1NC Round 3 vs Zong Aff

Topicality-need a plan
The affirmative should defend a topical plan.
A. Explore means to travel in or through an area for the purpose of
learning about it
Oxford 14 (Oxford Dictionaries 2014
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/explore)
explore Syllabification: explore Pronunciation: /iksplr verb [with object] 1Travel in or
through (an unfamiliar country or area) in order to learn about or familiarize
oneself with it: the best way to explore Icelands northwest figurative the project
encourages children to explore the world of photography More example
sentencesSynonyms 1.1 [no object] (explore for) Search for resources such as mineral
deposits: the company explored for oil More example sentences 1.2Inquire into or
discuss (a subject or issue) in detail: he sets out to explore fundamental questions More
example sentences 1.3Examine or evaluate (an option or possibility): you continue to
explore new ways to generate income

Ocean is the single continuous body of salt water

Science Dictionary 2 The American Heritage Science Dictionary Copyright
2002. Published by Houghton Mifflin. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ocean
ocean ('shn) Pronunciation Key The continuous body of salt water that covers 72
percent of the Earth's surface. The average salinity of ocean water is approximately three
percent. The deepest known area of the ocean, at 11,034 m (36,192 ft) is the Mariana Trench ,
located in the western Pacific Ocean. Any of the principal divisions of this body of water, including
the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, and Arctic Oceans. Our Living Language : The word ocean refers to
one of the Earth's four distinct, large areas of salt water, the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, and Arctic
Oceans. The word can also mean the entire network of water that covers almost

three quarters of our planet. It comes from the Greek Okeanos, a river believed to
circle the globe. The word sea can also mean the vast ocean covering most of the world. But it
more commonly refers to large landlocked or almost landlocked salty waters smaller than the
great oceans, such as the Mediterranean Sea or the Bering Sea. Sailors have long referred to all
the world's waters as the seven seas. Although the origin of this phrase is not known for certain,
many people believe it referred to the Red Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, the Persian Gulf, the
Black Sea, the Adriatic Sea, the Caspian Sea, and the Indian Ocean, which were the waters of
primary interest to Europeans before Columbus.

B. Violation the affirmatives historical re-presentation of the Zong

is physically removed from the single continuous body of salt water
and is not exploration of the ocean
A stasis point is key to debate we offer the only one rooted in the
resolution.

Shively, Assistant Prof Political Science at Texas A&M, 2K [Ruth Lessl, Assistant
Prof Political Science at Texas A&M, 2000 Partisan Politics and Political Theory, p.
182-3)

The point may seem trite, as surely the ambiguists would agree that basic terms must
be shared before they can be resisted and problematized. In fact, they are often very
candid about this seeming paradox in their approach: the paradoxical or "parasitic" need
of the subversive for an order to subvert. But admitting the paradox is not helpful if, as
usually happens here, its implications are ignored; or if the only implication drawn is that
order or harmony is an unhappy fixture of human life. For what the paradox should tell
us is that some kinds of harmonies or orders are, in fact, good for resistance; and some
ought to be fully supported. As such, it should counsel against the kind of careless
rhetoric that lumps all orders or harmonies together as arbitrary and inhumane. Clearly
some basic accord about the terms of contest is a necessary ground for all further
contest. It may be that if the ambiguists wish to remain full-fledged ambiguists, they
cannot admit to these implications, for to open the door to some agreements or reasons
as good and some orders as helpful or necessary, is to open the door to some sort of
rationalism. Perhaps they might just continue to insist that this initial condition is ironic,
but that the irony should not stand in the way of the real business of subversion. Yet
difficulties remain. For and then proceed to debate without attention to further
agreements. For debate and contest are forms of dialogue: that is, they are activities
premised on the building of progressive agreements. Imagine, for instance, that two
people are having an argument about the issue of gun control. As noted earlier, in any
argument, certain initial agreements will be needed just to begin the discussion. At
the very least, the two discussants must agree on basic terms: for example, they
must have some shared sense of what gun control is about; what is at issue in arguing
about it; what facts are being contested, and so on. They must also agreeand they do
so simply by entering into debatethat they will not use violence or threats in making
their cases and that they are willing to listen to, and to be persuaded by, good
arguments. Such agreements are simply implicit in the act of argumentation.

The impact is decision-making skills - focused deliberation is key to

informed opponents that are adequately prepared to debate.
Steinberg, University of Miami, and Freeley, John Caroll University, 8

[Austin L. and David L., 2/13/2008, Argumentation and Debate: Critical

Thinking for Reasoned Decision Making, 12th edition,
http://teddykw2.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/argumentation-anddebate.pdf, p. 43-44]

Debate is a means of settling differences, so there must be a difference of

opinion or a conflict of interest before there can be a debate. If everyone is in
agreement on a fact or value or policy, there is no need for debate; the matter can be
settled by unanimous consent. Thus, for example, it would be pointless to attempt to
debate Resolved: That two plus two equals four, because there is simply no
controversy about this statement. Controversy is an essential prerequisite of debate.
Where there is no clash of ideas, proposals, interests, or expressed positions on
issues, there is no debate. In addition, debate cannot produce effective decisions
without clear identification of a question or questions to be answered. For
example, general argument may occur about the broad topic of illegal immigration. How
many illegal immigrants are in the United States? What is the impact of illegal
immigration and immigrants on our economy? What is their impact on our
communities? Do they commit crimes? Do they take jobs from American workers? Do
they pay taxes? Do they require social services? Is it a problem that some do not speak
English? Is it the responsibility of employers to discourage illegal immigration by not
hiring undocumented workers? Should they have the opportunity to gain citizenship?
Does illegal immigration pose a security threat to our country? Do illegal immigrants do
work that American workers are unwilling to do? Are their rights as workers and as
human beings at risk due to their status? Are they abused by employers, law
enforcement, housing, and businesses? How are their families impacted by their
status? What is the moral and philosophical obligation of a nation state to maintain its
borders? Should we build a wall on the Mexican border, establish a national
identification card, or enforce existing laws against employers? Should we invite
immigrants to become U.S. citizens? Surely you can think of many more concerns to
be addressed by a conversation about the topic area of illegal immigration.
Participation in this debate is likely to be emotional and intense. However, it is not
likely to be productive or useful without focus on a particular question and
identification of a line demarcating sides in the controversy. To be discussed and
resolved effectively, controversies must be stated clearly. Vague understanding
results in unfocused deliberation and poor decisions, frustration, and emotional
distress, as evidenced by the failure of the United States Congress to make
progress on the immigration debate during the summer of 2007.Someone disturbed
by the problem of a growing underclass of poorly educated, socially disenfranchised
youths might observe, Public schools are doing a terrible job! They are overcrowded,
and many teachers are poorly qualified in their subject areas. Even the best teachers
can do little more than struggle to maintain order in their classrooms. That same
concerned citizen, facing a complex range of issues, might arrive at an unhelpful
decision, such as We ought to do something about this or, worse, Its too complicated
a problem to deal with. Groups of concerned citizens worried about the state of
public education could join together to express their frustrations, anger,
disillusionment, and emotions regarding the schools, but without a focus for
their discussions, they could easily agree about the sorry state of education
without finding points of clarity or potential solutions. A gripe session would follow.
But if a precise question is posedsuch as What can be done to improve public
education?then a more profitable area of discussion is opened up simply by placing a
focus on the search for a concrete solution step. One or more judgments can be
phrased in the form of debate propositions, motions for parliamentary debate, or bills for

legislative assemblies. The statements Resolved: That the federal government should
implement a program of charter schools in at-risk communities and Resolved: That the
state of Florida should adopt a school voucher program more clearly identify specific
ways of dealing with educational problems in a manageable form, suitable for debate.
They provide specific policies to be investigated and aid discussants in identifying points
of difference.

