(De) Coloniality Affirmative - JDI 2014

(De)Coloniality AFF
JDI 2014 Kaut/Johnson Lab
(DE)COLONIALITY AFF
****Affirmative****................................................................3
1AC...................................................................................... 4
2AC Ext: Colonialism Root Cause of Violence.........................12
2AC Ext: Rhetoric Proceeds Action.......................................14
2AC Ext: Alt Epistemic Disobedience....................................16
2AC Ext: Colonialism Root Cause of Genocide........................18
2AC Ext: Colonialism Root Cause of Warming........................21
2AC Ext: Development=Colonialism......................................23
2AC Ext: Development=Deforestation..................................25
2AC Ext: Coloniality destroy society.....................................27
2AC Ext: Colonialism Causes Poverty....................................29
2AC Ext: Colonialism=Structural Violence.............................31
2AC Ext: Exploration means changes in mindset...................35
2AC Ext: Rhetoric proceeds action........................................36
AT: Imperialism Root Cause.................................................39
AT: Imperialism Good..........................................................41
AT: Cap............................................................................... 43
AT: Anthro..........................................................................45
AT: Biopolitics Root Cause...................................................47
AT: Natives.........................................................................49
AT: Gender K....................................................................... 51
AT: Root Cause Debate Bad/ Root Cause Debate Good...........54
AT: Colonialism Good...........................................................55
AT: Race K..........................................................................59
AT: Framework/Topicality.....................................................66
AT: Limits...........................................................................67
****Negative****..................................................................69
NEG: Colonialism Good........................................................70
NEG: Colonialism Not Root Cause.........................................73
NEG: Colonialism=Better Education......................................76
1
(De)Coloniality AFF
NEG: Victimization Bad........................................................77

NEG: Speaking for others bad..............................................80
NEG: Globalization root Cause of structural violence.............83
NEG: Imperialism Good........................................................85
NEG: Colonialism key to Democracy.....................................88
NEG: Eurocentrism Good......................................................90
NEG: Alt BAD......................................................................92
NEG: Vague Alts Bad...........................................................94
NEG: Modernity good..........................................................95
NEG: Pragmatism key to Solve.............................................99
NEG: Pragmatism bad........................................................100
(De)Coloniality AFF
****Affirmative****
(De)Coloniality AFF
1AC
THE IMPERIALISTIC BEHAVIOR IN HOMO SAPIENS HAS BEEN
HARD-WIRED INTO OUR GENES SINCE THE DAWN OF
EVOLUTION. WITH THE OCEAN BEING THE NEW FRONTIER FOR
HUMAN DEVELOPMENT, HUMAN INQUIRY IN OCEAN HAS
EXEMPLIFIED A COLONIALIST APPROACH TOWARDS OCEANIC
ENGAGEMENT BY POSITING THEM AS A STANDING RESERVE.
Steiner, 12Steiner, Richard. "On Columbus Day, It's Time to Rethink Our 'Manifest Destiny'."The
Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 8 Oct. 2012. Web. 24 June 2014.
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-steiner/on-columbus-day-its-time-_b_1943442.html>.
Today is Columbus Day, celebrating the "discovery of the New World." As this event set off a wave of
conquest, environmental devastation, and empire building that continues today, this seems a good time to
reflect on this history, and discuss a better way forward for 21st century humanity.
In today's clamor to develop our final frontiers -- the Arctic, the

deep sea, and outer space -- it's easy to hear echoes of voices
from centuries past calling for the westward expansion of
"civilization" as a divinely ordained "Manifest Destiny." The only
thing missing is the covered wagons.The term "Manifest Destiny" was first
used by Journalist John Sullivan in 1845 writing that it was:
"the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to
possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given
us." The phrase captured the expansionist fervor and messianic vision that had been in play for
centuries, and was perhaps the first expression of the jingoistic "American exceptionalism" heard in
American politics today. This
imperialistic behavior in Homo sapiens had

been hard-wired into our genes at the dawn of human
evolution, and played out in the competitive replacement of Neanderthals by Cro Magnon 30,000
years ago. At that time, Cro Magnon's behavioral traits -- violence, aggression, competition, greed, and
domination -- prevailed. But what may have been adaptive in the upper Paleolithic is clearly not today, as
these same traits may be our ultimate undoing. Despite this troubled history, there have been glimmers of
Although there were preexisting territorial claims in one of the last untouched regions
of the world -- Antarctica -- the U.S. proposed to manage the
area as a U.N. Trusteeship, as the "common heritage of
mankind." The 1959 Antarctic Treaty reserved the region
exclusively for peaceful, non-extractive, scientific purposes, a
model for global cooperation. Unfortunately, this goodwill was
short-lived as humanity looked toward its next frontiers. The
next frontier today is the deep ocean. The vast abyssal plain,
covering 60% of the Earth surface, is intersected by deep
ocean trenches, the longest mountain range on Earth, and rare hydrothermal
vent ecosystems. Marine ecologist Fred Grassle says that the
deep-sea may rival tropical rainforests in terms of species
present, with perhaps 10 million species. Presently, large
hydrocarbon reservoirs are being developed in the deep
waters of the Gulf of Mexico, Brazil, and West Africa. A dozen
hope. Out of the ashes of WWII, the United Nations was born.
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state/private consortia, interested in mining polymetallic (manganese) nodules, hold seabed exploration
leases between Baja and Hawaii and the Indian Ocean. Companies are interested in mining cobalt-rich
crusts on Pacific seamounts, and Nautilus Minerals is set to begin the first ever commercial mining of deep-
we now have the stampede to

develop the Arctic, where global carbon emissions have caused
a catastrophic loss of Arctic sea ice. Oil and gas projects are
underway in Greenland, Norway, Russia, Canada, and Alaska, with many more
planned. There are projects across the Arctic to mine uranium, coal, diamonds, gold, copper, nickel,
sea hydrothermal vents off Papua New Guinea. And
zinc, and other minerals. Arctic shipping is steadily increasing as sea ice melts. Current U.S. Arctic policy,
issued in the last week of the Bush administration, is essentially an industrial development manifesto, with
only cursory mention of environmental protection. After asserting that "high levels of uncertainty remain
concerning the effects of climate change and increased human activity in the Arctic," the policy states that
"the United States may exercise its sovereign rights over natural resources such as oil, natural gas,
methane hydrates, minerals, and living marine species" on the Arctic seabed. It calls for the U.S. to join the
land grab for more continental shelf seabed, to "assert a more active and influential national presence to
protect its arctic interests and project sea power throughout the region," and that an Arctic Treaty, similar
there is a better way to

govern our last frontiers. The first thing we need is a
"timeout." We need a lot more science, and more deliberate
thinking about whether this frontier development will help, or
hinder, our quest for a sustainable future. We need to rekindle that
to that for the Antarctic, is "not appropriate or necessary."Clearly,
cooperative spirit with which the Antarctic was protected 50 years ago. To better manage development in
outer space, the United Nations should establish a U.N. Outer Space Environment Commission to oversee
all human activity in space, and a specific Environmental Protocol to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty .For
the deep sea, we need a moratorium on all mineral development, within national and
international waters, until we have a better understanding of the risks and
impacts; large protected areas of the deep ocean permanently
free from any commercial development; and an Independent Environmental
Commission to oversee all exploration and development. For the Arctic, we need an Arctic Treaty (similar to
the Antarctic) protecting the region for peaceful, non-extractive purposes, and as the "common heritage of
all humankind." All waters outside of current 200-mile jurisdictions of the coastal states should be
protected as a global sanctuary, where oil and gas, mineral, and fishery development are prohibited. As
well, many sensitive areas within national jurisdictions should be contributed to the Arctic sanctuary. The
U.N. should convene an Arctic Council including not just the eight coastal states currently represented, but
also Indigenous Peoples of the Arctic and other governments with interests in the Arctic as equal voting
The Arctic is too important to global climate regulation and

biodiversity to leave to the parochial whims of the coastal states or
industrialists. And instead of exploiting the energy and mineral
resources in these frontier areas, we can simply increase the
efficiency with which we use energy and materials, and switch
to sustainable alternatives, thereby eliminating the need to
exploit these non-renewable, frontier resources altogether.
Our 21st century challenge is whether we can transcend our
aggressive, domineering Paleolithic programming, or not. In
approaching our final frontiers, we should carefully consider
our motivations, needs, and goals, and make sure we approach
these frontiers in a cooperative, sustainable manner, or not at
all.
members.
WITHIN THE LAST TWO DECADES, U.S. EXPLORATION OF THE

OCEAN HAS INCREASED SUBSTANTIALLY. THIS INCREASED
INQUIRY OF THE OCEAN ALONG WITH OTHER HUMAN
(De)Coloniality AFF
ACTIVITIES HAVE CONTRIBUTED TO EXPLOITATION OF THE

OCEAN AND ITS NATURAL RESOURCES. THIS EXPLOITATION
LEADS TO CLIMATE CHANGE, OCEAN ACIDIFICATION AND
FURTHER ATMOSPHERIC DEPLETION.
Hermione 12, HERMIONE is a Collaborative Project funded under the European Commission's Framework
Seven Programme at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton. Accessed 6/25/14 http://www.euhermione.net/learning
over the last two decades has shown that the deepsea environment has already been impacted by man. Resources
from the deep are increasingly exploited and clear signs of
direct and indirect anthropogenic impacts are now visible in many
deep-sea ecosystems. Direct impacts of human activities relate to
existing or future exploitation of deep-sea resources (e.g. fisheries,
hydrocarbon extraction, mining, bioprospecting), to seabed uses (e.g., pipelines, cable laying,
carbon sequestration) and to pollution (e.g. contamination from land-based sources/activities,
waste disposal, dumping, noise, impacts of shipping and maritime accidents). Indirect impacts
relate to climate change, ocean acidification and atmospheric
ozone depletion. This raises a series of concerns because deep-sea
processes and ecosystems are not only important for the marine
web of life but they also fundamentally contribute to global
biogeochemical patterns that support all life on Earth. Moreover they
Deep-sea exploration
provide direct goods and services that are of growing economic significance. Most of todays
understanding of the deep oceans comes from the natural sciences, supplemented by data from industry.
socio-economic research in support of the sustainable use and

conservation of deep-sea resources is lagging behind. There is
a clear need to identify the societal and economic implications of
human activities and impacts, and to investigate the key
socioeconomic and governance issues related to the
conservation, management and sustainable use of the deep-seas.
But
THE TOPIC IN IT OF ITSELF RE-CREATES THE HISTORICAL

COLONIAL EPISTOMOLOGY BY DEPLOYING THE OCEAN AS A
RESOURCE FOR HUMANS TO EXPLOIT AND BENEFIT.
HISTORICALLY THE LANGUAGE OF DEVELOPMENT SETS THE
PRECEDENT FOR COLONIAL EXPLORATION AND DEVELOPMENT.
IT IS ESSENTIAL TO REJECT COLONIAL IDEOLOGY BY
INTERROGATING HOW DEVELOPMENT AND EXPLOITATION ARE
INEXTRICABLY LINKED.
Barker 1998[Dr. Drucilla Barker is the Womens Studies Chair at Hollins University. Dualisms,
Discourse, and Development. Hypatia 13.3]
The language of development economics reads like a chapter in the

Enlightenment dream, a dream that promised an orderly progress
from poverty and ignorance to prosperity and modernity . It is a
discourse infused with the Enlightenment ideal of innocent knowledge, an ideal that masks the
development has played in maintaining global

structures of neocolonialism and dependency. Instead of
progress and prosperity, much of the world has experienced
instrumental role that
(De)Coloniality AFF
profound poverty, growing income inequality, high debt

burdens, and environmental degradation. By the 1980s, even
the proponents of development had agreed that their policies
had been largely unsuccessful. Policy interventions designed to foster economic growth
and alleviate poverty were abandoned in favor of neoliberal orthodoxies (Escobar 1995, 73-94).
Privatization, trade liberalization, and fiscal austerity were the

new strategies that would enable free-market capitalism to
work its magic. Missing from this analysis, however, was any awareness of
the role that development rhetoric and policies played in
producing underdevelopment, exploitation, and oppression.(1)
THE LANGUAGE OF THE TOPIC, UNDER THE GUISE OF EXPLORE
AND DEVELOP ENCOURAGES COLONIALISM. THESE EUROPEAN
CONCEPTS OF EXPLORATION AND DEVELOPMENT ENCOURAGES
AND REQUIRES COLONIALISM.
Nayar, Jayan. "SYMPOSIUM: RE-FRAMING INTERNATIONAL LAW FOR THE 21ST CENTURY: Orders of
Inhumanity." Hein Online SW 9.2 (1999): n. pag. Web. 26 June 2014. University of Warwick School of
Law
Since the demise of the colonial legitimization of the "civilizing" mission,

"development" has come to express the contemporary challenge of
bringing the benefits of "civilization" and human progress to the
populations of the world. It is, it appears, the primary purpose of
human endeavor to be collectively undertaken by all and sundry
within the context of a humanity-embracing, "new," post-colonial,
"world-order"-- another "new beginning." Through many ups and downs, through many failures
and too few successes, the spirit of development as a great human
cause has been kept alive. Now we must do everything we can
to 'turn that spirit into practical, visible progress for people in
Africa, and people everywhere. Development is everyone's job. No more fundamental cause
exists today. I believe that we stand at the start of a time of unique achievement.19 So many
possible audiences stand to be identified by this appeal of the
former Secretary-General of the United Nations for the "job" of "development." To
the leaders of the world is made the plea to revitalize efforts
toward the implementation of development initiatives. To the doubters of the
"development" project is made the reassurance that now, despite the "many ups and downs," the spirit
and vision of development still rings true and firm. To himself and his staff of the development-related
institutions of the UN, perhaps the audience for which the statement is truly intended, is made the
They, the development

workers, have the historic role of ensuring the realization of
this vision of human progress, and so much futility and even failure may be erased or
reassertion that this work of development is an important one.
forgotten through a renewed commitment to carry on persistently with their tasks. All this expression of
angst and hope is, of course, nothing new. Like a social ritual played out with consistent regularity, we
have become familiar with these gatherings of "developmentalists," at which they administer healthy
measures of both admonishments for past failures and encouragements for future hope. And like in all
rituals, processes of "remembering," which are the public face of proceedings, are accompanied by the
equally important processes of "forgetting." Repeated and remembered are the "failures," the
commitments to "humanity," the conditions of suffering that are deemed "intolerable," and the
articulations of hope in future "action." Ignored and forgotten are the violence of the failures, the
fraudulence of the commitments, the processes of inflicted suffering deemed necessary, and the
articulations of despair about past actions. Still, the ritual performs a regenerative purpose. It recasts anew
the project of development with all its civilizational importance and reassures its practitioners of their
(De)Coloniality AFF
historic mission to "order" society. But what is the message given to the "victims" of development-those
who, although intended as the beneficiaries of this universal project, have had to suffer the "many failures
and too few successes" as these rituals are enacted? 20 To them is made a plea for patience and a
rearticulation of a vision for tomorrow. For them, however, perhaps a different experience of
developmental (mis)orderings persists, one which bears a striking resemblance to the earlier phase of
colonial ordering. While once colonialism was blatant in its dehumanizing of social relationships,
dehumanization takes
place under the acceptable, if not desirable, guise of globalized
development. The "poor" has come to replace the "savage/native;"
notwithstanding the claims of the "civilizing mission," now that same
the "expert consultant," the "missionary;" "training seminars," mass "baptizing;" the handphone in the
pocket, the cross on the altar. But some things-the foreigner's degree, attire, consumer items, etc.- don't
change. And what of the "comprador elites," that band of minority mercenaries who symbolized to the
colonialist all that was good about what it meant to be the servile "civilized," who served as the faithful
mouthpieces of the master? Today, many go by the names of "government functionaries" and
"entrepreneurs."
Regenerated by these contemporary ideological

weapons of the desired human condition, the processes of
ordering, of creating orders of inhumanity, carry on with violence intact.
Contrary to assumptions of a lack of order and non-inclusion, many of the "conditions" of
human suffering that justify developmental interventions
result from a very considerable amount of ordering and forced
inclusion. Processes of ordering, as coercive command, are visible
in the perpetuation and exacerbation of food insecurity resulting from
structures instituted during the colonial period and carried
through to the globalizing practices of international agribusiness (the globalization of hunger),21 the impact of the invasion of
transnational corporations on the environmental and social
fabric of communities (the globalization of ecocide),22 the societal
disintegration resulting from structural adjustment policies and the imperatives of the
transnational economic system (the globalization of
impoverishment),23 and the resulting destruction of social
diversity through the homogenization of "pop" and consumer
culture (the globalization of social alienation). These have all contributed to
the marginalization of populations following half a century of (violent)
"development."24 How many more "new beginnings" of "development" are necessary before
the embodied "world" that is the result of all this ordering is recognized as a familiar one from earlier
After five decades of "development," the following description by Frantz

the colonial condition still rings true of the contemporary
"post-colonial," "globalized" neighborhood, and of its inhabitants: The
times?
Fanon of
settler's town is a strongly-built town, all made of stone and steel. It is a brightly-lit town; the streets are
covered with asphalt, and the garbage cans swallow all the leavings, unseen, unknown and hardly
thought about. The settler's feet are never visible, except perhaps in the sea; but there you're never close
enough to see them. His feet are protected by strong shoes although the streets of his town are clean and
even, with no holes or stones. The settler's town is a well-fed town, an easy-going town; its belly is always
full of good things.... The town belonging to the colonized people, or at least the native town, . . . is a place
of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die
there, it matters not where, nor how. It is a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of each
other, and their huts are built one on top of the other. The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread,
of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light. The native town is a crouching village, a town on its knees, a town
wallowing in the mire. It is a town of niggers and dirty arabs. The look that the native turns on the settler's
town is a look of lust, a look of envy; it expresses his dreams of possession-all manner of possession: to sit
at the settler's table, to sleep in the settler's bed, with his wife if possible. The colonized man is an envious
man. And this the settler knows very well; when their glances meet he ascertains bitterly, always on the
defensive, "They want to take our place." It is true, for
there is no native who does
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not dream at least once a day of setting himself up in the

settler's place.25
CHANGING LAWS AND PUBLIC POLICIES WILL NOT CHANGE OUR
ORIENTATION TOWARDS OCEANS. WE MUST FIRST RE-EVALUATE
AND CHANGE/DEVELOP OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH OCEANS AND
OTHER RESOURCES BEFORE WE CAN CREATE ANY PUBLIC
POLICY THAT ENCOURAGES INTERACTIONS WITH THE OCEAN.
BY PARTICIPATING IN EPISTEMIC DISOBEDIENCE
Mignolo 2006 [Walter D. Mignolo, Professor of Cultural Studies at Duke University, Citizenship,
Knowledge, and the Limits of Humanity American Literary History 18.2 (2006) 312-331]
I will describe the veiled connections as the logic of coloniality, and the surface that covers it I will describe
The rhetoric of modernity is that of salvation,

whereas the logic of coloniality is a logic of imperial
oppression. They go hand in hand, and you cannot have
modernity without coloniality; the unfinished project of modernity carries over its
as the rhetoric of modernity.
shoulders the unfinished project of coloniality. I will conclude by suggesting the need to decolonize
"knowledge" and "being" and advocating that the (decolonial) "humanities" shall have a fundamental role
to play in this process. Truly, "global citizenship" implies overcoming the imperial and colonial differences
Changing the law

and public policies won't be of much help in this process. What
is needed is that those who change the law and public policy
change themselves. The problem is how that may take place if we would like to avoid
the missionary zeal for conversion; the liberal and neoliberal belief in the
triumphal march of Western civilization and of market
democracy; and the moral imperatives and forced behavior imposed by socialism. As I do not
believe in a new abstract universal that will be good for the entire world, the question is how
people can change their belief that the world today is like it is
and that it will be only through the "honest" projects of
Christians, liberals, and Marxist-socialists that the world could
be better for all, and citizenship will be a benediction for all.
The changes I am thinking about are radical transformations in
the naturalized assumptions of the world order. The naturalized
that have mapped and continue to map global racism and global patriarchy.
assumptions I am thinking about are imperialcolonial, and they have shaped the world in which we live in
the past five hundred years when Christianity and capitalism came together and created the conditions for
the transformations I am thinking about

require an epistemic decolonial shift. Not a "new," a "post," or
a "neo," which are all changes within the same modern colonial
epistemology, but a decolonial (and not either a "deconstruction"), which
means a delinking from the rules of the game (e.g., the decolonization of
the self-fashioned narrative of "modernity." Hence,
the mind, in Ngugi Wa Th'iongo's vocabulary) in which deconstruction itself and all the "posts-" for sure are
Delinking doesn't mean to be "outside" of either

modernity or Christian, Liberal, Capitalist, and Marxist
hegemony but to disengage from the naturalized assumptions
that make of these four macronarratives "une pensee unique," to use Ignacio
Ramonet's expression.2 The decolonial shift begins by unveiling the
imperial presuppositions that maintain a universal idea of
caught.
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humanity and of human being that serves as a model and point

of arrival and by constantly underscoring the fact that oppressed and racialized subjects do not care
and are not fighting for "human rights" (based on an imperial idea of humanity) but to regain the "human
dignity" (based on a decolonial idea of humanity) that has and continues to be taken away from them by
the imperial rhetoric of modernity (e.g., white, Eurocentered, heterosexual, and Christian/secular).
PLAN: THE UNITED STATES FEDERAL GOVERNMENT SHOULD

SUBSTANTIALLY DEVELOP ITS EXPLORATION OF THE OCEAN
WE MUST EXPLORE EVERY INSTANCE OF COLONIAL
EXPLORATION THROUGH HISTORICAL ANALYSIS IN ORDER TO
ENGAGE IN A DE-COLONIAL THINKING THAT SHIFTS THE WAY
WE ENGAGE WITH REAL WORLD ISSUES. THIS EPISTEMIC
DISOBEDIENCE ALLOWS A REFRAIMING OF INTERACTION WITH
THE OCEAN.
Mignolo (Professor of Literature in Duke University, Joint Appointments in Cultural Anthropology and
Romance Studies) 2012
Walter, Epistemic Disobedience and the Decolonial Option: A
Manifesto, Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 6263, NDW //DDI13
We could continue the argument by including Mahatma Gandhi among the figures who are central to the
decolonial turn. To mention him here is important for the following reason: Cugoano and Gandhi are united,
at distinct points on the planet, by the British Empire. Waman Puma and Cugoano are united by the
continuity of Western European imperialisms in America. We could continue with Frantz Fanon, and connect
him to Cugoano through the imperial wound of the Africans and also through the imperial complicity
between Spain, England, and France (in spite of their imperial conflicts). With this, I would like to highlight
the genealogy of decolonial thinking is structured in

the planetary space of colonial/imperial expansion, contrary to
the genealogy of European modernity that is structured in the
temporal trajectory of a reduced space, from Greece to Rome, to Western
Europe and to the United States . The common element between Waman
Puma, Cugoano, Gandhi, and Fanon is the wound inflicted by
the colonial difference (e.g., the colonial wound). The decolonial
turn (i.e., the epistemic disobedience) of Waman Puma and of Cugoano took
place on the horizon of monarchies, prior to the emergence of
the modern (bourgeois) state and the emergence of the three secular imperial
ideologies: conservatism, liberalism, and socialism/Marxism.27 They opened up the
decolonial option, and on the horizon of both, theology was the
queen of knowledge. A second part of this manifesto (in progress) explores the decolonial
the following:
horizon (Gandhi, Cabral, Du Bois, Fanon, Anzalda, Indigenous social movements in Bolivia and Ecuador,
Afro social movements in Colombia and Ecuador, the World Social Forum and the Social Forum of the
Americas, etc.) on the horizon of the imperial modern state .
The genealogy of
decolonial thinking is pluri-versal (not uni-versal). As such, each knot on
the web of this genealogy is a point of de-linking and opening
that re-introduces languages, memories, economies, social
organizations, and at least double subjectivities: the splendor and the
miseries of the imperial legacy, and the indelible footprint of
what existed that has been converted into the colonial wound;
in the degradation of humanity, in the inferiority of the
pagans, the primitives, the under-developed, the non-
10
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democratic. Our present situation asks, demands a decolonial

thinking that articulates genealogies scattered throughout the
planet and offers other economic, political, social, subjective
modalities. This process is in progress and we see it every day, in spite of the bad news that
arrives from the Middle East, from Indonesia, from Katrina, and from the interior war in Washington.
ACTS OF EPISTEMIC DISOBEDIENCE UNCOVER THE INVISIBLE

VOILENCE OF MODERNITY AND CREATE SPACE FOR
ALTERNATIVE PERSPECTIVES AND ETHICAL ENGAGEMENT.
BEFORE WE DIRECTLY ENGAGE WITH OCEANS WE MUST
SITUATE OURSELVES ETHICALLY.
Mignolo (Professor of Literature in Duke University, Joint Appointments in Cultural Anthropology and
Romance Studies Walter, Epistemic Disobedience and the Decolonial Option: A Manifesto,
Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 45-46, NDW //DDI13)
2012
But the basic formulation of decolonial delinking (e.g., desprendimiento) was advanced by Anbal Quijano
in his ground-breaking article Colonialidad y modernidad/racionalidad (1991) [Coloniality and
modernity/rationality]. The argument was that, on the one hand ,
an analytic of the limits

of Eurocentrism (as a hegemonic structure of knowledge and
beliefs) is needed. But that analytic was considered necessary rather
than sufficient. It was necessary, Quijano asserted, desprenderse de las vinculaciones de
la racionalidad-modernidad con la colonialidad, en primer trmino, y en definitiva con todo poder no
constituido en la decisin libre de gentes libres It
is necessary to extricate
oneself from the linkages between rationality/modernity and
coloniality, first of all, and definitely from all power which is not
constituted by free decisions made by free people].4 Desprenderse means
epistemic de-linking or, in other words, epistemic disobedience. Epistemic disobedience
leads us to decolonial options as a set of projects that have in
common the effects experienced by all the inhabitants of the
globe that were at the receiving end of global designs to
colonize the economy (appropriation of land and natural
resources), authority (management by the Monarch, the State, or the Church), and
police and military enforcement (coloniality of power), to colonize
knowledges (languages, categories of thoughts, belief
systems, etc.) and beings (subjectivity). Delinking is then necessary
because there is no way out of the coloniality of power from
within Western (Greek and Latin) categories of thought. Consequently, de-linking
implies epistemic disobedience rather than the constant search for newness (e.g.,
as if Michel Foucaults concept of racism and power were better or more appropriate because they are
newerthat is, post-modernwithin the chronological history or archaeology of European ideas).
Epistemic disobedience takes us to a different place, to a different

beginning (not in Greece, but in the responses to the conquest and colonization of America
and the massive trade of enslaved Africans), to spatial sites of struggles and
building rather than to a new temporality within the same space (from Greece, to
Rome, to Paris, to London, to Washington DC). I will explore the opening up of these spacesthe spatial
paradigmatic breaks of epistemic disobediencein Waman Puma de Ayala and Ottabah Cugoano. The
basic argument (almost a syllogism) that I will develop here is the following :
constitutive of modernity
if coloniality is
since the salvationist rhetoric of modernity presupposes the
oppressive and condemnatory logic of coloniality (from there come the damns of Fanon),
then this
11
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oppressive logic produces an energy of discontent, of distrust,

of release within those who react against imperial violence.
This energy is translated into decolonial projects that, as a last resort,
are also constitutive of modernity. Modernity is a three-headed hydra, even
though it only reveals one head: the rhetoric of salvation and
progress. Coloniality, one of whose facets is poverty and the
propagation of AIDS in Africa, does not appear in the rhetoric of modernity
as its necessary counterpart, but rather as something that
emanates from it. For example, the Millennium Plan of the United
Nations headed by Kofi Anan, and the Earth Institute at Columbia University headed by
Jeffrey Sachs, work in collaboration to end poverty (as the title of Sachs book
announces).5 But, while they question the unfortunate consequences of
modernity, never for a moment is the ideology of modernity or
the black pits that hide its rhetoric ever questioned: the
consequences of the very nature of the capitalist economyby which
such ideology is supportedin its various facets since the mercantilism of the sixteenth century, free
trade of the following centuries, the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, and the technological
revolution of the twentieth century. On the other hand, despite all the debate in the media about the war
against terrorism, on one side, and all types of uprisings, of protests and social movements, it is never
the logic of coloniality that hides beneath the rhetoric

of modernity necessarily generates the irreducible energy of
humiliated, vilified, forgotten, or marginalized human beings.
Decoloniality is therefore the energy that does not allow the
operation of the logic of coloniality nor believes the fairy tales
of the rhetoric of modernity. Therefore, decoloniality has a varied
range of manifestationssome undesirable, such as those that Washington today
describes as terroristsand decolonial thinking is, then, thinking that
de-links and opens (de-linking and opening in the title come from here) to the
possibilities hidden (colonized and discredited, such as the traditional, barbarian, primitive,
mystic, etc.) by the modern rationality that is mounted and enclosed by
categories of Greek, Latin, and the six modern imperial European languages.
suggested that
12
(De)Coloniality AFF
2AC Ext: Colonialism Root

Cause of Violence
EXPROPRIATION LEADS TO VIOLENCE, HISTORY PROVES
Sargeson 11/7/13
(Violence as Development: land expropriation and Chinas urbanization,
Sally Sargeson, independent writer focused on Chinese history with 2 other publications, 7 November,
2013, Accessed on 6/25/14, http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/cap-events/2013-11-07/violence-developmentland-expropriation-and-chinas-urbanization#.U6pjXhapqagJWH)
Explanations of the violence occurring during land

expropriation in China predominantly centre on competing
actors efforts to capture, redistribute or defend income from
land development, or violence as a differentiator of political
ecology and a catalyst of villagers politicization. These
explanations assume a) instrumental antagonism between rational, unitary collective actors
that violence is of limited temporal duration and spatial and
social reach. To conceptualize violence in a way that is not
and b)
solely instrumental, or epiphenomenal and discrete,
I build on
Escobars proposition that violence is constitutive of development to argue for an alternative view:
Violence authorizes and constitutes an inclusive, ongoing project of urban development in China. It
authorizes development, because the rural spaces surrounding urban centres are characterized as
institutionally insecure, disorderly, economically under-productive and incompatible with urban modernity .
It constitutes development, because it involves an ideology of

urban improvement, the government-directed transformation
of property rights and land use, the reorganization of
governing organizations and changes in villagers political and
economic subjectivity. The concluding section of the seminar
briefly demonstrates the generalizability and analytical and
methodological utility of the concept of violence as
development by applying it to three most different cases of
land expropriation in China: Wukan and the urban villages of
Guangzhou, in Guangdong province, and Zhejiangs Tongxiang
COLONIALITY ENSURES A PARADIGM OF VIOLENCE

AND WAR. THIS VIOLENT NATURE OF
COLONIALITY CREATES A NEVER ENDING
OPPRESIVE US-THEM DICHOTOMY.
Nelson Maldonado-Torres, associate professor of comparative literature at
Rutgers, 8 [Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity, p. 237-8] //DDI13
13
(De)Coloniality AFF
In this work I have attempted to make explicit the subtle complicities between dominant epistemological and
anthropological ideals and the exercise of violence. The works of Levinas, Fanon, and Dussel oppose what I have
called a paradigm of violence and war. This dominant paradigm is

characterized by making invisible or insignificant the
constitutive force of inter human contact for the formation of
subjectivity, of knowledge, and of human reality in general.
The relation with objects, whether practical or theoretical,
takes primacy over the relation between human beings. The
first motivation for this way of thinking is to attain knowledge,
truth, comprehension, or adequate understanding. The self is
thereby taken to be primarily a monad, a transcendental ego,
or an autonomous and free human being for whom the relation
with the Other tends to represent only an undesirable detour
in the project of adequately representing the world. The self
becomes allergic to the Other, and the intersubjective contact
is then accounted for either in epistemological categories or in
concepts tied to a theoretical approach. This philosophical
anthropology ends up legitimating the superiority of theory
over praxis and contemplation over liberation. One of my central points is that
once a civilization begins to conceive the humanity of the human in

these terms it will either commit violence with good conscience,
find itself incapable of opposing violence, or legitimize ideals

of peace that are complicit with violence. I trace dominant themes surrounding the
discussion of the crisis or so-called malaise of Europe back to the allegiance of Western civilization to practices that obey
a skewed vision of the human. Such a vision combines

claims for autonomy and freedom with the production of the
color line or the systematic differentiation between groups
taken as the norm of the human and others seen as the
exception to it. The so-called discovery of the New World
became a crucial point in the establishment of this vision: it
oriented Western humanism in a radically dehumanizing
direction. From then on, Western humanism argued for the glory of
Man and the misery of particular groups of human beings
simultaneously. Indeed, Man became the most glorious as he was
able to claim relative independence from God and superiority
over the supposedly less than human others at the same time.
The relationship between (imperial) Man and God has been
ambiguous for the most part, but not so the relation between
Man and his inferior sub-others. It is as if the production of the
"less than human" functioned as the anchor of a process of
autonomy and self-assertion. The paradigm of war, at first reconciled to
and to some extent promoted by imperial Christendom, legitimates war against God,
nature, and, particularly, the less than human others. The relationship
with God and nature, however, can vary. What typically remains constant for the
warring paradigm is the assertion of the color line. The
distinction between God, Man, and the non-human precedes
the reduction of subjectivity to a totality or its naturalization.
the logics opened up by
14
(De)Coloniality AFF
And it was the colonized and the modern slave who

experienced the systematic negation of her and his
subjectivity, long before positivism, naturalism, or
philosophies of history subsumed subjectivity in larger
frameworks or anonymous mechanisms. In modernity, the
racialized others take the place of enemies in a perpetual war
out of which modern ideals of freedom and autonomy get their
proper sense. This is the foundation of modernity as a
paradigm of war and the source of many of its pathologies,
crises, and evils.
15
(De)Coloniality AFF
2AC Ext: Rhetoric Proceeds

