Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
Topicality-need a plan
The affirmative should defend a topical plan.
A. Explore means to travel in or through an area for the purpose of
learning about it
Oxford 14 (Oxford Dictionaries 2014
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/explore)
explore Syllabification: explore Pronunciation: /iksplr verb [with object] 1Travel in or
through (an unfamiliar country or area) in order to learn about or familiarize
oneself with it: the best way to explore Icelands northwest figurative the project
encourages children to explore the world of photography More example
sentencesSynonyms 1.1 [no object] (explore for) Search for resources such as mineral
deposits: the company explored for oil More example sentences 1.2Inquire into or
discuss (a subject or issue) in detail: he sets out to explore fundamental questions More
example sentences 1.3Examine or evaluate (an option or possibility): you continue to
explore new ways to generate income
three quarters of our planet. It comes from the Greek Okeanos, a river believed to
circle the globe. The word sea can also mean the vast ocean covering most of the world. But it
more commonly refers to large landlocked or almost landlocked salty waters smaller than the
great oceans, such as the Mediterranean Sea or the Bering Sea. Sailors have long referred to all
the world's waters as the seven seas. Although the origin of this phrase is not known for certain,
many people believe it referred to the Red Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, the Persian Gulf, the
Black Sea, the Adriatic Sea, the Caspian Sea, and the Indian Ocean, which were the waters of
primary interest to Europeans before Columbus.
Shively, Assistant Prof Political Science at Texas A&M, 2K [Ruth Lessl, Assistant
Prof Political Science at Texas A&M, 2000 Partisan Politics and Political Theory, p.
182-3)
The point may seem trite, as surely the ambiguists would agree that basic terms must
be shared before they can be resisted and problematized. In fact, they are often very
candid about this seeming paradox in their approach: the paradoxical or "parasitic" need
of the subversive for an order to subvert. But admitting the paradox is not helpful if, as
usually happens here, its implications are ignored; or if the only implication drawn is that
order or harmony is an unhappy fixture of human life. For what the paradox should tell
us is that some kinds of harmonies or orders are, in fact, good for resistance; and some
ought to be fully supported. As such, it should counsel against the kind of careless
rhetoric that lumps all orders or harmonies together as arbitrary and inhumane. Clearly
some basic accord about the terms of contest is a necessary ground for all further
contest. It may be that if the ambiguists wish to remain full-fledged ambiguists, they
cannot admit to these implications, for to open the door to some agreements or reasons
as good and some orders as helpful or necessary, is to open the door to some sort of
rationalism. Perhaps they might just continue to insist that this initial condition is ironic,
but that the irony should not stand in the way of the real business of subversion. Yet
difficulties remain. For and then proceed to debate without attention to further
agreements. For debate and contest are forms of dialogue: that is, they are activities
premised on the building of progressive agreements. Imagine, for instance, that two
people are having an argument about the issue of gun control. As noted earlier, in any
argument, certain initial agreements will be needed just to begin the discussion. At
the very least, the two discussants must agree on basic terms: for example, they
must have some shared sense of what gun control is about; what is at issue in arguing
about it; what facts are being contested, and so on. They must also agreeand they do
so simply by entering into debatethat they will not use violence or threats in making
their cases and that they are willing to listen to, and to be persuaded by, good
arguments. Such agreements are simply implicit in the act of argumentation.
legislative assemblies. The statements Resolved: That the federal government should
implement a program of charter schools in at-risk communities and Resolved: That the
state of Florida should adopt a school voucher program more clearly identify specific
ways of dealing with educational problems in a manageable form, suitable for debate.
They provide specific policies to be investigated and aid discussants in identifying points
of difference.