Critiques get bogged down in theoretical jargon that distract from

efforts for true political change we must engage in the rhetoric of
policymaking.
McClean Rutgers Philosophy Professor 1
[David E., Annual Conference of the Society for the Advancement of American
Philosophy, The Cultural Left and the Limits of Social Hope, http://www.americanphilosophy.org/archives/past_conference_programs/pc2001/Discussion%20papers/davi
d_mcclean.htm]

Yet for some reason, at least partially explicated in Richard Rorty's Achieving Our
Country, a book that I think is long overdue, leftist critics continue to cite and refer to
the eccentric and often a priori ruminations of people like those just mentioned, and
a litany of others including Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Jameson, and Lacan, who are to
me hugely more irrelevant than Habermas in their narrative attempts to suggest
policy prescriptions (when they actually do suggest them) aimed at curing the ills
of homelessness, poverty, market greed, national belligerence and racism. I would
like to suggest that it is time for American social critics who are enamored with this
group, those who actually want to be relevant, to recognize that they have a
disease, and a disease regarding which I myself must remember to stay faithful to my
own twelve step program of recovery. The disease is the need for elaborate
theoretical "remedies" wrapped in neological and multi-syllabic jargon. These
elaborate theoretical remedies are more "interesting," to be sure, than the
pragmatically settled questions about what shape democracy should take in
various contexts, or whether private property should be protected by the state, or
regarding our basic human nature (described, if not defined (heaven forbid!), in such
statements as "We don't like to starve" and "We like to speak our minds without fear of
death" and "We like to keep our children safe from poverty"). As Rorty puts it, "When
one of today's academic leftists says that some topic has been 'inadequately
theorized,' you can be pretty certain that he or she is going to drag in either
philosophy of language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist
version of economic determinism. . . . These futile attempts to philosophize one's
way into political relevance are a symptom of what happens when a Left retreats
from activism and adopts a spectatorial approach to the problems of its country.
Disengagement from practice produces theoretical hallucinations"(italics mine).(1) Or as
John Dewey put it in his The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy, "I believe that

philosophy in America will be lost between chewing a historical cud long since reduced
to woody fiber, or an apologetics for lost causes, . . . . or a scholastic, schematic
formalism, unless it can somehow bring to consciousness America's own needs and its
own implicit principle of successful action."
Those who suffer or have suffered from this disease Rorty refers to as the Cultural
Left, which left is juxtaposed to the Political Left that Rorty prefers and prefers for
good reason. Another attribute of the Cultural Left is that its members fancy themselves
pure culture critics who view the successes of America and the West, rather than some
of the barbarous methods for achieving those successes, as mostly evil, and who view
anything like national pride as equally evil even when that pride is tempered with the
knowledge and admission of the nation's shortcomings. In other words, the Cultural
Left, in this country, too often dismiss American society as beyond reform and
redemption. And Rorty correctly argues that this is a disastrous conclusion, i.e.
disastrous for the Cultural Left. I think it may also be disastrous for our social hopes,
as I will explain.
Leftist American culture critics might put their considerable talents to better use
if they bury some of their cynicism about America's social and political prospects and
help forge public and political possibilities in a spirit of determination to, indeed,
achieve our country - the country of Jefferson and King; the country of John Dewey and
Malcom X; the country of Franklin Roosevelt and Bayard Rustin, and of the later George
Wallace and the later Barry Goldwater. To invoke the words of King, and with reference
to the American society, the time is always ripe to seize the opportunity to help create
the "beloved community," one woven with the thread of agape into a conceptually single
yet diverse tapestry that shoots for nothing less than a true intra-American cosmopolitan
ethos, one wherein both same sex unions and faith-based initiatives will be able to be
part of the same social reality, one wherein business interests and the university are not
seen as belonging to two separate galaxies but as part of the same answer to the threat
of social and ethical nihilism. We who fancy ourselves philosophers would do well to
create from within ourselves and from within our ranks a new kind of public
intellectual who has both a hungry theoretical mind and who is yet capable of
seeing the need to move past high theory to other important questions that are
less bedazzling and "interesting" but more important to the prospect of our
flourishing - questions such as "How is it possible to develop a citizenry that cherishes
a certain hexis, one which prizes the character of the Samaritan on the road to Jericho
almost more than any other?" or "How can we square the political dogma that undergirds
the fantasy of a missile defense system with the need to treat America as but one
member in a community of nations under a "law of peoples?"
The new public philosopher might seek to understand labor law and military and trade
theory and doctrine as much as theories of surplus value; the logic of international
markets and trade agreements as much as critiques of commodification, and the politics
of complexity as much as the politics of power (all of which can still be done from our
arm chairs.) This means going down deep into the guts of our quotidian social
institutions, into the grimy pragmatic details where intellectuals are loathe to
dwell but where the officers and bureaucrats of those institutions take difficult
and often unpleasant, imperfect decisions that affect other peoples' lives, and it

means making honest attempts to truly understand how those institutions actually
function in the actual world before howling for their overthrow commences. This
might help keep us from being slapped down in debates by true policy pros who
actually know what they are talking about but who lack awareness of the dogmatic
assumptions from which they proceed, and who have not yet found a good reason to
listen to jargon-riddled lectures from philosophers and culture critics with their snobish
disrespect for the so-called "managerial class."

Simulating government discourses allows students to synthesize

theory and fact creating useful real-world knowledge.
Esberg and Sagan, special assistant to the director at New York University's and
Professor at Stanford, Center 12
(Jane Esberg is special assistant to the director at New York University's Center on.
International Cooperation. She was the winner of 2009 Firestone Medal, AND Scott
Sagan is a professor of political science and director of Stanford's Center for
International Security and Cooperation NEGOTIATING NONPROLIFERATION:
Scholarship, Pedagogy, and Nuclear Weapons Policy, The Nonproliferation Review,
19:1, 95-108 accessed 5-7-13,