Action
RHETORIC IS KEY TO ACTION. RHETORIC INFLUENCES
THE DECISIONS THAT ARE MADE BY
IDNIVIDUALS. BY UNDERSTANDING THE
EPISTOMOLOGY OF THE MODERN, WE CAN
LEARN HOW TO COMBAT OUR CURRENT
IDEALOGY THAT JUSTIFIES COLONIALISM.
Grosfoguel in 2005
[Ramon, associate professor in the department of ethnic studies at the

university of California at Berkeley, Critical Globalization Studies, edited by Richard Appelbaum and William
Robinson 288-89 ]
the history of the moderncolonial capitalist patriarchal world-system

has privileged the culture, knowledge, and epistemology produced by
the West (Spivak, 1988; Mignolo, 2000). No culture in the world remained untouched by European
modernity. There is no absolute outside to this system. The monologism and mono-topic
global design of the West relates to other cultures and peoples
from a position of superiority and is deaf toward the cosmologies and
epistemologies of the non-Western world. The imposition of
Christianity in order to convert the so-called savages and barbarians in the
sixteenth century, followed by the imposition of "white man's burden" and
"civilizing mission" in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the imposition of
the "developmentalist project" in the twentieth century and, more recently, the
imperial project of military interventions under the rhetoric of democracy and human
rights in the twenty-first century, have all been imposed by militarism and
violence. Two responses to the Eurocentric colonial imposition are Third
World nationalisms and fundamentalisms. Nationalism provides
Eurocentric solutions to a Eurocentric global problem. It reproduces an internal
So far,
coloniality of power within each nation-state and reifies the nation-state as the privileged location of social
Struggles above and below the nation-state are not

considered in nationalist political strategies. Moreover, nationalist
responses to global capitalism reinforce the nation-state as the political
institutional form per excellence of the moderncolonial capitalist patriarchal worldsystem. In this sense, nationalism is complicit with Eurocentric thinking
and political structures. On the other hand, Third World fundamentalisms of
different kinds respond with an essentialist "pure outside space" or
"absolute exteriority" to modernity. They are antimodern forces that reproduce the binary
change (Grosfoguel, 1996).
oppositions of Eurocentric thinking. They respond to the imposition of Eurocentric modernity with an
antimodernity that is as hierarchical, authoritarian, and antidemocratic as the former.
A plausible
solution to the Eurocentric vs. fundamentalist dilemma is what Walter

Mignolo, following Chicana thinkers such as Gloria Anzaldua (1987), calls "critical border
16
(De)Coloniality AFF
thinking" (Mignolo, 2000). Critical border thinking is the epistemic response

of the subaltern to the Eurocentric project of modernity. Instead of
rejecting the institutions of modernity and retreat into a fundamentalist
absolutism, border epistemologies redefines modernity from the
cosmologies and epistemologies of the subaltern, located in the
oppressed and exploited side of the colonial difference. What border
thinking produces is a redefinition of citizenship, democracy, human
rights, and humanity, beyond the narrow definitions imposed by
European modernity. Border thinking is not antimodern; it is the
modern response of the subaltern to Eurocentric modernity
17
(De)Coloniality AFF
2AC Ext: Alt Epistemic

Disobedience
EPISTEMIC DISOBEDIENCE IS A DELINKING PARADIGM
THAT SEPERATES INDIVIDUALS FROM COLONIAL
EPISTOMOLOGY AND MODERNITY BY RE-EVALUTING
HEGEMONIC RELATIONSHIPS. DELINKING AS A MODE OF
THINKING, OPENS UP VARIOUS POSSIBILITIES TO
ETHICALLY ENGAGE WITH OCEANS.
Mignolo (Professor of Literature in Duke University, Joint Appointments in Cultural
Anthropology and Romance Studies) 2012
Walter, Epistemic Disobedience and the Decolonial Option: A Manifesto,
Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World,
45-46, NDW //DDI13
But the basic formulation of decolonial delinking (e.g., desprendimiento) was
advanced by Anbal Quijano in his ground-breaking article Colonialidad y
modernidad/racionalidad (1991) [Coloniality and modernity/rationality]. The
argument was that, on the one hand, an analytic of the limits of
Eurocentrism (as a hegemonic structure of knowledge and beliefs) is
needed. But that analytic was considered necessary rather than sufficient . It
was necessary, Quijano asserted, desprenderse de las vinculaciones de la
racionalidad-modernidad con la colonialidad, en primer trmino, y en definitiva
con todo poder no constituido en la decisin libre de gentes libres [ It is
necessary to extricate oneself from the linkages between

rationality/modernity and coloniality, first of all, and definitely from
all power which is not constituted by free decisions made by free
people].4 Desprenderse means epistemic de-linking or, in other words,
epistemic disobedience. Epistemic disobedience leads us to decolonial
options as a set of projects that have in common the effects
experienced by all the inhabitants of the globe that were at the
receiving end of global designs to colonize the economy
(appropriation of land and natural resources), authority (management by the
Monarch, the State, or the Church), and police and military enforcement
(coloniality of power), to colonize knowledges (languages, categories of
thoughts, belief systems, etc.) and beings (subjectivity). Delinking is then
necessary because there is no way out of the coloniality of power
from within Western (Greek and Latin) categories of thought.
Consequently, de-linking implies epistemic disobedience rather than
the constant search for newness (e.g., as if Michel Foucaults concept of racism
and power were better or more appropriate because they are newerthat
is, post-modernwithin the chronological history or archaeology of European
ideas). Epistemic disobedience takes us to a different place, to a
different beginning (not in Greece, but in the responses to the conquest
and colonization of America and the massive trade of enslaved Africans), to
18
(De)Coloniality AFF
spatial sites of struggles and building rather than to a new temporality

within the same space (from Greece, to Rome, to Paris, to London, to
Washington DC). I will explore the opening up of these spacesthe spatial
paradigmatic breaks of epistemic disobediencein Waman Puma de Ayala and
Ottabah Cugoano. The basic argument (almost a syllogism) that I will develop
here is the following: if coloniality is constitutive of modernity since
the salvationist rhetoric of modernity presupposes the oppressive and
condemnatory logic of coloniality (from there come the damns of Fanon), then
this oppressive logic produces an energy of discontent, of

distrust, of release within those who react against imperial
violence. This energy is translated into decolonial projects that, as
a last resort, are also constitutive of modernity. Modernity is a threeheaded hydra, even though it only reveals one head: the rhetoric
of salvation and progress. Coloniality, one of whose facets is
poverty and the propagation of AIDS in Africa, does not appear in the
rhetoric of modernity as its necessary counterpart, but rather as
something that emanates from it. For example, the Millennium
Plan of the United Nations headed by Kofi Anan, and the Earth Institute at
Columbia University headed by Jeffrey Sachs, work in collaboration to end
poverty (as the title of Sachs book announces).5 But, while they question
the unfortunate consequences of modernity, never for a moment
is the ideology of modernity or the black pits that hide its
rhetoric ever questioned: the consequences of the very nature of the
capitalist economyby which such ideology is supportedin its various facets
since the mercantilism of the sixteenth century, free trade of the following
centuries, the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, and the
technological revolution of the twentieth century. On the other hand, despite all
the debate in the media about the war against terrorism, on one side, and all
types of uprisings, of protests and social movements, it is never suggested that
the logic of coloniality that hides beneath the rhetoric of
modernity necessarily generates the irreducible energy of

humiliated, vilified, forgotten, or marginalized human beings.
Decoloniality is therefore the energy that does not allow the
operation of the logic of coloniality nor believes the fairy tales of
the rhetoric of modernity. Therefore, decoloniality has a varied
range of manifestationssome undesirable, such as those that Washington
today describes as terroristsand decolonial thinking is, then,
thinking that de-links and opens (de-linking and opening in the title come
from here) to the possibilities hidden (colonized and discredited, such as
the traditional, barbarian, primitive, mystic, etc.) by the modern rationality
that is mounted and enclosed by categories of Greek, Latin, and the six
modern imperial European languages.
19
(De)Coloniality AFF

Cause of Genocide
COLONIALISM IS THE ROOT CAUSE OF COLONIALISM.
COLONIALISM STRIPS BODIES OF THEIR INTRENSIC VALUE
AND MARKS THEM IN TERMS OF UTILATRIAN PURPOSE.
ONCE THIS PROCESS OF DEVALUATION HAS HAPPENED
AND MADE CERTAIN BODIES EXPENDABLE, EXTERMINATION
OF THESE BODIES IS INEVITABLE.
Mignolo and Tlostanova 9 [Walter D., Doctor of semiotics and literary theory, prof of
decoloniality at Duke University, Madina, Doctor of literature and postcolonial studies, professor at Peoples
Friendship University of Russia, Times for re-thinking, re-learning and networking, February, Interview,
http://kristinabozic.wordpress.com/decolonization-interview/]
What if any is the difference between colonization and genocide? Prof Mignolo: There is a difference,
genocide is a
consequence of colonialism. Another question is can this be claimed for all genocides? Prof
Tlostanova: Holocaust, for example. Prof Mignolo: Ooh. Lets start the other way round. One of the
features of coloniality is its connection to economy based on
dispensability of human life, which is seen as a commodity: you sell
sugar or you sell slaves. Genocide means we do not care. Therefore,
genocide is possible because certain human lives are dispensable .
though I never really thought of it. The first thing that comes to mind is that
Iraqi lives are more dispensable than American lives. Holocaust, however was based on stripping human
life of legal rights, as Hannah Arendt writes. So it was not about the dispensability of human life in terms of
For white European

bourgeoisie Christians the really horrible part of holocaust was not
the crime itself but the fact that it was committed against white
people using the technique Europe learned in its colonies. Economic
dispensability of human life that build the system of the economy
liberals and Marxists call capitalism came back on the level of the
state. Jews were internally inferior. I will not say that all genocides have been a consequence of
economy but it presented bareness of life in relation to the state and law.
coloniality, but I would make these two connections. The third one could be Rwanda. There
colonialists, especially of the second wave after the Enlightenment

created the idea of national identity. Before there existed
communities of faith, not of birth. Genocide there was therefore a
consequence of conditions colonialists left behind . We could think of other
genocides How can we think Stalins genocide? Prof Tlostanova: I was just thinking about it. It was not
framed in racial terms, though many scholars today question this. They ask if Stalins genocides were
connected with peoples ethnic origins and race or only with class. There was no racial discourse in Soviet
Union but crimes were often committed on racial grounds nobody has ever put Russian in jail for
nationalistic reasons while all other nationals were imprisoned, if their belief in the Soviet idea was not
So
there is the underlying notion of dispensability of human life as an
economic category, while genocide on the level of the state also
includes the idea of elimination of an enemy. Be it Hitlers Aryan
state or Stalins communist state. Prof Tlostanova: But Hitler tried to
strong enough. I think it was based on race although it was masked as a class fight. Prof Mignolo:
20
(De)Coloniality AFF
make Jews economically efficient as well. In concentration camps

there was the McDonalds logic before Jews were killed they took
everything of use and value from them clothes, hair, teeth Stalin
made enemies build things, sometimes useless. They have built the
Moscow State university. What about the genocide as a tool for eradication of culture
or religion? Prof Mignolo: I think this in included in the notion of dispensability of the human life be it
Another thing is if these are used to present the

enemy you want to eradicate. Islam or the criminal inside the
society, or the Communists in the US during the Cold War. There
seem to be two types of genocide one motivated by economics
and here we do not have the notion of an enemy it is just a tool.
organs or something else.
Prof Tlostanova: You do not kill on purpose, it is a consequence of use. Prof Mignolo: Yes, you have a horse
to work or you have a slave to work. He is not your enemy on the contrary, it is useful it is a tool. You
buy it, sell it, use it. A different kind of genocide is when you have to eradicate. However, eradication does
not necessarily imply genocide. In colonial Peru there was eradication of ideology. They did not kill, they
That is why I think

coloniality is wider and deeper than genocide. You can leave people
alive but you wipe everything out of their minds to put something
else there. In a way this is also a genocide you leave them their
physical lives but you take away their inside Prof Mignolo: We call it
epistemic lobotomy. Now that I think of, the cleaning of ideology
might had been a fore-runner of Hitlers work. Except that Indians of
the time were not the menace for Christian theologians like Jews
were for Hitler. Christians are very clear of who their enemies are at that moment in history it
just converted to Christianity. They wanted to conquer souls. Prof Tlostanova:
was Islam and Protestants. Catholics controlled the game but they wanted a dangerous enemy eager to
destroy them this was also the Bush discourse after the 9/11. Prof Tlostanova: This is a very American
discourse. It is the only way how to keep America together and form its national identity. To be together
against someone. In Europe I think there is bigger common base of religion, roots, culture
GENOCIDE IS A NECESSARY PROCESS OF COLONIALISM BY

WIPING OUT NATIVE POPULATIONS AND COLONIZING
FOREIGN SPACES.
Ahmed 4/11
(Colonial Dynamics of Genocide Imperialism, Identity and Mass
Violence, Journal of Conlict Transformation & Security, Dr. Nafeez
Mosaddeq Ahmed, British author, an investigative journalist, and an
international security scholar, Accessed on 6/26/14, April 2011)
Conventional definitions of genocide, in particular the United
Nations Convention standard, are state-oriented and primordialist.
Genocide is seen primarily as the outcome of extremist ideology
linked to undemocratic modern bureaucratic nation-states, whose
homogenizing structures generate conflict with pre-existing minority
groups. The UN definition of genocide imposes unwarranted politicized constraints on Lemkins wider
original sociological conceptualization of genocide as a colonial form. For Lemkin , perpetrators of
genocide could be states as well as decentralized and-dispersed
groups such as settler-colonists. The need for a return to Lemkins Historical
Sociological theory of genocide, now increasingly recognized among
genocide scholars, demonstrates not merely that specific cases of
European imperial violence can potentially be understood as
21
(De)Coloniality AFF
genocidal, but that this is precisely because genocide can best be
understood as an extreme form of colonization.
Several scholars have

now made a strong case that while this does not mean that all colonialism is genocidal, it is unequivocally
colonial dynamics. These colonial

dynamics emerge due to the radicalization of identity politics in
clear that genocides are comprised of distinctively
the context of historically specific socio-political contestations

leading to major social crises, which drive the construction of
new bifurcated inside and outside group identities. This
speaks to the need for a new research agenda in Genocide Studies,
focusing specifically on the dynamics that link socio-political crisis
with exclusionary identity constructions and regressive political
programs, which legitimize mass violence. By identifying how and
when social crises can lead to the Otherization of communities, it
may become possible to develop more robust early warning systems
for genocide prevention.
COLONIZATION OF THE AMERICAS SHOWS THE GENOCIDAL

LOGIC OF COLONIALISM
Wolfe 06 (Patrick, La Trobe Research Fellow in History at La Trobe University, Australia

and author of Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and
Poetics of an Ethnographic Event , "Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native",
hawaii.edu, December 2006, pg 3,
http://www.hawaii.edu/amst/pwolfe/PWolfeArticles/PWolfe_EliminationNative.pdf, CH)
The logic of elimination not only refers to the summary

liquidation of Indigenous people, though it includes that. In
common with genocide as Raphael Lemkin characterized it,6 settler colonialism
has both negative and positive dimensions. Negatively, it strives for the
dissolution of native societies. Positively, it erects a new colonial
society on the expropriated land baseas I put it, settler colonizers
come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event. 7 In its positive
aspect, elimination is an organizing principal of settler-colonial society
rather than a one-off (and superseded) occurrence. The positive outcomes of the
logic of elimination can include officially encouraged
miscegenation, the breaking-down of native title into alienable
individual freeholds, native citizenship, child abduction, religious
conversion, resocialization in total institutions such as
missions or boarding schools, and a whole range of cognate
biocultural assimilations. All these strategies, including
frontier homicide, are characteristic of settler colonialism. Some
of them are more controversial in genocide studies than others.
22
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Cause of Warming
IGNORING THE BASIS OF COLONIALISM IN THE CLIMATE CRISIS
DOOMS MANAGERIAL SOLUTIONS TO SERIAL POLICY
FAILURE EPISTEMIC ENGAGEMENT THROUGH DELINKING
IS CRUCIAL TO SOLVE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS
Manuel-Navarrete 10 [David, Research Staff, Kings College, London. BA, Environmental
Sciences, ecological economics, and geography. Power, realism, and the ideal of human emancipation in a
climate of change WIREs Climate Change Vol. 1, November/December 2010]
Climate change is often portrayed as a management and policy

problem.10 This positioning outside the evolution of sociopolitical
structures has the advantage of discussing mitigation and
adaptation as unproblematically carried out from, and by, these
structures, without challenging them in any significant fashion. This
implies an abstraction of climate change as an external threat to
social stability, and an object of study that can then be elegantly
compartmentalized into different types of risk. In addition, mitigation
and adaptation can be neatly defined as strategies to reduce overall
threat and cope with risks so that humanitys development can
continue unaffected. Leaving the messiness of politics outside the equation allows for the
emphasis on technologies, targets, indexes, accounting schemes, and strategies that can be translated
into explicit policies or actions. The human dimension of climate change can then be studied by singlingout the parts of the social fabric that need to be adapted or proofed, so that the system as a whole,
this simplistic
view fails to acknowledge the increasing penetration of climate
change into all the dimensions of human life .11 In fact, a growing body
of empirical work reveals a more complicated picture than that
portrayed by apolitical policy approaches.12 WILL POLITICAL REALISM DO THE JOB?
A realist agenda to study climate change politics is consolidating
around the notions of global environmental governance and
regimes.13 Governance refers to the wielding of power and authority by both government institutions,
and other social actors in order to influence and enact public decisions and actions. Indeed, the notion
of governance stretches Montesquieus checks-and-balances thesis beyond the three
powers of democratic government (executive, legislative, and judiciary) to include the
role of private actors or markets, and civil society. These new
political actors are then reified as stakeholders who have particular
interests, resources, values, and cultures. Accordingly, politics can be conveniently
more or less in its current state, can weather climate challenges. Unfortunately,
represented as stakeholders negotiation and accommodation toward solving specific problems such as
emission reductions or shielding development from disasters. This approach to accounting for politics may
advocate adjustments of governance structures and the emergence of new regimes, but these
the ethical dimension

of power distribution is brought to the background, so that attention
can be directed toward goal setting, problem solving, and policy
adjustments are justified in terms of problem-solving performance. Thus,
23
(De)Coloniality AFF
outcomes. As noted above, political realism assumes a pessimistic stance of human nature.
Authority is needed to control peoples egoistic nature and prevent
the harming of others and the environment. As a consequence,
coercion, and/or legitimation through consent are preconditions for
order and security. The success of political systems is measured in terms of stability and
consensus between rulers and ruled, rather than ideals of fairness, justice, or freedom. Corruption and
oppression from rulers can be avoided through appropriate checks and balances, or good governance.
This realist position is particularly convenient in validating the liberal state, law, and the institution of
in the present historical moment, this realist

stance often leads to neoliberal economic rationalities, which are
commonly assumed to provide the basis for co-ordinating conflicting
interests in modern capitalist societies. At the core of realism is the assumption that
property as grantors of order. In fact,
society is politically in a close to equilibrium state, orbiting around a liberal democratic attractor. The
notion of an attractor evokes a sense of final destination, the end of political history toward which Western
societies perceive themselves to have been tending during the last centuries. This semi-equilibrium politics
allows for the conceptualization of power as an intrinsic quality of prototypical actors and institutions,
climate
politics can be represented as the negotiation between a given set
of social actors who, in the light of new scientific findings and
technological breakthroughs, rearrange markets, norms,
institutions, regulations, or decision-making procedures. Justice and
rather than an outcome of unstable historical processes and social struggles. As a result
fairness belong to the policy process, rather than being intrinsic to social structures. Thus, unrealistic
idealist aspirations for universal justice or emancipation can be reoriented toward pragmatic targets such
as the implementation of transparent, inclusive, and accountable policies, even if carried out in a context
of inequality and mere representative democracy. The staging of international climate negotiations is a
Developed countries, developing countries, corporations,

scientists, and nongovernmental organizations are to follow preassigned roles and bargain our way out, without even discussing the
possibility of altering power or pursuing any form of social
transformation. Instead, the debate is centered on national emission targets, technological
case in point.
incentives, setting a price for carbon, and the transfer of economic resources to compensate those who will
bear the highest costs.
24
(De)Coloniality AFF
2AC Ext:
Development=Colonialism
THE DISCOURSE OF DEVELOPMENT ENCOURAGES
COLONIALISM. HISTORICALLY DEVELOPMENT
HAS BEEN USED TO CREAT COLONIAL
CONDITIONS THAT PERPETUATE VIOLENCE SUCH
AS DEHUMANIZATION BY ERADICATING
DIFFERENCE AND EXPLOITING RESOURCES.
Nayar,
Jayan. "SYMPOSIUM: RE-FRAMING INTERNATIONAL LAW FOR THE 21ST CENTURY: Orders of
Inhumanity." Hein Online SW 9.2

Law
(1999):
n. pag. Web. 26 June 2014. University of Warwick School of
Since the demise of the colonial legitimization of the "civilizing" mission,

"development" has come to express the contemporary challenge of bringing
the benefits of "civilization" and human progress to the populations of the world.
It is, it appears, the primary purpose of human endeavor to be
collectively undertaken by all and sundry within the context of a humanityembracing, "new," post-colonial, "world-order"-- another "new beginning." Through
many ups and downs, through many failures and too few successes, the spirit of development as a
great human cause has been kept alive. Now we must do everything
we can to 'turn that spirit into practical, visible progress for people in
Africa, and people everywhere. Development is everyone's job. No more fundamental cause exists today. I believe
that we stand at the start of a time of unique achievement.19 So many possible audiences stand
to be identified by this appeal of the former Secretary-General of the United Nations for the
"job" of "development." To the leaders of the world is made the plea to
revitalize efforts toward the implementation of development initiatives. To the doubters
of the "development" project is made the reassurance that now, despite the "many ups and downs," the spirit and vision
of development still rings true and firm. To himself and his staff of the development-related institutions of the UN, perhaps
the audience for which the statement is truly intended, is made the reassertion that this work of development is an
They, the development workers, have the historic role of

ensuring the realization of this vision of human progress, and so much futility and
important one.
even failure may be erased or forgotten through a renewed commitment to carry on persistently with their tasks. All this
expression of angst and hope is, of course, nothing new. Like a social ritual played out with consistent regularity, we have
become familiar with these gatherings of "developmentalists," at which they administer healthy measures of both
admonishments for past failures and encouragements for future hope. And like in all rituals, processes of "remembering,"
which are the public face of proceedings, are accompanied by the equally important processes of "forgetting." Repeated
and remembered are the "failures," the commitments to "humanity," the conditions of suffering that are deemed
"intolerable," and the articulations of hope in future "action." Ignored and forgotten are the violence of the failures, the
fraudulence of the commitments, the processes of inflicted suffering deemed necessary, and the articulations of despair
about past actions. Still, the ritual performs a regenerative purpose. It recasts anew the project of development with all its
civilizational importance and reassures its practitioners of their historic mission to "order" society. But what is the
message given to the "victims" of development-those who, although intended as the beneficiaries of this universal
project, have had to suffer the "many failures and too few successes" as these rituals are enacted? 20 To them is made a
plea for patience and a rearticulation of a vision for tomorrow. For them, however, perhaps a different experience of
developmental (mis)orderings persists, one which bears a striking resemblance to the earlier phase of colonial ordering.
While once colonialism was blatant in its dehumanizing of social relationships, notwithstanding the claims of the "civilizing
25
(De)Coloniality AFF
dehumanization takes place under the acceptable, if not

desirable, guise of globalized development. The "poor" has come to replace
the "savage/native;" the "expert consultant," the "missionary;" "training seminars," mass "baptizing;" the
mission," now that same
handphone in the pocket, the cross on the altar. But some things-the foreigner's degree, attire, consumer items, etc.don't change. And what of the "comprador elites," that band of minority mercenaries who symbolized to the colonialist all
that was good about what it meant to be the servile "civilized," who served as the faithful mouthpieces of the master?
Regenerated by these
contemporary ideological weapons of the desired human condition, the
processes of ordering, of creating orders of inhumanity, carry on with violence intact.
Contrary to assumptions of a lack of order and non-inclusion, many of the "conditions" of human
suffering that justify developmental interventions result from a very
considerable amount of ordering and forced inclusion. Processes of ordering, as
coercive command, are visible in the perpetuation and exacerbation of food
insecurity resulting from structures instituted during the colonial period
and carried through to the globalizing practices of international agribusiness (the globalization of hunger),21 the impact of the invasion of transnational
corporations on the environmental and social fabric of communities
(the globalization of ecocide),22 the societal disintegration resulting from structural adjustment
policies and the imperatives of the transnational economic system (the
globalization of impoverishment),23 and the resulting destruction of
social diversity through the homogenization of "pop" and consumer culture
(the globalization of social alienation). These have all contributed to the marginalization
of populations following half a century of (violent) "development."24 How many more
Today, many go by the names of "government functionaries" and "entrepreneurs."
"new beginnings" of "development" are necessary before the embodied "world" that is the result of all this ordering is
After five decades of "development," the

following description by Frantz Fanon of the colonial condition still rings true of the
contemporary "post-colonial," "globalized" neighborhood, and of its inhabitants:
recognized as a familiar one from earlier times?
The settler's town is a strongly-built town, all made of stone and steel. It is a brightly-lit town; the streets are covered with
asphalt, and the garbage cans swallow all the leavings, unseen, unknown and hardly thought about. The settler's feet
are never visible, except perhaps in the sea; but there you're never close enough to see them. His feet are protected by
strong shoes although the streets of his town are clean and even, with no holes or stones. The settler's town is a well-fed
town, an easy-going town; its belly is always full of good things.... The town belonging to the colonized people, or at least
the native town, . . . is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or
how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how. It is a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other,
and their huts are built one on top of the other. The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of
coal, of light. The native town is a crouching village, a town on its knees, a town wallowing in the mire. It is a town of
niggers and dirty arabs. The look that the native turns on the settler's town is a look of lust, a look of envy; it expresses
his dreams of possession-all manner of possession: to sit at the settler's table, to sleep in the settler's bed, with his wife if
possible. The colonized man is an envious man. And this the settler knows very well; when their glances meet he
there is no native
who does not dream at least once a day of setting himself up in the
settler's place.25
ascertains bitterly, always on the defensive, "They want to take our place." It is true, for
26
(De)Coloniality AFF
2AC Ext:
Development=Deforestatio
n
COLONIALISM CAUSED DEFORESTATION THROUGH
EXPLOITATIVE POLICIES AS IT RELATES TO
CLIMATE CHANGE AND GLOBAL WARMING. FOR
EXAMPLE, THE MADAGASCARS DOMESTIC
ECONOMY HAS BEEN TAILORED TOWARDS
CONSUMPTION FOR WESTERN EXPANSION AND
BENEFIT.
WRM 03
WRM is the World Rainforest Movement, Madagascar: Colonialism as the historical root cause of
deforestation, (WRM), 6-25-14 http://www.wrm.org.uy/oldsite/bulletin/66/Madagascar.html#top
Madagascar's historic problem of deforestation can be linked

to the detrimental policies of the colonial state in terms of land
use and agriculture. The deforestation problem in Madagascar
began when it was annexed as a French colony in 1896. An
uncertain political climate and famine followed this annexation ,
and many of the Malagasy fled to the woods for survival. These farmers started practicing the
method of shifting cultivation as a means of survival. Madagascar's domestic economy,
from the beginning of colonial times, has been geared toward export
promotion. Exports consisted primarily of coffee, but rice and beef were sold
abroad as well. Coffee was originally planted on only the east coast, but expanded across
the island when it became apparent that producers were able to generate large profits.
Because of this expansion of coffee, the island's economic development was uneven. Rice
shortages resulted as early as 1911 because of the excess demand for labor in the coffee
sector, and the nation's "food security" began to erode. Rice was also more vulnerable to
changes in the weather and cyclones, which exacerbated the shortages. Peasants that
once worked cultivating the nation's rice moved into regions where they were
able to cultivate coffee because of the higher wages. These peasants would
then clear additional land so that they could practice shifting cultivation and
generate enough food to subsist. In response to the increasing shifting cultivation, or
tavy as it is called locally, the Governor General prohibited it's practice in 1909. The state's
objective of this ban was to try and save what was left of the nation's forest as well as impose
"rational forest resource management". However, the land set aside by the state for the
nation's rice cultivation was inefficient because of soil problems. The policy was therefore
ineffective in erasing Madagascar's rice production problem. The government also thought that
the ban would give them a greater ability to collect taxes because it would be easier to locate
citizens if they were forced to remain in one place. The Malagasy interpretation of the ban was
almost entirely opposite of the state's intentions. They viewed wage work as equivalent to
enslavement and many revolts took place. Not only did the Malagasy ignore the ban, but they
illegally burned many acres of forest in protest. "The ban elevated the practice of tavy to a
27
(De)Coloniality AFF
symbol of independence and liberty from colonial rule." The Malagasy viewed shifting
cultivation as a sacred means of survival that they were taught by their ancestors. The
forest
degradation problem became even more serious when the state decided to
open up the island's forests to logging concessions in 1921. Many viewed it
as ironic that the state allowed massive clear cutting on concessions while
the ban on shifting cultivation was still in effect. More than just the claimed
lands were ruined however, because many owners clear-cut lands beyond
their concessionary limits. The Forest Service was unable to regulate the
concessions because of shortages in labor and "a lack of political will." Much
of the illegal felling of trees was completely overlooked and the fines that
were levied for violation of the permits were far lower than the actual
damages. The combination of these detrimental government policies meant
that "roughly 70% of the primary forest was destroyed in the 30 years
between 1895 and 1925". It is interesting to note that the much publicized "population
growth" issue didn't become a factor in forest degradation in Madagascar until 1940 when
vaccines were introduced that lowered the death rate. During the next 40 years the population
increased rapidly from 4.2 million to 9.2 million, and some 4 million hectares of forests were
cleared during this 40 year period, as compared to between 3 and 7 million hectares in the 40
year period from 1900 through 1940. Much of this deforestation was, however, still linked to
concessions, export promotion, and insecure land tenure, rather than on population growth in
itself. Even more interestingly, much of the process described above can be easily mirrored
with what has happened in many other former European colonies throughout the tropics,
where the historical root causes of deforestation are clearly linked to the expropriation and
exploitation of natural resources for the benefit of the colonial powers. Most of those colonies
have now become formally independent, but not much seems to have changed in the
unsustainable economic model inherited from colonial rule, which continues producing cheap
and abundant raw materials at the expense of people and their environment for the benefit of
the North.
28
(De)Coloniality AFF
2AC Ext: Coloniality destroy

society
COLONIALITY MEANS A WORLD OF ABSOLUTE
DOMINATION AND TOTAL VIOLENCE. ECONOMIC
ENGAGEMENT IS JUST ANOTHER TOOL OF
GENOCIDE UNLESS WE FIRST ADDRESS THE
BRUTALITY OF COLONIAL RELATIONSHIPS
Cesaire 55 (Aim Csaire, politician from Martinique, 1955,
Discourse on Colonialism, Discours sur le colonialism)
I see clearly what colonization has destroyed: the wonderful
Indian
civilizations - and neither Deterring nor Royal Dutch nor Standard

