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Contents
1AC............................................................................................................................. 1
INHERENCY/ IMPACT................................................................................................... 2
PERFORMANCE...................................................................................................... 10
SOLVENCY/ MORE IMPACTS................................................................................11

1AC

INHERENCY/ IMPACT
The year 1492. Christopher Columbus, while looking for India
falls on a contintent inhabited by 90 million people. The people
greeted Columbus with gifts, and Colombus returned the gifts
with rape, genocide, and enslavement. Walter 2005
Before 1492, the Americas were not on anybodys map, not even on the map of the
people inhabiting Anhuac (the territory of the Aztecs) and Tawantinsuyu (the
territory of the Incas). The Spanish and Portuguese, as the sole and diverse
European occupants in the sixteenth century, named the entire continent that was
under their control and possession . It may be hard to understand today that the
Incas and the Aztecs did not live in America or, even less, Latin America. Until the
early sixteenth century, America was not on anybodys map simply because the
word and the concept of a fourth continent had not yet been invented . The
mass of land and the people were there, but they had named their own places: Tawantinsuyu in the Andes, Anhuac in what is today the valley of Mexico,
and Abya-Yala in what is today Panama. The extension of what became America was unknown to them. People in Europe, in Asia, and in Africa had no
idea of the landmass soon to be called the Indias Occidentales and then America, or of all the people inhabiting it who would be called Indians.

America came, literally, out of the blue sky that Amerigo Vespucci was looking at
when he realized that the stars he was seeing from what is now southern Brazil were not the same stars he had seen in his familiar Mediterranean.

What is really confusing in this story is that once America was named as such in the
sixteenth century and Latin America named as such in the nineteenth, it appeared
as if they had been there forever. America, then, was never a continent
waiting to be discovered. Rather, America as we know it was an
invention forged in the process of European colonial history and the
consolidation and expansion of the Western world view and institutions.

The

narratives that described the events as discovery were told not by the inhabi- tants of Anhuac or Tawantinsuyu, but by Europeans themselves. It would
be four hundred and fifty years until a shift in the geography of knowledge would turn around what Europeans saw as a discov- ery and see it as an
invention. The conceptual frame that made possible this shift in the geography of knowledge, from discovery to invention, came from the Creoles
consciousness, in the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking world. Of course, we should briefly note that Indigenous and Afro frames of mind in continental
South America had not yet inter- vened in these public debates from their own broken histories. The idea of America and subsequently of Latin and
Anglo America was an issue in the minds of European and Creoles of European descent. Indians and Creoles of African descent (men and women) were
left out of the conversation. Afro-Caribbeans had been working toward a similar and complementary shift in the geography of knowledge, but in English
and French. For Creoles of Afro descent, the European arrival in the islands that today we call Caribbean was not of primary concern: African slaves were
brought to the conti- nent that was already called America many decades after it was dis- covered or invented. In the Indian genealogy of thought,

Mexican historian
and philosopher Edmundo OGorman strongly and convincingly argued many years
ago that the invention of America implied the appropriation and integration of the
continent into the Euro-Christian imaginary.2 The Spanish and Portuguese, as the sole and diverse European foreign
whether America was an existing continent discovered or a non-existing entity that was invented was not a question.

intruders in the sixteenth century, claimed for themselves a continent and renamed it at the same time as they began a process of territorial organization

Vespucci could pull America out of the sky when he realized

that, navigating the coasts of what is today Brazil, he was in a New World (new for
Europeans, of course), and not in India, as Columbus thought about ten years
before him. The story is well known that since Vespucci conceptually dis- covered (in the sense of discovering for oneself or realizing) that
as they had it in Spain and Portugal.

Europeans were confronting a New World, the continent was renamed America after Amerigo Vespucci himself, with a slight change to the ending to

Discovery and invention are not

just different interpretations of the same event; they belong to two
make it fit with the already existing non- European continents, Africa and Asia.

different paradigms . The line that distinguishes the two paradigms is the line of the
shift in the geo-politics of knowledge; changing the terms and not only the content
of the conversation. The first presupposes the triumphant European and imperial

4
perspective on world history, an achievement that was described as modernity ,
while the second reflects the critical perspective of those who have been placed
behind , who are expected to follow the ascending progress of a history to which
they have the feeling of not belonging. Colonization of being is nothing else
than producing the idea that certain people do not belong to history
that they are non-beings . Thus, lurking beneath the European story of discovery
are the histories, experiences, and silenced conceptual narratives of those who
were disqualified as human beings , as historical actors, and as capable of
thinking and understanding. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the
wretched of the earth (as Frantz Fanon labeled colonized beings) were Indians and African slaves. That is why missionaries and men
of letters appointed themselves to write the histories they thought Incas and Aztecs did not have, and to write the grammar of Kechua/Kichua and Nahuatl
with Latin as the model. Africans were simply left out of the picture of conversion and taken as pure labor force. Toward the end of the seventeenth
century, a new social group surfaced, and when they surfaced they were already outside of history: the Creoles of Spanish and Portuguese descent.
Although their marginalization was far from the extremes to which Indians and Africans were subjected, the Creoles, between the limits of humanity
(Indians and Africans) and humanity proper (Europeans), were also left out of history.The geo-political configuration of scales that measured the nature of
human beings in terms of an idea of history that Western Christians assumed to be the total and true one for every inhabitant of the planet led to the
establishment of a colonial matrix of power, to leave certain people out of history in order to justify violence in the name of Christianization, civilization,
and, more recently, development and market democracy. Such a geo-political configuration created a divide between a minority of people who dwell in
and embrace the Christian, civilizing, or devel- oping missions and a majority who are the outcasts and become the targets of those missions. Max Weber
has been credited, after Hegel, with having concep- tualized modernity as the direction of history that had Europe as a model and a goal. More recently,

Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano unveiled coloniality as the darker

side of modernity and as the historical perspective of the wretched, the outcasts
from history told from the perspective of modernity. From the perspective of
modernity, coloniality is difficult to see or recognize, and even a bothersome
concept. For the second set of actors, the wretched, modernity is unavoidable
although coloniality offers a shifting perspective of knowledge and history. For the
first actors, modernity is one-sided and of single density. For the second, modernity
is double-sided and of double density. To understand the co- existence of these two
major paradigms is to understand how the shift in the geography and the geopolitics of knowledge is taking place. My argument is straightforwardly located in
the second paradigm, in the double density of modernity/coloniality . How do these
since the late 1980s,

two entangled concepts, modernity and coloniality, work together as two sides of the same reality to shape the idea of America in the sixteenth century
and of Latin America in the nineteenth? Modernity has been a term in use for the past thirty or forty years. In spite of differences in opinions and
definitions, there are some basic agreements about its meaning. From the European perspective, modernity refers to a period in world history that has
been traced back either to the European Renaissance and the discovery of America (this view is common among scholars from the South of Europe,
Italy, Spain, and Portugal), or to the European Enlightenment (this view is held by scholars and intel- lectuals and assumed by the media in Anglo-Saxon
countries England, Germany, and Holland and one Latin country, France). On the other side of the colonial difference, scholars and intellectu- als in the
ex-Spanish and ex-Portuguese colonies in South America have been advancing the idea that the achievements of modernity go hand in hand with the
violence of coloniality. The difference, to reiterate, lies in which side of each local history is told. OGormans invention of America theory was a turning
point that put on the table a perspective that was absent and not recognized from the existing European and imperial narratives. Lets agree that
OGorman made visible a dimension of history that was occluded by the partial discovery narratives, and lets also agree that it is an example of how
things may look from the varied experiences of coloniality.

