NotesI don’t even know where to begin.

T, Marx (or other K), PIC (maybe multiple), and Case Turns=solid 1NC strat

Good luck and don’t let them get shifty on you!

Case Neg

T

Not exploration of oceans

A. Interpretation: explore means to travel in or through an area for the purpose of learning about itOxford 14 (Oxford Dictionaries 2014 http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/explore ) explore Syllabification: ex·plore Pronunciation: /ikˈsplôr verb [with object] 1Travel in or through (an unfamiliar country or area) in order to learn about or familiarize oneself with it: the best way to explore Iceland’s northwest • figurative the project encourages children to explore the world of photography More example sentencesSynonyms 1.1 [no object] (explore for) Search for resources such as mineral deposits: the company explored for oil More example sentences 1.2Inquire into or discuss (a subject or issue) in detail: he sets out to explore fundamental questions More example sentences 1.3Examine or evaluate (an option or possibility): you continue to explore new ways to generate income

Ocean is the single continuous body of salt waterScience Dictionary 2 The American Heritage® Science Dictionary Copyright © 2002. Published by Houghton Mifflin. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/oceanocean (ō'shən) Pronunciation Key The continuous body of salt water that covers 72 percent of the Earth's surface. The average salinity of ocean water is approximately three percent. The deepest known area of the ocean, at 11,034 m (36,192 ft) is the Mariana Trench , located in the western Pacific Ocean. Any of the principal divisions of this body of water, including the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, and Arctic Oceans. Our Living Language : The word ocean refers to one of the Earth's four distinct, large areas of salt water, the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, and Arctic Oceans. The word can also mean the entire network of water that covers almost three quarters of our planet. It comes from the Greek Okeanos, a river believed to circle the globe. The word sea can also mean the vast ocean covering most of the world. But it more commonly refers to large landlocked or almost landlocked salty waters smaller than the great oceans, such as the Mediterranean Sea or the Bering Sea. Sailors have long referred to all the world's waters as the seven seas. Although the origin of this phrase is not known for certain, many people believe it referred to the Red Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Black Sea, the Adriatic Sea, the Caspian Sea, and the Indian Ocean, which were the waters of primary interest to Europeans before Columbus.

B. Violation – the affirmative’s historical re-presentation of transatlantic slavery is physically removed from the single continuous body of salt water and is not exploration of the ocean

C. The affirmative interpretation unlimits by eliminating the bright line boundary of the ocean. Exploration could be from any location and involve any number of contemplation or analytic methods. There is no other way to distinguish exploration from any thought process or the ocean from any physical location, making it impossible for the negative to be adequately prepared and clash. Timmons 12 Bob Timmons, Artist - Author – Speaker, the Artist for the Ocean October 21, 2012 Ocean Guardians http://oceanguardians.com.au/artist-for-the-ocean-bob-timmons/Everything is connected and everything affects the ocean in the end since its majority of the planet’s surface and subsurface

D. T is a voter because it’s necessary for good, well-prepared debating

K’s

Drexciyans K

Notes Drexciyans are a bad starting pointUsing black motherhood as a starting point for understanding slave or African experiences is bad b/c 1.) slave masters interacted with mothers from privilege and 2. ) we only know about them from a single notion—we only see them as mothers which limits their potential

You can read this stuff on case as solvency take-outs/case turns or as an off case PIC or as a DA to the aff. Choices on choices on choices.

Cards

Using Black motherhood as a starting point is bad—it devalues the women and subjects their bodies to white supremacist state control—also entrenches their role as property because they are viewed as carrying slave master’s children culminating in sterilizationRoberts, ’97, (Dorothy E., acclaimed scholar of race, gender and the law, at the University of Pennsylvania, “UNSHACKLING BLACK MOTHERHOOD,” Michigan Law Review, (1997): 938-964, http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1290050?uid=3739800&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21104544992673)//erg

The diversionary strategy might be worth the neglect of Black women's particular injuries if it presented the only feasible route to

victory. Yet this tactic has other disadvantages that weaken its power to challenge policies that devalue Black childbearing. By di- verting attention from race, this strategy fails to connect numerous policies that degrade Black women's procreation. In addition to the prosecutions, for example, lawmakers across the country have been considering schemes to distribute Norplant to poor women, as well as measures that penalize welfare mothers for having addi-

tional children.115 Viewed separately, these developments appear to be isolated policies that can be justified by some neutral govern- ment objective . When all are connected by the race of the women most affected, a clear and horrible pattern emerges . Lynn Paltrow recently stated, "'for the first time in American history.., what a pregnant woman does to her own body becomes a matter for the juries and the court.' ",116

Paltrow is correct that the criminal regulation of pregnancy that occurs today is in some ways unprecedented. 117 Yet it continues the legacy of the degrada- tion of Black motherhood. A pregnant slave woman's body was subject to legal fiat centuries ago because the fetus she was carrying already belonged to her master. Over the course of this century, government policies have regulated Black women's reproductive decisionmaking based on the theory that Black childbearing causes social problems." 8 Although the prosecution of women for prena- tal crimes is relatively recent, it should be considered in conjunction with the sterilization of Black welfare mothers during the 1970s and the promotion of Norplant as a solution to Black poverty.

These images are traumatic—they trivialize the black mothers who were abused and mistreated.Roberts, ’97, (Dorothy E., acclaimed scholar of race, gender and the law, at the University of Pennsylvania, “UNSHACKLING BLACK MOTHERHOOD,” Michigan Law Review, (1997): 938-964, http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1290050?uid=3739800&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21104544992673)//erg

At least one woman who was pregnant at the time of her arrest sat in a jail cell waiting to give birth.32 Lori Griffin was transported weekly from the jail to the hospital in handcuffs and leg irons for prenatal care. Three weeks after her arrest, she went into labor and was taken, still in handcuffs and shackles, to MUSC. Once at the hospital, Ms. Griffin was kept handcuffed to

her bed during the en- tire delivery.33 I opened PunishingDrugAddicts Who Have Babies with the recollection of an ex-slave about the method slave masters used to discipline their pregnant slaves while protecting the fetus from harm: A former slave named Lizzie Williams recounted the beating of pregnant slave women on a Mississippi

cotton plantation: "I[']s seen nigger women dat was fixin' to be confined do somethin' de white folks didn't like. Dey [the white folks] would dig a hole in de ground just big 'nuff fo' her stomach, make her lie face down an whip her on de back to keep from hurtin' de child."34 Thinking about an expectant Black mother chained to a belt around her swollen belly to protect her unborn child, I cannot help but re- call this scene from Black women's bondage. The sight of a preg- nant Black woman

bound in shackles is a modern-day reincarnation of the horrors of slavemasters' degrading treatment of their female chattel.

Monstrous portrayals of black mothers justified sexual abuse and devaluation—you fundamentally mischaracterize images of black womenRoberts, ’97, (Dorothy E., acclaimed scholar of race, gender and the law, at the University of Pennsylvania, “UNSHACKLING BLACK MOTHERHOOD,” Michigan Law Review, (1997): 938-964, http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1290050?uid=3739800&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21104544992673)//erg

By focusing on maternal crack use, which is more prevalent in inner-city neighborhoods and stereotypically associated with Blacks,70 the media left the impression that the pregnant addict is typically a Black woman.71 Even more than a "metaphor for women's

alienation from instinctual motherhood, '72 the pregnant crack addict was the latest embodiment of the bad Black mother. The monstrous crack-smoking mother was added to the iconog- raphy of depraved Black maternity, alongside the matriarch and the welfare queen. For centuries, a popular mythology has degraded Black women and portrayed them as less deserving of motherhood. Slave owners forced slave women to perform strenuous labor that contradicted the Victorian female roles prevalent in the dominant white society.73 One of the most prevalent images of slave women was the character of Jezebel, a woman

governed by her sexual desires, which legitimated white men's sexual abuse of Black women .74

The stereotype of Black women as sexually promiscuous helped to perpetuate their devaluation as mothers. This devaluation of Black motherhood has been reinforced by stereotypes that blame Black mothers for the problems of the Black family, such as the myth of the Black matriarch - the domineering female head of the Black family. White sociologists have held Black matriarchs responsible for the disintegration of the Black family and the consequent failure of Black people to achieve suc- cess in America.75 Daniel Patrick Moynihan popularized this the- ory in his 1965 report, The Negro Family: The Casefor National Action, which claimed, "At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family." 76 Moynihan blamed domineering Black mothers for the demise of their families, arguing that "the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is so out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole.177

Their use of the state and the re-living of the social order means black women are objects to be abused and raped by their male slave masters entrenching a violent patriarchal mindsetRoberts, ’93, (Dorothy E., acclaimed scholar of race, gender and the law, at the University of Pennsylvania, “RACISM AND PATRIARCHY IN THEMEANING OF MOTHERHOOD,” Am. UJ Gender & L. 1 (1993): 1. http://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1199&context=jgspl&sei-redir=1&referer=http%3A%2F%2Fscholar.google.com%2Fscholar%3Fq%3Dblack%2Bmotherhood%2Bportrayal%2Bbad%26hl%3Den%26as_sdt%3D0%26as_vis%3D1%26oi%3Dscholart%26sa%3DX%26ei%3DgqnaU7S5K_XJsQS0hoKwCg%26ved%3D0CB0QgQMwAA#search=%22black%20motherhood%20portrayal%20bad%22)//erg

The intimate intertwining of race and gender in the very structure of slavery makes it practically impossible to speak of one without the other. The social order established by white slaveowners was founded on two inseparable ingredients: the dehumanization of Africans on the basis of race, and the control of women's sexuality and reproduction. The American legal order is rooted in this horri- ble combination of race and gender. America's first laws concerned the status of children born to slave mothers and fathered by white men: a 1662 Virginia statute made these

children slaves.27 The experience of Black women during slavery provides the most brutal example of the denial of autonomy over reproduction. Fe- male slaves were commercially valuable to their masters not only for their labor, but also for their ability to produce more slaves.28 White masters, therefore, could increase their wealth by controlling their slaves' reproductive capacity - by rewarding pregnancy; pun- ishing slavewomen who did not bear children; forcing them to breed; and raping them.29 Racism created for white slaveowners the possibility of unrestrained reproductive control. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. writes about the autobiography of a slave named Harriet A.Jacobs, it "charts in vivid detail precisely how the shape of her

life and the choices she makes are defined by her reduction to a sexual object, an object to be raped, bred or abused."'30 The radical femi- nist model of motherhood, which is characterized by the patriarchal male's use of a woman's body for reproduction, is epitomized in slavery.-3 Slavery allowed the perfection of patriarchal mother- hood. Patriarchy devised the most dehumanizing form of slavery. Compulsory childbirth was a critical element of the oppression of both Black and white women of the time. A racist patriarchy re- quired that both Black and white women bear children, although these women served different and complementary functions. Black women produced children who were legally Black to replenish the master's supply of slaves.3 2 White women produced white children to continue the master's legacy.33 The racial purity of white wo- men's children was guaranteed by a violently enforced taboo against sexual relations between white women and Black men and by an- timiscegenation laws that punished interracial marriages 3 4 There was a critical difference in the white patriarch's relationship to these two classes of women. White men accorded some degree of

respect and protection to white women, who were their wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters. White patriarchs, however, owed nothing to their female slaves, who were denied even the status of "woman."

