1NC

1
We advocate that the United States federal government should
give reparations for the past and present enslavement of black
bodies.
Our call for reparations is not limited to fiscal or legal
requests, but is an impossible demand that requires a
fundamental rupture and reorganization of modernity
Harding, Professor and Civil Rights Activist, 1970
[Vince, Professor of Religion and Social Transformation at Illiff School of Theology,
Black Students and the Impossible Revolution, Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1
(Sep., 1970)]
The demand for reparations is always revolutionary, for it often involves
levels of confiscation deemed unacceptable in the orderly processes of things , but
orderly processes almost never serve the disinherited, only the privileged. That is why the privileged (and their
servants) call for law and order and the disinherited call for justice. The campus experience strongly indicates that
in a society where law and order support exploitation, justice may demand disorder. Another revelation from the
student experience is no less revolutionary if it should now move to serve as total challenger to American

the black community cannot possibly enter this society's overall life in full,
pulsating, living surges without transforming the mainstream. Actually, the student position,
education;

the increasingly explored black position, is that the mainstream is deeply poisoned in its content and dangerous in

Only
in the deepest, probing, dreamlike sections of the mind can we imagine a blackaffirming throng surging into every institution of American society , from the ederal
government on out, transforming as it goes. But the impossible must be imagined if there
is to be hope. One example of the chance might be that black people who shared a deep
sympathy with and relationship to, the wretched of the earth would have no choice but to
force changes in Americas exploitative, repressive relationship to the nonwhite
world. Such a reordered America could send no more sons to fight that worlds poor
on behalf of a racist societyand it would have to send none at all if that society
moved toward the humanity that blacks so desparately need. Black movement into America
on terms deemed acceptable by black people would likely surpass even the student energies . It would
demand, for instance, that the society do at home what it has the power but not the
will to do: at least end poverty. Black participation could not be satisfied until that
were accomplished with more than deliberate speed, through whatever
redistribution and rechanneling of national wealth and priorities were deemed
necessary. Following the student lead, moving beyond it into the heart of American institutions, we would
the direction of its flow. It is therefore in need of purification and radical redirection. What would this mean?

redefine all experiences. American culture and the arts, education, business-all would be saturated not only with
black people but with evidences of the black experience, with proud development of the black perspective. Who can
imagine, for instance, what television would be like if it were not only filled with black images, but if it reflected a

White
America as we know it could not survive the second coming of black life to these
shores. It would have to die.
vision of life that came out of the black encounter with oppression, suffering, struggle, and endurance?

We solve the aff demanding reparations OPENS UP our

relationship to history it challenges progressivist notions of
time
Henry, Professor of African American Studies at Berkeley, 2007
[Charles P., Long Overdue: The Politics of Racial Reparations, pp.6-7]
Following the Civil War and Emancipationand in the absence of truth and reconciliation commissionsAmericans have had to sort
out the relationship between healing and justice. White Americans in the North chose to heal the wounds with White Americans in
the South. This politics of reconciliation, which took several decades and still exists in some forms today, forged a number of
unifying myths to make it safe to remember the Civil War. This

reconciliation between North and South did

not, however, include Black Americans. Even at the fiftieth reunion of battle of Gettysburg in 1913, Black Civil War
veterans were literally and figuratively left out of sight and mind. Fifty years later, Lincoln's "rebirth of freedom" had become
Woodrow Wilson's forward-looking "righteous peace."'' The Emancipation Proclamation and the Twelfth through Fifteenth
Amendments to the Constitution, also known as the Civil War Amendments, granted Blacks citizenship in the "civic" nation but

the Civil War ended slavery but did not create

equality. In short, to satisfy Whites in both the North and the South, Blacks were given citizenship but
denied equality. Whites, Blacks, and others assume the responsibility of historical obligations when they become citizens,
whenever and however that occurs. A nation is an intergenerational community, and the existence of historical
obligations is predicated on our moral relations to our successors . Our government's ability to
denied them membership in the "ethnic" nation. That is,

make treaties, for example, is dependent on the belief that the agreements we make will be honored by our successors. But we are
entitled to interpret the agreements of our predecessors according to our own ideas of justice.18 We may know, for example, that
our "founding fathers" did not include African Americans as citizens in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. If our
political community is to continue to evolve, we must remedy that. Many other countries, as well, are having difficulty dealing with

Memory of historical injustice is not a trivial matter to

be swept under the rug in the name of progress. Memory or, more precisely, remembering is an
the past because the past is still with them.'"

important part of the identity of individuals and communities. The moral identity of a nation may be defined as the remembrance of
those events that comprise its obligations and entitlements. Practices that require the living to keep the promises and contracts of
the dead are inseparable from the value we assign to the self-realization of individuals and their ability to fulfill their responsibility to

The call for racial reparations challenges the official histories that
ignore, explain away, or trivialize mass cruelties. Reparations thus are a
way of democratizing history and hearing those voices that were silenced in the past.
others.20

Reparation is not just an act but a distinct mode of thinking

about politics. The affs drive to demystification is a paranoid
reading of history that confirms what it already knows about
the Middle Passage. Instead, our reparative reading gestures
towards a future not yet known one able to disrupt
temporality and recognize historical contingency without
falling into the trap of historical determinism
Shahani, assistant professor at Washington State University,
2012
[Nishant, Department of Critical Culture, Gender, and Race Studies, Queer
Retrosexualities: The Politics of Reparative Return, pp.8-11]
In response to Jameson's urge to "always historicize" in order to oppose the pseudo-history of retro culture, Eve

