Fugitivity Affirmative - Michigan7 2015

Fugitivity Affirmativebeffjr
Note
-- On File Layout
Each 1ac below contains a different fugitive poetic. The
explanation of that idea can be found in the 1ac TremblayMcGraw evidence, which is located in almost every version of
the 1ac. Thank you to Elijah Smith from Wake Forest, who
originally found and produced this evidence at Wake Forest
and whose vision and scholarship made creating this file
possible.
Some of the 1acs utilize music as a form of poetics, such as
the song Cold War by Janelle Monae, Feeling Good by
Nina Simone, Ronald Reagan by Killer Mike or Power by
Kanye West.
Other 1acs use different literary devices. The Moten 1ac
cites the story of Uncle Tolliver to explain fugitivity, and
Black Privilege plays a poem by Crystal Valentine.
Researching how different artists perform fugitivity was one
of the most fun parts of this file. If youd like to be creative
and do this on your own there is a section called Build Your
Own 1ac that contains some of the various parts you would
use to help you construct your argument.
-- On File Construction
Thank you to Tamara Morrison from U Prep who brought the
idea to the lab and put in tons of extra hours in the library to
make it happen. I think her note here is excellent and right to
the point;
This is a file that we put a lot of work, thought, and
passion into so instead of miscategorizing the
arguements you should try to meet up with one of the
contributors to understand it more. Everyone is a
fugitive in their own little way so you should try to find
your own connection to it and capitalize on that.
To follow Tamaras advice, holler anytime with questions or
ideas to any of these folks, who all did great work on this file;
Danielle Zitro from Austin SFA
Isaac Cui from Liberal Arts and Sciences (LBJ)
Kristina Curtiss from Traverse City Central
Nicolas Williams from Henderson
Riley Franklin from Dulles
Ragul Manoharan from Little Rock Central
Ross Fitzpatrick from Barstow
Simone Schwartz-Lombard from Notre Dame
Tamara Morrison from U Prep
**additional thanks to DJ Williams and Peyton Woods from
Little Rock Central for their contributions as well, all the more
impressive given that this was work they added on top of
their work in their own lab.
1acs
1acJanelle Monae
~Janelle Monae - Cold War
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqmORiHNtN4
So you think I'm alone?
But being alone's the only way to be
When you step outside
You spend life fighting for your sanity
This is a cold war
You better know what you're fighting for
This is a cold war
Do you know what you're fighting for?
If you wanna be free?
Below the ground's the only place to be
Cause in this life
You spend time running from depravity
This is a cold war
This is a cold war
This is a cold war
This is a cold war
Bring wings to the weak and bring grace to the strong
May all evil stumble as it flies in the world
All the tribes comes and the mighty will crumble
We must brave this night and have faith in love
I'm trying to find my peace
I was made to believe there's something wrong with me
And it hurts my heart
Lord have mercy, ain't it plain to see?
This is a cold war
This is a cold war
KELLINDOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Do you know it's a cold, cold war?
Do you, do you... do you?
Bye, bye, bye, bye

Don't you cry when I say goodbye
~Janelle Monae - Cold War (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqmORiHNtN4)
With her performance as a black women and her reference to

the cold war Janelle creates a duality of everywhere-ness and
concrete experience
REDMOND, 11 (Shana L. is Associate Professor of American Studies and
Ethnicity at USC. She received her combined Ph.D. in African American Studies
and American Studies from Yale University. Her research and teaching interests
include the African Diaspora, Black political cultures, music and popular culture.
"Marking the Margins: Janelle Mone's 'Cold War' Landscape":This Safer Space:
Janelle Monaes "Cold War", Post45 Conference, Roundtable/Panel, Refereed
Paper, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Cleveland, OH, Post45, Spring 2011 )
"Cold War" facilitates and relies on a reimagining of the Cold War; it is no
longer an international struggle over the expansion of communism, nor
is it fought in hidden theaters of influence abroad. Monae s treatment
locates the contest at the level of individual experience, confirming President
Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1953 statement that the Cold War was a battle for "the soul
of man himself." Monae's reinvention of the war makes the soul and
struggles of interiority central to the ongoing battles fought anywhere
within the reach of her voice. She accomplishes this revision through the
use of her bodya black, female, and explicitly working class body. Her
black and white stage uniform may be stripped away in this scene but its imprint is
everywhere present as we examine her flesh: a body made from the labors of a
janitor mother and garbage-truck-driving father. This body is now the
landscape for cold war battles and marks a new frontier in its debates. "On
the one hand," according to McKittrick, raced and gendered geographies
"reach far beyond the nation or existing maps, and on the other hand,
rest on very specific locations such as black women's bodies, sexualities
and subjectivities" (2000b: 225). Monaes spatial dislocation of the Cold
War therefore does not fix it in any one locale but instead highlights its
duality as a radical everywhere-ness and a concrete experience by
mapping its negotiation onto the nonnationalized body of the black
woman.
Thus affirm the 1ac as a performance to counter-gaze the

state.
Freedom isnt fiat; it is elusive, momentary, and a state of

mind; it is discursive play rather than related to the location
of the body or an abstract vision of social change.
Monaes narrative creates a space that fosters different
methods of state deconstruction.
Monaes questions to us throughout the song are met with definitive
statements as she narrates a story of dispossession and alienation. Her
second verse, which argues, "If you want to be free / below the ground's
the only place to be / 'cause in this life / you spend time running from
depravity," details a space not of death ("below the ground") but of
safety that is shared by a self-selected group who choose freedom over
flight ("running from depravity"). It is an underground, a shelter, where
political consciousness might best be fostered and utilized safe from the
culture wars fought outside. Monae s spatial realignments signal a powerful
departure from conventional narratives of black suffering; unlike much of the
disaster and tourist photography of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which
purports to display black reality without allowing the subject to speak, we are
forced, through viewing her moving image, to brace ourselves for her next
utterance as she looks us in the eye and uses her emotional intensity to displace
our intentions for her body. Through this effort she becomes the subject through
which the forces under consideration are elucidated. Raw emotion punctuates this
possession; at the moment of revealing, "I was made to believe there's something
wrong with me / And it hurts my heart," Monae s eyes well up with tears. She
breaks character as the emotions escalate, missing the lines of her playback, and
shaking her head and hands in acknowledgement of the emotions that originally
inspired the song's composition and that are now replayed in the act of
performance. This rupture dismisses the standard ventriloquism of music video lip
synchronization in favor of vulnerability before a knowing audience, signaling her
investment in using her own "Cold War" for new ends: it is no longer a
contained project (war) or a historical object (music video) but it is,
through her, an entire field of play and performative engagement that
traverses period, ideology, and method. This radical act of self-exposure
spurns the longstanding surveillance practices of the United States and
offers an alternative to the subterfuge used by oppressed peoples.
Monaes sound takes advantages of social movements and

leave an opportunity for future one
Monae has developed, within a relatively short period of time, a

sound/sight corpus of black feminist knowledges that take advantage
of social movement methodsnotably the use of her own experience as
evidenceto inspire and instruct those around her. Her embodied
protest challenges the popular black political cultures of the
contemporary moment, which have been deftly disciplined by formal
political structures like the Obama White House; in the process,
these actors dismiss the rich heterogeneity of the black public
sphere by conceding too much of their intellectual authority to those
whose sociopolitical strategies long ago diverged from traditions of
black struggle.14 Monae s challenge to those who have forgotten,
lost, or ignored their own voice and agency, and her maintenance of
black diasporic arts traditions in which "the cultural realm is always in
play and already politically significant terrain," is a "fantastic"
disruption to black political lethargy, and evidences an intelligent
design rooted in black feminist constructions that wed body to mind
and experience to history (Iton). It is within these methods and
conjunctions that the future spaces of political possibility might be
realized
This space allows black women to not only deconstruct the

state, but also patriarchy in order to combat oppression with
alternative forms of performance.
Monaes performance refuses the acts of dissemblance that have long
characterized black women's participation in the public sphere. Darlene
Clark Hine argues that black women employed dissemblance throughout
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a way to respond to rape,

violence, and the threats thereof, thus "creat[ing] the appearance of
openness and disclosure but actually shield[ing] the truth of their inner
lives" (912). These refusals produced a "self-imposed invisibility" that
allowed them to "accrue the psychic space and harness the resources
needed to hold their own in the often one-sided and mismatched
resistance struggle" (Hine 915). Monae relies on invisibility in "Cold War,"
insisting that "Being alone's the only way to be / When you step outside /
you spend life fighting for your sanity. "7 Her words echo the sentiments of
Mary Church Terrell, who early in the twentieth century announced to her
constituency in the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs that "our
peculiar status [as black women] in this country . . . seems to demand that we
stand by ourselves" (Hine 917).Monaes staging of interiority, however, is already
undercut by her choice of ae' forum: it is not a platform from which she speaks
only to other black women, but a music video that comprised both a sonic
announcement to be replayed again and again, and a moving image that catalogs
and exposes her for all time to anyone who would watch/listen. There is a
dramatic tension here; while Mon acknowledges dissemblance as a strategy, she
also forestalls its efficacy through that revelation, effectively lifting the veil of
secrecy that allowed for black women's sociopolitical subterfuge.
This deconstruction allows us to question history as it affects

present structures as well as promoting a free space that
advocates for alternative discourse.
Monaes performative unveiling sensitizes us to questions of truth as the
layers of history, identity, and resistance collapse on one another . Yet
her engagement with and demand for the rights of access and voice are
consistent throughout. Her performance makes the space to critique how
dissemblance may have "contributed to the development of an
atmosphere inimical to realizing equal opportunity or a place of respect";
yet the method of exposureperformancesignals another intervention
(Hine 915). The music video, which has offered a platform for display and critique
since the 1970s, is used by Monae in "Cold War" as a confessional site, a
shelter ae where the struggles of the ordinary black women described by
Hine, and embodied by Monae might be discussed and responded to. Too often
safe spaces are limited in their availability for the disenfranchised, yet
Monae is able, through various creative and organizing techniques, to
construct a "Cold War" free speech zonea task and location little known
during the historical moment that the song references. Her "Cold War"
imagination therefore creates an alternative reality that is recognizably

different from those of her contemporaries within the shared
"superpublic" described by Richard Iton, in which black bodies and
performances are conspicuous in the visual cultures grown from hip hop
and the Internet. Monae s willingness to challenge history situates her as a
spectral figure representing the unfinished work of the past, even as she leads a
cohort in the present and envisions a future beyond her own critique.8
Fugitivity exists in our use of language and its constant rereading and re-use. Such a freedom is utopian and fugitive
Tremblay McGraw 10 Robin Tremblay-McGraw @University of California,
Santa Cruz Enclosure and Run: The Fugitive Recyclopedia of Harryette Mullens
Writing MELUS Volume 35, No.2 Summer 2010. Pp 71-94 (Article) Oxford
University Press [E.Smith]
Harryette Mullen has published five books of original poetryTree Tall Woman
(1981), Trimmings (1991), S*PeRM**K*T (1992), Muse & Drudge (1995), and
Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002). Additionally, she has published two books
which reissue her earlier works: Blues Baby: Early Poems (2002), which reprints
Tree Tall Woman and also includes a previously unpublished collection; and
Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge (2006). Mullen selfconsciously inherits and intervenes in what Kathy Lou Schultz calls the legacy
gone missing of avant-garde practice by African-American women poets (n.
pag.). Mullen is actively engaged in recovering this legacy through her creative,
scholarly, and editorial work.1 Poised in the dialectic of what I call enclosure
(identity, history, and the archive, but also, racism, exclusion, and limitation) and
run (mobility, flight, escape, critique, ongoing poesis, and revision), Mullens
work plies the tensions between these disparate but mutually dependent poles.
From the negotiation of this tension, Mullen produces a formal strategy predicated
on the communal participation of others and distinctive among innovative poets
the recyclopedia. Mullens writing creates texts that remain open to ambiguity,
difficulty, and difference. Her writing engages in political and social
criticism with particular attention to race, gender, and the discourse of the
commodity, while it delights in the pleasures of an infinite linguistic jouissance.
Many of the critics who have written about Mullens work, including Elisabeth A.
Frost, Juliana Spahr, Allison Cummings, and Deborah Mix, foreground its complex
mixtery of disparate sources and infl uences, illustrating its rich and critical
interrogation and reframing of literary history. Importantly, each critic also
emphasizes Mullens attention to communal reading practices and several situate
Mullens work as a negotiation between multiple discourses and infl uences,
including Black Arts, Steinian modernism, and Language writing. Mix locates
Mullens work in Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T in relation to Gertrude Stein but
demonstrates how Mullens subversion of convention . . . is both more
complicated [than Steins] (in its inclusion of race in the welter of discourses of
femininity and sexuality) and more communitarian (in its recognition of the
individuals tangled in these linguistic webs (71). Frost demonstrates Mullens rare
(among recent avant-garde poets) revamping of the lyric and argues 72 that
Mullen constructs lyric otherwiseas an experiment in collective reading and an

assertion of the complexities of community, language, and poetic voice (466).
While Spahr asserts that what has interested me about Mullens work has been
her attention to reading, an attention that is rooted in the intersection between
language writings pursuit of wild reading and autonomy- and identitycentered poetrys concerns with community building and alliance (115),
Cummings points out that Mullens work then has garnered critical adulation not
only because it works to synthesize disparate traditions, but because it reflects on
that synthesis explicitly (24). Surveying Mullens body of work as a whole and
elaborating on Cummingss assertion that Mullen self-consciously refl ects her
works synthesis of multiple discourses, I contend in addition that Mullens writing
is characterized by a productive tension between enclosure and run, between
an archive of cultural, linguistic, and historical references, images, and information
and the fugitivity that is both a thematics and a formal strategy. Her archive
manifests in the form of the palimpsest, or, to use a fi gure that Mullen herself
foregrounds, her archive is a recyclopedia. She takes debased, erased, and
forgotten histories and found discourses and runs with and recycles them; she
invites the reader to participate in this educative process of conservation and
production, enclosure and fugitive run . Her work articulates a need for a more
equitable ecology, one of acknowledgment and memory, conservation and reuse;
she and we as readers are caught up in her recyclopedia, an ongoing poetics of
reuse that benefits from the multiple perspectives of a heterogeneous community.
The concept of the fugitive in Mullens work is connected equally to the history of
the United States, the global slave trade, historical strategies of escape for
enslaved blacks, and formal methods for escaping and reinventing genre and
poetic method. Furthermore, the fugitive is both critical and generative and
intimately linked to Mullens concept of the recyclopedia. Mullens formal
strategies explicitly reference the history of the fugitive slave laws . In an interview
with Cynthia Hogue, Mullen delineates the connection of the fugitive to her own
work: I wanted the poem to have that quality of quick movement from one thing
to another, from one subject or thought to another, from one mood or emotion to
another. Partly because I wanted things to be in flux, a state of flux, a state of
change. If you stand still too long, they will put chains on you, so you
want to keep moving. This is one of the things that is most fascinating to me
about the slave narratives I was studying while I was writing my dissertation. The
true freedom in the slave narrative is at the point of deciding to escape and the
journey north . . . the freedom that people experience is actually when they are on
the road, in fl ight. (par. 25)\ Mullen links the structure of her poetry to the fl ight
of the fugitive slave and then connects these movements of fugitivity with
freedom. Interestingly, Mullen simultaneously problematizes the effi cacy of such
movement and the resultant freedom gained when she further locates the
moment of true freedom . . . at the point of [the slaves] deciding to escape
and . . . journey. This quote suggests that freedom is elusive, momentary,
and a state of mind; it is discursive rather than related to the location of
the body. Such a freedom is utopian and fugitive. The diffi culties of fl ight
and the frequency of slaves being returned to owners as mandated by the Fugitive
Slave Act made the journey north dangerous, exhausting, and subject to failure.
Furthermore, in the literature of passing Mullen surveys in her article Optic White:
Blackness and the Production of Whiteness, which explores how whites repress
and suppress miscegenation and argues that the racial category of white is
predicated on the black, she notes that in texts such as Harriet Jacobss Incidents
in the Life of a Slave Girl, Death is better than slavery. This is a recurring refrain
in Jacobss and other slave narratives, [that] acquires an ironic signifi cance when
Benjamin [Jacobss lightskinned uncle] dies as a slave, vanishing into the white
race in his third and fi nal escape (82). For some, freedom means leaving ones
family and community, effectively dying in order to take up a new life as a free
person or as a black who passes for white. Historically, flight is a means of escape,
but not an unproblematic or uncomplicated means. Flight and travel (voluntary or
not) undertaken by slaves, refugees, exiles, or nomads does not always erase
histories but rather sometimes produces a palimpsestic and productive layering. In
her doctoral dissertation, Mullen writes about Olaudah Equiano, the son of an
African king who was taken into slavery and wrote from England in the eighteenth
century. Discussing how captivity disrupts his life, so that this African child fails to
be ritually initiated [via scarifi cation] as an adult member of his tribe, Mullen
notes that in Equianos own discursive production: the displaced African is no
blank page, as his reconstruction of early memories goes to show. He is more like
a palimpsest, or like the protean form of this Narrative. . . . In the pages of
Equianos prolifi c narrative, the black body retains its relation to a place of origin,
but never acquires a fi xed signifi cation; instead layers of meaning accumulate as
the character of the narrator evolves through a series of travels and adventures.
(Gender 59) According to Mullen, for Equiano retrospectively this disruption of
cultural continuity is figured as a divine providence that intervenes to open up a
new identity and destinya destiny constructed out of the individuals unique
interaction with chance and continually changing environments rather than a
predetermined fate or fi xed identity (60). For some individuals fl ight and
cultural disruption will enable strategic redefi nitions or recycling and make
possible an identity open to change and resignifi cation; flight can create a kind of
open archive always sedimented and palimpsestic so that past traces are not
erased but available and recontextualized, refi gured and thus open to the future.
Individuals and texts constructed out of fugitive fl ight from the law or those that
travel across multiple cultural communities constitute the recyclopedias of
disparate experiences, ideologies, and discourses. In the recyclopedia, fugitive fl
ight rewrites identity by enabling a return to and reappropriation of the past. The
neologism recyclopedia in the title of Mullens collection of three of her previous
books is a combination of recycle and encyclopedia. Recycle references reuse,
suggesting to use again in the original form, and the taking of intractable used
or waste material and making it suitable for something new. Pedia recalls
encyclopedia and its Greek root, paideia, meaning education. Mullens neologism
clearly articulates a project that is both process and product. It entails a cyclical
reuse of given materials and a process that takes dirty, contaminated, and
worthless waste materials and turns them into something newly usable. Mullens
recyclopedia suggests that the continual reuse of materials, even those that
construct blacks as dirty, contaminated, and worthless, can serve to identify an
original use (the racist construction of blacks as waste, for example); her writing
enables the critical recycling of problematic materials to produce something new,
something with different or oppositional value for writer, reader, history, and the
future. Mullens recyclopedia constructs fugitive movement as a means of
escape from arrest and as a productive process of remembering and
rewriting. Mullen includes in her recyclopedia many diverse materials, yet she is
particularly attentive to bringing to the surface the unarticulated, marginalized,
nearly lost, and invisible as well as the used or waste material . Mullens
recyclopedia enables the sort of activity described by David Scott that opens up
vast possibilities not just of memory but of countermemory; the moral idiom and
semiotic registers of remembering against the grain of the history of New World
black deracination, subjection, and exclusion (vi). Such a process entails both
identifying and preserving histories and experiences elided and
prohibited from official discourses and simultaneously exposing such
discourses bad faith. Rather than placing them under lock and key in order to
solidify, arrest, and exclude racist and sexist discourses, Mullen remakes the
encyclopediathe discourse and its attendant pedagogiesthrough her
recycling of its alphabets, grammars, metaphors, and other tropes . In the process,
these discursive tigations reveal the often unmarked and unnamed structurings of
various internecine ideologies.
The knowledge here is specifically key. It allows experimental

ways of change
Warren and Fassett, 2004 [The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights
reserved Theatre Topics 14.2 (2004) 411-430John T. Warren is an assistant
professor in the School of Communication Studies at Bowling Green State
University, where he teaches courses in performance, culture, identity, and power.
Deanna L. Fassett is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication
Studies at San Jos State University, where she teaches courses in instructional
communication and critical, feminist, and performative pedagogies //liam]
Boal's argument that performance activists and teachers should work against the
mystification process, not the myth; work against the struggles, not the hero,
reminds us that this sort of performance work is significant precisely because it
attempts to destroy not the white person, but rather the illusions, trappings, and
power games that make whiteness so powerful. It is the process of
interactive performance that these kinds of workshops foreground that can
allow a resistant white participant to engage in a critique of white power
and privilege without lapsing into feelings of guilt or self-pity, which
can too easily reduce conversations of race and racism to individual
actions without calling out the system that makes those actions possible.
These kinds of performances allow the theories and engagements with
critical race theory to move participants in ways that matterthrough
listening, understanding, and then recreating their qualities in ways

that speak to them. This mode of embodiment moves theory through
their bodies, effecting change in experiential ways.
The role of the ballot is to vote for the team that best creates
a space of under-commons to deconstruct and overthrow
anti-black structures of power
1acMoten
The history of domestic surveillance is inseparable from the
history of slavery. Lists of human cargo, plantation
inventories, and diaries were used by masters to govern
slaves, to impose domination onto unwilling bodies.
Disciplinary power utilizing information technology such as
slave patrols or wanted posters functioned to create a racially
stratified security system, imposing a compulsory visibility
upon the black body as communicated through the literacy of
the White bodyit is from this that contemporary policing
and surveillance arises. Simone Browne, in 2012, explains
that
Browne 2012 PhD in Sociology and Equity Studies in Education (Simone;
Race and Surveillance Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies; Google
Book; https://books.google.com/books?
hl=en&lr=&id=F8nhCfrUamEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA72&dq=race+and+surveillance+Si
mone+browne&ots=y_cvDcnYS0&sig=ZmhtR3WJI2mp_clVI6qwScZDZwQ#v=onep
age&q=race%20and%20surveillance%20Simone%20browne&f=false; 7/5/15 ||
NDW)
the history of surveillance in America can be traced to the
"simple accounts" of slave owners. Of course, the accounting practices of transatlantic slavery were
also present outside of the Americas. These simple accounts included slave vessel manifests
listing human cargo, plantation inventories, diaries which contained observations
about plantation life and instructions for governing slaves. One example involved the
According to Christian Parenti,
"General Rules" recorded by Charles Tait for his Columbus, Texas plantation: "4th in giving orders always do it in a
mild tone, and try to leave the impression of the mind on the Negro that what you say is the result of reflection."
The detailed cataloguing of slave life was a mechanism of disciplinary power,

where disciplinary power, as Michel Foucault tells us, is "exercised through its invisibility,"
while imposing a "compulsory visibility" on its targets. Disciplinary power then
operated on the enslaved as racialized surveillance that individuals were at once
subjected to and that produced them as racial , and therefore enslave able, subjects. Such
a racializing surveillance was apparent in the plantation security system , a system
that relied on, as Parenti lays out, three "information technologies: the written slave pass,
organized slave patrols, and wanted posters for runaways". Here, surveillance and literacy were
closely articulated as slaves and indentured servants who could read and write could also forge passes and
manumission papers or alter existing ones by replacing dates, names, and other unique identifiers, in this way
functioning as antebellum hackers" able to "crack the code of the planters' security system". These forged passes
were used for unauthorized travel outside of the plantation and were [produced by fugitives upon demand by
slave patrollers, or "Pattie rollers", who were often non-property owning armed white men who policed slave
mobilities. Sometimes producing a forged pass was not necessary. Any piece of printed text would do given that
fugitive slaves were aware of many of these pattie rollers were illiterate, so they would hand over these "passes"
This security system, then, relied on the "racially defined contours of

(white) literacy and (black) illiteracy", a dichotomy that was not so readily upheld. Less easily
counterfeited passes were later fashioned out of metal. The compulsory visibility of the racial
when apprehended.
subject can be seen in the circulation of newspaper advertisements and wanted

posters for runaway slaves and truant servants. These texts were primarily aimed at
a white public that was assumed to be literate and free, and who in consuming these texts,
became a part of the aparatus of surveillance , and the eyes and ears of face-to-face watching
and regulating. In detailing physical desacriptions, the surveillance technology of the
fugitive slave advertisement made the already hypervisible racial subject legible
as "out of place." For instance, a March 15 1783 advertisement in The Royal Gazzette offering a "Two Dollar
Reward" for "a Mulatto, or Quadroon Girl, about 14 years of age, named Seth, but calls herself Sall," attests to the
role of fugitive slave notices, and similarly, wanted posters, in upholding racial categorization. This notice went on
to state: "sometimes says she is white and often paints her face to cover that deception." Seth's, or Sall's,
duplicity is not limitefd to her use of an alias, as this notice tells us, but also to her racial ambiguity, witness her
apparent choosing to self-identify or pass as white, rather than as "a Mulatto"(one black parent and one white
parent) or a "Quadroon Girl" (one black grandparent) as per the racial nomenclature that arose out of slavery.
Later such classifications as a form of population management were made official

with the first US federal census in 1790 . I will retun to the census as a technology that formalized
racial categorization later. For now, the wanted notice for fugitive slaves as an infoprmation
technology demonstrates that then as now race was a social construct that
required constant policing and oversight. However, the format of the fugitive notice was
repurposed in the form of handbills that functioned as a means of counter-surveillance. An 1851 handbill
produced by abolitionists Theodore Parker attests to this as it cautioned "colored people of Bostonb" to steer clear
of "watchmen and oilice officers" and to "keep a sharp look out for kidnappers, and have top eye open." "Top eye"
here was a directive to look out and about with keen intent as police officeers were empowered to act as slave
catchers under fugitive slave laws. Black spectatorship, along with the gazes of white abolitionists and other
allies, functioned as a form of oppositional looking back at racializing surveillance. In her discussion of black
spectatorship, the gaze and looking relaitons during slavery and the racial apartheid of Jim Crow in the southern
United States, bell hooks tells us that black people often "cultivated the habit of casting the gaze fdownwards so
as not to appear uppity To look directly was an assertion of subjectivity, equality". hook suggests that the boften
violent ways in which blacks were denied the right to look back - think of the gruesome beating and murder of 14year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955, allegedly for looking at a white woman - "had produced in us an
overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze". Such politicized and oppositional looking
were agential acts and can be seen, for example, in a June 14th 1783 runaway slave notice printed in the Royal
Gazette for 16-year-old Samm, who is described in the notice as "five feet high" and "remarkable in turning up
the whites of his eyes when spoken to." This notice records Sam's oppositional gaze, his lokking back, and shows
us that resistance can be found even in the simple act of rolling one's eyes. Black looks have the power to trouble
surveillance as a "Technology of Whiteness".
Slaves were not, however, passive objects implicated within

the play of this biopolitical endeavor. Consider the story of
Uncle Toliver, as told in Leon Litwacks Been in the Storm So
Long:
In Nansemond County, Virginia, a slave known as Uncle

Toliver had been indiscreet enough to pray aloud for the
Yankees. The masters two sons ordered him to kneel in the
barnyard and pray for the Confederacy. But this stubborn old
man prayed even louder for a Yankee triumph. With growing
exasperation, perhaps even bewilderment, the two sons took
turns in whipping him until finally the slave, still murmuring
something about the Yankees, collapsed and died. (Litwak
1979, 30)1
One might conclude that Uncle Tolivers death was a nihilistic,
tragic eventthat his state of subjugation was so entrenched
that nothing meaningful could come from it. Yet, the aporia of
the slaves unintelligible actions, of propertys critique
against Property, creates a bewilderment, a disorientation of
the Master that allows for the possibility of agency. Fred
Moten notes in 2004 that
Moten, UC Riverside Department of English professor, 2004
(Fred, Knowledge of Freedom, The New Centennial Review, Vol. 4, No. 2, Fall
2004, p. 285-287, ProjectMUSE, IC)
But this is a simple passage, one designed to provide some sense of the violent
imposition of silence that marks slavery and will have marked every disaster,
every violent assault on or ritual destruction of the whole. We might gather from
this simple recounting, this simple objectivizing archivation, that slavery is that
institutionviolent and ritual dehumanization is that eventwherein nothing can
be said, whereof nothing can be said, which arrives for us, even now, enveloped in
the silence that accompanies the absence of specificity, the lack of an immediate
resonance. But to speak here of simplicityof a text, a passage, that tells, simply,
the barest story and unearths, simply, the smallest remnant of a life that gives us,
simply, an indication of the nature of a mode of beingis a matter that is, of
course, not so simple. The passage, which can only be called Uncle Toliver, is
more than a subject and more than a text; and its transmission of the whole of
Uncle Toliver to us is far from simple. It arrives through various arrangements of
the story of Uncle Toliver, the story of a man who could not tell his story as a
matter of law, and as a matter of the materiality of his life and death. But the
mediation that gives us that story does not obscure the position and situation
spoken through his silence. It is spoken so profoundly that the entirety of the
Enlightenment tradition and its critical other is invoked, reopened, revised,
improvised. The mediated and reconstructed voicing of the slave speaks through
1 Qtd. In Moten 2004, Knowledge of Freedom, p. 282
the vernacular and for freedom. The mediated and reconstructed voice of a man
held as property arrives to us as a critique of Property. As the passage arrives
once more, hear again its simplicity in a repetition that serves to further
obl/iterate (ob/literate) that simplicity: the subject, the textthat which is more
than the person and more than the textof Uncle Toliver haunts and infuses us.
In Nansemond County, Virginia, a slave known as Uncle Toliver had been indiscreet
enough to pray aloud for the Yankees. The masters two sons ordered him to kneel
in the barnyard and pray for the Confederacy. But this stubborn old man prayed
even louder for a Yankee triumph. With growing exasperation, perhaps even
bewilderment, the two sons took turns in whipping him until finally the slave, still
murmuring something about the Yankees, collapsed and died.
How is this strange arrival possible? What is its significance for us today in the
midst of an attempt to provide a desperately needed re/presentation of liberation
within an argument for the necessity of something other than either a rejection of,
or an indifference to, or a convergence with the (old or given) Enlightenment?
Ensemble, figured in and improvised through the ethical mediation of the
Enlightenments critical opening of the whole, is the improvisation of the singular
identities of Litwack and Uncle Toliver, and the totality which is generated by
lingering in the music that airily fills the space between them. They speak in
ensemble and are written there in a moment at which we are given, through the
mediation of improvisation, the whole of the history of the whole, and the whole of
the history of singularist (and differentiated) totalizations of the whole. Uncle
Toliver is, once more, the autobiography of ensemble and the history of an
ensemble voicing and agency; it is not the recording of a differentiated, repressed,
and oppressed ego by another ego in search of affirmation. Uncle Toliver is the
reality which invocations of naive and idiomatic writing, or calls for a voicingtowards-agency, or overlordly assertions of the whole only imagine within the
inevitable return to the best and worst of the Enlightenment that poststructuralism
and identity politics must make. Uncle Toliver prepares the ground for the real
formulation of a more than discursive ethics; we are propelled toward that view of
the world that allows our knowledge of the passage, a view that demands a
particular way of being in the world. In other words, our attention to ensemble, as
it exists in and as Uncle Toliver, activates and improviseskeeps faith with
ensemble. It is an attention that will have always moved through the interminable
attention to differentiating singularity or homogenizing totality that has always
foreclosed the possibility of a genuine agency. Agency is in the tradition of Uncle
Toliver.
Uncle Tolivers narrative is part of a chain of recitation that moves from a never
fully unveiled originary encounter to the specter of an impossible encounter to
come, the encounter in the future that would mark the impossible justice of a
strange, oppositional resolution. But the oppositional resolution that the bridge or
passage would mark falls before its own form. Descent, not oscillation; descent,
not the asymmetrical tensions and reemergent subjectivities of a gaze; descent,

as in the future resonances of variations of an unknown tongue.
Vote affirmative to recognize the fugitive politics of Uncle

Toliver.
Vote affirmative to acknowledge that the United States
federal government should substantially curtail its domestic
surveillance of fugitive bodies.
Vote affirmative to endorse fugitivity.
Fugitivity is not simply opposition to or transgression of the
social but, rather, functions in a zone of indeterminacy that
disrupts the relationship between knowledge and resistance
it is through this space of unintelligibility that blackness
can find social life within social death. Moten, in 2008,
continues
(Fred, The Case of Blackness, Criticism, Vol. 50, No. 2, Spring 2008, p. 178-179,
ProjectMUSE, IC)
**gender modified
Ill begin with a thought that doesnt come from any of these zones, though its
felt in them, strangely, since it posits the being of, and being in, these zones as an
ensemble of specific impossibilities:
As long as the black man is among his own, he will have no occasion, except in
minor internal conflicts, to experience his being through others. There is of course
the moment of being for others, of which Hegel speaks, but every ontology is
made unattainable in a colonized and civilized society. It would seem that this fact
has not been given enough attention by those who have discussed the question.
In the Weltanschauung of a colonized people there is an impurity, a flaw, that
outlaws [interdit] any ontological explanation. Someone may object that this is the
case with every individual, but such an objection merely conceals a basic problem.
Ontologyonce it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the waysidedoes
not permit us to understand the being of the black man [person]. For not only
must the black man [person] be black; he [they] must be black in relation to the
white man [person]. Some critics will take it upon themselves to remind us that
the proposition has a converse. I say that this is false. The black man [person] has
no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man [person].1
This passage, and the ontological (absence of) drama it represents, leads us to a
set of fundamental questions. How do we think the possibility and the law of
outlawed, impossible things? And if, as Frantz Fanon suggests, the black cannot be
an other for another black, if the black can only be an other for a white, then is
there ever anything called black social life? Is the designation of this or that thing
as lawless, and the assertion that such lawlessness is a function of an already
extant flaw, something more than that trying, even neurotic, oscillation between
the exposure and the replication of a regulatory maneuver whose force is held
precisely in the assumption that it comes before what it would contain? Whats the
relation between explanation and resistance? Who bears the responsibility of
discovering an ontology of, or of discovering for ontology, the ensemble of
political, aesthetic, and philosophical derangements that comprise the being that
is neither for itself nor for the other? What form of life makes such discovery
possible as well as necessary? Would we know it by its flaws, its impurities? What
might an impurity in a worldview actually be? Impurity implies a kind of noncompleteness, if not absence, of a worldview. Perhaps that noncompleteness
signals an originarily criminal refusal of the interplay of framing and grasping,
taking and keepinga certain reticence at the ongoing advent of the age of the
world picture. Perhaps it is the reticence of the grasped, the enframed, the taken,
the keptor, more precisely, the reluctance that disrupts grasping and framing,
taking and keepingas epistemological stance as well as accumulative activity.
Perhaps this is the flaw that attends essential, anoriginal impuritythe flaw that
accompanies impossible origins and deviant translations.2
Whats at stake is fugitive movement in and out of the frame, bar, or whatever
externally imposed social logica movement of escape, the stealth of the stolen
that can be said, since it inheres in every closed circle, to break every enclosure.
This fugitive movement is stolen life, and its relation to law is reducible neither to
simple interdiction nor bare transgression. Part of what can be attained in this
zone of unattainability, to which the eminently attainable ones have been
relegated, which they occupy but cannot (and refuse to) own, is some sense of the
fugitive law of movement that makes black social life ungovernable, that demands
a para-ontological disruption of the supposed connection between explanation and
resistance.3 This exchange between matters juridical and matters sociological is
given in the mixture of phenomenology and psychopathology that drives Fanons
work, his slow approach to an encounter with impossible black social life poised or
posed in the break, in a certain intransitive evasion of crossing, in the wary mood
or fugitive case that ensues between the fact of blackness and the lived
experience of the black and as a slippage enacted by the meaningor, perhaps
too trans-literally, the (plain[-sung]) senseof things when subjects are
engaged in the representation of objects.
The narrative of Uncle Toliver is always already in the process

of continual reinvention, oscillating between the planes of
intelligibility and unintelligibility as it is passed down,
translated, and transcribed. It is from this unstable and
aporic space that we derive the knowledge of freedom and
the subjectivity to assert that freedom
Noam Chomsky and others have begun to frame the fundamental questions
concerning knowledge of language as an innate endowment activated in the cut
(between speech and writing, between inner and outer speech, between silence
and sound, between competence and performance, in the interstice that is and
engenders rhythm, generated anew and improvised throughout from the strange
combination of experience and n[othing]). Knowledge of freedom is also in that cut
or hiatus; its where Mary Prince isas if given by the mediating and
improvisational force of de Law/d when that force is enacted in the improvised
nonexclusionary expansion of humanity. Ellen Butlers insight into our knowledge
of prayer as a particular linguistic mode is also insight into our knowledge of
freedom.
And Uncle Tolivers prayeruttered in an unknown tongue, given aloud and
transmitted through narrative mediation and through a citation and recitation in
the rhythmic interstice where ensemble fellis a citation (one given under the
collective name of the Workers of the Writers Program of the Works Project
Administration in the State of Virginia) which Litwack names, reigns, showing the
mark of that unnamed flowing in his rcit, his recitation. But, again, Litwacks is
not some predatory erasure, but the echo of that already extant loss inherent in
intelligibility, translation, and transcription, whose presence is and allows the
mediational ethics of ensemble. (Think of what is lost in the translation from
Ellen Butlers dialect to standard English: the constitutive cut that separates
the Lord and de Law/d and is transformed but retained in the chain of re-citation
that marks the writing of oral history.) Uncle Toliver is the gain and loss in this
recording at the end of the chain of recitations which is history, and which here is
extended at the end of a chain of narratives, of the kind of narrative wherein
knowledge of freedom is given to us and for us. The constellation of these
recitations and narratives is where Orwells problem (how we know so little given
so much evidence) and Platos problem (how we know so much given so little
evidence) intersect.12 Its where the questions concerning the law of genre, the
strange institution called literature (where the law is lifted, where everything can
be said), and the peculiar institution called slavery (where nothing could be said
as a matter of a law broken, and reconstituted in the breaking and reconstitution
of the law of genre, and the law of the law of genre, and their intersection)
converge.
One story told in Nansemond County concerns Uncle Toliver, who had the
indiscretion to pray aloud. When rumor reached the great house that he had been
praying for the Yankees, Tom and Henry, sons of the master, told the aged slave to
kneel in the barnyard and pray for the Confederates. Uncle Toliver prayed as loud
as he could for a Yankee victory. All day long they kept him there, taking turns in
lashing him, but he would not give in. At last he collapsed, still praying, his voice a
mumbled jargon. The only word that could be distinguished was Yankee. Sometime
that night, while they were still lashing him, Uncle Toliver died (Negro in Virginia
1994, 209).
So you pause at the recitation of lost names and the mumbled jargon where the
rest of Uncle Tolivers utterance remains unheard. In the space that jargon opens
(a space off to the side or out-from-the-outside; an appositional spacing or
displacement of the encounter in the interest of a subjectivity whose presence
remains to be activated; a space not determined by the zero encounter that
ruptures the subject or the nostalgic return to an other subject before the
encounter; a space where Uncle Toliver speaks through Tom and Henrythe sons
of the masterand through the Workers of the Writers Project of the Works
Project Administration of the State of Virginia, and through Leon Litwak to us:
piercing and possessing, disabling and enabling mediation and meditation) the
rest is what is left for us to say, the rest is what is left for us to do, in the broad
and various echoes of that utterance, our attunement to which assures us that we
are in the tradition.
Vote affirmative to steal from the academy. Moten and

Harney explain in 2004 that
Moten, UC Riverside Department of English professor, and
Harney, Singapore Management University professor, 2004
(Fred and Stefano, The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses, Social
Text, Vol. 22, No. 2, Summer 2004, p. 101-102, ProjectMUSE, IC)
To the university Ill steal, and there Ill steal, to borrow from Pistol at the end of
Henry V, as he would surely borrow from us. This is the only possible relationship
to the American university today. This may be true of universities everywhere. It
may have to be true of the university in general. But certainly, this much is true in
the United States: it cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and
it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment. In the face
of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can.
To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy
encampment, to be in but not ofthis is the path of the subversive intellectual in
the modern university.
Worry about the university. This is the injunction today in the United States, one
with a long history. Call for its restoration like Harold Bloom or Stanley Fish or
Gerald Graff. Call for its reform like Derek Bok or Bill Readings or Cary Nelson. Call
out to it as it calls to you. But for the subversive intellectual, all of this goes on
upstairs, in polite company, among the rational men. After all, the subversive
intellectual came under false pretenses, with bad documents, out of love. Her
labor is as necessary as it is unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but
cannot bear what she brings. And on top of all that, she disappears. She
disappears into the underground, the downlow lowdown maroon community of the
university, into the Undercommons of Enlightenment, where the work gets done,
where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong.
1acNina Simone
Play https://youtu.be/D5Y11hwjMNs?t=18s
It will start at: 0:18
Press pause/close tab at: 2:52
It's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life for me.
Yeah, it's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life for me,
ooooooooh...
And I'm feelin' good.
Fish in the sea, you know how I feel
River runnin' free, you know how I feel
Blossom on the tree, you know how I feel
It's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life for me,
And I'm feelin' good
Dragonfly out in the sun, you know what I mean, don't you
know,
Butterflies all havin' fun, you know what I mean.
Sleep in peace when day is done: that's what I mean,
And this old world is a new world and a bold world for me...
Stars when you shine, you know how I feel
Scent of the pine, you know how I feel
Yeah, freedom is mine, and I know how I feel
It's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life for me
And I'm feelin'... good.
-----
Nina Simones powerful articulation of freedom first rang out

in 1965 but it has echoed as a haunting challenge to the
dominant Western episteme of anti-black violence that
birthed and sustains domestic surveillance.
We affirm Ninas Simones Feeling Good as an act of
fugitivity.
Our sampling of Simone is part of a fugitive poetics that joins
artists who attempt to mobilize her tradition of social protest
and self-definition, a fluid and complex challenge to antiblackness that can serve as the basis for pedagogy among
listeners
Modell, 12Amanda Renae, MA thesis in American Studies @ University of
South Florida. "You Understand Me Now": Sampling Nina Simone in Hip Hop"
(2012). Graduate Theses and Dissertations, University of South Florida Scholar
Commons http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/4168 --BR
The overarching goal of this research is to explicate the implications of hip hop
artists sampling Nina Simones music in their work. By regarding Simone as a
critical social theorist in her own right, one can hear the ways that hip hop artists
are mobilizing her tradition of socially active self-definition from the Civil
Rights/Black Power era(s) in the post-2000 United States. By examining both the
lyrics and the instrumental compositions of Lil Wayne, Juelz Santana, Common,
Tony Moon, Talib Kweli, Mary J. Blige and Will.I.Am, G-Unit and Timbaland, and
bearing in mind the intersecting oppressions of race, class, gender, and sexuality,
this study concludes that the way that these artists employ Simones recorded
voice in their works oftentimes corresponds to the degree to which they retain her
figurative message. While many would assume that these tendencies would
correspond with the subgenres of mainstream and conscious hip hop, in fact
the fluidity and complexity of these artists positions in subgenre refutes this
essentialist notion. By engaging in an intersectional analysis of the political and
personal implications of hip hop sampling, this essay provides a critical
interpretation of the ways the cultural products of the Civil Rights era still
operate in contemporary U.S. society. These operations are integral to the
human rights struggle in which we are all still very much engaged. In 2010,
William Morris Endeavors Global Finance and Distribution Group announced plans
to produce a biopic of Nina Simones life, starring the contemporary queen of hip
hop soul Mary J. Blige.1 Although production of the film has subsequently been
delayed because of scheduling issues with other projects2 the prospect of the
project raises an interesting proposition for cultural commentators and the movie-
going and music-listening public alike. How is it that this current media superstar
will assume the role of such an historically specific figure? Aside from the
perfunctory acting classes, piano lessons and vocal training, what does it mean for
a black woman in the post-2000 United States to assume the mantle of a cultural
giant from the Civil Rights/Black Power era(s) like Nina Simone? In addition, how
will the global corporate interests that fund this project shape its production, tone,
promotion and reception? And what meaning will audiences gain from it? This is
not the first time such questions could be posed of a virtual, intergenerational
collaboration between Mary J. Blige and the late Nina Simone. On her 2005 release
The Breakthrough Blige features a deceptively powerful track entitled About
You,3 for which producer Will.I.Am samples Simones classic 1965 recording
Feeling Good.4 While the way that he samples from the track is fairly distinctive,
Will.I.Am is far from the only hip hop producer to draw from this recording, or
Simones catalog in general. Particularly since the singers death in 2003, the
trend of sampling her music in hip hop has become somewhat pervasive. This
trend is significant because Nina Simone articulated an ethic and aesthetic of
social activism and self-definition against controlling images throughout her
life and work. This overarching framework ran as a consistent thread throughout
her personal/professional life, her performance style, and her music. As a black
female musician who grew up singing and playing in church in the rural South,
Simones rise to fame would have fit neatly into an authentic blueswoman
typology. However her extensive classical training and tenure at Julliard exploded
this essentialist image for her audiences and the popular press during her career.5
Further, her virtuosity established her in circles of classical and jazz criticism,
traditionally male-dominated high culture. By establishing a public persona
outside of what was then acceptable for or expected of a black female singer, Nina
Simone succeeded in defining herself before the eyes and ears of the U.S. and the
world. She used her cultural clout to leverage support for the black freedom
struggle, performing at various times for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating
Committee, the Congress for Racial Equality, and the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People. Simone created a self-defined public persona as a
black woman activist musician who did not conform to the prevailing images of
how she should behave. This aesthetic and ethical articulation and practice
comprise what I will refer to as Nina Simones grammar of cultural production ,6
or critical social theory. Although those in the traditional academe do not
generally view musicians as intellectual theorists, regarding Nina Simone as a
critical social theorist in her own right is essential to preserving the radical
subjectivity that she fought so hard to articulate and maintain in her life and
work.7 For a hip hop artist, choosing to sample Nina Simone can be a political or
aesthetic decision, or most often a combination of the two. Similarly, hearing a
Nina Simone sample can be both a pedagogic and a sensual experience for
the listener; as a Signifyin(g) symbol, the hip hop sample carries only the
meaning that a listener ascribes to it.8 However the manner in which these artists
sample Simones work as well as the nature of the lyrics that accompany their
beats can affect the extent to which her critical social theory remains intact . The
hip hop artists that sample Simones work are mobilizing her tradition of
social protest and self-definition to varying degrees. By retaining Simones
voice in ways more faithful to her original recordings, these artists also retain her
figurative articulation of socially active self-definition against the
constraining matrix of domination. And when they silence or distort Simones
voice very drastically, they are oftentimes also eschewing her social theory in
favor of embodying and propagating the very controlling images that Simone
spoke and acted against. The proliferation of these images in hip hop music begs
important questions about who has the power to promote them and why. While it
would be convenient to type these diverse artists as either conscious or
commercial rappers who work against or for the matrix of domination, the
complexities and fluidities of their work and speech preclude this type of neat
typology. Individual artists move fluidly between the sub-genres of conscious9 or
mainstream rap, often in the same composition, and by doing so explode
essentialist notions of two- dimensional hip hop voices.
We begin our discussion of domestic surveillance in the same

way that domestic surveillance originally came to be in
American societyfrom slaverythe original lists of human
cargo, plantation inventories and diaries that were used by
masters to govern slaves.
Fugitivity is a challenge to that power matrixdisciplinary
power operates through the compulsory visibility of targets
the aff is a challenge to the framework of wanted posters and
slave patrols that evolved into modern policing and the
domestic surveillance apparatus
NDW)
According to Christian Parenti, the history of surveillance in America can be traced
to the "simple accounts" of slave owners. Of course, the accounting practices of
transatlantic slavery were also present outside of the Americas. These simple
accounts included slave vessel manifests listing human cargo, plantation
inventories, diaries which contained observations about plantation life and
instructions for governing slaves. One example involved the "General Rules"
recorded by Charles Tait for his Columbus, Texas plantation: "4th in giving orders
always do it in a mild tone, and try to leave the impression of the mind on the
Negro that what you say is the result of reflection." The detailed cataloguing of
slave life was a mechanism of disciplinary power, where disciplinary power, as
Michel Foucault tells us, is "exercised through its invisibility," while
imposing a "compulsory visibility" on its targets. Disciplinary power then
operated on the enslaved as racialized surveillance that individuals were at
once subjected to and that produced them as racial, and therefore enslave able,
subjects. Such a racializing surveillance was apparent in the plantation security
system, a system that relied on, as Parenti lays out, three "information
technologies: the written slave pass, organized slave patrols, and wanted posters
for runaways". Here, surveillance and literacy were closely articulated as slaves
and indentured servants who could read and write could also forge passes and
manumission papers or alter existing ones by replacing dates, names, and other
unique identifiers, in this way functioning as antebellum hackers" able to "crack
the code of the planters' security system". These forged passes were used for
unauthorized travel outside of the plantation and were [produced by fugitives
upon demand by slave patrollers, or "Pattie rollers", who were often non-property
owning armed white men who policed slave mobilities. Sometimes producing a
forged pass was not necessary. Any piece of printed text would do given that
fugitive slaves were aware of many of these pattie rollers were illiterate, so they
would hand over these "passes" when apprehended. This security system, then,
relied on the "racially defined contours of (white) literacy and (black) illiteracy", a
dichotomy that was not so readily upheld. Less easily counterfeited passes were
later fashioned out of metal. The compulsory visibility of the racial subject can be
seen in the circulation of newspaper advertisements and wanted posters for
runaway slaves and truant servants. These texts were primarily aimed at a white
public that was assumed to be literate and free, and who in consuming these
texts, became a part of the aparatus of surveillance, and the eyes and ears
of face-to-face watching and regulating. In detailing physical desacriptions, the
surveillance technology of the fugitive slave advertisement made the already
hypervisible racial subject legible as "out of place ." For instance, a March 15 1783
advertisement in The Royal Gazzette offering a "Two Dollar Reward" for "a Mulatto,
or Quadroon Girl, about 14 years of age, named Seth, but calls herself Sall,"
attests to the role of fugitive slave notices, and similarly, wanted posters, in
upholding racial categorization. This notice went on to state: "sometimes says she
is white and often paints her face to cover that deception." Seth's, or Sall's,
duplicity is not limitefd to her use of an alias, as this notice tells us, but also to her
racial ambiguity, witness her apparent choosing to self-identify or pass as white,
rather than as "a Mulatto"(one black parent and one white parent) or a "Quadroon
Girl" (one black grandparent) as per the racial nomenclature that arose out of
slavery. Later such classifications as a form of population management were made
official with the first US federal census in 1790. I will retun to the census as a
technology that formalized racial categorization later. For now, the wanted notice
for fugitive slaves as an information technology demonstrates that then as now
race was a social construct that required constant policing and oversight.
However, the format of the fugitive notice was repurposed in the form of handbills
that functioned as a means of counter-surveillance. An 1851 handbill produced by
abolitionists Theodore Parker attests to this as it cautioned "colored people of
Bostonb" to steer clear of "watchmen and oilice officers" and to "keep a sharp look
out for kidnappers, and have top eye open." "Top eye" here was a directive to look
out and about with keen intent as police officeers were empowered to act as slave
catchers under fugitive slave laws. Black spectatorship, along with the gazes of
white abolitionists and other allies, functioned as a form of oppositional looking
back at racializing surveillance. In her discussion of black spectatorship, the gaze
and looking relaitons during slavery and the racial apartheid of Jim Crow in the
southern United States, bell hooks tells us that black people often "cultivated the
habit of casting the gaze fdownwards so as not to appear uppity To look directly
was an assertion of subjectivity, equality". hook suggests that the boften violent
ways in which blacks were denied the right to look back - think of the gruesome
beating and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955, allegedly for
looking at a white woman - "had produced in us an overwhelming longing to look,
a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze". Such politicized and oppositional looking
were agential acts and can be seen, for example, in a June 14th 1783 runaway
slave notice printed in the Royal Gazette for 16-year-old Samm, who is described
in the notice as "five feet high" and "remarkable in turning up the whites of his
eyes when spoken to." This notice records Sam's oppositional gaze, his lokking
back, and shows us that resistance can be found even in the simple act of rolling
one's eyes. Black looks have the power to trouble surveillance as a "Technology of
Whiteness".
Our performance is an act of poetics from a legacy gone

missing, a strategy that both utilizes enclosure and run, that
is here but is not here, that is there but is not there, visible
but not visible.
We begin with a radically different interpretation of freedom.
Freedom from surveillance isnt achieved when the NSA
dissolves or the PATRIOT Act is reversed, nor is the fugitive
simply imagined or demanded as a concept in the 1ac.
Fugitivity and freedom exists in our use of language and its

constant re-reading and re-use as a way of knowing the
world. Freedom isnt achieved or experienced when a plan is
fiatedit is elusive, momentary, and a state of mind; it is
discursive play rather than related to the location of the body
or an abstract vision of social change. Such a freedom is
utopian and fugitive
(1981), Trimmings (1991), (1992), Muse & Drudge (1995), and Sleeping with the
Dictionary (2002). Additionally, she has published two books which reissue her
earlier works: Blues Baby: Early Poems (2002), which reprints Tree Tall Woman and
also includes a previously unpublished collection; and Recyclopedia: Trimmings,
S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge (2006). Mullen self-consciously inherits and
intervenes in what Kathy Lou Schultz calls the legacy gone missing of avantgarde practice by African-American women poets (n. pag.). Mullen is actively
engaged in recovering this legacy through her creative, scholarly, and editorial
work.1 Poised in the dialectic of what I call enclosure (identity, history, and the
archive, but also, racism, exclusion, and limitation) and run (mobility, flight,
escape, critique, ongoing poesis, and revision), Mullens work plies the tensions
between these disparate but mutually dependent poles. From the negotiation of
this tension, Mullen produces a formal strategy predicated on the communal
participation of others and distinctive among innovative poetsthe recyclopedia.
Mullens writing creates texts that remain open to ambiguity, difficulty, and
difference. Her writing engages in political and social criticism with particular
attention to race, gender, and the discourse of the commodity, while it delights in
the pleasures of an infinite linguistic jouissance. Many of the critics who have
written about Mullens work, including Elisabeth A. Frost, Juliana Spahr, Allison
Cummings, and Deborah Mix, foreground its complex mixtery of disparate
sources and infl uences, illustrating its rich and critical interrogation and reframing
of literary history. Importantly, each critic also emphasizes Mullens attention to
communal reading practices and several situate Mullens work as a negotiation
between multiple discourses and infl uences, including Black Arts, Steinian
modernism, and Language writing. Mix locates Mullens work in Trimmings and
S*PeRM**K*T in relation to Gertrude Stein but demonstrates how Mullens
subversion of convention . . . is both more complicated [than Steins] (in its
inclusion of race in the welter of discourses of femininity and sexuality) and more
communitarian (in its recognition of the individuals tangled in these linguistic
webs (71). Frost demonstrates Mullens rare (among recent avant-garde poets)
revamping of the lyric and argues 72 that Mullen constructs lyric otherwiseas
an experiment in collective reading and an assertion of the complexities of

community, language, and poetic voice (466). While Spahr asserts that what has
interested me about Mullens work has been her attention to reading, an attention
that is rooted in the intersection between language writings pursuit of wild
reading and autonomy- and identity-centered poetrys concerns with
community building and alliance (115), Cummings points out that Mullens
work then has garnered critical adulation not only because it works to synthesize
disparate traditions, but because it reflects on that synthesis explicitl y (24).
Surveying Mullens body of work as a whole and elaborating on Cummingss
assertion that Mullen self-consciously refl ects her works synthesis of multiple
discourses, I contend in addition that Mullens writing is characterized by a
productive tension between enclosure and run, between an archive of cultural,
linguistic, and historical references, images, and information and the fugitivity that
is both a thematics and a formal strategy. Her archive manifests in the form of the
palimpsest, or, to use a fi gure that Mullen herself foregrounds, her archive is a
recyclopedia. She takes debased, erased, and forgotten histories and found
discourses and runs with and recycles them; she invites the reader to participate
in this educative process of conservation and production, enclosure and fugitive
run. Her work articulates a need for a more equitable ecology, one of
acknowledgment and memory, conservation and reuse; she and we as readers are
caught up in her recyclopedia, an ongoing poetics of reuse that benefits from the
multiple perspectives of a heterogeneous community. The concept of the fugitive
in Mullens work is connected equally to the history of the United States, the
global slave trade, historical strategies of escape for enslaved blacks, and formal
methods for escaping and reinventing genre and poetic method. Furthermore, the
fugitive is both critical and generative and intimately linked to Mullens concept of
the recyclopedia. Mullens formal strategies explicitly reference the history of the
fugitive slave laws. In an interview with Cynthia Hogue, Mullen delineates the
connection of the fugitive to her own work: I wanted the poem to have that quality
of quick movement from one thing to another, from one subject or thought to
another, from one mood or emotion to another. Partly because I wanted things to
be in flux, a state of flux, a state of change. If you stand still too long,
they will put chains on you, so you want to keep moving . This is one of the
things that is most fascinating to me about the slave narratives I was studying
while I was writing my dissertation. The true freedom in the slave narrative is at
the point of deciding to escape and the journey north . . . the freedom that people
experience is actually when they are on the road, in fl ight. (par. 25)\ Mullen links
the structure of her poetry to the fl ight of the fugitive slave and then connects
these movements of fugitivity with freedom. Interestingly, Mullen simultaneously
problematizes the effi cacy of such movement and the resultant freedom gained
when she further locates the moment of true freedom . . . at the point of [the
slaves] deciding to escape and . . . journey. This quote suggests that freedom is
elusive, momentary, and a state of mind; it is discursive rather than
related to the location of the body. Such a freedom is utopian and
fugitive. The diffi culties of fl ight and the frequency of slaves being returned to
owners as mandated by the Fugitive Slave Act made the journey north dangerous,
exhausting, and subject to failure. Furthermore, in the literature of passing Mullen
surveys in her article Optic White: Blackness and the Production of Whiteness,
which explores how whites repress and suppress miscegenation and argues that
the racial category of white is predicated on the black, she notes that in texts such
as Harriet Jacobss Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Death is better than
slavery. This is a recurring refrain in Jacobss and other slave narratives, [that]
acquires an ironic signifi cance when Benjamin [Jacobss lightskinned uncle] dies
as a slave, vanishing into the white race in his third and fi nal escape (82). For
some, freedom means leaving ones family and community, effectively dying in
order to take up a new life as a free person or as a black who passes for white.
Historically, flight is a means of escape, but not an unproblematic or
uncomplicated means. Flight and travel (voluntary or not) undertaken by slaves,
refugees, exiles, or nomads does not always erase histories but rather sometimes
produces a palimpsestic and productive layering. In her doctoral dissertation,
Mullen writes about Olaudah Equiano, the son of an African king who was taken
into slavery and wrote from England in the eighteenth century. Discussing how
captivity disrupts his life, so that this African child fails to be ritually initiated [via
scarifi cation] as an adult member of his tribe, Mullen notes that in Equianos own
discursive production: the displaced African is no blank page, as his reconstruction
of early memories goes to show. He is more like a palimpsest, or like the protean
form of this Narrative. . . . In the pages of Equianos prolifi c narrative, the black
body retains its relation to a place of origin, but never acquires a fi xed signifi
cation; instead layers of meaning accumulate as the character of the narrator
evolves through a series of travels and adventures. (Gender 59) According to
Mullen, for Equiano retrospectively this disruption of cultural continuity is figured
as a divine providence that intervenes to open up a new identity and destinya
destiny constructed out of the individuals unique interaction with chance and
continually changing environments rather than a predetermined fate or fi xed
identity (60). For some individuals fl ight and cultural disruption will enable
strategic redefi nitions or recycling and make possible an identity open to change
and resignifi cation; flight can create a kind of open archive always sedimented
and palimpsestic so that past traces are not erased but available and
recontextualized, refi gured and thus open to the future. Individuals and texts
constructed out of fugitive fl ight from the law or those that travel across multiple
cultural communities constitute the recyclopedias of disparate experiences,
ideologies, and discourses. In the recyclopedia, fugitive fl ight rewrites identity by
enabling a return to and reappropriation of the past. The neologism recyclopedia
in the title of Mullens collection of three of her previous books is a combination of
recycle and encyclopedia. Recycle references reuse, suggesting to use again in
the original form, and the taking of intractable used or waste material and
making it suitable for something new. Pedia recalls encyclopedia and its Greek
root, paideia, meaning education. Mullens neologism clearly articulates a project
that is both process and product. It entails a cyclical reuse of given materials and
a process that takes dirty, contaminated, and worthless waste materials and
turns them into something newly usable. Mullens recyclopedia suggests that the
continual reuse of materials, even those that construct blacks as dirty,
contaminated, and worthless, can serve to identify an original use (the racist
construction of blacks as waste, for example); her writing enables the critical
recycling of problematic materials to produce something new, something with
different or oppositional value for writer, reader, history, and the future. Mullens
recyclopedia constructs fugitive movement as a means of escape from
arrest and as a productive process of remembering and rewriting. Mullen
includes in her recyclopedia many diverse materials, yet she is particularly
attentive to bringing to the surface the unarticulated, marginalized, nearly lost,
and invisible as well as the used or waste material . Mullens recyclopedia
enables the sort of activity described by David Scott that opens up vast
possibilities not just of memory but of countermemory; the moral idiom and
1acKiller Mike
Killer Mike Reagan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lIqNjC1RKU
1:49 3:20
The end of the Reagan Era, I'm like number twelver
Old enough to understand the shit'll change forever
They declared the war on drugs like a war on terror
But it really did was let the police terrorize whoever
But mostly black boys, but they would call us "niggers"
And lay us on our belly, while they fingers on they triggers
They boots was on our head, they dogs was on our crotches
And they would beat us up if we had diamonds on our watches
And they would take our drugs and money, as they pick our pockets
I guess that that's the privilege of policing for some profit
But thanks to Reaganomics, prisons turned to profits
Cause free labor is the cornerstone of US economics
Cause slavery was abolished, unless you are in prison
You think I am bullshitting, then read the 13th Amendment
Involuntary servitude and slavery it prohibits
That's why they giving drug offenders time in double digits
Ronald Reagan was an actor, not at all a factor
Just an employee of the country's real masters
Just like the Bushes, Clinton and Obama
Just another talking head telling lies on teleprompters
If you don't believe the theory, then argue with this logic
Why did Reagan and Obama both go after Qaddafi
We invaded sovereign soil, going after oil
Taking countries is a hobby paid for by the oil lobby
Same as in Iraq, and Afghanistan
And Ahmadinejad say they coming for Iran
They only love the rich, and how they loathe the poor
If I say any more they might be at my door
Who the * is that staring in my window
Doing that surveillance on Mister Michael Render
I'm dropping off the grid before they pump the lead
I leave you with four words: I'm glad Reagan dead
The problem of surveillance is bigger than the anecdote Killer

