Quarters---MBA---Oceans

1NC

1NC—vs. Centennial KP

1Settler, slave, savage. Our demand: return Turtle Island to the savage. Repair the demolished subjectivity of the slave.Frank B. Wilderson 2010 [Frank B., killed apartheid officials in South Africa, nuff said, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, pages 1-5]

When I was a young student at Columbia University in New York there was a Black woman who used to stand outside the gate and yell at Whites, Latinos, and East- and South Asian students, staff, and faculty as they entered the university. She accused them of having stolen her sofa and of selling her into slavery . She always winked at

the Blacks, though we didn’t wink back. Some of us thought her outbursts too bigoted and out of step with the burgeoning ethos of multiculturalism and “rainbow coalitions” to endorse. But others did not wink back because we were too fearful of the possibility that her isolation would become our isolation, and we had come to Columbia for the

express, though largely assumed and unspoken, purpose of foreclosing upon that peril. Besides, people said she was crazy. Later, when I attended UC Berkeley, I saw a Native American man sitting on the sidewalk of Telegraph Avenue. On the ground in front of him was an upside down hat and a sign informing pedestrians that here was where they could settle the “Land Lease Accounts” that they had neglected to settle all of their lives. He too , so went the scuttlebutt,

was “crazy.” Leaving aside for the moment their state of mind, it would seem that the structure, that is to say the rebar, or better still the grammar of their demands—and, by extension, the grammar of their suffering—was indeed an ethical grammar. Perhaps their grammars are the only ethical grammars available to modern politics and modernity writ large , for they draw our

attention not to the way in which space and time are used and abused by enfranchised and violently powerful interests, but to the violence that underwrites the modern world’s capacity to think, act, and exist spatially and temporally. The violence that robbed her of her body and him of his land provided the stage upon which other violent and consensual dramas could be enacted. Thus, they would have to be crazy, crazy enough to call not merely the actions of the world to account but

to call the world itself to account, and to account for them no less! The woman at Columbia was not demanding to be a participant in an unethical network of distribution: she was not demanding a place within capital, a piece of the pie (the demand for her sofa

notwithstanding). Rather, she was articulating a triangulation between, on the one hand, the loss of her body, the very dereliction of her corporeal integrity , what Hortense Spillers charts as the transition from being a being to becoming a “being for the captor” (206), the drama of value (the stage upon which surplus value is extracted from labor power

through commodity production and sale); and on the other, the corporeal integrity that , once ripped from her body, fortified and extended the corporeal integrity of everyone else on the street . She gave birth to the commodity and to the Human, yet she had neither subjectivity nor a sofa to show for it. In her eyes, the world—and not its myriad

discriminatory practices, but the world itself—was unethical. And yet, the world passes by her without the slightest inclination to stop and disabuse her of her claim. Instead, it calls her “crazy.” And to what does the world attribute the Native American man’s insanity? “He’s crazy if he thinks he’s getting any money out of us?” Surely, that doesn’t make him crazy. Rather it is simply an indication that he does not

have a big enough gun. What are we to make of a world that responds to the most lucid enunciation of ethics with violence? What are the foundational questions of the ethico-political? Why are these questions so scandalous that they are rarely posed politically, intellectually, and cinematically—unless they are posed obliquely and unconsciously, as if by accident? Return Turtle Island to the “Savage.” Repair the demolished subjectivity of the Slave. Two simple sentences, twelve simple words, and the structure of U.S. (and perhaps global) antagonisms would be dismantled. An “ethical

modernity” would no longer sound like an oxymoron. From there we could busy ourselves with important conflicts that have been promoted to

the level of antagonisms: class struggle, gender conflict, immigrants rights. When pared down to twelve words and two sentences, one cannot but wonder why questions that go to the heart of the ethico-political, questions of political ontology, are so unspeakable in intellectual meditations, political broadsides, and even socially and politically engaged feature films. Clearly they can be spoken, even a child could speak those lines, so they would pose no problem for a scholar, an activist, or a filmmaker. And yet, what is also clear—if the filmographies of socially and politically engaged directors, the archive of progressive scholars, and the plethora of Left-wing broadsides are anything to go by—is that what can so easily be spoken is now (five hundred years and two hundred fifty million Settlers/Masters on) so ubiquitously unspoken that they not only render their speaker “crazy” but become themselves impossible to imagine. Soon it will be

forty years since radical politics, Left-leaning scholarship, and socially engaged feature films began to speak the unspeakable.i In the 1960s and early 1970s the questions asked by radical politics and scholarship were not “Should the U.S. be overthrown?” or even

“Would it be overthrown?” but rather when and how —and, for some, what—would come in its wake. Those steadfast in their

conviction that there remained a discernable quantum of ethics in the U.S. writ large (and here I am speaking of everyone from Martin Luther King, Jr. prior to his 1968 shift, to the Tom Hayden wing of SDS, to the Julian Bond and Marion Barry faction of SNCC, to Bobbie Kennedy Democrats) were accountable, in their

rhetorical machinations, to the paradigmatic zeitgeist of the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, and the Weather Underground. Radicals and progressives could deride, reject, or chastise armed struggle mercilessly and cavalierly with respect to tactics and the possibility of “success,” but they could not dismiss revolution-as-ethic because they could not make a convincing case—by way of a paradigmatic analysis—that the U.S. was an ethical formation and still hope to maintain credibility as radicals and progressives. Even Bobby Kennedy (a U.S. attorney general and presidential candidate) mused

that the law and its enforcers had no ethical standing in the presence of Blacks.ii One could (and many did) acknowledge America’s strength and power. This seldom,

however, rose to the level of an ethical assessment, but rather remained an assessment of the so-called “balance of forces.” The political discourse of Blacks, and to a lesser extent Indians, circulated too widely to credibly wed the U.S. and ethics. The raw force of COINTELPRO put

an end to this trajectory toward a possible hegemony of ethical accountability. Consequently, the power of Blackness and Redness to pose the question— and the power to pose the question is the greatest power of all—retreated as did White radicals and progressives who “retired” from struggle. The question’s echo lies buried in the graves of young Black Panthers, AIM Warriors, and Black Liberation Army soldiers, or in prison cells where so many of them have been rotting (some in solitary confinement) for ten, twenty, thirty years, and at the gates of the academy where the “crazies” shout at passers-by. Gone are not only the young and vibrant voices that affected a seismic shift on the political landscape, but also the intellectual protocols of inquiry, and with them a

