Affective Correspondences Aff

and Neg

Notes

Explanation

Aff
Major concepts behind the aff:
1) Racial Melancholia as how the authors describe the psychological position
occupied by Asian Americans product of processes of assimilation,
racialization, and pervasive exclusion.
2) Genealogy as a strategy for resurfacing narratives that have been
redacted/erased by processes of assimilation. Also the concept behind
refusing liberal subject building at large (the model minority would be a
specific example in the context of Asian people).
3) Affect as a lens of analysis/genealogical exploration the idea of
transforming the negativity of melancholia into positive passions. This can be
extended to the love and community building arguments.
Topic Link: The way the debate community constructs China is problematic.
Specifically, demonizing China directly translates into colonial violence toward Asian
bodies both abroad and at home.
Important authors:
-

On Asian American Racial Melancholia: David L. Eng, Anne Anlin Cheng

On genealogy: Foucault
(On Mourning and Melancholia: Freud, Melanie Klein to an extent)

Important notes:
-

The Eng cards utilize affect in a psychoanalytic as opposed to deleuzian

sense. This is an important distinction.
Writing the 1AC: The case subsections contain other cards that could be used
to form different 1ACs; for example writing a 1AC that has a greater focus on
the critique of china studies in Western academia.
Debating framework: The version of the 1AC that is currently in the file is
structured in such a way that it criticizes the resolutional set-up as well as the
types of affective investment in China (as a construct) that circulate through
the debate community. Naturally, the 1AC is a performative disruption of this
pattern.

Further explanation and clarification can be found in the case overviews.

Neg
The negative arguments are pretty self-explanatory. The file contains links to
common critiques and some case answers. In my opinion, the cap K and the antiblackness K are the most well developed sections.

Assessment

Aff
Strengths:
-

The aff can be adapted/modified very easily depending on argument

preference and circumstance. The point is that it should be personalized.
Built in responses to framework. Also I think Asian identity will (and should
be) a core topic issue, just based on the content of the literature. I think it will
likely be difficult to argue that these discussions should be excluded. Also, the
critique of liberalism is helpful against any T versions.
The aff is supposed to be personal. That should fortify permutation/no link
arguments against a lot of critiques. The aff is not trying to create a broad
theory to describe how violence operates in general or to forward a universal
strategy for liberation, but is a personally productive strategy for its readers.
(Obviously, on the flip side, there are also a lot of arguments that can be
made against this set up as an effective strategy for creating material
change).

Weaknesses:
-

I think the aff is still very shallow in its current state. The literature is much
deeper and spans a variety of very important issues. Reading more about the
concepts and Asian American studies in general would be immensely
beneficial (in terms of both debate arguments and life).
The aff doesnt do much materially; obviously, there is a debate to be had,
but from a truth perspective it likely favors the negative. It is too personal
and it is difficult to define the strategy of affective correspondences in any
concrete way.
The aff attempts to connect a lot of theoretical concepts that do not
necessarily interact in these ways normally. As a result, it can be disjointed.
However, I do think that the authors weave these otherwise disconnected
ideas together very nicely and that methodology is also sort of the point of
affective correspondences.

Neg
Strengths:
-

The links that currently exist in the file are all pretty good and correct, in my
opinion.

Weaknesses:
-

There could be more case answers.

All of the off case positions that the links are for are very generic.

Looking Forward

Aff
-

As aforementioned, personalize the 1AC. It is compatible with narratives,

performances, maybe playing Rea Tajiris History and Memory video.
The 2AC responses to most arguments need to be either written or further
developed.
In general, more reading would be immensely beneficial and necessary if you
plan to read this affirmative.

Neg
-

I am fairly certain that there is enough literature on this issue (Racial

melancholia, genealogy, etc.) to find and cut a very specific critique. That
should be looked into.
If no critique, definitely more answers to the case or both.

General
This entire article is so important:
http://www.uib.no/sites/w3.uib.no/files/attachments/9._enghana_dialogue_on_racial_melancholia_0.pdf

Ruth
Feel free to email me with questions: smiley02421@gmail.com (embarrassing I
know)

Aff

1AC
We begin with China as trauma. Chinas entrance into
modernity is marked by injury and political crisis at the hands
of diplomatic and economic engagement with the West: the
Opium wars (economic engagement), spheres of influence
and the open door policy (diplomatic engagement), the
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Contemporary China studies,
undermined by Western redaction and lacking the analytical
vocabulary to adequately account for a legacy of colonial
exploitation and complex entanglements, reduce China to
spectacle either monstrous, The China Crisis, or exotic, the
object of our oriental fantasies. Likewise, the resolution urges
us to participate in this regime of China watching, to
regurgitate the narratives of China as demonic, aggressive, in
turmoil, and ever prone to nuclear war. We refuse to
participate in this extension of colonial extraterritoriality by
which the reality that is broadcasted to us is faxed back to
China in the form of violent subjugation. If not re-writing of a
fabricated history, what constitutes topical knowledge
production and why is it valuable?
-Violence against the Chinese woman.

Chow 91 (Rey, Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature at Duke University,

Violence in the Other Country: China as Crisis, Spectacle, and Woman, THIRD
WORLD WOMEN AND THE POLITICS OF FEMINISM, Mohanty, Chandra Talpade,
1955-; Russo, Ann, 1957-; Torres, Lourdes, 1959-, Indiana University Press) rz
China as Crisis, Spectacle, and Woman*
Rey Chow

On June 4, 1989 , after weeks of peaceful demonstrations by Chinese civilians for

reform and democracy, the Chinese government sent troops and tanks
to massacre hundreds at Beijing's Tiananmen Square . In the following weeks, Chinese armies were

hundreds
were arrested and tried, and an unknown number executed.' Benedict Anderson (1983, 68), in a footnote in his book Imagined
Communities: Reflections on the Spread of Nationalism, says: "So, as European imperialism
smashed its
ordered to clean up the mess they had created; soldiers became so socially constructive that they cut civilians' hair on the streets of Beijing. Meanwhile,

insouciant way around the globe , other civilizations found themselves

traumatically confronted by pluralisms which annihilated their sacred

genealogies. The Middle Kingdom's marginalization to the Far East is

emblematic of this process." The fact of China's marginalization in the twentieth-

century world is obvious; it is a marginalization that makes us think

of it as the "other country." 2 However, Anderson's remarks contain another, equally important point, if only in passing, in the word
traumatically.

The trauma faced by Chinese people in the whole process of

"modernization" has yet to be

understood. The Tiananmen incident

confronts us with this fact. The first point about this trauma is the futility of
intellectual discourse at the moment of shock. There is nothing subtle, nothing reflexive, about a
government gunning down its own, or for that matter any, people. This experience shocks us out of our assumed categories of thinking. All of a sudden, those
of us who are academics cannot see the world as scholars , but rather become
journalists. We become suddenly aware of the precarious,
provisional nature of our discourse. The unreliability of conventional
properly

sources of information, the limitations of our reasoning instruments ,

the repetitive narratives to which we are subjected -all these raw

aspects of our representational machinery suddenly become acute ,

plunging our perception into crisis . I heard a feminist ask: "How should we read what is going on in China in terms of gender?" My
immediate response to that question was, and is: "We do not, because at the moment of shock Chinese people are degendered and become simply 'Chinese.' "

how we can

use gender to

To ask

"read" a political crisis such as the present one is to

insist on the universal and timeless sufficiency of an analytical

category, and to forget the historicity that accompanies all categorical
explanatory power . In her essay "Explanation and Culture: Marginalia," Gayatri Spivak (1987, 105; emphasis in original) writes: The will

to explain was the symptom of a desire to have a self and a world ... the
possibility of explanation carries the presupposition of an explainable (even if not fully)
universe and an explaining (even if imperfectly) subject. These presuppositions
assure our being. Explaining, we exclude the possibility of the radically
heterogeneous. Any analytical discourse on the Chinese situation in
terms of a single category , when Chinese prodemocracy protesters are being arrested, punished, or killed for having demonstrated peacefully for
freedom

, is presumptuous . The problem is not how we should read what is going on in China in terms of gender, but rather: what do the events in China tell

us about gender as a category, especially as it relates to the so-called Third World? What are gender's limits, where does it work, and where does it not work? How do these events help
us recognize the anger often voiced by non-Western women about the singular priority that is given to "woman" by bourgeois liberal feminism? The roots of this anger do not simply lie in
the need, neglected by bourgeois liberal feminism's agenda to put the female sex in the forefront of all battles, to pluralize the term woman. Women, often used as remedy for that
neglect, leaves most problems of social inequity intact. If the more trendy women itself is, at best, an unstable category, it is because, as Denise Riley (1988, 5) tells us, "this instability
has a historical foundation." The anger felt by non-Western women is never simply that they have been left out of bourgeois liberal feminism's account "as women," but., more
important,, that their experiences as "women" can never be pinned down to the narrowly sexualized aspect of that category, as "women" versus "men" only. What is often assumed to be

Rather than a
purely analytical discourse on the China situation, I want to raise a set of
questions that pertain more closely to us in the U.S., where most of
the central transaction between women and culture-women's heterosexual relation to men-has little relevance to the China crisis. China Watching

us participate in "China watching" as

TV

audiences and newspaper readers.

China is , in this instance as it has been for the past several decades, a spectacle for the West . Our

condemnation of the military violence in Beijing must go hand in

hand with the understanding that the deaths of the thousands of Chinese
people were an overdetermined event . In many respects., the media all over the
world perform the function of urging those protesters on; our cameras lie in wait for the next "/newsworthy" event to unfold

before us. When I say "41overdetermined," therefore, I mean to include the complicity of

our technology, which does much more

than enable us to "see."/ Since the week of June 11, 1989, for instance, the focus on the China crisis has shifted to how the Chinese government
is controlling the dissemination of the news and how it is, after the military crackdown, instituting the control of thought and speech through propaganda. The Chinese authorities are
ruthless in their deployment of camera networks and other mass communication channels to track down "dissidents." The crudity of their technologies of indoctrination is transparent:
they kill, and then they lie. But what role do the media play on our side? There have been instances in which Chinese people cautioned photographers not to take their picture for fear
they would be arrested, and what happens to them? We see their pictures with their cautioning as "/explanation" of the "'China crisis," either in the form of a silent caption (in the
newspapers) or in the voiced commentary of our reporters (on television). This happened even in the same reports that criticized the Chinese government for issuing telephone numbers
so that people could turn others in. Even though some newscasters now take the trouble to obscure the faces of the people they interview, in some cases it is too late.

Meanwhile, these newscasts continue to take us to more remote

places such as villages, where they continue to film people and try
to make them talk. To use a familiar narrative from the archives of
imperialism, we are still locked within the political structure of the
movie King Kong (1933), with our media always ready to venture out to "make a
movie" about the unknown jungle with its dark, abominable secrets .
Much like Director Denim's film crew, our cameras capture the inhuman monster and
present it to us in the "civilized" world as a spectacular sight on
display. King Kong was mounted on a rack for a well-dressed theater audience in New York City; China is served to
us on the television screen at home. Describing what she calls "the civilizing power of socialized capital," Spivak (1987, 90) says: " The irreducible
search for greater production of surplus-value (dissimulated as, simply, 'productivity')
through technological advancement; the corresponding necessity to
train a consumer who will need what is produced and thus help realize surplus-value as profit... all
conspire to 'civilize.' " Recast in the realm of ideological production alone,
Spivak's remarks explain the frantic simulation of
information/knowledge in what I'd call the King Kong syndrome . This is
the cross-cultural syndrome in which the "Third World," as the site of
the "raw" material that is "monstrosity ," is produced for the surplusvalue of spectacle , entertainment, and spiritual enrichment for the
"First World ." The intensive productivity of the Western newsperson

leads to the establishment of clear boundaries. Locked behind the bars of our
television screens, we become repelled by what is happening "over
there," in a way that confirms the customary view, in the U.S. at least, that
ideology exists only in the "other" (anti-U.S.) country . In King Kong, the white woman, Ann (Fay
Wray), is the point of struggle between the film crew and the "natives." Within her society Ann occupies the position of the underprivileged. Herself the victim of patriarchal oppression
(an oppression that includes her being "lifted" into the role of heroine as a result of hunger and thus made part of the profitmaking film industry), the white woman becomes the hinge of
the narrative of progress, between enlightened instrumental reason and barbarism-lurking-behind-the-Wall. The white woman is what the white man "produces" and what the monster
falls for. If her body is, in filmic language, the place of "suture," what it sews together-what it "coheres" are the white man's production and the monster's destruction. The "King Kong
syndrome" surfaces in the China crisis in the way the "goddess of liberty" is reproduced across Chinese communities as a defiant emblem of what China "lacks": democracy. The first
replica of the Goddess of Liberty was constructed at the Beijing Academy of Arts at the height of the Tiananmen demonstrations. After the statue was mowed down with the protesters
on the morning of June 4, Chinese groups in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the U.S. produced other replicas in a concerted effort to attack the Chinese communist government's scandalizing
acts. King Kong ends with the statement "Beauty killed the Beast." In the China crisis this sounds like a prophecy for the future, and Chinese people in particular, with little intellectual

In the age of electronic and

mechanical reproductions, the Chinese government's resort to
political repression should make us think not only in terms of their
current violence, but of the global roots of that violence, and the
similar gestures of repressive veiling we have already encountered
in other non-Western countries. What the Western media reenact is
the whole issue of extraterritoriality that has been present in SinoWestern relations since the mid-nineteenth century. For those who are not familiar with the term,
extraterritoriality was one of the many concessions China was forced to
choice of any kind left, feel obligated to condone the statement's prescriptive as well as descriptive meaning.

grant to foreign powers in the "unequal treaties" signed during the

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It meant that nationals

and subjects of the "treaty powers" were subject to the civil and
criminal laws of their own countries and not to Chinese law.
Foreigners were thus protected for their undertakings on Chinese
soil-against the Chinese. From the days of England's gunboat
diplomacy to the present day , the question of human rights , when it is
raised in China in relation to the West , has never been separable from
the privilege of extraterritoriality demanded by the Western diplomat,

trader, or missionary. If you think of a person such as Ted Koppel or Tom Brokaw standing on the street in Beijing, speaking a language which is not
Chinese, condemning the Chinese government, and how fantastic a spectacle that is, then the issue of "journalistic freedom" that is presented as the grounds for intrusive filming and
reporting becomes much more problematic than what it purports to be. This is not the same as criticizing such "freedom" by endorsing the Chinese government's facile, misleading
charge that the West is "meddling with China's internal affairs." What it means is that

it forces us to question the

presuppositions that underlie such "freedom," revealing it to be not a

basic existential condition to which all are entitled (though this is the claim that is made) but
a network of demands, negotiations, and coercions that are
themselves bound by historical determinants constructed on
slaughter and bloodshed. The tragedy of the China crisis lies in the

polarization, which is still inscribed in nativist and nationalistic terms (the Chinese vis-a-vis the rest of the world), between an
obsolete cultural isolationism, currently supported by military
violence and the paternalistic ideology of the governing regime, and a naive, idealistic clamor for
democracy "American style," produced from a plethora of discourses ranging from the astrophysicist Fang Lizhi, to workers, intellectuals,
and students, and to the overseas communities, all of which converge on the symbolism of the
whitewoman-as-liberty. This polarization leaves everyone little to choose
from , and that is why the emotional and moral stand taken by

Chinese "representations" around the globe, myself included, is unanimously

supportive of the "white woman" symbolism. Only a united front, oblivious of the differences in class, gender,
education, and profession, can cope with the violence experienced as ethnic trauma. But the polarization between "traditionalism" or what I have called cultural isolationism
(represented by the Party official line), on the one hand, and "democracy," on the other, means that

extraterritoriality -the exemption from local jurisdiction-

becomes itself exempted from the history of its own role, not in the

promotion of freedom and rights but in the subjugation of other

peoples in the course of colonial conquests . To return to the theme of

the production of knowledge as surplus-value: the production of

knowledge about the non-West was possible, in the past, because the
producers were exempted from local jurisdiction even as they
committed crimes on "local territory." Now adays, instead of guns , the
most effective instruments that aid in the production of the "Third

World" are the technologies of the media. It is to these technologiesthe bodies of the Western journalist and cameraperson, their voices, their images, their
equipment, and the "reality" that is broadcast in the U.S. and then

"faxed" back to China -that extraterritoriality is extended, and most of all by Chinese
communities overseas who must, under the present circumstances, forget the history of extraterritoriality in Sino-Western relations. The fetish of the white woman is a serious one, even

Here woman is not the heterosexual

opposite of man, but the symbol of what China is not/ does not have .
In the eyes of many U.S. leftist intellectuals, it is disturbing to see young
Chinese students fighting for their cause with this symbolism. Don't
they know what atrocities have been committed in the name of
liberty and democracy? we ask implicitly or explicitly. For instance, Ronald Reagan's comments on the current Chinese situation, heard during the
though it is not, unlike some interpretations of King Kong, about sex.

week of June 11, sound more like an unconscious description of his own foreign policies: "They have something elemental to learn: you cannot massacre an idea; you cannot run tanks on

And couldn't the Chinese students learn about "democracy" from

the way Margaret Thatcher's British government is treating the citizens of Hong
Kong? From 1842, when Hong Kong (Island) was, by the Treaty of Nanking,
ceded to Britain as a result of the Opium War (which British historians nowadays prefer to call,
euphemistically, the "First AngloChinese War"), to the present, when Hong Kong (the British crown colony that includes the Hong Kong Island,
the Kowloon Peninsula, and the leased New Territories) is an international city, Britain's policy toward its
hope...."

colonized peoples has remained untouched by history and motivated by

pure self-interests . A century and a half ago, self-interests (monetary profit

derived from opium, produced in India and sold in China) were

justified in terms of Chinese people's desire for opium, in the sense
of "they asked for it"; now, self-interests (the need to protect
England from being "colonized" by the peoples from its previous and
current "dependent territories") are expressed pointblank by
members of the British public in the following way: "The thought of three and a half
million people coming over to the island of Britain is quite horrifying."13Three and a half
million is the number of Hong Kong people whose national status is, as their passports specify, "British Dependent Territories citizen." Such elaborations
of the contradictory nature of the claims of democracy remain, as
yet, inaccessible to the Chinese who grew up on the Mainland in the
past twenty to thirty years. They have been, precisely because of the cultural isolationism implemented by the government at different
levels, deprived of the intellectual space that would allow them the kind of critical understanding I am suggesting. An emotional idealism which arises from desperation and which is
displaced onto a fetish such as the Goddess of Liberty is the closest they could come to a taste of freedom. There is as yet no room-no intellectual room, no reflexive mobility-to

Instead of focusing only on the

problematic nature of their fetishizing (and thereby implicitly sneering at their naivete"), it is
necessary for us to ask why these students are doing this, what
their frustrations are., and what the causes of those frustrations are
in their own as well as world history. Because as intellectuals we do the kind of work that is by necessity reflexive, more
understand the history in which the ideal of "democracy" deconstructs itself in the West.

likely to have effects in the long run than in the immediate future., responses to these questions can be only preliminary at a moment such as this. And yet, as well, we must respond.

The image of the Chinese intellectual I often have in mind is that of a

tiny person weighed down with a millstone, much heavier and much
older than she is, as she tries to fight her way into the "'international"
arena where, if only perfunctorily, she can be heard. This millstone is
"China." My choice of the feminine pronoun is deliberate. If, as I said, "woman" and "women" become rather pointless categories if they refer only to the dominant sexual
transaction of woman-versus-man, then there are other ways in which the oppressed and marginalized status of the "Third World" woman can be instructive.

China as a

spectacle , as what facilitates the production of surplus-value in the

politics of knowledge - as-commodity-this China becomes , in its relation

to the West, "woman": in the sense that it is the "Other" onto which the
unthinkable , that which breaks the limits of civilized imagination , is
projected .

"Woman" in the Other Country

In an event such as the present one, the

Chinese woman , who is forever caught between patriarchy and

imperialism, disappears as a matter of course. Where she appears, she does not
appear as "woman" but as "Chinese"; this is the message we learn from the twenty-three-year-old student leader Chai
Ling. The issues that the figure of the Chinese woman brings, the issues of gender and sexuality and their enmeshment in politics, are here intercepted and put on hold by the outbreak
of military violenceeven though it is precisely these issues that have to be probed in order for us to get to the roots of violence in patriarchal Chinese culture. What are the links between
what is currently happening and a tradition that emphasizes order and harmony, but that also consistently crushes the openness brought to it by intellectuals, students, and young
people? Time and again in the past few decades, when things have just begun to be open enough for such issues of liberation to come into their own, we see a crackdown of the kind

Chinese women, like their

counterparts in many other patriarchal "Third World" countries, are
required to sacrifice and postpone their needs and their rights again
and again for the greater cause of nationalism and patriotism . As one of the
that immediately requires the postponement of the consideration of such issues. As a result,

most oppressed sectors of Chinese society, they get short shrift on both ends: whenever there is a political crisis, they stop being women; when the crisis is over and the culture rebuilds
itself, they resume their more traditional roles as wives and mothers as part of the concerted effort to restore order. To my mind, it is sexuality and gender, and the challenge to the
bases of traditional authority they bring, which would provide the genuine means for undoing the violence we witness today. This is because this violence cannot be understood apart
from the long-privileged status that is conferred upon paternalistic power among the Chinese, be that power exercised in the home, in channels of education, and in civil as well as
military administration. If this sounds like a contradiction to my opening remarks, it is because the very efficacy with which we can use gender and sexuality as categories for historical
inquiry is itself historical; this efficacy is a result of the relative political stability and material well-being that are available to us as an intellectual community in North America. The battle

we see how the challenge to authority

posed by gender and sexuality is resisted in a field such as sinology ,
which is much more interested in protecting the timeless treasures of the Chinese
tradition. In the practices of sinology we see not the barbaric but the
we fight is thus a different, albeit concurrent, one. Closer to home,

beautiful China , which occupies a highly revered place among world

intellectuals as the "Other" that satisfies the longing for exotic ancient
civilizations . Alternatively, China was also the Other that provided, for Western

leftists in the 1960s-precisely at the height of what have since then been revealed as the horrors of the Cultural Revolution- a hopeful
different route to communism. Both the specialist and the amateur China
admirer have the tendency to attribute to "China" absolute differences
from the West. In this tendency lies a suppression of thought: if, as
historians tirelessly tell us, modern East Asian history is the history of
"Westernization," and if "Westernization" is not merely a "theme"
but the materiality of daily life for modern Asian peoples, then how
could it be possible to insist on the idealist demarcation between
"East" and "West" that we still so often encounter? "This is Chinese" and "this is
not Chinese" are modes of description and criticism which we
constantly hear , from
modes of description

journalists, to business people, to academic

and criticism, which are

"China specialists ." These

articulated on the presumed certainty of

what is "Chinese," use the notion "Chinese" as a way to legitimize the

authority of tradition and thus exclude the fundamental instability of any
ethnic category.

The suppression of thought through authoritarianism, even when the "authority" of tradition has become, literally, corrupt, is therefore not

limited to the blatant policies of the Chinese communist government, although at this point that government is making a spectacle of what is a long process of cultural trauma and
collapse.

When we move our attention away from the short-term brutality ,

which we must remember and condemn, we will see that repressive

politics is a general problem pertaining to (the understanding of)
modern China as a part of the "Third World," a problem whose roots

cannot be confined to a single incident. If the immediate cases of military violence are translatable into the paradigm of
"King Kong breaks loose," then the problems posed by sinology and China studies
find a revealing analysis in a more recent film, Gorillas in the Mist (1988).4 In many ways, Gorillas is the antipode to King Kong: whereas in
the latter movie we see the "Other" world depicted as being uncivilized, a condition that leads to its death, in the former we see the good and gentle
nature of the gorillas in contrast to the brutality of those who hunt
them down for profit. Thanks to the pioneering work of primatologists such as Dian Fossey, the film's ending credits tell us, this "Other" world is
allowed to live. Mediating between the civilized and uncivilized worlds is once again the white woman, whose bravery and foolhardiness "create" the story. This time, instead of King
Kong holding a screaming Ann in his gigantic paw, we see the Dian Fossey character (Sigourney Weaver) responding to Nature's call and holding hands with the gorillas. Instead of the
gorilla, it is the white woman who is killed. The destruction of King Kong affirms civilization; the white woman in Gorillas is seen to have "gone off the deep end" in her battle against
civilization, a battle which results in her mysterious death. In the present context, I propose to recast Gorillas in the logic of Edward Said's argument about "Orientalism," even though

the white female

primatologist, like the great Orientalists, knows the language of the
"natives" and speaks to/of/on behalf of them with great sympathy.
But in her doing so, the "native culture" also becomes her
possession, the site of her spiritual war against the "home" that is
the Western world. We are thus confronted with what is perhaps the
ugliest double bind in the history of imperialism: while the kind,
personal intent behind many a missionary exploration of the "Other"
world must be recognized-as a benign humanism extended
pluralistically across not only nations and cultures but species-such explorations
are implicated in colonialism and neocolonialism in their romantic
insistence that the "wild" stay "alive" in their original, "natural"
habitat. This double bind is, I believe, the thorniest issue that our progressive
discourses, in dealing with the "others" as part of a selfconsciousnessraising program, have yet to acknowledge fully.
that logic may appear rigid and predictable at times. What the Orientalism argument enables us to see is this:

US discourse surrounding China has historically been

characterized by yellow peril where the demonization and
construction of China a threat directly translates into physical
violence against Asian bodies. We refuse to answer the
resolutional question that invites us to debate China war and
the trade deficit without understanding the violent
implications of painting China as such as a necessary
intervention within this pandemic, so familiar to the debate
community.
Lyman 2K (Stanford M., Robert J. Morrow Eminent Scholar and Professor of Social
Science, Florida Atlantic University, The "Yellow Peril" Mystique: Origins and
Vicissitudes of a Racist Discourse, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and
Society, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Summer, 2000), pp. 683-747,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/20020056.pdf, accessed 6/28/16) rz

THE YELLOW PERIL AFTER 1945: THE REEMERGENCE OF CHINA

In the

five-

decades since the Second World War

course of the nearly

and-one-half
has ended,?
except for a brief period in the 1970s and early 1980s when an economically expanding Japanese economy and a very large U.S.-Japan trade
imbalance216reawakened fierce Japanophobic passions that had seemed to have been repressed for good by the atomic bombs that fell on Hiroshima and

China,
or, rather, the Peoples Republic thereof, has been moved into that place in the pantheon of
U.S. threatening yellow peril nations. The wars that the United States fought
in Korea and Vietnam were in one sense surrogative conflicts, i.e., aggressions
and counter-aggressions pitting the evils, committed or anticipated,
by the USSR?sometimes thought of as a non-European, even Oriental, empire?and Mao's
China against America's emergent status not merely as the single most important world power, but
also, as the global defender of Western democracy .221 Unlike American Japanophobia, which
Nagasaki,217or which only occasionally emerged from their slumberous state on annual anniversaries of the bombing of Pearl Harbor,218?

tended to organize itself around either fears of invasion, worries about California's farmlands and fisheries, or apprehensions about an "unfair" trade war,

today's Sinophobia is caught up in the unresolved questions about U.S.China trade whether commerce should be linked to China's record on
human rights and to suspicions about the aggressive aims of the
People's Republic .

222

sovereignty

With China's

recovery of Hong Kong from Britain,223 Macao from Portugal,224 and

continuing pressure for the restoration of its

Chinese influence,"
is seeping into more and more of Asia
With the firing and
arrest of Wen Ho Lee, whose indictment accuses him of
intent to secure an advantage to a foreign nation," the elements of a revived yellow peril imagery
have found a point of focus
it has been reported both scholars and students from China are finding it
more difficult to obtain visas for entry into America
Allegedly, these intellectuals and
scholars
are potential risks to America's national security
MISSIONS, MARKETS AND
MARXISM: AWAKENING AMERICA TO THE CHINESE DRAGON So long as China appears to beckon to America with a
promise of 400,000,000 customers, docile but hard-working people who will be willing converts to both
free-market commerce and faith-driven Christianity the threat of its people, culture, and armaments to
the security of the U S is lowered. However, since the 1920s a falling off of missionary endeavor and the
rise of nationalism and communism have undermined the earlier sanguine outlook
Underlying the notes was the assumption that the ancient Chinese empire was
unable to be its own doorkeeper
thirty years later the Open Door and
the other principles are seen to be not principles of cohesion but of division They are in practice
policies of intervention, essential neither to prosperity nor to peace
little more than the old
imperialism with a new name.
the Qing emperor's representatives had
been forced by Great Britain, France, and the U S to sign the first "unequal treaties"
the long-term patterns of Western history as they impinged upon China contrib uted to the
destruction more than to the creation of any observable rhythm in the Chinese social process."
because of China's failure to
meet the West
on equal terms it had, from the time of the treaties until 1943, been a part of that "treaty system
which had been created to serve as a vehicle for British and other Western trade diplomacy, and
evangelism in Chin
The burning question of the moment Fairbank believed,
was how to integrate into a world community one-fifth of the human race whose social heritage is
essentially at variance with that of the West
However, even if there were
a
renewed intellectual effort at understanding how China's trade and diplomatic history had gotten both
it and the U S into such difficulties either would be sufficient to halt the revival of the once slumbering
Chinese dragon.
FROM ASIATIC COOLIES TO ARMED ENEMY Hostile anti-Chinese remarks had
been noticed during World War II, where Kuomintang soldiers ought side by side with troops from the
US
Ordered not to use the term "Chink" to refer to America's Chinese allie the U.S. "G.I.'s" turned
to the ethnophaulism "slopey"
adding after the Korean War
the term "Gook,"
analyst of
the Second World War in Asia and American images of ethnoracial peoples,
explained the wartime rise of anti-Chinese prejudices thus:
a long-lingering image of Chinese soldiers as a "human
sea" of Asiatic coolies incapable of either combat artfulness or techno-military skills would begin to
give way in the face of Chinese military successes in the Korean War. Before the Korean War ended
the new image of the Chinese warrior and foe became something more than a vision of vast numbers of
massed barbarians akin to the Mongol hordes These were Mongol hordes with big guns and jet aircraft
and a growing number who knew how to use these weapons with precision and skill."
1950
apprehension about a Chinese military incursion into Vietnam
was a principal fear
over Taiwan,225 "

in the words of Robert D. Kaplan, "

possession of the United States,227 and an arena long held to be of strategic importance to the West.

."226 Further, both China and Taiwan have established footholds on the Panama Canal, no longer a

subsequent

acting "with

228

. Since then,

n universities and colleges.

postgra dute

;229 while new revelations about Chinese being smuggled into the United States via Hong Kong are alleged to herald "a new and troubling trend."230

or more

also

nited

tates

both

. Pearl S. Buck (1892-1973), born to missionary parents and a missionary herself unt il conditions in C hina led to her outspoken crit ique of the West's default on it s humanit arian obligations,232

had, by the early 1930s, worried over the future of Protestant ism in Asia: How much will remain of Christianity in the future of the Far East it is impossible to tell . . . There is in the Orient as in the Occident a genuine spiritual hunger ... In the midst of eager, ex perim ental yout h the Christian Church cont inues to proceed in the main with formal and uninspiring creeds and forms, and communism and People's Movements are supply ing this idealism . . . [I]t may be that... the strength of communism will be the next chief cultural missionary movement in the world. No one can say.233 In the same year and published in the same volume of essays in which Ms. Buck's essay appeared, Ty ler Dennet offered a stinging critique of what had been the cornerstone of American foreign and trade policy with C hina since 1899, that of the "Open door": The . . . Open Door notes of John Hay, American Secretary of State, in the last year of the

last century . . . sought to secure the volunt ary assent of the trading nations ... to the principle that the trade of C hina should remain subject to the conditions of free competit ion for all nations . . .

, patently correct,

. . . McKinleyism, in which the Open Door and the integrity of China doctrines were the initial chapters, contem plat ed a polit ical world of harmonious states held together by enlightened self-interest . . . The idea was sensible enough, but it could not be realized ... In the world as we find it

.. .

. . . [ T]he Open Door principle is likely to turn out to be

234 Two decades later, John King Fairbank, perhaps America's leading authority on C hina, would apply a different twist to the matter in his reexamination of the sociocultural and ideological changes that had occurred in C hina in the one hundred years since

nited

tates

(1842-1844). His analysis stressed the ignorance, indifference, and confusion of the Chinese leaders who had had to deal with the incursions made by the West.235 He

concluded that "

236 In contrast, he asserted, the same century had witnessed an entirely

different history of modernizat ion for Japan: "Japan . . . had a patriot ic and adaptable ruling class. C hina did not. Japan had the medieval tradition of the samurai as a basis for modern chauvinism. The early bankers of Osaka and Toky o were forerunners of the modern Zaibatsu. By the nineteent h century, Japan . . . was a nat ion somewhat like Western nat ions, while the Middle Kingdom was a state of a different polit ical species altogether."237 Thus, precisely

fit into a pattern comparable to that of Japan, as well as its "inability to

,"238

.. .

a. . . ,"239 a system which, while it contrasted fundamen tally wit h the "preceding millennia of the [C hinese empire's] tribute system . . ., contrasts. . . less sharply wit h the new international order of commu nism of which China has become a part."240

"

."241 The issue was made more urgent, he observed, by "the fact that this effort is currently being made under the banner of communism . . ."242

nited

tates

to occur a respiritualized C hrist ian missionary movement in China, or

,n

Its awakening was once again said to be imm inent .243

in fact

in those very areas

nited

tates in the struggle against Japan's im perialist advance.

s,

, or perhaps invented

Pacific area or the Far East).244 Harold Isaacs, a searching

(derived, perhaps, from "slope-eyed" or "slope-headed"),

both the Chinese revolut ion,245 the nature and consequences of

the onset of

and continuing into the Vietnam War,

(which at one time referred to Filipinos and would become a feature of military slang designating any non- white person in the

,246

247

C onsider what happened: the prev ious direct contacts of Americans with Chinese in C hina were confined to a small number of missionaries, officials, businessmen, scholars, and students. There were abrupt ly widened to include about a quarter of a million young Americans drawn from a cross-sect ion of the whole American populat ion. This large and significant body of men emerges from the

experience nursing v iolent prejudices. They ret urn to their homes attributing to the Chinese people as a whole all the brutality and venality and ugly viciousness of C hina's ruling cliques, its big and small officials, its generals and many of its soldiers, its exploiters. They bring to the tradit ionally amorphous American feeling of sympathy for China a sharp and bitt er and explicit contradict ion.248 However,

"

," Isaacs observed,

"

among them

considerable

, then in conflict with France,

249 Moreover according to a now declassified CIA memo randum dated December 29,

in the U.S. int elligence community: "The C hinese Communist regime is already furnishing the Viet Minh materiel, training and technical assistance . . . The intervent ion of

China's threat: To accept

Mainland Chinese domination in Asia would be to look forward to
conditions of external domination and probably totalitarian control,
not merely for twenty years but quite possibly for generations . . . But
C hinese C ommunist troops in force in support of the Viet Minh would render the military posit ion of the French untenable . . . Direct intervention by Chinese C ommunist t roops may occur at any time . . . The st rong probability is that the loss of Indochina to Communist control would mean the eventual loss of all mainland Southeast Asia."250 When by 1966, the much-feared Chinese inv asion of South Vietnam had not occurred, William P. Bundy provided a more nuanced variat ion of

essentially we are dealing here not with the power of ideas but with the power of subversive organization?perhaps the one field in which Communist China has shown real innovation and

Suspicions
about the real aims of Chinese in America had been rekindled after
the outbreak of the Korean conflict and would become even sharper
during and after the Vietnam War. When, during the first year of the Korean
struggle, Chinese "volunteers" halted the American military advance
across the 38th parallel,253 there were roundups of alien Chinese
along the east coast of the United States.254 Although during that war both
American-born and immigrant Chinese . . . "experienced the wrath of
the larger society because they were considered 'enemy images'," Rose
skill. . .251 The awakened dragon was once again, as in the days of the Boxer uprising, about to be perceived as "cruel and revengeful."252

Hum Lee, the first Chinese American to chair an American university sociology department, took comfort from the fact that "... they were not placed in concentration camps, as the

in 1960, "most persons of Chinese

ancestry, regardless of birthplace, feared the repetition of an established precedent:
the deprivation of civil rights and privileges, without due process of
law, confiscation of property, and imposition on them of all the onus
of enemy-subversive status."256 A few years later, in 1966, these fears were made
palpable by a rumor reported in Jerome Beatty, Jr.'s column in the Saturday Review to the effect that detention
camps were being prepared to "relocate" all the Chinese in the United
States in the hope of preventing them from sabotaging the U.S. war
effort in Vietnam.257 The policies and perspectives that would culminate in the arrest and indictment of Wen Ho Lee can be traced to the return of yellow
Japanese had been during World War II . . ."255 However, Professor Lee would point out

peril fears during the first years of the People's Republic. The fall of Nationalist China in 1949 had, in effect, threatened the status and the future of 5,000 overseas Chinese students,
professionals, trainers, government officials, and visitors to the United States with displacement and statelessness.258 By 1951, Public Law 535, coupled with the U.S. Attorney General's
collateral regulation, had relieved the plight of many of the stranded students, allowing those who had entered the United States before 1950 to complete their studies, find employment,
and-perhaps most important-convert their non-immigrant student status to that of a permanent resident.259 Nevertheless, most of the members of this aggregate suffered in numerous

these students and intellectuals

were not infrequently regarded as security risks, with some officials holding
that they should be repatriated to the People's Republic and others believing "that the
Chinese Communists would give their highest medal to the immigration department for sending back these students to Peking."261 Those Chinese students
whose visas had expired were subjected to Justice Department
interrogations with "Catch 22"-style queries not un like the infamous Questions 27 and 28 given to the already
ways from the effect of the marginality that events had thrust upon them.260 Worse,

incarcerated Issei, Kibei and Nisei by the War Relocation Authority in 1943:* The Chinese stu dents were asked which of two Chinese governments, that of Chiang Kai shek or that of Mao
Tse-tung, they supported or had some positive feelings toward. As an editorial in the April 12,1952 issue of the Nation pointed out: The Chinese student faces a particularly difficult

They have to prove

their innocence of any disloyalty to our government instead of being
presumed innocent until proven guilty, as the American system of justice prescribes.262 Fears about the knowledge and
position. If he rejects Chiang's leadership, this does not necessarily make him a follower of Mao . . . this fact is often overlooked . . .

skills that American-educated Chinese might give to China after they returned to their homeland eventually led the president of the United States to invoke a restraint on any who sought
to depart. This restraining order continued in full force until 1955, when, after numerous protests, 76 students, among the hundreds who sought to return, were permitted to depart for

Suspicions about Chinese students in America would be

renewed after China entered the "nuclear club." Concerns about
what kind of assistance Chinese scientists and technicians might be able to
give to the weaponry of the People's Republic of China became even more serious when it
became clear that Mao's regime had sought and received aid from the Soviet
Union in its drive to join the nuclear club.264 From 1950 to 1960, the USSR supplied China with eleven thousand
China.263

"advisers," who helped in the construction of 141 industrial proj ects that included building the Anshan steel complex in southern Manchu ria, developing the Sinkiang oil fields, as well as
advising on the construction of numerous railway networks, automotive and tractor factories, and hydro electric power plants. In 1955, Soviet specialists set up an atomic reactor and a
cyclotron inside China, while a score of Chinese nuclear physicists studied at the USSR's Joint Institute of Nuclear Research at Dubna. Al though an agreement of 1957 had pledged
Russian aid in supplying China with the "new technology for national defense," the developing rift in Sino Soviet relations soon prevented further assistance. After 1960, when all Russian

technicians had been withdrawn, the Chinese proceeded on their own. On October 16,1964, claiming that it was "a major contribution made by the Chinese people to the cause of the
defence of world peace," China detonated what President Lyndon Johnson called "a crude nuclear device which can only increase the sense of insecurity of the Chinese people."265 In
May, 1965, China set off a second bomb; one year later, still another, ten times larger than the second and using some thermonuclear material; five months later, a bomb that could be

on June 17, 1967, China exploded a true

hydrogen bomb of at least three megatons, i.e., a device one hundred
times more powerful than the bomb that had been dropped on
Hiroshima in 1945. Americans as well as the other Occidental nations had to recognize that the
Chinese dragon was no longer somnolent. If aroused, it could breathe thermonuclear fire. THE
carried on a missile; and, two months after that, a 300 kiloton device. Then,

YELLOW PERIL AND THE COX REPORT

For a brief moment in 1900?that is, until, five years later, Japan's startling emergence as the first

in the early
decades of the twentieth century, the Boxers were widely viewed as
'the Yellow Peril personified' . . ."266 After nearly a century-long hiatus, during which Japan took its place, China's new thermonuclear
"boxers" revived Occidental apprehen sions of the perfidy that supposedly characterized the dreaded demons from the East. " The Boxer Uprising,"
recalled Jonathan G. Utley, "proved to Americans what they had already believed , that
the Chinese were not a trustworthy people, that they valued
duplicity and deceit rather than honesty."267 China's people, once admired in Pearl Buck's
stories about their sturdy peasantry, were transformed into a Cold War enemy after 1949 .
Asian power to defeat a European state eclipsed it?China and its "Boxers" awed and frightened Americans. "In the West," observes Paul A. Cohen, "

Whereas the original view of China's threat achieved its legitimation through futuristic novels and stories, occasional American military ventures in China, labor union-inspired screeds
denouncing immigrant Chinese la borers, and, after the threat of invasion had receded, lurid tales of crime and vice in America's and England's Chinatowns, the current version finds its
legitimation in concerns over Asiatic communism, China's military and foreign policies, and?most significantly?the possibility that Chinese sci entists, technicians and engineers, working
in American laboratories, uni versities and corporations on secret, arms-related, and other thermonuclear matters, might use their positions of knowledge, authority and privilege to aid

That this belief might be rooted in some factual matters

does not remove it from the realm of racial prejudice from which it came and to which it
the People's Republic of China

belongs. Herbert Blumer has pointed out how race prejudice is formulated as a "sense of group position."268 Further, he noted, the prejudi cial process takes place in public arenas,
wherein representative spokesper sons, e.g.,"leaders, prestige bearers, officials, group agents, dominant indi viduals, and ordinary laymen," employing "tales, stories, gossip, anecdotes,
messages, pronouncements, news accounts, orations, sermons, preach ments, and the like," take up a "big event," giving it a meaning that develops the particular racist image, and
designating the position of the racial group with respect to it. The history presented in the body of the present essay, describing the formation, development, vicissitudes, and

However, in the present

situation, rather than popular fiction, Asiatic exoticisms, laborite
hostility, and sensational stories all of which have been stored away
in the American consciousness, able to be called up for both
cognitive and cathectic support whenever needed to buttress its
reappearance the onset of the still developing anti-Chinese thesis is
applications of yellow peril discourse to Asian countries and Asiatic peoples, clearly matches this pattern.

given its impetus by breaking news reports and hastily completed

on March 6, 1999, on the front page of

the usually staid and colorless New York Times, a "special report" broke the story that
would lead not only to the dismissal and later the arrest of Dr. Wen Ho Lee, but also, and
more ominously, to the lowering of a cloud of suspicion over virtually all Chinese in,
or coming to, the United States, with the headline: "Breach at Los Alamos: A
Special Report; China Stole Nuclear Secret For Bombs, U.S. Aides
Say."269 Within two days Dr. Lee was fired from his job and a new yellow peril
campaign had begun. According to Robert Schmidt, "The Times onslaught continued for five months. In a series of front-page articles . . . the Times
pressed the case against Lee, insinuating that he was guilty of various nefarious deeds."270 When, on September 7, the Times
saw fit to publish an article by a different journalist, complaining "that
the Federal investigation [had] focused too soon on the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and . . .
Wen Ho Lee,"271 it was too late. Five days earlier, Paul D. Moore, from 1978 to 1998 the FBI's chief analyst for Chinese counterintelligence,
government investigations.

Thus,

had published an op-ed essay in the Times suggesting that "China may have succeeded in devising an espionage strategy that can, over time, consistently defeat our ability to
investigate or prosecute spying offenses."272 On November 19, the San Jose Mercury News, a local California newspaper that had been skeptical of the Times' reports on Wen Ho Lee
from the beginning, published Vernon Loeb's and Walter Pincus's {Washington Post) article headlined "New spy data suggests scientist is innocent,"273 but it had little effect. Dr. Lee was
arrested three weeks later. "Several Asian-Americans," observed New York Times reporter James Sterngold on December 13, "said the event merely brought to a head four years of
growing anger at the way they were being treated and portrayed in the media."274

FBI investigations of Chinese

Americans who had contrib uted to political campaigns were

intensified. Chinese Americans, beset with new revelations about a Buddhist Church's role in vice-president Gore's fund raising
activities, and confessions by Chinese campaign workers who had collected and given improper and perhaps illegal contributions from suspicious sources to President Clinton's

began to experience what Lisa Lowe calls that feeling of being the
permanent "foreigner within," the people who, regardless of
birthplace and citizenship, are forever under suspicion about their
"true" loyalty.276 Asian American civil rights groups-including the Organization of Chinese Americans, the Committee of 100, and the Steering Committee of the
Wen Ho Lee Defense Fund began to coordinate efforts to douse what they perceived as a smouldering fire of Sinophobic race hatred.277 The capstone thus far on
the current revival of yellow peril Sinophobia is to be found in "U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People's Republic of China,"
The House of Representatives Report of the Select Committee on U.S. National Security and
Military/Commercial Concerns with the People's Republic of China, popularly
known as the "Cox Report," after Christopher Cox, the chairman of the House Policy Committee.278 Enjoying unanimous and bi-partisan
election,275

support from committee members, this report is a fine illustration of how what Richard Hofstadter calls the "paranoid style" that so often colors sudden shifts in American policy and

the report claims: The PRC [People's Republic of China]

has mounted a widespread effort to obtain U.S. military
technologies by any means-legal or illegal. . . The . . . Intelligence Community is insufficiently focused on the threat posed by PRC intelligence and the targeted
effort to obtain militarily useful technology from the United States .In June, 1993,... a former Chinese philosophy
professor, Bin Wu, and two other PRC nationals were convicted ... of
smuggling third-generation night vision equipment to the PRC . . . Wu appears
perspective279 can be conjoined with a yellow peril thematic. Among its accusations

to have been part of a significant PRC intelligence structure in the United States. This structure uses "sleeper"agents, who can be used at any time but may not be tasked for a decade or
more . . . The [PRC's] State Science and Technology Commission was involved in efforts to elicit nuclear weapons information from a Chinese American scientist. . . Peter Lee, a
Taiwanese-born naturalized U.S. citizen who formerly worked at the Los Alamos Laboratories, passed classified information to the PRC in 1977 and in 1985 ... In 1993, PRC national, Yen
Men Kao, a North Carolina restaurant owner, was arrested by the FBI and charged with conspiring to steal and export classified and export controlled high technology items to the
PRC . . . The PRC also relies heavily on the use of professional scientific visits, delegations, and exchanged to gather sensitive technology . . . Another risk in scientific exchanges is that
U.S. scientists . . . are prime targets for approaches by professional and non-professional PRC organiza tions that would like to coopt them into providing assistance to the PRC. In many
cases, they are able to identify scientists whose views might support the PRC, and whose knowledge would be of value to PRC programs. The Select Committee has received information
about Chinese-American scientists from U.S. nuclear weapons design laboratories being identified in this manner . . . The People's Republic of China . . . has stolen classified information
on all of the United States' most ad vanced nuclear warheads. . . The stolen U.S. secrets have helped the PRC fabricate and successfully test modern strategic thermonuclear
weapons . . . The PRC em ploys various approaches to co-opt U.S. scientists to obtain classified information ... : appealing to common ethnic heritage; arranging visits to ancestral homes
and relatives; paying for trips and travel in the PRC; flattering the guest's knowledge and intelligence; holding elaborate banquets to honor guests; and doggedly pep pering U.S.
scientists with technical questions by experts, sometimes after a banquet at which substantial amounts of alcohol have been consumed . . . Until at least the year 2000, the Department
of Energy's counterintelligence program will not be adequate.280 In a preface to the Cox Report, Kenneth deGraffenreid writes: "The American people should be in no doubt about this?in
important ways Communist China might pose a more dangerous threat to the United States than did the Soviet Union."m And in his "Foreword"282 to the same report, former secretary
of defense Caspar W. Weinberger reinforces deGraffen reid's point, noting, "The PRC in the past twelve to fifteen years has changed from being a friend that is anxious to have our
support in its attempt to wield a strong defense against the Soviets, to being a power that has made a conscious effort to replace the former Soviet Union as a superpower rival of the
United States." Moreover, he went on, "To achieve that goal, the leaders of the PRC will use?and have used?every available means to make Communist China our strategic equal." In
effect, Weinb erger seems to be arguing that Communist China has risen once again, as the Qing empire had over a century earlier, to be the representative yellow peril nation of the Far
East. To achieve its nefarious ends, he charges, it will steal or buy U.S. technology, oppose and block U.S. foreign policy actions, and try "to displace American influence in Asia and the
Pacific region." However, Weinberger goes further: In passages that do not men tion but will be reminiscent to all who recall how fanciful and false tales of espionage, subversion, and
fifth-column activities in the years before Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor helped fuel the justification for imprisoning without a trial the Pacific coast Japanese Americans,283 he links the
findings of the Cox Report to the 1993 People's Liberation Army publication of a textbook entitled Can the Chinese Army Win the Next War?, a work that identified the United States as
China's "principal adversary" but, he com plains, one that had not aroused President Clinton's administration to undertake any significant counteraction. Weinberger then asserts that
"the Clinton-Gore administration stands condemned of some of the worst and most damaging national security decisions of this century," and praises the Cox Report for uncovering "the
most serious breach of national security since Julius and Ethel Rosenberg betrayed our atomic secrets to the Soviet Union and Aldrich Ames sold us out for a mess of pottage."

Neither Wen Ho Lee nor any Chinese in America can take comfort
from Weinberger's ominous conclusion: "For their crime, the
Rosenbergs were executed. The crimes uncovered ... by this Report have yet to be redressed." Lest anyone might have missed the
implications for Chinese Americans of the Cox Report, Lars-Erik Nelson, in one of the few critiques of this foreboding document, points out: ". . . most irresponsibly, the Cox
report suggests that every Chinese visitor to this country, every
Chinese scholar, every Chinese student, every Chinese permanent
resident, and even every Chinese-American citizen is a spy,
potential spy, or 'sleeper agent,' merely waiting for the signal to
rise up and perform some unimaginable act of treachery."284 From all this it would
appear to be the case that Charlie Chan, the unacculturated book-and-reel-life Chinese detective who used his Oriental cleverness to help Americans to be safe from domestic criminals
and foreign spies during World War II, has died,285 and been succeeded by the real-life minions of that preternaturally brilliant scientist, Dr. Fu Manchu,?("Imagine a person, tall, lean and
feline, high-shouldered," Sax Rohmer, his creator, wrote, "with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest
him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect. . . Imagine that awful being and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril
incarnate in one man"),286?with Caspar Weinberger and the members of the committee that wrote the Cox Report self-appointed detectives who with public support, might save
America from an otherwise awful fate.

CIVILIZATIONS?

THE YELLOW PERIL IN THE "ASIAN CENTURY" A CLASH OF

As the twentieth century drew to a close Ian Buruma, a prominent writer on the relations of Asia to the West, pointed out how "silly" it now seems to recall the fears voiced in the 1970s and

1980s by "politicians, pundits and... novelists [who] rode the bandwagon, explaining how Japan, with the rest of East Asia in tow, was about to conquer the world."287 Yet, he goes on, despite the fact that "Michael Crichton's 1992
novel, 'Rising Sun,' in which predatory Japanese conglomerates virtually take over Los Angeles, looks as quaint these days as Sax Rohmer's stories about the demonic Dr. Fu Manchu," China, "the last large Asian country still trying to
combine authoritarian government with capitalist enterprise," survives. Believing that "

It is hard to imagine how a nation's

economy can keep on growing without freedom of information,

without its citizens having the right to question their leaders and
without laws that are based on popular consent and that people will
obe
y," Buruma nevertheless cannot refrain from noting that ". . . Anyone who has recently been to Shenzen, Canton or Shanghai will have seen young Chinese, computer-literate, enterprising, free-spirited and almost

frighteningly eager to take on the world." He concluded that "If only China were to follow South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand and, one hopes, Indonesia, then I would raise my glass and propose a toast to the coming
Chinese century." Buruma's glass is not likely to be hoisted in the near future. China's record on just those acts that arouse suspicion and fear has been enlarged: Two days after his essay appeared it was reported that on August 7
Chinese authorities in Beijing had arrested Professor Yongyi Song,?an applicant for American citizenship, and a research scholar from Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, specializing in the analysis of the Chinese Cultural
Revolution (1966-1976)?charging him with making "illegal provision of intelligence to foreigners." He was released six months later and permitted to return to the United States.288 Four months earlier, in a wide-ranging news report
on undocumented Chinese in Vancouver, British Columbia, James Brooke of the New York Times added still another element to allegations of Chinese deceptiveness.289 He reported that "Every year about 5,000 people flying to
Canada tear up their documents on airplanes, and then apply for refugee status. An increasingly popular practice is to apply for refugee status, and then disappear during the one year review period. That abuse has increased 20-fold
during the 1990s, reaching 4,203 docu mented cases last year . . . Most are presumed somehow to have sneaked or been smuggled across the border to the United States." Six days after Buruma's essay appeared, the New York
Times reported on a new wrinkle in smuggling Chinese into the United States-hiding them in the containers used on cargo ships that ply the Pacific, crossing from Hong Kong to port cities in Washington and California.290 Further, in

China and the United States are likely to be the

two dominant world powers during the twenty-first century. It is
imperative that these two continental giants learn to live and work
together productively and cooperatively."
two essays designed to lessen Sino-American tensions?(e.g., "

291)?David Shambough de scribes China's military capability?(e.g., "Its current weapons

inventory remains ten to twenty years or more behind the state of the art in almost all categories")292?in a manner that, unintentionally, to be sure, could exacerbate adherents of the Cox Report to even greater heights of concern
about Chinese attempts at theft and espionage. However, in two "human interest" stories about ordinary Chinese?one, a by-lined item in the morn ing edition of the New York Times, January 2, 2000, reporting that cat nabbing has
become a problem in Beijing because "some Chinese pay good money to eat cat, in a Cantonese dish called Dragon and Tiger Fight, which combines the meat of snakes and cats"; the other, a report on the 82,000 rural migrants in
Beijing who are forced to root through the garbage to avoid starvation and who live in constant fear of apprehension by the police, harassment and deportation to the countryside from which they have fled.293?the "dragon" has
been, for some, cowed, while the "tiger" is once again regarded as weak as its "paper" icon. Will it arise, reassert its strength, and retaliate? In academic western post-cold war analyses-as well as in instances of published fiction in
the United States of the 1930s* and, more recently, in samizdat and new fiction in both the PRC and Taiwan-there have appeared modern civilizational variants of a revived yellow peril discourse. In 1993, Samuel P. Huntington's "The
Clash of Civilizations"294 announced that "World politics is entering a new phase . . . [T]he fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among
humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural." Although he allowed that "Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs," Huntington insisted that the "principal conflicts of global politics will

he
projected a future in which the clash of these civilizations will occur
at both the micro-and macro-levels
occur between nations and groups of different civilizations." Positing the existence of "Western, Confu cian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and possi ble African" civilizations,

. At the former, "adjacent groups along the fault lines between civilizations [will] struggle, often violently, over the

control of territory and each other"; at the latter, "states from different civilizations compete for relative military and eco nomic power, struggle over the control of international institutions and third parties, and competitively
promote their particular political and religious values." China, Huntington argues, as a "Confucian" civilization, is already involved in a conflict with the West over cultural differences and in terms of control over "nuclear, chemical and
biological weapons, ballistic missiles and other sophisticated means for delivering them, and . . . guidance, intelligence and other electronic capabilities." The greatest danger to the West-for Huntington sees the basic clash as "the
West versus the rest" of the civilizations-would arise if?reminiscent of William W. Crane's short story, "The Year 1899," which, of course, Huntington does not acknowl edge-a Confucian-Islamic coalition brought their combined military
power to bear on the Occident. Such a coalition is already in its nascent state, he believes. Huntington does not favor intercivilizational warfare; rather he warns that the West "will increasingly have to accommodate . . . non Western
modern civilizations whose power approaches that of the West but whose values and interests differ significantly from those of the West. . . ." However, he believes that the Occident will have to "maintain the economic and military
power necessary to protect its interests . . ., to develop a more profound understanding of the basic religious and philo sophical assumptions underlying other civilizations . . . , [and] learn to coexist with the others." He does not say
how these necessities are to be obtained. Huntington's thesis has evoked a chorus of critiques, most of which are beyond the scope of the present essay.295 In the PRC, however, the People's Republic has of late been novelized as,
respectively, a fearsome yellow peril or as a triumphant survivor of global conflicts. Thus, in a startling response to Huntington's claims, Wang Xiaodong, an editor of the PRC journal Strategy and Management, writing under the
pseudonym Shi Zhong, not only denied that China was a Confucian civilization, that China sought to Confucianize the world, or that the clashes between China and the United States were anything other than competitive struggles
over which nation had the economic strength to dominate Asia,296 but, also, in the process of developing his argument, quoted from an essay that had been appended to the 1991 samizdat three-volume novel, Huanghuo, (Yel low
Peril) by Bao Mi (pseudonym for Wang Lixiong).297 The novel provided a new focus for a Chinese yellow peril. Banned in mainland China but published to acclaim in Taiwan, Huanghuo, said to have been inspired by the calamitous
events in Beijing in 1989, seems to imagine a degraded and distorted Chinese communism as the real peril, for, according to Geremie R. Barm?, it is a piece of futuristic fiction that foretells "the collapse of Communism in China and
the outbreak of a civil war that leads to a global conflagration ..." Its author's most outspoken contempt is directed at China's prosperous intellectuals: They might not talk like louts, but theirs is a realm of utter spiritual degradation.
They are without integrity; they crave depravity; they are shameless and thick skinned. They are always ready to sell out their principles, and they will take risks only if there's the chance of making a profit. They regard all that is
sacred with disdain and despise all ideals.298 However if Wang Lixiong sees a world-threatening yellow peril in the profit-seeking policies of the post-Mao intellectuals and the domestic and foreign policies that they are pursuing,299
another futuristic novel, Qiao Liang's Gateway to Doomsday, published in China in 1995, envisions a more sanguine yet formidable future for a thoroughly modernized techno-military China.300 Rather than being pictured as a
corrupt and greedy nation, or one whose armies threaten the peace of the world, Qiao Liang's China seems to be possessed by the Hegelian spirit of history.301 Set as the millennium dawns,

has become an economic giant

this China

, a veritable symbol for worldwide hope for an end to conflict. A Chinese computer genius, attached to the People's Liberation

Army and aided by his half-Russian, Bloody-Mary-consuming lover-who has the power to divine the future but only when she is in the midst of coitus?develops an apocalyptic computer virus "like AIDS" that infects all the world's
computers except China's. Having disabled the global network, China assumes a benevolent sovereignty over it. The conclusion to this melodramatic novel takes place at the female protago nist's funeral, where there is echoed the
sign-off call of an astronaut who, like Hegel's Owl of Minerva, is circling the globe?"Good night America . . . good morning to the East. Good morning Asia." Should he read these two books from wherever his place is in the afterlife,
Kaiser Wilhelm might smile in recollection of his own prescience.*

DONE?

CHINESE AMERICA AND THE YELLOW PERIL: WHAT IS TO BE

In the last year of the nineteenth century, Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Spring Rice, a British diplomat, boasting, "Together . . . the two branches of the Anglo-Saxon race . . . can whip the world."302 A few years

first China, then Japan, then

China again would rise up in America's public consciousness as a
threat to the West
and the U S in particular In each era of this
yellow peril mystique Americans of Asian heritage, whether
immigrant aliens or native-born citizens, would suffer outrages
directed against their character, culture, opportunities, and, often
enough, their very lives. Whether cast as members of a "race," a
"civilization," or a "culture," Asian Americans are treated as bearers
of
ineradicable traits that, are
assumed to be "inherited."
later, he was not that sure. And neither were the U.S. presidents who came after him. For the next one hundred years

in general

nited

virtually

tates

at least implicitly

Thus,

Professor Huntington asserts that civilizational "differences are the products of centuries"303 and that cultural differences are "far more fundamental than differences among political ideologies and political regimes."304 For
Huntington, as Robert G. Lee has pointed out in his thoroughgoing critique of the "clash of civilizations" thesis,305 Asian Americans, together with all those representatives of other non-western civilizations residing in America, are
imagined to threaten the U.S. with "de-Westernization." This is a fate so terrible, Huntington-sounding very much like Homer Lea?warns, that "if Americans cease to adhere to their liberal democratic and European-rooted political

it is the Asian
American victims of individuals and groups that have been moved to
murderous action who have become the real martyrs to such
apprehensions.
Lee summarized some of
lethal attacks that
have occurred since the re-emergence of the yellow peril in the
American mind-life and the imposition of what he calls the "mere
ideology, the United States as we have known it will cease to exist and will follow the other ideologically defined superpower [the Soviet Union] on the ash heap of history."306 However,

Robert G.

has

the most

of the

gook rule," .e., the rule that any Asian American is

worthy of
extermination Most notorious have been the murders of Vincent
Chin in Detroit; Navorze Mody, an Indian American, in New
Jersey;. . . Vandy Phorng, a Cambodian American, in Massachusetts
Jim Loo a Chinese American, in North Carolina and five Cambodian
and Laotian American children in a Stockton, Calif
Hung
Trong, a Vietnamese American, in Los Angeles
i

a "gook"

in

1987;

., schoolyard, in 1989;

in 1996 . . ., [and] the killings of scores of Asian American shopkeepers and

cabdrivers ... [as well as] twenty-five Korean American shopkeepers . . . killed by non-Korean assailants [in the two years before the Los Angeles riot of 1992].307 And, what is to be done? Rose Hum Lee, writing in 1960, after the

the national security fears about

China and America's Chinese had revived a new yellow peril
Korean conflict had ended but before the Vietnam War, the temporary competitive advantage of Japan, or

, thought that "Now is the

most auspicious time [for Chinese residing in the United States] to strive for total and unreserved integration into the American society" and put the burden of accomplishing this on the Chinese themselves: "Regardless of where the
peoples of the United States of America originated, they must strive to fit in to the new social climate which emerged in American society and the world after World War II."308 Forty years later we can see that such a program, even

Even after being designated as

one element of the Asian American "model minority,"
if it is desirable?and some of the new multiculturalists have registered their dissent from it?has not been effected.

309 a veritable role model for other ethnoracial

groups experiencing race prejudice, discrimination, and poverty,

Chinese Americans discover that in times of crisis

they are thrust back into the special category reserved for internal

The idea of America, or the entire Occident for that

matter, being in peril from the "yellow" people has something of a
"geological" character. It is deeply embedded in the Occidental
consciousness of itself a consciousness that, until recently, took
"whiteness" to be a fact of nature
and
"Orientalism" to be its utter and absolute antithesis It is an all-tooneglected element in the "American dilemma" that
has not been resolved
enemies

.310

needing neither an "archaeology" nor a sociological deconstruction,311

.312

, despite numerous efforts over the past half-century,

.313 Robert Park once pointed out that "A more thorough investigation of the facts would probably show that minorities, racial, cultural, and national, have

always sought the freedom and protection of the more inclusive imperium."314 No doubt this is true, but two questions arise with respect to that claim: How is that freedom and protection to be gained? What forms of social and
cultural organization are most conducive to both liberty and security? None of the proposed processual and institutional answers to these questions-assimilation, acculturation, amal gamation, on the one hand; congregation,

pluralism, ethnic power, and multiculturalism on the other-has as yet proved either effective or become likely to be fully realized.315

The lair of the yellow peril's

fire breathing dragon is to be found in the winding labyrinth of the

American psyche.

It is one of the "idols" of the American mind in a society that, as Harold Isaacs pointed out so presciently in 1975, is "fragmenting and retribalizing ... at a much more rapid

Asian Americans, not only

Wen Ho Lee, are thus waiting for an outcome still unclear and more
than likely to be unsatisfying.
rate, certainly, than [it is] moving toward any more humane kind of humanhood in the arrangement of [its] social and political affairs."316

Closer to us, the Asian-American exists in a state of racial

melancholia a pathological and endless mourning for the loss
of whiteness (as an unattainable ideal) and her unrequited
love for the nation. She is haunted by a history of institutional
exclusion and a type of psychological violence that plagues her
with a desire to erase her identity and her body.
-Assimilation is adopting ideals that are foreclosed to you, failed and unresolved
integrations
-Asian Americans are perpetual foreigners based on skin and facial features

-Discourses of American exceptionalism and democracy redact a history of and

continued exclusion from the national narrative.
-The model minority is a product and productive of a continued absence that
characterizes Asian presence, denying both multiplicity, and working to manage a
history of institutionalized violence.

Eng and Han 2K (David L., Assistant Professor of English and Comparative
Literature at Columbia University, Shinhee, psychotherapist at the Counseling &
Psychological Services of Columbia University, A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia,
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 10(4):667700, 2000, The Analytic Press,
http://www.uib.no/sites/w3.uib.no/files/attachments/9._enghana_dialogue_on_racial_melancholia_0.pdf, accessed 6/26/16) rz

Freuds theory of melancholia provides a

model to consider how
processes of assimilation work in the U S and how the depression
that characterizes
our contemporary culture
might be
thought about in relation to
marked social groups
assimilation into
culture for people of color means adopting a set
provocative

nited

tates

so much of

at the turn of this century

particularly

. In the United States today,

mainstream

still

of dominant norms and ideals whiteness, heterosexuality, middle

class family values often foreclosed to them The loss of these norms
the reiterated loss of whiteness as an ideal
establishes one
melancholic framework for delineating assimilation and racialization

, for example

processes

in the U

nited

tates precisely

as a series of failed and unresolved integrations

. Let us

return for a moment to Freuds (1917) essay, Mourning and Melancholia, in which he attempts to draw a clear distinction between these two psychic states through the question of successful and failed resolutions to loss. Freud

[m]ourning is regularly the reaction to loss of a loved

person or
some abstraction which has taken the place of one
country, liberty an ideal
In some people the same influences
produce melancholia
Mourning,
in which the loss
occasions the withdrawal of libido from
that object or ideal
cannot be enacted at once
Libido
is detached bit by bit eventually, the mourner is able to declare
the object dead and to invest in new objects
melancholia
reminds us at the start of this essay that

the

to the loss of

, such as ones

, and so on.

instead of mourning and we consequently suspect them of a pathological disposition (p. 243).

process

unlike melancholia, is a psychic

of an object or ideal

. This withdrawal

; instead, it is a gradual letting go.

so that,

. In Freuds initial definition of the concept,

because it is a mourning without end . Interminable

grief is the result of the melancholics inability to resolve the
conflicts
the loss
effects
the melancholic cannot
get over this loss cannot work out this loss in order to invest in
new objects. To the extent that ideals of whiteness for Asian
is pathological

precisely

various

and ambivalences that

of the loved object or ideal

. In other words,

Americans (and other groups of color ) remain unattainable processes

of assimilation are suspended conflicted, and unresolved The
irresolution of this process places
assimilation within a
,

the concept of

otherwise, mourning describes a finite

aligned with the American myth of immigration,

melancholic framework

process

that might be reasonably

. Put

popular

assimilation, and the melting pot for dominant white ethnic groups
In contrast, melancholia describes an unresolved process that might
describe the unstable immigration and suspended assimilation of
Asian Americans into the national fabric.
this inability to
blend into the melting pot of America suggests that, for Asian
Americans, ideals of whiteness are continually estranged
.

usefully

This suspended assimilation

. They remain at an unattainable distance,

at once a compelling fantasy and a lost ideal.

In configuring assimilation and melancholia in this particular manner, it is important to

In

challenge Freuds contention that melancholia ensues from a pathological dispositionthat it emerges from the disturbance of a one-person psychology rather than the disruption of an intersubjective relationship.

our model, the inability to get over the lost ideal of whiteness
is less individual than social
Asian Americans are
seen
emphasize,

. For instance,

typically

, we must

by the

as perpetual foreigners based on skin and facial markings . Despite

however long they have resided here Asian
Americans are continually perceived as eccentric to the nation
mainstream

color

the fact that they may be U.S.-born or despite

may

. At other times,

Asian Americans are recognized as hyper model minorities inhumanly

productiveand hence pathological to the nation .

mainstream
refusal to see Asian Americans as part and parcel of the American
melting pot is less an individual failure to blend
than a
socially determined interdiction
melancholia may
proceed from environmental influences
rather than internal
conditions that threaten the existence of the object or ideal
the debilitating psychic consequences of melancholia faced with
unresolved grief
the melancholic preserves the lost object or ideal
by incorporating it into the ego and establishing an ambivalent
identification with it
the
In both scenarios,

in with the whole

. Indeed, Freud (1917) suggests in Mourning and Melancholia that

(p. 243)

. Freud (1917) goes on to

delineate

. When

, he tells us,

ambivalent precisely because of the unresolved and conflicted nature of this forfeiture. From a slightly different perspective, we might say that

melancholic makes every

the psyche.

conceivable

effort to retain the lost object ,

to keep it alive within the domain of

However, the tremendous costs of maintaining this ongoing

relationship

to the lost object or ideal

are psychically damaging

. Freud (1917) notes that

the

distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly

painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of
the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the
self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in selfreproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional
expectation of punishment

(p. 244).

In identifying with the lost object the

melancholic is able to preserve it

identification

object

or ideal,

. That is,

but only

as a

type of

haunted, ghostly

the melancholic assumes the emptiness of the lost

identifies with this emptiness, and

thus

participates in

his or

her own

selfdenigration and ruination of self-esteem

In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty;
. Freud (1917) summarizes the distinction between mourning and melancholia in this

oft-quoted remark:

in melancholia it is the ego itself

melancholia is the most
difficult
condition to confront and cure as it is largely an
unconscious process
that the patient cannot consciously perceive what
he has lost either
even if
aware
the depression often accompanying
melancholia is extremely dangerous, characterized by the tendency
to suicide
, suicide may not merely be physical ; it may also be
(p. 246). He contends that

of psychic

s both

to

one of

. In yet other cases, Freud observes, one feels justified in maintaining the belief that a loss of the kind occurred, but one cannot see clearly what it is that has

been lost, and it is all the more reasonable to suppose

. This, indeed, might be so

the patient is

of the loss which has given rise to his melancholia, but only in the sense that he

knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him [p. 245]. Freud tells us that

(p. 252). Here, we must add

a psychical erasure of ones identity racial, sexual, or gender identity

, for

example.

National Melancholia

For Asian Americans

suspended assimilation
not only
may involve severe personal consequences ultimately, it also
constitutes the foundation for a type of national melancholia , a
and other groups of color,

into mainstream culture

national haunting with negative social effects

,

. In Sennas (1998) Caucasia,

the

ambivalence characterizing whiteness leaves the narrator with the

constant and eerie feeling of contamination.

