Doubles---Wake---Oceans

1AC

1AC—Wake—Oceans

1AC—ZongThe following is an excerpt from Feeding the Ghosts by Fred D’Aguiar— “The sea is slavery.... sea receives a body as if that body has come to rest on a cushion, one that gives way to the body’s weight and folds 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 don’t 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 slave’s 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 Hegel’s 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 narratives—which 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 Wilberforce’s 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 Gilroy’s and Edouard Glissant’s work, is an experience of confronting an ontopological displacement, of being thrown from a knowable ‘‘placeworld’’ into the bewilderments of a delocalized, despecified world space. If Wilberforce’s discourse and J. M. W. Turner’s canvas Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and 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 Glissant’s 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 Brathwaite’s 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 Glissant’s poetics takes its departure) but, metaleptically, in the epigraphs that introduce that book. Here, in the earlier work, Caribbean Discourses , is what

Brathwaite’s 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 reader’s eye as an intimation of déjà vu the moment the eye, scanning the book’s 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 sea’s 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 Glissant’s 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. Austin’s sense of the word) but as a tropological argument , as a ‘‘poetics’’ whose organizing figures (‘‘except ion,’’ ‘‘exchange,’’ ‘‘relation’’) name Glissant’s 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, Glissant’s 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 transformations 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 functions in Benedict Anderson’s

account of nationalism. 8 Glissant’s 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 Glissant’s Poetics of Relation are, as I have mentioned, from Edward Brathwaite (‘‘The unity is submarine’’) and Derek Walcott (‘‘The sea is history’’). Walcott’s poem, in its turn, both alludes to Brathwaite (as the Jamaican poet’s ‘‘The unity is submarine’’ is transformed into the ‘‘subtl e... submarine’’ expanse into which Walcott leads his readers) and is cited by D’Aguiar as one of the epigraphs to Feeding the Ghosts . D’Aguiar’s novel (whose second epigraph is, like Glissant’s, 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 study of Turner’s Slavers canvas, the English painter’s depiction of the Zong massacre, a painting that not only haunts D’Aguiar’s novel and David Dabydeen’s 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 Boston [where it has been since John Ruskin sold it in ] is yet another pointer toward the shape of the Atlantic as a system of cultural exchanges.’’ 9 This seems an apt comment, though

to my mind, it is less the wanderings of Turner’s 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 other’s 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 Glissant’s 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 repeatedly stage their ‘‘abyssal’’ descent into ‘‘the depths of the sea’’ (). For what Glissant discovers there is not only an ending but a ‘‘beginning,’’ an array of ‘‘underwater signposts’’ () 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, the commonly inherited remains of a history that has become ‘‘something shared’’ (). Thus, as the line from Brathwaite’s own 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 Heidegger’s terms, of the subject’s 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 D’Aguiar has it, where what seemed to figure the loss of home ‘‘is therefore home.’’ 11 Such is also the insight of Walcott’s poem ‘‘The Sea Is History.’’ For as that 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 everyone’’ (). There is an extraordinary generosity to this pledge and 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 the birth of justice), Glissant’s 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 capital’s 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 Glissant’s 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 capital’s 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 globe’s 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 sea’s 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 of exchange’’ (). Glissant’s entire poetics is 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 Glissant’s 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,’’ D’Aguiar 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 Africa’s 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 so—if this is, in fact, how our choice inclines us—not only do we demonstrate the critical advantages of a way of reading and reveal the insights of a historical materialism that, in Walter Benjamin’s 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 Glissant’s 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 loss’s 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 Derrida’s 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 ‘‘singular’’—which I would gloss as something like ‘‘the exceptional’’ in Glissant’s work, the ‘‘irreducible’’ in Derrida’s, and ‘‘the wound’’ in Adorno’s—is 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 Coetzee’s 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 Spivak’s Critique in a footnote on Derrida’s 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 unverifiable’’ ( n). Thereafter, the term appears in a cluster of passages surrounding a reading of Coetzee’s 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 other as margin, I will look at a novel in English, Foe .(–) Coetzee’s novel figures the singular and unverifiable margin, the refracting barrier over against the wholly other that one assumes in the dark. The native informant disappears in that shelter. () Tseng 2002.1.21 14:32 6488 SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY 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 anticolonialism 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. The curious guardian at the margin who will not inform. () There is an enormous amount of ‘‘work’’ taking place here, work 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 Spivak’s alternate terms for the ‘‘native informant’’ foreclosed within a system animated by its ‘‘dread’’ of such spaces of withholding (). 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 Spivak’s example, the withheld secret of Friday’s 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 Spivak’s 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 Friday’s 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 Friday—or indeed for the Zong —to ‘‘exemplify’’ the singular, or what becomes of ‘‘such’’ singularity when its withheld secret marks something other than itself, 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) Spivak’s 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 déjà vu.This is, as the title of D’Aguiar’s 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 D’Aguiar’s 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: moments in which 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 D’Aguiar’s novel—a novel that finds itself obliged to tell its tale not once but serially: first in a synoptic preface, then in a set of harrowing chapters in which each of the murders is counted off one after the other, then again in an account of the ensuing trials, once more through the memory of a solitary survivor, and, finally, again in the text’s epilogue—is, 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 violence of actuarial reason. Played out between the poles of the and the , the narrative attempts to account for an event that can be conceived as an event only by projecting

