1NC

1We advocate that the United States federal government should give reparations for the past and present enslavement of black bodies. Our call for reparations is not limited to fiscal or legal requests, but is an impossible demand that requires a fundamental rupture and reorganization of modernityHarding, Professor and Civil Rights Activist, 1970

[Vince, Professor of Religion and Social Transformation at Illiff School of Theology, Black Students and the Impossible Revolution, Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Sep., 1970)]

The demand for reparations is always revolutionary, for it often involves levels of confiscation deemed unacceptable in the orderly processes of things, but orderly processes almost never serve the disinherited, only the privileged. That is why the privileged (and their servants) call for law and order and the disinherited call for justice. The campus experience strongly indicates that in a society where law and order support exploitation, justice may demand disorder. Another revelation from the student

experience is no less revolutionary if it should now move to serve as total challenger to American education; the black community cannot possibly enter this society's overall life in full, pulsating, living surges without transforming the mainstream. Actually, the student position, the increasingly explored black position, is that the mainstream is deeply poisoned in its

content and dangerous in the direction of its flow. It is therefore in need of purification and radical redirection. What would this mean? Only in the deepest, probing, dreamlike sections of the mind can we imagine a black-affirming throng surging into every institution of American society, from the ederal government on out, transforming as it goes. But the impossible must be imagined if there is to be hope . One example of the chance might be that black people who shared a deep sympathy with and relationship to, the wretched of the earth would have no choice but to force changes in America’s exploitative, repressive relationship to the nonwhite world . Such a reordered America could send no more sons to fight that world’s poor on behalf of a racist society—and it would have to send none at all if that society moved toward the humanity that blacks so desparately need. Black

movement into America on terms deemed acceptable by black people would likely surpass even the student energies. It would demand, for instance, that the society do at home what it has the power but not the will to do: at least end poverty. Black participation could not be satisfied until that were accomplished with more than deliberate speed, through whatever redistribution and rechanneling of national wealth and priorities were deemed necessary. Following the student lead, moving beyond it into the heart of American institutions, we would redefine all experiences. American culture and the arts, education, business-all would be saturated not only with black people but with evidences of the black experience, with proud development of the black perspective. Who can imagine, for instance, what television would be like if it were not only filled with black images, but if it reflected a vision of life that came out of the black encounter with oppression, suffering, struggle, and

endurance? White America as we know it could not survive the second coming of black life to these shores. It would have to die.

We solve the aff – demanding reparations OPENS UP our relationship to history – it challenges progressivist notions of timeHenry, Professor of African American Studies at Berkeley, 2007

[Charles P., Long Overdue: The Politics of Racial Reparations, pp.6-7]

Following the Civil War and Emancipation—and in the absence of truth and reconciliation commissions—Americans have had to sort out the relationship between healing and justice. White Americans in the North chose to heal the wounds with White Americans in the South. This politics of reconciliation, which took several

decades and still exists in some forms today, forged a number of unifying myths to make it safe to remember the Civil War. This reconciliation between North and South did not, however, include Black Americans. Even at the fiftieth reunion of battle of Gettysburg in 1913, Black Civil War veterans were literally and figuratively left out of sight and mind. Fifty years later, Lincoln's "rebirth of freedom" had become Woodrow Wilson's forward-looking

"righteous peace."'' The Emancipation Proclamation and the Twelfth through Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, also known as the Civil War Amendments,

granted Blacks citizenship in the "civic" nation but denied them membership in the "ethnic" nation. That is, the Civil War ended slavery but did not create equality . In short, to satisfy Whites in both the North and the South, Blacks were given citizenship but denied equality. Whites, Blacks, and others assume the responsibility of historical obligations when they become citizens, whenever and however that occurs. A nation

is an intergenerational community, and the existence of historical obligations is predicated on our moral relations to our successors. Our government's ability to make treaties, for example, is dependent on the belief that the agreements we make will be honored by our successors. But we are entitled to interpret the agreements of our predecessors according to our own ideas of justice.18 We may know, for example, that our "founding fathers" did not include African Americans as citizens in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. If our political community is to continue to

evolve, we must remedy that. Many other countries, as well, are having difficulty dealing with the past because the past is still with them.'" Memory of historical injustice is not a trivial matter to be swept under the rug in the name of progress . Memory or, more precisely, remembering is an important part of the identity of individuals and communities. The moral identity of a nation may be defined as the remembrance of those events that comprise its obligations and entitlements. Practices that require the living to keep the promises and contracts of the dead are inseparable from

the value we assign to the self-realization of individuals and their ability to fulfill their responsibility to others.20 The call for racial reparations challenges the official histories that ignore, explain away, or trivialize mass cruelties. Reparations thus are a way of democratizing history and hearing those voices that were silenced in the past.

Reparation is not just an act but a distinct mode of thinking about politics. The aff’s drive to demystification is a paranoid reading of history that confirms what it already knows about the Middle Passage. Instead, our reparative reading gestures towards a future not yet known – one able to disrupt temporality and recognize historical contingency without falling into the trap of historical determinism Shahani, assistant professor at Washington State University, 2012

[Nishant, Department of Critical Culture, Gender, and Race Studies, Queer Retrosexualities: The Politics of Reparative Return, pp.8-11]

In response to Jameson's urge to "always historicize" in order to oppose the pseudo-history of retro culture, Eve Sedgwick offers quite possibly

the most trenchant critique: Always historicize? What could have less to do with historicizing than the commanding, atemporal adverb "always"? It reminds me of the bumper stickers that instruct people in other cars to "Question Authority." Excellent advice, perhaps wasted on anyone who does whatever they're ordered to do by a strip of paper glued to an automobile!32 Behind the sardonic humor and irreverence of Sedgwick's riposte can be discerned a more engaged resistance to a prescriptive form of

historicizing. It is not surprising that to Sedgwick, the " always historicize" command comes off as a paternalistic injunction to queer theorizing. In this project then, I wish to offer the framework of queer retrosexualities as an alternative mode of historiography that draws on the "failures" of nostalgia and other "backward feelings"33 that inform the politics of retrospection. First, I briefly turn to the essay in which Sedgwick makes her critique of Jameson, since it not only offers the means to rethink the "passivity" associated with retrospective and nostalgic thinking, but it provides valuable methodological tools for this project in general. In "Paranoid Reading and

