, for example, in their ‘‘principle of accommodation,’’ in which interlocutors are obliged to respect and accommodate their opponents as far as possible in order to reduce hostilities and ‘‘sustain a moral community’’ (80). Gutmann and Thompson also endorse contentious debate in certain circumstances. Citizens may take
‘‘extreme and even offensive stands,’’ refuse to cooperate with opponents, or even threaten retaliation, especially to attract attention to an issue that is being ignored (90). Their recognition of such conflict, however, is limited by their desire to contain it within a liberal framework rather than to understand it on its own terms. They permit ‘‘extreme nondeliberative methods,’’ for example, only insofar as they are ‘‘necessary steps to deliberation’’ (135).
This model would no doubt improve deliberation if the parties share the same ethico-political framework, but it is not of much use when the parties do not. For example, the principle of reciprocity requires respecting an opposing position to the point of being open to the possibility of being converted to it (83). A fanatic may respect her opponent but would reject any requirement that would force her to question fundamental principles.
Radical abolitionists would have scoffed at the notion that they and the slaves should be open to the possibility that the master could be right to argue that slavery reflects the ‘‘natural’’ relation between white and Black persons.4 An antiabortion activist who sees abortion as murder sensibly refuses to keep an ‘‘open mind’’ about the pro-choice position. Such conflicts are difficult to moderate using deliberative methods because they regard the very framework within which disagreement takes place.
Masters refuse to acknowledge slaves’ full humanity; ‘‘abortionists’’ refuse to recognize the moral status of the fetus. Slaves and abolitionists cannot agree with masters, pro-lifers cannot sympathize with ‘‘murderers,’’ friends cannot come to a consensus with enemies.
How can deliberation work in such circumstances? The principle of reciprocity is ineffective when the objective of struggle is not to find fair terms of debate but to defeat one’s opponent.
In sum, Gutmann and
Thompson’s deliberative theory presumes the hegemony of a liberal framework and thus has little to say about struggles over the framework itself.
For this reason, it has little to say about fanaticism. They acknowledge the existence of ‘‘politically extremist’’ arguments (347) as well as the existence of ‘‘moral fanatics,’’
i.e., those who take ‘‘unyielding stands,’’
presume to possess the Truth, create ‘‘no-holds-barred opposition,’’ manipulate others, and sometimes turn to violence (44). Yet such persons are viewed as inherently threatening to democracy and the only proposed solution is to either bring them into the deliberative fold or exclude them.
Undoubtedly, an extensive discussion of fanaticism is beyond the scope of Democracy and Disagreement.
Unfortunately, the deliberative literature in general follows its lead in ignoring conflict between ethicopolitical frameworks.
For example, studies on incommensurability, or the problem of values that are so different that trying to prove one better than or even equal to another invariably reflects the biases of the person doing the comparison, presents deliberation as a solution that can make the problem tractable by crafting compromises that require one to respect the values of others rather than try to change them (e.g.,
Ankersmit 2002). Yet fanaticism is a different creature from incommensurability. The zealot insists that conflicting values can be compared and that her values are better than the others and therefore must replace them. Another deliberative approach to conflict is to defend the rights of extremists to speak rather than trying to exclude them for being unreasonable, racist, or exclusionary (e.g., Fennema and Maussen 2005). Extending the principle of reciprocity to those who refuse to reciprocate, however, does not really address the struggle for hegemony between competing frameworks, which is a problem of power more than a question of free speech.
Finally, John Dryzek’s (2005) interesting work on
‘‘deeply divided societies’’ advocates using deliberative practices outside of the state to moderate sharp conflicts between ‘‘core identities’’ such as Palestinians and Jews, Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, and religious fundamentalists and secular liberals. This approach has much to offer yet even it betrays a desire to ‘‘deal with’’ extremism rather than theorize it on its own terms. In other words, as with Gutmann and
Thompson, Dryzek still understands bipolar conflict as inherently dangerous to democracy.
Agonism excludes fanaticism
(Joel, Assc. Professor of Politics and Intl Affairs @ Northern Arizonia Univ.-; Friends and
Enemies, Slaves and Masters: Fanaticism, Wendell Phillips, and the Limits of Democratic Theory ; THE JOURNAL
OF POLITICS, Vol. 71, No. 1, January; pp. 82-95.)
Agonal democratic theorists, of course, have long argued that deliberative theories do not sufficiently appreciate the role of conflict in politics. As an analysis of the work of Chantal Mouffe shows, however, agonal models have difficulty theorizing fanaticism for the same reason: they are overwhelmingly concerned with conflict that takes place within a common, typically liberal, ethical, and political framework. As a result, they also assume a pejorative perspective in relation to the agonistic actor par excellence, the extremist.

Author Qualificaitons
Shari Stone-Mediatore specializes in the politics of knowledge, a theme she has pursued through Kant,
Marx, and Arendt as well as feminist philosophy, Latin American philosophy, and narrative theory.
Having turned to philosophy after several years of public-interest and human-rights work, she also is particularly interested in drawing on philosophical texts to throw light on contemporary social problems.
Her book, Reading Across Borders: Storytelling and Knowledges of Resistance (Palgrave Macmillan), inspired the theme for the 2004 New Jersey Project on Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, at which she was the keynote speaker. Her work appears in journals including Hypatia, The Journal of Global Ethics, and The National Women’s Studies Association Journal. She was a Mellon-Grant guest-lecturer at St.
Louis University and also has guest-lectured at Northwestern University, Wooster College, and
University of California, Berkeley. At Ohio Wesleyan, she teaches courses in Social & Political Philosophy,
Ethics, Environmental Ethics, Feminist Philosophy, Critical Thinking: Ideology Critique, and topical courses such as Modernity & Colonialism. She received a Great Lakes Colleges Association New
Directions Grant to study intercultural education and has led student trips to Honduras and Chiapas,
Mexico.
(Found @ http://philosophy.owu.edu/stoneMediatore.html)

Cards
THEIR DISCONNECTED OBJECTIVE NARRATION HAS REAL IMPACTS
The VALORIZATION of traits associated with OBJECTIVITY can have REAL and DANGEROUS historical effects, promoting a MORAL NUMBNESS that facilitates institutionalized VIOLENCE ignoring that distance itself is a SOCIAL LOCATION that privileges the voices of those who can remove themselves from social ills while UNDERVALUING the voices of those who experience social suffering directly. Under the guise of professional responsibility we promote an IRRESPONSIBLE inattention to living beings and a concomitant ethics of CALLOUSNESS and INDIFFERENCE burying violence in technical abstractions while providing a CONVENIENT ALIBI for turning our back to PAIN.
STONE-MEDIATORE 2k7 (Assc Prof of Philosophy @ Ohio Wesleyan U Shari, Assc Prof of Philosophy
@ Ohio Wesleyan U - Challenging Academic Norms: An Epistemology for Feminist and Multicultural
Classrooms http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nwsa_journal/v019/19.2stone-mediatore.html)
Even if objectivity is a myth, the valorization of traits associated with objectivity can have real—and dangerous
— historical effects
.
In particular, an unqualified valorization of distance and detachment promotes the kind of moral numbness that facilitates institutionalized violence.
Certainly, a theorist should have some degree of distance from her subject matter insofar as her knowledge claims should not be immediate personal reactions but well considered and publicly accountable reflections. However, when we confuse absolute emotional and geographic distance from one's subject matter with "objectivity," we forget that such distance is itself a social location, namely, one of isolation from social problems. As a result, when we sanctify sheltered social standpoints as "professional distance," we privilege the voices of those who can remove themselves from social ills while we undervalue the voices of those who experience social suffering more directly.
4
Likewise, when we valorize detachment, we overlook the qualities of the world that are known through physical and emotional closeness.
Dedicated forest defender Joan Norman indicated the importance of knowledge gained through closeness to phenomena when she attributed her appreciation for forests to her walks in the woods with her grandson. "You cannot [End Page 57] just read about wild places," she says, "you have to go there" (O'Shea 2005, 42). Social critics Arundhati Roy and Paul
Farmer practice a similar creed when they travel, respectively, to Adivasi communities in India and to rural Latin America to walk among and offer support to people subjected to economic violence. Only "compassion and solidarity," says Farmer, allow a writer to break the conditioned silence of subjugated people and to hear expressions of pain and struggle that await sympathetic ears (2003, 27).
5
Ultimately, when we confuse distance and detachment with rigor, we promote, under the guise of professional responsibility, an irresponsible inattention to living beings and a concomitant ethics of callousness and indifference.
Nazi administrators exemplified such contradictions of objectivity when they assumed an "objective attitude" toward the death camps, attending to technicalities of mass execution as coolly as if they were managing a bank (Arendt 1992, 69). Although ordinary academics and bureaucrats are less directly involved in murder, our disciplined aloofness can
similarly bury violence in technical abstractions while our conscience defers to "professionalism."
For instance, purportedly objective
French reporters and United Nations members refrained from taking a stand on French colonialism in Algeria, only to model apathy in the face of colonial violence, while today's "experts, from anthropologists to international health specialists choose to collude" with economic violence by ignoring it in the name of "neutrality" (Fanon 1963, 77–8; Farmer 2003, 10, 17).
"Objective" discourses facilitate
this charade, as when planners of India's big dams shield themselves from ethical questions raised by the displacement of hundreds of thousands of individuals by reducing these people to the category "Project Affected People," or simply "PAP," a term which conveniently "mutate[s] muscle and blood into cold statistics" (Roy 1999, 32). For Nazi bureaucrats, French colonial reporters, and contemporary analysts alike, objectivity provides a convenient alibi for turning our back to pain and suppressing compassionate impulses that would otherwise be troubled by violence.

FALSE OBJECTIVITY produces the WORST type of subjectivity as judges pick and choose what evidence to call for at the end of the round and piece back together the voices of participants through a personal preference that prioritizes academic data published in peer reviewed articles over the personal testimony of people who have experienced life and dictated rhetoric through their social location.
WE STRAIGHT TURN THEIR NOTION OF OBJECTIVITY
Treating empirical data as the HALLMARK of objectivity FAVORS the perspective of DOMINANT groups with privilege while SILENCING perspectives UNPOPULAR with official record-keeping and SUPRESSING questions about what is registered as data
STONE-MEDIATORE 2k7 (Assc Prof of Philosophy @ Ohio Wesleyan U Shari, Assc Prof of Philosophy
@ Ohio Wesleyan U - Challenging Academic Norms: An Epistemology for Feminist and Multicultural
Classrooms http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nwsa_journal/v019/19.2stone-mediatore.html)
Granted, accurate empirical analysis of the measurable dimensions of our world is a crucial component of credible knowledge. Thus, even critics of objectivity, including Fanon, Farmer, Arendt, Roy, and Galeano support their claims, insofar as possible, with carefully documented historical data. However,
Significantly, for instance, the U.S. government has ample data on economic growth rates but no central data on police violence, the human costs of war, the relation between health and poverty, or the destructive effects of industry waste products, with the latter having left their marks mainly in unofficial testimonies.
7
The Bush administration's failure to record civilian casualties in the Iraq War 8 attests to the urgency of looking beyond "hard data" to the politics that underlie data availability.
.
For instance, French medical, psychiatric, and legal professionals in colonial
Algeria viewed data on Algerian violent crime in terms of a worldview that abstracted social phenomena from history and naturalized social communities, thereby allowing them to regard the data as evidence "that the Algerian was a born criminal" (Fanon 1963, 296). When the same data were viewed by Algerians in the context of their resistance to colonialism, it could be seen as a symptom of colonial social relations.
Nevertheless, [End Page 59] the interpretation of the French professionals (and not the Algerians) informed the seemingly objective medical societies and legal institutions.
Smith 1987, 161–4; 1990,
53–5, 85–92, 116–30).
, for instance, when newscasters report on the number of "illegal aliens" crossing the border, working "American" jobs, and attending "American" schools, for these supposed "facts" are produced by agencies concerned to regulate the activities of Mexican immigrants and whose category "illegal alien" reflects the dominant culture's assumptions about the sanctity of national borders and the dependence of rights on national citizenship.

Debate attempts to paint the judge as a NEUTRAL impartial observer to JUSTIFY false claims of OBJECTIVITY. They real feel there are “objective standards” perched in the norms and procedures of the activity that can serve as a blue print and if followed will maintain the neutrality of the person evaluating the debate.
THEIR CLAIM OF NEUTRALITY IS AN EXAMPLE OF FALSE OBJECTIVITY
NEUTRALITY a central mark of OBJECTIVITY is DECEPTIVE as standards measured against a taken-forgranted “CENTER” are often constituted through the ELITE-DOMINATED professional discourses who appear NEUTRAL while identities that deviate from the culturally constituted norm are considered
BIASED.
STONE-MEDIATORE 2k7 (Assc Prof of Philosophy @ Ohio Wesleyan U Shari, Assc Prof of Philosophy
@ Ohio Wesleyan U - Challenging Academic Norms: An Epistemology for Feminist and Multicultural
Classrooms http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nwsa_journal/v019/19.2stone-mediatore.html)
"Neutrality," another central mark of "objectivity," is also deceptive. For instance, the text my colleagues selected as the centerpiece for our university's globalization workshop, A Future Perfect: The
Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalization by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge (2000), seemed to them "balanced" and "neutral." Such standards, however, measure "extremes" and
"imbalances" against a taken-for-granted "center," which is constituted through the media as well as elite-dominated professional discourses.
9 On account of their agreement with such a culturally constituted "center," Micklethwait and Wooldridge's laudatory account of transnational economic institutions can seem "balanced"—despite their failure to engage a single of the many serious critics of these institutions.
Similarly, due to the cultural contingency of what counts as the "center," authors from culturally dominant groups tend to seem neutral while writers whose identities deviate from the culturally
constituted norm are considered biased.
10 Like my colleagues, some of my students have unwittingly attested to this skewed character of "neutrality." When asked to compare two well-respected but quite different histories of U.S.-Latin American relations—one a standard college textbook that focuses on the concerns of U.S. policymakers and the other Galeano's extensively documented indictment of U.S. imperialism—several students responded that "Galeano is biased because he is Latin American." The same students did not attribute any bias to the other book's two authors, despite their North American education and identities. [End Page 60]
DISCONNECTED OBJECTIVE NARRATION EXCLUDES MARGINALIZED GROUPS BECAUSE
IT PRIVELAGES THE OPINIONS OF THOSE PRIVELAGED TECHNOCRATS WHO CREATED
OBJECTIVITY IN THE FIRST PLACE

also
Texts with such a focus may appear perspective-free, but they tend to reflect the perspective of people who have greater access to public institutions and who relate to the world through abstract analysis. At the same time, they overlook the perspective of those whose knowledge is based on direct experience, who endure the harms of public policies in their private lives, and who, when they protest such harms, are denied access to the public arena and can express their resistance only through "unofficial" channels, such as community speak-outs, hunger strikes, or even suicide.
11
When we mystify abstract discourses as objective, we not only privilege the detached standpoints of scholars and technocrats but also insulate their standpoints from critical feedback
. For when abstract accounts of the social world are treated as reality, people who are positioned to test abstract theory against everyday experience, such as nurses, mothers, social workers, and research assistants, must fit the world they experience into received categories, with the result that "[e]verything going on in the everyday settings . . . that does not fit the prescribed frameworks of reporting is left unsaid" (Smith 1990, 100).
Moreover, when the institutions that determine the "prescribed frameworks of reporting" regularly neglect the human costs of social policies, on the one hand, and the social causes of human ailments, on the other, social suffering and its systemic causes tend to be the "unsaid."
12
The mystification of abstract, depersonalized analysis likewise allows scholars who use detached technical discourses to appear dignified and "self-confident" while writers who turn to more engaged and creative, nontechnical language to recover "unsaid" human aspects of the social world tend to have their work dismissed as "unprofessional" or even "an injury to human dignity"
(Cohen 2003, 65; Marx
1997, 280, emphasis in original). For instance, World Bank economists David Dollar and Aart Kraay convey authority, in part, by virtue of their distance from the social processes they study and their reduction of the latter to abstract public indices. Granted, statements such as, "[t]he aggregate annual per capita growth rate of the globalizing group accelerated steadily from one percent in the 1960s to five percent in the
1990s" can offer relevant information about countries that have joined the global economy (Dollar and Kraay 2002, 121); however, when we mistake
such technocratic statements for objective truth, we obscure the diverse and contested human implications of the global economy for specific communities, while we allow people who try to express those human meanings to be summarily dismissed
—as Roy was, when the Supreme Court charged her with
"pollut[ing] the [End Page 61] stream of justice," upon her attempt to express some of the human costs of India's "economic growth" (Roy
2001b, 97).
OBJECTIVITY ALLOWS FOR ELITES TO IGNORE PERSONAL EXPIRENCE WHICH LEAVES
THE CURRENT FRAMEWORK LARGELY UNCHALLENGED
STONE-MEDIATORE 2k7 (Assc Prof of Philosophy @ Ohio Wesleyan U Shari, Assc Prof of Philosophy
@ Ohio Wesleyan U - Challenging Academic Norms: An Epistemology for Feminist and Multicultural
Classrooms http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nwsa_journal/v019/19.2stone-mediatore.html)
"Objective" scholarship does not always exclude personal stories entirely, for the latter often help to concretize and support analytic claims; however, the devaluation of experience allows scholars to invoke personal stories in merely instrumental ways to serve preconceived arguments, while ignoring the complexity and challenges that personal experience can present when approached as a source of fresh insight.
For instance, Columbia University professor, Jagdish Bhagwati, states that the social merits of "globalization" are easy to see,
"once one starts thinking about the matter deeply and empirically." His supposedly deep empirical investigations, however, refer only abstractly to "Japanese housewives" who came to "the West" with their husbands and who subsequently learned "how women could lead a better life," and to "[w]omen in poor countries" who work for transnational corporations and find that "work away from home can be

