Aff - Afro-Orientalism - K Lab

Afro-Orientalism
Michigan Kritik Lab 2016
Afro-Orientalism Aff
Marquis Ard, Elan Wilson, Michael Hellie, Ryan James, Henry Heligas, Shivang Charan, Manav Rathod, Tanner
Engh, Ousaf Moqeet
Afro-Orientalism
Notes
This file was cut and produced by the Michigan Debate Institutes 2016 Kritik Lab, specifically by
the house that Frank, Hortense, Saidiya, and Jared built; led by Marquis Ard.
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Afro-Orientalism
Possible Intro Poem

Northbound the Seven Isles we fear;
Southbound we dread K'un-lun; If rudder break or compass veer,
Nor ship nor crew return
Nothing remarkable is to be seen on this island.
The inhabitants neither build houses nor cook their food.
They eat fruit, fish, and shrimps,
they live either in caves or in nests built in the trees.
Wild beasties.
Hsing Chai Sheng Lan Ming Dynasty
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Questions
--What are some material examples of the commodity speaking??? What is the survival
pedagogy??? Can this be contextualized to Afro-Asians.
-Aunt Hesters scream while she was being beat. This operates at a different sonic wave.
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1AC version 1
From the ascension of the Arabian Slave Trade which fueled the Tang
dynasty, blackness as commodity has circulated as a phantasmic
spectre within the Chinese social order. Through its reduction to
bestial inhumanity within racialized systems of naming, the mystic
Kun-lun-nu, the dark-skinned Kwei-nu laid the foundation for the
economic emergence of the Chinese Imperial state.
Hsing-Lang 1930 (Chang Hsing-lang Professor at Catholic University of Peking in
Chinese and African American Humanities, The Importation Of Negro Slaves To China Under
The Tang Dynasty (A. D. 618-901), Catholic University of Peking Bulletin No. 7 December, 1930
pages 37-59, http://library.uoregon.edu/ec/e-asia/read/tangslave-3.pdf - ERW)
The majority of the inhabitants of the South Sea Islands are black-skinned . It is not
only the people of Chen-la who are black; there are others who are even blacker. Kun-lun of the
Two Peaks is a small island of the South Sea where only dragons and no human beings page 40
dwell. Though situated near Chenla, it is not a dependency there-of. Why are the terms K'un-lun and Chen-la used to designate
black people? It is because all ships must pass K'un-lun on voyages to and from the South Sea, and hence its name is familiar to
mariners who naturally extend this
designation to denote all savages of the South Seas. In this way

the name came to signify black people in general. The analogous use of Chen-la is due to the fact that this
country was very powerful during T'ang times, having subjugated all the various tribes of South
Sea Islanders." In a note, the same author further says: The Sung Shih ("Dynastic History of Sung") tells us that the Persian
envoys to China were accompanied by attendants who had sunken eyes and black skin and who were called K'un-lun-nu.
It is evident that these black Persian slaves were Hindoos. Thus it would appear that the term K'un-lun is here
used to designate the K'unlun of the West." It is my personal opinion that Fei Hsin, a writer of the early Ming
dynasty, was responsible for the corruption that changed K'un Tun Shan ("Condur". "Pulo Condore") into K'un-lun. In his Hsing
Chai Sheng Lan ("Description of the Beautiful Isles"), he says: "This mountain rises very high in the midst of the sea, and forms as it
were a triangle with Chan-ch'eng and the islands of Du. The mountain is a lofty rectangular eminence that extends over a large area.
The surrounding sea is known as the K'un-lun Ocean. All trading vessels bound for the Western
Sea pass this point after a voyage of seven days, provided the winds be favorable. The sailors
have a rhyme that runs thus: 'Northbound the Seven Isles we fear; Southbound we dread K'unlun; If rudder break or compass veer, Nor ship nor crew return.' "Nothing remarkable is to be
seen on this island. The inhabitants neither build houses nor cook their food. They eat fruit, fish,
and shrimps, and they live either in caves or in nests built in the trees." According to Western scholars of
modern times, K'un-lun is the largest of a group of islands, its length being about 12 English miles. The group comprises other
islands, the next two in size being each about three English miles in length, and there are about six ,smaller islands besides. The
modern name of the largest island is Pulo Condore. It has an excellent harbor, fresh water, and luxuriant vegetation. The
inhabitants, who number about eight hundred, are of Cochin China stock. The islands are under the control of the French authorities
of Saigon. It is absurd to supp ose that these small islands could supply such an enormous number of black slaves to so many lands,
in both East and West, during the T'ang dynasty. The notion, too, that K'un-lun Slaves were natives of Chen-la is equally groundless;
for the people of Chen-la being of the Malay race have the same complexion as the Cantonese and the Annamites. The suggestion
that K'un-lun
came to designate black men in general, because "all ships must pass
K'un-lun island on voyages to and from the South Sea," is nothing more than a conjecture. On the
other hand, we have no reason to suppose that the K'un-lun Slaves derived their name from the K'un-lun Shan of the West; for the
latter region has been familiar to the Chinese from From
the earliest times, and no Chinese work has ever

described its inhabitants as black-skinned. Inasmuch as it is clear from T'ang literature that the term
K'un-lun is not a Chinese one, we may take it for granted that it is a transliteration of some Foreign name. The fol'owing
passage occurs in Book II of Chu Yu's Ping Chiu K'o T'an ("Notes on P'ing Chiu") : " Many wealthy people of Canton
keep Kwei-nu ('devil slaves'). These are endowed with prodigious strength and can carry
burdens weighing several hundred catties. Their language and tastes differ from ours, but they are
docile and do not run away. They are also spoken of as yeh-jen ('savages'). Their skin is inky black, their
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lips red, their teeth white, and their hair is woolly and tawny. They are of both sexes. Their
native haunts are the mountains beyond the sea. They eat their food raw. After being captured, they are fed on cooked food,
which gives them the diarrhea. While in this condition they are said to be 'renewing their entrails.' Some of them die of the process,
but those who survive become domesticated, and learn in time to understand human language, although unable to speak it
themselves. Those of these savages who come from maritime regions, can
dive into water without closing their

eyes, and the same are called K'un-lun-nu." In Book CDXC of the Sung Shih ("Dynastic History of Sung") where it speaks
of Arabia, we read: "In the second year of T'ai-P'ing' Hsing Kuo (i.e. A.D. 977), Arabia sent the ambassador P'u-sze-na, the
viceambassador Moho-mo ('Mahmud'), and the judge P'u-lo, with the products of their country as presents. Their attendants had
sunken eyes and black skin and they were called K'un-lun-nu." (IV) The Native Land of the K'un-lun Slaves Having determined the
We
may dismiss without further ado the suggestion that the K'un-lun-nu were natives of Arabia. The
signification of the term K'un-lun-nu, we must next determine the land of their origin and the race to which they belonged.
Ho-ling Kuo Tiao ("Topography of the Land of Ho-ling") contained in Book CCXXII of the Hsin Tang Shu ("New Dynastic History of
T'ang") says: "In the eighth year of the Yuan Ho period (A.D. 813), the land of Ho-ling presented four Seng-chih slaves." In Book III
of Chiu Ch'u-fei's Ling-wai Tai-ta ("Notes on the Lands beyond the Mountains") there is to be found a section that deals with a land
named K'un-lun Ts'eng-ch'i; here, among other things, it says: " Many
savages dwell on the islands. They have

lacquer-black being used as a bait, and they are captured by the thousands, food being used as a
bait, and they are subsequently sold into slavery." In the first part of Chao Ju-k'uo's Chu Fan Chih
("Information about Barbarians"), there is one section which treats of the various lands beyond the sea, and which says among other
things: "The Land of K'un-lun Ts'eng-ch'i is situated on the shores of the Southwestern Sea behind a screen of large islands. In this
land are to be found gigantic Rukhs, enormous birds whose wings outstretched darken the sun and turn day into night. They prey
upon wild camels, which they swallow at a single gulp. The quills of the feathers which they shed, are cut into sections by the natives
to serve as water-casks. The products of page 42 the land consist of elephant tusks and rhinoceros' horns. To the west there is an
They are
captured by using food as a bait, and are sold at great profit to the Arabs as slaves. The Arabs entrust
them with their keys, knowing that they will be faithful be-cause they have no kith nor kin." From the last two
island peopled with savages whose complexion is like black lacquer and whose tresses resemble wriggling tadpoles.
quotations we obtain detailed information regarding the place from which the Arabs got their slaves. Seng-chih and Ts'eng-ch'i are
identical with the Zinj of Cosmas' Topographia Christiana. On the maps and in the geographical works of the present day this place
is designated as Zanzibar. Marco Polo, in Book III, Chapter 34, of his Travels, calls the locality Zanghibar, "which being interpreted
means The Region of the Blacks.'" The Arabs give the name of Zanzibar to that portion of East Africa that stretches from the Juba
River to Cape Delgado, eleven degrees south of the equator. According to Abulfeda, the King of Zinj resided at Monbasa. In the
parlance of modern Europeans the name of Zanzibar has been restricted to a small island. In Book III, Chapter 33, of Marco Polo's
Travels, where he speaks of the Island of Madagascar, we have the following passage: "In this Island, and in another beyond it called
Zanghibar, about which we shall tell you afterwards, there are more elephants than in any country in the world. The amount of
traffic in elephants' teeth in these two Islands is something astonishing." Further on we read: "Tis said that in those other Islands to
the south, which the ships are unable to visit because this strong current prevents their return, is found the bird Gryphon, which
appears there at certain seasons. The description given of it is however entirely different from what our stories and pictures make it.
For persons who had been there and had seen it, told Messer Marco, Polo that it was for all the world like an eagle, but one indeed of
enormous size; so big in fact that its wings covered an extent of 30 paces, and its quills were 12 paces long, and thick in proportion.
And it is so strong that it will seize an elephant in its talons and carry him high into the air, and drop him so that he is smashed to
pieces; having so killed him the bird gryphon swoops down on him and eats him at leisure. The people of those isles call the bird
Ruck, and it has no other name. So I wot not if this be the real gryphon, or if there be another manner of bird as great. But this I can
tell you for certain, that they are not half lion and half bird as our stories do relate; but enormous as they be they are fashioned just
like an eagle." Later he adds : "They brought (as I have heard) to the Great Kaan a feather of the said Ruc, which was stated to
measure ninety spans, whilst the quill part was two palms in circumference, a marvellous object!" In Chapter 34 of the same Book.
we read : "Zanghibar
is a great and noble Island, with a compass of some 2000 miles. The people
are all idolaters, and have a king and a language of their own, and pay tribute to nobody. They are
both tall and stout, but not tall in proportion to their stoutness. for if they were, being so stout and brawny, they would be absolutely
like giants; and they are so strong that they will carry for four men and eat for five. page 43 "They
are all black, and go

stark naked, with only a little covering for decency. Their hair is as black as pepper, and so
frizzly that even with water you can scarcely straighten it. And their mouths are so large, their
noses so turned up, their lips so thick, their eyes so big and bloodshot that they look like very
devils; they are in fact so hideously ugly that the world has nothing to show more horrid. "Elephants are produced in this country
in wonderful profusion. There are also lions that are black and quite different from ours. And their sheep and wethers are all exactly
alike in color ; the body all white and the head black ; no other kind of sheep is found there, you may rest assured . . . . The
women of this Island are the ugliest in the world, with their great mouths and big
eyes and thick noses; their breasts too are four times bigger than those of any other women ; a
very disgusting sight." Marco Polo's description of Madagascar and Zanzibar agrees perfectly with Chao Ju-k'uo's description of
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K'un-lun Ts'eng-ch'i. And it is beyond all doubt that Ts'eng-ch'i
is a Chinese rendering of Zinj, or Zenj, or Zanzi, or

"Region of the Blacks." Hence we have every reason to
believe that the prefix K'un-lun signifies "black" for which it is a Chinese rendering of either the
Arabic or the Persian. Hui Ch'ao speaking of Persia in his previously quoted work says that the Persians were wont to go to
Zanghi. Zanghibar, according to Marco Polo, means the
K'un-lun for gold. This agrees with what Cosmas records regarding the people of Axum who go to Africa for gold." Hence we have the
strongest reasons for identifying K'unlun with Africa.
This chattel status provided a vestibule through which the Chinese

elite could degrade slaves under conventions of Social Darwinism.
Slaves oscillated between the positions of the superhuman wonder
and the savage beast, finalizing the designation of a complete Other.
Wilenski 2002 (Julie Wilenski Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
University of Pennsylvania, Sino-Platonic Papers, July, 2002, http://sinoplatonic.org/complete/spp122_chinese_africa.pdf - ERW)
Chinese sources from the Song dynasty create a more defInite link than Tang sources between the kunlun
slaves and the Arabs, who continued to dominate the East African slave trade. An account offoreign
trade in Guangzhou, Zhu Yu's 1119 Pingzhou ketan ~?J+II:iJ~ (Notes on Pingzhou), repeats some of the earlier images of the
kunlun, but like earlier nonfiction sources, lacks the supernatural element of the Tang stories.54 Zhu
Yu depicts the blackskinned "devil slaves jl~:X" or "wild people !fA" as nothing more than beasts. Just as
fictional and nonfiction sources from the Tang differ in their portrayals of people with dark skin , we
would expect Zhu Yu's account to differ from images of the kunlun in popular Song fiction. Unfortunately, however, I have found no
Zhu
Yu provides a lengthy description of slaves who are superhuman in strength but subhuman
in intellect and habit: Many of the wealthy households in Guangzhou raise devil slaves. They
definitely have strength and can carry several hundred catties of weight. Their languages and
preferences are not the same as ours, [but] their temperament is honest and they do not attempt to run away. They are
also called wild people. Their coloring is black like ink, their lips are red and their teeth
white, their hair is curly and yellowish (huang Ji).57 There are both females and males. They were born in the
mountains beyond the sea. They eat uncooked food. When they are captured, they are fed cooked food,
which gives them diarrhea. This is called "changing their bowels." This causes some of them to become sick and die.
Those who do not die can be domesticated (xu~).58 Those who have been domesticated for a long
time can understand human language, although they cannot speak it themselves. A type ofwild man
who comes from a place near the sea and who can enter the water without closing his eyes is called a kunlun slave.59 In his
description of these "devil slaves," Zhu Yu uses vocabulary to describe animals. He writes that many
fictional sources from the Song about the kunlun or others with dark skin that allow a similar comparison across genres.55
of the wealthy households "raise" them, and he uses the gender terms one would use for animals rather than the human "male" and
these
slaves are viewed as domesticated animals. Their nonsensical languages cann~t be human
languages. After all, only a few of these slaves can understand - but never speak - human languages, and only after a long period
of "being domesticated." Perhaps "honest" because they do not know any better, the "devil slaves" do not resist their
captors and endure the painful process of "changing their bowels" in order to become
"domesticated" into their roles as slaves in a civilized society. Zhu Yu's comment about the
"female.,,6o He also writes that these slaves are "reared on" rather than "fed" cooked food once captured, implying that
inability of the "devil slaves" to digest cooked food also reveals a Chinese prejudice against the non-Chinese practice of eating raw
food. Food and dietary practices signified social status in premodern China; the Chinese traditionally divided non-Chinese into two
categories, shengfan 1:.* and shufan ~*, meaning "raw" and "cooked" foreigners.61 The Chinese considered the "raw'; foreigners as
"savage and resisting," whereas the "cooked" foreigners were "tame and submissive."62 Zhu Yu emphasizes this distinction, writing
that many of the ~'devil slaves" actually died from eating cooked food, suggesting the slaves' inability to participate in even the most
basic social interactions of Chinese civilization. This passage repeats elements of Huilin's description of the kunlun during the Tang
but embellishes the negative qualities Huilin attributed to them. Going even further than Huilin,
Zhu Yu claims that the
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languages of the "devil slaves" are not even human. Like Huilin, Zhu Yu disti.nguishes the kunlun from other
races of people with black skin. Not all of the "devil slaves" he describes are kunlun. That category is reserved for only those 'who live
Zhu
Yu also reinforces this image by describing the ability ofthe "devil slaves" to repair leaks
oftrading ships under water: If the boat suddenly develops a leak that cannot be reached from the inside to fix, they order
near the sea and can open their eyes in the water, echoing the recurring image from the Tang ofthe kunlun's skill in the water.
"devil slaves" to take knives and cotton wadding and go overboard to fix it themselves, since the "devil shives" are good swimmers
and enter the water withoutclosing their eyes.63 This passage occurs in the context of Zhu's discussion of foreign traders in
Guangzhou, suggesting that these slaves were on foreign ships and that the "devil slaves" he discusses earlier also came from foreign
traders. The description of the kunlun fixing leaks on foreign trade ships may explain the origins of both
fictional and
nonfiction images from Tang and Song of the kunlun as strong swimmers. Zhu Yu does not identity the
owners ofthe devil slaves, but other Chinese sources in the Song indicate a connection between the Arabs and the kunlun, The Song
shi *~ (History of the Song) reports that kunlun slaves accompanied Arab envoys to the Chinese court in 977: "The Arabs (da shi)
sent the ambassador Pusina, the vice-ambassador Mohemuo, and the judge Puluo, to present as tribute items from their country.
Their servants had deep-set eyes and black bodies and were called kunlun slaves." 64 The Arabs did not present their slaves as exotic
objects of curiosity, suggesting that such slaves routinely accompanied Arab officials. The historical context suggests that the
kunlun "devil slaves" Zhu Yu describes were probably the Arabs' East African.slaves and not the
kunlun Southeast Asians ofthe Tang, although Zhu Yu did not seem to make this connection in 1119. It was not until the late twelfth
century that certain Chinese geographers did so, as the next chapter explains.
The etymological schism of the Chinese from the devil slaves created
a social fabric of Afro-orientalism through which the templates of
economic exchange became coherent blackness as object and nonblack as sovereign subject. This tactic of westernization served to
eject the slave from the fabric of social reality and was exported as a
canon for the international spectrum of antiblackness.
Rutledge 14 (Gregory E. Ruthelberg Professor at University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Received Masters in Afro-American studies and English Literature from University of Florida,
JD/MAMC (1992), University of WisconsinMadison, MA (1999), University of Wisconsin
Madison, PhD (2005), Race, Slavery, and the Re-evaluation of the T'ang Canon - Volume 16
Issue 6 (December 2014) Article 8, http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=2532&context=clcweb ERW)
-Etymology is the study of words, meanings, and connotations.
Given the uniqueness of Wilensky's "The
Magical Kunlun," the politics of its critical methodology deserves keen

a peculiar Orientalist technique , one that entirely omits a slaveryattuned perspective. Consequently, proper interpretation of such lore would, at minimum, include close readings
sensitive to key issues elided by Chang and Wilensky: African epic traditions and the unique place of the
exceptional Other, sexuality and gender politics, labor and the culture of the slave trade , and the
question of religion and the psycho-social consequences of chattel slavery. Because its cultural
attention since it deploys
comparison (T'ang Dynasty, Arab empire, and East African kingdoms and cultures) focuses on ancient stories of slave-heroes, "The
Magical Kunlun" apprehends a comparative temporality. Indexed to ancient East African and Asian temporalities largely unknown
to Western scholars, Wilensky's study is challenged by a most critical methodological question: given its temperospatial magnitude,
how expansive should one's database of knowledge be if this folkloric fiction is to be properly read? This question is perhaps the
defining question confronted by literary scholars in East Asia. For example, at the annual English Language and Literature
Association of Korea International Conference held in November 2013 at Sookmyung Women's University in Seoul, Eric Hayot
delivered a keynote entitled "Scale, Data, and World Literature" addressed to the conference's topic of "Micro versus Macro
Literatures in English." Hayot attended to literary critics' methodologytraditionally at odds with interrogations of methodological
assumptions, biases, and research questionsin light of Franco Moretti's critique of literary scholars' canonized method of close
reading and the sudden rise of the Gregory E. Rutledge, "Race, Slavery, and the Re-evaluation of the T'ang Canon" page 4 of 11
Special Issue Western Canons in a Changing East Asia. Ed. Simon C. Estok digital humanities and world literature. " The
Magical Kunlun" anticipated questions of this nature in East Asia, for the "ontology" of the literary
object Hayot suggested, not only denotes the formal components of the text, but also identity
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politics. Wilensky's interest and Hayot's expertise in East Asian Studies highlight the rising importance of East Asian "ontology"
to Western literary scholars. In a globalized world in which East Asiawith or without China as a
superpowerwill play a central role in emergent world literature canons , issues of
identity are paramount. Significantly, kunlun etymology speaks to the place East Africa held, and holds, in
ancient and modern China at a time when its relationship to Africa legitimately raises questions
about cultural exchange and neo-colonialism. The racial hostility Wilensky documents among a
"mob of more than 3000 Chinese students" toward the African "black devils" in 1988, in significant part because of
interracial dating (43-44), seems to parallel much of the African American experience. Her implicit
questionWas kunlun in Chinese culture equivalent to nigger in the U.S ., and is it the
source or correlative of racial hostility to Africans among contemporary Chinese today?goes right to the
heart of complex issues regarding racial oppression, aesthetics, and culture as globalization
unfolds. Wilensky makes this clear as she delineates her research focus, questions, and methodology: The first chapter section of
this paper seeks to explain how Chinese people perceived these black slaves by analyzing representations
of people with dark skin in fictional and nonfiction sources from the fifth century through the Song dynasty, tracing
the evolution of the meanings and connotations of the term kunlun . This mysterious and poorly
understood word first applied to dark-skinned Chinese and then expanded over time to encompass
multiple meanings, all connoting dark skin. This chapter examines the meaning of the term kunlun in nonfiction
before and during the Tang; fictional tales about magical, superhuman kunlun slaves from the Tang fiction compendium Taiping
guangji (Extensive Gleanings of the Reign of Great Tranquility); and finally, representations of the kunlun from a
nonfiction writer from the Song, Zhu Yu Were these Tang and Song images of the kunlun based on direct contact between
Chinese and African peoples? When did the Chinese make a conceptual link between the kunlun slaves in China and the
countries and peoples of East Africa? (2) Wilensky's study is a watershed unlike the studies concerned with historicizing the
enslavement of East Africans in China and the etymological focus of the study extends from nonfiction to include her interpretation
of race in fiction, a "valuable source because its popularity reveals widespread cultural perceptions of people with dark skin" (2).
Although Wilensky foregrounds historical and nonfiction accounts in her study, on grounds of reliability her article is, a priori,
aligned with methodology fundamental to literary critique. At its core, Wilensky's study raises a philological question central to the
method used by literary scholars: what does the etymology of a word reveal about writers' authorial intent and readers'
understanding that we can use to interpret a text and its context? For English literature scholars, the Oxford English Dictionary is
considered authoritative both for its exhaustive inclusion of multiple senses of a given word and for its etymology. The close reading
method developed in recent decades often turns upon critical insights into denotations,
connotations, and
etymologies of words comprising a key passage from a literary text . While "scale jumping" is possible even
within one sentence, as Hayot suggested, textual close reading is often criticized as an apolitical micro-logical exercise based on the
critic's privileging interpretations of one or a few texts without regard for the macro-logical context (history, politics, and class), or
even the author's intent. The battle over whether politics and aesthetics should mix is, of course, old and entrenched. But Wilensky's
kunlun etymology
constitutes an altogether different species of interpretation that might be called a

"closed" reading of literary texts. In other words, while tracing the racial meaning of kunlunfrom "the Tang
dynasty, [when] Arab traders brought a number of East African slaves to China" (1)provides the
raison d'tre for Wilensky's investigation, the semantic content and literary strategies evident in the stories are "closed" to
interpretation. The method is the message, for Wilensky's construction of kunlun etymology associated with East Africans, even of
the most exceptional slaves, confines and defines their status as kunlun chattel . Far too little attention is given
by her to considering whether the stories might contradict literal constructions that simply equate kunlun and slave. While Wilensky
rhetorically foregrounds "fictional tales about magical kunlun slaves from the Taiping guangji a massive Song period collection of
Tang and earlier tales" (5), this is misleading. Although in keeping with her earlier identification of these tales as a "valuable source,"
her core methodological superstructure relies upon a fiction-nonfiction divide that maps onto
another: while noting that "these fictional tales were widely read at the time of their publication, revealing
common images Gregory E. Rutledge, "Race, Slavery, and the Re-evaluation of the T'ang Canon" page 5 of 11 of the
kunlun that reflect popular perceptions of people with dark skin," Wilensky privileges the objective,
scholarly viewpointsfound in "a nonfiction source from the Song"that ultimately treat East
Africans as "foreign 'devil slaves'" (5). "Perceptions" are the soft power of Wilensky's methodology, which initially
valorizes but ultimately negates the "common" and "popular perceptions"valorizes their existence as a
reflection of how the masses think, but negates their substance as an aspect of human culture meriting
attention in its own rightsin favor of nonfiction, which is more reliable for its authors' knowledge and facts. Chinese culture and
literature were already considered "heathen" by late-nineteenth-century US-Americans, (Lutz 9-21), but US-American Orientalist
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policy filled the power vacuum WWII created, with a critical difference: while centuries of Western European Orientalism, Said
argues, depended on a "broad catholic" approach, for the U.S. it was "but an administrative one, a matter for policy" (290). Said
speaks here with reference to the Middle or Near East, Islam in particular, but his analysis is relevant insofar as it reflects the advent
of US-American East Asian academic culture and policy that predated and, more importantly, dominated after World War II: One of
the striking aspects of the new American social-science attention to the Orient is its singular avoidance of literature. You can read
through reams of expert writing on the modern Near East and never encounter a single reference to literature. What seems to matter
far more to the regional expert are "facts," of which a literary text is perhaps a disturber. The net effect of this remarkable omission
in modern American awareness of the Arab or Islamic Orient
is to keep the region and its people conceptually

emasculated, reduced to "attitudes," "trends," statistics: in short, dehumanized. Since an Arab
poet or novelistand there are manywrites of his experiences, of his values, of his humanity (however strange that may be), he
effectively disrupts the various patterns (images, clichs, abstractions) by which the Orient is represented. A
literary text
speaks more or less directly of a living reality The non-philological study of esoteric Oriental languages is useful
for obvious rudimentary strategic reasons; but it is also useful for giving a cachet of authority, almost a mystique, to the "expert" who
appears able to deal with hopelessly obscure material with firsthand skill. In the social-science order of things, language study is a
mere tool for higher aims, certainly not for reading literary texts. (Said 290-91)
Chinese societys equation of Kun-lun-nu as a signifier of blackness

morphed into a hieroglyphic imposed upon the flesh an atomizing
of the captive epidermal schema which marked difference across
generations.
Weheilye 14(Alexander G. Weheliye - professor of African American studies at
Northwestern University, Habeas Viscus: Racialized Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black
Feminist Theories of the Human, pgs. 31-34 ERW)
Spillers concentrates on the processes through which slaves are transformed into bare life/flesh
and then subjected to the pleasure of the bodied subject, arguing, before the body there is flesh, that
zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush
of discourse or the reflexes of iconography. We regard this human and social irreparability as high crimes against
the flesh, as the person of African females and males registered the wounding.21 Flesh, while representing both a
temporal and conceptual antecedent to the body, is not a biological occurrence seeing that its
creation requires an elaborate apparatus consisting of the calculated work of iron, whips, chains, knives, the canine
patrol, the bullet (Mama's Baby, 207), among many other factors, including courts of law.22 If the body represents legal
personhood qua selfpossession, then the flesh designates those dimensions of human life cleaved by the working together of
depravation and deprivation. In order for this cruel ruse to succeed, however, subjects must be transformed into flesh before being
granted the illusion of possessing a body. What Spillers refers to as the
hieroglyphics of the flesh created by

these instruments is transmitted to the succeeding generations of black subjects who have been
liberated and granted body in the aftermath of de jure enslavement. The hieroglyphics of the flesh do not vanish
once affixed to proper personhood (the body); rather they endure as a pesky potential vital
to the maneuverings of cultural seeing by skin color (Mama's Baby, 207). Racializing
assemblages translate the lacerations left on the captive body by apparatuses of political violence to a
domain rooted in the visual truth-value accorded to quasibiological distinctions between different
human groupings. Thus, rather than entering a clearing zone of indistinction, we are thrown into the vortex of hierarchical
indicators: racializing assemblages. In
the absence of kin, family, gender, belonging, language,

personhood, property, and official records, among many other factors, what remains is the flesh ,
the living, speaking, thinking, feeling, and imagining flesh: the ether that holds together the world of
Man while at the same time forming the condition of possibility for this world's demise. It's the end
of the worlddon't you know that yet? While Wynter's resistance to the universalization of gendered categories associated with
bourgeois whiteness in certain strands of feminism, which I discussed in chapter 1, is understandable, her genealogy of modernity,
which sees a mutational shift from the primacy of the anatomical model of sexual difference as the referential model of mimetic
ordering, to that of the physiognomic model of racial/cultural difference in the Renaissance, remains less convincing, because it
leads to the repudiation of gender analytics as such.23 This aspect of Wynter's thinking fails to persuade in the way the other
Engh, Ousaf Moqeet
Afro-Orientalism
race
the systematizing principle according to which the Homo
sapiens species is categorized into full humans, not-quitehumans, and nonhumans .
elements of her global analytics of the human do, since it assumes that beginning with the colonization of the Americas,
(physiognomy) dislodges gender/sex (anatomy) as
The shift Wynter diagnoses, though surely present in the history of modernity, cannot be encompassed by the distinction between
physiognomy and anatomy, even if not construed as either categorical or complete, because neither anatomy nor sexual difference
recede like silhouettes sketched in the soil at the shores that delimit the Drexciyan waters of the Middle Passage.24 Instead, sexual
difference remains an intoxicating sociogenically instituted mode of mimetic structuring in modernity, though always tied to specific
variants of (un)gendering. Wynter's dismissal of gender/sex as forceful indicators of the hierarchical ordering of our species thus
seems to discard sexual difference with the proverbial bathwater; and it also largely leaves intact the morphological dimorphism
upon which the modern west constructs gendered stratification. In this context, it is useful to distinguish between physiognomy as
inferring from an individual's external appearance, particularly a person's facial features or expression[, their] character or ethnic
origin, while anatomy designates the bodily structure of humans, animals, and other living organisms, and physiology analyzes
how organisms or bodily parts (e.g., the brain) function and behave.25 Wynter's statement assumes a substantial variance between
physiognomy and anatomy, even though the former is unthinkable without some recourse to the latter, at the same time as it does
not account for the many attempts at creating an isomorphic echo chamber between racial and anatomical difference, as was the
case with Sarah Baartman, the so-called Venus Hottentot, for instance. Put differently, in
the sphere of racial and sexual

difference, anatomy and physiognomy form a continuum in a larger modern assemblage that
requires the physiognomic territorialization of anatomic qualities. Moreover, if, according to Wynter, there
exists no universal instantiation of gender, then how can racial differentiation persist without being modulated by gender or
sexuality? To be clear, I am not after an academic commonsense invocation of the necessary intersectionality of all axes of
subjugation but of one that takes Wynter's insights about how race
inflects human physiology in colonial

modernity seriously, while still asking how, even if it is not the primary model of hierarchical differentiation,
sexual difference might figure into this theory of the human. How do we think gender categories based upon the
anatomical foundation of sexual distinction through the lens of racialization, and vice versa? How do we account for what Spillers
calls female flesh ungendered birthed by the Middle Passage (Mama's Baby, 207), which continues to affect all black subjects?
26 As black feminist theorists Hazel Carby, Julia Oparah, Claudia Tate, Evelynn Hammonds, Patricia Hill Collins, Angela Davis,
Darlene Clark Hine, and Cathy Cohen, among many others, have pointed out, black subjects genders and sexualities operate
differently from those found in the mainstream of the world of Man.27 Namely, in
the same way that black people

appear as either nonhuman or magically hyperhuman within the universe of Man ,
black subjects are imbued with either a surplus (hyperfemininity or hypermasculinity) of gender and
sexuality or a complete lack thereof (desexualization). However, regardless whether deficit or surplus, what remains
significant is that the histories of racial slavery, colonialism, Jim Crow, the prison, and the like, which all represent different
racializing assemblages in Man's extensive armory, have constitutively incapacitated black

subjects ability to conform to hegemonic gender and sexuality norms, and often excessively so. Drawing on examples
from racial slavery and the more recent pathologization of the black family in the infamous Moynihan report,
Cathy Cohen and Spillers ascertain how the prohibition of marriage among slaves and the complete erasure of traditional kinship
arrangements during and subsequent to the Middle Passage underwrite the policing and disparaging of those black genders and
sexualities outside of heteronormative privilege, in particular those perceived as threatening systems of white supremacy, male
domination, and capitalist advancement.28 Thus, circling back to Wynter's distrust of gender-focused inquiries, it is imperative to
consider how the translation of sexual difference to de facto nonnormative genders and sexualities within black communities (the
ungendered flesh) suggests a fundamental component in the barring of black
people from the category of the

human-as-Man. Which is to say that taking on the semblance of full humanity requires apposite gender and
sexuality provisos that cannot be taken for granted in postslavery black cultures . Indeed, this is why I believe
we need both Wynter and Spillers to come to a fuller understanding of how racializing assemblages operate, since the sociogenic
anchoring of racial difference in physiology and the banning of black subjects from the domain of the human occur in and through
gender and sexuality. Retrospectively describing the concept of the hieroglyphics of the flesh in the introduction to her 2003
collection of essays, Spillers
maintains that she was attempting not only to pinpoint one of diasporic
slavery's technologies of violence through marking , but also to propose that beyond
the violating hand that laid on the stigmata of a recognition that was a misrecognition , or the regard
that was disregard, there was a semiosis of procedure that had enabled such a moment in the first
place. Spillers concludes, The marking, the branding, the whippingall Instruments of a terrorist regimewere more
deeply thatto get in somebody's face in that way would have to be centuries in the making that would have had little to do, though
it is difficult to believe, with
the biochemistry of pigmentation, hair texture, lip thickness,

and the indicial measure of the nostrils , but everything to do with those unacknowledged legislators
of a discursive and an economic discipline.29 Despite having no real basis in biochemistry, the hieroglyphics
Engh, Ousaf Moqeet
Afro-Orientalism
of the flesh requires grounding in the biological sphere so as to facilitate even as it conceals and because
it masksthe political, economic, social, and cultural disciplining (semiosis of procedure) of the Homo
sapiens species into assemblages of the human, not-quite-human, and nonhuman; this is
what I am referring to as racialization. The profitable atomizing of the captive body (and the bodies
of the colonized, tortured, imprisoned, interned, etc.) puts into place the conditions of possibility for
the creation and maintenance of racializing assemblages and most decidedly not the
suspension of racialized divisions in a biopolitical zone of indistinction (Mama's Baby,
208). As a result, the flesh epitomizes a central modern assemblage of racialization that highlights how bare life is not only a
product of previously established distinctions but also, and more significantly, aids in the perpetuation of hierarchical
categorizations along the lines of nationality, gender, religion, race, culture, sexuality, and so
on.30 In its focus on both the genesis and the aftermath of zoe's specifically modern politicization, Spillers's
conceptualization of the flesh shines a spotlight on slavery's alternate passages to the formation
of bare life. In other words, the flesh is not an abject zone of exclusion that culminates in death but an alternate instantiation of
humanity that does not rest on the mirage of western Man as the mirror image of human life as such. Analogously, Luce Irigaray
argues that within phallogocentric structures, women, as commodities, are a mirror of value of and for man.31 Here the different
groups excluded from the category of proper humanity encounter only a scopic echo of their deviance fromand therefore reinscribe
the superiority of western Man, reflecting their own value as ontological lack and western Man's value as properly human. Thus, as
Spillers remarks, [the
black American woman] became instead the principal point of passage between
the human and the non-human world. Her issue became the focus of a cunning differencevisually,
psychologically, ontologicallyas the route by which the dominant modes decided the
distinction between humanity and other. At this level of radical discontinuity in the great chain of being, black is
vestibular to culture.32 And being vestibular to culture means that gendered blacknessthough excluded from culture, and
frequently violently sois a passage to the human in western modernity because, in giving flesh to the word of Man, the flesh comes
to define the phenomenology of Man, which is always already lived as unadulterated physiology. As a result, the flesh rests at that
precarious threshold where the person metamorphoses into the group and the individual-in-the-mass and the mass-in-theindividual mark an iconic thickness: a concerted function whose abiding centrality is embodied in the flesh, and which is whyas
we shall see laterthe
flesh resists the legal idiom of personhood as property .33 For Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
the flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance; rather, in his phenomenological theorization, the flesh functions as
an integral component of being, which is not a fact or a sum of facts , and yet adherent to location and to
the now.34 If the flesh represents an element in the vein of the classical quadfecta of earth, wind, (water,) and fire, it appears
as a vital prop in the world of Man's dramaturgy of Being. Following Merleau-Ponty, Elizabeth Grosz holds that
the relationality of the fleshits nonsubstantive substancematerializes through an inherent intertwining of subject and
world, creating a new ontology, one which supersedes the ontological distinction between the animate and the inanimate, between
the animal and the human,in ways that might also suit the interests of feminists, since the hierarchical differentiation between
reason and enfleshment is complicit with the hierarchy which positions one kind of subject (male, white, capitalist) in the position
of superiority over others.35
Chinas contemporary scramble for Africa in competition with the US

