Middle Passage NEG

Case
1NC
A sole focus on the Middle Passage causes a form of irreconcilable disassociation
which dooms the AFFs search for solidarity
Hartman, 2002, specialist in African American literature and history and a professor at Columbia
University (Saidiya, In Time of Slavery The South Atlantic Quarterly 101.4 Project Muse) // dobp
The journey to Elmina Castle, Ouidah, or Goree Island is first and foremost a way of commemorating slavery at its purported site of origin, although
one could just as easily travel to Portugal or visit the Vatican. The paradox here is that the title to home and kin emerges only in the aftermath
of the dislocation and death of the Middle Passage and the social death of enslavement; in short, it is a
response to the breach of separation. Kinship is precious by virtue of its dissolution, and "wounded kinship" defines the diaspora. 10 The pristine
and idealized vision of home and kin is even more esteemed as a consequence of its defilement. It is, in
this way, not unlike virginity, which Faulkner observed "must depend upon its loss, its absence to have
existed at all." The dissolution of the self or estrangement from ancestral land necessarily precedes "the
achievement of a full, restored, and authentic identity" held out by return. That is, enslavement fundamentally mediates this diasporic
identification with Africa and accentuates what Kobena Mercer has described as the essential constituent of diasporic identity"the rupture between me and my origins." Yet if this
rupture engenders diasporic identity, then the search for roots can only exacerbate one's sense of
being estranged, intensify the exilic consciousness, and confirm the impossibility of reversion. 11 The
want of an authentic identity and long-awaited reunion with Africa exacerbates the crisis of
homelessness. The complex and ambivalent forms of identification and disidentification with Africa and
the United States facilitated in these excursions hint at an anxiety about home, that is, a fear that being
a stranger in a strange land might be an inveterate condition on native soil and ancestral land. In the
end, these peregrinations might be less about the search or reclamation of [End Page 764] home, than
expressions of the contrarieties of home. Let me make clear that my intention here is not to reinscribe a racialist account of diaspora, position Africa as
primordial land, suggest that diasporic identity is best explained along the singular axis of reclamation, or fall prey to what Gerald Early describes as the "confused wonder" of black Americans
in the face of things African, but rather to interrogate the dominant framing of this encounter with the past and elucidate its vexed character. 12

Our argument is not that the Middle Passage was in any way insignificant---rather,
presenting this argument in a debate introduces a form of guilt politics which flips
the AFFs search for solidarity and injects into it a form of Western theology which has
historically used it as an excuse to carry out atrocities---this form of politics is a
pervasive one that precludes a holistic morality and generates a culture of
narcissism
Johnson, 2012 Alan, professor of democratic theory and practice at Edge Hill University in Lancashire,
(Pascal Bruckner and the Tyranny of Guilt, http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/alan-
johnson/pascal-bruckner-and-tyranny-guilt) // dobp
Bruckner is not inviting us to become cheerleaders. Dissent has been an essential ingredient in the story of Western civilization and must
remain so. But the tyranny of guilt contributes virtually nothing to those reform fights. Rather, it functions
more like an inverted religion, only it brings not a god-spell, or good news, but bad news: Western civilization is nothing but a
barbarismthe sick man of the planet which it is infecting with its pestilence. Like Christianity, this new conformism has a
notion of original sin. The West is eternally guilty, and thus unable to judge or combat other
systems, other states, other religions. When faced with the existential question, Who is to blame? many intellectuals
standard spontaneous response is: We are. And the new conformism is also a kind of universalism: There is no
monstrosity in Africa, Asia or the Near East for which it is not to blame, observes Bruckner. The religion of
guilt offers salvation in return for repentance. When Europe withdraws from a harsh world in the spirit
of well, who are we to tell anyone it is saved. And self-conscious displays of piety to the new conformism are rewarded
not in heaven but the here and now. Like any establishment, the clerks dole out the appointments and invitations and the access. (In a bizarre
twist, the new conformism manages to control large parts of the academic-media complex while thinking of itself as insurgents from the Devils
Party. Win-win for the herd of independent minds!) Bruckner argues this conformism is now a stifling orthodoxy in the
West, instilling within us the desire to practice self-flagellation and making us think that the habit of
wallowing in shame and self-loathingfor example, presenting our national story as a catalogue of enormitiesis an
exercise of virtue. At the personal level, the politics of guilt is a perfect accompaniment to another dubious
legacy of the (late) Sixtieswhat Christopher Lasch once called a culture of narcissism; an infantile and expressive and
therapeutic culture of the self, self, self. At a political level, guilt acts as a set of blinders. Bruckner points out
that although Western democracies won the Cold War by defeating totalitarianism, the intellectuals have not allowed us to reach that self-
understanding. We really dont understand what that conflict was about (wasnt it all just anti-Communist McCarthyite paranoia?) or why we
won it (didnt that nice Mr. Gorbachev do it all?).
This guilt politic spills over and pervades multiple forms of knowledge production
Fulford 2010 Robert, officer of the Order of Canada and the holder of honorary degrees from six
Canadian universities (Guilt trip, writ large) // dobp
There's nothing that can't be blamed on the West. Many countries are poor today because Western capitalism keeps them that way. If
they are undeveloped, that's the fault of colonialism, which was invented by Europe after it invented slavery. Colonialism's numerous crimes will
never be forgotten or forgiven, its numerous virtues never celebrated. Pascal Bruckner describes the
melancholy results of these attitudes in his forthcoming polemic, The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism (Princeton University
Press). His angry book could change a whole civilization's opinion, if only that civilization had sense enough to pay attention. "Nothing is more Western than
hatred of the West," Bruckner says. It runs through the bloodstream of opinion, a river of poison that thrives in
our universities, affects our media, saps the spirit of foreign policy, and routinely gets subsidized by genial NGOs. In theory,
guilt has a positive effect when it encourages better behaviour. Everyone could use some improvement. But the guilt of the West, as Bruckner correctly
sees it, takes a morose and cynical pleasure in moral failure. "We Euro-Americans," Bruckner argues, "are supposed
to have only one obligation: endlessly atoning for what we have inflicted on other parts of humanity."
Bruckner identifies guilt as an indirect form of self-glorification. Popular American memoirs express the same syndrome when
the authors describe, for large audiences, their earlier lives of degradation as alcoholics or drug addicts. Old sins become the basis of a new importance. In the same
way, Europe's barbarity in the fascist and communist eras gives it the authority of an expert witness. It acknowledges, of course, only the barbarity of the West.
For the crimes of non-Western states, the West likes to find extenuating circumstances, a way of
denying them responsibility.


The AFFs method of repossessing the dispossessed is flawed---this form of memory-
citizenship is an exclusionary model entrenched in black Cosmopolitanism
Nayar, 2013 University of Hyderabad, India, (Pramod K, Mobility, migrant mnemonics and memory
citizenship: Saidiya Hartmans Lose Your Mother. Nordic Journal of English Studies 12(2):81-101,
http://ojs.ub.gu.se/ojs/index.php/njes/article/viewFile/2205/1961, Date accessed: 7/2/14) // dobp
Hartmans project of retrieving the memory of slavery from Ghana is directed at acquiring a citizenship
alongside the historically dispossessed and the dispossessed of history. However, this citizenship, my essay argues, is not easy to
come by. Memory-citizenship in slaverys traumatic history is exclusionary, just as slavery was made
possible through the exclusion of particular ethnic groups and races from the category of citizens and
humans. Further, Hartmans problematic project of memory retrieval is complicated by the tension her
mobility engenders, between her status as an African American of Ghanaian origins journeying out to
Ghana and her awareness of the race-situation in the USA and other parts of the world. Mobility across
spaces, times and differently scaled histories of the blacks (slavery in Ghana and racism in the USA) makes Hartmans a
cosmopolitan and even global memory of atrocity and slavery in what is called multidirectional
memory. If the memory of slavery is the ethnic property of a particular group in Ghana, Hartmans project of acquiring a citizenship within
this Ghanaian memory is woven into her consciousness of other similarly dispossessed groups,
immigrant memories and racial contexts. All memory of slavery, Hartman discovers, thus aspires to the condition
of multidirectionality and cosmopolitanism. Lose Your Mother therefore constantly seeks to negotiate
between Ghanaian cultural memoriesthe ethnic property of the Ghanaiansand Hartmans own cosmopolitan mobility
that, in turn, seeks an insertion into this and other memories. Her memory work, the essay demonstrates, is fraught
with ironies due to the complicated nature of her own mobility. My essay focuses on these tensions of memory that permeate Hartmans
text.

