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Index
Index...................................................................................................................................................................1 1NC Shell.............................................................................................................................................................2 Space Links.......................................................................................................................................................10 Technology Links...............................................................................................................................................12 At: Aliens link....................................................................................................................................................12 Modernity links..................................................................................................................................................14 Racism Normative.............................................................................................................................................19 Apocalypse Now................................................................................................................................................22 Alternative Solvency.........................................................................................................................................24 Role of the ballot...............................................................................................................................................29 Framework........................................................................................................................................................31 Afrofuturism performance good........................................................................................................................39 General Performances Good..............................................................................................................................40 General Science Fiction Good............................................................................................................................41 At: Afrofuturism ignores American women........................................................................................................45 At: Afrofuturism ignores queer politics..............................................................................................................48 AT: Japanese Answers.......................................................................................................................................50 AT: Chicana Answers.........................................................................................................................................52 AT: Brazilian Answers........................................................................................................................................54 AT: Hip Hop Bad................................................................................................................................................61 .........................................................................................................................................................................67 At: Electronic music bad....................................................................................................................................67 AT: Cap K..........................................................................................................................................................68 At: Perm............................................................................................................................................................69 Affirmative answers..........................................................................................................................................70

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1NC Shell
We open this round as an opportunity to interrupt the hegemonic structure of white privilege within the debate round. As two white kids from private schools, we can use our social position to elicit a critique that will not be pushed to the margins in debate of the status quo. Only through this discursive resistance can we hope to dislodge the roots of oppression and domination that are generated within our own community. The affirmative has actively made the choice to remain complicit with and advance the logic of white domination, closing the door for anyone that does not fit the strict traditional, socially constructed norms of policy debate and public policy discourse.

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The apocalypse has already happened but the aff acts as if they can stop it. They fail to realize that the harms that they have identified have already been perpetrated by the system they have actively chosen to endorse in the 1ac. You should reject the affirmative for their complicity with the march of modernity that discursively reproduces the worst atrocities in history within the debate round. Only in its absence can we orient ourselves toward an Afrofuture. the 1ac representation of technological advancement and space exploration strengthens modernity through a white-washed construction of progress Modernity by its nature inevitably produces apocalyptic futures we must reconfigure our future seeking jubilee instead of progress Galli 09 (Galli, Chuck, "Hip-Hop Futurism: Remixing Afrofuturism and the Hermeneutics of Identity" (2009).
Honors Projects Overview. http://digitalcommons.ric.edu/honors_projects/18.) Gilroy contends that thinking about the future has a distinctive character in Black traditions and has roots in the material history of many Black peoples. He references the high frequency of Black spirituals based on deliverance and postulates that the mind of the Black slave was firmly planted in the future because the present was so hopeless and wretched. To grossly summarize his very brilliant works and arguments, Gilroy proposes that since the Black present has so often provided no impetus to survive or hope of personal and group betterment, the future became a mental and spiritual location for Blacks on the plantation, wherever that may have been.54 Gilroy considers himself to be a successor in this theoretical lineage (though obviously not informed by the same lived conditions as slaves and colonial subjects) and admits that when considering issues of race theory, racism, and anti-racism, he prefers to [invoke] the unknowable future against the unforgiving present.55 Gilroy believes that Corrective or compensatory inclusion in modernity should no longer supply the dominant theme of anti-racist discourse and says that people should self-consciously become more future oriented, drawing his inspiration from Franz Fanon, who advocated that one should know his history, but break from it if he is ever to be free.56 In his book The Black Atlantic, Gilroy deals with what he sees as a stark ideological differentiation between Western peoples and peoples of the African diaspora regarding their respective eschatologies.57 On the one hand, he identifies the theme of a futuristic utopia in the Western literary tradition. Western futurism, he claims, operates within a framework of European modernity and holds to the idea that society is progressing through rationalism, and that such progress will lead humans to better lives.58 Essentially, in the popular Western tradition, technological advances and material gain are seen as indicators of progress, and such progress can be followed along a rational path (that is, a path which rationalizes the continued perception of increased technological complexity and material gain as measures of advancement) toward a utopia where basic needs are no longer extant thanks to innovation, labor, and the removal from society of things which interfere with progress. Conversely, Gilroy points to a long tradition of the jubilee in Black literature and history that is inconsistent with the Western belief in utopia.59 If utopia is a state of perfect being achieved through a process of societal progress, jubilee is a process of being perfect regardless of the eventual destination.60 Gilroy relates the story of a female slave who fled to a free state with her children before the American Civil War and took refuge in a house. Upon finding her whereabouts, slave hunters surrounded the house with firearms and demanded that the woman and her children come out. Rather than do the rational thing and surrender in hopes of receiving less punishment for herself and he children, the woman grabbed a knife and slit the throat of one of her small children, making for the others in hopes of achieving the same ends.61 For the slave woman, the murder of her children is a jubilant thing, for it defies slavery as a practice and institution, terrorism, White supremacy, and American law. The act of perfect being in the moment supercedes the hope of attaining personal, material betterment. Gilroy credits this phenomenon of the jubilee in Black thought partially to the relationship between Blacks and labor.62 As Europe entered the Modern era and individual rights began to (slowly) replace the feudal labor system, Europeans began to see a correlation between their labor, personal progress, societal progress, and the betterment of everything through work.63 Blacks, Gilroy argues, were not infused with the same (some say Protestant) work ethic, tending to associate Modern labor with terror, slavery, colonization, and a diminishing of individual rights. As he succinctly puts it: This inclination towards death and away from bondage is fundamental. It reminds us that in the revolutionary eschatology which helps to define this primal history of modernity, whether apocalyptic or redemptive, it is the moment of jubilee that has the upper hand over the pursuit of utopia by rational means.64 The repeated choice of death rather than bondage articulates a principal of negativity that is opposed to the formal logic and rational calculation characteristic of modern western thinking and expressed in the Hegelian slaves preference for bondage rather than death.65 This resulted in a vastly different interpretation of the technological, economic, and civil advances created through work. Rather than seeing these European markers of cultural progress as proof that work was directly 3

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Camp Tournament Neg Arg Group related to a more perfect life, and as a basis for hope that future benefits can be attained through more work, Gilroy argues that Blacks interpreted their work as antithetical to their own interests and perceived as a lie the notion that labor led to advancements, which led to a better life. The modern labor ethic was/is thus seen as Middle Ages feudalism gone through metamorphosis and reemerged with a new selling-point of universality.66 Music critic and writer Mark Sinker says that the central fact of Afrofuturist art is that the Apocalypse already happened.67 The queue to take this post-apocalyptic position can arguably be drawn from a number of instances in Black history: the abduction of Africans and subsequent transportation to an alien land, the institution of generational slavery and the construction of a legal hell, or even the subjugation of a people to the needs of the Cross-Bronx Expressway and the abandonment of the society which followed. It seems to follow that if Afrofuturist thought has been constructed in a mindset of post-apocalypsis, that the concept of the jubilee would very easily come to be a prime futuristic aspiration since the march of modernity led to the apocalypse in the first place We have, then, arguments that postulate the existence of something which occurs with such frequency in the futuristic imaginings of Blacks that it warrants a prefix such as Afroor Black- in describing it. I would add this thing to Derys and Nelsons definitions of Afrofuturism that there is essentially a challenge to the entire European notion (which, thanks to modernity, has practically issued an official, though not de facto, statement of monopoly to the world) that progress is tied to labor and that such progress is necessarily good. A muted rebuttal has been made for centuries to the grand structure by which humans of various colors and backgrounds have been told to measure goodness this progress-hermeneutics superstructure. The aim here is to grasp some relatively broad, generally recognized definitions and characteristics of Afrofuturism. We have identified the popular definitions of Mark Dery and Alondra Nelson as well as the concepts of utopia, jubilee, apocalypse, and what I have termed the progress-hermeneutics superstructure. All of these concepts will play a major role in the treatment of my coming proposition that hip-hop futurism be considered a unique and important praxis in its own right. For now, however, I will move on to illuminate the many futuristically oriented modes of production in hip-hop which will hopefully lay sufficient groundwork for the introduction and exploration of hip-hop futurism.

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The march of modernity has ignored and trampled the plight of the black body beneath its heels. Reconstruction ended slavery but gave way to a more diffuse form of socially constructed slavery through the violence of Jim Crow. From that point on, the discursive representations that sustained that system have materialized in all facets of society. In the 60s, resistance was aimed at the war machine and the military industrial complexes domination of black bodies today modernity marches through with the flag of the prison industrial complex as the newest means of controlling and objectifying the black body the apocalypse occurs everyday and is sanctioned by white privilege and the white body as the human ideal Vargas 05 (Geiza Vargas, Juris Doctor, Boston College Law School, White Investment in Black Bondage,
27 W. New Eng. L. Rev. 41, 2005.) [*47] This Article is about the criminal justice system's joint venture with Wall Street. It is about white fantasy, desire and pleasure. n25 It is, in short, about the how the law sanctions white supremacy. n26 In this Article, I argue that as the law processes more and more black bodies, and as prisons further entrench themselves as investment vehicles, the dynamics that distinguished slavery reappear. n27 In Part I, I argue that white supremacy is fueled by social constructions, or fantasies, of black identity that legitimize the exploitation of blacks for social and economic advantage. Professor Anthony Paul Farley's theories about race and fetishism bolster my argument that white fantasies of blacks are deeply rooted in American history and reflect American values of pleasure consumption. In the ante-bellum era, whites dominated a culture that marked blackness with savagery and inferiority. n28 Clearly, the end of slavery did not eradicate such conceptions. n29 Rather, it marked an opportunity to adopt new ways to objectify blacks ways which continued to serve whites. [*48] In Part II, I examine the private prison real estate ownership and management industry. Private prisons mirror our social hierarchy - whites derive economic and political power from these corporations, power systematically denied to blacks. The American economy is about consumption, n30 and from that a market has materialized in the consumption of black crime. The emergence of private prisons, I argue, exhibits a desire to preserve a social, economic, and legal structure through which whites can extract pleasure, profit, and power. Slave narratives are important accounts of a violent time in U.S. history n31 that many white Americans wish to forget. n32 In this Article, I study a form of narrative written by those who profit from the incarceration of black bodies - private prison owners and operators, whose duty is to increase shareholder profit. n33 The narratives consist of certain annual and quarterly financial reports n34 and registration statements filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). n35 In reading these reports, I am interested in [*49] how corporations represent the opportunity to invest in the confinement of (black) human bodies. I also consider narratives produced by the U.S. government. I examine reports about the prison population produced by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), a division of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). In reading these statistical reports, I am interested in how our government represents black crime to the public.

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Our discussion of the discursive constructions that make racial domination possible is key to stop it and spills over into the broader educational space. The racist disciplinary power of the debate community that marginalizes blackness can only be sustained and instituted by those within itwe all must say NO MORE and shed the chains of exclusionary white oppression. Reid-Brinkley 08 (Shanara Rose Reid-Brinkley, Assistant Professor of African American Studies and
Communications as well as the Director of Debate at the University of Pittsburgh, THE HARSH REALITIES OF ACTING BLACK: HOW AFRICAN-AMERICAN POLICY DEBATERS NEGOTIATE REPRESENTATION THROUGH RACIAL PERFORMANCE AND STYLE, 2008. http://www.comm.pitt.edu/faculty/documents/reidbrinkley_shanara_r_200805_phd.pdf) The attempts at educational reform are not limited to institutional actors such as the local, state, and federal governments. Non-profit organizations dedicated to alleviating the black/white achievement gap have also proliferated. One such organization, the Urban Debate League, claims that Urban Debate Leagues have proven to increase literacy scores by 25%, to improve grade-point averages by 8 to 10%, to achieve high school graduation rates of nearly 100%, and to produce college matriculation rates of 71 to 91%. The UDL program is housed in over fourteen American cities and targets inner city youths of color to increase their access to debate training. Such training of students defined as at risk is designed to offset the negative statistics associated with black educational achievement. The program has been fairly successful and has received wide scale media attention. The success of the program has also generated renewed interest amongst college debate programs in increasing direct efforts at recruitment of racial and ethnic minorities. The UDL program creates a substantial pool of racial minorities with debate training coming out of high school, that college debate directors may tap to diversify their own teams. The debate community serves as a microcosm of the broader educational space within which racial ideologies are operating. It is a space in which academic achievement is performed according to the intelligibility of ones race, gender, class, and sexuality. As policy debate is intellectually rigorous and has historically been closed to those marked by social difference, it offers a unique opportunity to engage the impact of desegregation and diversification of American education. How are black students integrated into a competitive educational community from which they have traditionally been excluded? How are they represented in public and media discourse about their participation, and how do they rhetorically respond to such representations? If racial ideology is perpetuated within discourse through the stereotype, then mapping the intelligibility of the stereotype within public discourse and the attempts to resist such intelligibility is a critical tool in the battle to end racial domination. Education theorist Ludwig Pongratz argues that the testing focus in the standards and accountability movement is probably the most effective means of realizing disciplinary procedures. 11 He argues further that the contemporary reformist drive sweeping western nations is a tool designed to replicate normative practices, values, beliefs and behaviors consistent with the broader society. In other words, building on the work of Michel Foucault, Pongratz argues that the educational system, including reform efforts, function as a disciplinary apparatus that shapes and molds social bodies into normalized social systems. 12 The disciplinary character of modern education systems do not operate through institutional control, but instead through the positioning of social bodies to engage in self-control, an internalization of the discourse of institutional power. Pongratz notes that in this way, it becomes possible to integrate school pupils into the schools institutional framework more effectively than ever before. 13 Acclaimed French Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu theory of habitus is useful here. For Bourdieu, habitas represents the incorporation of the social into the corporeal. 14 Gender theorist Terry Lovell argues Through habitus, social norms are incorporated in the body of the individual subject. 15 An institution, like those attached to public education in the U.S. can only be efficacious if it is objectified in bodies in the form of durable dispositions that recognize and comply with the specific demands of a given institutional area of activity. 16 In other words, the disciplinary character of the school system only functions in so much as disciplinary parameters can be internalized by the members of a social body. What is missing from the study of education reform and the black/white achievement gap is an analysis of the discursive construction of racial images and stereotypes with which the public is confronted. 17 Public discourse about education reform, particularly that which revolves around the black/ white achievement gap, requires the use of race, class, and gender imagery that is intelligible to the general public. In essence, from experts to politicians to the news media, public representations of black underachievement and reform efforts depend on the versatility of social and cultural stereotypes consistent with the argumentative structures and social ideologies that make rhetorical efforts at reform intelligible. Education reform engages in a discourse of paradigm shift. 18 In essence there is a discursive consistency amongst education reform proponents for characterizing reform efforts as a change in perspective from previous values and beliefs about how best to educate Americas youth. Philosophy of education scholar Jeff Stickney argues that scholars interested in 6

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Camp Tournament Neg Arg Group the production of education reform discourse should be concerned with how a change of perception is to be brought about or secured. 19 In other words, Stickney argues that the discourse supporting educational reform functions to discipline educators into a compliance that belies any attempt to critique and engage the viability of the reform effort to the specific contexts educators find themselves working within. 20 While Stickney is interested in engaging such discourse for the purpose of furthering theoretical scholarship on curriculum development, his study raises the question of how the public discourse surrounding education reform may function to discipline its differently situated stakeholders.

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It is your responsibility as an intellectual to map out the structures that support social dominance because it is individual participation that sustains it. The affirmative has made an active choice in the 1ac to endorse an ideology that discursively advances the basis of white privilege. Instead of realizing that they have endorsed a system of discursive violence, they have reapplied a complete eradication of difference within the debate sphere by running framework. Reid-Brinkley 08 (Shanara Rose Reid-Brinkley, Assistant Professor of African American Studies and
Communications as well as the Director of Debate at the University of Pittsburgh, THE HARSH REALITIES OF ACTING BLACK: HOW AFRICAN-AMERICAN POLICY DEBATERS NEGOTIATE REPRESENTATION THROUGH RACIAL PERFORMANCE AND STYLE, 2008. http://www.comm.pitt.edu/faculty/documents/reidbrinkley_shanara_r_200805_phd.pdf) To begin an investigation of these questions of race, representation and performance, I utilize ideological criticism as a rhetorical method. This project is interested in the ideological discourses and representations of race, class, gender, and sexuality within the public conversation about race and education. The dominant narratives, bred within institutional structures, must be interrogated for processes of normalization implicated in the success and achievement of black students in American society. In other words, an ideological analysis provides us with an opportunity to critically analyze the networks of power through which ideologies flow and gain discursive and representative dominance. The Marxist conception of ideology, reformulated and popularized by Louis Althusser, revolves around the assumption that social bodies are trapped within a false consciousness that blinds them to the truth. Althusser argues that ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence. 66 Such a conception of ideology was necessary to explain why the working class did not rise up against the ruling class. Such ideologies were theorized as part of the superstructure resulting in the limited ability of subjects to exercise agency. For Althusser, dominant ideologies allowed the social structure to reproduce itself without ensuing conflict. Ideology functioned to naturalize the dominant structure encouraging individuals to participate by engaging in practices and behaviors designed to maintain that system. More importantly, ideologies were thought to construct an imaginary reality by which social beings became dependent on the structure as it functions, in order to make sense of their very lives. In essence, ideology was considered to be deterministic, binding individuals to the imaginary reality. However, current scholarship has been expressly critical of such a conceptualization of ideology, particularly, within the field of cultural studies, as it made the critical turn away from the study of dominant ideology and toward the cultural and everyday practices by which subjects engage ideological domination. Noted theorists, including Michel Foucault, Raymond Williams, and Stuart Hall have offered significant critiques of such a view of the relations of power in social system. One criticism of this version of ideology is that it assumes there is a truth, somewhere out there, that we are unable to ascertain because of the false consciousness produced through ideological discourses. 67 Second, as Foucault argues, ideology stands in a secondary position relative to something which functions as its infrastructure, as its material, economic determinant, etc. 68 In other words, ideology is defined as a result of economic structures. Thus, the economic structures are pre-existent and thus, uninfluenced by ideology, but simply productive of it. And, third, if the individual or the subject is not critical to the development of such ideological structures, but are instead determined by them, then social subjects become agent-less. They become simply social beings produced by the superstructure. Despite significant criticism of the concept of ideology, it remains significantly useful in the study of social domination. We can agree that there is not some true expression of reality out there that we are somehow blinded from seeing. We can agree that ideology is both produced by and produces economic and social structures. And, we can agree that social actors and their actions are not determined by ideology as much as social actors are strongly influenced toward accepting those ideologies as within their best interest, an internalization of ideological discourse as inscribed through various apparatuses of power. Yet, as media and communications scholar Nicolas Garnham cautions, the focus on resistance in cultural studies can prevent us from studying the manner in which dominance is maintained, both through structure and discourse. 69 He notes that it is the responsibility of intellectuals to map out structural and social dominance. Social actors participate in the production and maintenance of culture, both dominant and subordinate. In any given situation, both dominance and resistance are likely to be active in varying degrees. Thus, this project is not simply interested in the study of the production and maintenance of dominant ideologies; simultaneously, we must look to the manner in which social actors engage in resistance efforts within and through such dominant ideologies. Contemporary racism is reproduced and maintained through discursive constructions that are circulated through ideologies. Ideologies help to make stereotypical representations intelligible to an audience. As long as racism remains a social phenomenon in our society, racial ideologies will likely remain a critical tool by which racial difference is signified. All racial ideologies do not function the same way; they are 8

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Camp Tournament Neg Arg Group often complicated by intersections of class, gender, sexuality and context. And, as ideologies often function to dominate, they also create circumstances for resistance. This project seeks to engage both dominance and resistance; how racial ideologies reproduce social dominance, and how those affected by that dominance attempt to resist it. The rhetoric surrounding race and education offers one space from which to analyze the social reproduction of racial dominance. Looking to specific contexts through which we analyze the significance of racial ideologies allows us as scholars to map out the forces of power active through racial difference. Specifically, a rhetorical focus can map the public discursive maneuvers that (re)produce and resist these social ideologies. The rhetoric surrounding race, culture, and performance within educational discourse is of critical importance to the future course of educational opportunity in American society. We must understand the strategies of signification that are most persuasive and powerful to the general public audience. What representations of racial others are most intelligible to the public and how might racial others respond to that intelligibility? As our previous discussion of the acting white thesis and the rise of cultural explanations of racial difference indicate, contemporary ideological representations of race have changed and in some ways remained the same. We must interrogate the use of ideological representations of race, gender, class, and sexuality as rhetorical strategy in public deliberations. And, it is important to read the social actors involved and watching as embodied. It is quite clear, that the public discourse surrounding race and education is extensive and far beyond the space allotted for this project. Thus, I have chosen a localized context from which to interrogate the ideological representations of race that may operate in any given American educational context. Academic policy debate is a competitive activity available to high school and college students. The activity dates back to the early 1900s in American history. 70 It is an extracurricular activity that pits students against one another in a rigorous mental and verbal challenge. To engage in the ideological analysis of race and education discourse, I analyze three case studies within American policy debate and its representation. Chapter Two is an analysis of a non-profit organization for minority, inner city youths, the Urban Debate League, that has received wide media representation. I analyze the representation of UDL participants in local and national newspapers, as well as, an extended primetime story by 60 minutes on the Baltimore Urban Debate League. In this chapter, I argue that successful black students are scapegoated in news media representation and then redeemed by their debate participation. More specifically, I argue that the news media relies on racial stereotypes of black youths to make the UDL participants intelligible to the viewing and reading audience. It is necessary for the audience to view the students as at risk in order to later demonstrate their exemplary status. It is the students ability to mimic the performative dynamics of success that allows their race, class, and gender status to be redeemed in news media representation. I conclude that such a practice demonstrates the social significance of the stereotype even in positive portrayals of inner city black youths. Chapter Three is an analysis of race and performance in national college policy debate. The rising interest in diversifying policy debate at the high school level through non-profit organizations has fueled attempts to diversify at the college level. This chapter analyzes the University of Louisville Malcolm X debate program as it pushes the debate community to confront its race and class privilege. In this chapter, I ask how do black students respond to the racial ideologies surrounding their debate participation? What are the rhetorical strategies by which they engage a majority white audience in public discussion about race, privilege, and performance? I argue that these students use black sub-cultural styles, including signifyin, and black popular culture such as gospel and hip hop, to engage in a critical re-negotiation of intellectual knowledge making practices within the debate community. I argue further that the Louisville students engage in rhetorical practices that violate the genre of policy debate speechmaking. To engage in this investigation I review three elimination round debates at the Cross-Examination Debate Associations National Championship Tournament. I specifically focus on the most successful of the Louisville teams made up of the partnership between Elizabeth Jones and Tonia Green. I argue that the use of subcultural style offers a means for the Louisville students to resist the norms of white privilege that permeates the traditional debate landscape. Chapter Four is an analysis of the debate communitys response to the Louisville Project. In this chapter we are interested in how a majority white community responds to confrontational protest rhetoric in resistance narratives centered around racial representation and performance. I argue that the debate community engages in anti-movement resistance strategies. Instead of an outright rejection of the Louisville Project, the debate community attacks the Projects violation of the communitys notion of order and decorum. Through these three case studies, I seek to demonstrate the connection between the public representation of blackness and the performative strategies engaged in by Blacks in the attempt to resist the stereotypes associated with such representations. This project takes seriously the use of performative and cultural style as a strategic and rhetorical engagement with contemporary racism in America.

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The use of alien and futuristic metaphors in an Afrofuturist context allows us to resurrect the common other within all of us and unexoticize the black body within the debate sphere by linking blackness with the notion of extraterrestriality. We must question the legitimacy of using the tools of hegemonic knowledge to tear down the masters house. Young 11 (Sade Marie Young, Masters degree candidate. SOUTHERN-PLAYALISTIC-HIPHOP-SPACESHIPMUSIC, Thesis Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University for a Master of the Arts Degree. August 2011.) To clarify, this thesis is in no way suggesting that the futuristic themes and sounds of hip hop are inherently new to hip hop or innovative. Afrofuturists claim that blacks scattered across the Atlantic world are aliens in an alien land, ever on the lookout for clues and resources that point the way out of alien nations and conditions of bondage (Gray 166). Themes of alien embodiment and futuristic landscapes are commonly used in literary and musical expressions by subaltern groups. This paper serves as an additional lens through which to view post-human representations in Afro-Futuristic thought and their connections to hip hop artistry. Sun Ra, Lee Perry and George Clinton all call upon similar tropes and metaphors of space and alienation that link their common diasporic African history to a notion of extraterrestriality (McLeod 344). Perry, Clinton and many other musicians of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s patterned themselves after Sun Ra and used spacethemed sounds and futuristic beats. In the hip hop tradition, Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash employed space imagery and sound. Although their efforts were revolutionary their adventures did deal with the same sense of resistance to commercial conformity as current artists face. They were neither from the South nor dealing within the realms of neo-liberalism and the commodified trappings of popular hip hop tropes. For Wayne and Andre to step into a new frontier and phone home to a planet that their minds have metaphorically left is shrewd and entertaining. Using and constructing new identities for their post-human bodies has proven the potential for black wealth and power (McLeod 344) that George Clintons lyrics have long prophesied. Focusing on hip hop as a stage to explore Afrocentric identity and space encourages us to ponder whether or not it is logical to expect a culture that has been placed on the margin of societys concern to employ the same language (pedestrian speech patterns or performance) used by those responsible for such marginalization, thereby reinforcing the very practice that [repressed] them (Wilkins 2000). It is necessary to use those tools (capitalism, commodification, de-humanization) to counter societies hegemonic structure. Thus, one can use these tools coupled with creativity to profit from the profitless situation of the ghetto. These works lead towards a re-appropriation of what blackness and the performance of otherness looks and sounds like. These alien and futuristic metaphors are essential to the promulgation of Afro-Futurist teaching, insofar as it resurrects the common other in all of us, one that can be used to reconfigure the post Atlantic black experience and help to unexoticize the black body.

Space Links
One of the main focuses of Afrofuturist writers was Space exploration and Extraterrestriallity Eshun 92 (Kodwo Eshun MA in Arts, Course Leader of Arts at Goldsmiths College ,Further Considerations of Afrofuturism)Page (9) The London-based group Black Audio Film Collective released The Last Angel of History, also known as The Mothership Connection, their essayfilm which remains the most elaborate exposition on the convergence of ideas that is Afrofuturism. Through the persona of a time-traveling nomadic figure known as the Data Thief, The Last Angel of History created a network of links between music, space, futurology, and diaspora. African sonic processes are here reconceived as telecommunication, as the distributed components of a code to a black secret technology that is the key to diasporic future. The notion of a black secret technology allows Afrofuturism to reach a point of speculative acceleration. Imagine
the archaeologists squinting at the cracked screen of the microvideo installation that shows the Data Thief trapped in the

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history vaults of West Africa . .

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. Black Audio director John Akomfrah and scriptwriter Edward George integrated a thesis from critic John Corbetts Brothers from Another Planet, an essay whose title references John Sayless science-fiction movie of an alien that takes on African American identity to escape his interstellar captors. Akomfrah and George take up in particular the oeuvres of Sun Ra and his group, the Arkestra; Lee Perry, reggae producer, composer, songwriter, and architech of dub reggae; and Parliament-Funkadelic funk producer George Clinton, three figures analyzed in terms of their use of the recording studio, the vinyl record, and the support of art work and record label as the vehicle for concept albums that sustain mythological, programmatic, and cosmological world pictures. Corbett pointed to Ras group, the Arkestra; Perrys s recording studio, the Black Ark; and the Mothership Connection, Parliamentsalbum cycle to argue that largely independent of one other, each is working with a shared set of mythological images and icons such as space iconography, the idea of extraterrestriality and the idea of space exploration. The affirmative is continuing an ongoing tradition of privileged Eurocentric science programs that neglect the positioning of the black body. The fallacy of their plan presumes a color-blind world while marginalizing the oppressive history behind space exploration Bloud 07(Mark Bould, Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 34, No. 2, Afrofuturism (Jul., 2007), pp. 177-186, Reader in Film and Literature at the University of the West of England, UK)
From the 1950s onwards,

sf in the US magazine and paperback tradition postulated and presumed a color-blind future, generally depicting humankind "as one race, which has emerged from an unhappy past of racial misunderstandings and conflicts" (James 47; see also Kilgore). This shared assumption accounts for the relative absence of people of color from such sf: if race was going to prove unimportant, why even bother thinking about it, when energies could instead be devoted to more pressing matters, such as how to colonize the solar system or build a better robot? And so questions of race remained as marginalized as black characters-at best, it seemed, Chewbacca's Jim to Han's
Huck. A year after Star Wars, DC Comics put Superman in the ring with Muhammad Ali and then concocted a convoluted narrative that culminated in the speedy declaration of Ali's victory by a technical knockout as, stripped of his superpowers, the well-whupped Man of Steel refused to hit the canvas (until a split second after the referee announced the result). The exclusion of people of color from sf's future had already been noted by, among others, Gil Scott-Heron, whose 1970 track "Whitey on the Moon" (1970) contrasts the corporate profiteering of the US space program (so close, ideologically, to much of the Campbell-Heinlein tradition) with the impoverishment of black urban communities: "I can't pay no doctor bill (but Whitey's on the moon)/Ten years from now I'll be payin' still (while Whitey's on the moon)." The space race showed us which race space was for. This is not to say that the dominant US sf tradition did not occasionally attempt, with varying degrees of equivocation, to consider issues of race and prejudice in contemporary and future worlds. For example, Allen De Graeff's Human and Other Beings (1963) collects sixteen such stories, published between 1949 and 1961, by Raymond E. Banks, Leigh Brackett, Ray Bradbury, Fredric Brown, Theodore R. Cogswell, C.M. Kornbluth, George P. Elliott, J.T. McIntosh, Frederik Pohl, Mack Reynolds, Eric Frank Russell, Robert Sheckley, Evelyn E. Smith, William Tenn, and Richard Wilson.' It is not insignificant, though,

that only one-third of these stories addressed the position of African Americans with anything like directness; only two or three of them could be seen to have black viewpoint characters, despite the growth of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and such high-profile events as McLaurin vs. Oklahama State Regents (1951), Sweatt vs.
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Camp Tournament Neg Arg Group Painter (1951), the announced desegregation of the US Army (1951), Brown vs. the Board of Education (1954), the murder of Emmett Till (1955), the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-56), and the desegregation of Little Rock (1957). ]

Technology Links

New Science and technology develop in tandem with Afrofuturism it demands a place for the black subject in our imaginations of space
Yaszek 05- Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies School of Literature, Communication, and Culture 05 (Lisa, June/September 2005, Rethinking History. Vol. 9, No. 2/3, pp. 297-313. An Afrofuturist Reading of Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man)
Although there have been relatively few book-length studies of Afrofuturism to date, scholars generally agree that the movement began in the late 1950s with jazz musicians such as Sun Ra and Lee Scratch Perry who presented themselves as alien visitors from other worlds.3 In the 1960s, Black Arts Movement authors including Ishmael Reed and Amiri Baraka also began telling stories about fantastic black people who travelled freely through time and space.

By blending science fictional motifs with more conventional modes of black cultural expression these artists insisted on the right of Afrodiasporic subjects to fully participate in the dawning space age. After all, their stories suggested, if black men and women could imagine themselves travelling to other worlds and other times, what right did anyone have to prevent them from staking their claims on the future since it was actually unfolding in the present? With the advent of global communication and information technologies in the 1970s and 1980s, Afrofuturist artists
broadened the scope of their attention to encompass both outer space and cyberspace. For example, techno DJs such as Spooky That Subliminal Kid and Derek May, visual artists such as Carrie Weems and Fatimah Tuggar, and speculative writers including Nalo Hopkinson and Minister Faust all explore the de- and reconstruction of Afrodiasporic subjectivity in digital culture. Taken

together, these artists demonstrate both the pervasiveness of Afrofuturism throughout contemporary culture and the diverse ways that this aesthetic practice has evolved in tandem with new sciences and technologies themselves.