spate of feature films that became authorized, if not by an unabashed revolutionary polemic, then certainly by a revolutionary zeitgeist. Is it still possible for a dream of unfettered ethics, a dream of the Settlement and the Slave estate’s destruction, to manifest itself at the ethical core of cinematic discourse, when this dream is no longer a constituent element of political discourse in the streets nor of intellectual discourse in the academy? The answer is “no” in the sense that, as history has shown, what cannot be articulated as political discourse in the streets is doubly foreclosed upon in screenplays and in scholarly prose; but “yes” in the sense that in even the most taciturn historical moments such as ours, the grammar of Black and Red suffering breaks in on this foreclosure, albeit like the somatic compliance of hysterical symptoms—it registers in both cinema and scholarship as symptoms of awareness of the structural antagonisms. Between 1967 and 1980, we could think cinematically and intellectually of Blackness and Redness as having the coherence of full-blown discourses. But from 1980 to the present, Blackness and Redness manifests only in the rebar of cinematic and intellectual (political) discourse that is, as unspoken grammars. This grammar can be discerned in the cinematic strategies (lighting, camera angles, image composition, and acoustic strategiesdesign), even when the script labors for the spectator to imagine social turmoil through the rubric of conflict (that is, a rubric of problems that can be posed and conceptually solved) as opposed to the rubric of antagonism (an irreconcilable struggle between entities, or positionalities, the resolution of which is not dialectical but entails the obliteration of one of the positions). In other words, even when films narrate a story in which Blacks or Indians are beleaguered with problems that the script insists are conceptually coherent (usually having to do with poverty or the absence of “family values”) the non-narrative, or cinematic, strategies of the film often disrupt this coherence by posing the irreconcilable questions of Red and Black political ontology—or non-ontology. The grammar of antagonism breaks in on the mendacity of

conflict. Semiotics and linguistics teach us that when we speak, our grammar goes unspoken. Our grammar is assumed. It is the structure through which the labor of speech is possible. iv Likewise, the grammar of political ethics—the

grammar of assumptions regarding the ontology of suffering—which underwrite Film Theory and political discourse (in this book, discourse elaborated in direct relation to radical action), and which underwrite cinematic speech (in this book, Red, White, and Black films from the mid-1960s to the

present) is also unspoken. This notwithstanding , film theory, political discourse, and cinema assume an ontological grammar, a structure of suffering. And the structure of suffering which film theory, political discourse and cinema assume crowds out other structures of suffering, regardless of the sentiment of the film or the spirit of unity mobilized by the political discourse in question. To put

a finer point on it, structures of ontological suffering stand in antagonistic , rather then conflictual, relation to one another (despite the fact that antagonists themselves may not be aware of the ontological positionality from which they speak). Though this is perhaps the most controversial and out-of-step claim of this book, it is, nonetheless, the foundation of the close reading of feature films and political theory that follows.

The affirmative forgets global anti-blackness. Their move to situate the conversation to the position of Asian-Americans renders anti-blackness a non-issue. Furthermore their starting point of the Pacific passage ignores the originary act of violence of the Middle Passage.Copeland & Sexton 2003 (Raw Life: An Introduction Jared Sexton and Huey Copeland Qui Parle, Volume 13, Number 2 (Spring/Summer 2003) published University of Nebraska Press Copeland; Ph.D., History of Art, University of California, Berkeley, 2006) is Director of Graduate Studies and Associate Professor of Art History with affiliations in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies Sexton Director, African American Studies School of Humanities Associate Professor, African American Studies School of Humanities Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, Ethnic Studies) G.L

It is at this impasse and with such questions that the essays collected here begin: with the notion derived from Fanon, of the impossibility of representing race, either for the slave or the master, outside of an entrenched visual schema predicated on the fungibility of the black slave that this reckoning comes to the fore at this moment and that it connects cultural practitioners working across a range of disciplines –art, history, literature, film, critical theory –not only suggests the longevity of Fanon’s insight, but also underlines the pressing need to think the structural and

structuring function of racial difference for our symbolic economies. For it is that very function which contemporary racial theory more often than not seeks to leap over, in the process revealing its own ineffectuality, a kind of willful blindness that cannot be overstated. In its single-minded capacity to concentrate on everything except that which matters most in the restructuring of white supremacy, such theory is undoubtedly more egregious than intellectual faux pas or public disservice. It is a modality of complicity, or better, fraud. But the fraudulence of this diverse intellectual project is not only analytic; it is also ethical. Besieged by the conservative restoration, the Left finds itself today enamored of political pragmatism and in thrall to the lures of counter-hegemonic populism. From the emergent networks of anti-globalization to the reinvigorated peace movement, from the embattled environmentalist campaigns to the desperate efforts at urban police reform, the official rhetoric is multiracial and the organizational logic is coalition. Yet, for whatever energies are dispensed in elaborating the new complexity of race in the age of globality, the radical imagination inexorably comes to rest on the assumption of horizontality, that is ot say, a progressive community-in-struggle, even if only a possible one. Indeed, it has become commonplace in the U.S. to call for a paradigm shift with respect to racial theory and the politics of anti-racism. This clarion call resonates in the ivory towers of academe, in the pages of the most useless print media outlets, certainly in the alternative press, and in the policy papers and strategic deliberations of progressive non-profit institutes and community-based

organizations. What we are told , in a variety of tones and tenors, is that race matters are no longer –if they ever were – “ simply black and white ” at the least, the focus of such a Manichean lens is deemed inadequate to apprehend the current and historical relatity of U.S. racial formation (to say nothing of the Americas more generally

or other regions of the world) At its worst, this dichotomous view is rendered as politically stunting and, moreover, as effectively excluding “discussion of the colors in the middle, now inexorable parts of the Black/White spectrum.” We now enjoy a vast literature in the social sciences and humanities detailing the vexed position (or positions), between the black and the white. “ Neither black nor white ” thus indicates not only the articulation of multiracial (or Mixed race) identity claims in the post-civil rights era, but also the contemporary reformulations of critique and political mobilization among Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, Chicana/os,

Latina/os, and Native American peoples. Of course, racial discourse in what would become the U.S., from the colonial era onward, has always been multi-polar, so to speak, and the psychodynamics of race have always been quite complex; the lines of force and the relations of racial power have been reconfigured regularly across a multiplicity of times and spaces. In fact, the notion of a black/white paradigm is something of a theoretical fiction, deployed for a wide range of purposes. In our attempts to displace it, then, we do well to recognize it as a recent emergence, involved in an imaginary lure that says more about the historical preoccupations of white supremacy than it does about, say, the blind insistence of black scholars, activists, or

communities. When perusing the critical literature on the “explanatory difficulty” of present-day racial politics, one frequently wonders exactly to whom the demand to go “beyond black and white” is being addressed. Also puzzling is the singularly incoherent nature of the reasoning demonstrated in current race talk, a failure, that is, to offer cogent accounts of the implications of this newfound (or, more precisely, rediscovered) complexity. Taken together, these twin ambiguities beg a key question: what economies of enunciation are involved in this broadly atterned discursive gesture to put an end to “biracial theorizing”?

