MEAN GREEN WORKSHOPS 2007 BORDERS K

INDEX

BORDERS
CRITICISM
1NC SHELL-PG. 1-5
AFRICA - 6-20

AID-21 BORDERS - 22-23

GOVERNMENT TRANSITIONS - 24-25 ~ I T I ~ E N S H I P26 COLONIALISM - 27 ECONOMY - 32 KRITIKS OF WESTERN IMPERIALISM - 33 FOREIGNERS - 34-35 ETHIOPIA - 36-40 FRANCE- 41-42 MAPPNG - 43 NATIVES - 44 NORTH~SOUTH DISCOURSE - 45 SOCIAL SCIENTISTS - 46 STATE - 47-50 WESTERN LITERATURE - 51-52

DISCOURSE - 28-3 1

BROUGHT TO YOU BY CHASE,

PAMELA, ROHAN, AND JOHN SPERGER

IMPACTS
EUROCENTRISM - 53

DISEMPOWRMENT54-56 DISCOURSE57-61
NO SOLVENCY - 62-63 ERADICATION OF POPULATIONS- 64 DESTRUCTION OF CULTURE - 65 BIOPOWER - 66 SECURITIZATIOE~ - 67 IDENTITY ERASURE - 68-72 SUPERIORITY - 73-74 DOMINATZTLON - 75

ALTERNATIVES AL'r SOLVENCY - 76-83 ANSWERS TO A T FRAMEWORK - 84 AT: IMPACTS OW - 85-88 A T REALISM - 89

AFF ANSWERS: 90-98

MEAN GREEN WORKSHOPS 2007 BORDERS K

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THE AFFIRh4ATIVES BOUNDARY PRODUCED PERFORMANCE UPHOLDS THE VIOLENT EXCLUSION OF OTHERS THAT EXIST OUTSIDE OUR ARBITRARY BORDERS

CAMPBELL 05

Over time, of course, ambiguity is disciplined, contingency is fixed, and dominant meanings are established. In the history of U.S.

foreign policy regardless of the radically different contexti in which it has operated-the formalized practices and ritualized acts Of SeCUihl discourse have worked to produce a conception of the United States in which
freedom, liberty, law, democracy, individualism, faith, order, prosperity, and civilization are claimed to Exist because of the constant Struggle with and often violent suppression of opponents said to embody tyranny, oppression, anarchy, totalitarianism, collectivism, atheism, and barbarism

This record demonstrates that the boundary-producing political performance of foreign policy does more than inscribe a geopolitical marker on a map. This construction of social space also involves an axiological dimension in which the delineation of an inside from an outside gives rise to a moral hierarchy that renders the domestic superior and the foreign inferior. Foreign policy thus incorporates an ethical power of segregation in its performance Of identitddifference. While this produces a geography of "foreign" (even "evil") others in
conventional terms, it also requires a disciplining oi"domes1ic" elements on the inside that challenge this state identity This is achieved through exclusionary practices in which

resistant elements to a secure identity on the "inside" are linked through a discourse of "danger" with threats identified and located on the "outside." Though global in scope, these effects are national in their legitimation. 12

MEAN GREEN WORKSHOPS 2007 BORDERS AND NAMES K SUE-SAHARAN AFRICA IS A M C I S T TERM DESIGNED TO ASSMILATE AFRICAN IDENTITIES INTO A POSITION OF SUBORDINATION SHkdIADAH 20% OWEN ALK Shahadah studied Aeronautical Engineermg (BEng) m London
and zoology (Bsc) at the Umversity of the West lndies He is currently workmg on obtamng a doctorate m Afncan hstory and culture., August 71h

Sub-Saharan Africa The notion of some invisible border, which divides the North of African from the South, is rooted in racism, which in part assumes that a little sand is an obstacle for African people. This barrier of sand hence confineslconfined Africans to the bottom of this make-believe location, which exist neither politicallv or Ohvsically. The Sahara is a broad desert belt, which encompasses countries like Mali, Sudan, and Mauritania, and hence they are neither sub nor North Africa. In addition, many African communities historically have travelled freely across this European barrier set for Afiicans. Mansa Musa famous Hajj travelled through North Afiica in the 13th century so why do we assume Africans would be confined to this nonsensical designation called Sub-Saharan Africa. Again, Eurocentric dialectics is at plav in the insatiable need to cateaorize and define things solelv on superficial limited phvsical observation. This is a mindset, which they cannot escape, and the only way they can process reality. Hence, sharp definitions, physical quantities are pre-emphasised in their mental navigation of the world around. Interestingly, most non-European cultures embody a more spiritual approach to reality, which is expressed in language, culture, and perception of the World. Sub-Saharan Africa sets-up the premises for the confiscation of any civilisation which happen to occur in African territory. These malicious definitions have been inherited by the victims of European imDerialism and normalise into African lanauaee and reality. Sub-Saharan Africa is a byword for primitive African: a place. which has escaped advancement. Hence, we see statements like no written languages exist in Sub-Saharan Africa. Egypt is not a Sub-Saharan African civilisation. Sub-Sahara serves as an exclusion, which moves, iumps and slides around to suit European negative generalization of Africa. Hence, they would exclude Sudan and Ethiopia, Mali and Niger from Sub-Saharan African if it suits their argument. Europeans place an emphasis on written script, and subsequent d e f ~ t i o n of s advance and primitive are rooted in this pre-concept. It can be said however that most of the world has, historically an oral tradition. However, both formulas for preserving history and communication can be found in Africa: oral and written. Traditionally Europeans in their historical attempts to exclude Africa from civilization have hit upon an obstacle when Amharic exists in Ethiopia. To solve this apparent contradiction the argument moves to, it was introduced from another people. At no point in time can Afiicans be allowed to be seen to have fostered anythng, which Europe labels as artefacts of civilization. So either the invisible border comes into play or civilisations are assigned to North Africa (non-Black) or alternatively, gifts given to Ahcans from external nowAfrican sources.

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MEAN GREEN WORKSHOPS 2007 BORDERS AND NAMES K HEGEMONIC DISCOURSE MASILS VIOLENCE, DOMINATION, AND CREATES A FASCIST FETISHIZATION OF AUTHORITY
Sorenson 1993, John Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Brigham Young University, Imagining Ethiopia: Struggles for History and Identity in the Horn of Africa p35-36

qiGi5

While apparently aberrant in its celebration of both Haile Selassie and Mengistu, Schwabs work does indicate what is at the center of hegemonic discourse: the relativity of violence and the fetishization of absolute authority. Violence is disregarded if the perpetrator observes the appropriate ideology; furthermore, the discourse is obsessed with sovereignty, identity, and authority and requires a powerful leader in the Horn. For US. policy makers, Haile Selassie provided such authority and was observant of the appropriate international hierarchy; therefore, the repressive aspects of his reign were acceptable. Despite the murderous actions of the regime that deposed their former ally, the U.S. was willing to increase its supply of arms to Ethiopia if the appropriate relations of power were preserved. It was MengkNs alliance with the Soviet Union, not the Dergs violent character, which led to his demonization. The symbolic significance of Ethiopia for Africans and AfricanAmericans also was concenuated in the image of Haile Selassie. During the decolonization period HaiIe Selassie enjoyed a reputation as an elder statesman and skilted diplomat and had enormous respect among less experienced African politicians; Nkrumah, Senghor, and Kenyatta were all inspired by him (Wubneh and Abate 1988:l). The enormous prestige of Haile Selassie influenced African support for Ethiopias position during the 1950 U.N. debates on Eritreas future. In particular, Liberia gave strong support to Ethiopian claims. As had medieval Europe, Liberia found its own reflection in Ethiopia: Amhara dominance over other ethnic groups paralleled that of the Americo-Liberian minority [that] imposed its norms and institutions upon the. . .sixteen or more ethnic groups in Liberia, employing all the mannerisms of an imperial power; l i e the Amhara, this minority felt itself possessed of a civilizing mission over backward Africans (Liebenow 1986:95,20).

MGW Senior Scholars Borders K

arbitrary borders upholds centuries of Eurocentric domination and western supremacy. Lassiter - 2007 [James, Senior Refugee Program Manager in the US . Department of Justice, Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), Office of International Affairs in Washington, D.C. Trained in anthropology and African Studies at the University of Oregon (M.S., 1975; Ph.D., 1983) and has published in his area of expertise. In addition to conducting anthropological research in Swaziland f?om 1980-83, he served as a Peace Corps administrator in Tanzania and Ghana and as a Senior Desk Officer at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, African Culture And Personality: Bad Social Science. Effective Social Activism. Or A Call To Reinvent Ethnoloev? "African Studies Quarterly", hth,://www.afiica.ufl.edulasa/v3/~3i3al .htm]

From the early sixties to the present, African scholars outside the social sciences consistently claimed that there have been, are and will continue to be widespread psvchological and cultural themes and patterns that there are unique to subSaharan Africa. They also argue that these broad themes and patterns are undergoing rapid change in a similar manner and most often for the worse throughout most of the continent. The strength of their commitment to these concepts is reflected in the fact that the scholars persist in their efforts despite a historical intellectual context that eschews such inquiry. This survey reveals they have done so to clarifv and extol the virtues of what it means to be African in the face of increasing global Westernization, and to identify and promote the importance of "Africanness" in African national and regional development. African scholars also seek to reassert Africa's importance in the broader philosophical and cultural evolution of humankind. Although some of the works contain significant methodological shortcomings which will be addressed below, most of the scholars' assertions and arguments are well-reasoned and extremely compelling.

MGW Senior Scholars Borders Kritik

AFRICAN DISCOURSE IS SOMETHLNG ONE CANNOT HAVE OR HAVING SOMETHING ONE DOES NOT WISH FOR -MILLER 1985
[Christopher, Associate Professor of History and Philosophy at University of Texas, and Frederick Ford Professor of French and a c a n American Studies at Yale University; Blank Darkness- Africanist Discourse in French, University of Chicago Press.f?w

-TI

Favorable descriptions of Africa can be as detached from reality as negative ones: the axis between realism and fantasy does not run parallel to that of desire and loathing. Deske is,.she ,desi,re for realism, for the documented, reified presence of the obj%t..Thepeculiarity of Africa the slight and constant tease between what the author can prove; for, as often as not, what he wishes to deb an absence. Then what becomes of the notion of desire if one wailts nothing? Wanting something, Freud tells us, ul$m&I,y~makesit appear as real before the senses? but we have seen that wanting nolhing can thing,-?nd no one becomes a perso shape and lending themselves to the process of description. The positively valorized instances of AfricanistQiscourse could @us be defined. wishing for someriting one cannor~have(Leavis on Conrad: the emotional insistence on the presence of what he cant produce). Thyn.ptiue.versions would be

hayins s o m e l k g ~ one does not wish for-provided that having is understood as that dubious end-product of a wish, hallucination,
- . .

o\

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PLF'RICA IS A SINONYM TO ABSENSE IN WESTERN DISCOURSE -MILLER 1985 [Christopher, Associate Professor of History and Philosophy at University of Texas, and Frederick Ford Professor of French and African American Studies at Yale University; n French", University of Chicago Press. PP. 135-61 Darkness- Africanist Discourse i

T A n d yet, with Andromache, as with the ndgresse and the swan in "Le Cygne;* the ieference is to a previous state of captivity and a current state of "ironic freedom."5' Each has been emancipated, nflanchi, but actually only delivered over to a new condition of desire. Aeneas finds Andromache surrounded by idols of Troy ("Falsi Simoentis . . . une perite Troie, un Pergame qui reproduir le grand");"Baudelaire's Andromache, as we have seen, is caught in a self-pelpetuating nostalgia that further separates her from primal satisfaction. The ntgresse performs two actions: p ant and cherc/lonr. She "makes walking mavements while resling in plnce" (Grand Larousse: emphasis mine), scratching at an indeshuctible, formless. muddy surface, looking for something that is almost synonymous with absence in Western discourse: Africa." One is left with only the scratching, searching gesture of allegory: "All slips and is deadened on her granite skin" ("Ali&orie," Oeuvres, p. 116). onsumes herselfslowly, literally, in phthisis, consumption. Allegory is desire chasing after an object it will never reach nor yet completely lase; it is the movement ofpi~ritblanrdeeperinto the mud, haggard, but seduced by the conviction that something "superb" exists over there, By the temporality of their plight. reducing everything to an act of memory, by their spatial relationship to a barrier Uiat is always also a medium of transport; by the whole complex system of desire feeding on its own producGons.("ceux qui s'abreuvent de pleurs"), Andromache~andthe ndgresse~ .we~..hke.auggory itself, perfectly caught between tise~ecstasy of memory and.the pain of.lg,s. The nigresse and the Africa she contemplates are thus neither Fetishes nor "pure" allegories; they are midway between the total~identityof theone and the total difference of 'the- other. The nineteenth century may never 'have produced a more profoundly sympathetic role for the black than in this small passage of "Le Cygne." The otherness of the nigresse is allowed to exist in . . serenity, in a European (Greco-PariSian).context that deithei VuT~irIyaSsimilaiis the other to itself nor rejects it as a monstrous aberration.
~ ~

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MEAN GREEN WORKSHOPS 2007 BORDERS AND NAMES K

\r L i l/i 1 L -/- fLr

1 c&.

RACIAL DISTINCTIOKS LN AFRICA ARE MAULATED TO SERVE POLITICAL OBJECTIVES

Sorenson 1993,

John Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Brigham Young University, Imagining Ethiopia: Struggles for History and Identity in the Horn of Africa p29-30

7 Discussion continues about the proper racial daSSIiIcatIOI3 at tne Ethiopians. For example, Soviet Africanist Georgi Galperin places Ethiopians in an intermediate position between whites and blacks, asserting that they are closer to what he identifies as the European race (Jordan 1989:8,17n29).As in Africanist discourse generally, racial distinctions are manipulated to serve specific political objectives. Desire for closer political alliance, for example, leads to stress on European features, while efforts to vilify a particular regime are usually accompanied by references to African qualities. These remarks indicate a trope whose essential features are in contradiction: an Ethiopia that does not exist-or a multiplicity of Ethiopias, blacks who are whites, the quintessential Africans who reject African identity. However, rather than seeking deconstructionist explanations for an Africanist discourse based on nullity, one can propose a historical context for these contradictions. The fact that racial distinctions are easily manipulated and reversed indicates the absurdity of any claims that they have an objective basis and locates these distinctions where they actually occur, in the operations of power. In recent discourse on Ethiopia, ideas of race show this direct connection with power: famine is presented as the result of essential African qualities of savagery and incompetence. These qualitim are presented as dangerous threats to Western civilization (also conceived in racial terms-as white), which require a reassertion of power over the Thud World generally. This theme of racial essentialism relates to the

idea of the Third World as contagion and involves fear of erosion of racial identity through contact. Themes of racist and a~tiCO~mUnk4 discourse me interwoven and the famine that affected large WgionS of ~ f ris i distilled ~ ~ into an Ethiopian famine, presided Over by the nightmare figures of the Savage and the Communist who m e r g e d produce pure negativity.

MEAN GREEN WORKSHOPS 2007 BORDERS AND NAMES 1C

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-A-C.ABEMIC DISCOU?.SE IS USED TO LEGITIMIZE OPRESSWE P,EGIMES D-I AFRICA

Sorenson 1993,

John Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Brigham Young University, Imagining Ethiopia: Struggles for History and Identity in the Horn of Afiica p 70-71

Contrasting narrative constructions of history and competing versions of identity in the Horn have spawned external discourses. In turn, nationalists seize upon these discourses to legitimize and further their own claims. Examination of competing historical narratives used by Ethiopians and by those who reject Ethiopian identity cannot ignore the Western images of Ethiopia and the significance that Ethiopia has had for other Africans. Ethiopian and foreign discourses have fed upon each other and have been formed in opposition or reaction to one another. Academic discourse on the Horn, growing out of philological concerns, a focus on the Semitic roots of the Great Tradition of highland Abyssinian culture, and the hagiographic chronicles of the royal court, accepted and reinforced the narrative of Greater Ethiopia, as exemplified in some key texts. For example, Edward Ullendoffs study emerges from the tradition of Semitic studies and is firmly fixed on the role of the highland Abyssinian peoples; he dismisses the Oromo: The Callas had little to contribute to the Semitized civilization of Ethiopia; they possessed no significant material or intellectual culture, and their social organizationdiffered considerably from that of the population among whom they settled. They were not the only cause of the depressed state into which the country now sank, hut they helped to prolong a situation from which even a physically and spiritually exhausted Ethiopia might otherwise have been able to recover far more quickly (197333). The Oromos are portrayed as drawing a reign of darkness over Ethiopia, a time of isolation, stunted intellectual development and xenophobia. They are essentiahed as puw nepativiri, contrasted with the purposeful expansion of the Amhara: Not until the advent of King Theodore in the mid-nineteenth century does Ethiopia emerge from her isolation. Only then, in her rediscovered unity under the Emperors John, Menelik, and Haile Sellasie, does the country find its soil and genius again, its spirit and its sense of mission (ibid.:75).

...

