The Ark of Bones, a chapter in Henry Dumass the black

continuum reveals the mythological connections to blackness

and the Earth.
Ruffin 10 (Kimberly N Ruffin, Graduate Dean of College of Arts and Sciences @
Roosevelt University, Black on Earth: African American Eco literary traditions,
University of Georgia Press, pg 117-118)
This beauty resonates in Dumass stories about characters who construct myths out
of the ashes of trauma. Deaths in the recent and more distant past are the sources
of trauma in the short story Ark of Bones, about the initiation of a boy who agrees
to honor properly the memory of ancestors, especially the victims of racialized
violence. The riverbank where two young boys,4 Fish-hound and Headeye, encounter one another is called
Deadmans Landin. By the end of the story the boys learn that an African American
lynching victim was presumed thrown into the river. Even though the river is the
resting place of a lynching victim, it has the potential to be a place of redemptive
healing from the trauma of racialized violence, with the help of myth. Fish-hound, who
narrates the story, describes Headeye as a peer with exceptional intellectual and spiritual powers whose ugly
appearance stems from his large eyes and disproportionate head and body. Headeyes physical appearance
symbolizes his visionary skill, complemented by his willingness to be ordained while aboard a large ark designated
as a soulboat filled with bones and priests. Before the ceremony begins, Fish-hound describes what he sees:
Bones. I saw bones. They were stacked all the way to the top of the ship. I looked around. The under side of the
whole ark was nothing but a great bonehouse. I looked and saw crews of black men handlin in them bones. There
was a crew of two or three under every cabin around that ark. Why, there must have been a million cabins. They
were doin it very carefully, like they were holdin onto babies or somethin precious. (18) Analyzing the pervasive
image of bones in Dumass work, George Austin Jones writes, The

word bone is synonymous with

the multiple foundations of Black knowledge and wisdom which must be
nurtured. . . . Dumas warns us to return to the roots and build on the bones of our
ancestors through the African Continuum (In Redmond 26667). Although
Fishhound does not fully understand the careful handling of bones, he later learns
that its significance stems from the fact that the ark is the house of generations.
The boys in Dumass story are told that Every African who lives in America has a
part of his soul in this ark (Dumas 20). A biological understanding of race, in which
people retain some physiological connection not only to individual ancestors but also to a larger, geographically
designated group (in this story symbolized by bones ),

transmits itself to a cultural tradition which ,

although it may change, serves as a resource from which to draw valuable
strengths. This river experience in the U.S. South constructs ties to a geographically expansive history that has
the potential to address the communitys traumatic relationship to Deadmans Landin. Linking individual
stories to a larger story empowers Headeye as an ecological agent, someone able
to negotiate the natural and social order through his openness to the possibility that
what is real may also have elements of what is often understood as the mystical.
This mythology has the potential to revise his communitys connection to the
natural landscape and give them power over their traumatic history. Layers of
mythology and history form the African American cultural strengths from which the
youth are able to draw: biblical references (Ezekiel and the valley of dry bones;
Noahs ark), African American history (slave ships/the Middle Passage, racialized
violence), and non-Christian religious practice (voodoo, and the use of a mojo bone).
Clyde Taylor celebrates this multiplicity of discourses as related to Dumass
extraordinary discovery of nature, which Taylor suggests was found through
Dumas backtreading and reclaiming the sweet and acrid threads of Afro

experience, through the blues, Gospel, the Bible, Black country life and mores, into
the roots, the soil, until he found himself securely at home in his African person, in
the middle of the Mississippi Valley (In Redmond 356). Taylor also designates Dumass discovery as extraordinary
because of the ecological challenges African Americans have had as a racially marginalized group.

Summarizing the result of racism on blacks ecological outlook, he writes, A tree

lurks in this imagination as something you can be lynched from; a river becomes
someplace to dispose your body. At the most, the land is something you can love
and live with but never feel as your own (35657). But in Ark of Bones, Dumas
supplants these fears with the constructive tenor of his mythic voice. He places the
two boys in the story in the wilderness to return to the roots and build on the
bones; indeed, it is Headeyes river-rat knowledge of the natural area that returns him to what readers learn
is the ark. Once there, Headeye can confront the conflicted relationship to the nonhuman natural world that his

and heal the trauma of racialized violence and exploitation .