liberating" (2002, 5). He does not cite any of the actual women for whom he is supposedly speaking and, as a result, can elide such women's ample (even if "unofficial") expressions of discontent with transnational corporations.
13
Micklethwait and Wooldridge cite specific individuals, but only superficially to show their acknowledgment of poverty-related suffering, not to explore dimensions and mechanisms of poverty that they have not yet theorized. For instance, the authors offer a brief story of a young unemployed Brazilian couple whose odd jobs barely allow them to feed their child. This story and the accompanying statistics on poverty seem to provide balance to the authors' pro-globalization argument; however, the authors quickly reduce the Gobetti couple to an example of
"nonstarters: woefully underequipped people living miserable lives" and then suggest that such misery arises from their country's
"backwardness" (Micklethwait and Wooldridge 2000, 255). They proceed to claim that "[o]nly the most idiotic critic would try to lay all these failings [i.e., poverty, unemployment] directly at the feet of globalization," and they illustrate their point by citing an unemployed Brazilian magician who attributes his ill fate to a Las Vegas performer who appeared on television and gave away his secrets (Micklethwait and
Wooldridge 2000, 258). This unemployed magician may be an easy-to-refute "idiotic critic," but as the only critic the authors cite here, his brief story (and that of the Gobetti's) merely substitute for genuine engagement with opposing views.
Certainly, personal experience does not always favor the underdog and even a sensitive integration of personal experience within an analysis of current
trade institutions cannot settle definitively the question of those institutions' merits. Nevertheless, attentive engagement with historical experience opens up discussion to the rich and complex aspects of social phenomena, including aspects that contradict dominant worldviews,
[End Page 62] while the practice of avoiding close engagement with experience ensures that ruling conceptual frameworks remain unchallenged.
We must interrogate not only the stories of those we read, but how we present them.
This allows for an interrogation of our own bias and therefor an interrogation of our privilege
STONE-MEDIATORE
Assc Prof of Philosophy @ Ohio Wesleyan U
2k7
Shari- Challenging Academic Norms: An Epistemology for Feminist and Multicultural Classrooms http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nwsa_journal/v019/19.2stone-mediatore.html
The Epistemic Value of Stories and Testimony
When we specify the contradictions of the methodological and discursive practices that pass as
"objective," we clear a space for more "subjective" marginal-standpoint texts
; however, we still need to explain the epistemic value of the latter. Taking feminist standpoint theory a step further, I [End Page 64] examine below how texts that anchor their analysis in the lived experiences of people who have suffered and resisted oppression have value not only as alternative standpoints on the world but also as alternative forms of knowledge whose simultaneously empirically grounded, engaged, and creative formats play a unique intellectual role.
My claim, which builds upon transnational feminist analysis of experience-oriented writing, is not that all stories enhance our thinking but that some engagement with experience-sensitive, passion-driven stories
(just as some engagement with data and theory) is crucial to rigorous and responsible inquiry.
The Marginalized Standpoint as Story
Building on Hegel and Marx, feminist standpoint theorists argue that knowledge practices that begin from the standpoint of people living under conditions of oppression or exploitation can bring under scrutiny entrenched beliefs and institutions.
The marginalized standpoint has this critical power because people in socially subordinate positions confront, in their daily lives, the contradictions of our social order while their resistance to oppression and exploitation can expose the power relations that maintain our seemingly
"natural" ways of life. Thus, knowledge that begins from the standpoint of oppressed, exploited, and resisting lives can provide critical insight into ruling beliefs and practices, thereby helping us to confront more self-consciously and effectively the factors that shape our lives
.
21

However, while feminist standpoint theorists present a compelling case for knowledge that begins from the standpoint of marginalized lives, they leave largely unexamined the story-like, "unprofessional" format in which this knowledge often appears. Transnational feminist writers help to explain the need for unorthodox writing in responding to the struggles of marginalized groups. Critics such as Jacqui Alexander and
Chandra Mohanty investigate the specific transnational institutions that govern our lives, including economic institutions such as the World
Bank and World Trade Organization as well as gender and ethnic hierarchies, which economic institutions often exploit and reinforce. They point out that the contradictions between the claims of ruling institutions and their actual historical effects are most acute for third world women, for these women tend to remain the most oppressed within "free" and "democratic" societies. At the same time, their multi-pronged resistance to sexism, authoritarianism, and exploitation can indicate the complex character of contemporary power relations and the kind of work necessary to transform them. Thus, transnational feminist thinkers emphasize the particular importance of theorizing the social world from the standpoint of third world women and, most importantly, connecting these women's lived experiences of struggle to far-reaching relations of domination.
22 [End Page 65]
Alexander and Mohanty recognize, furthermore, that engaging third world women's experiences as a resource for critical insight and transformative politics is not a straightforward process.
"[T]he point is not just 'to record' one's history of struggle"
says
Mohanty, but "the way we read, receive, and disseminate such imaginative records is immensely significant," that is, we need to address experiences of struggle in a way that does not simply treat them as evidence of oppression or "difference" but instead respects the complexity of the experiences, locates the experiences within transnational relations of domination in which all of us are situated, and identifies elements of resistance, even within the most marginalized communities
(1991a, 34).
23 Such nuanced analysis demands empirical rigor as well as creative and engaged inquiry for, as Mohanty emphasizes and as the above texts on globalization illustrate, standard academic approaches to narrating others' lives tend merely to reduce those lives to preconceived theories and objectifying categories
.
24
Thus, thinking that genuinely pursues the standpoint from others' lives cannot be expected to conform to "what counts as scholarly or academic
('real?') historiography" but will likely mix historical analysis with empathetic and creative narration in order to address experiences outside the public spotlight and irreducible to received theories
(Mohanty 1991a, 36).
Emotionally sensitive and innovative narration is also crucial to the process of thinking from the standpoint of marginalized lives because, as some standpoint theorists have acknowledged, resistant experiences are rarely self-evident but tend to be "inchoate" and "a struggle to articulate"
(Smith 1987, 58;
Harding 1991, 282
). This occurs, in part, because a person's experiences of frustration with or resistance to social norms can be overshadowed by her ideologically formed consciousness.
Compounding this problem, the categories by which we interpret experience—categories of identity as well as categories such as "advanced" and "backward" or "home" and "work"—are formed from the standpoint of the dominant culture, so that experiences incongruent with white, upper middle-class, male-centered culture often cannot be articulated in straightforward prose
.
25 Gloria Anzaldúa, for instance, could turn her frustration with society's dichotomy between "American" and "Mexican" into critical insight only through soul searching and experimental writing, by which she sifted through painful memories and wove autobiography with history and poetry, so as to trace her "mixed breed" status to the history of U.S. exploitation of Mexican resources and to revise her seemingly schizophrenic identity in terms of new metaphors that embrace cultural intermingling and cross-border alliances (1990b).
Other times, sentiments of resistance to ruling institutions defy easy articulation because people in marginalized positions are unable to act on their resistant impulses so that the latter emerge only in contradictory and incomplete gestures
. Roy, for instance, recounts the story of a displaced indigenous man who protests [End Page 66] that his baby would be better off dead than living in the resettlement site, even while he rocks the baby gently in his arms (1999, 54).
Given the elusive, difficult to articulate character of many experiences of oppression and resistance, it is not surprising that
(like Anzaldúa) some of the most powerful critics
of the global economic order, including Roy,
Galeano, Fanon, 26 and Farmer 27 forgo academic conventions to experiment with styles more responsive to the existential richness and ethical pull of marginalized people's experiences.
Elsewhere, I have described such writing as "storytelling": writing that, whatever its particular content or style, begins from fully engaged reckoning with the complexities and contradictions of specific people's experiences and then uses this engagement with experience as a springboard for fresh perspectives on our shared world
. Such nonfiction

storytelling is accountable to rules of evidence and accuracy and thus often cites public records and reports; however, in "storytelling,
" emotionally close, attentive engagement with specific experiences overrides adherence to preconceived categories and disciplinary norms, rather than the other way around
.
28

Author Qualifications
Joshua Gregory is a professor at California State University, Fullerton. He is a professor of Human
Communication Studies.
Kasim Alimahomed is professor at Cal Poly, Pomona. He is a professor in Communication.

Cards
DEBATE SHOULD NOT OVERLOOK THE PERSUASIVE POTENTIAL OF FIRST PERSON
NARRATIVES. A rhetoric of possibility is created at the intersection between minority advocacy and the unrepresented narrative of another’s life story and can evince palpable change in debate.
( Josh & Kasim, professors of Comm @ CAL ST
FULLERTON -; EMPOWERING NARRATIVES; Narrative Voice and the Urban Debater: An
Investigation into Empowerment; paper submitted to the Urban Debate League Panel at the Western
States Communication Association Conference, Coeur ‘d Alene, Idaho February 23-27, http://communications.fullerton.edu/forensics/SCUDL.htm
)
This paper will discuss the empowerment of voice in the urban debate league. The authors contend that
. A final section investigates how
THE POLICY QUESTION EMBEDDED WITHIN THE RESOLUTION DOES NOT EXCLUDE THE
USE OF NARRATION AS A PERSUASIVE TOOL. An empirical example shows how
Congress prioritized personal narration over traditional policy calculations turning back their framework
( Josh & Kasim, professors of Comm @ CAL ST
FULLERTON -; EMPOWERING NARRATIVES; Narrative Voice and the Urban Debater: An
Investigation into Empowerment; paper submitted to the Urban Debate League Panel at the Western
States Communication Association Conference, Coeur ‘d Alene, Idaho February 23-27, http://communications.fullerton.edu/forensics/SCUDL.htm
)
Thomas J. Mickey (1997) explains a very powerful example of the use of Narrative in contemporary society: The events are as follows: On
October 10, 1990 Nayriah al-Sabah, a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, testified before Congress about the atrocities that the Iraqis were committing against Kuwaiti citizens . She specifically mentioned that Iraqis were taking Kuwaiti babies from incubators in area hospitals.
Soon afterwards, her [narrative] became the language of Washington’s call to arms
.
President Bush mentioned what became known as the “incubator atrocities” six times in one month and eight times in 44 days. In the Senate six other senators mentioned the incubator atrocities in the debate over whether to go to war. The resolution passed by five votes (p.278). The narrative testimony of the young Kuwaiti girl for “Citizens for Free Kuwait” was a strong rhetorical device, and many senators before the Gulf
War were persuaded by a child telling a story about the senseless infanticide occurring in the invaded nation of Kuwait. Mickey’s (1997) analysis continues by noting that the child was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the United States, was not even in Kuwait at the time, and was “coached” by the pubic relations firm Hill and Knowlton (at the nice price of $10.5 million) on how to tell a story the right way . Though the aforementioned scenario is a tragic example of how the narrative can be abused, this essay will try to shed some light on the more empowering uses of the narrative. Before a senate would ever go to war, deliberations would be heard from traditional policy arguments : Economics issues, oil issues, political policy ramifications of war, and risk of human life. The Kuwaiti girl’s narrative superceded all these items of deliberation and committed a country to war
. The traditional costbenefit criterion that guides both contemporary governmental policy making and academic debate would not had the ability to commit a country to war without further discussion. Academic debate uses traditional policy arguments; therefore, academic debate cannot afford to deny access to such a powerful persuasive device. Our implications are that academic debate hould incorporate the narrative because it utilizes two nontraditional persuasive faculties: 1) pathos appeals and 2) a rhetoric of possibility that emphasizes a personal identification . In order to justify this claim we must look to

some historical formulations of the narrative. From there the argument will progress as follows: 1) defining what the narrative is, which includes structural definitions and evaluative criteria, 2) examining how the narrative can liberate the person, which investigates empowerment and voice, and 3) implicate how pathos appeals and identifying with the possibility will better the debate community.
There are multiple definitions of narratives and they are as inescapable as being.
Communcation scholars evaluate narration in the realm of its function and their centrality to the representation of identity is within academic context.
( Josh & Kasim, professors of Comm @ CAL ST
FULLERTON -; EMPOWERING NARRATIVES; Narrative Voice and the Urban Debater: An
Investigation into Empowerment; paper submitted to the Urban Debate League Panel at the Western
States Communication Association Conference, Coeur ‘d Alene, Idaho February 23-27, http://communications.fullerton.edu/forensics/SCUDL.htm
)
Since there are so many arenas and disciplines that examine the persuasive effects of the narrative,
also
—each enmeshed with the ideological propositions of the discipline that defined it: In more academic contexts, there has been recognition that narrative is central to the representation of identity, in personal memory and self- representation or in collective identity of groups such as regions, nations, race, and gender . There has been widespread interest in narrative in history, in the operations legal systems, in psychoanalysis, in economics, and in philosophy. Narrative is as inescapable as language in general, or as is cause and effect, as a mode of thinking and being (Currie, 1998, p. 2). Referring back to Quintillian’s delineations, the Narratological discipline focuses on the form of the narrative, whereas legal theorists and
.
The Ideal narrative for debate is an oppressive tragic story that is distinct from the master narrative found within postmodern philosophical criticism
( Josh & Kasim, professors of Comm @ CAL ST
FULLERTON -; EMPOWERING NARRATIVES; Narrative Voice and the Urban Debater: An
Investigation into Empowerment; paper submitted to the Urban Debate League Panel at the Western
States Communication Association Conference, Coeur ‘d Alene, Idaho February 23-27, http://communications.fullerton.edu/forensics/SCUDL.htm
)
The term “narrative” can be defined in many different ways. A liberal interpretation could go so far as to say that all human communication is narrative, as in someone narrating to you. However, for the purposes of this essay, a clearer definition of the narrative is offered by Polkinghorne (1988) as an
“organizational scheme expressed in story form” (p.13). The narrative that this essay assumes is the personal story of an individual or group of individuals that are involved in the areas discussed by the current resolution. The ideal narrative that this essay would endorse for a debate round would be an oppressive tragic story, something that pains the heart and connects to a higher moral force for atonement. An unprivileged voice that comes from such a position in life that it moves competitor
and judge alike, calling for them to take action. In this essay, the narrative is not a discussion about master “narratives” that guide all of our lives, nor does it engage the metanarrative debate occurring
in postmodern philosophy. Our contention is that the organization of a story lends persuasive and
personal power, and this tool should not be shunned out of academic debate.

WE WILL DEFEND THE USE OF NARRATION AS A METHODOLOGY OF LIBERATION OF
OPPRESSED GROUPS
( Josh & Kasim, professors of Comm @ CAL ST
FULLERTON -; EMPOWERING NARRATIVES; Narrative Voice and the Urban Debater: An
Investigation into Empowerment; paper submitted to the Urban Debate League Panel at the Western
States Communication Association Conference, Coeur ‘d Alene, Idaho February 23-27, http://communications.fullerton.edu/forensics/SCUDL.htm
)
The narrative as a discursive act is probably one of the most “human” actions that a person can engage in.
Individuals organize their lives in personal stories, even to the extent that most theorists claim that the guiding force of personal development and psychological maintenance are intrapersonal self-narratives . To examine the force of the narrative to the personal, one must look at the narrative in relation to identity: Human identities are considered to be evolving constructions; they emerge out of continual social interactions in the course of life. Self-narratives are developed stories that must be told in specific historical terms, using a particular language, reference to a particular stock of working historical conventions and a particular pattern of dominant beliefs and values. The most fundamental narrative forms are universal, but the way these forms are styled and filled with content will depend upon particular historical conventions of time and place (Scheibe, 1986, p. 131). Personal narratives might differ , and special recurring narratives may dictate further action of the individual (such as in a self-fulfilling prophecy).
However, there are fundamental aspects of the narrative that run across all human beings, and it is in the ability to contrast a personal narrative with the narratives of others that creates a unity of the self with the other. If a human cannot find universal aspects that run across all narratives (including their own), than that human feels disjointed by society : The self is a kind of aesthetic construct, recollected in and with the life of experience in narrative fashion. One's personal story or personal identity is a recollected self in which the more complete the story that is formed, the more integrated the self will be…
A self without a story contracts into the thinness of the personal pronoun (Polkinghorne, 1988, p. 106). To feel a loss of self through the inability to compare the private narrative with societal narratives is a personal travesty, but in a multicultural world where individuals come from such diverse and varied settings, the inability to compare the self with the other leaves the unique self with a desire to let his/her voice be known. It is at this intersection that the narrative takes on the power to emancipate the silenced individual . The emancipatory function of the personal narrative lays not so much in the individuals ability to incorporate societal narratives into his/her life, but more so in making their personal narrative known to the greater society. By expressing the voice of the unique individual, other disjointed individuals can attempt to find similarities and hopefully, solidarity. The self as constructed narrative brings with it a dynamism, a fluidity toward social relations : [We] achieve our personal identities and self-concept through the use of the narrative configuration, and make our existence into a whole by understanding it as an expression of a single unfolding and developing story. We are in the middle of our stories and cannot be sure how they will end; we are constantly having to revise the plot as new events are added to our lives (Polkinghorne, 1988, p.150). Since personal identity is at stake in narrative dialogue, the interlocutors may choose to interject their unique narrative experiences —at best, a marginalized voice may gain discursive legitimacy, and at worst an interlocutor may be eschewed by others. For the exceptionally marginalized voice, the discursive space opened by the narrative is a wise move . Delgado (1992) posits that the narrative gives unique voice to the oppressed: No matter how limited one's resources or range of options, no matter how unequal one's bargaining position, at least one's thoughts are free. Small wonder that the recent legal-storytelling movement has had such appeal to people of color, women, gays and lesbians. Stories inject a new narrative into our society. They demand attention; if aptly told, they win acceptance or, at a minimum, respect. This is why women demand to tell their account of forced sex, why cancer victims insist that their smoking was a redressable harm despite the tobacco companies' pathetic warnings, and why patient advocates demand a fundamental restructuring of the doctorpatient relationship (p. 822). Since the narrative gives voice to the disenfranchised, peripheral, and marginal, it would be logical that these identities would evince action to accommodate for their rhetoric . Polkinghorne (1988) gives the final implication for the narrative: On this basis, humans make decisions about what they want and what they need to do to satisfy these wants. We retrieve stories about our own and the community's past, and these provide models of how actions and consequences are linked. Using these retrieved models, we plan our strategies and actions and interpret the intentions of other actors. Narrative is the discourse structure in which human action receives its form and through which it is meaningful (Polkinghorne, 1988, p.135). In academic debate, with its urban outreach programs, policy debate has never seen such a diversity of personality. Within resolutions there is enough freedom to accommodate a marginal voice—and in finding similarities between the urban debater and the oppressed narrative of a resolutional actor, the debater finds him/herself transformed. The marginalized voice is given an ear the form of the narrative, and according to the aforementioned quotation, human action in society gains meaning through narratives .