Book club actually solves your offense
Tseghay, 2009, writer from Vancouver who has written for the Toronto Star, The Georgia Straight,
and THIS Magazine, among others, (Book Review: James T. Campbell's Middle Passages,
http://this.org/blog/2009/09/09/review-james-campbell-middle-passages/) // dobp
The story of Africans being brought to the Americas, mainly in bondage, is well known. The transatlantic
slave trade has been exhaustively mined and narrated and, if the plot is misunderstood, one
only needs to peruse the history books for clarity. We
know relatively little, though, about African-Americans and their voyages back to the other side of the Atlantic. James T. Campbells Middle Passages: African
American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005 tells that story. Campbells book begins with an account of repatriated slaves in the years following the American
Revolution. The emigration movement that led many ex-slaves back to African as missionaries in Sierra Leone and Liberia is recounted here. The book tells also of
notable African-Americans, like Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Malcolm X, Maya Angelou and others, who made their way to Africa for one
reason or another. Hughes story, for one, is indicative. Leaving America in 1923 as a messmate for the steamer, the West Hesseltine, the poet believed the Africans
he was bound to meet would regard him as a long-lost brother. Instead they see him as white but not only because he was the product of miscegenation, and
therefore had lighter, tawnier, skin and wavy hair. Hughes was also fully Americanized by then and the Africans regarded foreign-born
Africans as little more than extensions of white rule; as clerks and administrators in the colonial
governments, to help carry out the white mans laws. By the time Malcolm X had visited Africa, he envisioned a kind of pan-African
unity binding the independence movements in Africa during the 1960s and the civil rights movement in the United States. His journey to Africa was caused by a
deep alienation from the country of his birth and a romantic vision of connection with Africa. He felt that the African-Americans salvation lies in his or her
immersion in Africa. And so he went to Africa to convince members of the United Nations to introduce a resolution charging the United States for its abuse of
African-Americans. The motivations behind these voyages vary. For some, it was borne out of a desire for
salvation; for others, Africa was something to reject or alter and they set sail to act like missionaries in
the Dark Continent
2NC Guilt Politics
The AFFs fatalistic condemnation of the West by guilt undermines the Wests capacity
for meaningful change
Bruner, 2012 Troy, Psychologist at Camas Institute (Pascal BrucknerGuilt in Western Consciousness
With Perspectives from Karl Jaspers and Viktor Frankl,
http://www.bu.edu/paideia/existenz/volumes/Vol.7-2Bruner.pdf) // dobp
Guilt as a Guise for Power Disempowering the Victims of History Bruckner argues that the West's self-denigration is really a disguised form of self-
glorification and aggrandizement of power. Only the West can be evil; the rest of the world acts from ignorance or justifiable anger against oppression.
The belief that the West is responsible for historical crimes, but the rest of the world innocent, is a form
of arrogance that infantilizes the rest of the world. Like a wise parent, the West is viewed a responsible
and knowledgeable; like a child, most developing and third world peoples are viewed as not responsible
and unable to autonomously act to help themselves. Bruckner cites as evidence several contemporary events. Most prominently, when Arab
terrorists killed innocents in the September 11th attack on New York, many Western intellectuals were
sympathetic or even adulatory and assumed the attitude that the "Americans deserved what they got"
(TG 14). Hypocritically, Western nations are condemned regardless of their action or inaction. When the West acts, it is
condemned for not doing it right or not doing enough, as with Iraq or Palestine, but the West is also condemned for inaction, as with the Rwandan genocide or Russian bullying of Moldavia
and Georgia (TG 14). Thus the West can do no right; outside nations and peoples can do no wrong. He argues that there
is a fixation upon intro-punitive self-critique and guilt in the West that is excessive and self-defeating in
that it ignores the fact that while Europe has given birth to monsters it has also destroyed these
monsters. Slavery was followed by the abolition of slavery; feudalism gave way to democracy; the
Enlightenment came out of religious oppression; wars have given way to anti-authoritarianism;
nationalisms evolved into the unity of Europe. While Europe, especially, has caused many global problems, its
contributory good has been indispensible. Europe, like a jailer who throws you into prison and slips you the keys to your cell, brought into the world
both despotism and liberty. It sent soldiers, merchants, and missionaries to subjugate and exploit distant lands, but it also invented an anthropology that
provides a way of seeing oneself from the other's point of view, of seeing the other in oneself, and
oneself in the otherin short, of separating oneself from what is near in order to come closer to that
from which one is separated. [TG 29] According to Bruckner, as a consequence of the anti-Occidental currents in social, political, and academic spheres, the West has
abandoned the values of the Enlightenment. True equality, individual freedom, and progressive democratic values have been
eroded by intellectuals and politicians whose guilt consciousness stems from a Western history
characterized by wars, economic exploitation, fascism, and the oppression of other peoples. Most modern and post
modem philosophies, including existentialism, allegedly emphasize a skepticism about Western values that has lead to defeatism and nihilism, further weakening the highest values of Western
civilization. Europe and America are experiencing an undermining of their highest values, as if historical crimes cancel out the enormous good and progress undeniably attributed to Western
civilization. The West is incapacitated by "endlessly atoning for what we have inflicted on other parts of
humanity" (TC 34).
The collective enunciation of guilt externalizes responsibility while perpetuating
Western notions of forgiveness
Bruner, 2012 Troy, Psychologist at Camas Institute (Pascal BrucknerGuilt in Western Consciousness
With Perspectives from Karl Jaspers and Viktor Frankl,
http://www.bu.edu/paideia/existenz/volumes/Vol.7-2Bruner.pdf) // dobp
In 2010, Pascal Bruckner's work, The Tyranny of Guilt, was published in English. In this essay Bruckner argues that Western social and political
consciousness is plagued by self-imposed, pathological guilt resulting from Europe's history of
enslavement, imperialism, racism, and exploitation of much of the world. This guilt is purportedly formulated and
disseminated by European intellectuals who negate the essential values of progressive democracy and fail to recognize the serious threats to a free society that
exist in the world today. He describes a double-standard wherein the dominant culture is perceived as shameful while all other
groups are considered less culpable when engaging in forms of oppression and violence because these
behaviors are perceived as reactive to poverty and exploitation, conditions attributed to Western
oppression and interference. Bruckner asserts that there is a self-loathing that pervades Western consciousness,
which subtly disempowers the rest of the world by fatalistically externalizing blame, thereby
discouraging expectations for responsibility and self-determination. He is critical of the thesis that Western nations are solely
and perpetually responsible for global problems and argues that this is a form a paternalism insofar as the non-Western world is considered too incompetent to
solve their own problems and incapable of acting responsibly; consequently, the West, like a parent, views itself as superior enough to correct the problems of the
rest of the world. This alleged paternalism and arrogance is assimilated and imputed to certain minority groups
that are perceived as incapable of forging their own destinies. Consistent with the ide fixe, Bruckner criticizes the excesses of
political correctness, multiculturalism, and political philosophies that supposedly perpetuate a guilt consciousness and
aggrandize Anglo-Eurocentric political and cultural hegemony of the world by fatalistically
externalizing blame, thereby discouraging expectations for responsibility and self-determination. Following
this assumption, Bruckner argues that Third World nations and minority peoples are considered exempt from criticism and guilt because they have been the victims
of Anglo-European tyranny. He asserts that endlessly atoning for the sins of the past essentially emasculates and
infantilizes the victims of history: while Europeans and Americans are considered perpetually culpable,
the rest of the world is considered innocent on a moral and historical level. Bruckner states that this is
condescending in that "innocence is the lot of children, but also that of idiots and slaves" and, "A people
that is never held accountable for its acts has lost all qualities that make it possible to be an equal" (TG 42).
The purported double standard is obvious: when the West harms, it is responsible; when others harm,
they are not responsible. Bruckner points out that this world-view sometimes takes extreme forms as it did in the
aftermath of the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001, which "the cream of European
intelligentsia" viewed as "ruthless punishment" and the "execution of immanent justice" for the wrongs
committed by the United States (TG 14). He notes the ease with which Christianity is criticized and even mocked in Europe, while the
governmental authorities quickly crush any anti-Islamic sentiments, even to the point of curtailing free
speech. The excesses of tolerance and multiculturalism include differing legal standards for minorities,
separate beaches for Muslims, and a tolerance for domestic violence if it is culturally based.3 He considers these
forms of separation as an erosion of the Enlightenment's values of equality and progress. Furthermore, Bruckner has criticized existentialism by name as being one
of the many modern philosophies that have denunciated the West by rejecting the values of the Enlightenment. Liberty, emancipation from authority, the primacy
of reason, anti-imperialism, and free thought are described as Western values that have been eroded by philosophies based in relativism and multiculturalism that
are in effect an attempt to disown the highest values and ideals of Western civilization. This reportedly developed as the West has grown to loathe and hate itself
because of the evils it has created. Thus it has become its own enemy, playing down its accomplishments and surrendering to defeatism. The modern European is
not proud, but astonishingly embarrassed by continental achievements. Multiculturalism allegedly fills this void by downplaying Western accomplishments and
portraying Anglo-Euro influences as inherently oppressive.
Victim identity makes victimhood a desirable subject position
Bruner, 2012 Troy, Psychologist at Camas Institute (Pascal BrucknerGuilt in Western Consciousness
With Perspectives from Karl Jaspers and Viktor Frankl,
http://www.bu.edu/paideia/existenz/volumes/Vol.7-2Bruner.pdf) // dobp
The Claim of Post-Guilt Multiculturalism and Victim Identity Multiculturalism, according to Bruckner, is superficially an attempt to protect women and
minorities, but in reality it is a "legal apartheid" that increases inequality and victimization in society by
discouraging integration, oppressing individual liberties with legal double standards, and fostering
hatred of conventional Anglo-European culture (EFR 22, TG 140-54). These phenomena, he claims, represent an erosion of the
Enlightenment values of equality and democracy. According to Bruckner, multiculturalism is a product of twentieth century
relativism which "demands that we see our values simply as the beliefs of the particular tribe we call the
West" (EFR 13). However, "The Enlightenment belongs to the entire human race, not just to a few privileged individuals in Europe or North America who have
taken it upon themselves to kick it to bits like spoiled brats, to prevent others from having a go" (EFR 22). In some of his other writings, Bruckner expands his
criticism of multiculturalism to argue that as it becomes the norm to view oneself as oppressed, societal values devolve
into a nearly a complete culture of victimhood. This has occurred, he argues, because no one is immune from finding
some external reason to attribute their problems to as a source of blame. Women claim oppression from men; criminals
blame their crimes on abusive childhoods, insanity, or genetics; others claim poverty or some minority status, such as homosexuality, as reasons for oppression.4
The effective corollary to this is that anything reminiscent of the masculine, strong, and Caucasian is
viewed as destructive and evil. It is now considered desirable to claim the identity of the victim and the
sufferer.