Yet for some reason, at least partially explicated in Richard Rorty's Achieving Our
Country, a book that I think is long overdue, leftist critics continue to cite and refer to
the eccentric and often a priori ruminations of people like those just mentioned, and
a litany of others including Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Jameson, and Lacan, who are to
me hugely more irrelevant than Habermas in their narrative attempts to suggest
policy prescriptions (when they actually do suggest them) aimed at curing the ills
of homelessness, poverty, market greed, national belligerence and racism. I would
like to suggest that it is time for American social critics who are enamored with this
group, those who actually want to be relevant, to recognize that they have a
disease, and a disease regarding which I myself must remember to stay faithful to my
own twelve step program of recovery. The disease is the need for elaborate
theoretical "remedies" wrapped in neological and multi-syllabic jargon. These
elaborate theoretical remedies are more "interesting," to be sure, than the
pragmatically settled questions about what shape democracy should take in
various contexts, or whether private property should be protected by the state, or
regarding our basic human nature (described, if not defined (heaven forbid!), in such
statements as "We don't like to starve" and "We like to speak our minds without fear of
death" and "We like to keep our children safe from poverty"). As Rorty puts it, "When
one of today's academic leftists says that some topic has been 'inadequately
theorized,' you can be pretty certain that he or she is going to drag in either
philosophy of language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist
version of economic determinism. . . . These futile attempts to philosophize one's
way into political relevance are a symptom of what happens when a Left retreats
from activism and adopts a spectatorial approach to the problems of its country.
Disengagement from practice produces theoretical hallucinations"(italics mine).(1) Or as
John Dewey put it in his The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy, "I believe that
philosophy in America will be lost between chewing a historical cud long since reduced
to woody fiber, or an apologetics for lost causes, . . . . or a scholastic, schematic
formalism, unless it can somehow bring to consciousness America's own needs and its
own implicit principle of successful action."
Those who suffer or have suffered from this disease Rorty refers to as the Cultural
Left, which left is juxtaposed to the Political Left that Rorty prefers and prefers for
good reason. Another attribute of the Cultural Left is that its members fancy themselves
pure culture critics who view the successes of America and the West, rather than some
of the barbarous methods for achieving those successes, as mostly evil, and who view
anything like national pride as equally evil even when that pride is tempered with the
knowledge and admission of the nation's shortcomings. In other words, the Cultural
Left, in this country, too often dismiss American society as beyond reform and
redemption. And Rorty correctly argues that this is a disastrous conclusion, i.e.
disastrous for the Cultural Left. I think it may also be disastrous for our social hopes,
as I will explain.
Leftist American culture critics might put their considerable talents to better use
if they bury some of their cynicism about America's social and political prospects and
help forge public and political possibilities in a spirit of determination to, indeed,
achieve our country - the country of Jefferson and King; the country of John Dewey and
Malcom X; the country of Franklin Roosevelt and Bayard Rustin, and of the later George
Wallace and the later Barry Goldwater. To invoke the words of King, and with reference
to the American society, the time is always ripe to seize the opportunity to help create
the "beloved community," one woven with the thread of agape into a conceptually single
yet diverse tapestry that shoots for nothing less than a true intra-American cosmopolitan
ethos, one wherein both same sex unions and faith-based initiatives will be able to be
part of the same social reality, one wherein business interests and the university are not
seen as belonging to two separate galaxies but as part of the same answer to the threat
of social and ethical nihilism. We who fancy ourselves philosophers would do well to
create from within ourselves and from within our ranks a new kind of public
intellectual who has both a hungry theoretical mind and who is yet capable of
seeing the need to move past high theory to other important questions that are
less bedazzling and "interesting" but more important to the prospect of our
flourishing - questions such as "How is it possible to develop a citizenry that cherishes
a certain hexis, one which prizes the character of the Samaritan on the road to Jericho
almost more than any other?" or "How can we square the political dogma that undergirds
the fantasy of a missile defense system with the need to treat America as but one
member in a community of nations under a "law of peoples?"