Narratives are uniquely key to understanding social location in debate and creating the epistemic conditions necessary for social change
( Josh & Kasim, professors of Comm @ CAL ST
FULLERTON -; EMPOWERING NARRATIVES; Narrative Voice and the Urban Debater: An
Investigation into Empowerment; paper submitted to the Urban Debate League Panel at the Western
States Communication Association Conference, Coeur ‘d Alene, Idaho February 23-27, http://communications.fullerton.edu/forensics/SCUDL.htm
)
The first step in orienting to the narratives of everyday life in this way is to listen to what people say.
Not necessarily to retell it in exactly those terms, but to enquire into how it would be possible for them to say that. What kinds of assumptions in what types of possible world could produce those accounts?
Clegg, 1993, p.31). This inquiry offers the ability to gain an insight into other’s existence and epistemological understandings. The ability to conceptualize or empathize with one’s stories creates a convergence between two different perspectives. This convergence is directly related to the unifying power of the narrative as well as providing a legitimate means for the disenfranchised voice to be heard.
Mumby (1993) illustrates how the duality of narrative structures create a social understanding as well as set up an epistemological device of meaning in which social awareness is created: Narrative is a socially symbolic act in the double sense that (a) it takes on meaning only in social context and (b) it plays a role in the construction of that social context as a cite of meaning in which social actors are implicated.
However, there is no simple isomorphism between narrative (or any other symbolic form) and the social realm. In different ways, each of the chapters belies the notion that the narrative functions monolithically to create a stable, structured, social order. Indeed, one of the prevailing themes across the chapters is the extent to which social order is tenuous, precarious, and open to negotiation in various ways. In this sense, society is characterized by an ongoing “struggle over meaning” (p. 5). The implication of these two factors on intercollegiate debate point to how the narrative not only relies on the social context for meaning, but aids in the construction of that context. Debate is a unique forum to meet Mumby’s socially symbolic act. Debate offers a unique social context in that the majority of audience members are intellectually versed on the social context of a particular narrative (due to debate research). The public advocacy emphasis of academic debate also allows for a “cite of meaning” and the adversarial positions in a debate round allow a team to implicate a judge or another team by virtue of their position. It is in these mock situations that debaters are implicated as social actors, and thus are moved to action by virtue of close engagement with another’s story. In factors of debate the concepts of theory and practice are inexorably intertwined. When these two competing ideologies can be combined creates a holistic insight into the human psyche. Insight gained from this holistic understanding is created by stories (or narratives) that define human experience. The ability to construct a compelling story can have a dramatic impact on the social epistemology, which creates a coconstructed knowledge framework. Scholars have posited that: Stories are among the most universal means of representing human events. In addition to suggesting an interpretation for a social happening, a well-crafted narrative can motivate the belief and action of outsiders toward the actors and events caught up in its plot. A key question about stories, as with other situations-defining symbolic forms like metaphors, theories, and ideologies is whether they introduce new and constructive insights into social life (Bennett & Edelman, 1985, p. 156). This form of meaning production and the persuasive potential of identification established by the narrative can be a powerful force upon the debate community or even society. The process of which an individuals interacts with a narrative and then how a community reacts to the narrative is better explained by White (1987) who states: Narrative is revealed to be particularly

effective system of discursive meaning production by which individuals can be taught to live a distinctively “imaginary relation to the real conditions of existence,” that is to say, an unreal but meaningful relation to the social formations in which they are indentured to live out their lives and realize their destinies and social subjects. To conceive of a narrative discourse in this way permits us to account for its universality as a cultural fact and for the interest that dominant social groups have not only in controlling what will pass for the authoritative myth of a given cultural formation but also in assuring the belief that social reality itself can be both lived and realistically comprehended as a story (p.
187) The entrance of this new form of information processing seems uncertain. Thus, the final analysis looks to the debate community in particular and provides some investigation as to how the persuasiveness of the narrative could interact with the conventions and norms of the debate community.
Narratives both engage and challenge the traditional, objective policy framework by injecting pathos into the debate space. A ballot cast for a narrative provides an endorsement for emotional appeal and real change inside and outside of the debate community
( Josh & Kasim, professors of Comm @ CAL ST
FULLERTON -; EMPOWERING NARRATIVES; Narrative Voice and the Urban Debater: An
Investigation into Empowerment; paper submitted to the Urban Debate League Panel at the Western
States Communication Association Conference, Coeur ‘d Alene, Idaho February 23-27, http://communications.fullerton.edu/forensics/SCUDL.htm
)
Having justified that the personal narrative or story can empower the disenfranchised individual, the next claim that must be justified is that the introduction of narratives will aid the entire debate community. The structure of the narrative is vastly different than the structure of more traditional affirmative cases, disadvantages, and counterplans. This difference creates a problem of how a narrative should be evaluated versus a disadvantage resulting in worldwide destruction. The narrative structure does not refute this, nor does the disadvantage outweigh the narrative. The intersection of the disadvantage and the narrative only happens at the impact level—the narrative is an example of how one person feels in the vast number of individuals subjected to torture and death by case harms or disadvantage impacts. The relationship of these structures guides them to tangentially clash and this does not justify their exclusion from debate. The narrative structure is a powerful persuasive device, and should be introduced because it: 1) privileges the emotional appeal of the story over the logical structure of links, brinks, and impacts, 2) provides a snapshot of time in which a person can identify with true suffering as opposed to the longitudinal aspects of death tallies, and 3) opens a rhetoric of possibility in which competitors and judges alike can affirm or negate a resolution based off of the ability to foresee a future effected by the narrative. The debate community has privileged traditional logical appeals over nontraditional forms of argument. These logical appeals create easy comparisons for critics since the arguments can be broken down into simple equations. To weigh a disadvantage of ecological collapse versus a plan that saves fifty lives is basic math—survival of the planet always outweighs fifty lives. These logical appeals are naturally preferred over emotional appeals because there is no systematic way in which to quantify the emotions evoked by a message. However, narrative

debate could create a different form of impact analysis at the pathos level: the emotional appeal of the narrative could be weighed against the emotional appeal of a disadvantage. This new type of impact analysis provides clear ground, because the traditional disadvantage can have emotional appeal (deaths of children, environmental destruction—these all include basic pathos appeals) and the narrative can be weighed against this. The other advantage to this form of impact analysis is that it becomes a forum in the debate community, judges and competitors alike could begin to create rubrics and hierarchies that would help explain the more powerful versus less powerful pathos appeals. The realm of the pathos appeal has been understudied for years, and with its acceptance as a criterion in debate, the community could lend a helping hand to facilitate a mapping out the persuasiveness of pathos appeals. The second advantage that the narrative provides in academic debate is that the narrative is centered on a snapshot in time: the narrative is a glimpse into someone else’s life for just a moment. In debate rounds, competitors often prophesize the most severe impacts possible in an attempt to get enough “blood on the flow.” In every debate round, billions of human beings are killed by some proclaimed catastrophic event that a singular policy measure evoked. By tallying deaths into the billions, debaters and judges never really have a chance to empathize with one case of human pain and suffering. Narratives produce an insight into the human condition and illuminate the struggle our species endures. Compared to traditional policy arguments that concentrate on future action to remedy current problems, the narrative forces competitors to empathize with a particular problem that a human is experiencing now.
This empathy is lost in contemporary debate, with debaters claiming future destruction for the planet in almost every debate round. With more narrative debaters, we may see a resurgence of probabilistic arguments against disadvantages, since the unlikely scenario of nuclear war might be outweighed by the definite impact to the protagonist of the narrative (as well as the good possibility that other’s have similar narratives). The narrative helps to “keep it real,” and centers the debate round back to the individuals that the impacts are directly affecting, creating a strong link between debater and the change that they are advocating in the status quo. The final reason why narratives would help the debate community is that they do open up a rhetoric of possibility. The Gulf war may or may not have started (without the narrative), but after the young Kuwaiti girl spoke, there was a call for war, and war seemed inevitable, a conclusion that traditional forms of argument would never have established. This discourse is a prime example of the power of the narrative, which opened a possibility that before was not an option. The persuasive force of the narrative affects receiver and the individual immediately begins to ponder what sort of situation would bring about such a travesty. This thought process create new possibilities that individuals can begin conceived even though it was unconsidered before: The need to evoke possibilities of the human condition is central to the rhetorical enterprise, transcending any one school or strategy. However, narrative is perhaps the foremost means by which such possibilities are disclosed. Through storytelling, rhetors can confront the states of awareness and intellectual beliefs of audiences; through it they can show them previously unsuspected ways of being and acting in the world (Kirkwood, 1992, p. 32). These new ways of acting and being are reflections of a different rhetorical style, new faculties that should be available to the young debater. The rhetoric of possibility that is created by having competitors and judges alike engage the narrative calls for new creative actions that would have normally been dismissed in the contemporary debate society. The rhetoric of possibility is different from the rhetoric of actuality—the traditional debater creates claims from a realist framework—the political disadvantage based around the workings of government, the financial disadvantage from the workings of the stock market, or the counterplan that tries to implement a plan through the same traditional policy means. The narrative debater, working from a rhetoric of possibility

works from a different ideology or school of thought, though the narrative debater would recognize these same realist conceptions, the narrative debater also tries to guide the audience to see additional perspectives and to create more solutions than the realist platform—the narrative debater as asks the audience to try to work outside and around the realist framework as well. By helping people examine possibilities, which they previously did not imagine or think they could achieve, rhetors can free them to pursue more satisfying responses to both personal and public needs. Hence a rhetoric of possibility can illuminate diverse kinds of communication (Kirkwood, 1992, p.44). As of the writing of this paper, the signing of a debate ballot has gained perlocutionary force—the action of voting has some concrete impact in the community (debate and otherwise). Debaters have began to claim that the ballot can either operate in the traditional debate sense (working from any of a multitude of debate “paradigms:” stock issues, cost-benefit analysis, hypothesis-testing, etc.), or the ballot becomes an endorsement of an ideology, with the action of signing becoming a statement to a larger community. The narrative can operate at either level: it can be weighed in a debate round on the probability and pathos appeal of the narration, or it can be endorsed by a judge for its ideological power. However, the narrative can be impacted at even higher levels. A performance that touches debaters and critics alike should be endorsed for the mere fact that more individuals should hear it. The intellectual landscape would support any effort or trust to exchange and create ideas. The narrative could be a stronghold that keeps the death that debaters often claim as inevitable closer to home.
OUR FRAMEWORK THROUGH THE USE OF NARRATION IS BEST FOR DEBATE. Debaters and judges share in an epistemological process that emancipates and allows societal awareness for the urban debater as well as creates more enlightened and mindful individuals across the board.
( Josh & Kasim, professors of Comm @ CAL ST
FULLERTON -; EMPOWERING NARRATIVES; Narrative Voice and the Urban Debater: An
Investigation into Empowerment; paper submitted to the Urban Debate League Panel at the Western
States Communication Association Conference, Coeur ‘d Alene, Idaho February 23-27, http://communications.fullerton.edu/forensics/SCUDL.htm
)

Author Qualifications
Violet Ketels is an associate professor of English at Temple University. She has an award form Temple named after her for her excellence in teaching.

Cards
Intellectuals that haven’t been courted by imperial ideology, the non-bystanders, are key to any effective revolution. They can become capable to solve a laundry list of impacts by allowing for the human spirit to come together in a general mobilization of the human mind, spirit, responsibility, and reason.
KETELS 1996 (Violet, Assc Prof of English @Temple University -THE HOLOCAUST: REMEMBERING FOR
THE FUTURE: "Havel to the Castle!" The Power of the Word; THE ANNALS OF AMERICAN ACADEMY OF
POLITICAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCE, November; 548 Annals 45;)
Even though, as Americans, we have not experienced "by fire, hunger and the sword"
n19 the terrible disasters in war overtaking other human beings on their home ground, we know the consequences of human hospitality to evil.
We know about human perfidy: the chasm that separates proclaiming virtue from acting decently.
Even those of us trained to linguistic skepticism and the relativity of moral judgment can grasp the verity in the stark warning, "If something exists in one place, it will exist everywhere."
n20
That the dreadful something warned against continues to exist any-where should fill us with an inextinguishable yearning to do something. Our impotence to action against the brutality of mass slaughter shames us.
We have the historical record to ransack for precedent and corollaries--letters, documents, testaments, books--written words that would even
"preserve their validity in the eyes of a man threatened with instant death." n21 The truths gleanable from the record of totalitarian barbarism cited in them may be common knowledge; they are by no means commonly acknowledged. n22 They appear in print upon many a page; they have not yet--still not yet--sufficiently pene-trated human consciousness.
Herein lies the supreme lesson for intellectuals, those who have the projective power to grasp what is not yet evident to the general human consciousness: it is possible to bring down totalitarian regimes either by violence or by a gradual transformation of human consciousness; it is not possible to bring them down "if we ignore them, make excuses for them, yield to them or accept their way of playing the game" n23 in order to avoid violence.
The history of the gentle revolutions of Poland, Hungary, and [*51] Czechoslovakia suggests that those revolutions would not have happened at all, and certainly not bloodlessly, without the moral engagement and political activism of intellectuals in those besieged cultures.
Hundreds of thousands of students, workers, and peasants joined in the final efforts to defeat the totalitarian regimes
that collapsed in 1989. Still, it was the intellectuals, during decades when they repeatedly risked careers, freedom, and their very lives, often in dangerous solitary challenges to power, who formed the unifying consensus, developed the liberating philosophy, wrote the rallying cries, framed the politics, mobilized the will and energies of disparate groups, and literally took to the streets to lead nonviolent protests that became revolutions.
The most profound insights into this process that gradually penetrated social consciousness sufficiently to make revolution possible can be read in the role Vaclav Havel played before and during Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution. As George Steiner reflects, while "the mystery of creative and analytic genius . . . is given to the very few," others can be "woken to its presence and exposed to its demands." n24 Havel possesses that rare creative and analytic genius. We see it in the spaciousness of his moral vision for the future, distilled from the crucible of personal suffering and observation; in his poet's ability to translate both experience and vision into language that comes as close as possible to truth and survives translation across cultures; in the compelling force of his personal heroism.
Characteristically, Havel raises local experience to universal relevance.
"If today's planetary civilization has any hope of survival," he begins, "that hope lies chiefly in what we understand as the human spirit."
He continues:
If we don't wish to destroy ourselves in national, religious or political discord; if we don't wish to find our world with twice its current population, half of it dying of hunger; if we don't wish to kill ourselves with ballistic missiles armed with atomic warheads or eliminate ourselves with bacteria specially cultivated for the purpose; if we don't wish to see some people go desperately hungry while others throw tons of wheat into the ocean; if we don't wish to suffocate in the global greenhouse we are heating up for ourselves or to be burned by radiation leaking through holes we have made in the ozone; if we don't wish to exhaust the nonrenewable, mineral resources of this planet, without which we cannot survive; if, in short, we don't wish any of this to happen, then we

must--as humanity, as people, as conscious beings with spirit, mind and a sense of responsibility-somehow come to our senses.
n25
Somehow we must come together in "a kind of general mobilization of human consciousness, of the human mind and spirit, human responsibility, human reason." n26
To solve problems presented in the status quo we must forget the “I” of our consciousness and “do the right thing” by placing Morals above politics and responsibility over desires so that we can amass in a general mobilization of thought to become one with the natural world and rehabilitate ourselves from the abyss we have been thrown into.
KETELS 1996 (Violet, Assc Prof of English @Temple University -THE HOLOCAUST: REMEMBERING FOR
THE FUTURE: "Havel to the Castle!" The Power of the Word; THE ANNALS OF AMERICAN ACADEMY OF
POLITICAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCE, November; 548 Annals 45;)
... We are intimidated by the "high modernist rage against mimesis and content," monstrous progeny of the union be-tween Nietzsche and philosophical formalism, the grim proposal we have bought into that there is no truth, no objectivi-ty, and no disinterested knowledge. ... Nothing less than the transformation of human consciousness is likely to rescue us. ... They appear in print upon many a page; they have not yet--still not yet--sufficiently penetrated human conscious-ness. ... Somehow we must come together in "a kind of general mobilization of human consciousness, of the human mind and spirit, human responsibility, human reason." ... The question is whether we shall succeed in reconstituting the natural world as the true terrain of politics, rehabilitating . . . personal experience as the initial measure of things, plac-ing morality above politics and responsibility above our desires, in making human community meaningful, in returning content to human speech, in reconstituting, as the focus of all social action, the autonomous, integral, and dignified hu-man "I," responsible for ourselves because we are bound to something higher, and capable of sacrificing something, in extreme cases even everything .
. . for the sake of that which gives life meaning. ... Havel stresses the potential of truth and humane values to transform human consciousness incrementally over time. ... The very word "peace" has been drained of all content by the European experience of "peace in our time." ...
Only through truthful intellectuals who respect the integrity of linguistics and communication can we overcome lies to get to truth. This allows us to hold ourselves accountable for the fidelity between words and actions. This allows us to make a near utopia were violence is rare and life is sacred.
KETELS 1996 (Violet, Assc Prof of English @Temple University -THE HOLOCAUST: REMEMBERING FOR
THE FUTURE: "Havel to the Castle!" The Power of the Word; THE ANNALS OF AMERICAN ACADEMY OF
POLITICAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCE, November; 548 Annals 45;)
ABSTRACT: This article argues the virtue of Vaclav Havel's striking idea "that the world might actually be changed by the force of truth, the power of a truthful word, the strength of a free spirit, conscience, and responsibility." We are not powerless when we recognize the power of words to change history for good or ill. Intellectuals, whose work is inherently linguistic, bear unique responsibility for the thinking that shapes the general moral consciousness.
Havel calls intellectuals to account for vacuous verbal games
that erode faith in human communication
, for complicity in subversive linguistic manipulation, and for ethical