If you did not personally participate in the act of slavery you should not have to feel
guilt---attempts to collectively take guilt is inherently flawed, disingenuine and causes
very real melancholic neurosis
Bruner, 2012 Troy, Psychologist at Camas Institute (Pascal BrucknerGuilt in Western Consciousness
With Perspectives from Karl Jaspers and Viktor Frankl,
http://www.bu.edu/paideia/existenz/volumes/Vol.7-2Bruner.pdf) // dobp
Frankl might have agreed with Bruckner that there exists a measure of collective guilt consciousness in the Western mind, which has its origins in historical
atrocities, most especially, the holocaust. However, Frankl was critical of the very concept of collective guilt and argued
that authentic guilt can only occur with subjective responsibility. According to Frankl, even the idea of collective
guilt effectively dehumanizes the individual insofar as the person experiences guilt as "a victim of
circumstances and their influences."6 Furthermore, phenomenologically and existentially, collective guilt "is a
concept that has no meaning" because the individual can only be authentically guilty after exercising
free will irresponsibly.7 Assuming guilt for actions other than one's own is even a characteristic of
melancholic neurosis.8 In some instances, Frankl argued, even belonging to an immoral or violent organization is not enough to condemn someone's
actions if their knowledge and role within the organization was limited. Frankl was once booed during a lecture after saying "that there were even some good
people in the Nazi government" (LWL 120). In Frankl's existential model (logotherapy), authentic guilt cannot arise unless the individual
participates, condones, or does not attempt to prevent harm to self or others. Flowing from this premise, only a Nazi
who acted violently, or who had knowledge of Nazi organizational crimes, or did not act to prevent harm, would be existentially culpable. Moreover, the mere fact
that someone is German does not mean they should feel personally guilty for Nazi crimes, let alone guilt for the oppressive activities associated with Western
civilization of which Bruckner writes. As for the concept of collective guilt, I personally think that it is totally unjustified to hold one person responsible for the
behavior of another person or a collective of persons. Since the end of World War II I have not become weary of publicly arguing against the collective guilt
concept.9 There is, according to Frankl, a form of authentic guilt that is "simply inherent in the human condition."10
This guilt results from our inevitable imperfection in balancing responsibility and freedom (PE 90). However, this guilt should not be perpetual;
once it is recognized, the human onus is to transcend our guilt consciousness with attitudinal change,
forgiveness, and personal responsibility. Frankl was fond of the quote from Paul Valery, "we do not only want to remember the dead, but
also to forgive the living" (PE 111). We are indeed free to feel guilty, but it is also our "responsibility to overcome guilt."11 However,
failure to overcome collective guilt can create a kind of "collective neurosis" characterized by nihilism,
conformism, and an "ephemeral attitude toward life" (PE 119-20), the very issues Bruckner identified as our current problem in the
West, as allegedly apparent in modern and postmodern philosophies. Psychiatrically, excessive guilt accompanied by lack of a future
orientation is an indication of neurosis and melancholia. Frankl was not alone in declaring that a plethoric guilt is a symptom of
melancholia; Jaspers, Erwin Straus, Viktor von Gebsattel, and Eugene Minkowski, among others, shared this opinion.12