3 5 Black mothers reproduced for white patriarchy, but gained nothing from it.

They metaphor of Black motherhood limits black women’s potential because they are limited to being property to “rape”—that limits the potential of Black Motherhood.James Madison University, ’10, (“The Effects of Slavery on the Psyche of Motherhood,” James Madison University, 2010, http://www.jmu.edu/mwa/docs/2010b/maddox.pdf)//erg

Along with struggles for ownership, many slave mothers—as women—also had to deal with sexual harassment. Linda Brent is the primary example of this, due to her encounters with Dr. Flint: “My master met me at every turn,”

she wrote, “reminding me that I belonged to him, and swearing...that he would compel me to submit to him” (Jacobs 38). Dr. Flint pursued Linda with an appalling doggedness—he wrote her letters when he found out that she could read, routinely visited her at her grandmother’s home, and even followed her when she went to visit her mother’s grave. Dr. Flint was not the only example of such harassment, either—statistics of the slave population in 1860 show that 10% of slaves were “mulatto,”

demonstrating just how often female slaves gave birth to their master’s children, which does not include how

many were violated but not impregnated (Roberts 29). In addition, the rape of a black slave woman was not considered a crime. White slave holders could do it without fear of the law—and, in fact,

as Roberts asserts, used rape or the threat of rape as “a weapon of terror that reinforced whites’ domination over their human property” (29). Sexual abuse then, essentially, was a psychological tool used by slave owners to keep slave women submissive, in addition to a way to keep slave women pregnant and producing more slaves. Although Linda was never raped, the way that she avoided such a fate was simply another form of sexual abuse. Pressured and feeling as if she had no other choice, she used her body without her full assent—by becoming pregnant with another white man’s child—to escape from her current situation. Despite the fact that “[she knew what [she] did, and [she] did it with deliberate calculation” (Jacobs 66), she should not have had to do it at all. In addition, despite her calculations,

Linda’s situation as a pregnant slave only added to her emotional and psychological stress. Although no longer sexually harassed, she was instead plagued by guilt, Dr. Flint’s fury, and the disappointment of her respected grandmother.

Re-presentation K

Derrida K

The 1AC’s call to re-present the events of transatlantic slavery in fictional form further entrenches the destructive violence they isolate through a kind of psychic plagiarism that seeks to assimilate the other into the narcissistic self Kirkby, 06 (Joan, Department of Critical and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, “Remembrance of the Future’: Derrida on Mourning,” Social Semiotics Vol. 16, No. 3, September 2006, http://web.a.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=df402c47-70d2-4356-80fc-d0a1d8f6c5dd%40sessionmgr4002&vid=2&hid=4206, AW)Derrida also recalls de Man’s insistence on ‘‘the performative structure of the text in general as promise’’ (1986, 93), and goes on to argue that ‘‘the essence of speech is the promise, that there is no speaking that does not promise, which at the same time means a commitment toward the future through . . . ‘a speech act’ and a commitment to keep the memory of the said act, to keep the acts of this act’’ (1986, 97). He also reflects upon the significance of the word aporia in de Man’s last texts, in which an absence of path ‘‘gives or promises the thinking of the path’’ and provokes the thinking of ‘‘what still remains unthinkable or unthought’’ (Derrida 1986, 132). The aporia provokes ‘‘a leap of memory and a displacement of thinking which leads toward a new thinking’’. Aporicity promises an other thinking, ‘‘an other text, the future of another promise. All at once the impasse . . . becomes the most ‘trustworthy,’ ‘reliable’ place or moment for reopening a question . . . which remains difficult to think.’’ (Derrida 1986, 132/133) The aporia ‘‘ engenders, stimulates, makes one write, provokes thought . . .’’. There is in it ‘‘the incalculable order of a wholly other: the coming or the call of the other’’ (Derrida 1986, 137). The aporia of de Man’s death has provoked Derrida’s re-reading of de Man and a re-casting of the process of mourning. These ideas from de Man are then segued into the psychoanalytic model of mourning to produce what I would argue is a new, intellectually and emotionally nuanced model of mourning , a model wherein healthy psychic functioning depends neither on a refusal to mourn or abandoning the dead. The Derridean model offers a respect for the (dead) Other as Other ; it allows agency to the mourner in the possibility of an ongoing creative encounter with the Other in an externalising, productive, future-oriented memory ; it emphasises the importance of acting out the entrusted responsibility, which is their legacy to us; it upholds the idea of community and reminds us of our interconnectedness with our dead . And in a sort of irreligious religiosity, it enables us to conceive of a bond greater than ourselves, ‘‘the far away’’ within us. To summarise then. First, with regard to mourning, Derrida privileges the process of incorporation , which classical psychoanalysis has been seen as the pathological response to loss. He does this essentially because incorporation acknowledges the other as other, while the so-called normal process of mourning (introjection) merely assimilates the other into the self in a kind of psychic plagiarism. Second, however, it is not an unreconstructed incorporation that he recommends; he makes two important theoretical moves . In the distinction between memory as interiorisation (erinnerung) and memory as a giving over to thinking and inscription (gedachtnis), he appropriates gedachtnis to integrate with incorporation. So that what we internalise upon the death of the other is their dynamic engagements with the other*/their modus vivendi, their animating principle, their dialogue with the world. We do not have to give them up*/we do not murder them and find a substitute for the dead are irreplaceable. Third, the other important thing about gedachtnis is that it is an externalising memory; it is linked with technical or mechanical inscription, with writing and rhetoric. It is productive ; it leads to external engagement in an ongoing dialogue with the other .

It is, as he says, a ‘‘remembrance of the future’’ (Derrida 1986, 29). In conclusion, Derrida asks ‘‘What is love, friendship, memory?’’

The Alternative is to deconstruct the 1AC with an unconditional ethic to the Other in the form of an aporia – this is the only way to embrace the paradox of remembrance and prevent total-interiorization and introjection that lead to violence towards the OtherDerrida, 86 (Jacques, Professor of the Humanities at the University of California Irvine, “Mnemosyne,” in Memoires for Paul de Man, translated by Cecile Lindsay, 1986, it’s a book, AW)Everything remains “in me” or “in us,” “between us,” upon the death of the other . Everything is entrusted to me; everything is bequeathed or given to us, and first of all to what I call memory-to the memory, the place of this strange dative. All we seem to have left is memory since nothing appears able to come to us any longer, nothing is coming or to come, form the other to the present. This is probably true, but is this truth true, or true enough? The preceding sentences seem to suppose a certain clarity in respect to what we mean by “in me,” “in us,” “death of the other,” “memory,” “present,” “to come,” and so on. But still more light (plus de lumiere” is needed. The “me” or the “us” of which we speak then aris and are delimited in the way that they are only through this experience of the other , and of the other as other who can die, leaving in me or in us this memory of the other. This terrible solitude which is mine or ours at the death fo the other is what constitutes that relationship to self which we call “me,” “us,” “between us,” “subjectivity,” “intersubjectivity,” “memory.” The possibility of death “happens,” so to speak, “before” these different instances, and makes them possible. Or, more precisely, the possibility of the death of the other as mine or ours in-forms any relations to the other and the finitude of memory. We weep precisely over what happens to us when everything is entrusted to the sole memory that is “in me” or “in us.” But we must also recall, in another turn of memory, that the “within me” and the “ within us” do not arise or appear before this terrible e xperience . Or at least not before its possibility, actually felt and inscribed in us, signed. The “within me” and the “within us” acquire their sense and their bearing only by carrying within themselves the death and the memory of the other ; of an other who is greater than them, greater than what they or we can bear, carry, or comprehend, since we then lament being no more than “memory,” “in memory.” Which is another way of remaining inconsolable before the finitude of memory. We know, we knew, we remember – before the death of the loved one-that being-in-me or being-in- us is constituted out of the possibility of mourning . We are only ourselves from the perspective of this knowledge that is older than ourselves; and this is why I say that we being by recalling this to ourselves: we come to ourselves through this memory of possible mourning . In other words this is precisely the allegory , this memory of impossible mourning. Paul de man would perhaps say: of the unreadability of mourning. The possibility of the impossible commands here the whole rhetoric of mourning, and describes the essence of memory. Upon the death of the other we are given to memory, and thus to interiorization, since the other, outside us, is now nothing. And with the dark light of this nothing, we learn that the other resists the closure of our interiorizing memory . With the noting of this irrevocable memory. With the nothing of this irrevocable absence, the other appears as other , and as other for us, upon his death or at least in the anticipated possibility of a death , since death constitutes and makes manifest the limits of a me or an us who are obliged to harbor something that is greater and other then them; something outside of within them. Memory and interiorization: since Freud this is how the “normal” “work of mourning” is often described. It entail s a movement in which an interiorizing idealization takes in itself or upon itself the body and voice

of the other , the other’s visage and person , ideally and quasi-literally devouring them. This mimetic interiorization is not fictive; it is the origin of fiction, of apocryphal figuration. It takes place in a body. Or rather, it makes a place for a body, a voice, and a soul which, although “ours,” did not exist and had no meaning before this possibility that one must always begin by remembering, and whose trace must be followed. II faut, one must: it is the law, that law of the (necessary) relation of Being to law. We can only live this experience in the form of an aporia : the aporia of mourning and of prosopopeia, where the possible remains impossible . Where success fails. And where faithful interiorization bears the other and constitutes him in me (in us), at once living and dead. It makes the other no longer quite seems to be the other, because we grieve for him and bear him in us , like an unborn child , like a future. And inversely, the failure succeeds : an aborted interiorization is at the same time a respect for the other as other , a sort of tender rejection , a movement of renunciation which leaves the other alone , outside, over there, in his death, outside of us .