These government or quasi-government think tank simulations often provide very

similar lessons for high-level players as are learned by students in educational
simulations. Government participants learn about the importance of
understanding foreign perspectives, the need to practice internal coordination, and
the necessity to compromise and coordinate with other governments in
negotiations and crises. During the Cold War, political scientist Robert Mandel noted
how crisis exercises and war games forced government officials to overcome
bureaucratic myopia, moving beyond their normal organizational roles and
thinking more creatively about how others might react in a crisis or conflict.6 The
skills of imagination and the subsequent ability to predict foreign interests and
reactions remain critical for real-world foreign policy makers. For example,
simulations of the Iranian nuclear crisisheld in 2009 and 2010 at the Brookings
Institution's Saban Center and at Harvard University's Belfer Center, and involving
former US senior officials and regional expertshighlighted the dangers of
misunderstanding foreign governments preferences and misinterpreting their
subsequent behavior. In both simulations, the primary criticism of the US negotiating
team lay in a failure to predict accurately how other states, both allies and adversaries,
would behave in response to US policy initiatives.7
By university age, students often have a pre-defined view of international affairs,
and the literature on simulations in education has long emphasized how such
exercises force students to challenge their assumptions about how other
governments behave and how their own government works.8 Since simulations became

more common as a teaching tool in the late 1950s, educational literature has expounded
on their benefits, from encouraging engagement by breaking from the typical lecture
format, to improving communication skills, to promoting teamwork.9 More broadly,
simulations can deepen understanding by asking students to link fact and theory,
providing a context for facts while bringing theory into the realm of practice.10
These exercises are particularly valuable in teaching international affairs for many of
the same reasons they are useful for policy makers: they force participants to
grapple with the issues arising from a world in flux.11 Simulations have been
used successfully to teach students about such disparate topics as European
politics, the Kashmir crisis, and US response to the mass killings in Darfur.12
Role-playing exercises certainly encourage students to learn political and technical
factsbut they learn them in a more active style. Rather than sitting in a classroom and
merely receiving knowledge, students actively research their government's positions
and actively argue, brief, and negotiate with others.13 Facts can change quickly;
simulations teach students how to contextualize and act on information.

Animals K
The Aff is simply a pause of violence papers over the ongoing war on the
non-human animal the end of the world they call for merely brings forth
the same plane where every human subject can kill or be killed within the
circuit of anthropocentrism. The Aff ignores the fundamental reversibility
of all violence.
Bell (PhD candidate in social philosophy at Binghamton) 11
(Aaron, The Dialectic of Anthropocentrism in Critical Theory and Animal Liberation, pg. 173-5)
Freud noted in his well-known comments on what he termed "human megalomania"
that "curiously enough . . . [anthropocentric violence] is still 42foreign to children."
Despite our wretchedness and failings, in a "wrong life" that can
never be lived rightly, there is the hope that we can do better. The

bad facticity of our distorted and distorting relationship to other

animals and the rest of life is exposed as such by every generation
of children who must be broken and indoctrinated, whose innocence
must be sacrificed in order to continue in the logic of sacrifice. In the final aphorism of
Minima Moralia, Adorno holds that "perspectives must be fashioned that

displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and
crevices, as indigent and distorted 43as it will appear one day in the
messianic light." It seems that our one conso- lation is that this perspective, at least in
relation to our treatment of other animals, obstinately returns and cannot be entirely
snuffed out for as long as we continue to exist as a species.
If we are finally to abandon the self-aggrandizing narrative of anthropocentrism
constructed in the West, we will have to begin by reconceptualizing the difference
between humans and animals in a way that does not operate under a destructive
exclusionary logic. Both for human beings and for animals, any

cessation of violence under the current logic is only a momentary

deferment, an armistice but never a peace. Even moments of
apparent tenderness and compassion become grotesque
symptoms of a corrupted order so long as this way of life is
permitted to stand. As Horkheimer and Adorno observe in Dia- lectic of
Enlightenment, "the fascists' pious love of animals, nature, and children is the lust of the
hunter. The idle stroking of children's hair and animal pelts signifies: this hand can
destroy. It tenderly fondles one victim before fell- ing the other, and its choice has
nothing to do with the victims guilt. The caress intimates that all are the same before
power." The Nazi officers arbitrary choice of who would survive (for another day) and
who would be killed demonstrates the same terrible eitelkeit of Hegel's radical evil
individual, who reduces every decision to a choice of "this or that? The arbitrary

nature of the decision is an exercise of power in its rawest form,

and an uncanny reminder of our contemporary violence towards
animals. For the same perverse arbitrariness at the core of the SS
officers decision holds sway in a society which dooms millions of
animals to unimaginable suffering while pampering millions of
others as "pets."
Such interludes of apparent nonviolence are merely pauses between
atrocities: as Levinas puts it, "the peace of empires issued from war rests on war.
[Peace] does not restore to the alienated beings their lost identity." War on the other,
radicalized in the form of fascism, shows that "not only modern war but every war

employs arms that turn against those who wield them. It establishes an order from
which no one can keep his distance." There is no safe ground for the "authentically"
human individualbecause there can be no authentic anthropocentrism, just as Adorno
and Horkheimer claim that "there is no authentic anti-semitism." They write: "Just as . . .
the victims are interchangeable: vagrants, Jews, Protestants, Catholics . . .

each of them can replace the murderer, in the same blind lust for
killing, as soon as he feels the power of representing thenorm."
The Jew in Auschwitz, the Palestinian in the West Bank, the
Christian in Armenia, the enslaved African in the American South,
women everywhere they all have been reduced to the status of
animal and they all could do the same to others. We all can be reduced to
the "animal."

The Aff obscures the way the originary Human/Animal divide made civil
society, chattel slavery and coloniality possible
Pugliese (an Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney) 13
(Joseph, State Violence and the Execution of Law, pg. 38-40)
In her The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery, Marjorie Spiegel asks the
provocative question: Comparing speciesism with racism? At first glance, many

people might feel that it is insulting to compare the suffering of

non-human animals to that of the human. In fact, in our [Western]
society, comparison to an animal has come to be a slur.17 In her
Foreword to Spiegels book, Alice Walker notes that: It is a comparison that,
even for those of us who recognize its validity, is a difficult one to face.
Especially if we are the descendants of slaves. Or of slave owners.
Or of both. Especially so if we are also responsible in some way for
the present treatment of animals.18 Spiegel proceeds to stage a largely
descriptive yet important articulation of the dreaded comparison by evidencing how
the domination of animals . . . was in many cases used as a prototype for the
subjugation of blacks.19 She unfolds a history of the manner in which Western
societies, from the sixteenth century onwards, developed systems of human

slavery that closely paralleled humans treatment of animals,

including the use of shackles, auction, branding, stalls and pens,
and so on. As I remarked above, the issue of slavery, as constitutive in the
development of biopolitical formations founded on racism, is almost entirely absent from
Foucaults genealogical account. Yet, in his arguing that the pressure exerted by the
biological on the historical had remained very strong for thousands of years, Foucault
presents an alternative point of departure for the critical study and elaboration of his
concept of biopolitics. In pursuing this anachronic perspective on biopolitics I am, in
effect, attempting to flesh out an occluded aspect of the historical conditions of the
emergence of biopolitics. Derrida identifies in Aristotles Politics the articulation of a
zoo-politics that effec- tively opens the debate on biopolitics;20 Roberto Esposito
gestures to this pre- history of biopolitics when he posits the question of the relation of
modernity with its pre, but also that of the relation with its post. 21
As a fundamentally colonial formation of power, premised on the pivotal role of racism
in governing subject peoples and assigning them positions on racialized hierarchies of
life that spanned the right to genocidal extermination (of Indigenous peoples) and of
enslavement (of black Africans), biopolitics is informed by a parallel

history of speciesism that extends back to the very establishment

of human civil and political society as premised on animal

enslavement (domestication). Derrida traces the contours of this founding relation:
The socialization of human culture goes hand in hand with . . . the
domestica- tion of the tamed beast: it is nothing other than the
becoming-livestock [devenir- btail] of the beast. The appropriation, breaking-in,
and domestication of tamed livestock (das zahme Vieh) are human socialization . . .

