The Middle Passage has branded the black body as nonbeing, laying the foundation upon which civil

society was
built. Chattel changed his name to Jim Crow then to Mike
Brown but they both die under the same grammar of
suffering that originates from this fundamental
antagonism. The ROB is to vote for the debater that has
the best method to deconstruct antiblackness
Wilderson 08***Bracketed for Gendered Language*** He is one of
two Americans to hold elected office in the African National Co ngress and is
a former insurgent in the ANCs armed wing, He is a full professor of Drama
and African American studies at the University of California, Irvine. He
received his BA in government and philosophy from Dartmouth College, his
Masters in Fine Arts from Columbia University and his PhD in Rhetoric and
Film Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. (Frank B. III Chapter
One: The Ruse of Analogy Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of
U.S. Antagonisms,) 2008
Two tensions are at work here. One operates under the labor of ethical dilemmas-- simple enough one has
only not to be a nigger. This, I submit, is the essence of being for the White and non-Black position:

Tension is found in
the impossibility of ethical dilemmas for the Black: I
am, Fanon writes, a slave not of an idea others have of me but of my own appearance. Being
can thus be thought of, in the first ontological instance, as nonniggerness; and slavery then as niggerness. The visual field,
my own appearance, is the cut, the mechanism that
elaborates the division between the non-niggerness and slavery, the difference
between the living and the dead. Whereas Humans exist
on some plane of being and thus can become
existentially present through some struggle for/of/through
recognition, Blacks cannot attain the plane of
recognition (West 82). Spillers, Fanon, and Hartman maintain that the Violence that
has positioned and repetitively re-positions the Black as a void of
historical movement is without analog in the suffering dynamics of the ontologically
alive. The violence that turns the African into a thing is
without analog because it does not simply oppress
the Black through tactile and empirical technologies of
oppression, like the little family quarrels which for Fanon exemplify the Jewish Holocaust . Rather,
ontology scaled down to a global common denominator. The other

the gratuitous violence of the Blacks first ontological instance, the

Middle Passage, wiped out [his/her] [their] metaphysics
his [her] customs and sources on which they are based (BSWM 110) . Jews went into
Auschwitz and came out as Jews. Africans went into
the ships and came out as Blacks. The former is a Human holocaust; the
latter is a Human and a metaphysical holocaust. That is why it
makes little sense to attempt analogy: the Jews have the Dead (the Muselmenn) among them; the Dead

This violence which turns a body into

flesh, ripped apart literally and imaginatively,
destroys the possibility of ontology because it
positions the Black within an infinite and indeterminately horrifying
and open vulnerability, an object made available (which is to say fungible) for any subject . As
such, The black has no ontological resistance in the
eyes of the white man (110) or, more precisely, in the eyes of Humanity.
have the Blacks among them.

Link: Specifically, the 1AC fits neatly within the humanist

project, using traditional ethics and liberalism to reduce
suffering and promote freedom. This focus on the human
furthers the definition of the human against the nonhuman, solidifying the black as slave and creating the
logic of oppression.
Warren 13. Calvin. Onticide: Toward an Afro-pessimistic Queer Theory.
2013.
We could suggest that the term black queer dramatizes the fundamental tension in humanism itself,
especially contemporary iterations of it: how to eradicate the violence that limits human potential, and

Violence rejected is absolutely

necessary for the human to exist as such. In other words, Humanism is
expand the category of the human, when the

caught in an ethical dilemma, or double-bind. The emancipatory meditations against the violence that
produces contingent experiences of unfreedom for humans also provides the grounding for the category of

The human is a
repository of violent practices and technologies that
has crystalized over time. The ethical impulse is to resolve the tension within
the human around which these meditations mobilize.

humanism, to wrest the human from the historical violence upon which it is founded. This ethical
enterprise inevitably fails, for in the end, the human is nothing more than this very violence, rendering
violence and the human mutually constitutive and coterminous. The experience of unfreedom (suffering) is
the outcome of this violence. Making this suffering legible is the ethical drive of humanist thinking and the
objective of a politics invested in freedom. Violence, humanity, unfreedom, and freedom constitute an
unending cycle of desire, deferral, and despair. This cycle of violence captures the tension in humanism
that much of contemporary theory either attempts to resolve (Ethics) or wishes to abandon (divesture).
The violence that constitutes the human and produces suffering is sustained through an ontological
antagonism. The boundaries of the human are shored-up by this antagonism and without it, the human,

The non- ontology of

blackness secures the boundaries of the human; it delimits
and the world within which it lives, would cease to exist.

the coordinates of the human. Blackness is an exclusion that enables ontology. In its exclusion from the
realm of ontology, blackness is unthinkable, innominate, and paradoxical. In essence,

Blackness

exists to not existit embodies the most perplexing paradox that sustains ontology (or in
psychoanalytic terms it is the Real of ontology). The field of Ethics, then,
conceals a dirty secret: the ontological ground upon
which it is situated is unethical. Ethics subverts itself, but it can only exist
through this very subversion. All Ethical Discourses organized around the
elimination of suffering or the experiences of
freedom are imbricated in this unethicality. Blackness is both
the life and death of humanism and its ethics, and for this reason, it lacks a legible grammar to articulate
this dread. It is an incomprehensible suffering, or an unending injury not understood as legitimate injury. To

There would be no human suffering

without the prior exclusion of blackness, but there would also be
take matters further,

no world or human without this exclusion either. It is an unresolvable antagonism. [2]

