Doubles---Wake---Oceans

1AC
1ACWakeOceans
1ACZong
The following is an excerpt from Feeding the Ghosts by Fred DAguiar
The sea is slavery.... sea receives a body as if that body has come to rest on a cushion, one that gives
way to the bodys weight and folds round it like an envelope. Over three days 131 such bodies, no, 132,
are flung at this sea. ....Those bodies have their lives written on salt water. The sea current turns pages of
memory. One hundred and thirty one souls roam the Atlantic with countless others. When the wind is
heard it is their breath, their speech. The sea is therefore home. The Zong is on the high seas. Men,
women and children are thrown overboard by the Captain and his crew. There is no fear or shame in this
piece of information. There is only the fact of the Zong and its unending voyage and those deaths that
cannot be undone. Where death has begun but remains unfinished because it recurs. Where there is only
the record of the sea....Those spirits feed on the story of themselves. The past is laid to rest when it is
told.

So, we dont begin with a starting point, but with a drowning that never ended.

In 1781, 132 black slaves were tossed from the slave ship Zong into the Atlantic
Ocean. We are still haunted by the ghosts of these people made fungible, reduced to
insurance claims, worth more to a slave economy dead than alive.

Confronted daily by the ongoing violence of the Middle Passage, we can NEITHER
lay the dead to rest and forget, NOR reduce them to a resource for
PROGRESSIVIST attempts to move beyond their drowning.

Instead, we must acknowledge a continual haunting by the oceanic dead. This is the
only way to NAVIGATE between the risks of FORGETTING and
INSTRUMENTALIZATION.
Baucom 1 (Ian, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume 100, Number 1, Winter 2001, Specters of the Atlantic)
---The Zong is not just a certain instance of the slave trade; it is representative of the slave trade as a
whole since it accurately represents the values held within modernity (the prioritization of money over the
fungible blacks, the development of a libidinal economy, etc.)
---A haunting of the drowned is a constant act of rememberance; creates affective attachments to those
lost in the slave trade that fuel our demands for impossible justice
On which point, let me pause for just a moment, for it is precisely with regard to questions of justice and value that the case of the Zong has a bearing upon
that contemporary discourse of memory that I want to discuss, a discourse in which the theory of value upon which a politics of diasporic
remembrance founds itself originates in a refusal to identify either value or justice with that law of
exchange which was the true law governing the outcome of the Zong trials. For if it was a commercial triumph of the exchange principle
that permitted the courts to find, as they did, that Collingwood had produced something of value in each of those moments in which a slaves body hit the surface of the sea, that each such
miniapocalypse was not only an apocalypse of death but an apocalypse of money, an apocalypse in which,
through the metaphoric imagination of capital, death and the money form name one another as literal equivalents, then it was
also a conceptualization of justice as exchange, the triumph of a classical thinking of justice codified
for Enlightenment modernity in Hegels Philosophy of Right , that permitted what were to become a series of court inquiries into the eighteenth-century laws of
marine insurance to confirm those fundamental and complementary laws of capital which dictate that justice is done and value produced when one thing is exchanged for another. By such
thinkTseng It is damage absolutized. Only by stripping a thing of all that is specific to it can such justice speak its name. As with things, so, in this case, with narrativeswhich means, not that
Wilberforce was thinking of The Philosophy of Right when he told his tale, but that his rhetoric displays the working of the same logic. What Wilberforce seems to have sensed was that his story
was imperiled by its very specificity, that its value would attenuate to a zero point the more unique it became. The story, in other words, had to become generic if it was to have any use, if
Wilberforce was to inspire in his audience anything but melancholy, anything but a paralyzed regret before the absolute specificity of a scene of irreversible human damage. And if that was
Wilberforces impulse, an impulse to ground the value of memory in the substitution of the generic for the singular, the series for the event, then it is an impulse that has proven extremely
difficult to resist. Over the past two centuries, when the Zong has been invoked, it has repeatedly been invoked in a serialized,
dematerialized relation to itself, invoked not as irredeemably singular but of value precisely because it can
be read as equivalent either with the slave trade itself or with that anxious, Heidegerrian experience of modernity which, in Paul Gilroys
and Edouard Glissants work, is an experience of confronting an ontopological displacement, of being thrown from a knowable placeworld into the bewilderments of a delocalized,
Dying Typhoon Coming On (renamed The Slave Ship )
inaugurate and epitomize the former mode of serialization as they situate the problem of the Zong within a classical discourse on justice, then Glissants Caribbean Discourses and
Poetics of Relation are paradigmatic of the later impulse to equate the massacre aboard the Zong with a
global logic and the experience of modernity. To be sure, the Martinican novelist and philosopher does not mention the Zong massacre by name. But
something like that event, some revenant version or afterimage of it is central to his two most celebrated works. Indeed, if we read between Caribbean Discourses and Poetics of Relation , it
quickly becomes apparent that the two texts are held together by a singular scene that seems to have been haunting Glissant for well over a decade, a scene at least genealogically related to that
with which I began, a scene of slaves drowning. First present in Caribbean Discourses as something called to his mind by a phrase in one of Edward Brathwaites works (The unity is
submarine), that scene repeats itself not only in the first section of the later Poetics of Relation (repeats itself, indeed, as the occasion for the opening meditations of Poetics of Relation , as the
scene of terror from which Glissants poetics takes its departure) but, metaleptically, in the epigraphs that introduce that book. Here, in the earlier work, Caribbean Discourses , is what
Brathwaites comment causes Glissant to see: To my mind this expression [The unity is submarine] can only evoke all those Africans
weighed down with ball and chain and thrown overboard whenever a slave ship was pursued by enemy vessels and felt too weak to put up a fight.
They sowed in the depths the seeds of an invisible presence . And so transversality, and not the universal transcendence of the sublime, has come to light. It took us a long time to learn this. We
are the roots of a cross-cultural relationship ....Weth ereby live, we have the good fortune of living, this shared process of cultural mutation, this convergence that frees us from uniformity. 6 And
here, some years later, is the reapparition of that scene (a reapparition that is staged on the second page of Poetics of Relation but that, in a sense, does not wait until that page is turned to present
itself again, that encroaches on the readers eye as an intimation of dj vu the moment the eye, scanning the books epigraphs, sees there, again, the line by Brathwaite [The unity is
submarine] alongside one by Derek Walcott [The sea is history] and sees in anticipation, and in memory, what Glissant himself is about to see again): The next abyss was the depths of the
sea. Whenever a fleet of ships gave chase to slave ships, it was easiest just to lighten the boat by throwing cargo overboard, weighing it down with balls and chains. These underwater signposts
mark the course between the Gold Coast and the Leeward Islands. Navigating the green splendor of the sea s...still brings to mind, coming to light like seaweed, these lowest depths, these
deeps....Inac tual fact the abyss is a tautology: the entire ocean, the entire sea gently collapsing in the end into the pleasures of sand, makes one vast beginning, but a beginning whose time is
marked by these balls and chains gone green .... For though this experience made you, original victim floating toward the seas abysses, an exception, it became something shared and made us,
the descendants, one people among others. Peoples do not live on Tseng 2002.1.21 14:32 6488 SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY 100:1 / sheet 70 of 327 Specters of the Atlantic 67 exception.
Relation is not made up of things that are foreign but of shared knowledge. This experience of the abyss can now be said to be the best
element of exchange. 7 The reversal that structures Glissants first image of this scene, the reversal that replaces an image of terror with an image of promise, a knowledge of
endings with a knowledge of beginnings, is once again present here, though now that reversal manifests itself not only as an essentially
performative act (in J. L. Austins sense of the word) but as a tropological argument, as a poetics whose
organizing figures (except ion, exchange, relation) name Glissants attempt to grasp and make sense of the
reversal he had earlier merely insisted upon. Indeed, this passage from exception to relation, this passage from a vision of exceptional suffering and of
those violently excepted from history to a vision of a unity, a solidarity, functions as a shorthand code for, or condensation of, Glissants entire
poetics of relation. Crucially, however, what mediates that reversal, what enables that passage (from endings to beginnings, from terror to promise, from exception to relation), is
a second, implied reversal: a reversal of what, with reference to the slave trade, we commonly understand exchange to entail. For if, in this context, exchange suggests not merely
a formal, Marxian, logic of dematerialization, a stripping away of the exceptional quality of things in their transit from use values to exchange values, but an absolutization of such
dedifferentiating protocols, an apocalyptic stripping away of the exceptional quality of persons in their transit from
humanness to money, then, however counterintuitive this might seem, what Glissant suggests is that exchange must be apprehended, in precisely such moments, not only as a
word for loss butasawordfor gain . Exchange , in this sense, once more names a form of substitution, though here what replaces exceptionality is not fungibility
but relation, where relation is a word for an antimelancholic politics of memory, and a word for those new forms of culture, identity, and solidarity that emerge from even this most violent scene
of Atlantic exchange. If exchange , for Glissant, is a word that names an unending process, an enduring drama of historical t ransformations in which anything we might be inclined to regard as an
event survives its happening as an endless series of aftereffects, it does, nevertheless, seem to have a point of beginning or, at the least, a first point of application. Certainly that is the case for
the scene with which I began. For at the heart of this scene, at the dense nodal point of Tseng 2002.1.21 14:32 6488 SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY 100:1 / sheet
71 of 327 68 Ian Baucom this scene of substitutions, reversals, abandonments, recoveries, losses, and gains, at the absolute zero point of
relational contact, is that image of the drowning human body, an image of the body less in than as a contact zone, an image of a body
impoverished and strangely rewarded by exchange. And if that metamorphic body functions for Glissant as an entirely genealogical body, as something that is at once the originary body in a
genealogy of creole identity and a body in insurrection against the disciplinary regimes that seek to produce it (whether as a marketable exchange value or as the waste matter of cross-Atlantic
imperial exchange), then, in this, Glissant is by no means alone. Indeed, in recent years, it has sometimes seemed that this body, this vanishing but not vanished, drowning but transformed, lost
but repeating body has come to function in black Atlantic narrative, aesthetic, and commemorative practices much as the entombed body of the unknown soldier funct ions in Benedict Andersons
account of nationalism. 8 Glissants citations and epigraphs provide a glimpse of the archive that has been organizing itself as a sort of textual
cenotaph to this figure and of the manner in which that archive has assembled itself less as a repository or monument than as
an act of communicative and textual exchange. The two epigraphs of Glissants Poetics of Relation are, as I have mentioned, from Edward Brathwaite
(The unity is submarine) and Derek Walcott (The sea is history). Walcotts poem, in its turn, both alludes to Brathwaite (as the Jamaican poets The unity is submarine is transformed
into the subtl e... submarine expanse into which Walcott leads his readers) and is cited by DAguiar as one of the epigraphs to Feeding the Ghosts . DAguiars novel (whose second epigraph
is, like Glissants, drawn from Brathwaite) originated, in its turn, from his reading of Michelle Cliff s Abeng , in which the Zong massacre figures as a fleeting background memory, and from his
s DAguiars novel and David Dabydeens collection of poems
Turner but to which Paul Gilroy has directed his attention in both Small Acts and The Black Atlantic . Closing his discussion of the canvas in The Black Atlantic , Gilroy comments: Its exile in
tem of cultural exchanges. 9 This seems an apt comment, though
to my mind, it is less the wanderings of Turners canvas than the cross-Atlantic conversation that has been occupying the attention of these British, Guyanese, Jamaican, and Saint Lucian Tseng
2002.1.21 14:32 6488 SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY 100:1 / sheet 72 of 327 Specters of the Atlantic 69 writers, the circular exchange of images and epigraphs as they have borrowed each
others language to orient their collective gaze on this image of a drowning body that truly points to the shape of the Atlantic as a system of cultural and communicative exchanges. My point
in tracing these linkages is not simply that writers borrow from one another or that the genealogy of any of these works must entail a genealogy of these recyclings, quotations, allusions, and
borrowings (though that is, quite obviously, the case) or even that it is through just such intertextual exchanges that Glissants Poetics of Relation demonstrates the truth of its insights, that it is in
this dispersed but related corpus that the body Glissant signposts as foundational to both a discours antillais and a poetics of relation returns as a transversal, cross-cultural body of
writing. Rather, it is the logic by which that body of writing relates the body it writes, with which I am concerned, the logic which marks the former as a cenotaph to the latter, the logic which
marks the body of writing as both the burial ground and the resurrection of the written body, the logic which thus codes this poetics as not only a form of memorializing the body but also a mode
of allegorizing it, which indeed, so conflates allegory and memory as to make allegory the privileged form of relational memory, though, to be sure, a form haunted, as is always the case with
allegory, by the literal, material, bodily presence it at once names and displaces by its relational poetics of exchange. That allegory is itsel f a mode of exchange, indeed that it is an aesthetic form
which at once models itself on, proceeds from, and licenses those substitutionary acts of the imagination fundamental to the creation of capital exchange values, is, of course, an insight we owe to
Walter Benjamin. 10 That there might be something else at work in a diasporic allegoresis of the middle passage, that this kind of allegorical exchange of the specific qualitative character of
an event for its universal significance, that is, its value, might generate not a condemnation but a radical appreciation of the value of exchange, is a notion we owe to Glissant as his texts
that are both the enduring, recurring, uncannily resurfacing signs of the violence of the slave trade and of the loss of the placeworld and , for Glissant, the signs of the unification of the disparate,
meditation on Tseng 2002.1.21 14:32 6488 SOUTH ATLANTIC
QUARTERLY 100:1 / sheet 73 of 327 70 Ian Baucom precisely the same scene predicts, what Glissant finds here is unity: the unity of the creolized where creolization is understood both as
the unification of the disparate and as the diasporization of the unified, as a gathering in scattering. The scene of the utter loss of place, the scene, in Heideggers terms, of the subjects entry into
the unheimlich , unhomely, or, perhaps, anti-homely expanses of an unmarked world space, thus becomes for Glissant a scene of re place ment, a scene, as DAguiar has it, where what seemed to
figure the loss of home is therefore home. 11 Such is also the insight of Walcotts poem The Sea Is History. For as t hat poem takes its readers on a tour of the great underwater cemeteries
of the Atlantic, it finds in that subtle submarine expanse the monuments of a cross-Atlantic community of belonging, the monuments that make the depths of the sea a place of
memory (as Pierre Nora has it), which can be shared by the Martinican philosopher, the Jamaican historian, the Saint Lucian poet, and the black British novelist. 12 But there is still something
else to be discovered here, something that Glissant insists we find: a modern force, indeed, modernity itself, a modernity in which this experience of history, this transit from place to
space, this discovery of the zones of displacement as our new places of belonging, this rewriting of the self under the signposts of the creolized, is paradigmatic of a global experience of the
modern. Our boats are open, Glissant concludes the introductory section of Poetics of Relation , and we sail them for e
an invitation to rethink the relation of the global to the logics of exchange. For if our accounts of the global tend to identify globalization (as modernizaton) with a process whereby the local, the
vernacular, and the heterogeneous are exchanged for the uniform, the dedifferentiated, and the homogenized, accounts most familiar to us as some or other version of the end of history
(accounts in which, unsurprisingly, the story of the globalization of the exchange principle is represented as the story of t he birth of justice), Glissants comments suggest that we should read this
process as reversible. Difference, here, however, is not understood as something external to exchange but, as Glissant has it, the best element of exchange. It is from within what Giovanni
Arrighi calls global capitals spaces of flow that, for Glissant, difference returns as the relational counternarrative of globalization. 13 Arrighi tends to identify such spaces of flow with the
metropolitan centers of finance capiTseng 2002.1.21 14:32 6488 SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY 100:1 / sheet 74 of 327 Specters of the Atlantic 71 tal, and he associates their rise with the
slave-trading joint stock companies that over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries consolidated the Dutch and English dominance of global capital. What Glissants text suggests
is that if this is not only an accurate history of capital but a credible history of our long twentieth century, then such a history needs to attend not only to the metropolitan sites of capitals
distribution and return but also to the border zones of exchange, to the slave ships, colonies, and plantations, which are also spaces of flow, spaces that are, to be sure, spaces of
dedifferentiation but spaces that also, by concentrating difference, enjamb it, multiply it, or, as Glissant and Fredric Jameson in their different ways might say, relate it. In such spaces, exchange
is seen to exhibit a double logic, the logic, one might suggest, of creolization, the logic of the simultaneous erasure and multiplication of difference. And it is because he can read the globes
spaces of flow as subject to such a reversible, double logic of creolizing exchange that Glissant can discover in the sort of scene with which his text and this essay began not an injunction to
melancholy but the double promise of relation, the promise of an inherited solidarity and the promise of the connective, rhizomic identity of the nonidentical: For though this experience made
you, original victim floating toward the seas abysses, an exception, it became something shared and made us, the descendants, one people among others. People do not live on exception.