Reparative Reading, or You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think this Essay is about You," Sedgwick critiques the epistemological framing

of critical practic e' which , according to her, presumes too often that the process of demystification is the ultimate goal of social and ideological critique . The stasis that such a hermeneutics of exposure can result in obscures the more important question of what such a form of knowledge can perform—what does, to quote

Sedgwick, such "knowledge do?"35 According to Sedgwick, such readings are "paranoid" since they insist that "bad news he always already known.''36, Thus paranoid readings are those that ultimately only confirm what is already known. The act of exposure then, becomes a theoretical end in itself without any consideration of alternative possibilities of thinking and organizing. As a result, paranoid readings, writes

Sedgwick, "may have made it less rather than more possible to unpack the local contingent relations between any given piece of knowledge and its narrativeiepistemological entailments for the seeker, knower, or teller."'

Paranoid readings are implicated in interpretive methods that only confirm what they already always suspect. Hence paranoid reading practices result in critical tendencies that have rigid and tautological relations to questions of

temporality. In other words, in insisting on anticipatory forms of thinking, paranoid readings privilege what Sedgwick calls, "the notion of the inevitable"38 and efface epistemological questions concerning the performativity of knowledge production—the fact

that "knowledge does rather than simply is."39 Thus Sedgwick writes: "for someone to have an unmystified view of systemic oppressions does not intrinsically or necessarily enjoin that person to any specific train of epistemological or narrative consequences."40 Since as a psychic defense mechanism paranoia attempts to foreground a pre-emptive knowledge of a future violence, the successful exposure of that violence results ironically in a triumphant grand narrative that basks in the process of unveiling. Sedgwick rethinks the rigid investment in exposure and the insistence on unveiling through an articulation of "reparative" possibilities, which are effaced by the paranoid faith in exposure. Drawing on the psychoanalytical formulations of Melanie Klein and her insistence on the instability and flexibility of psychic

positions, Sedgwick's notion of "reparation" enables a shift from the hermeneutic of suspicion to a critical practice that allows for a critical reassembling. In a Kleinian framework, infants or adults constantly oscillate between the depressive position and the reparative position that promises pleasure-seeking possibilities. According to Sedgwick, the depressive position is temporarily occupied by the infant or adult as an escape from the threat and violence of trauma so that the resulting anxiety can he contained in the ego. It is from this depressive position of anxiety that the adult or infant attempts "to assemble or 'repair' the murderous part-objects into something like a whole—though ... not necessarily like any preexisting whole":' [T]o read from a position is to surrender the knowing,

anxious paranoid determination that no horror, however apparently unthinkable, shall ever come to the reader as new; to a reparatively positioned reader, it can seem realistic and necessary to experience surprise. Because there can be surprises,

however, there can also be good ones. Hope, often a fracturing, even a traumatic thing to experience, is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned reader tries to organize the fragments and part-objects she encounters and creates." As a result of the flexible movement among causes and effects, reparative practices operate through a principle of recursivity — in other words, knowledge of effects could not only result in a rethinking of the cause (so that consequently the effects may no longer seem axiomatic or inevitable), but more importantly, the flexible circularity implied in the reparative mode of thinking enables a move away from the anticipatory observative practices

of paranoid reading towards reading practices that Sedgwick defines as "additive and accretive."' Since reparative readings enable more mutable and less linear understandings of temporality, there is a recognition of historical contingency and the ways in which the present historical moment is recursively structured by the past as well as the promise for a better future. As Sedgwick writes: Because the reader has room to realize that the future may be different from the present, it is also possible for her to entertain such profoundly painful, profoundly: relieving, ethically crucial possibilities as that the past, in turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually did.44 At one level, paranoia seems to share an intimate relation to nostalgia in that they both are characterized by what Svetlana Boym calls "the disease of an afflicted imagination."45 In fact Boym makes this connection between

paranoia and nostalgia more explicitly when she points out: "Nostalgia operated by an `associationist magic,' by means of which all aspects of' everyday life related to one single obsession. In this respect nostalgia was akin to paranoia, only instead of a persecution mania, the nostalgic was possessed by a mania of longing ."46 Sedgwick's critique of paranoid thinking, however, illuminates the intimate connection between reparation and retrospection. The reparative reader in the above quote enables "ethically crucial possibilities" by recognizing the performative potential in returning to the past. It is only in

retrospect that reparation is gleaned. The retrospective rethinking of the past enables the reparatively informed reader to be more open to democratic possibilities in the future. Reparation in this context is an illustration of what Svetlana Boym calls "reflective nostalgia." Boym's distinction between "reflective" nostalgia and "restorative" nostalgia offers crucial insight into the reparative possibilities of retrospection. Boym points out that while restorative nostalgia is preoccupied with the recovery of lost origins and the pursuit of authenticity, restorative nostalgia "dwells in algia, in longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance . . . Restorative nostalgia manifests itself in total reconstructions of monuments of the past, while reflective nostalgia lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time."'

2.07

2The aff is STUCK IN 1781 – listen to their aff:

we can never lay them to rest – Our story doesn’t end – we are in a constant state of counter-memorial – forever recognizing the event – the Middle Passage is “the only stasis point” - even their plan says that their exploration of this moment of the Middle Passage should be “endless.”

The aff is so afraid that the meaning of the Middle Passage will experience closure that they must forever be on guard – they become the watchers and police of history.