Mike relates. The real questions are: Who does the
surveilling, who is the target of that surveillance, why does
that surveillance exist and how can it be curtailed?
American surveillance grew from slaverythe original lists of
human cargo, plantation inventories and diaries were used by
masters to govern slaves. Disciplinary power operated
through the compulsory visibility of targets, and fugitives
became targets of additional layers of surveillance like
wanted posters and slave patrols that evolved into modern
policing and oversight
NDW)

Whiteness".

but not visible.
world. Freedom isnt fiat; it is elusive, momentary, and a
state of mind; it is discursive play rather than related to the
location of the body or an abstract vision of social change.
Such a freedom is utopian and fugitive

When slaves sang songs like follow the drinking gourd they
were singing the steps and guides for fugitive slaves to
navigate the underground railroad and escape the plantation.
They could sing these songs publicly because their masters
interpreted it as the delightful tone of slaves singing in the
fields. It was at once visible but not visible, there but not
there.
Rap and hip hop are now invisible due to public dismissal of
mainstream songs with phrases like hip hop is dead.
This allows revolutionary rappers like Killer Mike to
masquerade their songs as meaningless drivel. Vote Aff to
speak out against social and institutional racism and
construct an alternative community through poetic fugitivity.
Mesing 14 PhD (Dave Mesing PhD in philosophy from Villanova University.
From R.A.P. Music to Run the Jewels: Killer Mike and the Homonymity of the Idea
- March 9, 2014. Wordpress. Accessed 7/7/15. https://itself.wordpress.com/2014/03/09/from-r-a-pmusic-to-run-the-jewels-killer-mike-and-the-homonymity-of-th-idea/ ) dortiz
However, Killer Mike and El-P, as Run the Jewels, conduct a conceptualization of
what Run the Jewels means as well, and its a conceptualization that brings
together the contrasting elements from Killer Mikes R.A.P. Music in a perfect
harmony. Let me explicitly state here that I am not suggesting that El-Ps
production or collaboration somehow completes Killer Mikes work, which would be
a kind of racist white savior reading of whats going on. I think the same type of
analysis could be done from another angle, viewing El-Ps progression into Run the
Jewels, but Im more familiar with Killer Mikes solo work, and so Ive chosen it. The
important thing for me here is that Run the Jewels comes to be a communally
joyful expression of militant resistance to the status quo. This can be seen in two
movements, first in the song Get It, and second in the final track, A Christmas
Fucking Miracle. Towards the end of Get It, both emcees set out blunt
statements about who they are:
[Verse 3: El-P] My name is Jamie Meline Im not chasing the green, Im taking it
Bosses dont change a thing in the name of seemingly making it Servantsll kiss
the ring of whoever they think is paying em You dont deserve the spit that they
hurdled up in your face and shit
[Verse 4: Killer Mike] My name is Michael Render And we are the new Avengers
Were here to tell you that all your false idols are just pretenders Theyre
corporation slaves indentured to all the lenders So even if you got seven figures,
you still a n****
This song radicalizes the opposition to most contemporary rap music that seethes
through the album. It not only declares war on unnamed other figures in
mainstream music, but it does so for the sake of resisting the contemporary
powers that be. It is in this sense that we should understand Killer Mikes
proclamation that Run the Jewels are the new Avengers. More than the all-out
assault on other rappers that pervades the album, this declaration boldly takes the
mantle of truth and justice upon Run the Jewels, as those fans of the Marvel Comic
will know. In what sense are Run the Jewels the defenders of truth and justice?
Quite simply, to the extent that they are successful in politicizing and
militarizing a negation of the ruling powers in favor of the construction
of an alternative community. Killer Mike makes the former most clear with the
following line on Twin Hype: Im no respecter of person, Im no respecter of
rules / I catch the Prince of England slipping, he goin to run me the jewels. The
sense in which the two are successfully brought together is most clear on the final
track, whose expression I will leave to Killer Mike and El-P: Towards the conclusion
of his chapter on homonyms, Agamben writes, while the network of concepts
continually introduces synonymous relations, the idea is that which intervenes
every time to shatter the pretense of absoluteness in these relations, showing
their inconsistency. (76) If Killer Mikes R.A.P. Music introduces a set of synonyms,
on Run the Jewels self-titled album, these synonyms become homonymous with
respect to the idea Run the Jewels. At the outset of The Coming Community,
Agamben also tells us of the importance of love for the coming politics: the
movement that Plato describes as erotic anamnesis is the movement that
transports the object not toward another thing or another place, but towards its
own taking-placetoward the Idea. (2) Run the Jewels, insofar as it successfully
brings together a militant refusal to give in or bow a knee to the powers that be
with a weaponization of love for the creation of alternative community, is such an
Idea, and perhaps, an exemplar of the coming community.
1acDark Twisted Pedagogy

Kanye West Power
https://youtu.be/ieXMNNOYWXI?t=2m19s
2:19 3:02
the system broken, the school's closed, the prison's open

we ain't got nothing to lose we rollin
huh?
we rollin
with some light skinned girls and some Kelly Rowland's
in this white man's world we the ones chosen
so goodnight cruel world, I'll see you in the mornin
huh?
I see you in the mornin'
this is way too much, I need a moment
no one man should have all that power
the clocks tickin' I just count the hours
stop trippin' I'm tripping off the power
til then, that,
the world's ours
but is the world ours? Who does the surveilling, who is the
target of that surveillance, why does that surveillance exist
and how can it be curtailed?
Our advocacy is that you should affirm Kanye Wests Power
as a fugitive poetics to challenge the United States Federal
Governments domestic surveillance apparatus and anti-black
violence.
NDW)
Whiteness".

but not visible.
Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge (2006). Mullen self-
consciously inherits and intervenes in what Kathy Lou Schultz calls the legacy



If youre thinking lol Kanye West as fugitive poetics? then

the aff worked, and thats why it can exist as both a visible
protest and remain elusive in the face of targeting and
surveillance.
there.
Similarly, the hook from Power no one man should have
all that power was easily interpreted by dominant powers as
more Kanye egoism, another Im going to let you finish
moment.
Deeper listeners heard the real message Kanye speaks of
being chosen in this white mans world and that no one man
should have all that power before envisaging a fugitive
departure, a beautiful death, jumping out the window,
letting everything go. The reference to power is an historical
allegory to the polices reaction to Malcolm Xs resistance to
racialized police surveillance and government control that
Kanye remixed as this generations rallying cry against white
supremacy and, were gonna let you finish about the power
of fiat, but Kanyes message reached more people than any
presidential speech of all time.
As an educator you should affirm a space away from

surveillance, fugitive knowledgein short, a Dark Twisted
Pedagogy. Our classroom model is one that envelops students
in opportunities to speak back and re-envisage the lines
theyve heard thousands of times as poetics but never
thought of as useful knowledge as their own guide to critical
consciousness through fugitivity
Garcia, 13Antero, Assistant Professor in the English department at Colorado
State University, Beautiful Dark Twisted Pedagogy: Kanye West and the Lessons of
Participatory Culture, Radical Teacher, no 97 (Fall 2013),
http://radicalteacher.library.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/radicalteacher/article/view/38/22
--BR
Over the fall of 2010, rapper Kanye West reimagined the way music was
distributed. He did this by engaging in an online conversation with millions. For the
greater part of that year, Kanye West was firmly present on the cultural radar. This
was deliberate and done in a way that made his presence, his performances, and
his music an ongoing conversation with his fans, with his past, and with a larger
network of engaged online participants. Through demonstrating the affordances of
participatory culture, West presents a framework for engagement and
communication that critical educators can leverage even within the increasingly
restrictive space of public education. Though the capitalist practices that led to his
album spending more than six months on the Billboard 200 may not seem like the
obvious place to search for liberatory educational pedagogy , I argue that the
strategies developed and tested by West offer an important framework for
guiding critical consciousness and fomenting action within our
classrooms. As a Hip Hop fan and former music journalist, I often infused my
classroom with beats and rhymes. Whether it was the first Lupe Fiasco album
encouraging my students to consider the blend between Hip Hop and
skateboarder social groups on my campus or formally utilizing classics like
Grandmaster Flashs The Message and Dead Prezs Police State as starting
points for literary and critical analysis, Hip Hop played a formative part in my
teaching practice. For the eight years that I spent teaching English and ELL
courses at a public school in South Central Los Angeles, my classroom breathed
Hip Hop as well as music across genres to speak to the diverse youth population I
worked with. Comprised of approximately 80% of my students identifying as
Latino and 19% as Black and a dropout rate that rocketed above 60%, my school
was characterized in the media by stereotypes of a failing school while my
students exuded the passion to learn that showed me an optimism in transforming
schools. Throughout this teaching time, I can see now how Kanye Wests music
acted as a through line in my classroom. On a year-round schedule, my first year
teaching allowed me to bring in Wests infamous 2005 declaration that George
Bush doesnt care about Black people during a Hurricane Katrina relief telethon.
Meanwhile Wests singles filtered into my classroom as music played by students
or analyzed for various writing assignments. At the time that West revolutionized
media distribution and opportunities for pedagogical growth in 2010, I was
working with ninth grade students and exploring how mobile devices like iPods
could help connect urban youth with civically engaging movements beyond the
classroom (Garcia, 2012a). Just in time to be heralded critically by music
publications ranging from XXL to Rolling Stone, Kanye West's fifth solo album My
Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was released in the United States on November 22,
2010. However, even by the time the album leaked through file sharing networks
and torrents online, weeks before the official release date, its music was anything
but surprising. Via his own music label, G.O.O.D. (Getting Out Our Dreams), West
leaked many of the tracks from his album as free downloads during the fall. A
matter of a few clicks from his official website yielded more than snippets from the
album. Releasing one song each week on G.O.O.D. Fridays, responding to
challenges and criticism from fans via Twitter, West sustained interest and
anticipation throughout the world. In addition to a slew of tracks from the album
including the lead single "Power," West released numerous tracks that were
subsequently never officially included in the final album. Speculation of what would make the cut drove
buzz around My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy rather than speculation about what kind of sound the album would take. By the end of 2010, fifteen
different tracks were given away by West, including two of the lead singles from his album: a remix of Power and the cameo- filled Monster.
Through use of simple and public media tools like Twitter, West moved popular hip-hop models of marketing beyond traditional mixtape culture and
illustrated how participatory culture can help foment profit as well as awareness and social organization. Moving Beyond the Mixtape As far as Hip Hop
is concerned, the role of mixtapes is one that dates back to the early days of Hip Hop in the late 70s (Westhoff, 2011). Splicing together popular rap
verses with unreleased Hip Hop beats, mixtapes were underground commodities traded and sold by the aficionados within an exclusive subculture.
Though it has been years since mixtapes were widely distributed as actual cassettes, the concept is still the same; otherwise unreleased or un-cleared
samples are released non- commercially. Like electronic music's prevalent use of "white label", unofficial releases (Reynolds, 1999), to help build
interest in a track, Hip Hop has incorporated mixtapes as more than underground productions by individuals and part of a larger marketing and
distribution ecology. Transitioning from tapes to CDs and now to direct Internet downloads, mixtapes are used by mainstream rappers to sustain
interest between album releases. Lil Wayne, for example, has benefited from a plethora of mixtape releases that have helped garner radio play and
online reviews long before his albums are available for media consumers (Westhoff, 2011). No longer are mixtapes simply an extension of the listening
experience for rap fans. Instead, they act as previews and major marketing ploys for Hip Hop artists. Additionally, because they are steeped in the
history of Hip Hop, they may signal an artists credibility for some rap fans. However, where the mixtape largely succeeded in previewing a forthcoming
album and playing with the expected commercial limitations of what could be released, Kanye West takes the model and deconstructs it. The
recognition that today's media consumer is also a media producer means that sustaining interest means responsiveness. Instead of the mishmash of
40-70 minutes of free music usually released on a mixtape, West slowly strings along track after track over months at a time, responding and changing
his music as responses are blogged and status-updated. In one notable example, teen-idol Justin Bieber, upon hearing that Kanye liked his song
Runaway Love tweeted, @kanyewest it's not a so what moment for me. I'm 16 and a fan. I'm kinda hyped u are listening to my stuff. Thank u. Nice
sunday morning" (Vilensky, 2010). Shortly afterwards, West responded to fomenting interest from online fans and released his remix of Runaway Love
featuring both West and Wu Tang rapper Raekwon. In terms of his album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy also built upon mixtape culture by
reflecting the practice within the production of his album. The silly mashup of unexpected artists that is typically reserved for mixtapes became a
centerpiece for the album: soft- crooning indie musician Justin Vernon of the band Bon Iver is featured prominently in the album's penultimate song,
"Lost in the World;" Vernons lilting voice is paired earnestly with Hip Hop verses. No longer a mixtape novelty, West builds upon accepted underground
Hip Hop practices and subverts what is expected within commercial Hip Hop. Amplification and the Participatory Culture of G.O.O.D. Fridays Though the
mixtape formula was popular in subverting official release dates, West moved from the singular verses and cobbled together mixes of unreleased music
to a model that placed agency and music decisions in the hands of his fans. In short, Kanye West released music in ways that utilized the connected
culture of social media to invigorate enthusiasm and to build camaraderie with a continually building fan base. Henry Jenkins et al. (2009) describe the
ways media as "participatory culture" shift the focus of literacy from individual expression to community involvement. Further, Jenkins et al. write,
Participatory culture is emerging as the culture absorbs and responds to the explosion of new media technologies that make it possible for average
consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content in powerful new ways. Wests G.O.O.D. Friday releases, in responding to
and encouraging dialogue with his fans, indicate a mass media application of participatory culture for profit. However, the general tenets of
participatory culture typically wrest control of media distribution from traditional mass media outlets in ways that empower teens fluent with the tools
on their laptops and smartphones. The recognition that today's media consumer is also a media producer means that sustaining interest means
responsiveness. It wasnt enough, for instance, for West to thank Bieber for the Twitter shout out. The voice (and the thousands that followed echoing
wishes to see a collaboration between the two musical stars) encouraged participation, remix and playfulness. YouTube is rife with tributes and parodies
of Wests songs. From a version of his song Monster that pays tribute to the food at Taco Bell (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnUKmk5Lz50) to
one that is sung by Harry Potters nemesis Voldermort (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA7leadDk9g), the digital tools online allow for new forms of
participation and engagement. In my own research on how young people may be able to challenge existing power structures and dominant narratives
In the public,
persistent spaces of Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, for instance, comments youth
make can be seen by anybody. However, within the educational world, the
participatory culture of out-of-school time is frequently stifled by school and
district policies that limit socialization (see Frey and Fisher, 2008). Further,
like the central argument of this article: that a massively popular, wealthy rapper
can provide meaningful pedagogical guidance for critical educators, I have also
via social tools, I have described the potential of participatory culture as an amplifying process (Garcia, 2012b).
argued that the mainstream and profit-driven companies like MySpace and
Facebook can build important socializing spaces for critical dialogue and student
support (Garcia, 2008). Through reimagining his relationship with an audience of
millions, West demonstrates ways to challenge traditional power structuresa
model that can be forged within today's classrooms. A year before the
Occupy movement would capture America's consciousness and months before the
Arab Spring more fully rolled across northern Africa, Kanye West demonstrated the
possibilities of social media as tools for knowledge building and sustained interest.
Though critical educators should rightfully challenge Wests capitalistic intentions,
the pragmatic lessons of utility and philosophy with social media should not be
disregarded. To date, West's album has sold more than one million physical copies
(Recording Industry Association of America, 2013). His follow up tour a year later,
co-headlined by collaborator Jay-Z, was the highest grossing Hip Hop tour of 2011,
making more than $48 million in ticket sales (Lewis, 2011). To consider West's
popularity anything of an underground phenomenon would be ludicrous. It is
important to recognize that Wests lyrical content can lead to further disregard for
the relevance of mainstream Hip Hop within the classroom. And the public persona
that West plays up does little to convince critical educators to consider the
possibilities that West represents. When West grabbed the microphone from Taylor Swift to decry that Beyonce did not win
a 2009 MTV Award, even President Obama called West a jackass (BBC 2009). To be clear, I do not apologize or account for Wests actions. Instead,
the focus on the rappers ability to expand the world of Hip Hop and the possibilities for critical educators mean looking beyond these actions; Wests
resources for engagement and community building offer myriad tools to encourage challenging and critiquing his non-critical work. Toward a Beautiful
Dark Twisted Pedagogy Wests every step in releasing the album, from ludicrous twitter messages to on-air blowups to banned album artwork meant
that there was not a day that I was unable to catch up with the latest in the Kanye-verse. In all of these updates Kanye evolved the Hip Hop mixtape to
its proper participatory-culture configuration: it is an always- on amalgam of music, personality, and hype. The pervasive nature of Kanyes approach
to marketing My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is something educators can lift. How can we deconstruct classroom pedagogy to move beyond
traditional application of emergent technologies? Is it really the best we can do to simply duplicate textbooks and textbook practices when equipping
students with iPads and mobile devices? This is essentially reducing the possibilities of screen and interfaces to a glowing page. Likewise, pedagogy
must incorporate the persistent always-on nature of Wests approach. His persistence and personality are what helped transfer knowledge, interest,
and passion for his work. Critical educators, qualms about West aside, must evaluate how this approach may be adopted for classroom use. Teachers
should ask themselves, how is my practice pervasive? How does the work that I do in my classroom transform students lives throughout the day?
year before the Occupy movement would capture America's consciousness and
months before the Arab Spring more fully rolled across northern Africa, Kanye
West demonstrated the possibilities of social media as tools for knowledge
building and sustained interest. I want to reiterate that what West accomplished
was not some secret phenomenon. West made abundant profits from his
efforts. At the same time West was mirroring widely adopted digital practices at a
highly visible level: responding to tweets, sharing updates, hosting online Q&As
and producing video and music content for others are all attributes of what youth
can and do easily engage in while online. In essence, Wests efforts mimic what
young people regularly do on their own. He mimics the literacy and learning
practices that take place outside the classroom. For educators, this is also an
important reminder: classroom practices should mirror the real world settings that
students will venture to after leaving our classrooms. Students are already experts
in media production and West reminds us to bring in these outside skills. How can
critical educators adjust their teaching practice in light of the work of Kanye West?
Perhaps this may not seem the most astutely worded of education- related
questions, but a necessary one nonetheless. West makes participating and
communicating with fans fun, memorable, and engaging. Classrooms can leverage
similar tools to get young people excited, in conversation, and networking globally
around classroom content. To be clear, I am not advocating co-opting youth

practices within a classroom. On the contrary, I am speaking about a large- scale
effort to update the classroom into the kinds of networked ecologies that are
utilized for interaction everywhere except for in schools. As Castells (2009) writes,
A network-based social structure is a highly dynamic, open system, susceptible to
innovating without threatening its balance (pp. 501-502). A Beautiful Dark
Twisted Pedagogy is one that envelops students in opportunities to engage with
extrinsic and intrinsic rewards. It allows youth to speak back to the content
and see work in dialogue. An instantiation of this pedagogy, despite the
capitalistic intentions of its namesake, begins with a dramatic
reorganization of power relationships (Castells, 2009, pp. 502) and funnels
classroom agency toward youth. It begins with youth interest and quickly
amplifies key concepts that resonate within a classroom and well beyond. Like
West, this shift toward meaningful engagement is one that requires educators to
remain attuned to the interests and cultural landmarks of youth culture as entre
into dialogues about socially conscious curriculum. The corners of
commercialismvideo games, music videos on YouTube, series on MTVare going
to function as signals for how young peoples attention is being drawn both
outside of schools and in classrooms. Instead of merely challenging the messages,
images, and intentions of these multimodal texts, this is a pedagogy that can use
these as starting places for youth-oriented production. Youth can remix and speak
back to dominant texts not solely as classroom exercises but as public statements
to be shared in the same social networks that they utilize daily. In this sense My
Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy illustrates ways transmedia storytelling (Jenkins,
Ford and Green, 2013) and textual play can emerge fluidly with the many digital
pathways enabled for youth. Transmedia, as described here, are media products that unfold across multiple platforms: a
narrative may be told via movie productions, video game plotlines, comic books, and cartoons (as is the case with The Matrix series, for example).
Instead of looking at a novel as a singular and definitive version of a text, the notion of transmedia allows youth literacies to demonstrate the text as a
hub for building upon and collaboration. How can the canonical text taught in a classroom extend learning from the context of the Shakespearean era
to contemporary social issues for youth. We can see burgeoning examples of this now: a quick search on Facebook and it is clear I can friend dozens of
Holden Caulfields and Othellos and Katniss Everdeens: teachers and students alike are using todays tools to extend stories across various forms.
These are not concepts presently being taught in teacher education programs and a Beautiful Dark Twisted Pedagogy calls for intentionality in this
respect. Wests album ends with the song Who Will Survive in America, built primarily around an excerpt from a 1970 poem by Gil Scott Heron,
Comment #1. This finds West not only recontextualizing a critique of leftist organizing in the late sixties and seventies for the modern day but also
continuing a dialogue between Wests and Herons work that extended across several albums; in 2005, West sampled a different Heron poem for his
song My Way Home; Heron responded with a sample of Wests Flashing Lights for his final album, Im New Here in 2010. West builds upon,
reinterprets, and engages in conversation with Herons work. The narrative and melodic dialogue spreads across three albums and invites listeners to
rethink the lyrics, music, and context for both works. It is a transformative work that challenges critical new literacies to build upon the notion of the
meme as an educational possibility (Lankshear and Knobel, 2006). With memes helping describe quickly spreading, viral, media across networks,
literature on memes often credits Dawkins (1976) with imbuing the term as a unit that spreads cultural content over time. As not merely a delivery
system of information, memes effectively write upon the world and change it. In their 1987 text, Freire and Macedo describe literacy as a process of
reading the world and then reading the word. It is an order often lost in discussions of Freires development of critical literacies: cultural, worldly
experience imbue the process of reading texts. West illustrates how advances in technology allow the world to be written upon and the need for
No one man should have all that power: The

Contradictions of Kanye In the lead single off of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,
Power, West raps that No one man should have all that power. It is a
declaration that contributes to Wests ongoing braggadocio. However, it is also
a quote that is steeped in pedagogical meaning and historical precedent .
A near word-for-word iteration of this quote was printed in 1957 in the Amsterdam
News; a stunned police officer, noted about Malcolm X, No one man should
have that much power (Marable, 2011, p. 128). It is likely that the quote was
picked up by West in the 1992 Spike Lee directed biopic, X. This would not be the
first time that Malcolm X is invoked in Wests lyrics. In Good Morning West
educators to renegotiate their pedagogical stance.
claims hes like the fly Malcolm X buy any jeans necessary. Both invocations of
the civil rights leader point back to the remixing and transmedia literacies that
West demonstrates; they are necessary components of Beautiful Dark Twisted
Pedagogy. However, I want to also return to the line from Power and its
implications both for reflecting on West and for classroom practice. As a selfcritique, Wests statement points to the problematic ways his performance of the
Hip Hop genre upholds individuals and capitalism in boasts that separate fans
through recognizable power structures. However, it is a model that West also
challenges in content: the song Power was shared in multiple mixes before its
profitable release on Wests album with power and voice distributed (though not
evenly) with his fans. From my own classroom experience, it is easy for critical
educators to look at the realm of capitalism and disregard it wholesale ; though I
secretly indulged in Wests music, I would deride it in discussions with my 11th
graders. And yet, while the content is a problematic perpetuation of marketing
practices, the approaches themselves speak to the ways students are engaging,
interacting, and approaching informal learning. Approaching the challenging
domain of capitalism with a lens of pragmatic optimism, West illustrates the
potential of participatory media as enacted by for-profit companies and illustrates
ways these can be harnessed for wholesale social transformation. Finally, in
returning to Wests lyric, No one man should have all that power, it is important
to notice that West distributes production, input, and narrative across various
platforms with numerous points of input for others. It is a reflection of what radical
educators classrooms can look like. The decentralization of the teacher as singular
leader within the classroom is neither new nor revolutionary. However, in looking
at the ways teacher- leaders, like West, can spark conversation, invite multimodal
exploration, and direct connection with the community , the role of the teacher is
not diminished as much as it is altered. Perhaps a problematic source for some, in
terms of beginning a conversation of how critical pedagogy continues to shift in
the 21st Century, Kanye Wests work illustrates practices our students are
engaged in everyday. His work functions as a provocation for a redefinition of
pedagogy that addresses the cultural shifts of participatory media. It is messy,
problematic, and in the liberatory possibilities it signalsbeautiful . It is a
pedagogy of hope for the digital age.
1acNWA
https://youtu.be/RcNAxtM3b0E
Starts at 0:30, pause/close the tab at 1:05
* tha police
Comin straight from the underground
Young * got it bad 'cause I'm brown
And not the other color so police think
They have the authority to kill a minority
* that *, 'cause I ain't tha one
For a punk * with a badge and a gun
To be beatin on, and thrown in jail
We could go toe to toe in the middle of a cell
*in with me 'cause I'm a teenager
With a little bit of gold and a pager
Searchin my car, lookin for the product
Thinkin every * is sellin narcota
You'd rather see me in the pen
When NWA stepped forward in 1988 to challenge the police

and the state of militarized law enforcement, it was a radical
act that revealed both historical knowledge and unbelievable
foresight regarding militarized violence that echoes the
forms of brutality that are still being practiced in the
surveillance, targeting and killing of black bodies. Our choice
to begin the 1ac with a fugitive poetic is a way of
reinterpreting and challenging the original police state, the
plantationits a performance that breaks down the existing
power hierarchies that govern over the structures that
control our role and identities in society
Browne 2012 PhD in Sociology and Equity Studies in Education (Simone; Race and Surveillance Routledge
Handbook of Surveillance Studies; Google Book; https://books.google.com/books?
hl=en&lr=&id=F8nhCfrUamEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA72&dq=race+and+surveillance+Simone+browne&ots=y_cvDcnYS0&sig=ZmhtR3
WJI2mp_clVI6qwScZDZwQ#v=onepage&q=race%20and%20surveillance%20Simone%20browne&f=false; 7/5/15 || NDW)
the history of surveillance in America can be traced

to the "simple accounts" of slave owners. Of course, the accounting practices of transatlantic slavery were also
present outside of the Americas. These simple accounts included slave vessel manifests
listing human cargo, plantation inventories, diaries which
contained observations about plantation life and instructions for
governing slaves. One example involved the "General Rules" recorded by Charles Tait for his Columbus, Texas
plantation: "4th in giving orders always do it in a mild tone, and try to leave the impression of the mind on the Negro that what
The detailed cataloguing of slave life was a

mechanism of disciplinary power, where disciplinary power, as Michel
Foucault tells us, is "exercised through its invisibility," while imposing a
"compulsory visibility" on its targets. Disciplinary power then
operated on the enslaved as racialized surveillance that individuals were at once subjected to
and that produced them as racial, and therefore enslave able, subjects. Such a racializing surveillance
was apparent in the plantation security system, a system that relied on,
as Parenti lays out, three "information technologies: the written slave pass, organized slave patrols, and
wanted posters for runaways". Here, surveillance and literacy were closely articulated as slaves and indentured
you say is the result of reflection."
servants who could read and write could also forge passes and manumission papers or alter existing ones by replacing dates,
names, and other unique identifiers, in this way functioning as antebellum hackers" able to "crack the code of the planters'
security system". These forged passes were used for unauthorized travel outside of the plantation and were [produced by
fugitives upon demand by slave patrollers, or "Pattie rollers", who were often non-property owning armed white men who policed
slave mobilities. Sometimes producing a forged pass was not necessary. Any piece of printed text would do given that fugitive
slaves were aware of many of these pattie rollers were illiterate, so they would hand over these "passes" when apprehended. This
security system, then, relied on the "racially defined contours of (white) literacy and (black) illiteracy", a dichotomy that was not
The compulsory
visibility of the racial subject can be seen in the circulation of
newspaper advertisements and wanted posters for runaway slaves and
truant servants. These texts were primarily aimed at a white public that was assumed to be literate and free, and who
in consuming these texts, became a part of the aparatus of surveillance , and the eyes
and ears of face-to-face watching and regulating. In detailing physical desacriptions, the surveillance
technology of the fugitive slave advertisement made the already
hypervisible racial subject legible as "out of place." For instance, a March 15 1783
so readily upheld. Less easily counterfeited passes were later fashioned out of metal.
advertisement in The Royal Gazzette offering a "Two Dollar Reward" for "a Mulatto, or Quadroon Girl, about 14 years of age,
named Seth, but calls herself Sall," attests to the role of fugitive slave notices, and similarly, wanted posters, in upholding racial
categorization. This notice went on to state: "sometimes says she is white and often paints her face to cover that deception."
Seth's, or Sall's, duplicity is not limitefd to her use of an alias, as this notice tells us, but also to her racial ambiguity, witness her
apparent choosing to self-identify or pass as white, rather than as "a Mulatto"(one black parent and one white parent) or a
"Quadroon Girl" (one black grandparent) as per the racial nomenclature that arose out of slavery. Later such classifications as a
form of population management were made official with the first US federal census in 1790. I will retun to the census as a
the wanted notice for fugitive

slaves as an information technology demonstrates that then as
now race was a social construct that required constant policing
and oversight. However, the format of the fugitive notice was repurposed in the form of handbills that functioned as
technology that formalized racial categorization later. For now,
a means of counter-surveillance. An 1851 handbill produced by abolitionists Theodore Parker attests to this as it cautioned
"colored people of Bostonb" to steer clear of "watchmen and oilice officers" and to "keep a sharp look out for kidnappers, and
have top eye open." "Top eye" here was a directive to look out and about with keen intent as police officeers were empowered to
act as slave catchers under fugitive slave laws. Black spectatorship, along with the gazes of white abolitionists and other allies,
functioned as a form of oppositional looking back at racializing surveillance. In her discussion of black spectatorship, the gaze and
looking relaitons during slavery and the racial apartheid of Jim Crow in the southern United States, bell hooks tells us that black
people often "cultivated the habit of casting the gaze fdownwards so as not to appear uppity To look directly was an assertion of
subjectivity, equality". hook suggests that the boften violent ways in which blacks were denied the right to look back - think of the
gruesome beating and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955, allegedly for looking at a white woman - "had
produced in us an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze". Such politicized and oppositional
looking were agential acts and can be seen, for example, in a June 14th 1783 runaway slave notice printed in the Royal Gazette
for 16-year-old Samm, who is described in the notice as "five feet high" and "remarkable in turning up the whites of his eyes when
spoken to." This notice records Sam's oppositional gaze, his lokking back, and shows us that resistance can be found even in the
simple act of rolling one's eyes. Black looks have the power to trouble surveillance as a "Technology of Whiteness".
NWA is uniquely positioned as a site to criticize the

development of the plantation into the modern surveillance
and prison system its an act of aggression that disrupts the
normality of white civil society. It is a fugitive art it is both
present on society but critiques it vehemently
McCann 2012 Contesting the Mark of Criminality: Race, Place, and the Prerogative of Violence in N.W.A.'s Straight
Outta Compton , Critical Studies in Media Communication, 29:5, 367-386, DOI: 10.1080/15295036.2012.676194
Fuck Tha Police continues this critique{s} of law enforcement

as the sole focus of N.W.A.s mockery and violent
fantasizing. No longer one of many in a series of potential enemies or the visual accompaniment of an otherwise a-political toast, law
enforcement officers function as the quintessential villain in N.W.A.s
cultural universe. The track begins by establishing the satirical courtroom
scene that will structure the entire song. In a reversal of the prevailing dynamics of law and order, the
criminalized members of N.W.A. place the police on trial for their
transgressions. The group delivers this opening portion over a soulful sample of brass horns, creating a sonic aesthetic reminiscent of
The Political Violence of Fuck Tha Police
but raises the ante by centralizing police officers
1950s and 1960s era crime shows (e.g., Dragnet), as if to parody such romantic narratives of law enforcement saving the day (N.W.A., 1988a). MC Ren
begins by announcing, Right about now, N.W.A. court is in full effect/Judge Dre presiding/In the case of N.W.A. vs. the Police Department;/Prosecuting
attorneys are: MC Ren, Ice Cube, /And Eazy-motherfuckin-E. Apparently unfazed by his bailiffs crass disregard for courtroom conduct, Dre enters the
courtroom and declares, Ice Cube, take the motherfuckin stand/Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth/ And nothin but the truth so help your
black ass? Cube responds with an affirmative, You god damn right! and lays into the incendiary verbiage that would light a cultural fuse: Fuck the
police comin straight from the underground/A young nigga got it bad cause Im brown/And not the other color so police think/They have the authority
to kill a minority/Fuck that shit, cause I aint the one/For a punk motherfucker with a badge and a gun/To be beatin on, and thrown in jail/We can go toe
to toe in the middle of a cell/Fuckin with me cause Im a teenager/With a little bit of gold and a pager/Searchin my car, lookin for the product/Thinkin
Critiquing the prison-industrial complex was nothing new in black popular culture
at the end of the twentieth century (see Ogbar, 2007; Public Enemy, 1988). However, after his initial take on law
enforcement transgressions, Cube threatens to Beat a police out of shape/And when Im finished,
bring the yellow tape/To tape off the scene of the slaughter. Images of
yellow tape typically mark scenes of ghastly crimes that heroic police
officers intend to solve and prosecute. But in Cubes hands, it Contesting the Mark of Criminality 375 Downloaded
every nigga is sellin narcotics.
by [] at 11:24 08 July 2015 denotes a scene of righteous vengeance against those very officers. After he is done with the humiliated law enforcer, Cube
brags, he Still cant swallow bread and water. Not content with forthright acts of violence, Cube also desires to castrate the hypermasculine
expression of state power by affixing homophobic epithets to routine search procedures. He raps, I dont know if they fags or what/Search a nigga
While such language is obviously alarming, we should also

be cautious about dismissing this derogatory tirade too quickly, as the mark
of criminality is infused with gendered politics. The public fantasy of the
archetypical black male predator portrays African American mens sexuality
as something to be tamed, even exterminated (Hill Collins, 2005). Viewed as a threat
to white civil society, black males are particularly problematic to white masculinity. Kobena Mercer (1997) writes that
cultural discourses concerning African-American men are acted out
through white male rituals of racial aggression (p. 290). Such acts of aggression manifest largely
through the criminal justice system, as archetypes of violent black masculinity on a rampage
function to rationalize enhanced surveillance and incarceration within primarily poor
down, and grabbin his nuts.
African-American communities (Jones, 2005). For example, George H.W. Bush won the White House in 1988 based in part on the now-infamous Willie
which capitalized on public fears of the fearsome black male predator

on the hunt for a pure, white femininity (see Jamieson, 1993). While Toya Like and Jody Miller (2006) claim that
Horton Ad,
young African-American females experience a disproportionate amount of sexual violence compared to other populations, the middle-class white
American female remains the quintessential gendered victim. Stacy De Coster and Karen Heimer (2006) make the important observation that
marginalized masculinities such as those of poor and working class black men often view crime and violence as resources for achieving or
demonstrating masculinity (p. 141) absent more hegemonic modes of articulating gendered identity. D. Marvin Jones (2005) argues that rap music
These performances...are intended at a deep level as

counternarratives, as resistance in the context of marginalized people
attempting to represent themselves as potent, large, and in charge:
predators rather than victims in a society where they have found
themselves jobless, powerless, social victims languishing on street corners
and in jails. (pp. 5859) Viewed through such a prism, Cubes emasculation of law enforcement
becomes something more than outright homophobia*although it certainly qualifies as such. Instead, it constitutes a parodic
reversal of the gendered roles associated with the war on crime that had
for far too long allowed his brethren to be humiliated, spreadeagle, by the likes of the LAPD. The
lyric is a flawed but nonetheless salient attempt to appropriate the mark of criminality and
recuperate masculinity that had been under threat of erasure since the
days of slavery. N.W.A. also deploys the mark of criminality to fashion
themselves as latter-day nationalist guerrillas defending their homeland
from colonial invaders. Ren raps, Fuck the police and Ren said it with authority/Because the niggaz on the street is a majority.
This declaration echoes a central ethic of Black Nationalism: the belief that
colonized people of color can find comfort and encouragement in the fact
that they outnumber their oppressor (see Campbell, 1971; Fanon, 1963; Hill Collins, 2006). By
imagining her- or himself as part of an urban majority, the listening youth
can, through Ren, assert, Readin my rights and shit, its all junk. The track, in other words, reveals the potential of
parody to articulate a proto-nationalist politics by mocking and, therefore,
reversing the discursive power dynamics of Compton. Like Cube, Ren highlights the artificiality of law
functions as one such resource, writing,
enforcement authority. Mocking the police, he raps, Pullin out a silly club, so you stand/With a fake-assed badge and a gun in your hand/ But take off
the gun so you can see whats up/And well go at it punk, and Im-a-fuck you up! Elaborating upon this theme Eazy-E joins in with a third verse,
police possess
no authentic authority in the hood. Rather, they are invaders rightfully vulnerable to
the mockery and weaponry of N.W.A. As I argue below, such a highly publicized parodic
reversal of law enforcements prerogative of violence constituted an
intolerable threat to the states institutional authority and cultural
hegemony in the war on crime. Instead of attempting to sanitize the public
image of the fearsome black male, N.W.A. enacts the mark of criminality as
a playful conduit for framing black urban violence as righteous vengeance,
replacing the ethical police officer with the savvy, Signifyin(g) gangsta
guerrilla. The tracks Straight Outta Compton and Fuck Tha Police intervened at a political and cultural moment when most Americans
rapping, Without a gun and a badge, what do ya got?/A sucker in a uniform waitin to get shot. Eazy insists that the
had been exposed to a particular narrative of the inner city that was void of irony, one in which law enforcement cleans the streets of drug dealers and
These tracks and much of the rest of the album invert this
dynamic not by refuting the criminal deeds that Reagan, Bush, and other
cultural figures crafted policy to supposedly combat, but by parodically
redeploying the mark of criminality as a resource for heroic, playful
masculinity and artistic mastery, while vilifying the colonizer police officer
as an unwanted fool in the streets of Compton. Because SOC was a multi-platinum album inaugurating a
violent gangsters.
new phase in music history, it represented a very potent threat to the discourses of criminality on which many had staked their political careers. The
fallout following the records release revealed precisely how unamusing their challenge would be.
Fugitivity exists in our use of language and its constant rereading and re-use. Freedom isnt fiat; it is elusive,
momentary, and a state of mind; it is discursive play rather
than related to the location of the body or an abstract vision
of social change. Such a freedom is utopian and fugitive

Vote aff in favor of embracing radical forms of public

pedagogy that are key to teens like us to deconstruct corrupt
politics and institutional violence
Giroux 2000 (The mouse that roared: Disney and the end of innocence)
The organization and regulation of culture by large corporations such as Disney
profoundly influence children's culture and their everyday lives. The
concentration of control over the means of producing, circulating, and exchanging
information has been matched by the emergence of new technologies that have
transformed culture, especially popular culture, which is the primary way in
which youth learn about themselves, their relationship to others, and the
larger world. The Hollywood film industry, television, satellite broadcasting
technologies, the internet, posters, magazines, billboards, newspapers, videos,
and other media forms and technologies has transformed culture into a pivotal
force, "shaping human meaning and behavior and regulat[ing] our social
practices at every turn."' Although the endlessly proliferating media sites seem
to promise unlimited access to vast stores of information, such sites are
increasingly controlled by a handful of multi- national corporations. Consider the
Disney Company's share of the communication industry. Disney's numerous
holdings include a controlling interest in twenty television stations that reach 25
percent of U.S. households; ownership of over twenty-one radio stations and the
largest radio network in the United States, serving 3,400 stations and covering 24
percent of all households in the country; three music studios; the ABC television
network; and five motion picture studios. Other holdings include, but are not
limited to, television and cable channels, book publishing, sports teams, theme
parks, insurance companies, magazines, and multimedia prod~ctions.~ Mass-
produced images fill our daily lives and condition our most intimate
perceptions and desires. At issue for par- ents, educators, and others is how
culture, especially media culture, has become a substantial, if not the primary,
educational force in regulating the meanings, values, and tastes that set
the norms that offer up and legitimate particular subject positions-what it
means to claim an identity as a male, female, white, black, citizen,
noncitizen. The media culture defines childhood, the national past, beauty,
truth, and social life.~ The impact of new electronic technologies as teaching
machines can be seen in some rather astounding statistics. It is estimated that
"the average American spends more than four hours a day watching television.
Four hours a day, 28 hours a week, 1456 hours a year."4 The American Medical
Association reports that the "number of hours spent in front of a television or
video screen is the single biggest chunk of time in the waking life of an American
~hild."Such statistics warrant grave concern, given that the pedagogical
messages provided through such programming are shaped largely by a $130billion-a-year advertising industry, which sells not only its products but also
values, images, and identities that are largely aimed at teaching young people to
be consumers. It would be reductionist not to recognize that there is also some
excellent programming that is provided to audiences, but by and large much of
what is produced on television and in the big Hollywood studios panders to the
lowest common denominator, defines freedom as consumer choice, and debases
public discourse by reducing it to ~pectacle.~ Consider the enormous control
that a handful of transnational corporations have over the diverse properties that
shape popular and media culture: "51 of the largest 100 economies in the world
are corporation^."^ Moreover, the U.S. media is dominated by fewer than ten
conglomerates, whose annual sales range from $10 billion to $27 billion. These
include major corporations such as Time-Warner, General Electric, Disney, Viacom,
TCI, and Westinghouse. Not only are these firms major producers of much of the
entertainment and news, culture, and information that permeates our daily lives,
they also produce "media soft- ware and have distribution networks like television
networks, cable channels and retail store^."^ Although this book focuses on the
role that the Disney corporation in particular plays as an educational force in
shaping American popular culture, it also makes clear that the production of
meaning, social practices, and desires-or what can be called public
pedagogy-must be addressed as both an educational issue and a matter
of politics and institutional power.
The use of popular culture and rap in educational spaces is

key to creating a critical pedagogy
Powell 2015 (The Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 60, No. 3, Socialization
Forces Affecting the Education of African American Youth in the 1990s (Summer,
1991), pp. 245
Conceptual Framework We initially considered how the two schools used popular
culture as critical pedagogy and how our own practices reflected the
philosophies of these schools. Critical pedagogy and popular media literature
provided a context for our thinking about the schools critical engagements.
Critical pedagogy provides a way of seeing an unjust social order and
revealing how this injustice has caused problems in the lives of

young people who live in impoverished conditions. It offers an approach to
education, through dialogue and reflection, whereby the effects of
power can be interrogated and the needs of students met
POPULAR MEDIA, CRITICAL PEDAGOGY, AND INNER CITY Youth247
(Apple, 1990). Shor (1987) additionally illustrates the need to situate formal
learning within students cultures. Through the process of unveiling reality and
thereby coming to know it critically (Freire, 1996, p. 51) those who have been
disenfranchised come to explore their own social and cultural realities, draw their
own conclusions, and work toward appropriate responses. Critical pedagogy
and cultural studies approaches offer understandings of how

young people use popular cultural representations to construct
and express the meaningfulness of their lives, identities, and
cultures (Giroux, 2001; Hall, 1997). These approaches interrogate
mainstream cultural representations and encourage youth to
construct their own representations through understandings of
their own realities. Willis (1990) referred to the extraordinary symbolic
creativity of the multitude of ways in which young people use, humanise, decorate
and invest meanings within their common and immediate life spaces and social
practices (p. 6). Creative engagement with popular culture allows
youth a sense that they are controlling their own representation,

that they are in control of their own cultural identity, and are
creatively shaping and moulding language, style, and self into
something new (Carlson & Dimitriadis, 2003, p. 21). If schools are to become
more relevant spaces for young people, it is useful to listen to the stories youth
are telling educators through their use of popular culture. Graveline (1998) has
added that insisting on people representing their own voices, their own stories
as a central pedagogical tool is imperative in the classroom (p. 124). Lincoln and
Denzin (2003) noted: We can study experience only through its
representations, through the ways in which stories are told (p.
240). Representation and narrative are useful concepts for
developing better understandings of how young people draw from

a variety of popular media to continually redefine and reposition
themselves within the social contexts of their everyday lives.
1acBlack Privilege
Black privilege - Crystal Valentine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rYL83kHQ8Y
Black Privilege is the hung elephant swinging in the room
Is the memory of a slave ship, preying for the Alzheimers to kick in
Black Privilege is me having already memorized my nephews eulogy,
My brothers eulogy,
My fathers eulogy
My un-conceived childs eulogy
Black Privilege is me thinking my sisters name safe from this list
Black Privilege is me pretending to know Travyon Martin on a first name basis
Is me using a dead boys name to win a poetry slam
Is me carrying a mouth full of other peoples skeletons to use at my own
convenience
Black Privilege is the concrete that holds my breath better than my lungs do
Black Privilege is always having to be the strong one,
Is having a crow bar for a spine,
Is fighting, even when you have no more blood to give
Even when you have lost sight of your bones
Even when your mother prayed for you
Even after theyve prepared your body for the funeral
Black Privilege is being so unique that not even God will look like you,
Black Privilege is still being the first person in line to meet him
Black Privilege is having the same sense of humor as Jesus
Remember how he smiled on the cross?
The same way Malcolm X laughed at his bullet
And there I go again, asserting my Black Privilege, using a dead mans
name without his permission
I can feel his maggots congregating in my mouth
Black Privilege is a myth,
Is a joke, is a punchline
Is that time a teacher asked a little boy what he wanted to be when he
grew up and he said alive
Is the way she laughed and said theres no college for that
Ignorance is the only thing that wont discrimination against you,
Is the only thing that dont need a tombstone to learn your name
And its tiring, you know, for everything about my skin to be a metaphor
For everything black to be pun intended, to be death intended
Black Privilege is the applause at the end of this poem

Is me giving you a dead boys body and you giving me a ten 10
Is me being okay with that
I tired writing a love poem the other day, but my fingers wouldnt move
My skin started to blister
Like it didnt trust me any more
Like it thought Ive forsaken it for something prettier
Something smoother to wrap around my bones
Like I was trading in my noose for a pearl necklace
Some days Im afraid to look into the mirror
For fear that a bullet George Zimmerman-ed its way into my chest while I was
asleep
The breath in my mouth is weapon enough to scare a courtroom
Ill be lucky if Im alive to make it to the stand
For some people, their trials live longer than they do
Black Privilege is knowing that if I die,
At least Al Sharpton will show up to my funeral
At least Al sharpen will mason jar my mothers tears
Remind us that the only thing we are worthy of is our death
We are judged by the number of people it takes to carry our casket
Black Privilege is me think thats enough
Is me thinking this poem is enough
Black Privilege is this
Is this breath in my lungs right now
Is me
Standing right here
With a crowd full of witnesses
To my heartbeat
Valentine began by defining Black Privilege as the memory

of a slave ship. Black Privilege begins with the beginning of
surveillance: slavery.

NDW)
Whiteness".

but not visible.