Relation is not made up of things that are foreign but of shared knowledge. This experience of the abyss can now be said to be the best element
concentrated here, as is a generalized poetics of the p ostcolonial, that by-n ow-familiar hyb ridity poetics that seeks to redeem the violences and losses of history by discovering within a
Manichaean economy of colonial loss a compensatory economy of postcolonial gain. However compelling this might be, however appealing it may be to read
the reading protocols of the postcolonial as protocols that turn exchange against itself, that reverse its reversals, I want to
pause to consider what it is that permits that exchange to take place. For Glissant, what lies between the time of death and the time of relation, what must be cleared
away to make way for relation, is, in his terms, exception. If exception , in the passage I have cited, is Glissants word for the moment of
drowning, exception or, perhaps more accurately, exceptionality is not merely anterior to relation but is that which blocks relation, as it is that which blocks the moment of living on.
To live on is then to refuse the exceptionality of Tseng 2002.1.21 14:32 6488 SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY 100:1 / sheet 75 of 327 72 Ian Baucom the exceptional, to refuse to permit the
exceptional to live on as a haunting, troubling, foreign element within the present. Relation is thus apprehensible as a form of completed
mourning and an act of burial, a clearing away of the dead. The past is laid to rest when it is told, DAguiar insists in closing his text.
14 To which we can imagine Glissant responding: The past is laid to rest when it is related . I have been suggesting that in turning our eye to the scene of the
Zong massacre we are asked to make a choice, asked to make both a more complicated and a more familiar choice than we might at first think. That
choice will be familiar because regardless of whether the details of this case are already known to us, this sort of case and the difficulty of responding to the claims this sort of past makes upon
the present certainly are. One might, indeed, historicize a late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century contemporaneity by suggesting that what demarcates this as a
quasi-coherent, periodizable moment are not simply the varied triumphs of global capital but the struggle
to find some way of doing justice to this sort of past, whether by the commissioners of South Africas Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the
state builders of postconflictual polities in Cambodia, Northern Ireland, or Argentina, the critical practitioners of trauma theory, or the narrative and philosophical intellectuals of cultural
haunting. Even to construct so provisional a list of the type of case to which this massacre could be said to belong, whether as one in a series of paradigmatically modern events or as one in
a series of like histories whose likeness we must both make sense of (if we are to uncover how they emerge from more than isolable acts of human evil) and refuse (if we are to avoid rendering
them interchangeable and interchangeably available to a general grammar of reading), reveals why the nature of such a choice is so complex, so constantly battering itself against the rocks of the
imperative and the objectionable. In making these decisions we are asked to choose more than whether we will remember or
forget, whether we will be just or unjust. Such choices, and the meaning of their outcome, are accompanied or perhaps preceded by the decision to
see what we see either as an exceptional scene of human suffering or as a sort of scene: a
scene of the injustices of the slave trade, a scene of the modern, a scene of the worst and best elements of exchange. And if we are to be just, if we are to do
justice to this terrible knowledge, then Tseng 2002.1.21 14:32 6488 SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY 100:1 / sheet 76 of 327 Specters of the Atlantic 73 our impulse, I think, is frequently to
incline toward the second of these two options, to substitute for the specific, qualitative character of this event a knowledge of its universal character or, more probably, given our
general shyness of universals, its global, imperial, modern, or episystemic character, that is, its value. In doing soif this is, in fact, how our choice inclines usnot only do we demonstrate
the critical advantages of a way of reading and reveal the insights of a historical materialism that, in Walter Benjamins fine phrase, trains itself to do justice to its object by assembl[ing]
large-scale constructions out of the smallest and most precisely cut components, 15 but we also, more troublingly, register the grinning triumph over such thought of what Hegel called the
cunning of reason, register, in fact, a latent but persistent Hegelianism in our standard conceptions of justice and reading as we identify both justice and reading, however implicitly, with the
principles of exchange. Though here, to be sure, what exchange generates is not money but something like conceptuality or systematicity, in Glissants case a concept of relation that functions
as belated compensation for the loss of the exceptional and that, thus, equates conceptuality not only with justice but also, and perhaps most troublingly, with insurance. As a theory of
justice, such systemic concept building, I am thus suggesting, constantly runs the risk of articulating itself as a form of
insurance, either by substituting for the singularity of any given experience of loss an actuarial knowledge
of that losss systemic value and meaning or by offering itself as a mode of compensation in which systematic understanding and (in the case at hand) a global theory of
relationality, creolization, or hybridity promise to reverse damage by conferring a conceptual exchange value on all those things whose loss it at once inventories and absolutizes. It is for such
reasons, I think, that Gayatri Spivak has been lamenting the absence of a developed critique of value within postcolonial discourse, an absence she attempts to remedy by outlining what I
understand to be a melancholy theory of value that functions as something like an analogue of Derridas spectrological theory of justice. Theory , however, is of course precisely the necessary
and the wrong word, a dilemma Spivak attempts to resolve by calling for the development of differentiated strategies of justice commonly grounded in the unexchangeability of the singular.
This singularwhich I would gloss as something like the exceptional in Glissants work, the irreducible in Derridas, and the wound in Adornosis accessible for
Spivak as the withdrawn, the cryptic, the word not spoken by J. M. Tseng 2002.1.21 14:32 6488 SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY 100:1 / sheet 77 of
327 74 Ian Baucom Coetzees Friday. It is that thing on which melancholy goes to work by not working itself through, that thing which melancholy refuses to surrender or exchange, that
thing which melancholy values because it is utterly nonfungible, without substitute, the very form of
incommensurable form, and, hence, for Hegel, that which is without value and without the domain of justice and, for Spivak, that which is invaluable, exceptional, the
priceless fundament of justice. As Spivak is aware, however, this mode of reading carries its own nostalgic dangers, dangers against which her Critique of Postcolonial Reason constantly
attempts to guard itself even as it cultivates its hermeneutic of the inexchangeable singular. Spivak proposes a number of strategic courses by which this danger may be evaded, perhaps the most
enigmatic but also, I believe, the most promising of which is that we read for the singular by way of the archive and the example. 16 Ironically, it is precisely this move, this linking of the
singular to the example, that reopens her text to that speculative mode of value creation against whose encroachments she is equally, resolutely, on her guard. But to get some sense of how this
might be and of how it might inform a reading of the Zong massacre as at once a singular and, in the most terrible sense, an exemplary modern event, we need to get some fuller sense of what
Spivak means by the singular. The singular first appears in Spivaks Critique in a footnote on Derridas comments on the signature: The interest here, she notes, is not merely
speculative. It has something to do with the fact that, reading literature, we learn to learn from the singular and the unv
surrounding a reading of Coetzees Foe before metastasizing, through that reading, into the variant forms of the withheld and the cryptic and then reappearing in its original form in the
subsequent chapters of the text: The named marginal is as much a concealment as a disclosure of the margin, and where s/he discloses, s/he is singular ....Tomeditateon the figure of the wholly
er over against the wholly other that one
LY 100:1 / sheet 78 of 327 Specters of the Atlantic 75
Friday...istheunemphatica gent of withholding in the text. For every territorial space that is value coded by colonialism and every command of metropolitan ant icolonialism for the native to yield
his voice, there is a space of withholding, marked by a secret that may not be a secret but cannot be unlocked. The native, whatever that might mean, is not only a victim but also an agent.
I can at best shorthand thus. The singular, as that first
footnote suggests, while not precisely an antispeculative device (the interest here is not merely speculative ), is something that exists at a remove from pure speculation (read abstraction,
as at once a capital and an epistemological protocol: speculation thus as a pun on financial and theoretical forms of value creation). A reinscription of Derrida, the singular thus also
reworks Gilles Deleuze, as something whose value has not been coded, as, indeed, one of those decoded [i.e., not-yet or no-longer coded] flows, which, in her Deleuzian moments, is one
of Spivaks alternate terms for the native informant foreclosed within a system animated by its dread of such spaces . The native informant is
thus singular to the extent to which he or she discloses a space of withholding within the
territorialized ambits of Enlightenment reason, imperial civilizing mission, multinational
financialization of the globe, and metropolitan speculative theory; singular to the extent to
which he or she marks off a cryptic, secretive space (a sort of internalized margin), discloses the presence of that withheld space, but
guards its secret. The singular is thus, in Spivaks example, the withheld secret of Fridays missing tongue, the cryptic silence that occupies
that space, withholds it from coding, refuses to subject this Kantian raw man to that
Enlightenment project of cultural education which will not so much civilize him or render him receptive to the categorical imperative as
erase him. That the singular, thus understood, is also in the terms of two of Spivaks key sources (Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok) a species of melancholy is not an element of her
stated argument, though the ghost of melancholy certainly haunts that argument. It is not the problem of melancholy, however, but another problem that I want to consider, the problem of the
singular as, precisely, a form of example, the problem exemplified here by Fridays exemplification of the sinTseng 2002.1.21 14:32 6488 SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY 100:1 / sheet 79
of 327 76 Ian Baucom gular. The example is a notably ambivalent, double-coded thing. It is at once a specificity, a singleness, a referent, and a specification of something else, a doubleness,
a reference to and beyond itself. The example names itself as itself and it names itself as not-itself but a mere instance of what it exists to render manifest. There is another way of putting this:
what does it mean for Fridayor indeed for the Zong to exemplify the singular, or what becomes of such singularity when its withheld secret marks something other than it self,
something other than its cryptic situation, something other than its space of withholding, something it merely represents? The interest here is precisely speculative, for what such questions
suggest is that in its life as an example the exemplary singular exists as two apparently opposed things: as something that is both in-itself and for-another, as an exchangeable singular. And it
is this indirect return of the speculative, the abstract, and the conceptual that, I believe, accounts for that palpable uneasiness present in all those moments in which Spivak attempts to dissociate
the singular from the nostalgic by exemplifying it. For if the reading of the cryptic, withheld singular contains (as one of its secrets) Spivaks answer to the many critics who have denounced her
the subaltern cannot speak, if what it suggests is that she really meant the subaltern will not speak (in code), then the moment in which that withheld speech licenses its abstract
conceptualization, the moment in which it insists on its exemplary value, is the moment in which it indeed becomes codable: for speculation (and speculative enrichment). Why then make
the move to exemplify the singular, to render it exemplary? My sense is that Spivak does this less from a concern that if she does not, the singular will, in the end, prove too singular, too
restricted to its own cryptic place of withholding, to prove to be of sufficient use than that it is by making this move that she can demonstrate (exemplify, if you will) that to speak of the singular
is to speak not of a state or a condition but of an undecidability and of the imperative of decision; that it is precisely by troping its double life that she can pose the singular not as a
once lost but now recovered thing but as the invitation to a decision. And it is as such an exemplary event that I believe the Zong massacre articulates its exceptionality, its twin life as an
irreducible and a representative event. Viewed thus, the decision it requests reveals the falsity of that choice I earlier indicated it asks us to make, it demonstrates that there is, finally, no single
right way of seeing this scene of murder. Rather, what I want to Tseng 2002.1.21 14:32 6488 SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY 100:1 / sheet 80 of 327 Specters of the Atlantic 77 suggest is
that to look back at this scene is to experience a sort of temporal double consciousness, a recoding along the axis of time of that knowledge of undecidability and that imperative of decision
implicit within the experience of the impossible. To witness this event is to regard something that appears both in the guise of the event and in the form of the series, to see what we see as if
we are seeing again what we are seeing for the first time, to encounter history as dj vu.This is, as the title of DAguiars text suggests, a ghost scene, an
apparitional scene, a scene, as Derrida has it, in which the initial appearance is the appearance of that which reappears, a scene in DAguiars words in which the eye
grows accustomed to rehearsal, to repeats and returns, a scene in which the event is serialized not only in relation to a roughly synchronic set of
like events but in a diachronic relation to itself. 17 Even if we regard nothing but the massacre in its moment, in isolation from its return as image
and text and memory, the event is serialized because the unity of the slaughter breaks down into, and is composed
by, each of its fatal moments a scene that is simultaneously the same and different plays
out before our eyes over and over and over again, so that to speak of the Zong , or the case of the Zong , is already to speak of the identity of the
nonidentical. The recursive, repetitive form of DAguiars novela novel that finds itself obliged to tell its tale not once but serially: first in a synoptic preface, then in a set of harrowing
once more through the memory of a solitary survivor, and, finally,
again in the texts epilogueis, in many respects, a response to this collapsing of the series into the event and the refraction of the event through the series: a response one might say to the
disparate but mutually familiar images onto a single screen, a screen on whose surface we see, as if we were seeing it again, something we are seeing for the first time. And if this is so, then the
visual disturbance occasioned by such a sight is, as we know from our experiences of dj vu, also a temporal disturbance, an experience of inhabiting a contemporaneity that is not contemporary
with itself, an experience of inhabiting what we might think of as a heterochronic order of time. Heterochronicity, in this sense, is that which inhabits the uneasy interregnum between the time of
melancholy and the Tseng 2002.1.21 14:32 6488 SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY 100:1 / sheet 81 of 327 78 Ian Baucom time of mourning, the time of singularity and the time of exchange,
the moment of the exceptional and the reiterative instant of the recurrently and paradigmatically modern. Heterochronic time, thus, is very much like the
time of dj vu. It is a time of uncertainty, of bewilderment, of not being able to determine the status of that which lies before our eyes, and of being unable to decide whether the
thing has or has not been seen before, whether it is exceptional or serial, and whether it belongs to a now or a then, as we manage, fail, or refuse to
encounter in the afterimages of the Zong massacre images of an exceptional or a serial event, images of a
brutally singular or a brutally exemplary violation, images of an isolable atrocity in the history of the
transatlantic slave trade or images of a punishing modernity recurrently replaying itself in every corner of the globe. However we might