4 Writing about the nature of collective identifications, Freud notes in Group

In a group every sentiment and act is contagious

to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal
interest to the collective interest
Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921):

, and contagious

. This is an aptitude very contrary to his nature, and of which a man is scarcely capable, except when he makes part of a

group (p. 75). Our dialogue on racial melancholia insists on thinking what happens when

the demand to sacrifice personal to

collective interest is not accompanied by inclusion withinbut exclusion

bythe larger group
entailedand

As we know,

the formation of the U.S. nation quite literally

continues to entail a history of institutionalized exclusions from

Japanese

American

internment to immigration exclusion acts legislated by

Congress brokered by the Executive and upheld by the Judiciary

against every Asian immigrant group
from 1882 to 1943,
Chinese Americans experienced the longest juridical historie of
exclusion as well as bars to naturalization and citizenship.
the first exclusion laws
were passed against the Chinese
At the
same time, other laws were instituted against miscegenation and
ownership of private property . Discourses of American exceptionalism
,

.5 For example,

one of

immigration

Yet, few people realize that

passed against a particular ethnic group

These laws were followed by a series of further exclusion acts culminating in the 1924 National Origins Act and the Tyding-McDuffie Act of 1934, which effectively halted all Asian immigration and naturalization.

and democratic myths of liberty, individualism, and inclusion force a

misremembering of these exclusions ,

that can only return as

a type of repetitive national haunting a negative or absent
presence
The
model minority stereotype that clings to
an enforced psychic amnesia

(see Cheng, 1997, pp. 5152).

type of

popular

Asian Americans is both product of and productive of this negative

a

or absent presence

.6 In its compulsive restaging,

the model minority stereotype

homogenizes widely disparate Asian and Asian American

groups by generalizing them all as economically or academically
successful with no personal
problems to speak of.
the
stereotype works
to deny the heterogeneity , hybridity, and
racial and ethnic

or familial

In this manner,

not only

multiplicity of

citizenry

.7 Moreover,

various

Asian American

group

s that do not fit its ideals of model

it also functions as a national tool that erases and manages

the history of these institutionalized exclusions. The pervasiveness of

the
stereotype in our contemporary vocabulary works, as a
melancholic mechanism facilitating the erasure and loss of repressed
model minority

then,

Asian American histories and identities. These histories

return
only as a ghostly presence
the Asian American model minority
subject also endures
as a melancholic national object as a
and identities can

type of

. In this sense,

in the United States

haunting specter to democratic ideals of inclusion that cannot quite

get over the histories of these legislated proscriptions of loss.

Before moving

national melancholia exacts on the

individual Asian American psyche One compelling example comes
from
Kingstons China Men
the narrator wildly
speculates about the disappearance of Grandfather
after
he helps complete the transcontinental railroad
Maybe he hadnt died
it was just that his existence
was outlawed
the laws refusal to recognize Chinese Americans as citizens
outlaws their existence, placing them under erasure.
this national refusal gains its efficacy through a simultaneous
psychic internalization of its interdicting imperatives on the part of
excluded Asian American subjects.
the Grandfathers own family
members refuse to recognize him They cannot perceive his
accomplishments building the railroad as legitimizing his
membership in the American nation.
can it be possible to see
themselves as legitimate members
, racial melancholia might
on, we extend our observations on the psychic consequences that this model of

Maxine Hong

(1980). In Kingstons historical novel,

the

of the Sierra Nevada Mountains

to

, the greatest technological feat of the 19th century:

in San Francisco, it was just his papers that burned;

by Chinese Exclusion Acts. The family called him Fleaman. They did not understand his accomplishments as an American ancestor, a holding, homing ancestor of this place (p. 151).

Kingston understands that

At the same time, she also underscores how

That is,

How, in turn,

of this society? In this regard

be described as splitting the Asian American psyche. This cleaving of

the psyche might be

thought about in terms of an altered,
racialized model of
Freudian fetishism
assimilation into the
national fabric demands a psychic splitting on the part of the Asian
productively

classic

.8 That is,

American subject who knows and does not know, at once, that she
part of the larger group .

or he

is

Stanley and Derald Sue

coined the term Marginal Man to describe an Asian American
subject who desires to assimilate into mainstream American society
In the early 1970s, Asian American psychologists

(1971)

at any cost. The Marginal [Wo]Man faithfully subscribes to the ideals

of assimilation
through an elaborate self-denial of the daily acts of
institutionalized racism irected against him
The Marginal Man finds it
only

. In Chinese-American Personality and Mental Health, the Sues write about the

complex psychological defenses that the Marginal Man must necessarily employ in order to function within American society.

difficult to admit widespread racism since to do so would be to say that

he aspires to join a racist society

(p. 42).

Caught in this untenable

contradiction the Marginal Man must necessarily become a split

,

subject one who exhibits

allegiance to the universal norms of
abstract equality and collective national membership at the same
time he displays an uncomfortable understanding of his utter
disenfranchisement from these democratic ideals.
Birdies
unresolved assimilation into the whiteness of New Hampshire
Through the twinning of her name the
impossible mulatta child is marked by doubleness: Birdie (mulatto)
Jesse (white). Birdie/Jesse is the object of melancholia for a
nation organized by an ecology of whiteness
she is the subject
of melancholiaa girl haunted by ghosts
contemporary
ethnic literature
is characterized by ghosts and hauntings
the objects and subjects of national melancholia.
the
subtitle of Kingstons
The Woman Warrior is Memoirs of a
Girlhood Among Ghosts Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The
AfroAmerican Presence in American Literature,
Toni Mor
writes the African American presence is the ghost in the
machine

a faithful

that

In Senna (1998),

gives us a final

reflection on the psychic effects of splitting in racial melancholia on the level of the signifier.

Here,

. At the same time,

. It is difficult not to notice that much of

in the United States

by

these perspectives

from both

For instance,

well-known

(1976)

. In

the Nobel laureate

rison (1989)

that

(p. 11).

The cage of melancholia is produced by a colonial structure of

mimicry which seeks a recognizable Other that is almost the
same, but not quite (white). This operates through structures
such as the myth of the model minority a narrative that
impels a pathological identification with the structure of
whiteness where our bodies are reduced to sites of production
and we come to desire a loss of complexity and agency.
-Melancholia from thwarted identification with unattainable whiteness but also an
estranged relationship with ones Asianness

Eng and Han 2K (David L., Assistant Professor of English and Comparative
Literature at Columbia University, Shinhee, psychotherapist at the Counseling &
Psychological Services of Columbia University, A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia,
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 10(4):667700, 2000, The Analytic Press,
http://www.uib.no/sites/w3.uib.no/files/attachments/9._enghana_dialogue_on_racial_melancholia_0.pdf, accessed 6/26/16) rz
Mimicry; or, the Melancholic Machine

Racial melancholia as psychic splitting and national dis-ease opens

on the interconnected terrain of mimicry, ambivalence, and the
stereotype Bhabhas
Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence
of Colonial Discourse, is crucial here Bhabha describes the ways in
which a colonial regime impels the colonized subject to mimic Western
. Homi

(1984) seminal essay,

ideals of whiteness. At the same time, this mimicry is also condemned

to failure .

Bhabha writes,

colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed,

recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same,

but not quite

. Which is to say, that

the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an

ambivalence; in order to be effect ive, mimicry must continually

reproduce its slippage, its excess, its difference

....

Almost the same but

Bhabha locates and labels the social imperative to

assimilate as the colonial structure of mimicry. He marks not only
this social imperative but also its inevitable, built-in failure This
doubling of difference that is almost the same but not quite, almost
the same but not white, results in ambivalence which comes to
define the failure of mimicry
not white

(pp. 126, 130).

. Here we connect Bhabhas observations on mimicry in the material space of the colonized with its transposition into the psychic

domain through the logic of melancholia. It is important to remember that, as with Bhabhas analysis of mimicry, Freud marks ambivalence as one of melancholias defining characteristics. In describing the genealogy of ambivalence
in melancholia, Freud (1917) himself moves from the domain of the material to the register of the psychic. He notes that the conflict due to ambivalence, which sometimes arises from real experiences, sometimes more from

Melancholia not only traces an

internalized pathological identification with what was once an
external and now lost ideal. In this moving from outside to inside
we get a strong sense of how social injunctions of mimicry
constitutional factors, must not be overlooked among the preconditions of melancholia (p. 251).

(from

Bhabha to Freud, as it were),

also

configure individual psychic structures as split and dis-eased another

angle from which to consider the cleaving of the Marginal Man The
.

ambivalence that comes to define

Freuds concept of

melancholia is one that finds

its origins in the social, in colonial and racial structures impelling

systems of mimicry and man . It is crucial to extend

theories on
colonial mimicry to domestic contexts of racialization in order to
consider
the material and psychic contours of
racial melancholia for Asian Americans One
site
is the
Bhabhas

how we might usefully track this concept to explore further

stereotype

potential

of investigation

. In an earlier essay entitled The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination, and the Discourse of Colonialism, Bhabha (1983) also aligns ambivalence and splitting with the stereotype,

he process of mimicry and the phenomenon of the stereotype

might be considered together. The stereotype
is a form of
suggesting that t

, Bhabha writes,

knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always

in place, already known , and something that must be anxiously
repeated

...

for it is the force of ambivalence that gives the colonial

If we conceptualize the model minority

myth as a privileged stereotype through which Asian Americans
stereotype its currency

(p. 66).

appear as subjects in the contemporary social domain, then we gain

understanding of how mimicry
functions as a material
practice in racial melancholia.
Asians Americans are forced to mimic
more refined

specifically

That is,

the model minority stereotype

society in order to be at all

in order

to be recognized by mainstream

. However, to the extent that this

mimicry of the model minority

stereotype

functions only to estrange Asian Americans from mainstream norms

and ideals (as well as from themselves ), mimicry can operate only as
a melancholic process .

As both a social and a psychic malady,

mimicry distances Asian Americans

from the mimetic ideals of the nation Through the mobilization and
.

exploitation of the model minority

always a partial success as well as

stereotype,

of whiteness .

a partial

mimicry for Asian Americans is

failure to assimilate into regimes

this
stereotyped dream of material success is partial because it is at
most configured as economic achievement The success of the model
Let us analyze this dynamic from yet another angle. Although Asian Americans are now largely thought of as model minorities living out the American dream,

minority myth comes to mask our lack of political and cultural

representation . It covers over our inability to gain full subjectivities,
to be politicians, athletes, and activists , for example to be recognized

as all American . To occupy the model minority position Asian

,

American subjects must follow this prescribed model of economic

integration and forfeit political representation as well as cultural voice

other words,

they must not contest the dominant order

of things;

. In

they must not rock

the boat or draw attention to themselves It is difficult for Asian

.

Americans to express any legitimate political, economic, or social

needs , as the stereotype demands

an enclosed but also passive

self-sufficiency.
the model minority stereotype also
delineates Asian American students as academically successful but
rarely well-rounded
in tacit comparison to the unmarked
(white) student body.
. This material
not only

From an academic point of view,

well-rounded

Here is another example of Bhabhas concept of mimicry as nearly successful imitation. This nearly successful assimilation attempts to cover over that gap

the failure of well-roundednessas well as that unavoidable ambivalence resulting from this tacit comparison in which the Asian American student is seen as lacking

failure leads to a psychic ambivalence that works to characterize the

colonized subjects identifications with dominant ideals of whiteness as a
pathological identification . This

ambivalence that opens upon the

landscape of melancholia and depression for many Asian American
students
Asian Americans who do not fit into the
is an

of the

with whom we come into contact on a regular basis. Those

model minority stereotype

are
erased from
society Like Kingstons grandfather in China Men, they are
(and this is probably a majority of Asian American students)

mainstream

altogether

not seen in

often

rejected by their own families as well

pejorative stereotypes

.9 The difficulty of negotiating this unwieldy stereotype is that,

of African Americans (but not unlike the myth of the black athlete),

unlike most

the model minority myth

is considered to be a positive representation, an exceptional

model for this racialized group. In this regard, not only mainstream
society but also Asian Americans themselves become attached to, and
split by its seemingly admirable qualities without recognizing its
,

simultaneous liabilities what Wendy Brown (1995) terms a wounded

attachment.

10 According to Bhabha, in its doubleness the stereotype, like mimicry, creates a gap embedded in an unrecognized structure of material and psychic ambivalence. In Gish Jens (1991)

Typical American, for instance, we encounter Ralph Chang, who chases the American dream through his attempts to build a fried-chicken kingdom, the Chicken Palace. Eventually, the franchise fails, and the a falls off the
Chicken Palace sign which becomes Chicken P__lace. This falling off is the linguistic corollary to the gap in the American dream that Ralph unsuccessfully attempts to mime. Perhaps it is in this gapin this emptinessthat Freuds

It is in this gapin this loss of whitenessthat the

negotiation between mourning and melancholia is staged.
theory of melancholia emerges and inhabits.

Thus, vote for the 1AC as a performance of affective

correspondence.
Our genealogical and affective exploration of kinship and
identity is necessary to re-surface lost connections displaced
by the processes of liberal subject building. We can reclaim
affect as a site of collective racial repair, where the past no
longer haunts us as trauma, but remains alive in the present
as a vehicle for love and change.
-We reject the liberal/progressive notion of a one shot fix in favor of a politics of
survival and self-discovery.
-We haunt spaces that are simultaneously imposed upon and denied to us; we
should abandon these spaces.
-liberal narratives of progress relegate trauma as resolved events of the past. They
haunt us. We explore that.

Eng 10 (David L., Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at

Columbia University, The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization
of Intimacy, Duke University Press, 2010) - http://reatajiri.com/videos.html -History and Memory rz

Affective Correspondences
Weaving the disjunctive time and space of the affective through official historical accounts of Japanese internment, History and Memory underscores the difficulty of animating a hermeneutic practice within and beyond the

dominance of the analytic. Even more, by focusing on the psychic predicament between mother and daughter, Tajiris video emphasizes how

the battle for history

becomes embedded on the level of the intersubjective as a question

of wounded kinship

. Ultimately,

Tajiri asks how we might begin to rework the

demands of historicism through the realm of affect and through the

domain of forgetting and the non-visible I remember having this

feeling growing up that I was haunted by something, that I was
living within a family full of ghosts, Tajiri tells us. I could
remember a time of great sadness before I was born. We had been
moved, uprooted. We had lived with a lot of pain. I had no idea
where these memories came from, yet I knew the place.
Tajiri returns alone to Poston, the site of the Colorado River Tribal
Indian Reservation, and searches for the house where her mother
had once lived.
the barrack where her
mothers family had once been imprisoned There are
, different ways of knowing and being that cannot be written
under the sign of the analytic I am precisely interested in Tajiris
notions of knowing and not knowing
inside the
hermeneutic spheres of affective life.
By juxtaposing
unexpected events, spaces, and objects from past and present,
History and Memory creates numerous sets of emotional analogies
that index the space of forgetting and loss, the space of the inbetween:
the wildflowers that adorn
Komokos grave
the wooden bird
with the
photograph of her grandmother
the nephews linking of Japanese
internment with the struggles for black empowerment
these are all dialectical images
They are objects and images taken out of their conventional temporal
.

Indeed, later in History and Memory,

Through some intuition or internal divining rod, Tajiri recounts, she had indeed found the spot,

mother and her

, as Tajiri shows us throughout History

and Memory

, and

outside the acceptable boundaries of the analytic and

Here, I would like to describe History and Memorys aesthetic strategy Tajiris deployment of picture as

affectas a kind of negative dialectics, one refusing the sublation of binary terms (e.g. visible/invisible) into ever-higher levels of liberal reason, development, freedom, and progress.

Spencer Tracys search for Komoko with that of Tajiri for her mothers history;

with those found in her mothers Chicago garden;

found in her mothers jewelry case

in a Poston wood carving class, discovered by accident one afternoon twenty-five years later in the National archives; the

abandoned space of the Poston internment camp with Colorado River Tribal Indian reservation;

; the canteen in the desert with the

canteen at the Salinas Race Track where the mothers family was first evacuated

in Walter Benjamins sense.

and spatial contexts , dislodged and ejected from sanctioned historicist

narratives of cause and effect Historicism contents itself with
.

establishing a causal connection between various moments in

history
But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason
historical Placed in sudden juxtaposition with one another, these
displaced objects serve to blast open the continuum of history ,
, Benjamin writes.

disturbing the pageant of historicism , of cause and effect, written and

endorsed by the victors It is important to emphasize that these

dialectical images are not historically transparent; they do not
reflect a given totality.
they are not analogies or resemblances
of likenesses or similarities Rather, they are displaced
.

In this sense,

traditional sense of the concept

connections in which

in the

a correspondence depends upon not just

formal structural analysis, but also the apprehension of difference
of a break, a displacement, an absence This is the methodology of
the positing of

queer diasporas Most importantly, these dialectical images are

driven together by affect
These emotional analogies join Tajiris present with forgotten
.

, lending Benjamins critique of historicism and his theories concerning the aesthetics of shock a specifically emotional character.

moments from the past carving out a space for what-could-have-been in

,

the now , through a practice of what I would like to call affective

correspondences .
Rather,

In doing so,

they refuse the writing of internment into the past

they keep the past affectively alive in the present , providing a site

for the reconstitution of melancholia s social residues, by configuring

affect as a tool for political disenchantment and social reform

affect becomes the site of history as a doing in futurity. It becomes a
. In this way,

site of both individual and collective repair of collective racial

,

reparation Affect thus comes to supplement the political

.

, allowing Tajiri to grasp the constellation

The aesthetics of shock is transformed into a

historical practice of not cause and effect but rather cause and
affect. Tajiri sustains through these affective correspondences an
which [her] own era has formed with a definite earlier one.

open and ongoing rather than fixed relationship with the past bringing
,

its fleeting ghosts and specters into the now These correspondences
.

are always there They are not visible however until we have
liberated their images from the sanctioned historical narratives in
which they are embedded Syntagmatic relationships
prevent us from seeing figural ones, and it is within the latter, rather
than the former, that the practice of history should reside
Tajiri
offers the possibility of socializing melancholia, assuming a
collective relationship with forgetting and loss . Unlike political
.

underwritten by the pageant of historicism

. In this manner,

us

reparation which seeks to write history into an eternal image of the

,

past , Tajiris deployment of affect

what I am describing as

psychic reparation supplies

a unique experience with the past, promising to change the specific

character of the past by generating an altogether different

analogy These affective correspondences contain within them an

.

explosive potential to reassemble the empty, homogeneous time and

space of the now , in which time stands still and has come to a

stop. they do not just connect the mothers past to Tajiris

present but, in turn, encourage us to connect Tajiris past to our
present: Japanese internment
to indefinite detention; the
exceptional spaces of Poston and Manzanar to Guantnamo Bay;
New Yorks Ground Zero to
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
they
promise to break the repetition compulsion of history the continual
That is,

, for instance,

that of

In doing so,

political rehearsal of history as the way-it-really was the continual

,

suspension of civil liberties , racial profiling , and the forgetting of race

in the name of national security and citizenship Over time, the

detritus of unacknowledged correspondences grows ever higher at
the feet of
history Neglecting to acknowledge or to connect
.

Benjamins angel of

them, we fail our accountability to an oppressed past, in which even

the dead
will not be safe.
an
ethics of history is constituted through an affective longing feeling
of kinship with and for the mother that refuses the notion of a
present that is not in transition, skirts the borders of pathology, and
provides a ghostly language for loss a new story, a new history
, as Benjamin warns us,

As a documentary of affect, History and Memory flaunts an institutional tradition that defines documentary as a genre

dividing affect from reason, or what Nichols describes as a difference between an erotics and an ethics separating the realm of fiction from the domain of the real. Refusing these binaries, Tajiri underscores how

the capacity to be with

specters lies at the core of justice and ethical politics
we might also describe Tajiri as a historian of affect who stops
telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. We have
yet to attend to the past adequately
and one measure of that
neglect arises at the affective level. Encouraging us to grasp the
historical constellation that our colorblind era has formed with an
earlier one,
history as image and affect indexes a feeling of
kinship that returns Japanese internment its ostensible political
resolution and its histories of forgetting to us in an entirely
different manner. The affective dissonance between the what-was
and the what could-have-been
inhabits and saturates the
emergence of our now turning us to cause and affect as an
helping us to remember differently

. Here, as Derrida reminds us,

. If History and Memory is a documentary of affect,

, one

, Tajiri insists,

Tajiris philosophy of

of history

alternative site for historical understanding

. It is this affective reciprocity between what-was and what-could-have-been that allows

The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is

referred to redemption There is a secret agreement between past
generations and the present one.
we have
been endowed with a
power to which the past has a claim
That claim cannot be settled cheaply
Affect is often
thought eccentric to the domain of the political usually managed
and erased
in the public sphere
official discourses of
recognition and commemoration dont fully address everyday
affects or
legal measures that dont fully provide emotional
justice
affect might help us not only to rethink the
politics of historicism but also to reformulate questions of identity,
family, and kinship in our colorblind age
We have grown accustomed,
to
describing our identities as linguistically inscribed as discursive
positions as interpellative events Numerous critics of the politics of
Benjamin to observe:

Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us,

weak Messianic power, a

. Identity Politics in a Colorblind Age

to be

. It is

, as Cvetkovich notes,

through

that

through

...

. History and Memory emphasizes how

. Since the advent of poststructuralism, we have typically attributed to language (and to

linguistic theories of performativity) powerful social functions relating to identity formation.

for instance,

recognition have pointed out the failure of identity labels to map or

to grasp fully our subjectivities The practice of intersectionality has
sought to address this critical impasse by providing an account of
the ways in which identity is simultaneously constituted through
multiple axes of difference We continue to explore identity within
linguistic traditions
however, rather than diverse and
convergent modes of affective recognition and particularity
.

largely

of poststructuralism,

. The deconstructive insights

of poststructuralism emphasize identity as a discursive position. They provide a powerful theory of social construction and thus a critique of essentialism and the evidence of experience as the bedrock of the universal subjects

less attention has been paid to the ways in which

affect might work to supplement linguistic theories of identity
History and Memorys exploration of affect helps to address the
current impasses of identity politics and colorblindness by offering a
way of worlding forgotten creatures and things, bringing them
into the time and space of the now in a manner radically divergent
from
a liberal humanist tradition Such a critical project
requires
a rethinking of the language of psychoanalysis after
poststructuralism but also
a new account of identity
formation across psychoanalytic and phenomenological registers
In rethinking the
divide between affect and history,
History and Memory also calls for
reconsideration of the divide
between affect and language, for the reevaluation of language as
the privileged frame through which both history and identity are
largely mobilized.
language and affect
are traditionally cast as oppositional with linguistically oriented and
affectively oriented conceptions of the psyche at definitive odds
with one another
critical authority. However, in all these critical conversations,

that of

not only

, as Tajiris documentary proposes,

(a

consideration to which I will return shortly).

conventional

the implicit

Such a rethinking of affect and language would insist on reevaluating the conceptual links, for example, between symbolic accounts of language in French

poststructuralism and theories of affect in British object relationsbetween Lacan and Klein, to invoke two paradigmatic figures from previous chapters. Here,

. For Lacan, the unconscious is organized like a language, with the symbolic prototypically closed to affective transfers, to itself, and indeed to the world. In Lacans famous

either-or formulation, we forfeit being for meaning, presence for language, jouissance for symbolic legibility. To be sure, conventional readings of Freud would also seem to endorse such a distinction. In The Interpretation of
Dreams, for example, language is said to bind affect, while affect is thought to exceed symbolic inscription beyond the occasion of its discursive deployment and decathexis. From a different angle, Terada points out that we have
assumed that the very idea of strong emotion is inconsistent with poststructuralism, and although he suggests that emotion and subjectivity seem to be deeply connected, Jameson also speaks about a waning of affect that is

what ails the

contemporary subject is precisely the fact that language has
become severed from affect. The cleaving of discourse from
emotional life,
curtails the subjects ability to make existential or
historical sense of his or her own existence.
the postmodern subject has lost the capacity to
articulate satisfying personal narratives and to conceive of itself as
a psychic being with depth and substance.
Ruti calls for an
account of identity that does not discard the deconstructive insights
of poststructuralism or anti-essentialist theories of the subject, but
uses these insights to modify a theory of object relations that allows
us to reconsider relationality in the larger social sphere
she
argues for a new conception of the subject as both a discursive
construct and an intricate psychic being with existential needs and
concerns with great psychic depth and capacity for feeling.
the distinct mark of our postmodern times. What are the effects of upholding this traditional division between language and affect? In New Maladies of the Soul, Julia Kristeva suggests that

she argues,

Attempting to reconcile French poststructuralist approaches to language with a

theory of affect, Kristeva argues that

Along similar lines, Mari

. As such,

It might be tempting to dismiss

the poststructuralist
tendency to view the psyche as a site of alienation rather than
potentiality only exacerbates the political and historical problems of
the marginalized and subordinated Ruti wonders whether it is a
coincidence that the proliferation of identity positions has resulted in
these existential needs and concerns, to argue that they expired with the deconstruction of the universal liberal humanist subject. But as Ruti asserts,

the

increased difficulty, if not

impossibility, of claiming agency ?

She asks: What do we make of the fact that the more subjectivity has ceased

If there is no universal subject

but only
infinite differences that we discursively cohere into
epistemological objects, how might affect be returned to language
so as to advance rather than impede Chuhs political insight about
identity formation and the social
, how might affect help in
to be restricted to a small subsection of the population, the more its has come to connote subjection rather than autonomy.

, as Kandice Chuh asserts,

? Even more

worlding those forgotten creatures and things leveled by historicisms

endless march of progress? If the rhetoric of colorblindness refuses

to recognize the ways
race
continue to constitute and divide
our
social order how might affect provide one way of moving
beyond the binds of liberalism and its politics of representation?
how might affect help us to recalibrate the intellectual afterlife of
post-identity politics?
affect need not be cast as oppositional to
language but
supplemental
to
conceive of affect as mediating rather than interrupting a
relationship between language and identity, between language and
history
while emotions are
consciously perceived
their meanings can often be misconstrued
Owing to the repression of its proper representative has been
forced to become connected with another idea and is now regarded
by consciousness as the manifestation of that idea. If we restore the
true connection we call the original affective impulse an
unconscious one Yet its affect was never unconscious; all that had
happened was that its idea had undergone repression
in which

national and

and racism

Indeed,

To begin,

, as History and Memory suggests, they must be seen as

to one another. Freud provides us with one way to approach this project and

. Like Sartres insistence that emotion is a certain way of apprehending the world, Freud endows affect with a certain phenomenological quality. In his essay on The Unconscious, Freud writes that it is

surely of the essence of an emotion that we should be aware of it, i.e. that it should become known to consciousness. However,

as such,

. By introducing the concept of unconscious

affect, in which an affective impulse is perceived albeit misinterpreted, Freud suggests that what is repressed from consciousness is not the affect as such, but the interdicted idea to which this affect was initially (though

Affect transports us across

different levels of signification, registers of pre-consciousness and
unconscious thought not all of which can be admitted in the
present.
affect becomes the privileged vehicle
through which unacknowledged correspondences
are brought together or
apart.
affect is configured
as that psychic glue that allows unexpected correspondences
between story and picture to emerge and stick
affective
correspondences provide the means of (re)connecting through
unexpected pairings disconnected words and things, unconscious
links through which identity and history might come to be redefined
provisionally) connected. Thus, he encourages us to understand affect as mediating a relationship between words and things.

In such a psychic economy of displacement,

between words and things, between linguistic signifiers and

visual perceptions,

forced

In History and Memory,

precisely

. In other words,

in psychic and social life. Here,

words

words do not bind affect

so much as

affect comes to reconstitute

and things through unacknowledged correspondencesdialectical images driven apart by historicism but driven together by emotion. In this regard, I would like to reprise my earlier discussion of transnational

adoption, of girl love, the negative Oedipus complex, and the creation of psychic space for two good-enough mothers. In chapter three, I suggested that the deployment of the negative Oedipus complexs affective intensity reveals a
forgotten but crucial new form of symbolization where libidinal openness, rather than fixity, holds pride of place, and where words rather than binding affect come under the influence of affects unconscious impulses and

racial reparation describes a psychic process by which

affect comes to re-symbolize racial melancholia and a debased and
hated mother can emerge as good enough
motivations. In this manner,

. Like First Person Plural, History and Memory underscores how affect comes to be the

privileged category through which, to borrow Freuds terminology, thing-presentations (images and perceptions) become associated with new word-presentations (linguistic and verbal signifiers), giving over to new histories of

the subject.

The enigma of Tajiris mother the picture without a story returns

as inexplicable pain , one eluding symbolic inscription. However,

through a process of affective correspondences , this picture without a

story brings forth a set of unacknowledged emotional pairings ,

creating anew a different historical sense . Tajiris affective
correspondences ultimately restore the mothe r

to return to our discussion from the previous two chapters

as a

it returns racial melancholia to

the domain of the social and to the politics of historicism as a
collective problem and collaborative endeavor
affect serves to
world the mother and the daughter as different historical subjects,
unfolding them into an alternative time and space , one in which they
might appear in a new guise to themselves and others
affect ultimately comes to bear upon
language, history, identity, family, and kinship
in a
transformative manner It returns the mother and Tajiri to the world
in a different mode of becoming .
this worlding and return to the
good-enough racialized object

. In the same breath,

. In the final analysis,

. If a forgotten history initially assumes a

displaced relationship between language and affect at the opening of Tajiris documentary,

not in a disjunctive or oppositional but

Importantly,

social does not reinscribe

liberal representation and identity .
It does not, in other words, conflate political with psychic
reparation, shore up the autonomy of the minority subject, or
restore history to its referential pedestal. affective correspondences
do not
recover the mother moving backward
to attempt the
recapture an ever-receding origin or a set of lost representations
Instead, they move forward to generate a new and unexpected set of
domain of the

the everyday terms of

Tajiris

recuperate or

in order

emotional analogies as well as historical links and images that allow

Tajiri

both

to apprehend the mother from a different perspective and to

she can forgive her

mother
Tajiris affective correspondences do not bring history
to the past, but instead bring the past to history a history of the
inhabit the world in a less painful manner

. Thus,

her loss of memory.

present
how

. Delineating the aesthetic and political processes through which affective correspondences come to be animated and sustained for a new racial politics in our colorblind age, History and Memory illustrates

the linguistic binds of identity might be loosened by affect to redefine

affirmation (of freedom) and forgetting (of race).

world and into the time and space of history, Tajiris

If Heidegger saw the process of naming as bringing Being into the

affective correspondences ultimately insist upon a

reconsideration of affects supplemental value

as the house of the truth of Being.
reconsidering the critical impasses between affect and language
might finally yield new understandings of family, kinship, and
the racialization of intimacy in our colorblind age.
History and Memory helps us
move beyond the binds of liberalism and its politics of
to language not as an instrument of domination over beings, but

Rethinking affect and language from such an idealist perspective might be worth exploring, for it is my

hope that

after poststructuralism

The Feeling of Kinship Throughout this book, I have been

asking why we have numerous poststructuralist accounts of language but few poststructuralist accounts of kinship.

to advance such

a project by insisting on the need to

representation to account for a new method of historical understanding

a new conception of psychic and political reparation that refuses the

closure of the past

. Tajiris documentary concludes with a rather dramatic aesthetic shift, one moving us from the vertiginous frenzy of the visible to a more phenomenological framing of the

affective horizons of Being. This aesthetic shift is marked by the directors closing voiceover, which has an indeterminate meaning. I could forgive my mother her loss of memory, Tajiri tells us, and could make this image for her.
What, we need to ask, is the referent of this image? On the one hand, this image could refer to the film as a whole, one in which the juxtaposition of image, sound, and text situates debates regarding history, identity, and kinship
in an analytic tradition concerning liberal representation and visibility, the limits of which I have been exploring throughout this chapter. On the other hand, this image could also refer to the final visual sequence accompanying
Tajiris concluding voiceover, a sequence in distinct contrast to the rest of the films busy aesthetic. This final image is of a desolate road near the Poston desert. As the camera slowly pans into the distance, the visual and acoustic
regimes merge. We hear the accompanying squawks of a flock of birds as the picture of a distant horizon slowly fades from view. Unlike the highly edited sequences that populate the rest of Tajiris film, this is not a full but an
empty picture, one devoid of human subjects altogether. Yet it would not be entirely accurate to describe this final image as an empty picture, for insofar as it marks the final coming together of the visual and acoustic registers, it

it presents a scene of
unfolding , a scene of discursive emptiness but affective fullness,
one through which Tajiri can finally forgive her mother her loss of
memory and create a new historical image for as well as of her
also marks a different time and space of the film. It signals not Adamss vistas of immensity and opportunity of America. To the contrary,

. This affective tone

and shift marking the end of Tajiris documentary indicates a being in and for the world not dissimilar to that of Lais emergence into the Taipei landscape at the conclusion of Happy Together, discussed in chapter two.

They are unexpected revelations of scenes of spring

in
which Lai can finally appear
Tajiris closing image might be
likened to a phenomenological horizon
Muoz describes this kind of a
phenomenological turn as a deliberate idealist endeavor seeking to
understand the rhythms, particularities, and potentialities that
constitute the world as cleaved from a natural attitude and
naturalized epistemologies
such an affective turn
returns us to
a human life-world not fully knowable by
standard modes of historical perspective or perception Unlike
poststructuralist accounts of language, in which the linguistic
that appear to Lai and

. In this respect,

, in both Edmund Husserls and Heideggers sense of the world as a horizon and of horizon as a nexus

of being, an ephemeral ontological field in which we must strain our vision in order to imagine otherwise.

. Set against the positivism of the analytic tradition,

Chakrabartys hermeneutic tradition,

signifier is said to induce a fading of being by separating us from the

world such affective attentiveness keeps us open to the world to its
,

inexhaustible phenomenal shapes and forms

Unlike political theories of reparation, which seek to
write history into a definitive past, psychic reparation does not

. In this regard, psychic reparation in History and Memory presents itself not as

something to be surmounted or left behind.

delineate such a finite process but rather a process of working through

,

Like the depressive position in Klein,

it moves us from the sphere of

paranoid splitting and

racial melancholia to

present us with the possibility of love and the creative impulse that
loss, grief , and forgetting might be temporally conjoined with new
ideas

The world is a picture,

Lacan explains in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis,

itself to be seen. But even more,

as History and Memory insists,

because it gives

it gives itself to be felt , it

gives itself to be loved It is precisely on the terrain of the affective ,

.

suggests,

Tajiri

where the visual and the discursive might interact , not in an over-

determined or bound manner, but in a way that might unfold the

world to us in its manifest shapes and forms . This is a feeling of kinship

in and with the world that exceeds the analytic prescriptions of

traditional perception, legal recognition , and social belonging
Rethinking the linguistic
signifier from an affective position brings together more
phenomenological notions of being and becoming with the politics
of identity and performativity that constitute the intellectual and
political limits of identity in our colorblind age. When Tajiris
nephew speculates he may not have a right to criticize Parkers
Come See the Paradise because, being half white, maybe I dont
have the moral authority we inhabit a
critical impasse in
identity politics, concerned with the ownership of representation
and its proper appropriations and mis-appropriations.
While essentialism in
identity politics encloses the world, essence in phenomenology
unfolds it.
Tajiri suggests one new approach to
rethinking essence in the context of a transformative politics. She

. Heidegger writes, the

essence of action is accomplishment [and that] to accomplish means to unfold something into the fullness of its essence.

that

again

significant

Essence in phenomenology, keyed into

affective horizons of Being, is not the essence, the evidence of experience, underwriting the conventional tenets of identity politics.

In turning away from the referential to the affective,

invites the viewer to inhabit her picture ,

but prevents the recovery of history in its conventional guise.

She uses

her camera to create a new set of correspondences.

such an affective enterprise must
necessarily belong to the world in neither a bound nor predetermined manner Confined within the narrow strictures of the
normative Oedipus complex affect functions to regulate and
reinscribe traditional boundaries of family and kinship dictating the
constrained ways in which we are coerced to displace
and to
affiliate
We are repeatedly inserted into the grammar of bodily
action and speech as performative demand and conscription
Importantly, if affect
is circumscribed by the trauma of
nationalist politics configuring Japanese Americans as target and
enemy circumscribed by conventional rules of racial identity,
family, and kinship by the end
it is transformed and released
As History and Memory, The Book of Salt, Happy

Together, First Person Plural, and our case history on Mina eloquently underscore,

the

(away from the mother)

(with the father).

at the beginning of Tajiris film

of History and Memory

into the world through an alternative register Tajiris

.

phenomenological turn insists a consideration of the ways in which

affect might respond to new identities and social formations still
searching for a form.
this appropriation and resignifying of
affect may serve to mend not only those psychic struggles marked
by filial connection but also those political struggles that exceed its
upon

As Tajiri shows us,

privatized boundaries If such affective responsibility is to have

greater ethical traction, or larger social significance, we must come
to recognize that no one person rightfully owns it.
There is no one law of kinship
Rather, the
feeling of kinship belongs to everyone.
.

No one person either is its proper receiver.

, no one structure of kinship, no one language of kinship, and no one prospect of kinship.

Understanding melancholia as conflict rather than damage

simultaneously renders it a site of resistance and disavows the
position of Asian Americans as solipsistic victims. As such, we
must build community structured around the absolute refusal
to relinquish our alterity to the violent forces of racialization
and assimilation, transforming negative into positive passions.
Only love escapes extinction.
-Frame as a survival strategy.

Eng and Han 2K (David L., Assistant Professor of English and Comparative
Literature at Columbia University, Shinhee, psychotherapist at the Counseling &
Psychological Services of Columbia University, A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia,
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 10(4):667700, 2000, The Analytic Press,
http://www.uib.no/sites/w3.uib.no/files/attachments/9._enghana_dialogue_on_racial_melancholia_0.pdf, accessed 6/26/16) rz
Depathologizing Melancholia

assimilation is a negotiation between mourning and

melancholia.
mourning and melancholia
coexist at once in the process of assimilation This continuum
allows us to understand the negotiation of racial melancholia as
conflict rather than damage
attention to ra cial melancholia as conflict rather than damage
The process of

The ethnic subject does not inhabit one or the other mourning or melancholiabut

between mourning and

melancholia

. Indeed, might we consider damage the intrasubjective displacement of a necessarily intersubjective dynamic of conflict? This

not only

renders it a productive category but also removes Asian Americans from

the position of solipsistic victims. We are dissatisfied with the
assumption that minoritarian subjectivities are permanently damaged

forever injured and incapable of ever being whole. Our theory of

intersubjective conflict
evokes Kleins notion of rebuilding on
a communal level This notion of communal rebuilding provides the
foundation for the reparation of individual psyches as well as group
identities. Our discussion of immigration, assimilation, and
racialization pursued here develops them as issues involving the
fluid negotiation between mourning and melancholia In this manner,
melancholia is neither pathological nor permanent but , as
Muoz
intergenerationally shared

Jos Esteban

following Raymond Williams,

(1999),

eloquently suggests, a structure of feeling, a structure of

everyday life

. In Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999), Muoz states that,

for queers as well as for

people of color, melancholia is not a pathology but an integral part of

daily existence and survival. He
states that it
is
part of the process of dealing with the catastrophes that occur
in the lives of people of color, lesbians, and gay men I propose a
different understanding of melancholia that does not see it as a
pathology or self-absorbed mood
Rather, it is a mechanism
provides a corrective to Freuds vision of melancholia as a destructive force and

instead

all

as a

have

that inhibits activism.

that helps us (re)construct identity and take our dead with us to the

various battles we must wage in their names and in our names

[p. 74].

Within the continuum of mourning and melancholia is a productive gap

inhabited by

the various issues under discussion here

immigration, assimilation, and racialization;

mimicry, ambivalence, and the stereotype; sacrifice, loss, and

reinstatement . The material and psychic negotiations of these

various issues are the conflicts with which Asian Americans struggle
everyday basis.
a productive and necessary
process It is
rebuilding.
every advance in
the process of mourning results in a deepening in the individuals
relation to his inner objects, in the happiness of regaining them
after they were felt to be lost
), in an increased trust in
them and love for them because they proved to be good and helpful
after all
. In
the work of racial melancholia there too lies a nascent ethical and
political project
We
focus
on an

This struggle does not necessarily result in damage but is finally

the work of

Suffering, Klein (1987b) offers, can become productive (p. 163): It seems that

(Paradise Lost and Regained

. This is similar to the way in which the young child step by step builds up his experiences but also from the ways in which he overcomes frustrations and unpleasant experiences, nevertheless retaining his

good objects (externally and internally) [p. 164]. We would like to think about the numerous difficulties of Asian American immigration, assimilation, and racialization processes in terms of Paradise Lost and Regained

. In Mourning and Melancholia, Freud (1917) originally describes the melancholics inability to get over loss in rather negative terms.

instead

on the melancholics absolute refusal to relinquish the otherto forfeit

alterityat any costs .

In his essay, Freud lays out the provocative idea that in melancholia the shadow of the object fell upon the ego (p. 249). In most of the Freudian oeuvre, it is

indubitably the ego that holds sway; his majesty the egos narcissism reigns supreme. Throughout his writings, Jacques Lacan (1991), even more, emphasizes the narcissism of the ego, reversing this particular formulation by
insisting that it is always the shadow of the ego that falls on the object. In this present formulation, however, we have the loved object, not the ego, holding sway. Racial melancholia thus delineates one psychic process in which the

loved object is so overwhelmingly important to and beloved by the ego that the ego is willing to preserve it even at the cost of its own self.

of melancholic identifications,

Freud (1917) suggests,

In the transferential aspects

is the expression of

something in common which may signify love

as W.R.D. Fairbairn (1954), Jessica Benjamin (1998), Christopher Bollas (1987), and others have noted

(p. 250).

there being

This community of love

is possible only through the aggressive

and militant preservation of the loved and lost object.

Hence,

the melancholic

process is one way in which socially disparaged objects racially and

sexually deprivileged others live on in the psychic realm

It displays the egos melancholic yet militant
refusal to allow certain objects to disappear into oblivion

. This behavior, Freud (1917) remarks,

proceeds from an attitude of revolt (p. 248) on the part of the ego.

. In this way, Freud tells us,

love escapes extinction

(p. 257). This preservation of the threatened object might be seen, then, as a type of ethical hold on the part of the melancholic ego. The mourner, in

contrast, has no such ethics. The mourner is perfectly content to kill off the lost object, to declare it to be dead yet again within the domain of the psyche.

While the

ambivalence, anger, and rage that characterizes this preservation of

the lost object threaten the egos stability we do not imagine this
threat is result of some ontological tendency on the part of the
melancholic; it is a social threat. Ambivalence, rage, and anger are the
,

that

the

internalized refractions of an ecology of whiteness bent on the

obliteration of cherished minoritarian subjectivities If the loved object is
.

not going to live out there, the melancholic emphatically avers, then it is
going to live here inside of me
melancholic who helps us come face-to-face with this social truth. It

. Along with Freud (1917), we only wonder why a man has to be ill before he can be accessible to a truth of this kind (p. 246). It is the

is the melancholic who teaches us that in the

last resort we must begin to love in order not to fall ill

(Freud, 1914, p. 85). Both Butler (1997) and Douglas

Crimp (1989) isolate the call of melancholia in the age of AIDS as one in which the loss of a public language to mourn a seemingly endless series of young male deaths triggers the absolute need to think about melancholia and

Muoz highlights the communal nature of this activist project the

community-oriented aspect of group rather than individual losses
identifications, and
activism.
activism.

(1999)

, of group

rather than individual

of group rather than individual

Communal mourning, by its very nature, is an immensely complicated text to

read, for we do not mourn just one lost object or other, but we also mourn as a wholeor, put another way, as a contingent and temporary collection of fragments that is experiencing a loss of its parts (p. 73).

series of unresolved fragments, we come together as a contingent whole .

We gain social recognition in the face of this communal loss. There is

a militant refusal on the part of the ego
a series of egos to let
go, and this militant refusal is at the heart of melancholias
productive political potentials.
better yet,

Paradoxically, in this instance, the egos death drive may be the very precondition for survival, the beginning of a strategy for

living and for living on. Butler (1997) asks of melancholia: Is the psychic violence of conscience not a refracted indictment of the social forms that have made certain kinds of losses ungrievable? (p. 185). And Crimp (1989) ends his

Militancy, of course, then, but mourning too:

mourning and militancy
essay, Mourning and Militancy, with this simple and moving call:

(p. 18). We pause here to insert yet another permutation of this political project in relation to the Asian American immigration, assimilation, and

racialization processes we have been discussing throughout this essay: mourning and melancholia.

Genealogy destabilizes essential notions of identity and the

processes of liberal subject building. It uncovers freedom as a
site of social change.
Clifford 01 (Michael, Professor of Philosophy at Mississippi State University,
Political Genealogy after Foucault Savage Identities, 2001, Routledge Press) rz
-Entstehung: formation

The work of Foucault allows us to understand political identity, not

in terms of a metaphysically given entity but as
a construct
Michel

Foucaults work allows us

a fabrication,

. In general terms,

to see political identity as discourse-specific and historically

according to the interplay of discursive regularities,

regional practices, disciplinary effects, and modes of selfproblematization
the notion of the
political subject as
an essential identity animated by spirit or
will becomes suspect
The self-identical
subject of traditional political philosophy emerges from genealogical
contingent

: it varies

. The political subject emerges within the space of this interplay. Considered in terms of this interplay,

a fundamental

. Rather, the political subject is an effect, an arsis, erected in a matrix of experience that thrusts onto undefined bodies the mask of their own identity. In this

sense, political subjectivity is an historical event, one which [is] not at all necessary, not linked to human nature, or any anthropological necessity.1

analysis shattered
Genealogy
exposes the nonessentiality of the political subject through a
historical analysis of its constitution
this analysis is not the origin of the
political subject, understood as transcendental
genealogical critique exposes the Entstehung of the political
subject, its emergence as an event
it is a nonplace, a pure distance
which indicates that adversaries do not belong to a common space.
emergence
it always occurs in the interstice
, dispersed, and exposed as a reticulated convergence of lines of power, of discursive limits, of self-limitations.

. The exposure of political subjectivity is effected by recognizing in it the axial interplay of discursive

practices, power relations, and processes of subjectivation. Yet what is exposed in

the

conditions of its appearance. Rather, what

is

. As Foucault explains, Emergence designates a place of confrontation but not as a closed field offering the

spectacle of a struggle among equals. Rather, as Nietzsche demonstrates in his analysis of good and evil,

the

Consequently, no one is responsible for an

; no one can glory in it, since

. In a sense,

only a single drama is ever staged in this nonplace, the endlessly repeated play of dominations.2 Here we have, arguably, one final reversal of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseaus history of the origins of the political subject

Genealogy as the
parodic pursuit of Entstehung
undermines any notion of
necessary origination The event of the political subjects emergence
is the effect, of pure play and raw contingency of the play of
dominations. The space of the political subject
refers not to the
firm ground of historical necessity but to a non-place,
pure
distance
Political subjects emerge in
the interstice, between discourses of right and disciplines of
subjection
between citizenry and individuality
between the antinomic concerns of a governmental
integration
In
this interstice we can see power extending its web, encircling the
body and cloaking it in the constricting fabric of its own identity.
We see subjection in this interstice, we
appeals to the notion of origin as Ursprung, which Foucault describes as the meta-historical deployment of ideal significations and indefinite teleologies.3

, by contrast,

rather,

s emergence

to a space of

opened and bordered by the accidental junction and concurrence of more or less random phenomena.

, between the polarizing demands of positive and negative freedom,

, between

unity and pluralism,

. This interstice, this space of axial interplay, is not unlike Jeremy Benthams mahogany cabinet at the University of London. In their own way political subjects are like Benthamsidentities

pieced together from alien forms, fabrications of anonymous technologies. In the interstice of the political subjects emergence we can see discourse at play, animating and giving meaning to an otherwise meaningless figure.

In this

interstice we can see the subject at work on itself, dutifully fashioning the dress of its stylized display.

see domination and oppression ; but we also see freedom , a persistent

obstinacy that holds the promise of new possibilities, of new beginnings.
This freedom, this resilience, gives life to the subjectit extends itself in
the form of pure force and desire seeking limits only for the sake of
,

transgressing them It is through revolt that subjectivity introduces

itself into history and gives it the breath of life. The political subject
.

...

is

at bottom nothing more than

t he envelopment of freedom, a circumscription of a

persistent resistance.

The story of freedoms relentless struggle to escape its bonds is the story of history itself. By listening with a suspicious ear to this story, the genealogist not only

the
discourses of the liberal tradition are
replete with metaphysical
biases and presuppositions regarding the political subject We see
this most distinctly in the liberal traditions conception of the
political subject as a concrete, ontologically distinct unit of
individuality This unit is invested with rights
obligations,
animated by
Sovereignty, protected by
spheres of liberty
exposes the nonessentiality of the emergence of the political subject, but also of those philosophical discourses which make the political subject the central figure of a juridical reflection. In particular,

shown to be

, freedoms,

the spirit of

inviolable

bound in a contractual relation to society

these discourses
are imbricated in the anonymous technology of power/knowledge
relations that turns individuals into subjects and puts them in the
service of the rationality of governmentality. These discourses
provide value systems and frameworks of conceptualization that
individuals can appropriate in the production of
truth about
themselves
that serves as the principle of their subjection as it
binds them to the constraints of a self-identification
the problem is to show how this metaphysics is used
as an instrument of subjection and subjugation
, pos- sessed of a proprietous power. Foucaults work undercuts the authority and

essentiality of all such claims and assumptions informing the discursive practice of the liberal tradition. It is not just a matter of dismissing

, however. Foucaults work shows

that they

a discourse of

, a discourse

. Thus, more is going on here than a positivistic

dismissal of a useless metaphysics. On the contrary:

effectively,

As Asian American students, we demand this space to create a

new public language and a new representation, to resolve not
only political, but intellectual and cultural issues. View the 1AC
as not a static artifact, but as an initial engagement in the
ongoing process of navigating racial melancholia and
rebuilding our communities.
Eng and Han 2K (David L., Assistant Professor of English and Comparative
Literature at Columbia University, Shinhee, psychotherapist at the Counseling &
Psychological Services of Columbia University, A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia,
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 10(4):667700, 2000, The Analytic Press,
http://www.uib.no/sites/w3.uib.no/files/attachments/9._enghana_dialogue_on_racial_melancholia_0.pdf, accessed 6/26/16) rz
Epilogue/Living Melancholia
This essay is an engagement with psychoanalysis and racial difference that belongs neither in the speculative nor in the clinical arena proper. Rather, this essay, like our theory of racial melancholia, exists in a gap between two

We wrote this essay with the hope of

proffering
new critical interventions
and with the desire
to understand better our students, our communities, ourselves.
spheres and seeks to establish a productive relationship between them.

a number of

significant to both realms

It also occurs to

us that our dialoguecrossing into the often disparate realms of the literary and the clinicalis an exercise in new models of communal interaction that we advocate in our various discussions on the everyday living out of racial
melancholia by Asian Americans. Much of this essay reexamines the ways in which the genealogy of racial melancholia as individual pathology functions in terms of larger social group identitiesas a type of psychic citizenship.

Indeed, it is our belief that

the refusal to view identities under social erasure as individual

pathology and permanent damage lies in the communal appropriation of

melancholia its refunctioning as a structure of everyday life that
,

annuls the multitude of losses an unforgiving social world

continually demands
we conclude with a few words on one
strategy of community building within the space of the university A
recent
trend in the academy is establishing Asian American
studies programs. In the face of this trend the model minority
. Toward that end,

, albeit contested,

the

of

stereotype is consistently marshaled by university administrations as

proof that Asian Americans neither

are in

want

of any special

recognition nor have

any

particular

needs as a distinct

and socially marked

group. The popular vision of Asian

Americans as model minorities

, as

having the best of both worlds (two

cultures, two languages), is a multicultural fantasy in the age of

diversity management
between East and West as less than fluid.

. Our investigation here of immigration, assimilation, and racialization as conflicted and unresolved processes of mourning and melancholia reveals the link

For Asian Americans , the reparation of these unresolved

processes requires a public language It requires a public space in which

.

these conflicts can be acknowledged and negotiated. In their ideal

form, Asian American studies programs provide this publicity, a
physical and psychic space to bring together various fragmented
parts intellectual, social, political, cultural to compose
a
holding environment, a whole environment. This type of public
space
facilitates the creation of new representations of Asian
Americans emerging from that gap of ambivalence between
mourning and melancholia. These new representations
contest the
conventional ways
Asian Americans have been apprehended but
also refunction the very meanings of Asian American within the
public sphere.
this essay has been an exercise for us to mourn
the various passings of Asian American students who no longer felt
tied to our present world such as it is.
this dialogue this
production of ideas about
racial melancholia
might be understood as only an initial engagement in the
(

, borrowing from Winnicott (1965),

ultimately

not only

in which

In the final analysis,

new

However,

the conditions and constraints of

should not be taken as a summary

moment. Instead, it

continued work of mourning and melancholia, and the rebuilding of

new communities .

2AC O/V
The position of Asian Americans in the status quo can be
characterized as one of racial melancholia where the
imposition and desire for whiteness creates a pathological
attachment to an unattainable ideal giving rise to a violent
negativity where we come to desire the erasure of both our
identities and our bodies. This process of assimilation that
operates through regimes such as the model minority myth
refine and cull the Asian population as an attempt to create a
recognizable other, demanding the sacrifice of history and
identity in the name of the nation-state. The racialized other
lingers as excess, a specter, haunting narratives of progress
and democracy that have always been denied to us. Thus the
1AC is an act of affective correspondence a genealogical
retrieval of redacted narratives and experiences, a refusal of
dominant historicism that is written by the victors and seeks
to cast acts of trauma permanently into the past. We carve out
a space for what-could-have-been in the now, in order to
establish new affective relationships with the past and with
ourselves, transforming the negative passions of racial
melancholia into positive ones, bearing the potential for love
in the face of extinction and the rebuilding of a battered and
fragmented community. Our genealogical method also shatters
liberal notions of subjectivity, as give rise to the model
minority stereotype which we must refuse at all costs.

1AR O/V
Asian Americans occupy a position of racial melancholia
where processes of liberal subject building and assimilation,
operating through narratives such as the myth of the model
minority, create a pathological attachment to whiteness, giving
rise to a violent and self-destructive negativity. The racialized
other lingers as excess, a specter, haunting narratives of
progress and democracy that have always been denied to us.
The 1AC is an act of affective correspondence a genealogical
rewriting of a history of exclusion and subjugation, carving out
a space for new affective relationships with the past and
ourselves. We transform negative into positive passions and
rebuild fragmented communities around love. This also
shatters liberal notions of subjectivity such as the model
minority, a narrative that we militantly disavow.

ROB (Anti-Asian Violence)

The role of the ballot is to vote for the team that best
deconstructs anti-Asian oppression.

ROB (Anti-Racist Scholarship)

The role of the ballot is to evaluate the merits of the 1AC as a
piece of anti-racist scholarship.

ROB (Liberal Subject Building)

The role of the ballot is to vote for the team that best
deconstructs the liberal subject.

China

China Studies
The Western academy reduces the Chinese narrative to a
monolithic ethnographic specimen under the Western gaze.
Minorities are only given the right to speak if they are
providing more data to study.
Chow 98 (Rey, Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature at Duke University,
Introduction: On Chineseness as a theoretical problem, Boundary 2; Fall 1998; 25,
3; ProQuest Central pg. 1) rz

Mimeticism here is no longer simply a literary convention, however.

Rather, it is a type of representational copula-tion forced at the
juncture between literature and ethnicity, a reflectionism that
explicitly or implicitly establishes equivalence between a cultural
practice and an ethnic labelin the form of "this kind of
poetic/narrative convention is Chinese." In this equation this act to
validate a particular kind of writing as ethnic difference per se
mimeticism, chastised though it may be at the formal level as an evil Western
tradition, returns with a vengeance as the stereotyped way to
control and police the reception of literary writing. In the hands of the
sinolo-gists, even ancient poems and narratives, it turns out, are documentariesof
what is Chinese. In the study of modern Chinese literature, such mimeticism between writing and ethnicity, which has all along been
foisted on Third World literature in general, would receive a different
namenational allegorysoon to be adopted widely even among Chinese critics.

Meanwhile, the migrs who can no longer claim proprietorship to

Chinese culture through residency in China henceforth inhabit the
melan-choly position of an ethnic group that, as its identity is being
"authenticated" abroad, is simultaneously relegated to the existence
of ethnographic speci-mens under the Western gaze . Worth mentioning in
this context is the work of Tsi-an Hsia, who, in the 1950s, attempted, in Taiwan, to
reinvigo-rate Chinese writing by advocating, through borrowing the principles of the
Anglo-American New Critics, serious attitudes toward "new poetry?' One of the
results of this attempt to rediscover the true poet's voice, however, was a further
displacement of the ethnicity that such literary efforts were supposed to consolidate
the trend among Chinese students from Taiwan to study abroad in the United
States, eventually bringing the habits of New Criticism to bear on their reading of
Chinese literature overseas.32 As Gunn comments, "It is tempting to conclude that
T. A. Hsia and his students had not brought modern literature to Taiwan but had
moved Chinese literature to the United States." 33 In exile, Chinese writing (first in
Taiwan, then in the United States) is condemned to nostalgia, often no sooner
reflecting or recording the "reality" of Chinese life overseas than rendering
Chineseness itself as something the essence of which belongs to a bygone era.34
Even so, the coerciveness of the typical mimeticism between

representation and ethnicity continues.35 No matter how

nonmimetic, experimental, subversive, or avant-garde such
diasporic writing might try to be, it is invariably classified,
marketed, and received in the West as Chinese, in a presupposed
correspondence to that reality called China. As in the case of
representations by all minorities in the West, a kind of paternalistic, if
not downright racist, attitude persists as a method of categorizing
minority discourse: Minorities are allowed the right to speak only on the
implicit expectation that they speak in the documentary mode,
"reflecting" the group from which they come.

A problematization of Whiteness within China and Asia studies

is necessary to having a genuine encounter with ethnicity. We
must reclaim our narratives from white Academia.
Chow 98 (Rey, Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature at Duke University,
Introduction: On Chineseness as a theoretical problem, Boundary 2; Fall 1998; 25,
3; ProQuest Central pg. 1) rz

Within the institutional parameters of Chinese literary studies in the

West, however, there is an additional ethnic factor that prohibits the
prob-lematization of ethnicity as I have suggested. This is the
persistent Orien-talist approach adopted by some white China
scholars toward their objects of study. Even at a time when race and
ethnicity have become ineluctable issues in academic inquiry, such
Orientalism often continues bald-faced, under the guise not only of
"objective" but also of morally "progressive," in-deed "theoretical,"
discourses.12 To fully confront the issue of Chineseness as a
theoretical problem, therefore, it is not sufficient only to point to the
lack of attempts to theorize Chineseness as such. It is equally
important for us to question the sustained, conspicuous silence in
the field of China studies on what it means for certain white scholars
to expound so freely on the Chinese tradition, culture, language,
history, women, and so forth in the postcolonial age; it is also
important for us to ask why and how one group of people can
continue to pose as the scientific investigators and moral custodians of another culture while the ethnic and racial premises of
their own operations remain, as ever, exempt from interrogation.
The theorization of Chineseness , in other words, would be incomplete
without a concurrent problematization of Whiteness within the broad

frameworks of China and Asia studies.

China Threat
Yellow peril is alive and well. The portrayal of Asians as the
enemy in every recent armed conflict involving the United
States as well as the discourse surrounding the rise of the East
has permanently stained the Asian body as foreign and
fungible. The 1AC performatively ruptures this parasitic cycle.
Saito 97 (Natsu Taylor, Associate Professor, Georgia State University College of
Law, Model Minority, Yellow Peril: Functions of Foreignness in the Construction of
Asian American Legal Identity, Asian American Law Journal, Volume 4, Article 6,
January 1997, http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1034&context=aalj, accessed 6/28/16) rz
III. THE PORTRAYAL OF ASIANS AS THE ENEMY A. Disloyalty as a feature of
foreignness "American" is a concept has been identified with political

loyalty, as well as perceptions of race, ethnicity and ...national

origin, since the founding of the nation. The first federal restrictions on
immigration came with the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.67 The Alien Enemies
Act and the Alien Friends Act allowed the President, in his discretion, to seize and
summarily deport an alien.68 The Sedition Act "essentially made strong criticism of
government officials a crime" 69 and was mainly enforced against foreign-born
critics.7 A strong association between foreignness and disloyalty was also evident
in the early 1900s. Although President McKinley was killed by a U.S.-born anarchist,
his assassination catalyzed nativist feelings, which were reinforced by anti-foreign
sentiment during World War I. During this period, restrictionist immigration laws
such as literacy tests were proposed explicitly to weed out immigrants from
southern and eastern Europe. 72 Quotas limiting immigration according to national
origin were included in immigration legislation in 1921 7 and 1924. 7 Restrictions
based on political beliefs were also imposed, beginning in 1903 with legislation
excluding "anarchists, or persons who believe in or advocate the overthrow by force
or violence of the Government of the United States or of all government or of all
forms of law."75 During World War II, the association of foreignness

with disloyalty was compounded by the presumptions attributed to

Japanese Americans "as a race."7 6 The original version of General DeWitt's
Final Report did not claim that the decision to evacuate and imprison Japanese
Americans was based on time pressure, but on presumptions about the foreignness
of the group as a whole: "It was impossible to establish the identity of

the loyal and disloyal with any degree of safety.... [A]n exact
separation of the 'sheep from the goats' was unfeasible."" On another
occasion DeWitt said, "It makes no difference whether he is an
American citizen, he is still a Japanese." 78 Despite the lack of
evidence of espionage or subversive activity on the part of Japanese
Americans in World War II, the Supreme Court justified its decision
in the Korematsu case by stating: Our task would be simple, our duty clear,
were this a case involving the imprisonment of a loyal citizen in a concentration

camp because of racial prejudice.... To cast this case into outlines of racial prejudice,
without reference to the real military dangers which were presented, merely
confuses the issue. Korematsu was not excluded from the Military Area

because of hostility to him or his race. He was excluded because we

are at war with the Japanese Empire .... As Lorraine Bannai and Dale Minami
point out, the Supreme Court first denied that there was any
connection between race and the exclusion, and then accepted the
argument that exclusion (and, implicitly, incarceration) was necessary
because of a race-based affinity Japanese Americans were presumed
to have for Japan. Thus, disloyalty became part of the racialized
identity of Japanese Americans. Gotanda says: [T]he separability of the
juridical categories of "citizen" and "alien" is clear, as is the parallel
social distinction between "American" and "foreign." But when the
individuals concerned are Other nonWhites, the racial
considerations render the "natural" coincidence of citizen and
American much less certain. A Japanese-American citizen in 1942 was easily
considered "foreign," thus making possible the judgment that likelilhood of
disloyalty was high enough to justify wholesale internment. B. The Fungibility

ofAsian Enemies The assumptions made about Japanese Americans

on the basis of their national origin were extended to other Asian
Americans on a racialized basis. This was particularly ironic, given that the
national origin of these other groups often pitted them squarely against the
Japanese. Korean Americans had a particularly hard time during World
War II because Korea was fighting the Japanese invasion and
occupation, yet Korean Americans were often treated as if they were
Japanese. Even the U.S. government, in the 1940 Alien Registration
Act, identified Korean immigrants as Japanese subjects-because Korea
was occupied by Japan-and after the United States declared war on Japan, Koreans
were classified as "enemy aliens.",83 Because the Chinese were allies of the United
States during World War II, efforts were made to distinguish Chinese from Japanese.
To help with this process, the December 22, 1941 Time Magazine printed the
following explanation, accompanied by pictures of a smiling, friendly Chinese and a
stem, unfriendly Japanese: HOW TO TELL YOUR FRIENDS FROM THE JAPS: Virtually
all Japanese are short. Japanese are likely to be stockier and broaderhipped than
short Chinese. Japanese are seldom fat; they often dry up and grow lean as they
age. Although both have the typical epicanthic fold of the upper eyelid, Japanese
eyes are usually set closer together. The Chinese expression is likely to be more
placid, kindly, open; the Japanese more positive, dogmatic, arrogant. Japanese are
hesitant, nervous in conversation, laugh loudly at the wrong time. Japanese walk
stiffly erect, hard heeled. Chinese, more relaxed, have an easy gait, sometimes
shuffle. As Ronald Takaki says, "Previously maligned as the 'heathen

Chinee,' 'mice-eaters,' and 'Chinks,' the Chinese were now friends

and allies engaged in a heroic common effort against the 'Japs." ' 85
But this bifurcation did not last long. In 1949 Mao Zedong's army

prevailed in the civil war in China, and the Chinese became part of
the "red menace." Chinese intervention in the Korean war fueled
anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States, and the Chinese were no
longer a favored minority. The new peril was seen as yellow in race and red in
ideology ... In late 1950, Congress passed the McCarran Internal Security Act, which
provided for the internment of Communists during a national emergency.
Authorizing the Attorney General to detain all persons for whom there was
"reasonable ground" for believing they would "probably" engage in espionage or
sabotage, this law became an ominous and menacing reminder to the Chinese:
what happened to the Japanese on the West Coast during World War II could happen
to them during the Cold War.8r Asian Americans participated in the United States'
military efforts and Asians were allies as well as enemies in each of these situations.
The United States supported Chiang Kai-shek's government in Taiwan, and fought
with the South Koreans in the Korean War. But this did not seem to matter much.
The stereotypes which portrayed Asians in these conflicts as evil and inhuman
affected the perception of all who were raced as Asian. 87 The same pattern was
seen during the war in Vietnam. Although many of the refugees from Southeast Asia
now residing in the United States were forced to flee their countries precisely
because they supported the United States, they have borne the brunt of the

negative images of Asians-as-enemy promoted by the war in

Vietnam. As Cynthia Lee notes, "Ironically, the reason America fought in
Vietnam was to protect the Vietnamese people from the
Communists (who were also Vietnamese). Somehow, all Vietnamese
people came to be seen as the enemy by many American soldiers."
88 And, one might add, by many other Americans. Southeast Asians in the
United States are often treated as if they are fungible with other
Asians.89 And their presence, combined with the traumatic
experiences brought to American society through the Vietnam War,
has resulted in yet another enemy image that is imputed to all Asian
Americans. According to a thirteen-year-old Tibetan now living in the United
States, They call me names like "nip" and "gook."... [W]e Asians need to stick
together. Some of my best friends in our gang are Chinese. It's strange to have
Chinese friends when my family has been treated so badly by the Chinese, but this
is America-I gotta live here with my own karma. Some skinhead doesn't care
whether I'm Tibetan or Chinese. He just wants to stomp my head. 0 The portrayal

of Asians as the enemy in virtually all recent armed conflicts

involving the United States has contributed to the perception of Asian
Americans as foreign. Groups identified as Asian can be distinguished on the
basis of nationality, with one group praised and another vilified through racialized
stereotypes. 91 However, because the stereotypes rest on racial imagery they can
then be turned against any of the other subgroups of the "Asian race." Today,
despite the extensive legal, governmental and social acknowledgment that

the internment was wrong, popular imagery still reflects the World
War II portrayal of Japanese Americans as the enemy, reinforcing

the conclusion that something more than wartime hysteria was at

work. In 1995, during the trial of O.J. Simpson, the following text appeared next to
a buck-toothed caricature of Judge Lance Ito, a third generation Japanese American,
in what was described as a "spoof' on the legal pad used by Simpson: Ito, Ito, Bag of
Fritos Hiroshima, Nuke Judge Ito Banzai, Banzai, Nagasaki, Use His Head for
Backyard Hockey! Also confusing Japanese Americans with the actions of the
Japanese government, in 1988 Senator Jesse Helms argued that reparations should
not be paid to Japanese Americans unless the Japanese government compensated
the families of Americans killed during the attack on Pearl Harbor. Keith Aoki notes:
From precipitating the breakup of the Beatles to bringing the U.S. auto industry to
the brink of disaster to flagrant piracy on the global information superhighway to
"sneak attacks" on the Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich's mother to
perpetuating revisionist history (gasp) by suggesting that the fiftieth anniversary of
the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki may be something less than an
unalloyed moment ofjoyous patriotism, the "Orient" and "Orientals" as a source of
threat have never been very far from the American consciousness. One

pervasive theme in this "enemy" imagery is the conflation of military

threat and economic competition . Frank Wu refers to "the threat of 'Japan,
Inc.,' the so-called 'Pacific Century,' and the rise of the East and the decline

of the West" as the "contemporary counterpart" of the yellow

peril.95 The following section addresses some of the economic incentives for
portraying Asians as foreign.

US discourse surrounding China has historically been

characterized by yellow peril where the demonization and
construction of China as a threat directly translates into
physical violence against Asian bodies. As such, we refuse to
answer the resolutional question that invites us to debate
China war and to participate in this pandemic, so familiar to
the debate community, of constructing China as a demonic
aggressor.
Lyman 2K (Stanford M., Robert J. Morrow Eminent Scholar and Professor of Social
Science, Florida Atlantic University, The "Yellow Peril" Mystique: Origins and
Vicissitudes of a Racist Discourse, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and
Society, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Summer, 2000), pp. 683-747,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/20020056.pdf, accessed 6/28/16) rz

THE YELLOW PERIL AFTER 1945: THE REEMERGENCE OF CHINA

In the

five-

decades since the Second World War

course of the nearly

and-one-half
has ended,?
except for a brief period in the 1970s and early 1980s when an economically expanding Japanese economy and a very large U.S.-Japan trade
imbalance216reawakened fierce Japanophobic passions that had seemed to have been repressed for good by the atomic bombs that fell on Hiroshima and

China,
or, rather, the Peoples Republic thereof, has been moved into that place in the pantheon of
U.S. threatening yellow peril nations. The wars that the United States fought
Nagasaki,217or which only occasionally emerged from their slumberous state on annual anniversaries of the bombing of Pearl Harbor,218?

in Korea and Vietnam were in one sense surrogative conflicts, i.e., aggressions
and counter-aggressions pitting the evils, committed or anticipated,
by the USSR?sometimes thought of as a non-European, even Oriental, empire?and Mao's
China against America's emergent status not merely as the single most important world power, but
also, as the global defender of Western democracy .221 Unlike American Japanophobia, which
tended to organize itself around either fears of invasion, worries about California's farmlands and fisheries, or apprehensions about an "unfair" trade war,

today's Sinophobia is caught up in the unresolved questions about U.S.China trade whether commerce should be linked to China's record on
human rights and to suspicions about the aggressive aims of the
People's Republic .

222

sovereignty

With China's

recovery of Hong Kong from Britain,223 Macao from Portugal,224 and

continuing pressure for the restoration of its

Chinese influence,"
is seeping into more and more of Asia
With the firing and
arrest of Wen Ho Lee, whose indictment accuses him of
intent to secure an advantage to a foreign nation," the elements of a revived yellow peril imagery
have found a point of focus
it has been reported both scholars and students from China are finding it
more difficult to obtain visas for entry into America
Allegedly, these intellectuals and
scholars
are potential risks to America's national security
MISSIONS, MARKETS AND
MARXISM: AWAKENING AMERICA TO THE CHINESE DRAGON So long as China appears to beckon to America with a
promise of 400,000,000 customers, docile but hard-working people who will be willing converts to both
free-market commerce and faith-driven Christianity the threat of its people, culture, and armaments to
the security of the U S is lowered. However, since the 1920s a falling off of missionary endeavor and the
rise of nationalism and communism have undermined the earlier sanguine outlook
Underlying the notes was the assumption that the ancient Chinese empire was
unable to be its own doorkeeper
thirty years later the Open Door and
the other principles are seen to be not principles of cohesion but of division They are in practice
policies of intervention, essential neither to prosperity nor to peace
little more than the old
imperialism with a new name.
the Qing emperor's representatives had
been forced by Great Britain, France, and the U S to sign the first "unequal treaties"
the long-term patterns of Western history as they impinged upon China contrib uted to the
destruction more than to the creation of any observable rhythm in the Chinese social process."
because of China's failure to
meet the West
on equal terms it had, from the time of the treaties until 1943, been a part of that "treaty system
which had been created to serve as a vehicle for British and other Western trade diplomacy, and
evangelism in Chin
The burning question of the moment Fairbank believed,
was how to integrate into a world community one-fifth of the human race whose social heritage is
essentially at variance with that of the West
However, even if there were
a
renewed intellectual effort at understanding how China's trade and diplomatic history had gotten both
it and the U S into such difficulties either would be sufficient to halt the revival of the once slumbering
Chinese dragon.
FROM ASIATIC COOLIES TO ARMED ENEMY Hostile anti-Chinese remarks had
been noticed during World War II, where Kuomintang soldiers ought side by side with troops from the
US
Ordered not to use the term "Chink" to refer to America's Chinese allie the U.S. "G.I.'s" turned
to the ethnophaulism "slopey"
adding after the Korean War
the term "Gook,"
analyst of
the Second World War in Asia and American images of ethnoracial peoples,
explained the wartime rise of anti-Chinese prejudices thus:
a long-lingering image of Chinese soldiers as a "human
sea" of Asiatic coolies incapable of either combat artfulness or techno-military skills would begin to
give way in the face of Chinese military successes in the Korean War. Before the Korean War ended
the new image of the Chinese warrior and foe became something more than a vision of vast numbers of
massed barbarians akin to the Mongol hordes These were Mongol hordes with big guns and jet aircraft
and a growing number who knew how to use these weapons with precision and skill."
1950
apprehension about a Chinese military incursion into Vietnam
was a principal fear
over Taiwan,225 "

in the words of Robert D. Kaplan, "

possession of the United States,227 and an arena long held to be of strategic importance to the West.