is another exemplification of our argument insofar as it locks into
violent, Sinophobic imperial narratives that have extended from the
paternalism of the premodern eraChinese economic interactions
are inseparable from the Wests neoliberal project, rendering African
governments and people as passive instruments of global colonialism.
Ayers 13 (Alison J. Ayers, Simon Fraser University (SFU), Political Science, Sociology &
Anthropology. Beyond Myths, Lies and Stereotypes: The Political Economy of a New Scramble
for Africa, New Political Economy, 18:2, 227-257 - ERW)
Commentators across the political spectrum have increasingly drawn attention to a new scramble for
Africa. This new scramble marks the latest chapter of imperialist engagement, with not only Western states
and corporations but also those of emerging economies (such as China, Russia, Brazil, India and Malaysia) seeking to
consolidate their access to African resources and markets. The new scramble for Africa involves therefore
Engh, Ousaf Moqeet
Afro-Orientalism
significant politico-economic transformations related to shifts in global politico-economic power. Accordingly, a burgeoning
literature has emerged to make sense of the current historical conjuncture. Indeed, as Roger Southall and Henning Melber argue,
something big is happening in contemporary Africa and there is an urgent need for us as analysts to seek to understand it (2009:
xxiv). However, as this article elaborates, much
of the burgeoning literature on the new scramble for Africa

is premised upon problematic substantive, theoretical and ontological claims and
debates. In particular, the article seeks to challenge two commonplace and related narratives. Firstly, the highly
questionable representations of the scale and perceived threat of emerging powers (particularly
Chinas) involvement in Africa, in contrast to the silences, hypocrisy and paternalistic
representation of the historical role of the West. As such, the Wests relations with Africa are
construed as essentially beneficent, in contrast to the putatively opportunistic, exploitative and
deleterious role of the emerging powers, thereby obfuscating the Wests ongoing
neocolonial relationship with Africa. Second, and relatedly, debate and analysis are framed
predominantly within an ahistoric statist framework of analysis, particularly that of interstate rivalry between China and other emerging states vs. Western powers. Absent or
neglected in such accounts are profound changes in the global political economy within which
the new scramble for Africa is to be more adequately located. Without contextualising the rise
of China (and other emerging states) in the neoliberal capitalist global order, it is too easy to single out
the country without addressing the structural and institutional forces that are driving not
only China, but also other emerging powers, to look with covetous eyes at Africas natural
resources and markets (Luk 2008: 13). This article interjects in such debates through critique of these
two commonplace but highly problematic narratives. In so doing, it seeks to contribute to a more adequate
analysis of politico-economic transformations in the twenty-first world order, and Africas place within it.
Yellow peril, dark continent, white mans burden Much of the discussion and debate around the new scramble for
Africa focuses on Chinas engagement with Africa. Such accounts are characteristic of a wider discourse on the
rise of China internationally and the so-called China threat evident in policy-making, social
science and mass public discourse (Gertz 2000; Yee and Storey 2002; Bernstein and Munro 1997; Mosher 2000;
Mearsheimer 2006; Nam 2007; Curtis 2008). Such representations give the impression that the African
continent, and much of the rest of the world, is in the process of being devoured by China, with
descriptors such as voracious, ravenous and insatiable appetite for natural resources used to characterise Chinas new role
(Guerrero and Manji 2008: 1; Mohan and Power 2008). Within the academic literature Robert Rotberg argues, for example, that
China is opportunistic, extractive and exploitive. Chinas very rapaciousness its seeming insatiable demand for liquid forms of
energy, and for the raw materials that feed its widening industrial maw responds to sub-Saharan Africas relatively abundant
supplies of unprocessed metals, diamonds, and gold (Rotberg 2008: viii ix). Similarly, Peter Navarro, in The Coming China Wars,
illuminates the so-called dark sides of Chinas leap into globalisation, including Chinas amoral involvement in Africa, arguing that
Chinas tentacles reach throughout Africa in its quest to access oil and other natural resources. Chinas Africa strategy, he concludes
is a threat that will colonise and economically enslave the vast majority of the continents population that lives outside the elite
circles. It is an imperialist marriage manufactured in China and made in hell (Navarro 2007: 100). Similar
concerns are
echoed in Western foreign policy positions, particularly within the United States . The Council on
Foreign Relations Report, More Than Humanitarianism: A Strategic US Approach Toward Africa, for example, highlights the threat
of China on the continent (CFR 2006). Similarly, US
Congress officials have voiced concerns that the Chinese

intend to aid and abet African dictators, gain a stronghold on precious African natural resources,
and undo much of the progress that has been made on democracy and governance in the last 15
years in African nations (Rep. Christopher Smith, quoted in Naidu and Davies 2006: 69). Meanwhile, sensationalistic and
Sinophobic accounts in the Western media routinely invoke the specter of Chinese expansion, including Chinese rapacity in Africa
(Brown and Sriram 2008). Reviewing the UK print media, Emma Mawdsley reveals that such accounts consistently depict China as
ruthless, unscrupulous, amoral, greedy and coldly indifferent (Mawdsley 2008: 517, 523). While French journalists Serge Michel
and Michel Beuret in China Safari: On the Trail of Beijings Expansion in Africa, liken Beijings role to that of the Godfather: Borrow
from the Chinese and you are drawn into the bosom of its highly profitable family. Beijing is the Godfather, engaged in
everything from textiles to infrastructure to uranium and oil. His bids are all interlinked and his motivation is constant (Michel and
Beuret 2009: 108). By
contrast, the operations of Western capital with the same ends are notably
absent from such accounts (Mawdsley 2008; Melber 2009), or are described with anodyne phrases such
as development, investment, employment generation (Guerrero and Manji 2008: 1). As such,
commonplace accounts claim that Western powers have developed a new vision of foreign partnership with Africa based on a
Engh, Ousaf Moqeet
Afro-Orientalism
shared agenda for change with the West undertaking ameliorative initiatives across Africa (Alden 2007: 9394; Rotberg 2008: 18).
Both the silences on the role of the West, together with the ahistoric distortions and flawed
understanding of the Wests ongoing neocolonial relationship with Africa characteristic of such
approaches, are highly problematic. Not least, as Kwesi Kwaa Prah (2007) has argued, it is hypocritical of Western
states to raise concerns about Chinas role in Africa, given their long history of exploitative relations with Africa, which continue to
the present day. Yet Western
powers continue to arrogate to themselves the project of spreading

enlightenment and culture to barbarous natives ... [whilst] seeking to convince us about how
bad and evil rapacious Chinese mercantilists are for Africa, all the while continuing to
rampage through Africa in search of markets to conquer and mad mullahs to vanquish (Adebajo
2008: 227). As such, it is necessary to shatter the Orientalist myth that often describes Chinas role
as that of a yellow peril seeking to monopolise markets, coddle caudillos and condone human
rights abuses on the continent; while Western powers ... are portrayed in contrast almost as
knights in shining armour, seeking to assist Africas economic recovery, spread democracy and
contribute to conflict-management efforts (Adebajo 2008: 227) The engagement of China and that of other so-called
emerging states with Africa has undoubtedly undergone significant changes, particularly over the last decade, with notable
consequences within and beyond Africa. However, a fuller and more nuanced understanding is required if we are to understand
contemporary shifts in the centres of politico-economic power within the twenty-first-century worldorder, and Africas place within
it. This necessarily includes analysis of the contemporary history of Western imperialism on the continent and the continuing
dominance of Western capital, albeit recognising that a significant spatial reorganisation of global capitalism is occurring with the
rise of the BRICs and other emerging states. This
spatial reorganisation of global capitalism and its

implications for and beyond Africa are addressed in the subsequent section . This section interrogates
commonplace Western claims regarding the scale and threat of China and other emerging powers in Africa, and, relatedly, subjects
the ongoing role of the West in Africa to critical scrutiny.
Thus we affirm the USFG should increase economic engagement

through demanding that the PRC let the ghosts kun-lun-nu speak as a
form of apportioning reparations.
This genealogical contact with the past of Chinese sovereignty stands
as an impossible demand that exhausts the idea of instutional
recapture for black life. Structural antiblackness encoded within the
norms of economic engagement, from chattel slavery to modern
neocolonial projects, makes it necessary to resist the inconceivable
nature of how black flesh as object registers within symbolic
economies of meaning. Through the ejection of black flesh from
humanity, neoliberalism par excellence became possible insofar as
African peoples were equated to standing reserves and pathologies
for the Western and Chinese order. Instead of affirming selfcorrecting engagement through the beaurocratic means of the topic,
the affirmative stands as a pursuit of autonomy beyond the social
coding of contemporary reality.
Engh, Ousaf Moqeet
Afro-Orientalism
Thus we allow the commodity to speak Niko huru. Mimi tena kitu.
Mimi tena kitu. I am free. I am no longer object. I am no longer
object.
Moten 08 (In the Break: The Aesthetics of Black Radical Tradition; Fred Moten; University
of Minnesota Press Minneapolis - ERW)
In his critical deployment of such music and speech, Douglass discovers a hermeneutic that is
simultaneously broken and expanded by an operation akin to what Jacques Derrida refers to as
invagination.5 This cut and augmented hermeneutic circle is structured by a double
movement. The Wrst element is the transference of a radically exterior aurality that disrupts
and resists certain formations of identity and interpretation by challenging the
reducibility of phonic matter to verbal meaning or conventional musical form. The second
is the assertion of what Nathaniel Mackey calls broken claim(s) to connection6 between
Africa and African America that seek to suture corollary, asymptotically divergent ruptures
maternal estrangement and the thwarted romance of the sexesthat he refers to as wounded
kinship and the the sexual cut.7 This assertion marks an engagement with a more
attenuated, more internally determined, exteriority and a courtship with an always already
unavailable and substitutive origin. It would work by way of an imaginative restoration of
the Wgure of the mother to a realm determined not only by verbal meaning and conventional
musical form but by a nostalgic specularity and a necessarily endogamous, simultaneously 6
RESISTANCE OF THE OBJECT virginal and reproductive sexuality. These twin impulses
animate a forceful operation in Douglasss work, something like a revaluation of that revaluation
of value that was set in motion by four of Douglasss contemporariesMarx, Nietzsche, Freud,
and Saussure. Above all, they open the possibility of a critique of the valuation of
meaning over content and the reduction of phonic matter and syntactic degeneracy in the
early modern search for a universal language and the late modern search for a universal science
of language. This disruption of the Enlightenment linguistic project is of fundamental
importance since it allows a rearrangement of the relationship between notions of human
freedom and notions of human essence. More speciWcally, the emergence from political,
economic, and sexual objection of the radical materiality and syntax that animates black
performances indicates a freedom drive that is expressed always and everywhere throughout
their graphic (re)production. In Caribbean Discourse Edouard Glissant writes: From the outset
(that is from the moment Creole is forged as a medium of communication between slave and
master), the spoken imposes on the slave its particular syntax. For Caribbean man, the
word is Wrst and foremost sound. Noise is essential to speech. Din is discourse. . . . Since speech
was forbidden, slaves camouflaged the word under the provocative intensity of the scream. It
was taken to be nothing but the call of a wild animal. This is how the dispossessed man
organized his speech by weaving it into the apparently meaningless texture of extreme noise.8
Lingering with Glissants formulations produces certain insights. The Wrst is that the temporal
condensation and acceleration of the trajectory of black performances, which is to say black
history, is a real problem and a real chance for the philosophy of history. The second is that the
animative materialitythe aesthetic, political, sexual, and racial force of the ensemble of
objects that we might call black performances, black history, blackness, is a real problem and a
real chance for the philosophy RESISTANCE OF THE OBJECT 7 of human being (which
would necessarily bear and be irreducible to what is called, or what somebody might hope
someday to call, subjectivity). One of the implications of blackness, if it is set to work in and on
such philosophy, is that those manifestations of the future in the degraded present that C. L. R.
Engh, Ousaf Moqeet
Afro-Orientalism
James described can never be understood simply as illusory. The knowledge of the future in the
present is bound up with what is given in something Marx could only subjunctively imagine: the
commodity who speaks. Here is the relevant passage from volume 1 of Capital, at the end of
the chapter on The Commodity, at the end of the section called The Fetishism of the
Commodity and Its Secret. But, to avoid anticipating, we will content ourselves here with one
more example relating to the commodity-form itself. If commodities could speak they would say
this: our use-value may interest men, but it does not belong to us as objects. What
does belong to us as objects, however, is our value. Our own intercourse as commodities proves
it. We relate to each other merely as exchange-values. Now listen how those commodities speak
through the mouth of the economist: Value (i.e., exchange-value) is a property of things, riches
(i.e., usevalue) of man. Value in this sense necessarily implies exchanges, riches do not. Riches
(use-value) are the attribute of man, value is the attribute of commodities. A man or a
community is rich, a pearl or a diamond is valuable. . . . A pearl or a diamond is valuable as a
pearl or diamond. So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or a
diamond. The economists who have discovered this chemical substance, and who lay special
claim to critical acumen, nevertheless Wnd that the use-value of material objects belongs to
them independently of their material properties, while their value, on the other hand, forms a
part of them as objects. What conWrms them in this view is the peculiar circumstance that the
use-value of a thing is realized without exchange, i.e. in a social process. Who would not call to
mind at this point the advice given by the good Dogberry to the night-watchman Seacoal? 8
RESISTANCE OF THE OBJECT To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but reading
and writing comes by nature.9 The difWculty of this passage is partly due to its dual
ventriloquizations. Marx produces a discourse of his own to put into the mouth of dumb
commodities before he reproduces what he Wgures as the impossible speech of commodities
magically given through the mouths of classical economists. The difWculty of the passage is
intensiWed when Marx goes on to critique both instances of imagined speech. These instances
contradict one another but Marx comes down neither on the side of speech he produces nor on
that of the speech of classical economists that he reproduces. Instead he traverses what he
conceives of as the empty space between these formulations, that space being the impossible
material substance of the commoditys impossible speech. In this regard, what is at stake is not
what the commodity says but that the commodity says or, more properly, that the commodity, in
its inability to say, must be made to say. It is, more precisely, the idea of the commoditys speech
that Marx critiques, and this is because he believes neither in the fact nor in the
possibility of such speech. Nevertheless, this critique of the idea of the commoditys
speech only becomes operative by way of a deconstruction of the specific meaning
of those impossible or unreal propositions imposed upon the commodity from
outside. The words Marx puts into the commoditys mouth are these: our use value . . . does
not belong to us as objects. What does belong to us as objects, however, is our value, where
value equals exchange value. Marx has the commodity go on to assert that commodities only
relate to one another as exchange-values, that this is proven by the necessarily social intercourse
in which commodities might be said to discover themselves. Therefore, the commodity discovers
herself, comes to know herself, only as a function of having been exchanged, having been
embedded in a mode of sociality that is shaped by exchange. The words of the commodity that
are spoken through the mouths of the classical economists are roughly these: riches (i.e., usevalue) are independent of the materiality of objects, but value, which is to say RESISTANCE OF
THE OBJECT 9 exchange-value, is a material part of the object. A man or a commodity is
rich, a pearl or a diamond is valuable. This is because a pearl or a diamond is exchangeable.
Though he agrees with the classical economists when they assert that value necessarily implies
Engh, Ousaf Moqeet
Afro-Orientalism
exchange, Marx chafes at the notion that value is an inherent part of the object. No chemist, he
argues, has discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or a diamond. For Marx, this chemical
substance called exchange-value has not been found because it does not exist. More precisely,
Marx facetiously places this discovery in an unachievable future without having considered the
conditions under which such a discovery might be made. Those conditions are precisely the fact
of the commoditys speech, which Marx dismisses in his critique of the very idea. So far no
chemist has ever discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or a diamond because pearls or
diamonds have not been heard to speak. The impossible chemical substance of the objects
(exchange-)value is the factthe material, graphic, phonic substanceof the objects speech.
Speech will have been the cutting augmentation of the already existing chemistry of objects, but
the objects speech, the commoditys speech, is impossible, that impossibility being the
Wnal refutation of whatever the commodity will have said. Marx argues that the classical
economists believe that the usevalue of material objects belongs to them independently of their
material properties. He further asserts that they are conWned in this view by the nonsocial
realization of use-valuethe fact that its realization does not come by way of exchange. When he
makes these assertions, Marx moves in an already well-established choreography of approach
and withdrawal from a possibility of discovery that Douglass already recited: the
(exchange-)value of the speaking commodity exists also, as it were, before exchange. Moreover,
it exists precisely as the capacity for exchange and the capacity for a literary, performative,
phonographic disruption of the protocols of exchange. This dual possibility comes by a
nature that is and at the same time is social and historical, a nature that is given as a kind of
anticipatory sociality and historicity. To think the possibility of an (exchange-)value that is prior
to exchange, and to think the reproductive and incantatory assertion of 10 RESISTANCE OF
THE OBJECT that possibility as the objection to exchange that is exchanges condition of
possibility, is to put oneself in the way of an ongoing line of discovery, of coming upon, of
invention. The discovery of the chemical substance that is produced in and by Marxs
counterfactual is the achievement of Douglasss line given in and as the theory and practice of
everyday life where the spectacular and the mundane encounter one another all the time. It is an
achievement well see given in the primal scene of Aunt Hesters objection to exchange, an
achievement given in speech, literary phonography, and their disruption. What is sounded
through Douglass is a theory of valuean objective and objectional, productive and
reproductive ontologywhose primitive axiom is that commodities speak. The impossible
example is given in order to avoid anticipation, but it works to establish the impossibility of such
avoidance. Indeed, the example, in her reality, in the materiality of her speech as breath and
sound, anticipates Marx. This sound was already a recording, just as our access to it is made
possible only by way of recordings. We move within a series of phonographic anticipations,
encrypted messages, sent and sending on frequencies Marx tunes to accidentally, for effect,
without the necessary preparation. However, this absence of preparation or foresight in Marx
an anticipatory refusal to anticipate, an obversive or anti- and anteimprovisationis condition
of possibility of a richly augmented encounter with the chain of messages the (re)sounding
speech of the commodity cuts and carries. The intensity and density of what could be thought
here as his alternative modes of preparation make possible a whole other experience of the
music of the event of the objects speech. Moving, then, in the critical remixing of nonconvergent
tracks, modes of preparation, traditions, we can think how the commodity who speaks, in
speaking, in the soundthe inspirited materialityof that speech, constitutes a kind of
temporal warp that disrupts and augments not only Marx but the mode of
subjectivity that the ultimate object of his critique, capital, both allows and disallows. All
of this moves toward the secret Marx revealed by way of the music he subjunctively mutes. Such
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Afro-Orientalism
aurality is, in fact, what Marx called the sensuous outburst of [our] essential activity.10 It is a
passion wherein the senses have . . . RESISTANCE OF THE OBJECT 11 become theoreticians
in their immediate practice.11 The commodity whose speech sounds embodies the critique
of value, of private property, of the sign. Such embodiment is also bound to the (critique
of ) reading and writing, oft conceived by clowns and intellectuals as the natural attributes of
whoever would hope to be known as human.
[HE CONTINUES]
Part of the project this drive animates is the improvisation through the opposition of spirit and
matter that is instantiated when the object, the commodity, sounds. Marxs counterfactual (If
the commodity could speak, it would say . . .) is broken by a commodity and by the trace of a
subjectivity structure born in objection that he neither realizes nor anticipates. There is
something more here than alienation and fetishization that works, with regard to Marx, as a
preWgurative critique. However, according to Ferdinand de Saussure, and in extension of
Marxs analytic, the value of the sign is arbitrary, conventional, differential, neither intrinsic nor
iconic, not reducible to but rather only discernible in the reduction of phonic substance. In any
case, it is impossible that sound, as a material element, should in itself be part of the language.
Sound is merely something ancillary, a material the language uses. All conventional values have
the characteristic of being distinct from the tangible element which serves as their vehicle. It is
not the metal in a coin which determines its value. A crown piece nominally worth Wve
francs contains only half that sum in silver. Its value varies somewhat according to the efWgy it
bears. It is worth rather more or rather less on different sides of a political frontier.
Considerations of the same order are even more pertinent to linguistic signals. Linguistic signals
are not in essence phonetic. They are not physical in any way. They are constituted solely
by differences which distinguish one such sound pattern from another.12 The value of the sign,
its necessary relation to the possibility of (a universal science of and a universal) language, is
only given in the absence or supercession of, or the abstraction from, sounded speech its
essential materiality is rendered ancillary by the crossing of an immaterial border or by a
differentializing inscription. Similarly, the truth about the value of the commodity is tied
precisely to the impossibility of its speaking, for if the commodity could speak it
would have intrinsic value, it would be infused with a certain spirit, a certain value
given not from the outside, and would, therefore, contradict the thesis on value
that it is not intrinsicthat Marx assigns it. The speaking RESISTANCE OF THE OBJECT 13
commodity thus cuts Marx; but the shrieking commodity cuts Saussure, thereby cutting Marx
doubly: this by way of an irruption of phonic substance that cuts and augments meaning with a
phonographic, rematerializing inscription. That irruption breaks down the distinction between
what is intrinsic and what is given by or of the outside; here what is given inside is that which is
out-from-the-outside, a spirit manifest in its material expense or aspiration. For Saussure such
speech is degraded, say, by accent, a deuniversalizing, material difference; for Chomsky it is
degraded by a deuniversalizing agrammaticality, but Glissant knows that the [scarred] spoken
imposes on the slave its particular syntax. These material degradationsWssures or
invaginations of a foreclosed universality, a heroic but bounded eroticismare black
performances. There occurs in such performances a revaluation or reconstruction of value, one
disruptive of the oppositions of speech and writing, and spirit and matter.
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This is an affirmation of survivalist pedagogy in the face of

materialist, libidinal, and linguistic violence this invokes a politic of
reclamation which counteracts the meaninglessness of black life.
Gumbs 10 (Alexis Gumbs - black queer feminist, Phd. Duke University, academic, organizer, revolutionary ERW)
Survival. The condition of bare life. The mythology of differential fitness. The continuity of property and properties.
But survival is more than this. Survival, as it emerges as a key word in the theory and poetics of Audre Lorde and June
Jordan is a poetic term. It provides the basis for the reconsideration of its own
meaning, and the reconsideration of the meaning of life, that which survival
queerly extends despite everything. Survival is a pedagogy: secret and forbidden
knowledge that we pass on, educating each other into a set of skills and beliefs
based on the queer premise that our lives are valuable in a way that the
economization of our labor, and the price of our flesh in the market of racism
deny. Survival is a mode of inquiry, providing a repertoire of critical insights, gained from
discerning what approach to a political and economic framework we can afford from one
moment to the next. Survival is an afterlife; by continuing to exist we challenge the
processes that somehow failed to kill us this time. Survival is a performance, a set of aesthetic
invocations that produce belief and resonance. Survival is a poetic intervention into the
simplistic conclusion of the political narrative: we were never meant to survive. The we that
was never meant to survive is a challenge to the gospel of individualism. The content of that we is at
stake because survival redefines who we are. For those of us who constitute the collection of people addressed by Audre Lordes
A Litany for Survival, the meanings of our lives have been slandered within an economy that uses
narratives of racial inferiority, gender determinism, and sexual subjectivity to devalue our
bodies, our breathing, our time. If we are survivors, who we are is the question of survival,
and whether we survive depends on the generation of a set of relationships that prioritizes who we are to each other through our
queer acts of loving the possible collectivity represented in each of our bodies. 2 Survival is a queer act for
oppressed communities because it interrupts the social reproduction of the

sanctioned deaths of those who were never meant to survive . In this chapter I argue that
survival as a fact, a possibility, an act, a tactic and an approach, is a performative and poetic
intervention into a meaning of life that the narrative of capitalism reproduces: the belief that
a differential monetary value can be assigned to the very time of our lives and our labor based
on stories about what race
The Affirmatives method reveals the diasporic and global

machinations of racialization that inform Chinese sociality. This is
key to visualizing the color line as a global heuristic of difference.
Feldman 2016 (Keith P. Feldman Assistant Professor Comparative Ethnic Studies UC
Berkeley; Theories of Race, Nation, and Empire; Cultural Theory; African, Arab, and Jewish
Diasporas; Visual Culture Studies; Transnational American Studies- Ph.D., University of
Washington, 2008 (with honors) M.A., The George Washington University, 2003, B.A., Brown
University, 2000 (cum laude) On Relationality, On Blackness: A Listening Post ERW)
The relational as a critical concept thus surfaces in part as a way to account descriptively and
analytically for connections, linkages, and articulations across the institutionalization of
difference in disciplines and the nation-state cartographies they reference. As much a seeing as a
doing, the interconnections revealed by a relational methodology are otherwise hidden or buried
by modern frames of the nation-state, the scale and scope of research agendas, and the
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disciplines and interdisciplines that draw on genealogies of comparison themselves. Delinking

from a comparative methodology invites shifting from an ontology of essence to what Walter
Mignolo calls a relational ontology. Relationality disrupts the positivist pretense of race,
gender, and sexuality as in the first or the last instance sociological facts. Relationality
enables us to think the doing of difference, difference as it constitutes and evades the
capture of the world (Puar). Relationality invites the development of literacies that can read
circuitries of power across uneven terrains (Layoun). Scholars interrogate archives and objects
in ways that reveal relational imaginaries in their contexts of emergence from the archives of
Anglophone liberalism in the construction of colonial domination and imperial management
(Lowe), to the material formulations of strange affinity encoded in U.S. women of color
feminisms and queer of color critique (Hong and Ferguson), to the impetus of transnational
feminisms to frame differentially arrayed and always already linked contexts of struggle
(Alexander and Mohanty). Genealogy renders such relations in their particular and provisional
dispersion, and thus their relation to the differentiated contexts of their emergence. The
predicates of a relational methodology invite us to uncover, reveal, desediment, unveil, and
excavate, prompting us to account for entanglement and its obfuscation or burial. From another
angle, liberal capitalism strives to produce individuated subjects properly calibrated for the
rational management of their possessions, including their possessions of self and of others
and possessions qua property, as abstractions commensurable through the equilibrations
of value (Singh). Relationality uncovers those interconnections that liberal capitalism seeks to
obscure, revealing the violence that appends recognition, unbound from redistribution, in arcs
of settler colonial capitalism (Coulthard), racial capitalism (Melamed), and the juridical
armature of neoliberalism (Cacho).
[HE CONTINUES]
Where and how, then, are we to think Blackness in relation? Such a question could be
answered in advance by the ante-relationality sedimented in the antiBlack ordering of the
modern world. At the same time, Blackness also elucidates a field formation suffused with
descriptive and analytical concerns with a deep and enduring relation to the contours of a
modernity animated by the lacerating trade winds of diaspora. Indeed, Black life
emerges out of always already heterogeneous overlapping diasporas (Lewis), a
horizon at once stilled, fixed, and determined from without and at the same time, as Harney and
Moten evince in the above epigraph, enacted in excess, beyond and beneath the regulatory
functions of state and capital. As Glissant elaborates (see epigraph), the channels of Black
diaspora are both the condition of and the counterpoint to modern globality. It is a
heteroglossic languaging that routinely announces and enunciates the practice and theory of the
impossible on the uneven terrain of the transatlantic world. The study of Blackness forecasts
insights into diasporic relationalities even as it renders the structural and systemic foundations
of capitalist/colonial modernity as concerned fundamentally with anti-relationality. Coloniality
binds diaspora to institutionalizations of violence and forces diaspora into the frame of the
nation-state, deploying an epistemic containment policy that buries, obscures, and delimits
relationalitys unbounded potentiality. Diaspora, as Stuart Hall reminds us, signals the
interconnections of difference. The dispersion at its mercurial core renders diaspora in
persistent apposition to the violence of the nation-state, a condition that is simultaneously a
mark of the unhomely and the worldly. The positivist presentiments that give the lie to what
once might have been called liberal multiculturalism and now often travels under the name
diversity have begun to fall away (Ahmed). Its hegemony was never complete, to be sure. It
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was always contested, and hence always worked over and through. Those policies for
representation that obscure plans for redistribution have been targeted by heterogeneous forms
of resistance to state-sanctioned anti-Blackness expressed intimately, affectively, bodily,
structurally, an anti-Blackness that is both cause and consequence of the ongoing violence of
capital accumulation (Kish and Leroy). In their respective contributions to this forum, Ther
Pickens and Vincent Schleitwiler foreground contemporary movements to contest anti-Black
state violence, as well as the pressing invitations to relationality connection, solidarity,
linkage, resonance that such movements evince. They also identify a relation to Blackness as a
sign and scene of futurity, of hosting forms of relation yet to come. Pickens underscores how
Arab American cultural production that relates to Blackness confronts the impulses both to
universalism and to exceptionalism, as well as to the volatility of an anti-Black antagonism that
circumscribes entry into U.S. civil society. Arab American fiction invites exploring the
possibilities of relation to Blackness with eyes wide open to these tensions. For Pickens, the Arab
American literary relation to Blackness has the capacity to interrupt the exceptionalist linear
narrative of progress that organizes conventional immigrant narratives and yields alternative
insights into formations of affect, kinship, and history. By theorizing Blackness as a when as
much as a what, Pickens reveals the potentialities as yet encrypted in Arab American literary
and cultural narratives. Schleitwiler takes the contemporary flourishing of collective action
against antiBlack state violence as an invitation to engage the ethically troubled matrix of
comparison required to write through the modalities of lynching that underwrite but also exceed
their denomination as such. With Du Boiss turn-of-the-century colorline heuristic in
mind, Schleitwiler formulates imperialism as animated by a will both to rule over and to do
justice to difference. While both Comparative Literature and Comparative Ethnic Studies have
critically investigated the former for some time now, the latter invocation of imperialisms
racial justice allows us to see how practices of imperial rule are catalyzed not just through
spectacular domination, torture, and violence, but also through an articulated investment in the
inclusion of hierarchically differentiated humanity in liberal educative and juridical institutions.
That is, imperialism always seeks to regulate the terms through which difference is included.
Rather than cede the field of comparison wholly, Schleitwiler calls on us to attend to
comparisons demons: those figure[s] of unpredictability and indeterminacy lurking within
the knowledge of a world ordered by competing imperialisms that can never finally guarantee
the universality to which they aspire. Because imperialisms comparative imaginary is always
partial, incomplete, and haunted, Schleitwiler finds in that always-provisional claim to totalizing
its rule over difference potential critical lines of flight. Genealogies of American empire, as
Pickens and Schleitwiler provide, crystallize the problematic of Blackness and relation.
Provincializing these genealogies is another matter altogether, and, in her contribution to the
forum, Shu-mei Shih takes up precisely this task. In extending a method of relational
comparison, Shih identifies the Global 1960s as the explosive flashpoint that reveals a
decolonial arc of transnational and comparative epistemes producing imagined geographies rich
with symbolic and material articulations of anti-imperialism. Part of that thread signifies China
in general, and Maoism in particular, as quintessentially animating a generative Third Worldism
for the times. This is the China embraced by Du Bois in 1959, a site through which revolutionary
racial brotherhood signified as Afro-Asian solidarity was to be conceived. Yet, a practice of
relational comparison, as Shih argues here, reveals another crucial thread in stark
counterpoint to Du Bois. To the South of China (both geographically and epistemically) lay
violent minoritizations, such as of the Hoa in Vietnam and Chinese Malaysians,
predicated not simply on the long shadow of European colonialism but also on the
active imperial race-making emerging out of China. The geographic impetus of the color
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line as the figure par excellence of racial solidarities is persistently interrupted by a rendering of
the South of the South that reveals its fractures, frictions, and racial contradictions.
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Afro-Orientalism
1AC version 2
618 B.C.E: The Tang dynasty under the rule of Li Yuan dawns in to
the world. The Chinese Golden age has been born, the dynasty for the
ages has finally arrived and a collective empirical order has been
secured. The borders of the nation grow at a fever pitch until contact
with the Middle East has been reached.
696 B.C.E: Chinese linkages of commerce begin to grow ever so
steadily. Sparse contact with Arabian traders soon evolves into a
committed relation of commerce and the coasts of East Africa, the
mystical Zangibar, the Region of the Blacks transformed into a
luring space of interest. The things that they exchanged, they went
by many names: Zanj or sengji if they were Bantu, Hindoos if they
were Persian, Kwei-nu if they were transferred for work in
Guangzhou. Voyage after voyage to their wild lands made contact
more frequent. Meticulous observation took hold as literary texts
were created to fabricate their essence, understand what they meant,
and witness what they did
Their eyes were ravaging red, with their enormous noses turned up
their lips were so big, their hair is woolly and tawny, so thickly
mottled. They eat fruit, fish, and shrimps, and they live either in caves
or in nests built in the trees. They dont speak any recognizable
human language. They go stark naked with little cover for decency.
They can swim under water without closing their eyes, and they are
strong beyond measure, capable of carrying several weights of cattle.
The women of this Island are the ugliest in the world, with their great
mouths and big eyes and thick noses; their breasts are four times
bigger than those of any other women.[sic.]
-Book II of Chu Yu's Ping Chiu K'o T'an ("Notes on P'ing Chiu"), Chao Ju-k'uo's description of
K'un-lun, and Zhu Yu's Pingzhou ketan (Notes on Pingzhou)
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Afro-Orientalism
There were so many of them what is it that they should be called?