choose to see this massacre, it is, I want to conclude by suggesting, precisely within such an order of time that, over the centuries, the Zong has appeared, most famously in its canonical visual
ustice, value, and time I have been discussing. First exhibited at
yself that word) of Wilberforces speech before the House of
Commons. Turner had been reading the recently republished edition of Thomas Clarksons Essay on the slavery and commerce of the human species , where he had come across an account of
the Zong murders and discovered in that massacre the epitome of all that was wrong with the slave trade. Three decades after Wilberforces address, and nearly sixty years after the massacre took
place, Turner sensed that the event retained its didactic value, though like Wilberforce, that that value was independent of the named particularities of the case. Thus, perhaps the most significant
feature of the canvas is its name or, indeed, the name that is missing from it, the name of the ship and the event that inspired its painting, the name that haunts the canvas but is not accommodated
by it. In this setting, the painting, once again, enlists the Zong in a classical discourse on justice as it asks its viewers once more to recall and to choose, but to choose on the basis of an act of
recollection that has made foreign to itself the peculiar, exceptional, singular qualities of the event it serves to recollect. Tseng 2002.1.21 14:32 6488 SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY 100:1 /
sheet 82 of 327 Specters of the Atlantic 79 But the painting also requests another choice, a form of choice that would have been familiar to Turner from something else he was reading while
working on the canvas: Walter Scotts Waverley novels, which Robert Cadell, Scotts publisher, had commissioned Turner to illustrate. Indeed, the canvas manages not only to depict the
massacre as though it were a scene from a historical novel but to make it an allegory of that romantic and Scottish Enlightenment philosophy of history which, as James Chandler and Homer
Brown have suggested, Scotts historical novels, in their turn, served to illustrate. 18 Central to that philosophy of history, and to Scotts novels, was a sense that the experience of modernity was
not, as the Continental Enlightenment suggested, one of the synchronization of experience, the reduction of historical time to a single, dominant base time, the homogenizing, leveling,
everywhere-available time of modernity, but the experience of a contemporaneity that was not contemporaneous with itself, an experience of time as that which was fractured, broken,
constellated by a heterogeneous array of local regimes of time. Scotts novels work by tracing the wanderings of a character across such an uneven geography of timetypically the Highlands
and the Lowlands, territories that he treats, in Raymond Williamss terms, as the geographies of the residual and the emergent, the customary and the cosmopolitan 19 and obliging that
character to make a choice for one order of time or another. That choice is, however, always predetermined, because Scott figures any time but the time of cosmopolitan capital as wounded,
dying, and worthy, finally, of no more than sympathy and an honorable burial. The typical posture of Scotts protagonists is t hus, as Ian Duncan suggests, the posture of a belated but sympathetic
spectator, the posture of one who looks on at scenes of suffering and death, sympathizes with the dying and the dead, and then moves on to inhabit a modernity cleansed, in Saree Makdisis
terms, of the ghosts issuing forth from the past. 20 Turners canvas, with its ship of the dying and the dead, its mute appeal for its spectators sympathy, captures this paradigmatic scene
exactly, not least because opposite the canvas Turner hung another, Rockets and Blue Light , an image of the coming of steam power, of the mechanization of the sea, of the modernization of
Britains imperium. With that painting in place opposite Turners tis sixty years since canvas (the subtitle, we will recall, of Scotts Waverley) , the image of the Zong massacre as a scene in
a historical novel is complete. Not only complete but completed, for what Turner effects by locating the case of the Zong within Tseng 2002.1.21 14:32 6488 SOUTH ATLANTIC
QUARTERLY 100:1 / sheet 83 of 327 80 Ian Baucom these generic conventions is both to acknowledge the unevenness of time, the uncanny, repetitive presentness of the past within the present,
and to smooth out that unevenness: by containing the massacre within past time, by appearing to enjoin a choice between that past and the emergent, modernized present but indicating that
there really is no choice, only an occasion for sympathy and a decent burial (of the dead, of the slave trade) that the living might live on unhaunted by these specters of the Atlantic.
Turners solution to the questions that the Zong puts to the problems of justice and memory, a solution borrowed from the
progressive romance of Scotts historical novel, is, at first glance, not unique. It also appears to be Glissants solution, the solution of Poet ics of Relation , which also begins
by enjoining us to look on at just such a scene of suffering and death, demands our sympathy, and then lays those dead to rest. And it is
the solution that DAguiar seems to desire in the final sentence of his novel. But it is also, as the melancholy reiterativity of that novel knows, as Glissant demonstrates through his
persistent return to this singular scene of loss, and as I have attempted to argue here,. a false solution. Time does not pass, it accumulates,
most densely, perhaps, within the wake of those modernity-forming spaces of flow that have governed and driven our long
twentieth centurys cycles of capital accumulation. And the dead, whose ghosts provide us with the figures by which we recognize and deny the cumulative burdens of history, the
dead, whose apparitions weigh as lightly and as heavily upon the present as that phantasmagoric nightmare
of all past generations which, in Marxs fable, deposits its strange weight upon the minds of the living, the dead do not precede but inhabit the split scenes of Turners exhibition hall, the
globes relational, creolizing spaces of flow, and the historical imaginary of a cross-Atlantic world that in the terms I have used is a world in which
the best elements of exchange are the endless temporal exchanges of a heterochronic modernity, a modernity, in Benjamins words, in
which our nowbeing is charged to the bursting point with time, a modernity in which, as Gilroy has it, one of the greatest challenges
available to us is the challenge of learning what it means to live nonsynchronously. 21 When the American painter George
Inness saw Turners canvas in Boston, he dismissed it as a trivial piece of work, sniffing that it has as much to do with human affections and
thoughts as a ghost. 22 To which I can only respond: exactly. That is its value.
The Middle Passage, the door of no return, functions as a passage not only ACROSS
the Atlantic Ocean, but also TO THE BOTTOM of the ocean; alongside the bodies
of slaves which sunk under the waves of temporality, emerges modern biopolitics,
the prison industrial complex, queerness, and death. Past events linger in present,
crafting a shallow grave of blackness long after modernity has declared a change in
the biopolitical schema of slavery.
Dillon 13 (Stephen Dillon, doctor of philosophy from the university of Minnesota, Fugitive Life: Race, Gender, and the Rise of the
Neoliberal-Carceral State, Pgs. 24-30, May 2013, Regina Kunzel, Co-adviser, Roderick Ferguson, Co-adviser,
http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/11299/153053/1/Dillon_umn_0130E_13833.pdf)
---The Middle passage is the site and origins of biopolitics; slavery created the foundations of history that
manifest themselves in the present
In A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, Dionne Brand writes of the Middle Passage, The door [of no return]
signifies the historical moment which colours all moments in the Diaspora. It accounts for the ways we observe and
are observed as people, whether its through the lens of social injustice or the laws of human accomplishment. The door exists as an
absence. A thing in fact which we do not know about, a place we do not know. Yet, it exists as the
ground we walk...Where one stands in a society seems always related to this historical experience. Where one can be
observed is relative to that history. All human effort seems to emanate from this door.32 For Brand, the Middle Passage
and chattel-slavery compose the original template for modern power. The door of no return is the site from which
all disciplinary and biopolitical regimes emanate. It (and not it alone) determines the ways people are
regulated, visualized, mobilized, positioned, and organized. Yet, the deathly touch of terror and the warm embrace of
inclusion are not just stained from the original scene. What began at the door is also transmitted, transformed, renewed,
and repositioned in our present day.33 This is what Saidiya Hartman calls the afterlife of slavery, where premature death,
incarceration, limited access to healthcare and education, and poverty are structured by the logics and technologies of chattel-slavery.34 Under
this analytic, the past does not give way to the present, slowly dissolving under the bright shinning light
of progress; slaverys afterlife is the pasts possession of the present. The past holds the present
captivestructuring, surrounding, and inhabiting it. The fabrication of concrete and
compartmentalized conceptions of time and space dissolves under the crushing weight of the blood
stained gate. But this possession does not just take the form of the tactile, visible, and known. Part of the afterlife of slavery
emanates from an absence that cannot be recovered or repaired. The door of no return is not a place, it is a
gap that founds the nowit is history as the unknown. The present rests upon this rupture, upon the
unknowable, upon the forgotten, and upon the dead. In this chapter, I use the term possession as a modification of the concept
of haunting. In Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Avery Gordon argues that haunting describes how that
which seems to be not theresomething that is absent or missingis often a seething presence...acting on and
meddling with taken for granted realities.35 A ghost is one way something lost, disappeared, or dead makes itself known.
Engaging a haunting means to consider the apparitions lingering outside the frame of disciplinary knowledge, to make
contact with the reality of fictions and the fictions of reality, to reckon with endings that are not over and past events that
loiter in the present.36 If haunting names the lingering presence of the dead in the realm of the livingthe
present absence of what is there and yet hidden, the feeling that there is something in the room with you even when your eyes tell you
otherwisethen possession is when the ghost does not haunt, but rather, takes hold. Possession is when the ghost
inhabits and controls. To be haunted is to see the ghost that has been waiting for your field of vision to change. By contrast, a possessive
spirit is not so passive and patient. Unlike a ghost, a spirit does not wait; it grabs hold of you first, perhaps without your knowledge. What seizes
you are not the murmurs of the oppressed or the whispered demands of those killed by state violence and terrorpossession is the deathly grip of
the dominant. Possession is a psychological state in which an individual's normal personality is replaced by another; domination by something
(as an evil spirit, a passion, or an idea); or something owned, occupied, or controlled.37 To be possessed is to be under the control of
something more powerful than the imagined free will of the liberal individual. We can witness possession in the relationship
between race, gender, and death as theorized by black feminists in the 1970s. For example, in her 1968 essay The Black
Revolution in America, Grace Lee Boggs argues that American capitalism was born out of the labor of black slaves and
has since used white workers to defend the system and...keep Blacks in their place at the bottom of the ladder, scavenging the old jobs, old
homes, old churches, and old schools discarded by whites...thereby contributing to the overall capital of the country.38 She goes on to outline a
regime of biopolitical management animated by this history: They [black youth] also recognize that although a particular struggle may be
precipitated by an individual incident, their struggle is not against just one or another individual but against a whole
power structure comprising a complex network of politicians, university and school administrators, landlords, merchants, usurers, realtors,
insurance personal, contractors, union leaders, licensing and inspection bureaucrats, racketeers, lawyers, policementhe overwhelming majority
of who are white and absentee, and who exploit the black ghetto the same way the Western powers exploit the colonies and neo-colonies in
Africa, Asia, and Latin America.39 Within a theory of power as possession, slaverys relationship to the present is more than the haunting of a
ghost. Slavery, for Boggs, is not lurking behind contemporary formations of power. Instead, the complex network of biopolitical
regulation and management outlined by Boggs is given life by an anti-blackness as old as liberal freedom.
Contemporary biopolitics are possessed by discourses and technologies produced under slavery that were
carried into the future (our present) by race, gender, sexuality, and anti-blackness. As Omiseeke Tinsley writes,
The brown-skinned, fluid- bodied experiences now called blackness and queerness surfaced in
intercontinental, maritime contacts hundreds of years ago: in the seventeenth century, in the
Atlantic Ocean.40 Extending Ruth Wilson Gilmores definition of racism as state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploration of
group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death, we can understand race and death as a possessive spirit that works as one, born out of the
genocide of conquest and slavery.41 Being placed at the bottom of the ladder by an expansive network of racialized management and control is
Boggss way of describing the uneven distribution of value and disposability produced by slaverys ongoing role in the present. Although death
is sometimes a natural biological phenomenon, it is more often manufactured and distributed by regimes of power far
removed from ones last breath or final heartbeat. Race is one such technology; it is a mechanism for distributing
life and death, and for black people, race and white supremacy are motivated by a past of subjection,
subjugation, torture, terror, and disposability that has not ended.42 Race possesses life in both the biological and
biopolitical sense, ending or extending biological life for individuals and populations. While race sometimes haunts, it more often limits life
chances by inhabiting and controlling individuals, institutions, and populations. In short, we are possessed by race, and death and life are the
outcome. The relationship between race and possession is also evident in the writing of prisoners and activists in the 1970s who connected the
contemporary prison to chattel- slavery. Within this body of work, the contemporary prison is animated by logics,
technologies, and discourses constructed under nineteenth-century U.S. slavery. For countless prisoners and
activists, race (and anti-blackness) were instruments that transcended space and time so that the past
could invade and contort the present in its image. For instance, in his best-selling collection of prison writing Soledad
Brother published in 1970, George Jackson described the ways that the prisons connection to slavery reverses, compresses,
and undoes the progress of time: My recall is nearly perfect, time has faded nothing. I recall the very first kidnap. Ive
lived through the passage, died on the passage, lain in the unmarked shallow graves of the millions
who fertilized the Amerikan soil with their corpses; cotton and corn growing out of my chest, unto
the third and fourth generation, the tenth, the hundredth.43 Here, Jackson describes the relationship between
memory, time, and possession. His captive body is metaphorically infested with the cotton and corn grown under the prison of
the plantation. Time did not wash away the horrors of slavery, but rather, modified and intensified
them. Jackson both lives the past and continues to live its afterlife. He feels possessed by the forms of death produced
under slavery, and throughout his writing connects this to his living death in prison. This possession is not temporally constrained;
neither the law nor the state can exorcise black bodies of this death sentence. Instead, Jackson argued that the U.S. must be destroyed and that
anything less would be meaningless to the great majority of the slaves.44 Although an extensive review of Jacksons discussion of slavery is
beyond the scope of this project, his ideas and declaration that I am a slave to, and of, property were not unique among the black liberation
movement.45 In fact, Jacksons writing was emblematic of larger political, social, and economic changes occurring in the 1960s and 1970s, and
paradigmatic of the political thought of the black liberation movement. The work of Shakur and Davis are one of the lines of flights that depart
from the thought of Jackson and the black liberation movement. Indeed, Davis dedicates Reflections to Jacksons life (cut short by his violent
death) and his struggle against his own misogyny. In addition, Davis offers a literal embodiment of how the theories, histories, and
epistemologies produced by the black feminist and black liberation movements have entered the university.