Cards

See Middle Passage case neg for extension cards

Marx

Links

The affirmative’s knowledge production will be incorporated into the system and sold as a new market for capital’s infiltration. The aff commodifies knowledge by attaching a marketable metaphor of the Drexciyan to it. Class is key to understand how to interact with difference. <THIS MIGHT BE THE BEST CARD YOU’LL EVER READ>Scatamburlo-D’Annibale and McLaren, ’03, (Valerie, University of Windsor, Peter, University of California, Los Angeles, “The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of “Race” and “Difference”” Sage Publications, Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, Volume 3 Number 2, 2003 148-175, http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/mclaren/mclaren%20and%20valerie.pdf)//erg

Because post-al theories of difference often circumvent the material dimen- sions of difference and tend to segregate questions of difference from analyses of class formation and capitalist social relations , we contend that it is necessary to (re)conceptualize difference by drawing on Marx’s materialist and historical formulations. Difference needs to be understood as the product of social con- tradictions and in relation to political and economic organization. Because sys- tems of difference almost always involve relations of domination and oppres- sion, we must concern ourselves with the economies of relations of difference that exist in specific contexts. Drawing on the Marxist concept of mediation enables us to unsettle the categorical (and sometimes overly rigid) approaches to both class and difference for it was Marx himself who warned against creat- ing false dichotomies at the heart of our politics—that it was absurd to choose between consciousness and the world, subjectivity and

social organization, personal or collective will, and historical or structural determination. In a simi- lar vein, it is equally absurd to see “difference as a historical form of conscious- ness unconnected to class formation, development of capital and class politics” (Bannerji, 1995, p. 30). Bannerji has pointed to the need to historicize differ- ence in relation to the history and social organization of capital and class (inclusive of imperialist and colonialist legacies) and to acknowledge the changing configurations of difference and “otherness.”

Apprehending the meaning and function of difference in this manner necessarily highlights the importance of exploring (a) the institutional and structural aspects of differ- ence ; (b) the meanings and connotations that are attached to categories of dif- ference; (c) how differences are produced out of, and lived within, specific his- 154 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies • May 2003 

torical, social, and political formations; and (d) the production of difference in relation to the complexities, contradictions, and exploitative relations of capitalism . Moreover, it presents a challenge to “identitarian” understandings of differ- ence based almost exclusively on questions of cultural and/or racial hegemony. In such approaches, the answer to oppression often amounts to

creating greater cultural space for the formerly excluded to have their voices heard (repre- sented). Much of what is called the “ politics of difference” is little more than a demand for an end to monocultural quarantine and for inclusion into the met- ropolitan salons of bourgeois representation—a posture that reinscribes a neoliberal pluralist stance rooted in the ideology of free market capitalism. In short, the political sphere is modeled on the marketplace, and freedom amounts to the liberty of all vendors to display their different “cultural” goods . A paradigmatic expression of this position is encapsulated in the following pas- sage that champions a form of difference politics whose presumed aim is to make social groups appear. Minority and immigrant ethnic groups have laid claim to the street as a legitimate forum for the promotion and exhibition of tra- ditional dress, food, and culture. . . . [This] is a politics of visibility and invisibil- ity. Because it must deal with a tradition of representation that insists on sub- suming varied social practices to a standard norm, its struggle is as much on the page, screen . . . as it is at the barricade and in the parliament, traditional forums of political intervention before the postmodern. (Fuery & Mansfield, 2000, p. 150) This position fosters a “fetishized” understanding of difference in terms of pri- mordial and seemingly autonomous cultural

identities and treats such “differ- ences” as inherent, as ontologically secure cultural traits of the individuals of particular cultural

communities. Rather than exploring the construction of difference within specific contexts mediated by the conjunctural embeddedness of power differentials, we are instead presented with an over- flowing cornucopia of cultural particularities that serve as markers of ethnicity, race , group boundaries, and so forth. In this instance, the discourse of differ- ence operates ideologically—cultural recognition derived from the rhetoric of tolerance averts our gaze from relations of production and presents a strategy for attending to difference as solely an ethnic, racial , or cultural issue. What advocates of such an approach fail to acknowledge is that the forces of diversity and difference are allowed to flourish provided that they remain within the prevailing forms of capitalist social arrangements. The neopluralism of difference politics cannot adequately pose a substantive challenge to the pro- ductive system of capitalism that is able to accommodate a vast pluralism of ideas and cultural practices. In fact, the

post-al themes of identity, difference, diversity, and the like mesh quite nicely with contemporary corporate interests precisely because they revere lifestyle—the quest for, and the cultivation of, the self—and often encourage the fetishization of identities in the marketplace as Scatamburlo-

D’Annibale, McLaren • Centrality of Class 155 they compete for “visibility ” (Boggs, 2000; Field, 1997). Moreover, the

uncritical, celebratory tone of various forms of difference politics can also lead to some disturbing conclusions. For example, if we take to their logical conclusion the statements that “postmodern political activism fiercely contests the reduction of the other to the same,” that post-al narratives believe that “dif- ference needs to be recognized and respected at all levels” (Fuery & Mansfield, 2000, p. 148), and that the recognition of different subject positions is para- mount (Mouffe, 1988, pp. 35-36), their political folly becomes clear. Eagleton (1996) sardonically commented on the implications: Almost all postmodern theorists would seem to imagine that difference, variabil- ity and heterogeneity are “absolute” goods, and it is a position I have long held myself. It has always struck me as unduly impoverishing of British social life that we can muster a mere two or three fascist parties. . . . The opinion that plurality is a good in itself is emptily formalistic and alarmingly unhistorical. (pp. 126-

127) The liberal pluralism manifest in discourses of difference politics often means a plurality without conflict, contestation, or contradiction. The inherent limita- tions of this position are also evident if we turn our attention to issues of class. Expanding on Eagleton’s observations and adopting the logic that seems to inform the unqualified celebration of difference, one would be compelled to champion class differences as well.

Presumably, the differences between the 475 billionaires whose combined wealth now equals the combined yearly incomes of more than 50% of the world’s population are to be celebrated—a posturing that would undoubtedly lend itself to a triumphant endorsement of capitalism and inequitable and exploitative conditions. San Juan (1995) noted that the cardinal flaw in current instantiations of culturalism lies in its decapi- tation of discourses of intelligibility from the politics of antagonistic relations. He framed the question quite pointedly: “In a society stratified by uneven property relations, by asymmetrical allocation of resources and of power, can there be equality of cultures and genuine toleration of differences?” (pp. 232- 233).

Black science fiction focuses on historical particularities past and future—precludes historical analysis of broader class exploitation Reynolds, The Guardian, 1997 (Simon, The Gaurdian, “KODWO ESHUN, More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction,” http://bringthenoisesimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2008/01/bring-noise-deleted-scene-45-kodwo.html, accessed 7/29/14 bh@ddi) More Brilliant Than The Sun is a survey of the 'black science fiction' tendency in music, from Lee Perry and George Clinton to contemporary sonic wizards like

Tricky and Goldie. Although the idea of 'Afro-futurism' has been broached before (most notably by American critics Mark Dery and Greg Tate), Kodwo Eshun's book is the most sustained and penetrating analysis to date of what the author calls 'sonic fiction': the otherworldly vistas and alien mindscapes conjured by genres like dub reggae, hip hop, techno, and jungle. The book kicks off at blitzkrieg pace and ferocity, with a manifesto that excoriates music journalists and cultural studies academics for being 'future shock absorbers', forever domesticating the strangeness of music. Dance music hacks are rightly ticked off for their abject failure to deal with rhythm, dance music's absolute raison d'etre and primary zone of impact on its listeners. As for the academy, Eshun is particularly scathing about treatments of black pop that analyse it in terms of soul, roots and 'the street'. Rejecting these notions of raw expression and social realism, Eshun instead celebrates a lineage of black conceptualists, speculators and fabulists. These renegade autodidacts - Sun Ra, Rammellzee, Dr Octagon, Underground Resistance's Mike Banks and Jeff Mills - weave syncretic and idiosyncratic cosmologies using an array of esoteric sources. Eshun tracks this 'MythScience' through lyrics, songs and album titles, cover artwork, and (in Underground Resistance's case) hermetic slogans etched

into the run-out vinyl of 12-inch singles. As well as decoding these encrypted expressions of the Afro-Futurist imagination, Eshun focuses on the materiality of

the music -- jungle's convoluted breakbeat rhythms, the headwrecking delirium of dub production and 'remixology', the timbral violence of the hip hop DJ's scratching. But

Eshun's brand of "sub-bass materialism" has nothing in common with Marxist historical materialism . Instead of causality or continuity, Eshun looks for breaks , those moments when the future seems to leap out of music; his punning name for the Afro-futurist canon he's erected in More Brilliant is a discontinuum. It's a provocative stance, for sure, but at times you wonder if the baby hasn't been thrown out with the proverbial bathwater. Jungle, for instance, is probably best understood as a tangle of 'roots and future', to borrow a phrase from drum & bass outfit Phuture Assassins; as a subculture and a sound, it has one foot in the concrete jungles of Kingston, Jamaica, and the other in the data jungles of cyberspace. And is it really

true, as Eshun seems to insist, that hip hop or reggae are diminished by attempts to locate them in a social context? 'The streets' may be a journalistic cliche too often mark ing a condescending attitude towards black creativity , but the phrase also contains a kernel of truth that

can't be blithely brushed aside: the material realities of exclusion , disadvantage and exploitation that simultaneously

hamper and energise all forms of underclass music, black and white.