Overlapping labels of the past became reduced to a single word
Kun-lun-nu, the dark-skinned peoples, the devil slave shall be their
name.
Hence arose the marking of the African as chattel, superhuman in
strength but subhuman in intellect. The kun-lun became nothing
more than wild beasts, the savages of the South Seas, primitive
animals who were only valuable insofar as they were domesticated
within the economic order.
The etymological schism of the Chinese from the devil slaves created
a social fabric of Afro-orientalism through which the templates of
economic exchange became coherent blackness as object and nonblack as sovereign subject. This tactic of westernization served to
eject the slave from the fabric of social reality and was exported as a
canon for the international spectrum of antiblackness.
Rutledge 14 (Gregory E. Ruthelberg Professor at University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Received Masters in Afro-American studies and English Literature from University of Florida,
JD/MAMC (1992), University of WisconsinMadison, MA (1999), University of Wisconsin
Madison, PhD (2005), Race, Slavery, and the Re-evaluation of the T'ang Canon - Volume 16
Issue 6 (December 2014) Article 8, http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=2532&context=clcweb ERW)
-Etymology is the study of words, meanings, and connotations.
Given the uniqueness of Wilensky's "The
Magical Kunlun," the politics of its critical methodology deserves keen

a peculiar Orientalist technique , one that entirely omits a slaveryattuned perspective. Consequently, proper interpretation of such lore would, at minimum, include close readings
sensitive to key issues elided by Chang and Wilensky: African epic traditions and the unique place of the
exceptional Other, sexuality and gender politics, labor and the culture of the slave trade , and the
question of religion and the psycho-social consequences of chattel slavery. Because its cultural
attention since it deploys
comparison (T'ang Dynasty, Arab empire, and East African kingdoms and cultures) focuses on ancient stories of slave-heroes, "The
Magical Kunlun" apprehends a comparative temporality. Indexed to ancient East African and Asian temporalities largely unknown
to Western scholars, Wilensky's study is challenged by a most critical methodological question: given its temperospatial magnitude,
how expansive should one's database of knowledge be if this folkloric fiction is to be properly read? This question is perhaps the
defining question confronted by literary scholars in East Asia. For example, at the annual English Language and Literature
Association of Korea International Conference held in November 2013 at Sookmyung Women's University in Seoul, Eric Hayot
delivered a keynote entitled "Scale, Data, and World Literature" addressed to the conference's topic of "Micro versus Macro
Literatures in English." Hayot attended to literary critics' methodologytraditionally at odds with interrogations of methodological
assumptions, biases, and research questionsin light of Franco Moretti's critique of literary scholars' canonized method of close
reading and the sudden rise of the Gregory E. Rutledge, "Race, Slavery, and the Re-evaluation of the T'ang Canon" page 4 of 11
Special Issue Western Canons in a Changing East Asia. Ed. Simon C. Estok digital humanities and world literature. " The
Magical Kunlun" anticipated questions of this nature in East Asia, for the "ontology" of the literary
object Hayot suggested, not only denotes the formal components of the text, but also identity
politics. Wilensky's interest and Hayot's expertise in East Asian Studies highlight the rising importance of East Asian "ontology"
to Western literary scholars. In a globalized world in which East Asiawith or without China as a
superpowerwill play a central role in emergent world literature canons , issues of
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identity are paramount. Significantly, kunlun etymology speaks to the place East Africa held, and holds, in
ancient and modern China at a time when its relationship to Africa legitimately raises questions
about cultural exchange and neo-colonialism. The racial hostility Wilensky documents among a
"mob of more than 3000 Chinese students" toward the African "black devils" in 1988, in significant part because of
interracial dating (43-44), seems to parallel much of the African American experience. Her implicit
questionWas kunlun in Chinese culture equivalent to nigger in the U.S., and is it the
source or correlative of racial hostility to Africans among contemporary Chinese today?goes right to the
heart of complex issues regarding racial oppression, aesthetics, and culture as globalization
unfolds. Wilensky makes this clear as she delineates her research focus, questions, and methodology: The first chapter section of
this paper seeks to explain how Chinese people perceived these black slaves by analyzing representations
of people with dark skin in fictional and nonfiction sources from the fifth century through the Song dynasty, tracing
the evolution of the meanings and connotations of the term kunlun . This mysterious and poorly
understood word first applied to dark-skinned Chinese and then expanded over time to encompass
multiple meanings, all connoting dark skin. This chapter examines the meaning of the term kunlun in nonfiction
before and during the Tang; fictional tales about magical, superhuman kunlun slaves from the Tang fiction compendium Taiping
guangji (Extensive Gleanings of the Reign of Great Tranquility); and finally, representations of the kunlun from a
nonfiction writer from the Song, Zhu Yu Were these Tang and Song images of the kunlun based on direct contact between
Chinese and African peoples? When did the Chinese make a conceptual link between the kunlun slaves in China and the
countries and peoples of East Africa? (2) Wilensky's study is a watershed unlike the studies concerned with historicizing the
enslavement of East Africans in China and the etymological focus of the study extends from nonfiction to include her interpretation
of race in fiction, a "valuable source because its popularity reveals widespread cultural perceptions of people with dark skin" (2).
Although Wilensky foregrounds historical and nonfiction accounts in her study, on grounds of reliability her article is, a priori,
aligned with methodology fundamental to literary critique. At its core, Wilensky's study raises a philological question central to the
method used by literary scholars: what does the etymology of a word reveal about writers' authorial intent and readers'
understanding that we can use to interpret a text and its context? For English literature scholars, the Oxford English Dictionary is
considered authoritative both for its exhaustive inclusion of multiple senses of a given word and for its etymology. The close reading
method developed in recent decades often turns upon critical insights into denotations,
connotations, and
etymologies of words comprising a key passage from a literary text . While "scale jumping" is possible even
within one sentence, as Hayot suggested, textual close reading is often criticized as an apolitical micro-logical exercise based on the
critic's privileging interpretations of one or a few texts without regard for the macro-logical context (history, politics, and class), or
even the author's intent. The battle over whether politics and aesthetics should mix is, of course, old and entrenched. But Wilensky's
kunlun etymology
constitutes an altogether different species of interpretation that might be called a

tracing the racial meaning of kunlunfrom "the Tang
dynasty, [when] Arab traders brought a number of East African slaves to China" (1)provides the
"closed" reading of literary texts. In other words, while
raison d'tre for Wilensky's investigation, the semantic content and literary strategies evident in the stories are "closed" to
interpretation. The method is the message, for Wilensky's construction of kunlun etymology associated with East Africans, even of
the most exceptional slaves, confines and defines their status as kunlun chattel . Far too little attention is given
by her to considering whether the stories might contradict literal constructions that simply equate kunlun and slave. While Wilensky
rhetorically foregrounds "fictional tales about magical kunlun slaves from the Taiping guangji a massive Song period collection of
Tang and earlier tales" (5), this is misleading. Although in keeping with her earlier identification of these tales as a "valuable source,"
her core methodological superstructure relies upon a fiction-nonfiction divide that maps onto
another: while noting that "these fictional tales were widely read at the time of their publication, revealing
common images Gregory E. Rutledge, "Race, Slavery, and the Re-evaluation of the T'ang Canon" page 5 of 11 of the
kunlun that reflect popular perceptions of people with dark skin," Wilensky privileges the objective,
scholarly viewpointsfound in "a nonfiction source from the Song"that ultimately treat East
Africans as "foreign 'devil slaves'" (5). "Perceptions" are the soft power of Wilensky's methodology, which initially
valorizes but ultimately negates the "common" and "popular perceptions"valorizes their existence as a
reflection of how the masses think, but negates their substance as an aspect of human culture meriting
attention in its own rightsin favor of nonfiction, which is more reliable for its authors' knowledge and facts. Chinese culture and
literature were already considered "heathen" by late-nineteenth-century US-Americans, (Lutz 9-21), but US-American Orientalist
policy filled the power vacuum WWII created, with a critical difference: while centuries of Western European Orientalism, Said
argues, depended on a "broad catholic" approach, for the U.S. it was "but an administrative one, a matter for policy" (290). Said
speaks here with reference to the Middle or Near East, Islam in particular, but his analysis is relevant insofar as it reflects the advent
of US-American East Asian academic culture and policy that predated and, more importantly, dominated after World War II: One of
the striking aspects of the new American social-science attention to the Orient is its singular avoidance of literature. You can read
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Afro-Orientalism
through reams of expert writing on the modern Near East and never encounter a single reference to literature. What seems to matter
far more to the regional expert are "facts," of which a literary text is perhaps a disturber. The net effect of this remarkable omission
in modern American awareness of the Arab or Islamic Orient
is to keep the region and its people conceptually

emasculated, reduced to "attitudes," "trends," statistics: in short, dehumanized. Since an Arab
poet or novelistand there are manywrites of his experiences, of his values, of his humanity (however strange that may be), he
effectively disrupts the various patterns (images, clichs, abstractions) by which the Orient is represented. A
literary text
speaks more or less directly of a living reality The non-philological study of esoteric Oriental languages is useful
for obvious rudimentary strategic reasons; but it is also useful for giving a cachet of authority, almost a mystique, to the "expert" who
appears able to deal with hopelessly obscure material with firsthand skill. In the social-science order of things, language study is a
mere tool for higher aims, certainly not for reading literary texts. (Said 290-91)
Chinese societys equation of Kun-lun-nu as a signifier of blackness

morphed into a hieroglyphic imposed upon the flesh an atomizing
of the captive epidermal schema which marked difference across
generations.
Weheilye 14(Alexander G. Weheliye - professor of African American studies at
Northwestern University, Habeas Viscus: Racialized Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black
Feminist Theories of the Human, pgs. 31-34 ERW)
Spillers concentrates on the processes through which slaves are transformed into bare life/flesh
and then subjected to the pleasure of the bodied subject, arguing, before the body there is flesh, that
zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush
of discourse or the reflexes of iconography. We regard this human and social irreparability as high crimes against
the flesh, as the person of African females and males registered the wounding.21 Flesh, while representing both a
temporal and conceptual antecedent to the body, is not a biological occurrence seeing that its
creation requires an elaborate apparatus consisting of the calculated work of iron, whips, chains, knives, the canine
patrol, the bullet (Mama's Baby, 207), among many other factors, including courts of law.22 If the body represents legal
personhood qua selfpossession, then the flesh designates those dimensions of human life cleaved by the working together of
depravation and deprivation. In order for this cruel ruse to succeed, however, subjects must be transformed into flesh before being
granted the illusion of possessing a body. What Spillers refers to as the
hieroglyphics of the flesh created by

these instruments is transmitted to the succeeding generations of black subjects who have been
liberated and granted body in the aftermath of de jure enslavement. The hieroglyphics of the flesh do not vanish
once affixed to proper personhood (the body); rather they endure as a pesky potential vital
to the maneuverings of cultural seeing by skin color (Mama's Baby, 207). Racializing
assemblages translate the lacerations left on the captive body by apparatuses of political violence to a
domain rooted in the visual truth-value accorded to quasibiological distinctions between different
human groupings. Thus, rather than entering a clearing zone of indistinction, we are thrown into the vortex of hierarchical
indicators: racializing assemblages. In
the absence of kin, family, gender, belonging, language,

personhood, property, and official records, among many other factors, what remains is the flesh ,
the living, speaking, thinking, feeling, and imagining flesh: the ether that holds together the world of
Man while at the same time forming the condition of possibility for this world's demise. It's the end
of the worlddon't you know that yet? While Wynter's resistance to the universalization of gendered categories associated with
bourgeois whiteness in certain strands of feminism, which I discussed in chapter 1, is understandable, her genealogy of modernity,
which sees a mutational shift from the primacy of the anatomical model of sexual difference as the referential model of mimetic
ordering, to that of the physiognomic model of racial/cultural difference in the Renaissance, remains less convincing, because it
leads to the repudiation of gender analytics as such.23 This aspect of Wynter's thinking fails to persuade in the way the other
race
the systematizing principle according to which the Homo
sapiens species is categorized into full humans, not-quitehumans, and nonhumans .
elements of her global analytics of the human do, since it assumes that beginning with the colonization of the Americas,
(physiognomy) dislodges gender/sex (anatomy) as
The shift Wynter diagnoses, though surely present in the history of modernity, cannot be encompassed by the distinction between
physiognomy and anatomy, even if not construed as either categorical or complete, because neither anatomy nor sexual difference
Engh, Ousaf Moqeet
Afro-Orientalism
recede like silhouettes sketched in the soil at the shores that delimit the Drexciyan waters of the Middle Passage.24 Instead, sexual
difference remains an intoxicating sociogenically instituted mode of mimetic structuring in modernity, though always tied to specific
variants of (un)gendering. Wynter's dismissal of gender/sex as forceful indicators of the hierarchical ordering of our species thus
seems to discard sexual difference with the proverbial bathwater; and it also largely leaves intact the morphological dimorphism
upon which the modern west constructs gendered stratification. In this context, it is useful to distinguish between physiognomy as
inferring from an individual's external appearance, particularly a person's facial features or expression[, their] character or ethnic
origin, while anatomy designates the bodily structure of humans, animals, and other living organisms, and physiology analyzes
how organisms or bodily parts (e.g., the brain) function and behave.25 Wynter's statement assumes a substantial variance between
physiognomy and anatomy, even though the former is unthinkable without some recourse to the latter, at the same time as it does
not account for the many attempts at creating an isomorphic echo chamber between racial and anatomical difference, as was the
case with Sarah Baartman, the so-called Venus Hottentot, for instance. Put differently, in
the sphere of racial and sexual

difference, anatomy and physiognomy form a continuum in a larger modern assemblage that
requires the physiognomic territorialization of anatomic qualities. Moreover, if, according to Wynter, there
exists no universal instantiation of gender, then how can racial differentiation persist without being modulated by gender or
sexuality? To be clear, I am not after an academic commonsense invocation of the necessary intersectionality of all axes of
subjugation but of one that takes Wynter's insights about how race
inflects human physiology in colonial

modernity seriously, while still asking how, even if it is not the primary model of hierarchical differentiation,
sexual difference might figure into this theory of the human. How do we think gender categories based upon the
anatomical foundation of sexual distinction through the lens of racialization, and vice versa? How do we account for what Spillers
calls female flesh ungendered birthed by the Middle Passage (Mama's Baby, 207), which continues to affect all black subjects?
26 As black feminist theorists Hazel Carby, Julia Oparah, Claudia Tate, Evelynn Hammonds, Patricia Hill Collins, Angela Davis,
Darlene Clark Hine, and Cathy Cohen, among many others, have pointed out, black subjects genders and sexualities operate
differently from those found in the mainstream of the world of Man.27 Namely, in
the same way that black people

appear as either nonhuman or magically hyperhuman within the universe of Man ,
black subjects are imbued with either a surplus (hyperfemininity or hypermasculinity) of gender and
sexuality or a complete lack thereof (desexualization). However, regardless whether deficit or surplus, what remains
significant is that the histories of racial slavery, colonialism, Jim Crow, the prison, and the like, which all represent different
racializing assemblages in Man's extensive armory, have constitutively incapacitated black

subjects ability to conform to hegemonic gender and sexuality norms, and often excessively so. Drawing on examples
from racial slavery and the more recent pathologization of the black family in the infamous Moynihan report,
Cathy Cohen and Spillers ascertain how the prohibition of marriage among slaves and the complete erasure of traditional kinship
arrangements during and subsequent to the Middle Passage underwrite the policing and disparaging of those black genders and
sexualities outside of heteronormative privilege, in particular those perceived as threatening systems of white supremacy, male
domination, and capitalist advancement.28 Thus, circling back to Wynter's distrust of gender-focused inquiries, it is imperative to
consider how the translation of sexual difference to de facto nonnormative genders and sexualities within black communities (the
ungendered flesh) suggests a fundamental component in the barring of black
people from the category of the

human-as-Man. Which is to say that taking on the semblance of full humanity requires apposite gender and
sexuality provisos that cannot be taken for granted in postslavery black cultures . Indeed, this is why I believe
we need both Wynter and Spillers to come to a fuller understanding of how racializing assemblages operate, since the sociogenic
anchoring of racial difference in physiology and the banning of black subjects from the domain of the human occur in and through
gender and sexuality. Retrospectively describing the concept of the hieroglyphics of the flesh in the introduction to her 2003
collection of essays, Spillers
maintains that she was attempting not only to pinpoint one of diasporic
slavery's technologies of violence through marking , but also to propose that beyond
the violating hand that laid on the stigmata of a recognition that was a misrecognition , or the regard
that was disregard, there was a semiosis of procedure that had enabled such a moment in the first
place. Spillers concludes, The marking, the branding, the whippingall Instruments of a terrorist regimewere more
deeply thatto get in somebody's face in that way would have to be centuries in the making that would have had little to do, though
it is difficult to believe, with
the biochemistry of pigmentation, hair texture, lip thickness,

and the indicial measure of the nostrils , but everything to do with those unacknowledged legislators
of a discursive and an economic discipline.29 Despite having no real basis in biochemistry, the hieroglyphics
of the flesh requires grounding in the biological sphere so as to facilitate even as it conceals and because
it masksthe political, economic, social, and cultural disciplining (semiosis of procedure) of the Homo
sapiens species into assemblages of the human, not-quite-human, and nonhuman; this is
what I am referring to as racialization. The profitable atomizing of the captive body (and the bodies
of the colonized, tortured, imprisoned, interned, etc.) puts into place the conditions of possibility for
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Afro-Orientalism
the creation and maintenance of racializing assemblages and most decidedly not the
suspension of racialized divisions in a biopolitical zone of indistinction (Mama's Baby,
208). As a result, the flesh epitomizes a central modern assemblage of racialization that highlights how bare life is not only a
product of previously established distinctions but also, and more significantly, aids in the perpetuation of hierarchical
categorizations along the lines of nationality, gender, religion, race, culture, sexuality, and so
on.30 In its focus on both the genesis and the aftermath of zoe's specifically modern politicization, Spillers's
conceptualization of the flesh shines a spotlight on slavery's alternate passages to the formation
of bare life. In other words, the flesh is not an abject zone of exclusion that culminates in death but an alternate instantiation of
humanity that does not rest on the mirage of western Man as the mirror image of human life as such. Analogously, Luce Irigaray
argues that within phallogocentric structures, women, as commodities, are a mirror of value of and for man.31 Here the different
groups excluded from the category of proper humanity encounter only a scopic echo of their deviance fromand therefore reinscribe
the superiority of western Man, reflecting their own value as ontological lack and western Man's value as properly human. Thus, as
Spillers remarks, [the
black American woman] became instead the principal point of passage between
the human and the non-human world. Her issue became the focus of a cunning differencevisually,
psychologically, ontologicallyas the route by which the dominant modes decided the
distinction between humanity and other. At this level of radical discontinuity in the great chain of being, black is
vestibular to culture.32 And being vestibular to culture means that gendered blacknessthough excluded from culture, and
frequently violently sois a passage to the human in western modernity because, in giving flesh to the word of Man, the flesh comes
to define the phenomenology of Man, which is always already lived as unadulterated physiology. As a result, the flesh rests at that
precarious threshold where the person metamorphoses into the group and the individual-in-the-mass and the mass-in-theindividual mark an iconic thickness: a concerted function whose abiding centrality is embodied in the flesh, and which is whyas
we shall see laterthe
flesh resists the legal idiom of personhood as property .33 For Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
flesh functions as
an integral component of being, which is not a fact or a sum of facts , and yet adherent to location and to
the now.34 If the flesh represents an element in the vein of the classical quadfecta of earth, wind, (water,) and fire, it appears
as a vital prop in the world of Man's dramaturgy of Being. Following Merleau-Ponty, Elizabeth Grosz holds that
the relationality of the fleshits nonsubstantive substancematerializes through an inherent intertwining of subject and
the flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance; rather, in his phenomenological theorization, the
world, creating a new ontology, one which supersedes the ontological distinction between the animate and the inanimate, between
the animal and the human,in ways that might also suit the interests of feminists, since the hierarchical differentiation between
reason and enfleshment is complicit with the hierarchy which positions one kind of subject (male, white, capitalist) in the position
of superiority over others.35
Chinas contemporary scramble for Africa in competition with the US

is an extension of our argument insofar as it locks into violent,
Sinophobic imperial narrative that has extended from the
paternalism of the premodern eraChinese economic interactions
are inseparable from the Wests neoliberal project, rendering African
governments and people as passive instruments of global colonialism.
Ayers 13 (Alison J. Ayers, Simon Fraser University (SFU), Political Science, Sociology &
Anthropology. Beyond Myths, Lies and Stereotypes: The Political Economy of a New Scramble
for Africa, New Political Economy, 18:2, 227-257 - ERW)
Commentators across the political spectrum have increasingly drawn attention to a new scramble for
Africa. This new scramble marks the latest chapter of imperialist engagement, with not only Western states
and corporations but also those of emerging economies (such as China, Russia, Brazil, India and Malaysia) seeking to
consolidate their access to African resources and markets. The new scramble for Africa involves therefore
significant politico-economic transformations related to shifts in global politico-economic power. Accordingly, a burgeoning
literature has emerged to make sense of the current historical conjuncture. Indeed, as Roger Southall and Henning Melber argue,
something big is happening in contemporary Africa and there is an urgent need for us as analysts to seek to understand it (2009:
xxiv). However, as this article elaborates, much
of the burgeoning literature on the new scramble for Africa

is premised upon problematic substantive, theoretical and ontological claims and
debates. In particular, the article seeks to challenge two commonplace and related narratives. Firstly, the highly
Engh, Ousaf Moqeet
Afro-Orientalism
questionable representations of the scale and perceived threat of emerging powers (particularly
Chinas) involvement in Africa, in contrast to the silences, hypocrisy and paternalistic
representation of the historical role of the West. As such, the Wests relations with Africa are
construed as essentially beneficent, in contrast to the putatively opportunistic, exploitative and
deleterious role of the emerging powers, thereby obfuscating the Wests ongoing
neocolonial relationship with Africa. Second, and relatedly, debate and analysis are framed
predominantly within an ahistoric statist framework of analysis, particularly that of interstate rivalry between China and other emerging states vs. Western powers. Absent or
neglected in such accounts are profound changes in the global political economy within which
the new scramble for Africa is to be more adequately located. Without contextualising the rise
of China (and other emerging states) in the neoliberal capitalist global order, it is too easy to single out
the country without addressing the structural and institutional forces that are driving not
only China, but also other emerging powers, to look with covetous eyes at Africas natural
resources and markets (Luk 2008: 13). This article interjects in such debates through critique of these
two commonplace but highly problematic narratives. In so doing, it seeks to contribute to a more adequate
analysis of politico-economic transformations in the twenty-first world order, and Africas place within it.
Yellow peril, dark continent, white mans burden Much of the discussion and debate around the new scramble for
Africa focuses on Chinas engagement with Africa. Such accounts are characteristic of a wider discourse on the
rise of China internationally and the so-called China threat evident in policy-making, social
science and mass public discourse (Gertz 2000; Yee and Storey 2002; Bernstein and Munro 1997; Mosher 2000;
Mearsheimer 2006; Nam 2007; Curtis 2008). Such representations give the impression that the African
continent, and much of the rest of the world, is in the process of being devoured by China, with
descriptors such as voracious, ravenous and insatiable appetite for natural resources used to characterise Chinas new role
(Guerrero and Manji 2008: 1; Mohan and Power 2008). Within the academic literature Robert Rotberg argues, for example, that
China is opportunistic, extractive and exploitive. Chinas very rapaciousness its seeming insatiable demand for liquid forms of
energy, and for the raw materials that feed its widening industrial maw responds to sub-Saharan Africas relatively abundant
supplies of unprocessed metals, diamonds, and gold (Rotberg 2008: viii ix). Similarly, Peter Navarro, in The Coming China Wars,
illuminates the so-called dark sides of Chinas leap into globalisation, including Chinas amoral involvement in Africa, arguing that
Chinas tentacles reach throughout Africa in its quest to access oil and other natural resources. Chinas Africa strategy, he concludes
is a threat that will colonise and economically enslave the vast majority of the continents population that lives outside the elite
circles. It is an imperialist marriage manufactured in China and made in hell (Navarro 2007: 100). Similar
concerns are
echoed in Western foreign policy positions, particularly within the United States . The Council on
Foreign Relations Report, More Than Humanitarianism: A Strategic US Approach Toward Africa, for example, highlights the threat
of China on the continent (CFR 2006). Similarly, US
Congress officials have voiced concerns that the Chinese

intend to aid and abet African dictators, gain a stronghold on precious African natural resources,
and undo much of the progress that has been made on democracy and governance in the last 15
years in African nations (Rep. Christopher Smith, quoted in Naidu and Davies 2006: 69). Meanwhile, sensationalistic and
Sinophobic accounts in the Western media routinely invoke the specter of Chinese expansion, including Chinese rapacity in Africa
(Brown and Sriram 2008). Reviewing the UK print media, Emma Mawdsley reveals that such accounts consistently depict China as
ruthless, unscrupulous, amoral, greedy and coldly indifferent (Mawdsley 2008: 517, 523). While French journalists Serge Michel
and Michel Beuret in China Safari: On the Trail of Beijings Expansion in Africa, liken Beijings role to that of the Godfather: Borrow
from the Chinese and you are drawn into the bosom of its highly profitable family. Beijing is the Godfather, engaged in
everything from textiles to infrastructure to uranium and oil. His bids are all interlinked and his motivation is constant (Michel and
Beuret 2009: 108). By
contrast, the operations of Western capital with the same ends are notably
absent from such accounts (Mawdsley 2008; Melber 2009), or are described with anodyne phrases such
as development, investment, employment generation (Guerrero and Manji 2008: 1). As such,
commonplace accounts claim that Western powers have developed a new vision of foreign partnership with Africa based on a
shared agenda for change with the West undertaking ameliorative initiatives across Africa (Alden 2007: 9394; Rotberg 2008: 18).
Both the silences on the role of the West, together with the ahistoric distortions and flawed
understanding of the Wests ongoing neocolonial relationship with Africa characteristic of such
approaches, are highly problematic. Not least, as Kwesi Kwaa Prah (2007) has argued, it is hypocritical of Western
states to raise concerns about Chinas role in Africa, given their long history of exploitative relations with Africa, which continue to
the present day. Yet Western
powers continue to arrogate to themselves the project of spreading
Engh, Ousaf Moqeet
Afro-Orientalism
enlightenment and culture to barbarous natives ... [whilst] seeking to convince us about how
bad and evil rapacious Chinese mercantilists are for Africa, all the while continuing to
rampage through Africa in search of markets to conquer and mad mullahs to vanquish (Adebajo
2008: 227). As such, it is necessary to shatter the Orientalist myth that often describes Chinas role
as that of a yellow peril seeking to monopolise markets, coddle caudillos and condone human
rights abuses on the continent; while Western powers ... are portrayed in contrast almost as
knights in shining armour, seeking to assist Africas economic recovery, spread democracy and
contribute to conflict-management efforts (Adebajo 2008: 227) The engagement of China and that of other so-called
emerging states with Africa has undoubtedly undergone significant changes, particularly over the last decade, with notable
consequences within and beyond Africa. However, a fuller and more nuanced understanding is required if we are to understand
contemporary shifts in the centres of politico-economic power within the twenty-first-century worldorder, and Africas place within
it. This necessarily includes analysis of the contemporary history of Western imperialism on the continent and the continuing
dominance of Western capital, albeit recognising that a significant spatial reorganisation of global capitalism is occurring with the
rise of the BRICs and other emerging states. This
spatial reorganisation of global capitalism and its

implications for and beyond Africa are addressed in the subsequent section . This section interrogates
commonplace Western claims regarding the scale and threat of China and other emerging powers in Africa, and, relatedly, subjects
the ongoing role of the West in Africa to critical scrutiny.
Thus we affirm the USFG should increase economic engagement

through demanding that the PRC let the ghosts kun-lun-nu speak as a
form of apportioning reparations.
This genealogical contact with the past of Chinese sovereignty stands
as an impossible demand that exhausts the idea of instutional
recapture for black life. Structural antiblackness encoded within the
norms of economic engagement, from chattel slavery to modern
neocolonial projects, makes it necessary to resist the inconceivable
nature of how black flesh as object registers within symbolic
economies of meaning. Through the ejection of black flesh from
humanity, neoliberalism par excellence became possible insofar as
African peoples were equated to standing reserves and pathologies
for the Western and Chinese order. Instead of affirming selfcorrecting engagement through the beaurocratic means of the topic,
the affirmative stands as a pursuit of autonomy beyond the social
coding of contemporary reality.
Thus we allow the commodity to speak Niko huru. Mimi tena kitu.
Mimi tena kitu. I am free. I am no longer object. I am no longer
object.
Moten 08 (In the Break: The Aesthetics of Black Radical Tradition; Fred Moten; University
of Minnesota Press Minneapolis - ERW)
In his critical deployment of such music and speech, Douglass discovers a hermeneutic that is
simultaneously broken and expanded by an operation akin to what Jacques Derrida refers to as
Engh, Ousaf Moqeet
Afro-Orientalism
invagination.5 This cut and augmented hermeneutic circle is structured by a double

movement. The Wrst element is the transference of a radically exterior aurality that disrupts
and resists certain formations of identity and interpretation by challenging the
reducibility of phonic matter to verbal meaning or conventional musical form. The second
is the assertion of what Nathaniel Mackey calls broken claim(s) to connection6 between
Africa and African America that seek to suture corollary, asymptotically divergent ruptures
maternal estrangement and the thwarted romance of the sexesthat he refers to as wounded
kinship and the the sexual cut.7 This assertion marks an engagement with a more
attenuated, more internally determined, exteriority and a courtship with an always already
unavailable and substitutive origin. It would work by way of an imaginative restoration of
the Wgure of the mother to a realm determined not only by verbal meaning and conventional
musical form but by a nostalgic specularity and a necessarily endogamous, simultaneously 6
RESISTANCE OF THE OBJECT virginal and reproductive sexuality. These twin impulses
animate a forceful operation in Douglasss work, something like a revaluation of that revaluation
of value that was set in motion by four of Douglasss contemporariesMarx, Nietzsche, Freud,
and Saussure. Above all, they open the possibility of a critique of the valuation of
meaning over content and the reduction of phonic matter and syntactic degeneracy in the
early modern search for a universal language and the late modern search for a universal science
of language. This disruption of the Enlightenment linguistic project is of fundamental
importance since it allows a rearrangement of the relationship between notions of human
freedom and notions of human essence. More speciWcally, the emergence from political,
economic, and sexual objection of the radical materiality and syntax that animates black
performances indicates a freedom drive that is expressed always and everywhere throughout
their graphic (re)production. In Caribbean Discourse Edouard Glissant writes: From the outset
(that is from the moment Creole is forged as a medium of communication between slave and
master), the spoken imposes on the slave its particular syntax. For Caribbean man, the
word is Wrst and foremost sound. Noise is essential to speech. Din is discourse. . . . Since speech
was forbidden, slaves camouflaged the word under the provocative intensity of the scream. It
was taken to be nothing but the call of a wild animal. This is how the dispossessed man
organized his speech by weaving it into the apparently meaningless texture of extreme noise.8
Lingering with Glissants formulations produces certain insights. The Wrst is that the temporal
condensation and acceleration of the trajectory of black performances, which is to say black
history, is a real problem and a real chance for the philosophy of history. The second is that the
animative materialitythe aesthetic, political, sexual, and racial force of the ensemble of
objects that we might call black performances, black history, blackness, is a real problem and a
real chance for the philosophy RESISTANCE OF THE OBJECT 7 of human being (which
would necessarily bear and be irreducible to what is called, or what somebody might hope
someday to call, subjectivity). One of the implications of blackness, if it is set to work in and on
such philosophy, is that those manifestations of the future in the degraded present that C. L. R.
James described can never be understood simply as illusory. The knowledge of the future in the
present is bound up with what is given in something Marx could only subjunctively imagine: the
commodity who speaks. Here is the relevant passage from volume 1 of Capital, at the end of
the chapter on The Commodity, at the end of the section called The Fetishism of the
Commodity and Its Secret. But, to avoid anticipating, we will content ourselves here with one
more example relating to the commodity-form itself. If commodities could speak they would say
this: our use-value may interest men, but it does not belong to us as objects. What
does belong to us as objects, however, is our value. Our own intercourse as commodities proves
it. We relate to each other merely as exchange-values. Now listen how those commodities speak
Engh, Ousaf Moqeet
Afro-Orientalism
through the mouth of the economist: Value (i.e., exchange-value) is a property of things, riches
(i.e., usevalue) of man. Value in this sense necessarily implies exchanges, riches do not. Riches
(use-value) are the attribute of man, value is the attribute of commodities. A man or a
community is rich, a pearl or a diamond is valuable. . . . A pearl or a diamond is valuable as a
pearl or diamond. So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or a
diamond. The economists who have discovered this chemical substance, and who lay special
claim to critical acumen, nevertheless Wnd that the use-value of material objects belongs to
them independently of their material properties, while their value, on the other hand, forms a
part of them as objects. What conWrms them in this view is the peculiar circumstance that the
use-value of a thing is realized without exchange, i.e. in a social process. Who would not call to
mind at this point the advice given by the good Dogberry to the night-watchman Seacoal? 8
RESISTANCE OF THE OBJECT To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but reading
and writing comes by nature.9 The difWculty of this passage is partly due to its dual
ventriloquizations. Marx produces a discourse of his own to put into the mouth of dumb
commodities before he reproduces what he Wgures as the impossible speech of commodities
magically given through the mouths of classical economists. The difWculty of the passage is
intensiWed when Marx goes on to critique both instances of imagined speech. These instances
contradict one another but Marx comes down neither on the side of speech he produces nor on
that of the speech of classical economists that he reproduces. Instead he traverses what he
conceives of as the empty space between these formulations, that space being the impossible
material substance of the commoditys impossible speech. In this regard, what is at stake is not
what the commodity says but that the commodity says or, more properly, that the commodity, in
its inability to say, must be made to say. It is, more precisely, the idea of the commoditys speech
that Marx critiques, and this is because he believes neither in the fact nor in the
possibility of such speech. Nevertheless, this critique of the idea of the commoditys
speech only becomes operative by way of a deconstruction of the specific meaning
of those impossible or unreal propositions imposed upon the commodity from
outside. The words Marx puts into the commoditys mouth are these: our use value . . . does
not belong to us as objects. What does belong to us as objects, however, is our value, where
value equals exchange value. Marx has the commodity go on to assert that commodities only
relate to one another as exchange-values, that this is proven by the necessarily social intercourse
in which commodities might be said to discover themselves. Therefore, the commodity discovers
herself, comes to know herself, only as a function of having been exchanged, having been
embedded in a mode of sociality that is shaped by exchange. The words of the commodity that
are spoken through the mouths of the classical economists are roughly these: riches (i.e., usevalue) are independent of the materiality of objects, but value, which is to say RESISTANCE OF
THE OBJECT 9 exchange-value, is a material part of the object. A man or a commodity is
rich, a pearl or a diamond is valuable. This is because a pearl or a diamond is exchangeable.
Though he agrees with the classical economists when they assert that value necessarily implies
exchange, Marx chafes at the notion that value is an inherent part of the object. No chemist, he
argues, has discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or a diamond. For Marx, this chemical
substance called exchange-value has not been found because it does not exist. More precisely,
Marx facetiously places this discovery in an unachievable future without having considered the
conditions under which such a discovery might be made. Those conditions are precisely the fact
of the commoditys speech, which Marx dismisses in his critique of the very idea. So far no
chemist has ever discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or a diamond because pearls or
diamonds have not been heard to speak. The impossible chemical substance of the objects
(exchange-)value is the factthe material, graphic, phonic substanceof the objects speech.
Engh, Ousaf Moqeet
Afro-Orientalism
Speech will have been the cutting augmentation of the already existing chemistry of objects, but
the objects speech, the commoditys speech, is impossible, that impossibility being the
Wnal refutation of whatever the commodity will have said. Marx argues that the classical
economists believe that the usevalue of material objects belongs to them independently of their
material properties. He further asserts that they are conWned in this view by the nonsocial
realization of use-valuethe fact that its realization does not come by way of exchange. When he
makes these assertions, Marx moves in an already well-established choreography of approach
and withdrawal from a possibility of discovery that Douglass already recited: the
(exchange-)value of the speaking commodity exists also, as it were, before exchange. Moreover,
it exists precisely as the capacity for exchange and the capacity for a literary, performative,
phonographic disruption of the protocols of exchange. This dual possibility comes by a
nature that is and at the same time is social and historical, a nature that is given as a kind of
anticipatory sociality and historicity. To think the possibility of an (exchange-)value that is prior
to exchange, and to think the reproductive and incantatory assertion of 10 RESISTANCE OF
THE OBJECT that possibility as the objection to exchange that is exchanges condition of
possibility, is to put oneself in the way of an ongoing line of discovery, of coming upon, of
invention. The discovery of the chemical substance that is produced in and by Marxs
counterfactual is the achievement of Douglasss line given in and as the theory and practice of
everyday life where the spectacular and the mundane encounter one another all the time. It is an
achievement well see given in the primal scene of Aunt Hesters objection to exchange, an
achievement given in speech, literary phonography, and their disruption. What is sounded
through Douglass is a theory of valuean objective and objectional, productive and
reproductive ontologywhose primitive axiom is that commodities speak. The impossible
example is given in order to avoid anticipation, but it works to establish the impossibility of such
avoidance. Indeed, the example, in her reality, in the materiality of her speech as breath and
sound, anticipates Marx. This sound was already a recording, just as our access to it is made
possible only by way of recordings. We move within a series of phonographic anticipations,
encrypted messages, sent and sending on frequencies Marx tunes to accidentally, for effect,
without the necessary preparation. However, this absence of preparation or foresight in Marx
an anticipatory refusal to anticipate, an obversive or anti- and anteimprovisationis condition
of possibility of a richly augmented encounter with the chain of messages the (re)sounding
speech of the commodity cuts and carries. The intensity and density of what could be thought
here as his alternative modes of preparation make possible a whole other experience of the
music of the event of the objects speech. Moving, then, in the critical remixing of nonconvergent
tracks, modes of preparation, traditions, we can think how the commodity who speaks, in
speaking, in the soundthe inspirited materialityof that speech, constitutes a kind of
temporal warp that disrupts and augments not only Marx but the mode of
subjectivity that the ultimate object of his critique, capital, both allows and disallows. All
of this moves toward the secret Marx revealed by way of the music he subjunctively mutes. Such
aurality is, in fact, what Marx called the sensuous outburst of [our] essential activity.10 It is a
passion wherein the senses have . . . RESISTANCE OF THE OBJECT 11 become theoreticians
in their immediate practice.11 The commodity whose speech sounds embodies the critique
of value, of private property, of the sign. Such embodiment is also bound to the (critique
of ) reading and writing, oft conceived by clowns and intellectuals as the natural attributes of
whoever would hope to be known as human.
[HE CONTINUES]
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Afro-Orientalism
Part of the project this drive animates is the improvisation through the opposition of spirit and
matter that is instantiated when the object, the commodity, sounds. Marxs counterfactual (If
the commodity could speak, it would say . . .) is broken by a commodity and by the trace of a
subjectivity structure born in objection that he neither realizes nor anticipates. There is
something more here than alienation and fetishization that works, with regard to Marx, as a
preWgurative critique. However, according to Ferdinand de Saussure, and in extension of
Marxs analytic, the value of the sign is arbitrary, conventional, differential, neither intrinsic nor
iconic, not reducible to but rather only discernible in the reduction of phonic substance. In any
case, it is impossible that sound, as a material element, should in itself be part of the language.
Sound is merely something ancillary, a material the language uses. All conventional values have
the characteristic of being distinct from the tangible element which serves as their vehicle. It is
not the metal in a coin which determines its value. A crown piece nominally worth Wve
francs contains only half that sum in silver. Its value varies somewhat according to the efWgy it
bears. It is worth rather more or rather less on different sides of a political frontier.
Considerations of the same order are even more pertinent to linguistic signals. Linguistic signals
are not in essence phonetic. They are not physical in any way. They are constituted solely
by differences which distinguish one such sound pattern from another.12 The value of the sign,
its necessary relation to the possibility of (a universal science of and a universal) language, is
only given in the absence or supercession of, or the abstraction from, sounded speech its
essential materiality is rendered ancillary by the crossing of an immaterial border or by a
differentializing inscription. Similarly, the truth about the value of the commodity is tied
precisely to the impossibility of its speaking, for if the commodity could speak it
would have intrinsic value, it would be infused with a certain spirit, a certain value
given not from the outside, and would, therefore, contradict the thesis on value
that it is not intrinsicthat Marx assigns it. The speaking RESISTANCE OF THE OBJECT 13
commodity thus cuts Marx; but the shrieking commodity cuts Saussure, thereby cutting Marx
doubly: this by way of an irruption of phonic substance that cuts and augments meaning with a
phonographic, rematerializing inscription. That irruption breaks down the distinction between
what is intrinsic and what is given by or of the outside; here what is given inside is that which is
out-from-the-outside, a spirit manifest in its material expense or aspiration. For Saussure such
speech is degraded, say, by accent, a deuniversalizing, material difference; for Chomsky it is
degraded by a deuniversalizing agrammaticality, but Glissant knows that the [scarred] spoken
imposes on the slave its particular syntax. These material degradationsWssures or
invaginations of a foreclosed universality, a heroic but bounded eroticismare black
performances. There occurs in such performances a revaluation or reconstruction of value, one
disruptive of the oppositions of speech and writing, and spirit and matter.
Our method of poesies is an affirmation of survivalist pedagogy in the