The echo of slavery transcends linear history, where the slave is murdered out of the
middle passage over and over into both the past and the present. The slave ship
moves through time and space, creating a rupture, which guides bullets, police
surveillance, the prison industrial complex, and the libidinal economy.
Dillon 13 (Stephen Dillon, doctor of philosophy from the university of Minnesota, Fugitive Life: Race, Gender, and the Rise of the
Neoliberal-Carceral State, Pgs. 24-30, May 2013, Regina Kunzel, Co-adviser, Roderick Ferguson, Co-adviser,
http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/11299/153053/1/Dillon_umn_0130E_13833.pdf)
---The past floods into the present and strengthens the fungible positionality of blackness; the past does
not wash away events and structures, but reinforces them
Although the connections between slavery and the prison are important to this project, I am also interested in more expansive understandings of
the afterlife of slavery. In particular, I am concerned with theories that can help make the connection between the market under chattel-slavery
and the market under neoliberalism. In other words, the afterlife of slavery structures much more than the prison or even more than Wacquants
carceral continuum. For instance, Christina Sharpe argues that our very subjectivity is indebted to, and born out of, the discursive codes of
slavery and post-slavery. For Sharpe, engaging and analyzing a post-slavery subjectivity means examining subjectivities constituted by trans-
Atlantic slavery and connecting them to present (and past) mundane horrors that arent acknowledged to be horrors.55 This is one of the main
projects of black feminism, as exemplified by Boggs engagement with the seemingly innocuous institutions of insurance, state bureaucracy, and
the university.56 This project is also central to Hortense Spillerss classic essay, Mamas Baby, Papas Maybe: An American Grammar
book, where she connects slavery to the life of the symbolic world. She writes: Even though the captive
flesh/body has been liberated, and no one need pretend that even the quotation marks do not matter, dominant symbolic activity,
the ruling episteme that releases the dynamics of naming and valuation, remains grounded in originating metaphors of
captivity and mutilation, so that it is as if neither time nor history, nor historiography or its topics, show
movement, as the human subject is murdered over and over again by the passions of a bloodless and
anonymous archaism, showing itself in endless disguise.57 Like Jackson and Shakur, Spillers argues that slavery ruptures the
progress of time. The ways meaning and value are institutionalized have been determined by the violence and
terror of slavery. Slavery is a death sentence enacted across generations, one that changes name and
shape as time progresses. Freedom presupposes and builds on slavery so that post-slavery subjectivities
are shaped by forms of power that resemble and sometimes mimic power under slavery (force, terror, sexual violence,
compulsion, torture) while they are also confined by the post-emancipation technologies of consent, reason, will, and choice.58 Frank Wilderson
summarizes this more expansive understanding of the afterlife of slavery: The imaginary of the state and civil society is
parasitic on the Middle Passage. Put another way, No slave no world.59 According to Wilderson, slavery
connotes an ontological (not experiential) status for blackness, one that is shaped not by exploitation and alienation, but by
accumulation and fungibility (the condition of being owned and traded.).60 In this way, slavery does not lay dormant in the past, but
became attached to the political ontology of blackness.61 What is most crucial for my project on the relationship between the
afterlife of slavery and neoliberalism is that as freedom navigated the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was not innocent and
it did not come alone. Something from the past held on to freedom as it maneuvered time and space.
Freedom was possessed by its opposite, a ghost wished away by liberal thought that did not so easily disappear. In the 1970s, when the market
produced the freedom of capital mobility, individuality, and choice, and the prison manufactured the freedom of safety and security, the spirit of
slavery dictated the movements and meanings of that freedom. Indeed, the spirit of slavery lives on in more ways than one can
imagine: in the shade of tree-lined suburban streets, in definitions and measures of value, in the
prosperity and health of some, and in the hail of the police as one walks down the street. It guides
bullets and bombs, makes visible what we see, and vanishes what is right in front of us. It is laced
in the cement and steel of the prison, solidified in dreams of liberation, and embedded in psychic
life. Although it is sometimes recognizable, it also lives on in what we do not know and cannot remember in the lives erased, expunged,
ended or that were simply never recorded to begin with. Whether it comes as spectacle or something one cannot see or feel, it is always there.
The spirit of slavery does more then meddle in the present; rather, it has intensified, seduced, enveloped, and animated contemporary formations
of power. Possession names the ways that the operations of corporate, state, individual, and institutional bodies are sometimes beyond the self-
possessed will of the living. Something else is also in control, something that may feel like nothing even as it compels movement, motivates
ideology, and drives the organization of life and death. In this way, slavery is not a ghost lingering in the corner of the roomrather, its spirit
animates the architecture of the house as a whole. The past does not merely haunt the present; it composes the present.
As Toni Morrison writes, All of it is now, it is always now.62
Our EXPLORATION of the Atlantic depths is the ONLY stasis point the STOP to
a suspect story of progress. The TIME and SPACE of the MIDDLE PASSAGE is a
different map entirely not the MAP of modernity, but a map of MOURNING of
BODIES sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic.

This EXPLORATION is not PROGRESS, it is not DISCOVERYbut rather a
HAUNTING. OCEANIC EXPLORATION materially embodies the only
ALTERNATIVE to the homogenization of TIME and CONTINUATION of
SLAVERY.
DeLoughery 10 (Elizabeth, Heavy Waters: Waste and Atlantic Modernity, PMLA, Volume 125, Number 3, May 2010, pp. 703712
(10))
---Status quo exploration is of progress and discovery thinking the ocean is a place of conquest; this
progressivist notion thinks of the ocean as a blank space to be taken over in order to further imperialism
---This way of thinking is bad; it disavows the drowning of slaves and sites of violence that have occurred
in the ocean; we need a politics of mourning and exploration that recognizes these ghosts, otherwise we
disavow the violence that has happened and we allow it to continue
A POEM THAT RENDERS THE SEA AS PEDAGOGICAL HISTORY, LORNA GOODISON'S ARCTIC, ANTARCTIC, ATLANTIC,
PACIFIC, INDIAN OCEAN depicts Caribbean schoolchildren learning the worlds waters rolled into a chant After shivering through the
cold Arctic and Antarctic, the class suffered [a] sea change in the destabilizing Atlantic, abandoning the
terrestrial stability of their benches to enter an ocean in which only their voices orient them in time and
space as they call out across / the currents of hot air In fathoming what Derek Walcott has called the sea [as] history, their
small bodies are borrowed / by the long drowned (Goodison). While colonial narratives of maritime
expansion have long depicted the ocean as blank space to be traversed, these students enter Atlantic stasis, a
place occupied by the wasted lives of Middle Passage modernity. This Atlantic is not aqua nullius, circumscribed and mapped
by the student oceanographer, but rather a place where the haunting of the past overtakes the present subject.
Edouard Glissant has described the Atlantic as a beginning for modernity, a space whose time is marked by... balls
and chains gone green (Poetics 6): a sign of submarine history and its material decay. Thus, Atlantic
modernity becomes legible through the sign of heavy water, an oceanic stasis that signals the dissolution of wasted
lives. After the poems irruptivc consonance of the bodies borrowed, the vowels lengthen to mimic a long drowned history of the Atlantic,
and the narrative is transformed. Reminding us that the Middle Passage abyss is a tautology that haunts ocean modernity
(Glissant, Poetics 6), the poem traps the students (and readers) in the violent corporeal history of the Atlantic.
Instead of moving on to the next ocean of the lesson, the class repeats the word Atlantic, as if wooden pegs / were forced between our lips;
Atlantic, as teachers / strap whipped the rows on. Only in the last two lines of the poem do we catch a glimpse of other oceans, trapped as we
are in learn[ing] this lesson: / Arctic, Antarctic, Atlantic, Pacific and then Indian. Goodisons poem foregrounds the process of naming global
space ( A is for Atlantic) and our epistemological limits in recording the immensity of ocean history, which, paradoxi cally, is
depicted in the condensed chrono tope of the belly of a slave ship. 1 This tension between the infinity of the seas
horizon and the contained hydrarchy of the ship (Line baugh and Rediker 143) is a constitutive trope of what I have elsewhere called the trans
oceanic imaginary (144). The poem suggests that rehearsing the list of the worlds oceans, as they have been partitioned and
mapped through European expansion, does not lead to geographic mastery over space. These melancholic
transatlantic crossings require a different epistemology of the ocean (Glis sant, Poetics 6). Constricted by the violence
of Atlantic history, trapped in an abyss that invokes the tortured sense of time of the postplantation Americas
(Glissant, Caribbean Discourse 144), the students cannot fathom a world ocean, one that, in nature, flows into the Pacific and
then Indian oceans. In learning what Gaston Bachelard has described as the metapoetics of . . . heavy wa ter (11, 56), Goodisons students
never emerge from the violence of the Atlantic to reach a pacific space. Here I adopt Bachelard to de scribe how
Atlantic inscriptions rupture the naturalizing flow of history, foregrounding a now - time that registers
violence against the wasted lives of modernity in the past and the present. As Zygmunt Bauman argues, moder nity is
constituted by the boundaries erected between the normative and the disposable, re sulting in an enormous
surveillance industry dedicated to policing the borders between citi zens and refugees. He characterizes our liquid
modernity as a civilization of excess, redun dancy, waste and waste disposal (97), one that produces human refugees as the
waste products of globalization (66). As Ill explain, this concept of patrolling heavy waters is vital to
interpreting historical and contemporary representations of Atlantic modernity waste, understood as a material residue of the
past as well as the lost lives of transoceanic subjects. Lorna Goodisons poem condenses many of the ideas circulating in
Caribbean cultural production that imagine the Atlantic as a cathected space of history and a sea [of] slavery (DAguiar
3). What David Scott terms the conscripted modernity of transatlantic slaves is distinct from the
cosmopolitanism associated with transoceanic travelers who represent the ocean as aqua nullius , a space of
transit in which the sea is barely present, subsumed by the telos of masculine conquest and adventure. Since the ocean is in
perpet ual movement and cannot be easily localized, representations of heavy water problematize movement and render
space into place as a way to memorialize histories of violence and to rupture notions of progress. These nar ratives merge
the human subject of the past and the present, establishing an intimacy Bachelard associates with the dissolving qual ities
of the ocean (6) and a process in which one might salvage the metaphysical waste of human history. Goodison
represents fathom ing the violence of Atlantic history as leading, not to a liberating mobility, but to the cessa tion
of movement across space, an immersion in the heavy waters of history. When the sea is rendered as
slavery, vio lence and mourning are symbolized by spa tial stasis. Aquatic stasis reflects temporal
depth and death; in fact, water is an element which remembers the dead (Bachelard 56). Moreover, human depth
finds its image in the density of water (12). Goodisons poem invokes the Sargasso Sea, famously inscribed by Jean Rhys as an oceanic morass,
an aporia between British and Caribbean ways of know ing and epistemologies of space. This is like the depiction of Middle
Passage stasis in John Hearnes novel The Sure Salvation , where time is distorted, tricked, frozen by violence as a slave
ship, trapped in the Sargasso, remains for much of the novel at the still centre of a huge stillness: pasted to the middle of a galvanized plate
that was the sea (47, 7). While maritime literature generally depicts movement across ocean space as a trope to generate narrative time, most
representations of Atlantic slav eryfrom Herman Melvilles Benito Cereno to Hea r nes Sure Salvation decouple
space from time. Narratives of ocean stasis provide a vital critique of progressive models of
capitalist time in which the movement of eighteenth - century ships on Atlantic slave routes created the mea surement of
longitude and, by extension, the homogenization of global time. Representa tions of trans oceanic slavery
offer an alter native modernity to counter the naturalized mobility associated with masculine fraternities working at
sea and with nineteenth - century maritime novels, which largely overlooked the greatest demographic body of transatlantic mi grants: African
slaves (DeLoughrey 5195)
Thus, we advocate that the United States federal government should endlessly
explore the oceans as a site of the Middle Passage. This statement doesnt define the
borders of our advocacywe affirm the resolution, not as a monument, but a
crosscurrent.
Our counter-monumental approach refuses the easy RESOLUTION of EITHER
right-wing redemption OR liberal sentimentality. Instead, we embrace polyvocal
relationships to history that animate the past without attempting closure.
Luciano 07 (Dana, Georgetown English Professor Dana Luciano. "Melville's Untimely History: 'Benito Cereno' as Counter-Monumental
Narrative Arizona Quarterly 60.3)
---Monumentalism closes of the possibility of rememberance by labelling the event as already
memorialized and no need for future memorials; counter-memorials allow us to revel in the past, creating
a space for interpretation while avoiding authoritarian demands for reverance
In its most severe form, however, this refusal to give space to public memorial does not fully liberate the present from the tyranny
of the past. Rather, it tends to disperse and atomize memory, making critical dialogue about the past impossible.