Asserting Black Privilege through Fugitivity is the alternative

to status quo racism.
there.
Similarly, Valentines challenge of current racial constructs is
a form of fugitivity through poetics. Her contrasting
definitions of Black Privilege mirror the contradictory nature
of the social role of black bodies and the difficulties of
maintaining Black Identity. Additionally, the different
interpretations of her poem her radical message to exist
under the masters proverbial nose.
She gives voice to the voiceless in order to instill and
embrace change
ARIEL 6/11 (Amani Ariel writer at Blavity. This Poet Explains Exactly What Black
Privilege Is 6/11/15. Blavity the Voice of Black Millennials. Accessed 7/7/15.
http://blavity.com/this-poet-explains-exactly-what-black-privilege-is/) dortiz
Crystal is the current two-time Grand Slam Champion of NYUs poetry slam team,
is the 2015 NYC Youth Poet Laureate, has won first place atCUPSI in both 2013 and
2015, and was a member of the 2014 Urban Word youth slam team. She has been
featured on the Melissa Harris-Perry show, as well as theBrian Lehrer Radio talk
show, and has performed at venues such as the Lincoln Center and the Apollo
Theater. During her time at New York University, when shes not immersed in work
for her creative writing and adolescent mental health studies courses, Valentine
continues to use her talents to give voice to the narratives of, and to be an
advocate for, Black and brown people whose stories are so often silenced. This
summer, with the support of her devoted fans (i.e. YOU!), she hopes to continue
pursuing her passion for writing in Paris. While away, Crystal will have the
opportunity to immerse herself in the experiences of a different culture while also
discovering new literary devices to better articulate the messages, pains,
struggles and triumphs of the Black and brown communities for which she
advocates. In the words of this dynamic Black female poet, Crystal believes in
poetrys ability to instill change in those who embrace it
Vote aff to affirm our use of poetic fugitivity to break down

social constructs of race and surveillance.
Build Your Own 1ac
Epistemology
Voting aff affirms the creation of a an entire body of
knowledge that isnt included in their epistemeits a prerequisite to affirming any alternative existence that can strive
towards freedom
Dillon 13 assistant professor of Queer Studies, holds a B.A. from the University
of Iowa and a Ph.D. in American Studies with a minor in Critical Feminist and
Sexuality Studies from the University of Minnesota. (Stephen, Fugitive Life: Race,
Gender, and the Rise of the Neoliberal-Carceral State ,A DISSERTATION
SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF
MINNESOTA , May 2013 //SRSL)
two new voices within national debates about
racism, imperialism, poverty, and civil rightsthe prisoner and the
fugitive. As more and more members of the 1960s liberation movements were imprisoned or
went underground, a new body of knowledge emerged from both of
these figures that negated national narratives of progress, equality, and
justice. While Fugitive Life tells a story about post-civil rights feminist, queer, and
anti-racist activism, it focuses on these two figures and two corresponding spaces:
the prison and the underground. In response to police repression in the form
of incarceration, sabotage, and assassination, and in order to deploy illegal tactics,
hundreds of activists in the 1970s left behind families, friends, jobs, and their
identities in order to disappear into a vast network of safe houses, under-the-table
jobs, and transportation networks. In fact, before she was imprisoned, Davis herself spent many months underground in
The late 1960s and early 1970s saw the emergence of
order to hide from the FBI. While there has been a resurgence of interest in many of these groups (prompted by and reflected in the anxiety about
their significance to the

post-civil rights landscapeas structured by the prison and neoliberalismhas
only begun to be explored. The books of imprisoned authors like Eldridge Cleaver,
George Jackson, and Malcolm X (which sold hundreds of thousands of copies)
exposed something about the United States that only they could know. In the
original introduction to Jacksons Soledad Brother, Jean Genet wrote that Jacksons
prison writing exposed the miracle of truth itself, the naked truth revealed. 20 For
Genet and many readers of this literature, the prisoner had access to a unique formation of
knowledge which led to alternative ways of seeing and knowing the
world. Indeed, scholars like Dylan Rodrguez, Michael-Hames Garcia, and Joy James have argued that the knowledge produced by the prisoner
Obamas connections to Weather Underground member Bill Ayers during the 2008 presidential election),
exposes a truth about the United States that cannot be accessed from elsewhere.21 The prisoner could name what others could not even see. At the
same time, thousands of political fugitives wrote devastating critiques of the United States as they bombed and robbed their way to what they hoped
Underground organizations like the Weather Underground, Black

Liberation Army, and George Jackson Brigade did more than attack symbols of
state violence; they also wrote poetry, stories, memoirs, communiqus,
magazines, and made films. These groups understood culture as foundational to
the production and survival of alternatives to things as they were. In this way,
culture became a site for the emergence of alternative forms of knowledge.
would be a better world.
DS Grew from Slavery

NDW)
the history of surveillance in America can be traced to the
"simple accounts" of slave owners. Of course, the accounting practices of transatlantic slavery were
also present outside of the Americas. These simple accounts included slave vessel manifests
listing human cargo, plantation inventories, diaries which contained observations
about plantation life and instructions for governing slaves. One example involved the
"General Rules" recorded by Charles Tait for his Columbus, Texas plantation: "4th in giving orders always do it in a
mild tone, and try to leave the impression of the mind on the Negro that what you say is the result of reflection."
The detailed cataloguing of slave life was a mechanism of disciplinary power,

where disciplinary power, as Michel Foucault tells us, is "exercised through its invisibility,"
while imposing a "compulsory visibility" on its targets. Disciplinary power then
operated on the enslaved as racialized surveillance that individuals were at once
subjected to and that produced them as racial , and therefore enslave able, subjects. Such
a racializing surveillance was apparent in the plantation security system , a system
that relied on, as Parenti lays out, three "information technologies: the written slave pass,
organized slave patrols, and wanted posters for runaways". Here, surveillance and literacy were
closely articulated as slaves and indentured servants who could read and write could also forge passes and
manumission papers or alter existing ones by replacing dates, names, and other unique identifiers, in this way
functioning as antebellum hackers" able to "crack the code of the planters' security system". These forged passes
were used for unauthorized travel outside of the plantation and were [produced by fugitives upon demand by
slave patrollers, or "Pattie rollers", who were often non-property owning armed white men who policed slave
mobilities. Sometimes producing a forged pass was not necessary. Any piece of printed text would do given that
fugitive slaves were aware of many of these pattie rollers were illiterate, so they would hand over these "passes"
This security system, then, relied on the "racially defined contours of

(white) literacy and (black) illiteracy", a dichotomy that was not so readily upheld. Less easily
counterfeited passes were later fashioned out of metal. The compulsory visibility of the racial
subject can be seen in the circulation of newspaper advertisements and wanted
posters for runaway slaves and truant servants. These texts were primarily aimed at
a white public that was assumed to be literate and free, and who in consuming these texts,
became a part of the aparatus of surveillance , and the eyes and ears of face-to-face watching
and regulating. In detailing physical desacriptions, the surveillance technology of the
when apprehended.
fugitive slave advertisement made the already hypervisible racial subject legible
as "out of place." For instance, a March 15 1783 advertisement in The Royal Gazzette offering a "Two Dollar
Reward" for "a Mulatto, or Quadroon Girl, about 14 years of age, named Seth, but calls herself Sall," attests to the
role of fugitive slave notices, and similarly, wanted posters, in upholding racial categorization. This notice went on
to state: "sometimes says she is white and often paints her face to cover that deception." Seth's, or Sall's,
duplicity is not limitefd to her use of an alias, as this notice tells us, but also to her racial ambiguity, witness her
apparent choosing to self-identify or pass as white, rather than as "a Mulatto"(one black parent and one white
parent) or a "Quadroon Girl" (one black grandparent) as per the racial nomenclature that arose out of slavery.
Later such classifications as a form of population management were made official

with the first US federal census in 1790 . I will retun to the census as a technology that formalized
racial categorization later. For now, the wanted notice for fugitive slaves as an infoprmation
technology demonstrates that then as now race was a social construct that
required constant policing and oversight. However, the format of the fugitive notice was
repurposed in the form of handbills that functioned as a means of counter-surveillance. An 1851 handbill
produced by abolitionists Theodore Parker attests to this as it cautioned "colored people of Bostonb" to steer clear
of "watchmen and oilice officers" and to "keep a sharp look out for kidnappers, and have top eye open." "Top eye"
here was a directive to look out and about with keen intent as police officeers were empowered to act as slave
catchers under fugitive slave laws. Black spectatorship, along with the gazes of white abolitionists and other
allies, functioned as a form of oppositional looking back at racializing surveillance. In her discussion of black
spectatorship, the gaze and looking relaitons during slavery and the racial apartheid of Jim Crow in the southern
United States, bell hooks tells us that black people often "cultivated the habit of casting the gaze fdownwards so
as not to appear uppity To look directly was an assertion of subjectivity, equality". hook suggests that the boften
violent ways in which blacks were denied the right to look back - think of the gruesome beating and murder of 14year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955, allegedly for looking at a white woman - "had produced in us an
overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze". Such politicized and oppositional looking
were agential acts and can be seen, for example, in a June 14th 1783 runaway slave notice printed in the Royal
Gazette for 16-year-old Samm, who is described in the notice as "five feet high" and "remarkable in turning up
the whites of his eyes when spoken to." This notice records Sam's oppositional gaze, his lokking back, and shows
us that resistance can be found even in the simple act of rolling one's eyes. Black looks have the power to trouble
surveillance as a "Technology of Whiteness".
Fugitivity
Recyclopedia: Trimming, and Muse & Drudge (2006). Mullen self-consciously
inherits and intervenes in what Kathy Lou Schultz calls the legacy gone missing
of avant-garde practice by African-American women poets (n. pag.). Mullen is
actively engaged in recovering this legacy through her creative, scholarly, and
editorial work.1 Poised in the dialectic of what I call enclosure (identity, history,
and the archive, but also, racism, exclusion, and limitation) and run (mobility,
flight, escape, critique, ongoing poesis, and revision), Mullens work plies the
tensions between these disparate but mutually dependent poles. From the
negotiation of this tension, Mullen produces a formal strategy predicated on the
communal participation of others and distinctive among innovative poetsthe
recyclopedia. Mullens writing creates texts that remain open to ambiguity,

Fugitivity arises out of the inadequacy of society in its

attempts to calculate and enframe blacknesswhile
blackness is constitutive of societal relations and is alwaysalready criminal, it doesnt bar the creation of undercommon
spaces of disorder
ProjectMUSE, IC)
So Im interested in how the ones who inhabit the nearness and distance between
Dasein and things (which is off to the side of what lies between subjects and
objects), the ones who are attained or accumulated unto death even as they are
always escaping the Hegelian positioning of the bondsman, are perhaps best
understood as the extra-ontological, extra-political constanta destructive,
healing agent; a stolen, transplanted organ always eliciting rejection; a salve
whose soothing lies in the abrasive penetration of the merely typical; an ensemble
always operating in excess of that ancient juridical formulation of the thing (Ding),
to which Kant subscribes, as that to which nothing can be imputed, the impure,
degraded, manufactured (in) human who moves only in response to inclination,
whose reflexes lose the name of action. At the same time, this dangerous
supplement, as the fact out of which everything else emerges, is constitutive. It
seems to me that this special ontic-ontological fugitivity of/in the slave is what is
revealed as the necessarily unaccounted for in Fanon. So that in contradistinction
to Fanons protest, the problem of the inadequacy of any ontology to blackness, to
that mode of being for which escape or apposition and not the objectifying
encounter with otherness is the prime modality, must be understood in its relation
to the inadequacy of calculation to being in general. Moreover, the brutal history
of criminalization in public policy, and at the intersection of biological,
psychological, and sociological discourse, ought not obscure the already existing
ontic-ontological criminality of/as blackness. Rather, blackness needs to be
understood as operating at the nexus of the social and the ontological, the
historical and the essential. Indeed, as the ontological is moving within the
corrosive increase that the ontic instantiates, it must be understood that what is
now meant by ontological requires special elucidation. What is inadequate to
blackness is already given ontologies. The lived experienced of blackness is,
among other things, a constant demand for an ontology of disorder, an ontology of
dehiscence, a para-ontology whose comportment will have been (toward) the
ontic or existential field of things and events. That ontology will have had to have
operated as a general critique of calculation even as it gathers diaspora as an
open setor as an openness disruptive of the very idea of setof accumulative
and unaccumulable differences, differings, departures without origin, leavings that
continually defy the natal occasion in general even as they constantly bespeak the
previous. This is a Nathaniel Mackey formulation whose full implications will have
never been fully explorable.12 What Fanons pathontological refusal of blackness
leaves unclaimed is an irremediable homelessness common to the colonized, the
enslaved, and the enclosed. This is to say that what is claimed in the name of
blackness is an undercommon disorder that has always been there, that is
retrospectively and retroactively located there, that is embraced by the ones who
stay there while living somewhere else. Some folks relish being a problem. As
Amiri Baraka and Nikhil Pal Singh (almost) say, Black(ness) is a country (and a
sex) (that is not one).13 Stolen life disorders positive value just as surely as it is
not equivalent to social death or absolute dereliction.
So if we cannot simply give an account of things that, in the very fugitivity and
impossibility that is the essence of their existence, resist accounting, how do we
speak of the lived experience of the black? What limits are placed on such
speaking when it comes from the position of the black, but also what constraints
are placed on the very concept of lived experience, particularly in its relation to
the black when black social life is interdicted? Note that the interdiction exists not
only as a function of what might be broadly understood as policy but also as a
function of an epistemological consensus broad enough to include Fanon, on the
one hand, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, on the otherencompassing formulations
that might be said not only to characterize but also to initiate and continually reinitialize the philosophy of the human sciences. In other words, the notion that
there is no black social life is part of a set of variations on a theme that include
assertions of the irreducible pathology of black social life and the implication that
(non-pathological) social life is what emerges by way of the exclusion of the black
or, more precisely, of blackness. But what are we to make of the pathological
here? What are the implications of a social life that, on the one hand, is not what it
is and, on the other hand, is irreducible to what it is used for? This discordant echo
of one of Theodor W. Adornos most infamous assertions about jazz implies that
black social life reconstitutes the music that is its phonographic.14 That music,
which Miles Davis calls social music, to which Adorno and Fanon gave only
severe and partial hearing, is of interdicted black social life operating on
frequencies that are disavowedthough they are also amplifiedin the interplay
of sociopathological and phenomenological description. How can we fathom a
social life that tends toward death, that enacts a kind of being-toward-death, and
which, because of such tendency and enactment, maintains a terribly beautiful
vitality? Deeper still, what are we to make of the fact of a sociality that emerges
when lived experience is distinguished from fact, in the fact of life that is implied
in the very phenomenological gesture/analysis within which Fanon asserts black
social life as, in all but the most minor ways, impossible? How is it that the off
harmony of life, sociality, and blackness is the condition of possibility of the claim
that there is no black social life? Does black life, in its irreducible and impossible
sociality and precisely in what might be understood as its refusal of the status of
social life that is refused it, constitute a fundamental dangeran excluded but
immanent disruptionto social life? What will it have meant to embrace this
matrix of im/possibility, to have spoken of and out of this suspension? What would
it mean to dwell on or in minor social life? This set of questions is imposed upon us
by Fanon. At the same time, and in a way that is articulated most clearly and
famously by W. E. B. Du Bois, this set of questions is the position, which is also to
say the problem, of blackness.
Fugitivity is the only resistance

Moten 8 Fred, OG, Member of the Undercommons. "Black optimism/Black operation". PMLA, October 2008. Pgs. 1743
1747. PWoods.
color +
beauty = blackness which is not but nothing other than who, and deeper still,
where I am. This shell, this inhabitation, this space, this garmentthat I carry with
me on the various stages of my flight from the conditions of its making is a zone
of chromatic saturation troubling any ascription of impoverishment
My field is black studies. In that field, Im trying to hoe the hard row of beautiful things. I try to study them and I also try to make them. Elizabeth Alexander says look for color everywhere. For me,
of any kind however much it is of, which is
to say in emergence from, poverty (which is, in turn, to say in emergence from or as an aesthetics or a poetics of poverty). The highly cultivated nature of this situated volatility, this emergent poetics of the emergency, is the
open secret that has been the preoccupation of black studies. But it must be said nowand Ill do so by way of a cool kind of accident that has been afforded us by the danger and saving power that is power pointthat
there is a strain of black studies that strains against black studies and its object,
the critique of western civilization, precisely insofar as it disavows its aim
(blackness or the thinking of blackness, which must be understood in what some
not so strange combination of Nahum Chandler and Martin Heidegger might call
its paraontological distinction from black people).
There was a moment in Rebeccas presentation when the image of a black saxophonist (I
think, but am not sure, that it was the great Chicago musician Fred Anderson) is given to us as a representative, or better yet a denizen (as opposed to citizen), of the space of the imagination. Whats cool here, and what is
also precisely the kind of thing that makes practitioners of what might be called the new black studies really mad, is this racialization of the imagination which only comes fully into its own when it is seen in opposition, say, to
that set of faces or folks who constituted what I know is just a part of Laurens tradition of Marxist historiographical critique. That racialization has a long history and begins to get codified in a certain Kantian discourse, one in
which the imagination is understood to produce nothing but nonsense, a condition that requires that its wings be severely clipped by the imagination. What Im interested in, but which I can only give a bare outline of, is a
two-fold black operationone in which Kant moves toward something like a thinking of the imagination as blackness that fully recognizes the irreducible desire for this formative and deformative, necessarily supplemental
The new black studies,

or to be more precise, the old-new black studies, since every iteration has had this
ambivalence at its heart, cant help but get pissed at the terrible irony of its
irreducible Kantianness precisely because it works so justifiably hard at critiquing
necessity; one in which black studies ends up being unable to avoid a certain sense of itself as a Kantian, which is to say anti-Kantian and ante-Kantian, endeavor.
that racialization of the imagination and the racialized opposition of imagination

(in its lawless, nonsense producing freedom) and critique that turns out to be the
condition of possibility of the critical philosophical project. There is a voraciously
instrumental anti-essentialism, powered in an intense and terrible way by
good intentions, that is the intellectual platform from which black studies
disavowal of its object and aim is launched, even when that disavowal comes in
something which also thinks itself to be moving in the direction of that object and
aim. Im trying to move by way of a kind of resistance to that anti-essentialism,
one that requires a paleonymic relation to blackness; Im trying to own a certain
dispossession, the underprivilege of being-sentenced to this gift of constantly
escaping and to standing in for the fugitivity
that is
an irreducible property of life, persisting in and against every disciplinary
technique while constituting and instantiating not just the thought but that
actuality of the outside that is what/where blackness isas space or spacing of
the imagination
Its annoying to perform what you oppose,
but I just want you to know that I aint mad. I loved these presentations, partly
because I think they loved me or at least my space, but mostly because they were
beautiful. I love Kant, too, by the way, though he doesnt love me, because I think
hes beautiful too and, as you know, a thing of beauty is a joy forever
(to echo Natahaniel Mackey, Daphne Brooks and Michel Foucault) (of the imagination)
, as condition of possibility and constant troubling of critique.
. But even though Im not mad, Im
not disavowing that strain of black studies that strains against the weight or burden, the refrain, the strain of being-imaginative and not-being-critical that is called blackness and that black people have had to carry. Black
black optimism, is bound up with

what it is to claim blackness and the appositional, runaway black operations that
have been thrust upon it. The burden, the constraint, is the aim, the paradoxically
aleatory goal that animates escape in and the possibility of escape from. Here is
one such black opa specific, a capella instantiation of strain, of resistance to
constraint and instrumentalization, of the propelling and constraining force of the
refrain, that will allow me to get to a little something concerning the temporal
paradox of, and the irruption of ecstatic temporality in, optimism, which is to say
black optimism, which is to say blackness
Studies strains against a burden that, even when it is thought musically, is inseparable from constraint. But my optimism,
. I play this in appreciation for being in Chicago, which is everybodys sweet home, everybodys land of California,
as Robert Johnson puts it. This is music from a Head Start program in Mississippi in the mid-sixties and as you all know Chicago is a city in Mississippi, Mississippi a (fugue) state of mind in Chicago. Da Da Da Da, The Child
The temporal paradox of optimismthat it is, on the

one hand, necessarily futurial so that optimism is an attitude we take towards that
which is to come; but that it is, on the other hand, in its proper Leibnizian
formulation, an assertion not only of the necessity but also of the rightness and
the essential timelessness of the always already existing, resonates in this
recording. It is infused with that same impetus that drives a certain movement, in
Monadology, from the immutability of monads to that enveloping of the moral
world in the natural world that Leibniz calls, in Augustinian echo/revision, the City
of God.
this remainder, their fugitivity, remains, for me, in the intensity of their refrain,
of their straining against constraint, cause for the optimism they perform. That
optimism always lives, which is to say escapes, in the assertion of a right to
refuse
the first right: an instantiation of a collective negative
tendency to differ, to resist the regulative powers that resistance, that differing,
call into being. To think resistance as originary is to say, in a sense, that we have
what we need, that we can get there from here, that theres nothing wrong with us
or even, in this regard, with here, even as it requires us still to think about why it is
Development Group of Mississippi, Smithsonian Folkways Records, FW02690 1967
With respect to C. L. R. James and Jos (Muoz), and a little respectful disrespect to Lee Edelman, these children are the voices of the future in the past, the voices of the future in our present. In this
recording,
, which is, as Gayatri Spivak says,
that difference calls the same, that resistance calls regulative power, into
existence, thereby securing the vast, empty brutality that characterizes here and
now.
Nevertheless, however much I keep trouble in mind, and therefore, in the interest of making as much trouble as possible, I remain hopeful insofar as I will have been in this very collective negative tendency, this
little school within and beneath school that we gather together to be. For a bunch of little whiles, this is our field (i.e., black studies), our commons or undercommons or underground or outskirts and it will remain so as long as it
its fugitive proximity to blackness

possibility of politics.
claims
, which I will claim, with ridiculousness boldness,
is the condition of
We must accept fugtitivity to create a space of acceptance

this is the only way to escape the states labels reflecting
institutionalized racism
Dillon 13 assistant professor of Queer Studies, holds a B.A. from the University of
Iowa and a Ph.D. in American Studies with a minor in Critical Feminist and
In her essay Reflections of Being Buried Alive, Susan Rosenberg describes her
first time entering the Lexington High Security Unit for Womena small
underground prison in Lexington, Kentucky, that held Rosenberg and other women
involved in 1970s revolutionary movements from 1986 until 1988. Rosenberg, a white
lesbian and member of a number of feminist and anti-racist revolutionary groups in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, writes: We stood at
the electronically controlled metal gate under the eye of one of eleven security cameras, surrounded by unidentified men in
We were wearing newly issued beige short sleeved shirts, culottes, and
plastic slippers. We were in handcuffs. An unidentified man had ordered us placed
in restraints while walking from one end of the basement to the other. The lights
were neon fluorescent burning and bright, and everything was snow whitewalls,
floors, ceilings. There was no sound except the humming of the lights, and nothing
stirred in the air. Being there at that gate looking down the cell block made my ears ring, and my breath quicken. 429
business suits.
What is remarkable about Rosenbergs writing from Lexington is how her attention to the banality of the unit captures the ways
torture and terror became inscribed in the ordinary. A white room. Plastic Slippers. Men in suits. The humming of lights. Eleven
cameras. Dead air. Her ears rang and her breath was lost, not at the spectacle of it, but at its normality, its routineness, its
technological perfection. The unimaginable violence of this new form of incarceration was cloaked in a new visual episteme. The
unit was clean, quiet, modern, rational, and orderly. It helped inaugurate a variety of psychological and physical contortions of the
Addressing the logics

behind the unit would necessitate an epistemology that could confront
the rationality and mundaneness of modern terror. The Control Unit at Lexington
human mind and body that are now so routine that they remain invisible in their banality.
embodied a new type of penal rationality that, once it was shut down in 1988 after Amnesty International declared it deliberately
and gratuitously oppressive, has spread to over 60 prisons across the country and the world.430 In these High Security Units (or
Control Units)what amount to prisons within prisonsthousands of people are held in solitary confinement and are subjected to
extreme sensory deprivation for 23 hours a day, often indefinitely .
The last forty years of neoliberal

economics has not only witnessed the exponential growth the prison as system of
racialized governance, but this period of economic restructuring has also seen the
rise of a new method of containment and bodily incapacitation in the form of the
control unit. Anti-racist, feminist, and queer activists in the 1970s and 80s were subjected to this new form of carceral
state violence before it rose to dominance in the 1990s. We can turn to their writings as a critique of
not only the broad contours of neoliberal-carceral state, but also the micro-politics
of its operation as practiced in the control unit. In addition, the writings embody what I have been
describing as a politics of anticipationwhen Rosenberg looked down the cellblock, she saw something she couldnt yet describe
indeed, something prisoners continue to say is indescribable. She knew something was coming. And what she saw made her
senses fail. Lexington set the stage for the expansion of the control unit as the prevailing domestic model of neoliberal
containment and immobilization. But under the war on terror, the control unit of the 1970s and 80s has since extended its
reach transnationally. Scholars like Avery Gordon, Michelle Brown, Colin Dayan, and Caleb Smith have observed that the living
death of solitary confinement and sensory deprivation at Guantnamo and elsewhere was first created in supermax prisons in the
United States.431 This work opens up opportunities for considering the connections between the imprisonment of 1970s radicals
and the detention of an unknown number of people in the carceral archipelago created under the war on terror. Indeed, Ivan
Greenberg has argued that the FBIs production of the domestic terrorist in the 1970s acted as the template for the creation of
the terrorist in the war on terror. In fact, it was during the 1970s that domestic terrorism first emerged as a major public
policy and policing issue.432
The ways that the category of terrorism was shaped around

groups like the Black Liberation Army and Weather Underground created a legal
apparatus and a set of discourses that would rise again in the U.S. governments
response to the attacks of September 11th. What Rosenberg and other imprisoned radicals (who were
often categorized as terrorists) experienced thirty years ago set the conditions for a global prison regime driven by an imperial
politics of permanent abandonment.433 In this chapter, I examine the history of Lexington and the writings of the women
detained there to consider the connections between the carceral politics of the neoliberal state and what has become a global
prison regime under the war on terror. An engagement with the gender and sexual politics of the control unit at Lexington can
lead to a different understanding of the forms of power inaugurated at Guantnamo Bay and elsewhere. Lexington is unique
among the control units that emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s because it was designed specifically for women and ended up
Focusing on Lexington as central to the

emergence of the space of exception in Iraq and Guantnamo, as well
as the neoliberal state, reveals a network of institutional, discursive, and
affective connections that traverse space, time, race, gender, and
sexuality. Such an investigation can make clear the relationship between the neoliberal-carceral state and the permanent
holding a number of women who identified as lesbians.
warfare state, as well as the ways that these changing formations were built on the bodies contained within new formations of
Activists and prisoners confronting the emergence of the neoliberal-carceral

state anticipated the emergence of that formation; further, their writings reveal a
critique of the forms of torture and terror constitutive of what Brown calls the
global prison-industrial complex.434
captivity.
Unintelligibility is the only way to combat the statewriting

is a tool to combat state violence that the usfg itself cant
register
Before being placed at Lexington, Rosenberg and Torres were held in a mens prison in Tucson, Arizona. They were two of five
Before being moved to administrative segregation units (or isolation

cells) on the womens side of the prison at Tucson, both women were held in
solitary confinement with men. This meant they were subjected to on-going,
incessant sexual harassment from male prisoners and guard s. It was here that they were told
women held there.513
they would soon be transferred to Lexington. Guards taunted them with the unimaginable forms of violence and terror they would
be subjected to at the unit. Part of the transfer process to Lexington involved a strip search and cavity search performed by a
male guard. Rosenberg writes of this experience: We were all standing in the hall and then the captain and the associate warden
I saw the heading

Permission/Notification for High Security Contraband Search and boxes with
writing next to them. The first box that was checked was cavity search and the
was second was rectal. They wanted us to sign the forms . Alex said, You can do an X-ray in
showed up. The captain had papers in his hand; he shoved them at us.
stead. The captain laughed. No, we dont have to and we wont. You are going to a control unit and its our call on this. We have
the right to do it. Rosenberg and Torres were then forcibly separated. Rosenberg heard Torres screaming: Five COs pushed me in
an examining roomI went crazy. I started hitting and kicking with every ounce of my being. I might have to do it, but I would not
do it easy. The y overpowered me, pushed my head down onto the examining table, pinned me there, and pulled down my pants.
I kept kicking backward until they held my legs. I was cursing and yelling. This
is rape. Youre fucking raping

me! You could do an X-ray. You know we dont have contraband. The physicians
assistant took his fist and rammed it up my anus, and then he took it out and did
the same thing up my vagina. He didnt look for anything. The woman officer
who had talked to me had to leave the roomThey half carried, half walked me
down the hall of the building into receiving and discharge. Alex was sitting on the
floor against the wall. She was shackled with full chains. When the marshals came
to transport us and I stood up, there was blood on the floor . They wouldnt let me change my
uniform or get medical attention. It was just policy.514 Many accounts of sexual violence committed
against women in prison concern exceptional cases where a guard violated the law
or other inmates perpetrate the violation. In this the case, sexual violence was
performed by the state in the name of the safety of the state. As the captain put it, the state
simply has the right to sexually assault those in their custody. Whether the cavity search is authorized by the consent of the
prisoner or not, consent is not available to the captive who is always already subject to the systems of violence and force
available to the prison. As Angela Davis observes, if strip searches and cavity searches were performed by men in plain clothes on
the street, there would be no question that an act of sexual violence was taking place.515 Yet, the body of the prisoner is
ontologically a threat to the state and the public, and thus violence performed on the captive body preempts the violence the
This particular act of

state violence did not occur because prisoners are juridical non-people as Dylan
Rodrguez would have it.516 Instead, sexual violence was authorized and
performed by the law and through the law. The women were even given the non-choice of signing a legal
prisoner is perpetually waiting to unleash. Simply, a rape is not a rapeit is safety and security.
document authorizing the terror that was coming regardless of their forced consent. Torres and Rosenberg were viewed as legal
subjects who could authorize their own violation. For example, when Amnesty International wrote the FBP about the assault, the
Associate Director responded: Regarding the particular search conducted of Ms. Torres and Susan Rosenberg prior to their transfer
This very
isolated occurrence involved a search that was performed in a professional
manner by a qualified physicians assistant.517 The sexual assault was the law,
policy, and procedure of the prison. It was professional and part of the larger
system of the prisons humane care of the prisoner. Like the unimaginable violence at Guantnamo,
to Lexington, our careful review indicates that the search was not punitive nor outside of agency policy.
the women at Lexington were not beyond the safety of the lawthey were possessed by it. Rosenberg countered state violence
Her lawyer told her

to write down the forms of violation, pain, and horror that were too numerous to
catalogue during their visits, were so unimaginable they could not be conveyed by
speech, or were simply unspeakable. Rosenbergs lawyer framed this process as building an archive that
and terror: I found a new way to survive by reading and writing and thinking with purpose.518
would contradict the states account of Lexington and thus would produce a different conception of the truth. Rosenberg
writes: Write it down, for the record. I half believed that keeping a record was a
futile effort, and she half believed it would be of use in fighting for justice, but that
sentence became a signal between us, a way to reference acts of violence too
difficult to discuss.519 The record in this formulation was a legal account that could potentially contest the state in
court, but it was also an alternative record of events that could live on in places and times beyond the states determination of
what is real and true. In this way, writing became a way of producing an epistemology that haunts the neoliberal-carceral states
Writing became a way to document the violence of

the lawviolence the law itself could not register.
discourses of freedom, equality, and justice.
Guerilla Communication
Our act of poetics is a form of guerillia communication that
allows for new modes of being human. Only these acts are
capable of resisting colonialism within current academic
spaces
Gagne, 2006 - PhD and MA from the Department of Historical Sociology @
Binghamton University, in New York (Karen M.; Fighting Amnesia as a Guerilla
Activity: Poetics for a New Mode of Being Human ; Dissertation; Pg. 260-262;
http://scholarworks.umb.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1135&context=humanarchitecture; DOA: 7/7/15 || NDW)
It was through autopoesis that another new mode of being human that of the
bourgeois manwas ignited from the 16th century onward to the present. And, it will be
through an autopoesis of equal or greater magnitude that we will be able to
leave this mode of being human. Poetry, Wynter writes, is the means by which
humans name the world. By calling themselves into being, humans invent their
humanness. She argues, to name the world is to conceptualize the world; and to conceptualize the world
is an expression of an active relation: A poem is itself and of mans creative relation to his
world; in humanizing this world through the conceptual/ naming process (neither
comes before the other like the chicken and the egg) h e invents and reinvents himself as human
(1976: 87). Indigenist autopoesis has been and will be central to work of dismantling
the bourgeois/Western mode of Humana framework in which everyone remains confined. If
the idea of the savage was a European invention, and it was made possible only as the negative concept of and
the simultaneous invention of the European Self to be known as Man, this could only occur by suppressing whole
This mode of cognition, Wynter argues, which we remain aware of

only through poetry. The exploration of an alternative FIGHTING AMNESIA AS A GUERILLA
areas of his Being.
ACTIVITY 261 HUMAN ARCHITECTURE: JOURNAL OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE, IV, SPECIAL ISSUE,
mode of cognition, still ideologically suppressed in everyone, becomes

the salvaging of indigenous selves, and the reclamation of vast areas of our being
(1976, 83). The power of this poetry lies in its noise ,10 in the disruption it causes to
our present episteme. This poetry, then, is not for arts sake, but offers a counter
effect to the project of colonialism (Grayson, 5); it is disenchanting. In it, we are
able to see how pre-colonial and pre-enslavement ways of knowing are as
important as postcolonial and post-enslavement systems of knowledge , if not more so.
SUMMER 2006
The significance of the circle in pre-colonial America and in pre-colonial Africa is illustrated in such a way that
Fighting against amnesia,

restoring memory and reconnection to the past are key to true freedom in the
present and future. The difficult but necessary process of restoring memory and
reconnection is proposed as crucial to collective resistance of colonized peoples.
cannot be duplicated by any sociological or anthropological study.
This perspective should be undertaken more seriously by all theorists and activists and clear thinkers and doers
in order to counter the

continuation of slavery and colonialism in the present. That it is not followed more closely,
of the warrior clan, to quote Bambara in The Salt Eaters (1980),
however, speaks to the depth of this cultural amnesia that marks the path of academics and of upward mobility
(Cooper, 1991: 81)or rather, our cultural systemic consciousness, as Sylvia Wynter calls it that continues to
be enforced and reproduced globally, particularly in academia, by the very disciplines that research and write
about such events and social relationships of the past.
Ultimately, this poesis is an exercise in
that After that Wynter writes about. It is to imagine the deconstruction of our
present memory of Man as Wynter puts it and the end of all things European in the Americas, as Silko
puts it. The proposed project for the 21st century is to move outside this field, and
should be, Wynter argues, as with any poetic text, to deconstruct the order of
consciousness and mode of the aesthetic to which this conception of being human
leads and through which we normally think, feel and behaveto redefine the
human on the basis of a new iconography (Wynter, 2000a: 26). It is my premiseas is that of the
many writers with whom I mention in this article, particularly Marshall, Bambara, Brodber, and Dashthat
through academia, people become SO far removed from the community that they
lose the power to affect that community.11 In order to regain that power, as
witnessed in the writing, a process of unlearningan exorcism, if you will and
a regaining of consciousness must take place. Engaging this revelatory work as witness and
prophesy, as almanacs, and Anzalda, Wynter, Silko, Bambara, and Dash as cultural workers who have been
engaged in such anti-hegemonic discourse for decades, actively writing new facts into being, is of considerable
To do so would confront the artificial separation between the activist and

the scholar, the purely Western-European mind/body/spirit split, and the fake
debate between the artist and the politician/historian/scientist. One cannot be
committed to truth and revolutionary struggle unless one is willing to follow ones
own words. So, with regard to my dissertation project in sociology, to citeNancy Welch, et al, editors of The
urgency.
Dissertation and The Discipline (2002), in order to change the field, one must refuse to renounce the course that
ones dissertation would necessarily take. It is at the level of the dissertation that the disciplines are produced
and reproduced. It is where we find our most profound, persistent beliefs about what it means to write and
teach (viii). So, if I want to change how writing gets carried out, and to resist replicating the status quo, then I
must see the dissertation as a site where the discipline is not just reproduced but could be reinvented (viii) or
even dismantled.
Performing Freedom
*noteused elsewhere, including A2 no safe spaces, etc.
We must perform freedom, even when unsure of an audience
Only these acts of fugitivity refuse the possibility of
dispossession and allow the black subject to be posited not
as slave or criminal, but as human.
Browne, 2012 - PhD in Sociology and Equity Studies in Education (Simone;
EVERYBODY'S GOT A LITTLE LIGHT UNDER THE SUN: Black luminosity and the
visual culture of surveillance; Article; Pg 551-555; DOA: 7/5/15 || NDW)
Moment by moment is the experience of surveillance in urban life , as David Lyon observes,
where the city dweller expects to be constantly illuminated (2001, p. 5153). It is how the
city dweller contends with this expectation that is instructive. To examine closely
the performance of freedom, a performative practice that I suggest that those named
fugitive in the Board of Inquiry arbitration hearings made use of , I borrow Richard Itons visual surplus
and its b-side performative sensibility (2009, p. 105). What Iton suggests is that we come to internalize an expectation of the
potential of being watched and with this emerges a certain performative
sensibility. Coupled with this awareness of an overseeing surveillance apparatus was the conscious effort to always give ones best performance and encourage others
to do the same, and indeed to perform even when one is not sure of ones audience (or whether there is in fact an audience) (p. 105). Iton employs the
term visual surplus to think about the visual media of black popular culture (graffiti, music
videos) made increasingly available to the public through the rise of hip-hop in the five
boroughs of New York City in the 1970s and the uses of new technologies (cellular phones, handheld cameras, the Internet, DVDs) to record and
distribute performances. Applied to a different temporal location,Itons analyses of visual
surplus and performative sensibility are useful for how we think about fugitive
acts, black expressive practices and the regulation of black mobilities in colonial
New York City 200 years earlier. What I am suggesting here is that for the fugitive
in eighteenth century New York such a sensibility would encourage one to perform
in this case perform freedom even when one was not sure of ones audience. Put
differently, these performances of freedom were refusals of dispossession,
constituting the black subject not as slave or fugitive, nor commodity but as
human. For the black subject, the potentiality of being under watch was a
cumulative effect of the large scale surveillance apparatus in colonial New York
City and beyond stemming from transatlantic slavery, specifically fugitive slave
posters and print news advertisements, blackbirders and other freelancers who
kidnapped free blacks to transport them to other sites to be enslaved, slave
catching and through the passing of repressive black codes, such as those in
response to the slave insurrection of 1712. April 1712 saw an armed insurrection in New York City where over two dozen black
slaves gathered in the densely populated East Ward of the city to set fire to a building, killing at least nine whites and wounding others. In the end over 70 were arrested, with many
coerced into admissions of guilt. Of those, 25 were sentenced to death and 23 of these death sentences were carried out. Burned at the stake, hanged, beheaded and their corpses
publicly displayed and left to decompose, such spectacular corporal punishment served as a warning for the citys slave population and beyond. With these events and the so-called
slave conspiracy to burn the city in 1741, the black code governing black city life consolidated previously enacted laws that were enforced in a rather discretionary fashion.6 Some of
these laws spoke explicitly to the notion of a visual surplus and the regulation of mobility by way of the candle lantern. On 14 March 1713, the Common Council of New York City
passed a Law for Regulating Negro or Indian Slaves in the Nighttime that saw to it that no Negro or Indian Slave above the age of fourteen years do presume to be or appear in any
of the streets of New York City on the south side of the fresh water one hour after sunset without a lantern or a lit candle (New York Common Council, Volume III). Fresh water here
referring to the Fresh Water Pond found in lower Manhattan, slightly adjacent to the Negroes Burial Ground and that supplied the city with drinking water at the time. Again, this law
regulating mobility and autonomy through the use of the technology of the candle lantern was amended on 18 November 1731 where no negro, mulatto or Indian slave above the
age of fourteen years unless in the company of some white person or white servant belonging to the family whose slave he or she is, or in whose service he or she there are was to
be without a light that could be plainly seen or it was then lawful for any of his Majestys Subjects within the said City to apprehend such slave or slaves and carry him, her or them
before the Mayor or Recorder or any of the Aldermen of the said City who are hereby authorized upon proof of offense to commit such slave or slaves to the 552 CULTURAL STUDIES
Downloaded by [] at 11:11 05 July 2015 Common Gaol (New York Common Council, Volume IV). Any slave convicted of being unlit after dark was sentenced to a public whipping of no
more than 40 lashes, at the discretion of the master or owner before being discharged. Later this punishment was reduced to no more than 15 lashes. Such discretionary violence
made for an imprecise mathematics of torture. Mostly, punishment for such transgression was taken into the hands of the slave owner. In 1734 a male slave of John van Zandt was
found dead in his bed. The dead man was said to have absented himself from van Zandts dwelling in the night-time (New York Weekly Journal CXIII, 5 January 1735). Although it was
first reported that the slave was horsewhipped to death by Van Zandt for being caught on the streets after dark by watchmen, a coroners jury found Van Zandt not negligent in this
death, finding instead that the correction given by the Master was not the cause of death, but that it was by the visitation of God (New York Weekly Journal CXIII, 5 January 1735).
Other laws put into place around light and black mobilities in New York City stipulated that at least one lantern must be carried per three negroes after sunset, more tightly regulated
curfews and in 1722 the Common Council relegated burials by free and enslaved blacks to the daytime hours with attendance of no more than 12, plus the necessary pallbearers and
gravediggers, as a means to reduce opportunities for assembly and to prevent conspiracy hatching. In recounting physician Alexander Hamiltons narrative about his travels through
New York City in July of 1744, Andy Doolen details that one outcome of the alleged conspiracy of 1741 was the ruining, according to Hamilton, of the traditional English cup of tea
(2005). It was thought by Hamilton that: they have very bad water in the city, most of it being hard and brackish. Ever since the negroe conspiracy, certain people have been
appointed to sell water in the streets, which they carry on a sledge in great casks and bring it from the best springs about the city, for it was when the negroes went for tea water
that they held their caballs and consultations, and therefor they have a law now that no negroe shall be seen upon the streets without a lanthorn after dark. (Hamilton 1948, p. 88)
We can think of the lantern as a prosthesis made mandatory after dark, a technology that made it possible for the black body to be constantly illuminated from dusk to dawn, made
knowable, locatable and contained within the city. The black body, technologically enhanced by way of a simple device made for a visual surplus where technology met surveillance,
made the business of tea a white enterprise and encoded white supremacy, as well as black luminosity, in law. Of course, unsupervised leisure, labour, travel, assembly and other
forms of social networking past sunset by free and enslaved black New Yorkers continued regardless of the enforcement of codes meant to curtail such things. BLACK LUMINOSITY
AND SURVEILLANCE 553 Downloaded by [] at 11:11 05 July 2015 Oftentimes social networking by free and enslaved black New Yorkers took place right under the surveillant gazes of
the white population, in markets and during Sabbath and holiday celebrations. In these spaces of sometimes interracial and cross-class commerce and socializing, black performative
practices of drumming, dancing and chanting persisted. During celebrations of Pinkster marking the feast of Pentecost of the Dutch Reformed Church, amongst the rituals, free and
enslaved blacks elected a governor who would serve as a symbolic leader resolving disputes and collecting tributes, making this holiday an event for white spectatorship of black
cultural and political production, although for many such celebratory resistance made this a festival of misrule (Harris 2003, p. 41). So much so that the Common Council of Albany,
New York, banned Pinkster celebrations in 1811, for reasons including a resentment of the space that it opened up for unsettling exchanges between blacks and whites (Lott 1993;
McAllister 2003; White 1989). The most controversial incorporation of black performativity into Pinkster was the Totau. On the Totau, McAllister writes: a man and a woman shuffle
back and forth inside a ring, dancing precariously close without touching and isolating most of their sensual movement in the hip and pelvic areas. Once the couple dances to
exhaustion, a fresh pair from the ring of clapping dancers relieves them and the Totau continues. (McAllister 2003, p. 112) That such a performative sensibility was engaged by black
subjects in colonial New York City approximately 200 years before the emergence of hip hop in the Bronx, New York City, is of much significance. The Totau, and later, the Catharine
Market breakdown reverberate in the cypher of b-boys and b-girls. In Eric Lotts discussion of black performances he cites Thomas De Voes eyewitness account of the Catharine
Market breakdown in the early nineteenth century New York City. De Voe writes: This board was usually about five to six feet long, of large width, with its particular spring in it, and to
keep it in its place while dancing on it, it was held down by one on each end. Their music or time was usually given by one of their party, which was done by beating their hands on
the sides of their legs and the noise of the heel. The favorite dancing place was a cleared spot on the east side of the fish market in front of Burnel Browns Ship Chandlery. (De Voe
1862, cited in Lott 1993, pp. 4142) In this instance, the breakdown is performed in a market, allowing for white spectatorship and patronage in a space that is already
overdetermined as a site of commerce within the economy of slavery. Later, DeVoe recalls public 554 CULTURAL STUDIES Downloaded by [] at 11:11 05 July 2015 negro dances at
Catharine Market in an 1889 New York Times article where he is quoted as saying that the dancers would bring roots, berries, birds, fish, clams, oysters, flowers, and anything else
Sylvia Wynters provision ground

ideology in instructive here for an understanding of solidarity, survival and the
role of folk-culture as resistance to the dehumanization of Man and Nature (1970, p. 36).
Out of the provision grounds came the cultivation of ceremonial practices,
including dance, that were, as Wynter tells us, the cultural guerilla resistance
against the Market economy (1970, p. 36).7 The remains of the Catharine Market
breakdown can be found in the cardboard and turntables of the breakdancing
cypher. Then and now cultural production and expressive practices offer moments
of living with, refusals and alternatives to routinized surveillance within a visual
surplus. In so being, they allow for us to think differently about the predicaments, policies
and performances constituting surveillance. Colonial New York City was a space of
both terror and promise for black life. Lantern laws, fugitive slave notices, public
whippings and the discretionary uses of violence by his Majestys subjects
rendered the black subject as always already unfree yet acts, like the breakdown,
that were constitutive of black freedom persisted. It is under this context where
certain humans came to be understood by many as unfree and the property of
others while at the same time creating practices that maintained their humanity
by challenging the routinization of surveillance, that we should read the 1783
Board of Inquiry hearings at Fraunces Tavern.
they could gather and sell in the market to supply themselves with pocket money (28 April 1889).
Unintelligibility
Fugitivity is not simply opposition or transgression to the
can find social life within social death
ProjectMUSE, IC)
outlaws [interdit] any ontological explanation. Someone may object that this is the
case with every individual, but such an objection merely conceals a basic problem.
Ontologyonce it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the waysidedoes
not permit us to understand the being of the black man [person]. For not only
must the black man [person] be black; he [they] must be black in relation to the
white man [person]. Some critics will take it upon themselves to remind us that
the proposition has a converse. I say that this is false. The black man [person] has
no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man [person].1
outlawed, impossible things? And if, as Frantz Fanon suggests, the black cannot be
an other for another black, if the black can only be an other for a white, then is
precisely in the assumption that it comes before what it would contain? Whats the
relation between explanation and resistance? Who bears the responsibility of

relegated, which they occupy but cannot (and refuse to) own, is some sense of the
fugitive law of movement that makes black social life ungovernable, that demands
a para-ontological disruption of the supposed connection between explanation and
resistance.3 This exchange between matters juridical and matters sociological is
given in the mixture of phenomenology and psychopathology that drives Fanons
work, his slow approach to an encounter with impossible black social life poised or
posed in the break, in a certain intransitive evasion of crossing, in the wary mood
or fugitive case that ensues between the fact of blackness and the lived
experience of the black and as a slippage enacted by the meaningor, perhaps
too trans-literally, the (plain[-sung]) senseof things when subjects are
engaged in the representation of objects.
Dance With the Dead

Embrace nothingness, dance with the dead
Moten 13 Fred Moten, Member of the Undercommons. Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh). The South Atlantic
Quarterly, 112:4, Fall 2013. Pgs. 736-739. PWoods.
well have occasion to consider what that means, by way of a

discussion of my preference for the terms life and optimism over death and
pessimism and in the light of Wildersons and Sextons brilliant insistence not only
upon the preferential option for blackness but also upon the requirement of the
most painstaking and painful attention to our damnation, a term I prefer to
wretchedness, after the example of Miguel Mellino, not simply because it is a more
literal translation of Fanon
but
also because wretchedness emerges from a standpoint that is not only not ours,
that is not only one we cannot have and ought not want, but that is
held
within the logic of im/possibility that delineates what subjects and citizens call the
real world
I will seek to begin
to explore not just the absence but the refusal of standpoint, to actually explore
and to inhabit and to think what Wagner
calls existence without standing
from no standpoint because this is what it would truly mean to remain in the hold
of the ship (when the hold is thought with properly critical, and improperly
celebratory, clarity).
What emerges in the
desire that constitutes a certain proximity to that thought is not (just) that
blackness is ontologically prior to the logistic and regulative power that is
supposed to have brought it into existence but that blackness is prior to ontology;
or, in a slight variation of what Chandler would say, blackness is the anoriginal
displacement of ontology, that it is ontologys anti- and ante-foundation,
ontologys underground, the irreparable disturbance of ontologys time and space.
Over the course of this essay,
(though often, with regard to Fanon, I prefer the particular kinds of precision that follow from what some might dismiss as mistranslation)
, in general,
(Mellino 2013). But this is to say, from the outset, not that I will advocate the construction of a necessarily fictive standpoint of our own but that
Bryan
(2009: i)
What would it be, deeper still, what is it, to think from no standpoint; to think outside the desire for a standpoint?
This is to say that what I do assert, not against, I think, but certainly in apposition to Afro-pessimism, as it is, at least at one point, distilled in Sextons work, is not what he calls one of that projects most polemical dimensions,
black lifewhich is as surely to say

lf as black thought is to say thoughtis irreducibly social; that, moreover, black
life is lived in political death or that it is lived, if you will, in the burial ground of the
subject by those who, insofar as they are not subjects, are also not, in the
interminable (as opposed to the last) analysis, death-bound,
I also agree with Sexton insofar as I am inclined to call this burial ground the
world and to conceive of it and the desire for it as pathogenic. At stake will be
what the difference is between the pathogenic and the pathological, a difference
that will have been instantiated by what we might think of as the view, as well as
the point of view, of the pathologist. I dont think I ever claimed, or meant to
claim, that Afro-pessimism sees blackness as a kind of pathogen.
namely, that black life is not social, or rather that black life is lived in social death (Sexton 2ollb: 28). What I assert is this: that
as Abdul Jan Mohamed (2005) would say. In this,
however,
, now,
I think I probably do, or at least hope that it is,
insofar as I bear the hope that blackness bears or is the potential to end the world.The question concerning the point of view, or standpoint, of the pathologist is crucial but so is the question of what it is that the pathologist
What
is the morbid body upon which Fanon, the pathologist, trains his eye?
What is the object of his complete lysis
examines.
, precisely,
(Fanon 2008: xiv)? And if it is more proper, because more literal, to speak of a lysis of universe, rather than body,
how do we think the relation between transcendental frame and the body, or nobody, that occupies, or is banished from, its confines and powers of orientation? What I offer here as a clarification of Sextons understanding of my
relation to Afro-pessimism emerges from my sense of a kind of terminological dehiscence in Orlando Pattersons (1982) work that emerges in what I take to be his deep but unacknowledged affinity with and indebtedness to the
The secular excommunication that

describes slavery for Patterson
is more precisely understood as the radical
exclusion from a political order,
with something on the order of a
radical relegation to the social. The problem with slavery, for Patterson, is that it is
work of Hannah Arendt, namely, with a distinction crucial to her work between the social and the political.
(1982: 5)
which is tantamount, in Arendts formulation,
political death, not social death; the problem is that slavery confers the
paradoxically stateless status of the merely, barely living; it delineates the
inhuman as unaccommodated bios.
At stake is the transvaluation or, better yet, the invaluation or antivaluation, the extraction from the sciences of value (and from
the very possibility of that necessarily fictional, but materially brutal, standpoint that Wagner [2009:1] calls being a party to exchange). Such extraction will, in turn, be the very mark and inscription (rather than absence or
What I am trying to get to

is the
consideration of a radical disjunction between sociality and the state-sanctioned,
state-sponsored terror of power-laden intersubjectivity, which is, or would be, the
structural foundation of Pattersons epiphenomenology of spirit.
eradication) of the sociality of a life, given in common, instantiated in exchange.
, by way of this terminological slide in Patterson,
To have honor, which is, of necessity, to be a man
of honor, for Patterson, is to become a combatant in transcendental subjectivitys perpetual civil war. To refuse the induction that Patterson desires is to enact or perform the recognition of the constitution of civil society as
It is,
to consider that the unspoken violence of political friendship
constitutes a capacity for alignment and coalition that is enhanced by the
unspeakable violence that is done to what and whom the political excludes.
I am in total agreement with the Afro-pessimistic understanding of blackness as
exterior to civil society and, moreover, as unmappable within the cosmological
grid of the transcendental subject. However, I understand civil society and the
coordinates of the transcendental aestheticcognate as they are not with the
failed but rather with the successful state and its abstract, equivalent citizensto
be the fundamentally and essentially antisocial nursery for a necessarily
necropolitical imitation of life.
Afro-pessimists say that social life is not the
condition of black life but is, rather, the political field that would surround it, then
thats a formulation with which I would agree. Social death is not imposed upon
blackness by or from the standpoint or positionality of the political; rather, it is the
field of the political, from which blackness is relegated to the supposedly
undifferentiated mass or blob of the social, which is, in any case, where and what
blackness chooses to stay. This question of the location and position of social
death is
crucial. It raises again that massive problematic
of inside and outside that animates thought since before its beginning as the
endless end to which thought always seeks to return
This mass is understood to be undifferentiated
precisely because from the imaginary perspective of the political subjectwho is
also the transcendental subject of knowledge, grasp, ownership, and selfpossessiondifference can only be manifest as the discrete individuality that
holds or occupies a standpoint. From that standpoint, from the artificial, officially
assumed position, blackness is nothing, that is, the relative nothingness of the
impossible, pathological subject and his fellows.
It is from this standpoint, which Wilderson defines precisely
by his inability to occupy it, that he, in a painfully and painstakingly lyrical tour de
force of autobiographical writing, declares himself to be nothing and proclaims his
decision which in any case he cannot make, to remain as nothing,
enmity, hostility, and civil butchery.
moreover,
This is to say that,
yes,
So that if
, as Sexton has shown no more rigorously than I could ever hope to do,
. Such mappability of the space-time or state of social death would, in turn, help us
better understand the positionalities that could be said, figuratively, to inhabit it.
I believe it is from that standpoint that Afro-pessimism identifies and articulates the imperative
to embrace that nothingness which is, of necessity, relative.
in genealogical and sociological isolation
even from every other nothing. Now, all that remains are unspoken scraps scattered on the floor like Lisas grievance. I am nothing, Naima, and you are nothing: the unspeakable answer to your question within your question.
This is why I could not would notanswer your question that night. Would I ever be with a Black woman again? It was earnest, not accusatoryI know. And nothing terrifies me more than such a question asked in earnest. It is
a question that goes to the heart of desire, to the heart of our black capacity to desire. But if we take out the nouns that you used (nouns of habit that get us through the day), your question to me would sound like this: Would
nothing ever be with nothing again? (Wilderson 2008: 265) When one reads the severity and intensity of Wildersons wordshis assertion of his own nothingness and the implications of that nothingness for his readerone is all
Its not that one wants to say no, Professor

Wilderson, you are, or I am, somebody; rather, one wants to assert the presence
of something between the subjectivity that is refused and which one refuses and
nothing, whatever that is. But it is the beautythe fantastic, celebratory force of
Wildersons and Sextons work, which study has allowed me to begin more closely
to approachof Afro-pessimism that allows and compels one to move past that
but overwhelmed by the need for a kind of affirmative negation of his formulation.
contradictory impulse to affirm in the interest of negation and to begin to consider

what nothing is
from the absoluteness of its generative
dispersion of a general antagonism that blackness holds and protects in as critical
celebration and degenerative and regenerative preservation.
the
fugitive field of unowning, in and from which we ask, paraontologically, by way of
but also against and underneath the ontological terms at our disposal: What is
nothingness? What is thingli-ness? What is blackness? Whats the relationship
between blackness, thingli-ness, nothingness and the (de/re)generative operations
of what Deleuze might call a life in common?
Our aim, even in the face of the
brutally imposed difficulties of black life, is cause for celebration.
because the cause for celebration turns out
to be the condition of possibility of black thought, which animates the black
operations that will produce the absolute overturning, the absolute turning of this
motherfucker out. Celebration is the essence of black thought, the animation of
black operations, which are, in the first instance, our undercommon, underground,
submarine sociality. In the end, though life and optimism are the terms under
which I speak, I agree with Sextonby way of the slightest, most immeasurable
reversal of emphasisthat Afro-pessimism and black optimism are not but nothing
other than one another.
, not from its own standpoint or from any standpoint but
Thats the mobility of place,
Where do we go, by what means do we begin, to study blackness? Can there be an aesthetic sociology
or a social poetics of nothingness? Can we perform an anatomy of the thing or produce a theory of the universal machine?
This is not because celebration is supposed to
make us feel good or make us feel better, though there would be nothing wrong with that. It is, rather,
I will continue to prefer the black optimism of his work just as, I am sure, he will continue to prefer the Afro-pessimism of mine. We will have been interarticulate, I
believe, in the field where annihilative seeing, generative sounding, rigorous touching and feeling, requires an improvisation of and on friendship, a sociality of friendship that will have been, at once, both intramural and
evangelical. Ill try to approach that field, its expansive concentration, by way of Don Cherry and Ed Blackwells (1982) extended meditation on nothingness; by way of Fanons and Peter Line- baughs accounts of language in and
as vehicularity; by way of Foucaults meditations on the ship of fools and Deleuzes consideration of the boat as interior of the exterior when they are both thoroughly solicited by the uncharted voices that we carry; by way,
even, of Lysis and Socrates; but also, and in the first instance, by way of Hawk and Newk, just friends, trading fours. Perhaps Im simply deluding myself, but such celebratory performance of thought, in thought, is as much about
I plan to stay a believer in

blackness, even as thingliness, even as (absolute) nothingness, even as
imprisonment in passage on the most open road of all, even asto use and abuse
a terribly beautiful phrase of Wildersons (2010: xi)fantasy in the hold
the insurgency of immanence as it is about what Wagner (2009: 2) calls the consolation oftranscen- dence. But, as I said earlier,
Parontology
Modernity was created by transatlantic slavery and is
inextricably haunted by it we embrace the paraontology of
blackness in order to end the world
Moten et al 13 Fred Moten, Member of the Undercommons. 2013. Undercommons: Fugitive planning and black
study. Pgs. 8-11, 26-28, 87-88, 92-97. PWoods.
study what it would mean to refuse what they term the call to order.
And what would it mean, furthermore, to refuse to call others to order, to refuse
interpellation and the reinstantiation of the law. When we refuse
we
create dissonance and more importantly, we allow dissonance to continue when
we enter a classroom and we refuse to call it to order, we are allowing study to
continue, dissonant study perhaps, disorganized study, but study that precedes
our call and will continue after we have left the room.
Moten and Harney also
, Moten and Harney suggest,
Or, when we listen to music, we must refuse the idea that music happens only
when the musician enters and picks up an instrument; music is also the anticipation of the performance and the noises of appreciation it generates and the speaking that happens through and around it, making it and loving it,
when we refuse the call to order the teacher picking up the book,
the conductor raising his baton, the speaker asking for silence, the torturer
tightening the noose we refuse order as the distinction between noise and
music, chatter and knowledge, pain and truth.
the undercommons is not a realm where we rebel and we create critique; it is not
a place where we take arms against a sea of troubles/and by opposing end
them. The undercommons is a space and time which is always here. Our goal
and the we is always the right mode of address here is not to end the troubles
but to end the world that created those particular troubles as the ones that must
be opposed.
refuse the logic that stages refusal as inactivity, as the
absence of a plan and as a mode of stalling real politics.
listen to the
noise we make and to refuse the offers we receive to shape that noise
Refusing to be for or
against the university and in fact marking the critical academic as the player who
holds the for and against logic in place,
subversive
intellectuals engage both the university and fugitivity : where the work gets done,
where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong. The
subversive intellectual
is unprofessional, uncollegial, passionate and disloyal.
The subversive intellectual is neither trying to extend the university nor change
the university, the subversive intellectual is not toiling in misery and from this
place of misery articulating a general antagonism.
the subversive intellectual
enjoys the ride and wants it to be faster and wilder; she does not want a room of
his or her own, she wants to be in the world, in the world with others and making
the world anew.
Like Deleuze. I believe in the world and want to be in it. I
want to be in it all the way to the end of it because I believe in another world in
the world and I want to be in that. And I plan to stay a believer
But thats
beyond me, and even beyond me and Stefano, and out into the world, the other
thing, the other world, the joyful noise of the scattered, scatted eschaton, the
undercommon refusal of the academy of misery. The mission then for the
denizens of the undercommons is to recognize that when you seek to make things
better, you are not just doing it for the Other, you must also be doing it for
being in it while listening. And so,
These kinds of examples get to the heart of Moten and Harneys world of the undercommons
Moten and Harney
Moten and Harney tell us to
into music. In the essay that
many people already know best from this volume, The University and the Undercommons, Moten and Harney come closest to explaining their mission.
Moten and Harney lead us to the Undercommons of the Enlightenment where
, we learn,
In fact,
Moten insists:
, like Curtis Mayfield.
yourself. While men may think they are being sensitive by turning to feminism,
while white people may think they are being right on by opposing racism, no one
will really be able to embrace the mission of tearing this shit down until they
realize that the structures they oppose are not only bad for some of us, they are
bad for all of us. Gender hierarchies are bad for men as well as women and they
are really bad for the rest of us. Racial hierarchies are not rational and ordered,
they are chaotic and nonsensical and must be opposed by precisely all those who
benefit in any way from them
The coalition emerges out of your
recognition that its fucked up for you, in the same way that weve already
recognized that its fucked up for us. I dont need your help. I just need you to
recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid
motherfucker, you know? The coalition unites us in the recognition that we must
change things or die. All of us. We must all change the things that are fucked up
and change cannot come in the form that we think of as revolutionary
Revolution
will come by entering
into study. Study, a mode of thinking with others separate from the thinking that
the institution requires of you, prepares us to be embedded
the with and
for
we must make common cause with
those desires and (non) positions that seem crazy and unimaginable: we must
refuse that which was first refused to us and in this refusal reshape desire,
reorient hope, reimagine possibility and do so separate from the fantasies nestled
into rights and respectability.
our fantasies must come from
call the hold: And so it is we remain in the hold, in the break, as if entering
again and again the broken world, to trace the visionary company and join it. The
hold here is the hold in the slave ship but it is also the hold that we have on reality
and fantasy, the hold they have on us and the hold we decide to forego on the
other, preferring instead to touch, to be with, to love. If there is no church in the
wild, if there is study rather than knowledge production, if there is a way of being
together in brokenness, if there is an undercommons, then we must all find our
way to it. And it will not be there where the wild things are, it will be a place where
refuge is not necessary and you will find that you were already in it all along.
[CONTINUED PAGE 26.]The Only Possible Relationship to the University Today is a
Criminal One To the university Ill steal, and there Ill steal
This is the only possible relationship to the American university today.
certainly, this much is true in the United States: it
cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be
accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment
one can only
sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite
its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of
this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university
. Or, as Moten puts it:
not as a masculinist surge
or an armed confrontation.
will come in a form we cannot yet imagine. Moten and Harney propose that we prepare now for what
in what Harney calls
and allows you to spend less time antagonized and antagonizing. For Fred Moten and Stefano Harney,
, on behalf of
this alignment,
Instead,
what Moten and Harney citing Frank B. Wilderson III
, to borrow from Pistol at the end of Henry V, as he would surely
borrow from us.
This may be true
of universities everywhere. It may have to be true of the university in general. But
. In the face of these conditions
. Worry about the university. This is
the injunction today in the United States, one with a long history. Call for its restoration like Harold Bloom or Stanley Fish or Gerald Graff. Call for its reform like Derek Bok or Bill Readings or Cary Nelson. Call out to it as it calls to
the subversive intellectual came under

false pretenses, with bad documents, out of love Her labor is as necessary as it is
unwelcome
She disappears into the
underground, the downlow lowdown maroon community of the university, into the
Undercommons of Enlightenment, where the work gets done, where the work gets
you. But for the subversive intellectual, all of this goes on upstairs, in polite company, among the rational men. After all,
. The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings. And on top of all that, she disappears.
subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong

teaching would be performing the work of the university
Teaching is merely a profession and an operation of what Jacques Derrida calls the
onto-/auto-encyclopedic circle of the Universitas. But it is useful to invoke this
operation to glimpse the hole in the fence where labor enters, to glimpse its hiring
hall, its night quarters. The university needs teaching labor, despite itself, or as
itself, self-identical with and thereby erased by it
it is
teaching that brings us in
. What is that work and what is its social capacity for both reproducing the
university and producing fugitivity? If one were to say
, one
. It is not teaching then that holds this social capacity, but something that produces the not
visible other side of teaching, a thinking through the skin of teaching toward a collective orientation to the knowledge object as future project, and a commitment to what we want to call the prophetic organization. But
. Before there are grants, research, conferences, books, and journals there is the experience of being taught and of teaching. Before the research post with no
teaching, before the graduate students to mark the exams, before the string of sabbaticals, before the permanent reduction in teaching load, the appointment to run the Center, the consignment of pedagogy to a discipline
called education, before the course designed to be a new book, teaching happened. The moment of teaching for food is therefore often mistakenly taken to be a stage, as if eventually, one should not teach for food. If the stage
teaching is consigned to those who

are known to remain in the stage, the sociopathological labor of the university
persists, there is a social pathology in the university. But if the teaching is successfully passed on, the stage is surpassed, and
. Kant
interestingly calls such a stage self-incurred minority. He tries to contrast it with having the determination and courage to use ones intelligence without being guided by another. Have the courage to use your own
But what would it mean if

the beyond of teaching is precisely
what one is asked to get beyond, to stop taking sustenance And what of those
minorities who refuse, the tribe of moles who will not come back from beyond2
(that which is beyond the beyond of teaching), as if they will not be subjects, as
if they want to think as objects, as minority? Certainly, the perfect subjects of
communication, those successfully beyond teaching, will see them as waste. But
their collective labor will always call into question who truly is taking the orders of
the Enlightenment
the biopower of the Enlightenment know this, or
perhaps it is just reacting to the objecthood of this labor as it must even as it
depends on these moles, these refugees, they will call them uncollegial,
impractical, naive, unprofessional
if one
hides from this interpellation, neither agrees nor disagrees but goes with hands
full into the underground of the university, into the Undercommonsthis will be
regarded as theft, as a criminal act. And it is at the same time, the only possible
act
. To enter this
space is to inhabit the ruptural and enraptured disclosure of the commons that
fugitive enlightenment enacts, the criminal, matricidal, queer, in the cistern, on
the stroll of the stolen life, the life stolen by enlightenment and stolen back, where
the commons give refuge, where the refuge gives commons
its about allowing subjectivity to be unlawfully overcome by others,
a radical passion and passivity such that one becomes unfit for subjection,
because one does not possess the kind of agency that can hold the regulatory
forces of subjecthood, and one cannot initiate the auto-interpellative torque that
biopower subjection requires and rewards. It is not so much the teaching as it is
the prophecy in the organization of the act of teaching. The prophecy that predicts
its own organization and has therefore passed, as commons, and the prophecy
that exceeds its own organization and therefore as yet can only be organized.
Against the prophetic organization of the Undercommons is arrayed its own
deadening labor for the university, and beyond that, the negligence of
professionalization, and the professionalization of the critical academic. The
Undercommons is therefore always an unsafe neighborhood.
To work
today is to be asked, more and more, to do without thinking, to feel without
intelligence.
teaching or rather what we might call
. The waste lives for those moments 102 Moten/Harneybeyond2 teaching when you give away the unexpected beautiful phrase unexpected, no one has asked, beautiful, it will
never come back. Is being the biopower of the Enlightenment truly better than this? Perhaps
. But
. And one may be given one last chance to be pragmaticwhy steal when one can have it all, they will ask. But
. In that Undercommons of the university one can see that it is not a matter of teaching versus research or even the beyond of teaching versus the individualization of research
. What the beyond2 of teaching is really about is not finishing
oneself, not passing, not completing;
[CONTINUED ON PGS. 87--97]
emotion, to move without friction, to adapt without question, to translate without

pause, to desire without purpose, to connect without interruption.
Only a short time ago many of us said work
went through the subject to exploit our social capacities, to wring more labor power from our labor. The soul descended onto the shop floor as Franco Bifo Berardi wrote, or ascended like a virtuoso speaker without a score as
Paolo Virno suggested. More prosaically
we heard
the entrepreneur, the artist, and the stakeholder all proposed as new models of subjectivity conducive to channeling the general intellect. But today we are
And why limit production to subjects,

who are after all such a small part of the population, such a small history of mass
intellectuality? There have always been other ways to put bodies to work, even to
maintain the fixed capital of such bodies
for capital the subject has
become too cumbersome, too slow, too prone to error, too controlling, to say
nothing of too rarified, too specialized a form of life.
This is the
automatic, insistent, driving question of the field of logistics. Logistics wants to
dispense with the subject altogether. This is the dream of this newly dominant
capitalist science. This is the drive of logistics and the algorithms that power
the conception of a drone
war.
Today this field of logistics is
in hot pursuit of the general intellect in its most concrete form, that is its potential
form, its informality, when any time and any space and anything could happen,
could be the next form, the new abstraction. Logistics is no longer content with
diagrams or with flows, with calculations or with predictions.
prompted to ask: why worry about the subject at all, why go through such beings to reach the general intellect?
, as Christian Marrazi might say. And anyway
Yet it is not we who ask this question.
that dream, the
same algorithmic research that Donald Rumsfeld was in fact quoting in his ridiculed unknown unknowns speech, a droning speech that announced
Because drones are not un-manned to protect American pilots. They are un-manned because they think too fast for American pilots.
It wants to live in the concrete itself in space at once, time at
once, form at once. We must ask where it got this ambition and how it could come to imagine it could dwell in or so close to the concrete, the material world in its informality, the thing before there is anything. How does it
? The rise of logistics is rapid.