Always historicize? What could have less

to do with historicizing than the commanding, atemporal adverb "always"? It reminds
Sedgwick offers quite possibly the most trenchant critique:

me of the bumper stickers that instruct people in other cars to "Question Authority." Excellent advice, perhaps
wasted on anyone who does whatever they're ordered to do by a strip of paper glued to an automobile!32 Behind
the sardonic humor and irreverence of Sedgwick's riposte can be discerned a more engaged resistance to a

the "always historicize"

command comes off as a paternalistic injunction to queer theorizing. In this project then, I wish to
prescriptive form of historicizing. It is not surprising that to Sedgwick,

offer the framework of queer retrosexualities as an alternative mode of historiography that draws on the "failures"
of nostalgia and other "backward feelings"33 that inform the politics of retrospection. First, I briefly turn to the
essay in which Sedgwick makes her critique of Jameson, since it not only offers the means to rethink the "passivity"
associated with retrospective and nostalgic thinking, but it provides valuable methodological tools for this project in
general. In "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think this Essay is about

Sedgwick critiques the epistemological framing of critical practice' which, according to her,
presumes too often that the process of demystification is the ultimate
goal of social and ideological critique. The stasis that such a hermeneutics of
exposure can result in obscures the more important question of what such a form of
knowledge can performwhat does, to quote Sedgwick, such "knowledge do?"35 According to
Sedgwick, such readings are "paranoid" since they insist that "bad news he always
already known.''36, Thus paranoid readings are those that ultimately only confirm
what is already known. The act of exposure then, becomes a theoretical end in itself
without any consideration of alternative possibilities of thinking and organizing . As a
result, paranoid readings, writes Sedgwick, "may have made it less rather than more
possible to unpack the local contingent relations between any given piece of
knowledge and its narrativeiepistemological entailments for the seeker, knower, or teller."'
You,"

Paranoid readings are implicated in interpretive methods that only confirm what they already always suspect.

paranoid reading practices result in critical tendencies that have rigid and
tautological relations to questions of temporality . In other words, in insisting on
anticipatory forms of thinking, paranoid readings privilege what Sedgwick calls, "the notion of the
inevitable"38 and efface epistemological questions concerning the performativity of knowledge productionthe
fact that "knowledge does rather than simply is."39 Thus Sedgwick writes: "f or someone to have an
unmystified view of systemic oppressions does not intrinsically or necessarily enjoin
that person to any specific train of epistemological or narrative consequences ."40
Since as a psychic defense mechanism paranoia attempts to foreground a pre-emptive
knowledge of a future violence, the successful exposure of that violence results ironically
in a triumphant grand narrative that basks in the process of unveiling. Sedgwick
Hence

rethinks the rigid investment in exposure and the insistence on unveiling through an articulation of "reparative"
possibilities, which are effaced by the paranoid faith in exposure. Drawing on the psychoanalytical formulations of
Melanie Klein and her insistence on the instability and flexibility of psychic positions, Sedgwick's notion of
"reparation"

enables a shift from the hermeneutic of suspicion to a critical practice

that allows for a critical reassembling. In a Kleinian framework, infants or adults constantly oscillate
between the depressive position and the reparative position that promises pleasure-seeking possibilities. According
to Sedgwick, the depressive position is temporarily occupied by the infant or adult as an escape from the threat and
violence of trauma so that the resulting anxiety can he contained in the ego. It is from this depressive position of
anxiety that the adult or infant attempts "to assemble or 'repair' the murderous part-objects into something like a
wholethough ... not necessarily like any preexisting whole":' [T]o read from a position is to surrender the knowing,
anxious paranoid determination that no horror, however apparently unthinkable, shall ever come to the reader as

to a reparatively positioned reader, it can seem realistic and necessary to

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

reparative mode of thinking enables a move away from the anticipatory observative practices of paranoid reading
towards reading practices that Sedgwick defines as "additive and accretive."' Since

reparative readings

enable more mutable and less linear understandings of temporality , there

is a recognition of historical contingency and the ways in which the
present historical moment is recursively structured by the past as well as
the promise for a better future. As Sedgwick writes: Because the reader has room to
realize that the future may be different from the present, it is also possible for her to
entertain such profoundly painful, profoundly: relieving, ethically crucial possibilities
as that the past, in turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually
did.44 At one level, paranoia seems to share an intimate relation to nostalgia in that they both are characterized
by what Svetlana Boym calls "the disease of an afflicted imagination."45 In fact Boym makes this connection
between paranoia and nostalgia more explicitly when she points out: " Nostalgia

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

The retrospective
rethinking of the past enables the reparatively informed reader to be more open to
democratic possibilities in the future. Reparation in this context is an illustration of what Svetlana
potential in returning to the past. It is only in retrospect that reparation is gleaned.

Boym calls "reflective nostalgia." Boym's distinction between "reflective" nostalgia and "restorative" nostalgia offers
crucial insight into the reparative possibilities of retrospection. Boym points out that while restorative nostalgia is
preoccupied with the recovery of lost origins and the pursuit of authenticity, restorative nostalgia "dwells in algia, in
longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance . . . Restorative nostalgia manifests itself in total
reconstructions of monuments of the past, while reflective nostalgia lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history,
in the dreams of another place and another time."'