Link: And, their politics of hope ignores this foundational

truth that the slave is always outside of the frame of
redeemability and instead creates an imaginary future
to keep the slave at bay, always promising something
greater.
Warren 15 [Calvin K., Assistant Professor of American Studies at George
Washington University, Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope, CR: The New
Centennial Review, Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2015]

The politics of hope, then, constitutes what Lauren Berlant would call cruel optimism
for blacks (Berlant 2011). It bundles certain promises about redress, equality,
freedom, justice, and progress into a political object that
always lies beyond reach. The objective of the
Political is to keep blacks in a relation to this political
objectin an unending pursuit of it. This pursuit, however, is
detrimental because it strengthens the very anti-black system that would pulverize black being. The
pursuit of the object certainly has an irrational aspect to it, as Farred details, but it is not mere means
without expectation; instead, it is a means that undermines the attainment of the impossible object
desired. In other words, the pursuit marks a cruel attachment to the means of subjugation and the
continued widening of the gap between historical reality and fantastical ideal. Black nihilism is a
demythifying practice, in the Nietzschean vein, that uncovers the subjugating strategies of political hope

Once we denude political hope of

its axiological and ethical veneer, we see that it
operates through certain strategies: 1) positing itself as the only
alternative to the problem of anti-blackness, 2)
shielding this alternative from rigorous
historical/philosophical critique by placing it in an
unknown future, 3) [and] delimiting the field of action to
include only activity recognized and legitimated by
the Political, and 4) demonizing critiques or different philosophical perspectives. The politics of
and de-idealizes its fantastical object.

hope masks a particular cruelty under the auspices of happiness and life. It terrifies with the dread of
no alternative. Life itself needs the security of the alternative, and, through this logic, life becomes
untenable without it. Political hope promises to provide this alternativea discursive and political
organization beyond extant structures of violence and destruction. The construction of the binary
alternative/no-alternative ensures the hegemony and dominance of political hope within the ontoexistential horizon. The terror of the no alternativethe ultimate space of decay, suffering, and death
depends on two additional binaries: problem/solution and action/inaction. According to this politics, all
problems have solutions, and hope provides the accessibility and realization of these solutions. The
solution establishes itself as the elimination of the problem; the solution, in fact, transcends the problem
and realizes Hegels aufheben in its constant attempt to sublate the dirtiness of the problem with the

. No problem is outside the reach of

hopes solutionevery problem is connected to the
kernel of its own eradication. The politics of hope must actively refuse the
pristine being of the solution

possibility that the solution is, in fact, another problem in disguised form; the idea of a solution is
nothing more than the repetition and disavowal of the problem itself. The solution relies on what we might
call the trick of time to fortify itself from the deconstruction of its binary. Because the temporality of
hope is a time not-yet-realized, a future tense unmoored from present-tense justifications and pragmatist
evidence, the politics of hope cleverly shields its solutions from critiques of impossibility or repetition.
Each insistence that these solutions stand up against the lessons of history or the rigors of analysis is met
with the rationale that these solutions are not subject to history or analysis because they do not reside
within the horizon of the past or present. Put differently, we can never ascertain the efficacy of the
proposed solutions because they escape the temporality of the moment, always retreating to a not-yet
and could-be temporality. This trick of time offers a promise of possibility that can only be realized in
an indefinite future, and this promise is a bond of uncertainty that can never be redeemed, only imagined.
In this sense, the politics of hope is an instance of the psychoanalytic notion of desire: its sole purpose is to
reproduce its very condition of possibility, never to satiate or bring fulfillment. This politics secures its
hegemony through time by claiming the future as its unassailable property and excluding (and devaluing)

The politics of
hope, then, depends on the incessant (re)production and
proliferation of problems to justify its existence.
Solutions cannot really exist within the politics of
hope, just the illusion of a different order in a future
tense. The trick of time and political solution converge on the site of action. In critiquing the
any other conception of time that challenges this temporal ordering.

politics of hope, one encounters the rejoinder of the dangers of inaction. But we cant just do nothing! We
have to do something. The field of permissible action is delimited and an unrelenting binary between
action/inaction silences critical engagement with political hope. These exclusionary operations rigorously
reinforce the binary between action and inaction and discredit certain forms of engagement, critique, and

protest. Legitimate action takes place in the politicalthe political not only claims futurity but also action
as its property. To do something means that this doing must translate into recognizable political activity;
something is a stand-in for the word politicsone must do politics to address any problem. A refusal
to do politics is equivalent to doing nothingthis nothingness is constructed as the antithesis of life,
possibility, time, ethics, and morality (a zero-state as Julia Kristeva [1982] might call it). Black nihilism
rejects this trick of time and the lure of emancipatory solutions. To refuse to do politics and to reject
the fantastical object of politics is the only hope for blackness in an anti-black world.