The new public philosopher might seek to understand labor law and military and trade
theory and doctrine as much as theories of surplus value; the logic of international
markets and trade agreements as much as critiques of commodification, and the politics
of complexity as much as the politics of power (all of which can still be done from our
arm chairs.) This means going down deep into the guts of our quotidian social
institutions, into the grimy pragmatic details where intellectuals are loathe to
dwell but where the officers and bureaucrats of those institutions take difficult
and often unpleasant, imperfect decisions that affect other peoples' lives, and it
means making honest attempts to truly understand how those institutions actually
function in the actual world before howling for their overthrow commences. This
might help keep us from being slapped down in debates by true policy pros who
actually know what they are talking about but who lack awareness of the dogmatic
assumptions from which they proceed, and who have not yet found a good reason to
listen to jargon-riddled lectures from philosophers and culture critics with their snobish
disrespect for the so-called "managerial class."
more common as a teaching tool in the late 1950s, educational literature has expounded
on their benefits, from encouraging engagement by breaking from the typical lecture
format, to improving communication skills, to promoting teamwork.9 More broadly,
simulations can deepen understanding by asking students to link fact and theory,
providing a context for facts while bringing theory into the realm of practice.10
These exercises are particularly valuable in teaching international affairs for many of
the same reasons they are useful for policy makers: they force participants to
grapple with the issues arising from a world in flux.11 Simulations have been
used successfully to teach students about such disparate topics as European
politics, the Kashmir crisis, and US response to the mass killings in Darfur.12
Role-playing exercises certainly encourage students to learn political and technical
factsbut they learn them in a more active style. Rather than sitting in a classroom and
merely receiving knowledge, students actively research their government's positions
and actively argue, brief, and negotiate with others.13 Facts can change quickly;
simulations teach students how to contextualize and act on information.
Animals K
The Aff is simply a pause of violence papers over the ongoing war on the
non-human animal the end of the world they call for merely brings forth
the same plane where every human subject can kill or be killed within the
circuit of anthropocentrism. The Aff ignores the fundamental reversibility
of all violence.
Bell (PhD candidate in social philosophy at Binghamton) 11
(Aaron, The Dialectic of Anthropocentrism in Critical Theory and Animal Liberation, pg. 173-5)
Freud noted in his well-known comments on what he termed "human megalomania"
that "curiously enough . . . [anthropocentric violence] is still 42foreign to children."
Despite our wretchedness and failings, in a "wrong life" that can
never be lived rightly, there is the hope that we can do better. The
displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and
crevices, as indigent and distorted 43as it will appear one day in the
messianic light." It seems that our one conso- lation is that this perspective, at least in
relation to our treatment of other animals, obstinately returns and cannot be entirely
snuffed out for as long as we continue to exist as a species.
If we are finally to abandon the self-aggrandizing narrative of anthropocentrism
constructed in the West, we will have to begin by reconceptualizing the difference
between humans and animals in a way that does not operate under a destructive
exclusionary logic. Both for human beings and for animals, any
employs arms that turn against those who wield them. It establishes an order from
which no one can keep his distance." There is no safe ground for the "authentically"
human individualbecause there can be no authentic anthropocentrism, just as Adorno
and Horkheimer claim that "there is no authentic anti-semitism." They write: "Just as . . .
the victims are interchangeable: vagrants, Jews, Protestants, Catholics . . .
each of them can replace the murderer, in the same blind lust for
killing, as soon as he feels the power of representing thenorm."
The Jew in Auschwitz, the Palestinian in the West Bank, the
Christian in Armenia, the enslaved African in the American South,
women everywhere they all have been reduced to the status of
animal and they all could do the same to others. We all can be reduced to
the "animal."
The Aff obscures the way the originary Human/Animal divide made civil
society, chattel slavery and coloniality possible
Pugliese (an Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney) 13
(Joseph, State Violence and the Execution of Law, pg. 38-40)
In her The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery, Marjorie Spiegel asks the
provocative question: Comparing speciesism with racism? At first glance, many
speciesism that determines who will live and who will die according
to an anthro- pocentric hierarchy of life and its attendant values of, amongst
other things, economic productivity. The non-human animal is, in this prehistorical
moment, marked by an ineluctable fungibility that pre-dates the transference of this
same attribute to the human slave.
