Settler Colonialism – RKS 2017

Megan, Sophia, Theo, George

**Aff Section**
Refusal Affirmative
 1AC
The founding of the United States is built upon genocidal value enacted through
colonialism. This colonization is not an event, but a process where a settler colonial
state compartmentalizes the violence it justifies. Liberal humanism erases the
geographies and subjectivity of indigenous people. Any call for freedom that cannot
grapple with settle colonialism are unethical
Byrd 11 (Jodi, citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma and an Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies and English at the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Transit of Empire,”//George)

As civil rights, queer rights, and other rights struggles have often cathected liberal democracy as the best possible
avenue to redress the historical violences of and exclusions from the state, scholars and activists committed to social
justice have been left with impossible choices: to articulate freedom at the expense of another, to seek
power and recognition in the hopes that we might avoid the syllogisms of democracy created through
colonialism. Lisa Lowe provides a useful caution as she reminds us that “the affirmation of the desire for freedom is so
inhabited by the forgetting of its condition of possibility that every narrative articulation of freedom is haunted by its
burial, by the violence of forgetting.” The ethical moment before us is to comprehend “the particular loss of the intimacies of
four continents, to engage slavery, genocide, indenture, and liberalism as a conjunction, as an actively
acknowledged loss within the present.”19 In attempting to people the intimacies of four continents, Lowe activates the Chinese
indentured laborer in the Caribbean just after Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 as the affective entry point into “a range of connections,
the global intimacies out of which emerged not only modern humanism but a modern racialized division of labor.”20 Her turn to the colonial
racialized labor force in the Americas helps to reveal the degree to which intimacy—here tracked through the spheres of spatial proximity, privacy,
and volatility—among Africa, Asia, and Europe in the Americas has served as the forgotten and disavowed constitutive means through which
liberal humanism defines freedom, family, equality, and humanity. In fact, liberal humanism, according to Lowe, depends upon the
“‘economy of affirmation and forgetting’” not just of particular streams of human history, but of the loss of
their geographies, histories, and subjectivities.21 In the indeterminacies between and among freedom, enslavement,
indentureship, interior, and exterior, the recovered Asian contract laborer, functioning as historical site for Lowe, can reveal the processes
through which liberalism asserts freedom and forgets enslavement as the condition of possibility for what constitutes “the human.” “Freedom
was” Lowe stresses, “constituted through a narrative dialectic that rested simultaneously on a spatialization of the unfree as exteriority and a
temporal subsuming of enslavement as internal difference or contradiction. The ‘overcoming’ of internal contradiction resolves in freedom within
the modern Western political sphere through displacement and elision of the coeval conditions of slavery and indentureship in the Americas.”22
But what seems to me to be further disavowed, even in Lowe's important figuration of the history of labor in “the intimacies of four
continents” is the settler colonialism that such labor underwrites. Asia, Africa, and Europe all meet in the Americas to
labor over the dialectics of free and unfree, but what of the Americas themselves and the prior peoples
upon whom that labor took place? Lowe includes “native peoples” in her figurations as an addendum when she writes that she
hopes “to evoke the political economic logics through which men and women from Africa and Asia were forcibly transported to the Americas,
who with native, mixed, and creole peoples constituted slave societies, the profits of which gave rise to bourgeois republican states in Europe
and North America.”23 By positioning the conditions of slavery and indentureship in the Americas as coeval contradictions through which Western
the fourth continent of settler
freedom affirms and resolves itself, and then by collapsing the indigenous Americas into slavery,
colonialism through which such intimacy is made to labor is not just forgotten or elided; it becomes the
very ground through which the other three continents struggle intimately for freedom, justice, and
equality. Within Lowe's formulation, the native peoples of the Americas are collapsed into slavery; their only role within the disavowed
intimacies of racialization is either one equivalent to that of African slaves or their ability to die so imported labor can make use of their lands,
“thus, within the “intimacies of four continents,” indigenous peoples in the new world cannot, in this system, give rise
to any historical agency or status within the “economy of affirmation and forgetting,” because they are
the transit through which the dialectic of subject and object occurs. In many ways, then, this book argues for a critical
reevaluation of the elaboration of these historical processes of oppression within postcolonial, critical race, queer, and American studies at the
beginning of the twentyfirst century. By foundationally accepting the general premise that racialization (along with the concomitant interlocking
oppressions of class, gender, and sexuality) causes the primary violences of U.S. politics in national and international arenas, multicultural
liberalism has aligned itself with settler colonialism despite professing the goal to disrupt and intervene in global forms of dominance through
investments in colorblind equality. Simply put, prevailing understandings of race and racialization within U.S. postcolonial,
area, and queer studies depend upon an historical aphasia of the conquest of indigenous peoples. Further,
these framings have forgotten, as Moreton-Robinson has argued, that “the question of how anyone came to be
white or black in the United States is inextricably tied to the dispossession of the original owners and
the assumption of white possession.”24 Calls to social justice for U.S. racialized, sexualized, immigrant, and
diasporic queer communities that include indigenous peoples, if they are not attuned to the ongoing conditions
of settler colonialism of indigenous peoples, risk deeming colonialism in North America resolved, if not redressed,
two cents for 100 billion dollars. Given all these difficulties, how might we place the arrivals of peoples through choice and by force into historical
relationship with indigenous peoples and theorize those arrivals in ways that are legible but still attuned to the conditions of settler colonialism?
These questions confront indigenous peoples still engaged in anticolonial projects of resistance. Colonialism brought the world, its
peoples, and their own structures of power and hegemony to indigenous lands. Our contemporary challenge is to theorize
alternative methodologies to address the problems imperialism continues to create. The conflation of racialization and colonization makes such
distinctions difficult precisely because discourses of humanism, enfranchisement, and freedom are so compelling within the smooth narrative
curves through which the state promises increasing liberty through pluralization. Just as Indianness serves as a transit of empire, analyses of
competing oppressions reproduce colonialist discourses even when they attempt to disrupt and transform
participatory democracy away from its origins in slavery, genocide, and indentureship. One reason why a
“postracial” and just democratic society is a lost cause in the United States is that it is always already conceived through
the prior disavowed and misremembered colonization of indigenous lands that cannot be ended by further
inclusion or more participation.251 hope to disrupt this dilemma by placing indige-nous phenomenologies into conversation with
critical theory in order to identify indigenous transits and consider possible alternative strategies for legibility. One such strategy is to read the
cacophonies of colonialism as they are rather than to attempt to hierarchize them into coeval or causal order. Southeastern indigenous
phenomenologies understand the Middle World (the reality we all inhabit) as a bridge between Upper and Lower Worlds of creation. When the
boundaries between worlds break down and the distinctive characteristics of each world begin to collapse upon and bleed into the others,
possibilities for rejuvenation and destruction emerge to transform this world radically. The goal is to find balance. To understand the dualistic
pairings of this dynamic system is to understand, as Cherokee scholar Daniel Heath Justice has argued, “its necessary complementarity; it is a
dynamic and relational perspective, not an assumption of unitary supremacy.” 26 Choctaw novelist and scholar LeAnne Howe demonstrates in
her writing the ways a phenomenology that draws upon traditional Southeastern cosmologies of balance between worlds might transform written
narratives and theorizations to represent the passage of time and the interactions of relationships and kinship differently. In her short story, “A
Chaos of Angels,” Howe explains that “when the Upper and Lower Worlds collide in the Between World,” there are repercussions in this world.27
The resultant chaos, or what she translates into Choctaw as "haksuba,” is both a generative, creative force as well as a potentially destructive
one. Her story focuses on the collision between the Choctaw, Chickasaw, French, and British worldings that occur in the creation of New Orleans.
"Haksuba or chaos,” she tells us, “occurs when Indians and non-Indians bang their heads together in search of cross-cultural understanding.”28
When the French, Choctaw, Haitian, Creole, Chickasaw, indigenous, slave, and free identities collide in the lands that will become Louisiana, the
“banging together” creates shockwaves that ripple outward from the collision in time, space, and popular culture (so hard that Darth Vader
himself feels the impact). Throughout the story, Howes narrator is tracked by a black Haitian woman and a bullfrog. Both characters taunt her
and incessantly remind her of connections and kinship relationships that she has denied or refused. The frog turns out to be the Frenchman Jean-
Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, whose obsessions are responsible for erecting New Orleans on the mosquito-infested swampland that the
Choctaw gave him as a joke; the Haitian woman is the narrator’s sister and cousin, a relative of Choctaws stolen by Bienville and sent as slaves to
the Caribbean. The haksuba that Howes story presents is not so much chaos as it is the intercontextual relations between histories and lived
experiences. The reader learns along with the narrator how to traverse the past and future worlds that begin to bleed into the present through
a rebuilding of kinship networks as an interpretive strategy. Howe’s evocation of the tattooed, bluelipped Ancient Ones who watch over the
narrator as she floats naked in a primordial swimming pool at the beginning of the story is simultaneously a reference to the Choctaw women’s
tradition of tattooing their lips with blue ink and a genealogical trace to the African and African-Choctaw ancestors of the Haitian woman.
Bienville’s presence attests to Choctaw diplomacies in negotiating with those arriving from Europe and reminds the narrator that New Orleans
was originally Choctaw land. Through the course of the story, the narrator struggles to understand the densities that surround her and her place
within them. At the end, when the narrator is reunited with her dead grandmother who has traversed life and death, past and future, in the living
challenge of a “cross-cultural afterlife,” the narrator is told, “‘Never forget that we are all alive! All people, all animals, all living things; and what
you do here affects all of us everywhere. What we do affects you, too.”29 The haksuba that Howe’s story describes provides a foundational ethos
for indigenous critical theories that emphasize the interconnectedness and grievability embodied within and among relational kinships created
by histories of oppressions. The narrator learns throughout the story to see that those pieces and elements “banging together” have deeper
motivating logics that place and connect them within already established and functioning Choctaw worldings. By privileging Southeastern
indigenous philosophical understandings and bringing them into conversation with Western philosophical traditions, this book responds in part
to calls Dale Turner (Teme-Augama Anishnabai), Sandy Grande (Quechua), Robert Warrior (Osage), and Chris Andersen (Michif) have made for
an intellectual disciplining of American Indian and indigenous studies with both an inward and outward turn.30 Ngati Pukenga scholar Brendan
Hokowhitu has suggested that, “as a canonical field ‘Indigenous studies’ does not exist. Its genesis,” he continues, “has been ad hoc, yet organic,
in the sense that the amorphous concept of ‘Indigenous studies’ has arisen out of pre-established local departments, such as Maori studies in
New Zealand, Aboriginal studies in Australia and Native studies departments in the US and Canada.”31 The challenge facing indigenous studies
in the academy is not just the need to negotiate the Western colonial biases that render indigenous peoples as precolonial ethnographic purveyors
of cultural authenticity instead of scholars capable of research and insight, but also the need to respect the local specificities, histories, and
geographies that inform the concept of indigeneity. Despite these pitfalls, however, indigenous critical theory as an emergent undertaking has
made strides in comparative indigenous studies attuned to the local conditions of colonialism that might speak across geopolitical boundaries.
Although the United Nations’ Working Group on Indigenous Peoples and the 2007 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples have resisted
defining “indigenous peoples” in order to prevent nation-states from policing the category as a site of exception, Jeft Corntassel (Cherokee) and
Indigenousness is an
Taiaiake Alfred (Kahnawake Mohawk) provide a useful provisional definition in their essay “Being Indigenous”:
identity constructed, shaped, and lived in the politicized context of contemporary colonialism. The communities,
clans, nations and tribes we call Indigenous peoples are just that: Indigenous to the lands they inhabit, in
contrast to and in contention with the colonial societies and states that have spread out from Europe and other centres
of empire. It is this oppositional, place based existence, along with the consciousness of being in struggle
against the dispossessing and demeaning fact of colonization by foreign peoples, that fundamentally distinguishes Indigenous
peoples from other peoples of the world.32 In their definition there emerges a contentious, oppositional identity
and existence to confront imperialism and colonialism. Indigenousness also hinges, in Alfred and Corntassel, on certain Manichean allegories of
foreign/native wand colonizer/colonized within reclamations of “placebased existence,” and these can, at times, tip into a formulation that does
indigenous critical theory could be said to
not challenge neoliberalism as much as it mirrors it. But despite these potential pitfalls,
exist in its best form when it centers itself within indigenous epistemologies and the specificities of the
communities and cultures from which it emerges and then looks outward to engage European philosophical, legal,
and cultural traditions in order to build upon all the allied tools available. Steeped in anticolonial
consciousness that deconstructs and confronts the colonial logics of settler states carved out of and on top
of indigenous usual and accustomed lands, indigenous critical theory has the potential in this mode to offer a
transformative accountability. From this vantage, indigenous critical theory might, then, provide a
diagnostic way of reading and interpreting the colonial logics that underpin cultural, intellectual, and
political discourses. But it asks that settler, native, and arrivant each acknowledge their own positions
within empire and then reconceptualize space and history to make visible what imperialism and its resultant
settler colonialisms and diasporas have sought to obscure. Within the continental United States, it means imagining an
entirely different map and understanding of territory and space: a map constituted by over 565 sovereign
indigenous nations, with their own borders and boundaries, that transgress what has been naturalized as
contiguous territory divided into 48 states.33 “There is always,” Aileen Moreton-Robinson writes of indigenous
peoples’ incommensurablity within the postcolonizing settler society, “a subject position that can be thought of as fixed in
its inalienable relation to land. This subject position cannot be erased by colonizing processes which
seek to position the indigenous as object, inferior, other and its origins are not tied to migration.”34

White settler society produces an educational curriculum geared toward ensuring their
futurity. This logic is pervasive operating to produce a feeling of inclusion, only to re-
occupy the marginalized spaces. This logic operates in spaces like debate which uses a
narrow political framework to limit out potentially radical dialogue on education within
this resolution.
Bazinet,(Trycia, Carleton University, School of Indigenous and Canadian Studies, Graduate Student at University of Ottawa ) 2016 (White
Settler-Colonialism, International Development Education, and the Question of Futurity: A Content Analysis of the University of Ottawa Master’s
Program Mandatory Syllabi in Globalization and International Development, pg 34-37, C.A.)
Given my empirical results and the discussion explaining the drive behind such results, I will now situate where the program stands in terms of which future is assumed.

Settler moves to innocence are the adaptations that occur when settler sovereignty or settler capacities
to possess land and Indigeneity are perceived to be challenged. With varying outward appearance and manifestations, they all
serve to restore settlers’ feelings of security, but do nothing to contribute to decolonization (Battell Lowman & Barker, 2015, p. 107). Engaging with settler-colonialism
means to recognize that the settler institutions and structures are not only always visceral – but that the actions emerging after the recognition of this fact are also
deeply ingrained -visceral (Hayes-Conroy & Hayes-Conroy, 2008, p. 1274). For instance, current white settler confessions of their privileges and complicity have been
shown to be performative when they only cater to settler discomfort, enabling
them to avoid taking any real responsibilities (Barker
& Batell Lowman, 2015, p. 102-103). White
settler curricula are skilled and equipped to “re-occupy the spaces” that
anticolonial, anti-racist, queer and feminist critiques struggle to create (Tuck & GaztambideFernandez, 2013, p. 73). The
point of this section is to highlight how good intentions behind the impulses to overcome and relegate to the past the oppressive systems in which we bathe often
serve to
“most potently re-entrench” these same systems (Ahmed, as cited in De Leeuw & al, 2013, p. 391) for the sake of a
certain futurity. White settler curricula, whether well-intentioned or not, can absorb, tame and distort
progressive language and ideas so that it leaves its own core unaffected . In settler-colonial universities, what is often
ignored in decolonizing efforts is the existing marginalized individuals who, in the first place, produced the progressive language and ideas from a place of survival,
white settler futurity is fragile and easily threatened. When this occurs, feelings of anger,
sacred duties and resurgence. But,

resentment and anxiety concentrate on re-attaining settler certainty, especially in regards to property
(Mackey, 2014). Settler certainty, which has to do with being able to assume white settler futurity, is protected and higher education, including in its reforms. It is
protected to such an extent that it is rarely perceived to be threatened in the first place. Given my empirical results, this is what seems to be happening in the master’s
of international development. Settler
attachments are turned into material quotidian representations, such as in
school curricula, in which presences and absences of Indigeneity/Indigenous might first appear like a
simple result of ignorance or dismissal when in reality they are not . Meanwhile, issues of colonization and Indigenous
perspectives are seen as a “difficult knowledge” (Marker, as cited in Kerr, 2014, p. 94) to engage with given the implications of trauma, violence, responsibility and
reparations that educators might not be ready or equipped to unravel. At times, it is even seen as a threat to academic freedom (Horne, 1999, as cited in Kuokkanen,
2007, p. 18). Educators might also simply think that teaching is and/or should be neutral and apolitical (Tuck & Gorlewski, 2016, p. 203). It remains easier to focus on
continued and present land assault and dispossession
Indigenous communities, sometimes labeling them as “difficult”. Likewise,

can even be ignored in “decolonizing talks”, rather than being at the center of them. Much of what is
called progressive education today still leaves settler occupation unchallenged (De Leeuw, Greenwood, & Lindsey
2013; Tuck & Gorlewski, 2016, p. 213). As we have seen, Indigeneity is detached from the body of the Indigenous person to be appropriated by settlers themselves to
try to make themselves Indigenous. Indigeneity is also circulating elsewhere; in most theories, it, stands as a sign, an exception, which serves to “reboot the colonialist
discourse” (Byrd, 2011, p. 221). Thismeans that when Indigeneity is present and/or appears, it does not necessarily
decolonize but rather it often helps a settler institution to adapt and tame the decolonizing challenges
it brings up. When Indigeneity poses challenges, settler futurity is ensured by “the absorption of any and all critiques”, but also through the “replacement of
anyone who dares to speak against ongoing colonization” (Tuck & GaztambideFernandez, 2013, p. 73). This is so because settler-colonialism is

constantly “producing the conditions of its own supersession”, even when it becomes self-aware or
“announces its passing” (Veracini, 2011, as cited in De Leeuw & Al, 2013, p. 385). The presences and circulation of Indigeneity
can be called “epistemic collisions” when they take place in educational places against the “secular
cosmology and neutral positioning of Western scientific materialism ” (Kerr, 2014, p. 84). Epistemic collisions
lead to a vast range of settler reactions and reassertions towards innocence. Indeed, decolonization is
not simple, rather, it is most often “messy, dynamic and contradictory” (Sium, Desai & Ritskes, 2012, as cited in De Oliveira
Andreotti & Al, 2015, p. 22). Moves to innocence are among the vast range of techniques and reflexes of settler people and settler institutions to reinscribe their non-
complicity in the present structure settler-colonialism from which they benefit (Tuck & Yang, 2012). They can happen voluntarily but also under the pressure to “to
collapse decolonization into coherent, normative formulas with seemingly unambiguous agendas” (De Oliveira Andreotti & Al, 2015, p. 22). In light of the recent Truth
This
and Reconciliation commission for instance, there is a current incentive to institutionally integrate its recommendations, including in the academy.

understandable rush to do things right creates epistemic collisions that have different results.
Unfortunately, these results may lead to the securing of settler futurity (Tuck & GaztambideFernandez, 2013). The
entrenchment of colonial relations in higher education means that even good intentions to decolonize, once
cornered with all the contradictions of Canada, result in further embedding of these relations (Deborah Bird Rose, 1996, as cited in De
Leeuw & al, 2013, p. 385).

This educational discourse is deployed in the service of the settler colonial state to
reaffirms its national sovereignty and the authority to naturalizes biopolitical violence.
Rifkin 9 (Mark Rifkin is an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. “Indigenizing
Agamben: Rethinking Sovereignty in Light of the "Peculiar" Status of Native Peoples.” Cultural Critique. Number 73, Fall 2009. Project
Muse//George)
In using Agamben's work to address U.S. Indian policy, though, it needs to be reworked. In particular, his emphasis on biopolitics tends to come at
the expense of a discussion of geopolitics, the production of race supplanting the production of space as a way of envisioning the work of the
sovereignty he critiques, and while his concept of the exception has been immensely influential in contemporary scholarship and cultural criticism,
such accounts largely have left aside discussion of Indigenous peoples. Attending to Native peoples' position within settler-state sovereignties
requires investigating and adjusting three aspects of Agamben's thinking: the persistent inside/outside tropology he uses to address the
exception, specifically the ways it serves as a metaphor divorced from territoriality; the notion of "bare life" as the basis of the exception,
especially the individualizing ways that he uses that concept; and the implicit depiction of sovereignty as a self-confident exercise of authority
free from anxiety over the legitimacy of state actions.5 Such revision allows for a reconsideration of the "zone of indistinction" produced by and
within sovereignty, opening up analysis of the ways settler-states regulate not only proper kinds of embodiment ("bare life") but also legitimate
modes of collectivity and occupancy—what I will call bare habitance. If the "overriding sovereignty" of the United States is predicated on the
creation of a state of exception, then the struggle for sovereignty by Native peoples can be envisioned as less about
control of particular policy domains than of metapolitical authority—the ability to define the content and
scope of "law" and "politics." Such a shift draws attention away from critiques of the particular rhetorics used to justify the state's plenary power and toward
a macrological effort [End Page 90] to contest the "overriding" assertion of a right to exert control over Native polities. My argument, then, explores the limits of
forms of analysis organized around the critique of the settler-state's employment of racialized discourses of savagery and the emphasis on cultural distinctions
between Euramerican and Indigenous modes of governance. Both of these strategies within Indigenous political theory treat sovereignty as a particular kind of political
content that can be juxtaposed with a substantively different—more Native-friendly or Indigenous-centered—content, but by contrast, I suggest that discourses

are deployed by the state in ways that reaffirm its

of racial difference and equality as well as of cultural recognition
geopolitical self-evidence and its authority to determine what issues, processes, and statuses will count as
meaningful within the political system. While arguments about Euramerican racism and the disjunctions between Native traditions and imposed
structures of governance can be quite powerful in challenging aspects of settler-state policy, they cannot account for the structuring violence performed by the figure
of sovereignty. Drawing on Agamben, I will argue that "sovereignty" functions as a placeholder that has no determinate content.6 The state has been described
as an entity that exercises a monopoly on the legitimate exercise of violence, and what I am suggesting is that the state of exception produced
through Indian policy creates a monopoly on the legitimate exercise of legitimacy, an exclusive uncontestable right to define what will count as
a viable legal or political form(ul)ation. That fundamentally circular and self-validating, as well as anxious and fraught, performance grounds the
legitimacy of state rule on nothing more than the axiomatic negation of Native peoples' authority to determine or adjudicate for themselves the
normative principles by which they will be governed. Through Agamben's theory of the exception, then, I will explore how the supposedly
underlying sovereignty of the U.S. settler-state is a retrospective projection generated by, and dependent on, the "peculiar"-ization of Native
peoples. The Domain of Inclusive Exclusion: The Camp and the Reservation In introducing his argument in Homo Sacer, Agamben marks, while
seeking to trouble the distinction between zoē and bios, "the simple fact [End Page 91] of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or
gods)" versus "the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group" (1). He suggests that in classical antiquity the former was excluded
from the sphere of politics, and that part of what most distinguishes modernity, particularly the structure of the state, is the effort to bring the
former into the orbit of governmental regulation, in fact to see it as the animating principle of political life ("the politicization of bare life as such"
[4]). The first articulation of the book's central thesis, then, is as follows: "It can even be said that the production of a biopolitical body is the
original activity of sovereign power" (6).7 In other words, modern sovereignty depends upon generating a vision of the "body"—of apolitical
natural life—that is cast as simultaneously exterior to the sphere of government and law and as the reference point for defining the proper aims,
objects, and methods of governance ("[p]lacing biological life at the center of its calculations" [6]). That "body" is divorced from politics per se
while simultaneously defining the aspirational and normative horizon of political action. "Bare life," therefore, serves as an authorizing figure for
decision-making by self-consciously political institutions while itself being presented as exempt from question or challenge within such
institutions. Further, and more urgently for Agamben, the generation of "bare life" makes thinkable the consignment of those who do not fit the
idealized "biopolitical body" to a "zone" outside of political participation and the regular working of the law but still within the ambit of state
power. Describing this possibility, he observes, "The relation of exception is a relation of ban. He who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set
outside the law and made indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold…. It is literally not possible
to say whether the one who has been banned is outside or inside the juridical order" (28–29). For Agamben, the Nazi concentration camp serves
as the paradigmatic example of the biopolitical imperatives structuring modern sovereignty, described as "the hidden matrix and nomos of the
political space in which we are still living" (166). The existence of the camps disrupted the "functional nexus" on which the modern nation-state
was "founded": "the old trinity composed of the state, the nation (birth), and land" in which "a determinate localization (land) and a determinate
order (the State) are mediated by automatic rules for the inscription of life (birth or the [End Page 92] nation)" (174–76). The camp opens up a
location within the state in which persons who are linked to the space of the nation by birth can be managed as "bare life," as mere biological
beings bereft of any/all of the legal protections of citizenship. Yet if that denial of political subjectivity and simultaneous subjection to the force
of the state confuses, or perhaps conflates, "exclusion and inclusion," to what extent is that blurring predicated on the reification of the
boundaries of the "sovereign power" of the nation? Put another way, if the person in the state of exception is considered "bare life" and thus
neither truly "outside [n]or inside the juridical order," how does one know that the "abandoned" comes under the sway of a given sovereign?
How might the "irreducible indistinction" enacted by sovereignty that Agamben describes itself depend on a prior geopolitical mapping that is
also produced through the invocation of sovereignty, differentiating those people and places that fall within the jurisdictional sphere of a given
state from those that do not? That process of distinction, I contend, draws on the logic of exception Agamben theorizes but in ways that cannot
be reduced to the creation of a "biopolitical body." In describing how modern sovereignty appears to found itself on the will of the people,
Agamben locates a biopolitical problematic at the core of that claim: It is as if what we call "people" were in reality not a unitary subject but a
dialectical oscillation between two opposite poles: on the one hand, the set of the People as a whole political body, and on the other, the subset
of the people as a fragmentary multiplicity of needy and excluded bodies; or again, on the one hand, an inclusion that claims to be total, and on
the other, an exclusion that is clearly hopeless; at one extreme, the total state of integrated and sovereign citizens, and at the other, the
preserve—court of miracles or camp—of the wretched, the oppressed, and the defeated. (177) The "People" stands less for the
actual assemblage of persons within the state than for the set of those who fit the ideal "body" and who
consequently will be recognized as "citizens," with the rest of the resident population consigned to the realm of "bare

life"—the people who are not the People and thus are excluded from meaningful participation while remaining the objects of state control. However, when reflecting
on the status of Indigenous populations in relation to the settler-state, a third category emerges that is neither people nor People—namely [End Page 93] peoples.
The possibility of conceptualizing the nation as "a whole political body" requires narrating it as "a unitary subject"
rather than a collection of separate, unsubordinated, self-governing polities. Conversely, for "inclusion" to be
articulated as "total," it needs to have a clear domain over which it is extended. In critiquing the approach of previous
theorists to the issue of sovereignty, Agamben notes, "The problem of sovereignty was reduced to the question of who within

the political order was invested with certain powers, and the very threshold of the political order itself
was never called into question" (12), but Agamben's account itself assumes a clear "within" by not posing the question of how sovereignty produces
and is produced by place, how the state is realized as a spatial phenomenon as part of "the very threshold of the political order itself." I am suggesting, then, that
the biopolitical project of defining the proper "body" of the people is subtended by the geopolitical project
of defining the territoriality of the nation, displacing competing claims by older/other political formations as what we
might call bare habitance. Agamben notes, "The camp is a piece of land placed outside the normal juridical order, but it is nevertheless not simply an external space"
(169–70), but that definition also seems to capture rather precisely the status of the reservation, a space that while governed under "peculiar" rules categorically is
denied status as "external," or "foreign." Examining the reservation, and more broadly the representation of Native collectivity and territoriality in U.S. governmental
discourses, through the prism of Agamben's analysis of the state of exception helps highlight the kinds of " sovereign violence" at play in the
(re)production and naturalization of national space.8 The effort to think biopolitics without geopolitics, bare life without bare habitance, results in
the erasure of the politics of collectivity and occupancy: what entities will count as polities and thus be seen as deserving of autonomy, what modes of inhabitance
and land tenure will be understood as legitimate, and who will get to make such determinations and on what basis?9 Focusing on the fracture between "the People"
and "the people" imagines explicitly or implicitly either a reconciliation of the two (restoring a version of the "trinity" of state, land, and birth) or the proliferation of
a boundaryless humanness unconstrained by territorially circumscribed polities. These options leave little room for thinking indigeneity, the existence of peoples
forcibly made domestic [End Page 94] whose self-understandings and aspirations cannot be understood in terms of the denial of (or disjunctions within) state
citizenship.10

White supremacist settler colonialism accentuates the logic of extermination of indigenous

populations, seizure of privatized lands, exploitation of marginalized people under a system of
capitalism, brutality, dehumanization, and the premature death of people of color.
Bonds & Inwood 16 [Anne Bonds is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee
with research interests in racialized poverty and privilege, neoliberal restructuring, and the politics of economic development; Joshua Inwood is
an associate professor in the Department of Geography and a research associate in the Rock Ethics Institute. He received his PhD from the
Department of Geography at the University of Georgia and before coming to Penn State was a faculty member at the University of Tennessee
and Auburn University.; Beyond white privilege: Geographies of white supremacy and settler colonialism, Progress in Human Geography 2016,
Vol. 40 (6); Hall]

Drawing from the fields of critical race and ethnic studies and postcolonial theory, we develop two
interconnected argument for the study of race, racism, and privilege. First, we argue for the value and need
of developing geographically sensitive theorizations of white supremacy as the animating logic of
racism and privilege. Second, we contend that the concept of settler colonialism, as an ongoing mode of
empire, has much to offer studies of race and racialized geographies, particularly in illustrating the
material conditions of white supremacy. Both conceptual tools complicate common sense temporalities
and spatialities: neither white supremacy nor settler colonialism can be relegated to historical contexts.
Rather, both inform past, present, and future formations of race. In expanding this theoretical frame, we
engage with recent debates in geography about the materialities of race (Mahtani, 2014; Slocum and Saldana, 2013;
Pulido, 2015) and develop a historicized, rather than historical (Schein, 2011), account that locates white
supremacy and colonization in the ‘right here, right now’ (Morgensen, 2011: 52) rather than the past. As a
project of empire enabled by white supremacy, settler colonialism is theoretically, politically, and
geographically distinct from colonialism. Rather than emphasizing imperial expansion driven primarily
by militaristic or economic purposes, which involves the departure of the colonizer, settler colonialism
focuses on the permanent occupation of a territory and removal of indigenous peoples with the express
purpose of building an ethnically distinct national community (Veracini, 2010; Elkins and Pedersen, 2005; Hixson, 2013;
Tuck and Yang, 2012; Seawright, 2014; Pasternak, 2013; Kobayashi and De Leeuw, 2010). Because of the permanence of settler societies, settler
colonization is theorized not as an event or moment in history, but as an enduring structure requiring
constant maintenance in an effort to disappear indigenous populations (Wolfe, 2006). Settler colonialism is
therefore premised on ‘logics of extermination’ (Wolfe, 2006) as the building of new settlements necessitates
the eradication of indigenous populations, the seizure and privatization of their lands, and the
exploitation of marginalized peoples in a system of capitalism established by and reinforced through
racism. Key examples of settler societies include the United States, Canada, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa,
Argentina, and Brazil. In connecting settler colonialism to studies of whiteness and racism in geography, we argue that white supremacy
is a critically important yet undertheorized concept, as compared to the more widely recognized notion of white
privilege. An emphasis on white supremacy rather than white privilege is more than just se mantics. Rather, white supremacy
more precisely describes and locates white racial domination by underscoring the material production
and violence of racial structures and the hegemony of whiteness in settler societies. The concept of
white supremacy forcefully calls attention to the brutality and dehumanization of racial exploitation
and domination that emerges from settler colonial societies. While white privilege remains an important analytic frame
to analyze the taken-for-granted benefits and protections afforded to whites based upon skin color, the concept of privilege emphasizes the social
condition of whiteness, rather than the institutions, practices, and processes that produce this condition in the first place (Leonardo, 2004;
White supremacy accentuates the structures of white power and the domination
Smith,2012; Pulido, 2015).
and exploitation that give rise to social exclusion and premature death of people of color in settler
colonial states (Gilmore, 2002,2006; Cacho, 2014). Our analysis begins with a discussion of studies of whiteness and white privilege. We
distinguish white supremacy from white privilege and advocate for a broadening of the discussion to take white supremacy more seriously (see
also Pulido, 2015; Berg, 2011). Our work should not be read in opposition to understandings of white privilege. 1 Such an approach would
undermine the significant and ongoing contributions of this work. However, we do wish to trouble the prominence of white
privilege as a theoretical pivot point in geography as well as our own stakes in this intellectual project.
Moreover, we do not rehash debates that posit political economic structures and historical materialism
against discourse. Instead, we encourage dialogue for critical engagement in theorizing the systematic,
enduring production of white racial dominance in settler societies at a moment of heightened political
struggle and in an era when neoliberal multiculturalism and post-racial ideologies frame racism in terms
of individualized prejudices rather than in terms of enduring structures of white power (Melamed, 2011;
Goldberg, 2009; Berg, 2011). Though still theoretically oriented around whiteness, we argue that the concept of white supremacy
destabilizes the ‘innocence of whiteness’ (Leonardo, 2004) and emphasizes the ways whites – including those
who identify as anti-racist – materially, socially and academically benefit in settler societies. Following this
discussion, we present the example of a recent land dispute in the US west-ern state of Nevada that illustrates the important, yet geographically
undertheorized, implications of white supremacy and settler colonialism. Settler colonialism as a concept has been developed primarily in
particular ‘colonial moments’ (Kempf, 2010)
Australian and Canadian contexts, and we draw from this example to show how
sustain and strengthen settler logics and white racial domination in the United States. Though our case is
focused on the US, it has broad implications for understanding white supremacy and enduring modes of empire. Finally, we conclude with general
remarks about the potential geography has to contribute to understandings of white supremacy and settler societies.
Thus, we affirm an ethnographic refusal as a regulation of the dominant settler colonial
curriculum that ensures endless violence in the name of futurity. This refusal creates a
space of anticolonial education and revolutionary dialogue that can begin to imagine
and fashion alternative futures for indigenous people.
Pochedley 16, (Lakota, M.A. The University of Texas at Austin, “Neshnabe Treaty Making: (Re)visionings for Indigenous Futurities in
Education” https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/39210/POCHEDLEY-THESIS-2016.pdf?sequence=10//George

Multiculturalism,” “Social Justice,” “Solidarity” has become common buzzwords within the realm of
education--in schools, professional development, or university education courses. Gloria Ladson-Billings (2004)
succinctly put, “Multicultural has made it to Main Street” (50). In the sentence before this, Ladson- 30 Billings (2004) describes “the ease with
which a major newspaper used the term multicultural tells us something about how power and domination appropriate event the most marginal
voices” (50). This is the settler colonial structure that hounds us, appropriates us, attempts to eliminate us, and
now decolonization “has made it to Main Street.” Within the structures of settler colonialism there is not
only a need to appropriate, but domesticate--domesticate the land, our bodies, our knowledge--to
allow for settler futurities (Tuck & Yang, 2012). Alyosha Goldstein in response to Sandy Grande’s (2015) first chapter in Red Pedagogy
reminds us, …as settler colonialism and decolonization are increasingly invoked by nonIndigenous scholars and
activists, it becomes especially important to engage the specificity, social etymology, and complex
genealogies of each term. Decolonization is not an analogy for struggles against domination in general (46). Indigenous scholars
have contributed painstaking work in examining the etymologies and genealogies of [settler] colonization,
imperialism, indigeneity, sovereignty and decolonization (Barker, 2011; Byrd, 2011; Coulthard, 2007, 2014; Grande, 2015;
A. Simpson, 2014b; Smith, 2012; Tuck & Yang, 2012). These theories, particularly decolonization, cannot be appropriated or manipulated to serve
projects that are not engage with decolonization as praxis in regards to all relationships structured by settler colonialism (principally relationships
to land as property). Thus, the need to delineate anti- and de-colonial theories and action becomes necessary. Patel (2014) explains,
“anticolonial...does not include in its semantic shape the unmet promises of stripping away colonization, as the term decolonization gestures to
do. This, in itself, marks anticolonial stances as incomplete, as they don’t necessarily address 31 material change” (360). An
anticolonial
approach allows for us to inquire and reflect on the underpinning of settler colonialism—“the
epistemological and ontological projects of coloniality”—and our relationships within, among, through,
and to coloniality because no one is irreproachable within the pervasive structures of settler colonialism
and white supremacy (Calderon, in press, as quoted in Patel, 2014: 360). Anticolonial engagement is
needed to pause and reflect to understand the complexities and intricacies of settler colonialism, white
supremacy, and currently neoliberalism—the ways in which these structures and institutions impact our
lives, relationships (among each other and other living beings), subjectivities—because context matters,
but it also shifts and transitions. Decolonization is not equivocal to other anti-colonial struggles. It is
incommensurable (Tuck & Yang, 2012: 31) If we are serious about decolonizing our political systems and
governance, we must be prepared to blatantly reject the colonizers’s view of our knowledge and we must
embrace strategies based on our own distinctive Indigenous intellectual traditions (L.Simpson, 2008: 76). When
we look to theories of decolonization, we look everywhere but here. We turn to Fanon or Said, Spivak or Babba, whose theories of de/post-
colonization are provocative, beautiful, restorative, but also exist in various contexts, except here, specifically addressing settler colonialism on
Turtle Island. The Indian is topic postcolonial studies steer clear from (Byrd, 2011), but the Indigenous nations here in North and South America
and in the Pacific have been waging a decolonial struggle for more than 500 years (L. Simpson, 2011). “‘Decolonization’ (like democracy) is neither
achievable nor definable, rendering it ephemeral as a goal, but perpetual as a process” (Grande, 2015: 234, italics in the original).
Decolonization is not a Western-based theory 32 or inquiry, it is a process that must enacted and lived, that
has always been in action and living on and in these lands (Grande, 2015; L. Simpson, 2011). Leanne Simpson (2014) reminds
us “the land must once again become the pedagogy” (14) because Indigenous Knowledge (IK) provides us
decolonial possibilities and futuries (L. Simpson, 2008, 2011, 2014; Saranillio, 2014, 2015). Saranillio (2014) conceptualizes,
…by taking subjugated indigenous knowledges seriously, expanding on a concern with the governance of
human bodies to include bodies of land and water, delicate ecosystems, and other life forms necessary to
the conditions that sustain life…such possibilities serve as the foundation for the materialization of an
alternative way of life to the settler state that would radically challenge the current system (p. 258). Before
addressing the importance of land in Indigenous epistemologies, we must critically explore what learning and pedagogy are, despite what they
have been framed as under neoliberal policies. Despite what has occurred due to school reforms, high stakes testing, and standardized curriculum,
schooling and learning are not interchangeable terms (Patel, 2016). Patel (2016) specifies, “learning is fundamentally about transform. It is coming
into being and constantly altering that being; it is subjective and often a messy act...Coming into being is in essence about being-in-relation (76).
And “Pedagogy is more than simply the act of teaching; it too is an active and critical engagement with
the world. Thus, teaching and learning are coterminous; one cannot truly engage in teaching without also being a learner” (Brayboy &
McCarty, 2010: 192). Learning, teachers, and pedagogy have always existed and been engaged within Indigenous communities long 33 before
Europeans arrived (Grande, 2015; L. Simpson, 2014; Smith, 2012). Yet, instead of learning being something reserved for classrooms and books,
learning was relational. To understand how
Indigenous Knowledge and learning was relational, one must turn
to the role and structure of our stories and epistemologies. Sarah Hunt (2014) writes, “Looking to Indigenous
epistemologies for ways to get beyond the ontological limit of what is legible as Western scholarship, a
number of Indigenous scholars have pointed to stories, art, and metaphor as important transmitters of
Indigenous knowledge. Stories and story-telling are widely acknowledged as culturally nuanced ways of knowing, produced with
networks of relational meaningmaking” (27). Leanne Simpson (2014) tells the story of Kwezens and how the Neshnabek learned how to harvest
maple syrup. Kwezens watched a squirrel nibble on a tree and then sucking on the tree. Kwezens reenacts what the squirrel is doing and finds
that there is something liquidity and sweet in the tree, then Kwezens decides to make a little slide and container from her surroundings so she
can take the sweetwater home to her mother. Simpson’s (2014) retelling of the story of Kwezens and maple syrup is a simple reminder of how
learning is transformative and relational—relations built not just between humans, but also between humans, animals, and the land. I choose
not to report back to the academy everything that was learned and discussed due to the exploitative relationships and histories that exist between
Indigenous communities and the university (Deloria, 1969; Grande, 2015; Smith, 2012). I turn to Leanne Simpson (Nishnaabeg) and Audra Simpson
(Kahnawake Mohawk) for their theorizing and negotiations as (public) scholar, community member, family member, and activist. I engage an
ethnographic refusal to institute limits of what the academy may 34 have access to, to use, expose, and
exploit. This project was specifically created and driven by community discussions and aspirations, but that also means that I am obligated and
answerable to the communities and nations involved (Patel, 2016). I invoke an ethnographic refusal, Rather, it [ethnographic refusal]
is an argument that to think and write about sovereignty is to think very seriously about needs and that,
basically, it involves an ethnographic calculus of what you need to know and what I refuse to write...Rather,
the deep context of dispossession, of containment, of a skewed authoritative axis and the ongoing
structure of both settler colonialism and its disavowal make writing and analysis a careful, complex
instantiation of jurisdiction and authority...My notion of refusal articulates a mode of sovereign
authority over the presentation of ethnographic data, and so does not present ‘everything.’ This is for
the express purpose of protecting the concerns of the community, It acknowledges the asymmetrical
power relations that inform research and writing about native lives and politics, and it does not
presume that they are on equal footing with anyone...Thus this refusal and recognition of sovereignty
should, I think, move us away from previous practices of discursive containment and pathology ... (A.
Simpson, 2014b: 105) These refusals, my refusal, situate and reinforce these tribal communities and nations
inherent sovereignty to their knowledge, lands, languages, and peoples. It is also important to
understand that refusal is not invoking a liberal (civil) rights discourse, but responding to relationality
and answerability. Rights discourses instantiate a notion of individualism and ownership, property to be
held to achieve equity and inclusion. Engaging a “rights discourse” can be seen an anti-colonial praxis
within a liberal, multicultural settler state, but when we refuse rights and engage relationality,
answerability, and obligations these are moves and actions towards decolonization (Grande, 2015; Patel, 2016; L.
Pochedley, 2013). Just as when we refuse exploitative, 35 Western, all knowing, universalizing research, we as
Indigenous peoples push back and unsettle settler’s norming of Indigenous containment, elimination, and
subordination. CONCLUSION The majority of the theories employed throughout my literature review are grounded in the work and theories
of Native studies theorists. I posit that it is necessary to understand these theories to fully explore what Native
children and their families are experiencing in and with schools, and throughout their every day lives as
Native peoples. These frameworks allow for further examination of what it means to center “Indian”
continual existence under the U.S. settler colonial state, specifically in regards to public education
institutions. Not only do these concepts allow us to see the present-day experiences shaped by colonial
relationships, but they also encourage us to imagine various Indigenous futures and possibilities outside
of the settler state structure.

Settler colonialism asserts is sovereign rule through everyday interactions in all of its
banality. The speech act of the 1AC is a critical destabilization of settler subjectivity by
decolonizing the resolution and the self.
Henderson 15 – prof of political science @ University of Victoria (Phil, ‘Imagoed communities: the psychosocial space of settler
colonialism,’ Settler Colonial Studies, Special Issue on Globalizing Unsettlement)

settlers must answer the legitimate charge that their

Facing assertive indigenous presences within settler colonial spaces,
daily life – in all its banality – is predicated upon the privileges produced by ongoing genocide. The jarring nature
of such charges offers an irreconcilable challenge to settlers qua settlers.64 Should these charges become
impossible to ignore, they threaten to explode the imago of settler colonialism, which had hitherto operated within the
settler psyche in a relatively smooth and benign manner. This explosion is potentiated by the revelation of even a portion of
the violence that is required to make settler life possible. If, for example, settlers are forced to see ‘their’ beach as a site of
murder and ongoing colonization, it becomes more difficult to sustain it within the imaginary as a site of frivolity.65 As Brown writes, in the ‘loss
of horizons, order, and identity’ the subject experiences a sense of enormous vulnerability.66 Threatened with this ‘loss of
containment', the settler subject embarks down the road to psychosis.67 Thus, to parlay Brown's thesis to the settler colonial context, the
uncontrollable rage that indigenous presences induce within the settler is not evidence of the strength of settlers, but rather of a subject lashing
out on the brink of its own dissolution. This panic – this rabid and insatiable anger – is always already at the core of the settler
as a subject. As Lorenzo Veracini observes, the settler necessarily remains in a disposition of aggression ‘even after indigenous alterities have
ceased to be threatening'.68 This disposition results from the precarity inherent in the maintenance of settler
colonialism's imago, wherein any and all indigenous presences threaten subjective dissolution of the settler as such. Trapped in a Gordian
Knot, the very thing that provides a balm to the settler subject – further development and entrenchment of the settler colonial imago – is also
what panics the subject when it is inevitably contravened.69 We might think of this as a process of hardening that leaves the imago brittle and
more susceptible to breakage. Their desire to produce a firm imago means that settlers
are also always already in a psychically
defensive position – that is, the settler's offensive position on occupied land is sustained through a
defensive posture. For while settlers desire the total erasure of indigenous populations, the attendant
desire to disappear their own identity as settlers necessitates the suppression of both desires, if the
subject's reliance on settler colonial power structure is to be psychically naturalized. Settlers’ reactions to
indigenous peoples fit, almost universally, with the two ego defense responses that Sigmund Freud observed. The first of these defenses is to
attempt a complete conversion of the suppressed desire into a new idea. In settler colonial contexts, this requires averting attention
from the violence of dispossession; as such, settlers often suggest that they aim to create a ‘city on the
hill’.70 Freud noted that the conversion defense mechanism does suppress the anxiety-inducing desire, but it also leads to ‘periodic hysterical
outbursts'. Such is the case when settlers’ utopic visions are forced to confront the reality that the gentile community they imagine is founded in
and perpetuates irredeemable suffering. A second type of defense is to channel the original desire's energy into an obsession or a phobia. The
effects of this defense are seen in the preoccupation that settler colonialism has with purity of blood or of community.71 As we have already
seen, this obsession at once solidifies the power of the settler state, thereby naturalizing the settler and
simultaneously perpetuating the processes of erasing indigenous peoples. Psychic defenses are intended to secure the subject from
pain, and whether that pain originates inside or outside the psyche is inconsequential. Because of the threat that indigeneity
presents to the phantasmatic wholeness of settler colonialism, settlers must always remain suspended in a
state of arrested development between these defensive positions. Despite any pretensions to the contrary, the settler is necessarily a
parochial subject who continuously coils, reacts, disavows, and lashes out, when confronted with his dependency on indigenous peoples and
their territory. This psychic precarity exists at the core of the settler subject because of the unending fear of its own dissolution, should indigenous
sovereignty be recognized.72 Goeman writes as an explicit challenge to other indigenous peoples, but this holds true to settler-allies as well, that
decolonization must include an analysis of the dominant ‘self-disciplining colonial subject’.73 However, as
this discussion of subjective precarity demonstrates, the degree of to which these disciplinary or phenomenological processes are complete
should not be overstated. For settler-allies must also examine and cultivate the ways in which settler subjects fail to
be totally disciplined. Evidence of this incompletion is apparent in the subject's arrested state of development.
Discovering the instability at the core of the settler subject, indeed of all subjects, is the central conceit of psychoanalysis. This
exception of at least partial failure to fully subjectivize the settler is also what sets my account apart from Rifkin's. His phenomenology
falls into the trap that Jacqueline Rose observes within many sociological accounts of the subject: that of assuming a successful
internalization of norms. From the psychoanalytical perspective, the ‘unconscious constantly reveals the “failure”’
of internalization.74 As we have seen, within settler subjects this can be expressed as an irrational anxiety that expresses itself whenever
a settler is confronted with the facts regarding their colonizing status. Under conditions of total subjectification, such charges ought to be
unintelligible to the settler. Thus, the process of subject formation is always in slippage and never totalized as
others might suggest.75 Because of this precarity, the settler subject is prone to violence and lashing out; but the subject in slippage also
provides an avenue by which the process of settler colonialism can be subverted – creating cracks in a
phantasmatic wholeness which can be opened wider. Breakages of this sort offer an opportunity to pursue
what Paulette Regan calls a ‘restorying’ of settler colonial history and culture, to decenter settler mythologies built upon and
within the dispossession of indigenous peoples.76 The cultivation of these cracks is a necessary part of
decolonizing work, as it continues to panic and thus to destabilize settler subjects. Resistance to settler
colonialism does not occur only in highly visible moments like the famous conflict at Kanesatake and Kahnawake,77 it also
occurs in reiterative and disruptive practices, presences, and speech acts. Goeman correctly observes that the
‘repetitive practices of everyday life’ are what give settler spaces their meaning, as they provide a degree
of naturalness to the settler imago and its psychic investments.78 As such, to disrupt the ease of these
repetitions is at once to striate radically the otherwise smooth spaces of settler colonialism and also to
disrupt the easy (re)production of the settler subject. Goeman calls these subversive acts the ‘micro-
politics of resistance', which historically took the form of ‘moving fences, not cooperating with census enumerators, sometimes disrupting
survey parties’ amongst other process.79 These acts panic the subject that is disciplined as a product of settler colonial power, by forcing
encounters with the sovereign indigenous peoples that were imagined to be gone. This reveals to the settler, if only fleetingly, the
violence that founds and sustains the settler colonial relationship. While such practices may not
overthrow the settler colonial system, they do subvert its logics by insistently drawing attention to the
ongoing presence of indigenous peoples who refuse erasure.

Affirming refusal doesn’t prohibit all study—it makes transparent regimes of

representation by employing research against education systems. The 1AC isn’t the
tired proliferation of pain narratives but portrays violations without victimization to
make way for desire-centered research against the telos of colonial visibility
Tuck & Yang 14 (E. & K., prof of nat am studies @ suny & prof of ethnic studies @ cal, R-words: Refusing research, p 241-243//George)
Considering Erased Lynchings dialogically with On Ethnographic Refusal, we can see how refusal is not a prohibition but a
generative form. First, refusal turns the gaze back upon power, specifically the colonial modalities of knowing persons as bodies
to be differentially counted, violated, saved, and put to work. It makes transparent the metanarrative of knowledge
production—its spectatorship for pain and its preoccupation for documenting and ruling over racial difference. Thus, refusal to be made
meaningful first and foremost is grounded in a critique of settler colonialism, its construction of Whiteness, and its regimes
of representation. Second, refusal generates, expands, champions representational territories that colonial
knowledge endeavors to settle, enclose, domesticate. Simpson complicates the portrayals of Iroquois, without resorting to
reportrayals of anthropological Indians. Gonzales-Day portrays the violations without reportraying the victimizations.
Third, refusal is a critical intervention into research and its circular self-defining ethics. The ethical justification for research is defensive and self-
encircling—its apparent self-criticism serves to expand its own rights to know, and to defend its violations in the name of “good science.”
Refusal challenges the individualizing discourse of IRB consent and “good science” by highlighting the problems of
collective harm, of representational harm, and of knowledge colonization. Fourth, refusal itself could be developed into both method and theory.
Simpson presents refusal on the part of the researcher as a type of calculus ethnography. Gonzales-Day deploys refusal as a mode
of representation. Simpson theorizes refusal by the Kahnawake Nation as anticolonial, and rooted in the desire
for possibilities outside of colonial logics, not as a reactive stance. This final point about refusal connects our conversation
back to desire as a counterlogic to settler colonial knowledge. Desire is compellingly depicted in Simpson’s description of a moment in an
interview, in which the alternative logics about a “feeling citizenship” are referenced. The interviewee states, Citizenship is, as I said, you live
there, you grew up there, that is the life that you know—that is who you are. Membership is more of a legislative enactment designed to keep
people from obtaining the various benefits that Aboriginals can receive. (p. 76) Simpson describes this counterlogic as “the
logic of the
present,” one that is witnessed, lived, suffered through, and enjoyed (p. 76). Out of the predicaments, it innovates
“tolerance and exceptions and affections” (p. 76). Simpson writes (regarding the Indian Act, or blood quantum), “‘Feeling citizenships’ . . . are
structured in the present space of intra-community recognition, affection and care, outside of the logics of colonial and imperial
rule” (p. 76). Simpson’s logic of the present dovetails with our discussion on the logics of desire. Collectively, Kahnawake refusals decenter
damage narratives; they unsettle the settler colonial logics of blood and rights; they center desire. By theorizing through desire,
Simpson thus theorizes with and as Kahnawake Mohawk. It is important to point out that Simpson does not deploy her tribal identity as a badge
of authentic voice, but rather highlights the ethical predicaments that result from speaking as oneself, as simultaneously part of a collective with
internal disputes, vis-à-vis negotiations of various settler colonial logics. Simpson thoughtfully differentiates between the Native researcher
philosophically as a kind of privileged position of authenticity, and the Native researcher realistically as one who is beholden to multiple ethical
considerations. What is tricky about this position is not only theorizing with, rather than theorizing about, but also theorizing as. To theorize with
and as at the same time is a difficult yet fecund positionality—one that rubs against the ethnographic limit at the outset. Theorizing
with
(and in some of our cases, as) repositions Indigenous people and otherwise researched Others as intellectual
subjects rather than anthropological subjects. Thus desire is an “epistemological shift,” not just a methodological shift (Tuck,
2009, p. 419). Culmination. At this juncture, we don’t intend to offer a general framework for refusal, because all refusal
is particular, meaning refusal is always grounded in historical analysis and present conditions. Any discussion of
Simpson’s article would need to attend to the significance of real and representational sovereignty in her analysis and theorizing of refusal. The
particularities of Kahnawake sovereignty throb at the center of each of the three dimensions of refusal described above. We caution readers
against expropriating Indigenous notions of sovereignty into other contexts, or metaphorizing sovereignty in a way that permits one to forget
that struggles to have sovereignty recognized are very real and very lived. Yet from Simpson’s example, we are able to see
ways in which
a researcher might make transparent the coloniality of academic knowledge in order to find its ethical limits,
expand the limits of sovereign knowledge, and expand decolonial representational territories. This is in
addition to questions her work helpfully raises about who the researcher is, who the researched are, and how the historical/ representational
context for research matters. One way to think about refusal is how desire can be a framework, mode, and space for refusal. As a framework,
desire is a counterlogic to the logics of settler colonialism. Rooted in possibilities gone but not foreclosed, “the not yet, and
at times, the not anymore” (Tuck, 2010, p. 417), desire refuses the master narrative that colonization was inevitable
and has a monopoly on the future. By refusing the telos of colonial future, desire expands possible futures. As a mode
of refusal, desire is a “no” and a “yes.” Another way to think about refusal is to consider using strategies of
social science research to further expose the complicity of social science disciplines and research in the
project of settler colonialism. There is much need to employ social science to turn back upon itself as
settler colonial knowledge, as opposed to universal, liberal, or neutral knowledge without horizon. This form of refusal
might include bringing attention to the mechanisms of knowledge legitimation, like the Good Labkeeping Seal of Approval (discussed under Axiom
III); contesting appropriation, like the collection of pain narratives; and publicly renouncing the diminishing of Indigenous or local narratives with
blood narratives in the name of science, such as in the Havasupai case discussed under Axiom II.
Settlement, spatiality, and place must all be theorized as essential to the production of
the “human” and the materialization of blackness as an ontological position—the
process of settlement enables self-actualization by the Settler through the turning of
blackness into a position of the settled-slave
King 13 [2013, Tiffany Jeannette King, “IN THE CLEARING: BLACK FEMALE BODIES, SPACE AND SETTLER
COLONIAL LANDSCAPES”, PhD Dissertation]//George

the
This is not an appeal to expand the category of the settler, as I have argued before Black slaves and descendants of slaves are not settlers. However,

processes which make Black bodies fungible flesh, a form of terra nullius, and embed their bodies in the
land as settled-slaves needs to be theorized as modalities of settlement. Settlement needs to be
retheorized along the contours of the bodies that it renders materially and socially dead . Scholarship from
Marxist geographies, cultural landscape studies, anthropology and the emerging field of settler colonial studies is useful for helping us think about space, however, it
does not help us think about the ways that the process of settlement also materializes Blackness as an ontological
position. Native studies and Black studies enable a discussion of how the production of Settler and Master
or Settler-Master subjectivity comes about due to its parasitic relationship to Native death and Black
fungibility/accumulation (social death). When we think about the Settler-Master as parasitic we can also begin
to think about their process of settlement as one that also requires the making of ontological categories
occupied by the dead. The process of settlement allows the Settler-Master to become a human with
spatial coordinates because the Native dies and the Black becomes a non-being (a settled-slave).15 Settlement
is more than transforming the land. It is more than the teleological process of weary white people making
a home and Native people naturally disappearing over time. Settlement is an assemblage of technologies
and processes of makings and unmakings. Its processes require the making and unmaking of bodies,
subject positions, space, place and claims to various forms of autonomy, self actualization and
transcendence. In Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, Lorenzo Veracini, a founding scholar of the emerging field of settler colonial studies
describes the process of settlement as a process that enables the “unfettered mobility” of the settler.16
While abject others within settler colonial nations are “principally characterized by restrained mobility” the settler experiences the capacity for

“unfettered mobility.” This description of the kind of state of existence that settlement allows the settler is instructive. While Veracini’s description moves
us closer to a discussion of states of being, I want to reframe Veracini’s description and introduce a few more elements to the equation. Settlement as an intricate,
dynamic and contradictory relationship to Native bodies, Black bodies and the land/nature. Settlement structures the Settler’s relationship
to the Native, the Black and nature as a relation of negation. Settlement also creates complex ontological
positions that are constituted by both states of stasis and flux. What I mean by this is that some bodies (Native and
Black) are relegated to a permanent position of flux. Native bodies are always slipping into death, Black
bodies are always sliding into states of fungibility and accumulation. The flux and instability of the Black
and the Native enable the Settler to experience a self actualizing state of both libratory stability and
transcendent autonomy. The ontological positions of the Native (slipping into death) and the Black (sliding
into fungibility and accumulation) are positions of fixed-flux. As Wilderson argues these positions do not occupy
the universal liberal orienting and humanizing frames of time and space. They are fixed and rooted in a
place of elimination and expanding use for the settler’s unending pursuit of self actualization. By settling,
or gaining an exclusive claim to time and space, the Settler is able to simultaneously become a stable, coherent and

autonomous human subject who occupies space while they also experience hyper mobility,
transcendence and self directed transformation. The Settler moves back and forth at will between states of
rootedness and mobility, stability and postmodern (self determined) constructedness. The Settlers’ unfettered movement
between these contradictory spaces and states is predicated on the “fixed-flux” of Native and Black
bodies. Fixed-flux is the underside of the Settler’s unfettered mobility and self actualization. It is always being susceptible to having the world flipped upside down
at the whim of another (the Settler). Settlement functions like a violent form of deconstruction. Settlement as a
gratuitously violent project that kills the Native and accumulates the Black also reorganizes discourse. The
relationship that exists between the signifier and signified for concepts like autochthony and indigeneity and words like clearing under conditions of settlement
become shifting ground beneath our feet.17 The prior meanings held by the terms and words autochthonous, indigenous and clear ing are destabilized and then
completely evacuated due to the material and discursive muscle of settlement. At the site of the clearing, Settlers are able to become
autochthonous and indigenous at the same time. Frank Wilderson helps us think about the kind of discursive and material violence that
occurs within what he calls the “Settler/Master/Human’s grammatical structure.”18 Within this grammatical structure, Wilderson argues that there is a disavowal of
the violence of genocide in the way the settler narrates the formation of the US. On one level, the disavowal occurs through the settler’s preferred part of speech.
Clearing is only spoken of as a noun in the Settler/Master/Human’s grammatical structure. Clearing is never used as a verb in the human’s grammatical structure.
Wilderson draws our attention to its use: “Clearing, in the Settler/Savage” relation, has two grammatical structures, one a noun and the other as a verb. But the
Western only recognizes clearing as a noun. But prior to the clearing’s fragile infancy, that is before its cinematic legacy as a newborn place name, it labored not across
the land as a noun but as a verb on the body of the “Savage,” speaking civil society’s essential status as an effect for geno cide.”19 This discursive displacement
represents an actual displacement. As the Settler/Master/Human renders the clearing a static place, void of settler
violence and absent of indigenous bodies and relations to the land, the Settler also indigenizes themselves
to this abstract space. The Settler is allowed to merge with the land as they root themselves. They become
autochthonous people that “sprang up from the land.”20 Settlers are now the group of humans that establish a right/righteous

relationship with the land. Settlers proclaim themselves the new indigenous population. The original indigenous
peoples are stripped of their indigeneity and rendered dead. Within the process of settlement, the indigenous people become embedded in or are literally buried as
the dead within the land. The Settler then assumes a new autochthonous identity and emerges from the earth
anew. Even when the Settler indigenizes or roots themselves into the land; they do not become stuck there like Native peoples. In her book, Black Body: Women,
Colonialism and Space, Radhika Mohanram spends time explaining how enlightenment notions of the Indigene and

European binary operate.21 The body conceived as incarcerated by nature is partially achieved by the
discursive construction of the native as a “person who is born and thus belongs to a certain place,” and is
in fact over determined by that place.22 The European on the other hand can be of a place but is not
incarcerated by it like the Native. Their settler “indigeneity” offers them “unfettered mobility” as well as
unfettered self actualization. Native people do not acquire this through their indigenous status. Upon
encountering the settler (who becomes indigenous) the Native experiences their indigeneity as non-existence and
death. The clearing also shapes Blackness as it carves out the settlement-plantation. The clearing in its verb form
certainly labored across the bodies of Native people. However, the clearing also worked on and transformed the bodies of Blacks.

The Black body is turned into the Settled-slave. Nana and Elizabeth Peazant are Settled-slaves whose
bodies evince the way that the process of settling “cleared” Blacks of all spatial coordinates that could
make them human during this process of making the settlement/plantation. Blacks become mere ‘states
of flux,” and the atomic potential for space. At the site of the clearing, both a spatial and ontological production,
Black bodies are the raw material and precursor to space. While Black bodies are geographic and
necessary to the production of space they are not geographic subjects that humanly inhabit space at the
site of the clearing.23 As geographic—dark—matter and material under settlement they make space possible but
cannot occupy it. Existing in a continual state of liminality and change Black femaleness is a place making
unit but not in place. Place is where humanness resides. According to Tim Cresswell, place and its links to
humanness, morality and identity are a part of a humanistic project.24 For the humanist undertaking
geography, “ontological priority was given to the human immersion in place rather than the abstractions
of geometric space.” The humanist concept of place is accompanied by the baggage of morality, identity,
authenticity and exclusion. Within modern thought systems, there is a tendency to locate people with certain identities in certain places. There is
also a tendency within this metaphysical framework to imagine “mobile people in wholly negative ways.”27 Bodies on the move or sentient

beings in a state of “fixed-flux” who slip into death like the Native or slide and transform as fungible flesh
have no place and are considered suspect within this worldview. Through humanist articulations and re-
theorizations of place, the universal and abstract notion of space becomes humanized and exclusionary
admitting only a select group of people. Making a place is also about making a home.28 Place (and space) as home was
functioning within imperialist endeavors of the enlightenment far before human geographers of the 1970s named it as such. As a
geographer, Tuan has focused a great deal of attention on the extent to which people have attempted to “create order and homeliness out of the apparent chaos of
raw nature.”29 In fact “the concept of place is central to our understanding of how people turn nature into culture by making it their home.”30 What happens

when this humanist endeavor of turning nature/chaos into culture/order/home meets up with the
imperialist endeavor? Sylvia Wynter argues that both the Native and the Black are considered states of non-
Reason and chaos within Enlightenment humanism. Under imperialism, both the bodies and the lands of
Native and Black people were states of chaos that needed to be ordered. While Tuan’s configuration of place and the
transformation of raw nature into a home for humankind does not have the violent and exclusionary form of the human in mind, my reconfiguration of the place of
The landscapes of settlement, when they appear to the eye as a tranquil pasture with a log
settlement does.

cabin or people sun bathing on a beach conceal the violent processes hidden in the clearing. One way of
revealing what is hidden is through rethinking what a landscape is and how it functions. Richard Schein presents an interpretation of landscape as a process. In fact,
Schein argues that landscape is always in the “process of becoming.”31 Another aspect of Schein’s theorization of the landscape that is productive is that he construes
the landscapes as having material and epistemological value. The epistemology of the landscape disciplines those who come into contact with it. The disciplinary
element of landscape is embedded in the fact that the material aspect of the landscape is seen, and presents itself as linear and objective.32 The landscape is in fact
not self evident but duplicitous.33 Likewise settlement
as a process and what it achieves even in its materiality (clearing,
settlement-plantation) is not self-evident but multivalent and at times counter intuitive. What is hidden is
that settlement is not just the making of a physical location for the Settler; rather, what is concealed is
the simultaneous process of the Settler rooting in order to launch. Settlement is the subjugation and
sinking/fixing of others into a state of flux (death, fungibility) in order for the Settler to transcend into a
state of humanness. As the ultimate self actualizing human, the Settler can actually overcome the
particularity of place (body, gender, race, abject sexuality) and launch into universal and abstract space
(humanness). To be human in Frank Wilderson’s terms is to have “cartographic capacity.”34 “Spatial and temporal
capacity is so immanent on the field of Whiteness that the effects and permutations of its ensemble of
questions and the kinds of White bodies that can mobilize this universe of combinations are seemingly
infinite as well.”35 To be a Savage or to be Black is to exist in the realm of no time and space.36 An apt
visual for what happens when the Settler (noun) settles (verb) both people and land is one of a propelling
long jumper. A long jumper is a subject who plants in order to launch oneself into space. This process of
disciplining bodies, land and the viewers’ eye is hard to always perceive.
 1AC Interchangeable Cards
Refusing research programs that reinforce the authority of the settler state solves
Steele 10—Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Kansas [gender/ableist language modified with brackets] (Brent,
Defacing Power: The Aesthetics of Insecurity in Global Politics pg 130-132)//George

When facing these dire warnings regarding the manner in which academic-intellectuals are seduced by
power, what prospects exist for parrhesia? How can academic-intellectuals speak “truth to power”? It should be noted,
first, that the academic-intellectual’s primary purpose should not be to re-create a program to replace
power or even to develop a “research program that could be employed by students of world politics,” as
Robert Keohane (1989: 173) once advised the legions of the International Studies Association. Because academics are denied the “full truth” from
we must avoid a trap into which governments would want intellectuals to fall (and
the powerful, Foucault states,
often they do): “Put yourself in our place and tell us what you would do.” This is not a question in which one
has to answer. To make a decision on any matter requires a knowledge of the facts refused us, an analysis
of the situation we aren’t allowed to make. There’s the trap. (2001: 453) 27 This means that any alternative order we
might provide, this hypothetical “research program of our own,” will also become imbued with authority and used for
mechanisms of control, a matter I return to in the concluding chapter of this book. When linked to a theme of counterpower,
academic-intellectual parrhesia suggests, instead, that the academic should use his or her pulpit, their
position in society, to be a “friend” “who plays the role of a parrhesiastes, of a truth-teller” (2001: 134). 28
When speaking of then-president Lyndon Johnson, Morgenthau gave a bit more dramatic and less amiable take that contained the same sense
of urgency. What the President needs, then, is an intellectual father-confessor, who dares to remind him[them] of
the brittleness of power, of its arrogance and blindness [ignorance], of its limits and pitfalls; who tells him [them]
how empires rise, decline and fall, how power turns to folly, empires to ashes. He[they] ought to listen to
that voice and tremble. (1970: 28) The primary purpose of the academic-intellectual is therefore not to just
effect a moment of counterpower through parrhesia, let alone stimulate that heroic process whereby power realizes the
error of its ways. So those who are skeptical that academics ever really, regarding the social sciences, make “that big of
a difference” are missing the point. As we bear witness to what unfolds in front of us and collectively analyze the testimony of that
which happened before us, the purpose of the academic is to “tell the story” of what actually happens, to
document and faithfully capture both history’s events and context. “The intellectuals of America,”
Morgenthau wrote, “can do only one thing: live by the standard of truth that is their peculiar responsibility as
intellectuals and by which men of power will ultimately be judged as well” (1970: 28). This will take time, 29 but if this happens, if we seek
to uncover and practice telling the truth free from the “tact,” “rules,” and seduction that constrain its
telling, then, as Arendt notes, “humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for
this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation” ([1964] 2006: 233).

Incorporating indigenous scholarship into preexisting spaces is key to refuse settlerist

knowledge in academia
Dei 2 (George Sefa, Professor of Sociology and Equity Studies@ Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto,
“Rethinking the Role of Indigenous Knowledges in the Academy,” The Research Network for New Approaches to Lifelong Learning,
http://www.nall.ca/res/58GeorgeDei.pdf //shree)

Ultimately, we have to consider the role of Indigenous knowledges in the academy as primarily one of ‘resistance’ to
Eurocentrism; that is, resistance to the dominance of Eurocentric knowledge as the only valid way of knowing. It is resistance
to Eurocentricism masquerading as a universal body of thought. I interpret resistance as referring to the social actions and practices of subordinate
groups (and their allies) that contest hegemonic social formations and knowledges, as well as unravel and dislodge strategies of domination
(Haynes and Prakash 1991: 3). Kellner (1995: 42) cautions against the ‘fetishization of resistance’. Abu-Lughod (1990) also reminds us of “...the
tendency to romanticize resistance, to read all forms of resistance as signs of the ineffectiveness of systems of power and the resilience and
creativity of the human spirit in its refusal to be dominated” (cited in Moore, 1997:89). My use of resistance is closer to Parry’s (1994) who points
to Frantz Fanon and Amy Cesaire’s work and their “...unwillingness to abstract resistance from its moment of performance” (p. 179) [cited in
Moore, 1997: 89]. Moore (1997) correctly alludes to the “...importance of historical, cultural and geographical specificity to any understanding of
resistance” (p. 89). He further understands the limitation of placing the focus on the ‘intentions’ of, rather on than the consequences of, everyday
human action and social practice (p. 89). Moore (1997) holds that we must explore alternative conceptions of resistance, “... [r]ather
than
measuring resistance against a yardstick of widespread social and political economic transformation, the micro-
politics of tactical manoeuvers... [take] center stage” (p. 90). In other words, we must view resistance in the academy as
collective actions and strategies for procedural and incremental change. Resistance starts by using received knowledges to ask
critical questions about the nature of the social order. Resistance also means seeing ‘small acts’ as
cumulative and significant for social change. As one of my Caribbean-born, African graduate students wrote, “...I can’t tell you how
affirming it is to see ‘patois’ in the books I am evaluating for my thesis. A few years ago, this would never
have been possible...The fact that these languages make their way into texts at all is a phenomenal act of resistance. Of course, I
realize that the use of local languages outside their appropriate contexts opens up a whole new set of challenges” (Lawson 1998). In thinking of
Indigenous knowledges as ‘resistance knowledge’ we must acknowledge how easy it is to be complicit in the reproduction of hegemonic
Eurocentric and colonized knowledges in the academy. By failing to speak out about Indigenous knowledges we have become complicit in the
continued marginalization and negation of such knowledges in the academy. The integration (that is, centering) of Indigenous knowledges into
the curricular, instructional and pedagogical practices of Western academies cannot be an unquestioned exercise. We must consider how power-
saturated issues of academic social relations are used to validate different knowledges to serve particular interests. Of course, we must also be
wary and critical of the integration of Indigenous knowledges into the academy if it is pursued to serve the interests of the modern state and
corporate capital. We must be concerned about the exploitative tendencies of Western academies in order to affirm
our caution and
the status quo. Indigenous knowledges should be critical and oppositional in order to rupture stable knowledge. However,
cynicism should not lead to us to claim a separate space for Indigenous knowledges in/outside the
academy. We must be careful that our academic practice and politics do not feed on the marginality of
Indigenous knowledges. Maintaining a separate space for Indigenous knowledge feeds on the problematic idea
that Indigenous ways of knowing/knowledges sit in a pristine fashion outside of the effects of other bodies of
knowledge. In fact, varied knowledge forms belong in the academy. Hence, we must understand our individual and collective academic
complicities in creating this marginality by our failure to speak about multiple knowledges in curricular, instructional, pedagogic and textual
practices. We must center the varied, alternative and sometimes oppositional discourses and knowledges systems in our academic
communicative and pedagogical practices.

Ethnographic classification is the backbone of settler colonial permanence—

epistemological possession maintains a triad where the coherence of the settler is
ascertained through genocide of the indigenous and labor of black chattel slaves (TAG)
Tuck & Yang 14 (E. & K., prof of nat am studies @ suny & prof of ethnic studies @ cal, R-words: Refusing research, p 241-
243//George)

Our thinking and writing in this essay is informed by our readings of postco-lonial literatures and critical literatures on settler colonialism. We
locate much of our analysis inside/in relation to the discourse of settler colonialism, the particu-lar shape of colonial domination in the United
States and elsewhere, including Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. Settler colonialism can be differentiated from what one might call
exogenous colonialism in that the colonizers arrive at a place (“discovering” it) and make it a permanent home (claiming it). The
permanence of settler colonialism makes it a structure, not just an event (Wolfe, 1999). The settler colonial
nation-state is dependent on destroying and erasing Indigenous inhabitants in order to clear them from valuable
land. The settler colonial structure also requires the enslavement and labor of bodies that have been stolen from
their homelands and transported in order to labor the land stolen from Indigenous people. Settler colonialism
refers to a triad relationship, between the White settler (who is valued for his leadership and innovative mind), the dis-appeared
Indigenous peoples (whose land is valued, so they and their claims to it must be extinguished), and the chattel slaves (whose bodies
are valuable but ownable, abusable, and murderable). We believe that this triad is the basis of the formation of Whiteness in
settler colonial nation-states, and that the interplay of erasure, bodies, land, and violence is characteristic of the permanence of settler
colonial structures. Under coloniality, Descartes’ formulation, cognito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”) transforms
into ego conquiro (“I conquer, therefore I am”; Dussel, 1985; Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Ndlvou-Gatsheni, 2011). Nelson Maldonado-
Torres (2009) expounds on this relationship of the conqueror’s sense-of-self to his knowledge-of-others (“I know her, therefore I am me”).
Knowledge of self/Others became the philosophical justification for the acquisition of bodies and territories,
and the rule over them. Thus the right to conquer is intimately connected to the right to know (“I know,
therefore I conquer, therefore I am”). Maldonado-Torres (2009) explains that for Levi Strauss, the self/Other knowledge paradigm is the
methodological rule for the birth of ethnology as a science (pp. 3–4).

We shouldn’t be constrained to instrumental readings of the resolution—affirming

refusal is a re-thinking of thinking that problematizes the claim “I know, therefore I
conquer, therefore I am” undergirding spatial logics of objective mastery
Marzec 1 (Robert, Teaches Postcolonial Studies @ SUNY Fredonia, An Anatomy of Empire, symploke 9.1-2 (2001) 165-168,
muse//George)

Retrieving crucial foundational shifts in history that determine the order of existence in our present marks the first aspect of this archival
study of empire, or, to use Spanos's term, "anatomy." The second involves the interrogation of not only accepted discourses, but cutting-
edge movements of critical thought as well, an aspect of scholarship that good cautious scholars take as a principal charge. In the work of
Edward Said, for instance, Spanos traces a movement of thought that inadvertently leads to a major oversight in the field of postcolonial
criticism empowered by Said's insights. Fleshing out the influence of colonization along the full continuum of being, Spanos throws into
relief the repercussions of Said's emphasis on geopolitical imperialism and subsequent failure to give full weight to the ontological origins
of occidental imperialism. This gesture enables Spanos to reveal the extent to which the
relay of imperial ideologies is
enabled by a centuries-long colonization of the notion of "truth" itself, a colonization governed by a logic of
mastery that stems from Imperial Rome and that "derives from thinking being meta-ta-physica ["above,"
"beyond," or "outside" things in contextual, temporal flux]." Similarly, Spanos finds it highly disabling that critics have
come to take Foucault's emphasis on the period of the Enlightenment as evidence for concluding this moment in history to
be a "mutation" in thinking resulting in Western Imperialism proper." Consequently, postcolonial theory in

general heedlessly contributes to a failure to consider the full jurisdiction of imperialism . The widespread
impulse to emphasize the period of the Enlightenment as if it were the cradle of true imperial practices is symptomatic of the very
disciplinarity that Foucault calls into question. This reconfiguration of critical thought enables Spanos to "unconceal" the ontological force
of American contemporary imperialism, and to resituate the war in Vietnam as an event that reveals the violent metaphysical imperative of
"mastering" informing the idea of America. In constructing his counter-memory archive, Spanos finds the origins of this impulse to master
reality in the Roman transformation of Greek thinking. The early Greek thinking of being as temporal and groundless
(notable in philosophers such as Parmenides and Anaxemander) undergoes a hardening process that results in the
colonization of lived events for purposes of intellectual manipulation: the Greek logos as legein (words) is
transformed into Logos as Ratio (the Word of Reason); the agonistic Greek [End Page 166] understanding of truth as a-
letheia is annulled in favor of the Roman circumscription of truth as correctness (veritas). More than a challenge to
accepted periodizations of imperialism, Spanos's compelling insight here shows how colonization begins at the site of
thought itself, that it has been a way of thinking holding dominion for far longer than commonly considered. Thinking, he reveals,
has come to be governed by an impulse to reify being as a thoroughly controlled spatial image, "a 'field' or
'region' or 'domain' to be comprehended, mastered, and exploited" (191). This change naturalizes and universalizes
an instrumentalism that transforms the "uncalculability of being" into a utility, into a "world picture"
that can be grasped in a technological age that conceals the nothing at the heart of the social order for purposes of reducing
being to a disposable commodity. Consequently, the instability and the antagonism offered by the heterogeneity
disseminated by the movement of temporality is re-presented as a problem to be surmounted and
eventually "solved" with the imposition of "a final and determinate solution" (191). The power of this
triumph of instrumentalist thinking lies in its ability to throw all foundational inquiry into oblivion. In its
ubiquity, this instrumentality affects the very people attempting to offer opposition to the dominant order, for
within the problematic of contemporary criticism, one is either characterized as engaging in a form of "high theory" that
uses a language that fails to speak to the world at large, or one resists by taking "real political action." Thus,
ontological analyses are doubly ostracized. This constitutes an incredible handicap to oppositional thinking in the post-Cold War era.
Spanos writes: [F]or an opposition that limits resistance to the political, means a time of defeat. But for the
oppositional thinker who is attuned to the ontological exile to which he/she has been condemned by the global triumph
of technological thinking it also means the recognition that this exilic condition of silence constitutes an
irresolvable contradiction in the "Truth" of instrumental thinking --the "shadow" that haunts its light--that
demands to be thought. In the interregnum, the primary task of the margin-alized intellectual is the re-thinking of
thinking itself . . [I]t is the event of the Vietnam War--and the dominant American culture's inordinate will to forget it--that provides
the directives for this most difficult of tasks not impossible. (193) This "silencing" of an ontological engagement--what Heidegger referred
to as "the forgetting of being"--parallels the silence surrounding the event of Vietnam on the part of American media and the intellectual
deputies of the dominant Cold-War culture. If represented at all in the dominant American imaginary, the war appears as an
embarrassment, a failure on the part of America to maintain its exceptionalist national self-image that has been part of the character of
American identity as far back [End Page 167] as the Puritan "errand in the wildnerness." This prevailing view of Vietnam--made manifest
most explicitly when President George Bush announced that the American people had "kicked the Vietnam syndrome" by "winning" the
Gulf War--is part and parcel of the reigning philosophical view of the American order: the Hegelian-informed view that we
have reached the "end of history" with the form of democracy known as "free-market" capitalism (an
economy of ordering that not only governs Western nation-states, but seeks to rule "Third World" cultures as well). Having "reached the
end" implies that one has solved and mastered the contradictions hindering the socio-political domain,
that one "stands above" the fray and movement of difference. It is at this point that we come to see Spanos's most significant contribution
to critical inquiry. His building of a counter-memory archive, through the refusal to separate the ontological from the
sociopolitical, enables him to reveal the full reign and power of an American exceptionalism that
presents itself as benign. The power of this current order of reality lies in its ability to separate the many
"sites" that constitute the continuum of being. By presenting Vietnam, free-market democracy,
Puritanism, the Hegelian "end of history," and the Roman transformation of Greek thinking as unrelated, the order disables
the critical thinker from "unconcealing" the depth of its control. This disciplined split--the logic of the "interregnum"--continues
to consume and disable the full potential of resistance. The split afflicts the most formidable thinkers, even Spanos's own
intellectual master guides, Heidegger (who's emphasis on ontology overlooks the socio-political) and Foucault (who's primary focus on the
socio-political register generates its own blindness to the power of ontological domination). Questioning
this logic of the
interregnum demands what one would hope scholarly research to always offer as a matter of course--a reconsideration of
the ways in which we think in the present. This requires that the scholar who wishes to rub against
the imperatives of the interregnum rethink the very movement of thought. In that rethinking we must
confront without apology the increasing rapaciousness of not only the self-congratulatory nature of American rhetoric, but the growing,
insidious neo-imperial movement of transnational corporations that have come to extend the logic of mastery beyond national borders. As
such, living in the interregnum presents the critical scholar with a singular intellectual burden--one, according to Spanos, "most difficult but
not impossible."

speaking out about settler histories is comparatively best ( Change Tag )

Alcoff 92 (Linda, Syracuse Philosophy, “The Problem of Speaking for Others” http://www.alcoff.com/content/speaothers.html //shree)
While the "Charge of Reductionism" response has been popular among academic theorists, what I call the "Retreat" response has been popular
among some sections of the U.S. feminist movement. This
response is simply to retreat from all practices of speaking
for; it asserts that one can only know one's own narrow individual experience and one's "own truth" and thus
that one can never make claims beyond this. This response is motivated in part by the desire to recognize difference and different
priorities, without organizing these differences into hierarchies. Now, sometimes I think this is the proper response to the problem of speaking
for others, depending on who is making it. We certainly want to encourage a more receptive listening on the part of the discursively privileged
and to discourage presumptuous and oppressive practices of speaking for. And the
desire to retreat sometimes results from
the desire to engage in political work but without practicing what might be called discursive imperialism.
But a retreat from speaking for will not result in an increase in receptive listening in all cases; it may result
merely in a retreat into a narcissistic yuppie lifestyle in which a privileged person takes no responsibility
for her society whatsoever. She may even feel justified in exploiting her privileged capacity for personal
happiness at the expense of others on the grounds that she has no alternative. The major problem with such a
retreat is that it significantly undercuts the possibility of political effectivity. There are numerous examples of the
practice of speaking for others which have been politically efficacious in advancing the needs of those
spoken for, from Rigoberta Menchu to Edward Said and Steven Biko. Menchu's efforts to speak for the 33 Indian
communities facing genocide in Guatemala have helped to raise money for the revolution and bring
pressure against the Guatemalan and U.S. governments who have committed the massacres in collusion. The
point is not that for some speakers the danger of speaking for others does not arise, but that in some cases certain political
effects can be garnered in no other way.