The 1ACs liberation strategy is fundamentally inaccessible to black

flesh, instead preserving the logical of structural reform and in/out
zones that sustains anti-blackness by creating palliative politics and
erasing blackness
Sexton 10 (Jared, Associate Professor at UC Irvine in African American Studies People of Color
Blindness; published in 1998; p. 14-7)

That is to say, in the debate about the colonial policy of assimilation and its discontents, a debate in which
Mannoni and Fanon intervene respectively, it is slavery and the particular freedom struggle it engenders that
mark the critical difference. Slavery: that which reduces

colonial peoples to a

molten state uniquely enabling the metropolitan power to pour them

into a new mould, a process in which the personality of the native is first destroyed through
uprooting, enslavement, and the collapse of the social structure (Mannoni 1990: 27). For Mannoni,
assimilation is only practicable where an individual has been isolated from his group, wrenched from his
environment and transplanted else- where (Mannoni 1990: 27, emphasis added). Fanons historical materialist
redaction of Mannonis psychology of the colonial relation is to refuse the latters projection of the affective
disorders produced by colonization into a pre-colonial cultural eternity. Not so much, perhaps, because such
projection would have the Malagasy desire her own colonizer (like the Inca who Mannoni suggests desires her
own conquistador in an earlier historical period), but because the contradictions of colonization might provide an
even more problematic recommendation for the introduction of slavery (Mannoni 1990: 27). To suffer

The

loss of political sovereignty, the exploitation of labor, the dispossession of land and
resources is

deplorable; yet, we might say in this light that to suffer colonization is unenviable unless

one is enslaved.

one may not be free, but one is at least not enslaved. More

simply, we might say of the colonized:

You may lose your motherland, but you will

not lose your mother (Hartman 2007). The latter condition, the Social death under
which kinship is denied entirely by

the force of law,

is reserved for the

natal alienation and genealogical isolation characterizing slavery.

Here is Orlando Patterson, from his encyclopedic 1982 Slavery and Social Death: I prefer the term natal
alienation because it goes directly to the heart of what is critical in the slaves forced alienation, the loss of ties

of birth in both ascending and descending generations. It also has the important nuance of a loss of native
status, of deracination. It was this alienation of the slave from all formal, legally enforceable ties of blood, and
from any attachment to groups or localities other than those chosen for him [sic] by the master, that gave the
relation of slavery its peculiar value to the master. The slave was the ultimate human tool, as imprintable and as
disposable as the master wished. And this was true, at least in theory, of all slaves, no matter how elevated.
(Patterson 1982: 78) True even if elevated by the income and formal education of the mythic American middle
class, the celebrity of a Hollywood icon, or the political position of the so-called Leader of the Free World. 4 The
alienation and isolation of the slave is not only vertical, canceling ties to past and future generations and
rendering thereby the notion of descen- dants of slaves as a strict oxymoron. It is also a horizontal prohibition,
canceling ties to the slaves contemporaries as well. Reduced

to a tool, the deracination

of the slave, as Mannoni and Fanon each note in their turn, is total, more fundamental
even than

the displacement of the colonized, whose status obtains in a

network of persecuted human relations rather than in a

collection or

dispersal of a class of things. Crucially, this total deracination is strictly correlative to the absolute
submission mandated by [slave] law discussed rigorously in Saidiya Hartmans 1997 Scenes of Subjection: the
slave estate is the most perfect example of the space of purely formal obedience defining the jurisdictional field
of sovereignty (Agamben 2000). Because the forced submission of the slave is absolute, any signs whatsoever
of reasoning intent and rationality are recognized solely in the context of criminal liability. That is, the
slaves will [is] acknowledged only as it [is] prohibited or punished (Hartman 1997: 82, emphasis added). A
criminal will, a criminal reasoning, a criminal intent, a criminal rationality: with these erstwhile human capacities
construed as indices of culpability before the law, even the potentiality of slave resistance is rendered
illegitimate and illegible a priori. The disqualification of black resistance by the logic of racial slavery is not
unrelated to the longstanding cross-racial phenomenon in which the white bourgeois and proletarian revolutions
on both sides of the Atlantic can allegorize themselves as revolts against slavery, while the hemispheric black
struggle against actually existing slavery cannot authorize itself literally in those same terms. The latter must
code itself as the apotheosis of the French and American revolutions (with their themes of Judeo-Christian
deliverance) or, later, the Russian and Chinese revolutions (with their themes of secular messianic transformation) or, later still, the broad anti-colonial movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America of the mid-20th
century (with their themes of indigenous reclamation and renaissance). 5 One of the defining features of
contemporary political and intellectual culture remains this metaphoric transfer that appropriates black suffering
as the template for non-black grievances, while it misrecognizes the singularity of black struggles against racial
slavery and what Loc Wacquant calls its functional surrogates or what Hartman terms its afterlife. Put
differently, the occult presence of racial slavery continues to haunt our political imagination: nowhere, but
nevertheless everywhere, a dead time which never arrives and does not stop arriving (Marriott 2007: xxi).
Hartmans notion of slaverys afterlife and Wacquants theorization of slaverys functional surrogates are two
productive recent attempts to name the interminable terror of slavery, but we are still very much within the crisis
of language of thinking and feeling, seeing and hearing that slavery provokes. Both scholars challenge the
optimistic idea of a residual legacy of slavery, precisely because it requires the untenable demarcation of an
historic end in Emancipation. The relations of slavery live on, Hartman might say, after the death knell of formal
abolition, mutating into the burdened individuality of freedom. The functions of the chattel system are largely
maintained, Wacquant might say, despite the efforts of Reconstruction, preserved in surrogate institutional form
under Jim Crow, the ghetto, and the prison. Slavery lives on, it survives, despite the grand attempts on its
institutional life forged by the international movements against slavery, segregation and mass imprisonment
(Davis 2003). But what if slavery does not die, as it were, because it is immortal, but rather because it is nonmortal, because it has never lived, at least not in the psychic life of power? What if the source of slaverys
longevity is not its resilience in the face of opposition, but the obscurity of its existence? Not the accumulation of
its political capital, but the illegibility of its grammar? On this account, for those that bear the mark of slavery
the trace of blackness to speak is to sound off without foundation, to appear as a ghost on the threshold of the
visible world, a spook retaining (only) the negative capacity to absent the presence, or negate the will to
presence, of every claim to human being, even perhaps the fugitive movement of stolen life explored masterfully