2.07

2
The aff is STUCK IN 1781 listen to their aff:
we can never lay them to rest Our story doesnt end we are
in a constant state of counter-memorial forever recognizing
the event the Middle Passage is the only stasis point - even
their plan says that their exploration of this moment of the
Middle Passage should be endless.
The aff is so afraid that the meaning of the Middle Passage will
experience closure that they must forever be on guard they
become the watchers and police of history.
Even their 1AC performatively spends most of their time
documenting the past which performatively sacrifices the
afterlife of slavery for a perpetual remembering of what
actually occurred.
The aff doesnt demonstrate what has changed about the
history of slavery it just assumes that the present is just like
the past. Arguing that the present is just like slavery turns
their aff because it does an injustice to both the past and the
present. You should prefer paying attention to the details of
current racism instead using the past to determine the present
Reed 13

--Adolph L. is a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in race and
American politics. NonSite, Django Unchained, or, The Help: How Cultural Politics Is Worse Than No Politics at All,
and Why, http://nonsite.org/editorial/django-unchained-or-the-help-how-cultural-politics-is-worse-than-no-politics-atall-and-why

the exact sort of work that given taxonomies, or categories within one, will do is
linked to historically specific regimes of hierarchy . A taxonomys ideological significance
and material impact, that is, can vary widely. Race was an ideology of essential difference in
1820, as it was in the 1850s. Yet it didnt do the same work in the earlier
periods defenses of slavery as a necessary evil that it did in later defenses of it as a positive good, like those
articulated by Fitzhugh and Hammond. Nor does gender do the same work in the early twentyfirst century that it did at the beginning , or even the middle, of the twentieth. Once
In addition,

established, stereotypes and the folk taxonomies that legitimize them may die hard, but their significance as props
for a regime of class hierarchy can change along with the political-economic foundations of the class order.

Persistence of familiar narratives of hierarchy can evoke the earlier associations, but
that evocation can be misleading and counterproductive for making sense of
social relations in both past and present. In particular the just like slavery or just
like Jim Crow proclamations that are intended as powerful criticism of current

injustices are more likely to undermine understanding of injustice in the

past as well as the present than to enable new insight. Another version of the trope of the
damaged ex-Confederate is illustrative. Unlike Firefly, the television drama Hell on Wheels constructs the wounded
ex-Confederate much nearer its original form but with revisions that underscore the contemporary period dramas
problematic and ideological relation to history. Adam Serwer adduces Hell on Wheels, which is set in 1865 in a
mobile railroad town, as another illustration of the persistence of the trope of the vengeful former Confederate
brooding hero/sociopath, albeit in a hilariously rationalized form. Its version of the character, Cullen Bohannan,
had been a large Mississippi planter who freed his slaves a year before the treasonous insurrection in deference to
his northern, anti-slavery wife whotrue to tale typewas later martyred by marauding Union soldiers, now the
targets of his quest. Serwer is correct to say that the preposterous device of separating the heros Confederate
loyalties from commitment to slave-holding is a transparent effort to sanitize the heros secessionism. However, the
difference in historical context is crucial in this regard as well. The old Lost Cause tropes, originating in the early
twentieth-century southern ideological campaign for sectional reconciliation on white supremacist terms, dont do
the same cultural and ideological work in a society in which Glenn Beck appropriates Martin Luther King, Jr. to
accuse President Barack Obama of racism that they did in a society in which racial subordination was supported
explicitly by the force of law and custom. This is not to imply that theres nothing politically disturbing and
reactionary about the conceits of Hell on Wheels. On the contrary, going beyond the superficial rehearsal of hoary
tropes to consider the programs representations in their actual historical context discloses its more insidious work
in legitimizing inequality. The conceit that Bohannan had freed his slaves before he fought for secession does more
than separate the treason from its foundational commitment to slavery. That conceit also replaces slavery as an
institution with slaveholding as a matter of individual morality, as in Django Unchained. That Bohannan manumitted
his slaves as a gesture of love for his wife folds into another trope of the genre, the pedestalizing, I love her so
much Id change my raffish ways for her fantasy. Thats the happy face of adolescent patriarchy, its expression
that doesnt usually involve a restraining order, though its probably best that the brooding loner heros sainted wife
is nearly always a martyr and thus motivation for, instead of the object of, his sadistic violence and mayhem. But in
Hell on Wheels that device also reinforces the reduction of slavery to slaveholding as an individual act, a consumer
preference to be negotiated within a marriagelike owning a motorcycle, going to the strip club with the guys
every weekend, or painting the living room magenta. From the standpoint of claims to social significance, a deeper
problem with period vehicles like Django Unchained, The Help, and Hell on Wheels is their denial of historicity. By
this I do not mean historical accuracy as faithfulness to facts about the past. The manumission themes in Hell on
Wheels and Django Unchained are instructive. Voluntary manumission was all but impossible in Mississippi as the
sectional crisis intensified on the eve of secession. By 1860 even Maryland with a relatively large free black
population and Arkansas, which had comparatively small slave population, had outlawed the practice; the states
with the largest black populations had done so much earlierSouth Carolina in 1820 and Mississippi in 1822.
Considering its relatively incidental place in each story line, though, the historical inaccuracy on which those bits
hinge is within the boundaries of acceptable artistic license. The problem is with the ideological character of the
larger story lines that preclude even wondering whether manumission would have been possible. Both tales trifle
with slavery. For Hell on Wheels its an unfortunate artifact of the genre, baggage that threatens to sully the appeal
of the hero as wronged Confederate. Producers Joe and Tony Gayton (a former production assistant for political
reactionary John Milius and co-writer with his brother Joe of the Vietnam POW rescue fantasy film Uncommon Valor)
may also have been concerned to preempt sharp criticism for romanticizing the institution indirectly through their
heros secessionist loyalties. For Tarantino slavery is a prop for a claim to social significance and a hook to connect
spaghetti western and blaxploitation. In both vehicles it is a generic bad thing, an especially virulent species of
racism, though slaverys pastnessnot only was Bohannan no longer a slave owner; but the series is set in 1865
keeps it peripheral in Hell on Wheels. And once again the central thread is the individual quest. Even the principal
ex-slave in Hell on Wheels, Elam Ferguson (played by the rapper Common), is depicted as coming to terms with
the risks and responsibilities of his newly-acquired freedom, and, because he had a white father and a slave
mother, apparently he is therefore a man with no true home or people he can call his own. And he and
Bohannan, also a disconnected individual, engage in an exchange about the need to let go of the past. Even
though that exchange seems intended partly as a comment on the impossibility of either mans doing so, the punch
line remains the individual quest, leavened with the unshakable personal demons that are the banal melodramas
yeast. (And I can anticipate the contention that Hell on Wheels is somehow critical of capitalism. Its not. Its critical
of big capitalism and once again the capital/government nexus and their running roughshod over beleaguered
individuals. Thats the critical standpoint of a reactionary populism thats as likely to support Tea Party style fascism
as any other politics, and it would be good for us all to be clearer in recognizing that for what it is.) Effacement of
historicity and the social in favor of the timelessthat is, presentistnarrative of individual Overcoming is the deep
politics and social commentary propounded in these products of the mass entertainment industry. They differ from
other such products only because they ostensibly apply the standard formulae to socially important topics. They
dont, however. They do exactly the reverse; they revise historically and politically significant moments to fit within
the formula. In doing so they are nodes in the constitution of neoliberalisms ideological hegemony. And the extent
of that hegemony is attested by claims from the likes of Lawrence Bobo, Jon Wiener and others who should know
better than to think that a film like Django Unchained somehow captures the essential truth of American slavery.
That truth is apparently, as Bobo condenses it, brutality, inescapable violence and absolutely thorough moral
degradation. But those features were neither essential nor exclusive to slavery; they were behavioral artifacts