indifference.
We must become
Cassandras, he urges, " warriors of the pen
," predicting, warning, bearing witness on the side of truth against lies, holding ourselves and others to account for the integrity of words and for fidelity between words and action. Only such scruple can change moral consciousness enough to make violence rare and human life sacred again.
Intellectuals are more focused on abstract attacks on values to hear the cries of the oppressed
KETELS 1996 (Violet, Assc Prof of English @Temple University -THE HOLOCAUST: REMEMBERING FOR
THE FUTURE: "Havel to the Castle!" The Power of the Word; THE ANNALS OF AMERICAN ACADEMY OF
POLITICAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCE, November; 548 Annals 45;)
[*46]
THE political bestiality of our age is abetted by our willingness to tolerate the deconstructing of humanist values. The process begins with the cynical manipulation of language. It often ends in stupefying murderousness before which the world stands silent, frozen in impotent "attentism"--a wait-and-see stance as unsuited to the human plight as a paci-fier is to stopping up the hunger of a starving child.
In the Germany of the 1930s, a demonic idea was born in a demented brain; the word went forth; orders were giv-en, repeated, widely broadcast; and men, women, and children were herded into death camps. Their offshore signals, cries for help, did not summon us to rescue.
We had become inured to the reality of human suffering. We could no longer hear what the words meant or did not credit them or not enough of us joined the chorus. Shrieking victims per-ished in the cold blankness of inhumane silence.
We were deaf to the apocalyptic urgency
in Solzhenitsyn's declaration from the Gulag that we must check the disas-trous course of history.
We were heedless of the lesson
of his experience that only the unbending strength of the human spirit, fully taking its stand on the shifting frontier of encroaching vio-lence and declaring
"not one step further," though death may be the end of it--only this unwavering firmness offers any genuine defense of peace for the individual, of genuine peace for mankind at large.
n2
In past human crises, writers and thinkers strained language to the breaking point to keep alive the memory of the unimaginable, to keep the human conscience from forgetting. In the current context, however, intellectuals seem more devoted to abstract assaults on values than to thoughtful probing of the moral dimensions of human experience.
"Heirs of the ancient possessions of higher knowledge and literacy skills,"
n3 we seem to have lost our nerve
, and not only because of Holocaust history and its tragic aftermath.
We feel insecure before the empirical absolutes of hard science. We are intimidated by the "high modernist rage against mimesis and content,"
n4 monstrous progeny of the union between Nietzsche and philosophical formalism, the grim proposal we have bought into that there is no truth, no objectivity, and no disinterested knowledge.
n5
Less certain about the power of language, that "oldest flame of the
[*47] humanist soul,"
n6 to frame a credo to live by or criteria to judge by, we are vulnerable even to the discredited
Paul de Man's indecent hint that "wars and revo-lutions are not empirical events . . . but 'texts' masquerading as facts."
n7
Truth and reality seem more elusive than they ever were in the past; values are pronounced to be mere fictions of ruling elites to retain power. We are embarrassed by virtue.
The depersonalization of power through disconnected philosophical criticism destroys humanity
KETELS 1996 (Violet, Assc Prof of English @Temple University -THE HOLOCAUST: REMEMBERING FOR
THE FUTURE: "Havel to the Castle!" The Power of the Word; THE ANNALS OF AMERICAN ACADEMY OF
POLITICAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCE, November; 548 Annals 45;)

Less certain about the power of language, that "oldest flame of the
[*47] humanist soul,"
n6 to frame a credo to live by or criteria to judge by, we are vulnerable even to the discredited
Paul de Man's indecent hint that "wars and revo-lutions are not empirical events . . . but 'texts' masquerading as facts."
n7 T ruth and reality seem more elusive than they ever
were in the past; values are pronounced to be mere fictions of ruling elites to retain power. We are embarrassed by virtue.
Words collide and crack under these new skeptical strains
, dissolving into banalities the colossal enormity of what must be expressed lest we forget. Remembering for the future has become doubly dispiriting by our having to remember for the present, too, our having to register and confront what is wrong here and now.
The reality to be fixed in memory shifts as we seek words for it; the memory we set down is flawed by our subjec-tivities. It is selective, deceptive, partial, unreliable, and amoral. It plays tricks and can be invented. It stops up its ears to shut out what it does not dare to face. n8
Lodged in our brains, such axioms, certified by science and statistics, tempt us to concede the final irrelevance of words and memory. We have to get on with our lives. Besides, memories reconstructed in words, even when they are documented by evidence, have not often changed the world or fended off the powerful seductions to silence, forgetting, or denying.
Especially denying
, which, in the case of the Holocaust, has become an obscene industry competing in the open market of ideas for control of our sense of the past.
It is said that the Holocaust never happened.
Revisionist history with a vengeance is purveyed in words; something in words must be set against it.
Yet what?
How do we nerve to the task when we are increasingly disposed to cast both words and memory in a condition of cryogenic dubiety?
Not only before but also since 1945, the criminality of governments, paraded as politics and fattening on linguistic manipulation and deliberately reimplanted memory of past real or imagined grievance, has spread calamity across the planet.
"The cancer that has eaten at the entrails of Yugoslavia since Tito's death [has] Kosovo for its locus," but not merely as a piece of land. The country's rogue adventurers use the word "Kosovo" to reinvoke as sacred the land where
Serbs were defeated by Turks in 1389! n9 Memory of bloody massacres in 1389, sloganized and distorted in 1989, de-mands the bloody revenge of new massacres and returns civilization not to its past glory but to its gory tribal wars. As Matija Beckovic, the bard of Serb nationalism, writes,
"It is as if the Serbian people waged only one battle--by widening the Kosovo charnel-house, by adding wailing upon wailing, by counting new martyrs to the martyrs of Kosovo. . . . Ko-sovo is the Serbianized [*48] history of the Flood--the Serbian New Testament." n10
A cover of Suddeutsche Zeitung in 1994 was printed with blood donated by refugee women from Bosnia in an eeri-ly perverse afterbirth of violence revisited. n11
We stand benumbed before multiplying horrors.
As Vaclav Havel warned more than a decade ago, regimes that generate them "are the avant garde of a global crisis in civilization." The depersonalization of power in "system, ideolo-gy and apparat," pathological suspicions about human motives and meanings, the loosening of individual responsibility, the swiftness by which disastrous events follow one upon another "have deprived us of our conscience, of our common sense and natural speech and thereby, of our actual humanity."
n12
Nothing less than the transformation of human consciousness is likely to rescue us.
Cries for human rights must be represented not only in words, but in actions
KETELS 1996 (Violet, Assc Prof of English @Temple University -THE HOLOCAUST: REMEMBERING FOR
THE FUTURE: "Havel to the Castle!" The Power of the Word; THE ANNALS OF AMERICAN ACADEMY OF
POLITICAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCE, November; 548 Annals 45;)
Books, essays, speeches by eyewitnesses to totalitarian experience plead for a reaffirmation of basic human rights. They are exhortations to plunder history for usable analogy.
But well-schooled intellectuals know that contingency rules human history. The flow of events does not stop, does not seem to hold fast long enough, for us to use the lessons historians exact from the past. Language seems pitifully unequal to history's caprice of presenting new configurations. In midthought, examples we adduce become obsolete as news of new horrors flash onto the screens of our moral imaginations.
Preachments about basic human rights, however elegantly urged, do not summon us to virtue or insulate us from the predators who have turned civilized cities into killing fields.
What, then, are they worth?
Are they merely the fic-tions they are labeled by intellectuals of skeptical chic who choose disdainful withdrawal from the chaos of history? n13

Fear of mockery tempts even the humanists among us to retreat into a stance of nonassessment.
The risk of being ac-cused of vapid moralizing ties our tongues and retards reaction.
Such failures of nerve seem justified by the history we are enjoined to plunder. They precipitate descent into a fatal-istic nihilism that relieves us from responsibility. Words do not matter; they rarely mean what they say.
What does it matter, then, how intellectuals use their verbal virtuosity? Values are relative and truth elusive.
We stand precisely where many gifted French intellectuals stood during World War II, in spite of the myth of re-sistance promulgated by the most brilliant among them. They remained glacially unmoved, engrossed
[*49] in vacuous verbal games, when the desperation of the situation should have aroused their moral conscience, their humane con-sciousness, and their civic spirit. They rushed to embrace the position "that language is not referential and the writing of history impossible,"
n14 because it let them off the hook.
History has survived them and provides a regenerative, other view against nihilism and detachment. It testifies that our terror of being found guilty of phrases too smooth or judgment too simple is not in itself a value. Some longing for transcendence persists in the human spirit, some tenacious faith that truth and goodness exist and can prevail.
What happened in the death camps, the invasion of Prague by Russian tanks, the rape of Muslim women, the dis-membering of Bosnian men, the degrading of a sophisticated society to subsistence and barbarous banditry: these things do not become fictions simply because we cannot speak of them adequately or because composing abstractions is safer than responding to the heinous reality of criminal acts.
No response to the Holocaust and its murderous wake or to the carnage in the former Yugoslavia could possibly be adequate to the atrocities alphabetized in file folders of perpetrators or to the unspeakable experiences burned into brains and bodies of survivors.
But no response at all breeds new catastrophe.
Saul Bellow warned about the "human-istic civilized moral imagination" that, seized with despair, "declines into lethargy and sleep."
n15
Imagine the plight of human creatures if it were to be silenced altogether, extinguished or forgotten.
"Humanism did not produce the Holocaust, and the Holocaust, knowing its enemies, was bent on the extermination of humanism.
It is an odd consequence of an allor-nothing mentality to repudiate humanist values because they are inadequate as an antidote to evil."
n16
Basic human rights asserted in words cannot be restored in reality unless they are matched to practices in all the spheres of influence we occupy. We feel revulsion at the repudiation of humanist values so visible in the savagery of the battlefield and the councils of war. Yet we seem inoculated against seeing the brutalities of daily human interactions, the devaluing of values in our own intellectual spheres, the moral and ethical debunking formally incorporated into scholarly
exegesis in literature, philosophy, the social sciences, and linguistics, the very disciplines that cradled humanist values.
Remembering for the future by rehearsing the record, then, is not enough, as the most eloquent witnesses to Holocaust history have sorrowfully attested.
We must
also respond
to the record with strategies that challenge humanist reductionism in places where we tend to overlook it or think it harmless.
Our moral outrage should be intensified, not subdued,
[*50] by what we know. We must search out alternatives to the anomie that seizes us when the linguistic dis-tance between words and reality seems unbridgeably vast, and reflections upon historical events ill matched to the dark complexities of the human experience we would illumine.
To be fair, it is not just a desire to evade responsibility or to forget that makes our responses so feeble. At times we simply have no words.
At times we are not unlike the German "executor executioners" who were interviewed for the film Shoah, "physically incapable of finding the true words and attaching them to the deeds, as a paralyzed man cannot tie his tie or lift a pen."
We need fresh air in our "separate national and linguistic rooms."
n17
The executioners have not earned forgiveness. We have not earned the right to "turn away from the dilemmas posed by the writers who bore witness to the ugly
European past."
n18

Using war as a justification for action creates mindless technocrats ready to push the button at any second. Opposition is critical.
KETELS 1996 (Violet, Assc Prof of English @Temple University -THE HOLOCAUST: REMEMBERING FOR
THE FUTURE: "Havel to the Castle!" The Power of the Word; THE ANNALS OF AMERICAN ACADEMY OF
POLITICAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCE, November; 548 Annals 45;)
The Prague Spring was "the inevitable consequence of a long drama originally played out chiefly in the theatre of the spirit and the conscience of society," a process triggered and sustained "by individuals willing to live in truth even when things [*52] were at their worst." n27 The process was hidden in "the invisible realm of social consciousness," conscience, and the subconscious. It was indirect, long-term, and hard to measure. n28 So, too, its continuation that ex-ploded into the Velvet Revolution, the magic moment when 800,000 citizens, jamming Wenceslas Square in
Prague, jingled their house keys like church bells and changed from shouting "Truth will prevail" to chanting "Havel to the cas-tle."
Havel developed his thinking in plays, petitions, letters, samizdat essays and addresses, written both in and out of prison, circulated at peril of new imprisonment, sometimes at peril of death: his is a humanist philosophy wrested from the logic of cruel experience, an anatomy of the process of social transformation, and a practical political strategy. He specifies to post-totalitarian societies, including Western democracies, for whom his reading of the Czech experience stands as warning and instruction, the relevance to us of his passionately argued convictions. His prescience is amazing; his candid truthfulness, startling.
In an utterly original departure from received wisdom, he discredits the two basic political strategies
between which he thinks
Western intellectuals unwittingly oscillate
: (1) inventing and deploying further weapons of mass destruction "for the defense of democracy"; and
(2) joining peace movements
. Both strategies
"colonize" human consciousness by moving it toward the same global totalitarianism; the second effectively makes the just mind ineffectual by "preoccupy-ing it, then occupying it, and ultimately rendering it intellectually harmless."
n29
Opposition to totalitarian systems is fumbling and futile if we fail to see them for what they really are: "a convex mirror of all modern civilization and a harsh, perhaps final call for a global recasting of how that civilization under-stands itself."
n30
The enemy is the momentum of impersonal power, whether wielded by technocrats or tyrants, which defines totalitarianism of territory and spirit. Defeating the enemy depends on routing totalitarianism from the structure of contemporary humanity, from our very souls.
The question is whether we shall succeed in reconstituting the natural world as the true terrain of politics, rehabilitating . . . personal experience as the initial measure of things, placing morality above politics and responsibility above our de-sires, in making human community meaningful, in returning content to human speech, in reconstituting, as the focus of all social action, the autonomous, integral, and dignified human "I," responsible for ourselves because we are bound to something higher, and capable of sacrificing something, in extreme cases even everything . . . for the sake of that which gives life meaning.
n31
Havel translates densely philosophical probing into simple principles of action by which individuals can resist al-ienating pressure. True to his genius for globalizing local experience, Havel defines the alienating pressure so as to in-clude "consumption, [*53] advertising, repression, technology, or cliche--all of which are the blood brothers of fanati-cism and the wellspring of totalitarian thought." n32
All of us, then, wherever we live, under whatever form of govern-ment, have a stake in the human struggle and a solution to try
, personally, you and I, and all of us together.
We are not powerless.
Havel learned from his particular experiment in "anti-political politics" something of essen-tial and universal importance: that a single, seemingly powerless person who dares to cry out the word of truth and to stand behind it with all his per-son and all his life, ready to pay a high price, has, surprisingly, greater power, though formally disfranchised, than do thousands of anonymous voters.
n33
A realist as well as a visionary with projective imagination, Havel acknowledges that most of such individual expres-sions remain rudimentary revolts, but
he points out,
"Here and there, a more coherent and visible initiative may emerge .
. . that transcends 'merely' individual revolt and is transformed into more conscious, structured, and purposeful work."
n34 He cites as an example Soviet fears of just such a transformation in the case of
Solzhenitsyn, who was expelled from Russia in the regime's desperate attempt "to plug up the dreadful wellspring of truth," a truth that might have caused "incalculable transformations in social consciousness, which in turn might one day produce political debacles unpre-dictable in their consequences." n3
Rockets aimed at this or that state are less dangerous to the enemy than human beings taking responsibility for the world, which presupposes our seeing ourselves in the convex mirror