Even their 1AC performatively spends most of their time documenting the past – which performatively sacrifices the afterlife of slavery for a perpetual remembering of what actually occurred.

The aff doesn’t demonstrate what has changed about the history of slavery – it just assumes that the present is just like the past. Arguing that the present is just like slavery – turns their aff – because it does an injustice to both the past and the present. You should prefer paying attention to the details of current racism instead using the past to determine the presentReed 13 --Adolph L. is a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in race and American politics. NonSite, Django Unchained, or, The Help: How “Cultural Politics” Is Worse Than No Politics at All, and Why, http://nonsite.org/editorial/django-unchained-or-the-help-how-cultural-politics-is-worse-than-no-politics-at-all-and-why

In addition, the exact sort of work that given taxonomies, or categories within one, will do is linked to historically specific regimes of hierarchy . A taxonomy’s ideological significance and material impact, that is, can vary widely. “Race” was an ideology of essential difference in 1820, as it was in the 1850s. Yet it didn’t do the same work in the earlier period’s defenses of slavery as a necessary evil that it did in later defenses of it as a positive good, like those articulated by Fitzhugh

and Hammond. Nor does gender do the same work in the early twenty-first century that it did at the beginning , or even the middle, of the twentieth. Once established, stereotypes and the folk taxonomies that legitimize them may die hard, but their significance as props for a regime of class hierarchy can change along with the political-economic foundations of the

class order. Persistence of familiar narratives of hierarchy can evoke the earlier associations, but that evocation can be misleading and counterproductive for making sense of social relations in both past and present. In particular the “just like slavery ” or “just like Jim Crow” proclamations that are intended as powerful criticism of current injustices are more likely to undermine understanding of injustice in the past as well as the present than to enable new insight. Another version of the trope of the damaged ex-Confederate is illustrative. Unlike Firefly, the television drama Hell on Wheels constructs the wounded ex-Confederate much nearer its original form but with revisions that underscore the contemporary period drama’s problematic and ideological relation to history. Adam Serwer adduces Hell on Wheels, which is set in 1865 in a mobile railroad town, as another illustration of the persistence of the trope of the vengeful former Confederate brooding hero/sociopath, albeit in a “hilariously rationalized” form. Its version of the character, Cullen Bohannan, had been a large Mississippi planter who freed his slaves a year before the treasonous insurrection in deference to his northern, anti-slavery wife who—true to tale type—was later martyred by marauding Union soldiers, now the targets of his quest. Serwer is correct to say that the preposterous device