Legal scholar Mari Matsuda offers a provocative thought on this score. During a symposium on critical race theory at the Yale Law

School in 1997 she claimed : We when say we need to move beyond Black and white, this is what a whole lot of people say or feel or think : “ thank goodness we can get off that paradigm, because those black people made me feel so uncomfortable . I know all about Blacks, but I really don’t know anything about Asians , and while we’re deconstructing that Black-white paradigm, we also need to reconsider the category of race altogether, since race, as you know, is a constructed category, and thank god I don’t have to take those angry black people seriously anymore.” Importantly, the comment is drawn from an otherwise

sympathetic mediation on a particular danger attendant to the desire for new analyses, and the often anxious drive for multiracial coalition, namely, the persistent risk of forgetting the centrality of anti-blackness to global white supremacy. Fanon , again, is prescient: “Wherever he goes, the negro remains a Negro” (B, 173). Wherever; there is no outside. Too often we forget , here in the U.S. especially, that there are blacks everywhere . When so many speak of the peculiarity of race as a North American obsession (one hears of the odd rigidity of the

Anglo-Saxon racial formation), it is important to think about black people as situated in those myriad locales supposedly outside of or alternate to the black-white binary. Lewis Gordon, philosopher and leading contemporary

commentator on Fanon, writes: Although there are people who function as “the blacks” of particular contexts, there is a group of people who function as the blacks everywhere. They are called , in now-archaic language –

Negroes. Negroes are the blacks of everywhere, the black of blacks, the blackest blacks. Blackness functions as the prime racial signifier . It is the element that enters a room and frightens Reason out… The

historical specificity of blackness as a point from which the greatest distance must be forged entails its status as metaphor.

For Asian immigrants, the ocean may be a space of loss, trauma and displacement, but it is also a space of settler colonialism and anti-black violence. Their silence is a move to innocence and proves they don’t meet their intralocality standard.

Alok Vaid-Menon and Janani Balasubrimanian, 4-23-2014, DarkMatter, a queer South Asian performance and literary arts duo, “Part 2: When White Supremacy isn’t About White People,” http://darkmatterrage.com/part-2-when-white-supremacy-isnt-about-white-people/

While it is often convenient to blame white settlers, people of color can also participate in settler colonialism . We have to name our privileges as settlers and attempt to operate in solidarity with indigenous peoples in order to do transformative work. Another fabricated parallel between our work and queer Palestine was the common enemy: white

homonationalism. This is simply not the case. Queer Palestinians are fundamentally fighting a decolonization struggle where the political ask is for the actual unsettlement of foreign peoples and the right of return to land. It was easy for us to agree with this demand in Palestine, and yet harder and more necessary for us to approach North American queer politics with unsettlement as a mandate. Our class- and caste- privileged Indian families came to this land for economic opportunity. In other words our families benefit from the spoils of centuries of genocide and anti-black racism. Rather than challenging the systematic racism that

allowed our families to succeed and obtain economic progress in this country, our families remained silent and continued to succeed on the backs of other people of color. As Asian Americans we have previously narrated our diasporic stories only through the lens of loss, trauma, and a sense of displacement . What this does is distract away from our mutual complicity in violence against Native Americans and African Americans who were involuntary brought to this context. As privileged diasporic people of color we have to reframe and rearticulate the ways we narrate our immigration toward mutual accountability. We must not only see ourselves as ‘oppressed,’ but also perpetrators of settler colonial and anti black violence. This means that we must come at our queer of color domestic activism from a position of allyship in similar ways to the transnational work that we participate in.

The 1ac’s advocacy misses the boat and only stands in to miss the broader demand of relinquishing stolen land.Tuck and Yang, 12

Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, State University of New York at New Paltz; University of California, San Diego; “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, Vol. 1., No. 1, 2012, pg. 19 //bghs-ms

Fanon told us in 1963 that decolonizing the mind is the first step, not the only step toward overthrowing colonial regimes. Yet we wonder whether another settler move to innocence is to focus on decolonizing the mind, or the cultivation of critical consciousness , as if it were the sole activity of decolonization ; to allow conscientization to stand in for the more uncomfortable task of relinquishing stolen land. We agree that curricula, literature, and pedagogy can be crafted to aid people in learning to see settler colonialism, to articulate critiques of settler epistemology, and set aside settler histories and values

in search of ethics that reject domination and exploitation; this is not unimportant work. However, the front-loading of critical consciousness building can waylay decolonization , even though the experience of teaching and learning to be critical of settler colonialism can be so powerful it can feel like it is indeed making change . Until stolen land is relinquished, critical consciousness does not translate into action that disrupts settler colonialism. So, we respectfully disagree with George Clinton and Funkadelic (1970) and En Vogue (1992) when they assert that if you “free your mind , the rest (your ass) will follow . ”

Anti-blackness outweighs—intersection of objective and subjective vertigo.Frank Wilderson, 2011 (revolutionary, “The Vengeance of Vertigo: Aphasia and Abjection in the Political Trials of Black Insurgents,” http://www.scribd.com/doc/79282989/Wilderson-the-Vengeance-of-Vertigo >:)