and absorbing the fearful lesson that suppression of human beings
in Prague or Moscow or Mostar threatens suppression of all human beings everywhere.
n36
In his speech on 8 May 1993 commemorating the Czech Liberation Day, Havel, now president, pointed to the "im-potence of contemporary
German democracy and the inability to present a united front to rampant Nazis." The policy of appeasement, suicidal in the 1930s and 1940s, is proving so now:
It is bowing down before evil and its terrible consequences for the whole world, if politicians and whole nations forget that a threat to the freedom of one country threatens the freedom of all nations. Indifference to others and to the com-munity opens the door to evil. The message is we cannot afford to be indifferent.
This sensible statement, suggesting a Czech national moral obligation to intervene in Yugoslavia, prompted instant dis-avowal by the Czech prime minister. It is hard to resist seeing in that disavowal a political difference between the two men that, given the peculiar constraints of the
Czech constitution, threatens to throttle the immediate effectiveness of Havel's presidency. It is, moreover, a lesson about the distance between morality and power
that must be negotiated by anyone who tries to change anything from inside a political system.
Havel's antipolitical politics is practical morality, service to truth,
[*54] not a technique of power and manipula-tion.
It is evident
, he writes,
"that wholly personal categories like good and evil still have their unambiguous content and, under certain circumstances, are capable of shaking the seemingly unshakable power with all its armies of soldiers, policemen, and bureaucrats."
n37 He grounds his hopes on a conviction that "the essential aims of life are present natu-rally in every person,"
and he defines them as a desire for dignity, for free expression of being, and "a sense of tran-scendence over the world of existence," a yearning to live in truth.
n38
Alongside this magnanimous view of human potential,
he keeps in mind its opposite pole: that we are all capable of trivializing our humanity by merging into the manipulated, unprincipled, anonymous crowd, with its insatiable demand for complicity in its lies.
n39
Intellectuals bear the responsibility for the choices they make in knowledge production
KETELS 1996 (Violet, Assc Prof of English @Temple University -THE HOLOCAUST: REMEMBERING FOR
THE FUTURE: "Havel to the Castle!" The Power of the Word; THE ANNALS OF AMERICAN ACADEMY OF
POLITICAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCE, November; 548 Annals 45;)
Intellectuals are not customarily thought of as men and women of action. Our circumstances are ambiguous, our credibility precarious. While our sense of past and future is "radically linguistic," n49 we scarcely have a common human language anymore, and our fashionable linguistic skepticism elevates the denying of verities to an article of faith, out of which we build academic careers of naysaying.
We use the written word as the primary political medium for gaining attention. We are "writing people," who traffic in words and thus carry an unavoidable accountability for what we say with them. n50 Havel defines intellectuals as peo-ple who devote their lives "to thinking in general terms about the affairs of this world and the broader context of things . . . professionally,"
n51 for their occupation.
If we aspire to be distinguished from mere scribblers, history demands that we choose between being "the apologist for rulers [and] an advisor to the people; the tragedy of the twentieth century is that these two functions have ceased to exist independently of one another, and intellectuals like Sartre who thought they were fulfilling one role were inevita-bly drawn to play both." n52
Alternatively, we can choose with Richard Rorty, echoing Max Weber, to stay out of politics, "where passionate commitment and sterile excitation are out of place," keeping "politics in the hands of charismatic leaders and trained officials." We can choose to pursue "[our] own private perfection." n53
That particular stance, however expedient, did not work well in Germany. In Czechoslovakia, it produced wartime Nazi collaborator Gustave
Husak, the "President of Forgetting," who sought to perfect totalitarianism by systematically purging "the Party and state, the arts, the universities, and the media of everyone who dared to speak critically, inde-pendently, or even intelligently about what the regime defined as politics." n54 It produced Tudjman and Milosevic in Yugoslavia.
Intellectuals can choose their roles, but cannot not choose, nor can we evade the full weight of the consequences at-tendant on our choices. "It is always the intellectuals, however
[*57] we may shrink from the chilling sound of that word . . . who must bear the full weight of moral responsibility."
n55
Humanist intellectuals can aspire to be judged by more specifically exacting criteria: as those whose work is worthwhile because it has human uses; survives the test of reality; corresponds to history; represses rationalizing in fa-vor of fact; challenges the veracity of rulers; refuses the safety of

abstraction; recognizes words as forms of action, as likely to be lethal as to be liberating; scruples to heal the rupture between words and things, between things and ideas; remains incorruptibly opposed to the service of ideological ends pursued by unnecessary violence or inhumane means; and, finally, takes risks for the sake of true witness to events, to the truth even of unpopular ideas or to the lies in popu-lar ones. Above all, intellectuals can resist the dreary relativism that neutralizes good and evil as if in defense of the theoretical pseudo-notion that distinguishing between them is not possible. The hour is too late, the situation too grave for such pettifoggery.
Our discourse in intellectual spaces matters.
KETELS 1996 (Violet, Assc Prof of English @Temple University -THE HOLOCAUST: REMEMBERING FOR
THE FUTURE: "Havel to the Castle!" The Power of the Word; THE ANNALS OF AMERICAN ACADEMY OF
POLITICAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCE, November; 548 Annals 45;)
Words have histories and power in the making of histories. They are predictive and they have consequences. "All important events in the real world . . . always have their prologue in words," writes Havel. Like the Slovenian writer, he traces the connections between words and events. He attests the potency of words. He weighs their mysterious ambigui-ty and warns intellectuals especially "to listen carefully to the words of the powerful, to be watchful of them, to fore-warn of their danger, and to proclaim their dire implications or the evil they might invoke." n68
The connivances of political doublespeak, which have become staples of statesmanship, the cynical rationalizations deemed realistic adjustments in day-to-day politics, and the cliches that pass for conversation have no place in Havel's notions of how to live a life or conduct the affairs of a country. Havel did not succumb to the debased jargon of Com-munist ideology, nor did he lapse into the safety of silence, passively complicit in the "semantic occupation of the pub-lic sphere," n69 that typical preemptive strategy of tyrants.
Havel stubbornly insists on equal regard for the liberating and redeeming potential of words even as he acknowl-edges their ambiguous, perfidious, terrifying, even lethal destructiveness.
[*62] He shows that the seemingly powerless are empowered by recovering confidence in language, and courage to bear public witness against the public lies that amnesty slaughters. It is sometimes possible to change history by calling things by their proper names. Calling the em peror naked when he is, refuting the lie out loud, insisting on verbal veracity against bombast and other linguistic distor-tions may not work, but, then again, they might
, Havel argues.
What certainly foredooms to failure is doing nothing.
Of course, the effectiveness of words in particular historical events depends on who says them, to whom, under what circumstances, and when.
Effective response to inhumane totalitarianisms cannot be improvisationally applied or delayed. Havel's philosophical and political strategies have both an immediate and a long-range aspect. Violence, in the short run, in particular situations, may be the only defense against human brutality. But unless we are also taking steps at the same time to change human consciousness so that violence of any kind becomes simply unthinkable as a solution for human problems, then we are condemned to an endless cycle of barbarous savagery.
On his unanimous election to the presidency of Czechoslovakia, Havel offered a cautionary observation as stun-ningly portentous in the West now as in Eastern Europe then:
"We have become morally ill, because we have become accustomed to saying one thing and thinking another."
n70
The schizophrenic pathology begins within the individual, but it also corrupts the relationship and drives a wedge of mistrustful incomprehension between the individual and those in power, thereby making dishonesty the norm in social and political interactions. Healing that schizophrenic split can begin by guarding the integrity of one's own word and holding others, especially those who wield power, accountable for theirs.
In dozens of public statements, Havel presses his theme that we are rooted in the universe with a responsibility to other people and to the human community.
He asserts as ethical imperative
for a civil society that citizens refuse to for-give mendacity, especially in the name of expediency or pragmatic politics. We must cry down especially the formal lie. When we do so in sufficient numbers, the game is up. "Even something as seemingly ephemeral as the truth spoken aloud, as an openly expressed concern for the humanity of humans, bears within itself a certain power and . . . even a word is capable of a certain radiation, of leaving a mark on the 'hidden consciousness' of a community."
n71
On the morning after the 1989 revolutions, the distinguished Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz wrote:
The failure of Marx's vision has created the need for another vision, not for a rejection of all visions. I do not speak of "socialism with a human face," for that belongs to the past. I speak instead about a concern for society, civilization and humanity in a period when the 19th century idea of progress has died out and a related idea, communist revolution, has disintegrated. What remains today is the [*63] idea of responsibility, which works against the loneliness and indiffer-ence of an individual living in the belly of a whale. n72
Havel offers precisely such a vision, such a concern for society, civilization, and humanity
. It restores to individuals the power to create history, to play a dynamic part in the polis, whether thought of as a local community or as the universal human family. It asks citizens to be responsible, not only to themselves but to something higher than themselves: the community, the family of humankind, to some

notion, however inchoate, of good and evil. Havel's writing calls philosophers, critics, professors, theorists, and other public purveyors of the word to account for the undermining of faith in human communication.
He reminds us that men who burn books know what they are doing. His moral authority resonates in every sentence. He writes, to borrow George
Steiner's eloquently precise lan-guage, after an "intolerable wrestle with word and meaning," stripping language to the bone, choosing words from the common store as if "borrowed at high interest," assessing them with "supreme scruple" lest they lie. n73
Using language so that it comes as close as humanly possible to truth and intention, to choosing words with "su-preme scruple," and reacting to words with like scruple, transforms literacy into
"humane literacy."
n74
To conceive of such nice precision as the civic duty of ordinary citizens, as a way of stirring the general consciousness, is the starting place for any individual who aspires to live in truth
, according to Havel.
Events have proved the virtue and validity of Havel's vision
. It is practical politics acting continuously as a check on any system kept in power by "appearances, distortions, oppression or lies." It refers to any way a person resists ma-nipulation. When even one person publicly refutes the lie by daring to cry out,
"certain changes happen in communal moral and spiritual sensibility" that indirectly, over time, gain in significance and effect change.
n75
Structures built on lies, any structures, from governments to block committees, work only as long as people are complicit by silence.
Example of how intellectuals screwed up w/o thinking about real world implications
KETELS 1996 (Violet, Assc Prof of English @Temple University -THE HOLOCAUST: REMEMBERING FOR
THE FUTURE: "Havel to the Castle!" The Power of the Word; THE ANNALS OF AMERICAN ACADEMY OF
POLITICAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCE, November; 548 Annals 45;)
Disillusion came too slowly. The influence of the French intellectuals took hold in the United States,
It’s easy for intellectuals to criticize from their ivory tower, but their words have implications that can have bad implications
KETELS 1996 (Violet, Assc Prof of English @Temple University -THE HOLOCAUST: REMEMBERING FOR
THE FUTURE: "Havel to the Castle!" The Power of the Word; THE ANNALS OF AMERICAN ACADEMY OF
POLITICAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCE, November; 548 Annals 45;)
From the safety of
those institutions, theorists continue to argue the impotence of language, while its raw power, exploding from the propaganda arsenals of political opportunists, foments violence across the world and seeks sanctions for it afterward. While we quibble about the efficacy of speech, as if silence or nonverbal signifiers were preferable, murderers recast familiar words to erase geography, rewrite history, and disguise human exterminations. Distracted
by lexemes, paroxytones, and phenomenological subjectivisms, we mindlessly neglect the connection between language and power.
It really does matter that intellectuals undermine confidence in words. In the real world, words are means to power and powerful catalysts to action.
When we are convinced that we cannot hold the word to account or take it at face value, we are muddled about what is going on in our own lives as well as in the larger human community.
Yes, we

must qualify inferences by all the variables we can bring to bear. But without a sense that language can be decipherable, we will not know what we know or be able to pass it on.
The relation of language to "the murderous falsehoods it has been made to articulate and hallow in certain totalitar-ian regimes and to the great load of vulgarity, imprecision and greed it is charged with in a mass-consumer democracy" are problems Steiner wrestles with in Language and
Silence. They are more disturbing now than when he raised them at the end of World War II. His consciousness was possessed "by the barbarism in modern Europe"; his anguish was deep-ened because the unanswered cries of the murdered "sounded in earshot of universities." n90 Is our consciousness less acute, our anguish immunized?
We must always be opposing fascist ideas and serving the community.
KETELS 1996 (Violet, Assc Prof of English @Temple University -THE HOLOCAUST: REMEMBERING FOR
THE FUTURE: "Havel to the Castle!" The Power of the Word; THE ANNALS OF AMERICAN ACADEMY OF
POLITICAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCE, November; 548 Annals 45;)
George Orwell connected political chaos with the decay of language. He thought it possible to arrest both by start-ing at the verbal end. He offers rules to improve linguistic clarity and exactness.
Language
, he said,
"becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier to have foolish thoughts." n94 The question of whether words or thoughts come first, travel different parallel paths, are interdependent, or even whether we think in words at all must not hang us up!
If language does "not determine the way we think,"
psy-cholinguists now concede,
"it does influence the way we perceive and remember and it affects the ease in which we perform mental tasks."
n95
The
"genuine politics"
that Havel defines
as " simply a way of serving those around us: serving the community, and serving those who will come after us" accustoms us to seeing the moral dimension in every aspect of human experience, including the way we use and understand language, because
[*69] it is there.
His genuine politics recognize that "di-rectness can never be established by indirection, or truth through lies, or the democratic spirit through authoritarian di-rectives." n96
As Havel wrote in his Summer Meditations,
"People want to hear that decency and courage make sense, that some-thing must be risked in the struggle against dirty tricks."
n97 His reelection to the Czech presidency proves that
"politics as the practice of morality is possible."
n98 He matches his words to deeds and in the process restores to language some-thing of its original integrity and moral authority. His way of being in the world is a victory of language over silence, of reason and decency over ignorance and mendacity. What he writes is primarily addressed to intellectuals, "warriors of the pen," like himself, but what he means permeates the consciousness of millions to revive moribund human hopeful-ness.
We must
, he says, be
like Cassandra: predicting, warning, bearing witness, "always at odds with hard and fast cat-egories"
; like Sisyphus in persistence, even in the face of what looks like sure defeat
n99 and is likelier to win us calum-ny than kudos.
"Havel to the Castle!" Those words became reality when tens of thousands of Czech citizens swept Havel to the very doors of Prague's Hradcany.
The words themselves still resonate with the vibrancy of Havel's most strikingly dar-ing idea: "that the world might actually be changed by the force of truth, the power of a truthful word, the strength of a free spirit, conscience, and responsibility." n100 Perhaps, like the Czechs during their revolution, we need, at this crisis moment in human civilization just such an unembarrassed embrace of virtue, beginning with the will to restore and re-spect the integrity of the word in human interaction.

Author Qualifications
Andrea Lee Smith is an intellectual, feminist, and anti-violence activist. Smith's work focuses on issues of violence against women of color and their communities, specifically Native American women. A cofounder of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, the Boarding School Healing Project, and the
Chicago chapter of Women of All Red Nations, Smith centers the experiences of women of color in both her activism and her scholarship. Formerly an assistant professor of American Culture and Women's
Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Smith is currently an associate professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside

Cards
The confession of privilege only serves to provide temporary amnesty to the privileged subject so that they cannibalize oppression to reify dominance in the discussion. We should instead undermine the structure of privilege itself.
SMITH prof of Media and Cultural Studies @ Univ of Cal Riverside 2k13
Andrea-intellectual, feminist, activist, co-founder of INCITE and focuses on Womyn of Color particularly Native
American Womyn; The Problem With Privilege; WORD PRESS, August 14; http://andrea366.wordpress.com/2013/08/14/the-problem-with-privilege-by-andrea-smith/
For a much longer and detailed version, see my essay in the book Geographies of Privilege
¶
In my experience working with a multitude of anti-racist organizing projects over the years, I frequently found myself participating in various workshops in which participants were asked to reflect on their gender/race/sexuality/class/etc. privilege.
These workshops had a bit of a self-help orientation to them: “I am so and so, and I have x privilege.”
It was never quite clear what the point of these confessions were.
It was not as if other participants did not know the confessor in question had her/his proclaimed privilege.
It did not appear that these individual confessions actually led to any political projects to dismantle the structures of domination that enabled their privilege. Rather, the confessions became the political project themselves. The benefits of these confessions seemed to be ephemeral. For the instant the confession took place, those who do not have that privilege in daily life would have a temporary position of power as the hearer of the confession who could grant absolution and forgiveness. The sayer of the confession could then be granted temporary forgiveness for her/his abuses of power and relief from white/male/heterosexual/etc guilt. Because of the perceived benefits of this ritual, there was generally little critique of the fact that in the end, it primarily served to reinstantiate the structures of domination it was supposed to resist.
One of the reasons there was little critique of this practice is that it bestowed cultural capital to those who seemed to be the “most oppressed.” Those who had little privilege did not have to confess and were in the position to be the judge of those who did have privilege. Consequently, people aspired to be oppressed. Inevitably, those with more privilege would develop new heretofore unknown forms of oppression from which they suffered.
“I may be white, but my best friend was a person of color, which caused me to be oppressed when we played together.”
Consequently, the goal became not to actually end oppression but to be as oppressed as possible. These rituals often substituted confession for political movement-building. And despite the cultural capital that was, at least temporarily, bestowed to those who seemed to be the most oppressed, these rituals ultimately reinstantiated the white majority subject as the subject capable of self-reflexivity and the colonized/racialized subject as the occasion for self-reflexivity.
¶ These rituals around self-reflexivity in the academy and in activist circles are not without merit. They are informed by key insights into how the logics of domination that structure the world also constitute who we are as subjects.
Political projects of transformation necessarily involve a fundamental reconstitution of ourselves as well. However, for this process to work, individual transformation must occur concurrently with social and political transformation. That is, the undoing of privilege occurs not by individuals confessing their privileges or trying to think themselves into a new subject position, but through the creation of collective structures that dismantle the systems that enable these privileges.
The activist genealogies that produced this response to racism and settler colonialism were not initially focused on racism as a problem of individual prejudice. Rather, the purpose was for individuals to recognize how they were shaped by structural forms of oppression. However, the response to structural racism became an individual one – individual confession at the expense of collective action. Thus the question becomes, how would one collectivize individual transformation? Many organizing projects attempt and have attempted to do precisely this, such Sisters in Action for Power, Sista II Sista, Incite! Women of Color
Against Violence, and Communities Against Rape and Abuse, among many others. Rather than focus simply on one’s individual privilege, they address privilege on an organizational level. For instance, they might assess – is everyone who is invited to speak a college graduate? Are