There is therefore neither socialization, political constitution, nor

politics itself without the prin- ciple of domestication of the wild
animal . . . Politics supposes livestock.22
The violence that this terse supposition enables politics supposes livestock is what I
will discuss in some detail in my discussion of those detainees inscribed within the
biopolitical trajectories of extraordinary rendition (Chapter 4). Politics supposes

livestock precisely as it also supposes the enslavement of animals

and the constitution of a biopolitical hierarchy: for the ox, writes
Aristotle, is the poor mans slave; and in Aristotles zoo-politics, the enslaved
animal comes last in an ascending sequence that includes wife, house and, at the apex,
man.23 The polit- ical ramifications of this historical enslavement of animals can be
further elabo- rated: Not only did the domestication of animals provide the

model and inspiration for human slavery and tyrannical government,

Charles Patterson writes, but it laid the groundwork for western
hierarchical thinking and European and American racial theories that
called for conquest and exploitation of lower races, while at the same
time vilifying them as animals so as to encourage and justify their
subjugation.24 Jim Mason amplifies Pattersons thesis, arguing, in his interlinking
of the enslavement of animals with larger colonial formations of power, that the
establishment of agri-culture operated as a license for conquest.25
The Latin etymology of the terms colony and colonial colonia evidences the
modalities of power over life that intertwine the concept of a farm and a public
settlement of Roman citizens in a hostile or newly conquered country.26 In the
prehistory of biopolitical power, the expropriated space of a conquered country is
inscribed with the genocidal extermination of the useless wild animals and the
enslavement of those that can be put to human use; in other words, there is precisely
what Foucault terms the biopolitical power to foster life or disallow it to the point of
death.27 This colonial move, then, is informed by a biopolitics of

speciesism that determines who will live and who will die according
to an anthro- pocentric hierarchy of life and its attendant values of, amongst
other things, economic productivity. The non-human animal is, in this prehistorical
moment, marked by an ineluctable fungibility that pre-dates the transference of this
same attribute to the human slave.
In figuring forth her compelling thesis that it is fungibility that characterizes the life and
death of the black slave, Saidya Hartman delineates its complex dimensions:
The relation between pleasure and the possession of slave property, in both figurative
and literal senses, can be explained in part by the fungibility of the slave that is, the
joy made possible by virtue of the replaceability in inter- changeability endemic to the
commodity and by the extensive capacities of property that is, the augmentation of
the master subject through his embod- iment in external objects and persons.28
In the colonial prehistory of biopolitics, non-human animals are branded as either
vermin to be exterminated so that, in Foucaults titular phrase, society can be
defended or, alternatively, as fungible objects that are infinitely replaceable and
exchangeable. The anthropocentrism of the master subject augments the sense of

embodied ownership over the enslaved animal while legitimating their right over its
life/death. The archaic development of colonial regimes of governance over the life of
animals pivots on a series of biopolitical technologies that include capture, enclosure,
harness, enforced labour, controlled breeding, castration, branding and auctioning at
markets. All of these animal technologies are invested, in their ancient inception,29 with
the biopolitical power of regularization, and it . . . consists in making live and letting
die.30 Moreover, all of these animal tech- nologies will effectively be transposed to
regimes of human slavery: the manage- ment of livestock, Mason notes, operated as
a model for the management of slaves.31 Biopolitical technologies of animal

enslavement were effectively drawn upon in the development of

modern slave plantations, with programs of captive breeding/rape
of black women by either the master or his overseers, confined
spaces for quartering, controlled food rations, auctioning at
markets and the use of a range of disciplinary technologies the
whip, the branding iron, shackles and the coffle, that train of slaves
or beasts driven along together;32 the use of the conjunction or testifies to a
sedimented history that binds animals to slaves. Europes prehistorical animalslave practices are what will be later exported out to the colonies in
the establishment of human slave plantations. If, as Cary Wolfe contends,
the practices of modern biopolitics forged themselves in the common subjection and
management of the factical existence of both humans and animals not in the least,
in the practices and disciplines of breeding, eugenics, and high-efficiency killing33
then the co-articulation between the animal farm and the slave plantation offers another
historical dimension of the biopolitical formation of power.

Reject the affirmatives speciesism Only an absolute refusal to move the

lines of violence can prevent the extinction
Pugliese (an Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney) 13
(Joseph, State Violence and the Execution of Law, pg. 95-7)

In the pumpkin patch, the hooded detainees are compelled to embody

the strange hybrid of vegetable-animal life. They fulfill, in a grotesque fashion,
Martin Heideggers euro-anthropocentric vision of the hierarchy of entities that inhabit
the world: man is not merely a part of the world but is also master and servant of the
world in the sense of having world. Man has world. The hierarchy of life, after this
imperial ground-clearing opening statement, follows: [1] the stone (material object) is
worldless; [2] the animal is poor in the world; [3] man is world-forming.20 In the context
of Guantnamos pumpkin patch, the masters of the world govern their militarized
domain and all its entities according to the biopolitical hierarchy of life. As masters of
the world, they are indeed world-forming, as they shape and constitute the lives, deaths
and realities of their subjugated subjects. In the pumpkin patch, the detainee, that
strange hybrid that has been reduced to animal-vegetable, is both worldless (in the
absolute denial through shackling, hooding, manacling and goggling of his worldforming sensorium) and, once dispatched to his cage, entirely poor in the world, as he
is stripped naked and denied the most rudimentary of things essential to a liveable
existence. Critically, the solution to this regime of violence is not to shuffle

the categories of life up or down the biopolitical hierarchy as this merely

reproduces the system while leaving intact the governing power of the
biopolitical cut and its attendant violent effects. Reflecting on the possibility of
disrupting this biopolitical regime and its hierarchies of life, Agamben writes: in our
culture man has always been the result of a simultaneous division and articulation of

the animal and the human, in which one of the two terms of the operation was what was
at stake in it. To render inoperative the machine that governs our

conception of man will therefore mean no longer to seek new more

effective or authentic articulations, but rather to show the central
emptiness, the hiatus that within man separates man and animal, and
to risk ourselves in this emptiness: the suspension of the suspension.21 Precisely
because everything is always already at stake in the continued mobiliza- tion of
biopolitical caesurae, the seeking of new articulations of life that will be

valorized as more authentic will merely reproduce the machine without

having eliminated its capacity for violence as ensured by the rearticulation of the biopo- litical cut. Looking back at the biopolitical infrastructure
of the Nazi state, one can clearly see the imbrication of ecology, the regime of animal
rights, and the racio- speciesist branding of Jews as collectively exemplifying the
dangers of seeking more authentic articulations of animals and humans that are
predicated on the biopolitical division and its capacity for inversions and recalibrations
while leaving the violent order of the biopolitical regime intact. The Nazis effectively
called for a more authentic relation to nature (blood and soil) that was buttressed by
animal rights (Reich Animal Protection laws) and the rights of nature (Reich Law on the
Protection of Nature).22 Animals and nature were thereby recalibrated up the speciesist
scale at the expense of Jews. Deploying the violence of racio- speciesism, the Nazis
animalized Jews as rats, vermin and other low life forms, situated them at the bottom
of the biopolitical hierarchy, and then proceeded to enact the very cruelty and
exterminatory violence (cattle car transport, herding in camps replicating stockyards
and the industrialized killing procedures of animal slaughterhouses) that they had
outlawed against animals. The Nazi state also exemplifies the manner in which the
regime of (animal) rights can be perfectly accommodated within the most genocidal
forms of state violence. This is so, precisely because the prior concept of human rights
is always-already founded on the human/animal biopolitical caesura and its asymmetry
of power otherwise the very categories of human and animal rights would fail to
achieve cultural intelligibility. The paternal distribution of rights to non-human animals
still pivots on this asymmetrical a priori. Even as it extends its seemingly benevolent
regime of rights and protections to animals, rights discourse, by disavowing this violent
a priori, merely reproduces the species war by other means. In order to short-circuit
this machine, a deconstructive move is needed, a move that refuses to
participate in the mere overturning of the binarized hierarchy, for example: animal >
human, and that effectively displaces the hierarchy by disclosing the conceptual aporias
that drive it. The challenge is to proceed to inhabit the hiatus, to run the risk