America, as a concept, goes hand in hand with

that of modernity , and both are the self-representation of imperial projects

and global designs that originated in and were implemented by European
actors and institutions. The invention of America was one of the nodal
points that contributed to create the conditions for imperial European
expansion and a lifestyle, in Europe, that served as a model for the achievements of humanity. Thus, the discovery and
conquest of America is not just one more event in some long and linear historical
chain from the creation of the world to the present, leaving behind all those who
were not attentive enough to jump onto the bandwagon of modernity. Rather, it was
a key turning point in world history: It was the moment in which the demands of
modernity as the final horizon of salvation began to require the imposition of a
specific set of values that relied on the logic of coloniality for their implementation.
The invention of America thesis offers, instead, a perspective from coloniality and,
in consequence, reveals that the advances of modernity outside of Europe rely on a

5
colonial matrix of power that includes the renaming of the lands appropriated
and of the people inhabiting them, insofar as the diverse ethnic groups and civilizations in Tawantinsuyu and Anhuac, as well
as those from Africa, were reduced to Indians and Blacks.The idea of America and of Latin America could, of course, be accounted for within the
philosophical framework of European modernity, even if that account is offered by Creoles of European descent dwelling in the colonies and embracing the
Spanish or Portuguese view of events. What counts, however, is that the need for telling the part of the story that was not told requires a shift in the

Coloniality, therefore, points toward and intends to unveil

an embedded logic that enforces control , domination , and exploitation
geography of reason and of understanding.

disguised in the language of salvation, progress, modernization, and

being good for every one . The double register of modernity/coloniality has, perhaps, never been as clear as it has been
recently under the administration of US president George W. Bush. Pedagogically, it is important for my argument to conceptualize modernity/coloniality
as two sides of the same coin and not as two separate frames of mind: you cannot be modern without being colonial; and if you are on the colonial side of
the spectrum you have to transact with modernity you cannot ignore it. The very idea of America cannot be separated from coloniality: the entire
continent emerged as such in the European consciousness as a massive extent of land to be appropriated and of people to be converted to Christianity,
and whose labor could be exploited. Coloniality, as a term, is much less frequently heard than moder- nity and many people tend to confuse it with
colonialism. The two words are related, of course. While colonialism refers to spe- cific historical periods and places of imperial domination (e.g.,
Spanish, Dutch, British, the US since the beginning of the twentieth century), coloniality refers to the logical structure of colonial domination underlying
the Spanish, Dutch, British, and US control of the Atlantic

The resolution calls for exploration and development in the

ocean waters. This form of epistemology is an endorsement of
Christopher Columbus idea of manifest destiny, which only
replicate Eurocentric and colonial ideology.
Grosfoguel (Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies Department at UC Berkeley) 2000
The modern idea that treated each individual as a free centered subject with rational control over his or her
destiny was extended to the nation-state level. Each nation-state was considered to be sovereign and free to
rationally control its progressive development. The further elaboration of these ideas in classical political
economy produced the grounds for the emergence of a developmentalist ideology. Developmentalism

is

linked to liberal ideology and to the idea of progress. For instance, one of the central questions
addressed by political economists was how to increase the wealth of nations. Different prescriptions
were recommended by different political economists; namely, some were free-traders and
others neomercantilist. In spite of their policy discrepancies, they all believed in national
development and in the inevitable progress of the nation-state through the rational
organization of society. The main bone of contention was how to ensure more wealth for a nation-state.
According to Immanuel Wallerstein,
This tension between a basically protectionist versus a free trade stance became one of the major themes of
policy-making in the various states of the world-system in the nineteenth century. It often was the most
significant issue that divided the principal political forces of particular states. It was clear by then that a central
ideological theme of the capitalist world-economy was that every state could, and indeed eventually probably
would, reach a high level of national income and that conscious, rational action would make it so. This fit very
well with the underlying Enlightenment theme of inevitable progress and the teleological view of human history
that it incarnated. (1992a, 517)
Developmentalism became a global ideology of the capitalist world-economy. In the Latin American

periphery these ideas were appropriated in the late eighteenth century by the
Spanish Creole elites, who adapted them to their own agenda. Since most of the elites were
linked to, or part of, the agrarian landowner class, which produced goods through coerced forms of
labor to sell for a profit in the world market, they were very eclectic in their selection of which
Enlightenment ideas they wished to utilize. Free trade and national sovereignty were ideas they
defended as part of their struggle against the Spanish colonial monopoly of trade. However, for racial and class
reasons, the modern ideas about individual freedom, rights of man, and equality were underplayed. There were
no major social transformations of Latin American societies after the independence revolutions of the first half
of the nineteenth century. The Creole elites left untouched the colonial noncapitalist forms of coerced labor as

6
well as the racial/ethnic hierarchies. White Creole elites maintained after independence a racial hierarchy where
Indians, blacks, mestizos, mulattoes and other racially oppressed groups were located at the bottom. This is

what Anbal Quijano (1993) calls coloniality of power.

During the nineteenth century, Great Britain had become the new core power and the new model of civilization.
The Latin American Creole elites established a discursive opposition between Spains backwardness,
obscurantism and feudalism and Great Britains advanced, civilized and modern nation. Leopoldo Zea,
paraphrasing Jos Enrique Rod, called this the new northernmania (nordomana), that is, the attempt by
Creole elites to see new models in the North that would stimulate develop- ment while in turn developing new
forms of colonialism (Zea 1986, 1617). The subsequent nineteenth-century characterization by the Creole elites
of Latin America as feudal or in a backward stage served to justify Latin American subordination to the new
masters from the North and is part of what I call feudalmania, which would continue throughout the twentieth
century.
Feudalmania was a device of temporal distancing (Fabian 1983) to produce a knowledge that denied
coevalness between Latin America and the so-called advanced European countries. The denial of

coevalness created a double ideological mechanism. First, it concealed European responsibility

in the exploitation of the Latin American periphery. By not sharing the same historical time
and existing in different geographical spaces, each regions destiny was conceived as unrelated to each other
regions. Second, living different temporalities, where Europe was said to be at a more

advanced stage of development than Latin America, reproduced a notion of

European superiority. Thus Europe was the model to imitate and the
developmentalist goal was to catch up. This is expressed in the dichotomy
civilization/barbarism seen in figures such as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento in Argentina.
The use of both neomercantilist and liberal economic ideas en- abled the
nineteenth-century Iberoamerican elites to oscillate between protectionist and freetrade positions depending on the fluctuations of the world economy . When they were
benefiting from producing agrarian or mining exports in the international division of labor dominated at the
time by British imperialism, liberal economic theories provided them with the rational justification for their role
and goals. But when foreign competition or a world economic crisis was affecting their exports to the world
market, they shifted production toward the internal markets and employed neomercantilist arguments to justify
protectionist policies. In Chile, Argentina, and Mexico there were neomercantilist and economic nationalist
arguments that anticipated many of the arguments developed one hundred years later by the Prebisch-CEPAL
school1 and by some of the dependentistas (Potasch 1959; Frank 1970; Chiaramonte 1971). For example, the
1870s developmentalist debate was the most important economic debate in Argentina during the nineteenth
century and one of the most important in Latin America. An industrial development plan using protectionist
neomercantilist policies was proposed. This movement was led by a profes- sor of political economy at the
University of Buenos Aires and member of the Camara de Diputados, Vicente F. Lpez. Lpezs group was
supported by the agrarian landowners, artisans, peasants, and incipient industrial capitalists. Although all of
them were protectionists, not all were economic nationalists. The protectionist position of the agrarian
landowners was due to the 1866 and 1873 world economic crises, which had negatively affected export prices on
wool, Argentinas major export item at the time. Thus Lpez promoted the development of a national cloth
industry as a transitional solution to the world depression. The movement ended once the wool producers
shifted to cattle raising and meat exports.