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AFRICA IS AN EUROPEAN CREATTION- ONE THAT MUST MONSTROUSNESS AND NOBILITY-MILLER 1985

23Ecf-R THE

[Christopher, Associate Professor of History and Philosophy at University of Texas, and Frederick Ford Professor of French and African American Studies at Yale University; Blank Darkness- Africanist Discourse in French, University of Chicago Press. PP. 5-61

PC *

, The difference in attitudes cannot be explained by a separation of thirty years

or by the fact that this passage was taken from the Abbe Raynals Hisroire des dew; lndes of 1770. Thrrghout the history of Afncanist writing there is a striking tendency toward dual, polarized evaluations, which are often too hastily ascribed to this or that historical trend. Africa has been made to bear a double burden, of monstrousness ond nobility, all imposed by a deeper condition of difference and instability (Plinys hewness). The result is a European discourse at odds with itself. Castelnaus claim to science brings him. with each argument he advances, farlher and farther beyond anything he can demonstrate, and, as fable and realism melt together, the reading process becomes more difficult. The gesture of reaching out to the most unknown pan of the world and bringing it back as language-the process we will be analyzing in this study-ultimately brings Europe face to face with nothing but itself, with the problems its own discourse imposes. Thus Pigault-Lebrun takes us lo the banks of the Niger to introduce us to women named Calipso or Fanni, creatures of European origin, fulfilling European desires. This is not an African problem but an Africanist one, born and numred in Europe of European ideas and concerns, The paper reality of Africanist objects must be sharply distinguished from the reality, paper or not, of Africa itself. Since any Western attempt to understand the latter must come to gnps with the ways in which European discourse ineluctably inscribes and blocks such an understanding, I have chosen to focus on the former. The question 1 Will ask is not what is different about Africa to make it appear in a fashion but what is different about a certain European discourse when ir pmduces an object aberrant to the system that created it. The pages that follow are *US a s W not of Africa but of the conditions within certain French and other European utterances that give rise to that peculiar empty profile Africa. But one must not assume that one knows those contours, that object preexists analysis. For this reason I find it necessary to stan as if zero, with the most basic of terms. to see how it all comes 10 pass. 1

AFRICANS WERE THOSE WITH THE MISSING HEADS, WITH THE ABSENCE op KNOWLEDGE AND CONTROL. THE DESCRIPTIONS BECAME PART OF THEIR CULTURE-BECOMING OBJECTS THE EYES OF MEN-MILLER 1985
[Christopher, Associate Professor of History and Philosophy at University of Texas, and Frederick Ford Professor of French and African American Studies at Yale University; Blank Darkness- Africanist Discourse in French, University of Chicago Press.$? 23 - B-J

< i n e pnviiege ot tne voice is to represent consciousness as present to itself.

prerequisite to the intercourse of speech, and therefore to the riras, the ways of civilization. Consciousness is utterly denied to these specific youps: for them a complete nullity is reserved, and they represent a total 5. refutation of the notion of civilization as based on consciousness and intersubjectivity. They do not wear exotic costumes; they go naked. The Blemmyae have no heads, their mouths and their eyes being seated in their breasts. No voice, no dreams, no heads, no clothes: European discourse projects an object onto the unknown. an object of impossible nullity. Each category (marriage, clothing, speech, religion) is filled, but with an object (promiscuous concubinage, nakedness, squeaking, worship of the infernal regions) that is a negation of the category itself. Africanist discourse in the West is one in which the head, the voice-the logos, if you will-is missing. Later, Medieval writers will represent this as an absence, among the Ethiopians, of the Godhead-the all-determining principle that holds phenomena in their proper relations. In Julius Solinus Polyhistor (translated by Golding in 1587). family relationships, symbolic of the relationship between God the Father and man,are reduced to a chaotic mishmash in which the name of Father hath no reverance at all . . . . For who is able to knowe hys Father, where such incestuous lecherie runnelh at large , . . ; they [the Ethiopians] have infringed the discipline of chastitie. and by a wicked culture destroyed the knowledge of their succession. The i log&a! . succession is annihilated by an absence of knowiedgc a missing head. ?.~

From this flow the other predicates: sin, earthly pleasure, evaporation ofthe
SPirit, the deformation of vice. It becomes possible for Saint jerome to interpret Chusi (which in Hebrew means Ethiopian) in Psalm 7, *thisEthiopian. to be no other thawthe devil and to add, incredibly, that he *is Ethiopian by reason of his vice. In the same homily, Jerome says that the devil is a snake because every part of him is completely on the ground; his animals head and the rest Of his body are all on the same level . . . . The may rest on the ground but long to rise up from it, but the devil cleaves to it with head, tail, and the middle part of him.53 This discourse can thus produce monstrous. nonhuman objects in which no Part Of the body transcends the others; the head has no is missing. Such Utterances and visual images constitute a whole tradition, passed on from the Ancients through the age of discovery and still alive in the Nam. Niam question of the 1850s. The contrast between this and the first tradition of blameless Ethiopians, beloved of the gods, could not be could they possibly he objects with the same name?> pilY
~

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*6
SINCE EARLY PHILOSOPHICAL WORKS, AFRICA WASLAND THAT PRODUCED MONSTERS-MILLER 1985
[Christopher, Associate Professor of History and Philosophy at University of Texas, and Frederick Ford Professor of French and African American Studies at Yale University; Blank Darkness- Africanist Discourse in French, University of Chicago Press.9, &- 27
C Aristotle knew not of any [slaves] who were so utterly devoid of any sem-

blance of v i m e as are the A f r i c a n ~ . In ~ Herodotus. both points of view are readily expressed. His Africa consists of Libya, Ethiopia, and the great unknown to the south of everything, and any attempt to attach his Troglodytes A radically unhuman human to this or that real location would be mi~guided.~ appears only through a series af oppositional removals that carries the text ever further from familiarity. The Ethiopians, when Herodotus discusses them alone, appear as another civilization, ruling over Egypt for fifty years, and black only by reason of the heat (p. 301). Yet in opposition to the more northerly Garamantes of Libya, the burnt-faces show another potential: these Garamantes go in tbeir four-horse chariots chasing the cavedwelling Troglodyte Ethiopians: for the Ethiopian cave-dwellers are swifter of foot than any men of whom tales are brought us. They live on snakes and lizards and such-like creeping things. Their speech is like none other in the world; it is like the squeaking of bats.

[P.3871
The land to the south and west (as the Nile was supposed lo divide the earth) was not exclusively monsuous, hut it was the only place in the Ancient cosmography that was capable ofprodncing dog-eared men, and the headless that have their eyes in their breasts, as the Libyans say, and the wild men and women, besides many other creatures not fabnloss. But in the nomads country to the nodh, there are none of these. Herodotus distinction is clear. But this is mild compared to Plinys version of the same story. He reports that the Cave-dwellers have no articulate voice, hut only utfer a kind of squeaking noise, and thus they are utterly destitute of all means of communication by language. The Garamantes have no institution of marriage among them, and live in promiscuous concubinage with their women. The Augylae worship no deities but the gods of the infernal regions. The Gamphasantes . . , go naked and are unacquainted with war. . . . The Atlantes, if we believe what is said, have lost all characteristics of humanity; for there is no mode of distinguishing each other by names , . . nor are they visited with dreams like the rest afrnortnls.*O

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NAMES OF AFRICAN COUNTRIES ARE INVENTIONS OF OUTSIDERS OF LIGHTER COMPLEXION WHO NAMED THE PLACE IN RELATION TO THEMSELVES-MILLER 1985
[Christopher, Associate Professor of History and Philosophy at University of Texas, and Frederick Ford Professor of French and &can American Studies at Yale University; Blank Darkness- Akicanist Discourse in French, University of Chicago Press.$? 6-47 fc
-,

It was relatively recently that Africa came to be the sole representative of a single continent, differentiated and circumscribed. Although it has been claimed that the Ancients circumnavigated Africa, the contoun oi the continent remained unknown to literate geography. Some versions of Ptolemys geography ended in the south with the frank label terra incognita; others, such as Sebastian Miinsters Geogruphiu of 1540, chose to fill in the blank unknown with myths and speculations (see figure 1). As late as 1508 the land

I
. U

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mass to the south bore no label Africa. A single name for the continent as a whole was problematical, and names for its parts floated inconsistently for ages. Names such as Ethiopia, Africa, Niger, Sudan, Nigritia, Libya, Guinea, etc., have had a slippery history of application to places, and interpreters of these names tend to see in them thematic content that is unexpected in place-names. Erhi.opiuwould appear to be the oldest Westernurpefor Africa; by tradition, Ethiopia and Libya are Greek terms, Africa is Roman. The applicability of Ethiopia to the whole of the continent and its pans is a question that has been dealt with elsewhere; the role of the word in signification is relevant here. Ethiopia, - .~according to the Shorrer Oxford English Dicrionury. i s c o w o n l y believed to be f r o m a k i u , &.bum + &+, face, and to mean primarily :burnt-face. The place is thus defined by its people and by the single characteristic that e m off from the Greek their skin. For everyon hiops seemedtorefer cans (Devisse, Llmage du noir, p. 53). Fkgerald franslates Ethiopians as the sun-bumt races,* and the addition of the sun is not graNitoUs, for it is understood as that which can bum a face black. Man, Ethiopian man, is the locus where the light of the sun becomes darkness. Fmm the moment Ethiopia is spoken, darkness and its cause, light, are posited together. I will return to the idea of darkness in discussing Homer; for the moment it suffices to note the coincidental positing of darkness with light in this etymology: the two e m given at once and are counterpans to each other. Place-names, anyone who has read Proust knows, are as charged with significance as any words can b e , yet their absence from dictionaries and relegation to encyclopedias (when the two genres separated) shows the purely referential status they are given. A map is all that is needed to define a place-name. But if the world is filled, as Rousseau wrote, with countries of which we know only the names, what kind of knowledge is that? Is a name that which one calls oneself, as in French (je mappelle , . . J or that which one is named by the outside world (my name i s . . , ; I am such as Ethiopia and Sudan are evidently the inventions called . . .)? N~mes, of ou.Lsiders, of lighter complerion,.who, naqgdthe place in relation to them-

selves. .By doing so, they attached a kind of significance to that which would n i w l h have none. We have already seen that. when etymologies are proposed, significance is spun around the referential core of the word. Thus Ethiopia already bespeaks a white subjectivity manipulating tropes, opening the door to significance. Such is also the case with Niger.: Recent scholarship claims that this name was origin?!ly Nigeir, a wholly unrelated word coming from a Nigeir number of possible African languages. . .. . ~- means river: the simplest possible of designations between word and thing. It was only through a misreading of this word by Latin-based Europeans that darkness entered. The phonological resemblance of nigeir to niger replaced river with black in such a way that Europe can say, The natives call it Black. f i e role of the name thus moves away from a simple, immanent river/river to a significant river/idea-of-blackness:d@rence and signification inter.vene by the arrival of this gap between word and thing. The scene depicted here between the lines is a familiar one incblanial mythology: & cplonizer ~is.this?and misinterp-ts the reply. In the case asks the colonized,.:What of the Niger River and the Zake as well. the answer was simply Water! which was then construed as a proper noun. In reply to Who are you?Bantu, i.e., people. 3

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AFRICA IS WHATEVER ONE WANTS IN THE LANGUAGE ONE WANTS- IT NEVER IS JUST AFRICA-MILLER 1985
[Christopher, Associate Professor of History and Philosophy at University of Texas, and Frederick Ford Professor of French and African American Studies at Yale University; Blank Darkness- Asicanist Discourse in French, University of Chicago Press.P,m -) I
By convention, the word is Latin. But the search for its origin beyond the Romans leads to a group of divergent hypotheses. Many sources agree that the Romans acquired the word from the Canhaginians. Again the colonial interrogation (What is this?-Africa), but this lime the original meaning is lacking. Africa originally applied only to the region around Canhage. but by synecdoche it came to represent the entire continent. The progress of the word in Western languages is that of a movement from Africa proper to Africa as a whole, insening a difference where before there was none. Diderots EncvclopPdie distinguishes between Africa proper or Little Africa surrounding Cmhage, and Africa in general.14 The movement away from the proper coincided with the inszrtion of the word in European language and discourse. From this moment on Africa will be a trope-a part for a whole or a whole for a part-recounting a colonial history, designating a difference. The answer to this would be an adjournment back to an authentic source, a simple designation within the confines of a local language, on the model of nigeir. But the Carthaginians may have handed the Romans a purely insignificant place-name, devoid of meaning in any language, Africa meaning only that place called Africa. This, however, cannot prevent etymologies from being produced. among which I have found ten different hypotheses:
i

l 1

--Africa may have been derived from the ethnic designation of some tribe in the neighborhood of Canhage whose name signified The Wanderers: the word is probably Punic, at all evem Semitic (Isaac Taylor).s
-It

may mean the South Land (Taylor).

--Its name is a mystery; it is supposed to be derived from Afrigah, which word, in the ancient Phoenician, is said to have meant colony;

the name given by the founders of Carthage to their territory, having spread to the whole contincnt" (New American CyclupaediaJ.l6

-Aphar

in Hebrew. meaning "dust" (Diderot, Encyclupidie)

-The grandson of Abraham and Kerurah, about whom almost nothing is written, was named "Ophres" or "Epher" (Genesis 25:l-4) (Diderot). --"Ou hien I'Afrique a estC nommee de ceste particule m et q p c q qui signifie froid, comme estant sans aucune froidure" ("Or else q , means cold, Africa was named from the particle cr and ~ p i ~ which as being without any cold" [ThCvet].)" Others cite this possibility of the Greek "uphrike (without cold)" (Encyclopedia Brirannica)."

--"De

Afer, lequel comnle nous lisons *s histoires Grecques et Latines, pour l'avoir subiugCe, y a re&, et faict appeller de son nom: car auparauant e l k s'appelloit Libye" ("From Afer, who as we read in Greek and Latin histories, subjugated and reigned over it, and had it named after himself" phivet]). Similarly: "Lybie was so named of Lybia, tbe daughter of Epaphus. and Affrick of Afer the Sonne of Hercules the Lyhian" (Gaius Julius Solinus)." --"Perhaps nica). -The from the Latin upricu (sunny)" (Encyclupediu Britun-

Arabic word for ear of corn, phbick (Diderot)

-Furuca in Arabic means "it has separated." and has been cited as the root of "lfrichia" of Africa (Leo Africanus).2n The diversity of meanings should tell us something about the nature of this etymology: it appears to mean whatever one wants, in the language one wants. , European researchers find that rhe Arabic place-name Ifriqiyuh is apparently . ' a "transliteration of Africa" (Encyclopedia BriiunnicaJ.a Roman word; those of Islamic schooling find the original meaning of the word in Arabic. from which the Latin would he only a derivative."J

It

COLONIZERS WOULD FIND REAL OBJECTS AND CHANGE THEIR NAMES, FROM AN APOCRYPHAL REALITY-MLLER 1985
[Christopher, Associate Professor of History and Philosophy at University of Texas, and Frederick Ford Professor of French and Afiican American Studies at Yale University; Blank Darkness- Africanist Discourse in French, University of Chicago Press.y. @a A

-11

It would be wrong to infer that the passage to legend here is merely a function of indirect speech or of the lack of real contact. It so happens that Le Canariell maintains its place as a historical document only so long as it remains With the places the monks saw. But the delight and the homor of the friars tale are bofh recounted in the same discourse of direct perception, only inside the occasional brackets o f according to the Friars book. k t co;~t.w.it!I Black Africa will not put anend to the play of delight and honor,

of black and white, of idolatry and natives beloved of the gods. These wiU merely find real objects &change names. When Rester John reaches identification with the real Christian kings of the rea Ethiopia, the discourse has found its happiest moment: the object projected into the void reNms percepntaliy as reality itself.w .. . The impnance of the whole French-priority question Lies in the return of ha1 reality Thhatives c d~Si&id t i i i h i < i j from an. nd the idolaten all d bon, . their mercantile lusts, . . .~~. unresolved difference between the two meanings of enrendre in Villaults Relorion. What sort of identity can be granted to the object? Was it actually heard or merely understood? And what are the implications of the two sons of discourse that ride on that difference? j -3 1
~

AFRICA IS THE OTHER- AN INFJXIOR CULTURE THAT IS NULLIFIED BY THE LACK OF AN AVAILABLE SLOT IN OUR INTELLECTUAL APPARATUS-MILLER 1985
[Christopher,Associate Professor of History and Philosophy at University of Texas, and Frederick Ford Professor of French and African American Studies at Yale University; Blank Darkness- Africanist Discourse in French, University of Chicago Press.?. I - &]
The comparison of these two discourses as discourses thus begins, appro. Priatek with a certain disharmony. Orientalism was recognized by its authors. in its heyday in the nineteenth century, as a category of thought and a principle oforganization-this in spite of, or perhaps due to, the fact that the -orient was a purely artificial construct, based rhetorically on directionthan location: East, but how far East? Its relativism is explicit, whereas that of Africa has been forgotien. Africa is real, the orient was made up, But I hope to have demonstrated, by analyzing the etymologies of *,Africa, that this seemingly referential term is as loaded w i h agendas as the obviously fictive Orient. It will be my aim to collapse !he distinction geography and Wififulmyth and to prove that a discourse has always surrounded the real ferm Africa, Africanist discourse-which I should call Africanism-consists of a series of repeated rhetorical moves, re. markably similar through the ages. which set it apart from orientalism;

of

course there is considerable overlapping in these two points of view on the

Other, but 1 believe the distinction to he deeply influential. First, what is Orientalism? Edward Saids important recent study, Or;enralisrn, analyzed the way in which such a term, conceived as a description df thdworld, generates concepts and categorizes thought until it becomes a massive screen between subject and object. From that moment on, perception is determined by Orientalism rather than Orientalisms heing determined by perception. Saids book is part of a crucial reappraisal of European knowledge, possible only when the categories of thought-all isms and their attendant classifications-are recognized as arbitrary judgments made by discourse rather than real distinctions in the world. Said writes, It is enough for US to set up these arbitraly boundaries in our minds; theybecome they accordingly, and both their territory and their mentality are designated as different from But within that general project of reappraisal, there is more than one they to be analyzed, more than one discourse of otherness to be extricated from its elaborate guise of realism. According to Saids work, what is the deter..~ . . mining mode of Orientalism? The Orient is a negative for Europe, conforming to the profile of what Europe thioks Europe is not; the opposition is therefore diametrical, producing a single, symmetrical Other. That Other always bas a separate identity of its own, an inferior culture but a cultuk nonethelessnamely, Islam. The negativity of Orientalism is that of a fully constituted nonself. To explore Arabia, the European can lfy to adopt that other identity, becoming an Oriental, perhaps disguised as an Indian Muslim doctor, as did Sir Richard Burton. Said sees Burton as the most successful of Orientalists because he knew that the Orient in general and Islam in particular were systems of information. behavior and belief, that to be an Oriental or a Muslim was to know certain things in a certain way (p. 195). Said describes Orientalism as all aggression, activity, judgment, will-to-truth and knowledge (p. 204), as a discourse of acquisition and domestication. The vocabulary is that of grammars, dictionaries, maps, museums, codes, and classifications, within which the Orient is all absence, whereas one feels the Orientalist and what he says as presence (p. 208). The archetypal Orientalist was Ernest Renan, a philologist whose exact science of the objects of the mind (p, 132) enabled him to create, command, and marshal his own Orient in a tour de force of knowledge as power. Saids readings bring out the happy ability of thinkers such as Renan to live in a world of their own design, to both precede and follow an object: to make a distinction that could be applied to any complex of historical and political events in order to pare them down to a nucleus both antecedent to and inherent in them (p. 231). TheOrient is the Other that is produced when this kind of thinking succeeds, when
~

I
, .
. ,

YII

I/
I1

the European Will-to-truth satisfies its own demands. n a t success and satisfaction must be understood as a purely rhetorical stance. The two interlocking profiles of Europe and the Orient leave no room for a third element, endowed with a posirive shape of its own; as on a sheet of paper, both of whose sides have been claimed, the third entry tends to be associated with one side or the other or to be nullified by the lack of an available slot in our intellectual apparatus. It is Africa that was always labeled the third part of the world, and Africanist discourse reads as a struggle with the problems inherent in that figure. Driven by the same will-to-tmth as Orientalism, Africanist writing projects out from itself an object that refuses to conform to the demands placed upon it. In the following pages I will offer a series of brief examples from various periods in literature to illustrate the difference between Orientalist and Africanist discourses, beginning with a return to the etymology of Africa according to Leo Africanus. Thelost sentence of Leosetymology reads: This is why the Arabsconsider as Africa almost nothing but that area around Carthage and give to Africa as a whole the name of Occident. The speaker conceives of two nonselves: the Arabs and Africa. On the biographical level, it is known that Leo came from non-Arab Muslims, who felt themselves to be superior; add to that his conversion to Catholicism and his adoption of a European viewpoint, and it becomes clear that this Orient, the Arabs. is a negative to him, defining the profile of what he is not. But Leo first brackets the Arabs as other, then tells how the Arabs themselves bracket Africa: they give to Africa as a whole the name of Occident. Both steps are certainly, in Saids words, constraints upon and limitations of thought (p. 42). acts of discursive power, first of the European over the Arab, but then of the Arab s no Africa here, prior to the amval of an outsider, over. . . what? There i King Ifrichos, to a land that has no shape or identity of its own. The first African was an Oriental according to this legend, and primd.Africa is a nullity. Africa is the Others other, the Orients orient, which happens to he called Occident, and w&ifh, is nothing. The etymologies of colony and Afer tell exactly the same story of an empty slate. written on by outsiders. Africa often occurs as the third part in cultural hierarchies, but, from the moment it is spoken, Africa is subsumed by one of the other two. In the relationship between the . self and the other, the thud is null.) ... . . . . . .

AFRICANIST NAMES IMPLY A WHITE POINT OF VIEW- DRAWN TOWARD THE MEANING OF DARKNESS AND OTHERNESS-MILLER
1985
[Christopher, Associate Professor of History and Philosophy at University of Texas, and Frederick Ford Professor of French and African American Studies at Yale University; Blank Darkness- Ahicanist Discourse in French, University of Chicago Press.y. 4-[5

\-The word Sudan has been used since well before the eighth century A.D. in application to everything south of the Mediterranem littoral and north Of the Congo Basin. One who says Sudan-which means *the blacl;sx in Arabic, just as Ethiopia, in Greek, includes blackness in its ,,,emingimplies a white point of view. The Moslem traveler-writer tho Battub (1307-77). one of the very first reporters on the Sudan, cast the problem clearly in terms of white and black, self and other, civilized and savage. He observes, The pagans hadnt eaten him [a Moslem] solely because of his white color. They say that eating a White man is unsafe because he isnt ripe; according to them, only the Black man is ripe. The etymologies of Africanist names would thus seem to be drawn toward meanings of darkness and otherness. This is evident with words whose etymologies and language of origin are established-Ethiopia in Greek, Sudan in Arabic-but it i s far more complicated with the word Africa itself..