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 déjà 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 déjà 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 incarnation in Turner’s canvas, a canvas that manages to concentrate virtually every aspect of the problems of memory, justice, value, and time I have been discussing. First exhibited at the world antislavery convention in London, the painting was displayed as a sort of visual equivalent (if I can permit myself that word) of Wilberforce’s speech before the House of Commons. Turner had been reading the recently republished edition of Thomas Clarkson’s 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 Wilberforce’s 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 Scott’s Waverley novels, which Robert Cadell, Scott’s 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, Scott’s historical novels, in their turn, served to illustrate. 18 Central to that philosophy of history, and to Scott’s 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. Scott’s novels work by tracing the wanderings of a character across such an uneven geography of time—typically the Highlands and the Lowlands, territories that he treats, in Raymond Williams’s 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 Scott’s protagonists is thus, 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 Makdisi’s terms, of the ‘‘ghosts issuing forth’’ from the past. 20 Turner’s 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 Britain’s imperium. With that painting in place opposite Turner’s ‘‘ ’tis sixty years since’’ canvas (the subtitle, we will recall, of Scott’s 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.

Turner’s solution to the questions that the Zong puts to the problems of justice and memory, a solution borrowed from the progressive romance of Scott’s historical novel, is, at first glance, not unique. It also appears to be Glissant’s solution, the solution of Poetics 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 D’Aguiar 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 century’s 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 Marx’s fable, deposits its strange weight upon the minds of the living, the dead do not precede but inhabit the split scenes of Turner’s exhibition hall, the

globe’s 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 Benjamin’s 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 Turner’s 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 it’s 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 powe r . 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; slavery’s afterlife is the past’s possession of the present . The past holds the present captive —structuring, 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 now—it 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 there—something that is absent or missing—is 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 living—the 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 otherwise

—then 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 terror—possession 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 slave s 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, policemen—the 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, slavery’s 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 Omise’eke 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 Gilmore’s 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

Boggs’s way of describing the uneven distribution of value and disposability produced by slavery’s 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 subjectio n, 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 prison’s 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. I’ve 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 Jackson’s 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, Jackson’s 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 Jackson’s 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 Wacquant’s “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 aren’t 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 Spillers’s classic essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s 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 room—rather, 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 DISCOVERY—but 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. 703–712 (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 teacher’s / 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.” Goodison’s 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 sea’s 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” (1–44). The poem suggests that rehearsing the list of the world’s 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), Goodison’s 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 I’ll 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 Goodison’s 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” (D’Aguiar

3). What David Scott terms the “conscripted modernity” of transatlantic slaves is distinct from the cosmopolitanism associated with transoceanic traveler s 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). Goodison’s 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 Hearne’s 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 ery—from Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno to Hea r ne’s 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 tim e. 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 51–95)

Thus, we advocate that the United States federal government should endlessly explore the oceans as a site of the Middle Passage. This statement doesn’t define the borders of our advocacy—we 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 hegemon y : 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 violenc e . 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 t o rescue, to salvage our relation to time, to the pas t , 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 differenc e , 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 violenc e . 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 tim e that are at play next to the economic and political systems of exploitation. We

suggest, for instance, looking at the illusion of the futur e 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 comeChambers 10 (lain, “Maritime Criticism and Theoretical Shipwrecks”, PMLA, Volume 125, Number 3, May 2010, pp. 678–684, 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 presen t , 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 no’s “atlas of emotion.” Here time exists beyond the linguistic act of nomination , be yond the subject that produces the image. This is why for Deleuze—and here we can return to the immediacy of Isaac Julien’s work—art 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 port—realism, mimesis—for 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 dominatio n 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 worl d of the subject. The

perspective that ar rives from the heterotopic site of the sea a nd 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 o f 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 (1990–94). 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 Gedächtnis der

Namen losen zu ehren als das Berühmten. Dem Ge dächt 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: IndigenousLinks of omission are absurdRichard 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 PICNo performance of 1ac- reject them cause they footnote – not temporality – that means they can’t solveKaplan 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 slavery’s hyperexploitation of labor, multi-scalar expropriation¶ and deformation of place —of bodies, homes, communities, and national status— and ¶ 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 Passage

—one that recognizes “that¶ the work of mourning, for genocide, cannot be allowed to end ” (244). The film’s

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 BadThe 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

2AC—Endless CPDoomsday 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 dayBarbara Omolade 1984 Calvin College’ first dean of multicultural affairs [“Women of Color and the Nuclear Holocaust”, Women’s 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 RhetoricTheir apocalyptic rhetoric makes war inevitablePeter 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 Derrida’s 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 Sontag’s 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 RezResolved is to reduce through mental analysisWebster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/resolved?s=ts)

to   reduce   by   mental   analysis  (often followed by into).

Government is the peopleJeff 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 heart—WE are the Government.  Not them.

“Exploration of” means discussing and thinking aboutLongman 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 goodDr. 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.]

Louisville’s 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, I’m 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 can’t 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 this 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 – OffenseTheir claims of [predictability, limits and topic education] all are encapsulated into a broader spectrum of Eurocentricism – diversity in curriculum is vitalMichael 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 the“civilized” 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 throughoutEurope’s 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 a n 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 & O’Brien, 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 Eisenhardt’s 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). Haggerson’s 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). Montouri’s 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: SSDNotions of switch side debate just creates morally ambiguous people who are disconnected and separated from reality – causes infinite Eichmann’s and retrenches the squoWilliam 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 don’t need to roleplay – we can make change just like the LBS movementDana 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 Bois’s 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 Bois’s 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 Baltimore’s 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: EducationThey don’t even access state good offense – their version of fiat isn’t real world and is coopted by elites – they are horribly naïveIris 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.