enabled by the institution because it conferred, with support of law and custom, a property rightabsolute control
of life and livelihoodof some individuals over others. That property right was the essential evil and injustice that
defined slavery, not the extremes of brutality and degradation it could encourage and abet. No effort is required to
understand why mass-market films go for the dramatic excesses, but what about the scholars and other nominal
leftists who also embrace that view of slavery? In part, the inclination may stem from a corrosive legacy of Malcolm
X. Malcolm was an important cultural figure for most of the 1960s, before and perhaps even more so after his
death. He was not, however, an historian, and few formulations have done more to misinform, distort and preempt
popular understanding of American slavery than his rhetorically very effective but historically facile house
Negro/field Negro parable. It doesnt map onto how even plantation slaverywhich accounted for only about half
of slaves by 1850operated. Not only was working in the house no major plum; it hardly fit with the Uncle Tom
stereotype, such as Tarantinos self-hating caricature, Stephen. The well-known slave rebels Nat Turner, Gabriel
Prosser, Denmark Vesey and Robert Smalls all gainsay that image. Anyway, the Uncle Tom notion is not a useful
category for political analysis. It is only a denunciation; no one ever identifies under that label. Yet its emptiness
may be the source of its attractiveness. In disconnecting critique from any discrete social practice and locating it
instead in imputed pathological psychologyWhy, that house Negro loved the master more than the master loved
himself, pace Malcolmthe notion individualizes political criticism on the (non-existent) racially self-hating
caricature, and, of course, anyone a demagogue chooses to denounce. Because it centers on motives rather than
concrete actions and stances, it leaves infinite room both for making and deflecting ad hominem charges and, of
course, inscribes racial authenticity as the key category of political judgment. That sort of Malcolm X/blaxploitation
narrative, including the insistence that Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind continue to shape Americans
understandings of slavery, also is of a piece with a line of anti-racist argument and mobilization that asserts
powerful continuities between current racial inequalities and either slavery or the Jim Crow regime. This line of
argument has been most popularly condensed recently in Michelle Alexanders The New Jim Crow, which analogizes
contemporary mass incarceration to the segregationist regime. But even she, after much huffing and puffing and
asserting the relation gesturally throughout the book, ultimately acknowledges that the analogy fails.3 And it would

the segregationist regime was the artifact of a particular

historical and political moment in a particular social order. Moreover, the rhetorical
force of the analogy with Jim Crow or slavery derives from the fact that those regimes
are associated symbolically with strong negative sanctions in the general culture because
have to fail because

they have been vanquished. In that sense all versions of the lament that its as if nothing has changed give

The tendency
to craft political critique by demanding that we fix our gaze in the rearview
mirror appeals to an intellectual laziness. Marking superficial similarities with
familiar images of oppression is less mentally taxing than attempting to parse
the multifarious, often contradictory dynamics and relations that shape
racial inequality in particular and politics in general in the current moment. Assertions that
phenomena like the Jena, Louisiana, incident, the killings of James Craig Anderson and Trayvon Martin,
and racial disparities in incarceration demonstrate persistence of old-school, white
supremacist racism and charges that the sensibilities of Thomas Dixon and Margaret Mitchell continue to
shape most Americans understandings of slavery do important, obfuscatory ideological
work. They lay claim to a moral urgency that , as Mahmood Mamdani argues concerning the
rhetorical use of charges of genocide, enables disparaging efforts to differentiate
discrete inequalities and appropriate to generate historically specific causal accounts of them as
themselves the lie. They are effective only to the extent that things have changed significantly.

irresponsible dodges that abet injustice by temporizing in its face.