Oil will ever console me for the Aztecs and the Incas. I see clearly
the civilizations; condemned to perish at a future date, into which it
has introduced a principle of ruin: the South Sea islands, Nigeria,
Nyasaland. I see less clearly the contributions it has made.
Security? Culture? The rule of law? In the meantime, I look around
and wherever there are colonizers and colonized face to face, I see
force, brutality, cruelty, sadism, conflict, and, in a parody of
education, the hasty manufacture of a few thousand subordinate
functionaries, "boys," artisans, office clerks, and interpreters
necessary for the smooth operation of business. I spoke of
contact. Between colonizer and colonized there is room only
for forced labor, intimidation, pressure, the police, taxation,

theft, rape, compulsory crops, contempt, mistrust,
arrogance, self-complacency, swinishness, brainless elites,
degraded masses. No human contact, but relations of
domination and submission which turn the colonizing man into a
class-room monitor, an army sergeant, a prison guard, a slave driver,
and the indigenous man into an instrument of production. My turn to
state an equation: colonization = "thing-ification." I hear the storm.
They talk to me about progress, about "achievements," diseases
cured, improved standards of living. I am talking about societies
drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions

undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent
artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out .
They throw facts at my head, statistics, mileages of roads, canals, and

railroad tracks. I am talking about thousands of men sacrificed to the
Congo-Ocean2 . I am talking about those who, as I write this, are
digging the harbor of Abidjan by hand. I am talking about millions of
men torn from their gods, their land, their habits, their life-from life,
from the dance, from wisdom. 2 A railroad line connecting
29
(De)Coloniality AFF
Brazzaville with the port of Pointe-Noire. (Trans.) - 6 - I am talking
about millions of men in whom fear has been cunningly instilled, who
have been taught to have an inferiority complex, to tremble, kneel,
despair, and behave like flunkeys. They dazzle me with the
tonnage of cotton or cocoa that has been exported, the acreage
that has been planted with olive trees or grapevines. I am talking
about natural economies that have been disrupted - harmonious and
viable economies adapted to the indigenous population - about
food crops destroyed, malnutrition permanently introduced,
agricultural development oriented solely toward the benefit of the
metropolitan countries, about the looting of products, the looting of
raw materials.
30
(De)Coloniality AFF
2AC Ext: Colonialism Causes

Poverty
COLONIALISM CAUSES POVERTY. WHEN COLONIAL
POWERS ENTER FOREIGN NATIONS, THEY
DESTROY NATIVE ECONOMIES THAT ARE
DERIVED FROM THOSE SPECIFIC CULTURES.
THESE COLONIZED NATIONS FIND IT IMPOSSIBLE
TO BOUNCE BACK.
Poverties 13
Poverties.org is an informational website about poverty in Africa and how it occurred, Causes of Poverty
Origins of a Worldwide Plague, (Poverties), 6-26-14
http://www.poverties.org/causes-of-poverty.html
The causes of poverty are quite overwhelming at first glance:

from colonialism to industrialization, from political institutions
to geography, corruption and so on. But they are extremely
interesting to look at if you want to better understand how so
many countries are where they are today. Each cause is rooted in a
radically different phenomenon and each needs a specific solution. Heritage is unquestionably
an essential factor among the causes of poverty. Most countries that started
their modern history with great inequalities evolved into

societies that often maintained such pattern of biased wealth
distribution. And conversely for countries that began with
more or less equal societies. So, countries that experienced
colonization and slavery often had trouble getting rid of the
inherited institutions and discrimination. Others like Canada or
the US on the other hand have been doing much better since
then. In the case of colonized countries such as Brazil, South
Africa or the Caribbean islands, the remaining white
population often inherited ownership of capital and means of
production once the country became independent. The former
colonies in Latin America were exploited to export their fancy
mineral (e.g. gold & iron ore) and agricultural resources. They have suffered
large-scale injustice as both land and manpower were seized by the spanish and portuguese
empires. In North America, the people started out more or less
from the same point which created the grounds for less
inequality in the first 100 years. That is, if we forget for a minute about the
"reduction" (read "massacre") of the Native American population to a more manageable size .
In Canada and the Northern part of the US, there was also no
particular activity that was suited for major exports (limited
31
(De)Coloniality AFF
and therefore there was no need for huge

amounts of workers. This in turn reduced the appeal of slavery
and thus erased from the start one of the common causes of
poverty that countries often inherit. Its interesting to realize
how politics, geography and economics are intertwined and
influence the evolution of a country (rather than humanistic ideals) Apart
from New Zealand and Australia, European colonies generally involved
only a few number of Europeans that were needed to take care
of administrative, military and political affairs. They were not
really building any ideal country, nor working together towards
some common goal. The segregation between Europeans and
locals (or mixed communities) has often remained thus far one of the
main causes of poverty and inequalities. The long lasting
system created by the Europeans, giving all the power (economic
and political) to a small minority, was passed on for centuries and
into the 20th century. The newly formed nations then had
great trouble getting rid of mechanisms and institutions that
limited access to social ascension and were reticent to fund
public services (school, hospitals,) that were essential to the growth
of the nation as a whole. For an example of pre-existing
inequalities in the Americas, you can just have a look at land
ownership per household in 1900 and realize that in Mexico
only 2.5% of households owned all of the land in the country.
On the Northern side of the border, at the same year, 75% of
households owned land in the US and more than 85% in
Canada.
economies of scale)
32
(De)Coloniality AFF
2AC Ext:
Colonialism=Structural
Violence
COLONIALITY RESULTS IN A PROCESS OF
SOCIALIZATION THAT CODIFIES BODIES IN A
SYSTEM OF DEVALUATION THAT LABELS CERTAIN
BODIES AS VALUABLE AND OTHERS AS
INVALVUABLE. THIS CODIFICATION ALLOWS FOR
THE EXPENDABILITY OF CERTAIN BODIES WHICH
JUSTIFIES VARIOUS ATROCITIES SUCH AS
MURDER, RAPE, AND GENOCIDE.
Maldonado-Torres 2007 [Nelson, Professor of Comparative Literature at Rutgers, PhD
in Religious Studies ON THE COLONIALITY OF BEING Contributions to the development of a Concept
2007 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162548]
Ideas of war, conquest, and genocide here bring up another

fundamental aspect of coloniality.28 The question about whether the
indigenous peoples of the Americas had soul or not was framed
around the question of just war. In the debates that took place in Valladolid in the sixteenth century Sepulveda argued
against Las Casas that the Spanish had the obligation to engage in a just war against subjects who, in their inferiority, would not adopt by themselves the superior
just like it happens in respect to the question

about the humanity of the so called Amerindians, the outcome of
the discussion is not as important as the question itself. The
discovery and conquest of the Americas was no less than an
ontological event with many implications, the most dramatic of which were established by the attitudes and
Christian religion and culture.29 Once more,
questions that emerged in the context. By the time when the question about engaging in a just war against the Amerindians was answered the conquerors had already
established a particular way of relating to the peoples that they encountered. And the way in which they pursued such relations did not correspond to the ethical
Columbuss redefinition of the

purpose of land as being one for us, whereby for us meant for us
who belong to the realm of Man vis-a`-vis those outside the human
oecumene, already introduces the exceptional character that ethics is
going to take in the New World.30 As we know, such exceptional situation
gradually lost its exceptionality and became normative in the
modern world. But before it gained such a widespread acceptance and became constitutive of a new reigning episteme, the
exceptionality was shown in the way in which colonizers behaved in
relation to the indigenous peoples and black slaves . And this
behavior coincided more with the kind of actions shown at war, than
with the ethics that regulated live with other European Christians .
standards that were followed in their countries of origin. Indeed, as Sylvia Wynter argues,
When the conquerors came to the Americas they did not follow
the code of ethics that regulated behavior among subjects of
33
(De)Coloniality AFF
the crown in their kingdom.31 Their actions were regulated by

the ethics or rather the non-ethics of war. One cannot forget that while early Christians criticized
slavery in the Roman Empire, later Christians considered that vanquished enemies in war could legitimately be enslaved.32 Indeed, in the Ancient world and the
What happens in
the Americas is a transformation and naturalization of the nonethics of war, which represented a sort of exception to the ethics
that regulate normal conduct in Christian countries, to a more
stable and long-standing reality ofdamnation. Damnation, life in
Middle Ages it was for the most part legitimate to enslaved some people, particularly prisoners of war and the vanquished.
hell, refers here to modern forms of colonialism which

constitute a reality characterized by the naturalization of war
by means of the naturalization of slavery, now justified in
relation to the very physical and ontological constitution of
people by virtue of race and not to their faith or belief .33 That
human beings become slaves when they are vanquished in a war
translates in the Americas to the suspicion that the conquered
people, and then nonEuropean peoples in general, are constitutively
inferior and that therefore they should assume a position of slavery
and serfdom. Sepulveda draws on Aristotle to justify this position, but he was more than anything translating into categories ideas that were already
becoming common sense. Later the idea was going to be solidified in respect to the slavery of people from Africa and become stable until today under the tragic reality
different forms of racism. Coloniality, I am suggesting here, can
be understood as a
radicalization and naturalization of the non-ethics of war . This
of
non-ethics included the practices of eliminating and slaving certain

subjects e.g., indigenous and black as part of the enterprise of
colonization. The hyperbolic expression of coloniality includes
genocide, which is the paroxysm of the ego cogito a world in which the ego cogito exists alone. War, however, is not
only about killing or enslaving. War includes a particular treatment
of sexuality and of feminity: rape. Coloniality is an order of things
that put people of color under the murderous and rapist sight of a
vigilant ego. And the primary targets of rape are women. But men of
color are also seeing through these lenses. Men of color are
feminized and become for the ego conquiro fundamentally

penetrable subjects.34 I will expand more on the several dimensions of murder and rape when I elaborate the existential aspect of
racialization works through

gender and sex and that the ego conquiro is constitutively a phallic
ego as well.35 Enrique Dussel, who submits the thesis of the phallic character of the ego cogito, also makes links, albeit indirectly, with the reality of
the analytics of the coloniality of Being. The point that I want to make here is that
war. And thus, in the beginning of modernity, before Descartes discovered...a terrifying anthropological dualism in Europe, the Spanish conquistadors arrived in
The phallic conception of the European-medieval world is now

added to the forms of submission of the vanquished Indians. Males,
Bartolome de las Casas writes, are reduced through the hardest, most horrible, and
harshest serfdom; but this only occurs with those who have
remained alive, because many of them have died; however, in war typically they only leave
alive young men (mozos) and women. 36 Joshua Goldstein complements this account by depicting conquest as an extension
America.
of the rape and exploitation of women in wartime.37 He argues that to understand conquest one needs to examine: (1) male sexuality as a cause of aggression; (2) the
these three things

come together in the idea of race that began to emerge in the
conquest and colonization of the Americas. Misanthropic skepticism
posits its targets as racialized and sexualized subjects . Once
vanquished, they are said to be inherently servants and their bodies
come to form part of an economy of sexual abuse, exploitation, and
control. The ethics of the ego conquiro ceased to be only a special
code of behavior for periods of war and becomes in the Americas
feminization of enemies as symbolic domination, and (3) dependence on exploiting womens labor. My argument is that
34
(De)Coloniality AFF
and gradually the modern world

by virtue of misanthropic
skepticism, the idea of race, and the coloniality of power , a standard of conduct that
reflects the way things are a way of things whose naturalization reaches its climax with the
use of natural science to validate racism in the nineteenth century. The
way things supposedly are emerge from the idea of how a world is conceived to be in conditions of war and the code of behavior that is part of it. What happens in
such a view of the world and code of conduct is transformed

through the idea of race
and becomes naturalized. Thus, the
treatment of vanquished peoples in conditions of war is perceived
as legitimate long after war is over . Later on, it wont be their aggression or opposition, but their
race which justifies continued serfdom, slavery, and rape. This represents a break
with the European medieval tradition and its ethical codes. With the initial exploitation of Africa and the colonization of the Americas in the fifteenth century, the
emerging modernity comes to be shaped by a paradigm of war.38
modernity is that
Building on the work of Dussel, Gordon, Quijano, and Wynter I articulated in this section what I see as three contributions to the understanding of coloniality and race:
(1) the understanding of race as misanthropic skepticism, (2) the interrelation of race and gender, and (3) the understanding of race and gender conceptions in
The lived experience of racialized people

is deeply touched by the encounter with misanthropic skepticism and
by the constant encounter with violence and death. The language
modernity as the result of the naturalization of the ethics of war.
that they use has also already being shaped by understanding

of the world as a battle field in which they are permanently
vanquished. Now that we have an idea about the basic conditions of life in the colonial side of the
modern world or in the dark side of the color-line we can try to find a more precise philosophical
articulation of these experiences and thus to lay out the fundamentals for a discourse about the
coloniality of being. But, while we have explored to some extent the meaning of the idea of
coloniality, we havent done the same with the idea of being. We shall do that next. What is
being? As I made clear at the outset, Heideggers fundamental ontology informs the conception of Being
that I want to elaborate here. His work, particularly his 1927 magnus opus, Being and Time is not the
point of departure to think about the coloniality of Being but it is, at least when spelled out in the context
of the phenomenological tradition and its heretic expressions, an inescapable reference point. I do not
think that Heideggers conception of ontology and the primacy that he gives to the question
of being necessarily provide the best basis for the understanding of coloniality or
decolonization, but his analyses of being-in-the-world serve as a starting point to
understanding some key elements of existential thought, a tradition that has made important
insights into the lived experience of colonized and racialized peoples.39 Returning to
Heidegger can provide new clues about how to articulate a discourse on the colonial aspects of world
making and lived experience. Heideggers ontology is characterized by the idea that Being is not a
being, an entity, or a thing, but the Being of beings, that is, something like the general horizon of
understanding for all beings.40 He refers to the distinction between Being and beings as the ontological
difference. 41 According to Heidegger, Western philosophy, particularly Western metaphysics, is
characterized by the forgetfulness of Being and by a denial of the ontological difference. Western
metaphysics has equally betrayed the understanding of Being by conceiving Being in terms of the
godhead or divinity. He calls this tendency ontotheology, which is for him what fundamental ontology
needs to overcome.42 In addition to arguing for the crucial importance of the ontological difference,
Heidegger makes the point that the answer to the question of the meaning of Being necessitates a new
radical point of departure. God cannot stand as the beginning of ontology anymore. Things as such are of
not much help either, since their meaning is partly independent of them, and surely they do not grasp
their own meaning. In fact there is only one being for whom the question of Being is significant: the
human being. Since Heideggers aim is to begin philosophy anew, he does not want to use Man or any
known concept to refer to human beings. They all carry the trace of metaphysics and of
epistemologically-centered philosophy, which would vitiate his efforts to escape from them. The concept
that he uses to refer to human beings-quabeings for whom their own being is in question is Dasein. Dasein
literally means being there. Thus, Dasein is simply the being who is there. For Heidegger, fundamental
ontology needs to elucidate the meaning of being there and through that, articulate ideas about Being
itself. Heideggers first reflection about Dasein is that it ek-sist, which means that it is projected to the
future.43But Dasein is also thrown there. Dasein ek-sist in a context which is defined by a history and
where there are laws and established conceptions about social interaction, subjectivity, the world, and so
on. Now, through the analysis of Dasein, Heidegger discovers that for the most time its subjectivity
takes the shape of a collective anonymous figure: the One or the They. The They could be compared to
what Nietzsche referred to as the herd or the mass of people.44Once Heidegger has elaborated his view
of the They the rest of part I of Being and Time takes on the question of how can Dasein relate
authentically to itself by projecting its ownmost possibilities not those defined by the They. Heideggers
response is that authenticity can only be achieved by resoluteness, and that resoluteness can
only emerge in an encounter with the possibility which is inescapably ones own, that is,
death. In death one is fully irreplaceable: no one can die for one, or one for another. Death is
35
(De)Coloniality AFF
a singular individualizing factor. The anticipation of the death and the accompanying anxiety
allow the subject to detach herself from the They, to determine her ownmost possibilities,
and to resolutely define her own project of ek-sistence.45 While the anticipation of death provides
the means for the achievement of authenticity at an individual level, a Fuhrer or leader became for
Heidegger the means to achieve authenticity at a collective level. Resoluteness at a collective level
could only emerge by virtue of a leader. From here that Heidegger came to praise Hitlers role in Germany
and became an enthusiastic participant in the Nazi administration. War in some way provided a way to
connect these two ideas: the wars of the volk (people) in the name of their leader provide the context
The possibility of dying

for the country in a war becomes a means for individual and
collective authenticity.46 This picture, to be sure, seems to reflect more the point of view of the victor in war, than that of the
vanquished. But it could be said that the vanquished can also achieve authenticity
through the confrontation with death in war . Anybody can. Yet, the missing factor here is the following:
if the previous account of coloniality in relation to the nonethics of war is plausible then it must be admitted that the encounter with
for a confrontation with death, and thus, to individual authenticity.
death is no extra-ordinary affair, but a constitutive feature of

the reality of colonized and racialized subjects. The colonized is
thus not ordinary Dasein, and the encounter with the possibility of
death does not have the same impact or results than for someone
whose mode of alienation is that of depersonalization by the One or
They. Racialized subjects are constituted in different ways than
those that form selves, others, and peoples. Death is not so much an
individualizing factor as a constitituve feature of their reality . It is
the encounter with daily forms of death , not the They, which afflicts
them. The encounter with death always comes too late, as it were,
since death is already beside them. For this reason, decolonization, deracialization, and des-generaccion (in sum,
decoloniality) emerge not through an encounter with ones own
mortality, but from a desire to evade death , ones own but even more fundamentally that of others. In
For
some subjects modernity changed the way of achieving
authenticity: they already live with death and are not even
people. What Heidegger forgot is that in modernity Being has a colonial side, and
short, while a vanquished people in war could achieve authenticity, for subjects who are not considered to be part of the people the situation is different.
that this has far-reaching consequences.
The colonial aspect of Being, that is, its tendency to submit
everything to the light of understanding and signification, reaches an extreme pathological point in war and its naturalization through the idea of race in modernity.
The colonial side of Being sustains the color-line. Heidegger, however, looses from view the
particular predicament of subjects in the darker side of this line and the significance of their lived experience for theorization of Being and the pathologies of
Heidegger recognizes the existence of what he calls primitive Dasein, but in no way he connected it with colonized Dasein.47
took European Man as his model of Dasein, and thus the
colonized appeared as a primitive . He forgot that if the concept of Man is
modernity. Ironically,
Instead,
he
a problem, is not only because it is metaphysical, but also

because it does away with the idea that, in modernity, what
one finds is not a single model of human being, but relations
of power that create a world with masters and slaves. He needed to break
with the idea of Europe and the European as models, in order to uncover the complex dynamics of Dasein in the modern period both of European and colonized Dasein,
to which we will refer here as the damne. But we are already in the territory of discourse on the coloniality of being.
36
(De)Coloniality AFF
2AC Ext: Exploration means

changes in mindset
DEVELOPMENT REFERS TO DEVELOPING OUR VIEWS
AND THOUGHT PROCESS
Dickson, 10
Dickson, Leanne. "Principals of Developmental Psychology ." Sage Pub. Rutgers University , n.d. Web. 26
June 2014. <http://www.sagepub.com/upm-data/9397_008824ch1.pdf>.
When we speak of development, to what, in fact are we referring?

One frequently used definition refers to development as patterns of
change over time, which begins at conception and continues through the life span.
Development occurs in domains, such as the biological (changes in our physical
being), social (changes in our social relationships ), emotional
(changes in our emotional understanding and experiences),

and cognitive (changes in our thought processes). Some developmental
psychologists prefer to restrict the notion of development only to changes, which lead to qualitative
Heinz
Werner (1957) argued that development refers only to changes,
which increase the organization of functioning within a domain.
Werner believed that development consisted of two processes: integration
and differentiation. Integration refers to the idea that development
consists of the integration of more basic, previously acquired
behaviors into new, higher-level structures. For example, according to Piaget
reorganizations in the structure of a behavior, skill or ability (Grain, 2000). For example,
([952), the baby who learns to successfully reach for objects has learned to Coordinate a variety of skills
such as maintaining an upright posture, moving their arm, visually coordinating the position of the hand
and the object, and grasping the object under an integrated structure called a scheme. New developments
build on and incorporate what has come before.
Differentiation refers to the idea that development also involves the

progressive ability to make more distinctions among things , for example,
learning to adjust one's grasp to pick up small objects (which requires the me of the fingers and fine motor
control) versus larger objects (which only require closing the hand around the object and less fine motor
Werner defined development as a combination of these two processes of integration and

saw development as a process of increasing hierarchical
integration and increasing differentiation. Of course, Werners view of development
control).
differentiation; he
is by no means universally accepted within developmental psychology. Many developmentalists argue that
anything, which evidences change over time, is relevant to the study of development (Grain, 2000). Thus,
this debate remains a tension within the study of human development.
37
(De)Coloniality AFF
2AC Ext: Rhetoric proceeds

action
RHETORIC IS THE PREREQUISITE TO ANY ACTION. ANY
INTERACTION WITH THE OCEAN REQUIRES A THOUGHT
PROCESS THAT INFLUENCES THAT ACTION. BEFORE ENGAGING
WITH THE OCEAN WITH A FLAWED RHETORIC, WE MUST FIRST
RESITUATE OUR RHETORIC WITHIN DECOLONIALITY.
Tota '11
Tota, Matt was the ENL 257th Best Essay in Rhetorical Theory winner. "Rhetoric: The Language of Action"
Retrieved from 'Corridors' November 2011. (Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.)
When we think of war or unrest, we often picture stern-looking soldiers

holding Kalashnikovs, frenzied dissidentsmarching through streets, and
armytanks lumbering into war-torn cities. Such images come to mind
because we are concerned only with theseaspects of the equation. In
other words, we do not bother with what occurs in the abstract: We
care about the answers circled on the chalkboard, not the work
scribbled around it. But before the soldiers collect their rifles,
protestors take to the streets, and tanks enter the warzones, there is
rhetoric, language that calls individualsto arms, galvanizes nations,
and shapes movements through the power of persuasion. Because
wars and protests do not simply materialize from the ether, and behind
every soldier or dissident is an ideology, powerless without rhetoric.
In 2003, the power of rhetoric led America to invade Iraq, initiating a
bloody campaignthat, though waning, continues today. It began when
then president, George W. Bush, connected our rising fear of terrorism
to Saddam Husseins despotism. This strategy entailed connecting one
thing with another as a means to further discourse. Roderick Hart and
Suzanne Daughton remark in their book Modern Rhetorical Criticism,
that this brand of rhetoric functions like a math equation: Rhetoric
operateslike a kind of intellectual algebra, asking us to equate things
we had never before considered equitable (16). When we see
something in relation to another, even if there is no clear connection,
we often react differently than if the connection had not been made,
especially when dealing with subjects that stimulate pathos. To garner
support for his war, Bush equated terrorism something all of America
both despises and fears to Iraq and its oppressive leader. Though the
two subjects had close ties, there was no hard evidence linking Hussein
to terrorist activities. For added appeal, Bush stated that experts had
unearthed caches containing weapons of mass destruction in secret
38
(De)Coloniality AFF
locations throughout Iraq, used, he argued, for terrorist activities. Hart

and Daughton note that such comparisons are the workhorses of
persuasion (16). Bush aimed to convince both congress and the
American people that a war against Husseins regime was necessary to
protect America against terrorism. And his linkage, formed as an
emotional appeal, worked flawlessly. He ultimately gained widespread
support. Indeed, other countries 35 nations in total were persuaded
by rhetoric to supporthis plea for war. It did not matter, of course, that
there were no weapons found in Iraq. By that time, Bushs rhetorical
bombshad already flattened most of Baghdad. Rhetoric played a
crucial role in laying the groundwork for war, and language came
before the Humvees and the tanks.
As mentioned before, rhetoric excels in fosteringthe ideals that
inevitablylead to action, be it toward war or peace, good or evil. It
leads with words and impregnates minds with ideas, whichare
exceedingly more powerful than actions. But it is rhetoric that carries ideas on its
back, lugging them into fruition. Grand ideas, deeply felt beliefs, and unsullied ideologies, Hart and
Daughton remark, are sources of powernone of these factors can be influential without a delivery
system, without rhetoric (18). In the end, these sources of power are what trigger nations, even
individuals, to wage wars or support causes. A rhetors potential to sway minds is determined, in part, by
his ethos, which varies by audience. What does this mean? Well, the line between an unsullied ideology
and a sullied one becomes harder to discern. What we perceive as sullied ideologies will invariably differ
from whatother nations consider sullied. Rhetoric is, of course, blind to taboos. The rise of Al Qaedas
perceived holy war against the United States, for example, was fueled by Osama Bin Ladens crooked
ideologies. Video after video depicting his psychotic rants, comprised of hate speech and bogus
accusations, appealed, specifically, to poor, hopeless, Arab youths, some of whom, persuaded by his
rhetoric, joined his jihad without giving any thought as to what they were joining. His ideals initiated Al
Qaedas rise to power, providing the organization with vital men and funds to pursue their misguided war.
Bin Laden stood as a figurehead for the organization and his followers viewed him as a hero because of his
powerful rhetoric. He managed to take an idea and turn it into one of the most feared organizations on the
planet simply through speeches and appeals. As he is now dead, there are questions as to how strong Al
Qaeda will be going forward without his rhetoric.
I would like to focus, now, on a specific aspect of rhetorical power known as symbolism. In fact, if you
examined rhetoric under a microscope, you would see symbolism as its nucleus. In The History and Theory
of Rhetoric, James Herrick calls a symbol a form of psychological power, remarking further that symbols
and the structure of human thought are intricately connected (19). Indeed, symbols dictate the way we
perceive ourselves in relation to the world around us. A rhetor employs symbolism in order to changethe
dynamic of his discourse. Because a symbol abandons preconceived notions and timeworn theories and
stands for something greater more abstract than what it represents, this tactic is effective in
connecting people of varying backgrounds to one ideology. Symbols, therefore, hold more power than
rigidly structured ideas, which tend only to appeal to certain groups.
Of course the ultimate goal of rhetoric is to, as Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee remark in Ancient
Rhetorics for Contemporary Students, move people to action (23), which requires not just symbolism but
every other weapon in the rhetors arsenal as well. During the 1960s, for instance, Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr.,one of the greatest American rhetors, spearheaded the social war against racism, moving thousands of
people to march against inequality. Dr. King was indeed a master of language; his speeches were
extraordinary examples of style, employing the artful use of words, instead of force, peace instead of
violence, to persuade.Ancient rhetoricians knew all too well about the power of language and were using
words to stimulate action long before Dr. Kings I Have A Dream speech(one of the greatest examples of
rhetorical style).Crowley and Hawhee point to an ancient rhetorician called Gorgias, who instructed young
minds on languages persuasive power: Gorgias went so far as to say that language could work on a
persons sprit as powerfully as drugs worked on the body (23). Moreover, the rhetor noted that language
could bewitch people and jolt them out of their everyday awareness (2). Dr. King had to jolt
Americans into altering their racist treatment of black people by forcing them to abandon erroneous
ideologies of the past. Thus, he geared his speeches toward reshaping white Americas racist suppositions,
drawing more and more individuals to his cause. For Dr. King, rhetoric functioned like a microphone, in that
it amplified his discourse, helping it to reach more minds. It worked, also, like a mirror in that it showed
white America its dark side. Once they saw the evils of racism, they changed their ways and marched
toward a better outlook. Dr. Kings control of rhetoric was the primary reason why the civil rights
movement was as a success.
39
(De)Coloniality AFF
Finally, the most intriguing aspect of rhetorical power is the way it

empowers marginalized or subjugated individuals, all of whom lack or,
in some cases, are stripped of a voice to speak out against their
mistreatment. In truth, it only takes one persons rhetoric to incite a revolution, and, after
thousands of years, the formula for dissent has remained relatively unchanged. It begins, generally, with
an ideology typically that of the controlling class that rules over the lower classes. That is, it dominates
all other ideologies, keeping them marginalized. Herrick notes, however, that the controlling ideology can
actually bring in significant ideologies what he calls unexamined ideologies (20) out of obscurity. What
is rhetorics role in all of this? It essentially acts to assist the oppressed in developing their unexamined
ideology. Usually, it is at this point when the tumult begins .The government in power reacts with attempts
to quell the uprisings. But Herrick argues that its attempts to suppress the newly empowered voices often
have the opposite effect: When rhetoric is employed to advocate ideas, but its capacity to test ideas is
subverted, the reign of the unexamined ideology becomes a real possibility (20). The subversion is seen
in the governments actions against the dissidents. In other words, think of the oppressed group as hydras
heads: You cut off one and two more spring up behind it. The unexamined ideology gains more power
every time the controlling government attempts to squash it. Eventually, the revolution succeeds in
overthrowing the powers that be. We saw this process in Egypt, where Hosni Mubarakwas ousted because,
over many years, he kept the ideology of the people suppressed. The protestors rallies grew stronger and
stronger every time he tried to subvert their rhetoric. This example displays that anyone, regardless of
social standing, can harness rhetorics power.
In sum, we should not toss rhetoric aside as powerless empty-talk to focus solely on the images appearing
on the nightly news. We must always remember that rhetoric is the reason behind all action, similar to how
every flame requires a spark. Rhetoric holds more power than the gun or the sword because it controls the
men wielding both. Dictators, moreover, may believe they are in power; they may look at the peons below
them as worthless, yet those peons, though they may never have wealth, will always have rhetoric. Thus,
they will always have the power to rise against their oppressor and demand their respect .
So, it is
time we refocus our attention on language and embrace the power it
possesses time to arm ourselves with words, not weapons, and alter
our understanding of persuasion.
40
(De)Coloniality AFF
AT: Imperialism Root Cause

COLONIALISM AND IMERIALISM BUT GOES BEYOND
THEM. COLONIALITY EXPRESSES ITSELF IN THE
OFRM OF MATERIAL VIOELNCE THAT ENSURES
THE CODIFICATION OF OTHERS.
Escobar 8
(Arturo, Kenan Distinguished Professor at UNC Chapel Hill, Ph.D, University of

Calfornia, Berkeley, Beyond the Third World: Imperial Globality, Global Coloniality,
and Anti-Globalization Social Movements, www.nd.edu/~druccio/Escobar.pdf)
Eurocentered modernity can be seen as the imposition of a

global design by a particular local history
radical alternatives to modernity are not a historically
foreclosed possibility
one may envision alternatives to the totality imputed to
modernity, and adumbrate not a different totality leading to
different global designs,
refracting modernity through the lens of
coloniality engage in a questioning of the character of modernity, a
conception of eurocentrism as the knowledge form of
modernity/coloniality a hegemonic representation and mode of
knowing that claims universality for itself, derived from Europes
position as center
The seeming triumph of
, in such a way that it has subalternized other local histories and designs. If this is the
case, could one posit the hypothesis that
? If so, how can we articulate a project around this notion? Could it be that it is possible to think about, and to think differently from, an exteriority
to the modern world system? That
but networks of local/global histories constructed from the perspective of a politically enriched alterity? This is precisely the possibility
that may be gleaned from the work of a group of Latin American theorists that in
(Dussel, 2000: 471; Quijano, 2000: 549). In sum, there is a re-reading of the myth of modernity in terms of modernitys underside and a new
denunciation of the assumption that Europes development must be followed unilaterally by every other culture, by force if necessary what Dussel terms the developmentalist fallacy (e.g., 1993, 2000). The main
that the proper analytical unit of analysis is

modernity/coloniality -- in sum, there is no modernity without
coloniality, with the latter being constitutive of the former
the colonial difference is a privileged epistemological and political
space
conclusions are, first,
. Second, the fact that
. In other words, what emerges from this alternative framework is the need to take seriously the epistemic force of local histories and to think theory through the political praxis of subaltern
groups. Some of the key notions that make up the conceptual corpus of this research program include: the modern colonial world system as a structurally heterogeneous ensemble of processes and social
. Coloniality of power
a global hegemonic
model of power in place since the Conquest that articulates race and
labor, space and peoples, according to the needs of capital and to
the benefit of white European peoples. Colonial difference and global
coloniality
refer to the knowledge and cultural dimensions of
the subalternization processes effected by the coloniality of power;
the colonial difference brings to the fore persistent cultural
differences, which today exist within global power structures
Coloniality of being
as the ontological dimension
of colonialty, on both sides of the encounter; it points at the
ontological excess that occurs when particular beings impose on
others;
Eurocentrism, as
the knowledge model of the European historical experience which
became globally hegemonic since the seventeenth century
);
hence the possibility of non-eurocentric thinking and
formations that encompass modern colonialism and colonial modernities
(Quijano),
(Mignolo) which
(more recently suggested by Nelson Maldonado-Torres, 2003)
it also addresses critically the effectivity of the discourses with which the other responds to the suppression as a result of the encounter.
(Dussel, Quijano
41
(De)Coloniality AFF
epistemologies.
modernity is a project, the triumphal project of the Christian and

secular west, coloniality is--on the one hand--what the project of
modernity needs to rule out and roll ove

coloniality is the site
of enunciation that reveals and denounces the blindness of the
narrative of modernity from the perspective of modernity itself
Here is a further, and enlightening, characterization of coloniality by Walter Mignolo (e-mail correspondence, May 31, 2003):
Since
r, in order to implant itself as modernity and --on the other hand-- the site of enunciation
were the blindness of the modern project is
11
revealed, and concomitantly also the site where new projects begin to unfold. In other words,
, and it is at the
same time the platform of pluri-versality, of diverse projects coming from the experience of local histories touched by western expansion (as the Word Social Forum demonstrates); thus
coloniality is not a new abstract universal Coloniality incorporates

colonialism and imperialism but goes beyond them; this is why
coloniality did not end with the end of colonialism New coloniality
regime is still difficult to discern. Race, class and ethnicity will
continue to be important
the single most prominent vehicle of
coloniality today seems to be the ambiguously drawn figure of the
(
, but new, or newly prominent, areas of articulation come into existence, such as religion (and gender linked to it, especially in the case
of Islamic societies, as we saw for the war on Afghanistan). However,
terrorist. Linked most forcefully to the Middle East, and thus to the
immediate US oil and strategic interests in the foreign regions that
obtain it
42
(De)Coloniality AFF
AT: Imperialism Good