Impact

Capitalism is the overarching totality that governs all oppression – their discursive focus on categories of difference ALLOWS the much larger CLASS CONFLICT to continue.McLaren and Scatamburlo-D’Annibale, 4 (Peter and Valerie, University of Windsor, Ontario, University of California, 2004, Educational Philosophy and Theory Vol 36 No 2, “Class Dismissed? Historical Materialism and the politics of ‘difference,’”)The cohesiveness of this position suggests that forms of exploitation and oppression are related internally to the extent that they are located in the same totality — one which is currently defined by capitalist class rule . Capitalism is an overarching totality that is , unfortunately, becoming increasingly invisible in post-

Marxist ‘ discursive’ narratives that valorize ‘difference’ as a primary explanatory construct. ¶ For

example, E. San Juan (2003) argues that race relations and race conflict are necessarily structured by the larger totality of the political economy of a given society, as well as by modifications in the structure of the world economy. He further notes that the capitalist mode of production has articulated ‘race’ with class in a peculiar way. He too is worth a substantial quotation:¶ While the stagnation of rural life imposed a racial or castelike rigidity to the peasantry, the rapid accumulation of wealth through the ever more intensifying exploitation of labor by capital could not so easily ‘racialize’ the wage-workers of a particular nation, given the alienability of labor- power—unless certain physical or cultural characteristics can be

utilized to divide the workers or render one group an outcast or pariah removed from the domain of ‘free labor.’ In the capitalist development of U.S. society, African, Mexican, and Asian bodies —more precisely, their labor power and its reproductive efficacy—were colonized and racialized; hence the idea of ‘internal colonialism’ retains

explanatory validity. ‘Race’ is thus constructed out of raw materials furnished by class relations , the history of class conflicts, and the vicissitudes of colonial/capitalist expansion and the building of imperial

hegemony. It is dialectically accented and operationalized not just to differentiate the price of wage labor within

and outside the territory of the metropolitan power, but also to reproduce relations of domination–subordination invested with an aura of naturality and fatality. The refunctioning of physical or cultural traits as ideological and political signifiers of class identity reifies social relations. Such ‘racial’ markers enter the field of the alienated labor process, concealing the artificial nature of meanings and norms, and essentializing or naturalizing historical traditions and values which are contingent on mutable

circumstances.¶ For San Juan, racism and nationalism are modalities in which class struggles articulate themselves at strategic points in history. He argues that racism arose with the creation and expansion of the capitalist world economy. He maintains, rightly in our view, that racial or ethnic group solidarity is given ‘meaning and value in terms of their place within the social organization of production and reproduction of the ideological-political order; ideologies of racism as collective social evaluation of solidarities arise to reinforce structural constraints which

preserve the exploited and oppressed position of these “racial” solidarities’.¶ It is remarkable, in our opinion, that so much of contemporary social theory has largely abandoned the problems of labor, capitalist exploitation , and class analysis at a time when capitalism is becoming more universal, more ruthless and more deadly. The metaphor of a contemporary ‘tower of Babel’ seems appropriate here—academics striking radical poses in the seminar rooms while remaining

oblivious to the possibility that their seemingly radical discursive maneuvers do nothing to further the struggles ‘against oppression and exploitation which continue to be real, material, and not merely “discursive” problems of the contemporary world’ (Dirlik, 1997, p. 176). Harvey (1998, pp. 29–31) indicts the new academic entrepreneurs, the ‘masters of theory-in-and-for-itself’ whose ‘discourse radicalism’ has deftly side-stepped ‘the enduring conundrums of class struggle’ and who have, against a ‘sobering background of cheapened discourse and opportunistic politics,’ been ‘stripped of their self-advertised radicalism.’ For years, they ‘contested socialism,’ ridiculed Marxists, and promoted ‘their own alternative theories of liberatory politics’ but now they have largely been ‘reduced to the role of supplicants in the most degraded

form of pluralist politics imaginable.’ As they pursue the politics of difference , the ‘class war rages unabated’ and they seem ‘either unwilling or unable to focus on the unprecedented economic carnage occurring around the globe.’¶ Harvey’s searing criticism suggests that post-Marxists have been busy fiddling while Rome burns and his comments echo those made by Marx (1978, p. 149) in his critique of the Young Hegelians who were, ‘in spite of their allegedly “world- shattering” statements, the staunchest conservatives.’ Marx lamented that the Young Hegelians were simply fighting ‘phrases’ and that they

failed to acknowledge that in offering only counter-phrases, they were in no way ‘combating the real existing world’ but merely combating the phrases of the world. Taking a cue from Marx and substituting ‘phrases’ with ‘discourses’ or ‘resignifications’ we would contend that the practitioners of difference politics who operate within exaggerated culturalist frameworks that privilege the realm of representation as the primary arena of political struggle question some discourses of power while legitimating others.

Moreover, because they lack a class perspective, their gestures of radicalism are belied by their own class positions.10 As Ahmad (1997a, p. 104) notes:¶ One may speak of any number of disorientations and even oppressions, but one cultivates all kinds of politeness and indirection about the structure of capitalist class relations in which those

oppressions are embedded. To speak of any of that directly and simply is to be ‘vulgar.’ In this climate of Aesopian languages it is absolutely essential to reiterate that most things are a matter of class. That kind of statement is ... surprising only in a culture like that of the North American university ... But it is precisely in that kind of culture that people need to hear such obvious truths.¶ Ahmad’s provocative observations imply that substantive analyses of the carnage wrought by ‘globalized’ class exploitation have, for the most part, been marginalized by the kind of radicalism that has been instituted among the academic Left in North America. He further suggests that while various post-Marxists have invited us to join their euphoric celebrations honoring the decentering of capitalism, the abandonment of class politics, and the decline of metanarratives (particularly those of Marxism and socialism), they have failed to see that the most ‘meta of all metanarratives of the past three centuries, the creeping annexation of the globe¶ for the dominance of capital over laboring humanity has met, during those same decades, with stunning success’ (Ahmad, 1997b, p. 364). As such, Ahmad invites us to ask anew, the proverbial question: What, then, must be done? To this question we offer no simple theoretical, pedagogical or political prescriptions. Yet we would argue that if social change is the aim,

progressive educators and theorists must cease displacing class analysis with the politics of difference.

Class is fundamentally different from race and gender – Race struggles downplays class struggles and negate the importance of classGimenez 2001 (Martha, Professor of Sociology at CU Boulder, “Marxism and Class, Gender and Race”, Race Gender and Class, Volume 8)There are many competing theories of race, gender, class, American society, political economy, power, etc. but no specific theory is invoked to define how the terms race, gender and class are used, or to identify how they are

related to the rest of the social system. To some extent, race, gender and class and their intersections and interlockings have become a mantra to be invoked in any and all theoretical contexts, for a tacit agreement about their ubiquitousness and meaning seems to have developed among RGC studies advocates, so that all that remains to be done is

empirically to document their intersections everywhere, for everything that happens is, by definition, raced, classed, and gendered. This pragmatic acceptance of race, gender and class, as givens, results in the downplaying of theory, and the resort to experience as the source of knowledge. The emphasis on experience in the construction of knowledge is intended as a corrective to theories that, presumably, reflect only the experience of the powerful. RGC seems to offer a subjectivist understanding of theory as simply a reflection of the experience and consciousness of the individual theorist, rather than as a body of propositions which is collectively and systematically produced under historically specific conditions of possibility which grant them historical validity for as long as those conditions prevail. Instead, knowledge and theory are pragmatically conceived as the products or reflection of experience and, as such, unavoidably partial, so that greater accuracy and relative completeness can be approximated only through gathering the experiential accounts of all groups. Such is the importance given to the role of experience in the production of knowledge that in the eight page introduction to the first section of an RGC anthology, the word experience is repeated thirty six times (Andersen and Collins, 1995:1-9). I agree with the importance of learning from the experience of all groups, especially those who have been silenced by oppression and exclusion and by the effects of ideologies that mystify their actual conditions of existence. To learn how people describe their understanding of their lives is very illuminating, for "ideas are the conscious expression -- real or illusory -- of (our) actual relations and activities" (Marx, 1994:111), because "social existence determines consciousness" (Marx, 1994: 211). Given that our existence is shaped by the capitalist mode of production, experience, to be fully understood in its broader social and political implications, has to be situated in the context of the capitalist forces and relations that produce it. Experience in itself, however, is suspect because, dialectically, it is a unity of opposites; it is, at the same time, unique, personal, insightful and revealing and, at the same time, thoroughly social, partial, mystifying, itself the product of historical forces about which individuals may know little or nothing about (for a critical assessment of experience as a source of knowledge see Sherry Gorelick, "Contradictions of feminist methodology," in Chow, Wilkinson, and Baca Zinn, 1996; applicable to the role of experience in contemporary RGC and feminist research is Jacoby's critique of the 1960s politics of subjectivity: Jacoby, 1973:37-49). Given the emancipatory goals of the RGC perspective, it is through the analytical tools of Marxist theory that it can move forward, beyond the impasse revealed by the constant reiteration of variations on the "interlocking" metaphor. This would require, however, a) a rethinking and modification of the postulated relationships between race, class and gender, and b) a reconsideration of the notion that, because everyone is located at the intersection of these structures, all social

relations and interactions are "raced," "classed," and "gendered." In the RGC perspective, race, gender and class are presented as equivalent systems of oppression with extremely negative consequences for the oppressed. It is also asserted that the theorization of the connections between these systems require "a working hypothesis of equivalency" (Collins, 1997:74). Whether or not it is possible to view

class as just another system of oppression depends on the theoretical framework within class is defined. If defined within the traditional sociology of stratification perspective, in terms of a gradation perspective, class refers simply to strata or population aggregates ranked on the basis of standard SES indicators (income, occupation, and education) (for an excellent discussion of the difference between gradational and relational concepts of class, see Ossowski, 1963). Class in this non-relational, descriptive sense has no claims to being more fundamental than gender or racial oppression; it simply refers to the set of individual attributes that place individuals within an aggregate or strata arbitrarily defined by the researcher (i.e., depending on their data and research purposes, anywhere from three or four to twelve "classes" can be identified). From the standpoint of Marxist

theory, however, class is qualitatively different from gender and race and cannot be considered just another system of oppression. As Eagleton points out, whereas racism and sexism are unremittingly bad, class is not entirely a "bad thing" even though socialists would like to abolish it. The bourgeoisie in its revolutionary stage was instrumental in ushering a new era in historical development, one which liberated the average person from the oppressions of feudalism and put

forth the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity. Today, however, it has an unquestionably negative role to play as it expands and deepens the rule of capital over the entire globe. The working class, on the other hand, is pivotally located to wage the final struggle against capital and, consequently, it is "an excellent thing" (Eagleton, 1996:57). While racism and sexism have no redeeming feature, class relations are, dialectically, a unity of opposites; both a site of exploitation and, objectively, a site where the potential agents of social change are forged. To argue that the working class is the fundamental

agent of change does not entail the notion that it is the only agent of change. The working class is of course composed of women and men who belong to different races, ethnicities, national origins, cultures, and so forth, so that gender and racial/ethnic struggles have the potential of fueling class struggles because, given the patterns of wealth ownership and income distribution in this and all capitalist countries, those who raise the banners of gender and racial struggles are overwhelmingly propertyless workers, technically members of the working class, people who need to work for economic survival whether it is for a wage or a salary, for whom racism, sexism and class exploitation matter. But this vision of a mobilized working class where gender and racial struggles are not subsumed but are nevertheless related requires a class conscious effort to link RGC studies to the Marxist analysis of historical change. In so far as the "class" in RGC remains a neutral concept, open to any and all theoretical meanings, just one oppression among others, intersectionality will not realize its revolutionary potential.