by Fred Moten (2008). We might rethink as well the very fruitful notion of fugitive justice that shapes the prizewinning 2005 special issue of Representations on Redress. Co-editors Saidiya Hartman and Stephen Best are
posing the right question: How does one compensate for centuries of violence that have as their consequence
the impossibility of restoring a prior existence, of giving back what was taken, of repairing what was broken?
(Hartman and Best 2005: 2) That is to say, they are thinking about the question of slavery in terms of the
incomplete nature of abolition, the contemporary predicament of freedom (2005: 5, emphasis added). Yet, the
notion subsequently developed of a fugitive life lived in loss spanning the split difference between grievance
and grief, remedy and redress, law and justice, hope and resignation relies nonetheless on an outside,
however improbable or impossible, as the space of possibility, of movement, of life. Returning to our
schematization of Fanon, we can say that the outside is a concept embedded in the problmatique of
colonization and its imaginary topography, indeed, the fact that it can imagine topographically at all. But, even if
the freedom dreams of the black radical imagination do conjure images of place (and to do here does not imply
that one can in either sense of the latter word: able or permitted); what both

The fact of blackness

and the lived experience of the black name[s] for us, in their discrepant registers, is an

anti-black

world for which there is no outside. 6 The language of race developed in the modern
period and in the context of the slave trade (Hartman 2007: 5). And if that context is our context and that context
is the world, then this is the principal insight revealed by the contemporary predicament of freedom: there is no
such thing as a fugitive slave. Malcolm X, by another route, was not far from this formulation in his famous The
Ballot or the Bullet address, delivered 3 April 1964 at the Cory Methodist Church in Cleveland, Ohio. Speaking
to the risks of political confrontation with the structures of racial domination, he exhorts: If you go to jail, so
what? If you black, you were born in jail. If you black, you were born in jail, in the North as well as the South.
Stop talking about the South. Long as you south of the Canadian border, youre south. For blacks in the USA,

The political borders of the nation-state mark the walls of a social

incarceration, a political ontology of race uninterrupted by ontic
differences of region or legal standing.

Of course, Malcolm X did not restrict his

commentary to the USA, even if recent developments in national electoral politics were the focus of this
particular address. His evolving analysis accommodated a much larger geographical scale, what he elsewhere
designated white world supremacy. But if there is any weight to his insistence that the Mason-Dixon Line,
demarcating the territories of a still unresolved civil war, or even the prison wall, constituting liberal democracys
internal hard edge, are incidental to black life this from a former prisoner of over six years should we not
extend this reasoning to the ultimate penalty, the absolute master, and stop talking about death as the limit of
black life? Not a loss (of life and limb, liberty and property), but a never having had. Not only the figurative
nothing to lose but your chains of the proletariat, but the literal inability to lose (because unable to own, to
accumulate, to have and to hold, to self-possess) at all. Cant have (even when we got), cant be (even when we
are): a strange freedom in the heart of slavery. The political ontology of race is a phrase borrowed from work of
political theorist Frank B. Wilderson, III, where it has been elaborated from his 2003 Social Identities article,
Gramscis Black Marx, to his 2008 American Book Award-winning memoir, Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and
Apartheid, and his forthcoming Red,White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms. Drawing
heavily upon Gordon and Fanon, alongside the early Patterson, the ongoing research of Wacquant on the four
peculiar institutions that have operated to define, confine, and control African Americans in the history of the
United States (Wacquant 2002: 41), and an array of noted literary critics and historians (e.g. David Eltis, Lindon
Barrett, Saidiya Hartman, Ronald A.T. Judy, David Marriott, Hortense Spillers); Wilderson supplants the
paradigm of comparative ethnic and racial studies in two principle ways. First, by moving conceptually from the
empirical to the structural, especially insofar as the question of differential racialization or the complications of
racial hierarchy makes recourse to a comparative sociology, measuring relative rates of infant mortality,
poverty, illiteracy, high school graduation, hate crimes, impris- onment, electoral participation, and so on.
Second, by reframing racism (pace Fanon) as a social relationship that is grounded in anti-blackness rather
than white supremacy. What Wilderson demonstrates at length is that the racialization of the globe (Diktter
2008) or the formation of the world racial system (Winant 2002) does not adhere strictly to Du Boiss thesis on

the color line the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men [sic] in Asia and Africa, in America and the
islands of the sea in which Negro slavery is referred to as but one phase of a general problem. Rather,
slavery establishes the vestibule of the category of the Human. To be sure, Humans do not live under conditions of equality in the modern world. In fact, Modernity

is, to a large degree, marked by

societies structured in dominance: patriarchy and white supremacy,

settler colonialism and extra-

territorial conquest, imperialist warfare and genocide, class struggle and the international division of labor .