CONTINUED IMPERIALISTIC CONQUEST LEADS TO
EXTINCTION AND DESTRUCTION OF THE
PHYSICAL WORLD
Rossi 7
Rossi, Ugo. "David Harvey. A Critical Reader Edited by Noel Castree and Derek Gregory and Spaces of
Global Capitalism. Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development by David Harvey." Area 39.4
(2007): 553-55. Web. 28 June 2014.
At times of savage devaluation, interregional rivalries typically degenerate into struggles over who is to
bear the burden of devaluation. The export of unemployment, of inflation, of idle productive
Trade wars, dumping, interest rate wars, restrictions

and foreign exchange, immigration policies, colonial
conquest, the subjugation and domination of tributary economies,
the forced reorganization of the division of labour within economic
empires, and, finally, the physical destruction and forced devaluation
of a rival's capital through war are some of the methods at hand. Each
entails the aggressive manipulation of some aspect of economic, financial or state power. The
politics of imperialism, the sense that the contradictions of capitalism can be cured through
world domination by some omnipotent power, surges to the forefront. The ills of capitalism
capacity become the stakes in the game.
on capital flow
cannot so easily be contained. Yet the degeneration of economic into political struggles plays its part in
the long-run stabilization of capitalism, provided enough capital is destroyed en route. Patriotism and
nationalism have many functions in the contemporary world and may arise for diverse reasons; but they
frequently provide a most convenient cover for the devaluation of both capital and labour. We will shortly
it is, I believe, by far the most serious threat,

not only to the survival of capitalism (which matters not a jot), but to the survival of the
human race. Twice in the twentieth century, the world has been plunged into global war
return to this aspect of matters since
the world
experienced the massive devaluation of capital through physical
destruction, the ultimate consumption of labour power as cannon
fodder. Class warfare, of course, has taken its toll in life and limb, mainly through the violence
through inter-imperialist rivalries. Twice in the space of a generation,
daily visited by capital upon labour in the work place and through the violence of primitive accumulation
imperialist wars fought against other social formations in the

name of capitalist 'freedoms'). But the vast losses incurred in two world wars were
(including
provoked by inter-imperialist rivalries. How can this be explained on the basis of a theory that
appeals to the class relation between capital and labour as fundamental to the interpretation of history?
This was, of course, the problem with which Lenin wrestled in his essay on imperialism. But his argument,
as we saw in chapter 10, is plagued by ambiguity. Is finance capital national or international? What is the
relation, then, between the military and political deployment of state power and the undoubted trend
within capitalism to create multinational forms and to forge global spatial integration? And if monopolies
and finance capital were so powerful and prone in any case to collusion, then why could they not contain
capitalism's contradictions short of destroying each other? What is it, then, that makes inter-imperialist
wars necessary to the survival of capitalism? The 'third cut' at crisis theory suggests an interpretation of
inter-imperialist wars as constitutive moments in the dynamics of accumulation, rather than as
abberations, accidents or the simple product of excessive greed. Let us see how this is so. When the 'inner
dialectic' at work within a region drives it to seek external resolutions to its problems, then it must search
out new markets, new opportunities for capital export, cheap raw materials, low-cost labour power, etc. All
such measures, if they are to be anything other than a temporary palliative, either put a claim on future
labour or else directly entail an expansion of the proletariat. This expansion can be accomplished through
The
insatiable thirst of capitalism for fresh supplies of labour accounts
for the vigour with which it has pursued primitive accumulation,
population growth, the mobilization of latent sectors of the reserve army, or primitive accumulation.
43
(De)Coloniality AFF
destroying, transforming and absorbing pre-capitalist populations

wherever it finds them. When surpluses of labour are there for the taking, and capitalists have
not, through competition, erroneously pinned their fates to a technological mix which cannot absorb that
labour, then crises are typically of short duration, mere hiccups on a general trajectory of sustained global
accumulation, and usually manifest as mild switching crises within an evolving structure of uneven
geographical development. This was standard fare for nineteenth-century capitalism.
The real
troubles begin when capitalists, fating shortages of labour supply and as ever urged on
by competition, induce unemployment through technological innovations
which disturb the equilibrium between production and realization,
between the productive forces and their accompanying social relations. The closing of the frontiers to
primitive accumulation, through sheer exhaustion of possibilities, increasing resistance on the part of precapitalist populations, or monopolization by some dominant power, has, therefore, a tremendous
significance for the long-run stability of capitalism. This was the sea-change that began to be felt
increasingly as capitalism moved into the twentieth century. It was the sea-change that, far more than the
rise of monopoly or finance forms of capitalism, played the crucial role in pushing capitalism deeper into
the mire of global crises and led, inexorably, to the kinds of primitive accumulation and devaluation jointly
wrought through inter-capitalist wars. The mechanisms, as always, are intricate in their details and greatly
confused in actual historical conjunctures by innumerable cross-currents of conflicting forces. But we can
construct a simple line of argument to illustrate the important points. Any regional alliance, if it is to
continue the process of accumulation, must maintain access to reserves of labour as well as to those
'forces of nature' (such as key mineral resources) that are otherwise capable of monopolization. Few
problems arise if reserves of both exist in the region wherein most local capital circulates. When internal
frontiers close, capital has to look elsewhere or risk devaluation. The regional alliance feels the stress
between capital embedded in place and capital that moves to create new and permanent centres of
accumulation elsewhere. Conflict between different regional and national capitals over access to labour
reserves and natural resources begins to be felt. The themes of internationalism and multilaterialism run
hard up against the desire for autarky as the means to preserve the position of some particular region in
the face of internal contradictions and external pressures - autarky of the sort that prevailed in the 193Os,
as Britain sealed in its Commonwealth trade and Japan expanded into Manchuria and mainland Asia,
Germany into eastern Europe and Italy into Africa, pitting different regions against each other, each
pursuing its own 'spatial fix'. Only the United States found it appropriate to pursue an 'open door' policy
war was fought to contain

open up the whole world to the potentialities of geographical
expansion and unlimited uneven development. That solution,
pursued single-mindedly under United States's hegemony after
1945, had the advantage of being super-imposed upon one of the
most savage bouts of devaluation and destruction ever recorded in
capitalism's violent history. And signal benefits accrued not simply from the immense
destruction of capital, but also from the uneven geographical distribution of that destruction. The
world was saved from the terrors of the great depression not by
some glorious 'new deal' or the magic touch of Keynesian economics
in the treasuries of the world, but by the destruction and death of
global war.
founded on internationalism and multilateral trading. In the end the
autarky and to
44
(De)Coloniality AFF
AT: Cap
COLONIALISM NECESSITATES THE CREATION OF A
STRUCTURE TO CONTROL LABOR AND
PRODUCTIONTHIS SYSTEM NATURALIZES
SUBORDINATION AND DOMINATION
Quijano 2000 (Anbal, professor of the Department of Sociology at
Binghamton University, New York, Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism,
and Latin America)
In the historical process of the constitution of America ,
all forms of control and

exploitation of labor and production, as well as the control of
appropriation and distribution of products, revolved around the
capital-salary relation and the world market. These forms of labor
control included slavery, serfdom, petty-commodity production, reciprocity, and
wages. In such an assemblage, each form of labor control was no
mere extension of its historical antecedents. All of these forms of
labor were historically and sociologically new: in the first place, because they
were deliberately established and organized to produce commodities
for the world market; in the second place, because they did not merely exist simultaneously in
the same space/time, but each one of them was also articulated to capital and
its market. Thus they configured a new global model of labor control ,
and in turn a fundamental element of a new model of power to which they were historically structurally
all forms
of labor as subordinated points of a totality belonged to the new
model of power in spite of their heterogeneous specific traits and their discontinuous relations
dependent. That is to say, the place and function, and therefore the historical movement, of
with that totality. In the third place, and as a consequence, each form of labor developed into new traits
structure of control of labor,

resources, and products consisted of the joint articulation of all the
respective historically known forms, a global model of control of work was
established for the first time in known history. And while it was constituted
and historical-structural configurations. Insofar as that
around and in the service of capital, its configuration as a whole was established with a capitalist character
Thus emerged a new, original, and singular structure of

relations of production in the historical experience of the world:
world capitalism.
as well.
45
(De)Coloniality AFF
The logic of the colony perpetuates inferiorityposits

native populations and resources as standing
reserve to be used to further institutional
means.
Quijano 2000 (Anbal, professor of the Department of Sociology at
Binghamton University, New York, Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism,
and Latin America)
Europeans associated nonpaid or

nonwaged labor with the dominated races because they were
inferior races. The vast genocide of the Indians in the first
decades of colonization was not caused principally by the violence of
the conquest nor by the plagues the conquistadors brought, but took place because so many American Indians were
used as disposable manual labor and forced to work until death . The
elimination for this colonial practice did not end until the defeat of the encomenderos in the middle of the sixteenth century. The subsequent Iberian
colonialism involved a new politics of population reorganization, a
reorganization of the Indians and their relations with the colonizers. But this did not advance American Indians as free and waged laborers. From then on, they
were assigned the status of unpaid serfs. The serfdom of the American Indians could not, however, be
compared with feudal serfdom in Europe, since it included neither the supposed protection of
a feudal lord nor, necessarily, the possession of a piece of land to
cultivate instead of wages. Before independence, the Indian labor force of serfs reproduced itself in the communities, but more than
The fact is that from the very beginning of the colonization of America,
one hundred years after independence, a large part of the Indian serfs was still obliged to reproduce the labor force on its own. The other form of unwaged or, simply put,
slavery, was assigned exclusively to the black population

brought from Africa. The racial classification of the population and
the early association of the new racial identities of the colonized
with the forms of control of unpaid, unwaged labor developed
among the Europeans the singular perception that paid labor was
unpaid labor,
the whites privilege. The racial inferiority of the colonized

implied that they were not worthy of wages. They were naturally
obliged to work for the profit of their owners. It is not difficult to fund, to this very day, this attitude
spread out among the white property owners of any place in the world. Furthermore, the lower wages inferior races receive in the present capitalist centers for the same
work as done by whites cannot be explained as detached from the racist social classification of the worlds populationin other words, as detached from the global
capitalist coloniality of power.
46
(De)Coloniality AFF
AT: Anthro
.
PERM DO THE AFF: WE OPEN OURSELVES UP TO THE UNIVERSE
THROUGH DELINKING EPISTOMOLOGY THAT ALLOWS US TO BE
OPEN TO ANIMALITY INSTEAD OF TRYING TO CONTAIN OR
DESTROY IT.
Yusoff 10 (Kathryn Yusoff, Lecturer in Human (and Non-human) Geography, and
Director of the MA in Climate Change at the University of Exeter, Biopolitical
Economies and the Political Aesthetics of Climate Change, Theory Culture Society,
2010, 27: 73, (Sage))
The implications of this thinking are that we must attend to Rancires distribution of the sensible, to
attack the a priori forms that govern what is visible in experience and politics, and to reconstitute our
political aesthetics of climate change with figures that make visible both the play of the world and the
evacuation of that play from the world. In order to make this argument of continually unworking restricted
categories of experience, Bataille descends into the archival orders to bring to thought those experiences
that are excluded, and are crucial to the parceling out of the visible and invisible. What is at issue in
Batailles archival forays is the double use of everything: an elevated use and a low use, which throws
into relief the topology of the archive through this de-class(ify)ing operation (Bataille, 1997: 47). The declassification both interrupts the archive, because there is literally no place for these experiences, and
signals the limits of such modes of accounting. In his refusal of the stable order of destructive things
Bataille opens
knowledge up to the wound that can connect us to the immanence of
the universe, be that through earthworms or spit, wild beasts or our own
animality. While we might acknowledge our co-evolution with lots of non-humans as an important
(collections of natural history have always been collections of the dead),
step in understanding various forms of cohabitation and forms of historical indebtedness and inheritance
(Clark, 2005, 2007: 63; Diprose, 2002: 42), in the end (and in the experience) this is not what is at stake in
what opens before us in animality is

both interior and external to us it is a line of communication
between two worlds. He says: We calculate our interests, but this
situation baffles us: The very word interest is contradictory with the
desire at stake under these conditions (1991a: 30). Desire, for Bataille, is
bound to and by the intimacy of that experience it must be bound
to experience as a possibility of politics and it must be bound by the
form of that aesthetic experience which forces a rethinking of the
dominant pre-ordered forms of experience . In short, categories of experience must
losing the play of the world. As Bataille argued,
be faithful to those experiences. Climate change must force new images full of loss and rage that scream
At a
time when so much is at stake, a thinking that does not shy away
from the limits of an exchange with animality, both exuberant and violent, is
surely needed. This desire to endlessly accumulate and fend off loss and
destruction ultimately inflates the likelihood and magnitude of
catastrophe and loss. This is what is so paradoxical about strategies
that exude care, but return to a ledger of accounting so stultified
that they imprison loss in a restricted economy, endlessly
suppressing the force of that biopolitical exchange (be that with polar
bears or the long-dead animal fossils that have fuelled our carbonclimate experiment). The restricted economy, which Bataille articulates,
shares everything with the logic of industrial capitalist modernity
through our aesthetic orders to break with the stockpiling of nature in neat categories of extinction.
47
(De)Coloniality AFF
that has been so destructive to other forms of life ,
and nothing with the

intimacy of experience that can open up possibility in a politics of biopolitical living. What is crucial here in
the constant bringing down in the world of accumulative categories is an attack on conservation itself as
a practice that ignores the limits of the biosphere (for Bataille these are the only real limits). How the
biopolitical is ordered through archival principles is key to the possibilities of intimacy and ethics. As Grosz
asks: what would an ethics be like that did not rebound with echoes of an exchange dictated by the past?
(1999: 11). By conserving and accumulating our archives of destruction, we continue ordering and
spending destruction without ever transgressing the limits (to transgress the limit is to become aware of
the limit) in ways that bring catastrophic loss and wholesale destruction, because violence and generosity
are systematically repressed. The blindspot in archives of extinction is that they use the very same
machinations and forms of thought to rank and discipline loss as those practices that are part of the
destruction the slow accumulated loss and encroachment of late capitalism that sees no limits to its
accumulative capacity. As Stoekl comments in his discussion of Bataille and energy politics: The qualified
mechanized destruction of the Earth becomes the quantified, mechanized preservation of the Earth
(2007a: 133).
48
(De)Coloniality AFF
AT: Biopolitics Root Cause

Theories of Biopolitics are still centered on European
understanding of the state and mechanisms of
control. Decoloniality escapes the Eurocentric
trap and provides a better knowledge base for
developing countries to escape modernity.
Mignolo 2011
(Walter D., is William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature and Romance

Studies and Director of the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities, at Duke University, Geopolitics
of Sensing and Knowing On (De)Coloniality, Border Thinking, and Epistemic Disobedience, eipcp.net,
2011, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0112/mignolo/en) RQ
(De)Coloniality[1] is, in the first place, a concept whose point of origination was the Third World. Better
yet, it emerged at the very moment in which the three world division was collapsing and the celebration of
the end of history and a new world order was emerging. The nature of its impact was similar to the impact
the concept of biopolitics, whose point of

origination was Europe. Like its European counterpart, coloniality moved to
the center of international debates in the non-European world as
well as in former Eastern Europe. While biopolitics moved to
center stage in former Western Europe (cfr., the European Union) and the United
produced by the introduction of
States, as well as among some intellectual minorities of the non-European followers of ideas that
originated in Europe, but who adapt them to local circumstances, coloniality
offers a
needed sense of comfort to mainly people of color in developing
countries, migrants and, in general, to a vast quantitative majority
whose life experiences, long and short-term memories, languages
and categories of thoughts are alienated to life experience, long and
short-term memories, languages and categories of thought that
brought about the concept of biopolitics to account for
mechanisms of control and state regulations.[2] Modernity,
postmodernity and altermodernity have their historical grounding in the
Enlightenment and the French Revolution . Decoloniality has its historical
grounding in the Bandung Conference of 1955, in which 29 countries from Asia and
Africa gathered. The main goal of the conference was to find a common
ground and vision for the future that was neither capitalism nor
communism. That way was decolonization. It was not a third way la
Giddens, but a delinking from the two major Western macro-narratives. The
conference of the Non-Aligned countries followed suit in 1961, and took place in Belgrade. On that
occasion, several Latin American countries joined forces with Asian and African countries. Frantz Fanons
Thus, the political and epistemic

foundations of decoloniality had been established in fifty-five years. From
The Wretched of the Earth was also published in 1961.
then until now and from now to the future, it will be decoloniality all the way down not as a new universal
that presents itself as the right one that supersedes all the previous and existing ones, but as an option. By
presenting itself as an option, the decolonial opens up a way of thinking that delinks from the chronologies
of new epistemes or new paradigms (modern, postmodern, altermodern, Newtonian science, quantum
theory, the theory of relativity, etc.). Epistemes and paradigms are not alien to decolonial thinking. They
While the
Bandung Conference pronounced itself in the political terrain as neither
capitalism nor communism but as decolonization, today, thinking
decolonially is concerned with global equality and economic justice,
cannot be, but are no longer the point of reference and of epistemic legitimacy.
49
(De)Coloniality AFF
but it also asserts that Western democracy and socialism are not the
only two models to orient our thinking and our doing. Decolonial
arguments promote the communal as another option next to capitalism
and communism. In the spirit of Bandung, Aymara intellectual, Simon
Yampara, makes clear that Aymaras are neither capitalist nor
communist. They promote decolonial thinking and communal doing .[3]
Because decolonialitys point of origination was the Third World, in its diversity of local histories and
different times and Western imperial countries that first interfered with those local histories be it in
Tawantinsuyu in the sixteenth century, China in the nineteenth century or Iraq from the beginning of the
twentieth (France and England) to the beginning of the twenty-first century (the US) border thinking is
the epistemic singularity of any decolonial project. Why? Because border epistemology is the epistemology
of the anthropoi, who do not want to submit to humanitas, but at the same time cannot avoid it.
Decoloniality and border thinking/sensing/doing are then strictly interconnected since decoloniality
couldnt be Cartesian or Marxian. In other words, decolonialitys point of origination in the Third World
connects to immigrant consciousness in Western Europe and the US today. Immigrant consciousness is
located in the routes of dispersion of decolonial and border thinking.
50
(De)Coloniality AFF
AT: Natives
COLONIALISM AND COLONIAL EPISTOMOLOGY IS THE ROOT
CUASE OF NATIVE GENOCIDE AND CONTINUED OPPRESSION. BY
EMBRACING THE AFFIRMATIVE METHOD OF DE-LINK WE CAN
LOOK CRITICALLY AT HOW WE ENGAGE WITH COLONIZED
PEOPLES AND STRUCTURALLY CHANGE OUR RELATIONSHIP
WITH THEM.
PERM: DO AFF
Alfred 2009
(Gerald Taiaiake Alfred, PhD, School of Indigeous Governance,
University of Victoria, 11/ 2009, Accessed on 6/25/14,
http://web.uvic.ca/igov/uploads/pdf/GTA.Colonialism%20and
%20State%20Dependency%20NAHO
%20V5_I2_Colonialism_02.pdfJWH)
Ongoing indigenous struggles against colonialism consist mainly of
efforts to redress the fundamental injustice of being forcibly
removed from the land or being denied access to the land to
continue traditional cultural activities. Yet there is another aspect to
colonialism which is often ignored in the public discourse, and
certainly does not form a major focus of either First Nation
organization or Canadian government policy efforts. This aspect is the
colonially-generated cultural disruption affecting First Nations that compounds the effects of
dispossession to create near total psychological, physical and
financial dependency on the state. The cumulative and ongoing
effects of this crisis of dependency form the living context of most
First Nations existences today. This complex relationship between
the effects of social suffering, unresolved psychophysical harms of
historical trauma and 42 Journal de la sante autochtone, novembre
2009 cultural dislocation have created a situation in which the
opportunities for a self-sufficient, healthy and autonomous life for
First Nations people on individual and collective bases are extremely
limited. As is typical in all colonial societies, First Nations today are characterized as entrenched
dependencies, in physical, psychological and financial terms, on the very people and institutions that
When one
considers the material consequences of Canadas century-long policy
of state-sponsored, forcible assimilation, a simple fact emerges: for
generations, opportunities to live well as an Aboriginal person have been
actively frustrated. Successive governments, committed to the notion that Aboriginal
have caused the near erasure of our existence and who have come to dominate us.
cultures belong only to the past, have made no provision for the well-being of these cultures in the present
and future. In the arrangement of Canadas social affairs, only the assimilated Indian has been offered
even the prospect of wellness.
For those who resisted or refused the benefits

of assimilation, government policies assured a life of certain
indignity. That is the essence of life in the colony: assimilate and be
like us or suffer the consequences (Kirmayer & Valaskakis, 2009, p. xi). Beyond the
effects on the individual, it is a real tragedy that First Nations people are generally wanting of the
51
(De)Coloniality AFF
Cultural dislocation
has led to despair, but the real deprivation is the erosion of an ethic
of universal respect and responsibility that used to be the hallmark
of indigenous societies. The material conditions of First Nations life, pressures exerted on
inspiration and support that healthy and cohesive communities provide.
Indigenous people from settler society and this state of overall dependency has created a reality
characterized by discord and violence experienced as daily facts of life in most First Nation communities.
The self-hating inward turn of this negative energy in reaction to

colonization is one of the most damaging aspects of the problem , what
Lee Maracle has called the systemic rage so common among colonized peoples (Maracle, 1996, p. 12).
Colonialism, as it is understood by most people, consists in such

things as the resource exploitation of indigenous lands, residential
school syndrome, racism, expropriation of lands, extinguishment of
rights, wardship, and welfare dependency. And while all of this is
certainly colonialism, Indigenous people dont experience colonialism

as theories or as analytic categories. Colonialism is made real in the
lives of First Nations people when these things go from being a set of
imposed externalities to becoming causes of harm to them as people
and as communities, limitations placed on their freedom, and
disturbing mentalities, psychologies, and behaviours . In order to
get to the root of the colonial problem in Canada, it is necessary

to understand that oppression experienced over such a long period of
time effects peoples minds and souls in seriously negative ways.
Meaningful discussions on the subject of alleviating the harms that
colonization has wrought requires seeing beyond colonialism as
historical process of societal changes or a set of legal and military
events. It means recognizing that colonial injustices and
oppression have had effects on both individuals and
collectivities, and that addressing these effects necessitates
perspectives and strategies that situate First Nations people
not simply as individuals within Canada, but as members of
cultured communities on the land. Understanding this history of colonialism the
political and economic aspects of the changing relationship between Indigenous peoples and European
which resulted in the subjugation of First Nations to European powers is, in a fundamental sense, less
important than appreciating the damage to the cultural integrity and mental and physical health of the
people and communities who make up those nations. As Eduardo Duran has characterized the problem:
Once a group of people have been assaulted in a genocidal fashion,

there are psychological ramifications. With the victims complete
loss of power comes despair, and the psyche reacts by internalizing
what appears to be genuine powerthe power of the oppressor.
The internalizing process begins when First Nation American people
internalize the oppressor, which is merely a caricature of the power
actually taken from First Nation American people. At this point, the
self- worth of the individual and/or group has sunk to a level of

despair tantamount to self-hatred. This self-hatred can be either internalized or
externalized (Duran & Duran, 1995, p. 29; See also Trexler, 1995). In particular, Indigenous mens
difficulties in comprehending and dealing effectively with the source of their own disempowerment has
led to a compounding of the problem for Indigenous women and children, who are frequently the targets
of mens raging manifestations of internalized self-hatred. This problem exists in various forms and
intensities across the entire economic and social spectrum in First Nations, and in spite of other recent
politico-legal advances in the empowerment of First Nations enterprises and governments. Women express
colonized mindsets as well, but mainly through self-destructive behaviour. Men tend to channel their rage
externally, and as a consequence gendered violence has become endemic within First Nations
52
(De)Coloniality AFF
communities. The gradual transformation of First Nations communities from violent and discordant
environments cannot be accomplished by conceptualizing the harm as dysfunction or by isolating
problem behaviours. It is becoming clear, as this paper will argue, that without the foundation provided
by a connection to land-based cultural practices and the reestablishment of authentic indigenous
community life, individualizing efforts actually work to compound the problems by promoting further
alienation from proven sources of strength and healing on the individual level, and the social-cultural
This paper advocates a radical Journal of

Aboriginal Health, November 2009 43 Colonialism and State
Dependency Colonialism and State Dependency approach to
change, consisting in the effort to reintegrate the essential features
and benefits of a reconnection to homeland and of traditional
indigenous land-based cultural practices that have proven in many
cases to be key to the reclamation of spiritual, physical and
psychological health and to the restoration of communities
characterized by peace and harmony and strength.
atomization of indigenous communities.
53
(De)Coloniality AFF
AT: Gender K
COLONIALISM CAUSES BINARIES, IN SPECIFIC,
GENDER. BY SOLVING FOR COLONIAL
EPISTOMOLOGY WE CAN TAKE ETHICAL STEPS
TOWARD CREATING PRAGMATIC UN-GENDERED
ACTIONS.
Lind 12 [Amy Lind, Mary Ellen Heintz Endowed Chair and Associate Professor of Womens, Gender,
and Sexuality Studies, University of Cincinnati Intimate Governmentalities, the Latin American Left, and
the Decolonial Turn. feminists@law, Vol 2, No 1 (2012)
https://journals.kent.ac.uk/kent/index.php/feministsatlaw/article/view/43/115]
The
second disjuncture I see draws from the above scenario and speaks
to how the governance of intimacy or intimate governmentalities and
biopolitics are (or are not) understood as part of this process. Thus far much of
the emphasis has been on competing modernities among the
hegemonic Euromodernity and indigenous and Afro-modernities. Less has been
done to understand how notions of life and intimacy comparatively
figure into these competing accounts, and how this shapes current political processes. Rather,
these issues which scholars such as Arturo Escobar (1995) have noted are central to
modern, colonial, developmentalist governmentalities continue to be sidelined and/or
compartmentalized. While of course there are exceptions, debates on life or intimacy pertaining to
indigeneity follow one trajectory (e.g., an emphasis on sustainability and overcoming the nature/culture
debates on these same issues as they pertain to sexuality or

typically follow another trajectory (e.g., an emphasis on citizen rights or the
dualism);
gender
debates on
modernity/coloniality, capitalism and states invoke a kind of
heteronormativity that is left unexamined by most analysts, despite the
fact that by now many scholars and activists have pointed out the
central significance of heterosexuality as a social institution in
shaping modern/colonial economies and social life (see Lugones 2010 for a
right to bodily integrity and autonomy). And generally speaking,
Some refer to men and women, including in

discussions of gender complementarity vs. gender (in)equality, without questioning
discussion of this topic).
the construction of these categories themselves (beyond the obvious dualism). Moreover there is no doubt
that narratives of reproduction, gender, heteronormativity, sexuality, intimacy, kinship, life, death, etc.
continue to be central to both right-wing and leftist forms of governance, to both neoliberal and postneoliberal forms of production, and to the alternative modernities being sought by indigenous and AfroLatin American social movements. Categories of the family, gender, sexuality are no more or less
modern than categories of race or ethnicity. Yet scholars tend to under-theorize the former categories
and write them off as simply modern, as solely reformist, or as a side issue and therefore
However some of
the most interesting examples of post-liberal, post-capitalist and anti-neoliberal
practices have come out of modern/colonial social movements
such as the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer movement
in both Ecuador and Bolivia movements that are mostly ignored by scholars of global justice
studies and Latin American cultural studies. These movements, while perhaps small in
uninteresting for a discussion of alternative modernities or another world.
comparison to indigenous movements when seen through the Eurocentric lens of visibility/invisibility (on
this topic, see Horn 2010),
are deeply significant for understanding how both
54
(De)Coloniality AFF
capital and states structure and govern peoples intimate lives,

including how they think, feel, express love, desire, seek forms of attachment, understand themselves and
their communities. Capital defines how love itself is or is not valued, as well as constructed (Wesling
state practices institutionalize modern/colonial notions of

intimacy, kinship, sexual practice, etc., thus attributing value to some
intimate arrangements while rendering others invisible, undeserving or deviant a
2012). Likewise,
phenomenon institutionalized as well through arenas of global governance, most notably the development
Colonial/modern states have long governed

reproduction, including through miscegenation laws banning
interracial marriage, prostitution laws, laws criminalizing sodomy and/or homosexuality, and
laws concerning biological reproduction itself (e.g., abortion, birth control). In many cases new
left governments have opposed reproductive rights and same-sex
marriage two current hot button issues converging more with right-wing ideologies than with the
industry (Lind 2010b).
various social movements that supported them, including the feminist and LGBTI movements (Lind in
Why, for example, is there no discussion of how the

family is being disputed in various kinds of modernities? How does
this play out in indigenous contexts, as former Bolivian Director of Cultural Patrimony,
press; Viterna in press).
David Arequipa, also a founding member of the well-known La Paz-based political drag community, Familia
Galan, set out to do as part of Morales MAS administration? And likewise, how does this play out within
largely mestizo/a and/or urban contexts, such that we see fissures in identity politics that also deeply
challenge the colonial architecture of Latin American states? I have found that leftist activists and
biopolitics
itself, including the governance of intimacy, is wrapped up in their
own theories of another world. Indeed, this kind of epistemological and
political disjuncture seems to be at the heart of what Breny Mendoza refers to
when she speaks of the Feminists in Resistance coalitions own quandary
academics often will say, oh, youre talking about biopolitics, without theorizing how
about whether to continue working with the male-dominated left in Honduras. While this type of quandary
disjuncture in intellectual thought

about the governance of intimacy and biopolitics as it shapes all kinds of
is by no means new, it is fascinating to see the
modernities/colonialities, structures or geometries of power (as Venezuelan Hugo Chvez calls its,
and epistemic communities and

forms of knowledge. From a feminist perspective, to truly do this would
require intersectional thinking, and the ability to think across and from the perspectives
drawing from Doreen Masseys work see Escobar 2010),
of various epistemic, cultural, social, economic and political communities (Richards in press; Lugones
2010).
Coloniality is the vehicle that enables gendered violence to

persist
Lugones 10 (Maria, Argentine scholar, philosopher, feminist, and an

Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Philosophy,
Interpretation, and Culture and of Philosophy and of Women's Studies
at Binghamton University, "Toward a decolonial feminism." Hypatia
25.4, 742-759)
beginning with the colonization of the Ameri- cas and the
Caribbean, the modern hierarchical dichotomous distinction between
men and women became known as characteristically human and a
mark of civilization Indigenous peoples of the Americas and enslaved Airicans were understood as not human, as animals, as
monstrously and aberrantly sexual, wild The dichotomous gender
distinction became a mark of civilization: Only the civilized are men
With colonial modernity,
55
(De)Coloniality AFF
or women European bourgeois man is a subject, fit for rule, for the
public, a being of civilization, heterosexual, Christian, a being of
. The
mind and reason
. The European bourgeois woman is not his complement, but the one who reproduces race and capital. This is tightly bound to her sexual purity, passivity,
Being gendered in this dichotomous

manner makes being a mana mark of humanity Women are human in
their relation to white, bourgeois, European men The hierarchical
dichotomy as a mark of the human becomes also a normative tool to
damn the colonized
animals were differentiated since the
conquest and colonization of the Americas as males and females, the
male being the perfection, the female, the inversion, deformation of
the male
As primitive, wild, not quite
human, the colonized were also understood sexually as males and
females, the female the inferior, inverted male.
home-boundedness. The bourgeois white Europeans are civilized; they are fully human.
. As the behavior and personalities/ souls of the colonized are judged as bestial, of animals, the colonized are nongendered, promiscuous, grotesquely
sexual, sinful. Though at this time the understanding of sex was not dimorphic,
. Hermaphrodites, sodomites, viragos were all understood as deviations from male perfection.
But to the extent that the civilizing mission and conversion to
Christianity has been always present in the ideological conception of conquest and colonization, colonized males are also judged from the normative understanding of man, and colonized females are judged
from the normative understanding of woman. The priests and the church overtly presented their mission as transforming the colonized animals into human beings through conversion. From this point of view,
Consequently,
though sexually colonized females lack was understood in relation
to male perfection, her human lack compared her only to women.
Colonized females were never understood as' lacking because they
were not men-like.
. What has been understood as
the feminization of colonized men seems rather a gesture of
humiliation, attributing sexual passivity to the threat of rape. This
tension between hypersexuality and sexual passivity defines one
of the domains of masculine subjection of the colonized. The colonial
civilizing mission was the euphemistic mask of brutal access to
colonized people became males and females. Males became not-human-as- not-men, the human trait, and colonized females became not-human-as- not-women.
Colonized men were not understood to be lacking as not being women-like. Notice the important distinction between sex and gender at this time, which is
conilated later as sexual dimorphism becomes the companion of the dichotomous understanding of gender
peoples bodies through unimaginable exploitation, violent

sexual violation, control of reproduction, and systematic
terror, which included, for example, feeding living people to dogs
and making pouches and hats from the vaginas of brutally killed
indigenous females civilizing mission used the hierarchical gender
dichotomy as a judgment, though the attainment of dichotomous
gendering was not the point of the normative judgment
the colonizing mission included the profound
transformation of the colonized into men and women-a
transformation not in identity but in nature-in its repertoire of
justifications for abuse Christian confession, sin, and the Manichean
division between good and evil served to imprint female sexuality as
evil
. The
. Tuming the colonized into human
beings was not a colonial goal. Rather,
. There is an important separation in this respect between the treatment of comuneros, commu-
nity members, subjects of empires, and the treatment of the indigenous nobility that needs exploration
from the point of view of the coloniality of gender. Here I am highlighting the most direct and brutal conception and treatment of those whose labor and sexuality were clearly understood in terms of the coloniality of
The civilizing transformation justified the colonization of

memory and thus of ones sense of self intersubjective
relations, and relation to the spirit world, to land, to the very
fabric of ones conception of reality, identity, social, ecological,
and cosmological organization as Christianity became the most
gender.
. Thus
powerful instrument in the transformative mission, the normativity

that tied gender and civilization became involved in the erasure of
community, of ecological practices, knowledges of planting,
weaving, and the cosmos, and not only in changing and controlling
reproductive and sexual practices.
One can begin to appreciate the tie
between the colonial introduction of the instrumental modern
56
(De)Coloniality AFF
One can
recognize the dehumanization constitutive of what Nelson
Maldonado-Torres calls the coloniality of being in the scope of
concept of nature central to capitalism and the colonial introduction of the modern concept of gender and appreciate it as macabre and heavy in its impres- sive ramifications.
the modem colonial gender system