Headeye responds to Gods call, undergoes his anoint[ing], and recites the epigraph quoted at this chapters
community has endured

opening as part of the ceremony. Dumas concludes the story with the image of Headeye leaving the town but
promising Fish-hound he will return, perhaps with more tools that will assist his anointed stewardship. Trudier HarrisLopez writes, The

myth that Dumas creates is one in which black people recognize

their oppressions and move beyond them to the possibility of creating something
else. . . . Generations upon generations of black people on Western soil must ever
be aware [of the message in Ark of Bones]. It is the impetus to redefinition of self,
to the claiming of cosmic ties for people of African descent (South of Tradition 143).
Dumas turns to the nonhuman natural world as a resource for moving beyond
oppressions and articulating cosmic ties. The river gives access to the otherworld of
the Ark of Bones. Once Headeye returns from his initiation, he picks up Heyboy, Fish-hounds no-count
dog, as a companion for his next journey. Out of a history of enslavement and a present of
racialized violence, Headeye takes a mythic journey and redefines himself as a
powerful protector of his people.

In our rush for the technical fix, we erase the mythical power
structures that undergird the existence of a racialized
emission industry
There is a calculative sacrificial grid that undergirds a
historical and cultural ecology between blackness and
environmental destruction. Extensive state plantation
economies continue to tropicalize and exploit the structural
inequalities within ecological division and justifies slavery
Rusert 10 (Britt M., Britt Rusert received her Ph.D. in English and graduate
certificate in Feminist Studies from Duke University, Polygraph, Black Nature: The
Question of Race in the Age of Ecology, pg 151-153,
http://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/37351392/Rusert_BlackNature_
Polygraph.pdf?
AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJ56TQJRTWSMTNPEA&Expires=1471368654&Signature=ucJQ
TESDyONu%2F0ROXkyfrdxALQ0%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B
%20filename%3DBlack_Nature_The_Question_of_Race_in_the.pdf, accessed 8/16/16,
YLP)
From widespread environmental degradation in economically and geographically vulnerable areas to the
proliferation of bioprospecting (the mining of indigenous peoples lands for genetically valuable specimens),

transformation of nature under the conditions of late capital are

occurring with particular intensity in Southern geographies across the globe.3 While
carbon emissions are disproportionately produced by a small number of countries in
the global North, the global South suffers greatest from its effects.4 And yet,
popular media coverage of ecological disasters routinely presents such catastrophic
events as Mother Nature taking her revenge. The naturalization of global capital and
its uneven ecological effects became especially apparent in the U.S. in the wake of
Hurricane Katrina, which threw the connection between a supposedly provincial
Deep South and extranational spaces into spectacular relief. The tropicalization of
the Deep South during and in the aftermath of Katrina illuminated rampant racism
and socioeconomic inequality, linking regions of the U.S. South with rampant
poverty and dispossession throughout the world.5 The governments initial nonresponse to Katrina was coextensive with a long history of environmental racism in
the South, where communities of color have been both disproportionately exposed
to environmental hazards and placed in an uncomfortable proximity to the
American wilderness, making structural racism appear natural. Through such
struggles over the

naturalizations, the residents of New Orleans and surrounding areas could be disappeared into the toxic stew of the
environmental and social catastrophe. Katrinas tropical miscegenations revealed the U.S. South as an unstable
environment that had been thoroughly disordered by both the natural disaster of the hurricane and the unnatural

Despite the ever-growing economic gulf

between nations of the global North and global South, we might say that due to
rapidly rising temperatures and the increased frequency of natural disasters linked
to global warming, along with ongoing disinvestment in public institutions and
public in restructure (which has long been a hallmark of the South), we are
witnessing a veritable Southernization of the globe . Under such circumstances, the history of the
disaster of the governments post-storm abandonment.