In figuring forth her compelling thesis that it is fungibility that characterizes the life and
death of the black slave, Saidya Hartman delineates its complex dimensions:
The relation between pleasure and the possession of slave property, in both figurative
and literal senses, can be explained in part by the fungibility of the slave that is, the
joy made possible by virtue of the replaceability in inter- changeability endemic to the
commodity and by the extensive capacities of property that is, the augmentation of
the master subject through his embod- iment in external objects and persons.28
In the colonial prehistory of biopolitics, non-human animals are branded as either
vermin to be exterminated so that, in Foucaults titular phrase, society can be
defended or, alternatively, as fungible objects that are infinitely replaceable and
exchangeable. The anthropocentrism of the master subject augments the sense of
embodied ownership over the enslaved animal while legitimating their right over its
life/death. The archaic development of colonial regimes of governance over the life of
animals pivots on a series of biopolitical technologies that include capture, enclosure,
harness, enforced labour, controlled breeding, castration, branding and auctioning at
markets. All of these animal technologies are invested, in their ancient inception,29 with
the biopolitical power of regularization, and it . . . consists in making live and letting
die.30 Moreover, all of these animal tech- nologies will effectively be transposed to
regimes of human slavery: the manage- ment of livestock, Mason notes, operated as
a model for the management of slaves.31 Biopolitical technologies of animal
the animal and the human, in which one of the two terms of the operation was what was
at stake in it. To render inoperative the machine that governs our
Mourning K
Mourning is a paradox - The 1ACs call to endless re-presentation of
the Zongs events further entrenches the destructive violence they
isolate through a kind of psychic plagiarism that seeks to assimilate
the other into the narcissistic self
Kirkby, 06 (Joan, Department of Critical and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University,
Remembrance of the Future: Derrida on Mourning, Social Semiotics Vol. 16, No. 3,
September 2006, http://web.a.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=df402c4770d2-4356-80fc-d0a1d8f6c5dd%40sessionmgr4002&vid=2&hid=4206, AW)
Derrida also recalls de Mans insistence on the performative structure of the text in
general as promise (1986, 93), and goes on to argue that the essence of speech is
the promise, that there is no speaking that does not promise, which at the same time
means a commitment toward the future through . . . a speech act and a commitment to
keep the memory of the said act, to keep the acts of this act (1986, 97). He also reflects
upon the significance of the word aporia in de Mans last texts, in which an absence of
path gives or promises the thinking of the path and provokes the thinking of
what still remains unthinkable or unthought (Derrida 1986, 132). The aporia
provokes a leap of memory and a displacement of thinking which leads toward a
new thinking. Aporicity promises an other thinking, an other text, the future of
another promise. All at once the impasse . . . becomes the most trustworthy, reliable
place or moment for reopening a question . . . which remains difficult to think.
(Derrida 1986, 132/133) The aporia engenders, stimulates, makes one write,
provokes thought . . .. There is in it the incalculable order of a wholly other: the
coming or the call of the other (Derrida 1986, 137). The aporia of de Mans death
has provoked Derridas re-reading of de Man and a re-casting of the process of
mourning. These ideas from de Man are then segued into the psychoanalytic model of
mourning to produce what I would argue is a new, intellectually and emotionally nuanced
model of mourning, a model wherein healthy psychic functioning depends neither
on a refusal to mourn or abandoning the dead. The Derridean model offers a respect
for the (dead) Other as Other; it allows agency to the mourner in the possibility of
an ongoing creative encounter with the Other in an externalising, productive,
future-oriented memory; it emphasises the importance of acting out the entrusted
responsibility, which is their legacy to us; it upholds the idea of community and
reminds us of our interconnectedness with our dead. And in a sort of irreligious
religiosity, it enables us to conceive of a bond greater than ourselves, the far
away within us. To summarise then. First, with regard to mourning, Derrida
privileges the process of incorporation, which classical psychoanalysis has been
seen as the pathological response to loss. He does this essentially because
incorporation acknowledges the other as other, while the so-called normal process
of mourning (introjection) merely assimilates the other into the self in a kind of
psychic plagiarism. Second, however, it is not an unreconstructed incorporation
that he recommends; he makes two important theoretical moves. In the distinction
between memory as interiorisation (erinnerung) and memory as a giving over to thinking
and inscription (gedachtnis), he appropriates gedachtnis to integrate with incorporation.