Yet, for Wilderson, there is a qualitative difference, an ontological one, between the
inferiorization or dehumanization of the masses of people in Asia in America and the islands of the sea,
including the colonization

of their land and resources, the exploitation of their labor and even their

extermination in whole or in part, and

the singular commodification of human being

pursued under racial slavery, that structure of gratuitous violence in

which bodies are rendered as flesh to be accumulated and
exchanged. 7 On this score, we should note that the absolute submission mandated by law was not
simply that of slave to his or her owner, but the submission of the enslaved before all whites (Hartman 1997:
83). The latter group is perhaps better termed all non-blacks (or the unequally arrayed category of nonblackness), because it is racial blackness as a necessary condition for enslavement that matters most, rather
than whiteness as a sufficient condition for freedom. The structural position of the Indian slaveholder or, for
that matter, the smattering of free black slaveholders in the USA or the slaveholding mulatto elite in the
Caribbean is a case in point (Blackburn 1997; Koger 2006; Miles and Holland 2006). Freedom from the rule of
slave law requires only that one be considered non-black, whether that non-black racial designation be white or
Indian or, in the rare case, Oriental this despite the fact that each of these groups have at one point or
another labored in conditions similar to or contiguous with enslaved African-derived groups. In other words, it is
not labor relations, but property relations that are constitutive of slavery.

Impact: Civil Society is produced through gratuitous antiblack violence The coherence of civil society relies on a
prior ontological exclusion of black bodies. Paradigms
that fail to forefront the structural antagonism between
civil society and black positionality only reproduce antiblack violence
Wilderson 09 [Wilderson, African American Studies and

Drama and UC-Irvine, fought in Anti-Apartheid

struggle in South Africa, 2009. Red, White, & Black:
Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, intro]
I have little interest in assailing political conservatives. Nor is my argument wedded to the disciplinary
needs of political science, or even sociology, where injury must be established, first, as White supremacist
event, from which one then embarks on a demonstration of intent, or racism; and, if one is lucky, or
foolish, enough, a solution is proposed. If

the position of the Black is, as I

argue, a paradigmatic impossibility in the Western Hemisphere, indeed,

in the world, in other words, if a Black is the very
antithesis of a Human subject, as imagined by Marxism and psychoanalysis,
then his or her paradigmatic exile is not simply a function of repressive practices on the part of institutions
(as political science and sociology would have it). This banishment from the Human fold is to be found
most profoundly in the emancipatory meditations of Black peoples staunchest allies, and in some of the
most radical films. Here not in restrictive policy, unjust legislation, police brutality, or conserve ative
scholarshipis where the Settler/Masters sinews are most resilient. The polemic animating this research
stems from (1) my reading of Native and Black American metacommentaries on Indian and Black subject
positions written over the past twenty-three years and (2) a sense of how much that work appears out of
joint with intellectual protocols and political ethics which underwrite political praxis and socially engaged
popular cinema in this epoch of multiculturalism and globalization. The sense of abandonment I experience
when I read the metacommentaries on Red positionality (by theorists such as Leslie Silko, Ward Churchill,
Taiaiake Alfred, Vine Deloria Jr., and Haunani-Kay Trask) and the metacommentaries on Black positionality
(by theorists such as David Marriott, Saidiya Hartman, Ronald Judy, Hortense Spillers, Orlando Patterson,
and Achille Mbembe) against the deluge of multicultural positivity is overwhelming. One suddenly realizes
that, though the semantic field on which subjectivity is imagined has expanded phenomenally through the
protocols of multiculturalism and globalization theory, Blackness and an unflinching articulation of Redness
are more unimaginable and illegible within this expanded semantic field than they were during the height
of the FBIs repressive Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO). On the semantic field on which the new
protocols are possible, Indigenism can indeed become partially legible through a programmatics of
structural adjustment (as fits our globalized era). In other words, for the Indians subject position to be
legible, their positive registers of lost or threatened cultural identity must be foregrounded, when in point
of fact the antagonistic register of dispossession that Indians possess is a position in relation to a socius
structured by genocide. As Churchill points out, everyone from Armenians to Jews have been subjected to
genocide, but the Indigenous position is one for which genocide is a constitutive element, not merely an
historical event, without which Indians would not, paradoxically, exist. 9 Regarding the Black position,
some might ask why, after claims successfully made on the state by the Civil Rights Movement, do I insist
on positing an operational analytic for cinema, film studies, and political theory that appears to be a

why should we
think of todays Blacks in the United States as Slaves
and everyone else (with the exception of Indians) as
Masters? One could answer these questions by
demonstrating how nothing remotely approaching
claims successfully made on the state has come to
pass. In other words, the election of a Black president
aside, police brutality, mass incarceration,
segregated and substandard schools and housing,
astronomical rates of HIV infection, and the threat of
being turned away en masse at the polls still
constitute the lived experience of Black life. But such
empirically based rejoinders would lead us in the
wrong direction; we would find ourselves on solid
ground, which would only mystify, rather than clarify,
the question. We would be forced to appeal to
dichotomous and essentialist pairing of Masters and Slaves? In other words,

facts, the historical record, and empirical

markers of stasis and change, all of which could be
turned on their head with more of the same.
Underlying such a downward spiral into sociology,
political science, history, and public policy debates
would be the very rubric that I am calling into
question: the grammar of suffering known as
exploitation and alienation, the assumptive logic whereby subjective
dispossession is arrived at in the calculations between those who sell labor power and those who acquire
it. The Black qua the worker. Orlando Patterson has already dispelled this faulty ontological grammar in
Slavery and Social Death, where he demonstrates how and why work, or forced labor, is not a constituent
element of slavery. Once the solid plank of work is removed from slavery, then the conceptually
coherent notion of claims against the statethe proposition that the state and civil society are elastic
enough to even contemplate the possibility of an emancipatory project for the Black position