Debate is a key site for intervention against oppressors of spectacular societies

Richter 13 (Zach, Disability Activist, Grad Student at University of Illinois, Chicago in Disability Studies; BA in English at West Conn State
University, “Gaming and Revolution: Gaming as training for activism,” Stims, Stammers and Winks: A Catalogue of Awkward Gestures, 8-13-13,
http://stimstammersandwinks.blogspot.com/2013/08/gaming-and-revolution-gaming-as.html //George)

The game which initiated me into being an activist is policy debate. The rules of policy debate are so complex that I still didn't master them
after 4 years of hard work, so I'll get down to the details. In CEDA-NDT policy
debate, teams of two debaters compete against one another
using a variety of arguments. Judges
arbitrate the winner, but debates are won by a largely strategic calculus. Debaters need
to answer all arguments. Arguments that go unanswered count as a loss. The best thing about the current state of
debate is that debaters are allowed to use a wide range of arguments. As a new debater, I started by supporting
foreign policies toward Japan in some rounds and then finally moved on to using arguments based on the work of philosophers and critical
theorists. The first philosopher I used heavily was Nietzsche, I then moved on to using Foucault and finally used queer and disability theory
based argumentation in debate rounds. Debate is a unique situation particularly because the game is usable for overtly activist purposes. Not
all games translate into politics so easily. I
did become a disability activist after doing research in the area of disability
theory in order to win the game of debate, but other revolutionaries throughout history have differing connections to gaming. Guy
Debord, famous leader of the neo-marxist/anarchist revolutionary and art group known as The Situationists designed his own war game called
"A Game of War" that took place on a board with squares and consisted of elaborate war strategy with lines of communication, soldiers and
artillery. Debord was fascinated with war and war gaming and hoped to use his board game as a way that "revolutionary activists could
learn how to fight and win against the oppressors of spectacular society"
http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/27323/le-jeu-de-la-guerre Elsewhere, some versions of the tabletop pen and paper role playing game
Dungeons and Dragons have been innovated so that they could place players in historical situations. In Generic Universal Role Playing System's
World War 2 game, one can play as the french resistance, for example. Elsewhere, some activists have used online games in order to
communicate dire messages about genocide and other political events. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darfur_is_Dying What is becoming
elaborately clear is that gaming does function as training for activism and revolution, both through a content focus which
communicates important political messages and through strategy which forces research or critical thinking in the player.
Games have, since they have existed, been used by dominant state and capitalist interests to naturalize
competition and to distract players from politics, but it doesn't always have to be like this. Debord, master
game designer and revolutionary, advocates detournement or the combination of various media items with an activist message to confront
assumptions.

Lack of creative process approaches makes debate a monoculture

Baker 8 (Michael, U Rochester, Eurocentrism and the Modern/Colonial Curriculum: Towards a Post-Eurocentric Math & Science Education
– A Critical Interpretive Review, http://www.academia.edu/1517810/Towards_a_Post-Eurocentric_Math_and_Science_Education_--
_A_Critical_Interpretive_Review)

This essay reviews literature in science and mathematics education that assumes the possibilities for knowing the realities of the world through
the official curriculum are reductively maintained within a Eurocentric cultural complex (Carnoy, 1974; Swartz, 1992; Willinsky, 1998).
Eurocentrism will be described as the epistemic framework of colonial modernity, a framework through which western knowledge enabled and
legitimated the global imposition of one particular conception of the world over all others. Eurocentrism is an ethnocentric projection onto the
world that expresses the ways the west and thewesternized have learned to conceive and perceive the world. At the center of this ethnocentric
projection are the control of knowledge and the maintenance of the conditions of epistemic dependency (Mignolo, 2000a). Every conception of
the “world” involves epistemological and ontological presuppositions interrelated with particular (historical and cultural) ways of knowing and
being. All forms of knowledge uphold practices and constitute subjects (Santos, 2007a).What counts as knowledge and what it means to be
human are profoundly interrelated (Santos, 2006). The knowledge that counts in the
modern school curriculum, fromckindergarten to
graduate school, is largely constructed and contained within an epistemic framework that is constitutive of the
monocultural worldview and ideological project of western modernity (Meyer, Kamens & Benavot, 1992; Wallerstein, 1997, 2006;
Lander,2002; Kanu, 2006; Kincheloe, 2008; Battiste, 2008). The monocultural worldview and ethos of western civilization are based in part upon
structures of knowledge and an epistemic framework elaborated and maintained within a structure of power/knowledge relations involved in
five hundred years of European imperial/colonial domination (Quijano, 1999, p. 47). If our increasingly interconnected and
interdependent world is also to become more and not less democratic, schools and teachers must learn to incorporate the worldwide diversity
of knowledges and ways of being (multiple epistemologies and ontologies) occluded by the hegemony of Eurocen trism. Academic knowledge
andunderstanding should be complemented with learning from those who are living in andthinking from colonial and postcolonial legacies
(Mignolo, 2000, p. 5). Too many children and adults today (particularly those from non-dominant groups)continue to be alienated and
marginalized within modern classrooms where knowledge and learning are unconsciously permeated by this imperial/colonial conception of
the world.The reproduction of personal and cultural inferiority inherent in the modern educational project of monocultural assimilation is
interrelated with the hegemony of western knowledge structures that are largely taken for granted within Eurocentric education (Dei,2008).
Thus, in the field of education, “we need to learn again how five centuries of studying, classifying, and ordering humanity within an imperial
context gave rise to peculiar and powerful ideas of race, culture, and nation that were, in effect, conceptual instruments that the West used
both to divide up and to educate the world” (Willinsky,1998, pp. 2-3). The epistemic and conceptual apparatus through which the modern
worldwas divided up and modern education was institutionalized is located in the culturalcomplex called “Eurocentrism”. Western education
institutions and the modern curriculum, from the sixteenthcentury into the present, were designed to reproduce this Eurocentric imaginary
under thesign of “civilization” (Grafton & Jardine, 1986; Butts, 1967, 1973). Eurocentric
knowledge lies at the center of an
imperial and colonial model of civilization that now threatens to destroy the conditions that make life possible (Lander, 2002, p.
245). From a post-Eurocentric interpretive horizon (described below), the present conditions of knowledge are embedded within a hegemonic
knowledge apparatus that emerged withEuropean colonialism and imperialism in the sixteenth century (Philopose, 2007;Kincheloe, 2008).
Based upon hierarchical competition for power, control, and supremacy among the“civilized” nation-states, imperialism is an original and
inherent characteristic of themodern western interstate system that emerged with the formation of sovereign Europeanterritorial states in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Wallerstein, 1973; Gong, 1984 ;Hindness, 2005; Agnew, 2003; Taylor & Flint, 2000). Closely interrelated
with imperialism, colonialism involves a civilizing project within an ideological formation established to construct the way the world is known
and understood, particularly through the production, representation, and organization of knowledge (Mignolo, 2000a; Kanu,2006). Colonialism
reduces reality to the single dimension of the colonizer. Colonialism and imperialism impose on the world one discourse, one form of
conscience, one science, one way of being in the world. “Post-colonial analysis leads to a simple realization: that theeffect of the colonizing
process over individuals, over culture and society throughoutEurope’s domain was vast, and produced consequences as complex as they are
profound”(Ashcroft, 2001a, p. 24). In yet to be acknowledged ways, the Eurocentric curriculum, and western schooling in general, are
profoundly interrelated with both modern imperialism and colonialism.The persistence and continuity of Eurocentrism rather leads one to see
it asa part of a habitus of imperial subjectivity that manifests itself in a particular kind of attitude”: the European attitude – a subset of a more
encompassing “imperial attitude.” The Eurocentric attitude combines the search for theoria with the mythical fixation with roots and the
assertion of imperial subjectivity. It produces and defends what Enrique Dussel hasreferred to as “the myth of modernity” (Maldonado-Torres,
2005b, p. 43). Western schooling reproduces this “Eurocentric attitude” in complicity with a globalizedsystem of power/knowledge relations,
tacitly based upon white heterosexual malesupremacy (Kincheloe, 1998; Allen, 2001; Bonilla-Silva, 2001, 2006; Twine & Gallagher,2008; Akom,
2008a, 2008b). Eurocentrism is a hegemonic representation and mode of knowing that relies on confusion between abstract universality and
concrete world hegemony (Escobar, 2007; Dussel, 2000; Quijano, 1999, 2000). Worldwide imperialexpansion and European colonialism led to
the late nineteenth century worldwidehegemony of Eurocentrism (Quijano, 2005, p. 56). Eurocentrism, in other words, refers to the hegemony
of a (universalized) Euro-Anglo-American epistemological framework that governs both the production and meanings of knowledges and
subjectivities throughout the world (Schott, 2001; Kincheloe, 2008). Eurocentrism is an epistemological model that organizes the state, the
economy,gender and sexuality, subjectivity, and knowledge (Quijano, 2000). The production of Eurocentrism is maintained in specific political,
economic, social and cultural institutions and institutionalized practices that began to emerge with the colonization of the Americasin the
sixteenth century. The nation-state, the bourgeois family, the capitalist corporation, Eurocentric rationality, and western educational
institutions are all examples of worldwideinstitutions and institutionalized practices that contribute to the production of Eurocentrism (Quijano,
2008, pp. 193-194). Eurocentrism as a historical phenomenon is not to be understood withoutreference to the structures of power that
EuroAmerica produced over thelast five centuries, which in turn produced Eurocentrism, globalized itseffects, and universalized its historical
claims. Those structures of power include the economic (capitalism, capitalist property relations, markets andmodes of production,
imperialism, etc.) the political (a system of nation-states, and the nation-form, most importantly, new organizations to handle problems
presented by such a reordering of the world, new legal forms,etc.), the social (production of classes, genders, races, ethnicities, religiousforms
as well as the push toward individual-based social forms), andcultural (including new conceptions of space and time, new ideas of thegood life,
and a new developmentalist conception of the life-world) (Dirlik,1999, p. 8). Eurocentric thinking is embedded in the concepts and categories
through which the modernworld has been constructed. “The
West defines what is, for example, freedom, progress and civil
behavior; law, tradition
and community; reason, mathematics and science; what is real and what it means to be human. The non-
Western civilizations have simply to accept these definitions or be defined out of existence” (Sardar, 1999, p.
44). The mostly taken-for-granted definitions and conceptual boundaries of the academic disciplines and school subjects such as “philosophy”,
“math”, “science”,“history”, “literature”, “literacy”, “humanities”, “education” are all Eurocentric constructions.If Eurocentrism is intrinsic in
the way we think and conceptualize, it is alsoinherent in the way we organize knowledge. Virtually all the disciplines of social sciences, from
economics to anthropology, emerged when Europewas formulating its worldview, and virtually all are geared to serving theneed and
requirements of Western society and promoting its outlook. Eurocentrism is entrenched in the way these disciplines are structured, the
concepts and categories they use for analysis, and the way progress is defined with the disciplines (Joseph et al. 1990) (Sardar, 1999, p. 49). This
hegemonic knowledge formation envelops the modern school curriculum within an imperial/colonial paradigm legitimated by the rhetoric of
modernity (i.e., equal opportunity, mobility, achievement gap, meritocracy, progress, development, civilization,globalization). Western
education (colonial and metropolitan) reproduces imperial/colonial, monocultural, and deluded conceptions of and ways of being in the world
(Mignolo, 2000a; Kincheloe, 2008). “The effect of Eurocentrism is not merely that it excludes knowledges and experiences outside of Europe,
but that it obscures the very nature and history of Europe itself” (Dussel, 1993). Understanding
Eurocentrism thus involves
recognizing and denaturalizing the implicitly assumed conceptual apparatus and definitional powers of the west (Sardar,
1999, p. 44; Coronil, 1996). Individually,understanding Eurocentrism may also involve the experience of disillusionment and cultureshock as one
begins to demythologize the dense mirage of modernity. Yet, today, in the academic field of education, “Eurocentrism” is commonlyunderstood
as a cultural perspective among political conservatives who ascribe to thesuperiority of western contributions (e.g., scientific, cultural and
artistic) to world ivilization that in turn justify the continued exclusion of non-European cultures andknowledges in the curriculum (Collins &
O’Brien, 2003). Understanding Eurocentrism as a conservative perspective on western culture and education ignores the historical claim that
Eurocentrism is the framework for the production and control of knowledge – thatEurocentrism is the way the “modern” world has been
constructed as a cultural projection.For many of us educated in the western tradition – within this still dominantepistemological framework -- a
Eurocentric worldview may be all we know. We may not recognize that our enlightened, liberal versus conservative, university educated ways
of thinking, knowing, and being are a reflection of a particular historical-cultural-epistemological world-view, different from and similar to a
variety of other equally valid and valuable ways of knowing and being (Santos, 2007; Battiste, 2008). In other words, if we are “well educated”,
we conceive, perceive, interpret, know, learn about, and (re)produce knowledge of the “world” through an ethnocentric cultural projection
knownas “Eurocentrism” (Ankomah, 2005). This review begins therefore by situating Eurocentrism within the historical contextof its emergence
– colonial modernity – and proceeds to define Eurocentrism as theepistemic framework of colonial modernity. From this decolonial (or post-
Eurocentric)historical horizon and framing of Eurocentrism, the second part will frame and reviewliterature on the critique of Eurocentrism
within mathematics and science education thatrepresent alternatives to the hegemony of western knowledge in the classroom. This literature
was searched for and selected because it provides critiques of Eurocentrism that include specific proposals for de-centering and pluralizing the
school curriculum. Thereview concludes by summarizing, situating, and appropriating these two school subject proposals within a vision for a
post-Eurocentric curriculum. In framing, selecting, andreviewing literature that challenges and reconceptualizes the underlying
Eurocentricassumptions of the modern school curriculum, this literature review adopts from critical philosophical (Haggerson, 1991),
interpretive (Eisenhardt, 1998), and creative processapproaches (Montuori, 2005). The rationale for this two-part organization, as well as
thetype of review this rationale calls for deserve further clarification, before analyzing thehistorical context of Eurocentrism. Methodological
and Theoretical Rationale Conventional literature reviews seek to synthesize ideas as overviews of knowledgeto date in order to prefigure
further research (Murray & Raths, 1994; Boote & Beile, 2005).Eisenhardt (1998) however, describes another purpose of literature reviews as
interpretivetools to “capture insight ….suggesting how and why various contexts and circumstancesinform particular meanings and reveal
alternative ways of making sense (p. 397).Following Eisenhardt’s description, this unconventional literature review is intended tosituate and
review an emergent literature on a post-Eurocentric curriculum within anhistorical analysis of Eurocentrism. A post-Eurocentric interpretive
horizon is describedthat provides an alternative way of making sense of the curriculum literature. Eurocentricmodernity is the historical context
within which the modern curriculum is conceived. Mostuses of term Eurocentrism within the curriculum literature have yet to include analyses
of the origins and meaning of Eurocentrism within the history and project of modernity. Thislack of recognition and analysis of the historical
context of Eurocentrism contributes to both incoherence and impotency in the use of this critical concept (for examples seeMahalingam, 2000;
Gutierrez, 2000; Aikenhead & Lewis, 2001). The concepts Eurocentrism and post-Eurocentrism offer contrasting paradigmsthrough which the
curriculum can be evaluated in relation to whether teaching and learningreproduces or decolonizes the dominant modern/colonial system of
power/knowledgerelations. The successful development and implementation of a post-Eurocentriccurriculum is dependent upon an adequate
historical-philosophical interpretation of Eurocentrism. As such, this literature review adopts elements from the critical philosophical,
interpretive, and creative process approaches (Haggerson, 1991; Eisenhardt,1999; Livingston, 1999; Meacham, 1998; Schwandt,
1998; Montuori, 2005). Eisenhardt describes interpretive reviews as presenting information that “disrupts conventional thinking”
and seeks to “reveal alternative ways of making sense”

Monocultural absorption marginalizes indigeneity

Hammersmith 7—PhD in Education from U South Africa (Jerome, CONVERGING INDIGENOUS AND WESTERN KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS:
IMPLICATIONS FOR TERTIARY EDUCATION, http://iportal.usask.ca/docs/Hammersmith/Hammersmith.pdf)

In this study Indigenous knowledge is treated as an integral aspect of the ontological theory held by Indigenous people. Knowing is relational
and participatory. Through participation, Indigenous students come to understand knowledge as a means of strengthening ecological balance.
Indigenous knowledge is gained from a way of living and being in the world; learning is understood as participation, and it is in this forum that
human beings influence the manifestation of the physical reality. Indigenous epistemology is explored through engaging and participating in a
process that is a reflection of Indigenous ways of building knowledge (Ermine 1995: 104-106). Recurring negative feedback in the relationships
with the external knowledge systems brought to bear on Indigenous Nations and peoples, (relationships which have not always effectively
addressed many of their special needs, languages, learning styles and cultures), have resulted in extensive marginalization of their knowledge
systems. This has, in turn, contributed to the marginalization of cultural integrity. Some examples of this marginalization are identified in
chapter three. 1.5 COMPLIMENTARY DIVERSITY AND CREATIVE INTERCONNECTIVITY The study, using the Cree as an example, as in M. Battiste
and J. Barman (1995: vii-xx), R. Barnhardt and O. Kawagley (1999: 1-13), W. Ermine (2004: 1-5), C. Odora-Hoppers (2002: iii-285), H.K. Trask
(1999: 1-255), L. Tuhiwai Smith (1999: 1-208) and others argues that there is a need for enhancing efforts at identifying and fostering a
functional complimentarity leading to creative interconnectivity - between the Indigenous knowledge systems rooted in the Indigenous First
Nations and Metis cultures that inhabit Saskatchewan – and the modern versions of formal Western knowledge systems originally intended to
serve the educational needs of all Saskatchewan communities. While these complex knowledge systems are functionally interdependent, they
are currently often largely disconnected. In considering the cross-cultural knowledge systems in Saskatchewan, this study reviews observations
made by the Federation of Saskatchewan Indians (FSI), the National Indian Brotherhood (NIB), the Assembly of First Nations (AFN), Indian and
Northern Affairs Canada (INAC), R. Devrome (1991: 1- 165), C. Odora-Hoppers (2002: iii-285), M. Battiste & J. Barman (1995: v-328), W. Ermine
(2004: 1-5) and others. It points out that attempts at ‘bridging’ between cultures often suffered, and continues to suffer, from a
colonial ‘one-way bridge’ perception that assumes that change is required only in respect of Indigenous people. In Chapter two, the
study refers to G. Esteva and M. Suri Prakash (1998: v-147) who describe multicultural education as an oxymoron. Often when attempting to
include Indigenous content within Western knowledge systems curricula in Canada, educators have ignored the fact that such
content is only meaningful within an Indigenous context and process (V. Deloria and D.R. Wildcat 2001: 79-84). The fact
that in Saskatchewan and in the rest of Canada the natural and social sciences, the humanities and fine arts have all been presented and
evaluated primarily from Western perspectives, content, context and process is identified in this study as a shortcoming. It limits
the education provided to First Nations and Métis in Saskatchewan by restricting its holistic quality. This has been true from
elementary through tertiary levels in Saskatchewan and Canadian educational institutions. Despite differences in degree and intensity, it
remains true whether Federal, Provincial, First Nations' or Metis’ governance exercise educational jurisdiction. Similar to the observations made
by OdoraHoppers (2002: vii-22) with respect to Indigenous education in Africa, education for all Indigenous Nations and people has not been
attained. In fact, education for all has collapsed into ‘schooling for all’ – ‘the blind leading the blind for several decades!’ (Odora-Hoppers 2002:
vii-22). As Odora-Hoppers observes with reference to Africa, this study, in referring to Saskatchewan and Canada, asserts that Indigenous
Knowledge Systems (IKS) represent a national heritage and a national resource. Odora-Hoppers also states (2002: 2-4) that its subjugation and
its continuing marginalization challenge us both individually and collectively at moral, ethical, pragmatical and philosophical levels. She
continues (2002: 4-8) that at institutional levels, practises, philosophies and methodologies are still non-inclusive and embarrassingly Western-
focused and Eurocentric. She argues (2002: 8-20) that these impact on the definition of what constitutes appropriate knowledge and especially
what constitutes science. This study agrees with Odora-Hoppers, that in Saskatchewan and Canada, as in Africa and other Indigenous settings
globally, IKS impels within us the need to undertake systematic reviews and the transformation of curricula in a manner that can bring to bear
fulfillment of the core values embedded in the Canadian Constitution. The study also argues that adding
Indigenous content to the
Western contexts and processes, while continuing to ignore the need for Indigenous context and processes, cannot
constitute innovative improvement. Consistent with the observations of Odora-Hoppers in Africa, IKS carries with it an indictment and a call
to action to confront attitudes, choices, preferences and nomenclature in everything that Indigenous persons do as they strive to maintain
indigeneity in a world in which there should be room around the banquet table for all (Odora-Hoppers 2002: 11-12). In his paper, ‘Ethical Space
– Transforming Relations,’ Ermine (2004: 3-4) observes that the ‘ethical space’ or the place of convergence of two societies with two
worldviews can represent a location from which a meaningful dialogue can take place. This dialogue between communities can move them
towards the negotiation of a new research order. Such an order can ethically engage different knowledge systems. (Ermine 2004: 2). Socio-
economic indicators identifying serious shortcomings in Indigenous educational results constitute a credible cry for forging an enhanced,
innovative process for Indigenous tertiary education in Saskatchewan. <Cont> Ermine’s paper points out that Poole (1972: 3-7) earlier
suggested the idea of ‘ethical space’ in seeing that an ‘ethical space’ is formed when two different kinds of space created by different
worldviews intersect each other. Ermine’s paper conceives this intersection taking shape when the Western world meets the Indigenous mind.
He finds this intersection, where the two worlds meet, an interesting and significant location for theorizing appropriate research and
development solutions. He says that the confluence of Indigenous and Western worlds and the encounter between two worldviews can
theoretically represent a space of flux where nothing is yet formed or understood. Ermine’s paper continues that in abstract terms, the
encounter of cultures at a space where no definitive rules exist to guide an interaction can appropriately represent an
opportunity for understanding and the place for negotiation of intercultural activity. He points out that this will entail the examination of
structures and systems in attempts to remove all vestiges of colonial and imperial forms of knowledge production in any research
and development that contemplates crossing cultural borders. He concludes that the ‘ethical space’ or place of convergence of two societies
with two worldviews can also represent a location from which meaningful dialogue between communities can take place, enabling a new
research and development order that ethically engages different knowledge systems. He observes that these are knowledge systems
embedded in communities characterised by distinct and different political, historical, linguistic, cultural, social and economic realities (Ermine
2004: 2). According to Ermine, this space exists where there is refuge from the undercurrents that divide nations. For Indigenous peoples, the
heart of destructive undercurrents exists in recurring viewpoints that portray only the Western narrative as the model of society. He refers to
the story of the west as an embedded consciousness that transcends generations and institutions. (Ermine 2004: 2-3) Western knowledge has
constructed its own Indigenous Nations’ image and through Western society and its schools, that has influenced the self-image of younger
Indigenous citizens, Ermine says. Western knowledge’s story of the Canadian West is what Saskatchewan Indigenous children are getting. The
danger is that there is a mono-cultural point of view about how humans are supposed to be, and this does not create an optimal condition, he
says. This is not God-given but indoctrinated into people. They were not born with unethical behaviour; the system constructed it (Ermine
2004: 3). Ermine’s paper says that although there have been many good attempts by sincere people trying to build bridges, these undercurrents
are powerful and keep washing away good intentions. He continues that when we have had breaches and ruptures in the past, it is because we
have failed to look at the area in between our two worlds. It is in this ‘ethical space’ that we can understand one another's knowledge systems
(Ermine 2004: 3). Ermine (2004: 4) refers to the grand institution of Western learning as a place where students become entrapped in one
worldview. He says that the West needs to detach from this worldview to see what it is doing by presenting a mono-cultural
monopoly. He presents the Western and Indigenous knowledge systems as alternate forces such as natural versus artificial contexts, oral
tradition versus written tradition, holistic versus a physical worldview and asks us to imagine the possibilities if society could learn from both
(Ermine 2004: 3-4). Earlier, Ermine (2004: 1) had also identified a persistent form of divergence, an alienating tension, at times bordering on
animosity, that tarnishes and hangs like a dark cloud over the precarious relationship between Indigenous Peoples and the Western world. He
states that misunderstanding and division had its genesis long ago and that ensuing relations has not alleviated the condition to any perceptible
degree of comfort on either side (Ermine 2004: 4). Ermine sees the schism as ‘continually reminding us of the anguished legacy of the
Indigenous/West confluence festering in a convoluted entanglement between the two worlds.’ This is characterised by failure to arrive at a
mutual and amiable meeting of minds (Ermine 2004: 4). Ermine’s paper observes that this misunderstanding has very often resulted in
violence and the urge to dominate or change the others’ existence to a more discernable form, more easily
predictable, or fitted into modes of thought more familiar, more palatable. This is a global phenomenon, wherever worldviews/cultures
have collided. The cultural tensions looming over the Indigenous/West relations, in their historical dimension, are particularly magnified on the
contested ground of knowledge production and validation, in particular in its flagship enterprise of research (Ermine 2004: 4). Again using
Roger Poole (1972: 140-152) as a major reference, Ermine states that his own intent for ‘ethical space’ is to describe a space between the
Indigenous and Western worlds; the separation betwixt cultures and worldviews. The space opens up by creating contrast, by purposefully
dislocating and isolating two disparate knowledge systems and cultures as represented by the Indigenous and Western worlds. In turn, the
space unifies the schism of understanding that contributes to the tension riddled enterprise of cross cultural research, development and other
forms of interaction involving the two entities. Misunderstanding occurs because the encounter of two solitudes features disparate worldviews
each formed and guided by distinct histories, languages, knowledge traditions, cultures, values, interests, and social, economic, and political
realities. These differences are under the radar of most cross-cultural interaction Ermine 2004: 3). 1.8.2 Complementary diversity The
researcher’s initial interest was encouraged and his motivation for this study enhanced by work done by Godfrey and Monica Wilson (1945:
100-101), who, from observations on social change in Central Africa, pointed out that: social activities involve both broad uniformities and
detailed diversities of culture. Neither uniformity nor diversity itself can provide any positive inducement to human beings to enter into or
remain in relations with one another. It is complementary diversities of culture within broad uniformities that alone can give rise to social
activities . . . They further point out (1945: 100-101) that complementary diversity is the positive content of relations – people trade neither
when their products are identical nor when the things they value are totally different, but when their products are different, yet valued by both.
So also in the intellectual and emotional aspects it is the difference within a wider uniformity which makes men communicate with one
another. A high degree of specialisation and variety is thus the basis for a large number of relations, i.e., for largeness of scale. Recognising that
though diminished discredited and often, if taken seriously at all by Academia, selected portions of Indigenous knowledge systems are seen by
this study as simply co-opted and modified to suit the goals of the Academy. However, among the Elders in many Indigenous communities,
much Indigenous knowledge, ways of knowing and worldview remains intact and in practise. The study argues that there is a growing need to
appreciate the contributions that Indigenous knowledge can make to contemporary understanding in areas such as environmental
enhancement, resource and wildlife management, meteorology, biology and medicine, as well as in basic human behaviour and educational
practises. Wangoola (2000: 273), in describing the African multiversity, says that it differs from a university insofar as it recognises that the
existence of alternative knowledges is important to human knowledge as a whole. Yet another important reason identified for establishing an
African Multiversity, is that the problems facing humankind today cannot be resolved by either modern scientific knowledge alone, or by
Indigenous knowledge alone. More durable solutions will be found in a new synergy between Indigenous knowledges and modern scientific
knowledge. The need for a new synergy between these two is highlighted by the current acceptance that the problems we face today are such
that none of the public sector (government), the private sector (business), and civil society alone has comprehensive and durable solutions. It is
through imaginative collaboration among these three sectors that societies will be able to conceptualize and organize sustainable solutions.

The abstracted knowledge of instrumental propositions effaces colonial violence

Mignolo 9 (Walter, Prof of Humanities at Duke, “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and De-Colonial Freedom,” Theory,
Culture, & Society 26(7-8) //shree, language modified in [brackets])

ONCE UPON a time scholars assumed that the knowing subject in the disciplines is transparent, disincorporated from the known and untouched
by the geo-political configuration of the world in which people are racially ranked and regions are racially configured. From a detached
and neutral point of observation (that Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez (2007) describes as the hubris of the zero
point), the knowing subject maps the world and its problems, classifies people and projects into what is good for
them. Today that assumption is no longer tenable, although there are still many believers. At stake is indeed the question of
racism and epistemology (Chukwudi Eze, 1997; Mignolo, forthcoming). And once upon a time scholars assumed that if you ‘come’ from Latin
America you have to ‘talk about’ Latin America; that in such a case you have to be a token of your culture. Such expectation will not arise if the
author ‘comes’ from Germany, France, England or the US. In such cases it is not assumed that you have to be talking about your culture but can
function as a theoretically minded person. As we know: the first world has knowledge, the third world has culture; Native Americans have
wisdom, Anglo Americans have science. The need for political and epistemic delinking here comes to the fore, as well as decolonializing and
decolonial knowledges, necessary steps for imagining and building democratic, just, and non-imperial/colonial societies. Geo-politics of
knowledge goes hand in hand with geo-politics of knowing. Who and when, why and where is knowledge generated (rather than produced, like
cars or cell phones)? Asking these questions means to shift the attention from the enunciated to the enunciation. And by so doing, turning
Descartes’s dictum inside out: rather than assuming that thinking comes before being, one assumes instead that it
is a racially marked
body in a geo-historical marked space that feels the urge or get the call to speak, to articulate, in whatever semiotic
system, the urge that makes of living organisms ‘human’ beings. By setting the scenario in terms of geoand body-politics I am starting and
departing from already familiar notions of ‘situated knowledges’. Sure, all knowledges are situated and every knowledge is constructed. But
that is just the beginning. The question is: who, when, why is constructing knowledges (Mignolo, 1999, 2005 [1995])? Why did eurocentered
epistemology conceal its own geo-historical and bio-graphical locations and succeed in creating the idea of universal knowledge as if the
knowing subjects were also universal? This illusion is pervasive today in the social sciences, the humanities, the natural sciences and the
professional schools. Epistemic disobedience means to delink from the illusion of the zero point epistemology. The shift I am indicating is the
anchor (constructed of course, located of course, not just anchored by nature or by God) of the argument that follows. It is the beginning of any
epistemic decolonial de-linking with all its historical, political and ethical consequences. Why? Because geo-historical and bio-graphic loci of
enunciation have been located by and through the making and transformation of the colonial matrix of power: a racial system of social
classification that invented Occidentalism (e.g. Indias Occidentales), that created the conditions for Orientalism; distinguished the South of
Europe from its center (Hegel) and, on that long history, remapped the world as first, second and third during the Cold War. Places of
nonthought (of myth, non-western religions, folklore, underdevelopment involving regions and people) today have been waking up from the
long process of westernization. The anthropos inhabiting non-European places discovered that s/he had been invented, as anthropos, by a
locus of enunciations self-defined as humanitas. Now, there are currently two kinds or directions advanced by the former anthropos who are no
longer claiming recognition by or inclusion in the humanitas, but engaging in epistemic disobedience and de-linking from the magic of the
Western idea of modernity, ideals of humanity and promises of economic growth and financial prosperity (Wall Street dixit). One direction
unfolds within the globalization of a type of economy that in both liberal and Marxist vocabulary is defined as ‘capitalism’. One of the strongest
advocates of this is the Singaporean scholar, intellectual and politician Kishore Mahbubani, to which I will return later. One of his earlier book
titles carries the unmistakable and irreverent message: Can Asians Think?: Understanding the Divide between East and West (2001). Following
Mahbubani’s own terminology, this direction could be identified as de-westernization. Dewesternization means, within a capitalist economy,
that the rules of the game and the shots are no longer called by Western players and institutions. The seventh Doha round is a signal example
of de-westernizing options. The second direction is being advanced by what I describe as the decolonial option. The decolonial option is the
singular connector of a diversity of decolonials. The decolonial paths have one thing in common: the colonial wound, the fact that regions and
people around the world have been classified as underdeveloped economically and mentally. Racism not only affects people but also regions
or, better yet, the conjunction of natural resources needed by humanitas in places inhabited by anthropos. De colonial options have one aspect
in common with de-westernizing arguments: the definitive rejection of ‘being told’ from the epistemic privileges of the zero point what ‘we’
are, what our ranking is in relation to the ideal of humanitas and what we have to do to be recognized as such. However, decolonial and de-
westernizing options diverge in one crucial and in disputable point: while the latter do not question the ‘civilization of death’ hidden under the
rhetoric of modernization and prosperity, of the improvement of modern institutions (e.g. liberal democracy and an economy propelled by the
principle of growth and prosperity), decolonial options start from the principle that the regeneration of life shall prevail over primacy of the
production and reproduction of goods at the cost of life (life in general and of humanitas and anthropos alike!). I illustrate this direction, below,
commenting on Partha Chatterjee’s re-orienting ‘eurocentered modernity’ toward the future in which ‘our modernity’ (in India, in Central Asia
and the Caucasus, in South America, briefly, in all regions of the world upon which eurocentered modernity was either imposed or ‘adopted’ by
local actors assimilating to local histories inventing and enacting global designs) becomes the statement of interconnected dispersal in which
decolonial futures are being played out. Last but not least, my argument doesn’t claim originality (‘originality’ is one of the basic expectations of
modern control of subjectivity) but aims to make a contribution to growing processes of decoloniality around the world. My humble claim is
that geoand body-politics of knowledge has been hidden from the self-serving interests of Western epistemology and that a task of decolonial
thinking is the unveiling of epistemic silences of Western epistemology and affirming the epistemic rights of the racially devalued, and
decolonial options to allow the silences to build arguments to confront those who take ‘originality’ as the ultimate criterion for the final
judgment. 1 II The introduction of geo-historical and bio-graphical configurations in processes of knowing and understanding allows for a radical
re-framing (e.g. decolonization) of the original formal apparatus of enunciation. 2 I have supported in the past those who maintain that it is
not enough to change the content of the conversation, that it is of the essence to change the terms of the
conversation. Changing the terms of the conversation implies going beyond disciplinary or interdisciplinary controversies and the conflict of
interpretations. As far as controversies and interpretations remain within the same rules of the game (terms of
the conversation), the control of knowledge is not called into question. And in order to call into question the
modern/colonial foundation of the control of knowledge, it is necessary to focus on the knower rather than on
the known. It means to go to the very assumptions that sustain locus enunciations. In what follows I revisit the formal apparatus of
enunciation from the perspective of geo and bio-graphic politics of knowledge. My revisiting is epistemic rather than linguistic, although
focusing on the enunciation is unavoidable if we aim at changing the terms and not only the content of the conversation. The basic assumption
modern epistemology (e.g. the hubris of the
is that the knower is always implicated, geo and body-politically, in the known, although
zero point) managed to conceal both and created the figure of the detached observer, a neutral seeker of truth and
objectivity who at the same time controls the disciplinary rules and puts [themselves] himself or herself in a privileged
position to evaluate and dictate.

Reformist accommodations are gifts of death that reaffirm the generative structures
of colonialism
Coulthard 13 [Glen, Dene activist, professor of First Nations Studies and Political Science at University of British Columbia, “Indigenous
Peoples and the ‘Politics of Recognition,’” 23 Mar 2013, http://www.newsocialist.org/685-indigenous-peoples-and-the-politics-of-recognition]

Fanon's insights here immediately expose the limits of the politics of recognition for restructuring
indigenous]-[po-state relations in Canada. This project has largely been conceived of in terms of reformist
state redistribution schemes like granting certain "cultural rights" and concessions to indigenous
communities through self-government and land claims processes. Although this approach may alter some
of the effects of colonial-capitalist exploitation and domination, it does little to address their generative
structures - in this case the racist capitalist economy and the colonial state. Seen from this angle, the contemporary politics of
recognition simply leaves one of the two operative levels of colonial power identified by Fanon untouched. The second
key problem with the politics of recognition's proposed remedy for colonial injustice has to do with the subjective realm of colonial power. Here
it is important to note that most recognition-based proposals - whether we're -state relations in Canada. This project has
largely been conceived of in terms of reformist state redistribution schemes like granting certain "cultural
rights" and concessions to indigenous communities through self-government and land claims processes.
Although this approach may alter some of the effects of colonial-capitalist exploitation and domination, it
does little to address their generative structures - in this case the racist capitalist economy and the colonial state. Seen
from this angle, the contemporary politics of recognition simply leaves one of the two operative levels of colonial
power identified by Fanon untouched. The second key problem with the politics of recognition's proposed remedy for colonial injustice
has to do with the subjective realm of colonial power. Here it is important to note that most recognition-based proposals - whether
we're talking about the recommendations of Charles Taylor or the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples - rests on the assumption
that the flourishing of indigenous peoples as distinct and self-determining agents is dependent on their
being granted recognition and institutional accommodation by and within the settler-state apparatus. As
sociologist Richard Day has put it, under these models, recognition is conceived of as a "gift" bestowed from a
superior identity to an inferior one. For Fanon, there are at least two problems underlying the idea that freedom and
independence can be achieved via a gift of recognition. The first involves the relationship that he draws between struggle and the disalienation
of the colonized individual. Simply stated, for Fanon it is through struggle and conflict (and for the later Fanon, violent struggle and conflict)
that the colonized come to be rid of the "arsenal of complexes" driven into the core of their being through the colonial process.
 2AC OV
Genocide, actuated by the policies of settler colonialism, underpins the ethic of
America. This colonization is not an event, but a continual process which fatalistically
consumes all of indigenous life. Liberal humanism, the dominating ideology of the
virulent colonizer, destroys the geographies and subjectivity of indigenous people,
rendering any liberatory strategy which is not explicitly in dialogue with settler
colonialism a failure. Educational curriculum, working in tandem with this genocidal
ethic, ensures colonial futurity by using a narrow political framework to limit out
potentially radical dialogue on education, weaponizing the resolution in the process.
This logic is pervasive in operating to produce a feeling of inclusion, but in reality, it
only entrenches marginalization. This logic is also especially prevalent in spaces like
debate, which is why we see this space as uniquely valuable for our advocacy.
However, that is only true if we rupture the now naturalized biopolitical violence of
extermination, seizure, exploitation, brutality, and dehumanization, all of which
dictate colonial society and spaces in the status quo. We go about this rupture by
committing what the 1AC calls “ethnographic refusal,” a regulation of the dominant
settler colonial curriculum which will work to create spaces of decolonized education
which will, in turn, help provide the much needed alternatives for indigenous people
suffering under settler colonial rule. Furthermore, the very performance of the 1AC
rocks settler subjectivity to its very core, decolonizing the resolution and the self
through subversive, performative discourse. The 1AC’s speech act of ethnographic
refusal as a regulation of a settler colonialist education state as per our Pochedley
evidence is key to challenge these manifestations of settler subjectivity because of the
way that refusal allows for a transgression of attempts to contain anticolonial
discourses embedded within the status quo.
 2AC Impacts
Settlerism requires a logic of elimination to maintain the territorial integrity of states
like the U.S., premised on a triadic structure between settlers, indigenous, and black
chattel slaves
Tuck et al 13 (Eve, State University of NY; Ruben A Gaztambide-Fernandez, University of Toronto. “Curriculum, Replacement, and Settler
Futurity.” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing ♦ Volume 29, Number 1, 2013. gendered language modified in <<brackets>>//George)

Settler colonialism is the specific formation of colonialism in which the colonizer comes to stay, making
himself <<themselves>> the sovereign, and the arbiter of citizenship, civility, and knowing. Patrick Wolfe (2006)
argues that settler colonialism “destroys to replace,” (p. 338) operating with a logic of elimination. “Whatever settlers may say—
and they generally have a lot to say,” Wolfe observes, “the primary motive for elimination is not race (or religion, ethnicity,
grade of civilization, etc.) but access to territory” (ibid., parentheses original). The logic of elimination is embedded
into every aspect of the settler colonial structures and its disciplines—it is in their DNA, in a manner of speaking. Indeed
invasion is a structure, not an event (p. 402). The violence of invasion is not contained to first contact or the
unfortunate birthpangs of a new nation, but is reasserted each day of occupation. Thus, when we write about
settler colonialism in this article, we are writing about it as both an historical and contemporary matrix of relations and
conditions that define life in the settler colonial nation-state, such as the United States, Canada, New Zealand,
Australia, Israel, South Africa, Chinese Tibet, and others. In North America, settler colonialism operates through
a triad of relationships, between the (white [but not always]) settlers, the Indigenous inhabitants, and chattel
slaves who are removed from their homelands to work stolen land. At the crux of these relationships is land, highly
valued and disputed. For settlers to live on and profit from land, they must eliminate Indigenous peoples, and extinguish their historical,
epistemological, philosophical, moral and political claims to land. Land, in being settled, becomes property. Settlers must also import chattel
slaves, who must be kept landless, and
who also become property, to be used, abused, and managed. Several belief systems
need to be in place to justify the destruction of Indigenous life and the enslavement of life from other
lands, in particular the continent of Africa. These belief systems are constituted through “what Michel Foucault identifies as the
‘invention of Man’: that is, by the Renaissance humanists’ epochal redescription of the human outside the terms of the then theocentric, ‘sinful
by nature’ conception/‘descriptive statement’ of the human” (Wynter, 2003, p. 263). These include what was termed in the 19th century
“manifest destiny”–or the expansion of the settler state as afforded by God; heteropaternalism–the assumption that heteropatriarchal nuclear
domestic arrangements are the building block of the state and institutions; and most of all, white supremacy. Settler colonialism requires the
construction of non-white peoples as less than or not-quite civilized, an earlier expression of human civilization, and makes whiteness and white
subjectivity both superior and normal (Wynter, 2003). In doing so, whiteness and settler status are made invisible, only seen when threatened
(see also Tuck & Yang, 2012). Settler
colonialism is typified by its practiced epistemological refusal to recognize the latent relations
of the settler colonial triad; the covering
of its tracks. One of the ways the settlercolonial state manages this covering is through the
circulation of its creation story. These stories involve signs-turned mythologies that conceal the teleology of violence
and domination that characterize settlement (Donald, 2012a, 2012b). For example, Dwayne Donald examines the centrality of the
“Fort on Frontier” as a signifier for the myth of civilization and modernity in the creation story of the Canadian nation-state. The image of the fort
works as “a mythic sign that initiates, substantiates and, through its density, hides the teleological story of the development of the nation” (2012a,
p. 43): Fort pedagogy works according to an insistence that everyone must be brought inside and become like the insiders, or they will be
eliminated. The fort teaches us that outsiders must be either incorporated, or excluded, in order for development to occur in the desired ways.
(2012a, p. 44)

Colonialism necessitates genocide and symbolic death as war becomes a permanent

relation
Harting 6 – Associate Professor of English at the University of Montreal (Heike, “Global Civil War and Post-colonial Studies,” from the
Globalization and Autonomy Online Compendium, globalautonomy.ca/global1/servlet/Xml2pdf?fn=RA_Harting_GlobalCivilWar)//George

The Necropolitics of Global Civil War As with other civil wars, global civil war
affects society as a whole. It "tends," as Hardt and Negri argue,
"towards the absolute" (2004, 18) in that it polices civil society through elaborate security and surveillance systems,
negates the rule of law, militarizes quotidian space, diminishes civil rights to the degree in which it increases torture, illegal incarceration,
disappearances, and emergency regulations, and fosters a culture of fear, intolerance, and violent discrimination. Hardt and

Negri, therefore, rightly argue that war itself has become "a permanent social relation" and thereby the "primary

organizing principle of society, and politics merely one of its means or guises" (ibid., 12). What Hardt and Negri suggest is new about today's global
civil war is its biopolitical agenda. "War," they write, "has become a regime of biopower, that is, a form of rule aimed not only at controlling the population but
producing and reproducing all aspects of social life" (ibid., 13). For example, the biopolitics of war entails the production of particular economic and cultural
subjectivities, "creating new hearts and minds through the construction of new circuits of communication, new forms of social collaboration, and new modes of
interaction" (ibid., 81). The ambiguity of Hardt and Negri's notion of biopower subtly resides in their adaptation of the language of social and political revolution, for
it seems to be the regime of biopower, rather than the multitude, that absorbs and transvalues the revolutionary, that is, anti-colonial, spirit inscribed in the rhetoric
a biopolitical definition of war "changes war's entire legal
of "new hearts and minds." At the same time, they argue, that

framework" (ibid., 21-22), for "whereas war previously was regulated through legal structures, war has become
regulating by constructing and imposing its own legal framework" (ibid. 22). If none of this, at least in my mind, is marked by
a particular originality of thought, then this may have to do with Hardt and Negri's reluctance to address the historical continuities between earlier wars of
decolonization and contemporary global wars, the legacies of imperialism, and the imperative of race in orchestrating imperia l, neo-colonial, and today's global civil
biopolitical global warfare might be a new phenomenon on the sovereign territory of the United States of America, specifically
wars. In fact, while

after 11 September 2001, it is

hardly news to "people in the former colonies, who," as Crystal Bartolovich points out, "have long
lived at the 'crossroads' of global forces" (2000, 136), violence, and wars. For example, in Sri Lanka global civil war has been a
permanent, everyday reality since the country's Sinhala Only Movement in 1956, and become manifest in the normalization of racialized violence as a means of politics
since President Jayawardene's election campaign for a referendum in 1982, which led to the state-endorsed anti-Tamil pogrom in 1983. Similarly, according to Achille
Mbembe, biopolitical warfare was intrinsic to the European imperial project in "Africa," where "war machines emerged" as early as "the last quarter of the twentieth
century" (2003, 33). In other words, although Hardt and Negri argue convincingly that it is the ubiquity of global war that restructures social relationships on the global
and local level, their concept tends to dehistoricize different genealogies and effects of global civil war. Indeed, not only do Hardt and Negri refrain from reading wars
of decolonization as central to the construction of what David Harvey sees as the uneven "spatial exchange relations" (2003, 31) necessary for the expansion of capital
accumulation and of which global war is an intrinsic feature, but they also dissociate global civil wars from the nation-state's still thriving ability to implement and
exercise rigorous regimes of violence and surveillance. As for the term's epistemological formation, global civil war has bee n sanitized and no longer evokes the
conventional association of civil war with "insurrection and resistance" (Agamben 2005, 2). Instead, it has become the effect of a diffuse new sovereignty (i.e. , Hardt
and Negri's Empire), a sovereignty that no longer decides over but has itself become a disembodied, that is, denationalized and normalized, state of exception. Yet,
to talk about the disembodiment of global war not only reinforces media-supported ideologies of high-tech precision wars without casualties, but it also represses
narratives about the ways in which the modi operandi of global war come to be embodied differently in different sites of war. In her short story "Man Without a
Mask" (1995), the Sri Lankan writer Jean Arasanayagam describes the global dimensions of a war that is usually considered an ethnic civil war restricted to internally
competing claims to territorial, cultural, and national sovereignty between the country's Sinhalese and Tamil population. Told by an elite mercenary who clandestinely
works for the ruling members of the government and leads a group of highly trained assassins, the story follows the thoughts of its narrator and contemplates the
politicization of violence and death. As a mercenary and possibly an ex-SAS (British Special Air Service) veteran the Sri Lankan Government hired after the failure of
the Indo-Lankan Accord, the narrator signifies the "privatization of [Sri Lanka's] war" (Tambiah 1996, 6) and, thus, the reign of a global free market economy through
which the state hands over its institutions and services to private corporations, including its army, and profits from the unrestricted global and illegal trade in war
technologies. Like a craftsman, the mercenary finds satisfaction in the precision and methodical cleanliness of his work, in being, as he says, "a hunter. Not a predator"
in his ability to leave "morality" out of "this business" (Arasanayagam 1995, 98). He is an extreme and perverted version of what Martin Shaw describes as the "
'soldier-scholar,'???the archetype of the new [global] officer" (1999, 60). As a self-proclaimed "scholar or scribe" (ibid., 100), the mercenary plots maps of death.
Shortly before he reaches his victim, a politician who underestimated the political ambition of his enemy, he comments that bullet holes in a human body comprise a
new kind of language: "The machine gun splutters. The body is pitted, pricked out with an indecipherable message. They are the braille marks of the new fictions.
People are still so slow to comprehend their meaning" (ibid., 100). These new maps or fictions of global war, I suggest, describe what Etienne Balibar calls ultra-
objective and ultra-subjective violence and characterize how global civil war both generates bare life and manages and instrumentalizes death. According to Balibar,
ultra-objective violence suggests the systematic "naturalization of asymmetrical relations of power" (2001, 27) brought about, for instance, by the Sri Lankan
government's prolonged abuse of the Prevention of Terrorism Act, which, in the past plunged the country into a permanent state of emergency, facilitated the random
arrest of and almost absolute rule over citizens, and thus created a culture of fear and a reversal of moral and social values. As the story clarifies, under conditions of
systematic or ultra-objective violence, "corruption" becomes "virtue" and "the most vile" man wears the mask of the sage and "innocent householder" (Arasanayagam
1995, 102). In this milieu, the mercenary has no need for a mask, because he bears a face of ordinary violence that is "perfectly safe" (ibid., 102) in a society structured
by habitual and systemic violence. But the logic of the "new fictions" of political violence is also ultra-subjective because it is "intentional" and has a "determinate
goal" (Balibar 2001, 25), namely the making and elimination of what Balibar calls "disposable people" in order to generate and maintain a profitable global economy
of violence. The logic of ultra-subjective violence presents itself through the fictions of ethnicity and identity as they are advanced and instrumentalized in the name
of national sovereignty. The mercenary perfectly symbolizes what Balibar means when he writes that "we have entered a world of the banality of objective cruelty"
(ibid.). For if the fictions of global violence are scratched into the tortured bodies of war victims, the mercenary's detached behavior dramatizes a "will to 'de-
corporation'," that is, to force disaffiliation from the other and from oneself ??? not just from belonging to the community and the political unity, but from the human
condition" (ibid.). In other words, while global civil war becomes embodied in those whom it negates as social beings
and thereby reduces to mere "flesh," it remains a disembodied enterprise for those who manage and orchestrate the

politics of death of global war. It is through the dialectics of the embodiment and disembodiment of global
violence that the dehumanization of the majority of the globe's population takes on a normative and
naturalized state of existence. Arasanayagam's short story also casts light on the limitations of Hardt and Negri's understanding of the biopolitics of
global civil war, for the latter can account neither for the new fictions of violence in former colonial spaces nor for what Mbembe calls the "necropolitics"

(2003, 11) of late modernity. Mbembe's term refers to his analysis of global warfare as the continuation of earlier
and the development of new "forms of subjugation of life to the power of death" and its attendant reconfiguration of
the "the relationship between resistance, sacrifice, and terror" (2003, 39). 4 Despite the many theoretical intersections of Hardt and Negri's and Mbembe's work,
Mbembe's notion of necropolitics sees contemporary warfare as a species of such earlier "topographies of cruelty" (2003, 40) as the plantation system and the colony.
Thus, in contrast to Hardt and Negri, Mbembe argues that the ways in which global violence and warfare produce subjectivities
cannot be dissociated from the ways in which race serves as a means of both deciding over life and death
and of legitimizing and making killing without impunity a customary practice of imperial population
control. If global civil war is a continuation of imperial forms of warfare, it must rely on strategies of embodiment, that is, of politicizing and racializing the colonized
or now "disposable" body for purposes of self-legitimization, specifically when taking decisions over the value of human life. After all, on a global level, race propels
the ideological dynamics of ethnic and global civil war, while, on the local plane, it serves to orchestrate the brutalization and polarization of the domestic population,
reinforcing and enacting patterns of racist exclusion and violence on the non-white body. In contrast to Hardt and Negri, then, Mbembe invites us to articulate imperial
genealogies for the necropolitics of today's global civil wars. In other words, if imperialism was a form of perpetual low-intensity global war, the biopolitics of
imperialism aimed at creating different forms of subjectivization. For example, while in India, the imperial administration sought to create a functional class of native
informants, in Africa and the Caribbean, the British Empire created the figure of homo sacer. The latter, as Agamben argues, refers to the one who can be killed but
not sacrificed. Homo sacer, Agamben clarifies, constitutes "the originary exception in which human life is included in the political order in being exposed to an
unconditional capacity to be killed" (1998, 85). Thus, the native is included in the imperial order only through her exclusion, while, simultaneously her humanity is
stripped of social life and transformed into bare life, ready to be commodified on slavery's auction blocs and foreclosed fro m the dominant imperial psyche. Agamben's
understanding of bare life derives from his reading of the Nazi death camps as the paradigmatic space of modernity in which the distinction be tween "fact and law"
(ibid., 171), "outside and inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit" (ibid., 170) dissolves and in which biopolitics takes the place of politics and "homo sacer" replaces
the "citizen" (ibid., 171). While the notion of bare life is instrumental for theorizing biopolitics and the normalization and legalization of state violence under the
pretense of, for example, protective arrests and preemptive strikes, it also suggests that the human body can be read as pure matter or in empirical terms. What goes
unnoticed is to what extent the production of bare life depends on ideologies of race, that is, on the racialization of bodies, citizenship, and the concept of the human.
For instance, under imperial rule, bare life is subjected to death and its politics in ways slightly different from those suggested by Agamben. More specifically, the
killing of natives or slaves as bare life ??? then and today, as Rwanda's race-based genocide clarifies ??? not only configures human life in terms of its "capacity to be
killed" (Agamben 1998, 114), that is as homicide and genocide outside of law and accountability, but also measures the value of human life on grounds
of race. The making of bare life is a racialized and racializing process rooted within the necropolitics of colonialism.
For, killing the native or slave presupposes the remaking of the human into bare life both through ideologies of pseudo-scientific racism and by
subjecting them to what Orlando Patterson calls the "social death" (1982, 38) of the slave, that is, to a symbolic death of the human as
a communal and social being that precedes physical death. 5 Thus, imperialism's necropolitics involves the making of disposable lives
through practices of zombification and the "redefinition of death" itself (Agamben 1998, 161). In this sense, imperialism not only facilitated the

extreme forms of racialized violence characteristic of global civil war, but it also helped create the
conditions for making bare life the acceptable state of being for the present majority of the globe's
population. Not unlike Jean Arasanayagam's short story, Mbembe's account of the Rwandan genocide and the Palestinian intifada suggests that the new global
subjectivities are not so much the networked multitude Hardt and Negri imagine. Rather, emerging from the "new fictions" of global war, they are the suicide bomber,
the mercenary, the martyr, the child soldier, the victim of mass rape, the refugee, the woman dispossessed of her family and livelihood, the mutilated civilian, and
the skeleton of the disappeared and murdered victims of global civil war. What these subjectivities witness is that, on one hand, living under conditions of global civil
war means to live in "permanent???pain" (Mbembe 2003, 39) and, on the other hand, they refer back to the dialectical mechanisms of colonial violence. For under
the Manichaean pressures of colonialism, colonial violence always inaugurates a double process of subjection and subject formation. Frantz Fanon famously argues
that anti-colonial violence operates historically on both collective and individual subject formation. For, on the one hand, "the native discovers reality [colonial
alienation] and transforms it into the pattern of this customs, into the practice of violence and into his plan for freedom" (1963, 58), and on the other, a violent "war
of liberation" instills in the individual a sense of "a collective history" (ibid., 93). Thus, as Robert Young suggests, anti-colonial violence "functions as a kind of
psychotherapy of the oppressed" (2001, 295). Yet, it seems that read through the necropolitics of imperialism, global civil warfare no longer aims at the "pacification"
of the colonial subject or the "degradation" of the "postcolonial subject" (ibid., 293) but, as I suggested earlier, at the complete abolishment of the human per se. We
may therefore say that if global civil war produces new subjectivities, it does so through, what I have referred to as a process of zombification. Understood as sustained
acts of negation, zombification ??? a term that harks back to Fanon ??? refers to a dialectical process of the embodiment and disembodiment of global war. The
former refers to the exercise of ultra-objective violence ??? that is, the systematic "naturalization of asymmetrical relations of power" (Balibar 2001, 27) ??? in order
to regulate, racialize, and extinguish human life at will, while the latter suggests the production of narratives of "de-corporation" (ibid., 25) and detachment by those
who manage and administrate global civil war. The notion of zombification, however, connotes not only the exercise of, but also the exorcism of, the ways in which
global war is scripted on and through the racialized body. Thus, a post-colonial understanding of global war needs to think through the necropolitics of war, including
the uneven value historically and presently assigned to human life and the politicization of death. The latter issue will be addressed in the last section of this paper.
The next section examines the cultural production and perpetuation of normative narratives of global warfare. The Rhetoric of the Archaic and Michael Ondaatje's
"Anil's Ghost" Published shortly after Sri Lanka's civil war became entangled with the global politics of the South and the rise of the Sri Lankan nation-state to one of
the war's principal and most corrupt actors, Ondaatje's novel Anil's Ghost dramatizes both the transformatio n of the country's civil war into a permanent state of
exception and the failure of global non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to intervene in the war's rising human rights abuses and violent excesses. While the novel
presents an extraordinary search for social justice through narrative and seeks to understand the operative modes of violence beyond their historical and social
configurations, it also tends to sublimate and aestheticize violence by treating it as a normative element of human and, indeed, planetary life. My purpose here is to
indicate that the novel's own project of dramatizing the complicity between religious and secular, anti-colonial and nationalist agents of war, and civilians and global
actors (i.e., NGOs) remains compromised by the novel's aesthetic investment in a particular rhetoric of the archaic. The latter, I argue, unwittingly coincides with
normative narratives of global war and facilitates the reader's detachment from the ways in which the Global North has reconstructed global life as a permanent state
of exception. Ondaatje's novel (2000) opens with an Author's Note that locates the narrative at a time when "the antigovernment insurgents in the south and the
separatist guerrillas in the north???had declared war on the government" and "legal and illegal government squads were???sent out to hunt down" both groups. In
this instance, the Hobbesian rhetoric of a "war of all against all" is more than a clich??. In fact, it is symptomatic of the novel's ambiguous critique of the role of the
Sri Lankan nation-state and its elaborate, modernist discourse of violence. The Note foreshadows what the narrator later repeats on several occasions, namely that
Sri Lanka's war is a war fought "for the purpose of war" (ibid., 98) and for which "[t]here is no hope of affixing blame" (ibid., 17). In short, the "reason for war was
war" (ibid., 43). At first glance, the narrative's emphasis on the war's self-perpetuating dynamics implies a Hobbesian understanding of violence as the natural state
of human existence. At the same time, it translates the actual politics of Sri Lanka's war into the Deleuzean idiom of the "war machine." For, according to Deleuze and
Guattari, armed conflict functions outside the control and accountability of the "state apparatus???prior to its laws" (1987, 352), and beyond its initial causes. Although
such an interpretation of Sri Lanka's war reflects what the political scientist Jayadeva Uyangoda calls the "intractability of the Sri Lankan crisis" (1999, 158), its political
and ethical stakes outweigh its gains. 6 To begin with, the novel's leitmotif of "perpetual war" situates Sri Lanka's conflict wi thin a general context of global war,
because, as the narrator reports, it is fought with "modern weaponry," supported by "backers on the sidelines in safe countries," and "sponsored by gun-and drug-
runners" (Ondaajte 2000, 43). In this scenario, the rule of law has deteriorated into "a belief in???revenge" (ibid., 56), and the state is either absent or part of the
country's all-consuming anarchy of violence. This absence suggests that the state no longer functions, in Max Weber's famous words, as "a human community that
(successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory" (2002, 13). It is of course possible to argue that the novel's critique
of the Sri Lankan nation-state lies in its absence. It seems to me, however, that the narrative's tendency to locate the dynamics of Sri Lanka's
war outside the state and within a post-national vision of a new global order generates a normative narrative of global war.
On the one hand, it resonates with the popular ??? though misleading ??? notion that the "appearance of 'failed states'," as
Samuel Huntington argues in his controversial study The Clash of Civilizations, intensifies "tribal, ethnic, and religious conflict" and thus "contributes to

[the] image of a world in anarchy" (1996, 35). On the other, situating Sri Lanka's war outside the institutions of the
state re-inscribes a Hobbesian notion of violence that helps legitimize and cultivate structural violence as
a permissive way of conducting politics. Such a reading of violence, however, overlooks that in a global context violence has become "profoundly
anti-Hobbesian" (Balibar 2001, xi). Balibar usefully suggests that the twentieth century history of extreme violence has made it impossible to regard violence as "a
structural condition that precedes institutions." Instead, he maintains, "we have had to accept???that extreme violence is not post-historical but actually post-
institutional." It "arises from institutions as much as it arises against them" (ibid., xi). Thus, in such popular post-colonial narratives of war as Anil's Ghost, the
normalization of violence figures as a forgetting of the institutional entrenchment and historical use of violence as a state-sanctioned political practice. If Ondaatje's
novel presents Sri Lanka's war as an "inherently violent" event (Das 1998), it is also an event narrated through the symbolism and logic of archaic primitivism. For
example, in the novel's central passage on the nature of human violence, the narrator observes, "The most precisely recorded moments of history lay adjacent to the
extreme actions of nature or civilisation ???Tectonic slips and brutal human violence provided random time-capsules of unhistorical lives???A dog in Pompeii. A
gardener in Hiroshima" (Ondaatje 2002, 55). The symbolic leveling of the arbitrariness of primordial chaos and the apparently ahistorical anarchism of violence create
a rhetoric of the archaic that is characteristic, as Nancy argues, of "anything that is properly to be called war" (2000, 128). He convincingly argues that archaic
symbolism "indicates that [war] escapes from being part of 'history' understood as the progress of a linear/or cumulative time" and can be rearticulated as no more
than a "regrettable" remnant of an earlier age (ibid., 128). In that, Nancy's observation coincides with Hardt and Negri's that the
"war on terror" employs
a medievalist rhetoric
of just and unjust wars that moralizes rather than legitimizes the use of global violence by putting it
outside the realm of reason and critique. In Nancy's observation, however, two things are at stake. First, what initially appears to be a
postmodern critique of the grand narratives of history in fact demonstrates that a non-linear account of history may lend itself to the transformation of extreme
violence into exceptional events. In this way violence
is normalized as a transhistorical category that fails to address the
unequal political and economic relations of power, which lie at the heart of global wars. Second, Nancy rightly
warns us against treating war as an archaic relic that is "tendentiously effaced in the progress and project of a global humanity" (2000, 128). For not only does war
return in the process of negotiating sovereignty on a global and local plane, but the representation of war in terms of archa ic images also repeats a primordialist
explanation of what are structurally new wars. As theorists such as Appadurai and Kaldor have argued, the
primordialist hypothesis of global
wars merely reinforces those mass mediated images of global violence that dramatize ethnic wars as pre-
modern, tribalist forms of strife. Huntington's notion of civilization or "fault-line" wars as communal conflicts born out of the break-up of earlier
political formations, demographic changes, and the collision of mutually exclusive religions and civilizations presents the most prominent and politically influential
version of a primordialist and bipolar conceptualization of global war. In contrast to Huntington's approach, however, the narrative of Anil's Ghost contends that all
forms of violence "have come into their comparison" (Ondaatje 2000, 203). Notwithstanding its universalizing impetus, the novel thus insists on the impossibility to
think the nation and a new global order outside the technologies of violence and modernity. Indeed, in the novel's narrative it is the suffering of all war victims that
"has come into their comparison" and suggests that the new wars breed a culture of violence that shapes everyone's life yet for which no one appears to be
accountable. On the one hand, then, the novel's self-critical humanitarian project seeks to initiate a communal and individual process of mourning by naming, and
therefore accounting for, in Anil's words, "the unhistorical dead" (ibid, 56). On the other hand, read as its critical investment in the war's politics of complicity, the
novel's humanitarian endeavor is countered by the narrator's tendency to articulate violence in archaic and anarchistic terms. For, to revert to the symbolic language
of "primitivism and anarchy" and "to treat [the new wars] as natural disasters," as Kaldor observes (2001, 113), designates a common way of dealing with them. Thus
the rhetoric of the archaic not merely dehistoricizes violence but contributes to the making of a normative
and popular imaginary through which to make global wars thinkable and comprehensible. Thus, their violent excesses
appear to be rooted in primordialist constructions of the failed post-colonial nation-state rather than a
phenomenon with deep-seated roots in the global histories of the present. Such a normative imaginary of global

war is produced for the Global North so as to dehistoricize its own position in the various colonial processes
of nation formation and global economic restructuring of the Global South. In this way, as Ondaatje's novel equally
demonstrates, the Global North can detach itself from the Global South and create the kind of historical and cultural distance needed to accept ultra-objective violence
as a normative state of existence. Conceptualizing war as a phenomenon of criminal and anarchistic violence, however, may do more than merely conform to the
popular imagination about the chaotic and untamable nature of contemporary warfare. Indeed, anarchistic notions of violence tend to compress the grand narratives
and petite recits of history into a total, singular present of perpetual uncertainty, fear, and political confusion and generate what the post-colonial anthropologist
David Scott sees as Sri Lanka's "dehistoricized" history. Given the important role the claiming of ancient Sinhalese and Hindu history played in the violent identity
politics that drive Sri Lanka's war, Scott suggests that devaluing or dehistoricizing history as a founding category of Sri Lanka's narrative of the nation breaks the
presumably "natural???link between past identities and the legitimacy of present political claims" (1999, 103). This strategy seems useful because it uncouples Sri
Lanka's colonially shaped and glorified Sinhalese past from its present claims to political power. We need to note, however, that, according to Scott, dehistoricizing
the past does not suggest writing from a historical vacuum. Rather, it refers to a process of denaturalizing and, thus, de-legitimizing the normative narratives of
ethnicized and racialized narratives of national identity. Anil's Ghost engages in this process of "dehistoricizing" by foregrounding the fictitious and fragmented, the
elusive and ephemeral character of history. Indeed, as the historian Antoinette Burton suggests, the novel offers "a reflection on the continued possibility of History
itself as an exclusively western epistemological form" (2003, 40). The latter clearly finds expression in what Sarath's brother, Gamini, condemns as "the last two
hundred years of Western political writing" (Ondaatje 2000, 285). Steeped in the imperial project of the West, such writing is facilitated by and serves to erase
the figure of the non-European cultural Other in order to produce and maintain what Jacques Derrida famously called the "white mythology"
(1982, 207) of Western metaphysics. The novel usefully extends its reading of violence into a related critique of knowledge production, so that
the latter becomes legible as being complicit in the production of perpetual violence and war. This critique is perhaps most articulated through the
character of Palipana, Sarath's teacher and Sri Lanka's formerly renowned but now fallen anthropologist. Once an agent of Sri Lanka's anti-colonial liberation
movement, Palipana represents the generation of cultural nationalist who sought history and national identity in an essentially Sinhalese culture and natural
environment. Rather than employing empirical and colonial methods of knowledge production and historiography, Palipana had left the path of scientific objectivity,
tinkered with translations of historical texts, and "approached runes???with the pragmatic awareness of locally inherited skills" (Ondaatje 2000, 82) until "the
unprovable truth emerged" (ibid., 83). Now, years after his fall from scientific grace, Palipana lives the life of an ascetic, following the "strict principles of" a "sixth-
century sect of monks" (ibid., 84). To him, history and nature have become one, for "all history was filled with sunlight, every hollow was filled with rain" (ibid., 84).
Yet, Ondaatje's construction of Palipana and his account of the eye-painting ritual of a Buddha statue ??? a ritual that assumes a central place in the novel's
cosmopolitan vision of artisanship as a practice of cultural and religious syncretism in the service of post-conflict community building ??? are themselves built on a
number of historical texts listed in the novel's "Acknowledgment" section. As Antoinette Burton astutely observes, "the orientalism of some of the texts on Ondaatje's
list is astonishing, a phenomenon which suggests the ongoing suppleness of 'history' as an instrument of political critique and ideological intervention" (2003, 50).
Rather than effectively "dehistorizing" the character of Palipana, then, Ondaatje bases this character and the eye-painting ceremony on a central Sri Lankan modernist
text, Ananada K. Coomaraswamy's Mediaeval Sinhalese Art (1908/1956). Cont For Hardt and Negri, then, the state of exception functions as the universal condition
and legitimization of global civil war, while positioning the United States as a global power, which transforms war "into the primary organizing principle of society"
(2004, 12). They rightly observe that the state of exception blurs the boundaries between peace and war, violence and mediation. Yet, curiously enough, Hardt and
Negri's understanding of the state of exception largely emphasizes the concept's regulatory and pragmatic politics, so that the United States emerges as a sovereign
power on grounds of its ability to decide on the state of exception. By exempting itself from international law and courts of law, protecting its military from being
subjected to international control, allowing preemptive strikes, and engaging in torture and illegal detention (ibid., 8), the United States instrumentalizes and maintains
war as a state of exception in the name of global security and thus seeks to consolidate its hegemonic role within Empire. Although Hardt and Negri openly disagree
with Agamben's reading of the state of exception as defining "power itself as a 'monopoly of violence' " (2004, 364), it seems to me that Agamben's theory of the
state of exception, as put forward in Homo Sacer rather than in States of Exception, might be usefully read alongside Hardt and Negri's crucial claim that global civil
war as well as resistance movements depend on the "production of subjectivity" through immaterial labour (2000, 66). What this argument overlooks is that, according
to Agamben, the state of exception constitutes an abject space or "a zone of indistinction between outside and inside, exclusion and inclusion" (1998, 181), where
subjectivity enters a political and legal order solely on grounds of its exclusion. Moreover, the sovereign ??? albeit a nation, sovereign power, or global network of
power ??? can only transform the rule of law into the force of law by suspending the legal system from a position that is sim ultaneously inside and outside the law.
Through these mechanisms of exclusion and contradiction, subjectivity is not so much created as it is deprived of its social and political relationships. Thus the
"originary activity" of global civil war is the violent conflation of political and social relationship and thereby the "production of bare life" (ibid., 83), of life that need
not be accounted for, as is the case with the civilian casualties of the US-led war against Iraq. The state of exception, however, also figures as a prominent concept in
post-colonial theory, for it raises questions not only about the ways in which we configure the human but also how we understand imperial or global war. In 1940,
Benjamin famously wrote, "the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain
to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight" (1968, 257). Benjamin's statement, as Homi Bhabha reminds us half a century later in his essay
"Interrogating Identity," can be usefully advanced for a critical analysis of the dialectical ??? if not revolutionary ??? relationship between oppression, violence, and
anti-colonial historiography. Indeed, "the state of emergency," as Bhabha says, "is also always a state of emergence" (1994, 41). Read in the context of today's global
state of exception, namely the recurrence and intensification of ethnic civil wars across the globe and the coincidence of democratic and totalitarian forms of political
rule, Bhabha's statement entails a number of risks and suggestions for a post-colonial historiography of global civil war. First, Bhabha's notion of
emergency/emergence reflects his critical reading of Fanon's vision of national identity and thus reconsiders the state of emergency as a possible site of "the occult
instability where the people dwell" (Fanon 1963, 227) and give birth to popular movements of national liberation. In this context, the state of exception might be
understood as both constitutive to the alienation that is intrinsic to liberation movements and instrumental for a radical euphoria and excessive hope that create and
spectralize the post-colonial nation-state as a deferred promise of decolonization. It is through this perspective that we can critically evaluate Hardt and Negri's
endorsement of what they call "democratic violence" (2004, 344). This kind of violence, they argue, belongs to the multitude. It is neither creative nor revolutionary
but used on political rather than moral grounds. When organized horizontally, according to democratic principles of decision making, democratic violence serves as a
means of defending "the accomplishments" of "political and social transformation" (ibid., 344). Notwithstanding the concept's romantic and utopian inflections,
democratic violence also derives from Hardt and Negri's earlier argument that "the great wars of liberation are (or should be) oriented ultimately toward a 'war against
war,' that is, an active effort to destroy the regime of violence that perpetuates our state of war and supports the systems of inequality and oppression." This, they
conclude, is "a condition necessary for realizing the democracy of the multitude" (ibid., 67). In one quick stroke, Hardt and Negri move anti-colonial liberation wars
into their post-national paradigm of Empire and divest them of their cultural and historical particularities. Moreover, translating explicitly national liberation
movements into a universalizing narrative of global pacifism precludes a critique of violence within its particular historical and philosophical formation. In contrast, a

post-colonial analysis of global war must tease out the intersections between the ways in which racialized
violence constitutes colonial and post-colonial processes of nation formation and helps construct an
absolute enemy through which to legitimize global war and to abdicate responsibility for the
dehumanizing effects of global economic restructuring. Second, while Bhabha's pun is symptomatic of the resisting properties that he
sees as operative in the various practices of colonial ambiguity, it also, despite Benjamin's opinion, draws attention to the possibility that oppression alters the linear
flow of Western history and challenges "the transparency of social reality, as a pre-given image of human knowledge" (Bhabha 1994, 41). Here, Bhabha rightfully asks
to what extent do states of emergency or acts of extreme violence constitute a historical rupture and, more importantly, call into question the nature of the human
subject. It is at this point that a post-colonial reading of the state of exception fruitfully coincides with Agamben's notion of exception. For in both cases, the focus
of inquiry is the construction of disposable life through the logic of necropower and the collapse of social
and political relationships that enable the exercise of particularly racialized forms of violence, including
torture and disappearances. Third, Bhabha's notion of the double movement of emergency and emergence envisions an anti-colonialist historiography
in terms of a dialectical process of perpetual transformation. It is at this point, however, that the coupling of emergency or exception and emergence becomes
combining both terms prematurely translates the violence of the political
problematic for at least two reasons. First,

event into that of metaphor and risks erasing the micro- or quotidian narratives of violence ??? such as
Arasanayagam's account of war ??? that both legitimate and are perpetuated by political and social states of

emergency. In order to examine the relationship between global and communal forms of violence, a critical practice of post-colonial studies, I suggest, must
reassess the term "transformation" and, concurrently, the assumption that acts of extreme global violence can be advanced in the service of "making history" (Balibar
2001, 26). In other words, if, as Hannah Arendt argues, there has been a historical "reluctance to deal with violence as a separate phenomenon in its own right" (2002,
25), it is time to examine the possibility of employing post-colonial studies in the service of a non-dialectical critique of global war. This kind of critique must ask to
what extent those on whose bodies extreme violence was exercised are a priori excluded from articulating any transformative theory of violence. How, in other words,
does bare life ??? if at all possible ??? attain the status of subjectivity within the dehumanizing logic of exception or global civil war? Fourth, like Bhabha, we
need
to take seriously Benjamin's insight into the intrinsic relationship between violence and the
conceptualization of history. Notwithstanding Bhabha's pivotal argument that the violence of a "unitary notion of history" generates a "unitary," and
therefore extremely violent, "concept of man" (1994, 42), I wish to caution, alongside Benjamin's analysis of fascism, that what enables today's global

civil war is that even "its opponents treat it as a historical norm" (Benjamin 1968, 257). What is at stake, then, in dominant as
well as critical narratives of global civil war is their representation as natural rather than political phenomena, and the acceptance of globalization as a political fait
accompli. Both of these aspects, I believe, contribute to the proliferation of dehistoricized concepts of the global increase of racialized violence and war. It seems to
the enormous rise of violence inflicted by global civil wars requires a post-colonial
me, however, that

historiography and critique of global war that questions notions of history based on cultural
fragmentation, rupture, and totalization. Instead, such a historiography must seek out patterns of connection
and connectivity. But more importantly, as I have argued in this paper, it must trace the post-colonial moment of global civil war and begin to read
contemporary war through the interconnected necropolitics of global and imperial warfare. Thus, to understand
the logic and practice of global war we need to develop a greater understanding precisely of those civil wars and national liberation wars that do not appear to
threaten the new global order. Furthermore, a post-colonial critique of global civil war should facilitate the decoding and rescripting of both the normalizing narratives
and racialized embodiment of global civil warfare.