NOTHING ABOUT YOUR DISPRUPTION OF HISTORY

DELIGITIMATES BELIEFS IN PROGRESS. The 1ACs depiction of
the brutality of the Middle Passage allows people to say, well,
at least, the present isnt that bad. If you want to dislodge
beliefs in progress then detail the present not the past. The
idea that their history cant be reappropriated ignores that
theres a danger in trying to play the game of history with
colonialism. Meaning doesnt just give up just because there
are new histories
Yoneyama 95, cultural studies & Japanese studies in the Dept of Literature at the UC, San Diego, (lisa, Public
Culture, 1: 499-527)

Like the state forces that police national borders, the boundaries shaping the
discourse of authentic memorialization, which exclude and domesticate
heterogeneous and ambiguous elements, are invisible to most people until
they are encountered directly. But for those in subjugated positions, the
boundary walls reveal themselves with clear force and violence. In as much as they
are effects of power, any endeavor to challenge or blur boundaries provokes
conflict and entails pain and brutality. In sum, the politics of ethnic memory over the 1990
relocation issue intensified by a seemingly paradoxical sense of alarm: to remember the past in a
particular way might be tantamount to closing the possibilities of the present and
aborting the future.

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

theoretical reconstructions of historical events are not impartial , nor are

the presentations of the historical places and museums completely free from the
"politics of memory": they also are influenced by the essential connection of
knowledge and power (as noted by Foucault). What if, in our well-meaning efforts to
memorialize past historical traumas like the Holocaust and Hiroshima, we have
inadvertently masked the very social structures, relations of power, and
forms of economy and culture that not only led to the genocidal practices
of the past, but may already be setting in motion the genocides of the
future?
Nevertheless,

We should affirm that too much history can destroy the

present.
ZIZEK 5

Slavoj, Why is Wagner Worth Saving?

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

One often hears that, in order to understand a work of

art, one needs to know its historical context. Against this historicist commonplace,
understanding of the work in question.

one should affirm that too much of a historical context can blur the proper
contact with a work of art - in order to properly grasp, say, Parsifal, one should ABSTRACT from such
historical trivia, one should DECONTEXTUALIZE the work, tear it out from the context in
which it was originally embedded. Even more, it is, rather, the work of art itself
which provides a context enabling us to properly understand a given historical
situation. If, today, someone were to visit Serbia, the direct contact with raw data there would leave him
confused.

Evaluate the alternative through the lens of ethical obligation

our obligations for ethical considerations should not come
from the past ethics traverse temporal understandings and
should be understood in proximity
Meister 5 Robert, "Never Again": The Ethics of the Neighbor and the Logic of
Genocide, PMC 15.2 Proximity and Ethics
Our responsibility to alleviate suffering comes before the past in the sense in
which ethics can be said to come before politics. The priority of ethics arises "from the fear of
occupying someone's place in the Da of my Dasein": "My . . . 'place in the sun,'" he says, "my home--have they not
been a usurpation of places which belong to the others already oppressed or . . . expelled by me into a third world"

in ethics, unlike politics, we do not ask

who came first and what we have already done to (or for) each other . The
distinctively ethical question is rather one of proximity--we are already here
and so is the other, cheek-by-jowl with us in the same place. The neighbor is the figure of the
("From the One to the Other" 144-5). Lvinas's point is that

other toward whom our only relationship is that of proximity. For Lvinas, the global movement to give
ethics primacy over politics must be accompanied, within ethics, by the effort to give primacy to the
ethics of the neighbor--the local over the global. In this way, the global primacy of ethics crystallizes
around our horror of the inhuman act (the "gross" violation of human rights) rather than, for example,
around the international distribution of wealth or the effects of global climate change. Proximity is,
thus, the marker that distinguishes an ethics of the neighbor as a basis for human rights from global
concerns about injustice that might also be considered ethical. Proximity is not itself a merely spatial

it is useful to think of the ethics

of the neighbor as a spatializing discourse within ethics, as distinct from a
"temporalizing" discourse that subordinates ethics to political rhetorics
associated with memory and identity (Boyarin, "Space" 20). The latter is held
accountable for the atrocities of the twentieth century because it suggests that the
suffering of one's immediate neighbor can be justified through an historical
narrative that links it to redeeming the suffering of someone else, perhaps an
ancestor or a comrade, to whom one claims an historical relationship that is "closer"
than relations among neighbors. To regard proximity of place as the ethical
foundation of politics is to resist this tendency from the beginning , and thereby to set the
concept--both space and time can be proximate or distant--but

stage for the fin-de-sicle project of transitional justice, which is both the alternative to human rights interventions
and their professed aim.
2.30 left