!
also
I use the term coloniality following Anibal Quijanos analysis of the capitalist world system
of power in terms of coloniality of power and of modernity, two inseparable axes in the workings of this system of power. Quijanos analysis provides a historical understanding of the in- separability of racialization
and capitalist exploitation as constitutive of the capitalist system of power as anchored in the colonization of the Americas. In thinking of the coloniality of gender I complicate his understanding of the capitalist
. In using the term coloniality I

mean not just classification of people in terms of the coloniality of
power and gender but also the process of active reduction of
people, the dehumanization that fits them for the classification, the
attempt to turn the colonized into less than human beings.
global system of power, but I also criticize his understanding of gender only in terms of sexual access to women
This is in stark contrast to the
public aim of conversion, which constitutes the Christianizing mission.
57
(De)Coloniality AFF
AT: Root Cause Debate Bad/

Root Cause Debate Good
ROOT CAUSE DEBATES GOOD FOR SOLVING REAL
WORLD PROBLEMS
Pavey NODATE
(Root Cause Analysis Tracing a Problem to its Origins A powerful fivestep problem-solving process, Sarah Pavey, editor Mind Tools, Mind
Tools, Date Accessed: 6/23/14,
http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMC_80.htmJWH)
In medicine, it's easy to understand the difference between treating
symptoms and curing a medical condition. Sure, when you're in pain
because you've broken your wrist, you WANT to have your symptoms
treated now! However, taking painkillers won't heal your wrist, and
true healing is needed before the symptoms can disappear for good .
But when you have a problem at work, how do you approach it? Do you jump in and start treating the
symptoms? Or do you stop to consider whether there's actually a deeper problem that needs your
attention? If you only fix the symptoms what you see on the surface the problem will almost certainly
happen again... which will lead you to fix it, again, and again, and again .
If, instead, you look

deeper to figure out why the problem is occurring, you can fix the
underlying systems and processes that cause the problem. Root
Cause Analysis (RCA) is a popular and often-used technique that
helps people answer the question of why the problem occurred in
the first place. Root Cause Analysis seeks to identify the origin of a
problem. It uses a specific set of steps, with associated tools, to find
the primary cause of the problem, so that you can: Determine what
happened. Determine why it happened. Figure out what to do to
reduce the likelihood that it will happen again. RCA assumes that systems and
events are interrelated. An action in one area triggers an action in another, and another, and so on . By
tracing back these actions, you can discover where the problem
started and how it grew into the symptom you're now facing. You'll
usually find three basic types of causes: Physical causes Tangible,
material items failed in some way (for example, a car's brakes stopped working). Human causes
People did something wrong, or did not do something that was
needed. Human causes typically lead to physical causes (for example, no
one filled the brake fluid, which led to the brakes failing). Organizational causes A system, process, or
policy that people use to make decisions or do their work is faulty (for example, no one person was
responsible for vehicle maintenance, and everyone assumed someone else had filled the brake fluid).
Root Cause Analysis looks at all three types of causes. It involves

investigating the patterns of negative effects, finding hidden flaws
in the system, and discovering specific actions that contributed to
the problem. This often means that RCA reveals more than one root cause.
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AT: Colonialism Good

THE POWERFUL IDEAS OF FEAR AND TERROR COME IN THE
OCNTEXT OF THE DESTRUCTION, THAT COMES FROM
COLONIZATION-ESPECIALLY AMERICA
Dei and Kempf 06,
Anti-colonialism and education: the politics of resistance page 76-77

George Jerry Sefa Dei is a professor of sociology at the University of Toronto, Arlo Kempf is an instructor
and program coordinator at UT, http://books.google.com/books?
id=HyupVZD5SzwC&pg=PA76&lpg=PA76&dq=colonialism+creates+negative&source=bl&ots=V3eyZcmT
6_&sig=uqaXV812yKstDLPIN8x2fsHELnE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=koGsU_eIYaKqga6oICQAw&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false
colonialism creates
negative destructive emotions, notably fear and anxiety
associated with exposure to colonialist thoughts imagery and
actions that are then transformed into unconscious referents
that give rise to implicit, yet observable and measurable racist
attitudes. Obviously at a more fundamental level, colonialism is based on concrete
material social relationships built on unequal social relations that
allow a colonizer to extract the resources (both human and
material) from colonized lands and impose their own dominant ideas
and forms of economic and social relations on a colonized
people privileging their own knowledge and technology over
those of others. According to Hazel Waters (2004. p. I). the latest wave of colonization
is occurring within a historical conjuncture where The occasion
is terror, the instrument, fear and its delivery mechanism,
racism". In a recent article, William Schroder (2005) has accurately captured
the operative logic of colonialism and imperial domination today, carried out by the
most powerful colonizer in the history of the world, the United States:
Like the great imperialists of bygone days. Americas rulers share a long history
of creating fear - one evildoer or another always threatens the
destruction of the American way of life". Then, while the
frightened population huddles gratefully under the umbrella of
power, the government pursues an agenda calculated to transfer vast
sums of public wealth into the hands of the corporate and
political elite.
Underlying the main arguments presented in this study is the idea that
Colonialism plunges violence, terror and fear onto

society
Dei and Kempf 06,

59
(De)Coloniality AFF
Roy (2004) using a very appropriate metaphor, has compared colonialism

to rape. 0n countless occasions, the dominant white culture has
portrayed land as open to penetration willing, and needing
conquest. This metaphor pits femininity (with its associated concepts of
Arhundmti
passivity, nature, emotion and purity) Arhundmti Roy (9.004% using a very appropriate metaphor has
compared colonialism to rape. On countless occasions, the dominant white culture has portrayed land as
open to penetration, willing, and needing conquest. This metaphor pits femininity) with its associated
against the masculinity of

calculative logic and conquering reason. Indeed, this narrative of
colonial conquest in the form of sexual domination, permeates
the culture of Euro-American colonial expansion. And the fixation
with sexualizing colonized bodies is reflected today in
literature, movies, television, and advertising. A very recent
concepts of passivity nature. emotion and purity)
manifestation of this is the now infamous imagery of sexual domination and abuse of Iraqi prisoners
carried out by US soldiers at Abu Ghmih prison. As argued in other works in this volume,
colonialism unleashes a torrent of negative emotions as a result of its

perverse logic - it is rape committed on a mass scale. Indeed, the greatest tolls
of colonialism are its emotional ones. Colonialism plunges entire societies into
cycles of terror, dependency and continued violence as it sucks out
the spirits of people, crushing bodies and minds in the process. Colonialism takes up the narrative of
race with a vengeance and transforms it into a weapon conquest.
Establishing minority rule over the majority by creating divisions that are built into
cultural space and buttressed by the practice of class and gender
inequalities. Finally, colonialism plunges colonized people into a
perpetual state of fear which is eventually replicated in the
colonizer's own society.
Colonialism invokes fear into the colonized, it spreads

violence and hate
Dei and Kempf 06,

colonialism plunges colonized people into a perpetual

state of fear which is eventually replicated in the colonizer's
own society. Brain research has revealed a great deal about the negative impact of the fear
response and what it can do to the human body-mind axis. When the amygdala is
activated by images that invoke fear, it initiates a chemical cascade. One
of the more important chemicals in this cascade is acetylcholine. This chemical
activates other regions of the cortex, pulling the brain in a state of arousal
and facilitating memory formation to create vigilance against future
negative stimuli.5 Increased levels of acetylcholine from the emotional
centers of the brain signal the adrenal glands located just above the kidneys to
release more chemicals, including norepinephrine and adrenaline (epinephrine) into the
Finally,
blood stream. These chemicals cause an accelerated heart rate, increased respiration, and a tightening of
the muscles.
When these chemicals reach the nervous system, they
60
(De)Coloniality AFF
provoke spontaneous automatic behaviour to facilitate escape

or engage in combat. If neither option is available, the brain
goes into a general state of hypervigilance or anxiety that carries the
negative emotions forward in time, creating stress and
wreaking havoc on the body-mind axis, leading to the long term expression of
violent and defensive moods. As we all know, if permitted to continue, continual stress
results in an elevated risk of cardiovascular disease, high blood
pressure cancer and autoimmune disorders. These chemicals work at the
intersections of the bodymind axis, providing the actual feeling or sensation of our experiences, but they
These processes also represent

some of the neurobiological correlates of colonization. Though I have
also have the potential to harm the body-mind.
made it sound like all these chemical reactions happen outside of an individuals control in the simple
The automatic learning of

fears only represents one form of learning a very basic form that
causes spirit injury". It is necessary to confront and come to terms with
the negative emotions being perpetuated by us and by society, or else
they become, as we have seen, virulent automatic unconscious
afflictions that spread violence and hate. This requires a different type of
sketch provided above, this is definitely not the whole story.
learning one that is more disciplined and focused on the mind, a process of learning that questions the
way our mind-body axis produces reality. [I is based on the idea that the current reality we perceive, based
on the perpetuation of negative emotions, is not right and that we have the power to transform this
situation.
COLONIAL VIOLENCES CROSSES GENERATIONS AND ITS

EFFECTS ARE LONG-LIVED
Dei and Kempf 06, Anti-colonialism and education: the politics of resistance page 80-81
Before concluding, it is necessary to ask what studies of the human brain can tell us about racism. Western
Brain
studies are reaffirming the negative effects of colonization on
the colonized. Brain research has provided us with information regarding the mechanisms
through which racism continues to be exhibited in the mind of the
colonizer over the centuries as the dominant social forces
giving rise to colonialism have changed themselves and also
adjusted the operative logic of modern-day politics of colonialism.
scientists have recently begun to learn a lot about the functioning of the human brain.
Yet current research has a long way to go in understanding the hidden mysteries of this highly complex
process. More research is required and the arguments presented in this paper must be regarded with some
skepticism, for it is misleading to assume that a few regions of the brain are responsible for, or is predictive
of a highly complex behaviour such as racism. In the final analysis, brain research seems to yield more
questions than answers regarding racism. The questions we choose to address will determine the approach
we take to combating racism at the level of education. What is education if not (at some level) the active
rewiring of the brain? The problem with rewiring, as with education must necessarily be the
knowledge we have accumulated about

brain function over the centuries stresses the necessity for
social transformation to be carried out alongside the transformation
of minds in order to create a system of social relations free of
bias and prejudice in any of their forms. A deeper understanding of the interactive nature of
unpredictability of the outcome. This aside, the
the functions of the cerebral cortex would allow us to form pedagogical strategies appropriate for
61
(De)Coloniality AFF
repetitive images provoking

strong negative emotions gives way to rapid unconscious
categorizations of information in the mind. We also now are beginning to find
out that these categorizations become automatic referents
working beneath the level of conscious awareness to activate
certain regions of the brain in response to stimuli. Hearing the
words the suspect has been identified as a black male ... and
having the image associated with this line reproduced in movies,
music and in other cultural outlets over and over again creates a
situation where the human amygdala (responsible for fear response, anger, etc.).
combating racism more effectively. We know that
In this case, as described above, the ACC (regulating attention), and the PFC (responsible for higher level
arouse some sort of

defensive emotional posture (such as fear) when white subjects see
a black face even in the isolated and relatively safe environment of
the laboratory. White subjects thus perceive a socially
constructed and mediated threat and respond with a survivalmode response that in the evolutionary schema of our species did not originally
develop for this purpose. Furthermore, in face-to-face interactions, studies have shown
emotional processing) are automatically activated and may
that white subjects in conversations with black subjects perform badly on a Stroop test, requiring higher
executive function immediately after their interaction. Scientists point to the drain of resources caused by
whites checking their responses and inhibiting their inherent biases from emerging. Moreover, we have
the brain changes with time, going through several 80 crucial

periods of rapid change (periods of high plasticity). And finally, as we age, our
average abilities to recall detailed information decreases,
leading to more stereotyping and generalizing to compensate for
declining functionality in certain memory systems Studies have also
also learned that
shown that people are more likely to engage in stereotyping activity as they attain higher degrees of
situational (social) power, which is likely to also occur with age.
WE CANNOT EXPAND IDEALS OF COLONIALISM. WE

MUST STEP BACK AND DEVELOP OUR
UNDERSTANDING OF THE OCEAN-OTHERWISE
COLONIALISM WILL PERPETUATE AND EXTEND
PASS AMERICAN BOUNDARIES
Dei and Kempf 06,

All of this evidence points to the need for what Memmi (l999) has described as a lifelong pedagogy to
science findings reveal the need for a

struggle geared towards social and spiritual transformation
combat racism. This paper has argued that
waged at the multiple levels of individual human minds (through mindfulness techniques described above)
such as introducing more anticolonial and anti-racist literature into the curriculum. In addition,
it is necessary to launch an assault on the automatism created by the social
forces that compel us to accept and internalize social values
without questioning them, leading to the formation of automatic frames of
alongside collective action in various forms,
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(De)Coloniality AFF
reference that operate in the background of our minds. From an

early age, we must teach children how to take control of their
minds and direct it in ways that expand positive emotional states in
earnest, while taking responsibility and devoting our lives to make right
the wrongs of the past and the present. This is why anti-colonial, antiracist literature and imagery to counter colonial narratives must become a
part of our lived experience. Finally, as the fields of cognitive neuropsychology,
developmental neurobiology, and brain imaging techniques continue to develop and expand the emerging
research will have a profound impact on education - just as it has already on clinical psychology. And as we
parts of the brain, like the parts of the Earth, can be claimed as
territory by colonial powers and relationships. It is therefore
absolutely necessary for anticolonial, critical pedagogy to
establish the brain as a part of the interdisciplinary and complex terrain of anticolonial struggle.
have seen, the
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(De)Coloniality AFF
AT: Race K
COLONIAL MODERNITY IS PREDICATED UPON RACIAL
DIFFERENCES THAT MARKS NON-WHITE
KNOWLEDGE AS USELESS AND CROWDS OUT
EFFECTIVE NATIVE, NON-WESTERN SOLUTIONS.
THESE SOLUTIONS COULD BE KEY TO ETHICAL
ENGAGEMENT WITH OCEANS.
Mignolo- 2010
(Walter D., Department of Romance Studies, Duke University, The geopolitics

of knowledge and the colonial difference, Praxis Publica, October 2010, http://praxispublica.org/wpcontent/uploads/2010/10/WALTER-MIGNOLO-GEOPOLITICS-OF-KNOWLEDGE-DUKE-UNIVERSITY.pdf
The irreducible colonial difference that I am trying to chart, starting from

Dussel's dialogue with Vattimo, was also perceived by Robert Bernasconi in the challenge that African
Bernasconi notes that

"Western philosophy traps African philosophy in a double bind: either
African philosophy is so similar to Western philosophy that it makes no
distinctive contribution and effectively disappears; or it is so different
that its credentials to be genuine philosophy will always be i n doubt
(Bernasconi 1998, 188)." This double bind is the colonial difference and it
creates the condition for what I have elsewhere called "border
thinking". I have defined border thinking as an epistemology from a
subaltern perspective. Although Bernascon i describes the phenomena
in a different terminology, the problem we are dealing with here is the
same. Furthermore, Bernasconi makes his point with the support of Afro - American philosopher Lucius
Philosophy puts forward to Continental Philosophy. Simply put,
Outlaw in an article entitled "African 'philosophy': decons tructive and reconstructive challenges".
Emphasizing the sense in which Outlaw uses the concept of "deconstruction", Bernasconi at the same time
underlines the limits of Derrida's deconstructive operation and the closure of Western metaphysics.
Derrida, ac cording to Bernasconi, offers no space in which to ask the question about Chinese, Indian, and
especially African philosophy. Latin and Anglo - American philosophy should be added to this. After a
careful discussion of Derrida's philosophy, and pondering pos sible alternatives for the "extension" of
deconstruction, Bernasconi concludes by saying: "...even after such revisions, it is not clear what
contribution deconstruction could make to the contemporary dialogue between Western philosophy and
African philosoph y" (1998, 187). Or, if a contribution could be foreseen, it has to be from the perspective
that Outlaw appropriates and which "denaturalizes" deconstruction of Western metaphysics from inside
(and maintains the totality, a la Derrida). That is to say, it h as to be a "deconstruction" from the
"exteriority" of Western metaphysics, from the Walter D. Mignolo perspective of the double bind that
Bernasconi detected in the interdependence (and power relations) between Western and African
philosophy. However, if we invert the persp ective, we are located in a particular deconstructive strategy
that I would rather name the "decolonization of philosophy" (or of any other branch of knowledge, natural
sciences, social sciences, and the humanities). Such a displacement of perspective was already suggested
by Moroccan philosopher Abdelkhebir Khatibi, which I have discussed at length elsewhere (Mignolo 1999a).
However, certainly Bernasconi will concur with Khatibi in naming decolonization as the type of
deconstructive operation proposed by O utlaw, thus maintaining and undoing the colonial difference from
the colonial difference itself. "The
existential dimension of African philosophy's

challenge to Western philosophy in general and Continental philosophy
in particular is located in the need to decolonize the mind. This task is
at least as important for the colonizer as it is for the colonized. For
Africans, decolonizing the mind takes place not only in facing the
experience of colonialism, but also in recognizing the precolonial,
64
(De)Coloniality AFF
which established the destructive importance of so - called

ethnophilosophy (Bernasconi 1998, 191). The double bind requires also a
double operation from the perspective of African philosophy: an
appropriation of Western philosophy and at the same time a rejection
of it grounded in the colonial difference. Bernasconi recognizes that these, however, are
tasks and issues for African philosophers. What would be similar issues for a Continental philosopher? For
Europeans, Bernasconi adds, "decolonizing the colonial mind nece ssitates an encounter with the
colonized, where finally the European has the experience of being seen as judged by those they have
denied. The extent to which European philosophy championed colonialism, and more particularly helped to
justify it through a philosophy of history that privileged Europe, makes it apparent that such a decolonizing
is an urgent task for European thought" (Bernasconi 1998, 192)
THE CODIFICATION OF COLORED BODIES IS ROOTED IN

COLONIAL VIOLENCE. COLONIZATION IS ROOTED IN AN USTHEM DICHOTOMY THAT SITUATES COLONIZERS AS CLEAN
RIGHTEOUS SUBJECTS AND CODED BODIES AS INFERIOR.
Mignolo 2006
[Walter D. Mignolo, Professor of Cultural studies at Duke University,

Islamophobia/Hispanophobia: The (Re)Configuration of the Racial Imperial/Colonial Matrix, Human
Architecture, 2006]
the point of departure of my argument is that current debates about

whether race is an eighteenth and nineteenth-century discourse,
or whether in the sixteenth century caste was the proper system
of classification, both assume that the classifications concocted by
Renaissance men of letters or Enlightenment philosophies were
universal. My point of departure is that the system of classification and
hierarchies during the Renaissance or during the Enlightenment was
a local one in this precise sense: people in India, China, Ottoman,
Tawantinsuyu, Anahuac, etc., certainly were part of the classification
but none of them, except Christian theologians, had any say in the
classification. The only possibility to those who did not participate in
the imperial organization of knowledge was either to accept how
they were classified or to reclassify themselves for their own pride
but with little effect on the organization of world power that was at
stake. Let me explain. Discourses of difference in the European Renaissance went hand in hand with
Thus,
discourses of fear.1 There is plenty of evidence about Christians in Spain but also in England. British
travelers to the Hapsburg or Austro-Hungarian Empires expressed their strangeness and the discomfort
The European Renaissance could be taken as a reference

period in which several empires (a general name extended after the name of the
Roman Emperor instead, for example, of Sultan or Tzar) coexisted; although the
discourses of Christianity and later on of political theory and
political economy emerged as the dominant imperial discourses of
Western capitalist empires. Racism went hand in hand with the historical foundation of
capitalism as we know it today. Take the Black Legend as a good and early
example of the propagation of the Muslim menace from the
Iberian Peninsula to the Atlantic countries, north of the Pyrenees.
The Black Legend is, first and foremost, an internal conflict in Europe
and for that reason I will describe it as the imperial internal
difference. But the Black Legend, initiated and propelled by England,
shared with the Spaniards the Christian cosmology that
distinguished itself from the Muslim, the Turks and the Russian
Orthodox. That is, the Black Legend contributed to the reinforcement of an imperial divide that was
already carried out by the Spanish Kingdom of Charles I and the Spanish Empire under Philip II. We all
vis--vis the Turks.
65
(De)Coloniality AFF
know it: in1492, the Moors and the Jews were prosecuted in the
Iberian Peninsula; Indians were discovered in the New World and
massive contingents of African slaves were transported through the
Atlantic. The discovery of the New World posed a different
problem for Western Christians dealing with Muslims, Jews and
Turks: if Jews and Moors were classified according to their belief in
the wrong God, Indians (and later on Black Africans), had to be
classified assuming that they had no religions. Thus, the question of
purity of blood acquired in the New World a meaning totally
different from the one it had in the Iberian Peninsula. Nonetheless, the fact
remains that with the double expulsion of Moors and Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, the New World
brought a different dimension to the classificatory and hierarchical
system. While in Spain Jews and Muslims identified themselves with those racialized labels, there were
no Indians in the New World. To become Indian was a long and painful
process for the diversity of peoples, the diversity of languages, and the diversity of
memories and rituals from todays Southern Chile to Canada. And there were no Blacks
either. Africans transported to the new World from different regions
of the continent had different languages, memories and religions,
but now all of them became Blacks in the New World. In other words,
whatever the system of classification in the Iberian Peninsula and in
the New World, that system of classification was controlled by
Christian Theology as the overarching and hegemonic frame of
knowledge. Neither the Turks, nor the Mughal, nor the Christian Orthodox in Russia had any say in
iteven less, of course, Indians and Blacks
COLONIAL IDENTITY PRODUCTION HAS REDUCED NATIVES TO A

CONSTANT STATE OF NEAR-DEATH. THE ABILITY OF THE
BIOPOLITICAL TO MANDATE THE RELEVANCE OF NATIVE
CULTURE PRODUCES A VIOLENT RACISM THAT SEEKS TO ERASE
NATIVE THOUGHT AND LIFE.
Smith 3 [Andrea, Not an Indian Tradition: The Sexual Colonization of Native Peoples, Hypatia,
Volume 18, Number 2, Spring, pp. 70-85]
Ann Stoler argues that racism, far from being a reaction to crisis in which racial others are scapegoated for
[R]acism is not an effect but a tactic

in the internal fission of society into binary opposition, a means of
creating biologized internal enemies, against whom society must
defend itself (1997, 59). She notes that in the modern state, the constant
purification and elimination of racialized enemies within that state
ensures the growth of the national body. Racism does not merely arise
in moments of crisis, in sporadic cleansings. It is internal to the biopolitical
state, woven into the web of the social body, threaded through its fabric (1997, 59). Similarly, Kate
Shanley notes that Native peoples are a permanent present absence in the
U.S. colonial imagination, an absence that reinforces at every turn
the conviction that Native peoples are indeed vanishing and that the
conquest of Native lands is justified. Ella Shoat and Robert Stam describe this
absence as an ambivalently repressive mechanism [that] dispels the
anxiety in the face of the Indian, whose very presence is a reminder of
social ills, is a permanent part of the social fabric.
66
(De)Coloniality AFF
the initially precarious g rounding of the American nation-state

itself . . . In a temporal paradox, living Indians were induced to play
dead, as it were, in order to perform a narrative of manifest destiny in which
their role, ultimately, was to disappear (1994, 11819). This absence is
effected through the metaphorical transformation of Native bodies into
a pollution of which the colonial body must purify itself. As white
Californians described in the 1860s, Native people were the dirtiest lot
of human beings on earth. They wear filthy rags, with their persons
unwashed, hair uncombed and swarming with vermin (Rawls 1984, 195). The
following 1885 Proctor & Gamble ad for Ivory Soap also illustrates this equation between Indian bodies and
dirt: We were once factious, fierce and wild, In peaceful arts unreconciled Our blankets smeared with
grease and stains From buffalo meat and settlers veins. Through summers dust and heat content From
moon to moon unwashed we went, But IVORY SOAP came like a ray Of light across our darkened way And
now were civil, kind and good And keep the laws as people should, We wear our linen, lawn and lace As
well as folks with paler face And now I take, wherever we go This cake of IVORY SOAP to show What
In the colonial
imagination, Native bodies are also immanently polluted with sexual
sin. Alexander Whitaker, a minister in Virginia, wrote in 1613: They live naked in
bodies, as if their shame of their sinne deserved no covering: Their
names are as naked as their bodies: They esteem it a virtue to lie,
deceive and steale as their master the divell teacheth them (Berkhofer
civilized my squaw and me And made us clean and fair to see. (Lopez n.d, 119)
1978, 19). Furthermore, according to Bernardino de Minaya: Their [the Indians] marriages are not a
sacrament but a sacrilege. They are idolatrous, libidinous, and commit sodomy. Their chief desire is to eat,
Stolers
analysis of racism in which Native peoples are likened to a pollution
that threatens U. S. security is indicated in the comments of one doctor
in his attempt to rationalize the mass sterilization of Native women in
the 1970s: People pollute, and too many people crowded too close
together cause many of our social and economic problems. These in
turn are aggravated by involuntary and irresponsible parenthood . . .
We also have obligations to the society of which we are part. The
welfare mess, as it has been called, cries out for solutions, one of which is
fertility control (Oklahoma 1989, 11). Herbert Aptheker describes the logical consequences of this
sterilization movement: The ultimate logic of this is crematoria; people are
themselves constituting the pollution and inferior people in particular,
then crematoria become really vast sewerage projects. Only so may
one understand those who attend the ovens and concocted and
conducted the entire enterprise; those wastedto use U. S. army
jargon reserved for colonial hostilitiesare not really, not fully people
(1987, 144). Because Indian bodies are dirty, they are considered
sexually violable and rapable. That is, in patriarchal thinking, only a
body that is pure can be violated. The rape of bodies that are
considered inherently impure or dirty simply does not count. For instance,
prostitutes have almost an impossible time being believed if they are
raped because the dominant society considers the prostitutes body
undeserving of integrity and violable at all times. Similarly, the history
of mutilation of Indian bodies, both living and dead, makes it clear to
Indian people that they are not entitled to bodily integrity, as these
drink, worship heathen idols, and commit bestial obscenities (cited in Stannard 1992, 211).
67
(De)Coloniality AFF
examples suggest: I saw the body of White Antelope with the privates cut off, and I heard a
soldier say he was going to make a tobacco-pouch out of them. (cited in Wrone and Nelson 1982, 113)
Each of the braves was shot down and scalped by the wild volunteers, who out with their knives and
cutting two parallel gashes down their backs, would strip the skin from the quivering [ esh to make razor
straps of. (cited in Wrone and Nelson 1982, 90) One more dexterous than the rest, proceeded to [ ay the
chiefs [Tecumsehs] body; then, cutting the skin in narrow strips . . . at once, a supply of razor-straps for
the more ferocious of his brethren. (cited in Wrone and Nelson 1982, 82) Andrew Jackson . . . supervised
the mutilation of 800 or so Creek Indian corpsesthe bodies of men, women and children that he and his
men massacredcutting off their noses to count and preserve a record of the dead, slicing long strips of
[ esh from their bodies to tan and turn into bridle reins. (Stannard 1992, 121) Echoing this mentality was
Governor Thompson, who stated in 1990 that he would not close down an open Indian burial mound in
Dickson, Illinois, because of his argument that he was as much Indian as are current Indians, and
consequently, he had as much right as they to determine the fate of Indian remains.1 He felt free to
appropriate the identity of Native, and thus felt justified in claiming ownership over both Native identity
and Native bodies. The Chicago press similarly attempted to challenge the identity of the Indian people
who protested Thompsons decision by stating that these protestors were either only part Indian or were
only claiming to be Indian (Hermann 1990).2 The message conveyed by the Illinois state government is
that to be Indian in this society is to be on constant display for white consumers, in life or in death. And in
Indian identity itself is under the control of the colonizer, subject to

eradication at any time. As Aime Cesaire puts it, colonization = thingi> cation (1972, 21).
As Stoler explains this process of racialized colonization: [T]he more
degenerates and abnormals [in this case Native peoples] are
eliminated, the lives of those who speak will be stronger, more
vigorous, and improved. The enemies are not political adversaries, but
those identified as external and internal threats to the population.
Racism is the condition that makes it acceptable to put [certain people]
to death in a society of normalization (1997, 85). Tadiars description of
colonial relationships as an enactment of the prevailing mode of
heterosexual relations is useful because it underscores the extent to
which U. S. colonizers view the subjugation of women of the Native
nations as critical to the success of the economic, cultural, and political
colonization (1993, 186). Stoler notes that the imperial discourses on
sexuality cast white women as the bearers of more racist imperial
order (1997, 35). By extension, Native women as bearers of a counterimperial order pose a supreme threat to the imperial order. Symbolic
and literal control over their bodies is important in the war against
Native people, as these examples attest: When I was in the boat I
captured a beautiful Carib women . . . I conceived desire to take
pleasure . . . I took a rope and thrashed her well, for which she raised
such unheard screams that you would not have believed your ears.
fact,
Finally we came to an agreement in such a manner that I can tell you that she seemed to have been
brought up in a school of harlots. (Sale 1990, 140) Two of the best looking of the squaws were lying in such
a position, and from the appearance of the genital organs and of their wounds, there can be no doubt that
they were first ravished and then shot dead. Nearly all of the dead were mutilated. (Wrone and Nelson
1982, 123) One woman, big with child, rushed into the church, clasping the alter and crying for mercy for
herself and unborn babe. She was followed, and fell pierced with a dozen lances . . . the child was torn
alive from the yet palpitating body of its mother, first plunged into the holy water to be baptized, and
immediately its brains were dashed out against a wall. (Wrone and Nelson 1982, 97) The Christians
attacked them with buffets and beatings . . . Then they behaved with such temerity and shamelessness
that the most powerful ruler of the island had to see his own wife raped by a Christian officer. (Las Casas
1992, 33) I heard one man say that he had cut a womans private parts out, and had them for exhibition
on a stick. I heard another man say that he had cut the fingers off of an Indian, to get the rings off his
hand. I also heard of numerous instances in which men had cut out the private parts of females, and
stretched them over their saddle-bows and some of them over their hats. (Sand Creek 1973, 12930)
American Horse said of the massacre at Wounded Knee: The fact of the killing of the women, and more
especially the killing of the young boys and girls who are to go to make up the future strength of the Indian
people is the saddest part of the whole affair and we feel it very sorely. (Stannard 1992, 127)
68
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COLONIALISM ESTABLISHES A FRAMEWORK OF RACISM TO