, logistics is everywhere. And beyond these
classic capitalist sciences, its ascent is echoed ahistorically in the emerging fields
of object-oriented philosophy and cognitive neuroscience, where the logistical
conditions of knowledge production go unnoticed, but not the effects.
logisitics, is today
increasingly reduced to collateral damage in the drive of logistics for dominance.
In war without end, war without battles, only the ability to keep fighting, only
logistics, matters. Where did logistics get this ambition to connect bodies, objects,
affects, information, without subjects, without the formality of subjects, as if it
could reign sovereign over the informal, the concrete and generative
indeterminacy of material life? The truth is, modern logistics was born that way. Or
more precisely it was born in resistance to, given as the acquisition of, this
ambition, this desire and this practice of the informal. Modern logistics is founded
with the first great movement of commodities, the ones that could speak. It was
founded in the Atlantic slave trade, founded against the Atlantic slave.
proposes to dwell in nothing, and why
Indeed, to read today in the field of logistics is to read a booming field, a conquering field. In military
science and in engineering of course, but also in business studies, in management research
In military science the world has
been turned upside down. Traditionally strategy led and logistics followed. Battle plans dictated supply lines. No more. Strategy, traditional ally and partner of
Breaking from the plundering
accumulation of armies to the primitive accumulation of capital, modern logistics was marked, branded, seared with the transportation of the commodity labor that was not, and ever after would not be, no matter who was in
From the motley crew who followed in the red wakes of these slave
ships, to the prisoners shipped to the settler colonies, to the mass migrations of
industrialisation in the Americas, to the indentured slaves from India, China, and
Java, to the trucks and boats leading north across the Mediterranean or the Rio
Grande, to oneway tickets from the Philippines to the Gulf States or Bangladesh to
Singapore, logistics was always the transport of slavery, not free labor. Logistics
remains, as ever, the transport of objects that is held in the movement of things.
And the transport of things remains, as ever, logistics unrealizable ambition.
that hold or containerized in that ship.
Logistics could
not contain what it had relegated to the hold. It cannot. Robert F. Harney, the historian of migration from the bottomup, used to say once you crossed the Atlantic, you were never on the right side again. B Jenkins, a migrant
sent by history, used to turn a broken circle in the basement floor to clear the air when welcoming her students, her panthers. No standpoint was enough, no standpoint was right. She and their mothers and fathers tilled the
same fields, burned up the same desert roads, preoccupied the same merely culinary union. Harney kept in mind the mass migrations from Southern and Eastern Europe at the turn of the 19th century, beside themselves in the
annunciation of logistical modernity. No standpoint.
If commodity labor would come to have a standpoint, the
standpoint from which ones own abolition became necessary, then what of those
who had already been abolished and remained? If the proletariat was located at a
point in the circuits of capital, a point in the production process from which it had
a peculiar view of capitalist totality, what of those who were located at every
point, which is to say at no point, in the production process? What of those who
were not just labor but commodity, not just in production but in circulation, not
just in circulation but in distribution as property, not just property but property
that reproduced and realized itself? The standpoint of no standpoint, everywhere
and nowhere, of never and to come, of thing and nothing. If the proletariat was
thought capable of blowing the foundations sky high, what of the shipped, what of
the containerized? What could such flesh do? Logistics somehow knows that it is
not true that we do not yet know what flesh can do. There is a social capacity to
instantiate again and again the exhaustion of the standpoint as undercommon
ground that logistics knows as unknowable, calculates as an absence that it
cannot have but always longs for, that it cannot, but longs, to be or, at least, to be
around, to surround. Logisitics senses this capacity as never before this historical
insurgent legacy, this historicity, this logisticality, of the shipped. Modernity is
sutured by this hold. This movement of things, unformed objects, deformed
subjects, nothing yet and already. This movement of nothing is not just the origin
of modern logistics, but the annunciation of modernity itself, and not just the
annunciation of modernity itself but the insurgent prophesy that all of modernity
will have at its heart, in its own hold, this movement of things, this interdicted,
outlawed social life of nothing.
The work of Sandro Mazzadra and Brett Neilson on borders for instance reminds us that the proliferation of borders between states, within
states, between people, within people is a proliferation of states of statelessness. These borders grope their way toward the movement of things, bang on containers, kick at hostels, harass camps, shout after fugitives, seeking
all the time to harness this movement of things, this logisticality. But this fails to happen, borders fail to cohere, because the movement of things will not cohere. This logisticality will not cohere. It is, as Sara Ahmed says, queer
the improvisational imperative

is, therefore, to stay in the hold of the ship, despite my fantasies of flight. But
this is to say that there are flights of fantasy in the hold of the ship. The ordinary
fugue and fugitive run of the language lab, black phonographys brutally
experimental venue. Paraontological totality is in the making. Present and unmade
in presence, blackness is an instrument in the making.
Do you remember the days of slavery?
the void of our
subjectivity. And so it is we remain in the hold, in the break, as if entering again
and again the broken world, to trace the visionary company and join it. This
contrapuntal island, where we are marooned in search of marronage, where we
linger in stateless emergency, in our lysed cell and held dislocation, our blown
standpoint and lyred chapel, in (the) study of our sea-born variance, sent by its
pre-history into arrivance without arrival, as a poetics of lore, of abnormal
articulation, where the relation between joint and flesh is the folded distance of a
musical moment that is emphatically, palpably imperceptible and, therefore,
difficult to describe.
disorientation, the absence of coherence, but not of things, in the moving presence of absolutely nothing. As Frank B. Wilderson III teaches us,
Quasi una fantasia in its paralegal swerve, its mad-worked braid, the
imagination produces nothing but exsense in the hold.
Nathaniel Mackey rightly says The world was ever
after/elsewhere,/no/way where we were/was there. No way where we are is here. Where we were, where we are, is what we meant by mu, which Wilderson would rightly call
Having defied degradation the moment becomes a theory of the moment, of the feeling of a presence that is ungraspable in the way that it touches. This musical moment
the moment of advent, of nativity in all its terrible beauty, in the alienation that is always already born in and as parousia is a precise and rigorous description/theory of the social life of the shipped, the terror of enjoyment in its
endlessly redoubled folds. If you take up the hopelessly imprecise tools of standard navigation, the deathly reckoning of difference engines, maritime clocks and tables of damned assurance, you might stumble upon such a
Youll know the moment by how it requires

you to think the relation between fantasy and nothingness: what is mistaken for
silence is, all of a sudden, transubstantial. The brutal interplay of advent and
chamber demands the continual instigation of flown, recursive imagining; to do so
moment about two and a half minutes into Mutron, a duet by Ed Blackwell and Don Cherry recorded in 1982.
is to inhabit an architecture and its acoustic, but to inhabit as if in an approach

from outside; not only to reside in this unlivability but also to discover and enter it
Mackey, in the preface to his unbearably beautiful Splay Anthem, outlining the provenance and relationship between the books serial halves (Each was given its impetus by a piece of recorded music from which it takes its title,
the Dogon Song of the Andoumboulou, in one case, Don Cherrys [and Ed Blackwells] Mu First Part and Mu Second Part in the other) speaks of mu in relation to a circling or spiraling or ringing, this roundness or rondo linking
to the wailing that accompanies entrance into and expulsion from

sociality.
marking
socialitys ecstatic existence beyond beginning and end, ends and means, out
where one becomes interested in things, in a certain relationship between
thingliness and nothingness and blackness that plays itself out in unmapped,
unmappable, undercommon consent and consensuality. Blackness is the site
where absolute nothingness and the world of things converge. Blackness is
fantasy in the hold and Wildersons access to it is in that he is one who has
nothing and is, therefore, both more and less than one. He is the shipped. We are
the shipped, if we choose to be, if we elect to pay an unbearable cost that is
inseparable from an incalculable benefit. How would you recognize
gratuitous violence
in
The
answer, the unmasking, is mu not simply because in its imposed opposition to
something, nothing is understood simply to veil, as if some epidermal livery,
(some higher) being and is therefore relative
but because
nothing
remains unexplored, because
we dont know what we mean by it, because it is neither a category for ontology
nor for socio-phenomenological analysis. What would it be for this to be
understood in its own improper refusal of terms, from the exhausted standpoint
that is not and that is not its own?
beginning and end, and
But his speaking makes you wonder if music, which is not only music, is mobilized in the service of an eccentricity, a centrifugal force whose intimation Mackey also approaches,
the antiphonal accompaniment to
the sound that can be heard as if it were
response to that violence, the sound that must be heard as that to which such violence responds?
as opposed to what Nishida Kitaro, would call absolute;
(this paraontological interplay of blackness and nothingness, this aesthetic sociality of the shipped, this logisticality)
We attach, Fanon says, a fundamental importance to the phenomenon of language and consequently consider the study of
language essential for providing us with one element in understanding the black mans dimension of being-for-others, it being understood that to speak is to exist absolutely for the other. He says, moreover, that [t]he black
this is not simply a question of perspective, since

what we speak of is this radical being beside itself of blackness, its off to the side,
off on the inside, out from the outside imposition.
being together in homelessness,
this interplay of the refusal of what has been refused, this undercommon
appositionality, be a place from which emerges neither self-consciousness nor
knowledge of the other but an improvisation that proceeds from somewhere on
the other side of an unasked question? Not simply to be among his own; but to be
among his own in dispossession, to be among the ones who cannot own, the ones
who have nothing and who, in having nothing, have everything
man possesses two dimensions: one with his fellow Blacks, the other with the Whites. But
The standpoint, the home territory, chez lui Markmans off the mark, blind but insightful,
mistranslation is illuminative, among his own, signifying a relationality that displaces the already displaced impossibility of home. Can this
. This is the sound of an unasked question. A choir
versus acquisition, chant and moan and Sprechgesang, babel and babble and gobbledygook, relaxin by a brook or creek in Camarillo, singing to it, singing of it, singing with it, for the bird of the crooked beak, the generative
hook of le petit negre, the little niggers comic spear, the cosmic crook of language, the burnin and lootin of pidgin, Birds talk, Bobs talk, bard talk, bar talk, baby talk, B talk, preparing the minds of the little negro steelworkers
Come on, get to this hard, serial information, this brutally beautiful medley
of carceral intrication, this patterning of holds and what is held in the holds phonic
vicinity
brokenness and crumpling, the imposition of irrationally
rationalized angles, compartments bearing nothing but breath and battery in
hunted, haunted, ungendered intimacy. Is there a kind of propulsion, through
compulsion, against the mastery of ones own speed, that ruptures both recursion
and advance
for meditation.
. That spiraling Mackey speaks of suffers
? What is the sound of this patterning? What does such apposition look like? What remains of eccentricity after the relay between loss and restoration has its say or song? In the absence of
amenity, in exhaustion, theres a society of friends where everything can fold in dance to black, in being held and flown, in what was never silence. Cant you hear them whisper one anothers touch?
Poetics
Shantel Honeyghan - "Speak"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b19h3NxXQPw
"it was the silence of my presence was the most deadly"
Pat's Justice- "Innocent Criminal"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xYJ_YPB5gI&list=WL&index=2
lifes a bitch from the start thats why you come out your momma crying
and if he (god) spend me to hell, oh well, because I just spent 19 years in the
ghetto as a black male and it cant get much harder than that
what I wasnt taught in school word on the curb

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNfH41-LI4w
alternate names for black boys

BY DANEZ SMITH
1. smoke above the burning bush
2. archnemesis of summer night
3. first son of soil
4. coal awaiting spark & wind
5. guilty until proven dead
6. oil heavy starlight
7. monster until proven ghost
8. gone
9. phoenix who forgets to un-ash
10. going, going, gone
11. gods of shovels & black veils
12. what once passed for kindling
13. fireworks at dawn
14. brilliant, shadow hued coral

15. (I thought to leave this blank
but who am I to name us nothing?)
16. prayer who learned to bite & sprint
17. a mothers joy & clutched breath
Black privilege - Crystal Valentine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rYL83kHQ8Y
Black Privilege is the hung elephant swinging in the room
Is the memory of a slave ship, preying for the Alzheimers to kick in
Black Privilege is me having already memorized my nephews eulogy,
My brothers eulogy,
My fathers eulogy
My un-conceived childs eulogy
Black Privilege is me thinking my sisters name safe from this list
Black Privilege is me pretending to know Travyon Martin on a first name basis
Is me using a dead boys name to win a poetry slam
Is me carrying a mouth full of other peoples skeletons to use at my own
convenience
Black Privilege is the concrete that holds my breath better than my lungs do
Black Privilege is always having to be the strong one,
Is having a crow bar for a spine,
Is fighting, even when you have no more blood to give
Even when you have lost sight of your bones
Even when your mother prayed for you
Even after theyve prepared your body for the funeral
Black Privilege is being so unique that not even God will look like you,
Black Privilege is still being the first person in line to meet him
Black Privilege is having the same sense of humor as Jesus
Remember how he smiled on the cross?
The same way Malcolm X laughed at his bullet
And there I go again, asserting my Black Privilege, using a dead mans name
without his permission
I can feel his maggots congregating in my mouth
Black Privilege is a myth,
Is a joke, is a punchline
Is that time a teacher asked a little boy what he wanted to be when he grew up
and he said alive

Is the way she laughed and said theres no college for that
Ignorance is the only thing that wont discrimination against you,
Is the only thing that dont need a tombstone to learn your name
And its tiring, you know, for everything about my skin to be a metaphor
For everything black to be pun intended, to be death intended
Black Privilege is the applause at the end of this poem
Is me giving you a dead boys body and you giving me a ten 10
Is me being okay with that
I tired writing a love poem the other day, but my fingers wouldnt move
My skin started to blister
Like it didnt trust me any more
Like it thought Ive forsaken it for something prettier
Something smoother to wrap around my bones
Like I was trading in my noose for a pearl necklace
Some days Im afraid to look into the mirror
For fear that a bullet George Zimmerman-ed its way into my chest while I was
asleep
The breath in my mouth is weapon enough to scare a courtroom
Ill be lucky if Im alive to make it to the stand
For some people, their trials live longer than they do
Black Privilege is knowing that if I die,
At least Al Sharpton will show up to my funeral
At least Al sharpen will mason jar my mothers tears
Remind us that the only thing we are worthy of is our death
We are judged by the number of people it takes to carry our casket
Black Privilege is me think thats enough
Is me thinking this poem is enough
Black Privilege is this
Is this breath in my lungs right now
Is me
Standing right here
With a crowd full of witnesses
To my heartbeat
Dear White America Danez Smith

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSp4v294xog
I have left Earth in search of darker planets, a solar system that revolves too near
a black hole. I have left a patch of dirt in my place & many of you wont know the
difference; we are indeed the same color, one of us would eventually become the
other. You may give it my name if it makes you feel better while running your
hands through its soiled scalp. I have left Earth in search of a new God. I do not
trust the God you have given us. My grandmothers hallelujah is only outdone by
the fear she nurses every time the blood-fat summer swallows another child who
used to sing in the choir. Take your God back, though his songs are beautiful, his
miracles are inconsistent. I want the fate of Lazarus for Renisha, I want Chucky,
Bo, Meech, Trayvon, Sean & Jonylah risen three days after their entombing, their
ghost re-gifted flesh & blood, their flesh & blood re-gifted their children. I have left
Earth, I am equal parts sick of your go back to Africa as I am your I just dont see
color (neither did the poplar tree). We did not build your boats (though we did
leave a trail of kin to guide us home). We did not build your prisons (though we did
& we fill them too). We did not ask to be part of your America (though are we not
America? Her joints brittle & dragging a ripped gown through Oakland?). I cant
stand your ground. I am sick of calling your recklessness the law. Each night, I
count my brothers. & in the morning, when some do not survive to be counted, I
count the holes they leave. I reach for black folks & touch only air. Your master
magic trick, America. Now hes breathing, now he dont. Abra-cadaver. White
bread voodoo. This systemic sorcery you claim not to practice, but have no
problem benefitting from. I tried, white people. I tried to love you, but you spent
my brothers funeral making plans for brunch, talking too loud next to his bones.
You interrupted my black veiled mourning with some mess about an article you
read on Buzzfeed. You took one look at the river, plump with the body of boy after
boy after boy & asked why does it always have to be about race? Because you
made it so! Because you put an asterisk on my sisters gorgeous face! Because
you call her pretty (for a black girl)! Because black girls go missing without so
much as a whisper of where?! Because there is no Amber Alert for the Amber
Skinned Girls! Because our heroes always end up shot or shootin-up! Because we
didnt invent the bullet! Because crack was not our recipe! Because Jordan
boomed. Because Emmitt whistled. Because Huey P. spoke. Because Martin
preached. Because black boys can always be too loud to live. Because this land is
scared of the Black mind. Because they have sold the Black body & appropriated
Soul. Because its taken my fathers time, my mothers time, my uncles time, my
brothers & my sisters time, my nieces & my nephews time how much time do
you want for your progress? I have left Earth to find a land where my kin can be
safe. I will not rest until black people aint but people the same color as the good,
wet earth, until that means something, until our existence isnt up for debate, until
it is honored & blessed & loved & left alone, until then I bid you well, I bid you war,
I bid you our lives to gamble with no more. I have left Earth & I am touching
everything you beg your telescopes to show you. I am giving the stars their right
names. & this life, this new story & history you cannot own or ruin
This, if only this one, is ours.
When a Black Man Walks Neiel Israel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsC0Li4S6LQ
There are prayers in a black mans walk. Dont let them shoot me down where
Im standing
How to Survive Being a Black Girl Raven Taylor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3Dfav7Ysv0
remember your backbone, put the bass in your voice and tell him no
you taste sweet on everyones lips but theyll still try to whitewash you down
remember that when you are a black girl, every day that you exist in your body
without apologizing is activism
Poetics solve
Rosenbergs description of first entering the control unit at Lexington challenges any notion that the control unit was exceptional:
As I looked down the hallway, my mind filled up with images of other places that were centers of human suffering: death rows in
Huntsville, Angola, and Comstock; white cells and dead wings in West Germany where captured enemies of the state experience
the severest effects of isolation; the torture center on Robbin Island in South Africa and the La Libertad in Uruguay. All these
images rose and fell, my ideas and goals my whole lifepassed before me. I began to disassociate from myself.520 Rosenbergs
writing has profound implications for how we think about incarceration under the war on terror. Instead of beginning a critique
of Guantnamo from the post- September 11th moment, Rosenbergs writing forces a retheorization of the genealogy of power
that makes Guantnamo possible. She situates the forms of legal violence at Lexington within a more expansive imaginary of
carceral technologies across time and space. For Rosenberg, Lexington existed on a transnational continuum, a continuum she
Rosenberg is part of a
genealogy of thought I have been exploring throughout Fugitive Life. When
Lexington was shut down, Rosenberg and others insisted it wasnt a victory
signifying the end of the era of the control unitinstead they warned that the
control unit was a new norm, one that would expand and intensify. Indeed, what has
changed in the last few decades is not the powers that make incarceration
possible, but rather the magnitude of the control unit as a model of human
incapacitation. In the above passage, Rosenberg describes entering the unit as a
type of deathher life passed before her eyes, she lost her sense of self, she was
alive but nowhere at all. Yet, as she insists throughout her memoir and other writings, she wasnt living a death in
life outside the law, she was dead within the law, killed by its banality. This understanding forces a
reconsideration of how to end the violence of incarceration inside the United
has since placed Guantnamo within since Lexington has become standard.521 In this way,
States and beyond. Throughout Precarious Life, Butler argues that the solution to the execution of state violence and
terror at Guantnamo is to expand the category of the human. For Butler, if exceptional lawlessness and illegitimate power are to
continue, we will fail to radically redistribute rights of recognition governing who may be treated according to the standards that
ought to govern the treatment of humans. We have yet to become human, it seems, and now that prospect seems even more
radically imperiled, if not, for the time being, indefinitely foreclosed.522 For Butler, if some lives are subjected to pain and death
because they are not recognized as human, then the optics of recognition must be expanded to envelope more lives within the
safety and security of the human and human rights. But the prison arose out of calls for humanity; it is a product of reform,
designed to be humane, to recognize the humanity of its captives. The call for human rights seeks to humanize subjects through
the very law that has rendered them dead. People in prison are not beyond the safety and security of the embrace of the law
they are deadened by it.523 Indeed, if the prison was built as a monument of humanity (to be more human in contrast to the
barbarity of the Middle Ages), but still produces sexual violence, living, social, civil, and biological death on a massive scale, it is
not enough to expand the human. Indeed, that is how the prison came into being the first place. We can turn to a poem written by
an anonymous detainee at Guantnamo to consider the politics that emerge from spaces of social death. In O Prison Darkness
the author/captive who goes by the name Abulaziz writes: O prison darkness, pitch your tent. We love the darkness. For after
the dark hours of night, Prides dawn will rise. Let the world, with all its bliss, fade away So long as we find favor with God. A boy
may despair in the face of a problem, But we know God has a design. Even though the bands tighten and seem unbreakable,
Those who keep knocking shall gain entry. O

crisis, intensify! The morning is about to break forth.524 If we follow the
metaphors of the poem, unlike Butlers call to shine the light of humanity onto the
figure of the prisoner thereby saving her from the terror of the night, Abulaziz
embraces the darkness, invites it in, and learns to love it. This logic embodies what Avery Gordon
They will shatter. Those who persist will attain their goal;
calls the prisoners curse. As Gordon writes, The curse delivers to you a vision of your own deathly existence laid bare
because [t]he prisoners fate is always bound up with those of us who are not yet captured, regardless of whether this relation is
acknowledged.525 Indeed, Abulaziz does not just invite the prisons violence to expand; he hopes it possesses the world,
taking away bliss and contentment. The prisoners curse, for Gordon, is a type of subjugated knowledge that can alter the course
of events. The prisoners curse can send reality reeling in a direction no one expected, sending the time of progress to
unimaginable places.
It is a way of ensuring that regardless of whether anyone is

listening, no one will ever forget that your world is dead.526 There is a politics of
temporality embedded in the poem by Abulaziz. Like Rosenbergs anticipatory assertion twenty
years ago that Lexington was only the beginning of something that was coming, Abulaziz sees the crisis of Guantnamo
Abulaziz knows that the

social death of the prisoner is not just a lesson about the prison; it is also a lesson
for the rest of us, the ones who imagine we are alive, the ones who sometimes
feel freedom where there is only the prison. O crisis, intensify! The morning is
about to break forth.
intensifying. More so, he desires its intensification and accumulation. Like Rosenberg,
Refusal of Order
Our refusal of their call to order is how we have spill over
because that disorder will continue when we leave
Halberstam, 13 (Judith Halberstam, also known as Jack Halberstam, is the
Professor of English and Director of The Center for Feminist Research at University
of Southern California. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study:
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten)
The path to the wild beyond is paved with refusal. In The Undercommons if we
begin anywhere, we begin with the right to refuse what has been refused to you.
Citing Gayatri Spivak, Moten and Harney call this refusal the "first right" and it is a
game-changing kind of refusal in that it signals the refusal of the choices as
offered. We can understand this refusal in terms that Chandan Reddy lays out in
Freedom With Violence (2011) - for Reddy, gay marriage is the option that cannot
be opposed in the ballot box. While we can circulate multiple critiques of gay
marriage in terms of its institutionalization of intimacy, when you arrive at the
ballot box, pen in hand, you only get to check "yes" or "no" and the no, in this
case, could be more damning than the yes. And so, you must refuse the choice as
offered. Moten and Harney also study what it would mean to refuse what they
term "the call to order." And what would it mean, furthermore, to refuse to call
others to order, to refuse interpellation and the reinstantiation of the law. When
we refuse, Moten and Harney suggest, we create dissonance and more
importantly, we allow dissonance to continue - when we enter a classroom and we
refuse to call it to order, we are allowing study to continue, dissonant study
perhaps, disorganized study, but study that precedes our call and will continue
after we have left the room. Or, when we listen to music, we must refuse the idea
that music happens only when the musician enters and picks up an instrument;
music is also the anticipation of the performance and the noises of appreciation it
generates and the speaking that happens through and around it, making it and
loving it, being in it while listening. And so, when we refuse the call to order - the
teacher picking up the book, the conductor raising his baton, the speaker asking
for silence, the torturer tightening the noose - we refuse order as the distinction
between noise and music, chatter and knowledge, pain and truth.
Case Blocks
A2 Resistance/Opposition Fails**
They missed the mark it is not that resistance must be
oppositional but rather, appositionalblack life itself, as
fugitive and unknowable, functions to disrupt and haunt the
oppressor through life within death
ProjectMUSE, IC)
While Fanon would consider the zealous worker in a colonial regime a
quintessentially pathological case, remember that it is in resistance to colonial
oppression that the cases of psychopathology with which Fanon is concerned in
The Wretched of the Earthin particular, those psychosomatic or cortico-visceral
disordersemerge. Whats at stake is Fanons ongoing ambivalence toward the
supposedly pathological. At the same time, ambivalence is itself the mark of the
pathological. Watch Fanon prefiguratively describe and diagnose the pathological
ambivalence that he performs:
The combat waged by a people for their liberation leads them, depending on the
circumstances, either to reject or to explode the so-called truths sown in their
consciousness by the colonial regime, military occupation, and economic
exploitation. And only the armed struggle can effectively exorcise these lies about
man that subordinate and literally mutilate the more conscious-minded among us.
How many times in Paris or Aix, in Algiers or Basse-Terre have we seen the
colonized vehemently protest the so-called indolence of the black, the Algerian,
the Vietnamese? And yet in a colonial regime if a fellah were a zealous worker or a
black were to refuse a break from work, they would be quite simply considered
pathological cases. The colonizeds indolence is a conscious way of sabotaging the
colonial machine; on the biological level it is a remarkable system of selfpreservation and, if nothing else, is a positive curb on the occupiers stranglehold
over the entire country. (220)
Is it fair to say that one detects in this text a certain indolence sown or sewn into
it? Perhaps, on the other hand, its flaws are more accurately described as
pathological. To be conscious-minded is aligned with subordination, even
mutilation; the self-consciousness of the colonized is figured as a kind of wound at
the same time that it is also aligned with wounding, with armed struggle that is
somehow predicated on that which it makes possible namely, the explosion of
so-called truths planted or woven into the consciousness of the conscious-minded
ones. They are the ones who are given the task of repairing (the truth) of man
[humanity]; they are the ones who would heal by way of explosion, excision, or
exorcism. This moment of self-conscious selfdescription is sewn into Fanons text
like a depth charge. However, authentic upheaval is ultimately figured not as an
eruption of the unconscious in the conscious-minded but as that conscious mode
of sabotage carried out every dayin and as what had been relegated, by the
conscious-minded, to the status of impossible, pathological socialityby the ones
who are not, or are not yet, conscious. Healing wounds are inflicted, in other
words, by the ones who are not conscious of their wounds and whose wounds are
not redoubled by such consciousness. Healing wounds are inflicted appositionally,
in small, quotidian refusals to act that make them subject to charges of
pathological indolence. Often the conscious ones, who have taken it upon
themselves to defend the colonized against such charges, levy those charges with
the greatest vehemence. If Fanon fails to take great pains to chart the tortured
career of rehabilitative injury, it is perhaps a conscious decision to sabotage his
own text insofar as it has been sown with those so-called truths that obscure the
truth of man.
This black operation that Fanon performs on his own text gives the lie to his own
formulations. So when Fanon claims, The duty of the colonized subject, who has
not yet arrived at a political consciousness or a decision to reject the oppressor, is
to have the slightest effort literally dragged out of him, the question that
emerges is why one who is supposed yet to have arrived at political
consciousness, one who must be dragged up out of the pit, would have such a
duty (220). This, in turn, raises the more fundamental issue, embedded in this
very assertion of duty, of the impossibility of such non-arrival. The failure to arrive
at a political consciousness is a general pathology suffered by the ones who take
their political consciousness with them on whatever fugitive, aleatory journey they
are making. They will have already arrived; they will have already been there.
They will have carried something with them before whatever violent manufacture,
whatever constitutive shattering is supposed to have called them into being. While
noncooperation is figured by Fanon as a kind of staging area for or a preliminary
version of a more authentic objectifying encounter with colonial oppression (a
kind of counter-representational response to powers interpellative call), his own
formulations regarding that response point to the requirement of a kind of thingly
quickening that makes opposition possible while appositionally displacing it.
Noncooperation is a duty that must be carried out by the ones who exist in the
nearness and distance between political consciousness and absolute pathology.
But this duty, imposed by an erstwhile subject who clearly is supposed to know,
overlooks (or, perhaps more precisely, looks away from) that vast range of
nonreactive disruptions of rule that are, in early and late Fanon, both indexed and
disqualified. Such disruptions, often manifest as minor internal conflicts (within the
closed circle, say, of Algerian criminality, in which the colonized tend to use each
other as a screen) or muscular contractions, however much they are captured,
enveloped, imitated, or traded, remain inassimilable (231). These disruptions
trouble the rehabilitation of the human even as they are evidence of the capacity
to enact such rehabilitation. Moreover, it is at this point, in passages that
culminate with the apposition of what Fanon refers to as the reality of the
towelhead with the reality of the nigger, that the fact, the case, and the
lived experience of blacknesswhich might be understood here as the troubling of
and the capacity for the rehabilitation of the humanconverge as a duty to
appose the oppressor, to refrain from a certain performance of the labor of the
negative, to avoid his economy of objectification and standing against, to run
away from the snares of recognition (220). This refusal is a black thing, is that
which Fanon carries with(in) himself, and in how he carries himself, from
Martinique to France to Algeria. He is an anticolonial smuggler whose wares are
constituted by and as the dislocation of black social life that he carries, almost
unaware. In Fanon, blackness is transversality between things, escaping (by way
of) distant, spooky actions; it is translational effect and affect, transmission
between cases, and could be understood, in terms Brent Hayes Edwards
establishes, as diasporic practice.28 This is what he carries with him, as the
imagining thing that he cannot quite imagine and cannot quite control, in his
pathologizing description of it that itthat hedefies. A fugitive cant moves
through Fanon, erupting out of regulatory disavowal. His claim upon this
criminality was interdicted. But perhaps only the dead can strive for the
quickening power that animates what has been relegated to the pathological.
Perhaps the dead are alive and escaping. Perhaps ontology is best understood as
the imagination of this escape as a kind of social gathering; as undercommon
plainsong and dance; as the fugitive, centrifugal word; as the words autointerruptive, auto-illuminative shade/s. Seen in this light, black(ness) is, in the
dispossessive richness of its colors, beautiful.
Fugitivity emerges not in radical acts of resistance, but

rather, in quotidian yet ubiquitous ruptures in the ordinary
our resistance through the play of language functions to
nurture a stolen life
If the distinction between the surface of a discursive event and the depth of its
meaning is constitutive for modern thought, then the reduction of (phonic)
materiality is modern thoughts most fundamental protocol, an ordinance that
protects the exclusionary universality of a totality that cannot stand, in its
orderedness, in the face of the rough non-sense or extra-sensethe nonreduction
of sense that is more than senseof the surface in its ordinary serrations. It is no
accident that irruptions on the surface of the event, that irruption as (the surface
of) the event, will have constituted the severest challenge to that Kantian notion
of freedom that depends upon smooth containment. The Romanticism of the black
radical tradition, if you will, is at issue here, and, as I hope to show, both are
played outin and as surface, in and as irruptive, uncontainable, fugitive, phonic
materialityon the plain of the ordinary. One way to think of that plain or field is
as the domain of J. L. Austin (1975), whose work was devoted to the proposition
that the proper object and methodological apparatus for philosophy was ordinary
languagethe material, as it were, of everyday discursive events or, in his
parlance, speech acts. However, when Austin sets out on the path toward a
general theory of language, he moves along lines determined by the paradigmatic
opposition of material surface and semantic depth. Austin anticipates the
enterprise of deconstruction in his comportment towards the critique of what he
calls false alternatives; but, like Jacques Derrida after him and Ferdinand de
Saussure before him, the desire for universality in language and in the theory of
language requires the reduction of phonic substance (in Saussures terms) or the
dismissal of the merely phonetic (in Austins). Still, Austins anticipation of
deconstruction comes upon an effect that, perhaps efficaciously, is never fully
crystallized as method. He submits his own work (his own logical direction, his own
diegetic comportment) to that effecta liberating cascade of breakdowns in which
linguistic categories are cut by the everyday events of speech so that, within the
plain of the ordinary, the distinctions between words and gestures and between
words and sounds emerge and recede in order to let us know that the
extraordinary is the always surprising path through the ordinary that is made by
way of the montagic, transversal sequencing of events. That sequence is, in turn,
structured by the logic of the surprising, multiple singularity of the eventthat it is
unprecedented, that it is infused with the plexed singularity of its fellows. The
event in question is the criminal, repeating head of a step aside; the object at
hand is the lawless choreophonography of stolen light, stolen life. Such movement
in sound and light, such dispossessed and dispossessive fugitivity, in its very
anticipation of the regulative and disciplinary powers to which it responds,
reminds us, along with Foucault, that It is not that life has been totally integrated
into techniques that govern and administer it; it constantly escapes them.
(Foucault 1978, 143)
A2 Aff Fails bc Backlash

Surveillance inevitably marks black bodies as suspects and
fugitives but that doesnt prevent meaningful possibilities for
resistance within confinement
Goffman, 14 Sociology Prof @ UW-Madison, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an
American City, p 7-8 BR
The first chapters of the book concern the dirty world: the young men spending
their teens and early twenties running from the police, going in and out of jail, and
attempting to complete probation and parole sentences. These chapters reflect
my attempt to understand this world through the eyes of Mike and Chuck and their
friendsyoung men living with the daily fear of capture and confinement. Because
the reach of the penal system goes beyond the young men who are its main
targets, later chapters take up the perspective of girlfriends and mothers caught
between the police and the men in their lives; of young people who have found
innovative ways to profit from the legal misfortunes of their neighbors; and finally
of neighborhood residents who have managed to steer clear of the penal system
and those enmeshed therein. The appendix recounts the research on which this
work is based, along with some personal reflection about the practical and ethical
dilemmas of a middle-class white young woman reporting on the experiences of
poor Black young men and women. Together, the chapters make the case that
historically high imprisonment rates and the intensive policing and surveillance
that have accompanied them are transforming poor Black neighborhoods into
communities of suspects and fugitives. A climate of fear and suspicion pervades
everyday life, and many residents live with the daily concern that the authorities
will seize them and take them away. A new social fabric is emerging under the
threat of confinement: one woven in suspicion, distrust, and the paranoiac
practices of secrecy, evasion, and unpredictability. Still, neighborhood residents
are carving out a meaningful life for themselves betwixt and between the police
stops and probation meetings. The scope of punishment and surveillance does not
prevent them from constructing a moral world in which they can find dignity and
honor; and the struggles of young men and women to negotiate work, family,
romance, and friendship in this hyper-policed zone, under threat of confinement,
constitute as much of the story as the late-night raids or full-body searches.
A2 Cant Abolish Prisons
The neoliberal narrative is described as the home of the

free, but is rather an extension of the prisonit connects
the powers of market under slavery to the powers of the
market under neoliberalismembracing fugitivity is key
prison is not that much
different from the streetFor many cells are not that different from the
tenementsand the welfare hotels they live in on the streetThe fights are the
same except they are less dangerous. The police are the same. The poverty is the
same. The alienation is the same. The racism is the same. The sexism is the
same. The drugs are the same and the system is the same. 24 For Shakur, the regulations
of a burgeoning neoliberal-carceral state possessed life in ways that rendered the
free world an extension of the prison. An assemblage of race, gender, capital,
policing, and penal technologies produced a symbiosis between the deindustrialized landscape of the late 20th century urban United States and the
gendered racisms of an emerging prison-industrial complex. Diffuse structural networks of racism and sexism
In her 1978 essay Women in Prison: How We Are, Black Liberation Army member Assata Shakur wrote: For many,
mimicked the steel bars of a cage. This is the complicity between freedom and captivity, the entanglements between t he living and the living dead, and the hemorrhaging of a
buried past into the imagined progress of the present. For Shakur, prison looked like and felt like nineteenth century chattel slavery: We sit in the bull pen. We are all black. All
restless. And we are all freezing.25 In the essay, affect continually forces the past to open directly onto the present.26 The sensations and feelings of frozen skin speaks in a way
that words cannot. In prison, shivering black flesh weighted with chains looked like slavery to Shakur. As a fugitive who now has political asylum in Cuba, she understands herself as
Shakurs essay does not name neoliberalism explicitly, we can read it as a black feminist
theorization of neoliberalism at the very moment of its emergence. Indeed, it is a narration of the drastic racialized and
gendered restructurings of social and economic life in the 1970s United States
from the perspective of someone detained for resisting those changes . Written by a captured
a twenty-first century runaway slave, a maroon woman.27 Although
member of the underground black liberation movement, the text names the discourses and (state) violence neoliberalism requires yet erases. Neoliberalism is most certainly an
economic doctrine that prioritizes the mobility and expansion of capital at all costs, but its mechanisms exceed the liberation of the market from the repression of the state. As
Shakur indicates, one of the conditions of possibility for the emergence of the neoliberal state is the kinship shared between the free world and the prisonan affinity structured and
Shakur argues throughout the essay, the

technologies of immobilization utilized by the neoliberal state specifically target
black women, a process connected to the emergence of the black feminist
movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s . By reading black feminist texts from the 1970s as implicit theories of
produced by an anti- blackness inaugurated under chattel-slavery. More over, as
neoliberalism, we can come to understand the formation and implementation of neoliberalism in a new light. Shakur not only connects an emergent neoliberalism to a rapidly
expanding prison regime, she also links the contemporary prison to chattel slaveryan institutional, affective, and discursive connection apprehended by Angela Daviss phrase,
From the prison of slavery to the slavery of prison.28 The connections made by Shakur between the prison and neoliberalism, and between slavery and the prison, have been
thoroughly explored by many scholars.29 Indeed, during the past two decades, a growing body of scholarship has affirmed and extended Shakurs analysis of blackness, slavery, and
the prison by exploring what Saidiya Hartman calls the afterlife of slavery.30 By centering racial terror in a genealogy of the prison, scholars have come to understand the
barracoons, coffles, slave holds, and plantations of the Middle Passage as spatial, discursive, ontological, and economic analogues of modern punishment that have haunted their
way into the present.31 If the carceral becomes a functional surrogate for slaverys production of social and living death, then Shakurs text also hints at another connection that has
garnered less attentionslaverys haunting possession of neoliberalism. While the prisons connection to slavery and the market has been well explored, the contemporary markets
relationship to chattel slavery has largely been overlooked. If slaverys anti- black technologies inhabit and structure the prison, how do they live on in the operations of the market?
What is the relationship between an anti-blackness inaugurated under the Atlantic slave trade and the methods of population management used under neoliberalism? How does the
absence, death, and loss left behind by slavery connect to the formation of the contemporary neoliberal-carceral state? What is the connection between the necropolitics of chattelslavery and the biopolitics of neoliberalism? To answer these questions, I read two texts written by captive black women in the 1970s United States: Assata Shakurs "Women in
Prison: How We Are and Angela Davis's "Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves." Both texts were composed at the very m oment of the neoliberalcarceral states emergence and index the ways that black feminism developed under and critiqued this formation. Throughout the chapter, I examine how Shakur and Davis theorize
the relationship between the carceral, the market, the population, and the body. While Daviss essay explores black womens experiences of terror and resistance under chattel
slavery in order to contest the discourse of the black matriarch, Shakurs essay describes black womens experiences of gender, sexuality, race, violence, and incarceration in the
early 1970s. I also include a discussion of Sherley Anne Williamss 1986 novel Dessa Rose. Although the novel was written in the mid-1980s, in the author's note, Williams cites
Davis's essayand the rise of the prison in the 1970sas providing the inspiration for the novel. Williams uses fiction to recover the histories of enslaved black women Davis could
not discover in the written record. Williams turns Davis's brief description of a uprising on a slave coffle led by a pregnant black woman into a novel that theorizes the racialized,
gendered, affective, and economic politics of chattel slavery and its regimes of incarceration, torture, and terror. All three texts emerge from the late twentieth-century prison (and
Yet the texts do not undo

normative conceptions of time by deploying the conventions of fact; rather, they
an emergent neoliberal state) in order to theorize chattel slavery as a history of our social, political, and economic present.
use fiction, memory, and imagination to connect the forgotten, the lost, and the
dead to the now. These texts insist that the absence of memory shapes the contours of the present. While many projects on the legacy of slavery utilize
demographic data to measure slaverys extension into our present in concrete terms, I attempt to engage the past through its forgetting. I leave behind the world of facts, proof,
and Truth in order to connect the powers of the market across time and space through non-normative epistemologies that rely on affect, memory, and imagination. As a matter of
fact, it was the reason and rationality of mathematics, demographics, and insurance that produced millions of corpses in the service of making millions of commodities. To be clear,
it connects the powers of market under slavery to powers of the

market under neoliberalism by exploring how black feminists made sense of the
afterlife of slavery under an emergent neoliberal state . Second, it uses black
feminist engagements with loss, to assert that death and loss undo to the
progress of time so that the past lives on, and possesses the present . By engaging death, loss, and
this chapter has three goals. First,
forgetting, the texts I analyze connect penal and economic technologies in the 1970s United States to the carceral nature of the market under chattel slavery. Finally, by constructing
a critical genealogy of the market through the writings of black feminists working within and under the neoliberal-carceral state, I argue that under neoliberalism, the market
supplements and mimics the prison.
A2 Cant Escape
**note also in SFugitivity
Fugitivity arises out of the inadequacy of society in its
attempts to calculate and enframe blacknesswhile
blackness is constitutive of societal relations and is alwaysalready criminal, it doesnt bar the creation of undercommon
spaces of disorder
ProjectMUSE, IC)
So Im interested in how the ones who inhabit the nearness and distance between
Dasein and things (which is off to the side of what lies between subjects and
objects), the ones who are attained or accumulated unto death even as they are
always escaping the Hegelian positioning of the bondsman, are perhaps best
understood as the extra-ontological, extra-political constanta destructive,
healing agent; a stolen, transplanted organ always eliciting rejection; a salve
whose soothing lies in the abrasive penetration of the merely typical; an
ensemble always operating in excess of that ancient juridical formulation of the
thing (Ding), to which Kant subscribes, as that to which nothing can be imputed,
the impure, degraded, manufactured (in) human who moves only in response to
inclination, whose reflexes lose the name of action. At the same time, this
dangerous supplement, as the fact out of which everything else emerges, is
constitutive. It seems to me that this special ontic-ontological fugitivity of/in the
slave is what is revealed as the necessarily unaccounted for in Fanon. So that in
contradistinction to Fanons protest, the problem of the inadequacy of any
ontology to blackness, to that mode of being for which escape or apposition and
not the objectifying encounter with otherness is the prime modality, must be
understood in its relation to the inadequacy of calculation to being in general.
Moreover, the brutal history of criminalization in public policy, and at the
intersection of biological, psychological, and sociological discourse, ought not
obscure the already existing ontic-ontological criminality of/as blackness. Rather,
blackness needs to be understood as operating at the nexus of the social and the
ontological, the historical and the essential. Indeed, as the ontological is moving
within the corrosive increase that the ontic instantiates, it must be understood
that what is now meant by ontological requires special elucidation. What is
inadequate to blackness is already given ontologies. The lived experienced of
blackness is, among other things, a constant demand for an ontology of disorder,
an ontology of dehiscence, a para-ontology whose comportment will have been
(toward) the ontic or existential field of things and events. That ontology will have
had to have operated as a general critique of calculation even as it gathers
diaspora as an open setor as an openness disruptive of the very idea of setof
accumulative and unaccumulable differences, differings, departures without

origin, leavings that continually defy the natal occasion in general even as they
constantly bespeak the previous. This is a Nathaniel Mackey formulation whose
full implications will have never been fully explorable.12 What Fanons
pathontological refusal of blackness leaves unclaimed is an irremediable
homelessness common to the colonized, the enslaved, and the enclosed. This is
to say that what is claimed in the name of blackness is an undercommon disorder
that has always been there, that is retrospectively and retroactively located there,
that is embraced by the ones who stay there while living somewhere else. Some
folks relish being a problem. As Amiri Baraka and Nikhil Pal Singh (almost) say,
Black(ness) is a country (and a sex) (that is not one).13 Stolen life disorders
positive value just as surely as it is not equivalent to social death or absolute
dereliction.
So if we cannot simply give an account of things that, in the very fugitivity and
impossibility that is the essence of their existence, resist accounting, how do we
speak of the lived experience of the black? What limits are placed on such
speaking when it comes from the position of the black, but also what constraints
are placed on the very concept of lived experience, particularly in its relation to
the black when black social life is interdicted? Note that the interdiction exists not
only as a function of what might be broadly understood as policy but also as a
function of an epistemological consensus broad enough to include Fanon, on the
one hand, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, on the otherencompassing formulations
that might be said not only to characterize but also to initiate and continually reinitialize the philosophy of the human sciences. In other words, the notion that
there is no black social life is part of a set of variations on a theme that include
assertions of the irreducible pathology of black social life and the implication that
(non-pathological) social life is what emerges by way of the exclusion of the black
or, more precisely, of blackness. But what are we to make of the pathological
here? What are the implications of a social life that, on the one hand, is not what
it is and, on the other hand, is irreducible to what it is used for? This discordant
echo of one of Theodor W. Adornos most infamous assertions about jazz implies
that black social life reconstitutes the music that is its phonographic.14 That
music, which Miles Davis calls social music, to which Adorno and Fanon gave
only severe and partial hearing, is of interdicted black social life operating on
frequencies that are disavowedthough they are also amplifiedin the interplay
of sociopathological and phenomenological description. How can we fathom a
social life that tends toward death, that enacts a kind of being-toward-death, and
which, because of such tendency and enactment, maintains a terribly beautiful
vitality? Deeper still, what are we to make of the fact of a sociality that emerges
when lived experience is distinguished from fact, in the fact of life that is implied
in the very phenomenological gesture/analysis within which Fanon asserts black
social life as, in all but the most minor ways, impossible? How is it that the off
harmony of life, sociality, and blackness is the condition of possibility of the claim
that there is no black social life? Does black life, in its irreducible and impossible
sociality and precisely in what might be understood as its refusal of the status of
social life that is refused it, constitute a fundamental dangeran excluded but
immanent disruptionto social life? What will it have meant to embrace this
matrix of im/possibility, to have spoken of and out of this suspension? What would
it mean to dwell on or in minor social life? This set of questions is imposed upon
us by Fanon. At the same time, and in a way that is articulated most clearly and
famously by W. E. B. Du Bois, this set of questions is the position, which is also to
say the problem, of blackness.
A2 Didnt Interpret Poems

Poetry does not impose a particular meaning, but opens up
space for multiple potential interpretations
Fernando 10 --- Jean Baudrillard Fellow at the European Graduate School, Research Fellow at the
Centre for Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
(Jeremy, The Suicide Bomber; and her gift of death, ATROPOS PRESS, pg 170-171)//RAW
whenever there is a statement of relationality, one can never fully legitimise

this relationality, not because there is a subjective bias in making the statement I want there to be a
Hence,
relationality so there will be one' but as there is always already an unknowability within this very relationality.
This is a structural assumption, a structural condition. And it is this very assumption that both allows the
statement of relationality to be made, and which also never allows the statement to be fully legitimate. It is for
a descriptive statement, one that never reaches the

status of a definition, and is never a definitive statement. Hence, ______ is like ______ is a
claim. In fact, one can no longer even discern whether the claim made is true or false
as such one can no longer differentiate whether it is a performative or a
constative statement as there is no external referent. Referentiality is precisely the assumed relationality
this reason that "______ is like ______" is
of language itself. In this we find an echo of Paul Celan, who on March 26, 1969, wrote this about poetry: "La
posis ne s'impose plus, elle s'expose" (Poetry
does not impose, it exposes itself).20 Perhaps

then, relationality can at best only be a poetic relationality; one that does not impose a frame,
impose a particular meaning, does not efface the singularity of the relationality,
but instead only seeks to be open, exposes itself, to the potentiality of
relationality.
Poetry eludes capture an (enigmatic) gift