At: Aliens link

Slavery is analogous to alien abduction thus blacks have been living in an alien nation for centuries thus the black body does not represent the ideal of humanity Afrofuturist discourse demonstrates a move by black bodies from the subhuman to the posthuman

Nelson, Associate Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, 2002 (Alondra, holds an appointment in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWaG). Her areas of specialization include race and ethnicity in the U.S.; gender and kinship; socio-historical studies of medicine, science and technology; and social and cultural theory. Nelson studies the production of knowledge about human difference in biomedicine and technoscience and the circulation of these ideas in the public sphere: Her research focuses on how science and its applications shape the social world, including aspects of personal identification, racial formation and collective action. In turn, she also explores the ways in which social groups challenge, engage and, in some instances, adopt and mobilize conceptualizations of race, ethnicity and gender derived from scientific and technical domains. Afrofuturism, Duke University Press, 2002) page 27
Taking the negative ontological placement of black subjects in Western modernity as his point of departure, Kodwo Eshun constructs an argument that posits a specifically black constellation of the posthuman in which New World black subjects have privileged access to the posthuman because they were denied the status of human for so long.20 Eshun belongs to a growing number of critics exploring the intersections of black cultural production, technology, and science fiction collected under the rubric Afrofuturism, including Greg Tate, Sheree Thomas, Mark Dery, Carol Cooper, Nalo Hopkinson, Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky), and the many 12

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Camp Tournament Neg Arg Group contributors to the AfroFuturism Web site and listserv.21 Eshuns 1998 volume More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction represents the most extensive manifesto of this movement, tracing different forms of alienness and posthumanity through various genres of post World War II black popular music, including jazz, funk, hip hop, techno, and jungle, as well as providing a dazzling account of the technicity of black music. Eshun claims that the sign of the human harbors a negative significance, if any, in Afrofuturist musical configurations. In these genres, he argues, shifting forms of nonhuman otherworldliness replace the human as the central characteristic of black subjectivity: The idea of slavery as an alien abduction means that weve all been living in an alien-nation since the eighteenth century. The mutation of African male and female slaves in the eighteenth century into what became negro, and into an entire series of humans that were designed in America. That whole process, the key behind it all is that in America none of these humans were designated human. Its in the music that you get this sense that most African- Americans owe nothing to the status of the human. There is this sense of the human as being a really pointless and treacherous category. (192 93; emphasis mine) As a result of the dehumanizing forces of slavery, in Eshuns frame of reference, certain kinds of black popular music stage black subjectivity, bypassing the modality of the human in the process of moving from the subhuman to the posthuman. According to Eshun, black posthumanism stands in stark contrast to the strong humanist strand found in a host of black cultural styles, ranging from the majority of African American literature to the history of soul and the blues. Eshun describes these two modes of thinking as Afrodiasporic futurism and the humanist futureshock absorbers of mainstream black culture. Eshuns important work unearths some of the radical strands of black music that refuse to uncritically embrace the Western conception of the human, are largely instrumental, and therefore do not rely on the black voice as a figure of value.

The subject position of alien disrupts normative social binaries like male/female, black/white, etc. Mcleod,2003(Ken McLeod, Author and Teacher of Tibetian Buddhism, Space Oddities: Aliens, Futurism and Meaning in Popular Music, journals.cambridge.org/article_S0261143003003222, published October 23 2003)
As explored in the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, many, if not most, socio-cultural readings of rock/popular music have been situated upon various notions of youth music as resistance to mainstream/dominant values. As such, the use of alien tropes in popular music typically resists the bourgeois concept of normality which, in Adorno's words, leads to 'the very disintegration of the subject' (Adorno 1987, p. 171). Psychoanalytic theorists have also sought to explain 'Otherness' in terms of the 'non assimilable alien... monster' (Kristeva 1982, p. 11). Similarly, Derridian deconstructive readings of rock music typically seek to explain popular music in terms of its Otherness or 'difference' or, by any other name, its ability to reflect, repress, empower or encode the alien. As illustrated below, such literal representations of resistance and metaphoric 'difference' lie at the heart of many instances of space and/or alienation appropriation. Such images, however, also allow room for alternate, more pluralistic definitions - the space alien as a transcendent form of Other capable of challenging simplistic binaries of male/female, black/white or rich/poor. Particularly evident in rave culture, for example, alien labelling allows for a symbolic incorporation of the idealised raceless, classless and genderless plurality of the dance floor. As Susan McClary has remarked: The musical power of the disenfranchised - whether youth, the underclass, ethnic minorities, women or gay people - more often resides in their ability to articulate different ways of construing the body, ways that bring along in their wake the potential for different experiential worlds. (McClary 1994, p.34) The adoption and embodiment of alien and/or futuristic personas represents one of the most powerful of such articulations, one that is common to all the disenfranchised groups that McClary lists. As such this article is concerned not just with the politics of music and the construction of identity but also with the politics of potential, of who we might become.

Music disrupts normality - mimicking an alien presence Mcleod,2003(Ken McLeod, Author and Teacher of Tibetian Buddhism, Space Oddities: Aliens, Futurism and Meaning in Popular Music, journals.cambridge.org/article_S0261143003003222, published October 23 2003)
The fascination with such images involves, of course, a fundamental fascination with the unknown, the unidentified. Reflecting an ultimate mystery and associated feelings of awe and quasi-spirituality, space, aliens and the future deflect the often darkly rational, scientific, and sometimes militaristic notions of progress that have characterised much of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century life. Music is heavily involved in both the creation and literal colonisation of. As cultural musicologist Jody Berland has recognised, listening to local, regional or national radio broadcasts brings listeners together in time outside of space that both 13

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Camp Tournament Neg Arg Group narrates an imagined community and defines a cultural space but also takes us outside of where we are and our everyday activities - driving, working, etc. (Berland 1998). Thus music, in general, connects listeners to fantasy, pleasure and an ever-elusive future. Like a time-travelling, omnipresent alien presence music takes us outside of our bodies and place while simultaneously reminding us of our location and what it means to live there

Modernity links
The collective trauma of slavery is the founding moment of modernity this forever renders modernity suspect we must continue to indict imperial modernity as we look toward the future Eshun 92 (Kodwo Eshun MA in Arts, Course Leader of Arts at Goldsmiths College ,Further Considerations of Afrofuturism) Page (3)
Imagine a team of African archaeologists from the futuresome silicon, some carbon, some wet, some dryexcavating a site, a museum from their past: a museum whose ruined documents and leaking discs are identifiable as belonging to our present, the early twenty-first century. Sifting patiently through the rubble, our archaeologists from the United States of Africa, the USAF, would be struck by how much Afrodiasporic subjectivity in the twentieth century constituted itself through the cultural project of recovery. In their Age of Total Recall, memory is never lost. Only the art of forgetting. Imagine them reconstructing the conceptual framework of our cultural moment from those fragments. What are the parameters of that moment, the edge of that framework? In our time, the USAF archaeologists surmise, imperial racism has denied black subjects the right to belong to the enlightenment project, thus creating an urgent need to demonstrate a substantive historical presence.

This desire has over determined Black Atlantic intellectual culture for several centuries. To establish the historical character of black culture, to bring Africa and its subjects into history denied by Hegel et al., it has been necessary to assemble counter memories that contest the colonial archive, thereby situating the collective trauma of slavery as the founding moment of modernity. In an interview with critic Paul Gilroy in his anthology Small Acts, novelist Toni Morrison argued that the African subjects that experienced capture, theft, abduction, mutilation, and slavery were the first moderns. They underwent real conditions of existential homelessness, alienation, dislocation, and dehumanization that philosophers like Nietzsche would later define as quintessentially modern. Instead of civilizing African subjects, the forced dislocation and commodification that constituted the Middle Passage meant that modernity was rendered forever suspect. Ongoing disputes over reparation indicate that these traumas continue to shape the contemporary era. It is never a matter of forgetting what it took so long to remember. Rather, the vigilance that is necessary to indict imperial modernity must be extended into the field of the future. Whether intentional or not, the Affirmative/negative has propped up the normative protocol of knowledge that is whiteness. Typical white maleness is not merely a function of appearance, but of a culture of control alternative knowledges help highlight the manner in which knowledge is bound and policed Perkinson, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Marygrove College and of Social Ethics at Ecumenical Theological Seminary, 2005 [James W., Shamanism, racism and hip hop culture (pg. 120-122)]JB The great question in the precincts of academe is the degree to which the humanities or social sciences, as part of a culturally particular episteme of knowing the human that is constituted precisely in the imperialistic pretension to know universally, are themselves idolatrous. The focus I want to propose is one that succeeds the
Enlightenments turn to the subject and Deconstructions turn to language in what I would call a somersault towards rhythm. To some degree,

Foucaults notions of nave and subjugated knowledges are helpful in

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catching a glimpse of the bounded and policed terrain of knowing that is in question here (Foucault, 1980, 8283). What must be highlighted in the envisioning processes characteristic of theoria,
though, is exactly a turn away from the eye toward the ear. capacity Constructing the Break 91 Ironic Polyphony Henry Louis Gates, Jr.s work in The Signifying Monkey offers a helpful cipher by which to query the history. He emphasizes the for ironic improvisation characteristic of black language use as the requisite trope requiring attention. Ironic and parodic improvisation opening out the paradigmatic register of speech underneath the syntagmatic chain emerges, in his analysis, as a primary political tactic for a people under surveillance (Gates, 49). The considerable skill with double-voiced discourse that has been so evident a feature of Afrodiaspora survival tactics gained street-level recognition in the United States by the late nineteenth century as a collective capacity to defy oppression through signifying, specifying, and lying (Gates, 54, 77; Willis, 1, 45). Capping on ones enemies, inverting insult and aggression into a masterful put-down that was simultaneously a put-on, served the need to find ways of preserving dignity while also preserving life in a hostile world. What was heard simplistically and eagerly in one way by the Master or Boss could be made to encode an altogether different and even opposite meaning for those in the know. More often than not, the space of public speech, in such ritual revisions, was transvalued in terms of a different time code. The jerk of a neck, the bob of a head, the flash of an eye, the arch of a back created instant syncopation in the visual modea matter of troping the words actually said with two, three, five, or fifteen alternative inflections by way of the timing of the bodily gesture on top of or underneath the speech. Such an exercise is a savvy volatilizing of the solidity of dominant organizations of space, and of the flow of meaning through space, by way of an act of multiplication in the dimension of time. In this sense, African American creativity inside the disciplinary domains of the academy has often taken the form of a subversive mathematics. Not only in oral presentations, but also in written interventions as erudite as those of a Du Bois or a Cornel West, as aesthetically stunning as those of a Hurston or a Morrison, or as politically cunning as those of a King or a Baldwin, words have been made the reservoir of a promiscuous wit. There has often been, in academic interventions culturally coded as African American, a proliferation of meaning that can be experienced as simultaneously dense in depth and dazzling in intertextuality. Wrestled into the language of a sine curve and sound, the impression is one of a mixing of high frequency melodic lines with low frequency base-beats that grip the 92 Shamanism, Racism, and Hip-Hop Culture mind and grope the trunk all at once. How does such a claim register in the protocols of knowing that carry the imprimatur of higher education? It registers in the body, even when that body is white, and male, and afraid of itself. My argument is that the Western

university is generally not, however, able to recognize such within its own protocols of knowledge. The white male body remains normatively regnant,6 as erect as a tree stump and as (im)mobile, focusing all its lights in the surveilling eye of objectivity, ignorant of the night inside its own cells. Identity, in my experience, is not first of all a word, but a rhythmic resonance
giving rise, eventually, to a groan (Perkinson, 2001, 96, 112). When James Brown screams I, I, I, nine times in a row on his hit record, Please, Please, Please, before moving on to the next part of the sentence, he is trying to say something about the core of human being that the first person pronoun (or indeed, language in general) cannot say except through its own rupturing (Gilroy, 213). Clear articulation and certain identification, on the other hand, are much further down the line and conceptualization is at an even greater remove. Deep thinking begins with a plastic body, capable of exploring the cadences of a quiet timbre, the caterwauling of an unmet desire, the catharsis of a whole community of ancestry still locked up in silence inside a moving bone (Brandon, 142; Goodman, 219221; Murphy, 67; Walker, 1972, 104115).

Cut off from a wide-ranging repertoire of gestural performance, thought is easy prey to the design of domination, the fixation of meaning in a
incidental to thought, as recent studies have made clear.

single reference, the mistaking of map for territory (Esteva and Prakash, 7677, 145146). Having a body that is freed for more full-bellied forms of expression is by no means a guarantee against take-over by dominating categories. But neither is gesture accidental and

The kind of body offered as the preferred signifier in most academic departments is a living icon of ideology and dominant class
This bodys

hieroglyphics (the history of affirmative action efforts and multicultural initiatives aside, the statistics still descry the facts: university departments remain reflections of the white affirmative action that has characterized this country from its modern inception) (Mills, 53).

typical white maleness is not merely a function of appearance, but of a whole cult and culture of controlling norms (Dyer, 4445). It works not only at the level of sight, but also in quite ruthless pedagogies of time and timing. That it is schooled to understand its own peculiar disposition as universal and exemplary is the very substance of its
Constructing the Break 93 sense of entitlement and apotheosis. Never mind that society today is avowedly color blind and secular in its public practice. The absolutizing of white privilege that began with Columbus, was given explicit theological valence in Puritan colorcodes, and found institutional investment in the southern plantation and the northern suburb, today remains a sacred inscription in and on the typical middle-class body, in spite of a more recent training in race neutrality. Since the emergence of the ethnicity paradigm for explaining sociocultural difference beginning with the University of Chicago in the 1930s, it has become de rigueur to educate dominate class people in the designs of the color-blind eye (Omi and Winant, 15, 40, 69). But

the body habituated in white upbringing carries a deeper memory and an older code. Light skin today is a social palimpsestbearing contradictory witness to the racial projecteven when the
persona is committedly antiracist.

Afrofuturism developed as a cultural response to the failure of the Civil Rights Movement to solve the consequences of centuries of racial oppression the Earth has become no refuge for black people and they have turned to the mothership

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Galli 9- Faculty of Arts and Science at the Rhode Island College for the Program in African and African-American Studies. (Chuck, April 1, 2009, Rhode Island College Honors Project, Paper 18, Hip-Hop Futurism: Remixing Afrofuturism and the Hermeneutics of Identity)
Particularly germane to this thesis is the sudden popularity and frequency of Afrofuturist music which arose in the 1970s funk scene. According to Paul Gilroy: This period of intense musical creativity arose between the demise of Black Power and

the rise of popular Pan-Africanism triggered by Bob Marley. It was dominated by the desire to find a new political and ethical code in which the contradictory demands for blackness on one side and postcolonial utopia on the other could be articulated together under the bright signs of progress, modernity, and style.40 There was, essentially, an intellectual vacuum during this transitional phase as regarded how Blacks were to carry over the spirit of a proud Blackness of the civil rights and Black Power era into a new epoch which was defined in large part by the failure of these very movements to produce their full emancipatory promises. Until
popular Pan- Africanism assumed this role as navigator to the future, an outer-space oriented musical and artistic aesthetic took hold.

The disappointment resulting from the end of the civil rights era inspired an artistic genre which had given up hope of an earthly refuge for Black people and instead turned to a mothership, an alien planet, or somewhere out there.

European Structure Monopolizes Modern World Undermining the Progress of other Races Galli 9- Faculty of Arts and Science at the Rhode Island College for the Program in African and African-American Studies. (Chuck, April 1, 2009, Rhode Island College Honors Project, Paper 18, Hip-Hop Futurism: Remixing Afrofuturism and the Hermeneutics of Identity)
We have, then, arguments that postulate the existence of something which occurs with such frequency in the futuristic imaginings of Blacks that it warrants a prefix such as Afro- or Black- in describing it. I would add this thing to Derys and Nelsons definitions of

Afrofuturism that there is essentially a challenge to the entire European notion (which, thanks to modernity, has practically issued an official, though not de facto, statement of monopoly to the world) that progress is tied to labor and that such progress is necessarily good. A muted rebuttal has been made for centuries to the grand structure by which humans of various colors and backgrounds have been told to measure goodness this progress-hermeneutics superstructure.

History should not be Repeated: Western Ideas of Superiority should be Dropped in Favor of Respect Towards Alien Life Forms Galli 9- Faculty of Arts and Science at the Rhode Island College for the Program in African and African-American Studies. (Chuck, April 1, 2009, Rhode Island College Honors Project, Paper 18, Hip-Hop Futurism: Remixing Afrofuturism and the Hermeneutics of Identity)
The Zulu Nations and Afrika Bambaataas engagement with alien life and alien planets deserves significant attention as well. Mark

Dery, the foundational thinker in Afrofuturist discourse, has said that African-Americans are, in a very real sense, the descendants of alien abductees, referencing the people-stealing which took place during the trans-Atlantic slave trade.136 The Wisdom and Understanding of the Fifteen Beliefs of the Universal Zulu Nation explicitly dictates that if someday we do meet Aliens from another planet, then the whole Universe must be ruled with equal justice for all. Peace.137 The insistence repeated throughout Zulu Nation texts that racism and other forms of discrimination be renounced even regarding life forms we have not yet encountered seems to represent a mindset which developed from an alien people (Africans) who were not afforded such rights when they arrived on someone elses mother planet (Europe and the New World.) The Zulu Nation abandonment of Western ideas of alien encounter fits a
theoretical framework articulated by Fredrick Douglas who objected to Hegels assertion that in the mater-slave narrative, the slave eventually becomes enlightened to the masters way of thinking and accepts this new paradigm over death. Douglass, buttressed by the history of jubilee in slave societies, argued that the slave prefers death to adaptation into a philosophical framework which led to his own enslavement.138 Though no longer subject to immediate death as punishment for insolence, the Zulu Nation has preferred to let die the modern idea of betterment through superiority over others by both respecting alien life forms which are not even known and by respecting phenomena of the seen and unseen which are brought to them from outside.

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The White West have dominated colored bodies given that these bodies were never defined as truly subjects, hip hop futurism disrupts and abandons the notion of a wholistic/determinate subject Galli 9- Faculty of Arts and Science at the Rhode Island College for the Program in African and African-American Studies. (Chuck, April 1, 2009, Rhode Island College Honors Project, Paper 18, Hip-Hop Futurism: Remixing Afrofuturism and the Hermeneutics of Identity)
Hip-hop futurisms abandonment of the subject as a whole, perfect entity makes sense given two of its main influences: the Black experiences in the Americas and the politics of abandonment in American urban areas. In a very real sense, Blacks were only subjects in the sense that they were subjects of dominating empires for the bulk of Black history. In other respects, Blacks have been constructed by White nations and histories as objects of various political and philosophical subjects: the Black was to be civilized by Western culture, to be evangelized by Christianity, to be modernized by industrialism, or to be exterminated by any means necessary. Blacks, whether those remaining in Africa or those taken abroad, were treated, if we think metaphorically, as

avenues of possibility for the realization of Western ambitions rather than subject- creators of such ambitions.

Though Blacks produced almost the entire crop and mineral wealth for European colonizing nations in Africa and the New World, provided invaluable labor and raw resources for the United States, invented some of the most revolutionary technological innovations of their times, and contributed their foods, music, and words to Western cultures, they are often portrayed not as authors of such endeavors, but as tools employed in them. Whether it be the White House or the pyramids, those who actually built societies are often times not credited for their creations. Hip-hop is often treated in the same way; the creation of fantastically rich,

complex, enjoyable, and important works are brushed off as illegitimate because the true labor is perceived as having been performed by those outside of hip-hop. DJs and MCs allegedly do not make music; they just steal it from other artists who apparently created their records in a total intellectual vacuum and can claim originality over their work.195 If originality and authenticity are one and the same, are privy only to socially dominant groups, and are the largest measures of progress in a modern sense, then what incentive do hip-hop producers have to remain loyal these ideas? The Baganda cotton farmer is not credited with the vitality of the British Empire, the American Negro slaves are not considered the founding fathers of the United States, and the hip-hop artist is not considered to be constructively creating.196 There is a serious bone of contention here, supported by empirical evidence, between Black communities and Western modernity.

We must create afrofuturist imaginary A building of the future through a critical rethinking of the past is necessary to resist the system of white privilege that permeates our current route to a social, political, and economic future Yaszek 5- Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies School of Literature, Communication, and Culture (Lisa, June/September 2005, Rethinking History. Vol. 9, No. 2/3, pp. 297-313. An Afrofuturist Reading of Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man)
Given this interest in alternate history, it is perhaps not surprising that the authors who have been most closely associated with literary Afrofuturism have been fabulists such as Ishmael Reed and Amiri Baraka and science fiction authors such as Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler.1 In this article I propose that we think about Ralph Ellison as a kind of early or proto-Afrofuturist as well.2 After briefly reviewing the Afrofuturist tendencies in Ellisons critical writing I turn to a more extensive consideration of Invisible Man itself. As with his

critical writing Ellisons fiction powerfully anticipates the tenets of contemporary Afrofuturism, demonstrating a very real need for black Americansand indeed all Americansto resist the whitewashed social, political, and economic futures that many of our leaders and other, more hidden persuaders promise us. However, Ellison

ultimately leaves it to the next generation of artists to imagine what alternative futures might replace them. In this sense his novel is not an Afrofuturist one per se. Rather, it is a literary clarion call for an Afrofuturist imaginary that was just barely thinkable at the time of Invisible Mans publication. To understand how Ellisons novel fits into the history of Afrofuturism we must first consider the political and aesthetic mission of Afrofuturism as a whole movement. In its broadest dimensions

Afrofuturism is an extension of the historical recovery projects that black Atlantic intellectuals have engaged in for well over two hundred years. According to Toni Morrison, these projects demonstrate how the conditions of homelessness and alienation experienced by African slaves and their descendants anticipate what philosophers such as Nietzsche claimed were the founding conditions of modernity (Gilroy 1993, p. 178). Thus historical, literary, and other aesthetic representations of Afrodiasporic history insist on both the authenticity of the black subjects experience in Western history and authenticity of this experience as a literal embodiment of the dislocation felt by many modern peoples.

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As we approach the future, blackness is conflated with catastrophe signifying the failure of global capitals progress the growing technological dependency worldwide creates a dangerous situation for those bodies denied access to the narrative of progress Yaszek 5- Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies School of Literature, Communication, and Culture (Lisa, June/September 2005, Rethinking History. Vol. 9, No. 2/3, pp. 297-313. An Afrofuturist Reading of Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man)
Afrofuturism is not just about reclaiming the history of the past, but about reclaiming the history of the future as well. Kodwo Eshun argues that our most culturally pervasive visions of tomorrow are generated by a futures industry that weaves together technoscientific findings, mass media storytelling practices, and economic prediction to make sense of its own movements. More often than not, the futures industry conflates blackness with catastrophe. For example, Eshun notes that African social reality is overdetermined by intimidating global scenarios, doomsday economic projections, weather predictions, medical reports on AIDS, and life-expectancy forecasts, all of which predict decades of immiserization (Eshun 2003, pp. 291 292). As such, Africa becomes a site of absolute dystopia, an imaginary futurological space where the persistence of black identity signifies a disastrous failure in the ongoing progress of global capital as a whole. Of course, these predictions are not limited to the continent of Africa. Rather, they implicitly and explicitly structure dominant
As its name implies, perceptions of blackness in Atlantic nations as well. Nelson notes that over the past decade Western discourse has become increasingly dominated by the rhetoric of the digital divide, an expression that serves primarily as a code phrase for the tech[nical] inequities that exist between blacks and whites (Nelson 2002, p. 1). According to Nelson, the rhetoric of the digital divide does more

than assume that, in the best of all worlds, technology can and should eliminate racial distinctions. It also assumes that race is a liability in the twenty-first century and that blackness is always oppositional to technologically-driven chronicles of progress (p. 1). Whether proponents of this concept attribute the digital divide to material,
economic, or cultural differences, the end result is the same: even in the seemingly most advanced nations black subjects cannot hope to participate fully in the world of tomorrow.

Afrofuturist discourse attempts to reconfigure the relationship between science, technology and race such a reimagniation of the future disrupts and transforms the Western narrative of exclusion Yaszek 5- Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies School of Literature, Communication, and Culture (Lisa, June/September 2005, Rethinking History. Vol. 9, No. 2/3, pp. 297-313. An Afrofuturist Reading of Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man)
Afrofuturist artists fight these dystopic futures in two related ways. First, they use the vocabulary of science fiction to reconfigure the relations of race, science and technology. Noting that science fiction has long treated [alien] people who might or might not exist, author Octavia Butler argues that the genre provides an ideal language for artists interested in the seemingly fantastic possibility that there might be Afrodiasporic subject relations that exist outside those most commonly described by the discourses of the futures industry (quoted in Crossley 1988, p. xvi). Furthermore, as I
have argued elsewhere, Afrofuturist artists like Butler herself appropriate deracinated images of robots and cyborgs to specifically politicized ends, as tropes through which to explore the appropriation of black labour in the name of national or global progress and to celebrate black mastery over communication and information technologies.4 As such, these tropes become powerful tools for

demonstrating the Afrodiasporic subjects cognitive dissentor what W.E.B. Du Bois called double consciousnessfrom those visions of tomorrow that are generated by the futures industry. Second, Afrofuturist artists disrupt, challenge and otherwise transform those futures with fantastic stories that, as Ruth Mayer puts it, move seamlessly back and forth through time and space, between cultural traditions and geographic time zones and thus between blackness as a dystopic relic of the past and as a harbinger of a new and more promising alien future (Mayer 2000, pp. 556 566). For example, the Detroit electronic duo Drexciya present themselves in the liner
notes to their albums as sea creatures evolved from the premature babies born by African women who were raped and thrown overboard in the course of the Middle Passage. After years of building dazzling submarine civilizations, the Drexciyans now stand poised to head for the stars. By retelling the story of the Middle Passage as the disturbing but ultimately triumphant tale of strangers in a strange land, Drexciya produce self-destroying narratives, fictions that strain against the conventional pull of identification and closure (Mayer 2000, p. 563). These acts of chronopolitical intervention, as Eshun calls them, double, triple, and even quadruple

readers consciousness about what it might mean to live in a world made by people of colourin other words, to live in a black future (Eshun 2003, p. 298). Thus Afrofuturist artists like Drexciya encourage disalienation from the world of

tomorrow by insisting on a multiplicity of black futures that are distinctly alien to those whitewashed ones featured regularly in Hollywood films, Sci-Fi Channel television programming, and glossy computer magazines.>

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Afrofuturism Breaks the Socially Imposed Chain to Retrieve the Future Yaszek 5- Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies School of Literature, Communication, and Culture (Lisa, June/September 2005, Rethinking History. Vol. 9, No. 2/3, pp. 297-313. An Afrofuturist Reading of Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man)
Ellisons protagonist to simply witness what he calls the boomerang of history. Eventually he must learn to take control of history and deny those whitewashed histories of the future predicated on the erasure of black subjectivity. He learns this lesson from Brother Tarp, an unassuming old man who becomes a kind of spokesperson for
Of course it is not enough for Afrofuturity. As a young man in the south, Tarp refuses to give up his possessions to a white man; later, he refuses to accept the sentence of life imprisonment he receives for doing so, and, after nineteen years of patient waiting, he finds his opportunity and escapes to the north. As he tells the invisible man: I said no to a man who wanted to take something from me; thats what it

cost me for saying no and even now the debt aint fully paid and will never be paid in their terms. . .. I said no. . .I said hell no! And I kept saying no until I broke the chain and left (p. 387). Significantly, this passage does more than demonstrate one mans refusal to play the role that has been socially scripted for him. It shows how, in refusing this role, one man can change the future: Tarps debtsuch as it iswill never be paid because he refuses to become the subservient black man he is supposed to be. Instead, he removes himself from the future that has been imposed on him and allies himself with the Brotherhood in the hope of a better tomorrow.

Racism Normative
The Affirmatives discursive construction of apocalyptic impacts ignores the manner in which black spaces are characterized as the battlefields of global warfare and economic struggle Africa as the dark continent becomes the space of racist projections as we progress toward futurity violent oppression becomes inevitable

Eshun 92 (Kodwo Eshun MA in Arts, Course Leader of Arts at Goldsmiths College, Further Considerations of Afrofuturism) Page (5-6)
If global scenarios are descriptions that are primarily concerned with making futures safe for the market, then Afrofuturisms first priority is to recognize that Africa increasingly exists as the object of futurist projection. African social reality is overdetermined by intimidating global scenarios, doomsday economic projections, weather predictions, medical reports on AIDS, and life-expectancy forecasts, all of which predict decades of immiserization. These powerful descriptions of the future demoralize us; they command us to bury our heads in our hands, to groan with sadness. Commissioned by multinationals and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), these developmental futurisms function as the other side of the corporate utopias that make the future safe for industry. Here, we are seduced not by smiling faces staring brightly into a screen; rather, we are menaced by predatory futures that insist the next years will be hostile. Within an economy that runs on SF capital and market futurism, Africa is always the zone of the absolute dystopia. There is always a reliable trade in market projections for Africas socioeconomic crises. Market dystopias aim to warn against predatory futures, but always do so in a discourse that aspires to unchallengeable certainty. The AFF conceptualizes Africa where misery and doom is all that exist and that mentality can only be detrimental

Eshun 92 (Kodwo Eshun MA in Arts, Course Leader of Arts at Goldsmiths College ,Further Considerations of Afrofuturism) Page (5-6)
If global scenarios are descriptions that are primarily concerned with making futures safe for the market, then Afrofuturisms first priority is to recognize that Africa increasingly exists as the object of futurist projection. African social reality is overdetermined by intimidating global scenarios, doomsday economic projections, weather predictions, medical reports on AIDS, and life-expectancy forecasts, all of which predict decades of immiserization. These powerful descriptions of the future demoralize us; they command us to bury our heads in our hands, to groan with sadness. Commissioned by multinationals and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), these developmental futurisms function as the other side of the corporate utopias that make the future safe for industry. Here, we are seduced not by smiling faces staring brightly into a screen; rather, we are menaced by predatory futures that insist the next years will be hostile. Within an economy that runs on SF capital and market futurism, Africa is always the zone of the absolute dystopia. There is always a reliable trade in market projections for Africas 19

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Camp Tournament Neg Arg Group socioeconomic crises. Market dystopias aim to warn against predatory futures, but always do so in a discourse that aspires to unchallengeable certainty.