Case
1 Theres no impact to biopower or linear time in the 1ac and

they cant solve their Vasquez evidence because the aff only
disrupts one chronological narrative
2 Polyvocality is an empty gesture - You dont solve everything just
because youre open to different interpretations of history. The
1AC was not open to multiple histories it only presented a
very narrow understanding of the Middle Passage. The aff
chose to talk about a very specific history the year 1781,
drowning not resistance to drowning, the Zong trials, and only
the non-lives of those who were drowned. This is not
polyvocality this is presenting their events of the Middle
Passage as a form of truth.
3 Their aff documents biological death not living death and living

death is key to understand modern prisons

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

biological death that

does not offer a
complete measure of the genocidal abjection of (early) modern imprisonment .15 That
For my purposes, however, it is important that we recognize how the incidence of

occurred in the coffles, barracoons, factories, ships, and pens, of the Middle Passage

both Beloved and Dr. Newton speak of the living and the dead being piled on top of one another and fastened

the killing of the African slave

involved more than the taking of her biological life . Stated simply, Black Atlantic and
New World mass internment, enslavement, and genocide were and are produced
as much through the mass reproduction of living death as through the production of
biologically expired bodies. Here we might think of the radical import of Sethes only monologue in which
together by chains in the holds of slave ships graphically testifies to how

she explains the untold reason behind her ostensibly insane act of infanticide: If I hadnt killed her she would have
died and that is something I could not bear.16 If we take into account living death as a fundamental aspect of
Middle Passage and plantation imprisonment, then the number of those killed in the trade does indeed approach
the seemingly miscalculated death count of 60 million and more that appears in Beloveds epigraph. And, as we
shall see below, 60 million and more becomes an even more accurate count if we consider how slaverys (living)

The inclusion of the category of living death

allows us to attend to the ways in
which todays modern version of mass human warehousingthat is, the penitentiary
represents an extension of rather than an antithesis to Middle Passage genocide. As
death toll reaches across the border of Emancipation.

within the techniques of state and corporate killing also

Colin (aka Joan) Dayan states with respect to the connected positionalities of slave and criminal: Death takes many
forms, including loss of status beyond which life ceases to be politically relevant.17 The status loss that
accompanied the mass entombment and natal alienation of transatlantic imprisonment was enacted on the
ideological and ontological level through the questioning of the slaves membership in the community of humans.18
In other words, if the captive could be projected as inhuman or subhuman then dehumanization could be emptied of
any semantic value, thereby disqualifying black injury.19 Sylvia Wynter uses the term biological idealism to describe
the ideological system that transmuted African humanity into quasi-bestiality and black personhood into
objecthood. For her, the nigger was made to represent the ultimate zero degree category of an ostensibly primal

 human nature whose differentiation from a lurking bestiality was dangerously imprecise and uncertain, so
uncertain as to call for a question mark to be placed with respect to the humanity of this zero-degree category.20
The repeated references to the dispossession of manhood and womanhood on the part of Sethe, Paul D, and the
rest of the Sweet Home menyou got two legs not four; I had a bit in my mouthrepresent the reintroduction
within the post slavery moment of the ideological construct of black subhumanitydiscursive branding processes
that began with chattel slavery, and that were specifically inaugurated with the mass physical branding, rape, and
cargoing of human beings aboard the slave ship. Consequently, the realm of ideologythe casting of blackness as
an anthropology of metaphysical deficit21was as much of a weapon in the production of mass social and living
death as whips, chains, and pistols.2

4 The aff is too open: The affs fear of closure AND telling people

what they outght to think ensures that all interpretations of

history are allowed even white supremacist ones.
Polyvocality means that even disinterested formalist histories
will be just as legitimate as post-colonial readings. Counterhistories cant be successful by ignoring that memory is
hegemonically constructed. Polyvocality depends on a playing
field that can never be equal. Openness to all views creates a
view from nowhere and repeats the problems of the public
sphere
Brock 98

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

In recent debates about memory, two intellectual approaches have developed

relatively independently of each other. One of these approaches is to discuss
memory in descriptive, formalist terms: as a human faculty, as a mnemonic technique, as a
culturally stabilizing repertoire combined of brain capacities, psychic abilities,
scientific knowledges, and social rituals. That kind of quasi disinterested,
disengaged focus on memory has occupied Western European intellectuals fascinated
with the phenome- non as such, leading to questions such as: How does the mnemonic faculty work within the
individual, how does memory become collectivized, e.g., on a national level, which techniques have human

The second tendency, in its

textual practice and its theoretical inscriptions, can be directly related to the recent moment of
postcolonial writing that has concerned itself , on a specifically local as well as on a transnational
level, with a recuperation of lost history , with representing the undersides of modernity's imperial
societies in history used to remember, to not fall prey to forgetting over time?2

discourses. I am thinking here of writers and critics as diverse as, for example, Wilson Harris, Caryl Phillips, Charles

They share a focus on a

decidedly ethical and political need for a far-reaching restoration of Western cultural
memory to the effect of re-inscribing, foregrounding a crucial cultural lack by way of
what Bhabha has called the "supplement" of memory of oppressed cultures .3 The effect of an
'unthinking' of hundreds of years of dismemberment in the 'officiar records, then, would be a challenge to
what Morrison has called a "national amnesia."4 Morrison and other authors writing from the
perspective of dominated and marginalized cultures or subcultures have invested
considerable urgency in this making of memory that seems to have become so very compelling at
the end of the twentieth century. For those writers (and their critics), cultural memory in our historical
Johnson, Sherley Anne Williams, Michelle Cliff, Derek Walcott, and Toni Morrison.