[re-cut this into two or more cards] Settler colonialism operates in a state of precarity,
constantly stabilizing itself by demonstrating the possibility of accommodating
indigenous self-determination. The affirmatives pushes that claim to its extreme to
exacerbate a crisis of legitimacy, exposing the groundlessness of settler sovereignty and
the indistinction between limitless imperial violence and legal accommodation.
Rifkin 9 [2009, Mark Rifkin is associate professor of English and women's studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
"Indigenizing Agamben: Rethinking sovereignty in light of the" peculiar" status of Native peoples." Cultural Critique 73.1 (2009): 88-124] evidence
modified for ableist language

If U.S. Indian policy in its circulation of the figure of sovereignty has the potential to displace Native polities entirely, why
not do so? Why not simply erase this ongoing threat to the jurisdictional imaginary of the nation?24 To do
so would foreground the very unilateral will—the theoretically limitless imperial violence—on which U.S.
territoriality rests, exacerbating the very structural crisis of legitimacy the topos of sovereignty works to
dissimulate. In other words, the claim of sovereignty appears at moments in which a gap has opened in the
operative logics of U.S. law, offering a way of resolving legal and political questions that threaten to undo
the geopolitics of the settler-state. If Native peoples are the subjects of treaties, how are they not foreign? Why can the United States pass laws
applicable to people on Native lands? On what basis can the federal government claim the right to regulate political

entities that predate the existence of the United States? The official answer provided for all of these questions is that Native
populations and lands are within the domain over which the United States is sovereign. While tautological, self-serving, and resting on

nothing more than outright assertion, this response is an attempt to provide a foundation for the exercise
of U.S. authority, seeking to validate the domestication of Native peoples by generating terminologies and
doctrines that appear to offer a logical/legal explanation.25 Simply to present U.S. superintendence as a
function of brute force would undercut the very legitimizing aim of the arguments in which sovereignty
is employed, thwarting their effort to cover the inability of U.S. law philosophically to ground itself in
the ground of the nation. The citation of sovereignty, therefore, is less a confident and self-assured indication
of untroubled control than a restless performance in which the failure to find a normative foundation on
which to rest the legitimacy of national jurisdiction remains a nagging source of anxiety. Justice Clarence Thomas
addresses this dynamic in his concurrence to the decision in U.S. v. Lara (2004).26 Thomas observes that there is a contradiction at the heart of

U.S. Indian policy. “In my view, the tribes either are or are not separate sovereigns, and our federal Indian law
cases untenably hold both positions simultaneously” (215), and he later adds, “The Federal Government cannot simultaneously claim
power to regulate virtually every aspect of the tribes through ordinary domestic legislation and also maintain that the tribes possess anything resembling ‘sovereignty’”
(225).27 Despite the fact that the majority opinion describes tribes’ “inherent sovereignty” as the source of
their, still circumscribed, criminal jurisdiction, it also indicates that such “sovereignty” can be abridged,
restored, and reconfigured at will by Congress, suggesting that the powers reaffirmed by the court under
the rubric of tribal sovereignty actually are not predicated on the existence of Native peoples as
autochthonous (“separate”) entities but instead on the authority arrogated by the U.S. government to redefine
the status of Native collectivities according to any principle it wishes. Still substantively conditioned by congressional sanction, the legalism
of “inherent sovereignty,” not unlike “domestic dependent nation,” draws attention away from the untenability of the
United States’ overriding claim to sovereignty itself, or rather the absence of a legitimate legal claim (or
basis for making one) that is registered by the citation of the figure of sovereignty. That process of invention

signals an effort to cloak U.S. imperial modes of exception as something other than, in Agamben’s terms,
“sovereign violence,” to cover the degree to which Native peoples are left “exposed and threatened on
the threshold” of national territoriality (Homo Sacer, 64, 28). The attempt to locate legitimacy for U.S. jurisdiction in something other than its
own imposed, circular obviousness can be found even in the most strident declarations of sovereignty. In Oliphant, for example, the majority opinion suggests that
“Indian tribes do retain elements of ‘quasi-sovereign’ authority after ceding their lands to the United States” and that they “give up their power to try non-Indian
citizens” after “submitting to the overriding sovereignty of the United States” (208, 210). Such moments suggest a point at which Native peoples voluntarily surrender
While quite doubtful as a way of characterizing the actual workings of the treaty
certain forms of political authority.

system or the ways it was understood by Native signatories (assuming that sale or lease of particular plots of land is tantamount to
a wholesale acceptance of unconstrained regulation by the United States over every aspect of Native life), this description does predicate federal

power on consent (“ceding,” “submitting”), seeking to cast U.S. sovereignty as encompassing yet fundamentally
noncoercive. This effort to find a way to ameliorate the force of settler-state jurisdiction suggests that part of the metapolitical generation
of categories, concepts, and statuses is the attempted simulation of legitimacy as well. If the notion of
“inherent sovereignty” as employed in U.S. Indian policy is somewhat of a placeholder given its continued
subjection to potential congressional reworking (the supposed “overriding sovereignty” of the federal government), it still
provides a discursive entry point that can be occupied by Native peoples in ways that expose the
domination at play in the deployment of the topos of sovereignty by the settler-state. In other words,
exploiting the kind of logical incoherence and underlying normative crisis toward which Thomas points,
the discourse of sovereignty can be mobilized [utilized] to deconstruct U.S. rule by illustrating how the
settler-state exerts a monopoly on the production of legitimacy—the ways statuses are imposed on
Native peoples in the context of their axiomatic yet constitutionally indefensible subjection to U.S.
authority. The countercitation of sovereignty can reveal and contest the operation of such a monopoly
by drawing attention to the organizing indistinction between force and law in Indian policy—the
operation of a geopolitical state of exception. This position, though, runs against the grain of two
understandings of Native articulations of “sovereignty” prominent in Indigenous political theory: as the adoption of a
specific set of principles of governance imposed by settler-states or as a pragmatic attempt to make
Indigenous concepts intelligible within state terminologies and to state institutions.28 The First, presented perhaps
 The
most forcefully by Taiaiake Alfred in his essay “Sovereignty,” envisions sovereignty as a particular form of government, one derived from alien conventions.

problem for Native peoples in utilizing the discourse of sovereignty is that doing so reifies a “European
notion of power and governance” which is fundamentally at odds with Native beliefs and practices:
“Sovereignty itself implies a set of values and objectives that put it in direct opposition to the values and objectives found in most traditional indigenous philosophies”
(43).29 Alfred suggests that “the process of de-colonization” has focused on “the mechanics of escaping from direct state control and . . . gain[ing] recognition of an
indigenous governing authority” while losing track “of the end values of the struggle” (41). More than distinguishing between a politics focused on outside
“recognition” and one concerned with the needs, desires, and selfunderstandings of Indigenous peoples, Alfred insists that “Indigenous leaders engaging themselves
and their communities in arguments framed within a liberal paradigm have not been able to protect the integrity of their nations,” instead “the benefits accrued” by
such a strategy requires a de facto “agree[ment] to abandon autonomy” (39).30 The issue, then, is not only what Native communities want for themselves but also
what ultimately will “protect” their “autonomy” from state intervention and management. In describing “sovereignty” as a set of “values” at odds with “indigenous
philosophies,” Alfred presents “retraditionalization,” eschewing settler-state terminologies and ideologies in favor of the “wisdom coded in the languages and cultures
but what I have been arguing
of all indigenous peoples” as the vehicle for “achiev[ing] sovereigntyfree regimes of conscience and justice” (40, 49),

is that “sovereignty itself” is empty, a topological placeholder through which to displace, or contain, the
paradox of asserting “domestic” authority over populations whose existence as peoples precedes the
existence of the state. Thus, adopting a different set of principles—an Indigenous rather than European “notion . . . of governance”—does not secure
“autonomy” from settler-state superintendence, from being coded as an “anomaly” axiomatically subject to the metapolitical authority of the settler-state. While

Alfred raises the immensely important questions of whether Indigenous peoples desire a form of
government that is structured around the principles of liberalism and whether the acceptance of such a structure does irrevocable
damage to traditions that historically have been crucial to such communities, these issues are askew with respect to contesting

“sovereignty itself” or mapping, in Agamben’s terms, “the very threshold of the political order” of
settler-state imperialism. Alfred’s argument relies on the juxtaposition of Indigenous political models
with European ones without addressing how the settler-state narrates its jurisdiction over national space and justifies its extension of regulatory control
over Native peoples. He suggests that “sovereignty” designates “a conceptual and definitional problem centered

on the accommodation of indigenous peoples within a ‘legitimate’ framework of settler state governance”
(34–35), adding that they “must conform to state-derived criteria and represent ascribed or negotiated

identities” (43), but he stops short of investigating the ways the topos of sovereignty works to validate a range of discrepant (kinds of) “identities” that Native
peoples at various times have been and are called on to inhabit.31 By giving sovereignty a determinate content, then, Alfred runs into similar problems as those raised
by the invocation of “culture.” An insistence on difference cannot unsettle the state’s assertion of the authority to adjudicate the status of Indigenous polities because
“sovereignty” is the vehicle not of implementing a stable set of “values and objectives” but of repudiating any challenge to the territorial imagina ry of the nation.
Moreover, articulations of difference can be refracted back through the prism of Native “peculiar”-ity, possibly reinforcing the process of exceptionalization. Put
another way, Alfred draws attention to a particular type of identity (liberal bureaucracy) imposed by the state
rather than the state’s fraught and uneven effort to generate legitimacy for its management of Native
identities. As against Alfred’s call for eschewing the framework of “sovereignty,” Dale Turner insists that the protection of Native peoples involves making their
concerns and representations intelligible within the legal and political structures of the settler-state. In This Is Not a Peace Pipe, Turner argues that the political terrain
on which Native peoples must move has been mapped by the settler-state and that if they are to gain greater traction for their land claims and assertions of
governmental autonomy, they will need to express them in ways that non-native people and institutions can understand. “As a matter of survival, Aboriginal
intellectuals must engage the non-Aboriginal intellectual landscapes from which their political rights and sovereignty are articulated and put to use in Aboriginal
communities” (90). Given that non-native political processes already are active in shaping the terms of Indigenous governance and social life, Native peoples cannot
afford simply to ignore them or to insist on the significance of “traditional” knowledge in ways that speak past non-native modes of articulation. Turner suggests that
such translation is the work of “the word warrior,” whose “most difficult task will be to reconcile indigenous ways of knowing with the forms of knowledge that define
European intellectual traditions” (93). “Survival” for Native polities, from this perspective, is predicated on a kind of communication in which discrepant “ways of
knowing” can be bridged. However, to what extent does Turner’s notion of “reconcil[ing]” knowledges also present the struggle over sovereignty as a function of
cultural dissonance between Indigenous peoples and the settler-state? The central question he poses is “how do we explain our differences and in the process
empower ourselves to actually change the state’s legal and political practices?” (101), but does transposing Indigenous concepts into non-native terminologies
intervene in the logic structuring “the state’s legal and political practices”? Does such a conversion challenge the jurisdictional imperative and imaginary driving the
settler-state assertion of authority over Native peoples? The idea of “explain[ing]” Indigenous “differences” acknowledges the imperial force exerted under the sign
of sovereignty, but it does not contest the state’s monopoly over the legitimate exercise of legitimacy, nor does it prevent those “differences” from being reified,
regulated, and subordinated as “culture” in the ways discussed earlier. Alongside the discussion of the necessity for translation by “word warriors,” though, Turner
also calls for a thorough accounting of the violences of settler-state imperialism. “The project of unpacking and laying bare the meaning and effects of colonialism will
open up the physical and intellectual space for Aboriginal voice to participate in the legal and political practices of the state” (30–31). Later, he suggests that Indigenous
intellectuals should pursue three goals: “(a) they must take up, deconstruct, and continue to resist colonialism and its effects on indigenous peoples; (b) they must
protect and defend indigeneity; and (c) they must engage the legal and political discourses of the state in an effective way” (96). What kind of “participat[ion]” and
“engage- [ment]” do such strategies yield? Although Turner tends to answer this question by focusing on the possibility of explaining Indigenous intellectual traditions,
the above comments offer another option, namely deconstructing the
making them comprehensible to non-natives,

dynamics of settler-state power—problematizing the ways it seeks to generate legitimacy for itself . He
describes such intervention as “understanding . . . how colonialism has been woven into the normative
political language that guides contemporary Canadian legal and political practices” (30), and folding
deconstruction back into the elaboration of “differences” between Natives and non-natives, he argues,
“indigenous peoples must use the normative language of the dominant culture to ultimately defend world

views that are embedded in completely different normative frameworks” (81). Highlighting the horizon of “difference”
positions deconstruction as a tool for elaborating the distinction between “normative” systems, but what falls away in this formulation is the violence of demanding
that Native polities, regardless of the content or contours of their political systems, be subjected to the superintendence of settler-state regimes due to the brute,
unfounded assertion of the former’s domesticity with respect to the latter. In other words, the kinds of “normative” claims made by the settler-state are not simply
distinct from Indigenous ones but are aporetic, themselves predicated on the (thread)bare insistence that the state maintains an “overriding sovereignty.” Instead,
by “unpacking and laying bare” the logical and legal emptiness of sovereignty, the “space” opened is
precisely that which has been placed in the state of exception, illustrating how Native “peculiar”-ity—and the various statuses
derived from it— are less a function of a mistranslation of Indigenous difference than the marker of an enforced structural relation. As Agamben suggests in Means
Without End, sovereignty “is the guardian who prevents the undecidable threshold between violence and right . . . from coming to light” (113). Emphasizing

the normative crisis over which the topos of sovereignty is stretched does not so much make room for
Indigenous principles within Euramerican terminologies and institutions as refuse en toto the right
claimed by the state to assess and adjudicate Native governance, drawing attention to the state’s
inability to ground Indian policy in anything but the forced incorporation of Native persons and lands
into the nation. Might this deconstructive approach not be open to the same pragmatic critique Turner makes of Alfred, that it fails to appreciate the
exigencies faced by Native communities and the consequent need to find a more “effective way” of engaging with settler-state policy? Reacting to a similar question
with respect to his discussion of the need to challenge the racist stereotypes embedded in the precedents cited by the U.S. Supreme Court, Robert Williams observes,
“the legal history of racism in America teaches us that the most successful minority rights advocates of the twentieth century recognized that the real waste of time
was trying to get a nineteenth-century racist legal doctrine to do a better job of protecting minority rights” (xxxii). While his emphasis on the “metaprinciple of Indian
racial inferiority” cannot fully address the geopolitics of settler-state jurisdiction, as discussed earlier, his caution here seems quite relevant in considering the value
of directly challenging the process by which the United States legitimizes its management of Indigenous peoples. In the three cases on which I have focused, the

assertion of Native autonomy threatens to disrupt the U.S. territorial/jurisdictional imaginary and that
potential rupture is contained by the citation of “sovereignty”—a concept whose substance keeps
shifting and out of which emerge statuses and classificatory schemes that determine the institutional
intelligibility of Native identities and claims. That process of exceptionalization has no check— the “plenary
power” or “overriding sovereignty” of the United States is taken to license complete control over Native

collectivities, including in what ways and to what extent, if any, they in fact will be recognized as
collectivities (never mind as self-determining polities). To leave uncontested the topology of settler-state sovereignty, then, is to allow for Native peoples to
remain abandoned to, in Agamben’s terms, a “zone of indistinction between . . . outside and inside, violence and law” (64). Moreover, that “zone” is less a function
of a self-confient exercise of power than a sign of the normative tenuousness of U.S. authority. As Clarence Thomas’s comments suggest, the creation of a concept
like “inherent sovereignty” works to cover while not unsettling the “overriding” and potentially limitless authority exerted by the U.S. government, specifically
it might be
Congress, in Indian affairs, providing the impression of a legal logic that can guide or legitimize U.S. actions. I am suggesting, howevedr, that

possible to occupy the contradiction embedded in a formulation like “inherent sovereignty” in ways
that neither endorse the category as (continually re)formulated within U.S. Indian policy, disown it as
the imposition of an alien norm, nor translate Indigenous traditions into its terms. Instead, the status can
be used as a discursive entry point through which to highlight the groundlessness of U.S. claims to Native
land and the impossibility of reconciling Indian policy with the principles of constitutionalism, drawing
attention to the difficulty of validating the incorporation of Native peoples into the mapping of the
jurisdictional geography of the state except through recourse to violence. Such a strategy emphasizes the
coercive imposition of domesticity on Native peoples who neither sought nor desired it, foregrounding
the ways the narration of Indigenous polities as subjects of domestic law depends on a process of
exceptionalization in which they axiomatically are consigned to a “peculiar,” and thus regulatable,
internality that forcibly disavows their autonomy and self-representations.32 If such a deconstructive argument were
successful, in Turner’s terms “open[ing] up the physical and intellectual space for Aboriginal voice,” what might the resulting relationship look like? I have been arguing
that the United States exerts metapolitical authority over Indigenous peoples, setting the terms of what will constitute
politics and inventing statuses through which to interpellate Native polities, but I also have suggested that process is animated by a

persistent anxiety about the validity of U.S. rule, the invented categories of Indian law marking an effort
to generate legitimacy for national jurisdictional mappings. The disjunction between the supposed fact of Indians’ domesticity and
their existence as independent political collectivities prior to the formation of the United States appears perhaps most visibly in the negotiation of treaties, and that
tension supposedly is allayed by the assent of Native peoples to these documents. Yet, as suggested earlier, the discourse of consent at play in the treaty system is
not simply an expression of the free will of Native peoples, instead serving as a way of validating the process of land acquisition those agreements enabled. Moreover,
while certainly less unilateral than the declaration of authority over Native populations contained in Kagama and Oliphant, treaties were not free from U.S. efforts to
regulate what would constitute viable forms of political subjectivity, representing Native governance and land tenure in ways that facilitated the project of white
expansion. That being said, as the process within U.S. constitutionalism most suited to the recognition of extraconstitutional entities, treaty-making seems the most
Rather than trying to contain the geopolitical difficulties that Indigenous
viable vehicle for a “sovereignty-free” politics.

occupancy generates for the imaginary of the settler-state, treaties can serve as sites of negotiation, not
simply over particular concrete issues but the terms of engagement themselves.33 When no longer subordinated to
the assertion of an overriding, underlying, preemptive, or plenary authority, such dialogue could perform the kind of translation

Turner describes between different traditions or frameworks of governance, displacing sovereignty in

favor of politics. In Means Without End,Agamben suggests, “Politics is the exhibition of a mediality: it is the act of making a means visible as such. Politics is
the sphere neither of an end in itself nor of a means subordinated to an end” (116–17), and in this vein, treaties freed from the end of securing the obviousness of
The forms of recognition emerging from that process would not
national territoriality become a “mediality” of negotiation.

function as part of a mode of regulation and would not be predicated on casting Native peoples as an
exception within the sphere of U.S. politics and law. What I have sought to do, then, is to use Agamben’s
analysis of the violence of sovereignty in its reliance on the production of a state of exception to suggest
the absence of a normative framework for U.S. Indian policy and more broadly for the geopolitics of the
settler-state. The coding of Native peoples as “peculiar” within U.S. governance depends on the assertion of a territorially based jurisdiction over them that
further licenses the regulation of their entry into the shifting field of national politics, generating various (kinds of) categories that they are called on to occupy.
While offering rigorous critique of such statuses, including their racializing premises and inability to
engage with traditional philosophies and practices, Indigenous political theory largely has not contested
the broader ways violence is transposed into legitimacy through the circulation of the enveloping yet
empty sign of “sovereignty.” Exposing that transposition, potentially through the countercitation of Native
sovereignty (giving deconstructive force to what largely operates as a placeholder within settler-state
governance), can work to disrupt the attendant metapolitical matrix through which Native identities
are produced and managed. As Justice Thomas suggests, “The Court should admit that it has failed in its quest to find a source of congressional power
to adjust tribal sovereignty” (225). Emphasizing that failure and thus the location of Native peoples at the threshold

between law and violence, between “ordinary domestic legislation” and imperialism, opens the state
of exception to the possibility of self-determination, in which Indigenous polities cease to be
axiomatically enfolded within the ideological and institutional structures of the settler-state.

Modern/coloniality is root cause of genocide—speaking from the colonial difference

key to resistance
Mignolo 2000 [Walter, William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University Local Histories/Global
Designs, 97-98]
Postcolonial theorizing in the United States, as Dirlik noted, found its liinise in the academy among intellectual immigrants from the Third
postcolonial theorizing is not an invention of third World intellectuals
World (|nlin 1996). But, of course,
migrating to the United States and should not be limited to this enclave. On the other hand, there is nothing
wrong with tin fuel lhat migrating Third World intellectuals found themselves comfortiihli m the space of postcolonality. What Third World
intellectuals and "i Inilars in the United States (and I am one of them) contributed to was tin marketing of postcoloniality among an array
of available theories and a >t i Hum of "post" possibilities. On the other hand, Afro-American studies in 11 ii United States, whose
emergence is parallel to postmodern and postcoI'11.11 theories, is deeply rooted in the African diaspora and, consequently, in ihr history
of colonialism and slavery (Eze 1997a; 1997b). Dirlik has a |mhit il we interpret his dictum as the marketization of postcolonial theory
Within the U.S academy. His point loses its poise when we consider, for in lance, Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy in England, or we go beyond
the U.S. iii aili iny and take seriously Ruth Frankenberg's dictum that in the United 'iiaii ihe question is not the postcolonial (as it is, e.g., for
England and linli.i) hut civil rights (Frankenberg and Mani 1993). In this sense, the con111'i nl i ivil rights has not been used to claim an
identity and, similarly, civil H^lir. in ihe United States will have more similarities with post-dictatorships in the Southern Cone: neither of
them is the locus of subjectivity and identity formation, although both are extremely helpful to understand the political landscape in the
United States and the Southern Cone, contemporary with the movement of decolonization in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. Once more,
the bottom line is the subaltern reason in the geopolitical distribution of knowledge that could be explained by colonial legacies and local
 Subaltern reason, or whatever you want to call it, nourishes and is nourished by a theoretical
critical histories.
practice prompted by movements of decolonization after World War II, which at its inception had
little to do with academic enterprises (Cesaire, Atnilcar Cabral, Fanon) and had at its core the question of race. If Marxist
thinking could be described as having class at its core, postcolonial theorizing could be described as
having race at its core. Two of the three major genocides of modernity (the Amerindian and the
African diaspora in the early modern period; the Holocaust as closing European modernity and the
crisis of the civilizing mission) are, in my understanding, at the root of colonial and imperial histories—which
is to say, at the root ol the very constitution of modernity. The subaltern reason is what arises as a
response to the need of rethinking and reconceptualizing the stories that have been told and the
conceptualization that has been put into place to divide the world between Christians and pagans,
civilized and barbarians, modern and premodern, and developed and underdeveloped regions and
people, all global designs mapping the colonial difference.
We must understand things through a parallax view of upper and lower worlds that
should not be obfuscated
Byrd 11, citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma and an Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies and English at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Jodi, “Transit of Empire,” p. 20-21, accessed via Google Books 11-25-12)//George

On the threshold, then of “the necessity with the aleatory, chaos, and untimely” that is both the work of Derrida’s
mourning of Deleuze and the haksuba of Southeastern cosmologies that Choctaw scholar LeAnne Howe defines in her work as headache, chaos,
and the collision of Upper and Lower Worlds initiated by colonialism, the Indian wills against the
signifying system.77 That the Indian represents the violent slamming of worlds in what might otherwise
be fluidity and flow helps us frame the problem within a U.S. empire, with ties to Enlightenment liberalism, that
continues to transit itself globally along lines put to flight by “the Indian without ancestry” that makes
everyone its progeny. It is untimely as a site of death of signification. That haksuba can additionally mean “to be stunned with noise,
confused, defeaned” signals the degree to which cacophony, whether joyous or colonialist, hinges upon the
disruptions caused when “the Indian” collides with the racial, gendered, classed, and sexed
normativities of an imperialism that has arisen out of an ongoing settler colonialism.78 The Southeastern
cosmologies of the Chickasaw and Choctaw imagine worlds with relational spirals and a center that does not so much hold as stretches, links, and
ties everything within to worlds that look in all directions. It is an ontology that privileges balance, but understands that we are constant
movement that exist simultaneously among the Upper and Lower Worlds, this world and the next. In her poem “The Place the Musician Became
a Bear,” Mvskoke poet and musician Joy Harjo sings about how Southeastern Indians have always known “where to go to become ourselves again
in the human comedy. / It’s the how that baffles, the saxophone that can complicate things.”79 Harjo reminds us that there is always a priori
“becoming-human” within Southeastern worlds that links us to the complications and improvisations of stars, spirals, and jazz. Much
of the
scholarship on U.S. imperialism and its possible postcoloniality sees it as enough to challenge the
wilderness as anything but vacant; to list the annihilation of indigenous nations, cultures, and languages
in a chain of –isms; and then still to relegate American Indians to the site of the already-doneness that
begins to linger as unwelcome guest to the future. This last is particularly relevant to understanding how the United States
propagates itself as empire transhemispherically and transoceanically not just through whiteness, but through the
continued setting and colonizing of indigenous peoples’ lands, histories, identities, and very lives that
implicate all arrivants and settlers regardless of their own experiences of race, glass, gender, colonial,
and imperial oppressions. My point in tracing the Deleuzian wilderness and the Indian deferred is to detail the ways in which “the
Indian” is put to flight within Western philosophical traditions in order to understand how the United States transits itself globally as an imperial
project. As
Derrida and Deleuze are evoked within affect theories, the “Indian” and “tattooed savages”
remain as traces. Any assemblage that arises from such horizons becomes a colonialist one , and it is the
work of indigenous critical theory both to rearticulate indigenous phenomenologies and to provide (alter)native interpretative strategies through
which to apprehend the colonialist nostalgias that continue to shape affective liberal democracy’s investment in state sovereignty as a source of
violence, remedy, memory, and grievability.
Colonization reinforces a patriarchal state – allows gender domination and exclusion
Lugones, 7 (María, "Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System." Hypatia 22, no. 1 (2007): 187-188, doi:10.1111/j.1527-
2001.2007.tb01156.x.)
The imposition of the European state system, with its atten- dant legal and bureaucratic machinery, is the most
enduring legacy of European colonial rule in Africa. One tradition that was exported to Africa during this period was
the exclusion of women from the newly created colonial public sphere. ...The very process by which
females were categorized and reduced to ‘‘women”made them ineligible for leadership roles. ...The
emergence of women as an identifiable category, defined by their anatomy and subordinated to men
in all situations, resulted, in part, from the imposition of a patriarchal colonial state. For females,
colonization was a twofold process of racial inferioriza- tion and gender subordination. The creation of “women”
as a category was one of the very first accomplishments of the colo- nial state. It is not surprising, therefore,
that it was unthinkable for the colonial government to recognize female leaders among the peoples
they colonized, such as the Yorhbl. ...The transfor- mation of state power to male-gender power was accomplished at one level by
the exclusion of women from state structures. This was in sharp contrast toYonib state organization, in which power was not gender-
determined. (123-25) Oyewijmi recognizes two crucial processes in colonization, the imposition of races with the accompanying
inferiorization of Africans, and the inferiorization of anafemales. The inferiorization of anafemales extended very
widely-fiom exclusion from leadership roles to loss of control over property and other important
economic domains. Oyewiimi notes that the introduction of the Western gender system was accepted by Yoruba
males, who thus colluded with the inferiorization of anafemales. So, when we think of the indifference of
nonwhite men to the violences exercised against nonwhite women, we can begin to have some sense
of the collaboration between anamales and Western colonials against anafemales. Oyewhmi makes clear
that both men and women resisted cultural changes at different levels. Thus, while in the West the challenge of feminism
is how to proceed from the gender-saturated category of “women” to the fullness of an unsexed
humanity. For Yo&bA obinrin, the challenge is obvi- ously different because at certain levels in the society and in some spheres, the
notion of an “unsexed humanity” is neither a dream to aspire to nor a memory to be realized. It exists, albeit in concatenation with the
reality of separate and hierarchical sexes imposed during the colonial period. (156) We can see, then, that the scope of the coloniality of
gender is much too narrow. Quijano assumes much of the terms of the modern/colonial gender system’s hegemonic
light side in defining the scope of gender. I have gone out- side the coloniality of gender in order to examine what
it hides, or disallows from consideration, about the very scope of the gender system of Eurocentered global
capitalism. So, though I think that the coloniality of gender, as Quijano pointedly describes it, shows us very important aspects
of the intersection of race and gender, it follows rather than discloses the erasure of colonized women from most
areas of social life. It accommodates rather than disrupt the narrowing of gender domination.
Oyewamfs rejection of the gender lens in characterizing the inferiorization of anafemales in modem colonization makes clear the extent
understanding of gender, the colonial, Euro- centered capitalist
and scope of the inferiorization. Her
construction is much more encompassing than Quijano’s. She enables us to see the economic, political,
and cognitive inferiorization as well as the inferiorization of anafemales regarding reproductive
control.

Eurocentered capitalism reinforces violent and demeaning heterosexuality – the impact

is endless violence
Lugones, 7. (María, Argentine scholar, philosopher, feminist, and an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Philosophy,
Interpretation, and Culture and of Philosophy and of Women's Studies at Binghamton University, "Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern
Gender System." Hypatia 22, no. 1 (2007): 201, doi:10.1111/j.1527-2001.2007.tb01156.x.)
Allen has not only enabled us to see how narrow Quijano’s conception of gender is in terms of the
organization of the economy and of collective author- ity, but she has also revealed that the production of
knowledge is gendered, as is the very conception of reality at every level. Allen supported the question- ing of
biology in the construction of gender differences and introduces the important idea of gender roles being chosen and dreamt. Allen also
showed us that the heterosexuality
characteristic of the modem/colonial construction of gender relations
is produced, mythically constructed. But heterosexuality is not just biologized in a fictional way; it is compulsory and
permeates the whole of the coloniality of gender in the renewed, large sense. In this sense, global, Eurocentered
capitalism is heterosexualist. I think it is important to see, as we understand the depth and force of violence
in the production of both the light and the dark sides of the colonial/modem gender system, that this
heterosexual- ity has been consistently perverse, violent, and demeaning, turning people into
animals and turning white women into reproducers of “the (white) race” and “the(middle or upper)class.”Horswell’s
and Sigal’s work complements Allen’s, particularly in understanding the presence of sodomy and male homosexuality in colonial and
precolonial America.

The heterosexual order of coloniality is based on continual sexual violence

Schiwy, 7 (Freya, Associate Professor in the department of Hispanic Studies at the University of California, Riverside, "Decolonization and the
Question of Subjectivity: Gender, Race, and Binary Thinking." Cultural studies 21, no. 2-3 (2007): 275-276, doi:10.1080/09502380601162555.)

The colonial imaginary has employed gender as a metaphor and means of subalternization, a metaphor
that resulted not only in the representation of territories as female virgin lands that the conquerors
penetrated with the sword in hand. The gendering of colonial imaginaries has operated as a means of
rendering European masculinity through Othering. That is, European and Caucasian men have thought
themselves in opposition to colonized (or postcolonial) men who have been represented as effeminate or as part
of an irrational nature where nature itself is also bound up with tropes of femininity (Shohat 1991, pp. 53􏰀5). The emasculation of
indigenous men in Latin America has prefigured and paralleled that of other colonized peoples, enacted and
inscribed through rape, both real and in the imaginary of colonial texts, and later in indigenista literature and film. The force of this
tool of war has relied not only on the harm inflicted on women it also enacts the inability of colonized men to protect
‘their women’. Rape, the founding act and trope of mestizaje re-enforces patriarchal relations where women are
reduced to objects and their abuse comes to signify damage to male honor. It thus inscribes a heterosexual order and
may lead to an urgent need to affirm male power in the process of decolonization.

Climate change is not anthropocentric and isn’t just the extinction of humanity—
climate change is a product of white culture and means the extinction of minorities—
their neutral representations of climate make warming inevitable
Wynter 07, [2007, Sylvia, Professor Emeritus in Spanish and Romance Languages at Stanford Univeristy,
“The Human being as noun? Or being human as praxis? Towards the Autopoietic turn/overturn: A
Manifesto,” otl2.wikispaces.com/file/view/The+Autopoetic+Turn.pdf]

For if, as Time magazine reported in January 2007 (Epigraph 2), a U.N. Intergovernmental panel of Natural
Scientists, were soon to release "a smoking-gun report which confirms that human activities are to blame
for global warming" (and thereby for climate change), and had therefore predicted "catastrophic
disruptions by 2100," by April, the issued Report not only confirmed the above, but also repeated the
major contradiction which the Time account had re-echoed. This contradiction, however, has nothing to
do in any way with the rigor, and precision of their natural scientific findings, but rather with the
contradiction referred to by Derrida's question in Epigraph 3—i.e., But who, we? That is, their attribution
of the non-natural factors driving global warming and climate change to, generic human activities, and/or
to "anthropocentric forcings"; with what is, in effect, this mis-attribution then determining the nature of
their policy recommendations to deal with the already ongoing reality of global warming and climate
change, to be ones couched largely in economic terms. That is, in the terms of our present mode of
knowledge production, and its "perceptual categorization system" as elaborated by the disciplines of the
Humanities and Social Sciences (or "human sciences") and which are reciprocally enacting of our present
sociogenic genre of being human, as that of the West's Man in its second Liberal or bio-humanist
reinvented form, as homo oeconomicus; as optimally "virtuous Breadwinner, taxpayer, consumer, and as
systemically over-represented as if it, and its behavioral activities were isomorphic with the being of being
human, and thereby with activities that would be definable as the human-as-a-species ones.
Consequently, the Report's authors because logically taking such an over-representation as an empirical
fact, given that, as highly trained natural scientists whose domains of inquiry are the physical and (purely)
biological levels of reality, although their own natural-scientific order of cognition with respect to their
appropriate non-human domains of inquiry, is an imperatively self-correcting and therefore, necessarily,
a cognitively open/open-ended one, nevertheless, because in order to be natural scientists, they are
therefore necessarily, at the same time, middle class Western or westernized subjects, initiated 15 as
such, by means of our present overall education system and its mode of knowledge production to be the
optimal symbolically encoded embodiment of the West's Man, it its second reinvented bio-humanist
homo oeconomicus, and therefore bourgeois self-conception, over-represented as if it were isomorphic
with the being of being human, they also fall into the trap identified by Derrida in the case of his fellow
French philosophers. The trap, that is, of conflating their own existentially experienced (Western-
bourgeois or ethno-class) referent "we," with the "we" of "the horizon of humanity." This then leading
them to attribute the reality of behavioral activities that are genre-specific to the West's Man in its second
reinvented concept/self-conception as homo oeconomicus, ones that are therefore as such, as a
historically originated ensemble of behavioral activitiesas being ostensibly human activities-in-general.
This, in spite of the fact that they do historicize the origin of the processes that were to lead to their recent
natural scientific findings with respect to the reality of the non-naturally caused ongoing acceleration of
global warming and climate change, identifying this process as having begun with the [West's] Industrial
Revolution from about 1750 onwards. That is, therefore, as a process that can be seen to have been
correlatedly concomitant in Great Britain, both with the growing expansion of the largely bourgeois
enterprise of factory manufacturing, as well with the first stages of the political and intellectual struggles
the British bourgeoisie who were to spearhead the Industrial Revolution, to displace the then ruling group
hegemony of the landed aristocracy cum gentry, and to do so, by inter alia, the autopoetic reinvention of
the earlier homo politicus/virtuous citizen civic humanist concept of Man, which had served to legitimate
the latter's traditionally landed, political, social and economic dominance, in new terms. This beginning
with Adam Smith and the Scottish School of the Enlightenment in the generation before the American,
French, and Haitian (slave) revolutions, as a reinvention tat was to be effected in now specifically
bourgeois terms as homo oeconomicus/and virtuous Breadwinner. 116 That is as the now purely secular
genre of being human, which although not to be fully (i.e., politically, intellectually, and economically)
institutionalized until the mid-nineteenth century, onwards, when its optimal incarnation came to be
actualized in the British and Western bourgeoisie as the new ruling class, was, from then on, to generate
its prototype specific ensemble of new behavioral activities, that were to impel both the Industrial
Revolution, as well as the West's second wave of imperial expansion, this based on the colonized
incorporation of a large majority of the world's peoples, all coercively homogenized to serve its own
redemptive material telos, the telos initiating of global warming and climate change. Consequently, if the
Report's authors note that about 1950, a steady process of increasing acceleration of the processes of
global warming and climate change, had begun to take place, this was not only to be due to the Soviet
Revolution's (from 1917 onwards) forced march towards industrialization (if in its still homo oeconomicus
conception, since a march spearheaded by the 116 See the already cited essay by J.G.A. Pocock "symbolic
capital," education credentials owning and technically skilled Eastern European bourgeoisie)—as a state-
directed form of capitalism, nor indeed by that of Mao's then China, but was to be also due to the fact
that in the wake of the range of successful anti-colonial struggles for political independence, which had
accelerated in the wake of the Second World War, because the new entrepreneurial and academic elites
had already been initiated by the Western educational system in Western terms as homo oeconomicus,
they too would see political independence as calling for industrialized development on the "collective
bovarysme "117 model of the Western bourgeoisie. Therefore, with the acceleration of global warming
and climate change gaining even more momentum as all began to industrialize on the model of homo
oeconomicus, with the result that by the time of the Panel's issued April 2007 Report the process was now
being driven by a now planetarily homogenized/standardized transnational "system of material
provisioning or mode of techno-industrial economic production based on the accumulation of capital; as
the means of production of ever-increasing economic growth, defined as "development"; with this calling
for a single model of normative behavioral activities, all driven by the now globally (post-colonially and
post-the-1989-collapse-of-the-Soviet Union), homogenized desire of "all men (and women) to," realize
themselves/ourselves, in the terms of homo oeconomicus. In the terms, therefore, of "its single (Western-
bourgeois or ethno-class) understanding" of "man's humanity," over-represented as that of the human;
with the well-being and common good of its referent "we"—that, not only of the transnational middle
classes but even more optimally, of the corporate multinational business industries and their financial
networks, both indispensable to the securing of the Western-bourgeois conception of the common good,
within the overall terms of the behavior-regulatory redemptive material telos of ever-increasing economic
growth, put forward as the Girardot-type "cure" for the projected Malthusian-Ricardo transumed
postulate of a "significant ill" as that, now, ostensibly, of mankind's threatened subordination to [the
trope] of Natural Scarcity, this in the reoccupied place of Christianity of its postulate of that "ill" as that of
enslavement to Original Sin."' With the result that the very ensemble of behavioral activities
indispensable, on the one hand, to the continued hegemony of the bourgeoisie as a Western and
westernized transnational ruling class, is the same ensemble of behaviors that is directly causal of global
worming and climate change, as they are, on the other, to the continued dynamic enactment and stable
replication of the West's second reinvented concept of Man; this latter in response to the latter's
existential imperative of guarding against the entropic disintegration of its genre of being human and
fictive nation-state mode of kind. Thereby against the possible bringing to an end, therefore, of the
societal order, and autopoetic living Western and westernized macro world system in it bourgeois
configuration, which is reciprocally the former's (i.e., its genre of being human, and fictive modes of kind's
condition of realization, at a now global level. This, therefore, is the cognitive dilemma, one arising directly
from the West's hitherto unresolvable aporia of the secular, that has been precisely captured by Sven
Lutticken in a recent essay. Despite, he writes, "the consensus that global warming cannot be ascribed to
normal fluctuations in the earth's temperature... [the] social and political components of this process have
been minimized; man-made nature is re-naturalized, the new (un)natural history presented as fate." And
with this continuing to be so because (within the terms, I shall add, of our present "single understanding
of man's humanity" and the unresolvable aporia which it continues to enact), "[t]he truly terrifying notion
is not that [global warming and climate change] is irreversible, but that it actually might be reversible—at
the cost of radically changing the economic and social order..."119 The changing, thereby, of the now
globally hegemonic biologically absolute answer that we at present give to the question to who we are,
and of whose biohumanist homo oeconomicus symbolic life/death (i.e., naturally selected/dysselected)
code's intentionality of dynamic enactment and stable replication, our present "economic and social
order" is itself the empirical actualization.
Apocalyptic environmental rhetoric causes eco-authoritarianism and political apathy –
turns the case
Buell 3 (Frederick, cultural critic on the environmental crisis and a Professor of English at Queens College
and the author of five books, From Apocalypse To Way of Life, pages 185-186)

Looked at critically, then, crisis discourse thus suffers from a number of liabilities. First, it seems to have
become a political liability almost as much as an asset. It calls up a fierce and effective opposition with its
predictions; worse, its more specific predictions are all too vulnerable to refutation by events. It also
exposes environmentalists to being called grim doomsters and antilife Puritan extremists. Further,
concern with crisis has all too often tempted people to try to find a “total solution” to the problems
involved— a phrase that, as an astute analyst of the limitations of crisis discourse, John Barry, puts it, is
all too reminiscent of the Third Reich’s infamous “final solution.”55 A total crisis of society—
environmental crisis at its gravest—threatens to translate despair into inhumanist authoritarianism;
more often, however, it helps keep merely dysfunctional authority in place. It thus leads, Barry suggests,
to the belief that only elite- and expert-led solutions are possible.56 At the same time it depoliticizes
people, inducing them to accept their impotence as individuals; this is something that has made many
people today feel, ironically and/or passively, that since it makes no difference at all what any individual
does on his or her own, one might as well go along with it. Yet another pitfall for the full and sustained
elaboration of environmental crisis is, though least discussed, perhaps the most deeply ironic. A problem
with deep cultural and psychological as well as social effects, it is embodied in a startlingly simple
proposition: the worse one feels environmental crisis is, the more one is tempted to turn one’s back on
the environment. This means, preeminently, turning one’s back on “nature”—on traditions of nature
feeling, traditions of knowledge about nature (ones that range from organic farming techniques to the
different departments of ecological science), and traditions of nature-based activism. If nature is
thoroughly wrecked these days, people need to delink from nature and live in postnature—a conclusion
that, as the next chapter shows, many in U.S. society drew at the end of the millenium. Explorations of
how deeply “nature” has been wounded and how intensely vulnerable to and dependent on human
actions it is can thus lead, ironically, to further indifference to nature-based environmental issues, not
greater concern with them. But what quickly becomes evident to any reflective consideration of the
difficulties of crisis discourse is that all of these liabilities are in fact bound tightly up with one specific
notion of environmental crisis—with 1960s- and 1970s-style environmental apocalypticism. Excessive
concern about them does not recognize that crisis discourse as a whole has significantly changed since
the 1970s. They remain inducements to look away from serious reflection on environmental crisis only if
one does not explore how environmental crisis has turned of late from apocalypse to dwelling place. The
apocalyptic mode had a number of prominent features: it was preoccupied with running out and running
into walls; with scarcity and with the imminent rupture of limits; with actions that promised and
temporally predicted imminent total meltdown; and with (often, though not always) the need for
immediate “total solution.” Thus doomsterism was its reigning mode; eco-authoritarianism was a grave
temptation; and as crisis was elaborated to show more and more severe deformations of nature,
temptation increased to refute it, or give up, or even cut off ties to clearly terminal “nature.”
Solves the root cause – status quo environmental movements fail because of white
privilege.
Mandell 08, [4/1/08, Bekah Mandell is an A.B. from Vassar College; J.D., Boston College Law School;
Director of the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity Fair Housing Project; Father Robert
Drinan Family Fund Public Interest Fellow. “Racial Reification and Global Warming: A Truly Inconvenient
Truth,” http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1046&context=twlj]

[*297] Fear of eroding the hierarchies that define race explains why politicians and other elites have
consistently championed ineffectual "market-based approaches" to global warming. n36 By focusing
public and private energy on relatively insignificant individual behavior changes, the Bush administration
and other privileged elites are able to maintain the racial hierarchy that consolidates their economic and
social power. n37 Politicians know that "[w]ithout white-over-black the state withers away." n38
Therefore, they have a profound incentive to maintain the racial hierarchy. Unsurprisingly, "because
th[ese elites] accrue social and economic benefits by maintaining the status quo, they inevitably do." n39
This white consensus to maintain the spatial and mobility hierarchies that reify race is possible because,
"[w]hite privilege thrives in highly racialized societies that espouse racial equality, but in which whites will
not tolerate being either inconvenienced in order to achieve racial equality . . . or being denied the full
benefits of their whiteness . . . ." n40 With so much white privilege to lose, it becomes clear why even
most passionate environmental advocates are far more willing to call for, and make, small non-structural
changes in their behavior to ameliorate [*298] global warming, but are unwilling to embrace significant
or meaningful actions to address the crisis. n41 Even as global warming is starting to become the subject
of increasing media coverage and as more environmental groups call for action to halt the crisis, most
activism is limited to changes that maintain the existing spatial, social, economic and legal framework that
defines American society. n42 Despite knowing for decades that we have been living unsustainable
lifestyles, and "hav[ing] had some intuition that it was a binge and the earth couldn't support it, . . . aside
from the easy things (biodegradable detergent, slightly smaller cars) we didn't do much. We didn't turn
our lives around to prevent it." n43 Greenhouse emissions reduction challenges have cropped up on
websites across the country, encouraging Americans to change their light bulbs, inflate their tires to the
proper tire pressure to ensure optimal gas mileage, switch to hybrid cars, run dishwashers only when full,
telecommute, or buy more efficient washers and dryers. n44 However, popular emissions challenge web
sites are not suggesting that Americans give up their cars, move into smaller homes in more densely
populated urban neighborhoods near public transportation, or take other substantive actions to mitigate
the global climate crisis. n45 Even Al Gore, [*299] the most famous voice in the climate change
movement, reminds his fellow Americans that "[l]ittle things matter . . . buy a hybrid if you can, buy a flex-
fuel car if you can. Get a higher mileage car that's comfortable for your needs." n46 "[M]any yuppie
progressive 'greens' are the [*300] ones who drove their SUVs to environmental rallies and, even worse,
made their homes at the far exurban fringe, requiring massive car dependence in their daily lives," taking
residential segregation and racial and spacial hierarchies to previously unimagined dimensions. n47 This
focus on maintaining one's privileged lifestyle while making minimal changes reflects the power of the
underlying structural impediments blocking a comprehensive response to global climate change in the
United States. n48 It is not just political inaction that prevents a meaningful response. Millions of
Americans do not demand a change in environmental policy because, just as with political elites, it is
against the interests of those enjoying white privilege to take genuine steps to combat climate change.
n49 Real climate action would ultimately require relinquishing the spatial, social, and economic markers
that have created and protected whiteness and the privilege it confers. n50 Although "we too often fail
to appreciate how important race remains as a system for amassing and defending wealth and privilege,"
the painfully slow reaction of the American public to the growing dangers of global warming highlights
just how important racial privilege remains and how reluctant its beneficiaries are to give it up. n51 Elite
reformists make meaningful change even more remote as they push for behaviors to tweak, but not to
change the existing social, economic, and legal hierarchy in the face of [*301] "problems, [like global
warming] that arise to threaten the predominance of the traditionalist, capitalist ruling class." n52

Coloniality is the r/c of militarized violence & connects domestic ghettos to war-torn
countries
McKittrick (Katherine, Professor of Gender Studies at Queen's University in Kingston Ontario) 2013 (Plantation Futures, Duke University
Press, Small Axe, Volume 17, Number 3, November 2013 (No. 42), pp. 1-15, C.A.)
The interlocking workings of human worth, race, and space demonstrate the ways the uninhabitable
still holds currency in the present and continues to organize contemporary geographic arrangements.
The colonial enactment of geographic knowledge mapped “a normal way of life” [End Page 6] through
measuring different degrees of humanness and attaching different versions of the human to different
places. More clearly, the extension of what some European explorers assumed was “nonexistent” was a geographic system that came to
organize difference in place and to regard this differential process as a commonsense or normal way of life. This normal way of life is
rooted in racial condemnation; it is spatially evident in the sites of toxicity, environmental decay,
pollution, and militarized action that are inhabited by impoverished communities—geographies
described as battlegrounds or as burned, horrific, occupied, sieged, unhealthy, incarcerated, extinct,
starved, torn, endangered.25 What stands out are the ways we can trace the past to the present and the present to the past through
geography. The historical constitution of the lands of no one can, at least in part, be linked to the present and
normalized spaces of the racial other; with this the geographies of the racial other are emptied out of life precisely because the
historical constitution of these geographies has cast them as the lands of no one. So in our present moment, some live in the unlivable,
and to live in the unlivable condemns the geographies of marginalized to death over and over again. Life,
then, is extracted from particular regions, transforming some places into inhuman rather than human geographies. Or, those who have
lived outside what is considered normal and those who continue to inhabit the uninhabitable are so
perversely outside the Western bourgeois conception of what it means to be human that their
geographies are rendered—or come to be—inhuman, dead, and dying. We can collectively think of several
places that are considered lifeless—without history, geography, or suitable capitalist life-support systems: war-torn
countries, reservations, ghettos, what is referred to as “the global South.” Most explicitly, the not-so-present and
popular push to “save” ailing Africa and its children reveals it as a continental human geography that is not human at all but an unlivable space
the spaces of otherness have hardened
occupied by the racially condemned, the already dead and dying. This suggests that
through time, often with black, “wretched” bodies occupying or residing outside the lowest rung of
humanness and thus inhabiting what most consider inhuman or uninhabitable geographies. This is the
mutual construction of identity and place writ large. If some places are rendered lifeless in the broader geographic imagination, what of those
inhabiting the lifeless? And what of the worldview of those who occupy the wretched category—is this worldview also lifeless because the
geographies surrounding the marginalized are rendered dead? How does the dehumanization and racial marking of some communities follow
the colonial logic that the human in human geography is a direct reference to Man, who not only represents a full version of humanness (the us,
in the us and them) but at the global level naturally inhabits the livable, wealthy, overdeveloped countries? In what ways does this colonial logic
imply that Man’s human others (the them of the us and them) naturally occupy dead and dying regions as they are cast as the jobless underclasses
whose members are made to function as our “waste products” in our contemporary global world?26 Thus condemned, most of the world’s
population, [End Page 7] a population Sylvia Wynter describes as the dysselected/imperfect/less-than-human, inhabits not cosmopolitan cities
but slums.27 How, in the present, have the lands of no one emerged and normalized a mode of organizing the planet according to life and
 It is the descriptive statement identifying black geographies as dead spaces of
lifelessness? Plantation Logic
absolute otherness that has prompted my return to the plantation—precisely because in my research
the plantation is cast as the penultimate site of black dispossession, antiblack violence, racial encounter,
and innovative resistance. Indeed, it is the plantation that was mapped onto the lands of no one and
became the location where black peoples were “planted” in the Americas—not as members of society
but as commodities that would bolster crop economies.28 Within this geographic system, wherein racial violence is tied
to the administration of economic growth, the “protean capabilities” of black humanness are lived.29 As I note in Demonic Grounds, the
The plantation
plantation is often defined as a “town,” with a profitable economic system and local political and legal regulations.30
normally contains a main house, an office, a carriage house, barns, a slave auction block, a garden area,
slave quarters and kitchen, stables, a cemetery, and a building or buildings through which crops are
prepared, such as a mill or a refinery; the plantation will also include a crop area and fields, woods, and
a pasture. Plantation towns are linked to transport—rivers, roads, small rail networks—that enable the
shipping of crops, slaves, and other commodities. This is a meaningful geographic process to keep in mind because it compels
us to think about the ways the plantation became key to transforming the lands of no one into the lands of someone, with black forced labor
propelling an economic structure that would underpin town and industry development in the Americas. With this in mind, the plantation
spatializes early conceptions of urban life within the context of a racial economy: the plantation contained identifiable economic zones; it
bolstered economic and social growth along transportation corridors; land use was for both agricultural and industrial growth; patterns of
specialized activities—from domestic labor and field labor to blacksmithing, management, and church activities—were performed; racial groups
were differentially inserted into the local economy, and so forth.31 In Cabin, Quarter, Plantation, Clifton Ellis and Rebecca Ginsberg examine the
architecture and landscape of plantation towns in North America, adding to the racial economy by noticing “the hand of enslaved workers in
transforming (literally) the land[,] … the efforts of pro-slavery agents [in shaping] environments that facilitated control and surveillance of slaves’
activities[,] … slaveholders adapt[ing] old building types and develop[ing] new ones with [End Page 8] the purpose of employing architecture to
subjugate and control their human chattel.”32 These features—the economy, the landscape, the architecture—go hand in hand with different
kinds and types of racial violence, what Saidiya Hartman describes as “scenes of subjection”: the mundane terror of plantation life; the brutalities
perpetuated under the rubric of pleasure, paternalism, and property; the suffering, rape, and depersonalization; the “brutal exercise of power
that gave form to resistance.”33 While plantations differed over time and space, the processes through which
they were differentially operated and maintained draw attention to the ways racial surveillance,
antiblack violence, sexual cruelty, and economic accumulation identify the spatial work of race and
racism. In many senses the plantation maps specific black geographies as identifiably violent and impoverished, consequently normalizing the
uneven production of space. This normalization can unfold in the present, with blackness and geography and the past and the present enmeshing
to uncover contemporary sites of uninhabitablity. Yet to return to the plantation, in the present, can potentially invite unsettling and contradictory
analyses wherein: the sociospatial workings of antiblack violence wholly define black history; this past is rendered over and done with, and the
plantation is cast as a “backward” institution that we have left behind; the plantation moves through time, a cloaked anachronism, that calls forth
the prison, the city, and so forth. These contradictions keep in place, to borrow from Kara Keeling, “common memory images” that are habitually
called forth to construct blackness as silent, suffering, and perpetually violated, just as it attempts to erase the ways antiblack violence is enacted
this kind of analytical framework is unsettling because it simultaneously
in the present.34 Put differently,
archives the violated black body as the origin of New World black lives just as it places this history in an
almost airtight time-space continuum that traces a linear progress away from racist violence.

Coloniality makes war and genocide inevitable

Mignolo (Professor of Romance Languages at Duke University) 5
(Walter, “The Idea of Latin America,” pg. 11)
The logic of coloniality can be understood as working through four wide domains of human experience: (1) the economic: appropriation
of land, exploitation of labor, and control of finance; (2) the political: control of authority; (3) the civic: control of gender and sexuality; (4)
the epistemic and the subjective/personal: control of knowledge and subjectivity. The
logic of coloniality has been in place
from the conquest and colonization of Mexico and Peru until and beyond the war in Iraq, despite
superficial changes in the scale and agents of exploitation/control in the past five hundred years of
history. Each domain is interwoven with the others, since appropriation of land or exploitation of labor also
involves the control of finance, of authority, of gender, and of knowledge and subjectivity.8 The
operation of the colonial matrix is invisible to distracted eyes, and even when it surfaces, it is
explained through the rhetoric of modernity that the situation can be “corrected” with
“development,” “democracy,” a “strong economy,” etc. What some will see as “lies” from the US presidential
administration are not so much lies as part of a very well-codified “rhetoric of modernity,” promising salvation
for everybody in order to divert attention from the increasingly oppressive consequences of the logic
of coloniality. To implement the logic of coloniality requires the celebratory rhetoric of modernity, as
the case of Iraq has illustrated from day one. As capital and power concentrate in fewer and fewer hands and poverty
increases all over the word, the logic of coloniality becomes ever more oppressive and merciless. Since the
sixteenth century, the rhetoric of modernity has relied on the vocabulary of salvation, which was
accompanied by the massive appropriation of land in the New World and the massive exploitation of
Indian and African slave labor, justified by a belief in the dispensability of human life – the lives of
the slaves. Thus, while some Christians today, for example, beat the drum of “pro-life values,” they reproduce a rhetoric
that diverts attention from the increasing “devaluation of human life” that the thousands dead in
Iraq demonstrate. Thus, it is not modernity that will overcome coloniality, because it is precisely
modernity that needs and produces coloniality.

Modernity legitimizes war under colonial connotations

Maldonado-Torres 07 Nelson Maldonado-Torres¶ (Professor Comparative Literature¶ Rutgers, The State University of New
Jersey,¶ Education:¶ Ph.D in Religious Studies, with distinction, Phi Beta Kappa, Brown University¶ (2002). Exchange at Harvard University—Spring
1996. Certificate for Outstanding¶ Work in Africana Studies.¶ B.A. in Philosophy, summa cum laude, University of Puerto Rico (1994). GPA¶ 4.00.
Exchange at Hunter College, C.U.N.Y.—Fall 1991) “ON THE COLONIALITY OF BEING¶ Contributions to the development of a¶ Concept” 2007
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162548)
While Dasein is lost in the They and achieves authenticity when it anticipates¶ its own death, the damne´ confronts the reality of its own
finitude as a day to¶ day adventure. That is why Fanon writes in Black Skin, White Masks that the¶ black lacks the opportunity to descend
into hell.53 As Lewis Gordon puts it, ¶ the reason is because the black already lives in hell.54 The extraordinary event¶ of confronting
mortality turns into an ordinary affair.¶ Hellish existence in the colonial world carries with it both the racial and¶
the gendered aspects of the naturalization of the non-ethics of war. Indeed,¶ coloniality of Being
primarily refers to the normalization of the extraordinary events that¶ take place in war. While in
war there is murder and rape, in the hell of the¶ colonial world murder and rape become day to day
occurrences and menaces.¶ ‘Killability’ and ‘rapeability’ are inscribed into the images of the colonial¶
bodies. Lacking real authority, colonized men are permanently feminized. At¶ the same time, men of color represent a constant threat
and any amount of¶ authority, any visible trace of the phallus is multiplied in a symbolic hysteria ¶ that knows no limits.55 Mythical depiction
of the black man’s penis is a case in¶ point. The Black man is depicted as an aggressive sexual beast who desires to¶ rape women,
particularly White. The Black woman, in turn, is seeing as¶ always already sexually available to the raping gaze of the White and as¶
fundamentally promiscuous. The Black woman is seeing as a highly erotic being¶ whose primary function is fulfilling sexual desire and
reproduction. To be¶ sure, any amount of ‘penis’ in both represents a threat. But in its most familiar¶ and typical forms the Black man
represents the act of rape ‘raping’ while¶ the Black woman is seeing as the most legitimate victim of rape ‘being¶ raped’. Women deserve
to be raped and to suffer the consequences in terms¶ of lack of protection from the legal system, further sexual abuse, and lack of¶ financial
assistance to sustain herself and her family just as black man deserve¶ to be penalized for raping, even without committing such an act.
Both ‘raping’¶ and ‘being raped’ are attached to Blackness as if they were part of the essence¶ of Black folk, which is seeing as a dispensable
population. Black bodies are¶ seeing as excessively violent and erotic, as well as the legitimate recipients of¶ excessive violence, erotic and
otherwise. ‘Killability’ and ‘rapeability’ are part¶ of their essence understood in a phenomenological way. The ‘essence’ of¶
Blackness in a colonial anti-black world is part of a larger context of meaning¶ in which the non-ethics of war gradually becomes a
constitutive part of an¶ alleged normal world.In its racial and colonial connotations and uses,¶ Blackness is an
invention and a projection of a social body oriented by the¶ non-ethics of war. The murderous and raping
social body projects the features¶ that define it to sub-Others, in order to be able to legitimate the same
behavior¶ that is allegedly descriptive of them. The same ideas that inspire perverted acts¶ in war, particularly slavery, murder and
rape, are legitimized in modernity¶ through the idea of race and gradually are seeing as normal to a great extent¶ thanks to the
alleged obviousness and non-problematic character of Black¶ slavery and anti-Black racism. To be sure those who suffer the consequences
of¶ such a system are primarily Blacks and indigenous peoples, as well as all of¶ those who appear as colored. In short, this system of
symbolic representations,¶ the material conditions that in part produce it and continue to legitimate it,¶ and the existential dynamics that
occur therein, which are also at the same time¶ derivative and constitutive of such a context, are part of a process that¶ naturalizes the
The sub-ontological difference is the result of¶ such naturalization. It is legitimized
non-ethics of war.
through the idea of race. In such a world,¶ ontology collapses into a Manicheism, as Fanon suggested.56¶
Fanon offered the first phenomenology of the Manichean colonial world,¶ understood properly as a Manichean reality and not solely as
ontological.57 In¶ his analysis, he investigated not only the relation between whites and blacks,¶ but also those between black males and
black females. Much can be added to¶ his discussion, but that is not my purpose here. What I wish is first to provide a¶ way to understand
the Fanonian breakthrough in light of the articulation of ¶ sub-ontological difference and the idea of the naturalization of the non-ethics¶
of war. This is important because, among other things, we can see now that¶ when Fanon called for a war against colonialism, what he
was doing was to¶ politicize social relations which were already premised on war. Fanon was not¶ only fighting against anti-black
racism in Martinique, or French colonialism in¶ Algeria. He was countering the force and legitimacy of a historical
system¶ (European modernity) which utilized racism and colonialism to naturalize the¶ non-ethics of war. He was doing a war against
war oriented by ‘love’,¶ understood here as the desire to restore ethics and to give it a proper place to ¶ trans-
ontological and ontological differences.58

Their modernist politics privilege the West and underwrite violence and genocide in the
name of civilization, rationality, science, and philosophy—the West is cast as the hero
of the world, justifying the redemptive sacrifice of all others
Mignolo 2000 [Walter, William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University Local Histories/Global
Designs, p. 115-117]
Henrique Dussel, an Argentinian philosopher associated with the philosophy of liberation, has been articulating a strong countermodern
argument. I quote from the beginning of his Frankfurt lectures: Modernity
is, for many (for Jurgen Habermas or Charles Taylor, for
example), inessentially or exclusively European phenomenon. In these lectures, I will argue that modernity is, in
fact, a European phenomenon, but one constituted in dialectical relation with a non-European alterity
that is its ultimate content. Modernity appears when Europe affirms itself as the "center" of a World
history that it inaugurates; the "periphery" that surrounds this center is consequently part of its self-
definition. The occlusion of this periphery (and of the role of Spain and Portugal in the formation of the modern world
system from the late fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries) leads the major contemporary thinkers of the
"center" into a Eurocentric fallacy in their understanding of modernity. If their understanding of the genealogy
of modernity is thus partial and provincial, their attempts at a critique or defense of it are likewise unilateral and, in part, false. (Dussel
[19931 1995, 65) The construction of the idea of modernity linked to European expansion, as forged by European
was powerful enough to last almost five hundred years. Postcolonial discourses and
intellectuals,
theories began effectively to question that hegemony, a challenge that was unthinkable (and perhaps
unexpected) by those who constructed and presupposed the idea of modernity as a historical period and
implicitly as the locus of enunciation—a locus of enunciation that in the name of rationality, science, and
philosophy as serted its own privilege over other forms of rationality or over what, from the perspective of
modern reason, was nonrational. I would submit, conse quently, that postcolonial literature and postcolonial theories are
constructing a new concept of reason as differential loci of enunciation. What does "differential" mean? Differential here first means a
displacement of the concept and practice of the notions of knowledge, science, theory, and understanding articulated during the modern
period.® Thus, Dussel's region alization of modernity could be compared with Homi Bhabha's, both speak ing from different colonial
legacies (Spanish and English respectively): "Driven by the subaltern history of the margins of modernity—rather than by the failures of
logocentrism—I have tried, in some small measure, In revise the known, to rename the postmodern from the position of the postcolo nial"
(Bhabha 1994, 175; emphasis added). I find a noteworthy coincidence between Dussel and Bhabha, albeit with some significant differences
in accent. The coincidence lies in the very iui portant fact that the task of postcolonial reasoning (i.e., theorizing) is not only linked to the
immediate political needs of decolonization (in Asia, Al rica, and the Caribbean) but also to the rereading of the paradigm of modi i n
reason. This task is performed by Dussel and Bhabha in different, although complementary ways. After a detailed analysis of Kant's and
Hegel's construction of the idea of I nlightenment in European history, Dussel summarizes the elements that i onstitute the myth of
modernity: (1)Modern (European) civilization understands itself as the most developed, the superior,
civilization; (2) This sense of superiority obliges it, in the form of a categorical imperative, as it were, to
"develop" (civilize, uplift, educate) the more primitive, barbarous, underdeveloped civilizations; (3) The path
of such development should be that followed by Europe in its own development out of antiquity and the Middle Ages; (4) Where the
barbarians or the primitive opposes the civilizing process, the praxis of modernity must, in the last instance,
have recourse to the violence necessary to remove the obstacles to modernization; (5) This violence,
which produces in many different ways, victims, takes on an almost ritualistic character: the civilizing
hero invests his victims (the colonized, the slave, the woman, the ecological destruction of the earth,
etc.) with the character of being participants in a process of redemptive sacrifice ; (6) from the point of
view of modernity, the barbarian or primitive is in a state of guilt (for, among other things, opposing the civilizing
process). This allows modernity to present itself not only as innocent but also as a force that will
emancipate or redeem its victims from their guilt; (7) Given this "civilizing" and redemptive character
of modernity, the suffering and sacrifices (the costs) of modernization imposed on "immature"
peoples, slaves, races, the "weaker" sex, el cetera, are inevitable and necessary. (Dussel 119931 1995, 75)
the myth of modernity is laid out by Dussel to confront alternative interpietations. While Horkheimer and Adorno, as well as postmodernist
think• is such as Lyotard, Rorty, or Vattimo, all propose a critique of reason (a v iolent, coercive, and genocidal reason), Dussel proposes a
critique of the enlightenment's irrational moments as sacrificial myth not by negating reason but by asserting the reason of the other—
thai is, by identifying postcolonial reason as differential locus of enunciation. The intersection between tbi idea of a self-centered modernity
grounded in its own appropriation of greco-Roman (classical) legacies and an emerging idea of modernity from the margins (or
countermodernity) makes clear that history does not begin in Greece, and that different historical beginnings are, at the same time,
anchored to diverse loci of enunciation. This simple axiom is, 1 submit, a bind.internal one for and of postsubaltern reason. Finally, Bhabha's
project in lename the postmodern from the position of the postcolonial also finds lis niche in postsubaltern reason as a differential locus
of enunciation.
 2AC AT: Util
Sequencing other moral claims before paradigmatic analysis of settler colonialism
disavows the material foundation upon which other oppressions are made possible
Byrd 11 (citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma and an Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies and English at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Jodi, “Transit of Empire,” p. xvii)//George

There is more than one way to frame the concerns of The Transit of Empire and more than one way to enter into the possibilities that transit
might allow for comparative studies. On the one hand, I am seeking to join ongoing conversations about sovereignty, power, and indigeneity –
and the epistemological debates that each of these terms engender – within and across disparate and at times incommensurable disciplines and
geographies. American studies, queer studies, postcolonial studies, American Indian studies, and area studies have all attempted to apprehend
injury and redress, melancholy and grief that exist in the distances and sutures of state recognitions and belongings. Those distances and sutures
of state recognitions and belongings, melancholy and grief, take this book from the worlds of Southeastern Indians to Hawai’i, from the Poston
War Relocation Center to Jonestown, Guyana, in order to consider how ideas of “Indianness” have created conditions of possibility for U.S. empire
manifest its intent. As
liberal multicultural settler colonialism attempts to flex the exceptions and exclusions that
first constituted the United States to now provisionally include those people othered and abjected from the
nation-state’s origins, it instead creates a cacophony of moral claims that help to deflect progressive and
transformative activism from dismantling the ongoing conditions of colonialism that continue to make the United Sates a
desired state formation within which to be included. The cacography of competing struggles for hegemony within and
outside institutions of power, no matter how those struggles might challenge the state through loci of race,
class, gender, and sexuality, serves to misdirect and cloud attention from the underling structures of settler
colonialism that made the United States possible as oppressor in the first place. As a result, the cacophony produced
through U.S. colonialism and imperialism domestically and abroad often coerces struggles for social justice for queers, racial minorities, and
immigrants into complicity with settler colonialism.

Alt corrective to consequentialism

Mignolo 7 (Walter, argentinian semiotician and prof at Duke, “The De-Colonial Option and the Meaning of Identity in Politics”
online)//George

The rhetoric of modernity (from the Christian mission since the sixteenth century, to the secular Civilizing mission, to development and
modernization after WWII) occluded—under its triumphant rhetoric of salvation and the good life for all—the
perpetuation of the logic of coloniality, that is, of massive appropriation of land (and today of natural resources), massive
exploitation of labor (from open slavery from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, to disguised slavery, up to the twenty first century),
and the dispensability of human lives from the massive killing of people in the Inca and Aztec domains to the twenty
million plus people from Saint Petersburg to the Ukraine during WWII killed in the so called Eastern Front.4 Unfortunately, not
all the massive killings have been recorded with the same value and the same visibility. The unspoken criteria for the
value of human lives is an obvious sign (from a de-colonial interpretation) of the hidden imperial identity politics: that is, the value of human
lives to which the life of the enunciator belongs becomes the measuring stick to evaluate other human lives who
do not have the intellectual option and institutional power to tell the story and to classify events according to a
ranking of human lives; that is, accoring to a racist classification.5
 2AC AT: Afropessimism
The 1AC’s analytic frame is necessary—slavery and anti-blackness are inadequate to
understand and must be theorized in conjunction with settler colonialism as structuring
modernity and constituting blackness
King 13
[2013, Tiffany Jeannette King, “IN THE CLEARING: BLACK FEMALE BODIES, SPACE AND SETTLER COLONIAL
LANDSCAPES”, PhD Dissertation]//George

We must consider that Settler colonialism shapes and constitutes Black life, specifically slavery and its afterlife in
America. While slavery and anti-Black racism should be active and robust analytic frames that guide Black Studies
and help us understand Black subjectivity in the Western Hemisphere, settler colonialism also structures Black life. The genocide of

Native peoples, the perpetual making of Settler space and Settler subjectivity—as unfettered self actualization—do not
immediately stop existing as forms of power when they run into Black bodies. The way that settler colonial
power looks and manifests itself just changes; it does not stop. Settler colonialism, as a subjectless discourse, is a
form of productive power that touches all that live in the US and Settler colonial nations.30 Though it touches and
shapes everyone’s life it does so in very different ways. For the purposes of my own research I am arguing that settler colonialism’s normalizing

power enacts genocide against Native peoples (disappears Native people) but it also shapes and structures antiBlack
racism. The ontological positions that were created by slavery, specifically the Slave are still alive and well however,
settler colonial power intersects with, works through and structures the repressive and productive
power that makes the Black captive fungible and socially dead. Throughout, In the Clearing poses the question, in what ways
does settler colonial power help structure slavery and anti-Black racism? This project ultimately argues that slavery and anti-Black racism are

not adequate to fully understand the material and discursive processes that create Blackness in all of
its embodied genres in North America. Slavery and anti-Black racism are also not the only repressive
powers that make the Black body abject, fungible and situated at the outer limits of being-ness. Both
slavery and settler colonialism structure modernity and need to be fully conceptualized as forms of
power that help constitute Blackness. Conceptualizing the ways that settler colonialism and slavery co-
constitute one another is an essential component of this dissertation.

Settlement, spatiality, and place must all be theorized as essential to the production of
the “human” and the materialization of blackness as an ontological position—the
process of settlement enables self-actualization by the Settler through the turning of
blackness into a position of the settled-slave
King 13 [2013, Tiffany Jeannette King, “IN THE CLEARING: BLACK FEMALE BODIES, SPACE AND SETTLER
COLONIAL LANDSCAPES”, PhD Dissertation]//George

the
This is not an appeal to expand the category of the settler, as I have argued before Black slaves and descendants of slaves are not settlers. However,

processes which make Black bodies fungible flesh, a form of terra nullius, and embed their bodies in the
land as settled-slaves needs to be theorized as modalities of settlement. Settlement needs to be
retheorized along the contours of the bodies that it renders materially and socially dead. Scholarship from
Marxist geographies, cultural landscape studies, anthropology and the emerging field of settler colonial studies is useful for helping us think about space, however, it
the process of settlement also materializes Blackness as an ontological
does not help us think about the ways that

position. Native studies and Black studies enable a discussion of how the production of Settler and Master
or Settler-Master subjectivity comes about due to its parasitic relationship to Native death and Black
fungibility/accumulation (social death). When we think about the Settler-Master as parasitic we can also begin
to think about their process of settlement as one that also requires the making of ontological categories
occupied by the dead. The process of settlement allows the Settler-Master to become a human with
spatial coordinates because the Native dies and the Black becomes a non-being (a settled-slave).15 Settlement
is more than transforming the land. It is more than the teleological process of weary white people making
a home and Native people naturally disappearing over time. Settlement is an assemblage of technologies
and processes of makings and unmakings. Its processes require the making and unmaking of bodies,
subject positions, space, place and claims to various forms of autonomy, self actualization and
transcendence. In Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, Lorenzo Veracini, a founding scholar of the emerging field of settler colonial studies
describes the process of settlement as a process that enables the “unfettered mobility” of the settler.16
While abject others within settler colonial nations are “principally characterized by restrained mobility” the settler experiences the capacity for

“unfettered mobility.” This description of the kind of state of existence that settlement allows the settler is instructive. While Veracini’s description moves
us closer to a discussion of states of being, I want to reframe Veracini’s description and introduce a few more elements to the equation. Settlement as an intricate,
dynamic and contradictory relationship to Native bodies, Black bodies and the land/nature. Settlement structures the Settler’s relationship
to the Native, the Black and nature as a relation of negation. Settlement also creates complex ontological
positions that are constituted by both states of stasis and flux. What I mean by this is that some bodies (Native and
Black) are relegated to a permanent position of flux. Native bodies are always slipping into death, Black
bodies are always sliding into states of fungibility and accumulation. The flux and instability of the Black
and the Native enable the Settler to experience a self actualizing state of both libratory stability and
transcendent autonomy. The ontological positions of the Native (slipping into death) and the Black (sliding
into fungibility and accumulation) are positions of fixed-flux. As Wilderson argues these positions do not occupy
the universal liberal orienting and humanizing frames of time and space. They are fixed and rooted in a
place of elimination and expanding use for the settler’s unending pursuit of self actualization. By settling,
or gaining an exclusive claim to time and space, the Settler is able to simultaneously become a stable, coherent and

autonomous human subject who occupies space while they also experience hyper mobility,
transcendence and self directed transformation. The Settler moves back and forth at will between states of
rootedness and mobility, stability and postmodern (self determined) constructedness. The Settlers’ unfettered movement
between these contradictory spaces and states is predicated on the “fixed-flux” of Native and Black
bodies. Fixed-flux is the underside of the Settler’s unfettered mobility and self actualization. It is always being susceptible to having the world flipped upside down
at the whim of another (the Settler). Settlement functions like a violent form of deconstruction . Settlement as a

gratuitously violent project that kills the Native and accumulates the Black also reorganizes discourse. The
relationship that exists between the signifier and signified for concepts like autochthony and indigeneity and words like clearing under conditions of settlement
become shifting ground beneath our feet.17 The prior meanings held by the terms and words autochthonous, indigenous and clearing are destabilized and then
Settlers are able to become
completely evacuated due to the material and discursive muscle of settlement. At the site of the clearing,

autochthonous and indigenous at the same time. Frank Wilderson helps us think about the kind of discursive and material violence that
occurs within what he calls the “Settler/Master/Human’s grammatical structure.”18 Within this grammatical structure, Wilderson argues that there is a disavowal of
the violence of genocide in the way the settler narrates the formation of the US. On one level, the disavowal occurs through the settler’s preferred part of speech.
Clearing is only spoken of as a noun in the Settler/Master/Human’s grammatical structure. Clearing is never used as a verb in the human’s grammatical structure.
Wilderson draws our attention to its use: “Clearing, in the Settler/Savage” relation, has two grammatical structures, one a noun and the other as a verb. But the
Western only recognizes clearing as a noun. But prior to the clearing’s fragile infancy, that is before its cinematic legacy as a newborn place name, it labored not across
the land as a noun but as a verb on the body of the “Savage,” speaking civil society’s essential status as an effect for genocide.”19 This discursive displacement
represents an actual displacement. As the Settler/Master/Human renders the clearing a static place, void of settler
violence and absent of indigenous bodies and relations to the land, the Settler also indigenizes themselves
to this abstract space. The Settler is allowed to merge with the land as they root themselves. They become
autochthonous people that “sprang up from the land.”20 Settlers are now the group of humans that establish a right/righteous

relationship with the land. Settlers proclaim themselves the new indigenous population. The original indigenous
peoples are stripped of their indigeneity and rendered dead. Within the process of settlement, the indigenous people become embedded in or are literally buried as
the dead within the land. The Settler then assumes a new autochthonous identity and emerges from the earth
anew. Even when the Settler indigenizes or roots themselves into the land; they do not become stuck there like Native peoples. In her book, Black Body: Women,
Colonialism and Space, Radhika Mohanram spends time explaining how enlightenment notions of the Indigene and

European binary operate.21 The body conceived as incarcerated by nature is partially achieved by the
discursive construction of the native as a “person who is born and thus belongs to a certain place,” and is
in fact over determined by that place.22 The European on the other hand can be of a place but is not
incarcerated by it like the Native. Their settler “indigeneity” offers them “unfettered mobility” as well as
unfettered self actualization. Native people do not acquire this through their indigenous status. Upon
encountering the settler (who becomes indigenous) the Native experiences their indigeneity as non-existence and
death. The clearing also shapes Blackness as it carves out the settlement-plantation. The clearing in its verb form
certainly labored across the bodies of Native people. However, the clearing also worked on and transformed the bodies of Blacks.

The Black body is turned into the Settled-slave. Nana and Elizabeth Peazant are Settled-slaves whose
bodies evince the way that the process of settling “cleared” Blacks of all spatial coordinates that could
make them human during this process of making the settlement/plantation. Blacks become mere ‘states
of flux,” and the atomic potential for space. At the site of the clearing, both a spatial and ontological production,
Black bodies are the raw material and precursor to space. While Black bodies are geographic and
necessary to the production of space they are not geographic subjects that humanly inhabit space at the
site of the clearing.23 As geographic—dark—matter and material under settlement they make space possible but
cannot occupy it. Existing in a continual state of liminality and change Black femaleness is a place making
unit but not in place. Place is where humanness resides. According to Tim Cresswell, place and its links to
humanness, morality and identity are a part of a humanistic project.24 For the humanist undertaking
geography, “ontological priority was given to the human immersion in place rather than the abstractions
of geometric space.” The humanist concept of place is accompanied by the baggage of morality, identity,
authenticity and exclusion. Within modern thought systems, there is a tendency to locate people with certain identities in certain places. There is
also a tendency within this metaphysical framework to imagine “mobile people in wholly negative ways.”27 Bodies on the move or sentient

beings in a state of “fixed-flux” who slip into death like the Native or slide and transform as fungible flesh
have no place and are considered suspect within this worldview. Through humanist articulations and re-
theorizations of place, the universal and abstract notion of space becomes humanized and exclusionary
admitting only a select group of people. Making a place is also about making a home.28 Place (and space) as home was
functioning within imperialist endeavors of the enlightenment far before human geographers of the 1970s named it as such. As a
geographer, Tuan has focused a great deal of attention on the extent to which people have attempted to “create order and homeliness out of the apparent chaos of
raw nature.”29 In fact “the concept of place is central to our understanding of how people turn nature into culture by making it their home.”30 What happens

when this humanist endeavor of turning nature/chaos into culture/order/home meets up with the
imperialist endeavor? Sylvia Wynter argues that both the Native and the Black are considered states of non-
Reason and chaos within Enlightenment humanism. Under imperialism, both the bodies and the lands of
Native and Black people were states of chaos that needed to be ordered. While Tuan’s configuration of place and the
transformation of raw nature into a home for humankind does not have the violent and exclusionary form of the human in mind, my reconfiguration of the place of
settlement does. The
landscapes of settlement, when they appear to the eye as a tranquil pasture with a log
cabin or people sun bathing on a beach conceal the violent processes hidden in the clearing. One way of
revealing what is hidden is through rethinking what a landscape is and how it functions. Richard Schein presents an interpretation of landscape as a process. In fact,
Schein argues that landscape is always in the “process of becoming.”31 Another aspect of Schein’s theorization of the landscape that is productive is that he construes
the landscapes as having material and epistemological value. The epistemology of the landscape disciplines those who come into contact with it. The disciplinary
element of landscape is embedded in the fact that the material aspect of the landscape is seen, and presents itself as linear and objective.32 The landscape is in fact
not self evident but duplicitous.33 Likewise settlement
as a process and what it achieves even in its materiality (clearing,
settlement-plantation) is not self-evident but multivalent and at times counter intuitive. What is hidden is
that settlement is not just the making of a physical location for the Settler; rather, what is concealed is
the simultaneous process of the Settler rooting in order to launch. Settlement is the subjugation and
sinking/fixing of others into a state of flux (death, fungibility) in order for the Settler to transcend into a
state of humanness. As the ultimate self actualizing human, the Settler can actually overcome the
particularity of place (body, gender, race, abject sexuality) and launch into universal and abstract space
(humanness). To be human in Frank Wilderson’s terms is to have “cartographic capacity.”34 “Spatial and temporal
capacity is so immanent on the field of Whiteness that the effects and permutations of its ensemble of
questions and the kinds of White bodies that can mobilize this universe of combinations are seemingly
infinite as well.”35 To be a Savage or to be Black is to exist in the realm of no time and space .36 An apt
visual for what happens when the Settler (noun) settles (verb) both people and land is one of a propelling
long jumper. A long jumper is a subject who plants in order to launch oneself into space. This process of
disciplining bodies, land and the viewers’ eye is hard to always perceive.