South may soon become universal history. The language of a global South first emerged during the 1970s in the
terms of a North-South global axis as a replacement for the outmoded language of the developing world. Arif
Dirlik notes that while in the early 1990s the term was primarily used [W]ith reference to U.S. policies in Latin
America it quickly came to be associated with the shift from governmental aid to marketization that

The South had to

seek development in the global capitalist economy. This also signified an important
shift in the content of development away from an earlier emphasis on
development as national development (or the development of the whole nation). It is
characterized the discourse of globalization, which itself acquired prominence in the 1990s.

quite evident in hindsight that under contemporary conditions, national economic development no longer means
the development of the whole nation, but rather only of those sectors of the economy and population that can
participate successfully in the global economy, usually in urban networks that are components of a global network
society In the age of globalization, the more permeable, less-clunky region takes precedence over the

bureaucratic nation-state, which too often slows down the flow of capital within and across national
borders. First deployed by a governmental commission and later by the United
Nations as an apparently neutral substitution for Third World, the global South
was eventually taken up by critics of an increasingly deregulated global capitalism
to describe the unequal distribution of wealth, rights, and resources under
supposedly kinder, gentler regimes of neoliberal governance. While the global South
emerged under conditions of intense globalization during the 1970s and is normally understood to encompass
regions of Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia, we might glimpse an earlier iteration of if not the global South
then definitely a more global South by turning to colonial environmental discourses beginning in the eighteenth

Colonial discourse joined the Southern U.S. colonies to other colonial spaces
in the Southern hemisphere through claims to a shared tropicality that racialized
both the environment and human bodies. The U.S. South has had a fraught relationship to nature
ever since its emergence as a region during the late eighteenth century.7 Historically, a technological
century.

and productive industrial North has been juxtaposed to a reproductive South that,
because of its imagined location outside of capitalist modernity, has remained
closer to nature.8 Romantic visions of a pre-industrial, pastoral South have populated Southern literatures
since the nineteenth century and continue to shape the contours of Southern tourism into the twenty-first century. 9

And yet, Southern nature has never been quite natural . Even in the eighteenth
century, observers of the new nation worried about how the teeming reproductions
of a tropical Southern environment made nature itself seem unnatural, if not
monstrous. The specter of plantation enslavement additionally interrupted such
pastoral utopias. Pastoral visions of the antebellum South were more interested in
taming the wild, uncultivated aspects of the environment than in celebrating them.
The careful transformation of Southern lands into domesticated landscape during
the antebellum period masked over the mutual exploitation of enslaved persons and
degraded soils. And yet, historically, the concept of a Southern nature has been
burdened by a lingering sense of impurity, or even toxicity, not only due to
widespread environmental destruction under exhaustive systems of plantation
monoculture but because of enduring anxieties that the Southern environment,
populated by enslaved laborers who threatened to rebel and usurp power, was
being transformed into a black geography. Indeed, the Atlantic plantation system
stands central to an enduring history of environmental degradation and
environmental racism in Southern spaces. Sociologist Robert Bullard has linked an ecologically
devastated U.S. South with its former entrenchments in a plantation economy: The South has always been thought

By default, the
region became a sacrifice zone, a dump for the rest of the nations toxic waste.
of as a backward land, based on its social, economic, political, and environmental policies.

A
colonial mentality exists in the South, where local government and big business take advantage of people who are

Many of these attitudes emerged from the regions

marriage to slavery and the plantation system, which exploited both humans and
the land.10 In order to understand the current Southernization of the globe, as well as the possibilities it might
politically and economically powerless.

enable, it behooves us to pay attention to the enduring ecological, economic, and political legacies of the plantation
complex into the twenty-first century. The plantation is not an archaic institution that withered away with the
termination of the slave trade and abolishment of slavery, but rather remains a central site of production across the
contemporary global South.11

The plantation has also served as an important site for the

management and regulation of an unruly tropical nature understood to traverse
both racialized subjects and a peculiar plantation environment. During the
antebellum period, the plantation emerged as a laboratory for experimenting with
and manipulating all kinds of biota on the plantation including plants, animals,
and enslaved persons. The plantation, in other words, has played a central role in
the negotiation and management of race and ecology in Southern geographies.

That makes the co-constitutive analysis of mythos and logos,

science and fiction, that much necessary. Mythos creates the
condition of possibility for recognizing a relationship that
interrogates racist mythology, while simultaneously
challenging the archive of representations
Ruffin 10 (Kimberly N Ruffin, Graduate Dean of College of Arts and Sciences @
Roosevelt University, Black on Earth: African American Eco literary traditions,
University of Georgia Press, pg 113-115)

I address this absence by offering an ecocritical reading of mythic literature rooted in the lives of African Americans.