The poet, irremediably split between exaltation and vulgarity, between the autonomy that produces the
concept within intuition and the foolish earthly being, functions as a contaminant for philosophy
a being who since Plato, has been trying to read and master an eviction notice
served by philosophy. The poet as genius continues to threaten and fascinate, menacing the philosopher
with the beyond of knowledge. Philosophy cringes. If we recall the words of Paul Cenan, the words that we turned
to earlier, that of poetry
does not impose itself, it exposes itself , ones instinctive reaction

the question expose itself to
the thought that comes to mind without thinking, without knowing is
what? Whilst it is easy, too easy, to dismiss a nave question like that, it would be to our detriment if we
choose not to attend it, not to attend a possibility that sometimes lies in the simplest of questions, the silly
questions, as it were. After all, if one exposes oneself, it can only be so if there was something, or someone to
expose oneself to. There has to be a witness to the exposure, otherwise there would not be one at all. Hence,
exposure is always a state of establishing a relationality with another .
It is not a relationality that

seeks to impose a particular, single, meaning, reading upon another. And this is why
poetry continues to menace the philosopher with the beyond of knowledge;
without an imposition, the borders are not drawn, the limits are not set . And whilst not
forgetting the registers that Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida opened earlier yes there are only always rules to
the lack of a boundary

also always opens more possibilities than we can account for . One may not even be
seeing, and we are always already in grammar, always bounded by grammar
all accounting systems which are set up to predict,

to control, via graphs, curves, probabilities fail. Whilst exposing itself, and hence, opening
overstating if one claims that at this point,
itself to response, any response, poetry always risks what it cannot avoid appealing to in reply, namely,
recompense and retribution. It risks the exchange that it might expect but is at the same time unable to count
Once the poem is sent off, set off, one can only hope for a response. In fact,
one always gets a response; even a non-response, a complete ignoring of the
poem, is a form of response. It is just that one can never know what kind of response one is going to
on.
get. Once the poem is set of, the poet remains completely blind to its effects. Once the bomb is set off, the
suicide bomber s completely blind to its effects. It is probably of no coincidence that the suicide bomber is
usually constituted as one who is completely irrational, cast as a complete idiot; the most common question
heard whenever there is an instance of a suicide bombing is why would one give up her life when she has so
All attempts to provide an answer to the question are banal, as the very
person that the answer attempt to address is dead; hence all answers are unverifiable. One has no choice
but to admit that all reason eludes, escapes, is beyond one, is beyond the limits of
ones cognition, is at the beyond of knowledge . Perhaps the only thing we can say is that she
much to live for?
gives up her life in spite of the fact that she has so much to live for; after all, it is she who chooses to do so.
Whilst this does not provide any answer to the question, provide any comfort that we finally understand her, this
enigma that is her gift to us. It is the

refusal to be understood, to be subsumed under any existing conception, to be
flattened, exchanged, reproduced, that is her gift. And in that same spirit, it is not a gift
that can be understood this is not a gift that one can bring to the return-counter
at the shop, to be exchanged for something else, something more palatable,
something easier, something more comfortable, more comforting. This is a gift
that is unknowable, in full potential, always possible ; perhaps always a gift that is to come.
is all we can say. Perhaps it is the fact that she remains an
What continues to trouble us is that this gift as with all gifts comes with an obligation to reciprocate, an
obligation to respond. So even though this is an objectless gift and to compound it a gift that we might not
even begin to comprehend, or even know is present we are always already within the realm of reciprocation.
This is the point where the eternal question of the serpent, that of what did she
mean, returns to haunt us, along with the other question of responding, and attempting an appropriate
response at that; the question of Lenin, that of what is to be done? If we attempt the question of Lenin, that of
what is to be done? If we attempt to answer the question, to provide a prescription, then we are back to the
situation of effacement. Perhaps then the task that we are faced with is that of reconstituting Lenin in and within
a situation. If the question of what is to be done is a situational question, there can be no answer outside of the
situation at the point of uttering both the question and the answer, we are always immanent to the story, in the
making, even when we are the ones telling the story to the other and more than that, each answer is at best a
provisional answer. However, the fact that one can even attempt an answer suggests that at least momentarily,
each answer,
each definition to the question can only be accomplished as a more or less
provisory, more or less violent arresting of a dynamic that is interminable, but
never simply interminable or infinite. For a dynamic such as this can only be conceived
as a series of highly conflictual determinations, as a movement of ambivalence, in which the
other is always being seized as a function of the same, all the while eluding this capture . The
other becomes the intimate condition of the possibility of the game, remaining all
the while out of bounds.
one must be able to step back as it were, be exterior to the question, to situation. Hence,
A2 Disconnected Narrative
The aesthetics of fugitivity is a refusal of convention in
favor of lived experienceit is through the refusal to be
limited that black writing can strive for liberation and
consciousness that transcends temporality
Bradley, Emory assistant professor, and Marassa, Duke
graduate student, 2014 (Rizvana and Damien-Adia, Awakening to the
World: Relation, Totality, and Writing from Below, Discourse, Vol. 36, No. 1, Winter
Black writing, in the example of the slave narrative and Baquaquas general
exemplification of its complex registers, thus demonstrates the ways in which
black writing proceeds toward liberation through fugitivity rather than
transparency and mastery. Hortense Spillers has asserted that black writers,
whatever their location . . . , retool the languages they inherit, opening the way
to a logological refashioning34 of writing. In observing Baquaquas multiple
literacies, there is a grammatology of black writing that is called into being that
unmasters the conventions of writing for the sake of tradition.
The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua is a text that surpasses the
conditions of its own documentary evidence: the fullness and fragmentary
incompleteness of origins held forth even in the biographers own name,
Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, seem to suggest a trespassing of the injunctions
and prohibitions of nomenclature. Baquaquas text is of a life irreducible to the
converging ideas and exigencies that shape the slave narrative as abolitionist
text. Its narrative precedes and extends beyond the horizon of any singular
readership. The narrative is of a life in the sense of Gilles Deleuzes formulation
of pure immanence as a life and nothing else.35 If, as Frantz Fanon argues,
Black consciousness is immanent in its own eyes,36 Baquaquas writing is a
life/writing that reflects this immanent fold of black consciousness.
Baquaquas biography opens a sacred geometry of black life that gathers Islam,
Christianity, and other African faith practices into the fold of his diasporic life,
producing a vertiginous subtext, a submerged textuality or invisible ink that flows
through all black letters. The traces, trails, bereavements, and victories woven
together in the recitations, annotations, recollected letters, and disparate tellings
of Baquaquas auto/biography conjure the ontological complexity that Wole
Soyinka describes in Myth, Literature, and the African World as the fourth stage:
the no mans land of transition between . . . the ancestors [past], the present
[of] the living, and the future of the unborn with the invisible forces, divinities, or
orishas.37 Together, these modes of experience form the totality of cosmic life
reflected in black consciousness. This cosmic totality in the Yoruba worldview is
reflective of larger patterns of African thought and belief throughout the
archipelago, wherein social life consists of a dynamic cosmic environment that
comprises the total spiritual community of living and dead.38 The immanent
gesture of black writing glimpses the spiritual totality that obtains between
ancestors, texts, and black writers and extends through a distribution and sharing
of sacred resources among poets, philosophers, and fugitives.
In this view, The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua is a constellation of
more than just a life, as it constellates a set of cartographic, poetic, and
historiographical resources that have grounded and extended the fugitive passage
of black letters through underground networks, railroads, and communities. To
echo Jacques Derrida, within the communities gathered by black writing, we
[learn] to live . . . in the upkeep, the conversation, the company, or the
companionship, in the commerce without commerce, of ghosts, [spirits, and
ancestors]. . . . And this being-with specters would also be . . . a politics of
memory, of inheritance, and of generations.39 Black writing emerges from this
cosmic milieu as an ecological signature of a people formed from the refusal of
structured limitationsa people given forth from the ocean to the geographic
path, way, or movement of archipelago in a sociality beyond the ken of social life.
A2 Gitmo
The concept of there but not is especially consistent with
Guantanamo--Guantnamo is an exception to the presumably
normal procedures that constitute the domestic. It is the
spectacular terror contrasted to the normal operations of law
and power within the formal boundaries of the United States
a critique of the carceral systems deployed in the war on
terror has become central to debates across a number of disciplines
about sovereignty, biopolitics, and the state of exception. For example, in Precarious
In the last decade,
Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, Judith Butler argues that the forms of detention inaugurated at Guantnamo Bay
the
suspension of the rule of law produces collusion between biopolitical
forms of governance and the will of the sovereign. In this way, the extra-legal
new war prison redefines Foucaults understanding of the relationship
between sovereignty and governmentality so that sovereignty emerges
within the field of governmentality where it is defined as the power to
withdraw and suspend the law. 435 Thus, sovereignty is a ghostly but forceful
presence within new forms of racialized population management. This suspension
of the law also produces a new mode of sovereignty that means that the bodies of
detainees act as the raw material for the production of a new form of power .436 The
created a new form of state sovereignty manifested by the suspension of the law. At Guantnamo and elsewhere,
danger of indefinite detention, according to Butler, is that it creates the condition of possibility for the exercise of indefinite extralegal state power. As she puts it, Indefinite detention thus extends lawless power indefinitely. 437
The state of
emergency is not spatially and temporally contained, but rather, rushes toward a
never-ending future. The future is produced as a time beyond the safety and
security of the law. In this way, indefinite detention is not an exception to the
norm, but is central to redefining the norm in the present and the future. This rupturing
of the norm by the exception renders the human beings detained at Guantnamo into animated flesh, producing humans who
are less than chattel and who embody what Giorgio Agamben calls bare life.438 Butlers critique is deeply indebted to the
work of Agamben, who argues that indefinite detention is a mode of biopolitical power where the law envelopes the bodies of
captives through its own suspension.439 This situation creates a legally unnamable and unclassifiable being whose only
historical analog are Jewish people under the Nazi regime.440 In this zone of indifference no law is the law.441 The new war
prison derealizes the humanity of its captives who might otherwise belong to a community of laws and recognition.442 This
creates populations that are not regarded as subjects, humans who are not conceptualized with in the frame of a political
The law
defines the human and so to be outside the boundaries of the law is to be
exposed to a form of illegal barbarism that renders one inhuman. The law is
central to Butlers concern with Guantnamo and to her understanding of the
carceral apparatuses used in the war on terror. As she writes, [W]hereas we expect the prison to
culture in which human lives are underwritten by legal entitlements, law, and so humans who are not humans.443
be tied to lawto trial, to punishment, to the rights of prisonerswe see presently an effort to produce a secondary judicial
system and sphere of non-legal detention that effectively produces the prison itself as an extra-legal sphere.444 In Butlers
theory, the forms of social death, sovereignty, and governmentality produced at Guantnamo are the result of the absence of the
law. The law is a site of security and safety, and its undoing opens up unprecedented spaces of living death and extra-legal terror.
Critically, this break with space, subjectivity, and normative modes of power is also a break with time. Guantnamo, for Butler,
has created a time that is unfamiliar, backwards, and archaic. As she writes, The historical time that we thought was past turns
The
appearances of sovereignty at Guantnamo are anachronistic resurgences that
confound normative conceptions of temporality. Diana Taylor tells a similar story about time and
out to structure the contemporary field with a persistence that gives the lie to history as chronology.445
torture, one where we have embarked on an extrajuridical power trip with no limits and no foreseeable end because we have
taken a road we should not have walked.446 By entering a time that is endless and anachronistic, Guantnamo marks a
departure from the norm. The torture performed there crosses the limit and suspends the rules so that Guantnamo becomes
a space of aberration and a time of distortion, confusion, and illegibility.447 In this way, Guantnamo is not only a break with the
The
irrationality and barbarism of the past resurges in this space beyond the law. A
past that is not a past returns in the space of exception. And like the backward
march of time, the norm undoes itself in a process of reversal and suspension so
that it too returns to an otherworldly place once left behind . For Butler and many others,
law, but also with time. It rewrites the time of chronological progress in favor of Ian Baucoms time as accumulation.448
Guantnamo is an exception to the presumably normal procedures that constitute the domestic. It is the spectacular terror
contrasted to the normal operations of law and power within the formal boundaries of the United States. Such understandings of
Guantnamo as a monstrous aberration from the domestic have been common among scholars, activists, and journalists. The
arguments advanced by Butler and Agamben have not gone without criticism. Joshua Comaroff argues that it is not the
exceptional, the supra- or extralegal that defines Guantnamism, but rather its conditional existence within the law, the
intentional contortions made possible byspatial and temporal contradictions inherent in the judicial system.449 Guantnamo
is not outside the law; rather, it is made possible by the law and the laws ability to contort its application through
spatialtemporal disarticulations that open up new possibilities of legal action.450 For Comaroff, it is not Guantnamo that is a
non-place, it is Agambens theory that is ahistorical and ageographical in its effacement of Guantnamos colonial history and
location.451 Nassir Hussain similarly argues that at Guantnamo one does not find not an emptying out of law but an abundant
use of technical distinctions, differing regulations, and multiple invocations of authority.452 If Guantnamo is understood as a
space outside the law, then the presumed solution is the application of more laws and regulations. Yet, Guantnamo is not a
space of suspensions, outsideness, and exclusionsit is a space of hyperlegality. It operates on a continuum where the norm and
exception have become indistinguishable and points to a desire for and an attempt at a zone that operates not as an exception
but as a parallel in a modern administrative legality.453 And as Hussain and others observe, among the detainees held in
Guantnamo, there are people who have been declared nonenemy combatants, but due to their stateless status continue to be
imprisoned in Guantnamo, as they would in any immigration jail in the United States.454 Thus, the space of domestic detention
and incarceration provides a genealogy of the forms of terror and violence that operate as the norm at Guantnamo and
elsewhere. The control unit is one such space. Unprecedented as the legal machinations employed at Guantnamo may seem, as
Colin Dayan documents, they rely on the last thirty years of Supreme Court decisions that have abolished the Eighth
Amendments prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.455 Further, as Dayan and Caleb Smith argue, the social, civic, and
biological death produced in the new war prison is also central to the institutionality of the domestic prison. From its inception
as an institution of humanity, civilization, and reform, its designers understood the prison as a place of deliberate
mortification.456 Early prison reformers in the 18th and 19th centuries specifically designed the prison as a place where human
beings would be rendered civically and socially deadboth dead to the law in that they were divested of any rights and dead to
the social world in that they were severed from its affective ties. Stripped of citizenship and subjectivity, the prisoner became a
the prison was a

living tomb, a space of terror and ghostly half- life.458 Before the 1970s,
the goal of incarceration was to rehabilitate the captive. But to be reborn, one first
had to be spiritually and legally killed in the name of reanimation. The reformer Benjamin
specter, an animate corpse in the eyes of the law.457 In the words of 18th century reformers,
Rush described the convict as one who was lost and is found was dead and is alive.459 Dehumanization is not an exception
to the rehabilitative intentions of confinement; it is the sole purpose of the modern prison, making death central to the spatial
and temporal politics of incarceration. Death, physic disintegration, and the undoing of subjectivity are built into the discursive
and material architecture of the prison. This is more than a metaphor; countless prisoners over the last three centuries recount
how the prison produces claustrophobia, chronic rage, panic, depression, blindness, hallucinations, weight loss, dizziness, and
These states of psychic and physical duress made it so the walls of

the prison whisper, scream, vibrate, and close in; cement, steel, and space
become animated by the necropolitical institutionality of the prison . For example, from the
heart palpitations.
late 1960s to the early 1970s, inmates in Soledad prison composed inside and smuggled out handwritten poems, essays, and
letters in order to construct a book titled, Words From the House of the Dead. Many of the authors understood themselves as
trying to breach a dividing line between the living and the living dead .
One essay in particular, How to

Develop a Mentally Unhealthy Individual, describes how the prison apprehends
subjects engaging in non-normative behaviors (loving a prostitute, using
drugs, or other insidious behaviors) because they are a threat to the social
order.460 The prison abolishes his identity and future and then systematically
produces psychic debility and incapacity in the form of mental illness. The
prisoner, forgotten by the world they threatened, lives a half-life of mindnumbing repetition and omnipresent control, regulation, punishment and
degradation.461 When George Jackson wrote in 1970 that capture is the closest thing to being dead that one is likely
to experience in this life, he was not being hyperbolic.462 He was articulating the historical fact that the modus operandi of the
temporality of incarceration, and the prison itself, is to produce premature death. This process is not exceptional to the operation
of the normit is how the norm comes into being. In the words of Smith, prisoners do not occupy a zone of exile outside the
circle of juridical and philosophical humanity: the prison that holds them is one of the primary sites through which the very idea
of modern humanity is imagined and contested.463 Like slavery and settler- colonialism, the prison is a foundational site for the
reproduction of liberalisms freedom. The criminal, like the slave, was already dead, expelled outside the realm of legal and extra-
The diseased body of the criminal had to be expunged

from civil society and once expelled became the visible record of the sacrifice on
which civilization maintained itself.464 It is crucial to note that this process did not occur outside the law,
legal concern, empathy, and embrace.
but was a manifestation of the killing power of the law itself. The convict was buried alive by the law, forced to live a death in life
within the tomb of the prison. Smith describes this when he writes, Perhaps
more than any other

institution, the prison manifests the power of the law to disfigure and kill those
within it circle of rights.465 The prisoner, though a living and breathing being, is
deadburied by the crushing weight of the law. 466 In short, prisoners do not need to be protected by
the law from lawlessness, because the law is what renders them dead. The construction of the prison as a space of death and the
prisoner as the living dead arose out of Enlightenment conceptions of humanity and natural rights that called for the abolition of
gratuitous public executions in favor of the sterility and isolationthe humannessof the prison. Humanity and rights are not the
Civil
societys future rested on the prisoners expulsion from humanitythis
is the life of the prison and it is central to the answer of why and how
Guantnamo can exist. It is crucial to remember, as I outlined in chapter one, that the modes of civil and social
potential saviors of the prisons dead, they are the technologies needed to turn the living into walking ghosts.
incapacity that live within the law and the prison were invented under the legal structures of chattel-slavery. The power of
Dayans work (and its significance to my project in this chapter) is that she charts a set of legal and extra-legal mechanisms that
The Supreme Courts

decisions concerning the Eighth Amendment over the last thirty years (that have
been foundational to the Bush administrations torture memos) summoned the
spirit of slavery and civil incapacitation so that old laws were given new life.467 In
the post-1970s era, legal terms governing the forms of violence that could be
exacted on the bodies of enslaved people returned to justify and legalize torture
in the U.S. prison system and later, under the war on terror. In the 1980s, legal terms like
connect the slave to the prisoner, the prisoner to the detainee, and the detainee to the slave.
decency, legitimacy, and basic human needs, which justified civil incapacity and social death under slavery, became legal
technologies to justify, extend, and invent forms torture in the United States and beyond. Within this framework, as long as the
The legal nullification of personhood

that created the slave became foundational to the category of the prisoner and
now envelopes and makes possible the non-human human that is the detainee .468
body was not bruised, personhood and the mind could be decimated.
This is crucial to comprehending the systems of power I am trying to outline between neoliberalism, the prison, and slavery, and
now in this chapter, the war on terror. As I have been arguing throughout, 1970s feminist, queer, and anti-racist activists offer a
these networks of
power live on in the law, and her work is a study of the law. In what follows, I am
less concerned with the law and more focused on the forms of knowledge, affect,
feelings, and intensities described by women buried alive by the law at the
Lexington Control Unit. This body of work rewrites the temporalities that
underwrite theories of the state of exception.
rich anticipatory genealogy for mapping these forgotten and unthinkable trajectories. For Dayan,
A2 Interpretation Bad
Poetry does not impose a particular meaning, but opens up
space for multiple potential interpretations
whenever there is a statement of relationality, one can never fully legitimise

this relationality, not because there is a subjective bias in making the statement I want there to be a
Hence,
relationality so there will be one' but as there is always already an unknowability within this very relationality.
This is a structural assumption, a structural condition. And it is this very assumption that both allows the
statement of relationality to be made, and which also never allows the statement to be fully legitimate. It is for
a descriptive statement, one that never reaches the

status of a definition, and is never a definitive statement. Hence, ______ is like ______ is a
claim. In fact, one can no longer even discern whether the claim made is true or false
as such one can no longer differentiate whether it is a performative or a
constative statement as there is no external referent. Referentiality is precisely the assumed relationality
this reason that "______ is like ______" is
of language itself. In this we find an echo of Paul Celan, who on March 26, 1969, wrote this about poetry: "La
posis ne s'impose plus, elle s'expose" (Poetry
does not impose, it exposes itself).20 Perhaps

then, relationality can at best only be a poetic relationality; one that does not impose a frame,
impose a particular meaning, does not efface the singularity of the relationality,
but instead only seeks to be open, exposes itself, to the potentiality of
relationality.
Poetry eludes capture an (enigmatic) gift

The poet, irremediably split between exaltation and vulgarity, between the autonomy that produces the
concept within intuition and the foolish earthly being, functions as a contaminant for philosophy
a being who since Plato, has been trying to read and master an eviction notice
served by philosophy. The poet as genius continues to threaten and fascinate, menacing the philosopher
with the beyond of knowledge. Philosophy cringes. If we recall the words of Paul Cenan, the words that we turned
to earlier, that of poetry
does not impose itself, it exposes itself , ones instinctive reaction

the question expose itself to
the thought that comes to mind without thinking, without knowing is
what? Whilst it is easy, too easy, to dismiss a nave question like that, it would be to our detriment if we
choose not to attend it, not to attend a possibility that sometimes lies in the simplest of questions, the silly
questions, as it were. After all, if one exposes oneself, it can only be so if there was something, or someone to
expose oneself to. There has to be a witness to the exposure, otherwise there would not be one at all. Hence,
exposure is always a state of establishing a relationality with another .
It is not a relationality that

seeks to impose a particular, single, meaning, reading upon another. And this is why
poetry continues to menace the philosopher with the beyond of knowledge;
without an imposition, the borders are not drawn, the limits are not set . And whilst not
forgetting the registers that Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida opened earlier yes there are only always rules to
the lack of a boundary

also always opens more possibilities than we can account for . One may not even be
overstating if one claims that at this point, all accounting systems which are set up to predict,
to control, via graphs, curves, probabilities fail. Whilst exposing itself, and hence, opening
seeing, and we are always already in grammar, always bounded by grammar
itself to response, any response, poetry always risks what it cannot avoid appealing to in reply, namely,
recompense and retribution. It risks the exchange that it might expect but is at the same time unable to count
Once the poem is sent off, set off, one can only hope for a response. In fact,
one always gets a response; even a non-response, a complete ignoring of the
poem, is a form of response. It is just that one can never know what kind of response one is going to
on.
get. Once the poem is set of, the poet remains completely blind to its effects. Once the bomb is set off, the
suicide bomber s completely blind to its effects. It is probably of no coincidence that the suicide bomber is
usually constituted as one who is completely irrational, cast as a complete idiot; the most common question
heard whenever there is an instance of a suicide bombing is why would one give up her life when she has so
All attempts to provide an answer to the question are banal, as the very
One has no choice
but to admit that all reason eludes, escapes, is beyond one, is beyond the limits of
ones cognition, is at the beyond of knowledge . Perhaps the only thing we can say is that she
much to live for?
person that the answer attempt to address is dead; hence all answers are unverifiable.
gives up her life in spite of the fact that she has so much to live for; after all, it is she who chooses to do so.
Whilst this does not provide any answer to the question, provide any comfort that we finally understand her, this
enigma that is her gift to us. It is the

refusal to be understood, to be subsumed under any existing conception, to be
flattened, exchanged, reproduced, that is her gift. And in that same spirit, it is not a gift
that can be understood this is not a gift that one can bring to the return-counter
at the shop, to be exchanged for something else, something more palatable,
something easier, something more comfortable, more comforting. This is a gift
that is unknowable, in full potential, always possible ; perhaps always a gift that is to come.
is all we can say. Perhaps it is the fact that she remains an
What continues to trouble us is that this gift as with all gifts comes with an obligation to reciprocate, an
obligation to respond. So even though this is an objectless gift and to compound it a gift that we might not
even begin to comprehend, or even know is present we are always already within the realm of reciprocation.
This is the point where the eternal question of the serpent, that of what did she
mean, returns to haunt us, along with the other question of responding, and attempting an appropriate
response at that; the question of Lenin, that of what is to be done? If we attempt the question of Lenin, that of
what is to be done? If we attempt to answer the question, to provide a prescription, then we are back to the
situation of effacement. Perhaps then the task that we are faced with is that of reconstituting Lenin in and within
a situation. If the question of what is to be done is a situational question, there can be no answer outside of the
situation at the point of uttering both the question and the answer, we are always immanent to the story, in the
making, even when we are the ones telling the story to the other and more than that, each answer is at best a
provisional answer. However, the fact that one can even attempt an answer suggests that at least momentarily,
each answer,
each definition to the question can only be accomplished as a more or less
provisory, more or less violent arresting of a dynamic that is interminable, but
never simply interminable or infinite. For a dynamic such as this can only be conceived
as a series of highly conflictual determinations, as a movement of ambivalence, in which the
other is always being seized as a function of the same, all the while eluding this capture . The
other becomes the intimate condition of the possibility of the game, remaining all
the while out of bounds.
one must be able to step back as it were, be exterior to the question, to situation. Hence,
A2 Ks of 1ac Authors
Their critiques of our authors are just like the colonial police
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten TAM)
Introducing this labor upon labor, and providing the space for its development,
creates risks. Like the colonial police force recruited unwittingly from
guerrilla neighborhoods, university labor may harbor refugees, fugitives,
renegades, and castaways. But there are good reasons for the university to be
confident that such elements will be exposed or forced underground. Precautions
have been taken, book lists have been drawn up, teaching observations
conducted, invitations to contribute made. Yet against these precautions stands
the immanence of transcendence, the necessary deregulation and the possibilities
of criminality and fugitivity that labor upon labor requires. Maroon communities
of composition teachers, mentorless graduate students, adjunct Marxist
historians, out or queer management professors, state college ethnic
studies departments, closed-down film programs, visa- expired Yemeni
student newspaper editors, historically black college sociologists, and
feminist engineers. And what will the university say of them? It will say
they are unprofessional. This is not an arbitrary charge. It is the charge
against the more than professional. How do those who exceed the
profession, who exceed and by exceeding escape, how do those
maroons problematize themselves, problematize the university, force
the university to consider them a problem, a danger? The undercommons
is not, in short, the kind of fanciful communities of whimsy invoked by Bill
Readings at the end of his book. The undercommons, its maroons, are always at
war, always in hiding.
A2 Music Fails
The noise, or what they call music, we present was to remind
those who it was meant for that the place they desire exists
and that they exist in it now because they have the desire
Moten and Harney want to gesture to another place, a wild place that is not
simply the left over space that limns real and regulated zones of polite society;
rather, it is a wild place that continuously produces its own unregulated
wildness. The zone we enter through Moten and Harney is ongoing and exists
in the present and, as Harney puts it, "some kind of demand was already
being enacted, fulfilled in the call itself." While describing the London Riots
of 2011, Harney suggests that the riots and insurrections do not separate out
"the request, the demand and the call" - rather, they enact the one in
the other: "I think the call, in the way I would understand it, the call, as in the
call and response, the response is already there before the call goes out. You're
already in something." You are already in it. For Moten too, you are always
already in the thing that you call for and that calls you. What's more, the
call is always a call to dis-order and this disorder or wildness shows up
in many places: in jazz, in improvisation, in noise. The disordered sounds
that we refer to as cacophony will always be cast as "extra-musical," as
Moten puts it, precisely because we hear something in them that reminds
us that our desire for harmony is arbitrary and in another world,
harmony would sound incomprehensible. Lis- tening to cacophony and
noise tells us that there is a wild beyond to the structures we inhabit
and that inhabit us.
A2 No Safe Spaces**
*noteused elsewhere, including A2 Ballot K, Performing
Freedom, etc.
sensibility. Coupled with this awareness of an overseeing surveillance apparatus was the conscious effort to always give ones best performance and encourage
others to do the same, and indeed to perform even when one is not sure of ones audience (or whether there is in fact an audience) (p. 105). Iton employs the
Downloaded by [] at 11:11 05 July 2015 Common Gaol (New York Common Council, Volume IV). Any slave convicted of being unlit after dark was sentenced to a public whipping of
no more than 40 lashes, at the discretion of the master or owner before being discharged. Later this punishment was reduced to no more than 15 lashes. Such discretionary violence
found dead in his bed. The dead man was said to have absented himself from van Zandts dwelling in the night-time (New York Weekly Journal CXIII, 5 January 1735). Although it
was first reported that the slave was horsewhipped to death by Van Zandt for being caught on the streets after dark by watchmen, a coroners jury found Van Zandt not negligent in
this death, finding instead that the correction given by the Master was not the cause of death, but that it was by the visitation of God (New York Weekly Journal CXIII, 5 January
1735). Other laws put into place around light and black mobilities in New York City stipulated that at least one lantern must be carried per three negroes after sunset, more tightly
regulated curfews and in 1722 the Common Council relegated burials by free and enslaved blacks to the daytime hours with attendance of no more than 12, plus the necessary
pallbearers and gravediggers, as a means to reduce opportunities for assembly and to prevent conspiracy hatching. In recounting physician Alexander Hamiltons narrative about his
travels through New York City in July of 1744, Andy Doolen details that one outcome of the alleged conspiracy of 1741 was the ruining, according to Hamilton, of the traditional
English cup of tea (2005). It was thought by Hamilton that: they have very bad water in the city, most of it being hard and brackish. Ever since the negroe conspiracy, certain people
have been appointed to sell water in the streets, which they carry on a sledge in great casks and bring it from the best springs about the city, for it was when the negroes went for
tea water that they held their caballs and consultations, and therefor they have a law now that no negroe shall be seen upon the streets without a lanthorn after dark. (Hamilton
1948, p. 88) We can think of the lantern as a prosthesis made mandatory after dark, a technology that made it possible for the black body to be constantly illuminated from dusk to
dawn, made knowable, locatable and contained within the city. The black body, technologically enhanced by way of a simple device made for a visual surplus where technology met
surveillance, made the business of tea a white enterprise and encoded white supremacy, as well as black luminosity, in law. Of course, unsupervised leisure, labour, travel, assembly
and other forms of social networking past sunset by free and enslaved black New Yorkers continued regardless of the enforcement of codes meant to curtail such things. BLACK
LUMINOSITY AND SURVEILLANCE 553 Downloaded by [] at 11:11 05 July 2015 Oftentimes social networking by free and enslaved black New Yorkers took place right under the
surveillant gazes of the white population, in markets and during Sabbath and holiday celebrations. In these spaces of sometimes interracial and cross-class commerce and
socializing, black performative practices of drumming, dancing and chanting persisted. During celebrations of Pinkster marking the feast of Pentecost of the Dutch Reformed Church,
amongst the rituals, free and enslaved blacks elected a governor who would serve as a symbolic leader resolving disputes and collecting tributes, making this holiday an event for
white spectatorship of black cultural and political production, although for many such celebratory resistance made this a festival of misrule (Harris 2003, p. 41). So much so that the
Common Council of Albany, New York, banned Pinkster celebrations in 1811, for reasons including a resentment of the space that it opened up for unsettling exchanges between
blacks and whites (Lott 1993; McAllister 2003; White 1989). The most controversial incorporation of black performativity into Pinkster was the Totau. On the Totau, McAllister writes:
a man and a woman shuffle back and forth inside a ring, dancing precariously close without touching and isolating most of their sensual movement in the hip and pelvic areas. Once
the couple dances to exhaustion, a fresh pair from the ring of clapping dancers relieves them and the Totau continues. (McAllister 2003, p. 112) That such a performative sensibility
was engaged by black subjects in colonial New York City approximately 200 years before the emergence of hip hop in the Bronx, New York City, is of much significance. The Totau,
and later, the Catharine Market breakdown reverberate in the cypher of b-boys and b-girls. In Eric Lotts discussion of black performances he cites Thomas De Voes eyewitness
account of the Catharine Market breakdown in the early nineteenth century New York City. De Voe writes: This board was usually about five to six feet long, of large width, with its
particular spring in it, and to keep it in its place while dancing on it, it was held down by one on each end. Their music or time was usually given by one of their party, which was
done by beating their hands on the sides of their legs and the noise of the heel. The favorite dancing place was a cleared spot on the east side of the fish market in front of Burnel
Browns Ship Chandlery. (De Voe 1862, cited in Lott 1993, pp. 4142) In this instance, the breakdown is performed in a market, allowing for white spectatorship and patronage in a
space that is already overdetermined as a site of commerce within the economy of slavery. Later, DeVoe recalls public 554 CULTURAL STUDIES Downloaded by [] at 11:11 05 July
2015 negro dances at Catharine Market in an 1889 New York Times article where he is quoted as saying that the dancers would bring roots, berries, birds, fish, clams, oysters,
Sylvia Wynters
provision ground ideology in instructive here for an understanding of solidarity,
survival and the role of folk-culture as resistance to the dehumanization of Man
and Nature (1970, p. 36). Out of the provision grounds came the cultivation of ceremonial
practices, including dance, that were, as Wynter tells us, the cultural guerilla
resistance against the Market economy (1970, p. 36).7 The remains of the Catharine
Market breakdown can be found in the cardboard and turntables of the
breakdancing cypher. Then and now cultural production and expressive practices
offer moments of living with, refusals and alternatives to routinized surveillance
within a visual surplus. In so being, they allow for us to think differently about the
predicaments, policies and performances constituting surveillance. Colonial New
York City was a space of both terror and promise for black life. Lantern laws,
fugitive slave notices, public whippings and the discretionary uses of violence by
his Majestys subjects rendered the black subject as always already unfree yet
acts, like the breakdown, that were constitutive of black freedom persisted. It is
under this context where certain humans came to be understood by many as
unfree and the property of others while at the same time creating practices that
maintained their humanity by challenging the routinization of surveillance, that
we should read the 1783 Board of Inquiry hearings at Fraunces Tavern.
flowers, and anything else they could gather and sell in the market to supply themselves with pocket money (28 April 1889).
A2 Opposition Fails
**notealso in unintelligibility good
Fugitivity is not simply opposition or transgression to the
can find social life within social death
ProjectMUSE, IC)
outlaws [interdit] any ontological explanation. Someone may object that this is
the case with every individual, but such an objection merely conceals a basic
problem. Ontologyonce it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside
does not permit us to understand the being of the black man [person]. For not
only must the black man [person] be black; he [they] must be black in relation to
the white man [person]. Some critics will take it upon themselves to remind us
that the proposition has a converse. I say that this is false. The black man
[person] has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man [person].1
outlawed, impossible things? And if, as Frantz Fanon suggests, the black cannot
be an other for another black, if the black can only be an other for a white, then is
precisely in the assumption that it comes before what it would contain? Whats
the relation between explanation and resistance? Who bears the responsibility of
relegated, which they occupy but cannot (and refuse to) own, is some sense of
the fugitive law of movement that makes black social life ungovernable, that
demands a para-ontological disruption of the supposed connection between
explanation and resistance.3 This exchange between matters juridical and
matters sociological is given in the mixture of phenomenology and
psychopathology that drives Fanons work, his slow approach to an encounter with
impossible black social life poised or posed in the break, in a certain intransitive
evasion of crossing, in the wary mood or fugitive case that ensues between the
fact of blackness and the lived experience of the black and as a slippage enacted
by the meaningor, perhaps too trans-literally, the (plain[-sung]) senseof
things when subjects are engaged in the representation of objects.
A2 Suffering/Slavery Reps Bad

The status quo is structured by the logics and technology of
chattel slavery and the afterlife of slavery is the pasts
possession of the present the attempt to forgo or move
beyond it is a new link
Brand writes of the Middle Passage, The door
[of no return] signifies the historical moment which colours all moments in the
Diaspora. It accounts for the ways we observe and are observed as people, whether its through the lens of social injustice or the laws of
human accomplishment. The door exists as an absence. A thing in fact which we do not know
about, a place we do not know. Yet, it exists as the ground we walkWhere one
stands in a society seems always related to this historical experience. Where one can be
observed is relative to that history. All human effort seems to emanate from this door .32 For Brand, the
Middle Passage and chattel-slavery compose the original template for modern power. The door of no return is the site
from which all disciplinary and biopolitical regimes emanate. It (and not it alone)
determines the ways people are regulated, visualized, mobilized, positioned, and
organized. Yet, the deathly touch of terror and the warm embrace of inclusion are
not just stained from the original scene. What began at the door is also
transmitted, transformed, renewed, and repositioned in our present
day.33 This is what Saidiya Hartman calls the afterlife of slavery, where premature death,
incarceration, limited access to healthcare and education, and poverty
are structured by the logics and technologies of chattel-slavery. 34 Under this
analytic, the past does not give way to the present, slowly dissolving under the bright shinning light of progress; slaverys afterlife
is the pasts possession of the present. The past holds the present captive
structuring, surrounding, and inhabiting it. The fabrication of concrete and compartmentalized conceptions of time
In A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, Dionne
and space dissolves under the crushing weight of the blood stained gate. But this possession does not just take the form of the tactile, visible, and
Part of the afterlife of slavery emanates from an absence that cannot be

recovered or repaired. The door of no return is not a place, it is a gap that founds the nowit is history as the unknown. The
present rests upon this rupture, upon the unknowable, upon the forgotten, and
upon the dead. In this chapter, I use the term possession as a modification of the
concept of haunting. In Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Avery Gordon argues that haunting describes how
known.
that which seems to be not theresomething that is absent or missingis often a seething presenceacting on and meddling with taken for granted
realities.35 A ghost is one way something lost, disappeared, or dead makes itself known. Engaging a haunting means to consider the apparitions
lingering outside the frame of disciplinary knowledge, to make contact with the reality of fictions and the fictions of reality, to reckon with endings
that are not over and past events that loiter in the present.36 If haunting names the lingering presence of the dead in the realm of the livingthe
present absence of what is there and yet hidden, the feeling that there is something in the room with you even when your eyes tell you otherwise
Possession is when the ghost inhabits and

controls. To be haunted is to see the ghost that has been waiting for your field of
vision to change. By contrast, a possessive spirit is not so passive and patient.
Unlike a ghost, a spirit does not wait; it grabs hold of you first, perhaps without
your knowledge. What seizes you are not the murmurs of the oppressed or the whispered demands of those killed by state violence and
then possession is when the ghost does not haunt, but rather, takes hold.
terrorpossession is the deathly grip of the dominant. Possession is a psychological state in which an individual's normal personality is replaced by
another; domination by something (as an evil spirit, a passion, or an idea); or something owned, occupied, or controlled.37 To be possessed is to
be under the control of something more powerful than the imagined free will of the liberal individual. We can witness possession in the relationship
between race, gender, and death as theorized by black feminists in the 1970s. For example, in her 1968 essay The Black Revolution in America,
Grace Lee Boggs argues that American capitalism was born out of the labor of black slaves and has since used white workers to defend the system
andkeep Blacks in their place at the bottom of the ladder, scavenging the old jobs, old homes, old churches, and old schools discarded by whites
She goes on to outline a regime of biopolitical

management animated by this history: They [black youth] also recognize that
although a particular struggle may be precipitated by an individual incident, their
struggle is not against just one or another individual but against a whole power
structure comprising a complex network of politicians, university and school
administrators, landlords, merchants, usurers, realtors, insurance personal,
contractors, union leaders, licensing and inspection bureaucrats, racketeers,
lawyers, policementhe overwhelming majority of who are white and absentee,
and who exploit the black ghetto the same way the Western powers exploit the
colonies and neo-colonies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. 39 Within a theory of power as
thereby contributing to the overall capital of the country.38
possession, slaverys relationship to the present is more than the haunting of a ghost. Slavery, for Boggs, is not lurking behind contemporary
formations of power. Instead, the complex network of biopolitical regulation and management outlined by Boggs is given life by an anti-blackness as
old as liberal freedom. Contemporary biopolitics are possessed by discourses and technologies produced under slavery that were carried into the
future (our present) by race, gender, sexuality, and anti-blackness. As Omiseeke Tinsley writes, The brown-skinned, fluid- bodied experiences now
called blackness and queerness surfaced in intercontinental, maritime contacts hundreds of years ago: in the seventeenth century, in the Atlantic
Ocean.40 Extending Ruth Wilson Gilmores definition of racism as state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploration of group-differentiated
vulnerability to premature death, we can understand race and death as a possessive spirit that works as one, born out of the genocide of conquest
and slavery.41 Being placed at the bottom of the ladder by an expansive network of racialized management and control is Boggss way of describing
the uneven distribution of value and disposability produced by slaverys ongoing role in the present. Although death is sometimes a natural biological
Race is
one such technology; it is a mechanism for distributing life and death,
and for black people, race and white supremacy are motivated by a past
of subjection, subjugation, torture, terror, and disposability that has not
ended.42 Race possesses life in both the biological and biopolitical
sense, ending or extending biological life for individuals and populations .
phenomenon, it is more often manufactured and distributed by regimes of power far removed from ones last breath or final heartbeat.
While race sometimes haunts, it more often limits life chances by inhabiting and controlling individuals, institutions, and populations. In short, we are
The relationship between race and possession is

also evident in the writing of prisoners and activists in the 1970s who connected
the contemporary prison to chattel- slavery. Within this body of work, the contemporary prison is animated by
possessed by race, and death and life are the outcome.
logics, technologies, and discourses constructed under nineteenth-century U.S. slavery. For countless prisoners and activists, race (and anti-blackness)
were instruments that transcended space and time so that the past could invade and contort the present in its image. For instance, in his best-selling
collection of prison writing Soledad Brother published in 1970, George Jackson described the ways that the prisons connection to slavery reverses,
compresses, and undoes the progress of time: My recall is nearly perfect, time has faded nothing. I recall the very first kidnap. Ive lived through the
passage, died on the passage, lain in the unmarked shallow graves of the millions who fertilized the Amerikan soil with their corpses; cotton and corn
, Jackson describes the

relationship between memory, time, and possession. His captive body is
metaphorically infested with the cotton and corn grown under the prison of the
plantation. Time did not wash away the horrors of slavery, but rather, modified
and intensified them. Jackson both lives the past and continues to live its afterlife.
growing out of my chest, unto the third and fourth generation, the tenth, the hundredth.43 Here
He feels possessed by the forms of death produced under slavery, and throughout his writing connects this to his living death in prison. This
possession is not temporally constrained; neither the law nor the state can exorcise black bodies of this death sentence. Instead, Jackson argued that
Although an
extensive review of Jacksons discussion of slavery is beyond the scope
of this project, his ideas and declaration that I am a slave to, and of,
property were not unique among the black liberation movement. 45 In fact,
the U.S. must be destroyed and that anything less would be meaningless to the great majority of the slaves.44
Jacksons writing was emblematic of larger political, social, and economic changes occurring in the 1960s and 1970s, and paradigmatic of the political
thought of the black liberation movement. The work of Shakur and Davis are one of the lines of flights that depart from the thought of Jackson and the
black liberation movement. Indeed, Davis dedicates Reflections to Jacksons life (cut short by his violent death) and his struggle against his own
Davis offers a literal embodiment of how the theories, histories, and

epistemologies produced by the black feminist and black liberation movements
have entered the university.
misogyny. In addition,
Framework Blocks
A2 T Version
No topical versions of the affthe fugitive strategy is
necessarily opposed to any use of the state. Rather than
inscribe bodies into the law, vote affirmative to escape the
law as a critique of the emancipatory potential of it
Hesse, Northwestern African American studies associate
professor, 2014 (Barnor, Escaping Liberty: Western Hegemony, Black
Fugitivity, Political Theory, Vol. 42, No. 3, 2014,
http://ptx.sagepub.com/content/42/3/288.full.pdf, p. 301-304, IC)
African American and Black British slave narratives developed rapidly as a genre
between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Catalyzed by
abolitionist movements on both sides of the Atlantic, they are important for
developing alternative figurations of Western liberty.47 Slave narratives have
been variously defined as accounts of the life, or a major portion of the life, of a
fugitive or former slave, either written or orally related by the slave personally48
or autobiographical narratives written or dictated by ex-slaves of African descent
in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.49 While factually correct,
perhaps what captures the political poignancy of the genre as foundational to
black fugitive thought is Frances Smith Fosterss characterization of them as
personal accounts by black slaves and ex-slaves of their experiences in slavery
and of their efforts to obtain freedom. Written after the physical escape had been
accomplished and the narrators were manumitted or fugitive slaves.50 What is
significant is the idea of freedom as a formulation conditional upon escape and
the accruing status and rationale of fugitivity in the enactment of that escape.
The slave narrative was based on a structure of exposition as escape. This
included escaping the prohibitions against speaking outside the racial law of
slavery; escaping the societal repression of the slaves aspirations for positive
liberty from the site of fugitivity; and escaping political retribution for portraying
the constraints, indignities and violence inflicted in the individual life of the slave
narrator as a communitarian experience.51 Implicating racial slavery in sustaining
the private space and privileged status of liberties accredited to white citizens,
the slave narrative raised both the prospect of extending liberal ideals to the
abolition of slavery and concurrent associations of liberal ideals with the
institution of slavery. Slave narratives were intensely political documents52
writing the agency of escape into the logic of fugitivity that produced the
narrating black subject.
Conventionally the idea of fugitivity in African American slave narratives is defined
by the slaves geographical journey of escape, from the slave territories of the
U.S. South to the free soil of the North or Canada.53 But we should not allow that
familiar trope to obscure the political meaning of the relation between liberty,
escape and fugitivity. Samira Kawash usefully suggests we can think about this in
four connected ways, which expose the liberal humanist conception of freedom
not only as socially hegemonic but as racially oppressive. First, in stealing him- or
herself the black fugitive both violated the law of property and became an
outlaw. Second, the black fugitive exposed the groundlessness of the
originating distinction between person and property. Since the former slave was
none of these, she/he could only occupy this non-place between master and
slave in terms of silence, invisibility and placelessness. Third, the black fugitive
never exists as subject, as an outlaw the fugitive is not subject to the law nor
recognized as subject by law. In being located as exterior to the law, the fugitive
slave exposes the law to its outside or what might be described as racially
prescribed terrain of unfreedom. Fourth, as the black fugitive is neither self
possessed nor simply property she/he cannot be recognized as a political
subject and therefore can never be free in accordance with the enduring status
of fugitivity.54 What Kawash manages to convey so insightfully are the political
predicaments of escape that confront the encounter of black fugitivity with the
Western institution of negative liberty in its mode of race governance. Negative
liberty was effectively white liberty exempt from the intrusiveness and incursions
of racial profiling. Although it provided the philosophical grounds for
emancipation, it also established the political conditions that conferred black
fugitivity, since it was evident that freedom from the law of slavery was not
homologous with freedom from the rule of race.55
Citizen Liberty, Slave Liberty
I want to suggest formulations of black freedom are only possible in their rewriting
as forms of escape from the Western hegemony of liberty. This means black
fugitive thought can only be sustained through the emancipation inherent in
escape from the colonial-racial foreclosure underpinning consent to Western
hegemony. We have seen the warrant for this approach in Csaire and Du Bois; it
can now be further developed in a critical reading of David Walker.56 Walker, a
free-born African American and anti-slavery activist in the early nineteenth
century, in 1830 published his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World but in
particular and very expressly to those of the United States of America. Comprising
in part a rhetorical mobilization for sustained diasporic political activism against
plantation slavery, it also developed a subtle if provocative analysis of the mix of
liberalism, republicanism, Christianity, race and colonialism in the Western
hegemony of American culture. Walker diagnosed the meaning of freedom and
slavery in Western hegemonic culture from the Western foreclosed, oppositional
focus of the enslaved, their dispersion, descendents and prospects for escape. In
short, he contested the liberty claims of modernity in two principal critiques of
Western colonial-racial foreclosure.
The first unraveled the racialization of modern liberty. Although nominally a free
man of color, Walker described his own freedom as of the lowest kind, the very
dregs and the most servile and abject kind since he was ever vulnerable to the
rule of race.57 His so-called freedom from interference was radically limited by
race. Not only did it prevent him from standing for high office, it undermined his
freedom of movement, invariably leaving him susceptible to being enslaved like
the majority of the black population in the United States if any white person
questioned him and he was unable to produce or demonstrate the credentials of
his liberty. Stephen Marshall suggests Walkers conception of freedom is
markedly similar to the classic characterization of liberty that Isaiah Berlin
associated with the canon of Western political philosophy.58 The importance of
this observation however lies in also appreciating that unlike Berlin Walker did not
privilege negative liberty and demonize positive liberty. Indeed while it might be
said in Berlins political terms that Walker radically lacked negative liberty, in
Walkers own political terms even the positive liberty that was necessary to rectify
this lack was radically insufficient and impoverished if it did not also include the
salvation of our whole body, the diaspora of black populations, on a world-wide
basis. Walkers awareness of the colonial dimensions of Western hegemony urged
that a collectivist, anti-slavery positive liberty was required to shore up an
individualist negative liberty degraded by the rule of race.
Walkers second critique unravels Atlantic racial slavery in modernity (i.e., the
Americas) as the more pressing meaning of freedoms antonym and as the
normative basis of metaphorical allusions in political discourse rather than slavery
in antiquity (i.e., Greece and Rome). During the course of this critique, Walker
indicts Enlightenment luminary Thomas Jefferson whose Notes on the State of
Virginia published in 1787 extolled liberal and republican values while
equivocating on the abolition of slavery, describing it as a great political and
moral evil, and yet favoring emancipation at some unspecified time in the distant
future.59 It should be recalled of course that Jefferson himself was a large-scale
slaveholder in Virginia. Perhaps this explains the use of his Notes to dwell at
length on the eternal monotony of the slave populations unfortunate skin
color, their lack of reflection and undeveloped intellectual capacity, all of which
he considered a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.60 What
is particularly striking about Jeffersons ambiguous defense and abhorrence of
slavery, as Walker highlights emphatically, is his disingenuous comparison of U.S.
plantation slavery with the slavery of Roman antiquity. Jefferson argued Roman
slavery was much more deplorable than American slavery and expressed
admiration that despite their ordeal the Roman slaves still managed to develop
artistic and intellectual abilities, many excelling as poets. Jefferson concluded
these achievements were possible because Roman slaves were a race of whites
and commented instructively that when achieving emancipation how socially they
were able to mix without staining the blood of their masters.61 Jefferson
regularly used this comparison between white roman slaves and black American
slaves to reinforce the idea of congenital racial inferiority among the enslaved
black populations and to absolve the American institution of slavery from the
causes of the slaves perceived intellectual incapacities. In effect, for Jefferson,
modernitys American slavery, as odious as it may have been to his moral
sensibilities, was not really slavery at all, that dubious distinction belonged to
antiquity.
Walker, who was very familiar with these passages of racial abuse from Jeffersons
Notes, provides not only a riposte but recasts the analysis of slavery politically as
a counter-point to Jeffersons moral ambiguities and racial convictions. Walker
reminds us emphatically that slavery in all its wretchedness is annexed to this
REPUBLICAN LAND OF LIBERTY!!!!!!62 His raised tone insists that a novel and
unique political formation of slavery had emerged in modernity that had no
correspondence in antiquity. Combining a colonial presence with universal claims
of liberty and Christian espousals of equality, modernitys Atlantic slavery
elaborated its governance through the Western hegemony of race. Within this
context, Walker reverses Jeffersons contrast of slavery in modernity with slavery
in antiquity to argue that the degradation of black populations in the Americas far
exceeded the slaves of the ancient world. Degradation was not just a question of
the dehumanizing formation of slavery in place, but also a racial abuse of the
definition and provision of freedom in the same place. Walkers appeal to
historiography is compelling: Everybody who has read history knows that as soon
as a slave among the Romans obtained his freedom, he could rise to the greatest
eminence in the State, and there was no law instituted to hinder a slave from
buying his freedom. Have not the Americans instituted laws to hinder us from
obtaining our freedom?63 Walkers stricture here against the Western hegemony
of freedom reveals the constitutive colonial relation between racial slavery and
liberalism. It requires us to think about the material implications of racial slavery
in the Americas being eclipsed by the metaphorical category of slavery in liberal
political theory. Walker wrote like a fugitive from the law of race. His Appeal
continues to be compelling in challenging us to escape the hegemonic Western
meaning of liberty. It reminds us of the theoretical and political tasks involved in
specifying the modern foreclosed Western colonial history and concept of racial
slavery from which alternative meanings of freedom needed to be extricated,
distinguished and formulated. With the universalization of liberalisms liberty
having evolved dissociated from its detriment of colonized others, whose
regulation it perpetuated in the racialization of their aspirational and potential
liberties, Walkers Appeal also raises the more perplexing but necessary question
of what might it mean to be liberated or escape from this Western liberty.64
2acUndercommons
The university necessarily is unable to recognize the
existence of blacknessthis means only the Undercommons
can create a space for alternative understandings of
knowledge
But surely if one can write something on the surface of the university, if one can
write for instance in the university about singularitiesthose events that refuse
either the abstract or individual category of the bourgeois subjectone cannot
say that there is no space in the university itself? Surely there is some space here
for a theory, a conference, a book, a school of thought? Surely the university also
makes thought possible? Is not the purpose of the university as Universitas, as
liberal arts, to make the commons, make the public, make the nation of
democratic citizenry? Is it not therefore important to protect this Universitas,
whatever its impurities, from professionalization in the university? But we would
ask what is already not possible in this talk in the hallways, among the buildings,
in rooms of the university about possibility? How is the thought of the outside, as
Gayatri Spivak means it, already not possible in this complaint?
The maroons know something about possibility. They are the condition of
possibility of production of knowledge in the universitythe singularities against
the writers of singularity, the writers who write, publish, travel, and speak. It is not
merely a matter of the secret labor upon which such space is lifted, though of
course such space is lifted from collective labor and by it. It is rather that to be a
critical academic in the university is to be against the university, and to be
against the university is always to recognize it and be recognized by it, and to
institute the negligence of that internal outside, that unassimilated underground,
a negligence of it that is precisely, we must insist, the basis of the professions.
And this act of against always already excludes the unrecognized modes of
politics, the beyond of politics already in motion, the discredited criminal
paraorganization, what Robin Kelley might refer to as the infrapolitical field (and
its music). It is not just the labor of the maroons but their prophetic organization
that is negated by the idea of intellectual space in an organization called the
university. This is why the negligence of the critical academic is always at the
same time an assertion of bourgeois individualism.
Such negligence is the essence of professionalization where it turns out
professionalization is not the opposite of negligence but its mode of politics in the
United States. It takes the form of a choice that excludes the prophetic
organization of the Undercommonsto be against, to put into question the
knowledge object, let us say in this case the university, not so much without
touching its foundation, as without touching ones own condition of possibility,

without admitting the Undercommons and being admitted to it. From this, a
general negligence of condition is the only coherent position. Not so much an
antifoundationalism or foundationalism, as both are used against each other to
avoid contact with the Undercommons. This always negligent act is what leads us
to say there is no distinction between the university in the United States and
professionalization. There is no point in trying to hold out the university against its
professionalization. They are the same. Yet the maroons refuse to refuse
professionalization, that is, to be against the university. The university will not
recognize this indecision, and thus professionalization is shaped precisely by what
it cannot acknowledge, its internal antagonism, its wayward labor, its surplus.
Against this wayward labor it sends the critical, sends its claim that what is left
beyond the critical is waste.
The Undercommons is a space deemed to be criminal and

unprofessionalbut it is only in this space that the fugitive
can find refuge to create resistance to the university
Perhaps the biopower of the Enlightenment know this, or perhaps it is just
reacting to the objecthood of this labor as it must. But even as it depends on
these moles, these refugees, they will call them uncollegial, impractical, naive,
unprofessional. And one may be given one last chance to be pragmaticwhy
steal when one can have it all, they will ask. But if one hides from this
interpellation, neither agrees nor disagrees but goes with hands full into the
underground of the university, into the Undercommonsthis will be regarded as
theft, as a criminal act. And it is at the same time, the only possible act.
In that Undercommons of the university one can see that it is not a matter of
teaching versus research or even the beyond of teaching versus the
individualization of research. To enter this space is to inhabit the ruptural and
enraptured disclosure of the commons that fugitive enlightenment enacts, the
criminal, matricidal, queer, in the cistern, on the stroll of the stolen life, the life
stolen by enlightenment and stolen back, where the commons give refuge, where
the refuge gives commons. What the beyond2 of teaching is really about is not
finishing oneself, not passing, not completing; its about allowing subjectivity to
be unlawfully overcome by others, a radical passion and passivity such that one
becomes unfit for subjection, because one does not possess the kind of agency
that can hold the regulatory forces of subjecthood, and one cannot initiate the
auto-interpellative torque that biopower subjection requires and rewards. It is not
so much the teaching as it is the prophecy in the organization of the act of

teaching. The prophecy that predicts its own organization and has therefore
passed, as commons, and the prophecy that exceeds its own organization and
therefore as yet can only be organized. Against the prophetic organization of the
Undercommons is arrayed its own deadening labor for the university, and beyond
that, the negligence of professionalization, and the professionalization of the
critical academic. The Undercommons is therefore always an unsafe
neighborhood.
Fredric Jameson reminds the university of its dependence on Enlightenment-type
critiques and demystification of belief and committed ideology, in order to clear
the ground for unobstructed planning and development.1 This is the weakness
of the university, the lapse in its homeland security. It needs labor power for this
enlightenment-type critique, but, somehow, labor always escapes.
The premature subjects of the Undercommons took the call seriously, or had to be
serious about the call. They were not clear about planning, too mystical, too full of
belief. And yet this labor force cannot reproduce itself, it must be reproduced. The
university works for the day when it will be able to rid itself, like capital in general,
of the trouble of labor. It will then be able to reproduce a labor force that
understands itself as not only unnecessary but dangerous to the development of
capitalism. Much pedagogy and scholarship is already dedicated in this direction.
Students must come to see themselves as the problem, which, counter to the
complaining of restorationist critics of the university, is precisely what it means to
be a customer, to take on the burden of realization and always necessarily be
inadequate to it. Later, these students will be able to see themselves properly as
obstacles to society, or perhaps, with lifelong learning, students will return having
successfully diagnosed themselves as the problem.
--1arUndercommons
We solve most of their offense our advocacy is one that
steals from the university, to abuse our welcome into its
place. True subversion cannot take place within the formal
politics of the universityonly a politics of the
Undercommons can create revolutionary action
To the university Ill steal, and there Ill steal, to borrow from Pistol at the end of
Henry V, as he would surely borrow from us. This is the only possible relationship
to the American university today. This may be true of universities everywhere. It
may have to be true of the university in general. But certainly, this much is true in
the United States: it cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and
it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment. In the face
of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can.
To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy
encampment, to be in but not ofthis is the path of the subversive intellectual in
the modern university.
Worry about the university. This is the injunction today in the United States, one
with a long history. Call for its restoration like Harold Bloom or Stanley Fish or
Gerald Graff. Call for its reform like Derek Bok or Bill Readings or Cary Nelson. Call
out to it as it calls to you. But for the subversive intellectual, all of this goes on
upstairs, in polite company, among the rational men. After all, the subversive
intellectual came under false pretenses, with bad documents, out of love. Her
labor is as necessary as it is unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but
cannot bear what she brings. And on top of all that, she disappears. She
disappears into the underground, the downlow lowdown maroon community of the
university, into the Undercommons of Enlightenment, where the work gets done,
where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong.
2acCant Get Free