Reframing our understandings of slavery through the lens of spatiality is critical—the

perm’s reframing is critical to understand the relationships of black women with civil
society as a struggle over the making and settlement of space
King 13 [2013, Tiffany Jeannette King, “IN THE CLEARING: BLACK FEMALE BODIES, SPACE AND SETTLER
COLONIAL LANDSCAPES”, PhD Dissertation]//George
This arrangement, or rearrangement, of the senses is interesting for a number of reasons. For one, many different senses are marshaled in order to enable one to
see.5 Additionally, seeing is not privileged as the sense that instantiates knowing or cognitive activity. Sight is only possible after one has felt. The body’s feeling of
Decolonizing sight requires
the rhythm tells the mind what the eyes are able to see. In this chapter, I explore the possibility of decolonizing sight.

that we understand what directs our sight. It also means that we interrogate a social world ordered by
conquest. What kinds of inner eyes direct the way that we view bodies and space in settler societies?6 How
have the ways that we have been taught to survive, self actualize and know ourselves in settler societies shaped the ways that we look, see and know? In this chapter,
I focus on the visual orders and optic regimes of settler colonialism as sites of knowledge creation and power that skew our vision. In this chapter, we will be developing
new ways of looking at old landscapes. I draw upon the creative work of Julie Dash and Catherine McKinley, and the scholarly writing of Sylvia Wynter, Jennifer
Morgan, Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Frank Wilderson and Oyeronke Oyewumi in order to challenge the visual and cognitive regimes of the settler colonial
order. These cultural producers and theorists help us apprehend, conceptualize, and develop inner eyes that help us visualize the ways that Blackness and slavery
shape the settler colonial landscape. They help us bring the plantation and the body of the slave back into settler colonialism’s analytic frames. These newunits
of analysis and conceptual tools can help change our inner eyes so that we can see how settler colonialism
and slavery structure one another. They make simultaneous vision possible.7 Simultaneous vision is
difficult to obtain. It requires that we retrain our thought, inner eyes and eyes to adjust their focus in
order to attend to the ephemeral and moving traces of power that at times recede or disappear into
the background or a realm of the seemingly invisible depending on the landscape. The power of settler
colonialism’s and slavery’s spatial and ontological formations does not appear on the landscape with equal
intensity, in the same hue, or equally positioned on the landscape. At times the productive and repressive
power that makes the slave will be the foreground color and the power of settler colonialism will provide
a bit of texture. The texture in the background is just as crucial as the foreground color. My reorganization of these units of analysis is what is new. Scholars
of slavery and settler colonialism have inherited analytic units like the plantation, the
homestead/settlement, the Master, the Settler, the Slave which often work to sequester Native Studies,
Black Studies, settler colonial studies and scholarship on slavery. I want to reframe some of the key
analytics from each of these fields of study by looking at them simultaneously. However, what happens when
we think about the plantation as a result of settler colonial spatial patterns? What is possible when we ask, how is Native
subjectivity and space obliterated by the plantation? What is possible when ask, how is the slave master also a settler?

Reframing allows us to view key units of analysis in new ways and think about them as co-constituting
one another. The amalgamations and hybrids that I introduce include: the conceptualization of conquest-slavery
as an assemblage of productive and repressive power, the settlement/plantation as a hybrid spatial unit,
and the settled-slave as a bodily formation at the intersections of conquest-slavery. I also borrow the ontological
 the master and the settler were not only intimate
category of the Settler-Master from scholar Frank Wilderson in order argue that

friends but in fact are the same person.8 These hybrids and amalgamations are all mediated by space and
the where of racial-sexual difference.9 Each of the four amalgams is formed due to contestations over and
the need for expansion, specifically the expansion and accumulation of property. As modern conflicts over the control of land and bodies, these
new analytics are best understood if analyzed through the production of settler and master spaces and
spatial practices. These spaces and spatial practices happen at various scales. Functioning at the scale of the hemisphere, the
settlement/plantation-plot, the slave body, the Native body and the Settler-Master (or human subject) position;
all of these locations reference a spatial struggle. Additionally, as contested sites they also index sites of contradiction, instability and
agentive possibility. Paying attention to the ways that turning Black female bodies into slaves functions as a mode

of space-making in the Western hemisphere, specifically in settler colonial states, is important for African Diaspora Studies.10 According
to McKittrick, due specifically to transatlantic slavery Black female bodies are already a part of the geography

of the New World.11 It has been well established that transatlantic slavery embedded Black female bodies into its
geographic processes as it crossed oceans, planted settlements and plantations and built prisons and
other spaces of Black internment in the afterlife of slavery. Slavery’s geographies are easily mapped onto Black bodies. However,
settler colonialism’s geographies are often theorized as if they never meet up with the Black figure, specifically its embodiment as Black and female.12 In the way that
settler colonialism’s
McKittrick argues that the geographic processes of slavery were interconnected with the category “black woman,” I argue that

space making and geographic processes are also intertwined with the formation of the Black female body
in the Western hemisphere. The Black woman is a construction—or effect-- of the power of the settler and
the geography of the homestead as much as she is a discursive and material necessity for the slave
master and the space of the plantation plot. We need more analytic frames to conceptualize the multiple
ways Black women spatialize various forms of power in the Western hemisphere. The category “Black
woman” is not only of analytic import to slavery, but is also an analytical necessity for the settler
colonial order as well.

Link turn—we don’t defend US reform or native land rights—your author agrees Native
life isn’t necessarily dialogic with civil society and solves the K.
Wilderson 5 (Frank, Your Author, Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?
http://bmorereadinggroup.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/frank_gramsci.pdf //George

What's being asserted here is that White Supremacy transmogrifies codes internal to Native American culture for its own purposes. However,
unlike immigrants and white women, the Native American has no purchase as a junior partner in civil
society. Space does not allow for us to fully discuss this here. But Ward Churchill and others explain how--unlike civil society's junior
partners—genocide of the Indian, just like the enslavement of Blacks, is a precondition for the idea of
America: a condition of possibility upon which the idea of immigration can be narrativized. No web of analogy can be spun between, on the
one hand, the phenomenon of genocide and slavery and, on the other hand, the phenomenon of access to institutionality and immigration. So,
though White Supremacy appropriates Native American codes of sovereignty, it cannot solve the
contradiction that, unlike the codes civil society's junior partners, Native American codes of sovereignty are
not dialogic with New World codes of immigration and access. It should also be noted that prior to the late 18 th century
and early to mid 19 th century the notion of Native America as sovereign nations was subordinated to the idea of the “savage.” In short,
articulation comes, conveniently, into play as the “Indian Wars” are being won.

No prior questions—claims that the slave’s bodily non-relation and lack of capacity
outweighs indigenous dispossession because “they’re still subjects connected to land”
obscures settler colonialism’s function to deny indigenous corporeality
Day 15 (Iyko, Associate Professor of English and Chair of the Critical Social Thought program at Mount Holyoke, “Being or Nothingness:
Indigeneity, Antiblackness, and Settler Colonial Critique,” Critical Ethnic Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2)//George
According to Sexton, no other oppression is reducible to antiblackness, but the relative totality of
antiblackness is the privileged perspective from which to understand racial formation more broadly. But
unlike the way feminist and queer critical theory interrogate heteropatriarchy from a subjectless standpoint, Sexton’s entire point seems to rest
on the very specificity and singularity—rather than subjectlessness—of black critical theory’s capacity to understand race. The privilege of this
embodied viewpoint similarly relies on rigidly binaristic conceptions of land and bodily integrity. He writes, “If the indigenous relation to land
precedes and exceeds any regime of property, then the slave’s inhabitation of the earth precedes and exceeds any prior relation to land—
landlessness. And selflessness is the correlate. No ground for identity, no ground to stand (on).”57 In other words, the slave’s nonrelation
to her body precedes and exceeds any other body’s relation to land. However, the settler colonial
designation of the United States and Canada as terra nullius—as legally empty lands—denies the very
corporeality of Indigenous populations to inhabit land, much less have any rights to it. Alongside
genocidal elimination, the erasure of Indigenous corporeal existence is inseparable from the ground it
doesn’t stand on, or is removed from. For the same reason that the economic reductionism of orthodox
Marxism has been discredited, such an argument that frames racial slavery as a base for a colonial
superstructure similarly fails to take into account the dialectics of settler colonial capitalism. The political
economy of settler colonial capitalism is more appropriately figured as an ecology of power relations than
a linear chain of events. Relinquishing any conceptual privilege that might be attributed to Indigeneity, alternatively, Coulthard offers a
useful anti-exceptionalist stance: “the colonial relation should not be understood as a primary locus of ‘base’ from
which these other forms of oppression flow, but rather as the inherited background field within which
market, racist, patriarchal, and state relations converge.”58 From this view, race and colonialism form
the matrix of the settler colonial racial state. Putting colonial land and enslaved labor at the center of a dialectical analysis, we
can see that blackness is neither reducible to Indigenous land nor Indigeneity to enslaved labor. Indigenous peoples and slaves are not reducible
to each other because settler colonialism abides by a dual logic that is originally driven to eliminate Native peoples from land and mix the land
with enslaved black labor. If land is the basis of settler colonialists’ relationship to Indigenous peoples, it is labor that frames that relationship
with enslaved peoples. We can draw on Patrick Wolfe’s important points about the heterogeneous racial effects of such a settler formation based
on Indigenous land and enslaved labor. To summarize those points, the
racial content of Indigenous peoples is the mirror
opposite of blackness. From the beginning, an eliminatory project was driven to reduce Native
populations through genocidal wars and later through statistical elimination through blood quantum and
assimilationist policies. For slaves, an opposite logic of exclusion was driven to increase, not eliminate, the
population of slaves. One logic does not cause the other; rather, they work together to serve a unitary
end in increasing white settler property in the form of land and an enslaved labor force. As a result, in
the postemancipation, postfrontier era, the racial content of Indigenous peoples is entirely dissolvable
and eradicable. Alternatively, the racial content of blackness remains absolute and essential, and
maintains an infinite capacity to contaminate. As Wolfe states, “the respective racializations . . . were
diametrically opposed, in a manner that reflected and preserved the foundational distinction between
land and labor. For whereas race for black people became an indelible trait that would survive any amount
of admixture, race for Indians became an inherently descending quantity that was terminally susceptible
to dilution.”59 One consequence is that the phrase “separate but equal” can take two meanings: as either an injurious legal relic or a
sovereign politics of the future.60 Given this stark distinction in racial ontologies, any critical theory that views race
and colonialism as a causal rather than dialectical relation is incapable of exposing these inextricable
logics of settler colonialism.

Afropessimism is inarticulate in the face of settler colonialism

Leroy (Justin, an intellectual historian of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States, with particular expertise in slavery and
abolition, the Atlantic world, black political thought, comparative histories of empire, and the history of capitalism. I recently joined the faculty
at the University of California, Davis as assistant professor of U.S. History.) 2016 (Black History in Occupied Territory: On the Entanglements of
Slavery and Settler Colonialism, Academia.edu,
https://www.academia.edu/29196118/Black_History_in_Occupied_Territory_On_the_Entanglements_of_Slavery_and_Settler_Colonialism,
C.A)
Recent work in blackstudies has argued for a reconceptualized notion of black racialization in which blackness emerges
at the edge of humanity—that is, the category “black” is defined against the category “human.” In such formulations,
black/non-black is the primary division of the modern social, epistemological, and ontological order, exemplified by Atlantic
slavery and its legacies. Although this group of scholars has disagreed about whether slavery's transformation of human life into a commodity
was radically generative or a shattering obliteration of the self, they are united by the idea that our ways of knowing the modern world and
imagining alternatives to it require centering the violence of enslavement.3 While this work is incredibly helpful for understanding the epochal
impact of slavery, it relegates forms of racialization and colonialism that do not self-subordinate to slavery to the realm of anti-blackness or liberal
Such framing has led Tiffany King to claim that black studies is “inarticulate in the face of settler
multiculturalism.
colonialism.” 4 Put another way, the field of black studies has not fully reckoned with the historical intimacy
between colonialism and slavery. In his seminal work Empire As a Way of Life, William Appleman Williams asserted that the imperial
life of the United States “is predicated upon a charming but ruthless faith in infinite progress fueled by infinite growth.” 5 The liberty so central
to the founding mythology of the United States was defined by its limitlessness —not in terms of whom it applied to, as in the fantasies of
liberalism, but in terms of its spatial expansion. To be free was to face no limits to growth. Tepid versions of black studies have made the
assumption that the struggle for justice is an inclusionary one, defined by access to rights and liberties guaranteed by the language of the
Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. This type of black studies has not reconciled with the fact that freedom has never been purely
abstract; it is always enacted over and against the ongoing history of colonialism. Thus Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri can claim, “between the
presidencies of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, the open space of the frontier became the conceptual terrain of republican democracy.”
6 Such scholarship has refused to grapple with what it means to diagnose oppression and demand its redress from within a settler state.
Even
the more robust formation of black studies concerned with the exceptionalism of slavery has not
reckoned with the relationship between this drive to growth and the expansion of human chattel.7 It has not reckoned with how black
racialization occurred in tandem with settler ideology and not merely adjacent to it . To be clear, this problem
is not one of black studies ignoring the presence of indigenous people, but of how the field theorizes black racialization in a way that precludes a
serious engagement with indigenous dispossession. If blackness is exclusion from the category of the human or access to a knowable self, the
loss of sovereignty can only be framed as a lesser loss with a subordinate grammar. For
example, Jared Sexton has argued that
slavery “precedes and prepares the way for colonialism,” and describes colonialism as “the issue or heir of slavery, its
outgrowth or edifice or monument.” 8 While this may be a generative theoretical claim that lends conceptual
coherence to Sexton’s insightful framing of slavery and antiblackness, it is simply not historically
accurate.

Insert Answers to Uniqueness

 1AR Afropessimism Extra Cards
Natal alienation disavows non-normative and extra-legal kinship and property
ownership among slaves which disproves their “absolute dereliction claims”—they’re
ahistoricism that turns case
Peterson 7(Christopher, “Kindred specters: death, mourning, and American affinity,” Published by the University of Minnesota Press, pages
33-34)//AD

kinship and slavery are intimately connected. This is not

To the extent that they are both implicated in a certain negation/ preservation of the body, then,

they both involve a relation between one spectral body and

to suggest that all forms of kinship are tantamount to slavery, only that

another, a “kindred possession,” to invoke Saidiya Hartman’s words, of one body in and by another.64 Understood
in terms of such kindred possession, the economy of slavery is not as distinct from the economy of kinship as we might imagine and

want it to be. To the extent that it fabricates self-presence through the cancellation and preservation of the other, normative kinship substantiates an

obliteration of the other/body that is not fully distinguishable from the dialectical logic of slavery. This
interimplication of slavery and kinship, as I noted above, is denied by analyses that oppose slavery and kinship,
such as Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death. Echoing Patterson, Hortense Spillers has argued famously that kinship
“loses meaning” with the advent of slavery, “since it can be invaded at any given and arbitrary moment
by the property relations.”65 Kinship, however, does not become “invaded” by property relations, as if the
latter were merely external to the former. The assumption that property relations contaminate an
otherwise nonviolent and nonappropriative kinship depends on an idealized conception of kinship—one
that is belied from both a theoretical and a historical perspective on American slavery. Historian Dylan
Penningroth’s The Claims of Kinfolk uncovers a wealth of evidence showing that American slaves developed a
complex informal economy of property ownership that—while not legal recognized—was customarily
recognized by other slaves as well as slave masters.66 Claiming property, Penningroth goes on to argue, was intimately
linked to claiming kin. Kinship was articulated not in opposition to property, but rather in and through
claims of possession and ownership. What counted as kinship for slaves, moreover, extended well
beyond biology and blood relations to include friends and neighbors. Penningroth’s account of slave property
ownership and its role in organizing kin relations among slaves implicitly challenges the definition of slavery as
connoting the absence of kin. Classifying as socially alive only those kinship relations recognized by the
law or only those relations that correspond to the patriarchal, biological family, Patterson excludes those non-
normative, extralegal relations that nevertheless counted as kinship for enslaved Americans. In this sense,
Patterson’s analysis does not merely describe an existing binary between the socially dead and the socially
alive but, rather, participates in the production of this very division.

Gratituous violence and general dishonor is not unique to black bodies, they’ve
occurred to natives through Manifest Destiny—to ontologize those claims is essentialist
Coates 13 (Ta-Nehisi, senior editor for The Atlantic, “A Flawed America in Context”, February 13,
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/02/a-flawed-america-in-context/273546/)

Toward the end of our meal we began discussing how one can look at racism in history and avoid falling into depression .
My answer was two-fold. 1) I enjoy the history for its own sake. I love history whether it has a political lesson to teach, or not. And 2) the history
of white racism and its attendent victims is horrifying, but it should be seen in scale. A taste of what I mean: The fugitives
who fled from the south after Nordlingen died of plague, hunger and exhaustion in the refugee camp at Frankfort or the overcrowded
hospitals of Saxony; seventhousand were expelled from the cantons of Zurich because there was neither food no room for
them, at Hanau the gates were closed against them, at Strasbourg they lay thick in the streets through the frosts of winter, so that by day the
citizens stepped over their bodies, and by night lay awake listening to the groans of the sick and starving until the
magistrates forcibly drove them out, thirty thousand of them. The Jesuits here and there fought manfully against the overwhelming distress; after
the burning and desertion of Eichstatt they sought out the children who were hiding in the cellars, killing and eating rats, and carried them off to
care for and educate them; at Hagenau they managed feed the poor out of their stores until the French troops raided their granary and took
charge of the grain for the Army. By the irony of fate the wine harvest of 1634, which should have been excellent, was trampled down by fugitives,
and invaders after Nordlingen; that of 635 suffered a like fate, and in the winter, from Wuttemberg to Lorraine, there raged the worst
famine of many years. At Calw the pastor saw a woman gnawing on the raw flesh of a dead horse on which a hungry dog and some ravens
were also feeding. In Alsace the bodies of criminals were torn from the gallows and devoured; in the whole Rhineland they watched the
graveyards against marauders who sold the flesh of the newly buried for food; at Zweibrucken a woman confessed to
having eater her child. Acorns, goats' skins, grass, were all cooked in Alsace; cats, dogs, and rats were sold in the market at Worms. In Fulda
and Coburg and near Frankfort and the great refugee camp, men went in terror of being killed and eaten by those maddened by hunger... That
is the great C.V. Wedgwood describing the last years of the Thirty Years War, in which eight million people died, and the
population of "Germany" (to the extent it existed) was reduced by a third. One of my professors followed this up by noting that ten million
Russians died in the first World War, and then 15 million more died in the second . When you study racism, with all its
attendent woes, there is something comforting about those kind of numbers. It tells you that whatever you are
struggling with here is not a deviation from the human experience, but an expression of it. There is very
little that "white people" have done to "black people" that I can't imagine them doing to each other.
America's particular failings are remarkable because America is remarkable, but they are not particularly deviant or
outstanding on the misery index. This is just sort of what we do. The question hanging over us though is this: Is this what we what
we will always do?

Libidinal accounts of anti-blackness are non-verifiable—they statisize identity when it

is in flux and cause political fatalism
Duck 13 (Leigh Anne, Associate Professor of English at the University of Mississippi. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary
literature, film, and photodocumentary concerning the southern United States; she also studies modern and contemporary literature of South
Africa and the U.S., constructions of race and nation, and theories concerning space, narrative, memory, and neoliberalism, Listening to
Melancholia: Alice Walker’s Meridian; Page 108-110 Naming Race, Naming Racisms)

Opinions concerning how psychoanalytic theory may function in such a context are divided. On the one hand, psychoanalysis has always sought
to understand how individuals can work through painful and internalized experience in order to transform their psyches and, ultimately, their
lives. Accordingly, it could have the potential, in Hortense Spillers'5 words, to elucidate ‘how "race," as a poisonous idea, insinuates itself not only
across and between ethnicities but within’, and thus to produce ‘discernment oi the nicest sort’, the kind of understanding and alertness necessary
to combat racism's social and psychological effects‘? Other critics warn, however, that psychoanalytic thinking could produce ‘a
prescription for a politics of quietism, fatalism and defeatism Their concern is not restricted to the fact that psychoanalysis has in
the past tended either to privilege colonialist hierarchies or to ignore how race functions as a vector for oppression; scholars working at
the intersections of anti-racist and psychoanalytic theory are, after all, committed to disrupting those historical patterns.““
Rather, critics fear that psychoanalytic accounts of identity may discourage engagement with contemporary political
problems precisely because of their focus on the past, exacerbating the nostalgia described above and
producing, in Slavoj Zizek’s argument, a ‘melancholic attachment to . . . lost roots These debates oflen emerge in discussions
of contemporary African American literature, in which ‘historical narrative’ has become ‘the dominant mode‘_2‘ Such novels
challenge triumphalist accounts of United States history by describing the oppression central to the nation's experience,
and may, in that process, provide catharsis: in Byeri-nan's words, they enable readers ‘to go through the shame and disruption of remembering
in order to begin to forge relationships; that can become communities that can make a difference'.2' But, while psychoanalysis holds that such
‘working through’ is necessary for individuals who seek to create new patterns for their lives, it also warns that subjects
may resist such
change, clinging instead to the very dynamics that cause them pain. This destructive potential is
encapsulated especially by theories of melancholia, in which identity is not only haunted but actually constituted by
‘attachment to a certain strain of its own dead past’, with a ‘structure of desire [that] is backward looking
and punishing At stake in these arguments is not simply the plot or concerns of any individual novel but rather the way in which literature
informs contempor-ary cultural and potentially political thought. As Warren explains, “discussion and analysis of literature and culture has been
central to ventriloquizing a black collective state of mind’; in such arguments, these texts are said to reflect a shared and determinate experience
of marginalization.“ Given this history, literary scholars interested in melancholia are duly wary that their commentary
could be taken
to classify such mental states as fixed racial attributes, a particular danger in a national context that so vigorously circulates
accounts of African American ’pathology’.25 Meanwhile, Dubey notes that some of this literature truly does seem melancholic,
as it 'recoil[s] from ideals of political modernity’ while ’affirming cultural traditions inextricably embedded
in the deeply inequitable conditions of racial segregation'.26 Accordingly, though analysis of such literature might provide
frameworks through which to explore, in Patricia Williams's words, the ‘psychic obliteration’ produced by racist and other forms of oppression,
it could also risk suggesting that persons subjected to ‘spirit-murder’ are unable to recover, an account that
would support racist stereotypes while simulta- neously promoting a pained and passive criterion for
racial belonging.” Such a process already occurs in some uses of trauma theory, another psychoanalytic paradigm often applied in African
American Si-uclies. While some such analyses explore how subsequent generations represent the historical experience oF slavery in order
to construe an understanding of the past that may be useful in their contemporary political milieu, others produce the essentializing,
ahistorical and even pathologizing argument that contemporary African American identities are
unconsciously determined by ‘the real of slavery’s trauma.

History—the concept of “social death” doesn’t arise from an anti-black animus—its

origins are from debates about the indigenous
Charoenying 8 [Timothy, citing Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Prof of Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley, Islamophobia & Anti-Blackness: A
Genealogical Approach, http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/islamophobia-anti-blackness-genealogical-approach]

The year 1492 marked a major turning point in the trajectory of Western Civilization. Elementary age children are
taught this as the year Columbus famously crossed the Atlantic. An equally significant event that year, was the Spanish conquest
of al-Andalus–a Moorish province on the southern Iberian peninsula established eight centuries earlier–and more importantly, the last major
Muslim stronghold on the European continent. Critical race scholars have argued that these two events would not only shift the geopolitical
balance of power from the Orient to the Occident, but fundamentally alter conceptions about religious and racial identity. According to Nelson
Maldonado-Torres, of the University of California, Berkeley, the expulsion of the Moors from continental Europe marked a transition from an age
The
of imperial relations between Christian and Muslim empires, to an age of European colonial expansion throughout the known world.
“discovery” of “godless” natives in the Americas would also inspire the great debates between Las Casas
and Sepúlveda in 1550 on the nature of the human soul. Such a geopolitical and philosophical shift, Maldonado-Torres
argues, would lead to a Eurocentric, re-categorization of humanity based upon religous—and ultimately racial—
differences. Maldonado-Torres has proposed that anti-black racism is not simply an extension of some historical bias
against blacks, but rather, is an amalgam of old-world Islamophobia linked to the history of the Iberian peninsula, and to the
notion of souless beings embodied in popular conceptions about the indigenous natives of the Americas.
These beliefs would contribute to an ideological basis for, and justification of, colonial conquests in the name
of cultural and religious conversion, as well as pave the way for the enslavement and human trafficking of sub-
Saharan Africans.

Epistemology—Only accounting for anti-blackness mystifies Red genocide and land

dispossession—that’s Byrd. Independently, the alt alone is ineffective because people
perceive that they can absolve themselves of guilt if their ancestors didn’t actively own
slaves
Moreton-Robinson 8 (Aileen, Professor of Indigenous Studies at the Queensland University of Technology. “Writing off Treaties:
White Possession in the United States Critical Whiteness Studies Literature.” Transnational Whiteness Matters, 2008. pp. 81-98//shree)

Whiteness studies proliferated in the United States during the 1990s in response to overt acts of racist violence reported in the press and the
need to reconsider the persistence of racism in light of the proposition that race was socially constructed and not biologically determined.
Whiteness studies scholars share in common their commitment to racial justice, anti-racism and a more humane society. In most of the literature,
prescriptive politics assume a central role; many writers are committed to the abolition of whiteness through naming it, deconstructing it, resisting
it and betraying it. Their scholarship is informed by a variety of disciplines such as literary studies, cultural studies, anthropology, feminism,
postcolonialism, sociology and history while their research methods include textual analysis ethnography, interviews, surveys and the archival.
Whiteness studies has entered Canada and crossed both the Pacific and Atlantic providing a new history of race and modernity in 'settler'
colonies.1 However, the United States of America remains one of the most productive sites for whiteness studies.2 A field of studies that is full
of contradictions and ambivalences as well as sympathetic critics. Mike Hill argues that "the contradictions surrounding whiteness studies remain
one of its most salient and worthwhile features . .. the study of whiteness was never- and with hard enough work will never be- an
unproblematically unified institutional force."3 Debates about the epistemological assumptions and approaches to whiteness within the field
continue to abound. Robyn Wiegman surmises that the contradictory nature of white power has been underplayed by Dyer and other white
studies scholars through claiming its invisibility and universality as the source of its power. Wiegman argues that the universal serves to work in
the interests of white particularity. This particularity simultaneously distances itself from white supremacy and denies the benefits of white power
creating a disassociation that takes the form of "liberal whiteness, a colour blind moral sameness."4 Peter Kolchin critiques whiteness studies for
its lack of historical specificity and the claim that whiteness is everything or nothing leads him to question whether it is a useful tool of enquiry
and explanation. He argues that "underlying the new interest in white power, privilege and identity there is evident an intense discouragement
over the persistence of racism, the unexpected renewal of nationalism, and the collapse of progressive movements for social change. While
Stephen Knadler cautions whiteness studies scholars against "an increasing linguistic slippage from the fiction of race into the fiction of racism."6
The pliable morphology of whiteness, its utilization of the universal, the lack of historical specificity and the linguistic slippage that fictionalizes
racism as problems have shaped this paper's consideration of the relationship of this field of study to Indigenous sovereignties. The field of
Whiteness studies is not a uniquely white enterprise, African Americans have commented on and written about whiteness since the early 1800s.7
African American scholarship has been influential, particularly the work of W. E. B. Du Bois and more recently Toni Morrison whose seminal text
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination challenged the naturalized whiteness of American l.iterature by illuminating how the
omnipresence of African Americans has historically shaped it. 8 She exposes the embedded racial assumptions that enable whiteness to
characterize itself in the literary imagination in powerful and important ways. In her analysis of Hemmingway's To Have and to Have Not, Morrison
illustrates how black men and women were positioned as inferiors within his texts to prop up white masculinity .9 Morrison further suggests in "
Black Matters" that the African American presence has also "shaped the body politic, the Constitution, and the entire history of the [USA] culture."
Indigenous peoples are outside the scope of Morrison's analysis. Through the centering of the African American presence, Native American texts
that have challenged, resisted and affected the American literary imagination, politics, history and the Constitution remain invisible. This silence
is an interesting discursive move considering that the best-selling novels within the USA in the late eighteenth century were captivity narratives.
it was the positioning of Indians as incommensurable
And as Native American legal scholar Raymond Williams argues
savages within the Declaration of Independence that enabled " ' the Founders' vision of America's growth and potentiality as a
new form of expansionary white racial dictatorship in the world."ll The most valuable contribution of Morrison's work for my purposes
is her thesis that "blackness," whether real or imagined, services the social construction and application of whiteness in its myriad forms. In this
way it is utilized as a white epistemological possession. Her work opens up a space for considering how this possessiveness operates within the
whiteness studies literature to displace Indigenous sovereignties and render them invisible. WHITE POSSESSIVENESS Most historians mark 1492
as the year when imperialism began to construct the old world order by taking possession of other people, their lands and resources. The
possessive nature of this enterprise informed the development of a racial stratification process on a global scale that became solidified during
modernity. Taking possession of Indigenous people's lands was a quintessential act of colonization and was tied to the
transition from the Enlightenment to modernity, which precipitated the emergence of a new subject into history within Europe. Major social,
legal, economic and political reforms had taken place changing the feudal nature of the relationship between persons and property in the 16th
and 18th centuries. "These changes centered upon the rise of 'possessive individualism,' that is, upon an increasing consciousness of the
distinctness of each self-owning human entity as the primary social and political value. "12 Private ownership of property both tangible and
intangible operated through mechanisms of the new nation state in its regulation of the population and especially through the law. By the late
1700s people could legally enter into different kinds of contractual arrangements whereby they could own land, sell their labor and possess their
A new white property owning subject
identities all of which were formed through their relationship to capital and the state.
emerged into history and possessiveness became embedded in everyday discourse as "a firm belief that
the best in life was the expansion of self through property and property began and ended with possession of one's
body."13 Within the realm of intra-subjectivity possession can mean control over one's being, ideas, one's mind, one's feelings and one's body or
within inter-subjectivity it can mean the act or fact of possessing something that is beyond the subject and in other contexts it can refer to a state
Within the law possession can refer to holding or occupying territory with or without actual
of being possessed by another.
can also refer to territorial domination of a state. At an
ownership or a thing possessed such as property or wealth and it
ontological level the structure of subjective possession occurs through the imposition of one's will-la-be on
the thing which is perceived to lack will, thus it is open to being possessed. This enables the formally free subject to make the thing
its own. Ascribing one's own subjective will onto the thing is required to make it one's property as " willful possession of what was previously a
will-less thing constitutes our primary form of embodiment; it is invoked whenever we assert: this is minc."14 To be able to assert ' this is mine'
requires a subject to internalize the idea that one has proprietary rights that are part of nonnative behavior, rules of interaction and social
engagement. Thus possession that forms part of the ontological structure of white subjectivity is reinforced by its sociodiscursive functioning.
WHITE WRITING A number of texts have been written historicizing the acquisition of white identity and the privileges conferred by its status
through a trope of migration, which is based on the assumption that all those who came after the white people had taken possession are the
immigrants. White possession of the nation works discursively within these texts to displace Native American sovereignties by disavowing that
everyone else within the USA are immigrants whether they came in chains or by choice. The only displacement that is theorized is in relation to
African Americans. Theodore Allen's work on how the Irish became white in America illustrates that the transformation of their former status as
the blacks of Europe relied on their displacement by African Americans in the new country. IS David Roediger di scusses how the wages of
whiteness operated to prevent class alliances between working class whites and African Americans. 16 Karen Brodkin 's excellent book on how
Jews became white demonstrates that the lower status of African American workers enabled Jewish class mobility.17 Jacobsen illustrates that
European migrants were able to become white through ideological and political means that operated to distinguish them from African American
blackness.18 The black/white binary permeates these analyses enabling tropes of migration and slavery to work covertly in
these texts erasing the continuing history of colonization and the Native American sovereign presence .
Blackness becomes an epistemological possession that Allen, Roediger, Brodkin and Jacobsen deploy[ed] in
analyzing whiteness and race, which forecloses the possibility that the dispossession of Native Americans was tied to migration
and the establishment of slavery driven by the logic of capital. Slaves were brought to America as the property of white
people to work the land that was appropriated from Native America tribes. Subsequently, migration became a means
to enhance capitalist development within the USA. Migration, slavery and the dispossession of Native Americans were integral to the project of
nation building. Thus the question of how anyone came to be white or black in the United States of America is inextricably tied to the dispossession
of the original owners and the assumption of white possession. The various assumptions of sovereignty beginning with British 'settlers' the
formation of individual states and subsequently the United States of America all came into existence through the blood-stained taking of Native
American land. The USA as a white nation state cannot exist without land and clearly defined borders, it is the
legally defined and asserted territorial sovereignty that provides the context for national identifications of whiteness. In this way I argue Native
American dispossession indelibly marks configurations of white national identity. Ruth Frankenberg acknowledges in the introduction to her
edited collection Displaying Whiteness that whiteness traveled culturally and physically, impacting on the formation of nationhood, class and
empire sustained by imperialism and global capitalism. She wrote that notions of race were tied "to ideas about legitimate 'ownership' of the
nation, with 'whiteness' and' Americanness' linked tightly together" and that this history was repressed. After making this statement she then
moves on to discuss immigration and its effects. 19 Her acknowledgement did not progress into critical analysis that centered Native American
dispossession, instead Frankenberg represses that which she acknowledges is repressed . Repression operates as a defense mechanism to protect
one's perception of self and reality from an overwhelming trauma that may threaten in order to maintain one's self image. Repressing
the
history of Native American dispossession works to protect the possessive white self from ontological
disturbance. It is far easier to extricate oneself from the history of slavery if there were no direct family and
material ties to its institution and reproduction. However, it is not as easy to distance one's self from a history of
Indigenous dispossession when one benefits everyday from being tied to a nation that has and continues
to constitute itself as a white possession. Within the whiteness studies literature whiteness has been defined in multiple ways.
It is usually perceived as unnamed, umnarked and invisible, and often as culturally empty operating only by appropriation and absence .20 It is a
location of structural privilege, a subject position and cultural Praxis. Whiteness constitutes the norm operating within various institutions
influencing decision making and defining itself by what it is not. 22 It is socially constructed and is a form of property that one possesses, invests
in and profits from.2..1 Whiteness as a social identity works discursively becoming ubiquitous, fluid and dynamic24 operating invisibly through
pedagogy.25 What these different definitions of whiteness expose is that it is something that can be possessed and it is tied to power and
dominance despite being fluid, vacuous and invisible to white people. However, these different conceptualizations of whiteness, which use
blackness as an epistemological possession to service what it is not, obscure the more complex way that white possession functions
sociodiscursively through subjectivity and knowledge production. As something that can be possessed by subjects it must have ontological and
epistemological anchors in order to function through power. As a means of controlling differently racialized populations enclosed within the
borders of a given society, white subjects are disciplined, though to different degrees, to invest in the nation as a white possession that imbues
them with a sense of belonging and ownership. This sense of belonging is derived from ownership as understood within the logic of capital and
citizenship. In its self-legitimacy, white possession operates discursively through narratives of the home of the brave and the land of the free and
through white male signifiers of the nation such as the Founding Fathers, the 'pioneer' and the 'war hero.' Against this stands the Indigenous
sense of belonging, home and place in its sovereign incommensurable difference.

Positing blackness as ontologically void and incapable of subjectivity or cartographic

coherence denies the fullness of black geographies that can re-forge kinship and
genealogical capacity—they naturalize white settler power and prime us to destruction
Tuck et al 14 (Eve Tuck (Unangan) is a member of the Educational Studies Department and Coordinates the Native American Studies
Program at the State University of New York at New Paltz; Allison Guess is a graduate student at The Graduate Center, The City University of New
York in the program of Earth and Environmental Sciences where she studies Geography; Hannah Sultan graduated from Smith College with a self-
designed major in international development studies with a focus on agricultural resource use and food security, and later spent time in Brazil
with a Fulbright fellowship. “Not Nowhere: Collaborating on Selfsame Land.” 6-26-14. https://decolonization.wordpress.com/2014/06/26/not-
nowhere-collaborating-on-selfsame-land/ //shree. Footnote 2 inserted in [brackets] BLP = Black Land Project)

Along with Allison, Hannah, Tavia Benjamin and other members of The Black/Land Project, Mistinguette has worked for the past three years to
interview and record the narratives of members of many Black communities as they describe their relationships to land as Black people, however
that identity presents itself in their lives. Eve has theorized decolonization of Indigenous land (with K. Wayne Yang), Land education (with Marcia
McKenzie and Kate McCoy) and the significance of place in social science research (with Marcia McKenzie). What is important about that first
fifteen minute encounter between Mistinguette and Eve is that they discussed the tripled relationships between Indigenous peoples, Africans-
made-into-chattel, and white settlers (see also Byrd, 2011; Tuck & Yang, 2012; Wilderson, 2010). We discussed these tripled relationships as
antagonisms (Wilderson, 2010), but also spoke of the need for more thought and attention given to the relationships between Indigenous peoples
and Black peoples. This is to say that the imbrication of settler colonialism and antiblackness was what sparked our collaboration– but more, our
desire has been to supersede the conventions of settler colonialism and antiblackness toward another kind of futurity.
Not knowing that futurity is what makes our collaboration contingent, but knowing that there are many futurities available to us
brings us to the work. This post is meant to be in conversation with other Black writers and Indigenous writers on land, Indigenous
dispossession, and antiblackness, but also Indigenous sovereignty and futurity, Black futurity and optimism, and again, land. The Black/Land
Project was founded to amplify, re-narrate and regenerate the relationships that Black people engage with
land, including past relationships, present relationships, and future relationships. The Black/Land Project has lovingly crafted
interview experiences from members of Black communities in Flint, MI, Las Vegas, NV, Cleveland, OH, upstate New
York, among other places across the US. Interview participants identify racially as Black, and from lots of different ethnic and national
backgrounds, including African immigrants, Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Latino, African American, and mixed race Black peoples. Interview participants
have been diverse in age, gender and gender expression, sexuality, and in the amount of time lived where they live. The Black/Land Project (BLP)
has conducted its work entirely outside the academy and, until recently, completely separate from the codes and discourses that preoccupy
academic inquiry. This is not to say that the interview inquiry project has not been conducted in a way that is ethical (it has) or systematic (it has)
or antitheoretical (it isn’t). Instead, the protocols and theorizing have emerged relationally between The Black/Land interviewers and the
interview participants. Rather than bringing (outside) theory to the inquiry, participants and interviewers have engaged in what Allison
has come to call a “geotheorizing” of Black relationships to land. Eve, along with Brian K. Jones and Kondwani Jahan Jackson
(SUNY New Paltz), began working formally with The Black/Land Project through an American Studies Association Community Partnership Grant
to support BLP in organizing and analyzing their now numerous interviews (see Tuck, Smith, Guess, Benjamin & Jones, 2014). Along with this
work, Eve also agreed to help bring BLP’s work to new audiences. Part of the tension of writing to academic audiences has been how to frame
the relevant literature and theory that interfaces so powerfully with what BLP has sought to do: it isn’t accurate to say that BLP’s work has been
informed by the (academic) theorizing of antiblackness, settler colonialism, Black optimism, and futurity; yet, it is useful to presume that from
where ever those theories came, Black/Land’s work has come too. So, here and elsewhere, we engage theory not as an origin story, not as a
genealogy, but because it may be useful in translating to those who read that theory (or want to) the many ways that Blackness persists to make
relationships to land. Empire/Settler Colonialism/triad/antagonisms/fusings. Writing with Marcia McKenzie, Eve has sought to understand how,
among other epistemic violences, settler colonialism has attempted to reduce human relationships to land to
relationships to property, making property “ownership” the primary vehicle to civil rights in most settler colonial nation-states. In the
United States and other “slave estates” (Wilderson, 2010), the remaking of land into property was/is accompanied by the
remaking of (African) persons into property, into chattel (Wilderson, 2010; Spillers, 2003, Tuck & Yang, 2012). The remaking
of land and bodies into property is necessary for settlement onto other people’s land. To be made into property, according to settler colonialism,
Black people must be kept landless (see Tuck & McKenzie, 2014) and thus exceptionalized from settler communities. These manifestations of
property suggest multiscalar discourses of ownership (McKittrick, 2006). These include discourses of “having ‘things,’ owning lands, invading
territories, possessing someone,” all “narratives of displacement that reward and value particular forms of conquest” (McKittrick, 2006, p. 3).
McKittrick observes, “(This) reward system repetitively returns us to the body, black subjecthood, and the where of blackness, not just as it is
owned, but as black subjects participate in ownership. Black diasporic struggles can also be
read, then, as geographic contests
of discourses of ownership. Ownership of the body, individual and community voices, bus seats, women, “Africa,”
feminisms, history, homes, record labels, money, cars, these are recurring positionalities, written and articulated through
protest, musics, feminist theory, fiction, the everyday. These positionalities and struggles over the meaning of
place add a geographic dimension to practices of black reclamation. Yet they also illustrate the ways in which the legacy
of racial dispossession underwrites how we have come to know space and place, and that the connections between what are considered “real”
or valuable forms of ownership are buttressed through racial codes that mark the body as ungeographic” (pp. 3-4). Discourses and practices of
making-property and ownership are central to the hegemonic relations of settler colonialism and antiblackness. As Wilderson (2010) observes
about the United States, there are three structuring positions, antagonisms, which converge to typify relationships of power and place, ultimately
remaking land into property. Each of the three structuring positions (“Savage,” Slave, and Human in Wilderson’s analysis) are “elaborated by a
rubric of three demands: the (White) demand for expansion, the (Indian) demand for return of the land, and the (Black) demand for ‘flesh’
reparation” (p. 29). Jodi Byrd’s borrowing of the word arrivants from African Caribbean poet Kamau Brathwaite in place of “chattel slave,” refers
broadly to people forced into the Americas “through the violence of European and Anglo-American colonialism and imperialism around the
globe,” (2011, p. xix). This nomenclature is a recognition of the ways in which arrivants both resist and
participate as settlers in the historical project of settler colonialism. The word “arrivants” helps to highlight
the complicity of all arrivants (including Black people) in Indigenous erasure and dispossession, because settler
colonialism “requires settlers and arrivants to cathect the space of the native as their home,” (ibid., p. xxxix; see
also da Silva, 2013). But “arrivants” may also conceal the unique positioning of Blackness in settler colonialism and
the complicity of white people and nonwhite people (including Native people) in antiblackness. Thus, settler
colonialism fuses a set of (at least) tripled relationships between settlers/settlement, chattel/enslavement,
and Indigenous/erasure. Following a discussion between Patrick Wolfe and J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Eve has written (with coauthors)
elsewhere about this set of relationships as a triad, perhaps even a triangle. As Eve and K. Wayne Yang have argued, this set of relations is tangled
(and though it initially appears as a footnote in Decolonization is not a metaphor, it is perhaps even more important for this discussion):
“[A]lthoughthe setter-native-slave triad structures settler colonialism, this does not mean that settler,
native, and slave are analogs that can be used to describe corresponding identities, structural locations,
worldviews, and behaviors. Nor do they mutually constitute one another. For example, Indigenous is an identity independent of the triad, and
also an ascribed structural location within the triad. Chattel slave is an ascribed structural position, but not an identity. Settler describes a set of
behaviors, as well as a structural location, but is eschewed as an identity.” (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 7) Perhaps it is obvious that there is (again, at
least) a tripled relationship between these nonanalogous locations–but what exactly do these locations comprise? Identities? Structural
pigeonholes? Flexible prism points? These questions continue to challenge us. In conversation with Leigh Patel, Eve has constructed some
renderings of the triad as groups described by their actions, yet all of these are still/also actions committed by settlers (grabbing land,
“eradicating” Indigenous peoples, bringing in slaves, etc). In K. Wayne Yang’s teaching, he describes the triad as a rubber band, bending and
stretching to accumulate and not/equivocate. Eve has written with C. Ree about the tripled relations perhaps being zombies, ghosts and monsters.
Indeed, decolonization is not a metaphor, but we continue to need compelling metaphors/ways to understand the fusion of relationships
generated by settler colonialism’s relentless attempts to make Indigenous land and Black bodies into property. Theorizing antiblackness and
Blackness. Among theorizations of blackness and fugitivity (Moten, 2008), blackness as value and excess (da Silva, 2013), blackness as fungible
(King, 2014), blackness-qua-violence (Douglass & Wilderson, 2013), the work of The
Black/Land Project most directly coheres with
Spillers’ (2004) theorizing of Black spatial practices and McKittrick’s (2006) theorizing of Black life as
ungeographic, at the same time that BLP insists on the acumen of Black people’s narrations of their
relationships to land. Seeking definitions of Blackness beyond accumulation and fungibility (similar to
Wilderson, 2010, p. 59; King, 2014), the Black/Land Project has engaged in interviews to co-construct Blackness-as-
resistance (James, 2013b, p. 68), and refuse the ever-circulating tropes of Black people as landless. Fred Moten (2008)
lyrically points out these creative im/possibilities of blackness as “thing” – an object without being and without value, whose very value lies in its
resistance to the foundations of capitalist value, being, and thingness. Moten asks: “What if the thing whose meaning or value has never been
found finds things, founds things? What if the thing will have founded something against the very possibility of foundation and against all anti-
or post-foundational impossibilities? What if the thing sustains itself in that absence or eclipse of meaning that withholds from the thing the
horrific honorific of “object”? At the same time, what if the value of that absence or excess is given to us only in and by way of a kind of failure
or inadequacy—or, perhaps more precisely, by way of a history of exclusion, serial expulsion, presence’s ongoing taking of leave—so that the
non-attainment of meaning or ontology, of source or origin, is the only way to approach the thing in its informal (enformed/enforming, as opposed
to formless), material totality?” (p. 181-2) These questions form a musical fugue of “Black
optimism”[1] (Moten, 2013), akin to the
grounded theoretical moves that The Black/Land Project (BLP) has made in deciding to attend to the questions that
Black people ask and answer about their relationships to land (see also Joy James, 2013a, on Afrarealism). Regarding her
participation as an interviewee in the BLP inquiry project, I.B. explains that her interests are in… “…relation to the genealogy piece and not
knowing–what people don’t know because they don’t have access to that knowledge or it hasn’t been passed down to them. Moving and
transience and separations of families and all that stuff; that makes it hard to track. To know whom your people are and where you really come
from and where your history is rooted, that really interests me. I wonder how much that plays a role in other Black peoples’ experiences. Finding
where they come from and who are their people. Because there is strength in knowing that kind of stuff.” [Interview excerpt] Like
many of
the co-participants and co-theorists of the Black Land/Project, I.B. points to the importance of learning
from the routes and roots of the presumably rootless, the geographies of those presumed ungeographic,
and the genealogies of those presumed kinless. Theorizing land. When we say at the outset that we are writing from the middle
of something, that something has to do with Black life constructed as landless on stolen Indigenous land, land as epistemology and ontology for
Indigenous peoples, and Black narratives which recover relationships to that selfsame land. This is the tangled[2] inspiration for our shared work,
and the reason our collaboration must always for now (in this futurity) be contingent. In the following passages, to help describe the something
(not the thing [Moten, 2008; da Silva, 2013] but not not the thing) we
place side by side some of the articulations of land and
place–by Indigenous peoples (the first two selections) and by Black peoples (the latter two selections)–that expose the
various wheres that we are. “This is where our women first planted corn. They have planted it again and again. Each year we have
harvested enough to roast and dry and store away. These fields look after us by helping our corn to grow. Our children eat it and become strong.
We eat it and continue to live. Our corn draws life from this earth and we draw life from our corn. This earth is part of us! We are of this place…
We should name ourselves for this place!…You see, their names for themselves are really the names of their places. This is how they were known,
to others and to themselves. They were known by their places. This is how they are still known.”–Charles Henry (Apache) quoted in Basso, 1996,
p. 21; ellipses inserted. “Land is our mother. This is not a metaphor. For the Native Hawaiians speaking of knowledge, land was the central theme
that drew forth all others. You came from a place. You grew in a place and you had a relationship with a place. This is an epistemological idea…
One does not simply learn about land, we learn best from land.” –Manulani Meyer (Kanaka Maoli), 2008, p. 219, italics original; ellipses inserted.
“Spatial practice, written on by climate and ideology, as well as history and geography, is so impressed by human bodies in relations that it is fair
to say that, given the year, one could tell how he or she “felt” about the Mississippi, either vicariously or experientially—the Mississippi of the
“Trail of Tears,” 1838, the Mississippi of the great floods of 1927 and 1993, the Mississippi of summer 1980, when I crossed the river from the
west, enroute to Memphis, at the end of a honeymoon, the Mississippi of the Golden Arch of St. Louis, the Mississippi of 2003 and the official
opening of the Louis Armstrong Memorial, Algiers Landing, New Orleans. Of the three dimensions of locatedness, the place of the Mississippi, as
of any other topographically representable space, would express its thickest solidity of meaning because it is the scenic apparatus that bristles
with “man/woman,” “race,” “class,” “region,” and the long arcs of desire in which the sexualities are prolonged and declared; the site of the
emblematic and mystic chords of the memorial, place therefore defines what Hannah Arendt calls “the location of human activities” (1958, p.
73), the closest space, the topos with an intimate name.” –Hortense Spillers, 2004, p. 558-559. “You know we often don’t talk about it. I think
that there is a profound relationship between people of African descent and the land because we come from a people that didn’t really look on
land and ownership as being the way we approach material gains here. I think that the relationship of people to land is a part of who we are. In
other words, I think African Americans coming from Africa, we came from a communal relationship among us as people but also on relating to
that which nurtures us and supports us. So the relationship with land was very organic in my opinion. It meant that we had a very personal
relationship, almost spiritual, a kind of respect for it and an understanding that there is a relationship between us and land.…[Native peoples]
used land like water. It was fluid. Depending on which cultures you look at, whether they are particularly stable people or wanderers what have
you, the relationship with land was very important. I think that we see some of that in people who are farmers, who worked the land. But people
who live in cities and buy condos and whatnot, we don’t see land in that way at all. There isn’t that relationship. But I do think that, particularly
people of color and certainly Africans and Native peoples, land is not just simply dirt. It’s not just simply space and stuff. It is a part of who we
are. I think it is part of how we define ourselves. It really is.” –T.G. Black/Land Project interview excerpt. [Start Footnote 2] This is one
of the
key differentiations that Wilderson (2010) makes between the Slave and the Savage– The Savage, though a
“genocided object” (p. 51) is afforded an ontology (afforded by a genealogy derived from land, presumably, or at
least prior occupation of it) whereas the Slave, positioned within a grammar of suffering (p. 11), is denied an ontology so long as
she is denied freedom. The Black/Land Project’s work takes up an entirely different line of suppositions. [End Footnote
2] Blackness as (not) nowhere: fantasy in the hold. Moten (2013), reading Wilderson (2010) explains that the settler and ‘the
savage’, unlike the slave, have been afforded cartographic practice– Wilderson notes of the settler and ‘the savage’: “although
at every scale their maps are radically incompatible, their respective ‘mapness’ is never in question (p.181). The “capacity for
cartographic coherence…. secures subjectivity for both the Settler and the ‘Savage’ (ibid.). Moten observes
that because blackness is denied a cartographic practice, the interplay between thingliness and nothingness that relates to
blackness plays out “outside and against the grain of the very idea of self-determination—in the unmapped and unmappable immanence of
undercommon sociality” (Moten, 2013, p. 752). Moten calls this playing out “fantasy in the hold.” The hold is a holding of movement (of “nothing
suspended in dislocation. Yet, the
yet and already” objects [Harney & Moten, p. 93]) and the hold of the ship (ibid., p. 94) —
participants in the Black/Land interviews press against this suspension, this dislocation. They are inhering
a different logic/logistic, one that insists upon the fullness of (an exclusive) Black geography. T.G. describes the
substance of Blackness in place: “The issue is trying to find richness. I mean let’s face it, when I’m going to get a haircut,
I know where I’m going. I’m not going down to the shopping center. I’m going back to the hood where they cut hair.
You get in a barbershop and in the course of two hours in the barbershop, you’ve solved all the problems
of the world because we have all the answers.” –T.G. [interview excerpt]. In the interview, T.G. unpacks his decision
to continually go back to the hood within the context of anti-black development strategies, which, under the
guise of increasing the ‘diversity’ of a neighborhood, trick away Black cartographic coherence. Yet, T.G. also suggests that in
Blackness, there are endless possibilities. Likewise, Moten asks: “Can this sharing of a life in homelessness, this
interplay of the refusal of what has been refused and consent, this undercommon appositionality, be a place from which
to know, a place out of which emerges neither self-consciousness nor knowledge of the other but an
improvisation that proceeds from somewhere on the other side of an unasked question? But not simply
to be among one’s own; rather, also, to live among one’s own in dispossession, to live among the ones who
cannot own, the ones who have nothing and who, in having nothing, have everything. (Moten, 2013, p. 756)” Black
geographies have been relegated to the hold because of settler constructions of property and scarcity. In
this, Black people become viewed by white settlers as place-holders on stolen Indigenous land. The truth is, white settlers have no problem giving
Indigenous land to Black people, until they want it back. S.P. recalls: “What’s also very interesting is that we bought in to this neighborhood where
the houses were going for an average of $250,000 before we moved in. When we moved in, they were under $100,000. So you had this influx of
people of color buying in and you had this rush of people wanting to sell as the neighborhood began to look different.” [Interview excerpt] S.P.
later explains how the phenomena of ‘white flight’ has allowed other people to move in and, as S.P. puts it, “make roots” in a new location. For
The Black/Land Project, land is not just about what is owned. Ownership, according to the storytellers who contribute to the BLP, is not the most
important relationship to land. Mistinguette recalls one interviewee who said, “Land ownership is a temporary and revokable agreement between
you and the government.” People often describe their relationship to land “as something that owns them.” Blackness as not nowhere
means that Black claims to place happen somewhere, on selfsame land. In this regard, struggles against
dislocation and gentrification cannot be warranted as the antidote to nowhereness. Not nowhere also
evokes the Black double consciousness of unfounded yet found relationships to selfsame land – similar
to the afropessimist optimism of Moten, the wisdom of some BLP participants who identify the Black
desires to be not nowhere without becoming a settler somewhere. Black dislocation within the settler state is always an
unfinished and incomplete project. Policing tactics, gentrification, vigilantism, and political isolation find
justification in the settler colonial truism that Black people should not be where white settlers want to be.
Yet the struggle to resolve Black dislocation can obscure the fact of Indigenous erasure and resilient,
radical relationship to that selfsame land. There isn’t something easy to say about this. Decolonial futurity at the
henceforward. “Henceforward, the interests of one will be the interests of all, for in concrete fact everyone will be discovered by the troops,
everyone will be massacred—or everyone will be saved.” —Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. Writing about the process of decolonization
and the search for a Black cyborg, Joy James meditates on the saliency of the word henceforward in these lines from Fanon (1963). Henceforward
referring to a (later) pinpoint-able time and space in which the turn
is “both exhortation and puzzle” (James, 2013b, p. 58)
toward mass resistance to oppression materializes. Connecting the henceforward with what we have written elsewhere about
futurity, it is the future that is made possible in the present, it is the time and space in which we can tumble
into something that will be arranged differently, coded differently, so that our locations and labors are
more than just who we are to the settler. Henceforward is the start of the future now. James tells us that for
Fanon, decolonization, at minimum, means that the colonized will change places with the colonizer. What decolonization can be at maximum
remains to be seen, but for it to be more than merely a change in personnel, this requires the colonized to “have visions rather than mere dreams”
it all hinges on the henceforward because, without the henceforward, there is
(James, 2013b, p. 64). For James,
only mutually assured destruction. We write to you from the middle of the henceforward, from the
middle of the rage against the hold.

Perm do the alt—it’s reciprocal if they make a floating PIK

Alt doesn’t solve—Alt’s ontological fatalism naturalizes colonialism and turns their
impact
Hudson 13, (Peter, Political Studies Department, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg , South Africa, has been on the editorial
board of the Africa Perspective: The South African Journal of Sociology and Theoria: A Journal of Political and Social Theory and Transformation,
and is a member of the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism, The state and the colonial unconscious, Social Dynamics: A journal of
African studies, 2013)

Thus the self-same/other distinction is necessary for the possibility of identity itself. There
always has to exist an outside, which is
also inside, to
the extent it is designated as the impossibility from which the possibility of the existence of
the subject derives its rule (Badiou 2009, 220). But although the excluded place which isn’t excluded insofar as
it is necessary for the very possibility of inclusion and identity may be universal (may be considered “ontological”),
its content (what fills it) – as well as the mode of this filling and its reproduction – are contingent. In other
words, the meaning of the signifier of exclusion is not determined once and for all: the place of the place of
exclusion, of death is itself over-determined, i.e. the very framework for deciding the other and the same,
exclusion and inclusion, is nowhere engraved in ontological stone but is political and never terminally
settled. Put differently, the “curvature of intersubjective space” (Critchley 2007, 61) and thus, the specific modes of the
“othering” of “otherness” are nowhere decided in advance (as a certain ontological fatalism might have it)
(see Wilderson 2008). The social does not have to be divided into white and black, and the meaning of these
signifiers is never necessary – because they are signifiers. To be sure, colonialism institutes an ontological
division, in that whites exist in a way barred to blacks – who are not. But this ontological relation is really on the side of the
ontic – that is, of all contingently constructed identities, rather than the ontology of the social which refers
to the ultimate unfixity, the indeterminacy or lack of the social. In this sense, then, the white man doesn’t exist, the black
man doesn’t exist (Fanon 1968, 165); and neither does the colonial symbolic itself, including its most intimate structuring relations – division
is constitutive of the social, not the colonial division. “Whiteness” may well be very deeply sediment in
modernity itself, but respect for the “ontological difference” (see Heidegger 1962, 26; Watts 2011, 279) shows up its ontological status as
ontic. It may be so deeply sedimented that it becomes difficult even to identify the very possibility of the
separation of whiteness from the very possibility of order, but from this it does not follow that the “void” of
“black being” functions as the ultimate substance, the transcendental signified on which all possible forms
of sociality are said to rest. What gets lost here, then, is the specificity of colonialism, of its constitutive axis, its
“ontological” differential. A crucial feature of the colonial symbolic is that the real is not screened off by the imaginary in the way it is
under capitalism. At the place of the colonised, the symbolic and the imaginary give way because non-identity (the real of
the social) is immediately inscribed in the “lived experience” (vécu) of the colonised subject. The colonised is
“traversing the fantasy” (Zizek 2006a, 40–60) all the time; the void of the verb “to be” is the very content of his interpellation. The colonised
is, in other words, the subject of anxiety for whom the symbolic and the imaginary never work, who is left stranded
by his very interpellation.4 “Fixed” into “non-fixity,” he is eternally suspended between “element” and
“moment”5 – he is where the colonial symbolic falters in the production of meaning and is thus the point of
entry of the real into the texture itself of colonialism. Be this as it may, whiteness and blackness are (sustained
by) determinate and contingent practices of signification; the “structuring relation” of colonialism thus itself
comprises a knot of significations which, no matter how tight, can always be undone. Anti-colonial – i.e., anti-
“white” – modes of struggle are not (just) “psychic” 6 but involve the “reactivation” (or “de-sedimentation”)7 of
colonial objectivity itself. No matter how sedimented (or global), colonial objectivity is not ontologically immune to antagonism.
Differentiality, as Zizek insists (see Zizek 2012, chapter 11, 771 n48), immanently entails antagonism in that differentiality both makes possible
the existence of any identity whatsoever and at the same time – because it is the presence of one object in another – undermines any identity
ever being (fully) itself. Each element in a differential relation is the condition of possibility and the condition of impossibility of each other. It is
this dimension of antagonism that the Master Signifier covers over transforming its outside (Other) into an element of itself, reducing it to a
condition of its possibility.8 All symbolisation produces an ineradicable excess over itself, something it can’t
totalise or make sense of, where its production of meaning falters. This is its internal limit point, its real:9 an errant “object” that
has no place of its own, isn’t recognised in the categories of the system but is produced by it – its “part of
no part” or “object small a.”10 Correlative to this object “a” is the subject “stricto sensu” – i.e., as the empty subject of the signifier
without an identity that pins it down.11 That is the subject of antagonism in confrontation with the real of the social,
as distinct from “subject” position based on a determinate identity.

Afropessimism naturalizes black abjection—turns the K

Hook 13 – prof @ birkbeck college, university of London (Derek, The racist bodily imaginary: The image of the body-in-pieces in
(post)apartheid culture, Subjectivity Vol. 6, No. 3, 254–271)
One of the great strengths of Fanon’s (1952/1986) Black Skin White Masks lies precisely in its apparent exaggerations,
which show how adept the young Fanon was, amidst his early enthusiasm for psychoanalysis, in reading white fantasy. Fanon uses
the imagery of the black body being broken apart, burnt, cut, exploded, eviscerated, describing such scenes with the notion of
‘corporeal malediction’.3 He was obviously deeply affected by accounts of lynching and related forms of physical racist violence, but his
disturbingly eloquent descriptions, articulated in the vocabulary of phenomenology and psychoanalysis, go further
than this. He taps into the just ‘beneath the surface’ imaginary quality of racist fantasy. Fantasy of this sort is not
readily assumed or ‘owned’ by the subject. It is not openly spoken of, or effectively ‘subjectivized’; quite the contrary,
the experiencing subject might be surprised, even repelled by the fantasy if it is rendered too clearly, in
overly explicit forms. Nor for that matter is the fantasy wholly unconscious; it is more like a latent schema of
understanding, a subliminal frame of apprehension through which black otherness comes to be understood.
Fanon (1952/1986) is also profoundly aware of the idealizing aspect of such fantasies. These idealizations are entwined
with stereotyping caricatures, so that apparently admirable qualities become reduced to racial vices: the perception of economic industriousness
is thus transformed into ‘the Jew’s love of money’ (for detailed elaboration of Fanon’s argument, see Hook, 2011). What this postulate brings to
light is the possibility that the (post)apartheid preoccupation with the black body-in-pieces maintains a ‘co-representative’,
an additional fantasmatic component. I have in mind here the notion of the black body as strong, impervious, possessed of a formidable
and superior physicality. This stereotypical trait, which might be recognized variously in irrational attributions of athleticism, bodily strength,
vitality and natural physical endowment, is of course a well-known trope of racism also in British and US contexts (St Louis, 2005; Stuart, 2005).
The black body here becomes – perhaps unexpectedly – ‘phallic’: an emblem of strength, of power, of what the white subject has lost, or stands
to lose. Our tentative analysis thus points to a twofold schema, an antinomy of fantasy. On the one hand: the phallic corporeality of black
corporeality, the black body as epitome of physicality, as icon of vitality, as body in apotheosis. Yet, in contrast to such (distorted) idealizations,
these bodies remain in perpetual proximity to death, to suffering; they are pictured in terrible states of
duress, of dismemberment and violence that the white subject can never quite imagine for themselves. The fantasmatic
black body exists thus in two irreconcilable scenes: as site of destruction (the body-in-pieces), and as image of physical perfection, bodily
exultation, site of exaggerated vitality. Body in extremis coincides thus with the body in excelsis. Such a complex of coinciding images makes
for fertile terrain within the racist (or racialized) imaginary, and affords a variety of dynamic explanations. One may understand
the alternating components of this complex, this racist ‘archetype’, along the lines suggested by Mbembe’s (2001) discussion of the body of the
colonized, in which an exaggerated physicality eradicates properties of agency, spiritual elevation and humanity: [I]n the colony the body of the
colonized individual is considered, in its profanity, one object among others. Indeed, being no more than a ‘body- thing’, it is neither the substrate
nor the affirmation of any mind or spirit ... His cadaver remains lying on the earth in a sort of unshakable rigidity, a material mass and a simple,
inert object, condemned in the position of that which plays no role at all. (Mbembe, 2001, pp. 26–27) What is particularly useful about Mbembe’s
contribution is that it links many of the above psychoanalytic theorizations of the body to a more overtly political dimension, that of key notions
within the philosophy of colonial subjugation.4 These ideas link back to a longstanding Fanonian theme: the delegation of the bodily. This is the
idea that the crass corporeality of the body that a particular (racial/class) group disavows is projected upon another group, who is thus consigned
to the position of abject racial other. Fanon’s concern is primarily with white attributions of the hyper-sexuality of blacks, but we may extrapolate
his idea to include the facet of excess corporeality, the dimension of the abject body. The factor of racialization here is impossible
to ignore: the broken body, the suffering body, the repulsive body-in- pieces is always, certainly within apartheid culture,
the black body. We can go one step further and link this conceptualization to Lacan’s (2006) formulations regarding the corps morcelé. In
his seminal essay on the mirror-stage, Lacan notes that the ‘fragmented body ... is regularly manifested in dreams’, particularly so under
experiences of ‘the aggressive disintegration of the individual’ (p. 78). Of course, given the predominance of the social fantasy with which we are
concerned here, it is apparent that such schemas of fragmentation are not equally distributed throughout all social
groups. One would expect, in situations of radical social asymmetry, that such imagery would be delegated to racial/cultural/
class others who are then given the burden of acting as depository for all such values and all related anxieties of
fragmentation. This would be to say that the white body-in-pieces in racist or (post)colonial culture is elided; it never
comes into view; it is never present except in the displaced form of the abjected black body-in-pieces.
On the basis of the above theorizations we can offer at least two accounts of the dynamic relationship between the facets of the
fantasy we are examining. Doing so enables us to speculate on the libidinal economy, that is, the distribution of affects, in these related
scenes. We might begin by emphasizing the priority placed on the imagining of the black body-in-pieces in racist contexts, and stress
the need for white subjects to revisit or visualize this image precisely as the displacement of the fragmentary
experiences of the white body-in-pieces. Odd as it may sound, such images here would have a placatory function, soothing anxieties
of dissolution by locating them in a site of pronounced dis-identifica- tion. A societal fixation with such images, their incessant
repetition within various forms of popular culture, can thus be understood along affective lines: such images
glow with the gratification of respite, with the alleviation of anxiety, they make a tacit pronouncement:
‘White bodies are not destined for this fate’. There is also an argument that such scenes visit upon their victims
exactly the violence they are thought to deserve. One relies here on the notion of projection, the idea that the other
comes to be the carrier of the repellant values that the racist subject has themselves discarded. One thus
attacks the other, blames them, with vigour proportionate to the need to expel these attributes from the self. To this we may add the Lacanian
thesis that such depictions play the part of a scene of (dis) identification. Lacan’s (2006) notion of the mirror stage specified that a double relation
obtained between the subject and potential image of identification: the image is both jubilantly loved as a narcissistically
gratifying object, and yet also hated inasmuch as it proves a destabilizing or rivalrous influence. Such images of black body-in-pieces are,
as such, a pure imagining of hate. There is a wishfulness about them, as if they visualize a desire, perhaps like the picturing of a wish in a dream,
albeit in a literal and unusually undisguised manner.
 2AC AT: Capitalism
No link- the AFF is in opposition to the neoliberal hegemonic state that created the
conditions of both settler colonialism and capitalism. If we win we’re in line of the
alternative, we win this round because it proves that the AFF and the alternative can
work in tandem and proves ground for the permutation.

Individual strategies for solving capitalism are best- instead of a totalizing project that
erases difference among the working class we attend to dividing notions within the
revolution to prevent fracturing- means we’re a prerequisite to their alternative.

Ivory Tower DA: Their authors have no understanding of how oppression actually
functions in the world, their privilege allows them to make the arguments they do
because they are not affected by things such as settlerism; they claim to stage a
jailbreak while holding a “get out of jail free” card

Perm: do both. The AFF is a rejection of a neoliberal state and in the direction of the alt.

Analysis of neoliberalism as a root cause skips over racism and settler colonialism.
Capitalism feeds off inequality and analysis of race is necessary to solve.
Tuck and Gorlewski 16 (Eve Tuck is Associate Professor of Critical Race and Indigenous Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies
in Education (OISE), University of Toronto – Gorlewski is Ph.D. in social foundations of education, State University of New York at Buffalo “Racist
Ordering, Settler Colonialism, and edTPA: A Participatory Policy Analysis”//George)

The ongoing structure of settler colonialism reduces human relationships to (Indigenous) land to
relationships to (settler) property, making property ownership the primary vehicle to civil rights in most
settler colonial nation-states. Settler Colonialism and Antiblackness In the United States and other slave
estates, the remaking of land into property was/is accompanied by the remaking of (African) persons into
property, into chattel (Spillers, 2003; Tuck & Yang, 2012; Wilderson, 2010; see also King, 2014 on Black life as fungible). To attend to
the specificity of antiblackness and its fusing to Indigenous erasure through settler colonialism is to set
aside the catchall term racism. It is to recognize that, as Holland (2012) observes, (W)hen we see and say “race,”
regardless of how much we intend to understand race as being had by everyone, our examples of racial
being and racist targets are often grounded in black matter(s) In this instance, the black body is the
quintessential sign for subjection, for a particular experience that it must inhabit and own all by itself. (p.
4, emphasis in original) The remaking of land and bodies into property is necessary for settlement onto other
people’s land. Discourses and practices of property and dispossession are central to the hegemonic
relations of settler colonialism and slavery in the United States. Implications Thus, in our view, analyses
of settler colonial dispossessions are incomplete when they do not connect Indigenous erasure and
antiblackness. settler colonialism insist that Indigenous peoples disappear at the same time that they
require Black life to be kept landless. Settler colonialism is a network of structures, narratives, and
justifications which promote the ascendancy of settler ontologies, especially of property and state
violence against Indigenous peoples and Black peoples. Frank Wilderson (2010) points to the antagonisms
built into the ways that Indigenous peoples can access humanity and the ways that Black peoples are
blocked from accessing humanity because of the ways that their relationships to land are differently
structured in settler colonialism. By attending to settler colonial dispossessions rather than theories of
dispossession related to colorism or capital accumulation (alone), it is possible to see dispossession as not
just material but always also connected to possible relations to place and land. In theorizing and using a
settler colonial construction of race, we bring together the otherwise seemingly disconnected phenomena
of Indigenous erasure and Black life as ungeographic (McKittrick, 2006; see also Tuck et al., 2014). The full version of the
alternative edTPA scoring tool that we created will soon be available as part of a book-length discussion of this study, but in service of this
discussion, we share about one section, on social context. As noted, Pearson’s implementation and scoring of the edTPA ignored all aspects of
race, class, or gender expression, even in a required section called Context for Learning. Because standardized evaluations also set
standards/expectations, leaving out the prompt for teacher candidates to attend to issues of race and racism in their performance assessment
materials devalues this type of reflection among new teachers. In contrast, understanding that a scoring tool can have a normalizing power over
discourse and practice, our scoring tool makes explicit reference to issues of race, dispossession, power, and privilege in the classroom. Our
scoring tool evaluates the degrees to which diverse students/families are treated with respect; students’ lives are woven into the curriculum; the
synergy between classroom community and students’ cultural communities is fostered; and multiple forms of intelligence and creativity are
encouraged. In our scoring tool, teacher candidates are expected to address issues of representation, lived experience, connectedness, and
dignity. Our scoring tool, because it is informed by understandings of settler colonial constructions of race, emphasizes dignity and connectedness
as practices which can be performed and observed. Our collective engaged in nuanced discussions about how these practices can be performed
and observed, which always came back to how teachers meet students in place and time. Locating this meeting within a context of settler
How to
colonialism which is premised upon the erasure of Indigenous peoples and Black life as no where breaks open other questions,
welcome without re-settling? How to communicate belonging without ownership? How to make place
without dispossessing others? These are the types of questions that become possible when settler
colonialism, Indigenous erasure and survivance, and antiblackness and Black resistance are imbued in
educational policy analysis. That we hope readers will understand from this is that education policy analysis
that just points to neoliberalism is not enough in terms of social explanation. Critiques of neoliberalism
often take racism for granted, as an a priori condition of modernity. Thus, education policy analyses which
culminate in a critique of neoliberalism can easily skip over the material effects of ongoing settler
colonialism, how different bodies are differently racialized, and how those made other in race-based
stratifications might otherwise relate to one another. Policy “solutions” that result in technologies of assessment such
as edTPA reify inequities related to fictions of race, racism, and antiblackness. In a sense, then, teacher education
faculty who participate uncritically in the implementation of these policies perpetuate the fiction of race.
Detractors might say that this is an overstatement, that it puts too much on both edTPA and Schools of Education. Indeed, the words race and
racism do not appear in any edTPA materials or prompts. Yet, as Ruthie Wilson Gilmore (2015) reminds us of the status quo, What is the status
quo? Put simply, capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it . . . Although it has become mildly mainstream to
decry outrages against poor people of color, the new “new realists” achieve their dominance by defining the problem as narrowly as possible in
order to produce solutions that on closer examination will change little. (n.p.) The edTPA as it has been adopted in New York State is exactly a
case in which the problem has been defined so narrowly that the “solutions” it will produce—teachers who have passed a standardized
performance assessment without any occasion to reflect on the roles of race and racism in classrooms or schools—will change little to affect the
Locating education analyses within a larger analysis of settler
everyday racist ordering of life in the United States.
colonialism and antiblackness attends directly to the roles of race and racism in formation and
implementation of policy. Leigh Patel’s (2015) recent work has raised useful questions about the prospects of ever securing what others
refer to as “racial justice” (including Keisch & Scott, whom we quote above). Patel (2015) writes, Much as it would seem somewhat logical to seek
redress of racialized violence and dehumanization through racial justice, that is exactly the kind of wrong-headed remedy born of a society that
is overly constricted by both race as a construct and loose ideas of justice. (n.p.) Patel writes of race as an invention to establish and
maintain injustice, and such an invention cannot be refashioned to establish justice. Patel (2015) disbelieves the notion that “fiction birthed
to enact, meter out, and discipline human from inhuman can be the source of humanity.” Patel, reading the history of constructions of
race as justifications for theft of Indigenous land and enslavement of Black people do not see race as a
construct that can be redeemed. Instead, Patel (2015) urges us to disrupt that fiction, decenter Whiteness,
and “focus on the humanity, the history, the psychology, the undeniable vibrancy, the embodied
beingness of black and brown peoples.”

Settler colonialism is a structure, not an event. It overdetermines economic and

educational policies.
Tuck 16 (Eve Tuck is Associate Professor of Critical Race and Indigenous Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE),
University of Toronto “Neoliberalism as nihilism? A commentary on educational accountability, teacher education, and school reform”)//George

Epistemology, economic strategy, and moral code rolled into one, neoliberalism refers to the reliance on
market-based relationships to explain how the world works, or how it should work. It treasures both
individual self-responsibility and social efficiency, aligning the purposes of public institutions to the
primacy of the market. Though many scholars position neoliberalism as recent or emergent paradigm, Indigenous and anti-
colonial scholars recognize neoliberalism as only the latest configuration of colonial imperialism. Indeed,
neoliberalism is an extension of/ the most recent iteration of (settler) colonialism (Bargh, 2007; See also Postero
& Zamosc, 2006; Bhavani, Foran, Kurian & Eve Tuck 326 | P a g e Munshi, 2009). Often overlooked by non-Indigenous scholars, indigenous
decolonizing theory is a rich resource for theorizing neoliberalism and dispossession (Tuck, 2012). In settler
colonial societies such as the United States, rights of property and occupation rely upon discovery
narratives. Settler colonies were/are not primarily established to extract surplus value from indigenous
labor, but from land, which required/requires displacing Indigenous peoples from their homelands (Wolfe,
1999, p. 1). Settler colonization is not a fixed event in time, but a structure that continues to contour the lives
of Indigenous people, settlers, and all other subjects of the settler colonial nation-state. Because settler
colonialism has not only shaped how the US nation-state has managed Indigenous people, but all peoples
on presumably valuable land (recast as “property”), indigenous theories of settler colonialism and
contestations of that structure are especially relevant to the theorizing of urban space and urban
schooling. Settler colonialism is the context of the dispossession and erasure of poor youth and youth of
color in urban public schools, and Indigenous responses to settler colonialism provide salient insights for
urban school reform. My empirical work has been on how neoliberal logic produces the conditions of school pushout, but an important
recurrent theme is how neoliberalization (the insertion of market values into non-market sectors of human activity) has worked defund the public
sphere and increase the size and influence of private sectors. Neoliberal restructuring has focused on building a seamless global market, at the
same time diminishing the public sphere in ways that make everyday people more politically and economically vulnerable, more fully exposed to
the dips and turns of the speculative market, and ultimately, more poor Maori scholar Maria Bargh notes the ways in which neoliberalism is
balanced upon “assumptions about the individual and the market as having particular natural identities,” (2007, p. 12) assumptions which prop
up neoliberal arguments as objective (thus scientific) and humanistic (thus progressive). Neoliberalism represents a Translation of many older
colonial beliefs, once expressed explicitly, now expressed implicitly, into eelanguage and practices which are far more covert about their civilizing
mission… A key feature of neoliberal policies is this conflict between not wanting to be or appear
paternalistic, wanting to be seen to allow people the ‘freedom’ and ‘empowerment to govern themselves,
but at the same time distrusting the abilities of some peoples, particularly indigenous peoples, to do so.
(p. 13 & 14) Indigenous theories engage neoliberal logic and neoliberalization as part of a very particular
trajectory of human thinking (not inevitable) and as reflective of shared aims with logics of settler
colonialism and manifest destiny. [24 Paragraphs Later…] Neoliberal ideology, which shapes schooling in the
Unites States, is often theorized as a new logic that emerged in the late 1970s, yet Indigenous scholars
argue that neoliberalism is a contemporary expression and extension of colonialism. Whilst settler
colonialism (as a structure and not an event [Wolfe, 1999]) is primarily concerned with the dispossession
and erasure of Indigenous peoples, neoliberalism as an extension of colonialism is concerned with the
dispossession and erasure of the unworthy subject. Educational accountability policies fall under the rare
category of allowable interventions of the neoliberal nation-state into the lives of individuals and families:
ensuring the viability of a service-based economy that thrives on consumerism and credit. Communities call upon school and government leaders
for more accountability for the quality of their teachers and schools,
the state responds with more and more accountability
measures aimed at appraising the use of dollars spent, measures that do nothing to secure schooling as
desired by communities, and in fact, undermine the potential for schools as sites of meaningmaking.
Educational accountability policies are not accountable to poor and low-income families, urban
communities, migrant and immigrant communities, and disenfranchised peoples. Accountability policies are
accountable to those who advocate for them, in order to keep a tight rein Eve Tuck 342 | P a g e on how tax dollars are spent and/or to close out
those who display any sort of dependence on the state.