Eurocentric colonial ideology produced in the debate space

privileges those with institutional and economic power while
excluding alternative knowledge DR. SHANARA REID-BRINKLEY
8

[Dr. Shanara Reid-Brinkley, "THE HARSH REALITIES OF ACTING BLACK: HOW AFRICAN-AMERICAN POLICY
DEBATERS NEGOTIATE REPRESENTATION THROUGH RACIAL PERFORMANCE AND STYLE" pages 81-83]
The process of signifyin engaged in by the Louisville is not simply designed to critique the use of traditional
evidence; their goal is to challenge the relationship between social power and knowledge. debaters In other
words,

those with social power within the debate community are able

to produce and determine legitimate knowledge. These

legitimating practices usually function to maintain the dominance of
normative knowledge-making practices, while crowding out or directly
excluding alternative knowledge-making practices. The Louisville framework looks to the people who
are oppressed by current constructions of power. Jones and Green offer an alternative framework for drawing claims in debate
speeches, they refer to it as a three-tier process: A way in which you can validate our claims, is through the three-tier process. And
we talk about personal experience, organic intellectuals, and academic intellectuals. Let me give you an analogy. If you place an
elephant in the room and send in three blind folded people into the room, and each of them are touching a different part of the
elephant. And they come back outside and you ask each different person they gone have a different idea about what they was
talking about. But, if you let those people converse and bring those three different people together then you can achieve a greater

debate claims are based on singular

perspectives that privilege those with institutional and economic
power.
truth. Jones argues that without the three tier process

Debate is mind colonization: a form of EPISTEMIC VIOLENCE

that takes possession of our consciousness. Intervention of
HIGHER POWERS feeds into the forces of oppression. this is
the root cause of all colonial oppression. Mind colonization
leads to mind control of the victim and labels oppression and
suffering as inevitable. Radical acts are key to battling against
this colonial episteme. Dascal 2007
2007, Marcelo- PhD epistemology/ literature and Professor of Philosophy at Tel Aviv
University; Colonizing and decolonizing minds
Whereas the most visible forms of political colonialism have for the most part
disappeared from the planet by the end of the millennium, several of its
consequences remain with us. Criticism of colonialism, accordingly, has shifted
its focus to its more subtle and lasting manifestations . Prominent among
these are the varieties of what came to be known as the colonization of the
mind . This is one of the forms of epistemic violence that it is certainly the task

8
of philosophers to contribute to identify and struggle against.Postcolonial thinkers
have undertaken not only to analyze this phenomenon, but also to devise strategies
for effectively combating and hopefully eradicating colonialisms most damaging
aspect the taking possession and control of its victims minds. My purpose
in this paper is to contribute, qua philosopher, to both of these undertakings. I begin
by trying to clarify the nature of the colonization of the mind and its epistemic
underpinnings and the typical reactions to it. Next, I examine examples of these
reactions with their corresponding analyses and strategies. The assumptions
underlying them reveal certain inherent paradoxes, which call into question the
possibility of a full decolonization of mind. I conclude by suggesting an alternative
strategy and a series of means to implement it. What is colonization of the mind?
In this section, the range of phenomena that fall under the label colonization of the
mind is extended beyond its usual application and briefly toured; the main features
of the phenomenon are described; its epistemic characteristics are analyzed; and
the typical instinctive reactions to mind colonization are considered. 1.1 The
metaphor colonization of the mind highlights the following characteristics of the
phenomenon under scrutiny here: (a) the intervention of an external source the
colonizer in the mental sphere of a subject or group of subjects the colonized;
(b) this intervention affects central aspects of the minds structure, mode of
operation, and contents; (c) its effects are long-lasting and not easily removable; (d)
there is a marked asymmetry of power between the parties involved; (e) the parties
can be aware or unaware of their role of colonizer or colonized; and (f) both can
participate in the process voluntarily or involuntarily. These characteristics are
shared by a variety of processes of mind colonization,regardless of whether they
occur in socio-political situations that are literally categorized as colonial.
Therefore, colonization of the mind may take place through the transmission of
mental habits and contents by means of social systems other than the colonial
structure. For example, via the family, traditions, cultural practices, religion,
science, language, fashion, ideology, political regimentation, the media, education,
etc.Consider education, for instance. The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire has
analyzed a typically mind-colonizing educational paradigm, which he
suggestively dubbed the banking model. In this paradigm, a commodity
(knowledge) is deposited by those who have it (the teachers) in the minds of those
(the pupils) who dont have it; the task of both is basicallypassive: the formers, to
transmit and the latters to absorb knowledge. i1.2The banking model displays the
characteristic epistemic nature of mind colonization: What grants the colonizer (in
this case the teacher) the right to intervene in the pupils mind, thereby colonizing
it, is the fact that the former possesses and the latter lacks knowledge. This is a
commodity that everybody is presumed to desire by virtue of its epistemic
properties, namely truth and universality, whence its applicability and utility derive.
Analogously, parents have the experience their children lack, customs and
traditions embody proven methods of survival in natural and social environments,
religion grants transcendental validity to human behavior, language provides
reliable tools for mental operations such as identification, conceptualization,
classification, and inference, science supplies the basis of technologies that work,
and ideologies, of policies that are presumed to work. The expressions in italics refer
to epistemic warrants that yield epistemic legitimacy and thereby endow teacher,
family, tradition, religion, language, science or ideology each with its brand of
epistemic authority. Notice thatin most of these cases those who perform the

9
colonizing are either not aware of the nature of their action or of the epistemic and
other damaging consequences of their action. ii Quite on the contrary, they believe they are
helping the colonized, by providing them with better beliefs and patterns of action
that improve their ability to cope successfully with the environment. Furthermore,they are
also unaware of the fact that for the most part their minds have themselves been
colonized by others, whose agents they become by attributing to them the
same epistemic authority they rely upon vis--vis those they colonize. In
order for any of these sources of authority to become, in turn, an effective vehicle of
mind colonization, it must, in addition, obtain the support of power structures
capable,by a variety of means, of transmuting epistemic authority into social
authority and so to ensure its enforcement.These means range from semiotic
displays of authority, through overrating some sources of epistemic authority and
devaluating others, up to appealing to overt and covert forms of
discrimination, making use of socio-economic rewarding or punishment,
and sheer violent coercion. Nevertheless, however powerful the pressure of its

authority

means, social
alone, without an epistemic authority counterpart,
isnt sufficient, for it cannot per se generate the authority necessary for succeeding
in the colonization of minds. Success in this endeavor cannot be achieved by
coercion and fear alone, for it consists in inducing a set of beliefs in the colonized
mind via some sort of inferential, persuasive process a process that is cognitive in
nature. Its basic constituent is the implicit acceptance by the colonized of a
rule of inference that automatically grants superiority to the colonizers
epistemic warrants or reasons when they clash with those of the
colonized. By virtue of this rule,when comparing the colonizers and his own
grounds for holding a specific belief, the colonized will usually tend to prefer the
formers reasons and consequently adopt the colonizers belief. In other
words,colonization of the mind is achieved when the colonized adopts the
colonizers epistemic principle of invidious comparison. iiiThis means his implicit
acceptance of the colonizers asymmetric distinction between a primitive mind
that of the colonized and a superior or civilized one that of the colonizer.It is
this acceptance that establishes a sort of implicit agreement between
colonized and colonizer which justifies the recurring inference by both to the
effect that, in any matter involving cognitive abilities, the formers performance
must be presumed to be inferior to the latter. 1.3 Of course, not always the
colonization of mind is successful and yields acceptance and resignation by the
colonized,although its rate of success can be considered typical, in so far as it has
been surprisingly high throughout history. iv Another typical reaction of the
colonized to the colonization of mind drive of the colonizer, characteristic of the
relatively recent decolonization movement, is characterized by all out rejection
and resistance. These two types of reaction are not the only ones, but they
deserve special attention because, though on the face of it contrary to each other,
they are widespread and equally instinctive or natural. Prima facie, the two
reactions are indeed radically opposed.v While the former acknowledges the

10
epistemic superiority of the colonizer and adopts it as a principle of colonized belief
formation, the latterdenies the alleged asymmetry, argues that it is groundless
because based on an invidious comparison procedure that is necessarily
biased, and therefore refuses to ad opt the presumption of epistemic
inferiority of the colonized. While the former assumes the compatibility of
adopting the colonizers conceptual framework with the preservation of the
colonized identity,the latter stresses the incompatibility between these two
attitudes, arguing that the adopted or adaptedcolonizers mind ultimately expels
the original mind of the colonized, and thereby obliterates the latters true or
authentic identity. As far as the political consequences are concerned, while the
resigned acceptance reaction does not recognize in the adoption of the
colonizers beliefs and forms of thinking one of the ways through which
colonizers enhance their control over colonized behavior,the resistance
reaction denounces it as a means of acquiring control over the will of the
colonized, thus becoming a powerful tool of oppression, which must be
combated