So that what we internalise upon the death of the other is their dynamic
engagements with the other*/their modus vivendi, their animating principle, their
dialogue with the world. We do not have to give them up*/we do not murder them
and find a substitute for the dead are irreplaceable. Third, the other important thing
about gedachtnis is that it is an externalising memory; it is linked with technical or
mechanical inscription, with writing and rhetoric. It is productive; it leads to external
engagement in an ongoing dialogue with the other. It is, as he says, a
remembrance of the future (Derrida 1986, 29). In conclusion, Derrida asks What is
love, friendship, memory?
memory of possible mourning. In other words this is precisely the allegory, this
memory of impossible mourning. Paul de man would perhaps say: of the
unreadability of mourning. The possibility of the impossible commands here the
whole rhetoric of mourning, and describes the essence of memory. Upon the
death of the other we are given to memory, and thus to interiorization, since the
other, outside us, is now nothing. And with the dark light of this nothing, we learn that
the other resists the closure of our interiorizing memory. With the noting of this
irrevocable memory. With the nothing of this irrevocable absence, the other appears as
other, and as other for us, upon his death or at least in the anticipated possibility of
a death, since death constitutes and makes manifest the limits of a me or an us who are
obliged to harbor something that is greater and other then them; something outside of
within them. Memory and interiorization: since Freud this is how the normal work of
mourning is often described. It entails a movement in which an interiorizing
idealization takes in itself or upon itself the body and voice of the other, the
others visage and person, ideally and quasi-literally devouring them. This
mimetic interiorization is not fictive; it is the origin of fiction, of apocryphal
figuration. It takes place in a body. Or rather, it makes a place for a body, a voice,
and a soul which, although ours, did not exist and had no meaning before this
possibility that one must always begin by remembering, and whose trace must be
followed. II faut, one must: it is the law, that law of the (necessary) relation of Being to
law. We can only live this experience in the form of an aporia: the aporia of
mourning and of prosopopeia, where the possible remains impossible. Where
success fails. And where faithful interiorization bears the other and constitutes
him in me (in us), at once living and dead. It makes the other no longer quite
seems to be the other, because we grieve for him and bear him in us, like an
unborn child, like a future. And inversely, the failure succeeds: an aborted
interiorization is at the same time a respect for the other as other, a sort of tender
rejection, a movement of renunciation which leaves the other alone, outside, over
there, in his death, outside of us.
Case
1. Past-oriented approaches towards whiteness neglect the way
future discourse affects the present futurity is key to full awareness
Baldwin, 11 (Andrew, Co-Director of the Institute of Hazard at the University of
Durhams Department of Geography, Whiteness and futurity: Towards a research
agenda, Progress in Human Geography 2012, originally published August 3, 2011,
http://phg.sagepub.com/content/36/2/172, AW)
My argument is that a past-oriented approach to accounting for geographies of
whiteness often neglects to consider how various forms of whiteness are shaped
by discourses of futurity. This is not to argue that a historicist approach to
conceptualizing white geographies is wrongheaded; the past continues to be a crucial
time-space through which to understand whiteness. It is, however, to argue that such a
past-focused orientation obscures the way the category of the future is invoked in
the articulation of whiteness. As such, any analysis that seeks to understand how
whitenesses of all kinds shape contemporary (and indeed past) racisms operates with
only a partial understanding of the time-spaces of whiteness. My argument is that we
can learn much about whitenesses and their corresponding forms of racism by
paying special attention to the ways in which such whitenesses are constituted by
futurity. I have offered some preliminary remarks on how we might conceptualize
geographies of whiteness qua futurity, but these should only be taken as starting points.