The origin story of the alt reproduces both settler colonial and capitalist violence by
flattening out space as empty without reference to their temporal chronology—the
logic of “space as empty” operationalizes speculation
Rosenberg 14 [Jordana, Associate Professor of English, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, “The Molecularization of
Sexuality: On Some Primitivisms of the Present,” Theory & Event, Volume 17, Issue 2, 2014]//George

The annihilation of space through revolutions in time must be understood, then, not only in terms of the
“leap” of capital into finance, but also in relation to the intensification of forms of imperial violence. I’m not
going to expand on the economics of this further here. In fact, my main point is straightforwardly political, and has to do with the ways
in which the Middle East broadly, but Palestine in particular have come to bear a very particular weight in the globalization of finance capital and
the securing of dollar hegemony through military means. As I indicated above, there is, simply put, a deepening of settler colonial dynamics as a
key component of global finance capital. As Adam Hanieh explains, “During the 1950s, Israel’s main external support had come
from Britain and France.”75 1967 and then 1973 changed this decisively, as the US became the main backer of the
Israeli state’s settler colonial project of dispossession and “economic subjugation.”76 “The key element
to U.S. control” in the Middle East – and this means not only the ability to produce lockdowns, but also the ability to produce profit-
rendering chaos – is, as Hanieh has argued, the “embrace of Israel, which, with its origins as a settler-colonial state,
was organically tied to external support for its continued viability” (Capitalism and Class, 213). This is hardly an exhaustive
review of the current dynamics of global finance and settler colonialism, but the point I wish to make is simply that there are multiple
foundational ways in which financialization and settler colonialism are tied together.77 The linkage that I hope
to have made clear is this: the relationship between settler-forms and financialization describes a kind of primitive accumulation for the present.
In much the same way that, for Marx, finance represents a crucial “lever” of primitive accumulation, I think we could say that finance
and
settler colonialism together constitute the levers of the present form of primitive accumulation. I say
“primitive accumulation,” rather than simply “capital accumulation,” as a way of marking – along with Harvey,
Luxemburg, and indeed Deleuze and Guattari–not only the ongoing violent character of capital’s self-perpetuation,
but the kinds of transitions internal to the capitalist mode of production (in this case from an industrial capitalist
system to one in which finance is predominant), and the narrative forms that accompany those transitions as well.78
Following Marx, then, we might attempt a dual focus: on not only the specific forms of dispossession particular to primitive accumulation, but
the origin narratives that mask those dispossessions.79 c) Spatio-Temporality and Settler Colonialism Before we close this section, I want to make
note of the ways in which primitive accumulation has received a fair amount of attention within the Humanities following David Harvey’s update
to Rosa Luxemburg in the articulation of capital accumulation as grounded in processes of “accumulation by dispossession.” There has been some
debate within settler colonial studies about this updating of the concept of primitive accumulation. Glen Coulthard has recently urged a focus on
the spatial logic of dispossession inherent in primitive accumulation, against what he argues is the traditional understanding of primitive
accumulation as the putting into place of a temporal logic: the wage-form, with its exploitation of the worker’s time.80 I want to think here about
Coulthard’s intervention into political-economic accounts that occlude the spatial dynamics of settler dispossessions, and consider this work in
relation to Brenna Bhandar’s recent investigations of the temporality of settler colonialism.81 For Bhandar, settler colonialism puts into
place a property-logic that is significantly different from feudal use-based conceptions of land. In some
contrast to pre-capitalist formations, settler colonialism constitutes the leading edge of capitalist forms of
speculative possession. If at one point, property ownership was demonstrated in use (alternately, “occupation”),
capitalist expropriation depends on “expectation of use.” Or, speculation: ““Whereas possession and use once
justified ownership, the commoditization of land witnessed a shift in the conceptual underpinnings of
ownership itself. While Locke had reconceived of land ownership, as based not on hereditary titles and inheritance (birthright), but on
labor, Jeremy Bentham emphasizes expectation and security as the key justifications for private property ownership. In the work of Bentham, we
see an abstract notion of ownership not based on physical possession, occupation, or even use, but the concept of ownership as a relation, based
on an expectation of being able to use the property as one wishes. Primary to the property relation is law, which secures the property relation,
or guards and protects the expectation.”82 Speculation – the expectation of use – requires the imposition of terrus nullius, or
what Bhandar describes as a “wasteland rationale”: the legal codification of land as unpopulated to justify the
speculative possession that ensues. The force of Bhandar’s argument here is to show that forms of speculative possession legitimate
not only settler expropriations, but the property form more broadly. The dynamics of speculation are not confined to either
financialization or the settler-form. Neither are the specifics of capitalist possession simply a bureaucratic carapace. Rather, they put in motion a
This feeling of
range of affects (e.g., of expectation) that are inextricable from the property-form and from racialization more broadly.
expectation “comes to be materialized, or … to have an actual life, in how we are constituted as subjects”
(12). “Possession … as a feeling … become[s] the sine qua non of ownership” (12). “Emergent forms of property ownership,”
Bhandar argues, along with the affective effects of property, “were constituted with racial ontologies of settler
and native, master and slave. This is as evident in the burgeoning realm of finance capital and its
relationship to the slave trade as it is with regard to transformations in how the ownership of land is
conceptualized in the colonial settler context.” Ontology itself, then, has a history. Its history is in many ways
crystallized in the legal forms that remain with us still, and in the affective, economic, and political
dimensions of racialization and settler colonialism. Put another way: “the relationship between being and
having, or ontology and property ownership animates modern theories of citizenship and law” (3).
Ontology cannot be thought outside of the spatial dispossessions to which Coulthard draws our attention. Nor can
it be thought outside of the temporal character that Bhandar demonstrates as encoded in property
relations. Bhandar and Coulthard together direct us toward an understanding of Marx’s annihilation of
space by time as a racialized, spatial, settler expropriation that simultaneously deploys – indeed,
weaponizes – temporality as a form of speculation. This spatio-temporal type of dispossession sets into
place the property form and racial ontologies at once. It is at the heart of the “ontological illusions” that
course through our social world, and it is at the heart, as well, of the forms of primitive accumulation that set
in place the state-form and the ascriptions of citizenship. Thinking alongside Bhandar and Coulthard, we see more clearly
now the ways in which “so-called primitive accumulation” – the narrative logics and conceptual forms that accompany transitional
phases of capitalism – take the form of an origin-brink figuration: the removing, or wrenching of temporality
from spatiality and from history.83 This figural annihilation of space by time, this origin narrative – one
that gets reiterated in the ontological turn – brings together the temporal accelerations of financialization
with the speculative settler-forms and speculation as a form of possession and racialized self-possession
that together mark a contemporary moment of primitive accumulation. In closing this section, I want to return to the
question of wasteland rationale to make a somewhat speculative suggestion of my own: that we understand the discourse of
molecularization as a kind of abstract dispossession – or making-waste of the body – that is the condition of a
fantasized speculative self-possession. In both Thacker and Preciado’s citations throughout, that is to say, we see a two-fold
movement: the assertion of the body as the new ground of resource extraction and laying-waste of
capitalism; and a speculative re-possession of that body (the hailing of the molecular as the future of political agency) on
the condition of that body’s dispossession. What I have described as the ancestral future-casting of molecular agency, in other
words, follows the abstract logic of the property form Bhandar lays out: when the social, historical contexts are elided from of our understanding
of what embodiment is – of what molecules “are” or appear to be – then those
molecules become the occasion for an anticipation, an
affect of possession and agency that recalls the abstractions (and, indeed, the racial ontologies) at the heart
of the property-form.84
Neoliberalism is a rearticulation of the U.S. settler project based off notions of
productivity and democracy
Pochedley 16, (Lakota, M.A. The University of Texas at Austin, “Neshnabe Treaty Making: (Re)visionings
for Indigenous Futurities in Education”
https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/39210/POCHEDLEY-THESIS-
2016.pdf?sequence=10//George
David Harvey (2005) defines neoliberalism as “the first instance a theory of political economy practices that proposes human well-being can best be advanced by
liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within and institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free
trade” (2), or more simply put, “free market fundamentalism” (7). Many trace the beginnings of neoliberalism to the elections of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald
Reagan in the late 1970s, in addition to the effects of the post-World War II Keynesian economic practices that had 23 been labeled as failing (i.e., stagflation) (Brown,
2015; Harvey, 2005). The reasoning and theorizing of neoliberalism appeared new and inventive, particularly with the rise of the “the Chicago boys,” a group of
economists who trained or engaged with Milton Friedman’s neoliberal theories (Harvey, 2005: 8). Yet, when we
investigate and deconstruct the
underpinnings of neoliberalism, we discover that neoliberalism is nothing new in the Americas, but rather
a contemporary, rearticulation of settler colonialism within the borders of the U.S. and more largely the
European-turned U.S. imperial project. Neoliberalism allowed and allows for an unbridled [global]
capitalism that seeks to destroy all public spheres of life for the continual, maximal accumulation of capital
for the few at the expense of the majority because it will allow for further “liberties” for the majority
within the realms such as individualism, private property, and personal responsibility (or choice). As an
economic theory enacted through political, governmental means, neoliberalism in practice has largely
been most successful at restoring the power of the economic elite, although these new elites may not be
the elites of the past (Harvey, 2005). To further understand how neoliberalism is a contemporary
rearticulation of settler colonialism, we must return to the fulcrum of settler colonialism--the insatiable
need for “empty” land to “work” in the name of profit and wealth regardless of the claims of Indigenous
peoples who were there (and were always there). One must understand the original sin of the United
States--the dispossession and subsequent genocide of Indigenous peoples, governing systems, and ways
of life (Grande, 2015)--to understand the current dispossessions of public spaces within U.S. 24 borders
and the dismantling of “savage,” or rather “undemocratic,” nations abroad under the guise of
neoliberalism, progress, and democracy. As Byrd (2011) argues this “reproduction of Indianness” or “to
make ‘Indian’” (p. xx) allows for the U.S. to employ these logics rooted in settler colonialism to further
their imperial claims to and over the world. It serves the U.S. imperial project by “facilitat[ing], justify[ing],
and maintain[ing] Anglo-American hegemonic mastery over the significations of justice, democracy, law,
and terror” and allows for them to savagize (“make Indian”) any “peoples or nations who stand in the way
of U.S. military and economic desires” (Byrd, 2011: xx). The exploration of U.S. colonization of the
Americas, particularly North America, has largely been ignored due to its unique status as a settler colony-
-thus, operating as metropole and colony within the same spatial confines (Tuck & Yang, 2012). When
communities, peoples, and nations are “made Indian,” settler colonial logics of dispossession and
subsequently erasure allow for legitimation of current neoliberal projects, such as, privatizing schools,
unlocking access to natural resources (i.e., timber), deconstructing labor unions in the name of “common
good.” The privatization of schools (and other public spaces) has been spearheaded by the neoliberal
policies institutionalized by our public, elected officials in the support of the economic elite. Widespread
privatization of schools has occurred in cities, such as New Orleans, Chicago, and New York, through the
institutionalization of charter schools. It is a common practice in these cities, and other cities across the
U.S., when a school is deemed “failing” according the top-down, prescribed accountability measures (i.e.,
high stakes standardized testing, school report cards, etc) the school can/will be closed. Just as 25 Anglo-
American settlers deemed these Indigenous lands to be “uncultivated,” and therefore not “owned” by the
Indigenous peoples of this place, the contemporary settlers have deemed these schools and spaces to be
“unproductive” according to their terms of usefulness, accountability. and/or productivity

Perm: do the AFF through the lens of the alternative – reflecting on Marxist ideas
provides an analysis of how external economic power functions that helps
decolonization projects.
Coulthard 14, Glen Sean Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene) is assistant professor in the First Nations Studies
Program and the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia.

The critical purchase of Marx’s primitive accumulation thesis for analyzing the relationship between colonial rule and
capitalist accumulation in the contemporary period has been the subject of much debate over the last couple of decades. Within
and between the fields of Indigenous studies and Marxist political economy, these debates have at times been hostile and polarizing. At its
worst, this hostility has led to the premature rejection of Marx and Marxism by some Indigenous studies
scholars on the one side, and to the belligerent, often ignorant, and sometimes racist dismissal of Indigenous peoples’ contributions to radical
thought and politics by Marxists on the other.31 At their nondogmatic best, however, I believe that the conversations that
continue to occur within and between these two diverse fields of critical inquiry (especially when placed
in dialog with feminist, anarchist, queer, and postcolonial traditions) have the potential to shed much
insight into the cycles of colonial domination and resistance that characterize the relationship between white settler states and
Indigenous peoples. To my mind, then, for Indigenous peoples to reject or ignore the insights of Marx would be a
mistake, especially if this amounts to a refusal on our part to critically engage his important critique of capitalist exploitation and his extensive
writings on the entangled relationship between capitalism and colonialism. As Tsimshian anthropologist Charles Menzies writes, “Marxism
retains an incisive core that helps understand the dynamics of the world we live.” It “highlights the ways
in which power is structured through ownership” and exposes the state’s role “in the accumulation of
capital and the redistribution of wealth from the many to the few.” All of this is not to suggest, however, that Marx’s
contributions are without flaw; nor is it meant to suggest that Marxism provides a ready-made tool for Indigenous peoples to uncritically
rendering Marx’s theoretical frame relevant to a
appropriate in their struggles for land and freedom. As suggested above,
comprehensive understanding of settler-colonialism and Indigenous resistance requires that it be
transformed in conversation with the critical thought and practices of Indigenous peoples themselves.

The NEG's criticism of capitalism is complicit in structure of power, only an

intersectional framework solves.
Coulthard 14, Glen Sean Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene) is assistant professor in the First Nations Studies
Program and the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia.

And finally, the fourth insight that flows from the contextual shift advocated here involves what many
have characterized as Marx’s (and orthodox Marxism’s) economic reductionism. It should be clear in the
following pages that there is much more at play in the contemporary reproduction of settlercolonial social
relations than capitalist economics; most notably, the host of interrelated yet semi-autonomous facets of
discursive and nondiscursive power briefly identified earlier. Although it is beyond question that the
predatory nature of capitalism continues to play a vital role in facilitating the ongoing dispossession of
Indigenous peoples in Canada, it is necessary to recognize that it only does so in relation to or in concert
with axes of exploitation and domination configured along racial, gender, and state lines. Given the
resilience of these equally devastating modalities of power, I argue that any strategy geared toward
authentic decolonization must directly confront more than mere economic relations; it has to account
for the multifarious ways in which capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and the totalizing character
of state power interact with one another to form the constellation of power relations that sustain
colonial patterns of behavior, structures, and relationships. I suggest that shifting our attention to the
colonial frame is one way to facilitate this form of radical intersectional analysis. Seen from this light, the
colonial relation should not be understood as a primary locus or “base” from which these other forms of
oppression flow, but rather as the inherited background field within which market, racist, patriarchal, and
state relations converge to facilitate a certain power effect—in our case, the reproduction of hierarchical
social relations that facilitate the dispossession of our lands and self-determining capacities. Like capital,
colonialism, as a structure of domination predicated on dispossession, is not “a thing,” but rather the sum
effect of the diversity of interlocking oppressive social relations that constitute it. When stated this way,
it should be clear that shifting our position to highlight the ongoing effects of colonial dispossession in no
way displaces questions of distributive justice or class struggle; rather, it simply situates these questions
more firmly alongside and in relation to the other sites and relations of power that inform our settler-
colonial present.
 1AR Capitalism Extra Cards
Historical materialism is compatible with refusal—residual links are totalizing
Leonardo 3 (Zeus, UC Berkeley Graduate School of Education, Associate Professor Language and Literacy, Society and Culture at UC Berk,
Resisting Capital: Simulationist and Socialist Strategies. Critical Sociology, Volume 29, issue 2//shree)

The dialectical tension between discourse and historical materialism is productive, but the “end of the real” thesis
appears unsustainable, and worse, complicit with relations of exploitation. In fact, ludic postmodernists may have succeeded in dodging Scylla
only to strengthen Charybdis. It is fair to assume that if the United States were to become a socialist state, white men will likely hold the
important bureaucratic positions, therefore racism will still be a problem and women will ?nd themselves ?ghting for gender rights. The
ugliest forms of racist and patriarchal relations may signi?cantly decrease through economic transformation, but race and gender relations will
not become insignificant in socialist America (Hunter 2002). Thus, socialtheory must incorporate an analysis of differences,
especially in their commodi?ed form. Here, postmodern theorizing has been helpful. Discourses of difference remind us that although gender,
sexual, and race issues do not exist autonomously from material relations, they are articulated in meaningful ways that have
their particular concerns. For example, we notice that socialist Cuba had to reconstruct the family, Mao’s China instituted the cultural
revolution, and the elite in the former Soviet Union was all but male. Difference is in?ected by the economy, but is not determined by it in the
orthodox sense of Marxism. To the extent that Marxist praxis neglects the specific discourses of identity formation, it is guilty of
subsuming the social meanings that racialized, gendered, and sexualized subjects experience on a daily basis, some of which
inform the epistemological work of revolutionary movements. Re- ducing identity politics to an individual’s experience minimizes
the institu- tional aspect of a subject’s identity. But asserting identity in its traditionally vague way assumes an a priori sameness between those
who invoke it, some of whom may experience a rude awakening when they discover the pane of difference (Brubaker and Cooper 2000). Rather,
the process of identi?- cation may be preferable to the apparent condition of having an identity. This is where Nancy Fraser’s (1998) ideas on the
politics of (mis)recognition ameliorate the otherwise vulgar suggestion that identity is private and only particular. She deploys a neo-Weberian
model for addressing the differ- ential status and rights of gays and lesbians in the context of heterosexist capitalism. This is an area where
orthodox Marxism has been criticized for its refusal to address identity discourses with respect to rights, prestige, and status. Although
Baudrillard’s theories did not create the notion of difference, they attend to its contours. The politics of identity is based on the notion that groups
of people have been treated as merely different in patterned ways that have material sources and consequences (Leonardo 2000, 2002). For
example, the social movement we know as the Civil Rights Movement was supra-individual. It was the recognition by masses of people of color,
women, and gays and lesbians that the white, male, heterosexual state was deliberately thwarting their rights as groups of people. There is also
a sense that the 1960’s identity politics movement extended beyond identity as politics-of-the-self when white Americans joined hands with
people of color and acknowledged that minorities were being oppressed on the basis of their identity. Looked at in this way, we can avoid
relegating identity politics to the margins of theory as a form of privatized discourse having no ties with material life. There is something to
suggest that the “new identity politics” and materialist politics are compatible. For the very notion of identity is traceable
to the material ?ow of life and how, for example, the black body is commodi?ed as the sexualized subject. In other words, a materialist identity
politics is part of an overall and more complete transformation of objective life insofar as it leaves its stamp on our subjectivity.
Identity is real because it is part of the productive process insofar as workers gain an identity through their practical activity. To the extent that
identity is abstract, it is imagined. It is very much like the sort of thing that Levi-Strauss described as a “‘virtual center (foyer virtuel) to which we
must refer to explain certain things, but without it ever having a real existence”’ (cited by Brubaker and Cooper 2000: 9; italics in original).
Keeping in mind the dialectic between the real and imagined aspects of identity, theorists avoid a fetishism of either pole.

WE are a pre-requisite to solve—dispossession of indigenous lands laid the ontological

foundation of all other antagonism—capitalist expansion is not possible without the
material base to originates from—that’s Byrd
Despiritualization DA—their refusal of discursive interventions guarantees continued
colonization because it re-affirms a mind-body dualism—that’s Marzec—their focus on
materialism make their impacts inevitable
Means 80—was a leader in the American Indian Movement (AIM) of the 1960s and 70s, and remains one of the most outspoken Native
Americans in the U.S. (Russell, Revolution and American Indians: “Marxism is as Alien to My Culture as Capitalism”,
http://endofcapitalism.com/2010/10/17/revolution-and-american-indians-marxism-is-as-alien-to-my-culture-as-capitalism/#more-1730)
I should be clear about something here, because there seems to be some confusion about it. When I speak of Europeans or mental Europeans,
I’m not allowing for false distinctions. I’m not saying that on the one hand there are the by-products of a few thousand years of genocidal,
reactionary, European intellectual development which is bad; and on the other hand there is some new revolutionary intellectual development
which is good. I’m referring here to the so-called theories of Marxism and anarchism and “leftism” in general. I don’t believe these theories can
be separated from the rest of the of the European intellectual tradition. It’s really just the same old song. The process began much earlier.
Newton, for example, “revolutionized” physics and the so-called natural sciences by reducing the physical universe to a linear
mathematical equation. Descartes did the same thing with culture. John Locke did it with politics, and Adam Smith did it with economics. Each
one of these “thinkers” took a piece of the spirituality of human existence and converted it into code, an abstraction.
They picked up where Christianity ended: they “secularized” Christian religion, as the “scholars” like to say–and in doing so they made Europe
more able and ready to act as an expansionist culture. Each of these intellectual revolutions served to abstract the European mentality even
further, to remove the wonderful complexity and spirituality from the universe and replace it with a logical sequence: one, two, three. Answer!
This is what has come to be termed “efficiency” in the European mind. Whatever is mechanical is perfect; whatever seems to work at the
moment–that is, proves the mechanical model to be the right one–is considered correct, even when it is clearly untrue. This is why “truth”
changes so fast in the European mind; the answers which result from such a process are only stopgaps, only temporary, and must be continuously
discarded in favor of new stopgaps which support the mechanical models and keep them (the models) alive. Hegel and Marx were heirs
to the thinking of Newton, Descartes, Locke and Smith. Hegel finished the process of secularizing theology–and that is put in his own terms–he
secularized the religious thinking through which Europe understood the universe. Then Marx put Hegel’s philosophy in terms of “materialism,”
which is to say that Marx despiritualized Hegel’s work altogether. Again, this is in Marx’ own terms. And this is now seen as the future
revolutionary potential of Europe. Europeans may see this as revolutionary, but American Indians see it simply as still more of that same old
European conflict between being and gaining. The intellectual roots of a new Marxist form of European imperialism lie in Marx’–and
his followers’–links to the tradition of Newton, Hegel and the others. Being is a spiritual proposition. Gaining is a material act. Traditionally,
American Indians have always attempted to be the best people they could. Part of that spiritual process was and is to give away wealth, to discard
wealth in order not to gain. Material gain is an indicator of false status among traditional people, while it is “proof that the system works” to
Europeans. Clearly, there are two completely opposing views at issue here, and Marxism is very far over to the other side from the American
Indian view. But let’s look at a major implication of this; it is not merely an intellectual debate. The European materialist tradition of
despiritualizing the universe is very similar to the mental process which goes into dehumanizing another person. And who
seems most expert at dehumanizing other people? And why? Soldiers who have seen a lot of combat learn to do this to the enemy before going
back into combat. Murderers do it before going out to commit murder. Nazi SS guards did it to concentration camp inmates. Cops do it.
Corporation leaders do it to the workers they send into uranium mines and steel mills. Politicians do it to everyone in sight. And what the process
has in common for each group doing the dehumanizing is that it makes it all right to kill and otherwise destroy other people. One of the Christian
commandments says, “Thou shalt not kill,” at least not humans, so the trick is to mentally convert the victims into nonhumans. Then you can
proclaim violation of your own commandment as a virtue. In terms of the despiritualization of the universe, the mental process works so that it
becomes virtuous to destroy the planet. Terms like progress and development are used as cover words here, the way victory and freedom are
used to justify butchery in the dehumanization process. For example, a real-estate speculator may refer to “developing” a parcel of ground by
opening a gravel quarry; development here means total, permanent destruction, with the earth itself removed. But European logic has gained a
few tons of gravel with which more land can be “developed” through the construction of road beds. Ultimately, the whole universe is open–in
the European view–to this sort of insanity. Most important here, perhaps, is the fact that Europeans feel no sense of loss in all this. After all,
philosophers have despiritualized reality, so there is no satisfaction (for them) to be gained in simply
their
observing the wonder of a mountain or a lake or a people in being. No, satisfaction is measured in terms of gaining
material. So the mountain becomes gravel, and the lake becomes coolant for a factory, and the people are rounded up for processing through
the indoctrination mills Europeans like to call schools. But each new piece of that “progress” ups the ante out in the real world. Take fuel for the
industrial machine as an example. Little more than two centuries ago, nearly everyone used wood–a replenishable, natural item–as fuel for the
very human needs of cooking and staying warm. Along came the Industrial Revolution and coal became the dominant fuel, as production became
the social imperative for Europe. Pollution began to become a problem in the cities, and the earth was ripped open to provide coal whereas wood
had always simply been gathered or harvested at no great expense to the environment. Later, oil became the major fuel, as the technology of
production was perfected through a series of scientific “revolutions.” Pollution increased dramatically, and nobody yet knows what the
environmental costs of pumping all that oil out of the ground will really be in the long run. Now there’s an “energy crisis,” and uranium is becoming
the dominant fuel. Capitalists, at least, can be relied upon to develop uranium as fuel only at the rate which they can show a good profit. That’s
their ethic, and maybe they will buy some time. Marxists, on the other hand, can be relied upon to develop uranium fuel as
rapidly as possible simply because it’s the most “efficient” production fuel available. That’s their ethic, and I fail to see where it’s
preferable. Like I said, Marxism is right smack in the middle of European tradition. It’s the same old song. There’s a rule of thumb which can be
applied here. You cannot judge the real nature of a European revolutionary doctrine on the basis of the changes it proposes to make within the
every
European power structure and society. You can only judge it by the effects it will have on non-European peoples. This is because
revolution in European history has served to reinforce Europe’s tendencies and abilities to export destruction to
other peoples, other cultures and the environment itself. I defy anyone to point out an example where this is not true. So now we,
as American Indian people, are asked to believe that a “new” European revolutionary doctrine such as Marxism will reverse the negative effects
of European history on us. European power relations are to be adjusted once again, and that’s supposed to make things better for all of us. But
what does this really mean? Right now, today, we who live on the Pine Ridge Reservation are living in what white society has designated a
“National Sacrifice Area.” What this means is that we have a lot of uranium deposits here, and white culture (not us) needs this uranium as energy
production material. The cheapest, most efficient way for industry to extract and deal with the processing of this uranium is to dump the waste
by-products right here at the digging sites. Right here where we live. This waste is radioactive and will make the entire region uninhabitable
forever. This is considered by the industry, and by the white society that created this industry, to be an “acceptable” price to pay for energy
resource development. Along the way they also plan to drain the water table under this part of South Dakota as part of the industrial process, so
the region becomes doubly uninhabitable. The same sort of thing is happening down in the land of the Navajo and Hopi, up in the land of the
Northern Cheyenne and Crow, and elsewhere. Thirty percent of the coal in the West and half of the uranium deposits in the United States have
been found to lie under reservation land, so there is no way this can be called a minor issue. We are resisting being turned into a National Sacrifice
Area. We are resisting being turned into a national sacrifice people. The costs of this industrial process are not acceptable to us. It is genocide to
dig uranium here and drain the water table–no more, no less. Now let’s suppose that in our resistance to extermination we begin to seek allies
(we have). Let’s suppose further that we were to take revolutionary Marxism at its word: that it intends nothing less than the complete overthrow
of the European capitalists order which has presented this threat to our very existence. This would seem to be a natural alliance for American
Indian people to enter into. After all, as the Marxists say, it is the capitalists who set us up to be a national sacrifice. This is true as far as it goes.
But, as I’ve tried to point out, this “truth” is very deceptive. Revolutionary Marxism is committed to even further perpetuation and perfection of
the very industrial process which is destroying us all. It offers only to “redistribute” the results–the money, maybe–of this industrialization to a
wider section of the population. It offers to take wealth from the capitalists and pass it around; but in order to do so, Marxism must maintain the
power relations within European society will have to be altered, but once again the
industrial system. Once again, the
effects upon American Indian peoples here and non-Europeans elsewhere will remain the same. This is much the same as when
power was redistributed from the church to private business during the so-called bourgeois revolution. European society changed a bit, at least
superficially, but its conduct toward non-Europeans continued as before. You can see what the American Revolution of 1776 did for American
Indians. It’s the same old song. Revolutionary Marxism, like industrial society in other forms, seeks to “rationalize” all people in relation to
industry–maximum industry, maximum production. It is a doctrine that despises the American Indian spiritual tradition, our cultures, our lifeways.
Marx himself called us “precapitalists” and “primitive.” Precapitalist simply means that, in his view, we would eventually discover capitalism and
become capitalists; we have always been economically retarded in Marxist terms. The only manner in which American Indian people could
participate in a Marxist revolution would be to join the industrial system, to become factory workers, or “proletarians,” as Marx called them. The
revolution could only occur through the struggle of the proletariat, that the
man was very clear about the fact that his
existence of a massive industrial system is a precondition of a successful Marxist society. I think there’s a problem with
language here. Christians, capitalists, Marxists. All of them have been revolutionary in their own minds, but none of them really means revolution.
What they really mean is continuation. They do what they do in order that European culture can continue to exist and develop according to its
needs. Like germs, European culture goes through occasional convulsions, even divisions within itself, in order to go on living and growing. This
isn’t a revolution we’re talking about, but a means to continue what already exists. An amoeba is still an amoeba after it reproduces. But maybe
comparing European culture to an amoeba isn’t really fair to the amoeba. Maybe cancer cells are a more accurate comparison because European
culture has historically destroyed everything around it; and it will eventually destroy itself. So, in order for us to really join forces with Marxism,
we American Indians would have to accept the national sacrifice of our homeland; we would have to commit cultural suicide and become
industrialized and Europeanized. At this point, I’ve got to stop and ask myself whether I’m being too harsh. Marxism has something of a history.
Does this history bear out my observations? I look to the process of industrialization in the Soviet Union since 1920 and I see that these Marxists
have done what it took the English Industrial Revolution 300 years to do; and the Marxists did it in 60 years. I see that the territory of the USSR
used to contain a number of tribal peoples and that they have been crushed to make way for the factories. The Soviets
refer to this as “the National Question,” the question of whether the tribal peoples had the right to exist as peoples; and they decided the tribal
peoples were an acceptable sacrifice to the industrial needs. I
look to China and I see the same thing. I look to Vietnam and I
see Marxists imposing an industrial order and rooting out the indigenous tribal mountain people. I hear the leading Soviet
scientist saying that when uranium is exhausted, then alternatives will be found. I see the Vietnamese taking over a nuclear power plant
abandoned by the U.S. military. Have they dismantled and destroyed it? No, they are using it. I see China exploding nuclear bombs, developing
uranium reactors, and preparing a space program in order to colonize and exploit the planets the same as the Europeans colonized and exploited
this hemisphere. It’s the same old song, but maybe with a faster tempo this time. The statement of the Soviet scientist is very interesting. Does
he know what this alternative energy source will be? No, he simply has faith. Science will find a way. I hear revolutionary Marxists saying that the
destruction of the environment, pollution, and radiation will all be controlled. And I see them act upon their words. Do they know how these
things will be controlled? No, they simply have faith. Science will find a way. Industrialization is fine and necessary. How do they know this? Faith.
Science will find a way. Faith of this sort has always been known in Europe as religion. Science has become the new European religion for both
capitalists and Marxists; they are truly inseparable; they are part and parcel of the same culture. So, in both theory and practice, Marxism demands
that non-European peoples give up their values, their traditions, their cultural existence altogether. We will all be industrialized science addicts
in a Marxist society. I do not believe that capitalism itself is really responsible for the situation in which American Indians have been declared a
national sacrifice. No, it is the European tradition; European culture itself is responsible. Marxism is just the latest continuation of this tradition,
not a solution to it. To ally with Marxism is to ally with the very same forces that declare us an acceptable cost.
No alt sans the aff—only we provide a blueprint for reversing alienation
Libretti 1 (Tim, professor of English and Women's Studies at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago, Ph.D from the University of Michigan
MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 47, Number 1, Spring 2001, pp. 164-189, The Johns Hopkins University Press//George)

survival that is central to the class consciousness Ortiz fosters, that is, a class consciousness that
And it is this issue of
comprehends the historical processes of genocide as inherent in and necessary to capitalist [End Page 179]
development and also as persistent and expanding to more populations in our contemporary global and domestic economies precisely
because, to reiterate Ortiz's urgent point, the priority of capitalism is not survival but the production of profit. As he writes, "The Southwestern
U.S. is caught in the throes of economic ventures and political manipulation which are ultimately destructive if the U.S. government and the
multinational corporations do not have people and the land and their continuance as their foremost concern" (360). It is at this moment in the
narrative where Ortiz speaks to the need to imagine alternative modes of resistance other than simply seeking higher wages or higher standards
of living, neither of which addresses the responsible use of resources, human and material, to ensure quality of life and survival. What Ortiz
emphasizes in particular is that this issue of survival--which encompasses issues of water rights and land use--while it has been a guiding concern
of Native American politics and resistance, is not or should not be a uniquely Native American political concern. When he asserts that "it is survival
that is at stake and it is the quality of life that is at stake," he is quick to insist also that [i]t is the survival of not only the Aacqumeh hanoh or the
Dineh or other Southwestern native peoples, but it is all people of this nation. If the survival and quality of life of Indian peoples is not assured,
then no one else's life is, because those same economic, social, and political forces which destroy them will surely destroy others. It is not only a
matter of preserving and protecting Indian lands as some kind of natural wilderness or cultural parks; rather it is a matter of how those lands can
be productive in terms which are Indian people's to make, instead of Indian people being forced to serve a U.S. national interest which has never
adequately served them. Those lands can be productive to serve humanity, just like the oral tradition of the Aacqumeh says, and the people can
be productive and serve the land so that it is not wasted and destroyed. (360) This rich passage raises many points for discussion in terms of how
Ortiz constructs class consciousness and how this text and his writing as a whole relate to and redefine the contours and politics of the proletarian
[End Page 180] literary genre. Ortiz here is asserting the privileged historical, economic, and social position, as well as the privileged perspective
of the Native American in the historical development and contemporary society of U.S. capitalism. Just as Lukacs in History and Class
Consciousness argues that "the superiority of the proletariat must lie exclusively in its ability to see society from the center, as a coherent whole"
(69), Ortiz effectively suggests that Native Americans occupy a "more central" position in society from which to comprehend it as
a coherent whole. However, while Lukacs argues that "the self-understanding of the proletariat is [. . .] simultaneously the objective
understanding of the nature of society" and that "when the proletariat furthers its own class-aims it simultaneously achieves the conscious
realization of the--objective--aims of society, aims which would inevitably remain abstract possibilities and objective frontiers but for this
conscious intervention" (149), Ortiz represents Native Americans' self-understanding as yielding a more accurate and insightful vision of the
trajectory of social history because they are most immediately threatened and affected by the historical development of
capitalism. First in line for genocide, they are first to understand through experience the operations and aims of our current course of
they occupy the most advantageous position from which both to achieve a full
historical development. Thus
consciousness of U.S. capitalism and to intervene consciously in redirecting historical development. Consequently, Ortiz
means to bring the exigency of survival to the forefront of political and class consciousness, suggesting that while Native Americans are most
urgently conscious of the task of survival, it needs to be a larger working-class issue; it needs to be the premise of the class struggle itself to
prioritize survival by making lands "productive to serve humanity." However, Ortiz warns that such a goal "will take real decisions and actions and
concrete understanding by the poor and workers of this nation" (360). The above passage also highlights the importance of understanding Native
Americans as a dynamic part of the U.S. proletariat and of U.S. labor history. In the text as a whole, Ortiz worries about the "preservation" of
Native American culture in museums and state parks that tend to hypostatize Native Americans as relics of history rather than as historical and
contemporary participants in U.S. society and economy. The worry is that Native Americans will be isolated in "natural wilderness or [End Page
181] cultural parks" (360) and thus relegated to the margins instead of recognized as the center of social change and class consciousness that
Ortiz believes they need to be. The other sectors of the working class need to understand the genocide and exploitation of Native Americans if
they are going to understand comprehensively the operations of U.S. capitalism, the path of their genuine self-interest within that system, and
the fate that awaits them if they do no act to redirect the course of history by learning from and following the lead of Native Americans. It is here
that Ortiz makes his most passionate plea, one worth quoting at length: They will have to see that the present exploitation of coal at Black Mesa
Mine in Arizona does not serve the Hopi and Navajo whose homeland it is. They will have to understand that the political and economic forces
which have caused Hopi and Navajo people to be in conflict with each other and within their own nations are the same forces which steal the
human fabric of their own communities and lives. They will have to be willing to identify capitalism for what it is, that it is destructive and
uncompassionate and deceptive. They will have to be willing to do so or they will never understand why the Four Corners power plants in
northwestern New Mexico continue to spew poisons into the air, destroying plant, animal, and human life in the area. They will have to be willing
to face and challenge the corporations at their armed bank buildings, their stock brokers, and their drilling, mining, milling, refining and processing
operations. If they don't do that, they will not understand what Aacqu and her sister Pueblos in the Southwest are fighting for when they seek
time and time again to bring attention to their struggle for land, water, and human rights. The American poor and workers and white middle
class, who are probably the most ignorant of all U.S. citizens, must understand how they, like Indian people, are forced to serve a national interest,
controlled by capitalist vested interests in collusion with U.S. policy makers, which does not serve them. Only when this understanding is attained
and decisions are reached and actions taken to overcome economic and political oppression imposed on us all will there be no longer a national
sacrifice area in the Southwest. Only then will there [End Page 182] be no more unnecessary sacrifices of our people and land. (360-61) In this
catalog of what the American poor and working class need to see, understand, and do--much of which entails facing and comprehending the
particular exploitation and colonized status of Native Americans--Ortiz is suggesting that Native American class consciousness and political self-
interests are not only identical to those of the non-Native American working class and poor but that, even more so, they are definitive of class
consciousness and working-class political interests. If they do not understand the Native American situation, they will not understand "the same
forces which steal the human fabric of their own American communities and lives." This same recognition is equally crucial in the literary critical
sphere when we attempt to map the coordinates of a genre of proletarian literature as such a genre becomes the cultural representation and
mouthpiece of the U.S. working class and its interests. Tomarginalize Native American literature or categorize it wholly apart
from and exclusive of proletarian literature re-enacts the same gesture of making invisible the Native American working
class, of isolating it from the scene of wage labor. Moreover, what is also rendered invisible by obscuring the historical experience of
Native Americans, their working-class experience, and their narrative of survival and class struggle, is the historical memory of an
unalienated relationship with the land. We have already seen Ortiz represent precolonial moments in which the Aacqu's
lives were described as ones of material well being and spiritual integrity. While his narrative of colonization represents their growing dependence
on wage labor and their general dependence under capitalism because of the diminution of their access to natural resources caused in part by
their dispossession and in part by industrial capitalism's destruction of those resources, Ortiz also highlights that what remains through oral
history is a memory of an actual culture or way of life characterized not by alienation but by integrity with nature, oneself, and others. Ortiz
writes, I don't know when it was that the grass was as high as a man's waist. I never knew that. All my life, the grass had been sparse and brittle.
All my life, the winters have been cold and windy [End Page 183] and the summers hot and mostly rainless. But the people talk about those good
years when they could cope with life on their own terms. The winters were always cold and the summers hot, but they could cope with them
because there was a system of life which spelled out exactly how to deal with the realities they knew. The people had developed a system of
knowledge which made it possible for them to work at solutions. And they had the capabilities of developing further knowledge to deal with new
realities. There was probably not anything they could not deal properly and adequately with until the Mericano came. (349) The phenomenon
Ortiz describes here is the general deskilling of the human, of the alienation that capitalism inflicts in its will to dominate. Here Ortiz depicts again,
it is worth reiterating, the way capitalism curtails rather than enhances productive efficiency as he represents how the colonizing process hobbled
the people, made them dependent rather than self-sufficient, and robbed them of their creative abilities and skills. But what is perhaps most
striking about the narrative is that Ortiz represents an actual useable past that is not simply a utopian invention but rather a viable historical
model. The importance of Ortiz's identification of this historical actuality is that it challenges those critics who see Marxism's ideal of a culture of
disalienation, in which each person realizes her species being, as not only unattainable but also as never having been attained, as historically
fantastic. Take, for example, Stephen Greenblatt's criticism of a passage from The Political Unconscious in which Fredric Jameson speaks to the
process whereby capitalism diminishes the unalienated individual subject in its production of the fragmented bourgeois individual. Greenblatt
writes, The whole passage has the resonance of an allegory of the fall of man: once we were whole, agile, integrated; we were individual subjects
but not individuals, we had no psychology distinct from the shared life of the society; politic and poetry were one. Then capitalism arose and
shattered this luminous, benign totality. The myth echoes throughout Jameson's book, though by the close it has been eschatologically reoriented
so that the totality lies not in a past revealed to have always [End Page 184] already fallen but in the classless future. A philosophical claim that
appeals to an absent empirical event. (3) While Greenblatt no doubt has a point--it is certainly difficult to attribute alienation solely to the onset
of capitalism, as though somehow feudal and slave economies featured whole and happy individual subjects--his own sense of the past is equally
distorted, at least in light of Ortiz's narrative. Nonetheless, Greenblatt's criticism is one commonly hauled out to attempt to undermine the
legitimacy of Marxist theories of human nature and liberation. Thus, Ortiz's identification of this historical moment of integration, as opposed to
alienation, serves not only to challenge the cynical bourgeois critics of Marxism but, perhaps even more importantly, to give the Marxist
tradition a model of possibility on which to build and imagine a postcapitalist culture. To distance or isolate Native Americans
from the U.S. working class and their literature from the larger proletarian tradition is to impoverish and, really, to disempower the U.S. working
class by cutting it off from this model of possibility that ought to inform class struggle. Indeed, as Ortiz strenuously argues throughout
the piece, it is the condition of alienation from ourselves, nature, and other people that most seriously needs to be addressed, as alienation is
Native Americans possess most vividly the collective memory
the premise of exploitation and the destructive features of capitalism;
of unalienated life, as opposed to most elements of the U.S. working class whose memory is confined to a capitalist
world and an experience of wage labor, which might explain why so much energy in labor struggles focuses on wages
rather than focusing more concertedly on alienation and on the use of resources. Native Americans are best positioned to assess
the experience of alienation under capitalism, Ortiz suggests, because they have not just an imagination but also an historical knowledge of a
different mode of production, culture, and way of life, as we see in the following passage in which Ortiz discusses the experiences of Laguna and
Navajo miners working for the Kerr-McGee mines in New Mexico: The Navajo men who went into the underground mines did not have much
choice except to work there, just like the Laguna miners who find themselves as surface labor and semi-skilled [End Page 185] workers. The Kerr-
McGee miners who had stayed for any length of time underground breathing the dust laden with radon gas would find themselves cancerous.
The Laguna miners would find themselves questioning how much real value the mining operation had when their land was overturned into a gray
pit miles and miles in breadth. They would ask if the wages they earned, causing wage income dependency, and the royalties received by the
Kawaikah people were worth it when Mericano values beset their children and would threaten the heritage they had struggled to keep for so
long. (356) The Laguna miners are able to measure their value system and the social relationships it entails against that of capitalism and its
destructive, even murderous, effects on the land and the people. Once again, Ortiz counterpoints two modes of conceptualizing value, embodied
in one culture that prioritizes quality of life and in another quantitatively oriented culture committed to accumulating monetary wealth at the
expense of life. The importance here, though, is that the Native American working class already possesses the value system for as well as the
memory and imagination of a postcapitalist culture that the non-Native American U.S. working class needs to recognize as a valuable and crucial
attribute of its tradition of resistance to capital and its aspirations of social transformation. Similarly, Ortiz also speaks of the memory of the
Peublo Revolt of 1680 in which enslaved Africans, native Americans, and descendants of the Chicano people fought back against Spanish
colonialism. This example of multiracial organizing and resistance is highlighted as a central element of the collective memory of empowerment
and change. It is just such models of revolt that the U.S. working class needs as part of its historical and class consciousness, which it needs to be
attached to and not dissociated from. But yet when critics narrowly periodize and restrictively define the category of proletarian literature, it is
just such dissociation and erasure that takes place. In developing a Marxist cultural tradition on the Left that is capable of directing and imagining
full liberation, we must construct a proper proletarian literature genre which maps comprehensively the body of texts that are expressions of
class struggle and which mediates the sociological and the cultural in a way that allows us to draw on the whole rich collective tradition of working
class struggle [End Page 186] against racial patriarchal capitalism. Understanding Native American literature as proletarian begins this process of
political and literary reorganization. Both Silko and Ortiz offer rethinkings of Marxism and class struggle that position Native Americans as pivotal
actants and Native American culture and history as a rich reservoir of models for imagining change as well as postcapitalist culture and economy.
Both culturally and politically, the Left needs to revivify its cultural imaginary and not dissociate by virtue of its exclusive cultural and political
categories from political and cultural traditions that offer meaningful cross-fertilization. Indeed, just as Marx said the educators must be educated,
so the Left must be educated by other left Marxist traditions it might not have even recognized as such. As Ward Churchill admonishes, when you
think about Native American political concerns over such issues as land and water rights, The great mass of non-Indians in North America really
have much to gain, and almost nothing to lose, from the success of native people in struggles to reclaim the land which is rightfully ours. The
tangible diminishment of U.S. material power which is integral to our victories in this sphere stands to pave the way for realization of most other
agendas--from anti-imperialism to environmentalism, from African-American liberation to feminism, from gay rights to the ending of class
privilege--pursued by progressives on this continent. Conversely, succeeding
with any or even all these other agendas would still
represent an inherently oppressive situation if their realization is contingent upon an ongoing occupation of
Native North America without the consent of Indian people. Any North American revolution which failed to free indigenous
territory from non-Indian domination would simply be a continuation of colonialism in another form. (88) Indeed, just as Marx
theorizes that the working class is the lynchpin of liberation because in order to liberate itself it must do away with class altogether, we can take
Churchill here, as well as Silko and Ortiz, to be in some sense saying that for the non-Indian U.S. working class to liberate itself, Native Americans
must be liberated. Put another way, the working class cannot liberate only part of itself, so it must identify and understand [End Page 187] itself
fully in order to liberate itself fully. Mapping this understanding via the space of a proletarian literary genre is a place to begin.
 2AC AT: Exceptionalism PIK
No link—this just says the chickasaw blamed black people for crimes—that doesnt
deny that the method of ethnographic refusal solves for a triad that is constituted by
settler colonialism and anti-blackness

Perm Do both

perm do the PIK

The 1AC’s analytic frame is necessary—slavery and anti-blackness are inadequate to

understand and must be theorized in conjunction with settler colonialism as structuring
modernity and constituting blackness
King 13
[2013, Tiffany Jeannette King, “IN THE CLEARING: BLACK FEMALE BODIES, SPACE AND SETTLER COLONIAL
LANDSCAPES”, PhD Dissertation]//George

We must consider that Settler colonialism shapes and constitutes Black life, specifically slavery and its afterlife in
America. While slavery and anti-Black racism should be active and robust analytic frames that guide Black Studies
and help us understand Black subjectivity in the Western Hemisphere, settler colonialism also structures Black life. The genocide

of Native peoples, the perpetual making of Settler space and Settler subjectivity—as unfettered self actualization—do
not immediately stop existing as forms of power when they run into Black bodies. The way that settler
colonial power looks and manifests itself just changes; it does not stop. Settler colonialism, as a subjectless
discourse, is a form of productive power that touches all that live in the US and Settler colonial nations.30

Though it touches and shapes everyone’s life it does so in very different ways. For the purposes of my own research I am arguing that settler

colonialism’s normalizing power enacts genocide against Native peoples (disappears Native people) but it also
shapes and structures antiBlack racism. The ontological positions that were created by slavery, specifically the
Slave are still alive and well however, settler colonial power intersects with, works through and structures

the repressive and productive power that makes the Black captive fungible and socially dead. Throughout,
In the Clearing poses the question, in what ways does settler colonial power help structure slavery and anti-Black racism? This project ultimately argues that
slavery and anti-Black racism are not adequate to fully understand the material and discursive
processes that create Blackness in all of its embodied genres in North America. Slavery and anti-Black
racism are also not the only repressive powers that make the Black body abject, fungible and situated at
the outer limits of being-ness. Both slavery and settler colonialism structure modernity and need to be
fully conceptualized as forms of power that help constitute Blackness. Conceptualizing the ways that
settler colonialism and slavery co-constitute one another is an essential component of this dissertation.
Settlement, spatiality, and place must all be theorized as essential to the production of
the “human” and the materialization of blackness as an ontological position—the
process of settlement enables self-actualization by the Settler through the turning of
blackness into a position of the settled-slave
King 13 [2013, Tiffany Jeannette King, “IN THE CLEARING: BLACK FEMALE BODIES, SPACE AND SETTLER
COLONIAL LANDSCAPES”, PhD Dissertation]//George

This is not an appeal to expand the category of the settler, as I have argued before Black slaves and descendants of slaves are not settlers. However, the

processes which make Black bodies fungible flesh, a form of terra nullius, and embed their bodies in the
land as settled-slaves needs to be theorized as modalities of settlement. Settlement needs to be
retheorized along the contours of the bodies that it renders materially and socially dead. Scholarship from
Marxist geographies, cultural landscape studies, anthropology and the emerging field of settler colonial studies is useful for helping us think about space, however,
it does not help us think about the ways that the
process of settlement also materializes Blackness as an ontological
position. Native studies and Black studies enable a discussion of how the production of Settler and
Master or Settler-Master subjectivity comes about due to its parasitic relationship to Native death and
Black fungibility/accumulation (social death). When we think about the Settler-Master as parasitic we can also
begin to think about their process of settlement as one that also requires the making of ontological
categories occupied by the dead. The process of settlement allows the Settler-Master to become a
human with spatial coordinates because the Native dies and the Black becomes a non-being (a settled-
slave).15 Settlement is more than transforming the land. It is more than the teleological process of weary

white people making a home and Native people naturally disappearing over time. Settlement is an
assemblage of technologies and processes of makings and unmakings. Its processes require the making
and unmaking of bodies, subject positions, space, place and claims to various forms of autonomy, self
actualization and transcendence. In Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, Lorenzo Veracini, a founding scholar of the emerging field
of settler colonial studies describes the process of settlement as a process that enables the “unfettered mobility”

of the settler.16 While abject others within settler colonial nations are “principally characterized by restrained mobility” the settler experiences
the capacity for “unfettered mobility.” This description of the kind of state of existence that settlement allows the settler is instructive. While
Veracini’s description moves us closer to a discussion of states of being, I want to reframe Veracini’s description and introduce a few more elements to the
equation. Settlement as an intricate, dynamic and contradictory relationship to Native bodies, Black bodies and the land/nature. Settlement
structures
the Settler’s relationship to the Native, the Black and nature as a relation of negation. Settlement also
creates complex ontological positions that are constituted by both states of stasis and flux. What I mean by this
is that some bodies (Native and Black) are relegated to a permanent position of flux. Native bodies are

always slipping into death, Black bodies are always sliding into states of fungibility and accumulation.
The flux and instability of the Black and the Native enable the Settler to experience a self actualizing
state of both libratory stability and transcendent autonomy. The ontological positions of the Native
(slipping into death) and the Black (sliding into fungibility and accumulation) are positions of fixed-flux. As
Wilderson argues these positions do not occupy the universal liberal orienting and humanizing frames of time

and space. They are fixed and rooted in a place of elimination and expanding use for the settler’s
unending pursuit of self actualization. By settling, or gaining an exclusive claim to time and space, the Settler is able to
simultaneously become a stable, coherent and autonomous human subject who occupies space while
they also experience hyper mobility, transcendence and self directed transformation. The Settler moves
back and forth at will between states of rootedness and mobility, stability and postmodern (self determined) constructedness.
The Settlers’ unfettered movement between these contradictory spaces and states is predicated on the
“fixed-flux” of Native and Black bodies. Fixed-flux is the underside of the Settler’s unfettered mobility and self actualization. It is always
being susceptible to having the world flipped upside down at the whim of another (the Settler). Settlement functions like a violent form of
deconstruction. Settlement as a gratuitously violent project that kills the Native and accumulates the
Black also reorganizes discourse. The relationship that exists between the signifier and signified for concepts like autochthony and indigeneity
and words like clearing under conditions of settlement become shifting ground beneath our feet.17 The prior meanings held by the terms and words
autochthonous, indigenous and clearing are destabilized and then completely evacuated due to the material and discursive muscle of settlement. At the site of the
clearing, Settlers are able to become autochthonous and indigenous at the same time. Frank Wilderson helps us think
about the kind of discursive and material violence that occurs within what he calls the “Settler/Master/Human’s grammatical structure.”18 Within this grammatical
structure, Wilderson argues that there is a disavowal of the violence of genocide in the way the settler narrates the formation of the US. On one level, the disavowal
occurs through the settler’s preferred part of speech. Clearing is only spoken of as a noun in the Settler/Master/Human’s grammatical structure. Clearing is never
used as a verb in the human’s grammatical structure. Wilderson draws our attention to its use: “Clearing, in the Settler/Savage” relation, has two grammatical
structures, one a noun and the other as a verb. But the Western only recognizes clearing as a noun. But prior to the clearing’s fragile infancy, that is before its
cinematic legacy as a newborn place name, it labored not across the land as a noun but as a verb on the body of the “Savage,” speaking civil society’s essential
status as an effect for genocide.”19 This discursive displacement represents an actual displacement. As the Settler/Master/Human renders
the clearing a static place, void of settler violence and absent of indigenous bodies and relations to the
land, the Settler also indigenizes themselves to this abstract space. The Settler is allowed to merge with
the land as they root themselves. They become autochthonous people that “sprang up from the land.”20 Settlers are now the
group of humans that establish a right/righteous relationship with the land. Settlers proclaim
themselves the new indigenous population. The original indigenous peoples are stripped of their indigeneity and rendered dead. Within the
process of settlement, the indigenous people become embedded in or are literally buried as the dead within the land. The Settler then assumes a

new autochthonous identity and emerges from the earth anew. Even when the Settler indigenizes or roots themselves into the
land; they do not become stuck there like Native peoples. In her book, Black Body: Women, Colonialism and Space, Radhika Mohanram spends time

explaining how enlightenment notions of the Indigene and European binary operate.21 The body
conceived as incarcerated by nature is partially achieved by the discursive construction of the native as a
“person who is born and thus belongs to a certain place,” and is in fact over determined by that place.22
The European on the other hand can be of a place but is not incarcerated by it like the Native. Their
settler “indigeneity” offers them “unfettered mobility” as well as unfettered self actualization. Native
people do not acquire this through their indigenous status. Upon encountering the settler (who becomes
indigenous) the Native experiences their indigeneity as non-existence and death. The clearing also shapes

Blackness as it carves out the settlement-plantation. The clearing in its verb form certainly labored across the bodies of Native
people. However, the clearing also worked on and transformed the bodies of Blacks. The Black body is turned

into the Settled-slave. Nana and Elizabeth Peazant are Settled-slaves whose bodies evince the way that
the process of settling “cleared” Blacks of all spatial coordinates that could make them human during
this process of making the settlement/plantation. Blacks become mere ‘states of flux,” and the atomic
potential for space. At the site of the clearing, both a spatial and ontological production, Black bodies are the raw
material and precursor to space. While Black bodies are geographic and necessary to the production of
space they are not geographic subjects that humanly inhabit space at the site of the clearing.23 As
geographic—dark—matter and material under settlement they make space possible but cannot occupy it.

Existing in a continual state of liminality and change Black femaleness is a place making unit but not in
place. Place is where humanness resides. According to Tim Cresswell, place and its links to humanness, morality
and identity are a part of a humanistic project.24 For the humanist undertaking geography, “ontological
priority was given to the human immersion in place rather than the abstractions of geometric space.”
The humanist concept of place is accompanied by the baggage of morality, identity, authenticity and
exclusion. Within modern thought systems, there is a tendency to locate people with certain identities in certain places. There is also a tendency within this
metaphysical framework to imagine “mobile people in wholly negative ways.”27 Bodies on the move or sentient beings in a state of

“fixed-flux” who slip into death like the Native or slide and transform as fungible flesh have no place and
are considered suspect within this worldview. Through humanist articulations and re-theorizations of
place, the universal and abstract notion of space becomes humanized and exclusionary admitting only
a select group of people. Making a place is also about making a home.28 Place (and space) as home was functioning
within imperialist endeavors of the enlightenment far before human geographers of the 1970s named it as such. As a geographer, Tuan
has focused a great deal of attention on the extent to which people have attempted to “create order and homeliness out of the apparent chaos of raw nature.”29 In
fact “the concept of place is central to our understanding of how people turn nature into culture by making it their home.”30 What
happens when
this humanist endeavor of turning nature/chaos into culture/order/home meets up with the
imperialist endeavor? Sylvia Wynter argues that both the Native and the Black are considered states of
non-Reason and chaos within Enlightenment humanism. Under imperialism, both the bodies and the
lands of Native and Black people were states of chaos that needed to be ordered. While Tuan’s configuration of
place and the transformation of raw nature into a home for humankind does not have the violent and exclusionary form of the human in mind, my reconfiguration
of the place of settlement does. The
landscapes of settlement, when they appear to the eye as a tranquil pasture
with a log cabin or people sun bathing on a beach conceal the violent processes hidden in the clearing.
One way of revealing what is hidden is through rethinking what a landscape is and how it functions. Richard Schein presents an interpretation of landscape as a
process. In fact, Schein argues that landscape is always in the “process of becoming.”31 Another aspect of Schein’s theorization of the landscape that is productive
is that he construes the landscapes as having material and epistemological value. The epistemology of the landscape disciplines those who come into contact with
it. The disciplinary element of landscape is embedded in the fact that the material aspect of the landscape is seen, and presents itself as linear and objective.32 The
landscape is in fact not self evident but duplicitous.33 Likewise settlement
as a process and what it achieves even in its
materiality (clearing, settlement-plantation) is not self-evident but multivalent and at times counter
intuitive. What is hidden is that settlement is not just the making of a physical location for the Settler;
rather, what is concealed is the simultaneous process of the Settler rooting in order to launch.
Settlement is the subjugation and sinking/fixing of others into a state of flux (death, fungibility) in order
for the Settler to transcend into a state of humanness. As the ultimate self actualizing human, the
Settler can actually overcome the particularity of place (body, gender, race, abject sexuality) and
launch into universal and abstract space (humanness). To be human in Frank Wilderson’s terms is to have
“cartographic capacity.”34 “Spatial and temporal capacity is so immanent on the field of Whiteness that
the effects and permutations of its ensemble of questions and the kinds of White bodies that can
mobilize this universe of combinations are seemingly infinite as well.”35 To be a Savage or to be Black is
to exist in the realm of no time and space.36 An apt visual for what happens when the Settler (noun)
settles (verb) both people and land is one of a propelling long jumper. A long jumper is a subject who
plants in order to launch oneself into space. This process of disciplining bodies, land and the viewers’
eye is hard to always perceive.

Reframing our understandings of slavery through the lens of spatiality is critical—the

perm’s reframing is critical to understand the relationships of black women with civil
society as a struggle over the making and settlement of space
King 13 [2013, Tiffany Jeannette King, “IN THE CLEARING: BLACK FEMALE BODIES, SPACE AND SETTLER
COLONIAL LANDSCAPES”, PhD Dissertation]//George
This arrangement, or rearrangement, of the senses is interesting for a number of reasons. For one, many different senses are marshaled in order to enable one to
see.5 Additionally, seeing is not privileged as the sense that instantiates knowing or cognitive activity. Sight is only possible after one has felt. The body’s feeling of
the rhythm tells the mind what the eyes are able to see. In this chapter, I explore the possibility of decolonizing sight. Decolonizing
sight requires
that we understand what directs our sight. It also means that we interrogate a social world ordered by
conquest. What kinds of inner eyes direct the way that we view bodies and space in settler societies?6
How have the ways that we have been taught to survive, self actualize and know ourselves in settler societies shaped the ways that we look, see and know? In this
chapter, I focus on the visual orders and optic regimes of settler colonialism as sites of knowledge creation and power that skew our vision. In this chapter, we will
be developing new ways of looking at old landscapes. I draw upon the creative work of Julie Dash and Catherine McKinley, and the scholarly writing of Sylvia
Wynter, Jennifer Morgan, Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Frank Wilderson and Oyeronke Oyewumi in order to challenge the visual and cognitive regimes of the
settler colonial order. These cultural producers and theorists help us apprehend, conceptualize, and develop inner eyes that help us visualize the ways that
Blackness and slavery shape the settler colonial landscape. They help us bring the plantation and the body of the slave back into settler colonialism’s analytic
frames. These new
units of analysis and conceptual tools can help change our inner eyes so that we can see
how settler colonialism and slavery structure one another. They make simultaneous vision possible.7
Simultaneous vision is difficult to obtain. It requires that we retrain our thought, inner eyes and eyes to
adjust their focus in order to attend to the ephemeral and moving traces of power that at times
recede or disappear into the background or a realm of the seemingly invisible depending on the
landscape. The power of settler colonialism’s and slavery’s spatial and ontological formations does not
appear on the landscape with equal intensity, in the same hue, or equally positioned on the landscape. At
times the productive and repressive power that makes the slave will be the foreground color and the

power of settler colonialism will provide a bit of texture. The texture in the background is just as crucial as the foreground color. My
reorganization of these units of analysis is what is new. Scholars of slavery and settler colonialism have inherited analytic

units like the plantation, the homestead/settlement, the Master, the Settler, the Slave which often work
to sequester Native Studies, Black Studies, settler colonial studies and scholarship on slavery. I want to
reframe some of the key analytics from each of these fields of study by looking at them simultaneously.
However, what happens when we think about the plantation as a result of settler colonial spatial patterns?

What is possible when we ask, how is Native subjectivity and space obliterated by the plantation? What is possible when ask, how is the

slave master also a settler? Reframing allows us to view key units of analysis in new ways and think
about them as co-constituting one another. The amalgamations and hybrids that I introduce include: the
conceptualization of conquest-slavery as an assemblage of productive and repressive power, the
settlement/plantation as a hybrid spatial unit, and the settled-slave as a bodily formation at the
intersections of conquest-slavery. I also borrow the ontological category of the Settler-Master from scholar Frank Wilderson in order argue that
the master and the settler were not only intimate friends but in fact are the same person.8 These hybrids
and amalgamations are all mediated by space and the where of racial-sexual difference.9 Each of the
four amalgams is formed due to contestations over and the need for expansion, specifically the expansion and
accumulation of property. As modern conflicts over the control of land and bodies, these new analytics are best understood if

analyzed through the production of settler and master spaces and spatial practices. These spaces and spatial
practices happen at various scales. Functioning at the scale of the hemisphere, the settlement/plantation-plot, the

slave body, the Native body and the Settler-Master (or human subject) position; all of these locations reference
a spatial struggle. Additionally, as contested sites they also index sites of contradiction, instability and agentive possibility. Paying attention to
the ways that turning Black female bodies into slaves functions as a mode of space-making in the Western
hemisphere, specifically in settler colonial states, is important for African Diaspora Studies.10 According to McKittrick, due specifically

to transatlantic slavery Black female bodies are already a part of the geography of the New World.11 It has
been well established that transatlantic slavery embedded Black female bodies into its geographic processes as it

crossed oceans, planted settlements and plantations and built prisons and other spaces of Black
internment in the afterlife of slavery. Slavery’s geographies are easily mapped onto Black bodies. However, settler colonialism’s geographies
are often theorized as if they never meet up with the Black figure, specifically its embodiment as Black and female.12 In the way that McKittrick argues that the
geographic processes of slavery were interconnected with the category “black woman,” I argue that settler
colonialism’s space making and
geographic processes are also intertwined with the formation of the Black female body in the Western
hemisphere. The Black woman is a construction—or effect-- of the power of the settler and the geography
of the homestead as much as she is a discursive and material necessity for the slave master and the
space of the plantation plot. We need more analytic frames to conceptualize the multiple ways Black
women spatialize various forms of power in the Western hemisphere. The category “Black woman” is
not only of analytic import to slavery, but is also an analytical necessity for the settler colonial order
as well.
The last Leroy card—attempts to render native and black suffering transparent—when
instead we should be speaking in terms of strucutre instead specific trauma—1AC
Bryd and Tuck say that only a structural analysis solves
 2AC AT: FW
Distancing DA- the NEG distances itself from real world forms of power. Systems of
settlerist domination are always present in the spaces we occupy, and refusing to
acknowledge the ways that power functions on an interpersonal level means that any
skills possibly gained by their form of debate because they never question the actual
structural issues at hand.

Our counter-interpretation is the vision of debate created through the framework of

the 1AC. This debate is about debate, and we think changing the pedagogy of the
space is a form of regulation on education, making the impacts of the AFF net benefits
to our model of debate. And-

Changing discourse is an important part of regulation- prefer our interpretation

because theirs severs out of topic education that is central to the topic.
Black ‘02 (2002. Julia Black, FBA is a Professor of Law at the London School of Economics. “Regulatory
Conversations.” Journal of Law and Society, Volume 29, No. 1. PDF.)

The article proposes a new site of analysis for the study of regulation: regulatory conversations, and a
new theoretical approach: discourse analysis. Regulatory conversations, the communicative interactions
that occur between all involved in the regulatory `space', are an important part of most regulatory
systems. Discourse analysis, the study of the use of language and communication, suggests that such
interactions are constitutive of the regulatory process, that they serve important functions, that they
can be the basis of co-ordinated action, and that they are important sites of conflict and contestation.
The article explores five key contentions of discourse analysis, considering how each may shed light on
aspects of regulatory processes. These are, first as to the meaning of language and co-ordination of
social practices; second, as to the construction of identities; third, the relationship of language, thought,
and knowledge; fourth, the relationship of language and power, and finally, that meaning, thought,
knowledge, and power are open to contestation and change.

We meet- we are reasonably topical as we discuss the status quo of education and
suggest a change in it.
Ethics DA- in order to ever have an ethical education space, it is key to have a space
open to realizing the broader structural inequality that shapes our relationships. This
turns their skills because they will never become ETHICAL policymakers until they
question the actual structures of power- means any policy created from their form of
debate will fail.
Giroux 4 (2004. Giroux, Henry. Henry A. Giroux currently is the McMaster University Professor for
Scholarship in the Public Interest and The Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. “Public
Pedagogy and the Politics of Neo-liberalism: making the political more pedagogical”, Policy Futures in
Education, Volume 2, Numbers 3 & 4, 2004,
http://www.cws.illinois.edu/IPRHDigitalLiteracies/GirouxPublicPFinE2004.pdf)

The moral implications of pedagogy also suggest that our responsibility as public intellectuals cannot be
separated from the consequences of the knowledge we produce, the social relations we legitimate, and
the ideologies and identities we offer up to students. Refusing to decouple politics from pedagogy means,
in part, that teaching in classrooms or in any other public sphere should not only simply honor the
experiences students bring to such sites, but should also connect their experiences to specific problems
that emanate from the material contexts of their everyday lives. Pedagogy in this sense becomes
performative in that it is not merely about deconstructing texts, but is also about situating politics itself
within a broader set of relations that address what it might mean to create modes of individual and social
agency which enable rather than shut down democratic values, practices, and social relations. Such a
project recognizes not only the political nature of pedagogy, but also situates it within a call for
intellectuals to assume responsibility for their actions, to link their teaching to those moral principles that
allow us to do something about human suffering, as the late Susan Sontag has recently suggested.[19]
Part of this task necessitates that cultural studies theorists and educators anchor their own work, however
diverse, in a radical project that seriously engages the promise of an unrealized democracy against its
really existing forms. Of crucial importance to such a project is the rejection of the assumption that theory
can understand social problems without contesting their appearance in public life. More specifically, any
viable cultural politics needs a socially committed notion of injustice if we are to take seriously what it
means to fight for the idea of the good society. I think Zygmunt Bauman is right in arguing that: ‘If there
is no room for the idea of wrong society, there is hardly much chance for the idea of good society to be
born, let alone make waves.’[20] Cultural studies theorists need to be more forceful, if not committed, in
linking their overall politics to modes of critique and collective action that address the presupposition that
democratic societies are never too just or just enough. Such a recognition means that a society must
constantly nurture the possibilities for self-critique, collective agency, and forms of citizenship in which
people play a fundamental role in critically discussing, administrating, and shaping the material relations
of power and ideological forces that bear down on their everyday lives. At stake here is the task, as the
late Jacques Derrida insisted, of viewing the project of democracy as a promise – a possibility rooted in
the continuing struggle for economic, cultural, and social justice.[21] Democracy in this instance is not a
sutured or formalistic regime, it is the site of struggle itself. The struggle over creating an inclusive and
just democracy can take many forms, offers no political guarantees, and provides an important normative
dimension to politics as an ongoing process of democratization that never ends. Such a project is based
on the realization that a democracy which is open to exchange, question, and self-criticism never reaches
the limits of justice. By linking education to the project of an unrealized democracy, cultural studies
theorists who work in higher education can make clear that the issue is not whether higher education has
become contaminated with politics, but rather that it is more importantly about recognizing that
education is already a space of politics, power, and authority. At the same time, they can make clear their
opposition to those approaches to pedagogy that reduce it to a methodology like ‘teaching of the conflicts’
or, relatedly, to simply opening up a culture of questioning. Both of these positions not only fail to
highlight the larger political, normative, and ideological considerations that inform such views of
education and pedagogy, but they also collapse the purpose and meaning of higher education, the role of
educators as engaged scholars, and the possibility of pedagogy itself into a rather short-sighted and
sometimes insular notion of method, albeit one that narrowly emphasizes argumentation and dialogue.
There is a disquieting refusal in such discourses to raise broader questions about the social, economic,
and political forces shaping the very terrain of higher education – particularly unbridled market forces, or
racist and sexist forces that unequally value diverse groups of students within relations of academic power
– or about what it might mean to engage pedagogy as a basis not merely for understanding, but also for
participating in the larger world. There is also a general misunderstanding of how teacher authority can
be used to create the pedagogical conditions for critical forms of education without necessarily falling into
the trap of simply indoctrinating students.[22] For instance, liberal educator Gerald Graff believes that
any notion of critical pedagogy that is self-conscious about its politics and engages students in ways that
offer them the possibility for becoming critical – or what Lani Guinier calls the need to educate students
‘to participate in civic life, and to encourage graduates to give back to the community, which through
taxes, made their education possible’ [23] – either leaves students out of the conversation or presupposes
too much and simply represents a form of pedagogical tyranny. While Graff advocates strongly that
educators create the educational practices that open up the possibility of questioning among students,
he refuses to connect pedagogical conditions that challenge how they think at the moment to the next
step of prompting them to think about changing the world around them so as to expand and deepen its
democratic possibilities. George Lipsitz criticizes academics such as Graff, who believe that connecting
academic work to social change is at best a burden and at worst a collapse into a crude form of
propagandizing, suggesting that they are subconsciously educated to accept cynicism about the ability of
ordinary people to change the conditions under which they live.[24] Teaching students how to argue,
draw on their own experiences, or engage in rigorous dialogue says nothing about why they should engage
in these actions in the first place. How the culture of argumentation and questioning relates to giving
students the tools they need to fight oppressive forms of power, make the world a more meaningful and
just place, and develop a sense of social responsibility is missing in work like Graff’s because this is part of
the discourse of political education, which Graff simply equates to indoctrination or speaking to the
converted.[25] Here, propaganda and critical pedagogy collapse into each other. Propaganda is generally
used to misrepresent knowledge, promote biased knowledge, or produce a view of politics that appears
beyond question and critical engagement. While no pedagogical intervention should fall to the level of
propaganda, a pedagogy that attempts to empower critical citizens cannot and should not avoid politics.
Pedagogy must address the relationship between politics and agency, knowledge and power, subject
positions and values, and learning and social change while always being open to debate, resistance, and
a culture of questioning. Liberal educators committed to simply raising questions have no language for
linking learning to forms of public scholarship that would enable students to consider the important
relationship between democratic public life and education, politics and learning. Disabled by a
depoliticizing, if not slavish, allegiance to a teaching methodology, they have little idea of how to
encourage students pedagogically to enter the sphere of the political, which enables students to think
about how they might participate in a democracy by taking what they learn ‘into new locations – a third
grade classroom, a public library, a legislator’s office, a park’ [26], or, for that matter, by taking on
collaborative projects that ad dress the myriad of problems citizens face in a diminishing democracy. In
spite of the professional pretense to neutrality, academics need to do more pedagogically than simply
teach students how to be adept at forms of argumentation. Students need to argue and question, but
they need much more from their educational experience. The pedagogy of argumentation in and of itself
guarantees nothing, but it is an essential step towards opening up the space of resistance towards
authority, teaching students to think critically about the world around them, and recognizing
interpretation and dialogue as a condition for social intervention and transformation in the service of an
unrealized democratic order. As Amy Gutmann argues, education is always political because it is
connected to the acquisition of agency and the ability to struggle with ongoing relations of power, and is
a precondition for creating informed and critical citizens.[27] This is a notion of education that is tied not
to the alleged neutrality of teaching methods but to a vision of pedagogy which is directive and
interventionist on the side of reproducing a democratic society. Democratic societies need educated
citizens who are steeped in more than the skills of argumentation. And it is precisely this democratic
project that affirms the critical function of education and refuses to narrow its goals and aspirations to
methodological considerations. This is what makes critical pedagogy different from training. And it is
precisely the failure to connect learning to its democratic functions and goals that provides rationales for
pedagogical approaches which strip the meaning of what it means to be educated from its critical and
democratic possibilities.

Perm: AND not OR- framework creates a false dilemma between two forms of debate
when really both are possible. Let them have the policy debates they want, but still
allow critical affirmatives like the AFF debate or you limit out non-state action versus
non-state action debates which are key to provide education on not only how we
should reorient our politics but also as to what reorientation is the best.

Access DA- this functions on two levels-

a. Political access- the political space is not neutral. Different subject positions
have different access to actual policymaking, meaning their form of debate will
never attend to these people. Having a monolithic framework like the one of
the NEG makes debate inaccessible for those already pushed to the margins in
this activity. This means skills and education learned from their form of debate
only benefits those already in privilege- this means their framework inherently
bolsters the settler state.
b. Their debate shuts down black debate- the historicity of black debate has
always been based off of being outside of what is thought of as “traditional”
debate. This shuts out an entire community of people from the activity and
makes the space one of exclusion, turning their education.
Revolutionary Potential DA- their form of debate allows for state action versus state
action and state action versus critical debates, but they never allow for students to
explore how different nonstate actions interact. This is key to ever question the best
way for us, as students and debaters, to effectuate change. We could’ve had a debate
about the ways our method could be better, about how the status quo is better, or
about how our focus on settler colonialism is bad, but rather they disengaged from
the content of the 1AC just like the framework of the NEG implicates them and
severed out of that education.

Lazy Activism DA- by centering fiat-based debate, they create lazy activists who just
say things are done and think that it effectuates change, but ignore the ways in which
fiat is not and never will be real. When 1AC’s read plans they never question HOW to
implement that plan which proves their skills are not enough. Furthermore, they
never question the actual, movement-building processes that always precede legal
change in the history books. This creates lazy activists which show how their form of
debate is locked into the debate space.
 1AR FW Extra Cards
Overly narrow deliberation solves neither agonism or decisionmaking
Norval 12 (Alleta, University of Essex—Government, ''Don't Talk Back!''−−The Subjective Conditions of Critical Public Debate”, Political
Theory December 2012 vol. 40 no. 6 802-810)

While Habermas’s sentiments clearly mirror the disdain for mass culture found generally in the writings of other critical theorists, one has to
reflect on whether they are also a sign of what Macpherson long ago has called “the liberal fear of the masses.” This is echoed in Simone
Chambers’s recently articulated question as to whether deliberative
democracy has abandoned mass democracy? 26 Mass
publics, she argues, seem to have been abandoned in favour of carefully constructed mini-publics, in which controlled
critical reasoning (deliberation) can take place.27Chambers links this question, as it should be, to the deep mistrust of rhetoric, and its
associations with the masses and the “wasteland of nondeliberative politics.” However, even though Chambers raises this important question,
the sentiments so clearly expressed in Habermas are re-affirmed through the introduction of another dichotomy: the distinction between
deliberative rhetoric and plebiscitory rhetoric, which suffers from all the pathologies Habermas attributed to mass publics. As in Habermas,
Chambers touches upon the importance of the question of how “citizens form their opinions,” arguing that it is “an integral part of a theory of
deliberative democracy.”28To think about the how is not a matter of multiplying mini-publics, but of fostering the promotion and proliferation
of a multiplicity of citizen–citizen encounters. Such “face-to face encounters of everyday talk” could promote “the skills needed to be a critical
yet receptive audience.”29 Could the uses of the social media with which I started this short piece be considered cases of such interaction, if not
face-to-face then in peer-to-peer networks and engagements between citizens and the state mediated via the new media? I would argue that,
indeed, they could and ought to be treated as such. However, for this to become possible, and to be able to note the democratic potential of
such interactions, the fundamentally dichotomous thinking that inspires both Habermas’s text and deliberative accounts of democracy more
generally, must be abandoned, for it is part of the problem. As Habermas notes with respect to Räsonnement, the nuances of both sides are
preserved in the term. The same holds here: publics are both capable of being critical and of being manipulated; it is not the case that the virtue
Democratic subjectivity is cultivated
of the critical use of reason belongs to a particular sociological group or form of society.
through participation in practices of “talking back.” It may include the education to which Habermas refers, but it also depends upon
embodied practices of habituation, 30 upon political imagination and upon the operation of exemplars, and upon actions that manifest
for us other possibilities of being and acting.31 The particular forms such “talking back” take is of lesser importance: they can take a range of
forms, not all of which would correspond to a neatly rationalized image of deliberation.32 But, that makes them no less
valuable. Of fundamental importance is the thought that critical abilities are verified in the articulation of wrongs, as Rancière may put it.33That
is, the ability to act critically is fostered, enacted, and deepened in the very process of expressing demands and making claims.34 The fostering
of virtues associated with democracy—giving voice to injustice, protesting, occupying, listening to others,
senses of wrong and
critically debating options, giving and receiving reasons, coming to see things in a different way through critical
engagement with others, proposing alternatives, aspiring to higher selves and better societies, to name but a few—come about in and
through construction of and participation in critical, oppositional activities.35 While recognising the limitations of the Internet
as discursive space, policy analysts and political theorists experimenting with these new spaces and their potential contribution to democratic
politics are emphasizing the extent to which they contribute to “the broad objective of making policy debate . . . accessible
and meaningful and at the same time agonistically authentic and equitable.” In particular, it contributes to the expansion of available
narratives that may compel policy makers to avoid setting agendas too narrowly, enabling the promotion of
nonhegemonic political alternatives and policy options and facilitating the voicing of views in a wide variety of ways. As Coleman argues,
there are virtues to digital storytelling that fosters and values situated contingency, “acknowledgement of the local and quotidian, and a
willingness to embrace existential ambiguity” in a pluralistic political universe.36One becomes a democrat;37one is not taught—from
above—to be one. Intuition and provocation takes precedence over tuition and instruction.38The emphasis Habermas puts on teaching and
training in the historical analysis of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is crucial. However, for these insights to take their proper
place in thinking about democracy, they need to be democratized, opened up to possibilities that cannot be contemplated within the structures
of the critical public–mass distinction. If we think of democracy in less restrictive terms, it becomes possible to focus on fostering the development
of radical democratic subjectivities, that cannot be anticipated nor held “accountable to any theoretical formulation”; radical democratic
utterances both proclaim and enact the coming into being of a democratic subjectivity.39This necessary openness only becomes a possibility
once one takes the fundamental abilities and capacities of all, the counted and the uncounted, seriously. Emerson, like Rancière, suggests that
each of us is capable of developing judgments from a standpoint that “all and sundry” “may be expected to find in themselves.”40Emerson is
clear about the continuous work on the self that this involves. He is also clear that it involves aversion to society and to the “herd.”41Yet, this is
never expressed in any other way than that those aspects of the self and of society that resemble the “herd”—the “mass” for Habermas—run
through each and every one of us. Aversion to those aspects is crucial, but it is not achieved through external means, nor is it something associated
with or limited to specific groups. “The virtue most in request [in society] is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion.”42Aversion opens the way to
activities through which we can foster the virtues associated with a critical engagement and development of a better self and society.
The perfectionism invoked here is non-elitist and non-teleological: it is a possibility open to each and all.43 It does not predetermine
and prefigure what is possible, and along which road we must all travel. To quote Cavell, “The better world we think . . . is not
a world that is gone, hence it is not to be mourned, but one to be borne, witnessed.”44We should not mourn the loss of the bourgeois public
sphere, but work on the possibilities opened up by the world coming

Narrowing affirmation to instrumental literalism creates a monoculture in debate—

collapses it
Valdivia-Sutherland 98 (Professor and Director of Forensics @ Butte Community College 1998. Cynthia-Celebrating Differences:
Successfully Diversifying Forensics Programs; National Communication Association’s 84th Annual Meeting, November 22;
http://www.phirhopi.org/phi-rho-pi/spts/spkrpts05.2/sutherland.htm, A Multicultural Communicative Style)

Although the foundation of forensics events may have been grounded in the ancient rhetoric of Greece and Rome, the globalization of
American culture calls for a more diverse rhetorical competency. One of the ways such competency can be developed is by
reviewing different multicultural communicative styles. To accomplish this we will briefly examine some features of Asian culture as an exemplar
of multicultural differences affecting forensic participation. Although this perusal is limited, it should offer insight into potential multicultural
impacts. Perhaps the single most important feature affecting communicative styles within some Asian cultures centers around Confucianism, a
philosophy encouraging both reciprocity and group harmony -- empathetic understanding of the other, and self-sacrifice for the good of the
community. Consequently, cultures upholding Confucianism as their dominant paradigm place high value on group conformity and relational
ethics, resulting in communication patterns designed to "initiate, develop, and maintain social relationships" (Yum, 1988, p. 384) Subsequently,
such cultures are more interested in the process by which communication occurs rather than its outcome, most often utilizing indirect
communication as a primary tool of the communication event. The impact of Confucianism on the communicative styles of its proponents is
profound. First, communication is designed to induce cooperation among group members, and second, to promote relationships rather than
individual goal attainments. In the world of forensic competitions, such commitment to the group disallows satisfaction in individualized success,
while at the same time creating an environment fraught with face-losing potential. Imagine the shame evident in the one team member who
does not advance to awards, or that debate team who drops in the final round. Such face-losing occurrences are common in current forensic
practices, and may account for the small number of known debate societies within collectivist societies. Equally relevant to this examination of
multicultural differences is nonverbal communication. Culturally bound, nonverbal communication is an area in which misunderstanding between
cultures has the potential to flourish. For example, Japanese display rules prohibit negative facial expressions; consequently, it is common for the
Japanese to smile even when angry (Argyle, 1982, p. 63). Consider the confusion during an interpretation of literature in which an angry or
distraught character smiles in what is perceived an inappropriate moment. The same would hold true if this competitor was attempting to
persuade the audience concerning some grave or life-threatening matter. Given Western cultural nonverbal norms, forensic critics would assess
the smiling competitor negatively, and the competitor would suffer the impact on the ballot. It is not unlikely such negative attribution would
result in the competitor not advancing into the final round, and thus, the competitor would not have opportunity to contribute to the overall
success of the team through acquisition of sweepstakes points. Again, such an outcome would constitute loss of face for the competitor, a serious
offense in many Asian cultures. Beyond facial expression, noted cultural differences in nonverbal communication range from amount and
frequency of eye contact to arrangements of time and space, as well as appropriateness of gestures. Any of these holds the potential for negative
impact within a forensics tournament, either in a round of competition, or during social interaction between rounds. The consequences of such
misunderstandings may be that multiculturalstudents, feeling uncomfortable in the Westernized cultural realm of
forensics, will leave the activity in order to maintain their own cultural perspectives. From this brief overview of some of
the inherent differences within multicultural approaches to communicative style, it is evident that the current underlying philosophy of forensic
competitions needs to expand if accommodation of cultural dissimilarities is to take place. The question remains: How? Toward Pluralism in
Forensics It has been argued that forensics is (or should be) primarily an educational enterprise, rooted in pedagogy, rhetoric, and research. If
this is so, then in advancing into the 21st century, an era in which societies will increasingly become multicultural, it makes sense to adopt Albert
and Triandis' (1985) objective of effectuating intercultural education within a multicultural society. The aim of this objective is "to prepare
individuals to function effectively in both their culture of origin and in their new culture" (p. 391). Implementing this objective in forensics will
not be easy. Change never is. However, while human beings do not automatically embrace the unknown, inability to move beyond a
state of stasis equates to stagnation in human development. Within the world of forensics, coaches, critics, and
competitors must continually adapt, evolving in their interactions with an ever-changing environment, or risk extinction. The
possibility for forensic multicultural evolution can be strengthened in several ways. First, those of us involved in the activity must
hone our self-diagnostic skills; in other words, we must consistently and honestly examine what we are doing, why,
and with what effect. Are we "doing the greatest good for the greatest number?" If not, why not? Second, we must recognize the potential
for educational gain when we expose ourselves and our students to multicultural awareness, knowledge, and acceptance. Not only will our
learning experience be enriched, but we may also be led to explore identities and to question cultural domination, thereby increasing acceptance
of differences. Finally, we must begin to begin. We cannot advance beyond our current state until we initiate action. This can be accomplished in
many different ways. Here are a few: a. Recruitment of forensics competitors through on campus multicultural clubs and organizations. b.
Development of non-traditional forensics programs. For example: a one-unit non-traveling team that exposes students to and educates them
about forensics and/or the use of intramural competitions. c. Adoption of debate topics centered on global rather than national concerns. d.
Expository speeches geared to inform about other cultures. e. Interpretive programs adopted from another culture's canons of literature. f.
Creation of new events or a return to old ones (such as oratorical speeches which harmonize with African speaking styles). g. Experiential activities
designed to expose individuals in forensics to other cultural views. h. Research assessing current forensic multiculturalism. Summary Returning
to the question, "Is it possible for pluralism, 'a process by which both minority and majority cultural members adopt some norms of the other
group' to thrive within the context of the competitive speech and debate arena?," the answer is yes, but a qualified yes. The reason for this
response comes from the understanding of what a process is: a state of evolution, a passage from one place to another. From this understanding,
it is easy to see that process implies ongoingness, a continuous going forth from one point to the next. Consequently, in investigating its status
quo, questioning its pedagogies, and attempting to initiate change, forensic professionals concerned with multiculturalism are already involved
in such a process. Ultimately, as gaps in cultural knowledge decrease, norms will shift. At such a time, we will begin to co-opt certain cultural
elements from outside our own -- in turn, sharing what has been exclusively ours with others. Arguably, this is not pluralism in its purest form,
but it is a move toward pluralism that constitutes participation in the process of pluralism. As such, it is a move toward multiculturalism in what
has traditionally been the monocultural world of forensics. So you still want to increase diversity within your forensics program? Good for you,
and for us. Now, let the celebration of differences begin!