Eurocentered colonialist ideology reinforces violent and

demeaning heteronormativity. This labels the queer body as
the other which only justifies violent and genocidal oppression.
Attacking this heteronormativity destroys the foundations of
eurocentrism.Lugones, 7. (Mara, 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, "Heterosexualism and the
Colonial/Modern Gender System."Hypatia22, no. 1 (2007): 201,

Allen has not only enabled us to see how narrowQuijanos conception of genderis in terms of the
organization of the economyand of collective author- ity, but she has also revealed that
the production of knowledge is gendered , as is the very conception of reality at
every level. Allen supported the question- ing of biology in the construction of gender differences and
introduces the important idea of gender roles being chosen and dreamt. Allen also showed us that the

heterosexuality characteristic of the modem/colonial construction of gender relations is

produced, mythically constructed . But heterosexuality is not just biologized in a fictional way ;
it is compulsory and permeates the whole of the coloniality of gender in the renewed, large
Eurocentered capitalism is heterosexualist . I think it is
important to see, as we understand the depth and force of violence in the production ofboth the
light and the dark sides of the colonial/modem gender system, that this heterosexual- ity has been
consistently perverse, violent, and demeaning , turning people into animals and
turning white women into reproducers of the (white) race and the(middle or upper)class.Horswells
sense. In this sense, global,

and Sigals work complements Allens, particularly in understanding the presence of sodomy and male
homosexuality in colonial and precolonial America.

11

12

PERFORMANCE
I'm angry. I'm angry for being condemned to death by strangers saying,
"You deserve to die" and "AIDS is the cure." Fury erupts when a Republican woman wearing
thousands of dollars of garments and jewelry minces by the police lines shaking her head, chuckling and wagging
her finger at us like we are recalcitrant children making absurd demands and throwing a temper tantrum when they

Angry while Joseph agonizes over $8,000 a year for AZT which
might keep him alive a little longer and which does make him sicker than the
disease he is diagnosed with. Angry as I listen to a man tell me that after
changing his will five times he's running out of people to leave things to. All of his best friends are
dead. Angry when I stand in a sea of quilt panels, or go to a candlelight march or
attend yet another memorial service. I will not march silently with a
aren't met.

f[uck]ing candle and I want to take that goddamned quilt and wrap myself in it and furiously rent
curse every god religion ever created. I refuse to accept a
creation that cuts people down in the third decade of their life. It is cruel and vile and
meaningless and everything I have in me rails against the absurdity and I
raise my face to the clouds and a ragged laugh that sounds more demonic
than joyous erupts from my throat and tears stream down my face and if this
disease doesn't kill me, I may just die of frustration. My feet pound the streets and Peter's hands
it and my hair and

are chained to a pharmaceutical company's reception desk while the receptionist looks on in horror and Eric's body
lies rotting in a Brooklyn cemetery and I'll never hear his flute resounding off the walls of the meeting house again.
And I see the old people in Tompkins Square Park huddled in their long wool coats in June to keep out the cold they
perceive is there and to cling to whatever little life has left to offer them, and I think, ah, they understand. And I'm
reminded of the people who strip and stand before a mirror each night before they go to bed and search their
bodies for any mark that might not have been there yesterday. A mark that this scourge has visited them. And

I'm angry when the newspapers call us "victims" and sound alarms that
"it" might soon spread to the "general population." And I want to scream
"Who the f[uck] am I?" And I want to scream at New York Hospital with its
yellow plastic bags marked "isolation linen," "ropainfecciosa" and its orderlies in latex
gloves and surgical masks skirt the bed as if its occupant will suddenly
leap out and douse them with blood and semen giving them toothe plague.
And I'm angry at straight people who sit smugly wrapped in their selfprotective coat of

heterosexuality confident that this disease has

nothing to do with them because it only happens to "them." And the teenage boys
monogamy and

who upon spotting my "Silence = Death" button begin chanting "Faggots gonna die"

and I

wonder, who taught them this? Enveloped in fury and fear, I remain silent while my
button mocks me every step of the way.

And the anger I feel when

a television program on the quilt gives profiles of the dead and the
list begins with a baby, a teenage girl who got a blood transfusion, an
elderly Baptist minister and his wife and when they finally show a gay
man, he'sdescribed assomeone who knowingly infected teenage male
prostitutes with the virus

13

SOLVENCY/ MORE IMPACTS

The ocean was hell for quares during the middle passage so
they used their sexuality as tool of resistance. Today that same
hell sustains itself through the episteme created in debate , so
like the slaves revolted on the ships we shall revolt against the
debate space.
Tinsley 08
Atlantic has always been the queer Atlantic. What Paul Gilroy never told us is how queer relationships were
forged on merchant and pirate ships, where Europe-and and Africans slept with fellow and I mean samesex sailors. And, more powerfully and silently, how queer relationships emerged in the holds of slave ships
that crossed between West Africa and the Caribbean archipelago. I began to learn this black Atlantic when I
was studying relationships between women in Suriname and delved into the etymology of the word mati. This is
the word Creole women use for their female lovers: figuratively mi mati is my girl, but literally it means mate,
as in shipmate she who survived the Middle Passage with me. Sed- imented layers of experience lodge in this
small word. During the Middle Passage, as colonial chronicles, oral tradition, and anthropological studies tell
us, captive African women created erotic bonds with other women in the sex-segregated holds, and captive
African men created bonds with other men. In so doing, they resisted the commodification of their bought
and sold bodies by feeling and feeling for their co-occupants on these ships. Queer in the sense of
marking disruption to the violence of normative order and power fully connect- ing in ways that
commodified flesh was never supposed to, loving your own kind when your kind was supposed to
cease to exist, forging interpersonal connections that counteract imperial desires for Africans
living deaths. Reading for shipmates does not offer to clarify, to tell a documentable story of Atlantic,
Caribbean, immi- grant, or gay pasts. Instead it disrupts provocatively. Fomented in Atlantic cross- currents,
black queerness itsel f becomes a crosscur rent through which to view hybrid, resistant
subjectivities opaquely, not transparently. Perhaps, as Brand writes, black queers really have no
ancestry except the black water.22 But diving into this water stands to transform African diaspora scholarship in
ways as sur- prising

WE MUST LEAVE BEHIND THIS MODEL OF DEBATE THAT CAUSE CONTINUOS

SILENCE AND SUBJAGATION OF OPPRESSED BODIES.

Therefore jayquan and I advocate for an epistemological revolt in the debate

space
The role of the ballot is for the judge to endorse the team that presents the
best methodology of survivability and liberation of oppressed bodies.