of separating the hero’s Confederate loyalties from commitment to slave-holding is a transparent effort to sanitize the hero’s secessionism. However, the difference in historical context is crucial in this regard as well. The old Lost Cause tropes, originating in the early twentieth-century southern ideological campaign for sectional reconciliation on white supremacist terms, don’t do the same cultural and ideological work in a society in which Glenn Beck appropriates Martin Luther King, Jr. to accuse President Barack Obama of racism that they did in a society in which racial subordination was supported explicitly by the force of law and custom. This is not to imply that there’s nothing politically disturbing and reactionary about the conceits of Hell on Wheels. On the contrary, going beyond the superficial rehearsal of hoary tropes to consider the program’s representations in their actual historical context discloses its more insidious work in legitimizing inequality. The conceit that Bohannan had freed his slaves before he fought for secession does more than separate the treason from its foundational commitment to slavery. That conceit also replaces slavery as an institution with slaveholding as a matter of individual morality, as in Django Unchained. That Bohannan manumitted his slaves as a gesture of love for his wife folds into another trope of the genre, the pedestalizing, “I love her so much I’d change my raffish ways for her” fantasy. That’s the happy face of adolescent patriarchy, its expression that doesn’t usually involve a restraining order, though it’s probably best that the brooding loner hero’s sainted wife is nearly always a martyr and thus motivation for, instead of the object of, his sadistic violence and mayhem. But in Hell on Wheels that device also reinforces the reduction of slavery to slaveholding as an individual act, a consumer preference to be negotiated within a marriage—like owning a motorcycle, going to the strip club with the guys every weekend, or painting the living room magenta. From the standpoint of claims to social significance, a deeper problem with period vehicles like Django Unchained, The Help, and Hell on Wheels is their denial of historicity. By this I do not mean historical accuracy as faithfulness to facts about the past. The manumission themes in Hell on Wheels and Django Unchained are instructive. Voluntary manumission was all but impossible in Mississippi as the sectional crisis intensified on the eve of secession. By 1860 even Maryland with a relatively large free black population and Arkansas, which had comparatively small slave population, had outlawed the practice; the states with the largest black populations had done so much earlier—South Carolina in 1820 and Mississippi in 1822. Considering its relatively incidental place in each story line, though, the historical inaccuracy on which those bits hinge is within the boundaries of acceptable artistic license. The problem is with the ideological character of the larger story lines that preclude even wondering whether manumission would have been possible. Both tales trifle with slavery. For Hell on Wheels it’s an unfortunate artifact of the genre, baggage that threatens to sully the appeal of the hero as wronged Confederate. Producers Joe and Tony Gayton (a former production assistant for political reactionary John Milius and co-writer with his brother Joe of the Vietnam POW rescue fantasy film Uncommon Valor) may also have been concerned to preempt sharp criticism for romanticizing the institution indirectly through their hero’s secessionist loyalties. For Tarantino slavery is a prop for a claim to social significance and a hook to connect spaghetti western and blaxploitation. In both vehicles it is a generic bad thing, an especially virulent species of racism, though slavery’s pastness—not only was Bohannan no longer a slave owner; but the series is set in 1865—keeps it peripheral in Hell on Wheels. And once again the central thread is the individual quest. Even the principal ex-slave in Hell on Wheels, Elam Ferguson (played by the rapper Common), is depicted as “coming to terms with the risks and responsibilities of his newly-acquired freedom,” and, because he had a “white father and a slave mother,” apparently he is therefore “a man with no true home or people he can call his own.” And he and Bohannan, also a disconnected individual, engage in an exchange about the need to “let go of the past.” Even though that exchange seems intended partly as a comment on the impossibility of either man’s doing so, the punch line remains the individual quest, leavened with the unshakable personal demons that are the banal melodrama’s yeast. (And I can anticipate the contention that Hell on Wheels is somehow critical of capitalism. It’s not. It’s critical of big capitalism and once again the capital/government nexus and their running roughshod over beleaguered individuals. That’s the critical standpoint of a reactionary populism that’s as likely to support Tea Party style fascism as any other politics, and it would be good for us all to be clearer in recognizing that for what it is.) Effacement of historicity and the social in favor of the timeless—that is, presentist—narrative of individual Overcoming is the deep politics and social commentary propounded in these products of the mass entertainment industry. They differ from other such products only because they ostensibly apply the standard formulae to socially important topics. They don’t, however. They do exactly the reverse; they revise historically and politically significant moments to fit within the formula. In doing so they are nodes in the constitution of neoliberalism’s ideological hegemony. And the extent of that hegemony is attested by claims from the likes of Lawrence Bobo, Jon Wiener and others who should know better than to think that a film like Django Unchained somehow captures the essential truth of American slavery. That truth is apparently, as Bobo condenses it, “brutality, inescapable violence and absolutely thorough moral degradation.” But those features were neither essential nor exclusive to slavery; they were behavioral artifacts enabled by the institution because it conferred, with support of law and custom, a property right—absolute control of life and livelihood—of some individuals over others. That property right was the essential evil and injustice that defined slavery, not the extremes of brutality and degradation it could encourage and abet. No effort is required to understand why mass-market films go for the dramatic excesses, but what about the scholars and other nominal leftists who also embrace that view of slavery? In part, the inclination may stem from a corrosive legacy of Malcolm X. Malcolm was an important cultural figure for most of the 1960s, before and perhaps even more so after his death. He was not, however, an historian, and few formulations have done more to misinform, distort and preempt popular understanding of American slavery than his rhetorically very effective but historically facile “house Negro/field Negro” parable. It doesn’t map onto how even plantation slavery—which accounted for only about half of slaves by 1850—operated. Not only was working in the house no major plum; it hardly fit with the Uncle Tom stereotype, such as Tarantino’s self-hating caricature, Stephen. The well-known slave rebels Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey and Robert Smalls all gainsay that image. Anyway, the Uncle Tom notion is not a useful category for political analysis. It is only a denunciation; no one ever identifies under that label. Yet its emptiness may be the source of its attractiveness. In disconnecting critique from any discrete social practice and locating it instead in imputed pathological psychology—“Why, that house Negro loved the master more than the master loved himself,” pace Malcolm—the notion individualizes political criticism on the (non-existent) racially self-hating caricature, and, of course, anyone a demagogue chooses to denounce. Because it centers on motives rather than concrete actions and stances, it leaves infinite room both for making and deflecting ad hominem charges and, of course, inscribes racial authenticity as the key category of political judgment. That sort of Malcolm X/blaxploitation narrative, including the insistence that Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind continue to shape Americans’ understandings of slavery, also is of a piece with a line of anti-racist argument and mobilization that asserts powerful continuities between current racial

inequalities and either slavery or the Jim Crow regime. This line of argument has been most popularly condensed recently in Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, which analogizes contemporary mass incarceration to the segregationist regime. But even she, after much huffing and puffing and asserting the relation gesturally throughout the book, ultimately acknowledges that the analogy fails.3 And it would

have to fail because the segregationist regime was the artifact of a particular historical and political moment in a particular social order . Moreover, the rhetorical force of the analogy with Jim Crow or slavery derives from the fact that those regimes are associated symbolically with strong negative sanctions in the general culture because they have been vanquished. In that sense all versions of the lament that “it’s as if nothing has changed” give

themselves the lie. They are effective only to the extent that things have changed significantly. The tendency to craft political critique by demanding that we fix our gaze in the rearview mirror appeals to an intellectual laziness . Marking superficial similarities with familiar images of oppression is less mentally taxing than attempting to parse the multifarious, often contradictory dynamics and relations that shape racial inequality in particular and politics in general in the current moment. Assertions that phenomena like the Jena, Louisiana,

incident, the killings of James Craig Anderson and Trayvon Martin, and racial disparities in incarceration demonstrate persistence of old-school, white supremacist racism and charges that the sensibilities of Thomas Dixon and Margaret

Mitchell continue to shape most Americans’ understandings of slavery do important, obfuscatory ideological work. They lay claim to a moral urgency that , as Mahmood Mamdani argues concerning the rhetorical use of charges of genocide, enables disparaging efforts to differentiate discrete inequalities and appropriate to generate historically specific causal accounts of them as irresponsible dodges that abet injustice by temporizing in its face.

NOTHING ABOUT YOUR DISPRUPTION OF HISTORY DELIGITIMATES BELIEFS IN PROGRESS. The 1AC’s depiction of the brutality of the Middle Passage allows people to say, “well, at least, the present isn’t that bad.” If you want to dislodge beliefs in progress then detail the present not the past. The idea that their history can’t be reappropriated – ignores that there’s a danger in trying to play the game of history with colonialism. Meaning doesn’t just give up just because there are new historiesYoneyama 95, cultural studies & Japanese studies in the Dept of Literature at the UC, San Diego, (lisa, Public Culture, 1: 499-527)

Like the state forces that police national borders, the boundaries shaping the discourse of authentic memorialization , which exclude and domesticate heterogeneous and ambiguous elements, are invisible to most people until they are encountered directly. But for those in subjugated positions, the boundary walls reveal themselves with clear force and violence. In as much as they are effects of power, any endeavor to challenge or blur boundaries provokes conflict and entails pain and brutality. In sum, the

politics of ethnic memory over the 1990 relocation issue intensified by a seemingly paradoxical sense of alarm: to remember the past in a particular way might be tantamount to closing the possibilities of the present and aborting the future.