Racism is a persistent deep-rooted construct in our society that even titanic cultural move-ments have been unable to eliminate in any significant way. White Americans rarely provide support for the movement unless it grants them some benefit that will only serve to further the racial tensions their policies have fostered. Harvard Law Review, 93 (April, 1993, The Harvard Law Review Association, BOOK NOTE: AND WE WILL NOT BE SAVED.
FACES AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WELL: THE PERMANENCE OF RACISM. By Derrick Bell.) The substance of Bell's argument is as straightforward as it is bleak: "[I]t is time to 'get real' about race and the persistence of racism in America" (p.5). Racism is an integral feature of American society; "[e]ven those herculean efforts we hail as successful will produce no more than temporary 'peaks of progress,' short-lived victories that slide into irrelevance as racial patterns adapt in ways that maintain white dominance" (p. 12 (emphasis omitted)). Bell provides several explanations for the persistence of racism. Whites provide blacks "little protection against one or another form of racial discrimination unless granting blacks a measure of relief will serve some interest of importance to whites" (p. 53). Fur-hermore, poor whites, instead of acknowledging the similarity of their position with that of blacks, are "easily detoured into protecting their sense of entitlement vis-a-vis blacks for all things of value"

White media and literature have created a culture that downplays the implication that slavery holds for the present and future by manipulating the history of black liberty Lavender, Associate Professor of English at Central Arkansas University, 11 (2011, Isaiah, Race in American Science Fiction. Indiana University Press, Pgs. 56-58, CJC)
Undoubtedly, American slavery survives in our cultural imaginaion, in our records, even in our sf. Terry Bissons
provocative Fire on the Mountain (1988), for example, describes an alternative history where John Browns raid, with the assistance of Harriet Tubman, succeeds at Harpers Ferry. The resulting changes include a socialist black republic in the Deep South that shapes much of the worlds politics. Bissons novel demonstrates that slavery is very thoughtfully studied by the author, giving us a

feel for its social environment, its common activities and values, as we progressively compile as much of its tradition as possible. Yet some aspects of the slave experience will always remain outside of this constructed history because the manner in which history is written is largely flawed. I say flawed because individual authors bring their various prejudices to bear on historical records and translate happenings through specific agendas. In other words, they influence our understanding of slavery by carefully shaping and manipulating our knowledge. This influence, positive or negative, affects how different races perceive historical slavery and each races position in relation to it. Racism, then, becomes specific to these social experiences recorded in history, charging black and white subjectivities in different ways, and fixing identities in racial categories that have proven nearly impossible to transcend. A case in point, William Styrons Pulitzer Prizewinning The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), offers a
fictionalized account of the brutal and violent 1831 Southampton, Virginia, slave revolt led by the infamous Nat Turner, in which fifty-nine white people died. Black objections to the novel concern the possible misrepresentation of history and the appropriation by white writers of the iconic image that Turner symbolizes for many black Americans. Undeniably, some people will feel that Styrons race undermines the artistic value of his novel as a social document because he has little personal association with slavery as a white man in America. Styron is a white man from the South using a black historical figure to talk about slavery. His reinterpretation of the past through his neo slave narrative clearly diminishes the blacks sense of ownership of this history. But even more, his interpretation sees only white men as historical subjects, and as a white American male he is fundamentally incapable of seeing beyond that fact. In defense of Styron, I believe that people on both sides of the color line have to deal with the consequences of slavery. Although slavery has ended, Sherryl Vint comments, its traumatic and continued effects on Americans, both black and white, have not been dealt with (Only, 242).

Through his three laws of robotics, Asimov justifies the unapologetic slavery of mechanical beings by protecting humans while in fact the laws ensure supreme dominance of the superior race. The same laws that enslave blacks today are justified with the premise that they are protecting humans. Lavender, Associate Professor of English at Central Arkansas University, 11 (2011,
Isaiah, Race in American Science Fiction, Indiana University Press, Pgs. 60-61, CJC)

Central to Asimovs future are the famous three laws of robotics: First, a robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; second, a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; and third, a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws (4445). These laws 20

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Camp Tournament Neg Arg Group ensure that humanity remains in charge, perhaps an unthinking construction of what might be called meta-slavery, wherein
technology, i.e., enslaved robots, presents conditions that distance us from historical human slavery but promote interrogations of its essential characteristics. Asimovs laws regulate robot behavior toward humanity by placing conditions upon robot actions. More specifically, while Asimovs three laws are intended to ensure the safety and superiority of humans, they actually ensure the technological bondage and inferiority of robots. In essence, the three laws require robots to protect humans from harm, to follow the commands of humans to the letter unless this conflicts with the first law, and to practice selfpreservation if, and only if, the self-saving act does not interfere with the first two laws. Arguably then, Asimov is refashioning the slave codes that subjugated blacks while he serves a progressive philosophy based on the assumption that

technological consciousness can be denied free will because it is inherently inferior. The concept of free will is obviously key because it is a repetition of the antebellum period in American history, a human sense that African slaves did not possess wills and were therefore not human. Asimovs relatively simple laws dictate that mechanized beings shall always be subordinate to humanity because men are afraid of their own creations; that the relationship between man and machine must be that of master and slave because robots are rivals that will surpass human capabilities. Therefore, humans must protect themselves by creating a limiting consciousness for robots in the form of a positronic brain. Such benign edicts are the basis of Asimovs seemingly inadvertent endorsement of racism as an acceptable starting point for relationships between conscious, intelligent entities. Ultimately, the
robots of the stories take command of the Earth in a quiet uprising led by the passing robot Stephen Byerly. Robots can better protect humanity as a whole by managing the worlds resources. It is questionable whether Asimov saw the racial implications in his storiesthat

the difference between humanity and the robots mirrors, mechanically, the difference between white masters and black slaves. I am suggesting, however, that in science fiction robots represent technological descendants of humanity, thus
becoming a logical step in our transformation to posthumanity. I contend, then, that these implications must be examined. If, for example, Asimov is indirectly suggesting that the practice of slavery is required for the betterment of humanity at the expense of artificial persons, he is apparently unconscious of the racist innuendo. Other scholars pick up on the underlying robot as slave connotation, and a formerly hidden race dialogue emerges. Consequently, I think it would be useful to investigate a few critical responses to Asimovs celebrated law.

Racism against african americans is undermined by more intimidating issues

Yaszek, Lisa 2005 ( Assosciate professor and directors of undergraduate studies school of literature, Communication and Culture.) (June 2005 afrofuturism and Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man. Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 9.2/3) As the name implies, (Afrofuturism is not just about reclaiming the history of the past, but about reclaiming the history of the future as well. Kodwo Eshun argues that our most culturally pervasive visions of tomorrow are generated by a futures industry that weaves together technoscientific findings, mass media storytelling practices, and economic prediction to make sense of its own movements. More often than not, the futures industry conflates blackness with catastrophe. For example, Eshun notes that African social reality is overdetermined by intimidating global scenarios, doomsday economic projections, weather predictions, medicalreports on AIDS, and life-expectancy forecasts, all of which predict decades of immiserization (Eshun 2003, pp. 291 2920). As such, Africa becomes a site of absolute dystopia, an imaginary futurological space where the persistence of black identity signifies a
disastrous failure in the ongoing progress of global capital as a whole.

Blackness functions as the antithesis to human the universal human is defined as white and male, which only has meaning in its relation to the black other as non-human in the black diaspora, humanity becomes denaturalized because of these historical exclusions

Nelson, Associate Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, 2002 (Alondra, holds an appointment in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWaG). Her areas of specialization include race and ethnicity in the U.S.; gender and kinship; socio-historical studies of medicine, science and technology; and social and cultural theory. Nelson studies the production of knowledge about human difference in biomedicine and technoscience and the circulation of these ideas in the public sphere: Her research focuses on how science and its applications shape the social world, including aspects of personal identification, racial formation and collective action. In turn, she also explores the ways in which social groups challenge, engage and, in some instances, adopt and mobilize conceptualizations of race, ethnicity and gender derived from scientific and technical domains. Afrofuturism, Duke University Press, 2002) page 27
Afro-Caribbean theorist Sylvia Wynters attempt to recast the human sciences in relation to a

new conception of man provides contexts in which to think the human that not only bridge the ever widening gap between the cognitive life sciences and humanities but also incorporate the colonial and racialist histories of the human.14 Tracing the 21

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religious conception of the self gave way to two modes of secularized subjectivity: first, the Cartesian Rational Man and then, beginning at the end of the eighteenth century, . . . Man as a selected being and natural organism . . . as the universal human, man as man (Beyond the Word, 645).15 In the discursive and material universe of biological idealism, the second of Wynters modes of secularized being, black subjects served as limit cases by which man could define himself as the universal human (Disenchanting Discourse, 436). Here, man appears as man via dis-identification, wherein whiteness connotes the full humanity only gleaned in relation to the lack of humanity in blackness. Moreover, the black population groups of the New World [acted] as the embodied bearers of Ontological lack to the secular model of being, Man, as the conceptual Other (Beyond the Word, 641).16 Because New World black subjects were denied access to the position of humanity for so long, humanity refuses to signify any ontological primacy within Afrodiasporic discourses. In black culture this category becomes a designation that shows its finitudes and exclusions very clearly, thereby denaturalizing the human as a universal formation while at the same time laying claim to it. Put differently, the moment in which black people enter into humanity, this very idea loses its ontological thrust
longue dure of Western modernity, Wynter maintains that the because its limitations are rendered abundantly clear. Black humanism disenchants Man as Man, bringing into being different modes of the human because it deploys the very formulation of man as catachresis (Disenchanting Discourse, 466). Current debates about the posthuman might do well to incorporate these ontological others into their theories in order to better situate and analyze the porous perimeters of the human.

Apocalypse Now
The apocalypse has already happened but the aff acts as if they can stop it. They fail to realize that the harms that they have identified have already been perpetrated by the system they have actively chosen to endorse in the 1ac. You should reject the affirmative for their complicity with the march of modernity that discursively reproduces the worst atrocities in history within the debate round. Only in its absence can we orient ourselves toward an Afrofuture. Galli 09 (Galli, Chuck, "Hip-Hop Futurism: Remixing Afrofuturism and the Hermeneutics of Identity" (2009). Honors Projects Overview. http://digitalcommons.ric.edu/honors_projects/18.)
Gilroy contends that thinking about the future has a distinctive character in Black traditions and has roots in the material history of many Black peoples. He references the high frequency of Black spirituals based on deliverance and postulates that the mind of the Black slave was firmly planted in the future because the present was so hopeless and wretched. To grossly summarize his very brilliant works and arguments, Gilroy proposes that since the Black present has so often provided no impetus to survive or hope of personal and group betterment, the future became a mental and spiritual location for Blacks on the plantation, wherever that may have been.54 Gilroy considers himself to be a successor in this theoretical lineage (though obviously not informed by the same lived conditions as slaves and colonial subjects) and admits that when considering issues of race theory, racism, and anti-racism, he prefers to [invoke] the unknowable future against the unforgiving present.55 Gilroy believes that Corrective or compensatory inclusion in modernity should no longer supply the dominant theme of anti-racist discourse and says that people should self-consciously become more future oriented, drawing his inspiration from Franz Fanon, who advocated that one should know his history, but break from it if he is ever to be free.56 In his book The Black Atlantic, Gilroy deals with what he sees as a stark ideological differentiation between Western peoples and peoples of the African diaspora regarding their respective eschatologies.57 On the one hand, he identifies the theme of a futuristic utopia in the Western literary tradition. Western futurism, he claims, operates within a framework of European modernity and holds to the idea that society is progressing through rationalism, and that such progress will lead humans to better lives.58 Essentially, in the popular Western tradition, technological advances and material gain are seen as indicators of progress, and such progress can be followed along a rational path (that is, a path which rationalizes the continued perception of increased technological complexity and material gain as measures of advancement) toward a utopia where basic needs are no longer extant thanks to innovation, labor, and the removal from society of things which interfere with progress. Conversely, Gilroy points to a long tradition of the jubilee in Black literature and history that is inconsistent with the Western belief in utopia.59 If utopia is a state of perfect being achieved through a process of societal progress, jubilee is a process of being perfect regardless of the eventual destination.60 Gilroy relates the story of a female slave who fled to a free state with her children before the American Civil War and took refuge in a house. Upon finding her whereabouts, slave hunters surrounded the house with firearms and demanded that 22

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Camp Tournament Neg Arg Group the woman and her children come out. Rather than do the rational thing and surrender in hopes of receiving less punishment for herself and he children, the woman grabbed a knife and slit the throat of one of her small children, making for the others in hopes of achieving the same ends.61 For the slave woman, the murder of her children is a jubilant thing, for it defies slavery as a practice and institution, terrorism, White supremacy, and American law. The act of perfect being in the moment supercedes the hope of attaining personal, material betterment. Gilroy credits this phenomenon of the jubilee in Black thought partially to the relationship between Blacks and labor.62 As Europe entered the Modern era and individual rights began to (slowly) replace the feudal labor system, Europeans began to see a correlation between their labor, personal progress, societal progress, and the betterment of everything through work.63 Blacks, Gilroy argues, were not infused with the same (some say Protestant) work ethic, tending to associate Modern labor with terror, slavery, colonization, and a diminishing of individual rights. As he succinctly puts it: This inclination towards death and away from bondage is fundamental. It reminds us that in the revolutionary eschatology which helps to define this primal history of modernity, whether apocalyptic or redemptive, it is the moment of jubilee that has the upper hand over the pursuit of utopia by rational means.64 The repeated choice of death rather than bondage articulates a principal of negativity that is opposed to the formal logic and rational calculation characteristic of modern western thinking and expressed in the Hegelian slaves preference for bondage rather than death.65 This resulted in a vastly different interpretation of the technological, economic, and civil advances created through work. Rather than seeing these European markers of cultural progress as proof that work was directly related to a more perfect life, and as a basis for hope that future benefits can be attained through more work, Gilroy argues that Blacks interpreted their work as antithetical to their own interests and perceived as a lie the notion that labor led to advancements, which led to a better life. The modern labor ethic was/is thus seen as Middle Ages feudalism gone through metamorphosis and reemerged with a new selling-point of universality.66 Music critic and writer Mark Sinker says that the central fact of Afrofuturist art is that the Apocalypse already happened.67 The queue to take this post-apocalyptic position can arguably be drawn from a number of instances in Black history: the abduction of Africans and subsequent transportation to an alien land, the institution of generational slavery and the construction of a legal hell, or even the subjugation of a people to the needs of the Cross-Bronx Expressway and the abandonment of the society which followed. It seems to follow that if Afrofuturist thought has been constructed in a mindset of post-apocalypsis, that the concept of the jubilee would very easily come to be a prime futuristic aspiration since the march of modernity led to the apocalypse in the first place We have, then, arguments that postulate the existence of something which occurs with such frequency in the futuristic imaginings of Blacks that it warrants a prefix such as Afroor Black- in describing it. I would add this thing to Derys and Nelsons definitions of Afrofuturism that there is essentially a challenge to the entire European notion (which, thanks to modernity, has practically issued an official, though not de facto, statement of monopoly to the world) that progress is tied to labor and that such progress is necessarily good. A muted rebuttal has been made for centuries to the grand structure by which humans of various colors and backgrounds have been told to measure goodness this progress-hermeneutics superstructure. The aim here is to grasp some relatively broad, generally recognized definitions and characteristics of Afrofuturism. We have identified the popular definitions of Mark Dery and Alondra Nelson as well as the concepts of utopia, jubilee, apocalypse, and what I have termed the progress-hermeneutics superstructure. All of these concepts will play a major role in the treatment of my coming proposition that hip-hop futurism be considered a unique and important praxis in its own right. For now, however, I will move on to illuminate the many futuristically oriented modes of production in hip-hop which will hopefully lay sufficient groundwork for the introduction and exploration of hip-hop futurism.

The affirmative articulation of their case harm proves that there is no value to human life The apocalypse has already occurred the colored bodies that have faced alienation and dispossession of their homelands reside in alien nations the very nature of modernity caused the apocalypse Faculty of Arts and Science at the Rhode Island College for the Program in African and African-American Studies. Galli 9 (Chuck, April 1, 2009, Rhode Island College Honors Project, Overview Paper 18, Hip-Hop Futurism: Remixing Afrofuturism and the Hermeneutics of Identity)
<This resulted in a vastly different interpretation of the technological, economic, and civil advances created through work. Rather than seeing these European markers of cultural progress as proof that work was directly related to a more

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Camp Tournament Neg Arg Group perfect life, and as a basis for hope that future benefits can be attained through more work, Gilroy argues that Blacks interpreted their work as antithetical to their own interests and perceived as a lie the notion that labor led to advancements, which led to a better life. The modern labor ethic was/is thus seen as Middle Ages feudalism gone through metamorphosis and reemerged with a new selling-point of universality.66 Music critic and writer Mark Sinker says that the central fact of Afrofuturist art is that the Apocalypse already happened.67 The queue to take this post-apocalyptic position can arguably be drawn from a number of instances in Black history: the abduction of Africans and subsequent transportation to an alien land, the institution of generational slavery and the construction of a legal hell, or even the subjugation of a people to the needs of the Cross-Bronx Expressway and the abandonment of the society which followed. It seems to follow that if Afrofuturist thought has been constructed in a mindset of post-apocalypsis, that the concept of the jubilee would very easily come to be a prime futuristic aspiration since the march of modernity led to the apocalypse in the first place.68>

Alternative Solvency
Through each discursive act, the white-masculine-hetero as normative is unconsciously reproduced and sustained. Contestation 0f white privilege in public arenas through black and other ethnic identities cultural elaborations, resist the social norms of embodiment. Perkinson, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Marygrove College and of Social Ethics at Ecumenical Theological Seminary, 2005 [James W., Shamanism, racism and hip hop culture (pg. 120-122)]JB
The hypothesis already limned in the above story is that white middleclass male forms of embodiment in this country are largely unconscious and inarticulate. They tend to encode technologies of normativity that normally do not require the work of conscious performance. They constitute an unproblematic physicality in the body politic. They navigate social spaceboth public and privateunobstructed, un(re)marked. The policing of such a body is an accomplished fact of middle-class pedagogy that rarely requires external reinforcement. It is this body that stands as the hegemonic body par excellence. Its particular constellation of meaningsits whiteness, maleness, middle class-ness, and heterosexualityare produced and reproduced in discourses that are not simply verbal. Indeed, a large part of this bodys social inscription is accomplished in and by its production and occupation of certain spaces in a normative4 realization of quite particular protocols. That such is the case only begins to come to consciousness for most white males in the challenge of other forms of embodiment that have enough power in a given confrontation to resist those protocols and either explicitly or implicitly interrogate their normativity. Paramount among such moments of challenge, as prototypical of the particular history of this country from its very inception, is the encounter with black male performances of the body. African American innovations of public blacknessas embodied forms of social commentary and contestationrealize the quintessential counter-hegemonic possibility of what it means to be a human being in America. They do so in various modes of gender inscription and sexual orientation. And they do so in no small measure because blackness historically has been made to appear (in the discourses of white supremacy and white racism) as the mutually exclusive opposite of whiteness, as a quality of humanity that was essentially fixed and irreducibly different from the whiteness it licensed as its other pole of meaning. Whatever the actual negotiation of white normativity overall, whether the individuals in question otherwise challenge the social order of domination or largely reinforce its requirements, it is black cultural elaborations of the body that give sharpest relief to the arbitrariness of social norms of embodiment. Black occupations of public space regularly and continuously challenge the limits of allowable deviance in gestural style, sartorial statement, physical posture, and verbal volatility.5 In such everyday public improvisations of black embodiment as a cultural semantics of domination and resistance, whiteness is forced onto the surface of the social body and into question. In the actual moment of such a conjuration, black urban male forms of embodiment most profoundly unmask invisible whiteness as itself a gendered, heterosexual class formation. That this writing began with an instance of black female confrontation of white males does not gainsay that claim, but only points to the complexity of the way race engenders body language and vice versa. It is also important to note here that white middleclass females, as indeed white working-class females and The Body of White Space 181 males, and white participants in gay and lesbian lifestyles also stand as partial challenges to the taken-for-grantedness of the dominant forms of white male embodiment. Just as

importantly, other ethnic identities and cultural heritages likewise pose implicit critiques of the way whiteness, maleness, and normative power tend to be conflated in the dominant culture of this country. How such a
conflation is made to cohere and what the theoretical stakes are in recognizing it requires a layered analysis.

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Our discussion of the discursive constructions that make racial domination possible is key to stop it and spills over into the broader educational space. The racist disciplinary power of the debate community can only be sustained and instituted by those within it. Reid-Brinkley 08 (Shanara Rose Reid-Brinkley, Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Communications as well as the Director of Debate at the University of Pittsburgh, THE HARSH REALITIES OF ACTING BLACK: HOW AFRICANAMERICAN POLICY DEBATERS NEGOTIATE REPRESENTATION THROUGH RACIAL PERFORMANCE AND STYLE, 2008. http://www.comm.pitt.edu/faculty/documents/reidbrinkley_shanara_r_200805_phd.pdf)
The attempts at educational reform are not limited to institutional actors such as the local, state, and federal governments. Non-profit
organizations dedicated to alleviating the black/white achievement gap have also proliferated. One such organization, the Urban Debate League, claims that Urban Debate Leagues have proven to increase literacy scores by 25%, to improve grade-point averages by 8 to 10%, to achieve high school graduation rates of nearly 100%, and to produce college matriculation rates of 71 to 91%. The UDL program is housed in over fourteen American cities and targets inner city youths of color to increase their access to debate training. Such training of students defined as at risk is designed to offset the negative statistics associated with black educational achievement. The program has been fairly successful and has received wide scale media attention. The success of the program has also generated renewed interest amongst college debate programs in increasing direct efforts at recruitment of racial and ethnic minorities. The UDL program creates a substantial pool of racial minorities with debate training coming out of high school, that college debate directors may tap to diversify their own teams. The debate community serves as a microcosm of the broader educational space

within which racial ideologies are operating. It is a space in which academic achievement is performed according to the intelligibility of ones race, gender, class, and sexuality. As policy debate is intellectually rigorous and has historically been closed to those marked by social difference, it offers a unique opportunity to engage the impact of desegregation and diversification of American education. How are black students
integrated into a competitive educational community from which they have traditionally been excluded? How are they represented in public and media discourse about their participation, and how do they rhetorically respond to such representations? If racial

ideology is perpetuated within discourse through the stereotype, then mapping the intelligibility of the stereotype within public discourse and the attempts to resist such intelligibility is a critical tool in the battle to end racial domination. Education theorist Ludwig Pongratz argues that the testing focus in the standards and accountability movement is probably the most effective means of realizing disciplinary procedures. 11 He argues further that the contemporary reformist drive sweeping western nations is a tool designed to replicate normative practices, values, beliefs and behaviors consistent with the broader society. In other words, building on the work of Michel Foucault, Pongratz argues that the educational system, including reform efforts, function as a disciplinary apparatus that shapes and molds social bodies into normalized social systems. 12 The disciplinary character of modern education systems do not operate through institutional control, but instead through the positioning of social bodies to engage in self-control, an internalization of the discourse of institutional power. Pongratz notes that in this way, it becomes possible to integrate school pupils into the schools institutional framework more effectively than ever before. 13 Acclaimed French Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu theory of habitus is
useful here. For Bourdieu, habitas represents the incorporation of the social into the corporeal. 14 Gender theorist Terry Lovell argues Through habitus, social norms are incorporated in the body of the individual subject. 15 An

institution, like those attached to public education in the U.S. can only be efficacious if it is objectified in bodies in the form of durable dispositions that recognize and comply with the specific demands of a given institutional area of activity. 16 In other words, the disciplinary character of the school system only functions in so much as disciplinary parameters can be internalized by the members of a social body. What is missing from the study of education reform and the black/white achievement gap is an analysis of the discursive construction of racial images and stereotypes with which the public is confronted. 17 Public discourse about education reform, particularly that which revolves around the black/ white achievement gap, requires the use of race, class, and gender imagery that is intelligible to the general public. In essence, from experts to politicians to the news media, public representations of black underachievement and reform efforts depend on the versatility of social and cultural stereotypes consistent with the argumentative structures and social ideologies that make rhetorical efforts at reform intelligible. Education reform engages in a discourse of paradigm shift.
18 In essence there is a discursive consistency amongst education reform proponents for characterizing reform efforts as a change in perspective from previous values and beliefs about how best to educate Americas youth. Philosophy of education scholar Jeff Stickney argues that scholars interested in the production of education reform discourse should be concerned with how a change of perception is to be brought about or secured. 19 In other words, Stickney argues that the discourse supporting educational reform functions to discipline educators into a compliance that belies any attempt to critique and engage the viability of the reform effort to the specific contexts educators find themselves working within. 20 While Stickney is interested in engaging such discourse for the purpose of furthering theoretical scholarship on curriculum development, his study raises the question of how the public discourse surrounding education reform may function to discipline its differently situated stakeholders.

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The affs perception of educational space positions blackness as a pollutant to be purged from the system. This structure is mediated discursively and our disruption of it is enough to make racist notions of black identity unintelligible. Reid-Brinkley 08 (Shanara Rose Reid-Brinkley, Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Communications as well as the Director of Debate at the University of Pittsburgh, THE HARSH REALITIES OF ACTING BLACK: HOW AFRICAN-AMERICAN POLICY DEBATERS NEGOTIATE REPRESENTATION THROUGH RACIAL PERFORMANCE AND STYLE, 2008. http://www.comm.pitt.edu/faculty/documents/reidbrinkley_shanara_r_200805_phd.pdf)
Particularly, I am interested in the speaking body of the other, that body that pollutes, or darkens the purity of the holistic social body. Post-structural education theorist John Warren describes schooling in terms of the institutional maintenance of purity. 55 Schools represent at their best, a pollutant and contaminant free environment, as critical to the educational and social maturation of student minds. Warren notes that "the body is perceptually rendered absent in an effort to center perceptual attention on the mind." 56 In other words, in the school environment the presence of the body is a social pollutant of the educational space. The body must be invisible in order to focus on the mind. The educational system attempts "to erase the impact of the body." 57 Warren suggests that bodies of color, in particular, exceed attempts to render them absent. 58 For cultural theorists Homi Bhabha and Franz Fanon, the colored, or more specifically, the black body signifies a difference from white bodies that makes the colored body significantly more visible in majority white societies. 59 The black body represents dirt or a stain, or to use symbolic anthropologist Mary Douglas' language, a pollutant, on and in the social body, one that must be controlled and contained. Color is written on the skin, encrusted on the flesh of the body at the surface level. 60 The Deleuzian metaphor of a body without organs is particularly useful here. For it is the flesh that signifies, not the internal processes of the body. And, yet the flesh signifies on internal processes of the biological body. The colored body signifies a biological difference, an inherent difference, from non-colored or white bodies. In other words, despite the fact that significant gains have been made in reducing the social belief in the biological difference between the races, American public and social discourse tends toward that belief, while political correctness reduces the ways in which such beliefs can be expressed. Such an ambivalent stance results in
the shading of the consistencies between all human bodies, resulting in a body without organs, where the surface level of the skin comes to (re)present biological difference. The fact that bodies of color remain present despite the fact that they

are supposed to be absent "is exactly what maintains white privilege. 61 Educational structures may or may not be directly racially discriminatory, "rather, they take the form of cultural values, methods of learning, styles of interaction, and other educational rituals that continually reinforce the culture of power. 62 In essence, Warren suggests that bodies of color represent a bodily contaminant that can only result in a systemically cycling
psychosis as these bodies can never fully be rendered absent. Thus, if the body can never be rendered fully absent then it is exceedingly relevant to the racial signification process in educational spaces and public discourse about those spaces. The speaking subject is a talking body. The body becomes critical in understanding and evaluating what the speaking subject says and

what is said about the speaking subject. Thus, a rhetorical consideration of the representation and performance of black people in a majority white environment, must engage the body as rhetorical.

Rhetoric and argumentation scholar Melanie McNaughton's essay, "Hard Cases: Prison Tattooing as Visual Argumentation," suggests that Given daily contact with the bodies of others, understanding the ways that bodies argue visually is important to understanding the operations of rhetoric in our lives. 63 For McNaughton who is interested in visual argumentation through prison tattooing, the body as an integral site of rhetorical voice problematizes our current emphasis in the field of rhetoric toward ignoring the body in favor of a focus on verbal discourse. If the body speaks, whom does it to and what might it be saying? McNaughton's study leads us toward theorizing the body as argumentative, and yet her study does not really look to the body as argument, as much as it looks to the style or the styling of the body as argument. Tattoos are an overlay on the surface of the body, and while certainly difficult and painful to cover or remove, they simply cover the body and are not of the body. While tattooing may represent and signify violence to the average onlooker, according to McNaughton, that violence is indicative of a cultural affiliation and not an inherent state of that marked body. In other words, the tattoo wearer could signify other than a violent subjectivity were the tattoo not there. Thus, tattooing might still clearly fit under the more traditional rubric of style or performance. Despite these limitations, McNaughton's essay leads rhetoricians toward asking the question of whether or not the body signifies within and through verbal, rhetorical communication and if so how might we begin to read and theorize the speaking body. McNaughton's essay reads the tattooing of bodies through the theoretical vocabulary of argumentation theory, intent on justifying such rhetoric as "operating by way of claims supported by evidence and reasoning. 64 However, a focus on the body per se may demonstrate a greater difficulty than McNaughton's essay implies. As prison tattoos are overlaid on the skin in distinctive patterns chosen by the wearer, its function as visual argument is more cleanly interpreted by onlookers. Yet, I seek to interrogate the manner in which racialized bodies supplement verbal argument in public discourse. Such a supplement will not be cleanly identifiable as engaging in "claims supported by evidence and reasoning. 65 Instead, an analysis of the racialized body might very well depend on a level of irrationality and subconscious reasoning, as racism in signification is hardly ever completely rational. In this project, I theorize the racialized body as speakerly, particularly within interracial public interactions. I read the body, both its

social representation and its performance, as critically implicated within any rhetorical situation, and as such, 26

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Camp Tournament Neg Arg Group I argue that it must read out of the visual surface of the speaking body. This project will not directly analyze the representation of young blacks in public rhetoric about the acting white thesis. Instead, I use this public and academic discussion as a critical example of the changing public discourse about race and educational inequality. The
term acting in reference to acting White, Black or Latino does imply that race is simply a performance. If race is only a performance then one can choose what to perform. Thus, those who perform cultures that are outside the normative mainstream make a choice and must be responsible for the consequences. Such a stance constitutes an ambivalent position by which one believes and actively supports efforts to ensure racial equality while simultaneously insisting that help must come with socially responsible behavior. Stereotypical images and representations strengthen this ambivalence. Racial stereotypes are par for the course in public

discourse. As the public and the media engage in argumentation about the education crisis, racial stereotypes function to make the discussion intelligible. And, it is not just the black body that must be intelligible, but the discussion depends on the very intelligibility of the white body. Cultural explanations of race may prevail, and yet, the body remains a specter of the natural, that thing that cannot be changed. And, the stereotype remains tied to it. Public representation of poor, black students is bound within this complex narrative of race, culture, and performance.