,,,:,,

MGW Senior Scholars Borders K

-i -

US policies of sending aid is the implicit creation of a new colonialism that create more political deftnine spaces that impede citizen interface and global institutions Buur, Jensen, and Stepputat-2007 [Lars Buur, PhD Ethnography and Social Anthropology, Senior Researcher, research unit on Politics and governance, specialization in South Afiica. Steffen Jensen, Steffen Jensen is Senior Researcher at the Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Survivors and teaches at International Development Studies at Roskilde University; Finn Stepputat, Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen. The Security-Development Nexus, The SecurityDevelopment Nexus: Expressions of Sovereignty and Securitization in Southern Africa. pg. 91
The critics of the introduction of US-style policing methods on the Afiican continent have suggested that it forms part of a new colonialism (Brogden and Shearing 1993:95, Dixon 2000:S) mainly governed by the requirements of overseas aid (Brogden 1996:225). But the spread of this type of policing is not restricted to Afiica. The emergence of community policing during, for instance, the Mozambican and South African political transitions form part of wider systems of glohalised changes in governance in which the communitv and its representatives become the spaces that order the interface between citizen-subjects and global institutions (Rose 1999; Garland 2001).

MEAN GREEN WORKSHOPS 3007 GEOGRAPHIC BOUNDARIES ENTAIL A VIOLENT NARRATIVE - STATECENTERED PLACEMENT OF BORDERS DISPLACES INDIGENOUS PEOPLE TO CLAIM POWER AND RIGHT TO THE LAND

SHAPIRO 97
[Michael J.. Violent CartoFraDhies: Mapping Cultures of War. 1997. pg 15, CT]

MEAN GREEN WOIXSIHOPS 2007 BORDERS K

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WHEN BEHOLDEN TO RIGID BOUNDARIES, NATIONS CONSTRUCT ANTAGONIZING OUTSIDERS TO MAINTAIN AND PERPETUATE THEIR OWN IDENTITY
SHAPIRO 97
[Michael I., Violent Canoerarhies: Mamine Cultures of War. 1997. pg 44-45. CT]

MGW Senior Scholars Borders K

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Processes of change destrov preexisting identities into an amalgam of Western ideolow and ueo-cultural community which threaten the security of political state Buur, Jensen, and Stepputat-ZOO7 [Lars Buur, PhD Ethnography and Social Anthropology, Senior Researcher, research unit on Politics and governance, specialization in South Afiica. Steffen Jensen, Steffen Jensen is Senior Researcher at the Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Survivors and teaches at International Development Studies at Roski!de University; Finn Stepputat, Senior Researcher at the Daxsh Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen. The Security-Develo~ment Nexus, The SecurityDevelopment Nexus: Expressions of Sovereignty and Securitization in Southern Afiica. pg. 91 Common to these contributions is the fact that processes of change either create subiects i t h their new identities or individuals and groups who deny, who identifv themselves w contest or challmze such forms of identitv. When the particular aesthetic form in which discrete identities are rendered becomes the obiect of contestation. such forms of identification are transformed into figures that are (or easily could be) identified as threatening the security of state or community. In this way, they become the bodies on which sovereignty is inscribed.

MGW Senior Scholars Borders K

..I

_r __

Transitions between Povernment structures destabilize identities, institutions are reconstructed and ontoloeical insecurity ensues Buur, Jensen, and Stepputat-2007 [Lars Buur, PhD Ethnography and Social Anthropology, Senior Researcher, research unit on Politics and governance, specialization in South PLfiica. Steffen Jensen, Steffen Jensen is Senior Researcher at the Rehabilitation and Research Centre for T o m e S\Lllivors and teaches at International Eevelcpment Studies at Roskilde University; Finn Stepputat, Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen. The Securitv-DevelopmentNexus, The SecurityDevelopment Nexus: Expressions o f Sovereignty and Securitization in Southern f i c a . pg. 91 However, the argument might still have merit if we distinguish between "real crime levels", that is, crime levels that are measurable, and perceptions thereof. Then, transitions do not necessarilv make societies more violent: rather. transitions are periods during which most identities are destabilised, institutions are placed under reconstruction and ontological insecuritv dominates (Scharf 2001).

MGW Senior Scholars

The modern definition of citizenship needs to be redefined Buur, Jensen, and Stepputat-ZOO7 [Lars Buur, PhD Ethnography and Social Anthropology, Senior Researcher, research unit on Politics and governance, specialization in Soutb Africa. Steffen Jensen, Steffen Jensen is Senior Researcher at the Reliabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Survivors and teaches at International Development Studies at Roskilde University; Finn Stepputat, Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for international Studies in Copenhagen. The Securitv-DevelopmentNexus, The SecurityDevelopment Nexus: Expressions of Sovereignty and Securitization in Southern Africa. pg. 91 Contrary to the present-day strong normative celebration of human rights, or what Wilson (2001) calls "rights-talk", citizenship as "the active or passive membership of individuals in a nation-state'' (Janoski and Grant 2002: 13) needs to be reassessed. When citizenship as rights is placed in its proper context of the old trinity of "state-nation-territory", the celebration of rights brings to the fore "the very ambiguity of the fundamental notions regulating the inscription of the native ... in the judicial order of the nation-state" (Agamben 2000a: 17, 8). The question, "Who is the native?" logically begins with determining who belongs and who does not belong to a nation-state, thus establishing the national personhood - that is, those who are recognised as citizens with rights out of the totality of natives, subjects of the tenitory and denizens.

MCW Senior Scholars Borders K

vz

k.iricvl:,iJ~$>"?

_ I_

Colonialism imposed Western thought on African culture, devastating the rural population Buur, Jensen, and Stepputat-ZOO7 [Lars Buur, PhD Ethnography and Social Anthropology, Senior Researcher, research unit on Politics and governance, specializa~on in South Africa. Steffen Jensen, Steffen Jensen is Senior Researcher at the Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Survivors and teaches at International Development Studies at Roskilde U n h d y ; Finn Stepputzt, Serior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen. The Security-Development Nexus, The SecurityDevelopment Nexus: Expressions of Sovereignty and Securitization in Southern Africa. pg. 93

Accompanying the use of communities as sites of development was the deployment of "psycho-social service" workers who, in the name of "community development," gathered intelligence "anticipatingwhat would be, in the following years, a truly hearts and minds campaign against Frelimo" (Coeho 1993:158). Making communities legible to which thev had iurisdiction has had a urofound bearing on how the rural uopulations have been governed since this policv was introduced. The most recent example of this has been the recognition, in 2000, of traditional leaders as "community authorities" whose core aspects and concepts bear an alarming similarity to colonial modes of governance.

b2 &47L
I ,
i

0 5 c.;
:

iLc.

AFRICA IS AN OBEJECT OF WESTERN DISCOURSE, SOFT WAX, A NULLITY, IT BECOMES A FETISH. A WORD FOR NOTHING IN THE WORLD -MILLER 1985
[Chistopher, Associate Professor of History and Philosophy at University of Texas, and Frederick Ford Professor of French and African American Studies at Yale University; Blank Darkness- Africanist Discourse in French, University of Chicago Press.p, 42 4 1

<

It will be a long time before man as a desiring machine, to be plugged into other desiring systems. having no fixed totality of his own, can he seen in anything but the most pejorative terms. The importance of this

passage is that Demanet is reading and themati,zing the underlying condition of Africa as an object in Wcstem discou him, Sof<$ax. soft w a x ~ i t i o form wha!:bljFk is to c o ~ s to religion, what .p nakedness~is~t6 ctothisg a nUKity!. Each of these Africanist creations must be called by a namethalis thereby negated form is undone by soft wax, religion by idolatry, etc. But 5 be.left with . .. .. . a .. red nullity is to fall silent, to cease reading and writing, to die. S p t h e ndliLy.iakes a concrete form, or rather ... . ~.~ .., _. any form thatjou wish, so that it reflects any desire. Demanets reading of ikesoft wax Z f F e 7 S froin other utterances in that it allegorizes the most profound condition of blankness, going beyond the usual observations of black and white. Two centuries after Demanet, when Marcel Mauss issues the death certificate for fetish as a valid anthropological term, he will use familiar terms to describe it: the fetish corresponds to nothing definife, only to an immense misunderstanding between two civilizations, African and European.n3Whether seen as a false term in discourse or as a real object in the world, the fetish defies form, frustrales intellection, and is ever a word for nothing in the world.
~

~~

>-

WORDS ARE THE FOUNDATION OF AN ENTIRE WORLD VIEW, THE DESCRIPTION OF HUMANITY, IN WHICH NULLITY IS PUT INTO A PARADOXICAL ORDER OF THE COLOR BLACK -MILLER 1985
[Christopher, Associate Professor of History and Philosophy at University of Texas, and Frederick Ford Professor of French and African American Studies at Yale University; Blank Darkness- Aliicanist Discourse in French, University of Chicago P r e s s . m

-311

c In fact the reduction to polar opposites of black and white represents a f i l l out of color. Colors occur on a spectrum, with infinite possibilities of variation. As tropes they are taken to represent infinite varieties of meaning; they are symbols. But black and white are not part of this system; they are invariable negatives of color. For example, blackness is said to have definite negative meanings. Yet in the writings we have seen, from the moment blackness is uttered its meaning is altered by intercourse with whiteness. Pure darkness is felt as a force so powerful that is must be repressed as a criterion for evaluating men. The consequence of this, however. is that meaning itself will fall out of a secure grounding in symbolism and be forced always to > , point elsewhere. Black and white designate each other before they designate any meaning, and their meanings follow suit by reversing constantly. The history of Africanist writing is the history of the collapsing-together of black and white-f their inability to remain as meaningful oppsitesand of the fNSbadOns of meanings attached to them. The Oxford English Dictionmy calls black a word of difficult history; in Old English . . . confused with blic, shining, white . , . ; in Middle English the two words are often distinguishable only by the context, and sometimes not by that. The literal definition given is this: black is the proper word for a certain quality practically classed among the colurs, but consisting . .. .. OPtiCdlY in the totd nbsence ofrolor, due to the absence 01 total Of light, 8s its opposite white arises from the rej%ciiort of all the rays of light (emphasis mine). White is fully luminous and devoidof any distinctive hues. That void is the point where white and black meet and for if white is an empty fullness (fully luminous hut void), then black is a full emptiness (IOtRl absence). Both are blank, absent, the null set of color. Black and white are to color what promiscuous concubinage, squeaking, and nakedness were to marriage, speech, and clothing: they negate the category they OCCUPY. Thus the Grand Robert defines the French noir as reflecting no visible radiation, but it adds: If black, properly speaking, does not designate a color, everyday speech, as well as the language of art, admits perfectly well the color black. Black and white must be practically classed among the colors for lack of a better term; by the same token, blackness persists in passing itself off as an idea. For lack of such better terms our own critical discourse finds itself faced with the same problem as the AMcanist writers we are interpreting: how to write about a nullity. We are forced into utterances on the paradoxical order of the color black. The question of the relationship between colors and meanings is one we will take up in reading Baudelaire. There is, of course, a relationship, put there by certain authors. often with disastrous results. Consider in passing the definition of black in French as that which does not reflect (ne r#7&hii pas), as the potential for a horrendous pun. Le-noir ne r6Rfchit pas means both Black does not reflect and The black man does not think. In a text such as Gobineaus Essni. that play on words is the very foundation of an entire world view, the starting point for an elaborate description of humanity, of which the nullified civilization [la nullill rivilisntricel of the blacks is the zero point..\ icri

MEAN GREEN WORKSHOPS 2007

.~ _ _ THE AFFIRMATIVES ONAFRICA IS ROOTED w A LOVE OF POWER AND A FEAR OF THE LOSS OF CONTROL

DISCOURSYE

Sorenson 1993, John Professor Emeritus of Anthropolozy at Brigham Young University, Imagining Ethiopia: Struggles for History and Identity in the Horn of Africa p 146

fricanist discourse is preoccupied with power and the fear of loss of control. At its core is an opposition between chaos and order, involving identity linked to racial essence. The power at issue is based on colonial rule over Africa and the Wests continuing economic and political domination over the former colonies in general. Elahorated during the process of colonial expansion and incorporating many of the themes of racism, this discourse has deep roots in European consciousness, where the image of the Wild Man had a long history as an object of both fear and desire (Dudley and Novack 1972). Colonial identity, constituted through domination and control of the non-European Other, was a repository for these fears and desires and also a symbol of control over such ambivalently regarded impulses. Inscribed within the history of imperialism is a vast allegory of fear of the Savage and longing for the Other, played out in many different manifestations. In the Horn, it is manifested in a peculiar racist vision involving both the image of savagery and the historical desire of the West to find in Ethiopia a supplementary reflection of itself, a desire expressed in an ensemble of discursive fragmgnts: Ethiopia as ancient monarchy and Christian state, Prester Johns mysterious realm, and Haile Selassie as dependable anticommunist ally. Just as Ethiopia had been the symbol of unconquered Africa that provided other Africans with a representation of past glory, it gave the West the image of a legitimate state. During the period of colonial expansion, this state served a useful role in the system of dependent colonialism (Holcomh

MEAN GREEN WORKSHOPS 2007 BORDERS AND NAMES K

I _-

DISCOURSE LEGITMIZING PARTICULAR HISTORES ARE ACTS OF SILENCING GURANTEEING DOMINATION AND ERASURE OF IDENTITY
Sorenson 1993,

John Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Brigham Young University, Imagining Ethiopia: Struggles for History and Identity in the Horn of Africap38-39

T h e past is contested terrain. Selectively remembered, conveniently forgotten, or sometimes invented, it may be used to justify and legitimize actions in the present and to provide the model for a future which is to be created in accordance with certain traditions. Not simply a sequence of completed events, the past is a creation of the present, with traditions invented to serve particular needs (Hobshawm and Ranger 1983). Some historians argue that there can be no neutral collection of historical facts and no single representative account of any given phenomenon (Zinn 1970). Past, present, and future are not distinct periods but part of one interactive and endlessly self-reflecting process , of imagination. In particular, nationalist historiography is part of an effort to create imagined communities (Anderson 1983; Barradough 1979). Events in the past are emphasized in order to support a spec& vision of the future. Nationalist histories tend toward a process of retrospective projection that defines the existing national self not as a created product of historical change but as the enduring and constant subject of history. Typically, such histories involve exclusion and silencing of certain voices and substitution of a hegemonic mythology. Official histories, institutionally authenticated and authorized, create particular visions of the past and provide instructions on how it should be perceived and revered. Elites frequently turn to history to developjustifications of their own power, and certain key historical events come to provide aspects of a groups image. Thus, history gives legitimacy to those in power and in turn defines that groups view of itself. Attempts to rewrite history fmm the point of view of subalterns, those excluded from power, may be opposed or suppressed, sometimes violently. Subnational entities cannot enforce their own histories, which are erased by the history-writing machine of the state (Tonkin, McDonald, and Chapman 1989:8).

MGW Senior Scholars Borders Kritik

TO POWERFUL NATIONS, AFRICA IS THE RAW MATERIAL IN THE ECONOMy OF BEAUTY THAT HELPS THE GROWTH OF THEIR HIERARCHY-MILLER 1985 [Christopher, Associate Professor of History and Philosophy at University of Texas, and Frederick Ford Professor of French and African American Studies at Yale University; Darkness- Africanist Discourse in French, University of Chicago Press.? 42-3

The

ne

prosperity is guaranteed, alas! for only a very short time. was formerly in the East; the light marched toward the southand now springs from the West. France, it is true, by her central location in the civilized world, seems to be called to gather all the notions and all the poemes from around her and to return them to other peoples marvelously worked and fashioned.

t n,is is

essay, the d e l a k claim

mercantilism, if not colonialism. In the express object of the of nations and of their respective PrdUch, Bauthat he does not wish to assert the supreniacy of one nation over (1 want only to affirm their equal usefulness in the eyes of HIM who is undefinable). But it seems that t~e.m%&!1Pf CeIlrra& conceals? S r m c ~ r eof c ~ n t m land domination: in the quotation above. raw materials come from other countries. that is, the shock of the new emmates from lands. But in order to be worked and fashioned into, these materials must be shipped back to France: the French Poet alone SLe at

faraway

the center of the world, in a __ superior ~-~ position for~~. the perception of raw
~

materials and the production of beauty. al in the economy of mz~barbarianis thus explicitly seen as r& beauty. It follows that the attentions of the well-educated, intelligent Frenchman will work and fashion the primitive into something else-an esthetic commodity. But Baudelaires problem with the other peoples of the earth is that they lack the differential perspective necessaq to create anything worthwhile themselves. America (the United States), for example, represents the idolatry of progress, this grotesque idea, this perfidious beacon. The average Frenchman is being Americanized3 by the love of material progress-gas, steam; and electricity-and is losing the notion of the differences that characterize the phenomenaof the physical and the moral worlds, of the nagIra1 and the SupernaNral. To be Americanized is to have lost the ability to discern that difference and thzTore to work and fashion the material into the beautiful, Such is the decadenl state of what Baudelaire describes h 1857% the noble counhy of Franklin. inventor of the morality of the counting house, the hero of a century devoted to materiality (Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe, p. 628). So eyeplp,it is grotesque to translate the of progress into the esthetic realm, B abe describes a hierarchy notion ,..., nations, which are, after all, (vast d e beings following a SOR c6Ss or life: Like childhood, they wail. SNtter, get fat, grow up.;&

MEAN GREEN WORKSHOPS 2007

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FOCUS ON COLONIALISM AS PURELY WESTERN PREVENTS THE CRITICISM OF BLACK COLONIALISM

Sorenson 19%

John Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Brigbam Young University, Imagining Ethiopia: Struggles for History and Identity in the Horn of Africa p63

Triulzi (1983) notes that whether or not one accepts the colonial nature of the Ethiopian empire, it is perceived as such by those dominated by the state. Andreas (1986)summarily dismisses the expenential aspect as a purely subjective criterion. .[that leads to] anarchy. In addition to mechanical Marxism and denials of experience, such dismissals project colonial domination as specifically European, and both Oromos and Eritreans have charged that racism prevents accu rate assessment and condemnation of black colonialism. -

THE FOREIGN MEANS THE OTHER-TO NOT HAVE THE SAME RIGHTS AS DO THE AKIN AND TO BE SEEN AS IMPROPERSAUNDERS 2kl
[Rebecca, "The Agonv And The Allegory: The Concept Of The Foreiw. The Language Of Apartheid, And "he Fiction Of J. M. Coetzee"; Cultural Critique 47 P. 215-264. ~http://muse.jhu.edu/joumals/cultural~critique/v047/47.1 saunders.html> Accessed 6\25/71 Yet the conceptual instability of foreigmess I have been describing would seem t= be effectively obviated by the barbed wire that unmistakably demarcates the border or the pass book that clearly designates who bas rights and who does not. This stabilized meaning of the foreign has, in current usage, become primary; "it is precisely with respect to laws," writes Kristeva, "that foreigners exist" (96). This legal definition, in which "foreimer" means one who is not a citizen. "allows one to settle by means of laws the prickly passions aroused bv the intrusion of the other in the homogeneitv of a familv or a group" (41); it renders "natural" and thus indisputable the idea that others do not have the same rights that I do (or, conversely, that I am not entitled to the rights that others are). This tension between the conceptual instability of foreignness and its regulation by law might also be articulated as a varying relation to, or possession of, context. Context is, before the department of [End Page 220) justice or the bureau of immigration, the court that governs the zone of error; in linguistic terms, it is the series of syntaanatic relations that regulate the semantic relation between signifier and signified. It is, hrther, the law to which hermeneutics turns to regulate epistemological foreimess: hermeneutics draws a clear equivalence between n error and out of context. Schleiemacher, for example, wams ofthe "completely erroneous being foreign. i
ideas" that result from extracting sentences from their context. And St. Augustine insists on context as the criterion through which the ambiguous (the unstable, moving in two directions) is stabilized into hermeneutic determination (bound, limited, fxed): "In the event that there are several [meanings that] remain ambiguous . . . then it is necessary to examine the context of the preceding and following parts surrounding the ambiguous place, so that we may determine which of the meanings [is] consistent" (79; emphasis mine). ,OWhile for hermeneutics (which insists on a master context that corrects error), context functions to regulate foreignness, but for the Russian formalisb (who prompt us to shift through multiple contexts), it is central to producing foreignness: "The various devices of defamiliarization," writes Jameson, "resembled the relationship of words to expected or unexpected contexts" (63). And Shklovksy notes that a writer like Tolstoy tends to describe things out of their normal context, to depict the domestic as a foreigner might see it. This is why, according to Shklovsky, poetic language often appropriates foreign ! languages. I