face of materialist, libidinal, and linguistic violence this invokes a
politic of reclamation which counteracts the meaninglessness of black
life.
Gumbs 10 (Alexis Gumbs - black queer feminist, Phd. Duke University, academic, organizer, revolutionary ERW)
Survival. The condition of bare life. The mythology of differential fitness. The continuity of property and properties.
But survival is more than this. Survival, as it emerges as a key word in the theory and poetics of Audre Lorde and June
Jordan is a poetic term. It provides the basis for the reconsideration of its own
meaning, and the reconsideration of the meaning of life, that which survival
queerly extends despite everything. Survival is a pedagogy: secret and forbidden
Engh, Ousaf Moqeet
Afro-Orientalism
knowledge that we pass on, educating each other into a set of skills and beliefs
based on the queer premise that our lives are valuable in a way that the
economization of our labor, and the price of our flesh in the market of racism
deny. Survival is a mode of inquiry, providing a repertoire of critical insights, gained from
discerning what approach to a political and economic framework we can afford from one
moment to the next. Survival is an afterlife; by continuing to exist we challenge the
processes that somehow failed to kill us this time. Survival is a performance, a set of aesthetic
invocations that produce belief and resonance. Survival is a poetic intervention into the
simplistic conclusion of the political narrative: we were never meant to survive. The we that
was never meant to survive is a challenge to the gospel of individualism. The content of that we is at
stake because survival redefines who we are. For those of us who constitute the collection of people addressed by Audre Lordes
A Litany for Survival, the meanings of our lives have been slandered within an economy that uses
narratives of racial inferiority, gender determinism, and sexual subjectivity to devalue our
bodies, our breathing, our time. If we are survivors, who we are is the question of survival,
and whether we survive depends on the generation of a set of relationships that prioritizes who we are to each other through our
queer acts of loving the possible collectivity represented in each of our bodies. 2 Survival is a queer act for
oppressed communities because it interrupts the social reproduction of the

sanctioned deaths of those who were never meant to survive . In this chapter I argue that
survival as a fact, a possibility, an act, a tactic and an approach, is a performative and poetic
intervention into a meaning of life that the narrative of capitalism reproduces: the belief that
a differential monetary value can be assigned to the very time of our lives and our labor based
on stories about what race
The Affirmatives method reveals the diasporic and global

machinations of racialization that inform Chinese sociality. This is
key to visualizing the color line as a global heuristic of difference.
Feldman 2016 (Keith P. Feldman Assistant Professor Comparative Ethnic Studies UC
Berkeley; Theories of Race, Nation, and Empire; Cultural Theory; African, Arab, and Jewish
Diasporas; Visual Culture Studies; Transnational American Studies- Ph.D., University of
Washington, 2008 (with honors) M.A., The George Washington University, 2003, B.A., Brown
University, 2000 (cum laude) On Relationality, On Blackness: A Listening Post ERW)
The relational as a critical concept thus surfaces in part as a way to account descriptively and
analytically for connections, linkages, and articulations across the institutionalization of
difference in disciplines and the nation-state cartographies they reference. As much a seeing as a
doing, the interconnections revealed by a relational methodology are otherwise hidden or buried
by modern frames of the nation-state, the scale and scope of research agendas, and the
disciplines and interdisciplines that draw on genealogies of comparison themselves. Delinking
from a comparative methodology invites shifting from an ontology of essence to what Walter
Mignolo calls a relational ontology. Relationality disrupts the positivist pretense of race,
gender, and sexuality as in the first or the last instance sociological facts. Relationality
enables us to think the doing of difference, difference as it constitutes and evades the
capture of the world (Puar). Relationality invites the development of literacies that can read
circuitries of power across uneven terrains (Layoun). Scholars interrogate archives and objects
in ways that reveal relational imaginaries in their contexts of emergence from the archives of
Anglophone liberalism in the construction of colonial domination and imperial management
(Lowe), to the material formulations of strange affinity encoded in U.S. women of color
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feminisms and queer of color critique (Hong and Ferguson), to the impetus of transnational
feminisms to frame differentially arrayed and always already linked contexts of struggle
(Alexander and Mohanty). Genealogy renders such relations in their particular and provisional
dispersion, and thus their relation to the differentiated contexts of their emergence. The
predicates of a relational methodology invite us to uncover, reveal, desediment, unveil, and
excavate, prompting us to account for entanglement and its obfuscation or burial. From another
angle, liberal capitalism strives to produce individuated subjects properly calibrated for the
rational management of their possessions, including their possessions of self and of others
and possessions qua property, as abstractions commensurable through the equilibrations
of value (Singh). Relationality uncovers those interconnections that liberal capitalism seeks to
obscure, revealing the violence that appends recognition, unbound from redistribution, in arcs
of settler colonial capitalism (Coulthard), racial capitalism (Melamed), and the juridical
armature of neoliberalism (Cacho).
[HE CONTINUES]
Where and how, then, are we to think Blackness in relation? Such a question could be
answered in advance by the ante-relationality sedimented in the antiBlack ordering of the
modern world. At the same time, Blackness also elucidates a field formation suffused with
descriptive and analytical concerns with a deep and enduring relation to the contours of a
modernity animated by the lacerating trade winds of diaspora. Indeed, Black life
emerges out of always already heterogeneous overlapping diasporas (Lewis), a
horizon at once stilled, fixed, and determined from without and at the same time, as Harney and
Moten evince in the above epigraph, enacted in excess, beyond and beneath the regulatory
functions of state and capital. As Glissant elaborates (see epigraph), the channels of Black
diaspora are both the condition of and the counterpoint to modern globality. It is a
heteroglossic languaging that routinely announces and enunciates the practice and theory of the
impossible on the uneven terrain of the transatlantic world. The study of Blackness forecasts
insights into diasporic relationalities even as it renders the structural and systemic foundations
of capitalist/colonial modernity as concerned fundamentally with anti-relationality. Coloniality
binds diaspora to institutionalizations of violence and forces diaspora into the frame of the
nation-state, deploying an epistemic containment policy that buries, obscures, and delimits
relationalitys unbounded potentiality. Diaspora, as Stuart Hall reminds us, signals the
interconnections of difference. The dispersion at its mercurial core renders diaspora in
persistent apposition to the violence of the nation-state, a condition that is simultaneously a
mark of the unhomely and the worldly. The positivist presentiments that give the lie to what
once might have been called liberal multiculturalism and now often travels under the name
diversity have begun to fall away (Ahmed). Its hegemony was never complete, to be sure. It
was always contested, and hence always worked over and through. Those policies for
representation that obscure plans for redistribution have been targeted by heterogeneous forms
of resistance to state-sanctioned anti-Blackness expressed intimately, affectively, bodily,
structurally, an anti-Blackness that is both cause and consequence of the ongoing violence of
capital accumulation (Kish and Leroy). In their respective contributions to this forum, Ther
Pickens and Vincent Schleitwiler foreground contemporary movements to contest anti-Black
state violence, as well as the pressing invitations to relationality connection, solidarity,
linkage, resonance that such movements evince. They also identify a relation to Blackness as a
sign and scene of futurity, of hosting forms of relation yet to come. Pickens underscores how
Arab American cultural production that relates to Blackness confronts the impulses both to
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Afro-Orientalism
universalism and to exceptionalism, as well as to the volatility of an anti-Black antagonism that

circumscribes entry into U.S. civil society. Arab American fiction invites exploring the
possibilities of relation to Blackness with eyes wide open to these tensions. For Pickens, the Arab
American literary relation to Blackness has the capacity to interrupt the exceptionalist linear
narrative of progress that organizes conventional immigrant narratives and yields alternative
insights into formations of affect, kinship, and history. By theorizing Blackness as a when as
much as a what, Pickens reveals the potentialities as yet encrypted in Arab American literary
and cultural narratives. Schleitwiler takes the contemporary flourishing of collective action
against antiBlack state violence as an invitation to engage the ethically troubled matrix of
comparison required to write through the modalities of lynching that underwrite but also exceed
their denomination as such. With Du Boiss turn-of-the-century colorline heuristic in
mind, Schleitwiler formulates imperialism as animated by a will both to rule over and to do
justice to difference. While both Comparative Literature and Comparative Ethnic Studies have
critically investigated the former for some time now, the latter invocation of imperialisms
racial justice allows us to see how practices of imperial rule are catalyzed not just through
spectacular domination, torture, and violence, but also through an articulated investment in the
inclusion of hierarchically differentiated humanity in liberal educative and juridical institutions.
That is, imperialism always seeks to regulate the terms through which difference is included.
Rather than cede the field of comparison wholly, Schleitwiler calls on us to attend to
comparisons demons: those figure[s] of unpredictability and indeterminacy lurking within
the knowledge of a world ordered by competing imperialisms that can never finally guarantee
the universality to which they aspire. Because imperialisms comparative imaginary is always
partial, incomplete, and haunted, Schleitwiler finds in that always-provisional claim to totalizing
its rule over difference potential critical lines of flight. Genealogies of American empire, as
Pickens and Schleitwiler provide, crystallize the problematic of Blackness and relation.
Provincializing these genealogies is another matter altogether, and, in her contribution to the
forum, Shu-mei Shih takes up precisely this task. In extending a method of relational
comparison, Shih identifies the Global 1960s as the explosive flashpoint that reveals a
decolonial arc of transnational and comparative epistemes producing imagined geographies rich
with symbolic and material articulations of anti-imperialism. Part of that thread signifies China
in general, and Maoism in particular, as quintessentially animating a generative Third Worldism
for the times. This is the China embraced by Du Bois in 1959, a site through which revolutionary
racial brotherhood signified as Afro-Asian solidarity was to be conceived. Yet, a practice of
relational comparison, as Shih argues here, reveals another crucial thread in stark
counterpoint to Du Bois. To the South of China (both geographically and epistemically) lay
violent minoritizations, such as of the Hoa in Vietnam and Chinese Malaysians,
predicated not simply on the long shadow of European colonialism but also on the
active imperial race-making emerging out of China. The geographic impetus of the color
line as the figure par excellence of racial solidarities is persistently interrupted by a rendering of
the South of the South that reveals its fractures, frictions, and racial contradictions.
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Afro-Orientalism
Solvency
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2AC Solvency Diasporic Schemas

The Aff is key to uncover how the diaspora has mapped black flesh
within Chinas economic landscape via epidermal schemas of
difference.
Castillo 2010 (Dr. Roberto Castillo has a PhD in Cultural Studies from Lingnan University
(Hong Kong) and a Master of Cultural Studies from The University of Sydney (Australia). He did
his undergraduate degree in International Relations and History at The University of the
Americas in Puebla (Mexico), where he also worked as a journalist, Perceptions and
representations of Africans in the Chinese imagination,
https://africansinchina.net/2012/11/05/perceptions-and-representations-of-africans-in-thechinese-imagination/- ERW)
Since the implementation of Deng Xiaopings Reform and Opening Up policy in the
early 1980s, China has slowly begun to relax its previous restrictions on the entrance
and settlement of foreign nationals in the country. Chinas opening up not only coincided with, but also
fuelled, the dawn of economic globalisation . As the Chinese economy started to rear its
head, businessmen, entrepreneurs and traders from all over the world were drawn to the country. Prior to
China opening its doors in the early 1990s, traders from around the world began to congregate in Hong Kong (at that time, still
under British rule). By the mid-1990s, Hong
Kong registered dramatic increases in the numbers of Middle
Eastern and African traders in search of cheap Chinese goods (Mathews, 2007: 170). By 2001, four years after the Return
of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty, and against the backdrop of Chinas entrance into the World Trade Organisation (WTO),
foreign traders in major Chinese cities had become a common sight. African
traders shipping Chinese products

back to their homelands via Hong Kong relocated to the Mainland, settling mainly in Guangzhou, the
capital of Guangdong province. By 2003, West Africans had become active in southern Chinas import-export sector (Michel, 2009:
13). The presence of foreigners in the Peoples Republic of China is still a relatively new phenomenon.[1] Although, [I1] foreigners (of
all nationalities) living in major cities are becoming increasingly common. Less common, however, are people from a one so-called
ethnic group becoming a dominant presence within a particular city. Consequently, the
emergence of an African
community of a significant size in Guangzhou is a remarkable phenomenon. From 2003 to 2009, Chinese official statistics
estimated that the African population in Guangzhou was growing at a rate of 30 to 40 percent annually, and reached
its peak of around 100,000 just before the 2008 Beijing Olympics (Bodomo, 2010: 9).[2] This essay is a first step in the pursuit of a
more ambitious project that aims to assess the implications of the emergence of an African community in southern China, and to
locate such emergence within the wider framework of contemporary Sino-African relations, as well as within different theories of
globalisation. The analysis of the cultural, historical, political and economic issues surrounding this case study [I2] will
provide for a better understanding of Sino-African cultural exchanges , in general; and work as a tool for
suggesting that other types of analysis (away from the traditional ones simply based on the interactions amongst nation-states) are
needed to make sense of these new patterns of migration.[3] This essay will provide a first rapprochement [I3] to a cultural history
of the representation of Africans in the Chinese imagination, focusing mainly on racial perspectives. The first section reviews one of
the few available sources on early encounters between Chinese and African civilisations. The second section analyses more
contemporary representations, focusing on two cases: African students in 1980s China, and online perceptions. The third section
presents the case-study of Guangzhous African community as a vehicle for highlighting how these representations
have
affected the everyday experiences of Africans in China. EARLY ENCOUNTERS About the middle
of October 1415, as Henry Vs army trudged through the mud of northern France towards Agincourt, a giraffe arrived in Beijing. The
giraffe came from Malindi, in Kenya, and not many animals in history have been so acclaimed. The Ming Emperor received it at the
gate of the inner palace. Prostrate officials congratulated their sovereign on its coming. And half a millennium later, in 1983, when
the political and economic business of the modern world brought a prime minister of China to Kenya for the first time, a Beijing
newspaper hailed the giraffe for its contribution to the friendship between the Chinese and African peoples. The giraffe bore witness
that two unlikely peoples had converged. Philip Snow, The Star Raft, 1988. The above epigraph is a fragment of one of the most
famous accounts of the first encounters between Chinese and African civilisations. It is particularly valuable here as a cue for
thinking about the relationship between these two peoples outside the mediation of Western powers and Western history. To
introduce the relatively unknown origins of this relation, this section will give a brief historical review of early Chinese-African
encounters, placing particular emphasis on the perceptions and representations of Africans in China and the Chinese imperial
courts. Oh! Mighty Star Raft, Oh! In The Star Raft, Snow (1988) suggests that the first
encounters between Chinese

and Africans happened long before contemporary Western historiographic analysis would
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Afro-Orientalism
assume. Snow is not trying to create a framework for the understanding of the longevity of Sino-African relations, nor is he
trying to make a case for the present day righteousness of Chinese incursion into African lands. What he does indeed do is present
an historical account that aims to provide a better understanding of the influences and milestones structuring and shaping this
relationship. Snow reminds us that modern Chinese scholars and politicians tend to value high age-old exchanges[I4] , and give a
moral justification to their attitudes and relations with other peoples based on (sometimes long forgotten) historical contacts. Some
accounts claim that in the early fifteenth century, the Chinese admiral, Zheng He, landed on African shores, somewhere near
contemporary Somalia (it would be another 60 years before Vasco da Gama and Bartolomeu Dias reached the southern tip of Africa)
(Snow, 1988: 25-26). In Beijings political discourse, since that first encounter, China has never left Africa (Shen, 2009:426). They
may not have been in direct [I5] contact for decades, or even centuries, but the profound impression left by Zheng Hes trading
expeditions in both places is evidence of the longstanding relationship between these two civilisations at least for some
contemporary Chinese scholars (Snow, 1988: 1). Snow highlights, however, that African scholars might take a rather more sceptical
approach to the origins of the Africa-China relation and to the relevance and accuracy of fifteenth century Chinese records talking
about first encounters between Africans and Chinese, especially as the African national consciousness dates back to the
relatively recent postcolonial period (1988: 2). Despite differing approaches, there
is significant evidence to locate the

beginning the exchanges between the peoples on the east coast of Africa, and peoples from the
southern realms of the Tang Dynasty back to some point around the eighth or ninth century. This
is relevant, because by the time that giraffe arrived in the Chinese imperial courts, there had been significant levels of interaction
between African and Chinese traders in the Indian Ocean; but more importantly, because the giraffe (and the few zebras that
followed) opened up a space for imagining other peoples and places in the Chinese mind. Depictions of the people that inhabited
those remote lands from where such an exotic animal came from were soon constructed and registered.[4] Kunlun Warriors
Dark-skinned people were talked of in China as early as the fourth century A.D. (Snow, 1988: 16). Early
depictions of these dark-skinned people were heavily spiced with imagination, however. Images of strong armoured
warriors confidently riding atop magnificent pachyderms were invoked as depictions of East
African peoples. In Chinese dynastic imagination, the early Africans were invested with the cloak of heroism
embodiments of valour and loyalty (1988: 16). It was not until the Arabs arrived in the Song Dynasty (960-1279) court around the
year 1000 that the Chinese recorded that their [the Arabs] attendants had
deep-socketed eyes and black bodies,

they were called Kunlun slaves (1988: 17) it is not clear, however, if they were Africans or Indonesians,
nonetheless, this record marks one of the first representations of black people in Chinese history. These Kunlun slaves, according to
Snow, were represented in several stories of the Tang period as unfailingly heroic and resourceful, able to speak Chinese, behave
like Chinese and worthy of being treated by their Chinese owners with every sign of respect (1988: 17). By 1100, Kunlun slaves were
common sight around Guangzhou and belonged to rich people of the area (1988: 18). However, as the local population got used to
them, their heroic and magical nature became somewhat bleaker. No
longer imbued by the strength of myth, the

Kunlun became displaced nomads, tragically ill-adapted to their Chinese surroundings (1988: 19).
Unlike the resourceful Chinese-speaking Kunlun of fiction, their speech and their desires are unintelligible after
they have been domesticated for a long time, they can understand human speech, but they cannot utter it
themselves (1988: 19). As Snow suggests, there is no getting round the implications of the last sentence: for some
Chinese, Kunlun were not considered to be humans (1988: 19). In a short time, their
depiction had gone from mythical warrior to sub-human. Thou Shalt Acknowledge Heavenly
Power Despite the shift in these representations, African delegations of merchants were still being received in Beijing with fanfares
in the thirteenth century. These Africans were free traders and not representatives of any state, kingdom or court. According to
Snow (1998: 20), their presence in the imperial Chinese courts was construed as an acknowledgment of the courts universal
sovereignty, and the goods they brought were presented to the Emperor as tribute from a faraway land. So, while the giraffe offered
to the Emperor in 1415 could well have been a regular sale in the mind of an Arab or African merchant, in the eyes of the imperial
bureaucracy in Beijing, it was a sign of tribute: a capitulation of a faraway land (now Africa) in front of the Mings heavenly
emperor. Interestingly enough, since the early encounters between these two peoples, the Chinese side sought to find some kind of
political recognition in the relationship. In the African imagination, those fair-skinned sailors from the east were different to the
Portuguese in that the former just arrived, traded and left,[5] whereas the latter, imposed trade and religion (and their rule) in a
rather more violent way.[6] In contemporary Chinese government discourse, Zheng Hes fleet set a precedent for how Chinese
approach Africans: as an exchange partner rather than as an oppressive colonial power, as Alden (2007) suggests. There are several
reasons why Imperial China did not have expansionist aims toward Africa, and why, by the end of the fifteenth century, direct
contacts between these two regions suddenly ceased. Amongst these reasons are the Ming introversion and the so-called Middle
Kingdom complex, but at this stage of research they are of minor concern.[I6] FROM NANJINGS ANTI-AFRICAN PROTESTS TO
THE CHOCOLATE GIRL OUTRAGE Chinese Social Darwinism? As China gradually started coming out of its self-imposed
introversion, a re-encounter with Africa was imminent. However, Africans
and Chinese would soon discover that

their relationship was not going to be an easy one. As outlined above, the image of Africans in the Chinese
imagination has undergone several changes over the past centuries. Nonetheless, a negative image of Africans, one
that was firmly entrenched by the time China closed itself off from the world in the Ming
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Dynasty (1368-1644), managed to persist until as far as the twentieth century . Throughout
the centuries, dark skin and consequently blackness was instilled in Chinese societies as a
sign of poverty, backwardness and inferiority (Sullivan, 1994: 441)[I7] . Another important
consideration around the image of Africans in China, and the attitudes of Chinese toward them, is the aesthetic
premium placed by Chinese on the lightness of skin colour (1994: 440). Liang Qichao (1873-1929), a reformminded intellectual who was highly influential during the last days of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), argued, in accordance
with the Social Darwinist spirit of his time, that the world was divided into five races black, red, brown, yellow and
white out of which the yellow and the white were historical races capable of civilisational
prowess, while the rest were historically destined to be subjugated since they had
failed to form cohesive national groups (1994: 442). Although it is a century old, Liangs analysis resonates with the
tendency of some Chinese to regard Africa as the embodiment of a past from which they wish to escape. [I8] A Communist
Flirtation? Since the creation of the Peoples Republic of China in 1949, the idea of Africa became a central element for the
international configuration of the newly born republics strategy. The New China sought recognition from several African (also
newly born) states. Trade,
as in the time of the dynasties, was important, however, aid became central
in the relationship (Sullivan, 1994: 445). By the beginning of the 1960s, scholarship programs established by the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) were set in motion. In 1961, more than a hundred students from African countries
arrived in Beijing. However, due to frictions with school authorities and harassment by local students,
less than a year later, more than 80 percent had returned to their home countries (1994: 444).
Notwithstanding initial setbacks, by the 1970s, international students from many African countries were commonly seen in the
major Chinese cities. Although, generally speaking, relations between Chinese and African students were not complicated, there
were several minor frictions and fights reported throughout the 70s and 80s. As Sullivan (1994) suggests, as Chinas economic
reforms broadened and encountered difficulties in the early 80s, tensions intensified between Chinese and African students. On the
Chinese side, as Sullivan explains, anger was a consequence of discomfort with what the students saw as an economic failure of the
socialist system. The anger became rage when some Chinese students, mixing patriotism and racial prejudices, complained against
the supposed better treatment of African students by the Chinese government. This
reactive mixture resulted in the

1988-89 Nanjing anti-African protests. After a series of clashes over African students dating Chinese
women, a minor incident in Hehai University unleashed major violent confrontations as never before seen in the
New China between Chinese and a foreign (non-Asian) group. Several days of demonstrations followed (1994: 447). These attitudes
revealed, according to Sullivan, how Liangs racially
based distinction still permeated Chinese society in the
late 80s. It must be said, however, that different analyses of the Nanjing incident have suggested that much of the anger fuelling
the incident and subsequent demonstrations was aimed at the government and it was not so much racially oriented the fact that
the demonstrations ended up with slogans like Democracy and Human Rights and Republic of China, and not mentioning
anymore the
black devil is evidence of that. Chocolate Girl: Online Perceptions of Africanness* More
contemporary representations of Africans in the Chinese imagination can be exemplified by the controversy
around Lou Jing, a 20-year-old Chinese girl born to an African-American father and a Chinese
mother, who came to the publics attention in Shanghais Go Oriental Angel talent show in 2009.
When Lou became one of the five finalists on the show, she was dubbed qiaokeli nushi (chocolate
girl) and rapidly became subject of a heated and not very politically correct online debate. In the same vein, the stir caused
by the story of a Chinese kindergarten female teacher in a relationship with an African man is also
remarkable. The story was carried by several Chinese online portals under the headline of Kindergarten teacher
reveals her shocking romance with a black foreigner (my emphasis club.sohu.com). The massive interest
that Lou and the kindergarten teacher attracted from Chinese media opened up serious debates about racism and racial prejudice in
present-day China. Against the backdrop of these racial prejudices, but at a more socio-political level, many Chinese Internet
users see illegal African
immigrants in China as paralysing Chinese society by unfairly tapping into

the resources of the socialist welfare system (Shen, 2009: 435). They portray illegal Africans as a threat to
morality and health within Chinese society. Shens study of online perceptions of Africa in China shows how the
traditional prejudices discussed earlier in this paper are still around. In the Chinese online realm, Africans are
prototyped [I9] as poor, lazy, sexist and threatening, with the added burden of
being possible AIDS carriers (2009). Ideas about the impossibility of Africans to succeed still abound. According to
Shen, there is a reciprocal relation between online opinions and the ideas that structure Chinas foreign policy
towards Africa. He argues that at a political level, the Chinese governments approach could be seen as orientalising
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Africans: Africa is thus seen as a timeless place that evokes nostalgia for a long forgotten Chinese past; and Africans are
brothers that cannot help themselves and need Chinas investment to overcome their structural failures. While online images and
comments cannot be taken as representative of major social behaviours, in a country where offline public spaces of expression are
highly striated, the online realm could give us an indication of certain popular perceptions. Online perceptions of Africanness, as
well as online perceptions of Chinas role in Africa, are central to the way Africans and Chinese are structuring their complex
relationships. Moreover, the construction of a Chinese image around its contemporary relation to Africa is crucial for the success of
the Peoples Republic in the twenty-first century. As Ien Ang (1993) reminds us, constructions of Chineseness
are based on
complex historical, social and migrational patterns influenced by mobility and displacement ,
either commercial or political (war and trade). In regard to this, despite a certain reluctance to the African presence in contemporary
China, a Sino-African hybrid may well become a Chinese sub-national identity in the future, as Adams Bodomo (2010) suspects. To
understand why Africans are going to China, it is imperative to analyse what the Chinese are doing in Africa, how they are doing it,
and how they have been received and stereotyped in different African nations. Unfortunately, perceptions and constructions of the
Chinese in the contemporary African imagination is a vast topic and one that is beyond the scope of this paper (it has, however, been
relatively well documented by Michel Serge in his recent book China Safari [2009]). IMAGINING THE COMMUNITY Immigrs
Clandestins Africains en Chine* Nobody really knows how many Africans live in China. There are no official statistics, no
authoritative account, and there is an immense silence around the African presence. It is as if both sides had signed a tacit
agreement to not disclose information about their mutual businesses. One of the biggest obstacles for ethnographic researchers in
Guangzhou has been that many of the African migrant traders settling there do not see any benefit in providing information about
their backgrounds and activities (Wei, 2009: sina.com.cn). Notwithstanding this obstacle, what we know is that Africans started
arriving in Guangzhou in the early 2000s, and since then, their numbers have increased. Africans arrive in China on a plethora of
Chinese visas, and most commonly on a tourist or business visas. Once these visas expire, it is possible to renew them in Hong Kong,
but visa runs can only be made a few times before exhausting the possibilities for consecutive renewal (renewal is strongly
dependant on nationality). In the last three years, the Chinese government has tightened its regulations on visas, making it
particularly difficult for Africans to renew their visas as a result, many of them have been forced to stay illegally in China. As
depicted by several media reports, the lack of visas (or residence permits) is perhaps the most [I10] widely experienced problem
amongst Africans in Guangzhou (Wei, 2009: sina.com.cn). As a consequence of the tightening of entry requirements, the number of
illegal Africans in China is increasing. This situation has created a vicious cycle in which Chinese police and Africans play the old
game of cat-and-mouse (Wei, 2009: sina.com.cn) one that many Africans with previous diasporic experiences are well equipped
to play. If Bodomo (2010), who foresees the rise of an African-Chinese sub-national group, is right, then it is imperative to outline
and investigate the dynamics and patterns that structure the so-called emergence of this community. To date, most of the
researchers have dealt with the concept of Africans, but there are no authoritative resources that pull the research to the sublevel of
nationalities, language and religion amongst other possible forms of imagining communities. What do we mean by Africans when
we talk about the African community of Guangzhou? Bodomo illustrates that most of the African people living in Guangzhou come
from West Africa mainly from Nigeria, Mali, Guinea and Ghana (2010: 9). Li Zhigang et al, (2008) claims that the majority of
African traders come from francophone countries such as Mali, Togo, Guinea, Senegal and Congo. Lis account is significantly
opposed to that of Bodomo, for whom Nigerians count to more than 70 percent of the community. Clearly, there are disagreements
on the ethnic composition of this highly mobile and changeable community. Notwithstanding this, Bodomo, Li Zhigang et al, and Li
Zhang (2008) all agree that most of these Africans are self-employed importers who enter China on tourist visas with limited capital,
and outsource [I11] many different types of merchandise. Li Zhigang et al, affirm that a majority of the African traders speak Arabic
and French, while very few are able to speak English or Mandarin. Less than 40 percent of these Africans studied beyond high
school (2008: 15). In Li Zhigangs sample, 70 percent were males while 30 percent were females, and most were Muslims (2008: 14).
It is a task for further research to look beyond the concept of an African trading community and delve into the everyday experiences
of people that have successfully inserted themselves into the dynamics not only of the African groups but of the Chinese population.
Many of these individual tales can help clarify the dynamics of globalisation and how they affect ordinary people. What I am
suggesting here is that the analysis of the emergence of an African community in Guangzhou can be framed as a point for the
microscopic observation of macroscopic trends and processes within globalisation. The study of this locale can aid us to better
understand how individuals resist and negotiate globalisation. CONCLUSION This essay has aimed to provide a loose framework for
more extensive research. There are, therefore, many angles and ideas central to the emergence of this community that were not
covered. Perceptions of Chinese from Africans in China and Africans in Africa, for example, could enrich our understanding of this
complex Sino-African cultural exchange. However, I decided to focus on the perceptions and representations of Africans in what I
call the Chinese imagination because I believe that, as a first step, this analysis could help sketch out possible paths for further
historical and
of Africa and Africans in the Chinese imagination often inform certain
prejudices that mark the experiences of African migrants within the borders of the
Peoples Republic of China. While I am not trying to racialise the African presence in China, I do try to problematise the
research. Two final points, however, must be made. First, in the introduction, I advanced the following thesis:
popular perceptions
fact that Chinese official discourse does not seem to be coherent with the treatment of Africans in Guangzhou, and seems to be
informed by the negative perceptions and representations highlighted throughout this paper. While the perpetuation of these
stereotypes is not entirely the Chinese governments fault, it is important to take into consideration Shens suggestion about the
close relationship between popular perceptions and the composition of official discourse in China. This is relevant, because I believe
that a case could be made for the following thesis in a future study: the stance that the Chinese government adopts in its treatment of
the African diasporic population within its borders could arguably mirror the governments prevailing (real) approach to African
continental affairs. At this stage, I suspect that the Chinese government keeps quiet about what happens in Guangzhou with regard
to the treatment and harassment of the African population, because it is not coherent with its own slogans of multiculturalism,
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diversity and partnership towards Africa and Africans. Second, as the evidence presented in this research clearly shows, there is no
distinction between the different African groups in Chinese representations. Arguably, within the Chinese imagination (and also for
some researchers) it does not matter if the migrant is from Ghana or Cameroon they are all Africans. This
attitude
reinforces the discredited notion of an African culture and provides a safe haven for a plethora
of negative stereotypes. I strongly believe that these stereotypes have to be challenged
and eventually demystified. I also think that the imaginary unity of African communities purely based on skincolour and ignoring sub-national narratives has to be problematised. The case of African migration to China is an interesting one
because it challenges common understandings of migration studies. Inclusion, or assimilation, of Africans into Chinese society is far
from becoming a reality in China, assimilation of foreigners is practically inexistent, legally and socially. No matter how long you
stay in China, no matter how well you perform Chineseness, you can never become Chinese as you can become French, I was told
by a woman from Mali that had been living in Beijing for ten years. Isabel Morais, in her analysis of the African experience in Macau,
reminds us how difficult it is for Africans to become legal citizens sometimes not even marriage with a Chinese national can grant
a legal status to Africans from certain countries. Finally, the diasporic identities that are being created in China also challenge the
traditional canon in that the immigrant is not living the experience of adapting to a Western or First World country/culture. Against
this framework of global migration, deterritorialisation and the transnationalisation of migrant communities, we need to endeavour
to decentre diasporic and migration studies.
Engh, Ousaf Moqeet
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Topicality
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2AC T-QPQ
W/M Reparations are a QPQ for victim slaves of the past.
Ohema et al 06 (Nana Yaa Asantewaa Ohema Co-Chair of NCOBRAs International
Affairs Commission, Kwame Nkrumah - President of the Republic of Ghana, Queen Mother
Dorothy Co-Chair of the National Coalition for Black Reparations, Returning to the source via
Reconciliation, Reparations, Repatriation, Transformation and African Nationalism Creating
the future http://www.bankie.info/content2/ACCRA%20Conference%20Book%20(Bankie).pdf
ERW)
The WCAR and its NGO Forum have added to the growing demand for reparations for African slavery. Already there
exists legal documentation on this issue. In 1993 in Nigeria a Pan-African meeting on reparations, chaired by Ambassador Dudley
Thompson was convened. As Harring states the current discourse on African economic recovery is
premised on the
understanding of a quid pro-quo from the developed countries to Africa for the
past super-exploitation of Africans. Also the 13th and 14th Amendments to the United States
Constitution provide moral and legal credibility to the case for reparations for African
slavery and for the devastation of colonialism, primarily involving blacks still living on the
African continent. The issue of quantum in the legal claim for reparations is a delicate matter, requiring more attention. Legal
claims in general require the setting of damages. The costs of colonialism and slavery in the Borderlands might be
described as incalculable thus presenting a barrier to these claims.
C/I Engagement can be conditional or unconditional
Kahler and Kastner, 6 (Miles Kahler and Scott L. Kastner, Graduate School of International Relations and
Pacific Studies, University of California, San Diego, Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland, May 1, 2010,
"Strategic Uses of Economic Interdependence: Engagement Policies on the Korean Peninsula and Across the Taiwan Strait", Journal
of Peace Research (2006), 43:5, p. 523-541, Sage Publications)
Scholars have usefully distinguished between two types of economic engagement:

conditional policies that require an explicit quid pro quo on the part of the target
country and policies that are unconditional.1 Conditional policies, sometimes labeled linkage or economic
'carrots', are the inverse of economic sanctions. Instead of threatening a target country with economic loss (sanction) in the absence
of policy change, conditional engagement policies promise increased economic benefits in return for desired policy change. Drezner
(1999/2000) has proposed several plausible predictions regarding the employment of conditional strategies and the conditions of
their success. He argues that the successful use of economic engagement is most likely between democracies (because democracies
are better able to make credible commitments than non-democracies), within the context of international regimes (because regimes
reduce the transactions costs of market exchange), and, among adversaries, only after coercive threats are first used. coercive threats
are first used. The success of a conditional engagement strategy should also be contingent on a state's influence over domestic firms.
If those firms find market-based transactions with the target state unappealing, a government pursuing a conditional strategy must
convince them to deal with the target when desired change occurs. On the other hand, if domestic firms have strong economic
incentives to conduct economic transactions with the target state, a successful conditional strategy must prevent them from
pursuing their economic exchange in the absence of the desired change in a target states behavior. In this regard, democracies may
have a harder time pursuing a conditional strategy: in a democratic setting, firms are likely to be openly critical of politicians who try
to restrict their commercial activities and will support candidates who do not place such demands on them. Our first hypothesis
(HI), therefore, is that conditional engagement strategies will be less likely to succeed if the initiating state is a democracy, especially
Unconditional
engagement strategies are more passive than conditional variants in that they do
not include a specific quid pro quo. Rather, countries deploy economic links with an adversary in the hopes
when underlying economic incentives to trade with or invest in the target state are strong.2
that economic interdependence itself will, over time, change the target's foreign policy behavior and yield a reduced threat of
military conflict. How
increased economic integration at the bilateral level might

produce an improved bilateral political environment is not obvious. While most empirical
studies on the subject find that increased economic ties tend to be associated with a reduced likelihood of military violence, no
consensus explanation exists (e.g. Russett & Oneal, 2001; Oneal & Russett, 1999; for less sanguine results, see Barbieri, 1996).
At a
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minimum, state leaders might seek to exploit two causal pathways by pursuing a
policy of unconditional engagement: economic interdependence can act as a
constraint on the foreign policy behavior of the target state, and economic
interdependence can act as a transforming agent that reshapes the goals of the
target state.
Engh, Ousaf Moqeet
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2AC T-Economic Engagement

W/M Reparations are a form of engagement which enhances
corporate responsibility and economic agendas.
Robinson 04 (Alfreda Robinson Associate Dean and Associate Director of the Litigation
and Dispute Resolution Program, The George Washington University Law School. B.A., The
University of Chicago, 1973; M.A., The University of Chicago, 1976; J.D., The George
Washington University Law School, 1978, Troubling Settled Waters: The Opportunity and
Peril of African-American Reparations,
https://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/schools/law/lawreviews/journals/bctwj/24_1/07_TXT
.htm -ERW)
The African-American
reparations movement has emerged as a major civil rights issue of the new millennium. The
movement dominates the national debate on racial equality. The reparations debate [*PG142]has yielded enormously
profound and provocative scholarship,7 has produced significant media coverage,8 has resulted in litigation,9 and has generated an
abundance of controversy.10 In terms of prominence, the movement for African-American reparations
has shared center
stage with the movement for enhanced corporate social responsibility. As I have argued elsewhere:
The movement for African American Reparations and the movement for corporate social responsibility have a point of intersection.
At that point, the two generate a profound, salubrious, and comprehensive discourse on two of the most powerful forces in American
liferace and the corporation. These two subjects, taken together, define, prescribe, or legitimize
every aspect of our

and play critical roles in the formulation of our social, economic,
and political agendas.11 Thus, it is not surprising that the African-American reparations movement has gained traction
in the last few years. Nevertheless, the focus on corporate social responsibility is only part of the explanation
society and economy,
[*PG143]for the reemergence of the debate over African-American reparations after a relatively long hiatus from the national
agenda. At the core of the explanation for the prominence of the African-American reparations issue are the continued disparities
between white Americans and African Americans, and the recent success of other groups in securing reparations.12 Overwhelmingly,
the most critical factor in the reemergence of reparations debate is the continued significance of race in American life. Race matters
and has always mattered.13 As I have previously argued, Race
is an inescapable determinate of every aspect

of American society. Consequently, there is a constant, if not increasing, socioeconomic disparity between the
races.14 In this sense, Professor William J. Wilsons major thesis that race is declining in significance has proved to be premature
at best, and invalid at world
W/M Reparations are cooperative economic engagement.