Future is not predetermined but a struggle, in which the future is internalized through the success of a specific superior. However, these groups such as gays and blacks are not part of the conflict and without this inclusion we are left to a dystopia which must be changed. Munoz 07' (Jose, Duke University Press Editor, CRUISING THE TOILET LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Radical Black Traditions, and Queer Futurity, Queers Futurity, 2010, Duke North Carolina)
The question of children hangs heavily when one considers Barakas present. On August 12, 2003, one of his daughters, Shani Baraka, and her female lover, Rayshon Holmes, were killed by the estranged husband of Wanda Pasha, who is also one of Barakas daughters. The thirty-one- and thirty-year-old womens murders were preceded a few months earlier by another hate crime in Newark, the killing of fifteen-year-old Sakia Gunn. Gunn was a black transgendered youth who traveled from Hoboken to Greenwich Village and the Christopher Street piers to hang out with other young queers of color. Baraka and his wife, Amina, have in part dealt with the tragic loss of their daughter by turning to activism. The violent fate of their child has alerted them to the systemic violence that faces queer people (and especially young people) of color. The Barakas have both become ardent antiviolence activists speaking out directly on LGBT issues. Real violence has ironically brought Baraka back to a queer world that he had renounced so many years ago. Through his tremendous loss he has decided to further diversify his consistent commitment to activism and social justice to include what can only be understood as queer politics. In the world of The Toilet there are no hate crimes, no lexicon that identifies homophobia per se, but there is the fact of an aggression constantly on the verge of brutal actualization. The mimetic violence resonates across time and to the scene of the loss that the author will endure decades later. This story from real life is not meant to serve as the proof for my argument. Indeed, the plays highly homoerotic violence is in crucial ways nothing like the misogynist violence against women that befell the dramatists family or the transgenderphobic violence that ended Gunns young life. I mention these tragedies because it makes one simple point. The future is

only the stuff of some kids. Racialized kids, queer kids, are not the sovereign princes of futurity. While Edelman does indicate that the future of the child as futurity is different from the future of actual children, his framing nonetheless accepts and reproduces this monolithic figure of the child that is indeed always already white. He all but ignores the point that other modes of particularity within the social are constitutive of subjecthood beyond the kind of jouissance that refuses both narratological meaning and what he understands as the fantasy of futurity. He anticipates and bristles against his future critics with a precognitive paranoia in footnote 19 of his first chapter. He rightly predicts that some identitarian critics (I suppose that would be me in this instance, despite my ambivalent relation to the concept of identity) would dismiss his polemic by saying it is determined by his middle-class white gay male positionality. This attempt to inoculate himself from those who engage his polemic does not do the job. In the final analysis, white gay male crypto-identity politics (the restaging of whiteness as universal norm via the imaginary negation of all other identities that position themselves as not white) is beside the point. The deeper point is indeed political, as, but certainly not more, political as Edelmans argument. It is important not to hand over futurity to normative white reproductive futurity. That dominant mode of futurity is indeed winning, but that is all the more reason to call on a utopian political imagination that will enable us to glimpse another time and place: a not-yet where queer youths of color actually get to grow up. Utopian and willfully idealistic practices of thought are in order if we are to resist the perils of heteronormative pragmatism and Anglo-normative pessimism. Imagining a queer subject who is abstracted from the sensuous intersectionalities that mark our experience is an ineffectual way out. Such an escape via singularity is a ticket whose price most cannot afford. The way to deal with the asymmetries and violent frenzies that mark the present is not to forget the future. The here and now is simply not enough. Queerness should and could be about a desire for another way of being in both the world and time, a desire that resists mandates to accept that which is not enough.

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We must not accept the ideal that the future is inevitably oppression-centric, we must come to recognize that with actions and with our discourse, change is possible. Despite the hardship that must be endured, it is important to recognize that change is possible.
Munoz 07' (Jose,

Duke University Press Editor, CRUISING THE TOILET LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Radical Black Traditions, and Queer Futurity, Queers Futurity, 2010, Duke North Carolina)
Thus the plays dramatic conclusion is not an end but, more nearly, an Agambenian means without an end. Recognition of this order challenges theories of antirelationality that dominate queer criticism like Edelmans and the Leo Bersani of Is the Rectum a Grave? and, to a lesser degree, Homos.24 The act of accepting no future is dependent on renouncing politics and various principles of hope that are, by their very nature, relational. By finishing on a note not of reconciliation but of the refusal of total repudiation a gestural enduring/supporting The Toilet shows us that relationality is not pretty, but the option of simply opting out of it, or describing it as something that has never been available to us, is imaginable only if one can frame queerness as a singular abstraction that can be subtracted and isolated from a larger social matrix.

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Despite a bleak future that is being developed by the society of today, hope exists and if we can embrace a rejection of today's society and engage in intellectualism with regards to afro futurism and the racism and the ideas that branch of of this, we can, as a community, change the way we conceptualize the world and decrease the amount of oppression. Munoz 07' (Jose, Duke University Press Editor, CRUISING THE TOILET LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Radical Black Traditions, and Queer Futurity, Queers Futurity, 2010, Duke North Carolina)
Lee Edelman, in his powerful polemic No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, wishes to alert his readers to the fact that the structuring optimism of politics of which the order of meaning commits us, installing as it does the perpetual hope of reaching meaning through signification, is always, I would argue, a negation of this primal, constitutive and negative act.17 Political hope fails queers because, like signification, it was not originally made for us. It resonates only on the level of reproductive futurity. Instead, Edelman recommends that queers give up hope and embrace a certain negation endemic to our abjection within the symbolic. What we get, in exchange for giving up on futurity, abandoning politics and hope, is a certain jouissance that at once defines and negates us. Edelmans psychoanalytic optic reveals that the social is inoperable for the always already shattered queer subject.18 I have attempted to outline this polemic in a fashion that displays some of my admiration for it. I agree with and feel hailed by much of No Future. Indeed, when I negotiate the ever-increasing sidewalk obstacles produced by oversized baby strollers on parade in the city in which I live, the sheer magnitude of the vehicles that flaunt the incredible mandate of reproduction as world historical virtue, I could not be more hailed with a statement like: Queerness names the side of not fighting for the children, the side of outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the value of reproductive futurism.19 But as strongly as I reject reproductive futurity, I nonetheless refuse to

give up on concepts like politics, hope, and a future that is not kids stuff. Maybe there are moments after the frenzy of negation that is symbolized as extreme violence in The Toilet, for instance, like Ray cradling Footss head, that might display an ethics of embracing ones constituting negation. Perhaps that gesture is a manifestation of queernesss jouissance. It certainly reads like a smoldering moment in a Jean Genet text . Edelmans emphasis on queer jouissance, his charge that we take up our abjection within the social, is calibrated on embracing the necessary failure within the symbolic and within the protocols of reason. A reading aligned with this polemic would reject an understanding of this bloodied embrace between men as indicating any notion of a principle of hope. Thus
Joness only justification for the plays ending would be rebuffed by an Edelman-inspired reading. In a 1978 interview, well after the heyday of his nationalist separatism and his immersion in a particular Marxist-Stalinist configuration, Baraka described the end of the play as tacked on, explaining that it was meant to end with the fight. I sat there for a while thinking, was this really the way it had to end? The whole thing needed some kind of rapprochement there was a question of wanting to offer that kind of friendship that existed across traditional social lines. At the time I was married to a white woman, and most of the friends I had were white, on the Lower East

Side. I didnt go around thinking in my mind this is the case, but I think that is why that kind of ending seemed more appropriate to me at the time.20 We know that many of these white friends on the Lower East Side, like OHara and Allen Ginsberg, were also a little lavender. The interview works as a mild disavowal of the plays ending, a display of ambivalence that ignores its queer affect and tenor. The authors need to justify his end as the appeasement of his immediate social world needs further scrutiny.

Role of the ballot

It is your responsibility as an intellectual to map out the structures that support social dominance because it is individual participation that sustains it. The affirmative has made an active choice in the 1ac to endorse an ideology that discursively advances the basis of white privilege. Instead of realizing that they have endorsed a system of discursive violence, they have reapplied a complete eradication of difference within the debate sphere by running framework. Reid-Brinkley 08 (Shanara Rose Reid-Brinkley, Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Communications as well as the Director of Debate at the University of Pittsburgh, THE HARSH REALITIES OF ACTING BLACK: HOW AFRICAN-AMERICAN POLICY DEBATERS NEGOTIATE REPRESENTATION THROUGH RACIAL PERFORMANCE AND STYLE, 2008. http://www.comm.pitt.edu/faculty/documents/reidbrinkley_shanara_r_200805_phd.pdf)
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To begin an investigation of these questions of race, representation and performance, I utilize ideological criticism as a rhetorical method. This project is interested in the ideological discourses and representations of race, class,

gender, and sexuality within the public conversation about race and education. The dominant narratives, bred within institutional structures, must be interrogated for processes of normalization implicated in the success and achievement of black students in American society. In other words, an ideological analysis provides us with an opportunity to critically analyze the networks of power through which ideologies flow and gain discursive and representative dominance. The Marxist conception of ideology, reformulated and popularized by Louis Althusser, revolves around the assumption that social bodies are trapped within a false consciousness that blinds them to the truth. Althusser argues that ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence. 66 Such a conception of ideology was necessary to explain why the working class did not rise up against the ruling
class. Such ideologies were theorized as part of the superstructure resulting in the limited ability of subjects to exercise agency. For Althusser, dominant ideologies allowed the social structure to reproduce itself without ensuing conflict.

Ideology functioned to naturalize the dominant structure encouraging individuals to participate by engaging in practices and behaviors designed to maintain that system. More importantly, ideologies were thought to construct an imaginary reality by which social beings became dependent on the structure as it functions, in order to make sense of their very lives. In essence, ideology was considered to be deterministic, binding individuals to the
imaginary reality. However, current scholarship has been expressly critical of such a conceptualization of ideology, particularly, within the field of cultural studies, as it made the critical turn away from the study of dominant ideology and toward the cultural and everyday practices by which subjects engage ideological domination. Noted theorists, including Michel Foucault, Raymond Williams, and Stuart Hall have offered significant critiques of such a view of the relations of power in social system. One criticism of this version of ideology is that it assumes there is a truth, somewhere out there, that we are unable to ascertain because of the false consciousness produced through ideological discourses. 67 Second, as Foucault argues, ideology stands in a secondary position relative to something which functions as its infrastructure, as its material, economic determinant, etc. 68 In other words, ideology is defined as a result of economic structures. Thus, the economic structures are pre-existent and thus, uninfluenced by ideology, but simply productive of it. And, third, if the individual or the subject is not critical to the development of such ideological structures, but are instead determined by them, then social subjects become agent-less. They become simply social beings produced by the superstructure. Despite

significant criticism of the concept of ideology, it remains significantly useful in the study of social domination. We can agree that there is not some true expression of reality out there that we are somehow blinded from seeing. We can agree that ideology is both produced by and produces economic and social structures. And, we can agree that social actors and their actions are not determined by ideology as much as social actors are strongly influenced toward accepting those ideologies as within their best interest, an internalization of ideological discourse as inscribed through various apparatuses of power. Yet, as media and communications scholar Nicolas Garnham cautions, the
focus on resistance in cultural studies can prevent us from studying the manner in which dominance is maintained, both through structure and discourse. 69 He notes that it is the responsibility of intellectuals to map out structural and social

dominance. Social actors participate in the production and maintenance of culture, both dominant and subordinate. In any given situation, both dominance and resistance are likely to be active in varying degrees. Thus, this project is not simply interested in the study of the production and maintenance of dominant ideologies; simultaneously, we must look to the manner in which social actors engage in resistance efforts within and through such dominant ideologies. Contemporary racism is reproduced and maintained through discursive constructions that are circulated through ideologies. Ideologies help to make stereotypical representations intelligible to an audience. As long as racism remains a social phenomenon in our society, racial ideologies will likely remain a critical tool by which racial difference is signified. All racial ideologies do not function the same way; they are often complicated by intersections of class, gender, sexuality and context. And, as ideologies often function to dominate, they also create circumstances for resistance. This project seeks to engage both dominance and resistance; how racial ideologies reproduce social dominance, and how those affected by that dominance attempt to resist it. The rhetoric surrounding race and education offers one space from which to analyze the social reproduction of racial dominance. Looking to specific contexts through which we analyze the significance of racial ideologies allows us as scholars to map out the forces of power active through racial difference. Specifically, a rhetorical focus can map the public discursive maneuvers that (re)produce and resist these social ideologies. The rhetoric surrounding race, culture, and performance within educational discourse is of critical importance to the future course of educational opportunity in American society. We must understand the strategies of signification that are most persuasive and powerful to
the general public audience. What representations of racial others are most intelligible to the public and how might racial others respond to that intelligibility? As our previous discussion of the acting white thesis and the rise of cultural explanations of racial difference indicate, contemporary ideological representations of race have changed and in some ways remained the same. We must

interrogate the use of ideological representations of race, gender, class, and sexuality as rhetorical strategy in public deliberations. And, it is important to read the social actors involved and watching as embodied. It is quite clear, that the
public discourse surrounding race and education is extensive and far beyond the space allotted for this project. Thus, I have chosen a localized context from which to interrogate the ideological representations of race that may operate in any given American educational context. Academic policy debate is a competitive activity available to high school and college students. The activity dates back to the early 1900s in American history. 70 It is an extracurricular activity that pits students against one another in a rigorous mental and verbal challenge. To engage in the ideological analysis of race and education discourse, I analyze three case studies within American policy debate and its representation. Chapter Two is an analysis of a non-profit organization for minority, inner city youths, the Urban Debate League, that has received wide media representation. I analyze the representation of UDL participants in local and national newspapers, as well as, an extended primetime story by 60 minutes on the Baltimore Urban Debate League. In this chapter, I argue

that successful black students are scapegoated in news media representation and then redeemed by their

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argue that the news media relies on racial stereotypes of black youths to make the UDL participants intelligible to the viewing and reading audience. It is necessary for the audience to view the students as at risk in order to later demonstrate their exemplary status. It is the students ability to mimic the performative dynamics of success that allows their race, class, and gender status to be redeemed in news media representation. I conclude that such a

practice demonstrates the social significance of the stereotype even in positive portrayals of inner city black youths. Chapter Three is an analysis of race and performance in national college policy debate. The rising interest in
diversifying policy debate at the high school level through non-profit organizations has fueled attempts to diversify at the college level. This chapter analyzes the University of Louisville Malcolm X debate program as it pushes the debate community to confront its race and class privilege. In this chapter, I ask how do black students respond to the racial ideologies surrounding their debate participation? What are the rhetorical strategies by which they engage a majority white audience in public discussion about race, privilege, and performance? I argue that these students use black sub-cultural styles, including signifyin, and black popular

culture such as gospel and hip hop, to engage in a critical re-negotiation of intellectual knowledge making practices within the debate community. I argue further that the Louisville students engage in rhetorical practices that violate the genre of policy debate speechmaking. To engage in this investigation I review three

elimination round debates at the Cross-Examination Debate Associations National Championship Tournament. I specifically focus on the most successful of the Louisville teams made up of the partnership between Elizabeth Jones and Tonia Green. I argue that the use

of subcultural style offers a means for the Louisville students to resist the norms of white privilege that permeates the traditional debate landscape. Chapter Four is an analysis of the debate communitys response to the Louisville Project. In this chapter we are interested in how a majority white community responds to confrontational protest rhetoric in resistance narratives centered around racial representation and performance. I argue that the debate community engages in anti-movement resistance strategies. Instead of an outright rejection of the Louisville Project, the debate community attacks the Projects violation of the communitys notion of order and decorum. Through these three case studies, I seek to demonstrate the connection between the public representation of blackness and the performative strategies engaged in by Blacks in the attempt to resist the stereotypes associated with such representations. This project takes seriously the use of performative and cultural style as
a strategic and rhetorical engagement with contemporary racism in America.

Framework
White supremacy has transplanted itself in Western culture, dictating which resources can be utilized and which forms of knowledge are produced. These practices are often reterritorialized into different forms of domination that manifest themselves as a white fear of blackness. This fear has infiltrated the debate space in the form of framework in the sense that it attempts to erase all signs of difference to safeguard traditional ideals of what this space should Perkinson, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Marygrove College and of Social Ethics at Ecumenical Theological Seminary, 2005 [James W., Shamanism, racism and hip hop culture (pg.
120-122)]JB The last 500 years of modern geopolitical aggression and transnational economic domination by which Europe transplanted itself around the globe and took over, is more clearly organized in its basic life-world patterns and power privileges by the racial category of white/non-white than by any other observable category of demarcation. Modernity is the advent of white supremacy as a global system of hegemony. My contention is simply that whiteness is also the great category of bewitchment that both masks and mobilizes the basic circuits of consumption, which are that systems raison dtre. In developing a genealogy of this claim regarding whiteness, we can imagine the construct as a linkage of Foucauldian erudite and nave knowledges (Foucault, 1980, 8283). The erudite knowledge will be supplied by Hegel, subject to criticism. The nave knowledge is this indigenous African reading of trauma and early death as unnatural, caused by an enemy. The two combined form my overall attempt to know racialization as a form of witchcraft. The claim runs something like this: White supremacy is the basic structuring practice of the modern world system in terms of which extraction, appropriation, production, and consumption of resources are differentially organized. The race discourse mobilized by that practice has gone through continuous development that can be periodized historically (Pagden, 12). It was first worked out as a theological discourse effecting a sharp divide of spiritual discernment between presumed Christianity and perceived infidelity and sorcery in the early period of conquest and colonization (Omi and Winant, 6162). It was reworked into a metaphysical discourse on geography and biology in the Enlightenment, and further shifted into anthropological discourse regarding cultural difference in the twentieth century (Mills, 17, 2527, 46; Omi and Winant, 6364; Pagden, 12; West, 1982, 47, 51). In the United States in particular, in the 1960s, this discourse was contested in the identity 31

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Camp Tournament Neg Arg Group politics of black power activism, challenging the assimilation designs of the Chicago School ethnicity paradigm with a demand for pluralism and autonomy, and despite its subswas emulated by other groups concerned to preserve other forms of identity from being metabolized by whiteness (Omi and Winant, 104 106, 108109). I understand my own effort here as also contestatory in attempting to mobilize indigenous categories to unmask race discourse as perhaps most suggestively known, if not accurately analyzed, not as theology, ontology, or anthropology, but as itself the quintessential witchery of modernity. The genealogy of the claim finds its root in an observation made by Cress Welsing. In outlining her theory that white genetic survival is the core motivation of the white supremacy system, she finds signs of a white fear of annihilation by black potency continuously exhibited in the symbolic productions of Western societymost notably in connection with the Christian rite of communion (Cress Welsing, xiiixv). This rite is built on eating the body and drinking the blood of a Jesus whose originally dark features have only been lightened over two millennia in a gradual process of repressing the raw form of the terror of what I would call eating and divinizing the scapegoat. This complex ritual alchemy transposing the horrific into the heroic the dream of a dark divinity compelled to offer its flesh to the teeth of believers in the lightwill serve as a kind of template for our own analysis. Obviously, such an interpretation of the opaque depths of Christian symbolics, imagining a layer of deep liturgical forgetting, is heuristic and provisionala positing of denial in the very act of probing it.

Traditional styles of debate are committed to sustaining white culture and epistemology. Black ideals and culture in debate are excluded and monitored in the form of framework Perkinson, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Marygrove College and of Social Ethics at Ecumenical Theological Seminary, 2005[James W., Shamanism, racism and hip hop culture (pg.
120-122)]JB In the face of such an invaded circumstance, black survival could then be understood, in part, to have been a constant struggle to combat the effects of such an intrusion, to develop tactics for living under and around such a surveillance. Whatever forms it took, the antidote for such would obviously have to be capable of countermanding that invasive force in kind. Against the hard eye of a watching white culture, black response for over three hundred years now could be said to have taken collective shape (in part) as a harder eye15 of communal support and surreptition. Anthropologist Thomas Kochman is helpful in grasping, from a comparative white point of view, some of the distinctiveness of that response.16 As a counterforce to oppressive white voyeurism, black culture developed a performative countercompetency (Kochman, 110, 131).17 In the forums of barber shops and beauty parlors, in street rituals of capping and porch rituals of specifying, in call and response from the pew and you cant touch this antiphonies on the dance floor, in a hundred different tiny gestures of everyday life, black cultural protocols demanded and reinforced an oppositional facility (Kochman, 1819, 24, 127).18 They inculcated dramatic expressivity and elaborated a contrastive sensibility capable of deflecting the power of a controlling gaze by communally proliferating the gazes before which the body-on-display negotiated its meanings. The contradictions of race were relativized in a percussive multiplication of the body, elaborating hidden living space in plain view under the surfacesignificance of the incarcerating category (of blackness). Again and again, culture critics and race theorists have remarked on the difference between white and black enculturation in this country in terms of a different set of expectations regarding public expression and physical exhibition. Black culture expects social time and space to be aggressively negotiated and contested in forms of communication that are physically and emotionally demonstrative.19 Its own pedagogical forms rework the body as what Stuart Hall calls a canvas of representation (Hall, 2729).20 But if black forms of embodiment can, indeed, be understood as (in part) the cultural products of ongoing attempts to deal with various kinds of surveillance, white habituation in the body is also partially glossed in the correlative notion of contemporary monitoring. White embodiment in the public spaces of this country, historically, has been more about the meeting of norms, quietly fitting in,21 not causing a spectacle (Pile, 230). It has been constituted in a gaze that solicits conformity, not subversive stylizations of individuality (Kochman, 114, 155).22 It has been disciplined not so much in intense forms of local community that act as a confirming chorus23 and supply a range of innovatory24 models and improvisational motives, but rather in a more plastic mode of spatiality, governed by more generic ideals. In its genesis as an empty negation (Dyer, 44), a largely vacuous assertion that whatever else I may be, at least I am not black, whiteness has not been generative of a white community per se; there has been no positive white cultural production coming into being in a serious struggle against invasive powers. Where white identities have indeed forged profound expressions of culture, it has been under the impress of other necessities, other exigencies of survival. American versions of Irish blarney, German industry, English understatement, Italian humor, Jewish spunk, Dutch Reformed discipline, East Coast sophistication, West 32

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Camp Tournament Neg Arg Group Coast trendiness, Midwestern practicality, Bryn Mawr taste, Southern hospitality, and so onall find their conditions of creation in something other than white struggle. White desire The Body of White Space 193 (as white) has simply not been that contested or threatened. Whiteness, as such, has had no daunting historical enemy. It has faced no hard eye of opposition (until, perhaps, the emergence of the Black Power Movement of the 1960s).25 It has more simply been either fascinated or frightened and acted accordingly, usually with impunity. Its only formative condition has been the blackness it projects and punishes. But there, in fact, we can identify the one operation that gives whiteness a certain common character.

Despite the presence of UDLs within the community, the door that they open can only be used when the other side accepts those that walk through it. Things like framework sustain the privilege that rich, white males already have while rigging the activity even more against black youth. Reid-Brinkley 08 (Shanara Rose Reid-Brinkley, Assistant Professor of African American Studies and
Communications as well as the Director of Debate at the University of Pittsburgh, THE HARSH REALITIES OF ACTING BLACK: HOW AFRICAN-AMERICAN POLICY DEBATERS NEGOTIATE REPRESENTATION THROUGH RACIAL PERFORMANCE AND STYLE, 2008. http://www.comm.pitt.edu/faculty/documents/reidbrinkley_shanara_r_200805_phd.pdf) Despite the UDLs success at increasing the participation levels of racial/ethnic minorities and women in high school policy debate, the program has not resulted in a significant increase in the participation levels in national level college policy debate. 3 Even with the financial resources made available to UDL students to increase their successful participation in high school and the specific interest of college debate teams in recruiting minority students, UDL participants are largely choosing not to participate in college policy debate. 4 Jon Brushke, debate scholar and debate director, notes that If even a very small percentage of those UDL students went on to college debate there should be an obvious and profound change in participation by ethnic groups, and that has not happened. 5 He notes further, that Whatever other benefits these leagues have offered their participants; they have not managed to change ethnic participation levels in college debate. 6 Stepp notes further that the activity remains primarily dominated by white males, from middle to upper class backgrounds. Even those UDL students who have chosen to debate in college still remain statistically under-represented at the most successful levels of national competition. 7 Stepp and Gardner note that although female and minority participation is increasing, there does not seem to be a proportional increase in their winning, including both team awards and speaker awards. 8 As the UDL movement gained attention from those in the debate community interested in diversifying the activity, Dr. Ede Warner at the University of Louisville became significantly involved in the development of debate curriculum, the training of UDL summer institute faculty members, and the instruction of UDL students. 9 In a 2001 essay, Warner along with Brushke argue: With UDL support, students from under-served high schools can go to tournaments and compete against students from wealthy school systems. Debate thus addresses at all levels the problems that the under-served confront when approaching institutions so often governed by the graduates of rich, private schools: Skills of discourse are equalized, economic disadvantages become less of a barrier when confronting rhetors, and the economically under-served gain a conduit to positions of institutional powerMore basically, when students from UDL schools debate against elite high schools and win, the students learn that victory is possible and that economic disadvantages can be overcome. 10 Warner and Brushcke demonstrate their commitment to the UDLs ability to be efficacious in encouraging and producing educational success and achievement amongst under-served communities. For these authors, the UDL movement creates a sense of hope that educational opportunities can significantly impact the social consequences of race, ethnicity, gender and class. In other words, Offering debate at under-served schools addressesinequalities. 11 Warner and Brushke go on to note that debate-asoutreach can be particularly powerful as the debate community learns to become increasingly more accepting of stylistic differences that are likely to result from the diversifying of that activity. They argue that debate audiences must appreciate these new forms. 12 However, as Warner observed the national development of the UDL and its impact on the nationally competitive high school circuit and the college debate community, he experienced a growing discontent. By 2005 Warners position on the UDL had drastically changed: Students are hoodwinked and bamboozled into believing that they can receive access to all of the benefits of interscholastic debate, in the same way that I have convinced students that the game could change to allow for more diversity. They are told that debate is a "way out" and can improve their lives. They are told that if they learn the norms and procedures of traditional debate they can achieve just like everyone else. What they are not told: that debate tools alone won't overcome their disadvantages, especially within the debate community, that the best they can generally hope for is becoming the best in that UDL and perhaps getting recruited by the local UDL partner, and ultimately living their life as a regional debater or a non-competitive national debater. They will not share in the resource expenditures of the larger 33

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Camp Tournament Neg Arg Group debate structure, they will not be on the pre-bid track and they will not receive the rewards reserved for a select few in national debate. Why? Not because of anything they do, but because the game is rigged against them, who they are, and what the community asks them to become to achieve success. 1

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Laws serve as the socially constructed foundations of a slavery advanced into modernity and are based on fantastical white conceptions of blackness. The notion of a private prison designed to profit from the objectification of black bodies functions as a mirror for the social hierarchies we have created within debate. Vargas 05 (Geiza Vargas, Juris Doctor, Boston College Law School, White Investment in Black Bondage,
27 W. New Eng. L. Rev. 41, 2005.) [*47] This Article is about the criminal justice system's joint venture with Wall Street. It is about white fantasy, desire and pleasure. n25 It is, in short, about the how the law sanctions white supremacy. n26 In this Article, I argue that as the law processes more and more black bodies, and as prisons further entrench themselves as investment vehicles, the dynamics that distinguished slavery reappear. n27 In Part I, I argue that white supremacy is fueled by social constructions, or fantasies, of black identity that legitimize the exploitation of blacks for social and economic advantage. Professor Anthony Paul Farley's theories about race and fetishism bolster my argument that white fantasies of blacks are deeply rooted in American history and reflect American values of pleasure consumption. In the ante-bellum era, whites dominated a culture that marked blackness with savagery and inferiority. n28 Clearly, the end of slavery did not eradicate such conceptions. n29 Rather, it marked an opportunity to adopt new ways to objectify blacks ways which continued to serve whites. [*48] In Part II, I examine the private prison real estate ownership and management industry. Private prisons mirror our social hierarchy - whites derive economic and political power from these corporations, power systematically denied to blacks. The American economy is about consumption, n30 and from that a market has materialized in the consumption of black crime. The emergence of private prisons, I argue, exhibits a desire to preserve a social, economic, and legal structure through which whites can extract pleasure, profit, and power. Slave narratives are important accounts of a violent time in U.S. history n31 that many white Americans wish to forget. n32 In this Article, I study a form of narrative written by those who profit from the incarceration of black bodies - private prison owners and operators, whose duty is to increase shareholder profit. n33 The narratives consist of certain annual and quarterly financial reports n34 and registration statements filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). n35 In reading these reports, I am interested in [*49] how corporations represent the opportunity to invest in the confinement of (black) human bodies. I also consider narratives produced by the U.S. government. I examine reports about the prison population produced by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), a division of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). In reading these statistical reports, I am interested in how our government represents black crime to the public.