moment finds itself in a state of "referential debt" to the victims of history .5 For them,
memory in some factual, unproblematic fullness, as a mnemonic faculty, as a transparent option to recollect the
past, cannot be assumed to be innocently present in a given culture; hierarchies of
empowerment or struggles between various so- cial factions institutionalize procedures of selection
and exclusion. Precisely because memory can only find representation in medial form, one has to deal
with the question of power: since all of a society's past is not equally accessible
to memory and se- lective decisions do not come to pass via free-market
competition, one cannot eclipse the problem of agency, individual and collective. Since memory needs
mediation (i.e., it is not automatically there, as an abstract, prestructured phenomenon), it may be
subject to repression, culturally and individually . Indeed, not being able to forget may be a
general human brain faculty,6 but historical experiences, as Toni Morrison's novel Beloved so clearly enacts
for us, can be disremembered. To ignore the terms of motive, intention, interest, or particularly
invested perspectives and subject positions in any discussion of memory
amounts to irresponsible omission. Toni Morrison's work stresses how interested, how invested
cultural memory actu- ally is, precisely because it is an act of mediation. Her project is part of a wider effort to
politically own memory and not to discuss it in merely formal terms. Different camps of writers on the so-called
margin have dealt with that paradoxical cultural need. As Haitian writers Barnabe, Chamoiseau, and Confiant have
argued recently And the history of colonization . . . favored exteriority and fed the estrangement of the present.
Within this false memory we had but a pile of obscurities as our memory. A feel- ing of flesh discontinued. . . . Our
chronicle is behind the dates, behind the known facts: we are words behind writing. Only . . . artistic knowledge
can . . . bring us ... back to the resuscitation of consciousness.7

5 Awareness mistake: Just because we know slaverys history

doesnt mean the aff helps struggles against anti-blackness.

Their Dillon evidence can be 100 percent correct that the
Middle Passage is the template for modern power that
doesnt mean that their history lesson will be a corrective to
anti-blackness. Their aff is predicated on academic fantasy and
premised on the idea that if we just inform people, they will
believe like we do.
BIGO 2, professor at Kings College London department of War studies,
(Didier, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 27.1 Jan-March)

Some "critical" discourses generated

academics assume that if people,

were more aware, they would change
their minds about migration and begin to resist securitizing it. The primary problem, therefore,
is ideological or discursive in that the securitization of migrants derives from the language itself and from the
by NGOs and

politicians, governments, bureaucracies, and journalists

different capacities of various actors to engage in speech acts. In this context, the term "speech act" is used not in
its technical Austinian sense, but metaphorically, to justify both the normative position of a speaker and the value

This understanding of
critique reinforces the vision of a contest between ideas and norms, a contest in which
academics can play a leading role. (3) This essay tries to be critical in a rather different sense. It seeks
of their critical discourse against the discourses of the security professionals.

to avoid presenting the struggle as an ideological one between conservative and liberal positions, or even as an
"intertextual competition" between agencies in which academics have a key role. It examines why

the

discourses of securitization continue to be so powerful even when alternatives

discourses are well known, and why the production of academic and alternative
discourses has so little effect in either the political arena or in daily life.
6 The aff has a nave understanding of the effects of counter-histories.

Its not that Americans dont know that slavery is part of their
past, its that its too guilt producing. This is what ensures
forgetting
Ater 10

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

Slavery remains an unreconciled and painful aspect of the American past. It is not
that we lack nuanced histories; historians from Eugene Genovese to Ira Berlin have written on this
subject, concentrating on the dynamics of the African American lived experience in the antebellum South.3 Yet we
find it difficult as a nation to place slavery into our national story of freedom. Historians
James Oliver Horton and Johanna C. Kardux argue, For Americans, a people who see their history
as a freedom story and themselves as defenders of freedom, the integration of
slavery into their national narrative is embarrassing and can be guilt-producing
and disillusioning. It can also provoke defensiveness, anger and
confrontation.4 The anguish of this past encourages us to forget it, and, yet, it
is deeply woven into the fabric of who we are as a nation. In the twenty-first century, the public conversation on
how best to remember slavery has focused on apologies and reparations, whereas the push to create sculptural

to represent slavery and its unsettling

memory, which can evoke feelings of shame and antipathy, in public monuments? In
the words of art historian James Young, who writes on Holocaust memorials, How does a nation
memorialize a past it might rather forget?6 In the last decade, artists and communities have come
memorials has occurred more slowly.5 How then

together to memorialize slavery through public monuments made of steel, bronze, stone, and organic materials
such as trees and plants. They use diverse forms: abstraction, figural representation, and the built and natural
environment. In part, these monuments are about recovering history and creating a common public memory of
slavery, a seeming impossibility in the postmodern world. The artists and communities involved in these projects
have created and are planning a range of monuments that also encourage reflection on the nature of bondage and
freedom. Some are more successful than others at presenting the multiple, shifting meanings of slavery in three
dimensions, allowing viewers to shape their own intellectual and emotional understandings of this tragic chapter in
American history.