This contextual rermlation of literarv foreignness is not only analogous - to, but often coincident with, the regulation of "literal" fore&ness: it is a lack of context that conditions the foreigner's social improprietr, her error. An insufficient grasp of those unspoken background assumptions that constitute cultural context--what Bultmann calls "pre-understanding'' or "the context of life" (75)--lead the foreigner to misinterpret, to be improper. to err. Similarly, a surplus of context-the availability of differing and competing cultural contexts--may condition a foreigner's uncertainty, ambiguity, errancy. If context (kom Latin contextere) is the fabric woven by a culture, foreigners make the errant stitches that tum the pattern into something else.
L

THE FOREIGN IS THE TRIAL AND ERROR TO THE LOGIC OF THE PROPER AND AKIN --SAUNDERS 2kl
[Rebecca, "The Agony And The Allegory: The Concept Of The Foreign, The Language Of Apartheid, And The Fiction Of J. M. Coetzee"; Cultural Critique 47 P. 215-264. ~1i~p:iim~ise.jhu.eduljournalsicuItural -cntique/v047/47.1saunders.htmB Accessed 6/25/71 If shifty relations and a fickle figurality render the concept of the foreign unstable, so too does the heterogeneity that haunts the entities against which it is defined. Foreimess, that is, characterizes the very nations. homes, and selves in omoxition to which it is ostensibly constituted a principle evoked poetically by Rimbaud's "Jeest un autre," developed psychologically by Freud's theories of the unconscious, and elaborated ontologicallyby Heidegger's unheimlichkeit--Dasein'scharacter as primordially "not-at-home" in the world. Foreignness, on this view. is precisely what is repressed in identity, in the proper, in signification: what is misrecognized as other. [End Page 2191 Produced by an unsound opposition, recalcitrantly nonliteral, and persistently destabilized by the migrations and transformations of peoples, boundaries, and customs, the foreim is clearly a "concept" perilous to the standards of respectable metaphysicians. It might he described as a zone oferror. To call the foreim "a zone of error" (as I do in this essay) is to acknowledge this impure metaphysical status, to recognize that the term "foreign" simultaneously is characterized by, and refers to, the irrational, the ambiguous, the confused, the anomalous, the uncertain, the imaginative: what cleanly thought sweeps humedly under the rug of untruth. It is to recognize the foreign as a site of trial and error, of nomastew and risk. crucial to contesting the logic of the proper and akin to the "strategic and adventurous" journey that Demda associates with delineation of) diffbrance:"Strategic because no transcendent truth present outside the field of writing can govem theologically the totality of the field. Adventurous because this strategy is not a simple strategy in the sense that strategy orients tactics according to a final goal, a telos or theme of domination, a mastery and ultimate reappropriation of the development of the field" ("Diffirance," 7). Finally, to name the foreign a zone of error is to evoke the everyday experience of foreignness, the error that results from the inability to read culturally inflected signs with precision: the fumble for protocol, the inadvertent offense, the unintended meaning.

'

MEAN GREEN WORKSHOPS 2007

I --

THE NAME ETHIOPIA IGNORES THE DIVERSITY OF ITS POPULATION AND PERPETUATES THE DOMINATION OF MINORITY GROUPS THERE Sorenson 1993, John Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Brigham Young University, Imagining Ethiopia: Struggles for History and Identity in the Horn of Afica p19-20

Ethiopia can be understood as a historical fiction based on and maintained by power,just as Said discusses the Orient as an imaginary construction. Indeed, Holcomb and Siai (1990) argue that Ethiopia was created as a dependent colonial state that could serve the interests of European powers. This has been a controversial intervention and, indeed, a threatening one to those who identify with Ethiopki as a long-unified state. In discussing Ethiopia as a created image, however, it is important to recognize that it was not simply an invention of Western power; the image of Ethiopia was constructed on the basis of an already-existing discourse of domination, that of the Amhara elite. This discourse proposed a particular version of history in which the boundaries of the contemporary state were projected backwards into a distant historical period. The image of Ethiopia contained within this discourse is one of African grandeur, liberty, modernization, and stability. It was the version of Ethiopian history accepted by the United Nations, other African states, and boch superpowers. External powers, including both the United States and the Soviet Union, used this discourse to extend their own influence over the region.

MEAN GREEN WORKSHOPS 2007 BORDERS AND NAMES K

i ____-

COMMITMENT TO THE IDEA OF A UNIFIED ETHIOPLA SUBORDINATES ALTERNATNE DISCOURSES

Sorenson 1993, John Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Brigham Young University, Imagining Ethiopia: Struggles for History andIde&y in the Horn of Africa p 187

Hegemonic discourse resisted challenges to entrenched history and identity. While successive Ethiopian governments dismissed the Eritrean independence movement as bandits, Ethiopian intellectuals at home and in exile have condemned not only Eritrean and Oromo nationalism but have also sought to discredit foreign commentators and scholars who have interpreted history in ways that do not support the mythologies of Greater Ethiopia. Similarly, efforts to cancel out oppositional versions of the past have been made hy Western academics and government officials who have remained committed to the idea of Greater Ethiopia despite their aversion to the Derg. Through rhetorical processes such as the construction of significant absence, falsification, insistence on the influence of foreign agents, and insinuation, as well the assertion of their own authority through mutual expressions of appreciation and cross-referencing, a number of so-called experts on Ethiopian history have sought to relegate subaltern and oppositional discourses to the status of propaganda. As Thomas (1989:24) demonstrates in regard to anthropological discourse, such experts, by asserting their own professional identity and their authoritative versions of history, attempt to establish their own monopoly over representation, seeking the colonization and control of discursive space.

MEAN GREEN WORKSHOPS 2007 BORDERS AND NAMES K ETHIOPIA IS A SYMBOL FOR SPREAD

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WOULD

Sorenson 1993, John Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Brigham Young {Jniversity, Imagining Ethiopia: Struggles for History and Identity in the Horn of Afiica p 188

However, it also seems clear that it is not only these explicitly political and instrumental concerns that have fostered African OppOSition to Eritrean independence. Ethiopia still retains its symbolic sign*cance for Africa, despite the fact that Ethiopian elites have rejected their own African identity and insisted upon their Semitic heritage. For some, therefore, any division of Ethiopia represents a transgression of African history as well as a threat to a greater unified identity and to the concept of an African self. The question remains, however, as to the stability of any forced unity.

M E A N GREEN WORKSHOPS 2007 THE AFFIRMATIVESNOTION OF A UNIFIED STATE OF ETHIOPIA IS A DEVICE OF IMPERIAL DOMWATION

S orenson 1993, J o h nProfessor Emeritus of Anthropology at Brigham Young University, Imagining Ethiopia: Struggles for History and Identity in the Horn of Africa p 186 - 187
The notion of Ethiopia as a long-unified state rooted in the remote past was a projection of the modern into antiquity, a device intended to consolidate the power of local ruling elites. Once viewed as an atypical African country that somewhat paradoxically came to symbolize those glories of the African past that had been banished from Westem histories, Ethiopia must now be seen as subject to the same forces that have shaped the rest of the continent. The personalized histories of the past that focused on the emperors are being rethought, and the notion of Greater Ethiopia has been challenged. The character of the more recent Ethiopian state created by the centralizing emperors Teodros, Yohannes, Menelik, and Haile Selassie remains contested among claims of restoration of unity, regional autonomy under recognized authority, and portraits of a tormented and splintering empire ruled only by force. Similarly, conflicting versions of national identity have been conceived in radically different ways, as a primordial essence, a historical construction, a colonial artifice, a creation of foreign agents, an open framework, or an imposition of raw power. Whereas Eritrean nationalist discourse typically relied on appeals to standards of international law and emphasized the contemporary character of national identity, Ethiopian nationalists mainly have employed mythological arguments and appeals to primordial unity; Tigrayan nationalism has shifted from an emphasis on regional identity, exemplified in the image of Wqrane, to a more inclusive form, while Oromo nationalists have employed the imagery of reawakening and recovery of a lost heritage. All of these struggles were viewed in terms of opposing images, as repression or unity, liberation or separatism, resurgence or tribalism. Differences in the form of nationalist mythologies reflect the fact that nationalism is a consequence of conflict rather than its primary cause, and these variations, shifts, and reversals of narratives are indications of the ebb and flow of power (Markakis 1987:xvi). These contested classifications must be recognized as struggles over the power to to impose the legitimate definition of the divisions of the social world and thereby, to make and unmake groups (Bourdieu 1991:221). They are conducted through the manipulation of images of the past and of symbols of identity that are intended to mobilize support for the narratives they construct. The production of subaltern histories is a challenge to established social control. A l l texts, including this one, which comment on the nature of history and identity in the region, are drawn into Contemporary struggles over representation, sometimes serving contradictory ends at different times (Tho1989:15). Involvement in these struggles does not require polemical motives, nor is it simply a matter of tmth, since howledge invariably has its effect, often unintended, and the most facdally accurate accounts may be couched in an overtly or covertly ideological framework.

MEAN GREEN WORKSHOPS 2007

THE NAME ETHIOPIA IS USED TO PROJECT MODERN BORDERS BACK INTO HISTORY TO ESTABLISH A FIXED IDENTITY ALLOWING FOR THE MARGmALEATION OF THOSE WHO FALL OUTSIDE THE SCOPE OF THIS IDENTITY
Sorenson 1993, JohnProfessor Emeritus of Anthropology at Brigham Young University, Imagining Ethiopia: Struggles for History and Identity in the Horn of Afiica p 40

The projection of contemporary borders backwards into time has characterized the historical narrative of Greater Ethiopia, as promoted by ruling elites. Ethiopian nationalist discourse emphasizes the deep historical roots of the contemporary state and continuity with the remote past. For example, in an undated manifesto of ENATAD (Ethiopian National AUiance to Advance Democracy, a monarchist group in exile), Prince Makonnen Makonnen states: Ethiopia is an ancient land and one of a few whose history as a nation-state can be traced hack to antiquity. The Egypt of the Pharaohs called it Punt, or the Land of God. Later, the Greeks thought of it as the land of wheat and of the olive tree, and much later in the Middle Ages, Ethiopia was perceived as a remote kingdom shrouded in legend and mystery, the land of PresterJohn. Its [Sic] borders covered most of the Horn of Africa and the western portion of the Arabian peninsula. . . . For millennia, Ethiopians have preserved their independence and national integrity, and few countries over the centuries have so zealously protected themselves from foreign invasion. Ethiopian nationalists trace their history to the ancient empire of Axum, which flourished from the first to sixth centuries and was based in what is now Tigray, a notthern region of the present state. Weakened by Arab expansion, Axum fell under attacks from the Beja and Agaw peoples, was succeeded by the Zagwe dynasty, and, according to this narrative construction of history, was restored in 1270 by a descendant of the single survivor of Axum. According to the K i h Negast, the Tigrean text which Donald Levine (1975) describes as Ethiopias national epic, the origins of the Amhara ruling elite lie i n the legendary union of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. The legend states that their son, Meneli I, w a s the first of a line of divine kings extending to the last emperor, H d e Selassie, a continuky that is a key theme in the Ethiopian nartative construction of history. This discourse proposes a fixed identity, deeply rooted in the ancient past, which has persisted to the present. Antiquity confers authenticity upon this identity, regarded as essential and unchanging throughout time.

IN FRENCH PRIORITY, AFRICAN NATIVES WERE ACTUA LY ABLE TO DENY THEIR OTHERNESS--MILLER 1985
[Christopher, Associate Professor of History and Philosophy at University of Texas, and Frederick Ford Professor of French and Akican American Studies at Yale University; Blank Darkness- Africanist Discourse i n French, University of Chicago Press.?.

5.13

At the same time that the scribe went ashore, he met a canoe that the Alcair had sent with people who surprised me. They are black, of somewhat lesser demeanor than our beggars of France, all naked excepting a small cloth, which covers them in the front. They asked who we were; we told them we were French. They said Have you come to stay or only to have refreshment? We told them that we would return to stay, to which fhey replied in French, Goad-Good, the French are better rhan rhe orhers. [Emphasis mine] It is a curious element in the legend of French priority that the native is made to support the French claim (The French, according lo whar the narives say. were established in this place before the Pomguese amval); curiouser still is the demise of the African from the moment he appears in European discourse. The sentence italicized above is to my knowledge the earliest utterance in French literature attributed to a Black African on native ground, and the fact that he is cast as speaking French to welcome the French should indicate the extent of wish-fulfillment at work in this discourse. The African first opens his mouth to deny his own otherness, to invite colonizatio:, to invoke a manifest destiny that the French will merely fulfill. 3

&

AFRICA BECAME A REFLECTION OF FRANCE, WITH FRENCH CITY NAMES-MILLER 1985

[Christopher, Associate Professor of History and Philosophy at University of Texas, and Frederick Ford Professor of French and African American Studies at Yale University; Darkness- Africanist Discourse in French, University of Chicago Press.?. sz
,
:,i:

., and eighteenth-century accounts, is the assimilation of Guinea to French

7

The boldest function of this legend, which is repeated in most sevenleenmsubjectivity. This occurs through name and language. A Dutch description of 1602 reports on a place in Africa called Paris, so named by the French. G. Fourniers Hydrograpkie of 1643 states, Before the Portuguese had taken La Mine [a French settlement on the coast] from us, a11 Guinea was filled with our colonies, which bore the names of the cities of France. Cartography from this period designates Petit Paris, Grand Setre, and again Petit Paris. Villault cites the presence of these names as proof of French priority (Yusuf Kamal, Monumenm Carrographica. pp. 1272-73). The chevalier des

re:

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L1

,, -.

Marchais wrote in 1730, The Negroes of the country have kept the name of Petit Dieppe for this Island. and the English, Dutch, and other Europeans who traffic on the coast have continued to nilme the place Petit Dieppe . . . , unquestionable proof that the French Normans were established at this place well before those who habitually caU themselves the first. The use of the name, the European utterance, by both Europeans and natives is the work of European discourse, but it is taken as referential proof. This is more clearly thematized in Villaults text in his chaprer entitled Remarques sur les cosies dAfrique & notamment sur la Coste d O r pour justifier que les Franqois y ont est6 longtemps avant les autres Nations. He relates a story so similar to that in the Prunaut text that one is tempted to see the latter as a translation of Villault into pseudo-Old French.: The natives put forth a great welcome. Villaults thesis is not only that the Erench w_e~ there first but that they have a naNral affinity with the Africans: *the humor of ihe Moors [blacks].is~inbetter agreement with that of the French than with any other. A double optic is created by the authors technique of relating his ownvoyage to Africa in conjuction with that of the merchants of Rouen in 1364.

MEAN GREEN WORKSHOPS 2007 BORDERS I :

L t LkL .SJLG-rpPyTHE AFFIRMATIVES NATION-STATE MAPPING OBSCURES VIOLENCE THAT

DOESNT OCCUR ON THE DOMINANT GEOGRAPHY

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SHAPIRO 97
[Michael 1.. Violent Cxtoesauhies: M a m i n e Cultures of Was. 1997. pg 21-22 CT]

MEAN GREEN WORKSHOPS 2007 BORDERS AND NAMES K

THE PLEA OF A NATIVE IS A RHETORICAL TRICK USED TO MASK HEGEMONIC DISCOURSE Sorenson 1993, John Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Brigham Young University, Imagining Ethiopia: Struggles for History and Identity in the Horn of Africa p29

Livtk

,/Uct& L J ~ S

r-

Placing the Aethiopiansabove the Nubians was one thing, but the pretensions of the Amhara elite sometimes had to be deflated. For example, T i m (June 1, 1962) refers to a growing recognition of newly independent African states by Ethiopia, which had scorned black Africans as baqa (slaves) for centuries, and quotes a cabinet minister: Its our heritage and duty to lead our recently enlightened brethren into the modern age. (It is noteworthy that this support from Ethiopia for African independence did not extend to Eritrea, which was annexed four months later.) As a U.S. ally, Ethiopia would be maintained and armed but Time made it clear that there should be no doubt about who would lead whom. After pointing out poverty, disease, corruption, and absolute rule in Ethiopia, Time supplies one visiting Senegalesewho utters the required lines: If this is the heritage of freedom, I say Bring back the colonialists. Invented or not, this Senegalese functions as a rhetorical device, namely, ventriloquism: the use of a local, or in this case, an African, to enunaate and give vahdity to the authors views. It is a standard technique of contemporary hegemonic discourse. .- . ^.

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MGW Senior Scholars

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DISCOURSE BETWEEN NORTH AND SOUTH IMPOSES IDENTITY-MILLER 1985 [Christopher, Associate Professor of History and Philosophy at University of Texas, and Frederick Ford Professor of French and African American Studies at Yale University; Darkness- Africanist Discourse in French", University of Chicago Press# Z q b P

The principal gesture of Africanist literature has appeared to consist of reaching out to the most unknown pan of the world to bring it hack as language. The incongruity hetween that world and the language that seeks to manipulate it, that overextension of discourse, is the source of its strength and its sbngeness. Writers have insisted on the unredecmed, unknown state of the object they have just brought back and made known: "1 knew a lady unknown"; "One is not obliged to make reason out of something that has none." The resistance of the object to rational explanation appears as pan of its nature, as a bard Fact before the reader's eye, whereas it is more probably the result of a question. The history of Africanist discourse is that of a continuing series of questions imposed on Africa, questions that preordain certain answers while ruling others out. It would be artificial to reduce that series-the discourse as a whole-to a single statement or historical condition, yet it seems that a % ceriain artificiality is of its essence. % Europe and Africa h uth,light PvGdark, white over bjihki as*"_y?Eegta!ed h~ A disFoucse dependent on such a j o l g . n ~ e $ J ~ c -a ipgwhat it means,, andjt bears a perversei&tiw.p~pth. ,are the questions that Europe asks of Africa? Perhaps the most compelling concern brought about by the historical relationship between the two is that of equality and identity. The problem is that, in desiring equality, ~5s identity. Aniaba and Zaga-Christ were permitted to he rage of France only in a social discourse that oblitemted their different identity, leaving them equal but indifferently so. A-hl:ck.x& s no longer a black. But writers who recognize blackness has been er "GGreting it as anything but a sign of inequality: de Brosses and Gobineau, Sade and Celine, all write in that mode. \ e)/

Western social scientists have focused on perpetuating Eurocentric influence in Africa. The affirmative reestablishes a system of measuring "individual modernity" and imposing western thought through their assumptions of Africa Lassiter - 2007 [James, Senior Refugee Program Manager in the U.S. Department of Justice, Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), Office of International Affairs in Washington, D.C. Trained in anthropology and African Studies at the University of Oregon (M.S., 1975; Ph.D., 1983) and has published in his area of expertise. In addition to conducting anthropological research in Swaziland horn 1980-83, he served as a Peace Corps administrator in Tanzania and Ghana and as a Senior Desk Officer at the U S . Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, African Culture And Personality: Bad Social Science. Effective Social Activism, Or A Call To Reinvent Ethnology? "Afiican Studies Quarterly", f l During the late 1950s and 1960s, national character and typical personality studies were broadly condemned, breathed their last gasp, and were ultimately relegated to the dusthin of bad social science. Since that time, various African scholars outside the social sciences have nevertheless been sustaining and redirecting group personality inquiry. They are not, however, approaching their subject as did Western social scientists in the first half of this century who used questionnaire instruments to determine if Africans were "traditional" or "modem" This was a particularlv popular approach among Western occupational psvchologists workinp in Africa in the 1950s and 1960s who sought to scientificallv assign statistical coefficients of modernization to Afr-ican populations. They did this. for the most part, to find out which Afiican noups were better suited for white or blue collar work in the colonial and post-independence socioeconomic setup (3). The maioritv of prior culture and personalitv researchers focusing on Africa were interested in creating and testing a "traditionaVWestern measuring device" (Dawson 1967), "assaving psvchological modernization" @oob 1967), or "measuring individual modemitv" (Smith and Inkeles 1966, Kahll968, and Gough 1975 and 1976).

a.