Freedom is not known through experience or thought, but
rather ensembleit is through improvising between the
dialectics of the unintelligible and intelligible, through the
recognition of affective responses towards structures, that
agency can be asserted and freedom recognized
One thinks again and often, in an inevitable return, of the image/figure of the ship
in the narrative: the proliferation of the gaze to and from the ship in Equiano, all
determined to a certain extent by his first encounter with it. The ship is never not
the figure of consumption and containment, and is never to be thought outside of
an original determination as the embodiment of the white man. Note, then,
Freeman Equiano, impatient with the ship he was on at the time for taking on too
much water, again expressing himself unguardedly: Damn the vessels bottom
out! Of course, his conscience instantly smote [him] for the expression (108);
but we are led to believe repentance was ineffectual, for the shipdescribed as
transfixed, fascinated, abject, and productive of abjectionsoon founders on the
rocks. The fear and horror that transfixion or encounter produces reconstitutes
and reconfigures the terror Equiano felt as a child, and to which he claims to have
grown a stranger; the terror that the ship once held, and which had shifted to a
terror of being transferred from one ship (and its correspondent comfort and
identification with ones original captor) to another, becomes a terror in being
torn away from the ship as such. All my sins stared me in the face [another
abject encounter or transfixion]; and especially I thought that God had hurled his
direful vengeance on my guilty head, for cursing the vessel on which my life
depended (109). We must think what it means to curse the ship, to curse what is
figured and embodied by the ship, to curse that upon which ones life depends.
Here, again, lie the problematics of the curse and the ship, and all in the midst of
a development towards reflection, reason, good English. The vessel or ship must
somehow be maintained, and yet that ships maintenance is to be figured within
the thinking of a kind of contained sabotage, reworking, contamination, poisoning.
The ship is that in which one must be contained, and yet what the ship contains
must always itself contain the possibility of contamination, reversed encounter,
returned gaze. Freeman Equiano returns to England and confronts his
benevolent/master Captain Pascal: . . . he appeared a good deal surprised, and
asked me how I came back. I answered, In a ship. (122)
In the end, it is important to return to the most familiar theorization of the form of
encounters such as those of Equiano. Again, the most familiar theorization of the
form of this encounter is that which Frantz Fanon structures around his own
answer to the question he asks in the midst of his long improvisation of Freud.
Fanon asks: What does the black man want? He answers: I had to meet the
white mans eyes. According to Bhabha (1990), Fanons answer signifies a desire
for the objectifying encounter with otherness. Is this paradoxically oppositional
resolution what Equiano wants? This question is bound up with the subtle
interplay between resistance and improvement, sentiment and thought, which
comes to signify an oppositional development that is, itself, quite problematic.
What is the relationship between the objectifying encounter that ruptures all
identity and the knowledge of freedom certain narratives and their interruptions
allow? The answer to this question might move us out from the outside that
hybridity or double-consciousness represent.
What Im after is a kind of knowledge that moves from somewhere on the other
side of either reason or experience, intelligibility or sensibility, and that is not
reducible to any originary state of nature but for that improvisation of the human
which is neither the encoding of or embeddedness in responsibility, nor a given
ethical tendency, but a predisposition to ensemble that moves through the
originary distinctions between ethics, epistemology, and ontology. Ensemble can
here be thought of as a rationalization of the social that is also a rationalization of
rationalization itself. In addition to joining Equiano and Uncle Toliver in a kind of
displaced and displacing resistance at the intersection of knowledge, language
(curse and prayer), and freedom, Mary Prince and Ellen Butler theorize or
rationalize, or, we might even say, decolonize that resistance precisely in the way
they propose a slide away from the proposition of encounter, a movement out of
the normal exigencies of emergent and contained subjectivity as it is theorized in
Fanon and extended in Bhabha. Mary Prince and Ellen Butler offer the
theorization, writing, sounding, re-sounding, recitation, performance,
rationalization, and improvisation of resistant practices, and of the social and of
the human and of the out-from-the-outside subjectivity or agency which produces
and which is those practices: ensemble.
Perhaps, in the light of the ensemble, the market, the open sea, the unstable zone
of power and the resistance that calls it into being, the crucial links between
baptism, liberation, and salvation, which are themselves linked to the questions of
knowledge, freedom, salvation, and the identity or subjectivity they demand and
allow, can be read. Recall that Equianos encounter with Captain Doran is
structured around a moment of misrecognition which forces him to remind
Equiano of who he is, so that Equiano can play his part in a dialogic moment
whose object is the establishment of Dorans own identity. Equiano refuses the
terms of that confrontation in the complex moment of what I termed a declaration
of in/dependence. The dependence at that declarations heart is, in a sense
deferred. What Id like briefly to examine is its return. Id like to think that return
in terms of a certain transcendence, one in which Equiano moves from the refusal
of an encounter with the lord to the acceptance of an encounter with the Lord.
That return takes place during the time of Equianos religious despair: a time at
which he has come to know a certain separation of liberation from salvation; a
time at which, it might be said, the strictures of a certain kind of subjectivity born
in abjection and objection reemerge, overwhelming the subjectivity born in

resistant apposition into which Equiano had never fully emerged. The moment at
which Equiano both prompts and refuses the lords determination of who he was
is overtakenin the midst of a desperate search for that certain knowledge of
salvation which is somehow tied to the loss of that intensity which generates and
regenerates the knowledge of freedomby the active search for the Lords
determination of who he was. (This search was urged upon him by a certain Mr. L
d, a clerk of the chapel wherein Equiano attends his first soul-feastthe site
which replaces the ship as the locus of consumption and assimilationin the
following manner: He then entreated me to beg of God to shew me what I was
and the true state of my soul [140; his emphasis].) This development carries with
it the echo of that illusory absence of terror we came across earlier, one bound up
with the slippage, in the traumatized mind of a child, from freedom to heaven
(While I was attending those ladies [the Miss Guerins], their servants told me I
could not go to heaven, unless I was baptized. This made me very uneasy; for I
had now some faint idea of a future state [52]), a slippage enabled by a disabling
and rupturous instruction ([The Miss Guerins] often used to teach me to read and
took great pains to instruct me in the principles of religion and the knowledge of
God [53]), and by the illusion of a virtual assimilation that leads to an inordinate
faith in the law which, when proven to be unfounded, turns to a rigid
differentiation of faith from law. Yet, at precisely the moment at which one would
seem to be sliding inexorably towards the need for a rigorous critique and
repudiation of the colonizing force of Western religions formulation of the
subjects provenance-in-abjection, one deferred by the refusal of the lord, but
fulfilled in the acceptance of the Lord, the paradoxically anarchic principle of
improvisational apposition returnsin the voices of Mary Prince and Ellen Butler
to raise again a fundamental question: Whats the relation between the
knowledge of God (so deeply bound to heaven, the faint idea of a future state)
and the knowledge of freedom (another, and one would hope more material,
future state)? This question is also prompted by a certain intuition that the
teaching of the Misses Guerin joined but did not erase or supersede the
knowledge Equiano already had, and which Ellen Butler theorizes. That knowledge
was always with him and activated, again, an improvisation of that with which he
would have been improved.
For Equiano, the determination of the Lord and the securing of his future state are
equivalent. They are bound to an adherence to a kind of fundamentalism which
returns again and again in abolitionist writing as an appeal to Christians to live up
to the principles of their religion as those principles are written. There is, then, a
pretty profound textualism embedded in Equianos search that is manifest in his
obsessive reading of the Bible; but Id like to argue that that textualism is never
disconnected from an impulse to confirm the knowledge that comes from a
certain innate endowmentbefore the ethical, the epistemological, and the
ontologicaltempered and sharpened by the experience of profound deprivation.
At this point, we might say that Equiano is given a revelation of a certain already
extant knowledgeof freedom or of salvation (one given as the human, the other
given by the Lord; one given in birth, the other given in rebirth)though for him,
liberation and salvation remain problematically differentiated. Therefore, for
Equiano, The word of God was sweet to my taste, yea sweeter than honey and
the honeycomb (143). We are still left in need of another rationalization of
sweetness, and of the subject that generates and is generated by it.
Two passages:
After this, I fell ill again with the rheumatism, and was sick a long time; but
whether sick or well, I had my work to do. About this time I asked my master and
mistress to let me buy my own freedom. With the help of Mr. Burchell, I could
have found the means to pay Mr. Wood; for it was agreed that I should afterwards
serve Mr. Burchell a while, for the cash he was to advance for me. I was earnest in
the request to my owners; but their hearts were hardtoo hard to consent. Mrs.
Wood was very angryshe grew quite outrageousshe called me a black devil,
and asked me who had put freedom into my head. To be free is very sweet, I
said [my emphasis]: but she took good care to keep me a slave. I saw her change
colour, and I left the room. (Prince 1987, 208)
Marster neber low he slaves to go to chuch. Dey hab big holes out in de fiels dey
git down in and pray. Dey done dat way cause de white folks didn want em to
pray. Dey uster pray for freedom. I dunno how dey larn to pray, cause dey warnt
no preachers come roun to teach em. I reckon de Lawd jis mek em know how to
pray. (Mellon 1988, 190)
To be free is very sweet. Mary Prince says it twice; it is written for her twice,
once in response to the question of how sheilliterate black devil might
possibly have known of freedom, and in interruption of her mistresss reverse
echo of the logic of the encounter between lord and bondsman that Captain Doran
illustrates and Hegel theorizes, the other time as a part of the rhetorical (hear the
echo of a certain persuasion/sweetness) climax she reaches in telling us that
slaves were not happy (214).11 Telling us, yes, because though we might be with
her, we also wish to know, and cannot understand, how she could have known
freedom in the absence of what we would recognize as the experience of freedom
(if we suspend a kind of thinking that moves through what is imagined as a radical
questioning of the very idea of experience). And our curiosity is, of course,
anomalous given the knowledge we have of freedom that transcends any
experience we will have had of it so far: any experience of personal liberty, any
Lee Greenwood crescendo, any illusion of opportunity, any phantasm of
accumulation, any etiolation of some either liberal or communitarian ethos.
The question is of the place of experience, of the projection or improvisation of
experience: Is knowledge of freedom always knowledge of the experience of
freedom, even when that knowledge precedes experience? If it is, something
other than a phenomenology is required in order to know it, something other than
a science of immediate experience, since this knowledge is highly mediated by
deprivation and by mediation itself, and by a vast range of other actions directed
toward the eradication of deprivation. Perhaps that knowledge is embedded in
action toward that which is at once (and never fully) withdrawn and experienced.
What this knowledge of freedom requires is an improvisation through the sensible
and the intelligible, a working through the idiomatic differences between the
modes of analysis which would valorize either over the other.
Indeed, Mary Prince requires something other than a reading, and the trace she
bears is precisely that non-unitary trait that improvises through race and origin as
the condition of the possibility of experience and knowledge, performance and
competence, of freedom. This is just as the knowledge she has is something
apposed but not opposed to the textual, and to the kind of subjectivity the textual
allows without determining. This something other than reading, this something
other than the application of an unrationalized understanding of reason, this
agency, is precisely what is exercised through Equiano in his quest for the
knowledge of freedom and of God. And whence comes Uncle Tolivers prayer?
Ellen Butler tells us, but her telling, her rationalizing, theorizing, improvising recitation, is only in that it is mediated. Indeed, the rationalization of the resistance
is in the disseminative effects of mediation. If so, Equianos prayers and curses
cannot be merely the products of the medicine/poison, bestowal/imposition of the
narrative apparatuses of a violent other. And who or what is de Lawd to
whom/which Ellen Butler refers, and what, if anything does de Lawd have to do
with the Lord? Mary Prince addresses this question by way of the transcendental
clue embedded in the displacing effects of a reply to her mistress that is not a
reply to one who is not her mistress, to one who will have and will have never
been, who could never be the mistress of another in and for whom the trace of an
anarch(ron)ic freedom of which that other has knowledge awaits, resonates,
augments, radiates.
The point is that in their work, Ellen Butler, Uncle Toliver, and Mary Prince evade
the opposition we might figure around the imaginary poles of the readable
Equiano and the unintelligible and illegible Ben Ali. They valorize neither literate,
rational identity nor its destruction; neither curse nor simplistic prayer; neither
material experience nor imaginative intellection; rather, they valorize ensemble,
transmitted in the trace of whatever it is that one carries as human: a generative
grammar and affect, a knowledge of language and freedom given by and as de
Law/d, by and as the improvisational presence of justice.
History is always already in the process of continual

reinvention, oscillating between the planes of intelligibility
and unintelligibility as narrative is passed down, stories
translated, and recitations transcribed. It is from this
unstable and aporic space that we derive the knowledge of
freedom and the subjectivity to assert that freedom
Noam Chomsky and others have begun to frame the fundamental questions
concerning knowledge of language as an innate endowment activated in the cut
(between speech and writing, between inner and outer speech, between silence
and sound, between competence and performance, in the interstice that is and
engenders rhythm, generated anew and improvised throughout from the strange
combination of experience and n[othing]). Knowledge of freedom is also in that
cut or hiatus; its where Mary Prince isas if given by the mediating and
improvisational force of de Law/d when that force is enacted in the improvised
nonexclusionary expansion of humanity. Ellen Butlers insight into our knowledge
of prayer as a particular linguistic mode is also insight into our knowledge of
freedom.
And Uncle Tolivers prayeruttered in an unknown tongue, given aloud and
transmitted through narrative mediation and through a citation and recitation in
the rhythmic interstice where ensemble fellis a citation (one given under the
collective name of the Workers of the Writers Program of the Works Project
Administration in the State of Virginia) which Litwack names, reigns, showing the
mark of that unnamed flowing in his rcit, his recitation. But, again, Litwacks is
not some predatory erasure, but the echo of that already extant loss inherent in
intelligibility, translation, and transcription, whose presence is and allows the
mediational ethics of ensemble. (Think of what is lost in the translation from
Ellen Butlers dialect to standard English: the constitutive cut that separates
the Lord and de Law/d and is transformed but retained in the chain of re-citation
that marks the writing of oral history.) Uncle Toliver is the gain and loss in this
recording at the end of the chain of recitations which is history, and which here is
extended at the end of a chain of narratives, of the kind of narrative wherein
knowledge of freedom is given to us and for us. The constellation of these
recitations and narratives is where Orwells problem (how we know so little given
so much evidence) and Platos problem (how we know so much given so little
evidence) intersect.12 Its where the questions concerning the law of genre, the
strange institution called literature (where the law is lifted, where everything can
be said), and the peculiar institution called slavery (where nothing could be said
as a matter of a law broken, and reconstituted in the breaking and reconstitution
of the law of genre, and the law of the law of genre, and their intersection)
converge.
One story told in Nansemond County concerns Uncle Toliver, who had the
indiscretion to pray aloud. When rumor reached the great house that he had been
praying for the Yankees, Tom and Henry, sons of the master, told the aged slave
to kneel in the barnyard and pray for the Confederates. Uncle Toliver prayed as
loud as he could for a Yankee victory. All day long they kept him there, taking
turns in lashing him, but he would not give in. At last he collapsed, still praying,
his voice a mumbled jargon. The only word that could be distinguished was
Yankee. Sometime that night, while they were still lashing him, Uncle Toliver died
(Negro in Virginia 1994, 209).
So you pause at the recitation of lost names and the mumbled jargon where the
rest of Uncle Tolivers utterance remains unheard. In the space that jargon opens
(a space off to the side or out-from-the-outside; an appositional spacing or
displacement of the encounter in the interest of a subjectivity whose presence
remains to be activated; a space not determined by the zero encounter that
ruptures the subject or the nostalgic return to an other subject before the
encounter; a space where Uncle Toliver speaks through Tom and Henrythe sons
of the masterand through the Workers of the Writers Project of the Works
Project Administration of the State of Virginia, and through Leon Litwak to us:
piercing and possessing, disabling and enabling mediation and meditation) the
rest is what is left for us to say, the rest is what is left for us to do, in the broad
and various echoes of that utterance, our attunement to which assures us that we
are in the tradition.
2acFugitivity = In Between
We are not against debate we exist outside of it while being
within
In the essay that many people already know best from this volume, "The
University and the Undercommons," Moten and Harney come closest to explaining
their mission. Refusing to be for or against the university and in fact
marking the critical academic as the player who holds the "for and
against" logic in place, Moten and Harney lead us to the "Undercommons of
the Enlightenment" where subversive intellectuals engage both the
university and fugitivity: "where the work gets done, where the work gets
subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong." The subversive
intellectual, we learn, is unprofessional, uncollegial, passionate and
disloyal. The subversive intellectual is neither trying to extend the
university nor change the university, the subversive intellectual is not
toiling in misery and from this place of misery articulating a "general
antagonism." In fact, the subversive intellectual enjoys the ride and
wants it to be faster and wilder; she does not want a room of his or her
own, she wants to be in the world, in the world with others and making
the world anew. Moten insists: "Like Deleuze. I believe in the world and
want to be in it. I want to be in it all the way to the end of it because I
believe in another world in the world and I want to be in that. And I plan to
stay a believer, like Curtis Mayfield. But that's beyond me, and even beyond me and
Stefano, and out into the world, the other thing, the other world, the joyful noise
of the scattered, scatted eschaton, the undercommon refusal of the academy
of misery."
Performance is a form of fugitvityits both above and below

the radar and helps guide theory towards practice
Polson 12 (2012, Dana Roe Polson (PhD in Language Literacy and Culture,
UMBC, Baltimore city public and public charter schools high school teacher),
Longing for Theory: Performance Debate in Action, E-Book pp. 2, RaMan)
Policy debate in Baltimore urban high schools is often all but invisible to anyone but the practitioners. With the exception of
occasional news stories and a 2003 60 Minutes segment featuring the Walbrook High School debate squad as an example of the
A performance
debate squad, which enacts a radical praxis that disrupts the norms of the more
traditional policy debate, would therefore similarly exist under the radar, or even
more so. The rhetoric and practice of performance debate is not aligned with the
Discourse of public schooling today; it does not fit with reform efforts emphasizing standards, merit pay,
accountability. And yet, students engaged in it are acting, in the sense of both
performing and doing, in rigorous, activist intellectual work. They are engaging in
success of Urban Debate Leagues, urban policy debate exists in a somewhat isolated, insular bubble.
an activity that is often described as a game, and yet by talking back, they
challenge its norms and practices in order to make it relevant to their lives as
debaters and as change agents. Further, the activity is performed with the
support of a counterhegemonic community that uses structural understandings
such as those provided by Critical Race Theory to bridge the gap between theory
and real life. The practice creates critical space for leadership development
through such structural understanding and by creating space for voice to be heard
and critique to be enacted in debate.
2acRace Pedagogy
Having conversations of race within classrooms opens space
for pedagogy that is necessary to combat forms of violence
both inside and outside of the academy
Yancy, 2012 - Professor of Philosophy, works primarily in the areas of critical
philosophy of race, critical whiteness studies, and philosophy of the Black
experience. (George; Look, A White!; Article; Pg. 60-61; DOA: 7/10/15;
ProjectMUSE || NDW)
Pedagogically engaging issues of race and racism calls for deeper levels of
analysis; it involves exploring aspects of the self that often operate beneath the
radar of conscious reflection. The transformation of consciousness is not limited to
pedagogies that stress the mere manipulation and mastery of concepts. Rather, it
is linked to a form of critical pedagogy that provides students with ways of
knowing that enable them to know themselves better [that is, more complexly
and more deeply] and live in the world more fully.29 Emphasis is also placed on
what one does in the world. Hooks does not reject the love of ideas, but she links
this love to the quest for knowledge that enables us to unite theory and
practice.30 In this way, the classroom becomes a dynamic place where
transformations in social relations are concretely actualized and the false
dichotomy between the world outside and the inside world of the academy
disappears.31 Hence, self-actualization in relation to issues of race and racism is
not simply about ones ability to comprehend concepts in the confines of a
classroom. According to hooks, the world outside and inside the walls of the
academy constitute a continuum. While it is important for her that practices of
freedom take place in the classroom, spaces that often teach conformity, such
practices must extend beyond. Healers, in this case both teachers/professors and
students, are not navel gazers, but are committed to social praxis. In short, we
must act and reflect upon the world in order to change it.32
2acPerformative Pedagogy
Performative pedagogy is the pedagogy of the oppressed
that forces the oppress to question the normal
communication and critical, feminist, and performative pedagogies //liam TAM]
Performative pedagogy, as a method and theory of the body, can ask
questions in a way that points to the structure and machinery of
whiteness . It can put flesh to the concept of whiteness. It can point to
whiteness's perceived absence. It can name the norm. Performative
pedagogy, in this way, can serve as a pedagogy of the oppressor it
can ask those in positions of power (via sex, race, class, or sexuality) to
question their own embodied experiences by de manding that they
encounter the other through the mode of performance. For if
whiteness functions in dominant discourse as the unmarked center of
cultural power, then a performative pedagogy can and must ask how
we can create a ground for subversion. Performative pedagogy, as a
method of enfleshment that brings theory to the body, can question
the normal, stable, inevitable actualiza tion of race, nurturing
subversive possibility.
2acPrisons
You cant get free inside the prison, and we define prisons as
institutions that dont allow for freedom this widened
interpretation is vital to disassemble hierarchy
Nagel and Nocella 13 [2013, Mechthild Nagel (Feminist Journal), The End
of Prisons: Reflections from the Decarceration Movement, edited, online , Google Books,
https://books.google.com/books?id=TZAjAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA3&lpg=PA3&dq=The+original+working+title+for+this+volume+was+Prison+Abolition.
+After+discussion+among+the+contributors+however,
+we+changed+the+title+to+The+End+of+Prisons.&source=bl&ots=wXMtuq07fB&sig=oI8ahleYYLf2pViywJmNfDhip3I&hl=en&sa=X&ei=0ISdVYTxBc
WfsgHbsLPoDg&ved=0CB8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=The%20original%20working%20title%20for%20this%20volume%20was%20Prison%20Abolition.
%20After%20discussion%20among%20the%20contributors%20however%2C%20we%20changed%20the%20title%20to%20The%20End%20of
%20Prisons.&f=false,
RaMan]
The original working title for this volume was Prison Abolition. After discussion
among the contributors however, we changed the title to The End of Prisons.
First, we wish to raise discussions about the telos of prisons what purpose do
they have?Second, Prison abolition is strongly related to a particular movement to
end the prison industrial complex. Following Michel Foucault(1977), we argue that
prisons are also institutions such as schools, nursing homes, jails, daycare
centers, parks, zoos, reservations and marriage, just to name a few. Prisons are
all around us and constructed by those in dominant oppressive authoritarian
positions. There are many types of prisons religious prisons, social prisons,
political prisons, economic prisons, educational prisons, and, of course, criminal
prisons. Individuals leave one prison only to enter another. From daycare to
school to a nursing home, we are a nation of instutionalized prisons. Criminal
prisons in the United States are not officially referred to as such, but rather as
correctional facilities. A prison, as we define it in this volume, is an institution or
system that oppresses and does not allow freedom for a particular group. Within
this definition, we include the imprisonment of non-human animals and plants,
which are too often overlooked. Michel Foucault (1977) famously said, Is it
surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all
resemble prisons? (p. 288). We believe that this volume is one of the first to
extend Foucaults logic, by making a connection between coercive institutions and
all systems of domination as forms of prisons. We argue that the conception of
prison is far reaching, always changing and adapting to the times and the sociopolitical environment. We expand the concept of prison from concrete walls,
barbed wire, gates and fences to many of the institutions and systems throughout
society such as schools, mental hospitals, reservations for indigenous Americans,
zoos for non-human animals, and national parks and urban cultivated green
spaces for the ecological community. United States imperialism, which promotes
global domination and capitalism, not only imprisons convicted criminals but its
people, land, non-human animals, those that surround it (non-United States
citizens) and those trapped within it (American Indians and immigrants).
2ac State Bad

The state is incurable and the former slave will always be
subject to extreme forms of torture, terror, and violence at its
hands
some scholars have followed the intellectual lead of prisoners and
activists in the 1960s and 1970s by exploring the legal, discursive, and
institutional relationships between chattel-slavery and the modern prison. Most critically,
the connection between slavery and the prison is formalized and institutionalized
by the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which reads: Neither
slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime whereof the
party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any
place subject to their jurisdiction.46 Joy James refers to this as an enslaving antienslavement narrative, since the Thirteenth Amendment recreates and
repositions slavery inside the prison, even as it abolishes it in the free world. 47 This
During the past few decades,
was made clear during congressional debates about the meanings of emancipation, when Senator Charles Sumner presented to Congress a notice from the sheriff of Anne Arundel
County in Maryland: Public Sale.The undersigned will sell at the court-house door, in the city of Annapolis, at twelve o clock, on Saturday, 8th December, 1866, a negro man
named Richard Harris, for six months, convicted at the October term, 1866, of the Anne Arundel county circuit court for larceny, and sentenced by the court to be sold as a slave.
Terms of sale, cash.48 Just six years later, the Supreme Court declared in Ruffin v. Commonwealth (1871) that prisoners were civically dead (dead to the law) and slaves of the
49 The power of the law converted the slave into a prisoner and the prisoner
into a slave. In this way, the law criminalized race, racialized crime, and allowed
slavery to live on, or possess, the law. And so, with the end of one form of slavery
came new mechanisms to control, exploit, and contain black bodies, labor, and
freedom. As the historian David Oshinsky writes, Law enforcement now meant keeping ex-slaves in
line.50 After the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation, the convict-lease
system emerged as one mechanism in slaverys aftermath that extended and
renewed the confinement and exploitation of black people . Throughout the
south, black people (former slaves) were rounded up and charged with
crimes that in the past would be punished by the torture and terror of
the master. The theft of a pig, insulting gestures, cohabitating with
whites, mischief, being unemployed, and vagrancy were now crimes
that would be punished by the state. The law of the master was now the law of the land: An offense against Mr. Shields had
become an offense against the state.51 Former slaves were arrested and leased to private contractors
to be worked until death. What was once personal property was made public and
since black bodies were no longer owned by private individuals but rather leased
by the state, many contractors felt free to work convicts to death. As one private contractor put it,
Before the war, we owned the negroes. If a man had a good negro, he could afford to keep himBut these convicts we dont own em. One dies, get another.52 Without
private investment and ownership by the master, black bodies were subject to
even more extreme forms of torture, terror, and violence. The legal construction
of new forms of freedom ushered in new mechanisms for producing human
disposability. Black pain, injury, and death did not slow the accumulation of capital in the same way as they did under plantation slavery; one could just get another.
state.
But the convict-lease system was just one mechanism among a massive
regime of racialized power and violence that allowed the spirit of slavery
to live on. Like the writing of Boggs and Shakur, the sociologist Loc Wacquant has extended this analysis of the relationship between race, the carceral, and death to
encompass the twentieth century as a whole. He argues that the prison is part of a carceral
continuum that traverses time (slavery, the convict-lease system, Jim
Crow, and the early ghetto) and space (the prison, schools, welfare, and
the hyper-ghetto) to manage and contain populations rendered surplus
or disposable to the racial state and neoliberal capital.53 In this way, an antiblackness established under chattel-slavery possesses and structures a variety of
institutions over space and time. Thus, we might modify Foucaults famous question, Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools,
barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons? to include the plantation, the slave ship, the coffle, and the auction block. 54 Although the
connections between slavery and the prison are important to this project, I am
also interested in more expansive understandings of the afterlife of slavery. In particular,
I am concerned with theories that can help make the connection between the
market under chattel-slavery and the market under neoliberalism. In other words, the afterlife of
slavery structures much more than the prison or even more than Wacquants carceral continuum. For instance, Christina Sharpe argues that our very subjectivity is indebted to,
and born out of, the discursive codes of slavery and post-slavery. For Sharpe, engaging and analyzing a post-slavery subjectivity means examining subjectivities constituted by
This is one of the main

projects of black feminism, as exemplified by Boggs engagement with the
seemingly innocuous institutions of insurance, state bureaucracy, and the
university.56 This project is also central to Hortense Spillerss classic essay, Mamas Baby, Papas Maybe: An American Grammar book, where she connects slavery to
trans-Atlantic slavery and connecting them to present (and past) mundane horrors that arent acknowledged to be horrors.55
the life of the symbolic world. She writes: Even though the captive flesh/body has been liberated, and no one need pretend that even the quotation marks do not matter, dominant
symbolic activity, the ruling episteme that releases the dynamics of naming and valuation, remains grounded in originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation, so that it is as if
neither time nor history, nor historiography or its topics, show movement, as the human subject is murdered over and over again by the passions of a bloodless and anonymous
The ways meaning

and value are institutionalized have been determined by the violence and terror of
slavery. Slavery is a death sentence enacted across generations, one that
changes name and shape as time progresses. Freedom presupposes and builds on
slavery so that post-slavery subjectivities are shaped by forms of power that
resemble and sometimes mimic power under slavery (force, terror, sexual
violence, compulsion, torture) while they are also confined by the postemancipation technologies of consent, reason, will, and choice .58 Frank Wilderson summarizes this more
archaism, showing itself in endless disguise.57 Like Jackson and Shakur, Spillers argues that slavery ruptures the progress of time.
expansive understanding of the afterlife of slavery: The imaginary of the state and civil society is parasitic on the Middle Passage. Put another way, No slave no world.59 According
to Wilderson, slavery connotes an ontological (not experiential) status for blackness, one that is shaped not by exploitation and alienation, but by accumulation and fungibility (the
What is
most crucial for my project on the relationship between the afterlife of slavery and
neoliberalism is that as freedom navigated the late nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, it was not innocent and it did not come alone. Something from the past
held on to freedom as it maneuvered time and space. Freedom was possessed by
its opposite, a ghost wished away by liberal thought that did not so easily
disappear. In the 1970s, when the market produced the freedom of capital
mobility, individuality, and choice, and the prison manufactured the freedom of
safety and security, the spirit of slavery dictated the movements and meanings of
that freedom. Indeed, the spirit of slavery lives on in more ways than one can imagine: in the shade of tree-lined suburban streets, in definitions and measures of
condition of being owned and traded.).60 In this way, slavery does not lay dormant in the past, but became attached to the political ontology of blackness.61
value, in the prosperity and health of some, and in the hail of the police as one walks down the street. It guides bullets and bombs, makes visible what we see, and vanishes what is
right in front of us. It is laced in the cement and steel of the prison, solidified in dreams of liberation, and embedded in psychic life. Although it is sometimes recognizable, it also
lives on in what we do not know and cannot remember in the lives erased, expunged, ended or that were simply never recorded to begin with. Whether it comes as spectacle or
The spirit of slavery does more then meddle in the

present; rather, it has intensified, seduced, enveloped, and animated
contemporary formations of power. Possession names the ways that the
operations of corporate, state, individual, and institutional bodies are sometimes
something one cannot see or feel, it is always there.
beyond the self-possessed will of the living. Something else is also in control,
something that may feel like nothing even as it compels movement, motivates
ideology, and drives the organization of life and death. In this way, slavery is not a
ghost lingering in the corner of the roomrather, its spirit animates the
architecture of the house as a whole. The past does not merely haunt the present; it composes the present. As Toni Morrison writes, All
of it is now, it is always now.62
Prefer this impact structural violence is invisible and

exponential and you have an ethical duty to challenge it
Nixon 11
(Rob, Rachel Carson Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Slow
Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, pgs. 2-3)
we urgently need to
rethink-politically, imaginatively, and theoretically-what I call "slow violence." By slow violence I
mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed
across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Violence is
customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive
and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. We need, I believe, to
engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor
instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out
across a range of temporal scales. In so doing, we also need to engage the representational, narrative,
and strategic challenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence. Climate change, the thawing
Three primary concerns animate this book, chief among them my conviction that
cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification, deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying oceans, and
a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes present formidable representational obstacles that
can hinder our efforts to mobilize and act decisively. The long dyings-the staggered and staggeringly discounted
casualties, both human and ecological that result from war's toxic aftermaths or climate change-are
Had Summers advocated

invading Africa with weapons of mass destruction, his proposal would have fallen
under conventional definitions of violence and been perceived as a military or even an
imperial invasion. Advocating invading countries with mass forms of slow-motion
toxicity, however, requires rethinking our accepted assumptions of violence to
include slow violence. Such a rethinking requires that we complicate conventional
assumptions about violence as a highly visible act that is newsworthy because it is event focused,
time bound, and body bound. We need to account for how the temporal dispersion of slow
violence affects the way we perceive and respond to a variety of social afflictions-from
underrepresented in strategic planning as well as in human memory.
domestic abuse to posttraumatic stress and, in particular, environmental calamities. A major challenge is
representational: how to devise arresting stories, images, and symbols adequate to the pervasive but elusive
slow violence is often not just attritional but also

exponential, operating as a major threat multiplier; it can fuel long-term,
proliferating conflicts in situations where the conditions for sustaining life become
increasingly but gradually degraded.
violence of delayed effects. Crucially,
Hip Hop Key/Pedagogy

Hip Hop helps to break down the disembodied whiteness of
the activity.
Longing for Theory: Performance Debate in Action, E-Book pp. 251-252, RaMan]
Further, the hip-hop music that animates many critical debate rounds is a sonic
disturbance to this quiet white space, an aural representation of the Black bodies
playing it. The presence of music in a debate round, the Blackness of hip-hop,
etc., all conspire against this disembodied whiteness. As Duane Hartman said: [Performativity] deals with
the performance of the body. And being able to identify something by the performance of the body. And that doesnt necessarily
have to be active, you know, it could just be looking at you. What makes a woman a woman is based
on the performance of that body. And so that gender becomes a performative identity. And so their argument became the
way in which we express ourselves within debate, is based on the performance of
our bodies as Black males, Black females. (Hartman, group interview I, p. 11)
What might the unique styles and expressions that Ede Warner and Jon
Bruschke (both veteran collegiate debate coaches) called for look like ? Jason Burton
described the beginnings of performance debate at the University of Louisville as an effort to increase participation of Black students. He said that the
Ede Warner, who was the founder of that program, began to introduce hip-hop music into debate rounds as a way of doing so (Jason Burton, group
he beginnings, then, had to do with changing the style of debate to

include culturally Black art as part of the debate performance. These
performances often still include hip-hop music, often pre-recorded, as part of
debate. In addition, to give just a few examples, students from Paul Robeson High School have played West
interview I, p. 3). T
African percussion and danced, read narratives about their families, created poetry. Student participant Jessica Cooper describes singing in debate,
as a way of being comfortable in debate by making it relate to her experience: ...

in debate we, like Ill sing my first speech because like, like first it was like a way
for me to be comfortable in the round....For me, singing was a way for me to
make myself comfortable and a way for me to make debate relate to me and my
community (Jessica Cooper, interview, p. 2).
State FailsHalberstam
We have to abandon the state and stop trying to be appeal to
it. Their framework is bs
If you want to know what the undercommons wants, what Moten and Harney
want, what black people, indigenous peoples, queers and poor people want, what
we (the "we" who cohabit in the space of the undercommons) want, it is this - we
cannot be satisfied with the recognition and acknowledgement
generated by the very system that denies a) that anything was ever
broken and b) that we deserved to be the broken part; so we refuse to
ask for recognition and instead we want to take apart, dismantle, tear
down the structure that, right now, limits our ability to find each other,
to see beyond it and to access the places that we know lie outside its
walls. We cannot say what new structures will replace the ones we live
with yet, because once we have torn shit down, we will inevitably see
more and see differently and feel a new sense of wanting and being and
becoming. What we want after "the break" will be different from what
we think we want before the break and both are necessarily different
from the desire that issues from being in the break.
State FailsReid-Brinkley
The state cant solve the framing of the black bodyvisible
political movements have failed to challenge squo power
structures
Reid-Brinkley 08 [Shanara Rose. PhD in Philosophy from the University of
Georgia. The Harsh Realities Of Acting Black: How African-American Policy
Debaters Negotiate Representation Through Racial Performance And Style.
https://getd.libs.uga.edu/pdfs/reid-brinkley_shanara_r_200805_phd.pdf pgs 19-20.
7/5]//kmc
Thus, America faces a grave difficulty in resolving this situation. We find it difficult to understand why such a situation exists in
it is difficult to believe that the Civil Rights Movement and the

passage of legal legislation to end segregation and 8 discriminatory practices,
targeted at racial and ethnic minorities, did not permanently resolve the
problem. Theoretically, all Americans have equal access to the tools that are
necessary to lead a successful life with the full benefits of citizenship. The Civil
Rights Movement and the Womens Movement ensured that racial and ethnic minorities and
women achieved equality with white men and thus barriers to their successful
participation in society had been removed. If equality has been achieved, and
yet we find that the heretofore excluded populations are still unable to
achieve the educational and economic heights of the American dream,
then one must look to that population for the explanation rather than to
American society in general.
the first place. In essence,
No Going Back
Our aff brings the humanities back to the activity, and it's too
late to get rid of them anyway.
Shanahan also believes that attempting to eradicate critical styles of debate is not
only foolish, but too late: To consider debate without Kritiks, at this time, is like
considering a policy alternative by wishing away the status quo. Kritiks are part of
contemporary policy debate (Shanahan, 2004, p. 67). Shanahan agrees with
Bruschke that the debate community should join the rest of academia in dealing
with intellectual conflict, and points out that ignoring such critical thinking for
some years damaged the debate community. Even the most casual glance
across a variety of disciplines demonstrated the irrefutable relevance of so-called
post-structuralism and postmodernism to debate practice. .... How could such a
sophisticated argumentative community fail to consider and evaluate the
relevance of such far-reaching and important changes in academic scholarship?
(Shanahan, 2004, p. 73). For many years, then, the collegiate policy debate
community isolated itself from intellectual currents in humanities departments.
Shanahan suggests that this isolationism kept them from using those ideas to
advance their practice and to stay relevant to academic as a whole. Becoming
more open to intellectual ideas, as opposed to attempting to preserve the
discipline as-is, is therefore a positive development, according to Shanahan and
Bruschke.
Social Location
Our aff allows debaters to connect global issues with their
social location.
The attempt, then, is to allow students to connect the arguments they hear in
debate with their own experiences. The result is that students are speaking from
their social location. They are not just talking about what went on at home as
emotional venting or commiseration, however valuable that may be; instead,
they are becoming cognizant of the structural nature of their home and
community lives and linking them to the concepts they learn about in debate. There is
an analytical approach. Aaron explained: And I think ... what gets people into debate, is when they apply
those arguments that they read to their lives and see how they actually connect
to the real world themselves.... I just dont look at arguments and say Hmm, Im
gonna run this. and say okay I look into the arguments and say ok how does this work in the real world. Like, what do people really think about these type of
arguments. And how do people feel about them, and economic social conditions or political conditions that we live in now. (Aaron, interview, p. 3) Performance debate revolves
Andre Rubens, a coach, explained how his

students created such connections between social location and theory: Well the
resolution for us, like when we debate each year, starts from a perspective of
what those words mean to someone living in their social conditio n. So for example when you when
around the pertinence of social location to argumentation and theorizing.
youre in the inner city and you think of police presence, what does that mean to you? Usually that means squad cars yelling out with bullhorns at your friends. Or presence that
scares you to death when you hear that siren. What is it, that that tense feeling when [imitates police car siren pull-up noise] woo-woop! of a police siren, what does it mean when
you hear that. .... what does this resolution, ... how do you feel about it, speaking as a person from where youre from. What does this mean to you. (Andre Rubens, group interview
ile performance debate used to more often take a metaphorical

approach to a resolution or to reject it altogether in favor of a metacognitive look
at the debate community, the relationship to the resolution has changed as the
practice has evolved. As Rubens puts it, his teams practice started with the relationship between the resolution and the debaters own experience with
II, p. 19) As noted in Chapter 1, wh
component parts of the resolution, in this case, police presence and their own experiences with it. By doing so, the team not only connected their own experiences to the
ey were able to link their oppression

to others, creating a sense of solidarity with people very far away and
developing a more general understanding of the way power is used to oppress . Rubens
resolution but connected themselves to people affected by United States liberal foreign policy. Th
noted, when we conceive of the question of Iraq and Afghanistan, we can make parallels between how the military acts in Iraq and Afghanistan as the same way the police do in
urban America (group interview II, p. 1). So, in this case we see that not only are various US oppression linked, such as gender and race, but also that performance debate can
Global white supremacy, a concept discussed by Charles W. Mills,

can be seen if the US military and local US police forces are compared, or if the
oppression of Black and Brown people world-wide is noticed .
foster a more global outlook.
A2 Equity/Fairness
Debate is not conformed to rules. Its about 2 opposing sides
convincing the listener about their argument.
Glazer and Rubenstein 2K [May 2000, Jacob Glazer (The Faculty of Management, Tel Aviv University) and Ariel
Rubenstein (The School of Economics, Tel Aviv University and the Department of Economics, Princeton University. Most of this authors research was
conducted while he was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, New York during the academic year 1996-7), Debates and Decisions: On a
Rationale of Argumentation Rules, online, http://arielrubinstein.tau.ac.il/papers/debates.pdf, RaMan]
This paper is a part of our long-term research agenda for studying different aspects of debates using game theoretic tools. Debates are common
e. In a debate, two or more parties (the debaters), who disagree

regarding some issue, raise arguments to support their positions or to rebuff the
other partys arguments. Sometimes the purpose of the debaters is to argue just for the sake of arguing, and sometimes their aim
is to try to convince the other party to change his position. In this paper, however, the purpose of each debater is to
persuade a third party (the listener) to support his position . Note that a debate is different from
phenomena in our daily lif
bargaining and war, which are also mechanisms for conflict resolutions, in that the outcome of those mechanisms heavily depend on the rivals' power.
A debate is different from a conversation, which is also a mechanism in which

interested parties make arguments, in that in a conversation, there is a common
interest among the parties. We view a debate as a mechanism by which an
uninformed decision-maker (the listener) extracts information from two informed
parties (the debaters). The debaters hold contradicting positions about the
decision that should be made. The right conclusion depends on several outcomes.
During the debate the debaters raise arguments to support their respective
positions and on the basis of these arguments, the listener reaches a conclusion
regarding the right decision. When we say that a debater raises the argument x, we mean that he reveals that aspect x
supports his position. When the other debater responds to an argument x with an argument y, we refer to argument y as a counterargument. The
realizations of the aspects are assumed to be independent. All aspects are assumed to be equally
weighted, in the sense that all of them have the same value of information regarding the right decision. In this paper, we address only the issue of the
relative strength of arguments and counterarguments. Under the above assumptions one may expect the optimal debate conclusion to be a function
only of the number of arguments made by each party. Our Page 5 intuitions supported by some experimental evidence is that this is not correct: after
one argument has been made by one party, the subjects, in the role of the other party, may find the seemingly equal counterarguments unequally
We show, that the optimal

debate rules have the property that the strength of a counterargument may
depends on the argument it is countering, even when there is no informational
dependency between the two arguments. In particular, we show the invalidity of
the following principle, regarding the dependency of the outcome of a debate on
two the argument raised by one debater and the counterargument raised by the
other debater: The Debate Consistency (DC) Principle: It is impossible that"x wins the debate" if y is
brought up as a counterargument to x, but "y wins the debate" if x is brought up
as a counterargument to y. We show that this principle is not necessarily a property of debate rules optimally designed to extract
information from the debaters. Let us emphasize that we do not intend to provide a general theory of debates. Our only aim is to
point out that the logic of the optimal design of debating rules is subtle and
contains some features which are not intuitive.
persuasive. Normatively, we investigate the optimal debate rules within a simple example.
A2 Limits/Stasis Good
Our refusal of their call to order is how we have spill over
because that disorder will continue when we leave
The path to the wild beyond is paved with refusal. In The Undercommons if we
begin anywhere, we begin with the right to refuse what has been refused to you.
Citing Gayatri Spivak, Moten and Harney call this refusal the "first right" and it is a
game-changing kind of refusal in that it signals the refusal of the choices as
offered. We can understand this refusal in terms that Chandan Reddy lays out in
Freedom With Violence (2011) - for Reddy, gay marriage is the option that cannot be opposed in the ballot box. While we can circulate multiple critiques of gay
marriage in terms of its institutionalization of intimacy, when you arrive at the
ballot box, pen in hand, you only get to check "yes" or "no" and the no, in this
case, could be more damning than the yes. And so, you must refuse the choice as
offered. Moten and Harney also study what it would mean to refuse what they
term "the call to order." And what would it mean, furthermore, to refuse to call
others to order, to refuse interpellation and the reinstantiation of the law. When
we refuse, Moten and Harney suggest, we create dissonance and more
importantly, we allow dissonance to continue - when we enter a classroom and we
refuse to call it to order, we are allowing study to continue, dissonant study
perhaps, disorganized study, but study that precedes our call and will continue
after we have left the room. Or, when we listen to music, we must refuse the idea
that music happens only when the musician enters and picks up an instrument;
music is also the anticipation of the performance and the noises of appreciation it
generates and the speaking that happens through and around it, making it and
loving it, being in it while listening. And so, when we refuse the call to order - the
teacher picking up the book, the conductor raising his baton, the speaker asking
for silence, the torturer tightening the noose - we refuse order as the distinction
between noise and music, chatter and knowledge, pain and truth.
A2 Masters Tools
Learning the masters tools is a joke the masters tools will
never dismantle the master's house
Bensimon 03 [June 2003, Catherine Bensimon (Professor of Educational Policy
and Administration at the University of Southern California), Like it or Not:
Feminist Critical Policy Analysis Matters, online,
https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1-101862111/like-it-or-not-feministcritical-policy-analysism, RaMan]
Master as Expert, Master as Oppressor Anderson's critique rests on the
assumption that her definition of the word "master" is everyone's definition. The meaning
she ascribes to master can be gleaned in the assertions she makes, such as, "Feminists cannot reject the masters tools, and that it is a good thing t00; . . . increasing
one's sensitivity to the nuances of the master's tools is the only way to go;
Bensimon and Marshall . . . follow linguistic rules that reveal their mastery of
academic ways of making meaning; . . . they [follow] established academic protocols, . . . the tools of critique . . . they urge upon their
readers are synonymous with the master's tools . . . the challenges they offer would not make sense to other members of the pro fession . . . if Bensimon
and Marshall had not mastered some of the academic protocols handed down by
men" (emphasis added). For Anderson the meaning of "master" is strictly
academic; it has to do with expertise or command of the "linguistic rules" that
signify one's "mastery of academic ways of making meaning" that separate the
masters from the apprentices and distinguish between academic insiders and
non-academics. Thus, according to Anderson, the masters tools (i.e.. methods) are "nothing more
than ways of apprehending the world" that have been handed down to women,
presumably because these are the only ways of apprehending the world or
because women academics are incapable of developing their own ways of
apprehending' the world. Joan Scott (l988) reminds us that "words, like the ideas and things they are meant to signify, have a history," And the history
that Anderson associates with the word "master" is fundamentally different from the history that moved Audre Lorde to declare, " The masters tools
will never dismantle the master's house." The presumption that the master's
definition is everyone's definition is precisely the kind of reasoning that leads to
analyses that are faulty, partial, and distorting. The Masters Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House was the title of a
talk given by Audre Lorde on a panel, "The Personal and the Political," featured at the Second Sex Conference held in New York City on October 29, 1979. The title
was intended as a criticism of white academic feminists who, in including black
feminists only in those sessions that had something to do with race and leaving
them out of topics such as existentialism, the erotic, feminist theory, etc., were in
fact using the "tools of a racist patriarchy . . . to examine the fruits of that same
patriarchy" (Lorde, I984, p. 98). Lorde's point was that feminist scholars have turned to the "master's tools" in order to gain acceptability and tit into the established
disciplinary canons. In contrast, Lorde urges us to tum the "differences" that are the mark of marginalized populations into strengths. She goes on to say, For
the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us
temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring
about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still
define the master's house as their only source of support . (Lorde, 1984, p. 99). For black
people the term "master" is embedded in a horrific history of legalized injustice
and violence. It connotes the control of one person over another or others based
on skin color. Master is associated with the institutions of slavery. It is also associated with masculine
representations such as the "man who serves as head of a household" or a "male
teacher," as for example, in Anderson's conception of male academics handing

down methods to feminist academics. Standpoint feminism helps us expand on Lordes use of the term master and its relevance to the
project of feminist and critical policy analysis. Feminist standpoint theorists make a case for the view from the bottom, "the slave," as the more complete one. "The point of
departure for standpoint feminist epistemology is the idea that knowledge is socially situated. It follows that in order to interpret and understand the situation of a particular group of
people, thought has to start from their lives. Essentially, standpoint feminist epistemology urges us to move away from the idea of simply adding the "other" to preexisting
Accordingly,
standpoint feminists reject the "master's" view because it is partial and distorting.
It is partial because it is derived from a vision of reality that takes into account
only the reality of the dominant class or power holders. It is distorting because it
tends to normalize the experience of the "master" as the generic experienc e. In contrast,
frameworks and directs us to ground knowledge on the particular experience of the people we want to understand" (Lorde, 1984, p. 144).
Audre Lorde urges us "to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled . . . to take our differences and make them strengths" (Lorde. 1984, p. 112). Similarly, standpoint feminists
suggest that the position of "outsider within" (Hill Collins, 1986) and "borderline" position (Anzaldua, 1987) provide a vision of the academy and relations within it that are inverse to
the master's view (Harding, l99l; Hartsock. 1983). For example, Patricia Hill Collins argues that it is the awareness of her marginal status as the "outsider within" that provides the
. She observes, "It is the "outsider

within" who is more likely to challenge the knowledge claims of insiders, to
acknowledge the discrepancy between insiders' accounts of human behavior and
her own experiences and to identify anomalies" (Fonow & Cook, 1991. p. 3). As black feminists make clear, to accept the
black female intellectual with a unique black feminist standpoint from which to analyze life in the academy
master's tools could be self-destructive because it would require us to adopt theories and methods - the tools - that historically have excluded women or devalued them. Lordes
To adopt the
masters tools is to become an insider and assimilate what we described in our
work as androcentric perspectives. "But," Anderson asks, "what makes those
disciplines and their methods androcentric?" But, we wonder, why ask a question that Anderson herself so clearly answers?
dictum, in the words of .loan Scott, warns us to not be "drawn into the very assumptions of the very discourse we ought to question" (Scott, l998, p. 36).
How else, other than androcentrism, could we describe the presumption that academic man handed down to us the "academic protocols" that enable our work to be understood and
heard? T
he implication is that fitting in is contingent on compliance with his rules.
A2 People Quit**
Their discomfort in the shape of T and Framework is proof
that our evil plan is working
Warren and Fassett, 2004 [The Johns Hopkins University Press. All
rights reserved Theatre Topics 14.2 (2004) 411-430John T. Warren is
an assistant professor in the School of Communication Studies at
Bowling Green State University, where he teaches courses in
performance, culture, identity, and power. Deanna L. Fassett is an
assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at
San Jos State University, where she teaches courses in instructional
communication and critical, feminist, and performative pedagogies
//liam TAM]
Further, this engagement engenders less defensiveness for white subjects
because it begins with their experiential interaction with this material, giving
acknowledgment to their voices and their experiences. And while their understandings of power and racial inequality are being challenged, they
are not individually identified as evil racists who are inflicting
intentional harm onto others. Rather, these workshops attempt to move
them to reflect on their own everyday behaviors by helping them to see
that they too are caught up in systems of cultural power. As Foucault
made clear, power is not a zero-sum game, an item that some may possess and
so others may not. Rather, power is fluid, flowing through everyone but not fixed
anywhere in particular. When we re- move the white subject from the site of direct
critique, we avoid the defensive mechanisms that white privilege breeds. It is
here that we might just move toward subverting their notions of how
racism functions. And if we do that, whiteness loses its naturalness and
is seen as the construct it is.But one should never lose sight of the fact
that this pedagogy asks white students/participants to question
themselves and their relation to whiteness. It destabilizes the comfort
with which they live their lives. Often, we learn from white students who
participate in these workshops that they can't imagine living their lives in
the same way after this experience. Indeed, some say that they now are
obsessed with their own social position and can't watch television, listen to
politicians, interact with other members of their family, or teach in the same
way that they used to because they are so uncomfortable with their
awareness of their cultural privilege that they must search out some
kind of change. Thus, they move from comfort to discomfort, from
safety to risk. While we want to acknowledge their feelings of
discomfort and vulnerability, we also want to embrace and celebrate
that repositioning.
Their framework destroys participation by shutting down

modes of expression that widen the scope of the activity by
increasing participation of socially conscious debaters
What would such problem-posing education, such unveiling of reality, look like
for students? C. Wright Mills concept of the sociological imagination is useful
here. The sociological imagination is a way of thinking based on a distinction
between troubles and issues. These are the personal troubles of milieu as
opposed to the public issues of social structure that occur when various milieu
overlap and interpenetrate to form the larger structure of social and historical
life (Mills, 1959, p. 8). Mills uses unemployment to illustrate this distinction. If a
couple of people in a city of several million are unemployed, those people are
experiencing troubles. If, however, a third of the city is unemployed, Both the
correct statement of the problem and the range of possible solutions require us to
consider the economic and political institutions of the society, and not merely the
personal situation and character of a scatter of individuals (Mills, 1959, p. 9). In
the case of my students, they were stating the problem and thus were considering
solutions as being personal situation and character rather than looking at them
on a structural, institutional level. Once we are employing a sociological
imagination to understand issues as opposed to troubles, we are least
understanding the problem at a more appropriate level of analysis. What
oppresses people? We are looking at larger-scale institutional and structural
explanations, as opposed to troubles-based explanations such as Black people
are lazy, which fail to take into account anything other than psychological
explanations for individual behavior. They fail to notice the issues facing various
groups in society more than other groups. They do not allow us to talk
productively about racism, or wealth inequality, or any of a number of structural
issues. In this section, I look at how the performance debate practice takes an
approach that develops students sociological imaginations by helping them
explore and defend generally structural explanations, before taking a deeper look
at how CRT is used to examine race in such a structural light. For some students,
this kind of structural talk and theorizing meets a deeply felt need for making
sense of their worlds. Perhaps these are students for whom the deep division
between American Dream ideology and patterns of inequality has always been a
contradiction; perhaps they reject psychological or cultural explanations for
inequity In my titular phrase, Aaron described an urban debater as someone who
longs for theory: I think our urban debater is a person that longs for theory. Like
bell hooks, I long for some theory to... it sounds corny, but, I long for some theory
to umm, to express what I was going through. .... How did [a] paradigm like
capitalism and a paradigm like government work, in my context of my socialeconomic condition. And all that questioning, to me made me even long for
theory even more. (Aaron, interview, p. 21).
Every single debate that engages issues leaves an impact

behind, arguments like ours influence more young debaters
to challenge the systemempirics prove
Peterson 14 [2014, David Peterson (Doctor of Philosophy), Debating race,
race-ing debate: An extended ethnographic case study of black intellectual
insurgency in U.S. intercollegiate debate, online,
http://gradworks.umi.com/36/15/3615472.html, RaMan]
The effort of the University of Louisville galvanized a generation of young students
who had found themselves in one of the many urban debate leagues around the
country. As one student explained, once I saw Louisville [debate] I knew I could never debate the same way again. An
indication of the influence of the students from Louisville could be seen when
they, after several years of being absent from competition (they both graduated
in 2004), visited a major national tournament at the University of Kentucky in 2011. The second they stepped
onto campus they were greeted as celebrities by the many young black debaters
who had seen videos of their old debates. They expressed astonishment at the
increase of black participation and the radicalization of oppositional arguments.
Though the students were clearly inspired by the University of Louisville and eager to replicate their successes, they pushed the
They had witnessed and

heard stories about the way in which Louisville challenged the debate activity and
the recalcitrance of debate participants to self- 80 reflect. They thus possessed a
particularly oppositional orientation when they entered the activity. They also
entered with more experience in traditional debate training than was possessed
by most of the Louisville students. Witnessing the lack of meaningful efforts to
expand diversity, the new cohort of black students de-emphasized the call for
inclusion. As one student told me, we didnt say let us in, we just did us. They
were concerned with more fundamental issues of structural white supremacy that
characterized even well-intentioned white liberal discourse.
critical envelope beyond the discourse relied upon by the University of Louisville.
A2 Predictability Good
Suggesting that performance is bad for debate only
reinforces neutrality and causes a vicious cycle of violence
Longing for Theory: Performance Debate in Action, E-Book pp. 16-18, RaMan)
Finally, situation or context is the third aspect of genre and our attempts to find meaning in genre. The context embraces content and form and
What is the context that enables

interpretation of critical debate? I think that is a contested question. Many members of the traditional debate community
find critical debate bad for debate. Performance debate proponents might say that they are
directly challenging traditional debate conventions that have become
mechanistic and are inherently racist, and that debate must find new ways of
becoming less exclusive and more relevant. Specifically, many debate community
members such as Preston (a coach and author) suggest that traditional debate
practices and pedagogy result in difficulty recruiting minority debaters. He cites Hill as
enable[s] interpretation of the action resulting from their fusion (ibid).
having noted that learning and communication styles of African Americans may differ from the learning and communication norms of the policy
debating community (Preston, Jr., 2006, p. 162). A call to solve this problem becomes one of the foundations of performance debate practice.
hrough content and form, performance debaters call for and demonstrate a
practice that is inclusive and challenges the norms of the community. ReidBrinkley quotes a Louisville debater in-round: The university of Louisville enacts
a full withdrawal from the traditional norms and procedures of this debate
activity. Because this institution, like every other institution in society, has also grown from the roots of racism. Seemingly neutral practices and
T
policies have exclusionary effects on different groups for different reasons. These practices have a long and perpetuating history. (Reid-Brinkley,
eid-Brinkley argues that many performance debate tactics are rhetorical

strategies designed to disrupt the normativity of traditional debate practices....
genre violation [is] a means of using style and performance to combat the social
ideologies that result in unequal power relations across race, gender, and class
within the national policy debate community (pp. 78-79). Reid-Brinkley identifies
four types of genre violations in critical debate: sonic and spatial disruption,
violations of strategic norms, violations of expectations regarding the resolution,
and violations of the policymaker debate persona. We can see here the interplay of content, form and
context in her argument. The disruptive aural presence of rap music in a debate round, for
example, is not coincidental to a substantive message critiquing Eurocentric
epistemology and white-normed debate practices , for example. I will discuss such genre violations much
2008, p. 114) R
more in Chapter 5, as I explain performance debaters attempts to do debate rather than just talking about it [social change].
A2 Self-Serving
Not sure how you argue this with a straight face is it that
shocking that someone would finally attempt to develop a
framework to serve the interests of black students and black
scholarship which were erased for this activitys entire
philosophical generation?
Peterson 14 [ 2014, David Peterson (Doctor of Philosophy), Debating race,
Corey and Kevin cited three main objectives in rejecting the traditional debate
framework and confronting their mostly white fellow debaters. Their first objective
was, they admitted, somewhat self-serving. They were both interested in antiracist political action and community building outside of the debate activity.
Confronting the debate community in an oppositional manner provided them a
political training ground for doing so. Kevin explains, Knowing the world we live in is run by people who
think like many of the people in the debate community in terms of policy analysis and social issues, I felt it would be productive
Going
somewhere where people might be more friendly 84 to the criticism or might feel
better about it being in a different form doesnt allow for the type of test that I
think is important. Thus, they sought to take advantage of the argumentative
prowess possessed by college debaters in order to sharpen their own ability to
advocate for oppressed people. The fact that white students did not volunteer to be faced with such a
to test these ideas in the face of overwhelming opposition in order to get the best possible test of these ideas.
criticism (as in the case, for example, of white students electing to take a course African-American studies or attend an antiracism workshop), and were unlikely to face such a criticism elsewhere, meant for Towson that the reaction and response of
these students would provide a particularly valuable training scenario. Like most other students I interviewed, the students from
TU were active in their Universitys Black Student Union (BSU). However, the relationship between the debate team and the BSU
The debaters at TU, devised a plan to utilize the TU campus in

an effort to effectuate larger social change in Baltimore and beyond. These
students, devised a plan to utilize campus organizations to train themselves to, as
one student put it, take over the city of Baltimore. The plan was to take control of leadership in the
BSU, the entire Student union, and the university debate team. The debate team was crucial to this plan
because it provided a unique site in which to receive training in public speaking
and argumentation. They would use this training to help them launch a number of
political projects outside the debate activity. Kevin, made headlines as one of the
youngest candidates for city council in the citys history and his organization is
active in a number of community-based initiatives. Alumni from TU have recently started a summer
debate training institute at Morgan State University for radical debaters. Additionally, many of them work as
teachers in the Baltimore Public School system, have gained positions of
leadership within the Baltimore UDL and other community organizations and are
intent upon utilizing the 85 activity of competitive debate to develop local leaders
that act in the interests of the Black population there.
is unique in the case of TU.
A2 Whatd *We* Do?