."226 Further, both China and Taiwan have established footholds on the Panama Canal, no longer a

subsequent

acting "with

228

. Since then,

n universities and colleges.

postgra dute

;229 while new revelations about Chinese being smuggled into the United States via Hong Kong are alleged to herald "a new and troubling trend."230

or more

also

nited

tates

both

. Pearl S. Buck (1892-1973), born to missionary parents and a missionary herself unt il conditions in C hina led to her outspoken crit ique of the West's default on it s humanit arian obligations,232

had, by the early 1930s, worried over the future of Protestant ism in Asia: How much will remain of Christianity in the future of the Far East it is impossible to tell . . . There is in the Orient as in the Occident a genuine spiritual hunger ... In the midst of eager, ex perim ental yout h the Christian Church cont inues to proceed in the main with formal and uninspiring creeds and forms, and communism and People's Movements are supply ing this idealism . . . [I]t may be that... the strength of communism will be the next chief cultural missionary movement in the world. No one can say.233 In the same year and published in the same volume of essays in which Ms. Buck's essay appeared, Ty ler Dennet offered a stinging critique of what had been the cornerstone of American foreign and trade policy with C hina since 1899, that of the "Open door": The . . . Open Door notes of John Hay, American Secretary of State, in the last year of the

last century . . . sought to secure the volunt ary assent of the trading nations ... to the principle that the trade of C hina should remain subject to the conditions of free competit ion for all nations . . .

, patently correct,

. . . McKinleyism, in which the Open Door and the integrity of China doctrines were the initial chapters, contem plat ed a polit ical world of harmonious states held together by enlightened self-interest . . . The idea was sensible enough, but it could not be realized ... In the world as we find it

.. .

. . . [ T]he Open Door principle is likely to turn out to be

234 Two decades later, John King Fairbank, perhaps America's leading authority on C hina, would apply a different twist to the matter in his reexamination of the sociocultural and ideological changes that had occurred in C hina in the one hundred years since

nited

tates

(1842-1844). His analysis stressed the ignorance, indifference, and confusion of the Chinese leaders who had had to deal with the incursions made by the West.235 He

concluded that "

236 In contrast, he asserted, the same century had witnessed an entirely

different history of modernizat ion for Japan: "Japan . . . had a patriot ic and adaptable ruling class. C hina did not. Japan had the medieval tradition of the samurai as a basis for modern chauvinism. The early bankers of Osaka and Toky o were forerunners of the modern Zaibatsu. By the nineteent h century, Japan . . . was a nat ion somewhat like Western nat ions, while the Middle Kingdom was a state of a different polit ical species altogether."237 Thus, precisely

fit into a pattern comparable to that of Japan, as well as its "inability to

,"238

.. .

a. . . ,"239 a system which, while it contrasted fundamen tally wit h the "preceding millennia of the [C hinese empire's] tribute system . . ., contrasts. . . less sharply wit h the new international order of commu nism of which China has become a part."240

"

."241 The issue was made more urgent, he observed, by "the fact that this effort is currently being made under the banner of communism . . ."242

nited

tates

to occur a respiritualized C hrist ian missionary movement in China, or

,n

Its awakening was once again said to be imm inent .243

in fact

in those very areas

nited

tates in the struggle against Japan's im perialist advance.

s,

, or perhaps invented

Pacific area or the Far East).244 Harold Isaacs, a searching

(derived, perhaps, from "slope-eyed" or "slope-headed"),

the onset of

both the Chinese revolut ion,245 the nature and consequences of

and continuing into the Vietnam War,

(which at one time referred to Filipinos and would become a feature of military slang designating any non- white person in the

,246

247

C onsider what happened: the prev ious direct contacts of Americans with Chinese in C hina were confined to a small number of missionaries, officials, businessmen, scholars, and students. There were abrupt ly widened to include about a quarter of a million young Americans drawn from a cross-sect ion of the whole American populat ion. This large and significant body of men emerges from the

experience nursing v iolent prejudices. They ret urn to their homes attributing to the Chinese people as a whole all the brutality and venality and ugly viciousness of C hina's ruling cliques, its big and small officials, its generals and many of its soldiers, its exploiters. They bring to the tradit ionally amorphous American feeling of sympathy for China a sharp and bitt er and explicit contradict ion.248 However,

"

," Isaacs observed,

"

among them

considerable

, then in conflict with France,

249 Moreover according to a now declassified CIA memo randum dated December 29,

in the U.S. int elligence community: "The C hinese Communist regime is already furnishing the Viet Minh materiel, training and technical assistance . . . The intervent ion of

China's threat: To accept

Mainland Chinese domination in Asia would be to look forward to
conditions of external domination and probably totalitarian control,
not merely for twenty years but quite possibly for generations . . . But
C hinese C ommunist troops in force in support of the Viet Minh would render the military posit ion of the French untenable . . . Direct intervention by Chinese C ommunist t roops may occur at any time . . . The st rong probability is that the loss of Indochina to Communist control would mean the eventual loss of all mainland Southeast Asia."250 When by 1966, the much-feared Chinese inv asion of South Vietnam had not occurred, William P. Bundy provided a more nuanced variat ion of

essentially we are dealing here not with the power of ideas but with the power of subversive organization?perhaps the one field in which Communist China has shown real innovation and
skill. . .251 The awakened dragon was once again, as in the days of the Boxer uprising, about to be perceived as "cruel and revengeful."252

Suspicions

about the real aims of Chinese in America had been rekindled after
the outbreak of the Korean conflict and would become even sharper
during and after the Vietnam War. When, during the first year of the Korean
struggle, Chinese "volunteers" halted the American military advance
across the 38th parallel,253 there were roundups of alien Chinese
along the east coast of the United States.254 Although during that war both
American-born and immigrant Chinese . . . "experienced the wrath of
the larger society because they were considered 'enemy images'," Rose
Hum Lee, the first Chinese American to chair an American university sociology department, took comfort from the fact that "... they were not placed in concentration camps, as the

in 1960, "most persons of Chinese

ancestry, regardless of birthplace, feared the repetition of an established precedent:
the deprivation of civil rights and privileges, without due process of
law, confiscation of property, and imposition on them of all the onus
of enemy-subversive status."256 A few years later, in 1966, these fears were made
palpable by a rumor reported in Jerome Beatty, Jr.'s column in the Saturday Review to the effect that detention
camps were being prepared to "relocate" all the Chinese in the United
States in the hope of preventing them from sabotaging the U.S. war
effort in Vietnam.257 The policies and perspectives that would culminate in the arrest and indictment of Wen Ho Lee can be traced to the return of yellow
Japanese had been during World War II . . ."255 However, Professor Lee would point out

peril fears during the first years of the People's Republic. The fall of Nationalist China in 1949 had, in effect, threatened the status and the future of 5,000 overseas Chinese students,
professionals, trainers, government officials, and visitors to the United States with displacement and statelessness.258 By 1951, Public Law 535, coupled with the U.S. Attorney General's
collateral regulation, had relieved the plight of many of the stranded students, allowing those who had entered the United States before 1950 to complete their studies, find employment,
and-perhaps most important-convert their non-immigrant student status to that of a permanent resident.259 Nevertheless, most of the members of this aggregate suffered in numerous

these students and intellectuals

were not infrequently regarded as security risks, with some officials holding
that they should be repatriated to the People's Republic and others believing "that the
Chinese Communists would give their highest medal to the immigration department for sending back these students to Peking."261 Those Chinese students
whose visas had expired were subjected to Justice Department
interrogations with "Catch 22"-style queries not un like the infamous Questions 27 and 28 given to the already
ways from the effect of the marginality that events had thrust upon them.260 Worse,

incarcerated Issei, Kibei and Nisei by the War Relocation Authority in 1943:* The Chinese stu dents were asked which of two Chinese governments, that of Chiang Kai shek or that of Mao
Tse-tung, they supported or had some positive feelings toward. As an editorial in the April 12,1952 issue of the Nation pointed out: The Chinese student faces a particularly difficult

They have to prove

their innocence of any disloyalty to our government instead of being
presumed innocent until proven guilty, as the American system of justice prescribes.262 Fears about the knowledge and
position. If he rejects Chiang's leadership, this does not necessarily make him a follower of Mao . . . this fact is often overlooked . . .

skills that American-educated Chinese might give to China after they returned to their homeland eventually led the president of the United States to invoke a restraint on any who sought
to depart. This restraining order continued in full force until 1955, when, after numerous protests, 76 students, among the hundreds who sought to return, were permitted to depart for

Suspicions about Chinese students in America would be

renewed after China entered the "nuclear club." Concerns about
what kind of assistance Chinese scientists and technicians might be able to
give to the weaponry of the People's Republic of China became even more serious when it
became clear that Mao's regime had sought and received aid from the Soviet
Union in its drive to join the nuclear club.264 From 1950 to 1960, the USSR supplied China with eleven thousand
China.263

"advisers," who helped in the construction of 141 industrial proj ects that included building the Anshan steel complex in southern Manchu ria, developing the Sinkiang oil fields, as well as
advising on the construction of numerous railway networks, automotive and tractor factories, and hydro electric power plants. In 1955, Soviet specialists set up an atomic reactor and a
cyclotron inside China, while a score of Chinese nuclear physicists studied at the USSR's Joint Institute of Nuclear Research at Dubna. Al though an agreement of 1957 had pledged
Russian aid in supplying China with the "new technology for national defense," the developing rift in Sino Soviet relations soon prevented further assistance. After 1960, when all Russian
technicians had been withdrawn, the Chinese proceeded on their own. On October 16,1964, claiming that it was "a major contribution made by the Chinese people to the cause of the
defence of world peace," China detonated what President Lyndon Johnson called "a crude nuclear device which can only increase the sense of insecurity of the Chinese people."265 In
May, 1965, China set off a second bomb; one year later, still another, ten times larger than the second and using some thermonuclear material; five months later, a bomb that could be

on June 17, 1967, China exploded a true

hydrogen bomb of at least three megatons, i.e., a device one hundred
times more powerful than the bomb that had been dropped on
Hiroshima in 1945. Americans as well as the other Occidental nations had to recognize that the
carried on a missile; and, two months after that, a 300 kiloton device. Then,

Chinese dragon was no longer somnolent. If aroused, it could breathe thermonuclear fire. THE
YELLOW PERIL AND THE COX REPORT

For a brief moment in 1900?that is, until, five years later, Japan's startling emergence as the first

in the early
decades of the twentieth century, the Boxers were widely viewed as
'the Yellow Peril personified' . . ."266 After nearly a century-long hiatus, during which Japan took its place, China's new thermonuclear
"boxers" revived Occidental apprehen sions of the perfidy that supposedly characterized the dreaded demons from the East. " The Boxer Uprising,"
recalled Jonathan G. Utley, "proved to Americans what they had already believed , that
the Chinese were not a trustworthy people, that they valued
duplicity and deceit rather than honesty."267 China's people, once admired in Pearl Buck's
stories about their sturdy peasantry, were transformed into a Cold War enemy after 1949 .
Asian power to defeat a European state eclipsed it?China and its "Boxers" awed and frightened Americans. "In the West," observes Paul A. Cohen, "

Whereas the original view of China's threat achieved its legitimation through futuristic novels and stories, occasional American military ventures in China, labor union-inspired screeds
denouncing immigrant Chinese la borers, and, after the threat of invasion had receded, lurid tales of crime and vice in America's and England's Chinatowns, the current version finds its
legitimation in concerns over Asiatic communism, China's military and foreign policies, and?most significantly?the possibility that Chinese sci entists, technicians and engineers, working
in American laboratories, uni versities and corporations on secret, arms-related, and other thermonuclear matters, might use their positions of knowledge, authority and privilege to aid

That this belief might be rooted in some factual matters

does not remove it from the realm of racial prejudice from which it came and to which it
the People's Republic of China

belongs. Herbert Blumer has pointed out how race prejudice is formulated as a "sense of group position."268 Further, he noted, the prejudi cial process takes place in public arenas,
wherein representative spokesper sons, e.g.,"leaders, prestige bearers, officials, group agents, dominant indi viduals, and ordinary laymen," employing "tales, stories, gossip, anecdotes,
messages, pronouncements, news accounts, orations, sermons, preach ments, and the like," take up a "big event," giving it a meaning that develops the particular racist image, and
designating the position of the racial group with respect to it. The history presented in the body of the present essay, describing the formation, development, vicissitudes, and

However, in the present

situation, rather than popular fiction, Asiatic exoticisms, laborite
hostility, and sensational stories all of which have been stored away
in the American consciousness, able to be called up for both
cognitive and cathectic support whenever needed to buttress its
reappearance the onset of the still developing anti-Chinese thesis is
applications of yellow peril discourse to Asian countries and Asiatic peoples, clearly matches this pattern.

given its impetus by breaking news reports and hastily completed

on March 6, 1999, on the front page of

the usually staid and colorless New York Times, a "special report" broke the story that
would lead not only to the dismissal and later the arrest of Dr. Wen Ho Lee, but also, and
more ominously, to the lowering of a cloud of suspicion over virtually all Chinese in,
or coming to, the United States, with the headline: "Breach at Los Alamos: A
Special Report; China Stole Nuclear Secret For Bombs, U.S. Aides
Say."269 Within two days Dr. Lee was fired from his job and a new yellow peril
campaign had begun. According to Robert Schmidt, "The Times onslaught continued for five months. In a series of front-page articles . . . the Times
pressed the case against Lee, insinuating that he was guilty of various nefarious deeds."270 When, on September 7, the Times
saw fit to publish an article by a different journalist, complaining "that
the Federal investigation [had] focused too soon on the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and . . .
Wen Ho Lee,"271 it was too late. Five days earlier, Paul D. Moore, from 1978 to 1998 the FBI's chief analyst for Chinese counterintelligence,
government investigations.

Thus,

had published an op-ed essay in the Times suggesting that "China may have succeeded in devising an espionage strategy that can, over time, consistently defeat our ability to
investigate or prosecute spying offenses."272 On November 19, the San Jose Mercury News, a local California newspaper that had been skeptical of the Times' reports on Wen Ho Lee
from the beginning, published Vernon Loeb's and Walter Pincus's {Washington Post) article headlined "New spy data suggests scientist is innocent,"273 but it had little effect. Dr. Lee was
arrested three weeks later. "Several Asian-Americans," observed New York Times reporter James Sterngold on December 13, "said the event merely brought to a head four years of

FBI investigations of Chinese

Americans who had contrib uted to political campaigns were
intensified. Chinese Americans, beset with new revelations about a Buddhist Church's role in vice-president Gore's fund raising
growing anger at the way they were being treated and portrayed in the media."274

activities, and confessions by Chinese campaign workers who had collected and given improper and perhaps illegal contributions from suspicious sources to President Clinton's

began to experience what Lisa Lowe calls that feeling of being the
permanent "foreigner within," the people who, regardless of
election,275

birthplace and citizenship, are forever under suspicion about their

"true" loyalty.276 Asian American civil rights groups-including the Organization of Chinese Americans, the Committee of 100, and the Steering Committee of the
Wen Ho Lee Defense Fund began to coordinate efforts to douse what they perceived as a smouldering fire of Sinophobic race hatred.277 The capstone thus far on
the current revival of yellow peril Sinophobia is to be found in "U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People's Republic of China,"
The House of Representatives Report of the Select Committee on U.S. National Security and
Military/Commercial Concerns with the People's Republic of China, popularly
known as the "Cox Report," after Christopher Cox, the chairman of the House Policy Committee.278 Enjoying unanimous and bi-partisan
support from committee members, this report is a fine illustration of how what Richard Hofstadter calls the "paranoid style" that so often colors sudden shifts in American policy and

the report claims: The PRC [People's Republic of China]

has mounted a widespread effort to obtain U.S. military
technologies by any means-legal or illegal. . . The . . . Intelligence Community is insufficiently focused on the threat posed by PRC intelligence and the targeted
effort to obtain militarily useful technology from the United States .In June, 1993,... a former Chinese philosophy
professor, Bin Wu, and two other PRC nationals were convicted ... of
smuggling third-generation night vision equipment to the PRC . . . Wu appears
perspective279 can be conjoined with a yellow peril thematic. Among its accusations

to have been part of a significant PRC intelligence structure in the United States. This structure uses "sleeper"agents, who can be used at any time but may not be tasked for a decade or
more . . . The [PRC's] State Science and Technology Commission was involved in efforts to elicit nuclear weapons information from a Chinese American scientist. . . Peter Lee, a
Taiwanese-born naturalized U.S. citizen who formerly worked at the Los Alamos Laboratories, passed classified information to the PRC in 1977 and in 1985 ... In 1993, PRC national, Yen
Men Kao, a North Carolina restaurant owner, was arrested by the FBI and charged with conspiring to steal and export classified and export controlled high technology items to the
PRC . . . The PRC also relies heavily on the use of professional scientific visits, delegations, and exchanged to gather sensitive technology . . . Another risk in scientific exchanges is that
U.S. scientists . . . are prime targets for approaches by professional and non-professional PRC organiza tions that would like to coopt them into providing assistance to the PRC. In many
cases, they are able to identify scientists whose views might support the PRC, and whose knowledge would be of value to PRC programs. The Select Committee has received information
about Chinese-American scientists from U.S. nuclear weapons design laboratories being identified in this manner . . . The People's Republic of China . . . has stolen classified information
on all of the United States' most ad vanced nuclear warheads. . . The stolen U.S. secrets have helped the PRC fabricate and successfully test modern strategic thermonuclear
weapons . . . The PRC em ploys various approaches to co-opt U.S. scientists to obtain classified information ... : appealing to common ethnic heritage; arranging visits to ancestral homes
and relatives; paying for trips and travel in the PRC; flattering the guest's knowledge and intelligence; holding elaborate banquets to honor guests; and doggedly pep pering U.S.
scientists with technical questions by experts, sometimes after a banquet at which substantial amounts of alcohol have been consumed . . . Until at least the year 2000, the Department
of Energy's counterintelligence program will not be adequate.280 In a preface to the Cox Report, Kenneth deGraffenreid writes: "The American people should be in no doubt about this?in
important ways Communist China might pose a more dangerous threat to the United States than did the Soviet Union."m And in his "Foreword"282 to the same report, former secretary
of defense Caspar W. Weinberger reinforces deGraffen reid's point, noting, "The PRC in the past twelve to fifteen years has changed from being a friend that is anxious to have our
support in its attempt to wield a strong defense against the Soviets, to being a power that has made a conscious effort to replace the former Soviet Union as a superpower rival of the
United States." Moreover, he went on, "To achieve that goal, the leaders of the PRC will use?and have used?every available means to make Communist China our strategic equal." In
effect, Weinb erger seems to be arguing that Communist China has risen once again, as the Qing empire had over a century earlier, to be the representative yellow peril nation of the Far
East. To achieve its nefarious ends, he charges, it will steal or buy U.S. technology, oppose and block U.S. foreign policy actions, and try "to displace American influence in Asia and the
Pacific region." However, Weinberger goes further: In passages that do not men tion but will be reminiscent to all who recall how fanciful and false tales of espionage, subversion, and
fifth-column activities in the years before Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor helped fuel the justification for imprisoning without a trial the Pacific coast Japanese Americans,283 he links the
findings of the Cox Report to the 1993 People's Liberation Army publication of a textbook entitled Can the Chinese Army Win the Next War?, a work that identified the United States as
China's "principal adversary" but, he com plains, one that had not aroused President Clinton's administration to undertake any significant counteraction. Weinberger then asserts that
"the Clinton-Gore administration stands condemned of some of the worst and most damaging national security decisions of this century," and praises the Cox Report for uncovering "the
most serious breach of national security since Julius and Ethel Rosenberg betrayed our atomic secrets to the Soviet Union and Aldrich Ames sold us out for a mess of pottage."

Neither Wen Ho Lee nor any Chinese in America can take comfort
from Weinberger's ominous conclusion: "For their crime, the
Rosenbergs were executed. The crimes uncovered ... by this Report have yet to be redressed." Lest anyone might have missed the
implications for Chinese Americans of the Cox Report, Lars-Erik Nelson, in one of the few critiques of this foreboding document, points out: ". . . most irresponsibly, the Cox
report suggests that every Chinese visitor to this country, every
Chinese scholar, every Chinese student, every Chinese permanent
resident, and even every Chinese-American citizen is a spy,
potential spy, or 'sleeper agent,' merely waiting for the signal to
rise up and perform some unimaginable act of treachery."284 From all this it would
appear to be the case that Charlie Chan, the unacculturated book-and-reel-life Chinese detective who used his Oriental cleverness to help Americans to be safe from domestic criminals
and foreign spies during World War II, has died,285 and been succeeded by the real-life minions of that preternaturally brilliant scientist, Dr. Fu Manchu,?("Imagine a person, tall, lean and
feline, high-shouldered," Sax Rohmer, his creator, wrote, "with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest
him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect. . . Imagine that awful being and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril
incarnate in one man"),286?with Caspar Weinberger and the members of the committee that wrote the Cox Report self-appointed detectives who with public support, might save
America from an otherwise awful fate.

CIVILIZATIONS?

THE YELLOW PERIL IN THE "ASIAN CENTURY" A CLASH OF

As the twentieth century drew to a close Ian Buruma, a prominent writer on the relations of Asia to the West, pointed out how "silly" it now seems to recall the fears voiced in the 1970s and

1980s by "politicians, pundits and... novelists [who] rode the bandwagon, explaining how Japan, with the rest of East Asia in tow, was about to conquer the world."287 Yet, he goes on, despite the fact that "Michael Crichton's 1992
novel, 'Rising Sun,' in which predatory Japanese conglomerates virtually take over Los Angeles, looks as quaint these days as Sax Rohmer's stories about the demonic Dr. Fu Manchu," China, "the last large Asian country still trying to

It is hard to imagine how a nation's

economy can keep on growing without freedom of information,
without its citizens having the right to question their leaders and
without laws that are based on popular consent and that people will
obe
combine authoritarian government with capitalist enterprise," survives. Believing that "

y," Buruma nevertheless cannot refrain from noting that ". . . Anyone who has recently been to Shenzen, Canton or Shanghai will have seen young Chinese, computer-literate, enterprising, free-spirited and almost

frighteningly eager to take on the world." He concluded that "If only China were to follow South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand and, one hopes, Indonesia, then I would raise my glass and propose a toast to the coming

Chinese century." Buruma's glass is not likely to be hoisted in the near future. China's record on just those acts that arouse suspicion and fear has been enlarged: Two days after his essay appeared it was reported that on August 7
Chinese authorities in Beijing had arrested Professor Yongyi Song,?an applicant for American citizenship, and a research scholar from Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, specializing in the analysis of the Chinese Cultural
Revolution (1966-1976)?charging him with making "illegal provision of intelligence to foreigners." He was released six months later and permitted to return to the United States.288 Four months earlier, in a wide-ranging news report
on undocumented Chinese in Vancouver, British Columbia, James Brooke of the New York Times added still another element to allegations of Chinese deceptiveness.289 He reported that "Every year about 5,000 people flying to
Canada tear up their documents on airplanes, and then apply for refugee status. An increasingly popular practice is to apply for refugee status, and then disappear during the one year review period. That abuse has increased 20-fold
during the 1990s, reaching 4,203 docu mented cases last year . . . Most are presumed somehow to have sneaked or been smuggled across the border to the United States." Six days after Buruma's essay appeared, the New York
Times reported on a new wrinkle in smuggling Chinese into the United States-hiding them in the containers used on cargo ships that ply the Pacific, crossing from Hong Kong to port cities in Washington and California.290 Further, in

China and the United States are likely to be the

two dominant world powers during the twenty-first century. It is
imperative that these two continental giants learn to live and work
together productively and cooperatively."
two essays designed to lessen Sino-American tensions?(e.g., "

291)?David Shambough de scribes China's military capability?(e.g., "Its current weapons

inventory remains ten to twenty years or more behind the state of the art in almost all categories")292?in a manner that, unintentionally, to be sure, could exacerbate adherents of the Cox Report to even greater heights of concern
about Chinese attempts at theft and espionage. However, in two "human interest" stories about ordinary Chinese?one, a by-lined item in the morn ing edition of the New York Times, January 2, 2000, reporting that cat nabbing has
become a problem in Beijing because "some Chinese pay good money to eat cat, in a Cantonese dish called Dragon and Tiger Fight, which combines the meat of snakes and cats"; the other, a report on the 82,000 rural migrants in
Beijing who are forced to root through the garbage to avoid starvation and who live in constant fear of apprehension by the police, harassment and deportation to the countryside from which they have fled.293?the "dragon" has
been, for some, cowed, while the "tiger" is once again regarded as weak as its "paper" icon. Will it arise, reassert its strength, and retaliate? In academic western post-cold war analyses-as well as in instances of published fiction in
the United States of the 1930s* and, more recently, in samizdat and new fiction in both the PRC and Taiwan-there have appeared modern civilizational variants of a revived yellow peril discourse. In 1993, Samuel P. Huntington's "The
Clash of Civilizations"294 announced that "World politics is entering a new phase . . . [T]he fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among
humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural." Although he allowed that "Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs," Huntington insisted that the "principal conflicts of global politics will

he
projected a future in which the clash of these civilizations will occur
at both the micro-and macro-levels
occur between nations and groups of different civilizations." Positing the existence of "Western, Confu cian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and possi ble African" civilizations,

. At the former, "adjacent groups along the fault lines between civilizations [will] struggle, often violently, over the

control of territory and each other"; at the latter, "states from different civilizations compete for relative military and eco nomic power, struggle over the control of international institutions and third parties, and competitively
promote their particular political and religious values." China, Huntington argues, as a "Confucian" civilization, is already involved in a conflict with the West over cultural differences and in terms of control over "nuclear, chemical and
biological weapons, ballistic missiles and other sophisticated means for delivering them, and . . . guidance, intelligence and other electronic capabilities." The greatest danger to the West-for Huntington sees the basic clash as "the
West versus the rest" of the civilizations-would arise if?reminiscent of William W. Crane's short story, "The Year 1899," which, of course, Huntington does not acknowl edge-a Confucian-Islamic coalition brought their combined military
power to bear on the Occident. Such a coalition is already in its nascent state, he believes. Huntington does not favor intercivilizational warfare; rather he warns that the West "will increasingly have to accommodate . . . non Western
modern civilizations whose power approaches that of the West but whose values and interests differ significantly from those of the West. . . ." However, he believes that the Occident will have to "maintain the economic and military
power necessary to protect its interests . . ., to develop a more profound understanding of the basic religious and philo sophical assumptions underlying other civilizations . . . , [and] learn to coexist with the others." He does not say
how these necessities are to be obtained. Huntington's thesis has evoked a chorus of critiques, most of which are beyond the scope of the present essay.295 In the PRC, however, the People's Republic has of late been novelized as,
respectively, a fearsome yellow peril or as a triumphant survivor of global conflicts. Thus, in a startling response to Huntington's claims, Wang Xiaodong, an editor of the PRC journal Strategy and Management, writing under the
pseudonym Shi Zhong, not only denied that China was a Confucian civilization, that China sought to Confucianize the world, or that the clashes between China and the United States were anything other than competitive struggles
over which nation had the economic strength to dominate Asia,296 but, also, in the process of developing his argument, quoted from an essay that had been appended to the 1991 samizdat three-volume novel, Huanghuo, (Yel low
Peril) by Bao Mi (pseudonym for Wang Lixiong).297 The novel provided a new focus for a Chinese yellow peril. Banned in mainland China but published to acclaim in Taiwan, Huanghuo, said to have been inspired by the calamitous
events in Beijing in 1989, seems to imagine a degraded and distorted Chinese communism as the real peril, for, according to Geremie R. Barm?, it is a piece of futuristic fiction that foretells "the collapse of Communism in China and
the outbreak of a civil war that leads to a global conflagration ..." Its author's most outspoken contempt is directed at China's prosperous intellectuals: They might not talk like louts, but theirs is a realm of utter spiritual degradation.
They are without integrity; they crave depravity; they are shameless and thick skinned. They are always ready to sell out their principles, and they will take risks only if there's the chance of making a profit. They regard all that is
sacred with disdain and despise all ideals.298 However if Wang Lixiong sees a world-threatening yellow peril in the profit-seeking policies of the post-Mao intellectuals and the domestic and foreign policies that they are pursuing,299
another futuristic novel, Qiao Liang's Gateway to Doomsday, published in China in 1995, envisions a more sanguine yet formidable future for a thoroughly modernized techno-military China.300 Rather than being pictured as a
corrupt and greedy nation, or one whose armies threaten the peace of the world, Qiao Liang's China seems to be possessed by the Hegelian spirit of history.301 Set as the millennium dawns,

has become an economic giant

this China

, a veritable symbol for worldwide hope for an end to conflict. A Chinese computer genius, attached to the People's Liberation

Army and aided by his half-Russian, Bloody-Mary-consuming lover-who has the power to divine the future but only when she is in the midst of coitus?develops an apocalyptic computer virus "like AIDS" that infects all the world's
computers except China's. Having disabled the global network, China assumes a benevolent sovereignty over it. The conclusion to this melodramatic novel takes place at the female protago nist's funeral, where there is echoed the
sign-off call of an astronaut who, like Hegel's Owl of Minerva, is circling the globe?"Good night America . . . good morning to the East. Good morning Asia." Should he read these two books from wherever his place is in the afterlife,
Kaiser Wilhelm might smile in recollection of his own prescience.*

DONE?

CHINESE AMERICA AND THE YELLOW PERIL: WHAT IS TO BE

In the last year of the nineteenth century, Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Spring Rice, a British diplomat, boasting, "Together . . . the two branches of the Anglo-Saxon race . . . can whip the world."302 A few years

first China, then Japan, then

China again would rise up in America's public consciousness as a
threat to the West
and the U S in particular In each era of this
yellow peril mystique Americans of Asian heritage, whether
immigrant aliens or native-born citizens, would suffer outrages
directed against their character, culture, opportunities, and, often
enough, their very lives. Whether cast as members of a "race," a
"civilization," or a "culture," Asian Americans are treated as bearers
of
ineradicable traits that, are
assumed to be "inherited."
later, he was not that sure. And neither were the U.S. presidents who came after him. For the next one hundred years

in general

nited

virtually

tates

at least implicitly

Thus,

Professor Huntington asserts that civilizational "differences are the products of centuries"303 and that cultural differences are "far more fundamental than differences among political ideologies and political regimes."304 For
Huntington, as Robert G. Lee has pointed out in his thoroughgoing critique of the "clash of civilizations" thesis,305 Asian Americans, together with all those representatives of other non-western civilizations residing in America, are
imagined to threaten the U.S. with "de-Westernization." This is a fate so terrible, Huntington-sounding very much like Homer Lea?warns, that "if Americans cease to adhere to their liberal democratic and European-rooted political

it is the Asian
American victims of individuals and groups that have been moved to
murderous action who have become the real martyrs to such
apprehensions.
Lee summarized some of
lethal attacks that
have occurred since the re-emergence of the yellow peril in the
American mind-life and the imposition of what he calls the "mere
gook rule," .e., the rule that any Asian American is
worthy of
extermination Most notorious have been the murders of Vincent
Chin in Detroit; Navorze Mody, an Indian American, in New
Jersey;. . . Vandy Phorng, a Cambodian American, in Massachusetts
ideology, the United States as we have known it will cease to exist and will follow the other ideologically defined superpower [the Soviet Union] on the ash heap of history."306 However,

Robert G.

has

the most

of the

a "gook"

in

Jim Loo a Chinese American, in North Carolina and five Cambodian

and Laotian American children in a Stockton, Calif
Hung
Trong, a Vietnamese American, in Los Angeles
1987;

., schoolyard, in 1989;

in 1996 . . ., [and] the killings of scores of Asian American shopkeepers and

cabdrivers ... [as well as] twenty-five Korean American shopkeepers . . . killed by non-Korean assailants [in the two years before the Los Angeles riot of 1992].307 And, what is to be done? Rose Hum Lee, writing in 1960, after the

the national security fears about

China and America's Chinese had revived a new yellow peril
Korean conflict had ended but before the Vietnam War, the temporary competitive advantage of Japan, or

, thought that "Now is the

most auspicious time [for Chinese residing in the United States] to strive for total and unreserved integration into the American society" and put the burden of accomplishing this on the Chinese themselves: "Regardless of where the
peoples of the United States of America originated, they must strive to fit in to the new social climate which emerged in American society and the world after World War II."308 Forty years later we can see that such a program, even

Even after being designated as

one element of the Asian American "model minority,"
if it is desirable?and some of the new multiculturalists have registered their dissent from it?has not been effected.

309 a veritable role model for other ethnoracial

groups experiencing race prejudice, discrimination, and poverty,

Chinese Americans discover that in times of crisis

they are thrust back into the special category reserved for internal

The idea of America, or the entire Occident for that

matter, being in peril from the "yellow" people has something of a
"geological" character. It is deeply embedded in the Occidental
consciousness of itself a consciousness that, until recently, took
"whiteness" to be a fact of nature
and
"Orientalism" to be its utter and absolute antithesis It is an all-tooneglected element in the "American dilemma" that
has not been resolved
enemies

.310

needing neither an "archaeology" nor a sociological deconstruction,311

.312

, despite numerous efforts over the past half-century,

.313 Robert Park once pointed out that "A more thorough investigation of the facts would probably show that minorities, racial, cultural, and national, have

always sought the freedom and protection of the more inclusive imperium."314 No doubt this is true, but two questions arise with respect to that claim: How is that freedom and protection to be gained? What forms of social and
cultural organization are most conducive to both liberty and security? None of the proposed processual and institutional answers to these questions-assimilation, acculturation, amal gamation, on the one hand; congregation,

pluralism, ethnic power, and multiculturalism on the other-has as yet proved either effective or become likely to be fully realized.315

The lair of the yellow peril's

fire breathing dragon is to be found in the winding labyrinth of the

American psyche.

It is one of the "idols" of the American mind in a society that, as Harold Isaacs pointed out so presciently in 1975, is "fragmenting and retribalizing ... at a much more rapid

Asian Americans, not only

Wen Ho Lee, are thus waiting for an outcome still unclear and more
than likely to be unsatisfying.
rate, certainly, than [it is] moving toward any more humane kind of humanhood in the arrangement of [its] social and political affairs."316

Chineseness
Before attempting to answer the resolutional question, we
must first pose the question of what is China and what does it
mean to be Chinese.
Chow 98 (Rey, Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature at Duke University, Can
one say no to Chinesesness? Pushing the limits of the diasporic paradigm,
Boundary 2; Fall 1998; 25, 3; ProQuest Central pg. 223) rz
William Yang was born in 1943 and grew up in Dimbulah, a small mining town in
northern Queensland, Australia. Today a celebrated pho-tographer working and
living in Sydney, he is presentedclassifiedas "a third-generation AustralianChinese." In an autobiographical account of his life, he recounts:
One day, when I was about six years old, one of the kids at school

called at me "Ching Chong Chinaman, Born in a jar, Christened

in a teapot, Ha ha ha." I had no idea what he meant although I
knew from his expression that he was being horrible.
I went home to my mother and I said to her, "Mum, I'm not Chinese, am I?" My mother looked at me very sternly and said,
"Yes you are."
Her tone was hard and I knew in that moment that being
Chinese was some terrible curse and I could not rely on my
mother for help. Or my brother, who was four years older than
me, and much more experienced in the world. He said, "And
you'd better get used to it."'
This is a classic tale of revelation that can undoubtedly be told
in countless variations and versions by many people throughout the
world, articulating the all-too-familiar experience of a subject's
harsh coming into awareness of his own, unchosen, minority status.
"Chineseness" here is the marker of that status, imparting an
externally imposed identity given meaning, literally, by a practice of
discrimination. It is the dominant culture's classificatory practice,
operating as a territorializing power highly effective in marginalizing
the other, that shapes the meaning of Chineseness here as a curse, as
something to "get used to." Yang reveals that for most of his life, he has
had negative feelings about "being Chinese." But what does his
Chineseness consist of? "We were brought up in the western way,"
explains Yang. "None of us learned to speak Chinese. This was partly because
my father, a Hukka [sic], spoke Mandarin, whereas my mother, a See Yup [sic],
spoke Cantonese, and they spoke English at home. My mother could have taught us
Cantonese but she never didfrankly she couldn't see the point." 2 This glimpse
into one ordinary family's history indicates the apparent lack of interest Yang's

parents had in transmitting their Chinese roots and cul-tural traditions to their
children. This would have been a difficult thing to do in Australia in the forties and
fifties, when the official ideology was still one of "white Australia" and
required the few nonwhite people in the country to assimilate. But at the
same time, Yang's family obviously never lost a sense of certainty

about the self-declared fact of their Chineseness. But are they

indeed Chinese? What makes them so? And how do they know?

Language
Language is a vehicle by which assimilation and failed
imitation are measured these dynamics are transmitted
through classroom walls. We disrupt nationalistic affects.
Eng and Han 2K (David L., Assistant Professor of English and Comparative
Literature at Columbia University, Shinhee, psychotherapist at the Counseling &
Psychological Services of Columbia University, A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia,
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 10(4):667700, 2000, The Analytic Press,
http://www.uib.no/sites/w3.uib.no/files/attachments/9._enghana_dialogue_on_racial_melancholia_0.pdf, accessed 6/26/16) rz
What we learn about Nelsons case is that, although his original connection to the
primary object (the mother) was through the Japanese language, this connection
was abruptly interrupted by a foreign property, English. The mothers poor
mimicry of English abandoned and revised the earliest motherson attachment, one
brokered in Japanese. As such, Nelson could no longer mirror himself from his
mother, in Japanese or in English. This estrangement from language,

native and foreign, is a double loss. Although acquiring a new

language (English) should be perceived as a positive cognitive
development, what is not often acknowledged or emphasized enough is
the concomitant psychic trauma triggered by the loss of what had
once been safe, nurturing, and familiar to the young child (Japanese).
The loss of Japanese as a safe and nurturing object reveals another
concrete way to think about racial melancholia in relation to Asian
American immigration and assimilation. In Nelsons case, melancholia
results not only from a thwarted identification with a dominant ideal
of unattainable whiteness but also a vexed relationship to a
compromised Japaneseness. Nelsons analytic situation reveals how on two
fronts ideals of whiteness and ideals of Asianness are lost and
unresolved for the Asian American subject. In both instances, language
is the privileged vehicle by which standards of successful assimilation
and failed imitation are measured. In this sense, language itself might be
thought of as a kind of stereotype, as demanding a flawless mimicry on the part of
the young Nelson, whose poor performance leads him to shame and selfabasement. Nelsons transition from Japanese to English is another example of the
negotiation between mourning and melancholia in the immigration and assimilation
process. That is, although he suffers a loss and revaluation of his mother tongue,
his transition into the adopted language (or ideal) of English is anything but
smooth. We need to emphasize that the shaming ritual to which the gradeschool teacher subjects Nelson one all too common in the Darwinian
space of the classroomis one that not merely makes his transition
into English difficult but also demonizes the mother (the mother tongue
and accent) at the same time. What was once a loved and safe object is

retroactively transformed into an object of insecurity and shame. To

the extent that the mother originally represented the safe notion of home,
Nelsons estrangement from his mother, and from his mother tongue, renders it
unheimlichunhomely, unfamiliar, uncanny.12 The relationship between language
and assimilation into national citizenry is developed in a short story by Monique T.D.
Truong (1991). Kelly is about a young Vietnamese refugee girl, Thuy-Mai, who
finds herself in the improbable space of a 1975 North Carolina classroom. Truongs
narrator writes a distressing epistolary monologue to her one and only (and now
absent) friend from that dark period of her life, Kelly. In doing so, she mimes the
melancholic logic discussed earlier. That is, an intersubjective external dialogue
meant for two parties is melancholically internalized and transformed into an
intrasubjective, interminable monologue of one remarkable for its anger and
depressed solipsism. What is an epistolary, after all, than an impassioned (but not
necessarily answered) plea to the other? Truongs (1991) narrator recalls their
grade-school teacher: Kelly, remember how Mrs. Hammerick talked about Veterans
Day? How about the Day of Infamy when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor? Mrs.
Hammerick, you know, the mayors wife always had a sweet something surrounding
her like she had spent too much time pulling taffy. . . . Kelly, you only knew that she
liked the Beths and the Susans cause they wore pink and never bulged and buckled
out of their shirt plackets. I was scared of her like no dark corners could ever scare
me. You have to know that all the while she was teaching us history she was

telling, with her language for the deaf, blind, and dumb; she was
telling all the boys in our class that I was Pearl and my last name
was Harbor. They understood her like she was speaking French and their names
were all Claude and Pierre [p. 42]. Truongs story expands our discussion
of language and its effects on the constitution of good and bad
national subjects. Here, Mrs. Hammericks common language for the
deaf, blind, and dumba language from which Thuy-Mai is emphatically excluded
is used to create good and bad students within the

institutionalized space of the classroom. The Susans and the Beths,

the Claudes and the Pierres, are all, as Louis Althusser (1971) would put it,
interpellated by the mayors wife as good citizen-subjects of the
classroom and consequently the nation. Truong emphasizes how
education is a primary site through which narratives of national
group identity are established, reinforced, and normalized. At the
same time, the Vietnamese refugee, ThuyMai, is pathologized as Asian
enemy, dismissively labeled Pearl Harbor, erroneously conflated
with the Japanese, and implicitly rendered a menace to the coherence of
the U.S. nation-state. Mrs. Hammerick is, of course, not literally speaking
French. However, Truongs attention to language underscores the ways
in which an unconscious discourse of racism is circulated in the space of
the classroom as a nationalizing tract . Furthermore, as Lowe (1996) points
out, Mrs. Hammericks nationalizing tract is also a gendered discourse: The
narrators observations that the teachers history lesson addresses all the boys

further instantiates how the American nationalist narrative recognizes,

recruits, and incorporates male subjects, while feminizing and

silencing the students who do not conform to that notion of patriotic
subjectivity (p. 55). Racialized subjects, such as Nelson and Thuy-Mai, become
good citizens when they identify with the paternal state and accept, as Lowe
summarizes, the terms of this identification by subordinating [their] racial
difference and denying [their] ties with the feminized and racialized motherland
(p. 56).

Racial Melancholia
The racialized subject exists in a condition of melancholia
longing after a vision that excludes herself, ungrieved and
unrelinquished haunted by a denied legacy of violence.
Cheng 97 (Anne Anlin, Professor of English and African American Literature at
Princeton University, The Melancholy of Race, The Kenyon Review New Series, Vol.
19, No. 1, American Memory / American Forgetfulness (Winter, 1997), pp. 49-61,
http://sites.uci.edu/mariaselenebose/files/2015/10/Cheng-Melancholy-Race.pdf,
accessed 7/6/16) rz
Not only is liability transmuted to asset and reformed yet again as liability, but the
vocabulary of the card also reveals a conceptualization of health and
pathology which underlies our very perceptions of race and its
abnormalities. In Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, the

narrator, after a vexed childhood full of racial and gender traumas,

tells her mother, "I've found some places in this country that are
ghost-free .. . where I don't catch colds or use my hospitalization
insurance. Here I am sick so often, I can barely work." 1 In other
words, I am most at home and fully myself when I am not at home
and not myself. The denigrated body gives rise to a hypochondriacal
body, and the way for that body to imagine health is displacement,
unheimlich. Yet the narrator's final deliverance can only play out its very
impossibility. Her claim for such a ghost-free and thriving America can only, within
the context of her "book of grievance," reveal itself as endlessly haunted. " Getting
over" the pathologies of her childhood and origin means, in a sense,
never getting over those memories, so that health and idealization
turn out to be nothing more than continual escape, and nothing less than

the denial and pathologization of what one is. Meditating on grief

and the recollection of the dead, Freud posits a firm distinction
between mourning and melancholia. His 1917 essay on "Mourning and
Melancholia" proposes melancholia as a pathological version of
mourning-pathological because, unlike the successful and finite work of
mourning, the melancholic cannot "get over" loss; rather, loss is
denied as loss and incorporated as part of the ego.2 In other words, the
melancholic is so persistent and excessive in the remembrance of loss
that that remembrance becomes part of the self. Thus the melancholic
condition produces a peculiarly ghostly form of ego formation. Moreover,
that incorporation of loss still retains the status of the original lost object as loss;
consequently, as Freud reminds us, by incorporating and identifying with the ghost
of the lost one, the melancholic takes on the emptiness of that ghostly
presence and in this way participates in his/ her own self-denigration . As
a model of ego-formation (the incorporation as self of an excluded other),

melancholia provides a provocative metaphor for how race in America,

or more specifically how the act of racialization , works. While the formation
of American culture may be said to be a history of legalized exclusions
(Native Americans, African-Americans, Jews, Chinese-Americans,
JapaneseAmericans .. . ), it is, however, also a history of misremembering

those denials . Because the American history of exclusions,

imperialism, and colonization runs so diametrically opposed to the
equally and particularly American narrative of liberty and individualism,
cultural memory in America poses a continuously vexing problem: how to remember
those transgressions without impeding the ethos of progress? How to bury the
remnants of denigration and disgust created in the name of progress and the
formation of an "American identity"? Those subjected to abjection hover on

the edges of the dominant progressive narrative as objects at once

ungrieved and unrelinquished . The invisible but corporeal body of
Ralph Ellison's protagonist in Invisible Man offers an excellent dramatization
of the minority as the object of white melancholia. In the opening scene,
his is the invisible body that the white man literally "bumps into," a forgotten ghost
who refuses forgetting, a lack-of-presence that chokes the white man.3 One might
say the latter ran into the bodily remnant of that which he has killed. We recall the
novel's figure of progress, Mr. Norton, a white patron of the southern Negro college,
who forgets the presence of the Invisible Man next to him in order to
monumentalize him, who cannot see the young black man driving him but sees in
the other's face his own "destiny." As a sponsor of Negro education, Mr. Norton
builds a monumento the "progress of history as a mounting saga of triumphs"4 on
the ghostly bodies of young black men. With examples like this it is not difficult to
conceive of dominant white identity in America as melancholic. In addition, Toni
Morrison has, with a different vocabulary, suggested that the American

literary canon itself is a melancholic corpus, proposing "an

examination and reinterpretation of the American canon, the founding
nineteenth-century works, for the 'unspeakable things unspoken'; for the ways in
which the presence of Afro-Americans has shaped the choices, the language, the
structure-the meaning of so much American literature.' 5 The canon is a
melancholic corpus because of what it excludes but cannot forget. The AfroAmerican presence, Morrison concludes, is "the ghost in the machine" (11). But
what about the minority? Can they be melancholic too? If so, who and what are they
forgetting in order to remember? If we were to exhume, as Morrison suggests, the
buried body in the heart of American literature, what exactly is the nature of the
"presence" that would be uncovered? What would be the morphology of
ghostliness? Figuring the minority has its difficulties. We understand that reparative
and redemptive tendencies underlie much of the intellectual and material interests
in "the minority." Yet as both the "race card" and the Kingston examples made clear,
there is more than a little irony, if not downright counterproductivity, in the effort to
relabel as healthy a condition that has been diagnosed, and kept, as sickly and

aberrant. Melancholia can be quite contagious. After all, it designates a

condition of identity disorder where subject and object become

indistinguishable from one another. The melancholic object, made neither

dead nor fully alive, must experience its own subjectivity as

suspension, as excess and denigration-and in this way, replicate the
melancholic subject. With Kingston's narrator, we see the "good" cultural
melancholic par excellence: one who longs after a vision of herself that
excludes herself. This pathological euphoria , however, merely assents to
the dream of multiculturalism : a utopian no-place where the

pathologies of race and gender miraculously heal themselves. The

very idea of the melting pot serves to celebrate assimilation while continually
remarking difference. It is startling how often in ethnic and immigrant narratives we
find overidealization and euphoria in place of injury. In Flower Drum Song, a
classically bad Hollywood representation of ethnic conditions, we actually get to see
the minority, and specifically the immigrant, celebrated as illegality, that which
came in but cannot be admitted. Produced in the wake of the repeal of the Chinese
Exclusion Act in 1943, this movie (as well as its Broadway predecessor) aims to
promote assimilation and reflect a new, positive image of Chinatown across
America.6 But what exactly is the face of this new citizenship? In the opening
sequence, we find the two main characters, the young woman Mei Li and her father,
stowed away on a boat that docks in San Francisco. When Mei Li offers to sing a
"traditional Chinese song" (that Rodgers and Hammerstein creation "A Hundred
Million Miracles") on the streets of San Francisco for money, the father worries about
the propriety of such performance and warns, "It is unlucky to start in a new country
by breaking the law." The irony-that the old man is anxious about breaking civic law
when he has already flagrantly broken the larger law of immigration-highlights a
deeper double bind within "naturalization": to survive, the stranger who has violated
the law must also be an ideal citizen, one who embodies the law. As he sails through
San Francisco's Golden Gate, the father simultaneously becomes both the illegal
alien and the model minority. Furthermore, illegal status turns out to be the very
solution to this national morality play. In the finale, after despair and frustration, Mei
Li finally lights upon a solution to free herself (and her real object of affection) from
the binds of an arranged marriage. On the threshold of that undesired marriage
ceremony, she announces to her newfound American friends: "I must confess ... my
back is wet!" She declares her own abject status with barely suppressed joy. In other
words, only by exposing herself as an object of prohibition can she achieve the
particularly American dream of the freedom of marrying for love; only by assenting
to illegality can she hope to acquire ideal citizenship. Her public confession and selfindictment anticipates the naturalization process, where one acquires

citizenship in a rhetoric of rebirth predicated on selfrenunciation

("Do you swear to give up..."). In fact, the one character who may be said to
be an instance of "good" assimilation in the movie-Helen the seamstress, who
seems to weave effortlessly together both her Chinese heritage and American styleis also the classic odd woman out, whose "just-rightness" no one chooses. The

choices of the "right" kind of love, the "right" kind of beauty, and the "right" kind of
girl in this movie turn out to be a lesson about the right kind of citizenship. And
those who finally attain this national ideal are precisely those marked as prohibited
by law. More than a haunting concept in America, the "minority subject"
presents a haunted subject . Minority identity reveals an inscription

marking the remembrance of absence. Denigration has conditioned its

formation and resuscitation. Not merely the object of dominant melancholia, the
minority (in this case, literally an impossible subject, the illegal alien) is also a
melancholic subject, except that what she renounces is herself . In the

landscape of grief, the boundary between subject and object, the

loser and the thing lost, poses a constant problem. Even Freud's idea of
a proper mourning begins to suffer from melancholic contamination. In order for
proper mourning to take place, one would have to be already, somehow, "over it."
For Freud, mourning entails, curiously enough, a forgetting: "...profound
mourning. does not recall the dead one."7 Upon a closer look, the kind of healthy
"letting go" Freud delineates goes beyond mere forgetting to complete

eradication. The successful work of mourning does not only forget,

it reinstates the death sentence: Just as the work of grief, by
declaring the object dead and offering the ego the benefit of
continuing to live, impels the ego to give up the object, so each single
conflict of ambivalence, by disparaging the object, denigrating it, even as it were
by slaying it, loosens the fixation of the libido to it. (emphasis added)8
Mourning implies the second killing off of the lost object. The denigration and
murder of the beloved object fortifies the ego. Not only do we note that "health"
here means rekilling a loss already lost, but we have to ask also how different

is this in aim from the melancholic who hangs onto the lost object as
part of the ego in order to live? That is to say, although different in method
and technology (the mourner kills while the melancholic cannibalizes), the
production of denigration and rejection, however re-introjected is concomittant with
the production and survival of "self." The good mourner turns out to be

none other than an ultrasophisticated, and more lethal, melancholic.

Genealogy

Disrupts Progress Narratives

Excavating the material history of the subjugated erased by
orthodox representations revealing wreckage upon wreckage
allows us to dispel the American exceptionalist myth of
progress as built on racial sacrifice.
Chang 12 (Juliana, Assistant Professor of English at Santa Clara University,
Inhuman Citizenship Traumatic Enjoyment and Asian American Literature, 2012,
University of Minnesota Press) rz

The police officers epistemological framework of looking at the

typical stuff and only looking at now limits what he can perceive
and comprehend. This is why Leilas narration follows a movement
back into the melancholic citizenship 43 past, instead of forward into
the future. Rather than unfolding into the future, that is, locating the
story in an ever-present now that is caused by, and replaces, events that move
unquestionably into the past, Bone disturbs this linear temporality of

modernity and national history. Instead of an inevitably arriving

future, it is the past that we are propelled into, a past that remains
unknown and radically open. These contrasting concepts of time correspond
to Freuds distinction between mourning and melancholia. Mourning is a
process that exemplifies progress. It acknowledges loss so that the
attachment to the lost object may be removed, and the subject may thus achieve
closure and move on. Melancholia, in contrast, signifies an improper
attachment to the past, palimpsestically keeping alive what should
be left behind. Bones lack of closure manifests this melancholic
temporality of deferral, a temporality that Leon learns from his days at sea:
Leon told us that sorrow moves through the heart the way a ship
moves through the ocean. Ships are massive, but the ocean has
simple superiority. . . . Forward and forward and then back, back
(145, emphasis in original). If normative mourning is marked by a linear arc and
resolution, Leons metaphor of the ship and ocean recognizes the

recursive nature of sorrow and affect, which may depart only to

return. In her chapter Decolonization, Displacement, Disidentification: Writing
and the Question of History in Immigrant Acts, Lisa Lowe explains how Asian
American novels prompt us to reconsider questions of history by presenting
alternatives to the realist aesthetic of historical narrative. In her reading, texts
such as Bone excavate the material histories that have been
subjugated or erased by orthodox historical representations.20 She
cites Bones reverse chronology as enabling an elaboration of
Chinatown space as a repository of layers of historical time. 21 I
would call Ngs reverse chronology, as an alternative to dominant national
history, a temporality of the remainder. Like Benjamins angel of history, to

which Lowe refers in her chapter, Bones backward gazing reader perceives
the catastrophic piling of wreckage upon wreckage.22 Ngs
temporality of the remainder acknowledges what is left behind by national

history, and what is covered over by historys transformation of racial

sacrifice into the exceptionalist myth of national democratic progress and
openness.

AT Intersubjective Relations First

The political subject and the attempt to define her rights
cannot be divorced.
Clifford 01 (Michael, Professor of Philosophy at Mississippi State University,
Political Genealogy after Foucault Savage Identities, 2001, Routledge Press) rz
The Foucault Conundrum
Putting the problem this way allows us to address some possible objections.
The first objection that I would like to consider is one which might be raised

from the liberal tradition itself. That is, traditional political philosophers may
or may not deny that they are dealing with a political subject as a pregiven
metaphysical entity. Yet even if they are assuming such a political subject ,

these philosophers might say, in the end it does not matter because
their real concern is with defining the principles of political justice
that would permit political subjects to live together in peace,
harmony, and, if possible, mutual prosperity. In fact, such an objection is
voiced explicitly by John Rawls, who says, One might say that our ordinary
conception of persons as the basic units of deliberation and responsibility
presupposes, or in some way involves, certain metaphysical theses about the
nature of persons as moral or political agents. Following the precept of avoidance, I
should not want to deny these claims. What should be said is the following. . . . If
metaphysical presuppositions are involved . . . they would not appear to be relevant
for the structure and content of a political conception of justice one way or the
other.5 From this standpoint it does not really matter how the political subject is
actually constituted, because we will always find ourselves dealing with
already-constituted, or pregiven, political subjects . The problem is to

identify and establish the political conditions necessary for

governing the subjects relations with other subjects, with
government, and with other nations. Given the real world of politics, the
best way to approach this is Genealogy and Other-Politics 153 by reference to
rights, freedoms, obligations, sovereigntyall of the elements of what have been
disparagingly labeled juridical reflections. This objection undermines itself

from within. It conceals an implicit premise that cannot be articulated

without the whole argument collapsing. This hidden premise is that
these juridical reflections, which are justified as being necessary to
addressing the real world faced by already-constituted political
subjects, can be somehow separated from the constitution, the
emergence, of the political subject ; but this is demonstrably false. Says
Seyla Benhabib, In the final analysis, conceptions of self, reason, and
society and visions of ethics and politics are inseparable.6 The

problem of showing how the political subject is constituted is not an extraneous or

purely academic enterprise. Such an analysis reveals that the juridical

reflections of the liberal tradition are themselves involved in,

contributing factors to, the constitution of the political subject. It shows
how such reflections are instrumental to techniques of subjection and domination.

Thus, the emergence of the political subject and the attempt to

define her rights, freedoms, and political obligations cannot be separated.
The liberal traditions juridical, rights-based appeals to sovereignty have been
complicitous with and inseparable from our emergence as political subjects.

AT Moral Nihilism/Inertia
Our argument is neither moral nihilism nor pure relativism, but
perspectivism. That is to say that the project of genealogy
provides us with the historical perspective and palpates new
forms of thought required to deal with our contingent facticity
and communal injustices. It is the opposite of inertia.
Clifford 01 (Michael, Professor of Philosophy at Mississippi State University,
Political Genealogy after Foucault Savage Identities, 2001, Routledge Press) rz
A variation of the first objection might take the following form: even if
everything is conceded to a Foucauldian analysis regarding the emergence of the
political subject, it is still necessary that certain rational principles of

political action be identified, to give impetus and direction to

resistance, to keep the subject from becoming immobilized by a kind of
moral inertia that results from the lack of objective normative standards against
which a given state of political subjugation could be judged. Something very like
this objection comes from Jrgen Habermas, who contends that Foucaults critique
of our subjection is so successful that it deprives us of the normative yardsticks
that would be required to get free of it.7 Indeed, this objection is very common; it is
raised by a number of critics as diverse as Nancy Fraser, Richard Rorty, Charles
Taylor, and Michael Walzer. This objection is so common, in fact, that perhaps the
dilemma that it is meant to identify deserves its own name: the Foucault
Conundrum. I agree with Honi Fern Haber that the criticism of Foucault about his
alleged lack of normative standards tends to miss the point.8 However, although
the criticism may miss the point with respect to Foucaults project, the concern that
motivates the criticism is a legitimate one. It is reasonable to desire that
political theorists, if Foucault can be characterized as such, tell us how we
ought to act with regard to the forces that subject us. 154 And,

although Foucault insists that this is not his role as an intellectual,

this insistence itself leaves Foucault vulnerable to a stronger
version of the Foucault Conundrum criticism from Alasdair MacIntyre that
challenges the intelligibility of the whole genealogical project. In the
discussion that follows I shall consider each point in turn. It is true that Foucault
closes off any transcendental appeal to reason by which we could identify what
Habermas calls yardsticks, or normative standards, since he shows that there are
only finite, historically contingent rationalities. It seems to be possible,

through genealogy, to recognize the force or compulsion of such

rationalities, but doing so seems to cut us adrift from rational
standards altogether, in the sense that we have no means by which to
condemn the powers that subject us, nothing on which to base the
judgment that we ought to resist it. Thus, we find ourselves
immobilized. We could resist a given form of rationality, but only by
putting ourselves under the subjection, the normative dictates, of

another form of rationality. Surely this is not the freedom promised by

Foucaults counter-memory. Thus, it would seem that there can be no freedom
from our subjection. However, there is a false assumption here. This

argument assumes that one must first identify a normative standard

before one can mount a resistance, and thereby get free of a mode
of subjection. It assumes that an ought is necessary to condemn a
rationality, to say that it is wrong, beforeand on the basis of whichone
attempts to get free of it. This assumption is false for two reasons. First,
it erroneously separates freedom from the recognition that one is
dominated; but since freedom, as Foucault understands it, consists
simply in the opening of new possibilities, this recognition is itself a
kind of freedom, at least in the sense of a distancing of oneself from
the necessity of ones subjection. Of course, the argument asserts
something else; it says that such a recognition is impossible without a
normative standard that allows us to see that the domination is
wrong and that one ought to resist it. However, no such
ought is required. In fact, Friedrich Nietzsche would argue to the
effect that such oughts are, if not superfluous, then at least
derivative.9 That is, an ought is always produced as a symptom
of a situation that must be dealt with (or not), but which in itself has
no moral value one way or anotheror at least no intrinsic moral value. The
moral value of a given choice extends from the context in which the choice is made
and through which an ought is articulated. Moreover, the historical

contingency of moral oughts need not count against the

rationality of abiding by them, nor should the apparent lack of
transcendental or a priori normative standards lead to moral inertia.
Such standards are always context-bound and historically
contingent, but that fact, in itself, does not count against their
legitimacy. Perhaps an analogy will help to explain this. Suppose someone
holds her hand directly above the flame of a candle. Experience tells
her that if she leaves her hand there, it will be burned. Is an
ought really necessary to tell her what to do here? Is it necessary
to say to her, You ought to remove your hand, friend, or you will be
sorry?10 She will find out what her options are in short order. But whether she
ought to move her hand or not will depend on the reasons her hand
is there in the first place; the point is that no ought is required beforehand
to tell her what she might do. Similarly, experiencethis time referring to
genealogical historycan tell us the story of dominations and
subjections. No extraneous normative or rational standards are
required to recognize dominations and subjections as such. We need only
appeal to the amoral, arational standard of freedomof open
possibilities, of possible transformations. This would not be a
transcendental appeal, since freedom is immanent to any power relation. We do not

need to get outside the situation in order to recognize our subjection. One can
recognize domination against the standard of open or closed possibilities. This
recognition, which is made possible by genealogical critique, is morally neutral with
regard to whether one ought to resist. One is faced with an arbitrary
choice, but it is no more arbitrary than the domination itself. A point
conceded by the objection we are considering (at least as I have set it up) is that
there are no transcendental normative standards; but this is a double-edged sword.
This means that there is no transcendental basis for saying that it is

better to be dominated than it is to be free. Yet one can recognize

ones subjection. When this subjection is judged against the
immanent, neutral standard of open possibilities, is it really
necessary to say that one ought to resist it? The choice, though
arbitrary, is clear: accept your subjection, or resist itmove your
hand, or let it burn. The argument erroneously assumes that unless
we can identify some transcendental normative standards, we will be
immobilized, that is, forced by inertia or lack of direction to accept
our subjection. But, in fact, it is only the requirement of such normative
standards itself that immobilizes us, since it precludes an arbitrary
response to an arbitrary situation. The reality of it is that we choose
freedom, or not, everyday. As I have already mentioned, one major
problem with criticisms of the sort discussed above is that they are
based on a misrepresentation of Foucaults project. These criticisms
are predicated on the assumption that Foucault wants to condemn
the power/knowledge regime. Because he lacks the normative
standards by which to do so, it is contended, this makes his
philosophy politically conservative. That is, we are forced to accept
our subjection with little or no hope of changing it. This is mistaken.
Foucaults object is not to condemn the network of power/knowledge
relations; his object is to expose the interplay of determining factors
constituting this network as the source of our emergence as
subjects. This exposure, this critique, has the effect of opening up new
possibilities for subjects, in the sense that the recognition and
understanding of their subjection can be used tactically in order to
resist it. Whether they will resist it or not is an arbitrary (though not
necessarily irrational) choice, and Foucault is adamant in his conviction that his
role as an intellectual is not to tell them whether they should or should not resist
it.11 His role, rather, is to show subjects where their freedom lies and to expose
points of weakness in the structures that dominate them. In this sense ,
Foucaults philosophy is far from conservative. In fact, it is

ideologically neutral, but effectually radical and activistic. Says

Foucault, My point is not that everything is bad, but that
everything is dangerous. . . . If everything is dangerous, then we always
have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to a hyperand

pessimistic activism.12 Everything is dangerousresistance as well as

submission. Resisting ones subjection involves an essential risk, not
simply in the sense that it invites the forces of retaliation against ones
insubordination, but also, and more important, perhaps, it involves the risk of
cutting oneself loose from a source of comfort and sustenance.
Relations of power are not bad in themselves, says Foucault.13
Relations of power are at play in the constitution of all that we deem
good or worthwhile in society. Thus, there is a risk, a danger, involved in
resistance; but there is also a danger in accepting uncritically and
without question our received values and political structures. Foucault
feels that the ethico-political choice we have to make everyday is to
determine which is the main danger.14 Like Nietzsche, Foucault wants to
activate an abiding suspicion. This suspicion requires a recognition of the

contingency and lack of necessity of things. But it also requires an

active engagement with the powers of subjection, not from the
standpoint of an anarchistic nihilism, but of challenging the forces that
make us what we are. This is a suspicion which courts danger, that flouts
limits, which transforms transgression from an occasion for moral condemnation
into an instrument of possible freedom. Nevertheless, any instrument may be
used for good or ill. We normally want to know how that instrument
ought to be used. In this sense, the objections from Habermas, Fraser,
Rorty, Taylor, and Walzer about the Genealogy and Other-Politics 157 apparent
lack of normative standards in Foucault are legitimate. On the other
hand, it would just be wrong to assert that Foucaults work lacks
ethical import, or even that it fails to provide some sort of ethical direction.15 In
fact, many critics suggest that the basis of such an ethics lies in
freedom.16 And yet, at present any ethical direction Foucault offers
us is largely implied. Thus, one might want an ethics where that
direction is made more explicit, where an ought is prescribed in a more
conventional sense. Still, it is not clear that such a prescription is even

possible within the discourse of genealogy; it may be that such an

ethics is precluded on genealogys own terms. In fact, before we can lay
the Foucault conundrum to rest, we have to consider a more serious
version of it that comes from Alasdair MacIntyre, who refers to the
conundrum as Foucaults self-engendering paradox. What is at
stake here is not simply genealogys difficulty in offering us
normative direction, but the rationality of the entire genealogical
project. Says MacIntyre, The insights conferred by this post-Nietzschean
understanding of the uses of history are themselves liable to subvert
the project of understanding the project. . . . Hence once again it
seems to be the case that the intelligibility of genealogy requires
beliefs and allegiances of a kind precluded by the genealogical
stance. Foucaults carrying forward of Nietzsches enterprise has thus

forced upon us two questions. Can the genealogical narrative find

any place within itself for the genealogist? And can genealogy, as a
systematic project, be made intelligible to the genealogist, a well as
others, without some at least tacit recognition being accorded to just
those standards and allegiances which it is its avowed aim to disrupt
and subvert?17 Although MacIntyre leaves open the door to the possibility that
some future genealogy might be able to answer the questions he raises in some
adequate and internally consistent way, the responses so far, he says, have only
confirmed genealogys progressive impoverishment. At first, MacIntyres
criticism may look devastating. For MacIntyre, genealogys strength
is also its fatal weakness, its successes a harbinger of its eventual failure.
That is, the genealogical critique inaugurated by Nietzsche in the nineteenth
century has been successful in subverting and undermining what MacIntyre calls the
encyclopaedic understanding of truth and the possibility of rational inquiry.
However, for MacIntyre, what genealogists like Nietzsche and Foucault
did waslike philosophical Frankensteins create and release a critical

juggernaut that would eventually turn back against its creators. 158
MacIntyre frames the self-engendering paradox of genealogy in
terms of a series of unacknowledgedand unacknowledgeable, from
the standpoint of genealogycontradictions. MacIntyre asserts that the very
intelligibility of the genealogists project rests on a commitment of the genealogist
to standards at odds with the central theses of the genealogical stance. In
particular, genealogys attempt to decenter and deconstruct the self of

Western metaphysics can make sense only to a self that is in fact

persistent and substantial.18 Thus, genealogical texts end up subverting
themselves, in the ironic sense that their success, their intelligibility, relies on
appealing to the very same sort of standards and assumptions they sought to
undermine in the first place. However, what MacIntyre refers to
negatively as self-subverting, other commentators, such as Bernd
Magnus, have called self-consuming concepts.19 These concepts are
part of the very methodology of genealogy and indeed most postNietzschean forms of inquiry. These are concepts that the genealogist

appeals to provisionally in order to critique a tradition, but which

are then subjected to the same sort of critique in order to avoid
repeating the same metaphysical gestures as the tradition they are
critiquing. For example, Nietzsche appeals to the will to power to
critique Western morality in Beyond Good and Evil. At first sight, will to
power looks like some sort of metaphysical postulate in the conventional
sense. Yet, by the end of Beyond Good and Evil, we see Nietzsche turning
his critical suspicion against his own thoughts, and in so doing,
attempting to effect their erasure.20 We see something like this selfconsumption of concepts in Jacques Derrida and his notion of diffrance, which he
says is neither a word nor a concept but which nevertheless for us remains a

metaphysical name. At some strategic point, says Derrida, diffrance

itself will have to be deconstructed.21 Something very similar is
going on in Foucault. Analogous to Magnuss idea of self-consuming
concepts, Charles Scott says that a certain kind of recoil occurs with many of
Foucaults ideas: In [The Order of Things] the knowledge developed by the

genealogical study has the effect of coiling again the various

discursive and epistemic strands and forming a springing, selfovercoming movement whereby the truth of this knowledge is
relegated to a lineage that is itself now in question.22 In fairness,
MacIntyre to a degree acknowledges this erasure or self-consumption in
Foucaults thought, and he locates it correctly, I think, in Foucaults appeal to
masks. However, he is nonetheless persistent in his suggestion that even,
or perhaps especially, this appeal to masks only underscores the
paradox: For in making his or her sequence of strategies of masking and
unmasking intelligible to him or herself, the genealogist has to ascribe to the
genealogical self a continuity of deliberate purpose and a commitment to that
purpose which can only be ascribed to a self not to be dissolved into masks and
moments.23 For MacIntyre the main problem with genealogy comes
down to the issue of personal identity, both in terms of the genealogist
having a self in the conventional sense that her own language cannot
accommodate, and also the continuity within discontinuity that such a self
implies. MacIntyre contends that behind the discourses of genealogy,
behind the masks of the genealogist, there is a shadow narrative of

heroic exploits, and that this shadow narrative points to a narrator

behind the masks, that is, it points to a stable and continuing
referent for the I.24 Moreover, it is only through the assumption
of such a continuing self that some notion of accountability makes
sense; and it is only by appeal to such a notion that the genealogist can be
held accountable, in terms of intelligibility, of being able to make sense to
herself and to others, and in moral terms, through which genealogical
thinkers such as Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man might be held
accountable for their ties to National Socialism, for example. Both of
these last points obviously have serious repercussions for whether or not
genealogy can be a viable form of political inquiry or critique, one that
doesnt compromise its own claims, either morally or epistemologically. MacIntyre
suggests that the genealogists reliance on masks, through which
the genealogist is able to employ personal pronouns but in a
provisional, highly encumbered sort of way, presupposes just that
metaphysical conception of accountability and hence of selfhood
which genealogy disowns.25 In his discussion of the genealogists reliance
on masks, has MacIntyre left something out? It is not just the
genealogist who wears a mask. Personhood, self-identity, is itself a
mask, a mask we all wear of necessity precisely to the extent that

we are persons. Benthams wax head is a symbol of that necessity as well as of

its historical contingency. The I is the mask, not that which lies behind
it. In a 1980 interview for the Paris newspaper Le Monde, Michel Foucault did
something rather unusual for a professional philosopherhe insisted that he be
interviewed anonymously. This particular interview was one in a weekly series,
extending over a period of five years, devoted to Europes top intellectuals. But this
time, at least, the readers of this series would have no name by which to orient
themselves. Why did I suggest that we use anonymity? Foucault remarks in the
interview. Out of a nostalgia for a time when, being quite unknown, what I said had
some chance of being 160 Political Genealogy After Foucault heard. . . . A name
makes reading too easy.26 Foucaults gesture says something about the way in
which a name can mark more than just a person, more even than an oeuvre, a body
of written works that transcend their author. A name represents the condensation of
an entire milieu of interpretations, critiques, sentiments, preconceptions, and
expectations. This milieu tends to determine beforehand the possibilities for
engagement with a given author or thinker. The interview in question was later
published under the title The Masked Philosopher, but Foucaults gesture of

anonymity can be interpreted as a kind of unmasking, the

stripping away of this dense and cumbrous mask designated by the
name, the milieu, of Michel Foucault. However, he does this, not in order to
reveal the real truth of his thought and work but, rather, to open
up new and different possibilities for encountering his thought.
When Foucault refused to identify himself in the Le Monde
interview, he could be construed, as I said, as unmasking himself, not in
order to reveal the true Foucault behind the mask, but rather of
making possible the formation, through discourse, of a new mask,
one that would be fashioned through the narrative engagement with
the interviewer initially and then embellished and expanded by the
larger public domain in which that discourse would circulate. Thus,
to assert that personhood is itself a mask does not rule out the
possibility of speaking of an Inor does it prevent the I from
speaking. To say that the Ithe subjectis an effect, not the agent, of
discursive and nondiscursive practices that exceed the I on all sides does not
thereby rule out the possibility that the I might speak as an I, as a
self. Obviously, it does speak. The genealogist differs from the Thomist in
rejecting the grounded or foundational, epistemological or metaphysical,
given-ness of the I. Instead, the genealogist attempts to show
how the I is given over, bound to and effected by anonymous factors
that precede it and sustain it as such. As Heidegger said in Being and Time, we are
thrown into a world which is always already there. In a similar sense, we are
always already identities, subjects, personsit would otherwise of
course be impossible to recognize ourselves as such or to anguish

over what we really are as persons. But that concession does not
entail the metaphysical assumptions regarding personal identity

that have reigned from Plato to Parfit. As for the issue of

accountability, once it is conceded that the genealogist can employ
the language of conventional selfhood on occasion without thereby
being involved in a contradiction, and since selfhood of whatever form
always presupposes a larger community informed by shared
standards both of morality and intelligibility, then it follows that the
genealogists project cannot only make sense to that community,
but that its success or failure can be judged, legitimately, by the
very same standards that the genealogist would otherwise call into
question. For the genealogist knows that while any stance is
provisional and historically contingent, intelligibilitysenseoften requires
that some stance be made. This possibility of taking a standof
appealing to standards through which an assertion is made or a conclusion is drawn
is not ruled out by the genealogist. It does not entail a

contradiction if the genealogist on occasion feels compelled to

appeal to such standards in order to render his or her own project
intelligible, in spite of the fact that the genealogist is always
suspicious of those standards, sensitive to their historicality, and
watchful of the play of heterogeneous and hegemonic forces that such
standards both stem from and perpetuate. On the other hand, the
genealogist retrieves marginalized discourses and local knowledges,
and may even experiment in genre in order to demonstrate that there
are more ways to make sense than by the quasi-Socratic method
of appealing to standards. As MacIntyre himself observes, perspectivism is
not tantamount to relativism or moral nihilism . Nor is the genealogist an
habitual perpetrator of the genetic fallacy. In fact, what the genealogist shares with
the philosopher of tradition (and not with the encyclopaedistas both are defined
by MacIntyre) is an understanding and appreciation of history, for what has come
before. This permits a kind of genealogically informed consideration

of different standards, of different normative and conceptual

schemes. Through a process of evaluative judgment based on the
experience derived from genealogical retrieval, one is able to say not
which set of standards is better in any ultimate or ontotheological sense,
but merely which one is preferable, based on an understanding of
what such schemes have committed us to in the past. On the other
hand, new ways of thinking might emerge precisely through the
genealogical critique of the old. But it is largely by the fact that we are

able to better appreciate the old that the new reveals itself, offers
itself as a choice. This no doubt is not what the Thomist philosopher has in
mind. To the Thomist, what the genealogist offers us is at best some form of meager
pragmatism. Perhaps. But, the genealogist would reply, this is not

offered as one set of standards over or against all the others, as an

option we may simply choose. Rather, the genealogist compels us to

recognize that that is all we ever had in the first place. This does not
mean that we cannot come to reasoned judgments or that we cannot be

held accountable for acting upon (or failing to act upon) those
judgments. Likewise, the genealogists recognition of the contingency
of moral stances does not mean that we must be frozen by moral inertia
or that we cannot be politically active . On the other hand, the genealogist
does tend to complicate all of these issues immensely. That is, there is no pure
form of subjectivity in the Cartesian sense, no pristine rationality in
the Platonic sense, no unadulterated notion of accountability in the
Kantian sense, no simple notion of guilt in the Judeo-Christian sense,
and, moreover, no possibility of freedom in either a positive or negative sense
that doesnt supplant one set of power relations for another . Thus,
any form of political activity that is predicated on a Cartesian,

Platonic, Kantian, Judeo-Christian, Hobbesian, or Rousseauian

understanding of selfhood or subjectivity is going to be suspect.
Nevertheless, what the genealogist shares with the existentialist is the
insight that we must deal with our facticity as it presents itself, and that
at this juncture in our history the problematizations of rationality,
accountability, and freedom are an essential feature of the matrix of
experience in which our subjectivity is at present defined. The genealogist
recognizes that necessity even as he or she points toward the
possibility that things might be otherwise.