Turn---their method strips guilt of its authenticity and leads to complicity
Bruner, 2012 Troy, Psychologist at Camas Institute (Pascal BrucknerGuilt in Western Consciousness
With Perspectives from Karl Jaspers and Viktor Frankl,
http://www.bu.edu/paideia/existenz/volumes/Vol.7-2Bruner.pdf) // dobp
The historical facts of the multifarious human rights failures associated with the activity of Western nations are not in question; neither Frankl, nor Jaspers, nor
Bruckner delegitimize the sources of Western guilt, such as slavery, religious oppression, economic exploitation, or imperialism. For Frankl and Jaspers, the
question is one of responsibility; those who came after historical eras associated with crimes are not
guilty for those crimes; nor does living within a nation whose government engages in human rights violations make all citizens of that nation share in
culpability. For Frankl, especially, the question is ultimately one of conceptual invalidity: collective guilt has no
meaning and is therefore inauthentic if it is vicariously shared by individuals not responsible for the
crimes of national regimes. Bruckner's emphasis is very different; he voices certainty and dictation in exposing what he views as hypocrisy and
intro-punitive tendencies that weaken Western resolve and erode the influence of the West's highest values. In essence, what Bruckner views as intellectual
complicity in undermining Western values, Frankl interprets as symptomatic of an existential crisis. However; it is uncertain whether Frankl and Jaspers would have
agreed with Bruckner that multiculturalism is a problematic symptom of guilt consciousness and that it is a guise for power. Bruckner asserted that. This could be
the current prevailing perception in multiculturalism is self- defeating: assuming that the West is
responsible for the world's ills effectively undermines non-Western self-determination interpreted as somewhat
analogous to Frankl's argument that fatalism is dehumanizing and disempowering MM 74). Another possible point of agreement is Frankl's
assertion that the guilt-ridden melancholic believes that "his guilt can never be atoned for" (DS 205), which appears congruent with Bruckner's social observation
that Euro-Americans are plagued by the "one obligation: endlessly atoning for what we have inflicted on other parts of humanity" (TG 34).Thus we can conclude
that neither Frankl nor Jaspers would concede that we who feel guilty in contemporary Western society
for crimes committed in the history of Western civilization prior to our birth and prior to our growth
to an age at which we could know of our complicity or counteract our complicity would be
experiencing authentic guilt. Both men agreed that contemporary Westerners are responsible for challenging the evils of our time; otherwise, we do
share collective political guilt; however, merely being a citizen of a Western nation is insufficient to create authentic guilt. Authentic guilt, however, does
result when individuals ignore or participate in the evils of their time. Frankl and Jaspers were emphatic in asserting that
the human experience of authentic guilt should be followed by responsible, transformative actions that
ensure a degree of amends and a commitment to avoiding a reoccurrence of socially sanctioned
immoral behavior. In effect, they argue that true responsibility results in our guilt being temporary, not perpetual,
as Bruckner argues it has been.



They have commodified their own speech act
Bruckner 2010, Pascal, French writer and philosopher whose latest book is "The Fanaticism of the
Apocalypse. (The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism) // dobp
An eternal movement: critical thought, at first subversive, turns against itself and becomes a new conformism,
but one that is sanctified by the memory of its former rebellion. Yesterdays audacity is transformed into clichs. Remorse
has ceased to be connected with precise historical circumstances; it has become a dogma, a spiritual
commodity, almost a form of currency. A whole intellectual intercourse is established: clerks are
appointed to maintain it like the ancient guardians of the sacred flame and issue permits to think and
speak.


2NC Cosmopolitanism Turn
Hartmans thesis is intrinsically tied to notions of cosmopolitanism
Nayar, 2013 University of Hyderabad, India, (Pramod K, Mobility, migrant mnemonics and memory
citizenship: Saidiya Hartmans Lose Your Mother. Nordic Journal of English Studies 12(2):81-101,
http://ojs.ub.gu.se/ojs/index.php/njes/article/viewFile/2205/1961, Date accessed: 7/2/14) // dobp
Hartman hopes to locate in the archive of suffering her (a) individual traumatic history, (b) memories of a family of slaves, and (c) the
history of dispossession within an African context of similar memories. She seeks not identity but
identification, a conscious and agential act of locating herself in a particular history and being recognized
(i.e., identified) for her location within this history. With this she hopes to also attain/obtain a citizenship of sorts. Hartmans biographical pact
with the history of every slave who left Ghana is messily merged with the autobiographical pact where she is keen on presenti ng herself as a more or less
unchanging observer of her own life. It is her individual memory that she hopes to retro-fit into a cultural memory. This move, I have proposed, is what is denied
her. Her attempts at a memory citizenship fail because Ghana does not wish to carry around a cultural memory of slavery. More importantly, as she comes to the
archive as a migrant, she also travels to it with an entirely different identity: as a cosmopolitan African. Thus, her
acts of memory citizenship with the Ghanaian archive of slavery do not merely not relocate her personal
memory into the Ghanaian one; it ends up cosmopolitanizing even the African archive. To this I shall now turn. The set of
questions (drawing from Hartmans statement, dispossession was our history, 74) that I began withwhat constitutes this our? What are its
demographic parameters? What is the shared cultural memory of slavery in Ghana?constitute the attempted imbrication of the personal with the communitarian.
When Mary Ellen, Hartmans friend in Accra calls herself black American rather than African American Hartman asks: what connection had endured after four
centuries of dispossession? (29). The burden of dispossession, however, is different for Mary Ellen and Hartman. Mary Ellen wishes to stop carrying around the
burden any more, while Hartman wishes to find her citizenship precisely in this burden. Where Mary Ellen is less interested in decoding the archive of slavery,
Hartman believes that resurrecting the archive for herself by performing a kind of memory work will give her a location in the past which, as she has already
declared, is a foreign country of which she is a citizen. In the US, Hartman says, the legacy of slavery is a way of saying that we had been treated badly for a very
long time and that the nation owes us (165). But Hartman wishes to expand the issue of slavery to beyond the blacks in
America: she wishes the state to acknowledge that slavery was a crime against humanity (166). This
complicates the kind of memory and identification that Hartman seeks. By proposing that slavery be
seen as a crime against humanity, whatever be the ethnic or racial identity of the victims, she is
rewriting the history of slavery as a global history of atrocity. She states this more or less explicitly when she writes: my future
was entangled with it [Africa], just as it was entangled with every other place on the globe where people were struggling to live and hoping to thrive (233). (This is
not substantially different from Frantz Fanons famous and controversial declaration: Every time a man has contributed to the victory of the dignity of the spirit,
every time a man has said no to an attempt to subjugate his fellows, I have felt solidarity with his act, (2008: 176).) What we have here is a
cosmopolitanization of atrocity memory. This is another instance of multidirectional memory where
the ethnic properties of different groups contribute to a global history of atrocity and trauma even
though Hartman is simultaneously trying to find local memory projects in Ghana into which she can fit her
own personal one.