Kato 15 (Hiroshi Kato Vice President of JMICA (Japan Multilateral International
Cooperation Agency), Japans Development Assistance: Foreign Aid and the Post-2015 Agenda
ERW)
-changing racial conscious is also involved in economic engagement.
Since pre-war times, Japanese politics has been strongly influenced by promi- nent businessmen (especially Of Zaibatsu Or pre-war
business conglomerates). peculiar economic
conditions Of post-war Japan further invited private sector

participation in the field of foreign economic cooperation. From the beginning Of economic cooperation in the
early 19SOs, it was clear that Japan's financial capacity Would not allow her to respond to demands from those who
claimed reparations. It was thus decided that capital lending and investment by the private sector should supplement the
shortages. The affinity among all governmental and business stakeholders made it natural for Japan to expand its economic engag&
ment with Southeast Asian countries. Most importantly, the arrangement
allowed reparations to effectively play

a role as "a vanguard Of Japanese exports, allowing countries in Southeast Asia to familiarize
themselves With Japanese capital" (LDP 1960, 110). Publicprivate partnership also empowered the "trading companies
(Shosha) to extend their business in this region quite readily, enabling the foundation of heavy chemical industry products from
Japan to proliferate" (Kashima 1973, 9). This style of "economic cooperation" has been carried over to the more recent ODA grant
practices, which consist of the provision of Japanese domestic products. At
the implementation level, economic
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cooperation includes reparations, direct private investment, yen credits, deferred

payments, and technical cooperation. The problem lies at the normative level. Economic cooperation, as
characterized by MITI in 1958, is "mutually beneficial" for the providers and the receivers, and it is a telling
illustration of how the term "economic cooperation" is understood at that period. M I'll's argument against the use the term "aid"
includes the perception that "benevolent cooperation
based on friendship and goodwill generated by a politicaldiplomatic initiative will invite suspicion on the side of less developed countries With regard to the political intention
behind it, and might also work against racial consciousness , leading to ethnic independence"
(MITI 1958, 1). The concept Of "mutual benefits" allowed enough room for business entities to play a role. However, private
participation in economic cooperation projects was never smooth, forcing companies to go through segmented bureaucracies for
permits, Which subsequently became the basis of their demands for administrative unity.
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2AC T Gov to Gov

W/M The 1AC is an impossible demand channeled between the US
and China.
C/I Engagement can be bilateral or multilateral
Delury 12 John Delury, Associate Director of the Asia Societys Center on U.S.-China Relations and Director of the China
Boom Project, Assistant Professor of Chinese Studies at Yonsei University, holds a Ph.D. in History from Yale University, 2012
(Triple-Pronged Engagement: China's Approach to North Korea, American Foreign Policy Interests: The Journal of the National
Committee on American Foreign Policy, Volume 34, Issue 2, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Taylor & Francis
Online)
-Includes sharing of knowledge.
So what is revealed about China's approach to Korea if Americans and South Koreans clear out a priori hopes and fears, and
analytically privilege state behavior (how is Beijing actually approaching North Korea) over public discourse (how do the Chinese say
The main
feature of China's approach to North Korea is neighborly engagement. Beijing's engagement
approach has three prongs: bilateral political ties, bilateral economic cooperation,
and multilateral diplomatic engagement. Bilateral political engagement is anchored in
maintaining strong ties between the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the Korean Workers
Party (KWP), with the CPC Central Committee International Liaison Department as the lead organizational entity. This approach
they should approach North Korea)? If we attend to Beijing's conduct, a fairly consistent pattern comes into focus.
implicitly promotes the strengthening of KWP rule within the DPRK system. But Beijing is pragmatic about the reality of One Party
Rule with Korean Characteristics. Beijing accepts the Kim family's paramount status, on public display when the entire Standing
Committee of the Politburo met Kim Jong-il on the first of four visits to the People's Republic of China (PRC) in the last two years.
Beijing also gave early recognition to Kim Jong-un as heir apparent, effusively embracing the succession moves after Kim Jong-il's
death. The political systems and ideologies of China and North Korea, as variations on the original Soviet blueprint, bear deep
structural affinitiesdespite the unique dynastic element and weaker Party role in the DPRK and despite 30 years of reform and
opening in China. This affinity, combined with their long and, for the most part, brotherly history, makes it considerably easier for
China to maintain close bilateral ties. The political affinity also makes it natural for Beijing to support the continued existence of the
DPRK as a communist party state and to prefer an improved version of the status quo to contingencies like regime collapse. The
second key component of China's approach (an improved version of the status quo) is reforming and strengthening the North
Korean economy. Thus, the
second prong of the pitchfork of Chinese engagementbilateral economic

engagement. This core feature of China's approach to North Korea is pursued regardless of diplomatic
vicissitudes. Economic engagement includes state-backed assistance, market-based
provincial trade, and long-term strategic investment. Assistance includes technical
assistance, knowledge sharing and human capacity buildingin effect, educating North Korean
counterparts on the China model of market transition and authoritarian capitalism. What is hoped is that trade will stimulate growth
in bordering Jilin and Liaoning provinces. Long-term investment is aimed at North Korean mineral resources and, perhaps, an East
Sea port (at Rason). North Korea's lack of basic infrastructure frustrates China's hopes for strategic development. The DPRK's
refusal to introduce basic market reforms, moreover, renders North Korea an inhospitable business environment for Chinese
entrepreneurs and traders. Nevertheless, Beijing persists in encouraging North Korea to take steps on the road to authoritarian
economic reformboth out of its own economic self-interest and its geopolitical interest in a more prosperous, and thus more stable,
Communist neighbor. The
third prong of China's engagement approach is multilateral diplomatic

engagement (i.e., the Six Party Talks). Both the ends and means of the Six Party Talks appear acceptable as the endgame for the
Korean Peninsula so far as Beijing is concerned. The North gives up its nukes but improves its security, perhaps at long last
triggering economic reform and opening. The way to get there is lots and lots of dialogue hosted by Beijing. The Six Party Talks, from
their initiation in 2003, was a rare example of China taking a proactive, leadership role in global diplomacy. For the fleeting period
when the Talks were making progress (from early 2007 until the fall of 2008), Beijing was justly proud of its diplomatic success, and
North Korea had even leapt to the top of the list of positives in SinoU.S. relations. The Six Party Talks are structurally flawed, with
multiple political factors responsible for their breakdown in late 2008. But the salient point here is that Beijing always saw its role in
the Six Party Talks as mediating a deal between the DPRK and the United States. The presumption that Pyongyang and Washington
are the principals is North Korea's long-held position (Pyongyang might like to cut out even Beijing's role as convener). But
Washington does not want to sit in the driver's seat. Its path of least resistance is to prioritize the ROK alliance and leave the
diplomatic initiative to the Chinese. South Korean President Lee Myung-bak is in no hurry to reengage the North, Washington
doubts that the North Koreans can be trusted to really denuclearize, and President Obama's political advisors would no doubt warn
him of the costs of direct engagement with an Axis of Evil regimealthough considerable progress was made in U.S.DPRK talks
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Afro-Orientalism
in the final months of 2011 (abruptly interrupted by Kim Jong-il's death). Thus, we find ourselves in the current Six Party whirlpool.
For Beijing, the Six Party Talks is a multilateral fig leaf to help the United States and North Korea make a deal. But Washington too
easily looks to Beijing to make Pyongyang behave and prove its seriousness of purpose. Common in U.S. foreign policy discourse
is talk of China as the only party with leverage over Pyongyang. The one place that sentiment is rarely heard is in China, where
claims of influence are modest. It is ironic, from a Chinese perspective, that Americans regularly call upon Beijing to exert its
influence by enforcing sanctions and cutting off aid to pressure Pyongyang to cease provocation and dismantle its nuclear program.
Why is it that China is the only country left with any direct influence on the DPRK? Precisely because Beijing has continued to
engage Pyongyang, whereas the ROK and United States have disengaged. So, from a Chinese perspective, the demand to exercise
influence by cutting off its source is illogical. Even more ironic is that the most effective leverage Beijing could gain over Pyongyang
would consist of the ability to bring Washington back to the negotiating table with a deal assuring North Koreans that they would get
what they wanteconomic aid, diplomatic normalization, and security assurances. It is significant that the most recent U.S.DPRK
bilateral talks, which reportedly made progress toward agreements on resuming U.S. humanitarian aid and freezing the DPRK's
uranium program, were held in Beijing. Until then, China had struggled to persuade the United States to reengage. The Six Party
Talks configuration was an anomaly to begin withand the United States and China are still not experienced at working proactively
with each other on an issue of such delicacy and complexity. So, when U.S.China relations take a downward turn, the Six Party
Talks can easily founder. For now, the Six Party Talks represent the one broken prong of China's three-fold engagement approach to
North Korea.
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Framework
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2AC Limits/Fairness
Fairness is an empty moral compass that uses the illusion of
objectivity to obtain the ethical high ground
it is weaponized to
preclude certain discussions and inscribe imperialism upon open
space.
Olson 2002 (Gary A. Olson, Professor of English @ University of South Florida. Justifying
Belief: Stanley Fish and the Work of Rhetoric p. 51-52, p. 64-65 ERW)
In intractable policy debates, invoking the principle of fairness will not advance these debates
because at a certain level such debates are about what fairness (or neutrality or impartiality) really is
(3). In effect, a contest over the content of a particular issue is also a contest over two or more contending notions
of fairness (or impartiality or whatever principle is being invoked). Even if it were possible to produce a general principle devoid
of specific content a notion of fairness, say, untethered to any specific perspective or ideological orientation it would be of no
use, says Fish, because it would be empty. That is, appealing to it would not point you in any direction in relation to other possible
directions. Its very emptiness renders it useless as a moral compass. In effect, a neutral principle
is a floating signifier, an unoccupied vessel waiting to be filled by whoever gets to it

first or with the most persuasive force (7). In fact, it is exactly this condition of emptiness, its
status as a floating signifier available for people to invest with substance, that makes neutral
principles so politically useful and even potentially dangerous , since they can be employed to
further evil (as defined by you) ends just as easily as more positive (as defined by you) goals: It is because they dont have the
constraining power claimed for them (they neither rule out nor mandate anything) and yet have the name of constraints (people
think that when you invoke fairness you call for something determinate and determinable) that neutral
principles can make an argument look as though it has a support higher or deeper
than the support provided by its own substantive thrust . Indeed, the vocabulary of neutral
principle can be used to disguise substance so that it appears to be the inevitable and
nonengineered product of an impersonal logic. (4) In other words, a general principle such as fairness is
deployed as a weapon in political, legal and ethical struggles precisely because it masks
the interestedness of those appealing to it and cloaks the fact that the actual policy, law, or proposal
being advanced in the name of the principle is embedded in specific historical circumstances
and furthers the interests and objectives of one set of individuals over and against the interests and
objectives of others. The fact that general principles do not exist and the fact that they can be deployed to effect harm may seem
at odds; however, there is no contradiction in declaring that, on the one hand, general principles do not exist (that is, that they have
no substance except when they are involved and thus invested with a particular substance that furthers a particular agenda) and
that, on the other hand, they can be deployed to further odious agendas (that is, agendas that you yourself find to be odious). It is
precisely the emptiness of principles (the fact that they can mean everything and thus nothing and therefore do not exist in any
meaningful way as neutral principles) that makes them available to be used to do harmful (or good) work in the world. In other
words, neutral principles do not exist as genuinely neutral principles independent of someones agenda, but the vocabulary of
neutrality causes principles to become very powerful tools in the political arena exactly because such language masks particular
agendas. Fish writes, The fact that the game of neutral principles is really a political game the
object of which is to package your agenda in a vocabulary everyone, or almost everyone, honors is itself neutral and tells you
nothing about how the game will be played in a particular instance (7). For example, someone may very well invoke the principle of
fairness (or some other principle), but the mere fact of invoking this terminology tells you nothing of whether you will or will not
agree with the petitioners agenda and with the petitioners definition of fairness until you have heard the substance that he or she
has packaged under the label fair. Nothing about the word fair would alert you ahead of time as to where that person is likely to
stand on the issue in question. Fish maintains that it would not be unusual or inconsistent to attack the rhetoric of neutral principles
in one instance and to employ that very same rhetoric in another, because in both instances what grounds a persons stance is his
or her convictions and commitments, and the means used to advance them would be secondary (8). People typically begin with a
strong conviction and them employ (or attack) a principle to advance that belief; they dont begin with a principle and then arrive at
a strong conviction. If this modus operandi sounds like a description of the Machiavellian ends justify the means conduct, it is
indeed, but Fish is quick to stipulate that he is only reporting on how things work, not advocating that they ought to work that way.
Because it is impossible to disentangle oneself from substantive agendas, ends-based behavior simply cannot be
avoided. People will always seek to further their own agendas and to defeat those they oppose. Fish is only pointing out for the
umpteenth time that when all is said and done there is nowhere to go except to the goals and desires that already possesses you,
and nothing to do but try as hard as you can to implement them in the world (8-9). []Continued That is, if the institution of law
and institution of religion were to correspond perfectly, then citizens would be able to extrapolate from moral precepts exactly what
their legal obligation are in any given situation, thus rendering the institution of law redundant. Interpretation is seen as a threat to
the law in that it is characterized as the act of disregarding or dismissing the meaning inherent in a text in favor of another more
partisan or interested reading of the text. Both morality and interpretation, then, threaten to substitute local or individual concerns,
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causes, or readings (since
there are multiple moralities and potential readings) for the larger, mores table, supposedly
disinterested perspective of the law. The law attempts to keep partisanship in check by
appealing to the doctrine of formalism, the belief that it is possible to compose language with
such precision that a texts meaning will always be clear and understandable despite the individual
perspective of those reading the text. Formalist assume that statutes, contracts, and other legal documents can be written in such a
way so as to prescribe that agents take or not take certain actions under specific circumstancesregardless of the agents desires,
ethical creeds, political convictions, or personal valuesand that it will always be clear precisely the, why, and under what
conditions such actions should be taken. Once a statement is expressed in its proper form as a legal statement or question, this text
will generate a chain of circumscribed actions unaffected by personal agendas. In other words, the very form of legal discourse
allows the law to adjudicate fairly and independently between two or more contending interests while establishing standards that
claim to rise above any specific interests. Fish, of course, insists that no such independent position is possible, that
individual desires, ethical creeds, political convictions, and personal values are always already at play in the production
and consumption of legal texts. The
aura of blind objectivity that the legal system embraces as its identity is
an illusion indeed, an impossibility. He argues that although the law yearns to have a formal existence, such aspirations will
consistently be frustrated because interpretation will always play a role in any specification of what the law is, and thus any such
specification will be susceptible to challenge. Rather than concluding, however, that the law completely fails to have formal
existence, he claims that in a very important sense it always succeeds, although the nature of that success it is a
political/rhetorical achievement renders it bitter to the formal taste (144). Fish in effect re-describes how formalism operates
within legal discourse.
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2AC T-Education
(Long Tag)The Aff is an interrogation of how modern practices of
Chinese economic governance are inseparable from the expansion of
the color line their interpretation justifies race-neutral objectivity
that systematizes imperialist narratives.
(Short Tag) The Aff is the best internal link to racially relevant topic
education.
Kim 2010 (Nami Kim Ph.D., Associate Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at
Spellman College, Engaging Afro/black-Orientalism: A Proposal -- Journal of Race, Ethnicity,
and Religion, http://www.raceandreligion.com/JRER/Volume_1_(2010)_files/Kim
%201%2007.pdf ERW)
The creation of this strategic bloc, comprised of significant portions of the so-called third world, was the beginning of what came to
be known as the nonaligned movement. According to Richard Wright, one of two African Americans who observed the conference
from the beginning, Bandung was an indictment of Western racialism, which had been the cornerstone of Western justification for
colonial exploitation and promotion of the idea of white Western racial superiority.26 Wright also wrote that the Bandung
Conference stressed economic cooperation among the Asian and African powers. Along
with the desire for economic

cooperation among the participating countries, the Bandung Conference represented
postcolonial nationalists call for the renewal of the ancient Asian and African
cultures and religions that had been interrupted during the past centuries.27 In other words, Bandung characterized
postcolonial nationalists emphasis on reviving traditional cultures and religions. Although many attempts to restore often-nostalgic
notions of tradition and culture were problematic as carried out in postcolonial societies during their nation-building processes,
examining them helps us understand the ongoing role of religion in colonial, anti-colonial, and
postcolonial power struggles.28 Indigestible Asian. Is It Necessary to Engage Afro/black-Orientalism? In
November 2006, more than thirty African leaders and Chinese gathered at the first Sino-African
summit (Forum on China-Africa Co-operation), which was held in Beijing to enhance economic and technical
cooperation between China and African nations. Chinese private and state companies have been building roads, dams,
hospitals, and running factories and telecommunications systems across the African continent. As a return on its investment,
China has demanded African resources like oil, mineral, timber, cotton, and so
on.29 While increasing cooperation between China and African nations has increased economic
opportunities for African nations, it has also brought unforeseen tensions, for example, between
local people and imported Chinese and other laborers from Asia who work in Chinese-owned and -run companies in Africa.
Competition over cheap labor has led to what is called the new face of the global race to
the bottom.30 When newly independent Asian and African nations met for the first time in Bandung in 1955 they could not
have predicted whether the outcome of their newfound collaboration would be positive or negative. Nor could W. E. B. Du Bois have
foreseen the possible tensions that might arise when he wrote China and Africa and I Sing to China during his visit to China at
the age of 91 in 1959. To many, the Bandung era of Afro-Asian
solidarity represented a high point of

the antiimperialist and antiracist struggles of people of Asian and African descent .
Fifty years later, however, the spirit and political significance of the Bandung era seems to have faded. Vijay Prashad also notes that
although AfroAsian solidarity emerged in the Bandung era as a political stand against colonialism, the
foundation for that solidarity is now largely eroded, with Africa and Asia interested in each others resources and capital, where the
bold pronouncements for a
radical reconfiguration of the international political economy
has vanished.31 The task of engaging Afro/black-Orientalism may seem challenging today because the context in which we
raise concerns and questions is different from that of the early to mid-twentieth century during which African American activists and
intellectuals had formed political solidarity. Also, people
are no longer primarily concerned with the thirdworld anti-colonial struggle for nation-state sovereignty and the color line of Jim Crow racial
segregation in the United States where African American activists and intellectuals began their search for global solidarity
among people of color. Yet, as black feminist Patricia Hill Collins stresses, the racial hierarchies Du Bois
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Afro-Orientalism
observed a century ago continue to exist not only on a local level but also on a global
scale.32 We now face what Hill Collins calls new racism, which is transnational due to the
global market economy and global mass media.33 Racialized and gendered globalization
continues to produce color lines in the twenty-first century. Also, while admitting that the
excavations of AfroAsian solidarity might be nostalgic and anachronistic,34 Prashad nonetheless maintains that the
epistemological and historical archive of solidarity and memory of the

interactions must be brought to light. 35 In a similar vein, Mullen states, AfroAsian solidarity needs a
constant reorientation to itself. The constant threat of historical erasure of the coalition building of
ethnic communities necessitates an urgent, disciplined commitment to a useable
AfroAsian past.36 By challenging white supremacy, which has persistently pit one racial/ethnic minority group against
another, Afro/black-Orientalism may shed new light on the forgotten history of interactions and
coalitions among African, African Americans, and Asians and Asian North Americans in their concerted efforts to
resist racism, colonialism, and U.S. imperialism.37
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2AC Orientalism DA
Orientalism DA Analogous to how the Chinese designated the
Kunlun in a contradistinction to the civil order, their invocation of
Eurocentric norms within academia have been mobilized to
pathologize our scholarship. This instantiates a will to know and
dominate which is inseparable from biopolitical violence.
Kamali 14 (Masoud Kamali Department of Sociology, University of Uppsala,
Conceptualizing the Other, Institutionalized Discrimination, and Cultural Racism,
https://cordis.europa.eu/pub/improving/docs/ser_racism_kamali_session2.pdf - ERW)
-Turns the form of FW even if content is good.
-Control of knowledge = power relations. Renders those who dot conform as exploitable nonhumans.
The orient has traditionally been considered to be the negation of the West, i.e. the other
side of rationality, science, development, economic growth, prosperity , and so forth. In
other words, everything that was prized as the elements of superiority of the occident was lacking in
the orient. Accordingly, the field of social scientific and sociological research has mainly neglected conducting research on the
complexity, heterogeneity, and major transformations of what was called the orient. The concepts of an Islamic civil society, Islamic
political ideologies and modern Islam have been controversial and rejected by many classic and contemporary scholars of social
sciences. The
Orient could not have its own existence; as Said puts it; the orient was a product of the
West and therefore it existed according to the wishes of the West. By now, we know that Max
Webers vision of a value-free-sociology remains just a vision yet to be realized.3 The field of production of
knowledge is an inseparable part of the reproduction of power relations in the
modern society. As Foucault (1977:27) mentioned:4 Power and knowledge directly imply one another,
that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not
presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations. Foucault emphasizes that power
produces knowledge.
They need each other for preserving and guaranteeing continuity of a system that serves both power
and knowledge. Therefore the triumph of reason is the triumph of the alliance of power and knowledge.
As Turner (1994:21) puts it, the categories of criminal, insane and deviant are the manifestations of a scientific
discourse by which the normal and sane exercise power along a systematic dividing of sameness
and difference. The alliance of power and knowledge created whatever would be
called the others. It could be the insane, the criminal, the deviant or the orient. The
modern reasonable man as the bearer of knowledge and power needed the deviance of unreason for
preserving and defining the normality of reason. No matter if this man of reason was as Foucault believe a modern
construction or, according to Derrida a development of the old reasonable man with its roots in ancient Greece, unreason and reason
have been and are inseparable.5 Following this line of discussion, one can say that the
Western image of itself, the

occident, was directly and necessarily connected to the discursive construction of the other, the orient. The
creation the paradigms of Orient and Occident is a manifestation of Western dominance and colonial intentions and politics.
the Orient is
simultaneously defined and controlled, To know is to subordinate (Turner, 1994:21) The role of
Orientalism is a discourse constituted of a network of categories, tables, and concepts by which
colonialists and imperial politics has been especially decisive in the constitution of Western image of Islam and the analysis of
oriental societies (Daniel, 1960; Southern 1962).6 Edward Said in his influential work, Orientalism, insightfully presents the
Western anti-Islamic and colonial policies formulated in the typology of Orientalism and how it was used as a subordinating
discourse on the part of westerners. Europe who defined the Orient has itself been imprinted by what was called the Orient and
therefore had a double-sided relation to it. This was not only depended on the fact that the Orient is situated very close to Europe,
but also because it is there that Europe finds its best, richest and the oldest colonies, the sources of its civilization and language, its
rival in cultural sphere, and one of its most usual picture of the others, as Said (1978) puts it. Europe began its sociopolitical
project of creation of a European or western identity since the eve of seventeenth century. Everything, rationalism,
political
democracy, individualism, and in short, Europe was supposed to begin at Greeces border against the Orient a
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constructed geographical line with great socio-cultural and political consequences for the whole world.
All properties that came to identify the West against the rest of the world, such as science, philosophy, democracy, were presented to
have their roots in the ancient Greece.7 The influences of non-western and in western tradition of: Histories of Western
philosophy invariably begin with the Greeks and avoid the issue of African and Oriental influences upon ancient Greek though. What
is of particular interest is the absence of reference to the role played by Egyptian and Oriental mystery tradition in the formulation
of Greek philosophical ideas and approaches. The
creation of a western imagined world and the spreading of

its joined universalistic ideas were highly Eurocentric attempts. The universal was nothing more than the
particular experiences of the western European understanding and socio-culturally embedded construction of themselves and the
others. Since, as Grace Jantzen (1995) arguments, the idea of a neutral, objective, and universal stance is a fiction.8 She means that
there have never existed neutral views or believes separated from a particular place, because: There are no views from nowhere and
there are no views from everywhere. There are only views from somewhere, and the particular place will have an inescapable effect
on what can be seen. If one assumes the contrary, then what is happening is that one is falsely universalizing a particular
perspective. Not only the universalistic value-free ideas about the world in general and the Orient in particular is imagination and
impossibility, but also the myth of value-free sociology, as Gouldner (1973) puts it, remains just a myth for academic inner-circle
discussions.9 Sociology, as many other sciences, has
been used in overall domain of sociopolitical and military

power exercises in creating the colonial and post-colonial world order. As mentioned
earlier, the role of colonial and imperialistic politics has been especially decisive in the constitution of
Western images of Islam and the analysis of so called oriental societies. Oriental societies was generalized and
categorized through classical meta-theories, such as those of Marx and Weber, as societies with distinct properties that are
completely different from the West. The main driving force for understanding the Orient and establishing
the tradition of
from controversies between Western countries religious rivalries and economic and
military conflicts with the powerful empires of the Orient, such as Ottoman and Persian empires. Therefore, as Turner
Orientalism came
(1994:37) mentions, knowledge of the Orient cannot, therefore, be separated from the history of European expansion into the
Middle East and Asia. The mutual relationship and influences between knowledge and power can be understood by the Western
powers imperialistic occupations during the Nineteenth and the beginning of Twentieth centuries. By 1878 Europe controlled about
67 percent and by 1914, 84 percent of the landed surface of the world (Headrick, 1977:3).10 After World War I the percentage rose
even higher when England and France established mandates over some of the succession states to the Ottoman Empire in the
Middle East (Gordon, 1989:3).11 This made the West an influential actor in the uneven development of other parts of the world and
also an enemy. The enmity of the West against other nations and peoples were not an imaginary construction, but a real
phenomenon that highly influenced both the intellectual and the indigenous groups of many non-Western countries. Although
Orientalism came during the Middle Ages to include even the non-Muslim countries, such as China and India, it always has related
to what was territorially called the Muslim World and religiously Islam. The foundation of Orientalism was laid by John of
Damascus (d. 748), a Christian scholar who was a great friend of the Ummayad Caliph, Yazid (Sardar, 1999). His declarations, that
Islam was a pagan cult, the Kaba in Makkah an idol, and the prophet Muhammad an irreligious and licentious man, became the
classical source of all Christian writings on Islam (Sardar, 1999:18). The Christian Westerns attitudes towards Muslim countries
have historically been very negative and full of prejudices. Such a negative attitude made one of the very crucial bases in mobilizing
simple European peasants for crusades. The crusades had in its turn reinforced the dogmatic Orient/Occident categorization. The
anti-Islamic attitudes and understandings have consequently become a very part of western colonialism and self-perception.
Following the example of animus towards Islam on the part of the West, even eminent scholars of the field, presented by Gordon
(1989:94) is highly illustrative: The Lebanese historian Marwan Buheiry observes that at the turn of the century, to take only one
example, a symposium was conducted in the fortnightly review Questions diplomatiques et colonials (15 may 1901) to consider
prospects of Islam in the coming century. Speaking for many of the Western scholars represented was the eminent Orientalist Baron
Carra de Vaux, who wrote that, except for Persia with its Aryan spirit, the prospects for progressive change among the Muslims
was minimal. Islam is today vanquished, he went on to declare, its political decadence was inevitable and in regard to its
temporal destiny, Islam is finished as a religion. To destroy any threat from Pan-Islamism, he then advised one need only play
Muslims against one another by encouraging Muslim heresies and the Sufi Orders against the mainstream and use nationalism to
divide the various Muslim ethnic groups from one another. Islam and Islamic societies were considered as the others or the other
side or counterpart of reason. Consequently, Islam and modernization were considered as two incompatible phenomena. Therefore
modernizing the Islamic countries was not possible without eliminating or destroying Islam as a religion and as a political ideology
and doctrine. The West was the motherland of modernization and had the prophetic mission to change the world according to a
blueprint created by Western intellectuals, social scientists, and of course its superior military power. The West was the model and,
as Aziz al-Azmeh (1981) formulates it, the Orient was and is reduced to the mirror image of the West and so is defined and
disfigured.12 In addition, the close connection of the Orient with Islam, consequently, led to creation of an imagined Muslim
world that has specific common properties, of course essentially different from the West. A large part of the globe with different
socioeconomic and cultural differences is encapsulated under a religious umbrella. Islam is a religion, like many other religions,
highly depended on theological interpretations on the one side, and on its social embeddedness on the other. Islam has during one
and half millennium of its existence gone through many theological and social transformations. The expansion of Islam as religion to
far reaching areas with different socio-cultural structures in Asia, Africa, and Europe, forced the Islamic conqueror and theologian to
adjust both themselves and Islam to the new 12 al-Azmeh Aziz (1981) The Articulation of Orientalism, in Arab Studies Quarterly,
No 3 (4), pp 384-402. societies traditions, history and institutional arrangements. The mutual adjustment of Islam and the new
societies helped to create very diverse societies such that the Islamic dimension was just one of many different properties that
separated every single Islamic society from each other. How one can compare the Islamic Iran, Arabic peninsula, and Spain as the
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same component of a Muslim world? One does not need to compare these remote areas to gain understanding of many differences
between these countries. The simple comparison of countries very closed to each other, such as Iran, Turkey and Afghanistan, give
us enough reason to put in question the imagined construction of the Muslim world. Furthermore, the internal differences, such as
urban/rural, elite/popular, diverse religious and ethnic groups, and different socioeconomic and cultural classes, in Muslim
countries make the concept more problematic. Denying these internal and external diversities has been a part of Western
Orientalists and social scientists value-free attempts to construct Muslims as the others who
crystallizes backwardness, the traditional, the failure, the irrational , etc.
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2AC Jouissance DA
Jouissance DA Their affective attachment to reform as a corrective
for antiblackness invokes morsels of jouissance in the western subject
insofar as they have the illusion that progress has finally arrived. This
form of fidelity necessitates the proliferation of anti-black violence to
justify the continuous extension of lawfare causing ressentiment
and lashout.
Warren 2015 (Calvin Warren Assistant Professor of American Studies, research fellow at
the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in Africology, "Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope",
CR: The New Centennial Review, 15.1, accessed on 9/26/15 ERW)
The issue, however, is that there is often a compulsory investment of this spiritual
substance in the Political. This is the forced destination of hope it must end up in the
Political, and cannot exist outside of it (or any existence of hope outside the political subverts,
compromises, and destroys hope itself. Like placing a fish out of water. It is as if hope only has intelligibility and
efficacy within and through the Political). Put differently, the politics of hope posits that one must have a politics in order to have
hope; politics
is the natural habitat of hope itself. To reject hope in a nihilistic way, then, is
really to reject the politics of hope, or certain circumscribed and compulsory forms of expressing, practicing, and
conceiving of hope. In the essay A Fidelity to Politics: Shame and the African American Vote in the 2004 Election, (2006) Grant
Farred exposes a kernel of irrationality at the center of African American political participation. Traditionally, political participation
is motivated by self-interested expectancy; this political
calculus assumes that political

participation, particularly voting, is an investment with an assurance of a return
or political dividend. The structure of the Politicalthe circular movement between self-interest, action, and
rewardis sustained through what Farred calls the electoral unconscious. It historicizes the subject
in relation to the political in that it determines the horizon of what is possible it maps, through its
delimitation or its (relative) lack of limits, what the constituency and its members imagine they can, or, would like to expect from the
political. (217) In this way, the
electoral unconscious, as the realm of political fantasy, mirrors the Lacanian notion of
of the political subject and teaches it how exactly to desire the
fantasy; it maps the coordinates
Political. 9 For Farred, there is a peculiar logic (another scene) operating as the motivation for African American participation
in the Political. Unlike the traditional political calculus, where action and reward determine civic engagement, African
American participation does not follow this rational calculusbecause if it did, there would
actually be no rational reason for African Americans to vote, given the historicity of voting as an ineffective
practice in gaining tangible objects for achieving redress, equality, and political
subjectivity. African Americans, according to Farred, have an irrational fidelity to a practice that,
historically, has yielded no concrete transformations of anti-blackness. This group is governed
not by the electoral unconscious, but by the historical conscious, which is the intense [and incessant] understanding of how the
franchise has been achieved, of its precarious preciseness as well as their (growing) contemporary liminality, their status as
marginalized political subjects. (217) African
Americans are a faithful voting block not because of votings