AT Critical Pedagogy Bad

Their offense doesnt apply because we reclaim critical
pedagogy. Our affective and genealogical interrogation can
transform Asian American bodies into countersites that
challenge the liberal/problematic models they criticize. It is
specifically important for Asian students.
Yoon 5 (K. Hyoejin, Assistant Professor of English at West Chester University,
Affecting the Transformative Intellectual: Questioning "Noble" Sentiments in Critical
Pedagogy and Composition, Journal of Advanced Composition (JAC), Vol. 25, No. 4
(2005), pp. 717-759, http://www.jaconlinejournal.com/archives/vol25.4/yoonaffecting.pdf, accessed 7/5/16) rz
Here, Asian American theorists can elaborate the discussion on

emotion and identity through the concepts of racial melancholy and

euphoria (Cheng, Eng). Thus, they are poised to illuminate the various
contours and features of our shared "emotional landscapes, "as bell
hooks notes, as well as the different paths we travel through them. Asian
Americans have been affectively interpellated and constructed in
American culture along different paths than Anglo Americans or
African Americans. These paths include the complex and
contradictory discourses of democracy and citizenship. While full
discussion of these implications is beyond the scope ofthis paper, I do want to point
out some potentially productive areas for further exploration. On the point of
citizenship and subject formation, we can turn to Lisa Lowe's Immigrant Acts, where
she argues that Asian American subject formation has been imbricated in the
changing claims, requirements for and rights to citizenship that are reflected in
conceptions of nationhood, race, and ethnicity, and iDJmigration policies. Lowe
writes, "In the last century and a half, the American citizen has been

defined over and against the Asian immigrant, legally, economically,

and culturally" (4).18 744 jac Positioned as an ambivalent figure, both insider
and outsider, the Asian immigrant as would-be citizen is disciplined
through affect. In particular, Anne Cheng's analysis, in The Melancholy of Race,
of the formation of the "citizen" through affect may provide a
productive contrast to the image of the liberated citizen of critical
pedagogy. Cheng argues that the model minority subject is constructed
and maintained through a melancholic affective process, which she
describes as euphoria, the performance of symbolic assimilation
(42).19 The model minority subject is "not only assimilated but also
euphorically sings the praises of the American way" (Cheng 23).20
Despite the attempt by model minority subjects to "alleviate the
pains of exclusion" this way, the performance itself is a sign of
outsiderness (42). Euphoria is a complex and contradictory concept
that presumes the exclusion of Asians while at the same time

celebrating the possibility of ideal citizenship and belonging . AsianAmerican subjectivity is disciplined by, on the one hand, the promise of
assimilation (which inspires them to strive after it) and, on the
other, the threat of "potential failure, shame, and humiliation, notto
mention [ ... ] self-denial and self-beratement" that the impossibility of
assimilation presents (69). Thus, euphoria represents the insinuation of Asian
Americans with dominant values and their identification with the dominant subjectpraised for remaining passive and joyous, demonstrating the tenuous position of all
those who strive to belong. One of the most powerful emotionologies for
Asian Americans is the need to belong, concomitant with the
aspiration to whiteness or racelessness. 21 The emotional dispositions

expected of model minority subjects, particularly in their

attachment to the ideal of citizenship and the assumption of a dominant,
white or whitely pedagogical standard, make it an especially
seductive and fraught position, especially when bestowed with the moniker
of "honorary white" (Tuan). The model-minority subject is valorized and
held up as a model citizen and worker, and Asian women are held up as
models of femininity (Cho). The "militant optimism" and ecstatic joy of
would-be teacherintellectuals are hailed to mollify their struggle, their
dreams and hopes for democracy, equality, and justice. This
interpellation both mirrors and stimulates the melancholic euphoria
ofthe model minority in interesting K. Hyoejin Yoon 745 and complicated
ways.22 While on the surface the comparison of the model minority with the
transformative intellectual may seem untenable, when we look more closely

at the assumptions and rhetoric of critical pedagogy, we can see

how and why euphoric Asian-American subjects could possibly be the
most appropriate subjects for critical pedagogy. Critical pedagogy

discourse dovetails with and capitalizes on modelminority discourse

to discipline euphoric hope and commitment that provides a buffer or
screen between the dominant white male power structure (and its
hidden ideologies) and the disempowered student masses. In this
scenario, the model minority becomes the most appropriate
gatekeeper, one who stands in the doorway, both belonging and not belonging,
desiring inclusion and enforcing the exclusion of others, held as a
stopgap by the promise of entry and the euphoria of occupying a coveted spot in a
long queue of hopeful initiates. Critical pedagogy's rhetoric of affect

needs to be demystified as not necessarily an emancipatory force,

but as also potentially serving exclusionary and ultimately
conservative ends. Lowe's understanding of citizenship as a
simultaneous "'technology' of racialization and gendering" could
provide further insights into how to resist normalizing affective
discourses (11).23 Lowe suggests that Asian American bodies function as

countersites that challenge the Western national body and rhetorics

of citizenship and meritocracy. Asian American cultural formations
reflect a heterogeneity, showing contradictions and disidentifications with "national
fictions of identity" that "'perfor[ m]' and imagin[ e] a new subject" (53).24

An examination of the intersection between Asian American

subjectivities and critical pedagogy's discursive interpellations may
help us imagine both sets of positions in new ways. I submit that
expanding our understanding ofrace beyond the tendency to
binarize black and white, and considering race, affect, and critical
pedagogy through the lens of citizenship may prove a fruitful
endeavor: doing so may help us deconstruct the transformative
intellectual as citizen extraordinaire, imagine new subjects, and
perform new affective stances in our struggle to make meaning and exercise
agency.

Cap K

2AC
Link turn (neo)liberal subjectivity underlies the market
economy. We dismantle that.
Hong 11 (Grace Kyungwon, Associate Professor of Women's Studies at UCLA,
Existentially Surplus Women of Color Feminism and the New Crises of Capitalism,
GLQ 18:1, 2011 by Duke University Press,
http://glq.dukejournals.org/content/18/1/87.full.pdf, accessed 7/5/16) rz

World War II marked a turning point wherein the ideological alignments that
legitimated this particular nexus of power began to crumble. The postwar era of
racial capital is one marked by the emergence of a new deployment of
difference that took its place alongside the old, what Howard Winant calls racial
dualism.9 Jodi Melamed describes a postwar sea change in racial epistemology
and politics. . . . In contrast to white supremacy, the liberal race

paradigm recognizes racial inequality as a problem, and it secures a

liberal symbolic framework for race reform centered in abstract
equality, market individualism, and inclusive civic nationalism.
Antiracism becomes a nationally recognized social value and, for the first time,
gets absorbed into U.S. governmentality.10 This shift was occasioned by
the emergence of liberation movements in the mid-twentieth century that
challenged the necropolitical formations of the earlier moment, formations
articulated as both colonial violence and Jim Crow segregation. Liberation
movements of the midcentury, including decolonization movements abroad and civil
rights and black power movements (as well as corresponding movements in
Chicana/o, Asian American, Native American communities) in the United States
emerged to highlight the hypocrisies of US postwar ascendency as a global
hegemon. Melamed observes: Politicizing the depth of Western and white
supremacy, [anticolonial and antiracist movements] demonstrated that European
powers and the United States claimed to be fighting an antiracist and antifascist
war, while practicing racism and fascism against people of color in the United
States, Europe, and the colonies. . . . to define successfully the terms of global
governance after World War II, U.S. bourgeoisie classes had to manage

the racial contradictions that antiracist and anticolonial movements

exposed. As racial liberalism provided the logic and idiom of such
management, it became an essential organizing discourse and force
for U.S. postwar society and global power. (4) Racial capital
transitioned from managing its crises entirely through white supremacy to also
managing its crises through white liberalism, that is, through the
incorporation and affirmation of minoritized forms of difference. This
meant normalizing racialized populations once positioned as
entirely nonnormative. Asian American racialization is a particularly
stark example of this. Nayan Shah documents how the popular press,

politicians, census enumerators, and public health officials characterized San

Franciscos Chinatown, home to Chinese bachelor societies,

predominantly made up of male laborers because of immigration

restrictions on Chinese women, as the preeminent site of urban
sickness, vice, crime, poverty, and depravity in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries.11 These early homosocial bachelor communities
were represented as harboring perverse practices, including crossrace and same-sex intimacies occasioned by opium usage, sodomy,
prostitution, and the like. Yet by the 1940s, with the establishment
of more Chinese American nuclear families, Shah finds these same
sources working to articulate Chinese American communities as
incorporable to US society. This process was exacerbated in the wake of the
Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which incorporated a
professional preference that allowed for the migration of
professionalized managerial and technical labor from Asia in the
context of a Cold War contest over scientific progress. At the same time,
as Chandan Reddy observes, through the family preference also enacted
through this law and a subsequent 1990 amendment to the immigration code that

requires the sponsoring family to guarantee that they and those

they sponsor will not apply for welfare benefits, US capital recruited
low-waged, vulnerable labor from Asia while shifting the social
burden to the impoverished communities that could least afford
them.12 It is thus the postcolonial moment, the decolonizing moment, in the
midtwentieth century, rather than the eighteenth century as in Michel Foucaults
periodization, that brings about the possibility of affirming and
managing minoritized (racialized, sexualized, gendered) life. In the wake of
the liberation movements of the mid-twentieth century, we have seen a new form of
power that affirms racialized, gendered, and sexualized difference yet levies death
and destruction to poor, racialized, sexually deviant populations. In this era,

we see subjects with access to capital and citizenship in ways

previously unimaginable. Aihwa Ong traces the emergence of a global
Asian technological and professional class that utilizes citizenship
flexibly and that is accorded forms of pastoral care whether or not these
professionals are actually citizens of a particular nation.13 M. Jacqui Alexander
documents the creation of a class of elite global south nationalist bureaucrats that,
in the wake of decolonization, facilitates the neocolonial extraction of wealth from
the global south to the global north in such places as Trinidad and Tobago and the
Bahamas.14 Cathy Cohen describes how new categories of jobs in

social welfare, policing, and government administration created an

African American middle class in the post civil rights era that served as a
conduit for the violent disciplining of the African American poor.15
Similarly, this era also sees the emergence of homonormative gay and
lesbian identities that mark themselves as parents, tourists,
homeowners, and taxpayers, and in so doing, exacerbate the

conditions which lead to utter devaluation of poor, racialized,

sexually and gender deviant populations.16 This new form of
(bio)power is marked by the rampant proliferation of carceral and
deadly regimes enabled by the limited incorporation and affirmation
of certain forms of racialized, gendered, and sexualized
difference.17 Such differences still operate to mark the surplus of capital, but
as surplus populations as well as surplus labor. As discussed earlier, industrial
capitalism produced contradictions around surplus labor as racially, sexually, and
gender differentiated. Contemporary capitalism, however, has shifted to
center on speculative economies. If, as Marx observed, circulation of money
as capital is an end in itself, we might see neoliberal capitalism, which has been
unmoored from its already tenuous connection to production, as centrally a
speculative enterprise. While published almost a decade before the global financial
crisis of 2008, Jean Comaroff and John Comaroffs description of a decidedly

neoliberal economy whose ever more inscrutable speculations seem

to call up fresh specters in their wake seems particularly prescient
right now.18 They observe, In the upshot, production appears to have been
superseded, as the fons et origo of wealth, by less tangible ways of generating
value: by control over such things as the provision of services, the means of
communication, and above all, the flow of finance capital. In short, by the market
and by speculation (5). If there is one thing that the recent financial crisis reminds
us, however, it is that there is no such thing as capitalism sans production ,
that the neoliberal stress on consumption as the prime source of
value is palpably problematic (7). Fergusons formulation that surplus labor
is both superfluous and indispensible is useful for understanding the
contemporary production of surplus populations as nonlaboring subjects, that is, the
populations that are surplus not to production but to speculation and circulation. If
the fundamental characteristic of capitalism is circulation, rather than production,
and if contemporary capitalism has increasingly been organized
around finance capital acting in and of itself, rather than anchored
by production, todays populations are not only surplus labor but are
also merely surplus: existentially surplus. In other words, currently,
certain populations are not necessary to capital as potential sources of labor,
but instead are useful for their intrinsic lack of value. While labor
exploitation is certainly still important, certain populations are not
destined ever to be incorporated into capitalist production as labor. As David Korten
observes, global capitalism treats people as a source of inefficiency,
ever more disposable.19 These conditions require a new definition of
difference. While the nonnormativity indicated by race, gender, and sexuality still
indexes the importance of surplus labor, it is also the marker of purely surplus
populations, populations who are existentially surplus. Ruth Wilson Gilmores
analysis of the prison-industrial complex in California provides a clear
and compelling example of the rise of surplus populations as a result of
speculative capitalisms need to continually expand. Gilmore observes that the

boom in prison building, and the corresponding 500 percent increase in the
state prison population in California since 1982, was not related to
crime rates. Instead, Gilmore traces how prisons were the solution for a
nexus of capitalist needs: the need to invest an overaccumulation of

speculative capital; the need to warehouse African Americans who

once had been employed as blue-collar workers in defense and other
industries that had since been relocated overseas; the need to shift state
bureaucracies from Keynesian social welfare to another governing function; and the
availability of rural land.20 In this context, Gilmore notes, African

American prison populations function within the prison-industrial

complex not as labor but as raw material. Put differently, African
American criminalization, which is legitimated through narratives of
racialized, gendered, and sexualized deviance, is not only a way to
relegate subjects to surplus labor pools but also a way to relegate
to surplus existence. In the era of the primacy of speculative capital, being
surplus means being extinguishable. To be surplus in this moment
is to be valueless, unprotectable, vulnerable, and dead . It is to be
racialized, gendered, and sexually nonnormative in ways simultaneously old and
new. As a part of the neoliberal response to these social movements,
subjectification became organized as a choice , available to populations

that were once categorically excluded from normative subjectivity .

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, in the
globalization/neoliberalism era, this subject still operates as a mechanism of
power. Indeed, as Reddy observes, the post World War II era is marked by
the extension of the US state into practices of subjectivity . That is,
subjectivity , rather than citizenship, became the site where the state
attempted to impose itself as an institution of universality .21 However, in
this later era, this subjectivity becomes instrumentalized. That is, while the notion of
a moral subject is still crucial, this subject is not incorporated into a social order
organized around notions of Western civilization and progressive, teleological
historical development. Instead, ones ability to articulate oneself as a

moral subject becomes a means of legibility within a structure of

biopolitical regulation. Being a moral subject means having claims to
protection from necropolitical violence, to having a claim to exist,
and for ones existence to be protected. Not choosing to inhabit this moral
subjectivity means relinquishing ones claims to protected life. In this
era, race, gender, and sexuality as identity categories do not automatically situate
one as alienated from moral subjectivity. This, however, does not imply the
declining significance of race, gender, and sexuality but describes a new procedure
for determining who is on the protected side of the life-death divide, and who is on
the vulnerable side, a procedure that nominally extends protection to certain
people of color, gays, and women but that creates in its wake even more

brutal legacies of racialized, gendered, and sexualized death and

devastation. As mentioned earlier, many scholars have identified the emergence
of homonormativity as perhaps the most exemplary manifestation of neoliberalisms
incorporation of previously despised subject formation. As Reddy has argued, the
emergence of homonormativity is central to the neoliberal turn.
Neoliberal reorganization of the US state in the service of contemporary capitalist
modes of production is anchored through family as a regulative formation in the
current governmentality (107). Reddy observes that gay and lesbian claims

to family status through the vocabulary of same-sex marriage

resignifies the US state as the locus of legitimacy and freedom. At the
same time, the US state deploys family for nonnational and noncitizen
labor not as a way to secure these laboring populations legitimacy or freedom but
as the exact opposite: as a way to condition them for labor exploitation.
Reddy notes that while immigration to the United States is largely spurred by the
demand for low-wage, unskilled labor, the preference category through which
most migrants enter the United States is through the family reunification category.
In this way, gay and lesbian claims to family rights are an example of what Reddy
terms the political and economic disenfranchisement of the racialized noncitizen
immigrant and the racialized citizen poor [that] is devised in the name of
securitizing civil society for its entitled subject, the citizenas-capitalist and its
juridical clones (105). In other words, family is a category of
normativization for the citizen-as-capitalist, but only insofar as it is

simultaneously a category of exploitation for the noncitizen

immigrant and the racialized citizen poor. In this context, the racialized
poor are rendered vulnerable so as to produce them as a form of surplus
labor, but they are also abjected as backward, homophobic, and
patriarchal as a way to render them as morally bankrupt and
exclude them from a privileged liberal subjecthood: existentially
surplus.

The production of freedom is the only way to incite collective

action towards a different world.
Read 9 (Jason, Associate Professor of Philosophy University of Southern Maine, A
Genealogy of Homo-Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity,
Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 25-36, February 2009,
http://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/viewFile/2465/2463), accessed
7/8/16) rz

Foucaults development, albeit partial, of account of neoliberalism as

governmentality has as its major advantage a clarification of the
terrain on which neoliberalism can be countered. It is not enough to
simply oppose neoliberalism as ideology, revealing the truth of
social existence that it misses, or to enumerate its various failings
as policy. Rather any opposition to neoliberalism must take seriously
its effectiveness, the manner in which it has transformed work

subjectivity and social relationships. As Foucault argues, neoliberalism

operates less on actions, directly curtailing them, then on the condition
and effects of actions, on the sense of possibility. The reigning ideal
of interest and the calculations of cost and benefit do not so much limit
what one can do, neoliberal thinkers are famously indifferent to prescriptive
ideals, examining the illegal drug trade as a more or less rational investment, but
limit the sense of what is possible. Specifically the ideal of the
fundamentally self-interested individual curtail s any collective
transformation of the conditions of existence. It is not that such actions
are not prohibited, restricted by the dictates of a sovereign or the structures of
disciplinary power, they are not seen as possible , closed off by a society

made up of self-interested individuals. It is perhaps no accident that one of

the most famous political implementers of neoliberal reforms, Margaret Thatcher,
used the slogan, there is no alternative, legitimating neoliberalism

based on the stark absence of possibilities. Similarly, and as part of a

belated response to the former Prime Minister, it also perhaps no accident that the

slogan of the famous Seattle protests against the IMF and World
Bank was, another world is possible, and it is very often the sense
of a possibility of not only another world, but of another way of organizing
politics that is remembered , the image of turtles and teamsters marching hand
and hand, when those protests are referred to.26 26 Maurizio Lazzarato, Les
rvolutions du capitalisme (Paris: Le Seuil, 2004), 19. It is also this sense of
possibility that the present seems to be lacking; it is difficult to imagine

let alone enact a future other than a future dominated by interest

and the destructive vicissitudes of competition. A political response
to neoliberalism must meet it on its terrain , that of the production of

subjectivity, freedom and possibility.

Coloniality K

2AC
Permutation: postcolonial theory is only effective insofar as it
uses genealogical critique to problematize the structures
through which the subaltern was initially sexed and violated.
(Further, opening up a third space that navigates the waters of
colonization and complicity, from which the subaltern first
emerged, creates the affective possibility for racial reparation;
it allows her to speak).
Clifford 01 (Michael, Professor of Philosophy at Mississippi State University,
Political Genealogy after Foucault Savage Identities, 2001, Routledge Press) rz

Multiculturalism, on the other hand, understands itself as a politics of

recognition, and what it attempts to recognize are precisely those
differences that traditional approaches would like to ignore . More
conservative versions of multicuturalism, such as those advocated by Charles Taylor
and Michael Walzer, have primarily targeted the academy, in particular the
curriculum and canon formation, and they do so by appeal to liberal
democratic ideals.36 More radical projects of multiculturalism are

based on a recognition that the issue of cultural diversity is an issue

of cultural identity, and that little will be changed simply by having students
read a few representative authors. Rather, these more radical versions of
multiculturalism direct themselves, on the one hand, to the
experience of what it is to belong to a particular racial or ethnic
group, to the experience of cultural difference itself, and, on the
other hand, to the cultural machinery in which such identities are
constituted.37 A particular conception of identity is at stake here. Is
cultural identity to be understood as pristine though adulterated
(and hence, in principle at least, recoverablethe classic Rousseauian lament), or
is it produced through adulteration itself? Nowhere has this question been
more important or more controversial than in postcolonial theory. Nicholas
Thomas, for example, asserts that for postcolonial discourse, recovering or

reinstating the subjectivity of the colonized is claimed to be a

central aim.38 Homi Bhabha, on the other hand, challenges the
possibility of retrieving any such pure identity. Instead, we need to
understand cultural identity in terms of what Bhabha refers to, in The
Location of Culture, as cultural hybridity. Says Bhabha, Colonial culture
is articulated as a hybridity acknowledging that all cultural
specificity is belated. . . . Cultures come to be represented by virtue
of the processes of iteration and translation through which their
meanings are vicariously addressed tothroughan Other. This
erases any essentialist claims for the inherent authenticity or purity of
cultures. . . . It is in this hybrid gap . . . that the colonial subject takes

place.39 The term hybridity conveys the sense that a union of sorts has occurred,
a union that effects a sort of transformation of the principals involved, that
whatever the conjoining entities in question were before, they can no longer be so
understood. In fact, postcolonial theory addresses itself properly, asserts Bhabha,
not to the space from which the colonizer proceeds and extends itself, nor even to
an original space of colonization. Rather, what issues from the union of
colonizer and colonized is a Third Space peculiar to both in their
complicity: It is that Third Space, though Genealogy and Other-Politics 167

unrepresentable in itself, which constitutes the discursive

conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols
of culture have not primordial unity or fixity, that even the same
signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized, and read
anew.40 Essentialist notions of cultural identity in a postcolonial
world are inconsistent with the idea of cultural hybridity, which brings
into relief both the imperialist interventions and the native responses
through which such identities have been constituted. Gayatri Spivak generally
shares Bhabhas reservations regarding the possibility of subjectival
retrieval; she likewise rebukes any nostalgia over a lost subjectivity . In
fact, her emphasis on the epistemic violence done to the subaltern

subject by the very postcolonial critic who would seek to understand

her casts doubt on the possibility of a retrieval or translation of any
sort . Can the subaltern speak? asks Spivak. No, she answers, there
is no space from which the sexed subaltern can speak.41 Can the
postcolonial critic speak for her? Only by an intervention that is in
its own subtle way also a form of colonization, suggests Spivak. However,
Bhabha has shown that there is a space from which the subaltern can
speak the Third Space, the space in which the subaltern emerges

as such in the first place. This is a space that postcolonial theory

doesnt so much translate as it delimits and demarcates . And what it
brings into relief is an act of mutual transformation and even
procreation, but also of violence and violation. The colonized world
of which, and to a degree for which, Bhabha and Spivak speak is a violent
world, as is shown clearly in the seminal work by Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of
the Earth, from which Bhabha draws. Fanon describes a world wherein the hands of
African dissidents are routinely chopped off, a world in which the lips of Angolan
malcontents are pierced in order to shut them with padlocks. Violence,

suggests Fanon, is at the very heart of the relationship between

colonizer and colonized: Their first encounter was marked by
violence and their existence togetherthat is to say the exploitation of the native
by the settlerwas carried on by dint of a great array of bayonets and cannon. . .
.The violence which has ruled over the ordering of the colonial world, which has

ceaselessly drummed the rhythm for the destruction of native social forms and
broken up without reserve the systems of reference of the economy, the customs of
dress and external life, that same violence will be claimed and taken over by the
native.42 The violence that Fanon describes and suggests is

constitutive of the relationship between native and settler is echoed

in Spivaks description of group rape, which she says is expressive
of the acts of colonial conquest itself.43 It was through such acts, says
Jean-Paul Sartre in the preface to The Wretched of the Earth, that Europe created a
new breed, the Greco-Latin Negroes.44 To be Other, then, in relation to the
colonizing subject, is to be known, identified, in the most

proprietary of ways; it is to be owned, co-opted, possessed, and

dispossessed in the same moment. It is to have ones identity
imposed upon one in the most violent and violative of ways. To the
extent that postcolonial theory attempts to trace out the history
and character of this imposition for the sake of altering its
trajectory, it can be said to be, at some level, a discourse of reparation .
Consider, for example, Bhabhas anticipation of an international culture, based on
cultural hybridity, wherein we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the
others of our selves.45 What postcolonial theory speaks for and about is that form
of identity that colonial culture itself would call the noble savage. Yet

postcolonial theory does not attempt to liberate the native from

colonial power by turning him or her into the reverse, namely that
abstract unit of free individuality that I have called the Savage Noble. If
postcolonial theory is effective in bringing about a change in the
relationship between colonizing Subject and colonized Other , it is not by
appeal to rights and freedoms in a juridical sense, nor through retrieval
of a lost identity , but rather through a genealogically informed critique

of the mechanisms through which such identities have been created.

This brief canvassing can only demonstrate in some small fashion the many ways
that postmodern feminism, multiculturalism, and postcolonial theory mark the
horizon toward which political theory must advance. For the juridical reflections of
traditional political philosophy, these (relatively) new political disciplines install
critical, genealogically informed reflections on identity. Slowly, begrudgingly,
traditional political theory has come to tolerate these theoretical
upstarts . Indeed, few scholars today would feel it necessary to offer a justification
for their existence in the academy. But what has yet to happen fully is for the
insights of postmodern feminism, multiculturalism, and postcolonial theory to
reverberate back upon more traditional political theory and thereby disrupt,
suspend, question the form of political identity that has long remained invisible,
transparentnamely, the autonomous individual, the Savage Noblewithin it, to
show that that identity, too, is a construct, is one form among diverse others, to
show how the American nation-space is itself a Third Space

inhabited by hybrid forms of identity. Although it is difficult to

trace the direction of influence, it is no coincidence, I think, that the
mythos of savage nobility that took shape during the colonial period
in America coincides with the height of social contract Genealogy and
Other-Politics 169 discourse and its appeal to a state of nature. The state
of nature is the theoretical counterpart of the real wilderness in which the new
American identity was forged. That identity, it turns out, is hybrid, born from the
marriage of American Indian and Europeannot a simple mixture or composite, but
something altogether new, something qualitatively different. Even the space upon
which this new identity emerges is transformed: from wilderness to frontier and,
finally, to nation. We may conceive of this space , the space of emergence

for modern political identity, as a Third Space formed by the

collision of American and European cultures. This would give new
meaning to Frederick Jackson Turners classic statement that the frontier is the
outer edge of the wavethe meeting point between savagery and civilization. 46

The frontier is what happens to the wilderness on its way to

becoming a nation, a body politic of civil laws, of civilized peoples,
but also of the disciplinary practices peculiar to governmentality.
The colonist tames the wilderness; but in doing so he transforms
himself. He becomes the Savage Noble, and the civil laws of his civilized
society must be such that they reflect and support his autonomous individualism. A
closer look at this individualism shows that it actually functions as the
ideological shield of the mechanisms through which we are really and
materially subjugated to the amorphous mass of the population and

the dictates of the governmentalized nation-space.

Commodification K

AT Visibility
The Asian-American body is always already an object of the
nation-states gaze regulated by the racial epidermal
schema. There is only a risk that our performance disrupts the
performance of racialization that renders our bodies legible to
the law.
Chambers-Letson 13 (Joshua Takano, Assistance Professor Performance
Studies at Northwestern University, A Race So Different: Performance and Law in
Asian America, New York University Press, 2013) rz
The Visual Racialization of Japanese America
Before turning to the Shimada scrapbook, it is important to foreground the

ways in which the guard towers and surveillance apparatuses of the

concentration camps were the logical extensions and architectural
manifestations of prewar legal technologies for managing Asian racial
difference. These practices utilized visual perceptions of
phenotypical difference to racialize Asian immigrants and Asian
Americans as permanently located outside the law and thus the
national body politic. In courtrooms, Asian immigrants were subject to
the scrutiny of the states disciplinary optic , which in turn produced
Asian racial difference as undifferentiated , a homogeneous mass or

yellow horde that could be rendered exceptional to the protections

of citizenship eligibility. Among other effects, this resulted in the
incarceration process, whereby the Japanese American body was
placed on spectacular display for the state . Nikkei were subject to the
states ever-present eye , which was manifest in the forms of guards and guard
towers, as well as the imaging equipment of officially commissioned WRA
photographers. The field of the visual is central to the process constituting the
imagined community of the nation. It also plays a central role in the

production of ideal national subjects along racialized lines.

Throughout US history, the subjection of racialized bodies to surveillance ,

exhibition, and display has played an important role in the racialization

of different ethnic groups as excluded from the normative limits of
national belonging . This history overlaps with, among many other
examples, the scenes of subjection characterizing slavery, the ethnographic
spectacles that accompanied modern raciology, and the compulsory

performances of racial stereotype in popular entertainment forms

(such as The Chinese Must Go).4 Visual technologies of racialization are
often amplified during periods of war, economic decline, or social

upheaval. As Elena Tajima Creef argues, In times of national crisis we take refuge
in the visual construction of citizenship in order to imagine ourselves as part of a
larger, cohesive, national American community.5 Thus, the (dis) articulation
of race and citizenship is often impossible to disentangle from the
politicized vision and performance of both. Franz Fanon understood
the process of racialization as occurring within a circuit of visual

assessment, performance, and consumption, which he described as

the ethnic subjects self-consciousness of being taken by a racial epidermal
schema .6 For Fanon, the racial epidermal schema lays claim to ethnic
subjects as they come to see themselves through the eyes of the
dominant white culture and to perform within the coordinates demanded
by the dominant spectator . Thus, for Fanon, it is not only being viewed

that makes him a racialized subject (encapsulated in his famous description

of a child responding to his visage with the statement Look, a Negro!) as it is
the process of (re)constituting his body to be viewed and consumed
as such.7 The embodied practice of performing the self for the others visual
consumption becomes a means of negotiating the dialectical tension between his
concept of self and the status of his (black) body as it is subject to (white) vision:
And then the occasion arose when I had to meet the white mans eyes. An
unfamiliar weight burdened me. The real world challenged my claims. In the white
world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily
schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person
consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty. . . .
[All of my] movements are made not out of habit but out of implicit knowledge. A
slow composition of my self as a body in the middle of a spatial and temporal world
such seems to be the schema. It does not impose itself on me; it is, rather, a
definitive structuring of the self and of the worlddefinitive because it creates a
real dialectic between my body and the world.8 Describing consciousness of the
body as solely a negating activity, Fanon gestures to the ways in which

self-presentation, or the performance of everyday life , subject s the

racialized body to the spectatorship of the white mans eyes. This gaze

defines and negates the racialized subjects will to exist beyond a

bodily schema. The self is locked within a series of coordinates
produced by social, spatial, and racial knowledge that shape the

racialized body as he or she performs a self for the world, effectively

becoming a subject through this performance. In US law, ethnic
subjects are claimed by a racial epidermal schema as they perform
themselves for the regulating eye of the law , as politicians, legislators,

judges, and law enforcement officials watch racialized populations,

writing law and other legal performatives in response to the visual difference of
their bodies, shaping racial knowledge and coordinating the crisis of

difference management within the state. Racialization in the United States

was thus bolstered by the collusion of visual and legal technologies. The legal
history of Asian American racial formation epitomizes this process . In the

Naturalization Act of 1790, the first Congress established a uniform rule that
limited citizenship eligibility to any alien, being a free white person, who shall have
resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term
of two years.9 Despite subsequent revisions to the naturalization code, the racial
prerequisite remained intact until it was rescinded in 1952 with passage of the
McCarran-Walter Act. In the Racial Prerequisite Cases, petitioners struggled with
courts to determine exactly what was meant by the term white person. Asian
petitioners in particular placed their bodies before the optic of the

state in the hopes of receiving a judgment that would expand the

definition of whiteness to the Asian body. For the courts, being white
became synonymous with looking white. Advocates argued that the lightness of a
petitioners skin, his or her capacity for cultural assimilation, and/or his or her
scientific descent from the Caucasus and Aryan races qualified Asian-immigrant
petitioners for categorical whiteness and, thus, for naturalization.10 Calling on a
range of rationales for rejecting the petitions, courts commonly proffered
commonsense justifications that utilized visual assessment of the plaintiff (the
pallor of skin, shape and color of eyes, hair texture, etc.) to determine citizenship
eligibility. The collusion of visual and legal technology in the production of race is
present in In re Ah Yup, the first prerequisite case, in which the 1878 California
circuit court denied a Chinese petitioners eligibility for citizenship.11 Judge Lorenzo
Sawyers opinion used a visual terminology of physical characteristics to define
commonsense understandings of the phrase white person.12 Later, in In re
Camille, an 1880 Oregon circuit court case dealing with a Native American
petitioner, Judge Matthew P. Deady declared, In all classifications of mankind
hitherto, color has been a controlling circumstance.13 The formal vocabulary of the
Prerequisite Cases reveals an interesting symptom of the visual obsession at the
heart of these cases. Whereas judicial opinions are generally written in the language
of authority, the Prerequisite Cases are instead full of the sensory language of
speculative vision. Namely, the word appear is ubiquitous: It does not appear to
the satisfaction of the court . . . (In re Kanaka Nian) and it appears the words
white person do not . . . include the red race of America (In re Camille) are just a
few examples of many.14 Indeed, in a Utah decision, United States v. Dolla,

the court went so far as to have an Indian petitioner pull up the

sleeves of his coat and shirt to show his skin, as the presiding
judge closely scrutinized his appearance to determine his racial
classification.15

The moment of affective resonance that characterizes

encounter with aesthetic works a kind of subtle beyond
escapes the visibility trap and can change the charge of
politics.
Chambers-Letson 13 (Joshua Takano, Assistance Professor Performance
Studies at Northwestern University, A Race So Different: Performance and Law in
Asian America, New York University Press, 2013) rz
A Kind of Subtle Beyond
In this chapter, I have suggested that Japanese American images of the internment
might not lead directly to calculated outcomes, such as the one that Miyatake
valiantly articulated as a motivating factor in his defiance of the photographic ban
in the camps. Instead, images of the incarceration are politically performative
precisely because of the ways in which they disrupt the line between spectatorship,
intended outcomes, meaning, and action. As Rancire reminds us, despite the

fact that there is no direct road from intellectual awareness to

political action, the aesthetic encounter makes possible politically
charged processes of dissociation : a break in a relationship between

sense and sensebetween what is seen and what is thought, what

is thought and what is felt.61 Clearly something may well be felt by
the spectator during the encounter with the image , but this affective

relationship cannot be accurately plotted. Indeed, this break

between sight, thinking, and feeling is part of what imbues the
images in the Shimada scrapbook with a politically performative power.
It disrupts the link between the visual apprehension of racial difference
and the construction of racialized knowledge established by the racial

epidermal schema at play in the camps. 172 / the nail that stands out I want
to be clear, however, that I am not suggesting that the Shimada scrapbook should
be received as a practice of outright liberation. If anything, Shimadas images
demonstrate the difficult and contradictory problems posited by the interplay of
visuality and entrapment vis--vis the process of racialization. If visibility is a

trap, many of Shimadas photographs are an exercise in making

visible, containing, and ultimately indicting the militarization of the camps, which
the government wanted to render invisible from its official records. Strategically
deploying benign performances of everyday life that would not otherwise
stick out or attrack undue attention, Shimada and his subjects were
capable of creating a visual record of the camps military
apparatuses and, by so doing, entrapping the trap. But to do so,
they had to once more render the Nikkei body subject to a form of
visiblity (for the photographer, viewer, or audience) that runs the risk of
replicating the violence of containment and entrapment. This is one

of the ambivalent paradoxes posed by the technologies of the racial

epidermal schema: if visuality is the trap by which racial meaning is
projected onto the body of the racialized subject, visibility may also be
the means through which the trap (or hammer) can be avoided or
interrupted. But does such a practice merely produce new conditions

of containment or entrapment? In an era in which the recourse to

visibility and identity is often utilized as a means of combatting
forms of institutionalized discrimination, do contemporary attempts
to become visible (through political, legal, and aesthetic representational
means) not, to some degree, merely extend the apparatuses of the camps
into our daily lives? And if this is the case, what are the conditions
necessary for us to dismantle the guard towerboth the one at the
edge of the camp and, more importantly, the one that each one of us
has internalized? The Barthesian kind of subtle beyond is politically
powerful insofar as it insists on the possibility of a space that exceeds the
dominating apparatuses of the visibility trap. In one of the few

scrapbook images without a human subject, two faded koi-nobori kites

float at the top of a pole erected on one of the barracks, flickering in a dusty wind.
The construction of the barrack is shoddy and weak; the flags are full bodied and
full of wind. The earth and empty corridors between the barracks open up, and for

a moment I can smell the clear, warm air with a slight trace of the
dust in it. I hear the fabric of the flags whipping around and rubbing up
against each other in the dry Wyoming wind. It is desolate and terrifying. I
imagine the streets filled with Nikkei bringing this frozen world alive
through their daily routines. I hear their voices talking the nail that stands out / 173
to each other in English and hushed Japanese, gossiping, disclosing loves and
losses, and telling stories under the shade of the koi. Here, in this prison,

these floating fish are significant of a kind of subtle beyond to what

is thinkable and feasible, floating upward, out of sight, and toward
something that we have never actually known, a thing we might
otherwise call freedom.

Debility K

2AC
Link turn genealogy destabilizes essential and stable notions
of being. It begs the question of what a body is.
Brown 01 (Wendy, Professor of Political Science at the University of California,
Berkeley, Politics Out of History, Princeton University Press 2001) rz
Genealogy does not resemble the evolution of a species and does not map the
destiny of a people. -Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" As the study
of "stock" or "descent" rather than development, as that which reverses the

direction in which historians conventionally proceed (tracing the

past of the present rather than searching for the present in the
past), genealogy invites "the dissociation of the self, its recognition
and displacement as an empty synthesis" (p. 81). As it inverts
conventional historical vision to regard historical scenes of conflicts
and accidents as contingently constitutive of the present, genealogy
; seeks to deconstruct essentialist and every other stable notion of the
body and the self; it disrupts coherent identities, both individual and
collective. Foucault's emphasis on "accidents," "errors," and "faulty
calculations" as that which "gave birth to those things that continue
to exist and have value for us" aims to replace the notion that "truth
or being [lies] at the root of what we know or what we are" (p. 81)
with an appreciation of the contingent-not merely accidental but noninevitablefeatures of our existence. If everything about us is the effect of historical accident
rather than will or design, then we are, paradoxically, both more severely historical
and also more plastic than we might otherwise seem. We are more sedimented by
history, but also more capable of intervening in our histories, than is

conceivable through historiographies that preserve some elements

of humans and of time as fixed in nature. "Nothing in man," Foucault
writes, "is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for . . .
understanding other men" (p. 87).

Fem K

2AC
Perm mimesis. Genealogical deconstruction of genders
historical contingency is the best method to disrupt the
masculine order. The alternative concedes to the dominant
order, demanding to speak as a (masculine) subject, we
problematize and expose such hierarchy, urging its own
unraveling.
Clifford 01 (Michael, Professor of Philosophy at Mississippi State University,
Political Genealogy after Foucault Savage Identities, 2001, Routledge Press) rz
For example, such a recognition will lead Luce Irigaray to observe that
femininity is a construct , produced and defined through male

systems of representation. Under such a condition a woman has an identity

in only a derivative sense. Constrained to such a relation, she has no
proper name, says Irigaray.30 The same could be said of all the
victims of racism, anti-Semitism, and colonialism, of homophobia and
xenophobia. They too have no proper namethough their history as
victims has been a dramatic, and dramaturgic, attempt to acquire such
a name, to achieve, to be conferred, nothing short of legitimacy.31
Theirs is a history of name-calling and misidentification: nigger,
kike, spick, fag. Of course, even apparently neutral, purely
referential designations are likewise historically contingent and
value-laden. From Negroes to blacks to African Americans,
Indians to Native Americans, Hispanic to Latino, from
queer to gay to queer again, the names, chosen or imposed, are as
much political gestures as taxonomic ones. Usually names are the nomina of
familiarity, but in this case the names are inflected with the
otherness and fractious alterity that preceded them. Traditional
feminism tries to liberate women by invoking the basic tenets of
liberal theoryrights, freedoms, personal sovereignty, justiceand does so on
behalf of a genderless abstract individuality. A classic example of this is the
Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, drafted and signed by Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, and others, in 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York. This document borrows both
the language and format of Thomas Jeffersons Declaration of Independence to
assert the rights and equality of women. Postmodern feminism tends to be

suspicious of such liberation movements and especially of the form

of political identity presupposed by them. Echoing Foucault, Irigaray
says, It is not a matter of toppling that order so as to replace it that
amounts to the same thing in the end but of disrupting and modifying it .32

This disruption proceeds not so much through marches and protests,

but through a number of much more subtle tactics and strategies ,

one of which is mimicry, which consists of, as Irigaray notes, assuming

feminine identity deliberately: [this means] to convert a form of
subordination into an affirmation, and thus to begin to thwart it .
Whereas a direct feminine challenge to this condition means demanding
to speak as a (masculine) subject, that is, it means to postulate a relation to
the intelligible that would maintain sexual indifference.33 Through mimesis ,
identity itself is turned into a political strategem whereby what had
been invisible and taken for granted is now re-presented in such a way that it
is rendered visible and , as such, problematic .34 Because femininity

refers to a cultural construct rather than to an essence, it cannot be

sustained without transformation once it is subjected to this sort of
hyperreflexive exposure . A kind of dehypostatization of identity occurs,
somewhat ironically, through a playful repetition of identity itself . It is
such genealogical and deconstructive gestures , not juridical claims to
rights and equality , that informs a politics of difference of the type
advocated by Irigaray .35 Similarly, contemporary multicultural theory resists the
politics of assimilation that has been the typical response to racial and ethnic
conflict. The politics of assimilation works, like traditional feminism, by invoking the
rhetoric of equality; through this rhetoric it attempts to assuage the conflict by
glossing over the differences between cultural groups.

Framework
"Living at the expense of the future rather than paving the way to the future.

2AC
Their arguments about the necessity of opposition and a
concrete either/or are exactly what we are critiquing. We
should reject the stifling confine of the liberal tradition which
limits us to proof and rejoinder with us or against us a logic
that entrenches sovereignty, originates in our institutions, and
plays out in our battlefields all the while obfuscating the
relational matrix that underlies our political dilemmas (in the
first place). The impact is endless violence against the
periphery and error replication. Traditional political philosophy
lacks the conceptual theory to recognize and address the ills of
liberalism.
Clifford 01 (Michael, Professor of Philosophy at Mississippi State University,
Political Genealogy after Foucault Savage Identities, 2001, Routledge Press) rz
*We dont endorse and apologize for ableist language.

To label Foucaults philosophy as conservative, liberal,

radical, or anarchistic is to place it under the dictates of
precisely those sorts of juridical and ideological oppositions that he
would seek to dissolve. We must escape the dilemma of being either
for or against, says Foucault.27 The oppositional and antagonistic
predilections of our standard political identifications blinds us to the
network of anonymous and disinterested factors that cause such
identifications to arise in the first place . By identifying ourselves in

these ways, under these labels, we only unwittingly contribute to

the perpetuation of the present power/knowledge regime. If our
task is to change it, or even some portion of it, we have to set aside
our political identifications. We have to suspend this power that binds
us to an arbitrary political identity committed to defending ideological
principles . As Foucault notes, One must pass to the other side . . . by trying to
turn off these mechanisms which cause the appearance of two separate
sides, by dissolving the false unity, the illusory nature of this other

side with which we have taken sides. This is where the real work begins .28
Yet, modern political subjectivity has been invested through and
through with this necessity of taking sides. It is an essential feature
of the discourse of threat that at once isolates us to a private autonomy
and binds us to a national identity . It is the practical expression of a

binary, juridical conception of power that obligates us to sovereignty

and is justified on the basis of right. It is the ethical substance of a technology of

self that gives rise to Genealogy and Other-Politics 163 fragmentary individuals who
define friends or enemies according to whether they cross an arbitrary ideological
line. This burdensome, agitating, fragmenting, oppositional gesture, this taking

of sides, pervades our experience as modern political subjects. It is

played out in our institutions and on our battlefields . It structures our

courts, our government, our policies and agendas, our diplomatic

relations and military alliances . In the nuclear age it represents the
ultimate threat . Thus, in so many ways, this taking of sides is the essence of
politics today. On one level, of course, we know this, but is it necessary? How
much violence could be avoided without it? It is important to understand that

when Foucault says we need to abandon this dilemma of taking sides,

he is not calling for some humanistic laying down of arms after
which we become united in an international brotherhood (or sisterhood,
or some vapid combination thereof). His is not the typical Marxist project of
establishing a more harmonious global community. Nor does Foucault think that
overcoming this dilemma is a matter of attacking ideology per se, or of raising
consciousness. He realizes that ideology and consciousness are merely
surface effects of a vast relational matrix . Nothing will be changed unless
we direct our energies toward this matrix. Thus, when Foucault calls us to the
other side he is inviting us to escape the limits of an identificational
determination in which taking sides is made a requirement. Outside

of this determination, the necessity of ideological opposition is

effectively and actively forgotten. Of course, there is always more work to
do. Political philosophy can help to guide this work, but only if it resists
the desire for closure that informs utopian teleologies or the attempt to
lay down first principles of political justice. Above all, it would have to be a
philosophy that is no longer erected around the problem of sovereignty.29
Perhaps Foucaults work on discourse, power relations, and modes of

subjectivation can serve as a basis for constructing a new political

philosophy. Such a philosophy would have to break free from the
narrow confines of right and sovereignty that delimit the discourses
of the liberal tradition. In order to understand our emergence as
political subjects, and to trace out the possibilities of getting beyond our
subjection, this new philosophy would have to extend its critique to the
farthest reaches, the darkest corners, of our history and culture . It
would have to apply itself to areas not immediately recognized as political: to
family, religion, sexuality, morality, art, literature, science. It would be a philosophy
that could cross (out) national boundaries, since it would no longer be tied to an
ideological interest, and apply itself to political subjection elsewhere: in Eastern
Europe, Northern Ireland, the Middle 164 Political Genealogy After Foucault East, for

instance. We can only begin to imagine of what such a philosophy would consist,
and the monumental task that would always be placed before it. Indeed, the
enormity of the task that is placed before political theory by genealogy indicates
that the time for grand totalizing theory is long past. Instead, we have

seen in the past decade or so a plethora of politicotheoretical

discourses that have moved from the margins and fringes of
academe into ever-increasing prominence. These discourses
fragment and disperse what had been a theoretical monolith. I have in
mind, among others, the discourses of political feminism (particularly of
the postmodern variety), postcolonial theory, and multiculturalism. These
discourses differ from those of traditional political philosophy in that the issue of
identity is problematized in a different way, both conceptually and methodologically.
It is not that traditional political philosophy cannot mark the difference between the
Western white male and his Others, but that difference tends to be marked in terms
of economic, social, and power imbalances. Moreover, traditional political
philosophy attempts to address those imbalances in typically juridical ways, by
appealing to principles of distributive and compensatory justice, for instance.
Traditional political philosophy lacks the conceptual machinery required
to recognize the way that those imbalances are tied inseparably to
cultural identity itself; it also lacks the methodological tools necessary
to effect a deconstruction of those identifi- cational constraints . Not to
be reductionistic or to obviate some important differences between them, but what
postmodern feminism, postcolonial theory, and multiculturalism have in common is
that they can be said to marshal a critique against identity itself, against
entrenched forms of cultural, social, and political identification and
conceptualization, in ways that could never be available to more traditional political
theory. What all three also have in common is that they address themselves to the
acts of violative (and often violent) appropriation through which in part such
identities have been constituted.

Their demand that we conform to their community norms

speak their language is part and parcel of a colonial process
of mimicry. Our refusal to concede is itself an act of countergaze.
-non-Western knowledge.

Chakrabarti 12 (Sumit, MOVING BEYOND EDWARD SAID: HOMI BHABHA AND

THE PROBLEM OF POSTCOLONIAL REPRESENTATION, INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
INTERDISCIPLINARY POLITICAL AND CULTURAL JOURNAL, Vol. 14, No. 1/2012, p. 5
21, DOI: 10.2478/v10223-012-0051-3) rz
Mimicry: Resemblance and Menace
An interesting aspect of Bhabhas work is the way he stitches aspects of his issues
with colonial politics with that of his strategies of representation. While he discusses

colonial tropes of discursivity and appropriation on the one hand, he methodically

addresses the problematic of his (or the Third-World intellectuals)
location in the West, on the other. The truly postmodern aspect of Bhabhas work is
in the neatness with which he undertakes this enterprise, cleverly camouflaging his
agenda of location within his well researched discourse on colonialism and its
critique. What I mean is really that it is easy to miss Bhabhas strategy because of
the layered masks he puts on them. Let us take mimicry, for example. Apparently
it might seem to be a discourse on colonial strategies of domination and a
consequent thwarting of the same by the imperialized. Of course it is a critique
of colonial domination and an interesting psychological unravelling of
possibilities of challenging it. But it is also more than just this. Once the

reader removes this mask, he discovers the face of the Third-World

intellectual lurking behind it. He also mimics; he also uses the
English language; he has also chosen the FirstWorld location. So is
mimicry not his (Bhabhas) strategy of protest, of consolidating his
position, of trying to negotiate possibilities of a dialogue or debate?
This is the reason why reading Bhabha is so interestinga continuous intellectual
challenge to unmask and decipher. Let us see what his concept of mimicry entails
both in terms of method and strategy. In the first place mimicry is born out of
the necessity of colonial domination, to assert itself through a panoptical
vision of domination. This entails not only a pervasive strategy of

cultural imperialism, but a regular supply of indigenous imitators of

an identical cultural logic who would maintain the mechanics of the
imperial administration: . . . colonial mimicry is the desire for a
reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is
almost the same, but not quite. Which is to say, that the discourse of
mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence (Bhaba, Of Mimicry and Man 122).
This ambivalence is both reassuring and menacing. The similarity that is not
quite helps the colonizer to locate the other as a difference, the fine
objectivity that sustains the master-slave binary and helps the tropes of
power. But what is implicit is the other obvious argument that is located antipodally,
and holds true by the same logic. The subject position of this mimic man
has shifted from its conclusively binary one of the colonized other. He is now
other but not quite. This lateral movement places him in the ambivalent
position of the hybrid subject who is neither colonizer nor colonized, but
something in between. This in-betweenness of the emergent colonial

subject who is white, but not quite portends the beginning of a

counter-gaze that effectively displaces the social control of the
power centre. As Bhabha writes, . . . the reforming civilizing mission is
threatened by the displacing gaze of its disciplinary double . . .
(Bhaba, Of Mimicry and Man 123). This continuous slippage from the
legitimate pattern of the colonizercolonized binary is something that Bhabha
discovers from his postmodern location, and this is what is menacing about

the otherwise sound administrative logic of the creation of the

mimic man. This kind of a double bind is something that the colonial masters did
not obviously anticipate. However, once this mechanism of the creation of the
mimic men was set in motion, the inevitability of this disciplinary gaze became
apparent. The initial necessity for the master was to create a

reformed colonial subject who would help in matters of

administration. As Macaulay had clearly laid down the exact denomination of
this pandering colonial subject, who is trained to help and not to
think, trained to imitate rather than imagine, to execute much less
to know matters of colonial policy: . . . a class of interpreters between us
and the millions whom we governa class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but
English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect (Macaulay 49). Clearly, the
basic idea behind the creation of these Anglicized (but not English)

subjects was to make them repeat rather than represent the West
and its socio-cultural formations. It was also to transform Indian
knowledge into European information that would facilitate
domination and rule: The Indians were sources or native informants who
supplied information, viva voce, in English or Indian languages; who collected,
translated, and discussed texts and documents; and who wrote exegeses of various
kinds that were classified, processed, and analyzed into knowledge of or about
India. (Cohn 51) However, what the European master failed to realize was that
many of these chosen and educated colonial subjects who were meant to play the
role of the mimic men were also men of letters by their own right. They realized that
they were being used by the colonizer for the simple reason that they were better
than many of their brethren in certain respects. In many cases, they were even
superior to some of their English masters, and this is why there was always the
implicit possibility of the counter-gaze: The Indian scholar knew he was superior to
his European Master in respect of Indian languages, [but] he was primarily an
informant, a mere tool in the exercise of language teaching to be handled by
others (Das 107). This sense of a deliberate suppression by the British
master, the humiliation of being merely an informant and not an
intellectual was something that automatically created the occasion for
counter-gaze, for making the colonizer nervous and uncomfortable.
This is the ambivalent location that Bhabha talks about. The English educated

colonial subject has the advantage of being conversant with the

cultural tropes of both the colonizer and the colonized. He thus
becomes a representative of a difference that works both waysthat
is both for the colonial master and his colonized other. Bhabha compares this kind of
colonial textuality with the partial nature of Freudian fantasy that is caught between
the unconscious and the preconscious. This is how Freud talks about fantasy: Their
mixed and split origin is what decides their fate. We may compare them with
individuals of mixed race who taken all round resemble white men but who betray
their coloured descent by some striking feature or other and on that account are
excluded from society and enjoy none of the privileges. (Freud, The Unconscious

qtd. in Homi Bhabha, Of Mimicry and Man 127) It is this kind of an interdictory
location that is the ideal site for mimicry, a blurred frame of reference from where
this mimic man revalues the normative principles of race, writing, history that have
been laid down by colonial hegemony. This is what Bhabha calls the metonymy of
presencea camouflage, a form of resemblance, which differs from or defends
presence by displaying it in part, metonymically: The desire of colonial mimicry
an interdictory desiremay not have an object, but it has strategic objectives which
I shall call the metonymy of presence. (Bhaba, Of Mimicry and Men 128). Thus
the desire for mimicry, that I had argued in the beginning to be the desire of
the colonizer is eventually transformed into a strategic desire of the

colonized, who, metonymically subverts the location from one of

disadvantage to one of advantage.

Their framework seeks to uphold the processes of racialization

and subjectification. Its not simply the law itself, but literal
speech acts that compel and inspire Asian Americans to
perform within the law. Asian American performance is a
critical affective disruption.
Chambers-Letson 13 (Joshua Takano, Assistance Professor Performance
Studies at Northwestern University, A Race So Different: Performance and Law in
Asian America, New York University Press, 2013) rz
-Kiyemba v. Obama: habeas corpus petition filed in the D.C. District Court on behalf
of 17 innocent Uighur(native to China) men who have been imprisoned in
Guantnamo Bay for almost seven years.
-Tracking Transience Hasan M. Elahi (artistic project)
-Chae Chan Ping v. United States (Upheld government authority to Chinese
exclusion)
Clearly, Kiyemba has eerie resonances with many of the historical cases studied
throughout this book. The case was haunted by the period of Asian
exclusion, as a group of ethnic Asian men were once again banned
from setting foot on US soil. Judge A. Raymond Randolph drew on no
less than six Asian exclusion cases to support the courts opinion.16
Randolph argued, Ever since the decision in the Chinese Exclusion
Case, the Court has, without exception, sustained the exclusive

power of the political branches to decide which aliens may, and

which aliens may not, enter the United States, and on what terms.17
Although Randolph concluded that the United States had insufficient evidence to
classify [the Uighurs] as enemy combatants, he absolved the government of
any responsibility to end the detention by accepting the Uighurs if no one
else would: their detention at Guantanamo for many years [does not] entitle them
to enter the United States.18 That the only alternative was for the men
to remain in the prison indefinitely was simply not the judiciarys

concern. Reading Kiyemba alongside Tracking Transience can help

us to understand how contemporary forms of profiling, exclusion,
and even indefinite detention are built on a juridical and social
architecture that reaches back to cases such as Chae Chan Ping. In
this way, Elahis project allows us to see the important role that Asian
Americanist criticism and cultural production may play in historicizing,
contextualizing, and challenging the forms of comparative
racialization and legal subjection occurring in a purportedly
postracial moment. An Asian Americanist critical and cultural insurgency
against the tactics of the national security state has to account for the ways in
which these tactics are played out in and on the body, through forms of
performance and subjection that confuse the distinction between voluntary and
coerced acts. The history of Asian American racialization is , thus, not
simply a story of legal performatives that produce knowledge about
racial difference . It is a story of speech acts that compel and inspire
Asian Americans to perform in response to and for the law as staged by
Tracking Transience. Furthermore, in a moment characterized by the

advent of multiracial conservatism, it is not simply that the law is

written onto and embodied by Asian Americans : Asian Americans

sometimes write the law. For example, the infamous Bush-administration

torture memo, determining that enhanced interrogation is legal, was coauthored
by Korean American lawyer John Yoo; the USA Patriot Act was written by a
Vietnamese American lawyer, Viet Dinh. The US governments profiling of
Elahi and the Uighur refugees, and detention of the latter, is thus
intimately tied to the history of Asian American racialization as well
as legal performatives about and even issued by Asian Americans.
If, as I have argued throughout this book, the interaction between
performance and law is partially responsible for the processes of
racialization , Tracking Transience reminds us that Asian American
performance (both quotidian and aesthetic) is a critical means for
disrupting and reformatting the process of subjectification . Engaging in a
war of positions, Elahi uses a seemingly weak tactical position, as a racialized
Bangladeshi American under the suspicious eye of the government, to his benefit.
That is, if the state is watching him because he is a racialized subject, he builds on
the fact that he has a captive audience for his virtual performance. Turning over
more data about his life than his official watchers could ever want, he stages a
public statement that radically undercuts the national security states claim to his
body. Obviously, the majority of immigrants caught within the web of the national
security state do not have the resources to mount such a response. Neither do
those who are already deeply integrated into these regulatory legal apparatuses, as
in the case of the Uighur refugees. It is, thus, as a work of aesthetics that Tracking

Transience reveals its true power. What is significant is not that the performance
has, by and large, relieved Elahi of the burden of government interference in his
everyday life. (Although, no doubt, he appreciates no longer having to be
interrogated every time he wants to catch a planea small victory that should not
be undervalued.) Rather, the power of Tracking Transience and Elahis
performance of and for the constant optic of the law is its ability to attack

the very logic that legitimizes the indiscriminate profiling and legal
regulation of racialized subjects under the auspices of national
security. Perhaps as importantly, the piece gives Elahi a platform to raise the
issue publicly. Interest in Tracking Transience has resulted in highly publicized
profiles of and interviews with the artist in Wired magazine, on National Public
Radio, and on Comedy Centrals popular political satire The Colbert Report . Like
many of the performances studied in this book, Tracking Transience is a
testament to the legal and political power of aesthetic practices. It

is also a sobering reminder of chapter 4s discussion of the ways in

which visibility can become a trap. In order for Elahi to free
himself of FBI intrusion into his personal life, he has made his entire life
a spectacle for public surveillance and consumption. He transforms his body
from being a target of power into the organ of its operation and the means of
powers articulation. At the same time, by refusing to allow spectators

to access the figure of his body or specific and intimate details

about his life, he reminds us that it may be in the act of withdrawing
from the field of the visible or the domain of recognizable
subjectivity that we are most capable of accessing emancipation or
liberation. My hope is that the conversations contained in A Race So Different
create a foundation for thinking about the unique relationship between law and
performance in the making and potential unmaking of racialized subjects. I have
argued that Asian American racialization is a process that incorporates

a unity of various and seemingly paradoxical opposites,

consolidating them within the Asian American body and compelling
this body to perform in a fashion that fosters the maintenance of
dominant norms. But perhaps most importantly, I have engaged with artists and
performers who demonstrate the power of performance as a strategically useful
means for challenging the processes of racialization while staging alternative worldmaking possibilities. At the very least, such practicesand forms of critical
engagement with themallow us to hold up a candle for future generations. In this
way, this book is a document of the insurgent impulses contained in performances
(both quotidian and aesthetic) that rise up against the limits of racialization in the
present and rehearse freedom from these limits for the future.

Debate is not some insulated space from outside politics.

Affective performances are never neutral and their model as
well as the polarization of interior and exterior entrench
sovereignty.
Chang 12 (Juliana, Assistant Professor of English at Santa Clara University,
Inhuman Citizenship Traumatic Enjoyment and Asian American Literature, 2012,
University of Minnesota Press) rz
This book is a study of Asian American domestic narrativesstories of private
homes and families. However, as scholars of American studies, feminist theory, and
postcolonial studies have established, it is impossible to separate the notion of
private domesticity from the concept of nation as domestic space.27 Home and
family serve as powerful metaphors for the nation, such that seemingly primal
desires and fantasies become 16 introduction transferred from the private domestic
sphere to the public sphere of the nation. Lauren Berlant, for example, explains

how national citizenship , often understood as an abstract and technical form,

produces powerful instinctual affects : In return for cultural, legal, and

military security, people are asked to love their country, and to

recognize certain stories, events, experiences, practices, and ways
of life as related to the core of who they are, their public status, and their
resemblance to other people. This training in politicized intimacy has also
served as a way of turning political boundaries into visceral , emotional,

and seemingly hardwired responses of insiders to outsiders .28 It is

this polarization of interior and exterior, as well as the security promised
in exchange for love, that links the two connotations of domestic as home and
nation. In both instances, the domestic signifies interiority, a condition
that is not only bounded and separate from the outside but indeed
needing dire protection from threats coming from outside. Against

the exterior as a source of strife, danger, and conflict, the interior

space of home or nation is imagined as a realm of safety, harmony, and
love. Home and family, of course, are more than metaphors for the nation; they
are also sites of subject and cultural formation for the nation. Ann
Laura Stoler contends that the study of intimate relations does not detract from an
understanding of rule by an imperial nation; rather, it enables us to

understand what Foucault called the microphysics of such power. To

study the intimate is not to turn away from structures of dominance
but to relocate their conditions of possibility and relations and forces
of production. . . . Refocusing on the intimate opens to what haunts
those social relations , to the untoward, to the strangely familiar that

proximities and inequalities may produce. . . . [I]t reminds us how

central the emotional economy of sexual access, parenting, and domestic

arrangements have been to colonial politics of labor recruitment

and pacification.29 If ideological norms of domesticity are posited as
crucial to the health and stability of the nation, then private homes
and families become sites of surveillance , knowledge production,
discipline, and regulation. In this way, apparently deviant domestic

formations are subject to regimes of hypervisibility. And as Avery

Gordon elucidates, hypervisibility can shade into invisibility: the deviant
are relegated to the margins of peripheral vision and become objects of
disavowed visibility or even blindness.30 In introduction 17 chapters 2 and 3, I refer
to this oscillation between racial hypervisibility and invisibility as deviant

visibility. This oscillation between visual ex - cess and visual lack

may be understood as a symptom of what Stoler refers to as the
haunting of structures of dominance by the intimate. To put this in the
terms of my study, I interpret private domestic realms, such as Asian
American family business, as the underside of U.S. national formations of
ideology, politics, the economy, and citizenship. As the obverse of U.S.
national fantasy, Asian American family business can support such fantasy as well
as disrupt and shatter it. As I will elaborate in chapter 1, Asian American family
business is a kind of secret of the nation. It is an open secret when it supports
fantasy in its guise as the model minority, but it becomes disavowed in its more
threatening form: the racial inhuman. Reassuring yet alien, Asian American family
business is an incarnation of the national uncanny.

They cede agency to simulation.