The 1AC is exclusionary in its cosmopolitanization of citizenship
Nayar, 2013 University of Hyderabad, India, (Pramod K, Mobility, migrant mnemonics and memory
citizenship: Saidiya Hartmans Lose Your Mother. Nordic Journal of English Studies 12(2):81-101,
http://ojs.ub.gu.se/ojs/index.php/njes/article/viewFile/2205/1961, Date accessed: 7/2/14) // dobp
We can as early as this moment discern that memory citizenship is itself schismatic. The returning myth-driven African Americans
who enact national and racial identities that erase slavery from their histories and instead rehearse the glory of past Africas versus the re-membering of Hartman
who clearly wishes to retrieve the slave past and recall the dead to locate its members-to 'redeem the enslaved' (54)-among the bone- strewn archives. Slave
families in Africa remember things differently, while footsteps travellers and migrants to the archives
are excluded from the memories. The exclusion is at least partly because cosmopolitanization is not what is sought by
Ghanaians here. Hartman remains a cosmopolitan whose memories and concerns are more global than local-
more transnational than tribal or regional. This meansand this is my thesismemory citizenship is as
exclusionary as substantive citizenship when attempted years after the historical fact of trauma. For
Hartman who seeks belonging in terms of remembering the past there is no citizenship because citizenship demands validation from a collective that is outside
ones self. Citizenship is less about identity than about identification, and identification presupposes an external source or vantage
point from which this identification is effected. Hartman in her travelogue has an identityAfrican American, obruni, slave descendentbut what she
seeks is identification with the disempowered and the disenfranchised, and it is this that she never
acquires. Identification also implies a certain agency, where one seeks out identification and affiliation (in
this case of Hartmans with the other descendants of slave in Ghana). Hartmans memory work is an act of agency through which
she hopes to establish the identification, but which does not obtain for her the affiliation she seeks.

Memory citizenship is problematic in its cosmopolitinzation of atrocity memory
Nayar, 2013 University of Hyderabad, India, (Pramod K, Mobility, migrant mnemonics and memory
citizenship: Saidiya Hartmans Lose Your Mother. Nordic Journal of English Studies 12(2):81-101,
http://ojs.ub.gu.se/ojs/index.php/njes/article/viewFile/2205/1961, Date accessed: 7/2/14) // dobp
It is therefore particularly interesting to see that Hartman ends not with memory but with a dream: The legacy
that I chose to claim was articulated in the ongoing struggle to escape, stand down, and defeat slavery in all of its myriad forms. It was the fugitives legacy *+ It
wasnt the dream of a White House, even if it was in Harlem, but of a free territory. It was a dream of autonomy rather than nationhood. It was a dream of an
elsewhere, with all its promises and dangers, where the stateless might, at last, thrive. (234) Hartmans mnemonic narrative ends on a note of irony, where
knowledge from memory is not possible any more. But this does not mean that her memory citizenship is denied totally. Rather, we need to see
memory citizenship as constituted within her shift toward a globalization and cosmopolitanization of
atrocity memory (autonomy rather than nationhood as she puts it in the above quote), of moving beyond a history of slavery.
Her mnemonic itineraries as Astrid Erll calls them (2011: 14) take her to Ghana, but do not end there. It is in the perpetual,
globalized and transcultural nature of mnemonic practices that Hartman discovers a citizenship.
Focus on the Past K
1NC K
This debate is about starting points---The AFF offers pain tourism as a method of
liberation by commodifying atrocity---this gaze with the past fundamentally fails at
reclaiming identity and instead reinscribes oppression by masking the horrors of the
past with anecdotes of victory---only a focus on the present can offer a solution to the
horrors of the past
Hartman, 2002, specialist in African American literature and history and a professor at Columbia
University (Saidiya, In Time of Slavery The South Atlantic Quarterly 101.4 Project Muse) // dobp
A central component of UNESCO and World Tourist Organization's Cultural Tourism Programme on the Slave Routes is the development of "roots tourism,"
that is, tourist products and excursions geared for North Americans in search of their roots. Of concern here are the kinds of identification
facilitated and the degree to which they are determined by the national location and political imaginary of African-American tourists, the development strategy of
African states, and the staging of these tourist excursions as the return of the exiled and the displaced. While it is neither implausible nor far-fetched to describe
those in the diaspora as exiled or estranged children, I question the sufficiency or adequacy of "return" as a way of
describing this transatlantic journey, which some have gone so far as to dub a "reverse Middle Passage" and the nature of this encounter with
the past. To what degree can the journey of the "native stranger" be termed a return? 4 How can one go
back to a place that one has never been or never seen? Is return, then, a figure that stands in for a more adequate language of
longing and estrangement and one that gainsays undeniable and definite difference as it attempts to mend the irreparable? If Pan-Africanism has been animated by
the desire for a "unity of sentiment and action" between Africa and the diaspora, a return to ancestral land, an abiding nostalgia, and unmet and perhaps
unrealizable longings for solidarity throughout the black world, then this desire has been engendered by captivity, deportation, and death. 5 Loss affixes
our gaze to the past, determines the present, and perhaps even eclipses a vision of the future. W. E. B. Du Bois
described this blocked horizon of possibility and enduring moment of injury as dusk. It is, as Jamaica Kincaid writes, "the time . . . when all you [End Page 759] have
lost is heaviest in your mind; your mother, if you have lost her; your home, if you have lost it, the voices of people who might have loved you, or who you only
wished might have loved you. . . . Such feelings of longing and loss are heaviest in that light." It has been dusk for four hundred years. If this past does
not pass by it is because the future, the longed for, is not yet attainable. This predicament and this yearning are centuries old.
Longing and loss figure centrally in the strategies of roots tourismthe loss of one's origins, authentic African names, progenitors, and ancestral land all act as
impetus to visit, shop, and purchase. Tourism slakes longing, exploits loss, and proffers a cure by enabling cathartic
and tearful engagements with the era of the slave trade. As the brochure for the Elmina and Cape Coast castles states,
"Prominent among these are the reenactments of the horrors of the slave trade as well as a solemn, touching portrayal
of the final journey of the Africans as they walked through the hellish dungeons into awaiting ships that transported them to the Americas." Yet, what does it
bode for our relationship to the past when atrocity becomes a commodity for transnational
consumption, and this history of defeat comes to be narrated as a story of progress and triumph? If restaging scenes of captivity and
enslavement elide the distinction between sensationalism and witnessing, risk sobriety for spectacle,
and occlude the violence they set out to represent; they also create a memory of what one has not
witnessed. The reenactment of the event of captivity contrives an enduring, visceral, and personal memory of the unimaginable. These fabricated
and belated encounters with slavery enable a revisiting of the past only fleetingly visible in the
unabashed contemporaneity of Africa, recovering origins in the context of commercial transactions and
exchanges, and experiencing the wonder and welcome made possible by the narratives of return. In the
context of this encounter with death much comes into view: the continuing crisis of black life in the postcivil rights era, the
social foreclosure of grief, and bereavement as a response to the limits and failures of political
transformation. Essentially, these belated encounters bring to light the broken promises of freedom.