Re-historicizing is never IMMUNE FROM POLITICS. Even well-meaning efforts to remember can mask relations of power that make genocides possibleDemenchonok 9, Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, (Edward, The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 68.1 (Jan): p9)

Nevertheless, theoretical reconstructions of historical events are not impartial , nor are the presentations of the historical places and museums completely free from the "politics of memory": they also are influenced by the essential connection of knowledge and power (as noted by Foucault). What if, in our well-

meaning efforts to memorialize past historical traumas like the Holocaust and Hiroshima, we have inadvertently masked the very social structures, relations of power, and forms of economy and culture that not only led to the genocidal practices of the past, but may already be setting in motion the genocides of the future?

We should affirm that too much history can destroy the present. ZIZEK 5 Slavoj, Why is Wagner Worth Saving?

23. However, the first problem here is that, even if accurate, such insights do not contribute much to a pertinent understanding of the work in

question. One often hears that, in order to understand a work of art, one needs to know its historical context. Against this historicist commonplace , one should affirm that too much of a historical context can blur the proper contact with a work of art - in order to properly grasp, say, Parsifal, one should ABSTRACT from such

historical trivia, one should DECONTEXTUALIZE the work, tear it out from the context in which it was originally embedded. Even more, it is, rather, the work of art itself which provides a context enabling us to properly understand a given historical situation. If, today, someone were to visit Serbia, the direct contact with raw data there would leave him confused.

Evaluate the alternative through the lens of ethical obligation – our obligations for ethical considerations should not come from the past – ethics traverse temporal understandings and should be understood in proximityMeister 5 Robert, "Never Again": The Ethics of the Neighbor and the Logic of Genocide, PMC 15.2 Proximity and Ethics

Our responsibility to alleviate suffering comes before the past in the sense in which ethics can be said to come before politics. The priority of ethics arises "from the fear of occupying someone's place in the Da of my Dasein": "My . . . 'place in the sun,'" he says, "my home--have they not been a usurpation of places which belong to the others already oppressed or . . . expelled by me

into a third world" ("From the One to the Other" 144-5). Lévinas's point is that in ethics, unlike politics, we do not ask who came first and what we have already done to (or for) each other. The distinctively ethical question is rather one of proximity--we are already here and so is the other , cheek-by-jowl with us in the same place. The neighbor is the figure of the other toward whom our only relationship is that of proximity. For Lévinas, the global movement to give ethics primacy over politics must be accompanied, within ethics, by the effort to give primacy to the ethics of the neighbor--the local over the global. In this way, the global primacy of ethics crystallizes around our horror of the inhuman act (the "gross" violation of human rights) rather than, for example, around the international distribution of wealth or the effects of global climate change. Proximity is, thus, the marker that distinguishes an ethics of the neighbor as a basis for human rights from global concerns about injustice that might also be

considered ethical. Proximity is not itself a merely spatial concept--both space and time can be proximate or distant--but it is useful to think of the ethics of the neighbor as a spatializing discourse within ethics, as distinct from a "temporalizing" discourse that subordinates ethics to political rhetorics associated with memory and identity (Boyarin, "Space" 20). The latter is held accountable for the atrocities of the twentieth century because it suggests that the suffering of one's immediate neighbor can be justified through an historical narrative that links it to redeeming the suffering of someone else, perhaps an ancestor or a comrade, to whom one claims an historical relationship that is "closer" than relations among neighbors. To regard proximity of place as the ethical foundation of politics is to resist this tendency from the beginning , and thereby to set the stage for the fin-de-siècle project of transitional justice, which is both the alternative to human rights interventions and their professed aim.

2.30 left

Case1 There’s no impact to biopower or linear time in the 1ac – and they can’t solve their Vasquez evidence because the aff only disrupts one chronological narrative2 Polyvocality is an empty gesture - You don’t solve everything just because you’re open to different interpretations of history. The 1AC was not open to multiple histories – it only presented a very narrow understanding of the Middle Passage. The aff chose to talk about a very specific history – the year 1781, drowning not resistance to drowning, the Zong trials, and only the non-lives of those who were drowned. This is not polyvocality – this is presenting their events of the Middle Passage as a form of truth.

3 Their aff documents biological death – not living death – and living death is key to understand modern prisons

Childs 9 Dennis, American Quarterly, “The American Chain Gang and the Middle Passage Remix,” Volume 61, Number 2, June, pp. 271-297

For my purposes, however, it is important that we recognize how the incidence of biological death that occurred in the coffles,

barracoons, “factories,” ships, and “pens,” of the Middle Passage does not offer a complete measure of the genocidal abjection of (early) modern imprisonment.15 That both Beloved and Dr. Newton speak of the living and the dead being piled on

top of one another and fastened together by chains in the holds of slave ships graphically testifies to how the killing of the African slave involved more than the taking of her biological life. Stated simply, Black Atlantic and “New World” mass internment, enslavement, and genocide were and are produced as much through the mass reproduction of living death as through the production of biologically expired bodies . Here we might think of the radical import of Sethe’s only monologue in which she explains the untold reason behind her ostensibly insane act of infanticide: “If I hadn’t killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear.”16 If we take into account living death as a fundamental aspect of Middle Passage and plantation imprisonment, then the number of those killed in the trade does indeed approach the seemingly miscalculated death count of “60 million and more” that appears in Beloved’s epigraph. And, as we shall see below, 60 million and more becomes an even more