14

Performance of quareness produces quare rage and negativity

that drives us to burn down the world. Quareness is a toxic
horror in the eyes of the normative order and acts as a raging
wave that causes world destruction.
Kendra Langeteig, Winter-xx-1997, Instructor of English at Indiana University ,
connection between homosexuality and menacing contagion that Burroughs
goes beyond parody of
homosexual adventure and fantasy taken to extremes. These activities have
an explosive sexual politics that point, by their very extremity, to Burroughs's
acute awareness of how society reads the homosexual body , and demonstrate his
urgent need for vindication. Homosexuality is the toxic in the horror autotoxicus of
the body politic, condemned to the margin along with society's other outlaws--its toxic
waste (the drug addict, the schizophrenic); all are banished in the social project of
preventing the transmission of social disorder and preserving the life of
the body politic from collapse. Since the AIDS epidemic, this horror of homosexual
contagion, more than a psychological threat ("homosexual panic" to be prosecuted in
court), is supplied with tangible proof of its toxicity or "unnaturalness" for
the reactionary thinker, actually fueling arguments to read this epidemic as a sign from an Old
This

makes explicit in the erotic exhibitionism of the Red Night trilogy obviously

Testament God punishing acts contra natura with plagues. While Burroughs makes no reference to this cultural
backlash in Cities--the Red Night plagues prefigure and can be only coincidentally connected with AIDS and its
social fallout--his portrayal of homosexuality painfully emphasizes how culture's message about toxicity is inscribed
on the gay male body. When the Red Night trilogy moves into the Age of AIDS, with Dead Roads (1983),

Burroughs seemingly mocks the "fear of a queer planet" by continuing to align

his homosexual heroes with the greatest "natural" disasters--plagues and
death. 46 His strategy of affirming society's negative construction of
homosexuality as disorder , rather than being victimized or overpowered

THE STARTING POINT OF REVOLUTIONARY epistemology

ALLOWS FOR A PEDOGOGY OF SURVIVAL WHICH IS ESPECIALLY
BENEFICIAL IN DEBATE AS IT TEACHES A METHOD of
ORIENTAATION AND SURVIVABILITY FOR THE OPPRESSED
BODIES.
Gumbs, Alexis 2010( black queer feminist, Phd. Duke University, academic,
organizer, revolutionary)

Survival. The condition of bare life. The mythology of differential fitness. The continuity of property and properties.
But survival is more than this.Survival,as it emerges as a key word in the theory and poetics of Audre Lorde

is a poetic term. It provides the basis for the reconsideration of

its own meaning, and the reconsideration of the meaning of life, that
which survival queerly extends despite everything. Survival is a
pedagogy: secret and forbidden knowledge that we pass on, educating
each other into a set of skills and beliefs based on the queer premise that
our lives are valuable in a way that the economization of our labor,
and the price of our flesh in the market of racism deny. Survival is a mode
and June Jordan

15
of inquiry, providing a repertoire of critical insights, gained from
discerning what approach to a political and economic framework we
can afford from one moment to the next. Survival is an
afterlife; by continuing to exist we challenge the processes that somehow
failed to kill us this time. Survival is a performance, a set of aesthetic
invocations that produce belief and resonance. Survival is a poetic
intervention into the simplistic conclusion of the political narrative: we
were never meant to survive. The we that was never meant to survive is
a challenge to the gospel of individualism. The content of that we is at stake because
survival redefines who we are. For those of us who constitute the collection of people addressed by Audre Lordes A
Litany for Survival, the meanings of our lives have been slandered within an economy that uses
narratives of racial inferiority, gender determinism, and sexual subjectivity to devalue our bodies, our
breathing, our time.If we are survivors, who we are is the question of survival, and whether we survive
depends on the generation of a set of relationships that prioritizes who we are to each other through our queer acts
of loving the possible collectivity represented in each of our bodies.2Survival

is a queer act for

oppressed communities because it interrupts the social reproduction of
the sanctioned deaths of those who were never meant to survive. In this chapter I
argue that

survival

THE PERFORMANCE OF THE 1AC BREATHES LIFE INTO THE

QUARE BODY. THIS ALOWS FOR QUARE BODIES TO LIVE
THROUGH THEIR PERFORMACE. PERFORMANCE CREATES A
FORM OF ENLIGHTMENT THAT ALOWS US TO CHANGE OUR
VIEW TO THE WORLD AND ALSO TO OUR SELVES. THIS SOLVES
FOR SELF HATRED AND PROMOTES A FORM OF SELF LOVE AND
PROGRESSION.JOHNSON 2K6 [Patrick E., professor of African American studies and
performance studies at Northwestern University, Quare Studies or (almost) everything I know about
Queer Studies I learned from my grandmother in Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology

a performance of self for the self in a moment of self-reflexivity that

has the potential to transform ones view of self in relation to the
world.People have a need to exercise control over the production of their
images so that they feel empowered. For the disenfranchised, the
recognition, construction, and maintenance of self image and cultural
identity functions to sustain, even when social systems and codes fail to
do so. Granted, formations orperformances ofidentity may simply reify oppressive systems, but they
may alsocontest and subvert dominant meaning systems. When gays, lesbians,
It also is

bisexuals, and transgendered people talk back, whether using the tools of the master or the vernacular on the
streets , their voices, singularly or collectively, do not exist in some vacuous wasteland of discursivity. As symbolic

performances are not simple reflectors or

expressions of culture or even of changing culture but may themselves be
active agencies of change, representing the eye by which culture sees
itself and the drawing board on which creative actors sketch out what
they believe to be more apt or interesting designs for living.
Performative reflexivity is a condition in which a sociocultural group, or its most
perceptive members acting representatively, turn, bend, or reflect back upon
themselves, upon the relations,actions, symbols, meanings, codes, roles, statuses, social
structures, ethical and legal rules, and other sociocultural components
which make up their public selves
anthropologist Victor turner suggests, their

16

THE ENGAGAMENT IN THEORIES OF PERFORMACE ALLOWS FOR

A BETTER ANAYSIS ON POWER RELATIONS. THE DISCOURSE
PRESENTED THROUGH THE PERFORMANCE OF THE 1AC
CHALENGES THE STRUCTURES OF POWER AND ALLOWS US TO
WORK ON AND AGAINST SYSTEMS OF OPPRESSION.

JOHNSON 2K6 [Patrick E., professor of African American studies and performance
studies at Northwestern University, Quare Studies or (almost) everything I know
about Queer Studies I learned from my grandmother in Black Queer Studies: A
Critical Anthology
Theories of performance, as opposed to theories of performativity, also take
into account the context and historical moment of performance. We need
to account for the temporal and spatial specificity of performance not only
to frame its existence, but also to name the ways in which it signifies. Such an analysis would
acknowledge the discursivity of subjects and would also unfix the discursively constituted subject as always already
a pawn of power. Although many queer theorists appropriate Foucault to substantiate the imperialism of power ,

Foucault himself acknowledges that discourse has the potential to disrupt

power: Discourses are not once and for all subservient to power or
raised up against it, anymore than silences are.We must make allowances
for complex and unstable process whereby discourse canbe both an instrument and
effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling block, a point of resistance and a starting pointfor an
opposing strategy.Discourse transmit and produces power; it reinforces it , but
also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to
thwart it. Although people of color, myself included, may not have
theorized our lives in Foucaults terms, we have used discourse in
subversive ways because it was necessary for our survival. Failure to
ground discourse in materiality is to privilege the position of those whose
subjectivity and agency, outside the realm of gender and sexuality, have
never been subjugated.

17

AFF ANSWER
Switch Side having a predictable is the only way to ensure
teams take both sides of an argument and learn multiple
perspectives about the topic they force overly generic
debatesThats key to critical thinking
Harrigan
Additionally, there are social benefits to thbbe practice of requiring students to
debate both sides of controversial issues. Dating back to the Greek rhetorical
tradition, great value has been placed on the benefit of testing each argument
relative to all others in the marketplace of ideas. Like those who argue on behalf of
the efficiency-maximizing benefits of free market competition, it is believed that
arguments are most rigorously tested (and conceivably refined and improved) when
compared to all available alternatives. Each and every student, whether in debate
or (more likely) at some later point in life, will be placed in the position of the
decision-maker. Faced with competing options whose costs and benefits are initially
unclear, critical thinking is necessary to assess all the possible outcomesof each
choice, compare their relative merits, and arrive at some final decision about which
is preferable. In some instances, such as choosing whether to eat Chinese or Indian
food for dinner, the importance of making the correct decision is minor. For many
other decisions, however, the implications of choosing an imprudent course of
action are potentially grave. As Robert Crawford notes, there are "issues of
unsurpassed important in the daily lives of millions upon millions of people...being
decided to a considerable extent by the power of public speaking" (2003). Although
the days of the Cold War are over, and the risk that "The next Pearl Harbor could be
'compounded by hydrogen" (Ehninger and Brockriede, 1978, p.3) is greatly reduced,
the manipulation of public support before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 points to the
continuing necessity of training a well-informed and critically-aware public
(Zarefsky, 2007). In the absence ofdebate-trained critical thinking, ignorant but
ambitious politicians and persuasive but nefarious leaders would be much more
likely to draw the country, and possibly the world, into conflicts with incalculable
losses in terms of human well-being. Given the myriad threats of global proportions
that will require incisive solutions.