Early African Americans (located largely in the U.S. South) cried out for myths that
would address their desire for ecological belonging against the context of
geographic and cultural change. They were a newly designated people in a New World who needed new
myths. As Jane Campbell writes in Mythic Black Fiction: The Transformation of History,
For Afro-American writers, whose ancestors were wrenched from their native
country, enslaved, and forced to subscribe to damaging notions about themselves
and their heritage, the creation of a distinct mythology has been almost essential to
the artistic process. . . . Myths, by definition, voice a cultures most profound
perceptions, and, when given fictional form, can awaken the audiences strongest
impulses (Campbell ix). Although mythological traditions often come directly from indigenous, long-standing
relationships to land, they also come from communities that have faced relatively recent geographic change.
Campbells description reiterates that myths importance does not diminish in the face of geographic displacement

African Americans history of displacement and exploitation brings two

facets of myth to bear in this chapters iteration of ecological beauty and burden.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines the first facet of myth as a traditional story,
typically involving supernatural beings or forces, which embodies and provides an
explanation, aetiology, or justification for something such as the early history of a
society, a religious belief or ritual, or a natural phenomenon. This definition
pertains to the beauty of verbal art that connects people with themselves and the
world around them. This type of myth links people with a particular locale or explains a particular group
and exploitation.

ethos. Like the metaphors discussed in Daniel J. Philippons Conserving Words: How American Nature Writers
Shaped the Environmental Movement, myths provide a trove of images that are not only descriptive but also
constructive and productive. They help to create meaning and reality and to produce certain effects (17). Lyle
Eslinger explains, Myths are cognitive maps by which we attempt to order an apparently chaotic world and
universe. Myths are stories that we remember about what our world is, how it came to be, how we came to be, what
we want from it, and fi nally about what our future might be. . . . Myths emerge from human need and express our

As mythmakers, African Americans consolidated

ideas about their group identity and connection with not only America but also
Africa and its diaspora. Their myths serve the constructive function of positive group
identity and create meaning and reality based in a connection to place, and they
sustain and propel African Americans through difficult circumstances . The second
facet of myth is defined as a widespread but untrue or erroneous story or belief; a widely held
misconception; a misrepresentation of the truth. Also: something existing only in myth; a fi
ctitious or imaginary person or thing (oed). Myth can also be a way of naming liesuntruths and with that
definition in mind, we can understand African Americans as being subject to an
onslaught of destructive myths. Racist ideologies that supported enslavement and
subsequent discrimination yielded burdensome myths refl ective of this meaning of myth. These myths
inextricable biological rootage in the world (1).

destroy the truth with obfuscating, barely human images of people of African descent. Myths also tell us that
something went badly wrong, that we humans have been exiled from home, ousted from the garden (Suzuki 185).

At the service of nation making, imperialism, and exclusionary group identity,

destructive myths demonstrate the ways in which pseudo- and nonscientific modes
of discourse have ecological impacts that equal or surpass those of scientific
discourse. This chapter is a call to investigate both the constructive and destructive
functions of myth. Central to this call is the question: What is the value of myth as
an aspect of ecological writing, particularly for African Americans , a largely nonindigenous
North American group? This is a call to investigate how African American ecoliterature
puts concepts of race and myth in place

Embrace the ritual, reinvent the mythos, and affirm the

performance of the 1AC - Racialized constructions of
mythology in ecoliteracy surrounds an imaginative politics that
has the liberatory potential to challenge calculative and
normative understandings of the environment
Ruffin 10 (Kimberly N Ruffin, Graduate Dean of College of Arts and Sciences @
Roosevelt University, Black on Earth: African American Eco literary traditions,
University of Georgia Press, pg 133-135)
Through myth, we grope for connection to place. Mythologies are there at the
beginning of human-land relationships, and they can also block human-land relationships from
evolving. Murray Book chin wants to infuse science and technology with myth in his
comments, Poetry and imagination must be integrated with science and
technology, for we have evolved beyond an innocence that can be nourished
exclusively by myth and dreams (Bookchin 84). I do not suggest that myth be the exclusive or an
exclusionary genre of eco literature; however, in examining the constructive and destructive
functions of myth in Dumass and Everetts work, we can better understand the
strengths of including myth as part of our ecological understanding. Caught
between the human need for myths in a time of geographic hypermobility and the
lasting impact of oppressive racial myths, contemporary African Americans stand to
benefit from the perpetual need for myths approximations to evolve (Eslinger 1).
Henry Dumass writing represents the beauty of being natural: human beings can
make myths that connect them to nonhuman nature . His work suggests that the
project of creating myths should not be over, for this activity provides ecological
beauty. In demonstrating ecological burden, Everetts work shows how human groups are endangered by racist
myths that dramatically impact their experience of place and inhibit their ability to develop affinity for the
nonhuman natural world. His work underscores that we must be cognizant of the myths about humanity that we tell