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The link to framework positions our arguments not only as useless for debate but as a deviant act that must be controlled and rejected. This notion of what is and isnt fair is based upon a structure of law created for and sustained by whiteness to extend and legitimize the control of black bodies. Vargas 05 (Geiza Vargas, Juris Doctor, Boston College Law School, White Investment in Black Bondage,
27 W. New Eng. L. Rev. 41, 2005.) Russian philosopher and legal scholar Evgeny Pashukanis argued that criminal law represented the ultimate manifestation of power over an individual. n41 Importantly, this was a kind of power that could not be wielded apolitically. n42 Instead, "every historically given system of penal policy bears the imprint of the class interests of that class which instigated it." n43 While Pashukanis was concerned with the implications this fact had for the Nineteenth Century Russian proletariat, it poses similar problems for blacks in the United States today. U.S. history is riddled with state and federal laws that principally served to oppress a so-called inferior race. n44 With good reason, [*51] it can be said that American law, as applied to blacks, is largely a response to a white imagination that perceives blacks as a threat. n45 Justice Harlan, in his Plessy v. Ferguson dissent, spoke directly to this underlying fear when he wrote: "Sixty millions of whites are in no danger from the presence here of eight millions of blacks." This fear begins to explain the law's track record of criminalizing certain activities conducted by blacks that it condones when perpetrated by whites. n47 Vast resources have been expended regulating black behavior. n48 This discriminatory law enforcement produces black crime, vindicating a white conception of blacks and criminals as synonymous. n49 Ultimately, the mass production of black crime makes two socially constructed concepts, i.e. crime n50 and race, n51 seem biological. n52 As Professor Farley argues in The [*52] Black Body as Fetish Object, "blackness is presented as a natural object, for it is only where the category of race is deemed natural, that is, independent of social choices, that the hierarchical ordering of things can by enjoyed." n53 Racism can only flourish when a legal structure supports it. n54 Whites' perceptions and values control the legal structure in the United States, and "of all types of law, it is precisely criminal law which has the capacity to affect the individual person in the most direct and unmitigated manner." n55

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Framework as a voting issue forces the judge to identify our critical advocacy with deviance in order to preserve their homogenous view of policy debate in the same way that police identify blackness with crime in order to preserve white rule. Your ballot is key to stop the chain of relating identity with criminality. Vargas 05 (Geiza Vargas, Juris Doctor, Boston College Law School, White Investment in Black Bondage,
27 W. New Eng. L. Rev. 41, 2005.) The police are important agents in enforcing the structure of the law and ensuring that the ruling "class" is not "dispossessed" of [*53] its "class rule." n59 In the United States, the police are the first to paint a black face on crime. n60 Gunnar Myrdal, in his study of the "American Dilemma" began his chapter on the black man's experience with the police with this observation. n61 It is an important one because it captures a brutal truth in the United States blacks have never lived free from police surveillance or intrusion. n62 Before the Civil War, Fugitive Slave Acts n63 empowered vigilante white policing. n64 After emancipation, the Black Codes n65 and Jim Crow n66 sanctioned white practices that "reduced blacks to a condition described [*54] by the Freedman's Bureau officials as worse than slavery." n67 While segregation is no longer the official law of the land, the drug war now grants police the authority to stalk black neighborhoods n68 and reduce black men into presumed deviants in need of state supervision, i.e. prison. In (E)racing the Fourth Amendment, Professor Devon Carbado recalls several encounters he had with the police soon after arriving in the United States. n69 For Carbado, these incidents seemed like "part of a broader informal naturalization process that structured the racial terms upon which [he] became American." n70 One incident Carbado recounts occurred at his sister's apartment after he picked up two of his brothers from the airport. Eight police officers arrived at the apartment and "pinned" the occupants "against the wall at gunpoint." n71 Then, Two officers entered the apartment. After about two minutes, they came out shaking their heads, presumably signaling that they were not at a crime scene... . "Look, we're really sorry about this, but when we get a call that there are [black] men with guns, we take it quite seriously. Again, we really are sorry for the inconvenience." With that apology, the officers departed. Our privacy had been invaded, we experienced a loss of dignity, and our blackness had been established - once more - as a crime of identity. n72 The cycle is self-sustaining. n73 The police give flesh to the fantasy [*55] that the black man is inherently criminal, n74 thereby justifying "the racial transaction - routinized social power freely expended upon black bodies ... ." n75

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The affs appeals to objective rules are based in the same flawed system of laws that whiteness wraps itself in an attempt to sustain privilege. Voting on this argument only enforces the system that is only fair in the eyes of the oppressor. Vargas 05 (Geiza Vargas, Juris Doctor, Boston College Law School, White Investment in Black Bondage,
27 W. New Eng. L. Rev. 41, 2005.) In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon writes that "the feeling of inferiority [of the colonized] is the correlative to the European's feeling of superiority ... . It is the racist who creates his inferior." n77 The right fantasy of black gives whites ownership and possession of not just blackness but of whiteness. n78 Whites' feelings of superiority are rooted in a fantasy that equates their skin complexion with industry, (and therefore) wealth, intelligence, and with law-abiding qualities. n79 Whites also fantasize the law as rational, objective, and race-less. n80 But alas, whiteness is a veil over blue eyes. n81 In the words of Professor Farley: "The veil creates a world [*56] in which reality is doubled - black, white, separate, and unequal - and the conditions of communication's possibility have been destroyed, not by the fact of doubling but by the violence out of which the veil is woven." n82 Whites fail to recognize that a legal system that consistently offers and protects white privilege will always seem objective and rational from their perspective. n83 The criminal justice system, and therefore, society, does not perceive whites as drug addicts or traffickers because drug laws are not enforced against them. n84 To be marked white is to "qualify" as legally and socially superior. n85 Whites are not first perceived as suspect, n86 and their historically superior position means the police are not stalking their neighborhoods or entering their homes and businesses looking for drugs. n87 And more important, the police are not making arrests that would reflect the actual occurrence of white crime. n88 Black is a loaded word that operates the black body. n89 Black is manipulated reality. n90 Black is a legal fiction that marks dark skin with white fear, desire, hatred, anger, and perversions. n91 White fantasies of black connect past to present supremacy. n92 For whites, [*57] blackness represents a shade of inferiority. n93 Black is criminal. n94 Black is ugly and scary. n95 And most important, black is not white and never can be. n96 What is white? What is the pleasure of whiteness? Whiteness is meaningless n97 unless there is a system that recognizes white privilege. n98 Enter American law, created by, and for, white privilege. n99 A deeply rooted fantasy that marks and equates blacks with criminality has driven the law's present and historical relationship with [*58] blacks. n100 American slavery was the most sadistic expression of that fantasy. Slavery allowed whites to delight in white supremacy, n101 and history has well-preserved the dynamic. The right imagery of black allows whites to maintain control of who they think they are. n102 Speaking from the position of the fantasized object, James Baldwin wrote that if the black man is not who/what the white man thinks he is, it is traumatic, because it means that the white man is not who he thinks he is: The danger, in the minds of most white Americans is the loss of their identity. Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of one's own reality. n103 Private prisons are almost entirely white enterprises. n104 Prisons full of black bodies provide the assurance that blacks are who/what whites think. The joint venture between private prison magnates [*59] and federal and state governments not only generates investment dollars; it also generates the Other. n105 Private prisons testify to the fact that in the United States, whites have no intention of relinquishing the social, economic, legal, and political power that they presently possess. n106

Afrofuturism disrupts the framework of institutional knowledge Eshun 92 (Kodwo Eshun MA in Arts, Course Leader of Arts at Goldsmiths College, Further Considerations of Afrofuturism) Page (5-6) For contemporary African artists, understanding and intervening in the production and distribution of this dimension constitutes a chronopolitical act. It is possible to see one form that this chronopolitical intervention might take by looking at the work of contemporary African artists such as Georges Adeagbo and Meshac Gaba. In the tradition of Marcel Broodthaers and Fred Wilson, both artists have turned towards museological emulation, thus laying bare,
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manipulating, mocking, and critically affirming the contextualizing and historicizing framework of institutional knowledge. Gabas Contemporary Art Museum is at once a criticism of the museological institution as conceived in developed countries, as well as the utopian formulation of a possible model for a nonexistent institution. This dual nature, critical and utopian, is related to the artist . . . founding a structure where there isnt one, without losing sight of the limitations of existing models that belong to a certain social and economic order based in the harsher realities of domination.

Afrofuturism performance good

Afrofuturism uses art to generate counter-histories and places people of color into the future Yaszek, Lisa, Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies School of Literature, Communication and Culture, ( June/September 2005, Afrofuturism and Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man. Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice
9.2/3) (Afrofuturism appropriates the narrative techniques of science fiction to put a black face on the future. In doing so, it combats those whitewashed visions of tomorrow generated by a global futures industry that equates blackness with the failure of progress and technological catastrophe. Although Ellison claimed that his novel was not science fiction, I propose that he none-the-less deploys a range of science fictional tropes and references throughout his work in ways that profoundly anticipate later Afrofuturist thinking about the future of black history and culture. In the novel proper, Ellison uses these tropes and references to signify a number of dystopic futures where blackness is technologically managed. However, the opening and closing scenes of Invisible Man hold forth the possibility of a different relationship between technology, race, and art: by hiding out under New York City and stealing electricity to power his turntables, Ellisons protagonist creates a space outside linear time where he can begin to rewire the relations between past and present and art and technology. In doing so, he becomes, however tentatively, the figurehead for a hopeful new Afrofuture. Recently, however, artists and scholars have indeed coined a name for this kind of storytelling: Afrofuturism. As Mark Dery argues, Afrofuturism is a process of signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically-enhanced future to address the concerns that people of color face in contemporary culture (Dery 1994, p. 136). First and foremost among these concerns is the representation of history. Whatever medium they work in, Afrofuturist artists are profoundly interested in identifying those histories of the past, present, and yes, even the future that deny the black Atlantic experience. They are also profoundly interested in the power of the Afrofuturist artist to generate counter-histories that reweave connections between past, present, and future in a new practice of technoscientific storytelling.)

Authors of the Black Arts Movement insist that african americans have a right to the space age and therefore also to the current age Yaszek, Lisa, Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies School of Literature, Communication and Culture, ( June/September 2005, Afrofuturism and Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man. Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice
9.2/3) Although there have been relatively few book-length studies of Afrofuturism to date, scholars generally agree that the movement began in the late 1950s with jazz musicians such as Sun Ra and Lee Scratch Perry who presented themselves as alien visitors from other worlds. (In the 1960s, Black Arts Movement authors including Ishmael Reed and Amiri Baraka also began telling stories about fantastic black people who travelled freely through time and space. By blending science fictional motifs with more conventional modes of black cultural expression these artists insisted on the right of Afrodiasporic subjects to fully participate in the dawning space age. After all, their stories suggested, if black men and women could imagine themselves travelling to other worlds and other times, what right did anyone have to prevent them from staking their claims on the future since it was actually unfolding in the present? With the advent of global communication and information technologies in the 1970s and 1980s, Afrofuturist artists broadened the scope of their attention to encompass both outer space and cyberspace. For example, techno DJs such as Spooky That Subliminal Kid and Derek May, visual artists such as Carrie Weems and Fatimah Tuggar, and speculative writers including Nalo Hopkinson and Minister Faust all explore the de- and reconstruction of Afrodiasporic subjectivity in digital culture. Taken together, these artists demonstrate both the pervasiveness of Afrofuturism throughout contemporary culture and the diverse ways that this aesthetic practice has evolved in tandem with new sciences and technologies themselves.) 39

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General Performances Good

Performance is the only solvency for any single type of oppression equalization. Whether it is for feminism, racism, or sexual orientation, discourse is not enough. Only through memorable acts can identity redemption be claimed by the People. We are a Queering of debate Performativity Munoz 07' (Jose, Duke University Press Editor, CRUISING THE TOILET LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Radical Black Traditions, and Queer Futurity, Queers Futurity, 2010, Duke North Carolina)
aesthetic production does more than socially symbolic work. Indeed, there is a performance of futurity embedded in the aesthetic. Blochs protocols of aesthetic analysis directed an eye toward what he called the anticipatory illumination of art. Queerness in my formulation is also not-quite-here and no-longer conscious (both terms are central to Blochs project). Queerness, if it is to have any political resonance, needs to be more than an identitarian marker and articulate a forward-dawning futurity. The dialectical movement that I am attempting to explicate is the interface between an engagement with the no-longer-conscious and the not-yet-here. This Blochian hermeneutic is especially felicitous when considering the queer residue and simultaneous potentiality that lay at the center of the example that Jones/Baraka and The Toilet generate.
For Bloch,

Gestures and actions do not solve the racism or sexism in our society, however disrupt the natural flow of life where vulnerability exists an can be taken advantage of. However, the problem is not never-ending, as end can't be used to describe this quandary. Instead it is a flow of time where power and discourse change and the glitch in this flow must be utilized to slow down the concept of power. Munoz 07' (Jose, Duke University Press Editor, CRUISING THE TOILET LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Radical Black Traditions, and Queer Futurity, Queers Futurity, 2010, Duke North Carolina)
The plays final moment is worth dwelling on, although I do not want to cast the gesture of tenderness as redemptive. I am not interested in cleansing the violence that saturates almost every utterance and move in the play. But I nonetheless want to consider how we might read this ending within the nexus of the historical moment, relational to an authors status as outsider among outsiders in a lost bohemia, an expired avant-garde. Baraka renounces queerness a few years later. He even shouts down the plays set designer, Larry Rivers, the straight painter who was also Frank OHaras art-boy, semi-rough-trade lover, in a public forum.14 This moment nonetheless tells a story that suggests some kind of futurity, a relational potentiality worth holding on to. Battered and bruised, shattered by internal and external frenzies of homophobic violence, the combatant lovers nonetheless have this moment of wounded recognition that tells us that the moment in time and in this place, the moment of a pain-riddled youth, is not all there is, that indeed something is missing. The

gestural speaks to that which is, to use Blochs phrase, the not-yet-here. The gesture is not the coherence or totality of movement. Gesture for Giorgio Agamben is exemplary of the politics of a means without ends. The gestural exists as an idealist manifestation and not as a monolithic act directed toward an end: What characterizes gesture is that in it nothing is being produced or acted, but something is being endured and supported.15 The gesture interrupts the normative flow of time and movement . The image of the lover
holding/enduring/supporting the others battered body is poignant when we recall that Foots, who is always doing/running his mouth or his feet, is finally still, living within the queer temporality of the gestural, a temporality that sidesteps straight times heteronormative bent. The politics of queer utopia are similarly not based on prescriptive ends but, instead, on the significance of a critical function that resonates like the temporal interruption of the gesture. Bloch rejected what he called abstract utopias that, within the

frame of Agambens writing, would indeed be a prescriptive end.16 The queer futurity that I am describing is not an end but an opening or horizon. Queer utopia is a modality of critique that speaks to quotidian gestures as laden with potentiality. The queerness of queer futurity, like the blackness of a black radical tradition, is a relational and collective modality of endurance and support . The gesture of cradling ones lovers head, a lover one has betrayed, is therefore not an act of redemption that mitigates violence; it is instead a future being within the present that is both a utopian kernel and an anticipatory illumination. It is a being in, toward, and for futurity. 40

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Performance Allows Alternate Means to Rethink the System Outside of Current Boundaries Yaszek 5- Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies School of Literature, Communication, and Culture (Lisa, June/September 2005, Rethinking History. Vol. 9, No. 2/3, pp. 297-313. An Afrofuturist Reading of Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man)
In essence, then, the invisible mans basement home becomes a kind of time- and spaceship that carries him outside of the known world, providing him with a new perspective from which he can see both the multiple aspects of the Afrodiasporic experience and its complex relations to the many strands of American reality. Much like Kodwo Eshuns ideal Afrofuturist subject, then, Ellisons protagonist begins to experience the kind of multiple consciousness that is itself the first step towards the creation of a new and more egalitarian multiracial futurity. Significantly, the invisible mans ability to multiply his consciousness directly correlates with his increasing mastery over new technologies. As Alexander G. Weheliye notes in his discussion of sonic Afromodernity, the hegemony of vision and visual technologies is a distinctly raced one in which the privileged look of white subjects deduces supposed inferior racial characteristics from the surface of the black subjects skin (2003, p. 107). By way of contrast, sonic technologies that enable the recording and mass distribution of sound both transform and extend what Weheliye identifies as the two main techniques of cultural communication in African America: orality and music (ibid., p. 102). These technologies are useful for both musicians and other artists who incorporate sonic elements into their work because they open up possibilities for thinking, hearing, seeing, and apprehending the subject in a number of different arenas that do not insist on monocausality (ibid.). In many respects, the sonic functions like the science fictional in Afrodiasporic art: both provide alternate means by which to rethink history and subjectivity outside of dominant visual and discursive structures.

Performance key to fair neg ground; African-Americans story of enslavement and genocide should be told through mediums such as music, dance, paintings, and theater. Lavender, Associate Professor of English at Central Arkansas University, 11 (2011, Isaiah, Race in American Science Fiction. Indiana University Press, Pgs. 37-38, CJC)
Afrofuturists feel that sf unceasingly symbolizes events that have shaped black culture, such as the legacy of slavery and the forced abduction and relocation of Africans to a strange land governed by strange white beings. In other words, the African American historical and cultural condition is inherently the stuff of sf. Slavery as the foundation of the U.S. depended on the systematic, conscientious, and massive destruction of African cultural remnants, according to Delany (Dery, 746). As such, the afrofuturists claim that black arts, especially music, resonated with a sense of alienation with the mix- ing of technology and sound (synthesizers, turntables, scratching, and sampling) while at the same time referencing the displacement of slavery. Artists such as Sun Ra, George Clinton, and OutKast quickly come to mind.6 But afrofuturism has expanded to claim all black cul-tural productionmusic, dance, painting, theaterand in particular literature. This is to say that nearly all black writing is sf because of black peoples perceived and experienced dislocation in the Western world dating back to the transatlantic slave trade. Herein lies the flaw of afrofuturism. Afrofuturism is its own aesthetic register that merely borrows from the sf tradition by adopting some science fictional motifs such as the alien encounter or time travel to explore black lifepast, present, and futureas well as how technology impacts black people. Afrofuturism is separate and distinct from sf, not synonymous with it.

General Science Fiction Good

Afrofuturism can be the inspiration for new technical and creative innovations in space exploration and development the language of science fiction is a necessary space of resistance as it is one of the signature languages of modernity

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Yaszek 5- Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies School of Literature, Communication, and Culture (Lisa, June/September 2005, Rethinking History. Vol. 9, No. 2/3, pp. 297-313. An
Afrofuturist Reading of Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man)

As a popular aesthetic movement centered on seemingly fantastic tropes such as the encounter with the alien other and travel through time and space, Afrofuturism holds the potential to bring the Afrodiasporic experience to life in new ways. As Alondra Nelson puts it, the science fictional elements of Afrofuturism provide both apt metaphors for black life and history and inspiration for technical and creative innovations of artists working in a variety of traditional and new media (http:// www.afrofuturism.net/text/about.html). Furthermore, by harnessing one of the signature languages of modernitythe language of science fiction Afrofuturist artists automatically create new audiences for their stories: those primarily young, white, Western and middle-class men who comprise the majority of science fiction fans and who may never otherwise learn much about the history of their country save what they haphazardly pick up in the high school classroom.

Music evolved from space and boosted Afro-futurism Mcleod,2003(Ken McLeod, Author and Teacher of Tibetan Buddhism, Space Oddities: Aliens, Futurism
and Meaning in Popular Music, journals.cambridge.org/article_S0261143003003222, published October 23 2003) Rock and roll developed roughly contemporaneously with the era of space exploration and the concomitant boom in science fiction. In its earliest manifestations, space was a popular subject. A leading candidate for the first ever rock 'n' roll record, Jackie Brenston's hot rod ode 'Rocket 88' (1951), immediately linked space travel with 1950s teenage rebellion. The formation of Bill Haley and His Comets (1953) followed in this tradition. The band name Comets was, of course, a pun on the famous Halley's comet; however, it was also consciously chosen to reflect the image of rock 'n' roll rebels, whose wild stage antics could have come from outer space.3 A similar early image of space and early rock 'n' roll rebellion is evident in the DJ antics of Allan Freed which were broadcast to the world in the mid-1950s via his radio show, Moon Dog Rock 'n' Roll House Party. Indeed, the association of space and alien themes with rock 'n' roll rebellion is found throughout rock's history and has had an impact on nearly all its stylistic manifestations. To list a few examples, such themes are employed in the glam rock of David Bowie, George Clinton's funk stylings, the astro-jazz of Sun Ra, the reggae-dub mixes of Lee Perry, the New Wave experimentalism of Nina Hagen and Gary Numan, the progressive album-oriented rock of Pink Floyd, the alternative rock of Smashing Pumpkins and in the urban genres of hip hop and techno dance music.4 As evident in the music of Sun Ra, Clinton and Perry space and alien themes are integral to a musical stream of Afro-futurism in which artists project empowering images of black power through futuristic imagery and control of technology. The most recent, and most prevalent, manifestation of alien imagery and identification occurred in the plethora of artists, DJs and participants engaged in various forms of electronica and techno dance music.

Science Fiction has many aspects that change the world Ramirez 08 (Catherine S. Ramirez, Assistant Proffesor in American Studies at UC Santa Cruz, published author, Afrofuturism/Chicanafuturism)
More than mere escapism, science fiction can prompt us to recognize and rethink the status quo by depicting an alternative world, be it a parallel universe, distant future, or revised past. Good science fiction re-presents the present or past, albeit with a twist. It tweaks what we take to be reality or history and in doing so exposes its constructedness. For this reason, the genre has proven fertile ground for a number of black and feminist writers, artists, and musicians, from Edgar Arceneaux to Marion Zimmer Bradley. These innovative cultural workers have transformed what was once con- sidered the domain of geeky white boys into a rich, exciting, and politically charged medium for the interrogation of ideology, identity, historiography, and epistemology.

Science Fiction can revolutionize the present by theorizing about otherness, difference, and power relations as projected into the future Eshun, MA in Arts, Course Leader of Arts at Goldsmiths College, 92 (Kodwo Further Considerations of
Afrofuturism, Page 3) ast forward to the early twenty-first century. A cultural moment when digitopian futures are routinely invoked to hide the present in all its unhappiness. In this context, inquiry into production of futures becomes fundamental, rather than trivial. The field of Afrofuturism does not seek to deny the tradition of 42

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Camp Tournament Neg Arg Group countermemory. Rather, it aims to extend that tradition by reorienting the intercultural vectors of Black Atlantic temporality towards the proleptic as much as the retrospective. It is clear that power now operates predictively as much as retrospectively. Capital continues to function through the dissimulation of the imperial archive, as it has done throughout the last century. Today, however, power also functions through the envisioning, management, and delivery of reliable futures. In the colonial era of the early to middle twentieth century, avantgardists from Walter Benjamin to Frantz Fanon revolted in the name of the future against a power structure that relied on control and representation of the historical archive. Today, the situation is reversed. The powerful employ futurists and draw power from the futures they endorse, thereby condemning the disempowered to live in the past. The present moment is stretching, slipping for some into yesterday, reaching for others into tomorrow. Kodwo E shun now deploys a mode the critic Mark Fisher calls SF (science fiction) capital. SF capital is the synergy, the positive feedback between future-oriented media and capital. The alliance between cybernetic futurism and New Economy theories argues that information is a direct generator of economic value. Information about the future therefore circulates as an increasingly important commodity. It exists in mathematical formalizations such as computer simulations, economic projections, weather reports, futures trading, think-tank reports, consultancy papersand through informal descriptions such as sciencefiction cinema, science-fiction novels, sonic fictions, religious prophecy, and venture capital. Bridging the two are formal-informal hybrids, such as the global scenarios of the professional market futurist. Looking back at the media generated by the computer boom of the s, it is clear that the effect of the futures industrydefined here as the intersecting industries of technoscience, fictional media, technological projection, and market predictionhas been to fuel the desire for a technology boom. Given this context, it would be nave to understand science fiction, located within the expanded field of the futures industry, as merely prediction into the far future, or as a utopian project for imagining alternative social realities. Science fiction might better be understood, in Samuel R. Delanys statement, as offering a significant distortion of the present (Last Angel of History ). To be more precise, science fiction is neither forward-looking nor utopian. Rather, in William Gibsons phrase, science fiction is a means through which to preprogram the present (cited in Eshun ). Looking back at the genre, it becomes apparent that science fiction was never concerned with the future, but rather with engineering feedback between its preferred future and its becoming present. Hollywoods love for sci-tech fictions, from The Truman Show to The Matrix, from Men in Black to Minority Report, can therefore be seen as product-placed visions of the reality-producing power of computer networks, which in turn contribute to an explosion in the technologies they hymn. As New Economy ideas take hold, virtual futures generate capital. A subtle oscillation between prediction and control is being engineered in Fur t her which successful or powerful descriptions of the future have an increasing ability to draw us towards them, to command us to make them flesh.

Afrofuturists include many different races with many different spin-offs and describes their innocence Eshun 92 (Kodwo Eshun MA in Arts, Course Leader of Arts at Goldsmiths College, Further Considerations of Afrofuturism) Page (5-6)
Gilroy argues that the articulations sketched above tend to overlap with historical flashpoints. To analyse black popular futures in this way is to situate them as fallout from social movements and liberation movements, if not as direct parts of those movements. These moments may be historicized by politicospiritual movements such as Black Christian Eschatology and Black Power, and postwar politico-esoteric traditions such as the Nation of Islam (NOI), Egyptology, Dogon cosmology, and the Stolen Legacy thesis. The NOIs eschatology combined a racialized account of human origin with a catastrophic theory of time. Ogotomelli, the Dogon mystic, provided an astronomical knowledge of the Sirius B Dog Star, elaborated by French ethnographers Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, that demonstrated a compensatory and superior African scientific knowledge. Egyptologys desire to recover the lost glories of a preindustrial African past was animated by a utopian authoritarianism. Before Martin Bernals Black Athena, George G. M. Jamess Stolen Legacy simultaneously emphasised the white conspiracies that covered up the stolen legacy of African science, reversing Hegelian thought by insisting upon the original African civilization. Afrofuturism is by no means naively celebratory. The reactionary Manichaenism of the Nation of Islam, the regressive compensation mechanisms of Egyptology, Dogonesque cosmology, and the totalising reversals of Stolen Legacystyle Afrocentricity are immediately evident. By excavating the political moments of such vernacular futurologies, a lineage of competing worldviews that seek to reorient history comes into focus. In identifying the emergence and dissemination of belief systems, it becomes critical to analyze how, in Gilroys words, even as the movement that produced them fades, there remains a degree of temporal disturbance. By creating temporal complications and anachronistic episodes that disturb the linear time of progress, these futurisms adjust the 43

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Camp Tournament Neg Arg Group temporal logics that condemned black subjects to prehistory. Chronopolitically speaking, these revisionist historicities may be understood as a series of powerful competing futures that infiltrate the present at different rates. Revisionist logic is shared by autodidact historians like Sun Ra and George G. M. James of Stolen Legacy, and contemporary intellectuals such as Toni Morrison, Greg Tate, and Paul D. Miller. Her argument that the African slaves that experienced capture, theft, abduction, and mutilation were the first moderns is important for positioning slavery at the heart of modernity. The cognitive and attitudinal shift demanded by her statement also yokes philosophy together with brutality, and binds cruelty to temporality. The effect is to force together separated systems of knowledge, so as to disabuse apparatuses of knowledge of their innocence. Afrofuturism can be understood as an elaboration upon the implications of Morrisons revisionary thesis. In a interview with the writer Mark Sinker, cultural critic Greg Tate suggested that the bar between the signifier and the signified could be understood as standing for the Middle Passage that separated signification (meaning) from sign (letter). This analogy of racial terror with semiotic process spliced the world of historical trauma with the apparatus of structuralism. The two genealogies crossbred with a disquieting force that contaminated the latter and abstracted the former. Kodwo E shun.

Ellison remarks that black men have been treated as natural resources for science instead of humansblackness is futurity but also different from perception of whitewashed future Yaszek, Lisa, Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies School of Literature, Communication and Culture,( June/September 2005, Afrofuturism and Ralph Ellisons
Invisible Man. Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 9.2/3) (Ellison performs just this kind of chronopolitical intervention in Invisible Man by inviting readers to critically assess the rhetoric of the mid-century futures industry as it served to define appropriate modes of American and specifically African Americansubjectivity. Ellisons novel follows the adventures of an unnamed protagonist who tries to become a national leader by allying himself with various institutions: the historic black college he attends as a young man in the south, the paint factory he works for when he first moves north, and then finally the leftist political group known as the Brotherhood. As I read this text in the history of Afrofuturism, what Ellisons protagonist is looking for is the possibility of a black future that, in the 1930s of the novel, he cannot find. In each case his dreams of self- realization are thwarted because he is treated as little more than a blankslate upon which institutional authority projects its own vision of the future. The most explicit acknowledgement of this comes from Mr. Norton, the rich white college trustee who tells Ellisons protagonist: You are my fate, young man. Only you can tell me what it really is. . .. Through you. . .I can observe in terms of living personalities to what extent my money, my time and my hopes have been fruitfully invested (pp. 42, 45). Here then the black subject is figured as a kind of venture capital, a natural resource available to white investors speculating in the stock market of tomorrow. Although white members of the Brotherhood explicitly oppose themselves to capitalists like Norton, they, too, treat black men as natural resources rather than as human beings. This attitude is clearly encapsulated in a Brotherhood poster entitled After the Struggle: The Rainbow of Americas Future. The poster depicts a group of heroic figures. An American Indian couple, representing the dispossessed past; a blond brother (in overalls) and a leading Irish sister, representing the dispossessed present; and [black] Brother Tod Clifton and a young white couple (it had been felt unwise simply to show Clifton and the girl) surrounded by a group of children of mixed races, representing the future (Ellison [1952] 1989, p. 385). Much like Norton, then, the Brotherhood equates blackness with futurity, but only insofar as the black subject conforms to a predictable and carefully controlled vision of the future of which he is not totally a part. Like later Afrofuturists, Ellison strategically deploys the language of science fiction to emphasize the alienation of black subjects from these kinds of whitewashed futures. The invisible man describes his fellow college students as robots with laced up minds (p. 36); later, a disillusioned black vet dismisses the invisible man himself as a walking personification of the Negative. . .. [a] mechanical man (p. 94). Elsewhere in Invisible Man a black factory worker notes that we the machines inside the machine (p. 217), and the Brotherhood leaders themselves treat black men as scientific prototypes, one step in the experiment of making society new (p. 350). Furthermore, both during the battle royale and his stay at the paint factory hospital, Ellisons protagonistmuch like Frankensteins monster finds himself subject to manipulation by white culture through literal applica- tions of electricity. At the end of the battle royale the invisible man scrambles for coins tossed on to an electrified rug by an amused group of white townsmen; meanwhile, at the paint factory hospital white doctors carefully administer a kind of electrical lobotomy to Ellisons protagonist to ensure his future docility. Taken together, these science fictional allow Ellison to suggest that American institutions do more than simply conspire to Keep This Nigger-Boy Running (p. 33). They conspire to keep him running right into the future as well. Ellison also insists that, as 44

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Camp Tournament Neg Arg Group the alien others of America, black subjects are defined by complex historic and material relations that cannot be streamlined to fit institutional visions of tomorrow. )

Science fiction tales of meta-slavery are essential to the study of the economic slavery and imbalance present within modern day culture Lavender, Associate Professor of English at Central Arkansas University, 11 (2011, Isaiah, Race in
American Science Fiction, Indiana University Press, Pgs. 87-88, CJC)
Meta-slavery tales, and in some respect neoslave narratives, are essential to the study of race in science fiction, especially as they re- cord the abiding interest in slaverys legacy. Although science fiction is largely overlooked by the academy on the subject of race, meta-slavery narratives can make positive contributions to the ongoing dialogue on race and American identity. Such sf stories as Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand, Kindred, Kiln People, and Lions Blood have certainly been patterned after slave narratives, consciously or otherwise. These stories and others like them reveal the imbalance between the reality of race and the dream of freedom that still endures in America today. By exploring how slavery plays itself out in sf, meta-slavery gets at notions of disempowerment, unconscious reflections of racism, and also direct confrontations of racist attitudes displayed in sf. Meta-slavery demonstrates how slavery lives on in our cultural awareness and helps us ask how to deal with this history. Such interchange is implicit in any discussion of race. These narratives also articulate disempowerment as well as the cultural horrors of American history, if not Western history, transforming literary expressions of this painful time into complex associations of racial subjectivities. Consequently, the various tools of otherhood such as meta-slavery provide us with a means to explore the black/white binaries of science fiction in new ways. So the next chapter continues along the historical chain of black-white race relations by considering how segregation has been recorded in science fiction through various Jim Crow extrapolations.

Afrofuturist science fiction functions as an allegory for post-slavery black bodies the apocalypse has already occurred blacks are living in an alien nation Eshun 92 (Kodwo Eshun MA in Arts, Course Leader of Arts at Goldsmiths College, Further Considerations of Afrofuturism) Page (5-6)
Afrofuturism uses extraterrestriality as a hyperbolic trope to explore the historical terms, the everyday implications of forcibly imposed dislocation, and the constitution of Black Atlantic subjectivities: from slave to negro to coloured to evolu to black to African to African American. Extraterrestriality thereby becomes a point of transvaluation through which this variation over time, understood as forcible mutation, can become a resource for speculation. It should be understood not so much as escapism, but rather as an identification with the potentiality of space and distance within the high-pressure zone of perpetual racial hostility. It is not that black subjectivities are waiting for science-fiction authors to articulate their lifeworlds. Rather, it is the reverse. The conventions of science fiction, marginalized within literature yet central to modern thought, can function as allegories for the systemic experience of post-slavery black subjects in the twentieth century. Science fiction, as such, is recast in the light of Afrodiasporic history. Afrofuturism therefore stages a series of enigmatic returns to the constitutive trauma of slavery in the light of science fiction. Isolating the enigmatic phrase
Apocalypse bin in effect from the Public Enemy track Welcome to the Terradome, Mark Sinkers essay Loving the Alien argued that this lyric could be interpreted to read that slavery functioned as an apocalypse experienced as equivalent to alien abduction: The ships landed long ago: they already laid waste whole societies,

abducted and genetically altered swathes of citizenry. . . . Africa and Americaand so by extension Europe and Asiaare already in their various ways Alien Nation.

At: Afrofuturism ignores American women

Black female science fiction writers help spur the imagination of what is out there Barr 2008 ( Marleen S. Barr, Professor of Communications and Media studies at Fordham University, Afro-Future Females)
On 20 July 1969, Apollo 11 successfully landed Neil Armstrong on the surface of the moon; to that moment, the site of humankinds only manned exploration of another celestial body (Parrett 1), this achievement arguably rendered wishing on the moon moribund.