Antonio 95 (Robert J., Professor of Sociology University of Kansas, Nietzsche's
Antisociology: Subjectified Culture and the End of History, The American Journal of
Sociology, Vol. 101, No. 1 (Jul., 1995), pp. 1-43) rz
The "problem of the actor," Nietzsche said, "troubled me for the longest time."'12
He considered "roles" as "external," "surface," or "foreground" phenomena

and viewed close personal identification with them as symptomatic

of estrangement. While modern theorists saw differentiated roles
and professions as a matrix of autonomy and reflexivity, Nietzsche held
that persons (especially male professionals) in specialized occupations
overidentify with their positions and engage in gross fabrications to
obtain advancement. They look hesitantly to the opinion of others,
asking themselves, "How ought I feel about this?" They are so
thoroughly absorbed in simulating effective role players that they have
trouble being anything but actors -"The role has actually become the

character." This highly subjectified social self or simulator suffers

devastating inauthenticity. The powerful authority given the social greatly
amplifies Socratic culture's already self-indulgent "inwardness." Integrity,

decisiveness, spontaneity, and pleasure are undone by paralyzing

overconcern about possible causes , meanings, and consequences of

acts and unending internal dialogue about what others might think,
expect, say, or do (Nietzsche 1983, pp. 83-86; 1986, pp. 39-40; 1974, pp. 302-4,
316-17). Nervous rotation of socially appropriate "masks" reduces
persons to hypostatized "shadows," "abstracts," or simulacra. One
adopts "many roles," playing them "badly and superficially" in the
fashion of a stiff "puppet play." Nietzsche asked, "Are you genuine? Or only an
actor? 12 The important passages on actor and role in The Gay Science were added
to the second edition in 1887 and, thus, reflect Nietzsche's mature thought. 14
Nietzsche's Antisociology A representative or that which is represented? . . . [Or] no
more than an imitation of an actor?" Simulation is so pervasive that it is hard to tell
the copy from the genuine article; social selves "prefer the copies to the originals"
(Nietzsche 1983, pp. 84-86; 1986, p. 136; 1974, pp. 232- 33, 259; 1969b, pp. 268,
300, 302; 1968a, pp. 26-27). Their inwardness and aleatory scripts
foreclose genuine attachmento others. This type of actor cannot

plan for the long term or participate in enduring networks of

interdependence; such a person is neither willing nor able to be a "stone" in the
societal "edifice" (Nietzsche 1974, pp. 302-4; 1986a, pp. 93-94). Superficiality rules
in the arid subjectivized landscape. Neitzsche (1974, p. 259) stated, "One thinks
with a watch in one's hand, even as one eats one's midday meal while reading the
latest news of the stock market; one lives as if one always 'might miss out on
something . ''Rather do anything than nothing': this principle, too, is

merely astring to throttle all culture . . . . Living in a constant chase

after gain compels people to expend their spirit to the point of
exhaustion in continual pretense and overreaching and anticipating
others." Pervasive leveling, improvising, and faking foster an inflated
sense of ability and an oblivious attitude about the fortuitous
circumstances that contribute to role attainment (e.g., class or
ethnicity). The most mediocre people believe they can fill any position, even cultural
leadership. Nietzsche respected the self-mastery of genuine ascetic priests, like
Socrates, and praised their ability to redirect ressentiment creatively and to render
the "sick" harmless. But he deeply feared the new simulated versions.
Lacking the "born physician's" capacities, these impostors amplify the worst
inclinations of the herd ; they are " violent, envious , exploitative, scheming,
fawning, cringing, arrogant, all according to circumstances. " Social selves are
fodder for the "great man of the masses." Nietzsche held that "the less one knows
how to command, the more urgently one covets someone who commands, who
commands severelya god, prince, class, physician, father confessor, dogma, or
party conscience. The deadly combination of desperate conforming and
overreaching and untrammeled ressentiment paves the way for a new
type of tyrant (Nietzsche 1986, pp. 137, 168; 1974, pp. 117-18, 213, 288-89,

303-4). Sovereign Selves: Dissimulators/Perspectival Beings The age of Socratic

man is over. (Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy) Opposing the tide of

subjectified culture, Nietzsche envisioned a "sovereign" type of

individual who is not taken over by roles but acts according 15
American Journal of Sociology to his or her inherent bodily "intelligence"
and "multiplicity." Sovereign individuals escape the social self's
characteristic dualisms (e.g., mind/ body, inner/outer, and being/appearance)
and consequent estrangement. They "dissimulate" to establish
"distance" from their roles, discerningly staging, watching, and concealing
themselves in "good conscience" to escape domestication, exert
command, express benevolence and modesty, seek solitude, avert unnecessary
conflicts, or just enjoy the freedom and playfulness of masks (Nietzsche 1986, p.
136; 1982a, p. 156; 1974, pp. 130-33, 169, 266, 302-4, 316-17, 321; 1968b, pp.
292-93; 1966, p. 160; 1969b, pp. 59-60). They "become those who we
arehuman beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws,
who create themselves" (Nietzsche 1974, p. 266).

Unpredictability structures authentic learning. Our model is

the only one that cultivates new knowledge and ethical
openness to the world. They merely regurgitate the same
knowledge.
Waghid 14 (Yusef, Stellenbosch University, Matieland, South Africa, Pedagogy
Out of Bounds Untamed Variations of Democratic Education, SENSE PUBLISHERS
2014) rz
AUTHENTIC LEARNING AND NEW BEGINNINGS: DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION IN
BECOMING
For Greene, authentic learning has the task of arousing students

imagination, which allows us to break with the taken for granted, to

set aside familiar distinctions and definitions (1995, p. 3). When
students are provoked to use their imagination they are stirred to
reach out on their own initiatives (Greene, 1995, p. 5). The point about
authentic learning is that it is considered as releasing the imagination
of students with the intention to cultivate a community always in
the making the community that may someday be called a democracy
(Greene, 1995, p. 6). In other words, the emphasis Greene places on positive
freedom as a condition for authentic learning is quite obvious in the
sense that students are encouraged to break the chain of causes and
effects, of probabilities in which they usually find themselves
entangled, and to come to be themselves. In other words, authentic
learning involves students taking initiative and looking at things as if
they could be otherwise, as has been mentioned previously in this book
(Greene, 1995, p. 16). So, tapping into imagination as a way of enacting their

positive freedom, students become able to break with what is

supposedly fixed and finished, objectively and independently real. It is to
see beyond and to carve out new orders in experience to glimpse
what might be, to form notions of what should be and what is not yet
(Greene, 1995, p. 19). Consequently, authentic learning always reaches beyond
itself towards a completeness that can never be attained. As aptly stated by Greene
(1995, p. 28), releasing students imagination is not to resolve, not to point the
way, not to improve. It is to awaken, to disclose the ordinarily unseen,
unheard, and unexpected. This makes authentic learning a perpetual
narrative in the making (Greene, 1995, p. 5) a democratically educative
experience that is always in the making (Greene, 1995, p. 39). It is for
the latter reason that authentic (positive) learning is concomitantly linked to a
democratic education in becoming, where [n]o one can predict precisely
the common world of possibility we will grow to [co]inhabit, nor can
we absolutely justify one kind of community over another (Greene, 1995, p. 167)
that is, pedagogical encounters remain out of bounds. A democratic community of
possibility in which individuals co-exist, says Greene, is one that embraces pluralism
and does not fly apart in violence and disorder (1995, p. 167). Such a
community of possibility engages individuals to speak with others as
eloquently and passionately as [they] can about justice and caring and
love and trust (Greene, 1995, p. 167). In a way, Greenes call for a democratic
community of possibility a democratic community in becoming intimates that
teachers and students become more responsive to societal injustices,
such as people being subjected to insecurity as a result of crime and violence;
those suffering under corrupt governments and dictatorships; and
others stunned by lives in refugee camps. Therefore, teachers need to be attentive
and vigilant if [they] are to open texts and spaces, [and] if [they] are to
provoke the young [students] to be free (Greene, 1995, p. 121). Greene places
vigilance at the centre of the concept of authentic learning and suggests some
interesting distinctions that further expand the concept. Authentic learning
therefore gains a new meaning that perhaps is beyond current human
understandings if thought of in relation to vigilance. In the first instance, to be

vigilant is to awaken in students an awareness of the ordinarily

unseen, unheard, and unexpected (Greene, 1995, p. 28). To be vigilant is to
be cautious and suspicious, yet attentive and open to something different and new.
This view of vigilance is corroborated by Applebaum (2013, p. 19), who states that

vigilance involves listening not simply to confirm what is already

known but listening to hear something new . More importantly,
vigilance implies being able to listen to the voices of the marginalised
when they suffer injustices that is, vigilance insists that teachers and
students show their outrage at injustices (Greene, 1995, p. 42). In this way,
vigilance does not only involve listening to what is beyond recognition, but also that
teachers and students remain in discomfort about the injustices and
identify moments where the new can emerge (Applebaum, 2013, p. 34)

 that is, where new authentic learning can occur. Such a notion of vigilance
intimates the possibility that students take an ethical and political stand .

And when students act ethically and politically they listen with an
openness so that there is always more to learn they are stirred to
wide-awakeness, to imaginative action, and to renewed
consciousness of possibility (Greene, 1995, p. 43). When vigilance interrupts
the minds of students they become conscious that is, pursue a kind of
thinking that always involves a risk, a venture into the unknown, and thus become
open to new ways of looking at things, what Greene refers to as the making of a
democratic community (Greene, 1998, p. 126). A potent example of authentic
learning in which vigilance is at play, and of the notion of a democratic community
in becoming, is poignantly illustrated in the film In the land of blood and honey,
directed by Angelina Jolie in 2011. Against the backdrop of the Bosnian war in the
1990s, when Serbs committed atrocious genocidal acts against Bosniaks (Bosnian
Muslims and Croats), Danijel, a soldier fighting for the Serbs, falls in love with Ajla, a
Muslim. The romantic relationship soon garnered the dissatisfaction of Danijels
ruthless father a Yugoslav Peoples Army general, and Danijel and Ajla were
confronted with the unfamiliar, the unexplored, and the unexpected. Ajla, once used
as a human shield by Serbs against resistant Bosniak fighters, also witnessed the
genocidal killings and sniper assassinations, and the torturous rapes of women
(including herself) in prison camps. Danijel, although in many ways sympathetic
towards Bosniak killings as a consequence of his love for a Muslim, could not look
beyond his parochialism towards pluralism and accept that every person had a
legitimate right to life, irrespective of ones hatred for them. Only when he himself
eventually killed Ajla did he realise the senselessness of the Bosnian war and
surrender to the United Nations forces as a criminal of war. Now for Danijel to have
acted vigilantly and with the human freedom to enact justice towards those whom
he disliked would have harnessed his learning in an authentic way. It is not that he
did not learn from his dogmatic blindness and prejudice towards unjust Serbian
atrocities. Of course he did, otherwise he would not have acted unjustly. However,
such learning is frivolous or useless, as he acted freely under coercion from his
fathers external influence and the suspicion he harboured towards the Bosniaks,
who made an attempt on his life by bombing a church that he attended. What
Danijel failed to do, unlike Ajla, was to have ventured into the unfamiliar, the
improbable, where there always was the possibility to think differently about his
situation. Ajla knew that her love affair with Danijel upset the Bosniaks, yet she did
not let the hatred of the Bosniaks blind her to recognise even her torturers (Serbs)
right to existence. Unlike Danijel, Ajla was prepared to embark on a new beginning
(with Danijel), in which they could have opened themselves up to the possibility of
human co-existence by writing the texts of their democratic community in
becoming.

Deliberation and state focus are soul stifling endeavors that

condemn us to perpetual mediocrity.
-Also, value to life claim?

Siemens and Roodt 08 (Herman W. Siemens, Professor of Modern Philosophy

Leiden University, Vasti Roodt, Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy
Stellenbosch University, Nietzsche, Power and Politics: Rethinking Nietzsche's
Legacy for Political Thought, Edited by Herman W. Siemens Vasti Roodt, Walter de
Gruyter 2010,
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ciano_Aydin/publication/254876042_The_Strug
gle_between_Ideals_Nietzsche_Schmitt_and_Lefort_on_the_Politics_of_the_Future/lin
ks/5440dd940cf2a4f54d433634.pdf#page=108, accessed 7/8/16) rz
3. Culture and state: an antagonistic relation
The term anti-political appears again in 1888, in Twilight of the Idols (Germans 4).
It is worth quoting the passage at some length as it captures the spirit of
Nietzsches anti-politics: Even a rapid estimate shows that it is not only obvious that
German culture is declining but that there is sufficient reason for that. [] If one
spends oneself for power, for power politics, for economics, world trade,

parliamentarianism, and military interests if one spends in this

direction the quantum of understanding, seriousness, will, and self-overcoming
which one represents, then it will be lacking for the other direction.
Culture and the state one should not deceive oneself about this
are antagonists [] All great ages of culture are ages of political
decline: what is great culturally has always been unpolitical, even anti-political.
Goethes heart opened at the phenomenon of Napoleon it closed at the Wars of
Liberation. Further on, he is unequivocal that what matters most [] always
remains culture (TI Germans 4). The Franco-Prussian war serves Nietzsche
as a metaphor for the contradiction of culture and state politics;
Nietzsche turns the warring parties into cultural antitheses. The

result of the war is that the political victor, the German nation-state,
has been culturally vanquished. Hence, Nietzsches reference to Goethes
contrary feelings toward Napoleon and the Wars of Liberation against France (see
also BGE 244). For the moment, though, let us stay with the reference to the antipolitical. It is quite telling that culture is understood here primarily as unpolitical,
and anti-political is the more extreme, less certain descriptor. This offers support to
the view that Nietzsches main quarry is the politicization of culture,
not the political domain or the state as such. Where the state makes a claim

to the forces and energies that move a people, it is a direct

antagonist of culture. Nietzsches primary concern is the states
appropriation and displacement of culture the sphere of thought,
value-creating and self-overcoming which must be resisted by those
with spiritual strength. It is instructive in this regard to consider Peter
Bergmanns political history of the idea of anti-politics. Bergmann traces the term
anti-political to the religious wars in sixteenth century France. In order to promote
the idea of a secular state, the Politiques used the term pejoratively, to refer to
those who supported a theocratic conception of politics (Bergmann 1987 2). In a
similar vein in the eighteenth century, Thomas Paine rejected Edmund Burkes idea

of the union of church and state as an antipolitical doctrine (Paine 1969 110). The
term was then used again in the late nineteenth century to defend the political
sphere from newly encroaching economic forces (Bergmann 1987 2). According to
Bergmann, Nietzsche inverts the use of the term as part of a new cultural critique
of the political. Unlike previous usages, Nietzsche marshals the term in a positive
sense, to isolate and confine the new danger, the secular state, in the name of
culture (1987 4). This reading is not only attuned to Nietzsches polemical
manoeuvres but offers the greatest scope for exploring the affirmative aspects of
his philosophy. Of interest here, Bergmann notes that in 1878 the liberal Julius
Froebel criticised the Wagnerian movement for introducing decidedly antipolitical
views into the political domain. Froebel identified the Wagnerian political religion
as the biggest threat to the German nation-state (Bergmann 1987 2 3). While
Bergmann thinks it very unlikely Nietzsche knew of Froebels use of the idea, the
reference provides confirmation the term continued to resonate with its earlier
meaning. According to Nietzsche, politics is for the statesman, not the

philosopher, and the latters cultural, spiritual energies are

endangered by a preoccupation with the vagaries of national
politics (HH 438, 481; SE 7). It is laughable that with the founding of the Reich in
1871, some have thought the world was put to rights. Nietzsche asks,
How should a political innovation suffice to turn men once and for
all into contented inhabitants of the earth ? (SE 4). This somewhat
parodic, rhetorical question sums up his disdain for progressive political
ideologies that seek a political solution to fundamentally human
problems. When it comes to the problem of existence, the
philosophers pre-eminent concern, politics has nothing to offer (SE
4). Nietzsche contends that political power makes stupid and enervates
the spirit (TI Germans 1; see also HH 465). Where once the Germans were known
as the people of thinkers, they no longer value spiritual concerns: Deutschland,
Deutschland ber alles I fear that was the end of German philosophy (TI Germans
1). Germany has suffered in the Prus- 94 Marina Cominos sian victory from the selfsatisfaction that followed the war and a general consensus that along with political
victory, German culture has triumphed (DS 1). The greatest risk to Germany is that
the German spirit will be sacrificed to the demands of the Reich, which promotes
culture only in support of its own power (DS 1; SE 6). Nietzsches central
condemnation of the German character is that the German spirit has fallen so far
short of its potential. He holds the idea of the German spirit in high esteem and his
attack on German culture is really an attack on the corruption of the spirit (see
Westfall 2004 44 45). In the early essay, Schopenhauer as Educator, he laments
his suspicion that the German now wants violently to cast off those ancient
obligations which his wonderful talentedness and the profound seriousness of his
nature imposed upon him (SE 6). Genuine culture is being demeaned by

the cultural philistine, the cultured man who surrounds himself

with the fragments and ornaments of culture but is not himself a
creator (DS 1; SE 4). Howard Caygill has shown that Nietzsches early
interpretative work on the beginnings of philosophy anticipates this later account of

the culturally destructive effects of the German Reich (1993). In his work of the
early 1870s, Nietzsche explains the birth of philosophy as a desire for
cultural reform. The pre-Socratic philosophers sought to supersede myriad local
cults with a Panhellenic tragic culture. Nietzsche presents the story as one of lost
potential as cultural Panhellenism was overtaken by the ambitions of Athens for
political domination (Caygill 1993 116 117). This destroyed the possibility of a
partnership between philosophy and tragic art, both of which degenerated in the
new age. The founding of the Reich, following the war, heralds a new era ruled by
public opinion. At this time, journalism is superseding philosophy (HH 447; SE 4).
According to Nietzsche, the hegemony of public opinion results in the

decline of free, individual thought and amounts to an assault on the

very hallmark of human being, each individuals uniqueness (HH 482;
SE 1). In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche attributes the decline of German
culture not only to the founding of the Second Reich, but to the deterioration
of education that has accompanied it. The German state has turned
education into a kind of factory aimed at producing individuals of service,
usable, abusable by the state (TI Germans 5). Nietzsche is making two
arguments here. Firstly, in a Tocquevillean vein, educational standards are
being sacrificed to accommodate the greatest numbers. This state-

based democratism of Bildung is producing a near-universal mediocrity .

Secondly, tying education to state goals threatens to destroy those
rare, free spirited individuals with the potential to forge new paths
and so enlarge the potential of humankind (SE 3; TI Germans 5; see also
Conway 1997a 8 10; Wolin 2004 460 461 ). Where education comes under
the dictates of the state , representing mass demands, culture
inevitably degenerates . Moreover, the modern ascendancy of the scienceindustry is a great despiritualizing influence, reducing humanity to animality,
rendering human beings slaves to nature rather than its perfector (TI Germans 3;
see also SE 5 6). Nietzsches promotion of culture is rooted in
veneration of the human capacity for self-transformation, a

proliferation of new, richer possibilities of existence and ever-larger

horizons of human aspiration. While the states main aim is to
preserve itself, the bearers of culture press towards their own
transfiguration. This explains, in part, Nietzsches contempt for
progressive political movements , whose ends of happiness and
contentment run counter to the cultural strivings that carry
humankind to greater heights . As we have noted, Nietzsche is better
understood as a fighter for culture than an adversary of the state as such (SE 6).
The Reich, however, promotes the state as the highest goal of humankind (SE 4).

The state has become the New Idol and aims to harness, for its

own ends, the veneration once accorded the church (SE 4; Z I New Idol).
In an oft-cited passage in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the state is characterised
as the coldest of all cold monsters for destroying the realms of
culture and spiritual longing or aspiration (Z I New Idol). Notably,
Nietzsche finds the church to be a nobler institution than the state because it
affirms the power of spirituality, while the state relies on brute force (GS 358). In
Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche observes that where religious feeling dies away,
so too will the state. The democratic attrition of hierarchical relationships spells the
demise of the state, for it will no longer bear the authority of a higher power.
Nietzsche does not unequivocally laud these developments as their course and
significance for humankind is unknown (HH 472). Indeed, it is democratization
rather than the state per se that may finally extinguish the power of selfovercoming that lies at the root of culture.

Consensus DA regurgitating the same knowledge and the

same beliefs, blindly upheld as truth, results in the worst types
of violence. Even if they win that their model is better, our
genealogical destabilization of the norms of debate is a
productive discussion and opens up new realms of knowledge
and understanding.
Brown 01 (Wendy, Professor of Political Science at the University of California,
Berkeley, Politics Out of History, Princeton University Press 2001) rz

Nietzsche offers a convergent, if more allegorical, recognition of

genealogy's power in the preface to On the Genealogy of Morals. "We are
unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge, " Nietzsche proclaims,
because we are always circling around the " beehives of our
knowledge" rather than dwelling in, and thus knowing, human
experience.3 Nietzsche's project with genealogy is to create some kind of
distance between us and our knowledge, unsettling what we think
we know, defamiliarizing the familiar, defamiliarizing us with
ourselves. This entails, among other things, calling into question all the
elements of human practices that have been attributed to a place or source
outside of humanity, calling into question the a priori, and, most important, calling
into question God as the source of evil. In ceasing "to look for the origin of evil
behind the world" (p. 1 7), Nietzsche will instead discern it inside particular
formations and formulations of morality, thereby disrupting both the

givenness of a particular moral precept and the notion of origins as

something left behind. The genealogical work of defamiliarizing also
entails asking whether values do what they claim or instead serve a
purpose that must be deciphered. This Inquiry is enabled by asking first,
"under what conditions did man devise these value judgements good
and evil"; second, "what value do they themselves possess"; and third,

"are they a sign of distress, of impoverishment, of the degeneration of

life ... or is there revealed in them ... the plenitude, force, and will of life. " As
Nietzsche describes this questioning, he also describes its productivity: " Out of my

answers there grew new questions, inquiries, conjectures,

probabilities-until at length I had a country of my own, a soil of my
own, an entire discrete, thriving, flourishing world, like a secret
garden the existence of which no one suspected" (p. 17). This secret
garden is what genealogy intends to produce: this other way of
conceiving the familiar, this radical displacement of the lay of the
land through which we think and perceive ourselves, our problems,
our imperatives. Genealogy promises a worldview that is differently
populated and oriented than the one in which we are steeped. "The project
is to traverse with quite novel questions, as though with new eyes,
the enormous, distant, and so well hidden land of morality-of morality that
has actually existed, actually been lived ... to discover this land for the
first time" (p. 21). The promise of genealogy is developed in the next section of
the preface, where Nietzsche outlines the explicit problem that will preoccupy him in
the first essay of the text, that of conventional morality: This problem of the value of
pity and of the morality of pity ... seems at first to be merely something detached,
an isolated question mark; but whoever sticks with it and learns how to ask
questions here will experience what I experienced-a tremendous new prospect
opens up for him, a new possibility comes over him like a vertigo, every kind of
mistrust, suspicion, fear leaps up, his belief in morality, in all morality, falters-finally
a new demand becomes audible. (p. 20) Nietzsche here suggests that genealogy

is a form of artful questioning, a way of asking "what really

happened there" about a commonplace. But this questioning inevitably
disturbs a much larger nest of beliefs than the one with which the
genealogist begins. Recall the projects of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, of
Foucault' History of Sexuality or Discipline and Punish, and the way in which each
interrogates not only certain conventional beliefs and histories but
also their structure and function in a larger social project. Each
begins with a story by which we commonly "know" ourselves-as
morally good, enlightened, sexually liberated, politically humane- and queries
both whether these stories are "really true" and what function of
power each purported truth serves, what each fiction disguises,
displaces, enforces, and mobilizes. Each study also opens out well beyond
its initial question to consider the imbrications in modernity of power, subject
formation, conscience, guilt, confession, and more. The vertigo that genealogy aims
to achieve means that more than a particular subject of knowledge is
transformed by the genealogical inquiry; the knower, too, is cast
into unfamiliarity with her- or himself. The genealogist will experiencepsychologically and physiologically as well as epistemologically-a loss of ground, as

particular narratives and presumptions are upended and scrutinized for

the interests they serve and the comfort they offer.

AT State Good
The law can only protect those who are recognized as
legitimate subjects. Specifically, we are critiquing the form of
the law the content becomes irrelevant because enforcement
is set up to commit preemptive violence against racialized
bodies.
Chang 12 (Juliana, Assistant Professor of English at Santa Clara University,
Inhuman Citizenship Traumatic Enjoyment and Asian American Literature, 2012,
University of Minnesota Press) rz
In American Son, the shameful citizenship of the Sullivans stands in marked contrast
to the injured citizenship claimed by white subjects. The novel demonstrates how

injury is most visible as damage done to white, propertied

individuals, and least visible as the suffering of racial others. The
reason for this racialized disproportion in the visibility of injury
becomes apparent when we clarify the definition of injury. Min Song
draws from the legal analysis of Carl Gutirrez-Jones to elaborate on the
connotations of injury: The concept of injury, as Carl Gutirrez-Jones explains,
is inextricably bound up with the law and with the state that provides

the muscle to enforce the law: like the verb form to injure, injury
marks an act against jur, against the law, rights, and accepted
privilege (2001, 24). Hence, this concept suggests the ways in which injury
reifies a feeling of having been wronged within social, and
bureaucratic, institutions that may or may not require some kind of mandated
compensation. . . . [T]his articulation is . . . accompanied by questions of
blame and recompense. Who caused the injury? In what ways might we
enumerate a just compensation for the suffering caused by injury?12 shameful
citizenship 71 If injury is an act against the law, then subjects must be
recognizable as legitimate in order to have an injury acknowledged

and redressed. The legitimacy conferred by property ownership, for example,

means that damage done to ones property is recognizable as an injury against the
owners right to enjoy his property. However, violence done to less legitimate
subjectsfor example, police harassment of youth of color who are
in the wrong part of townis less recognizable as injury. Instead, it
is simply considered enforcement of the law, one that preemptively
protects property and whiteness from damage done by racial others.

Injury and shame, then, are wielded to racialize whiteness as

aligned with law and social morality and racial others as juridical
objects that may be judged as outside social morality. Walter Benjamin
and other critics have pointed out how the violence of law enforcement not
only aims at enforcing the content of law, but at preserving the very
form of law. The violence of law and the state is transformed into law

itself, while other forms of violence are criminalized and outlawed. In

American Son, we see that violence against whiteness and property is
criminalized in this way, while violence against racial others is implicitly
sanctioned by law. Violence that protects whiteness and property is not seen as
injury against the racially or economically subordinated; it is seen simply as law.
Violence against whiteness and property, by contrast, is seen as criminal and
degenerate. American Son reveals how violence committed by youths of
color, often naturalized as lawless in its connotative senses (animalistic,
savage, irrational), emerges from a condition of lawlessness in a more precisely
institutional sense: exclusion from the protections of law; exclusion

from having ones violations recognized and legitimated as injury.

The Lacanian insight that I would like to add to this analysis of violence and law is
the understanding that jouissance, as well as violence, serves as a
support and underside of law. Violence denotes force, ferocity, and
aggression, but jouissance comprises an affective element of disgust
and obscenity. And while violence is often brutal and cruel, it can often be
understood through some kind of narration (for example, this person committed
violence because violence was committed against him). Jouissance, however,
cannot be narrativized, for it is a condition in which meaning and sense absolutely
collapse. What is especially traumatic about jouissance is its
enjoyment: the nauseating, disturbing satisfaction that one obtains from

violence as pain and pleasure.

Progress does not progress for the racialized Asian American

body, relegated to excess. Their arguments about reform
uphold US neoliberal hegemony.
-the private, not public policy, facilitates racialization

Chang 12 (Juliana, Assistant Professor of English at Santa Clara University,

Inhuman Citizenship Traumatic Enjoyment and Asian American Literature, 2012,
University of Minnesota Press) rz

While melancholia, like its companion concept, mourning, is commonly

understood as a response to loss, this chapter demonstrates the importance of
understanding how an epistemology of melancholia allows us to
comprehend excess as well as loss. Melancholia is a practice of animating
the lost object, imbuing this absence with a presence that should
not be. I use the trope of the living dead to reference how
melancholia keeps alive what is otherwise abandoned for dead. The
living dead are not simply alive; they are a disturbing surplus of life
substance, a category beyond the continuum of living and dead. A
reading of Ngs novel through the lens of melancholia allows us to understand
racial labor exploitation as constituting this kind of superfluous life.

The recruitment and exploitation of Chinese male labor in the late

nineteenth and early twentieth century was an integral part of U.S. nation
building during the period of continental and imperial expansion. We can see how
the Chinese were racialized as alien and temporary workers by
immigration laws and practices that discouraged the formation of
Chinese immigrant families. In the late twentieth century, such
racial labor exploita - tion became less obvious, with the apparent shift
to more open immigration policies that permitted the formation of Chinese
American families and thus an acceptance of Chinese as potentially permanent
members of the nation. However, we will see how such family formation
does in fact facilitate racial labor exploitation in the service of late
Cold War imperial nationalism, albeit in a different form. Through an
understanding of how the sorrows of racial domesticity are formed in a
melancholic citizenship, Bone helps us to apprehend the encrypted
secrets of a liberal and emergent neoliberal nation-state formation. In
particular, I will focus on how forces of neoliberalism, including the openings
of immigration in the 1960s, restructure the national economy in its
dimension as an economy of sacrifice. By sacrifice, I mean the
transformation of a social antagonism or contradiction into an
ejected surplus, so as to reconstitute the social as coherent and
whole. In my analysis melancholic citizenship 31 of Bone, I consider how racial
immigrant workers are figured as this sacrificial surplus. This status
means that they become surplus to the national Symbolic, even as
their labor is extracted to build American economic power. Posited as
the excess of the Symbolic, they are the nations living dead. Bone is
dedicated to Ngs great-grandfather, Ah Sam. In interviews and remarks about
Bone, Ng often refers to similar grandfatherly figures the old-timers of San
Francisco Chinatown. Such frequent references to a historical and elderly generation
of men are especially striking and even puzzling when we consider that the novel
centers on the travails of three contemporary young women. Indeed, the very first
sentences of Bone would seem to invite a reading that aligns it with famous Chinese
American woman-centered narratives, such as Maxine Hong Kingstons The Woman
Warrior and Amy Tans The Joy Luck Club: We were a family of three girls. By
Chinese standards, that wasnt lucky (3). Chinese American woman-centered texts
are often understood within a liberal multicultural feminist framework as narratives
of ethnicized female subordination and liberation. Like liberal nationalism,
however, liberal feminism presumes its own kinds of teleology,

understanding racial-ethnic women as oppressed by ethnic and

white patriarchies, and achieving self-actualization through
practices of freedom and autonomy. Under this paradigm, the lives of
young Chinese American women would seem quite discontinuous from those of the
old bachelors. While the grandfather figures may be considered remnants of an oldworld patriarchy or of a long-ago racist era, these young women are understood as
figures supplanting such anachronisms. Ngs dedication and comments provoke us

to question, however, how the lives of these young Chinese American

women resonate with, not merely against, those of the old bachelors. The
novel is set at a key historic moment, when large numbers of this younger
generation are coming of age and as families become more established in
Chinatown. In this chapter, I will highlight how this domestic restructuring is
produced by the emerging forces of global capital and neo - liberal state
formation. In this way, I interpret Ngs narration as an examination of how the
prehistory of neoliberalism restructured Chinatown domesticity. Histories of
neoliberalism posit its ascendance in the period of the early 1980s, when the
policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher intensified the dismantling of the
welfare state and the consolidation of the 32 melancholic citizenship deregulated,
privatized market economy.2 Bones historical setting roughly corresponds to this
period, at the very beginnings of neoliberal consolidation.3 When we analyze the
novels narration of Chinatowns domestic restructuring, we can already detect
some elements of an emergent neoliberalism. Specifically, we see that the support
and management of racial migrant labor takes place in the private
sphere of family, not the public sphere of government. Put another way,

governmentality and biopolitics have already been shifted into the

private sphere for racial communities, even in this very early, emergent
phase. Neoliberalism structures family business in both its economic and
institutional forms. While all members of the family work to sustain the family
economically, it is Leila who assumes the greatest responsibility for maintaining the
family as an institution. This means that Leila, as the child of immigrants, becomes
accountable for the management and support of migrant labor. The opening excerpt
depicting Leila as her mothers interlocutor and consultant is just one example of
such family management. Because of the imperatives of collective
survival, there is no room for Leilas individualized desires. This is not
to say that such desires do not exist; rather, they are rendered as excess
and transformed into secrets. Indeed, Leila even uses the form of the secret
to transform the burden of her obligations into a sticky enjoyment: I was afraid my
secret guilt would start to grow sweet, and I would never want to spit it out (106).
Bone reveals the secret guilt and enjoyment not only of its main character but also
of the U.S. nation. Even as it is haunted by the racial labor exploitation

that is both at the heart of its economy and in excess of its official
mythos, the nation also enjoys it. For example, as I will discuss below, the
old bachelors of Chinatown are hegemonically perceived as a kind of repellant,
obscene surplus of the nation. They are sites of a racial jouissance that allow the
nation to disavow its own inner antagonisms and to displace the disturbing affect of
antagonism onto the Imaginary other. Dominant narratives of the modern

nation-state are structured by Enlight enment values of

development and progress. They are modern in the sense that they
are linear and accumulative, rather than cyclical and recursive. In
the postcivil rights and late Cold War era, the American version of this
national fiction took the form of an exceptionalist myth of

multiracial democratic openness. The United States claimed a unique and

exceptional status in basing its offer of full citizenship on consent rather than
descent. In this developmental paradigm, racial migrants and racial
melancholic citizenship 33 subjects would progress along an arc of
ever-higher socioeconomic maturity, thus enabling American

democracy to become evermore complete. Such a linear, sequential

account of national modernity enabled the late Cold War formation of U.S.
global hegemony. The United States relied on this claim to exceptional
multiracial democracy for its mantle of moral leadership: it proclaimed
itself the exemplar and arbiter of liberal openness, economic progress,
and human rights. Because capitalism and liberal democracy are
fused together in this mythos, where freedom is equivalent to the free market,
the capitalist ideology of progress is tied to this notion of progress. A
foundational myth of U.S. capitalism is that everyone, of all
socioeconomic strata, has an equal opportunity to accumulate. In the
ideology of 1980s Reaganomics, for example, the accumulation of wealth in the
upper classes will trickle down to everyone else. Through deregulation of the
market, in which the freeing of economic activity uses the trope of political liberty,
all participants presumably become unencumbered so that their choices and their
opportunities to accumulate become limitless. Such material achievement acquires
a spiritual and transcendent dimension by being fantasized into the American
Dream. Let us clarify further the relationship between racial migrant labor and the
emergence of neoliberal and imperial nation-statehood. The ascendance of
U.S. global hegemony, its economic preeminence and might, relied

upon the surplus value extracted from a cheap and mobile migrant
labor force. In tandem, the ideological enfolding of racial migration
into multiracial exceptionalism formed part of the apparatus for
recruiting such migrant labor from around the world. As a result of the 1965
Immigration Acts, family reunification became the major category for the
re - cruitment of this type of labor, which meant that new migrant populations
were both supported by and subject to regulation by their families
and communities. In this way, they were outside the modern (impersonal,
bureaucratic) rationality of industrialized labor. In other words, support
and management of racial labor became privatized, the realm of the
private spheres of family and community, not the public spheres of
work, the formal economy, or the state.4 Within a national mythos of
multiracial democratic progress, the domes - tic restructuring of Chinatown is
understood as an incorporation of racial subjects into full citizenship. In Lee
Edelmans terms, the production of families as signaled through the
reproduction of children would mean that 34 melancholic citizenship
Chinese Americans have entered into the normative temporality of

re - productive futurism, the mode through which we understand

politics as such. In No Future, Edelman argues that political decision

making, as well as politics itself, is circumscribed by the ideology of

the ideal, mythical child as the figure of the future. To the extent that
queerness is excluded from such reproductive futurism, it is excluded from
politics and indeed from sociality. Edelmans critique, however, presupposes
a universal figure of the child, a trope of privilege whose whiteness is unstated. My
analysis of Bone reveals how the racial child and heteronormative family
do not in fact represent reproductive futurism. Instead, they animate

the past and produce the inhuman figure of the living dead.

Political compensation and reparation cannot solve neglects

the organization of discrimination and cant accommodate the
specific physical effects of those wounds. Understanding the
structures of racialization and melancholia is a prerequisite.
Cheng 97 (Anne Anlin, Professor of English and African American Literature at
Princeton University, The Melancholy of Race, The Kenyon Review New Series, Vol.
19, No. 1, American Memory / American Forgetfulness (Winter, 1997), pp. 49-61,
http://sites.uci.edu/mariaselenebose/files/2015/10/Cheng-Melancholy-Race.pdf,
accessed 7/6/16) rz

In the landscape of racialization, such boundary confusion occurs on

multiple levels: physical, sexual, ontological, terminological. In
Carolivia Herron's disturbing novel Thereafter Johnnie, incest as a trauma of
boundary is offered as a curse of slavery; in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's experimental
novel Dicte6e, the body of the narrator often literally merges into the geography of
division that is modern Korea, while the voice of the autobiographical subject
remains indistinguishable from various forms of cultural dictation; in her wellknown
essay "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," Zora Neale Hurston collapses the question of
race into the question of specularity (who is watching; who is playing for whom). As
James Clifford says, the question of boundary is the ethnic predicament. The point
here is not to repathologize the minority, but to confront the more difficult

question of what is a minority without his/her injury. Contemporary

political activities and rhetoric designed to set matters right cannot

really be effective , cannot escape relabeling those it aims to liberate ,

until we recognize that our very conceptions of cultural health and
integrity are themselves preconditioned by what have been deemed
abnormal or broken . In the way of Freudian logic, pathology defines health.

Racial identity, as a moment of active self-perception, is almost always

simultaneous with the racialization of another, an instance of othering.
When Hurston writes, "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white
background," she refers not only to the constitution of blackness, but of whiteness
as well, each defining the other's pathology.9 Or, as Nella Larsen's narrator in
Passing knows all too well, race is the company that you keep. It should be clear by

now that race itself lives in America as a melancholic presence. More specifically,
racialization - as an act of self-constitution through denying and reassimilating the Other - must be conceived of as a wholly melancholic
activity . The rhetoric of compensation , which attempts to reverse
discrimination through inversion , neglects the organization of the
activity that went into producing discrimination , nor can it accommodate
the physical effects of those wounds . There is a possibility that we may not

be able to retrieve an unmarked, unscathed subject under the dirty

bandage of racism. As we saw with Flower Drum Song, Mei Li's presence was
always marked as transgression, and re-marked as such in her final acquisition of a
new homeland. Similarly, we are all too painfully familiar with popular
racial fantasies that circulate within our public sphere , but rather than

identifying those stereotypes yet again or simply denying those

clearly troublesome images ("We aren't like that!"), it seems more fruitful
and important to go on to the more complex question of how
melancholic racialization works . To propose that the minority may

have been profoundly affected by racial fantasies is not to lock

him/her back into the stereotypes, but to perform the more
importantask of unraveling the deeper identificatory operations-and
seductions-produced by those projections. If the melancholic
minority is busy forgetting herself, with what is she identifying? We
have all heard the wisdom that women and minorities have internalized
dominant cultural demands, but do we really know what that means?
Where does desire come into this equation? It is a dangerous question to
ask what does a minority want. When it comes to political critique , it seems as if
desire itself may be what the minority has been enjoined to forget .
In David Henry Hwang's award-winning play M. Butterfly, the story of a French
diplomat (Gallimard) who after ten years discovers that his Chinese mistress (Song
Liling) was not only a spy but also a man, what remains glaringly missing from the
play is an entertainment of Song's desires. By now M. Butterfly has become an
almost-classic text of how racial fantasies facilitate sexual fantasies; central to
much critical attention has been the play's exposure of the consistent emasculation
of Asian males in white society. Indeed, the play's fundamental assumption is that
Song's sexual deception succeeded because of Gallimard's racial stereotypes about
"the East." Yet as an expose of sexual intrigue and racial fantasy, M. Butterfly begs
the question: aside from his professional objective to seduce Gallimard, does Song
have a personal investment in his disguise? And what would it mean for the political
agenda of the play if he did? In the three moments of the play when we might have
hints of Song's own private fantasies, we are greeted with silences and deferrals:
when Comrade Chin asks why Song remains in disguise when alone; when the judge
questions Song's incredible acting ability; and when Gallimard questions Song's
motivation. In all three brief instances, Song's answer comes in the form of ellipses

and pauses, as though his desire can only be pronounced as unutterability.

Significantly, the play can see Song only as the object of Gallimard's desire or as the
critic of that desire. It is as though to articulate Song's desire would render him less
"cool" or jeopardize his position as a proper critic of Western racial fantasies. In
other words, Song must not want. His inauthentic performance must remain
inauthentic in order to guarantee the authenticity of his critique. The notion that

cultural assimilation always requires certain acts of personal

relinquishment and even disguise is a common one, easily and
conventionally understood as the price of "fitting in." Think, for
example, of the long literary alignment of "passing" with deception.
Postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha offers us some insights into the connection
between assimilation and falsehood. He identifies "mimicry" as a colonial,
disciplinary injunction and device, one that is nonetheless doomed to
fail. He explains, "colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed,
recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the
same, but not quite." 10 By this account, the colonized finds him/herself
in the position of melancholically echoing the master, incorporating
both the master and his own denigration. What we have been calling the
"internalization of the other," Bhabha attributes to authoritative injunction.
Such injunction to mime the dominant can be seen from images such as the
Indian servant dressed as the Englishman to the colonial
institutionalization of language itself. We see here sophisticated versions of the
"price of fitting in." To put it crudely, Bhabha has located the social injunction to
assimilate and that injunction's built-in failure. The colonized subject must be
disguised, mimed, as almost the same, but not quite. His/her incomplete imitation
in turn serves as a sign of assimilative failure, the failure of authenticity. The
concept of melancholic racialization, however, implies that assimilation

may be more intimately linked to identity than a mere consequence

of the dominant demand for sameness. In melancholia, assimilation
("acting liko an internalized other") is a fait accompli, part and parcel of
ego formation for the dominant and the minority, except that with the
latter, such doubling is seen as something false ("acting like someone you're not").
The notion of racial authenticity is thus finally a cultural judgment which itself
disguises the identificatory assimilation that has already taken place in melancholic
racialization: "I am constituted by an other who finally must, and must not, be me."
The story of M. Butterfly suggests that deception might be more deeply
affective than merely facilitating assimilation; rather, "passing" may
share a profoundly similar logic with the activity of identity itself.
Near the end of the play Song seems to have forgotten the terms of his own game.
We see him protest startlingly and tellingly, "So-you [Gillimard] never really loved
me? Only when I was playing a part?""l The blindness of that question reveals Song
as having been seduced by his own mise-en-scene. The failure of Song's deception
comes from this plunge into the reality of that deception. And that failure of
authenticity has the very specific effect of creating a sense of "the real self": Song

cries, "I'm your butterfly... it was always me." 12 The seduction of authenticity turns
out to promise nothing less than the possibility of a pure self: ".. . it was always me."
In his introduction to Abraham and Torok's The Wolf Man's Magic Word (itself a
response to Freud on melancholia), Jacques Derrida similarly implies that the
disguise may be fundamental to an act of identification: The first
hypothesis of The Magic Word... supposes a redefinition of the Self (the systems of
introjections) and of the fantasy of incorporation.... The more the self keeps

the foreign element as a foreigner inside itself, the more it excludes

it. The self mimes introjection. But this mimicry with its redoubtable logic
depends on clandestinity. Incorporation operates clandestinely with a prohibition it
neither accepts nor transgresses. (underlining added)'3 The "foreigner inside"
lives as the "self." To racially assimilate (in the senses of blending in and
taking in) implies an act of public and subjective disguise: not only the

disguise of the self in the traditional sense of "taking it," but also in
the deeper sense of remaking the self through the other, a
profoundly selfconstituting act. What I called the pure self that Song in M.
Butterfy asserts is figured after the master. Song does not come to power in the end
nor assume the success of his political critique by acquiring some authentic Chinese
male identity. On the contrary, he does so by donning an Armani suit and adopting
the colonial voice: "You think I could've pulled this off if I wasn't full of pride? .. . It
took arrogance, really -to believe you can will . . . the destiny of another." 14 One
might say Song has not only learned how to be with a white man, but also how to be
the white man. The difficult lesson of M. Butterfly therefore is not the existence of
fantasy stereotypes as the playwright himself asserts in the Afterword, but the more
disturbing idea that fantasy stereotypes may be the very ways in which we come to
know and love someone..., come to know and love ourselves. Melancholia has

thus seeped into every corner of our landscape. Is there any getting
over it? First it seems more important than ever to recognize that
identity built on loss is symptomatic of both the dominant and the
marginalized. Second, at the risk of speaking like a true melancholic, perhaps
minority discourse might prove to be most powerful when it resides
within the consciousness of melancholia itself , when it can maintain a
"negative capability" between neither dismissing, nor sentimentalizing the minority.
Let us return to the hauntings of Invisible Man. Ellison's political critique in that
novel seems precisely the dramatization of a self-reflexive melancholia, a man
whose invisibility affects the margin as well as the center: I am invisible.... Like the
bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been
surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see
only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination.... 15 In that hall
of mirrors, who distorts whom? As much as racial blindness renders the narrator
invisible, his invisibility also reflects emptiness back on those gazers as well. If he
has been assimilated only through his invisibility, then he also renders dissimilar
and strange the status of their visibility. Here we have the potential for a kind of
subversive assimilation, a kind of mimetic dissimulation inherent in, though

differently inflected by, Bhabha's "discourse of mimicry." The phantasm of the

narrator's invisibility imitates the phantasm that is mainstream society. The
character who embodies this strategy of imitation is of course the phantasmatic
figure of Rinehart. Literally the real invisible man in the text, Rinehart never
appears-except as pure appearance: Rinehart the runner, Rine the gambler, Rine
the briber, Rine the lover, pimp, and reverend. He stands as the figure of a figure. To
try to locate Rinehart's "true" identity would be to miss the lesson of Rinehart: who
you are depends on whom you are talking to, which community you are in, and who
is watching your performance. Embodying dissimulative potentials, glaringly visible
in his invisibility, Rinehart operates and structures a network of connections in
Harlem from religion to prostitution to the law. A man defined by costumes and
props, he is at once the ultimate "outsider" and "insider," making visible the
contingency of identity and perverting the lines of power-or at least, exposing power
as positionality. As a parable for plurality, as a continually re-signifiable sign,
Rinehart critiques the mainstream ideal of an uncompromising individuality.
Rinehart as an event of visual performance demonstrates first that the act of
identification is dependent on representation, and thus draws our attention to the
power dynamics of viewer and spectatorship; second, that the act of representation
involves simultaneously, on a deeper level, an act of disidentification. To
impersonate Rinehart is to become Rinehart: "Something was working on me [the
narrator], and profoundly... being mistaken for him .., my entire body started to itch,
as though I had just been removed from a plaster cast ... you could actually make
yourself anew." 16 Yet even as the narrator celebrates a rebirth through his
disguise, he suffers from a kind of identity aphasia, asking repeatedly, "Who
actually was who?" Becoming a re-signable sign pays a price of its own. "It" is not
just a costume, as Song in M. Butterfly has found out. The site of identification is
presented as difficult and ambivalent precisely because there is a cost in every
identity staging. This liberation is thus provisional, if not downright shattering. By
impersonating Rinehart, the narrator arrives not at an identity, but the phantasm
that is the mode of identification. To follow Rinehartism is to plunge into the very
heart of racial melancholia: So I'd accept it, I'd explore it, rine and heart. I'd plunge
into it with both feet and they'd gag. Oh, but wouldn't they gag.... Yes, and I'd let
them swoller me until they vomited or burst wide open. Let them gag on what they
refuse to see.'7 "Gagging" literalizes the melancholic condition of race in America:
we gag on what we refuse to see. American culture is continually confronted by
ghosts it can neither spit out nor swallow. Rinehart, the "Spiritual Technologist,"
recommends a remedy for that social malady: "Behold the Invisible," 18 suggesting
that only by recognizing invisibility can we begin to understand the conditions of
visibility. Earlier I asked what is the status of the "presence" which Toni Morrison
wants us to uncover. Is she referring to "real" AfricanAmerican presence or the
phantasm of African-American presence? I propose that the answer can only be the
latter. The racialization and phantomization of African-Americans exist to produce
"American" presence. The always ghostly presence of African-Americans in
American literature implies that the entire process of racialization, of configuring
visibility (who is white, who is black; who is visible, who is not), must be considered
as itself melancholic. The act of delineating absence preconditions presence. Race
in America is thus "stuck" within the Moebius strip of inclusion and exclusion: an

identification predicated on dis-identity. It is a fear of contamination that works itself

out by contamination, a remembering of a forgetting that cannot be remembered.
And nothing is more disturbing than being made to witness the simultaneity of that
duality. This, to sidetrack for a moment, is perhaps why the theater of Anna Deveare
Smith holds such resonance. Each character is constituted, made real for us, by
his/her counterdefinition to another, and the table keeps turning. Anyone who has
partaken of Smith's performances understands the discomfort of being made to
watch the fine line between speaking for, speaking as, and speaking against. In
Smith's theater of incorporation, one sees on a single stage the agon, the
multifaceted, conflictual views between racialized peoples (even within individuals),
and the inconsolability of each of their positions. One gets a feeling too that there
will never be enough justice, enough reparation, enough guilt, pain, or anger to
make up for the racial wounds cleaved into the American psyche-remembered by
both the dominant and the marginalized as incommensurability itself. With Smith's
peculiar brand of impersonation, it is as if only in imitation, in the bodily occupation
of the other, that we come to see paradoxically an alternative to the traps of
representation. That is, representation has frequently and rightly been criticized for
its colonizing potentials. But Smith's art suggests that representation, mimicry even,
may be employed as a form of performative counteroccupation, whereby the act of
placing oneself in the other's place exposes one's vulnerability to that performed
other. More profoundly, her paradoxical polyphonic monologue dramatizes the
psychical truth that to speak is to speak the other. Invisible Man hints that the first
solution to that melancholic condition is not to recover a presence that never was,
but to recognize the disembodiment that is both the master and the slave.
Rinehart's metaphoric disembodiment becomes literalized in the narrator's own
epiphanic hallucination, the scene of castration. In a state of neither dreaming nor
waking, he confronts the groups that he has encountered and their particular
brands of incorporative histories and ideologies: ... I lay the prisoner of a group
consisting of Jack and Emerson and Bledsoe and Norton and Ras and the school
superintendent.... they were demanding that I return to them and were annoyed
with my refusal. "No," I said. "I am through with all your illusions and lies..." But now
they came forward with a knife... and I felt the bright red pain as they took the two
bloody blobs and cast them over the bridge, and out of my anguish I saw them
curve up and catch beneath the apex of the curving arch of the bridge, to hang
there, dripping down through the sunlight into the dark red water. "Now you're free
of illusions," Jack said, pointing to my seed wasting upon the air. "How does it feel to
be free of one's illusions?" And now I answered, "Painful and empty... But look...
there's your universe, and that drip-drop upon the water you hear is all the history
you've made, all you're going to make...." 19 The narrator's dismemberment, his
scattered, castrated ego becomes the resistance against group consolidations and
signifying processes. By trying to recruit the narrator as a mirror image of
themselves, by castrating him to do so, the various social organizations incorporate
the very loss that they instigate. If history enacts denigration, then history will be
structured by that brutalization. This scene demonstrates that "to be free of

illusions and lies" is viscerally brutalizing, but it also imagines that

freedom might occur in the very place of that rupture. This scene

speculates that freedom comes not from historical or social liberation , but

specifically from the renouncement of individual identity ("painful and

empty"), because the vocabulary of freedom itself can be deployed by
the rhetoric of enslavement (as illustrated by the rhetoric of the Brotherhood).

"To be free of illusions" paradoxically and crucially means to be free of

the ideologies of authenticity. Throughout the book, the narrator
has been searching for visibility, individualism, as well as communal
identification. The only vision of individualism, however, comes from
the state of disappearance, of pain and emptiness-a shattered
rather than reconstituted subject. In that scene of castration and
relinquishment, invisibility has been theorized as a condition of disembodiment and
abstraction, as an escape from "illusions." Ellison locates identity, not in
uncompromising individualism, but in intrasubjective negotiationsnegotiations that are experienced intersubjectively and violently. The resolution of
Invisible Man remains far from certain. What is the "socially responsible role" that
the narrator will play by the end of the novel? The narrative has offered us more
questions than any final affirmation or particular course of action. The narrator
informs us: "So it is now I denounce and defend... I condemn and affirm, say no and
say yes, say yes and say no.... So I approach it through division."20 Ellison's politics
in this work offer us description rather than prescription. "Community" embodies its
inverse: exclusion. Invisible Man remains wary of the very group ideologies that
"create" and isolate African-American communities in the first place. As the enclave
that protects but also marginalizes, Harlem is not free from that "soul-sickness." The
narrator tells us that he has been "as invisible to Mary [the nurturing 'mother' in the
heart of Harlem] as [he] had been to the Brotherhood." 2' When he asks of Clifton's
death, "Why did he choose to plunge into nothingness, into the void of faceless
faces, of soundless voices, laying outside history,"22 he anticipates his own falling
underground, significantly on the edge between Harlem and the mainstay of the
city. Invisible Man collapses the literal question of "where you stand" into the
metaphoric and political question of "where you stand," and exposes its
positionality. The discourse of identity fosters division and dis-identification as well.
Consequently, Ellison's political thesis has always seemed to me more radical than
minority politics find comfortable. It is radical in its profound undermining of group
ideology and of communal possibilities. The political platform of Invisible Man,
contrary to the appeal of the representative novel and its ethnic bildung, relies not
on identity-because the protagonist never arrives at one-but on the nonexistence of
identity, on invisibility with its assimilative and dissimulative possibilities. Yet this
place of political discomfort provides the most intense examination of
what it means to adopt a political stance . Words from the invisible man
remain to haunt us: "You carry part of your sickness with you" (575). You
carry the foreigner inside. This malady of doubleness, I argue, is the
melancholy of race, a dis-ease of location and memory, a persistent fantasy of
identification that cleaves and cleaves to the marginalized and the master

State policy and identity politics fail absent a dismantling of

static conceptions of race.
Seshadri-Crooks 2K (Kalpana, Professor of English at Boston College,
Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race, Routledge Press 2000) rz
Thinking that does not make system and perception accord conflicts with more than
isolated visual impressions; it conflicts with practice. (Horkheimer and Adorno, The
Dialectic of Enlightenment: 83) In presenting my hypothesis to various interlocutors
in formal and informal settings, I have been asked how my theory of race

as a symbolic system sustained by a regime of visibility translates

into social policy. How does it affect our thinking about affirmative
action, about anti-discrimination legislations, about those particularly
powerful modes of political mobilization that have aggregated
around identity? It is sophisticated and easy to be dismissive of
identity politics because it seems naive and essentialist. But the
immeasurable weightiness of, say, the black power movement or the
womens rights movement in pushing back the forces of exploitation
and resuscitating devalued cultures through the redefinition of
identity must give us pause. Identity politics works . However, the
argument of this book is that it also ultimately serves to reinforce the
very system that is the source of the symptoms that such politics
confines itself to addressing . It is race itself that must be dismantled as

a regime of looking. We cannot aim at this goal by merely formulating

new social policies. In fact, my theory is anti-policy for two reasons:

first, any attempt to address race systematically through policy, and

by that I mean state policy, will inevitably end up reifying race.
Second, the only effective intervention can be cultural, at the
grassroots level. Such intervention can and should work, sometimes
in tandem and at others in tension with state policy, but the project of
dismantling the regime of race cannot be given over to the state .
Gramsci speaks of the necessity of transforming the cultural into the political; where
race is concerned, it is imperative that we turn what is now political, an issue of
group interests, into the cultural, an issue of social practice.

AT Engage Institutions
Genealogy is itself a political project and our critique leads to a
more authentic form of politics, brimming with potential and
possibility.
-perm?

Brown 01 (Wendy, Professor of Political Science at the University of California,

Berkeley, Politics Out of History, Princeton University Press 2001) rz

Through these transformations in both the objects and movement of

history, genealogy reorients the relationship of history to political
possibility: although the present field of political possibility is
constrained by its histories, those histories are themselves tales of
improbable, uneven, and unsystematic emergence, and thus contain
openings for disturbance. In place of the lines of determination laid
down by laws of history, genealogy appears as a field of openingsfaults, fractures, and fissures. Conversely, rather than promising a certain
future, as progressive history does, genealogy only opens
possibilities through which various futures might be pursued.
Openings along fault lines and incitements from destabilized (because
denaturalized) configurations of the present form the stage of political
possibility. But these ; openings and incitements dictate neither the terms nor the
direction ' of political possibility, both of which are matters of imagination and .:
invention (themselves limited by what Foucault terms the "political , ontology of the
present"). ' As it is wrong to search for descent in an uninterrupted continuity, we
should avoid thinking of emergence as the final term of a historical development.
-Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" Just as histories of emergent
phenomena or formations are tales of conflicts, convergences, and accidents, so
these phenomena or formations are cast by genealogy as "episodes"
rather than "culminations." ) The metaphysics of conventional
histories, in placing present needs at , the origin, fail to grasp the
subjugating forces that constitute the dynamic of history ; they

substitute "the anticipatory power of meaning" for "the hazardous

play of dominations" (p. 83). Genealogy promises dirty histories,
histories of power and subjection, histories of bids for hegemony
waged, won, or vanquished-the "- endlessly repeated play of
dominations" (p. 85) rather than histories of reason, meaning, or
higher purposes. Genealogy traces continual yet discontinuous
histories, histories without direction yet also without end, histories of varied and
protean orders of subjection. "Humanity does not gradually progress from
combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity[;] ...
humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules 1 and
thus proceeds from domination to domination" (p. 85). The content, the

lived modality, of "effective history" is politics , and the moving force of

this history is an often diffused, sometimes institutionalized, sometimes sublimated
will to power. Put the other way around, there are no nonpolitical moments
in genealogical history. With gene alogy, we can no longer speak of an

"engine" of history, because genealogy makes clear that history is

not propelled; it does not lead forward but is rather the
retrospective record of conflicts that yield an emergence. History is no
longer "moved" because it does not harbor direction, ends, or end, even while it
bears generative processes.5 " [N]o one is responsible for an emergence; no one
can glory in it since it always occurs in the interstice" (p. 85). The space of this
kind of dirty history is what Nietzsche and Foucault both call a non-place, a
"pure distance," a "place of confrontation" (p. 85). It is a non-place
because in the confrontation or battle that genealogy seeks to document, at the site
of emergence, contestants do not oppose each other within an order that houses
them both; instead, each fights to bring into being an order (Foucault sometimes
recurs to the infelicitous language of "system") in their respective images. The
"place" that will feature the constituents recognized by the historian does not exist
until the contest has been (provisionally) won; t he contestants do not acquire their
identities until the battle is (provisionally) over; the elements in a new regime
do not exist until that regime has (provisionally) emerged, until a new
order of meaning and power has been brought into being .

Genealogy refuses to feature individuals, parties, or even purposes

as straightforwardly agentic or accountable in modernist terms, because
Foucault appreciates the extent to which the entity that would be held
accountable by conventional ethics does not yet exist when such
ethics is demanding that it justify itself and its actions. Thus, instead
of featuring parties to a battle, genealogy documents "the entry of
forces[,] ... their eruption, the lea p from the wings to center stage"
(p. 84). Moreover, these forces 1hemselves change over time: "the
isolation of different points of emergence does not conform to the successive
configurations of an identical meaning." The effort to disrupt a narrative

that essentializes historical forces includes documenting

"substitutions, displacements, disguised conquests, and systematic
reversals." Only then can a metaphysics committed to the " low
exposure of the meaning hidden in an origin" be supplanted with an
understanding that eschews a suprahistorical perspective (p. 86). And
only through such an understanding can a politics animated by
moral accountability of persons for political conditions be replaced
by an effective politics: a politics of projects and strategies rather
than moral righteousness; a politics of bids for power rather than
remonstrances of it.

Race K

AT Ontological
Race is governed by a racial epidermal schema by which
bodies are either folded in or cast out based on degrees of
whiteness. There is no totalizing antagonism.
Chambers-Letson 13 (Joshua Takano, Assistance Professor Performance
Studies at Northwestern University, A Race So Different: Performance and Law in
Asian America, New York University Press, 2013) rz
The Visual Racialization of Japanese America
Before turning to the Shimada scrapbook, it is important to foreground the

ways in which the guard towers and surveillance apparatuses of the

concentration camps were the logical extensions and architectural
manifestations of prewar legal technologies for managing Asian racial
difference. These practices utilized visual perceptions of
phenotypical difference to racialize Asian immigrants and Asian
Americans as permanently located outside the law and thus the
national body politic. In courtrooms, Asian immigrants were subject
to the scrutiny of the states disciplinary optic, which in turn
produced Asian racial difference as undifferentiated, a
homogeneous mass or yellow horde that could be rendered
exceptional to the protections of citizenship eligibility. Among other
effects, this resulted in the incarceration process, whereby the
Japanese American body was placed on spectacular display for the
state. Nikkei were subject to the states ever-present eye, which was
manifest in the forms of guards and guard towers, as well as the imaging equipment
of officially commissioned WRA photographers. The field of the visual is central to
the process constituting the imagined community of the nation. It also plays a

central role in the production of ideal national subjects along

racialized lines. Throughout US history, the subjection of racialized
bodies to surveillance, exhibition, and display has played an
important role in the racialization of different ethnic groups as
excluded from the normative limits of national belonging. This
history overlaps with, among many other examples, the scenes of subjection
characterizing slavery, the ethnographic spectacles that accompanied
modern raciology, and the compulsory performances of racial
stereotype in popular entertainment forms (such as The Chinese Must
Go).4 Visual technologies of racialization are often amplified during
periods of war, economic decline, or social upheaval. As Elena Tajima Creef
argues, In times of national crisis we take refuge in the visual construction of
citizenship in order to imagine ourselves as part of a larger, cohesive, national
American community.5 Thus, the (dis) articulation of race and citizenship
is often impossible to disentangle from the politicized vision and

performance of both. Franz Fanon understood the process of

racialization as occurring within a circuit of visual assessment,
performance, and consumption, which he described as the ethnic
subjects self-consciousness of being taken by a racial epidermal schema.6
For Fanon, the racial epidermal schema lays claim to ethnic subjects as
they come to see themselves through the eyes of the dominant
white culture and to perform within the coordinates demanded by
the dominant spectator. Thus, for Fanon, it is not only being viewed
that makes him a racialized subject (encapsulated in his famous description
of a child responding to his visage with the statement Look, a Negro!) as it is
the process of (re)constituting his body to be viewed and consumed
as such.7 The embodied practice of performing the self for the
others visual consumption becomes a means of negotiating the
dialectical tension between his concept of self and the status of his
(black) body as it is subject to (white) vision: And then the occasion arose
when I had to meet the white mans eyes.
An unfamiliar weight burdened me. The real world challenged my claims. In

the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the

development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body
is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness.
The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty. . . . [All of
my] movements are made not out of habit but out of implicit knowledge. A
slow composition of my self as a body in the middle of a spatial and temporal
worldsuch seems to be the schema. It does not impose itself on me; it is,
rather, a definitive structuring of the self and of the worlddefinitive because
it creates a real dialectic between my body and the world.8
Describing consciousness of the body as solely a negating activity, Fanon

gestures to the ways in which self-presentation, or the performance

of everyday life, subjects the racialized body to the spectatorship of
the white mans eyes. This gaze defines and negates the racialized

subjects will to exist beyond a bodily schema. The self is locked

within a series of coordinates produced by social, spatial, and racial
knowledge that shape the racialized body as he or she performs a
self for the world, effectively becoming a subject through this
performance. In US law, ethnic subjects are claimed by a racial
epidermal schema as they perform themselves for the regulating eye of
the law , as politicians, legislators, judges, and law enforcement officials
watch racialized populations, writing law and other legal performatives in
response to the visual difference of their bodies, shaping racial knowledge

and coordinating the crisis of difference management within the

state. Racialization in the United States was thus bolstered by the collusion of

visual and legal technologies. The legal history of Asian American racial
formation epitomizes this process . In the Naturalization Act of 1790,
the first Congress established a uniform rule that limited citizenship
eligibility to any alien, being a free white person, who shall have
resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term
of two years.9 Despite subsequent revisions to the naturalization code, the racial
prerequisite remained intact until it was rescinded in 1952 with passage of the
McCarran-Walter Act. In the Racial Prerequisite Cases, petitioners struggled with
courts to determine exactly what was meant by the term white person. Asian
petitioners in particular placed their bodies before the optic of the state

in the hopes of receiving a judgment that would expand the

definition of whiteness to the Asian body. For the courts, being white
became synonymous with looking white . Advocates argued that the

lightness of a petitioners skin, his or her capacity for cultural

assimilation, and/or his or her scientific descent from the Caucasus
and Aryan races qualified Asian-immigrant petitioners for
categorical whiteness and, thus, for naturalization.10 Calling on a range of
rationales for rejecting the petitions, courts commonly proffered
commonsense justifications that utilized visual assessment of the

plaintiff (the pallor of skin, shape and color of eyes, hair texture, etc.)
to determine citizenship eligibility. The collusion of visual and legal
technology in the production of race is present in In re Ah Yup, the
first prerequisite case, in which the 1878 California circuit court denied a
Chinese petitioners eligibility for citizenship .11 Judge Lorenzo Sawyers

opinion used a visual terminology of physical characteristics to

define commonsense understandings of the phrase white
person.12 Later, in In re Camille , an 1880 Oregon circuit court case dealing
with a Native American petitioner, Judge Matthew P. Deady declared, In all

classifications of mankind hitherto, color has been a controlling

circumstance .13 The formal vocabulary of the Prerequisite Cases reveals an
interesting symptom of the visual obsession at the heart of these cases. Whereas
judicial opinions are generally written in the language of authority, the
Prerequisite Cases are instead full of the sensory language of speculative
vision . Namely, the word appear is ubiquitous: It does not appear to

the satisfaction of the court . . . (In re Kanaka Nian) and it appears the
words white person do not . . . include the red race of America (In re
Camille) are just a few examples of many.14 Indeed, in a Utah decision, United

States v. Dolla , the court went so far as to have an Indian petitioner

pull up the sleeves of his coat and shirt to show his skin , as the
presiding judge closely scrutinized his appearance to determine his
racial classification .15

Race is not ontological or inevitable, but governed by a

contingent schema of racialized bodies and connections.
Affective investment in identitarian grids invites racial
gridlock.
Saldanha 6 (Arun, Associate Professor Department of Geography, Environment,
and Society, University of Minnesota, Reontologising race: the machinic geography
of phenotype, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2006, volume 24,
pages 9 ^ 24, http://planetarities.web.unc.edu/files/2015/01/s_s_saldanha.pdf,
accessed 7/8/16) rz
In Genesis, Michel Serres tries to understand emergence, how unity can emerge
from the background noise of multiplicity. At one point he writes of the ``chain of
contingency'': ``No, the contingent chain does not break, its links slide over one
another, as though viscous. They touch because they are adjacent, they touch like
sailors' hitches or the loops of motorway cloverleaves are stacked upon one
another. It is not a linkage, but a local pull, by way of little frictions. The local pull
induces global movement very seldom, although it can happen. This is not a solid
chain, it is simply a liquid movement, a viscosity, a propagation that wagers its age
in each locality'' ([1982] 1995, page 71, his italics). Race must similarly be
conceived as a chain of contingency , in which the connections between

its constituent components are not given, but are made viscous
through local attractions . Whiteness, for example, is about the sticky
connections between property, privilege, and a paler skin . There is no

essence of whiteness, but there is a relative fixity that inheres in all

the `local pulls' of its many elements in flux. Emergence and viscosity are
complementary concepts, the first pertaining to the genesis of distinctions, the
second to the modality of that genesis. Race's spatiality is emphatically not about
discrete separations between `races'. Nobody `has' a race, but bodies are
racialised. Gilroy asks: ``if `race' is a useful way of classifying people, then how
many ` races ' are there?'' (2000, page 37). This question betrays a logic of
solids and grids . The concept of race is not for taxonomic ordering,

but for studying the movements between human bodies, things, and
their changing environment. The concept of race is like the concept of subculture, or
diseasenobody wants to know how many subcultures or diseases there are, but
how they come to be. What are the constituent components of race? Potentially
everything, but certainly strands of DNA, phenotypical variation, discursive
practices (law, media, science), artefacts such as clothes and food, and the

distribution of wealth. How these are connected is entirely immanent to the way
certain humans behave in certain circumstances. Sarah Whatmore (2002) might call
race intrinsically more-than-human, irreducible to either biology or culture.
Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus can be understood as a
conceptualisation of irreducible and immanent heterogeneities like race (though
they do not explicitly confirm that race is such a heterogeneity). They call these
heterogeneities machinic assemblages. ``Taking the feudal
assemblage as an example, we would have to consider the interminglings of
bodies defining feudalism: the body of the earth and the social body; the body of
the overlord, the vassal, the serf; the body of the knight and the horse and their
new relation to the stirrup; the weapons and tools assuring a symbiosis of bodiesa
whole machinic assemblage. We would also have to consider statements,
expressions, the juridical regime of heraldry, all of the incorporeal transformations,
in particular, oaths and their variables (the oath of obedience, but also the oath of
love, etc.): the collective assemblage of enunciation. On the other axis,

we would have to consider the feudal territorialities and

reterritorializations, and at the same time the line of deterritorialization that
carries away both the knight and his mount, statements and acts. We would have to
consider how all this combines in the Crusades'' (Deleuze and Guattari, [1980]
1987, page 89). A machinic geography of bodies asks what immanent
connections they forge with things and places, how they work,
travel, fight, write, love how these bodies become viscous, slow

down, get into certain habits, into certain collectivities, like city,
social stratum, or racial formation. Machinism is wary of mediation: it
prefers connections and viscosities. Machinism asks how incredibly diverse
processes (such as agriculture and sexuality, religion and property law)
interlock, like cogs and wheels instead of signifiers and signifieds. But
machinism is not physicalism. It understands entities not as perfectly knowable
cause ^ effect sequences, but as bundles of virtual capacities. Approaching
phenotype machinically means being prepared for the unpreparable: phenotype
connects in infinite ways. Living, social machines are not machines in the
narrow sense, because they lack a preconceived `function' and are
constantly evolving. A quick return to Fanon to elucidate the
machinic assemblage of race. Another well-known quote: ``The
native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal,
of light. The native town is a crouching village, a town on its knees, a town
wallowing in the mire. It is a town of niggers and dirty arabs. The look
that the native turns on the settler's town is a look of lust, a look of envy; it
expresses his dreams of possessionall manner of possession: to sit at the settler's
table, to sleep in the settler's bed, with his wife if possible. The colonized man is an
envious man. And this the settler knows very well; when their glances meet he
ascertains bitterly, always on the defensive `They want to take our place'. It is true,
for there is no native who does not dream at least once a day of
setting himself up in the settler's place'' ([1961] 1967, page 30).

Numerous authors have theorised about the intersection of possession,

sexuality, urbanism and race (for example Low, 1996). The machinic
geography of phenotype, however, takes issue with the Hegelian
self/other scheme that supports much of this work, and studies

instead how certain bodies stick to certain spaces , how they are
chained by hunger, cold, darkness , mud, poverty, crime, glances full of

envy and anxiety. The segregation between colonists and colonised is

the apparently binary result of many nitty-gritty material processes
which, when analysed, render it a lot less binary . This also means race is

devious in inventing new ways of chaining bodies. Race is creative,

constantly morphing , now disguised as sexual desire, now as la mission
civilatrice, all the while weaving new elements in its wake. Deleuze and Guattari
might say that what defines race is not rigidity or inevitability, but its

``lines of flight''. Race can be as stark as apartheid, but mostly it is

fuzzy and operates through something else. The social sciences literature on race
(urban geography, postcolonial theory, film studies) remains relevant from the
machinic perspective. Race is shown to exist through ghettoes, travel
writing, and Hollywood cinema. What this literature shows is precisely race's
plastic, emergent, and more-than-human spatiality (for example, Anderson, 1991;
hooks, 1992; Jackson and Penrose, 1993; Jacobs, 1996; Robinson, 1996). Still, more
geographical and anthropological work needs to be done to theorise the biocultural
imbrications of race. For example, in the introduction to the collection Race, Nature
and the Politics of Difference it is argued that `` both race and nature are

historical artefacts: assemblages of material, discourse, and

practice irreducible to a single timeless essence. By charting the ways in
which race and nature work together, and by tracing key disruptions in their busy
traffic, we emphasize the cultural labors required to maintain them as they are. ...

We write against racisms not against `race' but against the

exclusionary effects produced through its invocation, deployment,
and reproduction'' (Moore et al, 2003, page 42). But the full implications of the
term assemblage that it includes biological and other nonhuman forcesstill need to
be explored. There is some work being done that quietly disrespects the disciplinary
boundaries of modern epistemology. Anthropologically inclined medical research has
the potential to offer a critical approach to the biocultural aspects of racial division
(Wade, 2002, pages 117 ^ 122). Luca Cavalli-Sforza maps human migration using
genetics and physical anthropology as well as archaeology, linguistics, and history
(Cavalli-Sforza et al, 1994). This research deserves theoretical attention, so that
more rigorous studies of the discursive, technological, and economic embeddedness
of phenotype can be imagined. Zack (2002) has recently argued that physical
anthropology can only account for variation through heredity, not the folk
(taxonomic) conception of race as such. She therefore continues to define `race'
as an essentialist social construction which has no basis in the science of

phenotype. What is needed, however, is to highjack the folk conception and

rethink race as culturally embedded phenotype. Saying that race has no
basis in biology is different from saying that phenotype plays some role in racial
differentiation. Phenotype is a crucial element in the assemblage called
race, and, because phenotype is already nondiscrete and shaped by
culture, race cannot be an essentialist concept. Now, what does this
nonessentialism mean to antiracist politics?
A thousand tiny races
Every time phenotype makes another machinic connection , there is a
stutter . Every time bodies are further entrenched in segregation ,

however brutal, there needs to be an affective investment of some

sort. This is the ruptural moment in which to intervene. Race should
not be eliminated, but proliferated , its many energies directed at
multiplying racial differences so as to render them joyfully cacophoni c.