Subjective vertigo is vertigo of the event. But the sensation that one is not simply spinning in an otherwise stable environment, that one’s environment is perpetually unhinged stems from a relationship to

violence that cannot be analogized. This is called objective vertigo, a life constituted by disorientation rather than a life interrupted by disorientation. This is structural as opposed to performative violence. Black subjectivity is a crossroads where vertigoes meet , the intersection of performative and structural violence. [4] Elsewhere I have argued that the Black is a sentient being though not a Human being. The Black’s and the Human’s disparate relationship to violence is at the heart of this failure of incorporation and analogy. The Human suffers contingent violence, violence that kicks in when s/he resists InTensions Journal Copyright ©2011 by York University (Toronto, Canada) Issue 5 (Fall/Winter 2011) ISSN# 1913-5874 Wilderson The Vengeance of Vertigo 4 (or is perceived to resist) the disciplinary discourse of

capital and/or Oedipus. But Black peoples’ subsumption by violence is a paradigmatic necessity, not just a performative contingency. To be constituted by and disciplined by violence, to be gripped simultaneously by subjective and objective vertigo, is indicative of a political ontology which is radically different from the political ontology of a sentient being who is constituted by discourse and disciplined by violence when s/he breaks with the ruling discursive codes.vi When we begin to assess revolutionary armed struggle in this comparative context,

we find that Human revolutionaries (workers, women, gays and lesbians, post-colonial subjects) suffer subjective vertigo when they meet the state’s disciplinary violence with the revolutionary violence of the subaltern; but they are spared objective vertigo. This is because the most disorienting aspects of their lives are induced by the struggles that arise from intra-Human conflicts over competing conceptual frameworks and disputed cognitive maps, such as the American Indian Movement’s demand for the return of Turtle Island vs. the U.S.’s desire to maintain territorial integrity, or the Fuerzas Armadas

de Liberación Nacional’s (FALN) demand for Puerto Rican independence vs. the U.S.’s desire to maintain Puerto Rico as a territory. But for the Black , as for the slave, there are no cognitive maps, no conceptual frameworks of suffering and dispossession which are analogic with the myriad maps and frameworks which explain the dispossession of Human subalterns.

The only viable political strategy must include the black body – the affirmative just recoordinates civil society and doesn’t provide any liberation – there is a direct tradeoffJared Sexton, Associate professor of African American studies and film and media studies at the

University of California, Irvine, 2010, “People-of-Color-Blindness; Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery,” http://socialtext.dukejournals.org/content/28/2_103/31.full.pdf

The upshot of this predicament is that obscuring the structural position of the category of blackness will inevitably undermine multiracial coalition building as a politics of radical opposition and, to that extent, force the question of black liberation back to the center of discussion. Every analysis that attempts to understand the complexities of racial rule and the machinations of the racial state without accounting for black existence within its framework — which does not mean simply listing it among a chain of equivalents or returning to it as an afterthought — is doomed to miss what is- essential about the situation. Black existence does not represent the total reality of the racial formation — it is not the beginning and the end of the story — but it does relate to the totality; it indicates the (repressed) truth of the political and economic system. That is to say, the whole range of positions within the racial formation is most fully understood from this vantage point , not unlike the way in which the range of gender and sexual variance under patriarchal and heteronormative regimes is most fully understood through lenses that are

feminist and queer. 75 What is lost for the study of black existence in the proposal for a decentered, “postblack” paradigm is a proper analysis of the true scale and nature of black suffering and of the struggles — political,

aesthetic, intellectual, and so on — that have sought to transform and undo it. What is lost for the study of nonblack nonwhite

existence is a proper analysis of the true scale and nature of its material and symbolic power relative to the category of blackness. 76 This is why

every attempt to defend the rights and liberties of the latest victims of state repression will fail to make substantial gains inso - far as it forfeits or sidelines the fate of blacks, the prototypical targets of the panoply of police practices and the juridical infrastructure built up around them. Without blacks on board , the only viable political option and the only effective defense against the intensifying cross fire will involve greater alliance with an antiblack civil society and further capitulation to the magnification of state power. At the apex of the midcentury social movements, Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton wrote in their 1968 clas - sic, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation , that black freedom entails “ the necessarily total revamping of the society. ” 77 For Hartman, thinking of the entanglements of the African diaspora in this context, the necessarily total revamping of the society is more appropriately envisioned as the creation of an entirely new world: I knew

that no matter how far from home I traveled, I would never be able to leave my past behind. I would never be able to imagine being the kind of person who had not been made and marked by slavery. I was black and a

history of terror had produced that identity. Terror was “captivity without the possibility of flight,” inescapable violence, precarious life. There was no going back to a time or place before slavery, and going beyond it no doubt would entail nothing less momentous than yet another revolution.

Negation is the only ethical act that can be taken in the world of colonialism.Marriott, 2007 (David, Professor of History @ UC Santa Cruz, Haunted Life: Visual Culture and Black Modernity Pg 237-240)

In Fanon it may be that the imperative of decolonization becomes an ethical law —hence his ambiguous

references to Kant—a law justifying risk and ruin rather than sacrifice and resignation. Hence, the move from colonialism to decolonization represents a move, not from the ethical into history, but involves a radical leap into a way of life based on indeterminate negation, a negation without end but always at work in the depths of history. On the other hand, Fanon also states, "My black skin is not the wrapping of specific values. It is a long time since the starry sky that took away Kant's breath revealed the last of its secrets to us. And the moral law is not certain of itself" (Fanon; Black Skin, 227). This statement follows another explicit reference to Kant: "One duty alone: That of not renouncing my freedom through my choices" (229). The text referred to here is Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, which concludes as follows: "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me."19 It is important to note that Fanon is not denying Kant's confidence in the sublime presentation of moral ideas, which, in the Critique of Judgment, Kant argues discloses the whole power (Macht) of the mind. Rather he is stating that Kant's enthusiasm for the infinitude of the starry heavens-the infinitude of which allows us to recognize, in turn, the infinite destiny of our own moral nature-cannot happen in the Antilles. It cannot happen there precisely because of the racial distribution of guilt and its paralysis at the level of the imaginary. Fanon's critique of Kant echoes that of Nietzsche's. For Nietzsche, the sacrificial exercise of morality in Kantian ethics results in impotence when the will to obey the law against natural desire and out of no interested motive-not even fear-overwhelms the individual and produces the resort to ressentiment, the culture of reaction. Nietzsche is not condemning the disciplining of natural desire, on the contrary, he commends it, but what he objects to is its moralized accountability, when it is

justified as disinterested submission to categorical law For Nietzsche (and Fanon), the law is interested, which is not to deny it is sovereign or universal, but to imply that the meaning of sovereignty depends on a principle of calculability, which, in his view, is to suspend the law itself and the opposition of disinterested reverence and natural desire. For the genealogist the moral law in the universality of its form constitutes the misrecognized form, not of law, but of will to power. Its cruelty—from Kant’s perspective its indifference to heteronomous interests—is the displaced symptom of its affective truth.