the state and civil society is

parasitic on the Middle Passage. Put another way, No
slave, no world. And, in addition, as Patterson argues,
no slave is in the world. If, as an ontological position,
that is, as a grammar of suffering, the Slave is not a
laborer but an anti-Human, a position against which
Humanity establishes, maintains, and renews its
coherence, its corporeal integrity; if the Slave is, to
borrow from Patterson, generally dishonored,
perpetually open to gratuitous violence, and void of
kinship structure, that is, having no relations that
need be recognized, a being outside of relationality,
then our analysis cannot be approached through the
rubric of gains or reversals in struggles with the state
and civil society, not unless and until the interlocutor
first explains how the Slave is of the world. The onus
is not on one who posits the Master/Slave dichotomy
but on the one who argues there is a distinction
between Slaveness and Blackness. How, when, and
where did such a split occur? The woman at the
gates of Columbia University awaits an answer
disintegrates into thin air. The imaginary of

Alt: The alternative is to reject the 1AC and vote negative

to engage in an unwaivering paradigmatic analysis of the
ontological position of Blackness. Resisting the lure of
anti-blackness through a genealogy of historys
constitutive void is the starting point for imagining a new
world.
Kokontis 2011 (Kate, PhD in Performance Studies from

UC-Berkeley, Performative Returns and the

Rememory of History: genealogy and performativity
in the American racial state, Dissertation available
on Proquest)
On one hand, she addresses the literal politics that the theological narratives espouse. There is a long
tradition of deploying the Exodus narrative toward the pursuit of social reform. That is, instead of appealing
to it in a way that focuses on the next world, [t]hrough biblical typology, particularly uses of Exodus,
African Americans elevated their common experiences to biblical drama and found resources to account
for their circumstances and respond effectively to them. [...] Exodus history sustained hope and a sense of
possibility in the face of insurmountable evil. The analogical uses of

the story enabled a

sense of agency and resistance in persistent moments of despair and

disillusionment.64 But even these efforts have not exclusively, but often relied on a particular iteration

presupposes a set of moral and

institutional imperatives (for instance, the ideal of
training racial, religious, sexual, social, or
institutional deviants or outlyers to behave
according to an ostensibly correct set of moral
principles) that run counter to a radical critique of
the underlying terms of the state and civil society
which tend to ratify, naturalize, and invisibilize
antiblackness and/or policies that adversely impact
black people who are not part of the middle class,
rather than to critique or subvert it. Hartman, on the other hand, does
call for, and mount, a radical critique of the terms of the state and civil society :
for her, they are inherently unethical rather than
redeemable, having engendered centuries of black
of the social gospel that

social death and historical unknowability, and thus

any struggle toward freedom demands an unflinching
critical analysis rather than an implicit or explicit
ratification of these institutions and the terms on
which they are predicated. But more fundamentally, she addresses the political
implications of the assumptive logic of a theological teleology. I interpret Hartman to posit that there is a
kind of freedom that can be predicated on not-knowing: if there is no predetermined future, there is no
divine imperative that might encourage an investment in the moral prescriptions of a conservative social

a toppled faith in the redemptive possibilities of

the struggle has the potential to open the door to
invention, speculation, refashioning, and cobbling
together something from nothing, presence from
absence. I interpret her to posit that a viable freedom
dream necessitates the acknowledgment of loss and
absence and the history of processes of
dehumanizing antiblackness, the acknowledgement
of the wound and its psychic, social, political, and
ethical causes as well as an acknowledgement of
its persistence rather than being deluded by tidy or
optimistic but under-analyzed narratives of progress
or redemption. Only then can any realistic stock be
taken toward re-imagining the world and the
possibilities and imperatives of a black freedom
struggle. While Haley and Gates draw on narratives that say
that the past, including its suffering, was meaningful, Hartman
offers what might appear to be a much bleaker interpretation that
insists that it is meaningless insofar as it is not folded
into any sort of teleology. But in that is a kind of
freedom/dream, because the subjects of her narrative are
free from a predetermination of the terms on which
liberation is possible, the structures around its enactment. What she calls
for is a profound refashioning of the epistemology of
the invisible, which is as fundamental a component of the black freedom struggle as is an
gospel:

she advocates the

excavation of psychic structures and historical
silences to replace an implicit or explicit faith in a
divine logic in the (racial) order of things. Genealogy
cannot connect with the unknown, so it becomes a
ghost story, an excavation. The term might then be interpreted less as a
means of accessing literal ancestors, and more as a process toward
understanding. Hartman constructs, in her text, not a genealogy of
anyones family, but a genealogy of the stranger, of the slave; a genealogy of
loss, of the lost, of searching. Projects that make use of imaginative ,
performative, quasi-fictional or poetic devices cant rest with notknowing: the imaginative devices emerge, in fact, from attempts to piece together or
epistemology of verifiable evidence of oppression. That is,

construct/invent evidence from its lack. They all insist on the importance of knowing, whether because of

The
imaginative devices dont exist for the sake of being
imaginative; they exist for the sake of survival. But in
being imaginative, they allow for radical possibilities
to emerge that literality forecloses. Part of what performance might offer
some large-scale sense of collective responsibility, or because of personal yearning, or both.