Now 45

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Camp Tournament Neg Arg Group that going to the moon no longer counted as a patent impossibility, the figurative dimension suddenly shifted into the literal, and the act of imagination that had fired the engines of poets and songwriters and graced the most youthful eroticisms with the stuff of myth and dreaming now belonged to the precincts of the engineer and the computer specialist. But there is every reason to believe that the moon landing, as well as space exploration more generally, owes its fruition as much to poetry and the range of the imaginative arts as to the initiatives of science and technology; in short, the imitation of art by the real world is not usually the way we think it goes, but it must be so, according to the dynamic dance of mimesis that Oscar Wilde celebrates in the Decay of Lying (97093). We might describe it this way: the writings of the imaginative artist, among which the extraterrestrial prominently figuresone scholar calls them the translunar narrativedeposit traces that the thickest empiricisms may well translate into products after their own encodations. To this ancient tradition of symbol-making, running back over the centuries, black women writers continue to make significant contributions. The realm of the extraterrestrial, or the entire gamut of fictions that pose alternative models of reality, including the fictions of science, Imaginative Encounters Introductions: Imaginative Encounters magic, and the fantastical, might be thought to have something of a prohibitive relationship to certain historical formations. Put another way, certain historical formations that arise in the world of realpolitik bear a critical
relationship, one might well believe, to literary realism; if the latter defines narrative strategy and modes of characterization according to mimetically vivid and verifiable principles, engendered by the real world of power relations, then realism would seem to match up well with its origins in the problematic of the everyday. By this logic, African-American literary development would locate its

center of gravity in realism. But if there is more than one way to make it real, then the work of fantasy and make believe has a genuine role to play in processes of social construction and identity formation. Among black women writers in the genre of science fiction, Octavia E. Butler has created entire alternative worlds that uncannily reflect reality and deflect and undermine it at the same time by generating subjects who improve on the available human models; in that regard, science fiction puts into play something that we know, that is rather familiar, while it so rearranges the signposts that the outcome is strange and defamiliarized. The melding of the familiar and the strange is not only the essence of the marvelous, but the very ground of the uncanny, which returns us to what we know in a way that we had not known and experienced before. Butlers fictional projects in the reterritorializations and displacements of realisms objects trace back to the 1970s and her Patternist series that immerses the reader in the cosmos of the immortal and
hermaphroditic Doro, encompassing Patternmaster (1976), Mind of My Mind (1977), Survivor (1978), Wild Seed (1980), and Clays Ark (1984) (Gates and McKay 251529). Butlers Xenogenesis series that tells the story of a new Lilith (Iyapo) takes us across the 80s decade of the writers career and includes Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago; perhaps the writers best-known novel, Kindred (1988), belongs to the same period, as it reverses the logic of futurism and time travel by taking us backward in time, or, more precisely, back to the future. From the 90s, Butlers Lauren Olamina transports us deep inside the twenty-first century by way of The Parable of the Sower and The Parable of the Talents.

On the basis of this substantial, single-authored canon, Octavia E. Butler most certainly inhabits a central chapter of a revised African-American literary history, alongside a sustained reassessment of the powers of the uncanny. When Dana, the protagonist of Kindred, finds herself on a path of reentry onto
slaverys old ground, she and the reader make the one return journey that they have both determined is the most dreadful event that the mind could conjure up and that the body, in utter recoil to terror, shudders Hortense J. Spillers | in the very act of imagining. Not only

does one try to think that such an occurrence is impossible, and to rest assured in that impossibilityafter all, there is that fragile membrane-moment that we like to call the Constitution but one also wants to believe that the thought itself is, paradoxically, unthinkable. That Butler indeed thought it, plucking this contemporary character out of a world that parallels our own and from the nesting place of an interracial marriage, inscribes the most daring of fictional moves with a result that is profoundly disturbing: if fictional time lays claim to plasticity, then it can retrogress as well as progress. In this case, Danas return demarcates a proleptic leap, insofar as she
must go back in order to give birth to her ancestors and, thus, to someone called Dana, which violent act of parturition will tear her arm off when she eventually makes it back to the novels diegetic time frame. We have no fiction quite like it in joining so terrible

a historical contingency to the canons of the magical; Kindred is also rare in its refusal of a unidirectional concept of time and the inevitability of progress. We do not want to know that the cost of our being here has been inestimable and that the way to our current peace swims in blood and the truncated bodies of the violent dead. Forced from our slumber of feigned innocence, we awaken here to full consciousness and its blasts of discomfort. In this instance, we have seen the future that is represented from one of its anglesthe terrible pastand it is a cautionary tale that we dare not disbelieve. This volume of criticism on science fiction with its brilliant new stars opens a path here to considerations of other worlds that illuminate the one we now so uncertainly inhabit.

African American Women writers change the society through their Science Fiction writing Barr 2008 ( Marleen S. Barr, Professor of Communications and Media studies at Fordham University, Afro-Future Females)
The central point of Afro-Future Females is that black women impact upon science fiction as authors, protagonists, actresses, and editors. I wish to create a dialogue with existing theories of Afro-Futurism in order 46

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at once applies Afro-Futurism to written and visual texts and offers something very different from existing scholarship. The volumes contributors expand Mark Derys masculinist foundation for our understanding of Afro-Futurism by explaining how to formulate a womancentered Afro-Futurism. Their essays and stories present a valuable argument concerned with repositioning previously excluded fiction to redefine science fiction as a broader fantastic endeavor. These texts can be used as a platform for scholars to mount a

vigorous argument in favor of redefining science fiction to encompass varieties of fantastic writing and, therefore, to include a range of black womens writing that would otherwise be excluded.4 The anthologys umbrella approach is not new in that it has for a long time been reflected by speculative fiction and by Eric S. Rabkins notion of a super genre.5 While presenting a complex method to redefine science fiction is certainly beyond the purview of this preface, I note that my term feminist fabulation6 encompasses black womens science fiction. The big-tent rubric figures in this collections central argument which goes beyond the point that marginalized texts and authors have been excluded from the itself-marginalized science fiction genre. Instead, I emphasize that it is necessary to revise the very nature of a genre that has been constructed in such a way as to exclude its new black participants. It is necessary to rethink science fiction in light of Afro-Futurist fiction. For example, the
stories by Octavia E. Butler, Andrea Hairston, Nisi Shawl, Sheree R. Thomas, and Nalo Hopkinson which I have included collectively indicate the ways in which science fiction should be reconceptualized. Traditional constructions of science fiction have

divided the genre into a fantastic continuum that often excludes fantasy, women, and people of color. The claim that black people do not write science fiction is dependent upon defining science fiction as texts that black people do not write. Expanding science fiction to include written and visual Afro-Futuristic imaginative visions changes the dynamic in which science fiction is always defined as inferior to mainstream realistic literature.7 For this change to occurin order to end the marginalization of science fiction which relentlessly relegates the genre to subliterary statusit is necessary to define the broad fantastic tendency in AfroFuturist texts as science fiction. In their contributions to this volume, Madhu Dubey and DeWitt Douglas Kilgore describe a new enlarged fantastic tendency. Kilgore points to the intermingling of fantasy, time, and history. Black science fiction writers alter genre conventions to change how we read and define science fiction itself.Dubey explains why previously impossible-to-imagine female Afro- Futurist stories emerge when black-centered fantasy interrogates normal science fiction premises.

African American SF writings deal with the community tracing back to other planets Barr 2008 ( Marleen S. Barr, Professor of Communications and Media studies at Fordham University, Afro-Future Females)Hack this: Why do so few African-Americans write

science fiction, a genre whose close encounters with the Otherthe stranger in a strange land would seem uniquely suited to the concerns of African-American novelists? Yet, to my knowledge, only Samuel R. Delany, Octavia E. Butler, Steven Barnes, and Charles Saunders have chosen to write within the genre conventions of SF. This is especially perplexing in light of the fact that African- Americans are, in a very real sense, the descendants of alien abductees. They inhabit a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but no less impassable force fields of intolerance frustrate their movements; official histories undo what has been done to them; and technology, be it branding, forced sterilization, the Tuskegee experiment, or tasers, is too often brought to bear upon black bodies. Moreover, the sublegitimate status of science fiction as a pulp genre in Western literature mirrors the subaltern position to which blacks have been relegated throughout American historyin which context William Gibsons observation that SF is widely known as the golden ghetto, in recognition of the negative correlation between the genres market share and its critical legitimation, takes on a curious significance. So, too, does Norman Spinrads glib use of the phrase token nigger to describe any science fiction writer of merit who is adopted . . . in the grand salons of literary power. Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced futuremight, for want of a better term, be called Afro-Futurism. The notion of Afro- Futurism gives rise to a troubling antinomy: Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have
subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures? Furthermore, dont the technocrats, SF writers, futurologists, Mark Dery | set designers, and streamlinerswhite to a manwho have engineered our collective fantasies already have a lock on that unreal estate? Samuel R. Delany has suggested that the flashing lights, the dials, and the

rest of the imagistic paraphernalia of science fiction have historically functioned as social signssigns people learned to read very quickly. They signaled technology. And technology was like a placard on the door saying, Boys Club! Girls, keep out. Black and Hispanics and the poor in general, go away! What Gibson has
termed the semiotic ghosts of Fritz Langs Metropolis; Frank R. Pauls illustrations for Hugo Gernsbacks Amazing Stories; the chromiumskinned, teardrop-shaped household appliances dreamed up by Raymond Loewy and Henry Dreyfuss; Norman Bel Geddess Futurama at the 1939 New York Worlds Fair; and Disneys Tomorrowland all still haunt the public mind, in one guise or another.

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At: Afrofuturism ignores queer politics

Our Alternative is inclusive of Queer politics queers have been foundational revolutionaries across various periods of activism they are a significant part of Afrofuturist and Chicanafuturist politics Munoz 07' (Jose, Duke University Press Editor, CRUISING THE TOILET LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Radical Black Traditions, and Queer Futurity, Queers Futurity, 2010, Duke North Carolina)
This essay takes its lead from Fred Motens brilliant In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition.3 Moten describes the conterminous relationship between black radical politics and improvisational aesthetic practices associated with blackness. Looking at the racial blind spots in Sally Baness historiography of New Yorks historical downtown bohemia, Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body, Moten counters Baness now almost canonical rendering of a downtown art scene that excludes black artists like LeRoi Jones, Cecil Taylor, and Samuel Delaney.4 Here I am interested in casting light on not only those important historical figures but also others like Mario Montez (the Warhol screen superstar who played Juanita Castro) or Dorothy Dean (the black woman who was the acknowledged ultimate fag hag of the day and worked as the sharp-tongued bouncer at Maxs Kansas City). These characters inhabit what Moten calls the B-side of this avant-gardes history, which Banes is uninterested in.5 While I am not proposing an alternative canon of what is an already existing, and in some ways already alternative canon of the American avant-garde, I do want to look at these minoritized historical players because they disrupt dominant historiographies of queer avant-gardism and radical aesthetics and politics.6 Gloria Anzalda famously indicated that jotera (queers) could be found at the base of every liberationist social movement.7 And while tales of social movements in the United States continue to ignore jotera, to an even larger degree disciplinary accounts of avant-garde aesthetics underplay both explicitly queer presences and (perhaps especially) racialized participation, labor, and influence. Anzaldas injunction to look for jotera is a call to deploy a narrative of the past to enable better understanding and to critique a faltering present. In this sense her call for mestiza consciousness is a looking back to a fecund no-longer-conscious in the service of a futurity that resists the various violent asymmetries that dominate the present.

All Oppression is connected Stacyann Chin

Being queer has no bearing on race or class or creed my white publicist said true love is never affected by color or country or the carnal need for cash I curb the flashes of me crashing across the table to knock his blond skin from Manhattan to Montego Bay to witness the bloody beatings of beautiful brown boys accused of the homosexual crime of buggery amidst the new fangled fallacies of sexual and racial freedom for all these under-informed self-congratulating pseudo-intellectual utterances reflect how apolitical the left has become I dont know why but the term lesbian just seems so confrontational to me 48

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Camp Tournament Neg Arg Group why cant you people just say you date other people? Again I say nothing tongue and courage tied with fear I am at once livid ashamed and paralyzed by the neo-conservatism breeding malicious amongst us Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Ally Questioning Two spirit Non-gender conformingevery year we add a new letter our community is happily expanding beyond the scope of the dream stonewall sparked within us yet everyday I become more afraid to say black or lesbian or womaneveryday under the pretense of unity I swallow something I should have said about the epidemic of AIDS in Africa or the violence against teenage-girls in East New York or the mortality rate of young boys on the south-side of Chicago even in friendly conversation I get the bell hooks-ian urge to kill mother-fuckers who say stupid shit to me all day bitter branches of things I cannot say out loud sprout deviant from my neck fuck you-you-fucking-racist-sexist-turd fuck you for wanting to talk about homophobia while you exploit the desperation of undocumented immigrants to clean your hallways bathe your children and cook your dinner for less than you and I spend on our tax deductible lunch! I want to scream all oppression is connected you dick! at the heart of every radical action in history stood the dykes who were feminists the anti-racists who were gay rights activists the men who believed being vulnerable could only make our community stronger as the violence against us increases where are the LGBT centers in those neighborhoods where assaults occur most frequently? as the tide of the Supreme Court changes where are the LGBT marches to support a womans right to an abortion? what say we about health insurance for those who can least afford it? HIV/AIDS was once a reason for gay white men to act up now your indifference spells the death of straight black women and imprisoned Latino boys apparently if the tragedy does not immediately impact you you dont give a fuck 49

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Camp Tournament Neg Arg Group offer a social ladder to those of us inclined to climb and watch the bottom of a movement fall out a revolution once pregnant with expectation flounders without direction the privileged and the plundered grow listless apathetic and individualistic no one knows where to vote or what to vote for anymore the faces that represent us have begun to look like the ones who used to burn crosses and beat bulldaggers and fuck faggots up the ass with loaded guns the companies that sponsor our events do not honor the way we live or love or dance or pray our life partnerships are deemed domestic and the term marriage is reserved for those unions sanctioned by a church controlled state for all the landmarks we celebrate we are still niggers and faggots and minstrel references for jokes created on the funny pages of a heterosexual world the horizons are changing to keep pace with technology and policy alike the LGBT manifesto has evolved into a corporate agenda and outside that agenda a woman is beaten every 12 seconds every two minutes a girl is raped somewhere in America and while we stand here well-dressed and rejoicing in India in China in South America a small child cuts the cloth to construct you a new shirt a new shoe an old lifestyle held upright by the engineered hunger and misuse of impoverished lives gather round ye fags, dykes trannies and all those in between we are not simply at a political crossroad we are buried knee deep in the quagmire of a battle for our humanity the powers that have always been have already come for the Jew the communist and the trade unionist the time to act is now! Now! while there are still ways we can fight Now! because the rights we have are still so very few Now! because it is the right thing to do Now! before you open the door to find they have finally come for you

AT: Japanese Answers

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Racism against blacks is only part of the system of domination that constrains all people of color The development of Asian and Black social positionality in the American context indicates a cross-cultural complexity in both the experience of and resistance to oppression Widener 2003 (Daniel Widener, Assistant Professor of history at the UCSD ps the Japanese Are to Be Thanked? Asia, Asian Americans, and the Construction of Black California, positions: east asia cultures critique, Volume 11, Number 1, Spring2003,pp.135-181,) http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/positions/v011/11.1widener.html)
(In addition to showcasing the tremendous importance of Japanese immigrants to black conceptualizations of self-determination, the complex interaction between people of African and Asian descent in California shows how binary examinations of race, often criticized in Chicano/Latino and Asian American studies, prove equally unsuitable for capturing the historical experience of African Americans. Moreover, the transpacific tale of interwar Los Angeles reminds us that black internationalism often moves along channels not explicitly routed through race. Imperialist Japan, after all, became champion of the darker races at precisely the same moment when black activists, intellectuals, and artists were debating the relative merits of Marxism, modernism, surrealism, Islam, and a whole mlange of competing strains of nationalism. Although the interwar interregnum remains justifiably celebrated as a high point of African diasporic sentiment, it remains worth noting that Langston Hughes composed his Pan-African paean The Negro Speaks of Rivers while on a train bound for Mexico, and that a young Ho Chi Minh occasionally attended the soapbox orations of Marcus Garvey. Recalling something of the breadth of this moment reveals that the identity of passions, which Ralph Ellison saw as the basis of bonds between blacks, extended even further beyond the boundaries of race than his observation at first suggests. At the same time, we might perhaps take the recurring themes raised by successive exchanges between African Americans and various Asian immigrant populations as one narrative strand within Asian American history. This strand contains both a history from above as well as a history from below. As Henry Yu points out, a generation of North Americas most influential social scientists took the Negro Problem as a point of departure for building an understanding of the Oriental Problem.3 Although these so-called problems came to be seen quite differently, the burden of comparison continues to shape external representations of both groups. From the callous language of sugar and cotton planters to the contemporary parlance of public policy research. Chinese immigrants, Japanese Americans, and South Asiansall in turnhave found themselves the counterpoint to African American demands for the reallocation of state resources. However, both the role played by the black power movement in the development of a panethnic Asian American identity and the undeniable affinity between many elements of black and Asian American youth culture suggest that links between the communities contain an important interconnected response. Borrowing from Amiri Baraka, one can perhaps find in the history of black North Americans and successive Asian immigrant groups a sort of changing same, caught between Toni Morrisons contention that immigrant groups learn the perils of being identified with blacks and the historical sweep of affinity and common cause that scholars have traced between black Americans and Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, South Asians, and Pacific Islanders.) Obviously, any attempt to theorize connections between populations of Asian descent in relation to their contemporary experiences with African Americans must involve sensitivity to historical particularities. Nevertheless, more remains to be said concerning the role of African America in the conceptual, cultural, and political dimensions of post-1960s Asian American life. Finally, in a state where the imminent lack of a single ethnic majority presupposes a complex and shifting political terrain, historical instances of conflict and cooperation seem increasingly salient, not as predictors conjured by a presentist urge, but as reminders that the past reveals complexities which oftentimes persist into the present day.)

The Chinese and African-Americans are racialized through similar discourses in the American narrative those bodies other than white bodies face violent and coercive reprisals at the hands of white America Widener 2003 (Daniel Widener, Assistant Professor of history at the UCSD ps the Japanese Are to Be Thanked? Asia, Asian Americans, and the Construction of Black California, positions: east asia cultures critique, Volume 11, Number 1, Spring2003,pp.135-181,) http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/positions/v011/11.1widener.html)
Almaguer notes the centrality of the specter of slavery to the increasingly triumphant discourse of free labor. (Viewing all blacks, regardless of actual status, as unsuitable for dignified, voluntary, and self-organized work provided a means 51

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Camp Tournament Neg Arg Group by which to demonize Mexican and Chinese labor as well. This is not to suggest that negroization was a pre condition of bigotry or racial violence. Both the rapid destruction of indigenous California and the endemic hostility toward the regions Mexican population were accomplished without widespread recourse to anti-black rhetoric. Nevertheless, early state statutes and constitutions conflated all nonwhites, describing Negro, Mongolian, and Indian as generic terms. According to Takaki, nagur apparently became a general term as well. Laws prohibiting those ineligible for citizenship from holding mining claims applied equally to slaves and Chinese sojourners. Thus the Chinese, who came to account for some 9 percent of the entire population of California, found themselves racialized along lines laid elsewhere, complete with lynchings, segregated institutions, and prohibitions against interracial relations and court testimony. Like blacks, the Chinese were taken as fearsome sexual predators, eager to prey on drug-addled and defenseless white women. The San Francisco Alta California was unequivocal in describing the mutual undesirability of both groups, noting that every reason that exists against the toleration of free blacks in Illinois may be argued against that of the Chinese here. And while this generalized white supremacy eventually made greater provision for ethnic particularity, comparisons continued. Some of these challenged credulity. One writer, for example, argued that the Chinese . . . though with complexions in some instances approaching fair, betrayed but a slight re- moval from the African race.9)

African Americans and Asian radicals have vision of Asiatic motherships in space. Asiatic Black man ideas still exist in modern rap music Widener 2003 (Daniel Widener, Assistant Professor of history at the UCSD ps the Japanese Are to Be Thanked? Asia, Asian Americans, and the Construction of Black California, positions: east asia cultures critique, Volume 11, Number 1, Spring2003,pp.135-181,) http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/positions/v011/11.1widener.html)
(Elusive Asian radicals spread a message of apocalyptic racial revolt throughout the United States internal colonies which survives, in various guises, into the present day. While the membership rolls of the Society for the Development of Our Own, the Pacific Movement of the Eastern World, and the Moorish Science Temple contained but a miniscule fraction of black America, the message of Japanese deliverance spread by W. D. Fard, Satohata Takahashi, and Policarpio Manansala achieved a wide consonance in African American life. Spreading an impassioned missive complete with Japanese bombers, troops, and arms, these figures and groups attracted thousands of blacks searching for a swift end to a seemingly intractable racism. The proponents of this vision often sought to tie African Americans and Asians together biologically, and the vision of Japanese motherships, the language of the Asiatic Black Man, and the fiery destruction of a racist white world proved enduring. However fanciful such scenarios might be, they remain impor- tant both as precursors to the explosion of a technophilic Afro-futurism in the 1970s and as a profound instance of the social construction of race from below. Indeed, the vocabulary of the Asiatic black man remains preva- lent in both the discourse of the Nation of Islam and in contemporary rap music. So pervasive were these sentiments at the time that black support- ers of Roosevelt, like Walter White, found themselves repeatedly forced to defend American aims in the Pacific, while the prospect of American mil- itary defeat at the hands of the Asian power became part of the litany of black humor.35)

AT: Chicana Answers

Afrofuturist and Chicanafuturist have a large role to play in science fiction writings Ramirez 08(Catherine S. Ramirez, Assistant Proffesor in American Studies at UC Santa Cruz, published author, Afrofuturism/Chicanafuturism)
Science fiction lends itself easily to stories by and about people of African descent in the New World. As cultural critic Mark Dery has noted, African Americans, in a very real sense, are the descendants of alien abductees; they inhabit a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but no less impassable force fields of intolerance frustrate their movements; official histories undo what has been done; and technology is too often brought to bear on black bodies (brand- ing, forced sterilization, the Tuskegee experiment, and tasers come readily to mind) (1993, 736). Works of literature, film, art, and music that address the relationship of black people to science, technology, and humanism have been grouped beneath the rubric of Afrofuturism.1 These texts use science fiction themes, such as abduction, slavery, displacement, and alienation, to renarrate the past, present, and future of the African diaspora. Butlers Parable of the Sower was the first Afrofuturist work I read, and in the mid-1990s it rekindled my passion 52

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for science fiction, which I had abandoned in an effort to be cool once I started high school. This 1995 novel offers a fairly common sci-fi scenario: it is set in the year 2024 in a Southern California plagued by drought, pollution, and economic crisis. However, the protagonist, Lauren Olamina, is like no other I had encoun- tered in science fiction, or in any other literary genre for that matter. She is an African American teenager afflicted with hyperempathy, a condition that causes her to experience others physical sensations as if they were her own. After a gang of marauders kills her family and destroys her home and community, she heads north in search of water and employment. Along the way, she picks up other refugees, some of whom are fugitive slaves.

The origin of Chicanafuturism Ramirez 08(Catherine S. Ramirez, Assistant Proffesor in American Studies at UC Santa Cruz, published author, Afrofuturism/Chicanafuturism) The concept of Chicanafuturism, which I introduced in Aztln in 2004, borrows from theories of Afrofuturism (see Ramrez 2004). Chicanafuturism explores the ways that new and everyday technologies, including their detritus, transform Mexican American life and culture. It questions the promises of science, technology, and humanism for Chicanas, Chicanos, and other people of color. And like Afrofuturism, which reflects diasporic experience, Chicanafuturism articulates colonial and postcolonial histories of indigenismo, mestizaje, hegemony, and survival. While it is indebted to Afrofuturism, the concept of Chicanafuturism was also inspired by the work of New Mexican artist Marion C. Martinez. I first saw Martinezs dazzling sculptures and wall hangings at the show Cyber The present ideas of society keep Chicanas/Chiancos, Native Americans, and Afrofuturists out of the future. Ramirez 08(Catherine S. Ramirez, Assistant Proffesor in American Studies at UC Santa Cruz, published author, Afrofuturism/Chicanafuturism)

Like black people, especially black women, Chicanas, Chicanos, and Native Americans are usually disassociated from science and technology, signifiers of civilization, rationality, and progress. At the same time, many Chicanas, Chicanos, and Native Americans have been injured or killed by and/or for science and technology. Here, Im thinking of forced sterilizations, environmental racism, and Jared M. Diamonds provocative argument about the important role guns, germs, and steel played in the European colonization of the New World. All too often, we are linked to savagery, carnality, intuition, and passion, and we are fixed in a primitive and racialized past. The future, in contrast, is generally imagined as white, as many of the science fiction movies and TV shows of my childhood made evident. More recently, information technologies such as the Internet have prompted some cultural critics to celebrate the present and imminent future as placeless, raceless [and] bodiless (Nelson 2002, 1). Already, people of color have been erased from the future, just as many of us were excised from narratives of the past and remain hidden from view in the barrios, ghettoes, reservations, and prisons of the present.

Chicanafuturism questions the definition of humans Ramirez 08(Catherine S. Ramirez, Assistant Proffesor in American Studies at UC Santa Cruz, published author,
Afrofuturism/Chicanafuturism) By appropriating the imagery of science and technology, Chicanafuturist works disrupt age-old racist and sexist binaries that exclude Chicanas and Chicanos from visions of the future. Examples include Yolanda M. Lpezs
1988 logo for the Chicana feminist organization Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social, which depicts a pre-Columbian goddess at a desktop computer; Alma Lpezs 2006 update, La Luchadora, in which a young, athletic brown woman cradles a laptop; and the collaborative projects of the MeChicano Alliance of Space Artists (M.A.S.A.) (fig. 1).5 At the same time, some of the most powerful

Chicanafuturist works, such as Martinezs santos and Guillermo Gmez-Pea and Roberto Sifuentess performances as El Naftazteca and El Cybervato, throw into question the link between science, technology, civilization, and progress.6 In addition, Chicanafuturism interrogates definitions of the human. El Teatro Campesinos acto Los Vendidos, first performed in 1967 and thus one of the earliest examples of Chicanafuturism, offers a more expansive defini- tion of human as it criticizes racist and classist perceptions of Chicanos and Mexicans, especially Mexican workers, as automatons. Similarly, Gloria Anzaldas 1987 theory of alien consciousness endeavors to undo the lega- cies of patriarchy, homophobia, and white supremacy in the United States by rejecting Enlightenment epistemology and ontology, as represented in great part by empiricism and the Cartesian subject.7

Chicanafuturism confronts and answers the questions that Afrofuturism cant

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Ramirez 08(Catherine S. Ramirez, Assistant Proffesor in American Studies at UC Santa Cruz, published author, Afrofuturism/Chicanafuturism) Finally, Chicanafuturism defamiliarizes the familiar. Like good science fiction, it brings into relief that which is
generally taken for granted, such as tradition, history, or the norm, including normative gender and sexuality.
Martinezs Catholic icons distort the santo tradition of which they are still a part. Set in the near future in the border region between the independent nation of Aztln and Gringolandia (the former United States of America), Cherre Moragas play The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (2001) reinterprets ancient Greek and Mesoamerican myths as well as the promises and pitfalls of Chicano cultural nationalism. And Laura Molinas 2004 painting Amor Alien (fig. 2) offers a sci-fi riff on mid-twentieth-century Mexican calendar art. Like Anzaldas theory, it points to the alien as a symbol for Chicana and Latina sexuality.8 Taken as a whole, these works show that

science fiction is just as well suited for Chicanas and Chicanos as it is for African Americans. Some, like Amor Alien, are clearly science fiction. Yet for others, such as Los Vendidos and Anzaldas Borderlands/La Frontera, the connection to science fiction is probably less apparent at first. Theories of Afrofuturism have taught me to see cultural products that would not necessarily be classified as science or science fiction, like the music of Parliament and Midnight Star, as, or at the very least through the lens of, science and science fiction. These theories have inspired me to ask: What happens to Chicana/o texts when we read them as science fiction? To Chicana/o cultural identity? And to the concepts of science, technology, civilization, progress, modernity, and the human? These are the questions Chicanafuturism offers and confronts.

AT: Brazilian Answers

Brazilian Hip Hop and the culture that surrounds it is used as a means of altering the sociocultural status quo which pushes certain races, classes, and genders to the periferia (margins) Derek Pardue 2009 B.A. University of Massachusetts, Amherst; M.M. University of Texas, Austin; Ph.D. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Social Anthropologist Ideologies of Marginalitiy in Brazilian Hip Hop Palgrave Macmillan ltd.
This book is an ethnography of Brazilian hip hoppers1 as they have attempted to institute an alternative system of ideology. As

they con- stitute and develop their identity as hip hoppers, Brazilian youth try to take control and refashion burdensome cultural categories such as Brazilian (brasileiro) and Brazilian-ness (brasilidade), often defined vis--vis gringo, ideas and people from the United States, Europe, and to a lesser extent anywhere outside of Brazil. Furthermore, Brazilian hip hoppers attempt to redesign social categories of race, class, and gender as well as socio-geographical categories such as periferia and marginality (marginalidade). They do this explicitly through a range of material (image and sound) and ideology (discourses, narratives, networking practices). I
have organized this book according to three pertinent categories: space, race, and gender. In the case of Brazilian hip hop, history and class systematically contextualize the meaning of these categories; therefore, I systematically underscore my analysis as historically grounded and class inflected. I certainly appreciate that meaning is context-driven; however, I also believe that meaning is highly dependent on intention. Hip hop- pers make this fact acutely apparent. While I found most hip hop- pers to be humble (an important class marker to be discussed later) and relatively easy going on a personal level, hip hoppers represent the world as reality and truth in extremely dogmatic ways. They foreground intention as the force of change to create and maintain a high level of intentional force, one has to believe in the design. Hip hoppers are crentes, a term that literally translates as believers but more specifically refers to evangelical or non-Catholic Chris- tian devotees in Brazil. The ideological and institutional connections between evangelicalism and Brazilian hip hop will be discussed later, but for right now, I want to convey the feeling and power of belief as essential to hip hop. As I state later, hip hop is a process of becoming, full of moments of recognition. It is a process of developing, often for the first time, an empowered sense of self. Disenfranchised Brazilian youth see hip-hop as a sociocultural system with which they can take control and potentially redesign their lives and conditions. Before I outline the chapters of the book and introduce in greater detail the pertinent debates and fieldwork methodologies, I want to demonstrate through a short vignette the logic of hip hop as a salvation.

Brazilian Hip Hoppers have turned their culture into a criticism of national classifications of race and gender through which they are able to empower themselves. Derek Pardue 2009 B.A. University of Massachusetts, Amherst; M.M. University of Texas, Austin; Ph.D. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Social Anthropologist Ideologies of Marginalitiy in Brazilian Hip Hop Palgrave Macmillan ltd.
Brazilian hip hoppers periodically refer to hip hop as a salvation (salvao), a force and set of beliefs that 54

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Camp Tournament Neg Arg Group helped reorient their lives. For rapper Necaf, hip hop saves one from falling into samba (cair no samba)an expression, in this case, symbolizing a step backward into mainstream notions of black, periphery males, namely malandros or hustlers with little to offer to society other than a little ditty. Cair no samba is a popular saying referring to standard lyrics of 1930s sambistas, samba composers and musician, such as Noel Rosa and Ary Barroso. Hip hoppers are, in effect, deconstructing this phrase and recasting it with contemporary criticisms of what they hold to be national ideologies of race, class, and citizenship. For many, hip hop saved (salvou) them from wrong and the despair of quotidian life in the urban peripheries. In short, hip hoppers use the material and discourse of marginality to save themselves from further negativity and by extension transform the periphery into a place and concept more akin to empowerment than marginality.