myth deconstruction leaves us at the same place where

Dumas begins: with the need for new stories. The negatively racialized cannot
afford to ignore the role of myths in their ecological experience. Ecological discourse
that does not recognize the immense impact of racist mythology will always be
under informed, offensive, and counterproductive . Returning to my application of Austins
ourselves. Everetts

concept of economic deviance, I cite her reflection on the consequences of the criminalization of people of African

The harm that blacks suffer from disrespectful and

disparate treatment goes beyond psychological pain or the sting of injustice in a
legal regime supposedly dedicated to racial equality. The most disturbing aspect of the
descent in the commercial world. She writes:

discriminatory service blacks experience in common ordinary commercial transactions is economic exploitation. . . .
Moreover, discriminatory service narrows blacks choices regarding where to consume and impedes their ability to
enter into efficient commercial transactions. . . . In addition . . . many of the maneuver blacks employ to make
consumption easier entail costs that add to the price of purchases. Finally, whites also are exploited by the
disparate treatment blacks receive, although they hardly seem to notice. (Austin 23132). What are the

Everetts works suggests that ecodeviants

are constantly cheated out of ecological belonging. Racist mythology follows African
Americans wherever they go, and with it the potential for life-extinguishing violence.
In addition, the eco-entitled are blinded to the true costs of their position in the
world. This ideology presupposes that the eco-entitled should be able to continue
their practices under the false pretense that they will never suffer like those
deemed ecodeviants. Dumass stories discussed here are positioned at the beginning of adolescents
consequences of ecological entitlement and deviance?

understanding about the natural world. The adolescent stage of human development is, perhaps, a fitting metaphor
for the worlds relationship to previous and future ecological behavior: people around the world are in conversation
with their peer group about the model of behavior set forth by their predecessors. At the beginning of what Al Gore
calls our age of consequences, what Alice Walker calls our age of global enlightenment, we would be wise to
enact the insight from both Henry Dumas and Percival Everett: unearth misguided mythology, and create
mythology for a sustainable future.

The performance of the 1AC challenges the archive, the

memetic vanguard, that coercively propagates notions of logos
to create inferior imitations of the excesses of truths and
politics that renders information dealing impossible. The
question is not one that demands a statistical explanation or
romance, but one that demands a total collapse of the archive,
a critical reading of fabulation that challenges the very core of
instrumental cultural fabrication
Nyongo 14 (Tavia, The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research,
Unburdening Representations,
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00064246.2014.11413689, accessed
9/9/16)
One way of articulating the way Afrofabulation can respond to English's call to
update our philosophical norms is in relation to what Rey Chow has termed
"coercive mimeticism." Discussing how the politics of representation have evolved
in the era of conservative multiculturalism, Chow has noted: Such politics may, as I
have been arguing, be designated by the phrase "coercive mimeticism," a general
cross-ethnic mechanism that provides the connection among otherwise disjointed
events such as the pedagogical cultivation and circulation of arcane cultural
knowledge; the activist clamor for institutional space for underrepresented
disciplines (demon- strated, for instance, by students going on hunger strikes on
campuses); and the ever-renewable government efforts to fabricate and stabilize
the kind of genealogy mentioned by [Etienne) Balibar, in which ethnics can be
securely contained (through surveys, statistics, scientific studies, intelligence
networks, and police and immigration records). While they demand and reward the
reiterations of self-mimicry in Western societies by Asian, Asian American, African
American, Latino, and other such demographic groups, the forces of coercive
mimeticism are ultimately what engender the profound sense of self-hatred and
impotence among ethnics, because, however conscientiously they attempt to
authenticate themselves-and especially when they attempt conscientiously-they will
continue to come across as inferior imitations, copies that are permanently out of
focus.14 In Chow's analytic, mimesis becomes the underlying process that sutures darstellen to vertreten, with
the added psychoanalytic insight (one seen also in Jose Munoz's work on disidentification) that the contradictions I
have been pointing out at the level of political representation also surface, at a psychic level, for the black or
minoritarian subject. 15 In broadening her institutional analysis beyond artistic spaces to include other sites of