of living the emptiness of an atopical locus that is neither animal nor

human. This non-foundational locus is the space that Agamben
designates as the open, marked by the reciprocal suspension of the
two terms [human/animal], something for which we perhaps have no
name and which is neither animal nor [hu]man [and that] settles in
between nature and humanity. Critically, the reciprocal suspension articulates
the play between the two terms, their immediate constellation in a non-coincidence.23
In naming their constellation in a non-coincidence, Agamben enunciates the possibility
of a Levinasian ethics that refuses the anthropocentric assimilation of the
Other/animal/nature into the imperialism of the Same/human. The urgent necessity of
instigating the move to render inoperative this anthropocentric regime is not incidental
to the violent biopolitical operations of the state. On the contrary, state violence is virulently animated by the logic of the biopolitical caesura and its anthropological machine
which produce[s] the human through the suspension and capture of the inhuman.24

The anthropocentrism that drives this biopolitical regime ensures that

whatever is designated as non-human-animal life continues to be

branded not only as expendable and as legitimately enslaveable but as
the quintessential unsavable figure of life.25 The aporetic force that drives this
regime is exposed with perverse irony in one of the entries of the al-Qahtani
interrogation log, which documents an interrogator reading to the detainee in the course
of his torture session two quotes from the book What Makes a Terrorist and Why?: The
second quote pointed out that the terrorist must dehumanize their victims and avoid
thinking in terms of guilt or innocence. In the context of the post-9/11 US

gulags, this biopolitical regime of state terror is what guarantees the

production of captive life that can be tortured with impunity and that,
moreover, enables its categoriza- tion as unsavable. Once captive life is
thus designated, it can be liquidated without compunction without having
to think in terms of guilt or innocence.

Mourning K
Mourning is a paradox - The 1ACs call to endless re-presentation of
the Zongs events further entrenches the destructive violence they
isolate through a kind of psychic plagiarism that seeks to assimilate
the other into the narcissistic self
Kirkby, 06 (Joan, Department of Critical and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University,
Remembrance of the Future: Derrida on Mourning, Social Semiotics Vol. 16, No. 3,
September 2006, http://web.a.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=df402c4770d2-4356-80fc-d0a1d8f6c5dd%40sessionmgr4002&vid=2&hid=4206, AW)
Derrida also recalls de Mans insistence on the performative structure of the text in
general as promise (1986, 93), and goes on to argue that the essence of speech is
the promise, that there is no speaking that does not promise, which at the same time
means a commitment toward the future through . . . a speech act and a commitment to
keep the memory of the said act, to keep the acts of this act (1986, 97). He also reflects
upon the significance of the word aporia in de Mans last texts, in which an absence of
path gives or promises the thinking of the path and provokes the thinking of
what still remains unthinkable or unthought (Derrida 1986, 132). The aporia
provokes a leap of memory and a displacement of thinking which leads toward a
new thinking. Aporicity promises an other thinking, an other text, the future of
another promise. All at once the impasse . . . becomes the most trustworthy, reliable
place or moment for reopening a question . . . which remains difficult to think.
(Derrida 1986, 132/133) The aporia engenders, stimulates, makes one write,
provokes thought . . .. There is in it the incalculable order of a wholly other: the
coming or the call of the other (Derrida 1986, 137). The aporia of de Mans death
has provoked Derridas re-reading of de Man and a re-casting of the process of
mourning. These ideas from de Man are then segued into the psychoanalytic model of
mourning to produce what I would argue is a new, intellectually and emotionally nuanced
model of mourning, a model wherein healthy psychic functioning depends neither
on a refusal to mourn or abandoning the dead. The Derridean model offers a respect
for the (dead) Other as Other; it allows agency to the mourner in the possibility of
an ongoing creative encounter with the Other in an externalising, productive,
future-oriented memory; it emphasises the importance of acting out the entrusted
responsibility, which is their legacy to us; it upholds the idea of community and
reminds us of our interconnectedness with our dead. And in a sort of irreligious
religiosity, it enables us to conceive of a bond greater than ourselves, the far
away within us. To summarise then. First, with regard to mourning, Derrida
privileges the process of incorporation, which classical psychoanalysis has been
seen as the pathological response to loss. He does this essentially because
incorporation acknowledges the other as other, while the so-called normal process
of mourning (introjection) merely assimilates the other into the self in a kind of
psychic plagiarism. Second, however, it is not an unreconstructed incorporation
that he recommends; he makes two important theoretical moves. In the distinction
between memory as interiorisation (erinnerung) and memory as a giving over to thinking
and inscription (gedachtnis), he appropriates gedachtnis to integrate with incorporation.

So that what we internalise upon the death of the other is their dynamic
engagements with the other*/their modus vivendi, their animating principle, their
dialogue with the world. We do not have to give them up*/we do not murder them
and find a substitute for the dead are irreplaceable. Third, the other important thing
about gedachtnis is that it is an externalising memory; it is linked with technical or
mechanical inscription, with writing and rhetoric. It is productive; it leads to external
engagement in an ongoing dialogue with the other. It is, as he says, a
remembrance of the future (Derrida 1986, 29). In conclusion, Derrida asks What is
love, friendship, memory?

The Alternative is to deconstruct the 1AC with an unconditional ethic

to the Other in the form of an aporia this is the only way to embrace
the paradox of mourning and prevent total-interiorization and
introjection that lead to violence towards the Other
Derrida, 86 (Jacques, Professor of the Humanities at the University of California
Irvine, Mnemosyne, in Memoires for Paul de Man, translated by Cecile Lindsay, 1986,
its a book, AW)
Everything remains in me or in us, between us, upon the death of the other.
Everything is entrusted to me; everything is bequeathed or given to us, and first of all to
what I call memory-to the memory, the place of this strange dative. All we seem to have
left is memory since nothing appears able to come to us any longer, nothing is coming or
to come, form the other to the present. This is probably true, but is this truth true, or true
enough? The preceding sentences seem to suppose a certain clarity in respect to what
we mean by in me, in us, death of the other, memory, present, to come, and so
on. But still more light (plus de lumiere is needed. The me or the us of which we
speak then aris and are delimited in the way that they are only through this
experience of the other, and of the other as other who can die, leaving in me or in
us this memory of the other. This terrible solitude which is mine or ours at the death
fo the other is what constitutes that relationship to self which we call me, us,
between us, subjectivity, intersubjectivity, memory. The possibility of
death happens, so to speak, before these different instances, and makes them
possible. Or, more precisely, the possibility of the death of the other as mine or ours informs any relations to the other and the finitude of memory. We weep precisely over
what happens to us when everything is entrusted to the sole memory that is in me or
in us. But we must also recall, in another turn of memory, that the within me and
the within us do not arise or appear before this terrible experience. Or at least
not before its possibility, actually felt and inscribed in us, signed. The within me and
the within us acquire their sense and their bearing only by carrying within
themselves the death and the memory of the other; of an other who is greater than
them, greater than what they or we can bear, carry, or comprehend, since we then
lament being no more than memory, in memory. Which is another way of
remaining inconsolable before the finitude of memory. We know, we knew, we
remember before the death of the loved one-that being-in-me or being-in-us is
constituted out of the possibility of mourning. We are only ourselves from the
perspective of this knowledge that is older than ourselves; and this is why I say
that we being by recalling this to ourselves: we come to ourselves through this