For Fanon, it is this cruelty and this impotence which is deeply racialized both in terms of its psychology and historical sociology. In considering the uncertainty of moral law, of racism and of time, Fanon holds fast to a notion of the colonial subject as always divided and never fully present to itself. The aporias between blackness and history, for example, illustrated this in the form of blacks as reactive or nihilistic Black Skin, White Masks explores this aporia in terms of a question: namely, what is it about colonial authority that allows it to generate forms of nihilistic passivity rather than Kant’s inner freedom of moral law? What is it about the autonomous imposition of duty that turns the black subject into a reactive affect, thematized here as a submission to racialized time and history? Colonial power reveals the limits of Kant’s categorical law here understood as the autonomous imposition of duty. The moral law is uncertain of itself in the Antilles because colonial racism makes that law, in terms of duty, an impossible demand which is aporetic: be like me and do not be like me, be white but not quite. As such, colonialism transforms the moral law into a will to power based on racial exclusion. In order to grasp why Fanon thinks this is the case, I have explored the relation between the loss

that racial forgetting represents and the negative sublimity of moral law in the Antilles. A negativity that exposes , almost inevitably, the extent to which the will to power in the colonial nation-state is one defined by its perpetual

readiness to wage war against the colonized at the level of both ideological fantasy and psyche . For Fanon,

colonialism operates a pure power politics completely divested of ethical and universalistic considerations. A war in which blackness is understood as a source of historical failure in need of cathartic cure and/or annihilation. A war in which the death of blacks, as utter abjection, is a nothingness without history and so indistinguishable from the unhistorical nothingness of a people without time. In conclusion, given that Fanon's last work-The Wretched of the Earth-was an attempt to work out the idea of an ethical state in the context of decolonization, many commentators have tended to lose sight of how the political question of social justice and revolutionary struggle was, for Fanon, invariably tangled up with questions of responsibility and risk. 20 In other words, the difficult task Fanon set himself was how to resolve the problem of power and justice in cultures distinguished by Manichaeism. What could the idea of an ethical state mean in nations divided according to whether blacks are the remnants of an unhistorical, unethical substance, .neither life nor being, but the unhappy existence of spectral life? Notions which were not only inscribed in economic and social relations but, more often than not, in judicial procedures and constitutional and parliamentary practices of executive governance.

Fanon's idea of revolution should therefore not be restricted to the political but must also be seen as an attempt to describe how national desires come to be bound by somatic fantasies. Fanon's error, according to

many, may have been in conceiving imperialism too psychologically, but his ideal of the decolonized cultural nation and political state cannot be understood without taking into account his ideas on the heteronomy of political demands and unconscious desires. If Fanon's political vision of the world was essentially Nietzschean-divided between

sovereign life and slavish abjection his call for national liberation and unity in the developing nations went hand in hand with a call to look at death in the face, to make death as such possible for blacks otherwise condemned to the nothingness of death , death as the representation of lawless violence . In Fanon's oeuvre the politics of black experience calls for the endurance of such negation and hence its movement, but only in the knowledge that the death within us cannot be determined , and this is the price we pay for life lived at the limits of both political virtue and political violence

ExpositionTreating the ocean as a metaphor obscures the way the sea is WITHDRAWN from human interaction—leads to instrumentalization and environmental dualism. Steinberg 13 Philip E. Steinberg (2013) Of other seas: metaphors and materialities in maritime regions, Atlantic Studies: Global Currents, 10:2, 156-169, DOI: 10.1080/14788810.2013.785192 Professor of Political Geography at Durham University in the UK 9/94 – 5/96 Ph.D., Clark University, Worcester, MA. Major: Geography. Dissertation: Capitalism, Modernity, and the Territorial Construction of Ocean Space. Supervisory committee: J. Richard Peet (chair), Roger Kasperson, David Angel, Janice Thomson, Robert Vitalis. 9/90 – 5/94 M.A., Clark University, Worcester, MA. Major: Geography. 9/83 – 5/87 B.A., Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH. Major: Politics / Third World Studies.

Even as ocean-region-based studies gain popularity, they all too often fail to engage the aqueous center that lies at the heart of

every maritime community. Studies that seek to highlight political economic connections across ocean basins tend to

ignore the sea altogether, while those that highlight it as a site for challenging modernist notions of identity and subjectivity tend to treat the ocean solely as a metaphor. In contrast, this article argues that in order for

oceanregion-based studies to reach their potential, the ocean must be engaged as a material space characterized by movement and continual reformation across all of its dimensions. Drawing on a range of theories, from conceptualizations of morethan-human assemblages to the oceanographic modeling techniques of Lagrangian fluid dynamics, this article proposes a perspective that highlights the liquidity of the ocean, so that the sea is seen not just as a space that facilitates movement between a region’s nodes but as one that, through its essential, dynamic mobility and continual reformation, gives us a new

perspective from which to encounter a world increasingly characterized by connections and flows . The sea is not a metaphor . So asserts Hester Blum in the first sentence of her agenda-setting article, ‘‘The Prospect of Oceanic Studies.’’ 1 Blum goes on to identify a fundamental flaw in the bulk of ocean-

themed literature, maritime history, analytical work on cultural attitudes toward the ocean, and a raft of scholarship in cultural studies in which the fluvial nature of the ocean is used to signal a world of mobilities, betweeness, instabilities, and becomings. While all of these perspectives on the sea serve a purpose in that they suggest ways for theorizing an alternative ontology of connection, Blum

cautions that they fail to incorporate the sea as a real, experienced social arena. Instead, she argues for a perspective that ‘‘draws from the epistemological structures provided by the lives and writings of those for whom the sea was simultaneously workplace, home, passage, penitentiary,

and promise’’ and that is thereby ‘‘attentive to the material conditions and praxis of the maritime world.’’ 2 I applaud Blum’s aversion to those who would reduce the ocean to a metaphorical space of connection; indeed, in the first part of this article I amplify her comments in this regard. At the same time, however, I find her alternative the study of works that emerge from the actual, material encounters of humans with the sea somewhat

wanting. While the sea is a social (or human) space a ‘‘social construction’’ it is not just a social construction. 3 Indeed, human encounters with the sea are , of necessity, distanced and partial . The encounter from the shore, from the ship, from the surface, or even from the depths, while

laden with affective feelings, captures only a fraction of the sea’s complex, four-dimensional materiality. 4 To be certain, the combination of emotional intensity with material distance that characterizes our understanding of the sea has made for some excellent literature. 5 Art, after all, thrives on the distance between affective and cognitive understandings. 6 This tension also happens to have led to some relatively enlightened environmental

management practices. 7 But the partial nature of our encounter with the ocean necessarily creates gaps, as the unrepresentable becomes the unacknowledged and the unacknowledged becomes the unthinkable. To that end, following a discussion of some of the problems with the way that the maritime is often considered in literary, historical, cultural, and geographical studies, I suggest three, related alternative perspectives that directly engage the ocean ’ s fluid mobility and its tactile materiality. To be clear, my aim is not to deny the importance of either the human history of the ocean or the suggestive power of the maritime metaphor. Rather, I am asserting that in order to fully appreciate the

ocean as a uniquely fluid and dynamic space we need to develop an epistemology that views the ocean as continually being reconstitute d by a variety of elements: the non-human and the human, the biological and the geophysical, the historic and the contemporary. Only then, can we think with the ocean in order to enhance our understanding of and visions for the world at large.