Ballot bad :Their liberation is relied on the use of ballot making

debate just a win or lost scenario McWhorter 5
In the growing body of literature that makes up what has in recent years come to be called
Whiteness Studies, observations like the following are commonplace: Whiteness
has, at least within the modern era and within Western societies, tended to be
constructed as a norm, an unchanging and unproblematic location, a position from
which all other identities come to be marked by their difference (Bonnett, 1996: 146).1
According to Whiteness Studies theorists, the white race functions not so much as a race, one
among many, as, at times at least, the race the real human race and, at other

18
times, no race, simply the healthy, mature norm of human existence as opposed to
all those other groups of people who are somehow off-white, off-track, more or less
deviant. Whiteness, the racial norm in Western industrial societies, is at one and the
same time the exemplar of human being and the unmarked selfsame over against
the racially marked other(s).2 This understanding of whiteness emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s as
race scholars in the USA and the UK began to treat white identity as an epistemic object, in contrast to many earlier
race theorists who studied non-whites primarily.3 By taking whiteness as an object of study, these scholars
problematized the status of the white race as an unmarked norm and exposed the racism implicit in its having that
status. Thus, it seemed, these new race theorists had discovered a potentially very powerful tool for dismantling
racism. Revealing the ways in which whiteness functions as a racial norm, they began to denaturalize it and thereby
rob it of some of its power to order thought and practice. Their scholarship was and is, deliberately and
unapologetically, deeply engaged political activism. Feminist sociologist Ruth Frankenberg articulates this
confluence of theory and practice well when she writes: Naming whiteness and white people helps dislodge the
claims of both to rightful dominance (Frankenberg, 1993: 234). While readers of the work of Michel Foucault may
well be struck by the deep affinities between Foucaultian genealogy, counter-memory, and counter-attack on the
one hand and Whiteness Studies denaturalization of heretofore largely unquestioned racial categories on the other,
surprisingly most writers in the Whiteness Studies movement seem all but unaware of Foucaults analytics of

Their repeated observation that whiteness

functions as a norm and their close analyses of its unmarked status come not out of
an awareness of Foucaultian genealogy but rather out of sociological studies of
institutional racism like Omi and Winants Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the
1990s (1994). Their work sounds like Foucaults at times, but if they are moving toward
an analysis that is like his in some ways, it is from a starting point that is radically
different. In this paper I will argue that, in part because of the limitations imposed by that
different starting point, Whiteness Studies theorists typically miss their mark both
naalytically and politically. Their major problem lies in the fact that they still work within
what Foucault calls a juridical conception of power, a conception that simply does
not capture the ways in which power operates in modern industrialized societies,
especially in relation to the so obviously bio-political phenomenon of racial
oppression
biopower and his descriptions of normalization.4

Performance doesnt create liberation. They rely their

liberation on chance rather than method Pendlebury
Performative pedagogy calls on the teacher to see her own slippery position, to be aware and wary of her
own authorial and authoritative positioning. It takes subjectivity seriously through a radical turn
to specificity, an ever-shifting play of relationships, perspectives and voices where, if anyone has
authority, it is the learner and then only at the moment of expression. Learner-centredness here
rests on an apparent presumption in favour of the view from below apparent because it
involves something of a pretence by the teacher and because there is no singular view from below, but many.

Taking subjectivity seriously in this way thwarts the very project it intends to
quicken and undermines the constitutive goods of teaching . How so? For a start, without
normative benchmarks, anything goes. By treating all voices and views as equally
valid, Carmen Luke (herself a feminist) argues, the feminist teacher risks a dangerous sameness:
Views and voices from everywhere and every body potentially are views and voices
from nowhere and no body (Luke, 1996: 291). If anything goes, then changing learners
perceptions becomes a matter of chance and if the teacher has a role at all, it is to play stagehand
to happenstance. Here teaching would seem to be thoroughly luck-dependent, leaving the
teacher without resources to establish the enabling conditions for fulfilling the definitive ends of her practice (cf
Pendlebury 1995).

19

Reform Is impossible in a world that is founded on the

foundation of black suffering. Wilderson- 2002
Civil society is the terrain where hegemony is produced, contested, mapped. And
th e invitat ion to p articipate in hegemony's gestures of influence, leadership, and
consent is not ext ended to t he unwaged. We live in the world , but ex ist out side
of civil s ociety. This structurally impossible position is a paradox,because the
Black subject, the slave, is vital to political economy: s/he kick-starts capital at its
genesis and rescues it from its over-accumulation crisis at its end. But Marxism has
no account of this phenomenal birth and life-saving role played by the Black subject:
from Marxand Gr amsci we have con sistent s ilence. In taking Foucault to ta sk for a
ssuming a universal s ubject in r evoltagainst d iscipline, in the same s pirit in which I
have t aken Gr amsci to ta sk for as suming a u niversal sub ject, the subject of civil
societ y in revolt a gainst capita l, Joy Jam es writes : The U.S. carceral network kills,
however, and in its prisons, it kills more blacks than any other ethnic group. American
prisons constitute an "outside" in U.S. political life. In fact, our society displays waves
of concentric outside circles with increasing distances from bourgeois self-policing. The
state routinely polices the14 unassimilable in the hell of lockdow n, deprivat ion tanks ,
control units , and holes for political prisoners (Resisting State Violence 1996: 34 ) But
this peculiar preoccupation is not Gramsci's bailiwick. His concern is with White folks;
or with folks in a White (ned) enough subject position that they are confronted by, or
threat ened by th e remova l of, a wag e -- be it monetary or social. But Black
subjectivity itself disarticulates the Gramscian dream as a ubiquitous emancipatory
strategy, because Gramsci, like most White activists, and radical American movements
like the prison abolition movement, has no theory of the unwaged, no solidarity with the
slave If we are to take Fanon at his word when he writes, #Decolonization, which sets
out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder #
(37) then we must accept the fact that no other body functions in the Imaginary, the
Symbolic, or the Real so completely as a repository of complete disorder as the Black
body. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Real, for in its
magnetizing of bullets the Black body functions as the map of gratuitous violence
through which civil society is possible: namely, those other bodies for which
violence is, or can be, contingent. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the
level of the Symbolic, for Blackness in America generates no categories for the
chromosome of History, no data for the categories of Immigration or Sovereignty; it is
an experience without analog # a past, without a heritage. Blackness is the site of
absolute derelictionat the level of t he Imaginary for #whoever says #rape # says
Black, # (Fanon) , whoever says #prison # says Black, and whoever says #AIDS # says
Black (Sexton) # the #Negro is a phobogenic object # (Fanon). Indeed &a phobogenic
object &a past without a heritage &the map of gratuitous violence &a program of
complete disorder. But whereas this realization is, and should be cause for alarm, it
should not be cause for lament, or worse, disavowal # not at least, for a true
revolutionary, or for a truly revolutionary movement such as prison a bolition. 15 If a
social movement is to be neither social democratic, nor Marxist, in terms of the
structure of its political desire then it should grasp the invitation to assume the
positionality of subjects of social deaththat present themselves; and, if we are to be
honest with ourselves we must admit that the Negro has been inviting Whites, and as