memory of possible mourning. In other words this is precisely the allegory, this
memory of impossible mourning. Paul de man would perhaps say: of the
unreadability of mourning. The possibility of the impossible commands here the
whole rhetoric of mourning, and describes the essence of memory. Upon the
death of the other we are given to memory, and thus to interiorization, since the
other, outside us, is now nothing. And with the dark light of this nothing, we learn that
the other resists the closure of our interiorizing memory. With the noting of this
irrevocable memory. With the nothing of this irrevocable absence, the other appears as
other, and as other for us, upon his death or at least in the anticipated possibility of
a death, since death constitutes and makes manifest the limits of a me or an us who are
obliged to harbor something that is greater and other then them; something outside of
within them. Memory and interiorization: since Freud this is how the normal work of
mourning is often described. It entails a movement in which an interiorizing
idealization takes in itself or upon itself the body and voice of the other, the
others visage and person, ideally and quasi-literally devouring them. This
mimetic interiorization is not fictive; it is the origin of fiction, of apocryphal
figuration. It takes place in a body. Or rather, it makes a place for a body, a voice,
and a soul which, although ours, did not exist and had no meaning before this
possibility that one must always begin by remembering, and whose trace must be
followed. II faut, one must: it is the law, that law of the (necessary) relation of Being to
law. We can only live this experience in the form of an aporia: the aporia of
mourning and of prosopopeia, where the possible remains impossible. Where
success fails. And where faithful interiorization bears the other and constitutes
him in me (in us), at once living and dead. It makes the other no longer quite
seems to be the other, because we grieve for him and bear him in us, like an
unborn child, like a future. And inversely, the failure succeeds: an aborted
interiorization is at the same time a respect for the other as other, a sort of tender
rejection, a movement of renunciation which leaves the other alone, outside, over
there, in his death, outside of us.

Case
1. Past-oriented approaches towards whiteness neglect the way
future discourse affects the present futurity is key to full awareness
Baldwin, 11 (Andrew, Co-Director of the Institute of Hazard at the University of
Durhams Department of Geography, Whiteness and futurity: Towards a research
agenda, Progress in Human Geography 2012, originally published August 3, 2011,
http://phg.sagepub.com/content/36/2/172, AW)
My argument is that a past-oriented approach to accounting for geographies of
whiteness often neglects to consider how various forms of whiteness are shaped
by discourses of futurity. This is not to argue that a historicist approach to
conceptualizing white geographies is wrongheaded; the past continues to be a crucial
time-space through which to understand whiteness. It is, however, to argue that such a
past-focused orientation obscures the way the category of the future is invoked in
the articulation of whiteness. As such, any analysis that seeks to understand how
whitenesses of all kinds shape contemporary (and indeed past) racisms operates with
only a partial understanding of the time-spaces of whiteness. My argument is that we
can learn much about whitenesses and their corresponding forms of racism by
paying special attention to the ways in which such whitenesses are constituted by
futurity. I have offered some preliminary remarks on how we might conceptualize
geographies of whiteness qua futurity, but these should only be taken as starting points.
Much more pragmatically, what seems to be required is a fulsome investigation into the
way the future shapes white geographies. What might such a project entail? For one,
geographers would do well to identify whether and how the practice of governing
through the future inaugurates new and repeats old forms of whiteness. It would
also be worth comparing and contrasting how the future is made present in various
dialectical accounts of whiteness. For instance, what becomes of whiteness when
understood through the binary actual-possible as opposed to an actual-virtual
binary, which has been my main concern? Alternatively, what becomes of the
category of whiteness if it is shown to be constituted by a future that has no
ontology except as a virtual presence? And, perhaps more pressing, how might
whiteness be newly politicized? Futurity provides a productive vocabulary for
thinking about and challenging whiteness. It does not offer a means of overcoming
white supremacy, nor does it provide white people with a normative prescription for living
with their whiteness guilt- or worry-free. Futurity is, however, a lacuna in the study of
whiteness both in geography and outside the discipline, and this alone suggests
the need to take it seriously. But equally, and perhaps more urgently, there is the
need to study whiteness and futurity given how central the future is to
contemporary governance and politics. Indeed, at a moment when the future
features prominently in both political rhetoric in his inaugural speech, Obama
implores America to carry forth that great gift of freedom and [deliver] it safely to future
generations and everyday life, how people orient themselves towards the future
is indelibly political. The future impels action. For Mann (2007), it is central to
interest. For Thrift (2008), value increasingly arises not from what is but from what
is not yet but can potentially become, that is fromthe pull of the future. Attention to
whiteness and futurity may at minimum enable us to see more clearly the extent to

which the pull of whiteness into the future reconfigures what is to be valued in the
decades ahead.

2. The affs attempt at continued re-presentation of the Zong is a futile

attempt of remembering that will only eclipse over the place of the
dead
Hartman, 02 (Saidiya, professor of African American literature and history at
Columbia University, The Time of Slavery, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 101, 4, Fall
2002, Duke University Press, EBSCO Publishing, AW)
At the portal that symbolized the finality of departure and the impossibility of reversion, the tensions that reside in

Mourning is both an expression of loss that

tethers us to the dead and severs that connection or overcomes loss by assuming
the place of the dead. The excesses of empathy lead us to mistake our return with
the captives'. To the degree that the bereaved attempt to understand this space of death by placing themselves in
the position of the captive, loss is attenuated rather than addressed, and the phantom
presence of the departed and the dead eclipsed by our simulated captivity. "You are back!"
mourning the dead are most intensely experienced.

We are encouraged to see ou rselves as Lhe vessels for the captive's return; we stand in the ancestor's shoes. We
imaginatively wi t- ness the crimes of the past and cry for those victimized -the enslaved, the ravaged, and the
slaughtered . And the obliterative assimilation of empathy enables us to cry for ou rselves, too. As we remember those
ancestors held in Lhe dungeons, we can't bul think of our own dishonored and devalued l ives and t he unrealized
aspirations and the broken promises of abolition, reconstruction, and the civil rights movemen t. The i n transigence of our
seemi ngly eternal secondclass status propels us Lo make recou rse to stories of origi n, unshakable explanatory
narratives, and sites of inju ry-the land where our blood has been spilt -asif some essen liaJ ingredien t of ourselves can

as if the location of the wound

was itself the cure, or as if the weight of dead generations could alone ensure our
progress. lronica ll}1 the decla ration "You are back!" undermines the very violence that these memorial s assiduously
be recovered at the castles and forts tha t dot the western coast of Africa,

work to present by claimi ng that the tourist'sexcursion is theancestor'sreturn.Given this, what does the journey back bode

despite the emphasis placed on remembrance and

return, these ceremonies are actually unable to articulate in any decisive fashion , other than the
reclamatio n or a true identity, what remembering yields. While the journey back is the vehicle of remedy,
recovery, and sel f-reckoni ng. the question begged is what exactly is the redressive work
actualized by remembrance. Is not the spectacular abjection of slavery reproduced
in facile representations of the horrors of the slave trade? What ends are served
by such representations, beyond remedying the failures of memory through the dramatic reenactment of
for the present? What is surprisi ng is Lhat

captivity and the incorporation of the dead? The most disturbing aspect of these reenactments is the suggestion that the
rupture of the Middle Passage is neither irreparable nor irrevocable but bridged by the tourist who acts as the vessel for
the ancestor. Inshort, the captive finds his redemption in the tourist.