Chow also reminds us how we

are all engaged in the everyday arts of mimesis. Chow places the contemporary
multicultural subject in the position of the hysteric, who demands of the other: Why
am I who you say I am? The only alternative to the attendant doubt Chow identifiesanxiety leading to "self-hatred and impotence"- is to somehow refuse this
cultural production and reproduction such as university departments,

identification, to assert and enact that "I is another," and to fabulate a different
version of the story that coercive mimeticism would have us tell . To appeal to fabulation, or
the storytelling function, as I have been throughout this essay, may appear to grant too much agency or
significance to discourse and narrative. Such a claim might also be poorly timed, given the emergence of a range of
posthumanisms and new material isms that seek, in at least some of their versions, to displace the human from its
central position in theoretical debates. From the vantage point of black studies, however, I would tend to follow

the human is a regulatory ideal on a horizon

we have not yet arrived at, and that to complete the impossible task of finding a
narrative form adequate to addressing that audience would be to fabulate, in Deleuze's
those who suggest that we are not yet human, that

terms, a "people who are missing."16 The risk in such a fabulation of a collectivity to come, of course, is that it may

This is why I find Saidiya Hartman's

formulation of a "critical fabulation" to be so necessary. That her account of such a
project is given within the context of her refusal to "recover" or speak for the
obliterated black female lives she encounters in the archive of the Atlantic slave
trade returns us again to the central tension in Spivak's formulations regarding subaltern speech in the colonial
be mistaken as entailing a disconnection from history.

modern. Hartman describes her project in the following terms:: Is it possible to exceed or negotiate the constitutive
limits of the archive? By advancing a series of speculative arguments and exploiting the capacities of the

in fashioning a
narrative, which is based upon archival research, and by that I mean a critical
reading of the archive that mimes the figurative dimensions of history, I intended
both to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling. ... The
method guiding this writing practice is best described as critical fabulation. ... By
playing with and rearranging the basic elements of the story, by re-presenting the
sequence of events in divergent stories and from contested points of view, I have
attempted to jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or
authorized account, and to imagine what might have happened or might have been
said or might have been done.17 Hartman's critical fabulation refuses the coercive
mimeticism that would demand that she produce , in her terms, a "romance" to fill in
the missing voices of the archive. Instead, her tactic is to mime "the figurative
dimensions of history" itself-to zero in on those points where archival reconstruction
and narrative invention come into maximum tension-and to (re)produce the sense of instability
subjunctive (a grammatical mood that expresses doubts, wishes, and possibilities),

and potentiality immanent to the event. In radically different circumstances from Portrait of jason, Hartman
nonetheless also encounters a series of characters in the archive, singularities her work can do nothing to restore
life to, nor manufacture a post- humous voice, but whose haunting trace interrupts attempt at a consistent or
complete historical account of their destruction and erasure. It is the spectrality of Hartman's discourse that
forestalls its decay into romance (or, for that matter, another genre such as the gothic). Critical fabulation is not a
genre or a discourse but a mode by which both genre and discourse can be set into oscillating tension, through the

the demand that a representation be either

true or false, either history or fiction. Commenting on how Deleuze upsets this classic schema of
upsetting of a key demand of representational mimesis:

representation, which Deleuze traces to Platonic conceptions of ideal forms (and Plato's corresponding distrust of
mimesis), Gregory Flaxman notes: Deleuze insists that the task of reversing Platonism must be sought in Plato
himself insofar as he alights on the concept of the simulacrum-a copy without a model- with which both
transcendent Ideas and subsequent idealisms are dispatched. In the dialectical pursuit of the sophist, we are finally
compelled to encounter the appearance qua appearance (apparaftre) of something that cannot be distinguished

"from originals or from models." ... If we insist on the difference that distinguishes
the powers of the false from mere deceit, it is because these powers create an
excess of truths, a plurality of possible worlds, that bear the world beyond the
precincts of truth and lying. 18 Rather than representations, on this reading, what
fabulation produces is simulacra, cop-ies without a model.