Commission is a crime and your ballot matters reject their
episteme it only reifies Eurocentric ways of knowing the
world only our approach can produce exchange for those
left outside this schema
Peterson 14 [ 2014, David Peterson (Doctor of Philosophy), Debating race,
Corey and Kevin argued that the contemporary social world, and the United States
in particular, can best be characterized by practices of white supremacy. To
support this assertion, they read passages from an array of critical race theorists
(Charles Mills, Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado) and black feminist scholars (bell
hooks, Patricia Hill Collins) and played clips of music and poetry, in a break from
the established norm of relying solely on written academic literature, from AfricanAmerican artists such as Lauryn Hill, Nas, and Tupac Shakur. They argued further
that the intercollegiate competitive debating activity functions to perpetuate
white supremacy. To support this assertion they cited the demographic
predominance of white males in the activity and, more importantly (to them),
their own feelings of exclusion and the operation of white normativity and
white aesthetics at the heart the debate activitys institutional culture. Kevin
explained, The debate community, in terms of its norms and procedures and
tradition, endorses epistemologically white European ideas of the world as the
best way to engage in political contestation and this then obscures other
approaches to developing ideas about knowledge that can be beneficial for people
outside of the traditional white male heterosexual framework. TU refused to
engage in a traditional debate about US government policy and demanded
instead that their white opponents critically interrogate whiteness and white
supremacy. They proposed a framework for debate according to which their
opponents should be selected the winner only 83 on the condition that they
could convincingly articulate how their approach to debate, and their desired
framework for debate, accounted for and confronted white supremacy. Kevin
explains that, We accused the debate community of the crime of commission with
white supremacy in terms of the type of scholarship thats being produced.
Because white supremacy is the status quo, by not deploying any political
analysis that takes this into consideration will then act to extend the invisibility
and pervasiveness of white supremacy. Towson argued they should be selected
the winner if they could demonstrate that their opponents failed to meet this
burden. This proposed framework invited a debate about the nature of white
supremacy in the post-civil rights era, the extent of its influence, and the
significance of its social consequences. Ideally, Corey and Kevin hoped the debate
activity could be a space where debates could be had concerning both the nature
of social power and privilege as well as the most appropriate and effective
methods of resistance.
Ballot Ks 2ac
A2 Calls out Fail

Were not attacking anyone personally so you have no reason
to feel offended. This is about something bigger than just
individual action that you benefit from
//liam TAM]
When working with issues of power and cultural violence, we have
tried to move our conversations from the bodies of those most readily
implicated (i.e., white people ) to conversations abou t how such beliefs,
such problematic social constructs (i.e., white supremacy ) have created the
possibility for inequality . In drawing on Boal's work, we focus our critical
energy on the mystification process, rather than the bodies who
stand as a result. This is an especially difficult tack to take when addressing
racism and whiteness, for often the tendency is for white people to
assume that such activist work levies critique at them alone. It is often
difficult to move white people from assuming such a critical project is
about them as individuals, to a place where they see themselves as
parts of complex social, cultural, and political systems that levy
privilege and power to some, while denying it to others.
A2 Judge is White
So what if we have a white judge this discussion is just as
important for them as it is for the fugitive
//liam TAM]
As students work toward their goals, we try to stress that it is not appropriate
to use these workshops as an opportunity to talk about white guilt or "reverse
discrimination," but to take seriously the social conditions in which they are
positionedindeed, we do sometimes have participants who want to deny
whiteness's centrality. We ask these participants to pretend, just for this workshop, that what they read, what they hear, and what they encounter is what it is
to imagine what life would be like if these things were indeed true.
Usually, by the end of the workshop, the students will begin to reflect on the
possibility of this reality, if not personally, then at least that these
voices (in performance and the literature) might experience that kind
of life. Our desire here is to distance the resistant students from the trappings
of intent. This is to say, whiteness is not so much about individual actions
based in diabolical intentions but rather that whiteness is more
insidious, more a structure of power that flows through them in covert
or unconscious ways. Thus, white people are trapped just as much as the
voices they encounter in the framing texts; they just happen to be
ensnared in their own privilege . This is not to say we let these students off
the hook, but rather that our goal is to challenge them to at least see the
problem as structural. From there, resistant students at least have the
possibility of genuine self-reflection on their everyday behaviors and
interactions. But without recognizing the fact that systems of
oppression exist, they will never see their roles within them.
A2 Narratives Fail
In order to undermine power we must start with those most
affected by it
communication and critical, feminist, and performative pedagogies //liam TAM]
Freire argues, "the starting point for organizing the program content of education
or political action must be the present, existential, concrete situation, reflecting
the aspirations of the people" (76). For him, we must begin with the peoplethat
any effort to undermine power structures through a pedagogy of the oppressed
must begin with the life situations of the people that are implicated in the power
struggle. He argues for a "dialogical" method, one that works from the "thematic
universe" of people in an effort to allow education to be a practice of freedom.
With this beginning in Freire, we decided to begin our workshops from the life
situations of peoplepeople's stories about or experiences with racism and
violence. Thus, a workshop in whiteness had to begin with collected narratives of
struggle, narratives of people in "real-life contexts" and their engagements with
whiteness. To begin with stories of whiteness meant that our effort would ask the
participants in the workshops to take seriously the life experiences of others in an
effort to search out possibility within their life circumstances.
A2 No Safe Spaces**
sensibility. Coupled with this awareness of an overseeing surveillance apparatus was the conscious effort to always give ones best performance and encourage
others to do the same, and indeed to perform even when one is not sure of ones audience (or whether there is in fact an audience) (p. 105). Iton employs the
Downloaded by [] at 11:11 05 July 2015 Common Gaol (New York Common Council, Volume IV). Any slave convicted of being unlit after dark was sentenced to a public whipping of
no more than 40 lashes, at the discretion of the master or owner before being discharged. Later this punishment was reduced to no more than 15 lashes. Such discretionary violence
found dead in his bed. The dead man was said to have absented himself from van Zandts dwelling in the night-time (New York Weekly Journal CXIII, 5 January 1735). Although it
was first reported that the slave was horsewhipped to death by Van Zandt for being caught on the streets after dark by watchmen, a coroners jury found Van Zandt not negligent in
this death, finding instead that the correction given by the Master was not the cause of death, but that it was by the visitation of God (New York Weekly Journal CXIII, 5 January
1735). Other laws put into place around light and black mobilities in New York City stipulated that at least one lantern must be carried per three negroes after sunset, more tightly
regulated curfews and in 1722 the Common Council relegated burials by free and enslaved blacks to the daytime hours with attendance of no more than 12, plus the necessary
pallbearers and gravediggers, as a means to reduce opportunities for assembly and to prevent conspiracy hatching. In recounting physician Alexander Hamiltons narrative about his
travels through New York City in July of 1744, Andy Doolen details that one outcome of the alleged conspiracy of 1741 was the ruining, according to Hamilton, of the traditional
English cup of tea (2005). It was thought by Hamilton that: they have very bad water in the city, most of it being hard and brackish. Ever since the negroe conspiracy, certain people
have been appointed to sell water in the streets, which they carry on a sledge in great casks and bring it from the best springs about the city, for it was when the negroes went for
tea water that they held their caballs and consultations, and therefor they have a law now that no negroe shall be seen upon the streets without a lanthorn after dark. (Hamilton
1948, p. 88) We can think of the lantern as a prosthesis made mandatory after dark, a technology that made it possible for the black body to be constantly illuminated from dusk to
dawn, made knowable, locatable and contained within the city. The black body, technologically enhanced by way of a simple device made for a visual surplus where technology met
surveillance, made the business of tea a white enterprise and encoded white supremacy, as well as black luminosity, in law. Of course, unsupervised leisure, labour, travel, assembly
and other forms of social networking past sunset by free and enslaved black New Yorkers continued regardless of the enforcement of codes meant to curtail such things. BLACK
LUMINOSITY AND SURVEILLANCE 553 Downloaded by [] at 11:11 05 July 2015 Oftentimes social networking by free and enslaved black New Yorkers took place right under the
surveillant gazes of the white population, in markets and during Sabbath and holiday celebrations. In these spaces of sometimes interracial and cross-class commerce and
socializing, black performative practices of drumming, dancing and chanting persisted. During celebrations of Pinkster marking the feast of Pentecost of the Dutch Reformed Church,
amongst the rituals, free and enslaved blacks elected a governor who would serve as a symbolic leader resolving disputes and collecting tributes, making this holiday an event for
white spectatorship of black cultural and political production, although for many such celebratory resistance made this a festival of misrule (Harris 2003, p. 41). So much so that the
Common Council of Albany, New York, banned Pinkster celebrations in 1811, for reasons including a resentment of the space that it opened up for unsettling exchanges between
blacks and whites (Lott 1993; McAllister 2003; White 1989). The most controversial incorporation of black performativity into Pinkster was the Totau. On the Totau, McAllister writes:
a man and a woman shuffle back and forth inside a ring, dancing precariously close without touching and isolating most of their sensual movement in the hip and pelvic areas. Once
the couple dances to exhaustion, a fresh pair from the ring of clapping dancers relieves them and the Totau continues. (McAllister 2003, p. 112) That such a performative sensibility
was engaged by black subjects in colonial New York City approximately 200 years before the emergence of hip hop in the Bronx, New York City, is of much significance. The Totau,
and later, the Catharine Market breakdown reverberate in the cypher of b-boys and b-girls. In Eric Lotts discussion of black performances he cites Thomas De Voes eyewitness
account of the Catharine Market breakdown in the early nineteenth century New York City. De Voe writes: This board was usually about five to six feet long, of large width, with its
particular spring in it, and to keep it in its place while dancing on it, it was held down by one on each end. Their music or time was usually given by one of their party, which was
done by beating their hands on the sides of their legs and the noise of the heel. The favorite dancing place was a cleared spot on the east side of the fish market in front of Burnel
Browns Ship Chandlery. (De Voe 1862, cited in Lott 1993, pp. 4142) In this instance, the breakdown is performed in a market, allowing for white spectatorship and patronage in a
space that is already overdetermined as a site of commerce within the economy of slavery. Later, DeVoe recalls public 554 CULTURAL STUDIES Downloaded by [] at 11:11 05 July
2015 negro dances at Catharine Market in an 1889 New York Times article where he is quoted as saying that the dancers would bring roots, berries, birds, fish, clams, oysters,
Sylvia Wynters
provision ground ideology in instructive here for an understanding of solidarity,
survival and the role of folk-culture as resistance to the dehumanization of Man
and Nature (1970, p. 36). Out of the provision grounds came the cultivation of ceremonial
practices, including dance, that were, as Wynter tells us, the cultural guerilla
resistance against the Market economy (1970, p. 36).7 The remains of the Catharine
Market breakdown can be found in the cardboard and turntables of the
breakdancing cypher. Then and now cultural production and expressive practices
offer moments of living with, refusals and alternatives to routinized surveillance
within a visual surplus. In so being, they allow for us to think differently about the
predicaments, policies and performances constituting surveillance. Colonial New
York City was a space of both terror and promise for black life. Lantern laws,
fugitive slave notices, public whippings and the discretionary uses of violence by
his Majestys subjects rendered the black subject as always already unfree yet
acts, like the breakdown, that were constitutive of black freedom persisted. It is
under this context where certain humans came to be understood by many as
unfree and the property of others while at the same time creating practices that
maintained their humanity by challenging the routinization of surveillance, that
we should read the 1783 Board of Inquiry hearings at Fraunces Tavern.
flowers, and anything else they could gather and sell in the market to supply themselves with pocket money (28 April 1889).
A2 SFO
They say speaking for others is bad but there is no other
method for revolution
The mission then for the denizens of the undercommons is to recognize that when
you seek to make things better, you are not just doing it for the Other, you must
also be doing it for yourself. While men may think they are being "sensitive" by
turning to feminism, while white people may think they are being right on by
opposing racism, no one will really be able to embrace the mission of tearing "this
shit down" until they realize that the structures they oppose are not only bad for
some of us, they are bad for all of us. Gender hierarchies are bad for men as well
as women and they are really bad for the rest of us. Racial hierarchies are not
rational and ordered, they are chaotic and nonsensical and must be opposed by
precisely all those who benefit in any way from them. Or, as Moten puts it: "The
coalition emerges out of your recognition that it's fucked up for you, in the same
way that we've already recognized that it's fucked up for us. I don't need your
help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much
more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know?" The coalition unites us in the
recognition that we must change things or die. All of us. We must all change the
things that are fucked up and change cannot come in the form that we think of as
"revolutionary" not as a masculinist surge or an armed confrontation. Revolution
will come in a form we cannot yet imagine. Moten and Harney propose that we
prepare now for what will come by entering into study. Study, a mode of thinking
with others separate from the thinking that the institution requires of you, prepares
us to be embedded in what Harney calls "the with and for" and allows you to spend
less time antagonized and antagonizing.
Debate = Key
Debate is a space in which racial identity can be understood
This dynamic is key to confronting racial domination and
questioning the underlying aspects of negative racial
identities
Reid-Brinkley 08 [Shanara Rose. PhD in Philosophy from the University of
Georgia. The Harsh Realities Of Acting Black: How African-American Policy
Debaters Negotiate Representation Through Racial Performance And Style.
https://getd.libs.uga.edu/pdfs/reid-brinkley_shanara_r_200805_phd.pdf pgs 2-3.
7/5]//kmc
The attempts at educational reform are not limited to institutional actors such as the
local, state, and federal governments . Non-profit organizations dedicated to alleviating the black/white achievement
gap have also proliferated. One such organization, the Urban Debate League, claims that Urban Debate Leagues have proven to increase literacy
scores by 25%, to improve grade-point averages by 8 to 10%, to achieve high school graduation rates of nearly 100%, and to produce college
matriculation rates of 71 to 91%. The UDL program is housed in over fourteen American cities and targets inner city youths of color to increase their
access to debate training. Such training of students defined as at risk is designed to offset the negative statistics associated with black educational
achievement. The program has been fairly successful and has received wide scale media attention. The success of the program has also generated
renewed 3 interest amongst college debate programs in increasing direct efforts at recruitment of racial and ethnic minorities. The UDL program
creates a substantial pool of racial minorities with debate training coming out of high school, that college debate directors may tap to diversify their
The debate community serves as a microcosm of the broader

educational space within which racial ideologies are operating . It is a
space in which academic achievement is performed according to the intelligibility
of ones race, gender, class, and sexuality. As policy debate is intellectually rigorous and has
historically been closed to those marked by social difference, it offers a unique
opportunity to engage the impact of desegregation and diversification of American
education. How are black students integrated into a competitive educational
community from which they have traditionally been excluded? How are they
represented in public and media discourse about their participation, and how do they rhetorically respond to such representations? If racial
ideology is perpetuated within discourse through the stereotype, then
mapping the intelligibility of the stereotype within public discourse and
the attempts to resist such intelligibility is a critical tool in the battle to
end racial domination.
own teams.
K Blocks
2ac Epistemology/Sequencing**
Voting aff affirms the creation of a an entire body of
knowledge that isnt included in their epistemeits a prerequisite to affirming any alternative existence that can
strive towards freedom
two new voices within national debates about
racism, imperialism, poverty, and civil rightsthe prisoner and the
fugitive. As more and more members of the 1960s liberation movements were imprisoned or
went underground, a new body of knowledge emerged from both of
these figures that negated national narratives of progress, equality, and
justice. While Fugitive Life tells a story about post-civil rights feminist, queer, and
anti-racist activism, it focuses on these two figures and two corresponding spaces:
the prison and the underground. In response to police repression in the form
of incarceration, sabotage, and assassination, and in order to deploy illegal
tactics, hundreds of activists in the 1970s left behind families, friends, jobs, and
their identities in order to disappear into a vast network of safe houses, under-thetable jobs, and transportation networks . In fact, before she was imprisoned, Davis herself spent many months
The late 1960s and early 1970s saw the emergence of
underground in order to hide from the FBI. While there has been a resurgence of interest in many of these groups (prompted by and reflected in the
their significance
to the post-civil rights landscapeas structured by the prison and neoliberalism
has only begun to be explored. The books of imprisoned authors like Eldridge
Cleaver, George Jackson, and Malcolm X (which sold hundreds of thousands of
copies) exposed something about the United States that only they could know. In
the original introduction to Jacksons Soledad Brother, Jean Genet wrote that
Jacksons prison writing exposed the miracle of truth itself, the naked truth
revealed.20 For Genet and many readers of this literature, the prisoner had access to a unique
formation of knowledge which led to alternative ways of seeing and
knowing the world. Indeed, scholars like Dylan Rodrguez, Michael-Hames Garcia, and Joy James have argued that the knowledge
anxiety about Obamas connections to Weather Underground member Bill Ayers during the 2008 presidential election),
produced by the prisoner exposes a truth about the United States that cannot be accessed from elsewhere.21 The prisoner could name what others
could not even see. At the same time, thousands of political fugitives wrote devastating critiques of the United States as they bombed and robbed
Underground organizations like the Weather

Underground, Black Liberation Army, and George Jackson Brigade did more than
attack symbols of state violence; they also wrote poetry, stories, memoirs,
communiqus, magazines, and made films. These groups understood culture as
foundational to the production and survival of alternatives to things as they were.
In this way, culture became a site for the emergence of alternative forms of
knowledge.
their way to what they hoped would be a better world.
2ac Perm
The permutation creates an ensemble of strategies that,
rather than strive and compete for dominance, functions to
more holistically invoke the critique of property and creates
the possibility of agency through narrative
But this is a simple passage, one designed to provide some sense of the violent
imposition of silence that marks slavery and will have marked every disaster,
every violent assault on or ritual destruction of the whole. We might gather from
this simple recounting, this simple objectivizing archivation, that slavery is that
institutionviolent and ritual dehumanization is that eventwherein nothing can
be said, whereof nothing can be said, which arrives for us, even now, enveloped in
the silence that accompanies the absence of specificity, the lack of an immediate
resonance. But to speak here of simplicityof a text, a passage, that tells, simply,
the barest story and unearths, simply, the smallest remnant of a life that gives us,
simply, an indication of the nature of a mode of beingis a matter that is, of
course, not so simple. The passage, which can only be called Uncle Toliver, is
more than a subject and more than a text; and its transmission of the whole of
Uncle Toliver to us is far from simple. It arrives through various arrangements of
the story of Uncle Toliver, the story of a man who could not tell his story as a
matter of law, and as a matter of the materiality of his life and death. But the
mediation that gives us that story does not obscure the position and situation
spoken through his silence. It is spoken so profoundly that the entirety of the
Enlightenment tradition and its critical other is invoked, reopened, revised,
improvised. The mediated and reconstructed voicing of the slave speaks through
the vernacular and for freedom. The mediated and reconstructed voice of a man
held as property arrives to us as a critique of Property. As the passage arrives
once more, hear again its simplicity in a repetition that serves to further
obl/iterate (ob/literate) that simplicity: the subject, the textthat which is more
than the person and more than the textof Uncle Toliver haunts and infuses us.
In Nansemond County, Virginia, a slave known as Uncle Toliver had been
indiscreet enough to pray aloud for the Yankees. The masters two sons ordered
him to kneel in the barnyard and pray for the Confederacy. But this stubborn old
man prayed even louder for a Yankee triumph. With growing exasperation,
perhaps even bewilderment, the two sons took turns in whipping him until finally
the slave, still murmuring something about the Yankees, collapsed and died.
How is this strange arrival possible? What is its significance for us today in the
midst of an attempt to provide a desperately needed re/presentation of liberation
within an argument for the necessity of something other than either a rejection of,
or an indifference to, or a convergence with the (old or given) Enlightenment?
Ensemble, figured in and improvised through the ethical mediation of the

Enlightenments critical opening of the whole, is the improvisation of the singular
identities of Litwack and Uncle Toliver, and the totality which is generated by
lingering in the music that airily fills the space between them. They speak in
ensemble and are written there in a moment at which we are given, through the
mediation of improvisation, the whole of the history of the whole, and the whole
of the history of singularist (and differentiated) totalizations of the whole. Uncle
Toliver is, once more, the autobiography of ensemble and the history of an
ensemble voicing and agency; it is not the recording of a differentiated,
repressed, and oppressed ego by another ego in search of affirmation. Uncle
Toliver is the reality which invocations of naive and idiomatic writing, or calls for a
voicing-towards-agency, or overlordly assertions of the whole only imagine within
the inevitable return to the best and worst of the Enlightenment that
poststructuralism and identity politics must make. Uncle Toliver prepares the
ground for the real formulation of a more than discursive ethics; we are propelled
toward that view of the world that allows our knowledge of the passage, a view
that demands a particular way of being in the world. In other words, our attention
to ensemble, as it exists in and as Uncle Toliver, activates and improviseskeeps
faith with ensemble. It is an attention that will have always moved through the
interminable attention to differentiating singularity or homogenizing totality that
has always foreclosed the possibility of a genuine agency. Agency is in the
tradition of Uncle Toliver.
Uncle Tolivers narrative is part of a chain of recitation that moves from a never
fully unveiled originary encounter to the specter of an impossible encounter to
come, the encounter in the future that would mark the impossible justice of a
strange, oppositional resolution. But the oppositional resolution that the bridge or
passage would mark falls before its own form. Descent, not oscillation; descent,
not the asymmetrical tensions and reemergent subjectivities of a gaze; descent,
as in the future resonances of variations of an unknown tongue.
Cap K2ac
The recognition of fugitivity is break from the dialectical
relation between the Master and Slaverather than
accepting the thesis of property and owner, the fugitive
demands analysis of its own human capacity from whence
black authenticity can arise
ProjectMUSE, IC)
This is all to say that Fanon can only very briefly glance at or glance off the
immense and immensely beautiful poetry of (race) war, the rich music of a certain
underground social aid, a certain cheap and dangerous socialism, that comprises
the viciously criminalized and richly differentiated interiority of black cooperation
that will, in turn, have constituted the very ground of externally directed
noncooperation. It turns out, then, that the pathological is (the) black, which has
been figured both as the absence of color and as the excessively, criminally,
pathologically colorful (which implies that blacks relation to color is a rich, active
interinanimation of reflection and absorption); as the cortico-visceral muscular
contraction or the simultaneously voluntary and impulsive hiccupped jazz
lament that in spite of Fanons formulations must be understood in relation to the
acceptable jaggedness, legitimate muscularity, and husky theoretical lyricism of
the bop and post-bop interventions that are supposed to have replaced it (176).
Because finally the question isnt whether or not the disorderly behavior of the
anticolonialist is pathological or natural, whether or not he is born to that
behavior, whether or not the performance of this or that variation on such
behavior is authentic: the question, rather, concerns what the vast range of
black authenticities and black pathologies does. Or, put another way, what is the
efficacy of that range of natural-born disorders that have been relegated to what
is theorized as the void of blackness or black social life but that might be more
properly understood as the fugitive being of infinite humanity, or as that which
Marx calls wealth?
Now, wealth is on one side a thing, realized in things, material products, which a
human being confronts as subject; on the other side, as value, wealth is merely
command over alien labour not with the aim of ruling, but with the aim of private
consumption, etc. It appears in all forms in the shape of a thing, be it an object or
be it a relation mediated through the object, which is external and accidental to
the individual. Thus the old view, in which the human being appears as the aim of
production, regardless of his limited national, religious, political character, seems
to be very lofty when contrasted to the modern world, where production appears
as the aim of mankind and wealth as the aim of production. In fact, however,
when the limited bourgeois form is stripped away, what is wealth other than the
universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces, etc.,
created through universal exchange? The full development of human mastery

over the forces of nature, those of so-called nature as well as of humanitys own
nature? The absolute working-out of his creative potentialities, with no
presupposition other than the previous historic development, which makes this
totality of development, i.e., the development of all human powers as such the
end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick? Where he does not
reproduce himself in one specificity, but produces his totality? Strives not to
remain something he has become, but is in the absolute movement of becoming?
31
Though Fanon is justifiably wary of anything that is presented as if it were written
into the nature of things and of the thing, this notion of wealth as the finite being
of a kind of infinite humanityespecially when that in/finitude is understood
(improperly, against Marxs grain) as constituting a critique of any human mastery
whatevermust be welcomed. Marxs invocation of the thing leads us past his
own limitations such that it becomes necessary and possible to consider the
things relation to human capacity independent of the limitations of bourgeois
form.
Like the (colonial) states of emergency that are its effects, like the enclosures that
are its epiphenomena, like the civil war that was black reconstructions
aftershock, like the proletariats anticipation of abolition; it turns out that the war
of national liberation has always been going on, anoriginally, as it were. Fanon
writes of a lot of things [that] can be committed for a few pounds of semolina,
saying, You need to use your imagination to understand these things (231). This
is to say that there is a counterpoint in Fanon, fugitive to Fanons own selfregulative powers, that refuses his refusal to imagine those imagining things
whose political commitment makes them subject to being committed, those
biologically organized things who really have to use their imaginations to keep on
keeping on, those things whose constant escape of their own rehabilitation as
men seems to be written into their nature. In such contrapuntal fields or fugue
states, one finds (it possible to extend) their stealing, their stealing away, their
lives that remain, fugitively, even when the case of blackness is dismissed.
Cap/Neolib K 2ac
Permutation do both solves--race theory explains
neoliberalism and our strategy is uniquely key to defeat the
penal state
I turn to the cultural products of imprisoned and underground activists as a record
of what has been forgotten by hegemonic epistemologies. As Roderick Ferguson writes,
Epistemology is an economy of information privileged and information excluded
under which national formations rarely disclose what they have rejected. 22 Yet, the
prisoner and the fugitive index the histories and forms of knowledge that were
erased and excluded by law and order and neoliberal economics. Fugitive Life
explores the ways that imprisoned and underground activists responded to the
changing operations of (and new technologies central to) racialized and gendered
power under late capital. In addition, I contrast the forms of knowledge arising from the underground to the epistemologies
central to build-up of the neoliberal-carceral state. In this way , I argue that the prisoner and the fugitive
are figures that produced epistemologies that undermined the political
and historical fictions underpinning this process. For example, while law and order
politicians argued that policing and penal technologies were instruments of safety
and liberty, and neoliberal economists argued that poverty was the outcome of
individual pathology, Davis and countless others labored to name the racialized
and gendered violence cloaked by these new discourses. Chapter one, "Possessed by Death: The
Neoliberal-Carceral State, Black Feminism, and the Afterlife of Slavery, examines the historical foundations of the neoliberal-carceral state. Since the
1960s, scholars, activists, and prisoners have argued that the contemporary prison exists on a historical continuum with nineteenth century chattel
slavery. More recently, a growing body of work has made clear the connections between the post-1980s prison and neoliberal economic policies.
While the prisons connection to slavery and the market has been well explored,
the contemporary markets relationship to chattel slavery has largely been
overlooked. If slaverys anti-black technologies inhabit and structure the prison, how do they live on in the operations of the market? What is
the relationship between an anti-blackness inaugurated under the Atlantic slave trade and the methods of population management used under
neoliberalism? How does the absence, death, and loss left behind by slavery connect to the formation of the contemporary neoliberal-carceral state?
To answer these questions, I read two texts written by captive black women in the 1970s United States: Assata Shakurs "Women in Prison: How We
Both texts were composed at

the very moment of the neoliberal-carceral states emergence and index the ways
that black feminism developed under and critiqued this formation. I also include a
discussion of Sherley Anne Williamss 1986 novel Dessa Rose. Although the novel
was written in the mid-1980s, Williams cites Davis's essayand the rise of the
prison in the 1970sas providing the inspiration for the novel. All three texts
emerge from the late twentieth- history of our social, political, and economic
present. Chapter two, The End of the Future: Law and Order, the Feminist Underground, and the Temporality of Violence, extends the first
Are and Angela Davis's "Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves."
chapters concern with time to consider the relationship between the prison, the market, and the future. I begin by exploring how, in their campaign
speeches and advertisements, law and order politicians understood the market and prison in relation to time and the future. For Richard Nixon and
Barry Goldwater, the very possibility of a future depended on the immobilization of those rendered surplus or resistant to new economic regimes
structured around privatization, deindustrialization, deregulation, and finance. In other words, embedded in the emergent discourses of the neoliberalcarceral state was a vision of the futureone where the freedom of individuality and the market required the mass immobilization of the prison. The
the freedom of the individual to the governance of

the prison, the politics of law and order were complicit with emerging neoliberal
discourses of self-care, personal responsibility, and individualism . In the last half of this chapter,
I examine how underground women activists of the period understood the time and future
of an emerging neoliberal-carceral state. Many1970s activists did not see the
prison and the market as separate systems of power . Instead, they understood them as deeply connected,
first section of the chapter argues that by connecting
if not at times, indistinguishable. I focus on the writings of underground revolutionary organizations that formed in direct response to the repression
I analyze the communiqus issued by these organizations

specifically the womens brigade of the Weather Underground and the George
Jackson Brigadeto consider what the future of neoliberalism and the prison
meant for those enmeshed in the changing carceral and economic regimes of the
1970s. As I argue, the communiqus written by these groups can be understood as
feminist and queer responses to the temporality of progress that supported law
and order and the development of the neoliberal-carceral state . Whereas chapter one considered
and violence of the law and order state.
how the past is theorized in the writings of imprisoned (and previously underground) revolutionary black women, this chapter analyzes the writings of
1970s imprisoned radicals and underground revolutionaries, most of whom identified as women, in order to examine how they theorized the prison,
the market, and time in relation to the state. It contrasts these revolutionary visions with the dreams of people like Nixon who understood the prison
and the market as foundational to the security and order of the nation and its future. The third chapter, Life Escapes: Neoliberal Economics, the
Fugitive, and Queer Freedom, explores two paradigmatic notions of freedom in the 1970s that I call neoliberal freedom and queer freedom. In
chapter two, I analyzed the politics of law and order to argue that law and order was symbiotic with, and productive of, neoliberal discourses that
emphasized the relationship between the freedom of the individual and the freedom of the market. In this way, the prison as a discursive field, a set of
fantasies, and a regime of dispersed institutional technologies aimed at policing and incapacitation became constitutive of the freedom of the market
and individual. Chapter three continues to explore the ways that penal and policing technologies were imagined as central to the life of the free
market, but focuses on the writings of early neoliberal thinkersin particular, Milton Friedmans 1962 Capitalism and Freedom. Friedman was a Nobel
Prize-winning American economist, statistician, and author who taught at the University of Chicago for more than three decades. As a leader of the
Chicago school of economics, he has been perhaps the most important opponent to Keynesian economics, and is considered central to the emergence
of neoliberal thought and policy. Despite Friedmans centrality to neoliberal policy across the globe, scholars of neoliberalism and late twentieth
century capitalism have largely ignored his writings. I argue that the emergence of neoliberal theories of freedom were, in part, a response to the
While feminist, anti-racist, and queer liberation

movements made demands that exceeded the material and epistemological
possibilities of the social order, neoliberal freedom confined and restricted what
freedom could be within the relations between the individual and the market . In
addition, Friedmans theory of freedom relied on the containment of populations he
deemed not responsible enough to be free. In this way, neoliberal theories of
freedom necessitated the prison. I compare Friedmans theory of freedom to those produced by 1970s women fugitives. By
liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s.
reading memoirs of former political fugitives alongside Susan Chois novel American Woman, I argue for a queer conception of freedom where freedom
is the very practice of running. Chapter four, The Control to Come: Sexuality, Terror, and the Control Unit, documents the rise of control units under
neoliberalism. Control units are prisons within a prison, where inmates are held in 6-by-9-foot rooms for 23 hours a day. After the demise of
rehabilitation as an ideal of incarceration, control units became a new model that guided the expansion of prisons. It is not just that the prison system
expanded exponentially under the neoliberal shifts of the 1970s; control units also emerged as a unique new penal technology. In this way, I argue that
control units are directly connected to the political and economic shifts of the 1970s. I explore one unit in particular, the High Security Unit in
Lexington, Kentucky, which operated from 1986 to 1988. The isolation unit at Lexington was originally designed to hold sixteen womenthose,
according to the Bureau of Prisons, who were incorrigible flight risks but Lexington ended up only detaining three women incarcerated for their
involvement with the black liberation movement and Puerto Rican independence movement in the 1970s and early 1980s. This chapter turns to the
prison writings of the women held at Lexington in order to explore the relationship between sexuality, the body, the expansion of control units as a
Lexington offers
a genealogy of the forms of punishment and incarceration central to the war on
terror
model of punishment, and the larger social and economic changes implemented under neoliberalism. It also argues that
The neoliberal narrative is described as the home of the

free, but is rather an extension of the prisonit connects the
powers of market under slavery to the powers of the market
under neoliberalismembracing fugitivity is key
Iowa and a Ph.D. in American Studies with a minor in Critical Feminist and Sexuality
Studies from the University of Minnesota. (Stephen, Fugitive Life: Race, Gender,
and the Rise of the Neoliberal-Carceral State ,A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA , May
2013 //SRSL)
prison is not that much
different from the streetFor many cells are not that different from the tenements
and the welfare hotels they live in on the streetThe fights are the same except
they are less dangerous. The police are the same. The poverty is the same. The
alienation is the same. The racism is the same. The sexism is the same. The drugs
are the same and the system is the same.24 For Shakur, the regulations of a burgeoning
neoliberal-carceral state possessed life in ways that rendered the free world an
extension of the prison. An assemblage of race, gender, capital, policing, and penal
technologies produced a symbiosis between the deindustrialized landscape of the
late 20th century urban United States and the gendered racisms of an emerging
prison-industrial complex. Diffuse structural networks of racism and sexism mimicked the steel bars of a cage. This is the complicity between freedom and
In her 1978 essay Women in Prison: How We Are, Black Liberation Army member Assata Shakur wrote: For many,
captivity, the entanglements between t he living and the living dead, and the hemorrhaging of a buried past into the imagined progress of the present. For Shakur, prison looked like and
felt like nineteenth century chattel slavery: We sit in the bull pen. We are all black. All restless. And we are all freezing.25 In the essay, affect continually forces the past to open directly
onto the present.26 The sensations and feelings of frozen skin speaks in a way that words cannot. In prison, shivering black flesh weighted with chains looked like slavery to Shakur. As a
Shakurs essay does

is a narration of
the drastic racialized and gendered restructurings of social and economic life in the
1970s United States from the perspective of someone detained for resisting those
changes. Written by a captured member of the underground black liberation movement, the text names the discourses and (state) violence neoliberalism requires yet erases.
fugitive who now has political asylum in Cuba, she understands herself as a twenty-first century runaway slave, a maroon woman.27 Although
not name neoliberalism explicitly, we can read it as a black feminist theorization of neoliberalism at the very moment of its emergence. Indeed, it
Neoliberalism is most certainly an economic doctrine that prioritizes the mobility and expansion of capital at all costs, but its mechanisms exceed the liberation of the market from the
repression of the state. As Shakur indicates, one of the conditions of possibility for the emergence of the neoliberal state is the kinship shared between the free world and the prisonan
Shakur argues throughout the essay,

the technologies of immobilization utilized by the neoliberal state specifically target
black women, a process connected to the emergence of the black feminist
movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s . By reading black feminist texts from the 1970s as implicit theories of neoliberalism,
affinity structured and produced by an anti- blackness inaugurated under chattel-slavery. More over, as
we can come to understand the formation and implementation of neoliberalism in a new light. Shakur not only connects an emergent neoliberalism to a rapidly expanding prison regime,
she also links the contemporary prison to chattel slaveryan institutional, affective, and discursive connection apprehended by Angela Daviss phrase, From the prison of slavery to the
slavery of prison.28 The connections made by Shakur between the prison and neoliberalism, and between slavery and the prison, have been thoroughly explored by many scholars.29
Indeed, during the past two decades, a growing body of scholarship has affirmed and extended Shakurs analysis of blackness, slavery, and the prison by exploring what Saidiya Hartman
calls the afterlife of slavery.30 By centering racial terror in a genealogy of the prison, scholars have come to understand the barracoons, coffles, slave holds, and plantations of the
Middle Passage as spatial, discursive, ontological, and economic analogues of modern punishment that have haunted their way into the present.31 If the carceral becomes a functional
surrogate for slaverys production of social and living death, then Shakurs text also hints at another connection that has garnered less attentionslaverys haunting possession of
neoliberalism. While the prisons connection to slavery and the market has been well explored, the contemporary markets relationship to chattel slavery has largely been overlooked. If
slaverys anti- black technologies inhabit and structure the prison, how do they live on in the operations of the market? What is the relationship between an anti-blackness inaugurated
under the Atlantic slave trade and the methods of population management used under neoliberalism? How does the absence, death, and loss left behind by slavery connect to the
formation of the contemporary neoliberal-carceral state? What is the connection between the necropolitics of chattel-slavery and the biopolitics of neoliberalism? To answer these
questions, I read two texts written by captive black women in the 1970s United States: Assata Shakurs "Women in Prison: How We Are and Angela Davis's "Reflections on the Black
Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves." Both texts were composed at the very m oment of the neoliberal-carceral states emergence and index the ways that black feminism
developed under and critiqued this formation. Throughout the chapter, I examine how Shakur and Davis theorize the relationship between the carceral, the market, the population, and
the body. While Daviss essay explores black womens experiences of terror and resistance under chattel slavery in order to contest the discourse of the black matriarch, Shakurs essay
describes black womens experiences of gender, sexuality, race, violence, and incarceration in the early 1970s. I also include a discussion of Sherley Anne Williamss 1986 novel Dessa
Rose. Although the novel was written in the mid-1980s, in the author's note, Williams cites Davis's essayand the rise of the prison in the 1970sas providing the inspiration for the
novel. Williams uses fiction to recover the histories of enslaved black women Davis could not discover in the written record. Williams turns Davis's brief description of a uprising on a
slave coffle led by a pregnant black woman into a novel that theorizes the racialized, gendered, affective, and economic politics of chattel slavery and its regimes of incarceration,
torture, and terror. All three texts emerge from the late twentieth-century prison (and an emergent neoliberal state) in order to theorize chattel slavery as a history of our social, political,
Yet the texts do not undo normative conceptions of time by deploying the
conventions of fact; rather, they use fiction, memory, and imagination to connect
the forgotten, the lost, and the dead to the now. These texts insist that the absence of memory shapes the contours of the
and economic present.
present. While many projects on the legacy of slavery utilize demographic data to measure slaverys extension into our present in concrete terms, I attempt to engage the past through
its forgetting. I leave behind the world of facts, proof, and Truth in order to connect the powers of the market across time and space through non-normative epistemologies that rely on
affect, memory, and imagination. As a matter of fact, it was the reason and rationality of mathematics, demographics, and insurance that produced millions of corpses in the service of
it connects the powers of market under slavery

to powers of the market under neoliberalism by exploring how black feminists made
sense of the afterlife of slavery under an emergent neoliberal state . Second, it uses
black feminist engagements with loss, to assert that death and loss undo to the
progress of time so that the past lives on, and possesses the present . By engaging death, loss, and
making millions of commodities. To be clear, this chapter has three goals. First,
forgetting, the texts I analyze connect penal and economic technologies in the 1970s United States to the carceral nature of the market under chattel slavery. Finally, by constructing a
critical genealogy of the market through the writings of black feminists working within and under the neoliberal-carceral state, I argue that under neoliberalism, the market supplements
and mimics the prison.
Foucault/Liberal Subject K2ac

Our narrative deconstructs the myth of the universal,
autonomous Kantian subjectrather than accede to the
univocal logic of the Enlightenment or of polemic critiques
thereof, our strategy inserts resistant appositional to both,
creating the possibility of a polyvocal discourse
(Fred, Knowledge of Freedom, The New Centennial Review, Vol. 4, No. 2, Fall 2004,
p. 274-278, ProjectMUSE, IC)
In 1989, in the tradition of answering the question concerning Enlightenment,
Jacques Derrida declares:
Of course I am in favour of the Enlightenment; I think we shouldnt simply leave it
behind us, so I want to keep this tradition alive. But at the same time I know that
there are certain historical forms of Enlightenment, certain things in this tradition
that we need to criticize or deconstruct. So it is sometimes in the name of, let us
say, a new Enlightenment that I deconstruct a given Enlightenment. And this
requires some very complex strategies; requires that we should let many voices
speak. . . . There is nothing monological, no monologuethats why the
responsibility for deconstruction is never individual or a matter of the single, selfprivileged authorial voice. It is always a multiplicity of voices, of gestures. . . . And
you can take this as a rule: that each time Deconstruction speaks through a single
voice, its wrong, it is not Deconstruction anymore. So in [Of an Apocalyptic Tone
Recently Adopted in Philosophy] . . . not only do I let many voices speak at the
same time, but the problem is precisely that multiplicity of voices, that variety of
tones, within the same utterance or indeed the same word or syllable, and so on. So
thats the question. Thats one of the questions.
But of course today the political, ideological consequences of the Enlightenment are
still very much with usand very much in need of questioning. So a new
Enlightenment, to be sure, which may mean deconstruction in its most active or
intensive form, and not what we inherited in the name of Aufklrung. . . . (75)
The black radical tradition is in apposition to enlightenment. Appositional
enlightenment is remixed, expanded, distilled, and radically faithful to the forces its
encounters carry, break, and constitute. Its (the effect of) critique or rationalization
unopposed to the deep revelation instantiated by a rupturing event of
dis/appropriation, or the rapturous advent of an implicit but unprecedented
freedom. Its the performance of something like a detour of Kant onto a
Heideggerian path, a push toward a critical rhythm in which Aufklrung and
Lichtung animate one another, in which the improvisation through their opposition
is enacted in (interruptions of) passage, tone, pulse, phrase, silence. But the dark
matter that is and that animates this tradition sounds, and so sounds another light
that for both Kant and Heidegger, in the ones advocacy and in the others
avoidance, would remain unheard.
Another way to put it would be this: there is an enduring politicoeconomic and

philosophical moment with which the black radical tradition is engaged. That
moment is called the Enlightenment. This tradition is concerned with the opening of
a new Enlightenment, one made possible by the ongoing improvisation of a given
Enlightenmentimprovisation being nothing other than the emergence of
deconstruction in its most active or intensive form. That emergence bears a
generativity that shines and sounds through even that purely negational discourse
which is prompted by the assumption that nothing goodexperientially, culturally,
aestheticallycan come from horror. The Afro-diasporic tradition is one that
improvises through horror and through the philosophy of horror, and it does so in
ways that dont limit the discursive or cultural trace of the horror to an inevitable
descriptive approach toward some either immediately present or heretofore
concealed truth. There is also a prescriptive component in this tradition, which is to
say in its narrative and in its narratives, that transcends the mythic and/or
objectifying structures and effects of narrative while, at the same time, always
holding on to its impossible descriptive resources. A future politics is given there so
powerfully that its present as a trace even in certain reactions that, in the very
force and determination of reaction, replicate horrors preconditions. Such
replication is done, for instance, in the vexed ethics of encounter of which Olaudah
Equiano tellsand which Frantz Fanon, among others, and Homi Bhabha, after
Fanon, cite and recite, theorize and retheorize. Im after another recitation of that
improvisatory and liberatory trace.
All this brings to mind an interesting and important recent text. In his (Dis)forming
the American Canon, Ronald A. T. Judy (1993) would deconstruct and abandon the
Enlightenment, its subject and its oppressive sociopolitical manifestations, by way
and in the interest of a valorized unreadability, an errant and essentially
unapproachable textuality that carries the trace of another being, another
subjectivity, another literacy, another politics: the Afro-Arabic. In so doing, however,
he renews the temporal and ontological constitutionnamely, the systemic relation
and opposition of totality and singularitywhich grounds the old Enlightenment
and its phantomic subject by his entrance into the nostalgic projection of an other,
pre-oppositional (and thus deeply oppositional) origin.
Judy attempts to take an improvisational tradition, one weighted toward the
impossible generativity of an apocalyptic event/institution, and expose it to a
deconstruction; or, he would find within it a certain self-deconstructive germ in the
form of a fragmentary eighteenth-century Afro-Arabic slave narrative called Ben
Alis Diary. He does so because he reads the canonical slave narratives (most
especially those of Douglass, though Id argue that his claim extends to those of
Mary Prince as well as Equianoabout both of which, more later) as replications of
certain deeply problematic metaphysical structures, the most important being a
unitary formulation of the subject which has its origins in an intensely racializedas
well as an intensely gendered (sexed and sexualized)understanding of Man.
What Ill attempt to argue here is that both the canonical slave narratives of Prince
and Equiano and the noncanonical and fragmentary narratives of Uncle Toliver and
Ellen Butler resist placement within a polemic for or against the old Enlightenment
subject. Rather they serve as rcits and recitations (which is to say rationalizations
or theorizations) of an improvisatory suspension of subjectivity, and of a certain
desire for subjectivity, and of any prior understanding of subjectivitys differentiated
ground.
These narratives are improvisational and generative in some deep ways, and the
tradition they recombine, extend, and transform is marked precisely by an ongoing
anarchic seizure, excess, and intensification of what it carries with it as
deconstruction. The tradition does so precisely by its active embrace of
improvisation in its relation to a material dissatisfaction with the opposition between
singularity and totality and its political effects. That improvisation is present in
European traditions as well, but with this difference: their general repression of
improvisation, an embarrassed refusal enacted by precisely that irrationalism
against which it would guard. One could more judiciously call this irrationalism a
wariness that manifests itself as a certain disabling decision neither to improvise
nor to rationally encounter the revelatory and critical dis/appropriation that must
ensue when one is confronted with the structures and effects of other traditions
that generate and are generated by improvisatory practices. Not even Derrida is
immune to this wariness (which, finally, we could call Eurocentrism), though whats
cool in his work is the trace of improvisation (of which he is wary, but to which,
more often than not, he is attuned, especially in his writing, more complexly in his
mediated and recorded speech) that emerges as if a certain elaborative moment in
the generative history of philosophy-as deconstruction always and all throughout
the ensemble of tradition(s) carries along with it another level of intensity. What Im
after is a critique of the absence of that intensity in the heretofore almost always
correspondent historico-philosophical phenomena of Enlightenment and
Eurocentrism, and in certain critiques of that absence and that correspondence
which lose that intensity themselves. Judy loses that intensity, that laughter outfrom-outside of the house of being, even as he raises crucial questions regarding
the development of that intensity in knowledge production and academic labor,
allowing us to linger, for instance, at the intersection of the university and the
plantation as places of work. What Ill do here is focus on some other important
questions he raises and prompts. Is writing (a more or less conventional and
complete autobiographical narrative) always writing-into-being as it is manifest in
the totalizing virtuality of the racialized, gendered, nationalized, universal Kantian
Subject? This question is a central one, for it implies and opens a critique of being
and its question, as well as an improvisation of that subject, its exclusionary
categorization, and its conflation with being. It also raises another question: What
are the effects of the personalized recounting of the horror of the African encounter
with the European other, the middle passage, and slavery? Finally, in a question
prompted by Judys work, what, asks Wahneema Lubiano in her introduction to
Judys text, are the effects if any, either good or badof the depersonalization of
that recounting, or at least the valorization of a narrative that, rather than
establishing authorial subjectivity, places the very idea of authorship/authority and
the possibility of subjectivity on interminable hold? I employ the term subjectivity
here, placed within the frame of possibility, in order to begin opening access to
what lingers in the cut between the subject and its deconstruction, the virtualities of
(European) Man and their others. Im interested in the objectivity of slave narrative
and in the knowledge of language and freedom contained there, and within which, if
we linger longer than Judy is willing, we might commit an action.
Ontology K2ac
Our strategy is one that operates from out of outside, that
begins with the improvisation of subjectivity itself. Our act of
telling, of imposing anarchy upon traditional understandings of
Man, is a prerequisite to creating new forms of agency
What I want to get at is that that telling must be situated at a frontier, on the border
that is the condition of possibility of the law of genre (Derrida 1980, 52). Such a
telling must simultaneously fulfill and exceed the generic responsibilities of
narrative, must be both rcit and recitation. It must move through and reorient the
paradoxical space-time of foreshadowing description, thereby exhibiting that
which, because of its material access to presents that are no longer or that have not
yet been, might have been called ecstatic temporality (52). This telling must also
occupy the space of a frontier between narrative and rationalization, between
narrative and the theory of narrative, between narrative and the improvisation of its
discourse and of its story, and above all, of its subjectivity and of what that
subjectivity knows, and of what that subjectivity is both constituted and capable.
This telling must also be situated on the frontier at which Man is improvised. Im
interested in how the free story that forms the paradoxically anarchic ground of the
black radical tradition will have rationalized that conception of Man, improvising
through its exclusionary force and toward a notion of agency that allows a
fundamental reconstitution of both the methods and the objects of ethics,
epistemology, and ontology. With regard to this last formulation, one must see how
this telling lies at the frontier of, or in the cut between, singularity and totality,
between the unlocatable origin and as yet unlocalized end of their mutual
philosophical and politicoeconomic systematization.
When I say that we must improvise notions of genre and of narrative; and that we
must descend into the rhythmic break between foreshadowing and description,
rather than treat their oxymoronic linkage as a fateful and convenient bridge that
erases itself in its presencing of origination and destination; and that we must honor
and extendby way of improvisationthe black radical traditions ongoing
improvisation of Man, knowing full well the danger of a kind of negative reification
such a distancing romance holds; and that we must venture a continued movement
out-from-outside of a range of conventional philosophical and historical
understandings embedded in the oppositional relation of singularity and totality
Im thinking of, and hopefully through, a certain pivotal moment in the tradition that
marks the intersection of these tasks and their unfulfillment, the event of their
dis/appropriation. In the epilogue to Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison writes: Our fate is
to become one and yet manyThis is not prophecy, but description. The impasse
this impossible fate represents, and the unresolvable caesura this passage is and
contains (and implicit here is an argument for the profoundly generative and
regenerative force of this phrasingwhich is less and more than a sentence, less
and more than a propositionits ability to spawn negations and affirmations of itself
that hold prominence in the contemporary extension of that strain of the tradition in
which social development is foregrounded), marks a need to know some things
again, as if for the first time, about knowledge and (language and their relation to)
freedom. So what Im interested in, here, is freedom and the relationship of certain
narratives of slavery to the question of freedom, not only in the historical context in
which they were written, but in the no-less-desperate context of our fiercely urgent
now. Mary Prince, Ellen Butler, Olaudah Equiano, and Uncle Toliver know something
narratives and understandings of narrative and understandings of the relation
between narrative and freedomthat we need to know. What Im after, among
other things, is the question of where that knowledge comes from, and the
im/possibilities and theoretical and political problems regarding our access to its
source.
Psychoanalysis K2ac
No link and impact turn the aff does not rely upon a universal
understanding of race we allow for black individualism and
resistance however we also recognize that the black body has
been objectively demonized by the status quo only the aff
confronts that the alts attempt to wish away anti-blackness
fails
Reid-Brinkley et al, 13 Dr. Shanara Reid-Brinkley, Assistant Professor of
Public Address and Advocacy Director of Debate, William Pitt Debating Union,
Department of Communication University of Pittsburgh; AND Amber Kelsie, M.A.,
Doctoral Student, Department of Communication University of Pittsburgh; AND
Nicholas Brady, Doctoral Student, Department of Culture & Theory, University of
California, Irvine; AND Ignacio Evans, B.A. History, Towson University; We Be Fresh
As Hell Wit Da Feds Watchin: A Bad Black Debate Family Responds, 10/6/2013,
http://resistanceanddebate.wordpress.com/2013/10/06/we-be-fresh-as-hell-wit-dafeds-watchin-a-bad-black-debate-family-responds, HSA)
The Philcox translation offers a fairly different wording; significantly what is removed from the Philcox translation
entirely is the line: Some critics will take it on themselves to remind us that this proposition has a converse. I say
the
were wiped out by civilization.[25] In
this is false.[24] After this section of the passage, Markmanns translation goes on to explain that
metaphysics of the Black (customs and agencies)
the Philcox translation, these same agental capacities and conditions are abolished.[26] Here is a moment in
which a studied comparison between the two translationsand the Markmann translation in particularcan be
enlightening. Though the wordings are different (and one more strongly worded than the other), the relationship of
Bankey interprets
this passage as indicating that a discussion of blackness as such reproduces racism
by ignoring lived experience of individual blacks. We think that is the opposite of what
is expressed in either version of the text. Rather, the texts explain that
individual/subjective/agental experience of a given black person is exactly what
cannot be accounted for because that being is overdetermined by blackness (at
symbolic, material, and metaphysical levels). Bankey misreads Philcoxs translation to suggest that
whiteness to blackness offered in each is not mutually exclusive, but mutually revealing.
we can get at the lived experience of the black, in a way that would be intelligible under the current (white)
framing (gaze). But the rest of the passage, not to mention the entire chapter and book as a whole, explain at
lived experience is exactly what is unintelligible and distinct from

subjective/white individual capacities for experience. In light of this reading,
Bankeys implication that black people (in debate/in the world) stop interrogating
whiteness and white bodies is especially nonsensical. It assumes that racism is
simply petty prejudice that can be bi-directionally imposed. Fanon in this passage makes it
clear that this proposition has no converse. There are criticisms that one could make of
Wilderson, and many have. We here do not care to defend Wildersons use of psychoanalysis for example. But
the suggestion that he makes his burden a proof of universal black experience has
failed to see the forest for the trees. Black experience is universalized as black
(Look! A Negro!). Individual experience is constituted in this conundrum. This
conditionof blacknessis something we must work through, rather than
wish away.
length that
Afro-Pessimism 2ac
Perm
No link and impact turn the aff does not rely upon a universal
understanding of race we allow for black individualism and
resistance however we also recognize that the black body has
been objectively demonized by the status quo only the aff
confronts that the alts attempt to wish away anti-blackness
fails
Reid-Brinkley et al, 13 Dr. Shanara Reid-Brinkley, Assistant Professor of
Public Address and Advocacy Director of Debate, William Pitt Debating Union,
Department of Communication University of Pittsburgh; AND Amber Kelsie, M.A.,
Doctoral Student, Department of Communication University of Pittsburgh; AND
Nicholas Brady, Doctoral Student, Department of Culture & Theory, University of
California, Irvine; AND Ignacio Evans, B.A. History, Towson University; We Be Fresh
As Hell Wit Da Feds Watchin: A Bad Black Debate Family Responds, 10/6/2013,
http://resistanceanddebate.wordpress.com/2013/10/06/we-be-fresh-as-hell-wit-dafeds-watchin-a-bad-black-debate-family-responds, HSA)
The Philcox translation offers a fairly different wording; significantly what is removed from the Philcox translation
entirely is the line: Some critics will take it on themselves to remind us that this proposition has a converse. I say
the
were wiped out by civilization.[25] In
this is false.[24] After this section of the passage, Markmanns translation goes on to explain that
metaphysics of the Black (customs and agencies)
the Philcox translation, these same agental capacities and conditions are abolished.[26] Here is a moment in
which a studied comparison between the two translationsand the Markmann translation in particularcan be
enlightening. Though the wordings are different (and one more strongly worded than the other), the relationship of
Bankey interprets
this passage as indicating that a discussion of blackness as such reproduces racism
by ignoring lived experience of individual blacks. We think that is the opposite of what
is expressed in either version of the text. Rather, the texts explain that
individual/subjective/agental experience of a given black person is exactly what
cannot be accounted for because that being is overdetermined by blackness (at
symbolic, material, and metaphysical levels). Bankey misreads Philcoxs translation to suggest that
whiteness to blackness offered in each is not mutually exclusive, but mutually revealing.
we can get at the lived experience of the black, in a way that would be intelligible under the current (white)
framing (gaze). But the rest of the passage, not to mention the entire chapter and book as a whole, explain at
lived experience is exactly what is unintelligible and distinct from

subjective/white individual capacities for experience. In light of this reading,
Bankeys implication that black people (in debate/in the world) stop interrogating
whiteness and white bodies is especially nonsensical. It assumes that racism is
simply petty prejudice that can be bi-directionally imposed. Fanon in this passage makes it
clear that this proposition has no converse. There are criticisms that one could make of
Wilderson, and many have. We here do not care to defend Wildersons use of psychoanalysis for example. But
the suggestion that he makes his burden a proof of universal black experience has
failed to see the forest for the trees. Black experience is universalized as black
(Look! A Negro!). Individual experience is constituted in this conundrum. This
conditionof blacknessis something we must work through, rather than
wish away.
length that
A2 Anti-Blackness
Unintelligibility is a way to question the idea of human
Butler, 04 (Judith Butler is an American philosopher and gender theorist whose
work has influenced political philosophy, ethics and the fields of feminist, queer and
literary theory. Undoing Gender TAM)
But what I would prefer is that we might consider carefully that when David invokes
the I in this quite hopeful and unexpected way, he is speaking about a certain
conviction he has about his own lovability; he says that they must think he is a
real loser if the only reason anyone is going to love him is because of what he has
between his legs. The they is telling him that he will not be loved, or that he will
not be loved unless he takes what they have for him, and that they have what he
needs in order to get love, that he will be loveless without what they have. But he
refuses to accept that what they are offering in their discourse is love. He refuses
their offering of love, understanding it as a bribe, as a seduction to subjection. He
will be and he is, he tells us, loved for some other reason, a reason they do not
understand, and it is not a reason we are given. It is clearly a reason that is Doing
Justice to Someone beyond the regime of reason established by the norms of
sexology itself. We know only that he holds out for another reason, and that in this
sense, we no longer know what kind of reason this is, what reason can be; he
establishes the limits of what they know, disrupting the politics of truth, making use
of his desubjugation within that order of being to establish the possibility of love
beyond the grasp of that norm. He positions himself, knowingly, in relation to
the norm, but he does not comply with its requirements. He risks a certain
desubjugationis he a subject? How will we know? And in this sense,
Davids discourse puts into play the operation of critique itself, critique
which, defined by Foucault, is precisely the desubjugation of the subject
within the politics of truth. This does not mean that David becomes
unintelligible and, therefore, without value to politics; rather, he emerges
at the limits of intelligibility, offering a perspective on the variable ways in
which norms circumscribe the human. It is precisely because we
understand, without quite grasping, that he has another reason, that he
is, as it were, another reason, that we see the limits to the discourse of
intelligibility that would decide his fate. David does not precisely occupy a
new world, since he is still, even within the syntax which brings about his
I, still positioned somewhere between the norm and its failure. And he
is, finally, neither one; he is the human in its anonymity, as that which we
do not yet know how to name or that which sets a limits on all naming.
And in that sense, he is the anonymousand criticalcondition of the
human as it speaks itself at the limits of what we think we know.
We are not striving to be human. To be human is to be

known. We are literally striving for the opposite (A2
antiblackness)
Butler, 04 (Judith Butler is an American philosopher and gender theorist whose
work has influenced political philosophy, ethics and the fields of feminist, queer and
literary theory. Undoing Gender TAM)
This is one way in which the matter is and continues to be political. But there is
something more, since what the example of drag sought to do was to make us
question the means by which reality is made and to consider the way in which being
called real or being called unreal can be not only a means of social control but a
form of dehumanizing violence. Indeed, I would put it this way: to be called unreal,
and to have that call, as it were, institutionalized as a form of differential treatment,
is to become the other against which the human is made. It is the inhuman, the
beyond the human, the less than human, the border that secures the human in its
ostensible reality. To be called a copy, to be called unreal, is thus one way in which
one can be oppressed. But consider that it is more fundamental than that. For to be
oppressed means that you already exist as a subject of some kind, you are there as
the visible and oppressed other for the master subject as a possible or potential
subject. But to be unreal is something else again. For to be oppressed one must
first become intelligible. To find that one is fundamentally unintelligible
(indeed, that the laws of culture and of language find one to be an
impossibility) is to find that one has not yet achieved access to the
human. It is to find oneself speaking only and always as if one were
human, but with the sense that one is not. It is to find that ones language
is hollow, and that no recognition is forthcoming because the norms by
which recognition takes place are not in ones favor.
The block body is socially dead and embracing fugitivity is the

only way to regain agency
2013 //SRSL)
In the fall of 1986, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons announced the completion of a new
16-bed high security unit at the federal penitentiary in Lexington, Kentucky. The unit
was an entirely self-contained basement wing of the already existing prison.
Although built for 16 women, it never held more than seven at any one time. The
three women held there the longest were Susan Rosenberg, Alejandrina Torres, and
Silvia Baraldini. Rosenberg and Baraldini had been involved with the new left, black
liberation, and Puerto Rican liberation movements, and both had been charged with
helping Assata Shakur escape from prison. Torres was part of the Puerto Rican
liberation movement and in 1983 was charged with conspiring to overthrow the U.S.
government along with Edwin Cortes, Jose Alberto Rodriguez, and Jose Luis
Rodriguez. All three women understood themselves to be political prisoners, or in