certain peoples always in the limelight? Based on this assessment, they develop structures to address how privilege is exercised collectively. For instance, anytime a person with a college degree is invited to speak, they bring with them a co-speaker who does not have that education level.
They might develop mentoring and skills-sharing programs within the group. To quote one of my activist mentors, Judy Vaughn,
“You don’t think your way into a different way of acting; you act your way into a different way of thinking.” Essentially, the current social structure conditions us to exercise what privileges we may have. If we want to undermine those privileges, we must change the structures within which we live so that we become different peoples in the process.
¶ This essay will explore the structuring logics of the politics of privilege. In particular, the logics of privilege rest on an individualized self that relies on the raw material of other beings to constitute itself. Although the confessing of privilege is understood to be an anti-racist practice, it is ultimately a project premised on white supremacy.
Thus, organizing and intellectual projects that are questioning these politics of privilege are shifting the question from what privileges does a particular subject have to what is the nature of the subject that claims to have privilege in the first place.
Privilege based confession only imposes Western universalism on the racialized other through a failed premise of multiculturalism. The alternative is an ethnographic refusal, a refusal to be known and be infinitely knowable.
SMITH prof of Media and Cultural Studies @ Univ of Cal Riverside 2k13
Andrea-intellectual, feminist, activist, co-founder of INCITE and focuses on Womyn of Color particularly Native
American Womyn; The Problem With Privilege; WORD PRESS, August 14; http://andrea366.wordpress.com/2013/08/14/the-problem-with-privilege-by-andrea-smith/
The Confessing Subject
¶ My analysis is informed by the work of Denise DaSilva. She argues inToward a Global Idea of Race that the western subject understands itself as self-determining through its ability to selfreflect, analyze and exercise power over others. The western subject knows that it is self-determining because it compares itself to ‘others” who are not. In other words, I know who I am because I am not you. These “others” of course are racialized. The western subject is a universal subject who determines itself without being determined by others; the racialized subject is particular, but is supposed to aspire to be universal and self-determining.
¶ Silva’s analysis thus critiques the presumption that the problem facing racialized and colonized peoples is that they have been “dehumanized.”
Anti-racist intellectual and political projects are often premised on the notion that if people knew us better, we too would be granted humanity. But,
according to Silva, the fundamental issue that does not get addressed, is that “the human” is already a racial project. It is a project that aspires to universality, a project that can only exist over and against the particularity of “the other.”
¶ Consequently, two problems result. First, those who are put in the position of racialized and colonized others presume that liberation will ensue if they can become self-determining subjects – in other words, if they can become fully “human.” However, the humanity to which we aspire still depends on the continued oppression of other racialized/colonized others. Thus, a liberation struggle that does not question the terms by which humanity is understood becomes a liberation struggle that depends on the oppression of others.
¶
Silva’s analysis implies that
“liberation” would require different selves that understand themselves in radical relationality with all other peoples and things. The goal then becomes not the mastery of anti-racist/anti-colonialist lingo but a different self-understanding that sees one’s being as fundamentally constituted through other beings.
An example of the political enactment of this critique of the western subject could be glimpsed at the 2008 World Social Forum that I attended. The indigenous peoples made a collective statement calling into question the issue of the nation-state. In addition to challenging capitalism, they called on participants to imagine new forms of governance not based on a nationstate model. They contended that the nation-state has not worked in the last 500 years, so they suspected that it was not going to start working

now. Instead, they called for new forms of collectivities that were based on principles of interrelatedness, mutuality and global responsibility.
These new collectivities (nations, if you will, for lack of a better world) would not be based on insular or exclusivist claims to a land base; indeed they would reject the contention that land is a commodity that any one group of people should be able to buy, control or own. Rather, these collectivities would be based on responsibility for and relationship with land.
¶
But they suggested that these collectivities could not be formed without a radical change in what we perceived ourselves to be. That is, if we understand ourselves to be transparent, self-determining subjects, defining ourselves in opposition to who we are not, then the nations that will emerge from this sense of self will be exclusivist and insular.
However, if we understand ourselves as being fundamentally constituted through our relations with other beings and the land, then the nations that emerge will also be inclusive and interconnected with each other.
¶ Second, the assumption that we have about liberation is that we will be granted humanity if we can prove their worthiness. If people understood us better, they would see we are “human” just like they are, and would grant us the status of humanity. As a result, anti-racist activist and scholarly projects often become trapped in ethnographic multiculturalism.
Ironically, in order to prove our worthiness, we put ourselves in the position of being ethnographic objects so that the white subject to judge our claims for humanity.
¶ Rey Chow notes that within this position of ethnographic entrapment, the only rhetorical position offered to the Native is that of the “protesting ethnic.” The posture to be assumed under the politics of recognition is the posture of complaint. If we complain eloquently, the system will give us something.
Building on
Chow’s work, this essay will explore how another posture that is created within this economy is the self-reflexive settler/white subject. This self-reflexive subject is frequently on display at various anti-racist venues in which the privileged subject explains how much s/he learned about her complicity in settler colonialism and/or white supremacy because of
her exposure to Native peoples.
A typical instance of this will involve non-Native peoples who make presentations based on what they “learned” while doing solidarity work with Native peoples in their field research/solidarity work, etc. Complete with videos and slide shows, the presenters will express the privilege with which they struggled. We will learn how they tried to address the power imbalances between them and the peoples with which they studied or worked. We will learn how they struggled to gain their trust. Invariably, the narrative begins with the presenters initially facing the distrust of the Natives because of their settler/white privilege. But through perseverance and good intentions, the researchers overcome this distrust and earn the friendship of their ethnographic objects.
In these stories of course,
to evoke Gayatri Spivak, the subaltern does not speak. We do not hear what their theoretical analysis of their relationship is. We do not hear about how they were organizing on their own before they were saved/studied by these presenters.
¶
Native peoples are not positioned as those who can engage in self-reflection; they can only judge the worth of the confession.
Consequently, the presenters of these narratives often present very nervously. Did they speak to all their privileges? Did they properly confess? Or will someone in the audience notice a mistake and question whether they have in fact become a fully-developed anti-racist subject? In that case, the subject would have to then engage in further acts of self-reflection that require new confessions in the future.
¶
Thus,
borrowing from the work of Scott
Morgensen and Hiram Perez, the confession of privilege, while claiming to be anti-racist and anti-colonial, is actually a strategy that helps constitute the settler/white subject.
In Morgensen’s analysis, the settler subject constitutes itself through incorporation. Through this logic of settlement, settlers become the rightful inheritors of all that was indigenous – land, resources, indigenous spirituality, or culture. Thus, indigeneity is not necessarily framed as antagonistic to the settler subject; rather the Native is supposed to disappear into the project of settlement. The settler becomes the “new and improved” version of the Native, thus legitimizing and naturalizing the settler’s claims to this land.
¶
Hiram Perez similarly analyzes how the white subject positions itself intellectually as a cosmopolitan subject capable of abstract theorizing through the use of the “raw material” provided by fixed, brown bodies. The white subject is capable of being “anti-“ or “post-identity,” but understands their post-identity only in relationship to brown subjects which are hopelessly fixed within identity. Brown peoples provide the “raw material” that enables the intellectual production of the white subject.
¶
Thus, self-reflexivity enables the constitution of the white/settler subject. Anti-racist/colonial struggles have created a colonial dis-ease that the settler/white subject may not in fact be self-determining. As a result, the white/settler subject reasserts their power through self-reflection. In particular, indigenous peoples and people of color become the occasion by which the white subject can self-reflect on her/his privilege. If this person self-reflects effectively, s/he may be bestowed the title
“ally” and build a career of her/his self-reflection.
As many on the blogosphere have been commenting recently (see for instance @prisonculture and @ChiefElk), an entire ally industrial complex has developed around the professional confession of privilege ¶ Of course, this essay itself does not escape the logics of self-reflexivity either. Rhetorically, it simply sets me up as yet another judge

of the inadequacies of the confessions of others. Thus, what is important in this discussion is not so much how particular individuals confess their privileges. If Native peoples are represented problematically even by peoples who espouse anti-racist or anti-settler politics, it is not an indication that the work of those peoples is particularly flawed or that their scholarship has less value. Similarly, those privileged “confessing” subjects in anti-racism workshops do so with a commitment to fighting settler colonialism or white supremacy and their solidarity work is critically needed. Furthermore, as women of color scholars and activists have noted, there is no sharp divide between those who are
“oppressed” and those who are “oppressors.” Individuals may find themselves variously in the position of being the confessor or the judge of the confession depending on the context. Rather, the point of this analysis is to illustrate the larger dynamics by which racialized and colonized peoples are even seen and understood in the first place.
¶
The presupposition is that Indigenous peoples are oppressed because they are not sufficiently known or understood. In fact, however, this desire to “know” the Native is itself part of the settler-colonial project to apprehend, contain and domesticate the potential power of indigenous peoples to subvert the settler state.
As Mark Rifkin has argued, colonial logics attempt to transform Native peoples who are producers of intellectual theory and political insight into populations to be known and hence managed. Native struggles then simply become a project of Native peoples making their demands known so that their claims can be recognized the by the settler state. Once these demands are known, they can they be more easily managed, co-opted and disciplined.
Thus, the project of decolonization requires a practice of
what Audra Simpson calls
“ethnographic refusal” – the refusal to be known and the refusal to be infinitely knowable. The politics of decolonization requires the proliferation of theories, knowledge, ideas, and analyses that speak to a beyond settler colonialism and are hence unknowable.
The notion of safe space too often securitizes itself from real interpersonal discussion that demonizes unprivileged subjects and erects a smokescreen over the real structures that we’re all implicated in.
SMITH prof of Media and Cultural Studies @ Univ of Cal Riverside 2k13
Andrea-intellectual, feminist, activist, co-founder of INCITE and focuses on Womyn of Color particularly Native
American Womyn; The Problem With Privilege; WORD PRESS, August 14; http://andrea366.wordpress.com/2013/08/14/the-problem-with-privilege-by-andrea-smith/
This kind of politics then challenges the notions of “safe space” often prevalent in many activist circles in the United States
. The concept of safe space flows naturally from the logics of privilege. That is, once we have confessed our gender/race/settler/class privileges, we can then create a safe space where others will not be negatively impacted by these privileges. Of course because we have not dismantled heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, settler colonialism or capitalism, these confessed privileges never actually disappear in “safe spaces.” Consequently, when a person is found guilty of his/her privilege in these spaces, s/he is accused of making the space “unsafe.” This rhetorical strategy presumes that only certain privileged subjects can make the space “unsafe” as if everyone isn’t implicated in heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, settler colonialism and capitalism. Our focus is shifted from the larger systems that make the entire world unsafe, to interpersonal conduct. In addition, the accusation of “unsafe” is also levied against people of color who express anger about racism, only to find themselves accused of making the space “unsafe” because of their raised voices. The problem with safe space is the presumption that a safe space is even possible.
¶
By contrast, instead of thinking of safe spaces as a refuge from colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy,
Ruthie Gilmore suggests that safe space is not an escape from the real, but a place to practice the real we want to bring into being.
“Making power” models follow this suggestion in that they do not purport to be free of oppression, only that they are trying to create the world they would like to live in now. To give one smaller example, when Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, organized, we questioned the assumption that “women of color” space is a safe space. In fact, participants began to articulate that women of color space may in fact be a very dangerous space. We realized that we could not assume alliances with each other, but we would actually have to create these alliances. One strategy that was helpful was rather than presume that we were acting “non-oppressively,” we built a structure that would presume that we were complicit in the structures of white supremacy/settler colonialism/heteropatriarchy etc. We then structured this presumption into our organizing by creating spaces where we would educate ourselves on issues in which our politics and praxis were particularly problematic. The issues we have covered include: disability, anti-Black racism, settler colonialism, Zionism and anti-Arab racism, transphobia, and many others. However, in this space, while we did not

ignore our individual complicity in oppression, we developed action plans for how we would collectively try to transform our politics and praxis.
Thus, this space did not create the dynamic of the confessor and the hearer of the confession. Instead, we presumed we are all implicated in these structures of oppression and that we would need to work together to undo them. kind of space facilitated our ability to integrate
Consequently,
in my experience, this personal and social transformation because no one had to anxiously worry about whether they were going to be targeted as a bad person with undue privilege who would need to publicly confess. The space became one that was based on principles of loving rather than punitive accountability.
No ideas will be perfect, but the only way to open ourselves to possibility to think beyond the Western notion of the self that claims the idea of privilege.
SMITH prof of Media and Cultural Studies @ Univ of Cal Riverside 2k13
Andrea-intellectual, feminist, activist, co-founder of INCITE and focuses on Womyn of Color particularly Native
American Womyn; The Problem With Privilege; WORD PRESS, August 14; http://andrea366.wordpress.com/2013/08/14/the-problem-with-privilege-by-andrea-smith/
Conclusion
The politics of privilege have made the important contribution of signaling how the structures of oppression constitute who we are as persons. However, as the rituals of confessing privilege have evolved, they have shifted our focus from building social movements for global transformation to individual self-improvement
. Furthermore, they rest on a white supremacist/colonialist notion of a subject that can constitute itself over and against others through self-reflexivity.
While trying to keep the key insight made in activist/academic circles that personal and social transformation are interconnected, alternative projects have developed that focus less on privilege and more the structures that create privilege. These new models do not hold the
“answer,” because the genealogy of the politics of privilege also demonstrates that our activist/intellectual projects of liberation must be constantly changing. Our imaginations are limited by white supremacy, settler colonialism, etc., so all ideas we have will not be “perfect.” The ideas we develop today also do not have to be based on the complete disavowal of what we did yesterday because what we did yesterday teaches what we might do tomorrow. Thus, as we think not only beyond privilege, but beyond the sense of self that claims privilege, we open ourselves to new possibilities that we cannot imagine now for the future.

Author Qualificaitons
PAUL KINGSNORTH
Certainly. Paul was born in 1972. He studied modern history at Oxford University, where, as well as studying, he edited the student newspaper and was politically radicalised by his involvement in the road protest movements of the 1990s.
After graduating, Paul spent two months in Indonesia working on conservation projects in Borneo and
Java. Back in the UK, he worked for a year on the staff of the Independent newspaper, which he hated.
Following a three year stint as a campaign writer for an environmental NGO, he was appointed deputy editor of The Ecologist , where he worked for two years.
He left the Ecologist in 2001 to write his first book One No, Many Yeses , a political travelogue which explored the growing anti-capitalist movement around the world. The book was published in 2003 by
Simon and Schuster, in six languages across 13 countries.
In the early 2000s, having spent time with the tribal people of West Papua, who continue to be brutally colonised by the Indonesian government and military, he was one of the founders of the Free West
Papua Campaign , which he also helped to run for a time.
Paul’s second book, Real England , was published in 2008 by Portobello. An exploration of the changing face of his home country in an age of globalisation, the book was quoted in speeches by the Prime
Minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury, helped inspire the success of the hit West End play
‘Jerusalem’ and saw its author compared to Cobbett and Orwell by more than one newspaper.
I haven’t finished. In 2009, feeling increasingly uncomfortable both with the state of the green movement and a literary culture that didn’t seem connected to the realities of its age, Paul launched, with Dougald Hine, the Dark Mountain Project – a call for a writers’ and artists’ movement which would question the stories our culture was telling itself. What began as a self-published pamphlet has become a global network of writers, artists and thinkers. Paul is now the Project’s editorial director.
In 2011, Paul finally realised his very first literary ambition, when he had a volume of poetry published.
Kidland was published by Salmon, and it has sold into three figures, which honestly is quite good for a book of poetry. Since the mid-1990s, Paul’s poetry has been published in various little magazines. He has been awarded the BBC Wildlife Poet of the Year Award, the Poetry Life Prize, and the
2012 Wenlock Prize, and has read his poetry at sevral festivals and other events.
In 2014, Paul’s first novel, The Wake was published. So far it has been described by novelist Adam
Thorpe, reviewing it for The Guardian as ‘a literary triumph,’ by Philip Pullman as ‘extraordinary’, by
Heathcote Williams as ‘an astonishing feat of imagination’, and by Lucy Mangan as ’the most glorious experience I’ve had with a book in years.’
Paul’s journalism has appeared in all sorts of places, including in the Guardian, Independent, Daily
Telegraph, Daily Express, Le Monde, New Statesman, New Internationalist, Big Issue,
Adbusters, BBCWildlife and openDemocracy, for which he once briefly worked as a commissioning editor. He has appeared on various TV and radio programmes, most shamefully ‘This Morning with
Richard and Judy.’ He is also the author of ‘Your Countryside, Your Choice’, a report on the future of the countryside, published in 2005 by the Campaign to Protect Rural England.
DOUGALD HINE
Dougald is co-founder and managing editor of Dark Mountain. In September 2007, he read a blog post by a writer called Paul Kingsnorth, announcing his intention to quit journalism. It struck a chord: a year earlier, he had walked away from a career in BBC newsrooms, and he had a sense that he and Paul were

converging on certain shared desires. A desire for a different kind of writing to that celebrated in the literary pages of the newspapers, and a desire for a different kind of conversation about the deep crises that surround us. So he sent Paul an email, which became a conversation over several pints of beer, which became a manifesto and then a lot of other things. Dougald is fascinated by the process by which an idea comes to life, the journey from dreams to responsibilities. Alongside Dark Mountain, he has been one of the initiators of projects including School of Everything, a web startup inspired by the informal learning experiments of the 60s and 70s; the utopian regeneration agency, Spacemakers; and
Redrawing the Maps, a week-long ‘free school’ inspired by the life and work of John Berger. He left
England in 2012 and is slowly arriving in Sweden, from where he continues to take an active role in the running of Dark Mountain. I’m a social thinker, writer, speaker and the kickstarter of a series of projects and organisations, including the ‘utopian regeneration agency’ Spacemakers, the web startup School of
Everything and theDark Mountain Project. My work is about bringing ideas to life. It’s what I aim to do in my writing and my talks, telling stories that help us make sense of our lives and rethink our institutions in a world of disruption and uncertainty. It’s also a process that I’ve been through with projects, enough times to start to recognise the patterns: the journey that starts when an idea in a conversation catches people’s imagination, becomes believable enough to put time, energy and money into making it real.
The journey by which dreams give rise to responsibilities. The projects that I’ve helped to dream up have caught a lot of people’s imaginations. In 2012, I was named as one of Britain’s 50 New Radicals by Nesta
(the UK innovation agency), my work was profiled as one of 13 case studies in the EU’s Team Culture report on ‘the role of culture in a time of crisis’, and I was invited to São Paolo and Buenos Aires to speak at Google’s Think Infinite! events. I’ve worked with organisations including the BBC, the British Council,
Demos, Design for London, King’s Cultural Institute, the London Borough of Lewisham, the London
Borough of Lambeth, the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Turning Point Network, Webb deVlam and the Young Foundation. My articles and essays have appeared in Aeon, The Guardian, Open
Democracy and STIR magazine, as well as in academic, cultural and policy publications. I’ve also collaborated on the writing and editing of eight books and pamphlets, including four issues of the Dark
Mountain journal. Arriving in Sweden Two years ago, I left London and I’m slowly arriving in Sweden. I live with my partner in Västerås, a small city on Lake Mälaren, 100km west of Stockholm. Right now, much of my time is given to learning the language, getting oriented to Swedish society and building relationships with institutions, projects and people here. So far, my clients in Sweden have included
Forsbergs Skola, Future Perfect festival, Global Utmaning, Göteborgs Universitet, Högskolan Dalarna,
Konstfack, Mejan Arc and Tensta Museum. I also published a book in 2013 with the Stockholm artist duo
Performing Pictures, The Crossing of Two Lines. In the longer term, I have an idea about creating a centre here in Sweden – part think tank, part school – a physical hub for the networks and conversations that have shaped my work over the last few years. For now, though, I’m looking for smaller-scale projects and commissions in which I can bring my experience, skills and networks together with the needs of Swedish partners. Wider connections I continue to advise on strategy for Spacemakers and I spend a significant amount of my time working with Dark Mountain as Managing Editor. I am a Senior
Visiting Fellow in Higher Education at the Centre for Educational Research and Development at the
University of Lincoln, a member of the faculty of the Kaospilots school in Aarhus and a member of the
FoAM culture lab in Brussels. I am a guest lecturer at a number of universities, art and architecture schools around Europe.