the study of history is a) different keys to be able to fill in the gaps, that arent so heavily reliant upon
explicit, legible empiricism, and b) not only permission for, but encouragement of what uncertainty can
yield. Genealogy, broadly understood, is what furnishes evidence: it is the key to filling in blanks that are
impossible to fill. One version of it is capable of being profoundly literal; of making reconstruction possible;
it is used to fill in the blank that has been lost to us whomever the us is: the dispossessed, displaced,

This I would call

genealogy as an object. A different version is used in order to
understand the gaps, to underscore or illuminate the
negative spaces and ask how they came to be, and
filling in the context around the blank spaces,
inheriting the loss, becomes the way to trace the
relationship between the past, present, and future. This
I would call genealogy as a process. What, then, is or could be critical
or even radical in roots-seeking genealogy projects?
marginalized providing an object to slip into a gaping negative space.

There is something inherently conservative about nostalgia, according to most interpretations; but not if a
notion of radical nostalgia, such as that offered by Peter Glazer, is pursued: such an enactment of
notalgia engages in worldmaking and invention; the definition takes for granted that nostalgia is for worlds
and times that never existed, and that therefore it is not conservative (i.e. about returning to an idealized
past), but that it is creative and always seeking something new. Performative returns are inevitably
projects of yearning, of wishing for a past that was imagined to be better than the present (which has

devolved in some way) or a future that has promise and potential. The mythical Aztec homeland Aztlan
that was made popular during the Chicano Movement is a very elegant example: it is a wished-for, utopian
space, acknowledged as being impossible to realize, but always animating the spirit of the concrete efforts
of its adherents toward social justice and structural change (see Anaya and Lomeli 1991). Hartman writes:
To believe, as I do, that the enslaved are our contemporaries is to understand that we share their
aspirations and defeats, which isnt to say that we are owed what they were due but rather to
acknowledge that they accompany our every effort to fight against domination, to abolish the color line,
and to imagine a free territory, a new commons. It is to take to heart their knowledge of freedom. The
enslaved knew that freedom had to be taken; it wasnt something that could ever be given to you. The
kind of freedom that could be given to you could just as easily be taken back. [...] The demands of the
slave on the present have everything to do with making good the promise of abolition, and this entails
much more than the end of property in slaves. It requires the reconstruction of society, which is the only
way to honor our debt to the dead. This is the intimacy of our age with theirs an unfinished struggle. To
what end does one conjure the ghost of slavery, if not to incite the hopes of transforming the present?
(Hartman 2007, 269-270). But performative return is not necessarily critical, and part of what I
demonstrate throughout this dissertation is how such projects are always more complicated than they
seem; they work to challenge and bolster the racial state; they are in some ways radical and in others
extremely conservative. And this question of criticality has precisely to do with normativity: do
genealogical practices, the conclusions they draw and the worldmaking they do, work to undo or to
reinscribe oppressive patterns, habits, worldviews, available roles of and categories for historically
marginalized groups of people? All three of these projects attempt to re-write the terms of America, such
that the circumstances of African-Americans are configured as being integral instead of outside the
dominant narrative; constitutive rather than an aberration. But they waver between trying to write that as
a narrative of progress, in which we have left slavery behind and have ascended to a space of constitutive
normativity; and trying to underline the fundamental and unending nature of slavery a kind of rejoinder
to uncritical narratives that not only attends to the subjective space of social death that it has yielded but
the possibilities and necessities of invention that have flourished in its wake. What they have in common is
that they present the necessity of grappling with the past instead of ignoring it, allowing AfricanAmericans movements and reinscriptions of migration to trouble the waters of complacency, forging a
broader awareness of the fraught position they have historically occupied. Each contains kernels of great
possibility for an inclusive vision of the future as well as more or less significant red flags. Hartmans
vision, however, seems to espouse a particularly liberating articulation of freedom, because it does not try
to deny or occlude the presence or significance of ongoing disparity and loss: while Gates and Haleys
subjects and implied audience have already succeeded, gained access to civil society, and have implicitly
ratified the fundamental terms on which it is predicated, Hartmans are still struggling to make something
from nothing; they have an urgency in attending to disparities, and no investment in a status quo that
excludes or violates their well-being. What she claims or advocates is not a victimized stance, but rather a
staunch activist one that is inflected by a rigorous and unflinching structural analysis, and a sensitive and
equally rigorous understanding of desire, yearning, and the possibilities for reinvention and reconstruction
that emerge when faced with profound and loss.

Case
They say that we should make the world better; we say
that the world should not exist at all. The negative
advocacy is an embracing of the ethical demand of the
slave a disorderly politics that demands the end of civil
society.
Wilderson 03. Frank B., The Prison Slave as Hegemonys Silent Scandal
in Warfare in the American Homeland ed. Joy James. 2003.
Fanon writes, "Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of
complete disorder. If we take him at his word, then we must accept that no other body functions in the
Imaginary, the Symbolic, or the Real so completely as a repository of complete disorder as the black body.