JUSTIFY CULTURAL INTERVENTION EXCLUSIVELY FOR
DOMINATION AND SUBJUGATION
Miguel 9 (Vincius Valentin Raduan, holds a degree in Legal Sciences

Faculty of Humanities and a professor at the Federal University of
Rondnia, Colonialism and Underdevelopment in Latin America
http://www.politicalaffairs.net/colonialism-and-underdevelopment-inlatin-america/)
Colonialism not only deprives a society of its freedom and its wealth, but of its very character, leaving its
people intellectually and morally disoriented (Franz Fanon, 1966). Introduction This essay is
going to assess colonialism and the class structure inherited as a main determinant of current development in Latin American countries. First
1.4 billion people in developing

countries are living under the extreme poverty. These countries are, in the majority,
former colonies from different cycles of expansion of the major imperialist countries.
Certainly, the processes driven by and the legacies of colonialism are
multiple and cannot be understood if reduced to only the economic
dimension. However, for the purpose of this paper, the effects of economic colonization will be stressed. The economic heritages of
of all, we must highlight statistics published by the World Bank:
colonization are the consequences of the process of conquering, controlling and possessing the specified regions. I also avoid a discussion of
colonialism
is imprecise and broad. In an effort to be more precise, I understand it as an external/foreign exploitation
assured through political control and dominance which led to a
situation of dependency on the colonial power by the exploited
economy. However, there are other extra-economic implications of colonialism: it is necessarily a violent
conquest and violently maintained system for the over-exploration
of the conquered people. It is an inhuman system in itself,
destroying any attempt at real development of the colony . Economically, it
confiscates and reserves productive lands for the use of the
colonizer. At a psychological level, it de-humanizes the colonized, forcefully
the entire 20th century in order to focus on how the colonial occupation shaped various countries. This definition of
imposing a foreign culture. It is a system sustained by a racist

ideology where cultural space is developed exclusively for
relations of domination. This allows for suppression and
subjugation of the colonized.
Our main question is to analyze how the low level of economic performance in
colonized countries is a reflex of social structures generated by colonialism. Thus, the first question which should be addressed is: Why do
colonial powers established colonies? Secondly, how did they do it? Therefore, it will be possible to comprehend the current impacts and
colonies (17th to 19th centuries)

were established as part of the expansion of the European
capitalistic production following the Industrial Revolution . European colonial
consequences of their practices. Historical context and genealogy of the colonialism The recent
powers aimed to incorporate territories which could provide raw materials and low-cost workforce, and in the process de-structuring and
unmaking solid pre-capitalistic social formations. Hence, the main goal was not the transference of the metropolitan population to populate
The economies of the

colonies were designed to serve as source of inexpensive labor and
natural resources, and never planned to spark internal development. This situation led to monopolistic trade-relations in
benefit of the economies of the colonial powers. To ensure these monopolistic privilege s, the
the colony, expanding their agriculture as practiced by the Roman (and earlier) Empire(s).
colonial powers forcibly shaped the social and economical

dynamics of the colonies. In this sense, the colonized countries were forced to develop non-technologically
intensive monocultures (ironically celebrated as specialization), selling unprofitably their entire production for the dominant countries. This
same agro-export oriented dynamics outlined the land-owning structure, based in large properties under the (political and economical) control
of non-modernizing oligarchies. The role of these oligarchies is of fundamental importance. The local elites were major actors on political-
69
(De)Coloniality AFF
economical scenario. Their agency cannot be ignored and their internal activity defined, organized and settled the relations of exploitation
which took place in the colonies. One of the most prominent Latin American economists, Celso Furtado, effectively explained the patterns of
colonialism. According to him, the foreign country worked in interrelation with the ruling classes in the region, using authoritarian means to
exclude large segments of the people from participating in political and economic control of their communities and countries with the intention
of decreasing the cost of labor (when it not reduced drastically through the use of enslaved traditional populations). To sum up, Furtado states:
The existence of vast non-utilized areas permitted new extensive

occupations of land instead of establishing a modern and intensive agriculture; 2. The profits accumulated by the local
1.
elites were wasted in the consumption of superfluous and luxurious goods for pure ostentation, rather than saving and investing in productive
As consequence of the agrarian structure

which extremely centralized power and wealth, a harsh situation of
inequality, poverty and all sorts of privation for the majority of the
society resulted. This excluded a major part of the population from
the basic means of subsistence. All these points, maintained a vicious cycle of lower productivity in colonized
sectors of the national and nascent economy; 3.
regions and the flow of wealth to the dominant economies. The fate of the lest developed countries were determined in this dialectical relation
where internal factors (the role of the dominant classes based in a semi-feudal order) interacted with external causes (the colonial power and
its thirsty for resources and labor force). In this historic trap colonized regions were lately incorporated in the world-market as a result of the
dissolution of the direct control of metropolitan capital over the colonies and had to be accommodated according to the needs of the previous.
massive poverty in those specified regions saw its

genealogy in the original privation of access to land and housing and
currently also determines the economic performance of those
countries where large majorities of the working classes are unable
to consume the products made in a society scarred by inequality .
Strict laws and other measures of social control were also
The (historical and contemporary)
established in the colonized countries. Even the manufacture of minimal technological

products such as nails were forbidden, artificially increasing the dependence of the colonies. This is an important element of the colonial
the development of the

colonial country comes at the expense of the
underdevelopment of the colonized. The markets and actual
system, and it cannot be understood if its inherent contradictions are ignored:
economies must be looked as historically constituted . In this sense, production in the

colony was determined by the colonial powers demands. The establishment of a monopolistic relation between the colonial power and the
This historical
process left the former colonies economically subordinated and
disabled. Though it is important to bear in mind that the identity of the colonial power (and the type of the colonization) can be a
colony not only asphyxiated the nascent industrialization, but also strangled the benefits of competition.
different variable. For instance, the legacy in terms of cultural, institutional and legal heritage of the colonial power can create slight
differences. In the table below, a list of the GDP of former colonies (in South America; data in American dollars) is contrasted with their Gini
coefficients, or the statistical measure of inequality. [A low Gini number indicates a more equal distribution of wealth. By comparison, the US
has a Gini coefficient of about .40, while many social democratic European countries are in the .20s. Ed.] Historically, this sample was
the pattern of colonization was to

establish centers for supplying agricultural and non-industrialized
products and minerals, such as gold and silver for the colonial powers. Generally speaking, Latin America has shown economic
subjected to a similar kind of colonization. In other words,
growth, although the social structure imposed colonialism has been perpetuated. The region is extremely unequal, with one of the worst
income distributions of the world. The explanation for this is that the initial degree of inequality, initiated with the long process of
fragmentation of local pre-capitalist and autonomous societies, followed by the enslavement of traditional indigenous populations, the
transference of African slaves to the continent and, finally, the hyper-exploitation of the free (or recently liberated) working class is still
affecting the actual development. The legacy of the colonial times - the concentration of power, wealth and land - led to a stratified society
with an extreme inequality. The discrimination and oppression present in those hierarchical societies are the main inheritance of the former
colonies and are a persistent tragedy, being part of the unsolved questions of the recent past.
RACISM IS A CONSTRUCT OF COLONIALISM USED TO

LEGITIMIZE SOCIAL CONQUESTRELATIONS OF DOMINATION
TRANSLATE INTO PHENOTYPIC INFERIORITY
Quijano 2000 (Anbal, professor of the Department of Sociology at Binghamton University,

New York, Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America)
What is termed globalization is the culmination of a process that began with the constitution of America and
One of the fundamental axes of

this model of power is the social classification of the worlds
population around the idea of race, a mental construction that
expresses the basic experience of colonial domination and pervades
colonial/modern Eurocentered capitalism as a new global power.
70
(De)Coloniality AFF
the more important dimensions of global power, including its specific

rationality: Eurocentrism. The racial axis has a colonial origin and character, but it has proven to be
more durable and stable than the colonialism in whose matrix it was established. Therefore , the model of
power that is globally hegemonic today presupposes an element of
coloniality. In what follows, my primary aim is too pen up some of the theoretically necessary questions about the
implications of coloniality of power regarding the history of Latin America.1 America and the New Model of Global Power
America was constituted as the first space/time of a new model of power of global vocation, and both in this way
and by it became the first identity of modernity . Two historical processes associated in the
production of that space/time converged and established the two fundamental axes of the new model of power. One
was the codification of the differences between conquerors and
conquered in the idea of race, a supposedly different biological
structure that placed some in a natural situation of inferiority to the
others. The conquistadors assumed this idea as the constitutive, founding element of the relations of domination that
the conquest imposed. On this basis, the population of America, and later the world, was classified
within the new model of power. The other process was the constitution of a new structure of
control of labor and its resources and products. This new structure was an articulation of all historically known previous
structures of control of labor, slavery, serfdom, small independent commodity production and reciprocity, together around
The idea of race,

in its modern meaning, does not have a known history before the
colonization of America. Perhaps it originated in reference to the phenotypic differences between
conquerors and conquered.4 However, what matters is that soon it was constructed to refer to
the supposed differential biological structures between those
groups. Social relations founded on the category of race produced
new historical social identities in AmericaIndians, blacks, and
mestizos and redefined others. Terms such as Spanish and
Portuguese, and much later European, which until then indicated only
geographic origin or country of origin, acquired from then on a racial
connotation in reference to the new identities. Insofar as the social relations that were
being configured were relations of domination, such identities were
considered constitutive of the hierarchies, places, and corresponding social roles, and
consequently of the model of colonial domination that was being imposed . In
other words, race and racial identity were established as instruments of
basic social classification. As time went by, the colonizers codified the
phenotypic trait of the colonized as color, and they assumed it as the emblematic characteristic of
racial category. That category was probably initially established in the area of Anglo-America. There so-called blacks
and upon the basis of capital and the world market.3 Race: A Mental Category of Modernity
were not only the most important exploited group, since the principal part of the economy rested on their labor; they
were, above all, the most important colonized race, since Indians were not part of that
colonial society. Why the dominant group calls itself white is a story related to racial classification.5 In America, the
idea of race was a way of granting legitimacy to the relations of
domination imposed by the conquest. After the colonization of America and the expansion of
European colonialism to the rest of the world, the subsequent constitution of Europe as a new identity needed the
elaboration of a Eurocentric perspective of knowledge, a theoretical perspective on
the idea of race as a
naturalization of colonial relations between Europeans 535 Quijano . Power, Eurocentrism, and
Latin America and non-Europeans. Historically, this meant a new way of legitimizing
the already old ideas and practices of relations of superiority/inferiority between
dominant and dominated. From the sixteenth century on, this principle has proven to be the most
effective and long-lasting instrument of universal social domination, since the much older principlegender or intersexual
the conquered and

dominated peoples were situated in a natural position of inferiority
and, as a result, their phenotypic traits as well as their cultural
features were considered inferior.6 In this way, race became the
dominationwas encroached upon by the inferior/superior racial classifications. So
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(De)Coloniality AFF
fundamental criterion for the distribution of the world population

into ranks, places, and roles in the new societys structure of power.
72
(De)Coloniality AFF
AT: Framework/Topicality
THE UNITED STATES FEDERAL GOVERNMENT SHOULD
SUBSTANTIALLY DEVELOP ITS EXPLORATION OF THE OCEAN.
We meet
Dictionary.com, 14
Dictionary.com. "Exploration dictionary definition | exploration defined."Exploration dictionary definition |
exploration defined. N.p., 23 June 2014. Web. 23 June 2014. <http://www.yourdictionary.com/exploration>.
penetrating, or ranging over for purposes of (especially

geographical) discovery
The exploration of 'unknown' areas often was the precursor to
colonization.
Notably
The mindset of ocean exploration is to gain Products.

NOAA 13 Head government ocean administration, What Is Ocean Exploration and Why Is It
Important? , NOAA, 6/26/14, http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/backmatter/whatisexploration.html,
While new discoveries are always exciting to scientists, information from ocean exploration is important to
Unlocking the mysteries of deep-sea ecosystems can

reveal new sources for medical drugs, food, energy resources,
and other products. Information from deep-ocean exploration can help predict earthquakes
everyone.
and tsunamis and help us understand how we are affecting and being affected by changes in Earths
Expeditions to the unexplored ocean can help focus

research into critical geographic and subject areas that are likely to produce tangible
benefits.
climate and atmosphere.
Standards:
Fairness: WE ARE A CRITICAL INTERROGATION OF WHAT IT
MEANS TO ENGAGE IN THE RESOLUTIONAL QUESTION OF
OCEANIC EXPLORATION HOWEVER WE ARE TOPICAL. WE SAY
THAT THE UNITED STATES FEDERAL GOVERNMENT SHOULD
SUBSTANTIALLY DEVELOP ITS EXPLORATION OF THE OCEAN.
Predictability: THE NEGATIVE MUST PROVE EXACTLY WHY OUR
AFF ISNT TOPICAL
PREFER DISCUSSION OF THE TOPIC OVER TOPICAL
DISCUSSION
OUR AFF IS NECESSARY TO CHALLENGE COLONIALISTIC
LOGIC
WE STILL ENGAGE IN USFG ACTION TOWARDS THE
DEVELOPENT OF OCEANIC EXPLORATION
73
(De)Coloniality AFF
Voters:
Education: We do not impede education, rather we promote by
talking about the root of ocean exploration. The negs
education voter is not viable because you the judge is not
voting for an aff that diminishes education.
74
(De)Coloniality AFF
AT: Limits
Limits are bad for education, they limit the amounts of
knowledge that can be produced in debate. The negative calls
for limits that exclude productive discussions about oceanic
exploration that are key to oceanic development.
Furthermore, the aff encourages critical thinking as a way of
engaging the resolutional question of oceanic exploration and
development. This does not signal untopical aff but rather
exemplifies the benefits of critical thinking. Without necessary
criticisms of the topic debate becomes an echo-chamber.
Critical thinking furthers education by eliminating narrowminded sociocentrism
Paul and Elder, 08 (Richard Paul is the Director of Research and Professional Development at
the Center for Critical Thinking , The Benefits of Critical Thinking, Foundation for Critical Thinking, June 24
2014,
http://www.doane.edu/facstaff/resources/cetl-home/31812)
Critical thinking
is, in short, self-directed, self-disciplined, self-monitored, and selfcorrective thinking. It presupposesassent to rigorous standards of excellence and mindful command
entails effective communication and problem solving

abilities and a commitment to overcome our native
egocentrism and sociocentrism.
of their use. It
Critical thinking good & is only way to solve injustice and

promote liberty
Gabennesch, April 07 (Howard Gabennesch is professor of sociology at the University of
Southern Indiana, Evansville, IN
47712. He suspects that multidimensional critical thinking is no more common in education than in
religion or politics, CriticalThinking: What is it good for?, The Comittie for Skeptical Inquiry, accessed
June 26th 2014)
When academic textbooks come to resemble hymnals that celebrate a religious denominations
theology, and when this goes by the name of critical thinking, it is time for some definition
adjustments. No one should pontificate a definition of critical thinking, nor should we expect to
Critical thinking is
the use of rational skills, worldviews, and values to get as
close as possible to the truth. Here, critical thinking is conceived as consisting of
achieve unanimity. But I offer the following definition for consideration:
three essential dimensions: skills, worldview, and values. Is critical thinking worth the costs?
Consider for a moment how costly uncritical thinking can be. Stephen Jay Gould (1997, x, xii) calls
attention to two precious human potentials that together constitute the most powerful joint
Only two possible escapes

can save us from the organized mayhem of our dark
potentialities-the side of human nature that has given us
crusades, witch hunts, enslavements, and holocausts. Moral
decency provides one necessary ingredient, but not nearly
enough. The second foundation must come from the rational
side of our mentality. For, unless we rigorously use human reason . . . we will lose out to
instrument for good that our planet has ever known:
75
(De)Coloniality AFF
the frightening forces of irrationality, romanticism, uncompromising true belief, and the apparent
resulting inevitability of mob action . . . Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized
irrationalism-and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency. According to this
critical thinking is one of the most important

resources a society could develop. This is because bad things do
not emanate only from bad people. Bad things can also occur because of the
mistaken thinking of decent people. Even when a bad idea originates with a
striking claim,
psychopath, the real danger occurs when it is accepted by the gullible and condoned by the sincere
who have little more than a childs understanding of what intellectual due process entails. It is likely
that an important link exists between critical thinking, broadly defined, and democracy itself. The
Liberty lies
in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no
constitution, no law, no court can save it . . . . The spirit of
liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the
spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the
minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the
spirit which weighs their interest alongside its own without
bias. So by cultivating genuine critical thinking, we strengthen
the crucial underpinnings of democracy (Kuhn 2003). People who are careful
American jurist Learned Hand (1952, 190) described this connection as follows:
about the truth are less likely to be fooled by the ideologies that justify illiberal practices or promise
simple solutions. Moreover, such people are more likely to recognize the value of intellectual and
ideological diversity-they understand that the truth comes in pieces and is unlikely to be found all in
one place. They are the best counterweight to true believers of all stripes. Ultimately, intellectual
due process is no less integral to democracy than is dueprocess of law.
76
(De)Coloniality AFF
****Negative****
77
(De)Coloniality AFF
NEG: Colonialism Good

Colonialism is good, colonialism in Africa proves
Lamprecht 01 APRIL 2007
(Colonialism Was Good For Africa, Jan Lamprecht, published author
and publishes a news article called Straight Talk, 01 APRIL 2007,
Accessed on 6/25/14,
http://www.nigeriavillagesquare.com/newsflash/colonialism-was-goodfor-africa.htmlJWH)
Colonialism was the best thing that ever happened to Africa.
Colonialism brought peace to the 300 warring tribes of Africa .
Colonialism for Africa meant more development than it had ever
known - before or after colonialism. Colonialists brought far more
into Africa than took out of it. It is for that reason that most world
empires easily let go of the continent, with only white settlers
opposing black rule. From London, Lisbon and Brussels, Africa is
totally useless. Local white settlers understood the destruction the
end of colonialism would bring into their lives, but for Europeans,
colonialism was a waste of money and resources. The standard of living in
Africa under colonialism has not been matched even despite billions of dollars of annual aid to the
continent from white countries. Why is South Africa the powerhouse of Africa? Answer: More whites lived
in South Africa than any place else, and white rule ended only 13 years ago. As whites (and Asians) were
kicked out, the continent's collapse accelerated. When Robert Mugabe took away farms and other property
from Zimbabwean whites, he pulled the rug from under his country's economy. This year, inflation is
expected to reach 4,000%. Other excellent examples are: Mozambique and Angola. Africais the richest
continent on Earth when it comes to natural resources. Parts of Africa have staggering fertility .
A
friend of mine went to Rwanda. He told me the ground there is so
fertile, the climate so wet and warm you can literally plant a stick
anywhere and it will grow. The question that must, therefore, be asked is: why are blacks
starving in the land of milk and honey? Why is Japan the 2nd richest nation on Earth and yet it has no
natural resources, and is far from its suppliers and markets? Answer: The Japanese people. Intelligent
people achieve great things. That is why East Asia is doing so well (except for hardcore communist states
Clever people, even in unfavorable conditions, are

capable of doing well. Africa made two mistakes: (1) Expelling
whites; and (2) adopting Socialist type models. (1) White people
are ingenious and hard-working. Their main contribution is ability to
organize and that is what brought prosperity to Africa. Whites
contribute out of all proportion to their small numbers . (2) Blacks have
such as North Korea).
been adopted by communists, Marxist, socialists, leftists and liberals - and most of these people believe in
some form of government handouts and drive blacks towards socialism. Unfortunately communism doesn't
work anywhere in the world - so why should it work in Africa? The
most successful
experiment in black capitalism I've ever seen occured in the mid1980's in South Africa under apartheid. President PW Botha changed
laws and allowed a black taxi industry to exist. In my view it is the
single most successful experiment in black capitalism that ever
occurred on the face of this planet. That model, if expanded, upon could be the future
of Africa and could provide hope for black people everywhere. The problem is that blacks prefer the
dreams of a socialist government giving them everything rather than working to improve their fate. And
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(De)Coloniality AFF
whites are not the first to come here anyway. All across southern Africa is evidence of (Southeast) Indians
sailing here and mining gold, hundreds of years before whites came. Indians came, mined gold and took it
away. The Great Zimbabwe ruins is nothing more than an Indian temple built in Africa (as propounded in a
recent theory by an academic in South Africa and shown to be consist with similar temples in India).
Colonialism worked. Foreign aid
has not. Handouts to Africa achieved little or nothing and will
Evidence of an Indian presence here is myriad.
continue to achieve little or nothng. Colonialism did what foreign aid

cannot - run Africa efficiently. Instead of pumping money into
Africa, Europe pumped skilled people into Africa,who came and
repeated in Africa what was done in Europe. By having them build and organise,
as well as bring science and engineering, colonialists built Africa. Anti-colonialism is leftist bunk that has
now become agreed upon as the "politically correct" version of history.
Colonialism Good. Better human rights, technologies,

and social structures. History proves.
Duke 2013
Selwyn Duke is a columnist, writer, traveler, and
entrepreneur, Was colonialism a positive force?, (The New
American), 6-25-14
http://www.thenewamerican.com/reviews/opinion/item/17194-wascolonialism-a-positive-force
Its hard to forget meeting a man who hated Mahatma Gandhi.
I once did, though. No, he wasnt some erstwhile viceroy
lamenting lost glory days, but an Indian born and raised in the
land of sati and saris. The reason for his ire? He said that when
Gandhi drove the British out, India lost everything:
technicians, engineers, expertise, bureaucratic integrity, etc. In
the same vein, I have a Zambian friend who has argued that colonialism had a positive impact,
in that it brought civilization to the lands such as his it touched. And, in fact, even that
Kenyan Obama agrees. The presidents half-brother George Obama, that is. He once told social
commentator Dinesh DSouza that it would have been better if the whites had stayed longer
in Kenya, as their premature expulsion caused his nation to descend into poverty. But what of
the conventional narrative that colonialism is responsible for Third World poverty? Economist
Dr. Walter Williams addressed this in 2011, writing: It turns out that countries
like the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand

were colonies; yet they are among the worlds richest
countries. Hong Kong was a colony of Great Britain until 1997,
when China regained sovereignty, but it managed to become
the second richest political jurisdiction in the Far East. On the
other hand, Ethiopia, Liberia, Tibet, and Nepal were never
colonies, or were so for only a few years, and they rank among
the worlds poorest and most backward countries. Despite the
many justified criticisms of colonialism and, I might add,
multinationals, both served as a means of transferring Western
technology and institutions, bringing backward peoples into
greater contact with a more-developed Western world. A tragic
fact is that many African countries have suffered significant
79
(De)Coloniality AFF
decline since independence. In many of those countries the

average citizen can boast that he ate more regularly and
enjoyed greater human-rights protections under colonial rule.
The colonial powers never perpetrated the unspeakable human
rights abuses, including genocide, that we have seen in postindependence Burundi, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Central
African Empire, Somalia, and elsewhere. Ah, colonialism cast as nation
building. Such a characterization can hit a nerve because many see colonialism as a
phenomenon whereby white Western powers dominated hapless minority nations, but this is
an ahistorical view. Consider Britain, thought the quintessence of colonial powers. At
one time it was, along with most of Western Europe, a colony of sorts itself
of the Romans. And, no doubt, this inspired many of the same complaints from
some early-first-millennium Europeans that we had heard more recently from colonized Third
Worlders: The colonizers were trampling their culture. They were imposing their values. They
were foreign interlopers. Yet the Romans brought more advanced
technology and higher culture to Britain; they built aqueducts,

bathhouses, and amphitheaters. The average Britons life
arguably was better under Roman rule than it had ever been
before. And when the last Roman troops had to leave Britain in
410 A.D. to defend Italy, its said that their departure was
lamented by no small number of natives. However the Romans exit was
The fact is that no great civilization

develops in isolation; in accordance with the two heads are better than one
principle, peoples can maximize their knowledge only when they
viewed, the results of their entrance are fairly clear.
learn from one another, and this can happen only if they
actually have contact. As economist Dr. Thomas Sowell wrote in Race, culture and
equality: When the British first crossed the Atlantic and confronted the Iroquois on the eastern
seaboard of what is today the United States, they were able to steer across that ocean in the
first place because they used rudders invented in China, they could navigate on the open seas
with the help of trigonometry invented in Egypt, their calculations were done with numbers
invented in India, and their general knowledge was preserved in letters invented by the
Romans. And when two cultures do have contact, its the less advanced that can learn more.
Yet since it can also be dominated more, this sometimes comes at the cost of colonization.
Note that this isnt an argument justifying colonization. In fact, its much as with a fellow I
knew whod been hit by a truck but said that dealing with his infirmities had made him a better
man. He certainly wasnt implying that getting hit by trucks was a good thing, but his
experience illuminated a truth: Even something bad in principle can have good outcomes in
the particular. The fact is that colonization was part of the inter-group-interaction phenomenon
that spread civilization; the Romans learned from the Greeks triumphs and built upon them,
and then brought this knowledge to the lands they conquered, such as England, France, and
Spain. In turn, those nations built further, became colonial powers and carried the treasures
(and trials) of civilization to what we now call the Third World. Another common misconception
is that colonialism robbed people of freedom. But whether it was pre-Roman Britain; or precolonial Africa, South or Central America, Mexico, or Asia, the peoples were governed by
monarchs of some kind. The only difference upon being colonized was that one unelected
government was replaced with another one that was often better. It wasnt just the
technology offered by colonial powers, either, but also more advanced morality. For example,
just as the Romans came to outlaw human sacrifice in their conquered lands, so did the
Spanish eliminate the human sacrifice so rampant among the Aztecs. The Portuguese, Dutch,
French, and British eventually outlawed sati (widow burning) in areas of India they controlled.
And it was colonial powers that ultimately ended slavery (where they could) in Africa. As for
freedom, insofar as representative government has taken hold in former colonies such as
India, Kenya, and Botswana is it conceivable that it could have happened without Western
influence? Democracy is a Western invention. The international language of business is
80
(De)Coloniality AFF
English. In China and Japan, people wear suits and ties, and the whole world wants the Western
lifestyle, with its cars, computers, refrigerators, advanced medicine and science, and other
wonders of modernity. Of course, it wont always be this way. If man still walks the Earth in
2,000 years, the colonizers and colonized may be different, but the story would still be the
same. Mans domination of man would be continuing, and many would complain about it, as
the legacy of civilization was passed on as it had always been.
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NEG: Colonialism Not Root

Cause
COLONIALISM NOT PROBLEM, REAL PROBLEM
UNKNOWN BECAUSE OF CENTURIES OF
VIOLENCE.
Williams 11
Walter Williams is an author for FEE.org, Poverty is Easy
to explain, (FEE), 6-26-14
http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/poverty-is-easy-to-explain
Academics, politicians, clerics, and others always seem
perplexed by the question: Why is there poverty? Answers
usually range from exploitation and greed to slavery, colonialism, and
other forms of immoral behavior. Poverty is seen as something to be
explained with complicated analysis, conspiracy doctrines, and
incantations. This vision of poverty is part of the problem in coming to
grips with it. There is very little either complicated or interesting about
poverty. Poverty has been mans condition throughout his history. The
causes of poverty are quite simple and straightforward.
Generally, individual people or entire nations are poor for one
or more of the following reasons: (1) they cannot produce
many things highly valued by others; (2) they can produce
things valued by others but they are prevented from doing so;
or (3) they volunteer to be poor. The true mystery is why there is
any affluence at all. That is, how did a tiny proportion of mans
population (mostly in the West) for only a tiny part of mans
history (mainly in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first
centuries) manage to escape the fate of their fellow men?
Sometimes, in reference to the United States, people point to its rich
endowment of natural resources. This explanation is unsatisfactory.
Were abundant natural resources the cause of affluence, Africa and
South America would stand out as the richest continents, instead of
being home to some of the worlds most miserably poor people. By
contrast, that explanation would suggest that resource-poor countries
like Japan, Hong Kong, and Great Britain should be poor instead of
ranking among the worlds richest places. Another unsatisfactory
explanation of poverty is colonialism. This argument suggests
that third-world poverty is a legacy of having been colonized,
exploited, and robbed of its riches by the mother country. But
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it turns out that countries like the United States, Canada,

Australia, and New Zealand were colonies; yet they are among
the worlds richest countries. Hong Kong was a colony of Great
Britain until 1997, when China regained sovereignty, but it
managed to become the second richest political jurisdiction in
the Far East. On the other hand, Ethiopia, Liberia, Tibet, and
Nepal were never colonies, or were so for only a few years, and
they rank among the worlds poorest and most backward
countries. Despite the many justified criticisms of colonialism and, I might add, multinationals, both
served as a means of transferring Western technology and institutions, bringing backward peoples into
greater contact with a more-developed Western world. A tragic fact is that many African countries have
suffered significant decline since independence. In many of those countries the average citizen can boast
that he ate more regularly and enjoyed greater human-rights protections under colonial rule. The colonial
powers never perpetrated the unspeakable human rights abuses, including genocide, that we have seen in
post-independence Burundi, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Central African Empire, Somalia, and elsewhere.
Any economist who suggests he has a complete answer to the causes of affluence should be viewed with
suspicion. We do not know fully what makes some societies richer than others. However, we can make
guesses based on correlations. Start out by ranking countries according to their economic systems.
Conceptually we could arrange them from more capitalistic (having a larger free-market sector) to more
communistic (with extensive State intervention and planning). Then consult Amnesty Internationals
ranking of countries according to human-rights abuses. Then get World Bank income statistics and rank
countries from highest to lowest per capita income.
COLONIALISM IS NOT THE ROOT CAUSE OF VIOLENCE.