Notes
A manifesto is a published verbal declaration of the intentions, motives, or views of the issuer, be it an individual, group, political party or government.
[1][2][3][4] A manifesto usually accepts a previously published opinion or public consensus and/or promotes a new idea with prescriptive notions for carrying out changes the author believes should be made. It often is political or artistic in nature, but may present an individual's life stance . Manifestos relating to religious belief are generally referred to as creeds . noun

Cards
A disruption is necessary for change – the illusion of what is ‘normal’ must be changed in order to break down the current system and leave the desire for meaning in its place.
KINGSNORTH
ed dir of DARK MOUNTAIN
& HINE
co-founder and managing editor of DARK MOUNTAIN
2k9
Paul- & Dougald; Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto; Summer; http://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/
Those who witness extreme social collapse at first hand seldom describe any deep revelation about the truths of human existence. What they do mention,
if asked, is their surprise at how easy it is to die.
The pattern of ordinary life, in which so much stays the same from one day to the next, disguises the fragility of its fabric.
How many of our activities are made possible by the impression of stability
that pattern gives?
So long as it repeats, or varies steadily enough, we are able to plan for tomorrow as if all the things we rely on and don’t think about too carefully will still be there.
When the pattern is broken, by civil war or natural disaster or the smaller-scale tragedies that tear at its fabric, many of those activities become impossible or meaningless
, while simply meeting needs we once took for granted may occupy much of our lives. What war correspondents
and relief workers report
is not only the fragility of the fabric, but the speed with which it can unravel.
As we write this, no one can say with certainty where the unravelling of the financial and commercial fabric of our economies will end.
Meanwhile, beyond the cities, unchecked industrial exploitation frays the material basis of life in many parts of the world, and pulls at the ecological systems which sustain it.
fragility of what we call civilisation is nothing new. ‘Few
1896,
Precarious as this moment may be, however, an awareness of the
men realise,’
wrote Joseph Conrad in
‘that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.’
Conrad’s writings exposed the civilisation exported by European imperialists to be little more than a comforting illusion
, not only in the dark, unconquerable heart of Africa, but in the whited sepulchres of their capital cities. The inhabitants of that civilisation believed ‘blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and its morals, in the power of its poUlice and of its opinion,’ but their confidence
could be maintained only by the seeming solidity of the crowd of like-minded believers surrounding them. Outside the walls, the wild remained as close to the surface as blood under skin, though the city-dweller was no longer equipped to face it directly.
Bertrand Russell caught this vein in Conrad’s worldview, suggesting that the novelist ‘thought of civilised and morally tolerable human life as a dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava which at any moment might break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths.’ What both Russell and Conrad were getting at was a simple fact which any historian could confirm: human civilisation is an intensely fragile construction.
It is built on little more than belief: belief in the rightness of its values; belief in the strength of its system of law and order; belief in its currency; above all, perhaps, belief in its future.
Once that belief begins to crumble, the collapse of a civilisation may become unstoppable. That civilisations fall, sooner or later, is as much a law of history as gravity is a law of physics. What remains after the fall is a wild mixture of cultural debris, confused and angry people whose certainties have betrayed them, and those forces which were always there, deeper than the foundations of the city walls: the desire to survive and the desire for meaning.
The myth of progress is beginning to be unraveled. Only by breaking down the failing machine can we begin to reform and see the truth which has been masked by western civilization.
KINGSNORTH
ed dir of DARK MOUNTAIN
& HINE
co-founder and managing editor of DARK MOUNTAIN
2k9

Paul- & Dougald; Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto; Summer; http://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/
It is
, it seems, our civilisation’s turn to experience the inrush of the savage and the unseen; our turn to be brought up short by contact with untamed reality. There is a fall coming. We live in an age in which familiar restraints are being kicked away, and foundations snatched from under us.
After a quarter century of complacency, in which we were invited to believe in bubbles that would never burst, prices that would never fall, the end of history, the crude repackaging of the triumphalism of
Conrad’s Victorian twilight — Hubris has been introduced to Nemesis.
Now a familiar human story is being played out. It is the story of an empire corroding from within. It is the story of a people who believed, for a long time, that their actions did not have consequences.
It is the story of how that people will cope with the crumbling of their own myth.
It is our story.
This time, the crumbling empire is the unassailable global economy, and the brave new world of consumer democracy being forged worldwide in its name.
Upon the indestructibility of this edifice we have pinned the hopes of this latest phase of our civilisation. Now, its failure and fallibility exposed
, the world’s elites are scrabbling frantically to buoy up an economic machine which, for decades, they told us needed little restraint, for restraint would be its undoing. Uncountable sums of money are being funnelled upwards in order to prevent an uncontrolled explosion.
The machine is stuttering and the engineers are in panic.
They are wondering if perhaps they do not understand it as well as they imagined. They are wondering whether they are controlling it at all or whether, perhaps, it is controlling them.
Increasingly, people are restless. The engineers group themselves into competing teams, but neither side seems to know what to do, and neither seems much different from the other. Around the world, discontent can be heard. The extremists are grinding their knives and moving in as the machine’s coughing and stuttering exposes the inadequacies of the political oligarchies who claimed to have everything in hand. Old gods are rearing their heads, and old answers: revolution, war, ethnic strife.
Politics as we have known it totters
, like the machine it was built to sustain. In its place could easily arise something more elemental, with a dark heart.
As the financial wizards lose their powers of levitation, as the politicians and economists struggle to conjure new explanations, it starts to dawn on us that behind the curtain, at the heart of the Emerald City, sits not the benign and omnipotent invisible hand we had been promised, but something else entirely.
Something responsible for what Marx, writing not so long before Conrad, cast as the ‘everlasting uncertainty and anguish’ of the ‘bourgeois epoch’; a time in which ‘all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.’
Draw back the curtain, follow the tireless motion of cogs and wheels back to its source, and you will find the engine driving our civilisation: the myth of progress.
The myth of progress is to us what the myth of god-given warrior prowess was to the Romans, or the myth of eternal salvation was to the conquistadors: without it, our efforts cannot be sustained.
Onto the root stock of Western
Christianity, the Enlightenment at its most optimistic grafted a vision of an Earthly paradise, towards which human effort guided by calculative reason could take us. Following this guidance, each generation will live a better life than the life of those that went before it. History becomes an escalator, and the only way is up. On the top floor is human perfection. It is important that this should remain just out of reach in order to sustain the sensation of motion.
Recent history, however, has given this mechanism something of a battering. The past century too often threatened a descent into hell, rather than the promised heaven on Earth. Even within the prosperous and liberal societies of the West progress has, in many ways, failed to deliver the goods.
Today’s generation are demonstrably less content, and consequently less optimistic, than those that went before.
They work longer hours, with less security, and less chance of leaving behind the social back- ground into which they were born.
They fear crime, social breakdown, overdevelopment, environmental collapse.
They do not believe that the future will be better than the past.
Individually, they are less constrained by class and convention than their parents or grandparents, but more constrained by law, surveillance, state proscription and personal debt. Their physical health is better, their mental health more fragile. Nobody knows what is coming. Nobody wants to look.
Most significantly of all, there is an underlying darkness at the root of everything we have built. Outside the cities, beyond the blurring edges of our civilisation, at the mercy of the machine but not under its control, lies neither Marx nor Conrad, Caesar nor Hume, Thatcher nor Lenin ever really understood. civilisation
— which has set the terms for global civilisation—
something that
Something that Western was never capable of understanding, because to understand it would be to undermine, fatally, the myth of that civilisation.
Something and
upon which that thin crust of lava is balanced; which feeds the machine and all the people who run it, which they have all trained themselves not to see.

Our separation from nature is parallel to the myth of nature. This viewing of nature
‘that happened somewhere else’ causes us to overcomplicate the activity and look plainly at the fact.
KINGSNORTH
ed dir of DARK MOUNTAIN
& HINE
co-founder and managing editor of DARK MOUNTAIN
2k9
Paul- & Dougald; Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto; Summer; http://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/
The myth of progress is founded on the myth of nature.
The first tells us that we are destined for greatness; the second tells us that greatness is cost-free.
Each is intimately bound up with the other.
Both tell us that we are apart from the world
; that we began grunting in the primeval swamps, as a humble part of something called ‘nature’, which we have now triumphantly subdued.
The very fact that we have a word for
‘nature’ is
[5] evidence that we do not regard ourselves as part of it. Indeed, our separation from it is a myth integral to the triumph of our civilisation. We are, we tell ourselves, the only species ever to have attacked nature and won. In this, our unique glory is contained.
Outside the citadels of self-congratulation, lone voices have cried out against this infantile version of the human story for centuries
, but it is only in the last few decades that its inaccuracy has become laughably apparent.
generations to grow up surrounded by evidence that been a grim failure
We are the first our attempt to separate ourselves from ‘nature’ has
, proof not of our genius but our hubris. The attempt to sever the hand from the body has endangered the
‘progress’ we hold so dear, and it has endangered much of ‘nature’ too. The resulting upheaval underlies the crisis we now face.
We imagined ourselves isolated from the source of our existence. The fallout from this imaginative error is all around us
: a quarter of the world’s mammals are threatened with imminent extinction; an acre and a half of rainforest is felled every second; 75% of the world’s fish stocks are on the verge of collapse; humanity consumes 25% more of the world’s natural ‘products’ than the Earth can replace — a figure predicted to rise to 80% by mid-century. Even through the deadening lens of statistics, we can glimpse the violence to which our myths have driven us.
And over it all looms runaway climate change. Climate change, which threatens to render all human projects irrelevant; which presents us with detailed evidence of our lack of understanding of the world we inhabit while, at the same time, demonstrating that we are still entirely reliant upon it. Climate change, which highlights in painful colour the head-on crash between civilisation and ‘nature’; which makes plain, more effectively than any carefully constructed argument or optimistically defiant protest, how the machine’s need for permanent growth will require us to destroy ourselves in its name. Climate change, which brings home at last our ultimate powerlessness. These are the facts, or some of them. Yet facts never tell the whole story. (‘Facts’, Conrad wrote, in Lord Jim, ‘as if facts could prove anything.’)
The facts of environmental crisis we hear so much about often conceal as much as they expose. We hear daily about the impacts of our activities on ‘the environment’
(like ‘nature’, expression which distances us from the reality of our situation
). this is an
Daily we hear, too, of the many ‘solutions’ to these problems: solutions which usually involve the necessity of urgent political agreement and a judicious application of human technological genius. Things may be changing, runs the narrative, but there is nothing we cannot deal with here
, folks.
We perhaps need to move faster, more urgently. Certainly we need to accelerate the pace of research and development.
We accept that we must become more ‘sustainable’. But everything will be fine.
There will still be growth, there will still be progress: these things will continue, because they have to continue, so they cannot do anything but continue. There is nothing to see here. Everything will be fine.
We do not believe that everything will be fine. We are not even sure, based on current definitions of progress and improvement, that we want it to be.
Of all humanity’s delusions of difference, of its separation from and superiority to the living world which surrounds it, one distinction holds up better than most: we may well be the first species capable of effectively eliminating life on Earth.
This is a hypothesis we seem intent on putting to the test. We are already responsible for denuding the world of much of its richness, magnificence, beauty, colour and magic, and we show no sign of slowing down. For a very long time, we imagined that ‘nature’ was something that happened elsewhere. The damage we did to it might be regrettable, but needed to be weighed against the benefits here and now. And in the worst case scenario, there would always be some kind of Plan B.
Perhaps we would make

for the moon, where we could survive in lunar colonies under giant bubbles as we planned our expansion across the galaxy. But there is no Plan
B and the bubble, it turns out, is where we have been living all the while. under which we have laboured for so long.
The bubble is that delusion of isolation
The bubble has cut us off from life on the only planet we have
, or are ever likely to have.
The bubble is civilisation.
Consider the structures on which that bubble has been built. Its foundations are geological: coal, oil, gas — millions upon millions of years of ancient sunlight, dragged from the depths of the planet and burned with abandon. On this base, the structure stands. Move upwards, and you pass through a jumble of supporting horrors: battery chicken sheds; industrial abattoirs; burning forests; beam-trawled ocean floors; dynamited reefs; hollowed-out mountains; wasted soil. Finally, on top of all these unseen layers, you reach the well-tended surface where you and I stand: unaware, or uninterested, in what goes on beneath us; demanding that the authorities keep us in the manner to which we have been accustomed; occasion- ally feeling twinges of guilt that lead us to buy organic chickens or locally-produced lettuces; yet for the most part glutted, but not sated, on the fruits of the horrors on which our lifestyles depend.
We are the first generations born into a new and unprecedented age — the age of ecocide. To name it thus is not to presume the outcome, but simply to describe a process which is underway. The ground, the sea, the air, the elemental backdrops to our existence
— all these our economics has taken for granted, to be used as a bottomless tip, endlessly able to dilute and disperse the tailings of our extraction, production, consumption. The sheer scale of the sky or the weight of a swollen river makes it hard to imagine that creatures as flimsy as you and I could do that much damage.
Philip Larkin gave voice to this attitude, and the creeping, worrying end of it in his poem Going, Going:
Things are tougher than we are, just As earth will always respond However we mess it about; Chuck filth in the sea, if you must: The tides will be
clean beyond. – But what do I feel now? Doubt? Nearly forty years on from Larkin’s words, doubt is what all of us seem to feel, all of the time.
Too much filth has been chucked in the sea and into the soil and into the atmosphere to make any other feeling sensible. The doubt, and the facts, have paved the way for a worldwide movement of environmental politics, which aimed, at least in its early, raw form, to challenge the myths of development and progress head-on. But time has not been kind to the greens.
Today’s environmentalists are more likely to be found at corporate conferences hymning the virtues of ‘sustainability’ and ‘ethical consumption’ than doing anything as naive as questioning the intrinsic values of civilisation. Capitalism has absorbed the greens, as it absorbs so many challenges to its ascendancy. A radical challenge to the human machine has been transformed into yet another opportunity for shopping.
‘Denial’ is a hot word, heavy with connotations.
When it is used to brand the remaining rump of climate change sceptics, they object noisily to the association with those who would rewrite the history of the
Holocaust. Yet the focus on this dwindling group may serve as a distraction from a far larger form of denial, in its psychoanalytic sense. Freud wrote of the inability of people to hear things which did not fit with the way they saw themselves and the world. We put ourselves through all kinds of inner contortions, rather than look plainly at those things which challenge our fundamental understanding of the world.
Today, humanity is up to its neck in denial about what it has built, what it has become — and what it is in for. Ecological and economic collapse unfold before us and, if we acknowledge them at all, we act as if this were a temporary problem, a technical glitch. Centuries of hubris block our ears like wax plugs; we cannot hear the message which reality is screaming at us. For all our doubts and discontents, we are still wired to an idea of his- tory in which the future will be an upgraded version of the present. The assumption remains that things must continue in their current direction
: the sense of crisis only smudges the meaning of that
‘must’. No longer a natural inevitability, it becomes an urgent necessity: we must find a way to go on having supermarkets and superhighways.
We cannot contemplate the alternative.
And so we find ourselves, all of us together, poised trembling on the edge of a change so massive that we have no way of gauging it. None of us knows where to look, but all of us know not to look down. Secretly, we all think we are doomed: even the politicians think this; even the environmentalists.
Some of us deal with it by going shopping. Some deal with it by hoping it is true. Some give up in despair.
Some work frantically to try and fend off the coming storm.
Our question is: what would happen if we looked down? Would it be as bad as we imagine? What might we see? Could it even be good for us?
We believe it is time to look down.