Pandora’s Box—the punishment paradigm fails and provoke K teams to be atopical—

turns every standard
Rehn & O’Doherty 7 (Alf, Department of Industrial Management, Royal Institute of Technology, Lindstedtsvägen, Damian, University
of Manchester Business School, “Organization: On the Theory and Practice of Excess,” Culture and Organization, June, Vol. 13(2), pp. 99–
113//George)

We have suggested that organization is not the other of excess, but rather better thought as synonymous with the very production and
exacerbation of excess. Organization is excess. The
more we push back the limits of restrictive economy the more we
amplify and stoke up the pressure of that excess ‘beyond the border’ in a movement that invites the inevitable
‘discharge’ and return of the unacceptable, the dangerous, the obscene, the disgusting. Organization at the level
of the nation state always borders a similar excess. Think of Holland and its structure of dykes that helps man reclaim and maintain land from the
sea. Consider the haunting and perhaps founding trauma of its nation state expressed in the image of Hans Brinker (Dodge, 2003) with his little
finger plugging a hole in the Haarlem dyke holding back the tides that threaten to sweep away hearth and home. It is of such ‘hinges’—the nuts,
bolts and washers that map the vinculum of organization—through which order and disorder is delicately poised. Think of New Orleans and the
inundation that led to the dystopia of the Louisiana Superdome and the Convention Centre. Each year, excess builds up: we try to bury it deeper;
we conceive plans to eject its waste into the stratosphere. Without restricted economy its sheer excess is likely to overwhelm social relations and
undermine the possibility of community and coherence stimulating passions and emotion that provoke contagion, panic and hysteria. But
organization is inevitably both restricted and general economy, a theatre of cruelty that folds together these two dimensions of organization to
form local ‘pools or order’ (Law, 1994), both complex and fractal in pattern. Excess does not exert its pressure in any consistent or uniform way,
marking out something like an outer circumference of organization, but instead is better thought as as an uneven and transient, vagrant force
that migrates and mutates in often capricious and unpredictable ways seeping into the nooks and crannies of organization where the nuts and
bolts of its heterogeneous assemblage tremor and bear the strain of imminent collapse. 5 You might tell from the tone in which we are compelled
to write this treatise that excess is both a fascination and a disgust. In an age of slimfast diets and streamlined arguments it might seem surprising
to claim that the notion of excess and the excess of theory still remains insufficiently attended to. This paradox of excess is particularly
acute given the accumulation of academic articles, edited collections, special editions, and online journals that seem to produce a
mindless orgy of paper and digital (reserve) ones and zeros. Excess takes many forms; unpredictable and explosive in its
manifestations it always pops up just when we thought we had tamed its wild and protean force. At the same time,
as we have argued, excess is not a form at all but more like a force or surplus energy. Indeed once it has been
‘formed’, rendered in the terms of in-form-ation for the purposes of cognition or theoretical deployment
we should argue it has been lost, condemned once more to a spectral region of uncertainty. It makes it difficult
therefore to introduce the question of excess, and indeed this special edition. We have seen that excess seems to fester just below
the surface of what we routinely perceive and understand to be relevant organizational phenomena—indeed
‘excess’ may be the very dragon that the Standing Conference on Organization Symbolism takes as its logo— an image and target for its brand of
organization analysis that has attracted little explicit attention (but see Sievers, 1990) perhaps because safely contained behind the frame and
bars of its iron cage we are still reassured that organization can contain its monstrous implications. In other words, we have still yet to think of
excess…
**Neg Section**
Exceptionalism PIK
 1NC vs Refusal
Colonialism and Slavery work in tandem to produce modernity. Black and Indigenous
scholarship claims to exceptionalism reduce the other field to multiculturalism.
Leroy (Justin, an intellectual historian of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States, with particular expertise in slavery and
abolition, the Atlantic world, black political thought, comparative histories of empire, and the history of capitalism. I recently joined the faculty
at the University of California, Davis as assistant professor of U.S. History.) 2016 (Black History in Occupied Territory: On the Entanglements
of Slavery and Settler Colonialism, Academia.edu,
https://www.academia.edu/29196118/Black_History_in_Occupied_Territory_On_the_Entanglements_of_Slavery_and_Settler_Colonialism,
C.A)

Indigenous and black critical theory are extraordinarily robust fields. They have challenged the notion that the United States
could live up to its universalist foundations (“liberty and justice for all”) if only it could address the structuring exclusions of race, gender,
sexuality, and class. Rather than framing such exclusions as the unfortunate effect of lingering prejudices that could be remedied by inclusion
within the fabric of the nation-state, indigenous and black theory frame settler colonialism and racial slavery, respectively, as the very
conditions of possibility for the United States. The violence of these processes is enduring and ongoing, and the hinge of inclusion/exclusion
both misnames that violence and narrows any sense of possibility for how it can be redressed. These fields have emerged in isolation
from one another. Each has supplanted facile notions of racial exclusion, but in doing so has proposed alternatives—colonialism and
slavery—premised upon exclusive claim to accounting for the violence of modernity.2 These claims are internally coherent and broadly useful,
but are incompatible. Eithercolonialism or slavery must be subordinated to the other, forcing them into
aporetic tension. Each field reduces the other to a variation on the theme of liberal multiculturalism in
order to maintain the integrity of its own exceptionalist claims. Yet these theories cannot fully account
for the historical messiness of black and indigenous encounters with one another and with the US
state. What might emerge if scholars suspended—even momentarily—such claims in order to consider the impasse of settlement and slavery
using historical methods?

Link – Settler colonialism cannot conceptualize the position of the slave. Black politics
become subsumed under narratives of sovereignty which erases radical politics that
lay outside it.
Leroy (Justin, an intellectual historian of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States, with particular expertise in slavery and
abolition, the Atlantic world, black political thought, comparative histories of empire, and the history of capitalism. I recently joined the faculty
at the University of California, Davis as assistant professor of U.S. History.) 2016 (Black History in Occupied Territory: On the Entanglements
of Slavery and Settler Colonialism, Academia.edu,
https://www.academia.edu/29196118/Black_History_in_Occupied_Territory_On_the_Entanglements_of_Slavery_and_Settler_Colonialism,
C.A)

Indigenous studies suffers from similar oversights. Jodi Byrd’s The Transit of Empire is a powerful critique of how scholars and activists
have translated colonial processes into the language of identitarian exclusion, demanding that the state be held accountable to its promises of
universal inclusion. The result, Byrd argues, is that social justice - oriented scholarship and activism inadvertently works in collusion with settler
colonialism when it does not recognize indigenous dispossession as a fundamentally different struggle. She writes, “By foundationally accepting
the general premise that racialization (along with the concomitant interlocking oppressions of class, gender, and sexuality) causes the primary
violences of US politics in national and international arenas, multicultural liberalism has aligned itself with settler colonialism despite professing
the goal to disrupt and intervene in global forms of dominance through investments in colorblind equality.” Byrd elaborates on the dangers of
including indigeneity as a racial category, arguing, “When the remediation of the colonization of American Indians is framed through discourses
of racialization that can be redressed by further inclusion into the nation-state, there is a significant failure to grapple with the fact that such
discourses further reinscribe the original colonial injury.” 9 Byrd offers a stunning corrective to the inclusive model of
redressing the foundational violence of the United States. She is one of a number of indigenous studies scholars who
refuse recognition by the settler state as the basis for political engagement. However, for all of its insights, this field
exceptionalizes the indigenous/non -indigenous divide in such a way that it cannot account for the
non-indigenous except as settlers. There has not yet been sufficient theorization of how to integrate non-indigenous, non-
settlers—primarily the enslaved—into a theory of colonialism without subordinating the dispossession they experience to that of indigenous
people. The work of Patrick Wolfe
represents the most uncompromising version of this formulation. He has
dismissed scholarship that questions the indigenous/settler binary as alternately “post-structuralist,”
“naive,” “complicit,” and “multiculturalism.” For Wolfe, skepticism of the binary “maintains settler authorities’ historical
suppression of Indigenous specificity.” 10 To punctuate the total impermeability of this divide, Wolfe writes, “The fact that enslaved people
immigrated against their will…does not alter the structural fact that their presence, however involuntary, was part of the process of Native
dispossession.” 11 Other scholars have offered ways of interrupting the binary—Byrd proposes the notion of “arrivants,” and Mahmood
Mamdani, in the southern African context, argues that the term “settler” differentiates “conquerors from migrants.” 12 Lorenzo Veracini has
elaborated on Mamdani’s formulation, arguing, “Settlers are founders of political orders and carry their sovereignty with them (on the contrary,
migrants can be seen as appellants facing a political order that is already constituted).” 13 Veracini
recognizes that although
some migrants are conscripted into the logic of settlement, this does not always make them settlers
definitionally. Yet none of these frameworks offer conceptually robust engagements with the figure of
the slave, and they cannot account for the particular history of blackness within settler societies . Jared
Sexton has taken Native studies scholars to task, arguing that the field misunderstands slavery as “de-
culturation or the loss of sovereignty.” By translating the violence of slavery into the idiom of settler colonialism, following
Sexton, indigenous studies misses the fact that “slavery is not a loss that the self experiences—of language, lineage, land, or labor—but rather
the loss of any self that could experience such a loss.” 14 Sexton here is making an argument about the ontological,
rather than historical, supremacy of slavery and its relationship to colonialism; the shattering loss of the self
trumps the loss of sovereignty. While I don’t think Sexton is convincing on that point, from it he derives two important arguments. First,
Native studies understands slavery and emancipation in a liberal, progressive narrative, relegating
slavery to the past so that black people can more seamlessly be cast in the role of settler (or arrivant, or
appellant). Second, black politics are subsequently subsumed into this narrative, leaving no room to think
about how politics which fall outside of it—such as black internationalism and anti-colonialism—
relate to indigenous struggles.

Impact– Narrative of exceptionalism w/in SC & AB theory is exploited and used to

reinvigorate modernity. Turns Case.
Leroy (Justin, an intellectual historian of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States, with particular expertise in slavery and
abolition, the Atlantic world, black political thought, comparative histories of empire, and the history of capitalism. I recently joined the faculty
at the University of California, Davis as assistant professor of U.S. History.) 2016 (Black History in Occupied Territory: On the Entanglements
of Slavery and Settler Colonialism, Academia.edu,
https://www.academia.edu/29196118/Black_History_in_Occupied_Territory_On_the_Entanglements_of_Slavery_and_Settler_Colonialism,
C.A)

Even a casual engagement with the entanglements of black and indigenous history in the United
States reveals that the claims of exceptionalism underlying so much black and indigenous critical
theory cannot stand up to scrutiny. Take, for example, the case of Native slaveholding at the close of the
Civil War. During the war, th e Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole nations fought with the Confederacy against the Union.
During the negotiation of peace treaties, the federal government had two related goals: to secure emancipation for the slaves owned by
Indians, and to erode indigenous sovereignty.15 The Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole entered into treaties that freed their slaves. The
Chickasaw and Choctaw, however, refused to make this concession. As Barbara Krauthamer observes, the Treaty of Washington,
which the Chickasaw and Choctaw signed in 1866, was “noteworthy precisely because of the twisted path it laid out for establishing black
people’s freedom.” 16 The refusal to
offer immediate emancipation was a way for the Chickasaw and Choctaw to
negotiate the terms of a bad treaty, and an expression of the self-determination that the United States was so hostile toward.
The treaty expressed a tension that had been building since the early years of the war. Eager for freedom, slaves took the opportunity to flee to
Union encampments once soldiers made their way into the Deep South. After
the war, but before the terms of the treaty
were negotiated, the enslaved petitioned the Freedmen’s Bureau and “complained that slavery
remained in tact (sic) in the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations, where their families remained enslaved.”
17 During and after the transition to freedom, Chickasaws
and Choctaws blamed black people for crimes such as
cattle and horse theft, and became suspicious of freedpeople’s communities, fearing that black
outsiders were settling on their land. These black men and women reported being pursued by their former masters and
subjected to tremendous violence. What are we to make of the fact that black slaves petitioned a government
actively hostile to the interests of their enslavers in pursuit of a form of freedom that indigenous
studies scholars might call complicit with the ideology of settlement? How do we make sense of the fact that
indigenous people used any means at their disposal, up to and including murder, to prevent black encroachment into lands already under
assault by the federal government? As the United States used black freedom to justify indigenous displacement, it relegated slavery and its
meanings to the past, and produced a myth about modern US nationhood in which both Indians and slaves were absent. It
is easy to see
the ways that the US government exploited tensions surrounding emancipation in Native nations to
set up these encounters between Natives and freedpeople. More difficult is working through the
meaning of such encounters without invoking the exceptionalism of either slavery or colonialism to
justify the actions of any set of actors. The historical complexities of state colonial power cannot be captured simply by asserting
that the freedmen’s status as slaves entitled them to pursue freedom despite strengthening Native dispossession, or that the sovereignty
claims of the Chickasaw and Choctaw entitled them to maintain racial slavery to defy the power of the United States. These
complexities should, instead, emphasize the fact that freedom articulated through colonialism is not
robust freedom, or that sovereignty expressed through racial slavery is not a useful model of
sovereignty. In an earlier period, the United States pursued expansion to further racial slavery. After the Civil War, black freedom became a
ruse to justify the continued erosion of Native sovereignty. The projects of slavery and colonialism have never been
concerned with which came first, or which is more elemental—they have in fact thrived on the
slippages and ambiguities of their relationship to one another.
 Afro-Pessimism Link

Afropessimism is inarticulate in the face of settler colonialism

Leroy (Justin, an intellectual historian of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States, with particular expertise in slavery and
abolition, the Atlantic world, black political thought, comparative histories of empire, and the history of capitalism. I recently joined the faculty
at the University of California, Davis as assistant professor of U.S. History.) 2016 (Black History in Occupied Territory: On the Entanglements
of Slavery and Settler Colonialism, Academia.edu,
https://www.academia.edu/29196118/Black_History_in_Occupied_Territory_On_the_Entanglements_of_Slavery_and_Settler_Colonialism,
C.A)

Recent work in black studies has argued for a reconceptualized notion of black racialization in which blackness emerges
at the edge of humanity—that is, the category “black” is defined against the category “human.” In such formulations,
black/non-black is the primary division of the modern social, epistemological, and ontological order, exemplified by Atlantic
slavery and its legacies. Although this group of scholars has disagreed about whether slavery's transformation of human life into a commodity
was radically generative or a shattering obliteration of the self, they are united by the idea that our ways of knowing the modern world and
imagining alternatives to it require centering the violence of enslavement.3 While this work is incredibly helpful for understanding the epochal
impact of slavery, it relegates forms of racialization and colonialism that do not self-subordinate to slavery to the realm of anti-blackness or
liberal multiculturalism. Such
framing has led Tiffany King to claim that black studies is “inarticulate in the face of settler
colonialism.” 4 Put another way, the field of black studies has not fully reckoned with the historical intimacy
between colonialism and slavery. In his seminal work Empire As a Way of Life, William Appleman Williams asserted that the
imperial life of the United States “is predicated upon a charming but ruthless faith in infinite progress fueled by infinite growth.” 5 The liberty so
central to the founding mythology of the United States was defined by its limitlessness —not in terms of whom it applied to, as in the fantasies
of liberalism, but in terms of its spatial expansion. To be free was to face no limits to growth. Tepid versions of black studies have made the
assumption that the struggle for justice is an inclusionary one, defined by access to rights and liberties guaranteed by the language of the
Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. This type of black studies has not reconciled with the fact that freedom has never been
purely abstract; it is always enacted over and against the ongoing history of colonialism. Thus Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri can claim,
“between the presidencies of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, the open space of the frontier became the conceptual terrain of
republican democracy.” 6 Such scholarship has refused to grapple with what it means to diagnose oppression and demand its redress from
within a settler state. Even the more robust formation of black studies concerned with the exceptionalism of
slavery has not reckoned with the relationship between this drive to growth and the expansion of human chattel.7 It has not
reckoned with how black racialization occurred in tandem with settler ideology and not merely adjacent
to it. To be clear, this problem is not one of black studies ignoring the presence of indigenous people, but of how the field theorizes black
racialization in a way that precludes a serious engagement with indigenous dispossession. If blackness is exclusion from the category of the
human or access to a knowable self, the loss of sovereignty can only be framed as a lesser loss with a subordinate grammar. For
example,
Jared Sexton has argued that slavery “precedes and prepares the way for colonialism,” and describes
colonialism as “the issue or heir of slavery, its outgrowth or edifice or monument.” 8 While this may be a generative
theoretical claim that lends conceptual coherence to Sexton’s insightful framing of slavery and
antiblackness, it is simply not historically accurate.
 Iyko Day Link
Day embraces exceptionalism and effaces the legacy of anti-blackness in the
colonization of the Pacific.
Leroy (Justin, an intellectual historian of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States, with particular expertise in slavery and
abolition, the Atlantic world, black political thought, comparative histories of empire, and the history of capitalism. I recently joined the faculty
at the University of California, Davis as assistant professor of U.S. History.) 2016 (Black History in Occupied Territory: On the Entanglements
of Slavery and Settler Colonialism, Academia.edu,
https://www.academia.edu/29196118/Black_History_in_Occupied_Territory_On_the_Entanglements_of_Slavery_and_Settler_Colonialism,
C.A)

Iyko Day has cautioned against “the pitfalls of any antidialectical approach to the political economy of
the settler colonial racial state from the position of either Indigenous or antiblack exceptionalism .” 18
The United States emerged as a racial capitalist settler state through the simultaneous operation of colonialism and anti-blackness. For all their
differences, settler colonialism and slavery are violent justifications for extermination—of bodies, of sovereignty, of self-possession.
Suspending claims to exceptionalism allows us to see how such forms of extermination blend into one
another. But these blended forms did not exhaust themselves in fraught nineteenth -century
encounters between black and Native people. The United States has exported the dual logic of colonialism and racism
through its own imperial ventures as well as through its political and cultural relationships to other settler states. This export process
has been crucial to the overlapping influence of ideas about settlement and blackness even in colonial
situations that may lack a clear indigenous population or a history of slavery, as is the case in
twentieth - and twenty-first-century US expansion into the Pacific and Middle East. As important as it is to be
mindful of the dangers posed by collapsing the distinction between slavery and settler colonialism, any theory that holds the two
apart or attempts to establish primacy between them cannot account for the interlocked histories
that inform colonialism and its resistance. Suturing indigenous dispossession to US imperial projects writ large, Byrd has
argued that “the United States has used executive, legislative, and juridical means to make ‘Indian’ those peoples and nations who stand in the
way of US military and economic desires.” 19 Byrd’s claim is important for understanding not only how settler colonialism is ongoing in the
United States itself, but also how its structure travels, fueling ideas behind non-settler forms of colonialism and warfare. Byrd challenges the
long-standing historiographical distinction between continental expansion and overseas empire, and allows us to see why, for example, Henry
Dawes thought Indian policy would be an apt template for governing the new acquisition of the Philippines. Dawes, who infamously brought
about the end of collective tribal land ownership, once opined in the Atlantic Monthly that when it came to the Philippines, “our policy with the
Indians becomes an object lesson worthy of careful and candid study.” 20 Supreme Court decisions concerning Natives in 1831 (Cherokee
Nation v. Georgia) and 1845 (United States v. William Rogers) produced the legal status of “dependent state” without citizenship; imperialists
of the late nineteenth century relied on this case law to theorize potential solutions to the problem of how to incorporate non-white races
under American control without granting them citizenship rights.21 It is also worth noting that it was precisely the history of emancipation,
which culminated in the Equal Protections Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, that necessitated these intellectual gymnastics—citizenship
with unequal rights based on race could no longer be legally countenanced. When critics of expansion raised the concern that the annexation
the Philippines would mean providing citizenship to its inhabitants, imperialists countered that the United States’ history with Indians proved
such claims false, paving the way for an empire composed of a white citizenry. A similar pattern followed US imperial wars throughout the
twentieth century. For example, in his classic work on frontier mythology, Richard Slotkin described the Vietnam War as the “last great Indian
war.” 22 And the metaphor of “Indian Country” as a frontier to be civilized has persisted into the contemporary era of imperial warfare in
Afghanistan and Iraq.23 But
twentieth-century colonial formations depended too on policing blackness and
the legacies of slavery. One of the major consequences of US empire has been the export of anti-black
racism. Amy Kaplan argues, “During the era of Jim Crow, white supremacists did battle on two related fronts: the foreign wars against Spain
and its colonies aspiring for national independence, and the domestic struggle against African Americans fighting to achieve civil and political
rights.” American
empire gave white supremacy new life, making it the conduit through which North
and South reconciled after the devastation of the Civil War. White supremacy was, in her words, the “definition of
modern American nationhood in the global arena.” 24 Expansion functioned as a way of conquering darker races abroad at the very moment
that the dark race at home was forgetting its proper place in the American racial hierarchy. Many black Americans identified similarities
between their own treatment and that of colonial subjects, and adopted an antiimperial critique. Others,
no doubt recalling tales
of black soldiers fighting for emancipation three decades earlier, were seduced by the idea of proving
their fitness for equal citizenship by becoming foot soldiers for empire. 25 Even the most hopeful,
however, would soon learn that American imperialism meant bringing American racism abroad. Empire
set the stage for a global Jim Crow in which any rebellious race could be treated like black Southerners. 26 Far from working as a mechanism for
assimilating black people into the national fold, expansion actually resulted in what Kaplan calls the “dissolution of the boundaries between the
foreign and the domestic that imperial battlefields were meant to reinforce.” 27 In other words, fighting
for empire would not
teach whites to treat black people as they did other whites; it would simply teach them to treat
Filipinos and Cubans like niggers—a term that traveled as widely as American soldiers. And, just as whites brought domestic forms
of racism abroad on their imperial ventures, domestic forms of racial violence became resignified as “part of a global imperial strategy of rule.”
28 Nikhil Singh punctuates this relationship in the contemporary period when he points out that former Attorney General Eric Holder has
justified drone assassinations by drawing analogy to police officers who, legally speaking, may in the pursuit of a fleeing felon “prevent escape
by using deadly force.” 29 The
wake of the police officer’s bullet or the drone’s missile collapses the
distinction between thug and terrorist, criminal and insurgent, policing and empire-building. In their global
history of white supremacist nationalism, Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds write, “White men’s countries rested on the premise that
multiracial democracy was an impossibility: this was the key history lesson learnt from the great tragedy of Radical Reconstruction in the United
States.” 30 The dangers of black enfranchisement, citizenship, and equality haunted the efforts of other white settler states to maintain white
supremacist governance even in the absence of a local black population, as was the case in Australia, and further eroded the distinction
between black and indigenous, as in South Africa. Global
intellectual exchanges among the architects of Jim Crow,
colonialism, white nationalism, and settler colonialism ensured that while these processes retained
their distinction, they operated only in relationship to one another. In a word, empire has functioned
by making its victims both Indian and black.

Day misses the nuances of Israel-Palestine relations and anti-blackness. Turns case, aff
is a form of colonial uknowing. Only acknowledging the antiblackness and settler
colonialism as co-constitutive solves.
Leroy (Justin, an intellectual historian of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States, with particular expertise in slavery and
abolition, the Atlantic world, black political thought, comparative histories of empire, and the history of capitalism. I recently joined the faculty
at the University of California, Davis as assistant professor of U.S. History.) 2016 (Black History in Occupied Territory: On the Entanglements
of Slavery and Settler Colonialism, Academia.edu,
https://www.academia.edu/29196118/Black_History_in_Occupied_Territory_On_the_Entanglements_of_Slavery_and_Settler_Colonialism,
C.A)

It is no coincidence that we often use the language of apartheid to describe the condition of Palestinians. The authors of the
Black Solidarity Statement assert, “Israel’s widespread use of detention and imprisonment against Palestinians evokes the mass

incarceration of Black people in the US, including the political imprisonment of our own revolutionaries. Soldiers, police, and courts justify
lethal force against us and our children who pose no imminent threat.” It is worth noting that the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of
the Crime of Apartheid, adopted by the U.N. in 1973, was ratified by the majority of its member states, with the notable exceptions of the United States and Israel.
The Convention defines apartheid as acts “committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other
racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.” Examples mentioned in the Convention include denying others the right to move freely about,
depriving them of the right to leave and return to their country or the right to freedom of residence, preventing mixed marriages, subjecting them to arbitrary
arrests, or expropriating property—all things Palestinians under Israeli jurisdiction are subjected to. Israel
justifies Palestinian dispossession
using the same racial ideologies all settler states draw upon to legitimize the elimination of
indigenous people. But with the global circulation of American racism after Reconstruction,
antiblackness has become an important tool for Israel in ways that it was not for older settler
societies. Anti-black racism is one of the ways that Israel has produced the idea of an existential racial threat, whether Palestinian or otherwise. For example,
anti-African race riots are not uncommon in Israel. In fact, Israel is actively hostile to African Jewish migrants, sometimes going so far as to offer them the choice of
returning to Africa or being imprisoned. 43 At
one 2012 riot in Tel Aviv, protestors blamed Africans for an increase in
crime and repeatedly referred to African men as rapists. One protestor carried a sign that read, “An Israeli is attacked by an
African every 7 minutes.” 44 The myth of the black male rapist was the primary justification for lynching in the

United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. So perhaps the reenactment of a lynching by Israeli
schoolchildren should not seem like it comes from a foreign cultural context, when it in fact draws on a form of racism fundamental to the structure of Israeli
society.And finally, there is the way Palestinian children are framed as threats both because they are, after all, potential terrorists, and because they are a
“demographic threat” to Israel’s Jewish majority through their very existence. This fear may seem unfamiliar in a settler colonial
context, which is predicated on the erasure of the indigenous population and the fantasy that such
erasure is always already complete. The notion of a demographic threat finds a more comfortable analogue in the post-Reconstruction United
States, when the fear of “Negro rule” justified increasing violence against black people. Conclusion Settler colonialism is a logic of

indigenous erasure that has developed and sustained itself through anti-blackness. Anti-black racism,
in turn, has overcome the setbacks of emancipation and the black freedom struggle by calling upon
discourses of securitization and militarized occupation with roots in colonialism. However, these mutually
constitutive origins are lost in recent claims that indigenous dispossession or racial slavery must vie for exceptional status as the foundational violence of

modernity. Such claims are a form of colonial unknowing; the refusal to see the full scope of slavery and

settlement’s interconnected history abets a colonial ontology. Turning to history is not an attempt to recover hidden pasts;
rather, it offers a body of evidence that we can marshal against ways of unknowing that are actively and aggressively produced.
 Impacts
The 1AC’s exceptionalism increases anti-blackness/anti-redness. Centering both as
working in tandem is key to unlocking radical transnational movements
Leroy (Justin, an intellectual historian of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States, with particular expertise in slavery and
abolition, the Atlantic world, black political thought, comparative histories of empire, and the history of capitalism. I recently joined the faculty
at the University of California, Davis as assistant professor of U.S. History.) 2016 (Black History in Occupied Territory: On the Entanglements
of Slavery and Settler Colonialism, Academia.edu,
https://www.academia.edu/29196118/Black_History_in_Occupied_Territory_On_the_Entanglements_of_Slavery_and_Settler_Colonialism,
C.A)

The sedimented histories of settler colonialism, US imperialism, white supremacy, and anti-blackness suffuse
contemporary Palestine. Familiar dynamics of indigenous erasure drove the removal of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from
their land and homes in 1948. Yet it is through the language of anti-blackness—apartheid, open-air prison,
ghetto—that the ongoing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza have been legible to anti-Zionist
activists around the globe. In the second quarter of the twentieth century, Palestine experienced overlapping forms of colonialism;
the British ruled formally while abetting Zionist settlement and the theft of Palestinian land. During this period, segregated South Africa served
as an important inspiration to Zionists, and South Africa was notably the sole African nation to support the creation of Israel in 1948.31 These
simultaneous histories of colonization have imparted Palestine with a degree of fungibility—it resonates as black and indigenous, colonial and
postcolonial. Israel emerged as a fully-fledged settler society at the very moment that liberal humanism triumphed globally in the wake of the
Second World War. The methods other settler states used to such brutal effect for removing their indigenous populations, such as outright
genocide, forced assimilation, and the separation of children from their families, were out of the question. Thus Palestinians were and continue
to be subject to legalized discrimination, ghettoization, the criminalization of protest, and hyper-policing—all techniques familiar to black
Americans. Thestructure of Israeli society itself does not easily comport to the settler/indigenous binary.
It is organized by the division between European Jews racialized as white, Arab Jews, and non-Jewish
Palestinian Arabs. Despite being founded as a Jewish state, there persists a racialized divide among Israel’s Jewish population. These
slippages have inspired a long history of black solidarity against the Israeli settler state formation. The poet June Jordan, black American by way
of Jamaica, once wrote, “I was born a Black woman / and now / I am become a Palestinian.” Jordan was not expressing sympathy in the
abstract, but rather recognized the shared precariousness of black and Palestinian lives. Identifying with these lines, Palestinian American poet
Suheir Hammad titled her first collection of poems Born Palestinian, Born Black . She offered as explanation the idea that black could mean
“Indians in England, Africans in America, / Algerians in France, and Palestinians in Israel.” Such solidarities have played an important role in the
history of both black and Palestinian liberation, and the juxtaposition of the two groups is more than mere analogy. In his work on Afro-Arab
radical thought, Alex Lubin observes, “Mizrahi Jews were called ‘black Jews’” and “put simply, racialized in Israel as black.” 32
The frequently overlapping categories of Palestinian, an indigenous colonial identity, and Arab Israeli, an identity racialized as black, open new
ways of thinking about how the structures of the Israeli settler state rely upon histories of anti-blackness. Activists
have productively
drawn on this fungibility to produce modes of solidarity that attend to both racism and colonialism,
refusing a disavowal of the shared histories of slavery, anti-blackness, settler colonialism, and indigenous
sovereignty in Israel, the United States, and beyond. Lubin traces the beginnings of this history to the Long Civil Rights era. On one side were
organizations whose goals were full citizenship and legal equality, such as the NAACP and the Urban League. These groups
supported Israel, seeing it as a democratic state founded by an aggrieved minority, unburdened by the legal discrimination so prevalent
in the United States (they were unaware of or ignored the condition of Palestinians).33 On the other side were organizations like SNCC and
the Black Panthers, which were centered around more capacious conceptions of justice and included an
anti-imperialist component. For these organizations, it was Israel’s status as a colonizer, rather than its liberal, multicultural
character, that influenced their orientation toward it. After 1975, Israel strengthened its ties to South Africa, and the Panthers began to argue
that Zionism was simultaneously an imperialist and racist discourse. Between 1968 and 1980, the Panthers developed a critique of the
nationalist model in the Middle East and any attendant anti-black racism. In other words, the Panthers critiqued the racism of Arab nationalism
and imagined a form of sovereignty incompatible with racial exclusion. They
even inspired a group of Arab Israelis who
called themselves the “Israeli Panthers.” While the Israeli Panthers at first sought only to end
discrimination against Arab Jews within Israel, they eventually came to break with Zionism and
oppose the occupation, and “would eventually attempt to link the oppression of the Mizrahim to that of the Palestinians.” 34 While
Lubin is ultimately skeptical of the extent of the Israeli Panthers’ radical politics, their work highlights the ways in which Arab racialization has
justified both exclusion from the settler state (Israeli Arabs as black) and colonization itself (Palestinian Arabs as indigenous). The
politics
of the Israeli Panthers makes the links between anti-blackness and settlement manifest in ways that
continue to resonate in the twenty-first century. In August 2014, progressive news sites and social media were dominated
by two topics: protests in Ferguson, Missouri after the shooting of Michael Brown, and the Israeli invasion of Gaza. The chronological overlap
between the two events was coincidental, but activists in the United States and Palestine were quick to transform coincidence into analysis. It
began when Palestinian activists used Twitter to give protestors in Ferguson advice for dealing with tear gas. And because of images showing a
militarized police presence in Ferguson, some reporters began using the language of “occupation.” It didn’t take long before commentators
began to make parallels to the Israeli occupation. The twinned refrains, “Occupation is a crime, from Ferguson to
Palestine,” and “Resistance is not a crime, from Ferguson to Palestine” became popular in Ferguson and beyond. These gestures continued:
protestors blocking traffic on California’s San Mateo Bridge on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in 2015 displaying an enormous Palestinian flag;
Black Lives Matter activists penning a letter of support for Indigenous People’s Day later that year; a
teach-in about anti-black violence in the United States at a Palestinian university; a delegation of
Black Lives Matter activists visiting Palestine.35 The culmination of this work was a “Black Solidarity Statement with
Palestine” that gave historical context for the actions of the previous year.36

.
 AT: Perm

Perm Fails
Leroy (Justin, an intellectual historian of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States, with particular expertise in slavery and
abolition, the Atlantic world, black political thought, comparative histories of empire, and the history of capitalism. I recently joined the faculty
at the University of California, Davis as assistant professor of U.S. History.) 2016 (Black History in Occupied Territory: On the Entanglements
of Slavery and Settler Colonialism, Academia.edu,
https://www.academia.edu/29196118/Black_History_in_Occupied_Territory_On_the_Entanglements_of_Slavery_and_Settler_Colonialism,
C.A)

Indigenous and black critical theory are extraordinarily robust fields. They have challenged the notion that the United States
could live up to its universalist foundations (“liberty and justice for all”) if only it could address the structuring exclusions of race, gender,
sexuality, and class. Rather than framing such exclusions as the unfortunate effect of lingering prejudices that could be remedied by inclusion
within the fabric of the nation-state, indigenous and black theory frame settler colonialism and racial slavery, respectively, as the very
conditions of possibility for the United States. The violence of these processes is enduring and ongoing, and the hinge of inclusion/exclusion
both misnames that violence and narrows any sense of possibility for how it can be redressed. These fields have emerged in isolation
from one another. Each has supplanted facile notions of racial exclusion, but in doing so has proposed alternatives—colonialism and
slavery—premised upon exclusive claim to accounting for the violence of modernity.2 These claims are internally coherent and broadly useful,
but are incompatible. Eithercolonialism or slavery must be subordinated to the other, forcing them into
aporetic tension. Each field reduces the other to a variation on the theme of liberal multiculturalism in
order to maintain the integrity of its own exceptionalist claims. Yet these theories cannot fully account
for the historical messiness of black and indigenous encounters with one another and with the US
state. What might emerge if scholars suspended—even momentarily—such claims in order to consider the impasse of settlement and slavery
using historical methods?

Alt alone Solves. Perm effaces overlap between policing blackness and policing
abroad. Key to coalitions
Leroy (Justin, an intellectual historian of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States, with particular expertise in slavery and
abolition, the Atlantic world, black political thought, comparative histories of empire, and the history of capitalism. I recently joined the faculty
at the University of California, Davis as assistant professor of U.S. History.) 2016 (Black History in Occupied Territory: On the Entanglements
of Slavery and Settler Colonialism, Academia.edu,
https://www.academia.edu/29196118/Black_History_in_Occupied_Territory_On_the_Entanglements_of_Slavery_and_Settler_Colonialism,
C.A)

These expressions should not be surprising. Black writers have long debated the relationship between blackness
and colonialism. One thinks of Fanon’s famous claim, “Colonial racism is no different from any other racism.”
Or Amiri Baraka’s comparison of black struggles to anticolonial struggles with his pithy statement, “In America, black is a
country.” Not to mention James Baldwin’s description of Harlem as “occupied territory.” And the black freedom
movement has served as inspiration for many global movements, such as the Israeli Panthers. These intellectual alliances
reflect material overlap between policing blackness and upholding the colonial status quo. There are
numerous ties between US law enforcement agencies and the Israeli military.37 If Palestinians were
able to give activists in Ferguson tips for dealing with tear gas, it was because the same US weapons
manufacturer, Combined Tactical Systems, provides tools for political repression around the globe, from
Ferguson, to Palestine, to Egypt, to Tunisia, Chile, Bolivia, Guatemala, Thailand, and beyond. The
Pennsylvania-based company does so much business with the Israeli military, in fact, that until several years ago they flew the Israeli flag
outside their corporate headquarters. The same weapons were being used in both Ferguson and Gaza.38
Alt key. Allows us to understand the way power operates.
Leroy (Justin, an intellectual historian of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States, with particular expertise in slavery and
abolition, the Atlantic world, black political thought, comparative histories of empire, and the history of capitalism. I recently joined the faculty
at the University of California, Davis as assistant professor of U.S. History.) 2016 (Black History in Occupied Territory: On the Entanglements
of Slavery and Settler Colonialism, Academia.edu,
https://www.academia.edu/29196118/Black_History_in_Occupied_Territory_On_the_Entanglements_of_Slavery_and_Settler_Colonialism,
C.A)

The techniques of repression circulate between the United States and Israel as easily as the physical means.
Timothy Fitch, the former police chief of St. Louis—the police department that killed Michael Brown and placed
Ferguson under siege—participated in a weeklong training in Israel in 2011.39 Such trainings are framed as Israeli
counterterrorism experts imparting their knowledge to American police departments so they can gain the skills to prevent terrorist attacks. But
large, urban police departments in the United States are far more likely to test these new skills and
techniques on poor black populations than so-called terrorists.40 Such trainings are not uncommon. The Oakland
Police Department, which used tear gas and rubber bullets on Occupy protesters, had participated in a similar
Israeli training program the year before, in 2010. The New York Police Department’s Demographics Unit, which illegally spies
on Arab and Muslim New Yorkers, was modeled on Israel’s practices in the West Bank. And the Los Angeles
Police Department traveled to Israel in 2013 to learn about drones and surveillance. Not long after, Los Angeles
became the first city to apply to the Federal Aviation Administration for a license to use drones and other forms of aerial technology for
policing. The LAPD’s IT chief commented, “As civilized nations, we are all confronted with, in many cases, the same enemy: the ever-growing
threat of terrorism and other criminal elements.” 41 Blackness hangs like a shadow as we are left to wonder what these “other” criminal
elements might be. Such exchanges expose the intimate relationship between the projection of state power inward in response to domestic
unrest, and its projection outward as warfare. This logic is also at work in civilian culture. Take, for example, a group of
Israeli students who dressed as Ku Klux Klan members and in blackface for a mock lynching during a
Purim festival.42 The principal of their school said she saw nothing wrong with the costumes. One might be tempted to dismiss the
incident as ignorance about the particular cultural context of lynching, but the fact that the principle condoned this re-
enactment of white supremacists about to commit a racially motivated vigilante execution actually
gives us insight into the racial architecture of Israel as a settler society. This event reminds us that in order to enact
indigenous genocide and displacement, settler societies have drawn upon the same language of racial threat and
criminality that has been invoked to justify anti-black violence since the end of Reconstruction.
Settler Colonialism Kritik
 1NC vs Policy
Civil Society reifies a temporal narrative that uses doomsday rhetoric to bracket out
the indigenous as “relics of the past” that are anathemas to progress—that instills a
linear futurism that absolves us of responsibility for settler colonialism
Lake 91, Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Southern California (Randall A., “BETWEEN MYTH AND HISTORY:
ENACTING TIME IN NATIVE AMERICAN PROTEST RHETORIC,” May 1991, The Quarterly Journal of Speech 77(2):123-151, accessed 12-13-12
//Bosley) *Evidence has been gendered modified

Nowhere is this contest more evident than in the on-going struggle among some contemporary Native Americans to withstand the manifold pressures of
assimilation and preserve a semblance of "traditional" tribal cultures. Their struggle is infused with temporal concerns: thoroughly (and painfully) cognizant of the
history of native/Euramerican relations on this continent, activists seek the meaning of this past, construe its relevance to their current condition, find in it their
purpose and tactics, and presage the final victory to come. Superficially, Red Power rhetoric is no different from that of other social movements in these respects;
all articulate a self-justificatory narrative that interweaves past, present, and future. Red Power's story, however, is unusual, and ought be of particular
concern to rhetorical scholars, for two reasons. First, it struggles against an especially well-developed and powerful Euramerican

narrative which, in telling the lessons of its own history, renders Native Americans relics of the past, thus absent from
(and logically, silent in) the present and irrelevant to the future. Second, Red Power rhetoric articulates a time

grounded in ritual that challenges prevailing Euramerican metaphors of time itself (expresses, that is, what Eliade
[1954; 1959, esp. pp. 68-113; 1963, esp. pp. 75-91] calls "sacred," as differentiated from "profane" time), and problematizes the very categories of

"past," "present," and "future." In short, the "shared time" of Native American protest rhetoric subverts
not only our own sense of the appropriate time for and timeliness of native activism, but also the very constructs with which we theorize

about the temporal dimensions of (their) rhetoric. This essay, then, examines certain temporal features of the Euramerican
establishment's discourse concerning Native Americans, and then the Red Power movement's responses thereto. In each case, I examine, first, the characterization
of Euramerican/native relations; second, the temporal metaphors that infuse these characterizations; and third, the discourse's rhetorical power and limitations. I
argue that both groups exploit the resources of metaphors of time in arguments concerning the relative superiority of native and Euramerican cultures, the meaning
and relevance of the "past," i.e., historical events in native/Euramerican relations, to the contemporary Native American activist cause, and the inevitability of the
triumph of one way of life over the other. However, because movement and establishment invoke different metaphors, the claims made and the shared time
created are starkly opposed. Drawing principally upon time's arrow, Euramerican discourse characterizes native cultures as outdated and regressive, native history
as uncorrectable (if regrettable), and native activism as a historical anachronism. Activist rhetoric, in contrast, exploits primarily time's circle to characterize native
"history" as an on-going tale of injustice, the modern movement as the fulfillment of ancient prophecies, and native cultures as the sort to which all human life will
turn to survive.3 Finally, I consider implications of this analysis. The Iron Law of History and the Native Other . . . How should I live? Among my people a small voice?
In your world silent? Among my people there is no horizon In your world I have seen the universe contained in glass . . . "[M]ost commentators on

American culture," contends Arnold Krupat (1989, p. 3), "generally have managed to proceed as though there were no relation between the two, white and
red, Euramerican and Native American, as if absence rather than avoidance defined the New World: as if America was indeed 'virgin land,' empty,

uninhabited, silent, dumb until the Europeans brought the plow and the pen to cultivate its wilderness." From the earliest days, however,

settlers seeking to carve out a "civilization" in this land confronted the persistent and awkward fact that the New
World was anything but empty and silent. And so, as Pearce (1953), among others, has documented amply, this "civilization"
came to define itself in opposition to native "savagism."4 At first, driven by the aggressive spirit of Puritan Protestantism,
"civilization" articulated a rhetoric of "salvationism," which Krupat (1989, p. 142) describes as "the discursive equivalent of a glass
trained on heaven through which all this world must be seen," and which narrowed the native horizon fundamentally to conversion and extermination. In the
second quarter of the nineteenth century, this discourse became secularized, and God's will became an evolutionary law of nature (Krupat, 1989, p. 142).
Salvationism became assimilationism. As Commissioner of Indian Affairs Morgan (cited in Forbes, 1964, p. 114) put it bluntly in 1889, natives were to "conform to
the fate of the
the White man's ways, peaceably if they will, forceably if they must. . ." But whether decreed in heaven or on earth, by divine will or history,

natives was sealed, to be supplanted by the inevitable march of American civilization. As "one who had no
right to be heard from" (Frost, 1949, p. 179), the savage Other was, finally and irrevocably, to be silenced. The
denouement of this narrative is the familiar theme of the "vanishing [Native] red man." The belief that primitive
native societies must and would give way before the advancing tide of Euramerican civilization, either to be absorbed or crushed, has a long history. Count Alexis de
Tocqueville (cited in McNickle, 1973, p. 3) remarked in 1831: "The Indians have been ruined by a competition which they had not the means of sustaining." A
century ago, a West Point cadet named Custer (cited in Steiner, 1968, p. x) lamented the passing of the race in a term paper for his ethics class: "The red man is
alone in his misery. We behold him now on the verge of extinction, standing on his last foothold . . . and soon he will be talked of as a noble race who once existed
but have passed away." In 1911, Boas (cited in Steiner, 1968, p. xi) noted that the proportion of people with Indian blood "is so insignificant that it may well be
disregarded," for the race had "vanished comparatively rapidly." Three years later, Moorehead (1914, p. 10) lamented that "we have brought about the extinction
of tribal and communistic life among the Indians." The theme of inevitable doom was common "in song and story," and exemplified by James E. Fraser's equestrian
statue, "The End of the Trail," first shown at the 1915 San Francisco Exposition (McNickle, 1973, p. 3). Doomsaying continued into the middle of this century. In his
1932 chronicle, The Passing American, Linderman (cited in Steiner, 1968, p. xi) observed that even the Indian had forgotten the Indian: "The young Indians know
next to nothing about their people . . . and now it is too late to learn." Journalist John Keats (cited in Steiner, 1968, p. xi) echoed this sentiment in 1964, asking: "But,
who speaks for the Indian? Amazingly his cause is almost without rebels to support it." The closing line of Paul Radin's The Story of the American Indian (1927/1937,
p. 371) stressed the finality of the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee: "The white man had triumphed . . . the Indians were crushed. Their nerve was gone. Broken,
disorganized, externally and internally they gave up the fight." In this way, the theme of the vanishing red man voices the evolutionary claim that time, indeed,
marches on. Ironically, many of these pronouncements were sounded by observers acutely sympathetic to the plight of Native Americans. To a degree, the theme
of the vanishing red man, like its cousin the noble savage, romanticizes native people and martyrs them to Euramerican greed and racism. Yet, the
portrayal
of their inevitable doom almost absolves whites of culpability, fixing blame instead on the inexorable march of
abstract forces like "progress." Unsurprisingly, this theme quickly became a self-fulfilling prophecy, legitimizing
even greater incursions upon the lands and liberties of native people (McNickle, 1973, p. 62). As Native Americans
occupied an ever-smaller part of the real world, to the general public they increasingly lived on only in the romantic fictions of literature and Hollywood (Forbes,
1964, p. 13; Friar & Friar, 1972), thereby cementing their consignment to history and, thus, irrelevancy. It is important to appreciate that this
Euramerican
narrative relies for its temporal structure on time's arrow, which itself has come to play a vital part in Euramerican thinking on
the subject over the centuries. Nowhere is this better shown than in Toulmin and Goodfield's well-known The Discovery of Time (1965), in which the authors trace
the "gradual emergence of a continuing sense of history out of earlier mythological and theological" conceptions of Nature (p. 15), argue that, by the nineteenth
century, all natural sciences save physics and chemistry had rejected the a priori categories of Greek thought in favor of an historical consciousness (p. 247); and
conclude that even the "laws of nature" may be discovered to be, not immutable, but subject to evolutionary change over time (pp. 263-265). Highly influential in
solidifying the position of time's arrow has been Christianity, in
which time—one product of the Creation—unfolds unidirectionally the
continuous action of God through history, progressing from the past into the future, until the
eschatological end of time foretold in Revelation as Christ's second coming (Puech, 1957/1983, p. 40).5 Further, in a
process akin to what Burke (1966, pp. 380-409; 1945/1969, pp. 430-440) calls the "temporizing of essences," time's arrow is frequently normative. The history of the
idea of "progress" is not coincident with that of "history" itself, and the former is in some respects at odds with the Christian story of the Fall and subsequent
degeneration. Nonetheless, "progress"is one ethical extension of the doctrines of history and Darwinism, and, like them, denies
alternative conceptions such as time's cycle (Bury, 1932/1960, esp. pp. xi—xxix, 334—349). In linear time, the inexorable march of
progress ensures that all events necessarily and certainly must become merely historical, superceded by the

superior future (Bury, 1932/1960, p. 109). Thus, anteriority comes to signify inferiority while posteriority implies superiority (Brown, 1982, p. 117), as
evidenced by evolution's infamous sociopolitical cousins, Social Darwinism and Manifest Destiny (on the latter, see Bass & Cherwitz,
1978). In sum, the story of civilization's triumph over savagism presupposes a linear time in which each present moment becomes the past (or falls into "history") as
life proceeds toward a qualitatively different future. This procession is inevitable and irreversible; history never literally repeats itself. And because the unfolding
future typically is conceived not only as different, but also as better, "living in the past" is anathema to the "progressive spirit."
As one among a host of stories that symbolize human experience in predominately linear terms, the narrative is rooted deeply in Euramerican thought.6 And in
consigning Native Americans to the past, it sentenced them to metaphoric and literal death. Pearce's (1953) analysis is telling and merits extended quotation:
Westward American progress would, in fact, be understood to be reproducing this historical progression [from a
lesser to a greater good, from the simple to the complex, from savagism to civilization]; and the savage would be understood as
one who had not and somehow could not progress into the civilized, who would inevitably be
destroyed by the civilized . . . For the Indian was the remnant of a savage past away from which civilized men had struggled to grow. To study him
was to study the past. To civilize him was to triumph over the past. To kill him was to kill the past. History would thus be the key to the moral worth of cultures; the
history of American civilization would thus be conceived as threedimensional, progressing from past to present, from east to west, from lower to higher, (p. 49) This
narrative is itself timeless, perennially available as a rhetorical resource .
Time's arrow treats past events as irretrievably past, as
strictly historical. Argumentatively, even when the vector from past to future is "smooth,"
"continuous," or "unbroken," the past nonetheless is dissociated from the present which, while perhaps the
product of the former, is a qualitatively different stage in evolutionary advance. Thus, time's arrow furnishes a powerful way to cast vestigial traditional Native
American life and efforts to sustain that life as anachronistic. Forms of this strategy recur today in Euramerican reactions to contemporary native activism.

Colonialism necessitates genocide and symbolic death as war becomes a permanent

relation
Harting 6 – Associate Professor of English at the University of Montreal (Heike, “Global Civil War and Post-colonial Studies,” from the
Globalization and Autonomy Online Compendium, globalautonomy.ca/global1/servlet/Xml2pdf?fn=RA_Harting_GlobalCivilWar)//George

The Necropolitics of Global Civil War As with other civil wars, global
civil war affects society as a whole. It "tends," as Hardt and Negri
argue, "towards the absolute" (2004, 18) in that it
polices civil society through elaborate security and surveillance
systems, negates the rule of law, militarizes quotidian space, diminishes civil rights to the degree in which it increases torture, illegal
incarceration, disappearances, and emergency regulations, and fosters a culture of fear, intolerance, and violent
discrimination. Hardt and Negri, therefore, rightly argue that war itself has become "a permanent social relation" and
thereby the "primary organizing principle of society, and politics merely one of its means or guises" (ibid., 12). What Hardt and Negri
suggest is new about today's global civil war is its biopolitical agenda. "War," they write, "has become a regime of biopower, that is, a form of rule aimed not only at
controlling the population but producing and reproducing all aspects of social life" (ibid., 13). For example, the biopolitics of war entails the production of particular
economic and cultural subjectivities, "creating new hearts and minds through the construction of new circuits of communication, new forms of social collaboration,
and new modes of interaction" (ibid., 81). The ambiguity of Hardt and Negri's notion of biopower subtly resides in their adaptation of the language of social and
political revolution, for it seems to be the regime of biopower, rather than the multitude, that absorbs and transvalues the revolutionary, that is, anti-colonial, spirit
inscribed in the rhetoric of "new hearts and minds." At the same time, they argue, that a
biopolitical definition of war "changes war's
entire legal framework" (ibid., 21-22), for "whereas war previously was regulated through legal structures, war
has become regulating by constructing and imposing its own legal framework" (ibid. 22). If none of this, at least in my
mind, is marked by a particular originality of thought, then this may have to do with Hardt and Negri's reluctance to address the historical continuities between
earlier wars of decolonization and contemporary global wars, the legacies of imperialism, and the imperative of race in orchestrating imperial, neo-colonial, and
today's global civil wars. In fact, while biopolitical global warfare might be a new phenomenon on the sovereign territory of the United States of
America, specifically after 11 September 2001, it is hardly news to "people in the former colonies, who," as Crystal Bartolovich points

out, "have long lived at the 'crossroads' of global forces" (2000, 136), violence, and wars. For example, in Sri Lanka global
civil war has been a permanent, everyday reality since the country's Sinhala Only Movement in 1956, and become manifest in the normalization of racialized
violence as a means of politics since President Jayawardene's election campaign for a referendum in 1982, which led to the state-endorsed anti-Tamil pogrom in
1983. Similarly, according to Achille Mbembe, biopolitical warfare was intrinsic to the European imperial project in "Africa," where "war machines emerged" as early
as "the last quarter of the twentieth century" (2003, 33). In other words, although Hardt and Negri argue convincingly that it is the ubiquity of global war that
restructures social relationships on the global and local level, their concept tends to dehistoricize different genealogies and effects of global civil war. Indeed, not
only do Hardt and Negri refrain from reading wars of decolonization as central to the construction of what David Harvey sees as the uneven "spatial exchange
relations" (2003, 31) necessary for the expansion of capital accumulation and of which global war is an intrinsic feature, but they also dissociate global civil wars
from the nation-state's still thriving ability to implement and exercise rigorous regimes of violence and surveillance. As for the term's epistemological formation,
global civil war has been sanitized and no longer evokes the conventional association of civil war with "insurrection and resistance" (Agamben 2005, 2). Instead, it
has become the effect of a diffuse new sovereignty (i.e., Hardt and Negri's Empire), a sovereignty that no longer decides over but has itself become a disembodied,
that is, denationalized and normalized, state of exception. Yet, to talk about the disembodiment of global war not only reinforces media-supported ideologies of
high-tech precision wars without casualties, but it also represses narratives about the ways in which the modi operandi of global war come to be embodied
differently in different sites of war. In her short story "Man Without a Mask" (1995), the Sri Lankan writer Jean Arasanayagam describes the global dimensions of a
war that is usually considered an ethnic civil war restricted to internally competing claims to territorial, cultural, and national sovereignty between the country's
Sinhalese and Tamil population. Told by an elite mercenary who clandestinely works for the ruling members of the government and leads a group of highly trained
assassins, the story follows the thoughts of its narrator and contemplates the politicization of violence and death. As a mercenary and possibly an ex-SAS (British
Special Air Service) veteran the Sri Lankan Government hired after the failure of the Indo-Lankan Accord, the narrator signifies the "privatization of [Sri Lanka's] war"
(Tambiah 1996, 6) and, thus, the reign of a global free market economy through which the state hands over its institutions and services to private corporations,
including its army, and profits from the unrestricted global and illegal trade in war technologies. Like a craftsman, the mercenary finds satisfaction in the precision
and methodical cleanliness of his work, in being, as he says, "a hunter. Not a predator" in his ability to leave "morality" out of "this business" (Arasanayagam 1995,
98). He is an extreme and perverted version of what Martin Shaw describes as the " 'soldier-scholar,'???the archetype of the new [global] officer" (1999, 60). As a
self-proclaimed "scholar or scribe" (ibid., 100), the mercenary plots maps of death. Shortly before he reaches his victim, a politician who underestimated the
political ambition of his enemy, he comments that bullet holes in a human body comprise a new kind of language: "The machine gun splutters. The body is pitted,
pricked out with an indecipherable message. They are the braille marks of the new fictions. People are still so slow to comprehend their meaning" (ibid., 100). These
new maps or fictions of global war, I suggest, describe what Etienne Balibar calls ultra-objective and ultra-subjective violence and characterize how global civil war
both generates bare life and manages and instrumentalizes death. According to Balibar, ultra-objective violence suggests the systematic "naturalization of
asymmetrical relations of power" (2001, 27) brought about, for instance, by the Sri Lankan government's prolonged abuse of the Prevention of Terrorism Act, which,
in the past plunged the country into a permanent state of emergency, facilitated the random arrest of and almost absolute rule over citizens, and thus created a
culture of fear and a reversal of moral and social values. As the story clarifies, under conditions of systematic or ultra-objective violence, "corruption" becomes
"virtue" and "the most vile" man wears the mask of the sage and "innocent householder" (Arasanayagam 1995, 102). In this milieu, the mercenary has no need for a
mask, because he bears a face of ordinary violence that is "perfectly safe" (ibid., 102) in a society structured by habitual and systemic violence. But the logic of the
"new fictions" of political violence is also ultra-subjective because it is "intentional" and has a "determinate goal" (Balibar 2001, 25), namely the making and
elimination of what Balibar calls "disposable people" in order to generate and maintain a profitable global economy of violence. The logic of ultra-subjective
violence presents itself through the fictions of ethnicity and identity as they are advanced and instrumentalized in the name of national sovereignty. The mercenary
perfectly symbolizes what Balibar means when he writes that "we have entered a world of the banality of objective cruelty" (ibid.). For if the fictions of global
violence are scratched into the tortured bodies of war victims, the mercenary's detached behavior dramatizes a "will to 'de-corporation'," that is, to force
disaffiliation from the other and from oneself ??? not just from belonging to the community and the political unity, but from the human condition" (ibid.). In other
words, while global civil war becomes embodied in those whom it negates as social beings and thereby reduces to
mere "flesh," it remains a disembodied enterprise for those who manage and orchestrate the politics of
death of global war. It is through the dialectics of the embodiment and disembodiment of global
violence that the dehumanization of the majority of the globe's population takes on a normative and
naturalized state of existence. Arasanayagam's short story also casts light on the limitations of Hardt and Negri's understanding of the biopolitics of
global civil war, for the latter can account neither for the new fictions of violence in former colonial spaces nor for what Mbembe calls the "necropolitics"

(2003, 11) of late modernity. Mbembe's term refers to his analysis of global warfare as the continuation of earlier

and the development of new "forms of subjugation of life to the power of death" and its attendant reconfiguration of
the "the relationship between resistance, sacrifice, and terror" (2003, 39). 4 Despite the many theoretical intersections of Hardt and Negri's and Mbembe's work,
Mbembe's notion of necropolitics sees contemporary warfare as a species of such earlier "topographies of cruelty" (2003, 40) as the plantation system and the
colony. Thus, in contrast to Hardt and Negri, Mbembe argues that the
ways in which global violence and warfare produce
subjectivities cannot be dissociated from the ways in which race serves as a means of both deciding over
life and death and of legitimizing and making killing without impunity a customary practice of imperial
population control. If global civil war is a continuation of imperial forms of warfare, it must rely on strategies of embodiment, that is, of politicizing and
racializing the colonized or now "disposable" body for purposes of self-legitimization, specifically when taking decisions over the value of human life. After all, on a
global level, race propels the ideological dynamics of ethnic and global civil war, while, on the local plane, it serves to orchestrate the brutalization and polarization
of the domestic population, reinforcing and enacting patterns of racist exclusion and violence on the non-white body. In contrast to Hardt and Negri, then, Mbembe
invites us to articulate imperial genealogies for the necropolitics of today's global civil wars. In other words, if imperialism was a form of perpetual low-intensity
global war, the biopolitics of imperialism aimed at creating different forms of subjectivization. For example, while in India, the imperial administration sought to
create a functional class of native informants, in Africa and the Caribbean, the British Empire created the figure of homo sacer. The latter, as Agamben argues, refers
to the one who can be killed but not sacrificed. Homo sacer, Agamben clarifies, constitutes "the originary exception in which human life is included in the political
order in being exposed to an unconditional capacity to be killed" (1998, 85). Thus, the native is included in the imperial order only through her exclusion, while,
simultaneously her humanity is stripped of social life and transformed into bare life, ready to be commodified on slavery's auction blocs and foreclosed from the
dominant imperial psyche. Agamben's understanding of bare life derives from his reading of the Nazi death camps as the paradigmatic space of modernity in which
the distinction between "fact and law" (ibid., 171), "outside and inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit" (ibid., 170) dissolves and in which biopolitics takes the
place of politics and "homo sacer" replaces the "citizen" (ibid., 171). While the notion of bare life is instrumental for theorizing biopolitics and the normalization and
legalization of state violence under the pretense of, for example, protective arrests and preemptive strikes, it also suggests that the human body can be read as
pure matter or in empirical terms. What goes unnoticed is to what extent the production of bare life depends on ideologies of race, that is, on the racialization of
bodies, citizenship, and the concept of the human. For instance, under imperial rule, bare life is subjected to death and its politics in ways slightly different from
those suggested by Agamben. More specifically, the killing of natives or slaves as bare life ??? then and today, as Rwanda's race-based genocide clarifies ??? not
only configures human life in terms of its "capacity to be killed" (Agamben 1998, 114), that is as homicide and genocide outside of law and
accountability, but also measures the value of human life on grounds of race. The making of bare life is a racialized and racializing process
rooted within the necropolitics of colonialism. For, killing the native or slave presupposes the remaking of the human into
bare life both through ideologies of pseudo-scientific racism and by subjecting them to what Orlando Patterson calls the "social death" (1982,
38) of the slave, that is, to a symbolic death of the human as a communal and social being that precedes physical

death. 5 Thus, imperialism's necropolitics involves the making of disposable lives through practices of zombification and the "redefinition of death" itself
(Agamben 1998, 161). In this sense, imperialism not only facilitated the extreme forms of racialized violence

characteristic of global civil war, but it also helped create the conditions for making bare life the
acceptable state of being for the present majority of the globe's population. Not unlike Jean Arasanayagam's short story,
Mbembe's account of the Rwandan genocide and the Palestinian intifada suggests that the new global subjectivities are not so much the networked multitude
Hardt and Negri imagine. Rather, emerging from the "new fictions" of global war, they are the suicide bomber, the mercenary, the martyr, the child soldier, the
victim of mass rape, the refugee, the woman dispossessed of her family and livelihood, the mutilated civilian, and the skeleton of the disappeared and murdered
victims of global civil war. What these subjectivities witness is that, on one hand, living under conditions of global civil war means to live in "permanent???pain"
(Mbembe 2003, 39) and, on the other hand, they refer back to the dialectical mechanisms of colonial violence. For under the Manichaean pressures of colonialism,
colonial violence always inaugurates a double process of subjection and subject formation. Frantz Fanon famously argues that anti-colonial violence operates
historically on both collective and individual subject formation. For, on the one hand, "the native discovers reality [colonial alienation] and transforms it into the
pattern of this customs, into the practice of violence and into his plan for freedom" (1963, 58), and on the other, a violent "war of liberation" instills in the individual
a sense of "a collective history" (ibid., 93). Thus, as Robert Young suggests, anti-colonial violence "functions as a kind of psychotherapy of the oppressed" (2001,
295). Yet, it seems that read through the necropolitics of imperialism, global civil warfare no longer aims at the "pacification" of the colonial subject or the
"degradation" of the "postcolonial subject" (ibid., 293) but, as I suggested earlier, at the complete abolishment of the human per se. We may therefore say that if
global civil war produces new subjectivities, it does so through, what I have referred to as a process of zombification. Understood as sustained acts of negation,
zombification ??? a term that harks back to Fanon ??? refers to a dialectical process of the embodiment and disembodiment of global war. The former refers to the
exercise of ultra-objective violence ??? that is, the systematic "naturalization of asymmetrical relations of power" (Balibar 2001, 27) ??? in order to regulate,
racialize, and extinguish human life at will, while the latter suggests the production of narratives of "de-corporation" (ibid., 25) and detachment by those who
manage and administrate global civil war. The notion of zombification, however, connotes not only the exercise of, but also the exorcism of, the ways in which
global war is scripted on and through the racialized body. Thus, a post-colonial understanding of global war needs to think through the necropolitics of war,
including the uneven value historically and presently assigned to human life and the politicization of death. The latter issue will be addressed in the last section of
this paper. The next section examines the cultural production and perpetuation of normative narratives of global warfare. The Rhetoric of the Archaic and Michael
Ondaatje's "Anil's Ghost" Published shortly after Sri Lanka's civil war became entangled with the global politics of the South and the rise of the Sri Lankan nation-
state to one of the war's principal and most corrupt actors, Ondaatje's novel Anil's Ghost dramatizes both the transformation of the country's civil war into a
permanent state of exception and the failure of global non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to intervene in the war's rising human rights abuses and violent
excesses. While the novel presents an extraordinary search for social justice through narrative and seeks to understand the operative modes of violence beyond
their historical and social configurations, it also tends to sublimate and aestheticize violence by treating it as a normative element of human and, indeed, planetary
life. My purpose here is to indicate that the novel's own project of dramatizing the complicity between religious and secular, anti-colonial and nationalist agents of
war, and civilians and global actors (i.e., NGOs) remains compromised by the novel's aesthetic investment in a particular rhetoric of the archaic. The latter, I argue,
unwittingly coincides with normative narratives of global war and facilitates the reader's detachment from the ways in which the Global North has reconstructed
global life as a permanent state of exception. Ondaatje's novel (2000) opens with an Author's Note that locates the narrative at a time when "the antigovernment
insurgents in the south and the separatist guerrillas in the north???had declared war on the government" and "legal and illegal government squads were???sent out
to hunt down" both groups. In this instance, the Hobbesian rhetoric of a "war of all against all" is more than a clich??. In fact, it is symptomatic of the novel's
ambiguous critique of the role of the Sri Lankan nation-state and its elaborate, modernist discourse of violence. The Note foreshadows what the narrator later
repeats on several occasions, namely that Sri Lanka's war is a war fought "for the purpose of war" (ibid., 98) and for which "[t]here is no hope of affixing blame"
(ibid., 17). In short, the "reason for war was war" (ibid., 43). At first glance, the narrative's emphasis on the war's self-perpetuating dynamics implies a Hobbesian
understanding of violence as the natural state of human existence. At the same time, it translates the actual politics of Sri Lanka's war into the Deleuzean idiom of
the "war machine." For, according to Deleuze and Guattari, armed conflict functions outside the control and accountability of the "state apparatus???prior to its
laws" (1987, 352), and beyond its initial causes. Although such an interpretation of Sri Lanka's war reflects what the political scientist Jayadeva Uyangoda calls the
"intractability of the Sri Lankan crisis" (1999, 158), its political and ethical stakes outweigh its gains. 6 To begin with, the novel's leitmotif of "perpetual war" situates
Sri Lanka's conflict within a general context of global war, because, as the narrator reports, it is fought with "modern weaponry," supported by "backers on the
sidelines in safe countries," and "sponsored by gun-and drug-runners" (Ondaajte 2000, 43). In this scenario, the rule of law has deteriorated into "a belief
in???revenge" (ibid., 56), and the state is either absent or part of the country's all-consuming anarchy of violence. This absence suggests that the state no longer
functions, in Max Weber's famous words, as "a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given
territory" (2002, 13). It is of course possible to argue that the novel's critique of the Sri Lankan nation-state lies in its absence. It seems to me, however, that
the
narrative's tendency to locate the dynamics of Sri Lanka's war outside the state and within a post-national vision of a new global order
generates a normative narrative of global war. On the one hand, it resonates with the popular ??? though
misleading ??? notion that the "appearance of 'failed states'," as Samuel Huntington argues in his controversial study The Clash of Civilizations,
intensifies "tribal, ethnic, and religious conflict" and thus "contributes to [the] image of a world in anarchy" (1996, 35). On the

other, situating Sri Lanka's war outside the institutions of the state re-inscribes a Hobbesian notion of violence
that helps legitimize and cultivate structural violence as a permissive way of conducting politics. Such a
reading of violence, however, overlooks that in a global context violence has become "profoundly anti-Hobbesian" (Balibar 2001, xi). Balibar usefully suggests that
the twentieth century history of extreme violence has made it impossible to regard violence as "a structural condition that precedes institutions." Instead, he
maintains, "we have had to accept???that extreme violence is not post-historical but actually post-institutional." It "arises from institutions as much as it arises
against them" (ibid., xi). Thus, in such popular post-colonial narratives of war as Anil's Ghost, the normalization of violence figures as a forgetting of the institutional
entrenchment and historical use of violence as a state-sanctioned political practice. If Ondaatje's novel presents Sri Lanka's war as an "inherently violent" event (Das
1998), it is also an event narrated through the symbolism and logic of archaic primitivism. For example, in the novel's central passage on the nature of human
violence, the narrator observes, "The most precisely recorded moments of history lay adjacent to the extreme actions of nature or civilisation ???Tectonic slips and
brutal human violence provided random time-capsules of unhistorical lives???A dog in Pompeii. A gardener in Hiroshima" (Ondaatje 2002, 55). The symbolic leveling
of the arbitrariness of primordial chaos and the apparently ahistorical anarchism of violence create a rhetoric of the archaic that is characteristic, as Nancy argues,
of "anything that is properly to be called war" (2000, 128). He convincingly argues that archaic symbolism "indicates that [war] escapes from being part of 'history'
understood as the progress of a linear/or cumulative time" and can be rearticulated as no more than a "regrettable" remnant of an earlier age (ibid., 128). In that,
Nancy's observation coincides with Hardt and Negri's that the "war on terror" employs a medievalist rhetoric of just and unjust wars
that moralizes rather than legitimizes the use of global violence by putting it outside the realm of reason and critique.
In Nancy's observation, however, two things are at stake. First, what initially appears to be a postmodern critique of the grand narratives of history in fact
demonstrates that a non-linear account of history may lend itself to the transformation of extreme violence into exceptional events. In this way violence is
normalized as a transhistorical category that fails to address the unequal political and economic
relations of power, which lie at the heart of global wars. Second, Nancy rightly warns us against treating war as an archaic relic that
is "tendentiously effaced in the progress and project of a global humanity" (2000, 128). For not only does war return in the process of negotiating sovereignty on a
global and local plane, but the representation of war in terms of archaic images also repeats a primordialist explanation of what are structurally new wars. As
theorists such as Appadurai and Kaldor have argued, the primordialist hypothesis of global wars merely reinforces those
mass mediated images of global violence that dramatize ethnic wars as pre-modern, tribalist forms of
strife. Huntington's notion of civilization or "fault-line" wars as communal conflicts born out of the break-up of earlier political formations, demographic changes,
and the collision of mutually exclusive religions and civilizations presents the most prominent and politically influential version of a primordialist and bipolar
conceptualization of global war. In contrast to Huntington's approach, however, the narrative of Anil's Ghost contends that all forms of violence "have come into
their comparison" (Ondaatje 2000, 203). Notwithstanding its universalizing impetus, the novel thus insists on the impossibility to think the nation and a new global
order outside the technologies of violence and modernity. Indeed, in the novel's narrative it is the suffering of all war victims that "has come into their comparison"
and suggests that the new wars breed a culture of violence that shapes everyone's life yet for which no one appears to be accountable. On the one hand, then, the
novel's self-critical humanitarian project seeks to initiate a communal and individual process of mourning by naming, and therefore accounting for, in Anil's words,
"the unhistorical dead" (ibid, 56). On the other hand, read as its critical investment in the war's politics of complicity, the novel's humanitarian endeavor is
countered by the narrator's tendency to articulate violence in archaic and anarchistic terms. For, to revert to the symbolic language of "primitivism and anarchy"
and "to treat [the new wars] as natural disasters," as Kaldor observes (2001, 113), designates a common way of dealing with them. Thus the
rhetoric of
the archaic not merely dehistoricizes violence but contributes to the making of a normative and popular
imaginary through which to make global wars thinkable and comprehensible. Thus, their violent excesses appear to
be rooted in primordialist constructions of the failed post-colonial nation-state rather than a phenomenon with
deep-seated roots in the global histories of the present. Such a normative imaginary of global war is
produced for the Global North so as to dehistoricize its own position in the various colonial processes of
nation formation and global economic restructuring of the Global South. In this way, as Ondaatje's novel equally
demonstrates, the Global North can detach itself from the Global South and create the kind of historical and cultural distance needed to accept ultra-objective
violence as a normative state of existence. Conceptualizing war as a phenomenon of criminal and anarchistic violence, however, may do more than merely conform
to the popular imagination about the chaotic and untamable nature of contemporary warfare. Indeed, anarchistic notions of violence tend to compress the grand
narratives and petite recits of history into a total, singular present of perpetual uncertainty, fear, and political confusion and generate what the post-colonial
anthropologist David Scott sees as Sri Lanka's "dehistoricized" history. Given the important role the claiming of ancient Sinhalese and Hindu history played in the
violent identity politics that drive Sri Lanka's war, Scott suggests that devaluing or dehistoricizing history as a founding category of Sri Lanka's narrative of the nation
breaks the presumably "natural???link between past identities and the legitimacy of present political claims" (1999, 103). This strategy seems useful because it
uncouples Sri Lanka's colonially shaped and glorified Sinhalese past from its present claims to political power. We need to note, however, that, according to Scott,
dehistoricizing the past does not suggest writing from a historical vacuum. Rather, it refers to a process of denaturalizing and, thus, de-legitimizing the normative
narratives of ethnicized and racialized narratives of national identity. Anil's Ghost engages in this process of "dehistoricizing" by foregrounding the fictitious and
fragmented, the elusive and ephemeral character of history. Indeed, as the historian Antoinette Burton suggests, the novel offers "a reflection on the continued
possibility of History itself as an exclusively western epistemological form" (2003, 40). The latter clearly finds expression in what Sarath's brother, Gamini, condemns
as "the last two hundred years of Western political writing" (Ondaatje 2000, 285). Steeped in the imperial project of the West, such writing is facilitated by and
serves to erase the figure of the non-European cultural Other in order to produce and maintain what Jacques Derrida famously called the
"white mythology" (1982, 207) of Western metaphysics. The novel usefully extends its reading of violence into a related critique of knowledge
production, so that the latter becomes legible as being complicit in the production of perpetual violence and war. This critique is perhaps most
articulated through the character of Palipana, Sarath's teacher and Sri Lanka's formerly renowned but now fallen anthropologist. Once an agent of Sri Lanka's anti-
colonial liberation movement, Palipana represents the generation of cultural nationalist who sought history and national identity in an essentially Sinhalese culture
and natural environment. Rather than employing empirical and colonial methods of knowledge production and historiography, Palipana had left the path of
scientific objectivity, tinkered with translations of historical texts, and "approached runes???with the pragmatic awareness of locally inherited skills" (Ondaatje
2000, 82) until "the unprovable truth emerged" (ibid., 83). Now, years after his fall from scientific grace, Palipana lives the life of an ascetic, following the "strict
principles of" a "sixth-century sect of monks" (ibid., 84). To him, history and nature have become one, for "all history was filled with sunlight, every hollow was filled
with rain" (ibid., 84). Yet, Ondaatje's construction of Palipana and his account of the eye-painting ritual of a Buddha statue ??? a ritual that assumes a central place
in the novel's cosmopolitan vision of artisanship as a practice of cultural and religious syncretism in the service of post-conflict community building ??? are
themselves built on a number of historical texts listed in the novel's "Acknowledgment" section. As Antoinette Burton astutely observes, "the orientalism of some of
the texts on Ondaatje's list is astonishing, a phenomenon which suggests the ongoing suppleness of 'history' as an instrument of political critique and ideological
intervention" (2003, 50). Rather than effectively "dehistorizing" the character of Palipana, then, Ondaatje bases this character and the eye-painting ceremony on a
central Sri Lankan modernist text, Ananada K. Coomaraswamy's Mediaeval Sinhalese Art (1908/1956). Cont For Hardt and Negri, then, the state of exception
functions as the universal condition and legitimization of global civil war, while positioning the United States as a global power, which transforms war "into the
primary organizing principle of society" (2004, 12). They rightly observe that the state of exception blurs the boundaries between peace and war, violence and
mediation. Yet, curiously enough, Hardt and Negri's understanding of the state of exception largely emphasizes the concept's regulatory and pragmatic politics, so
that the United States emerges as a sovereign power on grounds of its ability to decide on the state of exception. By exempting itself from international law and
courts of law, protecting its military from being subjected to international control, allowing preemptive strikes, and engaging in torture and illegal detention (ibid.,
8), the United States instrumentalizes and maintains war as a state of exception in the name of global security and thus seeks to consolidate its hegemonic role
within Empire. Although Hardt and Negri openly disagree with Agamben's reading of the state of exception as defining "power itself as a 'monopoly of violence' "
(2004, 364), it seems to me that Agamben's theory of the state of exception, as put forward in Homo Sacer rather than in States of Exception, might be usefully read
alongside Hardt and Negri's crucial claim that global civil war as well as resistance movements depend on the "production of subjectivity" through immaterial labour
(2000, 66). What this argument overlooks is that, according to Agamben, the state of exception constitutes an abject space or "a zone of indistinction between
outside and inside, exclusion and inclusion" (1998, 181), where subjectivity enters a political and legal order solely on grounds of its exclusion. Moreover, the
sovereign ??? albeit a nation, sovereign power, or global network of power ??? can only transform the rule of law into the force of law by suspending the legal
system from a position that is simultaneously inside and outside the law. Through these mechanisms of exclusion and contradiction, subjectivity is not so much
created as it is deprived of its social and political relationships. Thus the "originary activity" of global civil war is the violent conflation of political and social
relationship and thereby the "production of bare life" (ibid., 83), of life that need not be accounted for, as is the case with the civilian casualties of the US-led war
against Iraq. The state of exception, however, also figures as a prominent concept in post-colonial theory, for it raises questions not only about the ways in which
we configure the human but also how we understand imperial or global war. In 1940, Benjamin famously wrote, "the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the
'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight" (1968, 257).
Benjamin's statement, as Homi Bhabha reminds us half a century later in his essay "Interrogating Identity," can be usefully advanced for a critical analysis of the
dialectical ??? if not revolutionary ??? relationship between oppression, violence, and anti-colonial historiography. Indeed, "the state of emergency," as Bhabha
says, "is also always a state of emergence" (1994, 41). Read in the context of today's global state of exception, namely the recurrence and intensification of ethnic
civil wars across the globe and the coincidence of democratic and totalitarian forms of political rule, Bhabha's statement entails a number of risks and suggestions
for a post-colonial historiography of global civil war. First, Bhabha's notion of emergency/emergence reflects his critical reading of Fanon's vision of national identity
and thus reconsiders the state of emergency as a possible site of "the occult instability where the people dwell" (Fanon 1963, 227) and give birth to popular
movements of national liberation. In this context, the state of exception might be understood as both constitutive to the alienation that is intrinsic to liberation
movements and instrumental for a radical euphoria and excessive hope that create and spectralize the post-colonial nation-state as a deferred promise of
decolonization. It is through this perspective that we can critically evaluate Hardt and Negri's endorsement of what they call "democratic violence" (2004, 344). This
kind of violence, they argue, belongs to the multitude. It is neither creative nor revolutionary but used on political rather than moral grounds. When organized
horizontally, according to democratic principles of decision making, democratic violence serves as a means of defending "the accomplishments" of "political and
social transformation" (ibid., 344). Notwithstanding the concept's romantic and utopian inflections, democratic violence also derives from Hardt and Negri's earlier
argument that "the great wars of liberation are (or should be) oriented ultimately toward a 'war against war,' that is, an active effort to destroy the regime of
violence that perpetuates our state of war and supports the systems of inequality and oppression." This, they conclude, is "a condition necessary for realizing the
democracy of the multitude" (ibid., 67). In one quick stroke, Hardt and Negri move anti-colonial liberation wars into their post-national paradigm of Empire and
divest them of their cultural and historical particularities. Moreover, translating explicitly national liberation movements into a universalizing narrative of global
pacifism precludes a critique of violence within its particular historical and philosophical formation. In contrast, a
post-colonial analysis of global
war must tease out the intersections between the ways in which racialized violence constitutes colonial
and post-colonial processes of nation formation and helps construct an absolute enemy through which
to legitimize global war and to abdicate responsibility for the dehumanizing effects of global economic
restructuring. Second, while Bhabha's pun is symptomatic of the resisting properties that he sees as operative in the various practices of colonial ambiguity,
it also, despite Benjamin's opinion, draws attention to the possibility that oppression alters the linear flow of Western history and challenges "the transparency of
social reality, as a pre-given image of human knowledge" (Bhabha 1994, 41). Here, Bhabha rightfully asks to what extent do states of emergency or acts of extreme
violence constitute a historical rupture and, more importantly, call into question the nature of the human subject. It is at this point that a post-colonial reading of
the state of exception fruitfully coincides with Agamben's notion of exception. For in both cases, the
focus of inquiry is the construction of
disposable life through the logic of necropower and the collapse of social and political relationships that
enable the exercise of particularly racialized forms of violence, including torture and disappearances. Third,
Bhabha's notion of the double movement of emergency and emergence envisions an anti-colonialist historiography in terms of a dialectical process of perpetual
transformation. It is at this point, however, that the coupling of emergency or exception and emergence becomes problematic for at least two reasons. First,
combining both terms prematurely translates the violence of the political event into that of metaphor
and risks erasing the micro- or quotidian narratives of violence ??? such as Arasanayagam's account of war ??? that both
legitimate and are perpetuated by political and social states of emergency. In order to examine the relationship between
global and communal forms of violence, a critical practice of post-colonial studies, I suggest, must reassess the term "transformation" and, concurrently, the
assumption that acts of extreme global violence can be advanced in the service of "making history" (Balibar 2001, 26). In other words, if, as Hannah Arendt argues,
there has been a historical "reluctance to deal with violence as a separate phenomenon in its own right" (2002, 25), it is time to examine the possibility of employing
post-colonial studies in the service of a non-dialectical critique of global war. This kind of critique must ask to what extent those on whose bodies extreme violence
was exercised are a priori excluded from articulating any transformative theory of violence. How, in other words, does bare life ??? if at all possible ??? attain the
status of subjectivity within the dehumanizing logic of exception or global civil war? Fourth, like Bhabha, we
need to take seriously Benjamin's
insight into the intrinsic relationship between violence and the conceptualization of history. Notwithstanding
Bhabha's pivotal argument that the violence of a "unitary notion of history" generates a "unitary," and therefore extremely violent, "concept of man" (1994, 42), I
wish to caution, alongside Benjamin's analysis of fascism, that what
enables today's global civil war is that even "its opponents
treat it as a historical norm" (Benjamin 1968, 257). What is at stake, then, in dominant as well as critical narratives of global civil war is their
representation as natural rather than political phenomena, and the acceptance of globalization as a political fait accompli. Both of these aspects, I believe,
contribute to the proliferation of dehistoricized concepts of the global increase of racialized violence and war. It seems to me, however, that the
enormous
rise of violence inflicted by global civil wars requires a post-colonial historiography and critique of global
war that questions notions of history based on cultural fragmentation, rupture, and totalization. Instead,
such a historiography must seek out patterns of connection and connectivity. But more importantly, as I have argued in
this paper, it must trace the post-colonial moment of global civil war and begin to read contemporary war through the

interconnected necropolitics of global and imperial warfare. Thus, to understand the logic and practice of global war we need to
develop a greater understanding precisely of those civil wars and national liberation wars that do not appear to threaten the new global order. Furthermore, a post-
colonial critique of global civil war should facilitate the decoding and rescripting of both the normalizing narratives and racialized embodiment of global civil
warfare.