3. The affs focus on telling the history of the Zong fails at

transforming the present and fully representing the full atrocity of
slavery with just simulation
Hartman, 02 (Saidiya, professor of African American literature and history at
Columbia University, The Time of Slavery, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 101, 4, Fall
2002, Duke University Press, EBSCO Publishing, AW)
The point here is not to condemn tourism. but Lo rigorously

examine the politics of memory

and question whether "working through" is even an appropriate mod el for our
relationship with history. In Representing the Holocaust, Dominick LaCapra opts for working th rough as
kind of middle road between redemptive totaJiza tion and the im possibility of representa- tion and suggests that a degree
of recovery is possible i n the con text or a responsible working throu gh of the past. He asserts

that i n coming

to terms with trauma, there is the possibility of retrieving desirable aspects of the
past that might be used in rebuilding a new life.23 While LaCapra's argu men ts are persuasive,
I wonder to what degree the backward glance can provide us with the vision to
build a new life? To what extent need we rely on the past in transforming the
present or, as Marx warned , can we on ly draw ou r poetry from the fu ture and not the past? 2 Here I am not
advanci ng the impossi- bil ity of representa tion or declaring theend of history. but wondering aloud whether
the image of enslaved ancestors can transform the present. I ask this question in order to
discover again the political and ethical relevance of the past. If the goa l is something more than
assimilating the terror of the past into our storehouse of memory, the pressing question is, Why need we
remember? Does the emphasis on remembering and working through the past expose our insatiable
desires for curatives, healing, and anything else that proffers the restoration of
some prelapsarian intactness? Or is recollection an avenue for undoing history? Can remembering
potentially enable an escape from the regularity of terror and the routine of violence constitutive of black life in the United

Usually the
injunction to remember insists that memory can prevent atrocity, redeem the
dead, and cultivate an understanding of ourselves as both individuals and
collective subjects. Yet, too often, the injunction to remember assumes the ease of
grappling with terror, representing slavery's crime, and ably standing in the
other's shoes. I am not proscribing representations of the Middle Passage, particularly since it is the absence of a
States? Or is it that remembering has become the only conceivable or viable form of political agency?

public history of slavery rather than the saturation of representa tion that engenders these com pulsive performances, but
instead poin ting lo the

danger of facile invocations of captivity, sound bites about the

millions lost, and simulations of the past that substitute for critical engagement.

4. Haunting metaphors reassert colonial power perpetuate a

dancing around the wound effect that trades off with mobilization for
change and strip the victims of agency and dignity
Cameron, 08 (Emilie, Department of Geography at Queens University, Indigenous
spectrality and the politics of postcolonial ghost stories, Cultural Geographies, July 11,
2008, http://cgj.sagepub.com/content/15/3/383, AW)
What does it mean, then, to be haunted in a decolonizing settler colony like British
Columbia? Who is haunted in these stories, and who or what is doing the haunting? What kind of future might these
hauntings demand? Do

they signal, as Derrida intended, a recognition of the always unfinished

and unfinishable in our relation to the present and past and, by extension, a sense of generosity and hospitality
towards ghosts? Or do they, as Sarah Ahmed55 has argued in relation to white guilt in postcolonial Australia,
constitute yet another self-referential engagement with the colonial past, in which
the experiences and desires of the settler occlude consideration of other desires
and possibilities? This is the reason for my wariness in the face of haunting tropes,
for I fear that postcolonial ghost stories risk perpetuating a kind of endless dancing
around a wound56 that Daniel David Moses identifies among liberal, left-leaning Canadians, anxiously
replaying their complicity in an ugly colonial past while neglecting to mobilize
effectively for change in the present. The ghosts of the Stein do not seem to me to
represent the Nlakapamux with very much dignity or agency, and surely any postcolonial trope we
might mobilize ought at the very least to figure Indigenous peoples with dignity. In
Haraways terms, it seems to me that haunting has the potential to function as a particularly
deadly trope, one that requires the death and immateriality of Indigenous peoples to make
an e/affective claim on non-Indigenous British Columbians. It is a trope within which todays living descendents of the
generalized spirits haunting the Stein, people like Chiefs Leonard Andrew and Ruby Dunstan, seem to have no place: As
the direct descendents of those aboriginal peoples who have inhabited, shared, sustained, and been sustained by the

Stein Valley for tens of thousands of years down to the present, our authority in this watershed is inescapable Under the
cooperative authority of our two bands we will maintain the Stein Valley as a wilderness in perpetuity for the enjoyment
and enlightenment of all peoples.57 And so, at a time when (primarily non-Aboriginal) geographers, among others, seem
to have taken an interest in ghostly matters,

it seems critical to acknowledge that ghostliness is

a politicized state of being. Many scholars have interpreted these politics as a function of visibility
that is, they suggest that the uncovering and exposure of the ghosts of the past is an
emancipatory act. In many cases this may be true, but I would suggest that there is also a
politics of vision involved in these hauntologies. Those who see and imagine
ghosts are as deserving of interrogation as the ghosts themselves, and the ghosts
of the Stein are profoundly self-referential. And so while the spectral does seem to offer a
means of conceptualizing that which we cannot easily see, even of giving some voice to
colonial traumas, confining the Indigenous to the ghostly also has the potential to reinscribe the interests of the powerful upon the meanings and memories of place.

5. The 1ACs focus on the events of transatlantic slavery prevents

change and uses suffering narratives to distract from emancipation
Hartman, 02 (Saidiya, professor of African American literature and history at
Columbia University, The Time of Slavery, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 101, 4, Fall
2002, Duke University Press, EBSCO Publishing, AW)
History that hurts. The dungeon provides no redemption. Reckoning with our
responsibility to the dead cannot save them . The victor has already won . It is not
possible to undo the past. So, to what end do we conjure up the ghost? Of what
use is an itinerary of terror? Does it provide little more than evidence of what we
cannot change, or quell the uncertainty and doubt regarding millions Jost and u
nknown? The debate still rages as lo how many were transported to the Americas, killed
in the raids and wars Lhat supplied the trade, perished on the long journey to the coast,
committed suicide, died of dehydration during the Middle Passage. or were beaten or
worked to death-22 million. 30 million, 60 million, or more? 21 Isn't it enough to know
that for each captive who survived the ordea l of captivity and season- ing, at least one
did not? At best, the backdrop of this defeat makes visible the diffuse violence and the
everyday routines of domination, which continue to characterize black life but are
obscured by their everydayness. The normative character of ter- ror insures i ts i
nvisibility; i t defies detection behind rational categories l ike crime,povert y, and
pathology. ln other words, the necessity to underscore the centrality of the event.
defined here in terms of captivity, deportation , and social death, is a symptom of
the difficulty of representing "terror as usual." The oscillation between then and now
distills the past four hundred years into one definitive moment. And, at the same
time, the still-unfolding narrative of captivity and dispossession exceeds the
discrete parameters of the event. In itemizing the long list of violations, are we any
closer to freedom, or do such litanies only confirm what is feared-history is an
injury that has yet to cease happening? Given the irreparable nature of this event,
which Jamaica Ki ncaid describes as a wrong that can be assuaged only by the
impossible, that is, by undoing the past. is acting out the past the best approximation of
work- ing through available to us? By suffering the past are we better able to grasp
hold of an elusive freedom and make it substantial? Is pain the guarantee of
compensation? Beyond con templating injury or apportioning blam e, how can this
encounter with the past fuel emancipatory efforts? Is it enough that these acts of