The story of human dominance clouds our minds to the truth of our existence. Our construction of society is crumbling and it is time to rewrite the stories that cloud our vision.
KINGSNORTH
ed dir of DARK MOUNTAIN
& HINE
co-founder and managing editor of DARK MOUNTAIN
2k9
Paul- & Dougald; Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto; Summer; http://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/
If we are indeed teetering on the edge of a massive change in how we live, in how human society itself is constructed, and in how we relate to the rest of the world, then we were led to this point by the stories we have told ourselves
— the story of civilisation.
above all, by
This story has many variants, religious and secular, scientific, economic and mystic. But all tell of humanity’s original transcendence
of its animal beginnings, our growing mastery over a ‘nature’
to which we no longer belong, and the glorious future of plenty and prosperity which will follow when this mastery is complete. It is the story of human centrality, of a species destined to be lord of all it surveys, unconfined by the limits that apply to other, lesser creatures.
makes this story so dangerous is that
What
, for the most part, we have forgotten that it is a story.
It has been told so many times by those who see themselves as rationalists, even scientists; heirs to the Enlightenment’s legacy — a legacy which includes the denial of the role of stories in making the world.
Humans have always lived by stories
, and those with skill in telling them have been treated with respect and, often, a certain wariness.
Beyond the limits of reason, reality remains mysterious
, as incapable of being approached directly as a hunter’s quarry.
With stories, with art, with symbols and layers of meaning, we stalk those elusive aspects of reality that go undreamed of in our philosophy. The storyteller weaves the mysterious into the fabric of life
, lacing it with the comic, the tragic, the obscene, making safe paths through dangerous territory.
Yet as the myth of civilisation deepened its grip on our thinking, borrowing the guise of science and reason, we began to deny the role of stories, to dismiss their power as something primitive, childish, outgrown. The old tales by which generations had made sense of life’s subtleties and strangenesses were bowdlerised and packed off to the nursery. Religion, that bag of myths and mysteries, birthplace of the theatre, was straightened out into a framework of universal laws and moral account-keeping. The dream visions of the Middle
Ages became the nonsense stories of Victorian childhood. In the age of the novel, stories were no longer the way to approach the deep truths of the world, so much as a way to pass time on a train journey. It is hard, today, to imagine that the word of a poet was once feared by a king.
Yet
for all this, our world is still shaped by stories.
Through television, film, novels and video games, we may be more thoroughly bombarded with narrative material than any people that ever lived.
What is peculiar, however, is the carelessness with which these stories are channelled at us
— as entertainment, a distraction from daily life, something to hold our attention to the other side of the ad break.
There is little sense that these things make up the equipment by which we navigate reality. On the other hand, there are the serious stories told by economists, politicians, geneticists and corporate leaders. These are not presented as stories at all, but as direct accounts of how the world is.
Choose between competing versions
, then fight with those who chose differently.
The ensuing conflicts play out
on early morning radio,
in afternoon debates
and late night television pundit wars.
And yet, for all the noise, what is striking is how much the opposing sides agree on: all their stories are only variants of the larger story of human centrality, of our everexpanding control over ‘nature’, our right to perpetual economic growth, our ability to transcend all limits.
So we find ourselves, our ways of telling unbalanced, trapped inside a runaway narrative, headed for the worst kind of encounter with reality. In such a moment, writers, artists, poets and storytellers of all kinds have a critical role to play. Creativity remains the most uncontrollable of human forces: without it, the project of civilisation is inconceivable, yet no part of life remains so untamed and undomesticated. Words and images can change minds, hearts, even the course of history. Their makers shape the stories people carry through their lives, unearth old ones and breathe them back to life, add new twists, point to unexpected endings. It is time to pick up the threads and make the stories new, as they must always be made new, starting from where we are.

We are here to make a change through uncivilized writing. We must throw out the flawed human centric writing which plagues the world currently and adopt the method of using uncivilized writing to create change.
KINGSNORTH
ed dir of DARK MOUNTAIN
& HINE
co-founder and managing editor of DARK MOUNTAIN
2k9
Paul- & Dougald; Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto; Summer; http://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/
Mainstream art in the West has long been about shock; about busting taboos
, about
Getting Noticed.
This has gone on for so long that it has become common to assert that in these ironic, exhausted, post-everything times, there are no taboos left to bust.
But there is one.
The last taboo is the myth of civilisation. It is built upon the stories we have constructed about our genius, our indestructibility, our manifest destiny as a chosen species. It is where our vision and our self-belief intertwine with our reckless refusal to face the reality of our position on this Earth. It has led the human race to achieve what it has achieved; and has led the planet into the age of ecocide. The two are intimately linked.
We believe they must decoupled if anything is to remain.
We believe that artists
— which is to us the most welcoming of words, taking under its wing writers of all kinds, painters, musicians, sculptors, poets, designers, creators, makers of things, dreamers of dreams — have a responsibility to begin the process of decoupling.
We believe that, in the age of ecocide, the last taboo must be broken
— and
that only artists can do it.
Ecocide demands a response. That response is too important to be left to politicians, economists, conceptual thinkers, number crunchers; too all-pervasive to be left to activists or campaigners. Artists are needed. So far, though, the artistic response has been muted.
In between traditional nature poetry and agitprop, what is there? Where are the poems that have adjusted their scope to the scale of this challenge? Where are the novels that probe beyond the country house or the city centre? What new form of writing has emerged to challenge civilisation itself? What gallery mounts an exhibition equal to this challenge? Which musician has discovered the secret chord? If the answers to these questions have been scarce up to now, it is perhaps both because the depth of collective denial is so great, and because the challenge is so very daunting. We are daunted by it, ourselves. But we believe it needs to be risen to. We believe that art must look over the edge, face the world that is coming with a steady eye, and rise to the challenge of ecocide with a challenge of its own: an artistic response to the crumbling of the empires of the mind.
interested in one branch of it in particular:
This response we call Uncivilised art
Uncivilised writing
. Uncivilised writing is writing which outside the human bubble and see us as we are
, and we are attempts to stand
: highly evolved apes with an array of talents and abilities which we are unleashing without sufficient thought, control, compassion or intelligence. Apes who have constructed a sophisticated myth of their own importance with which to sustain their civilising project. Apes whose project has been to tame, to control, to subdue or to destroy — to civilise the forests, the deserts, the wild lands and the seas, to impose bonds on the minds of their own in order that they might feel nothing when they exploit or destroy their fellow creatures.
Against the civilising project, which has become the progenitor of ecocide, Uncivilised writing offers not a non-human perspective
—we remain human and, even now, are not quite ashamed — but a perspective which sees us as one strand of a web rather than as the first palanquin in a glorious procession.
It offers an unblinking look at the forces among which we find ourselves.
It sets out to paint a picture of homo sapiens which a being from another world or, better, a being from our own — a blue whale, an albatross, a mountain hare — might recognise as something approaching a truth.
It sets out to tug our attention away from ourselves and turn it outwards; to uncentre our minds. It is writing, in short, which puts civilisation
— and us — into perspective.
Writing that comes not
, as most writing still does, from the self-absorbed and selfcongratulatory metropolitan centres of civilisation but from somewhere on its wilder fringes. Somewhere woody and weedy and largely avoided, from where insistent, uncomfortable truths about ourselves drift in; truths which we’re not keen on hearing. Writing which unflinchingly stares us down, however uncomfortable this may prove.
It might perhaps be just as useful to explain what
Uncivilised writing
is not.
It is not environmental writing
, for there is much of that about already, and most of it fails to jump the barrier which marks the limit of our collective human ego; much of it, indeed, ends up shoring-up that ego, and helping us to persist in our civilisational delusions.
It is not nature writing
, for there is no such thing as nature as distinct from people, and to suggest otherwise is to perpetuate the attitude which has brought us here.
And it is not political writing, with which the world is already flooded, for politics is a human confection, complicit in ecocide and

decaying from within.
Uncivilised writing is more rooted than any of these. Above all, it is determined to shift our worldview, not to feed into it. It is writing for outsiders.
If you want to be loved, it might be best not to get involved, for the world, at least for a time, will resolutely refuse to listen. A salutary example of this last point can be found in the fate of one of the twentieth century’s most significant yet most neglected poets.
Robinson Jeffers was writing Uncivilised verse seventy years before this manifesto was thought of, though he did not call it that. In his early poetic career, Jeffers was a star: he appeared on the cover of Time magazine, read his poems in the US Library of Congress and was respected for the alternative he offered to the Modernist juggernaut. Today his work is left out of anthologies, his name is barely known and his politics are regarded with suspicion. Read Jeffers’ later work and you will see why. His crime was to deliberately puncture humanity’s sense of selfimportance. His punishment was to be sent into a lonely literary exile from which, forty years after his death, he has still not been allowed to return. But Jeffers knew what he was in for. He knew that nobody, in an age of ‘consumer choice’, wanted to be told by this stone-faced prophet of the California cliffs that ‘it is good for man … To know that his needs and nature are no more changed in fact in ten thousand years than the beaks of eagles.’ He knew that no comfortable liberal wanted to hear his angry warning, issued at the height of the Second World War:
‘Keep clear of the dupes that talk democracy / And the dogs that talk revolution / Drunk with talk, liars and believers … / Long live freedom, and damn the ideologies.’ His vision of a world in which humanity was doomed to destroy its surroundings and eventually itself (‘I would burn my right hand in a [14] slow fire / To change the future … I should do foolishly’) was furiously rejected in the rising age of consumer democracy which he also predicted (‘Be happy, adjust your economics to the new abundance…’) Jeffers, as his poetry developed, developed a philosophy too. He called it ‘inhumanism.’ It was, he wrote: a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to notman; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence…This manner of thought and feeling is neither misanthropic nor pessimist … It offers a reasonable detachment as rule of conduct, instead of love, hate and envy… it provides magnificence for the religious instinct, and satisfies our need to admire greatness and rejoice in beauty.
The shifting of emphasis from man to notman: this is the aim of Uncivilised writing. To ‘unhumanise our views a little, and become confident / As the rock and ocean that we were made from.’ This is not a rejection of our humanity — it is an affirmation of the wonder of what it means to be truly human. It is to accept the world for what it is and to make our home here, rather than dreaming of relocating to the stars, or existing in a Man-forged bubble and pretending to ourselves that there is nothing outside it to which we have any connection at all. This
, then, is the literary challenge of our age.
So far, few have taken it up. The signs of the times flash out in urgent neon, but our literary lions have better things to read. Their art remains stuck in its own civilised bubble.
The idea of civilisation is entangled, right down to its semantic roots, with citydwelling
, and this provokes a thought: if our writers seem unable to find new stories which might lead us through the times ahead, is this not a function of their metropolitan mentality?
The big names of contemporary literature are equally at home in the fashionable quarters of London or New York, and their writing reflects the prejudices of the placeless, transnational elite to which they belong.
The converse also applies. Those voices which tell other stories tend to be rooted in a sense of place.
Think of John Berger’s novels and essays from the Haute Savoie, or the depths explored by Alan Garner within a day’s walk of his birthplace in Cheshire. Think of Wendell Berry or WS Merwin, Mary Oliver or Cormac McCarthy.
Those whose writings
[15]
approach the shores of the Uncivilised are those who know their place, in the physical sense, and who remain wary of the siren cries of
metrovincial fashion and civilised excitement.
If we name particular writers whose work embodies what we are arguing for, the aim is not to place them more prominently on the existing map of literary reputations. Rather, as Geoff Dyer has said of Berger, to take their work seriously is to redraw the maps altogether — not only the map of literary reputations, but those by which we navigate all areas of life. Even here, we go carefully, for cartography itself is not a neutral activity. The drawing of maps is full of colonial echoes.
The civilised eye seeks to view the world from above, as something we can stand over and survey. The Uncivilised writer knows the world is, rather, something we are enmeshed in — a patchwork and a framework of places, experiences, sights, smells, sounds.
Maps can lead, but can also mislead. Our maps must be the kind sketched in the dust with a stick, washed away by the next rain. They can be read only by those who ask to see them, and they cannot be bought.
This, then, is Uncivilised writing. Human, inhuman, stoic and entirely natural. Humble, questioning, suspicious of the big idea and the easy answer. Walking the boundaries and reopening old conversations. Apart but engaged, its practitioners always willing to get their hands dirty; aware, in fact, that dirt is essential; that keyboards should be tapped by those with soil under their fingernails and wilderness in their heads.
We tried ruling the world; we tried acting as God’s steward, then we tried ushering in the human revolution, the age of reason and isolation. We failed in all of it, and our failure destroyed more than we were even aware of.
The time for civilisation is past. Uncivilisation, which knows its flaws because it has participated in them; which sees unflinchingly and bites down hard as it records
— this is the project we must embark on now. This is the challenge
for writing — for art — to meet. This is what we are here for.

The time to start the change is now. We do not know when the revolution will end but a beginning is key making this round key.
KINGSNORTH
ed dir of DARK MOUNTAIN
& HINE
co-founder and managing editor of DARK MOUNTAIN
2k9
Paul- & Dougald; Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto; Summer; http://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/
A movement needs a beginning.
An expedition needs a base camp. A project needs a headquarters. Uncivilisation is our project, and the promotion of Uncivilised writing — and art — needs a base. We present this manifesto not simply because we have something to say—who doesn’t?—but because we have something to do. We hope this pamphlet has created a spark. If so, we have a responsibility to fan the flames. This is what we intend to do. But we can’t do it alone.
This is a moment to ask deep questions and to ask them urgently. All around us, shifts are under way which suggest that our whole way of living is already passing into history. It is time to look for new paths and new stories, ones that can lead us through the end of the world as we know it and out the other side. We suspect that by questioning the foundations of civilisation, the myth of human centrality, our imagined isolation, we may find the beginning of such paths.
If we are right, it will be necessary to go literally beyond the Pale. Out- side the stockades we have built — the city walls, the original marker in stone or wood that first separated ‘man’ from ‘nature’. Beyond the gates, out into the wilderness, is where we are headed. And there we shall make for the higher ground for, as Jeffers wrote,
‘when the cities lie at the monster’s feet / There are left the mountains.’ We shall make the pilgrimage to the poet’s Dark Mountain, to the great, immovable, inhuman heights which were here before us and will be here after, and from their slopes we shall look back upon the pinprick lights of the distant cities and gain perspective on who we are and what we have become.
This is the Dark Mountain project.
It starts here.
Where will it end? Nobody knows. Where will it lead? We are not sure.
Its first incarnation, launched alongside this manifesto, is a website, which points the way to the ranges. It will contains thoughts, scribblings, jottings, ideas; it will work up the project of Uncivilisation, and invite all comers to join the discussion.
Then it will become a physical object, because virtual reality is, ultimately, no reality at all.
It will become a journal, of paper, card, paint and print; of ideas, thoughts, observations, mumblings; new stories which will help to define the project — the school, the movement — of Uncivilised writing. It will collect the words and the images of those who consider themselves Uncivilised and have something to say about it; who want to help us attack the citadels. It will be a thing of beauty for the eye and for the heart and for the mind, for we are unfashionable enough to believe that beauty — like truth — not only exists, but still matters.
Beyond that… all is currently hidden from view. It is a long way across the plains, and things become obscured by distance.
There are great white spaces on this map still. The civilised would fill them in; we are not so sure we want to. But we cannot resist exploring
them, navigating by rumours and by the stars. We don’t know quite what we will find. We are slightly nervous. But we will not turn back, for we believe that something enormous may be out there, waiting to meet us.
Uncivilisation, like civilisation, is not something that can be created alone.
Climbing the Dark Mountain cannot be a solitary exercise. We need bearers, sherpas, guides, fellow adventurers. We need to rope ourselves together for safety. At present, our form is loose and nebulous. It will firm itself up as we climb. Like the best writing, we need to be shaped by the ground beneath our feet, and what we become will be shaped, at least in part, by what we find on our journey.
If you would like to climb at least some of the way with us, we would like to hear from you. We feel sure there are others out there who would relish joining us on this expedition.
Come. Join us. We leave at dawn.
The time is now – we must reconnect with nature and rejected the human centered idea that the world currently force feeds the population.
KINGSNORTH
ed dir of DARK MOUNTAIN
& HINE
co-founder and managing editor of DARK MOUNTAIN
2k9
Paul- & Dougald; Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto; Summer; http://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/
THE EIGHT PRINCIPLES OF UNCIVILISATION
‘We must unhumanise our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.’

We live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling. All around us are signs that our whole way of living is already passing into history. We will face this reality honestly and learn how to live with it. We reject the faith which holds that the converging crises of our times can be reduced to a set of
‘problems’ in need of technological or political ‘solutions’. We believe that the roots of these crises lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves. We intend to challenge the stories which underpin our civilisation: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from
‘nature’. These myths are more dangerous for the fact that we have forgotten they are myths. We will reassert the role of storytelling as more than mere entertainment. It is through stories that we weave reality. Humans are not the point and purpose of the planet. Our art will begin with the attempt to step outside the human bubble. By careful attention, we will reengage with the non-human world. We will celebrate writing and art which is grounded in a sense of place and of time. Our literature has been dominated for too long by those who inhabit the cosmopolitan citadels. We will not lose ourselves in the elaboration of theories or ideologies. Our words will be elemental. We write with dirt under our fingernails. The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.