The alternative is affiliation---to imagine no return to the past is the only way to make
sense of the horrors of the slave trade
Seigel, 2008, Micol, Ph.D. NYU American Studies, Assistant Professor of African American and African
Diaspora Studies and American Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington,
http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/e-misferica-52/siegel // dobp
It is not that Hartman never tells stories; she does. She paraphrases accounts of early published witnesses such as Ottobah
Cugoano or Philip Quaque. She recounts historical events. Though clearly disinclined to make the subaltern speak, she even
occasionally succumbs to the desire to give voice to the voiceless. Hartman both reveals and denounces her own desire to represent the
underrepresented. She relates the tale of Captain Kimber abusing a captive on board the Recovery, for example, combing repeatedly through
the event by reiterating its pieces in each voice recorded in the transcript of Kimbers murder trial. Ending with the perspective of the captive
herself, Hartman indulges in a heartening exercise of identification with a victim whose death may be redeemed by the imagination of
transcendence. Hartman berates herself for this indulgence, wary of her motives just as she mistrusts those of the British abolitionists who first
publicized the shocking sadism. If the story ended there, Hartman writes, I could feel a small measure of comfort. I could find a salutary
lesson in the girls suffering and pretend a story was enough to save her from oblivion (153). The book proceeds in this unstinting juxtaposition
of self-disclosure and self-censure as Hartman offers herself as archetype to coax a similar critique from all who yearn for return, restoration,
and repair. Hartman demands understanding and forgiveness for such yearnings, fully recognizing the urgency of a collective reckoning with
slavery. Why, then, does Hartman rally people to do now voluntarily what they suffered historically in
abduction and dispersal? The title, in the imperative, leaves no doubt that this is what she commands. Lose your mother.
Imagine no return. Resist the temptation to fill the story-less gap. This is not a psychoanalytic version
of throw down your bucket where you are but a genuinely radical intervention. Hartman is at work
untangling a gnarled knot: some of the victims of slavery historically and of racism in the present now
reside in the belly of the worlds principal superpower. Through no consenting act of their own,
therefore, save perhaps capitalist accumulation, they are implicated in the immiseration of Africa today.
The solidarities generated by the historical experience of racism, Hartman charges, are wrongly
projected onto Africans. When Hartman finds commonality with Africans in her travels, she recognizes that it is a reflection not of
blood or kinship, but of affiliation (204). Recalling Stuart Halls wonderfully powerful concept of articulation but inflected in a markedly familial
vein, affiliation offers an active form of identification that can recognize difference, conflict, and change
over time, an alternative to the emptiness and irrelevance of an African identity in making sense of
the Atlantic slave trade (208).



1NC Alt Farley
Vote Negative as an act of radical negativity against the social-epistemological
ordering of the status quo currently characterized by a white over black hierarchy. The
counter-education is an epistemological revolution against the normative
reconstruction of the plantation that is the plan.
Farley, 2005 (Anthony Paul, Associate Professor at Boston College Law School, Perfecting Slavery,
Online, pdf Accessed: 11/15/11)
Education is where we begin. We begin after we are called.28 We are called and that is when and how we all begin. There is a calling. We are called upon to be. We can only be by becoming. What we become depends upon the calling that we choose to follow. We become the calling that we make our own. Jonathan Kozol writes of education in the neosegregated, post-Brown v. Board of Education era as death at an early age.29 White-over-black is death at an early age. Slaves are not called. Slavery is death. Education is where this death begins. V. ABOLITION
Abolition. The word calls to the slave but slaves are not called. Slaves cannot be called. Freedom is the only
calling. Everything not called is a thing, an object, and if the object takes the form of the human then it is
abject. Frederick Douglass wrote: If a slave ran away and succeeded in getting clear, or if a slave killed his master, set fire to a barn, or did any thing very wrong i n the mind of a slaveholder, it was spoken of as the fruit of abolition. Hearing the word in this connection very often, I set about learning what it meant.30 There, in the above passage fromDouglasss narrative of his life, we read of the call that became his calling, abolition, but slaves cannot be called. Education is the call and abolition is the same call (I set about l earning what
*abolition+ meant31). Education requires abolition. Abolition requires education. Freedom is the only education. One can only be called to freedom. Abolition called Douglass. Abolition became Douglasss calling.32 The tree of knowledge produces the forbidden fruit of abolition.33 What happens to the slave who responds to the call, who enables herself to call and to be called? What, in other words, happens to the slave who learns to read and to write? *T+he most common widely known penalty for learning to read and write was amputation.34 It is difficult to
remember these dismemberments and so we screen them with juridical memories of progress up from a slavery that never ended. Education and freedom are the same call, the same calling. VI. EDUCATION We who have slavery with us still are made up of memory and
forgetting. Freedom is our calling. Slaves are not called. Education is required to pursue our calling. Education
is dangerous to slavery, to the system of white-over-black. James Baldwin, speaking to Harlem teachers, noted: The paradox
of education is precisely thisthat as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the
society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the
ability to look at the world for [oneself] himself, to make *ones+ his own decisions, to say to [oneself] himself
this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not.35 Baldwin continued: [I]f I were a teacher in this school, or any Negro school . . . dealing with Negro children, who were in my care only a few hours of every day and would then return to their homes and to the streets, children who have an apprehension of their future which with every hour grows grimmer and darker, I would try to teach themI would try to
make them knowthat those streets, those houses, those dangers, those agonies by which they are surrounded are criminal. I would try to make each child knowthat these things are a result of a criminal conspiracy to destroy him. I would teach him that if he intends to be [an adult], he must at once decide that he is stronger than this conspiracy and that he must never make his peace with it. And that one of his weapons for refusing to make his peace with it and for destroying it depends on what he decides he is worth.36 C.L.R. James, writing on the revolution in Haiti,
observed of the small, privileged class of slaves that while most slavishly imitated their masters, albeit in a lesser key, a fewused their positions to become dangerous, to become the revolutionaries who would later burn down every plantation: Permeated with the vices of their masters and mistresses, these upper servants gave themselves airs and despised the slaves in the fields. . . . But a fewof these used their position to cultivate themselves, to gain a little education, to learn all they could. The leaders of a revolution are usually those who have been able to profit by
the cultural advantages of the systemthey are attacking, and the San Domingo revolution was no exception to this rule.37 The leaders of the revolution in Haiti were slaves who, like Douglass, took and ate of the forbidden fruit of abolition.38 The leaders of that revolution, in other words, were slaves who had educated themselves.39 James Baldwin understood this and warned the post-Brown school children of Harlem and their teachers that the institutions within which revolutionaries must never make . . . peace.40 It is with education, then, that the study of
memory and forgetting begins. C.L.R. Jamess description of the Haitian beginning is useful in understanding the beginning of white-over-black in the United States: From the underworld of two continents they came, Frenchmen and Spaniards, Maltese, Italians, Port uguese and Americans. For whatever a mans origin, record or character, here his white skin made him a person of quality and rejected or failures in their own country flocked to San Domingo, where consideration was achieved at so cheap a price, money flowed and opportunities of debauchery abounded.41
White-over-black is a calling (From the underworld of two continents they came. . . .). Education is a calling. Education in whiteoverblack is necessary to live within the world and time belted by the colorline for in that world and time white-over-black is everyones calling. White-over-black is a business and a pleasure, it is the business of pleasure, and it is the pleasure of business. White-over-black is sublime and earthly and divine and other many-splendored things besides these.42 White-over-black is the orientation needed to use the maps of all our territories: Upon
the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence as a foundation, there is built a superstructure of diversified and characteristic sentiments, illusions, habits of thought, and outlooks on life in general. The class as a whole creates and shapes them out of its material foundation, and out of the corresponding social relationships. The individual in whomthey arise, through tradition and education, may fancy them to be the true determinates, the real origin of his activities.43 Everyone, then, in a white-over-black order of things, is called to that order. The
order to which we are called (our social conditions of existence) is the structure of thought itself (of our diversified and characteristic sentiments, illusions, habits of thought, and outl ooks on life in general). In a white-over-black order of things the order to which we are all called is white-over-black. That calling to order is itself the material foundation of white-over-black. White-over-black occurs when those marked as white are made mind and those marked as black are made matter and it is also what we call thinking.44 To come to order requires training, an
education in that order. Whiteoverblack is the order of things at present. Our training begins early:45 Compulsory school attendance laws and the great expenditures for education both demonstrate our recognition of the importance of education to our democratic society. It is required in the performance of our most basic public responsibilities, . . . even service in the armed forces. Today it is a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing himfor later professional training, and in helping himto adjust normally to his environment. In these
days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education.46 And it never ends.47 VII. BURN What is to be done? Two hundred years ago, when the slaves in Haiti rose up, they, of necessity, burned everything:
They burned San Domingo flat so that at the end of the war it was a charred desert. Why do you burn everything?
asked a French officer of a prisoner. We have a right to burn what we cultivate because a man [or woman] has a right
to dispose of his *ones+ own labour, was the reply of this unknown anarchist.48The slaves burned everything because
everything was against them. Everything was against the slaves, the entire order that it was their lot to
follow, the entire order in which they were positioned as worse than senseless things, every plantation,
everything.49Leave nothing white behind you, said Toussaint to those dedicated to the end of white-overblack. 50 God gave Noah the
rainbow sign. No more water, the fire next time.51 The slaves burned everything, yes, but, unfortunately, they only burned everything in Haiti.52 Theirs was the
greatest and most successful revolution in the history of the world but the failure of their fire to cross the waters was the great tragedy of the Nineteenth
century.53 At the dawn of the Twentieth century, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, The colorline belts the world.54 Du Bois said that the problem of the Twentieth century
was the problem of the colorline.55 The problem, now, at the dawn of the Twenty-first century is the problem of the colorline. The colorline continues to belt the
world. Indeed, the slave power that is the United States now threatens an entire world with the death that it
has become and so the slaves of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, those with nothing but their chains to
lose, must, if they would be free, if they would escape slavery, win the entire world. VIII. TRAINING We begin as children. We are called and we become
our response to the call. Slaves are not called. What becomes of them? What becomes of the broken-hearted? The slaves are divided souls, they are brokenhearted, the slaves are split asunder by what they are called upon to become. The slaves are called upon to become objects but objecthood is not a calling. The slave, then, during its loneliest loneliness, is divided from itself. This
is schizophrenia. The slaves are not called, or, rather, the slaves are called to not be. The slaves are called unfree and thus the living can never be and so the slaves burst apart and die. The slaves begin as death, not as children, and death is not a beginning but an end. There is no progress and no exit from the undiscovered country of the slave, or so it seems. We are
trained to think through a progress narrative, a grand narrative, the grandest narrative, that takes us up from
slavery. There is no up from slavery. The progress from slavery to the end of history is the progress from white-
over-black to white-over-black to white-overblack. The progress of slavery runs in the opposite direction of
the past-present-future timeline. The slave only becomes the perfect slave at the end of the timeline, only
under conditions of total juridical freedom. It is only under conditions of freedom, of bourgeois legality, that the
slave can perfect itself as a slave by freely choosing to bow down before its master. The slave perfects itself as a slave by offering a prayer for equal rights. The
system of marks is a plantation. The system of property is a plantation. The system of law is a plantation. These plantations, all part of the same system, hierarchy, produce white-overblack, white-over-black only, and that continually. The slave perfects itself as a slave through its prayers for equal rights. The plantation system will not commit suicide and the
slave, as stated above, has knowing non-knowledge of this fact. The slave finds its way back from the undiscovered country only by burning down
every plantation. When the slave prays for equal rights it makes the free choice to be dead, and it makes
the free choice to not be. Education is the call. We are called to be and then we become something. We
become that which we make of ourselves. We follow the call, we pursue a calling. Freedom is the only
callingit alone contains all possible directions, all of the choices that may later blossom into the
fullness of our lives. We can only be free. Slavery is death. How do slaves die? Slaves are not born, they are made. The slave must be trained to
be that which the living cannot be. The only thing that the living are not free to be is dead. The slave must be trained to follow the call that is not a call. The slave must be trained to pursue the
calling that is not a calling. The slave must be trained to objecthood. The slave must become death. Slavery is white-over-black. White-over-black is death. White-over-black,
death, then, is what the slave must become to pursue its calling that is not a calling.
*Modified for Gendered Language.