Many in American critical race theory also argue against a utopian

transcendence of race, taking from W E B Du Bois and pragmatism a
reflexive, sometimes strategically nationalist attitude towards racial
embodiment (compare Outlaw, 1996; Shuford, 2001; Winant, 2004). What is
needed is an affirmation of race's creativity and virtuality: what race
can be. Race need not be about order and oppression, it can be wild,
far-from-equilibrium, liberatory. It is not that everyone becomes
completely Brown ian (or brown!), completely similar, or completely unique. It

is just that w hite supremacism becomes strenuous as many populations

start harbouring a similar economic, technological, cultural productivity

as whites do now, linking all sorts of bodies with all sorts of wealth
and all sorts of ways of life. That is, race exists in its true mode when
it is no longer stifled by racism. ``The race-tribe exists only at the level of an
oppressed race, and in the name of the oppression it suffers; there is no race but
inferior, minoritarian; there is no dominant race; a race is defined not by its purity
but rather by the impurity conferred upon it by a system of domination. Bastard and
mixed-blood are the true names of race'' (Deleuze and Guattari, [1980] 1987, page
379). In ``A thousand tiny sexes'', Grosz (1994b) follows a well-known passage of
Deleuze and Guattari to argue for non-Hegelian, indeed protohuman feminism that
utilises lines of flight of the gender assemblage to combat heterosexist patriarchy.
``If we consider the great binary aggregates, such as the sexes or classes, it is
evident that they also cross over into molecular assemblages of a different nature,
and that there is a double reciprocal dependency between them. For the two sexes
imply a multiplicity of molecular combinations bringing into play not only the man in
the woman and the woman in the man, but the relation of each to the animal, the
plant, etc.: a thousand tiny sexes'' (Deleuze and Guattari, [1980] 1987, page 213).

Similarly, the molecularisation of race would consist in its breaking up into a

thousand tiny races. It is from here that cosmopolitanism should start: the pleasure,
curiosity, and concern in encountering a multiplicity of corporeal fragments outside
of common-sense taxonomies. ``We walk the streets among hundreds of people
whose patterns of lips, breasts, and genital organs we divine; they seem to us
equivalent and interchangeable. Then something snares our attention: a dimple
speckled with freckles on the cheek of a woman; a steel choker around the throat of
a man in a business suit; a gold ring in the punctured nipple on the hard chest of a
deliveryman; a big raw fist in the delicate hand of a schoolgirl; a live python coiled
about the neck of a lean, lanky adolescent with coal-black skin. Signs of clandestine
disorder in the uniformed and coded crowds'' (Lingis, 2000, page 142). Machinism
against racism builds upon a gradual, fragmented, and shifting sense of corporeal
difference, that of course extends far further than the street. Responsibility,

activism, and antiracist policy will follow only from feeling and
understanding the geographical differentials that exist between
many different kinds of bodies: between a Jew and a black soldier,
between a woman in the Sahel and a woman in Wall Street, between a
Peruvian peasant and a Chinese journalist. A machinic politics of
race takes into account the real barriers to mobility and imagination that exist in
different places; cosmopolitanism has to be invented, not imposed. It may seem
that machinism is as utopian and open ended as Gilroy's transcendent
antiracism. It is not, because it is empirical, immanent, and pragmatic .
The machinic geography of phenotype shows that racism differs from place to
place, and cannot be overcome in any simple way. It shows that white

supremacy can subside only by changing the rules of education, or

the financial sector, or the arms trade, or the pharmaceutical industry, or whatever.
For machinic politics, the cultural studies preoccupations with apology, recognition,
politically correct language and reconsiliation, or else cultural hybridity, pastiche,
and ambivalence, threaten to stand in the way of really doing something about the
global structures of racism. A thousand tiny races can be made only if it is
acknowledged that racism is a material, inclusive series of events, a viscous
geography which cannot be `signified away'. Miscegenation, openness to strangers,
exoticism in art, and experimentations with whiteness can certainly help. But
ultimately cosmpolitanism without critique and intervention remains complacent
with its own comfortably mobile position. In a word, ethics encompasses politics,
and politics starts with convincing people of race's materiality.

Their theories of social death are historically inaccurate and

fall prey to colonial disavowal.
Fischer 4 (Sibylle FISCHER Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies @
NYU 4, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of
Revolution p. 34-38) rz
Similar criticisms could be directed against Habermas's writings about the Enlightenment and modernity. As critics
such as Edward Said, Gilroy, Garcia Canclini, and many others have pointed out, Habermas's account of the
"unfinished project of modernity" is extremely selective.93 Of course, neither Habermas nor Berman denies

The question is how we understand the

relationship between this dark side and the utopian aspect; between the modernity of
European expansionism, racial subordination, and genocide, and
modernity as emancipation and democratization. Can we really distinguish neatly
modernity's record of catastrophes.

between those Western values that underwrite colonialism and slavery, and those that promote emancipation and
democracy? Clearly the problem is not solved by simply adding some negative characteristics to overly flattering
accounts. It may well be worth recalling Adorno's and Horkheimer's deeply pessimistic proposal in Dialectic of
Enlightenment that modernity's emancipatory potential and its oppressive tendencies are rooted in exactly the
same characteristics-the hegemony of instrumental reason and the submission of nature to a calculating rationality.
One of the most explicit and sustained efforts to address the issue of modernity and barbarism, and, specifically,
modernity and slavery, has been made by Gilroy in his Black Atlantic. For Gilroy, the diasporic African
cultures are a source for a critical revision of modernity and a reservoir for utopian ideas. As a geopolitical and

configuration that came into being as a result of racial

slavery, the final referent of this tradition continues to be this
catastrophic experience. The transnational, hybrid cultures of the black Atlantic thus offer a unique
geocultural

standpoint or perspective that allows for crucial revisions to our concept of modernity. And this is not just because
the historical experience of slavery operates as a corrective to any tendency to produce naively celebratory

because the African diasporic culture is itself uniquely modern, while

retaining the memory of a premodern African past. It is "a non-traditional tradition, an irreducibly modern, excentric, unstable, and asymmetrical cultural ensemble" (198), a "political counterculture that
grew inside modernity in a distinctive relationship of antagonistic
indebtedness" (191). The "ancient pre-slave past" allows the thinker of the black Atlantic "to anchor its
dissident assessments of modernity's achievements" (71). Slavery and the struggle against
it provide the slave with an epistemological and moral advantageshe can recognize what remains hidden from the master's view; she can
accounts. Rather, it is

see the suffering and terror that modernity brought about. Slavery shows up the brutality of a modernity driven by
the rationality of profit and desire for domination. Those who champion modernity as an unfinished project (Gilroy
mentions Marshall Berman and Habermas) fail to recognize the barbarism that was part of modernity and that as its
counterpart produced emancipatory thought. In doing so, their description of modernity becomes lopsided:
modernity is seen as a reservoir for ideas of democracy and defended through the counterfactual thought rather
than the oppressive practices it in fact produced. One of the implications of Gilroy's claims is that
the standoff of the 198os between those who felt that modernity was irredeemable and needed to be superseded
by new ways of articulating diversity and difference, and those who maintained that it remains unfinished, is due to
an intrinsic incompleteness within both accounts of modernity. In this stalemate,

the cultures of the

black Atlantic offer "an opportunity to transcend the unproductive

debate between a Eurocentric rationalism which banishes the slave
experience
within,"

from its accounts of modernity while arguing that the crises of modernity can be resolved from

and "an equally occidental antihumanism

which locates the origins of

So far it would
seem, then, that Gilroy's revisions are roughly what is needed to
correct the silence, denial, and disavowal we found in response to
slavery and, especially, the struggles against it in hegemonic theories of modernity. Much of what Gilroy
modernity's current crises in the shortcomings of the Enlightenment project" (54).

describes in relation to diasporic culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Britain and the United Statesthe hybridity of cultural expression, the fragmented identities, the transnationalism, the coexistence of modern and
premodern practices-describes well what we will see later in Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, even though
nonAnglophone areas of the black Atlantic are only nominally included in his study.

silence

in Gilroy's Black Atlantic

Yet there is an odd

when it comes to the events that are at the core

of the history of the black Atlantic .

And

this, I think, is no coincidence. The

central move in Gilroy's strategy for uncovering a modern, contestatory

black Atlantic is a shift from history to memory. Slavery becomes the

bedrock of communal experience. It becomes a referent, that which
produced and continues to reproduce a specifically modern experience of
history (as loss, as catastrophe, as dispersal, as exile) but itself remains curiously
inanimate .94 Slavery, slave resistance, and radical antislavery

receive only perfunctory treatment, and the African past figures

exclusively as a recourse of discourse and memory. At times it thus seems that
the cultures of the black Atlantic are constructed as merely reacting to a modernity that is conceived and developed
elsewhere. The contestatory potential is ultimately derived from the memory of premodern traditions. It almost

to the extent that the black Atlantic is inside modernity, it

suffers it, and to the extent that it is outside, it contests it. Events
or movements such as the French Revolution, the revolution in Saint
Domingue, or the struggle against slavery that played a significant
role in shaping modernity in the Atlantic are barely mentioned.
Instead of a substantive account of emancipatory goals (What were
they? Were they achieved? Were they repressed? Forgotten?) Gilroy
offers a critique of the discursive regulations that govern
emancipatory accounts of the past. Ultimately, modernity thus remains
the master's domain. The (former) slave is forever condemned to
recoil: memory, double consciousness, critique of regulatory regimes, and so forth.
The slave's relation to history is that of insertion, not that of
construction. What makes the slaves' perspective different from that of the master, what provides the
seems that

slaves with a privileged position, is also what takes them out of the making of history. Gilroy wants to revise our

the privileged medium in which the experiences of the black Atlantic

survive is "non-representational," "non-conceptual" music, which is "not reducible to
the cognitive and the ethical" (76). It is the category of the sublime that
captures the experience of slavery: the unspeakable terror, the fear of death, which exceeds
discursive representation (77). From this perspective, then, it is not so surprising that Gilroy's
revised account of the modern experience from the perspective of the slave-the
"primal history of modernity," as he calls it, following Walter Benjamin-ends up sounding rather
concept of modernity, but

familiar from postmodern discourses about modernity, despite Gilroy's protestations that his is an "anti-anti-

a critique of notions such as "universality," "fixity of meaning," and

"coherence of the self." Is there really nothing in the perspective of the slave that escaped
metropolitan philosophers of postmodernity? Perhaps even more importantly, can we be so
confident that the modernity against which postmodern critiques are
directed is essentially the same as that of the Age of Revolution? In the
essentialist" stance (ro2):

end, Gilroy's "counterculture of modernity" is, I think, too closely tied to cultural phenomena that survived into the

Losses, fears,
and hopes both realized and unrealized need to be accounted for
concretely, not just in a general invocation of exile and dispersion. If
we replace history with memory, we can no longer discern the discontinuities that are
present, and too much based on the assumption of a continuous memory and history.

constitutive of the history of the black Atlantic and thus of Western modernity. If our conceptual alternatives are

we will find it difficult to understand

how the gaps and silences in hegemonic concepts of modernity ever
came into being. Instead of equating modernity with the Eurocentric
regime of racial subordination and colonial exploitation that became
hegemonic in the course of the nineteenth century, and then
opposing that modernity with a counterculture that grows out of
suffering, we need to understand the ideological, cultural, and
political conflicts that led to the ascendancy of a modernity that
could be claimed only by European nations (and then only by some of those) . This
book hopes to make a step in that direction. The radical revision in the concept of
modernity that Gilroy aspires to is urgently needed. But the way in
which he articulates modernity and a counterculture of modernity
does not allow for this revision. The precise content of the "counter-" in the counterculture of
marked out by "memory" and "the unspeakable,"

modernity remains obscure unless we articulate more precisely where the contestatory potential of the black
Atlantic lies. Dissent in the slaveholding Atlantic was by no means confined to the nondiscursive realm of music.

There are, for instance, the conflicts between revolutionary antislavery and
Creole movements for autonomy or independence; between
moderate and radical abolitionism; and between those who felt that
liberty meant securing racial equality, those who identified it with
having a lot of land for themselves, and those who felt it meant
keeping the state at bay. In the clashes between these conflicting
emancipatory projects, we can see divergent concepts of modernity,
progress, and liberty. We can observe how the issue of racial subordination (just as that of sexual
subordination in other historical contexts) is relegated to the realm of the moral or of social policy and thus
eventually appears to be, from the hegemonic point of view, out of reach for revolutionary action. I propose

the

concept of a disavowed modernity to signal the conflictive and

discontinuous nature of modernity in the Age of Revolution .
"Disavowal," taken both in its everyday sense as "refusal to acknowledge ,"
"repudiation," and "denial" (OED) and in its more technical meaning in psychoanalytic theory as a "refusal to
recognize the reality of a traumatic perception,"95 brings into focus the contestatory nature of human experience.
Not all forms of denial or repudiation require a description in psychoanalytic terms

. Only careful

consideration of the cultural and historical materials-not purely

theoretical or conceptual arguments-will tell us what kind of denial
we are confronted with , but that is precisely what makes this notion

workable for broadly historical and hermeneutical interpretation. Like

Gilroy's counterculture of modernity, it refers to an attitude or a perspective toward the past rather than the
supposed characteristics of a particular moment, historical stage, or ethnic or cultural formation. But it is also a
concept that only works if we remain cognizant that it is something that is being disavowed. As Freud explains,
disavowal exists alongside recognition: "Whenever we are in a position to study them [acts of disavowal] they turn
out to be half-measures, incomplete attempts at detachment from reality. The disavowal is always supplemented by

Unlike currently popular notions of trauma which

tend to move the traumatic event into the realm of the unspeakable
or unrepresentable and thus render it, in my view, quite useless for
critical purposes (see chapter 6), the concept of disavowal requires us to
an acknowledgement."96

identify what is being disavowed, by whom, and for what reason . Unlike the
notion of trauma, which becomes politically inert when it cannot properly distinguish between, for instance, a
traumatized slave and a traumatized slaveholder, disavowal does not foreclose the political by rushing to assign
victim status to all those who find it difficult to deal with reality. It is more a strategy (although not necessarily one
voluntarily chosen) than a state of mind, and it is productive in that it brings forth further stories, screens, and
fantasies that hide from view what must not be seen. As the following chapters will show, the attempts to suppress
certain memories of Haitian Revolution rarely produced silence.

AT BW Binary
The alternative cannot solve the case. Our argument is not
that anti-blackness is not important, but rather that the black
white paradigm is reductive and cannot address the ills of
other racialized groups. We have multiple justifications.
Alcoff 03 (Linda Martn, Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College and the CUNY
Graduate Center, Latino/As, Asian Americans, and the Black-White Binary, The
Journal of Ethics, Vol. 7, No. 1, Race, Racism, and Reparations (2003), pp. 5-27,
http://sites.middlebury.edu/whitepeople2015/files/2015/01/alcoff.pdf, accessed
7/5/16) rz
The reality of race in the U.S. has always been more complicated than
black/white . The initial exclusionary laws concerning testimony in court, as mentioned earlier, grouped "blacks, mulattoes, and Native

Chinese laborers brought to the West in the 1800's had

specific rulings and ideological justifications used against them,
restricting their right not only to vote or own property but even to marry other
Chinese. This latter ruling outlasted slavery and was justified by invoking
images of Asian overpopulation. To avoid reproduction, Chinese women were
allowed to come as prostitutes but not as wives, a restriction no other group faced. The
Mexicans defeated in the Mexican-American War were portrayed as cruel and cowardly
barbarians, and although the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo ratified in 1848 guaranteed the Mexicans who stayed in the U.S. full rights of
citizenship, like the treaties with Native Americans neither local govern ments nor the federal
courts upheld the Mexicans right to vote or respected the land
deeds they held before the Treaty.18 By the time of the Spanish American War of 1898 the image of barbarism used
against Mexicans was consistently attributed to a Latin-Catholic heritage and expanded for use throughout
Latin American and the Caribbean, thus subsequently affecting the immigrant
populations coming from these countries as well as justifying U.S. claims of
hegemony in the region.19 The so-called Zoot Suit riots in Los Angeles in
1943 targeted Mexicans and their ethnically specific style of dress. The
attempts made to geographically sequester and also to forcibly and totally
assimilate Native American groups were not experienced by any
other group, and had their own ideological justifi cations that combined
contradictory images of the Great Chain of Being with the
romanticized Noble Savage. Native peoples were represented as vanquished, disappearing, and thus of no account.
The paradigm of an antiblack racism intertwined with slavery does not help to
illuminate these and other specific experiences of other nonwhite groups,
where ideologies often relied on charges of evil, religious backwardness,
horde mentalities, being a disappearing people, and other
projections not used in regard to African Americans. The hegemony
Americans." The

of the black/white paradigm

account of

the

has

stymied the development of an adequate

diverse racial realities in the U.S., and weakened the

general theories of racism

which attempt to be truly inclusive.

This has had a negative

effect on our ability to develop effective solutions to the various forms racism can take, to make common cause against
ethnic and race based forms of oppression and to create lasting coalitions , and has recently played a significant
role in the demise of affirmative action. I will support these claims further in what follows. Critics of the black/white
paradigm have argued that, although all communities of color have shared the
experience of political and economic disenfranchisement in the U.S., there
are significant differences between the causes and the forms of this
disenfranchisement. Bong Hwan Kim, a Korean American community leader who has
worked both as the Director of the Korean Community Center of East Bay in Oakland, CA, and as Director of the Korean Youth and Community Center in

lames the black/white binary for disabling relationships

among people of color and even for creating the conditions leading to the
Los Angeles civil disaster of April 1992, in which 2,300 small Korean
owned busi nesses were destroyed by mostly Latino/a and African
American looters. Kim cites the xenophobia marshaled by African American leader Danny Bakewell before the looting occurred, and
Los Angeles, b

argues that the Korean Amer ican community had been and continues to be systematically rendered incapable of responding to such rhetoric because
they are not recognized in the media as a player in racial politics.20 Elaine Kim explains: It is difficult to describe how disempowered and frustrated many

Korean Americans across the country

shared the anguish and despair of the Los Angeles tongp'o
(community), which everyone seemed to have abandoned - the police and fire
departments, black and white political leaders, the Asian and Pacific American advocates who tried to dissociate
Korean Americans felt during and after the sa-i-ku p'ok-dong (the April 29 "riots").

themselves from us because our tragedy disputed their narrow and risk-free focus on white violence against Asians ... the Korean Americans at the center
of the storm were mostly voiceless and all but invisible (except when stereotyped as hysterically inarticulate, and mostly female, ruined

Koreans have been denied the legal or

socially recognized category of being a politicized group at the same time that they
are made subject to group based scapegoating . Moreover, as this event
demonstrates, the black/white paradigm of race is incapable of
theoretically or politically addressing racism among communities of color, or racism, in other words, which is not all
about white people. A response to this line of reasoning might be that it is white
supremacy which is at the root of the conflictual relations among communities of color, and responsible
for their acceptance of stereotypes manufactured by a white
dominant power structure. Thus, on this reading, what occurred in Los Angeles can be reductively analyzed as caused by
white supremacy. Although I do find explanatory arguments that focus on political economy often compelling, it is far too
simplistic, as I think Karl Marx himself knew, to imagine cultural conflict as the mere epiphenomenon of economic forces with no life or
shopkeepers .. .).21 Similar to the Mexicans in Texas, the

grounding of their own.

To blame only white supremacy

for what occurred in Los Angeles

would also

deny power and agency to any groups but the dominant , which is

increasingly untrue. We must all accept our rightful share of the blame ,
whatever that turns out to be in particular instances, and resist explanations that would a priori
reduce that blame to zero for communities of color. Supporting the arguments of both
Elaine Kim and Bong Hwan Kim, Juan Perea argues that because of the wide acceptance of the black/white paradigm, "other racialized groups like
Latino/as, Asian Americans, and Native Americans are often marginalized or ignored altogether."22 He points out that the concerns of Asian Americans
and Latino/as cannot be addressed through immigration legislation because all are not immigrants, which is one of the reasons to reject the claim of some
ethnic theorists that these groups will follow the path of European immigrants in gradual assimilation and economic success (the other reason to reject
this claim is their racialization).23 Roberto Suro argues that the black/white binary disadvantages Latino/as and other people of color who are not African
Americans by forcing them to adopt the strategies of civil rights litigation even though it was "not particularly well-suited to Latino/as" who are a much
more diverse group.24 For example, any meaningful redress of economic discrimination affecting Latino/as and Asian Americans will need to disaggregate
these groups, as some "target of opportunity" programs today in fact do, since the gap between median incomes in Filipino and Japanese households, or
between Puerto Rican and Cuban households, makes aver aging these incomes useless as an indicator of economic success. Richard Delgado argues that
"If one's paradigm identifies only one group as deserving of protection, everyone else is likely to suffer." Current civil rights legislation, in Delgado's view,
has provided legal advantages for African Americans, unwittingly perhaps, over other people of color. I do not take Delgado to be implying that the
legislation has effectively benefited the African American population and been applied forcefully and universally, but that the language of the law,
however much it has yet to be applied, identifies only one group and this is a problem. Just as the protection of the right of property advantages the

propertied, and the protection of free speech increases the influence of those who are articulate and can afford microphones, TV air time, and so on ... the
Equal Protection Clause produces a social good, namely equality, for those falling under its coverage - blacks and whites. These it genuinely helps - at

Put in more general terms, these

arguments can be summarized as follows: 1) The black/white
least on occasion. But it leaves everyone else unprotected.25

paradigm has disempowered various racial and ethnic groups from

being able to define their own identity, to mark their difference and
specificity beyond what could be captured on this limited map. Instead of naming and describing our own
identity and social circumstance, we have had descriptions foisted on us from outside. 2) Asian Americans and
Latino/as have historically been ignored or marginalized in the public discourse
in the U.S. on race and racism. This is a problem for two reasons, first, because it is simply unfair to be excluded from
what concerns one, and second, because it has considerably weakened the analysis of race
and racism in the mainstream discussions. To explain the social

situation of Asian Americans or Latino/as simply in terms of their de

jure and de facto treatment as nonwhites is to describe our
condition only on the most shallow terms. We must be included in the discussions so that a more
adequate account can be developed . 3) By eliminating specificities within the large
"black" or nonwhite group, the black/white binary

has

undercut the

possibility of devel oping appropriate and effective legal and political solutions

for the variable forms that racial

oppression can take. A broad movement for civil rights does not require that we ignore the specific circumstances of different racial or ethnic identities,
nor does it mandate that only the similarities can figure into the formulation of protective legisla tion. I will discuss an example of this problem, one that
concerns the application of affirmative action in higher education, at the end of this essay

of eliminating specificities within the

. 4) Another major disadvantage

large "black" or

nonwhite group is that one

cannot then either under stand or a ddress the real conflicts and
differences within this amalgam of peoples.

The black/white paradigm proposes to understand all conflicts

between communities of color through anti-black racism, when the reality is often more complex.

5)

For all these reasons,

the

possibility of achieving coalitions.

Without being a conspiracy theorist, it is obvious that keeping us in conflict with each
other and not in coalition is in the interests of the current power
structure. I would add to these arguments the following two. 6) The black/white binary and the
constant invocation of all race discourses and conflicts as between blacks and
whites has produced an imaginary of race in this country in which a
very large white majority confronts a relatively small black minority,
which has the effect of reenforcing the sense of inevitability to white
black/white paradigm

seriously

undermines

the

domination . This is not the reality of racial percentages in almost any major urban

Nonwhites outnumber whites

center in the country today.

in New York, NY, Miami, FL, Chicago, IL, Atlanta, GA, and Los
Angeles, CA, and come very close in San Francisco, CA, Dallas, TX, and Washington DC. The original intent of the electoral college was to protect small
states and create a buffer between the hoi polloi and the U.S. Government, but the current effect of the electoral college given these changed demo
graphics has the added "advantage" of disenfranchising the occupants of cities generally and people of color specifically from influencing national
electoral outcomes. If the popular vote determined elections, the cities would have the determining numbers of votes, since this is where the majority of
U.S. citizens now live and where the trend of movement is toward. The numbers and concentrations of people of color in the U.S. means that we are
quickly moving past the politics of recognition, where people of color clamor for recognition from the all powerful majority, and reaching the politics of

The white
majority will not maintain its near hegemonic political control as
power negotiation, where we can negotiate from a position of power rather than having to rely exclusively on moral appeals.

new configurations of alliances develop.26 Moreover, the white majority is far from monolithic,
splintering most notably along gender and class lines: the gender gap has widened in electoral politics along with the gap between union and non-union
households (the two largest gaps in the last presidential election), with droves of white women and white union members voting the same as the majority
of people of color. Thus, thinking of race in terms only of black and white produces a sense of inevitability to white domination which is not empirically
supportable. I believe this issue of imagery is very significant. Whites must come to realize that maintaining white dominance for much longer is simply
not a viability, short of fascism, or significantly expanding the fascist treat ments that many communities already experience. By maintaining the
black/white binary we only persist in falsely representing the realities of race in the U.S.; by opening up the binary to rainbow images and the like we can
more accurately and thus helpfully present the growing and future conditions within which political action and contestations will occur. This is in
everyone's interests. For this reason, the increasingly high profile of Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Latino/as is all to the good. It may also
someday lead away from the imagery of oppositionality, or mutually exclusive interests, which the very terms black and white have long conveyed, and
move toward an imagery of pluralism (which has some of its own problems, I realize, but which can more readily recognize the diverse ways in which
alliances and differences can occur

). 7)

The next argument that I would make in regard to

the black/white binary

is that it

mistakenly configures race imagistically as exclusively having to do

with color , as if color alone determines racial identity (which has not been the case even

and it makes it seem as if between African Americans and

European Americans all the other races must be lined up somewhere on this
continuum of color since "white" and "black" clearly represent the
polar extremes. There is certainly a racist continuum of color operat ing in this
and in many countries, but this continuum is not the only axis by which racism
operates. Some have taken the horrific reality of the hierarchy of adoption prefer ences in the U.S., that runs basically from white to Asian to
Latino/a to black, as indicative of the existence of this continuum of color. Related to this idea is the claim made by some
that Asian Americans and Latino/as will eventually "become" white , so
for African Americans),

let me address this first. The claim that Asians and Latino/as will become white is first of all premised on the assumption that we have two choices of
racialized identities: white and black. If a group is not economically and politically located at or near the bottom of the society, which the black/white
paradigm associ ates exclusively with "blackness," then such a group is assumed to have achieved "whiteness." What this claim forgets, among other
things, is the significant racial and class variety within each of these large amalga mated groups. Moreover, the discrimination faced by Asian Americans
and Latino/as will not likely lose its focus on language and cultural issues; the more Latino/as there are, the more virulent "English Only" campaigns
become. The claim also ignores the overwhelming evidence showing that most Latino/as persist in their identities for multiple generations, against their
own economic interests.27 And it seems inapplicable entirely to Asian Americans, who may be represented as having some so-called white attributes, but

There are three major differences

between the groups who have had "success" in becoming white, and
Latino/as and Asian Americans. The groups I am referring to here, and about
whom there is some very good historical research emerging, are the Irish and (white Anglo) Jewish
Amer icans. Whether Jews have wholly made it is debatable; they seem to move
who have never been legally or socially accepted here as white.28

back and forth, as they did in Germany. For the Klu Klux Klan, still influ ential in many parts of the U.S., Jews are not white. And even the U.S. mainstream,
one might suggest, seems able to accept an Alan Greenspan as "finance czar" but not a Jewish President of the U.S.29 The U.S. has already had Irish

the
first obvious significant difference is in their racialized differences
based largely on color and physical appearance. The Irish and Jews
can "blend in" to U.S. society in a way that Asian Americans and most
Latino/as cannot. The admission of the Irish and Jews into the category "white"
did not require challenging the idea that superior characteristics
come from European societies, and that superior characteristics are correlated to light
skin color. If nonwhites or non-light-skinned people were to become white, white ness would begin to deconstruct, perhaps mutating to a
presidents. In regard, however, to the differences between Irish and Jews on the one hand and Asian Americans and Latino/as on the other,

cultural and ethnic designation which still is marked by superiority, but it is not obvious that whiteness is on the threshold of deconstruction. Thus, to

The second
difference is historical. The Irish and Jews represent bad memories
within Europe, memories of colonialism and genocide, and thus they
operate as the symbolic representation of Europe's moral failings. The
Irish and Jews do not have that symbolic meaning in the U.S, and in fact may
carry the opposite symbolic meaning in representing the idea that "anyone" can make it and
be accepted here, even those who were despised in Europe. In contrast,
admit Asians and Latino/as into the category would cause necessary changes that were not necessary for the Irish and Jews.

African, Mexican and Native Americans, most notably, among others,

represent a symbolic reminder of the hollowness of claims to white
moral superiority. The Irish and Jews are not a psychic threat to the
ideological supremacy of white identity in the same way that many
Latino/as, Asian Americans, and certainly African Americans are. A third
major difference concerns perceived assimilability, although here the Irish and Jews must
separate. The Irish are perceived as entirely assimilable; Jews only partly so because of religion (which is another reason Jews tend to be moved back and
forth). Latino/as, to the extent they are European, come from a Spanish Catholic culture considered pre modern and less civilized, and to the extent they

The symbolic opposition

between "east" and "west," or the Orient and the Occident, is well-known to be a
major prop of the Anglo-European self-image fomenting a plethora of such dichotomies as between "individu alism versus
collectivism," "democracy versus despotism," and future oriented
versus backward oriented societies. The very definition of Asian
culture given in these orientalist constructions is to be non-western
and incapable of assimilation. The possibility of synthesis is not considered. This issue of assimilability has become
are also indigenous, come from a culture perceived as totally different than Anglo-European.

more rather than less important in recent years, with political theorists such as Peter Brimelow and Samuel Huntington making open claims to continue
the dominance of European cultural traditions, against liberal immigration laws and cultural integra tion, and asserting that the very survival of "western

Because of these three major differences, I cannot see

Asian Americans and Latino/as "becoming" white; it is still proving
difficult enough to be seen as "American." Thus, the claim that Asian Americans and Latino/as will
civilization" is at stake.30

become white ignores the issue of color and other differences, takes no notice of the varying symbolic meanings represented by these groups, and forgets
the problem of "assimilability." It returns us to the problem of misidentifi cation discussed earlier, refusing to recognize the complexity by which people can
be vilified. To give another example of this complexity, Asians and Jews can be grouped together in the ways that their cultures have been seen as in some
respects superior, threatening, and monolithic. In other words, unlike for African Americans and Latino/as, Asians and Jews are not seen as having inferior
intelligence or primitive cultures, yet they are seen as essentialized groups with collective goals to take over the world and/or evil intent toward those
outside their groups (the "yellow peril" and "Jewish world conspiracy"). This kind of ideology requires specific analysis, because it operates differently vis-a-

The most recent issue that has

arisen since September 11,2001, involves the representations of Arab
Americans, a group that is very much racialized. Yet again, their racialization works
in specific ways mediated by ideological claims about their cultures and
most notably the religion of Islam. Racial oppression works on multiple
vis, among other issues, affirmative action concerns in regard to higher education.

axes , I would argue, with color being the most dominant and currently most

pernicious. But color is not exhaustive of all the forms racial oppression can take. The most
pejora tive terms used against Asian Americans often have a racial
connotation but without a color connotation - "Chinks," "slant-eyes,"
and for the Vietnamese, "gooks." These terms denigrate a whole people, not a partic ular set of customs or a specific history, and thus
parallel the essentializing move of racist discourse that
universalizes negative value across a group that is demarcated on
the basis of visible features. The two most pejorative terms widely used against
Latino/as in this country have been the terms "spic" - whose genealogy
references people who were heard by Anglos as saying "no spic English" - and
"wetback." The first invokes the denigration of language, the second denigrates both where
people came from and how they got here: from Mexico across the
Rio Grande. Mexican Americans were also called "greasers" which
connoted the condition of their hair, not their skin color. Thus, these terms demonstrate the possibility of a
racial ization and racism that works through constructing and then denigrating other racialized features and characteristics besides color. We
might think of these as two independent axes of racialization that

operate through phys ical features other than color, and through
genealogies of cultural origin . There is, then, the color axis, the physical
characteristics other than color axis, and the cultural origin axis. The discrimination against Asian Americans and
Latino/as has also operated very strongly on a fourth axis of "nativism." Nativism
is a prejudice against immigrants; thus it is distinct, though often related to,
xenophobia or the rejection of foreigners. Rodolfo Acufia explains that historical nativism is also distinct from anthropological nativism,
which refers to a "revival of indigenous culture," because historical nativism refers to the belief of some Anglo-Americans that they are "the true

the
problem with Asian Americans and Latino/as is not just that they are
seen as foreign; they are seen as ineluctably foreign, from inferior
cultures (morally and politically if not intellectually), incapable of and
unmotivated toward assimilation to the superior mainstream white Anglo culture. They want to keep their
languages, demand instruction in public schools in their primary languages, and they often maintain their own holidays,
cuisines, religions, and living areas (the latter sometimes by choice). Despite the fact that Mexican Americans
have been living within the current U.S. borders for longer than most Anglo-Americans, they are all too often seen as
squat ters on U.S. soil, interlopers who "belong" elsewhere. This
"xenophobia directed within" has been especially virulent at specific times in U.S. history, during and after both world wars for example,
and is enjoying a resurgence now with the war fever and hysteria
against Arabs or anyone wearing a turban, the serious erosion of civil liberties for racially profiled
groups, the political rhetoric of Pat Buchanan, the right wing disc-jockeys ho make jokes about beating
up illegal immigrants, and the "scholarly" best-selling books like Alien Nation that warn "Americans" that their loose immigration
Americans, excluding even the Indian" because they represent in their cultural heritage the "idea" of "America."31 On this view,

laws will forever alter the racial make-up of the U.S. if left unchecked, and that altering our racial identity will have the dire consequences of undermining
the basic cultural and democratic values that make the U.S. what it is. Another feature of nativism is its use to justify claims of differential rights for

there is no question that African Americans

together with American Indians have a moral claim on this country
larger than any group, and that the redress made thus far is completely
inadequate toward repairing the present inequities that persist as a
legacy of past state-organized mass atrocities. Some may believe that a kind of nativist argument would provide further
various minority groups. In my view,

justification for these legitimate claims to redress, on the grounds that these groups' forbears were here longer and/or their labor and ingenuity
contributed a great deal to the wealth of this country. More recent immigrants, it may be thought, "deserve" less by way of protected opportunities or

The issue of nativism is thus important to address in

relation to the differences and potential conflicts among
communities of color, since many Asian Americans and Latino/as are
post-1965 immigrants (when the restrictions on immigration based on geography were lifted). One might well ask, what is
government assist ance.

wrong with nativist arguments, and is the critique of nativism based ultimately on group self-interest?

Perm
Perm do both melancholia as a vehicle for affirmation is
accessible and productive.
Cheng 97 (Anne Anlin, Professor of English and African American Literature at
Princeton University, The Melancholy of Race, The Kenyon Review New Series, Vol.
19, No. 1, American Memory / American Forgetfulness (Winter, 1997), pp. 49-61,
http://sites.uci.edu/mariaselenebose/files/2015/10/Cheng-Melancholy-Race.pdf,
accessed 7/6/16) rz

African Americans (and other people of color) continue to experience

what David Eng and Shinhee Han describe as racial melancholia in the post
civil rights era. They remain in a state of suspended assimilation in
which they are continually estranged from the ultimate object of
American citizenship: the ideal of whiteness.23 Because racial exclusion
had become part and parcel of African American political identity
since slavery, it cannot simply be willed or wished away. This
protracted experience of disillusionment, mourning, and yearning is
in fact the basis of African American civic estrangement.24 Its
lingering is not just a haunting of the past but is also a reminder of
the presentday racial inequities that keep African American citizens
in an indeterminate, unassimilable state as a racialized Other. While the
affect of racial melancholia was bred in the dyad of slavery and
democracy, it persists because of the paradox of legal citizenship and civic
estrangement. However, Eng, Han, and I, unlike Freud, do not see this form of
melancholia as destructive or damaging, but recognize it as a potentially
productive state. Quoting Jos Esteban Muozs Dis-Identifications, Eng and Han
offer a corrective to Freuds pathology, for Munoz proposes that melancholia is
a mechanism that helps us (re) construct identity and take our dead with
us to the various battles we must wage in their namesand in our
names. 25 In turn, by reconstructing these sites of slavery, postcivil

rights African American artists and intellectuals are able to speak

out against their racial plight (the living) and on behalf of their enslaved
ancestors (the dead). By doing so, African Americans not only call the
legitimacy of American civic myths into question, but also
reconfigure these civic markers in order to accommodate the
constitutive sites of American history that the national memory has
forgotten or excised. To combat this erasure and elision, contemporary black
cultural producers engage in what Charles Taylor aptly terms the politics of
recognition, the formal battle for equality that requires a revision of symbols and
images.26 Whereas the debates for legal citizenship largely took place in the
juridical and political realms, civic membership is symbolic in form. The demands for
civic membership, therefore, have mostly taken place in the aesthetic and cultural

realms. As Ralph Ellison put it, The society is not likely to become

free of racism, thus it is necessary for Negroes to free themselves

by becoming their idea of what a free people should be.27 In order
to gain this Ellisonian freedom, postcivil rights African Americans
have attached themselves to the myths, monuments, narratives,
icons, creeds, and images that render them eligible for civic
membership; they do so precisely by revising the very same
elements of national identity from which they have been rejected .
Those most likely to engage the abstract signs and symbols that make up the
national identity have been contemporary African American a rtists, writers, and

legislators whose projects contest the hegemony and racial

homogeneity of American civic myths while simultaneously creating
more historically faithful and more democratic national narratives.

Model Minority
The manifestation of the model minority is a product of the
color line and broader regimes of anti-black violence. Our
refusal of this myth is the best way for Asian students to
disidentify from and reject systems of whiteness.
Matsuda 96 (Mari J., law professor at the William S. Richardson School of Law at
the University of Hawaii, We Will Not be Used: Are Asian Americans the Racial
Bourgeoisie, Where Is Your Body? AND OTHER ESSAYS ON RACE GENDER AND THE
LAW, Beacon Press 1996,
http://www.dariaroithmayr.com/pdfs/assignments/Matsuda,%20We%20Will%20Not
%20Be%20Used.pdf, accessed 7/7/16) rz
It is a special honor to address supporters of the Asian Law Caucus. Here, before
this audience, I am willing to speak in the tradition of our women warriors, to go
beyond the platitudes of fund-raiser formalism and to talk of something that has
been bothering me and that I need your help on. I want to speak of my fear that
Asian Americans are in danger of becoming the racial bourgeoisie and
of my resolve to resist that path. Marx wrote of the economic bourgeoisieof the small merchants, the middle class, and the baby capitalists who
were deeply confused about their self-interest. The bourgeoisie, he
said, often emulate the manners and ideology of the big-time
capitalists. They are the "wannabes" of capitalism. Struggling for
riches, often failing, confused about the reasons why, the economic
wannabes go to their graves thinking that the big hit is right around
the corner. Living in nineteeth-century Europe, Marx thought mostly in
terms of class. Living in twentieth-century America, in the land where
racism found a home, I am thinking about race. Is there a racial
equivalent of the economic bourgeoisie? I fear there may be, and I fear it
may be us. If white, as it has been historically, is the top of the racial
hierarchy in America, and black, historically, is the bottom, will yellow

assume the place of the racial middle? The role of the racial middle
is a critical one. It can reinforce white supremacy if the middle
deludes itself into thinking it can be just like white if it tries hard
enough. Conversely, the middle can dismantle white supremacy if it
refuses to be the middle, if it refuses to buy into racial hierarchy,
and if it refuses to abandon communities of black and brown people,
choosing instead to forge alliances with them. The theme of the
unconventional fund-raiser talk you are listening to is "we will not be used." It
is a plea to Asian Americans to think about the ways in which our communities are
particularly susceptible to playing the worst version of the racial bourgeoisie role. I
remember my mother's stories of growing up on a sugar plantation on Kauai. She
tells of the Portuguese luna, or over- seer. The luna rode on a big horse and issued
orders to the Japanese and Filipino workers. The luna in my mother's stories is a

tragic/ comic figure. He thinks he is better than the other workers, and
he does not realize that the plantation owner considers the luna
subhuman, just like all the other workers. The invidious stereotype of the dumb
"portagee" persists in Hawaii today, a holdover from the days of the luna parading
around on the big horse, cloaked in self-delusion and false pride. The double
tragedy for the plantation nisei who hated the luna is that the sansei in Hawaii are
becoming the new luna. Nice Japanese girls from Manoa Valley are going through
four years of college to get degrees in travel industry management in order to sit
behind a small desk in a big hotel, to dole out marching orders to brown-skinned
workers, and to take orders from a white man with a bigger desk and a bigger
paycheck who never has to complicate his life by dealing with the brown people
who make the beds and serve the food. 1 He need only deal with the Nice-JapaneseGirl-ex-Cherry Blossom-Queen, eager to please, who does not know she will never
make it to the bigger desk. The Portuguese luna now has the last laugh with this
new, unfunny portagee joke: When the portagee was the luna, he did not have to
pay college tuition to ride that horse. I would like to say to my sister behind the
small desk, "Remember where you came from, and take this pledge: We will not be
used." There are a hundred ways to use the racial bourgeoisie. First is
the creation of success myths and blame-the-victim ideology . When
Asian Americans manage to do well, their success is used against
others. Internally, it is used to erase the continuing poverty and social
dislocation within Asian-American communities. The media are full of
stories of Asian-American whiz kids. 2 Their successes are used to erase
our problems and to disavow any responsibility for them . The

dominant culture does not know about drug abuse in our

communities, our high school dropouts, or our AIDS victims.3
Suggestions that some segments of the AsianAmerican community need special
help are greeted with suspicion and disbelie Externally, our successes are
used to deny racism and to put down other groups. African
Americans and Latinos and poor whites are told, "Look at those Asiansanyone can make it in this country if they really try." The cruelty of
telling this to crack babies, to workers displaced by runaway shops, and to families
waiting in line at homeless shelters is not something I want associated with my
genealogy. Yes, my ancestors made it in this country, but they made it against the
odds. In my genealogy, and probably in yours, are people who went to
bed hungry, who lost land to the tax collector, who worked to
exhaustion and illhealth, who faced pain and relocation with the bitter
stoicism that we call, in Nihongo, gaman. 4 Many who came the hard road of our

ancestors did not make it. Their bones are still in the mountains by
the tunnels they blasted for the railroad, still in the fields where
they stooped over the short-handled hoe, and still in the graveyards
ofEurope, where they fought for a democracy that did not include
them. Asian success was success with a dark, painful price. To use that success to
discount the hardship facing poor and working people in this country today is a

sacrilege to the memory of our ancestors. It is an insult to today's Asian-American

immigrants who work the double-triple shift, who know no leisure, who crowd two
and three families to a home, and who put children We Will Not Be Used 153 and old
folks alike to work at struggling family businesses or doing piecework until midnight.
Yes, we take pride in our success, but we should also remember the cost. The
success that is our pride is not to be given over as a weapon to use against other
struggling communities. I hope we will not be used to blame the poor for their
poverty. Nor should we be used to deny employment or educational opportunity to
others. A recent exchange of editorials and letters in the Asian-American press
reveals confusion over affirmative action. 5 Racist anti-Asian quotas at the
universities can give quotas a bad name in our community. At the same time,
quotas have been the only way we have been able to walk through the door of
persistently discriminatory institutions like the San Francisco Fire Department.6 We
need affirmative action because there are still employers who see an Asian face and
see a person who is unfit for a leadership position. In every field where we

have attained a measure of success, we are underrepresented in the

real power positions. 7 And yet, we are in danger ofbeing manipulated into
opposing affirmative action by those who say affirmative action hurts Asian
Americans. What is really going on here? When university administrators have
hidden quotas to keep down Asian admissions, this is because Asians are seen as
destroying the predominantly white character of the university. Under this
mentality, we cannot let in all those Asian overachievers and maintain affirmative
action for other minority groups. We cannot do both because that will mean either
that our universities lose their predominantly white character or that we have to
fund more and better universities. To either of those prospects, I say, why not? and I
condemn the voices from my own community that are translating legitimate anger
at ceilings on Asian admissions into unthinking opposition to affirmativeaction floors
needed to fight racism. In a period when rates of educational attainment for
minorities and working-class Americans are going down, 8 in a period when America
is lagging behind other developed nations in literacy and learning,9 I hope we will
not be used to deny educational opportunities to the disadvantaged and to preserve
success for only the privileged. Another classic way to use the racial
bourgeoisie is as America's punching bag. There is a lot of rage in
this country, and for good reason. Our economy is in shambles.
Persistent unemployment is creating new ghost towns and new soup kitchens
from coast to coast. The symptoms of decay-the drugs, the homelessness, and the
violence-are everywhere. From out of this decay comes a rage looking for

a scapegoat, and a traditional American scapegoat is the Oriental

Menace. From the Workingman's Party that organized white laborers
around an anti-Chinese campaign in California in 1877, rn to the
World War II internment fueled by resentment of the success of issei farmers,"
to the murder ofVincent Chin, 12 and to the terrorizing of Korean merchants
in ghetto communities today, there is an unbroken line of poor and
working Americans turning their anger and frustration into hatred
of Asian Americans. Every time this happens, the real villains - the

corporations and politicians who put profits before human needs are allowed to go about their business free from public scrutiny , and
the anger that could go to organizing for positive social change goes instead to
Asian bashing. Will we be used as America's punching bag? We can prevent this by
organizing to publicize and to fight racist speech and racist violence wherever we
find it. More important, however, Asian Americans must take a prominent role in
advocating economic justice. We must show that Asian Americans are allies of the
working poor, the unemployed, and the ghetto teenager. Ifwe can show our
commitment to ending the economic upheaval that feeds anti-Asian sentiment, the
displaced rage that terrorizes Asian Americans will tum on more deserving targets.
If we can show sensitivity to the culture and needs of other people of color when we
do business in their communities, we will maintain our welcome there, as we have
in the past. I hope we can do this so we can put an end to being used as America's
punching bag. The problem of displaced anger is also an internal problem for Asian
Americans. You know the story: the Japanese pick on the Okinawans, the Chinese
pick on the Filipinos, and the Samoans pick on the Laotians. On the plantation we
scabbed on each other's strikes. In Chinatown, we have competed over space.
There are Asian men who batter Asian women and Asian parents who batter their
children. There is homophobia in our communities, tied to a deep fear

that we are already so marginalized by white society that any

additional difference is intolerable. I have heard straight Asian men say
they feel so emasculated by white society that they cannot tolerate assertive
women or sexually ambiguous men. This is a victim's mentality, the tragic symptom
of a community so devoid of self-respect that it brings its anger home. I love my
Asian brothers, but I have lost my patience with malingering homophobia and
sexism and especially with using white racism as an excuse to resist change. You
know, the "I have to be Bruce Lee because the white man wants me to be Tonto"
line. Yes, the J-town boys with their black leather jackets are adorable, but the
pathetic need to put down straight women, gays, and lesbians is not. To anyone

in our communities who wants to bring anger home, let us say, "Cut
it out." We will not be used against each other. If you know Hawaiian
music, you know of the ha 'ina line that tells of a song about to end. This speech is
about to end. It will end by recalling echoes of Asian-American

resistance. In anti-eviction struggles in Chinatowns from coast to

coast and in Hawaii, we heard the song We Shall Not Be Moved. lJ For the
1990s, I want to say, "We shall not be used." I want to remember the
times when Asian Americans stood side by side with African
Americans, Latinos, and progressive whites to demand social justice. I
want to remember the multiracial ILWU, 1 4 which ended the plantation system in
Hawaii, 1 5 and the multiracial sugar beet strikes in California that
brought together Japanese, Filipino, and Chicano workers to fulfill their dream of a
better life. 16 I want to remember the American Committee for the
Protection of the Foreign Born, which brought together progressive
Okinawans, Koreans, Japanese, Chinese, and European immigrants to fight
McCarthyism and the deportation of political activists. 1 7 I want to remember the

San Francisco State College strike18 and the Asian-American students who
stood their ground in multiracial coalition to bring about ethnic studies and lasting
changes in American academic life, changes that make it possible for me, as a
scholar, to tell the truth as I see it.

The myth of the model minority upholds anti-black racism. We

must break it down.
Kuo 15 (Rachel, Everyday Feminism, scholar and educator based in New York City,
6 Reasons We Need to Dismantle the Model Minority Myth of Those Hard-Working
Asians, 4/2/15, http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/04/dismantle-model-minoritymyth/, accessed 7/8/16) rz
We are threatened, unlike most whites, by efforts to use our race against us.
Frank Wu Asians are good at math and science. Theyre successful economically and
academically. They are hard working and high achieving. While these tropes may
seem outdated, theyre still well known and recognizable. For example, the other
day, just to see what Google searches were most popular, I searched: Why are
and the first thing that came up was: Why are Asians so smart? Who are these
Asians that people keep talking about? While these sorts of comments might seem
like compliments or affirmations, they are actually overly simplistic generalizations
that reveal the devious and exploitative nature of race and racism in the United
States. And they all fall under the model minority myth a stereotype that
generalizes Asian Americans by depicting them as the perfect example of an if-theycan-do-it-so-can-you success story. This myth is also a political strategy that
highlights the success of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Indian immigrants with a
specific professional and educational background. It is a historical and

presently used tool designed to protect institutionalized white

supremacy and validate anti-black racism. For a long time, Asian American
activists have worked to debunk the model minority myth by discussing its negative
consequences and impacts. By positioning of some Asian American
groups as a model of success in the United States, we also need to ask:

A model for whom? Standing up against the myth has been a longtime call to action that has recently been re-incited by nonindictment verdicts for the murders of Eric Garner and Mike Brown,
as well as the murders of many others in the Black community . This
sentiment is currently amplified by social media movements like
#ModelMinorityMutiny and #StartTheConversation, which push for Asian
Americans to stand in solidarity alongside other communities of
color and to debunk the model minority myth in everyday
conversations about racism. Here are some ways to unpack why the model
minority myth is used as a tool of oppression, especially one that
perpetuates anti-black racism. 1. The myth fosters internalized
racism within certain Asian American communities against other
communities of color. In order to begin undoing the myth , we must
also begin to tackle the ways weve internalized anti-blackness.

Often, our communities use racist rhetoric thats disguised as casual observation or
advice: They just need to work harder, dont date them, or dont go to their
neighborhood. The myth can be a protective buffer against the stigma of being seen
as outsiders. Being cast as perpetual foreigners fueled a desire for
some Asian immigrants to survive by seeking ways to fit in and
belong, to have access to the same resources and privileges as those with the most
economic and political power wealthy, white Americans. As a result, we sometimes
subconsciously and consciously act protective and proud of that model status. If
were the model of success, then surely well be free from the persecution of those
who dont, wont, and cant adhere to the standard? Right? But it is through this
very orchestrated messaging that weve been conditioned to forget that America is
stolen land. It is occupied land. It is a country built on slave labor and the
colonization of its indigenous people. Yet, America, to some Asian Americans, is
viewed as a promised land, and many of us came to the United States with a
belief that there were opportunities to live free from oppression. Moving forward, we
need to re-examine who gives those promises, recognize the villainy behind why
they were offered, acknowledge whom we are truly taking them from, and heal from
the way they have hurt our diverse communities. We need stand up against the
model minority myth and demand resistance against white supremacy and
that means letting go of the idea of the American Dream. 2. The

model minority myth divides people of color and specifically serves

as a tool of anti-black racism. Racial myths and stereotypes are often used as
a wedge to divide groups, whether its creating unfair racial
hierarchies or emphasizing elements of cultural and racial
superiority and/or inferiority. In this specific case, the model minority
myth is successful because it constructs Black people as a
problem minority. It teaches some Asian Americans to compare where we are
and what weve accomplished with where Black Americans are and what theyve
accomplished. It turns us into juxtapositions and situates us as racial
binaries. Asian Americans have different histories of oppression than
other communities, and its unfair to compare existing struggles. This is rarely
talked about outside of activist communities, but some Asian immigrants were
intentionally selected to be model minorities, which well discuss more below.
Rooted in the pull yourself up by the bootstraps ideology, the term model

minority was popularized during the 1960s Civil Rights Movement

this stereotype is racist to both Asian Americans and Black
Americans. By creating a narrative that hard work equates success, it negates
past and present structural barriers that interrupt success for different
marginalized groups. The success of certain groups of Asian
Americans was contrasted with the failure of African Americans.
The myth comes hand in hand with other statements like, If Asians can be
successful by working hard, why cant Black people? It serves as a
functional stereotype that uplifted the narrative of meritocracy and the American
Dream. In witnessing family friends and relatives talk about their life experiences,

themes of hard work and sacrifice are the most salient. My own parents believe that
they have worked hard to get to where they are. At some point since they
immigrated here, they have learned to believe in the narrative that anyone can find
success if they just work hard enough. However, to accept any positive stereotype
about the model minority myth is to also comply with a racist system that favors
and privileges whiteness and that is something that not only harms other people
of color, it hurts members in our own communities.

Seshadri-Crooks
Argument:
Seshadri-Crooks 2K (Kalpana, Professor of English at Boston College,
Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race, Routledge Press 2000) rz
A briefer statement of the argument of this book could be made as follows: Race is
a regime of visibility that secures our investment in racial identity.

We make such an investment because the unconscious signifier

Whiteness, which founds the logic of racial difference, promises
wholeness. (This is what it means to desire Whiteness: not a desire
to become Caucasian [!] but, to put it redundantly, it is an insatiable
desire on the part of all raced subjects to overcome difference.)
Whiteness attempts to signify being, or that aspect of the subject
which escapes language. Obviously, such a project is impossible
because Whiteness is a historical and cultural invention. However,
what guarantees Whiteness its place as a master signifier is visual
difference. The phenotype secures our belief in racial difference,
thereby perpetuating our desire for Whiteness.

Black and white are not inevitable categories and the symbolic
is not structured by anti-blackness. Rather, whiteness
positions itself in the place of the object of desire and
designates race based on degrees of whiteness, and those
categories are maintained by affective investments.
Seshadri-Crooks 2K (Kalpana, Professor of English at Boston College,
Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race, Routledge Press 2000) rz
The body image and the raced body
The above view of the ego and the body image raises the question of the relation of
the ego ideal to race. What is the status of the master signifier of race in the
constitution of the bodily ego? If we agree that the body image is constituted with
the help of the signifier, then are all body images necessarily raced? Is Whiteness a
founding signifier for the subject as such, and of his/her ego? Is the racial signifier
necessary for the constitution of the bodily ego? It is important that we not
mistake the moment of the constitution of the bodily ego as the
necessary moment when the body becomes racially visible . To do so

would not be a sufficient departure from the erroneous belief that

race is purely a question of misrecognition or identification with a
mirror image. We would merely have added the factor of the racial signifier to
the account of the mirror stage. There is no doubt that one can be constituted
as a subject with a unified bodily ego without necessarily

identifying with a racial signifier, or seeing oneself as racially

marked. (The large point here is that race is not like sex. Not all are subject to the
racial signifier.) We only have to consider the numerous accounts from literature
and autobiography that enact the scene of becoming racially visible to oneself.
Besides Fanon , who speaks of discovering that he is black during his

first visit to France, there is Stuart Hall, who in Minimal selves says that
for many Jamaicans like himself, Black is an identity which had to be
learned and could only be learned in a certain moment (1996b: 116).
This process of introjecting the signifier is repeated by other characters
such as Janie in Zora Neal Hurstons Their Eyes Were Watching God,
James Weldon Johnsons protagonist in Autobiography of an Ex-Colored
Man, and by Oulaudah Equiano in his autobiographical narrative.
There are doubtless numerous other examples that one could cite. The fact that
the secondariness of race seems to apply only to so-called people of
color, and that there are rare, or virtually no instances of a socalled
white person discovering his or her race may lead to several specious
speculations such as: black people identify with whites as the latter
are more powerful and define the norm . Such misidentification on the
part of blacks leads to trauma when they discover the reality of their
blackness (Fanons thesis). Other problematic views might be that

white people impose an identity upon those they have colonized

in order to justify their dominance, or whites have no race or race
consciousness; whites are not racially embodied, and this is an index of
their transparency and power, etc. While some of these propositions might
make some ideological sense, all of these conclusions nevertheless
presume the pre-existence of black and white as if these were
natural and neutrally descriptive terms . I would suggest that the difference

among black, brown, red, yellow and white rests on the position of
each signifier in the signifying chain in its relation to the master
signifier , which engenders racial looking through a particular

process of anxiety. Perhaps the more effective ideological stance may be

not to raise race consciousness among so-called whites, as scholars
in Whiteness studies suggest, but to trouble the relation of the subject to
the master signifier . One must throw into doubt the security and

belief in ones identity, not promote more fulsome claims to such

identity. In the preceding discussion of the mirror stage, I suggested that the
signifier should be understood as subtending the image, but what
remains unexplained is the specificity of racial visibility and the
anxiety that is attached to it. The question of racial visibility

requires that one be more precise about the relation of the body
image to anxiety and the function of the signifier. In race one finds
ones place in the chain through the signifier , S1, S2, etc. that stands in
for one through the process of naming. The signifier comes from the
Other and makes a rigid reference to the subject in question.
Nevertheless, to be subjected to Whiteness means that race impacts on
the bodily ego as a regime of visibility . Certain marks of the body then
become privileged and anxious sites of meaning . To grasp this moment of
anxiety and visibility, one must turn once more to Lacans notion of the imaginary.
This time, what is necessary to note is not that the symbolic is in the
imaginary, but rather the presence of the Real in the imaginary. According
to Philippe Julien (1994), Lacans theory of the imaginary can be

periodized into three phases: the first is the notion of the mirror
stage as misrecognition marked by the jubilant hailing of ones
future bodily coherence; second is the conception of the mirror stage
and the imaginary as the demand of the child to the Other to
validate its misrecognition, thus introducing the function of desire
and the signifier; and the third is of the visible body image as that
which is sustained by the object of anxiety. It is this last formulation of
the imaginary, as elaborated by Lacan in Seminar X on anxiety and elsewhere ,
that is most valuable for an understanding of race. In Seminar X,
Anxiety, Lacan revisits the concept of the imaginary to attempt a more precise
articulation between the mirror stage and, as the Rome report puts it, between the
specular image and the signifier (session 3, 28 November 1962). Interestingly,
Lacan proposes that it is anxiety that will allow us to go over againthe
articulation thus required of me (28 November). Lacan insists in this session
that the imaginary and symbolic are not to be understood as two

phases of theory. He underlines the simultaneity of the subjects

articulation to the small other, or the ego ideal i(o) and to the big
Other, or the symbolic. He identifies the inaugural link between the little
and big Other as emerging at that moment when the infant in its socalled
jubilatory moment, when it assumes a specular wholeness, turns back
towards the one who is carrying him. turns back towards the adultwho
here represents the big Otherto ratify the value of this image (28
November). Later in the same session, Lacan goes on to elaborate two
sorts of imaginary identifications: 1) that of o: i(o), the specular
image, and 2) the more mysterious one whose enigma begins to be developed
therethe object of desire as such. Lacans articulation of the object of
desire (to be distinguished from the object cause of desire, the objet
petit a) is a complex reworking of Freuds theory of castration anxiety.
According to Lacan, during the childs so-called mirror stage , the whole of

libidinal cathexis does not pass through the specular image. There
is a remainder (28 November). This remainder is the phallus that appears in
the form of a lack, of a (minus phi) (28 November). The paradoxical notion that the
phallus appears as a lack indicates that something of the subject does not
get imaged or symbolized, and this limit, which is also the mark of castration,
is the object of desire . Unlike Freud, Lacan sees castration as not

tantamount to anxiety as it makes desire possible. What constitutes

anxiety, is when something, a mechanism makes there appearat the place which
corresponds tothe object of desire, something[or] anything at all. In other
words, when the place of the absent phallus is taken up by something,
anxiety ensues. Everything starts from imaginary castration, that there is
no image of lack . When something appears there, it is because the
lack is lacking . I would just like to point out to you that many things can appear
which are anomalous, that is not what makes us anxious. But if all of a sudden
all norms are lacking, namely what constitutes the lack -because the

norm is correlative to the idea of lack if all of a sudden it is not

lacking and believe me try to apply that to a lot of things it is at that

moment that anxiety begins . (X: 28 November) Anxiety should not be

understood as a threat to bodily integrity such as the fear of castration, but
rather as the lack of a lack. Anxiety, contra Freud, has an object, but it is no
identifiable entity. Rather this object of anxiety is uncanny; it is a phobic
object which ultimately sustains the body image. My point is that the
racial body is produced in just such a process. When the signifier of
race , Whiteness , positions itself in the place of the minus phi as the
object of desire , that is when its historicity is most apparent and productive of
anxiety. This is because Whiteness, by attempting to signify that which is
excluded in subject constitution , the more-than-symbolic aspect of the

subjectthe fact that he/she is not entirely determined by the

symbolic or the imaginary produces anxiety . There is a lack of a lack as it
appears in that place that should have remained empty. It is a false door opening
not onto a nowhere, but to an all-too-concrete wall. This anxiety then
produces the uncanny object of race , the arbitrary marks on the body ,
namely hair, skin and bone . These marks then are properly the

desiderata of race; they serve the function of the objet a . Uncanny and
phobic, they make desire possible again by producing lack on another
level. The difference between the visible body as an ego function ,

and the visible body as a function of Whiteness or racialization, can be

understood as the difference between seeing and being seen. The

subject of the imaginary is constituted as seeing by the signifier,
whereas the subject of race is constituted as seen , the subject of the
gaze, through a certain logic of the signifier . If racial identity is
produced by the signifier, racial visibility is produced as a
remainder, a phobic object, in order, paradoxically, to give consistency to
the signifier. Racial visibility is always a function of anxiety , but ones
place in the chain may determine what form that anxiety may take .

Consider for instance, the Third Reich, where the system of race is
installed as the promise of being. The lethal result is, of course, the
policy of anti-Semitism that finds its locus in that most anxious
regime of visibility that finds its object in minute and arbitrary
bodily marks. By providing a psychical account of the regime of
visibility, I suggest that we view the logic of anti-Semitism not as a
racist aberration of difference, but as the kernel of all racial
practice as a mode of looking.14

Not ontological: racialization does not occur on the level of the

imaginary, but on that of the symbolic.
Seshadri-Crooks 2K (Kalpana, Professor of English at Boston College,
Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race, Routledge Press 2000) rz

In the deployment of Lacans theory of the subject of the symbolic to the

subject of race, it is necessary to inquire what the subject of race
desires. Also, what kind of access does race, as a chain of signifiers
that determines the symbolic subject, have to being, or that
which is excluded by the chain? I will be suggesting that racial visibility is to
be located precisely at this point of interrogation: it is the level at
which race, or more properly its master signifier Whiteness
aspires to being. The above questions suggest that the model of the subject as
determined by a chain of signifiers is necessarily incomplete insofar as it cannot
account for sexual difference or more properly for the body. More questions emerge:
If the unconscious is structured like a language, then how is the body constituted? If
sexual difference is merely a question of the signifier, how do we account for the
bodys drives, or for sexuality that is often at odds with the logic of sexual
difference? In relation to race, to stop with the account of the
symbolic function of Whiteness would be too premature, for it does

not address the issue of visibility, or the relation of the signifier to

the visible body, which is, after all, the inaugural point of this inquiry. In
order to take up in earnest the question of the body and of its
constitution as raced, it is necessary to clarify the relation between
the ego as body image and racial visibility. First, one must repudiate

the notion that race is merely a process of specular identification,

where a pre-discursive and pre-raced entity assumes a racial identity
on the basis of certain familial others whose image it identifies with in a
mirror relation . Such a notion is based on a simplified account of
Lacans concept of the imaginary and the mirror stage . I undertake the
following discussion of the imaginary for two reasons: to suggest that insofar

as the symbolic underwrites the imaginary, race must be understood

as a symbolic phenomenon. It is a logic of difference inaugurated by

a signifier, Whiteness, that is grounded in the unconscious

structured like a language. This signifier subjects us all equally to
its law regardless of our identities as black, white, etc. Racial
visibility is a remainder of this symbolic system. Second, the process of
becoming racially visible is not coterminous with the organization of the ego or the
acquisition of the body image. In other words, the visibility of the body does
not necessarily have to be a racial visibility . It is important that one

disarticulate the two processes; otherwise racial visibility will seem to

be an ontological necessity that is a universal verity of subjective
existence as such.

Their structural account of blackness is wrong. The

intrinsicness of black to the constitution of self is predicated
on a misreading of the mirror stage and is an unproductive
starting point for combatting the ills of race. Rather, the
symbolic underlies the emergence of racialized bodies when
we invest in (submit to) certain signifiers in defining ourselves.
Seshadri-Crooks 2K (Kalpana, Professor of English at Boston College,
Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race, Routledge Press 2000) rz
-if race only pertained to the imaginary, then it would have nothing to do with the
symbolic.
-anti-blackness doesnt structure the symbolic; the symbolic structures antiblackness.
Racial identification and imaginary ideology
I emphasise the register of the symbolic order because we must never lose
sight of it, although it is most frequently forgotten, although we turn away
from it in analysis. Because, in the end, what do we usually talk about? What
we go on and on about, often in a confused, scarcely articulated fashion, are the
subjects imaginary relations to the construction of his ego. We talk all the time

about the dangers, the commotions, the crises that the subject undergoes at the
level of his egos construction. That is why I started by explaining the relation O-,
the imaginary relation to the other. (I: 179) It is commonplace to utilize Lacans
early essay on the mirror stage to analyze identification as a function of ideology.
Althussers much cited essay Ideology and ideological state apparatuses
(1972), through its allusions to Lacan, construes ideology as a form of

specularity whereby the subject (with a small s) is subjected to the

capitalized Subject in a relation of mutual recognition . Althusser maps

this mirror-structure of ideology (1972:180) on a dual plane, and

suggests that such duplication constitutes the mconnaissance
that guarantees the hegemony of the ruling classes. Such an
appropriation of Lacans mirror stage could potentially be extended to resolve the
conundrum of race as a (scientifically groundless) fraught looking. Insofar as racial
differences are understood as being inscribed on the body as skin color, hair texture
and bone structure, it seems inescapable that we should analyze race within the
paradigm of identification. In fact, Lacans emphasis on misrecognition as
constitutive of the childs nascent ego as a little other seems to lend itself to the
constructionist view of race as a mistake of or in the looking glass.11 This is a

powerful method of reading, and Fanon is perhaps the exemplar of

such a deployment of Lacan for race .12 In a long footnote in Black Skin,

White Masks, he speaks of racial identification as it occurs in white

and black children: It would indeed be interesting, on the basis of
Lacans theory of the mirror period, to investigate the extent to
which the imago of his fellow built up in the young white at the usual
age would undergo an imaginary aggression with the appearance of
the Negro. When one has grasped the mechanism described by
Lacan, one can have no further doubt that the real Other for the
white man is and will continue to be the black man. The Other is
perceived on the level of the body image, absolutely as the not-selfthat
is, the unidentifiable, the unassimilable. (Fanon 1967:161) Just as the
white child constructs its ego ideal on the basis of an exclusion, the
child in the Antilles, who looks in the mirror, also excludes its own color. Fanon
contends that when Antilleans are asked to recall their mirror image,
invariably they reply: I had no color (1967:162). In the Antilles
perception always occurs on the level of the imaginary. It is in white
terms that one perceives ones fellows (163). Further, the Antillean does not
think of himself as a black man; he thinks of himself as an Antillean (148). For
Fanon, the blackness of the Negros body is a brute fact , and must found
the subjects identification and not be displaced by identification with nation or
ethnicity. Such misplaced identification for Fanon (he terms it the
mirror hallucination) is caused by the ideological power of French

cultural imperialism. Ideology then pertains to the positioning of

blackness: for the black child, disavowalthe inability to accept its

own blackness, and for the white child, phobiathe inability to

introject the others image. The above analysis of race , based as it is on
a simple reading of the mirror stage, discloses several fundamental
problems in the common-sense attitude towards racial practice. 1 If we reduce
racial practice to racism , defined as powers agency to hierarchize

and discriminate, we must accept race as an a priori fact of human

difference . The concept of race as a system that fixates on arbitrary marks
on the body becomes neutralized, and racism becomes the enemy . In
other words, there is no possibility of interrogating the structure and
constitution of the subject of race. The question How do we become
white, black, brown, or yellow? will be foreclosed . We will fail to
discern racial practice as stemming from race rather than from racism . 2

By locating our reading of race on the ostensibly dual plane of the mirror
relation alone , which leads to the simpler opposition now entrenched in
cultural studies between the self and the other, we risk confin ing
race to a notion of the ego as false consciousness . Race, we will then be

led to assert, is an illusory , narcissistic construct , and racism is an

ego defense. 3 If the order of race or Whiteness pertained only to the
subjects assimilation of his/her ego ideal , then race as such would seem

to have nothing to do with the symbolic or the real of the unconscious, that
is, with the psychical structure of the subject. It would seem to be
free of the effects of the signifier, thereby rendering language
neutral and free of race. As Fanon implies, racial visibility must be

distinguished from the moment when the subject introjects an ego

ideal as a coherent body image. But by marking the temporal
difference in the constitution of the bodily ego and the raced body ,
we will see that the anxiety that Fanon refers to is not caused by the
ideology of blackness, but by the structure of Whiteness. Less
cryptically: we will see that racial anxiety, the unconscious anxiety that is
entailed by the sight of racial difference, has its cause not in
ideology, but in the structure of race itself, and in the functioning of
its master signifier, Whiteness. In the following, I return to the theory of
the mirror stage, and examine the process of the integration of the bodily image to
magnify the role of the symbolic in subtending the body image. I undertake this
brief elaboration of Lacans notion of the imaginary, which will be familiar to many

readers, to clarify my claim that race cannot be mapped onto the simpler
theory of misrecognition and ego identification, and that one can do so
only through an inadequate understanding of the imaginary, and of the raced
subject. The most extensive discussion of the mirror stage can be found in Lacans
Seminar I, where he proposes, significantly, a substitute for the mirror stage in an
optical experiment (I: 74). In between a concave mirror and a plane mirror, a vase
out of the line of vision is inverted below a box, with a bouquet of flowers placed
upright above it. The concave mirror reflects a real image which projects the vase
upright with the flowers in the vase, with the image itself seeming to appear behind
the mirror as with plane mirror images. Lacan utilizes this fairly commonplace
optical experiment, in several variations, to characterize the mirror stage as both a
moment in development and an exemplary function, that reveals the subjects
relations to his image, insofar as it is the Urbild [prototype] of the ego (I: 74,
emphasis added). In other words, the mirror stage is not yet, properly
speaking, the self-present moment of the total integration of the

bodily ego, or what Lacan will term the ego ideal. Rather, it is a
contingent moment when the primitive ideal ego is projected

outside as the outline of a form that promises unity . It is a projection

of a real image but not as yet a reintrojection of the image, which will

necessarily have to be libidinalized and narcissised (I: 153) in an

exchange with the image of the other, as the bodily ego. The ego ideal , as

distinguished from the ideal ego, is the site of secondary

identifications, and is a characteristic function of imaginary relations
that literally enables the subject to see his libidinal being in relation
to the other (I: 1256). This is primarily because for man the other has a
captivating value, on account of the anticipation that is represented

by the unitary image as perceived either in the mirror or in the entire reality
of the fellow being (I: 125). This captation by the other is also the
process of the birth of the bodily ego, which is always mediated by desire.
The subject originally locates and recognises desire through the
intermediary not only of his own image, but of the body of his fellow
being. Its exactly at that moment that the human beings
consciousness , in the form of consciousness of self, distinguishes itself . It is in
so far as he recognises his desire in the body of the other that the
exchange takes place . It is in so far as his desire has gone over to the

other side that he assimilates himself to the body of the other and
recognises himself as body. (I: 147) Identification, then, is always
mediated by desire,13 and clearly, ones own desire emerges in the
Other. One consequence of this formulation is that the body is factitious (I: 147),
insofar as human consciousness, which is bound to it, can nevertheless conceive of

itself as distinct. Also, this ability of man to conceive of himself as other than he
isentirely structures his fantasy life (I: 79). The body is constituted in a see-saw
movement of desire. In fact, there can be no imaginary relation or ego
function without desire , and when we invoke the term desire, we are
always in the realm of language and the symbolic . The symbolic, then,
is pivotal for the very existence of the mirror stage. The optical
experiment that Lacan invokes to clarify the mirror stage concept emphasizes the
importance of perspective. It is possible that the image may not be successfully
produced if the mirror were to be inclined in one way or another. For Lacan, this is
an indication of the uneasy accommodation of the imaginary in man (I: 140). As
he says, everything depends on the position of the subject. And the position of
the subjectis essentially characterised by its place in the symbolic
world, in other words in the world of speech (I: 80). This schema then
suggests that neither the imaginary nor the mirror stage can legitimately
claim an anteriority to the symbolic . Even though we tend to schematize
psychical development chronologically, probing the structural relation of the three
levels of the imaginary, the symbolic and the Real reveals that they are
imbricated in one another in an inextricable fashion. In other words, its the
symbolic relation which defines the position of the subject as seeing. It is speech,
the symbolic relation , which determines the greater or lesser degree of
perfection, of completeness, of approximation, of the imaginary . This

representation allows us to draw the distinction between the Idealich

and the Ichideal, between the ideal ego and the egoideal. The ego-ideal
governs the interplay of relations on which all relations with others
depend. (I: 141, emphasis added) The interplay of relations with others is
governed by desirea desire that is always of the Other. Desire must
be understood in its mediating role between the image of the other
and the consciousness of ones own body which the image engenders .
That is, the subject cannot recognize his/her desire except as manifested
by the other as his/her own ideal form (I: 176). Thus it is always

alienated from the subject. In the human subject, desire is realised in the
other, by the other. That is the second moment, the specular moment, the
moment when the subject has integrated the form of the ego. But he is only
capable of integrating it after a first swing of the see-saw when he

had precisely exchanged his ego for this other desire which he sees
in the other. From then on, the desire of the other, which is mans
desire enters into the mediation of language. It is in the other, by [par]
the other, that desire is named. It enters into the symbolic relation of I
and you, in relation of mutual recognition and transcendence, into the
order of a law which is already quite ready to encompass the history of each

individual. (I: 177) Insofar as the subject as ego cannot come into
existence except in a symbolic relation (which always implies

desire), it is logically impossible to isolate the imaginary or ego function

from the realm of the signifies Thus to speak of identificationsexual,

racial, etc.in terms of a mirror relation, as pure image, is to produce

an untenable opposition between the image and the signifier, or a
specious sense of development from the imaginary to the symbolic.
Consequently, the body cannot be pure image, an ego identification produced in the
mirror of error; it is, as Bruce Fink has insisted, written with signifiers and is thus
foreign, Other (1995:12). The signifier that constitutes the subjects body
emerges from the Other as the expression of recognition or ratification
of the mirror image, thereby enabling the image to be introjected . The
imaginary body has a symbolic status. As a creature of desire, the subject
invests in the signifier which marks it, and locates it within a matrix
where the body is engendered in submission to the logic of the
signifier . Thus to believe that we have particular bodies on the basis
of a simple visibility is to ignore the function of the signifier in the
production of the seeing subject . Thus the subjects corporeality is itself
constituted as a coherent image through the intervention of the signifier .
As Lacan recommends, One should always work at the level of the alphabet (I:
35). In other words, we must hunt down the signifier behind the image if
we wish to discern the subject of race, or to put it even more precisely, we
must grasp the contours of the lack that the signifier stands for, which in turn
supports the body image.