Much more pragmatically, what seems to be required is a fulsome investigation into the
way the future shapes white geographies. What might such a project entail? For one,
geographers would do well to identify whether and how the practice of governing
through the future inaugurates new and repeats old forms of whiteness. It would
also be worth comparing and contrasting how the future is made present in various
dialectical accounts of whiteness. For instance, what becomes of whiteness when
understood through the binary actual-possible as opposed to an actual-virtual
binary, which has been my main concern? Alternatively, what becomes of the
category of whiteness if it is shown to be constituted by a future that has no
ontology except as a virtual presence? And, perhaps more pressing, how might
whiteness be newly politicized? Futurity provides a productive vocabulary for
thinking about and challenging whiteness. It does not offer a means of overcoming
white supremacy, nor does it provide white people with a normative prescription for living
with their whiteness guilt- or worry-free. Futurity is, however, a lacuna in the study of
whiteness both in geography and outside the discipline, and this alone suggests
the need to take it seriously. But equally, and perhaps more urgently, there is the
need to study whiteness and futurity given how central the future is to
contemporary governance and politics. Indeed, at a moment when the future
features prominently in both political rhetoric in his inaugural speech, Obama
implores America to carry forth that great gift of freedom and [deliver] it safely to future
generations and everyday life, how people orient themselves towards the future
is indelibly political. The future impels action. For Mann (2007), it is central to
interest. For Thrift (2008), value increasingly arises not from what is but from what
is not yet but can potentially become, that is fromthe pull of the future. Attention to
whiteness and futurity may at minimum enable us to see more clearly the extent to
which the pull of whiteness into the future reconfigures what is to be valued in the
decades ahead.
We are encouraged to see ou rselves as Lhe vessels for the captive's return; we stand in the ancestor's shoes. We
imaginatively wi t- ness the crimes of the past and cry for those victimized -the enslaved, the ravaged, and the
slaughtered . And the obliterative assimilation of empathy enables us to cry for ou rselves, too. As we remember those
ancestors held in Lhe dungeons, we can't bul think of our own dishonored and devalued l ives and t he unrealized
aspirations and the broken promises of abolition, reconstruction, and the civil rights movemen t. The i n transigence of our
seemi ngly eternal secondclass status propels us Lo make recou rse to stories of origi n, unshakable explanatory
narratives, and sites of inju ry-the land where our blood has been spilt -asif some essen liaJ ingredien t of ourselves can
work to present by claimi ng that the tourist'sexcursion is theancestor'sreturn.Given this, what does the journey back bode
captivity and the incorporation of the dead? The most disturbing aspect of these reenactments is the suggestion that the
rupture of the Middle Passage is neither irreparable nor irrevocable but bridged by the tourist who acts as the vessel for
the ancestor. Inshort, the captive finds his redemption in the tourist.
that i n coming
to terms with trauma, there is the possibility of retrieving desirable aspects of the
past that might be used in rebuilding a new life.23 While LaCapra's argu men ts are persuasive,
I wonder to what degree the backward glance can provide us with the vision to
build a new life? To what extent need we rely on the past in transforming the
present or, as Marx warned , can we on ly draw ou r poetry from the fu ture and not the past? 2 Here I am not
advanci ng the impossi- bil ity of representa tion or declaring theend of history. but wondering aloud whether
the image of enslaved ancestors can transform the present. I ask this question in order to
discover again the political and ethical relevance of the past. If the goa l is something more than
assimilating the terror of the past into our storehouse of memory, the pressing question is, Why need we
remember? Does the emphasis on remembering and working through the past expose our insatiable
desires for curatives, healing, and anything else that proffers the restoration of
some prelapsarian intactness? Or is recollection an avenue for undoing history? Can remembering
potentially enable an escape from the regularity of terror and the routine of violence constitutive of black life in the United
Usually the
injunction to remember insists that memory can prevent atrocity, redeem the
dead, and cultivate an understanding of ourselves as both individuals and
collective subjects. Yet, too often, the injunction to remember assumes the ease of
grappling with terror, representing slavery's crime, and ably standing in the
other's shoes. I am not proscribing representations of the Middle Passage, particularly since it is the absence of a
States? Or is it that remembering has become the only conceivable or viable form of political agency?