Nevertheless, I want to argue against the notion that class should be considered equivalent to gender and race. I find the grounds for my argument not only on the crucial role class struggles play in processes of epochal change but also in the very assumptions of RGC studies and the ethnomethodological insights put forth by West and Fenstermaker (1994). The assumption of the simultaneity of experience (i.e., all interactions are raced, classed, gendered) together with the ambiguity inherent in the interactions themselves, so that while one person might think he or she is "doing gender," another might interpret those "doings" in terms of "doing class," highlight the basic issue that Collins accurately identifies when she argues that ethnomethodology ignores power relations. Power relations underlie all processes of social interaction and this is why social facts are constraining upon people. But the pervasiveness of power ought not to obfuscate the fact that some power relations are more important and consequential than others. For example, the power that physical attractiveness might confer a woman in her interactions with her less attractive female supervisor or employer does not match the economic power of the latter over the former. In my view, the flattening or erasure of the qualitative difference between class, race and gender in the RGC perspective is the foundation for the recognition that it is important to deal with "basic relations of

domination and subordination" which now appear disembodied, outside class relations. In the effort to reject "class reductionism," by postulating the equivalence between class and other forms of oppression, the RGC perspective both negates the fundamental importance of class but it is forced to acknowledge its importance by postulating some other "basic" structures of domination. Class relations -- whether we are referring to the relations between capitalist and wage workers, or to the relations between workers (salaried and waged) and their managers and supervisors, those who are placed in "contradictory class locations," (Wright, 1978) -- are of paramount importance, for most people's economic survival is determined by them. Those in dominant class positions do exert power over their employees and subordinates and a crucial way in which that power is used is through their choosing the

identity they impute their workers. Whatever identity workers might claim or "do," employers can, in turn, disregard their claims and "read" their "doings" differently as "raced" or "gendered" or both, rather

than as "classed," thus downplaying their class location and the class nature of their grievances. To argue, then, that class is fundamental is not to "reduce" gender or racial oppression to class, but to acknowledge that the underlying basic and "nameless" power at the root of what happens in social interactions grounded in "intersectionality" is class power.

Alt

Our historical materialist analysis is the only way to understand the structural forces and class inequalities behind racial oppression.Scatamburlo-D’Annibale and McLaren, ’03, (Valerie, University of Windsor, Peter, University of California, Los Angeles, “The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of “Race” and “Difference”” Sage Publications, Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, Volume 3 Number 2, 2003 148-175, http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/mclaren/mclaren%20and%20valerie.pdf)//erg

A historical materialist approach adopts the imperative that categories of difference are social/political constructs that are often encoded in dominant ideological formations and that they often play a role in “moral” and “legal” state-mediated forms of ruling. It also acknowledges the “material” force of ide- ologies—particularly racist ideologies — that assign separate cultural and/or biological essences to different segments of the population that, in turn, serve to reinforce and rationalize existing relations of power . But more than this, a historical materialist understanding foregrounds the manner in which differ- ence is central to the exploitative production/reproduction dialectic of capital , its labor organization and processes , and the way labor is valued and renumer- ated. The real problem is the internal or dialectical relation that exists between capital and labor within the capitalist production process itself—a social rela-tion in which capitalism is intransigently rooted. This social relation—essen- tial or fundamental to the production of abstract labor—deals with how already existing value is preserved and surplus vale is created. If, for example, the process of actual exploitation and the accumulation of surplus value are to be seen as a state of constant manipulation and as a realization process of con- crete labor in

actual labor time—within a given cost-production system and a labor market—we cannot underestimate the ways in which difference— racial as well as gender difference — is encapsulated in the production/reproduction dialectic of capital. It is this relationship that is mainly responsible for the ineq- uitable and unjust distribution of resources. Hence, we applaud E. San Juan’s goal of racial/ethnic semiotics that is “committed to the elimination of the hegemonic discourse of race in which peoples of color are produced and repro- duced daily for exploitation and oppression under the banner of individualized freedom and pluralist, liberal democracy” (1992, p. 96). A deepened understanding of this phenomenon is essential for understand- ing the emergence of an acutely polarized labor market and the fact that dispro- portionately high percentages of “ people of color” are trapped in the lower rungs of domestic and global labor markets (McLaren & Farahmandpur, 1999).

Difference in the era of global capitalism is crucial to the workings , movements, and profit levels of multinational corporations , but those types of complex relations cannot be mapped out without attending to capitalist class formations (Ahmad, 1998). To sever issues of difference from class conve- niently draws attention away from the crucially important ways in which “peo- ple of color” (and more specifically “women of color”) provide capital with its superexploited labor pools—a phenomenon that is on the rise all over the world. Most social relations constitutive of racialized differences are consider- ably shaped by the relations of production, and there is undoubtedly a racialized and gendered division of labor whose severity and function vary depending on where one is situated in the capitalist global economy (Meyerson, 2000; Stabile, 1997). That racism and sexism are necessary social relations for the organization of capitalism and new forms of emerging neoco- lonialism seems to escape the collective imaginations of those who theorize difference in a truncated and exclusively culturalist manner. Bannerji (2000, pp. 8-9) forcefully argued that culturalist discourses of difference have had the effect of “deflecting critical attention” from an increasingly “racialized” politi- cal economy.

A historical materialist analysis is key to understanding the oppression of all categories of difference – the dialectic of capital creates the material structures of exploitation.McLaren and Scatamburlo-D’Annibale, 4 (Peter and Valerie, University of Windsor, Ontario, University of California, 2004, Educational Philosophy and Theory Vol 36 No 2, “Class Dismissed? Historical Materialism and the politics of ‘difference,’”)An historical materialist approach understands that categories of ‘difference’ are social/political constructs that are often encoded in dominant ideological forma- tions and that they often play a role in ‘moral’ and ‘legal’ state-mediated forms of ruling. It also acknowledges the ‘ material’ force of ideologies—particularly racist ideologies—that assign separate cultural and/or biological essences to different segments of the population which, in turn, serve to reinforce and rationalize existing relations of power. But more than this, an historical materialist understanding foregrounds the manner in which ‘difference’ is central to the exploitative production / reproduction dialectic of capital , its labor organization and processes, and in the way labor is valued and renumerated.¶ The real problem is the internal or dialectical relation that exists between capital and labor within the capitalist production process itself—a social relation in which¶ capitalism is intransigently rooted. This social relation—essential to the production of abstract labor—deals with how already existing value is preserved and new value (surplus value) is created (Allman, 2001). If, for example, the process of actual exploitation and the accumulation of surplus value is to be seen as a state of constant manipulation and as a realization process of concrete labor in actual labor time—within a given cost-production system and a labor market—we cannot underestimate the ways in which ‘difference’ (racial as well as gender difference) is encapsulated in the production/reproduction dialectic of capital. It is this rela- tionship that is mainly responsible for the inequitable and unjust distribution of resources . A deepened understanding of this phenomenon is essential for understanding the emergence of an acutely polarized labor market and the fact that disproportionately high percentages of ‘people of color’ are trapped in the lower rungs of domestic and global labor markets (McLaren & Farahmandpur, 1999). ‘ Difference’ in the era of global capitalism is crucial to the workings , movements and profit levels of multinational corporations but those types of complex relations cannot be mapped out by using truncated post-Marxist, culturalist conceptualiza- tions of ‘difference.’ To sever issues of ‘difference’ from class conveniently draws attention away from the crucially important ways in which ‘people of color’ (and, more specifically, ‘women of color’) provide capital with its superexploited labor pools—a phenomenon that is on the rise all over the world. Most social relations constitutive of racialized differences are considerably shaped by the relations of production and there is undoubtedly a racialized and gendered division of labor whose severity and function vary depending on where one is situated in the capitalist global economy (Meyerson, 2000).6

PIK’sThe United States federal government should substantially increase its exploration of the Earth’s oceans via an encounter with the transatlantic slavery without their use of the phrase “middle passage,” the term “afrofuturism,” or depiction of slaves as monsters.

Middle Passage PIC The phrase “middle passage” imposes a linear progression of slave history with a known end point. This turns the 1AC’s historical analysis by restricting it within a set timeframe strategically omitting the slave’s ongoing captivity.Stephanie E. Smallwood 2007 Associate Professor of history University of Washington, Ph.D. Duke University in 1999 “saltwater slavery” Sibell's story reflects an important truth underlying the distinctive out Ines of our respective narratives: hers is a window not onto the experience of the slave ship, but rather on to the memory of it. The effort to construct a history—tracing the movement of captives from Africa to America—stands quite apart from the effort to integrate a memory—looking from America to Africa through the experience of the slave ship. ‘Sibell’s supplies a narrative that is less about enduring the crisis of the slave ship than about surviving it. Indeed, what is most striking about 'Sibell's story is its unambiguous message that the trauma of the slave ship survivor lay in the effort of integration—the challenge to integrate pieces of a narrative that do not fit neatly together to suture the jagged edges and bleeding boundaries of lives fragmented by captive migration. In this regard, it is intriguing also to consider the ways her narrative differs from Equiano's Narrative. Because Equiano shaped his text in response to eighteenth-century British antislavery sentiments specifically, and Enlightenment humanism and moral reformism generally, he wove a tale of migration and progressive displacement that, like this book, moves along a trajectory that any reader familiar with the tropes of early modern travel literature would recognize. In stark contrast, the fractured state of 'Sibell's account reflects the nonlinear temporality of a nonwestern subject and the familiar rhythms of oral, as distinct from written, narrative expression. 'Sibell's account reflects also the ways trauma disrupts normative narrative structures (whatever the cultural background of the subject) and the role that storytelling plays in the integration of traumatic memory. It is not just that "traumatic events" disrupt "attachments of family, friendship, love, and community" or "shatter the construction of the self that is formed and sustained in relation to others." More fundamentally, trauma specialist Judith Herman asserts, trauma directly disrupts the very "systems of attachment and meaning that link individual and community." Thus, another specialist has defined traumatic events as ones "that cannot be assimilated with the victim's 'inner schemata' of self in relation to the world." The "work of reconstruction," Herman writes, "actually transforms the traumatic memory, so that it can be integrated into the survivor's life story. Especially difficult to discipline was 'Sibell's recollection of the transaction that set her on the irreversible journey into saltwater slavery. The act of sale did more than transfer property rights to her person. In her reminiscence, it also propelled her, seemingly in an instant, into a new world—a world molded by the European Atlantic political economy—the world of white people, big ships, the expanse of the sea, and its ominous soundscape. In memory, the transaction also had a messy social dimension that belied the seeming simple exchange of economic values, for it drew 'Sibell, the brother-in-law, gun, and gunpowder together in a moment of collective embrace. This was the moment when social and mercantile values collided. By the rationalized logic of the market, this was a clean bartering of goods, one in which the girl, the gun, and the powder exchanged hands smoothly. But the transaction held the opposite meaning in 'Sibell's experience: it was not a smooth exchange but rather one marked by friction. She clung to her kinsman, and he could not let her go as long as her voice continued to resound in his ears. Only when she finally fell silent did he let her go.