accurate count if we consider how slavery’s (living) death toll reaches across the border of Emancipation. The inclusion of the category of living death within the techniques of state and corporate killing also allows us to attend to the ways in which today’s modern version of mass human warehousing—that is, the penitentiary — represents an extension of rather

than an antithesis to Middle Passage genocide . As Colin (aka Joan) Dayan states with respect to the connected positionalities of slave and criminal: “Death takes many forms, including loss of status beyond which life ceases to be politically relevant.”17 The status loss that accompanied the mass entombment and natal alienation of transatlantic imprisonment was enacted on the ideological and ontological level through the questioning of the slave’s membership in the community of humans.18 In other words, if the captive could be projected as inhuman or subhuman then dehumanization could be emptied of any semantic value, thereby disqualifying black injury.19 Sylvia Wynter uses the term biological idealism to describe the ideological system that transmuted African humanity into quasi-bestiality and black personhood into objecthood. For her, the “nigger” was made to represent “the ultimate zero degree category of an ostensibly ‘primal ’ human nature whose differentiation from a lurking bestiality was dangerously imprecise and uncertain, so uncertain as to call for a question mark to be placed with respect to the humanity of this zero-degree category.”20 The repeated references to the dispossession of manhood and womanhood on the part of Sethe, Paul D, and the rest of the “Sweet Home men”—“you got two legs not four”; “I had a bit in my mouth”—represent the reintroduction within the “post” slavery moment of the ideological construct of black subhumanity—discursive branding processes that began with chattel slavery, and that were specifically inaugurated with the mass physical branding, rape, and cargoing of human beings aboard the slave ship. Consequently, the realm of ideology—the casting of blackness as an anthropology of metaphysical deficit21—was as much of a weapon in the production of mass social and living death as whips, chains, and pistols.2

4 The aff is too open: The aff’s fear of closure AND telling people what they outght to think ensures that all interpretations of history are allowed – even white supremacist ones. Polyvocality means that even disinterested formalist histories will be just as legitimate as post-colonial readings. Counter-histories can’t be successful by ignoring that memory is hegemonically constructed. Polyvocality depends on a playing field that can never be equal. Openness to all views creates a view from nowhere and repeats the problems of the public sphere

Brock 98 Sabine, Pf English and African-American Studies at the University of Milwaukee, American Studies, “Postmodern Mediations and "Beloved's" Testimony: Memory Is Not Innocent” Vol. 43, No. 1, Media and Cultural Memory(1998), pp. 33-49

In recent debates about memory, two intellectual approaches have developed relatively independently of each other. One of these approaches is to discuss memory in descriptive, formalist terms: as a human

faculty, as a mnemonic technique, as a culturally stabilizing repertoire combined of brain capacities, psychic abilities, scientific knowledges, and social rituals. That kind of quasi disinterested , disengaged focus on memory has occupied Western European intellectuals fascinated with the phenome- non as such, leading to questions such as: How does the mnemonic faculty work within the individual, how does memory become collectivized, e.g., on a national level, which

techniques have human societies in history used to remember, to not fall prey to forgetting over time?2 The second tendency, in its

textual practice and its theoretical inscriptions, can be directly related to the recent moment of postcolonial writing that has concerned itself, on a specifically local as well as on a transnational level, with a recuperation of lost history, with representing the undersides of modernity's imperial discourses. I am thinking here of writers and critics as diverse as, for example, Wilson

Harris, Caryl Phillips, Charles Johnson, Sherley Anne Williams, Michelle Cliff, Derek Walcott, and Toni Morrison. They share a focus on a decidedly ethical and political need for a far-reaching restoration of Western cultural memory to the effect of re-inscribing, foregrounding a crucial cultural lack by way of what Bhabha has called the "supplement" of memory of oppressed cultures.3 The effect of an 'unthinking' of hundreds of years of dismemberment in the 'officiar records,

then, would be a challenge to what Morrison has called a "national amnesia."4 Morrison and other authors writing from the perspective of dominated and marginalized cultures or subcultures have invested considerable urgency in this making of memory that seems to have become so very compelling at the end of the twentieth century. For those writers (and their

critics), cultural memory in our historical moment finds itself in a state of "referential debt" to the victims of history.5 For them, memory in some factual, unproblematic fullness, as a mnemonic faculty, as a transparent option to recollect the

past, cannot be assumed to be innocently present in a given culture; hierarchies of empowerment or struggles between

various so- cial factions institutionalize procedures of selection and exclusion. Precisely because memory can only find

representation in medial form, one has to deal with the question of power: since all of a society's past is not equally accessible to memory and se- lective decisions do not come to pass via free-market competition , one

cannot eclipse the problem of agency, individual and collective. Since memory needs mediation (i.e., it is not automatically there, as

an abstract, prestructured phenomenon), it may be subject to repression, culturally and individually. Indeed, not being

able to forget may be a general human brain faculty,6 but historical experiences, as Toni Morrison's novel Beloved so clearly enacts for

us, can be disremembered. To ignore the terms of motive, intention, interest, or particularly invested perspectives and subject positions in any discussion of memory amounts to irresponsible omission . Toni Morrison's work stresses how interested, how invested cultural memory actu- ally is, precisely because it is an act of mediation. Her project is part of a wider effort to politically own memory and not to discuss it in merely formal terms. Different camps of writers on the so-called margin have dealt with that paradoxical cultural need. As Haitian writers Barnabe, Chamoiseau, and Confiant have argued recently And the history of colonization . . . favored exteriority and fed the estrangement of the present. Within this false memory we had but a pile of obscurities as our memory. A feel-

ing of flesh discontinued. . . . Our chronicle is behind the dates, behind the known facts: we are words behind writing. Only . . . artistic knowledge can . . . bring us ... back to the resuscitation of consciousness.7

5 Awareness mistake: Just because we know slavery’s history doesn’t mean the aff helps struggles against anti-blackness. Their Dillon evidence can be 100 percent correct that the Middle Passage is the template for modern power – that doesn’t mean that their history lesson will be a corrective to anti-blackness. Their aff is predicated on academic fantasy and premised on the idea that if we just inform people, they will believe like we do.