political efficaciousness, but as a way to contend with a painful (and shame-full) history of exclusion and
disenfranchisement. Political participation becomes an act of historical commemoration and obligation; one votes because someone
bled and died for the opportunity to participate, and duty and indebtedness motivate this partial political subject. Within this
piece, we get a sense that black
fidelity to the Political is tantamount to the Lacanian notion of drive

one perpetuates a system designed to annihilate participation, then, follows another logic.
The act of voting, according to Farred, is legitimate in and of itself; it is a means as an end (or a means without an end, if we follow
African American political

participation is an interminable cycle of reproduction, a continuous practice of
reproducing the means of reproduction itself. This irrational fidelity to a means without an end gives
rise to the politics of despairrepresentation for its own sake and the apotheosis of singular figuresand a politics
Agambens logic). The means, the praxis of voting, is all there is without an end in sight.
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Afro-Orientalism
without hope: African American fdelity, however, takes its distance from Pauline hopelike faith, hope is predicated upon a
complex admixture of expectations and difference. In this respect, the African American vote is not, as in the colloquial
sense, hopeful: it has not expectations of a shining city appearing upon an ever distant , ever retreating,
hill in the unnamed-able future. Fidelity represents the anti-Pauline politics in that its truth, its only truth, resides in
praxis. (223) 10 This brilliant analysis compels us to rethink political rationality and the value in meansas a structuring agent by
itself. What I would like to think through, however, is the distinction between hope and despair and expectations and object.
Whereas Farred understands political participation as an act without a political object, or recognizable outcomewithout an end,
if we think of end and object as synonymsI would suggest that the Politics of Hope reconfigures despair and expectation so that
black political action pursues an impossible object. We can describe this contradictory object as the lure of metaphysical political
The political
object that black participation encircles endlessly, like the Lacanian drive and its object, is
the idea of linear proximitywe can call this progress, betterment, or more
perfect. This idea of achieving the impossible allows one to disregard the historicity of
antiblackness and its continued legacy and conceive of political engagement as bringing one
incrementally closer to that which does not exist ones impossible object. In this way, the
Politics of hope recasts despair as possibility, struggle as triumph, and lack as
propinquity. This impossible object is not tethered to real history, so it is unassailable and irrefutable because it is the object
of political fantasy. The politics of hope, then, constitutes what Lauren Berlant would call cruel optimism for
blacks. (Berlant, 2011) It bundles certain promises about redress, equality, freedom, justice,
and progress into a political object that always lies beyond reach. The objective of the Political is to
keep blacks in a relation to this political objectin an unending pursuit of it. This pursuit, however, is
detrimental because it strengthens the very anti-black system that would pulverize black being.
activity: every act brings one closer to a not-yet-social order. What one achieves, then, and expects is closer.
The pursuit of the object certainly has an irrational aspect to it to it, as Farred details, but it is not mere means without
pursuit
marks a cruel attachment to the means of subjugation and the continued widening of the gap between historical
expectation, instead, it is a means that undermines the attainment of the impossible object desired. In other words, the
reality and fantastical ideal. Black Nihilism is a demythifying practice, in the Nietzschean vein, that uncovers the subjugating
strategies of political hope and de-idealizes its fantastical object. Once we denude political
hope of its axiological and ethical

veneer, we see that it operates through certain strategies: 1) positing itself as the only alternative to the
problem of anti-blackness 2) shielding this alternative from rigorous historical/ philosophical
critique by placing it in an unknown future 3) delimiting the field of action to include only
activity recognized and legitimated by the Political, and 4) demonizing critiques or different
philosophical perspectives. The politics of hope masks a particular cruelty under the auspices of happiness and life . It
terrifies with the dread of no alternative. Life itself needs the security of the alternative, and, through this logic, life becomes
untenable without it. Political hope promises to provide this alternativea discursive and political organization beyond extant
structures of violence and destruction. The
construction of the binary altemative/no-altemative

ensures the hegemony and dominance of political hope within the onto-existential
horizon. The terror of the no alternativethe ultimate space of decay, suffering, and deathdepends on two additional
binaries: problem/solution and action/inaction. According to this politics, all problems have solutions, and
hope provides the accessibility and realization of these solutions. The solution establishes itself as the elimination
of the problem; the solution, in fact, transcends the problem and realizes Hegels aufheben in its constant attempt to sublate the
dirtiness of the problem with the pristine being of the solution. No problem is outside the reach of hopes solution every problem
is connected to the kernel of its own eradication. The
politics of hope must actively refuse the possibility that

the solution is, in fact, another problem in disguised form; the idea of a solution is
nothing more than the repetition and disavowal of the problem itself. The solution relies on what we might
call the trick of time to fortify itself from the deconstruction of its binary. Because the temporality of hope is a time
not-yet-realized, a future tense unmoored from present-tense justifications and pragmatist evidence, the politics of
hope cleverly shields its solutions from critiques of impossibility or repetition. Each insistence that
these solutions stand up against the lessons of history or the rigors of analysis is met with the rationale that these solutions are not
can
never ascertain the efficacy of the proposed solutions because they escape the temporality of the
moment, always retreating to a not-yet and could-be temporality. This trick of time offers a promise of possibility that can
subject to history or analysis because they do not reside within the horizon of the past or present. Put differently, we
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Afro-Orientalism
only be realized in an indefinite future, and this promise is a bond of uncertainty that can never be redeemed, only imagined. In this
sense, the politics of hope is an instance of the psychoanalytic notion of desire: its sole purpose is to reproduce its very condition of
possibility, never to satiate or bring fulfillment.
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2AC Representation DA
Representation DA their faith in institutions to resolve anti-black
suffering obfuscates how black flesh has been existentially coded
within systems of western meaning. From the enlightenment age,
whiteness has occurred the label of life and propriety, while blackness
signified inferiority and danger [this is similarly applicable to systems
of naming the Chinese endorsed]. This produces forms of
unintelligible, quotidian violence which eludes institutional recovery.
Mahendran 07 (Dilan Mahendran University of California Berkeley, The Facticity of
Blackness: A Non-Conceptual Approach to the Study of Race and Racism in Fanons and
Merleau-Pontys Phenomenology Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self
Knowledge, 6-21-2007, http://scholarworks.umb.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1191&context=humanarchitecture ERW)
-Turns TVA and DCM both arguments assume contingent change.
-In world of their interpretation, gratuitous violence is inevitable.
This essay is an attempt to flesh out the significance of embodied perception of race in lived experience. What I argue in this essay is
the need for a non-conceptual understanding of race, racialization, and racism. The two previous quotes, the first taken from Paul
Gilroys book Against Race and the second from Frantz Fanons Black Skin White Masks, are included to elucidate the marked
difference in scholarship in theorizing race today. The third quote from Maurice Merleau-Ponty points to where science would
indeed need to go in order to describe the relation between theory and practice, as Lewis R. Gordon1 announces as the space of
experience and situation. Gilroy makes an explicit critique of Fanons understanding of the process of racialization and declares it no
longer relevant. Gilroy understands Fanons
concept of epidermalization2 of race as being synonymous

with skin color as a referent to the idea or concept of race. In this way ones skin color
designates or refers to a concept or idea and it is in that concept which holds the meaning
for that skin color. For Gilroy, Fanons privileging of skin color is not relevant today because what Gilroy and many of his
contemporary critical race theorists have done is to primarily locate post modern racialization in the space of what is representable
generally and in genomic4 representations in particular. However Fanon
is actually not concerned with (re)presentations

immanence in lived experience from the position of one who shows
up as black in an anti-black world. Rather than (re)presentations, Fanon sheds light on the presentation of race;
meaning how racial intelligibility is manifest to us immediately in perception. To dismiss the
quotidian way racial minorities in the West experience the violence of race and racism
as no longer critical in contemporary theory on the subject is incredibly disconcerting and shows
the investment that scholars have in the detachment of their research from the real world and their
of race, as concept or cogitation but its
continual disparagement of experience as a foundational and valid and form of knowledge. In a double move this peculiar Western
rationality has condemned lived experience and condemned those that are understood as only experiential beings (not mindful),
that is people
of color, to be non-existent in history. In Black Skin White Masks Fanon compares the
existential crisis of being Jewish with that of being black. For a Jewish person whose appearance is immediately
like that of his white Aryan oppressor, he can conceal for at least a moment his Jewishness
because his Jewishness is but a collection of objective facts about him.... that he is from Warsaw, from the ghetto, that his name is
Goldstein etc..... The Jew appears to white others immediately as they are, another white person, in other words, a human. Fanon
concludes that for
a black person there is no such possibility in an antiblack world

because a black person is immediately caught out there by white eyes in the visual
field of human perception as either hypervisible or invisible as Ralph Ellison articulates in Invisible Man.5
Therefore its not the idea of race but the immediate pre-reflective and pre-linguistic appearance of what
we call blackness or more generally racedness. Contrarily (re)presentations of race must be cognizable and therefore
within the positive sciences there is a tendency toward the rationally and explanatory models of race theory. What Fanon argues is
that ideas of race as abstracted representations
of lived experience miss the gravity of the phenomena of
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Afro-Orientalism
showing up as a ngre and the formation of the self-consciousness of person who appears to others this way. I
would argue that the relevance of a phenomenology of race is as much a contemporary issue as it was in post war France. Gilroys
honest mistake is that he confuses the lived experience of race for its (re)presentation. It is
the representation of
blackness and its commoditization in popular culture that Gilroy sees as shifting in the history of
raciology and not the lived experience of showing up black which has been durable in the long history
of racism in the West. Gilroy is probably not alone here and one can argue that the bulk of race theory leans toward the
privileging of mind in idea, concept and cognition rather than including bodily experience of being perceived as such and such a
race.
How we live the process of racialization and showing up such and such a racial way is difficult to describe because as Linda Martn Alcoff6 argues the process of being raced appears to us as self
evident; a sort of common sense which occurs for us without resorting to categories
and classifications, in other words without calling to mind (re)presentations. This
does not simply mean that racial intelligibility is sublimated to unconscious and therefore
unrecoverable. Merleau-Ponty writes I can experience more things than I represent to myself.....there are feelings in me which I do
not name, and also spurious states of well-being to which I am not fully given over (2002 p345). We can say that the fund of
perceptual experience is pregnant with meaning but meanings that are not always readily articulable in
cognition and through language. To pass over the most mundane experiences such as the intelligibility of human bodies
seems to implicate that its depths go far deeper than mere thought but are somehow sedimented layers of experience which impinge
on our ability to see others as who they really are as human. If
race and racism were simply ideas and ideologies

it should stand that we could rationally rethink our way out of it but , as I argue, racial perception
is implicated at a more fundamental level of who we are and how we experience
the world. Philosophers Linda Martn Alcoff (2001), Athena Coleman (2005) Lewis R. Gordon (2005) and Jeremy Weate
(2001) are but a few scholars who take up Fanons phenomenology and his re-articulation and challenge to Merleau-Pontys
descriptions of corporeal existence. In this essay I attempt to extend Merleau-Pontys theory of perception and his subsequent
development of a radical primordial ontology to the study of racial difference and racism. What
makes Merleau-Pontys existential phenomenology interesting here is that we can take a close look at the experience of race and
racism from the fact that much of what we understand race difference to be is lived by the body. Much of the theorization of race
theory privileges abstract epistemological concepts of racialization that explain structural and discursive formations of racial
ideology and representation. This area of race scholarship, objective racial knowledge, can be seen as an
epistemological approach to the study of race. Meaning that race is reducible to a concept that is cognizable by mind on an abstract
deworlded level. However emphasis on the abstract objective constructions of race that appear at the structural level such as through
media, juridical, and institutional, neglect the problem that race
is lived and experienced through the body both

individually and generally as our bodies. It can be said that aside from the objective knowing of the positive sciences
there is also a bodily knowing that founds the possibility of any knowing at allcertainly the objective and abstracted knowing of the
positive sciences. Merleau-Ponty would say, we are existent in the world and we are already thrown into a shared world. For
MerleauPonty these abstractions of race would be a sort of intellectualism that cannot account for the phenomena of racism as
experienced in our average everydayness. Quotidian
experience of racism from everyday people we share

our world with is far distant from the racism exercised by the nation, state, and
institutions yet this everyday intelligibility of race permeates these modern structures. Sociological
data such as statistics showing infant mortality, income distribution, joblessness rates or home
ownership between white Americans and African Americans is extremely useful but really only
show a part of the picture of how race is lived in the body that is already in the world.
Engh, Ousaf Moqeet
Afro-Orientalism
Kritiks
Engh, Ousaf Moqeet
Afro-Orientalism
2AC Capitalism
The 1AC was already an analysis of how neoliberalism has been
mutated through the chattel status of the Kunlun to inform
contemporary epidermal schemas of difference.
Castillo 2010 (Dr. Roberto Castillo has a PhD in Cultural Studies from Lingnan University
(Hong Kong) and a Master of Cultural Studies from The University of Sydney (Australia). He did
his undergraduate degree in International Relations and History at The University of the
Americas in Puebla (Mexico), where he also worked as a journalist, Perceptions and
representations of Africans in the Chinese imagination,
https://africansinchina.net/2012/11/05/perceptions-and-representations-of-africans-in-thechinese-imagination/- ERW)
Since the implementation of Deng Xiaopings Reform and Opening Up policy in the
early 1980s, China has slowly begun to relax its previous restrictions on the entrance
and settlement of foreign nationals in the country. Chinas opening up not only coincided with, but also
fuelled, the dawn of economic globalisation . As the Chinese economy started to rear its
head, businessmen, entrepreneurs and traders from all over the world were drawn to the country. Prior to
China opening its doors in the early 1990s, traders from around the world began to congregate in Hong Kong (at that time, still
under British rule). By the mid-1990s, Hong
Kong registered dramatic increases in the numbers of Middle
Eastern and African traders in search of cheap Chinese goods (Mathews, 2007: 170). By 2001, four years after the Return
of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty, and against the backdrop of Chinas entrance into the World Trade Organisation (WTO),
foreign traders in major Chinese cities had become a common sight. African
traders shipping Chinese products

back to their homelands via Hong Kong relocated to the Mainland, settling mainly in Guangzhou, the
capital of Guangdong province. By 2003, West Africans had become active in southern Chinas import-export sector (Michel, 2009:
13). The presence of foreigners in the Peoples Republic of China is still a relatively new phenomenon.[1] Although, [I1] foreigners (of
all nationalities) living in major cities are becoming increasingly common. Less common, however, are people from a one so-called
ethnic group becoming a dominant presence within a particular city. Consequently, the
emergence of an African
community of a significant size in Guangzhou is a remarkable phenomenon. From 2003 to 2009, Chinese official statistics
estimated that the African population in Guangzhou was growing at a rate of 30 to 40 percent annually, and reached
its peak of around 100,000 just before the 2008 Beijing Olympics (Bodomo, 2010: 9).[2] This essay is a first step in the pursuit of a
more ambitious project that aims to assess the implications of the emergence of an African community in southern China, and to
locate such emergence within the wider framework of contemporary Sino-African relations, as well as within different theories of
globalisation. The analysis of the cultural, historical, political and economic issues surrounding this case study [I2] will
provide for a better understanding of Sino-African cultural exchanges , in general; and work as a tool for
suggesting that other types of analysis (away from the traditional ones simply based on the interactions amongst nation-states) are
needed to make sense of these new patterns of migration.[3] This essay will provide a first rapprochement [I3] to a cultural history
of the representation of Africans in the Chinese imagination, focusing mainly on racial perspectives. The first section reviews one of
the few available sources on early encounters between Chinese and African civilisations. The second section analyses more
contemporary representations, focusing on two cases: African students in 1980s China, and online perceptions. The third section
presents the case-study of Guangzhous African community as a vehicle for highlighting how these representations
have
affected the everyday experiences of Africans in China. EARLY ENCOUNTERS About the middle
of October 1415, as Henry Vs army trudged through the mud of northern France towards Agincourt, a giraffe arrived in Beijing. The
giraffe came from Malindi, in Kenya, and not many animals in history have been so acclaimed. The Ming Emperor received it at the
gate of the inner palace. Prostrate officials congratulated their sovereign on its coming. And half a millennium later, in 1983, when
the political and economic business of the modern world brought a prime minister of China to Kenya for the first time, a Beijing
newspaper hailed the giraffe for its contribution to the friendship between the Chinese and African peoples. The giraffe bore witness
that two unlikely peoples had converged. Philip Snow, The Star Raft, 1988. The above epigraph is a fragment of one of the most
famous accounts of the first encounters between Chinese and African civilisations. It is particularly valuable here as a cue for
thinking about the relationship between these two peoples outside the mediation of Western powers and Western history. To
introduce the relatively unknown origins of this relation, this section will give a brief historical review of early Chinese-African
encounters, placing particular emphasis on the perceptions and representations of Africans in China and the Chinese imperial
courts. Oh! Mighty Star Raft, Oh! In The Star Raft, Snow (1988) suggests that the first
encounters between Chinese

and Africans happened long before contemporary Western historiographic analysis would
Engh, Ousaf Moqeet
Afro-Orientalism
assume. Snow is not trying to create a framework for the understanding of the longevity of Sino-African relations, nor is he
trying to make a case for the present day righteousness of Chinese incursion into African lands. What he does indeed do is present
an historical account that aims to provide a better understanding of the influences and milestones structuring and shaping this
relationship. Snow reminds us that modern Chinese scholars and politicians tend to value high age-old exchanges[I4] , and give a
moral justification to their attitudes and relations with other peoples based on (sometimes long forgotten) historical contacts. Some
accounts claim that in the early fifteenth century, the Chinese admiral, Zheng He, landed on African shores, somewhere near
contemporary Somalia (it would be another 60 years before Vasco da Gama and Bartolomeu Dias reached the southern tip of Africa)
(Snow, 1988: 25-26). In Beijings political discourse, since that first encounter, China has never left Africa (Shen, 2009:426). They
may not have been in direct [I5] contact for decades, or even centuries, but the profound impression left by Zheng Hes trading
expeditions in both places is evidence of the longstanding relationship between these two civilisations at least for some
contemporary Chinese scholars (Snow, 1988: 1). Snow highlights, however, that African scholars might take a rather more sceptical
approach to the origins of the Africa-China relation and to the relevance and accuracy of fifteenth century Chinese records talking
about first encounters between Africans and Chinese, especially as the African national consciousness dates back to the
relatively recent postcolonial period (1988: 2). Despite differing approaches, there
is significant evidence to locate the

beginning the exchanges between the peoples on the east coast of Africa, and peoples from the
southern realms of the Tang Dynasty back to some point around the eighth or ninth century. This
is relevant, because by the time that giraffe arrived in the Chinese imperial courts, there had been significant levels of interaction
between African and Chinese traders in the Indian Ocean; but more importantly, because the giraffe (and the few zebras that
followed) opened up a space for imagining other peoples and places in the Chinese mind. Depictions of the people that inhabited
those remote lands from where such an exotic animal came from were soon constructed and registered.[4] Kunlun Warriors
Dark-skinned people were talked of in China as early as the fourth century A.D. (Snow, 1988: 16). Early
depictions of these dark-skinned people were heavily spiced with imagination, however. Images of strong armoured
warriors confidently riding atop magnificent pachyderms were invoked as depictions of East
African peoples. In Chinese dynastic imagination, the early Africans were invested with the cloak of heroism
embodiments of valour and loyalty (1988: 16). It was not until the Arabs arrived in the Song Dynasty (960-1279) court around the
year 1000 that the Chinese recorded that their [the Arabs] attendants had
deep-socketed eyes and black bodies,

they were called Kunlun slaves (1988: 17) it is not clear, however, if they were Africans or Indonesians,
nonetheless, this record marks one of the first representations of black people in Chinese history. These Kunlun slaves, according to
Snow, were represented in several stories of the Tang period as unfailingly heroic and resourceful, able to speak Chinese, behave
like Chinese and worthy of being treated by their Chinese owners with every sign of respect (1988: 17). By 1100, Kunlun slaves were
common sight around Guangzhou and belonged to rich people of the area (1988: 18). However, as the local population got used to
them, their heroic and magical nature became somewhat bleaker. No
longer imbued by the strength of myth, the

Kunlun became displaced nomads, tragically ill-adapted to their Chinese surroundings (1988: 19).
Unlike the resourceful Chinese-speaking Kunlun of fiction, their speech and their desires are unintelligible after
they have been domesticated for a long time, they can understand human speech, but they cannot utter it
themselves (1988: 19). As Snow suggests, there is no getting round the implications of the last sentence: for some
Chinese, Kunlun were not considered to be humans (1988: 19). In a short time, their
depiction had gone from mythical warrior to sub-human. Thou Shalt Acknowledge Heavenly
Power Despite the shift in these representations, African delegations of merchants were still being received in Beijing with fanfares
in the thirteenth century. These Africans were free traders and not representatives of any state, kingdom or court. According to
Snow (1998: 20), their presence in the imperial Chinese courts was construed as an acknowledgment of the courts universal
sovereignty, and the goods they brought were presented to the Emperor as tribute from a faraway land. So, while the giraffe offered
to the Emperor in 1415 could well have been a regular sale in the mind of an Arab or African merchant, in the eyes of the imperial
bureaucracy in Beijing, it was a sign of tribute: a capitulation of a faraway land (now Africa) in front of the Mings heavenly
emperor. Interestingly enough, since the early encounters between these two peoples, the Chinese side sought to find some kind of
political recognition in the relationship. In the African imagination, those fair-skinned sailors from the east were different to the
Portuguese in that the former just arrived, traded and left,[5] whereas the latter, imposed trade and religion (and their rule) in a
rather more violent way.[6] In contemporary Chinese government discourse, Zheng Hes fleet set a precedent for how Chinese
approach Africans: as an exchange partner rather than as an oppressive colonial power, as Alden (2007) suggests. There are several
reasons why Imperial China did not have expansionist aims toward Africa, and why, by the end of the fifteenth century, direct
contacts between these two regions suddenly ceased. Amongst these reasons are the Ming introversion and the so-called Middle
Kingdom complex, but at this stage of research they are of minor concern.[I6] FROM NANJINGS ANTI-AFRICAN PROTESTS TO
THE CHOCOLATE GIRL OUTRAGE Chinese Social Darwinism? As China gradually started coming out of its self-imposed
introversion, a re-encounter with Africa was imminent. However, Africans
and Chinese would soon discover that

their relationship was not going to be an easy one. As outlined above, the image of Africans in the Chinese
imagination has undergone several changes over the past centuries. Nonetheless, a negative image of Africans, one
that was firmly entrenched by the time China closed itself off from the world in the Ming
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Afro-Orientalism
Dynasty (1368-1644), managed to persist until as far as the twentieth century . Throughout
the centuries, dark skin and consequently blackness was instilled in Chinese societies as a
sign of poverty, backwardness and inferiority (Sullivan, 1994: 441)[I7] . Another important
consideration around the image of Africans in China, and the attitudes of Chinese toward them, is the aesthetic
premium placed by Chinese on the lightness of skin colour (1994: 440). Liang Qichao (1873-1929), a reformminded intellectual who was highly influential during the last days of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), argued, in accordance
with the Social Darwinist spirit of his time, that the world was divided into five races black, red, brown, yellow and
white out of which the yellow and the white were historical races capable of civilisational
prowess, while the rest were historically destined to be subjugated since they had
failed to form cohesive national groups (1994: 442). Although it is a century old, Liangs analysis resonates with the
tendency of some Chinese to regard Africa as the embodiment of a past from which they wish to escape. [I8] A Communist
Flirtation? Since the creation of the Peoples Republic of China in 1949, the idea of Africa became a central element for the
international configuration of the newly born republics strategy. The New China sought recognition from several African (also
newly born) states. Trade,
as in the time of the dynasties, was important, however, aid became central
in the relationship (Sullivan, 1994: 445). By the beginning of the 1960s, scholarship programs established by the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) were set in motion. In 1961, more than a hundred students from African countries
arrived in Beijing. However, due to frictions with school authorities and harassment by local students,
less than a year later, more than 80 percent had returned to their home countries (1994: 444).
Notwithstanding initial setbacks, by the 1970s, international students from many African countries were commonly seen in the
major Chinese cities. Although, generally speaking, relations between Chinese and African students were not complicated, there
were several minor frictions and fights reported throughout the 70s and 80s. As Sullivan (1994) suggests, as Chinas economic
reforms broadened and encountered difficulties in the early 80s, tensions intensified between Chinese and African students. On the
Chinese side, as Sullivan explains, anger was a consequence of discomfort with what the students saw as an economic failure of the
socialist system. The anger became rage when some Chinese students, mixing patriotism and racial prejudices, complained against
the supposed better treatment of African students by the Chinese government. This
reactive mixture resulted in the

1988-89 Nanjing anti-African protests. After a series of clashes over African students dating Chinese
women, a minor incident in Hehai University unleashed major violent confrontations as never before seen in the
New China between Chinese and a foreign (non-Asian) group. Several days of demonstrations followed (1994: 447). These attitudes
revealed, according to Sullivan, how Liangs racially
based distinction still permeated Chinese society in the
late 80s. It must be said, however, that different analyses of the Nanjing incident have suggested that much of the anger fuelling
the incident and subsequent demonstrations was aimed at the government and it was not so much racially oriented the fact that
the demonstrations ended up with slogans like Democracy and Human Rights and Republic of China, and not mentioning
anymore the
black devil is evidence of that. Chocolate Girl: Online Perceptions of Africanness* More
contemporary representations of Africans in the Chinese imagination can be exemplified by the controversy
around Lou Jing, a 20-year-old Chinese girl born to an African-American father and a Chinese
mother, who came to the publics attention in Shanghais Go Oriental Angel talent show in 2009.
When Lou became one of the five finalists on the show, she was dubbed qiaokeli nushi (chocolate
girl) and rapidly became subject of a heated and not very politically correct online debate. In the same vein, the stir caused
by the story of a Chinese kindergarten female teacher in a relationship with an African man is also
remarkable. The story was carried by several Chinese online portals under the headline of Kindergarten teacher
reveals her shocking romance with a black foreigner (my emphasis club.sohu.com). The massive interest
that Lou and the kindergarten teacher attracted from Chinese media opened up serious debates about racism and racial prejudice in
present-day China. Against the backdrop of these racial prejudices, but at a more socio-political level, many Chinese Internet
users see illegal African
immigrants in China as paralysing Chinese society by unfairly tapping into

the resources of the socialist welfare system (Shen, 2009: 435). They portray illegal Africans as a threat to
morality and health within Chinese society. Shens study of online perceptions of Africa in China shows how the
traditional prejudices discussed earlier in this paper are still around. In the Chinese online realm, Africans are
prototyped [I9] as poor, lazy, sexist and threatening, with the added burden of
being possible AIDS carriers (2009). Ideas about the impossibility of Africans to succeed still abound. According to
Shen, there is a reciprocal relation between online opinions and the ideas that structure Chinas foreign policy
towards Africa. He argues that at a political level, the Chinese governments approach could be seen as orientalising
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Afro-Orientalism
Africans: Africa is thus seen as a timeless place that evokes nostalgia for a long forgotten Chinese past; and Africans are
brothers that cannot help themselves and need Chinas investment to overcome their structural failures. While online images and
comments cannot be taken as representative of major social behaviours, in a country where offline public spaces of expression are
highly striated, the online realm could give us an indication of certain popular perceptions. Online perceptions of Africanness, as
well as online perceptions of Chinas role in Africa, are central to the way Africans and Chinese are structuring their complex
relationships. Moreover, the construction of a Chinese image around its contemporary relation to Africa is crucial for the success of
the Peoples Republic in the twenty-first century. As Ien Ang (1993) reminds us, constructions of Chineseness
are based on
complex historical, social and migrational patterns influenced by mobility and displacement ,
either commercial or political (war and trade). In regard to this, despite a certain reluctance to the African presence in contemporary
China, a Sino-African hybrid may well become a Chinese sub-national identity in the future, as Adams Bodomo (2010) suspects. To
understand why Africans are going to China, it is imperative to analyse what the Chinese are doing in Africa, how they are doing it,
and how they have been received and stereotyped in different African nations. Unfortunately, perceptions and constructions of the
Chinese in the contemporary African imagination is a vast topic and one that is beyond the scope of this paper (it has, however, been
relatively well documented by Michel Serge in his recent book China Safari [2009]). IMAGINING THE COMMUNITY Immigrs
Clandestins Africains en Chine* Nobody really knows how many Africans live in China. There are no official statistics, no
authoritative account, and there is an immense silence around the African presence. It is as if both sides had signed a tacit
agreement to not disclose information about their mutual businesses. One of the biggest obstacles for ethnographic researchers in
Guangzhou has been that many of the African migrant traders settling there do not see any benefit in providing information about
their backgrounds and activities (Wei, 2009: sina.com.cn). Notwithstanding this obstacle, what we know is that Africans started
arriving in Guangzhou in the early 2000s, and since then, their numbers have increased. Africans arrive in China on a plethora of
Chinese visas, and most commonly on a tourist or business visas. Once these visas expire, it is possible to renew them in Hong Kong,
but visa runs can only be made a few times before exhausting the possibilities for consecutive renewal (renewal is strongly
dependant on nationality). In the last three years, the Chinese government has tightened its regulations on visas, making it
particularly difficult for Africans to renew their visas as a result, many of them have been forced to stay illegally in China. As
depicted by several media reports, the lack of visas (or residence permits) is perhaps the most [I10] widely experienced problem
amongst Africans in Guangzhou (Wei, 2009: sina.com.cn). As a consequence of the tightening of entry requirements, the number of
illegal Africans in China is increasing. This situation has created a vicious cycle in which Chinese police and Africans play the old
game of cat-and-mouse (Wei, 2009: sina.com.cn) one that many Africans with previous diasporic experiences are well equipped
to play. If Bodomo (2010), who foresees the rise of an African-Chinese sub-national group, is right, then it is imperative to outline
and investigate the dynamics and patterns that structure the so-called emergence of this community. To date, most of the
researchers have dealt with the concept of Africans, but there are no authoritative resources that pull the research to the sublevel of
nationalities, language and religion amongst other possible forms of imagining communities. What do we mean by Africans when
we talk about the African community of Guangzhou? Bodomo illustrates that most of the African people living in Guangzhou come
from West Africa mainly from Nigeria, Mali, Guinea and Ghana (2010: 9). Li Zhigang et al, (2008) claims that the majority of
African traders come from francophone countries such as Mali, Togo, Guinea, Senegal and Congo. Lis account is significantly
opposed to that of Bodomo, for whom Nigerians count to more than 70 percent of the community. Clearly, there are disagreements
on the ethnic composition of this highly mobile and changeable community. Notwithstanding this, Bodomo, Li Zhigang et al, and Li
Zhang (2008) all agree that most of these Africans are self-employed importers who enter China on tourist visas with limited capital,
and outsource [I11] many different types of merchandise. Li Zhigang et al, affirm that a majority of the African traders speak Arabic
and French, while very few are able to speak English or Mandarin. Less than 40 percent of these Africans studied beyond high
school (2008: 15). In Li Zhigangs sample, 70 percent were males while 30 percent were females, and most were Muslims (2008: 14).
It is a task for further research to look beyond the concept of an African trading community and delve into the everyday experiences
of people that have successfully inserted themselves into the dynamics not only of the African groups but of the Chinese population.
Many of these individual tales can help clarify the dynamics of globalisation and how they affect ordinary people. What I am
suggesting here is that the analysis of the emergence of an African community in Guangzhou can be framed as a point for the
microscopic observation of macroscopic trends and processes within globalisation. The study of this locale can aid us to better
understand how individuals resist and negotiate globalisation. CONCLUSION This essay has aimed to provide a loose framework for
more extensive research. There are, therefore, many angles and ideas central to the emergence of this community that were not
covered. Perceptions of Chinese from Africans in China and Africans in Africa, for example, could enrich our understanding of this
complex Sino-African cultural exchange. However, I decided to focus on the perceptions and representations of Africans in what I
call the Chinese imagination because I believe that, as a first step, this analysis could help sketch out possible paths for further
historical and
of Africa and Africans in the Chinese imagination often inform certain
prejudices that mark the experiences of African migrants within the borders of the
Peoples Republic of China. While I am not trying to racialise the African presence in China, I do try to problematise the
research. Two final points, however, must be made. First, in the introduction, I advanced the following thesis:
popular perceptions
fact that Chinese official discourse does not seem to be coherent with the treatment of Africans in Guangzhou, and seems to be
informed by the negative perceptions and representations highlighted throughout this paper. While the perpetuation of these
stereotypes is not entirely the Chinese governments fault, it is important to take into consideration Shens suggestion about the
close relationship between popular perceptions and the composition of official discourse in China. This is relevant, because I believe
that a case could be made for the following thesis in a future study: the stance that the Chinese government adopts in its treatment of
the African diasporic population within its borders could arguably mirror the governments prevailing (real) approach to African
continental affairs. At this stage, I suspect that the Chinese government keeps quiet about what happens in Guangzhou with regard
to the treatment and harassment of the African population, because it is not coherent with its own slogans of multiculturalism,
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Afro-Orientalism
diversity and partnership towards Africa and Africans. Second, as the evidence presented in this research clearly shows, there is no
distinction between the different African groups in Chinese representations. Arguably, within the Chinese imagination (and also for
some researchers) it does not matter if the migrant is from Ghana or Cameroon they are all Africans. This
attitude
reinforces the discredited notion of an African culture and provides a safe haven for a plethora
of negative stereotypes. I strongly believe that these stereotypes have to be challenged
and eventually demystified. I also think that the imaginary unity of African communities purely based on skincolour and ignoring sub-national narratives has to be problematised. The case of African migration to China is an interesting one
because it challenges common understandings of migration studies. Inclusion, or assimilation, of Africans into Chinese society is far
from becoming a reality in China, assimilation of foreigners is practically inexistent, legally and socially. No matter how long you
stay in China, no matter how well you perform Chineseness, you can never become Chinese as you can become French, I was told
by a woman from Mali that had been living in Beijing for ten years. Isabel Morais, in her analysis of the African experience in Macau,
reminds us how difficult it is for Africans to become legal citizens sometimes not even marriage with a Chinese national can grant
a legal status to Africans from certain countries. Finally, the diasporic identities that are being created in China also challenge the
traditional canon in that the immigrant is not living the experience of adapting to a Western or First World country/culture. Against
this framework of global migration, deterritorialisation and the transnationalisation of migrant communities, we need to endeavour
to decentre diasporic and migration studies.
Super exploitation DA Their economistic understanding of the

world cannot explain the enjoyment of plantation masters in
watching their slaves work, and brutally raping and dismembering
them because it would only make them less productive and valuable.
The affirmatives recognition of the intersection of economistic,
material, and libidinal violence is a necessary component of resolving
the position of blackness.
Wilderson 5 (Frank Wilderson III, January 2005 [Gramscis Black Marx: Whither the
Slave in Civil Society
http://bmorereadinggroup.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/frank_gramsci.pdf - ERW)
Capital was kick-started by the rape of the African continent . This phenomenon is central to
neither Gramsci nor Marx. The theoretical importance of emphasizing this in the early 21st century is two-fold: First, the socio-political order
of the New World (Spillers 1987: 67) was kick-started by approaching a particular
body (a Black body) with direct relations of force, not by approaching a White body
with variable capital. Thus, one could say that slaverythe accumulation of Black bodies
regardless of their utility as laborers (Hartman; Johnson) through an idiom of despotic power (Patterson)is closer
to capital's primal desire than is waged oppression the exploitation of unraced bodies (Marx, Lenin,
Gramsci) that labor through an idiom of rational/symbolic (the wage) power: A relation of terror as opposed to a relation of hegemony.3 Secondly, today, late
capital is imposing a renaissance of this original desire, direct relations of
force (the prison industrial complex), the despotism of the unwaged relation: and this Renaissance
of slavery has, once again, as its structuring image in libidinal economy,
and its primary target in political economy, the Black body. The value of reintroducing the
unthought category of the slave, by way of noting the absence of the Black subject, lies in the Black subjects potential for extending the demand placed on state/capital
formations because its re- introduction into the discourse expands the intensity of the antagonism. In other words, the slave makes a demand, which is in excess of the demand
made by the worker. The worker demands that productivity be fair and democratic (Gramsci's new hegemony, Lenin's dictatorship of the proletariat), the slave, on the other
The absence of
Black subjectivity from the crux of marxist discourse is symptomatic of the
discourse's inability to cope with the possibility that the generative subject of capitalism, the Black body of
the 15th and 16th centuries, and the generative subject that resolves late-capital's over-accumulation crisis, the Black (incarcerated) body
of the 20th and 21st centuries, do not reify the basic categories which structure marxist
conflict: the categories of work, production, exploitation, historical self-awareness and, above all, hegemony. If, by way of the Black subject, we consider the underlying
hand, demands that production stop; stop without recourse to its ultimate democratization. Work is not an organic principle for the slave.
grammar of the question What does it mean to be free? that grammar being the question What does it mean to suffer? then we come up against a grammar of suffering not only
in excess of any semiotics of exploitation, but a grammar of suffering beyond signification itself, a suffering that cannot be spoken because the gratuitous 3 Its important to bear
in mind that for Hartman, Johnson, Patterson, and Spillers
the libidinal economy of slavery is more
Engh, Ousaf Moqeet
Afro-Orientalism
fundamental to its institutionality than is the political economy: in other