2NC Link
Return is not an option---the mere attempt to reclaim origins misses the point and
distracts from contemporary approaches toward freedom
Hartman, 2002, specialist in African American literature and history and a professor at Columbia
University (Saidiya, In Time of Slavery The South Atlantic Quarterly 101.4 Project Muse) // dobp
What becomes apparent, despite the proclaimed unanimity of the ancestors [End Page 765] and their descendants in the commonplace
pronouncement "You are back" is the ambivalence of the identification with Africa forged in these encounters. After all, the origin identified is
the site of rupture and, ironically, the forts and castles built by Europeans come to approximate home. Loss predominates at this imagined site
of origin, since the genesis of the diaspora is located in this commercial deportation. This unhomely home hints that this state
of exile and estrangement might well be inescapable. 14 Nor is an African identity easily reclaimed, since
one is as likely to be called obroni, which means "foreigner" or "white," as "sister" and these salutations actually achieve a strange equality as
designations of exchange relations, markers of foreignness, and inducements to buy. While remembering the "anguish of the
ancestors" is a central aspect of the pilgrimage to these monuments of the transatlantic trade, recursion is also informed
by the imperatives and longings of the present. That is, dispossession is itself an inheritance that tethers us
to "that event." Racial subjection, incarceration, impoverishment and second-class citizenship: this is
the legacy of slavery that still haunts us. 15 The duration of injury and the seemingly intractable character of our defeat account
for the living presence of slavery, and as well for the redress proffered by tourism. A reverse middle passage? At the Door of No Returnthe
passage from the dungeon to the slave shipthe tour guide declares, "It is not really the Door of No Return because now you are back!" These
words cast the tourist as the triumphant captive and returning descendant. This proclamation, regularly issued at the final exit, is the ultimate
moment of convergence between the past and the present and one that reveals the dilemma of mourning as both a recognition of loss and
replacement of the lost object by way of identification. The return is a fantasy of origins; it is in the class of fantasies that Jean
Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis describe as primal. Akin to collective myths, such fantasies "provide a representation of and
solution to whatever constitutes a major enigma for the child" and "dramatise the primal moment or
original point of departure of a history. In the primal scene,' it is the origin of the subject that is
represented." 16