Anti-monumental refusal does not erase, but merely displaces monumental history; rather than desacralizing
the power of the past, it melancholically denies it. The counter-monument, however, deploys the critique of the
monument differently, resisting both monumental amnesia and anti-monumental melancholia. Described by James
Young as "brazen, painfully self-conscious memorial spaces . . . conceived to challenge the very premises of their being" (Texture of Memory
27), counter-monuments refuse to "tell people what they ought to think" about the past and thus to
relieve them of the burden of thinking it (Shalev-Gerz and Gerz, qtd. in Young, Memory's Edge 130).5 Instead of orienting the
viewer to an already-agreed upon understanding of the past and its significance, the counter-monument disorients its audience, disallowing
the self-consolidating security of standing outside a completed history tidily packaged for mass
consumption and emphasizing the observer's implication in an historical narrative that remains unresolved. In its
effort to restructure the terms of audience response, the counter-monument seeks forms that allow a certain liveness in memorial depictions of the
past. It supplants the symbolic appeal of the traditional monument, which severs present from past on the quotidian level in order to
unite them on the transcendent level of timeless truth, with the destabilizing effects of allegory, which links past
and present without collapsing them and disperses meaning across time rather than gathering it in a single transcendental instant. Recent
European Holocaust countermonuments, for example, project the working of memory against the passage of time, emphasizing displacement
and/or evanescence in order to highlight the damaged intersections of space and time sustained during and after the event.6 The narrativity of the
forms employed in these installations suggests that traumatic history is most effectively engaged not in the transcendence of a
single symbolic image but from moment to moment, as one struggles to move through the memorial site or watches its
appearance and disappearance.7 The turn to allegory in Holocaust counter-monuments reflects a desire to find ways of negotiating the
relationship between past and present that depend neither on linear emplotments of time nor on its collapse into
timelessness. Because allegory always stresses the temporality of the relationships it enfolds, referring insistently to a prior set of meanings
with which it can never fully coincide but without which it loses its significance, it has proven a powerful tool at moments in history when the
question of history itself engenders a temporal crisis. The use of allegory tends to arise, as Bainard Cowan has argued, whenever a people or
group finds itself unable either to accept the past or to abandon it. This experience of being "called in two opposing directions, by an allegiance to
its history and by an allegiance to truth" (Cowan 11) is expressed in allegory's gestures toward a referential relationship that is both
arbitrary and necessary. The tension between history and truth is explored in Walter Benjamin's writings on allegory, which highlight
the ways that allegory resists the symbol's flight from time: "Whereas in the symbol destruction is idealized and the transfigured face of nature is
fleetingly realized in the light of redemption, in allegory the observer is confronted with the fades hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial
landscape. Everything about history that . . . has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face-or rather in a death's head" (Origin
166). Allegory, in Benjamin's reading, is a "powerful" pleasure because it exposes the incompleteness of objects. The
functional instability of allegory's semiotic reveals history as a "script," as a set of meanings superimposed over the debris of
human existence; as in the ruin, in the allegory "history does not assume the form of the process of an eternal life so much as that of irresistible
decay" (Origin 177). It is, in particular, allegory's resistance to idealization and redemption that counter-monumentalism, in its desire to
engage with the way past traumas continue to shape the present, attempts to harness. The resultant emphasis on
death, decay and transience does not mean that its desire to engage history and truth are wholly nihilistic. Rather, the broken and
uncertain forms of counter-monumentalism express, while not a blithe optimism, something like a hesistant faith in the
possibility of the engaged critical dialogue it hopes its allegorical gestures will provoke. For if allegory is a mode in which, as
Benjamin notes, "any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else" (Origin 175), then it emphasizes the necessity of
making meaning of (rather than receiving meaning from) the counter-monument, a process that will, like allegory itself, necessarily be dispersed
across time. Counter-monumentalism resists the liberal/sentimental fantasy of the public as a boundless and timeless totality, merged in a
unanimity of automatic response. Instead, drawing on dispersed and disruptive allegorical forms to seek disparate, dissenting
reactions, it conceives of its audience as a space of interpretation: a space in which something like a critical
public might continue to inform, reform and reinvent itself and its relations without subsuming dissent to the demand
for reverence and unity emphasized in monumental history.
The politics of temporality our orientation to the past - are a PREREQUISITE to
a liberatory discussion. Our pedagogy must reclaim the invisible past instead of
orienting toward a hypothetical futurity that subordinates history.
Vasquez 2009 (Rolando, "Modernity coloniality and visibility: the politics of time." http://www.socresonline.org.uk/14/4/7.html,
Sociological Research Online 14.4 (2009): 7, 8/31/09)
---Chronology imposes the universal claim that the present is the only site of the real; this is a form of
oppression which forecloses remembrance of the past and ignores the ways in which the past orients itself
in the present
---The destruction of memory makes populations disposable and justifies genocide
This paper presents the problem of the mediation between modernity and coloniality; and it explores the usefulness of the question of time to
address this mediation. How can we think the simulation of modernity together with the oblivion of coloniality?
The text brings the critique of time to the centre of the modernity/ coloniality debate. It shows that chronology, chronological
narratives are at the heart of the modern/ colonial systems of oppression; and that the movements of
resistance against 'hegemonic globalization' are not only questioning the material structures of oppression, but also the
universality of the modern idea of time. It is an invitation to think about the politics of time that are at play in modernity/ coloniality.
Here, the modernity/ coloniality tandem is seen as the institution of a politics of time that is geared towards the
production of specific economic and political practices oriented to sever the oppressed from their past,
their memory. The ensuing temporal discrimination makes invisible all that does not belong to modern
temporality. Under this light, it is possible to see how the practices of resistance to the modernity/ coloniality project embody a
different politics of time, one that rescues memory as a site of struggle, one that involves the possibility of
inhabiting and rescuing the past. These practices of resistance are thus seen as fights against temporal
discrimination: fights against invisibility. By addressing the imposition of modern time we can better
understand the widespread injustice and violence of modernity/ coloniality. Furthermore, the question of time can help us to
bridge the gap between the simulacra of modernity and the oblivion of coloniality. This paper responds to the need of bringing the
critique of time to the centre of the modernity/ coloniality debate. It shows that chronology, chronological
narratives are at the heart of the modern/ colonial systems of oppression; and that the movements of resistance
against 'hegemonic globalization' are not only questioning the material structures of oppression, but also the universality
of the modern idea of time. In other words, this paper is an invitation to think about the politics of time that are at play in the struggles against
oppression. 1.2 Here, the modernity/ coloniality tandem is seen as the institution of a politics of time that is not only geared towards the
control of historical narratives (Chakrabarty, Fanon, Mignolo), but also towards the production of specific economic and political practices
oriented to sever the oppressed from their past, their memory. It is a politics that promotes modern temporality as a strategy of domination. It
imposes the universal claim that the present is the only site of the real, while dismissing the past as
archaic. The past is represented as a fixed entity with only documentary value. This analysis will show that the
imposition of modern time is coeval to the widespread injustice and violence of modernity/ coloniality. The
question of time is used to address the open question of the mediation between the illusion of modernity and the oblivion of coloniality. This text
exemplifies how the practices of resistance to the modernity/ coloniality project embody a different politics of time, one that rescues memory as a
site of struggle, one that involves the possibility of inhabiting and rescuing the past. 1.3 In an effort to break with the grammars of argumentation
that reproduce the modern notion of time, the text moves in a fragmented way. It presents a series of quotations in order to illuminate rather than
explain. This method aims to open images of thought instead of building up a single line of argumentation. Oblivion, invisibility and the politics
of time 2.1 'We are without face, without word, without voice'[1]. A Zapatista said that this is the reason for wearing the balaclava. The Zapatista
balaclava has turned oblivion into a sign of rebellion. Their fight can be seen as a fight for visibility. With these words we want to enquire how
oblivion has been a constitutive part of modernity's politics of time. 2.2 The forms of oppression that
characterize modernity or more precisely, modernity/ coloniality cannot be sufficiently understood only through its material
process without taking into account oblivion, invisibility. Modern systems of domination are not just about material exploitation;
they are also about a politics of time that produces the other by rendering it invisible, relegating the other to oblivion.
There is an intimate connection between oblivion and invisibility. The destruction of memory, as a result of the modern politics of
time produces invisibility. In turn, invisibility is tantamount to de-politicization. In this context it is possible to say
that the struggles for social justice are struggles for visibility. The oppressed can succeed in their fight against invisibility by bringing the claims
for justice into the light of the public, and thus becoming political[2]. 2.3 The use of the term 'visibility' signals the close relation that
there is between the material means of oppression and epistemic discrimination, violence. I propose to approach the
modernity/ coloniality compound and its social production of oblivion[3] through the question of time. Through the critique of modern time we
see how modernity and hence coloniality means the imposition of a time that dismisses the past, turns the future into the
teleology of progress and holds the present to be the only site of the real. Under the light of the critique of time, the
modernity/coloniality compound shows its double face. On the one hand we have the hegemony over visibility in the spectacle of modernity, the
phantasmagoria of modernity, and on the other, we have coloniality's strategies of invisibility, which impose oblivion and silence
and erase the past as a site of experience. The condition of possibility of these strategies over the visible,
the monopoly of the sense of the real, is grounded on the modern notion of time and constitutes under this
perspective the politics of time of the modernity/ coloniality compound. Modernity, coloniality and the question of their mediation 2.4 The
growing literature around the modernity/ coloniality research agenda[4] teaches us that we cannot speak of modernity without speaking of
coloniality. We cannot see the ideas of progress, modernization, universality, and the like, without thinking of exploitation, violence, and
segregation. The scholars of the modernity/ coloniality research program have made large efforts to re-write the history of modernity so that
modernity is only seen in and through its relation with coloniality. 'The "discovery" of America and the genocide of Indians
and African slaves are the very foundations of "modernity' more so than the French and Industrial Revolutions. Better yet,
they constitute the darker and hidden face of modernity, 'coloniality'' (Mignolo, 2005, p. xiii). 2.5 There is still a large effort
that is needed to solve the theoretical problem that emerges from the hiatus that separates the narratives of modernity from those of the
postcolonial perspective. In other words, there is a need to elucidate the mediation between the 'progress of modernity' and the 'violence of
coloniality'. 2.6 Coloniality is not a derivative or an unintended side effect of modernity, it is coeval and thus constitutive of
modernity. Coloniality is referred to as the dark-side, the under-side of modernity. We then can speak of the modernity/ coloniality
tandem to address the current social problems. 'Imperial globality has its underside in what could be called global coloniality, meaning by this
the heightened marginalisation and suppression of the knowledge and culture of subaltern groups' (Escobar, 2004, p. 207). 2.7 Let us stop for a
moment and look at how the modernity/ coloniality tandem appears in two illustrations of Mexico City published in the 1930 edition of the
National Geographic in an article called North America's Oldest Metropolis. 'A tattered old Indian came shuffling up to sell me a tiny terra-cota
mask. "Who made it?" I asked. ' La Gente Olvidada' (The Forgotten People)" (Simpich, 1930, p. 81). 2.8 Further down the reporter presents us
with another image: 'On billboards, in street cars, in news papers, and on theatre curtains the well-known illustrations for American made
toothpaste, typewriters, motor cars, and toilet soaps give gaudy welcome to visiting Yankees, and bring that sense of security which comes from
contact with familiar things in far places' (Simpich, 1930, p. 83). 2.9 For us the coupling of these images signals the same pressing question,
namely that of the mediation between modernity and coloniality. How can we mediate between the 'forgotten people' and the 'billboards' full with
'American' brands? How can we make sense of the invisibility of the people and the visibility of the commodity? Is this not an essential question
that arises in the midst of the modernity/ coloniality tandem? 2.10 Is it not that the phantasmagoria of modernity, unveiled by critical
thinkers such as Walter Benjamin (1999), Guy Debord (1994), Jean Baudrillard (1983) among others, is part and parcel of the economy of
oblivion that hides the 'colonial wound', that assures the continued silencing of oppression[5]? 2.11 If from the perspective of the critique of time,
modernity is seen as the age that is geared towards an unattainable future, we could venture to say that coloniality signals the movement of the
rejection of the past as a site of experience. 2.12 A useful mediation between modernity and coloniality can be found in the notion of a
modern politics of times that expresses itself in a threefold hegemony: a) the rejection of the past, b) the
future-oriented mentality and c) the objectivity of the present. a) Coloniality comes to view as a set of practices and
technologies of oblivion, of temporal discrimination that have contributed to making 'the other' invisible. b)
Modernity is seen as a race towards an unattainable future, the race of the 'phantasmagoria of modernity'. c) The
objectivity of modernity affirms the history of western metaphysics, the ontology of presence, it affirms the
present as the only site of the real. The critique of time 2.13 The critique of modern time shows that modernity is the time
that rejects the past, affirms the present as the site of the real, and construes the future in the semblance of a teleology.
Core ideas of modernity, such as progress, history, universality, individuality they all correspond to this conception of
time. 2.14 In modernity, the present is affirmed as the site of the real, it is the site of objectivity, it designates the space of
power. Michel de Certeau (1988) shows how modern domination is exercised through appropriating and defining its
'proper place', thus the enterprises of discovery, of map making, the scriptural economy of science, the modern city can all be read as
strategies to define and appropriate space. Modernity can hence be characterized as the age that designates space as
reality, and space is the site of power. What is important for our analysis is to realize that in modernity space coincides with
presence, it is the expression of the present. The present and presence come together in the modern notion of time to
constitute the site of the real[6]. 2.15 Benjamin's thinking of the 'empty present' of modernity helps us bring further this reflection as
it shows that the affirmation of the present as the site of the real cannot be separated from the cult of the new
and the illusion of the commodity. Modernity, Benjamin says, is the time haunted by its phantasmagorias. The modern
objectivity of the present is wedded with the simulation of the future. The modern hegemony over visibility is a
hegemony over the illusions of an objective present and a utopian future. 2.16 On the other hand,
coloniality comes to light, as the movement of oblivion, of the rejection of the past. It is the expression of a time that
praises the present as the site of the real and the future as the horizon of expectation and the ultimate source of
meaning. This notion of the future corresponds to the one-dimensional mind and its rational utopias. The violence of modernity and
coloniality has constantly been justified in the name of these rational utopias. The chronology of
historical necessity underlies the ideologies from right and left that flourished in the twentieth century and that
systematically suppress the other, fostering the devaluation of political alternatives, and of alternative
narratives. 'Historical determinism has been a costly and bloodstained fantasy' [7](Paz, 1991, p. 28). Practices of oblivion and
temporal discrimination 2.17 It is precisely because the suffering belongs to the past that it is rejected as non-objective,
non-valuable. The suffering of the oppressed is erased. Memory is historicized, the age of museums is the age of
institutions that have reduced the past into a proper place, the past has been confined / objectified within the grips of history as institution,
as a discipline. The past is confined to the objectivity of the present. History ceases to be a relation to the past, to acquire the
semblance of a museum. 'From the beginning of the sixteenth century onward, the histories and languages of Indian communities "become
historical" at the point where they lost their own history' (Mignolo, 2005, p. 26). The making of the past into an object of knowledge, 'the proper
place' of history as a discipline, means negation of the past as an open realm of experience. This corresponds to the
temporal hierarchy imposed by the modern notion of time and the hegemonic notion of history. '[F]or nineteenth-
century intellectuals, statesmen, and politicians, "modernity" was cast in terms of civilization and progress' (Mignolo, 2005, p. 70). And '[t]he
present was described as modern and civilized; the past as traditional and barbarian' (Mignolo, 2005). The terms barbarian and then
primitive, traditional, backward become key words in the vocabulary of discrimination and the production of otherness.
Societies were placed 'in an imaginary chronological line going from nature to culture, from barbarism to civilization
following a progressive destination toward some point of arrival' (Mignolo, 2005). Modern Europe was established as the present, the past was
the other (Mignolo, 2005). This type of temporal discrimination is clearly shown in the Zapatistas' claims. 'We are not your past, but your
contemporaries' this is what a group of Zapatista women said to a group of European feminists that came to help them 'liberate'[8] themselves.