Method

Self-reflexivity just reinscribes the coloniality and racialization. Andrea Smith, 8-14-2013, associate professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies @ University of California, Riverside, intellectual, feminist, and anti-violence activist, “The Problem with “Privilege”,” http://andrea366.wordpress.com/2013/08/14/the-problem-with-privilege-by-andrea-smith/

In my experience working with a multitude of anti-racist organizing projects over the years, I frequently found myself participating in various workshops in which participants were asked to reflect on their gender / race / sexuality / class / etc. privilege. These workshops had a bit of a self-help orientation to them: “I am so and so, and I have x privilege.” It was never quite clear what the point of these confessions were . It was not as if other participants did not know the confessor in question

had her/his proclaimed privilege. It did not appear that these individual confessions actually led to any political projects to dismantle the structures of domination that enabled their privilege. Rather , the confessions became the political project themselves. The benefits of these confessions seemed to be ephemeral. For the instant the confession took place, those who do not have that privilege in daily life would have a temporary position of power as the hearer of the confession who could grant absolution and forgiveness . The sayer of the confession

could then be granted temporary forgiveness for her/his abuses of power and relief from white/male/heterosexual/etc guilt. Because of the perceived benefits of this ritual, there was generally little critique of the fact that

in the end, it primarily served to reinstantiate the structures of domination it was supposed to resi st. One of the reasons there was little critique of this practice is that it bestowed cultural capital to those who seemed to be the “most oppressed.”

Those who had little privilege did not have to confess and were in the position to be the judge of those who

did have privilege. Consequently, people aspired to be oppressed . Inevitably, those with more privilege would develop new heretofore unknown forms of oppression from which they suffered. “I may be white, but my best friend was a person of color, which caused me

to be oppressed when we played together.” Consequently, the goal became not to actually end oppression but to be as oppressed as possible. These rituals often substituted confession for political movement-building . And

despite the cultural capital that was, at least temporarily, bestowed to those who seemed to be the most oppressed, these rituals ultimately reinstantiated the white majority subject as the subject capable of self-reflexivity and the colonized/racialized subject as the occasion for self-reflexivity.

2NC

Anti-Blackness

AT: “Asian Trayvon”Trivializes and is bad – recenters antiblacknessJessie-Lane Metz, 6-24-2013, “Ally-phobia: On the Trayvon Martin Ruling, White Feminism, and the Worst of Best Intentions,” http://the-toast.net/2013/07/24/ally-phobia-the-worst-of-best-intentions/

I want to emphasize that the Trayvon Martin murder trial and aftermath is not about having better white jurors. It is about ending racist laws in a racist system that target Black people in terrible ways. It is about having a jury that includes Black people, rather than excludes them because of their perceived racial biases (as though non-Black people do not carry biases that lead to the death of Black people on a daily basis). It is about living in a country where Black children can go to the store and get some candy and a drink without being profiled, followed, and killed. It is not about the racism that white women would hope to transcend were they appointed to a jury,

in which their very appointment would represent the exclusion of Black people. This is not about being the “best” ally. Being the best ally one can be should already be a given at this point. This is about centering and discussing racism, with Black

people leading this discussion. There are other examples of white responses to the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin that I will not go into in depth here. Eve Ensler wrote a now-infamous piece, “Boys With Tender

Hearts and Big Dreams in Their Hoodies,” which takes the story of Trayvon Martin and likens it to her struggles as a white women, promoting her own organization 1 Billion Rising throughout the article. Or David Sirota, who went so far as to compare Barack Obama’s use of drones to George Zimmerman targeting Trayvon Martin and killing him. This article served to conflate two social justice issues. It misappropriated the specific pain of Trayvon’s family, friends, and the entire Black community to draw attention to a cause that David clearly valued over that of justice for Trayvon Martin.

ROARuse of analogyWilderson 10, (Frank B. Wilderson, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Drama at the University of California & former member of the Umkhonto we Sizwe, Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms, FT)

This is one of several moments in Black Skin, White Masks when Fanon splits the hair between social oppression and structural suffering, making it possible to theorize the impossibility of a Black ontology (thus allowing us to meditate on how the Black suffers) without being chained to the philosophical and rhetorical demands of analogy, demands which the evidentiary register of social oppression (i.e., how many Jews

died in the ovens, how many Blacks were lost in the Middle Passage) normally imposes upon such meditations. The ruse of analogy erroneously locates the Black in the world—a place where s/he has not been since the dawning of Blackness . This attempt to position the Black in the world by way of analogy is not only a mystification, and often erasure , of Blackness’s grammar of suffering (accumulation and fungibility or the status of being non-Human) but simultaneously also a provision for civil society , promising an enabling modality for Human ethical dilemmas. It is a mystification and an erasure because, whereas Masters may share the same fantasies as Slaves, and Slaves can speak as though they have the same interests as Masters, their respective grammars of suffering are irreconcilable. In dragging his interlocutors kicking and screaming through “Fact of

Blackness,” or what Ronald Judy has translated more pointedly as “The Lived Experience of the Black,” Fanon is not attempting to play “oppression Olympics” and thus draw conclusions that Blacks are at the top of every empirical hierarchy of social discrimination, though that case has also been made.xv Having established that, yes, the Jew is oppressed (and, yes, the Black is oppressed) Fanon refuses to let the lived experience of oppression dictate the terms of his meditations on suffering. He writes: [The Jew] belongs to the race of those [who] since the beginning of time have never known cannibalism. What an idea, to eat one’s father! Simple enough one has only not to be a nigger [emphasis mine]...[I]n my case everything takes on a new guise. I am the slave not of an idea others have of me but of my own appearance. (Black Skin, White Masks 115-16)