the case of Torres, a prisoner of war.487 The control unit at Lexington was built
underground. Its walls, floor, and ceiling were white; there was no natural light, no
fresh air, no color, no sound, and there was a severe regulation of human contact of
any kind.488 Whenever the women were taken from the control unit to a part of the
larger prison they were shackled at the ankles and handcuffed (with a black box
over the handcuffs). During these transfers, the entire prison would be locked down
so that there was no contact between control unit prisoners and the general
population. This policy of isolation extended to the units visitation rules. Only one
prisoner could have one visitor at any one time. Guards often scheduled visitors for
the same time period and then canceled visitations once family and loved ones had
traveled long distances. On a number of occasions, human rights groups were
denied access to the control unit because another visitation was already under
way.489 Both of these policies meant that the women experienced an extreme form
of isolation that all three women understood as a form of social death.490 Central to
the control units security regime was an expansive system of monitoring and
surveillance; cameras surveilled every inch of the control units space, including the
showers. To block the cameras, the women hung a sheet over the shower entrance,
refused to shower, and showered fully clothed.491 All activities and conversations
were recorded in written logs. Florescent lights were on at all times. Visiting rights,
reading material, and correspondence were severely limited and always monitored.
Screens covered the windows. Amnesty International wrote that if a prisoner wanted
to see anything outside, one has to put ones eye close to the mesh to get fuzzy
view of the limited view [due to a perimeter fence] beyond.492 The women held
there were not allowed to participate in work, education, and rehabilitation
programs offered to most prisoners in the general population.493 They were
assigned prison-issued clothing that was designed to ensure they look
feminine.494 The only work available to them for a short period of time was
folding army shorts for six and a half hours a day in a small, poorly ventilated room
that was used to be a utility closet. Anytime they left their cells or the outdoor
recreation cage the women were strip searched by male guards.495 Yet, as Dr.
Richard Korn observed on behalf of the ACLU, the searches were useless for locating
contraband. When he pointed this out to the warden, the warden agreed, yet the
searches continued. The purpose of the pat downs and strip searches, as Korn
argued, was to exercise absolute dominion over the womens bodies. One of the
challenges of mounting legal battles against the unit, and indeed of writing about it,
is that very little is actually known about its origins or details of its daily operation.
Lawyers for the defendants and plaintiffs in a case over the existence of the unit
(Baraldini v. Meese) failed to discover any documents outlining the planning
objectives or commissioning procedures for the unit. The judge in the case found it
astounding that a prison that cost over one million dollars to build did not produce
any documents outlining long-term planning objectives or goals. In its report on the
unit, Amnesty International stated, Nothingis known about the origins or planning
of HSU.496 Most of what is known about the unit was recorded by the women or is
documented in a handful of letters between Amnesty International and the Federal
Bureau of Prisons (FBP). Based on statements from different directors of the FBP,
Amnesty International determined that women would be placed in the Lexington
Control unit for two reasons. First, the unit was intended to hold inmates who may
be subject to recue attempts by outside groups.497 Second, the unit was to
confine females who have serious histories of assaultive, escape prone, or
disruptive activity.498 The women and ACLU lawyers did not believe that the unit
was set up to hold high security prisoners. Instead, they argued that the unit was
designed as a behavioral experiment in the control and [possible] breaking of
women who may have constituted a security risk, but more importantly, held firm
political views to justify their criminal actions and response to imprisonment.499
For them, the unit was designed to hold women political prisoners, even though the
federal government recognizes no such category. In letters between Amnesty
International and the Federal Bureau of Prisons, all of this is denied. Lexington
simply operated according to normal FBP policy.500 Simple details, like the size of
cells, could not be confirmed, thereby limiting what could be known about the unit.
There is no dispute that each cell contained a bed; metal toilet; metal shelf and
chair; small metal cabinet; a notice board; and a color television. But Rosenberg
claimed that all the cells were different sizes and that the one she was detained in
measured 8-foot x 10-foot, while lawyers for the FBP claimed that every single cell
was 100 square feet. Other discrepancies concerning what was real and what was
imaginary existed as well. Part of the problem of knowing the reality of the unit was
created by the prison itselfthe physical architecture of the unit produced
hallucinations, memory loss, blindness, and other forms of mental and physical
debility and incapacity. The women held at Lexington experienced chronic rage;
claustrophobia; heart palpitations; depression; the blunting of affect; dizziness;
visual disturbances; and weight loss.501 The women became unhinged from realty
objects moved, the walls melted, and space contracted.502 When ACLU doctors
returned after the women had been held at Lexington for three months, they found
these symptoms had intensified to include insomnia; daily panic attacks; obsessive
focus on dying or being killed; inability to concentrate; the forced reliving of past
forms of sexual violence caused by humiliating and physically injurious body
search procedures; non-stop hallucinations; and ongoing fear of mental
breakdown.503 Dr. Korn stated that the unit was deliberately designed to
undermine their physical and mental well being, that is, to destroy them physically
and psychologically.504 In a report on the health effects of the control unit by the
ACLU, one of the women said, I feel violated every minute of the day.505 Amnesty
International described the unit as deliberately and gratuitously oppressive.506
Torres described the unit as a white tomb, Rosenberg called it existential death
and like being buried alive, and Debra Brown said she felt like she was in the
grave. Rosenberg writes, [The High Security Unit] is a prison within a prisonThe
High Security Unit is living deathI believe this is an experiment being conducted
by the Justice Department to try and destroy political prisoners and to justify the
most vile abuse to us as women and as human beings, and [to] justify it because we
are political.507 Rosenberg understood the control unit at Lexington as a specifically
gendered penal technology, one that destroyed gendered subjectivities by
deploying regimes of violence that are quite literally incomprehensible. Three
months before it was shut down and after two years of operation, a federal judge
ruled that the government had unlawfully placed the women in Lexington because it
found their political beliefs unacceptable.508 Yet, nowhere were the rules and
regulations governing placement in the unit recorded, let alone the units purpose,
goals, and history. All of the women reported that they were never told what types
of behavior or what period of time would lead to transfer to general population. This
meant that transfer into and out of the unit was completely out of the control of the
women. Rosenberg was told, You know, youre going to die here.509 All of the
women also reported being told they were placed in unit due to their political
affiliations. A few weeks into their incarceration, the warden told Torres and
Rosenberg, You can be transferred out of here if you renounce your associations,
affiliations, and youruh, err, uhviews. You can have the privilege of living out
your life in general population.510 While one of the units stated goals was to
contain escape prone inmates (even though all three women discussed here had
perfect disciplinary prison records), one of its other goals was to discipline, manage,
and control non-normative epistemologies, feelings, and affects. Korn describes the
centrality of knowledge to the units function when he writes: For three of these
women, whose ideology is an intrinsic part of their identity, the denial of a personal
library is an unmistakable assault on their identity and their right to decide who
they are. It is, additionally, an attack which is in itself ideological and violative of
their rights as intellectually free and mature human beings. For people such as
these, their books are a statement of who they area statement made by minds
which instruct and respect them. These books are, in effect, their only other society,
their only unfailing friends, and to deny them this companionship is as perverse as
it is viciousThe point cannot be stressed too much. The officials who imposed this
limitation are not unsophisticated, illiterate, provincials in some penological
backwater. They are nothing if not carefully deliberate, in every detail. They know
what they are doing, and why they are doing it. The prisoners know it tooand their
inability to convey their understanding of this intellectually murderous limitation is
part of the pain of it511 By isolating the prisoners from the general population,
their families and loved ones, and even the sociality of books, the unit created a
type of social and civil death that not only delegitimized subjugated forms of
knowledge, but also sought to eradicate them. The unit worked to discipline and
erase forms of knowledge that epistemologically undermined the racial state, the
naturalness of incarceration, and the dominance of new ways of ordering economic
and social life under neoliberalism. Indeed, memory loss was intrinsic to living in the
unit, which meant the womens histories, convictions, politics, and feelings
dissolved into the concrete. This is not only evident in how knowledge was
regulated within the unit, but also in how the FBP shaped what could be known
about it. We can witness the shaping of knowledge and vision in a FBP response to
Amnesty International. It is worth quoting the Deputy Director of the FBP at length
in order to understand the epistemological dilemma represented by Lexington: The
unit is not a control unit nor a disciplinary unit and sensory deprivation is not
practiced nor condoned thereWe have ensured that inmates in the unit have
access to educational, religious, medical and mental health programs and we have
established a small industries program thereAll walls in the unit have been
painted in soft, earth-tone graphicsThe industries work area is well ventilated and
has an outside windowIt is not true that the women in the unit are subject to
systematic strip searches whenever they leave or enter their cells. In fact, they are
not subject to any search, including pat search, when they enter or leave their cells.
Likewise, it is untrue that male guards accompanying Ms. Torres to a medical

examination were allowed to watch her undress through an open door. There is no
formal nor informal policy wherein security searches of inmates at Lexington are
designed to humiliate prisoners I assure you that the prisoners at Lexington are
being confined in a humane and proper manner.512 According to the FBP, the truth
of the prisoners world was a fiction to the forms of knowledge produced by the
state. The control unit was not a control unit: white walls were earth toned; a closet
was an industries work area; pat downs and strips searches were figments of the
imagination. Reconstituting our understanding of how the neoliberal-carceral state
operatesin addition to the state of exceptionmeans embracing fictive facts,
hallucinations, and theories produced by panic. The forms of knowledge produced
by the state simply could not comprehend what occurred at Lexington.
The state attempts to govern a system of civic death and

impose force over the captive bodies
2013 //SRSL)
The first control unit in the United States emerged as a direct response to the
radical and revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 70s. It also coincided with
the emergence of neoliberal economic restructuring. This period saw a dramatic rise
in anti- prison activism, prison riots and rebellions, and prisoner organizing that was
aligned with the underground and aboveground leftist movements sweeping the
country. Indeed, the late 1960s and early 70s constitute what Alan Eladio Gmez
calls the prison rebellion years. After the 1971 uprising and massacre at Attica
prison in New York, there were over 40 prison rebellions in 1972.469 A variety of
organizations involved in black, Chicano, Native American, and Puerto Rican
liberation movements understood the prison as the space that would ignite a new
struggle for revolutionary transformation in the era immediately after the civil rights
reforms of the mid-1960s. During this time, prisoners turned the rehabilitative logic
of the mid-twentieth century penal system against itself. Aligned with organizers in
the free world, prisoners learned to read and write, studied the law, started ethnic
studies classes, and clandestine study groups. The rehabilitative model created an
environment where prisoners could historicize and theorize their own subjection and
thus led to organized labor strikes, violence against guards, and cellblock shut
downs. During April 1972, the Federal Bureau of Prisoners transferred over 100
prisoners involved in organizing and activist work around the country to Marion
Federal Penitentiary in Southern Illinois.470 By isolating problem inmates within
one institution, the Federal Bureau of Prisons sought to control prison activism by
subjecting prisoners at Marion to a new regime of behavior modification techniques.
This included brainwashing, sensory deprivation, medication, and prolonged
isolation. 471 James Bennett, the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons for most
of the mid-twentieth century, believed that criminality was a biological and
permanent, yet treatable disease. Under his direction, Marion became a research
lab for psychiatrists working at the Center for Crime, Delinquency, and Corrections
at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale.472 Designed to cure criminal deviants,
programs at Marion attempted to change prisoners behavior, beliefs, and thoughts.
In response to this regime, prisoners wrote and submitted a report to the United
Nations, and began working with the American Civil Liberties Union, National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Peoples Law Office in
Chicago. Prisoner organizing at Marion peaked after the brutal beating of a Chicano
inmate by guards. In response, a racially diverse group of prisoners organized a
group called the Political Prisoners Liberation Front. The organization led a series
of labor strikes and work stoppages that shut down entire sections of the prison.
The prison administration responded by beating, gassing, and confiscating the legal
materials of organizers. What followed next would change incarceration models for
the next four decades. Authorities isolated members of the Political Prisoners
Liberation Front in special cells called steel boxcars.473 This form of containment
eventually became the control unita permanent form of solitary confinement
and sensory deprivation used at Marion and now across the country.474 This model
would also come to be called super-maximum security or the supermax in the
mid-1980s. In control unit prisons (or supermax prisons), prisoners are held in
solitary confinement in 6-foot by 8-foot cells for 23 hours a day. There are no
religious services, or congregate exercise, dining, and work opportunities. These
conditions exist indefinitely. Most prisoners held in control units will never see the
horizon, the night sky, or touch another human being. When they leave their cell,
they exercise in a slightly larger cell, often still wearing shackles.475 Many prisoners
have lived in these breathing coffins for decades.476 Control units are said to
assist with the management and security control of inmates who have been
designated as violent or disruptive. These inmates have been determined to be a
threat to safety and security in traditional high-security facilities and their behavior
can [only] be controlled only by separation, restricted movement, and limited
access to staff and other inmates.477 Despite discourses about security and
safety, Ralph Arons, a former warden at Marion, stated the purpose of the Control
Unit clearly: The purpose of the Marion Control Unit is to control revolutionary
attitudes in the prison system and in the society at large.478 It is important to note
that the goal of the unit was not to manage revolutionary action and organizing, but
rather, radical and revolutionary orientations and dispositions. In addition, the
effects of the unit were not only aimed at prisoners, but also the feelings, thoughts,
and attitudes of society at large. In this way, Marions seizure of the body was
about both capturing bodies in addition to knowledges, feelings, and affects. The
control unit was designed to inhibit and abolish the epistemological formations
produced by the Third World left that undermined the naturalness of the prison and
the racial state. These were knowledges that I have outlined in the last three
chaptersknowledges that worked to make sense of the emergence of a new state
form based on neoliberal economics and the racialized governance of the carceral
system. Lorna Rhodes has argued that the control unit aligns itself with
neoliberalism through logics of choice and responsibility that justify the prisoners
indefinite incapacitation. Contemporary penal discourses emphasize the choices

made by imprisoned people, thus abstracting the imagined culpability of the
individual from the social, political, and economic conditions that manufacture
crime, criminals, and prisons.479 The prisoner makes decisions and choices based
on a rational calculation of the costs and benefits of their conduct.480 As Rhodes
puts it, the prisoner is responsibilized as perfectly fitting the conditions of his
confinement.481 In this way, the control unit is actualized by neoliberal discourses
of choice and individuality. However, I am arguing that the control unit also acted as
the condition of possibility for the emergence of those discourses. Disappearing
insurgent and rebellious bodies of color in a new system of living death was a way
to efface and erase the knowledges that prisoners were creating. These knowledges
contested neoliberal discourses of freedom, choice, and individuality. The control
unit emerged to discipline and disappear forms of knowledge that threatened to
epistemologically and materially unravel the neoliberal-carceral state. In this way,
we can understand the control unit as a way to manage what could be known in the
era of the emergence of the neoliberal-carceral state. The Control Unit at Marion
was a tool of political repression that represented a new category of legal
incapacitation; it was a state of exception from the rule of prison law within an
already existing state of exception from the rule of civil law.482 As the warden
stated, the control unit was designed to send the message to prisoners and free
world activists that anti-racist and anti-imperialist forms of organizing would be met
with a form of punishment where the captive would be buried alive in a world
beyond human contact and concern. This world was not outside the lawit was
governed by it. As Rhodes writes, The state of exception thus created at Marion
blurred differences between crime and political action, guilty parties and
bystanders, and general population and segregation.483 Marion refashioned the
norm out of the state of exception by working within the confines of the law. In the
1980s and 90s, the Supreme Court made a distinction between disciplinary
isolation and administrative segregation. This meant that a prisoner could be placed
in the exact same cell but the label would be different. If the placement was due to
disciplinary reasons, it could be contested in court, but if it was an administrative
choice that affected the safety, security, and governance of the prison, then the
placement was legal. Under administrative segregation prisoners are denied due
process and exist in a legal realm beyond the supposed protection of the Eighth
Amendment which defines cruel and unusual punishment.484 Under the legal
logic of administrative segregation, the punishment of the control units isolation
does not register as punishment.485 Punishment is protection, living death is
security, and disposability is safety. Transforming the disciplinary into the
administrative allowed the control unit to expand as a system of incapacitation and
civil death. The control unit does not operate outside the lawit is the execution of
the laws ability to redefine and remake the human. In addition, it is part of a
centuries-long experiment executed by modern power to test the limits and
endurance of the human body and mind. And finally, the control unit is an attempt
to govern the potential futures of the captive. It attempts to repress, contain, and
preempt the forms of disobedience and insurgency inherent in the structural
position of the prisoner.486 In this way, in contrast to Butlers theorization of the
time of the state of exception, the exception that was (and is always already) the
norm captures the future through the law, not by exceeding it. Nowhere was this
more evident than at control unit at Lexington.
A2 Pessimism Fails
**note also in a2 Fanon/Sexton/Copeland
Blackness as constitutive and as an object does not
necessitate a politics of pessimismrather, in the spaces
between thing and object exist a slippage, a space to assert
the agency of the Thing, a space for the fugitive
[Fanon/Sexton/Copeland Link?]
ProjectMUSE, IC)
One way to investigate the lived experience of the black is to consider what it is to
be the dangerousbecause one is, because we are (Who? We? Who is this we? Who
volunteers for this already given imposition? Who elects this imposed affinity? The
one who is homelessly, hopefully, less and more?) the constitutivesupplement.
What is it to be an irreducibly disordering, deformational force while at the same
time being absolutely indispensable to normative order, normative form? This is not
the same as, though it does probably follow from, the troubled realization that one
is an object in the midst of other objects, as Fanon would have it. In their
introduction to a rich and important collection of articles that announce and enact a
new deployment of Fanon in black studies encounter with visual studies, Jared
Sexton and Huey Copeland index Fanons formulation in order to consider what it is
to be the thing against which all other subjects take their bearing.5 But something
is left unattended in their invocation of Fanon, in their move toward equating
objecthood with the domain of non-existence or the interstitial space between life
and death, something to be understood in its difference from and relation to what
Giorgio Agamben calls naked life, something they call raw life, that movesor more
precisely cannot movein its forgetful non-relation to that quickening, forgetive
force that Agamben calls the form of life.6
Sexton and Copeland turn to the Fanon of Black Skins, White Masks, the
phenomenologist of (the lived experience of) blackness, who provides for them the
following epigraph:
I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit
filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was
an object in the midst of other objects. (Black Skins, 77)
[Jarrivais dans le monde, soucieux de faire lever un sens aux choses, mon me
pleine du dsir dtre lorigine du monde, et voici que je me dcouvrais objet au
milieu dautres objets.]7
Fanon writes of entering the world with a melodramatic imagination, as Peter Brooks
would have itone drawn toward the occult installation of the sacred in things,
gestures (certain events, as opposed to actions, of muscularity), and in the
subterranean field that is, paradoxically, signaled by the very cutaneous darkness of
which Fanon speaks. That darkness turns the would-be melodramatic subject not
only into an object but also into a signthe hideous blackamoor at the entrance of
the cave, that world underneath the world of light that Fanon will have entered, who
guards and masks our hidden motives and desires.8 Theres a whole other
economy of skins and masks to be addressed here. However, I will defer that
address in order to get at something (absent) in Sexton and Copeland. What I am
after is something obscured by the fall from prospective subject to object that Fanon
recitesnamely, a transition from thing(s) (choses) to object (objet) that turns out
to version a slippage or movement that could be said to animate the history of
philosophy. What if we bracket the movement from (erstwhile) subject to object in
order to investigate more adequately the change from object to thing (a change as
strange as that from the possibility of intersubjectivity that attends majority to
whatever is relegated to the plane or plain of the minor)? What if the thing whose
meaning or value has never been found finds things, founds things? What if the
thing will have founded something against the very possibility of foundation and
against all anti- or post-foundational impossibilities? What if the thing sustains itself
in that absence or eclipse of meaning that withholds from the thing the horrific
honorific of object? At the same time, what if the value of that absence or excess
is given to us only in and by way of a kind of failure or inadequacyor, perhaps
more precisely, by way of a history of exclusion, serial expulsion, presences
ongoing taking of leaveso that the non-attainment of meaning or ontology, of
source or origin, is the only way to approach the thing in its informal
(enformed/enforming, as opposed to formless), material totality? Perhaps this would
be cause for black optimism or, at least, some black operations. Perhaps the thing,
the black, is tantamount to another, fugitive, sublimity altogether. Some/thing
escapes in or through the objects vestibule; the object vibrates against its frame
like a resonator, and troubled air gets out. The air of the thing that escapes
enframing is what Im interested inan often unattended movement that
accompanies largely unthought positions and appositions. To operate out of this
interest might mispresent itself as a kind of refusal of Fanon.9 But my reading is
enabled by the way Fanons texts continually demand that we read themagain or,
deeper still, not or against again, but for the first time. I wish to engage a kind of
preop(tical) optimism in Fanon that is tied to the commerce between the lived
experience of the black and the fact of blackness and between the thing and the
objectan optimism recoverable, one might say, only by way of mistranslation, that
bridged but unbridgeable gap that Heidegger explores as both distance and
nearness in his discourse on The Thing.
A2 Fanon/Sexton/Copeland
[Fanons analysis misses the core of the fugitive political
consciousness] It is not that resistance must be oppositional
but rather, appositionalblack life itself, as fugitive and
unknowable, functions to disrupt and haunt the oppressor
through life within death
ProjectMUSE, IC)
While Fanon would consider the zealous worker in a colonial regime a
quintessentially pathological case, remember that it is in resistance to colonial
oppression that the cases of psychopathology with which Fanon is concerned in The
Wretched of the Earthin particular, those psychosomatic or cortico-visceral
disordersemerge. Whats at stake is Fanons ongoing ambivalence toward the
supposedly pathological. At the same time, ambivalence is itself the mark of the
pathological. Watch Fanon prefiguratively describe and diagnose the pathological
ambivalence that he performs:
The combat waged by a people for their liberation leads them, depending on the
circumstances, either to reject or to explode the so-called truths sown in their
consciousness by the colonial regime, military occupation, and economic
exploitation. And only the armed struggle can effectively exorcise these lies about
man that subordinate and literally mutilate the more conscious-minded among us.
How many times in Paris or Aix, in Algiers or Basse-Terre have we seen the colonized
vehemently protest the so-called indolence of the black, the Algerian, the
Vietnamese? And yet in a colonial regime if a fellah were a zealous worker or a
black were to refuse a break from work, they would be quite simply considered
pathological cases. The colonizeds indolence is a conscious way of sabotaging the
colonial machine; on the biological level it is a remarkable system of selfpreservation and, if nothing else, is a positive curb on the occupiers stranglehold
over the entire country. (220)
Is it fair to say that one detects in this text a certain indolence sown or sewn into it?
Perhaps, on the other hand, its flaws are more accurately described as pathological.
To be conscious-minded is aligned with subordination, even mutilation; the selfconsciousness of the colonized is figured as a kind of wound at the same time that it
is also aligned with wounding, with armed struggle that is somehow predicated on
that which it makes possible namely, the explosion of so-called truths planted or
woven into the consciousness of the conscious-minded ones. They are the ones who
are given the task of repairing (the truth) of man [humanity]; they are the ones who
would heal by way of explosion, excision, or exorcism. This moment of selfconscious selfdescription is sewn into Fanons text like a depth charge. However,
authentic upheaval is ultimately figured not as an eruption of the unconscious in the
conscious-minded but as that conscious mode of sabotage carried out every dayin
and as what had been relegated, by the conscious-minded, to the status of

impossible, pathological socialityby the ones who are not, or are not yet,
conscious. Healing wounds are inflicted, in other words, by the ones who are not
conscious of their wounds and whose wounds are not redoubled by such
consciousness. Healing wounds are inflicted appositionally, in small, quotidian
refusals to act that make them subject to charges of pathological indolence. Often
the conscious ones, who have taken it upon themselves to defend the colonized
against such charges, levy those charges with the greatest vehemence. If Fanon
fails to take great pains to chart the tortured career of rehabilitative injury, it is
perhaps a conscious decision to sabotage his own text insofar as it has been sown
with those so-called truths that obscure the truth of man.
This black operation that Fanon performs on his own text gives the lie to his own
formulations. So when Fanon claims, The duty of the colonized subject, who has
not yet arrived at a political consciousness or a decision to reject the oppressor, is
to have the slightest effort literally dragged out of him, the question that emerges
is why one who is supposed yet to have arrived at political consciousness, one who
must be dragged up out of the pit, would have such a duty (220). This, in turn,
raises the more fundamental issue, embedded in this very assertion of duty, of the
impossibility of such non-arrival. The failure to arrive at a political consciousness is a
general pathology suffered by the ones who take their political consciousness with
them on whatever fugitive, aleatory journey they are making. They will have already
arrived; they will have already been there. They will have carried something with
them before whatever violent manufacture, whatever constitutive shattering is
supposed to have called them into being. While noncooperation is figured by Fanon
as a kind of staging area for or a preliminary version of a more authentic
objectifying encounter with colonial oppression (a kind of counter-representational
response to powers interpellative call), his own formulations regarding that
response point to the requirement of a kind of thingly quickening that makes
opposition possible while appositionally displacing it. Noncooperation is a duty that
must be carried out by the ones who exist in the nearness and distance between
political consciousness and absolute pathology. But this duty, imposed by an
erstwhile subject who clearly is supposed to know, overlooks (or, perhaps more
precisely, looks away from) that vast range of nonreactive disruptions of rule that
are, in early and late Fanon, both indexed and disqualified. Such disruptions, often
manifest as minor internal conflicts (within the closed circle, say, of Algerian
criminality, in which the colonized tend to use each other as a screen) or muscular
contractions, however much they are captured, enveloped, imitated, or traded,
remain inassimilable (231). These disruptions trouble the rehabilitation of the
human even as they are evidence of the capacity to enact such rehabilitation.
Moreover, it is at this point, in passages that culminate with the apposition of what
Fanon refers to as the reality of the towelhead with the reality of the nigger,
that the fact, the case, and the lived experience of blacknesswhich might be
understood here as the troubling of and the capacity for the rehabilitation of the
humanconverge as a duty to appose the oppressor, to refrain from a certain
performance of the labor of the negative, to avoid his economy of objectification
and standing against, to run away from the snares of recognition (220). This refusal
is a black thing, is that which Fanon carries with(in) himself, and in how he carries
himself, from Martinique to France to Algeria. He is an anticolonial smuggler whose
wares are constituted by and as the dislocation of black social life that he carries,
almost unaware. In Fanon, blackness is transversality between things, escaping (by
way of) distant, spooky actions; it is translational effect and affect, transmission
between cases, and could be understood, in terms Brent Hayes Edwards
establishes, as diasporic practice.28 This is what he carries with him, as the
imagining thing that he cannot quite imagine and cannot quite control, in his
pathologizing description of it that itthat hedefies. A fugitive cant moves
through Fanon, erupting out of regulatory disavowal. His claim upon this criminality
was interdicted. But perhaps only the dead can strive for the quickening power that
animates what has been relegated to the pathological. Perhaps the dead are alive
and escaping. Perhaps ontology is best understood as the imagination of this
escape as a kind of social gathering; as undercommon plainsong and dance; as the
fugitive, centrifugal word; as the words auto-interruptive, auto-illuminative shade/s.
Seen in this light, black(ness) is, in the dispossessive richness of its colors, beautiful.
Blackness as constitutive and as an object does not

necessitate a politics of pessimismrather, in the spaces
between thing and object exist a slippage, a space to assert
the agency of the Thing, a space for the fugitive
[Fanon/Sexton/Copeland Link?]
ProjectMUSE, IC)
One way to investigate the lived experience of the black is to consider what it is to
be the dangerousbecause one is, because we are (Who? We? Who is this we? Who
volunteers for this already given imposition? Who elects this imposed affinity? The
one who is homelessly, hopefully, less and more?) the constitutivesupplement.
What is it to be an irreducibly disordering, deformational force while at the same
time being absolutely indispensable to normative order, normative form? This is not
the same as, though it does probably follow from, the troubled realization that one
is an object in the midst of other objects, as Fanon would have it. In their
introduction to a rich and important collection of articles that announce and enact a
new deployment of Fanon in black studies encounter with visual studies, Jared
Sexton and Huey Copeland index Fanons formulation in order to consider what it is
to be the thing against which all other subjects take their bearing.5 But something
is left unattended in their invocation of Fanon, in their move toward equating
objecthood with the domain of non-existence or the interstitial space between life
and death, something to be understood in its difference from and relation to what
Giorgio Agamben calls naked life, something they call raw life, that movesor more
precisely cannot movein its forgetful non-relation to that quickening, forgetive
force that Agamben calls the form of life.6
Sexton and Copeland turn to the Fanon of Black Skins, White Masks, the
phenomenologist of (the lived experience of) blackness, who provides for them the
following epigraph:
I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit
filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was
an object in the midst of other objects. (Black Skins, 77)
[Jarrivais dans le monde, soucieux de faire lever un sens aux choses, mon me
pleine du dsir dtre lorigine du monde, et voici que je me dcouvrais objet au
milieu dautres objets.]7
Fanon writes of entering the world with a melodramatic imagination, as Peter Brooks
would have itone drawn toward the occult installation of the sacred in things,
gestures (certain events, as opposed to actions, of muscularity), and in the
subterranean field that is, paradoxically, signaled by the very cutaneous darkness of
which Fanon speaks. That darkness turns the would-be melodramatic subject not
only into an object but also into a signthe hideous blackamoor at the entrance of
the cave, that world underneath the world of light that Fanon will have entered, who
guards and masks our hidden motives and desires.8 Theres a whole other
economy of skins and masks to be addressed here. However, I will defer that
address in order to get at something (absent) in Sexton and Copeland. What I am
after is something obscured by the fall from prospective subject to object that Fanon
recitesnamely, a transition from thing(s) (choses) to object (objet) that turns out
to version a slippage or movement that could be said to animate the history of
philosophy. What if we bracket the movement from (erstwhile) subject to object in
order to investigate more adequately the change from object to thing (a change as
strange as that from the possibility of intersubjectivity that attends majority to
whatever is relegated to the plane or plain of the minor)? What if the thing whose
meaning or value has never been found finds things, founds things? What if the
thing will have founded something against the very possibility of foundation and
against all anti- or post-foundational impossibilities? What if the thing sustains itself
in that absence or eclipse of meaning that withholds from the thing the horrific
honorific of object? At the same time, what if the value of that absence or excess
is given to us only in and by way of a kind of failure or inadequacyor, perhaps
more precisely, by way of a history of exclusion, serial expulsion, presences
ongoing taking of leaveso that the non-attainment of meaning or ontology, of
source or origin, is the only way to approach the thing in its informal
(enformed/enforming, as opposed to formless), material totality? Perhaps this would
be cause for black optimism or, at least, some black operations. Perhaps the thing,
the black, is tantamount to another, fugitive, sublimity altogether. Some/thing
escapes in or through the objects vestibule; the object vibrates against its frame
like a resonator, and troubled air gets out. The air of the thing that escapes
enframing is what Im interested inan often unattended movement that
accompanies largely unthought positions and appositions. To operate out of this
interest might mispresent itself as a kind of refusal of Fanon.9 But my reading is
enabled by the way Fanons texts continually demand that we read themagain or,
deeper still, not or against again, but for the first time. I wish to engage a kind of
preop(tical) optimism in Fanon that is tied to the commerce between the lived
experience of the black and the fact of blackness and between the thing and the
objectan optimism recoverable, one might say, only by way of mistranslation, that
bridged but unbridgeable gap that Heidegger explores as both distance and
nearness in his discourse on The Thing.
Fanons construction of the black as deontologically bound to

resistance either reifies dominant narratives of the criminality
of blackness or prevents meaningful resistance
ProjectMUSE, IC)
I must emphasize my lack of interest in some puritanically monochromatic
denunciation of an irreducible humanism in Fanon. Nor is one after some simple
disavowal of the law as if the criminality in question had some stake in such a
reaction. Rather, what one wants to amplify is a certain Fanonian elaboration of the
law of motion that Adorno will come to speak of in Fanons wake. Fanon writes,
Here we find the old law stating that anything alive cannot afford to remain still
while the nation is set in motion, while man both demands and claims his infinite
humanity (221). A few years later, in different contexts, Adorno will write: The
inner consistency through which artworks participate in truth always involves their
untruth; in its most unguarded manifestations art has always revolted against this,
and today this revolt has become arts own law of movement [Bewegungsgesetz]
(Aesthetic Theory, 16869) and Artworks paradoxical nature, stasis, negates itself.
The movement of artworks must be at a standstill and thereby become visible. Their
immanent processual characterthe legal process that they undertake against the
merely existing world that is external to themis objective prior to their alliance
with any party (17677). In the border between Black Skins, White Masks and The
Wretched of the Earth, the body that questions is a truth that bears untruth. It is a
heavy burden to be made to stand as the racial-sexual embodiment of the
imagination in its lawless freedom, and the knowledge it produces exclusively,
particularly when such standing is a function of having ones wings clipped by the
understanding.29 However the burden of such exemplarity, the burden of being the
problem or the case, is disavowed at a far greater cost. So that what is important
about Fanon is his own minor internal conflict, the viciously constrained movement
between these burdens. On the one hand, the one who does not engage in a certain
criminal disruption of colonial rule is pathological, unnatural; on the other hand, one
wants to resist a certain understanding of the Algerian as born idlers, born liars,
born thieves, and born criminals (Wretched/P, 221). Insofar as Fanon seems to
think that the colonized subject is born into a kind of preconscious duty to resist,
that the absence of the capacity to perform or to recognize this duty is a kind of
birth defect that retards the development of political consciousness, Fanon is caught
between a rock and a crawl space. Against the grain of a colonial psychological
discourse that essentially claims that the North African in a certain way is deprived
of a cortex and therefore relegated to a vegetative and purely instinctual life, a
life of involuntary muscular contractions, Fanon must somehow still find a way to
claim, or to hold in reserve, those very contractions insofar as they are a
mobilization against colonial stasis (225). Against the grain of racist notions of the
criminal impulsiveness of the North African as the transcription of a certain
configuration of the nervous system into his pattern of behavior or as a
neurologically comprehensible reaction, written into the nature of things, of the
thing which is biologically organized, Fanon must valorize the assertion of a kind of
political criminality written into the nature of things while also severely clipping the
wings of an imaginative tendency to naturalize and pathologize the behavior of the
colonized (228). Insofar as crime marks the Algerian condition within which each
prevents his neighbor from seeing the national enemy and thereby arriving at a
political consciousness, Fanon must move within an almost general refusal to look at
the way the colonized look at themselves, a denial or pathologization or policing of
the very sociality that such looking implies (231). Here Fanon seems to move within
an unarticulated Kantian distinction between criminality as the teleological principle
of anticolonial resistance and crime as the unbound, uncountable set of illusory
facts that obscure, or defer the advent of, postcolonial reason. This distinction is an
ontological distinction; it, too, raises the question concerning the irreducible trace of
beings that being bears.30
A2 Whiteness
By subverting we de subvert the naturalness of whiteness
reserved Theatre Topics 14.2 (2004) 411-430John T. Warren is an assistant professor
in the School of Communication Studies at Bowling Green State University, where
he teaches courses in performance, culture, identity, and power. Deanna L. Fassett
is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at San Jos
State University, where she teaches courses in instructional communication and
critical, feminist, and performative pedagogies //liam TAM]
But subversion is not as simple as it seems. One might easily misread
"subverting," imagining we endorse a view of whiteness research that
suggests one can simply undo racism by undermining whiteness to such
an extent that it ceases to be the cultural center (see Ignatiev and Garvey;
McLaren). While such a vision of the world is well intentioned, it is an
enabling fiction at best and a dangerous myth at worst; in effect, such a
rhetorical move allows white identified/appearing people an easy out, an
easy dismissal of the power of whiteness in our lives and in our actions.
Rather than embrace this easy sense of subversion, we take "subverting"
as an active verb, in which we grapple with whiteness in an attempt to
unmask it. This is to say, these workshops are a way for participants to see and
think about whiteness in ways they have not done before. By pointing out
whiteness's power and discursive machinery, we hope to subvert its
naturalness, or rather, participate in the process of racial subversion. While
we do not think a single two-hour workshop will transform these participants into
antiracists, we hope to create spaces for us all to reenvision how race matters (as
well as how race comes to matter) in our lives.
Misc
Equianos story
Story beginningfear and abjection as a result of the
encounter with the ship but also the possibility of redemptive
resistance
Two passages:
The first object that saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast was the sea, and a
slave ship, which was then riding at anchor, and waiting for its cargo. These filled
me with astonishment, that was soon converted into terror, which I am yet at a loss
to describe, and much more the then feelings of my mind when I was carried on
board. I was immediately handled and tossed up to see if I was sound, by some of
the crew; and I was now persuaded that I had got into a world of bad spirits, and
that they were going to kill me. Their complexion too, differing so much from ours,
their long hair, and the language they spoke, which was very different from any I
had ever heard, united to confirm me in this belief. Indeed such were the horrors of
my views and fears at the moment, that if ten thousand worlds had been my own, I
would freely have parted with them all to have exchanged my condition with the
meanest slave in my own country. When I looked round the ship too, and saw a
large furnace or copper boiling and a multitude of black people, of every
description, chained together, every one of their countenances expressing dejection
and sorrow, I no longer doubted of my fate; and, quite overpowered with horror and
anguish, I fell motionless on the deck, and fainted. When I recovered a little, I found
some black people about me, who I believed were some of those who brought me
on board, and had been receiving their pay: they talked to me in order to cheer me,
but all in vain. I asked them if we were not to be eaten by those white men with
horrible looks, red faces, and long hair. They told me I was not: and one of the crew
brought me a small portion of spiritous liquor in a wine glass; but, being afraid of
him, I would not take it out of his hand. One of the blacks therefore took it from him
and gave it to me, and I took a little down my palate, which, instead of reviving me,
as they thought it would, threw me into the greatest consternation at the strange
feeling it produced, having never tasted any such liquor before. (Equiano 1987, 32
33)
I was soon put down under the decks, and there received such a salutation in my
nostrils as I had never experienced in my life: so that, with the loathesomeness of
the stench, and with my crying together, I became so sick and low that I was not
able to eat, nor had I the least desire to taste anything. I now wished for the last
friend, death, to relieve me; but soon, to my grief, two of the white men offered me
eatables; and, on my refusing to eat, one of them held me fast by the hands, and
laid me across, I think, the windlass, and tied my feet, while the other flogged me
severely. I had never experienced anything of this kind before, and although, not
being used to the water, I naturally feared that element the first time I saw it, yet
nevertheless, could I have got over the nettings, I would have jumped over the
side . . . (3334)
The ship is the emblem of the encounter, the originary site of abjection, of the
production or evocation of a shuddering affect that is quickly conceptualized in/as
the mark of the aural and visual differences encoded in language and complexion.4
This initial encounter remains. It is durative, domesticated or inhabited in
representation. It remains in every passage of the text, in the texts representation
of the act of passage. Part of what the encounter generates in Equiano is a fear of
being eaten, terror which is shaped by prior experience in the culture of his origin in
which food is given a double statussustenance and (possibly) poisonand is thus
to be regarded warily.5 The young Equiano is scared of being consumed, and though
he is not eaten by the white men, certainly he is consumed by the ship, situated
within its bowels, swallowed by and radically drawn into the economy the ship
symbolizes and instantiates, and incorporated into the dialectic of recognition that
is initiated by the encounter and its originary abjectification. But this description of
abjection foreshadows an emergent resistance. In that emergence, Equiano
embodies a reversal of the pharmakon, opening and marking the possibility of a
contamination of what consumes hima re-sounding and re-vision of the auralvisual assumptions and structure of European Man and his self-image. The abject,
force-fed child takes poison for medicine while being taken, as poison, for
sustenance.
Middle storylanguage as the simultaneous manifestation of

capitulation and resistance
Two passages:
It was now between two and three years since I first came to England, a great part
of which I had spent at sea; so that I became mured to that service, and began to
consider myself as happily situated; for my master treated me always extremely
well; and my attachment and gratitude to him were great. From the various scenes I
had beheld on ship-board, I soon grew a stranger to terror of every kind, and was, in
that respect at least, almost an Englishman. I have often reflected with surprise that
I never felt half the alarm, at any of the numerous dangers in which I have been,
that I was filled with at the first sight of the Europeans, and at every act of theirs,
even the most trifling, when I first came among them, and for sometimes
afterwards. That fear, however, the effect of my ignorance, wore away as I began to
know them.
I could now speak English tolerably well, and perfectly understood every thing that
was said. I not only felt myself quite easy with these new countrymen, but relished
their society and manners. I no longer looked upon them as spirits, but as men
superior to us; and therefore I had the stronger desire to resemble them, to imbibe
their spirit, and imitate their manners. I therefore embraced every occasion of
improvement; and every new thing that I observed I treasured up in my memory. I
had long wished to be able to read and write; and for this purpose I took every
opportunity to gain instruction, but had made as but very little progress. However,
when I went to London with my master, I had soon an opportunity of improving
myself, which I gladly embraced. Shortly after my arrival, he sent me to wait upon
the Miss Guerins, who had treated me with so much kindness when I was there
before, and they sent me to school. (5152)
There was also one Daniel Queen, about forty years of age, a man very well
educated, who messed with me on board this ship, and he likewise dressed and
attended the captain. Fortunately this man soon became very much attached to me,
and took great pains to instruct me in many things. He taught me to shave, and
dress hair a little, and also to read in the Bible, explaining many passages to me,
which I did not comprehend. I was wonderfully surprised to see the laws and rules of
my own country written almost exactly here; a circumstance which, I believe,
tended to impress our manners and customs more deeply on my memory. I used to
tell him of this resemblance; and many a time we have set up the whole night
together at this employment. In short, he was like a father to me; and some used
even to call me after his name; they also styled me the black Christian. Indeed I
almost loved him with the affection of a son. Many things I have denied myself, that
he might have them; and when I used to play at marbles or any other game, and
won a few halfpence, or got some money for shaving any one, I used to buy him a
little sugar or tobacco, as far as my stock of money would go. He used to say that
he and I never should part, and that when ship was paid off, as I was as free as
himself or any other man on board, he would instruct me in his business, by which I
might gain a livelihood. This gave me new life and spirits; and my heart burned
within me, while I thought the time long till I obtained my freedom. For though my
master had not promised it to me, yet, besides the assurances I had often received
that he had no right to detain me, he always treated me with the greatest kindness,
and reposed in me an unbounded confidence. He even paid attention to my morals;
and would never suffer me to deceive him, or tell lies, of which he used to tell me
the consequences; and that if I did do, God would not love me. So that from all this
tenderness I had never once supposed, in all my dreams of freedom, that he would
think of detaining me any longer than I wished. (6364)
The encounter remains in the memory of abjection and terror, an ineradicable and
inconsumable trace even and especially in the context of the desire to resemble the
one whod once been feared. The paradox of freedom resurfaces in the fact of the
abjectifying desire for and impossibility of resemblance. There is the illusion of
resemblancebetween the laws and rules of Equianos country of origin and those
written in the Bible (a paradoxically divergent coalescence about which more later)
but that illusion is disappeared by the split between the theory and practice of
Christianity; and in the absence of either an aural resemblance (a sound that is an
absolute sounding-like; the absence of accent) or a visual resemblance (effect of

some magical phenotypical transfiguration), resemblance must be reformulated and
relocated by and in Equianos relation to languageto tone, grammar, and the
written mark. Resemblance is to be made manifest in literacy, that which would
become the mark of the same, the universal, the human.
Equianos overcoming of terror corresponds, then, with a desire for resemblance
that is enacted in his virtual acquisition of English(ness). The ability to speak, read,
and write English tolerably well is connected to an ability no longer to look on
white men as spirits; instead, he looks on them as superior men and wishes to
resemble them, to imbibe their spirits and imitate their manners. (This opens, of
course, the possibility of a kind of intoxication, and reintroduces the motif of
consumption and the notion of pharmakon that goes along with it; this notion of
intoxication is bound up with the possibility of transportation or ecstasy, and this
imbibing of the spirit returns, along with the motif of consumption, during Equianos
conversion [again, about which more later], prompted by his attendance at a soulfeast at which nothing material was eaten or drunk, and at which the entire
complex of metaphors regarding consumption approaches resolution.)6 Equiano
therefore embraced every occasion of improvement, many of which were afforded
him by the Misses Guerin who taught him to read and also were responsible for his
baptism, thereby foreshadowing the resolution of a dialectical motion from the
white man as inhabiting the interstitial identity between God and Man, to the white
man as superior man or lord to the Lord. Nevertheless, there is a certain
reconstruction of language, a certain refusal to understand, that is embedded in the
desire, manifest in the re-citation, to move from the abject to the same. It is a desire
for selfimprovement through the knowledge of language that is, again, wholly
within the frame of the encounter. Equiano must be given this opportunity by the
one by whom he is taken. He depends upon random kindnesses and gifts: enter the
Misses Guerin, who offer Equiano the gift of (their) language; his profit, of course, is
the ability to curse. Again, one might reconfigure this ability: as a mode of
resistance, disabling the language, making it halt or limp or move unreliably for
which is to say againstits framers; as an infiltration or improvisation of the
language, a contamination or an improvement, if you will, of that with which one
would have been improved. The problem, though, is that even this reversal of
improvement is doubled by another kind of fall: one learns to curse when before, in
Africa, one had had neither the need nor the tools to pollute the name of the object
of our adoration. . . . (20)
Nevertheless, this reversal, the improvisation of improvement, is what must occur in
the absence of any absolute mimesis. The accent remains like the trace of the
encounteras the sound-alike is re-sounded. The written shifts uncontrollably; the
letter moves. That movement is not the authentic difference of (the)
African/Experience, a difference constitutive of the maintenance of the dialectic of
recognition in the discourse of abolition, and manifest in prefaces which, in an
attempt to figuratively confirm an imagined and already written/canonized
otherness, speak of round, unvarnished tale[s], thereby betraying the inability to
read Equiano except through the image of Othello, the phantasmatically stylized
other whose self-deprecation conceals an intoxicating and sexually transgressive

and predatory linguistic power, or in reviews that would vouch for the narratives
authenticity in spite of the artful mediation of some European editor which, finally,
must have been there.7 And, of course, one must remember that racial codes and
biologically determined boundaries would always have served to mark the absolute
boundary between the races, even as the consumptive sexual appetites of the
European (man) takes to itself that impurity against which it so zealously guards.8
Note, then, the echoes of Shakespeares construction of the colonized, enslaved, or
racialized other with which Equiano is determined, and which he is determined to
resemble: paradigmatic oppositional attitudes toward and within the white man and
his language (and his daughter).
Final Section speaking as both a co-option of the Masters

tools and the refusal to speak in the face of the master to
deconstruct the dialectic of Master and Slavethe
improvisation opens up the space for a possible transcendence
of various forms of power
Three passages:
In pursuance of our orders we sailed from Portsmouth for the Thames, and arrived
at Deptford the 10th of December, where we cast our anchor just as it was high
water. The ship was up about half an hour, when my master ordered the barge to be
manned; and, all in an instant, without having before given me the least reason to
suspect any thing of the matter, he forced me into the barge, saying, I was going to
leave him, but he would take care that I did not. I was so struck with the
unexpectedness of this proceeding, that for some time I did not make a reply; only I
made an offer to go for my books and clothes, but he swore I should not move out
of his sight; and if I did, he would cut my throat, at the same time taking out his
hanger. I began, however, to collect myself; and, plucking up courage, I told him
that I was free, and he could not by law serve me so. But this only enraged him the
more; and he continued to swear, and said he would soon let me know whether he
would or not and at that instant sprung himself into the barge, from the ship, to the
astonishment and sorrow of all on board. (6465)
But, just as we had got a little below Gravesend, we came alongside of a ship going
away the next tide for the West-Indies; her name was the Charming Sally, Captain
James Doran. My master went on board and agreed with him for me; and in little
time I was sent for into the cabin. When I came there Captain Doran asked me if I
knew him; I answered I did not; Then, said he, you are now my slave. I told him
my master could not sell me to him nor to anyone else. Why, said he, did not your
master buy you? I confessed he did. But I have served him, said I, many years,
and he has taken all my wages and prize-money, for I only got one sixpence during
the war. Besides this I have been baptized; and, by the laws of the land, no man has
a right to sell me. And I added, that I had heard a lawyer, and others, at different
times tell my master so. They both then said, that those people who told me so,
were not my friends; but I repliedit was very extraordinary that other people did
not know the law as well as they. Upon this, Captain Doran said I talked too much
English, and if I did not behave myself well and be quiet, he had a method on board
to make me. I was too well convinced of his power over me to doubt what he said;
and my former sufferings in the slave-ship presenting themselves to my mind, the
recollection of them made me shudder. However, before I retired I told them, that as
I could not get any right among men here, I hoped I should hereafter in Heaven, and
I immediately left the cabin, filled with resentment and sorrow. (65)
Thus, at the moment I expected all my toils to end, was I plunged into, as I
supposed, a new slavery; in comparison of which all my service hitherto had been
perfect freedom; and whose horrors, always present to my mind, now rushed on it
with tenfold aggravation. I wept bitterly for some time; and began to think that I
must have done something to displease the Lord, that he punished me so severely.
This filled me with painful reflections on my past conduct. I recollected that, on the
morning of our arrival at Deptford, I had very rashly sworn that as soon as we
reached London, I would spend the day in rambling and sport. My conscience smote
me for this unguarded expression: I felt that the Lord was able to disappoint me in
all things, and immediately considered my present situation as a judgment of
Heaven, on account of my presumption in swearing. (66)
Equiano tells of a lessening of the original terror of the encounter, and that telling
can be construed as the mark of the submergence of any possible resistance, and a
capitulation to an oppressive Eurocentric model of selfmeasure and self-fashioning.
The absence of terror is connected to Equianos relation to the ship, which is the
locus of his sense of himself as (virtual) Englishman, the site of a delicate shift from
the phantasm of consumption to the fantasy of assimilation. But, as we see, his
status on board the ship must have a double implication, and a resistant,
improvisatory, asyntagmatic use of language occurs at the very moment that the
virtuality of his Englishness is again unconcealed, namely in the reemergent
encounter with the otherthe redoubled image of another consuming shipthat
corresponds to his sale; this is the moment at which it becomes clear that the
absence of terror was a finite deferral, and not an erasure. The other side of that
implication is also indexed to his virtuality as an Englishman, a virtuality that leads
to the first of his many ineffectual appeals to the law. These appeals signify not only
the juridical difference between himself and the English, but the impotence of the
law with respect to freedom, on the one hand, and salvation on the other. Finally,
the law pales in comparison to a certain kind of knowledge (more precisely, faith,
though well see that neither faith nor law work in opposition to the other) that is
bound up with the improvisation of a future state, one indexed to both freedom and
salvation. Part of what Equianos text demands that we confront are the questions
of the relation between the knowledge of freedom and the knowledge of salvation,
and of what these have to do with the knowledge of language and the knowledge of
the Lord.
So, the double of Equianos narrative of his original encounter with his other is the
story of his first being sold. This sale comes just as Equiano has begun to believe he
will finally obtain his freedom. Equianos sale is seen by him as the result of the
unguarded expression of emotion. Still, though unguarded expressionnamely,
cursingproduces negative effects, those effects can be warded off by another form
of unguarded expression: a pouring out of the soul, with unfeigned repentance and
contrition of heart. Earnest prayer relieves Equiano: In a little time my grief, spent
with its own violence, began to subside; and after the first confusion of my thoughts
was over, I reflected with more calmness on my present condition (67). Its as if the
opposing profuse strains of unpremeditated expression cancel one another out and
are replaced by reasoned reflection and the possibility of a kind of redemption.9
Mediating between curse and prayer is the moment of an improvisatory
contamination of the oppressors language, the encounter in which Equiano talked
too much English. That impasse between imitative and resistant uses of the
language is itself marked by an interruptive logical displacement such that, at the
very moment at which it would seem we have a resistant encounter to valorize, we
must also see that that encounter is the emergence of an interruption of the
encounter as such, an interruption made possible by Equianos knowledge of
freedom. When Captain Doran asks Equiano if he knew him, he seems to imply that
Equiano ought to have some prior knowledge, a certain ante-metaphysical
bondsmans understanding or competence, that would allow him to recognize
Doran. The self-recognition that would emerge in Doran by way of Equianos
affirmative answer is interrupted, however, and in that deferral Doran must bestow
upon Equiano a moment of selfrecognition, a moment that would let Equiano know
who and what he is so that Dorans identity can be confirmed. You are now my
slave, says Doran; but here, recognition is missed again. Though Dorans utterance
would be performative, as if in the face of Equianos failure (or refusal) to recognize
his new master, Doran hopes to instantiate, by speaking, their relative statuses: you
are now, in the deferring absence of your immediate recognition of this fact and of
what it implies about our identities, my slave because I say so. Still, in the
interruptive absence of the immediate knowledge of his condition and of his identity
vis--vis Captain Doran, another knowledge is implied: precisely that knowledge
which animates Equianos resistant speech. The too much English that Equiano
talks is a function of the too little English he talks at the moment in which his
response is supposed to establish the identities of lord and bondsman. When
Equiano responds, answering that he did not know Captain Doran, that he did not
recognize the master or his mastery, that he did not know himself to be this
masters slave, he lays claim to that knowledge in his expression of it. Not to know
what Captain Doran would have him know is not to know nothing.
Of course, this moment of misrecognitionat which the condition of possibility of a
renaissance of resistance is revealedis shadowed by another recognition. One lord
is denied, but another Lord is affirmed as the author of Equianos misfortunes. Here,
swearing and resistant response, a stated intention to carouse, and an oppositional
legal assertion of independence are connected precisely in the fact that that
legalistic assertion of independence is, more precisely, a declaration of
in/dependence contingent upon the mediating effects of an already extant

ownership. Lordship and lordship return in and as one anothers figures, and at
moments of resistant or unguarded expression, moments which both constitute a
kind of devolution of their originary animus, like the I answered I didnt know that
marks the negative assertion of the trace of the knowledge of freedom. The
question, of course, of the origin of that trace is vexed and, perhaps, impossible.
Embedded in that question, however, is a possible improvisation of the very idea of
the lord in its relation/opposition to the bondsman. That improvisation, emerging at
the site of another question concerning the language of improvisatory resistances
origin, in which the knowledge of freedom is expressed, is one to which well return
by way of the theorization of Ellen Butler, a theorization which anticipates the
improvisation of another consciousness, moving outfrom-the-outside, that the
oppositions of lord and bondsman, Lord and bondsman, curse and prayer allow us
only to imagine.
Rowell
Challenge static structures of language and meaning
Rowell 2004 (Charles H., Ohio State University PhD in English literary studies,
Texas A&M professor of English, interviewing Fred Moden, UC Riverside Department
of English professor, Words Dont Go There: An Interview with Fred Moten,
Callaloo, Vol. 27, No. 4, Fall 2004, p. 962-963, ProjectMUSE, IC)
MOTEN: Although there are a whole set of very complicated, well-developed and
well-defined protocols within which music is created and received, music is not
constrained by the requirement to mean in the way that language is so constrained.
It is in this sense, according to Louis Zukofsky, Baraka, Harryette Mullen and a whole
bunch of others, that music becomes a limit that poets attempt to approach. But
even though music is not constrained by meaning, no one would ever say that
music doesnt bear content or that music doesnt have something to say. So Im
trying to write poems that are situated in relation to this question: how is it that a
work can bear content, have something to say, while not being wholly bound to the
constraints and the requirements of making meaning? At the same time, I never
want totally to refuse either the requirement or opportunity that is given in poetry
to produce meaning. I want to write poems that recognizably inhabit, but in some
kind of underground or fugitive way, the space between the laws of music and the
laws of meaning. I want to challenge the law that language lays down while taking
advantage of the opportunity that language affords. Of course, with regard both to
language and to music, the African Diaspora is a global experimental field in which
the laws of valuation, phonic organization and graphic (re) production are constantly
placed under the severe pressure of questioning and creativity. In Evrytime We
Say Goodbye, Cole Porter writes: Theres no love song finer / but how strange, the
change, / from major to minor; but what Betty Carter does both to these words and
to that change takes Porters composition out into the very economy, the very
discovery, of the secret (of loss and of love) that he wished to transmit. She moves
against the laws he broke and made, and I want to move on her line (which is also
Barakas line and Mullens line, but also, by way of different protocols, different
versions of the secret, Porters line and, in a whole other way, on wholly other
terrain, Zukofskys line as well).
Fugitivity aesthetics
Rowell 2004 (Charles H., Ohio State University PhD in English literary studies,
Texas A&M professor of English, interviewing Fred Moden, UC Riverside Department
of English professor, Words Dont Go There: An Interview with Fred Moten,
Callaloo, Vol. 27, No. 4, Fall 2004, p. 963-964, ProjectMUSE, IC)
MOTEN: In Nathaniel Mackeys great essay Cante Moro, he discussesby way of
Federico Garcia Lorcas elaboration of the term duende as well as some amazing
stuff Baraka has to say about how saxophonist John Tchicais tone and phrasing
slide away from the proposeda particular quality of sound that implies and
encodes movement, restlessness, a kind of fugal and centrifugal desire and
execution that he calls fugitivity. This sound is indicative of something that one is
possessed by; it indicates, finally, life; that, as Foucault says, life constantly
escapes; it steals away. Art works this way, too, I think; this sliding away from the
proposed, this placement of the truth or of the secret in that space of tension or
movement that is characterized by obscurity and indirection is what [Theodor]
Adorno calls arts immigrant law of motion. That law is given, and as its breaking,
in a sound, in the dispossessive tension between music and meaning that Harryette
Mullen talks about under the rubric of the runaway tongue. This is the sound of
the resistance to slavery; the critique of (private) property and of the proper, and it
is, in the radical transformationality of all of its reproduction and recording, its
commodified dissemination and circulation, irreducible and ongoing. That sound
infuses Taylors art and thats what I was trying to get at in the passage you quote.
Hes operating on a plane (and in a plain) of desire in which freedom and justice,
each in its own complicated relation to law, are envisioned as unopposed to one
another. Thats our tradition. It is fugitive, even criminal, but not lawless. It is, as
musician and musicologist Salim Washington says, a tradition of freedom but not of
license. Its not but nothing other than the tradition within which Holcomb exerts his
untamed sense of control. I cant help thinking of a vast set of ranges and styles
of fugitivity: Mondrianss and Shakespeares (and now Im back to the question that
precedes the one Im supposed to be answering) and Rakims and Arethas. But,
see, this is the trouble with talking about transitions and the qualities that inform
them: you just start babbling and dropping names. In the end, thats probably all my
writing isdropping names and droppin things, like Betty Carter.

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Fugitivity Affirmativebeffjr

Bye, bye, bye, bye

With her performance as a black women and her reference to

Thus affirm the 1ac as a performance to counter-gaze the

Freedom isnt fiat; it is elusive, momentary, and a state of

Monaes sound takes advantages of social movements and

Monae has developed, within a relatively short period of time, a

This space allows black women to not only deconstruct the

the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a way to respond to rape,

This deconstruction allows us to question history as it affects

imagination therefore creates an alternative reality that is recognizably

Mullen constructs lyric otherwiseas an experiment in collective reading and an

The knowledge here is specifically key. It allows experimental

listening, understanding, and then recreating their qualities in ways

The detailed cataloguing of slave life was a mechanism of disciplinary power,

This security system, then, relied on the "racially defined contours of

subject can be seen in the circulation of newspaper advertisements and wanted

Later such classifications as a form of population management were made official

Slaves were not, however, passive objects implicated within

In Nansemond County, Virginia, a slave known as Uncle

not the asymmetrical tensions and reemergent subjectivities of a gaze; descent,

Vote affirmative to recognize the fugitive politics of Uncle

The narrative of Uncle Toliver is always already in the process

Vote affirmative to steal from the academy. Moten and

Nina Simones powerful articulation of freedom first rang out

We begin our discussion of domestic surveillance in the same

Our performance is an act of poetics from a legacy gone

Fugitivity and freedom exists in our use of language and its

an experiment in collective reading and an assertion of the complexities of

The problem of surveillance is bigger than the anecdote Killer

a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze". Such politicized and oppositional looking

Our performance is an act of poetics from a legacy gone

(Gender 59) According to Mullen, for Equiano retrospectively this disruption of

1acDark Twisted Pedagogy

the system broken, the school's closed, the prison's open

Our performance is an act of poetics from a legacy gone

equitable ecology, one of acknowledgment and memory, conservation and reuse;

notes that in Equianos own discursive production: the displaced African is no

encyclopediathe discourse and its attendant pedagogiesthrough her

If youre thinking lol Kanye West as fugitive poetics? then

As an educator you should affirm a space away from

around classroom content. To be clear, I am not advocating co-opting youth

No one man should have all that power: The

When NWA stepped forward in 1988 to challenge the police

the history of surveillance in America can be traced

The detailed cataloguing of slave life was a

the wanted notice for fugitive

NWA is uniquely positioned as a site to criticize the

Fuck Tha Police continues this critique{s} of law enforcement

but raises the ante by centralizing police officers

While such language is obviously alarming, we should also

which capitalized on public fears of the fearsome black male predator

These performances...are intended at a deep level as

her attention to reading, an attention that is rooted in the intersection between

Vote aff in favor of embracing radical forms of public

The use of popular culture and rap in educational spaces is

revealing how this injustice has caused problems in the lives of

and cultural studies approaches offer understandings of how

youth a sense that they are controlling their own representation,

developing better understandings of how young people draw from

Black Privilege is the applause at the end of this poem

Valentine began by defining Black Privilege as the memory

American surveillance grew from slaverythe original lists of