The analysis of Walter Mignolo shows how modernity/ coloniality came with the instauration of temporal
discrimination. 'By the eighteenth century, when "time" came into the picture and the colonial difference was redefined, "barbarians" were
translated into "primitives" and located in time rather than in space. "Primitives" were in the lower scale of a chronological order driving toward
"civilization"' (Mignolo, 2005, pXX). 2.18 Next to the reduction of the past by the 'scriptural machine' (de Certeau 1988) of the historian and the
social scientist, and the forms of temporal discrimination prevailing in modern narratives, there have been other practices, politics of time,
oriented to sever the past from the realm of experience, strategies of erasure. Enormous resources and political capital have been
invested in the destruction of the links with the past. In the Mexican Codex of Tlaxcala there is an image of Franciscan monks burning
the cloths, the manuscripts, burning the gods (Figure 1). This pictorial example is just a token of the endless history of a
politics of time oriented towards the destruction of memory. 2.19 In 1894 during the attack of the Dutch in Indonesia,
'When the colonial soldiers conquered the Lombok kingdom a lot of cultural artefacts were ransacked .... when soldiers need[ed] something to
warm-up their bodies .... a shelf of "old" books from [the] king's library [were] burnt' (Subangun, 2008, p. 2) .... During the British colony in India
the colonial rulers organized bonfires to burn the traditional cloths[9]. In 1614 The Archbishop of Lima ordered the burning of the quenas and all
other musical instrument from the indigenous people. ... In 1562 Fray Diego de Landa burnt all the Maya books, burning eight centuries of
knowledge. In 1888 in Rio de Janeiro, the emperor Pedro II burnt the documents narrating three hundred Years of slavery in Brazil (Galeano,
2009, pp. 76-77)[10]. 2.20 "Colonialism is not simply content to impose its rule upon the present and the future of a dominated country.
By a kind of perverse logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it" (Fanon in
Mignolo, 2005, p. 84)[11]. These practices distinguish coloniality by a politics of time, driven to erasure. The objects, the instruments, the written
knowledge were systematically turned into ashes. This shows an economy of destruction that is not reducible to be a
side effect or a necessity of economic exploitation. What distinguishes these acts of destruction of the past from pre-modern acts of
cultural destruction is that these acts came together with the imposition of modern temporality. Memory as resistance 2.21 However the
memory of suffering cannot be burnt down, it cannot be totally erased by these practices. This highlights the value of the oral
tradition as a strategy of resistance in many rebellious movements. The suffering of the past remains. '[N]othing that has ever happened should be
regarded as lost to history' (Benjamin, 2003, p. 390). 2.22 The consciousness of the suffering of the previous
generations is the source of strength for a politics of time of liberation. The liberation from the
modern politics of time is a fight for 'a memory that looks for the future against western oblivion'[12]. The rescue of
memory is not a conservative move, the possibility to experience the past is not essentialist, but rebellious. 'I am sorry, I object the term
"nostalgia". Nostalgia is the waltdisneyization of the past. It is very different from the memory that doesn't idealize nor disguise' (Pacheco,
2009)[13]. The Mexican poet's warning shows that we should not turn memory into a utopia; if we turn memory into utopia it is
not memory anymore. Memory is the past as a site of experience it is a rebellion against the future oriented reason of
modernity, against the reason that idealizes and disguises. Memory stands up against the rational utopias that
have brought oblivion and violence. 2.23 As Walter Benjamin says the strength of rebellion, the spirit of sacrifice is
nourished 'by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than by the ideal of liberated grandchildren'
(Benjamin, 2003, p. 394). 2.24 The coming into visibility of the movements of resistance speaks of their capacity to break with
the continuity of the processes of oppression, a continuity where chronology is synonymous of oblivion. They break away from
the modern empty time that has been imposed upon them. 'The Mexican revolution of 1910, says Octavio Paz, was a popular
upheaval that brought to light what was hidden. That is why it is not just a revolution but a revelation' (Paz, 1991, p. 54)[14]. The event clashes
with the linear history of modernity and brings to visibility what was up until then marginalized out of the light of the public. Orfeo 'goes to
rescue, not to conquer: he has to receive, not to posses' (Mujica, 2004, p. 25)[15]. 2.25 The postcolonial critique of modern time, seeks to
transform our relation to time. The critical thinker of time does not want to conquer time, but rather she seeks to rescue, to
salvage our relation to time, to the past, to memory, to history; she must receive, not possess. The manner of appropriation of
the historian is replaced by a more humble reception, by listening, by experiencing time. We can then realize that the linear history of
modernity, its universal chronology is continually being called into question by a history based on difference, where
the present is constantly interspersed by the past. 'The silences and absences of history are speaking their presence' (Mignolo, 2005, p. 157).
Conclusion 3.1 Let us note that the critique of time, by recognizing the violence of the simulation of modernity
next to the violence of oblivion, is able to thematize the problem of those that are in the abyss, in-between the
paradigms of the subaltern subject and the modern subject. By revealing the connection between modernity and coloniality, the critique of
time brings to light all those who live in modernity's spaces of exclusion, no longer with an indigenous language,
name or identity, those who live in the lost 'cities of modernity' and which remain largely unseen by the literature that presents
modernity/coloniality as an unmediated dichotomy. 3.2 So far we know that modernity cannot be thought without coloniality, that the spread of
the ideas of progress and universality cannot be sundered from the spread of marginality and
violence. Let this text serve as an initial provocation to explore the hiatus that divides modernity and coloniality by raising the question of
their mediation. How can we think a modernity of simulacra that holds hegemony over the visible next to a coloniality of violence, oblivion and
invisibility? How can we think together simulation and oblivion? Our proposal is to explore this mediation through the question of time, by
taking seriously the politics of time that are at play next to the economic and political systems of exploitation. We
suggest, for instance, looking at the illusion of the future in the practices of commodity consumption, at the notion of the
present as being the site of the real in the institutional practices of power over places and knowledges and at the
oblivion of the past in the practices of destruction of memory. Simulation and oblivion can be thought
together when we see the politics of time that is at play in modernity/ coloniality.
OUR ocean exploration NECESSARILY exceeds language we have the sail
BEYOND THE MAP only a history IRREDUCIBLE to definition can honor the
memory of the NAMELESS with a JUSTICE that is yet to come
Chambers 10 (lain, Maritime Criticism and Theoretical Shipwrecks, PMLA, Volume 125, Number 3, May 2010, pp. 678684, 7)
---The site of the sea provides a freedom through a radical piracy that changes the idea of history we take
for granted
---We do not research the past; the past researches us; time is fluid like the oceans, we must demand an
impossible justice in the world of colonialism
This mask, the screen of the sea, like the cinema screen theorized by Gilles Deleuze, proposes the dehumanization of images. As Claire
Colebrook glosses Deleuze, the visual is freed from the subject and released to yield its autonomous powers (43). We
are brought into the presence of a contingent, temporal re lation and into the multiplicity of the present,
which is irreducible to its representation. This proposes the Deleuzian prospect of a more radical Elsewhere, outside
homogeneous space and time (17). Between perception and a re sponse emerges a zone of feeling, a resonance, a vibration, a powerful affect
that inaugurates the passionate geography evoked in Giuliana Bru nos atlas of emotion. Here time exists beyond the linguistic
act of nomination, be yond the subject that produces the image. This is why for Deleuzeand here we can return to the
immediacy of Isaac Juliens workart is not the expression of humanity, or of an underlying unity, but is rather the release of imagination from
its human and functional home. Impossible, we might say, and yet a necessary threshold, which a nonrepresen tational and affective art seeks
endlessly to cross. The veracity of the image is now to be located elsewhere: it is no longer a simple sup portrealism, mimesisfor narration
but is rather itself the narrating force. There are not images of life but images as life, a life already imagined, activated, and sustained in the im
age. There is not first the thought and then the image. The image itself is a modality of think ing. It does not represent, but rather proposes,
thought. This is the potential dynamite that resides in the image: it both marks and ex plodes time. This is the unhomely insistence of the artwork,
its critical cut, and its inter ruption. In the artwork, in the movement and migration of language, denomination is sun
dered from domination as it races on, along an unsuspected critical path through the folds of a depossessed
modernity. So we have traveled with the challenge of the sea to the critical cut of the artwork: both evoke an
interruption in and potential exit from a humanism that seeks to secure the world of the subject. The
perspective that ar rives from the heterotopic site of the sea and from the artistic interval in representational reason
provides the freedom for a critical pi racy that raids a selfassured, stable thinking grounded in the
provincial immediacies of a unique locale and language. This is to suggest an idea of history, indebted to the critical
oeu vre of Walter Benjamin, in which knowledge, sustained by a search for new beginnings, proposes history not from a stable point but
through a movement in which historians, no longer the source of knowledge, emerge as subjects who can never
fully command or comprehend their language. Historians, as Georges DidiHuberman argues, are set to float, called
on to navigate languages, currents, and conditions not of their making (96). From this Benjaminian revaluation of the historical
vision elaborated in Theses on the Philosophy of History, there emerges the posthumanist confirmation that what we see commences not from
the eye but from the external light of the world that strikes it. Similiarly, we do not research the past; the past researches
us (DidiHuberman 97). This is to engage with a history composed of in tervals, irruptions, and interruptions. It is
a history that speaks of the past, of oblivion, while seeking to open the doors of justice on the future. This is a history delineated in the
explosive explication of time rather than in the mental unity of an isolated intellect. All of which is to suggest a modernity
that mi grates, susceptible to unlicensed winds and currents: a modernity that seeds a discon tinuous history, always out of
joint with the synthesis required of an epoch that seeks only the selfconfirmation of its will. At Port Bou, in Spain, is a window on the sea. It is a
memorial to Walter Benjamin, who is buried there, by the Israeli artist Dani K a r a v a n , e n t i t l e d Passages Walter Benjamin (199094).
Two steel walls, rusted red by the sea, plunge downward toward the rocks and blue of the Mediterranean. A glass panel suspended between the
walls intersects our gaze; on it is inscribed a modified citation from Theses on the Philosophy of History: Schwe rer ist es, das Gedchtnis der
Namen losen zu ehren als das Berhmten. Dem Ge dcht nis der Namenlosen ist die historische Kon struk tion geweiht (It is more
arduous to honor the memory of the nameless than that of the renowned. Historical construction is devoted to
the memory of the nameless [my trans.]). A window on the sea, open to the storm blowing in from oblivion,
sustains an aperture on a justice that has yet to come.
2AC
Case
AT: Indigenous
Links of omission are absurd
Richard Rorty, Professor of Comparative Literature @ Stanford, 2002, Peace Review 14(2)
I have no quarrel with Cornell's and pivak's claim that "what is missing in a literary text or historical narrative leaves its mark through the traces of its expulsion." For
that seems simpl ty o say that any text will presuppose the existence of people, things, and institutions that it hardly mentions. So the
readers of a literary text will always be able to ask themselves questions such as: "Who prepared the sumptuous dinner the
lovers enjoyed?" "How did they get the money to afford that meal?" The reader of a historical narrative will always be able to
wonder about where the money to finance the war came from and about who got to decide whether the war would take place. "Expulsion," however, seems too
pejorative a term for the fact that no text can answer all possible questions about its own background and its own
presuppositions. Consider Captain Birch, the agent of the East Indian Company charged with persuading the Rani of Sirmur not to commit suicide.
Spivak is not exactly "expelling" Captain Birch from her narrative by zeroing in on the Rani, even though she does not try to
find out much about Birch's early days as a subaltern, nor about the feelings of pride or shame or exasperation he may have experienced in the course of his
conversations with the Rani. In the case of Birch, Spivak does not try to "gently blow precarious ashes into their ghostly shape," nor does she speculate about the
possible sublimity of his career. Nor should she. Spivak has her own fish to fry and her own witness to bear just as Kipling had his when he spun
tales of the humiliations to which newly arrived subalterns were subjected in the regimental messes of the Raj. So do all authors of literary texts
and historical narratives, and such texts and narratives should not always be read as disingenuous
exercises in repression. They should be read as one version of a story that could have been told, and
should be told, in many other ways.
State PIC
2AC AT: State PIC
No performance of 1ac- reject them cause they footnote not temporality that
means they cant solve
Kaplan 07 (Sara Clarke, Assistant Professor in the Ethnic Studies Department at University of California, San Diego Souls at the
Crossroads, Africans on the Water: The Politics of Diasporic Memory Callaloo Volume 30 Number 2 (Spring 2007) pg 512) NIJ
If, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore has argued, racism can be understood as the state-sanctioned and/or extra-legal
production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death, in distinct yet
densely interconnected political geographies (261), then African chattel slaverys hyperexploitation of
labor, multi-scalar expropriation and deformation of placeof bodies, homes, communities, and national
statusand mass administration of social and physical death to captive Africans and their enslaved
descendents can only be understood as a three-century practice of genocide.5 Any project that envisions
black liberation, therefore, must first come to terms with the significance of this history of genocide for future political
desire and action. In other words, the political and psychic stakes of how to mourn a genocide remain high
(Lockhurst 244). In what follows, I argue that when read in conjunction with historical and contemporary theories of melancholia,
Daughters provides a provocative model for mourning the conjoined genocide of African chattel slavery and the Middle
Passageone that recognizes that the work of mourning, for genocide, cannot be allowed to end (244). The
films deployment of diverse symbols, practices, and philosophies of the diasporic religions of the black Americas engenders an
ethical hesitation between the possible and the impossible, the living and the dead, Africa and its
displaced peoples, in which a radically different space and time of diaspora are produced (244). In this space and time of
diaspora, I suggest, both past griefs and current political desires can be articulated through a practice that I
term diasporic melancholia.
2AC Contradictions Bad
The affirmative presents a discourse of white supremacy and then presents a
different methodology to break away from it. It is these CONTRADICTIONS which
give racist ideology its FLEXIBILITY and power.
Nakayama & Krizek 95 Asst Prof, Dept of Communication @ Arizona State Univ. Asst Prof, Dept
of Communication @ St. Louis Univ. 1995 Thomas K. -& Robert L.-; WHITENESS: A Strategic
Rhetoric; QUATERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH 81, 291-309
Whether or not one discursively positions oneself as white, there is little room for maneuvering out of
the power relations imbedded in whiteness. Whiteness, stated or unstated, in any of its various forms,
leaves one invoking the historically constituted and systematically exercised power relations. This creates
an enormous problem for those in the center who do not want to reinforce the hegemonic position of the
center and for those elsewhere who would challenge this assemblage and its influence on their lives. As
Foucault observed, discursive formations are replete with contradictions. In the assemblage of whiteness,
we find that these contradictions are an important element in the construction of whiteness, as it is by
these contradictions that whiteness is able to maneuver through and around challenges to its space. The
dynamic element of whiteness is a crucial aspect of the persuasive power of this strategic rhetoric. It
garners its representational power through its ability to be many things at once, to be universal and
particular, to be a source of identity and difference. The discourses of nationality, for example, run
counter to those of scientific classification; yet the emergence of a racialized nation has been marked out
time and again in the U.S. and elsewhere. The discourses that define whiteness through its historical
relationships to Europe further problematize these discursive movements. Whiteness eludes essentialism
through this multiplicity and dynamism, while at the same moment containing within it the discourses of
essentialism that classify it scientifically or define it negatively. Our point here is not that there are
contradictions within this discursive assemblage. Rather our principal thesis is that these contradictions
are central to the dynamic lines of power that resecure the strategic, not tactical space of whiteness,
making it all the more necessary to map whiteness. Whiteness is complex and problematic; yet in
communication interactions we are expected to understand what it means when someone says white or
American or even All-American. It is perhaps when whites use whiteness in communicating with
other whites that the lines of power are particularly occluded, yet resilient as ever. This also has
significant implications for communication researchers.