MEAN GREEN WORKSHOPS 2007 BORDERS K

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BY INVOKING THE UNITED STATES AS A SINGLE ENTITY, TIIE AFFIRMATIVE ENGAGES IN A FORGETTING OF THE PAST - THIS FORGETTING ENABLES THEM TO REPRODUCE OUTSIDERS TO MAINTAIN THE INSIDE'S OWN COHERENCE. GENEALOGY IS CRITICAL TO UNDERSTANDING THIS DICHOTOMOUS RELATIONSHIP
SHAPIRO 97
[Michael J ,Violent Cartoeranhies Mavnine Culture? of War 1997 pg 20, CT]

I MEAN GREEN WORKSHOPS 2007 -BORDERS AND NAMES K j J /+& 0 u'\ S LINK - GOVERNMENTAL ACTIONS OF DEFINING BORDERS LEGITIMIZE THE CONCEPT OF THE FOREIGNER AND CONDONE THEIR OPPRESSION

L L/\kcGc

Rebecca Saunders, 2001 The Agony And The Allegory: The Concept Of The Foreign, The Language Of Apartheid, And The Fiction Of J. M. Coetzee http://muse.ihu.edu/iournals/cultural critique/v047/47.1saunders.html Yet the conceptual instability of foreignness I have been describing would seem to be effectivelv obviated by the barbed wire that unmistakablvdemarcates the border or the pass book that clearly designates who has rights and who does not. This stabilized meaning of the foreign has. in current usage, become primary; "it is preciselv with respect to laws," writes Kristeva, "that foreigners exisr' (96). This leqal definition. in which "foreiqner" means one who is not a citizen, "allows one to settle bv means of laws the prickly passions aroused by the intrusion of the other in the homogeneitv of a familv or a aroup" (41); it renders "natural" and thus indisputable the idea that others do not have the same rights that I do (or, conversely, that I am not entitled to the rights that others are).

MGW Senior Scholars Borders K

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Chances in eovernance and infrastructure that created the political boundaries reshape identity and destroy the inherent culture of Sub-Saharan Africa Buur, Jensen, and Stepputat-ZOO7 [Lars Buur, PhD Ethnography and Social Anthropology, Senior Researcher, research unit on Politics and governance, specialization in South Africa. Steffen Jensen, Steffen Jensen is Senior Researcher at the Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Survivors and teaches at International Development Studies at Roskilde University; Finn Stepputat, Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen. The Securitv-Development Nexus, The SecurityDevelopment Nexus: Expressions of Sovereignty and Securitization in Southern Africa. pg. 91 Whether implicitly or explicitly, the chapters in this volume deal with the transformation of Southern African societies from autocratic and military / regimes into liberal democracies. But how can this transformation be related to changes in the securitydevelopment nexus at the national and regional levels, and how have more global trends during the past thirty years been played out in the region? These questions cannot be answered without reference to the ways in which discourses of identity, recomition and misreconnition have changed along with the overall transfornation of southern Africa. From colonial times to the present, changes in domination and the structures of governance have worked bv shifting discourses of recognition. with huge effects on the politics of identitv.

Y4

MGW Senior Scholars Borders K

Western ideology and aid perverts self-reliance, nationalism, and pride Burke - 1968 [Fred, Commissioner of Education, Sub-Saharan Africa.] Some African countries, such as Tanzania and Guinea, have been concerned about the influence that foreigners will have on their young people. They fear that if most high school teachers, for example, are American Peace Corps volunteers, and if industrial and agricultural development depends on American dollars or Russian rubles, the self-image of their nations will suffer. President Nverere of Tanzania is prepared to sacrifice considerable foreign aid in order to inspire in his people a sense of self reliance, nationalism, and pride in accomplishment

LITERATURE ESTABLISHES THE FOREIGN-SOMEONE WHO LACKS IDENTITY-SAUNDERS 2kl

[Rebecca, "The Agony And The Allegory: The Concept Of The Foreign, The Language Of Apartheid, And The Fiction Of J. M. Coetzee"; Cultural Critique 47 P. 215-264. <http://muse.jhu.eduljoumals/cultural -critique/v047/47.1saunders.html> Accessed 6/25/71 Yet if literature is a process of making foreim, such a "making" is less a hostile incursion into evervdav language than the cultivation of a foreignness that inheres in the structure of language itself, in what Saussure calls the arbitrarv and differential nature of the linguistic [End Page 2171 sign and in what Demda describes as "the spacing which constitutes the written sign: the spacing which separates it ffom other elements of the internal contextual chain . . . but also ffom all the forms of a present referent" ("Signature," 317). If ordinarv speech sublimates this foreimess-through what Paul de Man calls "the myth of semantic correspondence between sign and referent" (Allegories, 6)--literature cultivates it. It bears witness to the uncanniness of a world living in the diasuora of language.
But isn't this merely to spin metaphors? Does this figural, literary foreignness have anything at all to do with literal foreignness, with the demarcations that designate who helongs in a place and who doesn't, with the segregation of ethnicities or "races," or w i t h the material reality of armed borders or access to education and medical care? For reasom I shall spell out over the course of this essay, my contention is that, yes, the regulation of "linguistic" or

"literarv" foreignness is a primary technique for producing and disciplining "literal" foreigners. Derived from a Latin term meaning "outside" ~ O M S ) the , word "foreign" designates a qualitv or an entitv conceived relatively: the foreign is alwavs relative to the inside, the domestic. the familiar, a boundm. No entity is inherently foreign; she who is a foreigner in one place is at home in another;
as the familiar is altered or a boundary redrawn, so too is the character of the foreign. This means that no one escapes being foreign; any time I have dealings with a foreigner, I too become one. Foreignness, moreover, can he a status that one assumes (as does the traveler), that is imposed on one (as under apartheid), or that exists somewhere on the spectrum between these positions. Symptomatic of the relative nature of the foreim is the

necessity of defining the foreign negativelv, a svmptom exhibited bv virtually any dictionary: to be foreign is not belonging to a moup. not speaking a given language. not having the same customs; it is to be unfamiliar, uncanny, unnatural, unauthorized, incomprehensible, inappropriate, improper, This final connotation is crucial: the English word "foreign," l i e French &anger,
Spanish extronjero and Greek **'*o*, cames the telling connotation of "improper" and can he used as a synonym for inappropriate. Indeed, both the prefix and the root of improper mark significant attributes of foreignness. On the one hand, the privative comtructs an entity that is comparative and [End Page 2181 dependent; it signals the fact that foreignness is conceived negatively. On the other hand, the rootproper--from the medieval French and Englishpropre and, ultimately, fiom Latinproprius (one's own, special, particular; a peculiar characteristic; foreigner bv definition lacks: identity (what identity he lasting, permanent)--designateswhat

possesses is fundamentally derivative; a repository for what the domestic conceives itself not to be); propriety (she misreads signs, responds inappropriately, makes errors); purity (he is imbedded in stereotypes of both physical uncleanliness and metaphysical comSision); literality (her words fall outside of proper meaning); property (he is, by quite logical extension, prohibited kom owning property).

MGW Senior Scholars Borders Kritik

LITERATURE SERVES A POLITCAL PURPOSE: TO TAKE FULL POSSESSION OF AFlUCAhS SUBJECTIVITY-MILLER 1985 [Christopher, Associate Professor of History and Philosophy at University of Texas, and Frederick Ford Professor of French and African American Studies at Yale University; Blank Darkness- Africanist Discourse i n French, University of Chicago Press.] Le Cygne is from beginning to end a series of thoughts: Je pense vous.. .je ne vois quen esprit...Je pense B mon grande cygnet.. .et puis B vous, Andromaque.. .Je pense 8 la nbgresse.. .aux matelots.. .Aux captifs, aux vaincus! (I think of you ...I see only in my minds eye / Only in spirit.. .I think of my great swan.. . and then of you, Andromache.. .I think of the Negress.. .of sailors.. .Of captives, of conquered ones!) Any reading of the poem must therefore take account of both the distance descried by each figure (between Andromache and Troy, the swan and its native lake, the Negress and Africa) and the distance from each of these figures in which the discourse of the poem establishes itself. The abolitionist poems sought to create an both the illusion of perceptual depth: to recreate before the sense (caresse ...bouche alf&r&e) present iniustice and the ahsent paradise. Bv using an enslaved first-uerson narrator. these poems project a present voice and a familiarity with the oppressed hat serve the political purpose but that also take full possession of the others subiectivity. The worst of this is obviously thepeftt & r e of the Rouxel vaudeville, but even in the nobler poems the slave and his sufferings are domesticated and elevated. then sold on the poetic market.

MGW Senior Scholars Borders Kritik

EUROCENTRIC POSITIONS RENDER THE AFRICAN CULTURE AS NULLMILLER 1985 [Christopher, Associate Professor of History and Philosophy at University of Texas, and Frederick Ford Professor of French and African American Studies at Yale University; Blank Darkness- Africanist Discourse in French, University of Chicago Press.]

The mode necessary to art is imagination, which is the work of matter, and a reflection of sensuality: it is a type of reflection based on ire(nd) one of Gobineaus flection, a nullification of thought. .&It favorite words, and he uses it almost exclusively in reference to !he black races: la nullit6 civilisatrice des noin: Ia-tite, le visage, sont nuls; LidCalisation morale est nulle. The imagination is alien to civilization; civilization is alien to blacks; and the arts, proper to blacks, are therefore a special, nullified category of thought, extrinsic to civilization. Gobineau, faced with the problem of accounting for a type of thought that is immanent and purely material yet still somehow manages to create. follows a course similar to that of Charles de Brosses in Du Calre des d i e m firiches. Having labeled the barbarians mode of thought or religion as absolutely material and therefore immanent and null, both writen insert a new category into their language, one that permits them to describe an impossible object. De Brosses used a neologism, fbtiche, to describe an animal taken for itself yet divine. Now Gobineau sees fit to combine artistic genius and null irreflection; he does so by manipulating the word imagination. The Loroussp du XJX siPcle makes clear that this faculty of representing to oneself objects by thought is dependent on three facts: memory. abstraction, and judgment.* For Gobineau, however, the imagination is a much baser tool. Being excluded from the work of reason, the imagination is still full of the fire, flames, and sparks of genius. The Larousse and common sense would indicate that this genius is an intellectual phenomenon, insists that it is based on the rejection of matter and objects, but Gobineau .~ irreflexive. Gobineau refuses to read ?he reflection o f matter as anything bur u k e r i a l pro&Ys;;and hisversion of the imagination winds up as precisely a~ reflexive irreflection. Nearly a century afth Du Cube des dieux fitiches. Gohineau has transposed the Africanist object into a new context and a new language, finding a new version of de Brosseer2nscendenlal immanence.
~ ~

Thedenial of the others capacity lo thinl-the ultimate academic gesture-works by contradiction, by positing a category that cannot be filled, then remarking on its emptiness.

1 .c;

THE BLACK RACE$ IS THE ONLY RACE THAT HAS INSPIRED NULLITY AND ANY ACCOMPLISHMENT IS JUST A REFLECTION OF THE WHITE RACE. AFRICA IS THEN ONLY REDUCED TO NONCIVILIZATION, RECEIVING LIFE ONLY FROM THE OUTSIDEMILLER 1985
[Christopher, Associate Professor of History and Philosophy at University of Texas, and Frederick Ford Professor of French and African h i e n c a n Studies at Yale University; Blank Darkness- Afiicanist Discourse in French, University of Chicago Press.$), I+ -

142

i It is only the black race (one assumes he is referring to Africans, hut his

caikgoxy of MClaniens is appropriately vague and fictive) tkat inspires Gobineamto the project of a nullity. a human being who may actually not think. The notion of a nullity is a key to understanding European conceptions of Black Africa; it will crop up many times in this sNdy, usually in phrases as ambiguous as Gobineaus or even null. This is because the burden of proving a nullity, and of maintaining it in a logical discourse, is crushing, and the overextension of discourse in relation to this object of its own design i s most typical of Africanist utterances. It is only the black African that Gobineau and other writers seek to depict as a pure human machine, siripped of reasoning faculties and moved only by a blind sensorial desire. The meaning and consequences of these terms are at the heart of the Africanist pmblem. But it is later in the Essai. while trying to explain away the fact that the dark-skinned Ethiopians produced a civilization, that Gobineau produces his most fenile meldphor for the black race: Pour la premiire fois, nos recherches viennent de trouver dans 1Ethiopie un de ces pays annexes dune grande civilisatinn itrangbre, ne la possedant que dune manlre incomplbte et absolument comme le disaue lunaire fait pour la clart6 du snleil. [P. 2971

For rhe first ttme, our research has now found In Ethlopla one of those counlnes adiacent to a great foreign clvlllzatlon, possesslng that civilization oniy in an incomplete fashion, absolutely as the moon does with the light of the sun.
Black African civilization is for Gobineau a contradiction in terms; any accomplishment in Ethiopia (Abyssinia to Rimbaud) is directly attributable lo white blood in the veins of the population, blood infinitely subdivided but sufficient to make the Ethiopians the lirst of the black peoples. Black Africa, like the moon, exists for Gobineau only insofar as it reflects something white. His choice of the word disk is revealing in that it describes a perception in only two dimensions, although of course Gohineau knew the moon to be three-dimensional. The lunar sphere is reduced to a mere reflecting disk; the absence of innate light dictates this stripping-away of knowledge; darkness does not exist in this image, darkness is nothing. By the same token, Black Africa is reduced to a noncivilization, receiving life only from the outside:

La population Cgyptienne avait B combiner les ClCments que voici: des noirs Q cheveux plats, des nbgres Q tBte laineuse, plus une immigration hlanche, qui donnnh la vie a tout ce melonge. [P. 216; emphasis mine]
The Egyptian population was composed of the following elements: blacks with flat hair, Negroes with woolly heads, plus a white immigration, which gave life to rhe whole mix. The most interesting aspect of the lunar metaphor is the breach in Gobineaus own knowledge that it represents: the question of the moons negated

third dimension, which Gobineau did not "intend" but which his discourse imposes, raises a similar question concerning Black Africa. What happens to the fullness of an object within a discourse that takes that fullness away? How can one read a text that all but denies the existence of the thing it has created? How can negativity be read? This last is a question that Gobineau "answers" to his own satisfaction in the following passage from the Essai,with a different truth from (he one he sees: Mais de dire quand la barbarie a commence, voila ce qui depasse les forces de la science. Par sa nature mtme elle est nPgarive, parce qn'elle r a t e sans action. Elle v@te inaperque, et "on ne peut constarer son existence que le jour ori m e force de nutiire contraire seprdsenfepour la banre en brtche. Ce jour fut celui de I'apparition de la race hlanche au milieu des noirs. [P. 217; emphasis mine]

But to say when barbarism began is a question that is beyond the forces of science. By its very nature it is negative. because it remains without action. It vegetates unperceived, and its existence can be noticed only on the day when a force of opposite nature presents itselfand barbarism is breached. This day was that of the appearmce of the white race among the blacks.
Knowledge (science) is light. But the miraculous appearance of the white, race among the blacks here, inaugurating history and knowledge (see Essai, pp. 445 ff.), must destroy what it "knows." Darkness can be known only by shedding light on it; that is, it cannot be "known" as such. The writer who persists in detailing that kind of knowledge is working on Africanist ground. J-

MEAN GREEN WORKSHOPS 2007

THE PROCESS OF B O R D E R W G ~ D N ~ I N IS G DONE FROM A EUROCENTRIC PERSPECTIVE DESIGNED TO DISEMPOWER AFRICANS BY RENAMING ALL ACHEVMENTS AS EUROPEAN
S I M A D A H 2007, OWEN &K Sbahadab studied Aeronautical Engineering (BEng) in London and zoology (Bsc) at the University of the West Indies. He is currently working on obtaining a doctorate in African history and culture., January
When history is reduced from all the pages and pages to the underlining conclusion, we find regardless of if the author is British liberal, American conservative, or Australian the conclusion is the same. Africa has fostered nothing the Western World considers artifacts of civilization. With few exceptions, this is the underlying summarization on Africa, the pathologv of discrediting and take-away. Ethiopia - Not of African Origin Egypt - Not of African origin
Sudan - Not of African origin Mali -Not of African origin The Moorish Empire -Not African Ancient Zimbabwe -Not of African origin

There is nothing glorious in Africa that has not been reassigned to White ownership. And some are confused about terms like Arab, but Arabs from the perspective of Eurocentric history are a Middle-Eastern Caucasoid, so quite happily will they reassign Ancient Egypt or Islamic Spain to Arab people. The question for the discerning student of history is; why do all the conclusions always serve to empower Europeans and disempower Africans. It does not matter if they use archeology or genetics, linguistics or reasoning fhe conclusions always make a deoosit towards the greatness of Europe, and a deduction from the glorv of Africa.

* Who ended the slave trade- Europe * Who stopped the Arab trade - Europe * who was the greatest Abolitionist - A European * The greatest scientist, thinker, architect, composers, inventors -Europe * Who invented modem civilization - Europe
* Who invented everything good - Europe * Who is the most civilized - Europe

The question that should be put to these historians is What has indigenous Africa contributed to the world? Because the history of take-away has reduced Africa to nothing. thus implying the old statement Africa is of no historical significance. So how are todays scholars any different from David Hume and Kant? If all their conclusions reduced all the nobility of Africa to given, borrowed or stolen. There is generally no film, book, or report made by Europe that is so controversial that it indicts them in any atrocity against humanity. We often hear statements such as, after colonialism things collapse. The ultimate hero in every single story is the European; it is the most inescapable imposed reality the world is forced to accept.