BIGO 2, professor at King’s College London department of War studies,

(Didier, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 27.1 Jan-March)

Some "critical" discourses generated by NGOs and academics assume that if people , politicians, governments,

bureaucracies, and journalists were more aware, they would change their minds about migration and begin to resist

securitizing it. The primary problem, therefore, is ideological or discursive in that the securitization of migrants derives from the language itself and from the different capacities of various actors to engage in speech acts. In this context, the term "speech act" is used not in its technical Austinian sense, but metaphorically, to justify both the normative position of a speaker and the value of their critical discourse

against the discourses of the security professionals. This understanding of critique reinforces the vision of a contest

between ideas and norms, a contest in which academics can play a leading role. (3) This essay tries to be critical in a rather different sense. It seeks to avoid presenting the struggle as an ideological one between conservative and liberal positions, or even as an

"intertextual competition" between agencies in which academics have a key role. It examines why the discourses of securitization continue to be so powerful even when alternatives discourses are well known , and why the production of academic and alternative discourses has so little effect in either the political arena or in daily life.

6 The aff has a naïve understanding of the effects of counter-histories. It’s not that Americans don’t know that slavery is part of their past, it’s that it’s too guilt producing. This is what ensures forgetting

Ater 10 Renée, Associate Professor of Art History & Archaeology, University of Maryland, College Park, American Art, “Slavery and Its Memory in Public Monuments,” Vol. 24, No. 1 (Spring), pp. 20-23

Slavery remains an unreconciled and painful aspect of the American past. It is not that we lack nuanced histories ; historians from Eugene Genovese to Ira Berlin have written on this subject, concentrating on the dynamics of the African

American lived experience in the antebellum South.3 Yet we find it difficult as a nation to place slavery into our national story of freedom. Historians James Oliver Horton and Johanna C. Kardux argue, “For Americans, a people who see their history as a freedom story and themselves as defenders of freedom, the integration of slavery into their national narrative is embarrassing and can be guilt-producing and disillusioning. It can also provoke defensiveness, anger and confrontation.”4 The anguish of this past encourages us to forget it, and, yet, it is deeply woven into the fabric of who we are as a nation. In the twenty-first century, the public conversation on how best to remember slavery

has focused on apologies and reparations, whereas the push to create sculptural memorials has occurred more slowly.5 How then to represent slavery and its “unsettling memory,” which can evoke feelings of shame and antipathy, in public

monuments? In the words of art historian James Young, who writes on Holocaust memorials, “How does a nation memorialize a past it might rather forget?”6 In the last decade, artists and communities have come together to memorialize slavery through public monuments made of steel, bronze, stone, and organic materials such as trees and plants. They use diverse forms: abstraction, figural representation, and the built and natural environment. In part, these monuments are about recovering history and creating a common public memory of slavery, a seeming impossibility in the postmodern world. The artists and communities involved in these projects have created and are planning a range of monuments that also encourage reflection on the nature of bondage and freedom. Some are more successful than others at presenting the multiple, shifting meanings of slavery in three dimensions, allowing viewers to shape their own intellectual and emotional understandings of this tragic chapter in American history.

7 You have no UNIQUE ADVANTAGE:

A. Time is not homogenized in the SQ – Vasquez says anti-globalization activists are already questioning the modern idea of time. And they can’t prove who doesn’t believe that slavery informs current racism–multiple scholars write everyday that slavery is still with us.

here

B. History has already been disrupted. Scholars don’t need your help – the link between slavery and the prison has already been thoroughly explored - and you don’t have an impact to doing your aff in the debate space

Dillon 13 [Stephen Dillon, doctor of philosophy from the university of Minnesota, Fugitive Life: Race, Gender, and the Rise of the Neoliberal-Carceral State, May, Regina Kunzel, Co-adviser, Roderick Ferguson, Co-adviser, http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/11299/153053/1/Dillon_umn_0130E_13833.pdf]

The connections made by Shakur between the prison and neoliberalism, and between slavery and the prison, have been thoroughly explored by many scholars .29 Indeed, during the past two decades, a growing body of scholarship has affirmed and extended Shakur’s analysis of blackness, slavery, and the prison by exploring what Saidiya Hartman

calls “the afterlife of slavery.”30 By centering racial terror in a genealogy of the prison, scholars have come to understand the barracoons, coffles, slave holds, and plantations of the Middle Passage as spatial, discursive, ontological, and economic analogues of modern punishment that have haunted their way into the present .31 If the carceral becomes a functional surrogate for slavery’s production of social and living death, then Shakur’s text also hints at another connection that has

garnered less attention—slavery’s haunting possession of neoliberalism. While the prison’s connection to slavery and the market

has been well explored , the contemporary market’s relationship to chattel slavery has largely been overlooked. If slavery’s antiblack technologies inhabit and structure the prison, how do they live on in the operations of the market? What is the relationship between an anti-blackness inaugurated under the Atlantic slave trade and the methods of population management used under neoliberalism? How does the absence, death, and loss left behind by slavery connect to the formation of the contemporary neoliberal-carceral state? What is the connection between the necropolitics of chattel-slavery and the biopolitics of neoliberalism?

C. Post-colonialism makes your aff nothing special – oceanic metaphors already rigorously theorize identity

TINSLEY 8 Dept of English, African American and African Studies @ University of Minnesota Omise’eke Natasha-; BLACK ATLANTIC, QUEER ATLANTIC: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage; GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol 14, Number 2-3, pp. 191-215; http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v014/14.2-3.tinsley.pdf

In the past fifteen years postcolonial studies effected sea changes in scholarly images of the global south, smashing and wearing away essentialist conceptions of race and nationality with the insistent pounding force of ocean waters.