Endless PIC
2ACEndless CP
Doomsday frame allows privilege to side-step issues of racism and oppression
people of color have lost their culture for centuries and live in constant war every
day
Barbara Omolade 1984 Calvin College first dean of multicultural affairs [Women of Color and the Nuclear Holocaust, Womens Studies Quarterly vol.
12, No. 2]
To raise these issues effectively, the movement for nuclear disarmament must overcome its reluctance to
speak in terms of power, of institutional racism and imperialist military terror. The issues of nuclear
disarmament and peace have been mystified because they have been placed within a doomsday frame
which separates these issues from other ones, saying. "How can we talk about struggles against racism,
poverty, and exploitation when there will be no world after they drop the bombs?" The struggle for peace cannot
be separated from, nor considered more sacrosanct than, other struggles concerned with human life and change In April. 1979. the US Aims
Control and Disarmament Agency released a report on the effects of nuclear war that concludes that, in a
general nuclear war between the United States and The Soviet Union. 25 to 100 million people would be
killed. This is approximately the same number of African people who died between 1492 and 1890 as a
result of the African slave trade to the New World. The same federal report also comments on the destruction of urban housing that would
cause massive shortages after a nuclear war. as well as on the crops that would be lost, causing massive food shortages Of course, for people of color the world over,
starvation is already a common problem, when, for example, a nation's crops are grown for export rather than to feed its own people And the housing of people of
color throughout the world's urban areas are already blighted and inhumane, families live in shacks, shanty towns, or on the streets, even in the urban areas of North
America, the poor may live without heat or running water. For people of color, the world as we knew it ended centuries ago.
Our world. with its Own languages, customs and ways, ended And we are only now beginning to see with
increasing clarity that our task is to reclaim that world, struggle for It, and rebuild it in our own image The
"death culture" we live in has convinced many to be more concerned with death than with life. more
willing to demonstrate for "survival at any cost" than to struggle for liberty and peace with dignity
Nuclear disarmament becomes a safe issue when it is not linked to the daily and historic issues of racism,
to the ways in which people of color continue to be murdered Acts of war, nuclear holocausts, and
genocide have already been declared on our jobs, our housing, our schools, our families, and our lands. As
women of color, we are warriors, not pacifists We must fight as a people on all fronts, or we will continue to die as a people. We have fought in people's wars in
China, in Cuba. In Guinea-Bissau, and in such struggles as the civil rights movement. The women's movement, and in countless daily encounters with landlords,
welfare departments, and schools. These struggles are not abstractions, but The only means by which we have gained the ability to eat and to provide for the future of
our people
2AC Apoc Rhetoric
Their apocalyptic rhetoric makes war inevitable
Peter Coviello, Assistant professor of English at Bowdoin College, 2k Apocalypse From Now On
Perhaps. But to claim that American culture is at present decisively postnuclear is not to say that the world we inhabit is in any way post-apocalyptic. Apocalypse, as I
began by saying, changed it did not go away. And here I want to hazard my second assertion: if, in the nuclear age of yesteryear, apocalypse signified an event
threatening everyone and everything with (in Jacques Derridas suitably menacing phrase) remainderless and a-symbolic destruction, then in the postnuclear world
apocalypse is an affair whose parameters are definitively local. In shape and in substance, apocalypse is defined now by the affliction it brings somewhere else, always
to an other people whose very presence might then be written as a kind of dangerous contagion, threatening the safety and prosperity of a cherished general
population. This fact seems to me to stand behind Susan Sontags incisive observation, from 1989, that, Apocalypse is now a long running serial: not Apocalypse
Now but Apocalypse from Now On. The decisive point here in the perpetuation of the threat of apocalypse (the point Sontag goes on, at length, to miss) is that
the apocalypse is ever present because, as an element in a vast economy of power, it is ever useful. That is,
though the perpetual threat of destruction through the constant reproduction of the figure of the apocalypse the agencies of power
ensure their authority to act on and through the bodies of a particular population. No one turns this point more
persuasively than Michel Foucault, who in the final chapter of his first volume of The History of Sexuality addresses himself to the problem of a power that
is less repressive than productive, less life-threatening than, in his words, life-administering. Power, he contends, exerts a positive
influence on life [and] endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise
controls and comprehensive regulations. In his brief comments on what he calls the atomic situation, however, Foucault insists as well that
the productiveness of modern power must not be mistaken for a uniform repudiation of violent or even
lethal means. For as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, agencies of modern power
presume to act on the behalf of the existence of everyone. Whatsoever might be construed as a threat to
life and survival in this way serves to authorize any expression of force, no matter how invasive, or,
indeed, potentially annihilating. If genocide is indeed the dream of modern power, Foucault writes, this is not
because of a recent return to the ancient right to kill it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the
species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population. For a state that would arm itself not with the
power to kill its population, but with a more comprehensive power over the patters and functioning of its collective life, the threat of an
apocalyptic demise, nuclear or otherwise, seems a civic initiative that can scarcely be done without.
Framework
2AC C/I Discussion of Rez
Resolved is to reduce through mental analysis
Websters Revised Unabridged Dictionary
(http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/resolved?s=ts)
to reduce by mental analysis (often followed by into).
Government is the people
Jeff Oakes, Freelance writer who has published 6 books, No Date What IS the Intent of the
Constitution? http://criminaljusticelaw.us/issues/gun-control/chapter-4-intent-constitution/
The very first principle forms the foundation for the new government, namely a Representative Democracy with the words, WE the
People. We hear this so often that we tend to forget the basic principle here is that this nation, the government, is the people
not the representatives in Congress, nor the President, nor the Supreme Court. Our government is WE,
so if we have a problem with our government, we have a problem with ourselves. If we do not like the job done by those we send to represent us,
we can fire them. Strangely enough, many claim to not be pleased, yet the same folks continually get elected for the most part, thus negating that
claim. But this is a principle we really need to take to heartWE are the Government. Not them.
Exploration of means discussing and thinking about
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, xx-xx-1978**, LDOCE, **first published 1978, exploration,
http://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/exploration
exploration of the exploration of space when you try to find out more about something by discussing it,
thinking about it etc exploration into/of
Affirming the rez as a metaphor is good
Dr. Reid-Brinkley, 2008[Shanara Rose, Professor of African American Studies at Pittsburg University, The Harsh Realities of Acting
Black: How African America Policy Debaters Negotiate Representation Through Racial Performance And Style, C.A.]
Louisvilles strategy is to engage the methods of debate practice. Thus, they argue that the resolution
should serve as a metaphor, as one alternative to the strict interpretation of the resolution that leads to a hyper focus on policy considerations. The
metaphorical interpretation changes the framework for the debate. The debate is taken out of the cost-benefit analysis framework
where teams argue over the relative merits of a policy as if it were actually going to be enacted in legislation after the debate. The Louisville debaters
argue that a metaphorical interpretation of the resolution allows debaters to shift their focus to issues
which they have the agency to change. In the following excerpt, Jones explains the metaphor: But you
see, Im really just trying to change the halls of Congress, that meets on the capitol hill of debate
tournament tabrooms where pieces of legislation or ballots signed by judges enact the policies of our
community. My words right here, right now cant change the state, but they can change the state of
debate. The University of Louisville enacts a full withdrawal from the traditional norms and procedures of this debate activity. Because t his institution, like every
other institution in society, has also grown from the roots of racism. Seemingly neutral practices and policies have exclusionary effects on different groups for
different reasons. These practices have a long and perpetuating history.
2AC Framework Offense
Their claims of [predictability, limits and topic education] all are encapsulated into
a broader spectrum of Eurocentricism diversity in curriculum is vital
Michael Baker, University of Rochester, 2008, Eurocentrism and the Modern/Colonial Curriculum:
Towards a Post-Eurocentric Math & Science Education A Critical Interpretive Review,
https://www.academia.edu/1517810/Towards_a_Post-Eurocentric_Math_and_Science_Education_--
_A_Critical_Interpretive_Review
This essay reviews literature in science and mathematics education that assumes the possibilities for knowing the realities of the
world through the official curriculum are reductively maintained within a Eurocentric cultural
complex (Carnoy, 1974; Swartz, 1992;Willinsky, 1998). Eurocentrism will be described as the epistemic
framework of colonial modernity, a framework through which western knowledge enabled and
legitimated the global imposition of one particular conception of the world over all others. Eurocentrism is
an ethnocentric projection onto the world that expresses the ways the west and thewesternized have learned to conceive and perceive the world.
At the center of this ethnocentric projection are the control of knowledge and the maintenance of
the conditions of epistemic dependency (Mignolo, 2000a). Every conception of the world involves
epistemological and ontological presuppositions interrelated with particular (historical and
cultural) ways of knowing and being. All forms of knowledge uphold practices and constitute
subjects (Santos, 2007a).What counts as knowledge and what it means to be human are profoundly
interrelated(Santos, 2006). The knowledge that counts in the modern school curriculum, fromkindergarten to graduate school,
is largely constructed and contained within an epistemic framework that is constitutive of the
monocultural worldview and ideological project of western modernity (Meyer, Kamens & Benavot, 1992;
Wallerstein, 1997, 2006; Lander,2002; Kanu, 2006; Kincheloe, 2008; Battiste, 2008). The monocultural worldview andethos of
western civilization are based in part upon structures of knowledge and an epistemic framework elaborated and
maintained within a structure of power/knowledge relations involved in five hundred years of European
imperial/colonial domination(Quijano, 1999, p. 47). If our increasingly interconnected and interdependent
world is also to become more and not less democratic, schools and teachers must learn to incorporate
theworldwide diversity of knowledges and ways of being (multiple epistemologies and ontologies)
occluded by the hegemony of Eurocentrism. Academic knowledge andunderstanding should be complemented with
learning from those who are living in andthinking from colonial and postcolonial legacies (Mignolo, 2000, p. 5). Too many children and adults
today (particularly those from non-dominant groups)continue to be alienated and marginalized within modern classrooms where knowledge
and learning are unconsciously permeated by this imperial/colonial conception of the world. The
reproduction of personal and cultural inferiority inherent in the modern educational project of
monocultural assimilation is interrelated with the hegemony of western knowledge structures that
are largely taken for granted within Eurocentric education (Dei,2008). Thus, in the field of education, we need to
learn again how five centuries of studying, classifying, and ordering humanity within an imperial
context gave rise to peculiar and powerful ideas of race, culture, and nation that were, in effect,
conceptual instruments that the West used both to divide up and to educate the world
(Willinsky,1998, pp. 2-3). The epistemic and conceptual apparatus through which the modern worldwas divided up and modern education was
institutionalized is located in the culturalcomplex called Eurocentrism. Western education institutions and the modern curriculum, from the
sixteenthcentury into the present, were designed to reproduce this Eurocentric imaginary under thesign of civilization (Grafton & Jardine, 1986;
Butts, 1967, 1973). Eurocentric knowledge lies at the center of an imperial and colonial model of civilization
that now threatens to destroy the conditions that make life possible (Lander, 2002, p. 245). From a post-Eurocentric
interpretive horizon (described below), the present conditions of knowledge are embedded within a hegemonic knowledge apparatus that emerged
withEuropean colonialism and imperialism in the sixteenth century (Philopose, 2007;Kincheloe, 2008). Based upon hierarchical competition for
power, control, and supremacy among thecivilized nation-states, imperialism is an original and inherent characteristic of themodern western
interstate system that emerged with the formation of sovereign Europeanterritorial states in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Wallerstein,
1973; Gong, 1984 ;Hindness, 2005; Agnew, 2003; Taylor & Flint, 2000). Closely interrelated withimperialism, colonialism involves a
civilizing project within an ideological formation established to construct the way the world is known
and understood, particularly through the production, representation, and organization of knowledge
(Mignolo, 2000a; Kanu,2006). Colonialism reduces reality to the single dimension of the colonizer. Colonialism
and imperialism impose on the world one discourse, one form of conscience, one science, one way of
being in the world. Post-colonial analysis leads to a simple realization: that theeffect of the colonizing process over individuals, over
culture and society throughoutEuropes domain was vast, and produced consequences as complex as they are profound(Ashcroft, 2001a, p. 24).
In yet to be acknowledged ways, the Eurocentric curriculum, and western schoolingin general, are profoundly interrelated
with both modern imperialism and colonialism.The persistence and continuity of Eurocentrism rather leads one to
see it asa part of a habitus of imperial subjectivity that manifests itself in a particular kind of attitude:
the European attitude a subset of a more encompassing imperial attitude. The Eurocentric attitude combines the search for theoria with the
mythical fixation with roots and the assertion of imperial subjectivity. It produces and defends what Enrique Dussel hasreferred to as the myth of
modernity (Maldonado-Torres, 2005b, p. 43). Western schooling reproduces this Eurocentric attitude in complicity with a globalizedsystem
of power/knowledge relations, tacitly based upon white heterosexual malesupremacy (Kincheloe, 1998; Allen, 2001; Bonilla-Silva, 2001, 2006;
Twine & Gallagher,2008; Akom, 2008a, 2008b). Eurocentrism is a hegemonic representation and mode of knowing
that relies on confusion between abstract universality and concrete world hegemony (Escobar, 2007; Dussel,
2000; Quijano, 1999, 2000). Worldwide imperialexpansion and European colonialism led to the late nineteenth century worldwidehegemony of
Eurocentrism (Quijano, 2005, p. 56). Eurocentrism, in other words, refers to the hegemony of a (universalized) Euro-
Anglo-American epistemological framework that governs both the production and meanings of knowledges
and subjectivities throughout the world (Schott, 2001; Kincheloe, 2008). Eurocentrism is an epistemological model that organizes
the state, the economy,gender and sexuality, subjectivity, and knowledge (Quijano, 2000). The production of Eurocentrism is
maintained in specific political, economic, social and cultural institutions and institutionalized practices
that began to emerge with the colonization of the Americasin the sixteenth century. The nation-state, the bourgeois family, the capitalist
corporation, Eurocentric rationality, and western educational institutions are all examples of
worldwideinstitutions and institutionalized practices that contribute to the production of Eurocentrism (Quijano, 2008, pp.