The 1AC situates the educational commons at the intermediate level of institutions
which fosters detachment and disavows cultural relationality in favor of settler
colonial abstraction. The alternative is to abolish the epistemology of whiteness in
educational policy—that’s key for a more ethical politics of the common that counters
indigenous erasure.
Juarez and Pierce 17 (Anita, Graduate Student at University of Utah in Education. Clayton, Assistant Prof at Western Washington
University, “Educational Enclosure and the Existential Commons: Settler Colonialism, Racial Capitalism, and the Problem of the Human.” From
“AJ Means et al (eds), Educational Commons in Theory and Practice,” P 149-157//George)

Crucially, institutions of education have been one of the most contested sites where enclosure and commons
have been interrogated. This is in large part because creating economic and political dependency
requires teaching people that they are incapable of learning outside the purview of expert control and
that education is little more than a commodified product detached from autonomous social and cultural
concerns (Illich, 1971). In the field of educational theory, several scholars have argued for the need to move away from
forms of subjective enclosure caused by neoliberal, educational policy and curriculum, and toward
collective movements and spaces that can help facilitate subjectivities attuned to a politics of the
common (De Lissovoy, 2011; De Lissovoy et al, 2014; Lewis, 2012; Means, 2013; Schnyder, 2010; Slater, 2014). In jumping to a politics of
direct access around those different means of the commons, as the autonomist Marxist Massimo De Angelis suggests, we want to ask for
a collective pause that considers whether the move to direct access to the means of production
adequately deals with the foundational assumptions about who can be fully human in the future
commons. It is our contention that we must deeply reflect on how antiblackness and settler colonialism
complicate the idea of remaking our social existences through “direct access to the means of existence,
production and communication.” Here we would be in agreement with De Lissovoy et al (2014) that “a new common school
movement will need to challenge the whiteness of education,” and abolish schools in neoliberal society that are part of
a “racist containment of black and brown students in preparation for semipermanent marginalization within the flux of an uncertain service
economy and prison state” (pp 92-93). We would, however, suggest that one important place to start a radical educational movement based in
a commons that “confronts the violent ontology that determines these students as mere objects or disposable instances of ‘bare life’” is to
begin to articulate what an abolitionary pedagogy might entail within the neoliberal education context (p 93). Extending previous calls in
educational theory for developing an abolitionary pedagogy, we argue that it is important to link a theory and practice of abolitionary pedagogy
to the commons movement in education—reason being that the white world remains invested in an ontological basis of humanity that is
measured by the accumulatory white subject’s ability to extract material and psychic wealth from the less than human “dark world” (Allen,
2004; Gillborn, 2005; Leonardo, 2002, 2009l Pierce, 2013b; Watkins, 2005). In fact, the white world’s education has supported and normalized
this dehumanizing ethic. [11 Paragraphs Later…] Wilderson’s assertion of Black fungibility (a state of anti-Humanness)
and indigeneity (Savage) as semi-human recenters how we think of the commons and enclosure because it asks us to
focus on a more fundamental problem of modern society: Humanity (whiteness) is defined as predicated on the fungibility
of Black bodies and populations as well the genocide of Indigenous peoples and land dispossession. So, in this
case, a communing politics of education that emphasizes the direct control of communities over their
productive powers, or, for instance, in the critical pedagogy tradition, conscientization, would not necessarily deal
with the variety of ways antiblackness and Indigenous erasure is integral to educational inequality in the US.
Following Michael Dumas (2016), we would argue that recommoning education within communities needs to take up
the challenge of how the ontological condition of human (whiteness) would need to be abolished as the
originary act of enclosure in the modern and premodern era for a different paradigm of the “existential
commons” to emerge. The combined critiques made by Wilderson, Jackson, and Coulthard ultimately shed light on the
different levels of colonial violence—psychic and material—produced by the process of primitive accumulation and enclosures.
More specifically, it brings attention to two major matters: 1. The ways in which identity formation and modes of being
fluctuate between different axis of power, and 2. How subjects are differently positioned in relation to land,
labor, dispossession, and each other. It is their particular attentiveness to antiblackness and Indigenous dispossession
within settler colonial contexts that presents crucial implications for how the educational commons can be theorized. We
believe these analytics are especially necessary when discussing educational commons in relation to the
white settler state and its contemporary neoliberal reform policies.

Don’t default to settler “common sense”—challenging the epistemic basis for action is
a prereq to ethical policymaking
Deloria 99 – Member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and Professor at University of Colorado Boulder (Vine Deloria Jr., also Former
Executive Director for the National Congress of American Indians and former Professor of Political Science and Law at the University of Arizona,
For This Land: Writing on Religion in America, p. 101-7, //George)

If there were any serious concern about liberation we would see thousands of people simply walk away from the vast economic, political, and
intellectual machine we call Western civilization and refuse to be enticed to participate in it any longer. Liberation
is not a difficult task
when one no longer finds value in a set of institutions or beliefs. We are liberated from the burden of Santa
Claus and the moral demand to be “good” when, as maturing adolescents, we reject the concept of Santa Claus.
Thereafter we have no sense of guilt in late November that we could have not behaved properly during the year, and no fear that a lump of
coal rather than a gift will await us Christmas morning. In the same manner, we are freed and liberated once we realize the insanity and fantasy
of the present manner interpreting our experiences in the world. Liberation, in its most fundamental sense, requires a rejection of
everything we have been taught and its replacement by only those things we have experienced as having values. But this
replacement only begins the task of liberation. For the history of Western thinking in the past eight centuries has been one of
replacement of ideas within a framework that has remained
basically unchanged for nearly two millenia. Challenging
this framework of interpretation means a rearrangement of our manner of perceiving the world, and it involves a
reexamination of the body of human knowledge and its structural reconstruction into a new format. Such a task appears to be far from the
struggles of the present. It seems abstract and meaningless in the face of contemporary suffering. And it suggests that people can be made to
change their oppressive activity by intellectual reorientation alone. All these questions arise, however, because of the fundamental orientation
of Western peoples toward the world. We
assume that we know the structure of reality and must only make certain
minor adjustments in the machinery that operates it in order to bring our institutions into line. Immediate suffering is thus
placed in juxtaposition with abstract meta-physical conceptions of the world and, because we can see immediate suffering, we feel impelled to
change conditions quickly to relieve tensions, never coming to understand how the basic attitude toward life and its derivative attitudes toward
minority groups continues to dominate the goals and activities that appear designed to create reforms. Numerous examples can be cited to
show that our efforts to bring justice into the world have been short-circuited by the passage of events, and that those
efforts are unsuccessful because we have failed to consider the basic framework within which we pose questions,
analyze alternatives, and suggest solutions. Consider the examples from our immediate past. In the early sixties college application
forms included a blank line on which all prospective students were required to indicate their race. Such information was used to discriminate
against those of a minority background, and so reformers demanded that the question be dropped. By the time all colleges had been forced to
eliminate questions concerning the race of applicants, the Civil Rights Movement had so sensitized those involved in higher education that
scholarships were made available in great numbers to people of minority races. There was no way, however; to allocate such scholarships
because college officials could no longer determine the racial background of students on the basis of their applications for admission. Much of
the impetus for low-cost housing in the cities was based upon the premise that in the twentieth century people should not have to live in
hovels but that adequate housing should be constructed for them. Yet in the course of tearing down slums and building new housing projects,
low income housing areas were eliminated. The construction cost of the new projects made it necessary to charge higher rentals. Former
residents of the low-income areas could not afford to live in the new housing, so they moved to other parts of the city and created exactly the
same conditions that had originally provoked the demand for low-rent housing. Government schools had a very difficult time teaching
American Indian children the English language. (One reason was the assumption of teachers that all languages had Latin roots, and their
inability to adapt the programs when they discovered that Indian languages were not so derived.) Hence programs in bilingual teaching
methods were authorized that would use the native language to teach the children English, an underhanded way of eliminating the native
language. Between the time that bilingual programs were conceived and the time that they were finally funded, other programs that
concentrated on adequate housing had an unexpected effect on the educational process. Hundreds of new houses were built in agency towns,
and Indians moved from remote areas of the different reservations into those towns where they could get good housing. Since they were
primarily younger couples with young children, the housing development meant that most Indian children were new growing up in the agency
communities and were learning English as a first language. Thus, the bilingual programs, which began as a means of teaching English as a
second language, became the method designed to preserve the native vernacular by teaching it as a second language to students who had
grown up speaking English. Example after example could be cited, each testifying to the devastating effect of a
general attitude toward the world that underlies the Western approach to human knowledge. The basis of this attitude is the
assumption that the world operates in certain predetermined ways, that it operates continuously under certain natural laws, and that the
nature of every species is homogeneous, with few real deviations. One can trace this attitude back into the Western past. Religious concepts,
which have since been transformed into Scientific and political beliefs, remain objects of belief as securely as if they had never been severed
from their theological moorings. Let us trace a few examples. Originally the continuity of the world was conceived as a demonstration of the
divine plan and God, conceived as a lawgiver in the moral sense, became a law-giver in the scientific sense also. Scientific
data was
classified in certain ways that in the eyes of Western peoples became a part of the structure of nature.
Phenomena that did not fit into the structure that had been created were said to “violate” the laws of
nature and hence to be untrue in the religious sense and unimportant in the scientific sense. When evolution replaced the
concept of creation in the book of Genesis, it became an inviolable law in the eyes of Western people in much the same way that the literal
interpretation of the biblical story had been accepted by Western people in former centuries. The world was originally conceived in terms of
the Near East as the center of reality. As awareness extended to other peoples, this world gradually expanded until by the Middle Ages it
encompassed those regions that were in commercial contact with Western Europe. The discovery of the Western hemisphere created a certain
degree of trauma, for suddenly there was an awareness of lands and peoples of which Western Europeans had no previous knowledge. The
only way that these people could be accounted for was by reference to the Scriptures. So it was hypothesized that the aboriginal peoples in
North and South America must have been the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel who had crossed into the New World over a land bridge somewhere in
northern Asia. The basic assumption of this theory was the creation of the human species as a single act, performed by the Christian God, with
its subsequent history one of populating the planet. The rise of social science, and the downgrading of theological answers to what were
considered scientific questions concerning the nature and history of human societies, meant that social science had to provide answers to
questions formulated within the theological context. With virtually no reconsideration of the basic question of the creation [or origination in
scientific terms) of our species as the product of a single act, anthropologists promptly adopted the old theological explanation of the peopling
of the Western Hemisphere, developing the Bering Strait theory of migration to account for the phenomenon. Whether secular or sacred, the
classification of American natives as a derivative, inferior group of Asian-European peoples, albeit far removed from those roots by the
postularion of many millenia of wandering, became a status from which American Indians have been unable to escape. The emphasis on
objective knowledge by Western peoples has meant the development of an attitude that sees reality as basically
physical, the knowledge thereof basically mental or verbal, and the elimination of any middle ground between
extremes. Thus religion has become a matter of the proper exposition of doctrines, and non-Western religions have been
judged on their development of a systematic moral and ethical code rather than the manner in which they conducted
themselves. When a religion is conceived as a code of verbal importance rather than a way of life, loopholes in the code become more
important than the code itself since, by eliminating or escaping the direct violation of the code by a redelinition of the code or a relaxation of its
intended effect, one can maintain two types of behavior; easily discerned in a practical way, as if they were identical and consistent with a
particular picture of reality. In recent decades Western science had made an important discovery, important at least for Western peoples who
had formerly confused themselves with their own belief system. Western
science was premised upon the proposition that God had
made the world according to certainlaws. These laws were capable of discovery by human reason, and the task of
science was to discover as many of these laws as possible. So human knowledge was misconceived as the
only description of physical reality, a tendency Alfred North Whitehead called the principle of “misplaced concreteness.”' With
the articulation of theories of indeterminancy in modern physics, this naive attitude toward human knowledge
radically shifted and became an acknowledgement that what we had formerly called nature was simply our
knowledge of nature based upon the types of questions we had decided to use to organize the
measurements we were making of the physical world. The shift in emphasis meant that all knowledge became a
relative knowledge, valid only for the types of questions we were capable of formulating. Depending upon the types of
information sought, we could measure and observe certain patterns of phenomena, but these patterns existed in
our heads rather than in nature itself. Knowledge thus became a matter of cultural preference rather
than an indication of the ultimate structure of reality. Presumably if one culture asked a certain type of question while
another asked another type of question, the two different answers could form two valid perspectives on the world. Whether these two
perspectives could be reconciled in one theory of knowledge depended upon the broader pattern of interpretation that thinkers brought into
play with respect to the data. When this new factor of interpretation is applied specifically to different cultures and traditions, we can see that
what have been called primitive superstitions have the potential of being regarded as sophisticated insights into the nature of things, at least
on an equal basis with Western
knowledge. The traditional manner in which Western peoples think is now only one of the possible ways
of describing a natural process. It may
not, in fact, even be as accurate, insofar as it can relate specific facts without
perverting them, as non-Western ways of correlating knowledge. This uncertainty is liberating in a much more
fundamental way than any other development in the history of Western civilization. It means that religious, political, economic, and historical
analyses of human activities that have been derived from the Western tradition do not have an absolute claim upon us. We are free to seek a
new synthesis that draws information from every culture, and every period of human history has as a boundary only the requirement that it
make more sense of more data than any other synthesis. Even the initial premises of such a synthesis can be different from what we have
previously used to begin our formulation of a picture of reality. When we apply this new Freedom to some of the examples cited above, we see
that the proper question we should have asked with respect to housing did not concern housing at all, but covered the more general question
of the nature of a community. We discover that the college applications and the bilingual programs should have been transcended by questions
concerning the nature of knowledge, how it is transmitted, and how it can be expanded, rather than how specific pre- determined courses of
action can be implemented. Once we
reject the absolute nature of Western conceptions of problems, we are
able to see different types of questions inherent in our immediate problem areas. The immediacy we feel when
observing conditions under which people live should enable us to raise new issues that contain within themselves new ways of conceiving
solutions. An old Indian saying captures the radical difference between Indians and Western peoples quite adequately. The white man, the
indians maintain, has ideas; Indians have visions. Ideas have a single dimension and require a chain of connected ideas to make sense. The
connections that are made between ideas can lead to great insights on the nature of things, or they can lead to the inexorable logic of Catch-22
in which the logic inevitably leads to the polar opposite of the original proposition. The vision, on the other hand, presents a whole picture of
experience and has a central meaning that stands on its own feet as an independent revelation. It is said that Albert Einstein could not conceive
of his problems in physics in conceptual terms but instead had visions of a whole event. He then spent his time attempting to translate
elements of that event that could be separated into mathematical and verbal descriptions that could be communicated to others. It is this
difference, the change from inductive and deductive logic to transformation of perceived realities, that becomes the liberating facto; not
additional information or continual replacement of data and concepts within the traditional Framework of interpretation. Let us return, then, to
our discussion of the manner in which racial minorities have been perceived by the white community, particularly by the liberal establishment,
in the past decade and a half, Minority groups, conceived to be different from the white majority, are perceived to be lacking some critical
element of humanity that, once received, would bring them to some form of equality with the white majority. The trick has been in identifying
that missing element, and each new articulation of goals is immediately attributed to every minority group and appears to answer the question
that has been posed by the sincere but unreflective liberal community. Liberation is simply the manner in which this missing element is
presently conceived by people interested in reform. It will become another social movement fad and eventually fade away to be replaced with
yet another instant analysis of the situation. Until fundamental questions regarding the assumptions that form the basis for Western
civilization are raised and new articulations of reality are
discovered, the impulse to grab quickly and apparently easy
answers will continue. Social conditions will continue to be described in a cause-and-effect logic that has dominated Western thinking for
its entire intellectual lifetime. Programs will be designed that fail to account for the change in conditions that occurs continually in human
societies. Ideas will continue to dominate our concerns and visions will not come. lf we are then to talk seriously about the necessity of
liberation, we are talking about the destruction of the whole complex of Western theories of knowledge and the construction of a new and
more comprehensive synthesis of human knowledge and experience. This is no easy task and it cannot be accomplished by people who are
encompassed within the traditional Western logic and the resulting analyses such logic provides. If we change the very way that Western
peoples think, the way they collect data, which data they gather and how they arrange that information, then we are speaking truly of
liberation. For it is themanner in which people conceive reality that motivates them to behave in certain ways,
that provides them with a system of values, and that enables them to justify their activities. A new picture of reality, a
reality conceived as a vision and not as a series of related or connected ideas, can accomplish over a longer period of time many
changes we have been unable to effect while conceiving solutions as short-term remedies. More important for
our discussion is the recognition that all parts of human experience are related and the proposed solution to any particular problem overlooks
the changes that will occur in related activities because of their relationship. Fundamental changes initiated by a new picture of reality will
create a transformation, and will avoid the traditional replacement of words with new words. In summary we now challenge the basic
assumptions of Western man. To wit: 1] that time is uniform and continuous; 2) that our species originated from a single source; 3) that our
descriptions of nature are absolute knowledge; 4) that the world can be divided into subjective and objective; 5) that our understanding of our
species is homogeneous; 6) that ultimate reality, including divinity, is homogeneous; 7) that by projection of present conditions we can
understand human history, planetary history, or the universe; 8) that inductive and deductive reasoning are the primary tools for gaining
knowledge.
 Ptx of Recognition Link
Colonialism has a new mask: Recognition. The AFF's call for accommodation and
recognition by the USFG only capitulates to the new, more insidious colonial regime.
Coulthard 14, Glen Sean Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene) is assistant professor in the First Nations Studies
Program and the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia.

Indigenous anticolonial nationalism that emerged during this period forced colonial power to
The expression of
modify itself from a structure that was once primarily reinforced by policies, techniques, and ideologies
explicitly oriented around the genocidal exclusion/assimilation double, to one that is now reproduced
through a seemingly more conciliatory set of discourses and institutional practices that emphasize our recognition and
accommodation. Regardless of this modification, however, the relationship between Indigenous
peoples and the state has remained colonial to its foundation.

The politics of recognition the AFF promotes turns their impacts, further entrenching
genocide.
Coulthard 14, Glen Sean Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene) is assistant professor in the First Nations Studies
Program and the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia.

In the following chapters I critically engage a multiplicity of diverse antiimperialist traditions and practices to challenge the increasingly
commonplace idea that the colonial relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state can be adequately transformed via such a
politics of recognition. Following the work of Richard J. F. Day, I take “politics of recognition” to refer to the now expansive range of
recognition-based models of liberal pluralism that seek to “reconcile” Indigenous assertions of nationhood with
settlerstate sovereignty via the accommodation of Indigenous identity claims in some form of renewed
legal and political relationship with the Canadian state. Although these models tend to vary in both theory and practice, most
call for the delegation of land, capital, and political power from the state to Indigenous communities
through a combination of land claim settlements, economic development initiatives, and self-
government agreements. These are subsequently the three broad contexts through which I examine the theory and practice of
Indigenous recognition politics in the following chapters. Against this variant of the recognition approach, I argue that Instead of ushering
in an era of peaceful coexistence grounded on the ideal of reciprocity or mutual recognition, the politics
of recognition in its contemporary liberal form promises to reproduce the very configurations of
colonialist, racist, patriarchal state power that Indigenous peoples’ demands for recognition have
historically sought to transcend.

Only Alt Solves. The AFF/NEG strives for colonial subjects to be recognized and fails in
the process, moving inexorably towards slavery
Coulthard 14, Glen Sean Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene) is assistant professor in the First Nations Studies
Program and the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia.

liberal
This brings us to the second key problem with Taylor’s theory when applied to colonial contexts. I have already suggested that Taylor’s
recognition approach is incapable of curbing the damages wrought within and against Indigenous
communities by the structures of state and capital, but what about his theory of recognition? Does it suffer the same fate
vis-à-vis the forms of power that it seeks to undercut? As noted in the previous section, underlying Taylor’s theory is the assumption that the
flourishing of Indigenous peoples as distinct and self-determining entities is significantly dependent on their being afforded cultural recognition
and institutional accommodation by the settler state apparatus. What makes this approach both so intriguing and so problematic, however, is
that Fanon, whom Taylor uses to make his case, argued against a similar presumption in the penultimate chapter of Black Skin, White Masks.
Moreover, like Taylor, Fanon did so with reference to Hegel’s master/slave parable. There Fanon argued that the dialectical progression
to reciprocity in relations of recognition is frequently undermined in colonial situations by the fact that,
unlike the subjugated slave in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, many colonized societies no longer have to struggle for
their freedom and independence. It is often negotiated, achieved through constitutional amendment, or simply “declared” by the
settler state and bestowed upon the Indigenous population in the form of political rights. Whatever the method, in these circumstances the
colonized, “steeped in the inessentiality of servitude,” are “set free by [the] master.” “One day the White Master, without conflict, recognize[s]
the Negro slave.” As such, they do not have to lay down their lives to prove their “certainty of being” in the way that Hegel insisted. The “upheaval”
of formal freedom and independence thus reaches the colonized “from without”: “The black man [is] acted upon. Values that [are] not . . . created
by his actions, values that [are] not . . . born of the systolic tide of his blood, [dance] in a hued whirl around him. The upheaval [does] not make a
difference in the Negro. He [goes] from one way of life to another, but not from one life to another.” There are a number of important issues
underlying Fanon’s concern here. The first involves the relationship he draws between struggle and the disalienation of the colonized subject.
For Fanon it is through struggle and conflict (and for the later Fanon, violent struggle and conflict) that imperial subjects
come to be rid of the “arsenal of complexes” driven into the core of their being through the colonial
process. I will have more to say about this aspect of Fanon’s thought below, but for now I simply want to flag the fact that struggle serves as
the mediating force through which the colonized come to shed their colonial identities, thus restoring them to their “proper places.” In
contexts where recognition is conferred without struggle or conflict, this fundamental self-transformation—or
as Lou Turner has put it, this “inner differentiation” at the level of the colonized’s being—cannot occur, thus foreclosing the
realization of freedom. Hence Fanon’s claim that the colonized simply go from “one way of life to
another, but not from one life to another”; the structure of domination is modified, but the subject
position of the colonized remains unchanged—they become “emancipated slaves.” The second important point
to note is that when Fanon speaks of a lack of struggle in the decolonization movements of his day, he does not mean to suggest that the colonized
the
in these contexts simply remained passive recipients of colonial practices. He readily admits, for example, that “from time to time”
colonized may indeed fight “for Liberty and Justice.” However, when this fight is carried out in a manner
that does not pose a foundational “break” with the background structures of colonial power as such—
which, for Fanon, will always invoke struggle and conflict—then the best the colonized can hope for is “white liberty and
white justice; that is, values secreted by [their] masters.”

Debate is sheltered and sanitary, for revolutionary conscious to be raised it requires

conflict and struggle that THREATENS imperial rule
Coulthard 14, Glen Sean Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene) is assistant professor in the First Nations Studies
Program and the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia.

Without conflict and struggle the terms of recognition tend to remain in the possession of those in
power to bestow on their inferiors in ways that they deem appropriate. Note the double level of subjection here: without
transformative struggle constituting an integral aspect of anticolonial praxis the Indigenous population
will not only remain subjects of imperial rule insofar as they have not gone through a process of purging the psycho-existential
complexes battered into them over the course of their colonial experience—a process of strategic desubjectification—but they will also
remain so in that the Indigenous society will tend to come to see the forms of structurally limited and
constrained recognition conferred to them by their colonial “masters” as their own: that is, the colonized
will begin to identify with “white liberty and white justice.” As Fanon would later phrase it in The Wretched of the Earth,
these values eventually “seep” into the colonized and subtly structure and limit the possibility of their
freedom. Either way, for Fanon, the colonized will have failed to reestablish themselves as truly self-determining:
as creators of the terms, values, and conditions by which they are to be recognized. My third concern with Taylor’s politics of
recognition involves a misguided sociological assumption that undergirds his appropriation of Hegel’s notion of mutual recognition. As noted in
the previous section, at the heart of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic is the idea that both parties engaged in the struggle for recognition are
dependent on the other’s acknowledgment for their freedom and self-worth. Moreover, Hegel asserts that this dependency is even more crucial
for the master in the relationship, for unlike the slave he or she is unable to achieve independence and objective self-certainty through the object
of his or her own labor. Mutual dependency thus appears to be the background condition that ensures the dialectic progress towards reciprocity.
This is why Taylor claims, with reference to Hegel, that “the struggle for recognition can only find one satisfactory solution, and that is a regime
of reciprocal recognition among equals.” However, as Fanon’s work reminds us, the problem with this formulation is that when applied to actual
struggles for recognition between hegemonic and subaltern communities the mutual character of dependency rarely exists. This observation is
made in a lengthy footnote in Black Skin, White Masks where Fanon claims to have shown how the colonial master “basically differs” from the
master depicted in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. “For Hegel there is reciprocity,” but in the colonies “the master laughs at the consciousness
of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but work.” To my mind this is one of the most crucial passages in Black Skin, White
Masks for it outlines in precise terms what is wrong with the recognition paradigm when abstracted from the face-to-face encounter in Hegel’s
dialectic and applied to colonial situations. Although the issue here is an obvious one, it has nonetheless been critically overlooked in the
contemporary recognition literature: in relations of domination that exist between nation-states and the sub-state national groups that they
“incorporate” into their territorial and jurisdictional boundaries, there is no mutual dependency in terms of a need or desire for recognition. In
the colonial state and state society—does not require recognition from the
these contexts, the “master”—that is,
previously self-determining communities upon which its territorial, economic, and social infrastructure is
constituted. What it needs is land, labor, and resources. Thus, rather than leading to a condition of reciprocity the dialectic either
breaks down with the explicit nonrecognition of the equal status of the colonized population, or with the strategic
“domestication” of the terms of recognition leaving the foundation of the colonial relationship relatively
undisturbed. Anyone familiar with the power dynamics that structure the Aboriginal rights movement in Canada should immediately see
the applicability of Fanon’s insights here. Indeed, one need not expend much effort to elicit the countless ways in which the liberal discourse of
recognition has been limited and constrained by the state, the courts, corporate interests, and policy makers in ways that have helped preserve
the colonial status quo. With respect to the law, for example, over the last thirty years the Supreme Court of Canada has consistently refused to
recognize Aboriginal peoples’ equal and self-determining status based on its adherence to legal precedent founded on the white supremacist
myth that Indigenous societies were too primitive to bear political rights when they first encountered European powers. Thus, even though the
courts have secured an unprecedented degree of protection for certain “cultural” practices within the state, they have nonetheless repeatedly
refused to challenge the racist origin of Canada’s assumed sovereign authority over Indigenous peoples and their territories. The political and
economic ramifications of recent Aboriginal rights jurisprudence have been clear-cut. In Delgamuukw v. British Columbia it was declared that any
residual Aboriginal rights that may have survived the unilateral assertion of Crown sovereignty could be infringed upon by the federal and
provincial governments so long as this action could be shown to further “a compelling and substantial legislative objective” that is “consistent
with the special fiduciary relationship between the Crown and the [A]boriginal peoples.” What substantial objectives might justify infringement?
According to the court, virtually any exploitative economic venture, including the “development of agriculture, forestry, mining, and hydroelectric
power, the general economic development of the interior of British Columbia, protection of the environment or endangered species, and the
building of infrastructure and the settlement of foreign populations to support those aims.” So today it appears, much as it did in Fanon’s day,
that colonial
powers will only recognize the collective rights and identities of Indigenous peoples insofar
as this recognition does not throw into question the background legal, political, and economic
framework of the colonial relationship itself. But the above examples confirm only one aspect of Fanon’s insight into the
problem of recognition in colonial contexts: namely, the limitations this approach runs up against when pitted against these overtly structural
expressions of domination. Are his criticisms and concerns equally relevant to the subjective or psycho-affective features of contemporary
colonial power?
 Monolith Link
Simulating USFG as a unified political subject is a settlerist ruse
Rifkin 9 (Mark Rifkin is an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. “Indigenizing
Agamben: Rethinking Sovereignty in Light of the "Peculiar" Status of Native Peoples.” Cultural Critique. Number 73, Fall 2009. Project
Muse//George)

In using Agamben's work to address U.S. Indian policy, though, it needs to be reworked. In particular, his emphasis on biopolitics tends to come
at the expense of a discussion of geopolitics, the production of race supplanting the production of space as a way of envisioning the work of the
sovereignty he critiques, and while his concept of the exception has been immensely influential in contemporary scholarship and cultural
criticism, such accounts largely have left aside discussion of Indigenous peoples. Attending to Native peoples' position within settler-state
sovereignties requires investigating and adjusting three aspects of Agamben's thinking: the persistent inside/outside tropology he uses to
address the exception, specifically the ways it serves as a metaphor divorced from territoriality; the notion of "bare life" as the basis of the
exception, especially the individualizing ways that he uses that concept; and the implicit depiction of sovereignty as a self-confident exercise of
authority free from anxiety over the legitimacy of state actions.5 Such revision allows for a reconsideration of the "zone of indistinction"
produced by and within sovereignty, opening up analysis of the ways settler-states regulate not only proper kinds of embodiment ("bare life")
but also legitimate modes of collectivity and occupancy—what I will call bare habitance. If the "overriding sovereignty" of the United States is
predicated on the creation of a state of exception, then the struggle for sovereignty by Native peoples can be envisioned as
less about control of particular policy domains than of metapolitical authority—the ability to define the
content and scope of "law" and "politics." Such a shift draws attention away from critiques of the particular rhetorics used to justify the state's
plenary power and toward a macrological effort [End Page 90] to contest the "overriding" assertion of a right to exert control over Native polities. My argument,
then, explores the limits of forms of analysis organized around the critique of the settler-state's employment of racialized discourses of savagery and the emphasis
on cultural distinctions between Euramerican and Indigenous modes of governance. Both of these strategies within Indigenous political theory treat sovereignty as a
particular kind of political content that can be juxtaposed with a substantively different—more Native-friendly or Indigenous-centered—content, but by contrast, I
suggest that discourses of racial difference and equality as well as of cultural recognition are
deployed by the state in ways
that reaffirm its geopolitical self-evidence and its authority to determine what issues, processes, and statuses will
count as meaningful within the political system. While arguments about Euramerican racism and the disjunctions between Native
traditions and imposed structures of governance can be quite powerful in challenging aspects of settler-state policy, they cannot account for the structuring
violence performed by the figure of sovereignty. Drawing on Agamben, I will argue that "sovereignty" functions as a placeholder that has no determinate content.6
The state has been described as an entity that exercises a monopoly on the legitimate exercise of violence, and what I am suggesting is that the
state of exception produced through Indian policy creates a monopoly on the legitimate exercise of legitimacy, an exclusive uncontestable right
to define what will count as a viable legal or political form(ul)ation. That fundamentally circular and self-validating, as well as anxious and
fraught, performance grounds the legitimacy of state rule on nothing more than the axiomatic negation of Native peoples' authority to
determine or adjudicate for themselves the normative principles by which they will be governed. Through Agamben's theory of the exception,
then, I will explore how the supposedly underlying sovereignty of the U.S. settler-state is a retrospective projection generated by, and
dependent on, the "peculiar"-ization of Native peoples. The Domain of Inclusive Exclusion: The Camp and the Reservation In introducing his
argument in Homo Sacer, Agamben marks, while seeking to trouble the distinction between zoē and bios, "the simple fact [End Page 91] of
living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods)" versus "the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group" (1). He suggests
that in classical antiquity the former was excluded from the sphere of politics, and that part of what most distinguishes modernity, particularly
the structure of the state, is the effort to bring the former into the orbit of governmental regulation, in fact to see it as the animating principle
of political life ("the politicization of bare life as such" [4]). The first articulation of the book's central thesis, then, is as follows: "It can even be
said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power" (6).7 In other words, modern sovereignty depends
upon generating a vision of the "body"—of apolitical natural life—that is cast as simultaneously exterior to the sphere of government and law
and as the reference point for defining the proper aims, objects, and methods of governance ("[p]lacing biological life at the center of its
calculations" [6]). That "body" is divorced from politics per se while simultaneously defining the aspirational and normative horizon of political
action. "Bare life," therefore, serves as an authorizing figure for decision-making by self-consciously political institutions while itself being
presented as exempt from question or challenge within such institutions. Further, and more urgently for Agamben, the generation of "bare life"
makes thinkable the consignment of those who do not fit the idealized "biopolitical body" to a "zone" outside of political participation and the
regular working of the law but still within the ambit of state power. Describing this possibility, he observes, "The relation of exception is a
relation of ban. He who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is,
exposed and threatened on the threshold…. It is literally not possible to say whether the one who has been banned is outside or inside the
juridical order" (28–29). For Agamben, the Nazi concentration camp serves as the paradigmatic example of the biopolitical imperatives
structuring modern sovereignty, described as "the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we are still living" (166). The
existence of the camps disrupted the "functional nexus" on which the modern nation-state was "founded": "the old trinity composed of the
state, the nation (birth), and land" in which "a determinate localization (land) and a determinate order (the State) are mediated by automatic
rules for the inscription of life (birth or the [End Page 92] nation)" (174–76). The camp opens up a location within the state in which persons
who are linked to the space of the nation by birth can be managed as "bare life," as mere biological beings bereft of any/all of the legal
protections of citizenship. Yet if that denial of political subjectivity and simultaneous subjection to the force of the state confuses, or perhaps
conflates, "exclusion and inclusion," to what extent is that blurring predicated on the reification of the boundaries of the "sovereign power" of
the nation? Put another way, if the person in the state of exception is considered "bare life" and thus neither truly "outside [n]or inside the
juridical order," how does one know that the "abandoned" comes under the sway of a given sovereign? How might the "irreducible
indistinction" enacted by sovereignty that Agamben describes itself depend on a prior geopolitical mapping that is also produced through the
invocation of sovereignty, differentiating those people and places that fall within the jurisdictional sphere of a given state from those that do
not? That process of distinction, I contend, draws on the logic of exception Agamben theorizes but in ways that cannot be reduced to the
creation of a "biopolitical body." In describing how modern sovereignty appears to found itself on the will of the people, Agamben locates a
biopolitical problematic at the core of that claim: It is as if what we call "people" were in reality not a unitary subject but a dialectical oscillation
between two opposite poles: on the one hand, the set of the People as a whole political body, and on the other, the subset of the people as a
fragmentary multiplicity of needy and excluded bodies; or again, on the one hand, an inclusion that claims to be total, and on the other, an
exclusion that is clearly hopeless; at one extreme, the total state of integrated and sovereign citizens, and at the other, the preserve—court of
miracles or camp—of the wretched, the oppressed, and the defeated. (177) The
"People" stands less for the actual
assemblage of persons within the state than for the set of those who fit the ideal "body" and who consequently
will be recognized as "citizens," with the rest of the resident population consigned to the realm of "bare life"—the
people who are not the People and thus are excluded from meaningful participation while remaining the objects of state control. However, when reflecting on the
status of Indigenous populations in relation to the settler-state, a third category emerges that is neither people nor People—namely [End Page 93] peoples. The
possibility of conceptualizing the nation as "a whole political body" requires narrating it as "a unitary subject"
rather than a collection of separate, unsubordinated, self-governing polities. Conversely, for "inclusion" to
be articulated as "total," it needs to have a clear domain over which it is extended. In critiquing the approach of
previous theorists to the issue of sovereignty, Agamben notes, "The problem of sovereignty was reduced to the question of

who within the political order was invested with certain powers, and the very threshold of the political
order itself was never called into question" (12), but Agamben's account itself assumes a clear "within" by not posing the question of how
sovereignty produces and is produced by place, how the state is realized as a spatial phenomenon as part of "the very threshold of the political order itself." I am
suggesting, then, that the
biopolitical project of defining the proper "body" of the people is subtended by the
geopolitical project of defining the territoriality of the nation, displacing competing claims by older/other
political formations as what we might call bare habitance. Agamben notes, "The camp is a piece of land placed outside the normal juridical order, but it is
nevertheless not simply an external space" (169–70), but that definition also seems to capture rather precisely the status of the reservation, a space that while
governed under "peculiar" rules categorically is denied status as "external," or "foreign." Examining the reservation, and more broadly the representation of Native
collectivity and territoriality in U.S. governmental discourses, through the prism of Agamben's analysis of the state of exception helps highlight the kinds of
"sovereign violence" at play in the (re)production and naturalization of national space.8 The effort to think biopolitics without
geopolitics, bare life without bare habitance, results in the erasure of the politics of collectivity and occupancy: what entities will count as polities and thus be seen
as deserving of autonomy, what modes of inhabitance and land tenure will be understood as legitimate, and who will get to make such determinations and on what
basis?9 Focusing on the fracture between "the People" and "the people" imagines explicitly or implicitly either a reconciliation of the two (restoring a version of the
"trinity" of state, land, and birth) or the proliferation of a boundaryless humanness unconstrained by territorially circumscribed polities. These options leave little
room for thinking indigeneity, the existence of peoples forcibly made domestic [End Page 94] whose self-understandings and aspirations cannot be understood in
terms of the denial of (or disjunctions within) state citizenship.10

Kills solvency because there’s no rational monolith to execute policy

Claude 88 (Inis L. Claude is a Prof. of Gov. and Foreign Affairs, U of Virginia, “States and the Global System,” p. 18, 1988)
This view of the state as an institutional monolith is fostered by the notion of sovereignty, which calls up the image
of the monarch, presiding majestically over his kingdom. Sovereignty emphasizes the singularity of the state, its monopoly of authority,
its unity of command and its capacity to speak with one voice. Thus, France wills, Iran demands, China intends, New Zealand promises and the
Soviet Union insists. One all too easily conjures up the picture of a single-minded and purposeful state that decides exactly what
it wants to achieve, adopts coherent policies intelligently adapted to its objectives, knows what it is doing, does what it intends
and always has its act together. This view of the state is reinforced by political scientists’ emphasis upon the concept of policy and upon the
thesis that governments derive policy from calculations of national interest. We thus take it for granted that states act
internationally in accordance with rationality conceived and consciously constructed schemes of action, and we
implicitly refuse to consider the possibility that alternatives to policy-directed behavior may have importance – alternatives such as random,
Our rationalistic assumption that states do what they have
reactive, instinctual, habitual and conformist behaviour.
planned to do tends to inhibit the discovery that states sometimes do what they feel compelled to do, or what they
have the opportunity to do, or what they have usually done, or what other states are doing, or whatever the line of least
resistance would seem to suggest. Academic preoccupation with the making of policy is accompanied by academic
neglect of the execution of policy. We seem to assume that once the state has calculated its interest and contrived a policy to
further that interest, the carrying out of policy is the virtually automatic result of the routine functioning of the bureaucratic mechanism of the
state. I am inclined to call this the Genesis theory of public administration, taking as my text the passage: ‘And
God said, Let there be
light; and there was light’. I suspect that in the realm of government, policy execution rarely follows so promptly
and inexorably from policy statement. Alternatively, one may dub it the Pooh-Bah/Ko-Ko theory, honouring those denizens of
William S. Gilbert’s Japan who took the position that when the Mikado ordered that something be done it was as good as done and might as
well be declared to have been done.

Especially true for education policy

Saarinen & Ursin 11 (Taina, Center for Applied Language Studies, University of Jyvaskyla. Jani, Finnish Institute for Educational
Research, University of Jyvaskyla. “Dominant and emerging approaches in the study of higher education policy change.” 8-9-11. Studies in
Higher Education. V 372. P 143-156//akash)

Enders (2004) analyses the internationalization of higher education from the perspective of (multi-level) governance theory, and argues
that higher education policy is still produced and shaped at the national level, based on the cultural, ideological, social and
economic functions of civic societies. According to Enders there is, however, a greater emphasis on international
influences of higher education, because ‘the narrative of globalization … is not just a narrative but an ideology with
multiple meanings and linkages’ (365). This global environment is complex in terms of transnational policy
making, and its interdependency with the national and local level, where resilient networks collide with
conventional nation-state political structures. Enders (378) also points out that globalization is not a linear and
uniform process but rather a multidimensional phenomenon with various time and space flows where local influences are becoming
more important. This is the case especially in terms of the responsibilities and capacities for political
steering. It seems, according to Enders, that nation-state is between the pressures of global and local forces,
which do not always have the same intentions and directions. Therefore, the current higher education context is a
multi-level and multi-actor, ‘within which higher education organizations operate and develop themselves their international
activities’ (375). All in all, Enders proposes the globalization of higher education to include both micro and macro dynamics, which can be
analysed either from top-down or bottom-up perspectives. His perspective on globalization is dialectical, in the sense that the dynamics of
globalization consists of the interplay between local, national and global. However, Enders does not analyse this interaction in more detail;
rather he points out that interaction has created a complex higher education context. Thus, he acknowledges the importance and complexity of
interaction between various levels, but he does not cling to the nature and essence of interaction. Although
Enders understands
internationalization of higher education as a greater co-operation between states, he views
internationalization from a structural perspective; i.e. through the lenses of levels (macro, meso or
micro) or actors (e.g. nation-state), not in the cross-section of levels and/or actors. Enders, however, points out
at the end of his article a need for further research to look into the complexity of internationalization from various perspectives. Vaira (2004)
Vaira, M. 2004. Globalization and higher education organizational change: A framework for analysis. Higher Education, 48(4): 483–510.
[CrossRef], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar] tries
to overcome the weaknesses of macro-structural and micro-analytic
approaches by introducing the concept of organizational allomorphism, which means that underneath the
social reforms and structures is a shared and common pattern. By analysing this, one is able to synthesize ‘the pressures
produced by globalization processes and the local responses to them, blunting the mutual exclusivity of both’ (485). Accordingly, ‘organizational
change is to be understood within the constitutive framework of wider institutional structure and dynamics’ (499). Organizational
allomorphism also combines the two opposite notions of the outcomes of globalization, the converging
and diverging effects of global forces. On the global level supra-national agencies (e.g. European Union, Organization for
Economic Co-operation and Development, World Bank) act as institutional carriers, a concept borrowed from Scott (1995) Scott, W. R. 1995.
Institutions and organizations, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. [Google Scholar] , by constructing and reconstructing the rationalized myths (myths
that characterize the world polity) of globalization. Furthermore, Vaira (2004 Vaira, M. 2004. Globalization and higher education organizational
change: A framework for analysis. Higher Education, 48(4): 483–510. [CrossRef], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar] , 485) argues that, in
higher education, both deinstitutionalization of its deeply embedded and inherited policy and value features, and institutionalization of new
ones is enacting simultaneously, thereby creating the dynamic of change. Even though Vaira
uses the concept of organizational
allomorphism, he takes structures – visible and invisible – as a starting point of his analysis. Accordingly,
he comprehends structures as shared and common patterns and concludes that following these
patterns one is able to understand organizational change. On the other hand he highlights the simultaneity of the
deinstitutionalization and institutionalization of policy and value attributes of higher education, but does not show the origin of this process,
nor takes this as a unit of his analysis. Hence, Vaira does not address where the deinstitutionalization of higher education's embedded values
and the institution of new ones interact. Both
Enders and Vaira can be criticized for focussing too much on
established structures and actors and not on their various intersections in higher education policy making.
Nonetheless, they make a contribution towards this direction, as Vaira (2004) Vaira, M. 2004. Globalization and higher education organizational
change: A framework for analysis. Higher Education, 48(4): 483–510. [CrossRef], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar] highlights that behind
organizational change there are institutional archetypes which have features from various structures and actors. Enders (2004) Enders, J. 2004.
Higher education, internationalisation, and the nation-state: Recent developments and challenges to governance theory. Higher Education,
47(3): 361–82. [CrossRef], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar] , for his part, stresses the importance of interaction between various levels in
studying the internationalization of higher education. Another question is whether governance theory provides the means for analysing this
interaction.
 Soft Left Link
Temporality Link—Time accumulates—gradually inching towards justice is too little
too late for those dying now
Dillon 13 (Stephen, PhD in American Studies at U of Minn, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory (2013): “It's here, it'sthat
time:” Race, queer futurity, and the temporality of violence in Born in Flames , Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, DOI:
10.1080/0740770X.2013.786277, 5/23)

In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon describes a “time lag, or a difference of rhythm, between the leaders of a nationalist party and the mass of
the people” (Fanon 1963, 107). According to Fanon, the rank and file of anti-colonial rebellions demand the complete and utter immediate
destruction of the forms of power that render them “more dead than alive,” while both colonial and nationalist governments attempt to
manage, temper, and restrain the demands of those who have no more time to give to the promises of a future that is always coming, but
never arrives (51). For example, in the film, the
state promises that “in the future” there will be jobs, an end to sexual
violence, and racial and gender equality. But for Fanon, the “hopeless dregs of humanity” (or the wretched of the earth) are filled
with an “uncontrollable rage” and thus exist in a temporal regime apart from that of the party or the nation. This is a
time of intensity and immediacy (“the slaves of modern times are impatient”), where the future of the present as it is
means no future at all (74). Like the financial, epistemological, and racialized legacies of slavery Baucom sees
intensifying in our current moment, Fanon diagnoses the future of colonialism as the accumulation of the social, biological, and living death
of the native. The native lives a death in life produced by the racism of slavery and colonialism. The future’s horizon is the
accumulation of past forms of racial terror and violence. In this way, Baucom and Fanon draw connections between race and time that are
crucial to questions of queer futurity. The relationship between race, gender, death, and the future is central to the immediacy and spontaneity
of the Women’s Army and is foundational to the film’s critique of the future. We can turn to the Fanonian-inspired prison writings of George
Jackson to further explore the relationship between death, race, and the future. In his 1972 text Blood in My Eye, published shortly after he was
shot and killed by guards at San Quentin prison, Jackson writes of racism, death, and revolution: Their line is: “Ain’t nobody but black folks
gonna die in the revolution.” This argument completely overlooks the fact that we have always done most of the dying, and still do: dying at the
stake, through social neglect or in U.S. foreign wars. The point is now to construct a situation where someone else will join in the dying. If it fails
and we have to do most of the dying anyway, we’re certainly no worse off than before. (Jackson 1972, 6) Here, Jackson argues that the social
order of the United States is saturated with an anti-blackness that produces, in the words of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “the state-sanctioned
or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (2007, 28). Jackson’s text is littered with a
polemic that links race and death in a way that preemptively echoes Michel Foucault’s declaration that racism is the process of “introducing a
break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die” (Foucault 2003, 254). When
Jackson, Gilmore, and Foucault define race as the production of premature death, they make a connection between race and the future. Race is
the accumulation of premature death and dying. For Jackson, race fractures the future so that the future looks like incarceration or the
premature death of malnutrition, disease, and exhaustion. The future was not the hopefulness of unknown possibilities. It
was rather the devastating weight of knowing that death was coming cloaked in abandonment, neglect, incarceration,
or murder. In other words, according to Jackson, death was always and already rushing towards the present of blackness.
 2NC Extinction
Extinction’s non-unique for natives—seeing it as a future, singular spectacle is
desensitizing, turns case
AbdelRahim 8 (Layla, Ph.D. from the Université de Montréal, Department of Comparative Literature, “Beyond the Symbolic and
towards the Collapse: Intro to John Zerzan’s conferences in Montreal, May 2008,” http://layla.miltsov.org/introduction-to-z/)

For, it is not Zerzan who has invented the Machine with its terminology and the technological solution that made the atomic bomb possible as THE option, leaving
no possibility for life outside of the “Atomic way of life” under the constant threat of obliteration (and, actual death; let us not forget Baghdad, Serbia, Hiroshima,
Nagasaki). And it is not Zerzan who has welcomed the extermination of millions of people around the world under the aegis of the defence of the Civilised way of
life (slavery, colonialism, the war of terror on terror, etc.). Those who are worried about the collapse of their system, close their
eyes on, and hence participate in, the continuing extinction of human and, what Zerzan calls, plant and animal communities around the world
whose collapse this civilisation has impelled. Perhaps, the speakers, still fail to perceive the millions of already dead and still dying as “people” or as complex entities
of a complex system that exists for its own right and not for the sake of being domesticated (appropriated and exploited) by some humans. Instead, in fearing

the onslaught of their

own collapse, these people see the “other” victims of civilisation as “resources”, the necessary
collateral damage needed to regulate the smooth flow of food to the fridges, restaurants and cafés of the speakers – what Malthus called the disasters
necessary to regulate “their” (the brown people’s) “overpopulation” and not “our” (civilised) voracious appetites. Being a white male, Zerzan has renounced the
privileges of the white male system and his biography is a witness to that fact. While, of course, there is a difference between someone renouncing having had a
choice in the first place and someone not having a chance to renounce because the System never extended an invitation to the Bacchanalia of Civilisation, it is still
an excellent example for those in the position of privilege to follow. Which, of course, hardly ever the
privileged do, since they greatly fear their own
demise even though for others this collapse has long occured. But then, Zerzan warns us that the symbolic
alienates people from the suffering of others and replaces our ability for empathy and experience with concentration
on personal salvation. In its imposition of a virtual reality, Civilisation estranges us from our own pain and, ultimately,
by killing the Other the civilised kill the Self. The other side of the question, though, is that many of those who do not even have a chance at
privilege, gobble up the whole value system and ensure that by their simple desire to “one day get there” (“there” is of course the ultimate abstraction) run the
system to its logical end: the Total Collapse, the Apocalypse – that elitist knowledge and desire that will blow up the rest of the world. Some of the so-called
“anarchists” at the fair seem to fall in this category: they do not associate themselves with the capitalist elites, they identify themselves as anarchists and yet scream
in fear that it is Zerzan – and not those who order and finance Knowledge and technologies – who is going to take away their cosy computers, tasty bakeries, black
uniforms, contraceptives and the medical establishment that makes their abortions and sex change operations, and the like. In other words, they are deaf to the
fact that it is this Knowledge with its implicit and inherent logic that has killed off thousands of varieties of animal, plant, and human cultures around the world.
When they scream that the collapse will kill millions of people, they obviously exclude all the Africans, Asians,
Aborigines who have already been killed and continue to perish around the world. This logic, obviously, excludes these people from
the category itself of “people” and we find ourselves facing the elitist eugenicist rhetoric, once again.
 1NC vs Afropessimism
Thesis statement – Indigenity must be theorized as a ghostly ‘thing,’ which requires a
rejection of aff’s lens of bodily identity that is measurable through the metaphysics of
absence and presence – there is no question of the link, all discourses can only ever
possibly name the intransitive shadows of Indianness
Cornellier 13 -- Centre for Globalization and Cultural Studies @ U of Manitoba
(Bruno, “The ‘Indian thing’: on representation and reality in the liberal settler colony,” Settler Colonial
Studies, Volume 3, Issue 1, pp. 49-64)

Nevertheless, if in this case it is indeed Canada that makes the Indian its ‘thing’, this does not make Canada the Indian's undisputed master. For
making the Indian its ‘thing’ means having to adhere to its law. Not the law that governs or regulates the order of things, but the law dictated
by the ‘thing’ ‘as an implacable command … [or] an insatiable demand’.32 For while discourse, by making
the Indian its ‘thing’, is not limited by the materiality, corporality, or existence of the Indian, it is
always in the Indian's name that it hears itself speak (of the Indian). It is, in a word, because discourse has no
other choice but to name the Indian and to give the Indian to ‘ourselves’ as a ‘thing’ that the ‘Indian thing’ imposes its law. As
Scott Lauria Morgensen explains: ‘settler subjects normatively recall and perform indigeneity as a
history they at once incorporate and transcend, inhabit and defer. Settlers thus are inexplicable apart
from their relationality to Indigenous peoples.’33 Len Findlay insists, in a similar vein, that within the colonial
settler state, ‘all communities live as, or in relation to, Indigenes. … [T]here is no hors-Indigene, no
geopolitical or psychic setting, no real or imagined terra nullius free from the satisfactions and
unsettlements of Indigene (pre)occupation’.34 Discourse pursues something that it cannot (or will not)
touch, while at the same time remaining unable ever to free itself completely from the object of this pursuit. So
that even if the ‘thing’ always slips from the grasp of the discourse or desire that seeks its presence, it still
asks to be pursued incessantly and unsuccessfully.¶ Now this ‘thing’, although it has made this request, says nothing
and means nothing. This means that nothing and no-one can ever guarantee the accuracy or the truth of what is said about it.
Because it neither speaks (to us) nor asks (us) for anything at all, the ‘thing’ can be represented only by a
desire that cannot not answer, that cannot not speak for it and in its name, that cannot not command
it, forever unsuccessfully, to ‘exist’ or to signify someone or something . The silence of that ‘Indian
thing’ commands speech. Or, if not speech, a reaction or a self-positioning that sometimes commands that we
remain silent. So that it is possible to affirm that the ‘thing’ does not exist or that the fact of its existence is, at the very least,
not pertinent; yet, speaking up in its name always produces something. And because the ‘thing’, emerging from the interval born out of
the colonial encounter, demands to be spoken of, these speech acts can never be understood as mere solipsism or pure relativism. For to
analyse these statements (or these representations) is also to analyse a relation of power in which we speak – not an act of speaking up for
Indians or in one's capacity as an Indian, but in the name of that ‘Indian thing’. Thus, it is through inciting that ‘Indian thing’ to say something,
although it is forever aphasic, that it becomes possible to produce and visualise Indian (and Canadian) differences and realities and,
consequently, identities. In this way, settlers and Indigenous peoples seek to signify and appropriate for themselves, within a particular
racial−colonial relation of power, the Indianness that exerts the perplexity of the identities interpellated by settler colonialism.¶ This explains
Gerald Vizenor's refusal to acknowledge that there had ever been an absence of the Native in colonial representation. He invites us, rather, to
observe ‘the eyes and hands in fugitive poses to see the motion of natives, and hear the apophatic narratives of a continuous presence’.35 I
reiterate, then, that it is due to the intransigent presence and the eloquent silences of those who are designated as ‘Indians’ that the colonial
project has to make the Indian its ‘thing’. Or rather, the colonial project's ‘thing’, its substance, its challenge, and its outcome are this
Indianness – the Indianness of these absolutely other bodies and territories over which Europe folds itself. It
is no longer the truth,
then, or the reality of the representation (or the represented) that is at play here. For reality no longer
constitutes the measure of the representation, but rather its effect. It will be necessary, then, to stop
conceiving of a real Indian (in the flesh) by virtue of the degree of his or her presence or absence in
representation (whether this representation is colonial, mainstream, native, or other) or indeed by virtue of a
gradient of reality. Rather, it is henceforth incumbent upon us to affirm and come to terms with the ‘intransitive
shadows’36 – neither presence nor absence – of the Indian in all of its representations.¶ The term-concept
‘thing’ offers us, in this respect, a way out of the paradigm of the imaginary Indian (or the discursive Indian)
and its demands. That ‘Indian thing’ escapes the logic of imitation and the moral demands (or impediments) of truth
and/or of the referential Indian. To conceive of Indianness as a ‘thing’ is to risk the ‘savage philosophies’ evoked
elsewhere by Bracken, that is, that desire and taboo of Western metaphysics that enables the sign and the
representation to exist beyond the opposition of presence and absence, and therefore beyond any and
all guarantees of identity.37 Otherness, henceforth projected outside the self, no longer belongs to either the substance
or the body of the other, but rather to the impossible expectation that is born from the meeting of
bodies and subjectivities that share a certain propinquity. And if there is indeed a body or substance that exceeds or precedes the
representation, this body is only insofar as it is given the gift of a presence. This is why I suggest that Indians, who also compete in the
colonial struggle to designate that which is truly ‘Indian’, can never be constrained by the body that girds them. For it is
not bodies but indeed that ‘Indian thing’ that constitutes the stakes, the quest, of the racial−colonial
relation of power in Québec and Canada – and this, even though it is the bodies that, in the end, are marked, trod upon, and
mobilised by the physical and epistemic violence of colonialism.¶ This said, while we may be obliged to acknowledge, with
Veracini, that it is indeed a characteristic of settler colonialism that it veils its own conditions of production by
continuously attempting to white out the indelible line separating the Indian from the settler (or Indianness from nationality), we will have to
admit that the most colossal difficulty – the most pessimistic will call it an impossibility – that awaits the process of decolonisation in Canada
will henceforth be to conquer and preserve the power, heretofore reserved for the Sovereign, to draw, signify, represent, and defend this
boundary that makes it possible to define Indianness in the face of its exteriority. In other words, the space that asks to be conquered in the
decolonisation effort is this ‘vantage point’ from which it is possible to lay claim to a certain authority or sovereignty in pointing one's finger at
that ‘thing’ that truly aligns with Indianness.¶ In such a context, what
will be primarily at stake in the politics of indigenous
representation, within our liberal modernity, will be this vantage point from which the Sovereign seeks to
regulate and limit access, more often than not, in the name of defending and preserving democracy and ‘human rights’. By presenting
itself as a defender of the universal right to free expression of dissidence and differences, the liberal state generally manages to consolidate its
sovereign power in the face of the actions performed by the dissident bodies that threaten its integrity and its borders. In so doing,
liberalism, sanctioned by the universalist and humanist rhetoric that is its lifeblood, seeks to reduce representational work in
a context of decolonisation or resistance to a simple exercise of poetic and symbolic expression, if not a
political exercise of pure form or ‘tokenism’, at the edges of or alongside (either way, out of reach of) the normative authorities of
political power. This is why I am affirming that, faced with the insurmountable task of decolonising settler colonial states, critical studies of film,
media, and literary representations of Natives, if they are to be active participants in the resistance against colonial violence, will henceforth
need to make it their duty to refuse to subscribe to any critical position that would make recognition of the true Indian in an ‘accurate’ (or
revised, documented) representation a way of better apprehending ‘togetherness’ across the racial−colonial divide. To that effect, we must
constantly be reminded that one of the very conditions of possibility for togetherness, in our liberal
democracies, is to prevent Natives from extirpating themselves from the ascendancy and the power of
death of the Sovereign.¶ Importantly, in the past 15 years, significant scholarly contributions in film and media studies have emerged
that focus on processes of production and/or cultural mediation in Indigenous cinema, thus complicating such colonial and intercultural
narratives of correction, misrepresentation, and liberal reconciliation.38 More recently, other scholars, while not indifferent to questions of
appropriate or responsible representation, have also moved away from discourses that would turn Indigenous media and/or Native self-
representation into possible tokens for transracial discourses of recognition that would make indigenous nationhood commensurate with the
liberal settler state's multicultural economy of presence, identity, and selfhood. For instance, Corinn Columpar's work focuses instead on a
definition of Fourth Cinema understood as an intersubjective nexus in which constant cultural and economic tensions, as well as the political
(and not just cultural) identity of Indigenous communities, emerge as part of a struggle with the systematic nature of settler colonialism.39 In
an analogous manner, Michelle H. Raheja's recent book describes tactical strategies of reading and making films that are ‘engaging and
deconstructing white-generated representations of indigenous people’ as part of larger dialogues about Native American sovereignty.40 And
yet, despite such ground-breaking academic contributions, one would be ill-advised to underestimate the continuous political, cultural, and
popular resilience and influence, within journalistic, policy-making, and academic institutions, as well as within the documentary and
indigenous film festival circuits, of such liberal philosophical intuition about the self as presence, absence, and/or re-emergence in
representation – an intuition which is also conforming to the NFB's liberal democratic mandate of giving a voice to underrepresented
minorities, thus ‘making [them] feel part of this great country’.41¶ Towards this end, the critical usefulness of the ‘Indian thing’,
as a theoretical concept, is to remove us from an understanding of Indianness that was amalgamated
with certain dichotomous oppositions – absence and presence, imaginary and referentiality, alienation and
identity. However, it will also be important to recall that the ‘Indian thing’ does not belong to the exteriority of such dichotomous
oppositions. Rather, it is born in the interval of these oppositions. It is that which is designated when, on either side of the
racial−colonial boundary, an attempt is made to identify that which is Indian and that which is not. Canada
and Québec, because their sovereignty rests on the moral and sovereign guarantee that ‘we’ are indeed at home in the territory of the ‘other’,
have no other choice but to constantly make Indianness say ‘something’ that makes ‘us’ possible. The same will hold true for Natives who, in a
colonial context as well as in a context of resistance vis-à-vis the state, cannot not also take a stand in regard to their Indianness, or, in other
words, in regard to this designation that is born out of the colonial encounter – this or that ‘thing’ that I am in regard to you who are not that. ¶
Faced with the impossibility of finding a way out of that ‘Indian thing’, I therefore maintain that such cultural and political
predicament calls for alternative strategies of resistance, as part of which, we will no longer seek to restore an
Indian reality that could be apprehended through the metaphysics of absence and presence supporting
the moral and sovereign architecture of the liberal settler colony. Rather, the task before us will be to
imagine a new textuality and to create political or media-based interventions that refuse to sanction the State's
authority to designate what or who truly corresponds to that ‘Indian thing’ – or to categorically forbid the State to situate itself
within the confines of Indianness. Importantly, such a proposition does not constitute an abrogation of the firm opposition between that which
I am and who you are – you, who are also human – rather, it calls for a constant re-delineation of this opposition. As
a result, it is the
entire edifice of settler colonialism that is made visible – or at least, the possibility of not seeing this edifice no longer
becomes an option. With the dramatisation and constant replotting of the irreducible racial−colonial dividing
line that settler colonialism seeks to render invisible, will we thus contribute to denaturalising the
sovereign, humanist discourse of the liberal state. As a result, we might perhaps be allowed to hope that such a
rupture in the relationship between the nation and that ‘Indian thing’ might have the potential to force our liberal
democracies to come into a profound, concrete, and consequential awareness of that which the contemporaneousness of the
racial and colonial foundations of ‘our’ sovereignty requires in the relationships between the State, Native
peoples, and non-Native racialised minorities – and this from both political and institutional standpoints. In the meantime,
antiracist and anticolonial efforts must take on the task of keeping ardent, like an inextinguishable fire,
the demands of conflict, incommunicability, fracture, and opposition if we hope to eschew the ultimate
triumph of settler colonialism: its self-supersession.

Settlement is an everyday process, constituted not only by the initial clearing of the
land but the ideological reiteration of the geopolitical and spatial self-evidence of the
terrain on which political struggle occurs – disorientation is necessary, a political
strategy that makes this space alien to us
Rifkin 13 – Associate Professor of English & WGS @ UNC-Greensboro
(Mark, “Settler common sense,” Settler Colonial Studies, Volume 3, Issue 3, pp. 322-340)
As opposed to the sense of withdrawal into a space divorced from contemporary political economy, the text also proposes a reframing of
perspective, altering the physical sense of relation to one's surroundings via a suspension of their givenness. In this vein, Ahmed
suggests,
“If orientation is about making the strange familiar through the extension of bodies into space, then
disorientation occurs when that extension fails” (11). These moments in the text suggest how the self can become
the site for an imaginative break with routine that produces a sensuous reorientation (getting “turned round”).
The critical project of the text appears here less as locating a space apart in which to discover the fullness of
the self than as the making alien of an already occupied place, such that “we should not recognize” it. The
act of turning round, of shifting one's orientation and redirecting the momentum by which one previously was impelled, offers
possibilities for perceiving differently, for seeing and engaging in ways that less take for granted the
jurisdictional matrix of the state and in which contemporary Native peoples can be acknowledged as themselves important
“inhabitants of New England” whose indigeneity compels a reconceptualization of the terms of occupancy for everyone.¶ Becoming
conscious of the everyday enactment of settlement involves relinquishing the notion of an
autonomous, extra-political selfhood existing in a place apart, instead opening onto a recognition not
only of enduring Native presence within contemporary political economy but of the effaced history of
imperial superintendence and displacement that provides the continuing condition of possibility for the
sense of settler escape into the wilderness. To be clear, the absence of a declared set of imperial commitments does
not suggest non-Natives' exoneration from continuing histories of violence perpetrated and perpetuated
by the settler-state. Returning from a different direction to Nicoll's critique discussed earlier, there may be an absence of
sentiments hostile to Native peoples in non-Natives' speech or writing, or non-Natives may adopt a
particular viewpoint supportive of Indigenous sovereignty on delimited plots of land when considering Native
peoples as such. However, that absence of malice or declaration of support does not address the ways
quotidian experiences of space (with respect to jurisdiction, occupancy, and ownership) and subjectivity (as modular, self-
identical, and extralegal) affectively register and iterate settler sovereignty in ways that shape the generation
of, for example, ethics, ideals, and political projects that do not take Native nations, voices, and lands as their
direct object. While arguments about the structural quality of settler colonialism – its scale, density, duration, and centrality to US life –
remain important, their very insistence on its pervasive and systemic operation can create the impression of an integrated whole. However, as
Latour observes, if “the body politic” is taken “to be virtual, total, and always already there”, then “the practical means to compose it are no
longer traceable; if it's total, the practical means to totalize it are no longer visible; if it's virtual, the practical means to realize, visualize, and
collect it have disappeared from view” (162–3). How is the settler body politic composed, collected, and realized in
everyday ways through the experiences, perceptions, associations, emplacements, and trajectories of
non-Native bodies? How do settler jurisdiction and governmentality shape the material possibilities available to non-Natives in scenes
and sites apparently disconnected from Native peoples and Indian policy, and how do non-Natives in their quotidian feelings
and interactions (and the cultural productions for which ordinary sensation serves as background) actualize the political and
legal geographies of the settler-state? Attending to settler common sense in this way does not so much bracket
Indigenous self-determination as draw on it as ethical inspiration to investigate the ways it is deferred through ordinary action whose
aim is not such but whose effect is to reiterate the self-evidence of settler geopolitics. Reciprocally, such
analysis also seeks to suggest how non-Natives might disorient and reorient themselves, how they might
come to understand not only that Indigenous peoples remain part of the social landscape of life in the US but that the very
terrain non-Natives inhabit as given has never ceased to be a site of political struggle.

Indigenity cannot be theorized through the affirmative’s lens of racial identity –

geopolitics, not biopolitics, is the critical factor that grounds the metapolitical
authority of the settler state to determine what counts as a political issue and what is
self-evidently natural – settler colonialism transcends racial violence of individual bare
lives and fosters a generalized state of bare habitance
Rifkin 9 – Associate Professor of English & WGS @ UNC-Greensboro
(Mark, “Indigenizing Agamben: Rethinking Sovereignty in Light of the ‘Peculiar’ Status of Native
Peoples,” Cultural Critique, Number 73, pp. 88-124)

In using Agamben’s work to address U.S. Indian policy, though, it needs to be reworked. In particular, his emphasis
on biopolitics
tends to come at the expense of a discussion of geopolitics, the production of race supplanting the
production of space as a way of envisioning the work of the sovereignty he critiques, and while his concept of the
exception has been immensely influential in contemporary scholar- ship and cultural criticism, such accounts largely have left
aside discussion of Indigenous peoples. Attending to Native peoples’ position within settler-state
sovereignties requires investigating and adjusting three aspects of Agamben’s thinking: the persistent
inside/outside tropology he uses to address the exception, specifically the ways it serves as a metaphor divorced from territoriality; the
notion of “bare life” as the basis of the exception, especially the individualizing ways that he uses that concept; and the
implicit depiction of sovereignty as a self-confident exercise of authority free from anxiety over the legitimacy of state actions.5 Such
revision allows for a reconsideration of the “zone of indistinction” produced by and within sovereignty, opening up
analysis of the ways settler-states regulate not only proper kinds of embodiment (“bare life”) but also
legitimate modes of collectivity and occupancy—what I will call bare habitance.¶ If the “overriding sovereignty”
of the United States is predicated on the creation of a state of exception, then the struggle for sovereignty by Native peoples
can be envisioned as less about control of particular policy domains than of metapolitical authority—
the ability to define the content and scope of “law” and “politics.” Such a shift draws attention away
from critiques of the particular rhetorics used to justify the state’s plenary power and toward a
macrological effort to contest the “overriding” assertion of a right to exert control over Native polities.
My argument, then, explores the limits of forms of analysis organized around the critique of the settler-
state’s employment of racialized discourses of savagery and the emphasis on cultural distinctions between
Euramerican and Indigenous modes of governance. Both of these strategies within Indigenous political theory treat sovereignty
as a particular kind of political content that can be juxtaposed with a substantively different—more
Native-friendly or Indigenous-centered—content, but by contrast, I suggest that discourses of racial
difference and equality as well as of cultural recognition are deployed by the state in ways that reaffirm its geopolitical self-
evidence and its authority to determine what issues, processes, and statuses will count as meaningful
within the political system. While arguments about Euramerican racism and the disjunctions be- tween Native
traditions and imposed structures of governance can be quite powerful in challenging aspects of settler-state policy,
they cannot account for the structuring violence performed by the figure of sovereignty . Drawing on
Agamben, I will argue that “sovereignty” functions as a placeholder that has no determinate content.6 The state has been described as an
entity that exercises a monopoly on the legitimate exercise of violence, and what I am suggesting is that the state of exception produced
through Indian policy creates a monopoly on the legitimate exercise of legitimacy, an exclusive
uncontestable right to define what will count as a viable legal or political form(ul)ation. That
fundamentally circular and self-validating, as well as anxious and fraught, performance grounds the legitimacy of
state rule on nothing more than the axiomatic negation of Native peoples’ authority to determine or adjudicate for
themselves the normative principles by which they will be governed. Through Agamben’s theory of the exception, then, I will explore how the
supposedly underlying sovereignty of the U.S. settler-state is a retrospective projection generated by,
and dependent on, the “peculiar”-ization of Native peoples.

Settler colonialism is integral to the formation of slavery and its afterlife—anti-black

racism is an inadequate frame absent understanding the role of colonialism
King 13
[2013, Tiffany Jeannette King, “IN THE CLEARING: BLACK FEMALE BODIES, SPACE AND SETTLER
COLONIAL LANDSCAPES”, PhD Dissertation]

We must consider that Settler colonialism shapes and constitutes Black life, specifically slavery and its afterlife in
America. While slavery and anti-Black racism should be active and robust analytic frames that guide Black Studies
and help us understand Black subjectivity in the Western Hemisphere, settler colonialism also structures Black life. The genocide
of Native peoples, the perpetual making of Settler space and Settler subjectivity—as unfettered self actualization—do
not immediately stop existing as forms of power when they run into Black bodies. The way that settler
colonial power looks and manifests itself just changes; it does not stop. Settler colonialism, as a subjectless
discourse, is a form of productive power that touches all that live in the US and Settler colonial nations.30

Though it touches and shapes everyone’s life it does so in very different ways. For the purposes of my own research I am arguing that settler

colonialism’s normalizing power enacts genocide against Native peoples (disappears Native people) but it also
shapes and structures antiBlack racism. The ontological positions that were created by slavery, specifically the
Slave are still alive and well however, settler colonial power intersects with, works through and structures

the repressive and productive power that makes the Black captive fungible and socially dead. Throughout,
In the Clearing poses the question, in what ways does settler colonial power help structure slavery and anti-Black racism? This project ultimately argues that
slavery and anti-Black racism are not adequate to fully understand the material and discursive
processes that create Blackness in all of its embodied genres in North America. Slavery and anti-Black
racism are also not the only repressive powers that make the Black body abject, fungible and situated at
the outer limits of being-ness. Both slavery and settler colonialism structure modernity and need to be
fully conceptualized as forms of power that help constitute Blackness. Conceptualizing the ways that
settler colonialism and slavery co-constitute one another is an essential component of this dissertation.