MGW Senior Scholars Borders Kritik

AFRICAN DISCOURSE I S A PERCEPTION OF NULLITY, A BARBARIC, OTHER, DEPENDENT ON FRANCE AND AN lMAGE OF WHAT FRANCE WOULD NOT LIKE TO RE-MILLER 1985 [Christopher, Associate Professor of History and Philosophy at University of Texas, and Frederick Ford Professor of French and African American Studies at Yale University; Blank Darkness- Africanist Discourse in French, University of Chicago Press. P. 136-71
~

C But if the word allegory is taken in its broadest sense, as designating a distance between discourse and its object, all Afncanist utterances are allegorical. In fact, we have observed this since the beginning of this study: if e_e is a quality of Africanist discourse, it consists in a certajn pl!e?sxxtenSiOn and incongruity betwein the European utterance and the African object. On the surface, this difference most often expresses itself as the perception . . . of a
nullity. a barbaric, originary, unanainable other, be it monstrous or idealized. ThuS~Gobiineausanistic genius, founded in irreflection as a material imagination, is an allegory where the academic and the barharous, the discourse and the object, cannot coincide. His irreflective reflection is an allegory of the unbridgeable gap between the two culNres and of his own inability to understand that gap for what it is. Such a discourse is not lacking in Baudelaire: the violent domestication of the Dame crCole and the sad pamdy of La Belle DorothCe leave subjectivity, meaning discursive power, entirely in the European comer, so lhdt any access to freedom and reflection is to be conferred by France. Thus again the self-conlradictory movements within the two poems allegorize a European perception that is itself in two pare parted, half way between perception and projection. Like images perceived in the dark, spurting out from my eye by the thousands. these allegories are written on (on the subject of and determined by) a nullity and yet have all the appearances of being reflections of the real world. Thus the same notions are found in A une dame cdole as in the Larousse encyclopedia article. The contemplation of France, the m e land of Glory, from within an African or creole subjectivity creates that subjectivity as fully dependent on France: left to its own devices, the other subject dreams of France and defines itself according to what France would like not to be.> 9

5 7

MGW Senior Scholars Borders Kritik

THE ONLY DICOURSE IN AFFUCA IS ONE THAT PERCEIVES OTHERNESS IN EVERYTHING-MILLER 1985 [Christopher, Associate Professor of History and Philosophy at University of Texas, and Frederick Ford Professor of French and African AniericG Studies at Yale University; Blank Darkness- Aficanist Discourse in French, University of Chicago Press. P. 137-81

But this is not a reversal of the hierarchy. Africa as a sign cannot hold the privileged position that France holds in Dame crkole and Dorothke; it is superb only because of its absence. The black woman of Le Cygne and the Africa of her dreams are thus equal in a universe where equality, being werywhere, has lost its meaning. T h e . . o n ~ d ~ ~ r s e . ~ h a tthe .~o.~s A f ~ ~ & ~ b the ~ t vanquillity , of its otherness is a discourse that perceives
otherness in everything. If the nggresse has as much of a head as anyone, it i z e c a u s i everyones head is in jeopardy. There is s:nment tharpwents total,equalily:rhe poetic subject. Everything in Le Cygne is framed by the phrase Je pense B . . . which repeats itself and imposes itself as the instigator of the whole process. That narrator represents the head without which no discourse of headlessness can exist. The reigning equal exchange of allegories is defined by a principle that is not equal. The total destruction of cultural, geographical, and discursive hierarchies is a hierarchical decision that inevitably affirms the superiority of the one who makes it. This is only to say that Le Cygne holds itself back from the disaster of a world without barriers. where everything is absent: Africa remains absent here by comparison to a voice that is less absent if not really present. The narrators voice is an allegory of the presence that remains in a world where everything is becoming absent: it is his voice thnf represents the power of a discourse to confer the superb absence of Africa and that invites a political reading-an analysis of power relations-such as the one I have proposed here.^, a

MEAN GREEN WORKSHOPS 2007 BORDERS AND NAMES K

_I -

z-Ih9& -fi~~G&e

HEGEMONIC DISCOURSE ERASES IDENTITY AFRICAN IDENTITY AND IGNORES HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Sorenson 1993, John Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Brigham Young University, Imagining Ethiopia: Struggles for History and Identity in the Horn of Africa p144

On the Eritrean issue, there has been a remarkable convergence of various discourses, a consensus accepted by those from all points on the political spectrum, including both superpowers, Marxists and conservatives, U.S.-supported emperors claiming biblical genealogies, and Soviet-supplied military dictatorships: the impossibility of Eritrean independence. Locked into the cycles of hegemonic discourse, these commentators all negate Eritrean identity, formed by common experience of colonialism and by three derades of terrible warfare. An analysis of the power of representation seveals that this discursive unity has been dedicated to producing what it ostensibly describes and to enforcing the legitimacy of Ethiopiaaterritorialintegrity while delegitimizing Eritrean nationalism, seeking to prevent its recognition, and thereby its existence. Dissenting v k e s are banished as propaganda with no effort to engage with thi-.r claims. This discourse concentrates on external factors, dismissing Eritrean nationalism as artificial and a product of Arab and comm list agitation rather than seeing it in the context of African history. Aciherence to the myth of a eentralized and historically united Ethiopian state overlooks both the recent development of that state and its essential instability, demonstrated by the proliferation of movements of various ideological orientations inside Ethiopia. Assertions that Eritreans lost their chance for victory in 1977 because of internal fragmentation overlook a major Ethiopian offensive assisted by the Soviet Union, Cuba, and South Yemen. Predictions of the failure of Eritrean nationalism have been refuted by decisive EPLF victories and the establishment of a provisional government, the collapse of Ethiopias military machine, and the fight of its dictator. Many felt that Eritrean independence already had been achieved in 1991, although the EPLF made no formal declaration. Regardless of the nature of Eritreas political future, serious negotiations remain to be undertaken to insure that the suffering of the entire region is not prolonged. Permanent resolution of conflicts in the Horn will not be aided by assessments that distort regional history.

MEAN GREEN WORKSHOPS 2007 BORDERS AND NAMES K

HEGEMONIC DISCOURSE ESSENTNIZES AFRICA AS THE ABODE OF ABSOLUTE EVIL

Sorenson 1993, John Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Brigham Young University, Imagining Ethiopia: Struggles for History and Identity in the Horn of Africa p 163-164
.

5 * * 4 5

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Typically, hegemonic discourse banishes history or substitutes its own version. Harris replaces historical analysis with a vision of basic savagery: True, Africa was a continent of colonially created states ripped apart by tribes that owed only loyalty to family and trihe. .. . But if the colonialist had never come, what difference would it have made? (1987:25). For Harris, Africa is the abode of Absolute Evil and its essence is chaos. In this discourse. colonialism was a selfless mission seeking to create order; the noble endeavour was betrayed by communists, liberals, and racial equality fanatics who refused to take up the civilizing mission and allowed African venality to emerge. Harris ignores completely the violent transformation of African societies, operations of multinational corporations, fluctuations of an international economic order in which the Third World is assigned a position as a producer of primary resources, cheap labor, and captive markets, as well as the structure of neocolonialism that drains the Third World through institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, supported by a continuous propaganda assault through the mass media and backed up by military force. He claims that the West gave up its colonies because of neurotic liberal guilt and a wish to set a good example: It was then that the West abolished the idea of evil, legislated away differences between people, and, to set an example, began to abolish their own colonial empires. In their place came aid, and the Aidgame. Its players were set to work in societies that, newly liberated from the straitjacket of colonialism, had returned not to a progressive Victorian optimism but to medievalism and feudalism dressed in modern military uniforms (ibid.: 18).This passage exhibits central discursive themes: important is the notion that the West abandoned its mission, allowing Africans to slip backwards on an evolutionary scale to the medievallevel. Harris disparages misguided attempts to legislate away differences; it is clear that he means racial differences, which he thinks are objective and significant. He conceals previous experience in South Africa, fearing criticism from liberal colleagues whom he terms racial equality fanatics? Although not openly advocating apartheid, he implicitly supports it by suggesting the destructive results of relaxing control over Africa.

MEAN GREEN WORKSHOPS 2007 BORDERS AND NAMES K

THE AFFIRMATIVES DISCOURSE ON AFRICA PRESENTS IT AS A ZONE OF PHYSICAL AND ONTOLOGICAL DANGER
Sorenson 1993, John Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Brigham Young University, Imagining Ethiopia: Struggles for History and Identity in the Horn of Africa p17

fli.,LW5e--r-f

-+

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Discourse on Africa is haunted by ideas of danger, contagion, and the threat to identity. The colonial image of Africa as the diseaseinfested White Mans Grave has been followed by theories that locate Africa as the source of AIDS. Not only is Africa seen as a zone of physical danger, it is also presented as a zone of ontological danger, a region of instability of meaning where order is threatened, and in which even racial essence can be reversed or subverted. This instability of racial identity has a particularly interesting elaboration in relation to ideas of Ethiopia, taken as a symbol of ALican identity but also viewed as a mirror image of the West. As elaborated below, the very nature of Ethiopian identity, of the Ethiopian self, has been bitterly contested both on the battlefields and in discourse, with competing versions of past and future. Racial factors also influenced African perceptions of this conffict, as Eritreans charged that their national liberation struggle was ignored because they were subject to black, rather than white, colonialism.

NO SOLVENCY:ATTEMPTS TO COGNIZE AFRICAN ACHIEVMENTS ARE CO-OPTED AS VICTORIES OF EUROPEAN POWERS Sorenson 1993, Jolm Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Brigham Young University, Imagining Ethiopia: Struggles for History and Identity in the Horn of Africa p63

MEAN GREEN WORKSHOPS 2007 BORDERS AND NAMES K J JC .rvL QkL

- The rewriting of history entails reconceptualization of significant

events such as the battle of Adwa. Rather than as a key symbolic event in African history-the triumph of Africans over a European colonial army-the event is reinterpreted as a proxy battle, an indirect confrontation between Britain and France. Processes of modernization and centralization carried out by successive emperors since the midnineteenth century are reconceptualiid as creations of European powers acting in their own interests. The emperors themselves, elevated to semidivine status by the Kiha Negmt and hailed as progressive modernizers in Great Tradition scholarship, are dismissed as mere functionaries. Ethiopian resistance is redefined as collusion. Even the central image of Ethiopian nationalist discourse, of Ethiopia as an ancient independent state, is here presented as an invention of European ideology, designed to support boundary claims and prevent expansion by rival powers.

MEAN GREEN WORKSHOPS 2007

~~

- /-

$+.p;' c - t - bt :&&-=j + ? efi&zYfi THE S l A T E ATTEMPTS TO UNIFY II'S INTERNAL COMPOSITION BY PROJECTING INSECURITIESON OUTSIDER GROUPS -HOWEVER, THE mrry OF THE UNITED STATES IS FAR FROM POSSIBLE FOR IT IS JUST AS PLURALIZED AS THE OUTSIDE IT ATTEMPTS TO ERADICATE
SHAPIRO 97
[Micliaei J., Violent Cartoerapliies: Mappine Cultures of War. 1997. pg 29-30,

BORDERS K

c{-uk,

crl

Colonial rule led to the bifurcation of culture Buur, Jensen, and Stepputat-2007 [Lars Buur, PhD Ethnography and Social Anthropology, Senior Researcher, research unit on Politics and governance, specialization in South Afica. Steffen Jensen, Steffen Jensen is Senior Researcher at the Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Survivors and teaches at International Development Studies at Roskiide University; Finn Stepputat, Senior Researcher at the Danish institute for International Studies in Copenhagen. The Security-Development Nexus, The SecurityDevelopment Nexus: Expressions of Sovereignty and Securitization in Southern Afnca. Although the Portuguese colonial system of indirect rule never became as well developed as that of the British colonies, by the turn of the 19th century it had come to rely on governance through chiefs. Over time, a bikcated society emerged, divided along racial and cultural lines, separating the population into indigenas governed by African custom on which colonial laws were superimposed, and nao-indigenas entitled to full Portuguese citizenship (Kyed 2005:5).

MGW Senior Scholars Borders K

Borders facilitate for militaristic and biopoliticai control Buur, Jensen, and Stepputat-2007 [Lars Buur, Phi3 Ethnography and Social Anthropology, Senior Researcher, research unit on Politics and governance, specialization in South Africa. Steffen Jensen, Steffen Jensen is Senior Researcher at the Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Survivors and teaches at International Development Studies at Roskilde University; Finn Stepputat, Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen. The Security-Development Nexus, The SecurityDevelopment Nexus: Expressions of Sovereignty and Securitization in Southern Africa. Pg. 91 As de Certeau (1984) has argued, this division of space between civilised, "proper places" and an unruly (barbarian) environment that can be made subject to surveillance from the proper places, is a constant figure of strategic thinking in military, political and business circles. Against the grain of Duffield's (2004a) insistence that the merging of development and security is a recent phenomenon, we find this spatialised configuration of sovereign power and biopower, of violent oppression and the development of moral citizens, at different points in the history of southern Africa, from colonial times through the Cold War counter-insurgency wars to the era of democratic dispensations with wars on crime, illegal migration and political enemies.

MEAN GREEN WORKSHOPS 2007 BORDERS AND NAMES K

T H E AFFIRMATIVES DISCOURSE ON AFRICA PRESENTS IT AS A ZONE OF PHYSICAL AND ONTOLOGICAL DANGER

Sorenson 1993, J o h n Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Brigham Young University, Imagining Ethiopia: Struggles for History and Identity in the Horn of Africa p17

oi.ii.wSe-r+yGt

I --

Discourse on Africa is haunted by ideas of danger, contagion, and the threat to identity. The colonial image of Africa as the diseaseinfested White Mans Grave has been followed by theories that locate Africa as the source of AIDS. Not only is Africa seen as a zone of physical danger, it is also presented as a zone of ontological danger, a region of instability of meaning where order is threatened, and in which even racial essence can be reversed or subverted. This instability of racial identity has a particularly interesting elaboration in relation to ideas of Ethiopia, taken as a symbol of African identity but also viewed as a mirror image of the West. As elaborated below, the very nature of Ethiopian identity, of the Ethiopian self, has been bitterly contested both on the battlefields and in discourse, with competing versions of past and future. Racial factors also influenced African perceptions of this conflict, as Eritreans charged that their national liberation struggle was ignored because they were subject to black, rather than white, colonialism.

MEAN GREEN WORKSHOPS 2007 BORDERS AND NAMES K

<&AD&

NO SOLVENCY: ATTEMPTS TO AFRICAN ACHIEVMENTS ARE CO-OPTED AS VICTORJES OF EUROPEAN POWERS

Sorenson 19!33,

&COGNIZE

John Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Brigham Young University, Imagining Ethiopia: Struggles for History and Identity in the Horn of Africa p63

The rewriting of history entails reconceptualization of significant events such as the battle of Adwa. Rather than as a key symholic event in African history-the triumph of Africans over a European colonial army-the event is reinterpreted as a proxy battle, an indirect confrontation between Britain and France. Processes of modernization and centralization carried out by successive emperors since the midnineteenth century are reconceptualiied as creations of European powers acting in their own interests. The emperors themselves, elevated to semidivine status hy the Kibm Negmt and hailed as progressive modernizers in Great Tradkion scholarship, are dismissed as mere functionaries. Ethiopian resistance is redefined as collusion. Even the central image of Ethiopian nationalist discourse, of Ethiopia as an ancient independent state, is here presented as an invention of European ideology, designed to support boundary claims and prevent expansion by rival powers.

_1

MEAN GREEN WORKSHOPS 2007 BORDERS AND NAMES K

I _-

SOLVENCY: THE AFRICA AS PURELY WESTERN DISCOURSE IGNORES THE HEGEMONIC DISCOURSE OF AFRICAN ELITES
Sorenson 1993, John Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Brigham Young University, Imagining Ethiopia: Struggles for History and Identity in the Horn of Afiica p18-19

An analysis of discourse on Ethiopia and Eritrea cannot remain at the level of a unidirectional approach that suggests Ethiopiais entirely the creation of Western obsessions and projected fantasies. Instead it is necessary to consider both the clash of local images, histories, and identities and the manner in which these have been supported or negated hy external interests. Orientalism has been criticized for taking an approach to the non-European world that conceptualizes it as inert and ignores the contribution to discourse made by indigenous ruling classes (Mani and Frankenberg 1985). Saids later work addresses those issues but, as a cautionary note, the point is relevant. A related criticism is that Said acknowledgesno political or cultural divisions among the subject peoples he is allegedly defending (Marcus and Fischer 1986:1). By incorporating such criticisms into an examination of discourse on Ethiopia, I hope to avoid a unidirectional model and to suggest a more complex view of discourse on the Third World. Colonial expansion throughout the world was not an entirely uniform process; instead there is a range of variation in interactions, with differential impact depending upon the time of contact. The West has dominated and exploited its Third World colonies, but Third World ruling classes exert their own power and perpetuate their own ideological truths. Despite their subordinate positions, these local ruling classes cannot simply be regarded theoretically as inert or as passive. Instead, within certain limits, there is a collusion of interests between locallevel elites and external forces. Rather than examining hegemonic and subaltern discourses as totally discrete entities, it is necessary to
see that they are not formed in isolation but interact with one another. Furthermore, subaltern discourses may contain their own internal o p positions and strive to impose their own hegemonic versions of history and identity (OBrien and Roseberry 1991).

MEAN GREEN WORKSI-IOPS 2007 - _ /_ BORDERS K =L-p.. c+ ho,&.rs + 3 ~ % ~ ~ - l THE STATE A? rEMPTS TO UNIFY ITS INTERNAL COMPOSrTION BY PROJECTING INSECURITIES ON OUTSIDER GROUPS - HOWEVER, THE UNITY OF THE UNITED STATES IS FAR FROM POSSIBLE FOR IT IS JUST AS PLURALIZED AS THE OUTSIDE IT ATTEMPTS TO ERADICATE

SHAPIRO 97
[Michael J , Violent Carlomaphie\ Mamlne Cultures 01 War 1997 pg 29-30, CT]

MGW Senior Scholars Borders K

Colonial rule led to the bifurcation of culture Buur, Jeusen, and Stepputat-2007 [Lars Buur, PhD Ethnography and Social Anthropology, Senior Researcher, research unit on Politics and governance, specialization in South Africa. Steffen Jensen, Steffen Jensen is Senior Researcher at the Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Survivors and teaches at International Development Studies at Roski!de Upiversity; Finn Stepptat, Senior Xesexche: zt the k n i s h Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen. The Security-Development Nexus, The SecurityDevelopment Nexus: Expressions of Sovereignty and Securitization in Southern Africa Although the Portuguese colonial system of indirect rule never became as well developed as that of the British colonies, by the turn of the 19th century it had come to rely on governance through chiefs. Over time, a bifurcated society emerged, divided along racial and cultural lines, separating the population into indigenas governed by African custom on which colonial laws were superimposed, and nao-indigenas entitled to full Portuguese citizenship (Kyed 2005:5).

MGW Senior Scholars Borders K

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1 ,

_ _I _

Boundaries perpetuate developmental securitization Buur, Jensen, and Stepputat-2007 [Lars Buur, PhD Ethnography and Social Anthropology, Senior Researcher, research unit on Politics and governance, specialization in South Afnca. Steffen Jensen, Steffen Jensen is Senior Researcher at the Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Survivors and teaches at International Development Studies at Rnskz!de Ihiversity; Fk-! Stepputzt, Secicr Researcher zt the Danish Institute fGi International Studies in Copenhagen. The Security-Development Nexus, The SecurityDevelopment Nexus: Expressions of Sovereignty and Securitization in Southern Africa. pg. 91

Knowing that power always works throw%the social organisation of space in different "territorialisinp repimes" (Wilson 2004), it comes as no surprise that the production of maces and boundaries represents certain continuities in development-security linkages fkom colonial times to the present. When ideas of people being differently valued and endowed in terms of capacities for development, self-determination and decency combine with strategic designs for the containment and control of danger and threat, we tend to get a "police concept of histow" (Ranciere, quoted in Feldman 2004), that is, the production of a Visual dichotomy of ideal. safe spaces and dvstopic. risk-laden spaces that impinge on and threaten safe spaces.