193-194). Eurocentrism as a historical phenomenon is not to be understood withoutreference to the structures of power that EuroAmerica
produced over thelast five centuries, which in turn produced Eurocentrism, globalized itseffects, and universalized its historical claims. Those
structures of power include the economic (capitalism, capitalist property relations, markets andmodes of production, imperialism, etc.) the
political (a system of nation-states, and the nation-form, most importantly, new organizations to handle problems presented by such a reordering
of the world, new legal forms,etc.), the social (production of classes, genders, races, ethnicities, religiousforms as well as the push toward
individual-based social forms), andcultural (including new conceptions of space and time, new ideas of thegood life, and a new developmentalist
conception of the life-world) (Dirlik,1999, p. 8). Eurocentric thinking is embedded in the concepts and categories through which the
modernworld has been constructed. The West defines what is, for example, freedom, progress and civil behavior;
law, tradition and community; reason, mathematics and science; what is real and what it means to be
human. The non-Western civilizations have simply to accept these definitions or be defined out of
existence (Sardar, 1999, p. 44). The mostly taken-for-granted definitions and conceptual boundaries of the
academic disciplines and school subjects such as philosophy, math, science,history, literature, literacy, humanities,
education are all Eurocentric constructions. If Eurocentrism is intrinsic in the way we think and conceptualize, it is also
inherent in the way we organize knowledge. Virtually all the disciplines of social sciences, from economics to
anthropology, emerged when Europe was formulating its worldview, and virtually all are geared to serving the need and requirements of Western
society and promoting its outlook. Eurocentrism is entrenched in the way these disciplines are structured, the
concepts and categories they use for analysis, and the way progress is defined with the
disciplines (Joseph et al. 1990) (Sardar, 1999, p. 49). This hegemonic knowledge formation envelops the modern
school curriculum within an imperial/colonial paradigm legitimated by the rhetoric of modernity (i.e.,
equal opportunity, mobility, achievement gap, meritocracy, progress, development, civilization,globalization). Western
education (colonial and metropolitan) reproduces imperial/colonial, monocultural, and deluded conceptions
of and ways of being in the world (Mignolo, 2000a; Kincheloe, 2008). The effect of Eurocentrism is not
merely that it excludes knowledges and experiences outside of Europe, but that it obscures the very nature
and history of Europe itself (Dussel, 1993). Understanding Eurocentrism thus involves recognizing and
denaturalizing the implicitly assumed conceptual apparatus and definitional powers of the west (Sardar, 1999,
p. 44; Coronil, 1996). Individually,understanding Eurocentrism may also involve the experience of disillusionment and cultureshock as one
begins to demythologize the dense mirage of modernity. Yet, today, in the academic field of education, Eurocentrism is commonlyunderstood
as a cultural perspective among political conservatives who ascribe to thesuperiority of western contributions (e.g., scientific, cultural and artistic)
to world ivilization that in turn justify the continued exclusion of non-European cultures andknowledges in the curriculum (Collins & OBrien,
2003). Understanding Eurocentrism as a conservative perspective on western culture and education
ignores the historical claim that Eurocentrism is the framework for the production and control of
knowledge thatEurocentrism is the way the modern world has been constructed as a cultural projection.For many of us educated in the
western tradition within this still dominantepistemological framework -- a Eurocentric worldview may be all we know. We may not
recognize that our enlightened, liberal versus conservative, university educated ways of thinking, knowing,
and being are a reflection of a particular historical-cultural-epistemological world-view, different
from and similar to a variety of other equally valid and valuable ways of knowing and being (Santos,
2007; Battiste, 2008). In other words, if we are well educated, we conceive, perceive, interpret, know, learn about, and (re)produce knowledge
of the world through an ethnocentric cultural projection known as Eurocentrism (Ankomah, 2005). This review begins therefore by situating
Eurocentrism within the historical context of its emergence colonial modernity and proceeds to define Eurocentrism as the epistemic
framework of colonial modernity. From this decolonial (or post-Eurocentric)historical horizon and framing of Eurocentrism, the second part will
frame and review literature on the critique of Eurocentrism within mathematics and science education that represent alternatives to the hegemony
of western knowledge in the classroom. This literature was searched for and selected because it provides critiques of Eurocentrism that include
specific proposals for de-centering and pluralizing the school curriculum. The review concludes by summarizing, situating, and appropriating
these two school subject proposals within a vision for a post-Eurocentric curriculum. In framing, selecting, andreviewing literature that
challenges and reconceptualizes the underlying Eurocentric assumptions of the modern school curriculum, this literature review adopts from
critical philosophical (Haggerson, 1991), interpretive (Eisenhardt, 1998), and creative processapproaches (Montuori, 2005). The rationale for this
two-part organization, as well as thetype of review this rationale calls for deserve further clarification, before analyzing the historical context of
Eurocentrism. Methodological and Theoretical Rationale Conventional literature reviews seek to synthesize ideas as overviews of knowledge to
date in order to prefigure further research (Murray & Raths, 1994; Boote & Beile, 2005).Eisenhardt (1998) however, describes another purpose of
literature reviews as interpretive tools to capture insight .suggesting how and why various contexts and circumstances inform particular
meanings and reveal alternative ways of making sense (p. 397).Following Eisenhardts description, this unconventional literature review is
intended to situate and review an emergent literature on a post-Eurocentric curriculum within an historical analysis of Eurocentrism. A post-
Eurocentric interpretive horizon is described that provides an alternative way of making sense of the curriculum literature. Eurocentric modernity
is the historical context within which the modern curriculum is conceived. Mostuses of term Eurocentrism within the curriculum literature have
yet to include analyses of the origins and meaning of Eurocentrism within the history and project of modernity. This lack of recognition and
analysis of the historical context of Eurocentrism contributes to both incoherence and impotency in the use of this critical concept (for examples
see Mahalingam, 2000; Gutierrez, 2000; Aikenhead & Lewis, 2001). The concepts Eurocentrism and post-Eurocentrism offer contrasting
paradigms through which the curriculum can be evaluated in relation to whether teaching and learning reproduces or decolonizes the dominant
modern/colonial system of power/knowledge relations. The successful development and implementation of a post-Eurocentric curriculum is
dependent upon an adequate historical-philosophical interpretation of Eurocentrism. As such, this literature review adopts elements from the
critical philosophical, interpretive, and creative process approaches (Haggerson, 1991; Eisenhardt,1999; Livingston, 1999; Meacham, 1998;
Schwandt, 1998; Montuori, 2005). Eisenhardt describes interpretive reviews as presenting information that disrupts
conventional thinking and seeks to reveal alternative ways of making sense (Eisenhardt, 1999, p. 392, 397).
Haggersons critical philosophical inquiry attempts to give meaning and enhance understanding of activities and institutions, bringing their norms
of governance to consciousness, and finding criteria by which to make appropriate judgments (Haggerson, 1991). Montouris creative process
model includes problematizing the underlying presuppositions of a field of inquiry along with
creating new frameworks for reinterpreting bodies of knowledge (Montouri, 2005). This review does not
describe and compare different perspectives. This review instead presents an alternative, post-Eurocentric framework for
reinterpreting the modern Eurocentric curriculum, with a specific focus on math and science education. This
post-Eurocentric framework provides an alternative way of thinking about school knowledge
whereby the entire spectrum of different perspectives can be re-viewed in relation to each other.
2AC AT: SSD
Notions of switch side debate just creates morally ambiguous people who are
disconnected and separated from reality causes infinite Eichmanns and
retrenches the squo
William Spanos professor of English and Comparative Literature at the SUNY Binghamton and
Christopher Spurlock, High school and college debater, conductor of the interview with William
Spanos, 2011, http://kdebate.com/spanos.html
CS: Many of the most charged criticisms of your comments on debate stem from the charge that you have had very little experience with debate
and are not qualified to comment on it. We've taken the position often that our insular activity could use some outside criticism, but others remain
skeptical of the view that disinterested, 'switch-side,' debate, where debaters can take any position on an issue,
will actually produce more neoconservatives like Cheney and Rumsfeld. They cite policy debaters who practiced
this and went on to champion rights for Guantanamo Bay detainees after debate and law school. Surely you don't believe that all debaters will
become neocons simply from following this model. But what should we be most on guard against in order to avoid the worst of the imminent
global disaster that the neocons are undoubtedly leading us to? WVS: The danger of being a total insider is that the eye
of such a person becomes blind [ignorant] to alternative possibilities. The extreme manifestation of this being
at one with the system, of remaining inside the frame, as it were, is, as Hannah Arendt, decisively demonstrated long ago, Adolph Eichmann.
That's why she and Said, among many poststructuralists, believed that to be an authentic intellectual --to see what disinterested
inquiry can't see-- one has to be an exile (or a pariah) from a homeland-- one who is both apart of and apart from the
dominant culture. Unlike Socrates, for example, Hippias, Socrates' interlocutor in the dialogue "Hippias Major" (he is, for Arendt,
the model for Eichmann), is at one with himself. When he goes home at night "he remains one." He
is, in other words, incapable of thinking. When Socrates, the exilic consciousness, goes home, on the other
hand, he is not alone; he is "by himself." He is two-in-one. He has to face this other self. He has
to think. Insofar as its logic is faithfully pursued, the framework of the debate system, to use your quite appropriate initial
language, does, indeed, produce horrifically thoughtless Eichmanns, which is to say, a political class whose
thinking, whether it's called Republican or Democratic, is thoughtless in that it is totally separated from and
indifferent to the existential realities of the world it is representing. It's no accident, in my mind,
that those who govern us in America --our alleged representatives, whether Republican, Neo-Con, or Democrat--
constitute such a "political class." This governing class has, in large part, their origins, in a
preparatory relay consisting of the high school and college debate circuit, political science
departments, and the law profession. The moral of this story is that the debate world needs
more outsiders -- or, rather, inside outsiders -- if its ultimate purpose is to prepare young people
to change the world rather than to reproduce it.
2AC AT: Social Justice !
We dont need to roleplay we can make change just like the LBS movement
Dana Roe Polson, former debate coach and Co-Director, teacher, and founder of ConneXions
Community Leadership Academy, 2012 Longing for Theory: Performance Debate in Action,
http://gradworks.umi.com/3516242.pdf
I think the Talented Tenth is actually the wrong metaphor for leadership in the performance debate community. Du Bois, later in his life, sharply
criticized and disavowed a reliance on the Black elite to lead, believing that they were more preoccupied with individual gain than with group
struggle, and willing to work within current structures rather than calling for radical change. They were becoming Americanized, Du Bois
believed, and deradicalized. This deradicalization occurs when more privileged African Americans (re) align themselves to function as a middle
class interested in individual group gain rather than race leadership for mass development (James, 1997, p. 24). Instead of his youthful belief in
the Black elite, Gradually, black working-class activists surpassed elites in Du Boiss estimation of political integrity and progressive agency.
He democratized his concept of race leaders through the inclusion of the radicalism of nonelites (James, 1997, p. 21). The young people
who have emerged as leaders in the performance debate community were definitely not those Du Bois would have
identified as the Talented Tenth in 1903. Du Bois was talking to and about the Black elite, the educated middle class. Earlier in Du Boiss life, he
assumed that those people, college-educated, were the natural leaders. My participants who might be seen as potential leaders do not come from
such backgrounds. Many do end up going to college and becoming potential leaders, but they are privileged through this process rather than prior
to it. In addition, their focus is most definitely political as opposed to cultural. Nowhere in my research did I hear a Bill
Cosby-esque injunction for Black people to shape up and work harder. Instead, the critique is focused on uplift as group
struggle for continued liberation. Finally, these young leaders are most definitely radicalized as opposed to
interested in incremental change that rocks no boats. From CRT and their open critique of white supremacy to their
willingness to call for change openly in debate rounds, these young leaders are contentious and bold. Two of my participants,
and many of their former debate peers, are involved with a Baltimore group called Leaders of a Beautiful
Struggle (LBS). The website of the LBS establishes their identity: We are a dedicated group of Baltimore citizens who
want to change the city through governmental policy action. Our purpose is to provide tangible, concrete
solutions to Baltimores problems and to analyze the ways that external forces have contributed to the
overall decline of our city. (Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, n.d.) As we see in this statement of identity, then, LBS as one
model of leadership is focused on the political and on an analysis of external influences; this focus is very
different from a racial uplift position, and their model of leadership very different from the Talented Tenth. LBS has developed
platforms regarding jobs, education, incarceration, and many other issues facing Black people in the city.
They hold monthly forums for discussion of these topics, inviting guests and discussing the topics themselves. Further, one of the LBS members
ran for City Council this year. He lost, but plans to run again. The training my participants discuss, therefore, is not in
the abstract: it is training for the real world, for their own empowerment and that of their
communities. This work is extending into local high schools, as well, and Paul Robeson High School
now has students involved in LBS. They attend events and meetings not only to help out but as a form of
leadership training.
2AC AT: Education
They dont even access state good offense their version of fiat isnt real world and
is coopted by elites they are horribly nave
Iris Marion Young, Oct 2001 (Political Theory, Vol. 29, No. 5 (Oct., 2001), pp. 670-690, Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy, JSTOR :)
Exhorting citizens to engage in respectful argument with others they dis- agree with is a fine
recommendation for the ideal world that the deliberative democrat theorizes, says the activist, where everyone is included and the political equal of
one another. This is not the real world of politics, however, where powerful elites representing structurally
dominant social segments have significant influence over political processes and decisions. Deliberation sometimes
occurs in this real world. Officials and dignitaries meet all the time to hammer out agreements. Their meetings are
usually well organized with structured procedures, and those who know the rules are often able to further their
objectives through them by presenting proposals and giv- ing reasons for them, which are considered and critically
evaluated by the others, who give their own reasons. Deliberation, the activist says, is an activ- ity of boardrooms and congressional committees and
sometimes even parlia- ments. Elites exert their power partly through managing deliberative settings. Among
themselves they engage in debate about the policies that will sustain their power and further their
collective interests. Entrance into such delibera- tive settings is usually rather tightly controlled, and the
interests of many affected by the decisions made in them often receive no voice or representa- tion. The
proceedings of these meetings, moreover, are often not open to gen- eral observation, and often they leave
no public record. Observers and mem- bers of the press come only by invitation. Deliberation is primarily
an activity of political elites who treat one another with cordial respect and try to work out their differences. Insofar as deliberation is exclusive in this
way, and inso- far as the decisions reached in such deliberative bodies support and perpetu- ate structural inequality or otherwise have unjust and harmful
consequences, says the activist, then it is wrong to prescribe deliberation for good citizens committed to furthering social justice. Under these circumstances of struc-
tural inequality and exclusive power, good citizens should be protesting out- side these meetings, calling public attention to the assumptions made in them, the control
exercised, and the resulting limitations or wrongs of their outcomes. They should use the power of shame and exposure to pressure deliberators to widen their agenda
and include attention to more interests. As long as the proceedings exercise exclusive power for the sake of the interests of elites and against the interests of most
citizens, then politically engaged citizens who care about justice and environmental preservation are justified even in taking actions aimed at preventing or disrupting
the deliberations.