‘Sibell’s remembered experience cannot fit into the neat temporal and spatial categories that frame my narration of the "middle passage " with its orderly narrative progression from African captivity through Atlantic commodification to American slavery. It is the meaning of remembered events rather than their temporal order that governs their place in 'Sibell's narrative. 'Sibell "finds" the people who she will remember in Barbados, already constructed as American subjects on the slave ship, already answering to what will be their plantation slave names, Sally, Dublin, and so on. The temporal and spatial categories of her remembered middle passage overlap, as past, present, and future comfortably commingle ("in de way me meet a Man, and de Man know my Dahdy and all my Family.—Ah! Budder . . . you see me here now but dere has bin grandee fight in my Country for me, for he will tell my Family"). 'Sibell's story conveys the very important truth that hers is a narrative that cannot come to closurer, because the events that give it shape have not yet exhausted their dramatic content. Her original captivity is not a past event; rather, it remains unresolved: her father and family continue to look for her; she is here in American slavery now, but her return to the world that framed her remembered African self is imminent. 'Sibell's narrative suggests that the slave ship charted no course of narrative continuity between the African past and American present, but rather memorialized an indeterminate passage marked by the impossibility of full narrative closure. The saltwater in African memory, then was perhaps the antithesis of a "middle" passage, with all that phrase implies about a smooth, linear progression leading to a known end. For many in the pioneering generations of slaves, there could be no such integration of the terror of Atlantic memory.

Monsters PIC Their depiction of slaves as monsters is a racist construction that creates new categories of differenceHoltz and Wagner, 2009 (Peter and Wolfgang, Johannes Kepler University of Linz, Australia, Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, “Essentialism and Attribution of Monstrosity in Racist Discourse: Right-wing Internet Postings about Africans and Jews,” January 5th, 2009, wiley interscience, accessed 7/29/14 bh@ddi) Mixing essentialized categories at the biological level. The most interesting aspect of the depiction of Blacks on this discussion board

is the forum users’ horror of the procreation of Blacks and Whites, which is the biological reification and natural consequence of categorical or symbolic hybridization. Hybridization, in which two incompatible natural essences are merged in one organism, creates disgust in the realm of animals and humans, the latter

particularly for the racist . The resulting hybrid of such merging is perceived as monstrous, which is a ‘. . . cognitive statement about the being not belonging to any accepted category of things’ where

normal patterns of categorizations do not apply (Wagner et al., 2006). In a sense, ‘the monster is the harbinger of a category crisis’ (Cohen, 1996) and hybrids are rejected in a highly affective way and must be physically removed :

Afrofuturism PIC

The term “afrofuturism” appropriates black culture under the cultural choice of white science fiction writers and inhibits self-determination of black science fiction culture Jones, Ojetade, and Khoe, members of State of Black Science Fiction 2012, 2012 (chronicles of harriet, “WHAT’S IN A NAME? Afrofuturism vs. Black Speculative Fiction!,” 7/24/14, http://chroniclesofharriet.com/2014/07/24/afrofuturism/, accessed 7/29/14 bh@ddi) “Why is there no clear cut definition of ‘Afrofuturism’? Is it because the term was not coined by a person of African descent, thus the examination comes from an external lens? Just wondering. Thoughts?” I received several responses. Here are a few: Mark Dery, father of Afrofuturism...yep. Mark Dery, father of Afrofuturism…yep. Ronald Jones: Afrofuturism wasn’t coined by a black person? :-o Balogun Ojetade: Nope, it was coined by Mark Dery, Ronald. Balogun Ojetade:

This is why self-defining terms like Sword and Soul, Steamfunk, Dieselfunk, Rococoa and Urban (capital “U”) Fantasy are so important. Ronald Jones: Now that is interesting! It just shows, we not only have to participate in all areas of speculative fiction, we have to claim them! Make them ours! Balogun Ojetade: Even Black Speculative Fiction works, even though “Speculative Fiction” was coined by Robert Heinlein – a posterboy for racism – in 1941 (or so it has been said), because WE added “Black.” No one added it FOR us. Ronald Jones: That’s right! It’s like jumping into a public pool and daring

the other swimmers to say something crazy! Pharoah Ama Khoe: We gotta stop letting other people define our culture.

Extension

The phrase “middle passage” forces the slaves narrative into linearity when it is based in disorientation – (SIMON CUTHBERT-KERR 2008 Simon, senior Policy Lead, Health Protection Team at The Scottish Government, and Lecturer in the Department of History at University of Dundee, “Journal of American Studies / Volume 42 / Issue 02 / August 2008” http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=1&fid=2135140&jid=AMS&volumeId=42&issueId=02&aid=2135132)The most satisfying section of the book considers the psychological impact of the Middle Passage. Smallwood argues convincingly that the market forces of enslavement and commodification defined a straightforward temporal narrative of slavery for Europeans (as implied the term "Middle Passage"), a narrative that was denied to slaves. The very alienness of the ocean, which for land-based West African cultures was a place of supernatural power, caused slaves spatial and temporal disorientation, and contributed to their commodification, and to "the complete disintegration of personhood" (r 2;)- Smallwood suggests that a linear narrative did not exist for slaves because the trauma of enslavement did not end-it remained unresolved for each individual until he or she was reunited with their kin, physically or spiritually after death. Yet spiritual return was unlikely because the deaths of so many Africans during the Middle Passage were not attended by the rituals which allowed the soul to pass to the next realm and rejoin the community of the living, the not-yet-born and the ancestors. ln the Americas, a diasporic Africa emerged among those who were bound together by the shared Atlantic experience, formed from the "plurality of remembered places immigrant slaves carried with them" (189). As American-born generations became established, the one-way migration from Africa to America led to creole culture valuing the African diaspora in America more highly than that of Africa itself. For saltwater slaves, however, Smallwood argues that the memory of enslavement and the Atlantic journey remained unresolved, an experience too traumatic to be understood as part of one's own life, and an event which prevented such individuals assimilating fully into the creole slave community.

Case

Analytics

1. They don’t break down linear temporality because they imagine Drexciyans to fill in these spaces. They fill in holes of history which is the same linear logic they try to prevent.

2. No such thing as linear in regards to blackness—blackness just exists.

3. Privilege turn—not everyone can sit around and imagine science fiction. People in the world who are suffering from white supremacist structures don’t have time to philosophize or ‘go to the future/past’ because the present is a time of survival strategies—they need material change and plans. That logic turns the case. <card would be nice but couldn’t find one so just read these as analytics>

4. Negativity turn--We should re-contextualize history from positive perspectives—that’s key to inspire activism and change—constantly focusing on the negativity of the past means we cannot ever envision a better future. A better starting point would be powerful and strong African tribes. <a card would be nice but couldn’t find one>

State Bad

They appeal to the same legal apparatus they cite as the source of oppression for help. Their use of the legal system reinforces the oppression they seek to eradicate because the law has “safe” limits as to how far it will go to achieve justiceAnsley 89Frances Lee Ansley, Professor of Law at University of Tennessee. Cornell Law Review September, 1989 74 Cornell L. Rev. 993, STIRRING THE ASHES: RACE, CLASS AND THE FUTURE OF CIVIL RIGHTSSCHOLARSHIP

[*1031] Law plays an important role. Law functions not as a weapon wielded so that, say, bosses win and workers lose in every legal conflict, but more subtly and powerfully by convincing us that the status quo is natural and just. Law plays a "fundamental social role . . . as legitimation of existing social and power relations." n150 According to Freeman, the redress of centuries of discrimination was simply too unsettling for the system to accommodate. n151 Undoing black subordination turned out to require massive social dislocation and redistribution. But our legal ideas and institutions are strongly, centrally anti-redistributionist. Concepts like the legitimacy of existing rights, the myth of equal opportunity and the sacredness of formal equality are lynch-pins in rationalizing class domination, and in justifying substantive inequalities in our class system. For Freeman, this account explains the uneven shape of Supreme Court civil rights doctrine. n152 Having committed itself to ending race discrimination, the Court soon found itself under tremendous pressure (both external and internal) to achieve results. In ordering remedies, n153 and sometimes even in finding violations, n154 the Court was pushed to try to end conditions of injustice, not simply instances of discrimination. In attempting to do so, the Court stretched traditional jurisprudence quite far. Eventually, however, this impulse was contained and anti-discrimination law was restricted within "safer" bounds not so potentially destabilizing to the system.

By using formal legal structures to correct injustice, they only reify the legal system’s mechanistic conception of justice. The concept that the system has always been bad is a myth used to extend its preferential existence. Glen 7[Patrick. Attorney with the Office of Immigration Litigation, Former Law Lecturer @ Georgetown and Northern Ohio. “The Deconstruction and Reification of Law in Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” and the Trial” Southern Interdisciplinary Law Journal, Vol 23 No 2. Winter 2007. ln/khirn]The reification of law is made complete by the formalization of the legal apparatus, a total generalization of legal principles that

no longer requires man and operates on the basis of the cogs and wheels put into place by initial and

subsequent codifications. This mechanistic conception of justice creates the appearance of the empty norm and, in severing the question of origin from its societal bases, obscures even those foundational premises that should shed light on what the essence of the law is. An examination of Kafka's law and the legal relationships in Kafka's stories displays this phenomenon with remarkable consistency. From an objective perspective, it is clear that the law in these stories has become reified, transformed into a formalistic system. Although Kafka does not write a great deal

on the history of the court, through hearsay a few "legends" are conveyed. Titorelli, when apprising K. of the possible decisional

outcomes, notes that definite acquittal is no longer granted, though it had been in the legends told of the court.