NECESSARY FOR DEVELOPMENT AND EXPANSION
Easterly and Levine 12

Bill Easterly and Ross Levine are lawyers, Was colonialism
good for growth?, (Cris Blattman), 6-25-14
http://chrisblattman.com/2012/07/03/was-colonialism-good-for-growth/
I read hastily, but see important new data and patterns. I dont really buy the instrumental
variables (sorry, Bill) but then again I dont really buy any of the historical instruments people
use to get around thorny causality issues. That doesnt make me a total party pooperI just
think we have to take all the causal claims and mechanisms pretty cautiously. Some people
rankle over any rosy glow put on colonialism. Most of the authors of the long
run growth papers know this acutely, but it bears repeating

that good for growth necessarily applies to peoples not
exterminated. If you are still angry about the rosy glow, its also helpful to
put in colonialism perspective: Development in most places in
most of history has basically been a process of violence and
coercion, either by your own elites or invading ones. When
historical events are good for growth they are often very
bad for the generation that experienced them, in Africa or elsewhere.
So good for growth does not necessarily mean good. This leads me to think: What is
interesting about modern growth policy is that it is one of the first to try to respect human
rights. I wonder to what extent growth take-offs require a trade-off between welfare of people
alive today versus welfare of future generations. There are reasons to think there are some
win-win solutions (e.g. education investments) but I am not so sure it is true generally. I think a
lot of development policy requires trickier trade-offs between those alive today and unborn
future generations than is commonly appreciated. More on that on that elusive day when I
have more time to write.
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COLONIALISM NOT THE PROBLEM, ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL

PROBLEMS STARTED WITH COUNTRIES AND EXIST TODAY
Spillius 09
Alex Spillius is a diplomatic correspondent and a
newspaper reporter, Barack Obama tells Africa to stop
blaming colonialism for problems, (Telegraph), 6-25-14
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/577
8804/Barack-Obama-tells-Africa-to-stop-blaming-colonialism-forproblems.html
Ahead of a visit to Ghana at the weekend, he (Obama) said:
"Ultimately, I'm a big believer that Africans are responsible for
Africa. "I think part of what's hampered advancement in Africa
is that for many years we've made excuses about corruption or
poor governance, that this was somehow the consequence of
neo-colonialism, or the West has been oppressive, or racism I'm not
a big I'm not a believer in excuses. Mr Obama, the son of a Kenyan,
added: "I'd say I'm probably as knowledgeable about African
history as anybody who's occupied my office. And I can give
you chapter and verse on why the colonial maps that were
drawn helped to spur on conflict, and the terms of trade that
were uneven emerging out of colonialism. "And yet the fact is
we're in 2009," continued the US president. "The West and the United
States has not been responsible for what's happened to
Zimbabwe's economy over the last 15 or 20 years. "It hasn't
been responsible for some of the disastrous policies that we've
seen elsewhere in Africa. And I think that it's very important
for African leadership to take responsibility and be held
accountable." Mr Obama told AllAfrica.com that he chose Ghana for his first trip to the
continent as president to highlight the country's development as a democracy. Providing
glimpses of a speech to be delivered in Accra on Saturday, he explained: "Ghana has now
undergone a couple of successful elections in which power was transferred peacefully, even a
very close election." Mr Obama made it clear that Kenya's ongoing instability had ruled out his
father's homeland as an initial destination, despite the euphoria it would have produced.
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NEG: Colonialism=Better
Education
COLONIALISM KEY TO GOOD EDUCATION-AFRICA
PROVES
Byerris 5/11
(Byerris, writer for StudyMode, Positive Effects of Colonialism, StudyMode, May 2011, Accessed on
6/26/14, http://www.studymode.com/essays/Positive-Effects-Of-Colonialism-685144.htmlJWH)
Colonialism is a system in which a state claims sovereignty over territory and people outside its own
boundaries; or a system of rule which assumes the right of one people to impose their will upon another.
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, rich, powerful states, including Britain and other European
countries, owned third world colonies. Third world originally referred to countries that did not belong to
the democratic, industrialized countries of the West (the First World) or the state-socialist, industrializing,
Soviet Bloc countries (the Second World). This paper uses specific third world examples to summarize the
main positive impacts of nineteenth and twentieth century colonialism, when colonial powers reached their
One view of development is

that, at the level of the individual, it implies increased skill and
capacity, greater freedom, creativity, self-discipline,
responsibility and material well being, which European colonial
powers achieved through economic growth, by exploiting the natural and
human resources of their colonies. Education In Africa this is considered to
be one of the positive impacts of colonization and that was
beneficial to both the Europeans and the Africans in general. It
was meant to enlighten Africans so that they would be able to
work efficiently under the Europeans regime without any
difficulties. Mostly the 3Rs method of learning was used i.e.
Reading, writing and Arithmetics. E.g. in Kenya they were
schools set aside for European kids in the white Kenyan
Highlands and for Africans in the other areas. Example; Lenana School
peak. It focuses on European colonialism in Africa.
(Duke of York 1949) and Nairobi School (Prince of Wales 1910) etc.
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NEG: Victimization Bad

THE AFFS POSITION ON DEVELOPMENT IS CLEARLY
DEPENDENT ON THE NARRATIVE POSED THROUGH
VICTIMIZATION- WHICH IS A BAD AND DOESNT TRULY
DEFINE DEVELOPMENT.
de Vries 7
[Pieter, Department of Rural Development Sociology at Wageningen University, Third

World Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 1, Dont Compromise Your Desire for Development! A Lacanian/Deleuzian
rethinking of the anti-politics machine, p. 27-30]
In the literature we find manifold explanations for the shortcomings

of development and the disjuncture between goals and expectations, and
real outcomes. Those who follow a modernisation perspective take a
benevolent position towards the project of development, arguing
that, for all its shortcomings and disappointing results, academics and
practitioners should keep united in their search for better strategies
of intervention. In this view there is simply no alternative for alleviating the fate of the poor. The
very existence of a body of international agencies working on the promotion of new forms of expertise is
viewed as a heroic (if quixotic) modernist endeavour, or as the expression of the culture of modernity as
manifested in the belief in planning and its symbolic paraphernalia.1 In this view it is important to
acknowledge that there is no alternative to development, that development in spite of its failures is the
only game in town. Here we see a predilection for the identification of constantly new approaches, as
manifested in the popularity of notions such as social capital, civil society development, participation, good
governance, etc. This is the position of institutions such as the World Bank, which are ready to engage in
thoroughgoing forms of self-criticism and to reinvent themselves by embracing new approaches and
methodologies so as to salvage the idea of development. Radical political economists, on the other
hand, see donor-funded development projects as vehicles for the penetration of capitalist
relations of production through the imposition of structures that enhance market dependence
via commoditisation processes.2 They argue that the rationales put forward by liberal
academics for development interventionsin the sense of programmes aiming at the opening up of
local economies to larger marketsare nothing but ideological justifications for the process
whereby non-capitalist modes of production are subordinated to global economic forces, thus
making their autonomous reproduction unfeasible. Commoditisation leads to the destruction of traditional
livelihoods, and their subsumption to the logic of capital for the sake of global forms of capitalist
accumulation. Planned development without thoroughgoing forms of socio-economic transformation
cannot but operate as a handmaiden to facilitate such processes of capitalist penetration. According to
this view, development interventions are not good or bad in themselves but must be analysed
in terms of their role in wider processes of social change, the question being what kinds of
interests they stand for. Are they those of transnational corporations, national capitalists, an emerging
rural bourgeoisie, or those of popular social classes, such as the peasantry, urban working classes, the
landless, etc? Development in this way is an arena of political negotiation between different social classes,
leading to different types of political economy. Since the late 1980s modernisation theory and radical
perspectives, which have in

common a critical stance towards development. The post-structuralist
political economy have been joined by several other
perspective of post-development criticises development by demonstrating its dependence on

patriarchal, positivist and ethnocentric principles which derive from the modernist project of
the Enlightenment.3 Modernity, according to post- structuralist thinkers, is predicated on the
idea that objects and subjects of knowledge are constituted through the will to power as
materialised through practices of classification and representation (mappings of territory,
classifications of nature, of sexuality, etc). Putting it in a somewhat charged way, in this view
development is seen as a constellation of power-knowledge. This constellation is geared at
controlling Third World populations through forms of governmentality in which what is at
stake is nothing less than the disciplining of bodies through the imposition of epistemic
structures that condition the ways in which the Other (in this case Third World people) relate to their
own bodies and to nature. Many of these authors have developed their analysis following a Foucauldian
perspective. Finally, the reflexive modernisation perspective rejects what it labels as the
utopianism/vanguardism of past notions of progress and development.4 Reflexive modernisation is a social
theory that purports to engage in wider social debates about the future of society while breaking with
notions of development as an emancipatory collective project aimed at making an end to poverty and
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injustice at a planetary level. The argument here is that, in an era of post-scarcity, social struggles revolve
around the acknowledgement of all sorts of risks brought about by modernity. What modern citizens
therefore have in common is not a collective, transformative social project but an awareness of shared
vulnerability to low-probability, high consequences types of risk. Reflexivity, then, is about the perceptions,
fears and expectations that the consequences of modernity produce in individuals. The questions posed in
theories of reflexive modernisation can be posed as: how does reflexivity look like in societies that have
never made a transition from a first to a second modernisation, that exhibit a lack rather than an excess
of development? How does it look in societies that experience both all the disadvantages of development
(environmental degradation, all sorts of risks, ranging from the emergence of new types of wars to AIDS, to
droughts, etc), without enjoying their erstwhile advantages (material well-being, health services, stable
bureaucracies, the existence of a public sphere, etc)? From having been a promise, modernity becomes a
risky challenge and accordingly a matter of risk management. This is basically a European socialdemocratic perspective purporting to design a third way between dogmatic socialism and savage
neoliberalism, which is gaining currency among policy makers within the Third World.5 Later I explain the
role that a reflexive modernisation stance can play in the reinvention of development as a radical
programme for dealing with the irrationalities of the South. Though poles apart, from my point of
these approaches suffer from a serious shortcoming. They

all focus on the actuality of development, on the effects of development
interventions on peoples lives. My argument, however, is that the actuality of
development is supplemented by a virtual dimension, as manifested
in the desire for, and imagination of, development. Of course, current
debates have produced diverse and interesting positions, some taking extreme antiview, all
development positions, others weighing the merits and disadvantages of development

alternatives or alternatives for development. The literature on this debate is huge and this is not
revolves around the question

of the extent to which development is a foreign and ethnocentric
construct. Labels such as alternative, endogenous, bottom-up, grassroots or
the place to review it, but it suffices to point out that it all
autonomous development are but different ways of answering this question. There is also a
vast body of work on indigenous and local knowledge that sets out to propose bottom-up or
grassroots development alternatives. Much recent work on globalisation from below is reminiscent
of these discussions. However ,
they rarely touch upon the work of imagination

involved in the thinking on development, and if they do they centre
on individual aspirations or expectations, not on collective dreams
and desires as manifestations of a collective unconscious. As I argue
later, this is not merely a theoretical question, as it raises important ethical issues. A case in
post-structural critiques of development, especially

concerning the right of development thinkers to legislate on the relevance of
development to poor peoples lives. Many authors have pointed out that it is
point is the debate among
poor people themselves who want development and that arguing against it amounts to
assuming that they are under the spell of false consciousness.
Much
of the debate has thus come to revolve around semantic questions about the diverse meanings of
development for various actors. Of course, post-structuralists may answer that the task of the
critical thinker is that of deconstructing the discourse of development and of developing new
languages for thinking about alternative modernities.6 Such a reconstructive agenda involves
redeeming subaltern peoples notions and practices of community solidarity and hope. Although
the desires for, and

imaginations of , development stand for an impossible, utopian
world. My point is that the utopian promise of development involves a
negative dialectics that goes further than imagining (a) different
world(s) or for that matter alternative modernitiesin the precise sense that it
points to the possibility of a radical break with the present. I argue in
the concluding section of the article that such utopian, impossible, desire for
development has important ethical implications, as it harbours the promise of
such a radical break. Thus my point is that development has a virtual
or fantastic side, as manifested in particular ways of desiring that
are part of the collective unconscious. Thus the above-mentioned perspectives do
it strongly concur with these views, the argument I develop here is that
not acknowledge the fact that development generates the kinds of desires that it necessitates
to perpetuate itself, that it is a self-propelling apparatus that produces its own motivational
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(De)Coloniality AFF
drives, that the development industry is parasitic on the beliefs and dreams of the subjects it
creates. In other words, development lies at the same plane of immanence as the subjects it
development relies on the production of

desires, which it cannot fulfil. In other wordsfollowing a Lacanian perspective there is
produces.7 As argued, the idea of
a certain excess in the concept of development that is central to its functioning. Development
thus points to a utopian element that is always already out of place. Since it is constitutively
impossible, it functions as its own critique. The question to be answered therefore is why
people in the Third World persist in desiring development in spite of all its failures. My answer
the desire for development fills the gap between

the promises and their meagre actual realisations, thus giving body
to a desiring machine that also operates in between the generation
and banalisation of hope.
to this question is that
MINORITY NARRATIVES ESTABLISH VICTIM POLITICS

DEPICTIONS OF THE MINORITY STRUGGLE CONSTRUCT IMAGES
OF MINORITIES AS HELPLESS VICTIMS
Jodi Dean (Editor, Cultural Studies and Political Theory. Lauren Berlant, The
Subject of true feeling: pain privacy, and politics 20 00) [Gunnarsdottir]
The central concern of this essay is to address the place of painful feeling in the
making of political worlds. In this I affiliate with Wendy Brown's concern about
the overvaluation of the wound in the rhetoric of contemporary U.S. identity
politics. Brown argues that the identification of minority identity with a
wound-a conventional story about the particular and particularizing injuries
caused by domination-must lead to the wound becoming fetishized evidence of
identity, which thereby awards monumentality and value to the very
negativity that would also be overcome. As a result, minority struggle
can get stuck in a groove of self-repetition and habituated

resentment while from the outside it would appear vulnerable to
the charge of "victim politics." In my view, however, what Brown locates in
minority discourse generally has a longer: more specific, and far more privileged
genealogy than she suggests. In particular, I would like to connect it to
something I call national sentimetality, a liberal rhetoric of promise history which
vows that a nation can best be built across fields of social difference through
channels of affective identification and empathy
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NEG: Speaking for others

bad
Speaking from a position of privilege props up power relationsthe

speaker relies on the assumption that less privileged cannot speak
for them selves
Nako, Nontsasa. "(Possessing the Voice of the Other: African Women and the Crisis of
Representation in Alice Walkers Possessing Secret of Joy." A Journal of Culture and African Women
Studies (2001): n. pag. Web. 27 June 2014
In her essay, The Problem of Speaking for Others, Linda Alcoff identifies two widely accepted claims
relating to speaking for others (1994). The first one concerns
the relationship between
location and speech;
that the position from which one speaks affects the meaning of his or
her speech. Therefore where one speaks from has an epistemically significant impact on that
speakers claim and can serve either to authorize or disauthorize ones speech(Alcoff 1994, 287).
This is perhaps the reason why most critics tend to leave their identities and locations visible. One
example is Chandra Mohanty in her introduction to a volume of essays by Third World women, where
she writes: I [also] write from my own particular political, historical, and intellectual location as a
third world feminist trained in the U.S., interested in questions of culture, knowledge production, and
activism in an international context (1991, 3).Whether such acts of self-identification are
always possible is debatable, as it is now commonly understood that identities are fluid and always
shifting. But it is clear that such acts are necessary, because for instance, in Mohantys case,
by foregrounding her position within the category Third World women she ensures that the meaning
of what she says is not separated from the conditions which produced it. She also acknowledges the
difference within Third World women, and this anticipates her definition of Third World women as
imagined communities of women with divergent histories and social locations(Mohanty 1991,
power relations make it dangerous for

a privileged person to speak for the less privileged because that often
reinforces the oppression of the latter since the privileged person is more
likely to be listened to. And when a privileged person speaks for the less
privileged, she is assuming either that the other cannot do so or she can
confer legitimacy on their position. And such acts, do nothing to disrupt the discursive
4).The second claim that Alcoff identifies is that
hierarchies that operate in public spaces (Ibid).
Speaking for others oppresses themwe must stop the impulse to

speak to allow the organic intellectual to rise up
Marinio, Lauren. "Speaking for Others." Malacester Journal of Philosophy 14.1 (2005): n. pag. Print.
What then is the solution? I agree with bell hooks that the oppressed must celebrate their
position on the margins. The oppressed should not try to move into the
center but appreciate their counterculture. The oppressed must produce
intellectuals so that the dominated can speak to the dominating. The idea goes
back to Antonio Gramscis concept of the organic intellectual.7 The elites are indoctrinated in the ruling
No matter how progressive their

politics may be, the elite will always be the elite. Their investment in the current social
ideology and have an investment in the current order.
order precludes offers of true systemic change. Gramsci writes of the need for the working class to develop
its own intellectuals who are organically tied to their class. This argument is similar to hooks argument.
The margin must produce organic intellectuals. It might be thought that these organic intellectuals should
translate between language games. But as hooks points out, using the oppressors language is not
adequate because it cannot articulate the experience of the oppressed. Yet, it is the only language game
the oppressing can play. Organic intellectuals affect the center from the margins if they are able to
incorporate multiple voices in the texts they create. The goal of the organic intellectual according to hooks
is to identify the spaces where we begin a process of revision to create a counter-ideology.8 Hooks
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relates this agency to language. Language is also a place of struggle.9 The counterculture can produce a
counter-language, which is able to produce a new language to mediate between the margins and the
center. Necessarily the new game must include portions of both old language games or no one will
understand it. It must use old understandings to create new meanings. These counter-languages can
function as the intermediary language games that the oppressed and the elites can be initiated
simultaneously. A new language game must be created. A good example of this is Martin Luther Kings I
Have a Dream speech. He used concepts of freedom and democracy familiar to the center to explain the
experience of the oppressed within in the mainstream language game, as well as created new metaphors
and linguistic form, i.e. the preachers sermon, to bring the voice of the oppressed and the oppressors into
a realm of communication. (bell hooks uses the preachers sermon form in her refrain language is also a
place of struggle).10 One famous metaphor is freedom as a bounced check to African Americans. This
created a new understanding of the situation. It worked between the language of oppression understood
by African Americans and the centers understanding of freedom and the promises of democracy. King was
able to include multiple voices, building a bridge between the margin and the center. The conclusion of
hooks is that the margin can be more than a place of oppression and alienation. It can be a site of radical
possibility, a space of resistance, that is not open to those in the center. It is the space to produce
The oppressed can retell

their story, and if we accept Rortys argument that the self is contingent , the oppressed create
themselves in the process. To speak for the oppressed is to silence
them. Moreover, in their absence of voice, we define them. We can define them in many ways, but
they will always be a they and not an us. They will be the other. We must
counter-hegemonic culture that the organic intellectual is looking for.
have faith in the margins to produce new language games to communicate with us.
Speaking for others is wrongits an act of commodification

and colonial domination,
Linda Martn Alcoff (Department of Philosophy at Syracuse University. The Problem
of Speaking For Others Cultural Critique Winter 1991-92, pp. 5-32.)
Feminist discourse is not the only site in which the problem of speaking for
others has been acknowledged and addressed. In anthropology there is similar
discussion about whether it is possible to speak for others either adequately or
justifiably. Trinh T. Minh-ha explains the grounds for skepticism when she says that anthropology is
"mainly a conversation of ùs' with ùs' about `them,' of the white man with the white man about the
primitive-nature man...in which `them' is silenced. `Them' always stands on the other side of the hill,
naked and speechless...`them' is only admitted among ùs', the discussing subjects, when
accompanied or introduced by an ùs'..."4 Given this analysis, even ethnographies written by
progressive anthropologists are a priori regressive because of the structural features of
anthropological discursive practice.
The recognition that there is a problem in speaking for others has followed from the widespread
acceptance of two claims. First, there has been a growing awareness that where one speaks from
affects both the meaning and truth of what one says, and thus that one cannot assume an ability to
transcend her location. In other words, a speaker's location (which I take here to refer to her social
has an epistemically significant impact on that

speaker's claims, and can serve either to authorize or dis-authorize
one's speech. The creation of Women's Studies and African American Studies departments
location or social identity)
were founded on this very belief: that both the study of and the advocacy for the oppressed must
come to be done principally by the oppressed themselves, and that we must finally acknowledge that
systematic divergences in social location between speakers and those spoken for will have a
significant effect on the content of what is said. The unspoken premise here is simply that a speaker's
location is epistemically salient. I shall explore this issue further in the next section. The second claim
holds that not only is location epistemically salient, but certain privileged locations are discursively
the practice of privileged persons speaking for or

on behalf of less privileged persons has actually resulted (in many
cases) in increasing or reenforcing the oppression of the group
spoken for. This was part of the argument made against Anne Cameron's
dangerous.5 In particular,
speaking for Native women: Cameron's intentions were never in question, but
the effects of her writing were argued to be harmful to the needs of Native
authors because it is Cameron rather than they who will be listened to and
whose books will be bought by readers interested in Native women. Persons from
dominant groups who speak for others are often treated as authenticating
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(De)Coloniality AFF
presences that confer legitimacy and credibility on the demands of subjugated

speakers; such speaking for others does nothing to disrupt the
discursive hierarchies that operate in public spaces.
For this reason, the

work of privileged authors who speak on behalf of the oppressed is becoming increasingly criticized
by members of those oppressed groups themselves. 6 As social theorists, we are authorized by virtue
of our academic positions to develop theories that express and encompass the ideas, needs, and
goals of others. However, we must begin to ask ourselves whether this is ever a legitimate authority,
is it ever valid to speak for

others who are unlike me or who are less privileged than me? We
and if so, what are the criteria for legitimacy? In particular,
might try to delimit this problem as only arising when a more privileged person speaks for a less
privileged one. In this case, we might say that I should only speak for groups of which I am a member.
But this does not tell us how groups themselves should be delimited. For example, can a white
woman speak for all women simply by virtue of being a woman? If not, how narrowly should we draw
the categories? The complexity and multiplicity of group identifications could result in "communities"
composed of single individuals. Moreover, the concept of groups assumes specious notions about
clear-cut boundaries and "pure" identities. I am a Panamanian-American and a person of mixed
ethnicity and race: half white/Angla and half Panamanian mestiza. The criterion of group identity
leaves many unanswered questions for a person such as myself, since I have membership in many
conflicting groups but my membership in all of them is problematic. Group identities and boundaries
are ambiguous and permeable, and decisions about demarcating identity are always partly arbitrary.
Another problem concerns how specific an identity needs to be to confer epistemic authority.
Reflection on such problems quickly reveals that no easy solution to the problem of speaking for
others can be found by simply restricting the practice to speaking for groups of which one is a
member.
Speaking for others is a tautologythe assertion that the oppressed

have no voice makes that a reality when the privileged constantly speak
for them
Jeanne Perreault (Professor of English at the University of Calgary, Chain Gang
Narratives And The Politics Of Speaking For Biography 24.1 (2001) 152-171,
Biographical Research Center) [Gunnarsdottir]
The problem of "speaking for" has become a problem since the

spoken for have begun, publicly, to examine the unconscious or unspoken
assumptions of superior knowledge, insight, and solutions of well-meaning
speakers for. The assumption of the speakers for is that the
oppressed have no voice, and thus intervention is required. This
belief is a kind of tautology: to be oppressed is to have no voice / to
have no voice is to be oppressed. The figuring of oppressed peoples
as without voice is no longer accurate, however, if it ever was. We
understand, as Canadian Mtis writer Emma LaRocque says, that the issue is not
of speaking, but of being heard (xv). Some of the earliest challenges to
speaking for came from African American feminists like Audre Lorde
and bell hooks in the 1970s and 1980s. They raised an impassioned double
assertion: that when white feminists made general references to
"women," they were not speaking about them; and that no one
could speak for them. When those understood to be the disenfranchised or
marginalized challenged those understood to have greater privilege to look to
their own histories and identities, the guilt for having socially designated
privilege was at least as pronounced as the fruitful examinations of responsibility
inhering to their own subject positions.
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NEG: Globalization root

Cause of structural
violence
THE GLOBALIZED ECONOMY UNDER IMPERIALISM
PROMOTES STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE
Demenchonok and Peterson 09
Demenchonok, Edward, and Richard Peterson. "1.Globalization and Violence: The Challenge to Ethics."
American Journal of Economics and Sociology 68.1 (2009): 51-76. Web. 28 June 2014.
DESPITE its many benefits,
violence.
globalization has proven to harbor a good deal of
This is not only a matter of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction
of indirect or
structural violence resulting from the routine of economic and
political institutions on the global scale. In this essay, the multifaceted phenomena of
inaugurated by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, but includes many forms
violence are approached from the standpoint of ethics. The prevailing political thinking associated with
realism fails to address the problems of militarism and of hegemonic unilateralism. In contrast, many
philosophers are critically rethinking the problem of global violence from different ethical perspectives.
Despite sharing similar concerns, philosophers nevertheless differ over the role of philosophical reflection
and the potentials of reason. These differences appear in two contrasting approaches associated with
postmodern philosophy and discourse ethics. In the analysis of discourse ethics, attention is paid to KarlOtto Apels attempt of philosophically grounding a macroethics of planetary co-responsibility. At the heart
of the essay is the analysis of the problem of violence, including terrorism, by Jrgen Habermas, who
explains the phenomenon of violence in terms of the theory of communicative action as the breakdown of
communication. Jacques Derridas deconstruction of the notion of terrorism also is analyzed. According
to the principle of discourse ethics, all conflicts between human beings ought to be settled in a way free of
violence, through discourses and negotiations. These philosophers conclude that the reliance on force does
not solve social and global problems, including those that are the source of violence. The only viable
alternative is the dialogical multilateral relations of peaceful coexistence and cooperation among the
nations for solving social and global problems. They emphasize the necessity of strengthening the
international rule of law and institutions, such as a reformed United Nations. THE IMPORTANCE OF the
global dimension has emerged on almost every level of social experience, from the economic and political
to the cultural and psychological. One can view globalizing phenomena and the problems they raise
through a variety of lenses, including those of social justice. These reveal questions of inequality, power,
and recognition. Closely related to each is an issue that can become a distinctive lens of historical
perception on its ownthe question of violence. Indeed, the question of violence is inescapable once one
attends to the actual conflicts that the many aspects of globalization and issues of justice have brought to
In a nuclear age ushered in by the bombing of Hiroshima, war

has become a global danger. The toll taken by the many regional
wars and neocolonial conflicts during the Cold War itself show,
further, that the nuclear stalemate was no solution to this recurring
danger facing human society. The problem of violence is itself extremely difficult to
the fore.
untangle, in part because what some thinkers treat as a matter of human nature has been shown by others
not to be a constant of human societies, and by still others to be something that evolves dramatically with
historical change.1 Nevertheless, within this multifaceted problem, two aspects are becoming more
obvious and disturbing: one is the globalization of violence; the other is the spread of structural violence.
First, the complex of change associated with the idea of globalization, despite all its benefits and promise,
is itself frequently a very violent business. One may think, indeed, that the underside of globalization is
itself a host of old and new kinds of violence. We can see this in the new kinds of wars that accompany
structural change pushed forward by global economic pressures,2 in the new weapons of destruction that
flow through global networks that often mix together the movement of arms and illegal drugs,3 as well as
in the new kinds of terrorist violence associated with the idea of a global network.4 One can think also of
new kinds of weapons systems associated with space weapons, including not just missiles but satellite
technology, laser-operated devices, and so on.5 And these observations only consider violence in the
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familiar sense of actual or threatened harms imposed on bodies and populations. In addition to its direct
manifestations, violence in a broader sense has many indirect and subtle forms. If we think of structural
violence, for example, we can see that many of the economic and environmental changes taking place
raise questions of violence as well.6 The term structural violence does not refer to all the kinds of
physical and psychological suffering caused by the workings of social institutions. Rather, it refers to those
institutionally caused harms that are not only predictable but have been predicted and debated, and for
which preventive measures could be taken. The moral force of the notion of violence is preserved in the
case of structural violence when we see that agents have knowingly permitted predictable harms, even
Structural violence in
this somewhat restricted sense includes the poverty that has
expanded with the dramatic increases of inequality that
globalization has caused, both on the global scale and within many
national societies like the United States itself. We see such violence in the
though they have not intended them, as is the case with direct violence.
proliferation of sweatshops and other kinds of harsh labor, including contemporary forms of slavery and
trafficking in humans. We see it, too, in so-called natural disasters, where conscious policies have made
populations vulnerable and unprepared for predictable harms triggered by dramatic weather events.
Facing the combination of the growing scope of structural violence with the evolving conditions of direct
we can think of violence as a key issue in the unfolding

conflicts over globalization. While violence is by no means the only challenge posed by
violence,
globalization, it is of indisputable importance both for its impact on the lives of individuals and societies
and for its place in the historical problem of finding adequate institutional forms to bring the processes of
globalization into line with the needs and aspirations proper to justice and democracy. In this light, the
theme of violence is a key part of the larger prospect of the kind of social learning that is needed if the
new structures and cultural forms that are needed are to be found/achieved.7 Within this sweeping set of
challenges, the problem of ethics has a key role. But ethics needs to be viewed in the historical terms of
globalization itself. In what follows, we will survey some facets of this problem of ethical reflection and
action in the shadow of a violence-prone globalization. In this setting is it possible to imagine a universal
ethics, one that informs a global co-responsibility for shared problems?
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NEG: Imperialism Good

COLONIALISM IS DIFFERENT FROM IMPERIALISM
SEP 12, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Colonialism, accessed 6/25/14

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/colonialism/
Colonialism is a practice of domination,
which involves the subjugation of one people to

another. One of the difficulties in defining colonialism is that it is hard to distinguish it from imperialism.
Like colonialism, imperialism also

involves political and economic control over a dependent territory . The etymology
Frequently the two concepts are treated as synonyms.
of the two terms, however, provides some clues about how they differ. The term colony comes from the
the practice of colonialism usually

involved the transfer of population to a new territory, where the arrivals lived
as permanent settlers while maintaining political allegiance to their country
of origin. Imperialism, on the other hand, comes from the Latin term imperium, meaning to
command. Thus, the term imperialism draws attention to the way that one country
exercises power over another, whether through settlement, sovereignty, or
indirect mechanisms of control.
Latin word colonus, meaning farmer. This root reminds us that
Imperialism is necessary to solve poverty, democracy, human

rights and war
Barnett,
Thomas MP. "The New Rules: Leadership Fatigue Puts U.S., and Globalization, at
Crossroads." Professor in the Warfare Analysis & Research Department, U.S. Naval War College
11.
7 Mar. 20
Web. 28 June 2014. <http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/8099/thenew-rules-leadership-fatigue-puts-u-sand-%C2%B6%20globalization-at-crossroads>.
We live in a time of arguably the

greatest structural change in the global order yet endured, with this
historical moment's most amazing feature being its relative and
absolute lack of mass violence. That is something to consider when Americans
It is worth first examining the larger picture:
contemplate military intervention in Libya, because if we do take the step to prevent larger-scale killing
by engaging in some killing of our own, we will not be adding to some fantastically imagined global death
count stemming from the ongoing "megalomania" and "evil" of American "empire." We'll be engaging in
the same sort of system-administering activity that has marked our stunningly successful stewardship of
As the guardian of globalization,

the U.S. military has been the greatest force for peace the world has
ever known. Had America been removed from the global dynamics
that governed the 20th century, the mass murder never would have
ended. Indeed, it's entirely conceivable there would now be no
identifiable human civilization left, once nuclear weapons entered
the killing equation. But the world did not keep sliding down that path of perpetual war.
Instead, America stepped up and changed everything by ushering in our nowglobal order since World War II. Let me be more blunt:
perpetual great-power peace. We introduced the international liberal trade order known as
What resulted was the

collapse of empires, an explosion of democracy, the persistent
globalization and played loyal Leviathan over its spread.
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spread of human rights, the liberation of women, the doubling of life

expectancy, a roughly 10-fold increase in adjusted global GDP and a
profound and persistent reduction in battle deaths from state-based
conflicts. That is what American "hubris" actually delivered.
Imperialism breeds democratic self rule

Kurtz 03 (Stanley, Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy
Center, A just empire? Democratic Imperialism: A Blueprint, April 1,
2003, http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/6426)
Even the mildest
imperialism will be experienced by many as a humiliation. Yet
imperialism as the midwife of democratic self-rule is an undeniable
good. Liberal imperialism is thus a moral and logical scandal, a
simultaneous denial and affirmation of self-rule that is impossible
either to fully accept or repudiate. The counterfactual offers a way out. If democracy
Our commitment to political autonomy sets up a moral paradox.
did not depend on colonialism, we could confidently forswear empire. But in contrast to early modern
After
many decades of independence, there is still no democracy in Iraq.
Those who attribute this fact to American policy are not persuasive,
since autocracy is pervasive in the Arab world, and since America
has encouraged and accepted democracies in many other regions. So
colonial history, we do know the answer to the counterfactual in the case of Iraq.
the reality of Iraqi dictatorship tilts an admittedly precarious moral balance in favor of liberal imperialism.
American imperialism keyworld peace

Elshtain 03 (Jean Bethke, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of
Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School,
Just War Against Terrorism pg. 169)
The heavy burden being imposed on the United States does not
require that the United States remain on hair-trigger alert at every
moment. But it does oblige the United States to evaluate all claims
and to make a determination as to whether it can intervene
effectively and in a way that does more good than harmwith the
primary objective of interdiction so that democratic civil society can
be built or rebuilt. This approach is better by far than those strategies of evasion and denial of
the sort visible in Rwanda, in Bosnia, or in the sort of "advice" given to Americans by some of our European
At this point in time the possibility of international peace and

stability premised on equal regard for all rests largely, though not
exclusively, on American power. Many persons and powers do not like this fact, but it is
critics.
inescapable. As Michael Ignatieff puts it, the "most carefree and confident empire in history now grimly
America's
fate is tied inextricably to the fates of states and societies around
the world. If large pockets of the globe start to go badhere, there, everywhere (the
confronts the question of whether it can escape Rome's ultimate fate."9 Furthermore,
infamous "failed state" syndrome)the drain on American power and treasure will reach a
point where it can no longer be borne.
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Interventionism protects basic human rights

Nardin and Pritcharal 90 (Terry- professor and head of the Political
Science Department at the National University of Singapore, Kathleen
D- director of community impact product development for the United
Way of America, ETHICS AND INTERVENTION: THE UNITED STATES IN
GRENADA, 1983 1990, pg 9)
A second major argument in favor of intervention is based on a
concern for human rights. This argument rests on the idea that a
country that values democracy and individual rights should be prepared to act when those values are threatened, not only at home but
abroad. According to this view, it is simply intolerable for a free nation to stand on the sidelines while
foreign tyrants like Idi Amin and Pal Pat enslave and massacre their own unfortunate subjects. At least in
extreme cases like these.
unilateral intervention should be permitted if
other means
fall. A nation that is not in a position to intervene Itself should support those
governments (like Tanzania in the case of Idi Amin) that are able to act.
US imperialism is flawed but is still the greatest force

for good
Boot 3
(Max, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow for National Security