Two tensions are at work here. One operates under the labor of ethical dilemmas-- “ simple enough one has only not to be [black ] a nigger.”xvi This, I submit, is the essence of being for the White and non-Black position: ontology scaled down to a global common denominator . The other tension is found in the impossibility of ethical dilemmas for the Black: “I am,” Fanon writes, “a slave not of an idea others have of me but of my own appearance.” Being can thus be thought of, in the first ontological instance, as non- niggerness; and slavery then as niggerness. The visual field, “my own appearance,” is the cut, the mechanism that elaborates the division between the non-niggerness and

slavery, the difference between the living and the dead. Whereas Humans exist on some plane of being and thus can become existentially present through some struggle for/of/through recognition, Blacks cannot attain the plane of recognition (West 82). Spillers, Fanon, and Hartman maintain that the violence that has positioned and repetitively re-positions the Black as a void of historical movement is without analog in the suffering dynamics of the ontologically alive. The violence that turns the African into a thing is without analog because it does not simply oppress the Black through tactile and empirical technologies of oppression, like the “little family quarrels”

which for Fanon exemplify the Jewish Holocaust. Rather, the gratuitous violence of the Black’s first ontological instance, the Middle Passage, “wiped out [his/her] metaphysics...his [her] customs and sources on which they are based” (BSWM 110). Jews went into Auschwitz and came out as Jews. Africans went into the ships and came out as Blacks. The former is a Human holocaust; the latter is a Human and a metaphysical holocaust . That

is why it makes little sense to attempt analogy: the Jews have the Dead (the Muselmenn) among them; the Dead have the Blacks among them. This violence which turns a body into flesh, ripped apart literally and imaginatively, destroys the possibility of ontology because it positions the Black within an infinite and indeterminately horrifying and open vulnerability, an object made available (which is to say fungible) for any subject . As such,

“the black has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man” (110) or, more precisely, in the eyes of Humanity.

1NR

Exposition

MetaphorsInstrumentalization of the ocean undergirds modernity, racism, slavery, ecological collapse and ongoing systems of colonial brutalityJacques 12

Environmental Governance: Power and Knowledge in a Local-Global World, ed Gabriela Kütting, Ronnie Lipschutz

Peter Jacques, Ph.D. Department of Political Science University of Central Florida

Education Ph.D., Political Science, Northern Arizona University, 2003, with distinction. Masters in Public Administration (M.P.A.), environmental policy focus, Northern Arizona University, 2000. B.A., Philosophy, Montana State University, with honors, 1993. B.A., Film and Theater Arts, Montana State University, with honors,1993

Natural law here is important to the construction of power also, because it normalizes a specific ontology as infallible. Thus, I have argued that it was not that Grotius made the ocean open for all to use that set up matrices of world power and marine crises, but rather it was what he made it

open for that became so disastrous. Even after the open pool regime is closed, the purpose remains the same—instrumental enterprise—and closing mare liberum fails to change the essential place that the World Ocean holds in the minds of technocratic elite of the modern nation-state . During modernity, such violence is unaccountable to the living spaces of the World Ocean whether as the source of life, a home, an organism, an integrated part in the universe that creates identity, or

other purpose, because what had been “as common once as light and air” had been bound in logos that precludes non-instrumental ontologies and converts the oceans into a global water closet and avenue to other lockers, just like South Africa became for Grotius’ Netherlands. Where mare liberum originates a few years after the Dutch East India

Company, the Dutch colonial seeds are soon thereafter spread to South Africa in 1652. One space on the ocean became the same as any other in its function and purpose. Thus, with a natural law of European privileged trade and accumulation via a World Ocean, all other purposes, histories, and geographies are erased or shrouded. See, for example, Hegel's view on Africa as a subject of such globalization that is only possible after social relations and human-ocean relations are commodified and open up the world to barbaric subjugation : Africa is not interesting from the point of view of its own history. ... Man [in Africa] is in a state of barbarism and savagery which is preventing him from being an integral part of civilization. ... [Africa] is the country of gold which closed in on itself, the country of infancy, beyond the daylight of conscious history, wrapped in the blackness of

night. Of course the “blackness of night” appears to be a crude reference to skin color , and blackness equating the

undeveloped, the empty, and the savage. Colonizing the “heart of darkness” then is rationalized by erasing geography through the sea, making European development the end of history, and replacing other purposc(s) with a singular global purpose of free access to the rest of the worlds spaces and homes as naturalized right. Such erasure connects Grotius to Stephen Biko—where Biko led Black South Africans to see “blackness of their skin” as the cause of their collective oppression and articulate a Black Consciousness to reinstate not just political power in the face of Apartheid (apartness), but to reinstate pre-colonial South African purposes and ontologies (sec

Abdi 1999). Colonial and neo-colonial periods expunge the meanings of the local connection of inlet to stars of the

South Pacific, or the organic functions of a living water. Perhaps this is the most powerful reducer of modernity where all life and home is made to serve one master, making the habitation of multiple “overseas” spaces (see Luke, this volume) less palpable because there is no perceptible loss of purpose or function to the then colonial and now globalized “Northern”

minds. Enterprise, use, and free access to habitat and home underlies the structure of contemporary political order, which means that this very order must maintain a hegemonic hold on ontological notions of not just the ocean or of social relations, but of all-inclusive ecology (human and non-human) itself. Plumwood agrees that a main explanation for how the rationalist culture of the west has been able to expand and conquer other cultures as well as nature was that it has long lacked their respectbased constraints on the use of nature—a thought that

puts the “success” of the west in a rather different and more dangerous light. (Plumwood 2002: 117) The success is “more” dangerous because it leads in a boomerang effect back to the West where ecological collapse presses hard on the

doors of the West threatening broad social collapse, and the West will not be immune regardless of how remote it tries

to make itself. Nonetheless, without the Grotian or Scldenian ocean, the colonial nations could not have gone across

the sea to siphon off resources, and ultimately create the structure of a world capitalist system we now live in. Imagine the power of the current core states, such as those in the G-8, without a colonial legacy to found their current power, and through this

image we can imagine a counterfactual position for the modem power of the sea. Certainly, this power of the sea

was not lost on Alfred Thayer Mahan, who knew that control of the ocean was a prerequisite for extending national and imperial power. Control the sea, control the world. was his modem contribution. In order to control the sea, it has to be something ontologically that can be controlled , such as the “heap of matter that Nature could not bring to perfection.”