Rigorously theorizing identities that have always already been in flux and rethinking black “insularity ”

from England and Manhattan to Martinique and Cuba, imaginative captains of Atlantic and Caribbean studies have called prominently on oceanic metaphors. Their conceptual geographies figure oceans and seas as a presence that is history, a history that is present. In the watershed The Black Atlantic, Gilroy evokes the Atlantic as the trope through which he imagines the emergence of black modernities. A past of Atlantic crossings underpins his engagement with contemporary multiracial Britain, where the black in the Union Jack is no novelty introduced by recent immigrants but a continuation of

centuries of transoceanic interchanges. Calling on the ship as the first image of this black Atlantic, Gilroy begins by stipulating that ships and oceans are not merely abstract figures but “cultural and political units” that “refer us back to the middle passage, to the half- remembered micro politics of the slave trade .”8 He underscores that seminal African diaspora figures like Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Robert Wedder- burn, and Crispus Attucks worked with and as sailors (why omit Harriet Jacobs, Mary Seacole, and other sailing women?), and notes that the physical mobility enabled by the ocean was fundamental to their intellectual motility. Yet while many of these masculine sailor-intellectuals resurface in Gilroy’s later discussions, the history of their sea voyages does not. Both ships and the Atlantic itself — as concrete maritime space rather than conceptual principle for remapping blackness — drop out of his text immediately after this paragraph. Neither the Middle Passage nor the Atlantic appear in the index, remaining phantom metaphors rather than concrete historical presences. Gilroy’s ghost ships and dark waters traverse five memorable pages of his introduction, then slip into nowhereness.

8 Agentless Forgetting: Who exactly is the problem? There is ZERO in the aff that details who or what subjectivities are the problem. And who we need to influence. The aff criticizes all progressives - without actually proving it.

Really the aff is just talking about literary texts and academic theorizing – not an actual reflection of larger cultural beliefs. They can’t prove who sustains or is responsible for a forgetting of nameless. Nothing about the aff changes literary texts which form the archives of the Middle Passage. The aff just points out that these beliefs exist and does nothing to remedy the actual problem. Who cares what academics think – lived reality separate from academia is more important.

Smith 14 Michael K, Dissident Voice, The Black Panthers: Revolutionaries, Not Thugs, 1-4, http://www.mediachannel.org/the-black-panthers-revolutionaries-not-thugs/

For those who value honesty and analytical rigor over impotent polemics, this book is a treasure. Here, for once, intellectual life is not about other intellectuals, but about real life, in this case ordinary people attempting to overcome extraordinary oppression by taking up arms and dedicating themselves to revolutionary struggle. The printed

word counts, but only insofar as it contributes to liberation from empire, both at home and abroad. The posturing and pontification so characteristic of thought-for-thought’s-sake arguments are blessedly absent from these pages.

9 The aff doesn’t care about ending slavery – they care about teology and ending the homogenization of time. This turns slaves into an instrument for perfecting history.

Hassan 14 Budour, Tidal Blog, The crisis of solidarity: Using ‘their’ plight to score political points, 3-17, http://tidalmag.org/blog/the-crisis-of-solidarity/

Another recurring problem in our discourse today on Israel’s mistreatment of African refugees is that it ends up using the plight of African refugees solely as a means to point to Israel’s brutality. African refugees are human beings, not pawns in our liberation struggle . Each refugee who has fled genocide, ethnic cleansing, military dictatorship or persecution has a personal story that deserves to be heard and respected. They deserve nothing less than us orienting and broadening our struggle against whatever processes forced them to flee their own homes, breaking up their lives, families, and communities. They deserve genuine solidarity from us rather than our using their plight as an advertising campaign for our cause. We must realise how we further dehumanise African refugees when we exploit their suffering to serve our own agenda. Indeed,

we fully disregard their own stories and never think to ask what their ideas are for the struggle . Indeed, we cannot think to ask them what they think about things because we do not engage them as dignified people; we see them and treat them only as victims.

10 The aff under-estimates their enemy. Working through histories is hard - COMING TO TERMS WITH THE PAST CAN CREATE AMNESIA

Yoneyama 95, cultural studies & Japanese studies in the Dept of Literature at the UC, San Diego, (lisa, Public Culture, 1: 499-527)

Yet, as Theodor Adorno wrote, the coming to terms with the past (Aufarbeitung der Vergungenheit) "does not imply a serious working through of the past , the breaking of its spell through an act of clear consciousness . It suggests , rather, wishing to turn the page and, if possible, wiping it from memory ” (1 15). This process , therefore, necessarily entails the forgetting of that very amnesia, masking the fact that the memories of aggression and discrimination have been deliberately and at times forcibly repressed for almost half a century since the end of the war.

11 ALT CAUSE: Dispassionate reporting is the problem

Brown 9 Vincent, Prof. of History and African and African-American Studies @ Harvard Univ., December, "Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery," American Historical Review, p. 1231-1249

For dispassionate accounting —exemplified by the ledgers of slave traders— has been a great weapon of the powerful, an episteme that made the grossest violations of personhood acceptable, even

necessary. This is the kind of bookkeeping that bore fruit upon the Zong. “It made it easier for a trader to countenance yet another dead black body or for a captain to dump a shipload of captives into the sea in order to collect the insurance, since it wasn’t possible to kill cargo or to murder a thing already denied life. Death was simply part of the workings of the trade.” The archive of slavery, then, is “a mortuary.” Not content to total up the body count, Hartman offers elegy, echoing in her own way the lamentations of the women aboard the Hudibras. Like them, she is concerned with the dead and what they mean to the living. “I was desperate to reclaim the dead,” she writes, “to reckon with the lives undone and obliterated in the making of human commodities.