public history of slavery rather than the saturation of representa tion that engenders these com pulsive performances, but
instead poin ting lo the
and unfinishable in our relation to the present and past and, by extension, a sense of generosity and hospitality
towards ghosts? Or do they, as Sarah Ahmed55 has argued in relation to white guilt in postcolonial Australia,
constitute yet another self-referential engagement with the colonial past, in which
the experiences and desires of the settler occlude consideration of other desires
and possibilities? This is the reason for my wariness in the face of haunting tropes,
for I fear that postcolonial ghost stories risk perpetuating a kind of endless dancing
around a wound56 that Daniel David Moses identifies among liberal, left-leaning Canadians, anxiously
replaying their complicity in an ugly colonial past while neglecting to mobilize
effectively for change in the present. The ghosts of the Stein do not seem to me to
represent the Nlakapamux with very much dignity or agency, and surely any postcolonial trope we
might mobilize ought at the very least to figure Indigenous peoples with dignity. In
Haraways terms, it seems to me that haunting has the potential to function as a particularly
deadly trope, one that requires the death and immateriality of Indigenous peoples to make
an e/affective claim on non-Indigenous British Columbians. It is a trope within which todays living descendents of the
generalized spirits haunting the Stein, people like Chiefs Leonard Andrew and Ruby Dunstan, seem to have no place: As
the direct descendents of those aboriginal peoples who have inhabited, shared, sustained, and been sustained by the
Stein Valley for tens of thousands of years down to the present, our authority in this watershed is inescapable Under the
cooperative authority of our two bands we will maintain the Stein Valley as a wilderness in perpetuity for the enjoyment
and enlightenment of all peoples.57 And so, at a time when (primarily non-Aboriginal) geographers, among others, seem
to have taken an interest in ghostly matters,
commemoration rescue the u n named and unaccounted for from obscurity and obl ivion
, counter the disavowals constitutive or the U.S. nalionaJ community, and unveil the
complicitou s discretion of the scholar- shi p of the trade?
Starting points based in the past create the linearity they critique and
preclude change a future-oriented approach is key
Baldwin, 11 (Andrew, Co-Director of the Institute of Hazard at the University of
Durhams Department of Geography, Whiteness and futurity: Towards a research
agenda, Progress in Human Geography 2012, originally published August 3, 2011,
http://phg.sagepub.com/content/36/2/172, AW)
geographies of whiteness? For my purposes here, they refer to geographies
spaces, places, landscapes, natures, mobilities, bodies, etc. that are assumed to be
white or are in some way structured, though often implicitly, by some notion of whiteness (Bonnett,
What, then, are
1997; McCarthy and Hague, 2004; Vanderbeck, 2006). The argument put forward in this paper is that research on
geographies of whiteness is almost invariably past-oriented (Bonnett, 1997, 2000; Hoelscher, 2003; Pulido, 2000). By
past-oriented I mean that whiteness, whether understood as a past or present phenomenon, tends
to be
explained, accounted for and examined as an expression of social relations that took shape
in the past (Satzewich, 2007). In the paper, I aim to show how this work is dominated by an orientation that looks to
the past as the temporal horizon through which research and learning about past or present white racial identity occurs.
By and large, this work assumes that in order to challenge or reconfigure whitenesses and their corresponding racisms
2009a; Dwyer and Jones, 2000; Jackson, 1998; McCarthy and Hague, 2004) suggest is a main point of reference for
debate about whiteness in geography, Alastair Bonnett (1997) argues that whiteness ought to be understood as a function
Linda Peake (2000) make a similar claim that whiteness is a historically constructed position: to understand whiteness
requires understanding its multiple genealogies.
geographic study of whiteness risks overlooking how whitenesses are made and
maintained in relation to futures both distant and immanent. Here, the task for a
futureoriented geographic research on whiteness might be to understand how
both contemporary and past forms of whiteness relate to the future (Anderson, 2010a), or
how specific geographic expressions of whiteness are contingent on the future. For instance, the task might be to
understand how discourses of futurity shape various forms of white supremacy from right-wing xenophobias to leftnationalisms to practices of liberal humanitarianism, and how these shape, for instance, geographies of place, nature,
space, mobility, bodies and so on. A
that affect can also be understood as a generalized attitude towards presencings of the past. Think, for example, affects
of nostalgia and loss.) Thus, we might ask: what futures infuse the affective logics of whiteness? How does this future
presencing occur? And how, if at all, are these futures constitutive of specific white spatio-temporalities? These reasons
together provide a rationale for a research agenda concerned with understanding how the future works as a resource in
the geographic expression of whitenesses.