commemoration rescue the u n named and unaccounted for from obscurity and obl ivion
, counter the disavowals constitutive or the U.S. nalionaJ community, and unveil the
complicitou s discretion of the scholar- shi p of the trade?

Starting points based in the past create the linearity they critique and
preclude change a future-oriented approach is key
Baldwin, 11 (Andrew, Co-Director of the Institute of Hazard at the University of
Durhams Department of Geography, Whiteness and futurity: Towards a research
agenda, Progress in Human Geography 2012, originally published August 3, 2011,
http://phg.sagepub.com/content/36/2/172, AW)
geographies of whiteness? For my purposes here, they refer to geographies
spaces, places, landscapes, natures, mobilities, bodies, etc. that are assumed to be
white or are in some way structured, though often implicitly, by some notion of whiteness (Bonnett,
What, then, are

1997; McCarthy and Hague, 2004; Vanderbeck, 2006). The argument put forward in this paper is that research on
geographies of whiteness is almost invariably past-oriented (Bonnett, 1997, 2000; Hoelscher, 2003; Pulido, 2000). By
past-oriented I mean that whiteness, whether understood as a past or present phenomenon, tends

to be
explained, accounted for and examined as an expression of social relations that took shape
in the past (Satzewich, 2007). In the paper, I aim to show how this work is dominated by an orientation that looks to
the past as the temporal horizon through which research and learning about past or present white racial identity occurs.
By and large, this work assumes that in order to challenge or reconfigure whitenesses and their corresponding racisms

The racist past is, thus,

used to explain the racist present. A brief example makes the point. In an essay that many (Baldwin,
whiteness must be diagnosed using some form of past-oriented analysis (Bonnett, 1997).

2009a; Dwyer and Jones, 2000; Jackson, 1998; McCarthy and Hague, 2004) suggest is a main point of reference for
debate about whiteness in geography, Alastair Bonnett (1997) argues that whiteness ought to be understood as a function

a methodological approach that reaches into

the past for answers about contemporary race and racism. Elsewhere, Audrey Kobayashi and
of historical geography.2 As such, Bonnett privileges

Linda Peake (2000) make a similar claim that whiteness is a historically constructed position: to understand whiteness
requires understanding its multiple genealogies.

I do wonder, though, whether a past-oriented

approach to the study of white geographies reproduces the teleological
assumption that white racism can be modernized away. Such an assumption
privileges an ontology of linear causality in which the past is thought to act on the
present and the present is said to be an effect of whatever came before. Consequently,
efforts to understand racism are thought to proceed from, or be enhanced by, some correct historical analysis of
whiteness. According to this kind of temporality, the

future is the terrain upon or through which

white racism will get resolved. It cleaves the future from the present and, thus, gives the future
discrete ontological form. Yet, in so doing, this kind of temporality disregards the ways
in which the future is very often already present in the present not as a discrete
ontological time-space, but as an absent or virtual presence that constitutes the
very meaning of the present (Anderson, 2010a; Massumi, 2007). This is a rather significant oversight when
attempting to account for geographies of whiteness because it means that such geographies are not
simply a function of the past but of the future as well. So, then, what about the future? To what
extent are geographies of whiteness a function not just of the past but of the future? How are white geographies
maintained in relation to the future? In what ways is the future already present in various forms of whiteness? It seems
that the geographic literature on whiteness is silent on these questions. In pointing this out, I do not mean to indict or
discredit the historicist approach that has come to dominate understandings of whiteness. Again, past-oriented analyses
of various kinds have been and continue to be critical for understanding whitenesses and the various racisms to which
they give rise. I simply wish to acknowledge that

by foregrounding the past in the present the

geographic study of whiteness risks overlooking how whitenesses are made and
maintained in relation to futures both distant and immanent. Here, the task for a
futureoriented geographic research on whiteness might be to understand how
both contemporary and past forms of whiteness relate to the future (Anderson, 2010a), or
how specific geographic expressions of whiteness are contingent on the future. For instance, the task might be to
understand how discourses of futurity shape various forms of white supremacy from right-wing xenophobias to leftnationalisms to practices of liberal humanitarianism, and how these shape, for instance, geographies of place, nature,
space, mobility, bodies and so on. A

worthwhile starting point for this work might be to

analyse how discourses of white crisis, such as those found in Great Britain in the early 1900s
(Bonnett, 2004) or throughout the West during processes of post-Second World War decolonization (Thobani, 2007),
relate to and are shaped by notions of futurity. They

do relate to the future. The question is: how

and to what effect? Acknowledging how the future is made present in white
geographies is important for at least three reasons. First, as many now argue (Grusin, 2010;
Massumi, 2007), the future is an important site through which individuals and societies
are governed (Anderson, 2010a). A focus on whiteness and futurity provides scope for thinking
about the way in which governing through the future might inaugurate new or
reconfigure old forms of whiteness. Eugenic science is a useful example here. Eugenics was
underwritten by an imagined future eradicated of human imperfections. Thus we might seek to understand how white
geographies are reproduced through new future-oriented technologies, like genetic screening and nanotechnology (Rose,
2007). Second, understanding

how white geographies articulate with discourses of

futurity opens up new terrains for conceptualizing and challenging racism. If white
supremacy is, in part, reproduced through shared practices of futurity, what then are
these practices? What kinds of futures do such practices seek to expunge or produce, and how can they be
resisted? The case of genetic medicine is again illustrative. For instance, individual genemapping allows genetic citizens
to witness their future health by assessing their genetic predisposition for disease (Rose, 2007). Genetic citizenship is, in
turn, shaped by new practices of bodily purification aimed at foreclosing certain unhealthy futures. We might ask whether

a focus on whiteness and futurity points to the idea

that affect shapes white racial formation (Hook, 2005). For the future can never exist
except as a form of virtual present, and affect can be understood, in part, as a
generalized attitude towards the presencing of particular futures. (Important, however, is
and how these practices are white. Third,

that affect can also be understood as a generalized attitude towards presencings of the past. Think, for example, affects
of nostalgia and loss.) Thus, we might ask: what futures infuse the affective logics of whiteness? How does this future
presencing occur? And how, if at all, are these futures constitutive of specific white spatio-temporalities? These reasons
together provide a rationale for a research agenda concerned with understanding how the future works as a resource in
the geographic expression of whitenesses.