In its magnetizing
of bullets the black body functions as the map of
gratuitous violence through which civil society is
Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Real, for

possible-namely, those bodies for which violence is, or can be, contingent. Blackness is
the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Symbolic, for blackness in America generates no
categories for the chromosome of history and no data for the categories of immigration or sovereignty. It is
an experience without analog-a past without a heritage. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the
level of the Imaginary, for "whoever says 'rape' says Black" (Fanon), whoever says "prison" says black
(Sexton), and whoever says "AIDS" says black-the "Negro is a phobogenic object."13 Indeed, it means all
those things: a phobogenic object, a past without a heritage, the map of gratuitous violence, and a
program of complete disorder. Whereas this realization is, and should be, cause for alarm, it should not be
cause for lament or, worse, disavowal-not at least, for a true revolutionary or for a truly revolutionary
movement such as prison abolition. If a social movement is to be neither social-democratic nor Marxist in
terms of structure of political desire, then it should grasp the invitation to assume the positionality of
subjects of social death. If we are to be honest with ourselves, we must admit that the "Negro" has been
inviting whites, as well as civil society's junior partners, to the dance of social death for hundreds of years,
but few have wanted to learn the steps. They have been, and remain today-even in the most antiracist
movements, such as the prison abolition movement-invested elsewhere. This is not to say that all
oppositional political desire today is pro-white, but it is usually antiblack, meaning that it will not dance

Black liberation, as a prospect, makes radicalism more

dangerous to the United States. This is not because it raises the specter of
an alternative polity (such as socialism or community control of existing resources), but because Its
condition of possibility and gesture of resistance function as a
negative dialectic: a politics of refusal and a refusal to affirm, a "program
of complete disorder." One must embrace its disorder, its incoherence, and allow
with death.

oneself to be elaborated by it if, indeed, one's politics are to be underwritten a desire to take down this
country. If this is not the desire that underwrites one's politics, then through what strategy of legitimation
is the word "prison" being linked to the word "abolition"? What are this movement's lines of political
accountability? There is nothing foreign, frightening, or even unpracticed about the embrace of disorder
and incoherence. The desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by disorder and incoherence is not
anathema in and of itself. No one, for example, has ever been known to say, "Gee-whiz, if only my orgasms
would end a little sooner, or maybe not come at all." Yet few so-called radicals desire to be embraced, and
elaborated, by the disorder and incoherence of blackness-and the state of political movements in the
United States today is marked by this very Negrophobogenisis: "Gee-whiz, if only black rage could be more
coherent, or maybe not come at all." Perhaps there is something more terrifying about the joy of black
than there is in the joy of sex (unless one is talking sex with a Negro). Perhaps coalitions today prefer to
remain inorgasmic in the face of civil society-with hegemony as a handy prophylactic, just in case.

If

through this stasis or paralysis they try to do the work of prison

abolition, the work will fail, for it is always work from
a position of coherence (Le., the worker) on behalf of a
position of incoherence of the black subject, or prison slave. In
this way, Social formations on the left remain blind to the contradictions of
coalitions between workers and slaves. They remain coalitions operating
within the logic of civil society and function less as revolutionary promises
than as crowding out scenarios of black antagonisms, simply feeding our frustration . Whereas the
positionality of the worker (whether a factory worker demand ing a monetary wage, an immigrant, or a
white woman demanding a social wage) gestures toward the reconfiguration of civil society, the
positionality of the black subject (whether a prison slave or a prison slave-in-waiting) gestures toward

The disconfiguration of civil society. From the coherence of civil society,

the black subject beckons with the incoherence of civil war, a war that reclaims

blackness not as a positive value but as a politically enabling site, to

quote Fanon, of "absolute dereliction." It is a "scandal" that rends civil society
asun der. Civil war, then, becomes the unthought, but never forgotten, understudy of hegemony. It is a
black specter waiting in the wings, an endless antagonism that cannot be satisfied (via reform or
reparation) but that must, nonetheless, be pursued to the death.

Violence experienced by others is contingent upon nonparticipation in dominant social practices-That is

subjective vertigo Blackness is structural position
outside humanity creating a non contingent form of
violence. Thats Objective Vertigo
Frank

Wilderson, 2011 (revolutionary, The Vengeance of Vertigo: Aphasia and Abjection in the Political

Trials of Black Insurgents, http://www.scribd.com/doc/79282989/Wilderson-the-Vengeance-of-Vertigo >:)

Subjective vertigo is vertigo of the event. But the

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

Black peoples subsumption

by violence is a paradigmatic necessity, not just a
performative contingency. To be constituted by and disciplined
by violence, to be gripped simultaneously by subjective and
objective vertigo, is indicative of a political ontology which is
radically different from the political ontology of a sentient
being who is constituted by discourse and disciplined by
violence when s/he breaks with the ruling discursive codes. vi When
disciplinary discourse of capital and/or Oedipus. But

Human
revolutionaries (workers, women, gays and lesbians, post-colonial subjects) suffer
subjective vertigo when they meet the states
disciplinary violence with the revolutionary violence
of the subaltern; but they are spared objective vertigo.
This is because the most disorienting aspects of their
lives are induced by the struggles that arise from
intra-Human conflicts over competing conceptual
frameworks and disputed cognitive maps, such as the American
we begin to assess revolutionary armed struggle in this comparative context, we find that

Indian Movements demand for the return of Turtle Island vs. the U.S.s desire to maintain territorial integrity, or the
Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacin Nacionals (FALN) demand for Puerto Rican independence vs. the U.S.s desire to maintain

for the Black , as for the slave, there are no

cognitive maps, no conceptual frameworks of suffering and
dispossession which are analogic with the myriad maps and
frameworks which explain the dispossession of Human
subalterns.

Puerto Rico as a territory. But