The ever-active Block, even though he has employed Huld and an array of pettifogging attorneys, yearns to employ one of

the "great lawyers," those brilliant jurists talked about only in legends who could secure any outcome they desired. These references are brief and come to the reader after passing through many ears and mouths, yet these legends paint

a portrait of a system that has not always been so rigid and formal. The objective reification creates this image of eternity and the notion that the system has always been the way it is. By concealing these legends and

chalking them up to fantasy the system is able to perpetuate its own existence not only into the future, but also as a fiction that extends into the past. Subjectively, the relationships of all who come into contact with the Law are reified. "Before the Law" is simplistic in its overt construction; the sole relationship that consumes the reader is between the man from the country and the doorkeeper. The law remains forever on the periphery. If the task of the man is truly to attain the law, has he achieved this goal? It seems not. Yet if this is so, it is less a function of an emptiness behind the gate than of the formalism alluded to by Weber. Viewing the law as reified one is led to the conception of the judge, and by obvious extension the law, [*58] that Weber characterized as necessary in capitalist society. Justice becomes a matter of computation; the law is given information and a judgment is disgorged. The man has given the doorkeeper some information, for the doorkeeper knows that he has come from the city seeking admittance to the law. That being the case, non-admittance must be the result of one of two things, both endemic to a reified system. First, the law might be in the process of computing the judgment. It may have attained all necessary information and is simply passing it through the necessary channels to decide the judgment. Perhaps the matter is extremely complex, requiring the consultation of any number of codifications. Or perhaps the light shining in the dimness of the dying man's eyes is evidence of an imminence of judgment. Maybe the process itself is infinite, tracing Deleuze and Guattari's field of immanence, the information passed on from room to room, another functionary always waiting behind the closed door to prolong the process indefinitely. The waiting may simply be a function of this processing. In any event, this function itself is a result of the reification of law which expels the exhortations of the man from its midst to focus solely on the thingified relation he has brought to the gate. Second, if the law has become reified and thus formal, then surely the rules of invocation are also formal and rigid. This matter has already been touched upon, but it is worth repeating in this context. German law was impersonal and formal and no doubt required a certain form of invocation to summon it forth. Previously I had noted the doctrines of standing and justiciability. Obviously it could be something far more mundane, such as a complaint being filed on paper of the wrong color or the improper structure of the man's

question of entrance. No matter the reason, the rules of the law have not been complied with and the law itself has not taken notice of the man. A machine will only work if certain levers are pulled and buttons pushed. If the exact sequence is not held to nothing will happen. Law as machine, reified law, has this exact characteristic; one must call it forth very specifically, taking care in the structure of the sentence, the order of the words, the color of the complaint, etc. If not, no audience will be granted. Whether the non-admittance of the man from the country is a function of the first or second scenario is not important. In either case it is the reification of law that has alienated the man, leaving him alone on the slopes of despair waiting for a judgment that may or may not come, depending solely on how well the machine is working or the question of whether it is even in the process of functioning. Ernst Fischer paints this portrait succinctly: "The law is no longer a living being, but a petrified institution, no longer timely, only still intimidating." 272 In such a stark portrait one is inevitably reminded

again of Kafka's own words, recast through the reified and clouded consciousness of the man: "How modest this man is. He comes to the Law and begs. Instead of storming the Law [*59] and smashing it to pieces he comes and begs." This isn't technically a quote - just my rephrasing of a statement Kafka had made.

Kappler

Their focus on the atrocities that the government creates trades off with recognizing our own personal complicity with violence. Only by refusing to make statements like “the United States Federal Government should” allows us to transform our own personal will to violence that is the root of their impactsSusanne Kappeler (Associate Professor at Al-Akhawayn University) 1995 The Will to Violence: The Politics of Personal Behaviour, pg. 75-76)War does not suddenly break out in a peaceful society; sexual violence is not the disturbance of otherwise equal gender relations. Racist attacks do not shoot like lightning out of a non-racist sky, and the sexual exploitation of children is no

solitary problem in a world otherwise just to children. The violence of our most commonsense everyday thinking, and especially our personal will to violence, constitute the conceptual preparation, the ideological armament and the intellectual mobilization which make the 'outbreak' of war, of sexual violence, of racist attacks, of murder and destruction possible at all. 'We are the war', writes Slavenka Drakulic at the end of her existential analysis of the question, 'what is war?': I do not know what war is, I want to tell [my friend], but I see it everywhere. It is in the blood-soaked street in Sarajevo, after 20 people have been killed while they queued for bread. But it is also in your non-comprehension, in my unconscious cruelty towards you, in the fact that you have a yellow form [for refugees] and I don't, in the way in which it grows inside ourselves and changes our feelings, relationships, values - in short: us. We are the war . . . And I am afraid that we cannot hold anyone else responsible. We make this war possible, we permit it to happen.5 'We are the war' - and we also 'are' the sexual violence, the racist violence, the exploitation and the will to violence in all its manifestations in a society in so-called 'peacetime', for we make them possible and we permit them to happen. 'We are the war' does not mean that the responsibility for a war is shared collectively and diffusely by an entire society - which would be equivalent to exonerating warlords and politicians and profiteers or, as Ulrich Beck says, upholding the notion of'collective irresponsibility', where people are no longer held responsible for their actions, and where the conception of universal responsibility becomes the

equivalent of a universal acquittal.6 On the contrary, the object is precisely to analyse the specific and differential responsibility of everyone in their diverse situations. Decisions to unleash a war are indeed taken at particular levels of power by those in a position to make them and to command such collective action. We need to hold them clearly responsible for their decisions and actions without lessening theirs by

any collective 'assumption' of responsibility. Yet our habit of focusing on the stage where the major dramas of power take place tends to obscure our sight in relation to our own sphere of competence, our own power and our own responsibility — leading to the -well-known illusion of our apparent 'powerlessness' and its accompanying phenomenon, our so-called political disillusionment. Single citizens — even more so those of other nations - have come to feel secure in their obvious non-responsibility for such large-scale political events as, say, the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina or Somalia -

since the decisions for such events are always made elsewhere. Yet our insight that indeed we are not responsible for the decisions of a Serbian general or a Croatian president tends to mislead us into thinking that therefore we have no responsibility at all, not even for forming our own judgement, and thus into underrating the responsibility we do have within our own sphere of action. In particular, it seems to absolve us from having to try to see any relation between our own actions and those events, or to recognize the connections between those political decisions and our own personal decisions. It not only shows that we participate in what Beck calls 'organized irresponsibility', upholding the apparent lack of connection between bureaucratically, institutionally, nationally and also individually organized separate competences. It also proves the phenomenal and unquestioned alliance of our personal thinking with the thinking of the major

powermongers. For we tend to think that we cannot 'do' anything, say, about a war, because we deem ourselves to be in the wrong situation; because we are not where the major decisions are made. Which is why many of those not yet entirely disillusioned with politics tend to engage in a form of mental deputy politics, in the style of 'What would I do if I were the general, the prime minister, the president, the foreign minister or the minister of defence?' Since we seem to regard their mega spheres of action as the only worthwhile and truly effective ones, and since our political analyses tend to dwell there first of all, any question of what I would do if I were indeed myself tends to peter out in the comparative insignificance of having what is perceived as 'virtually no possibilities': what I could do seems petty and futile. For my own action I obviously desire the range of action of a general, a prime minister, or a General Secretary of the

UN — finding expression in ever more prevalent formulations like 'I want to stop this war', 'I want military intervention', 'I want to

stop this backlash', or 'I want a moral revolution.'7 'We are this war', however, even if we do not command the troops or participate in so-called peace talks, namely as Drakulic says, in our 'non-comprehension': our willed refusal to feel responsible for our own thinking and for working out our own understanding, preferring innocently to drift along the ideological current of prefabricated arguments or less than innocently taking advantage of the advantages these offer. And we 'are' the war in our 'unconscious cruelty towards you', our tolerance of the 'fact that you have a yellow form for refugees and I don't' - our readiness, in other words, to build identities, one for ourselves and one for refugees, one of our own and one for the 'others'. We share in the responsibility for this war and its violence in the way we let them grow inside us, that is, in the way we shape 'our feelings, our relationships, our values' according to the structures and the values of war and violence

Focus on largescale politics absolves us of personal responsibility—triggers violenceKappeler 95 (Susanne, Prof @ Al-Akhawayn U, The Will to Violence: The Politics of Personal Behavior, p. 10-11)'We are the war' does not mean that the responsibility for a war is shared collectively and diffusely by an entire society - which would be equivalent to exonerating warlords and politicians and profiteers or, as, Ulrich Beck says, upholding the notion of' collective irresponsibility', where people are no longer held responsible for their actions, and

where the conception of universal responsibility becomes the equivalent of a universal acquittal. 6 On the contrary, the object is precisely to analyse the specific and differential responsibility of everyone in their diverse situations.

Decisions to unleash a war are indeed taken at particular levels of power by those in a position to make them and to command such collective action. We need to hold them clearly responsible for their

decisions and actions without lessening theirs by any collective 'assumption' of responsibility. Yet our habit of focusing on the stage where the major dramas of power take place tends to obscure our sight in relation to our own sphere of competence, our own power and our own responsibility - leading to the well-known illusion of our apparent 'powerlessness' and its accompanying phenomenon, our so-called

political disillusionment. Single citizens - even more so those of other nations - have come to feel secure in their obvious non-responsibility for such large-scale political events as, say, the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-

Hercegovina or Somalia - since the decisions for such events are always made elsewhere. Yet our insight that indeed we are not responsible for the decisions of a Serbian general or a Croatian president tends to mislead us into thinking that therefore we have no responsibility at all, not even for forming our own

judgement, and thus into underrating the respons- ibility we do have within our own sphere of action. In particular, it seems to absolve us from having to try to see any relation between our own actions and those events, or to recognize the

connections between those political decisions and our own personal decisions. It not only shows that we participate in what Beck calls 'organized irresponsibility', upholding the apparent lack of connection between bureaucratically, institutionally, nationally and also individually or- ganized separate competences. It also proves the phenomenal and unquestioned alliance of our personal

thinking with the thinking of the major powermongers. For we tend to think that we cannot 'do' anything, say, about a war, because we deem ourselves to be in the wrong situation; because we are not where the major decisions are made. Which is why many of those not yet entirely disillusioned with politics tend to

engage in a form of mental deputy politics, in the style of 'What would I do if I were the general, the prime

minister, the president, the foreign minister or the minister of defence?' Since we seem to regard their mega spheres of action as the only worthwhile and truly effective ones, and since our political analyses tend to dwell there first of all, any question of what I would do if I were indeed myself tends to peter out in the comparative insignificance of having what is perceived as 'virtually no possibilities': what I could do seems petty and futile. For my own action I obviously desire the range of action of a general, a prime minister, or a General Secretary of the UN - finding expression in ever more prevalent formulations like 'I want to stop this war', 'I want military intervention', 'I want to stop this backlash', or 'I want a moral revolution. 'We are this war', however, even if we do not command

the troops or participate in co-called peace talks, namely as Drakulic says, in our non-comprehension': our willed refusal to feel responsible for our own thinking and for working out our own understanding, preferring innocently to drift along the ideological current of prefabricated arguments or less than innocently taking advantage of the advantages these offer. And we 'are' the war in our 'unconscious cruelty towards you', our tolerance of the 'fact that you have a yellow form for refugees and I don't'- our readiness, in other words, to build identities, one for ourselves and one for refugees, one of our own and one for the