The language of hip hop in Brazil has created an alternative ideology which revolves around constructing criticisms of the status quos perception of gender and race and therefore has the potential to empower a new space identity. Derek Pardue 2009 B.A. University of Massachusetts, Amherst; M.M. University of Texas, Austin; Ph.D.
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Social Anthropologist Ideologies of Marginalitiy in Brazilian Hip Hop Palgrave Macmillan ltd. In their personal introductions, local hip hoppers directly connect salvation to reality. Hip hop becomes a cultural matrix with which practitioners attempt to represent and thus change the current state of things. In local terms, hip hop involves the concept (conceito) of imagining and acting on real changes. In this book, I draw from the energy and spirit of the majority of So Paulo hip hoppers and argue that in the process of transforming periferia reality, hip hoppers create and codify an alternative ideology.2 Hip hop as a design for real- ity includes formal aesthetics and ideological ethics for the structur- ing of daily life. As they organize and coordinate a range of images, sounds, and narratives around the key themes of marginality and vio- lence, hip hoppers comment on and contribute to a contemporary understanding of race and gender in Brazil. Therefore, Brazilian hip hop is about a dynamic material design and making of society (Pardue 2005). Virtually all Brazilian hip hoppers are invested in retelling periphery reality through narratives of marginality, with the aim of both legiti- mating the periferia as a potentially empowering space of identity, and revealing
problems of mainstream Brazilian views of social difference mostly around the markers of class and race (to a much lesser extent, gender and sexuality). According to hip hoppers, rather than a daily life filled with meaningless violence and insurmountable corruption, ubiquity should be about respect, honesty, and neighborhood pride or general attitude.

Hip Hop restructures the way we view the production of culture and formation of identities whilst critiquing Brazils current method of categorizing people socially. Derek Pardue 2009 B.A. University of Massachusetts, Amherst; M.M. University of Texas, Austin; Ph.D. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Social Anthropologist Ideologies of Marginalitiy in Brazilian Hip Hop Palgrave Macmillan ltd.
In

Brazil, hip hop functions as a general concept of culture, a dynamic and generative set of practices through which practitioners formulate a system of identity concepts, beliefs, ethics, aesthetics, and politics. In general, I understand hip hop in Brazil to be an ideology of represen- tation and personhood positioned in relation to a cluster of primar- ily national hegemonic discourses and practices represented in such terms as cordial,5 racial democracy,6 tropicalism,7 and tradition. Hip hoppers refer to this national hegemonic formation as the system (o sistema),8 and they understand this system as part of Brazils prob- lematic socialization process. Hip hop is an alternative system (sistema alternativo) of cultural production and identity formation grounded in
what practitioners call the four elements. Street dance includes break dancing, lockin, and poppin. Although there is some debate over these terms, most aficionados agree that what distinguishes breakin from poppin and lockin is the performative emphasis on spins (head, back, and other body parts) rather than footwork. In addition, breakin originated on the East Coast, while poppin and lockin came from California.

The hierarchy inherent in the hip hop community reflects the artists as racialized subjects Derek Pardue 2009 B.A. University of Massachusetts, Amherst; M.M. University of Texas, Austin; Ph.D. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Social Anthropologist Ideologies of Marginalitiy in Brazilian Hip Hop Palgrave Macmillan ltd.
Other significant factors that shape hip hop in So Paulo and that have structured my experience, data collection, and ultimately my

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analysis include hip hop hierarchy and geographical location. Simi-

lar to any other cultural system, hip hop is hierarchical with respect to emic or insider categories such as knowledge, respect, and skills, as well as in relation to etic or more general categories such as market forces within the Brazilian and international music industries and nationalist conceptions of art, folk, and Afro-Brazilian and pop culture. Of course, this division of emic/etic is an abstraction, since, in practice, there is a great deal of influence and overlap between insider and outsider classifications. For example, current notions of black- ness at a national level of discourse significantly affect hip hoppers as they position themselves as racialized subjects in their performance. Such affects are reflected in
hierarchical judgments directed at visible hip hoppers such as Bispo, Naldinho, DJ Tano, Thade, Marcelo D2, Rappin Hood, or Mano Brown and lesser known or anonymous hip hoppers. Members of the hip hop community express judgment often in terms of

being more or less conscious, having or not having a conscincia. In short, hip hop hierarchy is multifaceted and dynamic given various macro-level contextual factors. Part of the analytical challenge I address in the following chapters is to attempt to track hip hop hierarchy from the perspective of ideology and position.

In the context of Brazilian hip hop, Academia has become part of the oppressive system and is complacent in the negative representations of hip hop culture and those who participate in it. Derek Pardue 2009 B.A. University of Massachusetts, Amherst; M.M. University of Texas, Austin; Ph.D. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Social Anthropologist Ideologies of Marginalitiy in Brazilian Hip Hop Palgrave Macmillan ltd.
Hip hop studies in Brazil are late in coming when one considers that hip hop has enjoyed more than two decades of life and practice. This delay reveals, in part, the relative marginal status of urban popular culture in the Brazilian academy. One could forcefully argue that such paucity represents the skewed concerns of Brazilian academics; that is, otherness is relegated to indigenous and Afro-Brazilian groups in rural spaces. Scholarship on Brazilian youth culture in general was scarce until the 1980s, and those few sociological studies actually car- ried out tended to reduce youth culture to students,1 which in itself reveals a class dimension to the process of topic selection in the social sciences in Brazil. Another factor that contributed to scholars (and the society at large) late arrival to hip hop was that for the first decade of existence, hip hop itself was not particularly visible. Hip hop production mani- fested itself in live events of B-boy crews, clandestine graffiti activ- ity, and underground dance parties. Informal and formal meetings of neighborhood groups, a practice that would later develop into Brazils first hip hop posses, were even more underground in nature.2 In addition to the underground nature of early Brazilian hip hop, participants have been understandably suspicious of

outside research- ers, who are usually equated with journalists. Many hip hoppers see journalists as part of o sistema and thus perceive them as complicit in the negative representations the periferia receives daily in newspapers, on the radio, and on television.

Those on the prefeteria have become targets of prejudice and are now caught in the cloud of social invisibility that surrounds the lower class. Derek Pardue 2009 B.A. University of Massachusetts, Amherst; M.M. University of Texas, Austin; Ph.D. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Social Anthropologist Ideologies of Marginalitiy in Brazilian Hip Hop Palgrave Macmillan ltd.
The

history of hip hop in Brazil is part of an overall story of informa- tion access among marginalized youth in urban Brazil. According to So Paulo DJs, music producers, rappers, and pop music critics, to be informed is a valuable asset that
speaks to culture, business, history, and ideology.10 The term informao penetrated almost every conversation I had with hip hoppers. Brazilian hip hoppers are always in search of more; they represent an understanding of it in performance, and they divulge it in spaces of education and media communication. It is particularly with regard to exchanging infor- mation that consultants exercised demands of reciprocity. Over the past several years, consultants and I have traded copious amounts of information in the form of recorded material; U.S. magazine inter- view translations; translations of U.S. rap, funk, and soul lyrics; and informal local histories. As I checked my ideas and analyses during the writing of this text against opinions of Brazilian consultants online, we maintained a relationship of information exchange. In short, hip hoppers explicitly link information to who they are. Of course, we all are like this to some degreethat is, we are what we know. However, in the case of the millions of shantytown

resi- dents around urban Brazil, identity is seemingly always represented as a lack of or tardiness in access to modernity and citizenship. If not expressed in terms of paucity, periferia identity normally signifies a set of negative attributes. As targets of daily yet tacit prejudice within a social system deeply saturated in practices of racism, sexism, clas- sism, and regional-based markers of status, periferia residents accu- mulate countless moments of dehumanizing experiences. Their worth to society is service, enacted in the quotidian gesture of the submis- sive head nod done in silence. As Brazilian sociologist Luiz Edu- ardo Soares (2000, 2002) has cogently argued, many young, poor, (sub)urban, black (negro, preto, pardo, etc.) kids and adults do not exist socially. There is a

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Brazilian youth who are serious (srio) use hip hop to combat what Jose Limn in his description of young workers in south Texas called a growing depthlessness (1994, 11112) related to a flattening of historicity and an increasing proclivity to view culture as disspos- able. In fact, hip hoppers organize themselves in groups called posses and invest time in developing conscincia. This

process is akin to what Fredric Jameson has described as part of the objective of literary analysis that is tracing the repressed and buried reality in a manner that explicitly links to a master narrative (Jameson 1981)
such as Marxism or, in the case of Brazilian hip hoppers, o sistema. Hip hop- pers explicitly associate consciousness vis--vis a recognition of the system to identity formation. In his description of the foundation of Posse Hausa, a hip hop organization located in the So Paulo indus- trial periphery city of So Bernardo do Campo, Nino Brown states, The intention was to bring together more people, give support to the graffiti artists, the breakers, the rappers, all of whom could go there wherever and be able to say that they were from the Posse Hausa; they would have an identity (pers. comm.).

The consciousness of Brazilian hip hop is derived from both the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Cultural Revolution in the United States and the Vargas dictatorship at home. Derek Pardue 2009 B.A. University of Massachusetts, Amherst; M.M. University of Texas, Austin; Ph.D. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Social Anthropologist Ideologies of Marginalitiy in Brazilian Hip Hop Palgrave Macmillan ltd.
The two forces of U.S.-centered media and entertainment indus- tries, in addition to the second wave of Brazilian urbanization, greatly influenced hip hoppers consciousness. The former includes most directly the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Cultural Revolu- tion in the United States, and the latter refers to the formation of the contemporary periferia. The contemporary currency of conscincia within Brazilian hip hop is in part due to hip hops roots in popular social movements organized in response to the military dictatorship (196485) in urban Brazil. Political scientist Sonia Alvarez explains that in Brazil, the mili- tary dictatorship employed a development
model that, in fact, while promoting capital accumulation, resulted in expanding the structural base of the opposition to the government. Many hip hoppers refer to this period and their active extended family members a genera- tion before as part of the overall working-class process to develop an oppositional consciousness. Such organizational practices laid the groundwork for what would later become the political openings during the so-called transition to representative democracy during the mid-1980s (Alvarez 1990, 3743).

Hip hoppers contact with consciousness discourses and social activists exposed them to a number of social issues concerning class but also race, ethnicity, feminism, and ecology. The result is that there exists a latent
expectation that hip hoppers are conversant with perti- nent debates, active leaders, and prominent social institutions includ- ing the state. To a significant extent, this is true as hip hoppers work closely with the MNU (United Black Movement); the PT (Labor Party), PV (Green Party), and other official political parties; NGOs associated with the womens and black womens movements such as Fala Preta! and Geleds; and state departments of culture, education, labor, and health. Again, this dimension of hip hop responsibility dis- tinguishes Brazil from the general characterization of U.S. hip hop, which dictates a responsibility to know styles and skills primarily and politics and social context secondarily, if at all. With that said, it is important to note that Brazilian hip hop conscincia is an uneven phe- nomenon and one skewed by limited interests. This causes a host of internal contradictions. I investigate these in greater detail in Chapters 4 and 5 with regard to negritude and gender, respectively.

The ideology of Brazilian hip hop involves the strong connection between self expression and social change whilst using evolving consciousness of blackness to create alternate ethics for Brazilian culture as a whole. Derek Pardue 2009 B.A. University of Massachusetts, Amherst; M.M. University of Texas, Austin; Ph.D. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Social Anthropologist Ideologies of Marginalitiy in Brazilian Hip Hop Palgrave Macmillan ltd.
Brazilian hip hops ideologies of self-worth and attitude involve becoming conscious of race and, more specifically, blackness. The dissemination of the struggles and victories of civil rights partici- pants in the United States inspired periferia residents to make such connections between personal expression and group organization in the hope for social change. This was particularly true during the early to mid-1970s when the Black Power
Movement in the United States, although in organizational demise, was at it highest point of national and international exposure. In 1978, the MNU (Unified Black Move- ment) was officially founded in response to an explicit, violent act of racial prejudice directed at a black taxi driver. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the MNU established significant partnerships with various posses throughout the So Paulo area. In fact, my first con- tacts came through attending an MNU meeting in So Bernardo do Campo with a sociology graduate student from USP (University of So Paulo). It was there in August 1995 where I met members of the Posse Hausa. While MNU representatives saw the emergent hip hop culture as an important channel into youth communities of African descent, hip hop organizations perceived the MNU as an important organization with which they could traffic information. (I discuss this research entre in more detail in Chapter 4.): [The appropriation of forms, styles, and histories of struggle] was facili- tated by a common fund of urban experiences, by the effect of similar but by no means identical forms of racial segregation, as well as by the memory of slavery, a legacy of Africanisms, and a stock of religious experiences defined by them both. Dislocated from their original con- ditions of existence, the sound tracks of this AfricanAmerican cultural broadcast fed a new metaphysics of blackness elaborated and enacted in Europe and elsewhere within the

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underground, alternative, public spaces constituted around an expressive culture that was dominated by music. (Gilroy 1993, 83) Urban Brazil, and especially So Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, in the late 1970s and early 1980s became an empowering

site of what Gilroy describes as a new metaphysics of blackness. The emergence of the Black Rio Movement in Rio de Janeiro and Brazilian funk and soul in both cities was more than compelling post-tropicalia grooves. Artists such as Sandra S, Gilberto Gil, Tim Maia, Tony Tornado, and Banda Black Rio, internationalized Brazilian negritude by creating a hybridity of traditional Africanity, contemporary Brazilian social commentary (some artists, of course, more than others) influenced by roots reggae, and globalized black pop of James Brown and oth- ers. This new metaphysics of blackness in urban Brazil

was distinc- tively a youth movement, as these new sounds, images, and narratives attracted a new generation of Brazilians looking for alternatives to roots samba.14 One can listen to the recordings of Trio Mocot or
Gerson King Combo, peruse the extraterrestrial lyrics of Tim Maias Racional album, but these products do not translate the full impact of Brazilian funk and soul.Similar to any other phenomenon of popular culture, it is the prac- tice, the complexities of production, consumption, and distribution at all levels that brings one closer to the meaning. In the case of funk and soul, young Brazilians such as Beto, Tito, and Marco (older colleagues of Nino Brown I met in 1997 at a cultural center in So Bernardo do Campo) practiced networking, organizing, and reflect- ing beyond artistic and social dimensions, thus creating a nexus of what would later be recognized as an example of popular citizenship (Dagnino 1998; Pardue 2008). Figures such as DJ Marquinhos, Zulu King Nino Brown, and Nelso Triunfo became transitional agents of information and helped provide coherence among Brazilian samba- rock, funk, soul, and hip hop.

Brazilian hip hop discursively unites the favelas with higher class neighborhoods Derek Pardue 2009 B.A. University of Massachusetts, Amherst; M.M. University of Texas, Austin; Ph.D. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Social Anthropologist Ideologies of Marginalitiy in Brazilian Hip Hop Palgrave Macmillan ltd.
So Paulo city administrators and spokesmen during the first half of the twentieth century boasted that their city was the great Brazilian metropolis without favelas (see Figure 3.2). The term favela almost exclusively refers to city spaces rented to squatters. The residents do not own the land, although they usually own the house. If not rented, then the occupation is part of an invasion, the term most widely used by popular media.8 The forementioned claim by So Paulo adminis- trators was part of the general competition among Brazilian cities, especially between So Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. In Rio, the favela has been part of the landscape for approximately a century. Even in 1971, according to a study conducted by Sebes (Secretary of Social Well-Being), researchers reported a mere 163 favelas in So Paulo with 8,552 shacks (barracos) and 41,100 residents, or 0.75 percent of the urban population. In just thirteen years, a similar study conducted by Sempla (Municipal Secretary of Planning) reported over one mil- lion favelados (shantytown residents) distributed in 1,200 favelas.9

Favelas are spaces of drastic socioeconomic measures. In fact, most performing hip hoppers do not live in favelas; they rather reside in sur- rounding neighborhoods characterized by more conventional archi- tecture featuring houses (casas) over shacks or shanties (barracos). Again, to participate actively in hip hop requires a certain material investment. The primary goal of exchanging information demands expenditure in the process of becoming conscious. Purchasing recorded music, clothes, equipment, paint supplies, bus passes, pho- tocopying services (e.g., zines and flyers), and computer and Internet services are difficult but potentially manageable for the typical perife- ria dweller and next to impossible for the typical favelado. Despite this gap, which theoretically divides periferia communities, hip hoppers explicitly include the favela as an originary point of narra- tion and sociocultural activity through their work in posses and other organizations. The point is that the periferia is a heterogeneous space, which nevertheless hip hoppers seek to unite through discursive pro- tagonists such as the marginal and rhetorical tropes such as violence and crime in order to establish a new and different system. With that said, some hip hoppers certainly do live in favelas and
over time accumulate information material, develop their abilities to articulate (trocar uma idia), and accrue positive hip hop value. The story of Rappin Hood, one of the founders of Posse Mente Zulu dur- ing the early 90s, is well known by Brazilian hip hoppers. He is from one of the largest favelas in Latin America, Helipolis, located on the southeast side of So Paulo municipality. Since 2000 he has been one of the most visible hip hoppers in Brazil appearing constantly on tele- vision, radio, and in well-advertised public performances, such as the November 20 celebration of Black Pride.

Hip hop has become an vocalization of the Brazillian ethical state where culture is formed through a process of creating an ethical disposition Derek Pardue 2009 B.A. University of Massachusetts, Amherst; M.M. University of Texas, Austin; Ph.D. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Social Anthropologist Ideologies of Marginalitiy in Brazilian Hip Hop Palgrave Macmillan ltd.
My approach to hip hop as an articulation of Brazilian citizenship is based on the assertion that the state in Brazil presently is best characterized, following Gramscian scholars, as an ethical state. The function of the ethical state is to form citizens and to gain consent, the two distinct projects being in fact the same: the subject is to be formed as one who consents to hegemony . . . the work of formation is continuous, taking place not only through pedagogy but through the work of intellectuals in all the spheres of civil society (Lloyd and Thomas 1998, 21). Culture, then, does not manifest itself only as artifacts of aesthetic production or objects of 58

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Against the diverse racial background of Brazilian culture, hip hoppers are able to understand the stories of the objectification black bodies as more than a story of comparison against whiteness. Derek Pardue 2009 B.A. University of Massachusetts, Amherst; M.M. University of Texas, Austin; Ph.D. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Social Anthropologist Ideologies of Marginalitiy in Brazilian Hip Hop Palgrave Macmillan ltd.
Race competes with class and gender for center stage in Brazilian popular solidarity movements. Those AfroBrazilians who feel race as a fact to be argued and recast struggle against the mythological ideal that race as such tends to pass into the background as part of a unique chameleon society. MNU meetings and hip-hop activity
demonstrate in different ways how race has become salient as a strategy in political organizing. The curiosity among a few Posse Hausa members of a white gringo wandering into their social network complemented the example of whiteness I provided to many of the MNU activists. For the first time in Brazil, I felt my race as an unshakable fact. It was held up for inspection and judgment. I became, as Fanon once described, an object in the midst of other objects (1967, 109). Like a lab experiment, it was

investigation. It would pass. I would get over it. This is not a story of comparison. How could one compare a moment of whiteness to a fact of blackness (again from Fanon)? Rather, this is a story of how persons make race work in the construction of new subjectivities and how race works on personhood as a structural force that seal[s] [one] into that crushing objecthood.8 Stories can be defining moments as we reflect on experience. Hip hoppers not only know this but also depend on it as their raison dtre.
a temporary moment of

Brazilians consider the concept of blackness beyond African culture anti-Brazilian and racist and view it as a mark of Brazilian-ness Derek Pardue 2009 B.A. University of Massachusetts, Amherst; M.M. University of Texas, Austin; Ph.D. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Social Anthropologist Ideologies of Marginalitiy in Brazilian Hip Hop Palgrave Macmillan ltd.
Most Brazilians consider a claim of blackness beyond a notion of African cultural retentions to be anti-Brazilian and, in fact, racist itself.9 In other words, blacks, as well as indians, are accepted only as marks of Brazilianness, but not as persons (Guimares 1999, 27). Early studies of blackness as part of the Brazilian nation proposed that the state and citizenry have a great debt to Africans and Afro-Brazilian culture. While certainly
true, policy makers and scholars tended to reify blackness as a mark of nationa fixed point of historic atrocity now corrected through national inclusion. It is for this reason that, as Maggie and Rezende (2002) concluded, Brazilians, independent of racial

identification, rarely describe other Brazilians of color as black per se, and instead, utilize a range of focal yet often ambiguous vocab- ulary terms to depict persons. Since color is above all a mark, terms such as escurinho (little darky), caf com leite (coffee with milk), and even azul (literally blue, but used to refer to very dark skin color) make more sense than oppositional and socially loaded terms like black and white.10

Brazilian Hip-Hop inspires marginalized youth to reconnect with the discourses of race and education. Derek Pardue 2009 B.A. University of Massachusetts, Amherst; M.M. University of Texas, Austin; Ph.D. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Social Anthropologist Ideologies of Marginalitiy in Brazilian Hip Hop Palgrave Macmillan ltd.
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Hip hop matters, because it gives voicea transparent tone of demand. Its participants have developed ideologies and institutions that now have a hold on not only the collective imagination of the periferia but Brazil at large. Brazilian hip hop matters, because the bourgeoisie has become irritated that state agencies such as the Min- istry of Culture under Gilberto Gil have subsidized a number of hip hop organizations, including the Casa da Cultura de Hip Hop, under the category of cultural point.1 As kids become excited about hip hop, they begin to pay attention to issues such as race and education and formulate opinions about
pressing issues such as racial quotas in Brazils higher institutions of learning.2 While a significant part of Brazilian society continues to write off hip hop as gringo imitation and simplistic anti-art, there is an undeni- able community of practitioners, fans, and sympathizers who under- stand how to organize and who have developed the essential skills of expressing (returning for a moment to the opening section of this text) identity. Hip hop matters because it is one of the strongest discourses and practices of

contemporary citizenship, especially for those who historically and systematically have been marginalized from empowering discourses.

Brazilian Hip-Hop opens up space to critique the negative capitalist and misogynist elements of American Hip-Hop. Derek Pardue 2009 B.A. University of Massachusetts, Amherst; M.M. University of Texas, Austin; Ph.D. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Social Anthropologist Ideologies of Marginalitiy in Brazilian Hip Hop Palgrave Macmillan ltd.
the very naming of a hip hop group becomes a space to denounce the system using the discourse of oppositional violence. In September of 2001, I met two members of the group Periferia em Chamas
As I have mentioned elsewhere, (Burning Periphery) somewhat randomly in a locally organized hip hop event held in Jardim Plan- alto on the east side of So Paulo. In our conversation about rap music, hip hop style, and the concept of gangsta, rapper (MC) Jef- ferson and DJ Canhoto made it clear that the gangsta is the arche- type figure of masculinity and productive violence. While other hip hoppers had implied such connections, Jefferson and Canhoto were particularly direct:What is gangsta to you? What is cool about it? You understand, its against the system (anti-sistema) Its more than that. The gangsta is the man (o cara), who uses violence to make a new system, because the one in place now in the periferia is not working. Do you think of yourselves as gangstas? If so, how so? Sure, you see thats what hip hop is about. That is what attitude is about. Its feeling the energy and aggression of being a gangsta in your chest (sentir no peito). And you beat on your chest (bater no peito), because attitude is about strength. You understand? Can a woman be a gangsta? DP: DJ C: Sure, I mean it

could happen. There are some women in hip hop who I consider gangstas. I dont really like talking to them though. J: Yeah, there are some women who have a gangsta attitude, but it just doesnt stick (no cola). DP:
What about the name of your group Periferia em Chamas? How do you see burning an act of productive violence? J: The name is posture; it is an extension of attitude. We [in the periferia] need to start over again. But to do that, you gotta eliminate the present system. Machismo is an ideology of empowerment, which generates various types of violence (Soihet 1999). The association of

violence to perife- ria narratives in rap music, for example, is part of the recuperation of the marginal as protagonist and potentially a positive figure. How- ever, the reinterpretation of violence as resistant or productive has traditionally been the domain of men in Brazil. Alba Zaluar, a leading social chronicler of favela ways of life
in Rio de Janeiro, introduces an article regarding the division of labor in crime by stating, Whenever the subject is violent crime where outlaws are in charge, women are not the main protagonists. They are not the bosses, . . . and they dont defend their place in this business through the constant use of guns (Zaluar 1999, 109). Zaluar demonstrates the various roles women play in crime syndicates but ultimately concludes that women nor- mally figure as possession (posse)12 in the homosociality of favela masculinity (112).13 If women take up arms and pursue conquest, they transgress into masculinity as part of a recognized practice of male rage and machista power. While such ghetto reality receives steady airtime in U.S. gang-

the explicit depiction of women as trading material between periferia men is rare in Brazilian hip hop. This is not to say that So Paulo hip hoppers offer much of a sustained counter narrative or critique of such materi- alistic perspectives of women, but rather they elide the issue. In general, Brazilian hip hoppers feel obliged to, if not criticize the crass materialism of U.S. hip hop, at least avoid such a position. Masculinist discourses evince themselves in rhetorically softer machismo, such as the ubiquitous phrase grab a little body (agarrar um corpinho), which refers to the anonymous place of femininity in everyday life from a hip hop perspective. There are, of course, excep- tions to such a characterization. The
sta rap and general so-called playa (player) hip hop, group SP Funk recorded per- haps the most imitative album in the history of Brazilian rap music, in which they actually rap about bitches, a word left untranslated. In addition, woman rapper Cris attests to a certain influence from U.S. gangsta rap on Brazilian rap club performances. In other words, while machismo may be toned down on Brazilian rap recordings, the weekend club performances tend to play up this aspect live on stage.

Blackness is the main influence in the creation of machismo in Brazilian Hip-Hop culture.Derek Pardue 2009 B.A. University of Massachusetts, Amherst; M.M. University of Texas, Austin;
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Camp Tournament Neg Arg Group Ph.D. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Social Anthropologist Ideologies of Marginalitiy in Brazilian Hip Hop Palgrave Macmillan ltd. In the United States, hip hop scholars have historically constructed their analyses of gender through the perspective of black feminism, understood broadly as a claim for black female subjectivity, and thus not black women as simply victimized objects of hip hop discourse (Keyes 1991; Rose 1994; hooks 2003; Perry 2005; Pough 2006;
Pough, Richardson, Durham, and Raimist 2007). These authors have asked the question, how do young black women use hip hop to advance a range of agendas? In addition, a smaller cadre of authors has given serious critical reflection on black

masculinity as a complex issue within U.S. hip hop (Boyd 2002; Ferguson 2001). Scholars have presented the articulation of blackness to femininity or masculinity as a natural development in the case of the United States, based on the particular cultural design of U.S. hip hop. In Brazil, this articulation is not so commonsense, because there are other historical and systematic matrices of gender, namely machismo and patriarchy, which have been emphasized in a more explicit fashion as part of a general Latin American way of life. Of course race, particularly black- ness in its local expressions, informs contemporary understandings of both machismo and patriarchy. In the case of Brazil, the greatest importer of African slaves in the Americas, blackness has been essential in the very creation and development of machismo. Nevertheless, there is a Latin American distinction that requires specific attention.10 In the United States, hip hop (and mainstream society) configures machismo and popular patriarchy as black and more recently Latino things. Following Rivera, Puerto Rican women are portrayed [in hip hop] as ghetto-tropical, lighter-skinned variations on black femininity (2003, 128). In Brazil such social structures of gender are widely considered nationally inclusive, that is, a Brazilian or more generally a Latin American thing. Machismo is an ideology practiced by men and women in which gender is naturalized through moral discourses of labor division, public presence, emotion, physicality, and other marks of social value (Gilmore 1990). Machismo is a discourse constructed to resolve one of the basic problems of societythe problem of order and distinction. Bruscos definition of masculinity associated with her work on Colombian evangelicalism addresses the issue
of order: Masculinity is viewed as a culturally constructed bundle of roles, and it is the problematic nature of the social reproduction of male domestic roles (e.g., husband and father as actual domestic roles rather than as pub- lic statuses) in the Latin American setting that is of special interest (1995, 84). As Roger Lancaster forcefully argues in his ethnography about everyday life in Nicaragua, machismo is not epiphenomenal to basic sociality and social change (e.g., Sandinista Revolution) but rather sets conditions for peoples lives.

Machismo is an organization of social relations that generates ideas. . . . It is more than an effect produced by other material relations. It has its own materiality, its own power to produce effects (Lancaster 1992, 236).

Brazilian Hip-Hop is informed by and indicative of blackness. Derek Pardue 2009 B.A. University of Massachusetts, Amherst; M.M. University of Texas, Austin; Ph.D. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Social Anthropologist Ideologies of Marginalitiy in Brazilian Hip Hop Palgrave Macmillan ltd.
The second historical moment of hip hop development involves an expansion of the term black (left untranslated in Brazilian Portuguese) to include a greater and more descriptive level of social cri- tique. This moment from 1992 to 1996 marks a relatively high level of consciousness symbolized in more systematic involvement with MNU (United Black Movement) and other black political groups, in addi- tion to a more acute sensibility to diaspora and Pan-Africanism. As mentioned above, the exercise of historical periodization is heuristic in intent. The point is that negritude has been significantly dynamic throughout Brazilian hip hop. With that said, it is worth reiterating that the spirit of Afro-centricity in moment 2 is closely related to the notion of hip hop consciousness and attitude overall and there- fore is never absent. Moment 2, in this sense, did not end, but rather the dynamic of Afrocentricity changed toward the end of the 1990s with the relative success of narratives of crime and violence as reality told by the marginal as a hip hop protagonist. This constitutes what I am calling moment 3.

AT: Hip Hop Bad

The use of technology in African-American music, in the unconventional sense, has evolved music as a whole.

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Mcleod,2003(Ken McLeod, Author and Teacher of Tibetian Buddhism, Space Oddities: Aliens, Futurism and Meaning in Popular Music, journals.cambridge.org/article_S0261143003003222, published October 23 2003)
In contrast,

the use of technology by African-American musicians can be read in much different terms. Indeed Samuel Delany propounds the notion that hip-hop constitutes 'a specific miss-use [sic] and conscientious desecration of the artifacts of technology'.18 In this sense, as English pop music specialist Nabeel Zuberi observes: 'The machinations of hip-hop work belong to a continuum of black "misuses" of technology from the broken bottleneck applied to the blues guitar, and the oil drum bashed and buffed to create Trinidad steel sound, to the Roland 808 drum machine ... [an instrument] dumped by many musicians, and ... picked up secondhand by black producers in Chicago who turned its 'unmusical' sounds into the basis of house music' (Zuberi 2001, p. 149). The art of turntable 'scratching' also plays into the notion of an intentional miss-use of technology. The exploration of original, unheard sounds that arise from this miss-use of technology is intimately connected to what Kodwo Eshun calls 'AfroDiasporic futurism', a digital diaspora of 'computer rhythms, machine mythology and concept technics which routes and reroutes and criss-crosses the Black Atlantic' (Eshun 1998, p. 6). Such thinking also directly ties into the
general sense of black alienation as described earlier in this essay

The Creation of The Funky Cyborg Mcleod,2003(Ken McLeod, Author and Teacher of Tibetian Buddhism, Space Oddities: Aliens, Futurism and Meaning in Popular Music, journals.cambridge.org/article_S0261143003003222, published October 23 2003)
If we take a kind of Frankfurt School/ fascist/ industrial regimentation/ lack of creativity as our model for the machine, then of course funky cyborgs would seem like an utter contradiction; but if we understand the machine as a product of human creativity whose parameters are always suggesting what's beyond them, then we can read hip-hop as the response of urban people of color to the postindustrial landscape.16 The fear/fascination with the increasing dependence of humans on machines (computers, television, cell phones, etc.) and the influence of machines on the human body (genetic engineering, micro-chip implants, pacemakers, hearing aids and prosthetics) is commonly personified in the halfhuman / half-machine cyborg concept (popularised by Star Trek's villainous 'Borg' characters). To quote Ken McLeod Dery, 'Cyborgs populate a cultural landscape in which the human body is increasingly the site of what might be called micropolitical power struggles between an information-rich, technocratic elite and the information-poor masses' (Dery 1992, p. 507). Cyborg imagery, similar to alien imagery, suggests alternatives to the many
dualisms with which we regard our bodies (notably questions concerning gender, sexuality and reproduction). Alternately, though cyborgs undoubtedly offer the potential for transcending limitation of bodily gender roles, the masculine coding of machine culture also suggests that they are also prime sites for reinscribing feminine and homosexual subjugation/marginalization.