MGW Senior Scholars Borders Kritik

Africanist discourse resembles dream in Freud's description. Both are made * possible by a condition of blankness-of distance and ignorance, of sleep. Within that frame, a discourse unfolds having the singular capacity to appear real, to break the frame and fill the universe: a dream is not a dream unless the dreamer cannot distinguish it from reality. Similarly, Atncauist fantasies come armed with measurements in c e n t i m e t e w -every appearance ot accurate perception. But like the figure of ' ' A m c ~ " dream IS felt to be " s o m i s i $ - 7 o n . trastine with the remaining contents of the- mind," "extraneous to our minds."'" Yet, paradoxically, dreams can only he a result of "the arbitrary decision of the mind." They are the closest obiect to the mind and the funhest from it. The central question of thelnrerpreration ofDreams is the assignment of an etiology and a status to this uncanny discourse, for Freud's predecessors tended to "leave a great gap when it comes to assigning an origin for the ideational images which constitute the most characteristic material of dreams" (p. 74). This "riddle of the sources of dreams" runs parallel to our concern here with the stams of the Africanist object. It is well known that Freud's main thesis is that "a dream is the fulfiUment Of a wish." But the nature ofthat fulfillment is called into question by Freud's Posting N O identities Or types of fulfillment. Perceptual identity (Wahrneh. mun8sidenritat) occurs when "a psychical impulse . , . seeks to re-cathect the mnemic image of the perception and to re-evoke rheperception itself. that is to say, to re-establish the situation of the original satisfaction" (p, 605; my emphasis). This is the "regressive" pathof the unbridled primary process, the unsubdued preconscious, and this identity is founded in an illusionary Realism that consists of a "taking-for-real" (Wahmehmur!g) of its object. The coincidenceof the object and the investment is defined as wish-fulfillment: An impulse of this kind is what we call a wish; the reappearance of the perception is the fulfillment of the wish" ({hid.),
~~

..

MGW Senior Scholars Borders Kritik

The relevance of Freuds dream theory to Africanist discourse should become clear in his next sentence: Nothing prevents us from assuming that there was a primitive state ofthe psychical apparatus in which this path was actually traversed, that is. in which wishina fmv .ended in hulltcci~~otinp emphasis). That primitive slate of wish-fulfillment is how Europe conceives of African thought: as a free reign of fulfilled desire, a place to linger zelighted with the gods, where dualities of representation have been abolished in a single tetish-religion. where ornamentation and physique coincide, where the alien native cries welcome in your own language, where the people are nothing but a soft wax, and where any figure that ~ o u wish can be realized. Freuds projection of such a primitive state constimtes yet another rCverie du repfs; it parallels Homer, Herodotus, de Brosses, Demanel, and the others by dreaming, ineffect, o f a world without dreams. Pliny wote that the Ethiopians are,not visited with dreams like the rest of mortals (see p. 26, above): no dreams or nothing but dreams, this primitive state is in either case the end of the distinction between dream and reality.m 1 The opposite of perceptual identity is described by Freud as thought identity, which is nothing but a substitute for a hallucinatory wish but has abandoned this intention [of coinciding perceptually with a prior experience of satisfaction] and taken on another in its place-the establishment of a thought identity [with that experiencel (p. 641). Because dreams are caught within the confines of thought, no matter what impulses from the normally uninhibited Unconscious may prance upon the stage, we feel no concern; they remain harmless (p. 607). The thoupht i w a w s to itself in relation to the Africans null mode: Christianity with
I

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its symbols, opposed to idolatry with its fetishes, contemplation instead of oabli (forgetfulness; Bossuel), reflexive ideas and imitation instead of a direct cult without figures (de Bmsses). Thus, in Africanist discourse it is always the European subiect who represents thought (sane contemplation of an object recognized as other) as opposed to hallucination (illusory identification with the nonself, desire fulfilled and canceled out). Eumue conceives of Africa as the direct, immanent, unself-conscious annulment of its (Eumoesl own binary modes of thought. ) .

bZ - q

Individual identities areGrased due to the spreadine neoliberal reform Buur, Jensen, and Steppntat-2007 [Lars Buur, PhD Ethnography and Social Anthropology, Senior Researcher, research unit on Politics and governance, specialization in South Afiica. Steffen Jensen, Steffen Jensen is Senior Researcher at the Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Survivors and reaches at International Development Studies at Roskilde University; Finn Stepputat, Senior Researcher at the Danish Instibite for International Studies in Copenhagen. The Security-Development Nexus, The SecurityDevelopment Nexus: Expressions of Sovereignty and Securitization in Southern Africa. pg. 91 As Englund has asserted in regard to the present period, "the spectre of discrete identities is a global medicament, promoted bv the specific turn that liberal ideas have taken to facilitate neoliberal reform in national communities" (Englund 2004:ll). To be recomised as poor. as needy. as a soldier for demobilisation compensation. as a counterpart or stakeholder in concrete development proiects, or iust as a "good" citizen, alwavs involves and necessitates "a specific aesthetic, a particular form that claims - and the social relations that thev delineate - must assume in order to be recomised" (Englund 2004:lO).

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THE AFFIRMATIVE'S ACT OF MAPMAKING IS AN IMPERIALISTIC EFFORT TO FORCE THE REAL OF AFRICA TO CONFORM TO THE MODEL OF THE MAP CONDEMNCNG AFRICAN IDENTITY TO ERASURE

Baudriflard 1988, Cultural Theorist and Doctorate of Philosophy and Professor of Sociology Selected Writings (Stanford; Stanford University Press,), pp. 166-184 h t t u : / / w w w . s t ~ i f o r d . e d u d e n t / H P S / ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ n ! ! Sin~nulscra.Mm! ~~~/~a~~i!!~~~
If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the catographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (hut where, with the decline of the Empire this map becomes frayed and fmally ruined, a few shreds still discemible in the deserts - the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing), this fable would then have come full circle for us, and now bas nothing but tbe discrete charm of second-order simulacra.1

Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra -jt is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself. In fact, even inverted, the fable is useless. Perhaps only the allegory of the Empire remains. For it is with the same imperialism that present-day simulators try to make the real, all the real, coincide with their simulation models. But it is no longer a question of either maps or territory. Something has disappeared: the sovereign difference between them that was the abstraction's charm. For it is the difference which forms the poetry of the map and the charm of the territory, the magic of the concept and the charm n and is of the real. This representational imaginary, which both culminates i engulfed by the cartographer's mad proiect of an ideal coextensivity between the map and the territory, disappears with simulation, whose operation is nuclear and genetic, and no longer specular and discursive. With it eoes all of metaphysics. No more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept; no more imaginary coextensivity: rather, genetic miniaturization is the dimension of simulation.The real is produced from miniaturized units, fiom matrices, memory banks and command models - and with these it
can he reproduced an indefbite number of times. It no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. It is nothing more than operational. In fact, since it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer real at all. It is a hyperreal the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.

In this passage to a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor of truth, the age of simulation thus begins w i t h a liquidation of all referentials worse: by their artificial resurrection in systems of signs, which are a more ductile material than meaning, in that they lend themselves to all systems of equivalence, all binary oppositions and all combinatory algebra. It is no longer a Questionof imitation, nor of

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rednplication, nor even ofparody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself; that is, an operation to deter every real process bv its operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have to be produced: this is the vital function of the model in a system of or rather of anticipated resurrection which no longer leaves any chance even in the event of death. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room on!y for the orbital recurrence of models and the simulated generation of difference.

\ 1 .

m,

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AT THE MOMENT SUPREMACY IS MENTIONED INEOUALITY ASSERTS ITSELF-MILLER 1985 [Christopher, Associate Professor of History and Philosophy at University of Texas, and Frederick Ford Professor of French and African American Studies at Yale University; Blank Darkness- Africanist Discourse in French, University of Chicago Press.$).

<The last word of the poem forces an interpretive choice on the reader, and some, by inclination, will prefer to leave the poem unperturbed. But my point -7 is that the promise of social and geographical nobility is analogous to the promise of harmony and meaning in Baudelaires characterization of color. Poetry is, like the & of color, a function of infinity, as in the thousand sonnets of the last tercet. Poetry and color are the privilege of the North, &, to he given and taken away by the academic world. But the academic North \ nd c 9 ,I. cannot do without the barbarous South to provide it with raw wlierthe transpbkt takes place and the barbarous revivifies the academic with its strangeness, the result is the left-handed compliment of A une dame cdole. Of course, Baudelaire is never doing only one thing at a time; while with his left hand he may be following the pattern I have described, with his right he may not. The subject of A une dame crkole, or rather our reading of it as either stable or instable, depends on our frame of reference. Within the enclosure of belles-lettres, the subject may he as much slave as master, may not distinguish between projection and perception, may deal in equal exchange rather than centralized domination. This is the Baudelaire who jays, tl-d,o,.not vuish~t,o.asse$ tbe~.supremacy of one nation over another. But from the moment supremacy is mentioned, asjn the reference to slavery at the end of A une dame c d o k , inequality seems to assen itself. The act of breaking ..~ 9 e strictly self-referentiat, Eurocen&c-frame in which literature is norrhally deconsuucted and placing the subject in a world full of objects, even unstable ones, seems to~kveai an unequal set of rules by which meaning is indicated. O_ne object must.~.. be suppressed in order for another to rise: black for color, line-drawing for painting, zero for number, Creoles for poeg, . ,...
1 ,
~ ~~ ~ ~~~ ~

I/

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MEAN GREEN WORKSHOPS 2007 BORDERS AND NAMES K m L J "

pc. -t -&!1At.T&

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IMPLICATION - THE DESIGNATION OF ONE AS FOREIGN CREATES A RELATION OF SUPERIORITY AND INFERIORITY
Rebecca Saunders, ZOOJ The Agony And The Allegory: The Concept Of The Foreign, The Language Of Apartheid, And The Fiction Of J. M.Coetzee htto://muse.ihu.edu/iournals/culturalcritiaue/v047/47.1saunders.html Derived from a Latin term meaning "outside" (foras), the word "foreian" designates a quality or an entitv conceived relativelv: the foreign i s alwavs relative to the inside, the domestic, the familiar, a boundaw. No entitv is inherentlv foreian; she who is a foreigner in one place is at home in another; as the familiar is altered or a boundary redrawn, so too is the character of the foreign. This means that no one escapes beinq foreiqn: any time Ihave dealings with a foreiqner, Itoo become one. Foreiqnness, moreover, can be a status that one assumes (as does the traveler). that is imposed on one (as under apartheid), or that exists somewhere on the spectrum between these positions. smptomatic of the relative nature of the foreiqn is the necessitv of defining the foreign negatively, a symptom exhibited by virtually any dictionary: to be foreign is not belonainq to a group, not speakinq a aiven lanquaae, not having the same customs; it is to be unfamiliar, uncanny, unnatural, unauthorized, incomprehensible, inappropriate, improper. This final connotation is crucial: the English word "foreign," like French efranger, Spanish extranjero and Greek **'*o'. carries the tellina connotation of "imDroper" and can be used as a synonym for inappropriate. Indeed, both the prefix and the root of improper mark significant attributes of foreignness. On the one hand, the privative constructs an entity that is comparative and dependent; it signals the fact that foreignness is conceived negatively. On the other hand, the root proper--from the medieval French and English propre and, ultimately, from Latin proprius (one's own, special, particular; a peculiar characteristic; lasting, permanent)--deskmates what the foreigner bv definition lacks: -(what identitv he possesses is fundamentallv derivative; a repository for what the domestic conceives itself not to be); propriety (shemisreads signs, responds inappropriatelv, makes errors); (he is imbedded in stereotypes of both phvsical uncleanliness and metaphysical confusion); literality (her words fall outside of proper meaning); property (he is, by quite logical extension, prohibited from owning property).

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EXTERNAL DISCOURSE LEGI~IMIZ~S THE MYTHOLOGIESOF LOCAL ELITES PEWETUATING DOMINATION

Sorenson 1993, John Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Brigham Young University, Jinagining Ethiopia: Struggles for History and Identity in the Horn of Africa p19

In the Horn of Africa, discourses of Third World ruling elites have

been adopted by external powers for their own ends. T h i scan be seen
most clearly in relation to Eritrea, where Eritrean nationalist history was suppressed by the hegemonic mythology of the Amhara elites. During the pre-federation period, both superpowers acknowledged the validity of Eritrean claims for independence but dismissed them in order to extend their own influence in Ethiopia. The hegemonic mythology created by Ethiopian elites was accepted by numerous scholars, perpetuated in the mass media, and adopted by both superpowers to further their strategic interests as well as by other African governments who feared that Eritrean independence might legitimize nationalist or secessionist struggles elsewhere. Thus, struggles for control of representation of history and identity were carried out at various levels and particular versions of these struggles were authorized and legitimiied by different types of authorities. The struggles were rendered particularly complex because, in the past, Ethiopia functioned as a symbol of African antiquity, civilization, and liberty. Consequently, in addition to an established scholarly tradition of Ethiopian studies, there has been considerable emotional investment in and support for the image of a unified Greater Ethiopia within other subaltern discourses, including those of Africans and African-Americans. Defenders of the Ethiopian revolution also rejected the claims of Eritrean nationalists on the basis of an identification with the political character they ascribed to the regime.

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THE ALTERNATIVE DOES DISCURSIVE HEGEMON BUT RECOGNIZES THE COMPLEX INTERACTION OF DISCOURSE AND IDENTITY
Sorenson 1993, John Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Brigham Young University, Imagining Ethiopia: Struggles for History and Identity in the Horn of Africa p 188

An understanding of national identity in the Horn is complicated by the recognition that subaltern discourses also may be internally divided. Afar, Eritrean, and Oromo nationalisms all contain their own oppositions and contradictions. Whereas some have read these contradictions as a sign of the illegitimacy of any national identity among these groups, such oppositions do not negate the existence of a national consciousness but rather indicate the more complex nature of this consciousness and its historical formation. Oppositions and contradictions do not signify the aberrant character of these nationalist movements but instead may be typical of postcolonial nationalism in general (Geertz 1973:234-254). The future significance of these ethnic identities within an independent Eritrean state will be a matter of some interest.

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Citizenship should be reconfimwed from political communities to regional communities Buur, Jensen, and Stepputat-2007 [Lars Buur, PhD Ethnography and Social Anthropology, Senior Researcher, research unit on Politics and governance, specialization in South Africa. Steffen Jensen, Steffen Jensen is Senior Researcher at the Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Survivors and teaches at International Development Studies at Roskilde University; Finn Stepputat, Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen. The Security-Development Nexus, The SecurityDevelopment Nexus: Expressions of Sovereignty and Securitization in Southern AGica pg. 91
Citizenship is understood as Godified set of constiturional rights and duties that deline When apartheid broke down, South A h a hccanie membcrship of a political comni& the home of all Sozdi Ajjkaizs. This constituted a radical recasting of citizenship as it was pursued under apartheid The South African-ncss that emerged in apartheid legislation in the 1950s not only related to the now internationally recogniscd borders of South Africa, but was also subdivided it into ribal (African) territories separate from modem (Wh ite) South Africa (Mamdani 1996a). In the mind of the white South African regime, it mattered r o m Transkei inside South Africa or from .Mozambique, as little whether a migrant camc f all wcrc migrants coming from outside White South A h c a "South Ahcanisation" - or the reconfiguration of citizenship after 1994 - must therefore be understood not only as asserting the external borders of the Republic, but also as dissolving the internal borders of the new nation-state in order to iinifv the nation.

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A Pan-African identity can exist Buur, Jensen, and Stepputat-2007 [Lars Buur, PhD Ethnography and Social Anthropology, Senior Researcher, research unit on Politics and governance, specialization in South Africa. Steffen Jensen, Steffen Jensen is Senior Researcher at the Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Survivors and teaches at International Development Studies at Roskilde University; Finn Stepputat, Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen. The Security-Development Nexus, The SecurityDevelopment Nexus: Expressions of Sovereignty and Securitization in Southern Africa. pg. 91

However, this invocation of a Pan-Afiican identity and destiny exists parallel to another, more nationalist defense of the South African border, especially in relation to Southern African migrants. It is the production and maintenance of this parallel nationalist undercurrent and consequences it has for migrants that is the subject of this paper.

MGW Senior Scholars

Borders K ALT-The only way to break down theEuroceutric stranglehold on Africa is by desconstructine Western colonialist thoueht. Our alternative is to break down political and state borders to create a state of African unity based on cultural and regional similarities that embraces a unified economic policy.

A u 61

Nanjakululu - June 21,2007

[Wasai J., Kenyan based in Nairobi, working on HIV/Aids policy at the Agency for Cooperation in Research and Development (ACORD). Africa: Open the Borders. Let Africans Challenge HIV/Aids Together! http://allafiica.com/stories/2007062 11 030.html] We recognize that we were given artificial states through colonialism. Breaking these states overnight is a daunting task. We should instead build these states to become federal states of Africa in order to end up with a federal government of Africa. This kind of government should then identifv historical links that countries share and create reeional states like the East African Federation. This may help in dealing with internal conflicts. If the continental union's importance is based purely on political recognition, then what good shall come out of it? It must marantee freedom of movement and free markets that work for Africa. This will also provide an enabling environment to mount a continentwide HIV/Aids response. Bv making Africa one huge market we could iointlv procure anti-retrovirals and establish pharmaceutical factories on the continent. This would ease the prices of these essential life saving drugs. One, we need to break open state borders. Two, let the citizens be well informed and involved in policv making at countrv level, in order to allow people to engage democratically in governance, wealth creation and distribution. Then, when we propose the issue of Afiican u n i t y then the masses will not see the leaders as having hidden motives. Three, we have to come UP with a good economic policv for African unity. Finally, let us be on the look-out for reactionaw processes at country level and be prepared to deal with them.

I believe that you only see obstacles when you take your eyes off the goals. We also need
to come to a place where we can allow others to lead but not allow the stronger countries to dictate to other states. The AU must embrace a culture of empowering its people and preserve the historical links that unite us.

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THE ALTERNATIVE IS TO PROBLEMATEE THE NOTION OF FOREIGN BY RECOGNIZING IT AS A ZONE OF ERROR. ONLY BY RECOGNIZING THE METAPHYSICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE TERM CAN WE UNDERSTAND OUR BASIC POSITION AS FOREIGNERS Rebecca Saunders, 2001 The Agony And The Allegory: The Concept Of The Foreign, The Language Of Apartheid, And The Fiction Of J. M. Coetzee http:/imuse.ihu.edu/iournals/culturalcnti~nc/v047/47.1sauiidcrs.html Produced by an unsound opposition, recalcitrantly nonliteral, and persistently destabilized by the migrations and transformations of peoples, boundaries, and customs, the foreign is clearlv a "concept" perilous to the standards of respectable metaphvsicians. I t might be described as a zone oferror. To call the foreign "a zone of error" (as I do in this essay) is to acknowledge this impure metaphvsical status, to recognize that the term "foreign" simultaneouslv is characterized bv. and refers to, the irrational. the ambiguous, the confused, the anomalous, the uncertain, the imaginative: what cleanly thowht sweeps hurriedly under the rug of untruth. It is to recognize the foreign as a site of trial and error. of nonmasterv and risk, crucial to contesting the logic of the proper and akin to the "strategic and adventurous" journey that Derrida associates with (the delineation of) diffirance: 'IStrategic because no transcendent truth present outside the field of writing can govern theologically the totality of the field. Adventurous because this stratew is not a simple strategy in the sense that strategv orients tactics accordiw to a final goal, a telos or theme of domination, a mastery and ultimate reappropriation of the development of the field" ("Diffkrance," 7). Finallv, to name the foreign a zone of error is to evoke the evervdav experience of foreignness, the error that results from the inability to read culturally inflected signs with precision: the h b l e for protocol, the inadvertent offense, the unintended meaning.