Thus, a methodological bracketing of the dominant centrality of the black/white

binary is necessary in order to grapple with settler colonialism – the binary reduces
indigenity to merely racial identity, erasing the originary and ongoing moment of
displacement – instead of the traditional frame of race as cultural or bodily identity,
we must theorize settler colonialism through the social structures by which possession
of indigenous lands is made ordinary
Rifkin 14 – Associate Professor of English & WGS @ UNC-Greensboro
(Mark, ‘Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance,’ pp.
19-25)

Over the past twenty years, scholars have given greater prominence to slavery and its legacies and the
intertwined processes of (re)producing blackness and whiteness as ubiquitous features of U.S. history, politics, and culture,
understanding these dynamics as pervading all aspects of national life. In Playing in the Dark (1992), Toni Morrison asks the
landmark ques- tion of how the presence of black people and the practices and legacies of enslavement might be registered in texts that do not
foreground either, pro- viding “the very manner by which American literature distinguishes itself as a coherent entity” (6). She demonstrates
how texts illustrate “the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it” (11), “even, and especially, when American texts are not ‘about’
Africanist presences or characters or narra- tive or idiom” (46).26 This conceptual and methodological turn helps pro- pel the emergence of
immensely rich and important developments within nineteenth-century Americanist scholarship, enabling a centering of slavery and its
legacies, blackness as a mode of racialization and anti-black racism, and African American experience within the field as a whole by indicating
their relevance across the entire spectrum of U.S. political economy, cultural production, and social life. While
Settler Common Sense
owes an immeasur- able debt to this set of conceptual and methodological innovations, these salutary
developments also have had the effect of reaffirming what has been characterized as the “black/white binary.”27
Even more than taking the specifics of one vector of racialization and the modes of oppression that sustain it (and that
it sustains) and potentially generalizing them to all forms of racialization in ways that may ill-fit other histories,
the black/white binary tends to foreground citizenship, rights, and belonging to the nation, miscasting Indigenous self-
representations and political aims in ways that make them illegible.28¶ From a perspective organized
around bondage, emancipation, labor, polit- ical participation, and formal versus substantive freedom, Native
articulations of peoplehood, sovereignty, and collective landedness can appear confusing at best and at
worst are taken as indicative of an investment in a form of reactionary ethnic nationalism. As Byrd argues
in The Transit of Empire, “The generally accepted theorizations of racialization in the United States have, in the
pursuit of equal rights and enfranchisements, tended to be sited along the axis of inclusion/exclusion. . . . When the
remediation of the coloniza- tion of American Indians is framed through discourses of racialization that can be redressed by further inclusion
into the nation-state, there
is a significant failure to grapple with the fact that such discourses further
reinscribe the original colonial injury” (xxiii). More than simply leaving out Indigenous political aims, the
substitution of racialization for colonization “masks the territoriality of conquest by assigning
colonization to the racialized body . . . [;] land rights disappear into U.S. territoriality as indigenous identity
becomes a racial identity and citizens of colonized indigenous nations become internal ethnic
minorities within the colonizing nation-state” (xxiv), a process “of making racial what is international” (125).29 Such “conflation,”
confusion, obfuscation results in a tendency in American studies to treat Native presence and violence
against Native peoples as a kind of originary sin of white supremacy that can be quickly noted on the way to
a discussion of other apparently more significant and enduring modes of racial domination. Byrd observes
that American studies often “sees it as enough to challenge the wilderness as anything but vacant” while then “relegat[ing] American Indians to
the site of the already-doneness that begins to linger as unwelcome guests to the future” (20). She suggests that a
critical and historical
lens developed to examine modes of racialization—a form of study itself overdetermined by the black/white
binary—not only cannot grasp the contours and stakes of indigeneity but translates it in ways that
redouble colonial incorporation.30¶ Scholarship within nineteenth-century American literary studies that has sought to
consider both settlement and slavery often displaces the former on the way to the latter in ways that
leave aside the question of the self- determination of Indigenous peoples, as well as the process by which the
occupation of Native lands comes to be lived and represented as the “ready made” of everyday
nonnative possibility. In Captivity and Sentiment, Michelle Burnham suggests that the popularity of narratives of captivity from the
seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries (including slave narratives) can be understood in terms of the ways they worked to manage the
“resis- tant and unrecuperable surplus of cultural difference always left over by the process of cultural exchange” (9): “The experience of
captivity across cul- tural boundaries transports them [captives, the texts produced by and about them, and the readers of such narratives] to
interstitial zones of contact, where dominant values, standards, and modes of representation fail, alter, or are brought to crisis” (170).
Characterizing “boundaries” as cultural makes “space” and “zone” almost entirely metaphorical,
delinked from actual places, land claims, and modes of occupancy, abstracting from the particular kinds of
sociopolitical mappings at play in different instances in order to place them in the same analytic frame. “Culture” comes to mark the
difference of nonwhiteness per se rather than indexing the normalization of specific formations of
residence, land tenure, and political belonging. Ezra Tawil’s The Making of Racial Sentiment similarly enfolds American
Indians into a critical narrative that defers questions of Native sovereignty, reading rep- resentations of settler–Indigenous conflict as a coded
way of addressing slavery. He explores “the attribution of certain qualities of character and emotion to race,” which he characterizes as “racial
sentiment” (11): “In the most general terms, it stands to reason that the Indian and the slave could operate at times as analogous figures in
Anglo-American political discourse. Both could be represented as members of alien populations that vexed the smooth operation of Anglo-
American power on the continent” (59). He later indicates that “the thematics of Indian dispossession was one aspect of a contemporary
discussion about property conflict in which the politics of slavery, no less than Indian land ownership, was at stake” (86), naming Native
“dispossession” as a struggle around “property” in ways that allow the contested geopolitics of sovereignty to be cast as similar in kind (“analo-
gous”) to “the slavery debate.” In Fugitive Empire, Andy Doolen observes that the book’s title “invokes the heretofore hidden imperialism . . .
that shaped our culture and institutions in America’s formative years” while then indicating that he seeks to attend “to the histories of slaves
and the insti- tutions of slavery” (xiii). For Doolen, U.S. imperialism refers to a “logic of racial domination” that shapes “the American rhetoric of
equality” (xvi), as opposed to indicating a territorial project of expansion/incorporation in which governmental and jurisdictional authority is
exerted over nonmem- ber polities who do not seek such belonging, and from this perspective, Native political projects (such as that of
Mashpees in the 1830s, which I discuss in chapter 3) appear as the pursuit of “cultural autonomy” within the broader achievement of “civil
rights” (162–68).¶ If an existing analytics of race produces distortion, what is the alternative? Or, approached from a
slightly different angle, in addressing the implicit operation and reproduction of settler legalities in quotidian geographies of lived nonnative
experience, what happens to the notion of whiteness? Work within Indigenous studies coming out of Anglophone settler-states other than the
United States has foregrounded the role of whiteness as a principal mode through which settlement is realized and naturalized.31 In “White-
ness, Epistemology, and Indigenous Representation,” Moreton-Robinson distinguishes “between a racialised subject position and the power
and knowledge effects of racialised discourse,” positioning whiteness
not simply as a particular embodied social location
but as a means of naming the structure through which Indigenous territory comes to be understood as
possessable by nonnatives and by which that logic of expropriation/ownership by the settler nation comes to be
experienced as given (84). However, in the context of the United States, in which the de facto racial divide is not white/ Native but
white/black, can whiteness provide the principal means of naming the operation of everyday formations and sensations of settlement?
Moreton- Robinson suggests as much in “Writing off Treaties,” which addresses how whiteness studies in the United States takes the
black/white binary as given in ways that efface settler colonialism and Indigenous dislocation: “The USA as a white nation state cannot exist
without land and clearly defined borders, it is the legally defined and asserted territorial sovereignty that provides the context for national
identifications of whiteness. In this way I argue Native American dispossession indelibly marks configurations of
white national identity” (85). If racializing attributions of Indianness work as a way of displacing indigeneity, does that dynamic make
settlement equiv- alent to whiteness or identification with it? Moreton-Robinson observes that “the sovereignty claims” of Indigenous peoples
“are different from other minority rights at the center of the struggle for racial equality,” because “their sovereignty is not epistemologically
and ontologically grounded in the citizenship of the white liberal subject of modernity” (87). Describing Native “dispossession” as marking
“white national identity,” though, need not be the same as characterizing whiteness as the primary vehicle through which Indigenous
“sovereignty claims” are disowned.¶ In other words, whiteness in the United States
conventionally has signified in terms of a
racial hierarchy through which populations’ access to citizenship rights and social wealth are managed, but
given that all positions in that hierarchy are predicated on the continued existence of the settler-
state, settlement may be conceptualized less as a function of whiteness than whiteness may be understood as
expressing a particular privileged position within the allocation of Native lands and resources among
nonnatives. As Scott Morgensen suggests, “Racialization under white supremacy will grant non-Natives distinct, often mutually exclusive,
abilities to represent or enact settler colonial power. But all non-Natives still will differ in their experiences of settler colonialism from the
experiences of Native peoples” (21).32 Put a little differently, ifwhiteness names the mechanisms by which settler land
tenure and jurisdiction are legitimized, it may not be the same whiteness as that of the black/white
binary, even if both are lived in the same body, such that people of color may enact and aspire to
whiteness-as-settlement while still contesting whiteness-as-allocation-of-entitlements-within-
citizenship.33 Moreover, settlement may itself not depend on a routing through whiteness. In Creole Indigeneity,
Shona Jackson addresses the dynamics of belonging in Guyana, analyzing how black subjects make themselves
“native” in the process of emancipation and producing a postcolonial national identity. Jackson suggests that engaging
with the history of the Caribbean “requires the diffi- cult assessing of Creoles as themselves settlers,” adding that “we must begin to
address the ways in which, in the Caribbean and even within settler states like the United States. . . , those brought in as
forced labor (racialized capital) now contribute to the disenfranchisement of Indigenous Peoples” (3).
Specifically, casting labor as nationalizing and nativizing allows formerly enslaved people to be narrated as having an intimate connection to the
place of the state, a belonging made possible by the ongoing settlement of Native lands. Jackson argues, “[L]abor by formerly enslaved and
indentured people is precisely what they are able to make into and reify as the new prior time of their belonging[,] . . . with which they supplant
the prior time of Indige- nous peoples” (69). Doing so reaffirms the legitimacy and inevitability of the nation-state’s existence, which
itself depends on the translation and effacement of Native governments and geographies. Yet, in Guyana and elsewhere in
the Caribbean, articulations of national identity come from majority non- white populations, largely of African descent. For these
reasons, it may analytically be more productive to refer to the process of settlement in other terms than
as “whiteness,” especially in the U.S. context in which the latter de facto is understood as referring to a
struggle within the nation-state rather than as one over the nation-state’s domestication of Indigenous
peoples and territories.34¶ The operation of the United States as a settler-state cannot be under- stood
in isolation from the naturalization of racial identities and racialized access to resources, particularly inasmuch as the privileging of
whiteness shapes nonnatives’ experience of possession and personhood. However, for the reasons sketched above, I do not
foreground race as the primary modality through which to conceptualize processes of settlement and
the dynamics of settler phenomenology, even as I address the (racial) coding of Native people(s) as Indians as part of
how nonnatives edit out indigeneity and settler occupation from their sensation of the ordinary.35 I seek to
address the ways that the legalities of the settler-state shape everyday experiences of givenness for all
nonnatives, such that antiracist projects (along with other articulations of opposition, as in the texts I address)
can recycle those lived grids of intelligibility as a basis for their alternative imaginings. In addition,
bracketing the methodological centrality of race, while still engaging with dynamics of racialization,
works as a way of forestalling the gravitational pull of citizenship and analogy with African Americans as
the means for approaching settler colonialism, while also potentially opening up my analyses to a comparative frame that
addresses settler-states in which whites are not predominant.

Settlement is not an event, but a structuring ontological logic of elimination constantly

manifest in everyday reiteration of the very modes of spatial inhabitance and
subjective modes of being – distinct from racial violences
Rifkin 14 – Associate Professor of English & WGS @ UNC-Greensboro
(Mark, ‘Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance,’ pp.
7-10)
If nineteenth-century American literary studies tends to focus on the ways Indians enter the narrative frame and the kinds of meanings and
associa- tions they bear, recent attempts to theorize settler colonialism have sought to shift attention from its
effects on Indigenous subjects to its implications for nonnative political attachments, forms of
inhabitance, and modes of being, illuminating and tracking the pervasive operation of settlement as a
system. In Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, Patrick Wolfe argues, “Settler colonies were (are) premised on the
elimination of native societies. The split tensing reflects a determinate feature of settler colonization. The colonizers come to stay—invasion
is a structure not an event” (2).6 He suggests that a “logic of elimination” drives settler governance and
sociality, describing “the settler-colonial will” as “a historical force that ultimately derives from the primal drive to
expansion that is generally glossed as capitalism” (167), and in “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” he observes that
“elimination is an organizing principle of settler-colonial society rather than a one-off (and superceded)
occurrence” (388). Rather than being superseded after an initial moment/ period of conquest, colonization persists since “the logic of
elimination marks a return whereby the native repressed continues to structure settler- colonial
society” (390). In Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s work, whiteness func- tions as the central way of understanding the domination and
displacement of Indigenous peoples by nonnatives.7 In “Writing Off Indigenous Sover- eignty,” she argues, “As a regime of power, patriarchal
white sovereignty operates ideologically, materially and discursively to reproduce and main- tain its investment in the nation as a white
possession” (88), and in “Writ- ing Off Treaties,” she suggests, “At an ontological level the structure of subjective
possession occurs through the imposition of one’s will-to-be on the thing which is perceived to lack will,
thus it is open to being possessed,” such that “possession . . . forms part of the ontological structure of white
subjectivity” (83–84). For Jodi Byrd, the deployment of Indianness as a mobile figure works as the principal mode of U.S. settler
colonialism. She observes that “colonization and racialization . . . have often been conflated,” in ways that “tend to
be sited along the axis of inclusion/exclusion” and that “misdirect and cloud attention from the underlying structures
of settler colonialism” (xxiii, xvii). She argues that settlement works through the translation of indigeneity as
Indianness, casting place-based political collec- tivities as (racialized) populations subject to U.S. jurisdiction and manage- ment: “the
Indian is left nowhere and everywhere within the ontological premises through which U.S. empire
orients, imagines, and critiques itself ”; “ideas of Indians and Indianness have served as the ontological ground
through which U.S. settler colonialism enacts itself ” (xix).
the negative’s alternative is criticism of the aff through settler colonial theory, a
strategy that reveals settlers’ investments in the ongoing project of settlement – as
settlers, we cannot delude ourselves with the colonial fantasy that we can fully
comprehend and thus control our relationships with Indigenous peoples – it is
necessary to instead unknow the settler position, unwork settler colonial frames of
reference that create the naturalized teleology of settlement
Strakosch & Macoun 13 – researcher @ Indigenous Studies Research Network;
Institute for Culture and Society
(Elizabeth & Alissa, ‘The ethical demands of settler colonial theory,’ Settler Colonial Studies, Volume 3,
Issue 3, pp. 426-443)

For many decades, postcolonial theory

has shaped global scholarship of colonialism, and this has tended to obscure the
ongoing hierarchies of settler states.1 However, building on the theoretical contributions of Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini,
increasing numbers of scholars are beginning to think about settler colonialism as a specific political formation. Importantly, this work draws
a distinction between settler states and formally decolonized societies, and acknowledges that postcolonial does not ‘mean the
same thing as post-settler colonial’.2 While this movement may be animated by and in sympathy with major
developments in critical Indigenous theory and global Indigenous activism,3 settler colonial theory (SCT)
remains a largely White attempt to think through contemporary colonial relationships. Like us, most
settlers who use the theoretical framework are concerned to disturb rather than re-enact colonial hierarchies,
and seek to contribute to Indigenous political struggles. However, Indigenous scholars have not always
embraced the theory and it has been met with scepticism by some engaged in challenging colonialism.4 This article
seeks to make explicit SCT’s current location as a primarily settler framework, and to explore its
strengths and limitations in this context. While we do not suggest that SCT can only ever be used by
settlers, we frame our discussion in relation to the current political and theoretical dynamics of its use.¶
In the Australian context, SCT is an appealing interpretive framework for academics seeking to understand the state’s increasingly coercive
approach to Indigenous people. It has had a particularly significant presence in Australian academic debates over the Commonwealth
government’s Northern Territory (NT) Emergency Response (widely known as ‘the intervention’). Adopted with bipartisan support in 2007
following allegations of widespread abuse of children in remote Aboriginal communities, the intervention involves the imposition of
controversial and coercive measures such as racially based welfare quarantining, alcohol and pornography bans, and the imposition of
compulsory leases over Aboriginal land. The policy essentially understands Aboriginal communities as ‘insufficiently colonised zones’,5 and
its introduction required the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975. This pathologizing of Aboriginal communities links
Aboriginality to child abuse, prescribes additional interaction with the state and mainstream economy, and establishes a political debate
about the nature and future of Aboriginality in which Indigenous perspectives are problematized.6 Given the policy’s articulation through
language of ‘stabilizing’ and ‘normalizing’ Aboriginal communities,7 as well as obvious resonances with previous policies
of
segregation and assimilation, it is not surprising that a range of scholars have found settler colonialism
to be a compelling framework for analysis.8 The intervention has also sparked debate about the role of
non-Indigenous academics, and the ethical and political implications of contributions by ‘outsiders’ to
questions concerning the experiences and futures of Aboriginal people.9¶ In this paper, we draw on recent Australian academic debates
surrounding the NT intervention to assess the contributions of SCT and to investigate some of the ethical and political implications of its
use.¶ We contend that SCT makes major contributions to current mainstream scholarship, but that its analytic
and explanatory power also presents a range of political and ethical risks. Exposing colonization as ‘a
structure not an event’10 confronts settlers with an account of contemporary colonialism that is difficult
to avoid, exposing underlying similarities between conservative and progressive approaches to contemporary Indigenous policy and
revealing intimate connections between settler emotions, practices, knowledges and institutions.
However, emphasizing continuities in colonial relationships between the past and the present can tend to
construct existing political relationships as inevitable and unchanging. When deployed with a neutral
descriptive authority, SCT can also re-inscribe settler academics’ political authority and re‐enact the foundational
settler fantasy that we constitute, comprehend and control the whole political space of our relationships
with Indigenous people. In order to counter this potential, we suggest that while settler ways of thinking
structure and dominate much of our contemporary reality, they are not equivalent to it. SCT makes visible our
own frames of reference, thus revealing possibilities and political visions that lie outside them. From this
standpoint, the fact that settler colonialism struggles to narrate its own ending does not mean that it
cannot end. Ultimately, we contend that this approach has the potential to facilitate new conversations and
relationships with Indigenous people but, in order to unlock this transformative potential, settler
scholars must remain attentive to our own positions within colonial relationships.¶ The strengths of SCT¶
Australian debates about the NT intervention demonstrate the strength and potential of SCT. Highlighting the contemporary nature of
colonialism disrupts familiar temporal political narratives and emphasizes the partisan nature of settler institutions, and this is a crucial
contribution in the context of the NT intervention. The intervention policy framework depends for its coherence on framings of the settler
state as innocent, benign and neutral, with Indigenous peoples’ perspectives constructed as overtly politicized and illegitimate.11 Scholars
have used SCT to critically unravel this discourse and raise broader questions about sovereignty and Indigenous– settler relations.12¶ In this
section we argue that SCT evidences a range of other important analytical and political strengths in the contemporary Australian context. It
reveals the state to be part of a broader settler performance of sovereign legitimacy, and this insight has the potential to problematize both
conservative and progressive policy approaches. In
foregrounding the partiality of the state, SCT supplements other
critical approaches to race by analytically integrating the structural and personal nature of settler
domination. Ultimately, in identifying the underlying logics of settler colonial ventures – and the way
that these are expressed at all levels of settler societies – SCT reveals the entwinement of settler
institutions, knowledges, emotions and selves.

Settler colonial theory provides settlers with a challenging unsettling account of our
own structural subject positionality – this demand for disoccupation of the settler’s
ontological sovereignty creates space for the work of imagining imagining and thus
making possible alternative Indigenous futures committed to a radical reorientation of
the status quo’s violent cohabitation
Strakosch & Macoun 13 – researcher @ Indigenous Studies Research Network;
Institute for Culture and Society
(Elizabeth & Alissa, ‘The ethical demands of settler colonial theory,’ Settler Colonial
Studies, Volume 3, Issue 3, pp. 426-443)
SCT is most usefully understood as providing non-Indigenous people in settler states with a better
account of ourselves – rather than as an account of the entire settler–Indigenous relationship. It explains more
is not able to explain the entire encounter between
of who we are than previous approaches, but it is not coincident with all that we are, and

Indigenous and settler peoples. Most clearly of all, it does not account for Indigenous lives – the
assertion that it could do so is itself allied to the settler colonial impulse to erase Indigenous life and assert settler control
of this discursive space.¶ Settler logics, political priorities and processes have structured much of the settler- Indigenous
relationship in the past and present. For this reason, settler colonialism must be studied as an historical
and empirical phenomenon as well as a conceptual framework. However, settler processes do not
constitute these relationships in their entirety, and more importantly, they do not necessarily
determine the range of possibilities available in our futures. It is crucial that we continue to challenge the politically convenient conflation
of settler desires and reality and of the political present and the future, asking always whose interests are served by this new and more sophisticated settler colonial fantasy.¶ Veracini

rightly observes that ‘the decolonization of settler colonialism needs to be imagined before it is practised, and this
has proved especially challenging.’89 However, we do not need to imagine this process on our own. SCT can
show us our own frames of reference – and this by implication assists us to understand and engage with what lies
outside them. Settler colonialism posits that two political societies cannot exist in one place through time, and that one must necessarily replace the other – either by settlers
extinguishing Aboriginal difference or by Aboriginal people expelling settlers (an option rarely countenanced). It imagines that two societies remaining together must always be an

Settler colonialism assumes the inevitability of its own colonizing

inherently problematic state, leading those within it to seek an end.

actions in such a circumstance. But even within Western traditions, it is possible to imagine other ways that two societies might

behave and be in one place. If we decide to look outside our own frameworks, and engage with Indigenous people and ideas, we might find even richer political
possibilities.¶ SCT provides us with a number of insights and resources that enable us to use it well. It reveals our own partiality and investments,

and traces connections between our individual identities as scholars and broader colonial processes.
SCT cannot substitute for an engagement with Indigenous people or for an awareness of our own complicities, but it can help us towards these goals. It explains and
exposes the operation of colonial dynamics and processes where these are routinely obscured or
denied. In identifying and naming these systems, SCT provides us with a range of important opportunities – including the
capacity to name and contest settler interests, challenge the problematization of Indigenous peoples, and identify prospects for
different kinds of resistance. The moment that SCT reveals colonization as ongoing is not necessarily the moment we must give up hope of change. It could, in fact, be
the moment that settler colonialism is revealed as one, very limited, way of understanding and organizing our reality.
Case Neg
 2NC Block Cards
No prior questions
Day 15 (Iyko, Associate Professor of English and Chair of the Critical Social Thought program at Mount Holyoke, “Being or Nothingness:
Indigeneity, Antiblackness, and Settler Colonial Critique,” Critical Ethnic Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2)//George

According to Sexton, no other oppression is reducible to antiblackness, but the relative totality of
antiblackness is the privileged perspective from which to understand racial formation more broadly. But
unlike the way feminist and queer critical theory interrogate heteropatriarchy from a subjectless standpoint, Sexton’s entire point seems to rest
on the very specificity and singularity—rather than subjectlessness—of black critical theory’s capacity to understand race. The privilege of this
embodied viewpoint similarly relies on rigidly binaristic conceptions of land and bodily integrity. He writes, “If the indigenous relation to land
precedes and exceeds any regime of property, then the slave’s inhabitation of the earth precedes and exceeds any prior relation to land—
landlessness. And selflessness is the correlate. No ground for identity, no ground to stand (on).”57 In other words, the slave’s nonrelation
to her body precedes and exceeds any other body’s relation to land. However, the settler colonial
designation of the United States and Canada as terra nullius—as legally empty lands—denies the very
corporeality of Indigenous populations to inhabit land, much less have any rights to it. Alongside
genocidal elimination, the erasure of Indigenous corporeal existence is inseparable from the ground it
doesn’t stand on, or is removed from. For the same reason that the economic reductionism of orthodox
Marxism has been discredited, such an argument that frames racial slavery as a base for a colonial
superstructure similarly fails to take into account the dialectics of settler colonial capitalism. The political
economy of settler colonial capitalism is more appropriately figured as an ecology of power relations than
a linear chain of events. Relinquishing any conceptual privilege that might be attributed to Indigeneity, alternatively, Coulthard offers a
useful anti-exceptionalist stance: “the colonial relation should not be understood as a primary locus of ‘base’ from
which these other forms of oppression flow, but rather as the inherited background field within which
market, racist, patriarchal, and state relations converge.”58 From this view, race and colonialism form
the matrix of the settler colonial racial state. Putting colonial land and enslaved labor at the center of a dialectical analysis, we
can see that blackness is neither reducible to Indigenous land nor Indigeneity to enslaved labor. Indigenous peoples and slaves are not reducible
to each other because settler colonialism abides by a dual logic that is originally driven to eliminate Native peoples from land and mix the land
with enslaved black labor. If land is the basis of settler colonialists’ relationship to Indigenous peoples, it is labor that frames that relationship
with enslaved peoples. We can draw on Patrick Wolfe’s important points about the heterogeneous racial effects of such a settler formation based
on Indigenous land and enslaved labor. To summarize those points, the
racial content of Indigenous peoples is the mirror
opposite of blackness. From the beginning, an eliminatory project was driven to reduce Native
populations through genocidal wars and later through statistical elimination through blood quantum and
assimilationist policies. For slaves, an opposite logic of exclusion was driven to increase, not eliminate, the
population of slaves. One logic does not cause the other; rather, they work together to serve a unitary
end in increasing white settler property in the form of land and an enslaved labor force. As a result, in
the postemancipation, postfrontier era, the racial content of Indigenous peoples is entirely dissolvable
and eradicable. Alternatively, the racial content of blackness remains absolute and essential, and
maintains an infinite capacity to contaminate. As Wolfe states, “the respective racializations . . . were
diametrically opposed, in a manner that reflected and preserved the foundational distinction between
land and labor. For whereas race for black people became an indelible trait that would survive any amount
of admixture, race for Indians became an inherently descending quantity that was terminally susceptible
to dilution.”59 One consequence is that the phrase “separate but equal” can take two meanings: as either an injurious legal relic or a
sovereign politics of the future.60 Given this stark distinction in racial ontologies, any critical theory that views race
and colonialism as a causal rather than dialectical relation is incapable of exposing these inextricable
logics of settler colonialism.
anti-black racism is an inadequate frame absent understanding the role of settler
colonialism
King 13
[2013, Tiffany Jeannette King, “IN THE CLEARING: BLACK FEMALE BODIES, SPACE AND SETTLER
COLONIAL LANDSCAPES”, PhD Dissertation]

We must consider that Settler colonialism shapes and constitutes Black life, specifically slavery and its afterlife in
America. While slavery and anti-Black racism should be active and robust analytic frames that guide Black Studies
and help us understand Black subjectivity in the Western Hemisphere, settler colonialism also structures Black life. The genocide

of Native peoples, the perpetual making of Settler space and Settler subjectivity—as unfettered self actualization—do
not immediately stop existing as forms of power when they run into Black bodies. The way that settler
colonial power looks and manifests itself just changes; it does not stop. Settler colonialism, as a subjectless
discourse, is a form of productive power that touches all that live in the US and Settler colonial nations.30

Though it touches and shapes everyone’s life it does so in very different ways. For the purposes of my own research I am arguing that settler

colonialism’s normalizing power enacts genocide against Native peoples (disappears Native people) but it also
shapes and structures antiBlack racism. The ontological positions that were created by slavery, specifically the
Slave are still alive and well however, settler colonial power intersects with, works through and structures

the repressive and productive power that makes the Black captive fungible and socially dead. Throughout,
In the Clearing poses the question, in what ways does settler colonial power help structure slavery and anti-Black racism? This project ultimately argues that
slavery and anti-Black racism are not adequate to fully understand the material and discursive
processes that create Blackness in all of its embodied genres in North America. Slavery and anti-Black
racism are also not the only repressive powers that make the Black body abject, fungible and situated at
the outer limits of being-ness. Both slavery and settler colonialism structure modernity and need to be
fully conceptualized as forms of power that help constitute Blackness. Conceptualizing the ways that
settler colonialism and slavery co-constitute one another is an essential component of this dissertation.

Settlement is not an event, but a structuring ontological logic of elimination constantly

manifest in everyday reiteration of the very modes of spatial inhabitance and subjective
modes of being – distinct from racial violences
Rifkin 14 – Associate Professor of English & WGS @ UNC-Greensboro
(Mark, ‘Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American
Renaissance,’ pp. 7-10)
If nineteenth-century American literary studies tends to focus on the ways Indians enter the narrative frame and the kinds of meanings and
associa- tions they bear, recent attempts to theorize settler colonialism have sought to shift attention from its
effects on Indigenous subjects to its implications for nonnative political attachments, forms of
inhabitance, and modes of being, illuminating and tracking the pervasive operation of settlement as a
system. In Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, Patrick Wolfe argues, “Settler colonies were (are) premised on the
elimination of native societies. The split tensing reflects a determinate feature of settler colonization. The colonizers come to stay—invasion
is a structure not an event” (2).6 He suggests that a “logic of elimination” drives settler governance and
sociality, describing “the settler-colonial will” as “a historical force that ultimately derives from the primal drive to
expansion that is generally glossed as capitalism” (167), and in “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” he observes that
“elimination is an organizing principle of settler-colonial society rather than a one-off (and superceded)
occurrence” (388). Rather than being superseded after an initial moment/ period of conquest, colonization persists since “the logic of
elimination marks a return whereby the native repressed continues to structure settler- colonial
society” (390). In Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s work, whiteness func- tions as the central way of understanding the domination and
displacement of Indigenous peoples by nonnatives.7 In “Writing Off Indigenous Sover- eignty,” she argues, “As a regime of power, patriarchal
white sovereignty operates ideologically, materially and discursively to reproduce and main- tain its investment in the nation as a white
possession” (88), and in “Writ- ing Off Treaties,” she suggests, “At an ontological level the structure of subjective
possession occurs through the imposition of one’s will-to-be on the thing which is perceived to lack will,
thus it is open to being possessed,” such that “possession . . . forms part of the ontological structure of white
subjectivity” (83–84). For Jodi Byrd, the deployment of Indianness as a mobile figure works as the principal mode of U.S. settler
colonialism. She observes that “colonization and racialization . . . have often been conflated,” in ways that “tend to
be sited along the axis of inclusion/exclusion” and that “misdirect and cloud attention from the underlying structures
of settler colonialism” (xxiii, xvii). She argues that settlement works through the translation of indigeneity as
Indianness, casting place-based political collec- tivities as (racialized) populations subject to U.S. jurisdiction and manage- ment: “the
Indian is left nowhere and everywhere within the ontological premises through which U.S. empire
orients, imagines, and critiques itself ”; “ideas of Indians and Indianness have served as the ontological ground
through which U.S. settler colonialism enacts itself ” (xix).

The affirmative’s positing of slavery as the contradiction through which humanism

affirms itself collapse indigeneity into slavery and turns settler colonialism into the
very ground by which their analytic gains force
Byrd 2011 [Jodi, Professor of English at the University of Illinois, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous
Critique of Colonialism]

But what seems to me to be further disavowed, even in Lowe’s important figuration of the history of labor in
“the intimacies of four continents,” is the settler colonialism that such labor underwrites. Asia, Africa, and
Europe all meet in the Americas to labor over the dialectics of free and unfree, but what of the Americas
themselves and the prior peoples upon whom that labor took place? Lowe includes “native peoples” in
her figurations as an addendum when she writes that she hopes “to evoke the political economic logics
through which men and women from Africa and Asia were forcibly transported to the Americas, who with
native, mixed, and creole peoples constituted slave societies, the profits of which gave rise to bourgeois
republican states in Europe and North America.”23 By positioning the conditions of slavery and
indentureship in the Americas as coeval contradictions through which Western freedom affirms and
resolves itself, and then by collapsing the indigenous Americas into slavery, the fourth continent of
settler colonialism through which such intimacy is made to labor is not just forgotten or elided; it
becomes the very ground through which the other three continents struggle intimately for freedom,
justice, and equality. Within Lowe’s formulation, the native peoples of the Americas are collapsed into slavery;
their only role within the disavowed intimacies of racialization is either one equivalent to that of African
slaves or their ability to die so imported labor can make use of their lands. Thus, within the “intimacies of
four continents,” indigenous peoples in the new world cannot, in this system, give rise to any historical
agency or status within the “economy of affirmation and forgetting,” because they are the transit
through which the dialectic of subject and object occurs. In many ways, then, this book argues for a critical reevaluation of
the elaboration of these historical processes of oppression within postcolonial, critical race, queer, and American studies at the beginning of the
twenty-first century. By foundationally accepting the general premise that racialization (along with the concomitant interlocking oppressions of
class, gender, and sexuality) causes the primary violences of U.S. politics in national and international arenas, multicultural liberalism has
aligned itself with settler colonialism despite professing the goal to disrupt and intervene in global forms of dominance through investments in
colorblind equality. Simply put, prevailing
understandings of race and racialization within U.S. post-colonial, area, and queer
studies depend upon an historical aphasia of the conquest of indigenous peoples. Further, these framings
have forgotten, as Moreton-Robinson has argued, that “the question of how anyone came to be white or black in
the United States is inextricably tied to the dispossession of the original owners and the assumption of
white possession.”24 Calls to social justice for U.S. racialized, sexualized, immigrant, and diasporic queer communities that
include indigenous peoples, if they are not attuned to the ongoing conditions of settler colonialism of indigenous
peoples, risk deeming colonialism in North America resolved, if not redressed, two cents for 100 billion dollars.

mapping and understanding structures of settler colonialism important

Brown 14 – prof of American Indian Studies @ U Illinois Urbana-Champaign
(Nicholas, ‘The logic of settler accumulation in a landscape of perpetual vanishing,’
Settler Colonial Studies, Volume 4, Issue 1, pp. 1-26)
Referencing Part Eight of Karl Marx's Capital, Volume One, entitled “So-called Primitive Accumulation”, geographer Jim Glassman argues,¶ The
so-called primitive accumulation is no longer primitive. As much recent scholarship has recognized, the founding events that Marx saw as
enabling capitalist accumulation proper (i.e. the process of expanded reproduction) are not just preconditions of capitalism but ongoing
conditions of its existence.12¶ Writing about settler colonialism, on the other hand, Alyosha Goldstein argues, “[It] is not so
much an ‘event’ or a static relationship as a condition of possibility that remains formative while also
changing over time”.13 Elsewhere, he writes, “Settler colonialism in North America is not a relic of the past but a
historical condition remade at particular moments of conflict in the service of securing certain
privileges”.14 The similarity between Glassman's account of primitive accumulation and Goldstein's description of settler colonialism is
striking. Indeed, the terms could almost be substituted for another, which raises the question: Given these analogous trajectories, what is the
difference between primitive accumulation and settler colonialism? Do they seek to explain the same things? In addition, we might ask: What is
the value of these concepts as analytical and strategic tools? And does that value increase when we consider them in tandem – as intersecting
or mutually reinforcing processes or as “organically linked” partners in a dialectical dance of exploitation and oppression?15¶ Related to this
ongoing or continuous character, both primitive accumulation and settler colonialism are increasingly theorized as structures. Patrick
Wolfe, for example, famously argues that settler colonialism – as “a complex social formation and as a continuity
through time” – is “a structure rather than an event”. The “logic of elimination”, Wolfe suggests, is the
“organizing principle of settler-colonial society rather than a one-off (and superseded) occurrence”.16
In short, “settler colonialism destroys to replace” and “settler colonizers come to stay”.17 Like settler colonialism, today primitive
accumulation, more often than not, is theorized as a structure, not an event. As an ongoing process, clearly it cannot be relegated to a
pre-capitalist past. In this regard, primitive accumulation might well be described as an “organizing
principle” that also “destroys to replace” and “comes to stay”.18 “Primitive accumulation”, philosopher Jason Read argues, “serves as
the name not only for an event but also for a process: the expropriation and legislation necessary to destroy other economic
and social relations to make them productive for capital”. “Primitive accumulation”, he continues, “is the process of the separation of labor
from the means of production and reproduction of its existence. Thus primitive accumulation becomes not only a cause of the capitalist mode
of production but also its effect”.19 Critical theory aside, primitive accumulation and settler
colonialism, as hegemonic
“organizing principles” or “conditions of possibility”, efface their own readability as structures and
naturalize themselves as events.20 Thus, as Marx observes, “[P]rimitive accumulation plays approximately the same role in political
economy as original sin does in theology”.21 In contrast, Jodi Byrd argues, “[D]iscourses of racialization […] consolidated into the predominant
and ‘original’ sin of the United States that evacuated colonization as a process”.22¶ Despite these similarities, recent theories of primitive
accumulation and settler colonialism diverge in significant ways as well. Taking similarity as a starting point, then, sheds light on the specificity
of difference. It
helps us to map structures. And to understand, in the most basic sense, what is meant by
the term “structure”, and if/how this differs, for instance, from what Elizabeth Povinelli calls an “event”, “quasi-event”, or
“eventfulness”.23 By focusing on the relationship between primitive accumulation and settler colonialism, the conventional meaning of the
former (within political economic theory) is modified by the latter. And it is modified, I suggest, in ways that make political economy more
relevant to anti-colonial struggle. Indigenous
critical theory, in other words, allows us to consider the specific means
by which primitive accumulation functions within settler-colonial contexts. As geographer Cole Harris notes, “It is
important to identify the powers in the settler colonial arsenal, map their positions, and sort out some
of their linkages”. “The geography of dispossession”, he continues, “is explained more precisely when the powers that effected it are
disaggregated”.24 One of my goals, therefore, in examining this relationship is to disaggregate processes that are often conflated or
subsumed.25
 1NC Case
Love-Hate Relationship Turn—Anti-Western rhetoric inflates the power of
Eurocentrism
Bruckner 10 (Pascal, French writer and public intellectual, maître de conférences at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris and
collaborator at the Nouvel Observateur. “The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism” p. 33 //George)

Nothing is more Western than hatred of the West, that passion for cursing and lacerating ourselves. By issuing their
anathemas, the high priests of defamation only signal their membership in the universe they reject. The suspicion that hovers over our most
brilliant successes always threatens to degenerate into facile defeatism. The critical spirit rises up against itself and consumes its form. But
instead of coming out of this process greater and purified, it devours itself in a kind of self-cannibalism and takes a morose pleasure in
annihilating itself. Hyper-criticism eventuates in self-hatred, leaving behind it only ruins. A new dogma of demolition is born out of the rejection
of dogmas. Thus we Euro-Americans are supposed to have only one obligation: endlessly atoning for what we have
inflicted on other parts of humanity. How can we fail to see that this leads us to live off self-denunciation while taking a
strange pride in being the worst? Self-denigration is all too clearly a form of indirect self-glorification. Evil can come only from us;
other people are motivated by sympathy, good will, candor. This is the paternalism of the guilty conscience: seeing
ourselves as the kings of infamy is still a way of staying on the crest of history. Since Freud we know that masochism
is only a reversed sadism, a passion for domination turned against oneself. Europe is still messianic in a minor key, campaigning for its own
weakness, exporting humility and wisdom.6 Its obvious scorn for itself does not conceal. Thus it wants to be the sole seat of inhumanity in
action and wears this evil disposition as its insignia as others wear their decorations. Even natural catastrophes do not escape our delusions of
grandeur: there are always many analysts who see in the slightest hurricane, flood, or earthquake the perfidious hand of Euro-America.
Regarding the tsunami in December 2004, some even saw the goddess Gaia rising from the ocean floor to punish our industrial civilization. Like
prayer, self-accusation is a way of acting symbolically at a distance when one can do nothing. Megalomania without borders: by attributing all
the misfortunes of the world to man, a certain kind of ecology shows an unbridled anthropocentrism that confirms our status as the
"master and destroyer" of the planet. To think, for example, that tomorrow we will be able to determine whether we have rain or
sunshine, that we will eclipse nature, is to relapse into the Promethean fantasy nourished by the most fanatical adepts of progress. We can,
then, contest everything except our own depravity. A blatant case of imperialism in reverse. Decolonization has deprived us of our power, our
economic influence is constantly decreasing, but in a colossal overestimation we continue to see ourselves as the evil center of gravity on which
the universe depends. We need our cliches about the wretchedness of Africa, Asia, and Latin America to confirm the cliche about the
predatory, murderous West. Our loud stigmatizations serve only to mask this wound to our self-esteem: we no longer make the laws. Other
cultures know it but nonetheless continue to blame us in order to escape our judgment and call us, at the slightest tremor, "people in pith
helmets telling other people what to do" (Vladimir Putin). If colonial independence's record of achievement is at present problematic, there is
no doubt that someday Africa will take off, and the Arab world as well, that they will cease to be objects of our compassion and become direct
competitors, partners on equal terms. Then we will no longer be the "masters of the world" but only formerly well-off people with pale faces.
The whole paradox of a sobered-up Europe is that it is no less arrogant than imperial Europe because it continues to project its categories on
the rest of the world and childishly boasts that it is the origin of all the ills that beset mankind. Our superiority complex has taken refuge in the
perpetual avowal of our sins, a strange way of inflating our puny selves to global dimensions.

No root cause of violence

Sharpe and Goucher 10 (Mattew, Senior Lecturer of Philosophy and Psychanalytic Studies at Deakin University, and Geoff, Senior
Lecturer of Literary Studies and Psychoanalytical Studies at Deakin University, “Zizek and Politics: A Critical Introduction,” p231-233, accessed
via Google Books on 1-28-12)

We realise that this argument, which we propose as a new ‘quilting’ framework to explain Žižek’s theoretical oscillations and political
prescriptions, raises some large issues of its own. While this is not the place to further that discussion, we think its analytic force leads into a
much wider critique of ‘Theory’ in parts of the later twentieth- century academy, which emerged following the ‘cultural turn’ of the 1960s and
1970s in the wake of the collapse of Marxism. Žižek’s paradigm to try to generate all his theory of culture, subjectivity, ideology, politics and
religion is psychoanalysis. But a similar criticism would
apply, for instance, to theorists who feel that the method
Jacques Derrida developed for criticising philosophical texts can meaningfully supplant the
methodologies of political science, philosophy, economics, sociology and so forth, when it comes to
thinking about ‘the political’. Or, differently, thinkers who opt for Deleuze (or Deleuze’s and Guattari’s) Nietzschean
Spinozism as a new metaphysics to explain ethics, politics, aesthetics, ontology and so forth, seem to us
candidates for the same type of criticism, as a reductive passing over the empirical and analytic
distinctness of the different object fields in complex societies. In truth, we feel that Theory, and the continuing line of
‘master thinkers’ who regularly appear particularly in the English- speaking world, is the last gasp of what used to be called First Philosophy.
The philosopher ascends out of the city, Plato tells us, from whence she can espie the Higher Truth, which she must then bring
back down to political earth. From outside the city, we can well imagine that she can see much more widely than her
benighted political contemporaries. But from these philosophical heights, we can equally suspect that the ‘master
thinker’ is also always in danger of passing over the salient differences and features of political life –
differences only too evident to people ‘on the ground’. Political life, after all, is always a more complex affair
than a bunch of ideologically duped fools staring at and enacting a wall (or ‘politically correct screen’) of
ideologically produced illusions, from Plato’s timeless cave allegory to Žižek’s theory of ideology. We know that Theory largely
understands itself as avowedly ‘post- metaphysical’. It aims to erect its new claims on the gravestone of First Philosophy as the West has known
it. But it also tells us that people very often do not know what they do. And so it seems to us that too
many of its proponents and
their followers are mourners who remain in the graveyard, propping up the gravestone of Western
philosophy under the sign of some totalising account of absolutely everything – enjoyment, différance,
biopower . . . Perhaps the time has come, we would argue, less for one more would- be global, all-purpose existential and
political Theory than for a multi- dimensional and interdisciplinary critical theory that would challenge the chaotic
specialisation neoliberalism speeds up in academe, which mirrors and accelerates the splintering of the Left over the last four decades. This
would mean that we would have
to shun the hope that one method, one perspective, or one master thinker could single-
handedly decipher all the complexity of socio- political life, the concerns of really existing social movements – which
specifi cally does not mean mindlessly celebrating difference, marginalisation and multiplicity as if they could be suffi cient ends for a new
politics. It would be to reopen critical theory and non- analytic philosophy to the other intellectual disciplines, most of whom today pointedly
reject Theory’s legitimacy, neither reading it nor taking it seriously.

Decol Metaphors Bad—Decolonizing “the mind” or “the academy” is complacent—

your author votes NEG
Tuck 12—Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations at the State University of New York at New Paltz. (Eve, Decolonization is not a
metaphor, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012, pp. 1-40)

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.”¶ Paulo Freire, eminent
education philosopher, popular educator, and liberation theologian, wrote his celebrated book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in no small part as
a response to Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. Its influence upon critical pedagogy and on the practices of educators committed to social justice
cannot be overstated. Therefore, it is important to point out significant differences between Freire and Fanon, especially with regard to
de/colonization. Freire situates the work of liberation in the minds of the oppressed, an abstract category of dehumanized worker vis-a-vis a
similarly abstract category of oppressor. This is a sharp right turn away from Fanon’s work, which always positioned the work of liberation in
the particularities of colonization, in the specific structural and interpersonal categories of Native and settler. Under Freire’s paradigm, it is
unclear who the oppressed are, even more ambiguous who the oppressors are, and it is inferred throughout that an innocent third category of
enlightened human exists: “those who suffer with [the oppressed] and fight at their side” (Freire, 2000, p. 42). These words, taken from the
opening dedication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, invoke the same settler fantasy of mutuality based on sympathy and suffering. Fanon
positions decolonization as chaotic, an unclean break from a colonial condition that is already over determined by the violence of the colonizer
and unresolved in its possible futures. By contrast, Freire positions liberation as redemption, a freeing of both oppressor and oppressed
through their humanity. Humans become ‘subjects’ who then proceed to work on the ‘objects’ of the world (animals, earth, water), and indeed
read the word (critical consciousness) in order to write the world (exploit nature). For Freire, there are no Natives, no Settlers, and indeed no
history, and the future is simply a rupture from the timeless present. Settler colonialism is absent from his discussion, implying either that it is
an unimportant analytic or that it is an already completed project of the past (a past oppression perhaps). Freire’s theories of liberation
resoundingly echo the allegory of Plato’s Cave, a continental philosophy of mental emancipation, whereby the thinking man individualistically
emerges from the dark cave of ignorance into the light of critical consciousness. ¶ By contrast, black feminist thought roots freedom in the
darkness of the cave, in that well of feeling and wisdom from which all knowledge is recreated. These places of possibility within ourselves are
dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us
holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman's place of power within
each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep. (Lorde, 1984, pp. 36-37)¶ Audre Lorde’s words provide a sharp
contrast to Plato’s sight-centric image of liberation: “The white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of us - the
poet - whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free” (p. 38). For Lorde, writing is not action upon the world. Rather, poetry is giving a
name to the nameless, “first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action” (p. 37). Importantly, freedom
is a
possibility that is not just mentally generated; it is particular and felt.¶ Freire’s philosophies have encouraged educators to
use “colonization” as a metaphor for oppression. In such a paradigm, “internal colonization” reduces to “mental colonization”, logically leading
to the solution of decolonizing one’s mind and the rest will follow. Such philosophy conveniently sidesteps the most unsettling of questions:
The essential thing is to see clearly, to think clearly - that is, dangerously and to answer clearly the innocent first question: what, fundamentally,
is colonization? (Cesaire, 2000, p. 32)¶ Because colonialism is comprised of global and historical relations, Cesaire’s question must be
considered globally and historically. However, it cannot
be reduced to a global answer, nor a historical answer. To do so
is to use colonization metaphorically. “What is colonization?” must be answered specifically, with attention to the colonial
apparatus that is assembled to order the relationships between particular peoples, lands, the ‘natural world’, and ‘civilization’. Colonialism is
marked by its specializations. In North America and other settings, settler sovereignty imposes sexuality, legality, raciality, language, religion
and property in specific ways. Decolonization likewise must be thought through in these particularities.¶ To agree on what [decolonization] is
not: neither evangelization, nor a philanthropic enterprise, nor a desire to push back the frontiers of ignorance, disease, and tyranny... (Cesaire,
2000, p. 32)¶ We deliberately extend Cesaire’s words above to assert what decolonization is not. It is not converting Indigenous politics to a
Western doctrine of liberation; it is not a philanthropic process of ‘helping’ the at-risk and alleviating suffering; it is not a generic term for
struggle against oppressive conditions and outcomes. The broad umbrella of social justice may have room underneath for all of these efforts. By
contrast, decolonization specifically requires the repatriation of Indigenous land and life. Decolonization is not a metonym for social justice.¶
We don’t intend to discourage those who have dedicated careers and lives to teaching themselves and others to be critically conscious of
racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, xenophobia, and settler colonialism. We are asking them/you to consider how the
pursuit of
critical consciousness, the pursuit of social justice through a critical enlightenment, can also be settler moves to
innocence - diversions, distractions, which relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility, and conceal the need
to give up land or power or privilege.¶ Anna Jacobs’ 2009 Master’s thesis explores the possibilities for what she calls white harm
reduction models. Harm reduction models attempt to reduce the harm or risk of specific practices. Jacobs identifies white supremacy as a
public health issue that is at the root of most other public health issues. The goal of white harm reduction models, Jacobs says, is to reduce the
harm that white supremacy has had on white people, and the deep harm it has caused non-white people over generations. Learning from
Jacobs’ analysis, we understand the curricular pedagogical project of critical consciousness as settler harm reduction, crucial in the resuscitation
of practices and intellectual life outside of settler ontologies. (Settler) harm reduction is intended only as a stopgap. As the environmental crisis
escalates and peoples around the globe are exposed to greater concentrations of violence and poverty, the need for settler harm reduction is
acute, profoundly so. At the same time we remember that, by definition, settler harm reduction, like conscientization, is not the same as
decolonization and does not inherently offer any pathways that lead to decolonization.

Violence Focus DA—they drive complacency by propagating images of perpetual

victims and distance individuals from personal accountability—turns case
Grande 4 (Sandy, Associate Professor of Education at Connecticut College, Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought.
2004. Page 93-94)

Indeed, the marketplace is flooded with the tragic stories of American Indians as lost cultures and lost peoples. Moreover, such stories are told
and retold as history, as part of America's dark and distant past. Within the contexts of whitestream history, the consequence of
genocide is typically depicted as an egregious but perhaps unavoidable consequence of the country's belief in
manifest destiny. While I would never argue that stories depicting the tragedy of genocide (e.g., Indian boarding schools, the Trail
of Tears) are not centrally important to the telling of American history, their prominence in the discourse becomes problematic when
considered in the wider context of whitestream consumption. In other words, why are these stories upheld as a prime-
time programs in the commodified network of Indian history? What is gained from the proliferation of essentialist portrayals of Whitestream
domination and Indian subjugation? Such stories, in fact, serve several purposes, none of which contribute to the emancipatory project of
American Indians. First, by propagating romanticized images of American Indians as perpetual victims while simultaneously
marginalizing the work of indigenous intellectuals and social critics, whitestream
publishers maintain control over the
epistemic frames of the discourse and thus over the fund of available knowledge on American Indians. The desire for such
control is underwritten by the understanding that critical scholarship threatens the myth of the ever-evolving democratization of Indian-white
relations. Second, essentialist
accounts of Indian history ( framed in good- vs. bad-guy terms) allow the consumer to
fault rogue groups of dogmatic missionaries and wayward military officers for the slow but steady erosion of indigenous life,
thereby distancing themselves and mainstream government from the ongoing project of cultural genocide. Third, the virtually exclusive
focus on Indian history allows the whitestream to ignore contemporary issues facing American Indian communities. As a result, Indians as a
modern people remain invisible, allowing a wide array of distorted myths to flourish as contemporary reality: that all the "real" Indians are
extinct, that all surviving Indians are either alcoholics or gaming entrepreneurs. Meanwhile, as these images are circulated, the intensive,
ongoing court battles over land, natural resources, and federal recognition are relegated to the margins of the discourse, fueling the great lie of
the twenty-first century-that Americas "Indian problem" has long been solved.
 Afropessimism Links
The turn to the history of Native genocide obfuscates the paradigm of anti-blackness
which has always privileged the Native as able to ascend to inclusion in civil society at
the expense of the Slave
Wilderson, Professor of Drama and African American Studies at UC Irvine, 10
(Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, p. , accessed 6-16-13 //Bosley)

Granted, the “Savage” relation to the Settler by way of libidinal economy’s structure of exchange is far
from isomorphic, at the level of content, with what Fanon calls “existence.”xxi For example, there is indeed important and
resounding dissonance between the Indian’s spiritual/divine imagining of the subject in libidinal
economy and the Settler/Master’s secular, or psychoanalytic, or even religious imaginings (see Deloria, 1973: 217 and 1979: ix-xiii,
14-18, 86-101, and 118-120). But these differences do not cancel each other out. That is, they are not differences with an

antagonistic structure, but differences with a conflictual structure; because articulation, rather than a void, makes the
differences legible. In other words, “Savage” capacity is not obliterated by these differences . In fact, its interlocutory

life is often fortified and extended by such differences. The modern or post-modern subject alienated within language, on one
hand, and the Great Spirit devotee, or child of Mother Earth, on the other hand, may in fact be elaborated by different cosmologies (Deloria, 1973: 75-89),
predicated on what Deloria has noted as conflictual visions, but Lacan’s analysand (meaning a subjective capacity for full or empty speech) does not require the
Indian as its parasitic host, despite the fact that the Indian was forcibly removed to clear a space for the analyst’s office. This is because alienation
is
essential to both the “Savage” and the Settler’s way of imagining structural positionality; to the way
Native American meta-commentaries think ontology. Thus, the analysand’s essential capacity for alienation from being (alienation
that takes place in language) is not parasitic on the “Savage’s” capacity to be alienated from the spirit world or the land (which for Indians are cosmologically
inseparable). Whereas historically, the secular imperialism which made psychoanalytic imaginings possible
wreaked havoc on the “Savage” at the level of Fanonian existence, that contact did not wipe out
his/her libidinal capacity—or Native metaphysics. This is true not in some empirical sense, for as a Black I have no
access to the Indian’s spirit world. I am also barred from subjectivity in even the most revolutionary
schemata of White secularism (Lacanian psychoanalysis and Negri’s Marxism). Rather, it is true because the most profound and
unflinching metacommentators on the “Savage” and libidinal economy (although Indians would probably substitute
“spirit world” for “libidinal economy” and replace the “subject” with “the soul”) and the most unflinching meta-commentators on

the Settler and libidinal economy say it is true. Having communed around their shared capacity for subjective alienation since the dawn
of modernity (what Indians call “contact”), they formed a community of interpretation. Even as the Settler began to wipe the Indian

out, s/he was building an interpretive community with the “Savage” the likes of which the Master was
not building with the Slave. In the 1530s, the Thomist ecclesiastics of the School of Salamanca agreed that Indians possessed subjective dominion in
a way that slaves did not. Judy maintains that this claim was made possible on the basis of ethnographic evidence which Cortes and others had returned from the
“New” World to Spain with. For the Thomists and the Spanish explorers: Indians are humans and not animals…they possessed a certain rational order in their
affairs…Cortes’s ethnographic data…described a culture with extensive evidence of rationality and civility: a material culture capable of constructing cities of stone,
urbanization (society based on the polis), sophisticated and hierarchical social organization, commerce, juridical institutions, and above all highly ritualized religious
practice… Forfeiture of the natural right of dominium, then, would require that the Indian was truly irrational and so in violation of the law of nature. In the face of
overwhelming evidence of the Indians’ rationality and civility, even the two most frequently cited acts of abomination held against Indians, cannibalism…and
sacrifice…were viewed…as no more than singular temporary aberrations of reason and so not evidence of true irrationality, which made them insufficient grounds
for denying the Indians possession of dominium. (Judy 80-81) It should be noted that when cannibalism is “blackened it is considered to be a genetic predisposition
rather than a “temporary aberration of reason” (Judy). However compelling the “overwhelming” ethnographic evidence was for the Thomists, the evidence itself is
beached on the shore of “existence.” It has no ontological buoyancy. It is not the mechanism through which the Settler—at least in libidinal economy—is freed from
performing his necrophilia on the “Savage.” In short, it does not explain the how of this relation. Again, they could have “found” such “overwhelming” ethnographic
evidence in Africa, but one did not. Judy reminds us that even “Hegel [300 years after the School of Salamanca] explicitly
exclude[d] Africa from the dialectic, on the grounds of the primitiveness of the Negro” (309). Judy’s statement in
itself is a nonsequitur because the Negro is Hegel’s, meaning modernity’s, creation: there is no way to Africa through the Black. What precisely and

specifically prompted the communal imaginings in libidinal economy between Settler and “Savage”—
but not between Master and Slave, given that modernity’s Settler and Master are one and the same
(the Human)—is a question of origins that does not concern me for it might clarify the historical record
at the expense of mystifying paradigmatic relations of power. To know the precise origin of power
does not ensure an understanding of its arrangements. What concerns me is a certain will to analogy
which the Settler insists upon, when thinking the Aztec, but which is lacking in the absolute (by not
even being raised to be rejected) when his mind strays to Africa. Questions as to the why of Carib cannibalism and Aztec
sacrifice present epistemological dilemmas, questions which the ecclesiastics, the intellectuals of early modern civil society, had to answer in order for conquest of
the Indians to continue: Vitoria [a leading Salamancan Thomist] based his answer to this question on analogy:
the Indians are like children [emphasis mine]. As dominium is a natural right independent of objective
property, children can be said to have dominium, although they may not exercise it properly [emphasis in
original]. In this state of improper use, children are not irrational, but they are unrational, their reason is potential.

Instead of being natural slaves, the Indians are a class of natural children, much like the European
peasantry. (Emphasis mine 81) Analogy, then, is more than a rhetorical device. To be sure, its communal power cannot stop war,
stave off conquest and imperialism; in fact, it often evinces generative agency where such transgressions are concerned. But it brokers a community

of interpretation between Settler/Master and “Savage” as well as—and this is key—cradles that relation in
the swaddling of conflictual harmony and shields the relation from the cold incoherence of
antagonism. Analogy delivers the Indian from the wound of irrationality (in favor of unrationality); his/her subjectivity is questioned, and it is this calling into
question—the semiotic play, the conflictual harmony—more than the content of that ensemble of questions which enables “productive subjectivity” (89). For

though the Indian exists liminally in relation to the Settler, as do the Settler’s children and “his” Old World peasants, s/he
remains ontologically possible. That is to say, the “Savage,” unlike the Slave, is half-alive.

Indigenous claims of sovereignty become coherent only because of a shared fear of

Blackness by civil society – ensures their strategy can never resolve the anti-Black
animus
Wilderson, Professor of Drama and African American Studies at UC Irvine, 10
(Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, p. , accessed 6-16-13 //Bosley)

Most non-White and non-hetero people in the United States exist in social and political conflict within
its structure. Throughout this book I have been at pains to point out that this is not the same as existing in social and political antagonism to its structure.
The “Savage” and the Slave are positioned as antagonisms because ethical restoration of their

essential losses would obliterate the cartographic and subjective integrity, respectively, of the Americas, if not
the world. There is, however, a caveat to which I alluded to in Chapter 1. Whereas the “Savage” demand for the return

of Turtle Island—the restoration of sovereignty—would surely obliterate the cartographic integrity of

the United States, it is not a foregone conclusion that this demand would obliterate the subjective
integrity of the Settler/Master. By dismantling the cartographic institutionality of the nation-state, a
return to Native American paradigms of sovereignty need not destroy the spatial and temporal
capacity (the anthropological and historiographic power) of human existence. In fact, as the most prolific ontologists of
indigenous sovereignty are quick to point out, such a restoration, while bad for the United States as a
settlement, would ultimately be good for its Settlers. This is why so many Left-leaning and progressive
Settlers take such solace in Native American customs and forms of governance—but only after they
have “settled” in. The political common sense of Settler radicalism has drawn freely upon the ontological grammar of indigenous sovereignty, from Ben
Franklin to anti-globalization activist/intellectuals in Seattle. My argument in Part 3 is that sovereignty, as one modality of the “Savage” grammar of

suffering, articulates quite well with the two modalities of the Settler/Master’s grammar of suffering,
exploitation and alienation. The second thrust of my argument is this: whereas the genocidal modality of the “Savage” grammar of suffering
articulates quite well within the two modalities of the Slave’s grammar of suffering, accumulation and fungibility, Native American film, political texts, and
ontological meditations are not predisposed to recognize, much less pursue, this articulation. To put a finer point on it, one could safely say, first, that
“Savage” ontological meditations are animated by the network of connections, transfers, and
displacements between the constituent registers of indigenous sovereignty (governance, land
stewardship, kinship structure, custom, language, and cosmology) and the constituent registers of
Settler/Master meditations (Marxism, environmentalism, and psychoanalysis); but these ontological meditations do
not explore the being of the Indian as a product of genocide (except in the work of a handful of meta-commentators on ontology such as Ward Churchill and, to a
lesser extent, Leslie Silko). And these meditations are certainly not explorations of a network of connections, transfers, and displacements between Red ontological
death and Black ontological death. Second, one could argue that the small corpus of socially engaged films directed by Native Americans privilege an ensemble of
questions animated by sovereign loss. However, the
libidinal economy of cinema is so powerful that the ensemble of
questions catalyzed by genocide as a grammar of suffering often force their way into the discourse of
these films with a vengeance that exceeds their meek—or downright omitted—appearance in the scripts; scripts which,
nonetheless, tend to exert their authority by policing the cinematic exploration of genocide with the sovereign power of the narrative. Heretofore, little has been
written which comments on the disinclination of “Savage” ontological meditations to explore the network of connections, transfers, and displacements between
Red death and Black death. This section will end with an analysis of this disinclination and its alarming consequences for “Savage” cinema. Most alarming is the fact
that nearly half of the seven or eight feature films directed by Native Americans within the past thirty years, Follow Me Home (1996), Sioux City (1994), The Business
of Fancydancing (2002) and Skins (2002), are not content to balance the pathos of their ethical dilemmas solely on the back of White supremacy. In other words, in
these films the
aesthetic argument as regards the history (and continuation) of Native extinction rests as
much upon the iconography and symbolism of Blackness as it does upon the iconography and
symbolism of White supremacy. When I say as much I do not mean to imply a quantitative one for one pilgrim’s progress in which Indian films
envision Native encounters with Black people as being historically, or even empirically, the source of their extinction—cinema is seldom called to such a rational and
conscious account. By as much I mean the following: there are moments in these films in which the
spectator is being persuaded that the
suffering of Indian-ness is untenable, cannot be justified, and should not be endured. None would
argue with the political and economic reasoning of such claims. But the libidinal “reasoning” of these
claims, manifest in some of the most emotionally charged scenes, relies upon Settler civil society’s longstanding
commonplace and quotidian phobias as regards the image- and acoustic-based iconography of
Blackness as an unspecified and undisputed threat: for example, the quotidian depravity of Black rap music (Skins), the figure the cold
and aggressive Black woman (The Business of Fancydancing), the loud and impossible Black male task-master (Sioux City)lvii, and the vestmentary and kinesic codes
of mise en scène commonly accrued to Black youth-qua-criminal (Skins). TheBlack in both “Savage” and Settler cinema is
commonly imagined as a threat to sovereignty and civil society, respectively. Furthermore, it is the imaginative
labor around this threat in common which secures coherence for the grammar of “Savage”
sovereignty. The argument being made here for the first time in either film studies, Native American studies, Black studies, or, for that matter, comparative
ethnic studies, will proceed by examining not only what a benchmark film like Chris Eyre’s Skins yields symptomatically but by way of an extensive examination of
Native American ontological commentaries. In short, whereas
the coherence of Native American cinema may not
reproduce the White supremacy of Settler/Master cinema, its grammar of suffering, and the way that
grammar labors cinematically, is dependent on what I will call “Savage” Negrophobia—a Native American
brand of anxiety as regards the Slave, which is foundational not only to the emerging filmography of “Savage” cinema but also to the more
substantial and established archive of Native American political common sense and meta-commentaries on “Savage” ontology.

There are histories of a shared struggle in black-native struggles, but indigenous

perspectives and scholars have denied the knowledge that allows one to redress the
true horror of slavery and the loss of black culture.
Sexton 14 [Jared; Jared Sexton is the Director of African American Studies at the University of
California, Irvine, where he also teaches film and media studies; “The Vel of Slavery: Tracking the Figure
of the Unsovereign,” Critical Sociology, pp. 6-7; REJ]
Are native calls for black solidarity simply expedient in a situation of settler colonialism? My sense is that there is something more complicated,
and concerning, at work. If
one surveys the writing on black-native solidarity in the field of Native Studies,
one finds frequent reference to histories of shared struggle, strategic alliance, and cohabitation in
place of or alongside acknowledgment of histories of Indian slavery, ongoing exclusion of black-native
people, and pervasive anti-black racism. In drawing up the historical balance sheet this way, scholars suggest there is
ground for black-native solidarity in the present. Even where there is no denial or minimization of the history of Indian
slavery, even where native anti-black racism is recognized and the struggles of blacknative people are affirmed, an argument is forwarded that
solidarity in this moment can be retrieved from the past and refashioned for the future. In this sense, native peoples are seeking to reunite with
lost allies, namely, those enslaved Africans from the early colonial period who demonstrated a ‘a spiritual worldview, land-informed practices,
and were held together by kinship structures which created relationships that allocated everyone a role in the community’ (p. 127). This is
political solidarity derived from ‘cultural similarities’. The implications of this claim are considerable. If
black-native solidarity is
founded upon shared indigenous worldviews, practices and kinship structures, then the prerequisite for black
people to move, politically and ethically, from settlers to allies ‘in the interest of a deeper solidarity’
with native people is, in a word, re-indigenization. In so doing, black people on the North American
scene not only become politically relevant to settler decolonization but also, en route, redress ‘the
true horror of slavery’ – the loss of culture: Diasporic Black struggles, with some exceptions, do not
tend to lament the loss of Indigeneity and the trauma of being ripped away from the land that defines
their very identities. From Indigenous perspectives, the true horror of slavery was that it has created
generations of ‘de-culturalized’ Africans, denied knowledge of language, clan, family, and land base,
denied even knowledge of who their nations are. (Amadahy and Lawrence, 2009: 127)

Blacks have only an abstract connection to land, unable to become settlers of the
state. We must reframe the logics of blackness and natives in the context of white
supremacy. The struggle against anti-blackness and white supremacy is a prerequisite
and ultimately a struggle against colonialism.
Sexton 14 [Jared; Jared Sexton is the Director of African American Studies at the University of
California, Irvine, where he also teaches film and media studies; “The Vel of Slavery: Tracking the Figure
of the Unsovereign,” Critical Sociology, pp. 7-9; REJ]
From indigenous perspectives, diasporic black struggles would, first and foremost, need to lament the loss of indigeneity that slavery entails, a
process that requires acknowledging that the loss is both historic and ongoing. This would be a more proper post-traumatic response than
‘internalizing colonial concepts of how peoples relate to land, resources, and wealth’ (p. 127). However, what becomes curious upon even the
briefest reflection is the fact that ‘denied knowledge of language, clan, family, and land base’ – and the consequent temptation toward
‘internalizing colonial concepts’ – is precisely what native resistance and resurgence is struggling against to this day. To wit: ‘I believe that the
systematic disconnection (and dispossession) of Indigenous Peoples from our homelands is the defining characteristic of colonization’
(Waziyatawin, 2012: 72). So, de-culturalization, or loss of indigeneity, is a general condition of black and native peoples, not one that native
people can restrict to black people in order to offer (or withhold) sympathies. The
structuring difference between settler
colonization and enslavement is to be found precisely in the latter’s denial of ‘knowledge of who their
nations are’ – that is, deracination. On this count, the loss of indigeneity for native peoples can be
named and its recovery pursued, and that pursuit can (and must) become central to political
mobilization. The loss of indigeneity for black peoples can be acknowledged only abstractly and its
recovery is lost to history, and so something else must (and can) become central to political
mobilization. Not the dialectics of loss and recovery but rather the loss of the dialectics of loss and recovery as such, a politics with no
(final) recourse to foundations of any sort, a politics forged from critical resources immanent to the situation, resources from anywhere and
anyone, which is to say from nowhere and no one in particular. From indigenous perspectives, this baseless politics can only ever be a liability.
Without a base, which is to say a land base, a politics of resistance can only succumb to ‘civilization’s fallacies and destructive habits’. The quest
for equality is perhaps the most pernicious of those fallacies. The conclusion of this line of thinking is that, due
to ‘the trauma of
being ripped away from the land that defines their very identities’, landless black people in diaspora
cannot mount genuine resistance to the settler colonial state and society; they can only be held apart
from it as slaves. Which is to say that, without the benefits of a land-base and absent the constitutive exclusion of
slavery, blacks are destined to become white, and thus settlers, in thought and action and, moreover,
have effectively become so post-emancipation. But rather than argue that black people in North
America do, in fact, have significant, if attenuated, indigenous worldviews, practices and kinship structures or, in any case,
can learn such from others in order to begin fighting the good fight; I submit we
must consider the possibility that 1) the
‘Black Diasporic struggles’ under examination are irreducible to anti-racism, 2) that anti-racism is irreducible
to demands upon the state, and 3) that demands upon the state are irreducible to statist politics.
Blacks need not be indigenous and/ or enslaved Africans in order to be allies to native peoples in the
Americas, whatever that might mean. And I say all of this without need of mentioning the ‘notable exceptions’ otherwise known
as the black radical tradition. What if there are, and will have always been, ways to pursue settler decolonization otherwise than as indigenous
peoples and their immigrant allies, a movement from within that slavery whose abolition is yet to come? Of course, not all Native Studies
scholars adhere to this cultural criterion of political solidarity. But even among those attempting to coordinate struggles among black and
native peoples on a political basis, related problems arise. The
contributions of Andrea Smith in the last decade are
perhaps most generative on this note (Smith, 2006, 2010, 2012, 2013). In a series of recent articles, Smith proposes one
way to reframe the relational field of ‘people of color’ in North American political culture by thinking
through the multiple logics of white supremacy, in relation to the enforcement of normative gender
and sexuality, as a sort of permutation. The author thus nominates the three pillars: Slavery/Capitalism, Genocide/Colonialism,
and Orientalism/ War (Smith, 2010). We might recast them here as Racial Slavery, Settler Colonialism, and
Orientalism, with the understanding that all are coeval, at least, with the history of capitalism. Each pillar
operates according to a respective logic: the proprietary logic of slavery (through which captive Africans are rendered property of slaveholders
and regarded as such by the larger society), the genocidal logic of settler colonialism (through which indigenous peoples are dispossessed of
land, water and resources and made to disappear as indigenous peoples), and the militarist logic of Orientalism (through which the people of
Asia, the Middle East, and eventually Latin America are constructed as inferior, yet threatening ‘civilizations’ subjected to imperial warfare and
its domestic ramifications). The aim of this tripartite scheme is to illustrate for each pillar how those inhabiting its logic might become complicit
in the victimization of those inhabiting the other; the object is the fostering of strategic alliances across multiple axes of power, rather than a
politics based on notions of shared victimhood along a single axis. For present purposes, we are prompted to develop approaches to political
struggle that address both the indigenous/settler binary and the slave/master binary, working for settler decolonization while dismantling the
hierarchy established by racial slavery. And these movements would be set about in tandem with the movement to end American imperialism
abroad. Smith’s formulation seeks to ascertain the fundamental dynamics in the relative positioning of
various social groupings. The adjudication of those dynamics may involve not only the old canard of compromise (politics reduced to
the art of being uncomfortable), but also the creation of new abilities to think in different registers in turn or at once. To this end, ‘we might
focus on actually building the political power to create an alternative system to the heteropatriarchal,
white supremacist, settler colonial state’ (Smith, 2012: 87). While the three pillars model seeks to typify and diagram
interrelated logics, it makes no explicit attempt at analytical synthesis or integrated political strategy. Synthesis and strategy are implied,
however, a point that becomes clear when we look more closely at the working definitions of racial slavery and settler colonialism. In ‘Three
Pillars’, Smith
describes the logic of slavery as one that ‘renders Black people as inherently slaveable – as
nothing more than property’. She goes on to situate slavery as the ‘anchor of capitalism’, but in a
peculiar way: That is, the capitalist system ultimately commodifies all workers – one’s own person
becomes a commodity that one must sell in the labor market while the profits of one’s work are taken
by someone else. To keep this capitalist system in place – which ultimately commodifies most people
– the logic of slavery applies a racial hierarchy to this system. This racial hierarchy tells people that as
long as you are not Black, you have the opportunity to escape the commodification of capitalism. This
helps people who are not Black to accept their lot in life, because they can feel that at least they are
not at the very bottom of the racial hierarchy – at least they are not property; at least they are not
slaveable. (Smith, 2006: 67) We can agree that under the capitalist system one must sell their labor power and that it will be commodified
as labor, which is to say it will be converted into a factor of production. We can agree that under the capitalist system the surplus value of social
labor – not the bourgeois notion of individual work – is appropriated by the owners of the means of production and converted into profit. That
is the basic structure of labor exploitation under capital.13 We must object, however, that labor exploitation is a commodification of ‘one’s own
person’ or that the capitalist system ‘ultimately commodifies most people’. If this were true, then slavery as the conversion of person into
property would simply be an extreme form of labor exploitation.14 Or, vice versa, exploitation would be an attenuated form of slavery. In
either case, there would be only a difference of degree rather than kind between exploitation and slavery. At any rate, disabusing
ourselves of anti-black racism would, for Smith, enable us to see that they inhabit the same logic and
that black struggles against racial slavery are ultimately struggles against capitalism. Something
similar happens with respect to Smith’s statement of the relation between racial slavery and settler
colonialism. When she returns, in a more recent article on voting rights and native disappearance, to reprise her concept of racial slavery,
she has this to say about the ideological formation of anti-black racism and its effects on critical intellectual production: Because Africa is the
property of Europe, Africa must then appear as always, already colonized. […] The colonization of Africa must disappear so that Africa can
appear as ontologically colonized. Only through this disavowed colonization can Black peoples be ontologically relegated to the status of
property. Native peoples by contrast, are situated as potential citizens. Native peoples are described as ‘free’ people, albeit ‘uncivilized’. (Smith,
2013: 355) Smith rightly argues that theracist designation of native people as free, albeit uncivilized, precitizens is not
a privilege (i.e. proximity to whiteness) in relation to the racist designation of black people as unfree anti-
citizens incapable of civilization (i.e. antipode of whiteness) because the civilizing mission through which native peoples are
forcibly assimilated into the settler colonial society is, in fact, a form and aspect of genocide. Yet, what is missed in the attempt to demonstrate
that Black
Studies is also, like Native Studies, concerned with colonization is the plain fact that
colonization is not essential, much less prerequisite, to enslavement. In other words, to say that it is
only through ‘disavowed colonization’ that black people can be ‘ontologically relegated to the status
of property’ is a feint, just as it is to suggest that capitalism ‘ultimately commodifies most people’. In
this case, enslavement would be enabled by a prior colonization that it extends perforce. If this were true, then slavery as the conversion of
person into property would simply be an extreme form of colonization. Or, vice versa, colonization would be an attenuated form of slavery. In
either case, there would be only a difference of degree rather than kind between colonization and slavery. At any rate, disabusing
ourselves of anti-black racism would, for Smith, enable us to see that black struggles against racial slavery
are ultimately struggles against colonialism.

Decolonization is neither necessary nor a prerequisite to resolve anti-black violence

and the experience of enslavement
Sexton 14 [Jared; Jared Sexton is the Director of African American Studies at the University of
California, Irvine, where he also teaches film and media studies; “The Vel of Slavery: Tracking the Figure
of the Unsovereign,” Critical Sociology, p. 9; REJ]

Colonization is not a necessary condition of enslavement because: 1) slaves need not be colonial
subjects, or objects of colonial exploitation, and they do not face the fundamental directive of colonialism, ‘you, work for me’,
though slaves often enough labor; and 2) slaves need not be settler colonial subjects, or objects of settler colonial genocide,
since they do not face the fundamental directive ‘you, go away’, though slaves often enough are driven from their native
land. But the crucial problem with this formulation of the relations between racial slavery, settler
colonialism and capitalism (leaving aside any problems with the pillar of Orientalism) has to do with the drive to
confound the position of blacks in order to describe them as exploited and colonized degree zero.
Regarding the latter, Smith writes, ‘Africa is the property of Europe’; Africa rather than the African. As in the reduction of
slavery to the exploitation of labor, there is here an elision of the permanent seizure of the body essential to enslavement. What can be done to
a captive body? Anything whatsoever. The loss of sovereignty is a fait accompli, a byproduct rather than a precondition of enslavement.
Genocide is endemic to enslavement insofar as slavery bans, legally and politically, the reproduction of enslaved peoples as peoples, indigenous
or otherwise, whether they are removed from their native land, subjected to direct killing, unlivable conditions, or forced assimilation; or they
are kept in place, allowed to live, provided adequate means, or supported in their cultural practices. Native
Studies scholars
misrecognize ‘the true horror of slavery’ as de-culturalization or the loss of sovereignty because they
do not ask what slavery is in the most basic sense – its local and global histories, its legal and political
structures, its social and economic functions, its psychosexual dynamics, and its philosophical
consequences. Perhaps they do not want to know anything about it, as they evaluate it through the
lens of their own loss and lament and redress it through the promise of their own political
imagination. Slavery is not a loss that the self experiences – of language, lineage, land, or labor – but
rather the loss of any self that could experience such loss. Any politics based in resurgence or recovery
is bound to regard the slave as ‘the position of the unthought’ (Hartman and Wilderson, 2003).

Discussions of native sovereignty as a capacity and cultural celebration is a form of

savage negrophobia that turns their ethics
Sexton 14 [Jared; Jared Sexton is the Director of African American Studies at the University of
California, Irvine, where he also teaches film and media studies; “The Vel of Slavery: Tracking the Figure
of the Unsovereign,” Critical Sociology, pp. 9-10; REJ]
There is by now a literature on the historical relations between black and native peoples in the Americas, including, in the US context, the
award-winning work of Tiya Miles (2006, 2010) and the signal contributions of Barbara Krauthamer (2013).18 But Frank B. Wilderson, III’s Red,
White and Black may be the first sustained attempt to theorize, at the highest level of abstraction, the structural positions of European
colonists, Indigenous peoples, and African slaves in the ‘New World’ encounter and to think about how the conflicts and antagonisms that give
rise to those positions in the historic instance establish the contemporary parameters of our political ontology. At sovereignty. This is not a brief
in favor of Wilderson’s project as resolution or answer. The upshot of Red, White and Black is a provocation to new critical discourse and just
such an invitation is offered midway, even as it acknowledges the grand impediment: ‘What, we might ask, inhibits this analytic and
political dream of a “Savage”/Slave encounter? Is it a matter of the Native theorist’s need to preserve the constituent
elements of sovereignty, or is there such a thing as “Savage” Negrophobia? Are the two related’ (Wilderson, 2010: 182)? We might
understand something else about the historical relations between black and native peoples if we bear in mind that the dynamics of
Negrophobia are animated, in part, by a preoccupation with sovereignty. We have learned already that settler
colonialism is governed by a genocidal commandment and that, as a direct result, survival becomes central to indigenous
movements for settler decolonization. We have also learned that sovereignty, even disarticulated from the stateform, is
the heading for thinking about this survival as a matter of politics.19 Yet, in its struggle against settler
colonialism, the claim of native sovereignty – emerging in contradiction to the imposition of the imperial
sovereignty of Euro-American polities20 – ‘fortifies and extends the interlocutory life of America [or Canada or
…] as a coherent (albeit genocidal) idea, because treaties are forms of articulation, discussions brokered
between two groups presumed to possess the same kind of historical currency: sovereignty’ (Wilderson,
2003: 236). This point is not mitigated by the fact that native sovereignty is qualitatively different
from, not simply rival to, the sovereignty of nation-states. What links these statements discursively is an
‘ethico-onto-epistemological’ (Barad, 2007) point of contact: ‘At every scale – the soul, the body, the group, the land, and the
universe – they can both practice cartography, and although at every scale their maps are radically incompatible, their respective “mapness” is
never in question’ (Wilderson, 2010: 181).21 Capacity
for coherence makes more than likely a commitment ‘to
preserve the constituent elements of sovereignty’ (2010: 182) and a pursuit of the concept of ‘freedom as self-
determination’.22 The political de-escalation of antagonism to the level of conflict is mirrored by a conceptual domestication at work in the
field of Native Studies, namely, that settler colonialism is something already known and understood by its practitioners. The political-
intellectual challenge on this count is to refine this knowledge and to impart it. The intervention of Native Studies involves bringing into general
awareness a critical knowledge of settler colonialism.
Black studies are always already a promise of decolonization. We must start with
abolition as the route to decolonization or else we will re-elaborate anti-red anti-black
civil society – the alt is a politics of UNSOVEREIGNTY that takes as its end goal the
destruction of this world, including settler colonialism and its matrix of sovereignty
slavery and genocide
Sexton 14 [Jared; Jared Sexton is the Director of African American Studies at the University of
California, Irvine, where he also teaches film and media studies; “The Vel of Slavery: Tracking the Figure
of the Unsovereign,” Critical Sociology, pp. 10-11; REJ]
We might contrast the unsuspecting theoretical status of the concept of settler colonialism in Native Studies with its counterpart in Black
Studies: racial slavery. I remarked above that any politics of resurgence or recovery is bound to regard the slave as the position of the
unthought. This does not suggest, however, that Black Studies is the field in which slavery is, finally, thought in an adequate way. The field of
Black Studies is as susceptible to a politics of resurgence or recovery as any other mode of critical inquiry. Which is to say that the figure of the
slave and the history of the emergence of the relational field called racial slavery remains the unthought ground of thought within Black Studies
as well. The difference, provisionally, between these enterprises is that whereas
Native Studies sets out to be the
alternative to a history of settler colonialism and to pronounce the decolonial intervention, Black Studies
dwells within an un-inheritable, in-escapable history and muses upon how that history intervenes upon
its own field, providing a sort of untranscendable horizon for its discourse and imagination. The latter is an
endeavor that teaches less through pedagogical instruction than through exemplary transmission: rather than initiation into a form of living,
emulation of a process of learning through the posing of a question, a procedure for study, for black study, or black studies, wherever they may
lead. Native Studies scholars are right to insist upon a synthetic gesture that attempts to shift the terms of engagement. The problem lies at the
level of thought at which the gesture is presented. The settler colonial studies critique of colonial studies must be repeated, this time with
respect to settler colonialism itself, in a move that returns us to the body in relation to land, labor, language, this writing, Wilderson’s text has
not been taken up in the field of Native Studies, despite dedicating fully 100 pages to addressing directly the machinations of settler colonialism
and the history of genocide and to critically reading a range of indigenous thinking on politics, cosmology, and lineage – and the capture and
commodification of each – in order to ask the most pertinent questions about capacity, commitment, and concept. This might help not only to
break down false dichotomies, and perhaps pose a truer one, but also to reveal the ways that the study of slavery is already and
of necessity the study of capitalism, colonialism and settler colonialism, among other things; and that the
struggle for abolition is already and of necessity the struggle for the promise of communism, decolonization, and settler
decolonization, among other things. Slavery is the threshold of the political world, abolition the interminable
radicalization of every radical movement. Slavery, as it were, precedes and prepares the way for
colonialism, its forebear or fundament or support. Colonialism, as it were, the issue or heir of slavery, its outgrowth or edifice or
monument. This is as true of the historic colonization of the Third World as it is the prior and ongoing settler colonization of the Fourth.23
‘The modern world owes its very existence to slavery’ (Grandin, 2014a).24 What could this impossible debt
possibly entail? Not only the infrastructure of its global economy but also the architecture of its
theological and philosophical discourses, its legal and political institutions, its scientific and technological
practices, indeed, the whole of its semantic field (Wilderson, 2010: 58). A politics of abolition could never
finally be a politics of resurgence, recovery, or recuperation. It could only ever begin with
degeneration, decline, or dissolution. Abolition is the interminable radicalization of every radical
movement, but a radicalization through the perverse affirmation of deracination, an uprooting of the
natal, the nation, and the notion, preventing any order of determination from taking root, a politics
without claim, without demand even, or a politics whose demand is ‘too radical to be formulated in
advance of its deeds’ (Trouillot, 2012: 88).25 The field of Black Studies consists in ‘tracking the figure of the unsovereign’ (Chandler,
2013: 163) in order to meditate upon the paramount question: ‘What if the problem is sovereignty as such’ (Moten, 2013)? Abolition, the
political dream of Black Studies, its unconscious thinking, consists in the affirmation of the unsovereign slave –
the affectable, the derelict, the monstrous, the wretched26 – figures of an order altogether different
from (even when they coincide or cohabit with) the colonized native – the occupied, the undocumented, the unprotected,
the oppressed. Abolition
is beyond (the restoration of) sovereignty. Beyond the restoration of a lost commons through
radical redistribution (everything for everyone), there is the unimaginable loss of that all too imaginable loss itself (nothing for no
one).27 If the indigenous relation to land precedes and exceeds any regime of property, then the slave’s
inhabitation of the earth precedes and exceeds any prior relation to land – landlessness. And selflessness is
the correlate. No ground for identity, no ground to stand (on). Everyone has a claim to everything until no one has a claim to anything. No
claim. This is not a politics of despair brought about by a failure to lament a loss, because it is not rooted in hope of
winning. The flesh of the earth demands it: the landless inhabitation of selfless existence.