7 You have no UNIQUE ADVANTAGE:

A. Time is not homogenized in the SQ Vasquez says anti-globalization activists are
already questioning the modern idea of time. And they cant prove who doesnt
believe that slavery informs current racismmultiple scholars write everyday that
slavery is still with us.
here

B. History has already been disrupted. Scholars dont need your help the link
between slavery and the prison has already been thoroughly explored - and you
dont have an impact to doing your aff in the debate space
Dillon 13 [Stephen Dillon, doctor of philosophy from the university of Minnesota, Fugitive Life: Race, Gender,
and the Rise of the Neoliberal-Carceral State, May, Regina Kunzel, Co-adviser, Roderick Ferguson, Co-adviser,
http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/11299/153053/1/Dillon_umn_0130E_13833.pdf]

The connections made by Shakur between the prison and neoliberalism, and between slavery and
the prison, have been thoroughly explored by many scholars.29 Indeed, during the
past two decades, a growing body of scholarship has affirmed and extended Shakurs
analysis of blackness, slavery, and the prison by exploring what Saidiya Hartman calls the afterlife of
slavery.30 By centering racial terror in a genealogy of the prison, scholars have come to
understand the barracoons, coffles, slave holds, and plantations of the Middle Passage as spatial,
discursive, ontological, and economic analogues of modern punishment that have
haunted their way into the present.31 If the carceral becomes a functional surrogate for slaverys
production of social and living death, then Shakurs text also hints at another connection that has garnered less
attentionslaverys haunting possession of neoliberalism. While

the prisons connection to slavery and

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

C. Post-colonialism makes your aff nothing special oceanic metaphors already

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

In the past fifteen years postcolonial studies effected sea changes in scholarly
images of the global south, smashing and wearing away essentialist conceptions of race and nationality
with the insistent pounding force of ocean waters. Rigorously theorizing identities that have
always already been in flux and rethinking black insularity from England and Manhattan to
Martinique and Cuba, imaginative captains of Atlantic and Caribbean studies have called
prominently on oceanic metaphors. Their conceptual geographies figure oceans and
seas as a presence that is history, a history that is present . In the watershed The Black
Atlantic, Gilroy evokes the Atlantic as the trope through which he imagines the
emergence of black modernities. A past of Atlantic crossings underpins his engagement with
contemporary multiracial Britain, where the black in the Union Jack is no novelty introduced by recent immigrants
but a continuation of centuries of transoceanic interchanges. Calling on the ship as the first image of this black
Atlantic, Gilroy begins by stipulating that

ships and oceans are not merely abstract figures but

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

8 Agentless Forgetting: Who exactly is the problem? There is ZERO

in the aff that details who or what subjectivities are the

problem. And who we need to influence. The aff criticizes all
progressives - without actually proving it.
Really the aff is just talking about literary texts and academic theorizing not an
actual reflection of larger cultural beliefs. They cant prove who sustains or is
responsible for a forgetting of nameless. Nothing about the aff changes literary
texts which form the archives of the Middle Passage. The aff just points out that
these beliefs exist and does nothing to remedy the actual problem. Who cares what
academics think lived reality separate from academia is more important.

Smith 14

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

For those who value honesty and analytical rigor over impotent polemics, this book is a treasure. Here, for once,

intellectual life is not about other intellectuals, but about real life, in this case
ordinary people attempting to overcome extraordinary oppression by taking up arms and
dedicating themselves to revolutionary struggle . The printed word counts, but only
insofar as it contributes to liberation from empire, both at home and abroad. The posturing
and pontification so characteristic of thought-for-thoughts-sake arguments are blessedly absent from these pages.

9 The aff doesnt care about ending slavery they care about teology

and ending the homogenization of time. This turns slaves into

an instrument for perfecting history.
Hassan 14

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

Another recurring problem in our discourse today on Israels mistreatment of African refugees is
that it ends up using the plight of African refugees solely as a means to point to Israels
brutality. African refugees are human beings, not pawns in our liberation struggle .
Each refugee who has fled genocide, ethnic cleansing, military dictatorship or
persecution has a personal story that deserves to be heard and respected. They
deserve nothing less than us orienting and broadening our struggle against
whatever processes forced them to flee their own homes , breaking up their lives, families, and
communities. They deserve genuine solidarity from us rather than our using
their plight as an advertising campaign for our cause . We must realise how we
further dehumanise African refugees when we exploit their suffering to
serve our own agenda. Indeed, we fully disregard their own stories and never think
to ask what their ideas are for the struggle . Indeed, we cannot think to ask them what
they think about things because we do not engage them as dignified people; we see
them and treat them only as victims.

10 The aff under-estimates their enemy. Working through histories is

hard - COMING TO TERMS WITH THE PAST CAN CREATE

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

Yet, as Theodor Adorno wrote,

the coming to terms with the past (Aufarbeitung der

Vergungenheit) "does not imply a serious working through of the past , the
breaking of its spell through an act of clear consciousness . It suggests, rather,
wishing to turn the page and, if possible, wiping it from memory (1 15). This process,
therefore, necessarily entails the forgetting of that very amnesia, masking the fact
that the memories of aggression and discrimination have been deliberately and at
times forcibly repressed for almost half a century since the end of the war .
11 ALT CAUSE: Dispassionate reporting is the problem
Brown 9 Vincent, Prof. of History and African and African-American Studies @ Harvard Univ., December, "Social
Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery," American Historical Review, p. 1231-1249

For dispassionate accountingexemplified by the ledgers of slave tradershas

been a great weapon of the powerful, an episteme that made the grossest
violations of personhood acceptable, even necessary. This is the kind of
bookkeeping that bore fruit upon the Zong. It made it easier for a trader to
countenance yet another dead black body or for a captain to dump a shipload of
captives into the sea in order to collect the insurance , since it wasnt possible to kill cargo or to
murder a thing already denied life. Death was simply part of the workings of the trade. The archive of slavery,
then, is a mortuary. Not content to total up the body count, Hartman offers elegy, echoing in her own way the

lamentations of the women aboard the Hudibras. Like them, she is concerned with the dead and what they mean to
the living. I was desperate to reclaim the dead, she writes, to reckon with the lives undone and obliterated in the
making of human commodities.