words, the constituent element of slavery involves desire and the
accumulation of Black bodies and the fact that they existed as things
becoming being for the captor (Spillers 1987: 67). The fact the Black slaves labored is a historical variable, seemingly constant, but
not a constituent element. terror of White supremacy is as much contingent upon the irrationality of White fantasies and shared pleasures as it is upon a logicthe logic of
capital. It extends beyond texualization. When talking about this terror, Cornel West uses the term black invisibility and namelessness to designate, at the level of ontology,
what we are calling a scandal at the level of discourse. He writes: [America's] unrelenting assault on black humanity produced the fundamental condition of black culture -- that
of black invisibility and namelessness. On the crucial existential level relating to black invisibility and namelessness, the first difficult challenge and demanding discipline is to
ward off madness and discredit suicide as a desirable option. A central preoccupation of black culture is that of confronting candidly the ontological wounds, psychic scars, and
existential bruises of black people while fending off insanity and self- annihilation. This is why the "ur-text" of black culture is neither a word nor a book, not and architectural
monument or a legal brief. Instead, it is a guttural cry and a wrenching moan -- a cry not so much for help as for home, a moan less out of complaint than for recognition. (80-
the Black subject position in America is an antagonism, a demand that

can not be satisfied through a transfer of ownership /organization of existing rubrics; whereas
the Gramscian subject, the worker, represents a demand that can indeed be satisfied by way
81) Thus,
worker calls
into question the legitimacy of productive
practices, the slave calls into question the
legitimacy of productivity itself
of a successful War of Position, which brings about
the end of exploitation. The
. From the positionality of the worker the question, What does it
mean to be free? is raised. But the question hides the process by which the discourse assumes a hidden grammar which has already posed and answered the question, What does
Thus, exploitation (wage

slavery) is the only category of oppression which concerns Gramsci: society, Western
society, thrives on the exploitation of the Gramscian subject. Full stop. Again, this is inadequate, because it would
call White supremacy "racism" and articulate it as a derivative
phenomenon of the capitalist matrix, rather than incorporating White
supremacy as a matrix constituent to the base, if not the base itself . What I am saying is
it mean to suffer? And that grammar is organized around the categories of exploitation (unfair labor relations or wage slavery).
that the insatiability of the slave demand upon existing structures means that it cannot find its articulation within the modality of hegemony (influence, leadership, consent)
the Black body can not give its consent because generalized trust, the precondition for the solicitation of consent, equals racialized whiteness (Lindon Barrett). Furthermore,
as Orland Patterson points out, slavery is natal alienation by way of social death, which is to say that a slave has no symbolic currency or material labor power to exchange: a
slave does not enter into a transaction of value (however asymmetrical) but is subsumed by direct relations of force, which is to say that a slave is an articulation of a despotic
irrationality whereas the worker is an articulation of a symbolic rationality. White supremacys despotic irrationality is as foundational to American institutionality as
capitalisms symbolic rationality because, as Cornel West writes, it... ...dictates the limits of the operation of American democracy -- with black folk the indispensable sacrificial
lamb vital to its sustenance. Hence black subordination constitutes the necessary condition for the flourishing of American democracy, the tragic prerequisite for America itself.
This is, in part, what Richard Wright meant when he noted, "The Negro is America's metaphor." (72) And it is well known that a metaphor comes into being through a violence
marxism can only come

to grips with America's structuring rationality -- what it calls capitalism, or
political economy; but cannot come to grips with America's structuring irrationality:
the libidinal economy of White supremacy, and its hyper-discursive
violence which kills the Black subject that the concept, civil society, may
live. In other words, from the incoherence of Black death, America generates the
coherence of White life. This is important when thinking the Gramscian paradigm (and its
progenitors in the world of U.S. social movements today) which is so dependent on the empirical status of hegemony and civil society:
struggles over hegemony are seldom, if ever, asignifyingat some point they require
coherence, they require categories for the recordwhich means they
contain the seeds of anti-Blackness. Let us illustrate this by way of a hypothetical scenario. In the early part of the 20th century,
which kills, rather than merely exploits, the object, that the concept might live. West's interventions help us see how
civil society in Chicago grew up, if you will, around emerging industries such as meat packing. In his notes on Americanism and Fordism (280-314), Gramsci explores the
scientific management of Taylorism, the prohibition on alcohol, and Fordist interventions into the working class family, which formed the ideological, value-laden grid of civil
society in places like turn of the century Chicago: It is worth drawing attention to the way in which industrialists (Ford in particular) have been concerned with the sexual affairs
of their employees and with their family arrangements in general. One should not be misled, any more than in the case of prohibition, by the puritanical appearance assumed
by this concern. The truth is that the new type of man demanded by the rationalization of production and work cannot be developed until the sexual instinct has been suitably
regulated and until it too has been rationalized. (Prison Notebooks 296- 297) The discourse of this suitable regulation and rationalization underwrote the common sense
which hailed the proletariat through the influence, leadership, and spontaneous consent of an ensemble of questions (hegemony) and simultaneously crowded out the project
of transforming proletarian shards and We Write January 2005 2(1) 8 fragments of good sense into a revolutionary project. Gramsci called it a psycho-physical adaptation
to the new industrial structure [pre-Crash], aimed for through high wages (286). And it meant that the working class struggle was pre-hegemony existing, he suggested, still in
defense of craft rights against industrial liberty (Ibid). In this scenario a war of position has yet to commence because even unions, the vanguard of the working class, were
simply the corporate expression of the rights of qualified crafts and therefore the industrialists attempts to curb them [had] a certain progressive aspect (Ibid.). Gramscis
preceding diagnosis is indicative of his well known pessimism of the intellect but it also contains the glimmer of his optimism of the will. For the unflinching nature of his
analysis illustrates the moves that the worker must make (against Americanism and Fordism) in order to bring about the flowering of the superstructure (a War of Position)
so that the fundamental question of hegemony [can be] posed (Ibid.). But we must ask ourselves, for whom does his analysis provide an optimism of the will? Most American
political theorists and social moment activists have not pried open even the crevice of a doubt about the Gramscian Dreams applicability to all U.S. positions, which Gramsci
himself acknowledges when he writes: The absence of the European historical phase, marked even in the economic field by the French Revolution, has left American popular
masses in a backward state. To this should be added the absence of national homogeneity, the mixture of race-cultures, the negro question [Emphasis mine]. (286-87) For the
sake our scenariothe impact of a successful War of Position on our hypothetical meat packing plantlet us not refer to the question as the negro question. Instead, let us call
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it the cow question. Let us suppose that the superstructure has finally flowered, and that throughout the various fronts where the power to pose the question held by the
private initiatives and associations elaborated by the industrialists, hegemony has now been called into question and a war of position has been transposed into a war of
maneuver. The scandal which the Black subject position threatens Gramscian discourse with is manifest in the subject's ontological disarticulation of Gramscian categories:
work, progress, production, exploitation, hegemony, and historical self- awareness. Gramscis notes on Americanism and Fordism demonstrate his acumen in expressing how
the drama of value is played out away from the slaughter house (civil society: i.e. the family), while being imbricated and foundational to the class exploitation which workers
The
desiring machine of capital and White supremacy manifest in society two
dreams, imbricated but, I would argue, distinct: the dream of worker exploitation and the dream of
Black accumulation and death. Nowhere in Gramsci can one find sufficient
reassurance that, once the dream of worker exploitation has been smashed
once the superstructure, civil society, has flowered and the question of hegemony has been posed the dream of Black
accumulation and death will be thrown into crisis as well. I submit that death of the Black body is (a)
experience within the slaughter house. But still we must ask, what about the cows? The cows are not being exploited, they are being accumulated and, if need be, killed.
foundational to the life of American civil society (just as foundational as it is to the drama of valuewage slavery) and (b) foundational to the fantasy space of desires which
underwrite the industrialists hegemony and which underwrite the workers potential for, and realization of, what Gramsci calls good sense. Thus, a whole set of new and
difficult, perhaps un-Gramscian, questions emerge at the site of our meat packing plant in the throes of its War of Maneuver. First, how would the cows fare under a dictatorship
of the proletariat? Would cows experience freedom at the mere knowledge that theyre no longer being slaughtered in an economy of exchange predicated on exploitation? In
other words, would it feel more like freedom to be slaughtered by a workers collective where there was no exploitation, where the working day was not a minute longer than time
it took reproduce workers needs and pleasures, as opposed to being slaughtered in the exploitative context of that dreary old nine to five? Secondly, in the river of common
sense does the flotsam of good sense have a message in a bottle that reads Workers of the World Become Vegetarians!? Finally, is it enough to just stop eating meat? In other
words, can the Gramscian worker simply give the cows their freedom, grant them emancipation, and have it be meaningful to the cows? The cows need some answers before they
raise a hoof for the flowering of the superstructure. The cows bring us face to face with the limitations of a Gramscian formulation of the question, what does it mean to be
exploitation (rather than

accumulation and death) is at the heart of the Gramscian question, what does it mean to sufferand thus crowds out
analysis of civil societys foundation of despotic terror and White pleasure
by way of the accumulation of Black bodiesthe Gramscian question also
functions as a crowding out scenario of the Black subject herself/himself,
and is indexical of a latent anti-Blackness which Black folks experience in
the most sincere of social movements. So, when Buttigieg tells us that: The
struggle against the domination of the few over the many, if it is be successful, must be rooted in a
free? by revealing the limitations of the ways in which it formulates the question, what does it mean to suffer? Because
careful formulation of a counterhegemonic conception of the social order, in the dissemination of such a conception, and in the formation of counterhegemonic institutions
can only take place in civil society and actually require an expansion of
civil society [Emphasis mine]... (31) ...a chill runs down our spine. For this required
expansion requires the intensification and proliferation of civil societys
constituent element: Black accumulation and death.
which
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2AC Baudrillard
Seduction and reversibility are conspiracies of power which operate
through logics of willed submission and mutual benevolence between
dominated and domineer. This euphemizes the antagonistic fissures
inflicted within master-slave relations.
Hartman 1997 (Saidiya Hartman professor of English and comparative literature at
Columbia University | Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in nineteenthcentury America, Oxford University Press, 1997 ERW)
-Reversibility and seduction operates through mystified conception of power claiming it is alterable through the
subaltern destabilizing the domineer.
-Parasitic upon antagonistic fissures equivalent to saying black women should let themselves get raped because that
is an instance of seducing or tinkering with power if they arent free, they arent trying hard enough. Assumes that
master-slave relations can be contingently morphed.
-Distancing DA Baudrilard crafts theories which fall benign in the face of violence.
The construction of black subjectivity as will-less, abject, insatiate and pained, and the
instrumental deployment of sexuality in the reproduction of property, subordination, and
racial difference usurped the category of rape. Sexuality formed the nexus in which black,
female, and chattel were inextricably bound, and acted to intensify the constraints of chattel status by
subjecting the body to another order of violations and whims.23 The despotic ravages of power made violence
indistinguishable from the full enjoyment of the thing. The tensions generated by the law's dual invocation of property
and person, or by "full enjoyment" and limited protection to life and limb, were masked by the phantasmal ensnaring agency of the
lascivious black.24 Rape
disappeared through the intervention of seduction-the assertion

of the slave woman's complicity and willful submission. Seduction was central to the very
constitution and imagination of the antebellum South, for it provided a way of masking the antagonistic
fissures of the social by pathologizing the black body and licensing barbarous forms of white
enjoyment. The discourse of seduction enabled those like Mary Boykin Chestnut, who were disgusted and enraged by the
sexual arrangements of slavery, to target slave women as the agents of their husbands' downfall. The
complicity of slave women displaced the act of sexual violence. According to Chestnut, decent
white women were forced to live with husbands degraded by the lowliness of their enslaved "mistresses": "Under slavery, we lived
surrounded by prostitutes, yet an abandoned woman is sent out of any decent house. Who thinks any worse of a Negro or mulatto
woman for being a thing we can't name?" (Chestnut 21). The sexual
exploitation of the enslaved female,

incredulously, served as evidence of her collusion with the master class and as
evidence of her power, the power both to render the master weak and, implicitly, to be the
mistress of her own subjection. The slave woman not only suffered the responsibility for her sexual
(ab)use, but was blameworthy because of her purported ability to render the powerful
weak. Even those like Fanny Kemble, who eloquently described the "simple horror and misery" that slave women regularly
experienced, were able to callously exclaim, when confronted with the inescapable normativity of rape and the "string of detest- able
details" that comprised the life of the enslaved woman, as yet another woman, Sophy, shared her experience of violation: "Ah! but
don't you know-did nobody ever teach any of you that it is a sin to live with men who are not your husbands?!" (Kemble 270).25
Sophy, appropriately and vehemently responded: "Oh, yes, missis, we know-we know all about dat well enough; but we do anything
to get our poor flesh some rest from the whip; when he made me follow him into de bush, what use me tell him no? he have strength
the
eliding of sexual violence by the imputation of the slave woman's ensnaring sexual agency or lack of virtue, and the
presumption of consent as consequence of the utter powerlessness of her "no" (the "no means yes" philosophy) are important
constituents of the discourse of seduction. In a more expansive or generic sense, seduction denotes a theory of power
to make me" (Kemble 270). The equivocations which surround issues of consensual sexual relations under domination,
that demands the absolute and "perfect" submission of the enslaved as the guiding principle of slave relations, and yet seeks to
mitigate the avowedly necessary brutality of slave relations through the shared affections of owner and captive. The doctrine of
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"perfect submission" reconciled violence and the claims of mutual benevolence between master
and slave as necessary in maintaining the harmony of the institution. The presumed
mutuality of feelings in maintaining domination enchanted the brutal and direct violence of
master-slave relations. The term seduction is employed here to designate this displacement and
euphemization of violence, for seduction epitomizes the discursive alchemy which shrouds direct forms of violence
beneath the "veil of enchanted relations," that is, the reciprocal and mutual relations of master and slave
(Bourdieu). This mining of the discourse of seduction attempts to illuminate the violence obscured by the veil through an
interrogation of the language of power and feelings, specifically the manipulations of the weak and the kind-heartedness and moral
instruction of the powerful. The
benign representation of the paternal institution in slave law constituted the master-slave
relationship as typified by the bonds of affection, and thereby transformed relations of violence and
domination into those of affinity. This benignity depended upon a construction of the
enslaved black as one easily inclined to submission, a skilled maneuverer wielding weakness masterfully, and as
a potentially threatening insubordinate who could only be disciplined through violence. If what is at stake in social fantasy
is the construction of a non-antagonistic, organic, and complementary society , then
the ability of the South to imagine slavery as a paternal and benign institution and master-slave relations as bound by feelings
depended on the specter of the obsequious and threatening slave,26 for this manichean construction undergirded both the necessary
violence and the bonds of affection set forth in slave law. As well, this
fantasy enabled a vision of whiteness

defined primarily by its complementary relation to blackness and by the desire to incorporate
and regulate black excess. Seduction thus provided a holistic vision of social order, not divided
by antagonisms, and precariously balancing barbarism and civilization, violence and protection, mutual benevolence and
absolute submission, and brutality and sentiment. This harmonious vision of community was made possible
by the exercise of violence, the bonds of affection, and the consonance of the weak and the powerful. How does seduction
uphold perfect submission and, at the same time, assert the alluring, if not endangering, agency of the dominated? By forwarding the
strength of weakness. As a theory of power, seduction
contends that there is an ostensible equality

between the dominant and the dominated. The dominated acquire power based upon the identification of
force and feeling. As Baudrillard writes, "seduction play(s) triumphantly with weakness" (83). The artifice of
weakness not only provides seduction with its power, but defines its essential character, for the enactment of weakness and the
"impenetrable obscurity" of femininity and blackness harbor a conspiracy of power (Baudrillard 83). The
dominated
catalyze reversals of power, not by challenges presented to the system but by succumbing to the system's
logic. Thus power comes to be defined not by domination but by the manipulations of the
dominated. The reversibility of power and the play of the dominated discredit the force of violence
through the assertion of reciprocal and contubernal relations. In this regard, the recognition of the agency of the
dominated and the power of the weak secure the fetters of subjection, while proclaiming the power and influence of those shackled
and tethered. The pro-slavery ideologue George Fitzhugh, like Baudrillard, also celebrated
the reversibility of
power enacted through surrender. In Cannibals All! or, Slaves Without Masters, Fitzhugh argued that the strength of
weakness disrupts the hierarchy of power within the family, as well as the master-slave relationship. Appearances
conspire to contrary purposes, thus the seemingly weak slave, like the infant or (white) woman, exercises capricious
dominion: "The dependent exercise, because of their dependence, as much control over their superiors, in most things, as those
superiors exercise over them. Thus and thus only, can conditions be equalized" (Fitzhugh 204-5). Seduction appears
to be a necessary labor, one required to extend and reproduce the claims of power, though advanced in the guise of the
subaltern's control and disruptions: "The humble and obedient slave exercises more or less control
over the most brutal and hard-hearted master. It is an invariable law of nature, that weakness and dependence are
elements of strength, and generally sufficiently limit that universal despotism, observable throughout human and animal nature"
(Fitzhugh 205). If, as Fitzhugh insists, the greatest slave is the master of the household, and the enslaved rule by virtue of the
"strength of weakness," then, in effect, the slave is made the master of her subjection. As Fitzhugh
envisioned, kindness and affection undergirded the relations of subordination and dependency. As a model of social order, the
patriarchal family depended upon duty, status, and protection, rather than consent, equality, and civil freedom. Subjection was not
only naturalized but consonant with the sentimental equality of reciprocity, inasmuch as the power of affection licensed the strength
of weakness. Essentially, "the strength of weakness" prevailed due to the goodness of the father, "the armor of affection and
benevolence." The generosity of the father enabled the victory claimed by the slave, the tyrannical child, and the brooding wife. The
bonds of affection within the slaveholding family circle permitted the tyranny of weakness, and supplanted the stranglehold of the
ruling father. Ironically, the family circle remained intact as much by the bonds of affection as by the tyranny of the weak. Literally,
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theforces of affection bound the interests of the master and slave in a delicate state of equilibrium, as one form of strength modified
the other. Thus, we
are to believe that the exercise of control by the weak softens universal
despotism, subdues the power of the father by commanding his care, and guarantees the harmony of slave
relations. Seduction erects a family romance, in this case, the elaboration of a racial and sexual fantasy in which domination is
transposed into the bonds of mutual affection, subjection idealized as the pathway to equality, and perfect subordination declared
the means of ensuring great happiness and harmony. The patriarchal model of social order erected by Fitzhugh marries equality and
despotism through an explicit critique of consent, possessive individualism, and contractual relations. Feelings rather than contract
are the necessary corrective to universal despotism, therefore duty and reciprocity rather than consent provide the basis for equality.
The despotic and sovereign power celebrated by Fitzhugh could only be abated by the bonds of affection, a phrase which resonates
a
conspiracy of power resides within seduction, then questions arise as to the exact nature of this
conspiracy: Who seduces whom? Does the slave become en- trapped in the enchanted web of the
owner's dominion, lured by promises of protection and care? Does the guile and subterfuge of the dependent
with the ambivalence attendant to the attach- ments and constraints which characterize the relation of owner and object. If
mitigate the effects of power? Are the manipulations and transgressions of the dominated fated to reproduce the very order
presumably challenged by such actions? Or do such enactments on the part of the owner and the enslaved, the feigned concessions
of power and the stylized performance of naivete, effect any shifts or disruptions of force, or compulsively restage power and
powerlessness?
Baudrillards totalizing abstractions create a form of sign fetishism which fails to

explain the material violence of anti-black terror semiotic idealism does
nothing for the people directly impacted by worldly violence the alt is docility.
Best 91 [Steven Best, Douglas Kellner; Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations; 1991] J|
L
Furthermore, Baudrillard's
analysis operates on an excessively high level of abstraction . He fails to

make key distinctions and engages in misplaced abstraction. For instance, Ron Silliman pointed out in his response to
Baudrillard at the Montana conference that Baudrillard failed to distinguish between tranvestism and
transexuality. Transvestites play at dressing as members of the opposite sex and enjoy the 'gender fucking' and subversion of
dress codes; transsexuals, by contrast, are often tortured and suffering individuals who can appear uncomfortable in either sex as
evidenced by the high rate of suicides of those who undergo sex change operations. But human
suffering is erased from

Baudril- lard's semiological universe which abstractly describes certain sign spectacles
abstracted from material underpinnings. The same bad abstraction appears in his travelogue America (1988d).
Baudrillard speeds through the desert of America and merely sees signs floating by. He looks at
Reagan on TV and sees only his smile. He hangs out in southern California and concludes that
the United States is a 'realized utopia'. He fails to see, however, the homeless, the poor, racism
and sexism, people dying of AIDS, oppressed immigrants, and fails to relate any of to the
vicissitudes of capitalism (he the phenomena observed denies that capital ever existed in America !), or to the
conser- vative political hegemony of the 1980s. Baudrillard's imaginary is thus a highly abstract
sign fetishism which abstracts from social relations and political economy in order to perceive
the play of signs in the transvestite spectacles of the transaesthetic, transsexual, and
transpolitical. Baudrillard's 'trans' manoeuvres, however, are those of an idealist skimming the
surface of appearances while speeding across an environment which he never contextualizes,
understands, or really comes to terms with. Indeed, Baudrillard's erasure of the fundamentality
of sexual and racial differences is highly insensitive and even grotesque . Most blacks and people
of colour experience virulent racism in the United States and the fact of racial difference
Baudrillard to the contrary remains a salient feature of contemporary US society. Most blacks do
not achieve the media fame and wealth of a Michael Jackson and cannot easily mix racial and sexual features in new configurations.
As is obvious to anyone who has lived for any length of time in the United States, racial oppression and difference is a deep-rooted
Baudrillard's
current positions are profoundly super- ficial and are characterized by sloppy generalizations,
feature of contemporary US society from which Baudrillard abstracts in his 'theory' of fractal value. Indeed,
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extreme abstraction, semiological idealism and oft repeated banalities, such as: we are in a 'postorgy condition' of simulations, entropy, fractal subjects, indifference, transvestism, and so on,
ad nauseam. If he were merely expressing opinions or claiming to present a possible perspective on things, one would be able to
enjoy his pataphysical meanderings, but Baudrillard's writing is increasingly pretentious, claiming to
describe 'the real state of things', to speak for the masses, and to tell 'us' what we really believe .
For instance, the essay on 'Transaesthetics' opens with the declamation: It is commonly held that the avant-garde no longer exists,
whether this avant-garde is sexual, political or artistic; that this
movement which corresponds to the linear

acceleration of a history, to an anticipatory capacity and henceforth of a radical critique in the
name of desire, in the name of the revolution, in the name of the liberation of forms, that this
revolutionary movement has come to a close. Essentially this is true. This glorious movement which is called
modernity did not lead us to a transmutation of all values, as we had once dreamed, but to a dissemination and involution of value
which resulted in a state of utter confusion for us. This confusion expresses itself, first and foremost, by our inability to grasp anew
the principle of an aesthetic determinacy of things, might it be political or sexual. Baudrillard
thus contradicts himself

in denying that reality exists any longer in an era of simulations and hyperreality, and then
constantly appealing to 'the real conditions of things today'. Note also the glib references to 'this is true' and
'utter confusion' that has resulted 'for us', while pointing to 'our inability' to perceive this or that. The easy complicity of
Baudrillard and the masses, him and 'us', is pretentious and hypocritical in addition, for the
implication of the whole lecture is that he really understands what is going on while 'we' remain
confused and deluded. His positions are grounded in mere subjective intuition or ironic play
which he wants to pass off as profound truths and which his gullible followers appropriately
praise. Despite postmodern critiques of totalizing thought, Baudrillard represents totalizing
thought at its worst and despite critiques of representational thought which is confident that it is
describing reality as it is, Baudrillard foists his musings and asides as insight into the very heart
of things.
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2AC Deleuze
Deleuzian abstraction relies upon a structure of ontological privilege
premising that all bodies can assimilate into immanence and escape
initiates discussions of futurity which obfuscate the specificity of
identity politics.
Yountae, 2013 - Visiting Assistant Professor @ Lebanon Valley College. PhD. In
philosophical religion (An; Beginning in the Middle: Deleuze, Glissant, and Colonial
Difference; Published Book; Pg. 290-292; DOA: 9/17/15)
While Braidotti acknowledges the historical legacy of colonialism and violence , the middle, in her
reading of Glissant, still remains a privileged ground for a politics of becoming (Braidotti 2006: 68). For
both Deleuze and Glissant, the middle is the space in which intensities and creative potential are being
channeled. As it has been discussed so far, for Glissant, the intensities in the middle enfold the roiling water of darkness. It is important to note
that while it is not often acknowledged by many critics, for Deleuze too, the middle includes the substratum of dark
negativity just as he claims that in the Baroque, harmony always goes through a crisis that leads
to a broadened chromatic scale, to an emancipation of dissonance or of unresolved accords,
accords not brought back to tonality (Deleuze 1993: 93). Even chaos, adds Deleuze, the matrix out of
which the world is made and which contains all colors, emerges out of the uscum subnigrum
(the dark background of the soul in Leibniz), the depthless shadow of darkness (1993: 93). Contrary to
Braidot- tis nomadic middle, for both Deleuze and Glissant, the middle is the space of becoming in which the
darkness of the depth gives rise to an ever new act of beginning. Braidottis nomadic ethics
shows how a radical thinking falls easily into the trap of Eurocentrism when it fails to take into
account the colonial difference and the bottomless dimension of the historical trauma, which
cracks open the ontological ground of the colonial subject who drifts between the first
innumerable long-ago and the second all too easily enumerated present (Britton 1999: 41). On the other hand,
while Deleuze might still hold accountable to the postcolonial context, I argue that Deleuzes depersonalised and
decontextualised language is hardly capable of capturing the full depth of the colonial trauma or
colonial difference that constitute the ontological edifice of the colonised subject . It follows that
when such philosophical ideas are translated into a political language and applied universally to
different political contexts, it results in a disregard of the weight of history and the need of a
different kind of political imagination. Concluding remarks Glissants decolonial imagination is shaped by this irremediable gap
that splits the colonial subject. The middle, for Glissant, is an unde(te)rmined ground or groundlessness (abyss), for the Martinican reality is trapped
between the unending collective memory of suffering and the still absurd present. The
notion of freedom as arduously

advocated by philosophical nomadism is based on an ontological privilege, which enables the
subject to name the present in relation to a past and a future that is conceivable. Glissants decolonial
poetics stands as the refusal of such privileged time and space constituting the ontological ground of the Western-nomadic subject. Nevertheless, this is
not a project constrained to the past or a refusal to accept the present. Rather, it points to the present of people whose reality is breached with the
coloniality of Being: people for whom the denied past has not yet been materi- alised; people whose present socio-reality is in an immediate continuity
with the absurd past. The solid ground underlying Braidottis nomadic thought refers to the middle as an eventive space inhabited by the creative
affirmations of the life of free subjects. On the other hand, the ground, in Glissants decolonial poetics, is another name for the precarious
groundlessness of being, which can only be glimpsed in the collective work of taking upon oneself the weight of the unbearable past and naming the
A critical contribution that Glissant made for thinking the meaning of the middle
in relation to the past and trauma is that he urges us to turn to Relation amidst suffering. In his
endeavor to make sense of the fragmented sense of (collective) identity after catastrophe,
Glissant elaborates the trope of Relation. The key to envisioning the future, which is a seemingly
impossible project when looked at from the colonial abyss, lies in the liberating power of
Relation as the abyss, the abyss of suffering in particular, makes one see the freeing knowledge
of Relation within the Whole (Glissant 1997: 8). This is another reason why the tragically sad landscape of the Caribbean islands and
unspeakable present.
the history that accompanies it is, at the same time, beautiful. The horrifying abyss of time is, paradoxically, the very womb in which the shared
experience of suffering gives rise to a vision of future, relationality, and a collective sense of identity. Rhizomatic multiplicity arises out of this
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topographical matrix composed of relations: a bottomless middle where finitude and vulnerability bear the soil for new relations and new beginnings.
even when the

particularity of each traumatic event can not be shared, what trauma nonetheless forces us to
share is the experience of a limit, the limit as shared, or the finite sharing of finitude (Cetinic 2010:
292). The underdeveloped trope of relation in Deleuze and Braidotti becomes, in Glissant, the very
material through which he transposes the void of loss, the painful middle of the fragmented
history. Immanent multiplicity and nomadic subjectivity certainly expose their limits when
confined to the obsessive terms of self-affirmation, movement, and endless becoming . It is then
As Marija Cetinic remarked in her reflection on the thoughts of Jean-Luc Nancy in their relation to trauma and community,
Glissant who epitomises an alternative set of terms for embodying multiplicity and immanence differently. The embrace of finitude needs not be a
denial of the present, a regression to the past or a refusal to (re)construct the future. Rather, Glissant shows us that the humble submission to finitude
signifies the middle space in which the unified, sovereign self is dissolved and the liberating power of relation propels the self forward to the opaque
future. The freeing power of becoming and multiplicity is glimpsed perhaps in this groundless middle, which as Glissant remarks, will allow each
person, each creolised self to be there and elsewhere, rooted and open, lost in the mountains and free beneath the sea, in harmony and in errantry
(Glissant 1997: 34).
Their generic evidence about identity politics is embarrassing.

Blackness announces the End of the Grid-Logic.
Fred Moten 14 (Notes on Passage (The New International of Sovereign Feelings),
Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International, Volume 3, Issue 1 DOI:
10.1353/pal.2014.0010)
This experimental invagination, this slit or envelope in space-time, is given not so much as multiple points of entry but rather as the
division and collection of entry as such so that Anna Julia Coopers resonant phrase where
and when I enter is

properly understood as a black feminist announcement and enunciation of quantum reality at
both the cosmological and the subatomic levels, where and when both where and when are
beside themselves, as intrications of compulsive, propulsive, percussive, percaressive,
anarecursive, anaprogressive clearing; as no room, no place, amenitys absence, its out of phase,
nonstandard noncontemporaneity, where and when the laws of (meta)physics break down in
hapticalitys terrible, beautiful intensities. This syncopic feint and faked book, this unbooked, annotated, immanent
praes- thesis, does not impose the implication that physics is wrong to be concerned with the theory of everything; its just that we
must also be concerned with the theory of nothing. The interplay of physics and blackness is precisely at this intersectionthis
mutual sexual cutof the theory of nothing and the theory of everything. And
who are the theorists of everything

and nothing, everywhere and nowhere? Refugees, flightlings, black things, whose dissident
passage through understanding is often taken for a kind of lawless freedom. It is precisely in
the interest of such theory that one looks forward with great anticipation to Wrights address of this problematic in her work on the
physics of blackness even as one considers that whats really at stake, here, is the blackness of physics. Black
enlightenment,
the dark materiality of another way of thinking the universe, is how I understand this echoic
anepistemology of passage, this pedagogy of crossing to which Clarke, at least, still manages to gesture. 46 It is
the thought that emerges from the experience of time itself having been put in motion. As Wright knows, it is one of the very
theoretical physicists she cites in her response to Clarke, Lee
Smolin, whose account of quantum physics allows

and asks us to consider that the cessation of historical movement to which Hegel consigns Africa
is, in fact, nothing other than a belated and compensatory projection of the geometric and geographic
seizure to which Descartes consigned not only European thought but Europe itself. Smolin
appears, in my understanding, to resist that spatialization of time. He seeks to unfreeze
timeto represent time without turning it into space, a transformation the fixed coordinates of
the graph imposed upon the straight-ahead discontinuity of the timeline, whose minimalist
suggestion of motions arrowed, uncontained endlessness can at least be said to have figured an
escape from the graphs exacting incarceration of curvature . 47 But this is not about preferring the latter to the
former. Wright challenges what Heidegger calls the vulgar concept of time, and seemingly as a matter of course it is a certain
figure of the African American, in the fallen, ordinary sociality of a quite popular configuration of her within
some newly arisen subdivisions of public intellectual life , who constitutes the bad example ; but what Smolin is trying
Engh, Ousaf Moqeet
Afro-Orientalism
to cut is what he calls background dependent theories, such as the one that Kant, by way of Newton, codifies under the rubric of
the transcendental aesthetic. 48 Einsteins
general theory disrupts that background, disrupts its

sanctioning of a highly restrictive mode of representation, precisely in the
experience/performance of dynamic, interactive fields which I will call, by way of Darby English but against his
grain, black representational space, a field whose intricacies and intimacies even quantum
mechanics has yet to approach. 49 Black representational space is the hold of the ship.
Black representational space is a language lab. Strong and weak interaction not just in constraint but in
exhaustion, where the submerged (if not subatomic) and the cosmological converge. That space is nowhere or is,
at least not there but elsewhere, accessible through flight and/or fantasy but not
calculation. Not there is where we remain, in motion. An exact coordinate is, it seems to me, what Wright desires, a home in
which (pre-)Westphalian has some universal meaning, defining our differential commonness by way of that putatively straight Eurospatialization of time and Euro-temporalization of space that used to be known as imperialism. But
where we were wasnt

there. The world was ever after elsewhere, no way where we were was there. 50 What if spacetime, the transcendental aesthetic, and the coherence/sovereignty it affords/imposes, is an
effect rather than a condition of experience? This is the question that the submerged connector or conductor, that
the interplay between nothing and everything, nowhere and everywhere, never and always, coalescence and differentiation, allows us
to ask. B-series? B Sirius. Actually
enter into the tortuous, torturous chamber of horrors and wonders

that constitute serial form, the seriality of our formation, the brutally beautiful medley of
carceral intrication, this patterning of holds and of what is held in the holds phonic vicinity (as
disappearance in/ and expanse, hole, whole, blackness). So that a certain circling or spiraling Mackey speaks of
suffers brokenness and crumpling, the imposition of irrational, terribly rationalized angles, compartments bearing nothing but
breath and battery in hunted, haunted, ungendered intimacy. Is there a kind of propulsion, through compulsion, that ruptures both
recursion and advance? What is the sound of this patterning? What does such apposition look like? What remains of eccentricity
after the relay between loss and restoration has its say or song?
Engh, Ousaf Moqeet
Afro-Orientalism
They conflate identarian flux with ontological autonomy Lines of

flights cant escape the structure of anti-blackness corporeal
experience is effaced and becoming is interrupted by the process of
racial epidermalization that endlessly imposes quotidian violence.
Fanon 52 (Frantz, psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and influential writer in the field
of post-colonial studies, Black Skin White Masks, 1952, Pages 82-88 ERW)
I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in
things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the
midst of other objects. Sealed into that crushing objecthood, I turned beseechingly to others. Their attention was a
"Dirty nigger!" Or simply, "Look, a Negro!"
liberation, running over my body suddenly abraded into nonbeing, endowing me once more with an agility that I had thought lost, and by taking me out
of the world, restoring me to it. But just as I reached the other side, I stumbled, and the movements, the attitudes, the glances of the other fixed me
there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye. I was indignant; I demanded an explanation. Nothing happened. I burst apart. Now
the fragments have been put together again by another self. As
long as the black person is among their own, he will