20

well as civil society #s junior partners, to the dance of social death for hundreds of
years, but few have wanted to learn the steps. They have been, and remain today# even
in the most anti-racist movements, like the prison abolition movement # invested
elsewhere. This is not to say that all oppositional political desire today is pro-White,
but it is to say that it is almost always anti-Black which is to say it will not
dance with death. Black liberation, as a prospect, makes radicalism more
dangerous to the U.S. Not because it raises the specter of some alternative polity
(like socialism, or community control of existing resources) but because its condition of
possibility as well as its gesture of resistance functions as a negative dialectic: a politics
of refusal and a refusal to affirm , a program of complete disorder. One mus t embrace
its disorder, its in coherence and allow oneself to be elaborated by it, if indeed one's
politics are to be underwritten by a desire to take this country down. If this is not the
desire which underwrites one #s politics then through what strategy of legitimation is
the word #prison # being linked t o the word #abolition #? Wh at ar e this movement
#s lines ofpolitical a ccountabilit y? There #s nothing foreign, frightening, or even
unpracticed about the embrace of disorder and incoherence. The desire to be embraced,
and elaborated, by disorder and incoherence is not anathema in and of itself: no one, for
example, has ever been known to say #gee-whiz, if only my orgasms would end a little
sooner, or maybe not come at all. # But few so-called radicals desire to be embraced,
and elaborated, by the disorder and incoherence of Blackness # and the state of politica
l movements in A merica to day is ma rked by t his very N egrophobogenisis: #geewhiz, if only Black rage could be more coherent, or maybe not come at all. # Perhaps
there #s something more terrifying about the joy of Black, then there is about the joy of
sex (unless one is talking sex wit h a Negr o). Perhaps coalitions today p refer to
remain in- orgasmic in the face of civilsociety # with hegemony as a handy
prophylactic, just in case. But if, through this stasis, or paralysis , they tr y to do t he
work of prison a bolit ion # that work will fail; because it is always work from a
position of coherence (i.e. the worker) on behalf of a position of incoherence, the Black
subject, or prison slave. In this way, social formations on the Left remain blind to the
contradictions of coalitions bet ween worker s and s laves. T hey remain coalitions
opera ting with in the logic of civil society; and function less as revolutionary promises
and more as crowding out scenarios of Black antagonisms # they simply feed our
frustration. Whereas the positionality of the worker # be s/he a factory worker
demanding a monetary wage or an immigrant or White woman demanding a social
wage # gestures toward the reconfiguration of civil society, the positionality of the
Black subject # be s/he a prison-slave or a prison-slave-in-waiting # gestures toward
the disconfiguration of civil society: from the coherence of civil society, t he Black
subject beckons with the in coherence of civil war.

White supremacy will inevitably coopt your inclusion,

participation rhetoric makes it impossible to participate.
Mitchell 98
Institutional interests bent on shutting down dialogue and discussion may recruit new graduates skilled in argumentation
and deploy them in information campaigns designed to neutralize public competence and short-circuit democratic

21
capitalist
institutions to sustain themselves by manufacturing legitimacy through strategic communication as a
decision-making (one variant of Habermas "colonization of the lifeworld" thesis; see Habermas 1981, p. 376-373). Habermas sees the emergent capacity of

development that profoundly transforms the Marxist political dynamic. By colonizing terms and spaces of public dialogue with instrumental, strategically-motivated reasoning,

corporations and the state

forge a monopoly on argumentation and subvert critical deliberation by members of an enlightened,
debating public. This colonization thesis supplements the traditional Marxist problematic of class exploitation by highlighting a new axis of domination, the way in which
capitalist systems rely upon the strategic management of discourse as a mode of legitimation and exploitation. Indeed, the implicit bridge that connects
argumentation skills to democratic empowerment in many argumentation textbooks crosses perilous waters, since
institutions facing "legitimation crises" (see Habermas 1975) rely increasingly on recruitment and deployment
of argumentative talent to manufacture public loyalty.
institutions are said by Habermas to have engineered a "refeudalization" of the public sphere. In this distorted space for public discussion,

Identity politics gets molded over by the collective ideology of

societyWILLIAMS Associate Professor of Law @ City University of New York 1987
Patricia-now a professor of Law at Columbia; EXCLUDED VOICES: Realities in Law and Law Reform:
Spirit-Murdering the Messenger: The Discourse of Fingerpointing as the Laws Response to Racism;
42 U. Miami L. Rev. 127.

conforming to what others see in us is every childs way of becoming

socialized.n50 It is what makes children in our society seem so gullible, so impressionable so impolitely honest, so blindly
loyal, and so charming to the ones they initiate.n51 Yet this conformity also describes a way of being
that relinquishes the power of independent ethical choice. Although such a relinquishment can
It is true that

have quite desirable social consequences, it also presumes a fairly homogeneous social context in which values are shared and
enforced collectively. Thus, it is no wonder that western anthropologists and ethnographers, for whom adulthood is manifested by
the exercise of independent ethical judgment, so frequently denounce tribal cultures or other collectivist ethics as childlike. By
contrast, our culture constructs some, but not all, selves to be the servants of others. Thus, some Is are defined as your
servant, some as your master. The struggle for the self becomes not a true mirroring of self-in-other, but rather a hierarchallyinspired series of distortions, where some serve without ever being served, some master without ever being mastered, and almost
everyone hides from this vernacular domination by clinging to the legally official definition of I as meaning your equal. In such

relinquishing the power of individual ethical judgment to a collective

ideal risk psychic violence, an obliteration of the self through domination by an all
powerful other. In such an environment, it is essential at some stage that the self be permitted to retreat into itself and
an environment,

make its own decisions with self-love and self-confidence. What links child abuse the mistreatment of [*142] women, and racism is
the massive external intrusion into psyche that dominating powers impose to keep the self from ever fully seeing itself.n52 Because
the selfs power resides in another, little

faith is placed in the true self, that is, in ones own

experiential knowledge. Consequently, the power of children, women and blacks is actually
reduced to the intuitive, rather than the real; social life is necessarily based
primarily on the imaginary.n53 Furthermore, because it is difficult to affirm
constantly with the other the congruence of the selfs imagining what the other is
really thinking of the self, and because even that correlative effort is usually kept
within very limited family, neighborhood, religions, or racial boundaries,
encounters cease to be social and become presumptuous, random, and
disconnected.

Endorsing politics is key for aff to solve.

Guilhot 2005
political scientists produce an expertise that is increasingly
invested in these transnational struggles through issue networks. They provide these
new international actors not only with instruments, but also , as I have suggested,
with legitimacy linking up with the struggles which are highly rewarding in symbolic terms
Lawyers, obviously, but also

allows scholars

in turn to fight more on a local turf these external resources thus, the opposition of social

constructivists

with realists or neorealists, that of "transitologists" against

22
modernization sociology or, more generically, that of political scientists
against economists, are local conflicts waged by the proxy of more
universal symbols. In writing about issue or advocacy networks, epistemic
communities, and the power of ideas to influence policies, political
scientists therefore have been theorizing practices in which they were
increasingly involved. Human rights and democracy have been the twin
issues around which a major transformation of policy research and
advocacy took place in the 1980s: increasingly placing emphasis on values
and ideals as compared to technical problem solving, this transformation
has permitted the valorization of political commitment cum intellectual
skill beyond the campus perimeter . An activist ethos acquired in the
movements of the 1960s and 1970s became progressively functional to a new
articulation between foreign policy goals and their transnational implementation. At
the same time the administrative and entrepreneurial skills which came to be
associated with the conduct of academic research (e.g. Jacoby 1987) ualities easily
in the wider context of value-oriented, principled expertise . The role of social and
political scientists in the constitution of the techno-scientific skill base of
issue networks is the concrete historical and social background against
which the development of a scientific discourse on transnational activism
and the idealist theories of policy change associated with it must be
matched. I rati this perspective, it becomes possible to read the concepts
and the logic informing theories about the political consequences of ideas
as abstract redescriptions of an emerging academic activism. By
substituting the logic of ideas with the logic of social practices, however,
these theories also misrepresent their real object. An anonymous power
of ideas is thus substituted for the socially determined power of
professional idea brokers and committed academics. The methodological
choice of taking ideas

Role playing key

Schaap 2005

Using the role play encouraged

students to express ideas in terms of the concepts associated with the
particular ideology they were asked to engage with. A particular
advantage of the role play was that it enabled students to learn from each
other; students with different levels of competence in political theory
benefited from the questions and explanations that they gave to each
other. Moreover, the teacher naturally assumes a generous disposition in this situation as students ask for
#2 Concern and respect for students and student learning:

advice, help, clarification, etc. throughout the session. # 3 Appropriate assessment and feedback: The role play
provided immediate opportunities to provide students with feedback on their ideas. Like Levy, I tended not to
correct misinformation. However, I did reward students by pointing out when a particularly good point was being
made. I also recorded the meeting so that students could listen to the discussion later and I posted the various draft
declarations of human rights on the subject website. # 4 Clear goals and intellectual challenge: When devising the
role play I was forced to articulate the learning outcomes I hoped to achieve more clearly than I had done when
preparing regular lectures. This may have been related to the high-risk nature of this teaching method and my

A particular
advantage of this teaching method is that it posed an intellectual
challenge to students, regardless of their level of competence in the
subject
worry that students would not take it seriously if they could not see the point of it.