Attempts to return to the past ignores existent racializations and fails to establish
closure---turns the AFF
Catsam, 2008, associate professor of history at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin. He
received his BA from Williams College, his MA from the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, and his
PhD from Ohio University, where he was a student in the Contemporary History Institute (Derek,
African Americans, American Africans, and the Idea of an African Homeland,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/rah/summary/v036/36.1catsam.html) // dobp
The American image of Africa is at best vague, under-formed, simplified, and more often than not patronizing. White Americans in
particular have perpetuated the mythology of Africa as the "Dark Continent," a place apart where wildness and chaos and danger lurk. Africa has allowed the racist
American mindset to conjure its wildest images and to depict its deepest fantasies of repulsion and fascination. The African American image of
Africa has historically been no less warped but has been characterized by romanticism, fetishism, and nostalgia. Black
Americans have often perpetuated an uncomplicated view of Africa as a vestigial homeland awaiting the
return of its lost souls. While this view has tended to be more charitable toward Africa than the more
generalized American view, it is not necessarily less problematic. The two books under review address not only African
American views of Africa, but also the physical act of black Americans traveling to the continent, often in hopes of seeing their romantic image up close, usually in
conjunction with an attempt to escape the racial problems of the United States. Thus the African American quest to "return" to Africa
has, over the course of more than two centuries, represented not only an escape to an Africa of their
imagining, but also an escape from the very real racial problems in the United States. The idea of Africa thus came
to embody hopes and dreams and opportunity that America had failed in fulfilling. If, then, for most white Americans Africa represented an exotic and savage other,
for black Americans Africa represented an idealized other and increasingly for many the real land of opportunity. James T. Campbell's Middle Passages explores
these centuries of African American sojourns to Africa in one of the most remarkable works of historical scholarship and writing in the last decade. Campbell
synthesizes a rich and varied history in order to convey the many ways in which black Americans have engaged with both the Africa of their minds and the real
Africa on the ground. He successfully weaves a host of stories together to reveal the rich and complicated relationship black Americans have had with Africa.
Campbell approaches his subject matter both chronologically and biographically. He begins each chapter by sketching out an individual whose experiences will
inform the themes of the era in which he or she (though usually he) took those journeys. Some of these individuals such as Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, Newport
Gardner, Bishop Henry McNeil Turner, and Thomalind Martin Polite are obscure to all but perhaps some historians. Others, including Martin Delany, Marcus Garvey,
W.E.B. Du Bois, and Langston Hughes are well known, though through Campbell's eyes we are destined to see them differently from how we are accustomed. Each
person's encounter with Africa inevitably changed them in ways they could never have imagined, made complicated their previously uncluttered view of Africa, and
at times made them value their American lives in ways they never would have anticipated. Real Africa proved a lot more complex, and at
times difficult, than the one that had existed in idealized form in their imaginations. The impetus for traveling to
Africa proved almost as varied as the number of travelers. In the early phases of Campbell's chronicle, the returnees took the form of "recaptives," slaves who either
of their own volition, but more usually as part of a larger political process in which the slaves or recently freed slaves were props, became part of the political tug of
war over the slave question. Recaptives served a redemptive role in the eyes of abolitionists while presenting Africa as the motherland that it would grow to be
among the diasporic population. Thus from the outset the earliest returnees created multiple images of what Africa represented. Africa, and especially "Africa,"
became determined by its beholder, who usually did the beholding from across the ocean. The Africa of the imagination thus prevailed long
before any returnees ever saw its shores. For these earliest returnees the escape from slavery was probably more important than the return
to Africa. In a sense, Africa represented little more than a prop to those almost universally white patrons
of freed or escaped slaves.

The language of return undermines reparability and dooms the AFF to inevitable
failure
Hartman, 2002, specialist in African American literature and history and a professor at Columbia
University (Saidiya, In Time of Slavery The South Atlantic Quarterly 101.4 Project Muse) // dobp
Clearly, the primal scene that explains the origin of the subject is the event of captivity and enslavement, thus the sites
returned to are the dungeons, barracoons, and slave houses of the west coast of Africa. The journey through [End Page 766] the dungeons is a
kind of time travel that transports the tourist to the past. Not only do these fantasies have complicated and mixed origins, but their enactment
is no less vexed; for the identification of origins, the drama of return and the staging of recovery are shot through
with an awareness of both the impossibility and the necessity of redressing the irreparable. At the portal that
symbolized the finality of departure and the impossibility of reversion, the tensions that reside in mourning the dead are
most intensely experienced. Mourning is both an expression of loss that tethers us to the dead and
severs that connection or overcomes loss by assuming the place of the dead. The excesses of empathy
lead us to mistake our return with the captives'. To the degree that the bereaved attempt to
understand this space of death by placing themselves in the position of the captive, loss is attenuated
rather than addressed, and the phantom presence of the departed and the dead eclipsed by our
simulated captivity. "You are back!" We are encouraged to see ourselves as the vessels for the captive's
return; we stand in the ancestor's shoes. We imaginatively witness the crimes of the past and cry for
those victimizedthe enslaved, the ravaged, and the slaughtered. And the obliterative assimilation of empathy enables us to cry for
ourselves, too. As we remember those ancestors held in the dungeons, we can't but think of our own dishonored and devalued lives and the
unrealized aspirations and the broken promises of abolition, reconstruction, and the civil rights movement. The intransigence of our
seemingly eternal second-class status propels us to make recourse to stories of origin, unshakable
explanatory narratives, and sites of injurythe land where our blood has been spiltas if some
essential ingredient of ourselves can be recovered at the castles and forts that dot the western coast of
Africa, as if the location of the wound was itself the cure, or as if the weight of dead generations could
alone ensure our progress. Ironically the declaration "You are back!" undermines the very violence that
these memorials assiduously work to present by claiming that the tourist's excursion is the ancestor's
return. Given this, what does the journey back bode for the present? What is surprising is that despite the emphasis placed on
remembrance and return, these ceremonies are actually unable to articulate in any decisive fashion,
other than the reclamation of a true identity, what remembering yields. While the journey back is the vehicle of remedy, recovery, and self-
reckoning, the question begged is what exactly is the redressive work actualized by remembrance. Is not the
spectacular abjection [End Page 767] of slavery reproduced in facile representations of the horrors of the slave trade? What ends are served by
such representations, beyond remedying the failures of memory through the dramatic reenactment of captivity and the incorporation of the
dead? The most disturbing aspect of these reenactments is the suggestion that the rupture of the Middle
Passage is neither irreparable nor irrevocable but bridged by the tourist who acts as the vessel for the
ancestor. In short, the captive finds his redemption in the tourist. The celebration of return actually threatens to
undermine the work of mourning "by simulating a condition of intactness," rather than attending to the ruin and
wreckage of slavery and by declaring that those deported have in fact returned through their descendants. 17 In the dungeon, the history of
decline is narrated as a history of progress. The ease with which the "greatest crime against humanity" is invoked
and instantaneously eclipsed by the celebration of the return of those descendants of the Middle
Passage would suggest that in the last instance the language of return acts to disavow the very
violence that it purportedly gives voice to and insinuates that the derangements of the slave trade can
be repaired. 18


The 1AC is phantasmic politics---a focus on the haunting of the past is irreconcilable
with contemporary acts of resistance
Saunders, 2008, Senior editor for Anturium, a peer reviewed Caribbean Studies Journal, publishes
original works and critical studies of Caribbean literature, theater, film, art, and culture by writers and
scholars worldwide, (Patricia J., Fugitive Dreams of Diaspora: Conversations with Saidiya Hartman,
http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1155&context=anthurium DA:
7/14/14) // dobp
The Archaeologies of Black Memory symposium and seminar hosted by Small Axe and the Caribbean Literary Studies Program at the
University of Miami (June 2007) provided an occasion for a number of scholars to reflect on some of the critical concerns raised by Derrida in
this opening epigraph, though not primarily (or even simply) in regards to the specters of Marx. I am appropriating Derridas
engagement with the ghosts of Marx because it has particular relevance for the central focus of this two
day symposium, the work of memory in producing knowledge, in this case knowledge about black
people who have been disappeared, nowhere to be identified or localized, except (of course) in the
archives of history. The questions though, that haunt us are; what role does the archive, or should the
archive, play in constructing knowledge about black subjectivity? Put differently, to what extent can the archive
represent the place that these missing black bodies, denied the safe space of the marked burial space, have come to (un)rest? Another
set of questions that emerge from this line of inquiry about ghosts, the work mourning, the archive and
knowledge production highlights the problematic relationship between scholars and their disciplinary
conventions. There is an increasingly uneasy dialogue taking place between scholars and the ghosts of history that inhabit the texts we
depend on so heavily to represent the lives and worlds they once inhabited. Derrida warns us about the problematic
relationship of the scholar or spectator and the specter, noting, a traditional scholar does not believe in
ghosts (12). To be sure, this statement has little to do with faith or beliefs but more so the school of thought and conventions that inform
epistemological boundaries of the learned intellectual. There has long been a tradition in the theatre for imagining the voice of the specter, and
subsequently, through the novel and poetry, writers could address themselves to the ghost. But to reconstruct scholarly traditions
in this regard involves nothing short of what Derrida refers to as a hauntology or a staging for the end
of history (10).