Music serves as a medium for blackness to be represented and reconstituted. Specifically, Lil Waynes blurring of genre and adoption of an alien persona allows his music to adopt an Afrofuturist perspective that navigates through and around the traditional stereotypical undertones of black identity while creating a future space for this identity. Young 11 (Sade Marie Young, Masters degree candidate at Bowling Green State University. SOUTHERN-PLAYALISTIC-HIPHOP-SPACESHIP-MUSIC, Thesis Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University for a Master of the Arts Degree. August 2011.)
Music is the conduit of communication in the black community. In opposition to logocentrism, blacks use music to change the future while simultaneously negotiating the past and positioning themselves in the present. In this respect blackness can be invented and made over via sound and representation. Herman S. Gray attributes the most inventive producers of this reimagination of blackness, to the Afrofuturist (163). What connects the cultural productions of blackness and hip hop are the futuristic counter-narratives that move towards reconciliation of the past and the present. This reconciliation in the African American community takes place in the music.
Engaging in Grays critique of the film The Last Angel of History by John Akrumpha, he attributes the film as a cinematic riff on black science fiction, identity politics, black cultural studies and black Atlantic soundings, black people are likened to aliens stranded in strange lands (163). Gray continues that the only hope of metaphorical and discursive escape is to be found in renarrating

and reimagining the story of black dispersal and movement (163). I propose that the same reimagining is happening in hip hop through the dispersal of southern flavored artistry. Following this theme the music acts as cultural artifacts that contain clues to black lives whose meanings can only be decoded (and renarrated) by

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Camp Tournament Neg Arg Group Afro-futurists who traffic in sound, narrative, myth, cultural criticism, and science fiction. (164). By positioning certain southern rap artists as Afro-futurists, who (unbeknownst to them) actively engage in post human/ post black futuristic play we can then begin to reconcile their disdain with the industry and their zest to expand the hip hop genre. It is important to examine music because black soundings function for Afro-futurists as perhaps the quintessential body of evidence that can be accessed, read and re-encoded (64). In the case of Wayne and Andre, they have developed contempt for the music industry, and ultimately, the present state of hip hop culture led them to become detached from limiting hip hop tropes. In efforts to express themselves, they re-encode hip hop, southern authenticity, and blackness into various alternative projects that question hip hop tradition. Afrofuturists constitute themselves as a formation and movement engaging in shared cultural projects that cut across genres, scenes, spaces, and forms (164). Befittingly, Lil Wayne cast his gaze in to the future through genre expansion, dabbling in rock and pop genres but situates his past and present as a balance between the drugs, sex and violence themes. While Andre 3000, on the other hand, cast his gaze futuristically by medium expansion. He has worked to expand his brand through film, costumes and clothing lines, as well as adopting a more pop infused
sound. Though Lil Wayne garnered much success throughout his career, he was not content with his self-proclaimed title of best rapper alive. More recently, Waynes new fascination is rock music. Wayne is notorious for his rock star lifestyle of illicit drug use, fast cars and loose women (evident by his multiple arrests, the four different women with whom he fathered children, and his admitted drug addiction), but he had yet to try to cross into the genre itself. Drawing from his current success, rock seemed like the most natural progression for Wayne. The South is known for its rhythm and blues music and due to the popularity of artists like Wayne, southern hip hop has gained notoriety, but a southern rapper performing rock music has largely been uncharted territory. Waynes current musical projects

work hard to eliminate the genre restraints of hip hop completely. Showcasing his newly trained guitar skills on his last few albums, Wayne inevitably released a complete rock album titled Rebirth. The title is significant because it insinuates that Lil Wayne the rapper has died and that he will be born again as a rock star. This
imagery of denouncing the old and transcending to higher planes is reminiscent of other southern artists who have taken a different approach musically such as Andre 3000. It is as if rappers themselves acknowledge the constraints of the rap industry and see not genre expansion but actual separation from the hip hop genre itself as the only way to achieve the astronomical success that they seek. Consequently, these efforts can be viewed as an attempt to transcend the racialized and stereotypical characteristics of hip hop artistry. In an attempt to break the monotony of rap conventions, Wayne debuted the video for his first rock single, Prom Queen which displays him in full rock and roll persona mode. He not only sounds the part (with loud singing and minimal word pronunciation), but he and his accompanying bona fide rock band also put on a very convincing performance of the rock star to come. Playing the dual role of hip hop artist and rock star requires an application of double consciousness which Bunten (2008) describes as implicit in the representation of ethnic identity within in the [typical] hegemonic encounter of, in this case musical genre conventions (382). Though rock and roll is historically derived from African American musical traditions, it is currently deemed as (at least popularly) exclusively white. Waynes artistry

cannot rest on the laurels of his hip hop fame; he must carve out a niche in popular musics reservoir before consumers let him cross those (figurative) genre gates. The fact that his album was pushed back four times before its actual

February 2, 2010 release date may speak to the enforcement of the hegemonic structure within such music. Lil Waynes sixth studio album The Carter III contains the track titled Phone Home. The phone home title is a nod to the popular 1982 film ET: The Extra Terrestrial, in which a alien is left behind on earth and attempts to contact his home planet in hopes of returning. In Phone Home, Lil Wayne begins by chanting We are not the same I am a Martian. The chant is followed by a womans robotic voice welcoming the listener and preparing them for their galactic journey stating: Greetings from Planet

Weezy/ We will begin transmission in/ 5,4, 3, 2, 1 The countdown marks the beginning of our impending space odyssey. The rest of the song is a verbal barrage of metaphors that Wayne uses as an opportunity to authenticate himself as alien, Martian and most importantly above par when compared to other rappers. Through this song, Wayne is able to displace his southern origin, and authenticate it with a fictional outer space and expand his profit margin through persona building. Wayne uses each verse in Phone Home as an alien identity marker. In the first verse, he
exclaims, We are not the same /I am a Martian. This introduction lets us know that the artist and lyrics we are about to hear are like nothing we have encountered previously. After a few lines about murder for hire, he ends the verse declaring hip hop is my supermarket/shoppin cart full of fake hip-hop artists. This is where Wayne is self-reflexive, and recognizes the commodity fetishism of the rap industry and buys into its ideology. He re-authenticates himself by being the active consumer or even creator of the image and positions himself vis--vis the product being sold (the presumably fake rapper). The second verse begins We are not the same I am an alien and mid-verse he raps Flow so sick, make you wanna throw yo food up. This is the part where Wayne can become Weezy and just boast and brag about his skills. Weezy F. Baby is Waynes pseudonym that he usually uses when hes in lyrical rap battle mode. This is a time-honored tradition in hip hop, for one to showboat or brag about his rhyming capabilities. Waynes metaphors are poetic and eerie yet they have a tendency to elicit imagery that enhances his narrative. Wayne uses his last verse to reiterate his

uninhibited alien/other self declaration proclaiming They dont make em like me no more/Matter fact they never made em like me before/Im rare like Mr. Clean wit hair/ no brake lights on my car-eer. It is here that Wayne recognizes that his autonomy is invaluable in the rap industry. Gray argues that it is characteristic of the Afro-futurist to draw on images like alien, data thief, translator, scientist, and mythologizer to craft identities and to perform cultural politics(165). Thus, the lyrics could translate to meaning: that by establishing an alien persona, a
character without precedence he will in turn have fruitfulness and longevity in his career. If Waynes dominance and unique style have not been established for the listener by now his last few lines augment the aforementioned. Phone Home ends with the lines So Im polar/and they cant get on my system cause my system is the solar/ I am so far from the othars, I mean others/I can eat them for supper, get in my spaceship and hover. Once again Wayne turns into Weezy and puffs out his chest in pure rap supremacy. He raps as if he does not have to adhere to the demands of the English language (because hes a Martian), and he purposely mispronounces words because as hes claimed on numerous records only God can understand [him]. According to these lyrics, Wayne feels that he is not even

on the same planet as other rappers; hes so superior in style that he could literally digest them, eat them 63

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Camp Tournament Neg Arg Group up stylistically and continue about his business. Wayne uses his Martian alter ego as a process of transforming identity into a commodity (Bunten 385), in which he sells and promotes himself under this new image. Consequently his alienation
from his original southern self can either expand his fan base or create distance between his established followers and his new creative turn. Waynes eclectic persona exudes over into his Rebirth album as well, with many of the tracks ranging from love and love lost to illustrations of his extraterrestrial self. His second single titled Ground Zero is a hodgepodge collection of biblical, popular culture and science fiction metaphors. The song starts Back the hell off /Rock n roll Jesus with all my nails on /all I need is a blunt and a bail bond. This opening line sets the tone of superiority for the rest of the song. Though Wayne is new to the rock genre, we can decipher that he believes he is the messiah, who has come to save/change things up a bit. He balances the biblical reference with the hard-edged drugs (blunt) and bad boy (bail bond) descriptions. The first verse ends with I started on the block but that something to build on Once again Wayne makes note of his humble beginnings, coming from the block but adds that that was just in preparation for his new status. Continuing the religious scheme, he asks and how can I pray when I got nothing to kneel on. Before the listener can decipher why he has nothing to place his knees on, the chorus responds with: Hey The ground is gone dont look now but the ground is gone Im so high that the ground is gone and I dont even know which crowd Im on dont look down but the ground is gone dont look down cause the ground is gone right now Im a million miles from home and Im so high that the ground is gone The chorus gives us the double entendre of being high (intoxicated) and high (elevated) in the sky. The intoxicating high is established during the first few lines, but the rest of the imagery builds on Waynes already established celestial state of being. The million miles from home and ground is gone statements lead us to believe that Wayne has left Earth, he is in outer space on a different level than other hip hop earthlings. The aforementioned song is a far cry from the formulaic mainstream rap lyrics that focus on degrading women, spending money, drugs, sex or violence. This

space-themed song and Waynes rock influenced album have taken a departure from the urban hip hop norm and even the southern norms as he channels his artistic side. Lil Wayne has been able to navigate though and around traditional performance tropes due to his self-proclaimed Otherness. McLeod (2003) states that the adoption and embodiment of alien and/or futuristic personas represents one of the most powerful of such articulations, one that is common to all the disenfranchised groups. (339) This sense of self-alienation can be attributed to Waynes willingness to transform.

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Andre 3000s use of singing and abandonment of the dirty south persona is able to subvert stereotypical representations of the black body via an Afrofuturist gaze that allows blackness to take on a new productive, recognized self. This subversion positions his music as the antithesis to the Enlightenment view of blackness and allows Andre to develop a discourse of self-objectivity that rejects the tenets that sustain racism. Young 11 (Sade Marie Young, Masters degree candidate. SOUTHERN-PLAYALISTICHIPHOP-SPACESHIP-MUSIC, Thesis Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University for a Master of the Arts Degree. August 2011.)
After the release of Outkasts third album Stankonia, Andre was often quoted that he was beginning to become bored with hip hop. Although the album sold over five million copies, and earned the group two Grammys, Andre still wanted out. Feeling uninspired and limited by hip hop, he began to see a time when he would outgrow the music. He even talked of enrolling in Juilliard to study music formally (Sarig 187). This was also the era in which raps mainstream marketability prompted a widespread lyrical shift from claims of performer skills to concerns of crossing over, selling out, and keeping it real (Hess 302). In an interview with the United Kingdoms The Guardian, Andre expressed his growing dissatisfaction with hip hop stating Hip-hop dont have no fresh energy, none at all. Its money driven, everybody tryin to make tha cheque, nobody putting art in their albums anymore. Afrofuturists are involved in the

global project of identifying and breaking codes that bar access to freedom from old narratives and debilitating discourses of black identity (165). Focusing on Andres first solo effort, The Love Below, will demonstrate how Andre turns to Afrofuturism (self-consciously) in efforts to break conventional hip hop codes and express his creativity. The Love Below is a romantic tour de force, loosely chronicling the fictional tale of a young mans adventures of love. Even though Andre is a rap artist, the album consists primarily of singing and musical instrumentation, much like the
rock album by Lil Wayne. Andre says he chose the title Love Below to describe that bubbling under feeling that people dont like to talk about, that dudes try to cover up with machismo (as quoted in Petridis). A whole album dedicated to love is a conscious sidestep from the commercialized rap albums of gritty street tales and sex. Through there are conscious rappers and records of substance being produced in mainstream hip hop, it is still rare or alien to hear an entire album of singing and pining over love or a love lost. With the exception of Kanye Wests 808 and Heartbreaks, which was released five years after Love Below, we have yet to see a rap artist open himself up emotionally and become so vulnerable on wax. The performance of black

masculinity in hip hop draws upon the idea of doubleness, again positioning the artists construction of self with the authenticity of hip hop. Reframing W.E.B. Du Bois concept of double consciousness, hip hop artists must navigate the duality of being authentic (being true to yourself) and marketable (doing whats expected to sell). Traditionally hip hop artists authenticate themselves through their words. If the art of rapping is replaced with singing, one must use the words sung to create a new identity in which authenticity can be established. The commodified persona acts as resistance as rap artists confuse, or split their identities to subvert the often conflicting standards of authenticity and
marketability (Hess 298). As quoted in Weheliyes Feenin Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music essay, Lindon Barrett in Blackness and Value: Seeing Double contrasts the value of the black voice with lack of value ascribed to blackness in American mainstream culture (Weheliye 27). Weheliye describes how Barrett distinguishes the singing voice from the signing voice of Euro-American alphabetical literacy and how Barrett argues that the black singing voice provides a primary

means by which African Americans may exchange an expended, valueless self in the New World for a productive, recognized self. In terms of Afro-Futuristic post-human-ness, the signing voice signals full humanity, whiteness, and disembodiment, where the singing voice metonymically enacts blackness, embodiment, and subhumanity (Weheliye 28). Andre uses his singing voice to capitalize on his commodified persona, and serve as the antithesis to the Enlightenment subject by virtue of not only having a body but by being the body (Weheliye 28) thus revealing the power of his self-objectivity. Andres style and his singing voice are categorically not human; they are cyborg or alien and serve as extensions of Andres otherness because of his use of auto-tune. Andres eclecticism shines most brightly in the song and accompanying video on the seventh track of his
album titled Prototype. Prototype is a song about finding love and celebrating female adoration. The track has a funk-laden sound, with burgeoning bass and electric guitar riffs. The verses are simple and serene as he croons about falling in love again with a woman who he feels may be his perfect match or at least the prototype of such. The song ends with Andre giving credit to the woman, and his love for her for picking [him] up, and bringing [him] back to this world. These last lines suggest that he had given up on his earthly existence until he met this woman. Andre professes that all his hope and humanity was restored upon this meeting and even if they were to part now, he could not be mad at God because they met today for a reason. Gray adds that to describe black people and their

cultural practices these code breakers use epic tales and tropes of aliens, travelers, and dwellers whose aural soundtracks and imaginative visions are supplied by figures (165).Andre uses the tale of self as extraterrestrial, and the images are furthered in the aesthetics of the songs music video. The video depicts a family of white-haired, multi-racial, aliens wearing long white gowns. The narrator claims that the group has traveled 3000 light years from their home planet Prota. Upon their arrival they experience the rarest of all human emotionsLove. The rest of the video depicts the fairy tale encounter of love as described in the lyrics and ends with Andre
turning into a human and staying on earth with his newfound love and their alien baby. The aforementioned video speaks to the different perspectives that black artists have been able to achieve through their artistry. Although gyrating women, fast cars, and

excessive money were the norm for hip hop videos, select artists have carved alternative paths. The Afrofuturistic gaze provides a space for black art to be viewed and negotiated outside of the stereotypical lens 65

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Camp Tournament Neg Arg Group of negative representations. As a result of their success, Lil Wayne and Andre have become models to which popular culture can point to show how a black male rap artist should look, sound, and perform. Michael Eric Dyson
finds the weight of this representation problematic. He argues that: This situation makes it difficult for blacks to affirm the value of nontraditional or transgressive artistic expressions. Instead of viewing such cultural products through critical eyes-seeing the good and the bad, the productive and destructive aspects of such artmany blacks tend to simply dismiss such work with hypercritical disdain. A suffocating standard of "legitimate" art is thus produced by the limited public availability of complex black art. Either art is seen as

redemptive because it uplifts black culture and shatters stereotypical thinking about blacks, or it is seen as bad because it reinforces negative perceptions of black culture. That is too narrow a measure for the brilliance and variety of black art and cultural imagination (414). Wayne and Andre have had to battle this dichotomy of love and repulsion and pave distinct ways in which to express themselves and represent the southern hip hop culture authentically

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The use of alien and futuristic metaphors in an Afrofuturist context allows us to resurrect the common other within all of us and unexoticize the black body within the public sphere. Andre and Waynes use of these elements mixes the ideal blend of using the masters tools to bring down the masters house while still subverting the principles behind them. (Sade Marie Young, Masters degree candidate. SOUTHERN-PLAYALISTICHIPHOP-SPACESHIP-MUSIC, Thesis Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University for a Master of the Arts Degree. August 2011.)
Young 11 To clarify, this thesis is in no way suggesting that the futuristic themes and sounds of hip hop are inherently new to hip hop or innovative. Afrofuturists claim that blacks scattered across the Atlantic world are aliens in an alien land, ever on the lookout for clues and resources that point the way out of alien nations and conditions of bondage (Gray 166).

Themes of alien embodiment and futuristic landscapes are commonly used in literary and musical expressions by subaltern groups. This paper serves as an additional lens through which to view post-human representations in Afro-Futuristic thought and their connections to hip hop artistry. Sun Ra, Lee Perry and George Clinton all call upon similar tropes and metaphors of space and alienation that link their common diasporic African history to a notion of extraterrestriality (McLeod
344). Perry, Clinton and many other musicians of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s patterned themselves after Sun Ra and used space-themed sounds and futuristic beats. In the hip hop tradition, Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash employed space imagery and sound. Although their efforts were revolutionary their adventures did deal with the same sense of resistance to commercial conformity as current artists face. They were neither from the South nor dealing within the realms of neo-liberalism and the commodified trappings of popular hip hop tropes. For Wayne and Andre to step into a new frontier and phone home to a planet that their minds

have metaphorically left is shrewd and entertaining. Using and constructing new identities for their posthuman bodies has proven the potential for black wealth and power (McLeod 344) that George Clintons lyrics have long prophesied. Focusing on hip hop as a stage to explore Afrocentric identity and space encourages us to ponder whether or not it is logical to expect a culture that has been placed on the margin of societys concern to employ the same language (pedestrian speech patterns or performance) used by those responsible for such marginalization, thereby reinforcing the very practice that [repressed] them (Wilkins 2000). It is necessary to use those tools (capitalism, commodification, de-humanization) to counter societies hegemonic structure.
Thus, one can use these tools coupled with creativity to profit from the profitless situation of the ghetto. These works lead towards a reappropriation of what blackness and the performance of otherness looks and sounds like. These alien and futuristic metaphors

are essential to the promulgation of Afro-Futurist teaching, insofar as it resurrects the common other in all of us, one that can be used to reconfigure the post Atlantic black experience and help to unexoticize the black body.

At: Electronic music bad

All in All being an Alien has brought unity and community to us. Mcleod,2003(Ken McLeod, Author and Teacher of Tibetian Buddhism, Space Oddities: Aliens, Futurism and Meaning in Popular Music, journals.cambridge.org/article_S0261143003003222, published October 23 2003)
In a sense, Attali here recognises that sound technologies facilitate liminal, imaginary identities - this is in opposition to visual technologies which objectify and often statically fix images of alienation and alterity. Indeed, pop cultural theorist Andrew Blake refers to this phenomenon as 'prophetic noise' (Blake 1999). In a similar fashion, the futuristic concerns with social decay and nuclear destruction that obsess many artists (such as Klaus Nomi's Total Eclipse), what Jeff Nuttall has labeled Bomb Culture, offer a prophetic glimpse into an imagined future (Nuttall 1968). Whatever the ultimate rationale, it is clear that space, futurism and alien images permeate popular music history and its many stylistic manifestations. That such diversity of the use of space and alien images exists, however, appears symptomatic of a general alienation from late-twentiethcentury life and of an increasing need to strive for higher, alternative ideals and states of being. To be different, or alien, is a significant and familiar cultural metaphor marking the boundaries of social identity. In general, rock, pop, dance and hip-hop music's use of futuristic space and alien themes denotes a related alienation from traditionally dominant cultural structures, subverting the often racist and heterosexist values of these genres themselves. It often represents a neo-Gnostic withdrawal from the world and its institutions 67

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Camp Tournament Neg Arg Group an artificial escape from social reality, from commitment, from one's self, and into a utopian future. Usually benevolently portrayed, futuristic images of aliens and outer space 354 Ken McLeod unite us with a common 'other' that transcends divisions of race, gender, sexual preference, religion or nationality. Rock and popular music traditionally stress individuality (often in the guise of 'authenticity') to the point of virtually worshipping alienation, a trend particularly manifest in the fragmented popular music scene of the past decade. In an era of increasing self-alienation and suspicion of government and religion, institutions seemingly incapable of solving earth's problems, new music culture is increasingly looking to outer space for inspiration, if not outright salvation. The openness to the democratic pluralistic possibilities of the future may remain popular music's most lasting legacy.

The Use of Aliens in Rave culture created a Genderless and raceless harmony between people. Mcleod,2003(Ken McLeod, Author and Teacher of Tibetian Buddhism, Space Oddities: Aliens, Futurism and Meaning in Popular Music, journals.cambridge.org/article_S0261143003003222, published October 23 2003)
While the use of space and alien themes was common in 1990s alternative rock, nowhere, perhaps, has their use been more prevalent than in the burgeoning techno-electronic dance music scene. Rave culture, with its idealistic emphasis on

creating a temporary classless, raceless and genderless society on the dance floor, found alien images to be a powerful symbol of that ideal. Likewise, the sensory overload of the repetitive beats, loud volume levels, ecstatic dancing, flashing lights and, of course, the influence of various drugs combine to produce a hyperstimulated experience that helped facilitate a communal integration with the alien Other. Fuelled by the feel-good warmth of Ecstasy, a synthetic drug first therapeutically prescribed by psychiatrists to enhance intimacy and communication, rave participants often talk of harmony, unity, acceptance and the community of the dance floor. In the words of rave author Cinnamon Twist, rave is 'those altered moments when each of us in being truest to our uniqueness enters into a harmonious whole... Our Motto: Utopia or bust' (Twist 1995, p. 208). Such a state of idealistic non-differentiation closely mirrors Victor Turner's notion of communitas: 'an undifferentiated community or even communion of equal individuals'.22 Though commercially successful DJs,
such as the Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim and Moby are subverting much of the anti-elitist faceless ideology of early rave, as discussed earlier in this essay, the identity that ravers appear most often to identify with is that Space oddities 351 of a space alien - a faceless, genderless traveller from another world who transcends the socio-cultural baggage of Earth.

Music Evolution and Space exploration created Afrofuturism Mcleod,2003(Ken McLeod, Author and Teacher of Tibetian Buddhism, Space Oddities: Aliens, Futurism and Meaning in Popular Music, journals.cambridge.org/article_S0261143003003222, published October 23 2003)
While less well known than Bowie, one of the most vibrant and pervasive displays of extraterrestrial themes in contemporary popular music occurs within the realm of what cultural critic Mark Dery has termed 'Afrofuturism' (Dery 1993, p. 736). The term refers to African-American signification that appropriates images of advanced technology and alien and/or prosthetically enhanced (cyborg) futures. Afro-futurism is found in a variety of artistic genres including the science fiction writings of authors such as Steve Barnes, Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany and Charles Saunders, films such as John Sayles' The Brother from Another Planet and in the android creations of New York graffiti artist/theoretician Rammellzee. Such Afro-futuristic art is typically concerned with black nationalism and empowerment and the creation of mythologies based on the confrontation between historical prophetic imagination, such as Egyptian theories of the afterlife, and modern alienated black existence. As Mark Dery observes, 'African-Americans are, in a very real sense, the descendents of alien abductees' (Dery 1993, p. 736). Similarly, sociologist Paul Gilroy discusses Black diaspora in terms of a history of dispersed peoples, but also of the space that results from this dispersal - 'a utopian eruption of space into the linear temporal order of modern black politics' (Gilroy 1993, p. 198). Therefore, Black diasporic consciousness seeks to return to an inaccessible homeland - in some sense, an imaginary utopian homeland that outer space metaphorically represents.

AT: Cap K
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Movements to disrupt capitalism fail to solve racism - As a result of the disconnect between the whites and blacks in the lower class, Racism is inevitable because there will always be a desire for the Caucasians to maintain their superior social standing which is only possible due to the color of their skin. Your Kritik of capitalism Cant solve our Alternative Harvard Law Review, 93 (April, 1993, The Harvard Law Review Association, BOOK NOTE: AND WE WILL NOT BE SAVED. FACES AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WELL: THE PERMANENCE OF RACISM. By Derrick Bell.)
The "faces" in the title of Professor Derrick Bell's new book are those of poor

African Americans [are] stranded at the bottom of society's well. Poor whites, who stand only slightly higher, refuse to join forces with their black counterparts in an effort to escape their common plight. Instead, by keeping African Americans in their lowly position, whites derive self-esteem from peering down on them. This stark image that begins Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism is only the first of many suggesting that "racism is an integral, permanent, and indestructible component of this society" (p. ix). Although powerful and persuasive, the book is interesting as much for its
unique style as for its controversial arguments. Professor Bell, well-known as a creative legal writer, believes in "the use of literary models as a more helpful vehicle than legal precedent in a continuing quest for new directions in our struggle for racial justice" (p. ix). n2 Faces thus adds to a growing body of scholarship that "attempt[s] to sing a new scholarly song -- even if to some listeners [its] style is strange, [its] lyrics unseemly" (p. 144). n3Faces contains a melange of literary styles -- anecdotes, science fiction, allegory, and dialogue. Some of Bell's stories come from his own pen and some from the mystical intervention of his muse Geneva Crenshaw, a fictitious civil rights lawyer. The stories are peopled with a variety of characters, who range from a radical white activist training in the Oregon woods to a charismatic black leader who falls in love with a white woman. Through these stories and the dialogues [*1359] between Bell and Crenshaw that usually follow, Bell explores several themes: the frustration of relying on the law to bring about an end to racism; the need for involvement in protests; the belief in freedom symbols by African Americans; the yearning for a true black homeland; and, the rejection of testimony about racial issues when made by blacks (p. 13).The substance of Bell's argument is as straightforward as it is bleak: "[I]t is time to 'get real' about race and the persistence of racism in America" (p.5). Racism is an integral feature of American society; "[e]ven those herculean efforts we hail as successful will produce no more than temporary 'peaks of

progress,' short-lived victories that slide into irrelevance as racial patterns adapt in ways that maintain white dominance" (p. 12 (emphasis omitted)). Bell provides several explanations for the persistence of racism. Whites provide blacks "little protection against one or another form of racial discrimination unless granting blacks a measure of relief will serve some interest of importance to whites" (p. 53). Furthermore, poor whites, instead of acknowledging the similarity of their position with that of blacks, are "easily detoured into protecting their sense of entitlement vis-a-vis blacks for all things of value" (p. 7).

At: Perm
The affirmative cannot just add black culture to the affirmative and stir which is functionally their permutation argument you must engage the racial characterization of humanity from the start Eshun 92 (Kodwo Eshun MA in Arts, Course Leader of Arts at Goldsmiths College ,Further Considerations of Afrofuturism) Page (12) Afrofuturism does not stop at correcting the history of the future. Nor is it a simple matter of inserting more black actors into science-fiction narratives. These methods are only baby steps towards the more totalizing realization that, in Greg Tates formulation, Afrodiasporic subjects live the estrangement that science-fiction writers envision. Black existence and science fiction are one and the same. In The Last Angel of History, Tate argued that The form itself, the conventions of the narrative in terms of the way it deals with subjectivity, focuses on someone who is at odds with the apparatus of power in society and whose profound experience is one of cultural dislocation, alienation and estrangement. Most science fiction tales dramatically deal with how the individual is going to contend with these alienating, dislocating societies and
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circumstances and that pretty much sums up the mass experiences of black people in the postslavery twentieth century. At the centurys start, Dubois termed the condition of structural and psychological alienation as double consciousness. The condition of alienation, understood in its most general sense, is a psychosocial inevitability that all Afrodiasporic art uses to its own advantage by creating contexts that encourage a process of disalienation. Afrofuturisms specificity lies in assembling conceptual approaches and countermemorial mediated practices in order to access triple consciousness, quadruple consciousness, previously inaccessible alienations. Imagine that later, on that night, after the
site is sealed off, ready for the next day, after the AAAP have all been disinfected, one of the archaeologists dreams of six turntables; the realisation of the Invisible Mans dream of hearing Louis Armstrongs What Did I Have to Do to Be So Black and Blue multiplied to the power of 6.

Affirmative answers
Afrofuturist literature is heteronormative it excludes queers and women of color Zuberi,7- Senior Lecturer on Film, Television, and Media Studies at The University of Auckland
in New Zealand, 2007.
(Nabeel, July 2007, Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 34, No. 2, Afrofuturism, pp. 283-300. Is This the Future? Black Music and Technology Discourse http://www.jstor.org/stable/4241526 .) More mundanely, the male connoisseurship involved in collecting the "right" records and its relationship to high theory, sf narrative, and spectacle offer, in McRobbie's words, "no opening at all for prosaic questions about the politics of music in general and more specifically the sexual politics of dance music" (145). As Jason King remarked at an Experience Music Project conference in 2004, the Afrofuturist

canon of techno and hip hop is also selectively male and heterosexist. It prefers music without vocals and ignores recording artists such as Earth Wind & Fire, The Undisputed Truth, Missy Elliot, Labelle, and Sylvester. R & B, soul, disco, and house music with female and transgender voices have also drawn on the tropes of sf in their work. Alexander S. Weheliye rightly suggests that in their desire to reject the human for the posthuman, some Afrofuturist critics often fail to examine the various technological mediations of black women's voices as signifiers of "humanity" or "soul." Weheliye's own work on sound effects such as the vocoder and the
presence of the bleeps and audio quality of gadgets like beepers and mobile telephones in late 1990s R & B hits by female vocalists complicates the human/posthuman distinction ("Feenin"' 40). It also takes debates about blackness and technology into the broader terrain of popular taste, beyond an analysis limited to the pursuit of male cultural capital. Weheliye's Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (2004) develops his concern with the materiality of sound to begin to consider the ways in which girls and women use audio technologies such as personal stereos to fashion their environment sonically as they move through it. This is still a rare scholarly insight. Maybe now we will have more studies of the uses to which black girls and women have put records and turntables. While sympathetic to much Afrofuturist discourse, Herman Gray has tempered its technophilia with analysis of the everyday ways in which musicians conceptualize, integrate, and talk about the use of digital technologies in their musical production, as well as in its consumption (148-84; see also Zuberi).

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