23

Simply talking about methodologies will never solve , pragmatic

policy option is key
Varisco 7

In sum, the essential argument of Orientalism is that a pervasive and endemic Western discourse of Orientalism has constructed
"the Orient," a representation that Said.

The history of philosophy, aided by Orientalist and

ethnographic renderings of the panhumanities writ and unwrit large, is
littered with searches for meaning. Yet, mystical ontologies aside, the
barrier that has thus far proved unbreachable is the very necessity of
using language, reducing material reality and imaginary potentiality to mere
words. As long as concepts are essential for understanding and
communication, realityconterminous concept that it must bewill be
embraced through worded essences. Reality must be represented, like it or
not, so how is it to be done better? Neither categorical nor canonical
Truth" need be of the essence. One of the pragmatic results of much
postmodern criticism is the conscious subversion of belief in a singular
Truth" in which any given pronouncement could be ascribed the eternal
verity once reserved for holy writ. In rational inquiry, all truths are limited
by the inescapable force of pragmatic change. Ideas with "whole truth" in
them can only be patched together for so long. Intellectual activity
proceeds by characterizing verbally what is encountered and by reducing
the complex to simpler and more graspable elements. A world without
proposed and debated essences would be an unimaginable realm with no
imagination, annotation without nuance, activity without art. I suggest
that when cogito ergo sum is melded with "to err is human,"
essentialization of human realities becomes less an unresolvable problem
and more a profound challenge. Contra Said's polemical contentions, not
all that has been created discursively about an Orient is essentially wrong
or without redeeming intellectual value. Edward Lane and Sir Richard
Burton can be read for valuable firsthand observations despite their
ethnocentric baggage. Wilfrid and Anne Blunt can be appreciated for their
moral suasion. TheJ 'accuse of criticism must be tempered constructively
with the louche of everyday human give-and-take. In planed biblical
English, it is helpful to see that the beam in one's own rhetorical eye
usually blocks appreciation of the mote in the other's eye. Speaking truth
to power a la Said's oppositional criticism is appealing at first glance, but
speaking truths to varieties of ever-shifting powers is surely a more
productive process for a pluralistic society. As Richard King has
eloquently put it, "Emphasis upon the diversity, fluidity and complexity
within as well as between cultures precludes a reification of their
differences and allows one to avoid the kind of monadic essentialism that
renders cross-cultural engagement an a priori impossibility from the
outset."2?0 Contrasted essentialisms, as the debate over Orientalism
bears out, do not rule each other out. Claiming that an argument is
essentialist does not disprove it; such a ploy serves mainly to taint the ideas
opposed and thus tends to rhetorically mitigate opposing views. Thesis
countered by antithesis becomes sickeningly cyclical without a willingness to
negotiate synthesis.
The critical irony is that Said, the author as advocate

who at times denies agency to authors as individuals, uniquely writes and

24
frames the entire script of his own text. Texts, in the loose sense of
anything conveniently fashioned with words, become the meter for Said's
poetic performance. The historical backdrop is hastily arranged, not
systematically researched, to authorize the staging of his argument. The
past becomes the whiggishly drawn rationale for pursuing a present
grievance. As the historian Robert Berkhofer suggests, Said "uses many
voices to exemplify the stereotyped view, but he makes no attempt to
show how the new self/other relationship ought to be represented. Said's
book does not practice what it preaches multiculturally."29i Said's
method, Berkhofer continues, is to "quote past persons and paraphrase
them to reveal their viewpoints as stereotyped and hegemonic."
Napoleon's savants, Renan's racism, and Flaubert's flirtations serve to
accentuate the complicity of modern-day social scientists who support
Israel. Orientalism is a prime example of a historical study with one voice
and one viewpoint. Some critics have argued in rhetorical defense of Said
that he should not be held accountable for providing an alternative. The
voice of dissent, the critique (of Orientalism or any other hegemonic
discourse) does not need to propose an alternative for the critique to be
effective and valid," claim Ashcroft and Ahluwalia.29= Saree Makdisi
suggests that Said's goal in Orientalism is "to specify the constructedness
of reality" rather than to "unmask and dispel" the illusion of Orientalist
discourse.=93 Timothy Brennan argues that Said's aim is not to describe
the "brute reality" of a real Orient but rather to point out the "relative
indifference" of Western intellectuals to that reality.=94 Certainly no
author is under an invisible hand of presumption to solve a problem he or
she wishes to expose. Yet, it is curious that Said would not want to
suggest an alternative, to directly engage the issue of how the "real"
Orient could be represented. He reacts forcefully to American literary
critics of the "left" who fail to specify the ideas, values, and engagement
being urged.=95 If, as Said, insists "politics is something more than liking
or disliking some intellectual orthodoxy now holding sway over a
department of literature,"=9'6 then why would he not follow through with
what this "something more" might be for the discourse he calls
Orientalism? As Abdallah Laroui eloquently asks, " Having become concerned
with an essentially political problem, the Arab intelligentsia must inevitably reach
the stage where it passes from diagnosis of the situation to prescription of
remedial action.

25

THE PERFORMANCE OF THE 1AC BREATHES LIFE INTO THE

QUARE BODY. THIS ALOWS FOR QUARE BODIES TO LIVE
THROUGH THEIR PERFORMACE. PERFORMANCE CREATES A
FORM OF ENLIGHTMENT THAT ALOWS US TO CHANGE OUR
VIEW TO THE WORLD AND ALSO TO OUR SELVES. THIS SOLVES
FOR SELF HATRED AND PROMOTES A FORM OF SELF LOVE AND
PROGRESSION.JOHNSON 2K6 [Patrick E., professor of African American studies and
performance studies at Northwestern University, Quare Studies or (almost) everything I know about
Queer Studies I learned from my grandmother in Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology

a performance of self for the self in a moment of self-reflexivity that

has the potential to transform ones view of self in relation to the
world.People have a need to exercise control over the production of their
images so that they feel empowered. For the disenfranchised, the
recognition, construction, and maintenance of self image and cultural
identity functions to sustain, even when social systems and codes fail to
do so. Granted, formations orperformances ofidentity may simply reify oppressive systems, but they
may alsocontest and subvert dominant meaning systems. When gays, lesbians,
It also is

bisexuals, and transgendered people talk back, whether using the tools of the master or the vernacular on the
streets , their voices, singularly or collectively, do not exist in some vacuous wasteland of discursivity. As symbolic

performances are not simple reflectors or

expressions of culture or even of changing culture but may themselves be
active agencies of change, representing the eye by which culture sees
itself and the drawing board on which creative actors sketch out what
they believe to be more apt or interesting designs for living.
Performative reflexivity is a condition in which a sociocultural group, or its most
perceptive members acting representatively, turn, bend, or reflect back upon
themselves, upon the relations,actions, symbols, meanings, codes, roles, statuses, social
structures, ethical and legal rules, and other sociocultural components
which make up their public selves
anthropologist Victor turner suggests, their

i
ii
iii

iv
v.