have no occasion, except in minor internal conflicts, to experience their being through others. There is of course the moment of
"being for others," of which Hegel speaks, but every ontology is made unattainable in a colonized and
civilized society. It would seem that this fact has not been given sufficient attention by those who have discussed the question. In the
Weltanschauung of a colonized people there is an impurity, a flaw that outlaws any ontological explanation . Someone
may object that this is the case with every individual, but such an objection merely conceals a basic problem. Ontology-once it is finally admitted
as leaving existence by the wayside-does not permit us to understand the being of the black person . For not only
must the black person be black; he must be black in relation to the white person. Some critics will take it on
themselves to remind us that this proposition has a converse. I say that this is false. The black person has no ontological
resistance in the eyes of the white person. Overnight the Negro has been given two frames of reference within
which he has had to place herself. Their metaphysics, or, less pretentiously, their customs and the sources on which they were based, were
wiped out because they were in conflict with a civilization that he did not know and that imposed itself on
them. The black person among their own in the twentieth century does not know at what moment their
inferiority comes into being through the other. Of course I have talked about the black problem with friends, or, more rarely,
with American Negroes. Together we protested, we asserted the equality of all people in the world. In the Antilles there was also that little gulf that
exists among the almost-white, the mulatto, and the nigger. But I was satisfied with an intellectual understanding of these differences. It was not really
dramatic. And then And then the occasion arose when I had to meet the white person's eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me. The real world
Consciousness
of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness. The body is
surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty. I know that if I want to smoke, I shall have to reach out my right
challenged my claims. In the white world the person of color encounters difficulties in the development of their bodily schema.
arm and take the pack of cigarettes lying at the other end of the table. The matches, however, are in the drawer on the left, and I shall have to lean back
slightly. And all these movements are made not out of habit but out of implicit knowledge. A slow composition of my self as a body in the middle of a
spatial and temporal world-such seems to be the schema. It does not impose itself on me; it is, rather, a definitive structuring of the self and of the
world-definitive because it creates a real dialectic between my body and the world. For several years certain laboratories
have been
trying to produce a serum for "denegrification"; with all the earnestness in the world, laboratories have sterilized their
test tubes, checked their scales, and embarked on researches that might make it possible for the miserable Negro
to whiten themself and thus to throw off the burden of that corporeal malediction . Below the corporeal
schema I had sketched a historico-racial schema. The elements that I used had been provided for me not by "residual sensations and perceptions
primarily of a tactile, vestibular, kinesthetic, and visual character;" but by the other, the white person who had woven me out of a thousand details,
anecdotes, stories. I
thought that what I had in hand was to construct a physiological self , to balance space, to
here I was called on for more. "Look a Negro!" It was an external stimulus that flicked over me as I passed
by. I made a tight smile. "Look, a Negro!" It was true. It amused me. "Look, a Negro!" The circle was drawing a
bit tighter. I made no secret of my amusement. 'Mama, see the Negro! Im frightened!" Frightened!
Frightened! Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had
become impossible. I could no longer laugh, because I already knew that there were legends, stories, history, and above all historicity, which
I had learned about from Jaspers. Then, assailed at various points, the corporeal schema crumbled, its place
taken by a racial epidermal schema. In the train it was no longer a question of being aware of
localize sensations, and
Engh, Ousaf Moqeet
Afro-Orientalism
my body in the third person but in a triple person . In the train I was given not one but two, three places. I had already
stopped being amused. It was not that I was finding febrile coordinates in the world. I existed triply: I occupied space. I moved toward the other and
the evanescent other, hostile but not opaque, transparent, not there, disappeared. Nausea. . . I
was responsible at the same time

for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my
ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all
else above all "Sho' good eatin' On that day, completely dislocated, unable to be abroad with the other, the white person, who unmercifully
imprisoned me, I
took myself far off from my own presence far indeed, and made myself an object.
What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my
whole body with black blood? But I did not want this revision, this thematization. All I wanted was to be a person among other people.
I wanted to come lithe and young into a world that was ours and to help to build it together.
Engh, Ousaf Moqeet
Afro-Orientalism
2AC Weheilye
Radical Blackness is the starting point for habeas viscus as an
intervention insofar as its purpose is to destroy Man as the anchor for
the architecture of modernity.
Weheliye 2014 (Alexander G.. Habeas Viscus : Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and
Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham, NC, USA: Duke University Press Books
ERW)
While black studies became an institutional and disciplinary formation in the mainstream U.S. university in the 1960s, it has existed
since the eighteenth century as a set of intellectual traditions and liberation struggles that have borne witness to the production and
maintenance of hierarchical distinctions between groups of humans. Viewed in this light, black
studies represents a
substantial critique of western modernity and a sizeable archive of social, political, and
cultural alternatives. As an intellectual enterprise, black studies investigates processes of racialization
with a particular emphasis on the shifting configurations of blackness. If
racialization is understood not as a biological or cultural descriptor but as a conglomerate of sociopolitical
relations that discipline humanity into full humans, not- quite- humans, and nonhumans, then blackness
designates a changing system of unequal power structures that apportion and delimit
which humans can lay claim to full human status and which humans cannot. Conversely, white
supremacy may be understood as a logic of social organization that produces regimented, institutionalized, and militarized
conceptions of hierarchized human difference. 2 Although much of the critical, poetic, and quantitative work generated under the
auspices of black studies has been concerned with the experiences, life worlds, struggles, and cultural productions of black
populations around the world, the
theoretical and methodological protocols of black studies have always

been global in their reach, because they provide detailed explanations of how techniques of
domination, dispossession, expropriation, exploitation, and violence are predicated upon
the hierarchical ordering of racial, gender, sexual, economic, religious, and national differences. Since
blackness has functioned as one of the key signifiers for the sociopolitical articulation of visual distinctions among human groups in
modernity, black
studies has developed a series of comprehensive analytical frameworks both critical

the service of better understanding and dismantling the political, economic, cultural,
and social exploitation of visible human difference. In sum, black studies illuminates the essential role that
racializing assemblages play in the construction of modern selfhood, works toward the abolition of Man, and
advocates the radical reconstruction and decolonization of what it means to be
human. In doing so, black studies pursues a politics of global liberation beyond the
genocidal shackles of Man. 3 As will become evident, habeas viscus is but one modality of
imagining the relational ontological totality of the human. Yet in order to consider habeas viscus as an
and utopian in
object of knowledge in the service of producing new formations of humanity, we must venture past the perimeters of bare life and
biopolitics discourse and the juridical history of habeas
corpus, because neither sufficiently addresses how

deeply anchored racialization is in the somatic field of the human . Where bare life and
biopolitics discourse aspires to transcend racialization via recourse to absolute biological matter that no longer allows for portioning
of humanity or locating certain forms of racism in an unidentified elsewhere, habeas corpus, and the law in general, at least when it
is not administering racial distinctions, tends to recognize the humanity of racialized subjects only in the restricted idiom of
personhood- as- ownership. Bare life and biopolitics discourse not only misconstrues how profoundly race and racism shape the
modern idea of the human, it also overlooks or perfunctorily writes off theorizations of race, subjection, and humanity found in black
and ethnic studies, allowing bare life and biopolitics discourse to imagine an indivisible biological substance anterior to racialization.
The idea of racializing assemblages, in contrast, construes race not as a biological or cultural classification but as a set of
sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, not- quite- humans, and nonhumans.
Engh, Ousaf Moqeet
Afro-Orientalism
2AC Settler Colonialism

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 antiblackness and white supremacy is a prerequisite and ultimately a
struggle against colonialism.
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
Engh, Ousaf Moqeet
Afro-Orientalism
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 latters 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 civilizations 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
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
among those attempting to coordinate struggles among black and native peoples on a political basis, related problems arise.
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. Smiths
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
Engh, Ousaf Moqeet
Afro-Orientalism
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 ones own person becomes a commodity that
one must sell in the labor market while the profits of ones 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 ones 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
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 Smiths
statement of the relation between racial slavery and settler colonialism. When she
would be only a difference of degree rather than kind between exploitation and slavery. At any rate,
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 the
racist 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.
Engh, Ousaf Moqeet
Afro-Orientalism
Decolonization is neither necessary nor a prerequisite to resolve antiblack violence and the experience of enslavement
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
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, IIIs 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 Wildersons 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
What, we might ask, inhibits this analytic and political dream of a Savage/Slave
encounter? Is it a matter of the Native theorists 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
grand impediment:
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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
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
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
ground of thought within Black Studies as well. The difference, provisionally, between these enterprises is that
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, Wildersons 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
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necessity the
struggle for the promise of communism, decolonization, and settler decolonization, among
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
other things. Slavery
forebear or fundament or support. Colonialism, as it were, the issue or heir of slavery, its outgrowth or edifice or monument. This is
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
as true of the historic colonization of the Third World as it is the prior and ongoing settler colonization of the Fourth.23
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 slaves 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.
Studies of settler colonialism must go hand in hand with resistance

against white supremacy and anti-racism struggles
Smith 10 [Andrea Smith is a professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at
UC Riverside; Indigineity, Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy;

http://www.worlddialogue.org/content.php?id=488; REJ]
Whiteness in Settler Colonialism As mentioned previously, many Native studies scholars have
refused engagement with ethnic studies or critical race theory because they think
such engagement relegates Native peoples to the status of racial minorities rather
than sovereign nations. Yet, even as Native studies articulate their intellectual
framework around sovereignty, some strands within them also simultaneously
presume the continuance of settler colonialism. Glen Coulthards groundbreaking essay, Subjects of
Empire, sheds light on this contradiction.27 He notes that in the name of sovereignty, Native nations have shifted their aspirations
from decolonisation to recognition from the settler state. That is, they
express their political goals

primarily in terms of having political, economic or cultural claims recognised
and/or funded by the settler state within which they reside. In doing so, they
unwittingly relegate themselves to the status of racial minority, seeking
recognition in competition with other minorities similarly seeking recognition.
One
such example can be found in the work of Ward Churchill. Churchill offers searing critiques of the United States genocidal policies
towards Native peoples and calls for decolonising the Indian nations. 28 Nevertheless, he contends that we
must support
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Afro-Orientalism
the continued existence of the US federal government because there is no other

way to continue guarantees to the various Native American tribes [so] that their
landbase and other treaty rights will be continued. 29 Thus, in the name of
decolonisation, his politics are actually grounded in a framework of liberal
recognition whereby the United States will continue to exist as the arbiter and
guarantor of indigenous claims. In such a framework, Native peoples are then set
up to compete with other groups for recognition. Thus, it is not a surprise that Churchill opposes a
politics that would address racism directed against non-indigenous peoples, arguing that Native peoples have a special status that
should take primacy over other oppressed groups. 30 Such
analyses do not take into account how settler

colonialism is enabled through the intersecting logics of white supremacy,
imperialism, heteropatriarchy and capitalism. Consequently, when Native
struggles become isolated from other social-justice struggles, indigenous peoples
are not in a position to build the necessary political power actually to end
colonialism and capitalism. Instead, they are set up to be in competition rather
than in solidarity with other groups seeking recognition. This politics of
recognition then presumes the continuance of the settler state that will arbitrate
claims from competing groups. When one seeks recognition, one will define indigenous struggle as exclusively as
possible so that claims to the state can be based on unique and special status. When one wants actually to dismantle settler
colonialism, one will define indigenous struggle broadly in order to build a movement of sufficient power to challenge the system.
Thus, Churchills
work replaces a blackwhite binary with an indigenoussettler
binary. While, as I have argued previously, this latter binary certainly exists, our analysis of it is insufficient if not intersected
with other logics of white supremacy. In particular, we need to look at how settlers are differentiated through white supremacy.
Much of the rhetoric of the Red Power movement did not necessarily question the legitimacy of the US state, arguing instead that the
United States just needs to leave Native nations alone. 31 As Native activist Lee Maracle comments: AIM [the American Indian
Movement] did not challenge the basic character or the legitimacy of the institutions or even the political and economic organization
of America; rather, it addressed the long-standing injustice of expropriation. 32 Native
studies scholars and

activists, while calling for self-determination, have not necessarily critiqued or
challenged the United States or other settler states themselves. The problem arising from their
position, as Maracle notes, is that if we do not take seriously the analysis of race theorists such as Omi, Winant and Bell that define
the United States as fundamentally white supremacist, then we will not see that it will never have an interest in leaving Native
nations alone. Moreover, without
a critique of the settler state as simultaneously also white

supremacist, all settlers become morally undifferentiated. If we see peoples in Iraq simply as
potential future settlers, then there is no reason not to join the war on terror against them, because morally they are not
Native studies
scholar Robert Williams does address the intersection of race and colonialism as it
affects the status of Native peoples. Because Williams is both a leading scholar in
indigenous legal theory, and one of the few Native scholars substantially to engage
critical race theory, his work demands sustained attention. Consequently, I consider his
differentiated from the settlers in the United States who have committed genocide against Native peoples.
arguments in greater detail. Williams argues that while Native nations rely on the Cherokee nation cases 33 as the basis of their claims
to sovereignty, all of these cases imply a logic based on white supremacy in which Native peoples are seen as racially incompetent to
be fully sovereign. Rather than uphold these cases, he calls on us to overturn them so that they go by the wayside as did the Dred
Scot decision. I therefore take it as axiomatic that a winning courtroom strategy for protecting Indian rights in this country cannot
be organized around a set of legal precedents and accompanying legal discourse that views Indians as lawless savages and interprets
their rights accordingly ... I ask Indian rights lawyers and scholars to consider carefully the following question: Is it really possible to
believe that the [Supreme] Court would have written [the landmark 1954 civil-rights case] Brown the way it did if it had not first
explicitly decided to reject the language in Plessy v. Ferguson that gave precedential legal force, validity, and sanction to the
negative racial stereotypes and images historically directed at blacks by the dominant white society? 34 Williams shows that Native
peoples, by neglecting the analysis of race, have come to normalise white-supremacist ideologies within the legal frameworks by
which they struggle for sovereignty. Native
peoples can themselves unwittingly recapitulate the

logic of settler colonialism even as they contest it when they do not engage the
analysis of race. Williams points to the contradictions involved when Native peoples ask courts to uphold these
problematic legal precedents rather than overturn them: This models acceptance of the European colonial-era doctrine of discovery
and its foundational legal principle of Indian racial inferiority licenses Congress to exercise its plenary power unilaterally to
terminate Indian tribes, abrogate Indian treaties, and extinguish Indian rights, and theres nothing that Indians can legally do about
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Afro-Orientalism
any of these actions.35 However, Williamss analysis also tends to separate white supremacy from settler colonialism. That is, he
argues that addressing racism is a first step on the hard trail of decolonizing the present-day U.S. Supreme Courts Indian law by
changing the way that justices themselves talk about Indians in their decisions on Indian rights. 36 The reason for this first step is
that direct claims for sovereignty are politically more difficult to achieve than minority individual rights because claims based on
sovereignty challenge the basis of the United States itself. 37 The result is that Williams articulates a political vision containing many
of the contradictions inherent in Omi and Winants analysis. That is, he cites Derrick Bell to assert the permanency of racism while
simultaneously suggesting that it is possible to address racism as a simpler first step towards decolonisation. I believe that when
the justices are confronted with the way the legalized racial stereotypes of the Marshall model can be used to perpetuate an
insidious, jurispathic, rights-destroying form of nineteenth-century racism and prejudice against Indians, they will be open to at
least considering the legal implications of a postcolonial nonracist approach to defining Indian rights under [my italics] the
Constitution and laws of the United States.38 If the implications of Bells analysis of the permanency of racism are taken seriously, it
is difficult to sustain the idea that we can simply eliminate racial thinking in US governance in order to pave the way for
decolonisation. Consequently, Williams
seems to fall back on a framework of liberal

multiculturalism that envisions the United States as fundamentally a non -racial
democracy that is unfortunately suffering from the vestiges of racism . He says: I do not
believe that the Court is a helplessly racist institution that is incapable of fairly adjudicating cases involving the basic human rights
[and] cultural survival possessed by Indian tribes as indigenous peoples. I would never attempt to stereotype the justices in that
way.39 He seems to imply that the Supreme Court is not an organ of the racial state; it is simply a collection of individuals with their
personal prejudices.
In addition, the strategy of addressing race first and then colonialism

second presupposes that white supremacy and settler colonialism do not mutually
inform each otherthat racism provides the anchor for maintaining settler
colonialism. In the end, Williams appears to recapitulate settler colonialism when he calls for decolonizing the present-day
U.S. Supreme Courts Indian law in order to secure a measured separatism for tribes in a truly postcolonial, totally decolonized
U.S. society.40 As we have seen, he holds out hope for a postcolonial nonracist approach to defining Indian rights under [my italics]
the Constitution and laws of the United States, as if the Constitution itself were not a colonial document. Obviously, however, if the
United States and its Supreme Court were totally decolonised they would not exist. In the end, Williamss long-term vision for
Native rights does not seem to go beyond state recognition within a colonial framework. That said, this critique is in no way meant to
invalidate the important contributions Williams does make in intersecting Native studies with critical race theory. It may well be
that the apparent contradictions in his analysis are the result less of his actual thinking than of a rhetorical strategy designed to
convince legal scholars to take his claims seriously. Moreover, while conditions of settler colonialism persist, short-term legal and
political strategies are needed to address them. As
Michelle Alexander notes, reform and

revolutionary strategies are not mutually inconsistent; reformist strategies can be
movement-building if they are articulated as such .41 In this regard, Williamss provocative call to
overturn the precedents established in the Cherokee nation cases speaks to the manner in which Native sovereignty struggles have
unwittingly built their short-term legal strategies on a foundation of white supremacy. And as Scott Lyonss germinal work on Native
nationalism in X-Marks suggests,42 any project for decolonisation begins with the political and legal conditions under which we
currently live, so our goal must be to make the most strategic use of the political and legal instruments before us while remaining
alert to how we can be co-opted by using them. But in the end, as Taiaiake Alfred 43 and Coulthard argue, we must build on this work
by rethinking liberation outside the framework of the white-supremacist, settler state. A Kinder, Gentler Settler State? What is
at stake for Native studies and critical race theory is that without the centring of the analysis of settler colonialism, both intellectual
projects fall back on assuming the givenness of the white-supremacist, settler state. On the one hand, many racial-justice theorists
and activists unwittingly recapitulate white supremacy by failing to imagine a struggle against white supremacy outside the
Native scholars and

activists recapitulate settler colonialism by failing to address how the logic of
white supremacy may unwittingly shape our vision of sovereignty and selfdetermination in such a way that we become locked into a politics of recognition
rather than a politics of liberation. We are left with a political project that can do
no more than imagine a kinder, gentler settler state founded on genocide and
slavery.
constraints of the settler state, which is by definition white supremacist. On the other hand,
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Afro-Orientalism
2AC Black Feminism

The pedagogical underpinnings of the 1AC do not preclude sexual
difference but rather are transmitted through linkages of queer
mothering.
Gumbs 10 (Alexis Pauline, queer black trouble-maker with a PhD in Philosophy from Duke University, We Can Learn to
Mother Ourselves: The Queer Survival of Black Feminism 1968-1996, pgs. 125-126 ERW)
If queer theory is meant to challenge the reproductive narrative as it emerges in social institutions, then queer theorists must disrupt the
reproduction of a racist narrative that criminalizes the birth and mothering of Black life. The seeming contradiction between mothering and queer
intervention overlooks the fact that, as Cathy Cohen argues in Punks, Bulldaggers and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?
Black mothers are queer threats to the social order.47 This dissertation argues that Black
mothering queerly disrupts a reproductive narrative about what (whose) life is
worth, a narrative that says that Black life is worth less and that life itself can be valued and
used differentially based on race, economic status, gender etc. When queer theory argues against the child, and
criminalizes mothering as an inevitable consent to the reproduction of the status quo, queer theory PARTICIPATES in a 44 Audre Lorde. Of
Generators and Survival-Hugo Letter, Callaloo Vol. 14 no 1 (Winter 1991) 72-82. 45 Audre Lorde. Introduction: Pat Parker: Movement in Black in
Rudolph Byrd, Johentta B. Cole and Beverly Guy-Sheftall eds. I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2009, 158. reproductive narrative that denies the agencies of mother, particularly poor and racialized mothers, in order to reproduce
the differential use values of marked bodies in a capitalist system that turns difference into profit through violence. If
we reground our
queer intervention in a queer of color critique, which was in a large part developed by the Black
feminists under discussion in this dissertation (Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Barbara Smith, Alexis DeVeaux), who were
explicitly invested in mothering and the domestic as sites of intellectual and political production
of an alternative social value for life itself, we will be able to actually intervene in the narrative
that is reproducing our oppression. There is a reason that the centrist state effectively makes same-sex parenting illegal, and that
the religious right tries to ban queer teachers from schools. The pedagogical work of mothering is exactly the
site where a narrative will either be reproduced or interrupted. The work of Black
mothering, the teaching of a set of social values that challenge a social logic which
believes that we, the children of Black mothers, the queer, the deviant, should not
exist, is queer work. Therefore, as a queer theorist I theorize that work. I am both pointing out the complicity of a race-neutral (i.e. white)
queer construction AND critique of the reproductive narrative in the REPRODUCTION of the project of differential life value through the
criminalization and targeting of racialized mothers, as well as arguing the importance of an genealogy of queer theory, which as argued by Roderick
Ferguson among others, starts with Barbara Smiths Towards A Black Feminist Literary Criticism and the Combahee River Collective Statement.
Building on the work of Ferguson, Munoz, Evelyn Hammonds and others, assert that a 52 queer of color critique illuminates and queers the
reproductive narrative through which queer theory has constructed its own genealogy.48
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Afro-Orientalism
2AC Seshadri-Crooks
Fantasy DA How could Rodney King Traverse the Fantasy when he
was being beaten to death? How could Trayvon sit back and think
about signifiers when bullets were hurdling his way? Traversing the
fantasy of whiteness entails the production of a Eurocentric liberal
ethos which imagines the possibility to enact change through
philosophical contemplation as opposed to material strategies. This
perpetuates the pervasive capillaries of white semiotic idealism and
the disembodiment of blackness within psychological analysis
EVEN IF THEIR CARDS TALK ABOUT RACE.
Yancy, 2005 (George, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University and
Coordinator of the Critical Race Theory Speaker Series, Whiteness and the Return of the Black
Body, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 19.4 (2005) 215-241, Muse ERW)
I write out of a personal existential context. This context is a profound source of knowledge
connected to my "raced" body. Hence, I write from a place of lived embodied
experience, a site of exposure. In philosophy, the only thing that we are taught to "expose" is a weak
argument, a fallacy, or someone's "inferior" reasoning power . The embodied self is
bracketed and deemed irrelevant to theory, superfluous and cumbersome in one's search for truth. It is
best, or so we are told, to reason from nowhere. Hence, the white philosopher/author
presumes to speak for all of "us" without the slightest mention of his or her
"raced" identity. Self-consciously writing as a white male philosopher , Crispin Sartwell observes:
Left to my own devices, I disappear as an author. That is the "whiteness" of my authorship. This
whiteness of authorship is, for us, a form of authority; to speak (apparently) from
nowhere, for everyone, is empowering, though one wields power here only by becoming
lost to oneself. But such an authorship and authority is also pleasurable : it yields the pleasure
of self-forgetting or [End Page 215] apparent transcendence of the mundane and the particular, and the pleasure of
power expressed in the "comprehension" of a range of materials . (1998, 6) To theorize the Black
body one must "turn to the [Black] body as the radix for interpreting racial experience " (Johnson
[1993, 600]).1 It is important to note that this particular strategy also functions as a lens through
which to theorize and critique whiteness; for the Black body's "racial" experience is
fundamentally linked to the oppressive modalities of the "raced" white body . However, there is no
denying that my own "racial" experiences or the social performances of whiteness can become objects of critical reflection. In this
paper, my objective is to describe and theorize situations where the Black body's subjectivity , its
lived reality, is reduced to instantiations of the white imaginary, resulting in what I refer to as
"the phenomenological return of the Black body."2 These instantiations are embedded within
and evolve out of the complex social and historical interstices of whites' efforts at selfconstruction through complex acts of erasure vis--vis Black people. These acts of self-construction,
however, are myths/ideological constructions predicated upon maintaining white power. As James Snead has noted, "Mythification
is the replacement of history with a surrogate ideology of [white] elevation or [Black] demotion along a scale of human value" (Snead
1994, 4). How I understand and theorize the body relates to the fact that the bodyin this case, the
Black bodyis capable of undergoing a sociohistorical process of "phenomenological return"

vis--vis white embodiment. The body's meaningwhether phenotypically white or blackits
ontology, its modalities of aesthetic performance, its comportment, its "raciated" reproduction,
is in constant contestation. The hermeneutics of the body, how it is understood, how it is "seen," its "truth," is partly the
result of a profound historical, ideological construction. " The body" is positioned by historical practices and
discourses. The body is codified as this or that in terms of meanings that are sanctioned,
scripted, and constituted through processes of negotiation that are embedded within and serve
various ideological interests that are grounded within further power-laden social processes . The
historical plasticity of the body, the fact that it is a site of contested meanings, speaks to the historicity of its "being" as lived and
Engh, Ousaf Moqeet
Afro-Orientalism
meant within the interstices of social semiotics. Hence:
a) the body is less of a thing/being than a

shifting/changing historical meaning that is subject to cultural configuration/reconfiguration.
The point here is to interrogate the "Black body" as a "fixed and material truth" that preexists
"its relations with the world and with others"3 ; b) the body's meaning is fundamentally symbolic
(McDowell 2001, 301), and its meaning is congealed through symbolic repetition and iteration that
emits certain signs and presupposes certain norms; and, c) the body is a battlefield, one that is
fought over again and again across particular historical moments and within particular social
spaces. "In other words, the concept of the body provides only the illusion of self-evidence, facticity, 'thereness' for something
[End Page 216] fundamentally ephemeral, imaginary, something made in the image of particular social groups" (301). On this score,
it is not only the "Black body" that defies the ontic fixity projected upon it through the white gaze, and, hence, through the episteme
of whiteness, but the white body is also fundamentally symbolic, requiring demystification of its status as norm, the paragon of
beauty, order, innocence, purity, restraint, and nobility. In other words, given the three suppositions above, both the "Black body"
and the "white body" lend themselves to processes of interpretive fracture and to strategies of interrogating and removing the veneer
of their alleged objectivity. To have one's dark body invaded by the white gaze and then to
have that body returned as distorted is a powerful experience of violation . The

experience presupposes an anti-Black lived context, a context within which whiteness gets
reproduced and the white body as norm is reinscribed. The late writer, actor, and activist Ossie Davis recalls that
at the age of six or seven two white police officers told him to get into their car. They took him down to the precinct. They kept him
there for an hour, laughing at him and eventually pouring cane syrup over his head. This only created the opportunity for more
laughter, as they looked upon the "silly" little Black boy. If he was able to articulate his feelings at that moment, think of how the
young Davis was returned to himself: "I am an object of white laughter, a buffoon." The young Davis no doubt appeared to the white
police officers in ways that they had approved. They set the stage, created a site of Black buffoonery, and enjoyed their sadistic
pleasure without blinking an eye. Sartwell notes that "the [white] oppressor seeks to constrain the
oppressed [Blacks] to certain approved modes of visibility (those set out in the template of stereotype) and
then gazes obsessively on the spectacle he has created " (1998, 11). Davis notes that he "went along with the game
of black emasculation, it seemed to come naturally" (Marable 2000, 9). After that, "the ritual was complete" (9). He was then sent
home with some peanut brittle to eat. Davis knew at that early age, even without the words to articulate what he felt, that he had
been violated. He refers to the entire ritual as the process of "niggerization." He notes: The culture had already told me what this was
and what my reaction to this should be: not to be surprised; to expect it; to accommodate it; to live with it. I didn't know how deeply
I was scarred or affected by that, but it was a part of who I was. (9) Davis, in other words, was made to feel that he had to accept who
he was, that "niggerized" little Black boy, an insignificant plaything within a system of ontological racial differences. This,
however, is the trick of white ideology; it is to give the appearance of fixity, where the "look of the
white subject interpellates the black subject as inferior, which, in turn, bars the black subject
from seeing him/herself without the internalization of the white gaze " (Weheliye 2005, 42). On this score,
it is white bodies that are deemed agential. They configure "passive" [End Page 217] Black bodies according to their
will. But it is no mystery; for "the Negro is interpreted in the terms of the white man. White-man
psychology is applied and it is no wonder that the result often shows the Negro in a ludicrous
light" (Braithwaite 1992, 36). While walking across the street, I have endured the sounds of car doors
locking as whites secure themselves from the "outside world," a trope rendering my Black body ostracized,
different, unbelonging. This outside world constitutes a space, a field, where certain Black bodies are relegated. They are rejected,
because they are deemed suspicious, vile infestations of the (white) social body. The locks on the doors resound: Click. Click. Click.
Click. Click. Click. ClickClickClickClickClickClickClick! Of course, the clicking sounds are always already accompanied by nervous
gestures, and eyes that want to look, but are hesitant to do so. The cumulative impact of the sounds is deafening, maddening in their
distorted repetition. The clicks begin to function as coded sounds, reminding me that I am dangerous; the sounds create boundaries,
separating the white civilized from the dark savage, even as I comport myself to the contrary. The clicking sounds mark me, they
inscribe me, they materialize my presence in ways that belie my intentions. Unable to stop the clicking, unable to establish a form of
recognition that creates a space of trust and liminality, there are times when one wants to become their fantasy, to become their
Black monster, their bogeyman, to pull open the car door: "Surprise. You've just been carjacked by a ghost, a
fantasy of your own creation. Now, get the fuck out of the car." I have endured white women clutching their
purses or walking across the street as they catch a glimpse of my approaching Black body. It is during such moments that my body is
given back to me in a ludicrous light, where I live the meaning of my body as confiscated. Davis too had the meaning of his young
Black body stolen. The surpluses being gained by the whites in each case are not economic. Rather, it
is through existential exploitation that the surpluses extracted can be said to be ontological
"semblances of determined presence, of full positivity, to provide a sense of secure being" (Henry 1997, 33). When I was about
seventeen or eighteen, my white math teacher initiated such an invasion, pulling it off with complete calm and presumably selftransparency. Given the historical construction of whiteness as the norm, his own "raced" subject position was rendered invisible.
After all, he lived in the real world, the world of the serious man, where values are believed anterior to their existential founding. As I
recall, we were discussing my plans for the future. I told him that I wanted to be a pilot. I was earnest about this choice, spending a
great deal of time reading about the requirements involved in becoming a pilot, how one would have to accumulate a certain number
of flying hours. I also read about the dynamics of lift and drag that affect a plane in flight. After no doubt taking note of my firm
Engh, Ousaf Moqeet
Afro-Orientalism
commitment, he looked at me and implied that I should be realistic (a code word for realize that I am Black) about my goals. He said
that I should become a carpenter or a bricklayer. I was exposing myself, telling a trusted teacher what I wanted to be, and he
returned me to myself as something [End Page 218] that I did not recognize. I had no intentions of being a carpenter or a bricklayer
(or a janitor or elevator operator for that matter). The situation, though, is more complex. It is not that he simply returned me to
myself as a carpenter or a bricklayer when all along I had this image of myself as a pilot. Rather, he returned me to myself as a fixed
entity, a "niggerized" Black body whose epidermal logic had already foreclosed the possibility of being anything other than what was
befitting its lowly station. He was the voice of a larger anti-Black racist society that "whispers mixed
messages in our ears" (Marable 2000, 9), the ears of Black people who struggle to think of themselves
as a possibility. He mentioned that there were only a few Black pilots and that I should be more realistic. (One can only
imagine what his response would have been had I said that I wanted to be a philosopher, particularly given the statistic that Black
philosophers constitute about 1.1% of philosophers in the United States). Keep in mind that this event did not occur in the 1930s or
1940s, but around 1979. The message was clear. Because I was Black, I had to settle for an occupation suitable for my Black body,4
unlike the white body that would no doubt have been encouraged to become a pilot. As with Davis, having one's Black body returned
as a source of impossibility, one begins to think, to feel, to emote: "Am I a nigger?" The internalization of the white gaze creates a
doubleness within the psyche of the Black, leading to a destructive process of superfluous self-surveillance and self-interrogation.
This was indeed a time when I felt ontologically locked into my body. My body was indelibly marked with this stain of darkness.
After all, he was the white mind, the mathematical mind, calculating my future by factoring in my Blackness. He did not "see" me,
though. Like Ellison's invisible man, I occupied that paradoxical status of "visible invisibility." Within this dyadic space, my Black
body phenomenologically returned to me as inferior. To describe the phenomenological return of the Black body is to disclose how it
is returned as an appearance to consciousness, my consciousness. The (negatively) "raced" manner in which my body underwent a
phenomenological return, however, presupposes a thick social reality that has always already been structured by the ideology and
history of whiteness. More specifically, when my body is returned to me, the white body has already
been constituted over centuries as the norm, both in European and Anglo-American culture, and
at several discursive levels from science to philosophy to religion . In the case of my math teacher, his
whiteness was invisible to him as my Blackness was hyper-visible to both of us. Of course, his invisibility to his own normative here
is a function of my hyper-visibility. It is important to keep in mind that white Americans, more generally,
define themselves around the "gravitational pull," as it were, of the Black .5 The not of white America is
the Black of white America. This not is essential, as is the invisibility of the negative relation through which whites are constituted.
All of embodied beings have their own "here." My white math teacher's racist social performances (for example, his "advice" to me),
within the context of a [End Page 219] white racist historical imaginary and asymmetric power relations, suspends and effectively
disqualifies my embodied here. What was the message communicated? Expressing my desire to be, to take advantage of the
opportunities for which Black bodies had died in order to secure, my ambition "was flung back in my face like a slap" (Fanon 1967,
114). Fanon writes: The white world, the only honorable one, barred me from all participation. A man was expected to
behave like a man. I was expected to behave like a black manor at least like a nigger . I shouted
a greeting to the world and the world slashed away my joy. I was told to stay within bounds, to
go back where I belonged. (11415) According to philosopher Bettina Bergo, drawing from the thought of Emmanuel
Levinas, "perception and discoursewhat we see and the symbols and meanings of our social
imaginariesprove inextricably the one from the other" (2005, 131). Hence, the white math teacher's
perception, what he "saw," was inextricably linked to social meanings and semiotic
constructions and constrictions that opened up a "field of appearances" regarding my dark body .
There is nothing passive about the white gaze. There are racist sociohistorical and
epistemic conditions of emergence that construct not only the Black body , but the
white body as well. So, what is "seen" when the white gaze "sees" "my body" and it
becomes something alien to me?
Engh, Ousaf Moqeet

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Afro-Orientalism

Michigan Kritik Lab 2016

Michigan Kritik Lab 2016

Michigan Kritik Lab 2016

Possible Intro Poem

Michigan Kritik Lab 2016

Michigan Kritik Lab 2016

designation to denote all savages of the South Seas. In this way

the earliest times, and no Chinese work has ever

Michigan Kritik Lab 2016

dive into water without closing their

savages dwell on the islands. They have

are all black, and go

Michigan Kritik Lab 2016

K'un-lun Ts'eng-ch'i. And it is beyond all doubt that Ts'eng-ch'i

is a Chinese rendering of Zinj, or Zenj, or Zanzi, or

This chattel status provided a vestibule through which the Chinese

Zhu Yu claims that the

Michigan Kritik Lab 2016

Magical Kunlun," the politics of its critical methodology deserves keen

Michigan Kritik Lab 2016

constitutes an altogether different species of interpretation that might be called a

Michigan Kritik Lab 2016

is to keep the region and its people conceptually

Chinese societys equation of Kun-lun-nu as a signifier of blackness

hieroglyphics of the flesh created by

the absence of kin, family, gender, belonging, language,

Michigan Kritik Lab 2016

the sphere of racial and sexual

inflects human physiology in colonial

the same way that black people

racializing assemblages in Man's extensive armory, have constitutively incapacitated black

people from the category of the

the biochemistry of pigmentation, hair texture, lip thickness,

Michigan Kritik Lab 2016

Chinas contemporary scramble for Africa in competition with the US

Michigan Kritik Lab 2016

of the burgeoning literature on the new scramble for Africa

Congress officials have voiced concerns that the Chinese

Michigan Kritik Lab 2016

powers continue to arrogate to themselves the project of spreading

spatial reorganisation of global capitalism and its

Thus we affirm the USFG should increase economic engagement

Michigan Kritik Lab 2016

Michigan Kritik Lab 2016

Michigan Kritik Lab 2016

Michigan Kritik Lab 2016

Michigan Kritik Lab 2016

This is an affirmation of survivalist pedagogy in the face of

oppressed communities because it interrupts the social reproduction of the

The Affirmatives method reveals the diasporic and global

Michigan Kritik Lab 2016

disciplines and interdisciplines that draw on genealogies of comparison themselves. Delinking

Michigan Kritik Lab 2016

Michigan Kritik Lab 2016

Michigan Kritik Lab 2016

Michigan Kritik Lab 2016

There were so many of them what is it that they should be called?

Magical Kunlun," the politics of its critical methodology deserves keen

Michigan Kritik Lab 2016

constitutes an altogether different species of interpretation that might be called a

Michigan Kritik Lab 2016

is to keep the region and its people conceptually

Chinese societys equation of Kun-lun-nu as a signifier of blackness