4% 6)

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THE ALTERNATIVE IS TO CRITICIZE THE REPRESENTATIONS TO QUESTION THE POWER THAT GENERATES THEM Sorenson 1993, John Professor Emeritus of Anlhropology at Brighain Young University, Imagining Ethiopia: Struggles for History and Identity in the Horn of Africa p3-4

T h i shook& about the creation of images, the construction of hlstoand the formation of identities in t h e Horn of Africa, focusing on Eritrea and Ethiopia. Ethiopia, in a famous phrase, has been seen as a museum of peoples, but it is also a warehouse of images, a repository for obsessions and projections of various identities h t h from within the region and from without. I will analyze various representations of the Horn, discussing not only the depiction of faniie and its causes hut also investigatingother ways of imagining Ethiopia, including the clashing local versions of regional history and opposed nationalist struggles, as well as external explanations of conflict i n the Horn, and I will suggest how these representations fonned part of a broader discourse on the Third World i n general. While this involves a study of imagery and rhetoric, it should not t e assumed that these are purely textual matters. Instead, these conflirts over images, histo-ria, and identities are struggles for power and efforts to create and define reality. As Pierre Bourdieu j1991:221) pints out,
ries,

constituted by the strugg e over the d e h i t h n of re@malor ethnicitfentity only i f one transcends the opposition that science in order to break away fmm the preconceptions of spontaneou~ sociology, must first establish between representation and reality, and only if o n e includes in reality the representations of reality, or, more piecisely, the struggle over representations, in the sense of mental i m a m ,but also of socialdemonstiations whose aim ic is to manipulate mental ima-p (and even in the sense of delegationsresponiible for organizing the demonstrationsthat are necessary to modify mental representations).

One can understand the articular form of struggle over classifications that is

The struggle over representation, especially but not only in terms of ethnic identities, is a struggle to enforce meaning, a vision 01- the
world, and it is these imposed meanings themselves that create the realities of which they speak through t h e construction of consensus about the nature and the existence of groups. Struggles for identity may he conducted on the battlefield h u t also appeal for recognition from htiNtiOIId authorities, and these struggles may draw Other powers, as well as specialists from fields such as anthropology and history who compete to impose their vision of truth, sometimes for shared motives and sometimes in the pursuit of goah dissimilar to those of local protagonists. Consideration of the dcontext of such expressions of authority may reveal t h e situational in~rests of these experts. Acts of representation and classification are tius located at a l l s the act of the nexus of power and knowledge. What Bourdieu c soaal magic which consists in trying to bring into existc nce the thmg named (223) succeeds through the exercise of author ty, which determines and legitimiies. To question representatiou~, then, is to question the powers that generate them.
I

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OUR ALTERNATIVE IS TO CREATE AN INFINITE RESPECT FOR THE OTHER. STATIC IDENTITIES CONSTRUCTED THROUGH BORDERS ONLY CREATE VIOLENCE AND WAR - VIEWING IDENTITY AS ARBITRARY OPENS UP NEW AVENUES FOR ETHICAL ENCOUNTERS.

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SHAPIRO 97
[Michael J , Violent CartoeraDhles hlanDlne Cultures of War 1997 174-5, CT]

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i MEAN GREEN WORKSHOPS 2007 __BORDERS K P,J- ~ = ~ - . dr b ENGAGNG ON THE ONTOLOGICAL LEVEL OF OUR ALTERNATIVE IS A PREREQUISITE TO POLICY-MAKING BECAUSE ONTOLOGY INFORMS POLICY ACTION

rh

DILLON 9Y
[Michael, Professor at the Universq of Lancaster Another Justice Political Theory April, 1999 CT]

The return of the ontological was, then, a plural one radically disturbing the fundaments of all regional thought such as that of politics and justice as well as the more well-known and elaborated, though intimately related, subject of reason. This movement of thought was positive in that, while providing a critical reappraisal of ontology (cf. Heidegger), a certain ontological sensibility has also emerged from it. It is based upon a profound, if variously interpreted, appreciation of the ontological difference-the difference between beings, as existing entities. and being as such. It offers for all other thought the alternative and radically dualistic starting point of the mutually disclosive belonging together of being and beines.>*The return of the ontological thus became the driving force behind what William Connolly calls ontopolitical interpretation. Connolly reminds us that all political acts and every interpretation of political events no matter how deeply they are sunk in specific historical contexts, or how high the pile of data, upon which they sit, contain an ontopolitical dimension.jgWhatthat means, simply, is that & l political acts, and all political utterances, express-enact-a view of how things are. They establish fundamental presumptions, fix possibilities, distribute explanatory elements, generate parameters.2,11n short, thev establish a fundamental framework of necessity and desire. That is why the ontological turn has a direct bearing upon the question of Justice as well as upon the allied questions of freedom and belonging, & therefore challenges the language of politics as much as it challenges the politics of Language, and thus re-poses the very question of the political itself.>$

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THEIR POLICYMAKING PERVERSELY INCREASES THE PROBABILITY OF WAR

SHAPIRO 97
[Michael J., Violent Cartoera~hies: MaDPine Cultures ofLVar. 1997. pg 52 CTJ

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THE ALT SOLVES ALL OFFENESE - WAR IS ONLY CAUSED BY A BELIEF OF STATIC IDENTIY - THE ALTERNATIVE EXPOSES THESE IDENTITIES AS ARBITRARY
SHAPIRO 97
[Michael J., Violent Cartoermhies: blamine Cultures ofwar. 1997. pg 48, CT]

MEAN GREEN BORDERS K THE CASE IMPACTS CAN'T'BE EVALdATED - RATHER THAN DEBATING THE MERITS OF NATIONS WTERACTWG WITH ONE ANOTHER, WE MUST ASK HOW THESE NATIONS WERE CONSTRUCTED IN THE FIRST PLACE SHAPIRQ 97
[Michael J.; Violent Canoerai-hies: Mawine Cultures of War. 1997. pg 30-32; CT]

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BORDERS, BOUNDARIES, AND GEOGkAPHIC T E R R k N ARE NOT DETERMINED - RECOGNIZING THESE IMPOSITIONS AS ARBITRARY EXPOSES THE STATE'S ABILITY TO VIOLENTLY EXCLUDE THE OTHER

A a- - Re&.. i4?nll/q

SHAPIRO 97
[Michael J , Violent Cartoeraphica Mannlne Cultures ot War 1997 pg 15-16, CT]

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I -INEVITABLE

THE DESTRUCTION OF THE OLD

Sorenson 19% JG~ Professor , Enleiitus of hthropology at B1igha11i xLGUiigUlliversity, ~lllag~iliilg Ethiopia: Struggles for History and Identity in the Horn of Africa p 189-190 It is not only imagery that has been transformed; Ethiopia itself has undergone enormous changes. After the downfall of the Derg in 1991, a reordering of Ethiopia is inevitable. Following the April 1993 referendum Eritrea has now emerged as the newest independent country in Africa. Seen in the context of events such as the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the even more violent fragmentation of Yugoslavia and Somalia, continuing debates over self-determination for native people and Quebecs role in Canada, as well as new economic relationships in Europe and North America, the reorganization of the state and the questioning of national boundaries cannot be considered processes unique to Ethiopia in the 1990s. Nevertheless, such a reorganization of Ethiopia will not be easy for any of those involved. For many, the idea is traumatic. Those who have subscribed to an Ethiopian nationality have reacted in anger, bitterness, and confusion at what they see as a violation of their history and identity. Some refused to accept any reordering. For example, Ethiopias former Foreign Minister, Goshu Wolde, in an address to the National Press Club in Washington (July 11, 1991), protested that the EPRDF was engaged in a systematic dismantling of the Ethiopian state and damaging its fundamental interest. Even at this late date, Goshu insisted on the unified nature of Ethiopian identity and rejected any idea of independence for Eritrea: But for a short interval of 50 years, when it was under Italian cotonial administration, Eritrea has always been an integral part of the Ethiopian state. Eritrea was for centuries the cultural, political and economic center of Ethiopia. . . . Eritrea stands for Ethiopia as a symbol of determined defense of national unity and territorial integrity. Similarly, some Ethiopian expatriates reacted to the EPLFs victory with outrage and with calls to return to fight for the motherland. Others feel that the country they fled no longer exists and they are now adrift, facing the dissolution of identity.
For Erieeans, however, this reordering promises an end to exile and a rasertion of the national identity they have long been denied. Although the EPLF announced that a referendum would be held in 199% it was generally adtnowledged that independence had already been achieved in 1991. But with the emergence of Efitrea as an independent nation also come revelations of the COS~Fof the war. At least 50,000Eritreans were killed in the war. In addition, the economy and i~frastructure of Eritrea have been ravaged in the course of the conflict and Eritreans must start from less than zero, Huge numbem of refugees have fled the prolonged war in Eritrea and the reurn of these People poses major logistical problems for the new government in &ma=, both in immediate needs for food, shelter, and health care but also in long-term requirements for reintegration, education, and employment. Environmental conditions continue to create problems. In 1991, erratic rainfall was followed by a poor harvest, leaving a p Proximately two million people dependent on food aid. In 1992 food stock remained low and starvation was reported. While the EPLF and the Eritrean Relief Association did make remarkable achievements in areas such as education and health care in the past, there are other formidable problems to be faced in the future.

MEAN GREEN WORKSHOPS 2007 BORDERS AND NAMES K

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MILLERS CRITIQUE OF &RICANIST DISCOURSE IS USELESS BECAUSE IT IGNORES THE H~TORICAL CONTEXT OF AFRICA AND IS CLOUDED IN JARGON
Sorenson 1993, John Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Brigham Young University, Imagining Ethiopia: Struggles for History and Identity in the Horn of Africa p15-16

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Before discussing the image of Ethiopia, it i s useful to note how discourse on Africa has been studied so far. Christopher Mders Bhnk Darkness (1985) suggests that an Africanist discourse exists which is comparable to, but fundamentally different from, Orientalism. He argues that this discourse is created by a basic ambiguity and contradiction between ideas of blackness and whiteness; Miller claims that the instabdity of these terms defines the character of Africanist discourse, which is characterized by primary themes of loss of identity, self, and authority. He maintains that, unlike Orientalism, chis discourse has no object because Africa is only a blank space, unknowable, and lacking identity. This emphasis on abshact textudjty ignores the historical context of Africanist discourse. Furthermore, Onentalist discourse also cantaim contradictory images, rendering the differences less striking. In general, Millers deconstructionistjargon and failure to consider historical and political context from the works usefulness.

MEAN GREEN WORKSHOPS 2007 BORDERS AND NAMES K

MILLERS CLAIM OF A UNIQUE AF~ICANIST DISCOURSE IS OVERSTATED AND IGNORES HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Sorenson 1 9 2 , John Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Brighani Young University, Imagining Ethiopia: Struggles for History and Identity in the Horn of Africa p21

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T D i s c o u r s e on Ethiopia is premised on a racial distinction that is taken to constitute a fundamental difference but has always been ambiguous. Examining the etymology of the word Ethiopia, Miller (1985) suggests that it is the earliest Western name for all of Africa. It signifies burntface;reflecting assumptions that the skin color of the inhabitants resulted from exposure to African sunlight. Miller believes this indicates the unique character of Africanist discourse: the collapsing together of black and white-of their inability to remain as meaningful opposites-and of the frustrations of meanings attached s has been long recognized, efforts to define races to them (30). A have no scientific precision or validity, so that these frustrations of meaning are not entirely peculiar to Africanist discourse. Furthermore, Ethiopiawas applied not only to Africa but also to Arabia and India. Thus, Millers claims for an ambiguity unique to Africanist course seem somewhat overstated. -.

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MILLER IS WRONG - DISCOURSE ON POLARITIES BUT IS CREATED BY THEM
Sorenson 1993,

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AFRICAIS NOT BASED ON TEXTUAL

John Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Brigham Young University, Imagining Ethiopia: Struggles for History and Identity in the Horn of Africa p 70-71

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Intended ironically or not, Kaplans remarks indicate the essentiat nature of media interest in the Horn. Implicit is the assumption that the political situation is too difficult for audiences to understand. All conflict must be reduced to basic oppositions of good and evil and, if this is impossible, the technique of neither-norism is employed. This is a key operation; critical thought is presented as boring and arduous, likely to produce nervousness and exhaustion for North Americans, just as for Thomass Teodros. Analysis, other than that conforming to the hegemonic vision, is placed outside the boundaries of possible thought (there were no words at all for these things in his own language). This is both a conscious ideological decision and a result of the advertising-oriented nature of media corporations. Thus, discourse on the Horn is not based on purely larities; rather, channels of discourse maintain such essential commercial and ideological functions. The writing in a void, as Miller (1985) suggests, but rather that a certain kind of writing itself creates voids and textual absences, not because of linguistic terms employed but because of the interests served. The media are lucrative businesses, and they are business-oriented and business-dominated, providing reductionistic, easily assimilated,black and white (i.e., balanced) constructions of reality that can be presented in the form of an on-going dramatic series (the news) to attract viewers and advertisers alike. In promoting the ideology of the business elite, the media create certain polarities (the good guys and the bad guys) conforming to elite interests. In contrast to the Middle East or Central America, the polarities were not as easily found in the Horn. However, in the Amnican Spectotw, Kaplan suggests that here the media and the public have been deceived. The Marxism of the EPLF and the TPLF is presented as largely irrelevant to US. interh i l e sugests, for both groups are fiercely anti-Soviet (1986:25). W gesting that the EPLF and TPLF are the best weapons the US.can manipulate in its battle against Mengistu, Kaplan dismisses the actual objectives of both organizations as irrelevant because of their antiSoviet _. stance. ..

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MEAN GREEN WORKSHOPS 2007 BORDERS AND NAMES K ETHIOPIAS ORIGINAL MEANING WAS NOT ROOTED IN RACISM

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Sorenson 1993, John Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Biighaiii Young University, Imagining Ethiopia: Struggles for History and Identity in the Iom of Africa p 22

rworks The image of Ethiopia in ancient Greek, Roman, and Christian is examined in a study by Frank M. Snowdon,Jr. as part

(1970), of an effort to trace the genealogy of racist thought. In The Odyssey,

Ethiopia is presented as a distant land, and the idea of remote Ethiopia situated at the very ends of the earth became a standard theme of early Greek works. In various texts, Ethiopia refers to different locations, from Cameroon to India, hut increasingly, the term came to describe the Nubian civilization of Meroe in northern Sudan. The blackness bf their skin appears to have been the distinguishing mark of these partitular Ethiopians, although various types were identified on the hasis of other remarkable characteristics, such as their amazing height or swiftness; the cave-dwelling Ethiopians of the south were said to speak a language resembling the squeaking of bats. Just as Ethiopias location varied, so too the identities and physical characteristics of Ethiopians were reported in different terms. One quality consistently ascribed to Ethiopia was piety. In The Odyssey, the gods delight in visiting Ethiopia, where they are honored by elaborate festivals. The Ethiopians were seen as the first people who were taught to honor the gods and to make sacrifices.Just as the Ethiopians loved the gods, so were they divinely favored and remained free from subjugation. Many works called them the beloved of the gods. Such positive assessments lead Frank Snowdon to condude that Ethiopians were highly esteemed in antiquity and that doctrines of white supremacy did not exist at that time. It was only later, foltowing the growth of Christian imagery of spiritual qualities associated with black and white, that these doctrines developed and came to be applied to Ethiopians and other peoples of Africa. Snowdons effort to reveal negative racial stereotypes as recent historical inventions exemplifies the tendency of discourse on the Ethiopian past to figure as ._ intervention in contemporary political issues.

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THE NAME SUDAN IS NOT ROOTED IN RACISM Ali A. Mazrui, 2005 The Re-invention of Africa: Edward Said, V. Y . Mudimbe, and Beyond
Paradoxically, Islam and the Arabs stimulated color consciousness without necessarily stimulating racism. The concept of "Sudan" sienified the land of the Blacks without implvine inferiority of status. Timbuktu was saluted as a center of civilization by the Arabs, while they recoenized its location in what came to be known as "Western Sudan." It is in that sense that the Arabs "Sudanized" the whole of sub-Saharan Africa without creatine the elaborate racist structures of Western imperialism. The arrival of European colonization tilted the balance from a dual legacy (Afiicanity and Islam) to a triple heritage (Africanity, Islam, and Westernization). Sulayman Nyang of the Gambia as well as Nkrumah of Ghana and Edward Blyden of Sierra Leone and Liberia addressed in their books the convergence of African values, Islam and Western culture. But each paradigmatic thesis provoked its own antithesis. Both Eurocentrism and the concept of a triple heritage provoked the counterthesis of Afrocentricity. Scholars like Cheikh Anta Diop of Senegal and Molafe Asante of the United States became eloquent voices of Afiica's romantic gloriana. On the other hand, LCopold Senghor of Senegal and Aim6 CBsaire of Martinique responded with the rhythms of romantic primitivism.

MGW Senior Scholars Borders Kntik

The exact place of dream between perceptual and thought identity is the central question of the Inrerprerarion of Dreams. were limited to a pure thought identity, they would not be swayed by the darker regions, and, having renounced any desire or intention to fulfill a wish,eand enerev w o wev could not take themselves for wlity. I s, we would have taken a ste B U I beyond what can he demonstrat@ (p. 645). for the urimary process of h t! Unconscious is purely sensorial and alien to renresentatiop. Freuds am& is magnificently evasive: I have intentionally left gaps in the treatment of my theme because to fill them would on the one hand require too great an effort and on the other would involve my basing myself on material that is alien to the subject of dreams. Those gaps, if filled, would falsify the natwe of dream, which is constituted by its free play between perception and thought. In this section of sublime difficulty (The Psychology of the Dream-Processes: The Primary and Secondary Processes), Freud makes his own theory infinitely more complex than simple wish-fulfillment. . .tv would be to cure the system o @ defininl: d r e a r u x -

7 The difficultv of maintaining an identity in discourse is the central Africanist

Fetish-reson was projected by de Brosses as the annihilation of dualistic religion, imitation, and reflexive ideas by an animal taken for itself ; yet that animal was inexorably contaminated by a transcendent real Divinity nut congruent with the animal itself. This means thatp e e t h e animal being taken for re$ as a sensorial g o d ) z s reduced to a IhouQht identity (only representational) by de Brosses discourse. The impossibility of maintaining an immanence is what constc t d p t transcendenEe a nonfirmrative ibilitv of the discourse with . its .
3 .

an incomoatibilitv that c . & n i n e s it.> p. bl(

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l V l U V V J t A l l U 1 3CllUlkiI:,

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-MILLER 1985 [Christopher, Associate Professor of History and Philosophy at University of Texas, and Frederick Ford Professor of French and African American Studies at Yale University; Darkness- Afiicanist Discourse in French, University of Chicago Press.]

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3 e alternative to that maeistrorn appeared io be the discourse paEde@c s n c e - - f & n d in Baudelaires Le Cygiii i k i Ri&&ds - ~ s%; in which diff:Fse.mess, expressed as unfulfilled desire, were recognized as the very ion of identity. In this world the L W ~ ~ O m eto S &ntificatib;o .. . . ~ . ~ and clo~urcwith the self;the GiGifimated by the Out&. Since an idhit& knust~be defined in terms other Pure repetition of itself (A is A is A), alterity gets its foot in !he door as that which constitutes the identity (A is Y,and 2).If . - are p .

one

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p ~ ~ $ Geman r g .and may as well be

prallp to the al?egok!a[

.African. Xhisis analogous [emprocess of. p i n g to the present by sh:yj?s the present to be empty, showing what identity is hy pointing out difference. ISeaUegorical mode recounts difference while, in lhe~meantime, it p;aplodes he academic notion of identity (one vast unify. monotonous and imper; & I , immense like boredom and nothingness-Baudelaire). In LK Cypne and Mauvais sang one fid~$~~~$!uring prpspect. of .an other rationally recognized as such, n o G m i l a t e d , erased, c~rushed by the arrival & h a t *toke of opposite nature. presence.s_ee& to engage in an e s ~ w &elf w ~ a .dream, ~ a de recall that Mauvais sang ends n maise,~le sentier de Ihonneur!). just as, in Le Cygne, nothing transcends the ironic sky, cruelly blue: & m a m e m (with the whiles disembarking s be a miswke-8 noble mistake--roFe?hope forsbcialjuafice in a sympathetic depiction of the black such as Le Cygne. $Ld!E%!!se that will tell you yhat~yo_uwant to hey-that exJ@9!3Ld ,diff%!.nSe \scx~that will te!! you. that.~ou.canna!have.it. ?