Studies, Council on Foreign Relations, http://www.cfr.org/iraq/usimperialism-force-good/p5959)
What is the greatest danger facing America as it tries to rebuild Iraq: Shiite fundamentalism? Kurdish
separatism? Sunni intransigence? Turkish, Syrian, Iranian or Saudi Arabian meddling? All
of those
are real problems, but none is so severe that it can't readily
behandled. More than 125,000 U.S. troops occupy Mesopotamia. They are backed up by
the resources of the world's richest economy. In a contest for control of Iraq,
America can outspend and outmuscle any competing faction . The
greatest danger is that America won't use all of its power for fear of
the "I" word -- imperialism. When asked on April 28 on al-Jazeera whether the United States
was "empire building," Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld reacted as if he'd been asked whether he
wears women's underwear. "We don't seek empires," he replied huffily. "We're not imperialistic. We never
The United
States has been an empire since at least 1803, when Thomas
Jefferson purchased the Louisiana Territory. Throughout the 19th
century, what Jefferson called the "empire of liberty" expanded
across the continent. When U.S. power stretched from "sea to shining sea," the American
have been." That's a fine answer for public consumption. The problem is that it isn't true.
empire moved abroad, acquiring colonies ranging from Puerto Rico and the Philippines to Hawaii and
the United
States set out on another bout of imperialism in Germany and Japan.
Oh, sorry -- that wasn't imperialism; it was "occupation." But when
Alaska. While the formal empire mostly disappeared after the Second World War,
Americans are running foreign governments, it's a distinction without a difference. Likewise, recent
"nation-building" experiments in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan are imperialism under
another name. Mind you, this is not meant as a condemnation. The history of American imperialism is
hardly one of unadorned good doing; there have been plenty of shameful episodes, such as the
U.S. imperialism has been the

greatest force for good in the world during the past century. It
has defeated the monstrous evils of communism and Nazism
and lesser evils such as the Taliban and Serbian ethnic
cleansing. Along the way, it has helped spread liberal
mistreatment of the Indians. But, on the whole,
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institutions to countries as diverse as South Korea and

Panama. Yet, while generally successful as imperialists, Americans have been loath to confirm that's
there's no
need for the U.S. government to embrace the term. But it should
definitely embrace the practice.
what they were doing. That's OK. Given the historical baggage that "imperialism" carries,
97
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NEG: Colonialism key to

Democracy
American colonialism is key for democracy in
underdeveloped nations
Ishiyama 11
Ishiyama, John T. "6. Democratization and the Global Environment,." Comparative Politics: Principles of
Democracy and Democratization, (2011): n. pag. Print.
An oft- cited additional international factor affecting democratic development, particularly in the
developing world, is the legacy of colonialism. On the one hand, there is the extremely Eurocentric view
the spread of democracy is the political outcome of the

spread of European values and traditions via colonialism (for a discussion, see Huntington,
1984 ). This is because, theoretically, the colonial power may have
transmitted some of its culture and language to the colony,
which in turn may have led to the emergence of a
cooperative political culture, or may have left institutions that were conducive to
that
democracy in place when the colonizing powers exited (Weiner, 1989 ). However, some scholars (Barro,
1999 ; Quainoo, 2000 ) have found no relationship between colonial heritage and democracy, while others
(Lipset et al ., 1993; Clague et al. , 2001 ) find that being a former British colony increases the probability
scholars have argued that

the type of colonizer was important in explaining whether a
country was able to develop into a democracy after the end of
colonial rule. Myron Weiner (1989) , for instance, noted that by 1983 every country in the Third
that a country becomes democratic. In particular, several
World that emerged from colonial rule since World War II with a population of at least one million (and
almost all the smaller countries as well) with a continuous democratic experience was a former British
colony. This would suggest that there was something about British colonial rule that made it different from
the colonial administration of other European states, such as France and Belgium. Khapoya (1998) , for
instance, distinguishes between two main types of colonial rule in Africa: indirect rule and direct rule. The
indirect rule, where the emphasis was not on the assimilation of

Africans to become black Britishers, but rather to share skills, values, and culture, to empower
the Africans with the ability to run their own communities . Thus, instead of
British generally used a system of
assimilating the Africans as British citizens, society was segregated between the natives and the whites
living in the colony. The British also employed an indirect system of administrative rule. Generally this
meant that the colonial authorities would co - opt the local power structure (the kings, chiefs, or headman)
and via invitations, coercion, or bribery, incorporate them into the colonial administrative structure. In
return, these local elites were expected to enforce laws, collect taxes, and serve as the buffer between
A positive consequence of this system of

indirect rule (a system used elsewhere in the British Empire, such as in India and Malaya) was
that it provided native elites with important experiences in self
- rule. Further, many British colonies adopted practices that
mimicked British practices such as experience with electoral,
legislative, and judicial institutions (Clague et al. , 2001 ). Given this level of
the natives and colonial authorities.
preparedness, then following World War II, Britain was much more willing than other colonial powers to
grant independence, which in turn made the newly independent states more willing to retain the
institutions the British had put into place. Thus, from this perspective, Britain seems to have left its
colonies in a better situation to develop democracy later than non - British colonies.
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Colonialism is a medium which brings human rights

and civilization and destroys tyranny in the
country
DSouza 02
D'Souza, Dinesh. "Two Cheers for Colonialism ( Dinesh D'Souza." Two Cheers
for Colonialism ( Dinesh D'Souza. Free Republic, 5 Nov. 2002. Web. 26 June 2014.
<http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/680152/posts>.
Despite their suspect motives and bad behavior, however, the

British needed a certain amount of infrastructure to effectively
govern India. So they built roads, shipping docks, railway
tracks, irrigation systems, and government buildings. Then
they realized that they needed courts of law to adjudicate
disputes that went beyond local systems of dispensing justice.
And so the British legal system was introduced, with all its
procedural novelties, like "innocent until proven guilty." The
British also had to educate the Indians, in order to
communicate with them and to train them to be civil servants in the empire. Thus Indian
children were exposed to Shakespeare, Dickens, Hobbes, and Locke. In that way the
Indians began to encounter words and ideas that were
unmentioned in their ancestral culture: "liberty,"
"sovereignty," "rights," and so on. That brings me to the
greatest benefit that the British provided to the Indians: They
taught them the language of freedom. Once again, it was not the objective of
the colonial rulers to encourage rebellion. But by exposing Indians to the ideas of the West, they did .
The Indian leaders were the product of Western civilization.
Gandhi studied in England and South Africa; Nehru was a
product of Harrow and Cambridge. That exposure was not entirely to the good;
Nehru, for example, who became India's first prime minister after independence, was highly influenced by
Fabian socialism through the teachings of Harold Laski. The result was that India had a mismanaged
the champions of Indian

independence acquired the principles, the language, and even
the strategies of liberation from the civilization of their
oppressors. This was true not just of India but also of other Asian and African countries that broke
free of the European yoke. My conclusion is that against their intentions, the colonialists
brought things to India that have immeasurably enriched the
lives of the descendants of colonialism. It is doubtful that nonWestern countries would have acquired those good things by
themselves. It was the British who, applying a universal notion of human rights, in the early 19th
socialist economy for a generation. But my broader point is that
century abolished the ancient Indian institution of suttee -- the custom of tossing widows on their
husbands' funeral pyres.
There is no reason to believe that the Indians,

who had practiced suttee for centuries, would have reached
such a conclusion on their own. Imagine an African or Indian king encountering the
works of Locke or Madison and saying, "You know, I think those fellows have a good point. I should
relinquish my power and let my people decide whether they want me or someone else to rule." Somehow, I
Colonialism was the transmission belt that

brought to Asia, Africa, and South America the blessings of
Western civilization. Many of those cultures continue to have
serious problems of tyranny, tribal and religious conflict,
don't see that as likely.
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poverty, and underdevelopment, but that is not due to an

excess of Western influence; rather, it is due to the fact that
those countries are insufficiently Westernized. Sub-Saharan Africa, which
is probably in the worst position, has been described by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan as "a cocktail of
disasters." That is not because colonialism in Africa lasted so long, but because it lasted a mere halfcentury. It was too short a time to permit Western institutions to take firm root. Consequently, after their
independence, most African nations have retreated into a kind of tribal barbarism that can be remedied
only with more Western influence, not less. Africa needs more Western capital, more technology, more rule
of law, and more individual freedom.
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NEG: Eurocentrism Good

The Ks assumption of the modern being tangible
means their impacts are built upon false
assumptions
Grossberg 10 (Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies and Cultural
Studies, and Adjunct Distinguished Professor of American Studies, Anthropology, and
Geography at the University of North Carolina)
(Lawrence, Cultural Studies in the Future Tense, pg. 260) //DDI13
The question is neither empirical nor conceptual, but

conjunctural and discursive. To theorize the problematic of the
modern requires us to investigate the production of the
discourses of the modern-what are its conditions of possibility,
its effectivitics, and its dispersions. Or to put it differently, it
involves questions of what might be called conjunctural and
epochal ontologies. What are we saying about a context when we call it
modern, or when we deny it such a description? What was it that was brought
into existence under the sign of euro-modernity that is what we refer to as "the
modern"? What sort of answer would not simply condemn the modern to forever
becoming euro-modern? I offer a somewhat speculative analysis of fractions of a
spatially and historically dispersed conversation on modernity. What can
possibly be signaled by the complexity of the contexts and claims

made about and for modernity? The analysis does not seek to
define either an essence or a simple unity; rather, it points to the
virtuality of modern, to a reality that has effects but is never fully
actualized, because it can be actualized in multiple ways.
Modernity allows us to find solutions to world problems

Grossberg (Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies and Cultural Studies,
and Adjunct Distinguished Professor of American Studies, Anthropology, and
Geography at the University of North Carolina) 10
One of the most famous (in the English-speaking world at least) statements of tills chronotope
is Marshall Berman's marxist-influenced vision of modernity as a particular attitude toward
and experience of the increasingly rapid and dense actualizations of change: "a mode of vital
experience-experience of space and time, of ti1e self and others, of life's possibilities and
.... To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that

promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of
ourselves and the world -and at the same time, that threatens to
destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we
arc .... To be modcrn is to be part of a universe il1 which ... 'all that
is solid melts into air''' (1982, rs). To be modern is to make oneself at
home in the maelstron1, to embrace and even desire change.
Modernity is the experience of History. But there is no guarantee how this linear
perils
temporality is lived out. For son1e it is about the future as defined by a teleological sense of
progress rather than apocalypse. For David Bromfield, writing about Perth, Australia, "The
'modern' was only marginally understood ... as implying the future .... The modern is much
more commonly a known history" (quoted in Morris 1998, r6 ). Gyekye ( 1997, 280) similarly
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conceives modernity as a commitment to innovation and change: the "cultivation of the
Modernity is the
incessant claim to produce the new.10 And yet, Gyekye also contests
any account that ignores the complexity not only of modernity but
also of notions of innovation and change. After all, he points out,
traditional societies also change and often seek change, while on the
other side, modern societies always embody and embrace traditions.
ilu1ovative spirit or out~ look ... can be said to define n1odernity."
Similarly, Gaonkar (2oor) warns against those who emphasize the place of change in
modernity, ignoril1g on the one hand the growing importance of routil1e, and on the other,
that change itself is a new modality of power; as Cesaire (zoOI), Chakrabarty (zooo), and
others have argued, this construction of history as a linear temporality is powerfully
articulated to a variety of forms of violence and brutality, exhibited most clearly in slavery,
colonialisn1, and global wars.
EUROCENTRIC THOUGHT ALLOWED FOR LIBERATING

IDEAS, MODERNITIES GOOD
Alcoff 7
(Department of Philosophy at Syracuse University., Project Muse, Mignolos Epistemology of

Coloniality, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/new_centennial_review/v007/7.3.alcoff.html)
Hegemony in Mignolos usage of the term is very much taken from the Gramscian idea of hegemony as the
construction of mass consent. That is, [End Page 84] hegemony is achieved through a project of persuasion
that works principally through claims to truth. Europe is ahead because Europe is smarter and more
the United States has the right to hog the

worlds resources because it knows best how to make use of them.
Leading liberals like Arthur Schlesinger make the claim for Western
epistemic supremacy without any embarrassment : Schlesinger claims
not that Europe (and the U.S. as a European nation) has made no mistakes, but
reflective than the rest of the world;
that Europe alone invented the scientific method, which gave it

the capacity to critique its mistakes. Moreover, he claims that, although
every culture has done terrible things, whatever the particular
crimes of Europe, that continent is also the sourcethe unique
sourceof those liberating ideas . . . to which most of the world
today aspires. These are European ideas, not Asian, nor African, nor Middle eastern ideas, except
by adoption(Schlesinger 1992, 127; emphasis in original). The result of the wide acceptance of such
hegemonic claims in the United States and in Europe is a broad-based consent to imperial war as the
presumptive entitlement of the political vanguard of the human race; the result of the acceptance of such
hegemonic claims in the colonized world includes such symptomatic effects as the ones Samuel Ramos
and Octavio Paz described when they said that Mexicans have an alienated relationship to their own
temporal reality, and that they imagine the real present as occurring somewhere else than where they live.
The temporal displacement or alienation of space, which causes the colonized person to be unable to
experience their own time as the now and instead to see that now as occurring in another space, is the
result of a Eurocentric organization of time in which time is measured by the developments in
technological knowledge, the gadget porn of iPods and BlackBerrys, and the languages in which that
technological knowledge is developed. Who is developing the latest gadgets? What language do they
speak? These questions show us where the now resides, and thus, who is behind.
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NEG: Alt BAD

THEIR ASSERTIONS OF COLONIAL SUBJECTIVITY
ENFORCES AN ENDLESS CYCLE OF
CONFRONTATION THE ALT WILL NEVER REACH
AN ENDPOINT
Grossberg 10(Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies and Cultural
Studies, and Adjunct Distinguished Professor of American Studies, Anthropology, and
Geography at the University of North Carolina)
(Lawrence, Cultural Studies in the Future Tense, pg. 265-66)
This exteriority is, it seems to me, further compromised by the
assumption that the other is constituted as a subject. Thus, the
argument moves from coloniality as a complex political relation

to the colonial difference as a matter of subjectivity .5 The colonial
difference slides between a space of productive possibility, a
notion of a prior indigenous way of living/subject, and a wounded
yet celebrated identity/subject position occupied by specific
people who have been the ''victims" of colonization. On the one
hand, that position offers a vision of a hybridized colonial subject ,
which is, in its very extremity, the very inescapability of its violent subordination,
and therefore offers a clearer experience---and critique---of modernity from its
extremity. And on the other hand, the position also offers the
possibility of alternatives to modernity. Presumably, the

assumption is that the colonial subject is more than just the
colonized subject, that their very hybridity points to another
space-time of their existence (in another place, another time) that
opens the possibilities not of going back but of imagining new
futures. But the excluded, subalternized other is never outside of
modernity, since it is a necessary aspect of modernity' itself, since
modernity cannot be separated from coloniality. There must be
something more, for the critique of modernity is also ''from the

exterior of the modern/colonial world." There seems to be no
reason why that exteriority which, as quoted above, interpellates
the Other, must always and only be located within
modernity/coloniality or as subjectivity. While it is important to
recognize that there are vibrant alternatives to modernity, might such
alternatives not also come from other spaces of social possibility and political
imagination? Might they not also open up the possibility of other
modernities? Might not the possibility that the M/C group seeks a ''positive
affirmation of the alternative ordering of the world" (Escobar 2 0 0 7 , r88) open
up the multiplicity of modernities as well as alternatives to

modernity?
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(De)Coloniality AFF
Thinking outside of euro-modernity is bad

The difficulty and promise of the effort to think modernity outside or

beyond euro-modernity is made clear in the very important
"research program" of the "Modernity/Coloniality group," comprised
mostly of Latin American intellectuals.2 To be fair, the group is what Escobar (2007,
190) calls "a community of argumentation," sharing a project, a common political and epistcn1ologicil
desire, and a con1rnon set of assmnptions and conceptual tools. That desire is articulated out of a
particular "reading," one rlut echoes the opening of this book, of the contemporary context (r8r ):
"the
present is a moment of transition: between a world defuied in terms
of modernity ... and a new (global) reality which is still diflicult to
ascertain but which, at opposite ends, can be seen either as a
deepening of Inodernity the world over or, on the contrary, as a
deeply negotiated reality that encompasses many heterogeneous
culn1ral formations .... This sense of a transition is well captured by
the question: Is globalization that last st:.1ge of capitalist
modernity, or the beginning of something new?"
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(De)Coloniality AFF
NEG: Vague Alts Bad

VAGUE ALT- EVEN THE METHOD IS UNCERTAIN, ALL ABOUT THE
INTELLECTUAL AND NOT THE POLICY MAKER
that I do not know what this conversation will

look like, and I do not know what the outcome will be. I do not
know what a new university should be. I do not know what
other modernities-as well as alternatives to modernity-are
possible, but I do know that we have to begin in1agining such possibilities. We have to
Finally, I have to admit
imagine a world in which many worlds can exist together. And we have to figure out what is
going on, and how it has, for so long, prevented us from moving toward more humane
realities. I have always thought of cultural studies as an invitation into such conversations,
into the experimentation of collaboration, into a selfreflective practice of translation and
it is
difficult and enlivening, depressing and full of hope, modest and
arrogant. It is for me a promising way of being a political
intellectual!
transformation, and into an uncertain effort to build new institutional spaces. As such,
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(De)Coloniality AFF
NEG: Modernity good

Turn: their fixation on euro-modernity ignores multiple
modernities, which negates alternatives now challenging the
NorthREJECT their narrow reification euro-modernity that
effectively excludes the wills of real people who want
modernity
(Lawrence, Cultural Studies in the Future Tense, pg. 286-7) //DDI13
Before ending this discussion of multiple modernities, I want to address one final
challenge. One might, confronted with the claim of other modernities, ask why I
call them modern instead of something else, perhaps even alternatives to
modernity. This question deserves a serious answer, although I want to reiterate
that I do not think that other modernities are the only possibilities that are being
struggled over. There are certainly alternatives to modernity even in
the broad sense that I am using it, but there are also some
possibilities better thought of as modernities. I have no doubt that at
least one reason for this conclusion lies in the "origins" of this investigation, in
any effort to find a better way of understanding the contemporary conjuncture
of the United States. This led me to a story about struggles over the "coming
American modernity." As happens too often, having "discovered" modernity as
the definition of a problem-space, I discovered that many others have been
addressing the question of (and demand for) modernity in other- both
geographically and historically-conjunctures. A second reason is tl1at I want to
avoid paradoxically reproducing the negative logic of euromodernity. The question, are these other possibilities not outside
of, or other to, modernity itself?, can too quickly become a euromodern negative difference. Perhaps, by thinking about multiple
modernities, we can move our interrogation onto other
topologies; the effort to find other ways of thinking relationality
is itself a part of the effort to think beyond euro-modernity , but
without the analytic work, it can easily remain an imaginary logic. But the most
important reason is what Gaonkar (2oor, 21) describes as the "rage for
modernity" and what Lisa Rofel (1999, xi) captures, describing her fieldwork
conversations: "'Modernity' was something that many people from
all walks of lite felt passionately moved to talk about and

debate." Rofel (cited in Deeb 2006, r89) continues: "In the end, despite
its messiness, the attempt to redefine the terms of discourse
around being modern was really an attempt to posit a way of being
that is neither West nor East, and that is both 'modern and
'authentic."'38 Of course, I could have chosen to invent another term
for other modernities, given the power of euro- modernity over

our imagination of modernity itself, but I want to resist such a
temptation to give in to the power of euro-modernity . We cannot start
by denying people's desire to be modern , nor should we
underestimate their ability to imagine the possibility of being
modern without following in the path of the North Atlantic
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(De)Coloniality AFF
nation-states. Nor can we take for granted that we understand

what it is they are reaching for in this desire. Gyekye (1997, 263)
asserts that modernity "has in fact assumed or rather gained a
normative status, in that all societies in the world without
exception aspire to become modern, to exhibit in their social,
cultural and political lives features said to characterize
modernity---whatever this notion means or those features are."
He is clearly not suggesting that the whole world is trying to become Europe; in
fact, he similarly describes a number of writers in the Middle Ages (269): "In
characterizing themselves and their times as modern, both Arabic and Latin
scholars were expressing their sense of cultural difference from tl1e ancients. . .
. But not only tl1at: tl1ey must surely have considered tl1eir own times as
advanced (or more advanced) in most, if riot all, spheres of human endeavor." On
what ground<> do we deny such claims or judgments of modernity? Even
Lefebvre (I995, r85) acknowledges that the "'modern' is a prestigious word, a
talisman, an open sesame, and it comes with a lifelong guarantee." Admittedly,
tl1e relations to discourses of the modern are often extraordinarily complex and
contradictmy. Deeb's research with Shi'ites leads her to conclude: 1'The concept
of modern-ness is used as a value-laden comparison in relation to people's ideas
about themselves, others" (2006, 229), and "Incompatible desires come together
here -- tile desire to undermine dominant western discourses about being
modern and the desire to be modern (or to be seen as modern)" (233). I want to
suggest that at least a part of the complexity of these discourses is
precisely the thinness of our vocabulary --- and understanding --of modernity. Thus, the answer to why I want to think through and with the
concept of a multiplicity of modernities is because the contest over modernity
is already being waged, because it has real consequences, and because
we need to seek a new ground, of possibility and hope, and of a new
imagination for future ways of being modern. Cultural studies has always
taught that any successful struggle for political transformation has to
start where people are; the choice of where to begin the

discourses of change cannot be defined simply by the desires, or
even the politics, of intellectuals. Of course, there is another perspective
on such matters that we also have to take account of: Blaser (2009), for
example, has suggested that I am taking people's desire to be modern too
literally, and failing to consider that their use of the term may be an adaptation
to or the equivocation of a demand. That is, might not the demand for modernity
also be the product of the political positioning of such populations? I have no
doubt that such questions need to be raised in specific conjunctural struggles,
and for specific actors. I have no doubt that there are, as Deeb (zoo6, r89)
declares, "other stories to be told.'' (186).
Modernity allows us to find solutions to world problems

One of the most famous (in the English-speaking world at least) statements of tills chronotope is Marshall
Berman's marxist-influenced vision of modernity as a particular attitude toward and experience of the
increasingly rapid and dense actualizations of change: "a mode of vital experience-experience of space
.... To be modern is to
find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure,
power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world
and time, of ti1e self and others, of life's possibilities and perils
107
(De)Coloniality AFF
-and at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we

have, everything we know, everything we are .... To be modern
is to be part of a universe in which ... 'all that is solid melts
into air''' (1982, rs). To be modern is to make oneself at home in the
maelstron1, to embrace and even desire change. Modernity is
the experience of History. But there is no guarantee how this linear temporality is lived
out. For son1e it is about the future as defined by a teleological sense of progress rather than apocalypse.
For David Bromfield, writing about Perth, Australia, "The 'modern' was only marginally understood ... as
implying the future .... The modern is much more commonly a known history" (quoted in Morris 1998, r6 ).
Gyekye ( 1997, 280) similarly conceives modernity as a commitment to innovation and change: the
Modernity is
the incessant claim to produce the new.10 And yet, Gyekye
also contests any account that ignores the complexity not only
of modernity but also of notions of innovation and change.
After all, he points out, traditional societies also change and
often seek change, while on the other side, modern societies
always embody and embrace traditions. Similarly, Gaonkar (2oor) warns
"cultivation of the ilu1ovative spirit or out~ look ... can be said to define n1odernity."
against those who emphasize the place of change in modernity, ignoril1g on the one hand the growing
importance of routil1e, and on the other, that change itself is a new modality of power; as Cesaire (zoOI),
Chakrabarty (zooo), and others have argued, this construction of history as a linear temporality is
powerfully articulated to a variety of forms of violence and brutality, exhibited most clearly in slavery,
colonialisn1, and global wars.
Eurocentric thought allowed for liberating ideas,

modernities good
Alcoff 7 (Department of Philosophy at Syracuse University., Project Muse, Mignolos Epistemology of
Coloniality, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/new_centennial_review/v007/7.3.alcoff.html)
Hegemony in Mignolos usage of the term is very much taken from the Gramscian idea of hegemony as the
construction of mass consent. That is, [End Page 84] hegemony is achieved through a project of persuasion
that works principally through claims to truth. Europe is ahead because Europe is smarter and more
the United States has the right to hog

the worlds resources because it knows best how to make use
of them. Leading liberals like Arthur Schlesinger make the
claim for Western epistemic supremacy without any
embarrassment: Schlesinger claims not that Europe (and the U.S. as a
European nation) has made no mistakes, but that Europe alone
invented the scientific method, which gave it the capacity to
critique its mistakes. Moreover, he claims that, although every culture
has done terrible things, whatever the particular crimes of
Europe, that continent is also the sourcethe unique source
of those liberating ideas . . . to which most of the world today
aspires. These are European ideas, not Asian, nor African, nor Middle eastern ideas, except by
reflective than the rest of the world;
adoption(Schlesinger 1992, 127; emphasis in original). The result of the wide acceptance of such
hegemonic claims in the United States and in Europe is a broad-based consent to imperial war as the
presumptive entitlement of the political vanguard of the human race; the result of the acceptance of such
hegemonic claims in the colonized world includes such symptomatic effects as the ones Samuel Ramos
and Octavio Paz described when they said that Mexicans have an alienated relationship to their own
temporal reality, and that they imagine the real present as occurring somewhere else than where they live.
The temporal displacement or alienation of space, which causes the colonized person to be unable to
experience their own time as the now and instead to see that now as occurring in another space, is the
result of a Eurocentric organization of time in which time is measured by the developments in
technological knowledge, the gadget porn of iPods and BlackBerrys, and the languages in which that
108
(De)Coloniality AFF
technological knowledge is developed. Who is developing the latest gadgets? What language do they
speak? These questions show us where the now resides, and thus, who is behind.
Multiple modernities good for viewing the world in a new light

To repeat myself, I want to both accept and reread SantOs's (zooz, 13) perceptive statement that we face
that we face
modern problems that challenge us to think outside the
possibilities of our own ways of being modern. Thinking about
multiple modernities might enable us to admit that we no
longer know what questions to pose-for example, about
culture in general, and media and popular culture more specifically-for it
"modern problems for which there are no modern solutions."40 I would prefer to say
is not merely that the practices have changed (although we have too often the contexts of struggle-and
What effect does the hypothesis of a

multiplicity of modernities have on the generation of
imaginaries of economy, nature, and development, for
instance, or on social movement strategies, or on strategies of
place-making and temporalization? How do we create questions, vocabularies, and
the diagrams of modernity--arc changing.
concepts that sufficiently capture the complexity of forces, technologies, and struggles operating in the
transitions among, different visions and

formations of possible modernities and alternatives to
modernity? How do we imagine questions and languages that
sufficiently capture multipolar, multi temporal, and multiscalar
webs of connectivity, relationality, and difference, which are
driving the creation of contemporary geo-economic, political,
and cultural formations and spaces, and new subjectivities and
collectivities within and across them?
midst of numerous struggles over, and
109
(De)Coloniality AFF
NEG: Pragmatism key to

Solve
Political action key to solve the methodological shift
I want to describe a diagram of ways of being modern as a configuration-a doubled difference-
The
actuality of any possible modernity will be defined by particular
articulations of each of the terms of lived temporality-change and
the event-and of lived spatiality-institutional space and everyday
life-as well as the relations among them. In euro-modernity , for
example, these appear as history and the phenomenological present,
as the state and a commodified everyday life. But there arc other
ways of actualizing change, and the present of realizing institutional
and everyday space. They are virtualities that can be differently
actualized to create a multiplicity of ways of being modern . In other
words, being modern involves neither the event nor change in the
abstract but concrete actualizations of both in relation-neither
everyday life nor institutional space in the abstract but concrete
actualizations of both in relation. Insofar as each of these varied logics of
of four distinct but articulated apparatuses of spatial and temporal belonging."
belonging in space and time is never simply singular and universal, as if there were only one
possibility, then "being modern') itself is a real and positive multiplicity.
110
(De)Coloniality AFF
NEG: Pragmatism bad

Pragmatism is just theory that hinders action. Turns case-the
only way to know colonization is bad is to try.
Peter '07
Peter, the founder of the blog called 'On Philosophy' where he tackles many different and excepted ideas.
'Pragmatism : The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly'. Retrieved from 'On Philosophy'
(http://onphilosophy.wordpress.com/2007/08/06/pragmatism-the-good-the-bad-the-ugly/)
Where pragmatism is different from other theories about justification,

and where it goes bad, is by taking this claim to extremes. Pragmatism
claims that the only justification a claim can have is by working, by
being assimilated, validated, corroborated, and verified (again in the
words of William James). And pragmatism claims that there is no more
to truth than being justified in this way. Unfortunately for such a strong
version of pragmatism extending it in either of these ways makes the
position self-defeating. Consider first the idea that justification consists
only in a claim working. Suppose that a young scientist is attempting
to formulate a new hypothesis about gravity. A number of ideas
probably present themselves. According to pragmatism all of these
ideas are at this point equally justified; since none have been put to
the test none can be said to work better or worse than any of the
others. But clearly this is not actually the case, certain hypotheses are
already more justified than others by extrapolation from past theories.
Hypothesis involving gremlins, fairies, or anything other than simple
and unintelligent components interacting with each other are
unjustified. If our scientist really withheld judgment about each
hypothesis until putting it to the test then they would have to test each
hypothesis that presented itself to them, since they would have no way
to pick the one most likely to be a successful explanation. So, on
pragmatic grounds, we must reject the pragmatist theory of
justification if it is to stand by itself, since it simply wont work. (What
will work is pragmatism plus some rules that allow deduction from
what is already justified.)
111

(De) Coloniality Affirmative - JDI 2014

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JDI 2014 Kaut/Johnson Lab

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NEG: Victimization Bad........................................................77

JDI 2014 Kaut/Johnson Lab

JDI 2014 Kaut/Johnson Lab

In today's clamor to develop our final frontiers -- the Arctic, the

imperialistic behavior in Homo sapiens had

JDI 2014 Kaut/Johnson Lab

we now have the stampede to

there is a better way to

The Arctic is too important to global climate regulation and

WITHIN THE LAST TWO DECADES, U.S. EXPLORATION OF THE

JDI 2014 Kaut/Johnson Lab

ACTIVITIES HAVE CONTRIBUTED TO EXPLOITATION OF THE

socio-economic research in support of the sustainable use and

THE TOPIC IN IT OF ITSELF RE-CREATES THE HISTORICAL

The language of development economics reads like a chapter in the

development has played in maintaining global

JDI 2014 Kaut/Johnson Lab

profound poverty, growing income inequality, high debt

Privatization, trade liberalization, and fiscal austerity were the

Since the demise of the colonial legitimization of the "civilizing" mission,

They, the development

JDI 2014 Kaut/Johnson Lab

Regenerated by these contemporary ideological

After five decades of "development," the following description by Frantz

there is no native who does

JDI 2014 Kaut/Johnson Lab

not dream at least once a day of setting himself up in the

The rhetoric of modernity is that of salvation,

Changing the law

the transformations I am thinking about

Delinking doesn't mean to be "outside" of either

JDI 2014 Kaut/Johnson Lab

humanity and of human being that serves as a model and point

PLAN: THE UNITED STATES FEDERAL GOVERNMENT SHOULD

the genealogy of decolonial thinking is structured in

JDI 2014 Kaut/Johnson Lab

democratic. Our present situation asks, demands a decolonial

ACTS OF EPISTEMIC DISOBEDIENCE UNCOVER THE INVISIBLE

an analytic of the limits

Epistemic disobedience takes us to a different place, to a different

since the salvationist rhetoric of modernity presupposes the

JDI 2014 Kaut/Johnson Lab

oppressive logic produces an energy of discontent, of distrust,

the logic of coloniality that hides beneath the rhetoric

JDI 2014 Kaut/Johnson Lab

2AC Ext: Colonialism Root

Explanations of the violence occurring during land

solely instrumental, or epiphenomenal and discrete,

It constitutes development, because it involves an ideology of

COLONIALITY ENSURES A PARADIGM OF VIOLENCE

JDI 2014 Kaut/Johnson Lab

called a paradigm of violence and war. This dominant paradigm is

once a civilization begins to conceive the humanity of the human in

find itself incapable of opposing violence, or legitimize ideals

a skewed vision of the human. Such a vision combines

JDI 2014 Kaut/Johnson Lab

And it was the colonized and the modern slave who

JDI 2014 Kaut/Johnson Lab

2AC Ext: Rhetoric Proceeds

[Ramon, associate professor in the department of ethnic studies at the