'others.' We share in the responsibility for this war and its violence in the way we let them grow inside us, that is, in the way we shape 'our feelings, our relationships, our values' according: to the structures and the values of war and violence. So if we move beyond the usual frame of violence, towards the structures of thought employed in decisions to act,

this also means making an analysis of action. This seems all the more urgent as action seems barely to be perceived

any longer. There is talk of the government doing 'nothing', of its 'inaction', of the need for action, the time for action, the need for strategies, our inability to act as well as our desire to become 'active' again. We seem to deem ourselves in a kind of action vacuum which, like the cosmic black hole, tends to consume any renewed effort only to increase its size. Hence this is also an attempt to shift the focus again to the fact that we are continually acting and doing, and that there is no such thing as not

acting or doing nothing. Rather, the binary opposition of 'action' and 'no action' seems to serve the simple

evaluation of the good and the bad. We speak of being 'active' or wanting to be active again, where being active in its simple

vacuity is 'good', 'doing nothing' is rather bad, and where the quality of the action seems secondary to the fact of action as such. Quite the reverse, however, if we analyse the past: there, having 'done' anything bears the danger of it having been bad, since the results are available for analysis. Consequently, analyses of the past tend to feature an abundance of victims, who as victims cannot by definition have done anything, and therefore cannot either be 'guilty'. While descriptions of our future actions are thus distinguished by their vacuity - saying nothing about the kind of activity and explaining nothing about its purpose - the past on the contrary seems to cry out for the writing of histories that explain everything. In these rewritings of history asjustification, the mark of distinction for personal identity is no longer to have 'been active', but on the contrary, to have been the passive victim - if not of actual deeds by others, at least of circumstances. In other words, in the past we tend to have been passive, while in the future "we may become active. The present, however, is the eternal present in which we inhabit states of being, our identity.

Emancipation Turn

The 1AC’s focus on the events of transatlantic slavery prevents change and uses suffering narratives to distract from emancipation Hartman, 02 (Saidiya, professor of African American literature and history at Columbia University, “The Time of Slavery,” The South Atlantic Quarterly, 101, 4, Fall 2002, Duke University Press, EBSCO Publishing, AW)History that hurts. The dungeon provides no redemption. Reckoning with our responsibility to the dead cannot save them . The victor has already won . It is not possible to undo the past. So, to what end do we conjure up the ghost? Of what use is an itinerary of terror? Does it provide little more than evidence of what we cannot change, or quell the uncertainty and doubt regarding millions Jost and u nknown? The debate still rages as lo how many were transported to the Americas, killed in the raids and wars Lhat supplied the trade, perished on the long journey to the coast, committed suicide, died of dehydration during the Middle Passage. or were beaten or worked to death-22 million. 30 million, 60 million, or more? 21 Isn't it enough to know that for each captive who survived the ordea l of captivity and season ing, at least one did not? At best, the backdrop of this defeat makes visible the diffuse violence and the everyday routines of domination, which continue to characterize black life but are obscured by their everydayness. The normative character of ter ror

insures i ts i nvisibility; i t defies detection behind rational categories l ike crime,povert y, and pathology. ln other words, the necessity to underscore the centrality of the event. defined here in terms of captivity, deportation , and social death, is a symptom of the difficulty of representing "terror as usual."

The oscillation between then and now distills the past four hundred years into one definitive moment. And,

at the same time, the still-unfolding narrative of captivity and dispossession exceeds the discrete parameters of the event. In itemizing the long list of violations, are we any closer to freedom, or do such litanies only confirm what is feared-history is an injury that has yet to cease happening? Given the irreparable nature of this event, which Jamaica Ki ncaid describes as a wrong that can be assuaged only by the impossible, that is, by undoing the past. is acting out the past the best approximation of work ing through

available to us? By suffering the past are we better able to grasp hold of an elusive freedom and make it substantial? Is pain the guarantee of compensation? Beyond con templating injury or apportioning

blam e, how can this encounter with the past fuel emancipatory efforts? Is it enough that these acts of commemoration rescue the u n named and unaccounted for from obscurity and obl ivion , counter the disavowals constitutive or the U.S. nalionaJ community, and unveil the complicitou s discretion of the scholar shi p of the trade?

Past focus bad

Past-oriented approaches towards whiteness neglect the way future discourse affects the present – futurity is key to full awarenessBaldwin, 11 (Andrew, Co-Director of the Institute of Hazard at the University of Durham’s Department of Geography, “Whiteness and futurity: Towards a research agenda,” Progress in Human Geography 2012, originally published August 3, 2011, http://phg.sagepub.com/content/36/2/172, AW)My argument is that a past-oriented approach to accounting for geographies of whiteness often neglects to consider how various forms of whiteness are shaped by discourses of futurity. This is not to argue that a historicist approach to conceptualizing white geographies is wrongheaded; the past continues to be a crucial

time-space through which to understand whiteness. It is, however, to argue that such a past-focused orientation obscures the way the category of the future is invoked in the articulation of whiteness. As such, any analysis that seeks to understand how whitenesses of all kinds shape contemporary (and indeed past) racisms operates with only a

partial understanding of the time-spaces of whiteness. My argument is that we can learn much about whitenesses and their corresponding forms of racism by paying special attention to the ways in which such whitenesses are constituted by futurity. I have offered some preliminary remarks on how we might conceptualize geographies of whiteness qua futurity, but these should only be taken as starting points. Much more pragmatically, what seems to be required is a fulsome investigation into the way the future shapes white geographies. What might such a project entail? For one,

geographers would do well to identify whether and how the practice of governing through the future inaugurates new and repeats old forms of whiteness. It would also be worth comparing and contrasting how the future is made present in various dialectical accounts of whiteness. For

instance, what becomes of whiteness when understood through the binary actual-possible as opposed to an actual-virtual binary, which has been my main concern? Alternatively, what becomes of the category of whiteness if it is shown to be constituted by a future that has no ontology except as a virtual presence? And, perhaps more pressing, how might whiteness be newly politicized? Futurity provides a productive vocabulary for thinking about and challenging whiteness. It does not offer a means of overcoming white supremacy, nor does it provide white people with a normative prescription for living with their

whiteness guilt- or worry-free. Futurity is, however, a lacuna in the study of whiteness both in geography and outside the discipline, and this alone suggests the need to take it seriously. But equally, and perhaps more

urgently, there is the need to study whiteness and futurity given how central the future is to contemporary governance and politics. Indeed, at a moment when the future features prominently in both political rhetoric – in his inaugural speech, Obama implores America to carry ‘forth that great gift of freedom and

[deliver] it safely to future generations’ – and everyday life, how people orient themselves towards the future is indelibly political. The future impels action. For Mann (2007), it is central to interest. For Thrift (2008), ‘value increasingly arises not from what is but from what is not yet but can potentially become,

that is fromthe pull of the future’. Attention to whiteness and futurity may at minimum enable us to see more clearly the extent to which the pull of whiteness into the future reconfigures what is to be valued in the decades ahead.

No Solvency

The aff’s attempt at continued re-presentation of the Middle Passage is a futile attempt of remembering that will only eclipse over the place of the deadHartman, 02 (Saidiya, professor of African American literature and history at Columbia University, “The Time of Slavery,” The South Atlantic Quarterly, 101, 4, Fall 2002, Duke University Press, EBSCO Publishing, AW)

At the portal that symbolized the finality of departure and the impossibility of reversion, the tensions that reside in mourning the

dead are most intensely experienced. Mourning is both an expression o[ loss that tethers us to the dead and severs that connection or overcomes loss by assuming the place of the dead. The excesses of empathy lead us to mistake our return with the captives'. To the degree that the bereaved attempt to

understand this space of death by placing themselves in the position of the captive, loss is attenuated rather than addressed, and the phantom presence of the departed and the dead eclipsed by our simulated captivity. "You are back!" We are encouraged to see ou rselves as Lhe vessels for the captive's return; we stand in the ancestor's shoes. We imaginatively wi t ness the crimes of the past and cry for those victimized -the enslaved, the ravaged, and the slaughtered . And the obliterative assimilation of empathy enables us to cry for ou rselves, too. As we remember those ancestors held in Lhe dungeons, we can't bul think of our own dishonored and devalued l ives and t he unrealized aspirations and the broken promises of abolition, reconstruction, and the civil rights movemen t. The i n transigence of our seemi ngly eternal second•class status propels us Lo make recou rse to stories of origi n, unshakable explanatory narratives, and sites of inju ry-the land where our blood has been

spilt -asif some essen liaJ ingredien t of ourselves can be recovered at the castles and forts tha t dot the western coast of Africa, as if the location of the wound was itself the cure, or as if the weight of dead generations could alone ensure our progress. lronica ll}1 the decla ration "You are back!" undermines the very violence that these memorial s assiduously work to present by claimi ng that the tourist'sexcursion is theancestor'sreturn.Given this, what does the journey back

bode for the present? What is surprisi ng is Lhat despite the emphasis placed on remembrance and return,

these ceremonies are actually unable to articulate in any decisive fashion , other than the reclamatio n or a true

identity, what remembering yields. While the journey back is the vehicle of remedy, recovery, and sel f-reckoni ng. the question begged is what exactly is the redressive work actualized by remembrance. Is not the spectacular abjection of slavery reproduced in facile representations of the horrors of the slave trade? What ends are served by such representations, beyond remedying the failures of memory through the dramatic reenactment of captivity and the incorporation of the dead? The most disturbing aspect of these reenactments is the suggestion that the rupture of the Middle Passage is neither irreparable nor irrevocable but bridged by the tourist who acts as the vessel for the ancestor. Inshort, the captive finds his redemption in the tourist.