AT Afrocentrism
Perm searching for cultural roots of solidarity is a better
strategy toward liberation.
Prashad 01 (Vijay, George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and
Professor of International Studies at Trinity College, Everybody Was Kung Fu
Fighting, Beacon Press, 2001) rz
Iyi, along with Afrocentric historians Wayne Chandler and Graham Irwin,
makes the mistake of finding racial links when I am more tempted to

avoid that complex soup of descent, whatever that may mean.

They argue, for instance, that Buddha, the man whose tradition produces
kung fu, was of African descent.112 The school of Kamau Ryu System of
Self-Defense claims that Bodhidharma was black with tightly curled knots of hair
and elongated ear lobes which are traditional African traits.113 The incessant

interest in origins bespeaks a notion of culture as an inheritance

that is transmitted across time without mutation, and is the
property of certain people. There are numerous reasons to claim
origins and to mark oneself as authentic if one belongs to an
oppressed minority. Minority groups may mobilize around the notion
of an origin to make resource claims, to show that despite the
denigration of the power elite, the group can lay claim to an aspect
of civilization and the cultural currency attached to it. Furthermore,
to demarcate oneself from the repressive stereotypes, the
oppressed frequently turn to their roots to suggest to their
children that they have a lineage that is worthy despite racisms
cruelty. These are important social explanations for the way we use both origins
and authenticity (to protect our traditional forms from appropriation by the power
elite). As defensive tactics these make sense, but as a strategy for
freedom they are inappropriate . In a prosaic moment in , W. E. B.

Du Bois wrote of the blood of yellow and white hordes who

diluted the ancient black blood of India, but her eldest Buddha sits
back, with kinky hair.114 Du Boiss gesture toward Buddha was not
necessarily a claim to the racial or epidermal lineage of Buddha, but
it was a signal toward some form of solidarity across the Indian
Ocean and between Asians and Africans in diaspora. In his
novel Dark Princess, the Indian Kautilya seals her bond with the African
American Matthew through a ruby that is by legend a drop of
Buddhas blood; in time, their child, Incarnate Son of the Buddha, will rule
over a kingdom fated to overthrow British rule.115 Matthew, for Du Bois, was
a symbol of anti-imperialist solidarity, and the claim to Buddha
indicated a search for the cultural roots of solidarity not too dependent
on the mysterious world of biology

Permutation: Afro-Asian solidarity has been and should

continue to be a joint struggle against racism and imperialism.
Prashad 01 (Vijay, George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and
Professor of International Studies at Trinity College, Everybody Was Kung Fu
Fighting, Beacon Press, 2001) rz
Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting, ca. 1974
As Enter the Dragon came to us in Calcutta, a song also broke through the tedium
offered by Musical Bandbox, a Sunday afternoon program on AllIndia Radio. It was a
rather trite song: Everybody was kung-fu fighting, hunh, Those cats were fast as
lightning, hunh. Nothing to it, really. But Biddu, an exemplary Indian who lived in
England and produced Tina Charless Disco Fever and Nazia Hasans Disco
Dewanee, wrote the tune, hence its appearance on Indian radio. Sung by Carl
Douglas, an African American whose entire career was forged around the gimmick
of kung fu music (Dance the Kung Fu and Shanghai D), the song belongs in my
memory bank alongside an atrocious tribute to Muhammad Ali with that infectious
line from the master, Fly like a butterfly, sting like a bee.102 Tripping on Carl
Douglas and Biddu, we read the papers for news of the impending fight between
Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire, the famous Rumble in the Jungle in
the autumn of that year.103 From slave ship to championship, the promoters
declaimed. We were taken from Africa as slaves and now were coming back as
champions. Ali was only thirtytwo, a year younger than Bruce. And Ali was as

politically incensed about racism and imperialism as Bruce was.

Bruce was trained to hate white supremacy in the hovels of Hong
Kong. Alis life in the U.S. South prepared him to strike tough jabs
for the Black Power movement. It was Ali, after all, who denounced
the U.S. imperialist engagement in Southeast Asia with the
memorable line, No Vietcong ever called me nigger. Although Bruce
Lee was also a boxing champ in Hong Kong (and the Crown Colony ChaCha
Champion), he spent much of the s watching films of Ali boxing. An
orthodox boxer, Ali led with his left hand. Since Bruce was experimenting with a
right lead stance he set up a mirror so that he could watch Alis movements and
practice them the appropriate way.104 In an instance of classic cross-fertilization,
the great boxer Sugar Ray Leonard told an interviewer in that one of the
guys who influenced me wasnt a boxer. I always loved the catlike reflexes and the
artistry of Bruce Lee and I wanted to do in boxing what he was able to do in karate. I
started watching his movies before he became really popular in Enter the Dragon
and I patterned myself after a lot of his ways.105 So what are the

implications of the world of polycultural kung fu? Color-blind

capitalists wish to make a profit from its appeal, often by the
opportunistic combination of ethnic niche markets (when Jackie Chan and Chris
Tucker appear together in the Rush Hour, and soon in Rush Hour II, or else
when Sammo Hung and Arsenio Hall did time in CBSs Martial Law, or the ultracommodified Tae-Bo of Billy Blanks106). Primordialists (and perfectionists) argue
that the artistry originates in either Africa or Asia. It was Africa and not Asia that

first gave martial arts to the world, wrote Afrocentric scholar Kilindi Iyi, and those
same African roots are deeply embedded in the martial arts of India and China.107
Iyi looks at ancient murals from Beni Hasan, Egypt, to make his claim, but he could
equally make the point that the similarities between Capoeira Angola and kung fu
can be traced to those enslaved Africans who created the Brazilian art in the
s, nurtured it in the senzalas (slave houses), and developed it into a Kung
Fusion: Organize the Hood Under I-Ching Banners symbolic as well as a physical
response to the atrocity of a racist slavery. The language of Capoeira, indeed, is
replete with Bantu words, and the movements of Capoeira resemble the southern
Angolan dance of ngolo (zebra dance).108 If Iyi looks to Africa for the
origins of martial arts, others do the same with Asia. Most histories of
kung fu tell the story of Bodhidharma, an itinerant Buddhist monk who introduced
the monks of the Shaolin Temple in China to the martial arts of his homeland,
southern India. Bodhidharma may be the son of the King of Kancheepuram in the
region of todays Tamil Nadu (as some Japanese manuscripts claim), and it is said
that he imported the arts of Kalarippayattu to China from Kerala, in the southwest of
India.109 Bodhidharmas Hseih Mai Lun (Treatise on the Blood Lineages of True
Dharma) lays out a philosophy of the chi (life force), and how it must be kept
active to ensure that monks dont sleep during meditation. 110 The desire to

seek origins in what might be complex cultural diffusion or else

independent creation is certainly not of much help . However, we might
say that the martial arts traditions such as kung fu developed in a manifold world
that involved, in some complex way, Kalarippayattu of Kerala, Capoeira Angola of
Brazil, and the various martial arts of Africa. Kung fu is not far from Africa, nor from
the favelas (slums) of Brazil.111 Iyi, along with Afrocentric historians Wayne
Chandler and Graham Irwin, makes the mistake of finding racial links when I am
more tempted to avoid that complex soup of descent, whatever that may mean.
They argue, for instance, that Buddha, the man whose tradition produces kung fu,
was of African descent.112 The school of Kamau Ryu System of Self-Defense
claims that Bodhidharma was black with tightly curled knots of hair and elongated
ear lobes which are traditional African traits.113 The incessant interest in

origins bespeaks a notion of culture as an inheritance that is

transmitted across time without mutation, and is the property of
certain people. There are numerous reasons to claim origins and to mark oneself
as authentic if one belongs to an oppressed minority. Minority groups may mobilize
around the notion of an origin to make resource claims, to show that despite the
denigration of the power elite, the group can lay claim to an aspect of civilization
and the cultural currency attached to it. Furthermore, to demarcate oneself from the
repressive stereotypes, the oppressed frequently turn to their roots to suggest to
their children that they have a lineage that is worthy despite racisms cruelty. These
are important social explanations for the way we use both origins and authenticity
(to protect our traditional forms from appropriation by the power elite). As

defensive tactics these make sense, but as a strategy for freedom

they are inappropriate. In a prosaic moment in 1919, W. E. B. Du
Bois wrote of the blood of yellow and white hordes who diluted

the ancient black blood of India, but her eldest Buddha sits back,
with kinky hair.114 Du Boiss gesture toward Buddha was not
necessarily a claim to the racial or epidermal lineage of Buddha, but
it was a signal toward some form of solidarity across the Indian
Ocean and between Asians and Africans in diaspora. In his
novel Dark Princess, the Indian Kautilya seals her bond with the African American
Matthew through a ruby that is by legend a drop of Buddhas blood; in time, their
child, Incarnate Son of the Buddha, will rule over a kingdom fated to overthrow
British rule.115 Matthew, for Du Bois, was a symbol of anti-imperialist solidarity, and
the claim to Buddha indicated a search for the cultural roots of solidarity not too
dependent on the mysterious world of biology. In our own day, community scholars
like Q-Unique of the Arsonists come at kung fu from the lens of hip-hop. He believes
that Bruce Lee should be remembered as the first to teach non-Asians Martial Arts
and to be the first big Asian actor, and that right there is enough to tell me that
you should be able to believe in yourself to be able to climb the highest mountain.
Or just go against whatever is thrown your way. You should be able to look at
adversity in its face and believe in yourself to get what you want. And thats what
Bruce Lee ultimately taught me: What I do with my MCing skills is sort of like what
he did with his Martial Arts. You study everybodys techniques and you strip away
what you dont find necessary and use what is necessary and you modify it. You
give it your own twist. He used Jeet Kune Do. Mine is Jeet Kune Flow.116 The
polycultural view of the world exists in the gut instincts of many people such as QUnique. Scholars are under some obligation to raise this instinct to philosophy, to
use this instinct to criticize the diversity model of multiculturalism and replace it
with the antiracist one of polyculturalism. Culture cannot be bounded and

people cannot be asked to respect culture as if it were an artifact,

without life or complexity . Social interaction and struggle produces
cultural worlds , and these are in constant, fraught formation. Our
cultures are linked in more ways than we could catalog , and it is from
these linkages that we hope our politics will be energized . The Third

World may be in distress, where the will of the national liberation

movements has put the tendency to anti-imperialism in crisis, and
where the Third World within the United States has often been overrun
by the dynamic of the color blind and of the desire to make small,
individual gains over social transformation. Nevertheless, the
struggle is on, in places like Kerala and Vietnam, but also within the United

States as the Black Radical Kung Fusion: Organize the Hood Under I-Ching
Banners Congress greets the Asian Left Forum, the Forum of Indian
Leftists, the League of Filipino Students (among others), and as all of
them join together against imperialism, against racism. History is
made in struggle and past memories of solidarity are inspiration for that
struggle . Indeed , the AfroAsian and polycultural struggles of today

allow us to redeem a past that has been carved up along ethnic lines by
historians . To remember Bruce as I do, staring at a poster of him ca. , is
not to wane into nostalgia for the past. My Bruce is alive, and like the men and
women before him, still in the fight.

Subjectivity K

2AC
Our arguments are not prescriptive but descriptive. We dont
lock in any stereotypes.
Cheng 97 (Anne Anlin, Professor of English and African American Literature at
Princeton University, The Melancholy of Race, The Kenyon Review New Series, Vol.
19, No. 1, American Memory / American Forgetfulness (Winter, 1997), pp. 49-61,
http://sites.uci.edu/mariaselenebose/files/2015/10/Cheng-Melancholy-Race.pdf,
accessed 7/6/16) rz
It should be clear by now that race itself lives in America as a melancholic
presence. More specifically, racialization-as an act of self-constitution

through denying and re-assimilating the Other-must be conceived of

as a wholly melancholic activity. The rhetoric of compensation,
which attempts to reverse discrimination through inversion,
neglects the organization of the activity that went into producing
discrimination, nor can it accommodate the physical effects of those
wounds. There is a possibility that we may not be able to retrieve an
unmarked, unscathed subject under the dirty bandage of racism . As
we saw with Flower Drum Song, Mei Li's presence was always marked as
transgression, and re-marked as such in her final acquisition of a new homeland.
Similarly, we are all too painfully familiar with popular racial fantasies

that circulate within our public sphere, but rather than identifying
those stereotypes yet again or simply denying those clearly
troublesome images ("We aren't like that!"), it seems more fruitful and
important to go on to the more complex question of how
melancholic racialization works. To propose that the minority may
have been profoundly affected by racial fantasies is not to lock him/her
back into the stereotypes, but to perform the more important task of
unraveling the deeper identificatory operations-and seductions-produced
by those projections. If the melancholic minority is busy forgetting

herself, with what is she identifying? We have all heard the wisdom that
women and minorities have internalized dominant cultural demands ,
but do we really know what that means? Where does desire come into this
equation? It is a dangerous question to ask what does a minority want. When it
comes to political critique, it seems as if desire itself may be what the
minority has been enjoined to forget. In David Henry Hwang's awardwinning play M. Butterfly, the story of a French diplomat (Gallimard) who after ten
years discovers that his Chinese mistress (Song Liling) was not only a spy but also a
man, what remains glaringly missing from the play is an entertainment of Song's
desires. By now M. Butterfly has become an almost-classic text of how racial
fantasies facilitate sexual fantasies; central to much critical attention has been the
play's exposure of the consistent emasculation of Asian males in white society.

Indeed, the play's fundamental assumption is that Song's sexual deception

succeeded because of Gallimard's racial stereotypes about "the East." Yet as an
expose of sexual intrigue and racial fantasy, M. Butterfly begs the question: aside
from his professional objective to seduce Gallimard, does Song have a personal
investment in his disguise? And what would it mean for the political agenda of the
play if he did? In the three moments of the play when we might have hints of Song's
own private fantasies, we are greeted with silences and deferrals: when Comrade
Chin asks why Song remains in disguise when alone; when the judge questions
Song's incredible acting ability; and when Gallimard questions Song's motivation. In
all three brief instances, Song's answer comes in the form of ellipses and pauses, as
though his desire can only be pronounced as unutterability. Significantly, the play
can see Song only as the object of Gallimard's desire or as the critic of that desire. It
is as though to articulate Song's desire would render him less "cool" or jeopardize
his position as a proper critic of Western racial fantasies. In other words, Song must
not want. His inauthentic performance must remain inauthentic in

order to guarantee the authenticity of his critique.

Miscellaneous

Subjectivity Bad
The quest for affirmation from the starting point of subjectivity
is co-opted by Capitalism. They are merely folded into the
dominant order.
Hong 11 (Grace Kyungwon, Associate Professor of Women's Studies at UCLA,
Existentially Surplus Women of Color Feminism and the New Crises of Capitalism,
GLQ 18:1, 2011 by Duke University Press,
http://glq.dukejournals.org/content/18/1/87.full.pdf, accessed 7/5/16) rz
In this context, neither the affirmation nor abjection alone of certain
privileged forms of subjectivity can constitute a crisis. On the one

hand, in the wake of the liberation movements of the mid-twentieth

century, the affirmation of previously degraded forms of subjectivity
became a part of the apparatus of power. Ferguson writes, In the U.S.
context, Western Man suffered his greatest upset because of the
race and gender-based movements of the sixties and seventies. In
the wake of these movements, Ferguson observes, These new tales of
origins would mint another political entity and object of love, a new
article called minority culture. Minorities would go from being
members of empty-handed generations to people headstrong with
histories and civilizations. Yet this was not the lessening of power,
but a redeployment of it: The arrival of this new object did not usher
in a season of unbridled liberation but provided the building blocks for
a new way to regulate.24 Because the limited and narrow modes of
affirmation of difference occasion exacerbated violence for abjected
subjects, it does not follow that the entire abdication of affirmation
and embrace of abjection constitutes a crisis for capitalism.25

AT RC
Asian American racialization comprises two major facets the
myth of the model minority and perpetual foreignness both
of which are grounded in national fantasy.
Chang 12 (Juliana, Assistant Professor of English at Santa Clara University,
Inhuman Citizenship Traumatic Enjoyment and Asian American Literature, 2012,
University of Minnesota Press) rz
The Uncanny Domestic

As scholars of Asian American studies have established , Asian

American racialization comprises two major facets . First, Asian
Americans are model minorities whose putative success and

assimilation is pointed to as evidence of Americas color-blind

meritocracy and openness. Second, Asian Americans are construed as
perpetual foreigners , seen as alien to American culture regardless of

nativity or citizenship. Using a psychoanalytic schema, we might view

these two facets as different elements of national fantasy . The notion
of Asian Americans as the model minority is used to support a
certain vision of American exceptionalism : its openness to the world in
providing limitless opportunity regardless of race or national origin. The
perception of the Asian as alien , however, creates a frisson of
jouissance : one is both traumatized by and enjoys the status of the

Asian as utterly outside. In this fantasy, the normative American

subject achieves his own coherence by projecting alterity onto the
Asian other, who presumably enjoys by virtue of not being subjected to the
norms of Western civilization. My focus is on the domestic and undomestic
incarnations of such racial fantasy and jouissance. The belief that Asian
American families conform to American heteropatriarchal norms is
one aspect of model minority formation. Asian Americans are
considered an acceptable presence so long as they align themselves
with family values and contribute to the fantasy of the nation as itself a
harmonious family.26 What my study proposes, however, is a reading of Asian
American literature through the lens of family business, rather than family per se.
Where the paradigmatic family is the site of nationalist fantasy, the lens of family
business allows us to deconstruct these fantasies of nation and to uncover the
jouissance of imperialist nationalism. Where family is sentimentalized as the site
where we are most human, family business allows us a glimpse into the impersonal
and inhuman forces that permeate our most intimate relationships.

Neg

Psychoanalysis

Link
The 1AC is a manifestation of cruel optimism. The affs
apostrophe locates debate as the site of social
change/affective mobilization, but this fantasy is predicated
upon the illusory projection of the desired object (liberation)
onto the receivers. Debate cant do anything for us and their
demands are symptomatic of an obsessive and life-negating
attachment. A critique of cruel optimism is a prerequisite to
resolving the question of mourning and melancholia.
Berlant 7 (Lauren, Professor of English at the University of Chicago, Cruel
Optimism: On Marx, Loss, and the Senses, New Formations, Winter 2007/2008, pg.
33, http://www.chineseollie.com/didyouread/Berlant-Cruel-Optimism.pdf, accessed
7/11/16) rz
'Cruel optimism' names a relation of attachment to compromised
conditions of possibility whose realisation is discovered either to be

impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic. What's cruel

about these attachments, and not merely inconvenient or tragic, is that

the subjects who have x in their lives might not well endure the loss
of their object or scene of desire, even though its presence threatens
their well-being , because whatever the content of the attachment is,
the continuity of the form of it provides something of the continuity of
the subject's sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look

forward to being in the world. This phrase points to a condition

different than that of melancholia , which is enacted in the subject's
desire to temporise an experience of the loss of an object/scene with
which she has identified her ego continuity. Cruel optimism is the condition

of maintaining an attachment to a problematic object . One more thing:

the cruelty of an optimistic attachment is, I think, usually something an analyst
observes about someone's or some group's attachment to x, since usually that
attachment exists without being an event, or even better, seems to lighten the load
for someone/some group.2 But if the cruelty of an attachment is
experienced by someone/some group, even in disavowed fashion, the
fear is that the loss of the object/scene of promising itself will defeat
the capacity to have any hope about anything. Often this fear of loss of a
scene of optimism as such is unstated and only experienced in a sudden incapacity
to manage startling situations, as we will see below.

One might point out that all objects/scenes of desire are

problematic, in that investments in them and projections onto them

are less about them than about what cluster of desires and affects
we can manage to keep magnetised to them. I have indeed wondered
whether all optimism is cruel, because the experience of loss of the
conditions of its reproduction can be so breathtakingly bad, just as the threat of the
loss of x in the scope of one's attachment drives can feel like a threat to living on
itself. But some scenes of optimism are clearly crueller than others :

where cruel optimism operates, the very vitalising or animating

potency of an object/ scene of desire contributes to the attrition of
the very thriving that is supposed to be made possible in the work of
attachment in the first place. This might point to something as banal as a
scouring love, but it also opens out to obsessive appetites, working for a
living, patriotism, all kinds of things. One makes affective bargains about the
costliness of one's attachments, usually unconscious ones, most of which keep
one in proximity to the scene of desire/attrition.
This means that a poetics of attachment always involves some splitting
off of the story I can tell about wanting to be near x (as though x has
autonomous qualities) from the activity of the emotional habitus I have
constructed by having x in my life in order to be able to project out my
endurance as proximity to the complex of what x seems to offer and proffer. To
understand cruel optimism , therefore, one must embark on an analysis
of rhetorical indirection , as a way of thinking about the strange

temporalities of projection into an enabling object that is also

disabling . I learned how to do this from reading Barbara Johnson's work on
apostrophe and free indirect discourse. In her poetics of indirection , each of

these rhetorical modes is shaped by the ways a writing subjectivity

conjures other ones so that , in a performance of fantasmatic
intersubjectivity , the writer gains superhuman observational
authority , enabling a performance of being made possible by the

proximity of the object. Because this object is something like what I am

describing in the optimism of attachment, I'll describe a bit the shape of
my transference with her thought.
In Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,' which will be my key referent here,
Johnson tracks the political consequences of apostrophe for what has
become foetal personhood: a silent, affectively present but physically
displaced interlocutor (a lover, a foetus) is animated in speech as distant
enough for a conversation but close enough to be imaginable by the
speaker in whose head the entire scene is happening.3 But the

condition of projected possibility , of a hearing that cannot take place

in the terms of its enunciation (`you' are not here, 'you' are eternally belated
to the conversation with you that I am imagining ) creates a fake present
moment of intersubjectivity in which, nonetheless, a performance of
address can take place. The present moment is made possible by
the fantasy of you, laden with the x qualities I can project onto you,
given your convenient absence. Apostrophe therefore appears to be
a reaching out to a you , a direct movement from place x to y, but it is
actually a turning back , an animating of a receiver on behalf of the

desire to make something happen now that realises something in

the speaker, makes the speaker more or differently possible,
because she has admitted , in a sense, the importance of speaking for,
as, and to, two: but only under the condition, and illusion , that the
two is really (in) one.
Apostrophe is thus a n indirect, unstable, physically impossible but

phenomenologically vitalising movement of rhetorical animation that

permits subjects to suspend themselves in the optimism of a potential
occupation of the same psychic space of others, the objects of desire
who make you possible (by having some promising qualities, but also by not
being there).* Later work, such as on 'Muteness Envy,' elaborates Johnson's
description of the gendered rhetorical politics of this projection of voluble
intersubjectivity.5 The paradox remains that the conditions of the lush

submerging of one consciousness into another require a double

negation: of the speaker's boundaries, so s/he can grow bigger in
rhetorical proximity to the object of desire; and of the spoken of,
who is more or less a powerful mute placeholder providing an
opportunity for the speaker's imagination of her/his/their flourishing.

Cap

Genealogy Link
Genealogy as a method with mere potentiality as its end
fragments resistance to multinational capitalism.
Resch 92 (Robert Paul, Associate Professor of History at Texas A&M University,
Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory, University of California Press
1992) rz
In contrast to its fraternal twin, dissident postmodernism revels in the obstreperous
rhetoric of political rebellion. Revealing and resisting the spontaneous generation
and diffusion of "power" throughout society, dissident postmodernists, such
as Michel Foucault, claim to have discovered the only form of

radicalism appropriate for defending "freedom" in "postindustrial"

society. However, postmodern dissidence purchases its radical
credentials at a high cost . By abandoning allegedly "totalitarian"
global analysis for fragmentary "genealogies" of particular social

phenomena, postmodern rebels end up hypostatizing both the

"power" they resist and the "freedom" they defend. Even less willing

to admit the economic taproot of power and domination than were

their forerunners in the New Left, dissident postmodernists attempt
to resist power on an ad hoc basiseverywhere, in all forms, and all at
once. Ultimately such resistance collapses under the magnitude of its
task and the futility of its method. At the point of exhaustion, postmodern
dissidents capitulate to the greater wisdom of their cynical and accommodating
counterparts. In the end, "resist everything" is merely the flip side of
"anything goes." If everything is bad, it is not long before bad begins to look, if
not exactly good, at least irresistible. The domestication of dissident postmodernism
in the eighties (the shift of Lyotard and Foucault from gauchisme to "Americanism"
are only more serious examples of a general phenomenon parodied by the career of
Baudrillard) substantiates Fredric Jameson's contention that postmodernism
reflects , rather than critiques , "the cultural logic" of multinational
capitalism . The short-lived predominance of postmodern dissidence during the
seventies deserves further study. I suggest, provisionally, that dissident

postmodernism has functioned as the loyal opposition during the

birth pangs of multinational capitalism and in this respect has been
simply the ideological obverse of the New Right. The anti-Marxist or
post-Marxist rhetoric of postmodernism is obviously crucial in this
regard. The more blatant the effects of economic determination and
class struggle became during the seventies and eighties, the more
stubbornly they were denied by postmodern theorists. Indeed, a large part

of what is left of the New Left has rationalized its crushing defeat by blaming it on
traces of Marxism still at work within the radical movement and its social theory.

Aesthetics Link
Framing their 1AC and project of genealogy as an aesthetic
encounter ultimately fails. The avant-garde is co-opted by
capitalism and the impact is a new wave of military and
economic domination.
Jameson 91 (Fredric, Knut Schmidt-Nielsen Professor of Comparative Literature
and Romance Studies (French) and the director of the Center for Critical Theory at
Duke University, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, from Postmodernism, or,
The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke UP 1991,
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~drbr/jameson/jameson.html, accessed 7/13/16) rz
Consider, for example, the powerful alternative position that post-modernism is
itself little more than one more stage of modernism proper (if not, indeed, of the
even older romanticism); it may indeed be conceded that all the features of
postmodernism I am about to enumerate can be detected, full-blown, in this or that
preceding modernism (including such astonishing genealogical precursors as
Gertrude Stein, Raymond Roussel, or Marcel Duchamp, who may be considered
outright postmodernists, avant la lettre). What has not been taken into account by
this view, however, is the social position of the older modernism, or better still, its
passionate repudiation by an older Victorian and post-Victorian bourgeoisie for
whom its forms and ethos are received as being variously ugly, dissonant, obscure,
scandalous, immoral, subversive, and generally "antisocial." It will be argued here,
however, that a mutation in the sphere of culture has rendered such attitudes
archaic. Not only are Picasso and Joyce no longer ugly; they now
strike us, on the whole, as rather "realistic," and this is the result of a

canonization and academic institutionalization of the modern

movement generally that can be traced to the late 1950s. This is
surely one of the most plausible explanations for the emergence of
postmodernism itself, since the younger generation of the 1960s will now
confront the formerly oppositional modern movement as a set of dead classics,
which "weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living;" as Marx once said in a
different context. As for the postmodern revolt against all that, however,
it must equally be stressed that its own offensive features-from obscurity

and sexually explicit material to psychological squalor and overt

expressions of social and political defiance, which transcend
anything that might have been imagined at the most extreme
moments of high modernism-no longer scandalize anyone and are
not only received with the greatest complacency but have
themselves become institutionalized and are at one with the official
or public culture of Western society.
What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become
integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic
urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods

(from clothing to airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now

assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to

aesthetic innovation and experimentation. Such economic necessities
then find recognition in the varied kinds of institutional support available for the
newer art, from foundations and grants to museums and other forms of patronage.
Of all the arts, architecture is the closest constitutively to the economic, with which,
in the form of commissions and land values, it has a virtually unmediated
relationship. It will therefore not be surprising to find the extraordinary flowering of
the new postmodern architecture grounded in the patronage of multinational
business, whose expansion and development is strictly contemporaneous with it.
Later I will suggest that these two new phenomena have an even deeper dialectical
interrelationship than the simple one-to-one financing of this or that individual
project. Yet this is the point at which I must remind the reader of the obvious;
namely, that this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is

the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of

American military and economic domination throughout the world: in
this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood,
torture, death, and terror.

Communication Link
The aff participates in an economy of communication
capitalism by which the circulation of research, affect, and
utterances are void in meaning and only valued for the fact
that they are made at all. The alt is a prerequisite because
capitalism has subsumed communication. It trades off with
critical energy toward revolution.
Dean 12 (Jodi, political philosopher and professor in the Political Science
department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, The Communist Horizon, Verso
2012) rz
Communication technologies contribute to the displacement and
dispersion of critical energy such that even as inequality has

intensified, forming and organizing a coherent opposition has remained

a persistent probl em -and this in a setting lauded for the way it

provides everyday people with new capacities for involvement.

Participatory media is personalizing media, not only in the sense of
surveillance and tracking but also in the sense of the injunction to find out
for oneself and share one's opinion. Ubiquitous personal
communications media turn our activity into passivity , capturing it and
putting it into the service of capitalism. Angry, engaged, desperate to do

something, we look for evidence, ask questions, and make demands . Yet
the information we need to act seems perpetually out of reach; there is always
something we misunderstand or do not know. The astronomical increases in

information that our searching, commenting, and participating generate entrap

us in a setting of communication without communicability. As
contributions to circuits of information and affect , our utterances are

communicatively equivalent; their content, their meaning, is

unimportant . On a blog, for example, gibberish written by an automated bot is as
much a comment as any thoughtful reflection. The specific contribution has

no symbolic efficiency; rather, it marks only the fact of its having been
made . This decline in a capacity to transmit meaning, to symbolize beyond a
limited discourse or immediate, local context, characterizes communication's
reconfiguration into a primarily economic form. It produces for circulation,
not use. As Hardt and Negri argue in Empire, communication "is the form of

capitalist production in which capital has succeeded in submitting

society entirely and globally to its regime."8 Having become
production, communication flows and circulates with little to no

regard for transmitting meaning. Channeled through cellular networks and

fiber-optic cables, onto screens and into sites for access, storage, retrieval, and
counting, communication merges with the capitalist circuits it produces and
amplifies. Capitalist productivity derives from its expropriation and
exploitation of communicative processes. This does not mean that
information technologies have replaced manufacturing; in fact, they drive a
wide variety of mining, chemical, and biotechnological industries. Nor
does it mean that networked computing has enhanced productivity outside the
production of networked computing itself. Rather, it means that capitalism has

subsumed communication such that communication does not

provide a critical outside. Communication serves capital, whether in
affective forms of care for producers and consumers, the mobilization of
sharing and expression as instruments for "human relations" in the workplace,
or contributions to media circuits. 9 Marx's analysis of value in Capital helps explain
how communication can be a vehicle for capitalist subsumption. Value, for Marx,
derives from the social character of labor. What is common to different kinds
of human labor is that they are all labor in the abstract , components of
the larger homogeneous mass of human labor. Products of labor are "crystals of this
social substance, common to them all," that is to say, values. 10 Communicative
capitalism seizes, privatizes, and attempts to monetize the social

substance. It doesn't depend on the commodity-thing. It directly

exploits the social relation at the heart of value . Social relations don't

have to take the fantastic form of the commodity to generate value

for capitalism. Via networked, personalized communication and
information technologies, capitalism has found a more straightforward
way to appropriate value

Communicative capitalism co-opts liberatory discourse. Only

the alternatives hardline seizure of division and insistence on
revolution can escape the circuit.
Dean 12 (Jodi, political philosopher and professor in the Political Science
department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, The Communist Horizon, Verso
2012) rz
At the same time, however, the very communicative practices capitalism
drives and exploits entrap us in circuits from which escape seems
impossible: participation is personalization; the more we communicate,
the less is communicated; expansions in expression and creativity produce the
one rather than a collective of the many. The challenge, then, consists in
breaking with current practices by insisting on and intensifying the

division of and in the common . Continuing in the flow, persisting in

the repetitions of drive, we over and over reconstitute capitalism's

basic dynamic, perhaps generating "the possibility of another

organization of social life" but also and at the same time hindering "that
possibility from being realized."29 Capitalism demands change, permanent
revolution, crisis. Born out of opposition to planning, neoliberalism in particular
tluives on shock and emergency, converging yet again with communicative
capitalism in its mode of spectacle. To persist in the practices through

which communicative capitalism exploits the social substance, then,

is to fail to use division as a weapon on behalf of a communist
project. Division is common. We have to seize it.

Fragmenting Link
The 1ACs focus on individual performances disconnects
politics from the collective class struggle. Creating no material
change, the aff wallows in self-satisfaction to the backdrop of
climate disaster and capitalist exploitation. Communism is a
better world and requires mobilization.
Dean 12 (Jodi, political philosopher and professor in the Political Science
department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, The Communist Horizon, Verso
2012) rz

Instead of a politics thought primarily in terms of resistance, playful and

momentary aesthetic disruptions, the immediate specificity of local
projects, and struggles for hegemony within a capitalist parliamentary setting,
the communist horizon impresses upon us the necessity to abolish
capitalism and to create global practices and institutions of
egalitarian cooperation. The shift in perspective the communist
horizon produces turns us away from the democratic milieu that has been the
fmm of the loss of communism as a name for left aspiration and toward the
reconfiguration of the components of political struggle-in other words,
away from general inclusion, momentary calls for broad awareness, and
lifestyle changes, and toward militant opposition, tight
organizational forms (pa1ty, council, working group, cell), and the sovereignty
of the people over the economy through which we produce and reproduce
ourselves. Some might object to my use of the second-person plural "we"
and "us"-what do you mean "we"? This objection is symptomatic of the
fragmentation that has pervaded the Left in Europe, the U K, and North
America. Reducing invocations of "we" and "us" to sociological statements
requiting a concrete, delineable, empirical referent, it erases the division
necessary for politics as if interest and will were only and automatically
attributes of a fixed social position. We-skepticism displaces the performative
component of the second-person plural as it treats collectivity with

suspicion and p1ivileges a fantasy of individual singularity and

autonomy. I write "we" hoping to enhance a partisan sense of
collectivity. My break with conventions of w1iting that reinforce individualism by
admonishing attempts to think and speak as part of a larger collective subject is
deliberate. The boundaries to what can be thought as politics in certain
segments of the post-structuralist and anarchist Left only benefit capital.
Some activists and theorists think that micropolitical activities, whether
practices of self-cultivation or individual consumer choices, are more
important loci of action than large-scale organized movement-an

assumption which adds to the difficulty of building new types of

organizations because it makes thinking in terms of collectivity rarer,

harder, and seemingly less "fresh." Similarly, some activists and theorists
treat aesthetic objects and creative works as displaying a political
potentiality missing from classes, parties, and unions . This aesthetic focus
disconnects politics from the organized struggle of working people ,

making politics into what spectators see. Artistic products , whether

actual commodities or commodified experiences, thereby buttress
capital as they circulate political affects while displacing political
struggles from the streets to the galleries . Spectators can pay (or

donate) to feel radical without having to get their hands dirty . The
dominant class retains its position and the contradiction between this
class and the rest of us doesn't make itself felt as such. The celebration
of momentary actions and singular happenings-the playful
disruption, the temporarily controversial film or novel-works the same
way. Some on the anarchist and post-stmcturalist Left treat these flickers as the
only proper instances of a contemporary left politics. A pointless action involving the
momentary expenditure of enormous effort-the a11istic equivalent of the 5k and
lOk runs to fight cancer, that is to say, to increase awareness of cancer without
actually doing much else-the singular happening disconnects task from goal. Any
"sense" it makes, any meaning or relevance it has, is up to the
spectator (perhaps with a bit of guidance from curators and theorists).
Occupation contrasts sharply with the singular happening. Even as
specific occupations emerge from below rather than through a coordinated strategy,
their common form-including its images, slogans, terms, and practices-links them
together in a mass struggle. The power of the return of communism stands or
falls on its capacity to inspire large-scale organized collective struggle
toward a goal . For over thirty years, the Left has eschewed such a goal,

accepting instead liberal notions that goals are strictly individual

lifestyle choices or social-democratic claims that history already solved
basic problems of distribution with the compromise of regulated markets and
welfare statesa solution the Right rejected and capitalism destroyed. The Left

failed to defend a vision of a better world, an egalitarian world of

common production by and for the collective people. Instead, it
accommodated capital, succumbing to the lures of individualism,
consumerism, competition, and privilege, and proceeding as if there really
were no alternative to states that rule in the interests of mrukets. Marx
expressed the basic principle of the alternative over a hundred years
ago: from each according to ability, to each according to need . This
principle contains the urgency of the struggle for its own
realization. We don't have to continue to live in the wake of left
failure, stuck in the repetitions of crises and spectacle. In light of the

planetru-y climate disaster and the ever-intensifying global class war

as states redistribute wealth to the rich in the name of austerity,
the absence of a common goal is the absence of a future (other than
the ones imagined in post-apocalyptic scenarios like Mad Max). The premise of
communism is that collective determination of collective conditions is
possible, if we want it.

Melancholia Link
The 1AC is trapped in its own melancholia part of a left that
satisfies itself with insulated criticism to mask the guilt of
having abandoned the proletariat struggle.
Dean 12 (Jodi, political philosopher and professor in the Political Science
department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, The Communist Horizon, Verso
2012) rz
An emphasis on the drive dimension of melancholia, on Freud's attention to the way
sadism in melancholia is "turned round upon the subject's own self," leads to an
interpretation of the general contours shaping the Left that is different from
Brown's. Instead of a Left attached to an unacknowledged orthodoxy,

we have one that has given way on the desire for communism,
betrayed its historical commitment to the proletariat , and sublimated
revolutionary energies into restorationist practices that strengthen the
hold of capitalism. This Left has replaced commitments to the
emancipatory, egalitarian struggles of working people against
capitalism -commitments that were never fully orthodox, but always ruptured,
conflicted, and contested-with incessant activity (like the mania Freud associates
with melancholia) and so now satisfies itself with criticism and
interpretation, small projects and local actions, particular issues and
legislative victories, art, technology, procedures, and process. It sublimates
revolutionary desire to democratic drive, to the repetitious practices

offered up as democracy (whether representative, deliberative, or

radical). Having already conceded to the inevitably of capitalism, it noticeably
abandons "any striking power against the big bourgeoisie," to return to Benjamin's
language. For such a Left, enjoyment comes from its withdrawal from
responsibility, its sublimation of goals and responsibilities into the

branching, fragmented practices of micropolitics, self-care, and

issue awareness. Perpetually slighted, harmed, and undone, this Left
remains stuck in repetition, unable to break out of the circuits of drive in
which it is caught, unable because it enjoys them . Might this not explain why

such a Left confuses discipline with domination, why it forfeits

solidarity in the name of an illusory, individualist freedom that

continuously seeks to fragment and disrupt any assertion of collectivity

and the common? The watchwords of critique within this structure of left desire
are moralism, dogmatism, authoritarianism, and utopianism, watchwords enacting a
perpetual self-surveillance: has an argument, position, or view inadvertently risked
one of these enors? Even some of its militants reject party and state, division and
decision, securing in advance an inefficacy sure to guarantee it the nuggets of
satisfaction that drive provides. If this Left is rightly described as

melancholic-and I agree with Brown that it is-then its melancholia derives

from the real existing compromises and betrayals inextricable from
its history, its accommodations with reality, whether of nationalist war,
capitalist encirclement, or so-called market demands. Lacan teaches that, like
Kant's categorical imperative, the super-ego refuses to accept reality as
an explanation for failure. Impossible is no excuse-desire is always impossible
to satisfy. A wide spectrum of the contemporary Left has either
accommodated itself, in one way or another, to an inevitable capitalism,
or taken the practical failures of Marxism-Leninism to require the abandonment of
antagonism, class, and revolutionary commitment to overtuming capitalist
arrangements of property and production. Melancholic fantasy-the communist
Master, authoritarian and obscene-as well as sublimated, melancholic practices there was no altemative- shield this Left, shield us, from confrontation with
guilt over such betrayal as they capture us in activities that feel
productive, important, radical . Perhaps I should use the past tense here and
say "shielded" because it seems more and more that the Left has worked or is
working through its melancholia. While acknowledging the incompleteness of
psychoanalysis's understanding of melancholia, Freud notes nonetheless that the
unconscious work of melancholia comes to an end as "each single struggle of
ambivalence" loosens "the fixation of the libido to the object" and the object is
"abandoned as useless."22 Freud's reference to "each single struggle of
ambivalence" suggests that the repetitive activities I've associated with drive and
sublimation might be understood more dialectically, that is, not merely as the form
of accommodation but also as substantive practices of de- and reattachment,
unmaking and making. Mladen Dolar and Slavoj Zizek emphasize this destructive
dimension of the drive, the way its repetitions result in a clearing away of the old so
as to make a space for the new. 2:l ln a setting marked by a general
acceptance of the end of communism and of particular politicaltheoretical pursuits in ethics, affect , culture, and ontology , a Left

described in terms of its melancholic structure of desire may make less

sense than a Left that doesn't exist at all. Brown's essay would then be a
contribution to the working through and dismantling of left melancholia. In its place,
multiple practices and patterns circulate within an academic-theoretical enterprise
already subsumed within communicative capital ism. Some of the watchwords of
anti-dogmatism remain, but their charge is diminished, replaced by more energetic
attachment to new objects of inquiry and interest. The drive shaping melancholia, in
other words, is a force of loss as it turns round, fragments, and branches. Over time,
as its process, its failure to hit its goal, is repeated, satisfaction attains to this
repetition and the prior object, the lost object of desire, is abandoned. For

example, some theorists today find the analytic category of the

subject theoretically uninteresting, essentially useless; they've turned
instead to objects, locating there new kinds of agency, vitality, and
even politics. The recent reactivation of communism also bears witness to the end

of melancholia as a stmcture of left desire. Describing the massive outpouring of

enthusiasm for the 2009 London conference on the idea of communism, Costas
Douzinas and Slavoj Zizek note that the question and answer sessions were "goodhumored and non-sectarian," a clear indication "that the period of guilt is over."24
Even more pronounced is the movement against capitalism at work
in 2011's Arab spring, European summer, and US fall. Globally,
occupations put to work an insistent collectivity that struggles toward a
new assertion of the common and commons . Is it possible to understand this
reactivation of communism in terms of desire, and if so, in what sense? I think that
it is. In the next section, I defend two theses: first, communist desire designates the
subjectification of the gap necessary for politics, the division within the people;
second, this subjectification is collective-our desire and our collective desire for us.

Race Link/RC
Racialization is a device of advanced capitalism producing
ideological effects at the superstructure which in turn justify
the operations at the economic base. Only a transformation to
a post-capitalist society can create the possibility for racial
liberation and their post-structural focus on race alone
redirects attention away from the logic of capitalist
exploitation.
Young 06 (Robert, Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature,
Putting Materialism back into Race Theory: Toward a Transformative Theory of
Race,
http://www.redcritique.org/WinterSpring2006/printversions/puttingmaterialismbacki
ntoracetheory.htm, accessed 7/9/16) rz
This essay advances a materialist theory of race. In my view, race oppression
dialectically intersects with the exploitative logic of advanced capitalism,
a regime which deploys race in the interest of surplus accumulation.
Thus, race operates at the (economic) base and therefore produces
cultural and ideological effects at the superstructure; in turn, these
effects in very historically specific wayinteract with and ideologically
justify the operations at the economic base [1]. In a sense then, race

encodes the totality of contemporary capitalist social relations, which is

why race cuts across a range of seemingly disparate social sites in
contemporary US society. For instance, one can mark race difference and its
discriminatory effects in such diverse sites as health care,
housing/real estate, education, law, job market, and many other social sites.
However, unlike many commentators who engage race matters, I do not isolate
these social sites and view race as a local problem, which would lead to
reformist measures along the lines of either legal reform or a culturalideological battle to win the hearts and minds of people and thus keep the
existing socio-economic arrangements intact; instead, I foreground
the relationality of these sites within the exchange mechanism of
multinational capitalism. Consequently, I believe, the eradication of race
oppression also requires a totalizing political project : the

transformation of existing capitalisma system which produces

difference (the racial/gender division of labor) and accompanying
ideological narratives that justify the resulting social inequality. Hence,
my project articulates a transformative theory of racea theory that reclaims
revolutionary class politics in the interests of contributing toward a post-racist
society. In other words, the transformation from actually existing capitalism

into socialism constitutes the condition of possibility for a post-racist

society a society free from racial and all other forms of oppression.
By freedom, I do not simply mean a legal or cultural articulation of individual rights
as proposed by bourgeois race theorists. Instead, I theorize freedom as a
material effect of emancipated economic forms. I foreground my
(materialist) understanding of race as a way to contest contemporary accounts of
race, which erase any determinate connection to economics. For instance,

humanism and poststructuralism represent two dominant views on

race in the contemporary academy. Even though they articulate very
different theoretical positions, they produce similar ideological
effects : the suppression of economics . They collude in redirecting
attention away from the logic of capitalist exploitation and point us to

the cultural questions of sameness (humanism) or difference

(poststructuralism). In developing my project, I critique the ideological assumptions
of some exemplary instances of humanist and poststructuralist accounts of race,
especially those accounts that also attempt to displace Marxism, and, in doing so, I
foreground the historically determinate link between race and exploitation. It is this
link that forms the core of what I am calling a transformative theory of race. The
transformation of race from a sign of exploitation to one of democratic
multiculturalism, ultimately, requires the transformation of capitalism.

Root Cause
Capitalism structures racialized affects that cast Asian
American into the position of the melancholic desiring
assimilation but perpetually and tragically other.
Santa Ana 15 (Jeffrey, Associate Professor of English at Stony Brook University,
Racial Feelings: Asian America in a Capitalist Culture of Emotion, Temple
University 2015, http://www.temple.edu/tempress/chapters_1800/2342_ch1.pdf,
accessed 7/10/16) rz
Following Michael Omi and Howard Winant in their theory of racial formation, I want
to emphasize that stereotypes of Asians as economic agents inform and

express a racial ideology that has framed a "com-mon identity" for

Asian Americans (89). State-based racial projects and initiatives have
reinscribed and transformed racial ideology that forms Asian Americans as a race
group, and Asian Americans have redefined the meaning of Asian American in their
own racial projects and movements that reshape racial ideology. In the US
capitalist system , racial feelings affect perceptions of Asians as
racialized economic subjects that the state reinforces and alters as

racial ideology and that Asian Americans rearticulate as both

accommodation and resistance in their political movements and cultural
works. But why are these emotions that play such a critical role in the
racialization of Asian Americans specific to economics? And why have
they formed Asian Americans as a race group by representing them as agents of
finance capital? Critical analysts of capitalism have noted that this
economic sys-tem uses, organizes, and generates human subjectivities

to structure an emotional life that is consistent with preserving

capitalist material interests and social relations. Karl Marx, for
example, theorized capitalism as a system that engenders emotions,
referring to his thesis that capitalist economics and the relations peculiar
to upholding free enterprise are the foundation for all modern
human institutions and organizations, including religion, which assembles
beliefs, worldviews, and social norms into a culture of "spiritual
production" (Marx and Engels, On Literature 14o). As Marx's concept of capitalism
as "spiritual production" implies, capitalist economics are about the
private ownership of the means of production and the accumulation
of profit through the management and creation of feelings to
maintain the capitalist system. Capitalism's emotional production is,
according to Marx, hostile to other "branches of spiritual production, for example,
art and poetry," which express the humanist ideals that inspire genuine artists
(141). In coining the term spirit of capitalism to distinguish the attitudes and
temperaments that favor the rational pursuit of economic gain and that were based
on a Protestant ethics to engage in trade and accumulate wealth, Max Weber

argued that religious practice fostered capitalism, and, despite reversing Marx's
thesis, his argument further demonstrates the production of emotions (i.e., "spirit")
in capitalist economics. As the economist Albert 0. Hirschman argued in his classic
study of the drives and desires of self-interest that led to the rise of capitalism in
eighteenth-century Europe, the pursuit of material interests through a market
economy became understood as a social good in the Enlightenment era (63).

Economic activities were seen to improve the self while channeling

the unruly and destructive passions into "new ideological currents "
that bolstered benign interests and developed positive feelings vital
to sustaining civil order (63). For our current modern capitalist era,
Eva Illouz has devised the term emotional capitalism to describe a
contemporary social phenomenon in which emotions and economic
practices mutually define and shape each other, producing a culture
"in which affect is made an essential aspect of economic behavior and in
which emotional lifeespecially that of the middle classes follows the
logic of economic relations and exchange" (5). Illouz's argument that a
culture of emotional capitalism saturates today's popular media and
determines economic discourses and activities is a compelling
demonstration of the way modern capitalism structures human
subjectivities and creates new feelings befitting a consumerist
lifestyle predominating in liberal capitalist societies. As these critiques
of capitalism and the emotions suggest, capitalist economics has created an
enduring culture of feeling that affects racialized perception . Nowhere is
this more obvious than in the U nited S tates, where Asians have been
construed as agents of wealth and property acquisition. They have

also been seen as threats to liberal democracy when they attempt

to transcend their position as subjects of finance capital for white
entitlement and privilege. A capitalist culture of emotion influences
the way Americans have understood themselves on the basis of their
desires, drives, and interests. It also affects how they've identified other
people different from themselves, particularly those who come from
another country, speak a foreign language, have a different skin color and
physiognomy, and thus appear racially dissimilar . To understand why the
racialization of Asian Americans has been and continues to be
specific to economics, it is important to note that capital-ism
structures human subjectivities and generates emotional values and
cultures that influence perception. If, as Asian Americanist critics have
argued, Americans have identified Asians through economic tropes as
signs of globalization , this is because the capitalist production of racial
feelings has been and continues to be central in reproducing discourses

for norms , entitlements, and rights that uphold recognitions of person-hood

and citizenship in liberal democracy .' These affectively charged

discourses structure and maintain perceptions of Asians in America as

economic subjects, forming them as a race group that falls outside the
norms and social values traditionally determined by Euro-Americans.6
These norms and values have historically preserved and continue to sustain white
entitlements to define subjectivity in liberal democratic capitalism. Two questions,
then, guide this book: How do racial feelings in the historical and social contexts of
US liberal democracy affect the perception of Asians both as economic exemplars
and as threats? And how do Asian Americans in their own cultural works
characterize, accommodate, and resist their discursive portrayal as economic
subjects in a capitalist culture of emotion?

Alternative
The alternative is a glorious communist revolution! To
postpone, to wait for certainty, is to fail now.
Dean 12 (Jodi, political philosopher and professor in the Political Science
department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, The Communist Horizon, Verso
2012) rz

What's the alternative? Trusting our desire for collectivity. This means
acknowledging how autonomy is only ever a collective product,
fragments are parts of ever larger wholes, and dispersion is but the flipside of
concentration. We might think here in terms of a dynamic rather than
an either/or: dispersed local actions matter; they are amplified when
they are linked to a movement that can bring out huge numbers of people for
massive events. And these massive events are more than just spectacles,
more than momentary hints at the people's will, when they are strengthened
by the specific achievements of specific, targeted campaigns. In many
ways, this has already been a key component of Occupy. Yet, too much movement
rhetoric denounces centralization and celebrates locality such that people lose
confidence in anything but the local and the community-based. Likewise, strong
structures , structures that can grow, structures with duration, need
vertical and diagonal components in addition to horizontal ones . Again, this
has been obviously true in the movement, yet much of the rhetoric of Occupy
celebrates only horizontality , treating verticality as a danger to be
fought at every turn. Diagonality is basically neglected, which means we

haven't put much energy into developing structures of

accountability and recall. Collective power isn't just coming together.
It's sticking together . And sticking together requires a willingness to

make sacrifices for the sake of others. Many are already doing this, yet the
movement doesn't acknowledge it insofar as its language celebrates and valorizes
autonomy over collectivity. Collectivity is present in the common
language and common actions in the movement, but not to and for itself. It's
sometimes asserted, sometimes experienced. But it has to be collectively

desired and collectively built-hence the need for a party . In sum, the
Occupy movement demonstrates why something like a party is needed
insofar as a party is an explicit assertion of collectivity, a structure of
accountability, an acknowledgment of differential capacities, and a
vehicle for solidarity. It also gives us a sense of the form such a party might
take: a self-conscious assertion of the overlap of two gaps in the maintenance of
collective desire. Some depict the Leninist party as a spectre of horror , the
remnant of the failed revolution the tenors of which must be avoided at all costs. In

such a vision (which may not be concretely held by anyone but seems vaguely
intuited by many), communism is reduced not simply to the actual (which is
always necessarily ruptured, incomplete, irreducible to itself, and pregnant with the
unrealized potentials of the past) but to the parody of one actuality , an

actuality that has in fact changed over time and from different
perspectives. Through this reduction (which is an ongoing process), actuality is
displaced by an impossible figure, a figure so resolute as to be incapable of
revolutionary change. Rigid, exclusive, dogmatic-it's hard to see how

such a party could even function in a revolutionary situation much

less ever attract members in the first place: how would it get people to
show up, to march, to write and distribute newspapers , to put their
lives on the line? How would it grow or spread? In contrast, Lukacs's
account of the Leninist party suggests an organization formed as the
subjectification of two lacks, the chaos of revolution and the nonknowledge of the party. 12 Lukacs argues that Lenin's pruty presupposes the
actuality of revolution. It's a political organization premised on the fact
of revolution, on the fact that the terrain of politics is open and
changing and that revolutions happen. Revolutions are not messianic
events wherein long-awaited deities intervene in human affairs. They are
results, conditions, and effects of politics wherein states are overthrown ,

dismantled, distributed, reconfigured, redirected. In the chaos of

revolution , tendencies in one direction can suddenly move in a

completely opposite direction. Because the revolutionary situation is

characterized by unpredictability and upheaval, no iron laws of history
provide a map or playbook that revolutionaries can follow to certain victory.
That revolution is actual means that decisions, actions, and judgment
cannot be perpetually deferred. When we take them, we are fully
exposed to our lack of coverage in history, to the chaos of the
revolutionary moment. We have to be confident that the revolutionary
process will bring about new constellations, arrangements, skills, and
convictions , that through it we will make something else, something we
haven't yet imagined . For the Leninist party, to wait, to postpone until
we are sure , until we know, is to fail now . The actuality of revolution

requires discipline and preparation, not because the communist party can
accurately predict everything that will occur-it cannot-and not because it has an
infallible theory it does not. Its theory , like the conditions in which it is set, is
open to rigorous criticism , testing, and revision. Discipline and
preparation enable the party to adapt to circumstances rather than be

completely molded or determined by them. The party has to be

consistent and flexible because revolution is chaotic . The actuality of

revolution is thus a condition of constitutive non-knowledge for

which the party can prepare. It's a condition that demands response,
if the party is to be accountable to the exploited and oppressed
people, if it is to function as a communist party. A communist party is
necessary because neither capitalist dynamics nor mass spontaneity
Immanently produce a proletarian revolution that ends the
exploitation and oppression of the people. A revolutionary period brings
together and confuses multiple and changing groups and classes. Different
spontaneous tendencies, degrees of class consciousness, and ideological
persuasions converge. The Leninist party doesn't know what the people want. It's a

form for dealing with the split in the people , their non-know ledge of
what they, as a collectivity, desire. As Lukacs Wiites, "If events had to
be delayed until the proletariat entered the decisive struggles
united and clear in its aims there would never be a revolutionary
situation." 13 What the pruty knows is that such a lack of knowledge must
not impede action because it cannot forestall the actuality of
revolution. The party, then, is an organization situated at the overlap of two
lacks, the openness of history as well as its own non-knowledge. The communist
party occupies this site and subjectifies it; it provides a form for political

subjectivity as it works in " total solidarity with and support for all the
oppressed and exploited within capitalist society ." 14 This dedication

requires constant interaction with the struggling, proletarianized

people. Constant interaction installs a double dynamic in the party. On the one
hand, it must be strictly disciplined. On the other, it must be flexible
and responsive, capable of learning from and adapting to the everchanging situation. As it learns from the struggling masses, the
party provides a vehicle through which they can understand their
actions and express their collective will, much as the psychoanalyst
provides a means for the analysand to become conscious of her desire.

FW

T Version
Asian Americans can engage immigration law with China using
genealogical narrative as justification.
Chang 93 (Robert S., Professor of Law and Executive Director of the Fred T.
Korematsu Center for Law and Equality Seattle University School of Law, Toward an
Asian American Legal Scholarship: Critical Race Theory, Post-structuralism, and
Narrative Space, Seattle University School of Law Digital Commons 1993,
http://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1411&context=faculty, accessed 7/8/16) rz
Post-Structuralism and the Narrative Turn

Post-structuralism relies on a conception of language and knowledge

that is not based on any universalist theoretical ground.2" 4 In other
words, post-structuralism is anti-foundational. Stanley Fish writes: Antifoundationalism teaches that questions of fact, truth, correctness,
validity, and clarity can neither be posed nor answered in reference to
some extracontextual, ahistorical, nonsituational reality, or rule, or
law, or value; rather, anti-foundationalism asserts, all of these matters are
intelligible and debatable only within the precincts of the contexts or
situations or paradigms or communities that give them their local and
changeable shape.2 "5 From this, it might seem that anti-foundationalism is
nihilistic; however, it is quite the opposite in that it provides for certainty, but
only within the local, partisan point of view, which is posited as the
only available point of view. And as one commentator notes, "[k]nowing that
my knowledge is perspectival, language-based, culturally constructed, or what have
you, does not change in the slightest the things I believe to be true. 206 Many
people, though, find it disturbing that there are no external, overarching systems of
legitimation.0 7 They want to be able to say that all Nazis are bad, all of the time.
They are concerned that if Professor Fish's anti-foundationalism is correct, then they
will not be able to pass judgment on Nazis, that they will not be able to engage in
meaningful social criticism. Professor Fish responds that anti-foundationalism does
not prevent value judgments; it only allows value judgments to be made and have
meaning in certain contexts. Thus, to try to make a universal, ahistorical claim
about all Nazis being bad is meaningless because the phrase "All Nazis are bad" has
meaning only in certain contexts.20 8 The implication of anti-

foundationalism for the practice of social criticism is that it cannot

provide a compelling "ought" in the rigorous sense of the word.20 9
But then "ought" has been on shaky ground ever since David Hume
said, "'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the
whole world to the scratching of my finger."21 Yet life went onmorality was not destroyed,21 and anarchy did not ensue. The fear is
that if we go down the post-modern road, we will no longer be able
to practice social criticism in a compelling way, because without

objectivity, Asian Americans and other disempowered groups cannot claim

that our emergence from subordination "is less artificial and
constructed than that which [we] have cast off.' 2 1 2 This conclusion
seems to be the ultimate logic of the post-structuralist critique. However, this
conclusion is not as devastating as it first might seem. It does not
render political action impossible; if anything, it does the opposite,
in the sense that political action is all that will be left. The poststructuralist critique changes the present game, which involves the
search for legitimation, by eliminating the possibility of any appeal to an
external standard for legitimation. It becomes, as if it were ever anything
but, a question of power, where no one can claim a superior legitimacy nor
deny the legitimacy of another's viewpoint or story.213 Narratives,
then, cannot be discounted because in this game of power there is
no "objective" standard for disqualification; one "wins" by being
more persuasive. Narratives, especially narratives about personal
oppression, are particularly well-suited for persuasive purposes
because they can provide compelling accounts of how things are in
society.2 14 These stories will carry considerable persuasive power
because in our present political-legal climate , which is dominated by
liberal political philosophy, oppression is undesirable. 215 ' This is
the space within which Asian American Legal Scholarship will use
narrative.

Antiblackness

Slavery Link
They are missing the boat there is a fundamental ontological
divide that their arguments do not and cannot grapple with.
Sexton 11 (Jared, University of California, Irvine (School of Humanities), The
Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism, InTensions
Journal Copyright 2011 by York University (Toronto, Canada) Issue 5 (Fall/Winter
2011) ISSN# 1913-5874,
http://www.yorku.ca/intent/issue5/articles/pdfs/jaredsextonarticle.pdf, accessed
7/8/16) rz
Whereas Pattersons detractors take to task his historical sociology for its
inability and unwillingness to fully countenance the agency of the perspective and
self-predicating activity of the slave, his supporters (or those engaging his work
through generous critique) do not fail to remark, even if they rarely highlight, that
what is most stunning is the fact that the concept of social death
cannot be generalized. It is indexed to slavery and it does not travel.
That is, there are problems in the formulation of the relation of power
from which slavery arises and there are problems in the formulation of the
relation of this relation of power to other relations of power. This split
reading was evident immediately, as indicated in a contemporaneous review by
Ross K. Baker (professor of political science at Rutgers University and editor of a
1970 collected volume, The Afro American). Baker observes, against the
neoconservative backlash politics of angry white males and the ascendance

of another racialized immigration discourse alternating, post-civil

rights, between model minority and barbarians at the gate: The
mere fact of slavery makes black Americans different . No amount of
tortured logic could permit the analogy to be drawn between a former
slave population and an immigrant population, no matter how low-flung
the latter group. Indeed, had the Great Society programs persisted at
their highest levels until today, it is doubtful that the mass of American
blacks would be measurably better off than they are now (Baker 1983:
21). Bakers refusal of analogy in the wake of his reading of
Patterson is pegged to a certain realization brought home, as he
puts it, by the daunting force of Pattersons description of the bleak
totality of the slave experience (ibid). I want to hold onto this perhaps
unwitting distinction that Baker draws between the mere fact of slavery, on the one
hand, and the daunting force of description of the slave experience, on the other. In
this distinction, Baker echoes both the problem identified by Moten in his reading of
my co-authored piece as a certain conflation of the fact of blackness with the lived
experience of the black (Moten 2008: 179) and the problem identified by Hartman
as a certain conflation of witness and spectator before the scenes of subjection at
the heart of slavery (Hartman 1997: 4). I concede that Motens delineation is precise

(though its pertinence is in doubt) and that it encourages a more sophisticated

theoretical practice, but Hartmans conclusion, it seems to me, is also accurate in a
sort of noncontradictory coincidence or overlap with Moten that situates black
studies in a relation field that is still generally undertheorized. Rather than
approaching (the theorization of) social death and (the theorization of) social life as
an either/or proposition, then, why not attempt to think them as a matter of
both/and? Why not articulate them through the supplementary logic of the
copula? In fact, there might be a more radical rethinking available yet. [19] In recent
years, social death has emerged from a period of latency as a notion useful for the
critical theory of racial slavery as a matrix of social, political, and economic relations
surviving the era of abolition in the nineteenth century, a racial calculus and a
political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago (Hartman 2007: 6). This
afterlife of slavery, as Saidiya Hartman terms it, challenges
practitioners in the field to question the prevailing understanding of a

post-emancipation society and to revisit the most basic questions

about the structural conditions of antiblackness in the modern
world. To ask, in other words, what it means to speak of the tragic
continuity between slavery and freedom or the incomplete nature
of emancipation, indeed to speak of about a type of living on that survives
after a type of death. For Wilderson, the principal implication of slaverys
afterlife is to warrant an intellectual disposition of afropessimism, a qualification and a complication of the assumptive logic of black
cultural studies in general and black performance studies in particular, a
disposition that posits a political ontology dividing the Slave from
the world of the Human in a constitutive way. This critical move has been
misconstrued as a negation of the agency of black performance, or even a denial of
black social life, and a number of scholars have reasserted the earlier assumptive
logic in a gesture that hypostatisizes afro-pessimism to that end.ix

AT BW Binary
Calls to disband the black/white binary are rooted in a desire
to skirt the question of anti-black racism. This paradigms
institutionalization speaks not to the dogma of black scholars
and activists, but to the enduring and unique force of antiblackness.
Sexton 10 (Jared, Associate Professor, African American Studies UC Irvine,
Proprieties of Coalition: Blacks, Asians, and the Politics of Policing, 2010, Critical
Sociology 36(1) 87-108) rz
Beyond and Between / Black and White

In the post-civil rights era USA, the demand for paradigm shift with
respect to racial theory is a defining characteristic of political culture.7 We
are told in a variety of tones that race matters are no longer, if ever
they were, simply black and white. At best, the focus of a black-white
dualistic analysis is deemed inadequate to apprehending the complexity of
racial formation in the wake of post-1965 immigration and the rise in rates of
interracial dating and marriage since the landmark Supreme Court ruling in the case
of Loving v. Virginia (1967). At worst, the Procrustean tendency is deemed
politically stunting insofar as it precludes a discussion of the colors
in the middle, now inexorable parts of the Black/white spectrum (Cho 1993:
205). There is already a considerable literature in the social sciences and
humanities which details those vexed positions that are neither black nor white
(Sollors 1997), encompassing not only the articulation of emergent multiracial or
mixed race identity claims (Daniel 2002; J.M. Spencer 1997; R. Spencer 1999), but
also critique and political mobilization among Asian Americans, Pacific
Islanders, Chicano/as, Latino/as, and American Indians (Aguilar-San
Juan 1994; Gracia and De Greiff 2000; Jaimes 1991).8 However, the notion of an
endemic black-white model of racial thought is something of a social
fiction one might say a misreading that depends upon a reduction of the
sophistication of the paradigm in question. Once that reduction is performed, the
fiction can be deployed for a range of political and intellectual purposes (Kim 2006).
In addressing the call to displace the black-white paradigm, we may

recognize that its purported institutionalization indicates more about

the enduring force of anti-blackness (Gordon 1995, 1998) than the
insistence of black scholars, activists or communities more generally .9
When broaching the explanatory difficulty (Omi and Winant 1993: 111) of presentday racial politics, then, one wonders exactly who and what is addressed
by the demand to go beyond black and white. One finds a litany of
complicating factors and neglected subjects, but it is accompanied by a

failure to account cogently for the implications of this newfound

complexity. The recently appointed Dean of the Wayne State University Law
School, Frank Wu, has written: beyond black and white is an
oppositional slogan it names itself ironically against the
prevailing tradition It is easy enough to argue that society needs a
new paradigm , but it is much harder to explain how such an approach
would work in actual practice . (Wu 2006: xi) It is harder still to explain

why such an approach should be adopted. In fact, the implementation

of the new paradigm of racial theory seems unfeasible because it
does not and perhaps cannot develop a coherent ethical justification
as an attempt to analyze and contest racism. Taken together, these
ambiguities beg a key question: what economy of enunciation, what
rhetorical distribution of sanctioned speaking positions and claims
to legitimacy are produced by the injunction to end biracial
theorizing (Omi and Winant 1994: 154)? In pursuing this question, consider the
following provocation by another noted legal scholar, Mari Matsuda (2002), offered
at a 1997 symposium on critical race theory at the Yale Law School: When we say
we need to move beyond Black and white , this is what a whole lot of people
say or feel or think: Thank goodness we can get off that paradigm,
because those Black people made me feel so uncomfortable . I know all

about Blacks, but I really dont know anything about Asians , and
while were deconstructing that Black-white paradigm, we also need
to reconsider the category of race altogether, since race, as you
know, is a constructed category, and thank god I dont have to take
those angry black people seriously anymore (Matsuda 2002: 395). It is
important to note that this contention, like those of Ture and Hamilton and Wu
above, is not issued against progressive political coalition, but rather is drawn from
a sympathetic meditation on the need for more adequate models of racial analysis
and strategies of multiracial alliance-building in and beyond the US context. What
Matsuda polemically identifies are dangers attendant to the

unexamined desire for new analyses and the anxious drive for
alliance, namely, the tendency to gloss over discrepant histories, minimize
inequalities born of divergent structural positions, and disavow the historical
centrality and uniqueness of anti-blackness for the operations of
global white supremacy (Mills 1998). Sexton: Proprieties of Coalition 91
Matsuda urges the refusal of what historian David Hollinger (2003) has coined the
one-hate rule or the presumption of the monolithic character of white racism. By
calling to question the motive force of a nominally critical intervention
on the black-white paradigm, Matsuda traces a fault line in the field

formation of Asian American Studies that marks an opening for the

present inquiry. It seems that the question of anti-black racism
troubles contemporary efforts at mediation among the non-white

between black and non-black communities of color and interpolates

Asian American panethnicity (Espiritu 1992) in ways that exceed even the
immanent critique of that conceptual touchstone and principle of organization
(Lowe 1996; Ono 1995). If one of the benefits of a reconstructed racial
theory addressing the increasing complexity of racial politics and
racial identity today (Omi and Winant 1994: 152) is its capacity to grasp

antagonisms and alliances among racially defined minority groups

(1994: 154), that political-intellectual enterprise is not without hazard.10
As we will see below, this fraught dynamic is especially (though by no means
exclusively) evident in the academic literature of black-Asian conflict in the urban
USA. The public commentary dates back to at least the 1980s, but it reached a new
level of production in the 1990s following the highly publicized black-led boycott of
Korean grocers in Flatbush, New York in 1990 (Kim 2000) and, more sensationally,
the Los Angeles uprising of 1992 (Okihiro 1994, 2001, 2006; Yamamoto 1999). In
the second edition of their widely noted Racial Formation in the United States,
sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant state, for instance: The lessons of the
Los Angeles riot are instructive as a starting point to criticize bipolar conceptions of
race (Omi and Winant 1994: 152, emphasis added). Yet, rather than serving

as a critical starting point, the 1992 multiracial conflagration has,

for the most part, sowed a good deal of confusion regarding the
aptness of inherited frameworks of racial theory for the production
of knowledge and the ongoing challenges of political organizing and
activism on the Left. On both counts, the flashpoint between African Americans
and Asian Americans in general and the Black-Korean conflict in particular have
been acute.11 In this sense, the following critical engagement is not simply a
response to the observations of a select few scholars or even a rejoinder to
academic trends. Rather, it is an invitation to radical rethinking that should be
considered germane to those interested in forging a more ethical relation to black
strivings in a twilight civilization (West 1996) and, more pointedly, to those that still
feel the need to take those angry black people seriously (Matsuda 2002: 395). It is
perhaps unnecessary to add that this reckoning would be a prerequisite to

thinking more properly about social justice on a global scale.