“Stupid” KDon’t say “stupid”ICG, Feburary 15th 2014, http://ischemgeek.wordpress.com/2014/02/15/the-case-against-stupid/

Stupid first entered the English language as a word back in the early 1540s . According to current current usage and definitions, its most common usage has to do with describing a lack of ordinary “quickness or keenness of mind” and describing things

characterized or proceeding from “mental dullness”. In other words, it is a word that exists to belittle those based upon their perceived mental acuity. If you doubt this statement, look only to its accepted list of synonyms, which includes such words as “dull,” “dumb,” “unintelligent,” “dim,” “doltish,” “half-witted,” “idiotic,” and “moronic”, all of which are words with well-defined ableist history

(several of which were once ableist medical terms). This belittlement of perceived mental acuity is harmful to those with cognitive and developmental disabilities – we who, due to those disabilities, are often perceived as having lower mental acuity than our peers. So, we’ve established that it has an ableist definition. Now I’m going to talk about my

case that it constitutes a euphemism for one of the most vile ableist slurs out there . The first part of my case is to look at the synonyms of that slur. It includes many of the same words as the list of synonyms for stupid, and even includes the word stupid itself. If you look at the definition, a common slang use is as a synonym for stupid or foolish – this is the ableist slur usage we’re so familiar with. In other words, even dictionaries, which are notoriously slow to accept changes in language usage, recognize that stupid is synonymous with that slur. Dictionaries exist to document current language usage patterns, not to stay on top of slang fads. Hence, for something to be placed in a dictionary as an accepted definition, it must be both 1, common usage (technical definitions almost never make it into general English dictionaries) and 2, old enough for the dictionaries to recognize it’s not a one-year fad like the neologism “ruly” was in my childhood. On the more personal side of this argument: That’s exactly how it was used against me. The exchange I wrote at the start of this post actually happened to me, and I learned very quickly that the other kids couldn’t get away with calling me a r*****d in public, but theycould get away with calling me stupid. So they used stupid as a euphemism for r*******d, probably just like their parents told them to. But, you see, kids possess less ability for self-deception than adults. So they didn’t try to rationalize that they were just going around the social condemnation of the use of the word retard by saying that wasn’t really what they were doing, they were actually just saying it was a bad idea or I was annoying or made no sense or what have you. They said it like it was: When they said stupid, they meant r*******d. As people get older and they learn the why of why retard is so very offensive, many of them don’t want to give up other ableist insultswhile they’re at it. After all, how can they express ableist sentiments

without ableist words? So they rationalize. Stupid doesn’t mean r*******d, it just means dull-witted and dumb, amirite? Some get angry: How dare you tell me that stupid is a euphemism for retard! That’s offensive! I don’t use it to mean r******d, I use it to mean [insert other ableist word here]! But the kids are more honest. They say it like it is.

Method

Self-ReflexivityPolitics of self-reflexivity constitutes the privilege as one able to engage in self-reflection and indigenous/non-white bodies as a screen for dominant actors to project their desires upon.Andrea Smith, 8-14-2013, associate professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies @ University of California, Riverside, intellectual, feminist, and anti-violence activist, “The Problem with “Privilege”,” http://andrea366.wordpress.com/2013/08/14/the-problem-with-privilege-by-andrea-smith/

Rey Chow notes that within this position of ethnographic entrapment, the only rhetorical position offered to the Native is that of the “protesting ethnic.” The posture to be assumed under the politics of recognition is the posture of complaint. If we complain eloquently, the system will give us something . Building on Chow’s work,

this essay will explore how another posture that is created within this economy is the self-reflexive settler/white subject. This self-reflexive subject is frequently on display at various anti-racist venues in which the privileged subject explains how much s/he learned about her complicity in settler colonialism and/or white supremacy

because of her exposure to Native peoples. A typical instance of this will involve non-Native peoples who make presentations based on what they “learned” while doing solidarity work with Native peoples in their field

research/solidarity work, etc. Complete with videos and slide shows, the presenters will express the privilege with which they struggled. We will learn how they tried to address the power imbalances between them and the peoples with which they studied or worked. We will learn how they struggled to gain their trust. Invariably, the narrative begins with the presenters initially facing the distrust of the Natives because of their settler/white privilege. But through perseverance and good intentions, the

researchers overcome this distrust and earn the friendship of their ethnographic objects. In these stories of course, to evoke Gayatri Spivak,

the subaltern does not speak. We do not hear what their theoretical analysis of their relationship is. We do not hear about how they were organizing on their own before they were saved /studied by these presenters. Native peoples are not positioned as those who can engage in self-reflection; they can only judge the worth of the confession . Consequently, the presenters of these narratives often present very nervously. Did they speak to all their privileges? Did they properly confess? Or will someone in the audience notice a mistake and question whether they have in fact become a fully-developed anti-racist subject? In that case, the subject would have to then engage in further acts of self-reflection that require new confessions in the future. Thus,

borrowing from the work of Scott Morgensen and Hiram Perez, the confession of privilege , while claiming to be anti-racist and anti-colonial, is actually a strategy that helps constitute the settler/white subject. In Morgensen’s analysis,

the settler subject constitutes itself through incorporation. Through this logic of settlement, settlers become the rightful inheritors of all that was indigenous – land, resources, indigenous spirituality, or culture. Thus, indigeneity is not necessarily framed as antagonistic to the settler subject; rather the Native is supposed to disappear into the project of settlement. The settler becomes the “new and improved” version of the Native, thus legitimizing and naturalizing the settler’s claims to this land. Hiram Perez similarly analyzes how the

white subject positions itself intellectually as a cosmopolitan subject capable of abstract theorizing through the use of the “raw material” provided by fixed, brown bodies. The white subject is capable of being “anti-“ or “post-identity,” but understands their post-identity only in relationship to brown subjects which are hopelessly fixed within identity. Brown peoples provide the “raw material” that enables the intellectual production of the white subject. Thus, self-reflexivity enables the constitution of the white/settler subject. Anti-racist/colonial struggles have created a colonial dis-ease that the settler/white subject may not in fact be self-determining . As a result, the white/settler subject reasserts their power through self-reflection . In

particular, indigenous peoples and people of color become the occasion by which the white subject can self-reflect on her/his privilege. If this person self-reflects effectively, s/he may be bestowed the title “ally” and build a career of her/his self-reflection . As many on the blogosphere have been commenting recently (see for instance @prisonculture and

@ChiefElk), an entire ally industrial complex has developed around the professional confession of privilege.