AT LA Riots
Their analysis of the LA riots is just as if not more reductive
than ours. They eviscerate Asian complicity in anti-black
racism either reducing the issue to class or investing all
blame in white imperialism.
-multiracial analysis (beyond b/w binary) replaces race with class or disavows Asian
complicity in anti-black racism by blaming everything on white supremacy.

Sexton 10 (Jared, Associate Professor, African American Studies UC Irvine,

Proprieties of Coalition: Blacks, Asians, and the Politics of Policing, 2010, Critical
Sociology 36(1) 87-108)
The Innocence of (Asian/American) Capital12
In Ethnic Peace in the American City, Edward Chang and Jeannette Diaz-Veizades
(1999) write that no consensus has emerged regarding the causes and meaning of
the violence that erupted on April 29, 1992 (Chang and Diaz-Veizades 1999: 4).
However, in the following chapter they gloss the context of the encounter in
uncontested terms: 92 Critical Sociology 36(1) The seeds of tension between Korean
Americans and African Americans were sown and nourished during the 1970s and
1980s. While the African American community was stagnating economically, the
Korean American community was thriving. And while the African American
community watched capital flow out of the central city, the Korean American
community put to work its internally generated capital Korean immigrant
entrepreneurs found business opportunities in black neighborhoods as early as the
late 1960s and early 1970s [They] assumed that they could make a healthy profit
from only a small investment of capital, and they did not intend to stay in African
American neighborhoods for a long time. (1999: 31). We will consider these
passages in more detail momentarily, but what stands out immediately is the fact
that this reference to the urban political economy elicits no critical discussion and is
instead framed as an objective account of the material conditions of conflict. Even

if we were to accept the terms of description, there is no

explanation of why or by what means the African American community
was stagnating economically and the Korean American community
was thriving. Piecemeal speculation is offered, but it is put forth in lieu of
rigorous examination. In fact, this marked inability or refusal to pursue a
class analysis in the interpretation of racialized antagonism a
failure dispersed across the literature suggests a blind spot that
produces interference and distortion within the conceptual
framework. However, before that discussion can be broached, we must ask what
this ineffectual political economic commentary enables as a framing device. It does
not help us to understand the situation any better, but it does illuminate the
workings of the argument.13 After noting uncritically various dimensions of the
material context, Chang and DiazVeizades (1999) state that with the proliferation of
Korean-owned businesses in south central Los Angeles, several of the stores have

become the target of resentment, hostility, bigotry, boycotts, and sometimes

violence by African Americans (Chang and Diaz-Veizades 1999: 33). The targeting
of Korean-owned businesses is thus naturalized as a tragic and undeserved sideeffect of otherwise euphemized processes of economic expansion for Korean
American entrepreneurs: the penetration of internally generated capital and the
realization of value. The authors thereby cover over the question of analysis with
biological metaphors of proliferation and natural cycles. Yet, whereas black peoples
resentment, hostility, bigotry, boycotts, and violence are said to be the
inevitable outgrowth of a natural process the seeds were sown the reader is not
invited to make peace with the proverbial harvest. In order to avoid a causal
explanation that might suggest apology for rioting and looting, the root causes of
this societal discontent and conflict are displaced onto aggravating subsidiary
factors framed as cultural difference.14 Both legal scholar Sumi Cho (1993) and
cultural critic Elaine Kim (1993), to cite two additional examples, repeat this
theoretical maneuver in their respective work on the uprising. Cho (1993) affirms
that the ostensible root causes of the rioting were the King verdict and the racist
police violence it exemplifies, combined with the failure of the US economy to
provide jobs and a decent standard of living for all of its people (Cho 1993: 197). In
another section, she notes that, because the ability [of Korean Americans] to open
stores Sexton: Proprieties of Coalition 93 [in black neighborhoods] largely depends
upon a class variable (1993: 200),15 many of the tensions [between these groups]
may be class-, rather than racially, based, actually reflecting differences between
the store-owning Korean immigrants and the AfricanAmerican customers (1993:
206). Further, these class-based differences narrow the contact zone between
blacks and Korean Americans such that the interaction between the two racial
groups is structured strictly by market relationships: one is the consumer, the other
is the owner (1993: 198). However, these claims regarding the import of class are
attenuated in two ways. First, although it is noted that these particular Koreanowned businesses accumulate value (however great or small is beside the point) at
the expense of these particular black communities as an effect of the essentially
exploitative market relations between storeowners and consumers under capitalism,
it is argued that, like the King verdict, the failure of the US economy ... [one of]
the ostensible root causes of the rioting, [was] not the fault of Korean shop
owners (1993: 197, emphasis added). This is true in a limited sense, given that
political economy is not reducible to simple judgments of culpability. Yet, the point
not to be missed is that the moral extraction of small merchants
despite their mobilizing in excess of half a billion dollars in the riot zone alone

from analysis of the local reproduction of capitalist relations is a

precondition for the image of Korean Americans as victims of the
uprising per se.16 Second, although an essentially exploitative class
relation is established, the mention of this class-based relation is intended to
mitigate the resentment and hostility supposedly born of cultural differences and
racial animosities. In addition to the above cited passage, Cho also writes: The
ability to open stores largely depends upon a class variable, as opposed to a racial
one. (1993: 200, emphasis added). Establishing a rivalry between race and

class variables and situating them as opposing terms undermines the

attempt to theorize their mutual implication . However, even if we accepted
the counter-posing of race and class, nagging questions would remain. For instance,
how are class-based tensions and conflicts any less violent, politically untenable or
ethically liable than race-based tensions and conflicts from the point of view of the
exploited and oppressed? Are we to think that class oppression is somehow easier
to accept than racial oppression and that it is, for that reason, somehow less volatile
or less explosive? Is not class difference, pace Marx, itself a euphemism for a
permanent state of aggression, the fundamental systemic violence of capitalism
(iek 1996: 566)? As indicated in the opening section, subordinating the
significance of race while pacifying the notion of class rubs against the grain of a
number of other scholars in the field of Asian American Studies. Here we see that it
also contradicts Chos (1993) earlier insistence that the Black/white framing of race
issues must give way to a fuller, more differentiated understanding of a multiracial,
multiethnic society divided along the lines of race, class, gender, and other axes in
order to explicate effectively the Los Angeles explosion (Cho 1993: 196). Indeed,

what seems to give way is the explanatory power of racial

antagonism altogether, rather than the Black/white framing. This is
more than an unattended conceptual slip and I am arguing that a link exists
between the demand to move beyond the uncritical acceptance of
the dichotomous Black/white character of US race relations 94 Critical
Sociology 36(1) (1993: 206) and the inability to think race in a sustained
way once such an uncritical acceptance is refused. I want to suggest
that this shifting of the terms of debate about the black-Korean
conflict (and US black-Asian relations more generally) from race to class (as
opposed to race) is symptomatic of an affective difficulty shaping the
engagement of Asian American intellectuals with the intersection of racial
hierarchy and the hierarchy of class society . It registers the exertion required
for genuinely taking on the involvement of Asian Americans, however varied and
complex that involvement undoubtedly is, with the structures of anti-blackness and
the advance of financialization (Foster 2007) on a global scale not only as victims
of organized, state-sanctioned violence, but also as agents or, at the very least, as
accomplices. Kims (1993) reflections are similarly telling. She writes that Korean

shop owners in South Central and Koreatown were affluent

compared with the impoverished residents whom they often
exploited as laborers or looked down upon as fools with an aversion
to hard work (Kim 1993: 218). Beyond recognizing a structure of
material inequality and its accompanying condescension, she
represents Korean shop owners as subscribed to a bourgeois
immigrant ideology insofar as they regarded themselves as having arrived in a
meritocratic land of opportunity where a persons chances for success are limited
only by individual lack of ability or diligence (1993: 219). But rather than

pursue this line of investigation in order to understand the

racialized class conflict it suggests, the author evades its implications
in a footnoted admission: I am not grappling directly with social class issues here,
because, although I am cognizant of their crucial importance, I am simply not
qualified to address them at the present time (1993: 233, fn. 14). This disclaimer is
offered despite the earlier claim that class factors have been more important than
race factors in shaping Korean American immigrants attitudes toward African
American and Latino populations (1993: 233, fn. 14). By this account, the article
fails to discuss what is most important about the issue it sets out to address.17 Kim
(1993) does finally offer some comment on class, however. In the same footnote she
writes: Because they are merchants, the class interests of Korean American shop
owners in Los Angeles differ clearly from the interests of poor African Americans and
Latino customers (1993: 233, fn. 14). Much like Cho (1993), Kim (1993) concedes
that there are identifiable conflicts of interest grounded in a structural relation of
exploitation, whether in the form of wages for labor or prices for commodities. Still,
the otherwise welcome political struggle against inequality that this identifiable
class conflict might warrant is obviated in this context. According to Kim (1993),
working with simple dyads is impossible, since Korean American shop owners are
also of color and mostly immigrants from a country colonized by the United States
(1993: 233, fn. 14). However, it is unclear what about this qualification renders the
simple dyad of class conflict impossible, even if it is conditioned by the fact that
Korean American shop owners are postcolonial people of color.18 In claiming

that Korean American shop owners in this context are both victims
and victimizers (Omi and Winant 1994: 153), scholars misunderstand the
central insight of the middleman minority thesis to which they
allude, namely, that middleman minority merchants are both victims of
the more powerful dominant host population (in this case, Sexton:
Proprieties of Coalition 95 whites of the political elite and economic ruling
class) and victimizers of their less powerful laborers and clientele (in

this case, the black poor and working class) (Bonacich 1973: 58990). In
this way, they tend to conflate the structures of white supremacy and
US imperialism (which can and do oppress Koreans and Korean
Americans) with the violence or property destruction of the urban
uprising of the un-propertied black poor (which cannot and do not
oppress Koreans and Korean Americans). Rather than adding texture to a
fuller, more differentiated understanding of the Los Angeles explosion, the
postcolonial immigrant caveat appears instead as a non sequitur.19 The incessant
displacement of race onto class and the subsequent abdication of class analysis
together represent an aversion to considerations of the material conditions of
hierarchy and exploitation in theoretical work. As noted, there are references

to capital, relations of production, the market, relative

affluence, economic stagnation, etc. But none of this is elaborated
as the circumstances structuring antagonism between blacks and
Asians in the throes of globalization. More to the point, it is not

understood as a local and immediate relation of institutionalized

violence.20 This waffling about the material stakes of class conflict is duplicated
at the level of ideology. In Kims (1993) account, Korean Americans are at once
associated with and excused from ideologies of political conservatism,
class hatred, and anti-black racism .21 On the one hand, many Koreans exhibit
intensely negative attitudes toward the poor and indeed desperately fear being
associated with them. And, further, in the USA where blackness and

brownness have historically been almost tantamount to a

condemnation to poverty, prejudice against the poor brought from
Korea is combined with home-grown US racism, and the results have
been explosive (Kim 1993: 2334, fn. 14). On the other hand, she explains away
these class and racial hatreds as the ignorance and naivety of postcolonial subjects
paradoxically overexposed to American popular culture and history.22 [Korean shop
owners] hadnt heard that there is no equal justice in the U.S. They had to learn
about American racial hierarchies. They did not realize that, as immigrants of color,
they would never attain political voice or visibility but would instead be used to
uphold the inequality and the racial hierarchy they had no part in creating

Thanks to Eurocentric American cultural practices, they knew little

or nothing good about African Americans or Latinos Most Korean
immigrants did not even know that they were among the many direct beneficiaries
of the African American-led civil rights movement which helped pave the way for
the 1965 immigration reforms that made their immigration possible They were
unaware of the shameful history of oppression of nonwhite immigrants and other
people of color in the U.S. (1993: 21819) And so forth. Whereas the
conventional framing of black-Korean conflict (whether by the coverage
of white media outlets or the pronouncements of black nationalist community
activists) supposedly centers race in simplistic ways to the detriment

of a fuller, more differentiated understanding of a multiracial,

multiethnic society divided along the lines of race, class, gender,
and other axes (Cho 1993: 196), this new understanding generated
beyond the black/white paradigm, as it were, actually displaces race
with class , rather 96 Critical Sociology 36(1) than enlarging it. When class is
raised as an excluded variable of analysis, its salience is undercut by naturalizing
capitalist exploitation or confounding, rather than specifying, the location of Korean
Americans, merchant or otherwise, in the hierarchical class structure of US society
and the circuits of global capital (1993: 234, fn. 17). The mystification of class
is made possible, in circular fashion, by returning to the question of

race as a matter of the racial oppression of Korean (and other

Asian) Americans under white supremacy and US imperialism or the
sublimation of race as cultural difference. In the process, race and class
are disconnected and used against one another. What remains constant is the

inability or refusal to identify race and/or class power on the side of

Korean Americans.

Their analysis of the 1992 LA riots that starts from the point
of resentful black protestors destroying the property of
innocent Korean Americans frames the discussion in terms of
reparations for the latter and penalty for the former. A more
productive point of departure would be one of understanding
the conflict within a broader historical setting of anti-black
racism.
Sexton 10 (Jared, Associate Professor, African American Studies UC Irvine,
Proprieties of Coalition: Blacks, Asians, and the Politics of Policing, 2010, Critical
Sociology 36(1) 87-108) rz
International Racial Hierarchy
When the issue of race is admitted within the critical frame, its explosive results are
contained by discussion of racism between blacks and Korean Americans figured as
an equal exchange: quid pro quo. Cho (1993) indicates above that the conflict
between Korean Americans and African Americans contains definite cultural
differences and racial animosities (Cho 1993: 206); however, the nature of the
differences and the vectors of the animosities remain vague . Cultural difference
is invoked to explain the reputed misunderstanding between blacks
and Korean Americans regarding retail etiquette,23 even if Cho, like her
counterparts, notes the limitations of this account . Although Koreans wanted

very badly to believe in this reductionism, one making an honest

assessment must conclude that far too many Korean shop owners
had accepted widespread stereotypes about African Americans as
lazy, complaining criminals (Cho 1993: 199). Yet, this acceptance is
described more accurately as a capitulation delivered by force: The
dominant U.S. racial hierarchy and its concomitant stereotypes are
transferred worldwide to every country that the USA has occupied
militarily (1993: 199), a global imperial effect later referred to as the
international racial hierarchy (Cho 1993: 209). Cho (1993: 199) raises the issue
of Korean American anti-black racism only to temper such
observations with references to a titular black anti-Asian racism. And
just as Korean Americans are, in a sense, absolved of racism as an
effect of their ideological submission before an imperial US mass
media, so too are blacks, thanks to Eurocentric American cultural
practices, inculcated for similar reasons with distorted ideas about Korean
Americans (Kim 1993: 218). In this vein, Chang and Diaz-Veizades (1999) also argue
that the mainstream media did indeed have a major role in creating the KoreanAfrican American conflict constructing racial stereotypes, images, and
perceptions to pit Korean merchants against African American residents (Chang

and Diaz-Veizades 1999: 67). Thus, blacks and Korean Americans find

themselves in thrall to the respective image of the other

constructed by a white racist cultural apparatus and, pitted against
one another, they remain collectively divided and conquered.24 Yet, the quid
pro quo equivalence drawn between these various forms of racism and the
anti-racist prescriptions they solicit where two subordinate groups, imagined on a
horizontal plane, simply mistake one another for their true racial and class enemy
quickly discloses a pretense. Racial hierarchy, Sexton: Proprieties of
Coalition 97 which historically positions Asians over blacks, much as
class exploitation positions owners over customers and employers over workers, is
strangely inverted in this instance. The respective racisms between blacks
and Korean Americans are rendered politically equivalent once they are reduced to
stereotype and disconnected from racial hierarchy. In a further conceptual
maneuver, even this dubious equivalence is undone by the reassertion of a new and
different hierarchy representing a reversal of power relations that, incongruously,
privileges the black poor and working class over and against Korean American
entrepreneurs. Though it is widely known that the historic

disenfranchisement of the black population proceeds apace in the

post-civil rights era25 and that, in any case, political power in the USA grossly
favors the rich because it stems largely from economic power (Palast 2002), poor
and working class blacks are nonetheless represented here as
relatively empowered vis-a-vis Korean Americans in the political
realm.26 Black political power is said to be both effectively
constituted and determinately wielded over the latters collective
fate and fortune. No clear criteria is offered for measuring relative
political power save passing references to black elected officials, regardless of
their actual influence27 and the supposed political power of blacks is
generally conflated with the visibility of spokespersons in the mass media
(again, regardless of actual influence or lines of accountability). How any of this
properly constitutes political power and how the activities of either
elected officials or media spokespeople benefit black people in
general or the black poor and working class in particular is never
demonstrated; it is simply asserted in lieu of argument. In contrast,
blacks are understood to be economically less powerful relative to
Korean Americans, both in the aggregate (the political economy of blacks or
Korean Americans as groups) and in the more immediate context (the political
economy of merchantcustomer relations). However, this asymmetry is
hushed in its bearing on the discourse and the discrepancy of economic power is
minimized or explained away as relative success. Class struggle is de-politicized
and the scholars under review instead arrogate for Korean American merchants a
dubious right to capitalist enterprise that is ethically rationalized in the rather
misstated language of survival. To follow this account of events is to accept that
the paramount political problem highlighted by the 1992 uprising is not the past
and present of accumulation as evisceration (Williams 1993), but rather the fact

that the US power elite, by way of their police forces, did not secure a more
favorable business environment for entrepreneurial capital. On this score, I am
offering a condensed summary of and lodging a profound disagreement with Jeff
Changs (1993) early concept of differential disempowerment, a notion that
continues to inform the discourse to date.28 The differential is said to manifest in
various ways, including the exclusion of Korean Americans from official forums of
public debate about racial conflict in the city in contrast to a supposed black media
access.29 But the misconception of black political power is made most
apparent in the ominous imagery of angry mobs bent upon destruction
and violence descending on Koreatown (Cho 1993: 201). The ratio of black
political power does not reside in the ability, or even in the attempt, to shape the
policy environment or to affect or exploit political economic conditions to the
detriment of Korean Americans. In fact, the power differential cannot be established
as an institutional or structural reality. Instead, power is confused for brute force as
it takes the form of black 98 Critical Sociology 36(1) destruction and violence, the
very same rioting that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously described on numerous
occasions as the language of the unheard, the desperate recourse of the politically
powerless. The rhetoric of foreshadowed onslaught links together black peoples
resentment, hostility, bigotry, boycotts, and violence as a chain of equivalence,
a teleology leading inexorably from resentment to burning and looting. Thus,
Chang and Diaz-Veizades (1999) can read the seeds of conflict in the mood of the
black poor and Cho (1993) can ascribe to black people in their view from below a
politics of resentment wherein the scene was set for disaster and required simply
a spark to ignite a highly flammable situation (Cho 1993: 201). What King once
called blacks legitimate discontent is recoded somewhere between jealousy and
envy, reduced to sour grapes or refined into a petroleum product hazardous
material in any case. As an effect, this discontent is interpreted as the sign of an
impending disaster for Korean Americans and not as the sign of a concrete disaster
for blacks (Spillers 2003), an already oppressive state of affairs for which no
business owners insurance policy or municipal redevelopment plan is readily
available. However, the standard picture of unevenness between blacks and Korean
Americans can be imagined, and its attendant emotional drama can become
compelling, if and only if the preceding structures of power the evolving market
relationship between Korean American owners and black consumers, linked as it is
to transnational capital flows, Korean national development projects, the leveraging
functions of the racial state and its immigration policy machinations, the dynamics
of international racial hierarchy remain bracketed out or mystified.30 So long as
we approach the black-Korean conflict through the matrix of the April

1992 Los Angeles uprising , taking property destruction and the reification
of private holdings as our points of departure the opening scene we can
only ever understand this political relation as a question of reparations
for the latter and palliative or prison for the former .31 A more critical
perspective would have to acknowledge the suffering endured by Korean

American merchants in the wake of the Los Angeles uprising as a

relatively privileged experience . The collective experience of loss, both
materially and psychically, involves the mourning of conservative

ideological commitments and the divestment of ill-gotten value (illgotten insofar as the realization of value under capitalism is premised on
exploitation). It is, moreover, the resentment of frustrated bourgeois
aspirations by the relative loss of status and working proximity to
not membership in the most despised classes of the most despised
racial group in the USA. It represents, finally, the interruption of a collective
dream for those who disavow that Eurocentric economic migration (and eventually
even political exile) persists in the hope of justice under capitalism (Spivak 1999:
395, emphasis added); those who, working against the tide of US capitalism at
the mercy of banks, wholesalers, and retail outfits who [work] in concert with each
other, nonetheless desire and often enough attain the quick fix of the American
Dream to send children to the finest colleges, to own a house, to drive a car
(Prashad 2001: 101, emphasis added). The argument I have developed thus
far can accommodate the diversity of the Korean American
population, including the mixed fortunes of small merchants, and it does not
Sexton: Proprieties of Coalition 99 rely on denial of either the genocidal

history of US imperialism in Asia or the ongoing history of anti-Asian

racism within the context of domestic white supremacy, including all
the forms of continuing exploitation and discrimination.32 It does not,
moreover, refute the participation of blacks (or Latinos or even Asian
Americans) in the politics of exclusion and regulation that structure
contemporary immigration in the USA. What this argument does,
rather, is take the ensemble of scholars under consideration at its
collective word and give due attention to specificity. What it reveals
is that the indisputable complexity of the Korean American position ,
even in this circumscribed context, in no way mitigates the class and racial
violence that subtends it nor the conservative ideological
commitments that articulate it. In a phrase, the structural violence of
racial capitalism constitutes the political unconscious of the present
discourse on US black-Asian relations.33 To situate Korean American
merchants as victims of the black poor, innocent and ignorant of a
struggle that simply precedes them, that does not involve them,
that is not of their making, that is beyond their comprehension, and,
hence, not their fault is, quite plainly, to circumvent ethics and to
excise a population from time and space and the power relations they
unavoidably inhabit. It is to suggest that, because they are neither
white nor ruling class, they bear no responsibility toward their
current context. It is to suggest, more locally, that they bear no
responsibility to resist and undermine an interaction structured strictly
by market relations and to place first priority on the needs and well-

being of the disenfranchised (Kim 1997: 206) rather than the needs and wellbeing of the racially privileged and upwardly mobile. Instead, the thrust of the
discourse is an insistence on the uneven, if not exclusive,
responsibility borne by blacks presumed to enjoy collectively all of the
privileges and powers of native-born white citizens of the USA toward Korean
Americans and, by extension, toward other Asian Americans and Latinos vis-a-vis
the history and politics of immigration.

AT Coalitions
Calls for coalitions are looking for love in all the wrong places.
Multi-racial coalition does not span independent bases of
power, but a distance of extreme inequality that must be
reconciled first. Its a desire for freedom from the haunting
and volatile specter of blackness.
-Not foreclosing coalitions, but our analysis is a prerequisite.

Sexton 10 (Jared, Associate Professor, African American Studies UC Irvine,

Proprieties of Coalition: Blacks, Asians, and the Politics of Policing, 2010, Critical
Sociology 36(1) 87-108) rz

A Second-Hand Emotion
The explicit impetus of the literature surveyed in this article is the promotion of
multiracial coalition politics in the urban USA. Much like Ture and Hamilton, I am far
from foreclosing the question of coalition , but my concern nevertheless
has been to suspend this question while working to understand how the
desire for coalition is rhetorically structured . In concluding on this point, I
return to a passage in the penultimate section of Kims (1993) earliest essay. There
she recounts the trials and tribulations that followed upon the publication of a
shorter version of the same essay in Newsweek magazine. The bulk of mail received
in response was standard racist fare, replete with accusations of treason and calls
for immediate repatriation. In spite of this, Kim (1993) finds encouragement in the
many supportive and sympathetic letters arriving from both white allies and other
people of color. After all is said and done, however, it is an unnamed black
male prisoner (a non-violent offender)34 who writes the most touching
letter. He is describing a process of political enlightenment in which

he moves away from a presumably narrow black nationalism toward

100 Critical Sociology 36(1) some broader conception of multiracial
solidarity, at which point he is able to write the following: Our
struggle(s) are truly one in the same, your peoples struggle [is] my
peoples struggle (Kim 1993: 228). This gesture of newfound political
solidarity from the underside of civil society is not offered in service
of any stated self-interest on the part of the imprisoned black man
and it does not appeal to a convergence of interests linked to specific and
identifiable goals. It is not communicated across two independent bases

of power, but across the distance of extreme inequality . It is predicated

on a denunciation of property destruction and shaped by a curious
appeal to shared distress. But Kims identification is not driven by
her sympathy for a prisoner (much less the pain and suffering of his more

than two million imprisoned counterparts and all their relations), but the

pleasure taken in receiving the sympathy of a prisoner for the

(largely insured and recoverable) loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in
business property for a community of small merchants. What
happened in LA during the riot really hurt me because [there] was no way that
blacks [were] suppose[d] to do the things to your people that they did (Kim
1993: 228). For Kim (1993) the rationalization proves cathartic: This is
the ground I need to claim now for Korean American resistance and recovery, so
that we can become American without dying of han. (1993) The censure that
grounds the captive black mans statement of common cause by depicting resident
blacks as already discredited outlaws appears again to be the compulsory knock
at the Americanizing door before it will open (Morrison 1993: 57). Like the African
American man who wrote from prison, the African American man who had

been brutally beaten by white police might have felt the desire to love
everybody , but he had to amend or rectify that wish. He had to

speak last about loving people of color. The impulse to love

everybody was there, but the conditions were not right . For now, the

most practical and progressive agenda may be people of color trying

to work it out (Kim 1993: 228). Here, the ground of multiracial
solidarity is driven by the image of a black mans desire to love
interracially, a properly trained impulse that settles for the most
practical and progressive agenda. Thus, in working out the relations
between blacks and Asians , political or otherwise, we find an interracial
love borne by the interdiction of black rage , whose eventual and eventful
violence is, for all of our theorizing, ultimately without either explanation or
justification. To claim there was no way blacks were supposed to do the things
that they did is only to say there was no good reason. The profound damage
could have been exacted only for the wrong reason, or, perhaps, for no reason
whatsoever. In the final analysis, our intellectual efforts founder in
case after disastrous case of those angry black people (Matsuda
2002: 395) giving vent to frustration and resentment, perennially on the
verge of ignition. If we are coalition-minded, which is to say looking for

love (in all the wrong places), we are enjoined to purge the elements
of rage that make the specter of black violence such a hulking material
force: wreaking devastation, destruction, erasure and, at the extreme,

extermination.35 In the imaginary of this interracial political

romance, black rage converts magically into black affection.36
Considering the professed love of two black men from their respective locations
behind bars, beneath the baton, staring down the barrel of a gun we must ask
whether there is not a relation Sexton: Proprieties of Coalition 101

between the terror of state-sponsored racist violence and black

peoples seeming willingness to assure non-blacks (not least their

comrades!) of their security by exorcizing the specter of their own
violence and distinguishing themselves from the haunting image of
their own inconsolable rage. We must ask whether blacks are not
compelled to declare I love you by the proprieties of coalition that
permeate the hope to come clean and continue the interaction
[between blacks and Asians], freed from the burdening specter of
disaster (Chang 1998). Assuming we can move beyond a solidarity of
fear driven by the opportunistic protection of ones property in a
riot (Prashad 2001: 125), we might ask, further: is the quest for black love
so consuming that one will call on the police to secure it? Fortunately,
there are some among those thinking seriously about this conflicted/collaborative
interaction seeking a different common ground against property and propriety

Set Col

1NC
Their silence is the active disavowal of colonial violence and
the systematic annihilation of the other. Impact calculus must
begin from the site of the colonized body for which there is no
subjectivity, but death as the only available state of being.
-

This is not really a great link

Ndlovu-Gatshenoi 13 (Sabelo J., Head of the Archie Mafeje Research Institute,

University of South Africa, Professor of Development Studies, Coloniality of Power
in Postcolonial Africa Myths of Decolonization, 3/4/13, Chp 5 p.125-144, accessed
7/7/16) rz

The concept of coloniality of being locates the roots of violence

against Africans and other colonized people within the expansion of Western
modernity. It qualifies Casparus Barleus colonial dictum of beyond the
equator there are no sins by making the lives of colonized hellish.
Coloniality of being captures the central question of the effects of coloniality on
lived experiences of the colonized people that were mediated by the master-slave
and colonizercolonized dialectic where violence was naturalized and
routinized as a key feature of colonial government. The anarchic and
traumatic moment of the constitution of the colonizer and the colonized
subjectivities within the colonial encounters symbolized by the meeting of
Europeans and Africans led to the birth of what Fanon termed existentialia of the
subject of the coloniality of being. Fanon in his critique of Hegels ideas on
ontology, Frantz Fanon did not only contribute towards an alternative depiction of
the master-slave dialectic but, as Maldonado-Torres (2007: 242) argues, he also
advanced a rethinking of ontology in the light of coloniality and the search for
decolonization in his acclaimed book Black Skins, White Masks (1968). The

concept of coloniality of being is important as it captures not only

the depersonalization of black people under colonialism but the
constitution of Africans as racialized subjects with next to no value
placed on their lives. In the space of the colonized, death was no
extra-ordinary affair but a constitutive feature of the reality of
colonized and racialized subjects (Maldonado 2007: 251). At the centre of
coloniality of being is blackness as a defining feature of what Fanon (1968b: 110119) referred to as the damne (the condemned of the earth). Coloniality of

being is meant to capture the hell that descended on the colonized

lives and became naturalized and routinized as the African mode of being.
This hellish life is well described by Maldonado-Torres in this way: Hellish
existence in the colonial world carries with it both the racial and the
gendered aspects of the naturalization of the non-ethics of war.
Indeed, coloniality of Being primarily refers to the normalization of the
extraordinary events that take place in war . While in war there is murder and

rape, in the hell of the colonial world murder and rape become day to

day occurrences and menaces. Killability and rapeability are

inscribed into images of the colonial bodies . Lacking real authority,

colonized men are permanently feminized. [] Blackness in a

colonial antiblack world is part of a larger context of meaning in
which the non-ethics of war gradually becomes a constitutive part of
an alleged normal world (emphasis is in the original source) (Maldonado-Torres
2007: 255). One of the characteristics of the colonized person was is
disappearance of their humanity under the shadow of dehumanization.
Coloniality of being can be summarized as a state of human exception from the
order of normal being as represented by the colonizer. It refers to the violation of
the meaning of human alterity to the point where the alter-ego becomes a sub-alter
(Maldonado-Torres 2007:257). The daily life of the colonized

approximated very closely with situations of war. It is a humanity

that is denied (Maldonado 2007: 257). Fanon described black subjectivity that
emerged from the world of coloniality of being as damne, arguing that this subject
has non-ontological resistance in the eyes of the dominant group. The damn are
said to co-exist with death as their whole live are perpetually lived in the
company of death (Maldonado 2007: 257). It is a dark side of being
characterized by neglect, denial of humanity and betrayals by other
human beings. Colonial modernity was accompanied by the proletarianization of
Africans who were dispossessed and then forcibly pressed into serving as cheap
labour for white-owned farms, industries and mines, thus entering another hell in
the cities. The cities and urban centres were racially fragmented into two racial
realms, feeding Fanon with the material to provide an informative comparison
between the lives of natives and settlers within the urban colonial society The
settlers town is a strongly-built town, all made of stone and steel. It is a
brightly-lit town; the streets are covered with asphalt, and the garbage-cans

swallow all the leavings, unseen, unknown and hardly thought

about. The settlers feet are never visible, except perhaps in the sea; but there
youre never close enough to see them. His feet are protected by strong shoes
although the streets of his town are clean and even, with no holes or stones. The
settlers town is well-fed town, an easy-going town; its belly is always full of good
things. The settlers town is a town of white people, of foreigners (Fanon Ibid). On
the other side, is the town of the colonized people, which Fanon portrayed thus: The
town belonging to the colonized people [] is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of
evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there; it
matters not where, nor how. It is a world without spaciousness; men live there on
top of each other, and their huts are built one on top of the other. The native town is
a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light. The native town
is a crouching village, a town on its knees, a town wallowing in the mire (Fanon
1968a: 30). A few examples will help explain how violence has its roots deep in

colonial encounters and colonial modernity as well as how violence migrated from
the colonial period into the postcolonial neo-colonized present.

FW
Best FW for understanding race.
Glen 15 (Evelyn Nakano, Professor of Gender & Women's Studies and of Ethnic
Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, Settler Colonialism as Structure: A
Framework for Comparative Studies of U.S. Race and Gender Formation, Sociology
of Race and Ethnicity 2015, Vol. 1(1) 5474 American Sociological Association
2014,
http://www.asanet.org/sites/default/files/savvy/journals/SRE/Jan15SREFeature.pdf,
accessed 7/8/15) rz
Summary and Conclusions
The most widely used sociological frameworks for theorizing race
relations in the United States have focused on generating analyses that

encompass not just anti-black racism but also anti-Latino and

antiAsian American racisms. What these frameworks share is an
appreciation that racial hierarchy and inequality are not simply the products
of individual beliefs and attitudes but are built into American social
structure and that whites have historically benefited from racial inequality. I have
found each of the major frameworks, internal colonialism, racial formation, and
racialized social systems, useful in my own work in comparative race and gender
studies. However, what these theories do not explicitly consider is whether
and in what ways U.S. national and regional racial systems may be
unique and/or idiosyncratic because they have grown out of distinct
material, social, and cultural circumstances, in this case, U.S. settler
colonialism. I have offered the concept of settler colonialism as

structure, as a framework that encourages and facilitates

comparativity within and across regions and time. I believe that a
settler colonial structural analysis reveals the underlying systems of
beliefs, practices, and institutional systems that undergird and link
the racialization and management of Native Americans, blacks,
Mexicans and other Latinos, and Chinese and other Asian Americans
that I have described herein. What are these underlying systems/structures? First,
the defining characteristic of settler colonialism is its intention to acquire
and occupy land on which to settle permanently, instead of merely to
exploit resources. In order to realize this goal, the indigenous people who
occupy the land have to be eliminated. Thus, one logic of settler colonial policy
has been the ultimate erasure of Native Americans. This goal was pursued
through various forms of genocide, ranging from military violence to biological
and cultural assimilation. British settler colonialism in what became the United
States was particularly effective because it promoted family settlement right from
the beginning. Thus, the growth of the settler population and its westward
movement was continuous and relentless. Settler ideology justified
elimination via the belief that the savage, heathen, uncivilized indigenes were not

making productive use of the land or its resources. Thus, they inevitably had to give
way to enlightened and civilized Europeans. The difference between
indigenes and settlers was simultaneously racialized and gendered.
While racializing Native ways of life and Native Americans as other,

settlers developed their selfidentities as white, equating

civilization and democracy with whiteness. Indian masculinity was viewed
as primitive and violent, while Indian women were viewed as lacking feminine
modesty and restraint. With independence from the metropole, the founders
imagined the new nation as a white republic governed by and for white men.
Second, in order to realize a profitable return from the land, settlers sought to
intensively cultivate it for agriculture, extract resources, and build the infrastructure
for both cultivation and extraction. For this purpose, especially on large-scale
holdings that were available in the New World, extensive labor power was needed.
As we have seen, settlers in all regions enslaved Native Americans, and the
transnational trade in Native slaves helped to finance the building of Southern
plantations. However, in the long run, settlers could not amass a large
enough Indigenous slave workforce both because indigenes died in large
numbers from European diseases and because they could sometimes escape and
then survive in the wilderness. Settlers thus turned to African slave labor.
Slave labor power could generate profit for the owner in a variety of ways: by
performing field labor, processing raw materials, and producing goods for use or
sale and by being leased out to others to earn money for the owner. What linked

land taking from indigenes and black chattel slavery was a private
property regime that converted people, ideas, and things into
property that could be bought, owned, and sold. The purchase,
ownership, and sale of property, whether inanimate or human, were
regularized by property law or in the case of chattel slaves, by slave
law. Generally, ownership entails the right to do whatever one wants
with ones propertyto sell, lend, or rent it and to seize the profits
extracted from its use. The elimination of Native Americans and the
enslavement of blacks form two nodes that have anchored U.S. racial formation.
Redness has been made to disappear, such that contemporary Native

Americans have become largely invisible in white consciousness. In

contrast, blackness has been made 70 Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1(1)
hypervisible, and blacks are constantly present as an imagined threat to whites
and the settler colonial social order. As pointed out earlier, Indianness is
thought to be diluted and then to disappear through miscegenation,
while blackness is thought to be continually reproduced even
through generations of miscegenation. In this respect as well as
others, the racialization of blacksthe irredeemability and
dehumanization of blackshas been incommensurable with the
racialization of other groups. Nonetheless, the racialization of certain
(in Lorenzo Veracinis term) exogenous others has been a prominent
feature of settler colonial societies. In the United States, some groups have

been recruited and/or tracked into hard labor and super-exploited because they can
be induced to work by need and kept in place by restricted mobility. For a nation
that purports to stand for freedom, opportunity, and equality, the United States has
had a long history of imposing coercive labor regimes, social segregation, and
restricted mobility on many of its residents. Racializing certain groups as

insufficiently human serves to justify subjecting them to oppression,

subordination, and super-exploitation. Thus, conditions of compelled labor
short of chattel slaverycontract labor, sharecropping, payment in scrip, wages
paid only after completion of a long period of workwere legally allowed and
commonly imposed on racialized others even after the abolition of slavery. These
practices were designed to immobilize and disable workers ability to survive by
other means and thereby tie down theoretically free workers. These forms of

coercion might be labeled de facto slavery because they do not

involve ownership of the person and the enforcement of slave law.
The experiences of national and local policies toward Mexicans and
Chinese were examined herein to help illuminate the linked
processes of racialization and super-exploitation in U.S. settler
colonialism. Racialization has been integral to resolving the
contradiction between settler ideologies of freedom, equality, and
progress and the unfreedom, inequality, and denial of mobility and citizenship
rights to Mexican Americans in the Southwest and Chinese Americans in the Far
West. The various technologies of control and management (segregation, cultural
erasure, terrorism, expulsion, and legal exclusion) served the interests of capitalism
by enabling landowners, plantation owners, and railroad companies to super-exploit
these exogenous others. At the same time, racialization of others enabled white
workers to reap a psychic reward, the so-called wages of whiteness to succor the
wounds inflicted by class inferiority. The case studies of Mexican Americans

and Chinese Americans further illustrate the importance of paying

attention to both the specificities and differences and the
connections and commonalities among and between the
experiences of various racialized others. Some of the major technologies
for control and management of racialized groups were similar, most prominently the
use of terrorism. It could be argued that the continuous history of genocide against
Native Americans helped to normalize the use of extreme violence against nonwhite others. Extreme violence was rationalized as necessary to
ensure settler security. As described, not only blacks, but also Mexicans

and Chinese were subjected to extreme and disproportionate

violence that might well be characterized as ethnic cleansing. And, as
in the case of the denial of the founding violence against Native Americans, white
settler culture either denied or forgot its violence toward Mexicans
and Chinese by magnifying the threat they posed not only to individual whites
but also to the nation. The technology of erasure through cultural assimilation
practiced on Native Americans was also employed on Mexican Americans. In both
cases, schooling was intended to prepare girls and boys for gender-appropriate

domestic and vocational skills. The speaking of childrens natal languages was
punished, and mainstream (white/ Anglo) ways of living were valorized. Education
was also intended to teach racialized children their place in American society, that
is, to accept and be satisfied with a limited future. The technologies unique to

Mexicans and Chinese were those of mass deportation and legal

exclusion. Native Americans could be and were removed to remote reservations
in the United States and in a few instances driven across the Southern border into
Mexico, but they were not legally deported. Removal of freed blacks and resettling
them in Africa was tried after the Civil War, but the number of those removed was
only a small proportion of the population. Whites in the South were able to reimpose a white supremacist order that could control and super-exploit black labor.
However, once the transcontinental railroad was completed, Chinese
labor was not strictly necessary in the West, and moreover, as

immigrants, the Chinese could more easily be subjected to

expulsion and exclusion. In fact, the Chinese were the first immigrant
group subject to exclusion, first through the Page Act of 1875 and the
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and then through the Immigration Act
of 1924 that extended exclusion to cover other Asian peoples. Glenn
71 As described earlier, for nearly a century after the U.S. takeover of the
Southwest, Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans were able to cross back and
forth across the southern border more or less freely. However, this situation began
to change during the 1920s with the establishment of the U.S. Border Patrol.
Because of high unemployment during the Great Depression, Mexican Americans
became the first group subject to mass deportation. A second large-scale
deportation occurred during another period of unemployment in the 1950s under
Operation Wetback. The first decades of the twenty-first century saw the creation
and establishment of a vast federal machinery for safeguarding our borders,
ostensibly to battle terrorism. This machinery has been wielded primarily against
Mexicans, who are viewed as constituting a different kind of threat, a menace to
mainstream American (white) culture. Thus, the majority of deportees continues
to be immigrants from Mexico. Throughout my historical analyses of settler colonial
structures and practices as they developed in relation to Indigenous peoples,
blacks, Mexicans, and Chinese, I have tried to apply an intersectional lens that
views race and gender as co-formations. The bulk of the discussion has perhaps
focused greater attention on race and racialization; however, gender has been
present throughout the text. I pointed out that the settler project constructed
various racialized gender and gendered racial dualisms. The white race was
masculinized in relation to feminized black, red, or yellow races. Settler ideology
also defined appropriate gender relations within the settler family and community,
variously using Indian, black, and others as negative foils. White settler society
understood extreme gender differentiation as a mark of civilization and thus
attempted to shape white womanhood toward domesticity and dependency.
Importantly, white women were viewed as needing to be protected by white men,
particularly from the dangers posed by the primitive or perverse male sexuality of
Natives, slaves, and exogenous others. Thus, for example, lurid tales of Indian
capture of white women and their rescue by white soldiers circulated widely in

settler culture. Meanwhile, Indian, black, and exogenous women were viewed
variously as shameless, docile, alluring, or unfeminine because they did mens
work. Settler colonialism also had different effects on men and women from
subjugated groups as shown in several instances discussed in the main text. For
example, it was mentioned that Indian women were more likely to be enslaved,
while adult Indian men were more likely to be killed. Relatedly, Indian women were
also more likely to be brought into settler households to be sex slaves and domestic
servants. As for the Chinese, although male laborers were eventually
subject to exclusion, women had been legally excluded earlier and
more stringently on the assumption that all Chinese women attempting
to enter were prostitutes. In contrast, Mexican women were sometimes
viewed more favorably than Mexican men and were thought to be appropriate wives
for Anglo men. As for enslaved blacks, women were subjected to gender-specific
violence such as rape but not exempted from the same kinds of physical
punishment and heavy field labor to which slave men were subjected. I will now
briefly consider the implications of the present analysis in relation to anti-racist
politics. Given that many different groups have been victimized by

racial violence, exclusion, and dehumanization, coalitions among

racialized minorities are desirable and necessary. I suggest that
coalitions are best built by recognizing the specific histories of
racialized minorities other than our own. Our understandings ideally
should reckon with (a) commonalities, (b) relations and connections,
and (c) differences. All of these are highlighted by this settler colonial
analysis. Many commonalities have emerged from the case analyses,
including experiences of genocide and terrorism that have been
inflicted, justified, and forgotten or deemphasized by settler
society. Also having emerged are relations/connections in the
experiences of different groups that complicate their positionality
vis-- vis one another. Thus, for example, the analysis might lead us to ask
whether and in what ways racialized minorities might position themselves in
relation to the territorial dispossession of Native Americans. Finally, some
significant differences have emerged; for example, only blacks were

subjected to chattel slavery, which is a condition of social death and

subjection by slave law that even those who worked under
conditions of extreme coercion did not share. A final thought: in this
article I have suggested that a settler colonialism framework for analyzing
and understanding race and gender in America will have certain
advantages over other frameworks, most specifically in the strength
of its historicity and in a fuller incorporation of the role of Native
Americans in how racism and gender oppression have developed

and continue to operate. A question with which I have not dealt is to what
extent can a settler colonial framework relate to and interact with other frameworks
such as internal colonialism, 72 Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1(1) racial

formation, and racialized social systems. My belief is that there are significant
insights and analytical methods offered by each of the frameworks and
that the addition of settler colonialism to the mix may help us to work toward a
higher level theoretical model that can be widely used by social scientists both in
the United States and internationally. I suggest that a fruitful next task will be for us
to explore and discuss the connections and relationships among the various
frameworks, with a new awareness of the distinct historical, social, and cultural
understandings brought to our table by the settler colonialism framework.

Case

AT Genealogy
Foucaults method of genealogy is too abstract and superficial
to be effective.
Resch 92 (Robert Paul, Associate Professor of History at Texas A&M University,
Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory, University of California Press
1992) rz
Interpretations of Foucault's dense and elliptic text have ranged from serious
philosophical exegesis to aesthetic appreciation of it as a parody of epistemological
discourse. One interpretive strategy, surprisingly overlooked by otherwise thorough
commentators, is the anti-Althusserian dialectic at work in The Archaeology of
Knowledge . Foucault's "archaeological method" is largely a negative

image of Althusser's differential history. Both approaches begin with

the discontinuity of historical discourse and the absence of any
absolute grounding for historical knowledge. The difference is that
Structural Marxism incorporates these incontestable positions into a problematic
that then moves on to produce knowledges whose validity it may not be able to
prove philosophically but which it can use to defend itself on the battlefield of
philosophy. Foucault's archaeological method, in contrast, cannot but

flaunt its own arbitrariness and brazenly accept the consequences.

"If, by substituting the analysis of the rarity for the search for
totalities, the description of relations of exteriority for the theme of
241 transcendental foundation, the analysis of accumulations for
the quest of the origin, one is a positivist, then I am quite happy to
be one" (Foucault 1972, 109). Foucault's discourse is willfully superficial
since, in his view, any attempt to assert meaning constitutes a fall into
the coils of modernist oppositions. "It is not possible for us to
describe our own archive, since it is from within these rules that we
speak" (Foucault 1972, 130). Yet Foucault certainly does speak, and he
expects to be taken seriously: "in so far as it is possible to constitute a
general theory of productions, archaeology, as the analysis of rules proper to the
different discursive practices, will find what might be called its enveloping theory "
(Foucault 1972, 207). Those who dare to press Foucault on matters of

inconsistency, logical contradiction, or the larger theoretical

implications of his archaeological method are dismissed as
theoretical tyrants: "Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the
same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order"
(Foucault 1972, 17). This last remark is the most prescient in The
Archaeology of Knowledge . It portends the imminent resolution of

the tension between the production of discourse through epistemic

structures and the social determination of the structures of thought
themselves by means of an undifferentiated concept of
knowledge/power.

AT Melancholia
The 1AC is premised on a misreading of melancholia. Their
impacts dont derive from an externally imposed attachment to
the object of whiteness, but from a narcissistic refusal to
accept/overcome the pain of loss. The aff doesnt solve.
Ogden 02 (Thomas H., San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute California, A new
reading of the origins of object relations theory, International Journal of
Psychoanalysis, 2002 Aug;83(Pt 4):767-82,
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12204163, accessed 7/13/16) rz

A misreading of Mourning and Melancholia has, to my mind, become

entrenched in what is commonly held to be Freuds view of melancholia (see, for
example, Gay, 1988, pp. 372373). What I am referring to is the
misconception that melancholia , according to Freud, involves an
identification with the hated aspect of an ambivalently loved object that
has been lost . Such a reading, while accurate so far as it goes, misses the
central point of Freuds thesis. What differentiates the melancholic

from the mourner is the fact that the melancholic has all along been
able to engage only in narcissistic forms of object relatedness . The
narcissistic nature of the melancholics personality renders him
incapable of maintaining a firm connection with the painful reality of
the irrevocable loss of the object that is necessary for mourning.
Melancholia involves ready, reflexive recourse to regression to
narcissistic identification as a way of not experiencing the hard edge
of recognition of ones inability to undo the fact of the loss of the
object. Object relations theory, as it is taking shape in the course of Freuds writing
this paper, now includes an early developmental axis. The world of unconscious
internal object relations is being viewed by Freud as a defensive regression to very
early forms of object relatedness in response to psychological pain in the case
of the melancholic, the pain is the pain of loss. The individual
replaces what might have become a three-dimensional relatedness to
the mortal and at times disappointing external object with a twodimensional (shadow-like) relationship to an internal object that
exists in a psychological domain outside time (and consequently
sheltered from the reality of death). In so doing, the melancholic evades the
pain of loss and, by extension, other forms of psychological pain, but

does so at an enormous costthe loss of a good deal of his own

(emotional) vitality

AT Affect
The 1AC as an affective object fails politically because affect is
not a monolithic phenomenon the affs method is too
subjective to mobilize collective response and breeds
negativity, alienating those who experience deviating
reactions. Analyzing the process of affective conversion is
more productive.
Ahmed 07 (Sarah, Professor in Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths
University of London, Multiculturalism and the Promise of Happiness, New
Formations, Winter 2007/2008; pg. 121,
https://people.mcgill.ca/igsf/files/igsf/Ahmed1_multiculturalism.pdf, accessed
7/11/16) rz
So we may walk into the room and 'feel the atmosphere', but what
we may feel depends on the angle of our arrival . Or we might say that
the atmosphere is already angled; it is always felt from a specific point.
The pedagogic encounter is full of angles. How many times have I read

students as interested or bored, such that the atmosphere seemed one of

interest or boredom (and even felt myself to be interesting or boring)
only to find students recall the event quite differently ! Having read the
atmosphere in a certain way, one can become tense: which in turn affects what
happens, how things move along. The moods we arrive with do affect what
happens : which is not to say we always keep our moods. Sometimes I arrive

feeling heavy with anxiety, and everything that happens makes me

feel more anxious, whilst at other times, things happen which ease
the anxiety, making the space itself seem light and energetic. We do
not know in advance what will happen given this contingency , given
the hap of what happens; we do not know 'exactly' what makes things
happen in this way and that. Situations are affective given this gap between
the impressions we have of others, which are lively, and the impressions we make
on others. Think too of experiences of alienation. I have suggested that happiness is
attributed to certain objects that circulate as social goods. When we feel pleasure
from such objects, we are aligned; we are facing the right way. We become
alienated out of line with an affective community when we do not
experience pleasure from proximity to objects that are attributed as

being good. The gap between the affective value of an object and
how we experience an object can involve a range of affects, which are
directed by the modes of explanation we offer to fill this gap. If we are
disappointed by something that we expected would make us happy,
then we generate explanations of why that thing is disappointing.

Such explanations can involve an anxious narrative of self-doubt (why I

am not made happy by this, what is wrong with me?) or a narrative
of rage , where the object that is 'supposed' to make us happy is

attributed as the cause of disappointment, which can lead to a rage

directed towards those that promised us happiness through the elevation
of the object as being good . We become strangers , or affect aliens , in

such moments. So when happy objects are passed around , it is not

necessarily the feeling that passes . To share such objects (or have a share in
such objects) would simply mean you would share an orientation towards those
objects as being good. The family for instance might be happy not because it
causes happiness, but because of a shared orientation towards the family as being
good. Happiness is precarious; it does not reside in subjects or objects, but is an
effect of what gets passed around. What passes through the passing around of
happy objects must remain an open question. Objects become sticky, saturated with
affects, as sites of personal and social tension. After all, the word 'passing' can
mean not only `to send over' or `to transmit', but also to transform objects by 'a
sleight of hand'. Like the game Chinese whispers, what passes between

proximate bodies, might be affective because it deviate s and even

pervert s what was 'sent out'. What interests me is how affects

involve perversion; and what we could describe as conversion

points. One of my key questions is how such conversions happen, and
'who' or 'what' gets seen as converting bad feeling into good feeling
and good into bad. We need to attend to such points of conversion , and
how they involve explanations of 'where' good and bad feelings
reside. The sociality of affect involves 'tension given the ways in
which good and bad feelings are unevenly distributed in the social
field. When I hear people say 'the bad feeling is coming from "this person" or "that
person" I am never convinced. I am sure a lot of my scepticism is shaped by
childhood experiences of being a feminist daughter, at odds with the performance
of good feeling in the family, always assumed to be bringing others down, for
example, by pointing out sexism in other people's talk. Take the figure of the
kill joy feminist. We can place her alongside the figure of the happy
housewife. Does the feminist kill other people's joy by pointing out

moments of sexism? Or does she expose the bad feelings that get
hidden, displaced or negated under public signs of joy? Does bad
feeling enter the worn when somebody expresses anger about things, or could
anger be the moment when the bad feelings that saturate objects get brought to
the surface in a certain way? The feminist after all might kill joy precisely because
she refuses to share an orientation towards certain things as being good, because
she does not find the objects that promise happiness to be quite so promising. By

not expressing happiness in response to proximity to such objects,

the feminist becomes an affect alien; she 'brings things down'.

The affective turn is an unproductive substitute for critique

and subversion. It fails to translate into political change.
Pruchnic 08 (Jeff, Associate Professor of English at Wayne State University, THE
INVISIBLE GLAND: AFFECT AND POLITICAL ECONOMY, Criticism: Vol. 50: Iss. 1,
Article 11, http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1268&context=criticism, accessed 7/13/16) rz

These chapters on affective labor also most explicitly foreground the diffi
culty of integrating affect into theories of political economy and
possibilities for political action . Although contributors ably map how

affect creates value in contemporary capitalism, they struggle

somewhat with determining the value of affector, more precisely, the value
of affect theoryin changing our responses to economic and cultural
practices. Granted, many of the authors explicitly position their projects as
diagnostic rather than prescriptive in nature. Wissinger concludes by suggesting
that thinking about preindividual forces of affectivity and bodily energies provides
a new angle on how imagining technologies constitute bodies (255). Ducey
similarly defers focus on possible responses to affective labor, arguing
that since affect is not subject to the usual forms of measurement and
analysis . . . the political responses its modulations call forth are
emergent and unpredictable (205). The essays that do focus most

explicitly on such responses are, ironically, those in which theories

of affective labor are a starting-off point rather than a consistent
resource in their analysis. As such, their conclusions tend to follow
descriptions of the new importance of affect in economics and culture with fairly
traditional suggestions for intervention based on collective organization and political
recognition. For example, Melissa Ditmore concludes her sharp analysis of the
Dunbar Mahila Samanwanya Committee, an organization that promotes the safety
and welfare of its sixty thousand Indian sex workers, by noting irony in the fact that
the DMSC works with immaterial affect laborers in the worlds oldest, but as yet
unrecognized, profession to advance their cause at a far deeper, more meaningful
and effective level than has been achieved by recognized workers in affect labor
(184). However, the productive interventions identifi ed here are fairly traditional,
and because of the relative singularity of what Ditmore calls the worlds oldest
form of affective labor (both generally and particularly in India, where the laws
governing sex work are fairly ambiguous), it is diffi cult to imagine how the
examples given here might be translated to other forms of affective
labor (such as health care, womens work, and modeling, to use the other
industries assayed in this subject cluster) (170). Similarly, David Staples contributes
a notable argument that affective labor is best approached through a Bataillean
general economy rather than a restricted political economy, but his conclusion

suggests that the best response to the devaluation of womens work is to quantify
the time of that labor; drawing on Derridas work on gift economies, Staples states
that although the ethical duty or responsibility implicit in child care cannot be
measured, or estimated, or valorized as such, the time of child care can, and can
also be rewarded based on its duration, a measure he sees occurring in the
commodifi cation of child care generally and in the 1999 rewriting of the
constitution of Venezuela in particular (145). Both the conclusions marking

the unpredictability of future response and those relying on fairly

traditional strategies of intervention speak to the relative diffi culty
of following up analyses of the operations of affect with techniques
for mobilizing affect productively. All of which is to say, though Affective
Turn does a better job of introducing readers to the central issues surrounding the
study of affect in the humanities and social sciences than any single work I am
aware of, its value comes as much from the way it underscores sticking points or
aporias in this work as from the individual accomplishments of its contributors.
Indeed, the above concerns are perhaps better taken not as criticisms of
Affective Turn but of the segment of the affective turn to which the

authors are most commonly respondingwork, notably that of Sedgwick

and Massumi, that has positioned affect theory as a productive
alternative to critique in its traditional sense: a way out of the
ostensibly moribund focus on relationships of dominance and subversion
and the identifi cation of this or that phenomenon as ideologically or socially
constructed. Certainly such an endeavor has had a salutary effect on the
contemporary critical terrain, both through its emphasis on the often-neglected role
of human physiology and nervous processes in human subjectivity and ideation, as
well as its antagonism toward the idea that beliefs and predispositions can
somehow be made privative or defused when exposed to rational critique. However,
the question of how to deploy these insights within the traditionally

rational ecology of research in the humanities and social

scientists has proven to be a thornier issue.

Race
The abolition of race is a prerequisite. Any other anti-racist
practice reentrenches white supremacy.
Seshadri-Crooks 2K (Kalpana, Professor of English at Boston College,
Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race, Routledge Press 2000) rz
Guillaumins terms are useful not so much in distinguishing between premodern and
contemporary notions of race, as she suggests, but rather in discerning the
emergence of race through the self-splitting referred to earlier. Guillaumins failure
to discern the notion of Whiteness as the organizing principle of Eurocentrism (as
distinguished from banal ethnocentrisms) enables her to exonerate both
ethnocentrism and aristocratism as not true racism. But proper attention to the
crucial element of class at play in Whiteness reveals that it is not about
aristocratism, but about the people- the volk, with precisely the sense of its own
naturalness that Guillaumin disavows as an element in auto-referential systems. I
would also suggest that the altero-referential system does not so much displace but
is founded on the auto-referential notion of Whiteness. Thus the discourse of race as
we understand it today is an effect of that internal splitting that we identified earlier
as the cause of race. The structure of race is totalizing, and attempts to

master and overcome all difference within its boundaries. The

dichotomy of self and other is within Whiteness in the competition
over who properly possesses Whiteness, or sovereign humanness.
H.F.K.Gunthers (1927) classification along physiognomic lines is a part of the
logicalm nucleus of racial visibility grounded in the narcissism of small differences
that grounds racial visibility. Thus in Gunthers classification, other European races
such as the Mediterranean can carry the Negro strain, or the Tartar may carry the
Asiatic. The signifier Whiteness is about gaining a monopoly on the
notion of humanness, and is not simply the displaceable or reversible pinnacle
of the great chain of being.22 However, one must not forget that as the

unconscious principle or the master signifier of the symbolic

ordering of race, Whiteness also makes possible difference and
racial inter-subjectivity. It orders, classifies, categorizes,
demarcates and separates human beings on the basis of what is
considered to be a natural and neutral epistemology. This
knowledge is also the agency that produces and maintains
differences through a series of socially instituted and legally
enforced laws under the name of equality, multiculturalism,
antidiscrimination, etc. Anti-racist legislations and practices , in other words,
work ultimately in the service of race , which is inherently,
unambiguously, structurally supremacist . The structure of race is

deeply fissured, and that is discernible in the constitutive tension, or

contradiction between its need to establish absolute differences,
and its illegal desire to assert sameness. In fact, race establishes and

preserves difference for the ultimate goal of sameness , in order to

reproduce the desire for Whiteness . As Foucault might have put it, race

separates in order to master. However, unlike the technologies of power that

Foucault so painstakingly detailed, the analysis of race cannot be exhausted
through its historicization. Race produces unconscious effects, and as a

hybrid structure located somewhere between essence and

construct, it determines the destiny of human bodies. It is our ethical and
political task to figure out how destiny comes to be inscribed as
anatomy, when that anatomy does not exist as such.

State Good
Critical Asian American scholarship must be pragmatic and
engage the law material liberation is objectively beneficial
and can co-exist with broader revolutionary goals despite
tension.
Chang 93 (Robert S., Professor of Law and Executive Director of the Fred T.
Korematsu Center for Law and Equality Seattle University School of Law, Toward an
Asian American Legal Scholarship: Critical Race Theory, Post-structuralism, and
Narrative Space, Seattle University School of Law Digital Commons 1993,
http://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1411&context=faculty, accessed 7/8/16) rz
A. Stage One: Denial

The first stage is characterized by a denial of difference and, usually,

faith in traditional civil rights work. This faith is premised on notions
grounded in liberal political philosophy. The methods employed may
be race-neutral or race-conscious.388 Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 319 which held that
the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause applied to Chinese and other
immigrants, 390 represents an example of a successful race-neutral effort under
Stage One. A consent decree that set forth goals and timetables for the San
Francisco Police Department to hire persons bilingual in Chinese is an example of a
successful race-conscious effort under Stage One. 391 Another successful raceconscious effort is the Voting Rights Language Assistance Act of 1992.392 As these
victories indicate, legal scholarship in Stage One focuses on formal equality

and pursues remedial measures in order to obtain equal rights. The

denial of difference in Stage One is often accompanied by a
preference for assimilation as a solution to discrimination. For
example, one Japanese American newspaper in 1929 urged the Nisei-second
generation Japanese Americans-to become "one hundred percent Americans" in
order to avoid discrimination.393 Failure to assimilate fully, we are warned, leads to
the imposition of certain penalties.394 Problems arise, though, when some people
realize the contradictions of assimilation: "I wanted to be an American.... I wondered
why God had not made me an American. If I couldn't be an American, then what
was I? A Japanese? No. But not an American either. My life background is
American.... [But] my looks made me Japanese., 395 Such a realization may either
lead someone to try even harder to be "American," 396 or to reject full assimilation
and accept being different. Proponents of Stage Two start from this premise.397

B. Stage Two: Affirmation

Stage Two recognizes that formal equality cannot give us what it

promises; 398 thus, rather than deny difference, Stage Two accepts
and affirms it. In this stage, the disempowered group takes and

reconstitutes the term "Asian American. ' a9 9 The oppressive label

becomes a positive identity, a tool for empowerment. As such, a facet
of Stage Two is its anti-assimilationist attitude.' Assimilation is seen
as undesirable because it "resembles the attempt to run away from
ourselves, with success coming only through the negation of self,
history, culture, and community."' In opposition to assimilation is pluralistic
integration,40 2 which is based on an appreciation of American society's culturally
pluralistic nature. 43 The characteristics of Stage Two are evident in Cultural Asian
American Legal Scholarship, which emphasizes cultural differences as a method to
criticize legal principles and legal institutions that fail to take into account these
differences. An example of work in this area is Questioning the Cultural and GenderBased Assumptions of the Adversary System: Voices of Asian American Law
Students, 0 written by Carolyn Jin-Myung Oh. In her article, Oh examines the cultural
backgrounds of some Asian American law students and their perceptions of the
adversary system. She contrasts Western notions of individuality and self-sufficiency
with the greater emphasis on family in most Asian and Pacific American cultures." 5
She hypothesizes about the effects of Confucian principles "which emphasize
specific roles and proper harmonious relationships among people in family and
society. Because harmonious interpersonal relationships are so highly valued, direct
confrontation is avoided whenever possible. Being indirect or talking around the
point is a significant part of the communication style of Asian groups. 4 "" 6 While
the scope of her article is limited to responses of Asian American and Caucasian law
students to the potentially alienating legal system and their perceived roles within
it," 7 her focus on cultural explanations is a good example of the Cultural Asian
American Legal Scholarship embodied in Stage Two." We can use differences
between Asian cultures and Western cultures to question the assumptions of Stage
One's liberal political theory, which celebrates the notion of an individuated
autonomous self. As mentioned earlier, many Asian philosophies have at their
center the concept of noself.409 Without a metaphysical "self" as a locus
for rights, liberalism and rights talk lack coherence. Nevertheless,
Stage Two of Asian American Legal Scholarship recognizes that formal equality
cannot be denied to Asian Americans. Thus, Stage Two may also employ the

raceneutral and race-conscious methods of Stage One without

sharing its commitment to liberal political philosophy. Cultural Asian
American Legal Scholarship must avoid the pitfall of essentialism
present in cultural feminist theory.410 We must not generalize the
cultural differences of certain Asian American groups or individuals
in a way that excludes those who do not fit those characteristics. 41 I
Thus, for example, when authors write about Confucian principles, they should be
careful to note that for many Asian American groups, such as Filipinos, South Asians
and many Southeast Asians, Confucian principles may not be a significant part of
their culture. In addition to the essentialist critique, there is a further danger in
accepting difference, because difference, once recognized, can serve as the basis
for discrimination. This is, after all, exactly what discrimination is-differential
treatment based on difference. Radical Asian American Legal Scholarship operates

at this juncture by focusing on differences in power, particularly on how inequality in

power has constructed and legitimated racial subordination. Its focus thus contrasts
with traditional Asian American civil rights work, which treats difference as an
illusion or something to get beyond,4 " 2 and with Cultural Asian American Legal
Scholarship, which celebrates difference.413
C. Stage Three: Liberation

We see, then, that though there is power in affirming the category

Asian American, the category is also limiting, especially because it
remains defined in terms of the dominant group.414 As long as our
identity is defined oppositionally or in contradistinction to others,
we are still enslaved to a degree. That the term "Asian American"
can be an oppressive categorization is the starting point of the third branch
of Asian American Legal Scholarship-post-structuralism-which deconstructs the
category "Asian American," emancipating us from its limits. Only when we are free
of it can we be free to give ourselves our own identity.4 "5 Only in this way can we
be free to embrace our identity rather than having our identity thrust upon us from
the outside.416 The question becomes whether Asian American Legal Scholarship
can survive this post-structural deconstruction of the category "Asian American."4'1
7 If a full post-structural critique deconstructs all categories,
including race, then once the category "Asian American" is deconstructed, so the
question goes, how can it any longer serve as a useful category? This critique
misunderstands deconstruction. Part of the problem lies in the word
"deconstruction" which implies a breaking down or breaking apart.418
Deconstruction does no such thing. It reveals things to be historically situated and
socially constructed, but this realization in no way changes the current construction
of the category except to remove any foundational claims.419 Deconstruction
simply reveals the potential for change; a category could be constructed differently
in the future, or perhaps our present could be reconstructed differently by revising
or reinterpreting our past.420 To reiterate, in no way does deconstructing the
category "Asian American" change the fact that I am an Asian American. My

context has constructed me as Asian American. This understanding

of contextual situatedness enables Post-structural Asian American
Legal Scholarship to use multiple consciousness as a method to
understand and participate in Stages One, Two, and Three without
inconsistency. 421 It is able to do this because it understands law as a
contextual practice that has certain rules . Even while it criticizes and
tries to undermine those rules, it can engage in civil rights struggles
because it understands that removal of oppression is beneficial , even if

it must come in stages. Mari Matsuda's article, Voices of America: Accent,

Antidiscrimination Law, and a Jurisprudence for the Last Reconstruction, 42 2 is an
example of multiple consciousness at work. She says at the end of her article, " I

have written to persuade readers of good will to adopt legal rules

and ethical positions that promote linguistic pluralism. I have used

existing legal doctrine, traditional liberal theory, and new critical
theories in this effort."423 She recognizes the inherent
contradictions, the internal inconsistencies of doing all three, yet
she is able to do it because an Asian American Legal Scholarship has a
pragmatic face . It has a multiple consciousness that can assume

various guises. It assumes these guises with a final goal in mind:

liberation. Tremendous diversity exists within the category "Asian American." And
tremendous diversity exists among the disempowered. We must remember, though,
that it is only through solidarity that we will one day be free to express our diversity.

Recognition of anti-Asian violence begins with the law.

Woan 8 (Sunny, Santa Clara University, WHITE SEXUAL IMPERIALISM: A THEORY
OF ASIAN FEMINIST JURISPRUDENCE, Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights
and Social Justice Volume 14 | Issue 2 Article 5, 3/1/08,
http://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1243&context=crsj, accessed 6/25/16) rz
The U.S. recognizes the profound harms that the institution of slavery caused during
the early parts of American history which still endure today. Yet what about
imperialism? Students read of it from textbooks in neutral language. No sense of
penance comes with the recounts of U.S. occupation in Asia. Considering the

general trends of the Asian and diasporic Asian communities

enumerated in this essay, chiefly, severe underreporting of violent crimes
inflicted upon them and a lack of scholarship examining the role
imperialism played in the subjugation of Asian women, it comes as no
surprise that history, through America's eyes, would white-wash the imperialized
experience Asians endure even well into this century. Asian men feel
emasculated from the American media's portrayal of them as effeminate, and
many Asian women's subconscious preference for dating White men over Asian
men-a trend which has become increasingly popular. White men display the "Asian
fetish" syndrome, a symptom of not only the desire for male dominance, but also
the imported stereotype that Asian women want to be dominated. The mail-order
bride industry flourishes, capitalizing on the "Asian fetish." Then, the
overrepresentation of Asian women in pornography perpetuate the entire cycle of
White sexual imperialism as experienced by Asian women today. The action this

Article calls for is humble, but significant: recognition. Recognize

the pervasiveness of White sexual imperialism, understand its roots
and where the branches pan out, and see how firmly implanted it is
in the lives of those in the Asian community. The author asks for
little more for now: merely recognition. "Oppressed groups need the
law," said Professor Cynthia 216 Bowman. Thus, recognition of White
sexual imperialism begins with the law.